Gotham Diary:
After the Ball
6 February 2014
Everyone, but everyone who was anyone in le monde, circa 1950, appears in Thierry Coudert’s rather dispiriting tome, Café Society — everyone but Nancy Mitford. I made the mistake of picking the book up this morning, after reading the Times, because I hadn’t felt up to the chore of excavating it from the pile on the writing table in the living room yesterday. (It used to be at the bottom, but now it rests atop Allure.) I feared that I was on the edge of a cold yesterday morning, and exploited this worry to take it pretty easy all day. This morning, I feel somewhat more robust. I must make myself devote a few hours to paperwork this afternoon, or I shall be thoroughly demoralized. I shall listen to Der Rosenkavalier and plow through.
In Café Society, I encountered the faces of many people I’d been reading about in Diana Cooper’s letters, thanks to which, in many cases, they’ve acquired stable places in my memory. That many of them were interesting and amusing people cannot be doubted, and they seem to have had a lot of fun when they weren’t dolled up for dancing. When they were dolled up for dancing, they frequently had their pictures taken, and the pictures are not pretty. Money, couture, gilt, starch, disdain, envy, beauty products, the ravages of ageing, and more money — these are what the cameras captured. It’s a kind of hell. That’s how Diana Cooper seems to have felt about balls, although she never missed one. Noblesse oblige, I suppose.
I remembered that, in The Last of the Duchess, Caroline Blackwood paid a visit to Lady Norwich (Lady Diana Cooper that was; when her husband was given a peerage, she complained to her son about her “big step down”), and I thought I’d revisit the interview to see how closely Cooper’s voice resembled the one in her letters to her son. I found there to be a perfect match. To Blackwood, the octagenerian complains about hating being old, but she has a way of making her complaints amusing. It’s as though she knew how to infuse her speech with her great beauty. Eventually, Cooper got round to talking about the Duchess of Windsor. She told a story about an embarrassing evening at Elsa Maxwell’s, followed, at the Duchess’s insistence, by a frolic at a nightclub called Monseigneur, throughout which the Duchess found various ways of humiliating her husband.
It’s about the worst thing that I’ve ever read about the woman, and I’d like to hear a second account, because Diana didn’t find Wallis congenial. Anyway, I returned to the letters, where, wouldn’t you know, I came upon the very same story, this time written days after the event, not recounted decades later. The earlier version is, as you might imagine, less pointed in its details, and the bad behavior seems sillier and less nasty. Years of retelling made the story shapelier, and nowhere moreso than at the end. Cooper shared a ride with the demon of the evening, Jimmy Donahue, the gay Woolworth heir with whom the Duchess was conducting a flagrant, and possibly even unchaste, affair.
In the car he came quite clean. “Lady D,” he took to calling me. “Do you hate me for all the scandal? — it’s not our fault you know, it’s the newspapers. Isn’t Wallis your favourite duchess? She is mine — or would you rather have Alice Gloucester? I adore Wallis — she knows she’s only got to call on Jimmy and I’ll anything for her, I love her — like my mother you know — not any other way because I’m not that sort,” etc etc. I don’t write what I answered, it seemed useless to say much to someone quite beside themselves. I said the indiscretion of it all was idiotic and wounding and unsuitable to the Duke. Isn’t it all desperately sad? He showed nothing, I have to admit, on his royal wizened face but it it’s true and he learns it, the wife is gone, the legend dead, he’ll have to throw himself off the Empire State Building.
I include the peroration because it contradicts what Cooper told Blackwood all those years later: “The Duke immediately started to cry, he felt so humiliated.”
“It was ghastly,” Lady Diana told me. “The whole evening was ghastly. And once it was over, I ended up alone with Donahue. I had to drop him home in a car. I couldn’t bear him. He was so pleased with himself. He lolled around on the car cushion looking as puffed as a toad because he had proved he had the power to cause distress. I thought he was seriously cruel and common. I really loathed the way he talked about the Duchess. The car had no glass partition and he embarrassed me because the chauffeur could hear everything we said. “Don’t you love ‘Our Duchess’?” Donahue said to me. “Don’t you think ‘Our Duchess’ is fantastic?”
Lady Diana had tried to snub him. “I happen to be the daughter of a Duchess,” she said that she’d hissed at Donahue. “So Wallis can’t ever be ‘Our Duchess’ to me.”
Trust me, if Cooper had actually wound off such a zinger, John Julius would have been the first to read about it.
It’s fun to read about these shenanigans, at least when retold by someone clever. That’s what makes Nancy Mitford’s omission from Café Society so galling. It’s true that she wasn’t really part of it, and rarely appeared even at the fringe. She got an invitation to Charlie de Beistegui’s famous ball at the Palazzo Labia — the high point of both the 1951 Venice Film Festival and café society itself — but decided against going because the costume would cost too much, plus Venice. Mitford didn’t have the money. She didn’t have a husband with money, either. She was the mistress of a man who preferred not to be seen with her in public. But she knew all the interesting society folk in Paris and London, and she wrote about them in her copious letters. She’s the only reason, really, why I know anything about all of this, and why I care.
The pictures in Café Society, alluring as they occasionally are, make me rather ashamed of caring. I did get what I was after, though, a knockout photograph of Lady Diana Cooper being walked into the grand ball. She seems deeply frightened beneath her stunning looks, and that’s part of what makes them stunning. (She was very shy, I read, although I find it hard to believe.) It’s as though she has gotten stuck playing the Madonna in The Miracle, and can’t move. Having experimented, lightly, with plastic surgery, she looks magnificent for her age, 59. But she does look 59, if only in the eyes.
She doesn’t mention the ball in the letters, apparently because their recipient joined his parents in Venice just before the Film Festival crowd broke up; she would have told him about it in person. Then again, what was there to say?