Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  ‘Are you pleased?’ asked Lady Eden with a bright smile.

  ‘How could I be pleased?’

  ‘Oh, we thought we’d done right. Not too far and not too near.’

  ‘How, not too near?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t think it would be fair on them.’

  ‘Can you beat it!’ Diana asked Katharine Asquith indignantly.

  Diana never became resigned to Yugoslavia. She disliked Belgrade, resented being dependent on John Julius’s friends for company, was irritated at not being able to make herself understood in French or English. ‘I sure got a rough deal when they sent you there,’ she was complaining eighteen months later. ‘I’m despicable with self-pity, seeing all my contemporaries busy with their children and their grandchildren and their villages and their social activities and duties and good works and comforts. The science of living seems to have deserted me. It can’t go on.’ Nevertheless, it did go on, and became easier. Eden’s decision, however little Diana was prepared to admit the fact, forced her to make her own life independent of her son’s and, in the long run, proved a blessing. She made the best of a bad job. Tito visited Paris and a grand reception was given at the Quai d’Orsay. Diana got herself invited, with the help of General Catroux infiltrated the holy of holies where Tito was holding court, cornered his wife, Madame Broz, and told her firmly about John Julius and his guitar and pretty wife. Then she advanced on Tito himself with an inaudible mumble about a message from Churchill, threw in Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill for good measure, and once again dilated on the splendours of her son. ‘I can’t say he was interested by me,’ she admitted, ‘but I didn’t care. My objective had been reached.’

  The unfortunate consequences of her earlier intriguing did not deter her from further efforts. Harold Macmillan’s appointment as Foreign Secretary raised her hopes but he soon moved on to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘I can’t get over the bad luck of losing him as your boss,’ she wrote with mingled pleasure and dismay. ‘He looks so old and he shambles badly, but it is promotion and makes him nearer premiership.’ Selwyn Lloyd took his place and Diana spent a weekend with him at Petworth. ‘A little shy on arrival,’ she noted. ‘Out to please, not bad-looking, engaging, could be common. I wouldn’t put a dirty story past him, though he did not deliver himself of one.’ He spoke of the horrors of his life, his fear of flying, the fact that Eden had talked to him on the telephone the night before from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. (‘Harold would have hung up on him!’ muttered their host, John Wyndham). He was put out because the Daily Express had photographed him at his desk, including in the picture the pad on which he jotted down things he had to remember – The Yemen, Cyprus, Beaverbrook etc. – and blown it up for the entertainment of their readers. ‘Lucky, really, that I hadn’t written “Remind Anthony not to fuss so much”,’ observed Selwyn Lloyd.

  To Diana the main significance of the Suez crisis was that it brought about the destruction of the detested Eden and the promotion of her favourite Macmillan to 10 Downing Street. Yet she deplored the means to this desirable end. Sturdily patriotic, she knew what she instinctively felt herself, but was dismayed to find many of her friends saw things differently. ‘I need Papa to give me my lead,’ she told John Julius. ‘I’m desperately sorry for that donkey Eden. Being an objective old girl, I thought it was a clever, courageous plan, but like anything else we do, it was at dictation speed. Time is given for UNO gibbering, and though totally impotent it can blackmail. Now everyone seems pleased that we shall retire, tail between battered legs, and give what little we gained to a handful of Eskimos, Costaricans and harmless Laps with batons. It’s wrong, no doubt, to go against UNO, but if UNO is wrong, is it wrong to go against wrong?’

  With Macmillan Prime Minister and her new friend still at the Foreign Office, she had high hopes that John Julius might after all be sent to Paris when he had finished with Belgrade. Sir Frank Roberts had recently gone there as Ambassador to Nato and she persuaded him to plead her case in London. Eventually he spoke to the Chief Clerk in the Foreign Office, who was cautiously encouraging but raised the old objection. ‘What was that?’ demanded Diana. ‘Too near his mother.’ ‘Honestly,’ Diana wrote to John Julius, ‘you’d think I was infectious or a witch or unfit for trust!’ Instead, he was posted to Beirut; a more agreeable place certainly than Belgrade and offering greater possibilities for enjoyable sight-seeing, but still sadly far from home. Regrets became terror when civil war broke out in the Lebanon. Diana was on a ship sailing to Beirut at the time and took advantage of a stop at Athens to telephone her son. After hours of frustration in a suffocating booth she finally got through, to hear him say: ‘Mummy, haven’t you heard? I’ve been shot.’ Diana’s voice was inaudible in Beirut but John Julius guessed she was asking where he had been wounded and went on: ‘In the head. The head! Like Anthony!’ The fact that he could make puns slightly reassured Diana but not enough to calm her when the call was abruptly cut off, ‘Au secours!’ she bellowed at the operator. ‘Mon fils a été fusillé et il ne peut pas m’entendre!’ Eventually it became clear that the wound was a trifling one, and Diana returned to her ship.

  ‘We seem to have no radio communication with land,’ she wrote a day or two later.

  That’s perhaps why we sang ‘Eternal Father’ yesterday at evensong in the lounge, pronounced by the most unctuous, fat, self-indulgent padre. In spite of his shortcomings I cried my way through the service and thanked God that he had spared you death – but had to add a little something of disappointment that my nightly prayers for your protection from any harm had failed.

  One compensation for the Norwichs’ far-flung postings was that their daughter Artemis spent much time in France. When it was first suggested that Artemis – whose very name was a compliment to Diana – should spend the summer of 1955 at Chantilly, her grandmother was acquiescent. ‘Perhaps it will touch my heart,’ she wrote to Katharine Asquith. ‘I doubt it, poor Artemis. My heart and mind are as empty and heavy as a broken sarcophagus, and for all my praying aloud in night hours, nothing comes to fill it.’ Though she had enjoyed bringing up John Julius, Diana was generally shy with children, disconcerting them by her brusqueness and irritated by their failure to respond as grown-ups. At first Artemis conformed only too well to this pattern. ‘When this little girl looks at me she whitens, petrifies and then bursts into hysterical tears,’ Diana complained to Evelyn Waugh. But familiarity quickly banished alarm, Artemis got used to being treated as a grown-up and began to enjoy the barrage of questions and instructions with which Diana larded her conversation: ‘Who was Medusa?’ ‘What is seventeen minus two?’ ‘What’s the capital of Denmark?’ She was subjected to the same cross-examination on English kings and foreign capitals as her father had once endured and like him discovered that learning could be fun when the teacher enjoyed irreverence, originality and a sense of humour. Commonness was rebuked in all its manifestations: saying ‘Bye-bye’, going to the lavatory, catching cold. Artemis grew to adore her grandmother and Diana felt for the little girl the same affection as she had felt for John Julius twenty years before.

  Anne was slightly irritated by the advice that would descend on her when Artemis returned from a visit to Chantilly. She was apt to giggle, a vice that verged on commonness: ‘So reprove it.’ She could not recite a single nursery rhyme, ‘so do make her learn poems – too old for her but with simple metre. “Come Live With Me and be My Love” for instance.’ Her wider education must not be ignored: ‘What about piano? Can you begin?’ Diana complained about Artemis’s hair-style. ‘She looks like a prissy miss if trapped into her futile grip, and like a beatnik if it is loosened. This may be her prettiest year. Why spoil it for me, who has her with me day in day out?’ Though the advice was not always welcome, most of it made sense and Anne usually acted on it.

  Any mother who sees her child so strongly influenced by another woman – especially, perhaps, when that woman is her mother-in-law – is likely to feel some jealousy. Anne was not who
lly free of this, but she was too sensible not to appreciate the value of what Diana gave Artemis and to feel gratitude for it. Artemis’s brother, Jason, was at this stage too young to be exposed to his grandmother’s attention. It was not till they were all back in London that she came to know and appreciate him.

  *

  Most of Diana’s friends had assumed she would return to settle in England. ‘The peculiar beauty of [Chantilly] has a melancholy of its own which is sapping to the vitality and must enhance your permanent ache,’ wrote Pamela Berry. In London she could live in less grandeur but greater comfort, surrounded by her friends, close to all the things she enjoyed most. At first Diana thought she agreed; she told Ronald Storrs that she planned definitely to abandon France. She played with the idea of settling somewhere near Stratford, involving herself with the doings of the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming ‘relied on for something trivial and adored by cast and electricians alike’. And yet when it came to the point, ‘I have got attached to the house and see Duff everywhere.’ Besides, there was still a chance the Foreign Office would send John Julius and Anne to Paris.

  So she lingered on, though finding little pleasure in so doing. ‘I do nothing worth while and don’t suppose I ever will,’ she wrote sadly in 1955. What she hopefully told herself was no more than a phase threatened to become a lifetime’s pattern. ‘I read little, sleep little, go out seldom in Paris, thank God, do the minimum of gardening and dressing. I don’t fear or fret much, or enjoy much.’ Two drawings of her as a baby by her mother crashed inexplicably to the floor in the middle of the night. ‘If it presages my death I don’t really think I mind‚’ she wrote with perceptible relish; her melancholy was wholly genuine, yet she never failed to derive a certain pleasure from demonstrating it to others.

  Her life was made tolerable by the presence of Nora Fahie. Miss Fahie had been intrigued by an advertisement for a secretary-cum-Girl Friday with, among other qualifications ‘a deep knowledge of the laws of growth’. She applied for the job, was engaged and from that moment became indispensable. When Duff died she moved into the château and tended her employer with mingled love and firmness. Diana believed that without Nora Fahie she might have lost her reason. She underestimated her own toughness but did not exaggerate Miss Fahie’s devotion.

  Otherwise domestic disasters multiplied. New servants were hired just before Harold Macmillan came to stay; then the morning he arrived the French maid was removed by the police and the Italian manservant announced he had to return home to stand trial for murdering his former employer. When Joe Alsop came to dinner it was to find that the cook had just been shot to death on the streets of Paris. Quarmi, the drunken gardener, was at last bribed into retirement and returned to Holland, only to reappear within the week pleading that he be allowed to set up camp in the stables. ‘I found strength and cruelty to say no, so the poor clochard went off with a £10 bonus to Versailles. Is it not tragic? I feel like jelly masquerading as a stone.’

  The cold in the winter of 1955 was so fearsome that Diana’s bedroom was the only spot in the house of tolerable warmth. Paddy Leigh Fermor, rigid with lumbago, smoking five cigarettes in ten minutes, took refuge beneath her fur counterpane. ‘I stuck to my night cap because I hate floating hair. The communal bed was smothered in dictionaries, Shakespeare, Quotes, genealogy books, novels, plus trays of old snacks, gin, red wine, dregs and dusty telephone-wires, radio moaning overlapping programmes, more sweaters to fight the cold of a dying stove.’

  But with it all, life was slowly beginning to be fun again. Solitude was still hard to bear, but provided there was plenty of coming and going, friends thronging around her, Artemis to bring up, quick darts here and there, then things were tolerable enough. A week of intense activity, with never less than eight people in the house, constant parties, a race-meeting, picnics, visits to neighbouring châteaux, was followed by a night alone at home reading and listening to music:

  ‘I can manage that – just – but I cannot be quite alone for more than two nights,’ she told John Julius.

  It’s against my nature, and woman’s nature for that matter. I get thinking too unhappily and might do anything. Whatever you say about keeping still, and learning to be quiet and alone, I cannot. You might as well tell me to walk on my hands instead of my feet. I just have to wander around like the old Jew or the Flying Dutchman. And I do not find it unnatural or even strange. I’ve had a life of love, excitement, endeavour, success for fifty years. I can’t live another one completely.

  Fortunately there were many friends who were happy to cater for her needs. Evelyn Waugh proved notably loyal. In April 1955 he spent two long evenings reading aloud his new novel Officers and Gentlemen. Diana appreciated the effort, but, surprisingly, not the book itself, finding it ‘as true as life and war and equally boring’. There were too many incomprehensible military titles, too little story, no memorable character except ‘the man with the thunderbox, who died’, too many delicate nuances and undercurrents which no reader could hope to perceive without Waugh’s constant asides to help them. It was something that Mrs Stitch played a role – ‘not bad and acting exactly as I would in the end’ – but she could not redeem a failure. ‘I fear it cannot be a seller, and he does need money to feed the hungry seven.’ Waugh was on his best behaviour, acting with loving solicitude and only making mischief when the Due de Brissac cross-examined him on the intricacies of English prosody. With satisfaction Waugh gave him all the wrong answers.

  Randolph Churchill was another regular visitor, in particular favour with Diana because he was doing stalwart work raising money for Duff’s memorial. ‘Twice of an evening he danced a pas seul, bouncing with the lightness of a pingpong ball, his dropsical body gyrating and elevated by neat little stockinged feet. Then he’d hurl himself pancake flat on to a sofa, and breathe like a grampus’s death rattle.’ On Sunday night, like every other summer guest in 1955 and 1956, he was led across the park to find the great château ‘fading and waking under modulating lights’ while spectral voices pealed out its history: the death of Vatel, the building of the gardens by Le Nôtre. The hounds in full cry passed by out of human sight. Diana was entranced by this miraculous entertainment: ‘“Son et Lumière”, they call this great advance in pageants.’

  The Harveys had now been replaced in Paris by the Jebbs, a change which worked immeasurably to Diana’s advantage. From being a distrusted adversary she found herself transformed to honoured friend: constantly invited to the Embassy; consulted on the finer points of social etiquette; Chantilly a regular port-of-call for ambassadorial guests in need of amusement. There were, indeed, so many people pouring through the doors that it was easy not to notice how few of them were French. Such as did come tended to have Anglo-Saxon connections; conversation was almost always in English; talk more likely to turn to the rival merits of Gaitskell and Macmillan than the prospects for Mendès-France; to Graham Greene’s new novel than the thoughts of Jean-Paul Sartre or the feelings of Françoise Sagan. La bande had dispersed: dead or disaffected or too busy to come often to Chantilly. Even with Louise de Vilmorin the relationship had grown cool. When, after a long separation, Diana arranged to spend two nights at Verrières, Louise forgot and muttered excuses about hard work and a man coming to make a recording. ‘I said nothing,’ Diana wrote, ‘but found myself harbouring bitterness, so went to bed.’

  More and more her interests seemed to be centred on England; Chantilly no more than a redoubt where life could be carried on until the time came for a retreat to the homeland. One obvious way by which this might have been brought about was by remarriage. Lady Waverley wanted her to marry R. A. Butler, which Diana interpreted as a sure sign that she had her eye on him herself. ‘When I say “Perish the thought” she will ask me why not, which puts me in the devil of a spot as my reasons, she would think, should apply to her. How could I, at my age, when I have had the best? Now she wants me to marry Heathcoat Amory, which shows she is out to fish in new waters.’

  Bu
t though she had no intention of remarrying, she was far from abandoning the battle to maintain her beauty. In 1958 she went into the London Clinic for a face-lift. Strict secrecy was observed, even John Julius was at first told she was having a tooth dealt with. The amount of morphia the Clinic offered proved wholly inadequate and Diana had to persuade them that she was a former addict who needed double the normal dose. When she came to she found herself swathed in a blood-crusted iron helmet. The doctor assured her that she would have a nice surprise when the bandages came off. ‘I don’t like that,’ she noted darkly. ‘Les bonnes surprises often work out as mauvaises plaisanteries.’ In the event she was modestly relieved by what she found. ‘The gobble-gobble has gone leaving a pure curve, but the stitches round the swollen ears stick out like porpentine’s quills and my neck is a Turner sunset.’ She passed her convalescence reading Anthony Powell’s latest novel which, with a bold stab at accuracy, she called ‘At Aunt Mabel’s’. She liked it greatly but it filled her with disquiet: ‘Quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh, a dash of Proust, and the purpose – description of the slow decay of top people due to social revolution – a grim subject to me, excruciatingly funny for those who are not of noble class.’

  There were few signs of the top people’s decay at Buckingham Palace where Diana went for the state visit of General de Gaulle. The evening held all the splendour and pageantry that she adored; the only sadness coming from the sight of ‘the man that was – poor wrecked Winston’ hobbling off alone to the throne-room where dinner was to be served. Diana went with him and sat at his side till the other guests arrived. ‘He seemed to know me – “my dear” covers all-comers – but I can’t be sure. It was painful, painful; his emaciated and feeble leg looks loose in its garter which is sewn on.’ At dinner she sat between the French Ambassador and the Lord Chamberlain and a blast of icy air from the service door behind her blew her hair all over her cheeks. ‘Can we do anything about the draught?’ asked the Ambassador, whose wife had a temperature of 101°. ‘Can we do anything about the draught?’ Diana asked the Lord Chamberlain. ‘Can we do anything about the draught?’ the Lord Chamberlain asked a major domo behind him. ‘Can we do anything about the draught?’ the major domo asked some junior lackey. ‘Nothing whatever,’ came the firm reply, which was passed back down the line to the resigned Ambassador. The food was equally unworthy of the occasion: uninspired nursery broth with bits in it was followed by ‘le saumon Balmoral-republican’ which turned out to be none-too-tasty rissoles and finally by ‘Glace Croix de Lorraine’. ‘The crucifix, laid flat on a lordly dish and dripping with cream and custard shocked me too much to scoop an arm off it, so I don’t know if it was just plain vanilla.’