Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (33 page)

But it wasn’t just the peculiarity of her image that helped to wing Diana towards celebrity. It was the scope of American mass media and the ease of modern travel. During the next three and a half years the Atlantic crossing became very familiar to her as she returned to the States for a further series of tours, and her growing popularity with the American public generated significant offers of new work. Such was the trajectory of her success, she could easily have found herself distanced from Duff. His own professional progress was certainly much slower; he remained dependent on her financially, and his political career was still at a formative stage. Yet throughout most of this period, Diana never worried about outstripping Duff; on the contrary, she never lost her fear of losing him.

When he’d first left Diana in New York, Duff had sent letters and poems that were both literally and figuratively stained with tears. He hated leaving her almost as much as she hated to see him go. Yet just as she anticipated, he was barely settled back into London life, before he began consoling himself with other women. Guessing at details, and probably being fed some painful gossip by their friend Olga Lynn, who was visiting New York that winter, Diana was unable to prevent herself quizzing Duff by letter. Early in 1924 she confronted him about his latest interest, Poppy Baring. She supposed he was ‘in love with [her] & that’s about the size of it’;
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when Duff tried to deflect her suspicions she became so tormented by the idea that he no longer cared for her that she threatened to walk out of
The Miracle
and return to London.

Duff bluffed and cajoled Diana out of her misery, but a few weeks later it was Dollie Warrender whose name appeared in the letters. When Duff wrote for extra money to cover household bills, Diana accompanied the £200 cheque with a note of delicate acidity: ‘I hope it will be enough, tho I expect you to drop it on plovers’ eggs and Lady Warrender.’ Duff squirmed uncomfortably: ‘She’s on to that as I thought she would be,’ he noted in his diary.
⁴⁰
It was very rare for Diana to flaunt her financial power over Duff, but at moments like this it was irresistible. In the long term, too, it helped to maintain the balance of their marriage. Diana’s material independence helped to ward off feelings of self-pity, shame and worthlessness – the emotions of a betrayed wife. And while it wasn’t easy for her, she eventually learned to have confidence in herself, in Duff and in the very particular way they loved each other. Over time she found it easier to tidy his other women into a small and almost painless compartment of their relationship.

If earning her own money gave Diana power, it also provided her with a fascinating new game. She’d been astounded to discover that she could earn $1,000 simply by signing a testimonial for Pond’s Cold Cream, and she became greedy for more profits, persuading Kahn to fund her in a property-development scheme, signing up for new celebrity endorsements and writing articles for the press.
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At the same time she took proud, sometimes perverse pleasure in making economies – lunching on a ten-cent plate of macaroni cheese and seizing every perk that came with the job, including free hotel accommodation and use of a car.

Duff had been brought up to believe it was bad form to skimp on luxury, but Diana came from a class where discomfort was associated with moral fibre. When Violet came out to New York, full of interest and enthusiasm for her daughter’s career, she was almost as competitive in her economizing. She took a spare bed in Diana’s suite, rather than pay for a room of her own, and on nights when there were no party invitations, she would boil up a bit of rice pudding for their supper. She didn’t even complain when a third-class cabin was booked for her crossing home, although Diana felt a pang of fascinated guilt afterwards, wondering how her mother would fare in her ‘bolting-hole of beastliness among the lower-class barnacles’.
⁴¹
So proud was the Duchess of her powers of ‘poverty and economy’ that during a subsequent visit she boasted of them to a journalist – Diana had to explain that this was not what the American public wanted to hear. They didn’t get free rooms and chauffeur-driven cars ‘out of pity’, but because their rank was seen to deserve them.
*

*   *   *

As a result of Diana’s budgeting, however, sufficient capital was saved for Duff to resign from the Foreign Office in July 1924. He was accepted as Conservative candidate for Oldham,
^†
a solid industrial town in Lancashire, and when the general election was announced that autumn, Diana took time off from
The Miracle
to assist his campaign. After women had been given the vote, political wives had acquired a new importance; they were thought to lend a warmth to their husband’s image, which would appeal to the female electorate. Of course, women MPs were a rarity still – the 1924 election would see only four returned to parliament – but although much publicity was created by Diana’s arrival in Oldham (Duff noted ‘an excellent paragraph in the most conspicuous part of the
Daily Mail
’), she feared she might be too grand and too ignorant to be of any use. When she and Duff went out campaigning, she fully expected the voters to ‘bang the door in our silly, smirking out-to-please faces.’
⁴²

Yet Oldham considered her excellent entertainment. When Diana promised a group of mill workers that she would perform a clog dance if they voted for Duff, they ‘mobbed me and kissed me and thought me funny’. When she told the elderly ladies of the town that Duff was a wonderful husband, and therefore an ideal MP, they adored her. ‘There’s no swank about her and, oh my, isn’t she a beauty?’
⁴³
said one of them to the
Daily Mail
reporter who’d been sent up from London to follow her around. Her popular touch and his election speeches delivered a small but decisive majority. On their way back to London they stopped at Belvoir where, for Diana, the real triumph was the sight of her father, waiting at the door to congratulate Duff, and the fact that they had been put in the King’s Room (always reserved for Belvoir’s honoured guests). ‘It was a proud day for me,’
⁴⁴
she wrote, and when she had to return to America she was miserable to be missing Duff’s maiden speech in the House of Commons.

Yet, despite her loyalty to Duff, Diana was becoming increasingly addicted to her work. Later she would admit, ‘I was always happiest with the theatre people.’
⁴⁵
She enjoyed their rituals, their dramas and their gossip; they were were the people with whom she shared the daily comedy of theatre life, such as the woman in Cleveland who’d got drunk on highballs and groped Diana in the back seat of a ‘Chrysler B’. Or the story of the grumpy stagehand who had taken exception to the all-female
Ballet of the Nymphs
choreographed for
The Miracle
by Mikhail Fokine. ‘Fokine [just] can’t get away from Lesbianism,’ the stage-hand had muttered darkly, ‘but Lesbianism doesn’t fit in.’
⁴⁶

Above all, Diana loved her work because she believed she was good at it. In New York the Russian director Stanislavsky had pronounced her to be a ‘great artist’,
⁴⁷
and when she began to receive other offers of work, including a film in Germany, she dared to dream that
The Miracle
could be more than an isolated triumph. ‘I think I must go on the stage proper in England,’ she wrote to Duff. ‘I really think I could be good, if only for the reason that I can concentrate so easily and gladly on it and am such a good learner.’
⁴⁸
Aware of her lack of formal training, she began to study with a former student of Stanislavsky and with an elocution coach recommended by John Barrymore.

The latter proved a step too far – Mrs Carrington turned out to be fashionably Freudian in her theories of how to liberate an actor’s voice and Diana fled from classes that required her to explore her dreams and unconscious desires. Nevertheless, her ambitions were still in play. In 1925 she was complimented on her performance by Gladys Cooper, who hoped that a London season of
The Miracle
might be organized, in which she could alternate with Diana. Around the same time John Barrymore approached her to play Queen Ann in his production of
Richard III,
and Reinhardt and Kahn consulted her over their plan to acquire a London theatre, offering her a key role as both performer and director’s assistant. (Reinhardt had been impressed by Diana’s theatrical instincts, often agreeing to suggestions she made during
The Miracle
tour about costume and staging.)

In March 1927, when they were performing in Hollywood, Diana was offered the possibility of starring in a film adaptation of
Anna Karenina.
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Greta Garbo was meant to be playing the lead role, but had thrown temperamental objections to her contract, and even though she was eventually coaxed back onto the set, the offer to replace her was a significant one for Diana, and could easily have been parlayed into other roles. Yet Diana remained oddly unmoved by the opportunity. Hollywood reminded her of all that she’d disliked about cinema – ‘the depressing grizzly light in the studio’; ‘the snail’s pace that outwears any patience’ – and even while the role of Anna Karenina had appeared to be hers for the taking, she told Duff that she would only accept it for a drastically high fee.
⁴⁹

To most of her colleagues, Diana’s hesitation would have seemed madness, but ambitious as she was, her commitment to acting bumped up against two obstacles. One was Duff, to whose success and happiness she dedicated so much of herself, but the other was the nagging self-doubt she’d never been able to shed. Even with the éclat she was receiving in
The Miracle
she was incapable of pushing herself beyond what she believed she could do. Faced with a choice, she would rather stick with what she was good at than risk failure at something unknown.

She had disappointed Reinhardt with her merely ‘moderate enthusiasm’ for his theatre project in London, and in 1928 she reacted with similar timidity when Diaghilev offered her a mime role in his company’s latest production,
Ode.
The Russian ballet had entranced Diana back in 1911, yet she recoiled from the challenge of actually appearing in its ranks. She wrote back to Diaghilev, ‘All my advisors say that the first time I appear in London must be in
The Miracle …
as they tell me that I might have been very bad in
Ode
– and that it is better to appear for the first time in London in something you can do, rather than in something experimental.’
⁵⁰

Diana had grown comfortable acting in
The Miracle,
and as the years passed it became harder for her to imagine testing her reputation in another production. Perhaps the watershed moment came when she persuaded Iris Tree to join the cast, covering for Rosamond Pinchot in the role of the Nun. Iris had visited Diana in Salzburg in the summer of 1925, when
The Miracle
featured in the Salzburg festival. With another mutual friend, Ethel Russell, the three women had shared a large room at the top of Reinhardt’s schloss, and for Diana it was one of the most childishly pleasurable interludes of her life, another taste of what she had missed in the remoteness of her privileged upbringing. Every night was made ‘a riot’ by Ethel and Iris ‘laughing talking and wrestling’, she told Duff, and by the hatching of jokes and secrets and pranks.
⁵¹

In Iris’s company, Diana missed Duff less. Iris was ‘a perpetual renewer of spirits’, a ‘dearest romantic in clown’s clothes’,
⁵²
and when they returned to America for the next stage in
The Miracle
’s tour, the two women became inseparable, gossiping in rehearsals and talking late into the night in each other’s hotel rooms. Diana pondered what bliss this would have seemed to her and Iris when they were very young: ‘What would we not have given for a privacy like this, unhaunted by mothers and maidenheads.’
⁵³

She would always remain the more cautious of the two, berating Iris’s extravagance and drinking, her unprofessional habit of turning up late for rehearsals, dosed up on a hangover cure of ‘kippers, herrings and prairie oysters’,
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but as Diana happily admitted to Duff, ‘Iris leads me to folly.’
⁵⁵
She began to party more recklessly (ending up ‘flogged’ at 4 a.m.), and to spend more of her hard-earned money on herself – a $600 summer ermine coat and a £100 Frigid Air for Gower Street, so that she could enjoy ‘well chilled drinks’ and ‘ice made on demand’ whenever she was back in London.
⁵⁶

For Christmas that year she treated her fellow cast and crew to ready-cooked turkey, silver-spangled candles and hot dogs. When Diana had first arrived in New York she had winced at the stridency of an American Christmas: ‘electric trees … obscene Santas and deafening carols in the shops’.
⁵⁷
Two years later, while Duff was spending Christmas at a formal country house party, playing dull games of charades, Diana was enjoying a ‘greenroom frolic’, with whisky, dancing, banjos, singing and ‘a great many imitations of absent members of the cast’.

Under Iris’s influence Diana also grew thoughtful about her sexual fidelity. Iris was still married to Curtis, but already looking for pleasure elsewhere. The results could have been disastrous: her first lover in America refused to use a condom, and Diana was petrified that Iris would end up having another ‘illegal’. She had already had several and Diana wrote exasperatedly to Duff, ‘Next month in all probability it will cost her her life and me £500 in specialists’ bills.’
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