Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Duff’s bad opinion of the Germans was confirmed when he found that the barman was unable to mix a gin-fizz. He got still angrier when Diana tried to explain how it was done. It was no good, he felt, trying to improve people. Diana disagreed. She felt it was her mission in life to educate the world.

  By 1936 the Coopers were prominent in the still small group which opposed Nazi Germany clamorously and urged rearmament. At a supper-party at Emerald Cunard’s – ‘a really magnificent stew of Germans and French Jews and gentiles and Jockey Club stewards, tarts and duchesses and MPs and idiots’ – Diana was sitting next to the German Ambassador, Ribbentrop. He asked if she had been to Berlin lately. No, she said, but she was going to Paris next day. To buy dresses? asked the Ambassador archly. ‘“No, to Flanders to see the war cemetery,” I said, with a brave stare into his treacherous little eyes.’ Usually, however, Diana left the more belligerent pronouncements to her husband. At a dinner-party given by Venetia Montagu, where Chips Channon found the company sadly pro-semite and out of touch, ‘Crinks’ Johnstone toasted the death of Ribbentrop. Diana thought this was going too far, but Duff added the rider that he should die in pain.

  She did not much like the Germans she knew and was therefore all the more prepared to condemn the Nazis. The Italians she liked. Dino Grandi, the romantically bearded Italian Ambassador, wooed her fiercely. At dinner, while Diana made polite conversation about Whipsnade and Sir Oswald Mosley, he interrupted with hot whispers: ‘We are just play-acting with this talk, Diana. Why do we have to do it?’ ‘Quite,’ Diana replied politely, ‘why indeed?’ But she did not feel she was play-acting at all. She successfully kept the ardent Ambassador at bay, but ‘old Wopping’ amused and pleased her. He represented Fascist Italy; there must therefore be something to be said for Fascism, Italian style. Duff, more rationally, felt that it was folly to quarrel with Germany and Italy at the same time. When Italy invaded Abyssinia he found himself on the other side to his usual allies, Eden and Churchill. Politically he regretted Eden’s resignation and feared the advent of Halifax: ‘He knows very little about Europe, very little about foreigners, very little about men. He is a great friend of Dawson, whose influence is pernicious, and I think he is also a friend of Lothian, who is always wrong.’ Personally, he was not sorry to see Eden go, believing him to be an enemy. Diana actively rejoiced at Eden’s departure and hoped that it would clear the way for Duff’s eventual succession to the Foreign Office.

  It was the Abyssinian crisis that inspired Diana’s solitary foray into high diplomacy. At a dinner-party in the House of Commons, attended, inter alia, by Winston Churchill and Lord Tyrrell, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, there was much debate about how Italy was to be persuaded from her adventurist course. Diana was due to leave next day to attend the canonization of Thomas More – lover of Italy, wife of a senior Minister, who better could warn the Italians that they risked creating bitter resentment in Britain? She gamely undertook the mission but achieved nothing. It is doubtful whether anyone in authority was even aware of her presence and the only noticeable mark of her passing was a turbulent scene at Lord Berners’s luncheon-party. The Princess San Faustino was so offended by Diana’s well-intentioned political homily that she stormed from the table before the meal was over.

  Diana was in Geneva in September 1938 when it was announced that Chamberlain was to fly to Germany to try to secure a settlement to the problem of Czechoslovakia. She was sitting next to de Valera at a British Empire dinner when the news came. ‘This is the greatest thing that has ever been done,’ pronounced de Valera. Diana was sceptical, but more preoccupied by doubts as to whether her neighbour would stand up for the national anthem. She had promised to get him to his feet, and was ready to take a pin to him if necessary. Eventually she plucked up the courage to ask him his intentions and was relieved to find that it had never occurred to him not to stand with the other guests.

  Diana had gone to Geneva for a quiet holiday with John Julius but soon found herself caught up in a League of Nations Conference, acting as unofficial hostess to the British delegation. Halifax was there briefly, the young R. A. Butler, Litvinov smelling strongly of garlic, Carl Burckhardt. Diana gave a party in the deserted Villa Diodati, a rococo pleasure-house overlooking the lake where Byron had once lived. She lit it with candles and filled it with flowers; Maurice de Rothschild produced the wine and Chips Channon most of the food – ‘It cost a fortune,’ complained Diana. Burckhardt produced a bevy of Swiss beauties and R. A. Butler lured the wife of the consul on to the balcony and began to recite Lamartine to her. When he got to the end of the poem he looked round to find that his partner had fled and the balcony was bare.

  And so back to a London where trenches were being dug in the London parks. Diana had made herself absurd two years before in the eyes of many of her friends by taking a Red Cross course in the treatment of gas-victims; now first aid was the rage and the threat of war a staple of conversation. In office or out, Duff Cooper, with men like Stanley, Cranborne, Hore-Belisha, looked to Churchill for leadership. Admiralty House was a centre for their plotting. Oswald Mosley was their bête noire: ‘Canting, slimy, slobbering Bolshie,’ Duff had described him in 1923, in 1938 he would have substituted Nazi for Bolshie but otherwise kept the description unchanged.

  Soon after Diana’s return came Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler at Munich. As soon as he heard the full terms of the settlement, Duff decided that he must resign. Not all the ‘sound’ were ready to go so far, and his action surprised many of his friends. Harold Nicolson saw the headline ‘Cabinet Minister resigns’ and assumed that it was Lord De la Warr. When he heard the truth he was impressed: ‘That is fine of him. He has no money and gives up £5,000 a year plus a job that he loves.’ Though not everyone regretted his departure – ‘Good riddance of bad rubbish,’ remarked Alexander Cadogan tartly – there was agreement on every side that he had behaved with dignity and self-sacrifice. ‘Most honourable conduct,’ Sir Odo Russell found it. ‘She won’t like it! She won’t like giving up Admiralty House and the yacht.’

  Nor did she like it. Duff at least had the consciousness of duty done, and the heady if fleeting delights of being fêted as a hero. For Diana it was all loss: loss of the house she loved so much, loss of the perquisites, the holidays at sea, the consequence, the money. Some acquaintances like Odo Russell assumed that she would plead with Duff to change his mind, or at least would silently disapprove. They were wholly wrong. Diana never for a moment questioned Duff’s judgement and supported him wholeheartedly. On many things she held her own strong views but on matters of politics, as on money or learning, she felt that Duff knew best. On this occasion her instinct had brought her to the same conclusion. She loathed Nazism, was sickened by the stories of the persecution of Jews which were beginning to filter out of Germany, feared war but was prepared to risk it rather than suffer abject humiliation and the triumph of tyranny. Her views were unsophisticated but not without courage and generosity. History proved her right.

  For the moment she was sustained by the enthusiasm that her husband’s sacrifice engendered. Four thousand letters were received in the first few days, almost all of them supporting Duff. Answering these, training John Julius to forge his father’s signature, concealing this convenient technique from Duff, took time and energy. ‘Duff will get a swollen head if people don’t stop treating him as the Saviour of Honour,’ she wrote to Katharine Asquith. ‘For the moment he’s good and serene and free of conscience. I’m proud and not the least regretful – only bewildered by an entirely new future.’

  Leaving Admiralty House and moving into her mother’s house in Chapel Street was one troublesome part of that future. Luckily money was not a problem. A lucrative contract with the Evening Standard meant that Duff was better off as a result of leaving office. In theory he was pleased to be able to devote more time to his writing and to escape the pressures of politics. In fact he fretted in the wings, longing to be on stage where the action was. Di
ana fretted with him. ‘Duff Cooper and Eden, who resigned but won’t fight, expect to be recalled to the Cabinet for being good and causing no trouble,’ wrote Cecil King cynically. Diana knew well that Duff was bent on causing all the trouble he could and that it would take something near a miracle to persuade Chamberlain to invite him back. Churchill told her that he would certainly be in any future War Cabinet and that Duff should ‘wait patiently for he would not fail him’. But how long would the wait be, and who could be patient at such a moment? The Express ran a competition to select the ideal cabinet. Diana urged her friends to enter. ‘Put Duff as Home Secretary,’ she urged Conrad. ‘I don’t think I could face moving back to the Admiralty again.’

  1939 began. Diana took John Julius skiing in Italy. At the frontier a great banner proclaimed: ‘Mussolini ha sempre ragione’. ‘I told John Julius never to forget the idiocy of those words.’ Much of that last summer was spent at Bognor. Diana was in richly apocalyptic mood. ‘The days were long and, as I see them now, particularly radiant. I remember feeling that all they lit had the poignancy of a child that has to die.’ She was convinced that war would come, that Duff would go to battle, that most of her friends and relations would follow him, that even John Julius – then ten years old – would eventually fall victim. She meditated a suicide pact with Duff and even propounded it to him in all solemnity, only to be laughed out of it by his robust belligerence. One spring day they lunched off lobster, cold grouse, Montrachet 1924 and Château Yquem 1921. Duff noted that they were all in excellent form, ‘except Diana who, poor darling, cannot face the war at all’.

  Through the summer came the count-down to war. The German ultimatum on 31 August demanded the virtual dismemberment of Poland. To Duff’s dismay Diana could not see why it should not be accepted. ‘I felt that the reactions of millions of people might be the same as hers.’ Diana he could convince of the real truth, but who would do the same for the people of Britain? Next day she took John Julius into Bognor to buy fresh prawns for lunch. They saw a little crowd clustered round a motor-car and, on principle, joined in. From inside, a car-radio was announcing the invasion of Poland. Diana took John Julius’s arm and led him away. ‘You can’t imagine just how important this is going to be for everyone,’ she told him. ‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’

  NINE

  FIRST YEARS AT WAR

  The outbreak of the First World War had found Diana excited, exhilarated even; mildly irritated at the disruption of her social life; confident that all would be over in a few months before any of her dearest friends ran serious risk in battle. It was some time before she realized the enormity of the catastrophe that was overtaking her world. September 1939, in contrast, found her in black despair, convinced that London would shortly be destroyed by bombardment, its people choked by gases, famine and disease rampant among those who survived. It was some time before she realized that nothing of the sort was going on; that things, in fact, were remarkably unchanged.

  By the time the phoniness of the phoney war had become apparent, she was, indeed, already far away. Duff had long been pledged to go to the United States in October 1939 on a lecture tour. When war came he hoped for employment, but though Churchill, now back in the Cabinet, muttered that all would be well, it did not seem as if anything was in the offing. In America he would make some money and have a chance to put Britain’s case. Chamberlain was grudgingly acquiescent, sending his private secretary to Duff the night before he departed with the almost incredible instruction that, during his tour, he was to avoid saying anything that might smack of propaganda for the Allied cause. To this Duff resolved to pay no attention.

  Duff and Diana left Southampton on 12 October. Preparations had been chaotic, largely thanks to the ministrations of a lunatic butler who packed for Duff as for the Hunting of the Snark. There were fifteen small valises, half of them empty and the other half packed for single one-legged men. Each contained a suit and collar, one shoe, the top of a pair of pyjamas or the bottom, one handkerchief and a sock. ‘It is too peculiar,’ said Diana sadly. Photographers swarmed around the ship but she pleaded with them not to photograph the former minister in case the Germans assigned a special submarine for his destruction. Her precautions did not comfort one gloomy fellow-passenger who had been a survivor of the Lusitania and now announced that she would have cancelled her passage if she had suspected so obvious a target would be on board. Diana’s own spirits remained high. ‘I feel that this is the first time I have been part of real life,’ she told Conrad. ‘I was going to say “except when John Julius was born” but even that wasn’t very real. Artifice, science and drugs veiled the reality.’

  Her cheerfulness did not long survive arrival in New York. Ill health, reaction from former excitement, guilt at leaving Britain at a time of crisis, a bout of irrational melancholia, all contributed to her determination to view everything with a jaundiced eye. She was staying with the Paleys, rich, intelligent, successful. He was President of the Columbia Broadcasting System and she found him ‘very, very attractive. 100% Jew but looking more like good news from Tartary’ – everything she most liked in men. Yet the luxury was too stifling, the taste too exquisite, the wit too sophisticated and sterile. People rarely seemed to read and never to write. When Duff said he must write some letters, ‘the footman was asked to find all the necessities, as if one had asked to make toffee on a wet afternoon’. Diana knew that she was being carping and ungrateful, but she could not feel content.

  The Coopers were feted at a series of parties, each more elegant than the last. The Americans were extravagantly friendly, but their preoccupations were not the same. At the Cole Porters’: ‘They all talk of war, but I have a feeling it is because it comes under their duty to us, that really the interest except to keep out has died in them.’ At luncheon with Mrs Ryan: ‘I felt I should have to leave, I was so ill and irritable.’ Under the surface sympathy anglophobia still ran strong. The only book widely advertised was Louis Bromfield’s The Rains Came, a novel about India sharply critical of British rule.

  Diana found that she could not enjoy the New York life which once had seemed so delectable. She was taken to the smartest night-club, boasting what was said to be the best swing orchestra in America. ‘A room the size of the two Bognor sitting-rooms with a band composed of sixteen buck-niggers, bursting their cheeks and guts and bladders with blowing and banging and stamping and blaring. I got home at three and couldn’t sleep with the horror of it all, and the hideous expense [Diana was outraged to find the dollar had risen to $3.90 to the pound], and the great war, and the heart pounding against the electric air. The fire engines screech through the streets as soon as one drops off, and whine and yell like hell’s special sirens.’

  A nightmare weekend with the Averell Harrimans provided little relief. There were thirty guests, mostly writers of one kind or another – Robert Sherwood, Harold Ross, George Abbott, Charles MacArthur – but as they passed their time drinking and playing endless games of dice, cards or Mah Jong, they might as well have been the most illiterate philistines. Any conversation was drowned by the thunder from the bowling-alley which adjoined the one vast drawing-room. There was no fixed time for meals; they were late or later and uneatable when they came, so that Diana was forced to creep into the kitchen and beg for a piece of cake. Charles MacArthur, then one of America’s most successful dramatists, passed out in the pantry three nights running and had to be carried upstairs to bed. ‘Why does Charles always choose the pantry?’ the guests asked crossly. ‘I thought it showed discretion on his part,’ commented Diana to Conrad. Duff managed to find a four of bridge but nobody paid the slightest attention to Diana and she spent most of the weekend in her room trying unavailingly to sleep.

  Her spirits were not improved by her suspicion that nobody but Duff and herself was making any attempt to put over the British case. Apart from ‘a few cultural sods sent over by the Ministry of Information to talk about Swinburne’, the official voice was mute. Propaganda was b
elieved to be vulgar, probably counter-productive. Those Britons that were to be heard said the wrong things. Freddie Lonsdale was a menace, ‘always saying Germany was sure to win and had been driven into war’. His camp followers were even worse. Duff berated them and they drifted on to Diana to complain. ‘Duff says we’re traitors,’ they protested. ‘That wouldn’t matter much,’ said Diana. ‘It’s the Americans saying it that riles me.’ They protested that everybody had a right to speak out, whereupon Diana asked why they had been asking people not to pass on to Duff what they had been saying. ‘They looked awfully guilty and slunk away much upset, but they will not profit or change their behaviour a jot. Only fear could do that, and we cannot frighten them.’

  Her health did not make things any better. She went to a doctor to have wax removed from her ear, rashly admitted that she suffered also from chronic lumbago, and over her feeble protests, was stripped, X-rayed, stethoscoped, weighed and sent forth into the world swathed in twenty layers of white adhesive plaster. With the aid of Benzine and chloroform the mummy eventually managed to extricate itself from its carapace, but scarlet, covered with a rash and as sticky as fly-paper. At that evening’s dinner, given by Hamilton Fish Armstrong; ‘I dared not shake hands or pick anything up and my dress was stuck to me like rind to an apple.’ Perhaps in part because of this treatment, she passed the next few weeks in increasing discomfort from a skin disease and was reduced eventually to swollen, spotted shame. Dr Ludwig Loewenstein, America’s leading dermatologist, ‘put my head in a steaming machine, then under an X-ray, then under a violet ray, giving me injections in the bum and ointments and all the rest of it. Tea, out of the pot, has to be applied every morning and evening.’ The ointment, which smelt of dung, turned out to be the same as that used by would-be nigger-minstrels so, next day, ‘Poor Black Joe looks at me from the glass, underneath was lobster-red. Since applying the dregs of Duff’s morning tea it’s turned Hindoo. The smell of dung persists.’ Only her faith in Dr Loewenstein induced her to continue with the treatment, but she did, and faith was justified.