There were other papers. Diana contributed regularly to the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Duff did most of the work. In February 1922, for instance, she attended Princess Mary’s wedding at Westminster Abbey, rushed back to Gower Street, presented the facts to Duff and left it to him to write the piece over luncheon. One difficulty was that Duff found it hard to get on with the press Lords. Lord Rothermere was ‘one of the most repulsive men that I have ever met. He looks like a pig and when not speaking snores quietly to himself. He is rude, pompous, extremely stupid, common beyond any other member of his family, utterly devoid of the slightest streak of humour or dash of originality.’ Duff suffered fools no more gladly because they were millionaires or press barons, and Lord Rothermere was left in little doubt that Duff despised him. Nor was Lord Beaverbrook a friend. Duff distrusted him more each time he met him. ‘He was rude to me and I to him, but I thought I scored,’ Duff recorded with satisfaction; hardly a helpful attitude to adopt towards one who was proving a regular source of income. Nor did his habit of calling the Daily Express a ‘filthy rag’, even when its proprietor was present, do much to make for harmonious relations.
Fortunately Diana loved Beaverbrook and he her. At a ball at the Albert Hall in November 1919, while Duff was pursuing Diana Capel, Diana stayed with Beaverbrook in his box. Duff returned to find the maudlin magnate pouring out his heart, saying how devoted he was to Diana and for her sake to her husband. There was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for them; he was the best friend they had. ‘He was very drunk,’ Duff commented sourly, but the affection was sincere. The Coopers often stayed at Beaverbrook’s country house Cherkeley. Once Diana decided to steal some blossom from one of the more precious shrubs. She broke off several branches and hid them near the gate, meaning to retrieve her loot as she left. When the moment came, however, she found Beaverbrook seated on the grass near the gate in earnest conclave with another guest. He waved benignly as the Coopers drove past, leaving them to speculate whether his presence there was an unlucky accident or the mischievous thwarting of their project.
Diana was distressed by Duff’s dislike of Beaverbrook but accepted that she could do nothing to change it; Duff for his part recognized that Beaverbrook’s quirkishness, quicksilver mind and fearsome power were qualities bound to appeal to Diana, and made no attempt to interrupt their friendship. Diana took greater pains to reconcile Beaverbrook with others of their mutual acquaintance. In November 1919 she gave a dinner at which Churchill and Beaverbrook, at that time on the worst of terms, were supposed to make up their differences. The party teetered on the brink of disaster, Beaverbrook was truculent and offensive and Duff, with some glee, anticipated an explosion. Churchill, however, kept his temper and by the end of the evening something close to a rapprochement had been achieved.
As much by his casual benevolence as by the work he put in their way, Beaverbrook came often to the help of the Coopers. It was the cinema, however, which brought the first substantial improvement in their fortunes. Diana had had brushes with this world before. When making his propaganda film The Hearts of the World, D. W. Griffith had included her among a group of prominent women who had done much for the war effort. (When asked why he had included Diana he replied effusively: ‘Because she is the most beloved woman in England.’) Just before she married came an offer from Griffith of $75,000 for a three-month filming trip to the United States. The film was to be called Women and War and eventually appeared, without Diana, as The Great Love. The Duchess of Rutland was horrified at the thought of her daughter posturing in front of the cameras; then was told how much money was involved and became still more disturbed at the thought of her not doing so. Diana was greatly tempted and would have succumbed if wedding, honeymoon and finally the accident to her leg had not prevented her acceptance. Variety was not satisfied with so simple an explanation. According to that journal, the Duke forbade her to act in America. Diana appealed to the Queen and was told that if she disobeyed her father she would be banished from Court. To quarrel with her parents was one thing; to risk expulsion from the Palace was, Variety implied, something altogether too dreadful for Diana to contemplate.
She now fell into the hands of a decidedly inferior artist. J. Stuart Blackton had made a modest reputation as an innovator in Hollywood but his career had not prospered and he came to Britain more as a refugee than as a Messiah. Somehow he raised the capital to float a company and planned two films, in both of which he invited Diana to star. The news of this caused some indignation in the profession. Mr Geames of the Actors Association complained that a lady who took up acting was doing a true actress out of a job: ‘Titled folk are, I admit, in a category of their own; but people who have to live by acting resent this sort of competition.’ Diana took the remark to heart and put herself out to prove herself a true professional. Blackton’s righthand man, Felix Orman, testified to the success of her efforts. ‘Lady Diana was most democratic and serious about her work … the least troublesome member of the cast.’
Diana’s first film was The Glorious Adventure, a foolish fandangle based vaguely on Carolean politics and the Great Fire of London. Diana played Lady Beatrice Fair, a stout-hearted simpleton who married Bulfinch, a criminal condemned to death, so as to escape her debts. She was hoist with her own petard when the Fire led to Bulfinch’s release and his arrival in his ‘wife’s’ bedroom to claim his conjugal rights. Inevitably all ended well; Bulfinch, it turned out, had a wife already and Lady Beatrice was reunited with her dashing young lover, Hugh Argyle. Bulfinch was played by another debutant, Victor MacLaglen, a former pugilist who went on to make a highly successful career as a film-star.
Diana was particularly incensed by the ineptitude of the history: ‘Pepys is made a confidential pimp of Charles II, perpetually digging him in the ribs with a lewd double-entendre’; the costumes were out of period; horses in blinkers, something unheard of in the seventeenth century. Mrs Blackton, who fancied herself as a historian, not merely ignored Diana’s objections but was so rude to her that Duff felt bound to remonstrate with her husband. The Fire of London took place in a warehouse off the Strand and almost put an end to the production by getting out of hand, destroying much of the scenery and at one point threatening to do the same to the cast. The film being a silent one, Diana mouthed any words that seemed appropriate. ‘Don’t be such a beast! Oh, please leave me alone. You filthy cad!’ not surprisingly failed to repel MacLaglen when bent on rape, while a punch on his craggy jaw merely barked her knuckles.
Only twenty minutes of this film survive and the quality of the print is so poor that it is hard to be certain what it was really like. The epoch-making Prizma Natural Colour which was its pride has faded to a muddy sepia. Diana’s beauty transcends the limited range of her expressions, but neither performance nor film can ever have been outstanding. It was on the whole well received. The first night was a properly glamorous affair, Selfridge’s gave a window to a wax tableau from the film, the reviews were friendly, even fulsome. The Duchess of Rutland found the film ‘lovely, perfect’; her only criticism was ‘Oh, why can’t Diana be longer?’ For Duff the film was adequate but Diana’s performance sublime. ‘Her gestures were replete with dignity and breeding, which of course one never sees in film actresses.’
The reaction of some of her more traditional relations and acquaintances shows how the attitude of society had changed since 1914. Before the war the fact that a duke’s daughter made money by acting for the cinema would have outraged society, let alone when the performance involved being mauled lasciviously by an erstwhile pugilist. In 1922 it caused a frisson only among the most diehard. A more common reaction was satisfaction that she had done it well; to have held her own among the professionals was felt to be in some way a victory for her class. Duff was not alone in finding sublime poise in her performance, vulgarity in that of everyone else. It was among the middle classes that indignation was most deeply felt. ‘How can you, born in a high Social position, so prostitute your Status for pal
try monetary considerations?’ asked one anonymous correspondent. ‘You THING!’
The only person wholly unenthusiastic was Diana herself. She thought little of the result and still less of the labours necessary to achieve it. Blackton’s direction was uninspiring, the rest of the cast second-rate, both professionally and as companions; the heat lobstered her face and arms, the lights made her eyes smart so fiercely that she could not sleep and twice had recourse to a doctor in the middle of the night. She was, however, committed to a second film and would not have contemplated breaking the contract even if she had not had pay outstanding from the first film and feared Blackton would never be able to find the money if his enterprises were disrupted.
For her second and last film Diana moved back a century to play Elizabeth in The Virgin Queen. To look the part she shaved off her eyebrows – ‘This splendid sacrifice to her sense of art and duty,’ proclaimed the Daily Mail sonorously, ‘is assuredly unique and should alone augur a happy career for the film.’ They gave her clothes that seemed to have come off the local scrapheap and a crown ‘which I did thrice refuse because it had been made for George Robey and not for Baby’. The result, as Diana complained, was to make her look like Mummy Wart Hog, so grotesque that the donkey belonging to some nearby children shied and refused to pass her on the road. She exaggerated – in her Holbeinesque headgear she looked spectacularly beautiful – but the film had little to commend it. Sir Francis Laking, who played Darnley, was another amateur, amiable, heavy-drinking and wholly undistinguished. Carlyle Blackwell as jeune premier featured in endless love-scenes, each more compromising than the last – ‘I mind Carlyle’s kisses too too terribly.’ Inspired by his triumph with the Great Fire of London, Blackton resolved to make a fire the centrepiece of The Virgin Queen. Apprehensively Duff telegraphed next day to ask if she had been burnt up like Harriet or was still stamping around. ‘A tamer or more wretched performance I never hope to see,’ replied Diana. ‘I never acted at all because the flames were so minute I could not believe they were filming. A good producer would retake it at any price, but by tomorrow Blackton will have convinced himself that it all went exactly to his hopes.’ The film was shot on location at Beaulieu and Diana’s separation from Duff was an additional source of woe. They rented a little house, but the servants installed themselves in the best bedrooms and Duff found the charms of a New Forest picnic distinctly limited. For Diana it was a dismal time; her leisure spent largely bemoaning the absence of Duff and the presence of Laking and Blackton.
Diana did not enjoy acting for the cinema. She needed the stimulus of an audience and felt she could never do her best before a camera. Her motives for filming were unabashedly commercial. Mrs Belloc Lowndes brought in an American journalist to see her and begged Diana to make clear that it was the urge for self-expression and not money that drove her on. ‘Good God!’ exploded Diana. ‘It’s only for money and distantly imagined fun. Don’t let my grimaces to order be called self-expression.’ She was well paid for her two films but the need for extra income was still paramount. Duff forwarded a bill for the rates while she was at Beaulieu. ‘Can you pay them?’ he asked. ‘I have just done the Income Tax, the telephone and the gas and can do no more.’
If another suitable film had come up immediately Diana would certainly have undertaken it; The Glorious Adventure and The Virgin Queen had won her a reputation as a hard-working actress as well as a famous beauty. She considered making another Blackton film, playing Dorothy Vernon in Haddon Hall. To overcome her doubts about his grasp of history, Blackton proposed to hire Sir Charles Oman as adviser. Then came the offer to play in The Miracle and all thoughts of filming were put aside. While she was acting in America Greta Garbo flounced out of Anna Karenina and the part was offered to Diana. She wavered, and by the following morning Garbo was back again and the opportunity gone. Other potential employers were inhibited by the belief that her first commitment would be to film The Miracle, an enterprise that somehow never got off the ground. By the time Diana might have felt herself free to look for further film work, Duff was in the Government and she had other fish to fry.
*
For the moment it was a relieved goodbye to Beaulieu and the film industry and back to London. By now Duff and Diana had settled into a pattern of life which both of them found satisfactory. To some extent they took their separate courses. Duff was far less socially adventurous than Diana. He liked the company of writers and artists provided they were clean and reasonably decorous in their behaviour, but he was just as much at home with politicians. His spiritual home was White’s, playing bridge for high stakes, drinking and talking until late into the night. His friends were intelligent, certainly, but they also enjoyed a certain raffish grandeur, a conventionality even in their eccentricities. ‘I’m afraid I must confess,’ he wrote to Diana, ‘that the only milieu I really like is the “smart set”. I hate the provincialism of the respectable as much as I hate the Bohemianism of the unrespectable.’ Diana liked the smart set too, but they were not enough. She relished the genuine eccentric. Fecklessness, indifference to worldly standards, an inability to cope with the mechanisms of life, were to her endearing, while to Duff they were to be condoned in a friend and despised in others. They shared many friends but recognized that others were better kept apart. After a dinner-party at the Maclarens’, Duff commented glumly in his diary: ‘There was singing and recitations, bad white-wine cup and hosts of Jews culminating in Sir Alfred Mond. I hated and Diana loved it.’ Diana would have delighted in the singing and the Jews and not have noticed the badness of the white-wine cup. Duff liked his dinners well ordered and well cooked; Diana believed in providing good food and drink for her guests, but herself was equally happy picnicking in an attic with bread and cheese. She relished grandeur but did not need it to have fun.
High Bohemia was not Duff’s style. He would have disliked the dinner-party that Mary Hutchinson gave for the ten cleverest men in London to meet the ten most beautiful women. After dinner crackers were pulled and Diana collected all the riddles, climbed on to a chair and announced that she was now about to test the wits of the assembled intellectuals. Keynes was best, but his stutter slowed him up so that he could do no more than tie with T. S. Eliot. Aldous Huxley would have done better had not, Clive Bell recorded, ‘righteous indignation provoked by the imbecility of the conundrums, in some measure balked the stride of his lofty intellect’.
On the other hand Duff enjoyed himself more than Diana at a grand weekend party given at Belvoir in honour of Prince Henry, later the Duke of Gloucester. After dinner the guests settled down to Prince Henry’s favourite game, which was Blind Man’s Buff: ‘it was played for two hours and the young ladies’ dresses were torn and liberties were taken with the King’s son – a fine success’. A robin had taken up residence in the castle and followed the party from room to room, perching on the heads of the guests and living on Petit Beurre biscuits. The Rutlands were delighted, but Diana gloomily announced that a bird in the house could only presage death. Prince Henry – ‘who, by the way, is not half bad, a great deal better than Albert,’ observed Duff – was inspired by this to tell the story of the dove which entered the mausoleum at Frogmore as the royal family knelt in prayer on the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s death.
‘Dear Mama’s spirit,’ they murmured. ‘We are sure of it.’
‘No, I am sure it is not,’ said Princess Louise.
‘It must be dear Mama’s spirit,’ they repeated.
‘No,’ Princess Louise persisted. ‘Dear Mama’s spirit would never have ruined Beatrice’s hat.’
The theatrical world was another in which both the Coopers liked to mix, though Duff considered that only the grandest stars and the prettiest actresses should be encouraged to venture beyond the footlights. Both Duff and Diana were easily moved at the theatre. By the end of Gladys Cooper’s performance in The Second Mrs Tanqueray Diana was in such an ecstasy of misery that she had to be removed before the houselights went up. There w
as a party at the Eiffel Tower afterwards in honour of Gladys Cooper. Duff enjoyed it, but his threshold of tolerance was always low: ‘There was a terrible young man there called Ronald Firbank who writes novels.’
By the standards of most people their life was one of intense social activity. In the last three months of 1920 – a period chosen for no reason except that they were not abroad or in the country for more than two or three days at a time – they went to the theatre fourteen times and the cinema eight. They spent weekends at Mells, The Wharf (Asquiths), Pixton (Aubrey Herbert), Taplow (Desboroughs), Grimsthorpe (Ancasters), Blenheim, Ashby (Wimbornes), and several times at Belvoir. Duff passed, on an average, eight to ten hours a week at White’s; time which Diana mainly spent with close friends such as the Parsonses, the Hutchinsons and the Montagus. They spent four days in Paris, during which their life became still more hectic. On only five occasions during these three months did they spend an evening alone at home together. And yet in no sense did they grow apart; on the contrary each was amused by and interested in the other’s private life and each prized the other’s company more and more highly. At the end of 1923, when they faced a separation of several months, they were rightly felt by their friends to be among the happiest and most complementary of married couples.
* The biographer, always aware that he is intruding on others’ privacy, is relieved that the word was not hope but fear.
Diana Cooper Page 18
