But there was a hitch. Parkinson duly found a veterinary surgeon on arrival, only to be told that the French had eaten every horse on Tahiti some years earlier. Just when all seemed lost, the vet remembered that a plantation owner up the hill had a young, nervous stallion that had somehow escaped the casserole. The owner was rather intrigued by the idea of his animal being made over for Vogue and stood patiently for hours holding its head while the crew stitched 150 pounds of Dynel onto its flimsy harness. In Parkinson’s version of what happened next, the horse jumped in the air, with a leap “they would have recognised as something special at Cape Canaveral,” as soon as the owner handed the bridle to the model, destroying hours of work. In Diana’s version of Kenneth’s story, Kenneth made the mistake of brandishing the Dynel tail as he approached the stallion’s rear end. “Now, apparently, if you go near a certain part of the anatomy of a stallion . . . well, he took off! He went all the way. He was gone for five days.” In Kenneth’s version of his own story, the stallion “hadn’t seen a lady in eight years: he was as horny as hell. As I was dolling him up with fake hair, taffeta bows and real flowers, he saw a donkey around the bend. He took off, flying toward her. All my decorations flew off, too, down the side of a mountain, where no doubt they remain today.” In the end Parkinson managed to photograph a model beside a little white pony with its head and mane in two stripey bows, just to show Diana that they had all tried. He noticed that she never held a grudge against anyone who attempted an idea and failed magnificently. “Mrs. Vreeland was always in there punching for the impossible and the unattainable. When her ideas succeeded, and they often did work out well, they were triumphant. She gave the roar to get something not attempted before and there were no post mortems if they did not succeed.”
Meanwhile Diana widened Vogue’s focus so that it featured new talent and Beautiful People across the international social spectrum. The phrase “Beautiful People” was coined by Carol Phillips while she was managing editor of Vogue before Diana arrived, and Diana never took credit for it. But it came to be associated with the way she captured a new social order in the pages of Vogue in the 1960s, one in which British working-class pop stars and photographers, New York fashion figures, and, increasingly, designers and hairdressers, could be found alongside Moroccan and Italian princesses, and the queen of Thailand. The houses, gardens, and daily lives of fashionable British aristocrats, often identified by Nicholas Haslam but largely unknown in the United States, appeared in a series of articles by Valentine Lawford, photographed by Horst, alongside the homes of Doris Duke, Emilio Pucci, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. All the people featured in these articles were, in Diana’s view, “creative and warm-hearted human beings, with a sense of the romantic possibilities, as well as the practical demands, of everyday existence.” What interested Diana most, once again, was the philosophy detectable throughout her life: her faith in the divine spark, the complete worlds of imaginative people whose distinctive tastes and determination turned fantasy into reality. Horst and Lawford were enjoined to capture the way their subjects set about this in great detail—an idea that seems banal now but was an innovation in the 1960s. Those featured in Vogue often included Diana’s friends, many of whom she and Reed had first met in Europe in the 1930s, and they were so frequently related to people who worked at the magazine that Vogue in the 1960s often had a family feel about it. The profile of Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan was easily arranged, for she was a neighbor of Horst’s in Oyster Bay, and her grandson-in-law was Edwin Russell, publisher of Condé Nast. Marisa Berenson, who became one of Diana’s favorite models, was the granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli. Pauline de Rothschild, married to Baron Philippe, and the subject of another Horst and Lawford profile, was a distant cousin of Diana’s.
The job of editor in chief came with a substantial expense account for entertaining, and increasingly the Vreelands’ private life became indivisible from Diana’s work at Vogue. As Diana became ever busier, Reed took charge of the domestic arrangements, a role in which he seemed very happy—much happier, some thought, than in his business life. Secretaries noted that the only time Reed ever became irritated was when things were not done just as Diana liked them, when dollar bills were not folded correctly, for instance, or arranged so that she could tip easily. Their household accounts were managed by Madeleine Wilson, who had been Reed’s secretary since 1941. She later said that all the costs of running the apartment were borne by Diana, who transferred money each week to Reed’s account so that he could pay out checks. In one sense their role reversal was complete, though this was not quite how it seemed to Diana. “It’s always been men with feminine streaks in them that women love—which has nothing to do with homosexuality, you understand. What I was always aware of was a very feminine thing of protection. This, naturally, is what I miss more than anything—I’d never have gotten it from a wholly masculine man.”
Yvonne Duval Brown, the Vreelands’ French maid, was a particularly important figure in their lives, one who acquired a minor New York reputation of her own for her total dedication to the Vreeland way, particularly in the matter of footwear. “Unshined shoes are the end of civilization,” Diana was wont to say. Reed, she claimed, had the butler in Hanover Terrace polish his shoes for five years with cream and rhinoceros horn until the leather was “contented.” Yvonne used a rhinoceros horn to polish Diana’s shoes, too. “A highly emotional French lady, she wouldn’t lift a finger to polish the furniture, but she meticulously stained and polished all my shoes after each wearing—including the soles. Why, I wouldn’t dream of wearing shoes with untreated soles. I mean, you go out to dinner and suddenly you lift your foot and the soles aren’t impeccable . . . what could be more ordinary?”
Many of those photographed in Vogue—and many who were not—were invited to Sunday lunch or dinner at “the garden in hell” at 550 Park Avenue. By the 1960s the Vreelands were noted hosts, popping up in a book about entertaining by Florence Pritchett Smith. “Woman should be a creature who is inspired by ministering to the male senses,” proclaimed Smith, cheerfully ignoring the fact that chez Vreeland it had long been Reed who arranged the menus with their Spanish cook, Sen, noting them down in a book. Diana’s rules for entertaining were: pay personal attention to the guests, save yourself for the event, have the room at the right temperature, make sure everything is sparkling clean and smells wonderful, and make the table look attractive. The room should be quiet. “Arrange a quiet room so your guests feel that the only thing happening on God’s green earth is happening right there.” There should not be too many married couples either. This, apparently, was “suburban.” “Have pretty women, attractive men, guests who are en passant, the flavor of another language. This is the jet age, so have something new and changing.” The most important thing for the guests, she concluded, was a feeling of freedom. Everything should be kept fluid. “Let guests go home early if they want to. All you should ask of a guest is that he be enthusiastic, rested, interested in meeting new people and talking about the many fascinating things going on in the world. . . . Luncheons are a wonderful time to entertain because people arrive and leave on time and when they leave you can hear them laughing as they walk down the street.”
Behind the scenes, however, Reed’s health started to deteriorate. He had colon cancer in 1963, the year that Diana became editor in chief of Vogue. The following year he had a heart attack. Diana said nothing about this to any of her colleagues. Nor did she say anything when Reed went into the hospital for tests in the summer of 1966, having lost all interest in food and thirty pounds in weight.
Shortly after he went in, a doctor called her at work to say that the results of tests were back. He was about to tell Reed he had terminal cancer.
I said, “What do you take my husband for—an idiot? Don’t you think he knows?”
“Have you discussed it with him?”
I said, “Of course not! Why would he and I discuss cancer?”
The
doctor said, “Mrs. Vreeland, you’re not at all modern. We always tell our patients.”
I went to the hospital that evening. Always, Reed had been in the hall to meet me: marvelous foulard, and wonderful this and that. Not this time. He was in bed with his face to the wall. So I said hello.
He didn’t answer. So I sat down.
Twenty minutes later he turned, “Well, they’ve told you and they’ve told me, so now it’s on the table. Nothing to be done about it.” I didn’t even answer him.
Reed was in the hospital for about six weeks. One person who helped Diana through it was Yvonne Brown, because she understood the Vreelands so well. “Reed died loving Yvonne more than anything in the world,” said Diana.
Because she had the tact, the intelligence—the grace—to bring him one flower, never flowers, three times a week when she brought him clean linen. The apartment, you see, was filled with flowers, cards . . . we had to keep them away from him. They meant that he was dying. But Yvonne would bring him one rose. She’d put the rose in a little cream pitcher by his bed . . . and he’d be perfectly happy.
Diana confessed to Christopher Hemphill that Reed’s final illness was worse than it should have been because his business affairs were in a muddle. “The terrible thing was that he became ill at a time when he couldn’t quite . . . get on top of things. I can remember his looks in his hospital bed. He’d look at me and in his looks I’d read, ‘My God, I’m going to leave her with nothing.’ ”
Later Diana said that she refused to think of anything except how wonderful their life together had been. At the time, however, the strain showed. She was rumored to have chased Cordelia Biddle Robertson out of the hospital; and most uncharacteristically, she sent for Emi-Lu, who came dashing across the Atlantic from England to be on hand. Tim Vreeland came to see his father and went back to New Mexico, where he was living. Although Reed’s black hair had turned steel gray, it was not apparent that the end was near, and no one mentioned that it might be. Reed died soon after Tim’s visit. He discovered later that Diana’s first reaction had been not to tell him, and that Emi-Lu had had to insist. Diana was shattered. On the day Reed died, August 3, 1966, she drew a little heart with an arrow straight through it in her engagement diary. But she wore white to his funeral and insisted it should take place privately, and quickly. She was almost sixty-three, and her sons expected that she would now wind down and think about retirement. As they later acknowledged, they could not have been more wrong.
Veruschka, mink by Emeric Partos, Japan, February 1966. Photographer: Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Veruschka as a Tartary princess in “The Great Fur Caravan: A Fashion Adventure Starring the Girl in the Fabulous Furs, Photographed for Vogue in The Strange Secret Snow Country of Japan.” Vogue, October 15, 1966.
Diana in her office at Vogue. (Photographer: James Karales)
Veruschka in a “magnifcent windup” by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Vogue, July 1968. (Photographer: Franco Rubartelli)
Vogue shoot in Palmyra, Syria, 1965. (Photographer: Henry Clarke)
Veruschka in fur hood by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Vogue, July 1968.
(Photographer: Franco Rubartelli)
Jean Shrimpton photographed by Bert Stern, September 1, 1963. (Stern/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive © Condé Nast)
Four years later: Vanessa Redgrave, photographed by Bert Stern in a 1960s reworking of one of Diana’s lifelong favorites, the leotard, under a rhinestone-studded vinyl coat. Both by Oscar de la Renta. Vogue, February 15, 1967.
Diana at home at 550 Park Avenue. (Photographer: Cecil Beaton)
Installation view, “American Women of Style” (December 13 1975–August 31, 1976), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Costume Institute Galleries, photographed in 1975.
Installation view, “Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design” (December 14, 1983–September 2, 1984), The Metropolitan Musem of Art, The Costume Institute Galleries, photographed in 1983.
Diana Vreeland, fashion editor, New York, June 21, 1977. Photographer: Richard Avedon © 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Diana photographed for “A Question of Style,” by Lally Weymouth, Rolling Stone, August 11, 1977 (a variant image was published).
Chapter Seven
Wilder Shores
Diana impressed everyone with the way she behaved after Reed died. “She was so brave,” recalled Carol Phillips, Vogue’s beauty editor, who was astonished at the speed with which Diana replied to letters of condolence, and the trouble she took over them. Reed’s business affairs took some disentangling. It transpired that he had not updated his will since 1950; that he was owed money by several of the enterprises in which he had been involved, including Rigaud candles and Emilio Pucci Ltd.; and life insurance policies were swallowed up by his business debts. Diana was just as dependent on her salary from Vogue as she had ever been, but it was not in her nature to collapse under the weight of grief or to allow herself to become destabilized by complications with Reed’s estate. Far from winding down and starting to think about retirement, she responded to his loss by redoubling the pace.
Within weeks of his death she was busy six nights out of seven, and close friends saw a subtle change. While Reed had been alive, noted Kenneth Jay Lane, Diana had been careful not to reduce him in any way. “She was the wife, the hostess—very much part of a team. She didn’t project herself then because she didn’t want to overshadow him.” This changed; and, if anything, widowhood made her even more insistent on the romantic view. Cecil Beaton noted with amusement how even the most unattractive tycoons benefited from a sprinkling of Vreeland fairy dust. “Some may see Charles Engelhard, the gold, platinum, uranium tycoon, as a tough, obese business genius with fairly unattractive manners and a terrible physical onslaught,” he wrote in his diary. “To Diane he is ‘le Roi Soleil.’ Put a wig on him, then take the nose, he already has the stick, and watch his walk! With one foot forward! Why, he’s from all the pictures!”
New friendships went some way toward filling the gap. One of them was with the designer Oscar de la Renta, which began before Reed’s death but blossomed afterward. De la Renta, who had been an apprentice to Balenciaga and an assistant to Lanvin, traveled to New York from Paris in 1962, armed with a letter of introduction from the aristocratic Parisian socialite, fashion phenomenon, and putative designer Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes. He arrived at 550 Park Avenue to be greeted by the sight of Diana and Reed wafting cigarette holders and wearing caftans; but he also encountered Diana at her most practical. She strongly recommended he take a job he had been offered by Elizabeth Arden, arguing that Arden spent so much on advertising that de la Renta would make his name faster there than anywhere else, particularly since he wished to concentrate on ready-to-wear. It was the right advice and marked the start of a friendship that was important to both of them, one that blossomed when De la Renta married Françoise de Langlade, previously editor in chief of French Vogue, the year after Reed died. De la Renta proved to be particularly well attuned to Diana’s more exuberantly exotic ideas, re-creating them in a most luxurious way for his uptown New York clientele. Diana’s personal style took on more vivid, electric hues after Reed’s death. One bejewelled caftan De la Renta made for her in 1966 was described by the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum as evoking “the fantasy of foreign lands,” with a color palette recalling a desert sunset: a masterful interpretation of Diana’s dictum that “fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.”
Jerry Zipkin’s name also began to appear regularly in Diana’s diary from 1967. Heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, Zipkin made escorting fashionable women with busy husbands a way of life. Indeed, WWD coined the word “walker” to describe him. Though he was a man of considerable charm, it greatly amused him to dish out catty remarks to his closest lady friends and watch them crumple. There is little sign that he made much impact when he
tried this on Diana. It was, one observer remarked, a hilarious friendship. Zipkin was neurotically punctual; Diana was invariably late; and they often telephoned their mutual friends to complain bitterly about each other. But lunch at restaurants like La Caravelle or La Grenouille took on new social importance in New York in the 1960s, and one of Zipkin’s many advantages was that he brought Diana gossip from the new breed of lunching ladies whom she was too busy to listen to herself.
Bill Blass had known the Vreelands since the 1950s. Like others, he had initially found Reed the more affable: “Astonishingly friendly when you consider that the stigma of being a designer was enough to make you feel like an outcast.” After Reed’s death Blass drew close to Diana. He was a frequent guest at 550 Park Avenue, and they often went to the movies together. “Those were the evenings I loved most with her,” he remembered, though he learned to avoid escorting her to other people’s dinner parties. Diana earned a justified reputation for always being late, to the great irritation of her old friend Kitty Miller, who simply started dinner at eight forty-five without waiting for her. “She never had a sense of time, and I don’t think it was that ploy of being important when she arrived,” said Blass. “Time, like age, simply meant nothing to her.” Years later Blass was still laughing at the memory of Kitty Miller threatening, sotto voce, to give Diana a “knuckle sandwich” when she found herself upstaged by Diana’s conversational flow at a lunch party. The line was delivered “with startling movie-gangster relish—by a grand dame, about another grand dame.”
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