In Washington things began to go better. Duff was doubtful what sort of a reception they would get at the Embassy, but Lord Lothian welcomed them enthusiastically. ‘Giggly and pleasant and badly-dressed,’ Diana found him. He gave a dinner in Diana’s honour in which she sat next to the poet Archibald MacLeish. She delighted in him, and equally in his disconcertingly frumpish wife who won her heart by proclaiming after dinner: ‘The trouble about Mr Woollcott is that his flies are always open.’ Joseph Alsop met her at lunch at the Embassy and can still recall her piercing blue eyes and the white Molyneux dress with coffee-coloured trimmings which she wore on that occasion. It had been feared that the Ambassador might try to sabotage a proposed meeting with the President but, on the contrary, he expedited it. ‘He’ll say he’s met you before,’ he warned Diana. He did; the first words Roosevelt uttered were: ‘Lady Diana, come and sit next to me. I haven’t seen you since Paris, 1918.’ The President was gleeful over the recent repeal of the Neutrality Bill and made no pretence of being neutral himself. Perhaps deliberately he concentrated on Diana and avoided a tête-à-tête with Duff; the only direct question he asked him was the name of the head of Naval Intelligence, and as Duff could not remember, the conversation did not develop. ‘I was a bit nervous and didn’t do very well with him,’ Diana told John Julius, ‘but he did well with me. If his legs had not been paralysed he’d have danced a war-dance.’
From that moment all seemed to change. Diana felt as if some poison had mysteriously drained from her system. ‘My heart is no longer dead within me,’ she told Conrad. ‘It is heavy with sunk ships and a child and a lover I miss, but it’s alive again.’ She seemed too to sense a different spirit among the Americans. At a large luncheon given by Tom Lamont, an eminent banker, Mrs Lamont got to her feet and announced a toast which she said no one need drink if they did not want to: ‘Here’s to the victory of the Allies and to hell with neutrality!’ Everyone drank, though some with more enthusiasm than others, while Diana wept in gratitude. When Duff lectured in Brooklyn, trouble was predicted and five hundred police were posted around the auditorium. In the event only a handful of dispirited demonstrators appeared, carrying banners reading ‘We won’t be dragged in’ and ‘Send Duff home!’. ‘It merely gave Duff a chance to do a turkey-cock about the last stronghold of liberty being none too impregnable when you get demonstrations (there wasn’t one) and picketing (that hadn’t come off) against a man speaking his mind.’
For three months the Coopers were ceaselessly on the move. South Bend, Indiana, was the worst place they visited; Toledo, Ohio, the most agreeable. At Akron, Ohio, Diana was delighted by a bar with a panorama on one wall of a sandy bay edged with palm trees. Suddenly the view darkened, thunder pealed, lightning flashed, torrential rain descended. ‘It was all operated from a tiny magic electric box by two niggy-wigs who were enjoying it madly.’ Outside snow lay thick. At Chicago there was a St Andrew’s night dinner with a ram’s head, haggis, reels, sword-dance and Auld Lang Syne, but not a drop to drink. ‘What is the idea? Prohibition is dead. Is it a legacy? Why do they all have to drink behind closed doors? I can’t make it out.’ Dining in Boston she sat next to an American who told her he used to live in London, in Oxford Square. ‘To me,’ said Diana, recalling afternoons spent there with the Asquiths, ‘Oxford Square means painting a gigantic map on the wall. I wonder if it was washed out by the next tenant?’ ‘No,’ said the man. ‘I varnished it.’ Barbara Hutton arranged the list of those invited to Duff’s lecture in Palm Beach. Joseph Kennedy was not included, and when pressed for an explanation, Barbara Hutton explained that while he had been Ambassador in London she had found herself there, abandoned and unhappy. Kennedy was eager to help, but the help was to consist mainly of setting her up as his mistress. ‘I gather some pouncing accompanied these propositions,’ Diana wrote to Conrad. ‘How amusing, and how little I would have thought of it! Mr Asquith and Lord Wimborne, to think of only two old gentlemen, both put forward more or less the same plan to me, and I thought it so flattering. While poor Barbara feels she can never look Kennedy in the face again. She is probably right and I am wrong.’
At Fort Worth, Texas, they stayed with Amos Carter, ‘far and away the greatest boaster and god-darned bore we’ve hit yet.’ Over the huge log-fire was the stuffed head of a steer, his eyes flashing with red electric wrath, his nose snorting little puffs of smoke. Amos Carter disappeared and shortly afterwards the steer delivered a speech of welcome. Mr Carter possessed a collection of hats belonging to celebrities, including Lord Rothermere and the Prince of Wales, and a life-size wax nymph with eyelashes and real hair. The lecture that evening was introduced by the President’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, who opened question-time by asking, ‘Hasn’t the British Empire been built up by deeds similar to Hitler’s?’ Hardly, felt Diana, the question to be expected from your own chairman. It was at Fort Worth, too, that Duff was told of the appendicitis victim who pleaded that his navel should not be cut into. When asked why, he explained: ‘There is nothing I like better than lying naked on my bed eating celery, and I always put the salt in it.’ At Oklahoma City they went to see Gone With the Wind. When they entered the theatre everybody stood and sang ‘God Save the King’.
Hollywood was the furthest point of their expedition. They stayed with Jack Warner, richest and most powerful of the Warner brothers. ‘Diana is never happy in great comfort and longs to take me riding in the desert,’ noted Duff. ‘Also our host and hostess are almost rendering her anti-Semitic. To me people matter so much less than they do to her.’ But though the sybaritic luxury grated, she took a childish delight in meeting the stars. Dietrich came to dinner with Erich Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She was wearing a black trouser-suit made of velvet with Fauntleroy jabot and cuffs; ‘her face is really lovely,’ wrote Diana, ‘but she took so little interest in Duff and me that we are not very gone on her’. Errol Flynn she disliked intensely; apart from being anti-British and thinking the war foolish, he was vainer than any actor she had met. Charlie Chaplin she knew already. He was in the middle of making The Great Dictator, but though he said it was going to be magnificent, Diana had her doubts. She had an interminable conversation with him afterwards: ‘I did not think he made very much sense – who knows that the boot was not on the other foot!’ Of all the stars she met, her favourite was ‘a young man called James Stewart.’
Diana was more to Duff on this expedition than just a companion. He acclimatized well to his surroundings: ‘He has given up carrying a stick or umbrella,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘He is very energetic and full of hustle as though he thought “Time was Money”. He speaks through his nose and soon he will be wearing pince-nez and smoking a cheroot, and may even grow a little goatee beard.’ But though he had complete confidence on the lecture rostrum he found the necessary conviviality before and after the event a painful duty. He had no small talk and relied on Diana to ease his passage, in the same way as he had relied on her to make a success of his parties at Gower Street and Admiralty House. The lectures would have been well received in any case, but the affection that they left behind them was largely Diana’s doing.
Only the most churlish denied that the visit had been worthwhile. No dramatic shift in American policy ensued, but many people in a position to shape public opinion understood the British position better and felt more sympathy for it. Financially it had been less of a triumph. They had expected to make a minimum of $15,000 from the trip, but the expenses had been so great that they ended up with barely half that amount. Diana would not have cared if they had actually lost money, so pleased was she to be going home. She had as yet hardly adjusted to the austerity that lay ahead for Britain. Home thoughts from abroad in February 1940 included speculation as to where the Easter holidays should be spent. ‘Bognor will be frightfully cold. I have no servants but Wade, Nanny and the two Joneses. Can we run it on that? I don’t see why not, on lobsters, pâtés, salads, tinned stuff, baked potatoes. Then there is honey and cheese an
d prawns and tunny fish and foie gras that needs no cooking.’ A slight flavour of Marie Antoinette still clung about her a few weeks after her return. She speculated on why people would talk all the time about the food shortage. ‘I can’t think why, because there seems to be masses. The poor still refuse to eat all the things I love – hare, rabbits, venison, trout etc’ Such attitudes were not long to survive the opening of the total war.
*
The Coopers returned to find their Bognor cottage ‘dense with child-refugees’, the unfortunate exiles digging in the chilly sands with gas-masks dangling around their necks. Duff and Diana perched uneasily in Chapel Street but the house was too big, too difficult to run in wartime. Duff was unemployed and restless, Diana suffering with him, unable to settle to anything.
‘What a hopeless hell is it,’ she wrote to Juliet Duff, ‘so much worse than 1914 when there was a fanfare and a display of courage and high-spirits, cheering, boozing. I’m taking it like niggers and Jews are supposed to take danger – but don’t – with a drawn ghastly face no paint will disguise, wet hands, despairing lassitude. I’m deeply ashamed and feel it would be much better if I had anything to do, but I haven’t even a house to run. Two families with four children each are in occupation here, but they “do” for themselves and are no trouble at all. I’ve rung up the Labour Exchange about helping with the harvest but they say they know nothing about it. We can’t plant spuds till spring. Duff is, I can see, in a state of concealed restlessness. He has no job, he the great fire-eater – if I leave him for a second he’ll go to France as an interpreter or liaison man and I shall go out of my mind.’
At one point Duff actually set out to re-enlist in the Grenadiers. He had his old uniform altered, donned puttees and Sam Browne and set off for the wars. It was a gallant but abortive effort. The generals called him ‘Sir’ and it soon became clear that no one had a job for a fifty-year-old second lieutenant with several years of Cabinet service behind him.
Then came the invasion of Norway. In 1917 Duff had bet Patrick Shaw-Stewart £1,500 to £100 that Winston Churchill would never be Prime Minister. In May 1940 he lost his bet. Chamberlain’s Government fell, Churchill replaced him, and Duff was invited to serve as Minister of Information. It was not a post in which he was ever to feel at ease. He found his duties ill-defined and distasteful. Unjustly, he was attacked by the press for seeking to suppress their liberties, and found it temperamentally impossible to establish a relationship with proprietors or journalists that would remove the misunderstandings. To the public he was an ogre, none the less repellent for being slightly comical – ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ became a by-word for official interference with the freedom of the individual. With little support from the Cabinet and less from his staff, his remedy was often to retreat to White’s and play bridge. ‘More impotent, more negligible and more defeated than one would have thought possible,’ was Cecil King’s judgement; and though it was unfairly harsh it was not wholly beside the mark.
Diana did her best to make things work. Eminent American journalists like Vincent Sheean, who might have been riled by the inevitable censorship, were lulled by her into a mood of acquiescence. Walter Monckton, one of the few wholly capable organizers on Duff’s staff and meditating escape to greener pastures, was surprised to get a ‘rather miserable’ letter from Diana begging him to stand by his minister. Her role was never more than peripheral, however; she hardly visited the ministry and knew little of Duff’s work. ‘Papa tells me nothing,’ she complained to John Julius. ‘It’s been a grievance for twenty years.’ Knowing that Duff was unhappy and disaffected, she suffered with him but could do little to help. ‘It’s a hard life, politics, and you must have most of the things in “If”. Papa has most of them and is unaffected by bludgeonings, but your poor Mummy had none of them.’
Her own wartime activity was helping in a canteen at the YMCA. Every morning she would rise at six-thirty, put on blue overalls and yachting cap and with tin hat and gas-mask over her shoulder make her way to the canteen. There was often no hot water, so the problem of giving breakfast to four hundred men could be considerable; but somehow it was managed. Cooking, serving and washing up took till mid-day. Then it was home for a bath and usually abortive telephoning, and off to Chapel Street to pack up books, pictures and china for eventual storage at Belvoir. Most dreaded disturbance of the routine was the periodic giving of blood. The process filled her with horror, not least because her veins seemed to be abnormally slim and the doctor would have to battle with his ‘big, blunt bodkin’ to secure an entry. ‘The tears run out of my eyes in torrents. “Does it really hurt so much?” asked the doctor, but I couldn’t answer for tears.’
After the evacuation from Dunkirk Diana was asked to work with the Free French who were billeted at Olympia. This soon palled, however. All she was given to do was sew tricolors on soldiers’ caps, ‘speak French to them in my inimitable way, sell them toothpaste and bootlaces and seek out girl-friends for those who seemed most deserving’. Washing up four hundred breakfasts in cold, greasy water seemed a better use of her energies.
She was filled with plans for aiding the war-effort. One problem that concerned her was how British soldiers were to be distinguished from German parachutists. Badges or armlets would not provide an answer since they could be taken from the dead. Suddenly she thought of war-paint. Taint all our boys’ faces blue one day, scarlet the next, tiger stripes another day or snow-white. I don’t see how the enemy could catch up on that.’ Another brainwave which she hastened to pass on to the War Office provided for ‘some very strong magnates [sic] in open spaces – parks and even squares – to attract the land mines that come down slowly by parachute’. The authorities wrote to assure her that ‘a great many of the suggestions they received were far more foolish than hers’.
She was swept away by the mood of defiant patriotism that consumed Britain in 1940. The Duke of Windsor outraged her by allegedly saying that the English must be mad not to see they were doomed: ‘Well, maybe we are, but I’d rather be mad than turned slave by fear or reason.’ But she could not go so far as those of her friends who hungered for the Germans to come so that they might be defeated. ‘Your poor mother was never as brave as that,’ she told John Julius. ‘I would rather victory was achieved by famine and revolt in Europe than by hideous hordes in England.’ She was confident that God was on the right side. ‘It’s difficult, I find, to pray about the war, one feels both sides are praying equally hard. Still, I think that is the best we can do. He knows we’re fighting for all that Christ taught us was good and that the Huns are not. I love God and greatly rely on Him.’
Her son’s safety preoccupied her and when Joe Kennedy, the American Ambassador, offered to procure him a passage in a neutral ship to the United States, she leapt at the idea. She realized that to some this would look like cowardice and was disturbed by Churchill’s disapproval – ‘I hate these little Ambassadors,’ he snorted – but the counter-arguments seemed to her too strong. She was haunted by the vision of Britain over-run, Duff with the Government in Exile and John Julius held by the Germans as a hostage. Duff initially resisted the idea but allowed himself to be overborne. Possibly he suspected that, if necessary, Diana would have had John Julius passed from hand to hand like a recusant priest and shipped illegally from the country. If he had pleaded that his son’s evacuation would damage his career, Diana might have yielded, but arguments based on the national interest seemed to her unconvincing. They had to weather a certain amount of hostile comment, and Diana got a brief flurry of indignant letters and telephone calls, but the matter was soon forgotten in the larger crisis.
John Julius left in July 1940. The Daily Mirror carried a picture of him ‘sitting on your pathetic bottom on your pathetic trunk. You looked like all the refugees of the world rolled into one wistful little victim of the Nazi follow-my-leader. I nearly howled.’ He was carried to America on a tide of exhortations. Kaetchen Kommer, who was charged with his welfare, was to make sure that
John Julius was never spoiled. It was to be buses, not taxis; drug stores, not restaurants; clothes from Bloomingdale’s, not Saks. If he was rude to Americans, imitated their accent or behaved less than perfectly, he was to be severely reproved. To her son she wrote: ‘Remember always that you represent England in your way and that you must be respected by all the boys and masters as much as you want them to respect and admire our adored England. Don’t forget that there’s a war being fought and that it’s got to be won, and that your contribution towards winning it is to be better, more hard-working, more thoughtful and braver than usual.’
She was very aware that she was depriving John Julius of an experience which he might come to regret. The old gardener at Bognor underlined this poignantly. ‘Wouldn’t John just love it,’ he said repeatedly. ‘There’s a German plane lying at Rose Green and another in Pagham Harbour. The dead Germans are still lying there. Smell something frightful, they do. Wouldn’t John just love it!’ John would just have loved it, but there was time enough for that. Whatever the course of the war might be, Diana knew that it could not possibly be a short one. Her son, she decided, should come back when he was thirteen. ‘Thirteen I feel to be an age of grown-upness when you are no longer to be treated as a baby that must have bangs and alarms and disease and hunger kept from it. At thirteen you will feel perhaps that you must share in the struggles of other English boys who are here.’
*
By now they were installed in a bilious-coloured suite on the eighth floor of the Dorchester Hotel. They got it cheap, because few others wanted rooms so close to the roof. Otherwise the hotel was much favoured among the homeless rich, its ultra-modern wind-resistant steel structure offering, in theory at least, protection against acts of God or man. The place seethed with friends and acquaintances; Emerald Cunard, the Halifaxes, Ann O’Neill were permanent residents; Evelyn Waugh, trying to spend a night near Diana, was offered the choice between the Turkish baths and St John Hutchinson’s bed if neither he nor his daughter were using it. Cecil Beaton left a vivid impression of life in the hotel lobby one September evening in 1940:
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