D.V.

by Diana Vreeland

  “Well, so long as you know what you’re doing.”

  I thought to myself, “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  Margaret Case was part and parcel of this snobbish attitude, but she knew what she was talking about. She came from Ithaca, New York, and the story was that she was part of a dance team. You might ask how Margaret Case, coming out of a provincial environment like that, could become so acute in sniffing out Society. Well, have you ever known a lady’s maid? Have you ever known a butler? Try to beat them. Not that I’m putting Margaret in the same category. She was a very dignified, good woman. She was very good at fashion. She was Condé Nast’s right arm there for a long time. And then they decided to get rid of her. She didn’t get the hint. One day she was at her desk, which she’d had for forty or fifty years, and some moving men came and said they had to take the desk away. She said, “But it’s my desk. It’s got all my things in it.”

  Well, they took her desk away and dumped everything in it out. Boxes and boxes arrived here at this building. Isn’t that awful? Papers, letters, photographs. I couldn’t go upstairs to her apartment, I couldn’t look.

  Very early one morning my maid, Yvonne, came through the court in the back and found her. She’d gone out the window, sixteen floors. She was as neat as a pin. She was in a raincoat fastened to here, a little handkerchief, all the buttons to the very bottom, and a pair of slacks. I mean, she had thought everything out!

  Well, I was fired somewhat more courteously, I must admit. When he heard the news, Ted Rousseau of the Metropolitan Museum came to see me. I was terribly fond of Ted. What a marvelous man he was. Raised in Paris. He was the Metropolitan. He installed me there in an office in the Costume Institute, which has been in the Met for years—founded by the Lewisohn Stadium people. A really fantastic collection had been donated to start things—shawls, wonderful laces, the clothes of the Directoire, et cetera, et cetera, eighteenth-century dresses…it’s not only an incredible collection but wonderfully preserved. I took Marie-Hélène de Rothschild there and she said, “Oh, God, Diana, if my clothes could be kept like these!” Everything, you see, is breathing in there; the clothes are behind Venetian blinds in these huge cabinets—the temperature, humidity, and lighting are all carefully controlled.

  Balenciaga was the first exhibition. That was the sort of spectacle that the Museum officials expected. But then for the third show we put on one called “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design.” Tom Hoving, who was the director then, got on the phone. “In the name of God, Diana, why are we dragging Hollywood into the Metropolitan?”

  I said, “Tom, I’ve been looking at French couture for the last forty years, and I can only tell you that I have never seen clothes made like these.”

  It was true. They were unbelievable—the clothes those actresses wore. Of course, I’m talking about the glamorous years of Hollywood designs…what Garbo wore as Camille or Mata Hari. The Dietrich dresses in Angel…the costumes of Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind.

  I went all over the place to find those clothes. I got them out of the honky-tonks in New Orleans and the warehouses where they sell dresses for the Mardi Gras, and throughout the country. Of course, I went out to the studios in California…sending word to the costumers that I was interested in that period. Each one said, “Oh, Mrs. Vreeland, we have the biggest surprise for you! We have the one and only green curtain dress that Scarlett O’Hara wore in Gone With the Wind. We’ve been saving it for you. Everyone’s after it. It’s just for you.” I always said, “Thank you very much, but it’s much too nice of you,” because I had gone to see Danny Selznick, who had given me the key to his father’s closet, in which there was a gigantic safe. “Diana,” he said to me, “in there are all the clothes from Gone With the Wind.” And hanging in a neat row were all the beautiful clothes of Vivien Leigh. I must have been shown twenty “originals” in Hollywood, but at last I came away with the true article.

  I always remember about Gone With the Wind that when Reed and I were staying in Manhasset, Jock Whitney’s sister, Joan Payson, sent her chauffeur down with the manuscript of the book. She asked that I read it quickly because the next morning she was going to send the book off to David O. Selznick in Hollywood. That book made the telephone directory look like a pocket handkerchief. I told the chauffeur to explain to Mrs. Payson that I preferred to sleep at night, or at least part of it, and that what had been handed to me would have kept me up for two or three weeks. Actually I can’t stand novels—I don’t care what happens to people on paper.

  One of my favorite Metropolitan exhibitions was “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungary.” Unfortunately Hungarians don’t impress the world anymore—they’ve never been successful, and success is the only thing the world we live in now understands and remembers.

  I’d never been behind the Iron Curtain. I’ve been to Moscow and Leningrad, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the satellite countries like Hungary. And when I went back to Hungary to arrange for the exhibition at the Metropolitan, I was so dismayed that I couldn’t wait to do my work and pull out. There were a few compensations: no high-rises, so they’ve won a battle there. The baroque contours of the eighteenth-century palaces along the Danube remain. The two museums I was taken to were absolutely immaculate and beautifully lit. But the poverty! The lack of anything for anybody to do. What upset me the most were the men. It was March when I was there—chilly and gray—and the men were walking along in rusty overcoats and carrying black bags. What do you suppose they were carrying in those bags? I could never guess. Certainly not work, because I never had the sense that anybody was working. Wills, perhaps. Or a bottle. They all seemed slightly stooped, which is what happens to people if there is nothing toward which they are walking.

  But if you could have been in Budapest before the war, you could have learned history, you could have learned romance… Budapest before the war was the most chic city in Europe.

  Budapest! Buda-pest! There’s Buda and there’s Pest, with the Danube running in between. When you smell the Danube, you know you’re no longer in the West. It’s an undefinable smell that comes from the East.

  The Danube still smells the same. That was the only thing that hadn’t changed when I went back to Budapest to get clothes for the Hapsburg show. Now it’s a gray city with gray buildings, gray people…but the Budapest I remember was the last city of pleasure. It was simply charm and life and violins, and you’d look out a window and see a barefoot gypsy girl leading a bear walking on his hind legs with a ring in his nose, or a beautiful officer in a pale blue jacket with sable cuffs and collar slung over one shoulder. Embroidered boots! The dash of Budapest!

  Animals were once a great part of life. They certainly were in Budapest. We’d often have lunch in the zoo among the animals allowed to walk around loose—all sorts of beautiful horned animals and peacocks, cranes, and pelicans. The zoo in Budapest was the most romantic thing you could possibly imagine. Did you know that my favorite movie is Zoo in Budapest—with Loretta Young and Gene Raymond. Not many people know there is such a movie.

  Other days in Hungary we’d drive out to the country just above Budapest, which is like the steppes of Russia, where we saw something we’d seen only in Tunisia. We saw mirages of water, the fata morgana. There we saw cowboys with great wide-brimmed hats.

  In the evening we’d go back to the Duna Palato Hotel, where we always stayed. Ah, the total refinement of the Duna Palato! M. Ritz had stayed there with his wife late in the nineteenth century and had decided to copy it. Every Ritz hotel, starting with the Ritz on the place Vendôme in Paris, was copied from the Duna Palato, which was without question the best and most luxurious hotel in Europe until it got a direct hit during the war.

  We dined in the wine gardens about nine o’clock. On the way in you grabbed a tartan blanket—fluffy, woolen—off a tall stack by the door. I took two or three. They were to keep on your lap and to put over your shoulders. Candles were set throughout th
e gardens, and there were lots of waiters, more of them as the evening went on, hovering over you and changing this and that, and no suggestion from them that it was time to finish the drinks and move on. And violinists, treating you as if you were someone in a fairy tale.

  There were two other extraordinary places in Budapest—the Parisienne Grille, a big ballroom with a royal box to sit in at each of the four corners of the room, quite far up, and dancing below, and you’d sweep down and join in. The other was the Arizona. There was nothing in there that could remind anyone in Budapest of Arizona unless it was that the floor came up, very mechanical, very modern, with a girl on it wearing gray slacks and a wide felt hat and singing “Stormy Weather.” Why that reminded the Hungarians of the state of Arizona I haven’t the slightest idea. Certainly if you went into a place in Arizona named the Budapest you’d find a dozen or so strolling violinists and waiters in red pantaloons.

  The mud baths of Budapest! Every morning a woman would come to the Duna Palato with some mud from someplace up the Danube, and I’d sit there all morning, perfectly content, with this lovely mud all over my face and neck. Everyone’s face in Budapest was so wonderfully clean. Don’t forget, this is a city where no one had any money—but everyone was in love, everyone was so beautifully dressed, everyone had such beautiful shoes…. The best shoe and boot makers in the world were there—the very best—so all the women’s feet were wonderfully shod and elegant, like ballet dancers’ feet.

  And the men…ah, they were so dashing! And they were still dashing at eighty, because they never tired of pleasure. They had the beauty of age. We often went to the races with the swells of the racing world—I mean the Big-Timers, like the Hungarian equivalent of Lord Derby. Now this is interesting: the grand seigneurs in their striped trousers and cutaways and always a touch of makeup, under their gray toppers. It was just a matter of a little kohl here, a little black grease there, a little this and a little that…I’m talking about the expression of the face being brought out. Apparently, this is a Slavic thing—I think it comes from Rumania—but it was as comme il faut as an older woman wearing a lace collar. I never took it as anything extraordinary. I just took it as something one saw when one went to the races in Budapest. This was all part of life in those days.

  You can call this a “peacock complex”—I approve of that. Show me a dandy and I’ll show you a hero, as Baudelaire said. I’ve never seen dandies like the dandies I saw in Budapest. Very Hungarian thing. And in the nineteenth century it was more. When I went back to Budapest, I went mad over the nineteenth-century men’s uniforms. They’re the aristocracy of elegance. It’s the leather, it’s the placement of the gold embroidery, the small casques with one egret feather; the tasseled boots, the sables…. Of course, they’re all slightly absurd, because though they were seldom at war they were always in uniform—it was the rule of the Emperor that no man at court could be dressed in anything but the uniform of his own regiment. They have the real absurdity of style.

  Those Hungarian men are my heroes. And Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, is one of my heroines. She was born a Wittelsbach, and I can show you a picture of her and a picture of Ludwig when he was young that are identical—although they were only first cousins. You couldn’t tell the boy from the girl except for the length of the hair. Elisabeth adored her hair, took great care of her hair…perhaps you remember the great Winterhalter portrait. She was one of the first modern women. She was one of the first women who did exercises, one of the first who did gymnastics, and one night a week she’d go to bed in special sheets of bath toweling packed in beefsteaks—for her skin. Apparently, she never looked older than thirty—ever.

  Now during my search for costumes in Budapest I was shown…at first, I didn’t understand what I was being shown. My little interpreter and the costume curator were speaking Hungarian and German when a box was brought out. In it was a beautiful little black taffeta blouse with a high neck and a tiny waist. It had belonged to Elisabeth. She had very long legs—she wasn’t short—and was lithe and slender.

  “And this,” the curator said, “is the blouse in which the Empress was murdered.”

  “Oh…” I said.

  It was as immaculate as my shirt. There was a tiny slit where the stiletto had gone in—but other than that there wasn’t a mark. It was all corseting, you see. She was so tightly laced that there was no external bleeding of any kind, and that’s why neither she nor anyone else knew what had happened. She just kept walking. “Please give me your hand,” she said. “I’d like to go back to the boat….”

  She kept going while the hemorrhage was taking place—tightly laced within this black taffeta blouse. But she kept walking, kept walking, kept walking…she got back to the boat and was taken back to Geneva, where she died. You must imagine this. Of course, nowadays you wouldn’t have to imagine it. There’d be paparazzi standing around taking pictures of the whole thing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  In Russia they told me: “We’re not a royal country.”

  I thought of this just the other day. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about Russia. One day I was asked to do an advertisement on the radio for Hide-A-Beds. Rather a commercial job, you might say, but I happen to think that beds are marvelous. At home I have a huge sofa and, en plus, a long bed that comes out to here. So I said, “This is what I would like to say for the advertisement: When I was in Pavlovsk, outside of Leningrad—the palace that Catherine the Great built for Paul, her son—I saw Catherine’s bed, and it was L-shaped. Now that’s rather fascinating—an L-shaped bed. Here’s the bed and here’s the leg of the L—another very wide bed sticking out of it at right angles. Don’t ask me why—I have no idea. It was never explained to me. Whether she threw the army in there, took the navy in here…but that’s the sort of thing that I would like to suggest in the radio advertisement.”

  They didn’t think that would be quite suitable.

  “But,” I said, “wouldn’t people like to have a bed like Catherine the Great of Russia’s? She was great, as Mae West said…in fact that was the name of one of Mae’s plays, Catherine Was Great. I always believe in giving ’em something!”

  The first day I arrived in Russia to collect the clothes for the exhibition at the Metropolitan, I had nothing to do. No one was going to see me until the next day, so I went to Tolstoy’s house. It was once well out in the country on the outskirts of Moscow; now it’s just a little outside. There was no one else there, and I thought it was the most divine thing in the world. And when I saw these lilacs—like great big bunches of grapes—falling over the walls like bombs…I died.

  A child who was obviously the daughter of the caretaker was following me around. Of course, I was raving—I was so excited by my first day in Russia. I think she understood me. But then she ran away, like all children do, like dogs do—you know, they’re terribly fascinated with you for a while, then they lose interest. Then she came back…with one rose! From Tolstoy’s garden! I took it home, put it in a little cream pitcher, and had it the whole ten days I stayed in Moscow.

  We’re all exiles from something, but never to be able to go back to our country is something we don’t know. When I’d been in Russia for only forty-eight hours, I thought to myself: Of all the countries I’ve known, if it were my country not to be able to come back to this one would be the most terrible.

  When I found myself walking through Red Square in the middle of the night…I felt like a child. It was light right up until about eleven-thirty, but it wasn’t sun, it was light, the light behind the sky. I don’t think I’d like the midnight sun, actually. What I love is darkness—changing. I loved the golden onion domes and the beautiful skies. I love medieval Russia. Moscow is really my town.

  And then…Leningrad! I arrived there late in March and it was still winter. Everything was black—except for the buildings, of course. The farther north you get, the more love of color you find, and no one has ever loved color more than the Russians. When I got
back, a friend of mine said, “So you fell for all that third-rate Italian stuff—Leningrad, that ice-cream town?” Really!

  When I arrived in Leningrad, every tree was a thick black line. Then, in one week…it was spring! It was the most beautiful big city I’ve ever seen in my life. It was bigger than life. I mean, it only has forty square miles of pink, mauve, lavender, pistache green, and pale blue palaces, all of such a nobility, such a scale…wide, wide avenues and squares…nothing but rivers and bridges and sunsets and clean, clear northern air.

  I adore les russes. I call them that out of habit, because of the Ballets Russes, because of Fokine, because of all the émigrés I used to see in London, Paris, Lausanne, and New York. As you know, all émigrés speak French.

  I saw my friend Iya Abdy not long ago. Her father was a great dramatic actor who was known from one end of Russia to another. One night he was Boris Godunov, the next night he was Ivan the Terrible, and he traveled in caravans with parrots and leopards and cheetahs and tigers. That’s how Iya was brought up.

  She came to see the Russian show at the Museum. She came alone. She gives the impression of traveling all over the world alone. “Oh, Diana,” she said, “did you hate Rrrussia?”

  She’s never lost her Russian accent, which is rather curious considering the number of years she’s been out of Russia—well over fifty. But then she doesn’t look that different from when I first saw her, which, curiously enough, was in New York. She was exercising five Pekinese outside the Waldorf Towers. She had these huge macaroons of thick blond hair, an enormous black hat, and a big mouth. She was six feet tall. New York, you know, was a small city then—you could see people. And I said to myself, “That must be Lady Abdy.”