Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (34 page)

But precarious as Iris’s passions were, Diana also felt they displayed admirable verve, resurrecting her doubts about her own passivity. Her years in America had been attended by the usual flock of male admirers, including Reinhardt’s assistant, Rudolph Kommer, and Bertram Cruger, a not-so-wealthy off-shoot of an old New York family. Also, when their paths crossed, the singer Chaliapin, who came to Diana’s dressing room one day, ‘red faced’ and ready ‘for a romp’, appalling her by grabbing her hand and pressing it to his crotch. These men added to Diana’s notoriety, but while she admitted to Duff that she was a ‘glutton … for petting’,
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she rarely felt tempted to anything more.

In the autumn of 1926, however, Diana was thrown into the company of a nineteen-year-old boy, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who had joined the cast of
The Miracle
as a temporary extra.
*
He was slim, sweet-natured, poetic, and when he developed a crush on Diana she was aroused in a way that was both maternal and unexpectedly erotic. Raimond’s courtship was absurdly gallant: swearing he could never love another woman, he stood outside her bedroom for an entire night while she slept. The fact that his father Hugo was the librettist of Strauss’s opera
Der Rosenkavalier
gave a romantic twist to his attentions. While the affair remained platonic, Diana allowed her ‘Octavian’ special liberties, sitting by her bedside to talk and brushing her hair. Duff picked up more than enough to become jealous: ‘I do not much like the sound of Mr Hofmannsthal,’ he wrote in December 1926.
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The following month he wrote a jerky, anxious letter, questioning his attitudes towards Diana’s admirers. ‘I wonder how much I should mind if you really loved one of them. I wonder if you do. Don’t tell me if you do, I’m with Othello on “prisoners and all”.’ With self-conscious virtue he assured Diana he had no comparable tales of conquest.
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Even though Duff had no serious cause for sexual jealousy, a shift was occurring. It was now he who complained most about their periods of separation: ‘Is there to be no end of it,’ he grumbled in February 1926. Meanwhile, Diana’s letters were humming with a busy absorption. In New York the previous autumn, she had been to a dinner dance, held in her honour by Condé Nast; she had attended the premiere of Noël Coward’s latest play, and the Broadway adaptation of Michael Arlen’s novel
The Green Hat
(in whose London production Tallulah Bankhead had just opened). In Cincinnati a month later she improvised her way, fraudulently, through a live cookery demonstration; in Boston she went to a dance recital given by an avant-garde German who performed in a ‘Picasso-designed dress, with his naked parts covered with blood’.
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In Chicago there were dinners with Noël Coward and a visit to a preposterously rich architect, whose house boasted an Egyptian-themed dining room, with a table that ‘rose from the floor loaded with caviar’; there was also a roomful of black satin-sheeted beds that prompted Coward and Diana to wonder which of them the architect hoped to seduce. Probably both at the same time, they thought.

In San Francisco, she shopped for presents and ate with chopsticks in Chinatown; she also met up with her former admirer George Gordon Moore. Moore was still impressively rich and well connected, and in his company Diana visited a house that was decorated in the style of a Persian fairy tale, with a live white peacock, white china elephants and silver espaliered trees bearing golden apples. She and Iris went out riding to Moore’s country ranch, where champagne and bourbon flowed until three in the morning and the ‘negro house boys [sang] in perfect harmony’.
⁶³
Hollywood, a fortnight later, was less appealing. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were among the local celebrities attending
The Miracle
’s opening night, yet none bothered to extend a personal welcome to the visiting troupe. Diana chafed at the lack of professional camaraderie: ‘I believe they despise us for being legitimate stage,’
⁶⁴
and it heightened her contempt for the swank and entitlement of Hollywood life. She was offended by the fake lawns and the swimming pools, by the money men and the bottle-dyed blondes. Most repugnant to her was Elinor Glyn, the popular novelist who in middle age had become a Hollywood screenwriter, and who was about to create the flapper movie,
It Girl,
which would make a cult of Clara Bow. After lunching with Glyn, Diana wrote to Duff with appalled distaste of her inappropriately made-up face and gaggle of gigolos. It gave her vengeful pleasure to watch Iris Tree steal away one of Glyn’s ‘beautiful young men’, a six-foot Austrian, whom she would eventually marry.

Diana also dined with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (the latter was also trying to write a Hollywood script). The three of them had met previously in London, through Tallulah and Olga Lynn, and the Fitzgeralds joked that the reason they had hired an English nanny for Scottie was because they wanted her to develop an accent like Diana’s. Diana found an ally in Zelda, who disliked Hollywood almost as much as she did.

Yet even if touring with
The Miracle
could be frustrating, Diana had become addicted to a life of movement and change. Back in the spring of 1925, when an unexpected gap had opened up in the schedule, she hadn’t opted to return directly home to Duff, but had instead gone exploring on her own. Alan Parsons and Viola Tree were wintering in the Bahamas that year and Diana travelled from New York to Nassau to visit them. The Caribbean was a revelation of colour and beauty to her, and its impressions remained vivid for the rest of her life: ‘Prisms of humming birds’, and a ‘peacock sea’; ‘rainbow fish seen through a glass bottomed boat’, and women going to market in ‘white boots and organdie … and spotted kerchiefs topped by rakish angled hats’.
⁶⁵

Diana so relished that trip that when a second gap opened up in the tour, in December 1926, she proposed an adventure to the south-western desert with Iris. After an orgy of ‘dude buying’ – work shirts and ‘black kangaroo cowboy boots’ – they travelled to Taos, driving through mountain passes so steep and icy that they frequently had to get out of the car and travel by foot, warming themselves as they went with gulps of ‘white lightning’, the local corn liquor.
⁶⁶
Puebla, the Indian village close to Taos, enchanted Diana as an unspoiled American ‘Bethlehem’. She was astonished to meet the painter Dorothy Brett there, whom she and Iris had known before the war. Brett had followed D.H. Lawrence to Taos, in the expectation of becoming part of a utopian community, and had never gone home. She lived like a hermit, Diana reported to Duff: ‘She goes once a week to Taos for provisions and … thinks of it as London and Paris and New York. She nearly collapsed when she heard Iris & I were on the stage.’
⁶⁷

After Taos they travelled on to the Grand Canyon and a riding trip through the desert. Guided by a ‘cowboy philosopher … with an irresistible southern poetic voice and a rugged wistful face brimming with laughter’, she and Iris lunched on steaks cooked over a mesquite fire; saw not only eagles, big red flowers and queer cactuses, but also strange pockets of twentieth-century luxury, ‘with golf courses and shops round the hotel like Cannes’.
⁶⁸
She adored all of it, and in her letter to Duff floated the possibility that they might even live there.

‘We could be so happy,’ she wrote, apparently forgetting how much Duff hated to be separated from the familiar comforts of his drawing room and club. Increasingly, however, Diana was forgetting things about home. Every time she returned to London she was ecstatic to be back in her husband’s arms, yet apart from Duff and Gower Street, much of her old life had altered. The death of her father in 1925 (a cause of sadness rather than real grief) had led to Arlington Street being sold and Belvoir passing into the possession of her brother John. And while Diana kept in touch with many of her old friends, a younger generation of Bright Young Things had taken over London, with their costume balls and treasure hunts, their scandals of drink and drug taking. Diana found them entertaining and joined in with some of their exploits, but she had essentially outgrown their antics.

Her life was now centred on
The Miracle,
and when it had its final performance, during a short tour of central Europe in 1927, she was bereft. She had been clinging to the idea of a British season, but that would not take place until 1932; and so for the first time in six years she found herself without a job, or any other project to absorb her. Duff was busy – his career was advancing now, and in early 1928 he was given his first ministerial post as Financial Secretary to the War Office. But for all Diana’s genius at orchestrating social events, she did not want to dedicate herself to being a politician’s wife. She might hold a few dutiful dinners for Duff’s colleagues but, like her mother, she preferred to mix with her own friends.

There were plenty of amusing distractions – parties where Olga Lynn sang, Duff recited Shakespeare and Maurice Baring wrote impromptu poems; holidays abroad, including a trip to North Africa where Duff was persuaded to accompany her on rides in the desert and to smoke a hubble-bubble pipe – but as Diana admitted to herself, she had got into the habit of an ocean journey at least once a year, and she resented the confines of her suddenly shrunken world. In December 1928, when the Coopers’ friend Sidney Herbert invited her to travel with him to the Bahamas, she seized the chance, even though it meant missing out on Christmas with Duff for the first time in five years.

Diana claimed she was only going out of loyalty – Sidney Herbert was ill and needed a companion to care for him as he wintered in Nassau – and it may have been guilt that caused her to dwell on the negative aspects of the trip in her letters home: the toothache that plagued her and the ugliness of the new building developments on Nassau. But she couldn’t suppress the delight she took in the old Caribbean magic, as she bathed naked on a coral island, watched butterflies swoop in fluttering clouds, ate freshly caught turtle and danced under a full moon.

Towards the end of her trip, however, a new topic entered her letters. Diana had missed her period and begun to feel nauseous, and while she typically jumped to the conclusion that she must be incubating a horrible tumour, she also had to consider the idea that she might be pregnant. It was very unsettling. After almost a decade of marriage, she had come to terms with what she called her ‘barrenness’. Aside from a momentary fantasy that involved Iris having a ‘spare’ baby she could adopt, Diana had persuaded herself that she and Duff were better off without the worry of children: ‘Girls were sure to be plain and without virtue, boys dishonest, even queer and certainly gambling drunkards.’
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She had congratulated herself on avoiding the lumpen heaviness of pregnancy, the pain and danger of childbirth.

Now on Nassau she grew jumpy with panic and indecision. She wondered if she was so far beyond wanting a child that she should have an abortion, and made herself take a marginally dangerous dose of quinine to see if she would have the courage to go through it. She then wondered how disappointed Duff would be if she told him she was pregnant but turned out not to be. When she did finally gather the courage to report her suspicions, she hedged the news with foolish, pre-emptive jokes. She wrote that the baby was going to be the focus of enormous gossip: ‘everybody’ would be sure to suspect Sidney of being the father. Alternatively, it was certain to be dark skinned, like all descendants of those ‘who went even for a trip to the West Indies … it must be the climate and air’.
⁷⁰

Diana was right to predict that there would be gossip. The length of time it had taken for her to fall pregnant with Duff, and the number of men who hung around her, were sufficient for several alternative names to be mooted as the father of her baby, including her old admirer St John Hutchinson. But as soon as Diana was convinced the pregnancy was real, her panic gave way to exaltation and awe. She confessed to Duff that she hadn’t felt this kind of emotion since ‘I lost my virginity in your arms’.
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Startled by its intensity, she became desperate to return home and share her pregnancy with him.

Once back in London, however, her elation somersaulted with despair. Pregnancy was as inconvenient an invasion as she had always feared, and like Zelda she found her swelling body increasingly ‘grotesque’. (The desire to remain slender had almost as significant an effect on lowering the pregnancy rates among certain fashionable women as the growing availability of contraception.) Diana was also genuinely scared: dying from childbirth was commonplace in those pre-antibiotic days, she was nearly thirty-seven and the fibroid in her uterus added a worrying complication. During the last days of her pregnancy, she sat by the telephone, sending out telegrams to all her friends, begging them to pray for her, convinced she would never leave the nursing home alive.

On 15 September 1929 she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, John Julius—his middle name quixotically referring to the Caesarean section that saw him delivered safely into the world. Although weak and tremulous, she herself was far from dead, and when she was discharged from the Portland Place nursing home a few weeks later, a crowd of several hundred well-wishers had gathered outside to cheer her on her way.

These crowds were a sign of the public’s continuing interest in Diana, despite the years she had spent in America. Two years earlier a poll conducted by the
Sphere
had put her, along with Queen Mary and the now famous Tallulah Bankhead, among the nation’s ten most remarkable women. And even after giving birth to John Julius she still expected to maintain her relationship with the public. In 1932, when
The Miracle
regrouped for its British run, Diana jumped at the chance not only to perform a three-month London season, but to slog through a six-month tour of provincial theatres, causing amusement and concern amongst the more snobbish of her friends.