CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I don’t especially enjoy going out to evenings where someone gets up and performs—or where there’s entertainment. I much prefer talk. Good conversation is rare and becoming increasingly so. Nowadays, the custom is to go to a restaurant where it’s impossible to get a conversation going in all that din. It’s totally wonderful when you can experience an evening at someone’s house—a small, intimate gathering—when a good talker takes over and stimulates a good argument. A little restaurant? Nothing more tiresome. Good cooks, jolly fellows—that’s what make a dinner.
My favorite dinner partners are the English because they never laugh. I am so spellbound and overcome by the mood they create through their language. Their wit is what is so supreme. A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.
Noel Coward was great at it. Such a marvelous raconteur. “The other day…” and everyone at the table would lean forward to listen. It’s always dramatic, because all English are actors, and there are very few actors who are not English.
What I’m talking about is general conversation. Country-house stuff. I adore someone who has the attention of the whole table. Too much these days there’s this ritual at dinner of talking to the person on your right and then turning to your left. And people are much too keen on even-steven numbers at dinner—“Oh my God, I haven’t got anybody for so-and-so.” That’s ridiculous. Getting the numbers right never made a good dinner.
I don’t think men in this country take a social evening seriously enough—that is, they tend to take them for granted and don’t arrive with much flair to offer. Perhaps they’re too exhausted from the day’s work to provide it. It’s too bad. Men are more social than women. They enjoy the divertissement of an evening, the change of pace from the work of the day. But you can’t tell me that dining out has become a great art. We might get the gift of it back—if some of the men were English!
Of course, it helps if there’s some preposterousness in the air…something outrageous or memorable. Greta Garbo always brought a spark that ignited everyone around the table. A great gusher of language. Garbo never called anyone by their first name. “Mrs. Vreeeelandddd.” Everyone called her “Miss G.” Her voice, of course, was beautiful, and seductive. Totally seductive. She adored Reed, and Reed’s overcoats. She’d walk up and down our apartment in Reed’s overcoats, not to be admired but to enjoy being in them. She’d take one off and then she’d go into his closet and get into another one.
Cole Porter was another who brightened things up totally when he was around. Sometimes if Reed and I were invited to dinner he’d make up a little rhyme about us and play it for us on the piano. Nothing serious, of course…just as a pleasant surprise for a half minute or so while we were getting ice for the drinks. He owned a house in Paris on the rue Monsieur, one of those rounded eighteenth-century streets which looked as if it had been designed by a swirl of smoke, and you’d ring the concierge’s bell and the door would swing open and you’d find yourself looking through an orchard of apple trees at the kind of half-timbered house you’d find in Normandy. You’d go in and he’d play this little ditty.
Here’s Diana
Sittin’ on the pi-ana.
They also had a palazzo in Venice. Marvelous. At six in the morning he’d go out with his gondolier and he’d change positions with him—the gondolier would sit in the bow of the gondola in Cole’s seat, and Cole would stand in the back, with the big oar, and wearing a little navy pullover, and the little fluttering ribbons in his gondolier’s hat, and he would feel the rhythm of the gondola. The gondolier would correct him. Isn’t that divine? Everything with him was rhythm. That’s why he’s so contagious; that’s why he never dies.
He was just the most charming man you could ever have around. He looked so appetizing. Such a gentleman, such a mondaine chap. A bit of all right. In fact, he was what you’d call a big-time gent. He came from Peru, Indiana. But there was nothing local about him. He had the patina of the world. Actually, I’m crazy about Indiana. So many people with style come from Indiana—not that I can give you a long list, but it’s true. Cole always had a little patter—sparkling, amusing.
I was staying at the same house party in Long Island when he had that terrible accident with the horse. The horse had reared while crossing an asphalt road, frightened by an approaching automobile, and lost its balance and fell on top of Cole. Crushed both legs. And that was it. It started a whole thing with Cole—survival.
After his accident I think he went through twenty-eight operations over a period of something like thirty years. Reed and I saw a lot of him during his operations. We’d have divine teas at the Harkness Pavilion. He had his own valet. Canapés were served, lovely tea, and a shaker of drinks, all to keep it gay, because he was a merriment boy, of course. Full of it. And then his wife died—Linda Lee of Louisville, Kentucky—a famous beauty and very rich; though he made three times the money, he used to joke with her about it. And then the amputation came.
And then he stopped speaking. But he kept on living. He couldn’t bear not being with people. He’d ask one or two of his friends up to see him for lunch or dinner in his beautiful apartment at the Waldorf. You’d sit there and talk away at him, and he simply didn’t speak. I’d come in, he’d be sitting on the sofa, I’d give him a kiss on the forehead, I’d get my little vodka—this would be at dinner—and then Reed and I would put on the act we’d rehearsed in the cab going to the Waldorf. We’d say, “No one has more beautiful books than Cole—look how beautifully bound they are.” Et cetera. Et cetera. Dinner would then be announced, and Reed and I would leave the library and go into the dining room, but we wouldn’t sit down. We wouldn’t be anywhere near the table; we’d be at the other end of the room examining the beautiful Chinese wallpaper. And I’d say to Reed, “And Saturday afternoon…wasn’t that the funniest movie you ever saw?!” Cole would be carried in, he couldn’t walk, but we would see none of it. When he couldn’t walk, he wouldn’t talk; but he wouldn’t be alone, he couldn’t stand it. He’d be placed in his chair and he’d just sit.
One night I thought, I’m going to give this situation a little bit of a push. So I stopped at the drugstore near my office on Fifty-sixth Street. I bought some eyelashes—the longest lashes you ever saw; they were goosefeathers, and you glued them right on the lid with a piece of adhesive. They were about three inches long! They were supposed to be trimmed to whatever length you’d care to have eyelashes. Naturally, I didn’t trim them at all. So I walked into Cole’s; I got my drink and told him how well he looked, how happy I was to see him. He said nothing, as usual. At dinner, we went through one course, two courses—Reed and I chatting away—and then I said, “You know something, Cole, you haven’t mentioned my eyelashes.” And he suddenly said, “Well, I can see them.” It was the only sentence he said all night long.
I don’t want you to think that I’m being in any way critical of Cole. People were delighted to go, even though they knew they were going to have to go through with this charade. It was difficult, and yet one wanted to say “Bravo, bravo” all the time. At the end I’d say, “We’ve got to go, my darling Cole. As usual, what a lovely evening you’ve given us, and what a good time.”
Cole died in 1964. Reed died two years later. He wasn’t ill very long. He was only in the hospital six weeks. One Sunday morning he packed his suitcase with some dressing gowns and went to the hospital to have some tests. I was at my desk at Vogue. The doctor called me up. The tests were in. He was on his way to tell Reed.
I said, “What do you take my husband for—an idiot? Don’t you think he knows?”
“Have you discussed it with him?”
I said, “Of course not! Why would he and I discuss cancer?”
The doctor said, “Mrs. Vreeland, you’re not at all modern. We always t
ell our patients.”
I went to the hospital that evening. Always, Reed had been in the hall to meet me: marvelous foulard, and wonderful this and that. Not this time. He was in bed with his face to the wall. So I said hello.
He didn’t answer. So I sat down.
Twenty minutes later he turned, “Well, they’ve told you and they’ve told me, so now it’s on the table. Nothing to be done about it.” I didn’t even answer him.
But I don’t think of this. I don’t think of anything except how wonderful our life was together—the trips around Europe in our wonderful Bugatti and all the wonderful things we saw on those trips, the luxury in which we lived every day until all hours of the night, the perfume, the flowers….
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ah, the plainness of life!
I can remember Jackie Kennedy, right after she moved into the White House, telling me what it looked like. There were no flowers anywhere, there was no place to sit, no one was expected…it was awful. It wasn’t even like a country club, if you see what I mean—plain.
All that changed with the Kennedys. As you know, the White House changed. And the whole country changed. I couldn’t believe it happened so quickly, so beautifully—and so easily. How did it happen? Jackie Kennedy put a little style into the White House and into being First Lady of the land, and suddenly “good taste” became good taste. Before the Kennedys, “good taste” was never the point of modern America—at all. I’m not talking about manners—standing up when a woman comes into a room. The Kennedys released a positive attitude toward culture, toward style…and, since then, we’ve never gone back.
I had a small part in this. I occasionally gave Jackie advice about clothes. I did suggest that she carry a sable muff on Inauguration Day. It was only for practical reasons—I thought she was going to freeze to death. But I also think muffs are romantic because they have to do with history.
Reed and I went down to Washington for the Inauguration. We went to the ceremony on a snow plow. It was so cold that day, as you’ll remember, and the snow was that thick—there wasn’t a branch that wasn’t entirely encrusted with ice. And of course, there wasn’t a sound. The monuments of Washington stood out in this white, white atmosphere. But what I remember best is the blue of the sky.
Don’t forget that a low-ceilinged town is quite different from a high-ceilinged city like New York, all cluttered up with bricks and mortar and hideous glass skyscrapers. New York is really quite meager in a snowstorm. But Washington that day was so clean. And the dome of the Capitol stood out against this blue sky—blue like a China blue. I’ll never forget that blue—or that day.
The experience was identical to the impression the coronation of George V had made on me as a child. It didn’t have to do with grandeur, of course, but it had to do with something very special…. I know too little about America, but that day, for the first time in my life, I felt like an American.
My son Frecky, who really knew the Kennedys better than I did—he and his wife, Betty, knew them from Washington—was with the American Embassy in Rabat when Jack Kennedy was assassinated. He told me that when they woke up that morning—the news had come through to Rabat during the night—the front steps of their house were absolutely covered with little bunches of flowers. Then…when my two grandsons went to school that morning, every child stood outside and waited for them to go inside first.
The manners of Eastern countries are so refined.
Shortly before the assassination, my friend Whitney Warren had called me from San Francisco. He’s a rich connoisseur of beautiful things and has a charming collection of paintings and porcelain and a ravishing house on Telegraph Hill which looks out on Chinatown. His father was a famous architect who had a scandalous affair with Cécile Sorel of the Comédie-Française—their love letters are in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She was a woman of the great gesture. When her husband ended up in the bankruptcy courts, she left the Comédie-Française for the Casino de Paris to make money. She spent hours, this great actress, learning how to come down the long curved staircase of the Casino stage, just to walk down at the right speed, with the plumes waving, and the diamonds in the plumes, and her arms stretched up, and when she reached the bottom step she called out across the footlights, “Ai-je bien descendu?”—Did I come down well?—and the audience went insane.
Well, that was Whitney Warren’s father’s love, and we must not get too far afield or we’ll forget where we began. Which was that Whitney Warren called me from San Francisco and said, “I admire Mrs. Kennedy so much that I want to give her the most I can give. I want to give her the Sargent.”
I knew the painting so well. A few years before, Whitney had loaned us his house on Telegraph Hill for two weeks while he was away in Europe. I had his bedroom, which was built almost like the prow of a ship, with round windows on three sides framing the most extraordinary views. Between the windows was the most amazing assemblage of divine paintings and drawings, including Boldini’s wonderful sketch of the Duchess of Marlborough with her youngest son, and then…on the fourth wall, over the bed, hung the Sargent.
It’s a painting of a woman in a yellow-white dress, almost faint banana, lying under a black net. The picture is called The Mosquito Net. The painting of the dress is marvelous—the way the fabric is draped and the way the light falls on it. Then…the expression on the woman’s face is the most delectable thing. She’s half smiling and half asleep, and you don’t know whether she’s really worried about mosquitoes or whether the whole thing is a fantasy. That’s not the point. The point is the aura the woman gives, and the shadows and the lusciousness and the lightness and the whole allure of it, which is too beautiful.
So that day Whitney told me he’d like to give the painting to Mrs. Kennedy. “The thought is wonderful,” I said, “and a woman who has given this country such an inspiration of style, of beauty, of everything our civilization stands for certainly deserves it, but Whitney, what a present. You’re giving your right arm, your right leg, your right eye—it’s the most beautiful and, in a way, intimate possession I know of anyone having!”
“That’s why I want to give it to her,” he said. “That’s what I think of her.”
So he started the negotiations to give it away. And then, the President was killed just about the time this extraordinary gift arrived. Mrs. Kennedy left the White House.
It totally got to me—the whole histoire of this painting. I had a reproduction of it published in Vogue. This is the caption we ran with it:
The romantic mood is a point of view: beyond the ruffles and ribbons and laces—beyond all the familiar tokens—there is a secret world…. We look at this Sargent painting and sense, within the crush of black veiling and the pale volumes of satin, some secret laughter, some private delight, some coquetry withheld—that slight holding back that invests charm with mystery and magic; we sense that this moment of languor is only a lull before the simmering gaiety and vitality sweep her off her feet—this giggly, delicious girl is in love with the world around her. Her world; she has created it for herself, it is real for herself—and therefore real to us…. We believe in it as we believe in Prospero’s enchanted isle or in the Forest of Arden…or as we believe in the world of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes—a world which we know, in fact, to be no larger than a tiny French village—but a world so fully imagined by its author and so deeply realized that it becomes seductively real, vast and borderless: the world of the romantic…. It is for you to discover for yourself, within yourself—within the silent, green-cool groves of an inner world where, alone and free, you may dream the possible dream: that the wondrous is real, because that is how you feel it to be, that is how you wish it to be…and how you wish it into being.
I can’t remember how much of this is mine. Usually, I’d write out a few ideas and give them to the caption writer to work in. I know I wasn’t responsible for the reference to The Tempest—although I approve totally. But I’m sure I suggested Alain-Fournier. I was a
lways trying to get Le Grand Meaulnes in.
The painting now hangs in the Green Room on the State Floor of the White House. It has the title The Mosquito Net and the donor’s name on a little plaque, but of course it doesn’t have anything about why it was given, or Whitney Warren’s feelings about what the Kennedys had done for the country. I’m not sure it didn’t arrive the day he was killed. In fact, I’m sure she’s never even seen it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I’ve organized twelve exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum. Ted Rousseau got me involved with my Metropolitan shows originally. He came to see me four or five times—he was an old friend and an official of the Museum—and he sat right where you are now and argued with me. I’d say, “Ted, I’ve never been in a museum except as a tourist.”
He said, “Well, why don’t you change around a bit?”
I was free to do it, certainly. I’d been fired from Vogue. They wanted a New Deal there. And they got it.
They were not very good at letting people go. One of the great editors at Vogue was Margaret Case. She threw herself out a window because she was eighty, she was out of work, she had no money—and she’d been dismissed in the most terrible way. She lived in this building we’re sitting in now. From here she’d walk over to Lexington Avenue in the most awful, terrible weather—storms and so on—and take the bus to Forty-second Street to the Condé Nast offices, where when they decided they didn’t want her, no one bothered to speak to her…for years.
She had been a great editor. Her gift was Society. She really could smell you out. It was a time when there was a lot of prejudice everywhere. You have no idea. I’ll never forget photographing Baby Jane Holzer—the glorious blonde of the sixties, wonderful looking!—in Paris. The early sixties. Can you remember what the world was like then? Even someone as sophisticated as Tatiana Liberman said, “Do you know who she is?” I said, “No, who is she?” “She’s Jewish, Diana!” “Well,” I said, “really, Tatiana, this is a sort of a paper for the people. You know, we’ve put up the circulation by five hundred thousand in three years because we’re touching on everybody, so long as they’re exciting and glamorous and fashionable…that’s our business.”
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