Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  ‘Don’t overwork,’ urged Hilaire Belloc. ‘I was distressed when I heard from you that you were going at it again, and with travel and the foul towns at that. Courage is glorious, but the Devil is the master of the world and when he sees anyone as brave as you are he makes them overdo it.’ Belloc had earlier complained to Katharine Asquith that Diana should never have agreed to impersonate the Madonna. Katharine had passed on and perhaps exaggerated the rebuke. Hurriedly Belloc composed a sonnet sequence to appease Diana.

  Because I find foreknowledge in my soul

  Of your true sisterhood with heavenly things …

  he explained

  Therefore did I and therefore now complain

  That you’re profound, and daily do renew

  To make your own resplendent beauty vain

  Through mimic beauty of what’s likest you.

  This was my sentence. This was all my say;

  Mourning such light be clouded in a play.

  Frances Brett Young’s ‘votive epigram for the Madonna’s shrine’ was more approving, but the verse was worse:

  A miracle in Manchester! What manner

  Of miracle? Max Reinhardt’s? No, Diana!

  No number of epigrams could have made up for the absence of her friends. Duff came to Glasgow for a long weekend, but his departure left her more disconsolate than she had been before. He wrote on his return to London:

  I don’t think that I ever minded leaving you so much … My only consolation was the thought that our unhappiness was itself such a tribute to our happiness and love, and how much sadder it would have been had we parted with a sigh of relief. I don’t think I ever loved you more than these days – the first was the best because it had the ‘first day of the holidays’ feeling which only schoolboys know – the last was the worst because it was fog instead of sunshine and the approach of separation hung over it, darker than the fog.

  A new friendship was cemented during these weeks. Diana first met Evelyn Waugh at a luncheon given by Hazel Lavery. With Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies already published, Waugh was greatly in demand as a brilliant young novelist. Diana was enraptured by his wit, his sensibility, his gusto, his affection for her; dismayed by his black rages and cruelty. She called him her ‘dear malignancy’ and their relationship was punctuated by fearsome quarrels. Constantly she rebuked him for believing and embellishing stories that suggested she was speaking ill of him: ‘You know perfectly well that you have no Baby as loyal as this Baby and if you believe anything else you are very foolish.’ She was one of the few people who could to some extent call Waugh to order. In Birmingham, on the tour of The Miracle they were walking together down a steep hill. A man came towards them, crimson and tottering under the weight of a heavy suitcase. He asked if he was going the right way for the railway station. ‘Quite right,’ said Waugh. ‘Go to the very top of the street and turn left.’ They walked on, and then a thought struck Diana. Wasn’t the station in a different direction? ‘Certainly,’ said Waugh. ‘That’ll teach the vulgar little man to address us!’ Diana refused to speak to him again until he ran after the man, explained the mistake and even helped him some of the way with his case.

  Such aberrations did not detract from the delights of his company. Many weekends and sometimes during the week as well he sought her out in her provincial hotel and devoted himself to entertaining her. From Manchester they drove together over the Derbyshire hills and visited the great houses of the area, on a rainy afternoon in Glasgow he read her The Wind in the Willows‚ a classic which incredibly she had never come across before.

  In Edinburgh he introduced her to a Scottish Nationalist group. Eric Linklater, Moray McLaren and the like would gather in the Café Royal to discuss the destiny of the nation. Diana preferred the stained glass windows of sporting scenes to the political solemnities, but was entirely happy in this unexpected company. The provincial tour was not a high spot in Diana’s life, but it would have been much less tolerable if there had been no Evelyn Waugh to comfort her.

  The curtain went down for the last time on The Miracle at the Hippodrome, Golders Green, at the end of January 1933. There was talk of revivals, even as late as the 1960s it was seriously suggested that she should return to the part, but the ideas never came to anything and she did not want them to. Duff was now in the Government, henceforth he would play the starring roles. Diana’s part, she was resolved, would be that of the loyal but unobtrusive supporter. It did not work out quite like that – unobtrusiveness was never Diana’s forte – but henceforward it was Duff’s career that preoccupied her, never her own.

  SEVEN

  ‘A LIGHT WORLD’

  While Diana was winning glory on the stage, Duff was embarking on his long-meditated political career. He was not ideal material for a politician. His courage and pugnacity led him into rows with those who might otherwise have been his supporters. Though ambitious, he could not be bothered with much of the drudgery essential to the Member of Parliament and would spend drinking with his cronies in White’s hours which would have been better devoted to cosseting aldermen or acquainting himself with local issues. He had an on the whole well-deserved reputation for idleness: ‘And, Mr Cooper,’ Lord Curzon had inquired when Foreign Secretary, ‘in the intervals between entertaining your beautiful wife, how do you occupy yourself?’ His friends loved him but tended to consider him a lightweight: ‘We all,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘think Diana will be a more serious candidate than Duff himself.’

  Above all, he was singularly lacking in the common touch. He had no small talk and was shy and brusque except with those to whom he felt affinity. In 1925 Diana cross-examined Iris Tree on what she and other close friends like Alan Parsons and St John Hutchinson really thought of Duff.

  ‘They admire you and are proud of you,’ she told him, ‘but they are all frightened and none loving of you, because of your deathly coldness to them. They think it has greatly developed since you married. Iris feels you despise your companions of this order utterly. This may be true, but I hold it wrong that you should show it forth. I am very conscious and sometimes horrified at your lack of warmth to anyone, but have hugged the remembrance that to me you are different. Yet sometimes lately I have felt the habit, which is all it is, on myself and shuddered. Duffy, don’t be deathly proud, my darling. You cannot have a completely different manner just for my group, and so you probably dish out the frozen mitt to all, and I want all men to love as well as admire you.’

  Diana’s letter shows well not merely Duff’s deficiencies but also the ways in which her own strengths could complement him. Her political opinions, in so far as she had any, were instinctive and imprecise. She was for conservation, but not necessarily a supporter of the Conservative Party; a monarchist, but not automatically the champion of any individual monarch. On the whole she would have preferred to see the rich man remain in his castle, the poor man at the gate, but if the poor man by industry or sleight of hand gained possession of the castle, she would be perfectly ready to accept an invitation to dine there. What would have disturbed her most would have been if the castle had been demolished and a row of identical bungalows erected on the site, but even this would not have been cause for despair. Diana would have known that one bungalow would soon be larger and more luxurious, or at least more interesting than the others, and have felt confident that it was to that one that she would find her way.

  Duff could not have espoused communism or fascism without changing his character so fundamentally that he would have been no longer the man she loved; but short of such excesses she was prepared to follow in whatever direction he pointed. No wife of a would-be member was less qualified to argue the rights or wrongs of her husband’s position; what Diana knew, and was prepared, indeed determined, to say loudly, was that Duff was a good, brave and honourable man and that if he made half as good an M.P. as he was a husband then the electorate could count themselves lucky.

  When Duff was selected as Conservative candidate for the Lanca
shire mill-town of Oldham, Diana hastened back from America to help him in the election. The local Conservatives were alarmed. Diana had no intention of dressing down for the occasion or in any way pretending she was different from what she was. What would the Lancashire mill-hands, famous for their bluntness and sturdy commonsense, think of this exotic celebrity? The Sphere had recently conducted a poll among its readers to choose the ten most remarkable women of the day. The Queen, Edith Sitwell and Tallulah Bankhead accompanied Diana to the top. Was this the sort of galère from which a member’s wife should come? ‘Make that hussy go away from my door!’ had been the cry of an indignant voter in another by-election where Diana had assisted. Would this be the reaction of the inhabitants of Oldham? Diana herself was apprehensive and protested that she looked ‘such a foolish bear, being led around to be looked at, given a bun-bouquet. Or is it useful publicity?’

  It was, and more. Her attitude to the electors was perfect because it never occurred to her that any attitude was called for. She was totally unselfconscious, without any trace of patronage, friendly, interested and obviously delighted by her reception. She did not seem superior because she did not feel herself superior, merely different. ‘There’s no swank about her,’ an old lady told the Daily Express, ‘and, oh my, isn’t she a beauty.’ She genuinely liked the people of Oldham and they recognized her sincerity and liked her in return. ‘I loved the mills,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘because the girls mobbed me and kissed me and thought me funny. I promised them a clog dance if they put my husband in, which I later performed as best I could.’

  Duff won at Oldham with a small majority. To Diana it was self-evident that he deserved office as soon as possible. A year or so later a vacancy occurred in the Foreign Office and it was known that he was being considered as a possible candidate. Diana was acting in Boston, and as soon as she heard the news she telegraphed Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘Please look after Duffy’. Churchill never referred to the telegram but Duff heard of it through a private secretary. ‘I am sorry you telegraphed to Winston,’ he wrote. ‘If one can get on without intrigue – and I’m sure I can – it is much better not to indulge in it.’ Diana was chastened and pledged herself never to interfere again, but the resolution was not one she was likely to keep. Strings were there to be pulled, and never did pride or delicacy inhibit her from pulling them with a will when the need arose.

  Diana was back in England in May of the following year, 1926, the month of the General Strike. To her this seemed the prelude to violent revolution and she passed unhappy hours badgering Mrs Churchill and friends in the Government for news. How soon could they leave the country with honour, she asked Duff. Not till the massacres began, he answered firmly, knowing well that he would be dead on a barricade or a tumbril long before he would take to flight. Diana’s fears were multiplied when she realized that Churchill was virtually in control of the Government – ‘that terrifies – with his “whack ’em on the snout” policies’. She urged Katharine Asquith to stay away from London. ‘Don’t imagine you could be doing any good here – one simply isn’t wanted, though when the barricades and the shooting begin we may be.’

  Her morale improved when there was more for her to do. First she taxied people to and from Hackney and Putney and Golders Green. Then Lord Beaverbrook summoned her to the Daily Express, where she succeeded Edwina Mountbatten on the telephone switchboard. Finally she moved to The Times. Duff foresaw trouble with the pickets and tried to keep her at home, but she slipped out of the house and spent till 4 a.m. each morning folding newspapers. The rights and wrongs of the dispute never concerned her; it was our side and their side, and though she felt no animosity against the opposition she had no doubt that they must be defeated. Then it was back to America to earn more dollars. By the time The Miracle ended its run Duff was poised to enter the Government. Early in 1928 he was offered the post of Financial Secretary to the War Office, a post traditionally reserved for young men whom it is believed are destined to go far.

  *

  There were other changes too. In May 1925 the old Duke of Rutland had a heart attack and died. Diana had long accepted that he was not her father, but in his detached and on the whole benign way he had not done a bad job of playing a father’s part. Diana regretted rather than mourned him. The Duchess, after a brief pause for decorum, throve exceedingly. With relief she sold the house in Arlington Street for a satisfactory fortune and moved into the coachman’s lodge. There was a sale of the contents in July which on the whole went well, though a portrait of a child believed to be by Reynolds fetched only £42. Diana slipped into the sale various pieces of furniture given her by admirers and no longer wanted, and was delighted by the results, particularly a rather ugly Italianate cabinet presented by Tommy Bouch which fetched £68. The only out-and-out failures were the Duchess’s own drawings, on which she put high reserves and which all had to be bought in. ‘It must have saddened and rather humiliated her,’ commented Diana sympathetically.

  With the Duke’s death her brother John succeeded and Belvoir ceased to be home. Duff and she still slept in the same room, went there regularly for Christmas, yet now she was a guest where once she had gone of right. The 9th Duke’s accession was not followed by any slackening of formality. Duff was required to wear tails for a family party of six in June 1926. The new Duke’s brother-in-law, Michael Tennant, asked whether they never wore a black tie in the country. ‘Yes,’ said the Duke. ‘When I dine alone with my wife in her bedroom.’ Even Duff, who throve on grandeur, was disconcerted. ‘Your brother is really getting rather alarming, you know,’ he wrote to Diana.

  Things were very different at Aldwick, near Bognor, where the old Duchess presented Diana with the eighteenth-century farmhouse which the Duke of Portland had given her many years before. It was comfortable but never grand, tails were unheard of and even black ties a rarity. Instead it was a place of bathing and picnics and walks on the Downs, of Belloc reciting his latest ballad or Maurice Baring reading his new novel.

  Belloc was among the most regular visitors. ‘Children, I must have beer,’ he announced one evening as he swept in, cloak billowing behind him and dinner already on the table. Beer was, with some difficulty, provided; a glass of sherry proffered and accepted; red wine followed white; then came port and brandy. The glasses accumulated in front of Belloc as he ate and talked and talked and ate, until when Duff rose to leave the table Belloc looked at them in surprise. ‘God damn my soul, I must drink this up,’ he protested, and swilled down the whole collection, with no perceptible effect on his sobriety.

  Bognor also provided a haven for Major, the Bedlington, who was growing tetchy in London. Holbrook outraged Duff by announcing the dog would have to be destroyed as it had bitten a boy. ‘It does boys good to be bitten,’ protested Duff. ‘He also invariably flies at “the girl”. He doesn’t, it seems, like youth.’ In Sussex Major would be able to use up his surplus energy on long walks and worrying sheep.

  *

  For four years Diana had been complaining that acting in The Miracle kept her away from Duff, particularly at Christmas. Now, in 1928, when Christmas together was at last a possibility, she elected to go to Nassau with Sidney Herbert. The fact that she was ready to desert Duff in so cavalier a fashion shows how restless her theatrical life had made her. It was to be another twelve months before she found it possible to settle down to a normal married existence. Certainly this voluntary separation did not indicate that her marriage was under any strain, still less that she was having an affair with Herbert. Playing the copulation game, in which one had to list within ten minutes the ten people one would most like to go to bed with, Diana had tentatively come up with Jack Barrymore; Chaliapin; Reinhardt; D’Annunzio; Ivor Wimborne (‘I’d hate it!’); Bendor, Duke of Westminster (‘Phui!’); and Sidney Herbert’s brother Michael (‘I’d have to be driven to it!’). Sidney Herbert himself did not figure and was really more Duff’s friend than hers, much loved by both of them and now serio
usly ill. Diana’s role was in fact no more than to lend respectability to Sidney Herbert’s affair with another woman; she was anxious to do him a good turn, delighted to have all her expenses paid, and hungry to set out on her travels again.

  It was a model holiday. Diana described the perfect turtle dinner. Turtle-eating was a ceremony in Nassau, and when one was caught the turtle-cook was sent for. On this occasion turtle soup was followed by ‘the freshest, most amazingly cooked’ little mushrooms with a firm cream on them. Next came the turtle herself ‘on her own hot shell and under a little roof of pastry; the best food there is, I think’. Then a froth of coconut ice, the coconuts so young they were still unformed, served with a cake of fly-away nuts and a compote of cumquats. Finally a Roquefort cheese was followed by ‘the prettiest, reddest, most flavoured strawberries. It was a culinary masterpiece.’ Next day she felt distinctly sick. Her first reaction was to blame the culinary masterpiece, but when it persisted she began to look elsewhere for the cause.

  Diana’s attitude towards having a baby had been curiously ambivalent. Shortly before she married she told Katharine Asquith that she did not think she wanted one. ‘To have them seems purely egotistical and yet not worth it to oneself – more especially to me, who would fear for them so much.’ It was something of a relief when the first few years of marriage did not produce one: first filming and then The Miracle made such demands on her time that the interruption would have been inconvenient. Duff tried to convince himself that he felt the same, observing the sins of his friends’ children and congratulating himself that he was spared such tribulations.