In the early 1930s society was constantly on the move, and Diana often slipped over to Paris, taking advantage of the fact that it was now possible to fly from Croydon in the early morning and arrive by lunchtime. Disentangling what actually happened on these trips is not easy. Diana liked to tell a story about sitting next to Josephine Baker at the cinema in Paris in the early 1930s. She had, of course, encountered Josephine Baker before, in New York in the 1920s, and memorably at Condé Nast’s party. But in 1932 Diana met her again when she went to a screening of L’ Atlantide, starring the German actress Brigitte Helm, in a small cinema in Montmartre. Caught up in the film, Diana barely moved a muscle. “I have no idea if I actually saw the movie I thought I was seeing, but I was absorbed by these three lost Foreign Legion soldiers . . . their woes . . . the fata morgana. That means that . . . if you desire water, you see water—everything you dream, you see. But you never reach it. It’s all an illusion.” In the film the desperate soldiers crawl into an oasis to find a very wicked Brigitte Helm surrounded by cheetahs. Spellbound, Diana allowed her arm to drop down beside her in her cinema seat while Brigitte Helm and the cheetahs dispatched an unhappy ending to all concerned. “The lights went on, and I felt a slight movement under my hand. I looked down—and it was a cheetah! And beside the cheetah was Josephine Baker! ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you’ve brought your cheetah to see the cheetahs!’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly what I did.’ ”
On the street outside the cinema there was an enormous white-and-silver Rolls-Royce waiting for Josephine Baker. “The driver opened the door; she let go of the lead; the cheetah whooped, took one leap into the back of the Rolls, with Josephine right behind; the door closed . . . and they were off!” L’ Atlantide appeared in 1932 when Josephine Baker had moved to France, and she did indeed go about Paris in the company of a cheetah called Chiquita. It is perfectly possible that Diana came across Baker and Chiquita leaping into a Rolls-Royce together. They may all have been in the cinema at the same time. But the idea that Diana was able to keep her hand on Chiquita throughout L’ Atlantide collapses when one considers Chiquita’s character. In common with several others in Diana’s new European world, Chiquita was not quite what she seemed. She was a he, of independent disposition, and prone to terrorizing the musicians during Baker’s shows. On the other hand, the possibility that Chiquita was stunned into good behavior by the sight of fellow cheetahs on the silver screen should not be entirely discounted.
Stories told by Diana against herself often revolved around the sense of unreality that pervaded high society in the 1930s. In the face of economic depression and the rise of dictators in Germany, Italy, and Russia, there was more than an element of denial in the gratin’s obsession with trivialities, its intense inwardness, its fancy dress parties, and its constant movement from one modish resort to another. Astonishingly, spas in Germany and Austria continued to be fashionable until the end of the decade. Although Diana said later that she could feel everything “weakening, weakening, weakening” in the 1930s, she and Reed were among those who continued to prefer resorts in Germany and Austria to those in the south of France, and they regularly visited a spa near Freiburg in the company of the Brownlows and d’Erlangers. During one of these sojourns Diana had her only encounter with psychoanalysis. Curious about what this might involve, she consulted an eminent German psychotherapist who had a consulting room at the spa where she was staying. He saw her for three or four sessions, at which point they mutually called a halt. Each consultation left Diana flattened with exhaustion. “I simply had . . . to sleep for twelve hours I was so exhausted talking about myself,” she said. She resolved never to repeat the experience, a point of view allegedly shared by the eminent German psychotherapist. “You can’t handle it. Because you’re not ill,” he is supposed to have said. “It’s a bore for you and me.”
In June 1934, inspired by reading Henry “Chips” Channon’s The Ludwigs of Bavaria, Reed and Diana embarked on a tour of the castles and important places in the life of King Ludwig II. By her own admission Diana and Reed took very little notice of German politics, though there was a moment when Diana peered at Hitler over the edge of a theater balcony and thought his moustache was just plain wrong (she also sent Freck a postcard saying, “Watch this man”). Otherwise the Vreelands were enchanted by everything they saw. But one evening they arrived at their hotel in Munich to find goose-stepping soldiers on the street outside. Diana pushed her way past them to get into the hotel, and even Reed was annoyed with her. “ ‘Really,’ Reed said to me. ‘You’ve got to behave yourself. You simply cannot push your way past these men saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, I’ve got to get into my bath!” ’ ”
It was Diana’s maid who realized that something was terribly wrong. The following morning she rushed into Diana’s room crying, insisting that they must leave at once because something horrible was happening, though she was unable to explain what it was. Diana told her to pull herself together. “But Julie was getting more and more upset until she couldn’t even fasten a hook. She was a very sensible Frenchwoman, nothing simpering about her. She knew she was in very, very bad company.” It was only two weeks later that the Vreelands realized that Julie had been upset on the morning after the so-called Night of the Long Knives, which began on June 30, when Hitler moved against both the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and other critics of his regime. In her memoir Diana asserts that fourteen murders took place in their hotel that night. There is no record of this at all: the murders took place outside Munich at Bad Wiessee. Nonetheless there was a terrifying atmosphere of violence across the city, with hundreds of bludgeonings and arrests. But, like her father before her, turning away from ugliness and unpleasantness had become one of Diana’s habits. As she said: “The curious thing about me is that I only listen to what I want to hear. It’s not all deliberate. It’s just a sort of training of mine because I try to concentrate totally on what I want to hear.”
This trick of positive thinking, of blotting out ugly behavior and ugliness, and dreaming the beautiful, the “duh-vine” into existence had, of course, started years earlier during Diana’s childhood. The dream-come-true atmosphere of the early years of the Vreelands’ marriage and the delights of their new life in Europe had the effect of reinforcing what Diana described as “a sort of training of mine.” But it was not always easy being the children of a mother with this approach to life. Tim and Freck passed time in the nursery with Nanny at the top of 17 Hanover Terrace or in the basement with the butler. Their relationship with their parents was so distant it would now be regarded as neglectful, though such domestic arrangements were typical of the period. Diana’s notion of putting up world maps on the walls of their bedrooms so that her sons would know where she and Reed were traveling was not perhaps entirely helpful in this respect, even if it did discourage a provincial point of view. When Reed and Diana were at home there were privileged visits at stated hours, with occasional unscheduled glimpses of Diana in the distance when she had her rumba lessons. Reed often appeared to say goodnight, beautifully attired in evening dress, before he and Diana went out for the evening.
Neither son remembered being allowed into the gorilla cage at London Zoo on Nanny’s day off so that they would learn not to fear noble animals, as asserted by Diana later. On the other hand, the boys did have a genuine connection to the London Zoo, for Emily had presented it with two bear cubs after one of her hunting trips in the Rockies; and there were excursions with their parents to less glamorous destinations in Britain including the English seaside and a hotel belonging to a cousin of Diana’s in Devon. They also accompanied Reed and Diana to Belton and stayed with their aunt Alexandra at Gilmerton in East Lothian, where Tim Vreeland’s abiding memory was of a girl being dangled upside down after she swallowed mothballs. Tim Vreeland was four when he and his parents arrived in England, so much of his early childhood was spent there. “It was never very comfortable, I will say that. Little boys are very conventional. I o
ften wished she was like other mothers. I wanted the kind my friends had, just an ordinary old mother.” Being raised by someone who minded so much about external appearances was “terrible—in both senses of the word.” Diana loved English clothes for little boys, putting her own in long dressing gowns and small monogrammed slippers with pom-poms. She insisted on dressing her two boys so alike that the visors on their little caps had to be at precisely the same angle.
It was the other side of her positive attitude, her denial of anything negative, that made the boys’ lives particularly difficult. Diana admired Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge’s approach to child rearing: “Her little girls are enchanted by her. Around them everything moves, everything is gay. They live in a continual fairy-tale, conceived by Baba, not Grimm,” said Harper’s Bazaar. “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,” said Diana. But this approach to life reached a pitch of absurdity in the terrifyingly gruesome Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. “That was a bit of all right for them,” she opined. “Nothing wrong for them to see. Everybody had to go! All I can say is that my sons had a very healthy upbringing.” This view was not shared by her sons. Once they went to school, humanity’s darker side came as the most terrible shock. “I feel now that I was deprived of fifty percent of human existence,” said Freck much later.
In November 1933 Diana enjoyed a triumph: She became a “Dame de Vogue” in her own right. The November 1 issue of American Vogue included a drawing by Cecil Beaton of Diana lounging on a garden seat. It was intended, said Vogue, to comfort the reader and put her mind at rest. Mrs. Reed Vreeland was one of “the European highlights of chic” but here she was, sitting in a garden. It all went to prove “that even these glamorous women—these focal points—of Parisian fashion—have their off moments. . . . They loaf, they read, they sleep—even as you and I.” Such reassurance was probably necessary, given Johnnie McMullin’s description of Diana at Mainbocher’s atelier a few pages later:
Mrs. Reed Vreeland . . . is considered one of the most chic of the international set living in Europe. In London, where she has a house in Regent’s Park, she is much admired for her taste in dress, which, because of her striking, exotic personality, is extremely conservative. She is tall and thin, with a profile of a wife of the Pharoahs, a beautiful figure, and jet black hair, which she arranges like a cap on her head, curling at the nape of the neck. She knows what she wants at a glance—a thing that not all women are supposed to know.
As McMullin looked on, Diana chose a black wool Mainbocher coat as the basis of her winter wardrobe. “Under the coat she will wear different crepe de Chine dresses, mostly in colors, together with several different hats, all black.” Diana then turned her attention to evening dresses. “How delighted I am,” she said, “to see black satin again.” She favored an evening dress with two ostrich plumes placed like flowers on its bodice. “It is a new idea,” she remarked. But then her eye lit on a dark blue double-faced satin dress with a train over an underskirt of pleated blue tulle, with blue curled osprey feathers as a corsage decoration. “It will be my grand party dress, because it makes one think of footmen on the stairs,” said Diana, who was sketched wearing Mainbocher’s creations in the same issue.
In spite of her sterling efforts, however, Diana’s Arcadia was not to last. Once again beauty proved to be treacherous. She was, she discovered, not the only woman who considered Reed handsome: English society women could be breathtakingly predatory. “I made great friends among the English during the time I lived there but, then, I wasn’t there to get their men,” she told Christopher Hemphill. “Those English women look after English men like nobody’s baby has ever been looked after. On the other hand, they’ll go after anyone’s husband themselves. Brother, what I saw left and right! I certainly had a more attractive husband than most women have. He wasn’t that flirtatious, but they were, and, naturally, it was flattering to me . . . up to a point.” If an instinct for denial was one price paid by Diana as she fought back from her childhood, Reed’s role in giving her self-esteem was another. “Anyone who has been emotionally wounded is prepared to pay a very high price to preserve the stability of a bond that protects him,” writes Cyrulnik. Reed was kind as well as handsome and the extent to which he resisted as desperate Englishwomen flung themselves at him is not clear. Diana rarely spoke of this, coming closest with: “At times they liked him a bit too much for comfort but we can . . . forget it.”
Money was another disagreeable problem. Diana later maintained that the Vreelands were able to live well but inexpensively in London in the early 1930s, thanks to the relative strength of the dollar against the pound. At some point in 1933, however, their finances suffered a reverse. America was still in the grip of the Great Depression, and although recovery began slowly during 1933, stocks remained volatile and Reed appears to have made some poor investments. Moreover, Reed and Diana, like her parents before them, were mixing in very rich circles, on a relatively modest income, and had spent a great deal of money on 17 Hanover Terrace, believing that they would be there for many years. A favorable rate from the couturiers as mannequin du monde—like the generosity of richer friends—went only so far, and it would have been very difficult for them to live as they did in London without eating into their capital.
From the time she was fourteen and wrote to the “pin-money club” of the Woman’s Home Companion, Diana responded to financial problems by taking small practical steps to relieve the pressure. In London in 1933 she reacted by following the example of other wellborn women, especially Americans, by opening a small exclusive shop for a rich clientele. Diana’s shop sold lingerie, a small selection of scarves, and some fine household linens and was based in a mews near Berkeley Square. Lesley Benson, who had recently divorced Condé Nast and married Rex Benson, helped her to set the business up, but Diana supervised all the work thereafter, causing some amusement among her friends. “I should love to see you among your delicate lines of lingerie,” wrote William Acton from Florence. Running a shop made new, interesting demands on Diana. It drew on her sense of style, her love of luxury, and her perfectionism. The search for designs and fabrics took her frequently to Paris, while most of the sewing was done in a convent by the Sisters of Marie Auxiliatrice in Bow Road, in London’s East End, and the young women in their care. “I was never not on my way to see the mother superior for the afternoon. ‘I want it rolled!’ I’d say. ‘I don’t want it hemmed, I want it r-r-r-rolled.’ ”
Commissioning lingerie called for precision. Discounts had to be negotiated with suppliers; there were irritated exchanges about canceled orders with the fabric house Simonnot-Godard in Paris; and even the nuns were businesslike. While Diana may have been meticulous when commissioning lingerie, sound arithmetic was not her strong point, unlike her friend Mona Williams, who scrutinized every penny in the way of the very rich. Records for the business at the end of 1933 show that Diana’s customers were largely drawn from her friends—Mona Williams bought chemises and sheets, while Edwina d’Erlanger, Syrie Maugham, Kitty Brownlow, Kitty Miller, and Lesley Benson all placed orders, as did Lady Portarlington and Mrs. Fred Astaire. The nightgowns were so beautiful that Edwina d’Erlanger’s sister Mary bought one and wore it as a ball gown. “I was very thin. I was about twenty-three and I saw the most beautiful nightgown which I bought and wore backwards because it was low in the front and in [the] back. It was pink, so I wore it and I had great fun at the ball.” And according to Diana, it was the nightgowns that brought a new acquaintance into the shop, one Mrs. Ernest Simpson.
Diana only knew Wallis Warfield Simpson slightly, though she had been to lunch at her flat at Bryanston Court, where the food was memorably delicious thanks to Wallis’s tutor, Elsie Mendl. Wallis Simpson ordered three luxurious nightgowns and was exact about the deadline—three weeks. Diana remembered that she had already left Ernest Simpson, that she was feeling poor, and tho
ught she splurged on the nightdresses in anticipation of her first weekend alone with the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, a timetable that has led some to suppose the story must be apocryphal because the dates do not tally. Like many of Diana’s stories, however, this one is probably true in essence even if some facts require fine-tuning. It has recently been suggested that the relationship between Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales warmed up much earlier than either of them later suggested, while Wallis was still living with Ernest Simpson, and that their close circle was well aware of it. Mrs. Simpson’s union with the Prince of Wales was probably not consummated until later in the year, but she had good reason to think she might need glamorous nightdresses in the spring of 1934, while Diana was running her lingerie shop.
Then there came a most unexpected blow. “When Reed and I got to Regent’s Park, it was going to be our life. We thought we’d live there for the rest of our lives. You always think you’re going to live somewhere forever. It’s the only way to live—it’s forever!” But it turned out that their life in London was not going to be forever. In what Diana later described as the most ghastly single moment in her life, Reed came home from work one evening and delivered a bombshell: his role had changed, and unless he wished to lose his job with the Guaranty Trust, they were returning to live in the United States. “It was a fait accompli. There was nothing to discuss. There was nothing to do but get dressed and go to dinner.” For once Diana’s brave face deserted her. The Vreelands had been invited to the Savoy by Mona Williams, and Diana was wearing a beautifully pressed pink Vionnet dress with a long banner of pink crepe de chine. By the time they arrived at the Savoy, she looked a mess. “You’ve never seen anyone in such a condition. I was a disgrace. I can still remember Mona’s face when she saw me walking in, looking as if I’d fallen out of bed in this thing. All I’d done was drive from Regent’s Park to the Savoy but I’d had what you’d call a total chemical change. It was a shock. I was absolutely, literally, totally crushed.”
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