In the raising of her three daughters – Marjorie, Violet (Letty) and Diana – Violet also raised eyebrows: she took the girls on regular trips to the London theatre and encouraged in them a precocious independence of spirit. Diana, the youngest, had been born in August 1892 and for several years had been a plain, but interestingly fanciful child. She’d imagined herself a ‘necromancer’, filling her bedroom with bottles that were ‘coloured and crusted with incandescent sediment from elixiral experiments’,5 and because her mother liked ‘only the beautiful in everything’6 she’d been encouraged in her fancies. The governesses who’d educated Diana and her sisters (their brother John was sent off to boarding school) had been instructed to skip over ‘commonplace’ subjects like mathematics and geography and focus instead on poetry, singing, embroidery and art.
History was also favoured, especially family history, and from childhood Diana’s imagination had been shaped by stories of her ancestral past and by the imposing enchantment of Belvoir Castle, the Rutland family home. From early childhood she had played among its castellated towers and labyrinthine passage-ways, its vaulted roomfuls of Gobelin tapestries and Dutch paintings.* She had grown up inside a privileged kingdom, buffered by centuries of entitlement. And despite the romantic informality of Violet’s influence, the amateur theatricals she organized, the artistic guests she entertained, Diana and her siblings knew both the glamour and the burden of feeling themselves to be a breed apart.
By the time she approached her fourteenth birthday Diana had developed into a pretty, spirited teenager, and the clarity of her pale skin and large blue eyes promised she might even become beautiful. That summer she was invited to holiday in Norfolk with the Beerbohm Trees and their three daughters; to her joy, a group of Oxford students were also staying in the same village. Maud and Herbert tolerantly gave permission for shared suppers and picnics, and for three weeks Diana revelled in the company of these clever, good-looking boys. There were games, quizzes and flirtations, during which she ‘showed off madly’, and she slipped out to the chemist for a bottle of peroxide to bleach her hair a silvery gold. Even though she felt she was ‘spinning plates’ in her desperate need to impress, she knew that among these boys she had found her métier.
Afterwards she wrote to one of them: ‘Brancaster was heavenly, wasn’t it. I nearly cried when I left. Do for pity’s sake let’s all meet again soon … When one makes friends, I think one ought to go on being friends hard and not let it drop.’7 Further letters were exchanged, there were meetings in the houses of mutual acquaintances and Diana, who had always been so passionately attached to family and home, now hugged to herself the knowledge that she had acquired a circle of her own friends. ‘I wanted first to be loved, and next I wanted to be clever,’ she recalled, and to make herself worthy of her boys she began begging her mother for lessons in Greek and music,* while alone in her bedroom she practised clever, romantic bon mots in front of her mirror.8
Inspired by vanity and hope, she matured fast. There were appalling blanks in her knowledge (it was left to Iris Tree, four years her junior, to give her the most basic instruction in the facts of life), yet Diana’s brain was teeming with poetry, impressions and ideas, and sometimes she could appear obnoxiously forward. One evening, playing after-dinner guessing games with her mother’s friends, she grew impatient with the slowness of one of the players. ‘Use your brain, Mr Balfour; use your brain,’ she snapped at him.9 He was the former prime minister and she was about fifteen.
When Diana met Vita Sackville-West at a country house party, she desperately envied the older girl for her literary talent. ‘She is an aristocrat, rollingly rich, who writes French poetry with more ease than I lie on a sofa.’10 Feeling that she had no extraordinary gifts of her own, she aimed instead to develop an extraordinary style. At Belvoir she painted her bedroom walls black to contrast with her crimson bedspread; she made artful groupings of candles, religious paintings and dried flowers; she also transformed her clothes. In 1907 ‘all things Greek’ were in fashion, and dutifully Diana experimented with sandals and draperies, pinning a silver crescent moon in her hair. Dissatisfied with the appearance of her naked feet she tugged hopefully at her second toe, attempting to induce a more ‘Grecian’ length. Her new bible was L’Art et la Mode, the French magazine to which her sisters subscribed, whose pages were filled with the revolutionary designs of Paul Poiret and Mariano Fortuny.
With a yearning intentness, she studied pictures of languid female models, their fascinatingly uncorseted bodies draped in silks and diaphanous gowns. She thrilled to the element of theatre in Poiret and Fortuny’s clothes, their jewel-bright colours and suggestive flavour of the Orient. Most British girls her age were still aspiring to the fresh and curvy style of the Gibson Girl – hair piled high, waist cinched tight to emphasize a full bosom – but Diana was determined that her new adult self should be far more avant-garde.
Around this time her mother was visited by the playwright Henri Bernstein and his companion Princess Murat. Diana was entranced by the Princess and her stories of sophisticated French society, which were ‘totally different from anything we knew’,11 and she was even more entranced by her wardrobe. Obligingly, the Princess allowed Diana to examine her Fortuny dresses, created from brilliantly coloured, exquisitely pleated silk that shimmered to the touch. But what Diana coveted most was the Princess’s Poiret-designed tunic, and she was determined to make a copy. It was a simple enough design for Diana’s schoolroom sewing skills, and the result was so successful that she made others to sell to her friends, each with a different trim of ribbon, braid or fur. It proved to be a profitable enterprise and Diana squirrelled away the cash she earned: despite the family’s ancestral wealth, the Manners children received no pocket money of their own.
Diana continued adding to her wardrobe, designing clothes that were sometimes eccentrically experimental, but to her eyes rivetingly modish. As she refashioned her appearance, however, she became self-consciously critical of her figure. These new fluid fashions from Europe were liberating women from the corset, but they followed the line of the body so closely that they imposed a new tyranny. ‘Banting’ or ‘slenderizing’ were becoming de rigueur, and when Diana studied herself in the mirror she despaired at the ‘round, white, slow, lazy and generally … unappetising blancmange’ she saw reflected there.12
Edwardian Britain was collectively embracing the idea of physical fitness. Cycling, golf, tennis and bathing were much in vogue, part of the brisk tempo of the new century, but Diana’s regime of self-improvement was unusually strenuous. She went for long runs around the grounds of Belvoir, jigged furiously to the gramophone – a precious acquisition given to her by the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba – and pounded away at an old punch bag. The following year she discovered a more creative discipline in dancing. London was newly inspired by Isadora Duncan, the radical American dancer who had become as famous for performing barefoot and uncorseted as she had become for the unfettered, expressive beauty of her movements. Feminism, fashion and the theatre all reflected Duncan’s influence, and it was to a performance of one of her many imitators, Maud Allan, that Violet took Diana in 1908.
This was, in many ways, an odd choice for a mother and daughter outing, given the rumours that circulated around Allan, about her past career as a lingerie model, about her publication of a sex manual and about her many lovers, male and female. In addition, the solo she was dancing in London, The Vision of Salome, was a work of quite blatant eroticism. Wearing little but a transparent harem skirt and jewel-encrusted breastplate, Allan portrayed the seductive powers of her heroine with a sensuality that was advertised as more shocking than anything seen on the London stage. Publicity pamphlets circulated by the Palace Theatre promised a performance of unbridled passion: ‘desire … perverse and amoral flames from her eyes and bursts in hot gusts from her scarlet mouth’; her body undulates ‘like a silver snake eager for its prey’.13
Most deviant would be the climactic scene in wh
ich Allan toyed with the severed head of John the Baptist, kissing it slowly and lasciviously on the lips. To some viewers Allan was nothing more than a burlesque dancer with artistic pretensions, but to others she was a potent cultural force. The latest in a line of Salome interpreters – following on from Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’s opera – she was regarded as a beautifully perverse and amoral rebuttal of Victorian prudery. To her many thousands of female fans she offered an intoxicatingly public representation of their sexuality.
In Edwardian Britain, certainly in the world that Diana inhabited, the eroticism of women remained discreetly masked – the theories of Havelock Ellis had yet to be widely read and Marie Stopes’s revelatory advice on love and orgasm had yet to be written. For those who knew, or suspected themselves of sharing, Allan’s liberated tastes, it was nearly impossible to declare themselves. While lesbians were technically not outside the law (Queen Victoria had refused to believe that women could be lovers, and never approved a law to criminalize female homosexuality) it was difficult, even dangerous, for them to reveal their sexual preference in public.
Allan’s Salome, a woman brazenly in control of her own desires, became a coded rallying point. Women staged private parties in which they dressed up and danced in imitation of Allan’s voluptuous style (the male orchestras accompanying them remained discreetly hidden behind potted palms). When an American commentator noted that Allan had encouraged a dangerous tendency towards ‘bohemianism and dancing in London’, his more knowing readers picked up the sexual subtext – Margot Asquith, wife of the prime minister, was rumoured to be one of Allan’s lovers. A decade later, when an extreme right-wing politician, Noel Pemberton Billing, embarked on a crusade to expose degenerate and unpatriotic elements within the British aristocracy, he accused Allan of spreading ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ among the nation’s women.
The Duchess was certainly not part of that cult, nor would she hear talk of it. As a general rule she shrank from anything she considered vulgar; when she suspected her oldest daughter Marjorie of using cosmetics (still frowned on before the war) she could not even bring herself to utter the word rouge, merely touching her finger interrogatively to her daughter’s cheek. In art, however, Violet saw only beauty. And when she encouraged Diana to return to Allan’s performances she was simply imagining her daughter being inspired to imitate Allan’s expressive grace.
Diana was eager to try, and the following year she enrolled in classes to study Russian folk dance and classical ballet.* The unfamiliar discipline made her legs ache and her toes hurt, but she liked the new alertness of her body, and most of all the slender shape it was acquiring. By 1911 she had acquired the confidence to pose semi-naked for her brother John, who was a keen amateur photographer. Although she had her back to the camera, the mirror held up to her face plainly revealed her identity. Diana Manners, looking slender, elegant and defiantly self-possessed.
Diana’s programme of self-improvement was yielding results, but the world around her was proving harder to shape to her imagination. By the time she’d reached seventeen she’d become furiously irritated by her childish status: she could not yet put up her hair, go to dances, or see any of her friends without the elaborate organization of parents or governesses. Her Oxford boys were graduating into the real world, and Diana’s longing to join them was inscribed over and over again in her diary: ‘Only one year before I’ll be out – and – out OUT.’14
But coming ‘out’ did not provide the excitement she’d hoped for. The 1910 season was unusually muted, as the death of King Edward VII led to a suspension of court functions, including the formal presentation of debutantes.† Far more disappointing, however, were the people in whose company Diana found herself, during what proved to be a very long and very dull summer.
Most of her fellow debutantes were raw, shy girls: ‘innocent of powder … deplorably dressed, with their shapeless wispy hair held by crooked combs’.15 Most of the young men before whom they were being paraded as possible wives, seemed to her equally awkward and insipid. Diana’s ideal had been formed by the men in her Oxford circle: Alan Parsons, Raymond Asquith and Patrick Shaw Stewart, who were clever, funny and read poetry. None of the Guards officers, viscounts or earls with whom she danced that summer could compare.
Neither did they come close to inspiring the rapture Diana experienced when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes came to London the following June. She’d been spellbound by the sinuous choreography and haunting music of works like Scheherazade and by the blazing colour of Léon Bakst’s stage designs: here at least, she felt, the world aligned itself with her most brilliant imaginings. In 1912, when she saw the Russian opera, led by the majestic singing of Feodor Chaliapin, it was as if ‘comets whizzed across the unfamiliar sky, the stars danced’.16
That summer, too, Diana discovered another kind of theatre. She and her mother were in Venice and had become acquainted with the fabulously rich and eccentric Marchesa Luisa Casati. The Marchesa lived in a curious, low palazzo* on the Grand Canal, surrounded by a darkly overgrown garden and a menagerie of animals; and the extravagant style in which she held court was, for Diana, a ‘glorious shock’17 to her imagination.
When she and the Duchess were invited to their first party at the palazzo, they were ferried there in one of Casati’s gondolas. A pair of near-naked slaves met them on arrival, one throwing oil onto a brazier to send a flare of greeting into the night sky, the other ringing a massive gong. Casati, a modern Medusa with a death-white mask of powder and red, hennaed curls, was also waiting on the Palazzo terrace. Posing with statuesque grace in the middle of an enormous bowl of tuberoses, she silently handed a waxen flower to each guest in turn.
After the predictable formalities of English entertaining, this decadent spectacle was miraculous to Diana. It was everything for which she had hungered whilst drinking fruit cup and dancing quadrilles during her season. Yet even London was finally beginning to catch up with her fantasies. There were changes stirring in the city, a breath of cosmopolitan energy that came with the first exhibition of post-impressionist paintings, with the radical psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, and, infinitely more exciting to Diana, the appearance of a new kind of nightclub.
The Cave of the Golden Calf, a tiny basement just off Regent Street, fashionably decorated with Ballets Russes-inspired murals, was one of several establishments that opened in 1912 that offered a doorway to the modern world. Negro bands played music that was alive with the exoticism of America – the honking stridency of St Louis; the twang of the plantation South; the yearning echo of the blues. Cocktails such as Pink Ladies were served and women were not only encouraged to drink openly, but to wear lipstick, gamble and smoke. Diana was in her element. She might have had to bribe or trick her chaperone of the evening, but once inside the smoky darkness, she felt free. Crowded onto the dance floor of a club she could abandon herself to the rhythms of the Turkey Trot or Grizzly Bear, ragtime dances that jerked invisible wires inside her body, made her hips sway and her cheeks flush. Skirts were being worn shorter this season, a few inches from the floor, and as Diana danced she noted with pride the discreet flash of her own silk-stockinged ankles.
She was equally proud of her new expertise as a smoker, although like many women she was addicted less to the head rush of nicotine than to the elegance of her cigarette holder – an accessory designed to prevent flecks of tobacco catching on painted lips, yet ripe with the flirtatious possibilities of a fan. Late at night, when the sky was just beginning to lighten and Diana drove home in a taxi with one of her admirers, the driver would often be instructed to take a detour, as she very decorously allowed herself to be kissed.
Such activities would have been considered distressingly compromising by Violet – and that, for Diana, was largely the point. Her desire to become ‘incomparable’ was no longer coloured by her mother’s standards; she wanted to be bold and bad – ‘Unlike-Other-People’.18 As she remembered it, ‘There was a general new look in
everything in those years before the first war – a Poiret-Bakst blazon and a budding freedom of behaviour that was breaking out at the long last end of Victorianism. We felt it and revelled in it.’19
On the nights that Diana was able to escape her chaperones there was not only dancing in the Golden Calf, but illegal, moonlit swims in the Serpentine or the Thames; expeditions to pubs in the Limehouse docks and the occasional weaving ride on the back of a motorbike. Her new sacred texts were by Aubrey Beardsley, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, and on their inspiration, she and her friends began calling themselves, with only a hint of irony, the Corrupt Coterie. They coveted new sensations and transgressive ideas whilst affecting a style of cynicism and profanity: ‘Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling.’20
In reality much of the Coterie’s behaviour was little more than cultivated naughtiness. They invented after-dinner games, like Breaking the News – acting out scenes in which well-known women were informed of the deaths of their children. They staged exhibitionist stunts: Denis Anson faked epileptic fits; Maurice Baring set his hair alight during games of Risk; while Diana herself braved official censure by attending a formal reception at the Duke of Westminster’s with a set of fake medals pinned mockingly to her dress.
These mild acts of rebellion, however, brought a euphoric sense of daring and also a degree of public notoriety. The fact that several members of the Coterie had eminent parents made them very interesting to the press, and Lady Diana Manners was most interesting of all. Inwardly she might feel herself to be a ‘blancmange’, unable to match the cleverness and originality of her friends, but outwardly she seemed to scintillate. In a roomful of people it was Diana who held the floor in after-dinner games of charades or parentage, who galvanized everybody into impromptu dances to the gramophone, who scattered smart nonsense around the conversation.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 3