Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Son John Julius Norwich, 1939-1952 - Hardcover

Copyright

To my grandchildren

Who would have loved their great-grandmother

As she would have loved them

Introduction

She was an inveterate letter-writer. I can see her now, sitting bolt upright in bed, cross-legged, a pad of paper balanced on her right knee, a pencil in her hand – always pencil, so as not to get ink on the sheets. Bed was the bridge, the control tower, the centre of operations. On it was the telephone, the writing paper, the addresses, the engagements. Never did I see her sitting at a desk or other table if bed was within range.

She always maintained that she could never keep a diary; it was no fun writing to herself. So she wrote to other people instead – to my father if he was away somewhere, to her old friend Conrad Russell, or to me, her son. And she told us everything that happened, writing in a style that was entirely her own – there was no way that any letter of hers could be mistaken for anyone else’s. The writing was effortless; an hour would produce five or six long pages; then she would fold them rather roughly, give the envelope a quick lick, address it – still in pencil – and, as often as not, start on another.

Never did she seem remotely conscious of the fact that she was a celebrity; but a celebrity she was. First of all there was the startling beauty; second, she was a member of the high aristocracy – in those days still an advantage – born on Monday 29 August 1892 and brought up in one of England’s most spectacular country houses, Belvoir Castle, as the youngest daughter of the eighth Duke of Rutland. (Her adoring public would have been horrified to learn that she was in fact the result of a long and passionate affair between the Duchess and the Hon. Harry Cust, from the neighbouring estate at Belton.1) But there was more to it than that. Ever since her presentation at court in 1911, she had been the darling of the society and gossip columns; and when she married my father, Duff Cooper – a penniless commoner of whom no one had ever heard – at St Margaret’s, Westminster, a body of mounted police had to be brought in to control the adoring crowds outside.

She would have married him in any event; she was to love him to distraction until the day he died. But by then marriageable young men were thin on the ground. At the outbreak of the First World War my father, as a member of the Foreign Service, had been exempt from the call-up – a fact for which I am heartily thankful, since had he not been I should almost certainly not be here today – but most of his friends had not been so lucky. So much has been written of the massacre of that war – particularly of the young officers – that it seems superfluous to add anything further; but I remember my mother telling me that by the end of 1916, with the single exception of my father, every man she had ever danced with was dead.

In December 1916 Herbert Asquith resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by David Lloyd George, one of whose first actions – in view of what was becoming a serious shortage of manpower at the front – was to extend conscription to several of the ‘reserved professions’, including the Foreign Service. My father, who had been increasingly embarrassed by what he saw as his enforced inactivity while nearly all his contemporaries were in France, felt nothing but relief.

The training, he always maintained, was the worst part. It had been described by his friend Eddie Grant as ‘being stuck in a six-foot bog, trained like an Olympian athlete and buggered about like a mulatto telegraph boy’, and he hated it. He loved to tell the story of a certain evening in early July when he briefly escaped to London from his training camp at Bushey in Hertfordshire, only to discover that no one he knew, male or female, was in town. For once, he felt genuinely depressed; there was nothing for it but to go to his club – the Junior Carlton in those days, rather than the beloved White’s of his later years – and to order the best dinner he could get, washed down with a pint of champagne. From the library he took down a copy of Through the Looking-Glass, always one of his favourite books. ‘Then,’ he wrote, ‘as if by enchantment my melancholy left me and I knew that I should not be unhappy again.’2 On 27 April 1918 he left for France.

Even there, his high spirits did not desert him. ‘From a comfortable dug-out’ he reported to my mother that ‘the horrors of war have been much exaggerated’, and offered to send her a food parcel; but he soon had reason to change his mind. At 5 a.m. on 21 August he and his company went over the top in a heavy mist, and before long his platoon became separated from the rest. They reached their objective of the Arras–Albert railway line – the only platoon to do so – but immediately ran into heavy fire from a German machine-gun post. He went forward to destroy it, not knowing that all the men following him had been killed, and on his arrival – almost miraculously unscathed – shot one man and called upon the others, in what German he could still remember, to surrender. Believing themselves to be outnumbered, to his intense surprise they did; and so it happened that a callow young second lieutenant with practically no experience of battle managed to capture eighteen Germans single-handed. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross, but had to settle for the Distinguished Service Order which, particularly when awarded to a subaltern, was generally considered to be the next best thing.

Only two nights later his company attacked again. This time he described it as ‘one of the most memorable moments of my life ... a thrilling and beautiful attack, bright, bright moonlight and we guided ourselves by a star ... it was what the old poets said it was and the new poets say it isn’t’. After one more battle ‘the sun rose beautifully and the enemy fled in all directions including ours with their hands up, and one had a glorious Ironside feeling of Let God Arise and let His Enemies be Scattered. And then they came back again over the hill and one was terrified and had a ghastly feeling of God is sunk and His enemies are doing nicely.’ Fortunately ‘the battle rolled away’. It was his last engagement. Meanwhile my mother – much against my grandmother’s wishes – the Duchess could not bear the thought of her favourite child washing the wounded and emptying bedpans – had become a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. For the past year she and my father had been growing closer; only he, it seemed, could provide the strength and consolation she so desperately needed.

They were married seven months after the Armistice, on 2 June 1919. Just three years later, at the age of thirty and to the undisguised horror of her parents and their friends, she became a film star, taking the lead in two films – silent of course – for the then celebrated though now long-forgotten producer J. Stuart Blackton. In one, The Virgin Queen, she played Queen Elizabeth I; alas, all the prints have been lost. Of the other, a swashbuckling seventeenth-century drama called The Glorious Adventure, I possess a copy. It is not, I think, likely to be revived. These two films did little for my mother’s reputation in London society; but they led to something far more important. They brought her to the attention of the world-famous Austrian theatre producer Max Reinhardt, who was seeking actresses for the two leading parts in his forthcoming new production of The Miracle. This free adaptation of a medieval miracle play had had considerable success at London’s Olympia shortly before the First World War; Reinhardt now proposed to take it to New York and to give it a completely new and far more ambitious production at the Century Theater. If successful there it would tour America.

The action of The Miracle is set in a vast medieval abbey, which houses a convent of nuns. It also possesses a life-size statue of the Virgin and Child credited with miraculous properties. The plot, in brief, tells of a beautiful young nun who prays before the statue for her freedom – at which the Virgin slowly descends from her niche, dons the nun’s habit and thenceforth takes her place, leaving the niche empty. The poor girl has gained her liberty, but her venture into the outside world proves disastrous: she is betrayed, abused, corrupted; and a year or two later she makes her way back to the abbey broken in body and spirit, a dying baby in her arms. While all the other nuns are congregated in prayer, one of their number suddenly rises from their midst, removes her habit – which she gives back to the girl – takes the baby, now dead, from her and slowly returns with it to the niche, where it becomes the Christ-child.

Reinhardt’s production was a triumph. The theatre was dark for six months while it was transformed into a Gothic abbey, the bells of which rang for half an hour every evening before the performance. During the long New York run, my mother played sometimes the nun and sometimes the Virgin – the latter being by far the more taxing as she had to stand motionless in her niche, holding a heavy wooden baby, for some fifty minutes before slowly coming to life. When the run was over, she stayed on with the company for its nationwide tour of America. Later they did two more tours, the first through central Europe, the second through England and Scotland.

I have told the story of The Miracle at some length because it was immensely important in her life. This importance was to a large extent financial; as – in theory at least – the fifth child and third daughter of the Duke, she stood to inherit virtually nothing. She had been expected to find a rich husband; instead, she had picked a comparative pauper who had little to live on except his Foreign Office salary. They married on £1,100 a year – obviously a good deal more than it is today, but still far from princely; and my grandmother, who had had visions of Belgravia or Mayfair, was appalled when they settled at No. 90 Gower Street, Bloomsbury.

But The Miracle also gave my mother something else: experience of other worlds totally foreign to her own. For what must have been a total of six or seven years she lived in the world of theatre – and not the English theatre either, but the Austrian-American-Jewish theatre, which was something quite different again. It was a milieu that she would love for the rest of her life. This explains, in the earlier years covered by these letters, the presence of the near-ubiquitous Dr Rudolf Kommer (Kaetchen) who had been Reinhardt’s factotum and was to be my guardian during my wartime stay in America. On the other hand, the long enforced absences that my parents were called upon to suffer with the broad Atlantic between them could easily have destroyed their marriage, particularly in view of my father’s constant infidelities. In fact it did nothing of the kind. They both saw the Miracle money as an investment – one that would enable my father to throw up the Foreign Office and its salary of £900 a year and launch himself into the political career on which he had set his heart.

In the letters that follow, he plays a supporting role only; yet one feels his presence all the time. Commoner he may have been, but his lineage was not altogether without distinction. He was, in fact, the great-great-grandson of King William IV, who had no fewer than nine illegitimate children by Mrs Dorothy Jordan, the leading comédienne of her day. One of their countless grandchildren, Lady Agnes Hay, married James, fifth Earl of Fife – curiously enough, at the British Embassy in Paris – and had four children, the youngest of whom was named Agnes like her mother.

Lady Agnes grew up to be extremely attractive but more than a little flighty, and in 1871 at the age of nineteen eloped with the young and dashing Viscount Dupplin. Two years later she gave birth to a daughter, Marie, who married into the family of Field Marshal von Hindenburg and settled in Germany. A romantic novelist, she loved to talk about what she called ‘the Jordan blood’, and no wonder: when she was only two years old her mother eloped for the second time, on this occasion with a young man called Herbert Flower, whom she married in 1876 as soon as Lord Dupplin had been granted a divorce – on the grounds, it need hardly be said, of his wife’s adultery. The Flowers went off on a world cruise, but their idyll was to be all too short: just four years later in 1880, Herbert died at the age of twenty-seven.

Agnes was heartbroken; he was the love of her life. She herself was still only twenty-eight, but what was she to do? Her family had disowned her; she was virtually penniless; and after two elopements and a divorce not even an earl’s daughter with royal connections – her brother Alexander had married the eldest daughter of the future King Edward VII – could hope to be accepted into society. But she had never lacked spirit. In the hopes of becoming a nurse, she took a menial job in one of the major London teaching hospitals, and there, in 1882, it is said while she was scrubbing the floor, she caught the eye of one of the consulting surgeons, Dr Alfred Cooper.

Now Dr Cooper was a good deal more interesting than he sounds. Born in 1838 in Norwich to a family of lawyers, he had completed his medical studies at St Bartholomew’s in London and by the mid-1860s had built up a highly successful practice in Jermyn Street. According to the Dictionary of National Biography:

Cooper, whose social qualities were linked with fine traits of character and breadth of view, gained a wide knowledge of the world, partly at courts, partly in the out-patient rooms of hospitals, and partly in the exercise of a branch of his profession which more than any other reveals the frailty of mankind.

It did indeed. That branch was, moreover, forked: syphilis and piles. Within a short time my grandfather and grandmother together were said to know more about the private parts of the British aristocracy than any other couple in the country. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – he quickly made his name in London society, becoming a member of all the right clubs and an ever-popular guest at dinner parties, country houses and even on grouse moors. Among his patients he numbered Edward, Prince of Wales, whom in 1874 he accompanied to St Petersburg. (From which of the above two distressing complaints His Royal Highness suffered is not known; the Palace announced at the time that Dr Cooper was treating him for a form of bronchitis – but what else could the Palace have said?) The two remained friends, and in 1901, when the prince succeeded his mother on the throne and became King Edward VII, he was to award my grandfather a knighthood in his Coronation Honours.

Dr Cooper had done well: well enough to send his only son Duff3 – there were also three daughters – to Eton and Oxford where, according to his biographer John Charmley, ‘he trailed clouds of dissipation’, drinking, gambling and pursuing regiments of women, whom he wooed – on the whole successfully – not only by his charm and wit but also by bombarding them with sonnets, for which he had a quite extraordinary facility. These were a by-product of a genuine passion for literature, in particular poetry and nineteenth-century novels in both En...