As an entrepreneur, I value curiosity as a vital business trait. You never know where your curiosity will take you.
Case in point: this essay. Which has nothing to with business, but everything to do with being human.
Three degrees of
separation:
The world is smaller than you think. Let’s connect Orson
Welles, Winston Churchill, Napoleon’s sister, D.W. Griffith, and Gilligan’s
Island.
In preparation for my upcoming month in Paris, yesterday
I started reading John Julius Norwich’s book: France: A
History: from Gaul to de Gaulle. I didn't get very far.
I got stopped in the Preface, where the
author, John Julius Norwich, talks about his various stints living in France –
including while his father was Britain’s ambassador to France from 1944 to
1948. He describes life at the embassy (a palace formerly owned by Napoleon’s
sister Pauline) as a glamorous salon frequented
by the cultured and powerful. “The queen of it was the poetess – and my
father’s mistress – Louise de Vilmorin, who would stay in the embassy sometimes
for weeks at a time.”
Wow.
No less startling was the next sentence. (Remember, I’m
still on page 2.) “My mother, who had no conception of jealousy, loved her
almost as much as my father did.”
Intriguing as French history may be, I immediately put
down the book and picked up my phone to google these stunningly avant-garde artist/aristocrats.
I swear, someday Netflix will make a movie about all this.
Let’s start with the poet. “Louise de Vilmorin was a
novelist and poet and the most extraordinary of women. Married to a Hungarian
count, her lovers included Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Orson Welles and Andre
Malraux. But it was Duff Cooper, British Ambassador to France, during the 1940s,
who was the love of her life.”
“Born
4 April 1902 in the family château at Verrières-le-Buisson, she was heir to a great French seed company fortune. She
was afflicted with a slight limp that became a personal trademark.”
“Louise
had four brothers: Henry (1903–1961), Olivier (1904–1962), André (1907–1987),
and Roger (1905–1980), who was fathered by
King Alfonso XIII of Spain.”
So, five minutes in, and we've already met Saint-Exupery
(author of the beloved classic, The Little Prince), Orson Welles (wunderkind director of Citizen Kane), and a
king of Spain.
More
on Louise’s love life: “As a young woman, in 1923, she had been engaged to
novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; however, the engagement was called off, even though
Saint-Exupéry gave up flying for a while after her family protested such a
risky occupation. Vilmorin's first husband was an American real-estate heir,
Henry Leigh Hunt (1886–1972), the only son of Leigh S. J. Hunt, a businessman who once
owned much of Las Vegas, Nevada. They married in 1925,
moved to Las Vegas, and divorced in the 1930s.”
“Louise
spent the last years of her life as the companion of the French Cultural
Affairs Minister and author André Malraux, calling herself ‘Marilyn Malraux’.” (Pretty good pun, even for
a famous poet.)
But
getting to know Louise meant I now needed to know more about her ambassador
paramour. Who was Duff Cooper, I wondered, and why was his last name different
from that of his son? So back to Google we went.
Alfred
Duff Cooper was a rogue and a statesman, incredibly bright, a deft writer and
historian, and a disappointment to all. Wikipedia: “He was the only son of
society doctor Sir
Alfred Cooper (1843–1908),
a surgeon who specialised in the sexual problems of the upper classes (his carriage
was humorously known as “Cooper's Clap Trap”) and Lady Agnes Duff, daughter of James Duff, 5th Earl Fife and descendant of King William IV.”
Whoa.
Victorian shenanigans – and another
king.
At
Oxford, “Cooper cultivated a reputation for eloquence and fast living
and, although he had established a reputation as a poet, he earned an even
stronger reputation for gambling, womanising and drinking.”
Cooper joined the foreign office (on his third try,
Wikipedia snarks). But with WWI chewing up the bodies of young Englishmen, he
joined the Grenadier Guards as a junior officer in 1917. “Cooper spent six months on
the Western Front, during which, biographer Philip Ziegler writes, he proved
himself ‘exceptionally courageous, resourceful, and a natural leader of men.’ He
suffered a minor wound in the advance to the Albert Canal in August 1918, and was
awarded the Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry, a rare
decoration for a junior officer.”
His career off to a strong start, in 1919 Cooper
marries journalist/actress/socialite
Lady Diana Manners.
(He met her at Oxford, and once wrote, “I
hope everyone you like better than me will die very soon.”) Diana had appeared in the
1918 film, Hearts of the World, by legendary director D.W. Griffith, who called
her “the most beloved woman in England.”
Diana’s
family initially opposed the match. (They had hoped Diana would marry
the Prince of Wales.) Diana’s mother “thought Cooper a promiscuous drinker and
gambler, without title, position or wealth.” Still, Diana couldn't be too off-put
by liaisons dangereuses: while officially
the daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, “she was widely believed—by herself included—to be
the natural daughter of Harry Cust, a Belvoir Castle neighbour.”
Yes, the Victorians were pretty wild. (Cust is also reported to have
slept with Margaret Thatcher’s grandmother.)
As
the years went by, “Lady Diana tolerated Cooper's numerous affairs.” And there were
many: Franco-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, socialite Gloria Guinness, French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin, and writer Susan Mary Alsop (then an American
diplomat's wife, by whom he had an illegitimate son). The polo player 'Boy' Capel's wife Diana and fashion
model Maxime
de la Falaise were
two more, although Lady Diana reportedly did not mind, explaining to her son: “They
were the flowers, but I was the tree.”
With
Diana’s money, Cooper entered politics, becoming friends and cabinet colleagues
with the likes of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. In
1935, the scandalous scoundrel was named Secretary of State for War, and then First
Lord of the Admiralty, where “he enjoyed high living on board the
Admiralty yacht HMS Enchantress.”
Then Cooper went to Germany and witnessed a Nazi party
rally. Realizing that Hitler was serious about conquering the civilized
world, he resigned from the Cabinet to protest Chamberlain’s policies of appeasement (ie, “Let Germany re-arm, the English
Channel will protect us”). Fellow
Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams described Cooper's actions as
“the first step in the road back to national sanity.”
Out
of government, Cooper embarked on a lecture tour of the U.S., where he urged the democracies to stand firm against the dictatorships.
German
propaganda ranked Cooper with Churchill and Eden as Britain's most dangerous warmongers,
and after war broke out Cooper sent his son – then John Julius Cooper – to study
at Upper Canada College in Toronto.
(Cooper
was widely criticized for the move, but let’s cut him some slack. Hitler’s
enemies list was a real thing, and Cooper, who became Minister of Information
in 1940, topped the charts.)While
in North America, young John Julius (named because he was born of a caesarian
section, get it?) summered with the family of William S. Paley, the founder of
CBS – an old-school robber baron (and another long-time womanizer) who redeems himself by championing a prime-time news show called 60 Minutes. (Paley’s also the guy who saved Gunsmoke
from cancellation in 1967, resulting instead in the premature cancelling of
Gilligan’s Island.)
In December 1943, with the Allies planning an invasion of
France, Cooper became the British representative to the Free French – which
meant he had to placate both Churchill and de Gaulle, two of the world’s most
unmanageable people. A month after Paris was liberated in August 1944, he was
named Britain’s ambassador to France.
Wikipedia just can't help pointing out: “He was to prove
a very popular ambassador, with Lady Diana helping to make his term of office a
great social success. Some contemporary eyebrows were raised at his willingness
to entertain people with dubious records during the recent war, or his lack of
interest at entertaining trade unionists.”
After retiring as ambassador, Cooper remained in Paris
and wrote books, including one novel, about the Allies’ deception campaign
around the invasion of Sicily – which the U.K. Cabinet tried (and failed)
to block.
In 1952 Cooper was named to the House of Lords as Viscount Norwich,
a name his son later
adopted. Cooper's long-suffering spouse refused to be called
Lady Norwich, claiming it sounded too much like “porridge.” She took out an ad saying she would stick with “Lady Diana Cooper.”
After
Cooper’s death Philip
Ziegler wrote that Cooper was “not totally successful in worldly terms,
but never dull,” although he could be “arrogant, self-indulgent and selfish,
and devoted far too much time and energy to wine, women and gambling.” Quite
the epitaph!
But credit him this. In 2021, Cooper was posthumously
awarded the Order of
the White Lion, the Czech Republic’s highest
decoration, for his opposition to the Munich Agreement in which Hitler
carved up Czechoslovakia like a prize lamb.
John Julius never matched his father, in either infamy or
high office. He called himself someone "whom his mother adored, and his father
barely tolerated." But like his dad, he too attended Oxford and then joined the
Foreign Service. He served in
Yugoslavia and
Lebanon and
as a member of the British
delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. When his father died at sea (of course!)
in 1954, JJ inherited the “
Viscount Norwich”
title, and took his father’s seat in the House of Lords (until the rules were
changed in 1999 to reduce the role of arbitrary aristocrats in running England’s,
um, affairs).
JJ wrote books on history and the arts, and served as
chair of the Venice in Peril Fund, which helped save the Italian city from the rising
waters of the Adriatic Sea. He also made documentaries for BBC Television, and
hosted a quiz show for BBC Radio. One of his favourite sayings was, “When in doubt, say yes.”
JJ married twice and fathered two children,
Artemis and Jason.
Oops. Make that three
children. Turns out Norwich was also the father of Allegra Huston,
born in 1964 of his five-year affair with American ballet dancer Enrica Soma. At the time, she was estranged from her husband: actor/director John Huston.
(Winner of two Academy Awards, he directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The
Misfits, The Man Who Would Be King, Prizzi’s Honor, and Annie, a musical about orphans.)
By coincidence, Huston began his career playing the
title character in a 1930 film called Abraham Lincoln – the second-last movie directed
by D.W. Griffith.
Forty years later, Huston starred in The Other Side of the Wind, as an aging film director trying to stay
relevant. The film was written and directed by Orson Welles.
Production began
in 1970, and was finally finished (by Netflix!) in 2018.
Allegra is a writer (naturally) and has written a book on
how she learned, at 12, the truth about her father. She
described the day she met John Julius: “
His manners
were elegant and easy, as if he met his secret children every day of his life.” But over the longer term, as a reporter noted, “John Huston was sufficiently
egocentric for the reappearance of his daughter’s biological father to make no
difference.”“He
completely ignored it,” said Allegra, “which was fine by me."
She
explains the situation in her book, Love Child, by saying, “John Julius could
be accurately referred to as my father, but I had only one dad.”
But Allegra's book compelled one Huffpost reviewer to begin her article with the sentence, "Thank God I'm not a Huston." The reviewer recounts how Allegra often spent weekends with her half-sister Anjelica Huston at Jack Nicholson's house, where Roman Polanski had sex with an underage girl, an event that led to his exile. At 13, she lived with Anjelica and Ryan O'Neal, who comes off as a terrorizing brute. "Even the 13-year-old had the sense to tell her sister, 'You don't have to stay with someone who treats you like that.'"
Does generational dysfunction ever end? “The sources of bad luck reside in the
unconscious,” opined John Huston. “We inflict it upon ourselves
as kind of a self-punishment.”
Allegra seems to summarize a century of recklessness and high achievement when she writes: “Love Child is
the story of a childhood fractured by tragedy, of a motherless girl who never
quite feels she belongs. It is my search through the unreliable certainties of
memory for the widely adored mother I never knew, and my quest to create a
single family out of these odd-shaped pieces, a family which finally comes
together at the christening of my son in the Rio Grande.”
John Julius Norwich passed away in 2018, just after finishing his last book, France: A
History: from Gaul to de Gaulle.
He dedicated it to his mother.
And I am still only on page 2.
