Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Next day he was still drunkish. Duff endured him with sinister calm until, at lunch, he made some offensive remark about Mountbatten. This provoked an explosion: ‘How dare a common little man like you who happens to have written one or two moderately amusing novels, criticize that great patriot and gentleman? Leave my house at once!’ Evelyn Waugh left the room but not the house, and next day told Rupert Hart-Davis, a fellow-guest: ‘Don’t really like Cooper. Very fond of his wife.’ For a time he kept away from Chantilly, but Diana delighted in his company. Once he took her to the Ritz in London, even though she assured him that it was no longer what it had used to be. He asked for a wine list.’ “Red or white?” said the waiter. “What do you mean?” said Evelyn. “Well, you can have a carafe of either,” said the waiter. Before Evelyn had time for his stroke, he added “O, I see, you wants it bottled.” “Is there no wine-waiter or wine list?” gasped Evelyn. All this a great joy for me. Poor Evelyn doesn’t know and is too proud to realize his ignorance and learn.’

  They went together to stay with Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat. Alan Searle, who was filling the role of hostess, offended Diana by giving Waugh the better of the two rooms and offering him rather than her a sprig of heliotrope. Waugh had vitamin tablets in his bathroom, while Diana merely had aspirins. Evelyn Waugh called Somerset Maugham ‘Doctor’ every other sentence and read his new novel aloud for more than two hours after dinner. Diana did not find him altogether easy to travel with. He objected to her habit of dropping in at every hotel where she had ever stayed to gossip with the proprietor, and hated having things pointed out: ‘“Don’t miss the swans,” sort of thing; so it’s sealed lips when I see the spring’s pageant.’

  When he began to come to Chantilly again things for a time went more smoothly, though abuse still flew on occasions. Cecil Beaton heard ‘Diana and Evelyn being appallingly rude to one another – really vilely, squalidly rude’. Diana took particularly vigorous offence one day when the maid was ill and she ‘in my dressing-gown, barefeet and nightcap’, took Evelyn Waugh breakfast in bed. He surveyed the tray and commented disapprovingly that it ‘wasn’t properly furnished’. ‘Well, I let him have it. I said “Really Evelyn, it’s too much to put on such an act!” and I gave him the full benefit of everything that I’d been bottling up about his pretentiousness. It really rankled with him, but it’ll do him good!’ Waugh was disconcerted but not discomfited. ‘Goodness the Coopers were crazy,’ he reported to Lady Mary Lygon. ‘Both Sir Alfred and Lady Diana fell into the most alarming rages. No self-control at all, it comes from living with the volatile frogs.’

  A few months before Duff died he had another flamboyant set-to with Evelyn Waugh. ‘Duff has a well-known weakness for uncontrolled rudeness,’ wrote Diana to Waugh. ‘We all have grave weaknesses. Baby’s is melancholia and cowardice. You have some too.’ Waugh left in dudgeon, was persuaded to return and passed a further happy week at Chantilly. After he had left, Randolph Churchill showed him a letter which Diana had written, describing the row with Duff. Waugh, offended, wrote Diana a letter ‘coldly aimed to hurt – arrows heavy as lead, curare-tipped’. She was deeply distressed. ‘Baby is not rude,’ she wrote, ‘but both men in this story are exceptionally rude in their cups. Since recriminations are the note, neither Baby nor Duff would have told all and sundry that their hosts were trying to poison them. She will not write again, it’s too painful to face the leaden answers devoid of understanding or love.’ For once the element of farce that pervaded her rows with Evelyn Waugh was lacking – ‘Oh, Evelyn, Evelyn, how can you have done it to me?’ A reconciliation of a sort was patched up, but it was not till after Duff’s death that they really renewed their friendship.

  Graham Greene was another author who visited Chantilly at this period. She greatly admired his writing and was fascinated by his tormented relationship with his faith. ‘I think it’s guilty love which has put him all out,’ she concluded; hence The Heart of the Matter which had just been published. He had been to Padre Pio’s mass but had feared to talk to him afterwards in case his life might be altered as a result. Hugo Charteris bombarded him with questions: ‘Would you welcome death, Mr Greene?’ Mr Greene admitted that he would, though Diana could not decide whether he was prompted by alcoholic depression or a wish to be free of Charteris’s interrogation. ‘I think Graham Greene is a good man possessed of a devil,’ Diana concluded, ‘and that Evelyn is a bad man for whom an angel is struggling.’

  When remonstrating with Evelyn Waugh for picking quarrels, Diana complained that she had only a handful of men friends left in the world, one of them ‘the frog who people can’t endure’. The intolerable frog was Paul Louis Weiller, ‘Poor Louis’ as Diana habitually referred to him, a man of great wealth, power and generosity. Cecil Beaton remarked shrewdly that Diana combined a gift for using her friends and the amenities they had to offer, with a complete lack of selfishness. Paul Louis Weiller exemplified this admirably. Diana relied on him for food, drink, every kind of entertainment; he was constantly making available his Rolls-Royce or one of his many houses – ‘I’ve cost him a pretty penny and he can afford it’ – and yet in return she defended him loyally against his legion of enemies, gave him real affection and procured him the entrée to many places where he would otherwise never have penetrated. Thirty years later, when he had almost ceased to be of use to her, she was still writing to the British Ambassador to get him invited to a party for the Queen Mother. She was not in the least embarrassed by him, or his generosity. He gave her a mink coat from Dior worth – in 1951 – £4,500: ‘I like people to know he gave it to me,’ wrote Diana. ‘I consider it does him credit.’ ‘The coat of shame’, she christened it. It proved something of a liability. ‘It entails being chained to it, insuring it, not sitting on it, having to have better hats and gloves and bags, always thinking it’s lost or stolen, storing it all summer, ultimately being murdered for it.’

  Her gratitude for Paul Louis Weiller’s attentions was the greater since she felt that she had been to some extent dropped by her French friends since she had left the Embassy. ‘I know something of the sag in one’s social shares when you’ve no longer a Government background,’ wrote Ronald Storrs, ‘but I shouldn’t have thought that would have affected them.’ Nor did it to any great extent. The Coopers remained an ornament at any party and only the drearier official invitations no longer reached them. But there was a big difference between dropping in at the salon vert to see your friends and have a drink with the British Ambassadress and trailing all the way out to Chantilly to do the same thing with Diana Cooper. Diana had vaguely assumed that la bande would remain faithful and reconvene in fresh surroundings. That they did not was due more to geography than to lowered status, but they did not, and the fact distressed her. Even so close a friend as Louise de Vilmorin came far less often to see her. She was confirmed in her dislike of the French. In Panegyric Ronald Knox had suggested that the Reformation destroyed good fellowship. Diana disputed this hotly. ‘There’s good fellowship in the U.S. There are no nastier people than the frogs who were little affected by it, while the Scandinavians are comparatively pure; less wily than wops, less cruel than Spaniards.’ Duff preferred the company of his English cronies, and more and more Chantilly became a redoubt of foreigners; cosmopolitan certainly, but where the French rarely went unless soaked in alien culture.

  Diana was lonely, and the state was one for which she was ill-equipped. Three years in the social turmoil of Paris had weakened her aptitude for amusing herself. ‘I have no life, no beckoning delights, no admirers (there’s the rub),’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Duff scribbles and I’m left to Mrs Dale’s Diary or the Benvenuto Cellini-ism of the Third Programme. There is no sap in nature, or in me – not in pain or acute melancholy, I languish dully, not happily resigned.’ This vision of the housewife solacing her long hours with soap-operas from the BBC was a caricature of the reality. By the standards of most fifty-six-year-old wives of retired husbands her life was one of spectacular gaie
ty, crammed with incident and colour. But it was not what she was used to, and she found no comfort in the reflection that the lives of others were drab compared to hers. Duff was puzzled and a little irritated by her appetite for society, complaining that three nights running she had dragged him to Paris when he would rather have been dining peacefully at home. Diana knew that her restlessness was irrational but could not control it: ‘I’m bored, John Julius. Sad, isn’t it? This is not a life I could ever tolerate – from early childhood I was always praying for excitement.’

  In The Loved and Envied, Enid Bagnold presented what was intended to be a faithful portrait of Diana in old age. Diana was gratified by the attention, and told the author it was a striking likeness, but when she came to consider the noble, serene shadow which Enid Bagnold had discovered, she wondered whether a few more sittings might not have yielded a truer picture. Ruby Maclean is ‘almost my opposite,’ she told her son, ‘with no fears and frailties, panics and pains’. Panics and pains were particularly evident in the first few months after their return to France. Boredom and discontent became translated into imaginary illnesses. By the summer of 1948 Duff was worried enough about her state to pack her off to an English doctor, who recommended a plethora of drugs. Diana, who distrusted all drugs except those she prescribed herself and procured illegally, had little faith in his proposals.

  She pinned her faith on a man who cured anything except cancer and V.D. – the latter being about the only disease from which she never thought she suffered – by a system of footbaths. To supplement this she also consulted the immensely aged Dr Salvanoff, Professor of the Universities of Moscow, Paris and Berlin. To follow his course in its entirety would have been a full-time job: seven pills to be taken half an hour before every meal; constant hot baths with a secret fluid added; private parts thickly greased with vaseline before immersion; hot water bottles to be laid on the liver for forty-five minutes three times a day. Meanwhile, the chauffeur, Jean, was vomiting continually. ‘I do think servants should not be ill,’ wrote Diana peevishly. ‘We have quite enough illness ourselves without them adding to the symptoms.’

  ‘She hates old age and she fears death,’ wrote Duff in his diary. ‘I wish I could help her but I don’t seem to be able to.’ She was distressed that she could not do everything she had been used to, and refused to admit that this was so until the facts compelled her to face them. She fought old age by taking greater pains to preserve her beauty. The Evening Standard gleefully reported that she was having a face-lift; she had visited a plastic surgeon before going to the clinic; she wore dark spectacles and her face was swathed in light bandages; ‘then my age, which I resent (stupidly) and a bit about my rheumatic legs – altogether too horrible and malicious’. The worst of it was that she was not having a face-lift anyway: ‘the spectacles were put on to hide a cyst, the bandages my poor little bald-pate nightcap.’ She met Sam White, the Evening Standard representative in Paris and, more in sorrow than anger, complained about this unfair concentration on her doings. ‘I suppose if I had piles you’d put that in,’ she concluded sadly. It was not as if she was habitually preoccupied with her appearance. Often she looked strikingly unkempt. Malcolm Muggeridge saw her at Ann Roth-ermere’s ‘looking quite extraordinary with blond wig and sinewy bare legs, a more prosperous version of demented women to be seen on benches in Regent’s Park muttering and going through wastepaper baskets in the early morning’.

  Drugs, footbaths, face-lifts may have contributed, but the main reason for her regaining her spirits was that she grew used to her new condition. By the autumn of 1948 she was herself again. The cure seems to have started in Milan when she appeared in a vast hat and sunglasses and was hailed as Greta Garbo. A week or two later she told Duff that she felt really happy. ‘Pathetically, she said, “I feel like other people: you can’t imagine how heavenly it had asked her to bathe with him. ‘Accustomed all her life to such attention, she has been missing it.’ Certainly she blossomed on this holiday. At Aix they spent a riotously successful night with Winston Churchill. Mrs Churchill had left that afternoon for London; ‘I am afraid her absence increased the gaiety of the evening,’ noted Duff. Churchill had recently been taught Oklahoma and abandoned a quarter of a century’s addiction to six-pack bezique. He played very badly but with enormous relish till the early hours of the morning. Diana’s confidence, never more than frayed, had now returned in full. ‘I keep the table in roars,’ she told John Julius. ‘I’m considered the wittiest, funniest, most original angel that ever visited this dull earth. It puts up the morale splendidly.’

  The fact that Duff so obviously welcomed old age did much to soothe her. He was entirely without regrets for lost consequence, enjoying his writing, relishing his liberty, a model of elderly contentment. ‘Duff’s Sir Deaf Cooper now,’ wrote Diana, regretting the way in which he would lose track of a general conversation, then catch at some half-heard remark and join in with an irrelevance. But Duff did not seem to care a scrap, so why should she? Most important of all, he loved her and depended on her as much as ever. On the twenty-ninth anniversary of their wedding he presented her with a set of verses:

  Fear not, sweet love, what time can do

  Though silver streaks the gold

  Of your soft hair, believe that you

  Can change but not grow old.

  Though since we married, twenty-nine

  Bright years have flown away,

  Beauty and wisdom, like good wine,

  Grow richer every day.

  We will not weep, though spring be past,

  And autumn’s shadows fall,

  These years shall be, although the last,

  The loveliest of all.

  The poetry may not have been his finest, but he never wrote from a fuller heart.

  Duff’s satisfaction was still greater when, after the return of the Conservatives in 1951, he was made a peer. To him this meant not only a coveted honour but also a forum for his speechifying in the House of Lords. For Diana it seemed only retrograde. All her adult life she had been Lady Diana, daughter of a duke. Now she was to submerge her identity in that of a mere viscount. She suggested hopefully that Duff might style himself ‘Diana’ or even ‘Ladydiana’. Lord Ladydiana would sound nice. Duff countered with ‘Marrington’. John Julius and Diana scoffed at this leaden flight of fancy and came forward with Unicorn, Lackland, Sansterre, Erewhon, St Firmin, St James, St George, St Virgil, Templer. Still more adventurous, Diana tried Love-a-duck and Almighty. Duff was not impressed. ‘One can make a joke but one can’t be one, not from choice anyway,’ he observed cogently. He brooded, then, without consultation, settled for Norwich. ‘Of all names Norwich is the most horrible,’ wrote Diana in dismay. ‘Porridge’ would have been better, a word which seemed to her to be spelt much the same way. ‘“Man-in-the-moon” better still, though coarse, me being Diana the moon.’ ‘A little Norwich is a dangerous thing,’ was Duff’s retort to this barrage of wit, but he failed to convert his wife to the beauty of her new style. She always disliked the name, was surly when congratulated on what she considered her demotion, and swiftly followed Duff’s ennoblement with an announcement in The Times that she wished to retain her former name and title.

  She hankered after England, though her visits seemed increasingly connected with the deaths or diseases of her friends. She went to Breccles to visit Venetia Montagu, who was given only a few weeks to live by her doctor. At the end of the First World War and for fifteen years thereafter, Breccles had been a favourite resort – a place of comfort, beauty, gaiety, shoots, fireworks, picnics, rest. ‘This last visit was like an old woman looking in a glass and seeing her youth’s radiance. Very agonizing.’ Emerald Cunard died the same year. After her first heart-attack she told Diana that it was ‘extremely pleasant – one was floating among clouds’, and her end now seemed equally peaceful. She left Diana a third of her estate, but this was to amount to little beyond debts. Diana did not mourn her dying; it came, she knew, at the proper time, and
in the proper place. It was right to die where one had spent most of one’s life. She knew that she, too, wanted to die in England.

  Duff’s new jobs involved much travel; to Venice for the film festivals, to various European capitals for meetings of the Board of the Wagons Lits. Diana’s sight-seeing remained as voracious as ever. In Rome, when she went with the Altrinchams to the Vatican, she was outraged to find it closed. They battered their way past successive Swiss Guards, then met what seemed an immovable barrier. She recounted her eventual triumph to John Julius:

  I said Count Sforza [the Foreign Minister] had given me a name to ask for in case of trouble and I’d forgotten it. No good. I asked them to telephone the Count. They saved me by saying the Foreign Office would be shut. I told them to imagine I was Winston Churchill. What would they say then? They said ‘Chiuso’. It took the old trick of us not moving and the three of us forming an obstacle in a bottleneck to get us moved on to the next barrier. Suddenly tedium is stronger than guardianship, the morale gives, the pass is sold. The same thing at the second gate, this time with a senior man in civvies. I got as far as a laughing. ‘Siamo molto, molto importante’. This shook him into telephoning to some higher power or principality, which produced a tiny little priest carrying the key of the Sistine Chapel.