The Perfect Summer, page 11
Diana’s generation took things a little further. All through the summer of 1911, that year of her entrée into polite society, Diana was running close to the limits. Nowhere was she better able to indulge her impulse to challenge convention than among her sisters and her own special group of friends. The Manners girls were collectively known as The Hothouse or The Hotbed, for their exotic, undisciplined and affected behaviour, and Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, singled Diana out as ‘an orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in the day nursery’. Another sceptical friend was Julian Grenfell, Lady Desborough’s son and brother of Diana’s fellow-debutante Monica. Julian was so beautiful that an Eton master who had taught him said merely to pass him in the street made his eyes fill with tears. But Julian thought the Manners girls ‘born professionals’ and took this to be the secret of their ‘coldness and their enthusiasms and perhaps their second ratedness’. Julian’s brother Billy Grenfell felt differently. Writing to Diana after one June weekend, he awarded her ‘one hundred out of a hundred for companionship, beauty, wit, intelligence and intellect, seventy seven for athleticism and seven and a half for lawn tennis.’ The notorious group, known also to themselves and others as the ‘Corrupt Coterie’, had become friends during one summer holiday in Diana’s mid teenage years. She had been invited to stay with the Trees, friends of her parents whose children were slightly older and more worldly. Impressed by their sophistication and by the visiting ‘Oxford boys’ Patrick Shaw Stewart and Edward Horner, she had bought a bottle of peroxide and secretly dyed her hair, crediting the rays of the sun with her golden transformation. Her audacity pleased her, as did her increasingly slim body. The Coterie’s ‘devil may care’ attitude to life was summed up by Vita Sackville-West, whose own ethic was somewhat similar: ‘Why worry? Why not enjoy the present?’ she wrote. ‘We may all be dead tomorrow, or theremay be a war or an earthquake . . . I think one never enjoys life so much as when it becomes dangerous.’
Diana admired the slightly older Vita enormously. ‘She is an aristocrat, rollingly rich, who writes French poetry with more ease than I lie in a sofa,’ Diana herself wrote in awe. To many of the younger generation of the upper classes, this only child of the Sackvilles of the enormous and ancient house Knole, in Kent, was an impressive figure. She had been photographed that summer with her pet Russian bear cub, Ivan the Terrible, a gift from an admirer to add to the baboon and two tiger cubs that she already walked on leads round the garden at Knole. For an interview she gave the Evening Times she wore a white tennis dress with a scarf wrapped round her head ‘in Corsican fashion’. What neither Diana nor anyone else knew was that Vita was already rebelling in ways beyond even Diana’s vibrant but virginal imagination, by sleeping with women; Diana and her friends would, however, have been delighted, had they known. The Coterie made a common pledge to be ‘unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of decadence and gambling. In other words, Unlike Other People.’ They revelled in drink, blasphemy, gambling, drug-taking, chloroform (‘chlorers’) sniffing, and decadent behaviour of every kind imaginable. Diana boasted that ‘they prized honesty whether or not it offended’. They were healthy, beautiful and exceptionally clever, and the young men ‘carried off prizes and fellowships with as much ease as they could win a steeple-chase’. On leaving university they planned careers in the law or in the City, determined to remain rich enough to maintain the only way of life they knew or cared to know about.
They played a parody of the acting games so beloved of the Souls’ evenings. In the Coterie’s ‘Breaking the News’, the effect of the announcement of the death of a child to its mother was acted out for fun. Margot Asquith was deeply upset on hearing of it. ‘A more terrible game I never could imagine,’ she cried, ‘heartless and brutal.’ She believed Diana to be the ring-leader, and thought she suffered from ‘Love of notoriety and stainless vanity – her boredom with the country, her blasphemy, her entire want of sensitiveness, no imagination, and no compassion.’ At a party at Billy Grenfell’s rooms at Trinity College, Oxford, fifty rabbits were lowered out of the window in baskets, released, and then chased by a hundred humans and a bulldog, pursued in turn by several horrified dons who collected up the dead rabbits for burial. Raymond suggested that God had played his cards wrong, and that Jesus Christ would have been appreciated more if he had been clean-shaven and the Virgin if she had worn rouge. Diana was aware that they were ‘very irritating to others and utterly satisfying and delightful to themselves’, but even she knew she had gone too far on the occasion when the former Prime Minister and Conservative leader Mr Arthur Balfour hesitated for a moment during a guessing game and Diana shouted at him in exasperation ‘Use your brain, Mr Balfour, use your brain!’ The Duchess of Rutland was an indulgent mother, but even she drew the line at one activity: Diana was not permitted to fly in her golden-haired Swedish friend Gustav Hamel’s plane. Obedient but frustrated, she watched from the ground as her friend Sybil Cooper, a sister of her brother John’s friend Duff, rose into the air, two small squealing pigs in her pockets to prove to the world that such animals really could fly.
Without the occasionally moderating influence of Raymond Asquith the Coterie’s behaviour might have been even more unacceptable and out of control. He was fourteen years older than Diana and respected by the entire group. His sister-in-law Cynthia Asquith realised that there was ‘an insidiously corruptive poison in their midst’, the flagrant decadence was ‘brilliantly distilled by their inspiration, Raymond’, and Diana declared that ‘he was the one we liked best’. He had married her best friend Katherine Horner in 1907, but even so Diana could not help herself: he was the first love of her life. Ottoline Morrell had known him when he was an undergraduate and saw him as the leader ‘of all that was clever and reckless and contemptuous’, and while she confessed herself intimidated by his cynicism and intellectual dexterity, she also recognised a ‘charming gentleness and tenderness’, adding ‘but it was not easy to find the way to it through the armour of sceptical cleverness.’ Under Raymond’s direction the friends often behaved quite sensibly – dressing up and producing an entire Shakespeare play, for example. Duff Cooper, who had graduated from New College at the beginning of June, was invited to stay at the Manners’ house by the sea at Clovelly in Devon. There, with the core of the Coterie as fellow house-guests, he was entranced by the life of ‘picnics, games and charades, midnight bathing and clandestine suppers, singing and repetition of poetry.’
In the middle of June Diana briefly left behind the amusements of the Coterie and returned to London to continue with her summer debut. In Hyde Park the familiar stink of horse and car was alleviated a little by the distinctively summery smell of fresh hay that filled the nearby mews, and the cobblestones were alive with the little voles and field mice that arrived buried in the hay carts that rumbled into town from the country fields.
The Duke of Rutland was preoccupied with the proposed National Insurance Scheme and its compulsory contributions from all employees, which he felt ill-thought-through. Mindful of the number of servants in his own employ across the 65,000 acres of England in his possession, he wrote in anger to The Times that the new arrangement ‘would undermine the harmonious relationship currently enjoyed between employers and servants.’ But Diana would not allow a politically agitated adult world to derail her summer. For her presentation at Court, an ordeal she had not been looking forward to, she conformed to the obligatory white satin dress. She felt her own version only ‘adequate’, though she was pleased with her imaginative design for the accompanying train, sewn by herself, with its three yards of cream net ‘sprinkled generously with pink rose petals, each attached by a diamond dew drop’. Even the mandatory three ostrich feathers fastened to her head looked less ridiculous than she had feared. For Diana the proceedings were not as tiresome as they might have been, for the Duchess had been granted the ‘entrée’ by Queen Victoria, and this still-valid privilege meant they could avoid the three-hour queues at the front door of Buckingham Palace and ‘stalk in through a smaller but nobler entrance.’ The culmination of the presentation was the low curtsey to the monarch. Though Poiret’s fashionable hobble skirt was banned, courtiers were always in attendance to catch a toppling deb. Violet Asquith only achieved her smooth descent and rise after hours spent practising in front of the nursery rocking-horse.
As the Season continued there were daily excursions from London to the race meetings at Royal Ascot. Tatler recorded that on Ladies’ Day Lady Diana Manners wore a ‘picturesque dress of delicate pastel with a hat full of feathers, and a toilette of shell pink veiled in cloudy grey.’ Indeed, after the sombre beauty of the previous year’s mourning dress the clothes all seemed gayer than ever before. And still the ceaseless partying went on. There was a ball at Grosvenor House in Park Lane, where Gainsborough’s Blue Boy hung over a golden mantelpiece and his glorious Mrs Siddons watched as the jeunesse dorée danced below her. The sadly untitled but socially generous Mrs Hwfa Williams held a dance in the studio of her Ovington Square house, honoured by the ‘vision’ of Lady Diana with her ‘perfect face and figure’. The actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, half-brother of the novelist Max Beerbohm, was dressed, to the immense satisfaction of his hostess, in a manner ‘as immaculate and spruce as ever, an invaluable acquisition to a party’. He was much amused by the sudden appearance of a panicking horse belonging to Mrs Williams’s milkman that unknown to her had been locked up for safekeeping in the stable off the courtyard and was whinnying loudly in protest at the heat and noise generated by the energetic dancing to the band. Luckily, with the arrival of the Russian dancer Pavlova (in Mrs Williams’s words ‘the marvel’), who danced an impromptu pas seul, the harmony of the interrupted evening was restored and it turned out to be ‘one of the most successful and delightful dances’ Mrs Williams had ever given, though she said so herself.
That week Diana was being painted by the society portrait painter Philip de László, the sitting itself recorded in a charming pencil drawing by her mother. At the same time Diana was sketching in her own notebook a tubular skirt in brilliant yellow with a chiffon overlay. There was a belt of tasselled cord, and the clinging skirt was edged in orange and yellow beading, with a low-draped cowl-necked top. The model was clearly herself, her hair en bandeau. De László was not the only person for whom she was posing. For her brother John she stripped in private to nothing more than a sheer silk veil of cream lace, which she allowed to slip far below her waist, revealing a long naked back. Her left hand, braceleted above the elbow, held a mirror into which she gazed steadily back at John as he photographed her on an Arlington Street sofa. In another picture the protecting veil was removed entirely as she imitated Velásquez’s exquisite Rokeby Venus, a long strand of pearls creeping erotically down her back and round to the front of her body like the familiar and lingering hand of a lover.
And then, right in the middle of Royal Ascot, the swelling dissatisfaction in the docks suddenly erupted. On Wednesday 14 June the entire crew of the Olympic, moored at Southampton docks, went on strike, followed by the men of five shipping lines and the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ unions. By the end of the racing week dockers in Glasgow, Newcastle, Hull and Goole had come out in sympathy. In the last week before the Coronation, uncertainty suddenly filled the air. Churchill embarked on a series of urgent talks with the dock owners and the union leaders in an attempt to address the men’s concerns.
But Diana’s attention was concentrated on the impending arrival of the Russian Ballet.
5
Late June
The ballet made my hair stand on end.
Duncan Grant in a private letter
AFTER LOOKING INTO the face of the Marchioness of Ripon, things appeared green-coloured, as if one had stared directly into a blinding light. Gladys Ripon, patron of the opera and beloved of the accountants responsible for the cash takings at Covent Garden, was so beautiful that she made most people appear dumpy and, according to one admirer, the writer E.F. Benson, ‘a shade shabby’. He felt that in Lady Ripon’s presence even the glamorous ‘wanted the touch of the sponge or duster’. Six foot tall, smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder, she presented a figure of unequalled elegance. She wore her hair piled vertiginously above her head (a diamond brooch flashing at its summit when it was dressed for a ball), the dark waves swept back to reveal a broad and, for a woman in her fifties, curiously unlined forehead. From beneath thick eyebrows she would return a look with her head tilted at a slight and disconcerting angle. Her Russian ancestry was evident in her high cheekbones, and her ‘distinguished features of so pure a cut’marked her out for Osbert Sitwell as ‘the most striking individual to look at in any room she entered.’
Gladys had collected a succession of names from her two marriages that Henry James, always so scrupulous about the appropriate naming of his heroines, would have envied for their pertinent beauty.
Born Lady Gladys Herbert, daughter of Lord Herbert of Lea and niece of the Earl of Pembroke, she married first the faithless Earl of Lonsdale, a man apparently incapable of enjoying a healthy sex life with a member of his own class: he collapsed, dead of a heart attack, while in action in his own private brothel. His resilient widow’s next choice was Lord de Grey, heir to the Marquess of Ripon and famed for his grouse-shooting prowess. When in 1909 he inherited his father’s title, the new Marchioness found herself a peeress again, but this time very rich. She was the granddaughter of a Russian prince on her mother’s side, and therefore one-quarter Russian; her father had helped Florence Nightingale establish her hospital at Scutari. Her own encouragement and support of Oscar Wilde was rewarded when he teasingly dedicated his play A Woman of No Importance to her. She embodied something of the exotic, entrepreneurial and rebellious spirit that Lady Diana Manners sought to emulate. Diana and Gladys were indisputably rooted in the bosom of their aristocratic birthright, but these two beautiful women shared a spirit of mutiny, and in Diana’s eyes Gladys was well qualified to be her mentor: she had a ‘past’. She was indeed notorious for her many affairs, in particular with Harry Cust, witty and compulsively attractive but also sexually voracious and careless. (Diana, result of his earlier liaison with the Duchess of Rutland, was at least three when his affair with Gladys began.) Alone in her lover’s house one day, Gladys discovered a pile of wonderfully indiscreet love letters written to Harry by one of her social adversaries, Lady Londonderry. Perversely delighted with her discovery and especially relishing Lady Londonderry’s disparaging remarks about her husband, Gladys pocketed the lot, realising she was sitting on a source of irresistibly diverting material. Her friends and Theresa Londonderry’s enemies were cock-a-hoop with the instalments Gladys would read to them with her mischievously exaggerated delivery on rainy afternoons during lulls in the bridge game.
After the fun had exhausted itself, Gladys arranged for the letters to be delivered by her own footman to Londonderry House in Park Lane on an evening when she knew both husband and wife were dining alone at home. The butler approached his Lordship’s end of the table and solemnly handed him the ribbon-tied bundle. After a moment or two spent in absorbing their contents, his Lordship beckoned to the butler and directed him to carry the opened package to the other end of the table. Silence filled the large dining room, a silence so terrible that husband and wife suspected it might never be broken. Lord Londonderry had been shattered not just by the knowledge that his wife was being unfaithful but also by the realisation that, thanks to Lady Ripon, her affair was the stuff of common gossip. From that day onwards, the Londonderrys stood yards apart whenever they appeared together in public, and not a word passed between them. Society whispered for months afterwards, not of the immorality of having an affair but of the terrible consequences of being caught. Few considered Gladys in any way at fault for actions prompted by little more than spite.
Gladys found politics dreary and the personalities involved in them unattractive, so her party guests never included the political luminaries who attended the packed soirées at Londonderry House. Nor was she remotely interested in sport, although her husband was a legendary shot. For her, the chitchat of winter shooting parties and of summer tennis gatherings at Studley Royal, her father-in-law’s huge house in Yorkshire, was equally and thoroughly tiresome. She did not really like going outside at all – the relentless sound of the cuckoo during the summer months made her feel faint. Card games induced fits of yawning but had to be endured. The emerging Bloomsbury intellectualism she considered too blue-stocking. But she was intelligent and she disdained the frivolities that consumed Society: she needed an occupation. E.F. Benson, certainly a friend and admirer, though a little less dazzled by her than some, had the perception to recognise that in the early years of marriage Gladys was casting round for something original to do, in his words, for ‘a stunt’.
Among Gladys’s gifts was irresistible enthusiasm, and a talent for apparently artless salesmanship. According to Osbert Sitwell, her conversation was ‘fascinating and spontaneous’, and she spoke as a wise and genuine observer of ‘the behaviour of human beings’. She could not have been described as a woman passionate about music – in fact she knew nothing much about it at all, and E.F. Benson believed she would not have willingly listened to a Beethoven symphony ‘unless she had been a personal friend of the composer’– but she had been seduced by the opera, the drama of it all rather than the singing. The staginess of a full-blown operatic performance and its ‘pageantry and artifice’ exemplified just the sort of sophisticated bohemianism that attracted her, and over the past few years she had promoted the Covent Garden Opera so effectively that attending a performance there had become the de rigueur way of spending an evening. Her recruiting methods were subtle. At a dinner party she would mention, in a voice full of hushed theatrics, how gloriously Nellie Melba had sung in Drury Lane the night before, and how difficult it had been to reserve a seat for the performance. The next morning her guests would rush to buy tickets for the next available performance. The tiaras that packed the velvet tiers night after night confirmed her instinct for the effectiveness of word-of-mouth recommendation.
