Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (63 page)

She also became fond of Susan Mary Alsop, another of Duff’s Paris mistresses, who actually had a child by him.
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Yet if some of Diana’s acquaintances thought her bizarrely accommodating of Duff’s affairs, she did provide her own compensations. Conrad Russell, the nephew of the Duke of Bedford, was one of them. She had got to know him well in the early 1930s, a quiet Englishman, who preferred farming to politics or society. He lavished presents on Diana and wrote her long romantic letters, offering the unstinting devotion that she needed, still, as a prop to her confidence. They loved each other, platonically, until his death in 1947, although in 1938 Russell was roused to a rare dissatisfaction with that arrangement when Diana had an affair with Carl Burckhardt, High Commissioner at the League of Nations, whom she met in 1938.

There was something almost destined about this relationship, given that as a child Burckhardt had been raised by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the father of Raimond, her former ‘child lover’ back in the days of
The Miracle.
To Diana, Burckhardt appeared uncannily like Raimond’s confident and very seductive older brother; she even wondered if Raimond had asked for ‘lessons and tips’ from Carl when he was younger, for both men inspired a very unusual erotic response in her. Certainly the affair developed a level of physical passion that caused a jealous Russell to enquire if Diana and Burckhardt planned to ‘go off together’.
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Throughout all this, Diana’s love for Duff remained unshakeable, and if she was restive, it was principally for adventures other than sexual. The 1930s had in some ways been a period of limbo for her. While a younger generation of rebels was turning to communism rather than cocaine, her own world had remained largely unchanged. Many of the people she knew were unaffected by the economic depression: picnics, treasure hunts and parties continued, almost uninterrupted from the previous decade, and Diana was invited to scores of them. Yet even amidst the privileged fun and the secure knowledge of having Duff and John Julius at home, she despaired over her failure ‘to love my life as it deserves to be loved’. Depression and hypochondria stalked her, as they had always done when she had no serious occupation. And while she could diagnose herself as suffering from ‘introspection apprehension’ [and a] lack of interest’, she was unable to find any project to replace her acting career.
²⁵

It was war, yet again, that forced Diana out of herself. Initially she had been traumatized and tearful: with the grinding heartbreak of the Great War still lodged in her memory, she could only imagine that this second round of hostilities would be infinitely worse. But her most acute fears were for John Julius, and when he was sent to safety in America, she braced herself to do something useful. Periods of war would have to be given over to Duff’s official travels, but when Diana was in England she set herself up as a subsistence farmer at her family’s seaside cottage at Bognor. The work was hard and she knew nothing about agriculture, but she became as proud of the modest competence she acquired with her bees, chickens, ducks, cows and pigs as she had been of her nursing skills at Guy’s. The idea that she was producing sufficient food to contribute to the war effort pleased Diana enormously.

In 1944, when Duff was posted to Algiers, she initially resisted the move, reluctant to engage with yet more upheaval. However, as the headquarters of the Free French forces, Algiers had become a fascinating microcosm of the world at war, populated by a rogue mix of politicians, journalists and refugees. Diana soon found herself playing hostess to Charles de Gaulle and Andre Gide, Evelyn Waugh and Martha Gellhorn, and she discovered a spirit of informality and improvisation in the tenor of her new life that reminded her of the years when she was on tour with
The Miracle.

When the time came to move to Paris she again resented the change. She imagined that life in the embassy would confine her to a diary of rigidly formal dinners, and to a style of relentlessly codified behaviour. But in this she seriously underestimated herself. As she drew up guest lists for embassy events she rode roughshod over political allegiances and old grudges; notoriously she ignored the taint of wartime collaboration that hung over some of the Parisian artists, including Jean Cocteau, whom she included in ‘la bande’, her special group of favourites. Her solution to boredom was to mix everyone up: orchestrating dinners where Clement Attlee, the new Labour prime minister, might find himself seated next to Cocteau, parties where the Tory aesthete Chips Channon might find himself playing charades with a young communist trade unionist to whom Diana had taken a fancy.

Sometimes the guest list failed to spark. Ernest Hemingway was judged by Diana to be ‘the greatest bore to end bores’, and she disliked having to receive the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Before the war she had been a reluctant member of the Fort Belvedere set that revolved around Edward, the former Prince of Wales, and had observed his developing relationship with Wallis Simpson with a degree of pity. Now in Paris she judged that he had become ‘sillier and duller’, while his ‘Becky Sharp’ of a wife had become ‘more common’.
²⁶

Yet even the unsuccessful dinners added to the embassy’s allure. People clamoured for invitations precisely because the outcome was so unpredictable. It was widely assumed among political circles that it was because of Diana’s social astuteness that Duff retained his ambassadorial post as long as he did, surviving a year and a half under the new Labour government, despite his own staunchly Conservative affiliations. Success had been sweet for Diana, and when Duff’s post was terminated in the autumn of 1947, it was she who suffered most. They continued to live near Paris, renting a romantic eighteenth-century house, Chateau de St Firmin, yet while Duff settled more or less contentedly to the writing of his next book, she could not let her disappointment lie. She was outrageously disparaging about the new ambassador and his wife, and established her own rival court at St Firmin, poaching visiting dignitaries or celebrities to her own parties, which she made sure were always unsurpassably stylish and interesting.
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Guests like Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret may have bolstered her ego, but Diana was unused to being ousted from anything and, as she wrote in her memoir, she ‘felt much older after the dismissal’.
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She also became depressed about the diminishing of her beauty. Even though it had been years since she’d depended on it professionally, she had always believed her looks were the basis of any love she inspired and any success she achieved. Now in her late fifties, she clung to what remained of her youthful appearance, experimenting with wigs, suffering through an eccentric variety of beauty treatments and submitting to a painful facelift. These battles were sympathetically reported by Duff in his diary – ‘She hates old age and fears death’ – and inspired sections of Enid Bagnold’s 1951 novel
The Loved and Envied.

But Diana had much more to lose than her looks. Duff’s health, undermined by years of excessive eating and drinking, was in decline, and in May 1953 he suffered a severe stomach haemorrhage, vomiting quantities of terrifying, rusty black blood. He recovered sufficiently for Diana to take him on a convalescent cruise at the end of the year, but on board ship he suffered a second, fatal haemorrhage. He died on the afternoon of 1 January, Diana sitting crouched in the bathroom during his final struggling hours because she couldn’t bear to witness the undignified convulsions of his body, nor the final departure of his spirit.

For a long time afterwards she withdrew into herself. She refused to go to Duff’s funeral, feeling that to share her grief in public would be too unbearable and somehow too vulgar, and in the months that followed she considered suicide. As she explained to Evelyn Waugh, she had no faith in her ability to survive alone. In public she might appear to have a certain ‘incandescent aura’, but inwardly she felt she had never been anything ‘but a beating frightened heart built round and for Duff’.
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As always, though, Diana was stronger than she acknowledged, much stronger. Travel helped to save her, as did friends, and it was with Iris Tree that she travelled to North Africa and attempted to get high on hashish paste – Iris wrote wild poems all night, Diana was disappointed that she only had bad dreams. By 1955 she was sufficiently recovered to begin new projects, writing the first part of her trilogy of memoirs, and in 1960 moving back to London to be near John Julius and his family. From her little house in north-west London, she embarked on a new, and in some ways very contented, phase in her life. She discovered that the 1960s suited her; they reminded her of the 1920s: colourful, feckless, greedy for novelty and socially on the move. If Diana socialized with old friends and family, she also ended up at dinner parties with interesting young men such as Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol.

The irresponsibility of old age suited her, too. She had nothing more to prove and, as far as she could see, no occasion for guilt, even if to John Julius and his wife Anne she might often seem as demanding and irrational as her own mother had been. She was also just as capable of emotional blackmail. Anne had hoped Diana might settle in Clapham when she moved back to London, guaranteeing a few miles of family distance. Diana’s wounded response was, however, worthy of the late Duchess, and the house she moved into was just a few hundred yards away from her son and daughter-in-law.

Much of the time though, Diana in old age was entertainingly subversive and funny. When parking laws were first introduced in London, she left cajoling notes on her car: ‘Dearest Warden. Front tooth broken off, look like 81 year old pirate so at dentist 19a. Very old – very lame – no metres [sic].’
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While she could be extremely grand, she could also be startlingly practical – when invited to a ball at Wilton House and finding there was no accommodation provided, she hired a caravan and camped in the grounds. By the time she reached her eighties she told everyone she kept a phial of poison by her bed in case old age became too hideous. Yet although her sight and hearing started to fail, and she was bedridden for the last two years, her life was a relatively benign falling away. Diana was ninety-three when she died, and her body was taken to Belvoir Castle to be buried with the rest of her family and next to Duff.

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In the obituaries and reminiscences that followed she was celebrated as a wit, a society beauty and a loving wife; the turbulent years during which she had battled for Duff and for independence seemed to have been long buried and forgotten. These were, however, key to her story. Although Diana’s palatial upbringing had been a world away from Josephine’s ghetto childhood, she too had fought for her life against the destiny of her birth. She’d shown the same instincts of self-determination that had made Josephine run away from the ghetto when she was thirteen and carry on running until she became a star. And like Josephine’s Diana’s flight had been propelled by the restlessness of a generation.

Scott Fitzgerald observed that the flapper had been created by a spirit of emancipation that had been fermenting since the beginning of the century. But it had been the social derailment of the war years, combined with transformations in modern technology, that had driven the hopes and ambitions of these young women to new levels at the start of the 1920s. They were part of a collective surge in expectation that was carrying them far beyond anything their mothers and grandmothers could have envisaged.

It was not an easy transition. For Zelda, the process of shucking off her girlish habits of dependency for a more adult self was perplexing, painful and eventually crippling. For women who claimed their freedom in more provocatively sexual ways, it took a different kind of courage. Today we regard the Sixties and Seventies as a revolution in women’s liberation, yet when we look at the unself-regarding stubbornness with which Nancy claimed sexual equality with men and the audacity with which Tallulah and Tamara conducted their erotic adventures, they were, in fact, anticipating that revolution by several heroic decades.

The six women in this book seem very modern to us in the way they broke taboos and in the way they puzzled out their notions of freedom. But they also seem very modern to us in the way in which they struggled to combine their public and private lives. The Twenties was a decade of celebrity, and its shiny international culture of cinema and radio, advertising, fashion and the popular press, precipitated all six to a heady degree of fame. Even Nancy and Zelda, with their comparatively limited professional profiles, were elevated into icons – photographed and painted, and given the status of modern fairy-tale heroines by those who wrote about them in the gossip columns and magazines. No less than celebrities of the twenty-first century, some of the women became victims of their own fame, as they grew habituated to the distorting reflections of their public image. But all six found themselves grappling with the quintessentially contemporary conundrum: how to combine career and family, self-interest, marriage and love.

Certainly if their experience tells us anything, it is that progress is rarely linear. Much of what this flapper generation wanted to become was stalled or deflected by events of the Thirties and Forties. A few brave souls, like Nancy, moved with those events and took the flapper spirit of insurgency to a wider political arena. But by the middle of the 1960s it was up to a new post-war generation to confront the issues that had been raised in the 1920s. Once again there would be male dandies and short-skirted young women ready to elevate sexual emancipation and freedom of spirit over the dutiful conservatism of their parents, ready to take drugs and dance to music that was designed as an assault on the middle-aged.

It’s not surprising that Diana saw resemblances between the Sixties and her own youth. But another half-century on, it’s startling how closely we continue to identify with her and her peers. Nancy, Zelda, Diana, Tallulah, Tamara and Josephine belonged to a dissident, often brilliantly wayward generation of women. Even now their aspirations and battles have a resonance for us, and even now they hold up a standard against which our own vision and nerve can be judged.