American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (7 page)

Duff had been close to Churchill from the beginning and he
had to wait for the great man’s return to power to resume his career. He would briefly serve as minister of information in 1940 before becoming special envoy to the Far East. Finally, in January 1944, he left for Algiers, where he became the British government’s representative to General de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation. Working with touchy and distrustful de Gaulle was difficult and required all of Duff’s patience and tact. Not without reason, the general interpreted every move as an Anglo-American plot to prevent him from taking power in postwar France. Caught between Churchill and de Gaulle, two quick-tempered giants who had decided from the outset that they would not get along, Duff managed to be respected by both men, and to make himself useful. His reward was the job he had been hoping for: ambassador to Paris.

At the Hôtel de Charost

Diana was not thrilled at the idea of leaving Algiers. Had she been given the choice, she would have preferred to continue living in her pajamas until noon rather than face the responsibilities of an important embassy in a country for which she felt no particular attraction. Moreover, Diana’s favorite house was always the one she was about to leave. Still, she could not let Duff down, so, once again, she underwent a transformation and turned herself into an unforgettable ambassadress. The Hôtel de Charost, their new residence on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was a vast, peaceful, and elegant house imbued with the spirit of Pauline Bonaparte, who had once filled it with the carefree merriment of her parties. Diana was a worthy successor. Whether a grand reception or an
intimate dinner, every event held at the embassy had to be unique. Diana boldly ignored protocol, inviting her friends, mixing guests according to her fancy, and creating seating arrangements that paired off Aragon with Malraux; a comic like Noël Coward with the new prime minister, Clement Attlee; or Daisy Fellowes, reputed to be the most stylish woman on two continents, with the old Communist Marcel Cachin. This easygoing attitude led to criticism, both in Paris and in London. The Coopers, it was said, ought to be more careful about opening the embassy to people whose wartime activities had been less than impeccable. These mutterings went unheeded. Diana obeyed her own laws, and Duff, for his part, refused to blame those who had shown less courage than he had. He had no intention of getting involved in the internal conflicts of the French.

Whatever their reason for wanting to be asked, the guests all agreed that Lady Diana was simply marvelous. She entranced a number of men, from stout British statesman Ernest Bevin, who called her “Luff” and often tried to proposition her, to the last bey of Tunis, with whom she communicated by drawing on the table during an entire dinner. Cocteau immortalized the “pale blue pistol shot of her gaze,”
¹
and she dazzled the writer François Mauriac with “her adorable beauty.”
²

Thus, without even trying to compete with other salons (the musical evenings of Marie-Blanche de Polignac, Lise Deharme’s mezzanine, Florence Gould’s lunches, the meetings of the Académie Française at Edmée de La Rochefoucauld’s, cosmopolitan gatherings at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s, and artistic ones at the house of Marie-Laure de Noailles), the British Embassy became one of the most sought-after centers of Parisian
social life. Although she sometimes felt breathless from so much activity, Diana was happy as long as her husband was pleased.

Susan Mary entered the Coopers’ inner circle at the end of 1945. Diana had heard about her and invited her to the embassy with Bill. The beautiful Englishwoman was always surrounded by a bevy of admirers—courtiers, her detractors might have said. Her devoted retinue served and flattered her, treating her like a goddess, although on bad days she felt herself fit for the madhouse. To become part of the clique, one had to be beautiful, amusing, or both, and not too obscure or unconnected. Susan Mary met the requirements. She was pretty enough for the fearsome editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
, Carmel Snow, to have her regularly photographed, and so striking that Balenciaga sold her dresses at a special price for her to wear at society affairs as a
mannequin du monde
. She was also fashionable enough to be a regular guest of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Paris and Antibes. She could be trusted to make conversation about anything, from politics to gossip, and, unlike other society women, she was truly interested in the future of humanity. She read the morning papers not just to shine in the evening but because she had a genuine hope that peace might last and be even more exciting than war.

Still, Susan Mary was not at ease with her glamorous image. When Carmel Snow’s assistants admired photographs of her reclining on a sofa in a low-cut evening gown and said she looked like a painting by David, “
mais très
ladylike,” she disagreed, thinking she had an idiotic, frozen expression. She blamed herself for idleness since she had stopped working for the Red Cross and considered her French inadequate—for years she would keep
making mistakes on the gender of nouns. The letters she sent home dwelled on supposed failures and brushed aside achievements. She described going to tea at the house of a Frenchman who immediately tried to get her into bed. She fought back like a frightened schoolgirl and fled, instead of withdrawing gracefully. The next day, her coat, hat, and gloves were returned and the rejected party became a close friend. She sighed with relief and noted, “Frenchmen may be wonderful lovers. I wouldn’t know. Certainly they are very good thwarted lovers, bearing no rancor.”
³

Another story she told against herself was about the charity ball she organized for war orphans. She had reserved the Pré Catelan, a famous restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, for May 28, 1946, but nobody was buying tickets. In despair, Susan Mary went one morning to the embassy, begging Diana Cooper for help. Sitting in her bed of red damask, a massive Empire affair with carved bare-breasted Egyptian figures, the ambassadress, who loved acting as fairy godmother, hatched a plan. The next day, she and Susan Mary made the rounds of the couturiers, ordering fabric, reserving masks, and loudly congratulating themselves on their good luck at finding a few things still available so near to the date of an important ball. The rumor spread, the tickets sold like hotcakes, and the fete was saved.

Susan Mary had long learned to hide and overcome her lingering feelings of inadequacy. Even more than Washington, Paris demanded that she camouflage any weakness and refuse to feel sorry for herself. One had to keep in line with the relentless perfection of society life. So Susan Mary played her role at embassy receptions with quiet grace, then went home and
mischievously commented on them with Bill. Small parties were the best. At the end of the day, the regulars would gather around the fireplace in the green salon on the second floor and drink their liquor neat. There was Evelyn Waugh, whose friendship with Diana was as famous as the fits of rage he sparked off in Duff; Nancy Mitford, who watched her lover, Gaston Palewski, flirt with other women while noting the idiosyncrasies of her fellow guests for her next novel; and, above all, Louise de Vilmorin, enthroned at Diana’s side, gloomy when neglected and brilliant when everybody was listening to her. One evening, Susan Mary witnessed her fling a lump of butter to the ceiling (where it stuck) to bring herself back to the center of attention. The fiery intensity of Cocteau’s monologues scared her a little, but she thought it charming that Christian Bérard should throw himself at her feet in mock worship every time he saw her in a new dress.

Susan Mary was even more interested by the company of politicians and diplomats. There was no vulgar, personal motive in her desire to be near power. She liked seeing “history on the boil,” as Nancy Mitford put it, being present in a room where the fate of the world was being played out. She did not ask to be on the stage itself; a good place in the audience was more than enough, one from which she could see everything and be seen. For years, the British Embassy provided her a seat in the front row.

Indeed, there was much to be seen in 1946. Even as the peace treaties that were meant to put an end to the war were being negotiated, distrust grew among the Soviets, the English, and the Americans over German war reparations, elections in Eastern
Europe, and the United Nations’ regulation of atomic energy. On March 5, Churchill was the first to speak of the iron curtain that had fallen across Europe. Familiar with embassies, Susan Mary got to know the leading players: Ernest Bevin, who had replaced Anthony Eden as British foreign secretary; Churchill, out of office but a frequent visitor; and Vyshinsky and Molotov, the Russian ministers of foreign affairs who represented the Soviet threat. A conference on Asian affairs was held that summer at Fontainebleau; Susan Mary was introduced to, and greatly impressed by, Ho Chi Minh. Usually she behaved beautifully at these events, but one evening in September, she tripped up. Seated between Duff and Cocteau at a dinner, she mentioned the speech that had just been given by the American secretary of state, James Byrnes, concerning the need to rebuild Germany. It was quite the wrong thing to do. Ambassador Cooper held views similar to those of the French and was hostile to the idea of the German state rising anew. He exploded with rage. “Duff Cooper can be frightening,” she later concluded.
⁴

Still, thanks to Susan Mary, the Pattens had become a fixture in the enchanted life of the Hôtel de Charost.

A Strange Affair

What does a kiss mean? The final touch to a pleasant evening, a sweet mistake, one drink too many? A trial run, a question asked,
a promise given? A bolt of lightning, intense desire and fire in the veins? On February 27, 1947, after a dinner at the British Embassy, Susan Mary Patten kissed Duff Cooper, and the solid foundation of her well-ordered life shifted forever.

She had stopped loving her husband a couple of years earlier, and had taken pains not to let him notice. Gentle, kindly Bill deserved the pretense of conjugal bliss. Too many people, she felt, let the fabric of their marriages unravel out of carelessness or a misguided idea of truthfulness. There was no reason for Bill to catch cold just because she had fallen out of love. He had enough to worry about between his asthma, which had not improved in spite of treatments, and the constant threat of losing his job and being called back to the United States. It was best that he remain under the illusion that their relationship still made sense and had substance. Susan Mary had suffered a miscarriage early in their marriage, and the absence of children already made him very sad—she did not want to add to his grief.

Thus did Susan Mary show remarkable self-control in keeping up the appearance of happiness when the real thing eluded her. She would simply turn away when her husband’s eyes sought her own or when his hands ran over her unresisting body.

Life is simple when the heart is at rest; so simple that one almost forgets what love feels like. Susan Mary did not immediately understand the nature of the storm that was stirring inside her. One month after their first kiss, Duff went on vacation to Monte Carlo and Susan Mary began writing him cheerful and affectionate letters with increasing frequency. Bedridden with a severe case of gout, Duff enjoyed her stories: an afternoon at Versailles where she accidentally came across a friend making
love behind a bush; an unexpected visit from the pompous and insinuating author André Maurois; a weekend stay with Prince Antoine de Ligne at Belœil Castle in Belgium, where the painting above her bed had fallen off the wall, nearly braining her to death in the middle of the night. Duff wrote back in the same vein. When Susan Mary discovered she was not his only correspondent, she feigned indignation. “How many wretched women in Paris, London and New York do you write those lovely letters to? A good two dozen I should think.”
⁶

On April 29, she opened her heart to Duff, admitting she had fallen madly in love with him a month before. She did not want to hurt Bill, and she admired Diana more than anybody. “I could no more be jealous of her than of God.”
⁷
She hated cheap romance. Perhaps Duff existed only in her imagination, as he himself had suggested, or perhaps it was the reverse. “Has it not occurred to you that you might also have created me out of your illness and boredom? I am not beautiful, you know, but have only a sort of surface prettiness.”
⁸
She was afraid. She left the decision to him.

For Duff, the whole affair was highly flattering and somewhat disturbing. He was not in love with Susan Mary. He was seldom in love, as a matter of fact. He was straightforward about those things, to the point of bluntness. He took his pleasure as he took champagne, frequently, remorselessly, and without measure. Flings began and ended with a laugh. He did not care for women to stir up his life and he did not want to upset theirs. He obeyed a strict set of rules that had long organized the double lives of the English aristocracy, rules as commonly known as those of cricket: keep away from unmarried girls, make compromises, avoid
scandal. But Duff also truly enjoyed a woman’s company, and he was artfully versed in converting love into friendship. Nothing had prepared him for an earnest American girl married to a Boston puritan.

In truth, Susan Mary had come into Duff’s life at exactly the right moment. Weakened by illness, he was also concerned about his professional future. He had been appointed by Churchill, but Churchill had just been rejected by the British. In spite of Ernest Bevin’s friendliness, Duff could not help wondering how long the Labor government would keep him in Paris now that a Franco-British treaty had been signed. Besides, he was sentimentally at leisure. His most recent mistress, Gloria Rubio, had left for Kenya, and since the spring of 1946 he was, much to his relief, only a “confidant and
copain
”
⁹
to Louise de Vilmorin. Their very public affair had begun in November 1944, and Louise had lost no time moving into the embassy, using the excuse of a cleverly timed fever. For a long period of time, she reigned over this “strange Hôtel Négresco,”
¹⁰
as Cocteau described the embassy, playing with verve the triple role of invalid, official mistress, and best friend to her lover’s wife. Indeed, Diana had been as charmed as her husband. It was never clear whether lungs, love, or friendship were keeping Louise in a British bed. Duff’s feelings changed, but his protection and affection for witty Louise remained. She translated his books and speeches, wrote poetry in his honor, and admired his verses.