Darling Monster Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. ‘Pray for Hitler’s sharks not to catch us’

  USA, OCTOBER 1939–FEBRUARY 1940

  2. ‘No country for vile invaders’ feet’

  LONDON, JULY 1940–SEPTEMBER 1940

  3. ‘Only one thing matters – not to be overcome’

  LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1940–JUNE 1941

  4. ‘A happy Easter, dear egg’

  BOGNOR, FEBRUARY–JULY 1941

  5. ‘Papa is a wreck’

  SINGAPORE AND THE FAR EAST, AUGUST 1941–MAY 1942

  6. ‘Locusts, thick as lightly fallen snow’

  ALGIERS, JANUARY–AUGUST 1944

  7. ‘The giraffe shall lie down with the duck’

  THE PARIS EMBASSY, SEPTEMBER 1944–APRIL 1947

  8. ‘I feel as though I were getting married’

  LONDON–PARIS–CHANTILLY, DECEMBER 1947–FEBRUARY 1948

  9. ‘I must get up without coffee, that’s all’

  SETTLING IN, FEBRUARY–AUGUST 1948

  10. ‘I told him to imagine I was Winston Churchill’

  ON THE MOVE, AUGUST 1948–APRIL 1949

  11. ‘You really are a pig-child’

  FRANCE, MOROCCO, SPAIN, NOVEMBER 1948–APRIL 1949

  12. ‘I saw some cripples this morning, which makes me think I’m in the right place’

  CHANTILLY–PARIS–LONDON, APRIL–JULY 1949

  13. ‘I wonder if Dolly’s up to her tricks again’

  FRANCE, OCTOBER 1949–FEBRUARY 1950

  14. ‘Like the unsettled colour of newborn things’

  SEPTEMBER 1950–JUNE 1952

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Directory of Names

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Lady Diana Cooper, considered the most beautiful woman of her day, was an aristocrat, a socialite, an actress of stage and early screen. She married rising political star Duff Cooper, who went on to run the controversial Ministry of Information for Churchill. This golden couple knew everyone who was anyone and sat at the very heart of British public life.

  Diana’s letters to her only son, John Julius Norwich, cover the period 1939 to 1952. They take us from the rumblings of war, through the Blitz, which the Coopers spent holed up in the Dorchester (because it was newer, and therefore less vulnerable, then the Ritz), to rural Sussex where we see Diana blissfully setting up a smallholding as part of the war effort. After a spell with the Free French in Algiers, Duff was appointed British Ambassador to France and the couple settled into the glorious embassy in post-Liberation Paris.

  All of fashionable and powerful society is here, often in affectionate and unguarded detail, from Diana’s close friends Evelyn Waugh and the Mitfords to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Hollywood; from an off-duty Churchill to Roosevelt at the White House; from Edward and Wallis Simpson to the young princesses Margaret and Elizabeth.

  Over and beyond all the glitz, Diana emerges in these letters as highly intelligent, funny, fiercely loyal: a woman who disliked extravagance, who was often crippingly shy, who was happiest in the countryside with her cow and goats and whose greatest love and preoccupation were her son and husband.

  As a portrait of an age and some of history’s most important events, these letters are invaluable. But they also give us a vivid and touching portrait of the love between a mother and son, separated by war, oceans – and the constraints of the time they lived in.

  About the Author

  Lady Diana Cooper was born on August 29th, 1892, daughter ostensibly of the 8th Duke of Rutland, in fact of the Hon. Harry Cust. Defying all her mother’s efforts to stop her, she became a nurse at Guy’s Hospital during the First World War and married Alfred Duff Cooper, DSO, son of a surgeon from Norwich, who became one of the Second World War’s key politicians. Her startling beauty resulted in her playing the lead in two silent films and then Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle.

  For the war effort, Diana converted their seaside cottage in Sussex into a small farm. In 1944, following the Liberation of Paris, the couple moved into the British Embassy, Paris. They then retired to a house at Chantilly just outside the city. After Duff’s death in 1954 Diana remained there until 1960, when she moved back to London. She died in 1986.

  John Julius Norwich, the only son of Diana and Duff Cooper, is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire, the Mediterranean and, most recently, The Popes. He has also written on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and has presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC Television.

  To my grandchildren

  Who would have loved their great-grandmother

  As she would have loved them

  Darling Monster

  The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her son John Julius Norwich 1939–1952

  Diana Cooper

  Edited by

  John Julius Norwich

  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.