Alfred Duff Cooper--

Alfred Duff Cooper

1st Viscount Norwich

(1890-1954)

Exceptionally amorous but relentless, compulsive seducer.

"Duff, on the other hand, was not only exceptionally amorous but a relentless, compulsive seducer – his first infidelity took place in Venice, on their honeymoon. And the infidelities never stopped. Throughout his life his mistresses came and went (and sometimes came and stayed). Just a few of them: the Singer Sewing Machines heiress Daisy Fellowes; two nieces of Diana's, the beautiful Paget sisters; a beauty named Gloria Rubio, later Gloria Guinness – "I don't think I have ever loved anyone physically so much or been so supremely satisfied"; the young Susan Mary Patten, wife of an American diplomat, on whom he fathered a child; and, perhaps most seriously, the well-known writer Louise de Vilmorin, who became Diana's adored friend as well. Louise – suspected collaborator – often took up residency in the Paris embassy when the Coopers reigned there, and when Duff turned his attentions from her to Susan Mary, it was Diana who had to comfort her. In middle age Duff was still as driven a fornicator – like both her fathers – as he had been at 20." (Financial Review)

Duff Cooper's personal & family background.

He was the son of Sir Alfred Cooper and Lady Agnes Cecil Emmeline Flower. (Janus).

" . . . Duff's great-great-grandfather was King William IV, whose two children by his wife the queen died in infancy, but whose 10 children by his mistress, the Irish actress called 'Mrs. Jordan,' did not. The sixth of these, Duff's great-grandmother, married the eighteenth Earl of Errol, and it was her granddaughter who became Duff's mother, after his father, a society physician, named Alfred Cooper, rescued her from the social disgrace she had courted when she ran off in succession with two different men. Duff took his brains from his father, but his libido came from his mother's side of the family, as he evolved into a womanizer on the John F. Kennedy level, known for the scope and variety of the affairs he conducted, even while married (like Kennedy) to a stunning and erudite wife." (Weekly Standard)

Spouse & Children: "In 1919, despite initial opposition from her family, he had married Lay Diana Manners, daughter of the 9th Duke of Rutland. . . . " (Janus) [Ref2]

Husband of: 

Diana Manners (Lady) (1892-1986)

British aristocrat, actress & socialite.

Daughter of: Henry Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland & Violet Lindsay.

" . . . Diana . . . became internationally famous playing the Virgin Mary in The Miracle, a mime play with music, that toured Britain and America in the 1920s and 1930s. Renowned for her grace and classical loveliness, Diana married Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich, who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in 1938 in protest against his policy of appeasement. During the Second World War he would become British Representative to the French Committee of Liberation in the diplomatic melting pot Algiers. After the war he was appointed British Ambassador to France -- a post in which he was popular with the French and in which he practised the entente cordiale with enthusiasm. (Escape to Provence: 74)

His lovers were:

1) Daisy Fellowes (1890-1962)

Lover in 1919.

French celebrated society figure, acclaimed beauty, minor novelist and poet, editor & heiress

Wife of:

1. Jean-Amedee-Marie-Anatole de Broglie, Prince de Broglie, mar 1910-1918

2. Reginald Ailwyn Fellowes, mar 1919.

" . . . Daisy Fellowes, an heiress and 'destroyer of many a happy home,' as Duff called her in 1919, was a friend of the Coopers for over thirty years.  When he met her in 1919, Duff said he 'got on well with her especially when we reached the subject of pornography.'  According to his diary, Daisy was a part-time lover of his until at least 1938."  (My Three Fathers: 83)

"...One woman whom she particularly disliked was dismissed tartly as 'a silly, giggling, gawky, lecherous bit of dross'.  Others inspired as much alarm as scorn.  Daisy Fellowes was one of the very few who she felt posed a real threat to her marriage.  Malicious, intelligent and formidably elegant, Mrs. Fellows was the daughter of the Duc Decazes and the sewing-machine heiress Isabelle Singer, herself previously married to the Prince de Broglie.  Duff first met her at the end of 1919 and immediately took to her.  'Mean, cruel and beautiful,' he described her.  'She is the notorious Princesse de Broglie, the destroyer of many a happy home.  I expected to find her attractive and I wasn't disappointed... At Deauville i 1921 they met every afternoon for increasingly tempestuous assignations, while Diana resentfully went off for long drives with Lord Wimborne.  The climax came when Duff deserted Diana at the Casino and went off to Mrs. Fellowes's villa. Diana missed him, searched everywhere, decided Duff had been murdered and, frantic with worry, informed the police...."  (Ziegler, 2011, n.p.)

@ Mary Evans Picture Library, 2008

2) Diana Wyndham, Countess of Westmorland. (1893-1983)

Daughter of: Thomas List, 4th Baron Ribblesdale & Charlotte Tennant.

Wife of: 

1. Capt. Percy Lyulph Wyndham, mar 1913

2. Capt. Arthur Capel, mar 1918

3. Vere Fane, 14th Earl of Westmorland, mar 1923.

3) Dollie, Lady Warrender.

"His diary suggests that he relished the draw of playing with fire, as in 1924 in his affair with Lady Warrender, known as Dollie.  They met at one of Lady Curzon's parties" '[T]he stately rooms of Carlton House Terrace looked more like a Montmartre restaurant littered with confetti, masks, streamers, celluloid balls, etc.  I wore a skeleton mask in which nobody recognized me and I had the greatest fun.'  Duff talked with Dollie and 'though her perfect.  But later on, as the affair with Dollie evolved, Duff admitted: 'Before the conquest was completed there was glamour and romance about the matter that made it seem too [much] like real love and real love of another is the only crime against Diana I could never forgive myself and that she could never forgive me.  But with the flight of that illusion the wrong that I do Dollie grows greater.'" (My Three Fathers: 86)

4) Enrica Soma, Mrs. Huston.

5) Gloria Guinness.

6) Gloria Rubio.

" . . . Even twenty-six years later, at the age of fifty-six, he wrote poetically about his brief affair with Gloria Rubio, who was then engaged to Ahmed, son of the Egyptian minister Fakhri Pasha.  He slipped out late one afternoon to meet Gloria before an embassy dinner with Julian Hiuxley and Evelyn Waught.  'It was a lovely evening, havin grained all day.  The view from her window at the Sacre Coeur with the sunset rays on it was memorable---very memorable to me.'" (My Three Fathers: 86)

7) Louise Leveque de Vilmorin.

8) Maxime de la Falaise.

9) Paget sisters.

Lady Caroline Paget & Lady Elizabeth Paget.

" . . . Lady Caroline Paget was the eldest daughter of Charles, 6th Marquess of Anglesey. She was already, along her sister Elizabeth (Liz), one of the slightly rebellious beauties of the 1930s. She was the eldest of six children -- five girls (Liz being next to her age) and Henry, the son and heir, youngest of the family along with his twin sister, Katherine. Caroline was in her twenty-first year. With dark, curly hair, a perfectly formed face, translucent skin and a mouth that had a tendency to pout, she was described as having 'a moonlight beauty'. Attracting devotion in spite of herself, her mixture of bestowed warmth, vivacity and enigmatic aloofness was to fascinate those who loved but could not fully possess her. She had been promised to Anthony Knebworth, son of the Earl of Lytton, captivated by her since she was twelve years old. A dashing athletic pilot of the heroic mould, Anthony had been killed when his fighter plane crashed during a display at Hendon aerodrome the previous year. Caroline was distressed but not prostrated by his death and she and Liz --- 'each more beautiful than the other' --- were much sought after, never lacking a stream of invitations to the endless social events that filled the years of the jeunesse doree between the wars." (Escape to Provence: The Story of Elisabeth Starr and Winifred Fortescue: 72)

10) Susan Mary Jay.
Wife of American diplomat.

Lover in 1947.

References for Duff Cooper.
The Duff Cooper Diaries: 1915-1951.