Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  And so to the inevitable supper-party after the theatre and bed, if she was lucky, at two or three. It was a gruelling routine, made tolerable by the friendliness of most of her colleagues at the theatre, the confidence that she was a success and the faithful service of adorers like Kommer and Bertram Cruger.

  No one can have loved Diana more fervently than Mr Cruger. He was a middle-aged American of better family than fortune, his main source of income a somewhat ill-defined job on the Parole Commission. Good-looking in a conventional way, his rimless spectacles and stiff collars lent him an air of respectability tarnished only by the bouts of alcoholism which afflicted him every three or four months. Diana viewed him with mingled affection and dismay. ‘If any of you saw him I should, I think, die,’ she wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘with his incredible nasal twang, three-syllable words and invisible pinch-noses.’ But for all his lack of allure he was incomparably useful; dancing attendance at all hours, providing sandwiches and hot coffee when rehearsals dragged on towards dawn, acting like a shadow-slave at parties, ‘he truffles out champagne for me and fills my glass while all round are parched’.

  Cruger never braced himself to do more than make furtive grabs for Diana’s hand in a cinema. To worship and serve was all he wanted. When Diana asked him what he would do when she had gone, he replied, ‘I will walk in crowds looking for people who resemble you’. On such terms Diana would have been happy to retain him in service, but unfortunately Cruger had a long-established mistress already, who did not take kindly to this English interloper. ‘The other woman is completely off her head about it,’ wrote Diana. ‘He is livid to look at and frightening. I’m feeling unnecessarily responsible, sorry for her, miserable for him, and want only to be out of it, and yet haven’t the heart to.’ For weeks Diana meditated giving him up and finally found the courage to tell him they must see each other no more. Cruger’s response was to plunge into a swamp of alcohol and threaten to drown in it.

  Diana was distressed. She was convinced she was bringing Cruger much unhappiness yet feared for his life if she did nothing to rescue him. She wrote to Katharine Asquith for advice. ‘If it were an Englishman, Scotchman or Irishman,’ replied her friend, ‘I should say don’t worry. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But these Americans! One is dealing with a completely unknown factor. Impossible to make a forecast or prescription. It would be like taking the pulse of a pterodactyl and ordering it a bromide. How can you know? You can only act on some sort of ethical principle.’ Diana’s principle was that the quality of mercy should not be strained. Cruger, haggard and distraught, was given an interview. ‘He was half-crying and twitching, a dreadful picture of misery, and I’m ashamed to say I rather enjoyed a tremendous feeling of strength and knowledge that I could get him right.’ To Cruger’s delight and Diana’s relief (for she had missed his company as well as the early morning coffee) the relationship was resumed.

  Bertram Cruger was not the only admirer to ease her passage in those first few months in New York. George Baker Senior, a commodities millionaire, was at her day and night with senile fervour. ‘The old bugger asked me to stay with him,’ Diana told Duff. ‘It would mean a Rolls Royce at the door always but, I’m told, no hope of a cent in his will.’ She was tempted to move in all the same, if only to tease Baker’s daughter who was frantic with worry lest this adventuress should marry her father and make off with the family fortune. In the end, however, the thought of holding him perpetually at bay proved too forbidding; besides, the saving would not have been considerable for ‘my publicity has become so colossal that I hope to get a clean sheet for hotel bill’.

  Her mother would anyway not have approved. Delighted at the prospect of seeing her daughter starring on the New York stage, the Duchess of Rutland had set off in pursuit and taken up residence in the same hotel. Diana, anyway forlorn after Duff’s departure, was at first quite pleased by the visitation: ‘She will make-cocoa for me and give me a tonic and chatter to Wade.’ But soon the two women were on each other’s nerves. The Duchess was perpetually at the theatre, sketching the cast, advising on décor, wandering around behind the scenes. She seems in fact to have been generally well liked, but to Diana it felt as if her mother was making her position impossible, always ‘tearing around, whining, crying, saying I am being outraged, put upon, overworked, and what not, till I am so ashamed of her I can scarcely keep from silencing her roughly’. The two women egged each other on to excesses of economy, eating, if at all, in the cheapest cafeterias and more often boiling up rice pudding in the apartment at their hotel. Marjorie Anglesey, alarmed at reports of her sister’s loss of weight, sternly rebuked the Duchess. ‘Diana’s natural food, as mouse is to the cat or fish is to the seal, is lightly roast beef of Old England. She takes four heaped helpings if you give her the chance and you are feeding her on peptonized cocoa. This I know to be wrong considering the work she seems to be expected to do. It is equivalent to feeding said cat on mosquitoes or said seal on Gentleman’s Relish.’

  ‘Please Duffy Dumpling, get my mummy home, somehow, please,’ besought Diana, after the Duchess had been on the scene for several weeks. Perhaps the Duke could be induced to cable saying that he was missing his wife and wanted her back? Duff consulted his brother-in-law, John Granby, who reported that the Duke had never been happier in his life and was dreading the day of the Duchess’s return. It was more than four months after the arrival, and towards the end of Diana’s first season in New York, that the Duchess finally put to sea. Then at once Diana was overwhelmed by contrition, seeing her sail away, installed as a final economy in a third-class cabin, ‘some bolting-hole of beastliness among the lower barnacles’, leaving behind ‘her last real fun in life and going back to grumpiness and monotony’.

  Once she had gone Diana realized to the full how lonely she was and how much she was missing Duff. Everything suddenly seemed to be going wrong: ‘I’ve a growth on the sole [or as Diana expressed it “the soul”] of my foot and the chiro buggered it up and I broke my record and couldn’t appear yesterday’; it would take her four more weeks to pay off her tax; the Prince of Wales was in New York but he had never visited The Miracle; ‘it’s all black as night’. The best consolation she could find lay in assuring herself that to live in misery with some hope of future happiness was safer than to live in happiness with the constant fear of future misery. This thin comfort was supplemented by the arrival on the Aquitania of a Bedlington puppy called Major II after their dog in London. It took Cruger two days of negotiation to get Major II through immigration, since he had first ‘to give a true account of his ancestry and his health, and what’s more, he’s got to promise not to roger while he’s in the States’, but in the end officialdom was satisfied and Major II replaced the Duchess at the hotel.

  Though Diana had innumerable acquaintances in New York and could dine out or go to parties as often as she felt inclined, she missed the hard core of intimates with whom she could relax. Most of all she missed Duff. ‘I want you, Duffy,’ she wrote. ‘I need you. I’m famished for rocking and loving and being nonsensical and kissed and laughed at.’ On 1 April 1924 Diana opened a letter from Duff and read:

  My dear Baby. I don’t love you any more. I meant to have told you this before, but I didn’t like to hurt you. The knowledge has gradually been forcing itself on me. Of course I shall always be very fond of you but ever since I met [end of page] Yah! Boo! April Fool!

  Diana would have found the joke funnier if it had not echoed her secret fears. Separated from Duff, she found it impossible to believe that he would continue to care for her. ‘Do you still love me?’ she once cabled anxiously. ‘Her ladyship inquires whether you still love her,’ the lugubrious voice of Holbrook informed Duff as he drank with his cronies at Buck’s. She continued to grumble about Daisy Fellowes and Duff’s other paramours. Duff professed great indignation at her accusations. Mrs Fellowes was at Monte Carlo, another candidate ‘whore de combat’, if Diana would make a list of people h
e was to avoid he would be happy to obey. ‘When I think of my bachelor existence and your vile suspicions, my blood boils. Last week I dined six nights at the club, the seventh was in the company of my sister Sybil. If I do so again you will no doubt begin muttering about Lord Byron and Augusta Leigh. You beast, you beast, you horrid little, dearly-beloved beast!’ It was not so much the thought of other women that disturbed Diana as ‘a feeling that I cannot dismiss that you are learning to do without me, that your pangs of separation are less sharp. What am I losing to gain this miserable triumph and these few dollars?’ It was, she complained, a sailor’s marriage with her the sailor; and Duff was not cut out to play the part of a male Penelope waiting dutifully for his Odyssean bride.

  *

  Meanwhile Diana addressed herself doggedly to the task of making the ‘few dollars’ needed for Duff to be able to throw up the Foreign Office and take to politics. Another £1,000 a year would suffice, and ‘if we can’t pick that up with journalism, directorships, smiles, artful-dodging – we are not worth it’. Even with her mother gone she continued to scrimp and save, cadging the most unlikely perquisites in the name of publicity, ruthlessly beating down couturiers and hoteliers. The price of everything appalled her, taxis started at 19/6d, every dish – ‘sole, succotash, gallumagetty grandmother style or veal cutlets’ – always cost $2. Her life was transformed when she discovered a restaurant near the theatre where she could get a plate of spaghetti for ten cents. Meanwhile Duff weekended in Paris, ate and drank lavishly, visited theatres, night-clubs, brothels; came back, went to Buck’s, dined, drank a bottle of champagne, lost £8 at bridge; and was amazed at being overdrawn. ‘It is most disheartening, I indulge in no extravagances.’

  Diana’s earnings were now expanding to a point where they could cover even Duff’s most energetic economies. After a fierce battle with the management she got her pay raised by $150 a week, with $50 extra for each matinée. It was the extra-theatrical enterprises, however, that brought her the most striking rewards. Otto Kahn put her into property development in Florida and within a few months her $5,000, anyway provided by Kahn, had swollen to $30,000. A flaw was that the money never actually seemed to be there if wanted, but the profit on paper appeared massive – ‘So go ahead Mr Dumphy and don’t deny yourself noffing.’ A testimonial for Pond’s Cold Cream was worth $1,000, a signature at the end of an article for the Hearst Press as much again. Diana speculated whether it could be right to sacrifice dignity in this way. Duff was robust: ‘Cast dignity to the winds while in New York and get the Yanks’ money so that you may be able to resume dignity in Europe!’ It was Diana, however, who proved robuster when the depredations of the Inland Revenue were in question. She was outraged when it was suggested tax might be levied on her American earnings: ‘I won’t pay tax on this money. Why can’t I say my salary was exaggerated for publicity purposes? They can’t possibly look in Gest’s books and I luckily have no contract.’ This time it was Duff who had qualms. You must tell the truth, he urged her: ‘otherwise we shall end in gaol as sure as eggs is eggs. Besides, it’s very wicked to tell lies. When the poor unemployed do it they get sent to prison at once.’

  By now it was clear that The Miracle would be revived the following autumn, so when Diana was asked to stay on for another month and add a further £1,800 to the nest egg, she was inclined to refuse. Duff urged her to accept and promised to come out and collect her if she did so. Reluctantly she agreed; there was no one to talk to but Cruger and ‘he’s a slave lover, no fun, so I shall be deathly lonely’. Worse than the loneliness was the fear that Duff would have grown away from her and they would find it impossible to get on terms again. There was indeed some constraint at first but it soon wore off. Bertram Cruger’s sister-in-law Pinna, a formidable beauty much courted by the Prince of Wales, meditated an assault on Duff’s virtue. Then she heard the Coopers talking and laughing together in their bedroom. ‘We sounded so happy,’ recorded Duff, ‘that she realized there was no place for me in her life.’

  On 30 May 1924 came the last performance of the season. The whole company assembled outside ‘the theatre to cheer Diana as she left. Gest told Duff that he had never known a star so unanimously beloved. His words were no doubt tailored to his audience, but Diana had won the affection as well as the respect of all involved. She had proved herself not merely a shining success at the box office but the equal of any professional in resourcefulness, stamina and cheerfulness under adversity. No one doubted that The Miracle would be gravely impaired if it went on tour without her.

  Her respite lasted only three months before Duff and she were on the Atlantic again. This time the Prince of Wales was aboard, with the Mountbattens as escorts. Diana was assured by all the pressmen that she was a close friend of the Prince’s and lived in terror lest he might fail to recognize her and send her stock tumbling in New York. This fear was soon dispelled, but she then found herself offered enormous sums to report to the Hearst Press on what he ate for breakfast, how long he spent in the lavatory and other such details of the royal life at sea. She refused, mainly because she could think of nothing to say. The only story of any note seemed to concern the tug-of-war team, of which the Prince and Duff were members and which Mountbatten organized on the most scientific principles. He challenged the American champions and was confident of victory but, alas for science, brawn triumphed over brain, and sceptre and crown came tumbling down in ignominious defeat.

  For the next three autumns and winters Diana toured the United States in The Miracle. The reception was always enthusiastic, sometimes spectacular; she was feted, mobbed in the streets, placarded across the newspapers; The Miracle transformed the life of every city in which it was performed and for hundreds of thousands of Americans The Miracle was Diana. She loved the glory and the money that came with it, but the pleasures of American provincial life soon staled and she hankered after Duff’s love and the comforts of home. Cleveland, the first stopping-place, in some ways stood for the rest. ‘It’s worse than words have power to tell,’ Diana wrote. ‘To start with, climatically, it’s polar-deep snow and blizzard biting across Lake Erie. This enormous hotel is fustier and mustier than an old Great Eastern compartment and the hall is like Liverpool Street Station on Whit Monday.’ Every day the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported the mortalities from cold and fire. ‘I die of both in a mild way – because I won’t wear enough clothes and can’t regulate the heating apparatus.’ ‘Cooked and coma-ed,’ she would await Kommer’s morning telephone call. ‘That starts the melancholy day, and after a few moments groaning and complaining and upsetting him,’ she would clamber from bed. In the afternoon, if there were no matinée, she and Kommer would go to the cinema. Then she would read Proust and he the scripts of plays, before a tediously teetotal supper. After the evening show would come milk and oysters in the hotel bedroom, then, just as she pined for sleep, an hour-long telephone call from Cruger in New York – ‘I know it’s costing him £5 for three minutes, yet if I cut the talk short he’s hurt.’

  Ten thousand people a night crammed the Civic Hall at Cleveland and four or five times a week there were luncheons with the city fathers in their pompous mansions or receptions at a Woman’s Club where ‘1,600 women passed in single file shaking hands and saying “I certainly am charmed, Lady Manners!”’ As Iris Tree wrote of a later stage of the tour,

  In Cincinnati

  Everyone asked us to a party

  Because we act in The Miracle

  And Americans are so hysterical.

  Occasionally there were variations to this routine. Once it was Siamese twins in the audience. ‘No one looked at the play and they couldn’t see it, ’cos they sit almost back to back as if they were mad at each other.’ At the end the half-dressed cast forced their way to the door to see the distinguished visitors depart, but somehow the twins had slipped away. At one matinée Diana began to sway on her pillar and realized she was about to faint. She bit her cheek until the blood came but could not clear her head. Pinchot hea
rd her cry for help but could think of nothing to do and in the end Diana crumbled to the ground, missing by inches the spikes and candles that clustered round her eyrie. Within three minutes she was on her pillar again and that evening she acted the Nun. ‘It comes, of course, from a healthy life,’ she complained. ‘Not a drink since I’ve been here! I feel ridiculously sick and miserable.’ On another occasion an insect settled on Diana’s face and tormented her by crawling up her cheek and around her eye. Fortunately it was an election night in England. Diana told herself that if she moved a thousand votes would be lost to Duff, and the insect did its worst to no avail.

  Visitors from New York, or better still London, were vastly welcome, but Diana’s morale was so low that she was unusually censorious. Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie were in town. Bea was ‘the sweetest woman’ but Gertie was ‘so common one feels that she has nits in her hair, so kitchen-maidy’. (The comment, it is fair to say, was made only after Diana had been subjected to a particularly exuberant Lesbian party which left her cowering in disapproval on a stiff chair in the corner.) Lesbianism was always a threat. In Boston Diana and a female admirer were being driven home by young Mr Harvey Brown. The admirer swooped, head on Diana’s neck, fingers fumbling at her breast. ‘You look more like a Madonna than ever,’ commented Mr Brown as he tried to see what was going on in the back. Although it was 3 a.m. her would-be lover insisted on coming to Diana’s room. Diana, who was preoccupied not so much by fears of rape as her wish not to hurt anybody’s feelings, was dismayed, but luckily Kommer was in attendance. The admirer was eventually despatched, satisfied that Diana had a prior and heterosexual engagement. ‘Poor woman, I think it was perhaps more drink than lust,’ was Diana’s temperate conclusion.