Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

Diana was still not wholly happy in Algiers – she did not feel she had a proper role to play, slept badly, was bored by the official dinners – but life had many compensations. There was a freedom to life which she feared would be lost in Paris. ‘Duff allows me to be eccentric in clothes and deportment and behaviour. I thought he just put blinkers on but I discovered the other night when there was a row because I broke his last pair of spectacles, that his leniency is a policy. So good he is.’ Martha Gellhorn was summoned to help entertain important visitors and found her hostess in full Arab dress. Lunching with Sir John Slessor Diana wanted to bathe but had no costume. Rejecting all offers of a loan she plunged into the pool in her lettuce-green lunch dress and Chinese coolie hat and swam to and fro at a stately breast-stroke. She lunched in underclothes and Sir John’s macintosh, looking ravishing.

  She found activities to fill her day. At 8.30 every morning a forceful lady in white trousers arrived to put her through a routine of exercise, bending and stretching and puffing and panting. Two or three mornings a week were devoted to packing Red Cross parcels at a particularly sordid convent. She acquired a cow called Fatima, from the franche comté, with a white face and brown body. She was asked £170 for it, an impossible price; then a rich French colon offered to buy it and leave it with her on extended loan. ‘I said I couldn’t allow it. Then I said I could.’ Second thoughts proved best. There was also a tame gazelle that fed on rose-petals and cigarettes, a peacock that periodically visited the drawing-room and lay with tail extended on the sofa, two partridges, some hens and a family of hoopoes.

  From time to time she escaped officialdom to undertake the sort of expedition she adored. Often Bloggs Baldwin came with her. She dragged him once to the famous market at Michelet, a journey that involved a night in a bug-ridden hotel. They started too late on the return journey and darkness found them still in the mountains. Trying to remove the blackout-masks from the headlights, a relic of wartime London, Diana removed the entire light by mistake. She was delighted since it gave her an excuse to invade a nearby hamlet and curl up on the first verandah she came to. At her feet slept a cat, by her side a pariah dog; only at dawn, when it took off and harooshed over her, did she discover that an enormous hen was roosting a foot from her head.

  A still more perfect afternoon was passed after she escaped before the coffee from a stuffy lunch given by their Russian colleagues. ‘Bognor clothed, kerchiefed head and cowboy hat, I walked off into the hinterland, adventure bent.’ She infiltrated through the vineyards to a neighbouring convent and snooped around the farm, talking to the Arab cowman. Diana asked if she could milk them some time; the cowman was agreeable to the idea, but explained that the morning milk was at 3 a.m. Diana said that in England she always milked her cows at 7 a.m. The Arab saw nothing surprising about this apparition being a milkmaid but found her schedule grotesque – ‘“tordant”; he laughed and laughed and had to go to tell his chums of this English eccentricity.’ She rambled on happily in search of an old palace she had glimpsed from a distance. Encouraged by a No Entry sign she pushed on until she reached the front of the house. At this point the U.S. military arrived and asked what she was doing. She apologized for losing her way; as she had got this far could she perhaps see the other side of the house. ‘Certainly not,’ said the soldiers: a restricted area. Charmingly Diana surrendered, walked back out of sight, then darted through a hedge, across a ditch and into a farmyard. In a few minutes she would have reached her objective but the military police, now thoroughly suspicious, were on her track, and a jeep intercepted her. ‘Have you come to arrest me?’ asked Diana. The answer was clearly that they had: ‘So in I got, delighted that I was to see my house, and from the inside too.’ For an hour they incarcerated her, uneasily conscious that they had got hold of something not covered by the military manuals: ‘They’d caught something odd, like the clowns in The Tempest finding Caliban.’ Eventually they took her name and let her go. ‘I hope Duff won’t be serious,’ wrote Diana nervously. She had little cause for worry: it had all happened many times before and Duff knew that nothing he could do would stop it happening many times again.

  The end of the war was drawing near. The flying bombs were now hitting England – ‘terrible news from London,’ wrote Duff. ‘Wilton’s gone, and before the end of the oyster season.’ Life ebbed from Algiers as the war moved up Italy. Winston Churchill paid a brief visit in August 1944. Randolph, ‘all smiles and love and as irritating as possible’, elected to take Duff’s side in support of de Gaulle and pontificated as if he were the elder statesman and his father a foolish young man. ‘Shut up!’ shouted Churchill, finally enraged. ‘I will not be lectured by you.’ Lord Moran, in attendance as usual, thought that Diana looked as lovely as ever but exhausted. ‘When a beautiful woman begins to lose her looks she needs something else to keep her afloat. When the time comes, Diana, who is still beautiful, will, I think, be saved by her character. Meanwhile, she is one of the few women who is not intimidated by Winston.’

  Rome was liberated and at once Diana began to dream of a visit. It seemed likely to remain a dream, then suddenly it became reality. A passage was available, room could be found for Bloggs Baldwin as well, Churchill would be there and had said he was particularly anxious to see her. Jock Whitney, who had fallen from a table in Rome on which he was dancing and broken his glasses, had told her that never had licence and brothelry gone further. The prospect sounded delightful. It turned out less well. Bloggs fell ill shortly after their arrival. ‘Unforgivable,’ Diana stigmatized his conduct. ‘People have no right to be ill on three-day trips.’ Every time Churchill saw her he thought of de Gaulle and became apoplectic. Randolph Churchll fêted her energetically for the first day or two, then moved north with his father. Evelyn Waugh was at his most amiable, very much at home and clearly considering the Roman Catholic church his private property, but Diana declined to join in his enthusiasm for Pio Nono – Pope Fanny Adams I was Bloggs’s name for him. The Canadian George Vanier, too, was wild in his enthusiasm for the Roman Church and its Pontiff – ‘Please talk to George after dinner,’ pleaded Mrs Vanier. ‘I think he’s gone mad.’

  Diana was in Rome when news came of the liberation of Paris. Years later she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I remember to my shame the stab of personal anguish the news gave me.’ Algiers, once a hell-hole, now promoted to paradise, was behind her. The postwar was beginning. Shades of the prison house began to close. By the time she wrote the letter they had long closed. ‘It’s very dull now (my life I mean). It’s what you like. Calmly planned – unhurried – no adventures – no milking – no interest to me at all. I am to blame, but I was born and bred an adventurer, with a great zest for change and excitement.’ In fact, as always, she was to create her own adventures as she went along; but in Rome in August 1944 the future seemed depressingly taped and ticketed.

  She went back to Algiers for a few final days. ‘I feel sad,’ she told Conrad, ‘because it can never be again, and because it has been sunlit and strange and unlike real life.’ The last night she dragged her mattress to the garden, tethered her mosquito-net to a tree and tried to sleep. Within an hour she was woken by a cloud-burst that soaked her and ripped away her net. ‘I fled whimpering to the house,’ she wrote in her memoirs. Whimpering she left Algiers and, with a brave smile but inwardly whimpering still, she went to Paris.

  ELEVEN

  PARIS EMBASSY

  ‘I quite agree with Diana that she is not cut out for an Ambassadress,’ wrote her old friend Bridget McEwen to her husband.

  Although she is capable of great heroism and devotion she is not capable of enduring boredom: and to endure boredom with the good manners that don’t show it is half the duty of an Ambassadress. To be a successful Ambassadress means having a very considerable sense of public duty and public spirit unless you are uncommonly limited yourself. Diana will be no good at all. She will be rude to the bores, and she will wear trousers because they are comfortable, and offend everyone. Only if there is an
earthquake or a revolution will she show her true mettle. But who knows, there may be both.

  Whether or not Diana could be called a successful ambassadress depends on what one believes an ambassadress is supposed to do and be. Some expect her to be a benevolent mother hen, clucking lovingly over the migraines of the secretaries and the table-manners of the Head of Chancery. This certainly Diana failed to be. She knew the names of hardly any of Duff’s staff and tended to ask to the Residence only those whose company she enjoyed – a practice vexatious to the senior members who found themselves neglected. If a typist had been knocked down at her doorstep she would have coped with kindness and competence; but it would never have occurred to her to inquire after the typist’s welfare if the accident had happened round the corner. Somebody else would cope with that side of Embassy life and, if they didn’t … well, a grown human being should be able to look after itself. They gave three large parties the first Christmas: ‘one for some French friends and the principal members of the staff, “très digne”; one for the whole embassy staff and their friends, a nightmare; one for four hundred little British children, a bad smell’.

  Nor was she any more enthusiastic about her role as shepherdess, taking her flock of Embassy women to diplomatic soirées, conducting the wife of a newly arrived member of the staff to call on the other ambassadresses. It was a dreary chore, certainly, and one which gave pleasure to nobody concerned, but her failure to play her part caused embarrassment to younger members of the staff who knew that they ought to be doing something but did not feel that they could set about it on their own. Diana’s grisliest memory was of a tea-party with Mme de Gaulle. Dutifully she led her crocodile of diplomatic wives into the Elysée Palace, only to find that not one of them was prepared to say a word to their equally taciturn hostess. Then the ‘exceedingly vulgar Consul’s wife’ plunged into the silence and asked Mme de Gaulle whether she had ever been to the Marché aux Puces; if not, she would be delighted to take her any morning. Mme de Gaulle received the overture with disdain and ‘a rocket of a look’.

  Still less was Diana one of those formidably well-equipped ambassadresses who knew the difference between the ICPU and the SGMP and never forgot that the Permanent Under Secretary of the Ministry of Power had to be cosseted because an important contract for a new hydro-electric scheme was shortly to go out to tender. If the Permanent Under Secretary had wit, charm or good looks he would be well received, but bores – however influential – got short shrift at the British Embassy. Her habit of saying the first thing that came into her head could cause much offence. Talking to a young Frenchman from the Quai d’Orsay called Couve de Murville, she referred to a new book by Paul Reynaud and said that the only sensational and funny part was the title. ‘“What is the title?” froggy asked. I saw then and, seeing it, could feel my torso and feet flushing and quickly diverted the subject to a headline in the newspaper, for the title was La France a sauvé l’Europe.’

  She could not bring herself to take seriously the French preoccupation with place à table. At a grand dinner Princess Radziwill conceived herself ill-placed and lit a cigarette before the fish to signal her displeasure: her neighbour, Gaston Palewski, thought this entirely proper; to Diana it seemed insane. ‘As the French undo their napkins,’ she complained, ‘they take a look round two tables of twenty in hopes of seeing something wrong.’ She never bothered with the orthodox chains of command when she wanted something done. Nor was she much more concerned with the protocol of British officialdom. When one of her favourites was threatened with transfer, Diana wrote direct to the First Lord of the Admiralty to get the posting cancelled, without consulting Duff or the Naval Attaché. ‘Very naughty of her,’ Duff remarked mildly.

  But though she was something less than a copybook ambassadress, she gave the Embassy a glamour that was enjoyed by no other mission. Fierce resentment was caused among those who were not invited, those who were invited often disapproved of their fellow-guests, but the British Embassy was the place to be. There was a flavour of the unexpected about any occasion there, as if Diana was intent on seeing how far she could go without causing disaster. She could go far. Chips Channon, effetest of ultra-Tories, found himself confronted by a young communist trades-unionist; the two got on famously and after lunch the communist took Channon off to a place where he could buy cheap silk for his shirts. Before an opera gala Clement Attlee met Noel Coward, Jean Cocteau and the Spanish-American multi-millionaire Charles de Bestigui. ‘Rather an odd dinner-party to my mind,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, who was also there; but Attlee seemed to enjoy it greatly.

  Diana’s capacity to get on with people and convince them that their meeting was a memorable occasion for her as well as for them, now became a tool of real importance. To be with her gave great pleasure to many people who it was important should be well-disposed to Britain and British interests. Diana would hardly have seen it like that – she talked to people because she enjoyed their company and was interested in their affairs – but she was also a professional doing a good job of public relations for her husband’s sake. A bizarre illustration of Diana at work came at a grand banquet at the Quai d’Orsay in July 1945. She was sitting next to the guest of honour, the Bey of Tunis, and Duff, who knew the Bey spoke not a word of French or English, feared she would have a dull evening. From the other end of the table, however, he caught occasional glimpses of the couple apparently in intimate conversation, roaring with laughter and digging each other in the ribs. She explained her method to Conrad:

  I was determined to have some communication with him and managed, by boring guests and waiters, to get a fountain pen to draw my mute some pictures. I drew him a very pretty Tunisian mosque. Palm trees shaded it. He was so pleased he grabbed the pen and added dates. Then I drew him Othello, then the New York skyline, then three fishes. He drew a smart Tunisian lady, with no top to her head at all, and he added a flag and crescent to the mosque. All this time he was too busy to eat and the hundred diners were being held up so I signalled to the waiter to remove his untouched plate and started on folding caps and a boat to float on his forbidden champagne. Great fun. We then exchanged our hideous trinkets of jewellery, a diamond bird of mine, and all his rings were taken off. We gasped our admiration. I discovered later he was a professional jeweller and he promises to make me a ring of a serpent. So we’ll see what the word of a mussulman is worth.

  Diana’s own parties were occasionally disasters but they were never dull. People went to enjoy themselves but with the pleasing reflection that they might be outraged as well. Duff knew well how much he owed her. In her absence he had a dinner of what should have been merry young people: ‘I didn’t think it went very well. I can’t entertain without Diana.’ Another time there was lunch for M. Massigli, French Ambassador in London: ‘It didn’t go very well, I thought. These things never go well without Diana.’ It was his constant refrain. From time to time she could be an embarrassing liability but his mission would have been a tougher and bleaker one without her.

  *

  The Coopers left for Paris on 15 September 1944. A farewell luncheon was given at Wilton’s by Lord Sherwood and Daisy Fellowes, but though many of those she loved best were there, Diana’s spirits remained low. They flew to Paris in a private Dakota with an escort of forty-eight Spitfires. At the last moment Diana contemplated smuggling John Julius aboard ‘and could have with a little more courage – foolishly I asked Duff not to look and he stared it out of countenance’. The arrival at Paris itself was equally grandiose: a motor-cycle escort with klaxons blaring; ceremonial wreath-laying at the Arc de Triomphe, flags flying, crowds cheering. The Embassy was still uninhabitable so they went to the Berkeley Hotel – small, undistinguished but much loved by Diana as her and Duff’s Parisian base for many years. The sitting-room was bulging with orchids – a curious phenomenon in a Paris almost entirely deprived of heating: ‘There must have been £500 worth, and we know only coal grows them.’ Food was delicious – ‘O.K. for us; spam for the staf
f; beans only for the left bank.’ Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Victor Rothschild, Raimund von Hofmannsthal and other old friends were there to welcome them. A glimmer of light began to appear on the horizon.

  It was quickly extinguished. The Berkeley was insufficiently grand for a British Ambassador and Diana found herself translated to the more palatial but chillier Hôtel Bristol. ‘I was so cold today,’ wailed Diana. ‘No bath, no heat, no fire. One is driven to the whisky bottle.’ And this was in the comparatively low and small rooms of the hotel; could life survive at all in the vasty halls of the British Embassy? After they had been at the Bristol a few days it was discovered that P. G. Wodehouse, then in disgrace for broadcasting on the German radio during the war, was also ensconced there. Duff, who adored Wodehouse’s novels, nevertheless thought that his presence was an insult and he should be evicted. Diana, who found his books unreadable, felt a lot of silly fuss was being made about nothing and that it was indecent to hound an old man in this way. In the event she won, or at least Wodehouse was still in residence when they moved on to the Embassy. It was an unpleasant foretaste of the problems that were to embitter much of their first year in Paris.

  The British Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré is one of the noblest public buildings in Europe. An eighteenth-century palace in the grand manner, it yet is workable on a domestic scale, and, except in the pompous nineteenth-century additions, contrives to be gracious without being stuffy. Diana was aghast when she saw its condition: no water; no electricity; the bedroom floor in ruins; the ground floor littered with the possessions of thirty-two British families who had fled the Germans. The wartime debris was swiftly cleared away, and with Cecil Beaton in attendance she settled down to imprint her personality on the building, scattering books and candlesticks, hanging a favourite Victorian picture on a red cord over a mirror, propping silhouettes, wax masks and family photographs along a shelf – ‘humanizing the grandeur of the Embassy,’ Beaton called it, ‘spreading a warmth of character to these frigid rooms of state’. There was precious little other warmth and though gradually most of the more frequented rooms were properly heated, a year later a guest was still complaining about having to play bridge in a ‘great cold drawing-room untouched since the days of Wellington’.