Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  This image became a true reflection of their life together, but during the early years of their marriage there were many times when Diana winced and raged over Duff’s infidelities. He tried to conceal them, lying to her and even lying to himself about their number and variety. But jealousy sharpened Diana’s instincts. In 1920 when Duff began seeing Diana Capel (widow of Boy Capel, Coco Chanel’s former lover), Diana scented it almost immediately. Humiliated by the fact that this Diana was one of her friends, she turned on Duff with a ferocity that detonated into one of the worst quarrels of their marriage: she hated him for the humiliation he brought her, and even more for making her doubt their happiness together.

  When she could approve his choice of mistress, Diana tried to affect a benign indifference, but some of his women caused her profound offence. Daisy Fellowes, the expensive, competitive socialite with whom Duff had an on-off affair for many years, struck her as especially repugnant, a ‘silly giggling gawky lecherous bit of dross’.25 Duff, interestingly, was almost as dismayed by this attraction as Diana. He was fascinated by Daisy’s fashionable air of depravity. As the niece of Winnaretta Singer (the Princesse de Polignac), and an heiress to the Singer fortune, Daisy was notorious across Europe for the extravagance of her sexual and social adventures.* One evening when she was alone with Duff, she smoked an opium pipe and offered to ‘indulge [his] every fancy’, but the excesses of what followed induced in him a spasm of self-disgust.26 He was old-fashioned in so many ways, especially in his sexual double standards. If Diana was his necessary angel, Daisy was his whore.

  What Diana found hardest to bear was her own jealousy. She regarded it as a contemptible emotion, demeaning the modern and exemplary marriage to which she aspired. Yet sex remained her most vulnerable area. However momentous her wedding night had been, it hadn’t been as sensually liberating as she’d hoped. She still preferred the decorous games of flirtation to the actual reality of bed. Only in these did she feel truly confident, not only with Duff but with the dozens of other men who continued to hover round her. St John Hutchinson and Alan Parsons – ‘the boys’ from her pre-war circle – remained devoted, as did numerous older admirers, including the singer Feodor Chaliapin and Max Beaverbook, whom Diana found very compelling: ‘A strange attractive gnome with an odour of genius about him. He was an impact, a great excitement to me.’27

  However, her physical attachment to these men remained minimal, and during her most vulnerable moments, she wondered if she’d been born without the natural instincts and appetites of other women. Even if Diana didn’t care to read the writings of Freud, Marie Stopes or Havelock Ellis, their sexual terminology was much batted around at some of the parties she attended. People talked of orgasm and a healthy libido as essential to the pursuit of happiness and enlightenment: frigidity implied a kind of failure that Diana would surely have shrunk from applying to herself.

  Certainly every time Duff was with another woman it made her question herself, and her sexual uncertainties channelled into other physical fears. In the summer of 1920, she became morbidly convinced that a tumour was forming in her breast. The mysterious illness that had kept her bedridden for months as a child had marked her with a liftime’s tendency to hypochondria. But more justifiably she was also worried about her fertility. While neither Diana nor Duff were impatient to disrupt their busy lives with babies, as the months passed she still showed no signs of conceiving. Eventually she was diagnosed with a fibroid growth in her uterus, which could have been inhibiting a viable pregnancy, but she was too fearful to be operated on and instead persuaded Duff to take her on a tonic cure in the French Pyrenees, including a superstitious detour to Lourdes.

  Her support during this period was not so much Duff as drink and morphine. She’d started using the drug regularly again after breaking her leg in the summer of 1919 – she’d fallen through a skylight while watching a firework display – and by the time she’d progressed beyond any medical excuse for it she’d become emotionally dependent. Duff hated to see her withdraw into the glassy unnatural calm of her narcotic trance, yet for Diana it was a precious world away from the underlying confusion of her feelings for Duff. She was trying to make her marriage work in a sane and loving way, and accommodating his affairs felt like the modern thing to do. Even so it went against her romanticism and her determination to have something more precious than the pragmatic and unpassionate union for which her mother had settled. Like Zelda and many other young women of her generation, Diana was in experimental emotional terrain, and at moments it felt lonely.

  When she and Duff finally docked in New York in early December, the roiling, noisy strangeness of the city thrust aside her private concerns. A mob of journalists was waiting with a blinding assault of magnesium bulbs and a barrage of questions. ‘Was it true that Diana had just spent weeks in a convent to prepare for the part of the Madonna?’ ‘What did she think of Carmi?’ ‘Did she know whether she or her rival would appear on the opening night?’ Most of these questions had been planted by Gest, who had also telegraphed instructions during the voyage about how she should reply, including one ridiculous assertion that she’d had a dream in which God had told her that it must be she not Carmi who played the Madonna first.

  Diana had no intention of repeating such nonsense; what she didn’t know was how dogged Gest could be in pursuit of publicity. He had already been feeding fantastical stories about her and Carmi to the press, casting Diana as an heiress in possession of $10 million and a retinue of seventy servants and Carmi as the grand wife of an exiled Georgian prince (Carmi’s husband George Matchabelli was, in truth, a very minor royal whose main claim to fame would be the range of perfumes he launched in 1924). And before the New York season was out, Diana would be subject to several more of Gest’s stunts.

  For now the journalists were satisfied, and she and Duff were free to drive across the city to their hotel, the Ambassador on Park Avenue. Nothing Diana had read about New York, none of photographs she had seen, had prepared her for the arrogant scale of the city’s skyscrapers, or for the hectic activity in the streets below, the clattering crowds, the smoky press of motor cars, the noise and variety of the food and drink vendors. Duff, who stayed in New York for a week, never cared for it. ‘If it has beauty it is not the kind that leaps to the eye,’ he wrote.28 Unable to get the measure of the city’s dynamic, he thought it frantic and boorish, and inevitably the Prohibition laws filled him with contempt. It seemed unbelievable that any civilized place should prevent him from drinking anything stronger than coffee with his dinner. His outrage was barely appeased by the kindness of Cole Porter, whom he and Diana had met in Venice that summer, and who sent a crate of bourbon to their suite along with the key to a personal ‘liquor locker’ maintained by a mutual friend at the Knickerbocker Club.

  Diana’s curiosity was far more deeply stirred. Their penthouse suite at the Ambassador was a marvel to her – ‘the crystal New York sky a background to our high-perched luxury’29 – and she couldn’t get enough of modern American amenities: dial telephones that needed no operator, a press-button radio with a choice of channels from Buffalo to Chicago, a ‘Frigid Air’ machine that made ‘ice by electricity’; cafeterias ‘where you can see what you eat before you eat it’, and a non-alcoholic ‘highball’ served in her local drugstore that still contrived to make her feel wonderfully intoxicated, ‘an effect more powerful and delightful than anything I ever tasted’.30

  Compared to London, New York displayed an overweening confidence in its own success. In his essay on the jazz age, Scott Fitzgerald would describe post-war America as a nation serviced by ‘great filling stations full of money’, and Diana likewise saw New York as a city ‘paved with gold’, its population engaged in heedless, happy pursuit of ‘a fur coat or a better car’.31 The blatant materialism of the culture fascinated her: after a life attuned to the minutiae of British social stratification, she found a wonderful frankness in its overruling principles of money and meritocracy. The people she met see
med more interested in the commercial value of her title than its dignity, and that was a kind of liberation.

  Even so, when Duff sailed for London on 7 December, Diana found it hard not to take the next boat after him: ‘My heart seems to tear my body with pain for the loss of you,’ she wrote the following day.32 She doubted her ability to find friends among the huge crowd of cast and crew she’d encountered at her first rehearsal, all apparently indifferent as they went about their business or jostled for warmth around the wooden stove that provided the only heating in the hall. Yet, within a few days, Diana surprised herself by the degree to which she became absorbed in this new world of ‘rehearsals and stage jargon and the palpitating interest of “shop” ’.33

  It made every difference to her that, in contrast to Blackton’s film set, The Miracle was directed by an artist. ‘I was learning from the master of masters and falling in love with him,’ Diana wrote, and she was determined to be worthy of him.34 She had to unlearn the techniques she had acquired for the camera and acquire new skills for the stage; her toughest challenge was building up sufficient stamina for the first forty-five minutes of the production, in which she portrayed the motionless statue of the Madonna before she comes to life. Although Diana was supported by a plaster cast that mimicked the stone drapery of the Madonna’s robe, her muscles cramped with the effort of remaining completely still and her face grew stiff with the effort of projecting an other-worldly emotion.

  Diana worked hard, concentrating on Reinhardt’s points of direction. He rarely offered praise, but she was jubilant when the maestro’s assistant confirmed how surprised and impressed he was by the speed of her progress, and that compliment was confirmed when Reinhardt asked her to learn the role of the Nun, so that she could cover for the first-cast actress Rosamond Pinchot. Diana worried that she would not have the energy for both – the Nun’s voyage into worldly temptation led her on a frenetic whirl through tavern and street scenes – but she took a dogged pride in her own professionalism and refused to complain when rehearsals dragged on until four in the morning. She also tolerated, as best she could, the increasingly ridiculous publicity circus being orchestrated by Gest.

  The opening of The Miracle had been delayed by technical difficulties, and Gest was worried about sustaining the buzz of interest. As part of his press campaign, he planned a ‘public draw’ at which the issue of the Madonna’s casting would ‘finally’ be resolved. In truth, he and Reinhardt had already settled that Diana would take the role on opening night, but the draw was still a humiliating farce. Carmi arrived calculatedly late, looking ‘terribly flash in black and diamonds’, and in front of two dozen journalists and photographers she proceeded to patronize and belittle Diana with her diva airs.35 It shook Diana’s confidence, already undermined by flutters of stage fright, and by the time the show was finally ready to open on 15 January, she’d sunk into a ‘haunted desperate’ state of nerves.36

  Gest knew what he was doing, though. The first night of The Miracle received a full New York ovation, with flowers covering the stage and the audience standing to cheer for fifteen minutes. Thirty of the bouquets were for Diana alone. And even if the first reviews were largely obsessed with production trivia – such as the quantity of electric cable that had been required – tributes came from elsewhere. The impresario Charles Cochran, who had first presented The Miracle in London, cabled Duff: ‘Wife’s performance exquisitely beautiful unquestionable work of sensitive artist.’37 Valentine Castlerosse, later to became famous as a columnist for the Sunday Express, wrote, ‘It is ridiculous for me to try and describe the effect that Diana has on this enormous crowd. She holds them tight, tortures them, frightens them … lifts the whole thing to the sublime.’38

  News of her success spread beyond the theatre. When she attended a Manhattan charity ball, the entire room stood up to cheer her arrival; journalists came to her dressing room asking questions about her taste in men and fashion, and about her views on the United States; articles that she (and Duff) had written back in London were recycled in the American press. From the autumn of 1924, when The Miracle embarked on a nationwide tour, Diana was greeted with similar levels of adulation. She was guest of honour at galas and women’s club luncheons, and at a Drama League function, society women filed past to shake her hand, while speeches were made comparing her to Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. In Cincinnati she spoke on the radio and was heard by an audience of over 20 million.

  Diana was an intriguing novelty. She looked like a contemporary flapper, with her modern clothes, short hair and scarlet mouth, and she was reputed to behave like one, drinking, smoking and staying out late at parties. On the other hand she had none of the calculated sexiness of Louise Brooks, the working-girl feistiness of Clara Bow or the Southern swagger of Tallulah Bankhead. She was a modern young woman with a cut-glass accent and an aura of old-world mystery, and Americans were fascinated to get a glimpse of her.

  But it wasn’t just the peculiarity of her image that helped to wing Diana towards celebrity. It was the scope of American mass media and the ease of modern travel. During the next three and a half years the Atlantic crossing became very familiar to her as she returned to the States for a further series of tours, and her growing popularity with the American public generated significant offers of new work. Such was the trajectory of her success, she could easily have found herself distanced from Duff. His own professional progress was certainly much slower; he remained dependent on her financially, and his political career was still at a formative stage. Yet throughout most of this period, Diana never worried about outstripping Duff; on the contrary, she never lost her fear of losing him.

  When he’d first left Diana in New York, Duff had sent letters and poems that were both literally and figuratively stained with tears. He hated leaving her almost as much as she hated to see him go. Yet just as she anticipated, he was barely settled back into London life, before he began consoling himself with other women. Guessing at details, and probably being fed some painful gossip by their friend Olga Lynn, who was visiting New York that winter, Diana was unable to prevent herself quizzing Duff by letter. Early in 1924 she confronted him about his latest interest, Poppy Baring. She supposed he was ‘in love with [her] & that’s about the size of it’;39 when Duff tried to deflect her suspicions she became so tormented by the idea that he no longer cared for her that she threatened to walk out of The Miracle and return to London.

  Duff bluffed and cajoled Diana out of her misery, but a few weeks later it was Dollie Warrender whose name appeared in the letters. When Duff wrote for extra money to cover household bills, Diana accompanied the £200 cheque with a note of delicate acidity: ‘I hope it will be enough, tho I expect you to drop it on plovers’ eggs and Lady Warrender.’ Duff squirmed uncomfortably: ‘She’s on to that as I thought she would be,’ he noted in his diary.40 It was very rare for Diana to flaunt her financial power over Duff, but at moments like this it was irresistible. In the long term, too, it helped to maintain the balance of their marriage. Diana’s material independence helped to ward off feelings of self-pity, shame and worthlessness – the emotions of a betrayed wife. And while it wasn’t easy for her, she eventually learned to have confidence in herself, in Duff and in the very particular way they loved each other. Over time she found it easier to tidy his other women into a small and almost painless compartment of their relationship.

  If earning her own money gave Diana power, it also provided her with a fascinating new game. She’d been astounded to discover that she could earn $1,000 simply by signing a testimonial for Pond’s Cold Cream, and she became greedy for more profits, persuading Kahn to fund her in a property-development scheme, signing up for new celebrity endorsements and writing articles for the press.* At the same time she took proud, sometimes perverse pleasure in making economies – lunching on a ten-cent plate of macaroni cheese and seizing every perk that came with the job, including free hotel accommodation and use of a car.

  Duff had been brought up
to believe it was bad form to skimp on luxury, but Diana came from a class where discomfort was associated with moral fibre. When Violet came out to New York, full of interest and enthusiasm for her daughter’s career, she was almost as competitive in her economizing. She took a spare bed in Diana’s suite, rather than pay for a room of her own, and on nights when there were no party invitations, she would boil up a bit of rice pudding for their supper. She didn’t even complain when a third-class cabin was booked for her crossing home, although Diana felt a pang of fascinated guilt afterwards, wondering how her mother would fare in her ‘bolting-hole of beastliness among the lower-class barnacles’.41 So proud was the Duchess of her powers of ‘poverty and economy’ that during a subsequent visit she boasted of them to a journalist – Diana had to explain that this was not what the American public wanted to hear. They didn’t get free rooms and chauffeur-driven cars ‘out of pity’, but because their rank was seen to deserve them.*

  * * *

  As a result of Diana’s budgeting, however, sufficient capital was saved for Duff to resign from the Foreign Office in July 1924. He was accepted as Conservative candidate for Oldham,† a solid industrial town in Lancashire, and when the general election was announced that autumn, Diana took time off from The Miracle to assist his campaign. After women had been given the vote, political wives had acquired a new importance; they were thought to lend a warmth to their husband’s image, which would appeal to the female electorate. Of course, women MPs were a rarity still – the 1924 election would see only four returned to parliament – but although much publicity was created by Diana’s arrival in Oldham (Duff noted ‘an excellent paragraph in the most conspicuous part of the Daily Mail’), she feared she might be too grand and too ignorant to be of any use. When she and Duff went out campaigning, she fully expected the voters to ‘bang the door in our silly, smirking out-to-please faces.’42