Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Lady Horner is no better. The war is killing her wish to live. If one is 85 it might be wiser to die now than to live on another two or three years. On the other hand there are two Miss Horners aged 90 and 97. They don’t go to bed until 1 or 2 in the morning, and I’m told that if you pass their house about then you’ll see lights and hear a lot of chuckling and low quiet laughter coming from their room. I wonder if it’s: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one!”

  Our separation has begun and it will extend for 120 days at least, but I won’t indulge in mopeyness and self-pity. What prayers there are will be for your safety of mind and well-being and happiness. When we walked down the Savoy corridor in the early hours this morning, a corridor fragrant with memory of high jinks, I thought of Lady Wolseley saying that when Sir Garnet left her for active service (which was very often) she always said good-bye exactly in the same way as when he was going round to the club to see the evening papers. They were two turtle-doves.

  A new life now began, with the Pullman car as home and haven from the storms and doldrums, the feasts and fasts of lecture life. In the letter-diaries I read that mobility and action soothe and stimulate nerves frayed by keeping one’s end up, and one’s country’s end up, by night-clubs and by lack of confidence. The worn nerves had produced some inexplicable skin-disease that lowered my resistance. A famous German dermatologist told me that he had often had suicides among his patients. He put my head in a steaming-machine and under X-rays and ultra-violet rays, and gave me injections, instructions, unguents and tea-leaves from the teapot. I came out of his treatment-room with a scarlet face and white rings round the eyes where spectacles had protected them from malignant rays. His ointment was for a darkey make-up and smelt of dung. It humiliated me. The cure seems to have been complete, though the Massa Bones night-make-up was continued until I got on to a bottle labelled “Less dirty and milder” and once in the train everything pleased.

  We were on our way to Stanton and Washington, where Duff again saw the President, this time alone and off the record, admitted by a side-door, while I mouched round, occasionally eating a waffle in maple syrup or buying a paper to read inevitably bad news of the sinking of English destroyers and hideous threats.

  Conrad wrote in November:

  Why does censorship drive people (i.e. censors) demented? We read that Queen Mary went shopping in a West Country town, and a photograph of Lady Astor’s children at Cliveden was rubber-stamped “Not to be Published.” I presume because the picture might reach Germany, on which German bombers would leave for Cliveden in order to kill Lady Astor’s children. Insanity can go no further. Tommy Lascelles writes, dating his letter “Somewhere in England,” and the postmark is Sandringham plain as a gate.

  I go regularly to Maurice [Baring] at Rottingdean. He is fair. Spirits good. There are lamps in the train going down, but I come back in a completely dark train, last night alone with a woman (sex guessed by light-coloured stockings).

  The Daily Mail had a competition on “What part of the war do you mind most?” To my surprise “Women in uniform” came first and “Black-out” second or third. Some people simply put “Unity Mitford.” The thing that I mind most, which is shortage of animal feeding-stuffs, came sixteenth. “Evacuees” didn’t come as high as I expected.

  Seven and a half years of my grown-up life have been wars, and always, always England’s failure. It was Stormberg and the Black Week, Tugela, Magersfontein, guns lost, unpleasant white-flag incidents, the retreat from Mons, Gallipoli, Passchendaele and backs-to-the-wall etc., etc. Here we are still going strong, but never once in seven and a half years did there come the news of a brilliant victory, nothing like Waterloo, and Jutland was far from being like Trafalgar. When we had allies it was Caporetto or Tannenberg or “Mutiny of the French Army,” yet we seem to win in the end. I’m afraid you’ll mind coming back from the whirlwind gaiety of America to this sober serious melancholy life. Wars make it impossible to be happy.

  My cat Goebbels passed away yesterday after an illness of a few hours. It’s rather strange and may forbode something. As you may remember, I called a cat Austria and it was murdered by its own father. I’ve been woodcutting all day with Brixey and old Monty. A great deal of politics talked. They are very anti-Chamberlain as the man that got us into the war. “He’s too old” and “He’s too soft” they say. “Eden and Duff Cooper knew what was coming” and “We ought to have had Eden and Duff Cooper there to stop Mussolini taking Abyssinia, then there’d have been no more war.” This last opinion rather surprised me, and it’s always “Eden and Duff Cooper” who are named together as representing a particular attitude. Their only way of showing disapproval of Chamberlain is voting Labour next time.

  I went to Frome, where I took an oath holding the Bible in my right hand and saying “I swear by Almighty God” etc. and in the end I only swore by Almighty God that I didn’t know that I ought to pay American income-tax on my Celanese shares. It seems blasphemous.

  As our progress continued we learnt what we should have been taught beforehand: never to dine with the lecture-promoters before the lecture. They are hospitable to a fault. They will wish to entertain you royally, but dryly as a general rule. They allow plenty of time, and that is the snag. The lecturer is too nervous. Neither Duff nor I were mills that grind on water, and small talk had never been Duff’s long suit. It is not mine; I can babble of green fields for ever, but the babble is not worth listening to and nervous energy is wasted. We were growing wise in the profession, to accept no preliminaries and put the shoulder to the unpredictable wheel after the performance, never before.

  I wrote to Conrad:

  At Cincinnati the Union Jack and the Star-Spangled Banner streamed bravely from our window on the twenty-fourth floor. The town has changed from cottage to palace since I was here fourteen years ago. The great cities concentrate on stations and hotels; these take the place of the baths in a Roman community. Here the station is as always of marble and crystal, mosaic and silver, as warm as one’s bed and on such a scale that the entire town couldn’t crowd it. There you can eat and read, buy a hat or boots, medicine or Pravda, be photographed while you wait, be ill and retire to the Invalids’ Room, have your snack of oysters and stout in the taproom, or muffins-and-maple, shirred eggs, cookies or cheese, palm-hearts and lettuce and pineapple in the coffee-shop, or tenderloins, hash and brown potatoes, yams, chicken à la King, Bourbon, Scotch or Benedictine in the restaurant, all iced or piping. You can put a coin in the door and it will open and allow you to wash and dress in cleanth and artistic surroundings. It no doubt has a tasteful mortuary. The hotel does all this and more, and costs more. I prefer station life. By the way there is never a sight or a sound of a train until you leave the station proper. At the hotel you can buy the motor-car that is generally on show in the vestibule. I should think they would let you try it out in the corridors. You choose your music with a dime in a slot, melodious or hot, Hungarian or Hawaian. On every floor there are ballrooms, and dancing starts at noon. You can be shaved or shod, pedicured or dentally fixed, operated on or laundered, while you wait. One of these Baths of Caracalla hotels was a town, with at least two Conventions going on, and swarms of Elks and Kiwanis and Rotarians.

  We seemed to dart around as unsystematically as dragonflies. Our organiser, Mr Colston Leigh, appeared in our eyes a most whimsical madcap. But rests were allowed, and with reason, or he would have killed his paying geese. It was an exhausting fatigue. My diary tells of perpetual returns to New York, Washington or Chicago, with brief spells in rich homes.

  In these delightful houses hung with blessings it is often nearly impossible to write a letter, not for me who write with a stub on my rounded knee as the train cavorts, but for my patrician lord it’s more difficult. Educated, business-trained Americans don’t have a writing-table in the whole house. Staying with the Paleys, Duff said that he must write some letters and the footman was asked to find all the necessaries, as if one had asked to make toffee on a wet a
fternoon. Again at another house in Chicago the answer was: “Yes, of course, only the pen is such a bad one. That’s why I never write letters. The pen is so frightfully bad,” as though it was irremediable, like the central heating in our country.

  How came I not to write to you about the Chairman of our lecture in Toronto? The Lady-in-Command told us on arrival how lucky she felt herself, and for that matter us, in having secured him as Chairman. He had been gravely ill, but was back on his feet and he would turn the prettiest of speeches, brief, witty, succinct, all the facets. She was right. He said his piece to perfection and sat down two paces behind Duff, who was alone on the platform with his chairman. Within five minutes he was unmistakably drowsy; within ten he was in a logged sleep. Before they got used to it the audience tittered dreadfully, which poor Duff could not understand. No cheek-on-hands dumb-show from me in the front row would have explained the situation. The chairman remained to the final applause snoring, mouth cavernously open, slumped over his chair. He woke to clap loudly.

  Conrad wrote in December:

  I listen to Haw-Haw, the German propagandist from Germany, in English. I don’t know what it is meant to accomplish. Not being an idiot I’ve never thought England or the English perfect, so isn’t it very good for us all to know our faults? Then we can try and improve. We all ought to know about the Opium War and our failures in India and Ireland, the Black and Tans, the disgraceful surrenders in South Africa, the non-payment of the American debt, slums, low wages and unemployment. It can surely be only a benefit to have all this brought to our notice. I suppose Germans can’t stand hearing of their own faults. Hitler must be a demi-god or nothing, whereas we are quite aware that Chamberlain is a second-rate old bungler that we’ve got to put up with for the time being. The papers all advertise when to hear Haw-Haw.

  Lady Dufferin’s pet goldfinch was frozen to death in her bedroom. This is a remarkable thing to happen to a British bird.

  How dreadful your life sounds! We are happier in Mells. But Miss Gamble who keeps the general shop has said that she thinks Hitler is in the right. It has deeply shocked my carter and he said darkly that it wouldn’t surprise him if Miss Gamble found her windows broken one morning. So minorities are persecuted and Mrs Baker (aunt to Miss Gamble) said she believed that the Second Coming of Our Lord was at hand. He would appear as soon as the first bomb fell on England. Lady Horner sent Mrs Baker a message telling her not to talk such rot.

  The Vincent Sheeans came into our lives with a Christmas explosion of joy and goodwill. With them we hung over the radio for Graf Spee news. With them we heard that she had gone up in flames off Montevideo. Good news was so rarely come by that this glowed exaggeratedly bright. I groaned because America in the first flash called it “a Viking’s end” but rejoiced that later, on learning of the Captain’s disembarkation, they labelled it “ignominious suicide.”

  Conrad wrote at the end of December:

  Mrs James of Sutton [Conrad’s general servant] has been ill and her morale is zero minus. Everything is too awful and her tearful complaint of the war is: “It isn’t like an ordinary war—not like the last war at all.” She means the retreat from Mons and the long casualty lists, I suppose.

  Both my refugee boys have gone lousy. They had no lice when they came. Now the village heads are crawling and there is a delousing parade so many days a week in the barn. Mrs James told me about it and burst into tears. I had to say quite sharply: “Shut up! Everyone has lice in wartime.” She said she had had the most miserable Christmas of her life. I said: “I can well believe it; about a hundred million have.”

  A rest interval in January took us to Palm Beach, where friends had arranged an extra lecture for our benefit. Barbara Hutton, frail and beautiful as a sea-shell, gave us shelter from the fearful cold of Florida.

  Zero in Alabama, magnolias and gardenias under snow, but in Barbara’s house tuberoses that brought me all Venice—youth, escapades, d’Annunzio and Longhi—in a whiff. In the garden pattered her little Danish son, game and sturdy for three, followed by a big white French governess, English nanny and a burly detective in pale-grey flannel, growing fat and flabby in his unmanly occupation.

  I had to sleep under my fur coat. They’ve shut the schools in Florida as it’s too cold for the children, too cold to have Duff’s lecture in a tent as intended. So it was given at the Everglades Club and the hurricane gave the unenthusiastic guests no excuse for defaulting.

  I notice a distinct change in the Press and general attitude in this country. It isn’t much, but it’s clear that the feeling is leading away from the Allies. Our old fool who won’t allow propaganda here and says: “Leave it to Hitler and let the rugged truth talk” would change his orders if he could see the rugged German lies doing their work so successfully. Germans make speeches and write letters to the papers proving the war unnecessary and kept going by England. They write articles on the slavery practised on Indians by a tyrannic Empire masquerading as a democracy. Only Duff is here to reply against a powerful organisation. They are violently anti-war. It hasn’t died down at all, and won’t until the Allies’ true troubles begin. Duff answers the commonest question: “Why did England wait so long before seeing the danger and protesting with force?” by saying that it was because of the dread of war, and that there is no more dangerous state of mind for a country. The theory that anything is better than war will inevitably land you into one. That gives them pause.

  Jacksonville

  Shaming departure. In front of the Quality the big brown oubliette bag containing night-necessities, coats, boots, books, bottles, a radio, Duff’s slippers (embroidered with roses and a D.C. in forget-me-nots), buck-basket linen, a half-bottle of whisky etc. got a jab in its canvas back and split, spread and started gushing out its intimate contents, headed by Vincent Sheean’s collected works. Duff’s “vanity case,” designed and planned with tender care and great expense in ivory and scarlet, also gave out. So two pieces are scrapped, thank God!

  Mark Hopkins Hotel, Barbary Coast

  February 1940

  Good old George Gordon Moore, ranchless yet unwhitened by age, met the train and we dined with him at a Babylonian hotel with dance music to stun you. Moore is like a mammoth truffle, black and of no known shape. There’s no diminution of vigour. Twenty-five years ago it was just the same—a war and Moore screaming against the band, and my listening to hotly-whispered words of love, not one of which I could actually hear. You might say he has “a wild originality of countenance” while not at all resembling Byron. Another pleasant shock from the past was dear Sister White, ex-matron of the Rutland Hospital, she who brought me nightly to my dressing-room in old Miracle days hot chicken-wing smothered in mushrooms under a cloche.

  We had been asked to stay in Los Angeles by Mr and Mrs Jack Warner. I had fought it, fearing the high standard of clothes and up-to-the-markishness. Duff, on the other hand, was yearning for the “stars.” We compromised and I went, on the condition that we should spend a long week-end lost in some desert wilderness. But when the Sunday came we were too happy to move, overwhelmed by friendliness and wallowing in luxury. The house was beautiful, so was the hostess, and our own Rolls Royce had a better Ronald Colman at the wheel. Our rooms, bathed in sunshine, had a private terrace furnished with sofas, tables, cigarettes, books and gin. Lying on my bed I had only to press a button to find my room flooded by a Beethoven or Tchaikovsky symphony, not presented to me by Wrigley’s chewing-gum but coming from the tennis-court where Jack Warner was playing.

  I tried to straighten my possessions and conceal the dirt and deficiencies from the simpering maid who has been given to me. She whipped away every stitch as soon as my back was turned to have it washed or cleaned (there is a private laundry). The walls are covered in Chinese paper, the twin Chippendale beds are under a single Chippendale canopy, the carpet is rich and white, every piece of furniture is a museum piece. The lamps are Ming and the sheets embroidered from hem to hem. An on-time clock on every table, a
lordly dish of fresh fruit, a table of forty magazines of this week or month, flowers in profusion, a large orchid for this evening in a box, two white fur couvre-pieds, even stationery and pens, a radio too (of course). The ravishing dressing-room is made of unpolished flesh-coloured wood and is completely cupboard. There is no part of the wall that does not open on to shelves, hooks, racks, jacks, hangers and presses. The drawers of the dressing-table are filled with cotton-wool, tissues, aspirin, pins of all shapes and sizes. The bathroom is the size of a drawing-room and includes separate showers, with new rubber caps hung in them, separate lu-lu with cupboards within easy reach when seated, filled with a wide selection of the most intimate necessaries. Other bathroom cupboards hold all drugs, strapping, soaps, unguents and a big bottle of French scent to refill the bottle and spray on the dressing-table. My plan for the desert is collapsing.

  In the evening we went, while Duff lectured at Long Beach, to the Russian Ballet. They were giving, amongst others, the surrealist Dali creation. The male dancers are naked but for black trunks with large lobsters as codpieces. After this to a night-club and our first view of the stars at play—Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin and Olivia de Havilland. The dance-club got me down a lot, and once home I became a great nuisance of groans and despair. In Hollywood I always feel an undesirable alien.

  16 February

  However, I woke bright and better today. Mr Warner sent me down his osteopath, a very fresh young man who, when I asked him if he got tired on his job, said no, he always had a strong rye whisky between treatments, which kept him going. I don’t think he did me any good, but as everything is free in this house I won’t miss a trick. I talked to Aldous Huxley on the telephone and tried hard to get Laurence Olivier and your Miss Leigh without success, so we ordered our Rolls and drove off to lunch on top of a far hill, Palos Vendes by name. We ate out in the sun, staring hard at the Pacific, and I felt I could face things better. The birds sing when I wake. When dressing starts Mrs Warner sends her coiffeur down to me. I admit he improves me, but I’m embarrassed. I feel he is criticising my scalp and my comb and the unicorn’s vestige on my forehead. He will take no payment.