The year that followed was very hard. Though Diana kept up a dignified front, she was devastated, humiliated, and hurt. She insisted privately that it was all a duplicitous power grab by Liberman and talked about him venomously to confidantes, lacing vituperation with an ample seasoning of anti-Semitism. She was devastated, believing that colleagues she had befriended, mentored, and inspired, like Polly Mellen, had failed to support her in any way that counted. She never forgave Mellen, and refused to sign a copy of Allure for her years later. Freck flew to New York to assist with negotiations over severance terms, which were generous. Condé Nast Publications took account of the fact that Diana was a few months short of pensionable service. She was given the title of Consulting Editor. She remained on full salary for the rest of 1971. For that year her expense account, clothing and entertainment allowances, and a portion of the rent on her apartment remained intact. She was offered half her salary—and half her allowances—for two years thereafter. Diana was free to take on additional consulting work provided it did not compete with Vogue; and had an office and a secretary for as long as she remained consulting editor. She was not kicked out. But she was most definitely kicked upstairs and the moment it happened all creative authority drained away from her, and into the hands of Grace Mirabella.
Faced with no alternative, Diana moved to a smaller office, had it painted blood-red like her old one, and then stayed away as much as she could. Liberman, meanwhile, swept into her old office and ordered all signs of blood-redness, “tee-gray,” and Rigaud candles to be expunged. In public, Diana put on her customary brave face. She made sure she did not behave like Carmel Snow, who had continued to pull rank in similar circumstances and made life as difficult as possible for her successor. She arranged to be out of the country on a four-month tour of Europe when the news broke publicly in May 1971. On the day, she sent a cheerful cable from Paris to the office, saying she missed them all and wished they were sharing the Paris spring day, “which is my marvelous and good luck.” But friends knew that she was very unhappy. She went from Paris to stay with Kitty Miller in Majorca. Her old friend Edwina d’Erlanger infuriated her by remarking that at sixty-seven, Diana had to understand that her future was behind her. While it was wise to be away from New York and the chatter of the fashion press, Diana discovered that she hated traveling alone, and she was delighted when her old friend Kenneth Jay Lane, who was coming to Europe anyway, agreed to join her at the Ritz in Madrid. It was an old-fashioned establishment where female guests were still forbidden to wear trousers and Lane found Diana amusing herself by getting in and out of the grand entrance in slacks without being caught. But there was one evening when he was invited elsewhere. Before he went out, he sat with her in the dining room while she ate an early supper like a little old lady. The band struck up “Fascination,” and she started to cry—not just a little sniffle but great heaving, noisy sobs. Once she started she was unable to stop. She was utterly miserable: no Reed; no job; no one to travel with; worried about money all over again.
When Diana arrived in Paris in August, there was another brutal shock. Margaret Case, who was in her eighties and had been Vogue’s society editor for forty-five years, had committed suicide. She was Diana’s neighbor at 550 Park Avenue, a friend as well as a colleague. Case had been asked to vacate her office and work from home by the new regime a few weeks earlier, and had taken it extremely badly. She fell ill and became depressed. Rumors flew: Case had been asked to leave her office so as to make way for Diana; she had looked immaculate when she jumped from her bedroom window; the nurse who was caring for her had just left the room to make a cup of tea. For Diana, who flew home as soon as she heard the news, it was a blow upon a bruise.
It soon became clear that fulfilling her obligations as consulting editor would be anything but easy. Her relationship with Grace Mirabella suffered in a way that was all the more painful because they had once been so close. Mirabella was genuinely astonished to be offered the job of editor in chief by Liberman. But after she accepted, neither she nor Diana said anything about what happened, something Mirabella later regretted. Mirabella sent Diana pages that she had worked on and then cowered, “ashamed and afraid that I might one day run into her in the hallway and have to look her in the eye and say something.” Diana, meanwhile, never referred to her demotion. “Her sense of etiquette, her pride, and her inbred feel for the right way of doing things would tell her that it was my place to make the first stab at communication. She was right. But I simply couldn’t do it.”
Diana had one great success in this unhappy period, though it was not obvious at the time. A young and unknown designer called Manolo Blahnik came to see her in her new office to show her his portfolio of drawings. His sketches were mainly of theater sets and costumes, and Diana saw him alone. “I was so frightened I could hardly speak,” said Blahnik. “She must have thought I was mad. I could barely walk because I was wearing tiny Victorian shoes, far too small, which were killing me. And there was the woman I’d idolized.” Diana turned the pages of the portfolio making polite noises until she came to Blahnik’s drawings of shoes. “ ‘How amazing,’ she said. Then, energized, she looked up and said, ‘Young man, do things. Do accessories. Do shoes.’ ” Other than set one legendary shoe designer on the path to greatness, she continued to write memos: “Don’t you think the beauty of Mia Farrow is fantastic. . . . I think she is definitely a personality,” and “The underlying ways of beauty: walking, talking, smiling . . . the careful enunciation of the language you are speaking.” The memos grew more and more halfhearted: “Sleeveless knit low oval front and back looks marvelously—I can show you the kind of top if you are interested.” But no one was interested, or listening, and she soon stopped appearing at the office altogether. “I am not proud of that particular chapter in my history,” wrote Grace Mirabella in her memoir. “But in my defense, I have to say that, professionally, I had no choice but to make Vreeland disappear. Her legend was so great, and the resistance to me as her successor so widespread and so insidious, that I had to push on, at whatever personal cost, to establish myself, because there were just too many people gunning to bring me down.”
Diana continued to fret about money and looked for consulting work compatible with the terms of her agreement with Condé Nast. Friends came to the rescue, and she swallowed her pride. In September 1971 she took on the role of personal shopper for Katharine “Kay” Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and was rewarded with discreet checks. She became an adviser to the costume jewelers Coro-Vendome, advising them on trends and new designs; and in January 1972 she even proposed herself as a consultant to Marks & Spencer in London, recommending that they extend their line of “little knitted undershirts,” advice the store would have done well to heed, given how fashionable these subsequently became. There was talk about a book for the publisher George Weidenfeld. But it was very difficult to adjust to the lack of structure. “This has been a very curious autumn and winter so far,” she wrote to Pauline de Rothschild on January 28, 1972. “Not because anything serious has happened but because after 34 years of total routine, I have had to create each day by itself, most of which has been in various parts of town which is complicated and difficult to get to. Nothing has been overstrenuous, it has been, I can only say, ‘different.’ ” She was lining up jobs, she wrote, and had behaved “like a dream.” But there was much to think about: “It is just a question of my sorting out what I really am capable of accomplishing.”
Then there was a setback. In March 1972 Diana developed a vertebral infection that required treatment with intravenous antibiotics, and obliged her to stay in the hospital for several weeks until the end of April. It was an “ingenious, clever little bug,” she wrote to a friend. “Don’t ever get anything in your spine.” But illness turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Too many acquaintances had slithered away when she was fired from Vogue; but in the spring of 1972, this fresh bout of misfortune triggered a wave of sympathy and
support from dozens of people whose lives she had touched, improved, or changed, and who were unhappy at seeing her laid low. However forceful and demanding Diana may have been, she rarely said anything unpleasant about friends and colleagues behind their backs. On the contrary, her enthusiasm and encouragement had transformed lives. “To hear someone say that Diana Vreeland is a positive thinker, an evangelist of enthusiasm, is like seeing water poured over Niagara Falls,” wrote Jonathan Lieberson. “She has inspired and encouraged more people per cubic inch than Norman Vincent Peale.” This brought its own rewards now.
Her nurses gazed in amazement at the stream of glamorous visitors. “It seems to be a long Valentino parade,” Diana wrote to Valentino on April 24. Jackie, Audrey, and Babe had all worn Valentino when they came to see her, and they all looked marvelous. Even her hairdresser had worn Valentino at her bedside. The actor Terence Stamp paid her a visit. Friends formed the habit of dropping in on their way out to dinner. Caviar, delicious food, and luxurious bedsheets arrived daily. Seventh Avenue rallied: Norman Norell, Anna Potok of Maximilian furs, Marjorie Griswold from Lord & Taylor, and many others sent lavish flowers. In the thank-you letters she dictated to her secretary, Diana made being in the hospital sound like one enormous treat: “I happen to have a very beautiful room, overlooking the bridges and the whole of the city and at night when one starts to dream and think of other things, it looks like a modern Piranesi as the whole thing is so dreamlike and exalted.” But as she lay in her hospital bed looking out at the lights of Manhattan, not even Diana could have dreamed of the extraordinary last act that was about to begin.
Chapter Eight
Old Clothes
Not far from the hospital where Diana lay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was going through its own upheaval. It had acquired a charismatic young director called Thomas Hoving five years earlier and was still reeling from his arrival. Hoving was thirty-five when he was appointed. He had presided over a celebrated series of “happenings” in New York parks before taking the job, and he was determined to shake up the museum in the same way, informing its trustees that he regarded the place (and by implication, them) as “moribund,” “gray,” and “dying.” Hoving set about enlarging the building and the museum’s collections in a manner that might politely be described as piratical, but he revolutionized its attitudes, insisted that a populist approach was compatible with scholarship, introduced blockbuster exhibitions, and withstood much criticism for being a huckster as well as a visionary. He caused a stir early in his tenure by declaring that running the Metropolitan Museum of Art was no different from running General Motors, and that it had to be melded into an efficient business enterprise. He quickly lit on its Costume Institute as a potential money-spinner and crowd puller, but it turned out to be a headache.
The Costume Institute had started life independently in 1937, as the Museum of Costume Art, founded by Irene and Alice Lewisohn. Their aim was to raise awareness of dress in human history and to make the case for fashion as one of the decorative arts. The sisters built up a collection of about seven thousand pieces before Irene Lewisohn’s death in 1944. Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor then stepped in with a campaign to bring the collection to the Metropolitan Museum, insisting that it would inspire American designers and act as a spur to independence from Paris in the postwar years. Shaver deployed this argument so successfully that she raised $350,000 from Seventh Avenue to finance the transfer. The Costume Institute enjoyed semiautonomous status from 1947 before it was formally absorbed into the museum in 1960; but activity was low-key and patchy, a state of affairs Hoving was determined to change when he arrived in 1967. His first move was an exhibition called The Art of Fashion. To keep Seventh Avenue happy and involve living designers, he hired the leading fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert to work on the exhibition alongside its curator, making her the first outsider to work on a major show in the history of the Metropolitan. He soon discovered that this was not a good idea when he dropped in late one night to discover Lambert pushing mannequins attired in the clothes of her clients to the front of each display case.
Public relations as a curatorial concept was a step too far, even for Hoving. He closed the doors of the Costume Institute for much-needed building work between 1968 and 1971 and thought about what to do next. Small galleries in the north end of the museum basement were bulldozed to open up larger exhibition spaces; state-of-the-art storage for the ever-expanding collection was installed. After his brush with Lambert, Hoving went to the other extreme and appointed the scholarly Adolph Cavallo to oversee the renovations, but Cavallo’s first exhibition fell flat. The trustees of the Costume Institute’s new Visiting Committee, drawn from the city’s social elite and from Seventh Avenue, decided he lacked the common touch. For his part Cavallo was confronted by a committee who thought that Patricia Nixon’s wedding dress was just the thing to draw the crowds. These tensions resulted in the waning of Cavallo’s star and a vacuum that Hoving found difficult to fill. The Costume Institute had an outstanding curatorial staff led by Stella Blum, but it needed someone to give it the right sort of pizzazz.
In the first instance, however, neither Hoving nor Diana was very keen on the idea that it should be her. The idea of approaching Diana came not from Hoving, but from his curator in chief, Theodore Rousseau, and the museum’s secretary, Ashton Hawkins, both friends of the Vreelands and occasional guests at 550 Park Avenue. Diana’s lawyer, Peter Tufo, also claimed to have had a hand in the matter. After his experience with Eleanor Lambert, Hoving remained extremely nervous about installing anyone from a commercial background. Diana, meanwhile, was not at all sure she was the right person for the task. She had no interest in an academic approach to clothes; her professional instinct was to look for what was fresh and new; and even though she drew on decades of looking at beautiful things as Vogue’s editor in chief, she loathed nostalgia. Her initial reaction to Ted Rousseau’s proposition was unenthusiastic. However, he refused to give up. “He came to see me four or five times . . . and he sat right where you are now and argued with me. I’d say, ‘Ted, I’ve never been in a museum except as a tourist.’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you change around a bit?’ ”
By the time Diana fell ill in March 1972 she knew that no one at Condé Nast was interested in her point of view, and for all the bravado with which she wrote to Pauline de Rothschild, it is not clear that she enjoyed chasing around after consulting work with its attendant financial uncertainty. The proposition from Ted Rousseau was attractive. It came with an office, a secretary, and an annual salary. There was wisdom in going where she was wanted rather than where she was not; and some of her glamorous hospital visitors almost certainly persuaded her to think again, emphasizing that she was not being approached as a conventional curator but precisely because of other, creative talents. The sight of Diana so reduced had a galvanizing effect on her circle, and behind her back they sprang into action. Hoving overcame his reluctance when a group of Diana’s most powerful friends, including Marella Agnelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Babe Paley, and Mona Bismarck (now Mrs. Umberto de Martini) offered to contribute almost half her salary for the first year. It has been suggested that those who agreed to contribute subsequently did not do so; it has also been said that there were some who were asked to contribute but declined. However, with the exception of Mrs. Paul Mellon, who pledged one thousand dollars and had still not produced it at the end of 1972, a file note from the museum makes it clear that all Diana’s friends who agreed to support her paid up.
Diana signed a one-year agreement with the Metropolitan Museum in July 1972 (though she wrote at least one letter that suggests she had decided to take the job by the end of May). It was renewable annually by mutual consent. Her title was Special Consultant, and she was responsible for generating ideas for exhibitions, organizing them, and seeing them through; suggesting sources for additions to the collection and financial gifts; and acting as a link between the Costume Institute, the fashion industry
worldwide, and the fashion press. She would report directly to Hoving. For all this she would receive $25,000 for the year, up to $10,000 in expenses (a closely guarded secret), a full-time secretary, and an office, which she proceeded to have painted blood-red all over again. She had work to finish for Vogue in Paris in September, but she would start at the museum on September 5. The apartment at 550 Park Avenue was to be completely spring-cleaned in her absence. Her battered old desk chair would be sent from Condé Nast. “I have been rebuilding my life for the last two months,” Diana wrote to Mainbocher in August. She was full of excitement, tinged with apprehension. “I am ecstatically happy,” she told Ted Rousseau on August 11, 1972, “and I only hope that I don’t let you down or the museum.” In her engagement diary she wrote: “Life is a fine performance. There are entr’actes.” Elsewhere in the diary she scribbled: “Believe in the total authority of the imagination.”
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