Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Diana herself saw her entertaining through less rose-clouded glasses. A dinner for Sir John and Lady Anderson was hailed as a great success by the guests, but to Diana, in atrabilious mood, it was a squalid failure. Ava Anderson was ‘not altogether unamusing because of her very subtle beastliness about people, but when she leaves the acid for the cloying sweetness, one wants to throw up’. Sir John ‘has warts you can see through all over his face and is as dour and stuffy and graceless as a methodist elder’. The other guests included Pleven, Mendès-France – ‘a water-drinking melancholic’, Count d’Ormesson of Figaro and François Mauriac. All were ‘very boring indeed. How can one write about such doings? The table-cloths are always stained with gravy and coffee, the napkins are soaking wet from their last rinse, the towels in the bedroom are like those we have used night after night in the wagon-lit.’

  This jaundiced view of her own activities was characteristic of her first year in Paris. In spite of the glamour, the excitement, the acclaim, she was not content. Partly she was disturbed by the criticism of those she entertained; not disturbed enough to change her ways but worried lest she might be compromising Duff. Partly she took a long time to settle down to any new existence, and now regretted Algiers as she had regretted Bognor when in Algiers, or Singapore when in Bognor. Partly the life genuinely did not suit her. A grisly evening in March 1945 ended with Duff reducing Louise de Vilmorin, Lady Baldwin and Diana to tears in a mere forty-five minutes. ‘Too much nervous strain with work and feasting, we’re both fretful and when I am lethargic he becomes more choleric.’

  Duff throve on the relentless pressure of social life. Diana resented it. She wrote to announce to Conrad that they were about to have their second meal à deux in more than twelve months, but even before she had finished the letter the telephone rang to announce that the Ambassador would be bringing friends home to luncheon. The Travellers’ Club in the Champs Elysées was never as close to Duff’s heart as White’s but he still relished it and would usually go there if nothing else was on; to Diana it was ‘the cesspool of Paris where old drunks sozzle and cheat and scrap and calumnize’. In London she could forgive Duff’s clubland life; in Paris, with so many other demands on his time, it was harder to condone.

  The press was a constant source of irritation. Diana and her doings had been excellent copy for more than forty years and the journalists were not likely to forget her now. She had barely arrived in Paris before there were wild reports of the company she had brought with her: African body-servants, apes, peacocks, a tame gazelle. Her parties were headline news, any extravagance in running the Embassy led to angry mutters about misuse of taxpayers’ money. ‘Find out if you can who writes the rot about me in the Evening Standard,’ Diana wrote to Juliet Duff. ‘It’s most mischievous and has happened repeatedly.’ In the past she had often courted publicity; now her chickens had come home to roost.

  She had always enjoyed dressing-up, but even on the grandest occasion her appearance was apt to be unconventional and for the rest of the time she rarely bothered to look more than moderately tidy. Now she found formality and correctness were expected of her. She did not meet those expectations but the fact that they existed was a worry to her. She disliked the Parisian fashions: ‘I never saw such dreadful Aunt Sallies, nor more hideous clothes. Not a touch of imagination, femininity, glamour, history, just ugly stuffy garments made by sods to make women ugly.’ But she must be fashionable. Molyneux dressed her for almost nothing, which gratified her instinct for economy, but the results still dismayed her. In the end Cecil Beaton took it on himself to write to Captain Molyneux, telling him that Diana’s clothes were a disgrace and she was being made the laughing-stock of Paris. ‘He meant it kindly, but I wish he hadn’t,’ wrote Diana forlornly. Embarrassment all round ensued, and the clothes remained much the same. Diana decided that it was not Molyneux who was to blame but her own fading beauty. She went to a fashionable Swiss beauty specialist who examined her carefully and announced that Diana was suffering from suppressed acne; ‘so I bought a pot of expensive skin-educator, learnt a jaw-exercise which consists of saying “U” with a fish-like projection of lips, followed by “X” japanese-wise, and set her down as an ass’.

  As usual when she was bored or depressed, her health sprouted a crop of sympathetic ailments. The trouble started with abscesses in the teeth which she treated by neither eating nor drinking for several days. Not surprisingly this did little good, either to physique or morale. The doctor who eventually treated her was foolish enough to tell her that her heart missed every fifth beat. Thoroughly alarmed, Diana lay awake all night counting her heart beats and would break off a conversation in the middle of dinner with a worried expression and one hand clasped to her breast. Then she had her stroke, the right side of her tongue was numb and tingling, the same sensation creeping down her arm, ‘partial obstruction of vision, fiery cressets etc’. Duff was summoned, told her it was nerves and was grateful to find her all right by lunch-time. But Diana knew that she was merely putting a good face on it. ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge that will end me,’ she wrote direly; then, with a brave attempt to seek a silver lining: ‘It might be worse, cancer or foetid bronchitis.’

  Worse was to follow. A month later she had leprosy. Father Damien, she remembered, had discovered he had contracted the disease when he spilt boiling water on his leg and felt nothing. A similar test disclosed there was still life in Diana’s limbs. ‘What can it be?’ she asked Conrad Russell. ‘Paralysis? It worries me. Ask your doctor.’ She asked hers, complaining of legs stuffed with half-dead ants. The doctor laughed heartily and proclaimed her in perfect health, ‘but a victim of nerves, hallucinations, phantasmagoria, fata morgana, mirages, delusions and the rest of it – the Poet Cooper in fact. I feel splendid now.’ The reassurance soon wore off, however, and she went to Lourdes to see whether a miracle could be arranged. Dutifully, she doused her leg in holy water and found immediate relief. ‘I have thanked the BV in a very incapable way. I don’t know how to pray. I’m sure my efforts never leave the earth. Yet she has sent me peace of mind after many weeks of neurasthenia.’ Alas, the cure once more proved short-lived; a month later she was in London being prescribed pills for low blood-pressure.

  This catalogue of woes was not the whole story. She enjoyed the travel round provincial France with cheering crowds and affection so warm that she could almost see it in the air. She loved the peace celebrations. She coaxed Duff into an open car and drove down the Champs Elysées. In no time there must have been thirty people clinging to the car, singing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Auprès de ma Blonde’. It took an hour to get from the Etoile to the Place de la Concorde. ‘Our team was so proud of us, they’d hit by chance a star for their bandwagon and would not leave us till we got to the Embassy door. Poor Duff, it was not really up his street – his street has the silence of a Mayfair Sunday – but it was my street and he bore it sweating and smiling and once over felt it wonderful.’ She delighted in darting round a Paris still largely free of motor-cars in her tiny Simca, dodging the bicyclists, slithering in and out of what traffic there was, defying signals, mounting pavements – ‘On the bat’s back I do fly’ – with her chauffeur in the back leaning panic-stricken out of the window yelling ‘Méfiez-vous, messieurs’ to passing pedestrians.

  She enjoyed the perquisites and the privileges. ‘You get more presents as ambassadress, and amongst these poor givers I have an embarrassing pull, with my car at the door, sending it to and fro for lifts or to the Embassy for a guitar or a coat.’ Power was delightful, and she used it with zest for others as well as for herself. She was energetic in getting the Hertford Hospital on its feet again, shameless in her importunities on its behalf: ‘Let’s think who’s cadged on us so we can cadge back,’ was her ruling precept. She would devote an entire day to bullying, bribing, cajoling until at last she found a dose of penicillin for a dying girl whose mother had appealed for help – ‘It makes me quite happy, as a rule I feel so useless here.’ When Loui
se’s brother was dangerously ill she motored through the night with the vital medicine. When Susan Mary Patten rashly offered to organize a charity ball, only to find the Parisians far too snobbish to attend something proposed by somebody so insignificant, Diana took the enterprise under her protection. She dragged Susan Mary around the leading dressmakers, demanding to see the models for the masks at the great ball to be held at the Pré Catelan, reserving materials for the bevy of distinguished visitors from London who would be arriving for the occasion. Not one couturier had heard of the ball, not one dared admit the fact. They passed on the word to their clients and within two weeks every ticket was sold and a black market was developing. It was fun to provide food, wine, warmth, treats for less fortunate friends; fun to play Lady Bountiful, especially when effort was all that she was required to put into it.

  There were, in fact, many compensations for the pains of Embassy life. She only realized how many when it seemed likely that she would lose them altogether.

  TWELVE

  ‘PARADISE LOST’

  In July 1945 came the first post-war General Election. Until the votes were counted it was taken as a foregone conclusion by most people that Churchill and the Tories would coast home to an easy victory. Diana felt her first doubts when she went to a political meeting addressed by Beaverbrook and was disconcerted by the hoots and hisses he provoked. She reflected that he must be the most hated man in England. The electorate’s reaction showed that they could recognize real malignancy when they saw it, not that they favoured the Labour cause. Still, ‘he must be losing our party a rare number of votes’. Diana felt sorry for him, ‘a fireless, impotent little creature, bent with loose-hanging clothes’, but rejoiced that she did not have to take part in the election herself. Duff, she felt, still hankered for the battlefield.

  When the results were announced, Diana was aghast. Quite apart from the fact that the wrong party had won, what seemed to her the country’s ingratitude sickened her. She met Churchill shortly after the election. He was very affected, even stunned. ‘I’m told it’s a blessing in disguise,’ he said to Diana. ‘If it is, it’s very well disguised.’ Little Winston Churchill, then aged five, was brought over to Bognor for tea. Duff asked him kindly whether he knew what had been happening. He replied that he gathered he had a new grandfather.

  As a political appointee it was reasonable to expect that Duff would be removed by the new Government. Lindsay of Balliol was said to be favourite for the job. The Observer announced that Halifax and Duff Cooper would both be moved in a matter of weeks. Foreign Office officials were unlikely to fight hard to preserve a non-career diplomat. Duff decided that he would be regretful, but not extravagantly so: ‘Curiously enough Diana would mind much more than I should. She loves Paris now, although she was not prepared to and didn’t at first.’ The French were perturbed at the thought that they might be going to lose an ambassador so conspicuously well-disposed to their cause, and Gaston Palewski, with a certain amount of prompting from Diana, wrote informally to a friend in the Foreign Office to say that the General would be delighted if Duff were to be left in Paris.

  Duff claimed to want to stay for Diana’s sake, Diana was equally sure she wanted to stay only for the sake of Duff. Both in fact recognized that they would never find a position half as desirable. A fortnight after the election, rumour reported that Halifax was to stay in Washington. Diana exulted. ‘If this is true it should likewise apply to Duff who is less politically tainted than Holy fox, is newer to the job, more popular in the country to which he is accredited and loses more by dismissal.’ Next, Duff was summoned to London to see the man Diana for the first few months invariably spelt as ‘Bevan’. The interview went well but Ernest Bevin was noncommittal. The new Foreign Secretary gave the impression that personally he was well-disposed but that powerful elements in the Labour party felt that Duff should be removed. It was another six weeks before Duff was called again to the Foreign Office and told that the Embassy was definitely his for a year and perhaps for longer.

  Bevin soon became a staunch ally of Diana’s. He first visited the Embassy for the Peace Conference in April 1946. Diana was amused and impressed by this hulking uncouth figure, ‘the size of three Buddhas, hardly hewn at all’. His appearance was squalid – ‘Ernie’s nothing but a large spot of grease,’ explained Mrs Bevin; his manners were spectacular in their lack of polish; his courage, commonsense and self-confidence were evident in all he did and said. ‘He laughs uproariously,’ noted Diana, ‘and is nicely naive and quite uninhibited – a bit of a gurker too.’ At the first session of the Conference, Duff went peacefully to sleep. Bevin was most struck by this behaviour. ‘Tell Duff I’ll call ’im if anything ’appens,’ he said, and added, ‘’E’s the most sensible man in the room. It’s all a waste of time.’ (The habit stuck. When Diana went to a session of the Conference in August, Duff again dozed off and caused some alarm by almost pitching forward over the low balustrade which separated the Distinguished Visitors’ Gallery from the body of the hall. She shared Bevin’s view of the usefulness of the proceedings: ‘A more grotesque performance I never witnessed. I think the world should be put into women’s hands. We would never allow such foolery.’)

  At the first dinner the Coopers held for Bevin he ate enormously, drank deeply, talked without pause and showed every sign of having the time of his life. He ended by singing a few songs – cockney, 1890 type – ‘My Old Dutch’ and ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’. Diana retaliated with ‘Wotcher, all the neighbours cried’. ‘He has neither ear nor articulation,’ wrote Diana, ‘and my rendering wasn’t much better.’ At 11.30 his private secretary suggested taking him home. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You go. I’ll stay. I’m enjoying myself.’ Next time he came to the house Diana invited to meet the proletarian hero Lord and Lady Rothschild, Lady Crewe, Lord Pembroke, the Cavendishes and the Marquis and Marquise de Noailles. Bevin was delighted and thoroughly at home, ‘stroking and pinching and laying down the law and congratulating himself throughout dinner’. Someone asked:

  ‘Will you seek election again, Mr Cooper?’

  ‘Oh no,’ interrupted Bevin. ‘We’re going to send Duff to the ’Ouse of Lords.’

  ‘Oh, please, please not,’ cried Diana.

  ‘Why, don’t you want to be a Viscountess?’

  ‘No, indeed, I’d lose my rank. Besides, it would mean his job was over.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m a big bad Bevin who’s going to send you ’ome, do you?’

  Meanwhile Duff sweated with nerves and shame. Luckily Bevin had to leave for a meeting before things went much further. ‘I think he was pretty tight,’ observed Diana. ‘I know I was.’

  Susan Mary Patten was at the Coopers’ house near Chantilly when Bevin arrived to take some country air. He again talked ceaselessly except for a half-hour break after lunch when he went to sleep, made bad jokes, told dirty stories. ‘He is clearly in love with Diana, whom he addresses as “Luff”, and implored her to come to Durham for the annual miners’ gala.’ At the end of the day the chef was packed off to Paris in the Rolls while Bevin was loaded into Diana’s open Simca, with Duff and the detective perched uncomfortably in the back. The last words Mrs Patten heard from Ernest Bevin were: ‘Please, Luff, drive a little slower. You drive so well, but you frighten me more than the most ’ideous terrorist.’

  In a light-hearted way Bevin was indeed attracted by Diana. ‘Go the ’ole ’og, darling,’ was his advice when she asked him what she should wear at some reception, and the remark is typical of the relaxed, ribald relationship which existed between the two. In March 1947 he was again dining at the Embassy and as his private secretary, Pierson Dixon, had temporarily vanished, Diana took him to the lift:

  What was my surprise when he suddenly clasped me in his arms with the strength and immobility of a bear and buried his pudgy face in my neck. So we stood for a full minute, or an eternity: then, with a very slow, utterly relentless gesture, he shifted his mouth to mine. No struggles could have affecte
d the situation, as well stand against the mountain weight of lava. I was agonized at the thought of Bob Dixon coming in and writing me down as an office-hunter seducing the boss, but as far as I know he didn’t see anything, unless it was the lipstick that transformed poor Ernie into an end-of-the-evening old clown Joey. He asked me to stay the night. Could he have thought I would? Still, there’s life in the dear old dog and courage and character and humility and a lot of other nice things, and if he likes to be foolish late at night, he should be indulged.

  There were those who said Duff owed his job to Bevin’s affection for Diana. That is nonsense; the matter was decided long before they got to know each other and the most that Diana can have done was to convince the Foreign Secretary that the Embassy was a pleasant place to visit. Bevin was too shrewd not to realize that in part at least Diana’s attentions were aimed at protecting her husband’s future, and though he in no way resented her somewhat transparent scheming, he was equally not greatly influenced by it. He counted himself a friend of the Coopers, though, and in that friendship Diana more than played her part. Over the next two years Duff was going to need all the friends he could get among the Labour ranks.

  It would be foolish to pretend that Duff was temperamentally well equipped to represent a Labour Government. It was more a question of personalities than of principles. As a conscientious ambassador, he gave a party for delegates to an international Trades Union Conference, greeted them affably enough, but that night entered in his diary: ‘It was a strange spectacle – the dregs of all nations eating and drinking as though they had never had such an opportunity before, scattering the remains on the floor, pushing each other about as though they were on the platform of a railway station.’ He did his best to hide his feelings but a marked unease characterized his relationship with working-class – or indeed middle-class – socialists who were less robust and self-confident than Ernest Bevin. Diana was far better than he at getting on with people of different habits and outlook, mainly because she found such differences a source of curiosity and wonder rather than disdain. People were condemned for being common, but Bevin was not to be classed as common, and few were quite as common as the Duke of Windsor; her judgements were based more on idiosyncratic whims than social strata.