The same test naturally applied to any performer hoping to be hired by any of the venues in central Manhattan, who were also cashing in on ‘the negro vogue’. The Plantation Club, located just above the Winter Garden Theater, was typical. Meticulously refurbished in a faux Southern style, it boasted a painted décor of cotton plants and watermelons, a white picket fence around the dance floor and a ‘black Mama’ cooking waffles in a log cabin. A changing roster of black acts played there, with headlining stars including Florence Mills and Ethel Waters. The clientele, of course, were white.
When Josephine arrived in Harlem, the revue playing at the Plantation was Tan Town Topics. Not only did she manage to get hired, she was sufficiently well established to get her own featured billing as ‘the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville’. She was pleased with her new job, and also with the young actor Ralph Cooper, who had become her New York boyfriend. Ralph was handsome and amusing, and the fact that he was working temporarily as a chauffeur meant he frequently had a car in which he could pick Josephine up from the Plantation and drive her around Manhattan. She felt like a queen, roaring through the hot dusty nights in her ruffled taffeta frocks, fake pearl necklaces and big hats.
Once she stepped out of Ralph’s car, however, everything was different. Central Manhattan was still aggressively white. As a black woman, Josephine was unable go into a 5th Avenue store and try on a hat, or choose where she wanted to sit in a theatre. Even at the Plantation Club she only felt secure onstage. White men, and some white women, came to the club expecting to take away a black dancer for the night, and once again Josephine found herself in a situation where she was expected to oblige. It was a brutal reminder of the limits she faced as a black chorus girl, a reminder that however hard she worked on her stage technique, however rigorously she bleached her skin with lemon juice, she was still essentially bracketed alongside the ‘hot chocolates’ and ‘tantalizin’ tans’.
She yearned for real distinction. America’s decade of Flaming Youth had swept so many others to fame: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Tallulah Bankhead, Clara Bow and a host of other flapper actresses. It had made gods of black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But the only black women that Josephine knew who had risen to eminence were singers like Florence Mills, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. These performers topped the bill of every revue or vaudeville show in which they appeared; they were nationally famous, their voices heard on the record players and radios that were becoming household staples, yet a dancer had no equivalent opportunity for fame and money. Within the formulaic conventions of American show business, the best Josephine could hope for was an occasional solo and her featured spot at the end of the chorus line.
* * *
That summer, however, she was offered a completely new platform – in Paris. Josephine had been too young to register America’s entry into the European war, but it was to have a profound impact on her, given the craze for jazz and ragtime that the American forces imported with them to France. Many of the black musicians who’d fought there had opted to remain, rightly seeing it as a more liberal alternative to home.* Within a couple of years their music had spread through the clubs of Montmartre and into the bars and hotels of smart white neighbourhoods. In 1920 the song ‘Jazz Partout’ announced, ‘There are jazz bands by day, by night/There are jazz bands everywhere’.22 Even classical composers like Stravinsky and Auric were entranced by black music, and its hold on the city was confirmed when the Prince of Wales went on a tour of Montmartre and demanded a collection of jazz records to take back home.
By 1925 white French musicians were complaining of a ‘black peril’. According to one newspaper, they were happy to ‘do that jazzin’ themselves’, but were routinely told by dance hall managers to ‘call again when you have changed the colour of your skin’.23 There was a view in France that only black musicians could embrace the soul of jazz, its quintessential modernity and its Dionysiac spirit. Nor did this premium on blackness end with jazz. In the wake of Pablo Picasso’s absorption of African influences into his art, much of French culture embraced a new black aesthetic. The spectacular Exposition des Arts Décoratifs that opened in the spring of 1925 featured an entire section dedicated to African sculpture, celebrating the vibrancy of its line and its expressive simplicity of form. African motifs appeared in textiles, in ceramics, in jewellery. Even black boxers were deemed to embody a primitive visceral nobility. Jean Cocteau, the ultimate aesthete, wrote the libretto of a ballet, Le boeuf sur le toit, which was set in a speakeasy and had a boxer as a lead character. He also opened a nightclub with the same name and theme.
Black culture was also in the sights of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the modernist theatre which had held the violently controversial premiere of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring back in 1913 and had also been home to the avante-garde company Les Ballets Suédois. In 1925, its impresario, Rolf de Maré, had the idea of importing music-hall acts into the theatre, channelling a fashionable mix of the high and low brow that was currently so dear to Paris. It was while de Maré was scouting for suitable material that the painter Fernand Léger is said to have offered him a critical piece of advice: ‘Get Negroes. They’re dynamite.’24
It was through Léger, too, that de Maré was put in touch with an American woman living in Paris, who was regarded as a ‘negro’ expert. Caroline Dudley had been raised on French novels, impressionist paintings and an unusually liberal world view. Her father had invited black friends to the family’s Chicago house, and had taken his daughters to black vaudeville shows. Now living in Paris with her diplomat husband, Caroline Dudley had already been toying with the idea of bringing over a troupe of black dancers and musicians, convinced that they would ‘amaze, flabbergast [and] dumbfound’ the public.25
Once she was offered the resources of de Maré and his producer André Daven, her idea became practicable, and in July she sailed to New York, looking for talent for what was already being called La Revue Nègre. Her ambitions were high: she wanted to sign up a top-ranking singer, such as Florence Mills or Ethel Waters, to lead her cast. When both those women demanded fees that far exceeded her budget, Caroline had to rethink, however. And it was on a visit to the Plantation Club that she observed a dancer who ‘stood out like an exclamation point’, and became convinced she had found her star.
Others disputed her judgement. Louis Douglas, who was already hired as a choreographer and dancer for the revue, believed that Paris would not be impressed by Josephine. Her dancing was too eccentric, and her voice wasn’t strong enough to be of any use in the singing numbers. Even less enthusiastic about the plan was Josephine herself. She was very suspicious of Mrs Dudley, who came to see Josephine in her dressing room. She was a tiny birdlike woman, yet her intensity was alarming. She gazed at Josephine, her voice filled with emotion as she described the importance of bringing black art to America. Josephine wasn’t used to talking about art, nor was she used to producers – the people with money and power – being female. Warily she wondered if Caroline Dudley was going to try and get her alone and jump her bones.
Her reluctance also stemmed from a fear of the unknown. Ambitious as she was, part of her was still a little girl from the ghetto. Josephine was unable to project her dreams all the way across the Atlantic to a foreign city, whose language she couldn’t speak and whose people she knew nothing about. With untypical and largely mendacious sentimentality, she told Caroline that she couldn’t possibly think of going to Paris and leaving her boyfriend Ralph.
Undeterred, Caroline returned to the Plantation night after night. She spun enticing images of the success Josephine would enjoy and promised her a weekly wage of $250, double her current earnings. She half promised that Josephine might even sing a serious number or two in the revue. What tipped the negotiations, however, was Josephine’s helpless craving for lovely things. One night Caroline arrived at the club wearing a Chinese-style coat, richly embroidered with gold thread. Josephine thought it beautiful, and when she asked
Caroline if she could have it, the older woman spotted her moment. She handed over the coat immediately, and by 15 September Josephine was due to board the SS Berengaria to France.
If Tallulah had felt as though she were travelling to Mars when she prepared to cross the Atlantic two years earlier, Josephine was no less stricken. She had never experienced a terror like it, recalling that it ‘grasped my brain, my heart, my guts with such force that everything came apart’.26 Yet she also knew the value of fresh starts. As she packed her clothes for Paris, she put aside all the letters and notes she had saved, the photographs, the tributes from fans – any memento that connected to her American life. All of them were thrown out with the garbage. When Josephine arrived in France, she was determined to leave the past behind and take only the future with her.
Chapter Seven
DIANA
Josephine’s voyage to Europe was a professional break for freedom, but when Diana had crossed the Atlantic two years earlier it was America itself that seemed a land of possibility. In New York, where she was due to play in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle, the air wasn’t clouded by issues of family and duty. Even though her name and title would bring box office dollars to Reinhardt’s production, America didn’t really care about the nuances of the British class system. If Lady Diana Cooper wanted to go down the extraordinary route of supporting her husband financially, and do so by appearing onstage, no one would suggest she was demeaning herself. If she wanted to economize by dining on corned beef hash in a cafeteria, she could do so without eliciting Chinese whispers of gossip and comment.
At the end of the war, battling to gain her independence and marry Duff, such freedom had been unimaginable to Diana. On the evening of Armistice Day, as she and Duff had sat together and mourned the wasted lives of their friends, she had sworn to go home and tell her parents, finally, that they were engaged. Yet it was very hard for her. She knew that the Duchess continued to hope for a more elevated match – the sight of Diana in animated conversation with the Prince of Wales could still squeeze Violet’s heart with anguished expectation. And partly because she loved her mother, partly because she feared the violence of her disappointment, Diana quailed like a child at the thought of confronting her.
For days she dithered in nervous paralysis, until her friend Viola Tree – now married to Alan Parsons – took pity on her and offered to tell the Duchess herself. Diana despised herself as she hid cravenly in her bedroom, but the scene that broke out was as bad as she had feared. Her mother’s voice could be heard throughout the entire house, railing against ‘that awful Duff’, and declaring she would rather see her youngest daughter dead from cancer than waste her life on a man of such mediocre character and prospects.1
Part of the problem was Violet’s inability to believe that Diana actually loved Duff. Natural reticence had always prevented Diana from saying so, and when her mother challenged her to declare her feelings she was too angry and embarrassed to respond. Choked by her own emotions and trapped by her mother’s demands, Diana felt isolated within her own family and turned to her old morphine habit for relief.
Nonetheless, she could match her mother for stubbornness, and as the weeks passed Diana never wavered – if she couldn’t have Duff she would marry no one else. This was her trump card, and she knew it. The idea of Diana remaining a spinster was even more horrific to the Duchess than the idea of her being Duff’s wife, and after a wretched family Christmas at Belvoir, the war of attrition slowly turned Diana’s way. By April she’d wrung an agreement from her exhausted parents that she and Duff would be married that June.
It was the most grudging acceptance. Diana might not marry with a ‘ducal curse’ hanging over her head, as Cassell’s Saturday Journal had predicted,2 but the £300* annual allowance that her father settled on her was far less generous than Duff had hoped. The wedding arrangements were made in an awkward spirit, as Diana later bleakly recalled: ‘My five weeks of engagement were a little sad. My father chose 2 June for the wedding [because] he wanted to get away for Whitsuntide, before the trains were too crowded.’3
Yet if Diana minded her family’s lack of enthusiasm, the British press were effusive. Positive news stories were hard to find that spring, as post-war recession and the ravages of Spanish flu loaded misery onto an already wearied nation. When the engagement was announced at the beginning of May, photographs of the couple covered the entire front page of the Daily Sketch. On the wedding day itself, the public reacted as though it were almost a state event.
Groups of the curious and expectant had begun gathering in Arlington Street early that morning, and by the time Diana and her father left to drive the short distance to St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, mounted police had to clear a path through the crowd. The Duke was not a celebratory mood, ‘his temper was short and his gills were white and his top hat had no jauntiness’.4 The mob made him testier still. ‘What in the name of heaven is it all about,’ he protested as the car inched through the throng, apparently amazed by his daughter’s popularity.5
Thousands more were waiting outside the church. Many were journalists and photographers, but many were ordinary women, who having followed Diana’s activities in the society pages now felt a possessive interest in her wedding. They were avid for every detail: the bride’s dress (made of delicate gold lamé and flowered lace); the floral decorations (rose bushes and orchids, donated from the gardens of Blenheim Palace); the celebrity of the arriving guests. Also the astonishing hoard of presents that Diana and Duff were said to have received: cheques from the Aga Khan and George Moore*, diamond jewellery from the Royal Family, chests of fine linen, antique dinner services, rare books and paintings, and a brand-new car from the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook.
It was deemed by the public to be a very satisfactory event. Yet while Diana recalled that the ‘day had no shadow’, in some of the photographs her face registered more tension than joy.6 The last six months had been difficult for her, and there had been an alarming moment outside the church when a man had seemed on the point of attacking her, although he was simply trying to hand her a letter. Like Zelda, she was exulting in her new freedom and the knowledge that she ‘need never lie again’,7 but she was also fearful about what married life would be like.
At twenty-six Diana no longer really understood why she was still a virgin. Sexual frustration made Duff quarrelsome, and she acknowledged that her resistance to him was timid, even perverse. Yet she had been schooled by her mother to believe that virginity was a security to be given up only for a wedding ring, and deeper than that belief lay the fears of her own sexual adequacy. Diana’s suspicion that she might be less physically responsive than other women made her terrified of disappointing Duff.
A decade later she would remember her wedding night as a momentous emotional transition. In bed with Duff she was overtaken by a welter of conflicting sensations: ‘Nervous unhappy and elated feeling – as well as desirous too and extremely conscious of sex.’8 She felt that she had finally become a woman, and that knowledge made the whole of their month-long honeymoon idyllic to her. Duff was apparently just as happy. The sight of his new wife, walking naked in the moonlight in the grounds of their Italian villa, struck him with poetic awe, and he claimed it was ‘the most beautiful sight’ in Europe. He was, however, more guarded in his sexual rapture. In his diary he noted that their wedding night had been ‘very old-fashioned and conventional’,9 and only a few days later he caught himself lusting after another woman – a pattern that would continue throughout their marriage.
When they returned home it was to a temporary period of limbo. They needed to find a house of their own that they could both love and afford,* and they were set back for several months by Diana breaking her leg and having to remain bedridden in Arlington Street. But in March 1920 they discovered a suitable house to rent in Bloomsbury. Even if their richer friends considered 90 Gower Street to be quaintly ‘tiny’ and eccentrically far off the social map, for the next twenty years it was
the Coopers’ home, along with their ‘skeleton’ staff of five servants (Diana’s maid, Katie Wade; Duff’s manservant, Holbrook; plus a cook, housemaid and scullery maid).
Diana liked being poised between Belgravia and bohemia. She began to entertain at Gower Street, regrouping writers, painters, musicians and young politicians into a new version of the Coterie. The more wayward of her guests, the transvestite Prince Yusopov (also a friend of Tamara’s) and Curtis Moffat (Iris Tree’s American husband) gave her a pleasing frisson of modernity, even if Duff tended to disapprove. In 1919, when Moffat had dined with them at Arlington Street, Duff had been annoyed when the artist not only ‘forgot’ to dress for dinner, but produced a ‘new wonderful drug’ (possibly cocaine), which was supposed to produce ‘a thousand queer effects’.10
Set against the bohemians were their wealthy friends, who subsidized the Coopers to an amazingly generous degree. Dinners, theatre and opera tickets and holidays abroad were offered as a matter of course, and in July 1923, when Diana hosted a summer party, it was Max Beaverbrook and several others who paid for the food and drink, while the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the singer Feodor Chaliapin entertained the guests for free. Among all those who hoped for invitations, Gower Street appeared a world away from the suburban drabness that Diana’s mother had so gloomily prophesied for her.
It was Max Beaverbrook’s generous wedding gift of a car that also allowed Diana the dangerous luxury of driving. Cars were not yet commonplace in Britain – just 250,000 were on the roads in 1919 – and few of their owners possessed much aptitude or experience.* Diana herself was almost as feckless behind the wheel as Mrs Stitch, the character she would inspire in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop. The day she rammed straight into a milk cart, she found it both hilarious and wonderful that the owner of a pet shop opposite had to send out his dogs to lick up the spillage.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 22