Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  THIRTEEN

  ‘NEITHER QUEEN NOR TRAMP’

  It is a convention in the British Foreign Service that a retiring head of mission should not visit his former post until a year or so after his departure. Life, it is felt, is difficult enough for a new ambassador without the previous incumbent in the background observing that that is not how things were done in his day. The Coopers accepted that this was desirable in principle but felt that in their case the practice must be different. Most retiring ambassadors had a home awaiting them in England; they only had the house at Bognor, now rapidly disappearing beneath the suburban tide. Most ambassadors had no especial stake in the country in which they had last served; they had Chantilly, which the French Government was prepared to let them keep. Duff would pay far less in taxes, cling on to many of his diplomatic privileges, enjoy the status of an ‘ancien ambassadeur’; it seemed to them inconceivable that they should abandon all this to return to England, where politics seemed closed to them and no other job immediately offered.

  Within a few weeks of their departure from the Gare du Nord, Duff and Diana therefore found themselves packing for the return journey. It was hardly a propitious start to their new life. By the evening before their departure from London Duff was already fuming over the barriers which officials were erecting in his path. Diana and Louise de Vilmorin disturbed his concentration with their conversation and ‘he lost his temper, head and good manners and flounced to bed, red with rage and refusing to wish Lulu goodnight’. Diana, as white as Duff was red, soon followed, but was so indignant that she refused to speak to him. ‘I know I’m spoilt,’ said Duff contritely, ‘but I am sorry.’ ‘One can’t cure hurts with apologies always,’ retorted Diana, and they went to sleep in grim silence.

  Next morning was still worse. Either through fear or rage, Duff did not call Diana till eight, and the Golden Arrow left at nine. Pandemonium ensued, porters sitting on trunks that would not close; Diana, almost naked, barking instructions at anyone within earshot; parcels in one direction, cases in another, this to be sent to Belvoir, that to be left with Lady Cunard. Some ferocious telephoning delayed the train and they scraped aboard. Duff was more than ever in the dog-house. ‘I let him out on the SS Invicta. We couldn’t arrive in Paris like two sticks.’

  The first night back in Paris was an awful presage of the future. ‘Je me sens un peu perdue‚’ she admitted to Gaston Palewski. ‘Pauvre Diana,’ he replied, and a great lump welled up in her throat. They had borrowed the Military Attaché’s car all day but had sent it away in the evening. When they decided to go out to a restaurant for dinner they went on foot. It was cold and raining. The first restaurant was closed. So was the second. They were wet before they found one that was open and wetter still by the time they got back to the flat Loel Guinness had lent them in the Rue de Lille. ‘When we were in bed I found that Diana was crying,’ Duff noted in his diary.

  She is really unhappy about the fall from grandeur and the evening’s walk brought it home to her. I was deeply touched and surprised. I have many weaknesses but have never cared for being grand. I liked living at the Embassy, which she made very comfortable, but I always felt as though I was living in a hotel. I suppose that Diana enjoyed the position and enjoyed entertaining, though she often complained of it at the time. One always enjoys doing what one does well. To me the restoration of liberty makes up for everything, but I am sad that she should be sad.

  It was several weeks before they moved back into Chantilly and even then they were met by a chaos of packing-cases, books stacked on the floor, pictures leaning against the walls, all the old copper pans covered with verdigris, 799 bottles of champagne with ten magnums and one rehoboam to be stacked in the white wine cellar, servants absent or incompetent, the only food in the house porridge and tinned pilchards. Even the crocuses seemed bowed and mutilated, ‘none of that looking joyously to a new heaven of a million straight little throats that one gets in St James’s Park’. Instead of being stimulated by the challenge, Diana was depressed; for the first few days she was frequently in tears. ‘I do so hate the maîtresse de la maison life,’ she complained to John Julius. ‘I like to be a Queen or a tramp.’ She was bored, she was fretful, she felt herself ill-used. The scene was set for conflict with those whom she felt had supplanted her, ‘the horrible Harveys’.

  Ambassadors traditionally disapprove of their successors; with the wives disapproval is often elevated to hatred. Usually, however, an ocean or at least a frontier divides the rivals; the previous incumbent is either savouring the delights of retirement in the Home Counties or organizing coffee-mornings in Tegucigalpa. Diana was on the spot, rancorously disposed, ready to view any alteration to her Embassy as a slight, surrounded by friends who delighted in passing on or inventing offensive comments which the Harveys were alleged to have made about the old rægime. Relations would have been difficult between the Coopers and any new arrivals; with the Harveys they were quickly strained to and beyond breaking-point. Diana considered Lady Harvey dull, insipid, bourgeois; Lady Harvey felt Diana to be a frivolous and flashy wastrel. Each saw the bad side of the other and made no attempt to appreciate the qualities. To apportion blame would be a fruitless task, but greater understanding on either side might have avoided a world of chagrin. It would also have deprived Parisian society of a most enjoyable scandal; one which Lady Harvey hated and Diana more than half enjoyed.

  From a few days after her return to Paris Diana began to conduct raids on the Embassy to collect items of furniture which she claimed belonged to her. Lady Harvey would notice a chair or chandelier had vanished, ask where it was and be told that Lady Diana had called for it that morning. Then came the day of the Harveys’ first grand luncheon-party. Diana chanced to call at a quarter to one in search of more of her possessions. The guests arrived to find her in the hall. ‘Chère Diane! How lovely to see you here. We didn’t know you were coming to lunch.’ ‘Oh I’m not invited. We never are. You’ll find the Harveys up there somewhere,’ with a gesture upstairs. The guests clustered around her while upstairs the Harveys waited and wondered. Diana extended her attention to the staff as well. The chauffeur left to become Duff’s valet. ‘He has never valeted but it’s such a pleasure he wants to leave the Embassy for the Chantillians.’ Diana, of course, was quite taken aback when the proposal was made to her. ‘True, I’d seen him yesterday when I went to collect some leavings and asked him if he knew of anyone of about his age who would like the job. True, I elaborated on the charm of the situation – good food, foreign travel, smart car, etc. etc.’

  Everything Lady Harvey did was analysed and triumphantly ridiculed. She was said to have told the Bishop of Tanganyika that the library was a beautiful room considering the books. Could illiteracy be more clearly proven? She exhibited Diana’s Napoleonic bathroom with the comment that her predecessor had decorated it because of her love for North Africa. Could idiocy be more complete? She ‘hung a sparse row of her own pictures round the green salon’s walls as though for sale; a Segonzac and a Derain etc.’ Some might have thought that even a sparse row of Segonzacs and Derains was an enviable possession, but Diana would have scoffed at a gallery of Rembrandts or Leonardos. It was, however, somewhat provocative of Lady Harvey to change the colour of the carpets and curtains in Duff’s library. This exquisite room had been designed by Charles de Bestigui, filled with Duff’s books and donated to the Embassy: ‘that those ignorant, execrably tasted Harveys can have had the nerve to touch it entirely passes forgiveness’.

  Diana’s tendency to abuse the Harveys to anyone who would listen could cause embarrassment. Lees Mayall joined the Embassy as First Secretary, an old friend of the Coopers but very properly loyal to his Ambassador. By the time he arrived things had gone so far that it was tacitly accepted no member of the Embassy staff would visit Chantilly. Repeatedly he refused invitations, then one day Diana arrived uninvited at his house when mutual friends were staying there. She ate and drank nothing but talked merrily. As she left she said:
‘Now I’ve been to your house, you must stop refusing to come to mine. I promise not to say a word against the Harveys.’ From then on the Mayalls went regularly to Chantilly and Diana kept her word. All the same, they thought it best not to mention their visits at the Embassy. Then came the time that Oliver Harvey, who had hitherto refused to ask the Duke of Windsor to the house, was ordered by Churchill to repair the omission. He obeyed under protest and showed his feelings by inviting only members of his staff to meet the guests of honour. The Duchess walked round the circle in a frigid silence; then at last came to a face she knew and cried: ‘Lees, how lovely; that was fun at Chantilly last Sunday, wasn’t it?’

  Royal visitors provided a tasty bone to be fought over between the rival establishments. The first time Princess Margaret visited Paris, Diana, who had not been invited to the Embassy, left word that she was at Chantilly and would love a visit if the Princess had time. The message was not delivered and when Diana saw her at the opening of the British Hospital, she said that she had felt certain it had gone astray – ‘this last was not said naughtily. I meant in the general brouhaha it was natural.’ To Diana’s great satisfaction, Princess Margaret insisted on rearranging her schedule to include a visit to Chantilly. Nobody was there except the Coopers and Nancy Mitford. ‘Off home she drove, gay, and I’m sure delighted with the outing. It had the tang of the Forbidden. She had clearly been genuinely appreciated by disinterested people – there was fun and the three hosts were in a sense famous. Eric [Duncannon] told someone that she had said it was what she had most enjoyed in Paris.’

  Next time the Princess came to Paris, this time for a Hospital Ball, Diana arranged an evening at Chantilly – ‘not more than twenty or thirty, all young, in order to keep away my frog friends and Maudie Harvey’. Cecil Beaton was there – hardly notable for his youth – and Greta Garbo; John Julius played the guitar, two American folk-singers provided a cabaret, Princess Margaret sang and played the piano for an hour, the park was floodlit and the party ended at 4 a.m. eating roasted chestnuts round a brazier. It could hardly have been more successful, and like most of the best parties, its informality concealed careful organization. Months before Diana had written to Cecil Beaton: ‘The point of this letter is to beg you and Greta to come and stay with me when Princess Margaret visits Paris. The Hospital Ball she may like or hate, but I’m throwing a party on the 22nd.’

  Princess Elizabeth visited Paris in May 1948, shortly after Diana had heard the dread news of the Harveys’ plans for the Embassy library. ‘She was really deeply hurt,’ wrote Duff. ‘She thinks it was done out of spite and swears she won’t go to the reception for Princess Elizabeth.’ She was still more put out when Oliver Harvey cut several names off the list of guests submitted by the French authorities on the grounds that they had been collaborators, including two who had regularly visited the Embassy under Duff. Curiosity and propriety triumphed over indignation, however, and in the end she went, making her point by the chilliness of her manner; ‘the frights got the frozen mitt, not a smile broke from me’. Needless to say, everything seemed badly done: the Borghese candle-sticks had been suppressed and no candles were used; ‘the gloomy hosts stood looking ghastly under the deforming light of a much brighter candelabra’; the band was inaudible; the flowers were arranged by somebody imported from Constance Spry; it was all safe, unimaginative, dull. Duff was less discriminating or more objective: ‘I am bound to admit it was a good party and well done.’

  The feud soon became part of Parisian folklore and many of the more colourful incidents related to it are apocryphal, or at least exaggerated almost beyond recognition. Nancy Mitford, prominent in the British colony in Paris, took particular pleasure in fanning the flames and dining out on the stories that arose from it. In Don’t Tell Alfred she wrote a novel about a former ambassadress in Paris who secretly took up residence in a gatehouse of the Embassy, thereby causing confusion and chagrin to the new incumbents. The incoming ambassador and his wife bore little resemblance to the Harveys but Lady Leone was very evidently modelled on Diana. Miss Mitford sketched out this character to Diana while still working on the book. ‘As it might be me?’ asked Diana doubtfully. ‘Yes, tee hee hee hee!’ was the reply. Diana certainly did nothing to discourage the enterprise and paid for her failure when the Evening Standard published an article alleging that she knew all about the book in advance, had given her permission and had even suggested some refinements. The Coopers, said the article, had set up a rival Embassy and split the British colony into squabbling fragments. Diana contemplated a libel action but was advised to forget the matter.

  For Nancy Mitford it was an amusing game, for Lady Harvey unmitigated pain. For Diana it had something of both elements. She enjoyed baiting the Harveys, criticizing their activities, frustrating their projects. Many people would have said that the vendetta was a light-hearted affair for her, a stimulating entertainment. The real depth of her bitterness was shown only when Duff died and Diana flew back to Paris with his body. Lees Mayall was sent out to the airport with messages of sympathy and promises of help from the Ambassador. Diana emerged for an instant from her shocked apathy. ‘You can tell those bloody Harveys to go to hell!’ she snapped.

  *

  Meanwhile life at Chantilly was settling down. Diana took it for granted that bankruptcy lay ahead. An interview with her solicitor confirmed her fears. ‘We’ll not be able to live in France,’ she told John Julius, gazing far into a dismal future, ‘and I and Papa will drive to your home to ask for shelter, and your beastly tart-wife will be like Goneril and Regan merged and bang the flimsy door in our nose, and we’ll get a hulk on Bosham marshes as Peggotty did before us, and Papa will make love to the paid help and I will be Mrs Gummidge.’ Duff saw the same solicitor and emerged altogether more ebullient. His writing was earning him several thousand pounds a year. He joined the board of Wagons Lits. Alexander Korda appointed him Chairman of the Paris subsidiary of London Film Productions at £2,500 a year – ‘I like and trust Korda,’ Duff not surprisingly noted. They paid practically no taxes. ‘It all seems to me quite satisfactory but Diana never stops worrying.’

  Cecil Beaton took Greta Garbo to Chantilly while the Coopers were in England. ‘Even in her absence she loved Diana; for she said she must be a woman who loves rural things.’ Memories of wartime Bognor had inspired Diana to repeat her farming triumphs. The first her friends knew of it was when Chips Channon heard what sounded like quacking coming from his extravagantly sumptuous blue and silver Amalienburg dining-room in Belgrave Square. Investigating, he found twelve ducklings which Diana had put there to rest before taking them on to Chantilly. A few days later a cow and four pigs were also on their way to France. They were supposed to arrive at 10 p.m. and Diana spent the whole night fully dressed in a fever of excitement. In the event, they did not appear till breakfast on the following day. The pigs lacked charm but Diana was quickly seduced by the cow, who was ‘very small, very thin and as gentle as a sleepy baby – tiny undangerous horns, a very pale face with Panda eyes’.

  The routine of life at Chantilly quickly adjusted to accommodate the farmyard. A dinner-party was disrupted when the mother-goat gave birth to kids, the Beits were almost sent packing back to London in disgrace when they let the cow escape from the orchard and Diana got badly stung pursuing it through a nettle-patch. The French shared Diana’s pessimism about the future, which did not suit her at all; what she wanted was cheerfulness against which she could react. They made a lot of hay and, as she tottered under a heavy load towards the stack, she asked Quarmi, the gardener, whether he thought the cow would like it. ‘Je ne le crois pas,’ he answered gloomily. Quarmi had a fine line in the ghoulish, mitigated by a cleft palate which made most of what he said unintelligible. One of the few episodes which Diana understood in full was his account of his daughter’s visit to hospital with a fibroid in her womb. Diana reassured him that the condition was not serious, common in women, one she had endured herself. ‘Oui, mais Madame n’urine pas no
ir,’ said Quarmi with some relish. ‘On peut uriner jaune, rouge et même bleu, mais Madame n’a pas uriné noir.’

  Diana was determined that the wedding bells must chime for Caroline, the sow. She was loaded into a trailer and taken to a neighbouring farm where there was said to be a suitable mate. Frustration; ‘a furious daughter, the kind that will grow up a tricoteuse of the Communists’, shouted from an upstairs window that the hog had been castrated. On they went to a second farm, only to find that this hog had been despatched to a happer rootling-ground. The third farm belonged to an ogre whose first words were ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’ but who eventually admitted that he had a fine boar. It proved too fine for Caroline. The farmer cast one scornful look at the poor creature and ruled that her teats were badly hung, she was undoubtedly diseased and sterile. The only hope was that she might make acceptable pork for Christmas. ‘We got home in darkness, having given poor piggy a tiring, costly and abortive wedding trip.’

  Diana’s English friends were relieved that she was resorting once more to this healthy and relatively harmless pastime. She, for her part, longed for their visits but found that they did not always make life easier. The comings of Evelyn Waugh, in particular, tended to be beset by fearful rows. Diana once went to the airport to meet him, having deposited her other guests at a circus in the town. At the interval she was back, looking gloomy. ‘Evelyn’s plastered,’ she reported. There he was, in cloth cap and loud tweeds, clinging on to a guy-rope so as to remain on his feet. As the rope was at an angle of 45°, so was Evelyn Waugh. Diana took him home and shut him in his room to sleep it off, but by the time the party got back from the circus he had escaped and was annoying Lady Juliet Duff, who was trying to do the crossword.