Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Boston she hoped would be more congenial but her initial reaction was as sour as it had been in Cleveland. ‘We might as well be in Inverness for all the excitement or variety we get,’ wailed Diana. Boston was known by all connected with the theatre to be the vilest of cities.

  Gradually the enthusiasm of the Bostonians overcame her doubts. As she walked down the street florists dashed out to press roses on her, many shop-windows were dressed Miracle-style, Morris Gest was held by cultured Bostonians to be the only Jew of merit since Jesus Christ. In the flamboyantly extravagant Morisco-style hotel, everything was offered free and the rarest fruits and wines were lavished on the honoured guest: ‘The proprietor is a young successful bugger. I shall have to give him a solid gold enema or something else he’d really like.’ The Duchess of Rutland reappeared, and took Paderewski to The Miracle. After the performance he refused to go behind stage, not wishing to break the spell: ‘He thought it wonderful and Diana most excellent. He was enraptured and said to me “She is seraphic”.’ More than 120,000 Bostonians saw the performance and, if the Boston Sunday Post is to be relied on, any lingering reservations of Diana’s must have perished on the last night when the vast audience cheered her so long and so enthusiastically that the cast joined in and ‘accorded the beloved star a farewell certainly greater than in any other city’.

  A long stay in Chicago was brightened by the presence of Noel Coward. Two years later Clifton Webb found in his dressing-room the grim graffito ‘Noel Coward died here’, but at the time he seemed cheerful enough. He had his mother with him, and Mrs Coward and the Duchess struck up an unlikely rapport, shopping busily for bargains with which to cosset their children. Coward and Diana went together to visit the house of a celebrated architect, rich with glass-floored Turkish baths and black satin love-nests. They speculated on the sexual proclivities of the proprietor and decided that a romp with both of them had probably been intended.

  What should have been another triumphant visit was marred by the curious affair of Dr Henry Schireson. Dr Schireson was a facial surgeon who specialized in removing signs of wear and tear from the faces of ageing beauties. Diana was only thirty-four but she was worried about a small patch of sagging tissue below the left eye. She believed that the doctor was to deal with this for love, or at least for the credit of having worked on so celebrated a beauty. Dr Schireson did not agree and duly put in a swingeing bill for $1,000. Diana, according to the doctor, said there must be some mistake, smiled amiably, tore up the bill and promised to recommend him to her friend the Queen of Rumania. Dissatisfied, the doctor sued and the journalists buzzed thickly around Diana when she arrived in New York on her way home. She lost her head and denied that the doctor had ever touched her. ‘There is nothing new about me!’ she cried dramatically. ‘Look! Am I any different from when you last saw me?’ The journalists tended to give her the benefit of the doubt and her rapid retreat to Europe nipped a promising scandal in the bud. That Schireson’s charge was exorbitant and Diana to some extent misled seems clear; but so also does Diana’s reluctance to pay out money if she could avoid it and the panic which led her to lie about her operation.

  *

  Even back in Europe for the summer she could not wholly escape The Miracle. In 1925 she went to Salzburg to play the Madonna in a Festival production. To create a Gothic cathedral and improvise an astonishingly complicated production within the space of a few days proved well beyond the powers of all concerned; only a few hours before the first performance Diana was wandering around the theatre plaintively demanding of everyone she met: ‘Wird niemand mir ein Kind machen?’ On the night all turned out reasonably well: Duff thought the production worse, but his wife decidedly better, than in New York; the doyen of German actors declared that Diana could only be compared with Duse; while Gladys Cooper thought her Madonna ‘a really fine piece of work’ and tried to organize a London season in which she and Diana would alternate the two roles.

  English friends abounded, notably Maud – now styling herself Emerald – Cunard. Lady Cunard was at her most fractious; grumbling about the heat, the wasps, the theatre seats; complaining that the standard of the music was lower than that of Norwich. Duff charitably assumed that her ill-temper was caused by the change of life, but his tolerance was strained when she followed him to Venice. He took her to a cabaret where a woman danced wearing nothing but a sanitary towel and a live snake. Maud ‘cheered up wonderfully and showed symptoms of an incipient orgasm. When last seen she was asking the concierge for the number of the snake’s room.’

  Another visitor to Salzburg was Iris Tree; ‘that perpetual renewer of spirits,’ as Diana described her, ‘that dearest romantic in clown’s clothes’. Diana conceived the idea that Iris should return to America to act the Nun, overrode her objections, talked Reinhardt into acceptance, and the thing was done. To have an old and close friend with her when touring America made an inestimable difference to Diana. Iris Tree’s Nun, said the Duchess, was gentler than Pinchot’s, ‘less athletic and tender, though in many ways doesn’t come near Diana’s rendering’, but it was her company, not her acting, that was truly valued. Emotionally tempestuous; perpetually in love, though rarely with the same man for more than a few days; exuberant, extravagant, she threw a baked apple at Kommer when he complained about her endless long-distance telephone calls, followed it with a cup and saucer, burst into tears and ended in a paroxysm of laughter. She scattered her love-letters everywhere and left Diana divided between jealousy at her conquests and outrage at the untidiness of her life.

  Together they toured the Mid-West and California. In San Francisco Noel Coward gave a party for them. ‘They had a huge and ferocious negro called Paul Robeson to sing. His voice is amazingly beautiful and soft but niggy-wiggs have no accent or bone or grit and it doesn’t stir one.’ In Los Angeles it was William Hearst who feted her. She was sickening of her travels. ‘I cannot shake off my melancholy and prejudice against everything around me here. The people are more common, worse dressed, less amusing, more mushy and soiled and tousled and unchic than is believable. All the women are blowzy blondes, all their hair is lemon-coloured and their faces pasty from lack of rouge.’ She sat next to John Gilbert, super-star of the silent cinema, and found him ‘good-looking and terrificly conceited. He called me “darling” from the start, but I liked that.’ They drove to Taos to visit D. H. Lawrence but found him away. Brett was there, ‘middle-aged, fat and rabbit-faced’, dismayed to find Iris and Diana were on the stage.

  Iris’s promiscuity filled Diana with vague discontent. She knew that it was not her style but rather wished it was. The material for romance was at hand. In Salzburg she had met the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal; now his eighteen-year-old son Raimund arrived to delight her solitude. Slim, graceful, infectiously light-hearted; suffused by what David Cecil called ‘an exquisite Rococo spirit of pleasure’; Diana found him irresistible. He returned her affection with alarming fervour. When Diana suggested he should join the party in San Francisco he cabled his father: ‘If you met Helen and she asked you to go to Troy with her, would you send your son $100?’ The money came and Raimund went.

  For a month he played the Rosenkavalier to Diana’s Marschallin, without a suggestion of a Sophie to distract him. He was besottedly in love, asking no greater pleasure than to be allowed to run her bath, brush her hair, take off her shoes. He would sit all night outside her bedroom door, fill the night with the plangent fluting of his wooing. ‘He tells me he can never love another woman and if I laugh it wounds him almost to tears.’ Diana was touched and amused and slightly uncomfortable: ‘I feel like Leilah, and old and ridiculously ashamed.’ She would urge him to go and woo someone of his own age but her urging lacked conviction. She would not have banished him for the world.

  Others were less satisfied. Bertram Cruger telephoned anxiously about ‘the German boy’. Diana told him not to worry, she had never liked German boys. ‘Yes, but you will,’ retorted Cruger. Kommer was ‘green-tinged w
ith raging, furious jealousy over the child-lover’; ‘I’m through, I’m through’ he would moan, threatening suicide or an immediate return to Europe. Even Duff showed mild disquiet. He wrote from London:

  I don’t much like the sound of Mr Hofmannsthal. It is uncanny the fascination that German Jews seem to possess for you. But there’s no accounting for tastes. Some people like Elizabeth Bibesco. She arrived the other evening to dine with Maud very late. She talked very loud during dinner and shortly afterwards became unconscious. Maud turned to the butler and said ‘Her Highness has fainted. Give Her Highness a little brandy,’ to which the butler replied in a resounding whisper, ‘Her Highness has had seven brandies since dinner.’

  For one fearful week in February, Raimund, Kommer and Cruger were all with Diana in Los Angeles; all jealous of each other, all demanding exclusive attention. One evening she went to a party with Raimund, rang up Kommer on her return to try to placate him, failed, discovered that Cruger in the adjoining bungalow had overheard the conversation, rushed round to try to placate him, failed, and returned to find that Raimund had stormed out in a fit of jealousy. ‘I wasn’t born for this. I was born to be held safely in Duffy’s arms, to be soothed and comforted and loved.’ Meanwhile Duff was on the rampage in Paris, where he had gone with Michael Herbert and Fred Cripps. The jaunt ended in near-disaster when they were all three arrested for stealing a taxi. Only Duff’s repeated assertion: ‘Je suis un député très important’ eventually secured their release.

  *

  As the end of her last American tour drew near, Diana began to speculate about the future. She was never going to be so long separated from Duff again, of that she was sure, but a short season in Canada might be a possibility. She was now determined to acquire another £2,000 a year. Gest proposed she should do a round of the super-cinemas acting the Madonna coming to life against a drop-scene. Diana was revolted by the idea. She was more attracted by Diaghilev’s proposal to give her the part of ‘Nature’ in a new ballet he was putting on, but this came to nothing. Still more hopeful was Otto Kahn’s promise to back her in any play she cared to put on in London. Reinhardt volunteered to produce it and Kommer to manage the theatre. John Barrymore was about to act in Richard III and urged Diana to join him as Lady Anne. More cautiously George Arliss said that she should do a year in provincial repertory before undertaking a major speaking part in London. ‘I wanted to say “Balls to you, old fool!” but I agreed in word, while knowing it was foolish because it’s too late. What’s the use of starting at the bottom at my age?’ Privately, though, she suspected that Arliss might be right. She was not qualified to act a speaking role on the London stage and had no wish to make a fool of herself in front of all her friends.

  But there was life in The Miracle yet. In the summer of 1927 came a European tour. First stop was Dortmund, a visit made memorable by the fact that Diana had to play both Nun and Madonna in the same performance. Rosamond Pinchot was back in the cast – ‘She’s looking hideous and acting abominably but I like her all the same,’ wrote Diana. Reinhardt was brutal to her and she responded by spraining her ankle at the last minute, leaving Diana to dash around the theatre as the Nun and then, under cover of darkness, to slip into the niche above the altar, freeze into immobility and finally make the gradual transformation and descent. The strain was crippling, but she survived. To make matters worse, she was convinced the drains were unhygienic and went everywhere with an orange pressed to her nose, like some medieval courtier.

  A few weeks to recover, and the caravan was on the road again, this time to Budapest. Diana spelt Hungary ‘Hungry’ and complained she always over-ate there. All the men had wives who shot themselves or were lovers who had shot husbands; all the aristocrats were Jews and anglophiles who read the Sketch and Tatler weekly; all the impresarios – and a surprising number of Hungarians seemed to be impresarios as well as aristocrats, Jews and anglophiles – flung themselves on their knees before her and treated her like the prima donna which she knew she wasn’t but half wished she was. Diana enjoyed Budapest. She enjoyed Prague too, though she was shamed when Duff, as usual, remembered their wedding anniversary and she, as usual, forgot it. ‘Is it eight years? Oh dear, how quick it’s gone, and the rest will go quicker. Please always love me as you have done, I don’t need more. I can never change. It is only with you I am happy, safe and not anxious or wondering if all’s well. Hold me, hold me!’

  Vienna, the end of the tour, should also have been the high spot. Diana filled Sacher’s Hotel with close friends – Alan and Viola Parsons, the Hutchinsons, Iris Tree’s husband Curtis Moffat – yet somehow the mixture failed to work. Tempers wore thin, the performances seemed threadbare, Diana’s health never fully recovered from the exertions of Dortmund. She appealed to a doctor for something to stop her coughing on the stage and was recommended a long sea-voyage. Other prescriptions proved more relevant but equally ineffective: ‘The great Austrian Medical Faculty,’ she wrote crossly, ‘seems to me about as advanced as the Deauville one – leeches and cataplasms are this year’s discovery.’

  It seemed an inglorious end to what had been a spectacularly successful chapter in her life; but Diana would not accept that it was the end. The Miracle should be filmed; if it could not be filmed, then at least it should be staged in London. It had been a great success there before the war, why should it not be even greater now? C. B. Cochran agreed and wished to produce the play; after protracted negotiations Reinhardt accepted; The Miracle was to be revived. Earl’s Court in 1930 was the original proposal, the Lyceum in April 1932 proved the final answer.

  By the standards of the United States the production was done on the cheap – costing a mere £30,000. ‘Hollywood Perpendicular’, Brian Howard described the decor; the cathedral ‘more a triumph of the parrot than the Paramount mind’; the forest ‘resembling an effeminate vegetable garden’. The cast, however, was more ambitious; Massine played the Spielmann, Glen Byam Shaw was the Cripple, and Tilly Losch, the talented Viennese dancer-cum-actress, was cast as the Nun. Unfortunately Miss Losch proved as mischievous as she was talented. When Diana descended from her niche to put on the Nun’s clothes she had devised graceful movements to fit the music, by which she slipped the habit smoothly over her head and emerged triumphant. Tilly Losch put the habit back to front so that, far from emerging smoothly, Diana was left thrashing around ingloriously looking for the exit. Not to be caught twice Diana next time carefully inspected the costume, decided it was correctly placed, plunged in and emerged to find two of the largest hairpins ever made hanging from the veil so that they swung to and fro in front of her eyes. To her credit, Diana neither complained to Cochran nor allowed the incidents to put her out of her stride. A complaint to Cochran would anyway have achieved little; he was besotted by Tilly Losch and even allowed her to rewrite the final scene so that the Nun died dramatically, making the Madonna’s previous descent to take on her duties entirely pointless.

  ‘My lovie, my dovie, my duck and my dear,’ telegraphed Lord Beaverbrook. ‘I am certain you will have a great success on your first night and for ever after.’ On the whole his certainty was justified. The critics were somewhat less reverent than they had been in New York. ‘A remorseless production,’ the New Statesman described it, consisting mainly of ‘processions of what seem gleaming debutantes disguised as nuns, supporting electric-fixtures and intoning they know not what.’ A pageant, wrote The Times, which laid claim to a spiritual beauty beyond its grasp. ‘The play is full of ingenious substitutes for the truth which, like the electric bulbs that do service as candles, are enemies of the spirit while decorative of the substance.’ But no critic spoke harshly of Diana and some glorified her, notably The Times once more:

  One thing stood apart from and above it, Lady Diana’s representation of the Virgin. There are long passages during which a wise man will look at nothing but this glowing stillness, this superb passivity on which all action is gathered up and transcended. It is as if, coming in from a hot and tu
rbulent street, one is resting coolly before the picture of a master.

  Friends rallied loyally to admire. Robert Bruce Lockhart was moved to hot tears and was still more impressed when he found that Diana had a huge mosquito-bite on her shoulder but had resisted the urge to scratch it; was suffering from a cold but had managed not to cough. The King, too, was more impressed by her immobility than her acting. ‘You played this part twenty-five years ago?’ he suggested. ‘No,’ said Diana firmly. ‘How’s your broken leg? I remember you broke it on our Coronation Day.’ ‘No, sir, on Peace Day.’ ‘Does it not tire you to stand so long with your head on one side?’ ‘Yes, sir, it is a little tiring.’ ‘But of course you have no words to say, and talking is three quarters of acting.’ Diana was little better pleased by Max Beaverbrook, who did not come till the last night of the tour and then arrived so late that he missed three quarters of the play.

  After three months at the Lyceum the time came for a provincial tour. To act The Miracle in the United States had enjoyed a certain réclame. To appear in London’s West End was perhaps less acceptable, but Diana was known to behave surprisingly and her friends marvelled and forgave her. To appear in Manchester or Glasgow was inconceivable, however; eccentricity carried to the point of lunacy. Tilly Losch made it clear that she would submit herself to no such indignity; Diana reached the opposite decision with as little hesitation. She wanted the money; she was loath to lose the glamour and the glory; but, far more important than either of these, she was at heart a trouper. She liked the company – particularly since Tilly Losch was to abandon them; she knew her presence would be an important element in its success; she was loyal to her fellow-actors, to Reinhardt, to Cochran. In early July she set off on the trail that was to wend from Manchester to Golders Green by way of Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Southampton, Liverpool and Cardiff.