The Horror of Love (28 page)

Diana Cooper had resolved in Algiers that she must not swell the list of mad English ambassadresses, and her failure was the source of her social triumph. She entirely ignored the French obsession with
placement
, which meant that seriously
gratin
dinners could take weeks to organize and end up with all the
women sitting together. She merely dumped down a collection of people whom she thought amusing and observed the result. At one dinner, Princess Radziwill lit a cigarette and blew the smoke about before the fish to show that she thought she was
mal placée
. It was an uncomfortable indicator of the difference between the arriviste Gaston and the entirely entitled duke’s daughter that he considered this proper form, while she viewed it as potty. Odette Massigli, the French ambassadress whom Nancy had admired in London, complained about the terrible set hanging round the Embassy, and even the supposedly bohemian Harold Nicolson called Diana’s parties ‘rather odd’, but everyone came.

Cecil Beaton had introduced Diana to Cocteau; he also introduced Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard, who looked and smelled like a tramp but designed the most exquisite and innovative stage sets in France. Lord Norwich remembers him as exuberant, unabashed by his ‘septic’ filthiness and a model of perfect manners. When one woman’s nasty little Peke relieved itself in the
salon vert
, Bérard delicately picked up and removed the tiny turd without saying a word in case she should be embarrassed. Diana loved artists and felt that they had been singled out by the
épuration
while upper-class
collabos
remained unpersecuted. Edouard Bourdet, the director of the Comédie Française, Georges Auric, the composer and Jacques Février, the pianist, were guests, as well as Noël Coward and Laurence Olivier. Nancy and Noël recognized fellow blithe spirits. ‘Bliss … he shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes.’

If Diana’s dinners were a cassoulet of unlikely elements, somehow they worked. ‘Imagine, ’ wrote one guest, ‘Evelyn Waugh, Lord Carlisle, the Bishop of Fulham, Harold Laski and Peter Quennell all under one roof and none of them loath to speak at table, and all outdone by Louise de Vilmorin.’
⁵
If Louise felt she was not sufficiently attended to, she would catapult her butter to the ceiling, where it would stick ‘stronger than the planet Venus’. As the guests’ eyes were drawn upwards, Louise used the silence to launch one of her Scheherazade fantasies.
A dinner which included Nancy, Harold Nicolson, Raymond Mortimer and Bob Boothby produced

the best conversation I have ever known. The depth of erudition was never allowed to penetrate the surface, but without it could the talk have been so good … Very fast English conversation between the Coopers and their friends was different, not better, but different from French conversation. This could be wonderfully amusing, stimulating, brilliant … English women are wonderfully gifted, knowing just when to put in the aside or the question that brings out the best in men.
⁶

Not all Diana’s entertainments were a whiz, however. On one occasion she forced her French guests to sit through Coward’s film
In Which We Serve
, which bewildered them, though they forced out a few polite and manly snuffles. At the height of tension between Britain and France over Syria in the summer of 1945, when diplomatic relations were practically broken off, she invited Gaston to lunch alone with her to tell him her plans for her summer party. She thought of turning the garden into a huge dance floor, hanging lanterns in the trees and opening the courtyard gates to any Parisian who cared to come, in the spirit of the opera balls under Louis XV. Gaston gently dissuaded her – on Bastille Day the Parisians were just as likely to torch the place.

17

THE PURSUIT OF CHIC

B
efore the war had even ended, the authorities in Paris were turning their attention to the vital matter of women’s clothes. This was not quite such a trivial preoccupation as it might first seem. Since the seventeenth century, Paris had been synonymous with elegance and glamour, while the ingenuity of the Parisiennes during the occupation had not only boosted morale but made quite an impression on the arriving Allied troops. Stumping along in their wooden-soled shoes or bicycling in short A-line skirts stitched together from scarves (silk in the fashionable arrondissements, cotton in the bohemian sixth), with their sculpted hairdos and elaborately decorated hats reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette, they had, unlike the British, refused to surrender to utility. Paris fashion was the nexus of an economy that employed many, from the silk weavers of Lyon to the hundreds of specialist couture artisans in the capital; it was therefore economic necessity as much as national pride which required its reinvigoration.

In March 1944, the Chambre Syndicale staged an exhibition directed by Bébé Bérard featuring dolls costumed in the best the couture houses could produce. Jean Cocteau, Christian Dior and Jean Patou were among the team who produced the show, which was seen by over 100,000 people. The dolls – a traditional means of exhibiting French styles dating back to the days of Louis XIV, when they had enjoyed diplomatic status – wore satin and chiffon gowns accessorized with diamonds lent by Cartier and even tiny sets of silk lingerie. After the drabness of
the war, they seemed like a cloud of exquisite butterflies to women who hadn’t had a new dress for six years. The popularity of the exhibition reflected the need for colour, sensuality and luxury in the same manner that
The Pursuit of Love
sated the post-war hunger for charm and romance.

Like Linda Radlett’s, Nancy’s first priority when she established herself in Paris was to ‘arrange’ herself. She and her sisters loved clothes, which often feature in their letters, and Nancy was happy to declare that being well-dressed was a matter of health. She had deplored the dingy gowns and wooden suspender-belts of wartime austerity, and though she had always made efforts towards chic (her first biographer, Harold Acton, describes the elegance of her figure in a plain black skirt and velvet jacket when she worked at Heywood Hill) now, for the first time, she could indulge her passion.

Clothes had never been seen as frivolous in France. Like
quenelles de brochet
or a Watteau
boiseries
, the intricacy of their production and display was seen as part of the essential business of civilization, an idea Nancy thoroughly endorsed. Pierre Balmain recalled showing his 1945 collection, with those two unlikely fashion plates Gertrude Stein and her moustachioed companion Alice B. Toklas in the audience, ‘sitting on the seats of honour watching the pretty striped numbers go by, noting them on their cards with the same intensity of interest as they had noted the Picassos and Matisses which had passed through their lives’. Nancy had no truck with the idea that clever women ought to be scruffy and relished the whole complex ritual of fittings and pinnings, the discussion of the
toile
, the selection of hats. In
The Blessing
she enumerates with evident pleasure the complex process of assembling a Parisian
tenu:
‘the
elegance
, the manicurists, the
vendeuses
, the
modistes
, the
bottiers
and the
lingères
’

Englishwomen’s clothes had always been a source of derision to the French, rendering ‘the British female abroad an object of terror and avoidance to all beholders’
¹
and Nancy, who had so minded her serviceable frocks and shiny face on her first heavily
chaperoned visit to Paris, was prepared to put in the hours it would take to transform herself into a Frenchwoman. Her 1951 essay ‘Chic – English, French and American’ compares ‘chubby little red-faced Queen Victoria’ with the effortless beauty of Empress Eugénie. In England, smartness has nothing to do with clothes. If one is a duchess, like the two she reports being turned away from Dior, one can afford to dress like a gardener. ‘Ladylike’ is the best the Englishwoman, with her stiff, porridge-coloured tweeds and her skirt dividing ‘rather horribly’ over her calves, can aspire to. Compare those few ‘rich, ruthless and savagely energetic’ Frenchwomen who, if they can’t afford to dress well, don’t bother at all. Admittedly, not all duchesses were dowdy. Nancy wrote to Gaston with glee to describe Deborah taking her daughter Emma to Notre-Dame: ‘You’ve seen the outside, darling, you can
guess
the inside. Now let’s go to Christian Dior.’

Nancy’s first couture clothes came from Grés, from whom she ordered a black velvet ball dress with a chiffon waistband which showed off her adolescent slimness. (Cynthia Gladwyn was scandalized by both the price – £200 – and the fifty yards of fabric in the skirt.) The dress sailed through a dinner party, a rendezvous with Gaston, a gallery opening and cocktails at the Embassy, where the conversation next day was devoted to the miracle of Nancy’s waist. Nancy’s great love, though, was Dior. The impact of Dior’s first show on the Avenue Montaigne on 12 February 1947 was such that even the dukes of the Jockey Club spoke of nothing else. The New Look, as christened by Carmel Snow of
Harper’s Bazaar
, was Nancy’s idea of perfection. ‘You pad your hips and squeeze your waist and skirts are to the ankle, it is bliss.’

Nancy’s tall, thin figure set off the New Look perfectly, though interestingly, she was always troubled by her slimness, which could turn into unattractive skinniness when she was anxious or overworked. Hard to imagine a modern woman writing with pleasure to her mother from the country: ‘I am getting quite fat, you won’t know me.’ Nancy loved (well-disciplined) femininity. Grace de Valhubert is asked why she has ruined a Dior frock by having it made up to the neck, covering her beautiful breasts,
while in
Christmas Pudding
Philadelphia Bobbin is misguidedly troubled by her ‘beautiful, rounded body’ which she squeezes into over-laced stays. In her essay on chic, Nancy describes American women as looking pretty in both youth and old age, but characterizes their taste as adolescent: ‘Where are the grown up women in the prime of life dressed as adults?’ In
Love in a Cold Climate
, Polly Hampton’s beauty is dismissed by the callow debs’ delights of the London Season who find her too statuesque, too large, preferring the thin, bird-like women who were the ideal of the Twenties. The fact that Nancy herself perfectly conformed to this ideal does not stop her criticizing it. The worship of the juvenile, which she saw as particularly representative of an immature American culture, tapped into all her beliefs about the threat to European values from a society that prized youth above all else. She agreed with Stendhal that while Americans might have the gaiety of youth, they were devoid of sensibility, of the capacity for pleasurable passion. To Nancy, a beautiful woman was very much a woman, breasts and hips proudly on display, and the New Look confirmed her prejudice that only the French truly understood this.

Not everyone agreed. The conspicuous consumption embodied in Dior’s extravagant use of yards of cloth at a time when many French people didn’t have enough to eat provoked violence. A publicity shoot in Montmartre was disrupted by angry housewives who attacked the model, pulling her hair and trying to rip off her dress. Nancy playfully feared that her own fate would be that of
‘l’élégante de la Rue Lepique’
as ‘people shout
ordures
at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feelings in a way no sables could’. The French might worship clothes, but they did not forget that it was the Austrian Queen’s bill at Rose Bertin that contributed to her downfall.

Nancy was rich, she had her pretty flat and her pretty clothes and for the moment Gaston was not governing France. Although they remained discreet, they could now enjoy some sort of a life together, and within their circle they were perceived as a couple. Nancy was flattered when Violet Trefusis referred to her as ‘La
Palewska (it was never a sad little nickname she invented for herself), and her letters from England, where she still returned frequently, tease ‘Colonel Mitford’ with the confidence of a woman who was, at least for the present, secure in her relationship. Gaston introduced her to many of the friends he had known before the war, while her luncheon parties at Rue Monsieur became a regular event for both the English community in Paris and visitors passing through. There were never more than five guests, Marie would produce simple, delicious food – snails, roast chicken, salad and cheese, with a special English-style pudding if Gaston was asked – the Colonel adored nursery puddings, though Marie never thought much of them. Nancy never drank very much, but there was always plenty of champagne, wine and brandy for her friends, so much so that the less experienced ones occasionally over-indulged: ‘Hugh, if you drink as much brandy as that you’ll be dead before you’re thirty!’ Arthur Ross told Lord Thomas.

Lord Thomas met Nancy at the Cambridge Union and subsequently went often to the flat. He recalls that the conversation would be mainly in English, though it would switch to French for particular descriptions and phrases. It often touched on politics, though Nancy was discreet about her hotline to De Gaulle.
‘How
did you know that?’ asked Momo Marriott once. ‘Oh, I listened to the news on the wireless before you came.’ Nancy seemed ‘very attractive, very happy, full of beans’ and often spoke of the Colonel, though always as a dear friend. Paul Johnson, whom Lord Thomas introduced to Nancy, speaks of her as ‘very correct, even for the 1950s’. The colonel was certainly a fixture, and always lunched at Rue Monsieur on Sundays when he was in Paris, but Nancy was careful about who saw them together. Guests had to be mindful of their manners, says Johnson, but ‘laughter was the very essence of life to her’ and her flat appeared to the young man as the acme of elegant living. Gaston himself was ‘always popping in’. Another friend describes him arriving very late for a luncheon party and launching into a long anecdote about trying to book a burial plot at the Père
Lachaise cemetery. It was outrageous, he laughed, that a man in his position should not even have been offered a view.