Autobiography
Page 26
I dripped with emotion. Cochran did the same. I was delighted. His voice shook. He said that Diana was the finest actress he had ever seen. Diana is bored to death and very homesick, but there—her performance puts her in the class of the immortals. I can’t describe everything in detail. I thought it wonderful. I fancy though that without Diana one’s rather cynical subconscious self would assert itself. She lifts the whole thing into the sublime.
I wrote to Duff on 25 January:
Again all over. I must be a pretty good actress. It was frightening and flurrying because of the quick changes. One feels like “Any more Dickens characters?” and the man who dives into a mirror and comes up with Pickwick’s bald head or Fagin’s nose. Reinhardt thought “Unser Vater” very good—“eine so süsse Stimme.” For my part, like past childbirth’s pain, I cannot remember how it came, except that I used the American “as we forgive those” as Pinchot does. We never thought that my rasp would be a “süsse Stimme.”
26 January
My last excitement and last hope is over and successful. Now no more fright, and the acute longing for you and home is overpowering, yet only two weeks of the sixteen gone. It’s sad that I should have my life’s triumph without you, and you had yours in the war. Our real triumph is our happiness together after so many years (4½!).
The letters drone on. My mother weighed on me. She had had pneumonia and still coughed, and she could not rest or eat. The late theatre hours were her rest from everything disagreeable and, seeing me economising in the luxurious Ambassador Hotel and eating in drugstores, she overdid thrift and could not order an egg. She became desperately weak and her mind was on The Miracle only.
I went to a boot-shop, Mother with me. She lay in motionless coma while I tried on a hundred pairs. The owner of the business said he had heard that The Miracle was wonderful and that he was going one night. The word roused Mother from her coma (due to malnutrition) and she shouted “Not Mondays or Fridays” (Carmi’s days) and relapsed again.
I’ve bought a glorious fur coat made of honey-coloured lamb or pony or maybe foxhound.
16 February
Had tea with good Schuyler Parsons. He promised me a coat for my old old Russian Volotskoy, once a Lord Chief Justice or a Sir Thomas Lipton or something of that kidney, who makes sixteen dollars a week in the crowd and speaks Academy French. When I asked him whether he had no better coat than the cotton one he wears, he said “Pas précisément.” Schuyler had pink-eye, so I didn’t go in—just grabbed the coat and ran for it.
I went to a charity ball and was cheered to the echo. Then I sat in a box and was cheered again, and the limelight was thrown on me and I had to stand and bow. I thought I should die, yet I should have been so pleased. Many would have loved it.
Hoytie Wyborg, who with her sisters had taken London by storm in 1914, guided me gently through the New York mazes. Home and love sickness grew upon me with the weeks, though I had a lot to support me—a few new friends who would be lifelong and some old English ones. Valentine Castlerosse, a constant comfort and chuckle, lived in the same hotel. My mother was there for three months. She would not go home in spite of petitions. She was giving exhibitions of her pictures, and was happy day and night. Olga Lynn, a rip-roaring success in New York, was giving concerts in candle-lit drawing-rooms. Artur Rubinstein, already famous, was there, and Augustus John to paint Joe Widener. Sert was painting gloriously ebullient frescoes of Sinbad the Sailor for the Cosden house in Palm Beach. Kommer was ever near, trying to teach me German by reading Schnitzler’s Grüne Kakadu while my mother drew us. Snow and rain fell, and fire-alarm sirens at night kept me awake. Central Park looked as dank as a prison-yard. I teased my poor friend Bertram about his country’s shortcomings, his accent and his ice-creams, and he laughed at my English failings. We went a lot to silent films, in enormous sofa-stalls, and I would cry when I saw the King in his coach and tell Bertram that it was made of pure gold. He was patient and told me to wait for the spring to bring magnolias to Central Park and dogwood to the country.
In New York the streets were paved with gold. Everyone I knew of every class was flourishing, moving further west, getting a new radio set, buying a fur coat or a better car. I was used to our country “going to the dogs” and was incredulous and then fascinated to watch a story of success unfolding.
I love walking the streets. I passed a shop dedicated to dressing the very fat. “Stylish Stout Inc” it was called.
I thought I’d go and see Bob Chandler* in his big wandering house-workshop. Terrible smells, enough to anaesthetise one. Chandler still his old entertaining inaudible self, gay and alive. In his attic studio we found two old crony topers drinking neat whisky (a cat in a separate chair drawn up to the grog-tray), both boon companions fresh from inebriate homes, one for dropsy, the other for d.t.’s Bob asked a lot about you and kept repeating: “To think of you two bums marrying.”
The nest-egg was being laid. After a struggle where I showed, to my surprise, an iron strength, I got another 150 dollars a week, and every extra matinée, of which there were many (one for Eleanora Duse, two or three for the profession—any excuse was jumped at) brought me fifty dollars more. Reprints of my old articles written by Duff, a testimonial for Pond’s products and austere economy would lay a bigger egg. Besides, tours were already being planned, a silent film was to be made and a season in London was contemplated. The future was secure, but I refused to rejoice.
I have such fearful nights. It has to do with separation, of course. Odd, and I’m rather glad that it should get no better. I wake with a long anguished coming-to and a feeling of sinking death merged with nightmare dread, and a muddled recollection of anguish that makes my sleep-confused brain think that an omen of disaster to you has been sent me. This I can’t throw off. It happens often.
Duff’s daily letters were the opposite of mine, always cheerful, packed with affection, social life, quips and quotations from books that he was reading, poems, jokes, waiting for ships with letters, looking for constituencies, hoping for one at Melton Mowbray (soon snapped up by another candidate) and asking whether he would be wrong to leave the Foreign Office. Anyhow he was going to. Did I think he was right? I wrote:
What of your life’s plans? You know that I’ve always been for throwing up the F.O. and now I suppose I can always make money should anything go wrong. We cannot spoil a magnificent ship for £1000 p.a. (taxed at that). Mr Strasburger says he’d gladly pay all your election expenses. Bear that in mind. Why should he?
Duff’s determination hardened as several constituencies appeared and disappeared. There was no hurry. A General Election was not expected until the autumn. Meanwhile he could work and play and come to fetch me away when my contract ended. He sounded on admirable terms with my family, and wrote in reply to a suggestion that my mother should be sent for, as her happy life in New York was killing her:
I think your father is having a riotous time. He is putting down new pile carpet all over Arlington Street and re-covering the chairs. He has bought a Rolls Royce and is having the Duchess’s car entirely remade. He has a luncheon party every day. It might also be thought that Sister Malony, who comes in at the end of every luncheon party looking quite pretty, very painted and beautifully dressed, is his mistress. Any outside observer would say that she was. Perhaps he will leave her everything.
I could not tell my mother this alarming news, so she stayed until her wife’s conscience smote her in late April. Then Oggie developed chicken-pox (of course I thought that it was smallpox) and quarantine gave my mother an extra three weeks. Duff wrote in March:
There is the faintest shade of a breath of a ghost of a touch of spring in the air. How can I face the reality without you? From you I cannot be absent in the spring.
We were indeed both idolisers of spring. Already new plans and sailings were being studied. With half the term still to go a further shadow came to darken the gloom. The theatre asked for another month. The nest-egg would grow larger by 1800
pounds, but could I endure? Spring comes like a bounding hound in New York. Park Avenue wears a transfigured look. The sky is a glimmering crown. A few of my letters cheer up and see the funny side, and Duff writes scoldingly of my ingratitude to God, my fears, and above all my doubt of his fidelity. I must have taunted him with a familiar name used too often or, worse, an oft-repeated new Christian name. I doubted too his remaining staid as he had become since marriage, and feared a return to reckless living. He reproved me by a sonnet which, with the help of spring, strengthened me for a spell:
Doubt not, brave heart, oh never dare to doubt,
Lest care and calumny should breed distrust,
Lest the fine steel of faith should gather rust,
And we should lose what we were lost without.
Our castle of delight is girt about
By envious allies, Jealousy, Disgust,
Weariness, Separation, Age and Lust,
And still the traitor at the gate is Doubt.
Mount guard with me, beloved; you and I
Will baffle our besiegers with disdain.
The royal standard of our troth flies high
As e’er it flew, and shall not dip again;
So all assaults shall only serve to prove
Our faith impregnable, our changeless love.
and later:
17 March
I think your criticism of “allies” is right. All that line is bad. “Disgust” is nonsense. You might sometimes irritate but could never disgust me. Suppose we substitute:
Our citadel of light is girt about
With swords of darkness, allies of the dust,
Jealousy, Separation, Lies and Lust.
New York
Imagine my surprise when the manicurist of Jolies Mains gave me a rich man’s card and told me that he had suggested that if I want any fun I should telephone him. “I know as you’re acting the Madonna you have to behave circumspectly, but when you want to break out, just collect a bunch of girls and go round to his place. He’ll give you a good time.”
Yesterday I sat next Stanislavsky and Douglas Fairbanks. S. needed the French tongue and it wore me out. He told me his stage theories. They are so different to my practice that I got depressed.
Next day
Stanislavsky says that I’m a great artist. Tell Maurice to put that in his pipe and smoke it.
Jo Davidson the sculptor made a bust of me as the Madonna. I remember spring mornings (the magnolias out in a night) walking across Central Park in the electric air to his studio, Valentine Castlerosse sometimes with me. I would take my Bedlington terrier (looking more like a lamb than a dog) without the obligatory muzzle, and Irish Valentine would blanch and whimper with fear of the police arresting him as accomplice to this contempt of by-laws. Jo and I would cook hamburgers in the studio after the sittings, and we would laugh and I would forget to moan. Harrington Mann painted a lovely picture of my statue, and it stood in a Fifth Avenue window. In 1931 it was on an easel in the Drury Lane foyer, and I have never seen it since, any more than I have seen Jo’s statue, or an ample baroque bust by the Belgian Rousseau, a life-size portrait by Sir John Lavery and several McEvoys. And then one is surprised at losing spectacles and railway tickets!
So long ago, but freshly remembered now, are the people and the houses of Long Island that used to spoil me, the bowers of dogwood, the green golf-courses (on which I never played), holding on to rails under leaning sails on the dashing Sound, and the natural hospitality that became dearer to me as their spring and my departure met. Gone were my glooms.
I think so much of your returning to me. I lie for hours making little arrangements of how I will go to Cunard’s or the White Star and get a permit for Quarantine, and how I’ll sneak up the gangway with the camera-men, and of what I’ll wear (it will be May, warm and sunny). It makes me forget all my woes.
From now until Duff’s arrival the letters throb with anticipation. There is no other theme. It might be war-leave over again. I was always happiest with the theatre people. I knew that I should have pangs when the cast broke up, but then The Miracle was born to be a phoenix, with no language to stamp out its fires. Already its pyres were built in two continents, and we all knew that we should be together again.
25 April
Such an affecting last evening at the theatre. They all took a long goodbye of Mother, and she cried and I felt a beast to let her go. I’ve just looked at her ticket. It’s on F Deck and it will be some bolting-hutch of beastliness among the lower barnacles. My heart breaks for her leaving her last real fun in life and going back to monotony.
It’s a blindingly radiant morning. Does that make it better or worse? Better, as it stimulates physically. Mother sat up until five, I hope not crying. Once she gets to Nantucket she’ll start thinking of John’s rheumatism and Caroline’s glands and feel better.
Duff wrote from Brighton:
27 April
I came down here yesterday for Maurice [Baring]’s fiftieth birthday. There were fifty-two people to dinner—Hilary, Chesterton, E. V. Lucas, Harry Preston, Bluey Baker, Squire, lots of sailors and airmen. Maurice made a speech in rhyme, Chesterton, Harry Preston and I in prose. Hilary says that he has written you six sonnets and sent them to Katharine to forward to you.
This letter is necessarily disjointed as it is being written in the smoking-room of the Royal York on the morning after. Everyone is sitting round drinking shandygaff, and fresh people keep coming in, and everyone says “What happened to you last night?” and “Do you remember when, etc.” A hurricane is blowing. After dinner Maurice insisted on bathing. They all tried to stop him and there was a free fight on the beach. I said that he ought to be allowed to bathe if he wanted to and I fought on his side. He finally got into the water and an energetic sailor stripped stark naked and plunged in after him. He didn’t stay in long. I brought him back and gave him a hot bath.
I see in The Times this morning that the Duchess of Rutland and Viscount Castlerosse have sailed on the Majestic. O to think that I shall be sailing on it next week! It seems too good to be true.
Suddenly time gallops. A ticket is bought for the Majestic (not the coveted and saucy Aquitania) and the radios crackle:
“GLAD NEWS ARRIVED, OVEREXCITED.”
“BUSTLE UP I’M LONELY”
“FAIR WINDS SPEED YOU TO ME”
“O O THE WIND AND THE RAIN. I’M FRIGHTENED”
“I’M TOO IMPATIENT TO SLEEP”
It was now that Duff first saw me act. He was always, I think, a little afraid and embarrassed when watching me. I can understand the reason, but I find it impossible to define.
Belloc’s six sonnets he brought with him, reluctantly sent by Katharine Asquith, who had inadvertently told me that Hilary was unhappy about my playing the Madonna. I could not blame him, and delighted in his explanation: “Lady Diana playing the part of Our Lady in America, the Poet gravely wished her another rôle, but hearing that Mrs Asquith had made him out rougher than he had in truth been, he wrote these ensuing.” Five of the sonnets have been published; here is one of them:
Do not believe when lovely lips report
That I lost anchor in rough seas of jest,
Or turned, in false confusion manifest,
To pleading folly in high beauty’s court;
Or said of that you do (which in the doing
You maim yourself) what things I could not say,
For dread of unassuaged remorse ensuing
On one light word which haunts us all our way.
That I grow sour, who only lack delight;
That I descend to sneer, who only grieve:
That from my depth I should contemn your height;
That with my blame my mockery you receive—
Huntress and splendour of the woodland night,
Diana of this world, do not believe.
In June we came back to Gower Street, and to Bognor and summer holidays with Juliet Duff and Venetia and the neighbouring Holdens
. Duff burnt his boats and sent in his resignation to the Foreign Office. It seemed to him a terrible step to give up a profession that he had worked at for ten years, but he left without a pang of regret.
* Famous figure and inventor of art mediums. He married the beautiful Lina Cavalieri and on his wedding day received a telegram from his brother-in-law in a mental home which read “Who’s loony now?”
CHAPTER TWO
Dolls in Exile
IN July Oldham adopted Duff as a candidate. “The Plan” was no longer a blueprint. The elevation was rising. Together we returned to New York for The Miracle’s second opening. We crossed with the Prince of Wales and enjoyed the fêtes and follies of the polo season on Long Island. I must again suffer separation, but not for long, and I think of those autumn weeks of bright dyes in Long Island and New Jersey with calm and grateful remembrance. It was short-lived, for the election of 1924 was upon us, and Duff telegraphed from Oldham, where he was nursing the constituency, getting to know and be known, for me to join him. Morris Gest had agreed to liberate me in such a case, so I took the next boat and sailed with faithful Wade for English hustings.
When, in early October, I met Duff at Oldham the fight had begun, a three-cornered fight with two seats to be won. Duff was in great heart. My inner self (that has my shape, colour and features and is mercifully invisible) was bowed double with certainty of defeat and was making plans how best to comfort him. It was my first election, and that bent self was weighed down still further by its inadequacy and inability to speak on a platform. All Members’ wives could speak fearlessly and glibly, and Joan Grigg, known to me since nursery days and now wife of Edward Grigg, the Liberal candidate, spoke without inhibition. Why should I be the exception? My family, quickening with admiration of Duff (now become the young Disraeli), had rallied in full force. My mother was there with my two sisters, a stray uncle, cousins and friends, Juliet Duff, Rosemary Ednam, Diana Westmorland, and Maurice Baring to take care of the Catholic vote—a good fighting force, all living at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Oldham is some miles away, and at an early hour we reported daily to the Party’s headquarters and were given our canvassing orders for the day. There was a luncheon break when we all met to exchange our morning’s experiences. Though I did a good bit of canvassing, my place was more often by Duff’s side touring the cotton-mills, visiting clubs and sitting tortured on the platform for three or four meetings every evening.