Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Diana had never agreed that the delay should be more than six months, and in April they debated anxiously what they should do when the time ran out. The Rutlands stuck to their insistence on the full year. Duff and Diana meditated defiance, then opted for discretion. Diana wrote a letter to her mother, half loving, half reproachful, in which she accepted the further delay. As in some jujitsu match where feigned submission throws the opponent off balance, the Duchess was disarmed by her daughter’s unexpected docility. She told her that if she would approach the Duke she might get a better reception than the time before. Diana did so, to be met by total surrender. ‘Don’t go upstairs for a little,’ the Duke said nervously. ‘I don’t want your mother to think I gave in at once.’ Duff’s interview the following day was equally friendly. The only flaw was financial. ‘He said he would allow Diana £300 a year. I think he ought to do more than that. She costs him twice as much now.’ Duff promised to settle a total of £10,000 on Diana, most of it from a trust fund out of which he could dispose of no more until his mother’s death. His annual pay from the Foreign Office had now gone up to £520 and his mother promised to continue his present allowance of £600 a year.

  ‘The engagement is of the romantic order,’ announced the Daily Mirror, ‘and the wedding, which is bound to be picturesque, will be on June 2.’ The national press quickly decided that, in a lean season, Diana’s wedding was the story that would catch the public imagination. Her presents, in particular, were fine food for vicarious romance as the rich and the grand emptied their cornucopias at her altar. The list occupied eighty-eight pages of a large notebook from the Army and Navy Stores. The King and Queen gave a blue enamel and diamond brooch bearing their own initials; Queen Alexandra a diamond-and-ruby pendant; the French Ambassador a gold ewer for incense-burning; the Princess of Monaco a diamond ring; Lord Wimborne a William and Mary gold dressing-case; King Manuel a gold sugar-sifter; Sir Philip Sassoon a paste basket brooch; Lord Beaverbrook a motor-car; Dame Nellie Melba a writing-table; Augustine Birrell a first edition of Tristram Shandy; General Freyberg a handsome edition of Froude’s History of England; Solly Joel a vanity box of gold and diamonds; Mrs Belloc Lowndes a first edition of Edwin Drood; cheques came from, among others, Sir Ernest Cassel, the Aga Khan, Lord French and Sir Basil Zaharoff, the last for £250. Sir John Lavery, Mr J. J. Shannon and Mr Ambrose McEvoy all gave portraits of the bride.

  A few days before the wedding Duff and Diana went to the Italian consulate to get visas in their passports. Queues were long, bureaucracy stultifying, and Duff soon became bad-tempered. He snarled at Diana. ‘Never shall I forget how her face, which had been all smiles and laughter, turned suddenly to tears. It was so beautiful that I could hardly regret it. It taught me how gentle I must be.’ It is remarkable to what an extent he remembered this lesson. He never learnt to control his temper and would lash out when provoked with unthinking deadliness, but it was rarely indeed that his wife was the victim of his venom.

  ‘There was more of the Duff than the Manners touch about Lady Diana’s on the whole rather dull wedding,’ reported the London Mail loftily. It is hard to imagine what antics the journalist was expecting. St Margaret’s, Westminster, even when decorated with rose-bushes and orchids from Blenheim, is no place for informality, and the formidable weight of royalty was enough to ensure that the conventions would be observed. Diana sat forlornly in the sombre morning-room at Arlington Street until her father came to claim her – ‘his temper was short and his gills were white and his top hat had no jauntiness’. Once past the great wooden gates she was swept into a maelstrom of clamour and light and headlong rushing from one point to the next. There were crowds in St James’s to see her go, several thousand more spectators around the church, a still denser throng to surround the house for the reception and finally cheer her on her way. ‘Diana’s popularity with the mob is only comparable with that of Kitchener,’ wrote Duff in slight dismay. For Diana the day was a kaleidoscope of half-absorbed impressions; the malign gnome-face of Lord Beaverbrook with tears coursing down his cheeks; the photographers jostling for position and clambering up trees and lamp-posts; Duff holding her hand throughout the service; the Tree grandchildren in Greek robes scattering rose-petals before the bridal couple; the mad admirer who burst through the crowd and thrust a letter into her hand – ‘Read this, read this before you proceed!’ Diana’s mind rushed to the Ides of March but the message only wished her well.

  And so the car forced its way through the rampageous mob and the couple slipped away on honeymoon. First stop was Philip Sassoon’s house at Lympne, left empty for them for as long as they cared to use it. Opulent comfort, unobtrusive servants, fountains playing in the smoothly tailored gardens through which they sauntered after dinner while Duff read aloud from Donne’s Epithalamions:

  He comes, and passes through sphere after sphere,

  First her sheets, then her arms, then any where.

  Let not this day, then, but this night be thine,

  Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.

  ‘Our night,’ wrote Duff, ‘like so many of the main incidents in our love-story, was very old-fashioned and conventional.’ The only untoward incident came when he tried to turn out the light and by mistake summoned Diana’s surprised but gratified lady’s maid. A day of letter-writing, love, and reading the interminable reports of their wedding in the newspapers, and they were ready for Italy and the honeymoon proper.

  They stayed for a few days at Bernard Berenson’s villa near Florence, which had been rented by Ivor Wimborne. Duff loved the library and the champagne, Diana the garden. After dinner their host tactfully left them; the garden was full of fireflies; ‘the scent of the flowers was intoxicating, the moon was full. We seem to have reached almost the limit of beauty.’ Then it was Rome. Marconi had offered them his house, then gone back on the offer. Instead he booked them into the Grand Hotel. There was anxious speculation whether he intended to pay for them – he didn’t, but as the bill was less than £2 a night for bedroom, sittingroom and bathroom his dereliction caused them little concern. Final destination was Lord Grimthorpe’s Villa Cimbrone in the hills above Ravello – ‘Byzantine cloisters, endless rose-gardens, cypress avenues, statues everywhere.’ A thousand feet below lay the sea. After dinner and much white wine they strolled on the terrace. ‘Diana’s clothes fell from her and she stood by me naked as a statue but whiter and lovelier far. This was perhaps the most beautiful moment of all.’

  There is usually cause for relief in the ending of a honeymoon. The pressure-cooker intimacy of enforced isolation, the feeling that it would be a confession of failure to seek other company than one’s own, produce tension and a sense of constraint. Diana, with her fear of tête-à-têtes, was peculiarly vulnerable to such strain. Yet in the event the honeymoon proved an idyll. On the last night she broke down and cried, Duff recorded, ‘because we were going away, and she thought we might never be so happy again. Blissfully happy we have been here and it is sad to go.’

  The journey back was beset with disasters. A storm at sea reduced Duff to agonies of sea-sickness. Diana was too frightened to be sick; every voice she heard was an appeal for help with the pumps, every thump the captain taking off his boots. Then they were stranded in Marseilles because of a muddle over tickets: ‘I am bad at keeping cheerful when things go wrong,’ admitted Duff. ‘Diana is wonderful.’ But his habitual optimism and her pessimism soon reasserted themselves. When they were almost on the last lap an elderly couple entered the carriage and settled down opposite them. Later Duff and Diana compared their reactions. ‘One day we will be like that,’ thought Duff with satisfaction; ‘One day we will be like that,’ thought Diana in despair.

  *

  ‘We are, funnily enough, profoundly different,’ Duff had written in 1917, ‘without loving me she likes me more than I could like anyone. One of the most remarkable things about her is the strength of her “likes”. I am cold-hearted except where I love, her friendships are more passiona
te than others’ loves.’ It did not take a honeymoon to show Duff and Diana how sharply they differed in their emotions and their instincts; they had already realized that this was so and decided that it mattered little. Duff was intensely sensual. Physically he did not know how to be content with a single woman; even before their honeymoon was over he was seeking diversions outside their marriage. But such diversions were no more than the gratification of a nagging appetite. ‘My infidelities are entirely of the flesh,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The long habit of promiscuity asserts itself. I feel guilty of no unfaithfulness, only of filthiness.’

  Allied to this craving yet distinct from it was his longing for romance and adventure. Here it was the quest that counted rather than the fulfilment. Denied consummation after a protracted hunt, he congratulated himself on the fact that he was still young enough to enjoy love-making for its own sake. He felt himself deprived if he was not engaged in at least one secret and protracted love-affair, with all the fun of the amatory overtures, surreptitious messages, covert assignations, passionate declarations and, with luck, final seduction. He could never quite believe that Diana did not share his taste. Once, in Venice, she complained that Duff did not love her enough, or at least not romantically. He tried to explain that happiness and romance did not go together. Romance could not survive without the difficulties and dangers. She was suffering, he concluded, ‘from the same thing as I have been feeling here – these perfect moonlight nights were incomplete without some love-affair’.

  Diana was suffering from nothing of the sort. The physical side of love meant little to her, and with no wish to see any relationship ripen into illicit intimacy the whole paraphernalia of romantic seduction became a tedious irrelevance. Bed was an admirable place to sleep in and useful for procreation, but she could not imagine why so many men of her acquaintance were so importunate in their efforts to share it with her. What she loved was companionship and admiration. She had a genius for friendship, would work at it, make sacrifices for it, display furious loyalty in its cause. With her husband this friendship was transmuted into a devotion and commitment that was awe-inspiring in its completeness. But if she had been told at the end of her honeymoon that Duff had tired of sex, she would have received the news with equanimity, almost relief; regretting only that the chances of her having a child were thereby reduced.

  Some people – most usually men who had not enjoyed the success with Diana which they had anticipated – assumed that her coolness towards men proved that she lusted after women. The legend of Diana the nymphomaniac alternated with a rival version of Diana the lesbian. The second had as little basis in fact as the first. She loved beauty and appreciated it in either sex, but that was as far as it went. ‘Don’t tell me you want to hold me and love me,’ she wrote to one female admirer more than twenty years later. ‘It only upsets me and will make me scary. All my life I’ve been a very normal type: worshipping Duff; a few lovers; fond of men; and a happy companion of women – but no more, o no, no more.’

  ‘Diana is the kind of wife who will always eat the legs of a chicken and give her husband the wings,’ Lady Tree told her daughter Iris. ‘Oh for the wings, the wings of a Duff,’ replied Iris flippantly, but Lady Tree had identified an essential element in the Coopers’ marriage. From the moment that she married Duff, Diana dedicated herself to his interests. Her judgement of new acquaintances was not based on: ‘Do I like them?’ but ‘Would Duff like them or be amused to hear of them?’; half the satisfaction she derived from her adventures lay in the recounting of them afterwards; his success was her success, his happiness hers. Whenever he was out of her sight she worried about his welfare, in their London house she would rush from her bed to the window when he left in the morning to make sure he survived the crossing of the road.

  Duff was required to be as much a father as a lover. To Diana at Belvoir he wrote: ‘How cold it must be. Poor Baby! She must ask Mr Major [her dog] to keep her warm. Be a good little girl and above all obey Nannie – and obey obediently without whining or asking why.’ Diana replied in similar vein – ‘Up came poor baby’s mummy, who cosseted her and comforted her and gave her a stiff Bromo Selzer, so at last she got to sleep and woke up brave and strong.’ ‘I’m so happy that Swift wrote baby language and that it interests instead of shocks,’ she went on. ‘I suppose it doesn’t really matter if mine does shock though, for beyond Duffy these letters won’t, I fear,* be very widely read.’ One of the most capable of women if put to the test, she rejoiced in the myth that she was dependent on Duff to help her with the practical problems of life, and did all she could to propagate the image of herself as the innocent child, unfit to navigate the reefs of a dangerous world.

  She recognized that Duff had different needs from her and did not in the least resent them. It was clear from the start of their relationship that Duff was not made for monogamy and Diana was more than content to share with others the burden of a husband’s vigorous sexuality. Once at a party he swooped on an attractive girl and made conspicuous advances to her. Lady Cunard suggested to Diana that she might like to take him away. ‘Why, he’s not bored yet, is he?’ asked Diana, who was enjoying herself. ‘But don’t you mind?’ pressed her hostess. ‘Mind? I only mind when Duffy has a cold!’ On the whole she liked Duff’s women, knew that they were unlikely to last long and had a remarkable gift for retaining as friends women whom her husband had discarded as mistresses. When she did not like them – which usually meant that they had not taken the trouble to be nice to her – their reign was short indeed. Diana rarely made scenes but she would laugh at them and make it clear that she found them boring until Duff doubted his judgement and began to look elsewhere. Sometimes she seemed almost to procure for him. At Bognor they had a guest-cottage at the end of the garden. When Ann Charteris, who was staying with them, wanted to go to bed, Duff insisted that he should escort her. Anticipating a pounce in the shrubbery, Miss Charteris looked hopefully at another guest and suggested he should come too. ‘Oh, no, don’t spoil it!’ cried Diana, urging the couple on their way.

  But she was not incapable of resentment. One woman whom she particularly disliked was dismissed tartly as ‘a silly, giggling, gawky, lecherous bit of dross’. Others inspired as much alarm as scorn. Daisy Fellowes was one of the very few who she felt posed a real threat to her marriage. Malicious, intelligent and formidably elegant, Mrs Fellowes was the daughter of the Duc Decazes and the sewing-machine heiress Isabelle Singer, herself previously married to the Prince de Broglie. Duff first met her at the end of 1919 and immediately took to her, ‘Mean, cruel and beautiful,’ he described her. ‘She is the notorious Princesse de Broglie, the destroyer of many a happy home. I expected to find her attractive and I wasn’t disappointed.’ The discovery that she thought Flaubert had written La Chartreuse de Parme temporarily distressed him, but he rallied bravely. At Deauville in 1921 they met every afternoon for increasingly tempestuous assignations, while Diana resentfully went off for long drives with Lord Wimborne. The climax came when Duff deserted Diana at the Casino and went off to Mrs Fellowes’s villa. Diana missed him, searched everywhere, decided Duff had been murdered and, frantic with worry, informed the police. ‘I was terribly sorry for her, poor darling,’ wrote Duff contritely. ‘I fear she will never forgive Daisy.’ What Diana found hardest to forgive was that Duff had been so inconsiderate as to disappear without a word and expose her to such cruel fears. Duff’s assassination, not his seduction, was the threat she dreaded most.

  Where she did feel jealousy she was ashamed of it. Diana Capel was too good a friend to constitute a serious threat, yet Diana could not hide her distress when Duff launched into an unavailing pursuit soon after their marriage. A painful scene followed one party when Diana wished to leave and Duff to stay. ‘She blurted out in the middle of her sobs that it was all due to her jealousy of Diana Capel and she had hated herself for being jealous, which she had sworn that she would never be.’ Duff wished that she felt less strongly about it but was flattered
by her feelings. ‘I do love her infinitely more than the other Diana. I love also romance and intrigue and cannot live without them.’ He promised to see less of Diana Capel in future, but found it hard to keep his word, and friends like Scatters Wilson and Ivor Wimborne gleefully reported every transgression which they detected. In April 1921 Diana planned a short visit to Paris and was hurt when Duff encouraged the enterprise with what she felt was excessive eagerness. Injury turned to indignation when she discovered that Duff had intended himself to go to Breccles where Diana Capel would be staying. At once she telegraphed Ivor Wimborne to meet her in Paris.

  If her object was to make Duff jealous, she had chosen the wrong ally. Duff knew the limits of Diana’s enthusiasm for Lord Wimborne and did not take him seriously as a putative paramour. Chaliapin was another matter. Greatest operatic bass of his generation, majestic in stature, barbarously handsome, almost as celebrated a lover as he was a singer, Chaliapin had dazzled Diana briefly in London before the war. Now he reappeared to woo her in ardent French – ‘Chère, chère et adorable créature, je t’adore, ma belle Dianotchka.’ Diana was almost swept off her feet, but her unwavering commonsense told her that it could be no more than a fleeting fling. She flaunted her friendship with him and even organized a dinner for Chaliapin to meet the Prime Minister. Maurice Baring interpreted and Lloyd George interrogated him on conditions in Russia, a subject on which the singer did not seem to be conspicuously well-informed. But Duff remained unmoved; after the dinner: ‘Diana wanted to drive home with Chaliapin, so I drove Diana Capel home – a successful arrangement for all concerned.’ He did at one point express mild irritation when Diana dined with Chaliapin on two successive nights, but the protest related more to the fact that he had been left to himself in a week when White’s was closed than to any real jealousy.