Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Liberman’s title of Art Editor did not come close to describing his dominance within Condé Nast Publications. A talented sculptor and painter, Russian born and Jewish, he had arrived in the United States during the Second World War and been hired by Nast himself in 1941. “He had a great gift for jumping into the lap of power,” said one Vogue editor at the time. Liberman quickly displaced the dyspeptic Dr. Agha as Vogue’s art director. He looked like the British film star David Niven, with an attractive manner to match, and he deployed all his charm with Edna Chase to transform the look of Vogue. One of his greatest discoveries was a self-effacing man called Irving Penn whose photographs began to appear (in the teeth of considerable opposition from Mrs. Chase) in 1943. Liberman was responsible for transforming and modernizing Vogue’s design, and it was thanks to him, as much as to its fashion content, that Nast’s flagship magazine maintained its authority from 1941 onward. Liberman also became the éminence grise of Condé Nast because of several characteristics that Diana would have done well to note when she first arrived. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, has described him as a Jekyll and Hyde character: generous, charming, kind, and flirtatious; effective, stimulating, and creative; and manipulative, disloyal, calculating, destructive, and consumed by driving self-interest in equal measure. “He was a strange man,” said the British photographer David Bailey. “Always immaculate, never a speck of dandruff, nothing on his desk.” When Condé Nast Publications was acquired by newspaper owner Sam Newhouse in the 1950s, Liberman maneuvered himself into place as his unofficial right-hand man and achieved a position of unassailable power within the organization. As an artist, he was ambivalent about the world of fashion. But he was wary of potential rivals, highly controlling, and difficult to read. Though he could reduce junior editors to tears, he rarely confronted Condé Nast’s more powerful figures, preferring to set them against one another and stand back until one of them gave way.

  Luring Diana to work alongside Jessica Daves, in the hope that Daves would slip away of her own accord, was typical Liberman behavior. Jessica Daves had been editor of Vogue since 1946 and had taken over as editor in chief when Edna Chase retired in 1952. Daves had originally joined Vogue from the advertising department of Saks Fifth Avenue, and the rigidly conservative Mrs. Chase came to depend on her, molding her in her own stiff image and pronouncing Daves her anointed successor when she finally stepped down at the age of seventy-five. Daves had certain strengths that the Condé Nast organization later found it missed. She was a good businesswoman. She introduced changes to Vogue that made it more useful to readers, especially when it came to finding the clothes that appeared in the photographs. She supported America’s sportswear designers and ran a profitable magazine. Married to a writer, she commissioned fiction by artists of the caliber of John Updike and Arthur Miller. But it was not enough. Though Liberman introduced the work of Helmut Newton, William Klein, Bert Stern, and John Rawlings to Vogue alongside that of Penn during Daves’s tenure, attempts at further innovation consistently foundered on her prim and unwavering insistence, inherited from Mrs. Chase, that Vogue was for ladies and must therefore be ladylike. Anything suggestive was taboo. Open mouths were suggestive. Rear views of models in swimsuits were suggestive. So were nightdresses photographed near beds. The photographer Horst once had to retake a whole sitting because he photographed a girl on the floor. When Nicholas Haslam joined the art department in 1962, one of his tasks was retouching fashion photographs to remove all vestiges of the untoward. “We had to touch out navels, such innocent features being then—unbelievable as it now sounds—considered obscene.”

  By 1962 Jessica Daves’s vision of style was widely perceived within the fashion world as uninspiring. It did little for confidence in her judgment that she was mystifyingly badly dressed herself. Round and dumpy—“like a bullfrog,” said Bailey—she favored a dowdy uniform of navy blue dress, white gloves, and a small veiled hat that she wore all day even behind the closed door of her office. In spite of occasional concessions to innovators like Rudi Gernreich, American Vogue became ever stodgier as Daves advanced through middle age. “NO to a skirt three or four inches above the knee,” she declaimed in March 1962; “NO to most of the fashion proposals for the Twist.” “She believed in elegance, but her idea of elegance was that of the bourgeois who wanted it and thought they had achieved it,” said Horst. Youth fashion was treated with disdain, unless it came from Dior. In Daves’s view, the reader was a well-to-do female who spent her husband’s money and was likely to be “the sort of woman who takes a polite, but convinced and beleaguered stand against the current Youth Fixation.” She was already in possession of a little mink throw, and prepared to mark time until a really good tweed suit came her way. “You’ve cased the collections, French and American, made some major clothes-decisions on the basis of them, and your shopping list at this point rather resembles a half-solved crossword puzzle,” began one article in October 1961. Vogue’s raison d’être was helping the puzzled reader spend her “clothes-dollars” on appropriate clothes for an upper-class lifestyle and nudging her away from expensive mistakes.

  Diana arrived at Vogue in April 1962 and clashed with Jessica Daves almost immediately, just as Liberman intended. To begin with, her role at Vogue was ill-defined—she first appeared on the masthead in June 1962 with the catchall title of Associate Editor. Diana knew she had to proceed with care, and it was extremely frustrating. “We have thought of you so much in the first days of the new job,” wrote Betty on April 14, 1962. “It must certainly be wearing to know what one wants to do and yet have to pull oneself back & go slowly.” Egged on by Liberman, Diana increasingly took power into her own hands, bypassing Daves on important decisions and going straight to the Condé Nast high command for approval. Contributors found themselves caught in the crossfire. Horst, who had almost given up working for Vogue under Daves, was suddenly telephoned and asked to photograph Consuelo Balsan, who had been born a Vanderbilt, and later married and divorced the ninth Duke of Marlborough. He duly photographed Madame Balsan in color, whereupon Jessica Daves phoned him and protested, insisting that society women in Vogue were always photographed in black-and-white. Two days later Liberman and Diana both called Horst to tell him to go back and take as many photographs of Madame Balsan in color as he wished.

  “I worried that you with your birdlike legerté would find your flights of fancy arrested in mid air and that your wings would have been spattered with heavy oil,” wrote Cecil Beaton to Diana. But he need not have worried. Four months after Diana arrived, Jessica Daves ran up the white flag. A disagreement over whether to publish photographs from Bert Stern’s last sitting of Marilyn Monroe, taken just before she committed suicide, was probably the last straw, but by then the battle was already over. Although Liberman later pretended that he had never expected her to go, Jessica Daves slipped off, by way of a courtesy title of Editorial Adviser, and by mid-August 1962 negotiations had begun with Diana about her salary and expenses as editor in chief. Diana’s appointment was announced publicly in November 1962, to the great relief of her family who had taken nothing for granted. “My goodness we are so proud,” wrote Betty. “Freck was so worried that a new Miss White would be a bête noir. . . . But Diana, what an exciting adventure! . . . What fun to really have the reins and not be an ‘eminence grise’ . . . Frecky is just beaming! . . . He had been so worried for you—your news took a huge load off his shoulders.”

  In January 1963 Diana appeared on the masthead as editor in chief of Vogue for the first time. Later she would be accused of wild, publicity-seeking egotism. But at this point it was Condé Nast Publications that exploited her persona to publicize the reenergizing of Vogue, circulating an interview with WWD that took the form of questions and answers. “What is fashion?” asked WWD. “It’s a natural delight, stronger than pestilence, war and economic upheaval,” replied Diana. “What is the function of a fashion magazine?” asked WWD. “To instruct when possible, to delight,
to give pleasure, to bring to the reader what interests her,” said Diana. “Everybody makes an appearance every day.” The imagination was of paramount importance: “Before even the technique, there is the dream. Chanel had it. The dream is everything.”

  What she did not know, however, was that in the weeks before her appointment was secure, this kind of talk had been causing great concern. Freck had been right to worry that Condé Nast’s owner, Sam Newhouse, and Liberman would lose their nerve at the last moment and appoint a Nancy White “bête-noir” instead. There were those, including Vogue’s long-standing features editor, Allene Talmey, who argued that Diana would take the magazine in too frothy a direction, and that Liberman himself should take on the role of editor in chief. Liberman resisted, saying that he knew little about fashion, that Vogue had to be edited by a woman and needed strong medication. He nonetheless exploited these anxieties to his advantage. At the same time that Diana became editor in chief of Vogue in 1963, Liberman was made editorial director of Condé Nast, with the surreptitious brief of liberating Mrs. Vreeland from Vogue’s most conservative forces while simultaneously keeping her under control. But Diana was too excited by her fresh start to scent any danger.

  My God, when I think of my years on Vogue . . . I used to wake up every day of the week and I couldn’t wait to get cracking. I mean, I was a nervous wreck until I’d done at least 43 things that morning. I had three, four and five secretaries taking dictation at once—ideas, ideas, ideas . . .

  The new editor in chief took some getting used to. The greige tints favored by Jessica Daves were swept away, replaced by bloodred walls, “tee-gray” carpet, a sofa covered in leopard cotton, rattan chairs, Rigaud candles burning in silver saucers, and a black lacquer desk, where Diana kept a stack of lined notepads that were rarely filled beyond the first page. Those adjusting to life with Mrs. Vreeland soon understood that her exploding creativity went hand in hand with fierce attention to detail. She had a large bulletin board on her office wall, covered in swatches of fabric, illustrations, details of a Balenciaga cuff, photographs of Audrey Hepburn’s shoes, an Italian Renaissance portrait, and notes with phrases like “luck is infatuated with the efficient.” Within a short time, the atmosphere throughout Vogue’s offices began to change. “Diana Vreeland didn’t just sweep down the hallway, she loped,” Grace Mirabella remembered. “A stream of orders, barks of laughter, and bits of commentary announced her arrival at each doorway she passed. Her voice was low and throaty. It projected, hornlike, into every office. . . . It didn’t take long before half the office was moving, and standing and dressing and speaking, like Diana Vreeland.”

  Admiration for Diana’s style was one thing. A universally sympathetic reaction to the flood of “ideas, ideas, ideas” was quite another matter. Susan Train, Vogue’s American editor in Paris, found Diana uproariously funny and was immediately on her wavelength. Priscilla Peck, the art director, adored Diana, relishing her imaginative iconoclasm and her preference for the visual image over the written word. Peck had been a painter of note in her youth, and part of the lesbian set that surrounded Joe Carstairs, a tattooed cross-dressing Standard Oil heiress. Several of her Vogue colleagues thought she fell in love with Diana, though there was no sign that this was in any way reciprocated or indeed that Diana even noticed. Others came around to Diana’s way more slowly. Kate Lloyd was associate features editor at Vogue in 1962. She had worked hard on an article about the French ex-model Bettina, who was the mistress of Aly Khan, and had conscientiously covered every aspect of her life: her clothes, her makeup, her house in Paris, her trips down the Nile, and her exercise regime. Feeling rather pleased with herself, she sent the portfolio (the text and pictures) to Diana’s office. A short time later Diana rang her and told Lloyd—who had been at Vogue for considerably longer—that she didn’t quite seem to understand what Vogue was all about. “The steam started coming out of my ears at that point. I said, ‘Tell me, Mrs. Vreeland, what is Vogue?’ She said, ‘Vogue is the myth of the next reality.’ And I got it. I absolutely got it. Take the words apart and they don’t mean a thing, but I saw exactly what she was driving at, and I never had a moment’s difficulty with her again.”

  However, there were those like Rosemary Blackmon, Vogue’s managing editor, who never came to terms with Diana at all. A particular bone of contention was Diana’s refusal ever to hold a meeting with more than one person, and her lack of anything that could conceivably be described as a management style. “My mind drifts around a lot,” said Diana. “I could take in 17 situations in an hour.” Unlike Daves, Diana did not feel the need to explain even one of her seventeen trains of thought. She simply expected everyone to keep up. “Whereas the entire chain of editorial decision—view of fashion, choice of cover, choice of content and presentation—used to flow easily from the editor in chief to the fashion editor to the art department to the merchandising department, no one knew what was going on, from one hour to the next, with Vreeland but Vreeland,” wrote Grace Mirabella. “Sometimes she paid attention, sometimes she didn’t. I think that’s why Rosemary had such a terrible time with her,” said Carol Phillips, Vogue’s beauty editor. “If you say yes, that’s fine. Then two minutes later, she’d say I didn’t say it. You had to roll with the punches. I don’t think Rosemary could do that. She was quite literal and she was very upset.”

  Within months of starting, however, Diana had the sense to realize that she needed someone who could interpret her pronouncements and communicate her vision internally if she was to have any chance at all of succeeding. She eventually found the ideal person in Grace Mirabella, but it took some persuasion. Mirabella was working as a fashion editor at Vogue when she heard that Diana was coming to Condé Nast. She was so appalled by what she had heard through the grapevine about Mrs. Vreeland’s hallucinatory ways that she resolved to get as far away from her as possible. She even went to the lengths of swapping her job as a fashion editor for one in marketing, but she hated it so much that she eventually returned to the fashion side. Mirabella soon learned that working as a fashion editor for Diana was nothing like any job she had ever done before. “At my first run-through with Vreeland, I selected three racks of dresses and presented them, making a case for a story about how the look of dresses that season was wool jersey.” Diana listened without saying a word as Mirabella plowed on.

  At the end I asked her if there was a problem.

  “Well,” she said, “I wasn’t looking for a market report. I thought you were going to give me a little something.”

  “Like what?” I asked. I thought I had given a good deal.

  “A little something.” She said, “A dream.”

  The trick, said Diana, was not to give women what they already knew. It was to “give ’em what they never knew they wanted.”

  Diana sent Mirabella back to the sportswear department, where she had been happiest. This was not a compliment. By the time she arrived at Vogue, Diana had tired of all but a handful of American sportswear designers, and was preoccupied and excited by the Paris couture whose collections she was finally being allowed to attend in an official capacity for the first time. “Her tastes were as aristocratic and European as mine were democratic and American,” Mirabella wrote of Diana later. “Ready-to-wear barely qualified as fashion in her book. She called sportswear ‘boiled wool,’ said ready-to-wear fabric was ‘like the covering of an old tennis ball.’ ” Even when Mirabella was ensconced back in her sportswear niche, she found Diana’s criticisms of her sittings insufferable. The editor in chief demanded endless retakes. She only knew something was “duh-vine” when she saw it. “I’m looking for the suggestion of something I’ve never seen,” she kept saying. At the end of one particularly bad day, Mirabella decided to quit and take a well-paid job with Catalina, a swimsuit manufacturer. “It seemed the perfect antidote, like a drying-out period, to the delirium of Vreeland.” But a few days later she saw a much more down-to-earth and kindly side of Diana, who had h
eard about the job offer, knew that Mirabella had once turned down Bazaar out of loyalty to Vogue, and urged her to stay. A short time later she offered Mirabella the role of an associate who would help her get the magazine out, a producer to Vreeland as director. After agonizing for a day and a half, Mirabella decided to take the job. “It’s going to be a grand adventure,” said Diana.

  There is a perception, encouraged by Eleanor Dwight and others, that as soon as Diana took charge at Vogue, she stormed in, elbowed aside the dull fifties, opened up the magazine to the “swinging sixties,” and led the charge in a full-blown fashion insurrection. “From the moment she came to Vogue, she created a revolution,” wrote Alexander Liberman in 1989. “Diana Vreeland shook up years of tradition that needed to be reexamined. She brought iconoclastic daring. She encouraged the breaking of rules and taboos. . . . She was the most talented editor of her period because she was able to stamp an era in the reader’s mind.” However, anyone picking up a copy of Vogue from 1962 or 1963 hoping for a dazzling display of iconoclasm is destined to be disappointed, for several reasons.

  First, the tumult that characterized the decade only began to permeate America from 1964 onward, and though its roots are detectable much earlier, they grew in social and political movements at a metaphysical and geographical distance from Vogue’s offices. When it came to fashion, the head-to-toe glamour of the 1950s only disappeared gradually too. Fashion ideas still permeated relatively slowly in the early 1960s, and it would be another three years before the idea of appropriate dressing for different times of day entirely evaporated and the staple of Vogue’s pages ceased to be the little suit inspired by Coco Chanel, topped off with a hat and white gloves. Until the mid-1960s Paris couture took pride of place, and issues devoted to the New York collections invariably featured the grandee American designers Norman Norell and James Galanos, who had risen to prominence in the 1950s, and Mainbocher, who flew an ever-more-lonely flag for the spirit of prewar Paris couture from his New York atelier.