by Cecil Beaton
Lady Cunard’s genius shone in the manner in which she presided over the small, circular, green-painted dining table. She would bring out the latent qualities in each of her guests and was past mistress at the art of giving the field to anyone with something interesting to say, just as she would abruptly snatch it from them when they showed signs of becoming bores. If she herself performed, it was a virtuoso indulging in persiflage or heroics. She was brilliant in her sense of timing. The inflections in her husky little voice were so varied, her gestures so telling, her chuckles so effective, and her confiding manner so mock-sincere that one knew one was present at a unique occasion.
Lady Cunard made many enemies. There were certain people she could not appreciate. Perhaps she would not have suceeded in establishing herself among the more rigorously formal society of the Edwardians, but she brought a lightness and originality to even the conventional circles of the late Georgian period. There is a story that when the Duchess of York became Queen of England she sighed, “I’m afraid even now we shall never be included in Lady Cunard’s set. You see, she has so often said that Bertie and I are not fashionable.”
With the Second World War, Emerald Cunard’s world collapsed. The Grosvenor Square house was empty, the footmen were called up, the Marie Laurencins sent to the sale room. Emerald, after an unfortunate visit to America, where she hated, and was hated by, all but a few devoted and loyal friends, came back to live in two rooms of the Dorchester Hotel. Society as she had known it no longer existed; her finances were said to be somewhat rickety, and she told her friends how impossible it was for her to economize. Even under these straitened circumstances she managed to present herself, paradoxically enough, at her peak. Never before had she seemed so fully integrated as a personality; never did she appear to her friends wiser, kinder, and more understanding. Although, living in a large hotel, she was immune from the more rigorous restrictions of rationing and queueing, yet she reacted like a sensitive barometer to the changes that were taking place outside her ivory tower. She moved with the times to such a degree that she labelled as “dated” much younger people whose point of view had not become adapted to the changing world.
But however much the world changed, Lady Cunard’s intense interest in people always illuminated her life. She was a real collector of personalities; not, like other hostesses, with the intention of being the first to show them off, but out of a profound sympathy. She would discover people of merit—an unknown painter, a promising politician. A brilliant talent scout, she would rout out the author of some play she had seen in the small basement of an arts society production in the purlieus of London, to give him help and encouragement. Emerald Cunard could never become old.
Her sitting room at the Dorchester was an oasis of civilization in the barbaric wastes of war. A lift would take one from a dreary world to the seventh floor. On arrival at Room 707, one was enchanted by the sight of an array of cherry-coloured chairs, boule furniture, desks ornamented with ormolu figures, and, among the objets d’art and most exquisite of them all, Emerald, like a fantastic canary bird, holding forth on some strange topic with tremendous vivacity, reviving everyone around her by the originality of her provocative mind.
Sometimes during the middle of the night I would be awakened by the telephone. Oblivious to the fact that other people were asleep, Emerald would be at her most conversationally inspired. After lying laughing at her in the dark, I would switch on the light in order to make a note of some enchanting or inspiring remark, but without her vocal inflection and out of context the pencilled quotations seems lifeless next morning. Yet perhaps a little of her can be seen through the following excerpts which I have picked at random from diaries.
In a “stage confidence” tone she would relate the latest scandal: “I don’t know her, of course, but my doctor does. Doctors know everybody. A lot of people say she’s very common, but I don’t know about that. Nowadays all that sort of thing is changed. It’s the Duke that’s now considered beyond the pale, and this particular Duke has made the terrible mistake of falling in love, Well, he couldn’t help that, poor fellow, but I think perhaps he shouldn’t have told his wife about it. He did, and the shock was a little bit too much for her and she died from it, and people didn’t like that. The poor man’s been dreadfully criticized.”
Without her sweetness, her edicts might have seemed a little hard. But she would raise a tremendous laugh, when, in shocked seriousness, she would confide to the whole dinner table: “Babies are a terrible lot of trouble! Babies are terrible!” or, “Husbands can’t love wives; no, that is not possible!” or, “Boys must not marry girls!”
Although Emerald was a fantastic, she often brought others down to reality. One day Sir Thomas Beecham was holding forth. “A cello,” he said, “cannot be listened to by itself for more than a minute, or else you want to murder the man who plays it, and after ten minutes you do murder him.”
Lady Cunard asked, “Yes, and what does all that mean?”
When interrupted by the telephone, Emerald would pick up the receiver and say impatiently, “Yes, yes, who is it? Not that I care.” Sometimes she was a character from Oscar Wilde, asking, “you are not going to offend me by offering me champagne, are you? What I want is water. It is so difficult to get water. Water is so scarce in London.” Or when genuinely admiring some stranger: “Isn’t her hair lovely? Such a beautiful colour. It takes a little dye to make that effect.” When looking at pictures in a small gallery off Bond Street, she said to the salesman in a horrified voice, “Oh no, you must not show me anything Dutch. Don’t you dare show me anything Dutch. I can’t bear anything Dutch!”
When towards the end of her life things might have been considered difficult for Lady Cunard, she had few regrets. “I know I should look after my affairs, but I don’t and it’s terrible. My house is burned and it should have been insured and it wasn’t and it’s all my own fault and it’s terrible but we won’t think about it.”
Sometimes she would say in a frivolous manner something that meant more to her than she realized: “Maternity is a strong natural instinct and I abhor nature. I believe in art.” She made her life a work of art that was as delicate, witty, gay, sensitive, and eloquent as herself.
When Emerald became ill, the bodily aches and pains to which she was not accustomed baffled and lowered her vitality. She felt life was leaving her. At a small dinner party in her room she told her friends she did not think she could survive another three months; and since the world was becoming so ugly and life unlike everything she considered it should represent, she was not sorry to go. Thereupon Emerald Cunard raised a glass of champagne and said, “I drink to my death.”
Reared in the Edwardian school by a remarkable mother, Lady Diana Cooper is one of the few living aristocrats who can violate all the rules and still keep her balance on the pedestal of the noblesse oblige. Her roots are so deeply embedded in tradition of that, like some incredible plant, she thrives in an atmosphere of bohemianism without ever departing from her origins. English tradition is behind her whether she is cohorting with theatrical people or the highest society.
One-time ambassadress to France, Lady Diana has never allowed herself to become conventional: she mingles with commoners and keeps the royal touch. Her station is such that she might conceivably have married the Prince of Wales, but chose to marry Alfred Duff Cooper, now Lord Norwich, to whom she has been just as remarkable a wife as mother to their son.
Like most complex people, Lady Diana has many facets. She gives the impression that she bathes only in asses’ milk and has been pampered since birth by attendant slaves. But nothing could be further from the truth: her looks belie her character, for she is the complete opposite of this superficial appearance, being a woman of quick intelligence, tremendous courage, and great loyalty. Her rigid Edwardian training has left her with a cast-iron discipline that never rusts. She can set herself the most difficult tasks, flagellating herself in her endeavours. She never allows herself to look f
atigued, can drive five hundred miles in a motorcar and be the life and soul of the party on arrival. Her mind, likewise, is constantly exercised through the reading and analysis of books, a pastime which she often carries on aloud with her husband. And though she staunchly maintains that she is not avant-garde and that her appreciation stops with Cézanne, she maintains a lively interest in new art and artists.
This discipline reflects, too, in her sense of obligation to others and, combined with her aristocratic grace, it renders her capable of great empathy and concentration where people are concerned. Often she will help her friends without ever letting them know that she has done so.
Having been born a blonde, Lady Diana accentuates her pastel beauty by wearing pale colours with which her mother taught her to compliment her natural opalescence, and the result is a luminosity that creates the effect of all the lights being turned on when she enters a room. Yet Lady Diana thinks of herself as a brunette and possesses many of the gipsy’s bohemian traits. Little wonder, then, that the public has always had the wrong impression of her. It cannot believe that any great beauty should be so without airs and graces, and mistakes her naturalism for affectation.
From a spartan upbringing, Lady Diana has now, of her own volition, turned to the life of a Boy Scout at holiday camp. Like a sailor, she can tie every sort of knot and is executive in all manner of ways. When the car breaks down, it is Lady Diana who mends the punctured tyre. She can wallpaper a room and sew muslin curtains, knows how to do everything from embarking upon carving a ham and making cheeses to wiring a bouquet of lilies of the valley. In addition to this impromptu virtuosity, she will never accept a negative answer. She seldom stops working and allows herself very few hours of sleep each night. However late to bed, Lady Diana is on the job early in the morning, often bringing a cup of tea to wake members of the household who have early trains to catch.
Lady Diana’s appearance is always romantic or picaresque, and her styles have changed only in detail during the years that she has remained one of England’s great beauties. She has clothed herself in a series of costumes that range from those of an apotheosized cowboy, a highwayman, or a sublimated peasant with dirndl skirt and sandals. With head tied in a chiffon scarf she is like a nun in a coif. In a yachting cap Lady Diana is a young naval commander in an operetta, while oyster-coloured satin metamorphoses her into a court lady of Charles II.
When on rare occasions Lady Diana conforms to the dictates of fashionable dressmakers, appearing in the latest Paris dress, she is less effective than when she improvises out of her own imagination and her own wardrobe, creating costumes for all and every occasion, from buying vegetables in Venetian market to attending a ball at Buckingham Palace. Her treasure chest doubtless contains corduroy trousers, large pink chiffon handkerchiefs or babies’ caps with which to cover hair, boxes full of artificial flowers, tartan shawls, some imitation diamond stars, bolts of taffetas and lengths of classical drapery, a great collection of picture hats brought from Mexico, Morocco, California, and Sussex, tricorne hats, casquettes, and, for more occasional use, a busby.
In assembling her rooms, Lady Diana attacks the procedure with a mannish nonchalance. Nothing is carefully calculated. Somehow the things that conform to her taste, the grey brocades, the oyster colours, the jardinieres, the baskets, seem to fall into her capable hands. Like the true artist, she is almost heavy-handed in her arrangement of flowers. As she thrusts a rose among the flowers of high summer, she asides with a wink, “There’s nothing like a rose for pulling up a mixed vase.”
LADY DIANA COOPER
Her frankness of manner is often baffling to those accustomed to the pretences of the beau monde. Nor has she any false modesty. As ambassadress to France, she was direct and outspoken. “You’re ten minutes too soon,” she said to a marquis who had suggested he would like to see her at the British Embassy in Paris and had arrived before the appointed hour. Intuiting that he wished some special help or service from her, she continued, “And what can I do for you?” The Marquis, at first somewhat taken aback by the direct approach, at last began to explain his wishes, while Lady Diana, concentrating on all he had to say, proceeded to change her clothes in front of him. By the time the other guests had arrived at the appointed tea hour, she had completed her toilet and given her constructive suggestions for help.
Lady Diana knows the enjoyment of making an expensive gesture, but she also gains satisfaction from bringing economy to a fine art. Her dislike of waste is intense. During the last year of a war-scarred England she was on her way through the sitting room of her house at Bognor one early morning to milk her cow, when she noticed, among the litter of cards and ashes from the previous night’s bridge game, that two of the players had left two half-drunk glasses of whisky and soda. Though she herself hates the taste of whisky, she exclaimed, “Appalling waste,” and, making a wry face, drank both glasses to the dregs.
To enumerate Lady Diana’s virtues is to risk being accused of exaggeration or prejudice. Yet who does not warrant high praise if not a beauty who is a wit, an enlightening raconteuse, and a brilliant correspondent (it may well be that she will live in posterity by her letters)? She is an artist in life with countless artistic gifts, a friend with unswerving loyalties, at once businesslike, capable, imaginative, and full of heartbreak, a fantaisiste who is frank and outspoken with the knowledge of when not to mention any given subject. Lady Diana, indeed, seems to be a woman with most of the rare qualities.
CONCLUSIONS
IT WAS Colly Cibber who said that one might as well be out of the world as be out of fashion. But far more important than being stylish or passé is the question of our attitude towards fashion. Those who disregard it completely are the losers, for they miss the delightful multiplicity and charm of the fads that reflect our deepest psychological needs. He who ignores fashion ignores life itself.
In the course of this book I have hidden a number of general ideas behind particular people and things; or perhaps the ideas have emerged from a discussion of the individual. Having arrived at the end of a voyage of discovery, I now begin to realize the involved and complicated pattern that emerges from individual threads. It would be difficult to extract any authoritative moral lessons or philosophic meaning, but a few conclusions are inescapable.
It seems obvious that changes in fashion correspond with the subtle and often hidden network of forces that operate on society—political, economic, and psychological factors all play their part. In this sense fashion is a symbol.
EASTERN CLOTHING SHOWS GREAT ÆSTHETIC PERFECTION
A LONG TRADITION OF THE SAME KIND OF CLOTHING
Why should man, however, who is forever seeking eternal and changeless values, be so concerned with surface and fleeting ones? Is there a changeless spirit behind the endless mutations of life itself? Perhaps the truth is that no form of expression by man can satisfy him. In art as in fashion, new styles, or forms, seem only ceaseless and urgent search for some ultimate form of expression. Born in a changing physical body, man seeks the absolute, yet ironically creates things which are as changing and ephemeral as himself.
Even these changes have a certain constancy, however. There are forms that reappear in various ages with only slight variations. It is surprising how certain peasant designs and materials resemble the costume of the early Egyptians. A modern woman, when she goes to the hairdresser, may be unaware that the Babylonians had created similar hair styles some thousands of years ago. Thus, though it is true that fashions, per se, are never revived, there are constants which manifest themselves anew throughout the years.
Eastern clothing shows the æsthetic perfection that can emerge only from a long tradition of wearing the same kind of garment. In our Western world we can see the same example in church vestments, riding habits, uniforms, and liveries, these forms of apparel being rigidly subject to tradition because of religious, ritualistic, or functional reasons.
Why does European fashion not tend towards some kind of simpl
icity and beauty, some tunic or toga that would serve for longer than a single decade? The answer undoubtedly lies in our deep-rooted perversity, our incessant inner need for change and more change. This desire for change is costly. Billions of pounds and dollars and francs and lire and kroner and piasters and pesos are spent yearly.
Those whose lives or work are involved in fashion breathe the air of instability: they are like the Mexican farmer who several years ago discovered a volcano growing in his cornfield. Those who work in fashion’s sphere must expect the worse and should provide for an early demise. Unfortunately he who gets caught in the wheels forgets the lessons of the past. We know that others die, but our own death is inconceivable.
Fashion, however, has its happier aspects as well as its vicious ones. Our latter-day promotion, also, though it has done much towards standardizing fashion and robbing it of its air of mystery, has raised the general level of taste. Much as one may disagree with many of the influences of the wholesale trade and its merchandise, it has helped to create a potential canon of taste. Utility and ready-made clothing are today fabricated along better lines than ever before, particularly in America. The average person all over the world has become more sophisticated in matters of taste.