Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  I really have come to that conclusion. I think fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world—in the world.

  After the success of The Glory of Russian Costume, the acting director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, made a suggestion. Diana’s flair and taste were generating huge interest. The next exhibition should be nothing less than her personal edit of the thirty thousand pieces in the Costume Institute’s closets. Diana called this exhibition Vanity Fair. Its title was derived from the town of Vanity in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where pilgrims stopped on their way to Rome to indulge in “pleasures, lusts and delights.” To Diana, following Thackeray as well as Bunyan, Vanity Fair also meant “society, with its foibles, its weaknesses, its splendeur.” It was no coincidence, as Harold Koda and Richard Martin have pointed out, that Diana appropriated the title of a then-defunct Condé Nast magazine. The theme of the exhibition “was what she believed a magazine should be, and it exemplified the profile of her magazines.” Montebello warned in the accompanying publication that anyone looking for analysis or conventional costume history would be disappointed. “Why? Because we are not presenting an anthology of the collection but a personal choice, Diana Vreeland’s choice.” Though capricious, her selection was anything but random: “This is not so much an exhibition of clothes as of what Diana Vreeland can show us about clothes.”

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave Diana all the help she could. She agreed to chair the Party of the Year committee for a second year, and she wrote an appreciation of Diana for the catalog. She also paid the “high priestess” a visit in her “temple” while she was assembling the exhibition. On the morning of this visit Diana had already collected together “follies and fripperies” from all over the world: tiny shoes for bound Chinese feet, bustles, parasols with intricately wrought handles, kimonos, men’s waistcoats of rich brocade, towering hair combs fashionable in Buenos Aires for just one decade between 1830 and 1840, exquisitely tailored sporting jackets belonging to the Duke of Windsor, parachute-silk jumpsuits by Norma Kamali, and lingerie that would later become the talking point of the show. These objects had not been chosen for their historic interest but to show what the human mind could conjure up in the interest of allure. “These incredibly beautiful things,” said Diana. “You know, you have to demand them. You must wish for the most ravishing thing of beauty and quality because it’s there to be had, even now. Keep the demand high. If there is no one who demands, then what the craftsmen know will disappear.” Koda and Martin saw Vanity Fair as “the truest reflection of Vreeland’s commitment to the opulent expression of concepts; in it she allowed herself the freedom and flamboyance to select the best and most fantastic, as in fact she had always done.” But in Vanity Fair Diana went even further.

  Mrs. Onassis observed that the objects Diana had selected were, for the most part, “from a rarefied world of court and capital, whose inhabitants had had the leisure and the money to indulge their fantasies and their vanities.” But Diana countered this.

  “Do not be too hard on vanity,” Mrs. Vreeland cautioned. “Vanity has given a discipline. ‘Is that all you care about, clothes?’ people ask me—as if I’d never had children, never had a husband.” She smiled. “I happen to think vanity is a very important sort of thing.”

  She recalled Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

  “Do you remember, at the end, those three characters are standing in a room? There is glaring light, no shadow, no place to ever be away.” She turned her head and placed her hand to shade her face.

  “This is forever, this is hell. And there is no mirror and you lose your face, you lose your self-image. When that is gone, that is hell. Some may think it vain to look into a mirror, but I consider it an identification of self.”

  More than half a million people went to Vanity Fair, which ran from 1977 to 1978. Diana’s fame grew; and she was beside herself with delight when media magnate Jocelyn Stevens asked if he could name a racehorse after her. There were other honors, but the one that pleased her most was the Légion d’Honneur, awarded after The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties: Inventive Clothes 1909–1939. “We all have our dreams. We all want one thing. That little red ribbon . . . but to me, it was France, where I was born and brought up. . . . The night I got it, it was enfin, enfin, enfin—that night could have been the end of my life because it was all I ever wanted.” Nonetheless she disliked public speaking as much as she ever had, and when it came to accepting awards her acceptance speeches were short to the point of nonexistent. “I take my cue from the Gettysburg address,” she said. She never overcame the self-consciousness that gripped her when she was required to perform to order. When she made television appearances, they tended—with one notable exception—to fall flat.

  The most successful attempts at capturing Diana’s singular quality were inspired by Warhol and the Factory. It was Fred Hughes who finally worked out what to do. Andy Warhol had been entranced by the tape recorder since the 1960s and was in the process of composing his autobiography by tape-recording his entire life. Hughes thought that recording Diana in conversation as she moved through her day could be the way forward; and he began by asking Christopher Hemphill to listen to her voice. Hemphill reacted by saying that the tape recorder could have been invented especially for Diana. The listener could almost see her italics; her poetic choice of words was even more arresting than their delivery; and she gave the impression of inventing her own syntax as she went along. At Hughes’s behest, Diana came down to the Factory to meet Hemphill. “My first impression of Mrs. Vreeland was distinctly startling . . . ,” he wrote. “Wearing a black sweater, black pants, a purple scarf knotted around her waist, and round sunglasses, gliding on the balls of her feet like a ballerina, she advanced several paces into the room before coming to a complete stop several yards from where I was sitting. I rose from my seat. Raising her sunglasses to her forehead . . . she fixed me with a gaze both critical and sympathetic. I waited for her to speak. She extended her hand. ‘Hello there,’ she said archly.”

  Hemphill recorded Diana everywhere: “In restaurants, in taxicabs, and at what she called our ‘séances,’ sitting around a table on a banquette.” The method suited Diana perfectly. Paralyzing self-consciousness, which had plagued her since Mr. Chalif’s end-of-term shows at Carnegie Hall, fell away. In fact the presence of the tape recorder had the opposite effect. “Once, during a rare conversational lapse, the machine turned itself off loudly at the end of a tape. ‘Poor little thing,’ Mrs. Vreeland said sympathetically, ‘it has a mind of its own—it gets bored. We mustn’t let the splash drop! We must be amusing all the time.’ ” Allure, the book that emerged from this process, was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, now working for Doubleday. It was a book of images, accompanied by text edited from the recordings. Diana, the editor in chief, was in charge of the layouts, and Onassis very much wanted to understand how she set about it. Onassis, Hemphill, and Ray Roberts from Doubleday spent many Sunday afternoons at 550 Park Avenue while Diana assembled and reassembled the book. She credited Brodovitch with teaching her all she knew, and insisted they were working as a team. “Never say ‘I,’ ” she instructed Hemphill. “Always say ‘we.’ ”

  As the images took precedence, Christopher Hemphill’s text became shorter and more aphoristic. Diana was reluctant to let Allure become a chronological account of her own life, and eschewed pattern making of any kind. “Does anyone read a picture book from the beginning? I don’t,” she proclaimed at the beginning, opposite a Vogue photograph of an Issey Miyake mannequin. Allure nonetheless reflected much that had inspired or interested her since childhood. It was the commonplace book of a visual rather than a literary mind. Many old favorites found their way in: the coronation of George V, Josephine Baker, Rita Lydig, Gertie Lawrence, Daisy Fellowes photographed by Cecil Beaton, de Gaulle, Pauline de Rothschild, Bébé Bérard, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, Elsie Mendl, and a phot
ograph of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern that Jessica Daves had excluded from Vogue in 1962 because it was “too triste.” Diana included Irving Penn’s close-ups of the face of a geisha; Penelope Tree with a diamond in her eye; the great Munkácsi photograph of Lucile Brokaw running on the beach; and she put an image of the Dolly Sisters appearing as the Little Gods in Diaghilev’s Le Train Bleu next to “darling Alphonse”—a 1900 picture postcard of Alfonso XIII of Spain when he was fourteen. (“This has got to be our most peculiar spread,” said Diana.)

  Allure captured Diana’s views on photography. “A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point. I had to have a point or I didn’t have a picture.” On paparazzi photographs: “They catch something unintended, on the wing . . . they get that thing. It’s the revelation of personality.” It lassoed her opinion of noses. “A nose without strength is a pretty poor performance. It’s the one thing you hold against someone today. If you’re born with too small a nose, the one thing you want to do is build it up.” In Diana’s view the line and silhouette of the twentieth century started with the Ballets Russes, “the only avant-garde I’ve ever known. It all had to do with line. Everybody had the line.” It was the line that made blue jeans possible: “Blue jeans are the only things that have kept fashion alive because they’re made of a marvelous fabric and they have fit and dash and line . . . the only important ingredient in fashion.” But the question that pulsed through the book was the mysterious quality of allure itself. On Garbo (“but don’t let me go grand on you”): “I can’t say what it is she does. If I could say it, I could do it myself.” Allure had nothing to do with conventional beauty, but was deeply entwined with personality. “The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell—unquestionably.” Elegance had the quality of gazelles and Audrey Hepburn. “Elegance is refusal.” She loved Deborah Turbeville’s photographs of “worn out” girls in Vogue. “The girls keep looking in the mirror, which is all right by me. I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.” And finally, allure could never be captured anyway. “Really, we should forget all this nonsense and just stay home and read Proust.”

  A well-honed version of Diana’s life story appeared alongside Allure, in interviews that had the effect of complementing the museum’s public relations’ machine, even when they were not necessarily part of it. Lally Weymouth was the first to bring together successfully the constituent parts of the Vreeland legend. She interviewed Diana for a long article for Rolling Stone in 1977 and rounded up the Paris upbringing, Diaghilev, the ugly duckling, the coronation of George V, Buffalo Bill, the return to New York in 1914, the lack of education, marriage at eighteen, a remarkable assertion that she trained with the English dance troupe The Tiller Girls, and being spotted on the rooftop of the St. Regis by Carmel Snow. If Diana was pleased to find herself in Rolling Stone in her seventies, she was even more delighted by Jonathan Lieberson’s brilliant profile in Interview and by becoming its cover girl in December 1980 at the age of seventy-seven. “Diana Vreeland called and said how much she loved her cover story in Interview,” said Andy Warhol in his diary. “The cover makes her look about twenty, and she said, ‘The only problem is I’m beginning to think I look like that woman on the cover.’ ”

  Diana was much less pleased with Jesse Kornbluth’s article for New York in November 1982, and was reluctant to cooperate with photographers and profile writers thereafter. She allowed Priscilla Rattazzi’s images of her seventy-nine-year-old style to endure: black lacquered hair, scarlet lips, rouged cheeks, Vaselined eyelids, scarlet nails, matching ivory cuffs, an ivory tusk on a gold chain, and Roger Vivier scarlet snakeskin boots. But she was furious and upset that Kornbluth distorted a private joke. Years earlier, for the benefit of her grandson Nicky’s new film camera, she claimed to have been born to the sound of Berber ululations in the Atlas Mountains. Kornbluth somehow got hold of this story and presented it as an instance of her propensity for self-invention. She complained about this bitterly to George Plimpton who was at 550 Park Avenue to record more conversation for the memoir that became D.V. The idea of such a memoir had long been discussed. Diana and Truman Capote had even talked of working on it together after she left Vogue; and Capote arranged for Robert MacBride, a married man with whom he was obsessed, to do some preliminary research. MacBride was ill suited to the task and eventually extracted himself from the arrangement, saying that Diana did not quite come through to him and he was therefore not the right person.

  The idea of a memoir resurfaced again after Allure was published. Hemphill had recorded far more for Allure than he needed and had edited some of it into a short “autobiography.” George Plimpton was commissioned by Knopf to add some material and knit together Hemphill’s manuscript with his own. D.V. became the version of Diana’s life that persisted unchecked until Eleanor Dwight’s 2002 biography, though Diana kept reminding Plimpton that she was “terrible on facts” and that someone needed to check all dates and times. A benighted copyeditor started the process but appeared to give up in despair after one chapter, so that even the date of Diana and Reed’s wedding was wrong. When Freck responded to the manuscript with a large number of queries and asked George Plimpton what sort of book he was trying to write, Plimpton replied “A bestseller.” Plimpton later said that he really did not care whether any of it was true: the interesting thing was the way Mrs. Vreeland told it. And when it came the way Mrs. Vreeland told it, boring facts were not the point. “Did I tell you that Lindbergh flew over Brewster? It could have been someone else, but who cares—Fake it!” she said. “. . . There’s only one thing in life, and that’s the continual renewal of inspiration.”

  D.V. was reviewed favorably and sold very well. The effect was to make Diana even better known and the object of some teasing by her relations. When one of her grandsons found a note telling her secretary that Mrs. Vreeland had now signed a copy of D.V. for Elizabeth Taylor, he added in his own hand: “Also a book for Queen Elizabeth and one for Pope John Paul. Did the books for Rosalind Carter and Madame Gandhi get sent? As for Fidel Castro, it shouldn’t be too difficult to send him his book. He wants two copies, as he wants to send one to Chernenko, so do make sure Mrs. V. dedicates it appropriately.”

  Diana’s family came and went in the 1970s and 1980s. Tim and Jean Vreeland had two daughters, Daisy and Phoebe. After his marriage to Jean ended, Tim married Nancy Stolkin in 1982 and continued to live in Los Angeles. Freck and his second wife, Vanessa Somers, divided their time between Rome and Morocco. Freck’s younger son, Alexander, lived in Australia for much of the 1970s where he helped to run the Inner Peace Movement. Nicky continued to live in New York, but departed on a different kind of journey around 1980, toward life as a Buddhist monk. Diana found it hard to come to terms with his growing interest in Buddhism. She battled to keep her feelings under control though the only time he ever saw her cry was when he shaved his head. She made no secret of the fact that she felt Buddhism was keeping him from participating in the life he ought to be leading. She went to the lengths of asking a neighbor and friend, the Reverend John Andrew, who was rector of Saint Thomas Church, to talk to him. Even when John Andrew reported that Nicky was very serious and that his decision to pursue his monastic studies in India was not just a phase, Diana made one last attempt to turn him back.

  Near the time he was due to leave for India, she asked him to dinner with some people she wanted him to meet. Nicky had given up dinner parties by this stage, but he agreed to attend. When he arrived at 550 Park Avenue he was greeted by a butler with the news that Diana was ill and had taken to her bed, but that the dinner party would be going ahead without her. The “dinner party” turned out to be a table set for two, for Nicky and a young woman who was not only ravishingly beautiful but was studying Chinese and Tibetan at Columbia and liked art movies, just as he did. It was a grandmotherly fix-up. Afterward an unrepentant Diana wanted to know all about the dinner—and what the girl looked like. Though i
t took time, Diana did eventually accept Nicky’s decision. He knew that Diana had come around to it—more or less—when she said in an interview some time later that she liked people with a twinkle, and that the Dalai Lama had a twinkle.

  Fred Hughes, on the other hand, caused Diana much sadness. The first intimation of trouble came in Andy Warhol’s diary at the end of September 1977. He reported that Diana had called him and said someone “should talk to Fred about his drinking problem, to tell him he’s so attractive but that when he’s drunk he’s so unattractive.” A few weeks later there was a nasty scene. “All the way down in the cab Diana and Fred had been fighting like they were a screaming old married couple,” wrote Warhol. There were reports from other sources of a very public row between Diana and Fred in Paris, in which Yves Saint Laurent had tried to intervene. Warhol thought that Diana was jealous of Hughes’s friendships with younger, more beautiful women. “She thinks Fred’s making it with Lacey [Neuhaus] and I think she wants him to make it with her. Can you believe it? It’s so crazy.” Bob Colacello fielded many long, worried telephone calls from Diana that suggested she was simply concerned that Fred was going off the rails and nothing was being done to stop him. “She and I had had several talks about his behavior; in fact, it was hard to get her off the subject when we were alone,” he wrote. “One night, she went on about the beard that Fred had just shaved off. She hated his beard. It was ‘slovenly’ she said. But she was disappointed after it came off, ‘because Fred still doesn’t have that look I loved him for: well-proportioned, simple, good clothes, worn perfectly, everything just so. No accessory other than neatness. You know exactly what I mean, Bob. Well, I’m afraid he’s lost it.’ ” It would later turn out that Hughes was in the early stages of multiple sclerosis. At the time his behavior was attributed to heavy drinking and a great deal of cocaine. “Style was more than surface for Diana; it expressed the very essence of a person. And Fred’s style had changed,” wrote Colacello. Hughes, who had once been on the Best Dressed List, took to going around with shredded linings in his suits. “Diana saw the decline in Fred’s appearance as a sign of an inner collapse. ‘His spirit is broken, Bob.’ ”