In his own way Fred Hughes adored Diana. “I do, I do, I do love you. Happy birthday, Fritzie Pie,” he scribbled in one note. But one of the ways it showed was that he ventriloquized Diana when he was drunk, apparently without realizing, but to such an extent that Warhol called him Dr. Hyde and Mrs. Vreeland. Diana attributed Hughes’s decline to Warhol’s exploitativeness and manipulativeness, and, as he reported it, she was not above telling him what she thought. “She started screaming and belting me, and she really hurts!” he wrote of one particularly dire evening. “She said that she just couldn’t stand to be around old people, including herself.” Andy Warhol hated being touched, and an irate Diana may only have poked him once or twice hard with her famous index finger but Warhol was angry that Diana encouraged Hughes to assert himself. There was also something about Diana’s defiance of old age and weakening that made him uneasy. She fought against it by “running and jumping and dancing and humming and pushing forward with her tight body and her beautiful clothes.”
It is undeniable that Diana also took on some of the qualities of her terrifying, matriarchal, dark-haired grandmother in her seventies, the only example of old age in her family that she knew and loved. She had a rough manner with her staff at times; and when she was angry it showed. At the same time she knew how to proffer grandmotherly concern and kindness. Diana was appalled that Warhol stood back and took no action as Hughes appeared to self-destruct, for she sensed that his decline was caused by something no one could identify. By late 1980, however, the problems caused by Hughes’s antisocial attitude had gone well beyond either of them. Hughes offended Jacqueline Onassis very publicly; he turned up drunk at Cecil Beaton’s memorial in New York, too late to be an usher; and was so obnoxious at the prewedding dinner for Courtney Kennedy that he was thrown out by her mother, Ethel. Diana had Colacello on the phone for two hours after that incident. “I never thought that Fred would end up as a bum,” she said.
Unlike many of Fred Hughes’s so-called friends, Diana continued to provide moral support as he fell from grace, and did not give up on him after his illness was diagnosed. Although the intensity of their relationship slackened, she continued to have him to supper alone at 550 Park Avenue about twice a month for as long as it was feasible. There was no shortage of other company. There were constant dinners, lunches, movies, and outings, including concerts by Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan. From 1970 onward, Diana spent a few days each Christmas with Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in Santo Domingo, in the company of John Richardson, Boaz Mazor, and others. She caused a sensation when she visited the local pharmacy, her favorite place in the resort, maintaining that it sold pills and potions she could only get by prescription in the United States. She made a point of going there every afternoon around five o’clock, wearing a caftan. After a day or two, a crowd assembled to watch her arrival. Once she realized that she was the event for which they were waiting, she took to dressing up in ever more outré outfits to please her public, and eventually had to go home when she ran out of clothes.
Friendship and decades of experience in fashion continued to overlap. Carolina Herrera first met Diana as a friend in the early 1970s and was enchanted by her wit, extravagance, and style. In 1980 it was Diana who inspired and prodded Herrera into becoming a designer, giving her much encouragement in private, supporting her collections in public, and setting yet another great New York fashion designer on the path to success. There were new friends too. Bruce Chatwin had dinner with Diana in 1982 and watched her inner eye scanning away, with no sign of slackening, at the age of seventy-nine:
Her glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask tablecloth. Beyond the smear of lipstick, a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette.
“What are you writing about, Bruce?”
“Wales, Diana.”
The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees.
“Whales!” she said. “Blue whales! . . . Sperrrrm whales! . . . THE WHITE WHALE!”
“No . . . no Diana! Wales! Welsh Wales! The country to the west of England.”
“Oh! Wales. I do know Wales. Little grey houses . . . covered in roses . . . in the rain.”
As she became more famous, criticism of Diana’s exhibitions became more vocal. As Koda and Martin wrote later, Diana’s version of history was history of “the grandest memory, a sweep through the elegances of the court of Versailles, a promenade through the grand silhouettes and extravagant textures of the Belle Époque, and the colorful Russia of the Czars.” She liked to express the mood of an era through oblique, impressionistic details: a bouquet of violets on a winter sleigh stood for czarist indulgence (a Russian grand duke once paved an avenue in St. Petersburg with violets to welcome his Italian mistress); Alice in Wonderland, holding a flamingo, implied the topsy-turvy world of the Belle Époque. This approach to the past was extremely popular with the public; and Diana’s early exhibitions were so innovative, and their atmospheric lighting, music, perfumes, and backdrops so dazzling, that objections were muted. Three of Diana’s first five exhibitions—The World of Balenciaga; The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties; and Vanity Fair—all played directly to her connoisseurship. But after Vanity Fair the chorus of complaints grew louder.
Criticism by Nesta Macdonald in Dance magazine of the Diaghilev exhibition that followed was typical of much to come. “Diaghilev created theatrical magic—illusion. Vogue created fashion magic—delusion. At the Metropolitan, the exhibits come from one side and the presentation from the other . . . the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum seemed to me to resemble a battlefield.” Macdonald believed that mixing up the costumes from different ballets and failing to offer any kind of chronology or context made Diaghilev’s impact difficult to understand; and she was infuriated by errors in an accompanying brochure that was too sketchy. Diana Vreeland, she wrote, revolutionized fashion magazines with an instinctive and exhausting perfectionism: “The sad thing is that she seems to have thought that the showy nature of Diaghilev costumes could stand up to window-dressing technique.” Some critics found Fashions of the Hapsburg Empire, which followed, just as obscure. This was perhaps not surprising, since Diana explained to George Trow that what she liked best about the Hapsburgs was the gleaming brass turnout of their horses, a point of view only comprehensible to those who knew her very well indeed. “What Mrs. Vreeland likes is a source of simple energy so powerful that something rather excessive can be elaborated from what rises to the surface,” wrote Trow, manfully doing his best. “ ‘It’s important to get the point,’ she said. ‘The point is the gleam. It’s what the nineteenth century knew. The gleam, the positiveness, the turnout.’ ”
There was criticism from overseas too. When the V&A reopened its dress collection to the public in 1983, its director, Roy Strong, wrote in The Times: “The thing that unites the textile department is a deep loathing of what is being done at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. . . . We are all totally opposed to Diana Vreeland’s degradation of fashion. Instead of exulting in technique, she debases it.” This was a trifle unfair since Diana’s veneration of Vionnet’s bias cut in The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties inspired New York’s designers to experiment. Nevertheless she certainly thought that costume exhibitions predicated on dressmaking technique were excruciatingly dull. However, there were further objections: “The Metropolitan’s Costume Institute has turned its exhibitions into social events and crowd pullers under the guidance of the autocratic and eccentric Mrs. Vreeland. . . . Her style is to create the mood of a period with dash and verve, even if it means cutting two inches off an eighteenth century petticoat or adding unauthentic gloves. The international museum world criticizes her for lack of scholarship.”
In 1986 this line of criticism reached a fresh pitch in a book by Debora Silverman called Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America. In her book S
ilverman made the arresting assertion that Diana’s exhibitions from The Manchu Dragon onward consciously and deliberately propagated the values of the Reagan era. In Silverman’s view, Diana’s shows reflected Reaganite love of conspicuous consumption, rejection of so-called dependency culture, and a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude. The exhibitions particularly exalted the sort of avidity displayed by Mrs. Reagan, whom Diana knew, and who was well known for her love of luxury and couture clothes. In New York, argued Silverman, politics, commerce, and culture had converged on the Metropolitan Museum so that it was dominated by a clique of designer-tycoons, retail millionaires, and grandees. The museum had allowed itself to be colonized by their values for its own ends and had become grossly commercial. Silverman objected to the manner in which Bloomingdale’s was allowed to cash in on The Manchu Dragon by producing replicas of Chinese art; she lashed out at both La Belle Époque and The Eighteenth-Century Woman for reducing France to a parade of luxury goods without looking at the wider social context; and she excoriated a view of history that reduced it to a collection of sponsored merchandise in the museum shop. Silverman regarded the sale of D.V. in the museum as a particular travesty: not content with commodifying art by selling tacky replicas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was now apparently commodifying its curators too.
Debora Silverman greatly overstated Diana’s influence. As the gossip columnist Liz Smith put it in the New York Daily News, “her vision of Diana Vreeland as a kind of evil capitalist deus ex machina presiding over some imaginary link between New York society and the White House occupants [was] absurd.” Jean Druesedow, associate curator at the Costume Institute from 1984, commented that Silverman underestimated the degree of spontaneity and improvisation. Had she consulted anyone at the Costume Institute, she would have discovered that The Manchu Dragon was semi-imported and put together at very short notice when another exhibition collapsed, one reason why its presentation and its relationship with Bloomingdale’s was not as rigorous as it might have been. Silverman complained—with justification—about Diana’s ahistorical approach, but was somewhat ahistorical herself. There may have been a parallel between Diana’s views about the value of society, snobbism, and luxury and those of Nancy Reagan, but Diana’s concept of their worth went back to the 1930s and did not emerge as if by magic in 1981. It was also the case that while Diana knew the Reagans, and had a close mutual friend in Jerry Zipkin, she was much closer to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis than to Nancy Reagan. Silverman exonerated Onassis of all faults, even though she castigated Allure—on which Onassis had worked closely—because it “nourished fantasies not only of opulent nobilities of the past but of cruelty and decadence in the present.”
Moreover, Silverman made no attempt to look at Diana’s exhibitions in the context of the history of the Costume Institute. She thought it was suspicious that the shows influenced designers, failing to understand that this had always been part of its mandate. Had Silverman spoken to Thomas Hoving, she might have understood that he had hired Diana to deliver crowd-pleasing blockbusters, and she might have realized that many of the “vices” for which she was castigating Diana were more appropriately attributable to him. In spite of its weaknesses, however, Silverman’s book did light on some of the problems with Diana’s approach to exhibiting costume. Her exhibitions were best when their themes allowed her to convey a sense of the Girl—and even the Boy—behind the clothes, and the dreams behind the designs. She was much less secure when dealing with other important issues that also affected the wearing of clothes, such as caste, military rank, religious symbolism, and the display of power, a weakness that showed in The Manchu Dragon.
Silverman’s book also highlighted concern about the evident convergence of art, fashion, and powerful financial interests at the Met. She was not alone: Diana’s 1983 exhibition, Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design raised other eyebrows. This was the first time a living designer had been honored by the museum, and many people felt that this was nothing more than an elaborate public relations stunt that gave Saint Laurent an unfair competitive advantage, a feeling underscored by Diana’s rejection of chronology and anything close to a conventional retrospective. What she wanted to show in the exhibition was the inspired work of “the leader in all fashion today,” who had followed Chanel in understanding the new century and its changing way of life, and showed it how to dress. “This is an important point,” she wrote. “Both Chanel and Saint Laurent are equalizers. You and I could wear the same clothes; what we have on, anyone could wear.” But unease persisted, and a year later it deepened with the prominence given to Ralph Lauren’s sponsorship of the exhibition Man and Horse.
In many ways Diana’s exhibitions at the Costume Institute were ahead of their time. Exhibitions of living designers are no longer unusual; and exhibition-inspired merchandise in museum shops is now so routine as to provoke indignation if it is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, criticism of Diana’s later exhibitions had little effect on the public response. Both The Eighteenth-Century Woman (1981–82) and La Belle Époque (1982–83) brought in well over 500,000 people, and no fewer than 631,422 visitors went through the galleries to look at the work of Yves Saint Laurent (1983–84). Diana was always reluctant to accede to the idea that fashion was art: “I’ve never understood that—about art forms,” she once said. “People say a little Schiaparelli design is an art form. Why can’t it just be a very good dress?” She never pretended to be an academic curator. Yet she made a strong case for fashion as culturally significant while creating a whole new audience for costume. Her exhibitions at the Met induced many people to visit the museum for the first time, just as Hoving had intended. And her success persuaded museums much farther afield, including the V&A and the Louvre, to open up their own collections too.
By the time Selling Culture appeared in 1986, Diana was eighty-three and in no position to defend herself against its wilder accusations. She had long had problems with her eyesight—a photograph she took of Marina Schiano reveals how little she could see even in 1976. In conversation with George Plimpton in 1983, she complained that there were days when she had trouble making out anything at all. She was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which by its nature slowly became worse. It eventually left her with so little peripheral vision that she effectively became blind, though her abilty to see continued to fluctuate unpredictably until the end of her life. She went to great lengths to disguise this condition. When she mentioned her deteriorating eyesight to Christopher Hemphill during their recording sessions, she even presented it as something positive: she no longer had to cope with the gaze of strangers or, indeed, with seeing too much. “The curious thing is that now I can approach anyone myself. This started about ten years ago. As soon as I started going blind, I lost all my shyness. I was never shy in business, but I always had a terror of meeting people. Now, instead of suffering this terrible thing of seeing everyone and everything much too clearly . . . it’s very easy for me to speak to anyone.”
By 1985 emphysema had set in. Her grandson Alexander came to live in New York after his marriage to Sandra Isham in the fall of 1985. He took up a position as head of communications for Ralph Lauren, and they became very close. She continued to entertain. Andy Warhol had dinner with her in July 1985 and wrote in his diary that she had started to have people looking after her at night, including a young woman who sat with her while she slept. In spite of being ill, he observed, she drank four vodkas and smoked about fifteen cigarettes. In 1985 André Leon Talley began coming to the apartment to read to her. In the years that followed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was another who often called twice a week to read. The nurses who stayed overnight with Diana kept records that suggest she was not the easiest of patients. She was told firmly by her secretary at 550, Dolores Celi, that she was not to mix Ritalin with vodka, after an “episode” in May 1985. Diana paid not the slightest bit of attention. “On my arrival Mrs. V was sitting up drinking vodka,” wrote one nurse in the record book. Guests came for din
ner and stayed late; Diana entertained them as she had always done, but there were long and difficult nights after they left. She kept up a cheerful front; but friends thought she was lonely at times, and behind the facade the nurses recorded that from time to time she was “very depressed” and “very upset about everything.”
From 1985 Diana worked more from home and did everything more slowly. As time passed, she went in to the museum less and arrived later, though she telephoned her aide-de-camp Stephen Jamail and her research assistant Katell le Bourhis several times a day. She relied on them heavily, along with Jean Druesedow of the curatorial staff, for The Costumes of Royal India, which ran from December 1985 to August 1986. She continued to act as the public front of the exhibitions for the press, made contacts and opened doors, but Jamail, Le Bourhis, and Druesedow coordinated much of the installation while Diana animated and directed in the background. In a conversation with Le Bourhis and Jamail on February 13, 1985, the ideas she floated for the The Costumes of Royal India included using Andy Warhol’s elephant; talking to the British designer Zandra Rhodes, who had just come back from India; designing one of the backdrops as a page from an Indian miniature; and installing a water garden at the entrance: “Water, flowers, moonlight, to reflect moonlight would be wonderful . . . and good for the costumes.”
The exhibition was part of a yearlong Festival of India and curated in association with Prince Martand “Mapu” Singh of Kapurthala, whose connections had unlocked many princely cupboards in India to reveal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century garments that had never been seen beyond palace walls. Designers found it inspirational. In New York, Liz Claiborne featured scarab-print tunics, jodhpurs, and Nehru jackets the following season, and it had such an effect on Diana’s old friend Hubert de Givenchy that he dedicated his January 1986 collection to her. The Party of the Year that opened the exhibition in 1985 was outstandingly glamorous, even by its own standards: guests included Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and an assortment of maharajas and maharanis alongside Cher, Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, and many more.
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