Friends commiserated on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesley Benson wrote to say that Diana had been wonderful about the lingerie business, that she had a real genius for it, and that it was a tragedy that she was leaving. “I am pleased about Reed staying with the Guaranty, and I know you must be, that’s the bright spot.” Another friend wrote: “It is really too dreadful—I know so well how you feel—but you are such a marvelous person I know you will be able to cope with the situation and as long as you have Reid [sic] and the children it doesn’t matter much where you are.” Diana slowly pulled herself together. She wound down the lingerie business. The Vreelands gave notice to Freck’s prep school, taking him out at the end of the spring term in 1934, and they terminated the lease on 17 Hanover Terrace so that it came to an end in June 1934. Then there was a reprieve. Reed, who was suffering from a mysterious debilitation that he seemed unable to shake off, was sent to Switzerland to recover. The Vreelands stayed for several months in the opulent Hotel Beau-Rivage at the lakeside resort of Ouchy near Lausanne, a stay that stretched into the early months of 1935. The change of scene did Reed good. By September 1934 a friend, Ben Kittredge, was writing: “It is wonderful to have seen Reed so much better and to know that he is getting well so rapidly and thoroughly, that at last you have found both the cause and the cure,” and by the end of the year Elsie Mendl remarked: “I am so glad about Reed and how much better he is.”
Diana was fascinated by Lausanne in general and the Hotel Beau-Rivage in particular. “Switzerland before World War II was much more mysterious than it is today. It was full of Greeks and money.” The Aga Khan (who would also appear in Allure) used to bring his girlfriends to the hotel: “always with a different girl but always with the most beautiful girl you’d ever seen in your life. . . . He was a dreamboat, he’d be announced: His Highness, the Aga Khan!—and a personage really entered the room!” A banker from Lyon kept his second family in the hotel, unknown to his first, who lived elsewhere. Even when he was absent his mistress would dress for dinner, covered in jewels. Tim Vreeland was already at prep school in Switzerland by the time his parents came to Lausanne. Reed read Hans Christian Andersen stories to his sons in a large sitting room in front of a fire, and later he and Diana would go downstairs for dinner.
I was so happy in Ouchy, on the water. My bed faced Mont Blanc. . . . 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 downs and the wonderment . . . it was like our growing up in the world.
In May 1935 Diana went ahead to set up a home in New York, with the boys following a month later in time for the long summer vacation. “It’s strange, isn’t it—the things that happen in life over which one has absolutely no control? I thought my life was over. I couldn’t imagine anything other than the totally European life we led.” But as it turned out, a different kind of life was just about to begin, thanks to a slight, clear-eyed, and unusually determined woman called Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar.
On a summer evening in New York in 1936, in a nightclub on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, Reed and Diana Vreeland rose from their table and began to dance. As they eased into a slow foxtrot to the sound of Victor Lopez and his orchestra, heads turned and whispers fluttered round the room. Mrs. Snow’s eye was drawn to Mrs. Vreeland, who was wearing a white lace Chanel dress with a bolero, and roses in her blue-black hair (the better dancer of the pair, she moved with sinuous grace). Carmel Snow was not acquainted with the Vreelands, but she soon found out who they were. She was famous for her intuition about talent, and the next day she telephoned and offered Diana a job. “But Mrs. Snow,” Diana replied, “I’ve never been in an office in my life. I’m never dressed until lunch.” This reaction was tactically correct. Carmel Snow liked her lady fashion editors well connected as well as stylish and talented. “But you seem to know a lot about clothes,” Snow replied. “Why don’t you just try it and see how it works?” In spite of her apparent hesitation, Diana had no choice but to accept. In reestablishing her family in New York, she was going through money like “a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you’re an alcoholic.”
That was how the story was later told. In reality Carmel Snow, who worked at Vogue in the 1920s, had known of Diana as a fashionable New York debutante and had occasionally mentioned her in the magazine. After the Vreelands returned from Europe in 1935, Snow probably did not spot Diana in a white dress by Chanel in summer but in a pink dress by Vionnet in the winter of 1935, at a party where New York society paid for its tickets, a new trend. And Diana had in fact known she would have to earn a living somehow in New York well before she left England. The Vreelands had spent money on 17 Hanover Terrace that would never be recovered. She had been obliged to close her lingerie shop. Reed had been ill. Several months in the sumptuous Beau-Rivage could only have further depleted their funds. At the same time she was unsure of her direction. Before she left Europe, Diana took tentative steps toward becoming an interior decorator by signing an agreement with Syrie Maugham that she would receive a commission on “Syrie” furniture she sold in New York. By the time Snow approached her in New York, Diana had already started work for a small Hearst magazine, Town & Country, that would have involved her in society journalism.
But the outcome of the story was the same. Until this point Diana’s divine spark had been directed at herself and her household. From now on, with her faith in the power of dreams and dream making vindicated, and her “European upbringing” complete, it would be transmitted outward to many thousands of readers. Carmel Snow did not yet understand this, but she knew she had spotted a woman of rare taste and originality who deserved a broader canvas. She telephoned the editor of Town & Country and ordered him to hand Diana over to Harper’s Bazaar. He did as he was told—and another legend was born.
Diana aged nine, with her sister, Alexandra, c. 1912.
Diana aged thirteen, with her father, Frederick Dalziel, and Alexandra outside the Villa Diana.
Diana’s mother, Emily Hoffman Dalziel, photographed by Town & Country in 1911. The Town & Country caption describes Emily as living with her husband in Paris “until coming to New York a few years ago.”
Freck, Reed, and Tim Vreeland, c. 1931.
Diana and Reed in Tunisia in the early 1930s. (Photographer: John McMullin)
Diana in a preparatory study for a portrait by William Acton, c. 1931.
Diana as international woman of style. (Photographer: George Hoyningen-Huene)
Diana presented to readers of Harper’s Bazaar by Carmel Snow in January 1936. (Photographer: Martin Munkácsi)
Untitled, n.d. Diana styling a model on a fashion shoot in Arizona in 1941. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Diana and Carmel Snow at work in Snow’s office at Harper’s Bazaar in 1952, with a forthcoming issue laid out on the floor. (Photographer: Walter Sanders)
Untitled, n.d. Freck, Diana, Tim, and Reed at Brewster in the early 1940s. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Diana and Reed in Southampton in the 1950s.
Yearning in wartime: Harper’s Bazaar cover, September 1943. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Anxious in wartime: model in coat by Traina-Norell, outside the Wildenstein Galleries, New York, October 1943. Styled by Diana. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Lauren Bacall en route to fame: Harper’s Bazaar cover, March 1943, styled by Diana. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Harper’s Bazaar, March 1946: “Shipshape in navy . . . wool buttoned bang down the middle with high-sheened gilt,” by Nettie Rosenstein; “Shipshape in gray . . . wool jersey buttoned bang up one side with polished sterling silver,” by Traina-Norell. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Harper’s Bazaar, October 1956. Jeweled overblouse: “A flowery armatur
e of gold-and-silver paillettes” by Galanos. Jeweled collar: “Clustered with diamonds and worn here like a rajah’s ransom above the glint of white mink.” Collar: Van Cleef & Arpels. Mink capelet: Maximilian. (Photographer: Louise Dahl-Wolfe)
Diana Vreeland with model, on set for Harpers Bazaar, New York, 1946. Photographer: Richard Avedon © 2011 The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Chapter Four
Pizzazz
I arrived at Harper’s Bazaar. I came in on a Monday. . . . I was given a tiny office. I was sitting in my office talking to myself. I kept saying, “I work here! I work here!”—I couldn’t believe it.
George Davis, the fiction editor, stuck his head around her door and said: “What this country needs is Bob Hope.” Then he disappeared.
I didn’t know one thing. I didn’t know who Bob Hope was! My God, when I think of what I didn’t know, of what I had to learn.
It was all very puzzling.
After a few days had gone by, I made friends with the Managing Editor, a divine woman named Frances McFadden. And I said to her, “I’ve got to tell you something—I do stay up rather late at night and I just can’t do without lunch.”
“Well,” she said. “Why should you?”
“But there’s no time for lunch, is there?” I said to Frances.
“Of course there is. Why don’t you just have lunch?”
The strange new world in which Diana found herself in 1936 was all the more interesting because Harper’s Bazaar was undergoing a transformation. Bazaar first emerged as an upstart competitor to Vogue when it was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1913, but it only became a serious threat once Hearst started poaching Vogue’s staff. Three years before Diana arrived, Hearst pulled off a great coup by luring her new boss Carmel Snow to Bazaar. Snow had been heir apparent to Vogue’s formidable editor in chief, Edna Chase. She had begun her career by working in the dress shop of her domineering Irish mother, who made copies of French designs for rich New Yorkers. By the time she was in her early twenties, Snow knew everything there was to know about sewing and tailoring, French couture, and smart customers. But her own stylish flair, her omnivorous interest in much beyond fashion, and her desire to write brought her to the attention of Chase, who set about training her. Snow served a long apprenticeship as Chase presided over some radical changes at Vogue, including the shift from line drawings to fashion photography; and by 1929 Chase was so busy supervising international editions of Vogue that Snow became editor of American Vogue, while Chase herself became editor in chief. Condé Nast and Edna Chase both adored Snow, making their sense of betrayal when she left for Bazaar all the greater. In the end, however, her decision to defect was not surprising. Chase was a frustrating boss who became more autocratic with every passing year. Her rigid ideas about chic extended to every aspect of life. And although she kept promising to retire and make way for Snow, she never did.
Released from the oppressive atmosphere of Mrs. Chase, Carmel Snow came into her own. Within two years of arriving at Bazaar in late 1932 she had transformed a dull and musty magazine. She sacked the fashion department; appointed herself the temporary art director; and implemented lessons learned at Condé Nast Publications, operating at a peak that lasted until the late 1950s. During the week she left her three children with a nanny on Long Island, and she and her husband led separate lives. A slight woman, with an upturned nose, a face that reminded Beaton of a fox terrier, and hair that was almost blue, Snow never lost the Edna Chase habit of wearing a little hat and pearls to work but that was where the similarity ended. She was warm, funny, full of life, and open-minded. At the same time, her soft Irish lilt was deceptive, for she was much tougher than she looked or sounded. She was determined, rigorous, discerning, even ruthless in her search for quality. She believed that Bazaar had to startle and surprise and at her best, she was very bold. She was keenly aware that Bazaar could only succeed by being daring in a way that Vogue was not. She had a gift for spotting gifted people; and she was extremely good at creating a stimulating, disciplined atmosphere in which they flourished.
One of Snow’s early breakthroughs at Bazaar came when she noticed the work of the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkácsi. She had developed a keen understanding of the importance of fashion photography at Vogue, where she had worked closely with its innovative, irascible art director, Mehemed F. Agha (always known as “Dr. Agha”), and Vogue’s chief photographer, Edward Steichen. At Vogue the work of Steichen, Beaton, and others not only brought art to fashion but also had a profound impact on fashion itself, making it possible for readers like Diana to see new designs with far greater clarity. These images captured the independent, confident atmosphere of the New Woman of the 1920s, and extended the public space she inhabited while creating a fantastic, soft focus world of “real” but impossible glamour. On arrival at Bazaar, Snow was dismayed by the work of its house photographer, Baron Adolph de Meyer, whose ornate, romantic style had changed little since the early twentieth century. But she could find no satisfactory alternative until she came across Martin Munkácsi, a news photographer with an interest in sports who had never taken a fashion picture in his life.
“I decided that I had to let him re-photograph a bathing-suit feature that had been taken, as usual, in the studio against a painted backdrop,” she recalled. Together they came up with the idea of taking the swimsuit model to the beach at Piping Rock Club on Long Island on a cold November day. Here, to general astonishment, Munkácsi directed the model to run toward him as he photographed her with a sports camera, a 35 mm Leica. The resulting picture of the model running along the beach with her cape billowing out behind her became a defining image of the active American girl. It was also, said Snow, “the first action photograph made for fashion.” (It made such an impact on Diana at the time that she later put it in Allure.) Snow immediately dropped de Meyer and allowed Munkácsi free range, starting a new direction in fashion photography that connected high fashion with action, on location. Munkácsi’s photographs were dismissed by Edna Chase as “farm girls jumping over fences,” but they made Bazaar look modern and exciting at Vogue’s expense.
In a move that was even more farsighted, Snow hired Alexey Brodovitch, a designer of outstanding brilliance, in 1934. Russian by birth, Brodovitch had come to the United States by way of every European artistic movement of the early 1920s. Forced into exile during the Russian Civil War, he had made his way to Paris, where he found himself at the center of dadaism, constructivism, Bauhaus design, futurism, surrealism, cubism, and fauvism, working first as a backdrop painter for the Ballets Russes before becoming a highly successful graphic designer. In 1930 he moved to the United States to work at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and subsequently became head of its Advertising Design Department. An outstandingly good teacher, he set about pulling American advertising up to European standards while continuing to produce radically innovative work of his own. Snow spotted some of his work at an exhibition of advertising design run by the Art Directors Club of New York and, with her unfailing instinct, knew she was looking at the work of someone extraordinary, with the potential to become a great magazine art director. Without Hearst’s authority she persuaded Brodovitch to sign a contract with Bazaar on the spot. She then flew to see Hearst at San Simeon in California and persuaded him, most uncharacteristically, to approve a fait accompli.
As art director, Brodovitch transformed the look and feel of Bazaar and, ultimately, most American magazines. He was not the first to introduce Bauhaus-inspired design to the pages of a magazine, since Dr. Agha was already doing this in a more modest way at Vogue. Agha may also have been the first to tilt type, to allow white space on the page, to “bleed” photographs to the edge of the page, and to spread images into fan shapes. But Agha was limited in what he could achieve by Edna Chase, who could see no relationship between form and content. Snow was quite the opposite. She was decisive; she was very much in charge; but she had a gi
ft for collaboration. She and Brodovitch worked together closely so that crisp, snappy titles and editorial content conceived by Snow worked in a unified way with Brodovitch’s graphic design and modernist typefaces. Snow encouraged Brodovitch to be daring, to use type to compose arresting graphic shapes on huge white spaces, even permitting him to experiment with cellophane overlays that changed the image of the page beneath. Their most significant innovation was inspired partly by Brodovitch’s love of ballet and partly by film montage. They developed a way of working together in which they laid out each issue of Bazaar on the floor of Snow’s office, with the aim of introducing a sense of cinematic movement through its pages, juxtaposing the close-up with the wide shot and placing tranquil content next to more exhilarating material. Bazaar became, to quote Calvin Tomkins, “a monthly run-through of popular and high culture with its own ebb and flow, cadence and rhythm,” a magazine that captured the dynamic quality of 1930s modernity.
As Emily Dalziel’s article about her safari in Africa attests, Bazaar had always covered more than fashion. Once she became editor, Snow took this further, projecting her wide-ranging interests onto every issue in a way that has led her to be described as the first “magazine editor as auteur.” She conceived of the magazine precisely as a kind of “bazaar” where exotic items jostled for space, and she famously dubbed it a publication for “the well-dressed woman with the well-dressed mind.” She reeled in Jean Cocteau very early; she recruited the illustrator Marcel Vertès whom she found working for Schiaparelli; she published the first fashion drawing by Salvador Dalí; and fashion photographs by Man Ray. She was a voracious reader. There were none of Vogue’s restrictions on publishing fiction at Bazaar and, unusually for a Hearst magazine, fiction writers were paid well. With the help of Beatrice Kaufman, the wildly unpredictable George Davis (who put his head around Diana’s door on her first morning), and several others, Bazaar became a vehicle for some outstanding twentieth-century writing. Snow poached Frances McFadden from Vogue to become Bazaar’s managing editor, and she took in other refugees from Chase’s regime, including one of Vogue’s star photographers, George Hoyningen-Huene. The Bazaar office was small, housed on two floors of a former hotel at 572 Madison Avenue. It bore little resemblance to the stately premises of Condé Nast Publications, but it hummed with excitement. In the end Bazaar never overtook Vogue in terms of circulation. But, as Calvin Tomkins has observed, by 1935 Harper’s Bazaar “seemed years—decades—younger.”
Empress of Fashion Page 12
