A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  Another ancient monument who often came to Eaton Square was Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough. She quarrelled bitterly with the Duke, whom she called Little Ogpu. She was living in his house at Carlton House Terrace, where Ogpu, in an attempt to dislodge her, had the electricity turned off. Her lawyer insisted that she must nevertheless stay there. One hot summer evening after dinner we were sitting on the balcony overlooking the Mall; it was quite late, and the empty house was getting dark. Gladys, who must have heard the tinkle of a distant bell, got up and ran through the drawing room to the top of the stairs. I was slightly alarmed when I heard her call down; ‘Come along up, Duchess, come along up!’ There was an eccentricity about Gladys that made me wonder whether she might not be a little mad, and I thought she was talking to herself. However, a few moments later the Duchess of Hamilton appeared. We sat on the balcony until it got quite dark, the duchesses talking about dogs, a passion they shared. Then we felt our way down the stairs and out into the lighted street.

  Gladys Marlborough had been a beautiful and clever girl during the belle époque in Paris and Rome at the turn of the century. I often questioned her about this remote and fabulous pre-first-war world. Speaking of Ida Rubinstein, the dancer, she said: ‘Oh, she insisted on the grand luxe.’

  ‘What is the grand luxe?’ I asked.

  ‘A carpet of fresh blossoms on her bathroom floor, renewed twice a day,’ was one example Gladys gave.

  She was the victim of an early and disastrous attempt at face-lifting. The idea had been to give her a perfect Grecian nose; some sort of wax inserted under the skin where the nose joins the forehead had slipped to the lower part of her face, which consequently looked like a collapsed balloon. She was unselfconscious about it, and her large blue eyes remained as evidence of her former beauty.

  Gladys Marlborough, accompanied by dozens of Blenheim spaniels, went to live in the country; she became a hermit, and would see nobody. A few years later her mind gave way; she gradually sank into the sad and lonely world of madness.

  11.

  MUNICH AND ROME

  Unity was one of us who, despite my father’s dislike of the idea, did go to school, or rather to schools in the plural. She loved her schools but she was always expelled from them; she could never keep the rules.

  ‘Not expelled,’ Muv used to say. ‘Asked to leave.’ The result was identical.

  Her sins were so trivial that Farve took her part; he once went so far as to suggest throwing a headmistress who had got rid of Unity into a pond, but even if he had done so it would scarcely have induced her to change her mind. I have never been able to understand how anyone could abide school, but I sympathized with Unity as one after another of these dreadful establishments rejected her. Once she was expelled because she refused to be confirmed.

  All this was in the past, and she was now nearly nineteen. In the summer of 1933 it was with Unity that I made a journey which changed her life.

  In the spring of that year Mrs. Richard Guinness had invited me to come and meet ‘a very interesting German’. When I arrived the interesting German was playing the piano in her drawing-room.

  ‘He is a personal friend of Hitler,’ said Mrs. Guinness. ‘He plays the piano for him when he is exhausted after a great speech. He is David to Hitler’s Saul.’ I hardly realized at the time what a wonderfully inappropriate analogy this was.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl was a huge man with an exaggerated manner. He got up from the piano and began to talk in fluent English about his idol—for he left us in no doubt that Hitler was everything in the world to him, as leader and as friend. He had known him for twelve years; it was to Hanfstaengl’s wife and his sister that Hitler had fled after the failure of the 1923 putsch, when sixteen National Socialists had been shot dead as they marched, unarmed, past the Feldherrnhalle. Hitler, marching with them arms linked, had been thrown to the ground when his comrade was killed, and his shoulder was wrenched out of joint. In the Hanfstaengls’ house at Uffing he had been arrested.

  The Hanfstaengls had got plenty of American dollars, because the family firm which made art reproductions had a branch in New York. Putzi had helped Hitler to buy a newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, during the inflation. Now that Hitler was in power he had given Hanfstaengl the post of chief of a bureau dealing with the foreign press.

  All I knew of Hitler was what I read in the English papers. ‘How about the Jews?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the Jews, the Jews, that’s all one ever hears in London, what about the Jews,’ shouted Hanfstaengl. ‘People here have no idea of what the Jewish problem has been in Germany since the war. Why not think for once of the ninety-nine per cent of the population, of the six million unemployed. Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for the Germans. If the Jews don’t like it they can get out. They have relations and money all over the world. Let them leave Germany to us Germans.’

  He boomed on all evening; I had often met drawing-room communists who breathed fire and slaughter; he was my first drawing-room Nazi. He said if ever I came to Germany I must look him up and he would introduce me to Hitler. ‘You must all come to Germany,’ he told the assembled company. ‘You will see with your own eyes what lies are being told about us in your newspapers.’

  A few months later Unity and I decided to go abroad somewhere together and I suggested Bavaria, partly because I had never been there and partly because I wanted to ‘see for myself’.

  She told me afterwards that at the time she would have preferred France or Italy, but she agreed and we went to Munich. We found some English friends of Tom’s and went sightseeing with them, baroque churches and castles, and we went to the opera.

  Unity and I called at the old Brown House, afterwards to be rebuilt, and asked the man at the door how we could find Dr. Hanfstaengl. He had not given me his address because, according to him, everybody in the new Germany would know where to find him; he gave me to understand that his name was a household word. The hotel people seemed never to have heard of him, but at the Brown House they said they would try to forward my note.

  At that time I knew about twenty words of German and Unity none at all. I could put a simple question but I never understood the answer. Unity began to be disappointed because I had promised we should meet Hitler and so far it had been nothing but churches and picture galleries.

  Next day Hanfstaengl telephoned. ‘You have come at exactly the right moment,’ he said. ‘We are having our Parteitag tomorrow, I will get you tickets and a room in Nuremberg.’

  He met us at the station. The Parteitag turned out to last four days, not one as we had imagined. The old town was a fantastic sight. Hundreds of thousands of men in party uniforms thronged the streets and there were flags in all the windows. There were three different uniforms but Putzi wore yet another one he had designed for himself, of a darker shade of brown. Unlike the other Politische Leiter, who were in trousers, he had breeches and riding boots. Unity thought him wonderful and very funny; he was most kind to us and took us to all the speeches and parades. He had an adjutant, and in our party there was also an American lady who knew Germany well and explained things to us. I often went to the Nuremberg Parteitag in after years, but never again was the atmosphere comparable with this first one after Hitler came to power. It was a feat of improvised organization to bring such numbers of men from all over Germany and feed and house them and get them to the right places at the right moment. Most of them lived in tents near the town. The gigantic parades went without a hitch. A feeling of excited triumph was in the air, and when Hitler appeared an almost electric shock passed through the multitude. In other years the whole thing had become an established political circus marvellously synchronized and with permanent installations to contain the million or so performers; in 1933 it was a thanksgiving by revolutionaries for the success of their revolution. They felt the black years since their defeat in the war were now over and they looked forward to a better life. There were almost no foreigners; later on the diplomats and assort
ed guests came, but not in 1933. By a strange chance, Unity and the American lady and I witnessed this demonstration of hope in a nation that had known collective despair. We heard the speeches Hitler made, most of them very short, and we understood not a single word.

  There was not much in the English papers about the Parteitag; when they mentioned it at all it was to describe it as ‘militaristic’, though it was not even as militaristic as a torchlight tattoo in England. Hanfstaengl at this time still professed the deepest adoration for the Führer, though a querulous note came into his voice when some of the other members of the government were mentioned. He called Dr. Goebbels a ‘kleiner Rigoletto’. As Propaganda Minister he had a finger in Putzi’s pie.

  ‘When are we going to meet Hitler?’ Unity asked two or three times a day. She was put off with a variety of excuses, which ranged from his being far too busy to more personal matters. ‘You mustn’t wear lipstick, the Führer doesn’t like it.’ We were quite accustomed to make-up being disapproved of; it was a phobia of Farve’s, but in those days it was the fashion and Unity was firm. ‘I couldn’t possibly do without it,’ she said.

  We left Germany without having met Hitler, but Unity was determined to go back as soon as she possibly could. She set about persuading my parents to allow her to learn the language, in Munich, with obsessive determination.

  Soon after getting back to London from Germany I set off again, this time to Rome for a visit to Gerald Berners. He had become a great friend of mine the year before. We often met at Emerald’s and we had been fellow guests of Mrs. Ronnie Greville’s at Polesden Lacey, a luxurious house where Gerald approved of the cuisine. His house in Rome looked on to the Forum, the Forum was our garden, where we sat in the sun and wandered about. Gerald’s cook, Tito, bred canaries which sang all day and kept him company when Gerald was in England and he was alone in the house. An enemy opened the doors of all the cages and the canaries flew away into the Forum where they perched singing and twittering on bushes and trees. There was no food that day; Tito was in the Forum from morning till night coaxing and whistling to his birds. They all came back, and even seemed pleased to find their familiar cages once again. He made delicious things, in particular there was a cake, hard chocolate outside and inside sour cream, sponge, rum, angelica and candied cherries which I have often thought of since but never achieved.

  Our days followed a pattern. Gerald got up early and worked, composing at the piano, playing a little phrase and then writing it down. His music had a dying fall, there was a superficial gaiety in it accompanied by an underlying sadness. He had written the music for a Diaghilev ballet, The Triumph of Neptune, and was to compose The Wedding Bouquet, a ballet with chorus, the words by Gertrude Stein.

  In the afternoon we went sight-seeing; Gerald knew Rome well; he was en poste there as a young diplomat and since then had his own house. Luncheon and dinner were devoted to people; Gerald loved company and the Romans loved him. When one first arrived it took a day or two to get the trend of the scandals of the moment which were discussed in every house and all the time. I thought the Romans exceptionally beautiful to look at and also exceptionally spiteful about one another. They themselves would not have agreed, for Gerald told me that when Dorothy Radziwill visited Rome after a long absence they said of her disapprovingly: ‘Oh! Elle a la méchanceté d’avant guerre!’

  Half way through the morning Gerald would telephone from the landing outside my room, making plans for parties and expeditions. ‘Pronto, pronto, e Lord Berners,’ he began. His Italian was fluent but he made no concessions, he pronounced it as though it were English. He never embarrassed with a good accent like some of one’s compatriots.

  He loved it when the Romans translated literally from Italian to English. ‘No, it wasn’t amusing,’ said one, referring to a party, ‘there were only four cats there.’ And another when she heard Gerald and I were going for a walk along the Via Appia: ‘Not the Via Appia! I hate the Via Appia. Mama and I used to have such annoying talks on the Via Appia!’

  Gerald was clever and witty, we laughed all the time. He did not do imitations and he was not a raconteur; his stories and jokes were short and abrupt and took only a few seconds to tell. When he laughed himself it was a sort of delighted sneeze. Like most of the wittiest and funniest people I have known he was fundamentally sad and pessimistic. Happy extroverts are doubtless to be envied, but they do not make the best companions. It was in Rome that I first met Gerald’s ‘Mad Boy’, Robert Heber-Percy.

  A year later, when I was once again staying at Foro Romano, Gerald was writing The Girls of Radcliffe Hall. It was a roman à clef about a school of which he was the headmistress; many of our friends, lightly disguised, were the pupils. Every morning he came and sat on my bed to read the latest instalment. The book made us scream with laughter; he had it privately printed.

  During the golden month of October we saw beautiful things day after day; it was perfect happiness. Sometimes we motored out to Frascati, to Prince Aldobrandini’s villa, or to the Villa Medici, or to Caprarola. Once we lunched with the Caetanis at Ninfa, the most romantic of houses surrounded by streams. There is nowhere as green as Ninfa, or so it seems compared with the sunburnt campagna. We often lunched with Princess Jane di San Faustino; she had a parrot which had belonged to Marshal Ney, I was deeply impressed by this aged bird.

  Gerald went out with his painting things and he and Princesse Marie Murat painted side by side. She lived with the French ambassador, the Comte de Chambrun whom she subsequently married. Sometimes we wandered in Rome, not yet the wild noisy hub of crazy traffic, tearing motor bicycles, scooters and cars, every driver pressing a klaxon, that it was to become after the war. We climbed the dome of St. Peter’s, a rather terrifying climb up a steep stair set at an angle, hidden between the inner and outer shells of the dome. We walked on the roof of the great church where the San Pietrini live, selling Vatican stamps and postcards. We ate ices in the Piazza Navona.

  On one of these long visits to Gerald Phyllis de Janzé joined us for part of the time. I was fond of her; she was beautiful and intelligent and had been a great friend of Carrington at the Slade. But she tiresomely criticized all things Italian for not being French.

  ‘If you’ve lived in France,’ she said, ‘everything here seems coarse.’ We argued about it. ‘Diana and Phyllis quarrelling in the back of the car,’ Gerald called it. It seemed to me then and it seems to me still although I have lived for a quarter of a century in France, that next to Greece we owe nearly everything in architecture to the Italian Renaissance, above all to Michelangelo and Palladio. The Gothic north may be sublime, but ‘surtout soyons classique’ as Helleu used to say. Furniture is of course another thing altogether, and here France reigns supreme.

  Gerald, Desmond Parsons and I motored to Paris from Rome in easy stages in a lumbering Rolls Royce driven sedately by an English chauffeur. We visited Max Beerbolm in Rapallo and he showed us his latest books of photographs transformed with touches of Indian ink into fearful caricatures and monsters; an art Gerald himself excelled in.

  On our way through France we lunched at the Pyramide in Vienne, a temple of gastronomy to this day among the greatest in all France (which is equivalent to saying in the whole world). It is named after a Roman obelisk which local people formerly called the tomb of Pontius Pilate, probably because he was the only Roman whose name was familiar to them.

  When we got to Paris we dined with Violet Trefusis. She said to Gerald how amusing it would be for them to pretend to be engaged and get a deluge of presents. A day or two later we were all back in London and their forthcoming engagement was announced in the gossip column of a newspaper. Violet telephoned Gerald: ‘I’ve had dozens of telegrams of congratulations.’

  ‘Have you really?’ said Gerald, ‘I haven’t had a single one.’ Her mother, Mrs. Keppel, who happened to be in London, thought the joke had gone too far and issued a denial. Gerald said he was going to put in The Times ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the
Isle of Man’.

  Later that winter, probably as a result of overwork, M. had a recurrence of his old trouble, phlebitis. We went to Provence for him to recover in a charming house he rented from Sir Louis Mallet, near Grasse. Despite his illness M. and I were very happy there; we sat out in the sun by day and dined in front of a wood fire. I went for long walks in the hills, coming upon washer-women beating their linen on oaken boards in the bright streams and chatting together as they worked, like Joyce’s washer-women in Anna Livia Plurabel.

  At Eaton Square I saw old friends and made some new friends. Adrian Daintrey painted me at that time, and during the sittings he talked about Proust. I had read an essay on Proust by Clive Bell in which he made out that À La recherche du temps perdu was as difficult to read and as hard to understand as a manual of physics. Adrian told me this was complete nonsense; he urged me to try the Scott Moncrieffe translation. This I did, and fell under the spell. I have been under the spell ever since. Bryan gave me the N.R.F. edition; he had the sixteen volumes bound in pink cloth for me; a gift which has produced more amusement and pleasure over the years than anything else in my library. It must be admitted that the English translation, though brilliant in its way, is quite different from the original; however for those who cannot read French it is a hundred times better than nothing.

  The same year, 1934, I was painted with my two boys by Tchelichew. At that time he was well known in Paris but not in London; Edward James brought him over to design the sets and costumes for a ballet in which Tilly Losch was to dance. Tchelichew’s dream-like decor for Errante was romantically beautiful.