Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  In part at least Diana’s somewhat raffish life-style was designed to shock – her mother in particular but also the bourgeoisie or, for that matter, the staider sections of the aristocracy. The latter did not always prove easily shockable. At dinner with the Horners the conversation at one end of the table turned to sodomy and somebody told the story of the officer who had buggered his batman in a shell hole between the British and German lines. Old and deaf Sir John Horner called down the table to ask what was causing the laughter. His son Edward tried to turn the conversation but Diana insisted on repeating the anecdote. Sir John thought for a moment. ‘He must have been an uncommonly handy feller,’ he grunted.

  Duff saw Diana at a party in the Grafton Galleries, where all the other women seemed to be the lowest kind of actresses and chorus girls. ‘She was probably the only virgin there.’ Afterwards he took her to task. ‘She said she wanted to prove she could do these unconventional things without losing caste. She quoted Lady Ripon as having done the same. I said that Lady Ripon married first, to which Diana answered that she must surpass Lady Ripon by doing what she pleased before she married. One must not imitate the best but improve on it.’ Her consuming wish to be different, to excel if possible but at all costs to stand out from the ruck, marked her no less at twenty-two or twenty-three than it had done five years before. There might be many reasons for regret or shame, but the ultimate failure was to be inconspicuous.

  Some people felt she tried too hard. ‘I am not up to her glare‚’ wrote Cynthia Asquith after a weekend with the Howard de Waldens at Chirk. ‘I prefer more of a mental twilight – her exuberance is too much of the electric-light.’ Yet to most people her presence was a guarantee of exhilaration. No party was dull if Diana was there; she might go too far, but at least she was going somewhere and those who went along with her were sure of being well entertained. ‘Dear Diana, what a snag you are in our lives,’ wrote Tommy Bouch. ‘Why shouldn’t we have a happy party without you? Why does everything fall flat as soon as you slip away?’ An electric light can indeed be embarrassingly bright, even garish, but the dark when it is turned off is not necessarily preferable. Cynthia Asquith was an intelligent and attractive woman but she knew her own light burnt low compared with Diana’s and the knowledge vexed her.

  Some of Diana’s friends shone with equal effulgence. Nancy Cunard was one. She was the daughter of Maud Cunard, a celebrated hostess who in 1926 was to surprise her friends by announcing that Maud was a dull name and that she wished in future to be known as Emerald. Nancy’s father, Sir Bache, was a shipping millionaire who devoted most of his energies to hammering silver and carving coconuts preparatory to mounting them in ornate cups. He spent several months manufacturing a collection of pony-sized horse-shoes which he then mounted on the gate so as to read ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ – a touching gesture which signally failed to charm his wife. Lady Cunard was an intellectual snob, a Mrs Leo Hunter whose knowledge of literature and music was genuinely profound but who collected celebrities with the eagerness of a greedy child in a sweetshop. Except as a provider of worldly goods she had no use for the amiable, affectionate, slow-witted Sir Bache; for very different reasons she was beginning to look with equal distaste on her daughter Nancy.

  Nancy Cunard had been destined to rebellion almost since the moment of her birth. Rich, elegant, dazzlingly blonde, she defied the world in which she belonged. No one was more quick to perceive injustice and fight to remedy it; sometimes it seemed that if no cause for battle existed she would set out to invent one. More intellectual than Diana, and more sluttish, she inspired in her friend a vague unease, compounded of admiration and disapproval. ‘Well, Maud,’ Margot Asquith is supposed to have rasped a few years later, ‘what’s Nancy up to now? Is it dope, drink or niggers?’ In 1915 or 1916 niggers were in the future, but dope, drink and promiscuous sex all bulked prominently in her life. Duff and Diana called on her one morning at eleven. ‘We found Nancy not yet dressed, looking squalid, having been very drunk the night before. Diana was disgusted. Nancy’s dégringolade is so complete that I find it rather romantic’

  Nancy Cunard, Diana and Iris Tree, wrote Janet Flanner, ‘formed an inseparable trio of beauties – a kind of Mayfair troika of friendship, elegance, intelligence and daring’. Diana was never as close to Nancy Cunard as that would suggest, but Iris Tree she loved dearly. In the casual relish with which she took to sex and in her intellectual turbulence, Iris was closer to Nancy but she possessed a warmth, a naiveté almost, that was lacking in her friend and which Diana found wholly endearing. For most of her life Diana seemed to be protecting Iris, smoothing her path; rescuing her from the results of her wilder follies; and there was no surer way to Diana’s heart than to require her help. They enjoyed each other’s company with rich enthusiasm; when they met after a separation it was with an explosion of laughter and gossip and catching-up so extravagant that it seemed they could never bear to part again.

  Venetia Stanley was another star in Diana’s firmament. Tall, strongly built, formidably intelligent, she was lacking in seductive charm. She had the reputation of rendering even the most virile man impotent. She was handsome in her way; Laurence Jones wrote that she ‘rode like an Amazon and walked the high garden walls of Alderley with the casual stride of a boy. She was a splendid, virginal, comradely creature.’ Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, found her splendid and comradely at least. He was devoted to her, made her his confidante and wrote her letters of startling indiscretion in which personal revelation and official secrets were nicely blended.

  In July 1915 Venetia Stanley married Edwin Montagu. Montagu was Jewish and immensely rich, a member of Asquith’s Government and a man of power. His long, bony features were so pockmarked that Katharine Asquith, playing tennis on a particularly dilapidated asphalt court, remarked that it reminded her of Edwin’s face. His eyes were sombre and unhappy; his mood oscillated between gentle melancholy and despair; ‘My fires give no heat,’ he would mournfully remark. Diana and her friends appreciated his humour, relished his wealth and generosity, and accepted him as one of themselves. He was little older than Raymond Asquith, yet seemed of a different generation; he yawned like a hyena after dinner; in Katharine Asquith’s phrase ‘he had no thread to his personality’.

  The Montagus’ marriage and the couple’s installation in Queen Anne’s Gate were of great value to the Coterie since they provided a base where they could meet free from intrusive chaperones, more comfortably than in the Cavendish Hotel. Three or four nights a week Diana would dine there, Duff would also often be there, as would Alan and Viola Parsons, Katharine Asquith and whatever other members of the group might be in London. Edwin Montagu appeared genuinely pleased to see them, possibly finding that an influx of talkative friends eased what quickly proved to be a difficult marital relationship. Diana believed that Venetia had married Edwin ‘for her days rather than her nights’, and quickly found that the latter were more troublesome than she had expected. Being resourceful as well as ruthless, the burden did not prove intolerable to her, but it was evident to anyone who knew the couple well that the marriage gave little pleasure to either party. Nor did their friends feel that there was anything to be done about it. ‘It is no use our trying to put the Montagus right,’ wrote Katharine Asquith, ‘as they don’t exist at all.’

  Venetia’s defection had left the Prime Minister distraught. Since Diana had first got to know him well in Venice, she had become very attached to Mr Asquith. She enjoyed the schoolmaster in him; the solemnity with which she was made to recite the first line of Baedeker’s guide to Northern Italy, ‘Over all the movements of the traveller the weather exercises its despotic sway’; the endless questioning on who wrote what and in which play did so-and-so appear. At one point before the war the Duke so disapproved of the policy of the Liberal Government that Diana was forced to visit Downing Street without his knowledge, yet she continued to go, mainly to see the children but also for the pleasure she gained from her meetings with th
eir father. Once war was declared party differences were largely forgotten. The Prime Minister described the Duchess of Rutland and Maud Cunard descending on him in the Cabinet room ‘like an Atlantic tornado. The Duke wants to have the vacant Garter – which he doesn’t in the least deserve and which I certainly shan’t give him.’ He was sure, he told Venetia Montagu, that this plot had nothing to do with an invitation to lunch which he had recently received from Diana. Probably he was right, Diana had as little as possible to do with her mother’s scheming. He sat next to her at dinner a fortnight later. ‘She is a gifted creature,’ he noted, ‘oddly enough, according to her own account, rather lacking in real joie de vivre and much handicapped by her family and some of her surroundings. I think she rather likes me, but I am not sure.’

  Two weeks later they were side by side at dinner again. The Duchess was a champion of the campaign for enforced teetotalism in wartime; a crusade which had with some reluctance been espoused in Buckingham Palace. Somewhat dubiously Diana raised the question. ‘How do you feel about putting down champagne?’ she asked. ‘Let’s put it straight down!’ answered the Prime Minister, and drained a deep glass. ‘The King is pretty guarded about his pledge,’ Diana told her brother John. ‘I don’t think it will come to much with all the cabinet sots and swiggers – but God help England if it does! It is the cornerstone of their brains.’

  Then came Venetia Stanley’s engagement to Edwin Montagu. Mr Asquith visited Diana in bed where she was recovering from an accident. He made evident both his distress at Venetia’s desertion and his affection for Diana. Next day a letter arrived; prominently marked ‘Personal’ and with the instruction that any reply should be similarly labelled. Somewhat daunted by the letter’s contents, Diana that evening consulted Duff:

  Diana is quite certain that Venetia was his mistress, which rather surprises me. This letter, which was rather obscurely expressed, seemed practically to be an offer to Diana to fill the vacated situation. She was in great difficulty as to how she was to answer it, partly from being uncertain as to its meaning and partly from the nature of the proposal it seemed to contain. She was anxious not to lose him but did not aspire to the position of his Egeria, which she felt sure would entail physical duties that she couldn’t or wouldn’t fulfil. I advised her to concoct an answer which would be as obscure as his proposal and leave him puzzled.

  Duff never liked Mr Asquith; partly because of his designs on Diana; perhaps still more because the Prime Minister did not have much time for him: ‘He is oblivious of young men and lecherous of young women.’ Diana, however, though she managed to avoid any close entanglement, grew fonder and fonder of him as he grew more drunken and pathetic and power slipped away from him. At the end of 1916 she was reporting to Katharine, his daughter-in-law, ‘The feeling today seems to be that the old boy cannot eat dirt by remaining lopped of his war powers. His form on the other hand is perfect, detached and bobbish, but I fear lately too conspicuously buffed. Poor darling, I know what he feels.’ One of the things he felt was that it was high time Diana married, but when he broached with her the possibility of finding a suitable mate she replied that he would have first to produce another son like Raymond – a riposte that surprised and slightly shocked him.

  Margot Asquith was another matter. She professed great affection for Diana and abused her liberally as proof of it, ‘What a pity that Diana, so pretty and decorative, should let her brain rot!’ ‘Diana’s main faults are that she takes money from men and spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig’; such comments were duly passed on and caused, if not distress, then at least irritation. ‘As bridge twelve hours in the twenty-four cannot really make the brain active, she should keep her comments in her pocket,’ she retorted crossly to Patrick Shaw-Stewart. One weekend Mrs Asquith put Diana off at the last minute, which, since Duff and Alan Parsons were to be in the party and Diana had already thrown over another hostess in Margot’s favour, was by no means well received. Viola Tree, already staying with the Asquiths, rose in Diana’s defence.

  ‘It’s really a dreadful thing to have done. Diana isn’t accustomed to being treated like that.’

  ‘I thought she wasn’t accustomed to being received at all,’ retorted Margot.

  ‘Well, I expect Duff and Alan will both chuck. There’s nothing for them to come for now.’

  ‘Chuck! Surely they won’t be as middle-class as that?’

  To which Viola retorted that Margot was both middle-class and a chucker. To make matters worse for Diana, Duff and Alan did not chuck; but she had the satisfaction of telephoning the Asquiths at 3.15 a.m. to report that fourteen Zeppelins were overhead and she was in imminent danger of her life.

  There were many weekends when nothing arose to keep Diana away. At Walmer Castle the rooms were numbered. ‘I have been asked my number by the Prime Minister, his secretary, Hugh and Patsy. I keep my powder on through the awesome nights.’ Margot stamped around the castle with skins of bears and filthy hearthrugs ‘which she threw over the shoulders of her guests, muttering that she had nursed five sisters and three nephews through consumption and she knew what was needed’. At Bognor the Asquiths wolfed their lunch so as to get to the bridge-table and played all through a blazing summer weekend, boxed up in a den overlooking the pantry. Diana was in disgrace for bathing after dinner in a near hurricane; ‘at which they had an unequalled blue, more fuss made at the risk than we made when Denny drowned’. At the Wharf, the Asquiths’ country house, Lady Ottoline Morrell called one afternoon when Diana was there. ‘All these people seem curiously apart from real life,’ she commented, ‘as if they had no comprehension of what goes on except in their own little “Set”.’

  Though Diana was not prepared to help her mother in a campaign to secure a Garter for the Duke, there were times when she felt bound to cooperate in her plots. John Granby, Diana’s brother, was ‘the last male issue of our noble house and the trenches were certain death’. The Duchess was determined to get him into a staff job where he would be in relatively little danger. Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief, was a friend who could have fixed the matter with a stroke of the pen, but a more oblique approach seemed desirable. French’s closest friend and confidant was a sinister American adventurer called George Gordon Moore – George Gordon Ghastly as Duff and Diana called him. Moore showed every sign of being in love with Diana, Moore’s influence with French was unlimited, Moore said that Diana was the only living soul of whom French was jealous because he feared she might over-stimulate his friend. If Diana would offer Moore even modest encouragement, then Lord Granby’s future would be secure. So she did ‘and the results were excellent. John got on the staff, wore a red-and-gold band on his hat and was a bit despised.’ Hearing of this, Edward Horner at once asked Diana to intercede for him, too. The difference was that he wanted to be detached from the staff and sent to the front line. This too was done.

  The trouble was that Diana loathed Moore. She was sickened by his physique, which was that of a squat and podgy Red Indian. She could hardly understand a word he said. She despised his vulgarity and ignorance of all she had been taught to find civilized. She was terrified by his obsessive love. He was said to be divorcing his wife in America so as to marry her. Diana had an awful feeling that he might succeed. ‘I was very young and couldn’t cope at all.’ To Raymond Asquith she described his passion as ‘that vile torrent of gravy and steaming, putrefying blood’ compared to the ‘rainbowed ornamental fountain’ of Duff’s affection.

  Once, in a side room of Moore’s house, he got her to himself, pinned her arms to her sides in a bear hug and kissed her greedily. Fearing rape she wrenched her arms loose and tried to strangle him. But Moore had been a pugilist in his time, ‘the windpipe clutch which I did not relax for an easy three minutes proved useless and his throat muscles pulsed to the, to his mind, stimulating caress’. In the end he released her and she stormed from the house: ‘O Raymond, it was so sullying, almost mutilating and scarring. I can still fan
cy I see the traces on my features.’ Duff took her home and she protested, with a nice sense of melodrama, that her lips were not worthy of him any more. Duff took out his handkerchief, gave her lips a perfunctory wipe and said he thought that would do nicely.

  By her standards, she was making unusually heavy weather of what was neither a particularly violent nor an unprecedented assault upon her virtue. There was indeed an element of self-mockery in her protests, but she was genuinely frightened by Moore and had found the experience a disagreeable one. There were compensations, however, in Moore’s friendship, beside the doing of good turns for friends and relatives. He lavished presents on her: an ermine coat, a monkey with a diamond belt, a set of Maupassant bound in morocco, a cream poodle with pompoms on each buttock and shaved shanks and shins, a gigantic sapphire said to have belonged to Catherine the Great. ‘All this had to be accepted,’ she wrote drily to her son many years later. ‘Not difficult to accept, you’ll say, but I really did hate him.’ The Duchess, who believed in spoiling the Egyptians as well as making use of their talents, urged her to take anything that was offered, and Diana never needed much urging to accept a present.

  It was in Diana’s honour that Moore gave a series of parties nicknamed ‘the Dances of Death’, because no one knew which man would be alive when the next dance was held. Negro jazz and Hawaiian bands were summoned from afar; decors created from Bakst or Beardsley for the evening, vanishing at dawn like an insubstantial pageant; rivers of champagne, mountains of red and white camellias. At the heart of the revels, dazzlingly white and fair, Diana ruled. Her presence, wrote Iris Tree, ‘always brought to such feasts something of myth and legendary revival, glory Greece, grandeur Rome plus the clowning escapading of Villon. After one of these revels we came home on a horse-drawn hay-cart – how? – from where? – the dance-tunes singing through our limbs as we mounted into country sunlight.’