After an acclaimed maiden speech, Duff quickly advanced into the government, eventually becoming First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1938 he achieved world prominence when, on the day after Neville Chamberlain signed the notorious Munich Agreement with Hitler, he resigned from the Cabinet: “War without honour or peace with dishonour, but war with dishonour—that was too much.” When his and Diana’s old friend Winston became prime minister, Duff re-entered the Cabinet, but he chafed at his job as chief of war information until, in 1943, he was made the official liaison with the Free French, then located in Algeria, with the ambassadorship to Paris guaranteed as soon as the city was reconquered. It was a hellish job, given the mutual loathing of the two prima donnas—the rampageous Churchill (“Ducky”) and the ultra-prickly de Gaulle (“Wormwood”). But Duff turned out to be a born diplomat, more or less patching things up when the two men would defy and insult each other in outbreaks of misunderstanding and petulance.
Both in Algiers and in the Paris embassy after the Liberation, Diana, with her great talents as a hostess, made everything work smoothly, winning over everyone who came near her. The Coopers were so popular that even when the Conservatives were defeated in 1945, the Labour government kept them on for an extra year. The gruff new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, became a huge admirer of Duff’s and a slave of Diana’s. When, inevitably, they were replaced, Nancy Mitford wrote to her great friend Evelyn Waugh, “They’re gone at least for the moment and Paris is going to be dreary without them and my feet are cold and I’m on the verge of tears.” The comedy of Mitford’s novel Don’t Tell Alfred is largely based on a Diana stand-in—“the most beautiful woman in the world”—simply refusing to evacuate her part of the embassy even after her successors have moved in. When she finally chooses to depart, “the hall presented a scene like a picture of the Assumption: a mass of up-turned faces goggling at the stairs down which, so slowly that she hardly seemed to be moving, came the most beautiful woman in the world. She was dressed in great folds of white satin; she sparkled with jewels; her huge pale eyes were fixed, as though upon some distant view, over the heads of the crowd.… When Lady Leone got to the bottom of the stairs [the guests] divided into two lanes; she shook hands, like a royal person, with one here and there as she sailed out of the house forever.”
Duff had achieved a great deal in his official capacity. Against all kinds of opposition, he induced his country and France (still the impossible de Gaulle) to sign an official alliance. And he was already working indefatigably to bring Western Europe together, decades before it actually happened. As he had been prescient about the Nazi threat and the Munich Agreement, he was prescient about the future of the West. As early as the late fall of 1941, he wrote to the Foreign Office from Singapore, where he was on an official mission, doubting whether “vast populations of industrious, intelligent, and brave Asiatics” were likely to go on forever acknowledging “the superiority of Europeans.” His fascination with diplomacy and world strategy went back to the still admired biography of Talleyrand that he had written in 1932, when he was temporarily out of government. His large ideas and tactical skills were certainly apparent to Churchill, who wrote to Anthony Eden: “We must not underestimate Duff Cooper.… He has great qualities of courage. He is one of the best speakers in the House of Commons. He has the root of the matter in him.” (Even so, Eden—a longtime rival of Duff’s—was soon disparaging him as a “lecherous little beast!”)
What would Duff and Diana do, once they were free of their Paris responsibilities? They were already spending their weekends in a small but charming rented château not far away, and now they moved there and went on with their life of entertaining. The world came to them—to a considerable extent, and somewhat naughtily, distracting le tout Paris from the official residency and its new residents. During this period of exile Duff wrote his much-admired memoirs, Old Men Forget. And in 1952 he was created Viscount Norwich, to the irritation of Diana, who refused to be known by the title Lady Norwich—merely the wife of a peer: a comedown from Lady Diana, the daughter of a duke. She wasn’t a snob, but there were limits.
* * *
MUCH AS SHE HAD ENJOYED HER LIFE in the embassy, she had enjoyed just as much her life in the modest cottage at Bognor, on the Sussex coast, which her mother had once given her. During the early years of the war she spent most of her time there, Duff coming down whenever he would get away from London, flinging herself into farming, rattling around her few acres of garden, raising goats and pigs, milking the cow, dealing with her beehive, making (and selling) cheeses. She was also, of course, entertaining guests—from the Duchess of Westminster and Lady Cunard to Cecil Beaton and Waugh, all of whom were expected to pitch in.
Bognor was also where she spent her happiest times with her beloved friend Conrad Russell (nephew of the Duke of Bedford, cousin of Bertrand Russell). When in 1933 they met at Katharine Asquith’s, there was an instant affinity between them. During the war years he would travel down from his home on Katharine’s estate—exhausting wartime trips in jam-packed railway cars—so that he could help out on the farm and spend long quiet evenings alone with Diana over simple food and Algerian wine while they read aloud to each other and basked in each other’s (completely platonic) affection.
They wrote to each other constantly. “Everything I do with you is always amusing, always just the things I like best,” he wrote to her in July 1941, “like feeding pigs, paper-hanging, reading about jealousy, picking nettles, making cheese, fetching swill and dabbling about in hogwash.” On the twelfth anniversary of their first meeting, he wrote, “And in all those years and months dear Diana, I have not seen one fault in you. No my darling Diana, not one fault have I seen. It is the truth.”
How different from her friendship with Waugh, punctuated by friction, disagreement, asperity! (Diana referred to it as “that jagged stone.”) Their correspondence (edited by her granddaughter Artemis Cooper), beginning in 1932 and lasting until his death, in 1966, makes it clear that they enjoyed snapping at each other almost as much as they enjoyed being together. Diana’s need for unrelenting activity drove him crazy: “If only you could treat friends as something to be enjoyed in themselves not as companions in adventure we should be so much happier together.”
They also disagreed about religion, he writing to her on Christmas Eve 1951 that he has been praying “that you may one day find kneeling space in the straw at Bethlehem.” She takes him seriously enough to answer:
One cannot embrace something so serious as the church, for a whim, a love for another—(not God) or as an experimental medicine. I must wait for the hounds of heaven—or some force—some instance—that is irresistible—no reasoning is any good (a) I’m incapable of the process (b) I don’t believe reasoning counts any more than it does when explaining music to the tone deaf or rainbows to the blind.
He tells her,
I can’t see you as the pathetic waif. I have always seen you as a ruthless go-getter, enormously accomplished, dauntless, devoid of conscience or delicacy, Renaissance or Italian, a beautiful and sweet tempered Venetian but more frivolous.… I always see you as having everything you want.
She to him, after Duff’s death:
I’m not sure you know human love in the way I do. You have faith and mysticism, intense inner interests, a diverting, virile mind, gusto for vengeance and destruction if necessary, a fancy, a gospel. What you can’t imagine is a creature with a certain incandescent aura and nothing within but a beating, frightened heart built round and for Duff.
He addresses her as Baby (so did Duff), Pug, Sweet Baby-Doll; he is Darling Wu, Dearest Bo. Once he calls her Darling Stitch Pug Baby, Stitch being the name he gave her in Scoop (she sets the plot in motion, indulging in her genius for interfering with her friends’ lives) and again when she turns up in the Sword of Honor trilogy. As John Julius was to write, “My Mother had only to see a string to be compelled to pull it, with almost invariably disastrous results.” She was just too good a character for Da
rling Wu to use only once.
* * *
HER LETTERS ARE FILLED with vivid snapshots of the great and famous. About “my darling President” (FDR to us), she reports to ten-year-old John Julius that at tea at the White House just after the repeal of the Neutrality Act, “if his legs had not been paralyzed he’d have danced a war-dance.” After a luncheon party at the palace alone with the king and queen and the two princesses, she reports, “They don’t listen to him much; it’s her family and household. ‘All right, Daddy,’ then a quick turn away and ‘What did you say, Mommy darling?’” About Truman Capote: “A sturdy little pink girl of fourteen, with her blonde straight hair plastered neatly down all round, short for her age in rather light grey trousers and turtle-necked sweater with feminine curves suggesting through.” Hemingway? “The greatest bore to end bores we’ve ever struck: gigantic, ugly, spectacles with fairy glasses.”
As for the Windsors (from an account in a letter to Conrad Russell of a royal cruise before the Abdication): “It’s impossible to enjoy antiquities with people who won’t land for them and who call Delphi Delhi. Wallis is wearing very very badly. Her commonness and Becky Sharpishness irritate.… The truth is she’s bored stiff by him.” From Duff in his diaries: “It is sad to think that he gave up the position of king-emperor not to live in an island of the Hesperides with the Queen of Beauty but to share an apartment on the third floor of the Ritz with this harsh-voiced ageing woman who was never even very pretty.”
And then there was Hitler, whom she and Duff encountered at a Nuremberg rally in 1933:
I watched him closely as he approached, as he passed, as he retreated, compelling my eyes and memory to register and retain. I found him unusually repellent and should have done so, I am quite sure, had he been a harmless little man. He was in khaki uniform with a leather belt buckled tightly over a quite protuberant paunch, and his figure generally was unknit and flabby. His dank complexion had a fungoid quality, and the famous hypnotic eyes that met mine seemed glazed and without life—dead colourless eyes.
That many of these descriptions appear in Diana’s letters to John Julius suggests the openness with which she always treated him—as the reliable, intelligent boy he seems always to have been. Diana had never been drawn to children yet very much wanted one, and when he was born, in 1929, it was by Caesarian, hence Julius. (Among his godparents, the Aga Khan, J. M. Barrie, and Lord Beaverbrook.) When in 1940 the bombing intensified, she panicked and sent him off to Canada, where he was installed in a good boarding school, spending vacations with Bill and Babe Paley. But then he was missed too badly, and the Coopers wangled his way home on a Royal Navy cruiser.
Diana’s letters to him are filled with good counsel. When, for instance, he’s abroad perfecting his French after quitting Eton:
Don’t get engaged or married in Strasbourg. You must see a world of women before you pick one and don’t get picked yourself, especially not in the street or bar. They’ll contaminate and deceive you and most probably give you diseases of all kinds and so … keep yourself and your love for something or somebody almost exactly like me, with a happier disposition.
She reproaches him for not writing more frequently (he’s twenty-two):
Whenever you are in pain of heart or body, or in despair of jams, dishonour, disillusion, nervous apprehension, drink or blackmail, you may rely on your mother trudging thro’ snow, thro’ bars, to perjure, to betray, to murder, or—most difficult of all—behave courageously to help you—but in your own smooth days, I must be courted and petted and needed or I can’t react. I was ever so, with lovers too, neglect never roused me; only true love and cosseting got good exchange.
She was equally candid with him about her own emotional condition. John Julius writes in his commentary to Darling Monster, “But now, as the letters make all too clear, depression has struck my mother—as bad as I think she had ever suffered. ‘Melancholia,’ as she called it, had always been the bane of her life. She worked hard to conceal it from the outside world but never made any secret of it to my father or to me.”
Melancholia, and anxiety. “When I was six,” she wrote to her mother, “and you were late, I used to be sure of your murder and lie awake all night.” In London, Ziegler tells us, “she would rush from her bed to the window when he left in the morning to make sure he [Duff] survived the crossing of the road.” Once, in Monaco, she became hysterical when Duff was an hour late coming back from the casino, certain that he had been assassinated, and was relieved to learn that he had merely been visiting a lady friend. Her tenacious morbidity led her to imagine that she was dying of everything from heart failure to leprosy. She understood that she succumbed to her black moods when she was without occupation, excitement. “It’s not in my nature to be quiet. I have no wealth within me. All stimulus has to come through my eyes and ears and movement. Once still, I’m listless and blank and tortured by dread thought.”
* * *
CRUSHED AS SHE WAS BY DUFF’S DEATH, in 1954, in the thirty-two years that followed she kept going … and going. There were balls, parties, dinners; there was incessant travel—to Noël Coward in Switzerland; to Kenya, Portugal, Moscow, Washington, where she wowed the Kennedys. (“What a woman!” the president exclaimed.) She wrote and published her memoirs, spent time with John Julius and his family. And she was always driving—her favorite occupation. (At eighty-six she drove herself in her Mini to the north of Scotland and back.) But her driving, always erratic, got worse as her sight failed. Nor did she pay much attention to the rules, parking illegally and leaving notes for the traffic wardens. (“Dear Warden. Please try and be forgiving. I am 81 years old, very lame and in total despair.”) Then, John Julius reports, when she was eighty-nine, “she hit a traffic island in Wigmore Street. She drove straight home, locked the car, went up to bed and never drove again. ‘I never saw it,’ she told me later, ‘it might have been a child.’” And, he goes on, “She never left her bed again; there was no point.” She died in 1986, a few weeks before her ninety-fourth birthday.
In the final words of her memoirs she says:
Age wins and one must learn to grow old … so now I must learn to walk this long unlovely wintry way, looking for spectacles, shunning the cruel looking-glass, laughing at my clumsiness before others mistakenly condole, not expecting gallantry yet disappointed to receive none, apprehending every ache or shaft of pain, alive to blinding flashes of mortality, unarmed, totally vulnerable.
Yet, she concludes, “The long custom of living disinclines one to dying.… Besides, before the end, what light may shine?”
The New York Review of Books
JUNE 4, 2015
Showing Off
JOHN WILKES BOOTH AND HIS BROTHER EDWIN
WAS SIBLING RIVALRY RESPONSIBLE for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln? So you would conclude if you took seriously the phrase “The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy,” which is blazoned across the dust jacket and the title page of My Thoughts Be Bloody, a new book by Nora Titone, with a hyperbolic foreword by her “teacher and mentor,” Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Titone (this is her first book) has done her homework and digested it. If she had restrained herself from attempting to fit the Booth story into a soap-opera construct “filled with ambition, rivalry, betrayal, and tragedy … as gripping as a fine work of fiction,” as Goodwin puts it, she would have performed an even more valuable service than she has. Although there have been many books about John Wilkes Booth and the assassination, few have focused to this extent on his place in the theater dynasty of which he was a less distinguished member than his biographers—and he himself—would have liked us to believe. He started acting late, he was untrained, and his exceptional looks and natural charm and athleticism could carry him only so far.
He certainly, however, had his share of the family ambition. The father, Junius Brutus Booth, was the grandson of a Jewish silversmith whose origins lay in Portugal. Having failed to unseat Edmun
d Kean as London’s leading tragedian, Junius emigrated to America in 1821 and quickly established himself as one of the nation’s most famous actors, despite his chronic alcoholism and his periodic bouts of insanity. Junius Brutus Booth II, the oldest of his ten children born here, was only modestly talented as an actor, knew it, and wisely established himself as a theatrical manager. (He had an even temperament, but the Booth streak of madness emerged much later on in one of his children, who in middle age shot and killed himself and his wife.)
John Wilkes Booth
The second son, Edwin, born in 1833, grew up in the theater and began acting in his late teens, determined to rise to the very top, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, this ambition, combined with his great talent and relentless work ethic, had propelled him there. The third son—variously known as Wilkes, John, Johnny, and Jack—was driven by fantasies of stardom, but circumstances, together with his lack of discipline and judgment, stood in his way.
There was no rivalry between the two older brothers. Junius II opened up his San Francisco company to Edwin, and kept him busy learning stagecraft from the ground up, playing, as Titone puts it, “every part handed to him. He obediently donned blackface, thumped his banjo, sang minstrel tunes, and hoofed it in clogs. He acted comedies, melodramas, burlesques, variety shows, and farces.” (Later he would grasp how important this broad experience had been for his art, even if it had been humiliating at the time. He called it “a lesson for crushed tragedians.”) In time, he graduated to more significant parts, then to sudden and sustained success in his father’s most famous role, Richard III, and Hamlet, which would become his own most famous role.
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