reading

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Diana Cooper has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Illustrations

The story of my days has had to be divided, because of its fearful bulk, into three parts. Let those who read and enjoyed The Rainbow Comes and Goes be prepared here for disappointment. The colours pale with the olden days far behind me and time almost abreast. With the shoals and depths of young love turned to halcyon days of marriage, what is left romantic?

The splendid vision of The Miracle in America materialises into career and homesickness. Sails set for adventure record tedious travelogues. The throne of Shakespeare’s kings is usurped by flesh and blood that talks in prose. War’s alarms are echoes, peace harnesses rampaging death, the glory and the dream fade into the light of common day.

These lines are to mend the break in my narrative, which starts again as abruptly as it ended.

The Miracle

In November 1923, with a high heart, unaccustomed courage, a certain confidence in my new vocation, and the splendid vision of The Miracle no longer a mirage, I boarded the pretty dancing Aquitania for my first ocean journey. Duff was by my side and in my heart, so everything delighted and excited us – the fine big cabin, the bath with fresh and sea water, the springing decks and space, the interminable menus, the orchestra and the bustle, the cupboard-trunks, bouquets and radiograms, but through the delight and excitement flitted the sinister shade of the Titanic. I felt something of a Columbus too. In 1923 not so many of my English friends had crossed the Atlantic, and we were farewelled as though for circum-navigation, with Fortnum & Mason provisions, cases of champagne, prayers, telegrams and a bevy of friends to speed us well at Southampton. On the third day it got rough, the Titanic shadow loomed darker and I suffered fearful shame when Duff took me to the ship’s kind doctor that he might prescribe some calmative. He handed me bromide with a look of contemptuous pity. ‘I suppose there are any amount of frightened people like me?’ I said hopefully. ‘Sometimes a few emigrants in the hold,’ he replied.

Duff was sympathetic, so it did not matter. The bromide did not calm, but the waves did. We threw ourselves into the amusing novelty of life on a big liner – auctions, hat-pools, and horses and camels in the gymnasium. Halfway over, radiograms began fluttering in from friends in America. Less welcome ones arrived from newspapers, and formidable ones from Morris Gest, warning me of the pressmen at Quarantine and suggesting replies that I should give to difficult questions. This made me nervous, as some of the instructions, I saw on reading, I could not obey. To the question: ‘Who is to be the first to play the Madonna?’ I was to answer: ‘I am,’ and to the supplementary ‘How did I know?’ ‘Because I had had a message from God.’

I naturally replied, when they asked me, that I had no idea who would be the Madonna. I only knew that I had been engaged first. The cameras clicked away and the ‘Just one more’s seemed to have no end, but I did not then mind what I now abhor, and I had confidence in being well dressed by Madame Ospovat (the Russian designer of genius who had become famous in London overnight), though in the photographs of those days I look grotesque. On the quay stood Chaliapin and Morris Gest, who pinched Chaliapin’s cheek in greeting. This seemed too familiar to Chaliapin, loud words were said in Russian and a quickly forgotten blow administered. Beloved Kommer was there to pour essential oils on us all, and soon we were installed in our beautiful suite at the Ambassador Hotel, with a Bible each by our beds and the crystal New York sky a background to our high-perched luxury. It was Sunday and as quiet as a trafficless town can be. There were no orchids for me, but for Duff a case of Scotch and another of Bourbon whisky from Cole Porter, and also the key of Carroll Carstairs’s liquor-locker at the Knickerbocker Club, with which to fight Prohibition. Duff went down to explore while I unpacked. He came up to say that he had met George Gordon Moore in the lift and that we were supping with him that night. So much for the pre-war London stories that he could not show his face in New York.

At five o’clock I was to be ready for rehearsal. First we must have lunch, and gape and marvel at the canyons of architecture. We went to a restaurant on Fifth Avenue – Pierre’s – shy as bumpkins and feeling lost and foreign. Duff was asked if he would have tea or coffee with his lunch. He all but collapsed. Kommer fetched me for my ordeal. I had made a Nun’s rehearsal-dress to give me a little confidence, but I was very frightened. We drove to a vast unheated hall. It was freezing outside, and there was a big brazier of live charcoal, round which cowered some fifty shiverers, while another fifty or so were being rehearsed. Reinhardt strolled in, calm, with cigar-smoke curling round his magnificent brow and light compassionate eyes. I knew only him and Kommer, and it was to take me a little time to learn the rest of them. Luckily no one seemed in the least interested in my arrival. Maria Carmi was not due in New York for another three or four weeks. ‘Stand here, Miss Manners,’ said Mr West, a stage-manager. So I stood there on a chair, suddenly very, very happy. I had come back to what I was used to – rehearsals and stage jargon and the palpitating interest of ‘shop.’

The Nun in The Miracle is as important a part as the Madonna, and from the day of this production’s inception stars and beginners were praying and hustling to be given it. But it was an amateur who won it. Crossing the ocean a few weeks earlier, Reinhardt had noticed a magnificent young girl of eighteen, returning from buying her debutante’s trousseau in Paris. She was Rosamond Pinchot, daughter of Amos and niece of Governor Pinchot. She was rich, very beautiful, athletic, with a coltish grace and a strange face belonging to valleys and hills rather than gilded rooms and dance-bands. She had never thought of the stage, but she agreed, encouraged by her parents, to take the part of the Nun. Reinhardt was proud of his choice and became prouder as Rosamond was moulded by him into perfection. She was too busy rehearsing to pay any attention to me. I felt myself lucky in being allowed to stand and wait, learn the music and lose my fears.

Morris Gest knew well what he was doing when he engaged two women to play one part. The production was so enormous, and the turning of the Century Theatre into a cathedral so mighty a conversion, that the rehearsals and building took six weeks longer than anticipated. Publicity had to be kept explosive, and what better way than to build up a story of the Lion and the Unicorn? I found it dreadfully disagreeable, and there were days when the headlines made me threaten and even want to go home. Duff would be leaving me very soon, and Maria Carmi had declared that she would not rehearse in front of me. Advisers and friends seemed to think that to play on the first night was essential to my fame, and they finally persuaded Duff to have a showdown with Morris Gest. It failed completely. Duff asked for a guarantee that I should have the lead and not become the understudy, without which he threatened to take me back to England. What hope had he with these seasoned theatre-sharks? Fobbed off with a ‘Trust me’ and a leering wink from Gest, he sailed away, leaving me, in tears, to my fate. I felt ill with misery and fears, always fears, of immediate peril on the sea, of time and space, and the height of New York. Only the studio made it bearable. Letters tell more truthfully and more keenly the unhappiness than memory does, and mine for six months are an unpardonable jeremiad, a daily Gummidge-whine:

New York

I got home at five, having had my poor nut washed. I looked so dejected that the barber said ‘Poor kid.’ A lady had a hare-lip. It illustrated how foreign we feel in America and I felt surprised that there should be hare-lips here.

9 December 1923

I slept on my sofa, to be awakened an hour later by very noisy newsboys. I felt that they must be shouting an Atlantic disaster and worked myself up naughtily.

10 December

Your wireless today more to my liking in words than I could have prayed for. Those wretched newsboys I wrote of yesterday were screaming disaster, and darling Wadey on her despised eighteenth floor had the same panic as I had.

I lunched in a funnier, still cheaper place than Child’s. You take a long look at all the eggs, meat, fish, veg in appetising concoctions, you pick and carry your dish off to an armchair with one elephantine spatulate arm on which you place your plate, glass and utensils. I chose corned beef hash, a big sugar cake and a glass of milk (20 cents). I’m so sad that I’ll go and send you a cable. That sometimes helps.

The radiograms from east, west and mid-ocean flashed daily. So did the letters. We studied departures and arrivals of ships, calculating their knots and hours to know when we might hope for a batch of letters.

I was learning from the master of masters and falling in love with him, gaining confidence and making friends in and out of the theatre. The rehearsals lasted until 4 a.m., but did not begin until the afternoon. The great barrack hall got colder as the Christmas snow blocked the streets, and the brazier glowed less adequately. To see imagination fashion material with nature’s prodigality astounded me as might a real miracle. The Miracle, having no script and no stage-directions, had to be designed as it grew. The story was a legend, and the gathering of it together was claimed by Karl Vollmöller, but it was Reinhardt who carved it into its Gothic-Freudian shape, selecting and discarding and inventing. Werner Krauss, the famous German actor who played the Spielmann or Power of Evil, built his own part with an ebullience of graven stones and gargoyles and arches that bridged to Good. He was the central pillar. He had the roof to bear and carried it on dancing feet, an unbowed Atlas, for which responsibility he claimed a bottle of spirits and two of wine daily – not an easy assignment in spite of The Miracle’s private bootlegger.

11 December

I breathe prayers for you incessantly, even when thinking of other things. ‘My Mummy’ sails today. I shall have to pray for her too. O dear, O damn!

I feel discouraged with my part and think that I have gone back, due to never being rehearsed. They’ve got into a groove of ‘She’s all right.’ I’m not. I dread to think of what ‘my Mummy’ will say to the pressmen. She must have said at Southampton that I went on the pictures originally because of ‘desperate poverty.’ So all day the reporters have buzzed and shadowed me to discover what we call ‘poor.’ Oggie [Lynn] lands tomorrow.

Maria Carmi had arrived. In America she used her married name, Princess Matchabelli. She had been too obedient to the impresario’s dictates and had said silly things to her interviewers.

12 December

Carmi refused to meet me. One rehearsal, she says, at which I must not be present, for fear (I suppose) that I might pick up some good business – a disappointment to me, as I had relied on doing so. I’m forbidden the studio in consequence. The cast’s account is not favourable. She behaved very grande dame, stretched out a left hand to all the principals’ mouths and put all their backs up …

I sent Oggie to have a look at Carmi. The cast is out to poison her. She looked savage, dressed completely in leopard, old but tall and thin. There are awful interviews in tonight’s papers. She is referred to as ‘Royal’ and she tells how God visited her and said ‘Play My Mother,’ and a lot about being Reinhardt’s choice. Her ex-husband Vollmöller appeared tonight, the Miracle legend’s exhumer. He had travelled over on the same boat and not known that she was aboard. He’s a German – specs and Kultur. He shocked and adulated me. I don’t get his game.

As, on account of the Carmi competition, I was to play on alternate nights, the Pinchot family thought that their young daughter should be equally favoured (I considered the cutting down of my performances a disfavour). So the old search for another Nun began. There was a pen (not too near the brazier) where the postulants sat day after day, the discouraged giving place to new hopefuls. Ina Claire had hesitated at the gate, so had Marion Davies. As the opening night drew nearer and the Nun was still not chosen, it became easier for the directors to pick someone who knew the part perfectly, having heard and seen the tireless teaching and application of Reinhardt and Pinchot.

13 December

They worried me today about playing the Nun until I agreed to try it, on the condition that they would say without embarrassment and fear of hurting that I was unsuited. I’m glad I stood out and only gave in to the trial to get them out of their difficulties. I’ll do it far better, I know, than the understudies they have tried, yet so much worse than Pinchot.

The parts of the Madonna and Nun lend themselves to doubling, since they are in one way the same.

I never had the potter’s thumb to shape me to this part. I came out cast from a mould and saved them all a lot of trouble, and there was plenty of trouble. The cathedral and stained-glass windows, the organ, the choir and the cloisters would not materialise on promised dates, and while the creators waited, better ideas crowded, jostled and fought with one another. Norman Bel Geddes, the scene-designer, Werner Krauss and Reinhardt were all three too rich in invention to tolerate satisfaction. Scenes, costumes, music and crowd-dispersals were made, unmade and remade. My attendant black shade these days took the shape of myself alone on the stage with the enemy audience in front. The thought of standing as a statue of the Madonna, motionless for an hour, held no fear, with nuns and crowds within moral reach, but to break my stony cerements alone and take upon myself life and movement, to walk down my niche’s steps that wound through candles and reliquaries and votive offerings, my eyes raised to the high gothic arches, alone: this I could not contemplate without panic.

The under-stage-manager said today, staring at our cathedral set: ‘We got a cathedral in New York. I had a look at it. Fine it was. Did you ever see a cathedral, ma’am?’ He also said about the ballet of nymphs which nearly ruins The Miracle: ‘I don’t think it fits in. Lesbianism don’t fit in. Fokine can’t get away from Lesbianism.’ How staggering if these words had come from an English stage-hand!

Take care – if anything happens to you it happens to me.

It is natural for someone who has created a part to fight innovation. This Maria Carmi did tooth and nail. At Olympia she had been a sitting waxen figure, brocaded and jewelled. The new statue was a standing fourteenth-century Virgin, with Child held high in one hand. Maria Carmi was a beautiful Italian, taller than me, experienced and seductive and elegantly dressed. She was allowed to have her way at her own performance, spoiling our primitive atmosphere by baroque flamboyance.

16 December

I’ve been to see my stone coat. Rather wonderful, the ghost breaking through the slab and cerements rather than the laden graceful Lady of Lourdes. I can’t of course stoop to pick up the foundling Christ, which destroys the part, so Vollmöller may veto unyielding folds. The idea is to have the prisms streaming through the stained-glass windows round the theatre onto all the statues but me, so that when the moment of incarnation comes there will be true astonishment.

My mother had arrived for several months, perhaps never in her life so happy, beloved by the entire cast, eating prawns and rice pudding with me at drugstores, up all night, and for ever drawing in the darkened studio, with an electric flash-pencil, the groupings and gestures of the actors.

To the studio at 8. I did nothing until 11.30 when Otto Kahn and Paul Cravath arrived, so the last act was turned on and I did it so abominably that I dared not talk to anybody after it was over. My nerves were pouring icy sweat and tripping me over my long skirt, my knees jelly. I have been dejected since. What will the first night rouse in me if Otto Kahn can so much damage my faint heart? Mother had ‘high strikes’ at rehearsal this morning over her daughter’s ‘art and beauty.’ Very embarrassing it was.

Reinhardt, Gest, Krauss, old Schildkraut and Kommer came to me for a definite answer as to whether I would play the Nun. I’ve said that I’ll try, so tomorrow I start with Richard Boleslawsky of the Moscow Art Theatre. I’m over-excited, over-tired and very frightened, but I must venture. It’s good for me – anti-lethargy, anti-phat. I hope you will be pleased and not think I’m making a fool of myself.

I read these letters with surprise. Why was I not overjoyed and glowing with hope and thankfulness?

22 December

Third week over. I was so happy this morning. The Leviathan choked up its mail without delay and from its belly came the loveliest, longest, most satisfying letter from you, full of adventure and love, and a poem. My head was aching with apprehension. The relief numbed it for an hour when I trudged off to the Russian’s studio. I plodded for three hours pouring with sweat, as black as a sweep, trying to master the last scene where the Nun returns from the storm with her dead baby. The Crawling Order. Master it I did, but Lord knows how an amateur feels! One moment of certainty to ten of bewilderment. At two we sat down to a real Russian lunch – one Boleslawsky, one German pianist and four stray Russians. No plates, two saucers, a huge semi-carved cold turkey, a samovar, lemon, a loaf of bread, a knife, no other utensils, no excuses. My migraine was worsening, so I walked to the hotel for medicine and brought them back a bottle of gin. They were mad with joy. I should never have drunk it. My rich visitors can do without.

Another three hours’ work, thinking every time I stopped that I was going to die – heart and head throbbing wrong. (I believe it’s lack of stimulant that is killing me.) I staggered back to the main rehearsal and reported to Reinhardt that I had mastered a scene in base but accurate imitation of Pinchot. He was horrified and said that I mustn’t be in the least like Rosamond. Ecstatic I must be, not animal. (How am I to be ecstatic, I wonder?) So all today will have been wasted. Everybody was worn out and peevish, so a pause was called until tomorrow. Make everyone who can pray for me. Tell Maurice, Belloc, Polly Cotton, Katharine and all the Mariolaters to burn me candles and entrust me to Our Blessed Lady.

Christmas in 1923 was already commercialised, ablaze with electric trees, pretty green window-wreaths, obscene Santas and deafening carols in the shops. I had my mother and Olga Lynn as symbols of home.

Olga hung a stuffed stocking on my bed that held a diamond guard ring, a bottle of rare scent, a cigarette-case and shagreen box, silk stockings and chiffon handkerchiefs. In return I had nothing for her. It’s terrible … I’ve hated Christmas – my occupation gone. I long for tomorrow when rehearsals are resumed. They alone are strenuous enough to numb my achings for you.

I never tired at rehearsals, and they grew to last almost the clock round. A new and dear friend, Bertram Cruger, became my nurse and playmate. He would bring me sandwiches and hot coffee in cardboard containers at 3 a.m. and be sympathetic with my panics and self-dissatisfaction. He believed in the play and had no fears, but I knew him already for an incurable optimist.

I got up early and went to a smart sports shop to buy knee-caps so that I may now do ‘praying, much praying’ and falling on my joints without so much pain.

We cannot get into the theatre yet. They have forbidden fires in the studio and altogether things are so unsatisfactory and stale that they gave me my freedom for twenty-four hours or more. I dashed home to bed. My Mummy also in bed with what Holbrook calls ‘potmaine’ poisoning.

Letters tell of perpetual postponement, and every day lost was added to our separation, since the contract was for sixteen weeks of performance. The cathedral-theatre had to be made in such a way that the public, before and after the performance, could walk about as they do at Chartres. The proscenium arch was scrapped; there was no curtain, and chancel-steps led to the high altar; the pillars were not merely façades; the stalls were turned into pews. There were aisles and side-aisles, a resounding organ and, round the whole, gothic stained-glass windows. It could not be ready in time. The days dragged leadenly for us. Only the public were kept on the alert for news of the two stars fighting to win the lead. As the dread night drew nearer Maria Carmi, who sensed that she was to play second, suggested to Kommer an arrangement that would save her face. A reconciliation was to take place before the press and photographers. Our names were to be put into a hat and a little child should draw lots. The first name would be the first Madonna’s. To me it sounded a common solution, and Kommer made it less savoury by telling me that the draw was to be cooked and that I was the winner designate.

3 January 1924

I’m battered and bruised as the pulp of an old medlar from Nun rehearsals. At 4 the telephone rang rudely and a peremptory message told me to be at the studio by 5. I rang up Kommer for an explanation. He admitted that it was to meet Carmi and draw the contemptible lots. I said that nothing would drag me out of bed. I disapproved anyway. K. oiled me down and said that Reinhardt minded as much as I did and yet was bowing to the circumstances. So I fetched up at a very disgraceful séance. For our first meeting no one was present but Gest, Reinhardt, de Weerth and Kommer, twenty-four photographers and pressmen. Carmi arrived, terribly flash in black and diamonds, with a left hand’s languid greeting. I felt my Cinderellaism overdone and was horrified by her youth and beauty, height and elegance. She was the woman of the world to my shabby and awkward bumpkin. Her first words were ‘Ora la commedia è finita.’ Mine was ‘Spero,’ which I hope she took wrong. We were then photographed. My spirit was fainting and flaring up alternately. The little child was looked for. We waited and waited. No little child and no time to waste, so Kommer must draw the lot instead, Kommer so much lighter-fingered to pick the prize for me. Just at the moment of drawing Carmi said: ‘Stop! Before we draw I would like to say that if you want the first night so badly I will give it to you. I protested because I created the part, but I will give it to you.’ I was speechless and forgetful that she was guarding herself against certain failure, and it seemed to me for a moment generously fine. The cameras clicked, and a great lump gathered in my throat, so I couldn’t answer anything except ‘I don’t want the first night.’ Kommer’s sensitive hand drew out my name. I felt debased by the beastliness of it all, and raged that I should have to suffer the embarrassment and humiliation of cheating in this country that can’t paint a good production without framing it in glistening mud. They all made it worse still by congratulating me, including Carmi, the tears coursed down my silly old cheeks, and to cap it all Gest said: ‘You’re so ’uman, dear.’ I felt that I wanted to behave dramatically like the Nun and cover my ears and face with my hands and arms, so I found a screened-off corner and sobbed and sulked until Reinhardt and Kommer came and soothed me, both a little ashamed of the proceedings.

4 January

First day of the theatre. Its scaffolding is down. Carmi was there with her axe buried. She put Reinhardt in a rage (my docility has spoilt him) and he told me and Pinchot not to act, but only to mark time before her. The stone coat will be stunning. Pinchot’s father says that my performance of the Nun is ‘bully.’

5 January

Tonight five terrible days of dress rehearsals began. Worse than I thought. The clothes, I fear, may ruin all. Bel Geddes doesn’t know about movement. His cathedral is sublime, but his clothes (like my stone coat) are carapaces, cancelling movement and grace. Krauss lost his temper about his costume. Pinchot and the designer quarrelled permanently, I think because she is too young and rude to forgive the rude, tired and anxious. Schildkraut raged round because his dressing-room isn’t on the stage. Mine isn’t fit to trap a rat in, but I keep my trap shut. Kommer went further than I’ve ever heard him in uncalm when he said that he couldn’t be in two places at once. Reinhardt said: ‘Weiter, weiter, de Weerth, weiter, weiter’ with infinitely weary rage in his lovely voice. Bel Geddes took to not answering to his name and leaving the building. Pinchot cried unceasingly. I had a very bad cold but enjoyed every minute of it until 4 a.m.

Now I’m in bed with a newly-opened telegram of congratulation and wishes for personal success from unknown Lyn Harding! The English on alien soil cling pathetically close. I’m tired, tired. I’ve put some stinking embrocation all over my chest, and onto that I’ve clapped Thermogene smouldering wool, and I’m burning like a crater. I do need you here to laugh at me.

7 January

Cold worse. Nothing but drugs, sweat, dope and poultice. Mother just as bad. Got up for rehearsal. Carmi so difficult that she has been banished for this week. Pinchot’s nose bled at 4, so she left (dressed) for home and with great courage re-dressed when it stopped and took her place until 5.30 a.m. Bertram Cruger is my buckler and staff. He never fails in tender services – coffee in cartons, waiting until all hours. I’m lucky he loves me.

Great depression follows last rehearsals, known no doubt to all actors. Clothes have spoilt everything, so has the set with its unnecessary steps and stairs, pillars and properties, all so much better in the studio. After all, simplicity is of the first importance. No props, no pretence. There is only one prop that matters and that is the Holy Child. I can’t get one made that doesn’t look like a foetus, and no one listens to me because I don’t have to work in with the others and therefore need not be reckoned with. All these contorting nervous fears and fatigue breed terrors of other kinds, never properly under restraint.

5 a.m. I’m just in. I had a miserable bowel-aching day because of no answer to my cable to you. I know myself foolish and tried not to let my fears flame, but they did. So I sent another wire asking Holbrook how you fared.

12 January

Nauseated with misery. Miracle worse than ever. Everything wrong, me included, and nothing ready. Now they’ve ‘braced’ my stone coat with steel, and I can’t get in or out. I’m just home, having had my back broken by Krauss’s straw. He caught me in my dressing-room looking utterly woebegone. We groaned together in pidgin German, and he told me how ten years ago a German novelist had written a book with Reinhardt as the hero. It told of his rise to fame, and in the end this artist-producer goes to a fremdes Land and there he creates what is to be the crown of his genius – a super-colossal production. The night comes and gradually the audience starts hissing and whistling. I felt faint and had to sit down. He then told me that he thought of taking flight tomorrow. He couldn’t face it, he said. He must escape. He is so sadistic that he may have done all this to watch me writhe. He certainly succeeded and I hope felt better. My desperation is in the best theatre tradition and a better augury than satisfaction. Bertram has managed, against all precedents, to get admittance to the rehearsals, so he is always there to any hour. He runs out and buys me milk, and telephones and gets Mother a doctor, and once he even produced a bottle of champagne because Oggie told him to.

15 January

Two lines to take you my love and tell you that it’s all over and successful. I dread tomorrow’s papers. A few contretemps ruined my hopes. I say: ‘He’ll be proud of me’ when the ordeal of immobility seems unbearable.

The press was very good to me. I was not then or ever very anxious to read reviews, and when I did steel myself to the task, however glowing the praise, I felt it insufficient.

16 January

All day I tried to get a rehearsal with the finished stone coat, a necessity that I had never managed. I got it one hour before the bells clanged, summoning New Yorkers to church. The bells are tremendous and ring for half an hour. The coat needs a week’s practice to perfect the carrying round of it (me enclosed) in the finale. This scurrying didn’t add to my peace.

I got on to the stage ten minutes before the play was advertised to begin – already an improvement. As originally planned and rehearsed I was to be in place when the doors opened. Now, with locomotor ataxy legs I merge in (black-cloaked) among a knot of nuns and glide behind the church banner that conceals the holy statue. Behind it I wriggle into my carapace and put on my crown and am handed the Holy Child. What was my horror when they handed me (surreptitiously as rehearsed) a new impossible baby made of snow-white unpainted papier-mâché, a three-year-old, huge and unholdable. I whispered my rage to the praying nuns and in time got the property Child I was accustomed to, with no hole in its poor side to hold it by. The rest went well enough until the last touching moment when I break for a minute out of the stone into the animate to gather up the Nun’s brat, miraculously transfigured by death into the infant Christ. There again lay, in Death’s skeleton hand, the enormous obscene repudiated abortion, glowing with inner electricity connected by a white umbilical cord. I managed somehow to grasp it and was surprised that my stone folds held my rage in bounds. Once ‘off’ I lost my temper as no temperamental prima donna has ever done. It was a vile surprise and ruined the end from an artistic point of view. I was too cross to enjoy the fifteen minutes’ applause and the chancel banked up with flowers and felt outraged at being forced to take calls. A Madonna should not. Geddes threw a faint in the wings and remained for an hour unconscious. Reinhardt cried.

Today I think that I hate the profession. Rehearsing is heaven, but acting too painful. Tomorrow I rehearse the Nun with Carmi. Next day I act it, so fears are without end. So are the dangers, since they’ve jammed all the exits with extra chairs.

WIFE’S PERFORMANCE EXQUISITELY BEAUTIFUL UNQUESTIONABLE WORK OF SENSITIVE ARTIST WITH MANY INDIVIDUAL SUBTLETIES THE RESULT OF THOUGHT AND COMPLETE MASTERY OF RARE RESOURCES.

I am really writing to you about Diana. My dear Duff, she’s too magnificent. I can’t describe how superb she is. There are only a certain number of superlatives … I saw her as the Nun. I was really overcome.

I went with Charles B. Cochran (of London). You remember that he was the first man to produce The Miracle. He told me before we started that he didn’t think he’d enjoy it as he was prejudiced:

(1) against anything but dyed-in-the-wool professionals;

(2) because he had seen Miss Pinchot and thought the show anyway well inferior to his own production.

We arrived late and that’s all wrong. Before I’d been there three minutes I was gasping – really minding what was happening. Forgot the theatre, forgot New York, women, cards and Prohibition, the market, forgot everything but was rivetted (how many ts are there?). There was no nonsense. I have never been so carried away and you know that The Miracle is Diana. 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. The audience groan and writhe. One very soon forgets it’s a play.

I dripped with emotion. Cochran did the same. I was delighted. His voice shook. He said that Diana was the finest actress he had ever seen. Diana is bored to death and very homesick, but there – her performance puts her in the class of the immortals. I can’t describe everything in detail. I thought it wonderful. I fancy though that without Diana one’s rather cynical subconscious self would assert itself. She lifts the whole thing into the sublime.

Again all over. I must be a pretty good actress. It was frightening and flurrying because of the quick changes. One feels like ‘Any more Dickens characters?’ and the man who dives into a mirror and comes up with Pickwick’s bald head or Fagin’s nose. Reinhardt thought ‘Unser Vater’ very good – ‘eine so süsse Stimme.’ For my part, like past childbirth’s pain, I cannot remember how it came, except that I used the American ‘as we forgive those’ as Pinchot does. We never thought that my rasp would be a ‘süsse Stimme.’

26 January

My last excitement and last hope is over and successful. Now no more fright, and the acute longing for you and home is overpowering, yet only two weeks of the sixteen gone. It’s sad that I should have my life’s triumph without you, and you had yours in the war. Our real triumph is our happiness together after so many years (4½!).

The letters drone on. My mother weighed on me. She had had pneumonia and still coughed, and she could not rest or eat. The late theatre hours were her rest from everything disagreeable and, seeing me economising in the luxurious Ambassador Hotel and eating in drugstores, she overdid thrift and could not order an egg. She became desperately weak and her mind was on The Miracle only.

I went to a boot-shop, Mother with me. She lay in motionless coma while I tried on a hundred pairs. The owner of the business said he had heard that The Miracle was wonderful and that he was going one night. The word roused Mother from her coma (due to malnutrition) and she shouted ‘Not Mondays or Fridays’ (Carmi’s days) and relapsed again.

I’ve bought a glorious fur coat made of honey-coloured lamb or pony or maybe foxhound.

16 February

Had tea with good Schuyler Parsons. He promised me a coat for my old old Russian Volotskoy, once a Lord Chief Justice or a Sir Thomas Lipton or something of that kidney, who makes sixteen dollars a week in the crowd and speaks Academy French. When I asked him whether he had no better coat than the cotton one he wears, he said ‘Pas précisément.’ Schuyler had pink-eye, so I didn’t go in – just grabbed the coat and ran for it.

I went to a charity ball and was cheered to the echo. Then I sat in a box and was cheered again, and the limelight was thrown on me and I had to stand and bow. I thought I should die, yet I should have been so pleased. Many would have loved it.

Hoytie Wyborg, who with her sisters had taken London by storm in 1914, guided me gently through the New York mazes. Home and love sickness grew upon me with the weeks, though I had a lot to support me – a few new friends who would be lifelong and some old English ones. Valentine Castlerosse, a constant comfort and chuckle, lived in the same hotel. My mother was there for three months. She would not go home in spite of petitions. She was giving exhibitions of her pictures, and was happy day and night. Olga Lynn, a rip-roaring success in New York, was giving concerts in candle-lit drawing-rooms. Artur Rubinstein, already famous, was there, and Augustus John to paint Joe Widener. Sert was painting gloriously ebullient frescoes of Sinbad the Sailor for the Cosden house in Palm Beach. Kommer was ever near, trying to teach me German by reading Schnitzler’s Grüne Kakadu while my mother drew us. Snow and rain fell, and fire-alarm sirens at night kept me awake. Central Park looked as dank as a prison-yard. I teased my poor friend Bertram about his country’s shortcomings, his accent and his ice-creams, and he laughed at my English failings. We went a lot to silent films, in enormous sofa-stalls, and I would cry when I saw the King in his coach and tell Bertram that it was made of pure gold. He was patient and told me to wait for the spring to bring magnolias to Central Park and dogwood to the country.

In New York the streets were paved with gold. Everyone I knew of every class was flourishing, moving further west, getting a new radio set, buying a fur coat or a better car. I was used to our country ‘going to the dogs’ and was incredulous and then fascinated to watch a story of success unfolding.

I love walking the streets. I passed a shop dedicated to dressing the very fat. ‘Stylish Stout Inc’ it was called.

I thought I’d go and see Bob Chandlerfn1 in his big wandering house-workshop. Terrible smells, enough to anaesthetise one. Chandler still his old entertaining inaudible self, gay and alive. In his attic studio we found two old crony topers drinking neat whisky (a cat in a separate chair drawn up to the grog-tray), both boon companions fresh from inebriate homes, one for dropsy, the other for d.t.’s Bob asked a lot about you and kept repeating: ‘To think of you two bums marrying.’

The nest-egg was being laid. After a struggle where I showed, to my surprise, an iron strength, I got another 150 dollars a week, and every extra matinée, of which there were many (one for Eleanora Duse, two or three for the profession – any excuse was jumped at) brought me fifty dollars more. Reprints of my old articles written by Duff, a testimonial for Pond’s products and austere economy would lay a bigger egg. Besides, tours were already being planned, a silent film was to be made and a season in London was contemplated. The future was secure, but I refused to rejoice.

I have such fearful nights. It has to do with separation, of course. Odd, and I’m rather glad that it should get no better. I wake with a long anguished coming-to and a feeling of sinking death merged with nightmare dread, and a muddled recollection of anguish that makes my sleep-confused brain think that an omen of disaster to you has been sent me. This I can’t throw off. It happens often.

Duff’s daily letters were the opposite of mine, always cheerful, packed with affection, social life, quips and quotations from books that he was reading, poems, jokes, waiting for ships with letters, looking for constituencies, hoping for one at Melton Mowbray (soon snapped up by another candidate) and asking whether he would be wrong to leave the Foreign Office. Anyhow he was going to. Did I think he was right? I wrote:

What of your life’s plans? You know that I’ve always been for throwing up the F.O. and now I suppose I can always make money should anything go wrong. We cannot spoil a magnificent ship for £1000 p.a. (taxed at that). Mr Strasburger says he’d gladly pay all your election expenses. Bear that in mind. Why should he?

Duff’s determination hardened as several constituencies appeared and disappeared. There was no hurry. A General Election was not expected until the autumn. Meanwhile he could work and play and come to fetch me away when my contract ended. He sounded on admirable terms with my family, and wrote in reply to a suggestion that my mother should be sent for, as her happy life in New York was killing her:

I think your father is having a riotous time. He is putting down new pile carpet all over Arlington Street and recovering the chairs. He has bought a Rolls Royce and is having the Duchess’s car entirely remade. He has a luncheon party every day. It might also be thought that Sister Malony, who comes in at the end of every luncheon party looking quite pretty, very painted and beautifully dressed, is his mistress. Any outside observer would say that she was. Perhaps he will leave her everything.

I could not tell my mother this alarming news, so she stayed until her wife’s conscience smote her in late April. Then Oggie developed chicken-pox (of course I thought that it was smallpox) and quarantine gave my mother an extra three weeks. Duff wrote in March:

There is the faintest shade of a breath of a ghost of a touch of spring in the air. How can I face the reality without you? From you I cannot be absent in the spring.

We were indeed both idolisers of spring. Already new plans and sailings were being studied. With half the term still to go a further shadow came to darken the gloom. The theatre asked for another month. The nest-egg would grow larger by 1800 pounds, but could I endure? Spring comes like a bounding hound in New York. Park Avenue wears a transfigured look. The sky is a glimmering crown. A few of my letters cheer up and see the funny side, and Duff writes scoldingly of my ingratitude to God, my fears, and above all my doubt of his fidelity. I must have taunted him with a familiar name used too often or, worse, an oft-repeated new Christian name. I doubted too his remaining staid as he had become since marriage, and feared a return to reckless living. He reproved me by a sonnet which, with the help of spring, strengthened me for a spell:

Doubt not, brave heart, oh never dare to doubt,

Lest care and calumny should breed distrust,

Lest the fine steel of faith should gather rust,

And we should lose what we were lost without.

Our castle of delight is girt about

By envious allies, Jealousy, Disgust,

Weariness, Separation, Age and Lust,

And still the traitor at the gate is Doubt.

Mount guard with me, beloved; you and I

Will baffle our besiegers with disdain.

The royal standard of our troth flies high

As e’er it flew, and shall not dip again;

So all assaults shall only serve to prove

Our faith impregnable, our changeless love.

17 March

I think your criticism of ‘allies’ is right. All that line is bad. ‘Disgust’ is nonsense. You might sometimes irritate but could never disgust me. Suppose we substitute:

Our citadel of light is girt about

With swords of darkness, allies of the dust,

Jealousy, Separation, Lies and Lust.

New York

Imagine my surprise when the manicurist of Jolies Mains gave me a rich man’s card and told me that he had suggested that if I want any fun I should telephone him. ‘I know as you’re acting the Madonna you have to behave circumspectly, but when you want to break out, just collect a bunch of girls and go round to his place. He’ll give you a good time.’

Yesterday I sat next Stanislavsky and Douglas Fairbanks. S. needed the French tongue and it wore me out. He told me his stage theories. They are so different to my practice that I got depressed.

Next day

Stanislavsky says that I’m a great artist. Tell Maurice to put that in his pipe and smoke it.

Jo Davidson the sculptor made a bust of me as the Madonna. I remember spring mornings (the magnolias out in a night) walking across Central Park in the electric air to his studio, Valentine Castlerosse sometimes with me. I would take my Bedlington terrier (looking more like a lamb than a dog) without the obligatory muzzle, and Irish Valentine would blanch and whimper with fear of the police arresting him as accomplice to this contempt of by-laws. Jo and I would cook hamburgers in the studio after the sittings, and we would laugh and I would forget to moan. Harrington Mann painted a lovely picture of my statue, and it stood in a Fifth Avenue window. In 1931 it was on an easel in the Drury Lane foyer, and I have never seen it since, any more than I have seen Jo’s statue, or an ample baroque bust by the Belgian Rousseau, a life-size portrait by Sir John Lavery and several McEvoys. And then one is surprised at losing spectacles and railway tickets!

So long ago, but freshly remembered now, are the people and the houses of Long Island that used to spoil me, the bowers of dogwood, the green golf-courses (on which I never played), holding on to rails under leaning sails on the dashing Sound, and the natural hospitality that became dearer to me as their spring and my departure met. Gone were my glooms.

I think so much of your returning to me. I lie for hours making little arrangements of how I will go to Cunard’s or the White Star and get a permit for Quarantine, and how I’ll sneak up the gangway with the camera-men, and of what I’ll wear (it will be May, warm and sunny). It makes me forget all my woes.

From now until Duff’s arrival the letters throb with anticipation. There is no other theme. It might be war-leave over again. I was always happiest with the theatre people. I knew that I should have pangs when the cast broke up, but then The Miracle was born to be a phoenix, with no language to stamp out its fires. Already its pyres were built in two continents, and we all knew that we should be together again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY LADY DIANA COOPER

LADY DIANA COOPER

The Light of Common Day

Illustrations

1

The Miracle