Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  SIX

  THE MIRACLE

  In the summer of 1923 Diana received a letter from Professor Max Reinhardt in Vienna. With the help of the financier Otto Kahn he was planning a revival of The Miracle in the United States. Would Lady Diana be interested in acting in it and, if so, would she please arrange to visit him at his home in Austria? Diana knew little about Reinhardt, except that he was popularly reputed to be a genius and probably slightly mad, but she had seen The Miracle in London twelve years before and remembered it well. It was a mime play, German in origin, which told, in music, pageantry and dance, the story of a young nun who was lured from her vows by the wiles of a Spielmann or Trickster. The nun took with her the image of the Christ Child, which was in the arms of the Madonna before whom she daily prayed. After her flight the Madonna came down from her niche to take on the nun’s duties; returning to her place with empty arms when the nun returned, broken and contrite. With the nun came her dead baby, who was miraculously transformed into the Christ Child and restored to its proper place in the Madonna’s arms. The Madonna’s role was one of tranquillity and grace, requiring beauty, dignity and a capacity to stand stock-still for long periods while commanding the attention of the audience. The nun, on the other hand, demanded almost manic energy as she scampered from temptation to temptation, dancing to the tunes played by the Spielmann. It was as the Madonna that Diana was invited to play.

  Her first reaction was delight; ‘it would be such an adventure, and probably great fun’. C. B. Cochran had staged it at Olympia before the war, with music by Humperdinck and the lustrous Maria Carmi – in fact the daughter of a Genoese pastrycook but invested for the occasion with noble Roman ancestors – as the Madonna. For this grandiose production Olympia had been converted into a cathedral with a rose window three times bigger than that of Chartres, two thousand extras, enough incense to scent a hundred farmyards. Success was cut short by the unkind intervention of a motor-show, but before its closure it had been playing to 30,000 spectators a night. Reinhardt promised that the New York production would be equally spectacular. All seemed set fair; then came a long silence and at last the news that the project had been abandoned.

  Suddenly it was revived. Morris Gest arrived hot foot from conference with the maestro in New York. Gest would have served admirably as Rumpelstiltskin; dwarfish in size, green in complexion, thick-lipped, long-haired, perpetually in a dance of rage or ecstasy, he struck Duff as a ‘particularly revolting little Jew’. He claimed that it was he who had selected Diana in the first place. Walking down Fifth Avenue with Reinhardt he had suddenly leapt a foot in the air and cried out: ‘We shall have Lady Diana Manners for the Madonna. She does not seem to touch the ground when she walks. A more aristocratic, more sympathetic and beautiful woman for the part we could never find.’ This cry proved instantly persuasive. The financial arrangements for the revival had proved complicated but were now settled. All that remained was for Diana to agree. Gest had expected to have to ‘pass forty-seven flunkeys to see her ladyship’; instead, as he delightedly told the Boston Sunday Post, ‘with the true democracy of the real aristocrat’, she actually called on him at the Savoy.

  Diana would happily have called on him at a boarding house in Wigan if it had been necessary to secure the job. She saw him in August 1923. Confronted by this obviously apprehensive woman, Gest switched from the deference due to the real aristocrat to the contempt reserved for a true democrat, making her hold up her skirts for inspection and beating her down from $2,000 a week to $1,500. That still seemed a fortune to Diana and she was dismayed to discover that she would have to be approved by Reinhardt before the role was hers.

  A week later, en route for Venice, Duff and Diana called on Reinhardt at Salzburg. There they were met by ‘the funniest, most fantastical, spherical figure in Lederhosen and sky-blue, silver-buttoned jacket, shirt open on a fat child’s neck, round nose, round dark velvet eyes, thick semi-circular eyebrows and ruthlessly shaved round head’. This was Rudolph Kommer, Reinhardt’s most trusted lackey, friend and trouble-shooter. Jewish in race, more Rumanian than anything else in origin, subtle, servile, endlessly generous; Lytton Strachey found him ‘a ghastly looking dago’; Diana loved him at sight. He was called ‘Kätchen’ by everybody since the day Diana had applied to him the slogan of a famous Viennese café-proprietor who used regularly to tell his cat: ‘Ah, Kätchen, Kätchen, it is useless for you to park and crowl.’ Supremely cosmopolitan, surrounded always by the most beautiful and expensive women, he held court at the Ritz in London and Paris, the Colony in New York. How he financed his lavish lifestyle was a mystery; people had thought that Reinhardt subsidized him until one day the maestro was heard to muse: ‘What does Kätchen use for money?’ Some said he was a spy; but for and on whom remained obscure.

  Kommer was instantly enslaved by Diana. From the moment of their meeting till his death in 1942 his proudest ambition was to serve her. His adoration contained nothing sensual. Diana was often afraid that sex might obtrude in their relationship. ‘I’m so terrified Kätchen is going to declare his love for me,’ she wrote from New York. ‘He said, if I stayed much longer, he might fall in love with me. I can’t face it, darling Mr Duffy Dumpling.’ She had no need to worry. Kommer wished only to bask in the light of her countenance and would no more have laid a hand on her than he would have answered back when Reinhardt berated him.

  Now he took Duff and Diana off to Reinhardt’s baroque palace of Leopoldskron. Duff was disappointed by the food and still more the drink – beer alternating with indifferent white wine – but Diana was enchanted by the great candle-lit halls, excursions on the lake, endless teas on the terrace with their host while Kommer translated their banal chit-chat with a zeal worthy of the most sublime philosophizing. It was seven days before The Miracle was mentioned more than casually; then Diana plucked up her courage, tied her head in a pair of chiffon drawers and paraded for rehearsal. First Reinhardt expounded his version of the story and did it so beautifully that she broke down and cried. ‘Her tears seem to have made a great impression on him,’ noted Duff. So, presumably, did her acting. That evening she was told the job was hers.

  The appointment was announced to a fanfare of publicity. Diana was to enter a convent to get the right atmosphere for the part; she was to receive the highest salary ever paid to an English actress in the United States. ‘A stage star,’ proclaimed one paper, ‘possessed of $10m by ancestral inheritance, who lives in the famous Haddon Hall, England, and has seventy servants, is unique.’ But Gest had a still more ingenious piece of promotion up his sleeve. From the 1912 production he resurrected Maria Carmi. She, it was rumoured, was truly to be the Madonna. ‘Something else is needed for the part beside beauty and charm,’ Carmi proclaimed, and threatened to sue Gest for £20,000 if anyone but she played the leading role: ‘It is my life. Without me The Miracle would fail. It is fate.’ Alarmed, Diana telegraphed to know if she was still wanted. ‘Come to America and I’ll treat you like a queen,’ replied Gest. ‘Which Queen?’ Diana cabled back, ‘Mary Queen of Scots?’ The rivalry between the two Madonnas became headline news, but Diana refused to play the part allotted to her by Gest, declining his suggestion that she should announce the Virgin had appeared to her in a dream and insisted that she must play the part.

  In November 1923 Diana set sail on what was to be the first of many Atlantic crossings. Duff took some leave and came along to lend moral support; his presence did not prove enough to still Diana’s fears of storm and shipwreck and she eventually had recourse to the ship’s doctor for a calming dose of bromide. ‘I suppose there are any amount of frightened people like me?’ she asked plaintively. ‘Sometimes a few emigrants in the hold,’ was his unfeeling answer.

  New York proved a treasure-house of new excitements. There was a telephone with ‘a curious sort of dial typewriter attached to the apparatus which you work to get your own number without the operator’. There was a radio which, at the press of a button, would leap from Chicago to Buff
alo. There was a Frigid Air machine which made ice by electricity; a device Diana coveted and eventually persuaded the manufacturer to give her on the grounds that she would publicize it widely. There were delectable cafeterias: ‘I mean those places where you can see what you eat before you eat it.’ Diana found everything extraordinary and relished even what she disapproved of, including the décor which Elsie de Wolff had imposed on Condé Nast – tiger-chintz curtains in an eighteenth-century library, and a bedroom like a tart’s with red satin armchairs. She flung herself into local society with the same zest as she did into the local traffic: ‘she understands neither the workings of the car, nor the traffic laws of New York,’ wrote Duff resignedly, yet somehow she always arrived at her destination.

  Rehearsals took up most afternoons and sometimes went on until 4 a.m. As a foreigner and an amateur Diana feared a frosty reception from the other actors, but Maria Carmi, by her vanity and arrogance, did much to make the way easy for her rival. Rosamond Pinchot, who played the Nun, was still more of a novice, and any resentment there might have been at the intrusion of society beauties was aimed at her. The only problem was Werner Krauss who played the Spielmann. Krauss delighted in baiting Diana, making her laugh at solemn moments, biting her neck, pulling her hair, predicting disaster and threatening to flee back to Germany on the eve of the first night. Diana endured the torment stoically and in the end Reinhardt called the troublesome Spielmann to order.

  Reinhardt was greatly pleased by the prowess of his protégée. After a few weeks of rehearsal Kommer delivered a portentous message from the master:

  (1) He is positively delighted with your acting. You are admirable. He never expected that he would have so little work or trouble with you;

  (2) He is deeply grateful with the intense interest you have shown during rehearsals and he will always be grateful for the devotion with which you are doing your work;

  (3) He is particularly impressed by the unusual skill and great care with which you are already expressing, even in appearance, the part you are going to play;

  (4) He would like nothing better than to have you as his Councillor Supreme in all questions of costuming.

  There is no reason to doubt that Reinhardt meant what Kommer said, though in a letter to Helen Thimig he was slightly less wholehearted. Diana, he wrote, ‘is not my Madonna. Too much statue, but because of it and as such simply perfect, by no means unintriguing. A living wax figure and therefore touchingly childlike.’

  Reinhardt’s accolade arrived just after Duff had left for England and did something to restore her battered morale. It took Duff’s departure to make her realize how much she depended on him. ‘My heart seems to tear my body with pain for the loss of you,’ she wrote on 8 December, ‘I don’t know how I am going to bear it.’ Duff for his part went home and passed two evenings reading and rearranging the letters Diana had sent him during the war. They wrote to each other every day and Duff was delighted to find her new letters as full of love as the old ones. ‘How little I deserve all that expenditure of love’ – a reflection which did not curb his extra-marital adventures but was none the less sincere for that.

  One of Duff’s last acts in New York was to call on Gest and insist that Diana should play the Madonna on the first night. Gest winked and shuffled and hinted, but would not be trapped into a direct promise; the continuing doubt as to whether Diana or Carmi would have precedence was yielding far too rich publicity for him to cut it off before he had to. Carmi refused to admit Diana to any rehearsal in which she was acting but spies reported that her appearance was bizarre and her acting crude and vulgar. ‘I’m ashamed to be glad,’ wrote Diana, ‘in fact I am not, for it’s all very embarrassing.’ In the end it was announced that the two actresses were to draw lots for the privilege of playing first and Diana was secretly assured that she was going to win. An elaborate charade was played out. Carmi, who had refused even to meet her rival before this date, arrived ‘terribly flash in black and diamonds with a left-handed languid greeting’, making Diana feel like a gawky bumpkin. The lot was drawn and Diana duly won. She raged inwardly at the beastliness of it all; ‘that she should lose and that I should look so foolish winning, and that I should have to suffer the embarrassment and humiliation of cheating’.

  It was agreed that, after the first night, Diana and Carmi should alternate in the role. Pinchot then decided she too should share the role of the Nun. Various possibilities were canvassed and discarded; finally Reinhardt pleaded with Diana to take on this part whenever Carmi was acting the Madonna. Diana’s first instinct was to refuse – ‘I haven’t the lines or suppleness required, nor the nerves’ – but as each possible replacement proved more disastrous than the last, her resistance was worn down. In the end she agreed and went for coaching to the great Boleslawsky of the Moscow Art Theatre. She sought to model her performance on Pinchot’s, until Reinhardt saw what she was doing and remonstrated with her. ‘Ecstatic I must be, not animal. How the bloody hell am I to be ecstatic, I wonder?’ As she gained confidence she began to regard the part as rightfully hers. When Randolph Hearst brought his mistress Marion Davies to a rehearsal, and it was rumoured that she was to be offered the part of the Nun, Diana was indignant and meditated a protest to the management.

  By now the theatre had been transformed into a Gothic cathedral. ‘We got a cathedral in New York,’ remarked the under-stage-manager. ‘I had a look at it. Fine it was. Did you ever see a cathedral, ma’am?’ Diana loved all the stage-hands, in particular the one who observed the ballet of nymphs with baleful disapproval and muttered, ‘I don’t think it fits in. Lesbianism don’t fit in!’ Once the problem of Carmi had been solved Diana’s worst difficulty related to the Christ Child. The management proudly produced a gross, snow-white abomination which was wired for electricity and glowed like a spectral foetus. Diana substituted a simple doll but every time her back was turned the foetus reappeared. Only a spectacular explosion which even Carmi could not have bettered secured the banishment of the offending baby.

  The first night found Diana ‘haunted, desperate’. The play could be a disaster, her own part the most painful element. By the time the show was over and the audience had clapped and cheered for fifteen minutes she realized her fears were liars, but still dreaded next day’s papers. In the event even she admitted the notices were spectacular, though she complained that they concentrated on how many feet of wire cable were used in the theatre and the money taken at the box office. The comment she most appreciated came in a telegram C. B. Cochran sent Duff: ‘Wife’s performance exquisitely beautiful unquestionable work of sensitive artist with many individual subtleties the result of thought and complete mastery of rare resources.’

  So many unbiased observers praised Diana’s performance that one cannot doubt it was in some way remarkable. It is harder to decide in what the quality lay. For half an hour before the play began and forty-six minutes thereafter she remained immobile in a stone carapace on her pillar above the stage. Even when she descended from her eyrie no wide range of movement or expression was called for. Competently directed – and Reinhardt was a more than competent director – almost any actress of beauty could have been modestly impressive in the role. Somehow Diana contrived to transcend this norm. She had that capacity to impose herself upon an audience which is something quite distinct from great acting but is enjoyed by many of the greatest actors. At eighty-eight she can still command the attention of a crowded room; in 1924, at the height of her beauty, her presence was almost overwhelming in its impact. At no time as the Madonna did Diana do anything out of the ordinary; she merely was extraordinary.

  ‘I think I must go on the stage proper in England,’ she wrote to Duff. ‘I really think I could be good, if only for the reason that I can concentrate so easily and gladly on it, and am such a good learner.’ Never did she delude herself that she was a great actress. She sat next to Stanislavsky and was quite unable to see what he was going on about. Nor did she much care. But she did believe that she
could muster enough technique to make herself a true professional. No speech was called for in The Miracle and the thought that she would not often be so lucky deterred her greatly. For a while she took elocution lessons with the celebrated Mrs Carrington, who was said to have bestowed the gift of tongues on a hitherto dumb John Barrymore. Unfortunately this teacher believed that language must be approached through character, psycho-analysis must precede speech-therapy. ‘She’s going to explore baby’s personality,’ Diana wailed. ‘Baby hates it.’ She decided that this problem would have to wait until she confronted it on the stage. Meanwhile, playing the Madonna at one performance and the Nun at the next; leaping, sometimes within a few hours, from the statuesque to the hyper-active, seemed to her sufficient test of her abilities. She described a typical day to Katharine Asquith:

  Nerves start about five minutes before the opening. I’ve had to give up even the little cup of coffee which I relied on for keeping me awake because it makes my hand tremble so ridiculously through the long stand. During this I have a home programme thoughtage – Duff and you and others and towards the end Maurice [Baring] and Hilary [Belloc] and via them to the Mother of God. Three or four minutes I pray to her but I am not sure the prayer reaches her as I am past concentration by then. My turn comes, I get out of the stone and do it sometimes beautifully, I think, sometimes atrociously, sometimes sincerely, sometimes not, but the audience never knows, I discover, and the pundits who watch every night will say ‘You never gave a better performance,’ when I know it was my worst. There is a long pause in the middle in which reporters come and ask me what I think of American men and what make-up I wear. The stage again to wrestle back into my sepulchre, home by 5.30 to a bath, for one is black after a minute in the theatre. At 6.30 a dreary little dinner of beef which I hope will fortify but never does. Back to the theatre, always too soon, dressed too soon, so that one has to wait with shaking knees and sinking solar plexus. Out on the stage for the Nun’s part, no time for fear, only lightning plans for taking breath behind pillars, of getting rosin for my shoes, four full changes of sixty seconds each, dressing-rooms dotted around the theatre.