Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  As a small girl, Diana could not possibly have understood why her mother lashed out in this malign way. In the years between 1904 and 1914, Emily Dalziel pitched between restless unhappiness and exuberance and finally tipped into a depressive state that she later described as “wretched health . . . nothing definite you know, just a nervous miserable condition.” Poorly understood in the years before World War I, and compounded by acute anxiety about her fading beauty and appeal, Emily’s “nerves” resulted in histrionic and delinquent behavior toward her two daughters, with effects that stayed with both of them for years. Diana would later rationalize this by saying that mothers and daughters rarely got on well. But the truth, in the Dalziel family, was that the mother adored one daughter and not the other.

  “You ask ‘do I love you,’ ” Emily once wrote to Alexandra. “My precious baby girl, I love you with all my heart & soul & body. . . . I love you, the air you breath [sic], the things you touch, the ground you walk on. Every little bit of me loves every bit of you. I love you so it hurts, so it frightens me.” At the same time Emily developed an antipathy toward Diana, who committed the cardinal sin of refusing to show her mother the unconditional love she demanded from everyone else. Diana probably did become exceedingly difficult, for she possessed a fierce temper that never quite went away. In childhood, however, Diana was convinced that the root cause of Emily’s incontinent antagonism was her ugliness. While her mother reveled in Alexandra’s beauty, Diana’s looks were an embarrassment. “All I knew then was that my mother wasn’t proud of me,” said Diana. “I was always her ugly little monster.”

  Had Diana been luckier, an affectionate nanny might have compensated for her mother’s hostility. But in this instance she was truly unfortunate, for the Dalziel children grew up with a nanny who also found Diana difficult and made the dysfunctional family dynamics even worse. This was not, as Diana claimed in her memoirs, the nurse called Pink who took her for daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne. (Though there was a nurse of that name, she left the Dalziel household when Diana was about a year old.) The nanny in question was Katherine (or “Kay”) Carroll, who appeared in the New York household in 1908, about a year after Alexandra was born. She was no passing nursemaid. Because Emily was often out or away, she left Kay Carroll in charge and ceded control to her. Nanny Kay acquired a great deal of power. She became the person who held the Dalziel household together, and she stayed for decades, becoming, in effect, another member of the family.

  Kay Carroll adored her “baby” Alexandra, and Alexandra—and Emily—loved Nanny Kay. As far as Alexandra was concerned, Kay Carroll was the warm substitute mother who compensated for Emily’s increasingly frequent absences. Yet Alexandra was also the first to say that Nanny Kay’s attitude to Diana was completely different. “She didn’t like Diana,” she declared. “Diana and she didn’t get on.” Nanny Kay copied Emily by constantly comparing Diana unfavorably with her younger sister. Understandably Diana loathed Kay Carroll. “My nurse was appalling. Naturally, nurses are always frustrated. They may love the children but they’re not theirs and the time will come when they will have to leave them. . . . I couldn’t stand her. She was the worst.” Remarkably the loved and the unloved sisters remained fond of each other though they were very different, one bond in an otherwise fissile household.

  In Diana’s early adolescence, matters came to a head. Diana spoke of this fleetingly much later, though she generally only dropped hints, leaving the listener to put the constituent parts together. She told Christopher Hemphill, a New York writer who was custodian of Andy Warhol’s tapes, that she had a terrible nightmare as a child about being obliterated, one that stayed with her for years. “It was a wall of water coming curling over me when I was alone in the water—this body of water moving, moving, moving, moving. . . . It was like teeth almost—totally consuming. . . . I was terrified of the Atlantic but I couldn’t stay out of it. . . . It was always the same all-consuming war.” There are very few photographs of Diana in her early teens, so it is difficult to tell whether puberty wrought real damage to her looks. What is clear is that once she reached the age of self-consciousness and looked in the mirror, she hated what she saw; and what seems to have happened is that relentless labeling as ugly, and the denigration that went with it from the two female adults in the Dalziel household, conspired to reduce a fragile child to such a low emotional state that Diana later preferred to excise and rearrange much of the narrative about this part of her life, rather than remember that it nearly broke her.

  In Diana’s version of what happened, the problems began when the family returned from Paris to New York in 1914. In this account she could speak only French and was unable to understand what was said to her. “Actually, when I was brought to America from France in 1914, I didn’t know any English. But what was worse, I didn’t hear it. I was the most frustrated little girl.” She was certainly frustrated and miserable, but for a different reason. In 1914 (having actually moved to New York ten years earlier) both Diana and Alexandra followed their mother to the Brearley School, then as now a top private girls’ school. As an adult Diana consistently maintained that she and her sister were barely educated, but this was wrong. Their education was taken seriously. Brearley aimed to give young ladies an intellectual education comparable to that of their brothers, and when Diana was there its head, James G. Croswell, was a professor of Greek from Harvard. But once again the beautiful Alexandra, who was blessed with brains and sporting ability as well as beauty and an even temperament, thrived in the atmosphere of Brearley and stayed there for thirteen years. She went on to study mathematics at Bryn Mawr, and finished her degree at Barnard.

  Diana, on the other hand, hated Brearley and its academic ethos so much that she almost wrote it out of her life story. She loathed the school’s rigid authoritarianism, felt isolated from her more teachable classmates, and learned nothing. “It’s one time in my life I’ve always regretted—fighting my way through the place. . . . And those goddamn gongs! Everyone knew where to go when the gong went off except me, but I didn’t know whom to ask. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know anything—I couldn’t speak.” Talking to the New York curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler years later, she described her time at Brearley thus: “I lasted three weeks at the Brearley School . . . three months . . . three months. And really, they kept me there out of sort of kindness to my parents who obviously didn’t know what to do with me because I didn’t speak English, I’d never had time to learn English, wasn’t allowed to speak French and I’d no one to talk to.” Misery at Brearley may have led to an outbreak of stuttering. “English was decided on, which is why I speak such terrible French to this day.” This nonsense is best read as a metaphor for a time when Diana was so isolated and adrift that she could barely communicate. Her school records show that she was in fact at Brearley for three full years.

  To make matters worse, Emily found a new way of passing the time during the vacations that Diana truly hated. The outbreak of war in Europe put an end to family trips to Paris after 1914. Faced with being trapped in the United States during the long summer months, Emily turned to big-game hunting. She had long ridden to hounds, but from around 1916, when Diana was thirteen, Emily developed a passion for a sport in which upper-class women were slowly being allowed to participate. Although it was unusual for a woman to take up big game-hunting in North America, it gave those that did a rare opportunity to escape from society’s concerns and petty domesticity while remaining within the outer limits of social convention. It also gave women who could afford it a chance to develop a level of expertise and degree of focus that was uniquely exhilarating.

  Emily told a newspaper that she first went to the Rockies as a cure for her nervous debilitation. It worked. Photographs show her communing happily with a mountain lion and posing with a patient elk. A fascination with open spaces, wild animals, and the hunt “took possession of her.” It all did her so much good, she said, that she sent for her dau
ghters to join her, and at least one photograph shows that Nanny Kay went too, riding in the Rockies with her charges and Emily. Inevitably Diana’s claim that she was taught to ride by Buffalo Bill Cody has been regarded as one of her more outré assertions. However, this was true: like Diaghilev, Buffalo Bill entered Diana’s life because of Emily, though in this instance Emily was one of Cody’s patrons. If a woman from Emily’s background wanted to learn to track and shoot big game, Buffalo Bill’s establishment in Wyoming was the obvious destination. Buffalo Bill was part showman, part impostor, but he started out as a guide to European aristocrats and American millionaires on buffalo hunts. He traveled so widely that Emily and her daughters could have met him—and had an occasional riding lesson—at almost any time. However, it is most likely that Diana and Alexandra remembered him from the very end of his life, when they stayed at his Hotel Irma in Cody, Wyoming, in 1916.

  An epidemic of infantile paralysis swept through New York and its surroundings in the summer of 1916, causing panic. This tallies with Diana’s memory of being sent out of the city with Alexandra and a hysterical French maid (Kay Carroll was probably on holiday). In common with children from thousands of other families, they found themselves on a train at very short notice, though Diana’s account of watching drunken cowboys shoot each other dead from the train window as they traveled west should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Like many other children, the sisters were kept away from New York until long after the start of the new school year, when all danger of polio had passed. According to his biographers, Buffalo Bill did make a brief visit to his beloved Cody in November 1916, just before he died in Denver in January 1917. Ill and almost bankrupt, he could well have taken a liking to Emily’s daughters, found them two little Indian ponies to try, and whiled away the time by teaching them to ride. If so, he probably came to see them off too. “The last time I saw him was when he came to see us off on the train that was to take us back to New York. I can remember standing with my sister at the back of the train with tears pouring down our faces, waving.”

  She may have loved Buffalo Bill and his fringed jackets, but Diana hated everything else to do with this new world in which she found herself. She hated her mother’s enthusiasm for the wild. She hated Wyoming. She hated cowboys. She hated the great open spaces that ached of loneliness. “We were there in the wilds with the moose and the bears and the elks and . . . my word! It was so lonely. I remember lonely men, lonely spaces. . . . I couldn’t stand the loneliness of those cowboys.” Most of all she hated shooting and she loathed wild animals. In the grip of this new interest, which Alexandra shared enthusiastically, Emily ignored the reaction of her tiresome elder daughter. “I was just a nut. And a bore. But I didn’t declaim. I was very young. No one listened.”

  Then there came a body blow. In the summer of 1917 the headmaster of Brearley wrote to the Dalziels asking them to remove Diana, saying that she was not considered to be Brearley material. It is safe to assume that at the time Emily did not react sensitively; that she was angry and exasperated with Diana; that the effect on Diana of three very stressful years in the wrong school was never considered; and that “stupidity” was now added to Diana’s growing list of failings. Years afterward Diana was fond of saying that she was looking for something that Brearley could not offer—allure. At the time the impact of expulsion was almost certainly terrible, coinciding as it did with so much else that was going wrong. In later life Diana dropped hints that in the summer of 1917 she was so miserable she was suicidal. She was most frank with the journalist Lally Weymouth in an interview for Rolling Stone in August 1977.

  By the age of fourteen, she told Weymouth, “If I thought of myself, I wanted to kill myself.” Her mother had christened her Diana after the goddess of hunting, a name freighted with expectation. She was manifestly no goddess. “I thought I was the most hideous thing in the world. Hideous,” she said bleakly to Weymouth. She was isolated inside her own family, the only ugly child in a family of beauties; and her nanny’s power to hurt was as great as her mother’s. The top girls’ school in New York, which celebrated her beautiful, sporty, clever younger sister, had rejected her, evidently proving her mother’s point. It was a very low time. “But I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings,” said Diana years later. “Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.

  “It all came together for me when I got back to New York.”

  Chapter Two

  The Girl

  The first change was educational. In the autumn of 1917, Diana, who was now fourteen, started at a smaller, less academic school run by a Mrs. Randall McIver. The atmosphere was friendly; there were no more “goddamn gongs”; and when she forgot to do her homework, no one seemed to mind. Mrs. McIver held classes only in the mornings, making a second change possible since Diana was able to attend Louis Chalif’s dancing school in the afternoons. In later life she made it sound as if she abandoned academic education altogether in favor of a ballet school run by the Russian dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine. This was not the case, not least because Fokine did not open his New York studio until 1921; but in dispatching Diana to Chalif’s school two or three times a week, Emily did enroll her with New York’s leading dance educator of the time. Chalif was a distinguished Russian figure in his own right, the former ballet master of the Government Theater in Odessa. He wrote books for dance teachers and is credited with developing simplified ballet instruction for American children.

  “I am simply crazy over dancing and over Mr. Chalif,” wrote Diana in a diary she started in January 1918. Chalif had the gift of creating an atmosphere that was both disciplined and encouraging. “He is so nice & never gets mad or anything and I wish I could do nothing but take a nice warm bath with loads of perfume & dance dance dance.” His classes proved to be a powerful antidote to her problems at home: “Music can do something to me that nothing else can. It just makes me forget everything.” Inspired by Chalif’s classes, Diana longed to be a dancer when she grew up. By 1917 Isadora Duncan had opened up the idea of dance as an activity for noble, artistic women who hungered to connect the soul to spontaneous free expression of the body; and in her diary Diana wrote that she yearned to go to Duncan’s school and become one of her semiadopted daughters, known as the “Isadorables.”

  Unsurprisingly the notion that Diana should run off and become an “Isadorable” was not encouraged by her family. Neither was the idea that she should become a professional dancer. Her diary suggests that Diana would in fact have settled for much less, in the form of a kind word from Emily about her dancing, but even this was not forthcoming: “I still don’t think mother thinks I dance well and I guess I don’t but I won’t drop it,” she wrote. Having put herself out to find a new school and enroll Diana in ballet classes, Emily seems to have left her to get on with it. There is no suggestion in Diana’s diary that she came to watch her in class, although she was in New York at the time. Diana’s grandmother Mary Weir, known to her granddaughters as “Ama,” and her husband did put in an appearance, though even their reaction was distinctly qualified. “Ama and Daddy Weir went to saw me [sic] and they say I’m awfully good but that I don’t kick out my feet enough & I don’t thro my head back enough.” In the end the daydream faded of its own accord when Diana was overcome by self-consciousness during Chalif’s end-of-term shows in Carnegie Hall. “I suffered, as only the very young can suffer, the torture of being conspicuous,” she said.

  In spite of Emily’s lack of interest in Diana’s new craze, her own love of dancing had a great impact on her eldest daughter and on her view of fashion in the longer term. The Dalziels knew Irene and Vernon Castle, creators of the Castle Walk and a host of other ballroom dances adapted for polite society from raunchy South American originals, which became the rage from about 1912. The Castles came to 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street, probably to give Emily and Frederick Dalzi
el private lessons. Irene Castle was a fashion phenomenon, much fêted for the slim, uncorseted look she developed so that she could dance unencumbered, and for her short haircut of 1915, known as the “Castle bob.” Emily’s enthusiasm for the Ballets Russes had an even greater influence on Diana’s ideas about the “modern” female body and the way it should be dressed. Diana may or may not have encountered Diaghilev fleetingly before the First World War; what is more important is that she was taken to see his ballets as she grew up and her eyes were opened at a young age to the work of Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Nijinsky and the greatest artists and musicians of the period. Even as a child Diana was encouraged to admire the bold and brilliant colors, the rich textures, and the new silhouettes of Diaghilev’s vision, and the dress designers he influenced, Paul Poiret above all; and it is possible to trace her lifelong fascination with Cleopatra and Scheherazade to Diaghilev’s mock-Oriental conceptions of 1909 and 1910. Diana was not grateful to her mother for much, but she did appreciate being allowed to witness the first great revolution in style of the twentieth century at close range when she was very young: “I realize now I saw the whole beginning of our century . . . everything was new.”

  Emily also shared an outlook influenced by gymnastics, calisthenics, and the dress reform movement: aesthetic movements that emphasized healthy diets, fresh air, and exercise, as well, of course, as an attitude to sex that was anything but puritan. Paul Poiret claimed to have been the first to abandon the corset in 1905. In doing so, he captured a wider female mood that rejected restrictive clothes and embraced the pleasures of motion and rhythm. Diana sensed this when she tried to explore in her diary what dancing felt like: “I like dancing with lots of noise. I hate fluffy costumes. I like Spanish and gypsy costumes. I like diamond headed daggers and tambereens [sic]. I like it when you put your foot down hard on floor [sic] and the drum makes a boom.” Her diary offers a glimpse of her pleasure in the physicality of dance and the way dancing strengthened her sense of herself.