Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  The plan was for Churchill to shuffle through the garage between the two houses and avoid both the steep steps and the November air. Unfortunately the Joneses’ Rolls-Royce had rusted up and refused to budge, so the old man was forced to come round by the long way. Nothing deterred, he got through his short speech fairly well; Harold Macmillan spoke too, and Alan Moorehead, ‘and then it was the old war-horse saying “Ha-ha” in the battle, because warming and cleaving to his work, Winston said, “My dear, would you like me to wind up for you?” So up he got again with nothing to read from. He was for a flash the real Winston and ended with a joke about Gallipoli.’ ‘It was a wonderful, emotional party – perfect in every way,’ Diana reported. ‘I almost felt Papa was there, it was so to his taste and to his glory.’

  The annual presentation of the prize, with all its complications over the selection of judges, winner and presenter, was an endless diversion to Diana. The Queen Mother presented the prize to Lawrence Durrell the second year and Princess Margaret to John Betjeman, the third. Diana for some reason was nervous about this last affair but had no cause to be. Princess Margaret looked like a ‘jewelled, silky bowerbird, with a close-fitting, wild duck’s preened feather hat, no hair, skin like a tea-rose, wonderfully pretty – and she made her funny, faultless speech with art and sophistication. Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words.’ Sir Roderick Jones, ‘the only living man shorter than the Princess’, insisted on winding up with an interminable speech about the Empire, punctuated by whispers from his wife – half-proud, half-explanatory – of ‘You know, he’s eighty-one!’ He caused some offence to the Chairman of the Judges by referring to him as Sir Horace Bowra, an exploit matched the following year by the immensely aged Canon Andrew Young who remarked that Duff would always remain illustrious for his slim volume Operation Handbrake. The worst gaffe at a prizegiving came, however, from Diana herself some years later. Robert Lowell, who was to present the prize, suffered a serious nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental home. A substitute was arranged. Then at the last moment John Julius was told that Lowell had discharged himself and was on the way to the ceremony. At all costs he must be kept away from any kind of alcohol. John Julius rushed to the spot, to find Lowell, on his third glass of champagne and talking to Diana. ‘Darling,’ said Diana brightly. ‘I’ve just been telling this gentleman how the principal speaker has lost his marbles and been carted off to a loony-bin!’

  Her life in Warwick Avenue was sometimes more eventful than even she desired. ‘There are more burglars than occupiers in this dusky district, who laugh at locksmiths,’ she wrote apprehensively as she was moving in. They struck first in 1966, when Iris Tree was staying in the house. Masked men broke in and tied up the two women. Diana watched with resignation as jewels and furs, including Paul Louis Weiller’s precious ‘coat of shame’, were bundled into suitcases, but protested when they came to the box containing love-letters. Fortunately the burglars proved to have little interest in such irrelevancies. ‘Why should this happen to me?’ she inquired histrionically. ‘I’ve done no harm and I’m charitable!’ Then the absurdity of her words struck her, and in spite of fear and discomfort she laughed aloud.

  ‘I wasn’t all that frightened at the time,’ she told Katharine Asquith, ‘but I got a reaction of fear ten days later. I listen now for the bell to ring and for those muffled feet and featureless faces to return for what they didn’t take.’ The worst affront came when she left the house to resume her interrupted evening and found that her car had been stolen too. She still managed to get to Covent Garden for the last act. ‘Sorry, but I was rather tied up,’ she remarked as she entered the box, a line which she had been long awaiting an opportunity to use. To Evelyn Waugh it was the loss of dignity which seemed most horrifying – a point of view which would have surprised Diana if she had heard of it. ‘There should be a Praetorian Guard of Pansies,’ Waugh told Nancy Mitford, ‘to keep a standing 24 piquet on all these widows …’ Nancy Mitford unsympathetically suggested that Diana had organized the burglary herself because the coat of shame was growing shabby and needed replacement from the insurance money. Paul Louis Weiller himself reacted more generously. ‘Achète-toi un nouveau manteau chez Balmain‚’ he telegraphed next day.

  Some months later the muffled feet returned. This time Daphne Wakefield, still loyally helping out on the secretarial side, was in the house upstairs. She heard Diana say haughtily: ‘If only you would consult your colleagues you would know that this was not worth while.’ A few moments later came a cry of pain: ‘Oh, God, I’ve got a lump there. Don’t do that, you’re hurting me!’ Mrs Wakefield threw herself into the fray and got coshed for her pains. The burglars ransacked the house and, worst of all, took the ring which Duff had given Diana for their engagement and which had somehow been missed in the previous raid. When Daphne Wakefield recovered, she was horrified to hear of this loss. ‘It’s only a possession. What does it matter?’ said Diana calmly.

  In both cases the police were friendly but ineffective. They were less friendly in 1968 when they invaded the house in search of drugs. Diana was delighted. ‘Never did I enjoy myself more since youth’s diversions.’ She talked endlessly to the press, questions were asked in parliament and there were even two half-hour debates on the adjournment. Nothing was found and the reason for the police suspicions was never fully explained. ‘Who cares anyway if a very old lady drugs or not?’ asked Diana plaintively.

  Daphne Wakefield had had troubles more painful than a mere coshing. Some years before her daughter had been taken ill with polio and Diana put up the money to send her to a private hospital. She died before she even got there and Diana then insisted that the money be spent on a holiday to help the Wakefields recover from the shock. When Mrs Wakefield returned, still crushed by her loss, Diana rallied her with a firm: ‘Well now, Daphne, you’ve got to take pride in fortitude. The first thing to do is to have another baby.’ She did, and Diana was godmother. It sometimes seemed to Diana as she grew older her main purpose in life was to comfort the survivors when her friends and relations died. ‘You are the most wonderful friend,’ Ann Fleming told her. ‘No wonder there is always a queue of Kitty, Judy etc on your doorstep, all loving you, all with problems and relying on your courage, fabulous vitality, unselfishness and common sense.’

  One of the most painful features of old age is the gradual extinction of one’s friends, and the greater the talent for friendship, the longer grows the list of losses. Evelyn Waugh she saw for the last time shortly before he died. ‘He has lost all joie de vivre, eats nothing, drinks a fair amount and thinks a journey to London a labour of Hercules. I attribute it to sleeping-pills, parendahyl in massive quantities, etc. O dear, O dear, it haunts me. I’m so very fond of the little monster!’ Iris Tree, whom she had helped financially and succoured for twenty years; Raimund von Hofmannsthal, ‘the dearest and goodest of men and the most generous and compassionate’; his wife and her niece Elizabeth Paget and her sister Caroline; Louise de Vilmorin; Churchill; Noel Coward; Katharine Asquith; Cecil Beaton – even to start to compile a list is to marvel at the number and variety of people who counted Diana among their dearest friends. And yet, though each new death pained her, in taking Duff death had already done its worst. She no longer had it in her to suffer deeply except over the tiny group of people who were everything to her. Michael Astor – soon sadly to be one of the losses himself – thought her at the age of eighty a little like ‘Queen Elizabeth in her later years: clever, hard, fine and formidable. Underneath the façade there is something cold and lonely.’ The coldness was there, but it was the chill of something long extinguished. A candle had burnt out. When a friend died she had always tended to put them out of her mind, to cut her losses. Now the loss itself seemed inconsiderable. She wrote sombrely to Bridget McEwen when her husband died that she had no words of comfort. ‘It can never again be what it was. Years don’t help all that much. One’s own death is less fearful, that’s all … nothing is any good wh
en the love of one’s life is gone.’

  Yet she never ceased to make new friends, seek new experiences. At dinner she was almost as likely to find herself between Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol as Harold Macmillan and the Apostolic Delegate; in both cases she would be amused, intrigued, insatiably curious about what was going on and what her neighbours were thinking and doing. Nigel Ryan, forty years her junior, became one of her closest friends, ‘the last attachment’ as she half self-mockingly described him. Four times he had sat next to her at dinner and she had asked him who he was. The fifth time he refused to tell her, ‘I’ve told you too often’. The sixth time she turned to him again: ‘Now, who are you?’ ‘Martin Bormann,’ said Ryan. She never forgot him again. Aged eighty-six she took up with Sir Robert Mayer, then about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, and was delighted when the Daily Mail announced their imminent engagement. A near contemporary had been jeering at her for spending so much time with somebody as young as Nigel Ryan. Now she herself was being squired everywhere by a man of thirty odd, while Diana’s name was coupled with someone by far her senior. ‘My dear,’ Diana wrote to her sweetly, ‘when you are my age you will realize that what you need is the maturer man.’

  Her dog was almost as great a solace to her as any friend. Writhing, twitching neurotically, as much an insect as an animal, ‘Doggie’ – and later Doggie II and Doggie III – was a chihuahua, charmless to most of those who knew it but to Diana possessed of supernatural loveliness. Lurking in her sleeve, wrapped loosely in a shawl, it went everywhere with her; to Covent Garden, to Buckingham Palace, the more inaccessible the venue the more determined Diana was that it should not be left behind. Usually it behaved, when it did not Diana quickly repaired the damage. In a smart Soho restaurant Doggie escaped and defecated lavishly at the feet of a prosperous business man. Ugly scenes threatened but Diana rose to the occasion and within a few moments the bemused but enchanted business man was agreeing that really what was needed in the restaurant was a few more dogs; it was ridiculous of the head waiter to try to keep them out. In the innermost fastness of her bedroom, Doggie and the television helped to keep loneliness at bay, providing a soothing background of rustles, yaps and conversation, a convincing simulacrum of company when company was absent.

  There was anyway a retinue of courtiers ready to be summoned if she felt in need of support. She used them as ruthlessly as she had always used her friends, though no more ruthlessly than she used herself when her friends had need of her. Violet Wyndham was one of the most faithful members of the inner circle. Diana would go to great lengths to help her, sacrificing a precious last afternoon with Nigel Ryan before he left for New York because she had long before promised to spend it with Mrs Wyndham. But she would also treat her friend with singular roughness. Driving her from Covent Garden one afternoon, the brakes failed and she bounced off a stationary lorry and ended up half way down some area steps. Diana was unhurt, Violet Wyndham in mild shock. Diana rapidly calculated that, if Mrs Wyndham were taken home in an ambulance, it would still be possible to get to her next appointment on time. An ambulance arrived. ‘But I’m quite all right,’ protested Mrs Wyndham. ‘Of course you’re not,’ said Diana, pushing her in. Then she discovered that the ambulance would not take a patient home, but only to the hospital. Violet Wyndham would have to be escorted there and would need visiting. Diana flung open the ambulance door and told her friend that plans were changed. Mrs Wyndham, by this time cosy on her bunk and rather enjoying the fuss, complained weakly that she needed hospital attention. ‘Of course you’re all right!’ said Diana, pulling her out and looking round for a taxi.

  A prosecution followed for dangerous driving. As soon as the magistrate ingratiatingly said ‘Do sit down, Lady Diana,’ she reckoned she was in with a chance. Her defence was that the brake had suddenly failed. The prosecution counsel demonstrated at length why this was difficult to accept. At the end of his address Diana leant forward and said quaveringly: ‘I’m afraid I did not hear a word of what you said.’ He restated his case. ‘I’m afraid you really must speak up. I’m an old lady, you know.’ The third time the prosecution sounded altogether less compelling. ‘Was the brake hanging down before you started?’ he wanted to know. ‘I’m afraid I very rarely look under my car,’ replied Diana. By this time the prosecution was established as a brutal bully and Diana as his frail old victim. She was acquitted.

  Some time later she ran into a large lorry on the Brighton road, her only defence being that she had not seen it. Remembering her earlier triumph she was anxious to appear in court and give witness in her own defence, but her solicitor, appalled at the thought of this blind old lady groping her way to the witness box and probably ending up on the magistrate’s bench instead, insisted that she remain at home. He got her off with a fine: to her own vast relief and the dismay of anyone likely to encounter her during her progresses at the wheel. ‘It’s like driving a swallow,’ she exclaimed after her first trial of a Mini – a comment which said as much about her technique as about the car itself. Somehow she always survived unscathed, in terms of life and limb unscathing too, though she tested the nerves of her grandson when she taught him how to drive. Aged eighty-six Diana drove herself to the north of Scotland and back again, an exploit which she threatened to repeat.

  Parking in London was a problem, but she relished the challenge of devising notes that would soften the heart of the traffic warden. ‘Dearest Warden,’ she wrote one afternoon when entertaining Artemis. ‘Have pity. Am taking sad child to cinemar.’ ‘Dearest Warden,’ read another note. ‘Front tooth broken off; look like 81-year-old pirate, so at dentist 19a. Very old – very lame – no metres.’ The last message of all had about it the ring of incipient triumph. ‘Dear Warden. Please try and be forgiving. I am 81 years old, very lame and in total despair. Never a metre! Back at 2.15. Waiting for promised Disabled Driver disc from County Hall.’ Benevolent authority provided the disc, and from then on she could park with impunity on spots even more outrageous than those she had used before.

  Though she rarely allowed it to interfere with her driving, let alone her social life, infirmities came thick and fast as she moved on into the eighties. ‘I’ve broken a rib by coughing and am clothed in inertia’; ‘I have broken my hands and cannot write’; her knee was drained of fluid for the second time in two months and rendered her temporarily a total cripple; ‘my thigh muscle has withered as it did in childhood. On my other side I’ve a lump of great pain in my wrist. Test match bowlers get it.’ Frail bones snapped with increasing ease, slipping when falling downstairs, stumbling over a stone when carrying Doggie and crashing full on her face rather than dropping the dog and using her hands to protect herself. Twice her nose was broken; the indignity of her appearance offending her more than the pain. Pain was something she had learned to live with and subdue. Once she broke a bone when her regular doctor was away and was visited by his keen, young stand-in.

  ‘I don’t want you!’ said Diana brusquely. ‘I want a pusher.’

  ‘But Lady Diana,’ protested the doctor, not keen on prescribing morphia or heroin or whatever it was his patient had in mind, ‘all you need is something to relieve your pain. Have you ever tried alcohol?’

  ‘Idiot!’ snapped Diana. ‘Don’t you know I’m an alcoholic?’

  She never was an alcoholic but she would take drink to quell pain, nerves or melancholy. Always she used a modicum of restraint in her indulgence. Once in the West Indies she was taken to dinner with Claudette Colbert, who had long wanted to meet this legendary figure. Her conversation made little sense and at one point she laid her face on the warm plate and seemed to pass out. ‘Elle s’endort?’ inquired Miss Colbert above the recumbent figure. ‘Certainly not,’ said Diana, rallying with dignity. ‘I never sleep at meals.’

  ‘No money left,’ she wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘weak at the knees, dragged painted face, dim eyes that veil many devastations, mustn’t groan.’ She had met George Brown at dinner the previous night, drunk as
the lord he was shortly to become, who said when he was told her name: ‘It can’t be!’ ‘“It can be,” I replied. “I tell you it can’t be.” He was then shuffled off by someone and never will I know if he meant, “Well done, keep it up!” or “That it should come to this!”’

  Her sight was a constant problem, particularly when driving. She had always found difficulty in recognizing her closest friends, indeed her reputation when young for insolent hauteur stemmed largely from her unavailing struggles to focus on whoever it was who was addressing her. Now she found it still more difficult, exacerbated by nerves when she knew that much was expected of her. Nigel Ryan was detailed to escort her to Buckingham Palace. Diana swept past the queue on the stairs, announcing that her leg would not let her stand, and rushed to a sofa in the corner. Nigel was told that it was his duty to warn her who was approaching. Since he knew few people there he was doubtful how helpful he would be, but said that he would do his best. A woman in white came over and said ‘Good evening, Diana. We meet tomorrow, I think.’ Diana’s hand tightened convulsively, a sure sign she needed help. Luckily Ryan could oblige; the woman in white was the Queen Mother.

  She did still worse at the concert at the Festival Hall in honour of Sir Robert Mayer’s hundredth birthday. There was a reception afterwards and Diana, looking neither to left nor right in fear of not recognizing someone she ought to know, was wandering towards the bar. She got into conversation with a friendly little woman who apparently knew her well. Only when she recognized the magnificent diamonds did she realize that she was talking to the Queen. Belatedly she sketched out an arthritic curtsey and blurted out: ‘Ma’am, O ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t recognize you without your crown!’ ‘It was so much Sir Robert’s evening that I decided to leave it behind,’ concluded the Queen sweetly.