Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  The first time that I heard Duff address his audience I thought that I must be dreaming or that he had learnt his speech by heart. The sensible sentences rolled out without hesitation. There was nothing flustered about his calm stance and clear delivery, his hands clasping the lapels of his coat in a classical nineteenth-century way. He carried no notes and did not fidget. The speech was colourful and when necessary passionate, the applause uproarious. The chairman, the councillors, even the over-anxious agent, were completely satisfied. I had never believed in Duff’s powers of oratory. I knew him as a first-class actor of charades; dressed up as a judge with a white fox for a wig, he could deliver a summing-up to make a gay party cry with laughter. But this was different, and here he was as serious as a real judge and bound (I immediately felt certain) to gain every vote in the constituency. I saw too the reason for my mother’s different tone towards the Family’s new Pride. The situation shone like noontide.

  Elections are detestable when the candidate is one’s all. It is interesting and amusing to work for a stranger or a friend in whose principles one believes, but canvassing at all times I find miserably disagreeable—the knock on the door and the housewife’s unpredictable mood, influenced by whether she has the dinner or the high tea in the making, is wringing linen or having a nap. Her head is poked out of the door, and if she recognises the Party she favours she will open it wider, dry her hands and say: “Come forward.” She may be ready to talk about politics and wages, or she may say: “We’ve always voted Blue and always shall.” She may ask questions showing an unmade-up mind or she may (this I found more often with Liberal and Labour people) take refuge behind the secrecy of the ballot. I marvelled when they did not bang the door in our silly, smirking, out-to-please faces. Some did (the militant Labourites naturally, since the fight was joined), for indeed canvassing is an uncivilised intrusion into any man’s house and into the privacy of his views. I think that perhaps I am wrong to be so sensitive. Lancashire people are almost alone in their directness, their disinterested loyalty and uprightness. They have pride in these qualities and much warmth and humour. The warm this real; they never dissemble. They take this canvassing intrusion as normal to election time. They have said to me with hurt regret: “No one’s been down our street. We’re neglected. I’ve opened door to no one.” Behind their uniform lace curtains they would press me to “a cup of tea, luv?” and offer “ornaments” (whisky or rum) to improve it.

  Lancashire girls are very pretty. The damp climate and the damper mills, kept hot and humid for the cotton-yarn, give their complexions an unusual pink-and-white clarity. In those days they all wore gay clattering clogs and thick grey woollen shawls that protected them from crown to knees from the foggy cold. I loved the mills because the girls mobbed me and kissed me and thought me funny. I promised them a clog dance if they put my husband in, which I later performed as best I could. Duff summed it all up in Old Men Forget:

  The combination of anxiety and tedium is very trying. The solitary subject of conversation, to which, however hard one may try to avoid it, one always returns, the good ideas which suddenly strike one’s supporters, their hopes and fears and petty quarrels, the rumours of one’s opponents’ successes, the one thing that should have been done and has been forgotten, the great mistake that has been made and that it is too late to rectify, the vast accumulation of daily annoyances culminating in the evening’s speeches, which are followed by sleepless nights of pondering over possibly unwise utterances, all these build up an atmosphere of nightmare through which the distant polling day shines with promise of deliverance.

  While the tellers tell nothing and impassively count the votes from the secret boxes, one can but be idle for several hours and watch the opponents’ piles of voting-cards grow higher than one’s own. One must practise changing one’s glower to a forced grin, and pray for enough grace to shake the enemy’s hated hand and tell him that the best man had to win. But at last the count was declared and announced to the seething crowd outside the Town Hall, and the laurels were for Duff, head of the poll, a few hundred votes ahead of Edward Grigg, the Liberal, and with a majority of 13,000 over Labour.

  The next shining morning we motored to my old homes in the Midlands, first to Haddon Hall, now inhabited by my brother John and his wife, where joy was unrestrained, and then on to Belvoir, where my father was waiting at the door to congratulate the first man of the family since his own father’s day who was to devote his life to the country’s government. Surprise of surprises, we were lodged in the King’s Rooms, with our private drawing-room. It was a proud day for me.

  There were few weeks in which to relish Duff’s fruits of triumph. The Miracle called me for its opening in Cleveland, Ohio. It had drawn peacefully to its New York close, and Reinhardt himself was to re-create it in Cleveland’s gigantic Hall. I found it good to be back. The cast had not changed noticeably, but the great Krauss had returned to Germany. Though I loved and admired him dearly, it was restful not to have to overcome daily and nightly the double ordeal of acting with heart and conscience for the public and fighting waves of rage and barely suppressed laughter at his twists and pranks, his baitings and relentless determination to unbalance me. Tiredness unbalanced me too.

  13 December 1924

  I was exhausted yesterday as I got onto what Morris Gest calls my “pillow.” I thought how dreadful it would be to faint. It was upon me already. Followed a ghastly struggle not to collapse. It lasted perhaps twenty minutes—first sick, then that livid sensation of wet cold quicksilver running slowly over one. I prayed desperately to the Virgin. I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted the blood. I made ventriloquist noises, but only the Spielmann came near and said “Was?” I couldn’t explain, not in German. Then the stage cleared—only Pinchot running like a stag to her music. She heard but could do nothing, and I thought of you in the Great War and my knees buckled under me. I clung on by my neck in the stiff coat and thought wildly what would be best to do—walk out of my stone and ruin the play or wait for loss of consciousness and fall, breaking my neck or skull and certainly spiking my eyes on the hundred electric candle-spikes. The audience swayed and receded, and I found myself in inky darkness on the floor with Pinchot trying to drag me off. The Virgin must have guided my collapse to one side of her candles and softened my fall. The lights had been put out. A dramatic critic had rushed to the office and told them that I was dead. One of the black-garbed invisible stage-hands carried me off. Mr West gave me a whack of whisky and in three minutes I was propped back into my niche. I finished the part and did the Nun that night. All right today, and I’ve played the Nun again this afternoon. The amusing side is that the audience had no idea that anything was out of order. They are totally bewildered and (black-outs being used as a curtain) hours in total darkness don’t surprise them. They are buying seats from each other at fabulous prices. There’s not breathing room for ten thousand.

  The drugstore I patronise has suddenly produced a most obnoxious drink, slightly clouded bottles, lemonade-colour, with a stench of turps. They call it a highball. It has an effect more powerful and more delightful than anything I’ve tasted. It made an Ariel out of my Caliban mood. It must be alchemy, as it can’t be alcohol.

  I was sad to have left Duff, the gallant Member, to climb his ladder alone, and to bear alone the death of his mother in early January. She died in the South of France, too suddenly for him to reach her. I felt thankful that he had not joined me for Christmas but had been exclusively hers at Cimiez for ten days. Only two weeks before her death he had taken her to a circus, and she had enjoyed it with a child’s enthusiasm although she was over seventy. She was utterly selfless and handed down to Duff her great charity of heart. Her innocence pitied us all and prayed for us without intruding. Duff loved her deeply and mourned her death with dark grief. I felt myself an absentee. I took comfort in gladness that she lived to know he would be famous.

  Just before the Christmas recess he had made a brilliant maiden speech. His l
etters tell of anxious waiting, fevered excitement, postponement and final delivery. It was acclaimed by the high and the low, and I had showers of congratulations.

  Cleveland

  17 December

  So many letters and telegrams about the speech. Tell Nancy Astor more than once how touched I was. Kommer says that you represent him in the House. It’s the success that makes missing it heartbreaking, but one couldn’t foretell. It would have been foolish to forfeit a fortune for a frost.

  Lady Horner said: “Much better than Haldane.”

  Soon it was Christmas. I wrote from Cleveland:

  24 December

  At Belvoir now they are filling stockings and breaking glass baubles as they decorate the tree in the guardroom and fit candles onto green-black branches. How many times have I seen my mother, in some long gallery set out with trestle tables groaning with Christmas presents, sorting and culling gifts for the servants and employees. Each must have the individual touch in what they received. Housemaids got automatically two lengths of “print” with which to make their working dresses, but to these must be added something gay and touching—a brooch, a red purse, a lace scarf. The cowmen would inevitably be cold milking in winter hours, and must have wool mufflers and waistcoats and perhaps a photograph in a frame. “He won’t want a photograph of Marjorie, Mother!” “He can always take it out and put his children in.” This Christmas distribution was a nightmarish balancing puzzle and took days to solve. She loved it. We helped, hated the effort, despised it all and said that they would rather have money. I am sure that we were wrong.

  Three weeks in Cleveland were followed, now that my pockets were jingling, by a journey to Nassau, where Viola and Alan Parsons had been sent for Alan’s health. He wrote an enchanting book which describes, with his subtle humour, a Winter in Paradise. Nassau in 1925 was quite unhurt. For years no hurricane had blown to molest it. There were avenues of royal palms, and on the almost-deserted Hog Island were murmurations and prisms of humming-birds. The peacock sea cannot be altered by fluorescence and Coca-cola, but Bay Street can and has been. We lived in one of the many houses painted palest blue, green, pink or yellow, with cool screened balconies, built by Loyalist refugees after the American War of Independence. We sailed in glass-bottomed boats, watching the rainbow fish darting through the gardens of the sea. We landed on Robinson Crusoe islands with no Friday’s footprints, and we gathered, in fantastic clothes, one night at Old Fort, where I danced the bacchante to Viola’s piebald faun (“the god pursuing, the maiden hid”) on a natural stage that sloped down to the silver-moon-pathed Caribbean Sea.

  We are living very native on our verandah. The chairs rock. I tease Alan about his squalor and the ice broken with a boot, food teeming with ants, sucked-dry oranges and blackened knives, and he gets back on me when I pour water over my mosquito-bitten feet because it’s less trouble than scratching.

  Nothing to buy in the markets, yet I can’t keep away. It’s the prettiest village one could see in an old Colonial aquarelle. The market sells fruit and poor veg and occasionally a cast turtle disorientated. All the negresses wear white boots and organdie for their black to lower through, and spotted kerchiefs topped by rakish-angled hats. The seas are shark-infested. I hope I choke them if they get me.

  On my return to England sadness fell from the air one bright day in May. The Gower Street telephone rang to tell me, and my mother with me, that my father, slightly ailing and in bed, had been seized with a heart attack. We got home as quick as could be, but it was too late. The good old man (he was over seventy) was dead. He had been a loving and wise father. What hot tempers he had started with had long since abated into serenity. His bier lay in the guardroom at Belvoir, upon the long coffin my mother’s bay-leaves and her thanks for a happy life. I took her to his funeral, the last and almost the only one I have ever been to.

  Then came the ordering of his tomb. My mother seemed at all times to have a tomb in the making. The base of her son’s monument preoccupied her for thirty years. Her portfolios fluttered with tracings of Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance detail, with notes, quotations and surprising sequences of words for epitaphs.

  Tombs had a revered, a collector’s place in our upbringing. Until my great-grandmother, the creative Duchess, built the Mausoleum to guide her descendants on a flight of angels to Heaven, Bottesford, a few miles from Belvoir, had sepulchred our ancestors. The parish church is indeed packed with family effigies. Templars and other knights, later Earls with one wife (and often two) and their children born and stillborn, in ruffs and doublets and sad little shrouds, lie there beneath painted alabaster. The collection ended in the early eighteenth century, when their black-and-white marble skeletons and tearful cherubs clutching skulls became too numerous and cumbersome for the little church. Goodness knows where the intermediary inheritors lie. Where is Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Duke, whose wife Mary Isabella was known as “the beautiful Duchess”? He is commemorated as Viceroy of Ireland by the Rutland Memorial in Dublin’s Merrion Square. Where, O where lies the popular Marquess of Granby, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army at Dettingen, whose name and bald pate still give welcome from his pubs? My mother had designed my grandfather’s stone figure and struggled for years with his epitaph, and now my dead father must be sculpted by an obedient artist and laid recumbent in his rightful place.

  I returned to The Miracle to act in the Festspielhaus at the Salzburg Festival of 1925. I had an American friend, Ethel Russell, to whom I was devoted. She glowed with life and zest, infected you with her fun and gusto and then loved you for these qualities. Together with her, Iris Tree and Kommer, I motored across Bavaria to Salzburg. Kommer was known to his friends the world over by the sweet name of Kaetchen. This is a lady’s maid’s name, and he earned it by looking after me with the tenderness of one. At Augsburg we joined Emerald Cunard, Gerald Berners, Bertie Abdy and others. At Leopoldskron, Ethel, Iris and I were put in a dormitory at the top of the house which came to be known as Das Lady’s Zimmer and was lacking in all essentials. Three beds there were, but no looking-glass, basin, rugs or cupboards, hangers or hooks, but so many larks and jokes and secrets and whispers furnished that room that I liked it better than any other.

  Festival performances are notoriously unprepared, and Salzburg seemed to me chaos. Duff went to Venice to cure a skin illness with sun concentration, and I wrote to him there:

  Salzburg

  14 August

  Emerald has been stung by a wasp on her lip, and it has made her dreadfully fractious. I was at rehearsal until 3 a.m. and am all in with tiredness and despair—nothing ready, not even the Festspielhaus or décor. I had a good cry and got much pampered and spoilt by Iris and Ethel, but at night when I should be thinking and writing to you there is a riot of laughter and talk and wrestling. Kaetchen sleeps opposite and at ten a beastly breakfast is brought in on a big table by four rosy girls and K. joins us. It looks pretty with wide-open windows on the sunny lake and mist-hidden mountains.

  15 August

  Emerald, still cross, says that the wasps won’t leave her alone. I expect it’s Dr Oreste’s disgusting unguents she puts on her face (as I do). They must be made of wasps’ vomit. They smart enough and the rascals return to it. Gerald Berners will shriek: “O, I’ve been stung!” Then he sticks his finger in his mouth, and she falls for it and believes.

  The pandemonium where I write in the stalls is appalling. Hammering deafens. Frau Mildenburg, the famous old singer, is practising chest-notes. The rehearsal was called for nine. It’s now twelve and they are still gathering up the débris of last night’s Welt Theater. Three hours it took on wooden seats, and no entr’acte.

  17 August

  We were rehearsing on the stage last night at 8.30 with The Miracle announced for seven. I’ve never been so upset. I was sick in the morning with nerves and impotency to get anything done. My coat was soaking wet because I had had to gild and paint it the day before, with the result that I’ve got a cold today. There�
�s always trouble about my stone baby and the language traps. I shouted to the whole rehearsal, being empty-handed: “Will niemand mich ein Kind machen?” Uproar! The only bright moment in the black chaos.

  Letty, Aunt Mildred and Betty Manners have arrived en pèlerinage.

  My sister Letty had married Guy Benson in 1921. We felt her to be safe and happy, and she was to have three more sons to join the two who had been my wedding pages.

  It was at Leopoldskron that we persuaded Iris to act the Nun in the Miracle tour in America called for October. She fought the idea but lost. It made the difference of night and day to me. The thought of five or six months’ touring alone was gloomy, but with Iris constantly with me (that perpetual renewer of spirits, that dearest romantic in clown’s clothes that ever jogged me along) I could feel less apprehension. I wrote to Duff: