Duff Cooper

Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich GCMG DSO PC (February 22, 1890 - January 1, 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British diplomat, Cabinet member, and author. The son of fashionable society doctor Sir Alfred Cooper and Lady Agnes Duff (sister of Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife), he was the youngest of four children and the only son and enjoyed a typical gentleman's upbringing of country estates, London society, Eton College, and New College, Oxford. At Oxford, his Eton friendship with John Manners won him entree into a famous and fashionable circle of young aristocrats and intellectuals known as The Coterie, including Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith (son of the Prime Minister), Sir Denis Anson, Edward Horner and most famously Lady Diana Manners, the most beautiful woman in England and the "Lady Di" of her day. He cultivated a reputation for eloquence and fast-living and although he had established a reputation as a poet, he earned an even better reputation for gambling, womanizing, and drinking in his studied emulation of the life of Charles James Fox. Following Oxford, he entered into the Foreign Service and owing to the national importance of his work at the cipher desk, he was excluded from military service until 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He served with distinction as a lieutenant in the campaigns of 1918, winning a DSO for conspicuous gallantry. Almost all of his closest friends were killed in the war drawing him closer to Lady Diana Manners, whom he married in 1919. An extremely popular social figure hailed for her beauty and eccentricities, she was one of several daughters born to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland; her biological father, however, was believed to be Harry Cust, known as one of the handsomest men of his day. The Coopers' marriage was fraught with infidelities, notably Duff's affairs with the Franco-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, the French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin, the writer Susan Mary Alsop (then an American diplomat's wife, by whom he had an illegitimate son, William Patten Jr.), and the Anglo-Irish socialite and fashion model Maxime de La Falaise. He gave up political life in 1947, was knighted, and devoted himself primarily to literature until his death in 1954 at the age of 63. Duff Cooper's only legitimate child, John Julius Norwich (born in 1929), became well known as a writer and television host and his granddaughter Artemis Cooper has published several books, including A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper, 1913-50. Another granddaughter is screenwriter Allegra Huston, the only child of John Julius Norwich and Enrica Soma Huston (then married to the American film director John Huston).