Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  Blair, a journalist whose previous book was about the television reporter Jessica Savitch, is relentless in examining and anatomizing Donald Trump’s business dealings—she has the assiduousness and grasp (though not the power) of Robert A. Caro, her obvious role model. She makes you believe that this is how things worked in New York in the final third of the 1900s: the new glamour and glitz as fig leaf for the old backroom deal-making and corner-cutting.

  She’s also convincing on Donald Trump’s private life (she doesn’t even try to imagine his inner life, and nothing in her account suggests that he has one). He may have gone around with one blonde after another on his arm, but “a kind of gauche flashiness … did not endear Trump to women. His dates, which consisted of a ride in a limo, a visible table at a chic restaurant or club, and an expansive monologue about his plans to remake the Manhattan skyline, had the flavor of a sales pitch.” She cleverly proposes first wife Ivana as “his twin as a woman”: “They shared the same flashy aesthetic, the same boundless appetite for more marble, more mirrors, more shiny brass, more dramatic lighting.” But they competed with rather than complemented each other (“The developer did not want a queen, he wanted a concubine”), and for all her determination, Ivana was left behind. As for poor, pregnant Marla Maples, Trump kept “asking family and friends about whether tying the knot would help or hurt his business prospects.” When he finally did say “I do,” he had given Entertainment Tonight exclusive video rights to the rehearsal and sold the wedding photos (supposedly to benefit charities).

  The story is all here, from the near-collapse of the empire to the rebound; from the “amphetamine-like substances” and the phobias (worried about germs, he “avoided shaking hands whenever possible and when it was not possible, he washed his hands afterward”—a real drawback if you’re thinking of running for office), to the paranoias (bulletproof window shades). From first to last, he has been comfortable only with his family, clearly closer to his parents and siblings and children than to anyone else. (The family had its own dysfunctions, too, most conspicuously Donald’s older brother, who failed to live up to his name—Fred Jr.—and self-destructed at forty-two, his closets reportedly “stuffed with empty liquor bottles.”)

  For decades, the Trumps’ family minister was “God’s salesman,” Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the immense best seller The Power of Positive Thinking. But positive thinking hadn’t helped Fred Jr.; and despite all the money and the glitz and the notoriety, the bigness of the deals and the buildings and the headlines—despite the Tower and the Plaza and the Palace and the Game—Donald Trump doesn’t come across in this account as a happy man. Even if you’re the supreme positive thinker of your day, positive thinking takes you only so far.

  The New York Observer

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2000

  “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”

  DIANA COOPER

  WHAT CAN IT HAVE BEEN LIKE to have been Lady Diana Cooper, “the most beautiful girl in the world,” “the only really glamorous woman in the world,” the most celebrated debutante of her era, the daughter of a duke, the wife of a famous diplomat (and so the British ambassadress to Paris), an internationally acclaimed actress, a character in at least half a dozen novels (by writers as unalike as Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, and Enid Bagnold), a dedicated nurse to wounded and dying soldiers in World War I, and a pig farmer?

  It’s a question we can answer, given the vast literature about her, beginning with her enchanting three volumes of memoirs,1 and including biographies of both her and her husband, Duff Cooper; his much-admired memoirs, as well as his uninhibited (to say the least) diaries; an ample collection of their mostly rapturous letters to each other; an ample collection of her take-no-prisoners correspondence with Waugh; the letters of her dearest friend, Conrad Russell; and the frank autobiography of her son, the historian John Julius Norwich. And most recently we have a volume of her letters to that son. It’s called Darling Monster, although there’s nothing monstrous about her beloved John Julius, and there’s nothing monstrous in her passionate but practical attachment to him. The apparent stability of their relationship suggests that she was as good a mother as she was a society figure, nurse, actress, wife, writer, hostess, ambassadress, farmer, and perhaps most of all, friend.

  Lady Diana Manners (her name until she married Duff), born in 1892, was the last child of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, or at least she was the duchess’s last child: It was commonly assumed that her biological father was the brilliant, charming man-about-town (and serial seducer) Harry Cust, with whom Violet, the duchess, had a passionate affair. No one seemed to mind—not the duke, who politely (and affectionately) stood by as the baby’s official father, or the duchess, or Diana herself. “I am cheered very much by Tom Jones on bastards,” Diana wrote to a friend, “and like to see myself as a ‘Living Monument of Incontinence.’” Harry Cust—“very beautiful, I thought him,” she would write in her memoirs—was “a man I loved with all my heart.”

  You might think she had inherited her looks from this paragon, but Violet herself had been a great beauty (as well as an accomplished artist, her sculpture admired by Rodin, among others). “The most beautiful thing I ever saw,” said Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and a favorite of Queen Victoria’s. The duchess’s notion was that Diana should marry Edward, Prince of Wales, but Diana had no use for him and the prince liked hard, sophisticated older women. Otherwise it would not have been an impossible match. Victorian dukes were almost as esteemed as royalty, and the Manners family owned something like sixty-five thousand acres of land, abundant coal mines, and Belvoir (pronounced Beaver) Castle, one of the grandest of ducal residences. The duke himself was a genial and well-liked if far from outstanding man, whose principal interests, as Philip Ziegler put it in his indispensable biography of Diana, “were dry-fly fishing and fornication; pursuits requiring much dexterity but not intellectually demanding.”

  * * *

  DIANA WAS MOSTLY HAPPY IN HER HOME LIFE. She was very attached to her four older sisters, admired her two brothers, adored her mother (except when they drove each other crazy), and enjoyed life, both in London and up at the castle. She didn’t have much formal educating, but there were governesses and lots of reading—a lifetime passion. At ten she almost died of a rare form of paralysis called Erb’s disease. Fully expecting to die, she stayed firmly stoical. Her mother never suspected that Diana suffered from depressions, or “melancholias” as she called them. “If she had,” Ziegler writes, “she would have been uncomprehending and unsympathetic. Only housemaids moped.”

  At first Diana was thought to be plain and lumpish, but by the time she was fourteen, she had grown into a renowned beauty—only a few years later, Winston Churchill and a friend were determining which of the new crop of young dazzlers deserved the accolade as “the face that launched a thousand ships,” and only two made the grade: Clementine Hozier, whom Churchill would marry, and Lady Diana Manners. When she was staying with friends in Norfolk in her early teens, she fell in with a group of young men from nearby Oxford, whom she enchanted and who enchanted her. The group named themselves “the Coterie” and the men became her faithful and ardent swains. Only the one she cared most for—Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister—was ineligible: He was ten years older than the rest, and married. Even so, she grew intimate with both him and his wife, Katharine; his death in the war was one of the great traumas of her life, and she remained close to Katharine throughout their lives.

  Diana Cooper, by J. J. Shannon

  The years leading up to World War I were filled with fun and high jinks: balls, flirtations, jaunts around Europe. (When she went abroad with her mother, it was third class all the way: The duchess never liked to spend.) She had become a celebrity, her comings and goings avidly reported by the press, to her (secret) gratification. She was not only a beauty but an exotic, creating a somewhat outré style of dressing, getting in and out of highly publicized scrapes—she had a
desperate desire to be conspicuous, to be acknowledged as different, original, singular. The boys in the Coterie were pursuing her relentlessly with self-consciously passionate and flattering letters and handsome gifts—her lifelong habit of gleefully accepting if not soliciting presents was already in play. She was restless and daring, and in no hurry to settle down. Yet she was still being chaperoned, and she was technically chaste.

  Not everyone was amused by her carryings-on. Whereas the prime minister was all too markedly attached to her, his formidable wife, Margot, was one of the holdouts: “What a pity that Diana, so pretty and decorative, should let her brain rot!… [Her] main faults are that she takes money from men and spends her day powdering her face until she looks like a bled pig.”

  “She loved to be told that she was beautiful,” Ziegler writes, “but never really understood what all the fuss was about.” She was pale, blond, oval-faced—“sheeplike,” one of the rare dissenters called her. And she was wretchedly aware of her lack of formal education, certain that she was stupid and uninteresting. What she didn’t grasp was that she possessed an incandescence that animated and delighted almost every person she met. “When she came into a room it was plain it was a spirited person who entered, a person with an extra dose of life,” Enid Bagnold wrote of her in her 1951 novel The Loved and Envied. “It was apparent on all sides how people were affected. They had a tendency to rise to their feet to be nearer her, not of course in her honour, but to be at the source of amusement, to be sure not to miss the exclamation, the personal comedy she might make of the moment of life just left behind.” Typically, when Bagnold’s book was published, Diana wrote to her that she was “much relieved and insanely happy that you should see me as you have, a beautiful, serene woman and unblemished, noble, interested, brave and good, instead of a raw, aged hypochondriac, fretted with panics and pains, funking the future with no pride or curiosity or enthusiasm.”

  * * *

  ALL DIANA’S YOUNG MALE ADMIRERS, who were also her best pals, were quickly swept up in the war. All but one. Duff Cooper, two years her senior, was working in the Foreign Office, and so was kept from enlisting. Although he had many other women on his mind (and in his bed), he was determined to capture Diana. His background was suitable—his mother, Agnes, was the sister of the Duke of Fife, who was married to Louise, the Princess Royal. On the other hand, Agnes had barely survived the scandal of two elopements and a divorce and took to nursing until she married a prominent society doctor who specialized in the most intimate of surgeries. He liked to remark that between them, he and his wife “had inspected the private parts of half the peers of London.”

  If Duff’s lineage and background—Eton, Oxford—were acceptable to Diana’s family, nothing else about him was. He was already notorious for his drinking, his gambling, his womanizing. But to Violet, a far greater impediment was his impecuniousness: Apart from his very modest salary at the Foreign Office, he had an income of only a few hundred pounds a year, and no expectations. Diana couldn’t have cared less. Slowly, steadily, as their heated correspondence reveals, she came to rely on him for both stimulation and stability. His brilliance was incontestable. And his passion for her was balanced by his understanding of her volatile and needy nature. From early childhood Diana had known what her needs were. She remembered sitting under the piano while her mother played, thinking, “O, I’m glad I’m a girl. I’m glad I’m a girl. Somebody will always look after me,” a sentiment echoed in a letter from a later period: “There is no joy so lazy and delicious as to find one is a woman who depends.”

  Soon, the young men closest to Diana and Duff were dying. Duff would one day write to Diana, “Our generation becomes history instead of growing up.” (With their world collapsing, she and Katharine Asquith overindulged in morphine and chloroform. “I hope she won’t become morphineuse,” commented Duff. “It would spoil her looks.”) By the last year of the war, when he was finally allowed to join up, Duff was the only one left. Their ardent friendship had deepened into a serious love affair as they consoled each other. With regard to her parents’ opposition, Diana wrote to her brother John: “For many years I have wanted to marry Duff because I know that when I am with him I am perfectly happy, that his mind I adore, that his attitude towards me and love and understanding are only equalled by mine towards him.”

  The increasing physical intimacy between them is charted in their letters, with Duff ever importuning and Diana ever adamant about retaining the final barrier. And indeed when they were finally married in 1919—Duff having survived the war, having won the DSO for bravery under fire, and Diana having at last broken her mother’s resistance—she was still a virgin. Just. The wedding was a journalistic sensation, especially in regard to the presents: The list required eighty-eight pages of a large notebook and included a blue enamel and diamond brooch from the King and Queen (bearing their own initials); a diamond-and-ruby pendant from Queen Alexandra; a diamond ring from the Princess of Monaco; a gold sugar sifter from King Manuel of Portugal; and from among the scores of non-royals, a check from the Aga Khan, an automobile from Lord Beaverbrook, and a writing table from Dame Nellie Melba.

  It wasn’t only the rules of proper behavior that had kept her a virgin, or the bothersome but ineffectual chaperones. She was a loving woman but never a deeply sexual one: She craved embraces, cuddles, caresses, compliments, but as she would write, “Like most well-brought-up girls of my generation I was not much interested in it—sex I mean.”

  Duff, on the other hand, was not only exceptionally amorous but a relentless, compulsive seducer—his first infidelity took place in Venice, on their honeymoon. And the infidelities never stopped. Throughout his life his mistresses came and went (and sometimes came and stayed). Just a few of them: the Singer sewing machine heiress Daisy Fellowes; two nieces of Diana’s, the beautiful Paget sisters; a beauty named Gloria Rubio, later Gloria Guinness—“I don’t think I have ever loved anyone physically so much or been so supremely satisfied”; the young Susan Mary Patten, wife of an American diplomat, on whom he fathered a child; and, perhaps most seriously, the well-known writer Louise de Vilmorin, who became Diana’s adored friend as well. Louise—a suspected collaborator—often took up residency in the Paris embassy when the Coopers reigned there, and when Duff turned his attentions from her to Susan Mary, it was Diana who had to comfort her. In middle age Duff was still as driven a fornicator—like both her fathers—as he had been at twenty.

  Diana didn’t look the other way, she just stood aside, perhaps unhappy but unprotesting: What mattered to her was not Duff’s faithfulness but his love, of which she was completely certain. (“They were the flowers, but I was the tree.”) “Did my mother know?” wrote John Julius. “Of course she did. And did she worry? Not in the least. ‘So common to mind,’ she used to say.” When Lady Cunard asked the same question, Diana replied, “Mind! I only mind when Duffie has a cold.” As Duff’s excellent biographer, John Charmley, put it, what she wanted was “a father-figure to take care of her, and a romantic adoration; Duff provided both of these for his ‘darling baby.’” Besides, from the very start of their marriage she put Duff’s needs and pleasures ahead of her own. Not everyone was charmed, but those closest to them, including John Julius, accepted the situation with equanimity. And she herself, given her low-level libido, did only a little flirting, and perhaps after Duff’s death, indulged in the odd fling.

  * * *

  WHEN DUFF DECIDED TO LEAVE the Foreign Office to become a politician, how were they to pay the costs of a campaign? Diana, who had always been stagestruck, made (for a handsome fee) two movies that were respectable but hardly a launching pad for a major film career. Her chance to earn serious money came when the illustrious Austrian director Max Reinhardt decided to revive his famous religious spectacle The Miracle and offered her the central role of the Madonna for the extended American tour he was planning. She had to stand for well over an hour—speechless, motionless—pretending to be a stone statue cradling an infant,
before descending the steps from her niche in the cathedral to take the place of an errant nun who has been seduced. (Eventually, she would alternate roles and play, equally effectively, the sinning nun.) No words were spoken in The Miracle, but the theater was transformed into a cathedral—in the original production there were two thousand extras and a rose window that was three times the size of the one at Chartres.

  Diana’s radiant beauty and sublime composure thrilled and moved audiences everywhere—The Miracle toured America for six months of every year between 1924 and 1928, then went on to triumphs on the Continent and in England. All in all, and on and off, she played the Madonna to standing ovations for ten years. She had demanded a large salary so that Duff’s coffers could be constantly replenished. As Charmley writes:

  Where she was eating macaroni cheese and persuading hoteliers to let her have her room for free, Duff was dining off oysters and champagne at Bucks, or flitting over to Paris for a weekend at the gaming tables and the whores.… The simple fact was that Duff was incapable of thrift and as unrestrained in his financial behaviour as he was in his sexual appetites.

  Fortunately, it turned out that Diana was a real trouper, cheerfully sharing in the seedy life of rooming houses and relentless travel. She enjoyed it all—she was always attracted to what she called bohemian life. Duff hated it: Comfort and luxury came first with him. Not that Diana failed to appreciate good clothes, jewels, furs, as long as she didn’t have to pay for them.

  When Duff in due course ran for a seat in Parliament, she was there electioneering with him—a huge attraction to an electorate who had been fascinated by her for years. She proudly writes of how much she loved working up enthusiasm for him among a crowd of mill girls, promising that if her husband was elected she would come back and do a clog dance for them. He was—and she did.