Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (30 page)

At the end of the war, battling to gain her independence and marry Duff, such freedom had been unimaginable to Diana. On the evening of Armistice Day, as she and Duff had sat together and mourned the wasted lives of their friends, she had sworn to go home and tell her parents, finally, that they were engaged. Yet it was very hard for her. She knew that the Duchess continued to hope for a more elevated match – the sight of Diana in animated conversation with the Prince of Wales could still squeeze Violet’s heart with anguished expectation. And partly because she loved her mother, partly because she feared the violence of her disappointment, Diana quailed like a child at the thought of confronting her.

For days she dithered in nervous paralysis, until her friend Viola Tree – now married to Alan Parsons – took pity on her and offered to tell the Duchess herself. Diana despised herself as she hid cravenly in her bedroom, but the scene that broke out was as bad as she had feared. Her mother’s voice could be heard throughout the entire house, railing against ‘that awful Duff’, and declaring she would rather see her youngest daughter dead from cancer than waste her life on a man of such mediocre character and prospects.
¹

Part of the problem was Violet’s inability to believe that Diana actually loved Duff. Natural reticence had always prevented Diana from saying so, and when her mother challenged her to declare her feelings she was too angry and embarrassed to respond. Choked by her own emotions and trapped by her mother’s demands, Diana felt isolated within her own family and turned to her old morphine habit for relief.

Nonetheless, she could match her mother for stubbornness, and as the weeks passed Diana never wavered – if she couldn’t have Duff she would marry no one else. This was her trump card, and she knew it. The idea of Diana remaining a spinster was even more horrific to the Duchess than the idea of her being Duff’s wife, and after a wretched family Christmas at Belvoir, the war of attrition slowly turned Diana’s way. By April she’d wrung an agreement from her exhausted parents that she and Duff would be married that June.

It was the most grudging acceptance. Diana might not marry with a ‘ducal curse’ hanging over her head, as
Cassell’s Saturday Journal
had predicted,
²
but the £300
*
annual allowance that her father settled on her was far less generous than Duff had hoped. The wedding arrangements were made in an awkward spirit, as Diana later bleakly recalled: ‘My five weeks of engagement were a little sad. My father chose 2 June for the wedding [because] he wanted to get away for Whitsuntide, before the trains were too crowded.’
³

Yet if Diana minded her family’s lack of enthusiasm, the British press were effusive. Positive news stories were hard to find that spring, as post-war recession and the ravages of Spanish flu loaded misery onto an already wearied nation. When the engagement was announced at the beginning of May, photographs of the couple covered the entire front page of the
Daily Sketch.
On the wedding day itself, the public reacted as though it were almost a state event.

Groups of the curious and expectant had begun gathering in Arlington Street early that morning, and by the time Diana and her father left to drive the short distance to St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, mounted police had to clear a path through the crowd. The Duke was not a celebratory mood, ‘his temper was short and his gills were white and his top hat had no jauntiness’.
⁴
The mob made him testier still. ‘What in the name of heaven is it all about,’ he protested as the car inched through the throng, apparently amazed by his daughter’s popularity.
⁵

Thousands more were waiting outside the church. Many were journalists and photographers, but many were ordinary women, who having followed Diana’s activities in the society pages now felt a possessive interest in her wedding. They were avid for every detail: the bride’s dress (made of delicate gold lamé and flowered lace); the floral decorations (rose bushes and orchids, donated from the gardens of Blenheim Palace); the celebrity of the arriving guests. Also the astonishing hoard of presents that Diana and Duff were said to have received: cheques from the Aga Khan and George Moore
*
, diamond jewellery from the Royal Family, chests of fine linen, antique dinner services, rare books and paintings, and a brand-new car from the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook.

It was deemed by the public to be a very satisfactory event. Yet while Diana recalled that the ‘day had no shadow’, in some of the photographs her face registered more tension than joy.
⁶
The last six months had been difficult for her, and there had been an alarming moment outside the church when a man had seemed on the point of attacking her, although he was simply trying to hand her a letter. Like Zelda, she was exulting in her new freedom and the knowledge that she ‘need never lie again’,
⁷
but she was also fearful about what married life would be like.

At twenty-six Diana no longer really understood why she was still a virgin. Sexual frustration made Duff quarrelsome, and she acknowledged that her resistance to him was timid, even perverse. Yet she had been schooled by her mother to believe that virginity was a security to be given up only for a wedding ring, and deeper than that belief lay the fears of her own sexual adequacy. Diana’s suspicion that she might be less physically responsive than other women made her terrified of disappointing Duff.

A decade later she would remember her wedding night as a momentous emotional transition. In bed with Duff she was overtaken by a welter of conflicting sensations: ‘Nervous unhappy and elated feeling – as well as desirous too and extremely conscious of sex.’
⁸
She felt that she had finally become a woman, and that knowledge made the whole of their month-long honeymoon idyllic to her. Duff was apparently just as happy. The sight of his new wife, walking naked in the moonlight in the grounds of their Italian villa, struck him with poetic awe, and he claimed it was ‘the most beautiful sight’ in Europe. He was, however, more guarded in his sexual rapture. In his diary he noted that their wedding night had been ‘very old-fashioned and conventional’,
⁹
and only a few days later he caught himself lusting after another woman – a pattern that would continue throughout their marriage.

When they returned home it was to a temporary period of limbo. They needed to find a house of their own that they could both love and afford,
*
and they were set back for several months by Diana breaking her leg and having to remain bedridden in Arlington Street. But in March 1920 they discovered a suitable house to rent in Bloomsbury. Even if their richer friends considered 90 Gower Street to be quaintly ‘tiny’ and eccentrically far off the social map, for the next twenty years it was the Coopers’ home, along with their ‘skeleton’ staff of five servants (Diana’s maid, Katie Wade; Duff’s manservant, Holbrook; plus a cook, housemaid and scullery maid).

Diana liked being poised between Belgravia and bohemia. She began to entertain at Gower Street, regrouping writers, painters, musicians and young politicians into a new version of the Coterie. The more wayward of her guests, the transvestite Prince Yusopov (also a friend of Tamara’s) and Curtis Moffat (Iris Tree’s American husband) gave her a pleasing frisson of modernity, even if Duff tended to disapprove. In 1919, when Moffat had dined with them at Arlington Street, Duff had been annoyed when the artist not only ‘forgot’ to dress for dinner, but produced a ‘new wonderful drug’ (possibly cocaine), which was supposed to produce ‘a thousand queer effects’.
¹⁰

Set against the bohemians were their wealthy friends, who subsidized the Coopers to an amazingly generous degree. Dinners, theatre and opera tickets and holidays abroad were offered as a matter of course, and in July 1923, when Diana hosted a summer party, it was Max Beaverbrook and several others who paid for the food and drink, while the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the singer Feodor Chaliapin entertained the guests for free. Among all those who hoped for invitations, Gower Street appeared a world away from the suburban drabness that Diana’s mother had so gloomily prophesied for her.

It was Max Beaverbrook’s generous wedding gift of a car that also allowed Diana the dangerous luxury of driving. Cars were not yet commonplace in Britain – just 250,000 were on the roads in 1919 – and few of their owners possessed much aptitude or experience.
*
Diana herself was almost as feckless behind the wheel as Mrs Stitch, the character she would inspire in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel
Scoop.
The day she rammed straight into a milk cart, she found it both hilarious and wonderful that the owner of a pet shop opposite had to send out his dogs to lick up the spillage.

To her it was all part of the fun of being young, married and free in London. The city was slower to recover its pre-war spirit than Paris, yet nightclubs were reopening, shops were beginning to fill, and Diana was once again in the social columns. In his 1922 novel
Aaron’s Rod,
D.H. Lawrence portrayed her as the arresting Lady Artemis, holding court in a room full of admiring men: ‘smoking her cigarettes … making her slightly rasping witty comments … 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 free booter.’
¹¹

Superficially Diana had achieved the life she’d fought the Duchess for, but she also wanted to work. During the war she’d grown to like herself as an active and purposeful adult; more urgently she now needed to earn the money that would subsidize Duff’s eventual resignation from the Foreign Office and his move into politics. The modest salary paid to British MPs fell far short of meeting the expense of an election campaign or buffering against the vicissitudes of a parliamentary career.
^†
Diana’s ‘Plan’, as she confidently referred to it, was to find herself some generously paid employment that would lay the foundations for her husband’s future.

That confidence might easily have been misplaced – for a whole number of reasons. Unemployment remained high in Britain as the economy recovered from its wartime battering, and for a while it was particularly high among women. Despite the principles enshrined in the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, which for the first time permitted them to enter professions like accountancy and the law, and despite the ambition among many young women to work, there was pressure on them to remain in their homes. The Restitution of Pre-War Practices Act had specifically obliged those employed in manufacturing industries to relinquish their jobs when the war was over. Across other professions and other jobs, women were also being squeezed, and in May 1919 they constituted three quarters of the unemployed.

Diana was not like other women, of course. In some respects she was far less employable, having little training or education beyond her nursing skills. She was also hampered by her class. Although relations between her and her mother were much improved – Violet had become a regular visitor to Gower Street, bearing small treats and advice on interior design – there were few jobs that she could take without making her family, and probably her fellow employees, feel cross and uncomfortable.

But she did have extraordinary contacts, and it was Max Beaverbrook who first offered Diana a potential career as a newspaper columnist. In Britain, as elsewhere, women readers were being targeted by the post-war media, with a new style of editorial that focused on beauty, fashion and home-making tips. Beaverbrook wanted Diana as one of his new circulation-boosting writers, producing regular features for his
Sunday Express,
on subjects that would range from society weddings to the changing length of women’s skirts. Even though £50 per feature was only pin money within the grand context of her Plan, this seemed to Diana a promising start. Not only did commissions follow from other papers (including Beaverbrook’s main rival the
Daily Mail
), but in May 1921 came the offer of a permanent job.

The French women’s magazine
Femina
was launching a British edition, and was inviting Diana to become its editor. For an annual salary of £750 – over one and a half times Duff’s earnings at the Foreign Office – she would be required to do little more than write one editorial a month, reflecting the magazine’s coverage of fashion, arts and news, and have her photograph featured prominently. Apparently her Plan was launched. The only problem was that Diana knew she was faking most of her credentials as a journalist. She was unable to pretend an interest in every new trend in fashion or art – she could never even see the point of Picasso – and as for her writing, while she had a vivid and idiosyncratic prose style, she had learned little about grammar and spelling in the schoolroom, and even less about structuring an argument. She panicked over every deadline and persuaded Duff to ghost much of what she wrote, including, ironically, her ‘female’ response to the testy misogyny of Arnold Bennett’s
Our Women.
It wasn’t her fault that British
Femina
folded after just six months,
*
but it confirmed her instinct that journalism could never be her métier.

By now, however, Diana was exploring other career options. In 1918, when she’d made her brief appearance in D.W. Griffiths’ propaganda film,
Hearts of the World,
the director had believed he spotted potential in her. Her large pale eyes and fair skin had been luminous on the cinema screen, and when Griffiths was casting a new Hollywood feature in May 1919, he wanted to use her again. The sum he offered was enormous – $75,000 (or £21,000) – but while Diana gaped at it, the timing was close to impossible. She was still living at home and still not married to Duff, and when she tentatively mentioned the offer to her parents, there was a predictable fuss.