There’ve been several constants in my reading from the start. The Russians were the first.
Tolstoy! Tolstoy, naturally, was always my favorite. And when I think of Natasha in War and Peace, when she’s just seen a young lady kiss a young man she was obviously having a walkout with and then she sees a young lieutenant and she follows him into the conservatory and she grabs his hand…I know exactly what she was wearing. It’s actually known as the “Natasha dress.” Where would fashion be without literature?
Japan was another constant. The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon have been Japan to me since I first read them and reread them in Albany and in Regent’s Park. This is my cult. Some people have their Proust; I have my Pillow Book. I still keep it next to my bed. Meanderings of the mind, very charming. Little vignettes of wisdom and beauty.
I met Arthur Waley, the translator of Genji and The Pillow Book, in London. He was the handsomest man. And his translations of Chinese poetry are exquisite: “The birds are flying high, the swallows are flying low, knowing that it’s going to rain….” Just three or four lines. This is my paraphrase, you understand, not the poetry… which is to die.
It was Chips Channon’s book on the Wittelsbachs, The Ludwigs of Bavaria, that got me going on my Bavarian and Hungarian kicks. This was all in Regent’s Park and on rainy weekends in the country in England. I’d spend days and days in bed reading and think nothing of it. But there were so many books. I learned everything in England. I learned English.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been such a gypsy that I associate my reading so closely with the houses I was living in at the time. But, curiously enough, the hours of reading I remember most vividly are the months we stayed in Switzerland at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage when we’d left London but before we moved to New York. The boys were at school just down the lake, and every afternoon they would come for tea. We had a big sitting room with a fire and a huge table covered with jams and eggs, which the boys would eat, and then Reed and I would go downstairs for our dinner. But before then Reed, in this marvelous, sustained voice he had—he was a singer, you see—would read to them from Hans Christian Andersen and from Chinese fairy tales and from Russian fairy tales—out loud: It’s midnight, and the white polar bear is carrying the Princess to see the man she loves the most, and that’s all that’s on her mind, and she really is a Princess. And the polar bear is white, and the ice is blue, and the sky is midnight blue….
I was so happy in Ouchy, on the water. My bed faced Mont Blanc. Every night, I’d leave a small space open between the curtains so that I could see Mont Blanc in the morning when I woke up. And some mornings—this was in the winter, when the snow lay very, very thick on it—it would have a pink glaze. Other mornings it would have a blue glaze to it. I would sit and watch the pinks and blues change during the day as the light changed and the clouds constantly moved across the sky. Every day was totally and completely different. I can remember thinking how much like my own temperament it was—how much like everyone’s temperament. The light on Mont Blanc was a revelation of what we all consist of. I mean, the shadows and the colors and the ups and the downs and the wonderment…it was like our growing up in the world.
I think people forget that I have a family. In London people never thought of me as having any children. They thought I was only involved with clothes—and I was. But the family was very close. And though I did think terrifically about my sons, I wasn’t that close to them. I had an English nanny by then and the best French nurserymaid in London, so they were always speaking French. For them it was a very conventional upbringing of the period—up to a point.
Wednesday was the nurse’s day off, and also the nurserymaid’s, and that was my afternoon with my sons. If the weather was good, I’d take them across the street to the zoo in Regent’s Park with its ducks and flowers. Timmy and Frecky would go straight to their friends the gorillas. The boys knew the keeper, so we’d go into their quarters behind the cage and he’d bring in the gorillas. He’d leave us alone with these three enormous gorillas…and no cage! I had made a solemn vow to myself never to allow my children to know that anything in the world was frightening, impure, or impossible. Therefore, the gorillas were divine, and I had to sit and admire the slaps and pats they gave my two miniature sons. My boys would sit there with their arms around them, kissing them from time to time…they were no more frightened of those gorillas than they would be of you.
Then…if it was really raining, we’d go to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and see the beheadings. That was a bit of all right for them. Nothing wrong for them to see. Everybody had to go! All I can say is that my sons had a very healthy upbringing. And they’ve gone through life the same way. They’ve never been afraid of anything…physical or strange or bizarre.
On the walls of each of their rooms—they had separate rooms, which is very important—I put maps of the world. Then, when Reed and I would go abroad for several days to some delicious place like Tunisia or into the long grass of Bavaria, I’d show them exactly where we were going. It’s not that they were that interested in where we were going…but they’d connect the place with the idea. They never grew up with a provincial point of view.
People such as myself who’ve had no education are hungry…reaching out for something, as long as they don’t have to do it in a schoolroom with a gong going all the time. But I was determined my children wouldn’t be brought up that way.
In London we sent them to Mr. Gibbs’s school, which was very good and very conventional. They learned to read and write before they were four or five, which is essential—all children should. “Give me a child for seven years…” as the Jesuits say.
When Timmy was eight, we sent him to school in Switzerland. I hated doing it. But we didn’t keep them in London, because in those days the only boys who didn’t go away to boarding school were tubercular or something.
After we moved to America, the boys’ education didn’t cost us much. They both went through Groton on scholarships. I said, “Your father works, your mother works….” Nothing like a good push!
In many ways, I was a very conventional parent, though perhaps I never looked like a conventional parent. I can remember visiting the boys at Groton. Naturally, I was dressed to kill, and as rouged as I am now—if not more. The first little boy I saw said, “How do you do, Mrs. Vreeland?”
“How do you do?” I said. “But tell me, how did you know I was Mrs. Vreeland?”
“Because,” he said, “Timmy and Frecky said, ‘If you see a woman with red ears—that’s our mother!’”
I don’t think it bothered them. Eventually you learn to live with your parents. In London, in the days when people used to play parlor games, we played a game where you’d choose your parents. Once, I remember, someone decided to be very clever and chose Mussolini and Emerald Cunard. Well, the place broke up into such a row…I never even got my turn. But I can remember saying, “Do you know what you’d be with parents like that? You’d be the smallest coin at the bottom of the basin!”
I didn’t have a clever answer ready for myself. If I’d had the chance, I knew that I’d have chosen my parents exactly as they were.
And I had splendid godparents. Wouldn’t change them for the world! I’ve told you about Baby Belle Hunnewell. Bob Chanler was my godfather—Uncle Bob. He painted. That’s a lovely screen of his out in the front hall. He was a great big man with huge gray curls always filled with paint—gold and silver. He often came to our house with green hair and wild spirits and shouted up at us. Mad for girls and all that. My father was best man at one of his weddings. He was very much of the Diaghilev school of “Let’s-go-all-the-way-all-the-time!” He had a beautiful house on Nineteenth Street.
Bob Chanler once said, “Send the children down. They can have lunch here. They can walk around the garden.” So we arrived. No one answered the bell. Bong! We could hear it ringing inside the house. No one answered. Finally the door opened a crack. It was a Chinese cook. He said, ident
ifying himself, “Mr. Bob’s cook! Mr. Bob’s cook!” He looked terrified. He kept saying “Big, big, big, big!” and spreading his hands as if he were showing us a monstrous-sized fish. It turned out there was a large boa constrictor loose in the house. Something had gone wrong the night before, and the boa constrictor was roaming around and no one could find it. We left immediately. We never discovered if Bob Chanler was loose in there too. No, I think it was just this Chinese chef and the boa constrictor.
My other godfather was Henry Clews. He always had wives who were great beauties and great ladies. When he came to dinner he had to sit in a rocking chair, because that was his style. He simply didn’t like a straight-backed chair. Sometimes, if he felt like it, he wore his hat to the table—a beautiful, loose, floppy black fedora.
He was my father’s best friend in the world. My father hadn’t seen him in, say, thirty-five years, and so in his late eighties he decided to cross the big pond, the Atlantic, to see his old friend in La Napoule in the south of France.
My father arrived early in the morning on the Riviera, but he wasn’t met. He managed to get to this magnificent castle out on a neck of land that stuck out into the Mediterranean. He was told: “His Majesty will see you at quarter to three, Mr. Dalziel.” It took about four of these announcements to get my father into the mood that he was in the hands of madness—which he didn’t like. He didn’t have a thing to do. He walked in the gardens. He smoked cigarettes. He went up to his room two or three times. Then he came down. Finally a servant approached him—probably a very reliable sort—and said, “Would you come, sir, to the throne room, where Their Majesties will receive you.”
So my poor darling Daddy went to the “throne room”…I mean, like a child is taken to the leopard house or something. And there were the two of them on their thrones—dressed to the nines, crowns and everything—and Mrs. Clews came down off the dais: “Fred! How wonderful to receive you. This is such a pleasure for Henry and myself. Please sit down. We’re going to have a little lunch in a few minutes.”
My father had consumed about four breakfasts by this time. He was not amused. He was not amused at all! He asked to have a car, and he left for Paris before dinner. He couldn’t go through with it. He was too old to fool around with. He came back and said to me, “You see, my dear Diana, if Henry had said, ‘Look, I’ve got the biggest spoof on the whole Riviera. Got this magnificent castle…and we’re having the time of our lives. Most people our age don’t have the time of their lives, but we’re having it! Join us!’”—that might have been all right. Instead of that, he played his spoof off my father, his best friend. No, my father was not amused; he was terribly hurt. And when he told me this, his eyes flooded with tears. Because, naturally, when you’re almost ninety, you’ve lost all your friends, no? I’d say he was eighty-nine or ninety then. Oh, it’s such a sad story. And it was so sweet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
God, taxis are expensive! I should take a bus like the rest of the world. You can’t picture it? Neither can my grandchildren. They tell a story about me: “Nonnina”—that’s what they call me; it’s Italian for “little grandmother”—“Nonnina took a bus with Grandpa once, and you know what she said to him? ‘Oh, look! There are other people here!’”
Every time I have taken a bus, which naturally is about three or four times, I’ve had to ask the driver what the fare is. Naturally, the whole bus breaks into laughter. They go to pieces. So to explain, I say, “You see, I’m not from your country. I’m…Chinese!”
Don’t think I was always like this. When I went to work, I behaved like everyone else. I could use the subway.
Not long after we arrived back in New York in 1937, I was asked to work. I’d just arrived. I’d only been here for six months and I was going through money like one goes through…a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you’re an alcoholic. You couldn’t keep any money at all in New York; it was so expensive after London. Carmel Snow, who was the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, had seen me dancing at the St. Regis one night, and the next morning she called me up. She said she’d admired what I had on—it was a white lace Chanel dress with a bolero, and I had roses in my hair—and she asked me if I’d like a job.
“But Mrs. Snow,” I said, “except for my little lingerie shop in London, I’ve never worked. I’ve never been in an office in my life. I’m never dressed until lunch.”
“But you seem to know a lot about clothes,” Carmel said.
“That I do. I’ve dedicated hours and hours of very detailed time to my clothes.”
“All right, then why don’t you just try it and see how it works out?”
I knew so little when I started. I must have terrified them. One of those early days at Harper’s Bazaar I had a brainwave! I had on slacks like this and a little Chanel shirt with pockets inside, not on the outside like pockets are today. I said to an editor ambling around the hall, “I’ve got the best idea!” I took him into my office. “We’re going to eliminate all handbags.”
“You’re going to what?”
“Eliminate all handbags. Now look. What have I got here? I carry much more than most people. I’ve got cigarettes. I’ve got my lipstick, I’ve got my comb, I’ve got my powder, I’ve got my rouge, I’ve got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake. Put the money here, lipstick and powder there, the comb and rouge here. Of course, you’d have much bigger pockets, and they’d be rather chic.”
I told him how I would do the whole magazine just showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on, and also one’s walk—there’s nothing that limits a woman’s walk like a pocketbook.
Well, the man ran from my office the way you run for the police! He rushed into Carmel’s office and said, “Diana’s going crazy! Get hold of her.”
So Carmel came down and said, “Listen, Diana, I think you’ve lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!”
Well, she was correct, of course. It’s the same as if they cut out men’s ties. The country’d be destitute. “It’s your birthday, I’m bringing a tie.” The man who runs your building, what do you give him? A tie. It’s your father’s birthday, what do you give him? You give him a tie.
So I began that job. My father never referred to the fact that I worked for Harper’s Bazaar because, of course, it was a Hearst publication. It wasn’t that he objected to a woman working; it was that he hated the yellow press with such a passion. When I was growing up, no copies of any Hearst papers were allowed in the house. If a maid had been caught reading the Daily Mirror, she would have been fired. Oh, yes. And after I went to work, he never asked me how I was getting along, or how much money I was making, or whether they treated me well…the subject was never referred to—ever—because of his disapproval. And as for the fact that I was a great friend of Millicent Hearst’s and her sons…the subject simply didn’t exist for him.
Millicent died just a few years ago. I’m not big on funerals. I wouldn’t bring this up if it were in the least macabre, but it’s true: laid out in her coffin, she looked so absolutely ecstatic! She looked exactly like she did when she was the Belle of New York with every chandelier lit and all the bands playing. Really splendid. She looked…I mean, it was incredible! I’ve always been very fond of the Hearst boys, because I worked more than twenty-eight years for the Hearsts. Not that I had anything to do with the boys in terms of business—they didn’t know what side was up in the magazines. But I have a great fondness for them. So I walked around the corner of Sixty-seventh Street to Millicent’s apartment, and at the door Bill Hearst said, “You’ve got to see Mom. I’m sure this isn’t up your alley at all, but you’ve got to see!” He said, “It’s the goddamnedest thing!”
So we went into the dining room. It’s always in the dining room they put these poor people! And I mean, it was the work of art
of all artistry. I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life. She was in the coffin, all set to go.
I only believe in cremation—fast, fast cremation. Done with. But Millicent Hearst really did look simply radiant!
Millicent gave the last big parties in New York that were any fun. When I first knew her, she lived on Riverside Drive in a castle. You walked in…and there were suits of shining armor everywhere. It was a great old-fashioned baronial hall, and Millicent would be standing in the center of it all, roaring with laughter. One night she’d wear emerald shoulder straps. Then the next night she’d wear diamond shoulder straps. And don’t forget the emeralds and the diamons were this big, all across rather big shoulders. She was never a small girl—everything in a big way!
And funny! If she was going to make a joke, she’d start laughing, so she got you laughing before the joke was made, and by the time the joke was made, everybody was hysterical. She had quite an inflection. Instead of “the oil of Texas” and “the Earl of Sefton,” shall we say, she’d say “the Oil of Sefton” and “the earl of Texas.” She was from Brooklyn, and it was Brooklyn all the way. She was always surrounded by important, intelligent men. In London, in Paris, everywhere she went, she was treated like a great personality from this country. American royalty. And she never, never improved her English, nor did she care about it, nor did she know she was talking it—she didn’t hear it. She was a hearty, lusty, wonderful blonde from Brooklyn who went all the way around the world twice. I think she was just plain too big for old William Randolph Hearst. And that was the reason for Marion Davies.
She was another fascinator. She was like Nell Gwynn—she had sold oranges in the street and now she slept with a king. She was the most delightful, provocative, amusing company—an alive, electric creature of total charm…and power. She wasn’t all that different from Millicent. They both had power.
D.V. Page 9
