Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Louise de Vilmorin craved warmth and light and flattery. All these she found at the British Embassy in quantities far greater and quality richer than were to be had elsewhere. At the beginning of 1945 she almost took up residence, had her own room reserved for her, was present at every meal, slept there for a fortnight at a time. ‘She is an adorable companion,’ wrote Duff. ‘I don’t think I have ever known her equal – except Diana, who is almost as fond of her as I am.’ To some of Diana’s friends it seemed that Duff was too enraptured by his new mistress and would rudely neglect his wife so as to concentrate on Louise. If he did so, Diana was hardly aware of it. It was as happy and well-balanced a triangle as could have been contrived.

  ‘What an extraordinary element to come into a couple’s life at our age!’ wrote Diana gratefully.

  This forty-year-old genius (genius she is, mark my words) loves us both with so much passion, tenderness, monomania, that her friends think she’s mad. We are really rather dull, though good old things, but still, dim water to her fountain of rainbow waterdrops.

  Triangles are awkward relationships to sustain; and the more intense the emotions, the more likely the structure is to crumble. It was predictable that Duff would be the first to grow restless – his hungers were intense, his surrender to them total, yet he soon got bored with anyone except Diana. He began to complain that Louise took their love too seriously; she showed her affections ostentatiously; she was accaparante – monopolizing; when Daisy Fellowes arrived in Paris she became ridiculously jealous. ‘It is strange that so clever a woman should not understand that it is a mistake to telephone every morning, to want to meet two or three times every day. No friendship can stand such a strain.’ Why could she not be more like Diana?

  Feeling that Duff was slipping away from her, Louise redoubled her efforts to retain him and in so doing made his desertion all the more certain. Diana suffered with her. At dinner one evening Duff devoted more attention to Daisy Fellowes than Louise thought proper. She rushed from the room in tears, and thence to the house of a friend. Diana at once followed her there and tried to persuade her to come back. She failed, whereupon she returned to the Embassy herself, collected Duff and went once again to the Rue de Bellechasse. ‘We found her in bed, poor darling’, wrote Duff. ‘We had a great many tears, but she was fairly calm before we left. It was charming, if rather odd, to see Diana trying to comfort her and assuring her that I really loved her.’

  Perhaps unfairly, one suspects an element of play-acting in Louise’s distress. There was none in Diana’s. Her tolerance of her friend’s histrionics was infinite, her affection without restraint. ‘Lulu looks like death,’ she told Conrad.

  She cries all the time she is with me. I am the only one she can talk to about her mad and most unfortunate love for Duff. Duff belongs to the sense school, she to the sensibility. I fear she is on her nerves, or rather, being very masculine, he probably prefers bitchy women and cannot carry the weight of her adoration. I am frightened she will die of love and decline, or even kill herself. I love her so much, yet I dare not add to Duff’s coldness by worrying him to be nicer to her.

  Diana’s freedom from jealousy was awe-inspiring. She had usually condoned and sometimes encouraged Duff’s extra-marital adventures. The Duchess of Windsor once remarked that she would never have an affair with Duff because it would mean having Diana around the house day and night being nice to her. The notoriously promiscuous wife of a prominent politician came to stay just before the Coopers left for Strasbourg. Diana’s only concern was lest people should think she had removed her husband to protect him from the visiting harpy. ‘Indeed, indeed, I have not. I would love him to have a tumble with the pretty little fool.’ Louise was something totally different. With her Diana was prepared to share Duff’s love, to accept that Louise should play in Duff’s life a role comparable in importance to her own. Louise could never have done so and Diana soon realized the fact, but she would have been ready to make the sacrifice of her own unique position.

  She was not invariably tolerant of Duff’s relationships. While his affair with Louise was settling down into tranquil friendship, Duff had a short but passionate fling with a tall, slender seductress who also played an uncommonly fine hand of bridge. Diana was outraged. The woman was not worthy of Duff, she was vulgar, coarse, her flamboyance would compromise his position. More than her own injury, she resented the fact that Louise was ousted to make way for so contemptible a rival. Duff was indeed far more apprehensive about Louise’s reactions than about Diana’s, and was disconcerted when his wife abandoned her usual acquiescence for violent opposition. ‘Diana has one of her obsessions and can think of nothing else,’ he noted in his diary; and then a few days later, ‘Diana in floods of tears, I think she needs a rest.’ Duff’s therapy was to recite Modern Love to her; a disastrous remedy since ‘she saw in it many allusions to our own troubles which led to endless argument’. In the end he promised to abandon the woman, to whom Diana usually referred as the ‘Whore of Babylon’. Several times in the next few months he was tempted to break his word; ‘but I didn’t dare – or rather I would not willingly do anything that could give pain to Diana’.

  Louise de Vilmorin was a mistress whom Diana adored, but of whom Duff grew bored; the Whore of Babylon was adored by Duff, yet resented by Diana; last in the triptych of Duff’s Parisian loves was a woman who fitted smoothly into the Embassy scene and made herself appreciated by husband and wife alike. Susan Mary Patten was the ideal mistress. Like Louise she was in love with the establishment as well as the individuals, but unlike her she had no wish to do more than bask in its warmth and splendour, no ambition to impose her personality upon it. Diana first saw her when she had bicycled to a grand cocktail-party in bright red macintosh and blue plastic hat. She was enchanted by this gay, waif-like figure, discovered that she was the wife of Bill Patten, an attaché at the American Embassy, and asked them both to dinner. As the wife of a relatively junior official, Susan Mary’s proper place was near the bottom of the table, but on a whim Diana put her next to Duff. It took him a year to get her into bed, mainly because of her loyalty to her husband, who was fatally ill and in almost constant pain. Even when he did it was a comfortingly tranquil business, a refuge after the emotional storms of Louise and tempestuous orgies with the Whore of Babylon. It lasted until his death. ‘It is a strange, imaginative affair,’ Duff wrote, ‘very flattering to me but a little disturbing. She is a very sweet and charming girl whom I find most attractive.’

  Susan Mary was a monument of discretion. Her husband never knew of the liaison, her children were frequently at Chantilly. She idolized Diana, thought her the most romantic, daring, splendid woman she had ever met, never for a moment doubted that his wife would always be first in Duff’s affections. Duff wrote to her about Diana’s melancholia and the ways in which they might together cajole her out of it; Diana enlisted her as an ally who might persuade Duff to have a cup of tea instead of a dry martini. She made a most important contribution to Duff’s happiness in the last years of his life, and did so in a way that gave almost as much pleasure to Diana.

  *

  La bande was in its fullest glory one cripplingly cold night in January 1945, when Diana stoked high the fires in the salon vert and invited a bevy of poets to eat, drink and recite their works: ‘O the poor cold poets were so pleased, and the food too, and the wine – how they guzzled and gurked. There was Eluard, a new genius said to have outstripped Aragon; Vercors, author of Le Silence de la Mer; Max Fouchet, editor of Fontaine; Jean Cocteau, world-renowned for I don’t know what’; Hugnet, communist, surrealist, and hero of the Resistance. Hugnet presented her with a volume of his poems, printed on Japanese paper the thickness of cardboard, with more margin than print. ‘The poems are of tomorrow, I prefer them of yesterday. The illustrations are by Picasso, a drunk baby’s scrawl would be better.’ (Diana continued to abhor the modernism of several of those who came regularly to the salon vert, while relishing their company.) Much late
r they moved on to a restaurant in the Palais Royal. There was an electricity cut and Diana sent off to the Embassy for candelabra. It was the sort of gesture that delighted her, and the power to make it was the aspect of an ambassadress’s life that pleased her most.

  At other times the life of the Embassy became rather too much of a good thing. She loved to have her friends to stay but recognized an unpleasant flavour of truth behind the joke when Cecil Beaton discovered, copied and sent her an Internal Memorandum signed by the Unit Production Manager of London Film Productions. Mr Beaton and Miss Vivien Leigh, it reported, were to visit Paris in connection with a new film. They would be staying at the British Embassy Hotel. Miss Leigh had already made the reservation. Diana did not mind being a hotelier but wished her patrons would behave in a more orderly fashion. ‘The guests eat up our substance and make whoopee and ask their guests in our absence – as they did in the house of Ulysses,’ she told Conrad. ‘All goes worse than I have power to tell.’

  The closer the friend, the wilder the whoopee they seemed to make. Randolph Churchill caused his own particular kind of stir when a film of the ‘trial’ and execution of Stauffenberg and the other July conspirators was shown after dinner in a special theatre. ‘Exactly what we are doing in Nuremberg today,’ announced Churchill. Duff, who was sitting behind him, was so incensed by the remark that he slapped his guest hard on one side of the head with a folded programme and then still harder on the other. Diana besought him to make it up when the film was finished, but instead Duff launched into a diatribe on Churchill’s rudeness, drunkenness and immorality and sent him storming from the house. Evelyn Waugh was another mischief-maker. He had difficulty in getting his transit visa for Paris, since the only evidence he could show that he was invited to the Embassy was a telegram reading: ‘O yes please Stitch.’ Once there he settled down to bait the other guests. Julian Huxley he insisted on treating as a crypto-Communist zoo-keeper with no interest in life beyond the diet of his panda. Speaking of Peter Quennell, wrote Diana, ‘a good and harmless man, fond of pretty girls, he painted something so foetid and sinister that it will colour most unfairly my sentiments for him’. Later the same evening he got drunk and talked unsuitable sex in front of John Julius. ‘Poor Wu – he does everything he can to alienate himself from the affection he is yearning for.’

  The Embassy was no place for the over-sensitive or the fainthearted. Diana had high standards and harsh judgements; if people failed to contribute they would rarely be offered a second chance. The grandest celebrities were dismissed with a terse phrase. Ernest Hemingway was ‘the greatest bore to end bores we’ve ever struck; gigantic, ugly, spectacles with fairy glasses’. He insisted on reading a ‘twenty-page chaos of dirty words and surrealist sentiments called a “poem”. Poor man; well disposed and a good novelist – but woof!’ Cyril Connolly was ‘an ugly man. He has not even got the splendour of Beast – like Edwin [Montagu] or Jimmy Rothschild or Caliban. He’s disgustingly ugly in a fat yet mean way. I don’t derive any pleasure from his company.’ Julian Huxley was ‘curiously common in taste and accent’. Of T. S. Eliot: ‘No one with sensibility or imagination or the art of stringing words together could be capable of administering such a dose of tedium as he did for one hour.’ But she could relent. Charlie de Bestigui outraged Diana by inquiring of the heroic General Marshall, ‘Est-ce qu’il est de bonne famille?’; but she soon grew to appreciate him. ‘The despised little worm I have known on Lido beaches for thirty years has become a distinguished, good-looking genius.’ Cyril Connolly became a close friend and she was godmother to his son; presenting him for his christening with a handsome silver cup engraved with his name but marring the gesture by spelling both surname and Christian name incorrectly.

  The Windsors were a constant embarrassment, because of the ambiguity of their status and the uncertainty of their pretensions. Diana was loyal to old friends and defied etiquette by curtseying to the Duchess, but she got little pleasure from their company. She first met them again in September 1945. ‘The two poor little old things were most pathetic. Fear, I suppose, of losing their youthful figures, or homesickness, has made them both Dachau-thin. She is much commoner and more confident, he much duller and sillier.’ Second impressions were slightly less unfavourable – the Duchess was ‘slim and svelte as a piece of vermicelli’; the Duke ‘common, of course, and boring, but not so puppetish as I thought’ – but no sort of rapport was established. Diana did not imagine that the Duke found her any more congenial than she him. He saw her, she felt, as a sort of Folle de Chaillot; ‘It can’t be helped, we do very badly together.’

  Carl Burckhardt was in Paris as Swiss Ambassador, slightly more pompous and portly but still romantic. He had been thinking about Diana for six years, he said. His one desire was to renew the fires of their love. ‘We’ll see, but I don’t think we’ll see much,’ Diana told Conrad drily. ‘We’ve both got our cats away – Duff and Elizabeth – but I don’t think Mr Mouse has much courage, nor Mrs Mouse much heart to put into an escapade.’ They went off on a picnic together; Diana nervous because she knew Burckhardt would want to talk about love and she found the subject embarrassing. All passed off well and their relationship settled down into amused and sympathetic friendship. He passed on to her Parisian gossip about doings at the British Embassy. ‘Messalina is quite a common comparison, insatiable sexually and ruthless. I made a lover jump out of a fifth-storey window in Venice on to the pavement. Lesbian too, now intimately enlaced with Lulu. One who takes more than two to make love – husband and husband’s mistress preferred. Duff the greatest of all ambitious egoists knocks me about something cruel – yet I made him.’

  By now the Embassy was fully operational. For Diana no party was just a party; each had to be in some way special, so that the guests were surprised and flattered and would remember the occasion as extraordinary. For Montgomery the dining-room was transformed with flags and laurels into an anteroom for Valhalla. A thousand red roses were imported from Verrières. She found the guest of honour ‘slim and straight, smiling and talkative and charming’. Cocteau and Bérard were offended at not being asked to dinner and failed to turn up at the reception that followed it, but Diana had invited a girl who had fought with the resistance and now sang ballads on that theme. ‘The candles were burning low and the band had gone. She sat on an aristocratic marble console beneath the flags, this tough girl dressed in skirt and shabby black shirt, and sang everyone to tears and exultation. She made her guitar into a muffled band or a clandestine tramp of feet, or what she willed. Monty glowed.’ At the end of the visit Diana asked her visitor to give her a motor caravan. He smiled politely and proffered instead three photographs of himself, all signed ‘Montgomery of Alamein, Field Marshal’.

  It was not merely for grandees that she would put herself out. Charles Ritchie was at that time a relatively junior official in the Canadian Embassy. He complained wistfully to Diana that, though he had a lot of interesting and important things to say, nobody ever paid any attention to him. Struck by this misfortune, Diana set to work to organize a ‘Ritchie Week’. Parties were given in his honour and at his arrival a band played a hymn composed for the occasion by John Julius. Everyone telephoned everyone else to ask ‘Have you heard about Ritchie?’, ‘What’s the latest about Ritchie?’. Nancy Mitford painted five hundred balloons with the slogan ‘Remember Ritchie!’ and they were ceremoniously released from the Embassy courtyard with postcards attached asking the recipients to return them to Ritchie with their good wishes. Several came back from East Europe and one from Norway. It was an absurd waste of time, unjustifiable by any rational standards, but it gave great pleasure to everyone concerned, Charles Ritchie in particular.

  In her entertaining Diana relished skating on the thinnest ice. A somewhat stuffy dinner to say farewell to the Head of Chancery, Patrick Reilly, was drawing to a close when a telephone rang. Lady Pin was said to be calling. Lady Pin turned out to be Lady Peel, or Bea Lillie. Delighted, Diana asked her round at once
. ‘But darling, I’m stinking!’ ‘Not so good,’ reflected Diana. ‘Bea can sure stink’, but undismayed she sent a car for her. Half an hour later Lady Peel swept in; hair like a bird’s nest, monkey clinging to her back, swathed in a huge blood-red swastika flag which she had acquired on the way. She rushed to the piano and tried to sing and recite, ‘remembering no words and never being within two tones of the note, but so funny and charming that no-one was embarrassed’. Eventually she developed atom-splitting hiccups and had to be carried home. ‘The foreigners said they’d never enjoyed themselves so well, “tout à fait comme en famille”. Not my idea of life at Belvoir.’

  Anything might happen at the Embassy. An elderly and distinguished Frenchman arrived at the start of a reception to find Diana in the centre of the salon, unbuttoning her trousers preparatory to putting on a skirt. ‘And what can I do for you?’ she growled. Guests were dragooned into playing acting games and Laurence Olivier sharply criticized for his inept rendering of Remembrance of Things Past. When Julien Green lunched at the Embassy the conversation turned to Bresson’s new film Anges du péché. Luncheon was interrupted while a scene from convent life was acted out: Louise de Vilmorin as the mother superior, Diana as a postulant flat on her face before her. ‘Every meal, even lunch with two guests,’ wrote Susan Mary Patten, ‘was a piece of theatre for Diana, one never glimpsed the effort or machinery behind the scenes.’ She asked her once what her secret was. ‘Oh, just give them plenty of booze and hope it will go,’ Diana answered vaguely.