Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Gradually during these years Diana was evolving her own style. The Manners daughters were known to some as ‘The Hothouse’; an allusion to a greenhouse, explained Julian Grenfell, ‘they being renowned for their exotic affectations’. Diana gloried in the appellation, fancied herself as being mysterious, volatile, above all different. ‘Don’t search among metal elements or men for a metaphor to illustrate me,’ she advised Edward Horner; ‘just see and describe me as Diana whose curse it is to be incomparable to either the great, the base or the commonplace.’ She did not mean it as self-eulogy, she went on to assure him; but she did, of course. To be incomparable was her highest ambition. She sought it in her dress – Greek draperies and sandals, chiffon shirts cut like an Eastern djibbah, Rumanian peasant shirts. She sought it in her room at Belvoir, painted black with the bed upholstered in red damask and the walls hung with swags of everlasting flowers. The results veered between the arty-crafty and the exotic, striving for a sophistication she could not yet possess, but they showed imagination and a spirit of adventure, a genuine originality, which ensured that though she would make mistakes they would be her own and not in imitation of the current fashion. Her appearance gave her little satisfaction. ‘Christ, I am so fat!’ she complained. ‘If only I could even feel like Artemis I should reach the zenith of all happiness. Julian [Grenfell] once inspired me with the spirit of her. For the moment I was slim and sure-footed as the chamois. Now, alas, I’m like Diana of the moon; round, white, slow, lazy and generally like an unappetizing blancmange.’

  Her new friends filled Diana with regrets for her inadequate education. Her youth was marked by sudden darts in search of self-improvement, often quickly checked but usually leaving some trace behind. Patrick Shaw-Stewart inspired her with enthusiasm for Homer, and Edward Marsh taught her the Greek alphabet. Next day she wrote him a letter in Greek characters – ‘an incredibly apt pupil. A marvellous brain in a ravishing exterior.’ For several weeks she persevered, amazed by her own industry: ‘No summer moon has set that has not left me crescent shaped over vales as deep as sea-fishing. I swear to you by this time next year I shall be in the surge and thunder of the Odyssey.’ But long before next year had come she had abandoned the hunt, convinced of her own inadequacy. Instead she continued to read and memorize great tracts of poetry, Shakespeare, Keats, Browning, Meredith. This last was a friend of the Duchess. Diana wrote to him and won his praise: ‘To judge by her letter she can express herself in a way to give a picture as good as the photograph. This is not usual, and would be condemned as eccentric by every spectacled spinster in the Kingdom. The letter is pronouncedly spontaneous. It exhibits the heart in the head of the writer … the young person should be encouraged to continue flouting the world.’

  Little encouragement was needed. Though her unfailing capacity to find herself absurd saved her from any disastrous consequences, she was becoming decidedly swollen-headed. When playing some after-dinner game at Lord Curzon’s house she turned on the Prime Minister and chided him smartly, ‘Use your brain, Mr Balfour, use your brain!’ She was more dismayed than anyone else at her impertinence, but the episode still showed a self-confidence, almost arrogance, disconcerting in one so young. George Meredith sent her a copy of his poems inscribed with the strikingly banal couplet:

  Lady Diana Manners: her book.

  But if she my muse had been

  Better verse she would have seen.

  Proudly she passed on the compliment to Alan Parsons, ‘So I’m coming on in literary circles.’

  *

  In 1910 Diana, aged seventeen and three quarters, formally came out. Soon she was presented at court and began to attend her first balls in the great houses of London. She had for years dressed and behaved as if she were into if not past the debutante stage, had won frequent mention in the social columns and even been awarded a column to herself in the New York American on the eve of her presentation – ‘she is admired more by artists than by ordinary young men’. It was the extraordinary young men whom Diana was seeking and to her delight she found that they were to be met even in the sedater London houses. The first ball that she attended, in fact shortly before she came out, was given by Lady Manners – a Hampshire family only tenuously connected with the Rutland Manners. At supper she sat next to Maurice Baring, who entertained her by throwing rolls in the air and stabbing them with a sharp knife with his eyes shut. Then he put matches to his scant hair and let it frizzle. Next day he bombarded her with telegrams: ‘I loved you long ago in Thessaly’, ‘O, toi, mon clair soleil’. Diana was enchanted, startled and a little alarmed. It was not at all what she had expected.

  Society is now one polish’d horde

  Formed of two mighty tribes – the Bores and Bored.

  Diana was determined she did not belong to the former tribe and resolved to avoid the second if she could. She had some obstacles to overcome. It was assumed that the unmarried girl was ignorant of the facts of life and most other things as well. One need not believe in the Edwardian hostess who, wanting to show a young girl the library, threw open the doors to discover a couple making love in front of the fire and murmured warmly: ‘Mending the carpet, so kind,’ but most debutantes of the period would have accepted the explanation without demur. It was the preoccupation of the older woman to keep her junior in this ignorance and to make sure that she was never exposed to any situation which might compromise her virtue. Things had been relaxed somewhat since before the Boer War, at which time no girl of gentle birth could walk down St James’s Street, even with an escort, in case the clubmen leered offensively at her from the windows of White’s or Brooks’s, but the rules of chaperonage were still strict. Diana had always to be seen home from a party by a married woman, could enter no hotel except the Ritz. Even in 1914 she was bemoaning to Duff Cooper that ‘it seems to be a brazen law that you and I may never crack our eggs, masticate our marrows, coax down our caviare, without the two-edged sword of a married couple between us. It seems over-hard but insurmountable.’

  Diana did not defy the system but she pushed against it to the limits of discretion. Youth has always derided the shibboleths of society, and Diana and her friends were no more rebellious than any other generation. On all significant issues, indeed, they were anxious to conform. Nevertheless they felt themselves delightfully wicked. Diana strove to outdo them all. It was she who went to a grand reception at the Duke of Westminster’s wearing her Coronation medal, an eighteenth-century silver St Esprit and two medals for swimming won at the Bath Club. The Crown Prince of Germany goggled at this apparition, accosted her and later sent her a postcard of himself with Vergiss mich nicht written across the corner.

  Her most celebrated exploit came at a charity ball in the Albert Hall. Lady Sheffield was organizing a procession of ‘dancing princesses’, masquerading as swans and all dressed in virginal white; they were to be matched by a dozen ‘dancing princes’, one of them A. A. Milne, who wore silver smocks with very tight tights and a golden wig. At a party the previous night Milne heard Diana asking everyone; ‘Have you heard the scandalous story that I’m going to the ball in black? Not a word of truth in it!’ It came as no surprise to him, therefore, when a black swan arrived at the Hall, very late and only slightly abashed. Lady Sheffield surveyed her stonily: ‘Well, you look very interesting, Diana, but you can’t be in the procession.’ Diana, who had looked forward to a sensational entry, was in the end allowed to remain with the others. It was felt on the whole that Lady Sheffield had behaved well and Diana gone too far. The Duchess told everyone that ‘poor little Diana’ had had to go in dull black so as not to outshine the others in the procession.

  Such follies may seem innocent enough but Diana won a reputation among her generation for being daring to the point of outrage, exotic, almost corrupt. Raymond Asquith described her presence in a house-party at Lord Manners’s home, Avon Tyrrell, as being like ‘an orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in the day nursery’. He was far too intelli
gent himself to believe such nonsense but she played up to her image whole-heartedly, rejoiced when it was accepted by others, almost at times concurred in it herself.

  It was all part of the legend which was forming around her. It is always hard to define the quality which makes one person stand out among a multitude. Diana was recognized as a very considerable beauty. Winston Churchill and Eddie Marsh, standing together at London balls, played a game based on Marlowe’s line: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ How many ships would Miss X have launched? Or Lady Y? Only two faces earned the full thousand – Diana Manners and Clementine Hozier, Churchill’s future wife. Yet to have great beauty is one thing, to be acknowledged Queen of Beauty for a quarter of a century is something different. One could quote a hundred tributes to her ‘love-in-the-mist eyes, samite-wonderful complexion’, her ‘hair, pale gold and with the delicate texture of ancient Chinese silk’, without getting anywhere near the secret of her success. Perhaps nearest to it came Violet Trefusis with her account of Diana’s lighting up the room with her ‘flawless, awe-inspiring beauty. So must the angel have looked who turned Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. With a face like that she should, I thought, carry a sword or trumpet.’ And then there was Enid Bagnold who saw her for the first time at this period, coming down the stairs like a muslin swan. ‘Her blind, blue stare swept over me. I was shocked – in the sense of electricity. Born to the city I wanted to storm, the Queen of Jericho swept past me.’

  Awe-inspiring, shocking, like an avenging angel, there was nothing cosy or seductive about Diana’s beauty. The ‘blind, blue stare’ owed more to bad eyesight than a challenging disposition, but it was intimidating to those who did not know her. Yet within the classical and chilly carapace there burnt a light that could transform a gathering by its brilliance. Even at the age of eighteen, she could not enter a room without being noticed or leave it without causing a sense of loss. Without this radiance her features would still have been remarkable but she could never have caused the impression that she did.

  Not everyone conceded her beauty. Margot Asquith dismissed her brusquely as ‘what I most dislike in appearance – German-Greek’. Veronica Maclean, told as a child that she was about to see the most beautiful woman in the world, complained, ‘But mummy, she looks like a sheep!’ The same was felt by Rachel Ferguson, who admired Diana’s perfect heart-shaped face, ‘but the whole effect struck me as static and sheeplike’. One of the more unusual things about Diana was that she would have agreed with her critics rather than her admirers. She loved to be told that she was beautiful but never really understood what all the fuss was about. She would peer myopically into the glass, hoping that the blurred outline in front of her was indeed of transcendent splendour but suspecting that it was still the ‘unappetizing blancmange’ she had found there years before. Constantly she took action to put the matter right. ‘I’m preparing my seven bodily sins against your return –’ she wrote to an absent friend, ‘thinning by banting, oiling my hair, fading my skin. I hope it will all show.’ Always she doubted whether it would, always she assumed herself to be in the worst of looks. She would have liked Cecil Beaton’s reference to her ‘glorious goatish profile’ better than Lady Maclean’s sheepish analogy, but that was merely because she preferred to identify herself with the restless, intransigent goat rather than the docile sheep. From the point of view of looks she would not have quarrelled with either description.

  The public did not take her at her own valuation. The beautiful, daring, delightfully wicked Lady Diana Manners was the role in which they cast her, and all she did was news. She was natural fodder for those society magazines that catered for people who might actually meet her or liked to think they might, but she was also taken up by the new popular press, aimed at those millions who would not otherwise have known of her existence. Whether Lady Diana did or did not attend a party, the colour and material of her dress, her bons mots about the band, were believed to be just the sort of information for which the working classes were craving. She enjoyed the réclame which today would be reserved for the athlete or the pop-star. By contemporary standards the gossip purveyed was always most innocuous, innuendo was kept to a discreet minimum. Nevertheless to the strait-laced such publicity seemed deplorable; Lady Diana might be very pretty, clever too it was said, but she was not quite the thing.

  For Diana, not to be the thing was all she hoped for. She delighted in her publicity and did nothing to discourage it. Whether she actually courted it is another matter. She herself always denied it. Certainly she would not have altered her behaviour a whit if there had not been a journalist to record it. No one, however, who contrived to be so consistently in the right place at the right time doing the right thing to ensure the maximum of attention can be acquitted of working to achieve that end. Diana would never have warned a journalist that some exploit was in the offing, but she could feel reasonably confident that somebody else would do so and would feel rather disappointed if in the end the event went unrecorded. Many of the best things that happened to her came because of the publicity that surrounded her, and she was never so hypocritical as to pretend that it displeased her.

  A by-product of this publicity was that all her life she was the recipient of letters which were either anonymous or which came from people totally unknown to her. Many of these were touchingly ingenuous; the work of elderly pensioners or illiterate teenagers whose days had been brightened by Diana’s doings. Others were from would-be lovers: some proposing marriage; others less honourable behaviour – one such from Jesus of Nazareth of Chorley Wood, Herts. A small but significant number were rich in malice, accusing her of unmentionable vices, which were then not merely mentioned but described in detail. Even seventy years later it is disturbing to read these products of envy and impotent hatred; Diana’s sang froid was formidable but she can hardly have failed to feel disquiet and to wonder from time to time whether dull obscurity might not be a happier lot.

  *

  In February 1911 Diana’s sister Letty married. She had never been happy at home and, though she was sad to leave Diana, it was in every other way a merciful escape. Her husband was Ego Charteris, son of the Earl of Wemyss. In her memoirs Diana wrote that ‘of all men Ego was the nearest to a knight of chivalry’, but at the time she was apt to mock at his thoughtful diffidence – ‘Gentle Ego, meek and mild,’ she called him. She wanted something a lot more exciting for herself.

  Until this moment Diana had shared Letty’s bedroom; now she transferred to Marjorie and the two sisters grew still closer together. For some years Marjorie had been in love with Charlie Paget. Her mother disapproved – a ‘penniless charity-boy’ whom Marjorie cared for only because he was so patently unsuitable. Then Charlie Paget’s thirty-year-old cousin died and he unexpectedly became the enormously rich Marquess of Anglesey. All obstacles vanished but the Marquess now grew hesitant and vanished on his yacht with a married woman. In revenge, Marjorie took up with the glamorous Prince Felix Youssupoff. Alarmed, Lord Anglesey hurried back and proposed, Marjorie despatched her Russian prince, and the couple were married in August 1912. Prince Youssupoff returned home, where in due course he won fame as one of the assassins of Rasputin. ‘So Felix is a murderer,’ wrote Marjorie coolly. ‘Well, well, there it is. I have a feeling for the criminal classes and there it is and is and is. Dirty work all round, it sounds. Does one write and congratulate or condole?’

  Diana’s family circle had disintegrated. About this time it was dealt another blow. At dinner one night Edward Horner remarked casually that he had seen her father earlier that day. Diana said that he couldn’t have, the Duke was at Belvoir. ‘Oh, no,’ said Edward, ‘I mean your real father, Harry Cust.’ Then, seeing her expression, he added in consternation, ‘Do you mean to say you didn’t know?’ Diana denied that this revelation disturbed her, she was interested rather than upset, did not even mention the matter to her mother and in no way changed her manner to Harry Cust. Although she was fond of the Duke
she found her new father a far more romantic figure. Her standing as the daughter of a Duke – something of great importance to her – was in no way impaired by the fact that London society gossiped about her parentage. Yet her reaction can hardly have been as clearcut as that. The life of a child is based upon a complex of cherished certainties, of which the solidity of the parents’ union is one of the most important. Diana was no longer a child, but she still nurtured childish fears and doubts. However insouciant she may have seemed to others, however little concern she may in later years have convinced herself that she had experienced, it is hard to believe that at the time her confidence was not shaken, that she did not feel distressed and disconcerted. No one would have guessed it if she did, however. It is not possible to detect any change in her character or in her attitude towards her parents, and any psychiatrist seeking evidence of a traumatic wound would be hard put to find it.

  *

  By now Diana was gripped by an addiction to foreign travel which was to possess her all her life and provide some of her keenest pleasures. From the age of fifteen no peacetime year passed without her going abroad at least once, and usually several times. Her first expedition was with her mother and sisters to Florence. Whether, as Diana believes, because her father gave his wife only £100 to cover all expenses, or whether the Duchess’s delight in parsimony got the better of her, the party seemed perpetually undernourished and lodged sometimes in the grubbiest hotels, sometimes in luxurious but borrowed villas. Diana was not in the least discomfited; new sensations were all-important, comfort insignificant; ‘It’s character we want, not revolving doors,’ was her slogan through life. Anyway, though Belvoir might be grander, it was very little if at all more comfortable. The high spot of the trip was neither a church nor a gallery but