Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (31 page)

In Britain, even after the war, actresses were assumed to have a colourful reputation. The view expressed by one late-nineteenth-century critic that it was impossible ‘for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession’ still lingered.
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And if a career in the theatre carried a taint of disgrace, acting on screen was even more dubious. It had been perfectly acceptable for Diana to perform her patriotic cameo for Griffiths (even the Prime Minister Lloyd George had made an appearance), but a commercial film was a very different prospect.

Movie making was still a mongrel industry. Certain studios did a lively business in pornography, and even the cinemas themselves had a reputation for the illicit. While the new picture houses were large and lavishly appointed, at the opposite end of the spectrum were filthy, smoky dives, notorious for the activities that took place under cover of darkness. The idea of an aristocrat willingly placing herself in such a context was a jolt to British sensibilities, and not only to those of Diana’s family. When she came to make her first film a couple of years later, she would be sent hate mail by disgusted, betrayed members of the public. ‘You THING,’ wrote one furious correspondent. ‘How can you, born in high Social position, so prostitute your status for paltry monetary considerations?’
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Back in 1919, the opposition to Diana’s putative film career was nowhere near as sensational as the story reported in
Variety
magazine, which claimed she had been threatened with exile by her family if she accepted Griffiths’s offer and even banished from court by the Queen. The Duke and the Duchess
were
strongly against it, as were other members of the Rutland family, who felt their collective dignity was under threat. But the main reason why Diana did not fight for it was that she was just one month away from her wedding, and not prepared to take on another battle.

But sixteen months later she was differently situated, and when a new offer came from the British producer and director J. Stuart Blackton, she was determined to act on it. Blackton had, until recently, been working in New York, where his development of animation techniques had brought him professional and financial success. Competition from expensive new productions emerging from the Hollywood studios had, however, forced him back to Britain. He was now hoping to relaunch his career with a new genre of films – period British dramas cast with British stars.

For this, Diana was ideal. She might not be a professional actor, but as Duff rather enviously noted in his diary, there was no one other than Kitchener ‘who could equal her popularity “with the mob” ’.
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She was regularly stopped in the street by young women asking for her autograph, and when she entered a theatre she was sometimes greeted with a spontaneous round of applause. For such popularity, Blackton was willing to pay a high fee. His offer of £12,000 for two films might not match Griffiths’s, but to a delirious Diana it still seemed ‘preposterously big’.

She broke the news to her family with nervous defiance. Yet while there was some reflex protest, she encountered less antagonism than she had feared. It helped that the two roles for which Blackton wanted her were far from vampish: a seventeenth-century aristocrat in the first film, and Elizabeth I in the second. The money also argued her cause. In fact, as soon as Diana’s mother heard the sums involved, she became a most enthusiastic supporter. The most disconcerting opposition at this point came from the Actors’ Association, who delivered a formal complaint to Blackton about ‘titled folk’ taking work away from ‘people who have to live by acting’.
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Diana was determined to justify herself. Silent cinema was the ideal medium in which to make her acting debut, since there were no lines to learn and her lack of voice training would not be an issue. She assumed that all her appearances at costume balls and tableaux vivants had trained her to look the part of a period character. Even so, when she began to film Lady Beatrice, the lovely, hare-brained heroine of
The Glorious Adventure,
it was much harder work than she expected. The brute physical discomfort of the process surprised her, the burning heat of the lights and the weight of the costumes. She was thrown by the enervating rhythm of filming, the long waits punctuated by concentrated flurries of action. And any illusions she’d cherished about the artistic quality of the project were dashed at a very early stage.
The Glorious Adventure
seemed to her inexcusably full of historical inaccuracies (she particularly minded the portrayal of Samuel Pepys as a pimp), and Blackton seemed more concerned with meeting his studio schedules than eliciting quality performances from his cast. One of the things that galled her most was the age of Gerald Lawrence, her leading man – Diana had first seen him playing romantic leads at Her Majesty’s Theatre when she was only five.

Yet she had survived far greater discomfort working at Guy’s and, according to Blackton’s assistant Felix Orman, she was ‘most democratic and serious about her work … the least troublesome member of the cast’.
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The film opened to a glare of publicity: the department store Selfridges featured it in a large window display and crowds massed to watch the actors arrive for the premiere at Covent Garden on 16 January 1922.
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The press, especially the Beaverbrook-owned
Express
and Rothermere’s
Daily Mail,
were generous in their praise. And Diana was judged a triumph, especially by her mother and Duff, who preened over her beauty on screen: ‘her gestures … replete with dignity and breeding, which of course one never sees in film actresses’.
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Nine months later, when shooting began on
The Virgin Queen,
Diana was confident of delivering an even better performance, although far more cynical about the work involved. The costumes for this production were burdensome (farthingales, ruffs and ‘collars like tennis racquets’); for the sake of accuracy, she had to shave off her eyebrows (a fact that was unctuously reported in Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
as a ‘splendid sacrifice to her sense of art and duty’).
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And Diana was feeling particularly irritable the day she was interviewed by an American journalist and was hard-pressed to fake any enthusiasm for the film: ‘Good God,’ she exploded to Duff in frustration and contempt, ‘it’s only for money and distantly imagined fun.’
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Yet the money was still very necessary. Duff had just forwarded a hefty bill for the rates on Gower Street, and Diana was not so disillusioned with Blackton as to turn down a possible third film with him, this one based on the historical novel
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
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It had a resonance for her, as the real-life Haddon Hall was part of the Rutland estate and a Rutland ancestor featured as the novel’s hero. She thought she might even be able to maintain control over its period accuracy. But she hadn’t even begun filming when, in the summer of 1923, more elevated offer of work came to her, and Diana was able to leave the compromised world of cinema for the live stage.

Max Reinhardt was widely assumed to be a genius of the theatre, his productions a spectacular fusion of sound and light effects, drama and pageantry, and before the war his mime-play
The Miracle
had become a European phenomenon. In 1911 Diana had been one of hundreds of thousands held captive by its London staging, with a cast of two thousand dancers, actors and musicians telling the emotionally charged story of a young nun who strays from her religion and has to be saved by the miraculous intervention of the Madonna.

It was a style of ritualized, choreographed performance never seen on the Western stage before, and it developed into something of a cult, as famous and fabulous as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. During the war, plans for an American season had stalled, but in 1923 the banker and art patron Otto Kahn backed a new revival, to be staged in the Century Theatre, New York. He was investing $600,000 in the production, and it was partly at his instigation that Reinhardt had begun looking for a new female lead who could share the role of Madonna with its original actress, Maria Carmi.

Carmi had trained in Reinhardt’s own dramatic academy, and she enjoyed a considerable following in Europe. But the American box office required a star with a contrasting twist, a more saleable back story, and it was Reinhardt’s producer Morris Gest who had suggested Diana. As he extravagantly explained to Reinhardt, she possessed a style of refinement that was guaranteed to capture the American imagination: ‘She doesn’t seem to touch the ground when she walks,’ he claimed. ‘A more aristocratic, more sympathetic and beautiful woman for the part we could never find.’
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Gest was so in thrall to this vision of Lady Diana Cooper that when she agreed to meet him at the Savoy Hotel, he was disappointed to see her arrive alone, without any kind of retinue. He was also surprised by how easy she was to intimidate. Diana had been greatly moved by the invitation to work with Reinhardt, but Gest, with his snappy American manner, long hair and loud clothes, was not at all what she was expecting. She was too disconcerted to protest when he told her to raise her skirts a little so that he could check the shapeliness of her calves, and she failed to recover herself in time to press for the weekly rate that she’d been hoping for: $2,000 rather than the already extraordinary $1,500 that she’d been offered.

She also accepted Reinhardt’s condition that she travel out to his Salzburg schloss in order to audition for the role. It was to be one of the most intimidating experiences of her life, as she was closeted alone with the maestro for over an hour, miming the scene in which the statue of the Madonna slowly and impressively comes to life. She’d had no idea of how to prepare herself, beyond finding a skirt that she could drape over her head in a vaguely religious style, but she’d hoped her one year of dance training would sustain her while she tried to communicate a rapt, physical intensity. She was obviously successful, even though Reinhardt later intimated that what had most impressed him was the fact that when he’d talked to Diana about his vision of the story, she had burst into tears.

It seemed to her that she had done well, but during her stay in Salzburg she had her first inkling of how cut-throat the theatrical profession could be. Maria Carmi regarded her as a threat and was already trying to undermine her credibility with Reinhardt, spreading malicious gossip about Diana’s drinking and drug addiction, even cabling to suggest that her room be searched for empty gin bottles and needles. However, despite Carmi’s threat to sue the production for £20,000 if she had to share her role, contracts were eventually signed. On 26 October, Diana had her hair bobbed short in preparation for her conquest of New York – challenging a reproachful Duff ‘to mention any woman [he] admired who still had long hair’
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– and a month later she was boarding the
SS Aquitania
for the crossing to America.

Normally Diana relished the adventure of travel, yet she was surprisingly apprehensive about this voyage. Although she was older than Tallulah and more sophisticated than Josephine, an Atlantic crossing was no less of a journey into the unknown for her than it was for them. During the first two days she was soothed by the tranquil weather and the presence of Duff, who’d been given leave from the Foreign Office to accompany her. In contrast to her previous experience of travel – the family gyrations around Europe, for which the Duchess insisted on packing food and clothing sufficient for a year – this six-day voyage appeared all streamlined efficiency and luxury. She and Duff were childishly impressed by the spaciousness of their first-class cabin, by the Louis XIV opulence of their dining room and by the incredible modernity of the ship’s amenities, which included a spa, a gymnasium, dance bands and a seemingly inexhaustible variety of cocktails and cut flowers.

All this meant nothing, however, when conditions turned stormier. Always inclined to dark imaginings, and haunted by images of the
Titanic
disaster, Diana was terrified by the steely grey waves rearing up against the horizon. She went to the ship’s doctor to beg for a calmative bromide, enquiring plaintively, ‘I suppose there are any amount of frightened people like me?’ The doctor, too busy to concern himself with the nerves of the rich, replied brusquely, ‘Sometimes a few emigrants in the hold.’
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But Diana’s nerves weren’t just reacting to the weather. The closer they drew to New York, the more anxious she became about the fact that she would be spending nearly six months alone there, without Duff. She continued to suffer from periods of wavering uncertainty, when she feared that her personality lacked a solid centre and that all she amounted to was an ‘aura’ of social dazzle. But in their three and a half years of marriage she’d learned to anchor herself to Duff’s solidity and worldliness. And just as she liked to claim that she’d been ‘born to be held safely in Duffy’s arms’,
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she also liked to believe that he relied equally on her, for her ease in large social situations and her ability to make him laugh.

So closely meshed had they become that she doubted her ability to survive their separation. What she feared even more, however, was Duff’s guaranteed ability to do so. Much, much later, she would claim that her husband’s promiscuity had never really troubled her. She would rationalize that his incurable susceptibility to sex and her own comparable lack of interest were merely symptomatic of a general law: ‘like most men, Duff couldn’t have enough … like most well brought up girls of my generation I was not much interested …’
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She came to trust that his affairs were never more than passing diversions.
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His mistresses might be ‘the flowers’ but she was ‘the tree’.