The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (17 page)

Diana later claimed that Gerald didn’t meet the dictator and that she would have known, as they were constantly together. Diana was less of a joker than Gerald and more in the know than the chauffeur, so she may well have been right. John Betjeman wrote to Penelope, ‘Apparently it is all rot about Robert and Gerald lunching with Hitler.’ So maybe, in this open postcard, Gerald just wanted naughtily to set the gossip mills spinning. He was certainly no supporter of Nazism. In a notebook he wrote that he had been put off Wagner’s music (that he had loved so much in his youth) because it had been taken up by the Nazis, and he claimed that it was their banning of the poet Heine that first led him to execrate them.193 In 1935, when Diana brought Mosley to stay at Faringdon, Oliver Messel added a satisfying provocation under Mosley’s signature in the visitors’ book: ‘F.S.P.M.B.W.N.R. Founder of The Society for the Propagation of Marriages between the White and Negro Races.’ Other old friends confirmed that Gerald was not interested in politics. ‘He’d only have been intrigued because it was intriguing,’ said one.194

Nancy Mitford, Diana’s eldest sister, had a brief flirtation with Mosley’s movement, but soon took against it and leaned leftwards, or merely in the direction of satire, ever after. Diana accused her of being ‘synthetic cochineal’ – unlike Decca, whose dedication to Communism was almost as unwavering as Diana’s to Fascism. But Nancy despised both extremes. In 1939, she wrote to a friend, ‘There isn’t a pin to put between Nazis & Bolshies. If one is a Jew one prefers one and if an aristocrat the other, that’s all as far as I can see. Fiends!’ Nancy’s approach was far more in line with Gerald’s, and he became an increasingly important friend to her. Like him, she preferred humour and thoughtfulness to the bombast and grand plans of Mosley. Both Diana and Mosley were appalled when Nancy satirised their movement in her 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Unity (who was over six foot tall) is portrayed as ‘England’s largest heiress’, Eugenia Malmains. Mosley is the Captain, who must be obeyed in all things. The innocent, passionate Eugenia stands on a washtub on a village green, calling ‘in thrilling tones … “Britons, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion! … [the] Union Jack Movement is a youth movement … we are tired of the old.”’ Eugenia has a dog called the Reichshund, after Bismarck’s dog, and a horse named Vivian Jackson. Diana was outraged, Mosley furious and Nancy was banned from their house for years.

ERALD MAY HAVE BEEN running around with a younger set and getting caught up in politics more than was his natural inclination, but he didn’t neglect his long-standing friends. He continued to visit the famous London hostesses Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax, who skimmed off the cream of society for their gatherings. Robert might stay in the country or see his own pals; he was not generally interested in finely wrought soirées, where everybody was ‘somebody’. Gerald could catch up with worldly, cultured people like the Princesse de Polignac, Harold Nicolson or Lady Diana Cooper, the celebrated society beauty and actress who might be found there with her husband, Duff, politician and diplomat. People tended to speak of the two hostesses in one breath, and there were many who found them tiresome. ‘Coarse and usual and dull these Cunards and Colefaxes are,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, though there were many who adored one or the other and remained their supporters and friends.195 Gerald was far from being a Bloomsbury bohemian type (‘not for him the rufty-tufty Bloomsbury clothes with their unpressed trousers’, wrote Diana Mosley), but he was interested in meeting certain members of this influential group and a few cropped up at these parties. He had friendly relations with Virginia Woolf, who mentions him in the preface to Orlando, her 1928 novel that created a transsexual, time-hopping hero based partly on the life of her lover Vita Sackville-West. Woolf thanks Lord Berners, ‘whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable’. It sounds like a friendly little tease – a wink from one cerebral, creative, depressive type with an unconventional love life to another.

Gerald himself joked that while the tea parties of Sibyl Colefax were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by an efficient, trained hospital nurse’, those of Emerald Cunard were ‘a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic’.196 Of course, there were those who claimed that Gerald himself offered more to this type of gathering than he took. Osbert Sitwell wrote, ‘In the years between the wars, Berners did more to civilise the wealthy than anyone in England. Through London’s darkest drawing rooms, as well as through the lightest, he moved, dedicated to their conversion, a sort of missionary of the arts, bringing a touch of unwanted fun into many a dreary life – fun perhaps all the more funny for its being unwanted.’197 Gerald was the perfect guest for these ladies – accomplished, titled and witty. His increasingly notorious eccentricity only added a dash of welcome spice to the mix.

Certain commentators claimed there was no comparing the two grandes dames. While Lady Cunard’s witty intelligence sparked off truly interesting conversations, her rival, Lady Colefax (the ‘Coal Box’), was merely fixated with collecting famous names and didn’t know what to do with them when she got them.198 Harold Nicolson wrote of her formidable energy: ‘While London still slept round her, she would have written and addressed some sixty postcards and the telephone would start shrilling before the postman dared …’199

About ten years older than Gerald, Emerald Cunard had started off life in America as Maud Burke. After marrying into the Cunard shipping family, she changed her name to the more sparkling Emerald, and managed through intelligence, charm and ambition to create an immensely successful salon at her home in Grosvenor Square. Her great talent was to mix writers, musicians and painters with politicians, soldiers and members of the British and European aristocracy. Small-built, with birdy eyes and a small mouth, she had many lovers, including the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the writer George Moore, both of whose work she promoted and inspired. Harold Nicolson caustically described her in later years as ‘looking like a third-dynasty mummy painted pink by amateurs’, and many said she neglected her skinny, kohl-eyed daughter Nancy, who made a name for herself as a provocative anti-racist and civil-rights activist, taking up with a Harlem-based jazz musician.

Though the Ladies Cunard and Colefax were always pleased to catch the biggest social fish, the Coal Box was an easier target for teasing. Sibyl Colefax was an interior decorator, founding Colefax and Fowler and adopting the traditional Georgian country house as her style. ‘Dark, sharp-featured, beady-eyed’,200 she was an inveterate snob: ‘Like a bunch of glossy red cherries on a hard straw hat,’ said Virginia Woolf.201 She had less money and panache than her American rival, and she was a notorious social climber, who would go to great lengths to ‘acquire’ the famous and the rich. But as Beverley Nichols admitted, ‘a woman who is neither nobly born, nor very rich, nor very beautiful, does not create a brilliant salon unless she has herself some brilliant qualities.’202

Gerald quipped that when Sybil Colefax visited him in Rome and was given the room next to him, he got no sleep as ‘she never stopped climbing all night’.203 In a thank-you letter following a 1945 weekend at Faringdon, the playwright Terence Rattigan continued the theme, imagining Sibyl’s social activities continuing beyond death, something, he joked, he himself could soon be responsible for if her hand turned gangrenous from a cut she had sustained when he helped her through a barbed-wire fence on a walk.* ‘By the way,’ he asked Gerald, ‘who do you think will be at her first dinner party in Paradise? Would she begin with Shakespeare, Disraeli, Mrs Sidders and a member of The Divine Family, or start lower down and work her way up?’ Easy to caricature, the Coal Box provided inspiration for various writers of fiction, including Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Osbert Sitwell.204

Gerald is said to have once sent Sibyl a postcard asking her to a lunch to meet the P. of W., knowing only too well that the Coal Box would assume he meant the Prince of Wales. The entire country was gripped by the future king’s dalliance with the married Wallis Simpson. Imagine Sibyl Colefax’s disappointment when the guest turned out to be the Provost of Worcester (College, Oxford). It might have been apocryphal, but Lady Colefax trumped Gerald by inviting him to an evening at her King’s Road address where the newly crowned King Edward VIII turned up with Wallis Simpson. The fashionable couple’s preference for glitzy clubs was well known, so it was a triumph for the ambitious Coal Box. However, the evening nearly ended in disaster when the after-dinner entertainment was provided by Arthur Rubinstein, the world-famous Polish-American pianist, who performed several pieces by Chopin. The King became increasingly restive and got up, plainly intending to leave. In desperation, Sibyl begged Gerald to play something instead. Gerald refused, claiming that he had only come as a guest, at which the Coal Box threatened, ‘I’ll never ask you here again!’ Gerald’s teasingly nonchalant response was, ‘I rather think you will.’205 The impending calamity was narrowly averted when Noël Coward, who had just arrived, charmed the King with ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,) Mrs Worthington’. Rubinstein had meanwhile left with the Princesse de Polignac, both no doubt appalled by the musical taste of the English upper classes.

Gerald himself developed friendly relations with Wallis Simpson – another person whose well-known Fascist tendencies were not an impediment to adulation from vast numbers of people, though this was probably more a reflection of the gilded allure of ‘Majesty Divine’, as Lady Cunard called the King. (The diminutive hostess had snapped up her fellow American and was a great supporter of the woman she hoped would be the next queen.) Letters remain from Mrs Simpson to Gerald, written in a flowing, rather elegant hand. Though they are mostly apologising for cancelling engagements, they give a small taste of their intersecting lives:

Dear Lord Berners

I am so very sorry about last night – but I suddenly developed a pain around my heart. I’m afraid I’m very tired – the doctor has put me to bed for a week – no telephone calls. No visitors. It was disappointing to have my first party postponed. However I shall try again and hope to be fortunate enough to find you free to come. I did so enjoy my lunch with you both conversationally and gastronomically.

Yours Sincerely

Wallis Simpson

Gerald liked the pleasures of fashion and high society, but he was not seduced by their superficial glitziness. Sometimes he bridged the gap between his higher aspirations and his partiality to the social whirl by teasing, which took everything down a peg or two. Once, he was dining in the Ritz when a woman friend came in. She was well known to have had many lovers, who were getting younger and younger. On the day in question, she arrived with her eleven-year-old son, and Gerald said: ‘This time you’re going too far!’206

Sometimes, Gerald himself went too far. One prank involved placing an advertisement in a national newspaper: ‘Lord Berners wishes to dispose of two elephants and one small rhinoceros (latter housetrained). Would make delightful Christmas present. Apply R. Heber-Percy, Faringdon House, Berkshire.’ When a ‘special correspondent’ from the Daily Mirror rang up to enquire, R. Heber-Percy reported that ‘Harold Nicolson and Lady Colefax had snapped up the elephants.’ Several newspapers followed up the joke with articles, and both of Gerald’s old friends were mortified. Nicolson responded to the press with little of his usual jeu d’esprit: ‘It is just Lord Berners adding to the Christmas merriment. I have known him for twenty-five years but I do not feel friendly towards him today. I do not want an elephant, have never wanted one, and I have not bought one.’207 The endless teasing of ‘Harold Nickers’ (as one friend called him) and his wife, ‘Rye Vita’ (Vita Sackville-West), had worn rather thin.

No doubt Gerald revelled in the po-faced responses to his mischief. Although he was often gloomy and certainly valued time alone, he tried to make himself entertaining, if sometimes startling, to those around him. According to one friend, Gerald worked out a trick for keeping his train compartment to himself: wearing dark glasses, he would beckon to fellow passengers from within, with a sinister expression on his face, while holding a newspaper upside down.208 The story became legendary, and while it is unknown whether this approach was taken more than once, it became assumed by some that this was what Lord Berners always did if he was travelling by train.

Far worse than these more puerile japes, in fact positively sadistic, was the trick that Gerald played on some house guests to whom he had been speaking about suicide, well aware that they knew about his depression. Once his friends had gone to bed, he blew up a paper bag and popped it, making a bang that sounded disconcertingly like a gun. People rushed from their bedrooms to find Gerald sitting disingenuously downstairs, greeting their sudden appearance with an enquiring expression. Although Gerald was mocking his own vulnerability, it was a pitiless way to laugh at people who cared for him. Cecil Beaton’s assessment that Gerald had ‘very little heart’ sometimes seemed to be true. His jokes could be a form of self-defence, but they could also cross over into calculated aggression.

Flashes of psychological brutality had been a feature since the young Gerald worked out how to make a plank swing up under the outside lavatory to spank his governess’s bottom. But it was sometimes more chilling than practical jokes. It was as though the empathy that made him such a loyal friend could occasionally evaporate. When he was a boy, Gerald claimed to have thrown his mother’s fat spaniel out of the window. This was not, he wrote, from ‘innate cruelty’, hatred for dogs or because this particular one resembled Elizabeth Barrett Browning with its ringlets. It was merely because he had wondered whether the dog would fly, just as it swam when thrown into water.209 In Gerald’s story Mr Pidger, an angry husband throws his wife’s beloved, if infuriating, little lapdog out of the train window after it unwittingly destroys a large inheritance. There is drama and humour in the scene – rather as there was when Gerald popped the paper bag – but the overwhelming atmosphere that remains is one of isolation (the couple divorces) and sadness.