Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  The Bals Blancs, of which there were three or four a night, were very trying to me and I would welcome the dawn breaking and the red-breasted, top-hatted linkman at the door—Mr Piddlecock he was called—bidding us “Good Morning” as he packed us into the carriage.

  “Taking them all home, my lady, taking them all home!” he had once said to a lady like Mrs Bennet, with five unmarried daughters, who had not given him his end-of-season tip.

  As the sun rose the men in rubber boots and hats would be out hosing the streets. Pointed shoes in which one had danced for six hours hurt on the cobblestones of our courtyard, and the flights of stairs seemed long and steep before one saw the friendly bed. Counting eight on your fingers from bedtime, you jotted down appropriately “Call me at 10, [11 or 12]” on the pad that hung on your door, and gave yourself to the sleep of the exhausted.

  In 1911 I was presented at Court. My mother had been given by Queen Victoria the entrée at the time when she was nursing her first baby. The entrée has the advantage that it can never be taken from you, and you do not spend three hours queueing in your carriage to the main door of the Palace, but can stalk in through a smaller but nobler entrance.

  I had made my own train—three yards of cream net sprinkled generously with pink rose-petals, each attached by a diamond dewdrop. The dress was adequate and the three feathers springing out of my head looked less ridiculous when everyone was wearing them. I stood in the Arlington Street ballroom, self-conscious but pleased, while all the servants and a few old friends with nothing better to do came and had a look. I was nervous of making my double curtsey. The courtiers are very alarming and martinettish—they shoo you and pull you back and speak to you as they would to a wet dog, but once the trial is successfully over you have the fun of seeing others go through the same ordeal.

  The King was to be crowned and Crown Princes were assembling for the ceremony. The great houses were swept and garnished, the smaller ones had new coats of cream paint; their window-boxes were spilling over with lobelias, geraniums and marguerites. We went to the Coronation in the best of places—Queen Alexandra’s box. We looked down on my father and mother in their robes and ermine and we sucked our iron rations (meat lozenges) against starvation.

  I was given a medal to commemorate the Coronation, which I wore at Grosvenor House with two swimming-medals won at the Bath Club and an eighteenth-century silver St Esprit on a pompous blue bow. It made a brave show no doubt, but why did no one stop me? The Crown Prince of Germany (“Little Willie”), who was present, immediately spotted the enormity. He was amused and took me aside and sat me down and asked me about my medals. I told him, and I told him too that lots of people thought there was going to be a war between our countries. He said that if there was he promised to spare me. He kissed my hand and picked me out another evening to walk in the garden at Stafford House. I was on my way to an artists’ party dressed as Perdita, and I was proud and flattered and generally idiotic and thought I had made a conquest, but beyond a postcard of himself with “Vergiss mein nicht” written across the corner, nothing came of it.

  The medals (which I hide today since I have three commemorating Coronations) keep shining into my memory. This first Coronation medal I wore on my knee at a Court Ball. I was wearing a curious dress, half nightgown, half a black drapery that fell back and front from my left shoulder to meet again at the right knee. Being my own copy of a Lucille model it was insecurely stitched. When curtseying deeply in the Royal Quadrille (into which I had been commanded only because I knew the figures) the vital stitch gave. I considered it an inspired solution to use the medal as a linchpin. The courtiers were on to me like bloodhounds, but could do nothing, and I finished the quadrille with my knee decorated.

  The medals won at the Bath Club, which I came across lately blackened with age, evoked the only athletic pleasure I have ever known. I would start undoing belts and buttons in Berkeley Street, the quicker to plunge into that delectable green pool where I learnt to splash, to swim and then to dive reasonably well (“seventeen feet in front of Royalty,” I used to boast). After an hour’s hard tuition my friends and I, wrapped in bath-towels, would stagger into the hottest room of the “Turkish,” send for large strawberry ices from Gunter’s next door and shock the older, fatter ladies with our giggling gossip.

  Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson was the star turn at the Bath Club. She dived like a swallow, her beautiful Greek boy’s body, strong as an arrow in flight, pierced the water without splash and left us marvelling. Later she took to the “halls” to compete with Isadora Duncan, and though she was severely criticised for her audacity and lack of art I still believed in her.

  Maud Allan had made a sensation at the Palace Theatre. Greatly daring, she had appeared in a wisp of chiffon and bare legs with pipes and cymbals. My mother, who despised the art of ballet exemplified by Adeline Genée and very second-rate dancers, was enthusiastic about this new Grecian frieze form of movement. She sent us weekly to watch and learn, in spite of the number finishing with “Salome’s Dance”—considered scandalous, for she was all but naked and had St John’s head on a plate and kissed his waxen mouth (a business later forbidden on the Covent Garden stage, where a dish of gravy was substituted). My mother was untrammelled by convention.

  The Russians were the next to explode on the Palace Theatre stage—Karsavina and Baldina, with a little corps de ballet. Again my mother forgot her prejudice against blocked toes and tutus and we would stand every Saturday behind the circle, not believing that the legendary Pavlova could outshine such glory. Of course she did. Pavlova was a leaf, a rainbow, a flake, an iridescent foam, her bones of music made. Secret and unsocial, even when she sprang toe-first out of baskets of roses at the most extravagant private parties, she never let us meet her in the flesh.

  Looking back, I am surprised indeed by my childish vain ambitions. I bought ballet shoes, puckered up my sylphide skirts and hopefully signed on with Miss Dietz so as to swing my heavy legs on the bars and totter on my points. I went to Lydia Kyasht to be taught to glide like a Russian peasant, flicking a provocative red handkerchief. A year’s work taught me to stop learning.

  When the Imperial Russian Ballet arrived, Lady de Grey, with the zest and zeal of a girl, moved down to the centre stalls the better to see the whole, and would often lend us her box whence to swoon over Karsavina and Nijinski in Pavilion d’Armide, Spectre de la Rose, Sheherazade, Tamar, Les Sylphides and Carnaval, and as if all this was not enough the next year brought Chaliapin and the Russian Opera. Never since, I think, have we in England had our eyes so dazzled with new light. The comets whizzed across the unfamiliar sky, the stars danced. The time-revered old Italian opera in its buskins and farthingales, its tights and its cap-doffing, had wearied an audience older than me. Boxes at Covent Garden were hired for the season, but not for music. The darkness hid many sleepers. Wagner nights were more musically alert, because only enthusiasts could stand them. Now came a blast to awaken the dead, a blaze of blinding gold, the Kremlin bells clanged and crashed, and Boris was there, a humble giant on his way to be crowned.

  My mother thought Chaliapin looked exactly like me. I found it difficult to trace my features, colour and shape (he was six foot four) through the most skilful dark Muscovite make-up, but later, when I knew him, and loved him desperately, I boasted about this resemblance, although there was very little beyond colouring, a good disposition and maybe a line of chin.

  I was certainly an artist snob, but had I not been I would still have worshipped and put myself in his way for crumbs, and, getting the crumbs, I wanted praise, and after praise, love. My head was turned, and I behaved outrageously. I think he was pleased with me, for I was perhaps a little shield against the onset of what I then called “rapacious women.” He would bow to me from the stage as he must have done to the Czar. He would bring flowers to the box when he was not singing, he encouraged me in amusing pranks, such as dressing as a peasant or a boyard’s wife and singing in the chorus. Hearing him
sing so near to me on the stage made the stalls pall and the box an anti-climax.

  Everything Society criticised me for I now realise my mother encouraged. She was proud and pleased with my love for Chaliapin and thought I was quite right to forbid him to go to a party given in his honour to which I had failed to get invited. This insult to his host was even more outrageous of him than it was of me. No doubt he did not want to go anyway, but I thought it was for my sake. I triumphed. Maurice Baring reported the party-without-the-prince and reproved me for showing off. I felt repentant.

  Maurice loved Russia, spoke its tongue, translated its poems, told me what its picnics were like and imitated the gypsies’ raucous voices. He loved Chaliapin too, and through him Maurice and I became devoted to each other.

  I had known Maurice always as the most amusing of myths and the most heroic. He had been to the Russo-Japanese War as a reporter, and he went to a cholera camp somewhere else, and then I met him at a very young party and he took me to supper and said, ‘I’ll show you the game of risks,” and he cut some crusts up, with a very sharp knife in his trembling hands (they always trembled) so fast and close under his blind eyes that one knew blood would be drawn, and it was. Then he set fire to his sparse hair and it would fizzle a little and go out, and he would light it again with a match till it was all singed off, but his scalp never burnt, and he laughed uproariously as I did, and we made too much noise, and were half-mad with hilarity, and it was said that I was showing off again. Next day he sent me a telegram every two or three hours. One said “O toi, mon beau soleil” and another “I loved you long ago in Thessaly.”

  I was intoxicated with pleasure and haunted as usual by knowing the moment must come when he would discover that I was not all he thought me. I could think of nothing amusing or poetic, nothing at all to write in answer that I did not discard with disgust.

  This iridescent season of music, dance, pageantry and fluttering flirtations turned to the calmer joys of the country and on to London’s winter wet.

  The young men came to tea in the ballroom at Arlington Street. They played chess with me and we practised the csárdás—eight of us—for some fancy ball. I had, at eighteen, my first bona-fide proposal from a gentleman twenty years older. I cried with embarrassment and tried sophisticatedly to laugh it off. He accused me of lures and wiles and worse, but I was surely innocent. I had known him as a child and I loved him as a child loves.

  It was all games and courting, and in a corner of the ballroom was Jacques-Emile Blanche, painting one of us. He was to me as familiar as the piano. His English was fluent and he had an accent we loved to imitate. We treated him with all the affection you give to a cherished dog. We had no idea he was famous. He knew more than we did about our staff, knew the maids’ names and the pantry cupboard’s contents, and where the paper and string and screwdriver were kept. It was perhaps he who brought into our lives Reynaldo Hahn, who would come and show Marjorie how to sing L’Heure Exquise or Infidelité and sing himself under his breath the songs he had newly written or old ones by Gounod—Venise and Printemps—all now buried and unknown.

  There was the Slade School season. Letty and I both went to Gower Street by bus and sat shivering in the vast studios, absorbed in fixing the Discus Thrower on to our drawing-boards. A dear myopic man (the great Ambrose McEvoy, but I didn’t realise it till later) would shyly tell me what was wrong—everything, really, but he made it sound as though the hopeless drawing was very nearly first-class.

  It was warmer in the life class for the sake of the nudes, though for all the heat the poor things were very cold and livid and sagging and goose-fleshed. There the alarming figure of Professor Tonks would set me trembling as though he were Justice itself. I saw the drawing through his eyes as a silly insult to the human body. Having no talent and knowing it, I did not hope to improve, but the life was new and absorbing and here I learnt to love McEvoy. Lessons over, he took me to his little slum studio in Millbank. The lean-to in which he painted was not wide or high enough to hold his canvases. There was a half-finished picture of a Chilean and his wife and four children. I little knew that this unknown father was called Gandarillas and would be my friend for forty years.

  McEvoy would crouch on a camp-stool, his face close to his water-colour. Above me was a cruelly unbecoming skylight and in my eyes a strong electric bulb. He was surprised that I was surprised at the unnatural elaboration of light. That and a stiff toothbrush which he took to his all-but-finished portrait account for the strange etherealness—the blue lights and the yellow, the day and the flame—that strikes one in his pictures.

  It was a joy sitting to McEvoy. His conversation prattled and laughed, and friends—beautiful women and their admirers—crushed into the lean-to and talked scandal and art and love. Augustine Birrell would sit and read aloud to stop my chattering tongue. McEvoy painted me several times. Some pictures I have lost sight of. One I sought, sorrowing, for years—a water-colour of me in a big black dress and a serious top hat (“That silly Welsh hat Diana wears,” Margot Asquith said). One I still have. It was christened “The Call to Orgy.” He was fond of orgies and would love to come to our wilder parties. We took him to our hearts, and when he died, too young, a knife went through mine.

  * Later Lady Howe.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pleasure at the Helm

  IN the spring of 1912 I went with my mother for the first time to Venice, to stay with Anthony Drexel in the Palazzo Balbi Vallier. The Campanile had just been rebuilt and we watched its unveiling. The bells rang and forty thousand doves were liberated. The giant belfry dwarfed St Mark’s domes and the bronze horses, and generally the new tower looked too big and too new. Again no one reproved me for making myself a cynosure by wearing an Italian officer’s white cloth cloak, and on the side of my head a bersagliere’s hat, plumed with cocks’ feathers.

  That summer Lady Cunard, a new light in our lives, took a small casa in the Via dei Catecumeni. It was with her we stayed. The fabled Louisa Casati lived in the half-built Palazzo Vanier dei Leoni. I saw her drifting down the Grand Canal under a parasol of peacocks’ feathers, but this surprise was nothing to the succession of glorious shocks that were to come.

  At the first of her parties she received us in her roofless palace by the light of a brazier on to which a nakedish slave for each new arrival flung a fuel that flared up into white flame. Another slave struck a reverberating gong announcing every guest while she, the Casati, tall and elegant in a lampshade skirt, seemingly growing out of a wide bowl of tuberoses, presented each of us with a waxen flower. I remember thinking with what grace the foreigners received the flower and how clumsy we poor English were, saying “Doesn’t it smell good!” when another said “Quelle émotion—Madame!”

  The next party outshone the first and failed. It was planned that we should meet in the unbuilt palace dressed and masked as Longhis and Guardis and process in gondolas to the Piazza San Marco, there to disport ourselves—no one wondered how. The Casati wore the trousered Bakst-designed dress of an animal-tamer. On her shoulder was a macaw, on her arm an ape. She was followed closely by an attendant keeper leading a restive leopard, or puma it may have been. His hand was dripping with blood (doubtless paint). We were about sixty strong and had not reckoned with the normal Piazza crowd nor with the sensation we should make arriving at midnight with a menagerie and masks and a Turkish major-domo in gaberdine, pumpkin turban and stick of office to prepare a way for his procession. The Piazzetta was black with Venetians. The fine girls, dressed in their classical black-fringed shawls, made us the more garish. There were shouts and ribald screams and peals of laughter and we fought our way through a density that would have been impenetrable but for our leopard. Somehow we jostled our way across the immensity of the Piazza through the columned archway to the nearest embarking steps. For me it was no failure. I loved crowds and didn’t mind being a spectacle, and I enjoyed madly the jostle and even the discomfiture of the elders, who must have heard the tumbrils behi
nd the mob’s howls, but the party must be written down a failure.

  No longer a fledgling, I was allowed more liberty and choice after the first year. I was still forbidden to be alone with a man except by chance in the country. A married woman must bring me home from a ball. For walking and shopping and even driving in a taxi, a sister or a girl was enough protection. I could go to the Ritz but to no other London hotel. But generally there was more freedom. I was not forced to Ascot or to “young dances” and I had more courage in choosing my friends. I desperately wanted my mother to approve of them, but she could not.

  I had earned the hard name of a “scalp-collector” and I expect the cap fitted. The more the safer. Many would save me from one. I did not want to be possessed by my heart or by another’s.

  Like all good mothers she planned to see me married to an Adonis reigning feudally in a palace, while I was looking for a romantic struggle with some Unknown by my side. So the tangled web of deceits grew thicker, though it barely affected my love for her. The shadow crossing her face when she saw me with an unmistakable ineligible said “What waste of time!” This annoyed and perturbed me. The eligibles she put in my way were leprous to my eyes. Today I wonder why. I should have seen it as part of the romantic struggle instead of resenting it.

  Was Tommy Bouch eligible or ineligible? I do not know in what category my mother put him. I was very fond of him, so he cannot have been eligible. Before the war he was a Master of the Belvoir Hounds. He came from a hunting world in Warwickshire and with the courage of a Siegfried braved the fiery ring of taunts and ridicule and warnings of spells without a name that encircled the Castle, to become an intimate. The Belvoir Hunt thought the air too rarefied and theatrical. Perhaps they did not know that their Master was a poet—a poet whom Maurice Baring praised to the skies. He was imaginative and generous and a benedicton to those of us in trouble with scandals, debts, love or lack of a thoroughbred mount.