Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (32 page)

This image became a true reflection of their life together, but during the early years of their marriage there were many times when Diana winced and raged over Duff’s infidelities. He tried to conceal them, lying to her and even lying to himself about their number and variety. But jealousy sharpened Diana’s instincts. In 1920 when Duff began seeing Diana Capel (widow of Boy Capel, Coco Chanel’s former lover), Diana scented it almost immediately. Humiliated by the fact that this Diana was one of her friends, she turned on Duff with a ferocity that detonated into one of the worst quarrels of their marriage: she hated him for the humiliation he brought her, and even more for making her doubt their happiness together.

When she could approve his choice of mistress, Diana tried to affect a benign indifference, but some of his women caused her profound offence. Daisy Fellowes, the expensive, competitive socialite with whom Duff had an on-off affair for many years, struck her as especially repugnant, a ‘silly giggling gawky lecherous bit of dross’.
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Duff, interestingly, was almost as dismayed by this attraction as Diana. He was fascinated by Daisy’s fashionable air of depravity. As the niece of Winnaretta Singer (the Princesse de Polignac), and an heiress to the Singer fortune, Daisy was notorious across Europe for the extravagance of her sexual and social adventures.
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One evening when she was alone with Duff, she smoked an opium pipe and offered to ‘indulge [his] every fancy’, but the excesses of what followed induced in him a spasm of self-disgust.
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He was old-fashioned in so many ways, especially in his sexual double standards. If Diana was his necessary angel, Daisy was his whore.

What Diana found hardest to bear was her own jealousy. She regarded it as a contemptible emotion, demeaning the modern and exemplary marriage to which she aspired. Yet sex remained her most vulnerable area. However momentous her wedding night had been, it hadn’t been as sensually liberating as she’d hoped. She still preferred the decorous games of flirtation to the actual reality of bed. Only in these did she feel truly confident, not only with Duff but with the dozens of other men who continued to hover round her. St John Hutchinson and Alan Parsons – ‘the boys’ from her pre-war circle – remained devoted, as did numerous older admirers, including the singer Feodor Chaliapin and Max Beaverbook, whom Diana found very compelling: ‘A strange attractive gnome with an odour of genius about him. He was an impact, a great excitement to me.’
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However, her physical attachment to these men remained minimal, and during her most vulnerable moments, she wondered if she’d been born without the natural instincts and appetites of other women. Even if Diana didn’t care to read the writings of Freud, Marie Stopes or Havelock Ellis, their sexual terminology was much batted around at some of the parties she attended. People talked of orgasm and a healthy libido as essential to the pursuit of happiness and enlightenment: frigidity implied a kind of failure that Diana would surely have shrunk from applying to herself.

Certainly every time Duff was with another woman it made her question herself, and her sexual uncertainties channelled into other physical fears. In the summer of 1920, she became morbidly convinced that a tumour was forming in her breast. The mysterious illness that had kept her bedridden for months as a child had marked her with a liftime’s tendency to hypochondria. But more justifiably she was also worried about her fertility. While neither Diana nor Duff were impatient to disrupt their busy lives with babies, as the months passed she still showed no signs of conceiving. Eventually she was diagnosed with a fibroid growth in her uterus, which could have been inhibiting a viable pregnancy, but she was too fearful to be operated on and instead persuaded Duff to take her on a tonic cure in the French Pyrenees, including a superstitious detour to Lourdes.

Her support during this period was not so much Duff as drink and morphine. She’d started using the drug regularly again after breaking her leg in the summer of 1919 – she’d fallen through a skylight while watching a firework display – and by the time she’d progressed beyond any medical excuse for it she’d become emotionally dependent. Duff hated to see her withdraw into the glassy unnatural calm of her narcotic trance, yet for Diana it was a precious world away from the underlying confusion of her feelings for Duff. She was trying to make her marriage work in a sane and loving way, and accommodating his affairs felt like the modern thing to do. Even so it went against her romanticism and her determination to have something more precious than the pragmatic and unpassionate union for which her mother had settled. Like Zelda and many other young women of her generation, Diana was in experimental emotional terrain, and at moments it felt lonely.

When she and Duff finally docked in New York in early December, the roiling, noisy strangeness of the city thrust aside her private concerns. A mob of journalists was waiting with a blinding assault of magnesium bulbs and a barrage of questions. ‘Was it true that Diana had just spent weeks in a convent to prepare for the part of the Madonna?’ ‘What did she think of Carmi?’ ‘Did she know whether she or her rival would appear on the opening night?’ Most of these questions had been planted by Gest, who had also telegraphed instructions during the voyage about how she should reply, including one ridiculous assertion that she’d had a dream in which God had told her that it must be she not Carmi who played the Madonna first.

Diana had no intention of repeating such nonsense; what she didn’t know was how dogged Gest could be in pursuit of publicity. He had already been feeding fantastical stories about her and Carmi to the press, casting Diana as an heiress in possession of $10 million and a retinue of seventy servants and Carmi as the grand wife of an exiled Georgian prince (Carmi’s husband George Matchabelli was, in truth, a very minor royal whose main claim to fame would be the range of perfumes he launched in 1924). And before the New York season was out, Diana would be subject to several more of Gest’s stunts.

For now the journalists were satisfied, and she and Duff were free to drive across the city to their hotel, the Ambassador on Park Avenue. Nothing Diana had read about New York, none of photographs she had seen, had prepared her for the arrogant scale of the city’s skyscrapers, or for the hectic activity in the streets below, the clattering crowds, the smoky press of motor cars, the noise and variety of the food and drink vendors. Duff, who stayed in New York for a week, never cared for it. ‘If it has beauty it is not the kind that leaps to the eye,’ he wrote.
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Unable to get the measure of the city’s dynamic, he thought it frantic and boorish, and inevitably the Prohibition laws filled him with contempt. It seemed unbelievable that any civilized place should prevent him from drinking anything stronger than coffee with his dinner. His outrage was barely appeased by the kindness of Cole Porter, whom he and Diana had met in Venice that summer, and who sent a crate of bourbon to their suite along with the key to a personal ‘liquor locker’ maintained by a mutual friend at the Knickerbocker Club.

Diana’s curiosity was far more deeply stirred. Their penthouse suite at the Ambassador was a marvel to her – ‘the crystal New York sky a background to our high-perched luxury’
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– and she couldn’t get enough of modern American amenities: dial telephones that needed no operator, a press-button radio with a choice of channels from Buffalo to Chicago, a ‘Frigid Air’ machine that made ‘ice by electricity’; cafeterias ‘where you can see what you eat before you eat it’, and a non-alcoholic ‘highball’ served in her local drugstore that still contrived to make her feel wonderfully intoxicated, ‘an effect more powerful and delightful than anything I ever tasted’.
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Compared to London, New York displayed an overweening confidence in its own success. In his essay on the jazz age, Scott Fitzgerald would describe post-war America as a nation serviced by ‘great filling stations full of money’, and Diana likewise saw New York as a city ‘paved with gold’, its population engaged in heedless, happy pursuit of ‘a fur coat or a better car’.
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The blatant materialism of the culture fascinated her: after a life attuned to the minutiae of British social stratification, she found a wonderful frankness in its overruling principles of money and meritocracy. The people she met seemed more interested in the commercial value of her title than its dignity, and that was a kind of liberation.

Even so, when Duff sailed for London on 7 December, Diana found it hard not to take the next boat after him: ‘My heart seems to tear my body with pain for the loss of you,’ she wrote the following day.
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She doubted her ability to find friends among the huge crowd of cast and crew she’d encountered at her first rehearsal, all apparently indifferent as they went about their business or jostled for warmth around the wooden stove that provided the only heating in the hall. Yet, within a few days, Diana surprised herself by the degree to which she became absorbed in this new world of ‘rehearsals and stage jargon and the palpitating interest of “shop” ’.
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It made every difference to her that, in contrast to Blackton’s film set,
The Miracle
was directed by an artist. ‘I was learning from the master of masters and falling in love with him,’ Diana wrote, and she was determined to be worthy of him.
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She had to unlearn the techniques she had acquired for the camera and acquire new skills for the stage; her toughest challenge was building up sufficient stamina for the first forty-five minutes of the production, in which she portrayed the motionless statue of the Madonna before she comes to life. Although Diana was supported by a plaster cast that mimicked the stone drapery of the Madonna’s robe, her muscles cramped with the effort of remaining completely still and her face grew stiff with the effort of projecting an other-worldly emotion.

Diana worked hard, concentrating on Reinhardt’s points of direction. He rarely offered praise, but she was jubilant when the maestro’s assistant confirmed how surprised and impressed he was by the speed of her progress, and that compliment was confirmed when Reinhardt asked her to learn the role of the Nun, so that she could cover for the first-cast actress Rosamond Pinchot. Diana worried that she would not have the energy for both – the Nun’s voyage into worldly temptation led her on a frenetic whirl through tavern and street scenes – but she took a dogged pride in her own professionalism and refused to complain when rehearsals dragged on until four in the morning. She also tolerated, as best she could, the increasingly ridiculous publicity circus being orchestrated by Gest.

The opening of
The Miracle
had been delayed by technical difficulties, and Gest was worried about sustaining the buzz of interest. As part of his press campaign, he planned a ‘public draw’ at which the issue of the Madonna’s casting would ‘finally’ be resolved. In truth, he and Reinhardt had already settled that Diana would take the role on opening night, but the draw was still a humiliating farce. Carmi arrived calculatedly late, looking ‘terribly flash in black and diamonds’, and in front of two dozen journalists and photographers she proceeded to patronize and belittle Diana with her diva airs.
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It shook Diana’s confidence, already undermined by flutters of stage fright, and by the time the show was finally ready to open on 15 January, she’d sunk into a ‘haunted desperate’ state of nerves.
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Gest knew what he was doing, though. The first night of
The Miracle
received a full New York ovation, with flowers covering the stage and the audience standing to cheer for fifteen minutes. Thirty of the bouquets were for Diana alone. And even if the first reviews were largely obsessed with production trivia – such as the quantity of electric cable that had been required – tributes came from elsewhere. The impresario Charles Cochran, who had first presented
The Miracle
in London, cabled Duff: ‘Wife’s performance exquisitely beautiful unquestionable work of sensitive artist.’
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Valentine Castlerosse, later to became famous as a columnist for the
Sunday Express,
wrote, ‘It is ridiculous for me to try and describe the effect that Diana has on this enormous crowd. She holds them tight, tortures them, frightens them … lifts the whole thing to the sublime.’
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News of her success spread beyond the theatre. When she attended a Manhattan charity ball, the entire room stood up to cheer her arrival; journalists came to her dressing room asking questions about her taste in men and fashion, and about her views on the United States; articles that she (and Duff) had written back in London were recycled in the American press. From the autumn of 1924, when
The Miracle
embarked on a nationwide tour, Diana was greeted with similar levels of adulation. She was guest of honour at galas and women’s club luncheons, and at a Drama League function, society women filed past to shake her hand, while speeches were made comparing her to Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. In Cincinnati she spoke on the radio and was heard by an audience of over 20 million.

Diana was an intriguing novelty. She looked like a contemporary flapper, with her modern clothes, short hair and scarlet mouth, and she was reputed to behave like one, drinking, smoking and staying out late at parties. On the other hand she had none of the calculated sexiness of Louise Brooks, the working-girl feistiness of Clara Bow or the Southern swagger of Tallulah Bankhead. She was a modern young woman with a cut-glass accent and an aura of old-world mystery, and Americans were fascinated to get a glimpse of her.