Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  She had no cause for concern. In April 1937 the Coopers were summoned to Windsor for the weekend; ‘So much for the black list, anyway,’ wrote Diana in triumph. It was the first time she had spent a night at the Castle and she marvelled at the encrustation of Victorian relics which adorned the vast building. Their sitting-room had thirteen oil-paintings of royalty including a Landseer sketch and ‘about a hundred plaques, miniatures, intaglios, wax profiles etc of the family in two Empire vitrines and two bronze statuettes of King Edward VII in yachting get-up’. Diana’s bedroom, ‘throttlingly stuffy’, contained nine more oils and the bathroom added a further eight dating from 1856 with a bronze statuette of Princess Louise on horseback and of Princess Beatrice on the moors. She sat next to the King at dinner and talked busily of the Coronation and the Castle; then plunged boldly and asked if he had heard of a supposed visit the Coopers were to pay to Ernest Simpson. The question did not go down particularly well, nor did Diana’s sympathetic: ‘How awful, it’s a life-sentence for you.’ ‘Oh well, we all know that,’ he replied frostily, but then came the question ‘“When did you first know about it?” From then on it was jabber, jabber, jabber. Lady Desborough on the King’s left and Sir E. Ovey on my right got no conversation at all.’

  After dinner Duff was closeted with the Queen for more than an hour. ‘It’s a bit of bad manners,’ was Diana’s first reaction; then, after midnight had struck, ‘It’s d’Artagnan (no! Buckingham), it’s Bothwell; it’s Potemkin, it’s Lancelot, it’s boring.’ Duff emerged rosy with satisfaction but with no very clear memory of what had passed and the Coopers left Windsor with the impression that things would do a lot better under the new régime. Diana told a wistful Chips Channon how very different the atmosphere at Windsor had been to the old days at Fort Belvedere: ‘That was an operetta, this an institution.’

  *

  Duff’s career was at a point where the hostility of the royal family could have been most damaging. Many of his own party believed that he had been at best indiscreet, at worst mischievous, and that no sensible minister should have become embroiled in the scandal of the Nahlin. There was what Duff described as ‘a whispering campaign’ against him. His forthcoming dismissal was freely talked of, and when he was offered a lucrative contract to work as political adviser to the Evening Standard he was tempted to accept. ‘I suppose that I shall never know who was behind this campaign,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘From two or three sources I learnt that it was Anthony Eden.’ Diana believed the same and conceived a fierce dislike of Eden which lasted till he died.

  Duff had become Secretary of State for War in November 1935. He remained at the War Office for eighteen months. He himself felt that he was a success and that the army as a whole would share his view. Many disagreed. He had criticized Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, for blocking certain desirable if expensive reforms. He had been intemperate in his attacks on Bishop Barnes and other pacifists. He had confirmed his reputation for indiscretion, and his ability as an administrator was open to doubt. He offended his more sober colleagues by his taste for parties and pleasure. Even the Queen had been quoted as saying that he ought to be careful not to burn the candle at both ends. ‘I ought not to go to parties,’ he resolved. ‘I ought not to be seen having supper at restaurants. I ought not to drink too much.’ He proved no more able to put into effect these very proper sentiments than he had been twenty years before.

  Diana was his most energetic champion. Beaverbrook instructed Robert Bruce Lockhart to write an article denouncing Duff’s tenure of the War Office. Bruce Lockhart pulled his punches but made it evident he felt Duff had been a failure. ‘I can only tell you,’ wrote Diana, ‘that the Government (P.M.s, two of them) never meant there to be an army, nor that it should be equipped with armaments … The money was never given out. What meagre equipment there is today is due to three years’ struggle of Duff’s.’ It was, indeed, Duff’s successes rather than his failures that led to his unpopularity with the Conservative leadership. When he was summoned by Chamberlain during a Cabinet reshuffle, he suspected that he was about to be dropped. Instead he was offered the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. Diana was away in France and he wrote to her in ecstasy:

  How very fortunate I am. I have been tapping wood and crossing fingers. No money troubles, no health troubles, no love troubles, no political troubles and a perfect job. Can it last? I think even a few weeks’ separation from you is a good thing. It makes me realize how much I love you, how much I miss you, how you are the backbone and the bottom, the beginning and the end of me.

  Diana was delighted because Duff was, but there were other reasons for welcoming his transition. Ships were romantic things; the office had a pleasantly heraldic ring about it; best of all, it carried with it one of the most splendid houses in London. Admiralty House, built in the late eighteenth century, looks out over the Horse Guards Parade to St James’s Park. It was already more than adequately furnished, but Philip Sassoon, now Minister of Works, indulged all save her wildest fancies. A bust of Nelson was produced, a set of pictures illustrating Captain Cook’s voyages placed in the dining-room and a large Guardi banished from it as being too sombre. Sassoon drew the line, however, at a grand piano. Diana put an advertisement in the personal column of The Times, was offered several, and triumphantly installed the best of them in her drawing-room. On an expedition to Copenhagen with Conrad Russell she bought a large and extravagantly naked mermaid which her companion was made to clutch to his breast while tottering through Customs.

  Admiralty House already possessed a fine set of dolphin-legged chairs and tables made for a Mr Fish in 1815. Inspired by this, Diana plunged into aquatic riot. She bought mirrors held by Neptunes or nymphs, a dinner-service of Wedgwood shells, a tankful of sea-horses. John Julius’s schoolroom was transformed into a repository for anchors, compasses, nets, binnacles and other maritime delights. To Dirksen, the German Ambassador, ‘a slow, dense, humourless, typically thorough scientific type’, she poured out the details of her pastime. ‘“Zo,” he said, staring at me through his glasses with a look both penetrating and alarmed. “Zo – you have a feesh complex!” I felt he knew more Freudian lore than I did, and shuddered to think what admission I had unconsciously made.’

  As always with Diana’s houses, her bedroom was the heart of the establishment. The bed itself rose sixteen feet from a shoal of gold dolphins and tridents to a wreath of dolphins at the crown, while ropes made fast the sea-blue satin curtains. Here she would hold court every morning; seeing friends; dictating letters; planning a raid on some Ministry of Works storehouse; reading or listening to music. She visited the room again in April 1940, to find all the trimmings swept away and the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, using a narrow, curtainless pallet bed. Something of her presence perhaps lingered on, however. Many years later a maid at the Admiralty burst in on Mrs Healey and cried that she had seen a ghost, ‘a lady with a very beautiful white face and staring blue eyes was lying in the state bed’.

  ‘Luncheon very nasty, house superb,’ commented Evelyn Waugh. His bile had perhaps been stirred by the fact that everyone was discussing a new play of which he had never heard, called, it seemed, ‘a morning with the electric’. ‘Diana’, he complained, ‘made me feel a bumpkin and wanted to.’ He was unusual with this complaint; Diana’s greatest strength as a hostess, indeed as a guest, was her ability to make bumpkins feel sophisticated; schoolboys mature; scholars, wits; and wits, profound. It was the first time that she had been able to indulge her appetite for entertaining in a way that was both formal and fantastic; the rooms of Admiralty House were admirably designed for the grandest of occasions, Diana’s contribution was to leaven grandeur with fun, so that the dignity of the rooms was not lost but was never allowed to grow oppressive.

  Another delight of the Admiralty was the yacht Enchantress, a thousand-ton sloop at the disposal of the First Lord. Their first expedition, in September 1937, was close to being the last as far as Diana was
concerned. Enchantress took them from Anglesey, through the Minch to Uist and then on to Stornoway and round Cape Wrath. Stornoway was Stormoway and Cape Wrath so true to its name that the First Lord was tumbled out of bed and bounced about his cabin like a die in a dice-box. They joined the fleet at Invergordon, Duff inspecting the ships while Diana fraternized with the crew. ‘Duff is thrilled all day and doing his stuff with enthusiasm and therefore doing it well,’ she wrote to Conrad. ‘They must like us better than the Hoares, mustn’t they – but not I suppose as much as the Winstons.’

  Bad weather had almost wrecked the trip, but that, felt Diana, could hardly be repeated in October’s cruise in the Mediterranean. They were picked up at Venice and sailed down the Dalmatian coast to Skyros, where they deplored the memorial to Rupert Brooke. ‘It represents a huge nude man and when I say nude I don’t mean maybe. It is like some ghastly advertisement in a German bugger-journal. How can Eddie Marsh have allowed it?’ From there it was by way of Rhodes to Cyprus, where Diana delighted in a Turbaned Turk whose command of idiomatic English was more extensive than accurate. ‘I am,’ he assured her, ‘hand in blouse with Lady Leconfield.’ Cairo proved ‘the hell of a town – loud and crude and common’, while the pyramids were much as might have been expected on the outside and inside pervaded by an asphyxiating smell of elephants. For one who habitually responded excitedly to the monuments of antiquity, Egypt’s relics left Diana curiously cold. She was far more moved by the state of the sea, which defied propriety by producing a 105 m.p.h. gale: ‘Water is everywhere,’ she wrote to Conrad at the height of the storm,

  tearing down the passages, bearing the ship’s treasure to and fro – silver candlesticks and (O! bad omen) the bugle. I look like a Dalmatian dog because my bureau has also broken loose and covered me with ink. I am on my knees as usual, praying without knowing how to make myself heard. The ship seems without a crew. No sailor or steward is seen or heard above the roar of waves and shivering of timbers. I look through the porthole once, and see mad milk boiling over and no sky. I bang the shutter with a vow not to look again.

  Lord Gage, a guest aboard, sought to cheer her up by giving her a roaringly funny description of the Admiral sitting nervously in his cabin with his life-jacket laid out like a boiled shirt on the bed in front of him. Diana failed to find the story even faintly cheering.

  The third of the cruises in the Enchantress, in August 1938, was to the Baltic; to Kiel, where Duff had to propose Hitler’s health and Diana drank it in water; to Lübeck, where Brendan Bracken insisted on the band playing ‘O Tannenbaum’, a tune equally well known as ‘The Red Flag’; and on to Danzig. It was there that she got to know Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner. Burckhardt had been brought up by Hofmannsthal, and so was almost an elder brother to Raimund. Diana had met him once before at Venetia Montagu’s, had dismissed him as a slightly arid highbrow and was at first inclined to stick to her opinion. Then came an after-dinner shooting-party with no shooting but a lot of dancing in the dark. Brows fell, aridity diminished, ‘I felt that Carl is to be a friend at least,’ Diana reported to Conrad. Soon it was ‘my dear, beautiful Carl’. They disappeared together for a few days, allegedly to visit an exhibition of Velasquez’s paintings; they roistered in Paris; they corresponded with romantic precautions, Diana’s letters being signed ‘ta nièce Inez’, Burckhardt addressing his letters to Phyllis de Janzé formerly Boyd. Diana, conscious of the fact that she was now forty-six years old and as always sceptical about her beauty, was flattered to be wooed so ardently by a man of Burckhardt’s brains, good looks and international standing. She also enjoyed his company, though regretting the fact that they always spoke in French. ‘What is so amusing is that his advances of courtship are identical with Raimund’s,’ she wrote to Duff in the early stages of the affair. ‘The latter must have asked Carl as a boy for lessons and tips, but my new lover has it over Raimund every time for one reason, his hand is not like a hippopotamus’s tongue. I could almost fall for him if I wasn’t always in an agony of not understanding.’

  In part, Diana’s fling with Carl Burckhardt was spurred on by a hope that Duff would feel some anxiety. She relished the idea of getting something of her own back for Duff’s long sequence of amatory escapades. In this she was wholly unsuccessful. ‘Duff will never listen to accounts of my amours,’ she wrote crossly to Carl. ‘I fear it’s genuine boredom, not a kind of delicacy.’ Conrad, on the other hand, responded with amused outrage. ‘Oh, what a story of lechery and of lasciviousness and lickerishness,’ he wrote after Diana had described an outing to Paris. ‘And to think you look so pure and good!’ Early in 1939 she put off a projected meeting. Conrad accepted the delay with resignation but regret: ‘And the reason!’ he protested.

  Oh, dear! It’s just a regular thing in your life now. If it isn’t Geneva, it’s Montreux, and if it isn’t Montreux it’s Calais or Boulogne. And always hotels and always two geese. I wonder what you’d think if Lady Weymouth and I carried on in that way. But it’s no use pretending. Carl is madly in love with you and Lady Weymouth is not even mildly interested in my wooing. And it’s clear you take a much, much deeper interest in Carl than ever I do in Daphne. Sometimes you say it’ll be a relief when the war has actually started. Well, I feel I may be less unhappy when you and Carl have actually gone off together. It’s the anxiety and suspense that kill.

  There was no question of Diana and Carl ‘going off together’ in any permanent sense, and Conrad was well aware of it. There was an element of play-acting about the relationship even at its most extravagant, and both protagonists would have been dismayed if they had been required to take it seriously. The war put a natural term to it. Burckhardt, a Swiss, paid a last visit to London in October 1939 and distinguished himself by failing to turn up for his final assignation with Diana. ‘I think he was probably in bed with another woman,’ commiserated Conrad with some satisfaction. ‘If ever there was a treacherous, lecherous, bawdy villain in this world I know where to find him.’ Diana was more relieved than distressed. As she had found with Chaliapin nearly twenty years before, a little passion went a long way; and besides there were other, more important things to think about at the end of 1939.

  *

  The old Duchess of Rutland had died two years before. Diana had been abroad at the time of an earlier illness and Duff had written to warn that her mother’s life was in danger. ‘I could so well bear her death,’ Diana replied. ‘I am quite resigned and disgustingly selfish enough to hope it could happen when I was away, and this confession I am more ashamed of than any cowardly thought that ever passed through my distorted brain – but I cannot bear her to be anxious, or linger or suffer mentally.’ In the event she did none of those things, but Diana was still shaken by the strength of her regrets. She did not go to Belvoir for the funeral but, when she knew that the ceremony was over, ‘I got sad, sad, sad and had to crush surging memories and heartrending sentiment’. She had been at her mother’s deathbed. The Duchess had seemed tranquil, resigned, then a few moments before she died she tried to struggle from her bed and had to be held down. ‘Elle fuyait la mort,’ as Diana’s French maid said grimly of another such scene. It happened just before Christmas, and her son John decreed that the festivities at Belvoir should not be disturbed. Anyone who rang to inquire was told that the Duchess’s condition was unchanged, an elegant playing with the truth reminiscent of Franz Joseph’s courtiers who for ten days after their master’s death assured the world that the Emperor had left the palace for an unnamed destination. From 22 December until 27 December Diana kept vigil at the Duchess’s home in Chapel Street, alone with the corpse of her mother. Then she fled to Mégève to ski with John Julius. ‘All these days I receive sad letters from Diana,’ wrote Duff. ‘She doesn’t easily get over her mother’s death.’

  The Duchess left her house in Chapel Street to Diana, which meant that Gower Street, already deserted while the Coopers were at the Admiralty, was now obviously unneeded. To Diana’s regret
, they decided that it must be sold. There was no house in which she had been more happy and to abandon it was to put her youth finally behind her. Most of all, she regretted the loss of the drawing-room decorated by Rex Whistler with Roman plaques and vases in trompe l’oeil. For Duff the sacrifice involved a more immediate inconvenience. On several occasions he had used the empty house as a rendezvous for his illicit love-affairs. Once he was ensconced there when a party of potential buyers arrived with a key and demanded to inspect the property. Only with the greatest difficulty did he persuade them to go away and come back later. ‘They must have suspected the worst,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and they were right.’

  *

  Increasingly their life was being dominated by the coming war. The Coopers had had their first encounter with Nazi Germany in 1933 and had disliked intensely what they saw. Dismayed by the crowds at Bayreuth they took refuge in what should have been the quiet country town of Berneck. To their dismay they found themselves at the centre of what seemed to be an incipient Nazi rally. Seeking to distract them from an ill-cooked chicken, the waiter told them that Hitler was staying at the same hotel. Duff asked for an interview, and for half an hour Diana was left downstairs, praying that he would not lose his temper and put a premature end to their holiday. In fact he was fobbed off with Rosenberg, who said nothing of interest but offered them places for the Führer’s forthcoming speech at Nuremberg. The speech bored them so much – mainly, no doubt, because neither spoke German – that they left halfway through, but Diana at least got to within two feet of Hitler.

  His dark complexion had a fungoid quality, and the famous hypnotic eyes that met mine seemed glazed and without life – dead colourless eyes. The silly mèche of hair I was prepared for. The smallness of his occiput was unexpected. His physique on the whole was ignoble.