Diana enjoyed the business of being a political wife, giving gracious little dinners for the Baldwins, with eggs provided by Conrad Russell, gardenias by Maurice Baring, caviare by Lord Ashfield and champagne by Lord Beaverbrook. She would do anything to further Duff’s thriving political career, and knew her parties were relished by even the stuffiest politician. But political entertaining on a modest scale was not a full-time occupation. The revival of The Miracle temporarily filled the gap, but only for a few months. She dabbled in good works but her heart was not really in them; indeed she more than half approved of H. G. Wells’s reply to her begging letter: ‘I do not care a damn for the Westminster Church Mission for Sailors. Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable. I love and adore you, but all the same I am sending nothing to your Anglican charity.’
She cast around for a job that would divert her and supplement their income. She went to Brighton by the ‘new electric train’ and thought of starting a restaurant in what was then a culinary desert. She lent her name to the promotion of various products which she had never sampled and would hardly have recognized. Briefly she was co-director with Gertrude Lawrence of a flower-shop. She was tentatively offered a job as editress-in-chief of a newspaper called Eve. The place was said to be worth £5,000 a year but Diana found the chairman of the Illustrated Newspaper Group ‘a common, stupid man’ and rejected what anyway seemed an illusory prospect. She missed a chance of easy money when a syndicate offered her £10,000 if she could persuade Lord Wimborne to sell them his house. ‘You had better get busy,’ urged Duff, but she hesitated to bring too much pressure on the still besotted nobleman. Not paying one’s bills was a sure way of economizing. ‘They had the impudence to ring up from Selfridges and say that you owed them £130,’ wrote Duff indignantly. ‘They are the most insufferable badgerers for money. I told them they could go to hell!’
Instead of earning money she took up with the Bach Choir. Vaughan Williams tested her voice and accepted her: ‘He was an adorable man. I think he only let me in out of kindness – “She has tried, poor beast.”’ Diana was a contralto and for several seasons sang with great relish in the Matthew Passion. She was a pioneer of the crossword puzzle and did much to make Man Jong fashionable in Britain. The Daily Express even announced that she was taking flying lessons; Diana being far less likely than the proverbial pig to take to the air unless compelled to. But none of these diversions could blind her to the fact that she was not making full use of her talents.
Diana at forty was as beautiful as she had ever been. St John Hutchinson’s daughter, Barbara, had a vivid impression of her in a hammock at their cottage in the country, sewing in an enormous hat, with a ‘feeling of sun and blondness, very laughing and welcoming and golden; what I loved about her was the colour, white and gold and blue, blue eyes; and the sparkle’. Though her rasping, cracked-ice voice made the young Barbara Hutchinson think of the Snow Queen, in every other way she exuded life and warmth. Enid Bagnold modelled Lady Maclean partly on Diana in her novel The Loved and the Envied:
No one liked to be excluded. No one could afford to leave alone such a dispenser of life: everyone fed at the spring. She seemed to develop, when in the company of those who enjoyed life as she did, a baker’s yeast … When she came into a room it was plain it was a spirited person who entered, a person with an extra dose of life. It was apparent on all sides how people were affected. They had a tendency to rise to their feet to be nearer her, not of course in her honour, but to be at the source of amusement, to be sure not to miss the exclamation, the personal comedy she might make of the moment of life just left behind.
‘If she lives in a light world she does it with a splendour of spirit,’ said Duke Alberti in the same novel.
Hilaire Belloc’s small daughter made the same points more prosaically when she remarked at dinner: ‘She makes everyone happier wherever she is.’
Inevitably she was sought after socially, and since she found it almost impossible to refuse an invitation in case she missed an unexpected treat, her life was crowded and complex. The twenties and thirties were a golden age for the party-goer. Fantastic sums were squandered on clothes and decorations. At Ditchley the Ronald Trees erected a great tent of white muslin on the terrace and Oliver Messel decorated it with negro heads sporting feathered hats and ropes of pearls. There were fireworks and flowers by Constance Spry. The ladies were asked to wear red and white and Oliver Messel arrived in a white suit with a red tie – ‘Bugger ought to be thrown in the lake,’ muttered an outraged peer. But extravagance was not essential, a few nights later everyone sat on the floor at Sibyl Colefax’s while Rubinstein played Chopin and Noel Coward strummed and crooned. It was an exclusive society but beauty, breeding, money and the ability to amuse could all provide admission tickets: the more of these attributes one possessed, the more plentiful the invitations.
Even if very beautiful or very rich one had to sing for one’s supper. ‘The Game’ had recently arrived from America and provided an opportunity for the cream of London society to make a fool of itself several times a week. ‘A combination of Dumb Crambo and what we used to call Clumps,’ explained Duff, ‘and about as ridiculous and tedious as anything can be.’ Diana adored it, as she adored dressing up. Sometimes she borrowed costumes of luxuriant splendour, but more often she would spend only a few shillings and much ingenuity. She went on the cheap as a French revolutionary to a ball at Hampden House. A team of youngish beauties came as the Eton eight, coxed by Duff, while Lord Blandford elected to be a female cross-channel swimmer.
Hectic motorized treasure-hunts were another of her delights. One typical example took her to the Achilles Statue (‘A vulnerable point in Hyde Park’). A postcard of the Death of Chatterton then led her to the Tate Gallery where a messenger boy gave the next clue: ‘Not far from here, the warriors of Crimea have a garden.’ From the Pensioners’ Garden in Chelsea an anagram took her to the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and thence (‘Drury Lane. Look out for Nell Gwynne’) to Viola Parsons dressed as an orange girl and on to the treasure in a letter-box in Woburn Square. Diana completed the course in two hours ten minutes and came second.
Her appetite for such delights was inexhaustible. Time after time Duff would return home at 1 or 2 a.m., knowing Diana would not follow him for two hours or more. On three successive nights she was out till 4 a.m., ‘very happy. She divided her time between Jack Barrymore and the Prince of Wales’; 6 a.m., dallying with Barrymore again; and a mere 3 a.m. when a party at the Embassy Club broke up unexpectedly early. But though she enjoyed her London life, it was in travel that she found her greatest pleasure. An avid sightseer, she would go anywhere with anyone, accepting luxury if it was available but undeterred if it was not. Duff’s political duties and their differing tastes meant that they often went their separate ways. ‘I shall be back in a jiffy,’ Duff promised as he left for Cap d’Ail in 1932, ‘and you will like me all the better, like one of those angel faces which you have loved long since and lost awhile. I promise not to fall:
(1) out of the puffer
(2) into bad habits
(3) for the girls
(4) by the way
(5) at the tables
(6) off the boat
(7) from grace.’
He kept his word at least so far as the boat and the puffer were concerned. Throughout his absence Diana suffered agonies lest disaster overtake him. John Julius unwittingly fed her fears by seeking to appease them. ‘Papa will come back,’ he reassured her earnestly. ‘I know he will.’
Some of Diana’s more ambitious expeditions took place under the wing of Lord Beaverbrook. In 1927 she visited Germany with him, Venetia Montagu, Valentine Castlerosse and Arnold Bennett. Gross in appetite and appearance, with nimble wit concealed beneath buffoon’s exterior, Lord Castlerosse was Beaverbrook’s court jester. ‘What is your handicap?’ Nancy Cunard asked him on the golf-course. ‘Drink and debauchery,’ he answered sadl
y but correctly. Arnold Bennett was shocked by the coarseness of the conversation between Beaverbrook and Castlerosse in front of the women – ‘I mean physical love’ – and did his best to curb it. His gallantry was appreciated but not called-for; in Berlin, while he sought out a play by Bertold Brecht, Diana and Venetia went off with Castlerosse on a tour of the transvestite night-clubs. Bennett liked the two women. They ‘really do their best to be agreeable and very well succeed, though Venetia has a darting tongue. However, with her stings, she really is witty. Diana less so, but Diana is kinder. We called in at the most footling party I ever was at last night, and Diana threw herself into the total inanity and tedium in a manner which proves she has a very serious sense of human duty.’ Bennett was determined to go to Tristan and Diana seconded his efforts. ‘The women know about music because it seems to be somehow their job to be companionable in everything, and they must have taken the hell of a lot of pains to be so, and I think they may be mildly interested.’
Sefton Delmer, then a junior stringer for the Express in Berlin, was summoned to the Hotel Adlon. He found Bennett ‘sardonic, silent and sallow’, Castlerosse ‘fat, flushed and chortling’, Venetia ‘gracious, erect and smiling’ and Diana ‘brilliant, brittle and blonde, with the palest watery blue eyes’. They were in Berlin, he gathered, in connection with some film which Bennett was to write, Beaverbrook finance and Diana star in. In fact the idea was no more than an idle fantasy which none of those concerned wished to pursue with vigour.
A few years later came another expedition, this time to Brazil. Castlerosse was again in the party and this time Beaverbrook’s mistress, Jean Norton. Things went wrong even before they set off, with Diana determined not to fly over the Andes but equally determined not to be the scapegoat for the others. She was quite happy to remain behind in Rio while the others flew wherever they desired. Jean Norton begged her to be more cooperative. ‘Max doesn’t the least want to fly, is very frightened of it, but must be allowed to say it’s my fault that they didn’t soar over the Andes.’
Beaverbrook was cantankerous from the start. On the way to Paris he settled down with his secretary and began to go through the household accounts. ‘What’s this? Three dozen eggs, one dozen eggs and a further two dozen eggs? Will you tell me what the hell I keep a chicken-farm for? Tell the Leatherhead Gas people I’m not going to pay tenpence a therm for my gas – the gas is not worth that money. Tell them Lord Beaverbrook is very dissatisfied with their rates. What are Canadian Tabs [they were calendar refills]? I’m not going to be charged 1/3d for Canadian Tabs, whatever they are.’ He was authoritarian, even by his own standards. When he emerged from the eggs and Canadian Tabs he announced Diana would like some champagne.
‘No thank you, Max’
‘Of course you’d like some.’
‘Thank you, no; I don’t want any champagne.’
‘You must want some champagne.’
‘But Max, I don’t like champagne.’
‘Of course you like champagne. Waiter, some champagne for Lady Diana.’
Lord Castlerosse came in for still rougher treatment. It was discovered that he was writing a novel and he was told he must read it aloud after dinner. ‘Can Valentine read well?’ asked Diana. ‘Like hell he can, the worst in the world?’ Castlerosse spluttered through the 8,000 words he had written. ‘Not worth a damn, is it,’ said Beaverbrook triumphantly.
When they got to Rio there was said to be yellow fever, typhoid, cholera and leprosy rife in the city. Castlerosse was made to put on gloves before handling banknotes. Diana was in an agony of apprehension, scarcely sleeping at all. ‘I look like an old, coarse, wrung-out cloth – grey-white.’ She had also decided that Duff had met with some disaster and, every time she saw Beaverbrook look gloomy, assumed that he was about to break the news. Since Beaverbrook was gloomy much of the time, her alarm was constantly revived. Beaverbrook’s depression deepened when Jean Norton fell seriously ill and all trips from Rio had to be cancelled. As soon as she recovered enough to travel, the disgruntled party took the first boat home. ‘Personally I would rather spend six weeks in Wormwood Scrubs,’ Duff commented as he sped Diana on her way. By the time she got back she would almost have settled for the Scrubs herself.
The Coopers made many trips together. In 1930 they set off for Canada with Lord Dudley and his young son Billy. It was a camping holiday deep in the country, sleeping on a bed of spruce branches, riding, fishing, canoeing. For Duff it was flies, fleas, indigestible food and a lack of hot water; for Diana the romance of open spaces, still waters, sunrise and sunset in the wild. Duff bore it nobly, but never were their differing views as to what constituted an ideal holiday more dramatically displayed.
Duff’s reputation as a coming man had grown steadily over the previous years. So also had his renown as a writer. His study of Talleyrand, one of the best-written and mostly brilliantly perceptive short biographies of the twentieth century, had come out in 1932. It brought glowing reviews and a satisfactory flood of royalties. It did not, however, win Diana’s unquestioning reverence for all Duff wrote. When they went to Sweden, where Duff was to lecture, he meticulously kept a diary. Diana read it, found it dull and decided in future to dictate its contents. It at once took on a new tone. At Flushing the tickets were mislaid: ‘He always loses the tickets and even when he doesn’t he sends me nearly mad by fumbling in all the wrong pockets before he finds them.’ On the train to Stockholm, Duff read peacefully: ‘Duff never notices anything, he might as well stay at home. I noticed there were no motor-cars and no roads.’ Duff met the Swedish press ‘to whom he said a great many silly and indiscreet things. He was sorry afterwards when I pointed them out to him.’ At Gävle Diana first tested schnapps and spent the rest of the evening with her arm round the Governor’s neck. Duff did in fact make one observation of sociological import while in Sweden:
To speak with your mouth full
And swallow with greed
Are national traits
Of the travelling Swede.
Diana was still dictating the diary when they set off for Venice later the same year with St John Hutchinson by way of Paris and Annecy. At Paris she softened up the men with cocktails in the Crillon and then set off for Sèvres where she had heard there was a good restaurant with a terrace overlooking the river. ‘It is true the food was not very good and one saw nothing from the terrace but a large, disused factory. However, I think the men were grateful to me for taking them there.’ They returned by boat. ‘Duff had a suppressed fou rire because Hutchie, doing the highbrow, said Degas was a very witty painter.’ There were terrible scenes in the Berkeley that night because the chef stuffed the grouse which Duff had brought with him. ‘It did spoil them, but not sufficiently to excuse the absurd fuss that Duff made about it, refusing to touch them and shrieking for cold ham.’
At Annecy they found the Baldwins. Diana insisted the Conservative leader should be asked to luncheon. Duff grumbled but gave way on condition Diana did not wear trousers. After a battle he conceded even that point, against a promise Diana would say nothing embarrassing. Diana expressed dismay that Duff should even envisage so absurd a possibility. Baldwin duly arrived, hotfoot from a crucial conference with Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister. ‘Come on now,’ said Diana. ‘Tell us every word Ramsay said, for Duff tells me nothing.’ Duff blushed, Baldwin grunted, Mrs Baldwin observed: ‘My husband tells me nothing either, but then I would never ask him.’ The luncheon was not a total success. The Baldwins, Diana recorded, ‘are a boring couple, slow in the uptake and no sense of humour. They didn’t laugh even at my jokes.’ Walking off the effects of lunch, Duff tripped over a bush and fell flat on his face. ‘He was covered in blood and dirt and obviously in severe pain. I roared and roared with laughter. He was rather annoyed with me for laughing. Some people are quite extraordinary.’
Venice was visited almost every year. Cecil Beaton first saw Diana there, in an enormous apricot-covered garden hat. ‘Surely she must be the most beautifu
l English woman alive today. I stared in awe. Her lips were japonica red, her hair flaxen, her eyes blue love-in-the-mist.’ With her were her regular courtiers: Lord Berners, ‘who looks more like a figure in a tailor’s shop than a composer’; St John Hutchinson, ‘huge, jocular and Regency in his arty clothes’; and Maurice Baring, ‘who I believe writes novels’. Beaton saw her again a few nights later at a fancy-dress ball given by Baroness d’Erlanger in honour of the Crown Prince of Italy. Diana’s first costume had to be ruled out as it involved wearing a mask, something which Italian etiquette forbade in the presence of royalty. Undeterred, she reappeared half an hour later wearing crinoline and Turkish turban. ‘She looked furiously beautiful now, sitting in her box.’
Social life was as hectic in Venice as at the height of the London season, the participants slightly nastier. Laura Corrigan was at the heart of it. Immensely rich, a Mrs Leo Hunter of the most luxuriant order, she lived in a world of frenetic entertaining. Diana took some coaxing before she would settle in the Palazzo Mocenigo, where Byron had lived for two years and Mrs Corrigan now gloried and drank deep, but once there she relished the opulence, the hubbub and even the vulgarity. Mrs Corrigan delighted in royalty above all things and turned her palazzo upside-down to accommodate some Greek princes. ‘But Sir,’ she expostulated when they arrived, ‘where are the servants?’ They had none. ‘Why I, Sir, have two body-maids and Mr Corrigan never crossed the Atlantic without two body-men.’ Raymond Mortimer, Clive Bell and Frankie Birrell were staying in a flat on the Zattere. Diana insisted that Mrs Corrigan should ask ‘the Bloomsberries’ to a meal. Her hostess complied, supposing that three brothers called Bloomsbury were coming to the house. Dutifully Diana introduced: ‘Mr Raymond Bloomsbury, Mr Clive …’ Lytton Strachey also crossed her path. He found Diana very agreeable: ‘but I had, as I always do with her, the sensation of struggling vainly to show off that I’m not a fool – mysterious, because really her own comments are very far from being out of the ordinary.’
Diana Cooper Page 24
