by David Valentine
Diana was born on February 14, 1934, in Cape Town South Africa, and was educated at St. Cyprian’s School.
She left home very early, at the age of 15, and—with the brio that defined her life—shortly after moved to Egypt as an au pair.
Later, after a stint in the UK, where she worked for the Anti-Slavery Society, Diana moved to New York and settled down in the city she loved to dedicate the rest of her career to the United Nations, committed to its ideals of internationalism and peace about which she never became cynical.
Her first role at the UN was as a film maker; later, after completing her law degree at Columbia, she became the representative of the Secretary General in court cases, and ultimately she was appointed Chief of Rules, a key administrative position at the UN where she did the vital work of ruling on personnel matters in the complex space between member nations’ domestic laws and international law.
After her retirement in 1995, she continued working for UNDP as a consultant, spending time as part of the UN missions in Haiti and Cambodia, and was also secretary of the Group of Experts convened by the Secretary General to address sexual abuse and exploitation of local populations by UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere.
Throughout her career, both as part of her work and as an activist and advocate, she was a champion for women’s rights and the rights of victims of sexual abuse, a vocal opponent of corruption and misuse of power, and an advocate for sustainable land use both in the city and in upstate New York.
Almost single-handedly, she engaged in a campaign that pushed the UN to acknowledge and support spouses—living in the limbo produced by the mismatch between US and international law—of UN diplomats who had abandoned them in the US. Not only a thinker or intellectual, she put her body on the line for many causes: She marched in civil rights, women’s rights, environmental, and gay and lesbian rights marches with equal vigor, across the course of her life. She wrote letters of condemnation and commendation in equal measure, sharply decrying the abuse of power to Congress members and mayors, and lavishly praising the decency, kindness, and creativity of ordinary people like a minor administrator in Kinshasa, urging his supervisor to advance his career.
Diana is survived by her brother Quill, her nephew Timothy, and nieces Tessa and Jenny, to whom she was fiercely devoted.
Diana had no children, but developed deep and life-long relationships not only with her nephew and nieces, but with young artists, musicians, architects, scholars, activists, and others without portfolio whom she supported — spiritually and materially — by opening her legendary NYC loft apartment to them, and they join her natal family in mourning her passing as inheritors of her spirit and of her generosity.
Many of them lived at The Loft (always with the definite article, as if there were only one—which, to those who knew it, was in fact the case) for a decade or more, and went on to professional success thanks to her deep generosity.
The Loft was a location for art making, dinner parties, visiting notables, experiments in life, waifs and strays, deep conversations, intrigues, political arguments, accumulations of artifacts and books, story telling, love affairs, mad dance parties, and research projects, all powered and accommodated by Diana’s ferocious wit, unshakable convictions, and deep love for people (and punctuated by sharp, arabesque gesticulations with a cigarette-in-an-amber holder, given up only in the ’90s).
The Loft accumulated stories (the headquarters of Norman Mailer’s bid for NYC mayor, the amorous tenancy of the anarchist affinity group the Motherf****rs, that time someone almost ate a dead mouse meant for a pet owl), objects (the piano of her friend, the renowned South African Jazz Musician, Dollar Brand, pottery brought back from an annual pilgrimage to Portugal with a British Peer, carpets lugged back from a bazaar in central Asia), and, always, animals.
There were successive generations of talented and beloved cats, the essential component of Loft life, taking priority over any material belongings (“you either have furniture, or you have cats”). In addition to an aviary full of doves and finches, there were frequently other creatures in need of a temporary home that would likely have horrified neighbors (a sick chicken called Frank who sat with Diana as she typed briefs, an abandoned pair of turkey chicks called Pyramus and Thisbe whose development of object permanence was of endless fascination to Diana, a baby pig, or a duck with a broken leg).
The latter creatures were refugees from her country home (The Barn, also with a definite article) in Orange County where, in her spare time — however she managed to find it — she single-handedly converted an old cow barn into an equally storied home that was her escape from the city and also a place where many humans also found a refuge for the short or long term, and mostly on her dime.
Chicks, hatched in the guest room at the Loft, would be transported up to the Barn, and food waste from the city was dutifully carted up weekly to join the compost heap.
For all the apparent traces of Diva-status permeating her life story, there was no profligacy in her; Diana’s only real excess was in her generosity. The richness of her stories and connections was rooted in a deep frugality, and an insistence on not wasting, which meant she also rescued things as much as people and animals – a discarded dentist’s chair, a neglected harmonium, an old café table.
This came not only from her early years on her family farm in South Africa, but also from a recognition that care should extend beyond the living or animate to the material world. As such, she invested as much time in nature conservancy efforts as she did in advocating for livable and affordable city spaces; she was equally involved in her city’s neighborhood association (BAMRA) and her country home’s land preservation society (formerly the Warwick Conservancy, now part of the Orange County Land Trust).