Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Friends and Acquaintances



“I looked in on Chips in London and found the Duchess of Kent, her sister Countess Toren, the reigning Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein, the Ranee of Kapurthala and the King of Egypt’s sister. It was like a stamp album."

When not either waxing eloquent - to the extent that it's possible, given the subject - on the virtues of effective strategic communication or suffering the pangs of the damned with jet lag (which hits in waves in the afternoon around 4:00, feeling like a concentrated dose of a six-months' depression combined with some of the less attractive attributes of a migraine, and then mysteriously lifts just at about the time one actually wants to go to sleep), I am to be found in the depths of a book, joyously enraptured.

The book, from which the treasurable quote above is drawn, is a collection of letters from Lady Diana Cooper to her son, John Julius Norwich, which the latter recently put out under the title Darling Monster.  The title is a salutation much used from mother to son, but almost equally an apt description of Lady Diana, a holy terror of London and international society from before the First War and for six or so decades thereafter.

The letters are written in a style familiar both from her own writing (she published three voume of memoirs) and from that of the era - light, sentimental, sharp, and replete with vintage slang and overflowing with nicknames for people, places, and things.  It's the sort of book that's hard to recommend unless one knows a person rather well, or at least knows that they have an existing affinity for this sort of thing.  I fear it would be rather heavy going for a novice, someone who wasn't able to guess that repeated mentions of meeting up with Coalbox for tea or cocktails refer not to a vintage household fixture but rather the dashing (and occasionally tiresome) socialite Lady Sybil Colefax, or that Mr. Wu is not actually a Chinese acquaintance but in fact Evelyn Waugh (he, in return, referred to Lady Diana as Mrs. Stitch).

One of my favorite things is the unexpected way in which one book can suddenly call up thoughts of another, and I had one of those experiences on this trip somewhere over the Pacific.  My airplane reading this past weekend included the recent memoir by Anjelica Huston, Watch Me.  I knew very little about Huston's life (including, for that matter, that this is her second book of autobiography), but was vaguely aware that she'd had something of a rackety-packety growing up as the daughter of hell-raising director John Huston.  Well, it turns out there was mischief on both sides, parentally, as Anjelica's younger sister is not in fact Huston's offspring but rather that of - of all people - John Julius Norwich.

And just now, swatting up a bit on the Swiss Family Huston (and what a gang of wild ones they are) I had another little aha moment, for it turns that through her mother, Anjelica is the granddaughter of a man who shows up, among many other places, in the writings of Dorothy Parker as the proprietor of her favorite Prohibition-era hangout (a speakeasy, needless to say), Tony's.  Which was I bet, a place that Lady Diana Cooper might have gone once or twice during the years when she was a transtatlantic stage sensation and dabbler in silent films.

Small world, isn't it?

5 comments:

  1. Divine decadence, darling! Whoever would have thought the Cooper dynasty and that of the Hustons could or would ever have mingled in quite such a way? Noel Coward would no doubt have had a monologue ready, had he known... Jx

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  2. The book sounds too too. Must find out if my local bookseller has it. The kind of center-of-everything character one loves to read in bits. Thank you for the non-recommendation!

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    1. Well, I'm adoring it, but even I have to admit that at times it's almost too-too-too, if you know what I meant. The letter writer's a charmer, but at times she's almost too pleased at being a capital-L lady, an Ambassadress, and A Very Naughty Girl. That said, the wartime stuff is vintage.

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  3. Jill Clayburgh would've been a shoe-in for the biopic.

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    1. I'd agree - she's certainly got it, facially - except that the only period-vehicle appearance I can think for her is Gable and Lombard, and that's hardly the thing to give one much confidence, is it?

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