The London to which Duff returned was superficially much the same as the city which his friends had left four years before. Many of the faces had vanished, but the dress, the houses, the social rituals survived. Man and master took off their uniforms and settled back with apparent satisfaction into their former roles. There was no such conspicuous social revolution as followed the Second World War; the Unionists triumphed at the general election and the nation returned a parliament of ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’; Labour won only some sixty seats and the day when they might form a Government seemed still remote; the red flag was hoisted on Glasgow Town Hall, but its brief flutter caused only a frisson in the complacency of the ruling classes. The rigid protocol of pre-war society was never fully restored but the structure remained intact. To men like the Duke of Rutland, little if anything had changed.
Least of all had anything changed so far as the marriage of his daughter was concerned. Duff came back from the wars on 31 October 1918. As he walked into his flat the telephone rang. It was Diana. Duff passed the time till she arrived pacing up and down the room, wondering if it could all be really happening. ‘She came, and all that I had hoped of happiness in the last six months came true.’ The following weekend they went to stay with the Montagus at Breccles. Diana went to Duff’s room but hardly had she arrived than Alan Parsons walked in. Viola was ill, he had gone to seek help from Diana but had found the room empty. All their good resolutions about flaunting their relationship to the world were at once forgotten. Duff pretended to be half asleep; Diana hid under the bedclothes; as soon as Alan had gone she rushed back to her room by another staircase and was ensconced there by the time he arrived to look for her again.
To go on in this way would have been impossible, yet Duff knew that in the immutable world of the Rutlands he was as unacceptable as ever. His D.S.O. counted as nothing against the fact that he was, in The World’s amiable phrase, ‘a mere lieutenant without fortune, title or position’. Without future either, in the Duke’s judgement; a clerk in the Foreign Office in 1918 could achieve respectability but hardly greatness. ‘I think by gutter journalism, shady politics and crooked finance we might climb to pinnacles of power and have great fun en route,’ wrote Duff cheerfully, but the Duke would not have seen the joke. Duff had £300 a year from the Foreign Office, about the same amount of his own and £600 a year from his mother; no great wealth but enough to maintain a handsome standard of living. To the Duke, however, it was poverty; added to which Duff was what Lady Sackville described as ‘a contemptible parvenu’ and popularly believed to be a drunkard, a lecher and a gambler.
The situation seemed to be dragging on indefinitely with no one wishing to be the first to speak. Diana longed for one of her friends to take on the task. The Duchess interrogated Katharine Asquith, complaining that she could not sleep at night for fear her daughter might marry ‘that awful Duff’. Katharine denied any knowledge of such a plan. ‘It’s a pity,’ commented Diana, ‘for the poor old thing needs acclimatizing – but I’m very glad it’s worrying her.’ In the end it was Viola Parsons who plucked up her courage and broke the news. An appalling scene followed, from her room upstairs Diana could hear her mother screaming and moaning and a night-nurse being summoned to administer sedatives. Yet still nothing was said directly between the people principally concerned.
It was ten days later, at the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall, that Duff finally bearded his future mother-in-law. They retreated to a sofa on one of the upper floors and Duff addressed her, to his own mind at any rate, with ‘great eloquence and marvellous command of temper’. The latter was called for. The Duchess was ‘insulting, illogical and quite impossible to keep to any point’. She started off on Duff’s finances, then when he began to argue his case, said she knew nothing of money and cared less. It was his drunkenness she objected to, his bad character, his dissipated friends. The whole thing was a plot organized by Alan Parsons and Olga Lynn. Anyway, Diana did not even love him; otherwise she would not have gone to parties the previous week when Duff had been ill with flu. She had some reason for misunderstanding her daughter’s feelings. Diana always found it hard to talk of love, to her mother she felt it was impossible. She never stated bluntly that she adored Duff and could not live without him; the Duchess, eager to believe the contrary, was convinced Diana was only advancing this ridiculous project out of pique or a wish to escape from parental discipline.
Next morning Diana at last confronted her mother. The Duchess was beside herself. She said she would prefer her son to have been killed in the war or Diana to have cancer to this impossible alliance. Then she stormed from the house to recruit allies elsewhere. She did not find as many as she had hoped: ‘Her Grace is raising tallywhack and tandem all over London,’ wrote Ettie Desborough unsympathetically. Diana retired to bed, as was her habit in moments of stress, and by the time her mother returned to the battle some calm had returned. Her great cause for despair, it seemed, was that Diana’s love for her was dead. Diana could have withstood her mother’s rage more easily than her misery. That night, she told Duff, she dreamt that she and her mother were walking down a long passage at the end of which they saw Duff coming towards them. A meeting was unavoidable; so the Duchess said: ‘This is fate, so see how I will make full reparation and greet him lovingly.’ Open-armed and smiling she advanced, ‘and I just remember seeing you raise your gold-knobbed cane to her when I woke exhausted.’
‘Mummy is in an awful state,’ the Duke of Rutland wrote to Marjorie Anglesey. ‘I really think Diana will kill her.’ If the Duchess had not been in an awful state, it is unlikely the Duke would have been particularly put out by these developments. He was a detached and easy-going man and could soon have been cajoled into acceptance of what most people felt to be a reasonable if not particularly meritorious match. The Duchess, however, offered him no opportunity to weaken. When Duff, fortified by a stiff dose of port, called on him at Arlington Street, he was met by a wall of courteous obstinacy. The Duke was affable, ‘dear-fellowed’ Duff liberally, admitted he had always liked him, but gave no hope of a change of attitude even if Duff reappeared in six months, with £1,000 a year. ‘This,’ wrote Diana indignantly, ‘is analogous, though more gentlemanly, to kicking him out of the house, and a great insult to the man I have told them with holy resolve that I intend to marry.’
John Granby was now brought into the firing line. He was more temperate than his parents, but argued that a year’s delay was desirable to give all parties time to think. He doubted whether Diana really knew her own mind. Diana’s reply was firm:
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. I am not a giddy baby of eighteen but sensible, calculating for my happiness and in this well tried, for I have spent all my time and thought for two years with and for Duff … If I gave you the impression that I was not fond enough of Duff to warrant the disaster I have brought on this unfortunate household, it is because I find tremendous difficulty in baring my heart, much more than my body, and even now it is costing me a lot to confess.
She had a nightmare Christmas at Belvoir. John, Letty, and her sister-in-law Kakoo took it in turns to reason with her, and when she tried to discuss the matter with her mother, the Duchess turned the conversation to cancer and her own imminent demise. Her uncle Charlie Lindsay was most nearly an ally, but even he spoiled the effect by admitting that he had never seen Duff rise from the table completely sober. He too felt a year’s delay reasonable and Diana at last agreed to put this to Duff. ‘I could hardly bear it but suppose we must. Suppose we love each other less in a year? God, what a conspiracy of cruelty it is! Strengthen me, Duffy, I feel in despair.’
Early in 1919 the Duke wrote to Duff to say that if he would take no further steps regarding his engagement for twelve months, and the couple still wanted to marry after that period, then no further obstacle would be put in their way. The Duchess had prepared the first draft of this letter and scribbled in a covering note: ‘I told D that I found you very obdurate and firm. I said this wishing to get out of her head that I was the only one against it, and that you would do anything I wished.’ The Duke proved that occasionally he could ignore his wife’s wishes when he crossed out her final sentence, which said that he could never look on the match with any favour, and replaced it by a promise to do all he could to help. He wrote the same day to Diana asking her to read the letter. ‘In doing so I would urge you to remember that your mother and I are only anxious for your future happiness – their own don’t much matter – and you must also remember that it is within the bounds of possibility that they may have a clearer vision as to this than you. Anyway, do not doubt their very deep love for you, which is the reason for their present action – as I assure you they are suffering for and with you, very deeply.’
By now the press was hot on the trail. Cassell’s Saturday Journal gleefully reported that the couple would have to live on ‘£300 a year and a ducal curse’. Anything about Diana was grist to their mills; the Bulletin even announcing that she had seemed unusually pale at a recent weekend party. ‘She explained that she had sat up all night tending a sick lily but that it had died at dawn.’ The real explanation, it was archly hinted, was to be found in the failure of a certain father to pay attention to the bidding of his daughter’s heart. The Duchess was so enraged by newspaper reports that an engagement already existed that she caused a formal démenti to appear in The Times: ‘We are requested to state that there is no truth in the report that Lady Diana Manners is engaged to be married.’
Neither her father’s dulcet tones, nor her mother’s intransigence, affected Diana’s determination to marry Duff. She was more disconcerted by the attitude of certain of her friends. Claude Lowther besought her to draw back. ‘Don’t, I pray you, bind yourself for life to some slave you neither adore nor repect – but for whom you may have a profound pity. You possess youth, transcendental beauty, genius and a darling nature. Don’t for God’s sake be weak and in a moment of despondency marry a man who does not even know how to love.’ Tommy Bouch was equally discouraging. He could accept Duff as a fellow-subject ‘but as soon as you raise him up to be King, the situation is changed’. He would return to his hunting, Viola to her drama, the magic circle of Diana’s vassals would be dispersed. So much might have been expected from the former courtiers who saw themselves displaced; more surprising was the thinly disguised hostility of Edwin Montagu, who urged restraint and showed sudden and unexpected affection for the Duchess.
The rich old men who always rejoiced to serve her saw no reason to take any such line; Lord Wimborne and George Moore were both offering to pay the rent of whatever house Duff and Diana chose to live in: ‘Few other couples, I wager,’ wrote Diana proudly, ‘have men fighting to pay rents, rates, taxes for them.’ George Moore did even better and offered to give then £6,000 a year from the time of their marriage. They discussed the matter and at first decided to reject it, but, wrote Duff, ‘the more I think about it, the more I like it’. In the end Diana wrote to refuse the offer but in the tones of one who hoped to be over-persuaded. She perhaps overrated her skill as a letter-writer. The £6,000 were never forthcoming, though Moore deposited £500 in Diana’s bank, guaranteed her overdraft and took a box at Covent Garden in her name. ‘I hate the Opera,’ wrote Duff gloomily. Meanwhile Beaverbrook paid £200 for four articles in his new Sunday paper which Diana was to sign and Duff to write.
During the period of waiting it was tacitly agreed that Duff would keep away from Arlington Street. Once, when the Duke was at a Garter ceremony, the Duchess away and Diana recovering from flu, she was tempted to smuggle Duff in for a quiet supper. Prudence prevailed: ‘the risk of dignity suffering was too great, and besides the old bugger might have caught him in the courtyard and, being armed, would have belaboured him with his sword.’ Inevitably they all met in London society. At a party given by Lord Furness, Duff and Diana going up the stairs met the Rutlands coming down. Duff decided it would be best to cut them, Diana thought anxiously of her dream, but the Duke looked benign and gave his daughter a playful tap.
The Duchess tried to distract Diana by taking her to Paris. The Peace Conference was on and they saw much of Lord Beaverbrook who was with Venetia Montagu ‘living in open sin at the Ritz in a tall silk suite with a common bath and unlocked doors between, while poor Ted is sardined into the Majestic, unknown and uncared for’. Beaverbrook enraged the Duchess by telegraphing to the Daily Express that Diana and her mother had come to Paris to buy the trousseau. They dined with the Aga Khan, a meal so memorably rich that Diana, who cared little what she ate, took the trouble to record the menu. Emerald-green oysters were followed by fine soup in which floated a marrow-bone boiled to a shining ivory. Then came what Diana described as ‘souls in sauce’ and with them, served on great flat silver dishes, frizzling soft roes. Chickens’ wings resting on inky truffles gave way to foie gras ‘pinker than Helen’s cheek and cut like cottage loaves – in its wake a dozen fresh green asparagus apiece’. Entremet and Brie concluded the meal. The company was less satisfying, particularly the Frenchman who told her: ‘Je suis très keen sur le sport. Tout l’hiver c’est le rugby et puis, l’été, le waterpolo.’ Next day she took a long and no doubt badly needed walk with the Aga Khan. ‘I talked to him at length about my life, as I do to all who will listen. He was sympathetic and wound up with an offer to furnish my house – but I am losing faith in these promises.’
On 25 March the Rutlands gave a great ball at Arlington Street; the Queen of Rumania and the Prince of Wales dining there first. Duff went with Diana to Covent Garden in the early morning to help buy the flowers but was pointedly not invited to the ball. The Prince danced twice with Diana and talked to her at length. ‘So I take it you are to marry the Prince of Wales after all, and Duff will be appointed Lord High Chamberlain,’ wrote Tommy Bouch archly. The Duchess may even have cherished some hope of a last-minute miracle but she was given no satisfaction. The Prince asked Diana whether she was really engaged, congratulated her and said that he knew Duff by reputation and would like to meet him.
Diana had never agreed that the delay should be more than six months, and in April they debated anxiously what they should do when the time ran out. The Rutlands stuck to their insistence on the full year. Duff and Diana meditated defiance, then opted for discretion. Diana wrote a letter to her mother, half loving, half reproachful, in which she accepted the further delay. As in some jujitsu match where feigned submission throws the opponent off balance, the Duchess was disarmed by her daughter’s unexpected docility. She told her that if she would approach the Duke she might get a better reception than the time before. Diana did so, to be met by total surrender. ‘Don’t go upstairs for a little,’ the Duke said nervously. ‘I don’t want your mother to think I gave in at once.’ Duff’s interview the following day was equally friendly. The only flaw was financial. ‘He said he would allow Diana £300 a year. I think he ought to do more than that. She costs him twice as much now.’ Duff promised to settle a total of £10,000 on Diana, most of it from a trust fund out of which he could dispose of no more until his mother’s death. His annual pay from the Foreign Office had now gone up to £520 and his mother promised to continue his present allowance of £600 a year.
‘The engagement is of the romantic order,’ announced the Daily Mirror, ‘and the wedding, which is bound to be picturesque, will be on June 2.’ The national press quickly decided that, in a lean season, Diana’s wedding was the story that would catch the public imagination. Her presents, in particular, were fine food for vicarious romance as the rich and the grand emptied their cornucopias at her altar. The list occupied eighty-eight pages of a large notebook from the Army and Navy Stores. The King and Queen gave a blue enamel and diamond brooch bearing their own initials; Queen Alexandra a diamond-and-ruby pendant; the French Ambassador a gold ewer for incense-burning; the Princess of Monaco a diamond ring; Lord Wimborne a William and Mary gold dressing-case; King Manuel a gold sugar-sifter; Sir Philip Sassoon a paste basket brooch; Lord Beaverbrook a motor-car; Dame Nellie Melba a writing-table; Augustine Birrell a first edition of Tristram Shandy; General Freyberg a handsome edition of Froude’s History of England; Solly Joel a vanity box of gold and diamonds; Mrs Belloc Lowndes a first edition of Edwin Drood; cheques came from, among others, Sir Ernest Cassel, the Aga Khan, Lord French and Sir Basil Zaharoff, the last for £250. Sir John Lavery, Mr J. J. Shannon and Mr Ambrose McEvoy all gave portraits of the bride.
A few days before the wedding Duff and Diana went to the Italian consulate to get visas in their passports. Queues were long, bureaucracy stultifying, and Duff soon became bad-tempered. He snarled at Diana. ‘Never shall I forget how her face, which had been all smiles and laughter, turned suddenly to tears. It was so beautiful that I could hardly regret it. It taught me how gentle I must be.’ It is remarkable to what an extent he remembered this lesson. He never learnt to control his temper and would lash out when provoked with unthinking deadliness, but it was rarely indeed that his wife was the victim of his venom.
‘There was more of the Duff than the Manners touch about Lady Diana’s on the whole rather dull wedding,’ reported the London Mail loftily. It is hard to imagine what antics the journalist was expecting. St Margaret’s, Westminster, even when decorated with rose-bushes and orchids from Blenheim, is no place for informality, and the formidable weight of royalty was enough to ensure that the conventions would be observed. Diana sat forlornly in the sombre morning-room at Arlington Street until her father came to claim her – ‘his temper was short and his gills were white and his top hat had no jauntiness’. Once past the great wooden gates she was swept into a maelstrom of clamour and light and headlong rushing from one point to the next. There were crowds in St James’s to see her go, several thousand more spectators around the church, a still denser throng to surround the house for the reception and finally cheer her on her way. ‘Diana’s popularity with the mob is only comparable with that of Kitchener,’ wrote Duff in slight dismay. For Diana the day was a kaleidoscope of half-absorbed impressions; the malign gnome-face of Lord Beaverbrook with tears coursing down his cheeks; the photographers jostling for position and clambering up trees and lamp-posts; Duff holding her hand throughout the service; the Tree grandchildren in Greek robes scattering rose-petals before the bridal couple; the mad admirer who burst through the crowd and thrust a letter into her hand – ‘Read this, read this before you proceed!’ Diana’s mind rushed to the Ides of March but the message only wished her well.
And so the car forced its way through the rampageous mob and the couple slipped away on honeymoon. First stop was Philip Sassoon’s house at Lympne, left empty for them for as long as they cared to use it. Opulent comfort, unobtrusive servants, fountains playing in the smoothly tailored gardens through which they sauntered after dinner while Duff read aloud from Donne’s Epithalamions:
He comes, and passes through sphere after sphere,
First her sheets, then her arms, then any where.
Let not this day, then, but this night be thine,
Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.
‘Our night,’ wrote Duff, ‘like so many of the main incidents in our love-story, was very old-fashioned and conventional.’ The only untoward incident came when he tried to turn out the light and by mistake summoned Diana’s surprised but gratified lady’s maid. A day of letter-writing, love, and reading the interminable reports of their wedding in the newspapers, and they were ready for Italy and the honeymoon proper.
They stayed for a few days at Bernard Berenson’s villa near Florence, which had been rented by Ivor Wimborne. Duff loved the library and the champagne, Diana the garden. After dinner their host tactfully left them; the garden was full of fireflies; ‘the scent of the flowers was intoxicating, the moon was full. We seem to have reached almost the limit of beauty.’ Then it was Rome. Marconi had offered them his house, then gone back on the offer. Instead he booked them into the Grand Hotel. There was anxious speculation whether he intended to pay for them – he didn’t, but as the bill was less than £2 a night for bedroom, sittingroom and bathroom his dereliction caused them little concern. Final destination was Lord Grimthorpe’s Villa Cimbrone in the hills above Ravello – ‘Byzantine cloisters, endless rose-gardens, cypress avenues, statues everywhere.’ A thousand feet below lay the sea. After dinner and much white wine they strolled on the terrace. ‘Diana’s clothes fell from her and she stood by me naked as a statue but whiter and lovelier far. This was perhaps the most beautiful moment of all.’
There is usually cause for relief in the ending of a honeymoon. The pressure-cooker intimacy of enforced isolation, the feeling that it would be a confession of failure to seek other company than one’s own, produce tension and a sense of constraint. Diana, with her fear of tête-à-têtes, was peculiarly vulnerable to such strain. Yet in the event the honeymoon proved an idyll. On the last night she broke down and cried, Duff recorded, ‘because we were going away, and she thought we might never be so happy again. Blissfully happy we have been here and it is sad to go.’
The journey back was beset with disasters. A storm at sea reduced Duff to agonies of sea-sickness. Diana was too frightened to be sick; every voice she heard was an appeal for help with the pumps, every thump the captain taking off his boots. Then they were stranded in Marseilles because of a muddle over tickets: ‘I am bad at keeping cheerful when things go wrong,’ admitted Duff. ‘Diana is wonderful.’ But his habitual optimism and her pessimism soon reasserted themselves. When they were almost on the last lap an elderly couple entered the carriage and settled down opposite them. Later Duff and Diana compared their reactions. ‘One day we will be like that,’ thought Duff with satisfaction; ‘One day we will be like that,’ thought Diana in despair.
*
‘We are, funnily enough, profoundly different,’ Duff had written in 1917, ‘without loving me she likes me more than I could like anyone. One of the most remarkable things about her is the strength of her “likes”. I am cold-hearted except where I love, her friendships are more passionate than others’ loves.’ It did not take a honeymoon to show Duff and Diana how sharply they differed in their emotions and their instincts; they had already realized that this was so and decided that it mattered little. Duff was intensely sensual. Physically he did not know how to be content with a single woman; even before their honeymoon was over he was seeking diversions outside their marriage. But such diversions were no more than the gratification of a nagging appetite. ‘My infidelities are entirely of the flesh,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The long habit of promiscuity asserts itself. I feel guilty of no unfaithfulness, only of filthiness.’
Allied to this craving yet distinct from it was his longing for romance and adventure. Here it was the quest that counted rather than the fulfilment. Denied consummation after a protracted hunt, he congratulated himself on the fact that he was still young enough to enjoy love-making for its own sake. He felt himself deprived if he was not engaged in at least one secret and protracted love-affair, with all the fun of the amatory overtures, surreptitious messages, covert assignations, passionate declarations and, with luck, final seduction. He could never quite believe that Diana did not share his taste. Once, in Venice, she complained that Duff did not love her enough, or at least not romantically. He tried to explain that happiness and romance did not go together. Romance could not survive without the difficulties and dangers. She was suffering, he concluded, ‘from the same thing as I have been feeling here – these perfect moonlight nights were incomplete without some love-affair’.
Diana was suffering from nothing of the sort. The physical side of love meant little to her, and with no wish to see any relationship ripen into illicit intimacy the whole paraphernalia of romantic seduction became a tedious irrelevance. Bed was an admirable place to sleep in and useful for procreation, but she could not imagine why so many men of her acquaintance were so importunate in their efforts to share it with her. What she loved was companionship and admiration. She had a genius for friendship, would work at it, make sacrifices for it, display furious loyalty in its cause. With her husband this friendship was transmuted into a devotion and commitment that was awe-inspiring in its completeness. But if she had been told at the end of her honeymoon that Duff had tired of sex, she would have received the news with equanimity, almost relief; regretting only that the chances of her having a child were thereby reduced.
Some people – most usually men who had not enjoyed the success with Diana which they had anticipated – assumed that her coolness towards men proved that she lusted after women. The legend of Diana the nymphomaniac alternated with a rival version of Diana the lesbian. The second had as little basis in fact as the first. She loved beauty and appreciated it in either sex, but that was as far as it went. ‘Don’t tell me you want to hold me and love me,’ she wrote to one female admirer more than twenty years later. ‘It only upsets me and will make me scary. All my life I’ve been a very normal type: worshipping Duff; a few lovers; fond of men; and a happy companion of women – but no more, o no, no more.’
‘Diana is the kind of wife who will always eat the legs of a chicken and give her husband the wings,’ Lady Tree told her daughter Iris. ‘Oh for the wings, the wings of a Duff,’ replied Iris flippantly, but Lady Tree had identified an essential element in the Coopers’ marriage. From the moment that she married Duff, Diana dedicated herself to his interests. Her judgement of new acquaintances was not based on: ‘Do I like them?’ but ‘Would Duff like them or be amused to hear of them?’; half the satisfaction she derived from her adventures lay in the recounting of them afterwards; his success was her success, his happiness hers. Whenever he was out of her sight she worried about his welfare, in their London house she would rush from her bed to the window when he left in the morning to make sure he survived the crossing of the road.
Duff was required to be as much a father as a lover. To Diana at Belvoir he wrote: ‘How cold it must be. Poor Baby! She must ask Mr Major [her dog] to keep her warm. Be a good little girl and above all obey Nannie – and obey obediently without whining or asking why.’ Diana replied in similar vein – ‘Up came poor baby’s mummy, who cosseted her and comforted her and gave her a stiff Bromo Selzer, so at last she got to sleep and woke up brave and strong.’ ‘I’m so happy that Swift wrote baby language and that it interests instead of shocks,’ she went on. ‘I suppose it doesn’t really matter if mine does shock though, for beyond Duffy these letters won’t, I fear,* be very widely read.’ One of the most capable of women if put to the test, she rejoiced in the myth that she was dependent on Duff to help her with the practical problems of life, and did all she could to propagate the image of herself as the innocent child, unfit to navigate the reefs of a dangerous world.
She recognized that Duff had different needs from her and did not in the least resent them. It was clear from the start of their relationship that Duff was not made for monogamy and Diana was more than content to share with others the burden of a husband’s vigorous sexuality. Once at a party he swooped on an attractive girl and made conspicuous advances to her. Lady Cunard suggested to Diana that she might like to take him away. ‘Why, he’s not bored yet, is he?’ asked Diana, who was enjoying herself. ‘But don’t you mind?’ pressed her hostess. ‘Mind? I only mind when Duffy has a cold!’ On the whole she liked Duff’s women, knew that they were unlikely to last long and had a remarkable gift for retaining as friends women whom her husband had discarded as mistresses. When she did not like them – which usually meant that they had not taken the trouble to be nice to her – their reign was short indeed. Diana rarely made scenes but she would laugh at them and make it clear that she found them boring until Duff doubted his judgement and began to look elsewhere. Sometimes she seemed almost to procure for him. At Bognor they had a guest-cottage at the end of the garden. When Ann Charteris, who was staying with them, wanted to go to bed, Duff insisted that he should escort her. Anticipating a pounce in the shrubbery, Miss Charteris looked hopefully at another guest and suggested he should come too. ‘Oh, no, don’t spoil it!’ cried Diana, urging the couple on their way.
But she was not incapable of resentment. One woman whom she particularly disliked was dismissed tartly as ‘a silly, giggling, gawky, lecherous bit of dross’. Others inspired as much alarm as scorn. Daisy Fellowes was one of the very few who she felt posed a real threat to her marriage. Malicious, intelligent and formidably elegant, Mrs Fellowes was the daughter of the Duc Decazes and the sewing-machine heiress Isabelle Singer, herself previously married to the Prince de Broglie. Duff first met her at the end of 1919 and immediately took to her, ‘Mean, cruel and beautiful,’ he described her. ‘She is the notorious Princesse de Broglie, the destroyer of many a happy home. I expected to find her attractive and I wasn’t disappointed.’ The discovery that she thought Flaubert had written La Chartreuse de Parme temporarily distressed him, but he rallied bravely. At Deauville in 1921 they met every afternoon for increasingly tempestuous assignations, while Diana resentfully went off for long drives with Lord Wimborne. The climax came when Duff deserted Diana at the Casino and went off to Mrs Fellowes’s villa. Diana missed him, searched everywhere, decided Duff had been murdered and, frantic with worry, informed the police. ‘I was terribly sorry for her, poor darling,’ wrote Duff contritely. ‘I fear she will never forgive Daisy.’ What Diana found hardest to forgive was that Duff had been so inconsiderate as to disappear without a word and expose her to such cruel fears. Duff’s assassination, not his seduction, was the threat she dreaded most.
Where she did feel jealousy she was ashamed of it. Diana Capel was too good a friend to constitute a serious threat, yet Diana could not hide her distress when Duff launched into an unavailing pursuit soon after their marriage. A painful scene followed one party when Diana wished to leave and Duff to stay. ‘She blurted out in the middle of her sobs that it was all due to her jealousy of Diana Capel and she had hated herself for being jealous, which she had sworn that she would never be.’ Duff wished that she felt less strongly about it but was flattered by her feelings. ‘I do love her infinitely more than the other Diana. I love also romance and intrigue and cannot live without them.’ He promised to see less of Diana Capel in future, but found it hard to keep his word, and friends like Scatters Wilson and Ivor Wimborne gleefully reported every transgression which they detected. In April 1921 Diana planned a short visit to Paris and was hurt when Duff encouraged the enterprise with what she felt was excessive eagerness. Injury turned to indignation when she discovered that Duff had intended himself to go to Breccles where Diana Capel would be staying. At once she telegraphed Ivor Wimborne to meet her in Paris.
If her object was to make Duff jealous, she had chosen the wrong ally. Duff knew the limits of Diana’s enthusiasm for Lord Wimborne and did not take him seriously as a putative paramour. Chaliapin was another matter. Greatest operatic bass of his generation, majestic in stature, barbarously handsome, almost as celebrated a lover as he was a singer, Chaliapin had dazzled Diana briefly in London before the war. Now he reappeared to woo her in ardent French – ‘Chère, chère et adorable créature, je t’adore, ma belle Dianotchka.’ Diana was almost swept off her feet, but her unwavering commonsense told her that it could be no more than a fleeting fling. She flaunted her friendship with him and even organized a dinner for Chaliapin to meet the Prime Minister. Maurice Baring interpreted and Lloyd George interrogated him on conditions in Russia, a subject on which the singer did not seem to be conspicuously well-informed. But Duff remained unmoved; after the dinner: ‘Diana wanted to drive home with Chaliapin, so I drove Diana Capel home – a successful arrangement for all concerned.’ He did at one point express mild irritation when Diana dined with Chaliapin on two successive nights, but the protest related more to the fact that he had been left to himself in a week when White’s was closed than to any real jealousy.
Chaliapin was to pursue Diana to Chicago in 1926 when she was acting in The Miracle. He sat in the front row of the stalls and, after the performance,
came to my dressing room, red with love and bent on a romp. Unfortunately, since learning English, he makes love in it instead of the more veiled Russian tongue. As his choice of erotic words wasn’t too delicate I had a wave of nausea. He said he wanted to have baby, he said, and I had a struggle with him in which he pressed baby’s white-washed hand on his placey. I tore it away and in so doing left a cloud of white.
Reluctant to point out this consequence of his antics, yet still less ready to send him out into the world with the mark of shame upon him, Diana cunningly led Chaliapin to the long dressing-room glass and pointed out how nice they looked together. The singer concurred, but fortunately noticed the white stain on his trousers and put the matter right before venturing forth.
Though Chaliapin’s fame and charms faded, Diana remained loyal to him and several years later abandoned the delights of a Sussex summer to come up to London and go to an embarrassingly ill-attended recital at the Queen’s Hall. ‘I loved him greatly in the days of his greatness,’ she wrote. ‘Now he is older and heavier and has lost his English public, it would be vile to desert him.’ After the Second World War she received a letter from Chaliapin’s daughter, who had seen her photograph in a Russian newspaper and identified it with the many pictures of Diana that Chaliapin used to hang on his walls. When she had asked her father who the girl in the picture was, he had merely replied that it was a very beautiful English girl whom he had loved deeply many years before.
Such romantic interludes were rare in Diana’s life. She was at her happiest with a court of devoted admirers, female as well as male, who would serve her, appreciate her and to whom she was fiercely loyal. In the years after the war, ‘The Boys’, Alan Parsons and the lawyer St John Hutchinson – ‘the arrogant, fearless, mirthful Hutchie’ – were in almost constant attendance. Duff was occasionally irritated by their presence – ‘Diana never seems to weary of that couple. I do.’ – but liked them and was glad that they kept Diana diverted. Certainly he felt no trace of jealousy. Nor did ‘The Boys” respective wives. On the contrary, Viola Parsons and Mary Hutchinson both counted Diana among their dearest friends and seem never to have resented the time which their husbands devoted to her entertainment.
In June 1921 Duff and Diana returned from a dinner-party. It was the anniversary of their wedding. Diana went up to bed and when Duff followed and turned on the light he found her standing in the corner wearing her wedding dress. The romantic gesture enraptured him. Forty years later she could have done the same thing and he have been equally delighted. For all Duff’s infidelities and Diana’s distractions – perhaps, indeed, because of them – their marriage never staled. Not for an instant did either doubt that the other was by far the most important person in their life. When they were separated they wrote to each other every day. Duff always believed Diana to be the most beautiful, intelligent and delightful of women; there was no sacrifice that Diana would not have made to secure her husband’s happiness. They relished the society of others; they were happiest in each other’s company. Many would feel that marriage should be more exclusive, that endless amatory adventures are incompatible with a truly happy match. That was not Duff’s or Diana’s philosophy. They believed that a marriage as strong as theirs could accommodate other relationships, even the most passionate. If others thought differently, that was of little importance: the Coopers knew their marriage was a happy one. It was a curious relationship, but it worked. The success of a marriage can surely best be judged by the feelings of the two parties; by such a test Duff and Diana’s marriage was not merely successful, it was triumphant.
*
Duff and Diana got back to London from their honeymoon on 6 July 1919 and settled temporarily into a house which the Howard de Waldens had lent them in Portland Place. To find their own house was a first preoccupation, but in the meantime Diana was fully occupied trying to master the motor-car which Beaverbrook had given them as a wedding-present. Duff never learnt to drive efficiently, Diana’s style was individual and ambitious, immortalized in Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs Stitch who, irritated by a traffic jam, took her car down the steps of an underground station and trundled briskly across the ticket hall. On her first day with the new car Diana rammed a milk-cart in Stafford Street and flooded the road. Luckily a dog-shop was nearby. The proprietor rushed out with all his wares on leashes and set them to work lapping up the mess.
All plans were soon disrupted. The Coopers were dining in the house of Norman Holden, a clever and drily witty stockbroker. After dinner they clambered on to the roof to watch a firework display being given in Hyde Park to celebrate the peace. Diana gave a sudden cry and Viola Parsons looked round, to find only her hat marking the spot where she had been. She had taken a step backwards and fallen thirty feet through a skylight, badly fracturing her leg. Guests were despatched in search of doctors and surgeons and Viola went off to tell the Duchess what had happened. She was out, but the Duke, in sombre mood, surveyed Viola balefully and remarked: ‘I advise you to have nothing to do with them. They’re a bad lot.’
It was to be three months before the extension was removed and Diana could even hobble about her room. She spent most of the time in the Holdens’ drawing-room which had been rigged up as a temporary ward. In Aaron’s Rod D. H. Lawrence described Aaron Sisson’s presence in the bedroom of Diana – thinly disguised as Lady Artemis Hooper – as part of a string quartet summoned to entertain the invalid after her ‘famous escapade of falling through the window of her taxi-cab’. Lady Artemis ‘reclined there in bed in a sort of half-light, well made up, smoking her cigarettes and talking in a rather raucous voice, making her slightly rasping witty comments to the other men in the room … This was the bride of the moment! Curious how raucous her voice sounded out of the cigarette smoke. Yet he liked her – the reckless note of the modern, social freebooter.’ Diana never ran to a string quartet but Asquith, who visited her several times, found her surrounded by flowers enough to fill two or three hot-houses and with never less than five or six visitors.
In spite of the rasping witticisms she was in considerable pain. Her leg had been badly set and it was to be nearly a year before she could walk freely again. She had recourse to morphia to help her sleep. Soon she became alarmed at what she feared might become an addiction. A hypnotist was summoned to replace the drug, but he proved wholly ineffective; Diana merely pretending to sleep when he was there and giggling with the nurse over her dose of morphine as soon as he had left. Duff took the threat of addiction more seriously than Diana. He constantly nagged at her to renounce the habit, she as constantly promised to do so and then relapsed. Nearly a year after the accident she spent a night with Katharine Asquith, came back the following morning and went straight to bed. Duff found her there at lunch time. ‘I thought she was looking very bad, obviously suffering from a debauch of morphia. She at first denied but at length confessed. I told her how ugly it had made her look. Her fear of ugliness is, I think, the best preventive.’
Whether it was Duff’s therapy or Diana’s will-power, morphia was never allowed to dominate her life. It seems, however, to have been at this period that Diana developed the acute hypochondria that was so evident in later years. She always ignored discomfort, bore pain stoically, but reacted with extravagant alarm to anything she took to be a symptom of advancing disease. Though rarely afflicted when she was happy or busily employed, depression or boredom were enough to stimulate a plethora of spots, swellings and inexplicable aches. In July 1920 she detected a wholly imaginary hardness on her right breast and at once diagnosed cancer. The doctor pooh-poohed her fears but she persisted and grew almost hysterical. A second doctor was called in and carried slightly more conviction, but Diana’s nerves were by now so turbulent that only a stiff dose of morphine would appease them. Fortunately she met the King of Spain at a ball at Londonderry House. He danced with her several times, tried to put his hand up her dress and asked for an appointment. She told him there was nothing doing but was greatly cheered by the encounter and forgot all about her cancer. A few weeks later, however, it returned. Her morale became so low that Duff had to take a week’s holiday to succour her. Sir Arbuthnot Lane was called in and said she ought to have a baby – unhelpful advice, since she had been wishing for nothing better ever since her wedding. In the end a Portuguese quack called Gomez announced that she did not have cancer but intestinal sepsis and a slightly defective thyroid. Diana found this both convincing and comforting, and all thoughts of fatal illness were temporarily dismissed.
When gloomy or afraid, Diana was apt to turn to alcohol. At the height of the cancer scare she wrecked a weekend party by turning tipsily to her neighbour at dinner, Cardie Montagu, Lord Swaythling’s son, and reciting Belloc’s malicious verses:
Lord Swaythling, whom the people knew
And loved as Mr Montagu
Will probably be known in hell
As Mr Moses Samuel.
For though they may not sound the same
The latter was the rogue’s real name.
Cardie Montagu professed amusement, but left early next morning for the races and did not return. This was not a solitary incident. At a ball at Covent Garden Duff found her half seas over with the Duke of Manchester – ‘I got her away as quick as I could. She was uncertain in gait and speed.’ A few weeks later it was at the Parsons’s and the other party was Augustus John, ‘who of all men I think the most disgusting,’ recorded Duff. ‘I took her away and was cross with her. She was most penitent.’ She always was most penitent, but drink was too useful an anaesthetic for her to renounce it altogether. She drank partly because she liked it but much more to abate fears and dull nerves, and though she never became wholly dependent on it, it was a valuable prop in times of trouble.
*
While Diana was convalescing from her broken leg and Duff wheeling her around London in a bathchair, they set up house in a back drawing-room at Arlington Street. This was cheap, convenient and comfortable, but Duff pined to have his books around him and Diana wanted a home of her own. She found it in Gower Street, a pleasant and in those days quiet late-eighteenth-century street in unfashionable Bloomsbury. They took No. 90 on a fifty-year lease for £90 a year, rented the first-floor flat in No. 92 and turned it into bedroom and drawing-room-sized bathroom for Diana. What Chips Channon described as their ‘tiny house’ was big enough to accommodate a library as well as a drawing-room and five servants. In time they extended still further down the street, taking over the first-floor flat in No. 94 and making a bedroom and sitting-room for Duff.
The move from Arlington Street took place in March 1920. Housemaid and cook had moved in a few days before but returned to Arlington Street at 3 a.m. in their nightdresses and covered with soot. They had heard strange noises, decided it was either ghosts or burglars, clambered on to the roof and screamed until the police came to rescue them. There was no sign that anybody had been in the house, but the couple refused to return until the Coopers themselves took up residence.
Gower Street was their home for twenty years. Long afterwards Diana described her first years there as being probably the happiest of her life, ‘because I loved my husband so dearly and the war was over’. By the standard of most of their friends they were poor enough, but some rich admirers could usually be relied on to provide game, salmon or champagne and they gave lavish parties. Here too friends would help out. Rubinstein came regularly and would volunteer to play. He was endlessly accommodating – ‘No, not that one, Arthur; we want this’ – until one day he married, was immediately taken in hand, and never again touched a piano except professionally. At a typical party in July 1923 the garden was illuminated. First Rubinstein played, then there was supper in the garden. Rose-petals showered on the guests, a Russian orchestra took up station and Chaliapin sang. Maurice Baring and Viola Parsons danced a comic, orgiastic dance. Hilaire Belloc sang Auprès de ma blonde and French marching songs. The last guest left at 4 a.m. The drink was furnished by Lord Beaverbrook; the food too was largely provided by others; music and singing were given for love. Immense expenditure in effort, frugality in money, was Diana’s rule; and the result gave happiness to everyone, including the donors.
The mainstays of the establishment were Wade and Holbrook. Kate Wade was Diana’s maid, who had joined her during the war and remained for more than forty years. Tall, phlegmatic, strong in character and physique, she grumbled her way through a lifetime of faithful service and became so much part of Diana’s life that it seemed impossible things could go on without her. Holbrook had been Duff’s manservant since 1917 and came back as butler after the war. Diana was perpetually infuriated by the bland satisfaction with which this paragon anticipated all her requests. ‘We need some more coal, Holbrook.’ ‘I took the liberty of ordering it this morning, my lady.’ Once she resolved to confound him and announced at the last moment that she wanted two greyhounds to take to the Portrait Painters’ Ball, at which she was to appear as Diana the Huntress. ‘Would it be prudent to insure them, my lady?’ inquired Holbrook calmly. Within two hours they were at the house. ‘I hope they won’t bite me?’ said Diana apprehensively. ‘I have ascertained, my lady, that the animals are entirely docile.’ Then it turned out that Diana had got the date wrong, the ball was on the following evening. Holbrook was temporarily flummoxed. ‘I regret, my lady, that the animals are engaged tomorrow night. They have a prior engagement at the White City Stadium. I will, however, endeavour to secure another pair.’ He succeeded, and Diana’s greyhounds were the success of the ball. His omniscience, however, faltered when he accompanied Duff shooting, providing a flow of unwanted and often misleading information. As a hare lolloped slowly towards them, he hissed in Duff’s ear in a tone of tense excitement: ‘Very large rabbit coming up in front, sir.’
Duff had now been promoted at the Foreign Office, to become secretary to the Under-Secretary of State, Ronald McNeill, but he was restless and dissatisfied with the pay. He had exploratory talks with Barings and Rothschilds but no firm offer transpired. He was consumed by jealousy whenever he visited the House of Commons, yet asked himself: ‘Is it worth leaving a decent gentlemanlike job which may lead to an ambassadorship, in order to plunge into the cesspool of politics which can only lead to a few years of precarious power, during which one is the Aunt Sally of the guttersnipes of the earth?’ Besides, he felt himself a reactionary who was out of tune with the times. He was both friend and admirer of Winston Churchill. At dinner at Wimborne House Churchill held forth in his most truculent vein. He ‘said he was all out now to fight Labour, it was his one object in politics. He was a monarchist and swore we would have all the kings back on their thrones, even the Hohenzollerns.’ Duff was delighted with all he said, Diana dismayed. Their feelings were much the same a few weeks later when Churchill rejoiced at the coming of a ‘world wide movement of reaction’ and said that Gandhi should be bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and trampled on by an enormous elephant ridden by the Viceroy. But Churchill was generally downcast, seeing little future for himself in British politics and saying ‘if he had the choice between immortality and being blown out like a candle, he would choose the latter’. If his hero saw no chances of success, how could Duff hope to get on in politics?
Money was urgently needed if their life-style was to be maintained, still more if Duff were to abandon diplomacy and take to politics. Many projects were mooted. The Sunday Evening Telegram announced that Diana was to become a dress-designer, then that she was to set up as an adviser in house decoration – ‘Can’t you imagine how the profiteeresses would rush to consult her at ten guineas a time?’ Gilbert Miller offered her a share in the management of a theatre at £500 a year, the proposition sounded hopeful but came to nothing. Then she was invited to join the board and subsequently become Chairman of a company manufacturing scent. She was to receive £500 a year for doing nothing, and gleefully accepted. The company crashed, the managing director was arrested, Diana threatened with prosecution for fraud and obtaining money by false pretences. Duff was sympathetic but as ignorant in business matters as his wife. Diana was grilled in court. How much money had she put into the company? None. How did she imagine she could be a director in that case? She didn’t know. Had she never been educated? Well, not to speak of. Her patent ignorance of matters financial and her failure to gain a penny from the enterprise saved her from prosecution, but she left the court brow-beaten and abashed.
Journalism seemed more helpful. In 1921 she was appointed editress of the newly conceived English edition of the French magazine Femina. ‘A most thankless and wearing job,’ Mrs Belloc Lowndes described it, but to Diana it was an agreeable sinecure. ‘I said “yes” to everything all my life,’ she once commented, and an offer of £750 per annum was irresistible. She made no pretence of knowing how to edit, hardly even went to the office, and did no more than contribute a few articles, mainly written by Duff. In fact she wrote extraordinarily well, with real originality and a vivid turn of phrase, but she had no confidence in her ability and froze into bewildered apathy if required to write 800 words on Augustus John’s new exhibition or the latest style in shoes.
One problem was that she was generally required to write on fashion, and fashion bored her. She enjoyed new and beautiful clothes but did not find them a rewarding subject for discussion. Movements in hemlines or frills left her indifferent. No one was less vogueish than Diana. She regarded the avant garde with dismayed suspicion: Picasso’s drawings were ‘a drunk baby’s scrawl’; Moore’s sculpture ‘boring shapeless lumps of polished basalt, as undesigned as unkneaded dough’; Hugnet’s surrealist poems ‘are of tomorrow, I prefer them of yesterday’. ‘I have got to Godfrey Kneller and Watts,’ she remarked wistfully to Cecil Beaton, ‘but I got stuck at Cézanne.’ This hardly equipped her to work on a magazine dedicated to the premise that every new quirk of style was the dawn of a new age. She went abroad shortly after Femina opened and returned to find that – transitory as the fashions it celebrated – it had already closed.
There were other papers. Diana contributed regularly to the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Duff did most of the work. In February 1922, for instance, she attended Princess Mary’s wedding at Westminster Abbey, rushed back to Gower Street, presented the facts to Duff and left it to him to write the piece over luncheon. One difficulty was that Duff found it hard to get on with the press Lords. Lord Rothermere was ‘one of the most repulsive men that I have ever met. He looks like a pig and when not speaking snores quietly to himself. He is rude, pompous, extremely stupid, common beyond any other member of his family, utterly devoid of the slightest streak of humour or dash of originality.’ Duff suffered fools no more gladly because they were millionaires or press barons, and Lord Rothermere was left in little doubt that Duff despised him. Nor was Lord Beaverbrook a friend. Duff distrusted him more each time he met him. ‘He was rude to me and I to him, but I thought I scored,’ Duff recorded with satisfaction; hardly a helpful attitude to adopt towards one who was proving a regular source of income. Nor did his habit of calling the Daily Express a ‘filthy rag’, even when its proprietor was present, do much to make for harmonious relations.
Fortunately Diana loved Beaverbrook and he her. At a ball at the Albert Hall in November 1919, while Duff was pursuing Diana Capel, Diana stayed with Beaverbrook in his box. Duff returned to find the maudlin magnate pouring out his heart, saying how devoted he was to Diana and for her sake to her husband. There was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for them; he was the best friend they had. ‘He was very drunk,’ Duff commented sourly, but the affection was sincere. The Coopers often stayed at Beaverbrook’s country house Cherkeley. Once Diana decided to steal some blossom from one of the more precious shrubs. She broke off several branches and hid them near the gate, meaning to retrieve her loot as she left. When the moment came, however, she found Beaverbrook seated on the grass near the gate in earnest conclave with another guest. He waved benignly as the Coopers drove past, leaving them to speculate whether his presence there was an unlucky accident or the mischievous thwarting of their project.
Diana was distressed by Duff’s dislike of Beaverbrook but accepted that she could do nothing to change it; Duff for his part recognized that Beaverbrook’s quirkishness, quicksilver mind and fearsome power were qualities bound to appeal to Diana, and made no attempt to interrupt their friendship. Diana took greater pains to reconcile Beaverbrook with others of their mutual acquaintance. In November 1919 she gave a dinner at which Churchill and Beaverbrook, at that time on the worst of terms, were supposed to make up their differences. The party teetered on the brink of disaster, Beaverbrook was truculent and offensive and Duff, with some glee, anticipated an explosion. Churchill, however, kept his temper and by the end of the evening something close to a rapprochement had been achieved.
As much by his casual benevolence as by the work he put in their way, Beaverbrook came often to the help of the Coopers. It was the cinema, however, which brought the first substantial improvement in their fortunes. Diana had had brushes with this world before. When making his propaganda film The Hearts of the World, D. W. Griffith had included her among a group of prominent women who had done much for the war effort. (When asked why he had included Diana he replied effusively: ‘Because she is the most beloved woman in England.’) Just before she married came an offer from Griffith of $75,000 for a three-month filming trip to the United States. The film was to be called Women and War and eventually appeared, without Diana, as The Great Love. The Duchess of Rutland was horrified at the thought of her daughter posturing in front of the cameras; then was told how much money was involved and became still more disturbed at the thought of her not doing so. Diana was greatly tempted and would have succumbed if wedding, honeymoon and finally the accident to her leg had not prevented her acceptance. Variety was not satisfied with so simple an explanation. According to that journal, the Duke forbade her to act in America. Diana appealed to the Queen and was told that if she disobeyed her father she would be banished from Court. To quarrel with her parents was one thing; to risk expulsion from the Palace was, Variety implied, something altogether too dreadful for Diana to contemplate.
She now fell into the hands of a decidedly inferior artist. J. Stuart Blackton had made a modest reputation as an innovator in Hollywood but his career had not prospered and he came to Britain more as a refugee than as a Messiah. Somehow he raised the capital to float a company and planned two films, in both of which he invited Diana to star. The news of this caused some indignation in the profession. Mr Geames of the Actors Association complained that a lady who took up acting was doing a true actress out of a job: ‘Titled folk are, I admit, in a category of their own; but people who have to live by acting resent this sort of competition.’ Diana took the remark to heart and put herself out to prove herself a true professional. Blackton’s righthand man, Felix Orman, testified to the success of her efforts. ‘Lady Diana was most democratic and serious about her work … the least troublesome member of the cast.’
Diana’s first film was The Glorious Adventure, a foolish fandangle based vaguely on Carolean politics and the Great Fire of London. Diana played Lady Beatrice Fair, a stout-hearted simpleton who married Bulfinch, a criminal condemned to death, so as to escape her debts. She was hoist with her own petard when the Fire led to Bulfinch’s release and his arrival in his ‘wife’s’ bedroom to claim his conjugal rights. Inevitably all ended well; Bulfinch, it turned out, had a wife already and Lady Beatrice was reunited with her dashing young lover, Hugh Argyle. Bulfinch was played by another debutant, Victor MacLaglen, a former pugilist who went on to make a highly successful career as a film-star.
Diana was particularly incensed by the ineptitude of the history: ‘Pepys is made a confidential pimp of Charles II, perpetually digging him in the ribs with a lewd double-entendre’; the costumes were out of period; horses in blinkers, something unheard of in the seventeenth century. Mrs Blackton, who fancied herself as a historian, not merely ignored Diana’s objections but was so rude to her that Duff felt bound to remonstrate with her husband. The Fire of London took place in a warehouse off the Strand and almost put an end to the production by getting out of hand, destroying much of the scenery and at one point threatening to do the same to the cast. The film being a silent one, Diana mouthed any words that seemed appropriate. ‘Don’t be such a beast! Oh, please leave me alone. You filthy cad!’ not surprisingly failed to repel MacLaglen when bent on rape, while a punch on his craggy jaw merely barked her knuckles.
Only twenty minutes of this film survive and the quality of the print is so poor that it is hard to be certain what it was really like. The epoch-making Prizma Natural Colour which was its pride has faded to a muddy sepia. Diana’s beauty transcends the limited range of her expressions, but neither performance nor film can ever have been outstanding. It was on the whole well received. The first night was a properly glamorous affair, Selfridge’s gave a window to a wax tableau from the film, the reviews were friendly, even fulsome. The Duchess of Rutland found the film ‘lovely, perfect’; her only criticism was ‘Oh, why can’t Diana be longer?’ For Duff the film was adequate but Diana’s performance sublime. ‘Her gestures were replete with dignity and breeding, which of course one never sees in film actresses.’
The reaction of some of her more traditional relations and acquaintances shows how the attitude of society had changed since 1914. Before the war the fact that a duke’s daughter made money by acting for the cinema would have outraged society, let alone when the performance involved being mauled lasciviously by an erstwhile pugilist. In 1922 it caused a frisson only among the most diehard. A more common reaction was satisfaction that she had done it well; to have held her own among the professionals was felt to be in some way a victory for her class. Duff was not alone in finding sublime poise in her performance, vulgarity in that of everyone else. It was among the middle classes that indignation was most deeply felt. ‘How can you, born in a high Social position, so prostitute your Status for paltry monetary considerations?’ asked one anonymous correspondent. ‘You THING!’
The only person wholly unenthusiastic was Diana herself. She thought little of the result and still less of the labours necessary to achieve it. Blackton’s direction was uninspiring, the rest of the cast second-rate, both professionally and as companions; the heat lobstered her face and arms, the lights made her eyes smart so fiercely that she could not sleep and twice had recourse to a doctor in the middle of the night. She was, however, committed to a second film and would not have contemplated breaking the contract even if she had not had pay outstanding from the first film and feared Blackton would never be able to find the money if his enterprises were disrupted.
For her second and last film Diana moved back a century to play Elizabeth in The Virgin Queen. To look the part she shaved off her eyebrows – ‘This splendid sacrifice to her sense of art and duty,’ proclaimed the Daily Mail sonorously, ‘is assuredly unique and should alone augur a happy career for the film.’ They gave her clothes that seemed to have come off the local scrapheap and a crown ‘which I did thrice refuse because it had been made for George Robey and not for Baby’. The result, as Diana complained, was to make her look like Mummy Wart Hog, so grotesque that the donkey belonging to some nearby children shied and refused to pass her on the road. She exaggerated – in her Holbeinesque headgear she looked spectacularly beautiful – but the film had little to commend it. Sir Francis Laking, who played Darnley, was another amateur, amiable, heavy-drinking and wholly undistinguished. Carlyle Blackwell as jeune premier featured in endless love-scenes, each more compromising than the last – ‘I mind Carlyle’s kisses too too terribly.’ Inspired by his triumph with the Great Fire of London, Blackton resolved to make a fire the centrepiece of The Virgin Queen. Apprehensively Duff telegraphed next day to ask if she had been burnt up like Harriet or was still stamping around. ‘A tamer or more wretched performance I never hope to see,’ replied Diana. ‘I never acted at all because the flames were so minute I could not believe they were filming. A good producer would retake it at any price, but by tomorrow Blackton will have convinced himself that it all went exactly to his hopes.’ The film was shot on location at Beaulieu and Diana’s separation from Duff was an additional source of woe. They rented a little house, but the servants installed themselves in the best bedrooms and Duff found the charms of a New Forest picnic distinctly limited. For Diana it was a dismal time; her leisure spent largely bemoaning the absence of Duff and the presence of Laking and Blackton.
Diana did not enjoy acting for the cinema. She needed the stimulus of an audience and felt she could never do her best before a camera. Her motives for filming were unabashedly commercial. Mrs Belloc Lowndes brought in an American journalist to see her and begged Diana to make clear that it was the urge for self-expression and not money that drove her on. ‘Good God!’ exploded Diana. ‘It’s only for money and distantly imagined fun. Don’t let my grimaces to order be called self-expression.’ She was well paid for her two films but the need for extra income was still paramount. Duff forwarded a bill for the rates while she was at Beaulieu. ‘Can you pay them?’ he asked. ‘I have just done the Income Tax, the telephone and the gas and can do no more.’
If another suitable film had come up immediately Diana would certainly have undertaken it; The Glorious Adventure and The Virgin Queen had won her a reputation as a hard-working actress as well as a famous beauty. She considered making another Blackton film, playing Dorothy Vernon in Haddon Hall. To overcome her doubts about his grasp of history, Blackton proposed to hire Sir Charles Oman as adviser. Then came the offer to play in The Miracle and all thoughts of filming were put aside. While she was acting in America Greta Garbo flounced out of Anna Karenina and the part was offered to Diana. She wavered, and by the following morning Garbo was back again and the opportunity gone. Other potential employers were inhibited by the belief that her first commitment would be to film The Miracle, an enterprise that somehow never got off the ground. By the time Diana might have felt herself free to look for further film work, Duff was in the Government and she had other fish to fry.
*
For the moment it was a relieved goodbye to Beaulieu and the film industry and back to London. By now Duff and Diana had settled into a pattern of life which both of them found satisfactory. To some extent they took their separate courses. Duff was far less socially adventurous than Diana. He liked the company of writers and artists provided they were clean and reasonably decorous in their behaviour, but he was just as much at home with politicians. His spiritual home was White’s, playing bridge for high stakes, drinking and talking until late into the night. His friends were intelligent, certainly, but they also enjoyed a certain raffish grandeur, a conventionality even in their eccentricities. ‘I’m afraid I must confess,’ he wrote to Diana, ‘that the only milieu I really like is the “smart set”. I hate the provincialism of the respectable as much as I hate the Bohemianism of the unrespectable.’ Diana liked the smart set too, but they were not enough. She relished the genuine eccentric. Fecklessness, indifference to worldly standards, an inability to cope with the mechanisms of life, were to her endearing, while to Duff they were to be condoned in a friend and despised in others. They shared many friends but recognized that others were better kept apart. After a dinner-party at the Maclarens’, Duff commented glumly in his diary: ‘There was singing and recitations, bad white-wine cup and hosts of Jews culminating in Sir Alfred Mond. I hated and Diana loved it.’ Diana would have delighted in the singing and the Jews and not have noticed the badness of the white-wine cup. Duff liked his dinners well ordered and well cooked; Diana believed in providing good food and drink for her guests, but herself was equally happy picnicking in an attic with bread and cheese. She relished grandeur but did not need it to have fun.
High Bohemia was not Duff’s style. He would have disliked the dinner-party that Mary Hutchinson gave for the ten cleverest men in London to meet the ten most beautiful women. After dinner crackers were pulled and Diana collected all the riddles, climbed on to a chair and announced that she was now about to test the wits of the assembled intellectuals. Keynes was best, but his stutter slowed him up so that he could do no more than tie with T. S. Eliot. Aldous Huxley would have done better had not, Clive Bell recorded, ‘righteous indignation provoked by the imbecility of the conundrums, in some measure balked the stride of his lofty intellect’.
On the other hand Duff enjoyed himself more than Diana at a grand weekend party given at Belvoir in honour of Prince Henry, later the Duke of Gloucester. After dinner the guests settled down to Prince Henry’s favourite game, which was Blind Man’s Buff: ‘it was played for two hours and the young ladies’ dresses were torn and liberties were taken with the King’s son – a fine success’. A robin had taken up residence in the castle and followed the party from room to room, perching on the heads of the guests and living on Petit Beurre biscuits. The Rutlands were delighted, but Diana gloomily announced that a bird in the house could only presage death. Prince Henry – ‘who, by the way, is not half bad, a great deal better than Albert,’ observed Duff – was inspired by this to tell the story of the dove which entered the mausoleum at Frogmore as the royal family knelt in prayer on the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s death.
‘Dear Mama’s spirit,’ they murmured. ‘We are sure of it.’
‘No, I am sure it is not,’ said Princess Louise.
‘It must be dear Mama’s spirit,’ they repeated.
‘No,’ Princess Louise persisted. ‘Dear Mama’s spirit would never have ruined Beatrice’s hat.’
The theatrical world was another in which both the Coopers liked to mix, though Duff considered that only the grandest stars and the prettiest actresses should be encouraged to venture beyond the footlights. Both Duff and Diana were easily moved at the theatre. By the end of Gladys Cooper’s performance in The Second Mrs Tanqueray Diana was in such an ecstasy of misery that she had to be removed before the houselights went up. There was a party at the Eiffel Tower afterwards in honour of Gladys Cooper. Duff enjoyed it, but his threshold of tolerance was always low: ‘There was a terrible young man there called Ronald Firbank who writes novels.’
By the standards of most people their life was one of intense social activity. In the last three months of 1920 – a period chosen for no reason except that they were not abroad or in the country for more than two or three days at a time – they went to the theatre fourteen times and the cinema eight. They spent weekends at Mells, The Wharf (Asquiths), Pixton (Aubrey Herbert), Taplow (Desboroughs), Grimsthorpe (Ancasters), Blenheim, Ashby (Wimbornes), and several times at Belvoir. Duff passed, on an average, eight to ten hours a week at White’s; time which Diana mainly spent with close friends such as the Parsonses, the Hutchinsons and the Montagus. They spent four days in Paris, during which their life became still more hectic. On only five occasions during these three months did they spend an evening alone at home together. And yet in no sense did they grow apart; on the contrary each was amused by and interested in the other’s private life and each prized the other’s company more and more highly. At the end of 1923, when they faced a separation of several months, they were rightly felt by their friends to be among the happiest and most complementary of married couples.
* The biographer, always aware that he is intruding on others’ privacy, is relieved that the word was not hope but fear.