Chaliapin was to pursue Diana to Chicago in 1926 when she was acting in The Miracle. He sat in the front row of the stalls and, after the performance,
came to my dressing room, red with love and bent on a romp. Unfortunately, since learning English, he makes love in it instead of the more veiled Russian tongue. As his choice of erotic words wasn’t too delicate I had a wave of nausea. He said he wanted to have baby, he said, and I had a struggle with him in which he pressed baby’s white-washed hand on his placey. I tore it away and in so doing left a cloud of white.
Reluctant to point out this consequence of his antics, yet still less ready to send him out into the world with the mark of shame upon him, Diana cunningly led Chaliapin to the long dressing-room glass and pointed out how nice they looked together. The singer concurred, but fortunately noticed the white stain on his trousers and put the matter right before venturing forth.
Though Chaliapin’s fame and charms faded, Diana remained loyal to him and several years later abandoned the delights of a Sussex summer to come up to London and go to an embarrassingly ill-attended recital at the Queen’s Hall. ‘I loved him greatly in the days of his greatness,’ she wrote. ‘Now he is older and heavier and has lost his English public, it would be vile to desert him.’ After the Second World War she received a letter from Chaliapin’s daughter, who had seen her photograph in a Russian newspaper and identified it with the many pictures of Diana that Chaliapin used to hang on his walls. When she had asked her father who the girl in the picture was, he had merely replied that it was a very beautiful English girl whom he had loved deeply many years before.
Such romantic interludes were rare in Diana’s life. She was at her happiest with a court of devoted admirers, female as well as male, who would serve her, appreciate her and to whom she was fiercely loyal. In the years after the war, ‘The Boys’, Alan Parsons and the lawyer St John Hutchinson – ‘the arrogant, fearless, mirthful Hutchie’ – were in almost constant attendance. Duff was occasionally irritated by their presence – ‘Diana never seems to weary of that couple. I do.’ – but liked them and was glad that they kept Diana diverted. Certainly he felt no trace of jealousy. Nor did ‘The Boys” respective wives. On the contrary, Viola Parsons and Mary Hutchinson both counted Diana among their dearest friends and seem never to have resented the time which their husbands devoted to her entertainment.
In June 1921 Duff and Diana returned from a dinner-party. It was the anniversary of their wedding. Diana went up to bed and when Duff followed and turned on the light he found her standing in the corner wearing her wedding dress. The romantic gesture enraptured him. Forty years later she could have done the same thing and he have been equally delighted. For all Duff’s infidelities and Diana’s distractions – perhaps, indeed, because of them – their marriage never staled. Not for an instant did either doubt that the other was by far the most important person in their life. When they were separated they wrote to each other every day. Duff always believed Diana to be the most beautiful, intelligent and delightful of women; there was no sacrifice that Diana would not have made to secure her husband’s happiness. They relished the society of others; they were happiest in each other’s company. Many would feel that marriage should be more exclusive, that endless amatory adventures are incompatible with a truly happy match. That was not Duff’s or Diana’s philosophy. They believed that a marriage as strong as theirs could accommodate other relationships, even the most passionate. If others thought differently, that was of little importance: the Coopers knew their marriage was a happy one. It was a curious relationship, but it worked. The success of a marriage can surely best be judged by the feelings of the two parties; by such a test Duff and Diana’s marriage was not merely successful, it was triumphant.
*
Duff and Diana got back to London from their honeymoon on 6 July 1919 and settled temporarily into a house which the Howard de Waldens had lent them in Portland Place. To find their own house was a first preoccupation, but in the meantime Diana was fully occupied trying to master the motor-car which Beaverbrook had given them as a wedding-present. Duff never learnt to drive efficiently, Diana’s style was individual and ambitious, immortalized in Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs Stitch who, irritated by a traffic jam, took her car down the steps of an underground station and trundled briskly across the ticket hall. On her first day with the new car Diana rammed a milk-cart in Stafford Street and flooded the road. Luckily a dog-shop was nearby. The proprietor rushed out with all his wares on leashes and set them to work lapping up the mess.
All plans were soon disrupted. The Coopers were dining in the house of Norman Holden, a clever and drily witty stockbroker. After dinner they clambered on to the roof to watch a firework display being given in Hyde Park to celebrate the peace. Diana gave a sudden cry and Viola Parsons looked round, to find only her hat marking the spot where she had been. She had taken a step backwards and fallen thirty feet through a skylight, badly fracturing her leg. Guests were despatched in search of doctors and surgeons and Viola went off to tell the Duchess what had happened. She was out, but the Duke, in sombre mood, surveyed Viola balefully and remarked: ‘I advise you to have nothing to do with them. They’re a bad lot.’
It was to be three months before the extension was removed and Diana could even hobble about her room. She spent most of the time in the Holdens’ drawing-room which had been rigged up as a temporary ward. In Aaron’s Rod D. H. Lawrence described Aaron Sisson’s presence in the bedroom of Diana – thinly disguised as Lady Artemis Hooper – as part of a string quartet summoned to entertain the invalid after her ‘famous escapade of falling through the window of her taxi-cab’. Lady Artemis ‘reclined there in bed in a sort of half-light, well made up, smoking her cigarettes and talking in a rather raucous voice, making her slightly rasping witty comments to the other men in the room … This was the bride of the moment! Curious how raucous her voice sounded out of the cigarette smoke. Yet he liked her – the reckless note of the modern, social freebooter.’ Diana never ran to a string quartet but Asquith, who visited her several times, found her surrounded by flowers enough to fill two or three hot-houses and with never less than five or six visitors.
In spite of the rasping witticisms she was in considerable pain. Her leg had been badly set and it was to be nearly a year before she could walk freely again. She had recourse to morphia to help her sleep. Soon she became alarmed at what she feared might become an addiction. A hypnotist was summoned to replace the drug, but he proved wholly ineffective; Diana merely pretending to sleep when he was there and giggling with the nurse over her dose of morphine as soon as he had left. Duff took the threat of addiction more seriously than Diana. He constantly nagged at her to renounce the habit, she as constantly promised to do so and then relapsed. Nearly a year after the accident she spent a night with Katharine Asquith, came back the following morning and went straight to bed. Duff found her there at lunch time. ‘I thought she was looking very bad, obviously suffering from a debauch of morphia. She at first denied but at length confessed. I told her how ugly it had made her look. Her fear of ugliness is, I think, the best preventive.’
Whether it was Duff’s therapy or Diana’s will-power, morphia was never allowed to dominate her life. It seems, however, to have been at this period that Diana developed the acute hypochondria that was so evident in later years. She always ignored discomfort, bore pain stoically, but reacted with extravagant alarm to anything she took to be a symptom of advancing disease. Though rarely afflicted when she was happy or busily employed, depression or boredom were enough to stimulate a plethora of spots, swellings and inexplicable aches. In July 1920 she detected a wholly imaginary hardness on her right breast and at once diagnosed cancer. The doctor pooh-poohed her fears but she persisted and grew almost hysterical. A second doctor was called in and carried slightly more conviction, but Diana’s nerves were by now so turbulent that only a stiff dose of morphine would appease them. Fortunately she met the King of Spain at a ball at Londonderry H
ouse. He danced with her several times, tried to put his hand up her dress and asked for an appointment. She told him there was nothing doing but was greatly cheered by the encounter and forgot all about her cancer. A few weeks later, however, it returned. Her morale became so low that Duff had to take a week’s holiday to succour her. Sir Arbuthnot Lane was called in and said she ought to have a baby – unhelpful advice, since she had been wishing for nothing better ever since her wedding. In the end a Portuguese quack called Gomez announced that she did not have cancer but intestinal sepsis and a slightly defective thyroid. Diana found this both convincing and comforting, and all thoughts of fatal illness were temporarily dismissed.
When gloomy or afraid, Diana was apt to turn to alcohol. At the height of the cancer scare she wrecked a weekend party by turning tipsily to her neighbour at dinner, Cardie Montagu, Lord Swaythling’s son, and reciting Belloc’s malicious verses:
Lord Swaythling, whom the people knew
And loved as Mr Montagu
Will probably be known in hell
As Mr Moses Samuel.
For though they may not sound the same
The latter was the rogue’s real name.
Cardie Montagu professed amusement, but left early next morning for the races and did not return. This was not a solitary incident. At a ball at Covent Garden Duff found her half seas over with the Duke of Manchester – ‘I got her away as quick as I could. She was uncertain in gait and speed.’ A few weeks later it was at the Parsons’s and the other party was Augustus John, ‘who of all men I think the most disgusting,’ recorded Duff. ‘I took her away and was cross with her. She was most penitent.’ She always was most penitent, but drink was too useful an anaesthetic for her to renounce it altogether. She drank partly because she liked it but much more to abate fears and dull nerves, and though she never became wholly dependent on it, it was a valuable prop in times of trouble.
*
While Diana was convalescing from her broken leg and Duff wheeling her around London in a bathchair, they set up house in a back drawing-room at Arlington Street. This was cheap, convenient and comfortable, but Duff pined to have his books around him and Diana wanted a home of her own. She found it in Gower Street, a pleasant and in those days quiet late-eighteenth-century street in unfashionable Bloomsbury. They took No. 90 on a fifty-year lease for £90 a year, rented the first-floor flat in No. 92 and turned it into bedroom and drawing-room-sized bathroom for Diana. What Chips Channon described as their ‘tiny house’ was big enough to accommodate a library as well as a drawing-room and five servants. In time they extended still further down the street, taking over the first-floor flat in No. 94 and making a bedroom and sitting-room for Duff.
The move from Arlington Street took place in March 1920. Housemaid and cook had moved in a few days before but returned to Arlington Street at 3 a.m. in their nightdresses and covered with soot. They had heard strange noises, decided it was either ghosts or burglars, clambered on to the roof and screamed until the police came to rescue them. There was no sign that anybody had been in the house, but the couple refused to return until the Coopers themselves took up residence.
Gower Street was their home for twenty years. Long afterwards Diana described her first years there as being probably the happiest of her life, ‘because I loved my husband so dearly and the war was over’. By the standard of most of their friends they were poor enough, but some rich admirers could usually be relied on to provide game, salmon or champagne and they gave lavish parties. Here too friends would help out. Rubinstein came regularly and would volunteer to play. He was endlessly accommodating – ‘No, not that one, Arthur; we want this’ – until one day he married, was immediately taken in hand, and never again touched a piano except professionally. At a typical party in July 1923 the garden was illuminated. First Rubinstein played, then there was supper in the garden. Rose-petals showered on the guests, a Russian orchestra took up station and Chaliapin sang. Maurice Baring and Viola Parsons danced a comic, orgiastic dance. Hilaire Belloc sang Auprès de ma blonde and French marching songs. The last guest left at 4 a.m. The drink was furnished by Lord Beaverbrook; the food too was largely provided by others; music and singing were given for love. Immense expenditure in effort, frugality in money, was Diana’s rule; and the result gave happiness to everyone, including the donors.
The mainstays of the establishment were Wade and Holbrook. Kate Wade was Diana’s maid, who had joined her during the war and remained for more than forty years. Tall, phlegmatic, strong in character and physique, she grumbled her way through a lifetime of faithful service and became so much part of Diana’s life that it seemed impossible things could go on without her. Holbrook had been Duff’s manservant since 1917 and came back as butler after the war. Diana was perpetually infuriated by the bland satisfaction with which this paragon anticipated all her requests. ‘We need some more coal, Holbrook.’ ‘I took the liberty of ordering it this morning, my lady.’ Once she resolved to confound him and announced at the last moment that she wanted two greyhounds to take to the Portrait Painters’ Ball, at which she was to appear as Diana the Huntress. ‘Would it be prudent to insure them, my lady?’ inquired Holbrook calmly. Within two hours they were at the house. ‘I hope they won’t bite me?’ said Diana apprehensively. ‘I have ascertained, my lady, that the animals are entirely docile.’ Then it turned out that Diana had got the date wrong, the ball was on the following evening. Holbrook was temporarily flummoxed. ‘I regret, my lady, that the animals are engaged tomorrow night. They have a prior engagement at the White City Stadium. I will, however, endeavour to secure another pair.’ He succeeded, and Diana’s greyhounds were the success of the ball. His omniscience, however, faltered when he accompanied Duff shooting, providing a flow of unwanted and often misleading information. As a hare lolloped slowly towards them, he hissed in Duff’s ear in a tone of tense excitement: ‘Very large rabbit coming up in front, sir.’
Duff had now been promoted at the Foreign Office, to become secretary to the Under-Secretary of State, Ronald McNeill, but he was restless and dissatisfied with the pay. He had exploratory talks with Barings and Rothschilds but no firm offer transpired. He was consumed by jealousy whenever he visited the House of Commons, yet asked himself: ‘Is it worth leaving a decent gentlemanlike job which may lead to an ambassadorship, in order to plunge into the cesspool of politics which can only lead to a few years of precarious power, during which one is the Aunt Sally of the guttersnipes of the earth?’ Besides, he felt himself a reactionary who was out of tune with the times. He was both friend and admirer of Winston Churchill. At dinner at Wimborne House Churchill held forth in his most truculent vein. He ‘said he was all out now to fight Labour, it was his one object in politics. He was a monarchist and swore we would have all the kings back on their thrones, even the Hohenzollerns.’ Duff was delighted with all he said, Diana dismayed. Their feelings were much the same a few weeks later when Churchill rejoiced at the coming of a ‘world wide movement of reaction’ and said that Gandhi should be bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and trampled on by an enormous elephant ridden by the Viceroy. But Churchill was generally downcast, seeing little future for himself in British politics and saying ‘if he had the choice between immortality and being blown out like a candle, he would choose the latter’. If his hero saw no chances of success, how could Duff hope to get on in politics?
Money was urgently needed if their life-style was to be maintained, still more if Duff were to abandon diplomacy and take to politics. Many projects were mooted. The Sunday Evening Telegram announced that Diana was to become a dress-designer, then that she was to set up as an adviser in house decoration – ‘Can’t you imagine how the profiteeresses would rush to consult her at ten guineas a time?’ Gilbert Miller offered her a share in the management of a theatre at £500 a year, the proposition sounded hopeful but came to nothing. Then she was invited to join the board and subsequently become Chairman of a company manufacturing scent. She was to receive £500
a year for doing nothing, and gleefully accepted. The company crashed, the managing director was arrested, Diana threatened with prosecution for fraud and obtaining money by false pretences. Duff was sympathetic but as ignorant in business matters as his wife. Diana was grilled in court. How much money had she put into the company? None. How did she imagine she could be a director in that case? She didn’t know. Had she never been educated? Well, not to speak of. Her patent ignorance of matters financial and her failure to gain a penny from the enterprise saved her from prosecution, but she left the court brow-beaten and abashed.
Journalism seemed more helpful. In 1921 she was appointed editress of the newly conceived English edition of the French magazine Femina. ‘A most thankless and wearing job,’ Mrs Belloc Lowndes described it, but to Diana it was an agreeable sinecure. ‘I said “yes” to everything all my life,’ she once commented, and an offer of £750 per annum was irresistible. She made no pretence of knowing how to edit, hardly even went to the office, and did no more than contribute a few articles, mainly written by Duff. In fact she wrote extraordinarily well, with real originality and a vivid turn of phrase, but she had no confidence in her ability and froze into bewildered apathy if required to write 800 words on Augustus John’s new exhibition or the latest style in shoes.
One problem was that she was generally required to write on fashion, and fashion bored her. She enjoyed new and beautiful clothes but did not find them a rewarding subject for discussion. Movements in hemlines or frills left her indifferent. No one was less vogueish than Diana. She regarded the avant garde with dismayed suspicion: Picasso’s drawings were ‘a drunk baby’s scrawl’; Moore’s sculpture ‘boring shapeless lumps of polished basalt, as undesigned as unkneaded dough’; Hugnet’s surrealist poems ‘are of tomorrow, I prefer them of yesterday’. ‘I have got to Godfrey Kneller and Watts,’ she remarked wistfully to Cecil Beaton, ‘but I got stuck at Cézanne.’ This hardly equipped her to work on a magazine dedicated to the premise that every new quirk of style was the dawn of a new age. She went abroad shortly after Femina opened and returned to find that – transitory as the fashions it celebrated – it had already closed.
Diana Cooper Page 17
