‘Beware of the legend!” Diana Vreeland once cautioned the photographer Horst. As the 20th century’s most formidable arbiter elegantiarum, Vreeland knew what it meant to be venerated. For half a century, driven by fear of obscurity, financial need, and a wanton passion for beauty, Vreeland had seen to her own social transformation from a society career girl into a feared and adored icon. Although she died in 1989, she can claim more acolytes today than ever before, who reverently pore over old magazines, study old photographs and quote from her books Allure (1980) and D.V. (1984), the Vreeland Holy Writs. Next month, the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, her final stage, will be displaying a selection of relics—clothing, pictures, objects—pertaining to the Cult of Diana. Says grandson Alexander Vreeland, U.S. director of marketing for Giorgio Armani, “My grandmother is no longer a person. She’s an adjective” – as in This paper-white narcissus is very Diana Vreeland.
One reason Vreeland has passed so easily into abstraction is that she always trafficked in the elusive and insubstantial. If she ever once issued a precise directive to a subordinate, no one can recall it. “What should I do with the Italian collections this season?” photographer David Bailey once telexed her from Rome. “Plenty of Wops” was her reply. “More like concrete!” she goaded the Costume Institute’s Harold Koda as he struggled around the clock to second-guess her vision of a coiffure for a mannequin in the museum’s “Eighteenth-Century Woman” show. (“Now she’s ready for the guillotine!” she murmured when he had finally satisfied her.) And extracting a single autobiographical fact from her was like shooting game in a hall of mirrors. No one even agrees on the pronunciation of her first name; from people very close to her one hears not only Dee-ah-nah and Dye-ann-uh but also Dee-ahn. In Vreeland’s capricious mind, only the most gossamer and elastic filaments separated truth from illusion.
About four years before her death, Vreeland withdrew from society—a removal that, just as in her friend Garbo’s case, accelerated the mythmaking process. Her vanity made her turn most of “the chaps”—her male confidents—into “telephone friends.” Those few who were admitted to her apartment—family members and such special friends as the Musée des Arts de la Mode et de Textile’s Katell le Bourhis and *Vogue’*s André Leon Talley, whose booming voice and exotic getups enchanted her—tell stories about her final days that conflict and converge like the four Gospels. Some say that after a while Vreeland relegated nonfamily visitors to a hallway outside her bedroom, or behind a screen, where they sat and read to their invisible hostess. “That legend is ridiculous. Jealous people got crazy and made ugly stories,” fumes Talley, who says he never saw her trademark raven-black hair go completely white, nor did she ever receive him without full Kabuki makeup. But moments before she expired at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, the face—so often compared to a parrot’s or a cigar-store Indian’s—was totally bare and the hair dead white. “They were wheeling her out on a stretcher,” says a family friend. “I couldn’t look at her—it just wasn’t Mrs. Vreeland anymore. What I did see were beautiful, tiny white feet—immaculately pedicured, with scarlet toenails.”
Though Diana Dalziel was always proud to have been born with what illustrator Joe Eula calls “little Chinese-princess feet,” and in Paris (1903 is the most likely date), there wasn’t much else she felt innately blessed about. “I was the most hideous thing in the world,” she said in a 1977 interview. “If I thought of myself, I wanted to kill myself.” Vreeland’s niece Emi-Lu Astor says that in fact Diana resembled her “extremely handsome, tall” British father, Frederick Young Dalziel. “The nose looked wonderful on him,” Astor says. Dalziel (a Scottish name pronounced Dee-el) was a stockbroker who never managed to make much money but who somehow always lived rather well—a skill he passed on to his daughter along with his prominent nose. According to Frederick “Frecky” Vreeland, Diana’s younger son, the Dalziels were “a subclan, with a tartan. Mom had a pair of trousers made of it.”
Diana’s mother, Emily Key Hoffman, counted among her forebears two figures of early American lore, Francis Scott Key and Martha Washington. Warhol-estate executor Fred Hughes, one of Diana’s intimates in the 70s and 80s, once pulled a scrapbook out of a banquette drawer and saw a “clipping of Diana, at age 10 or 11, dressed as Martha Washington. She was the same basic person at 10 as at 70. In that 18th-century wig, she looked just as she did at the end of her life with silver hair.” The Hoffmans, according to Hughes, arrived in Colonial Maryland from Germany to fight in the Revolution.
Diana would spend a lifetime compensating for the fact that Emily Hoffman Daziel was, as Emi-Lu Astor put it, “a great beauty.” Compounding the problem, Alexandra, Diana’s younger sister, looked just like their fetching mother. “Mummy was a very, pretty conventional child, with a petite nose,” says Astor. “Aunt Diana was considered plain, ugly. It gave Aunt Diana a terrific complex.” Ironically, Diana took after her mother temperamentally. “She was a mad eccentric,” Frecky says. Mrs. Dalziel may not have entertained Vernon and Irene Castle, Diaghilev, Ida Rubinstein, and Nijinsky in her Paris drawing room (despite Vreeland’s claims in D.V.), but she was, like her daughter, crazy about dancing. “She loved to dance for charities,” Astor says. “She was one of the first ladies to show her ankles on stage.
Sometime before World War I, the Dalziel family moved to New York, where the sister enrolled at the Brearley School. Alexandra stayed until her graduation, but Diana completed only three years. Too impatient for the classroom, she studied dance instead, with Michel Fokine, the Russian ballet master, who, she claimed, “taught me total discipline.”
Alexandra often summered in Wyoming, camping and riding with her mother, Astor says. (Alexandra went on to excel as a sportswoman at Bryn Mawr, later marrying a Scot, Sir Alexander Kinloch, and the painter Cuthbert Orde.) Diana, however, preferred to pass the season with her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Hoffman, at her Katonah, New York, house, the Villa Diana. Vreeland remembered her grandmother as “an impossible, extraordinary woman…. Outside her bedroom she had a big balcony overlooking the garden, and she had all these Italians working for her. Then one day she said, ‘Where is Elsa?’ Elsa was a maid…. ‘She’s gone to Church, Madam.’ ‘CHURCH? I COME BEFORE GOD!’…. Servants never stayed with my grandmother.”
As a debutante, Diana threw herself into society with a vengeance. She discovered that outré makeup and smart clothes diverted attention from her imperfect features. “At 16 she started with the over-the-top make up,” Hughes says. “She would giggle with me about how she painted herself white and then got the white paint all over Stanley Mortimer’s dinner jacket when they went out dancing.” The elaborate maquillage was eventually reduced to a fundamental scheme: matching scarlet lips and nails, shiny lids, and scarlet slashes on her cheeks, forehead, and ears. She loved to ask her companions rhetorically, “Is it Kabuki enough?” (Bill Blass recalls that on a flight to Boston a stewardess bent over the fashion diva, saying, “Here, honey, let me rub in your rouge for you.” Unperturbed, Vreeland turned to Blass and remarked, “Isn’t that sweet? So American.”)
Somehow, through an intoxicating combination of prodigious chic and ferocious willfulness, this human hyperbole bewitched the most handsome, elegant man around, Thomas Reed Vreeland, a banking trainee in Albany. “Do you know the Spanish proverb “A beautiful woman would like to have an ugly woman’s luck’?” proposes columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle. Vreeland herself wrote in D.V., “I met him on the Fourth of July at a weekend party in Saratoga…. I believe in love at first sight because that’s what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry.” Although the wedding took place eight months later, on March 1, 1924, at the St. Thomas Episcopalian church on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, society shunned the ceremony, because Diana’s mother had recently been embroiled in a widely publicized adultery scandal.
Reed’s parents had held higher ambitions for their son. Frecky Vreeland says, “My father’s father was the 13th son of a poor Dutch Reformed minister. At the age of 13 he took a job shoveling coal into locomotive boilers. Then he became a ticket taker on the railroad. One day Mr. Vanderbilt was making a tour of his line with an inspector. Every time Vanderbilt asked a question, the inspector replied, ‘Let me get Vreeland to answer.’ Vanderbilt was so impressed that he made the young ticket taker president of the Harlem line.” The industrious railwayman went on to become a director of Royal Typewriter, where he worked well into his 80s.
The ex-coal shoveler’s son embodied the period’s very image of the romantic idle-rich gentleman. Frecky says, “He went to Tale, where he was the Rudy Vallee of his collegiate set. He was head of the Whiffenpoofs. Mom was swept off her feet.” Reed continued to take pleasure in singing around the piano at parties, “especially after Diana left,” the jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane says. “Then he got looser and sang naughty songs.”
In a sense, Diana had married her father. Both Reed and Dalziel practiced the kind of fastidious grooming that excited Diana’s senses. Both were also kindly, good-looking, tall, and patrician—instinctive gallants but lackluster businessmen. Vreeland worshiped the two men equally, and probably out of proportion with their merits. Even Diana’s detractors find her uxorial devotion to Reed touching. “He was flagrantly unfaithful to her,” says a former Harper’s Bazaar colleague. “He fell in love with someone in Canada while he was working for the d’Erlanger bank during the war. He wanted a divorce, and Diana said she didn’t believe in it. He used to send long-stemmed white roses to the women he was seeing—usually someone she knew.”
Reed remained, nevertheless, true in his fashion. An acquaintance says of one affair he knew about, “Reed went for the nearest thing he could get to Diana: Cordelia Biddle Robertson. She had a jet-black Veronica Lake hairdo and was as mannered and outrageous as Diana. She never realized how campy she was.” Whether from cowardice or strength, Reed stuck around—Diana’s perfect foil, the masculine half of a couple famous for its urbanity and chic. Though he worked in banking and also for other businesses, including the perfumers Rigaud, his real vocation was, in Fred Hughes’s words, being “the chatelain of the house.
He planned menus, organized dinner parties, and ran the household.
The Vreelands established their first home in Albany, where Reed continued his banking apprenticeship and their elder son, Thomas (“Timmy”), was born. Despite her bizarre makeup and scarlet front door, Diana wrote that in Albany she was still “very, very domestic…a Japanese wife.” Just before the 1929 crash, Reed took a position with the Guaranty Trust, and the family moved to London.
“The London dining room was painted a bright yellow,” Frecky says. “One of my earliest memories was of mom taking rumba lessons in the living room.” The Vreelands lived more luxuriously than they could ever afford again. They kept a Bugatti and driver, both of which accompanied them on their jaunts to the Continent. Their sybaritic existence was precariously propped up by the low pre-war cost of living, a knack for stretching credit, and a little lingerie business run by the enterprising Diana. It was there, if one believes D.V., that Wallis Simpson ordered the nightgowns that she wore on her first weekend assignation with the Prince of Wales. “Mom’s store brought down the British empire,” Frecky jokes.
Around 1933, Reed’s health weakened, and the Vreelands spent a year in Germany and Switzerland. Diana sent her younger son a postcard of Hitler, Frecky says. On the back she had scrawled, “Watch this man.” The family had an opportunity to do just that when, visiting a Black Forest clinic, they found themselves “attending Hitler’s birthday party.” Though Diana was no crypto-Fascist, her intrinsic apoliticalism—“Politics,” she said, “are beyond my ken”—led to some regrettable lapses in judgment. She could never, for instance, understand why the French ostracized Coco Chanel, a collaborator who had been protected by a Nazi lover during the war. “I’ve never taken any side in anything that went on in Paris during the war…because I was not there,” Vreeland told the writer Lally Weymouth. World events concerned her only as they affected style. Informed by someone in the Vogue art department that J.F.K. had been shot, she retorted, “Well, we can’t use Lady Bird in the magazine.” Kenneth Jay Lane says, “I remember her son Tim once told me, “‘Mom had no sense of right or wrong—to her things were either interesting or uninteresting.’”
Around 1937, the Vreelands moved back to New York. Diana had always felt more comfortable abroad—not only was she closer to her beloved couture salons (Chanel’s was her favorite) and her father’s roots but also she knew her jolie laide persona was a phenomenon better understood on the Continent. “In Europe the great style setters were never beauties,” fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert points out, citing the Vicomtesse de Noailles as an example. “Diana knew that she fit into that tradition.”
One American who instantly got the point of Vreeland’s stretched-to-the-limit chic was Carmel Snow, the brilliant, tippling editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, who during her 1934-to-1957 reign, guided the magazine’s transformation from tasteful ladies’ book into the most avant-garde popular publication of its day. A former Vogue fashion editor, she was responsible for hiring the great art director Alexey Brodovitch and for promoting or launching the careers of such artistic and literary luminaries as Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Marcel Vertès, and Truman Capote. Her instincts about fashion were so infallible, the story goes, that she would doze off at the collections only to awaken when the right dress passed by.
Not long after the Vreelands’ return to New York, Snow spotted Diana dancing at the St. Regis Roof. “The next morning she called me up,” Vreeland wrote. “She’d admired what I had on—it was a white lace Chanel dress with a bolero, and I had roses in my hair—and she asked me if I’d like a job.” Snow wrote in her memoirs, “I had been looking for a replacement for Daisy Fellowes [from] the new world of the International Set.” Vreeland accepted because she sorely needed the income. As Stephen Jamail, who started a sheet-and-fabric-licensing business with her in the 80s says, “Economic necessity was the driving force of her life. She never made any bones about it. She worked for a living practically until the day she died.”
Temperamentally, the two sacred monsters checked and balanced each other. “Mrs. Vreeland was like the most marvelous comet,” Condé Nast editorial advisor Leo Lerman says, “and Mrs. Snow glowed like a planet.” One of Vreeland’s most notorious contributions to Bazaar was her “Why Don’t You…” column, an escapist tip sheet extravagantly out of whack with Depression-era reality. Although both S.J. Perelman and the comedienne Spivy parodied it, they barely needed to tamper with such Vreelandisms as “Why Don’t You… have a furry elk-hide trunk for the back of your car?” and “Why Don’t You… twist [you child’s] pigtails round her ears like macaroons?”
Snow quickly advanced her eccentric contributor to the position of fashion editor. More than just an “eye,” a fashion editor in those days had to be a resourceful combination of movie director, prop-man, seamstress, and beautician. “She just had these magic hands,” says Lillian Groueff, who modeled for Vreeland before the war. “Once, I came back from vacation badly sunburned, with a bad permanent—and I had to be photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Diana did something with those hands, and suddenly the hair was all pulled together. She’d pull the shoulder pads out of suits, change the hemlines. She could always feel the change before the designers. I think they got ideas from her.” And when the war blocked off fashion news from Paris, American designers, like heliotropes bowing to a nearer sun, fed on her imagination instead.
“She was a tremendous inspiration to American sportswear,” says a Bazaar colleague. “When shoes were rationed, she put every foot in America in ballet slippers. She had Ceil Chapman whip up romantic thing overnight—ballet-length dresses with bows. The manufacturers were for once forced to allow designers leeway, to give them independence from Paris. It was the best America ever did. When Paris fashion opened after the war, that was the end of it.”
Expanding her sphere of influence socially as well as professionally, Vreeland cultivated the White Russian, Jewish, and European society figures and artists who turned New York into the world’s most vital and cosmopolitan capital during and after the war. The Vreelands’ apartment at 400 Park Avenue and their country house in Brewster, both decorated with the help of the fashionable George Stacey, became Euro-American havens for a confraternity of worldly souls. Frecky recalls the wartime summers he passed in Brewster while on holiday from Groton. “Jean-Pierre Aumont visited, and Schiaparelli was almost in residence perpetually. She and Mom would needlepoint together. Harry Hopkins had married a friend of my mother’s, so in the middle of the war I found myself talking to him about F.D.R. Johnny Schlumberger, the jeweler, was always there, and of course, there were the Russians—Princess Nathalie Paley and Serge Obolensky.”
The Vreelands also rented rooms for a couple of weeks every summer in Southampton, where they mingled with a different group. “mom had her social side and her artistic side. She didn’t mix the two.” Lillian Groueff remembers the Vreelands arriving in Southampton “with lots of luggage—all Vuitton—and a leopard throw.” Chessy Rayner, who worked for Vreeland briefly at Vogue, recounts, “She would show up at the beach in a little formfitting wool maillot, with that peculiar walk of hers—toes first, head and neck on a backward slant like a camel. Everyone else was still wearing those loose, skirted bathing suit from Peck & Peck.”
Vreeland’s personal style, as fixed and universally observed as a lodestar, was already becoming part of fashion lore. “Her look never really changed that much over the decades,” says the Bazaar colleague. “Only the headgear. The 30s were the turban period. Then came the snood period, and then the hatless phase,” starting in the early 60s, when the celebrated coiffeur Alexandre snipped her hair into what Talley calls “the black Kabuki flip.” One could also mark her “periods” by footwear. Her custom made T-straps “dated from the Bazaar era,” Talley says. “At Vogue she switched to the Vivier pilgrim pumps.” These accessories, along with the obsidian hair (“lacquered back until the corners of her eyes met,” Joe Eula says), red mouth, and jabbing, scarlet-tipped arrow of an index finger, became instantly recognizable synecdoches for the fashion doyenne. And when artists such as René Bouché portrayed her, they could get away with rendering only the lips, hairdo, and hands.
Vreeland’s decorating habits were as scrutinized and imitated as her gait, gestures, and dress. Those who stayed at the Brewster house, a converted coach house inherited from Reed’s father, still speak of it with awe. Dan de Menocal, Frecky’s Groton roommate, remembers “a huge balcony overlooking the living room that Mussolini could have given a speech from. Over it hung a life-size portrait of Frecky’s mother.” This “enormous, beamed, barnlike” Brewster living room was “painted shocking pink,” Frecky says. “And every door in the house was painted a different color. She convinced the painter he was Picasso.”
Vreeland expertly manipulated everyone, whether workmen or her “skivvies”—her office assistants—into giving her more than they knew they had. Her technique was to identify the best human raw material, endow her selection with a very special sense of being “chosen,” and then, as one of her former editors puts it, “mine the ore.” All of her successful protégés—from the sportswear designer Carolyn Schnurer during the Bazaar days to Polly Mellen and Grace Mirabella at Vogue, to André Leon Talley during the Costume Institute period—speak of this process as if they had received divine grace. Talley says, “Once she decided she saw something in me, I could do no wrong.” Mirabella agrees: “She hooked you. We all had the feeling that we’d die for her. From the moment she wanted you, you were as loyal as a Labrador.”
Forced by Snow after the war to concentrate her energies locally—she was not sent to the Paris collections—Vreeland and her team irrepressibly imposed their Francophile standards on Seventh Avenue. Some found her a stimulant, others a hindrance. “We turned a lot of sows’ ears into silk purses,” says a former Bazaar editor. Carolyn Schnurer raves, “As an editor she was always so color-right, fashion-right, silhouette-right. She told me to cut bathing-suit legs short in the front and rounded at the side to elongate the gorgeous American leg. She was the first one to insist I make a bikini. They had not really been seen outside of France and Italy. She kept telling me, ‘Less of it! Less of it!’”
Eleanor Lambert, however, whose six-decade-long career has been devoted to promoting American fashion, feels that an obstinate, condescending Eurocentricism prevented Vreeland from championing American designers to the extent they deserved. “She never, never accepted that American fashion meant anything—that world trends could be started here in sportswear and ready-to-wear and then move upwards to couture. France was the dream-world. She had in mind a school of fashion based in Paris, like Cubism or Impressionism.” Vreeland once asked fashion editor Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, “What is the name of that Seventh Avenue designer who hates me so?” “Legion,” he replied. Bill Blass says, “Nicky de Gunzburg was the editor at Bazaar and Vogue who believed in American fashion. Diana and I became far better friends after she left magazines. She hated Seventh Avenue—she used the Americans to make up fantasy clothes.
The dynamic equilibrium at Bazaar was upset when Carmel Snow retired in 1957. The elevation of her niece Nancy White as her successor was in effect a nepotistic checkmate against Vreeland. “Carmel told the Hearsts when she retired, ‘Don’t allow her to be editor in chief,’” a veteran of Bazaar says. Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast, confirms the story: “Carmel Snow—whom, incidentally, Condé Nast had always intended to make editor in chief of Vogue—understood that you needed an older, experienced editor to control Diana.” But by 1960 there was no one more experienced than Vreeland.
Feeling slighted and underpaid, Vreeland locked her sights on Vogue. “Diana seduced Mitzi Newhouse [the wife of Condé Nast owner S.I. Newhouse],” says an ex-editor. “We were all at a Ben Zuckerman showing, the Bazaar editors on one side of the room, the Vogue editors on the others. Afterwards, she rushed over to Mitzi, practically threw herself at her, and showered her with compliments.” Condé Nast hired Vreeland in 1962, first as an associate editor and then to fill the prim pumps of Jessica Daves as editor in chief when the Georgia minister’s daughter retired less than a year later. “She was my most difficult editor. But there was never any fashion at Vogue until Diana Vreeland arrived,” says Kay Hays, who worked as shoe editor under Edna Woolman Chase, Daves, Vreeland, Mirabella, and Anna Wintour. Polly Mellen, who observed the transition from Daves to the Vreeland regime, says, “When the change came, it was like a knife cutting through butter.” Alexander Liberman explains: “Vogue needed help in fashion. Jessica had been a manager. Creative fashion was not her strength. She and Diana clashed, so Daves resigned. [Iva] Patcévitch and [Perry] Ruston [president and vice president of Condé Nast] had wanted me to be editor, but I told them, ‘I’m a man. I have no intention of becoming that involved with fashion.’ Instead I was made editorial director. The memo sent around announcing Diana’s promotion said, ‘Diana Vreeland will work closely with Alexander Liberman.’ They wanted me controlling her. But Vreeland was uncontrollable.”
Unleashed at last, Vreeland’s fevered imagination was in perfect harmony with the wild hedonism of the era. Rock music, the Pill, the Warhol Factory—all, to use one of her pet phrases, thrilled her to madness. “The secret of her success as an editor was timing,” says photographer David Bailey, part of the British wave—including the Beatles and Twiggy—that crashed upon the pages of Vogue. So indulgent was Vreeland toward counterculture excesses that Joe Eula remembers her coolly ignoring a vial of cocaine that rolled out of his pocket during a meeting in her scarlet-walled, leopard carpeted office—only to advise him as he left to wear pockets that buttoned. No ideas were too outlandish, no expenditures too lavish, no fantasies too bizarre for the intrepid editor and her magazine. “Give them a little something!” she used to exhort her staff, recalls Mirabella.
Irving Penn says, “She’d use a kind of shorthand communication and you’d come to whatever conclusion you could. Once, she said in Paris, ‘Penn, the most important thing here is the buttonhole.’ I laughed. But I understood what she was saying—that tailoring was the important thing in the couture collections, and that’s what we photographed.” The most quixotic edict Vreeland issued to Penn was to “find me the Gypsy queen who bathes in milk and has the most beautiful skin in the world!” Penn took off for Spain, searched everywhere, but “of course I did not her. I did come back with an important essay on Gypsies.” When he went back to Vreeland to explain that the Gypsy queen had eluded him, “she with fake surprise asked me, ‘What are you talking about?’ I had taken hook, line, and sinker. It was a kind of magic she used to get things done.”
David Bailey says, “I once called her a blind old bat and got away with it. She liked people who weren’t scared of her. But it was a nightmare working for her. Once, I spent the whole day with Penelope Tree to do two pictures. Diana told me, ‘They’re wonderful, but we can’t use them.’ I asked her why. ‘Look at the lips,’ she said. ‘There’s no languor in the lips!’ She did have a way of spotting things immediately. She was the first to publish a photograph of Mick Jagger, and the one who sent me Veruschka.”
Convinced, to paraphrase Francis Bacon, that there is no beauty without strangeness, Vreeland brought in quirky-looking girls with curious genealogies—Veruschka, Tree, Twiggy, Anjelica Huston, Marisa Berenson, Edie Sedgwick—who redefined the era’s standard of attractiveness. If her tastes in models, editorial spreads, and fashion ran to extremes, it never stopped less courageous rivals from falling into lockstep behind her. No one dared applaud or even scribble a note at a show before Vreeland, according to Bailey. The sultana of style, who featured the New Look and monokini but never wore them, attributed her ability to mark trends to “never really thinking of clothes for myself.”
Her colleagues and competitors intuitively recognized that at the center of this outrageous whirlwind lay a rigorous, controlling eye. As Leo Lerman says, “Every great fantasist has to be a realist at bottom.” One look at her pen-stroke physique (which Cecil Beaton said conformed to furniture as supplely as cooked asparagus), her strictly ordered desk, her regimented routines (every day a peanut butter sandwich and a shot of scotch for lunch), or her reductive office uniform of dark cashmere separates (“Elegance is refusal,” she intoned) betrayed the sober face behind the party mask.
Only where money was concerned did her discipline falter. Warned by Condé Nast management to reduce spending, Vreeland, Bailey recalls, would “cable me in England to tell me to watch the money—and afterwards speak to me on the phone for two hours to see if I got her cable. Or assign me to go to India to photograph white tigers for a spread that would never run.” But of more significance than runway budgets, where her fate was concerned, were the changing times. Consumed by their own raging heat, the “youthquake” (one of her favorite neologisms) and go-go economy of the 60s were yielding to the recession austerity and earnest feminism of the 70s.
Liberman remembers, “Things had gotten out of hand. I saw enormous amounts of trouble….Diana shocked me at the time by something she said to me: ‘Alex, after all, this is only entertainment.’ Right then I knew something was deeply, deeply wrong. Vogue is supposed to be a responsible, carefully planned magazine.…She brought excitement to Vogue, but it had been a gamble. She should not have been editor in chief.…Without Snow to control them, Vreeland and Avedon—they both loved extremes—were a dangerous combination. I didn’t have the interest or strength to control Diana. So… mea cupla.” Condé Nast instead exercised the other alternative and fired her.
“The decision was Mr. Ruston’s. I gave her the warning,” Liberman continues. “Next thing I know, she making cracks about Yellow Russians. [Vreeland spread the story that she had told Liberman, who is Russian, “I’ve heard of the White Russians, Red Russians, but never a Yellow Russian.”] I admired her very much. She was a fashion genius—if that’s not a contradiction in terms.”
Grace Mirabella—who, during nearly two decades at Vogue, had risen from fashion marketing editor to associate editor in fashion—ascended to her former boss’s post. Torn by ambivalence, Mirabella “adored the title but hated the feeling of letting Vreeland down. My husband kept that connection going, but I wasn’t big enough to call her. I wasn’t big enough to know how to handle it—it was such a weird switch. I felt like I had betrayed her. She handled it so well, which is why I’m even more embarrassed. She was so big in her way of doing it.” Nonetheless, the new appointment had the desired effect on Vogue. “Under Grace, Vogue had an enormous renaissance,” Liberman says. “She addressed the needs, the looks, of the real, modern American woman.”
Whatever Vreeland herself felt about her expulsion from a position she proclaimed the best spot at the best time, she never voiced it. She faced the event with the same impenetrable stoicism with which she had braved the other great blow of her seventh decade, the death of Reed in 1966. In her effort to always be “up up up up!” as Diane Von Furstenberg puts it, Vreeland reflexively filed away any unpleasantness far from public view. “After Dad’s death,” Frecky says, “a friend tried to console Mom by saying, ‘At least you have you work.’ And she answered, ‘Before, I had Reed and my work.’” After the Vogue dismissal she had neither.
To put some distance between her and her travails, Vreeland went abroad for four months. During her absence, Theodore Rousseau, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum, proposed to Thomas Hoving, the museum’s director, that they appoint Vreeland special consultant to the Costume Institute, which was then an obscure division of the Met frequented mostly by fashion designers and scholars. “Coming out of a retailing family, I was high on the idea of the Costume Institute. But I thought, This is ridiculous. It will never work,” Hoving says. “Then Rousseau told me a group of people had raised the money for her salary for two years. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Now I’m interested.’ I didn’t think Vreeland would last more than six months.”
The consortium of magnanimous friends (who may also have paid her maid Yvonne’s salary) was rumored to include Jane Engelhard, Jayne Wrightsman, Babe Paley, and Jacqueline Onassis—women whom Vreeland had advised in the past, on style as well as on personal matters. (“She had extraordinary perspicacity about human nature,” says art critic John Richardson. “She would have made the best Miss Lonely-hearts.”) Surpassing Hoving’s—and everyone else’s—expectations, Vreeland mounted 14 exhibits over 14 years and “became one of my top curators,” Hoving says. Renewed, and elevated to her most splendid perch yet, the bird of paradise had risen from the ashes.
In turn, starting with her 1973 Balenciaga exhibition, Vreeland breathed life into the sleepy Costume Institute. Hoving says, “We had to keep the shows for nine months, there was such heavy traffic—close to a million for ‘Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design.’ We drew a completely different, young, trendy in-crowd who have since stuck around to become patrons. And we gained a lot of gifts. The institute became the hot place for donations. Remember, these were still the days when you could get a tax deduction for wearing a $15,000 ball gown once.” Uncharacteristically, she also, according to Hoving, produced every show “on time and on budget.”
Her detractors, who could not see past the chucky bracelets jangling on her double-length wrists, complained that the exhibits were academically unsound entertainments. But the costume department always retained the much less public Stella Blum as curator. “She was the scholar, Diana the rainmaker,” Hoving says. Some of Vreeland’s eyebrow-raising moves, from a museological point of view, included asking members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America to re-create the Hollywood costumes she couldn’t locate. “I remade Dietrich’s fox-trimmed coat from The Garden of Allah,” Bill Blass says. For “American Women of Style,” Harold Koda reports, “although we had Millicent Roger’s authentic Mainbocher blouses, Mrs. Vreeland wanted replicas made. The real ones looked old. She felt that to be true to the original spirit Millicent’s blouses had to be crisp and fresh.” As for the “cement” wig he made for “The Eighteenth-Century Woman,” Koda ultimately took his own cues from a period caricature, and would up with something so heavy and high it had to be balanced with buckshot and anchored to the ceiling. “She wanted the mannered exaggeration of fashion—the thrill of the new. The original, awed, hysterical response which is always a component of fashion. It was absolutely not the truth she was after.”
As if her whole life had been one long prologue building up to this final climax, everything that Vreeland had ever worshipped converged in her position as special consultant—history, fashion, ritual, pageantry, society, travel. For 1976’s “The Glory of Russian Costume” she visited Russia (which she sometimes grandly pronounced like “rush hour,” with a trilled r), accompanied by Hoving and Fred Hughes. Exhilarated by night orgies of caviar, vodka, and dancing to the balalaika, the Scarlet Empress conquered the “Ivans,” as she called them. Hoving says that on their first morning in Moscow she was scheduled to meet the minister of culture at 11 a.m. Unexpectedly, she sailed into the conference room on the dot of the hour, “all lacquered and Vaselined, a vision of black, white, and red. She couldn’t see a thing—she didn’t want to spoil the effect of her entrance by wearing glasses. ‘What do you think of the Soviet Union?’ the interpreter politely inquired. ‘I’ve been up since dawn walking. And I find your country marvelous, huge, and beautiful, and the skin of your women magnificent.’ From then on it was duck soup,” Hoving says.
“She became the queen of New York society,” says one of her Warhol-set friends. “there was such competition to go to her house for dinner.” Her jungle-red apartment at 550 Park accommodated about eight for dinner, but the number of guests was the only small about a Vreeland evening. Food, flowers, incense, and candles—adding to the permanent profusion of pictures, snuff boxes, and pillows (hypodermically injected with scent)—proliferated in the res rooms, while vodka and conversation flowed.
In the 70s, Vreeland drew into her orbit a number of new, young friend, culled mostly from the Halton and Warhol crowds. They found in a compelling, camp combination of sibyl and dinosaur. While frenetically keeping abreast of every pop culture novelty, from Deep Throat to Studio 54, she clung to all her arcane coquette habits left over from the 20s—sleeping on a black satin pillow to preserve her hair dye, popping “pony pills” (megadose vitamins), speaking in bootlegger slang, and having Yvonne (who had been Gloria Swanson’s maid) dress her, clean the inside of her handbags, and iron her five dollar bills. Insatiably curious, she relished the apocalyptic atmosphere of Student 54 but remained as much voyeur as reveler. “I took her to see Caligula with Debbie Harry,” says one Warhol associate. “We sat in the first row. Diana takes out her opera glasses and starts complaining, ‘This is the expurgated edition! What happened between Malcolm McDowell and the horse? This is CALIGULA! I know a jump cut when I see one!’”
Youthful companionship and up-to-the-minute diversions made potent but ultimately ineffective elixirs. Vreeland was becoming increasingly frail, and by 1983 her eyesight had weakened drastically. “My eyes have grown tired from looking at too many beautiful things,” she told a friend. She never made it to the Costume Institute’s December 1985 gala opening of “Costumes of Royal India.” The Saint Laurent dress she had hoped to wear, Talley says, she left laid out in Reed’s bedroom, “just like Miss Havisham. And she announced, ‘I’m going to relax now.’”
Vreeland took to her bed, talked on the phone, let her hair go white, developed a morbid curiousity about Ivana Trump, had books read to her—and recovered her family. Having found it, her younger son states, “hard to have that dynamic, powerful a dame as a mother,” Frecky had spent most of his adult life in Europe as a diplomat, while Timmy had established himself a continent away as an architect in California. “But my brother and I saw her a lot at the end. She ended her life as she started it—it the bosom of her family.” She discovered in her great-grandchildren Reed and Victoria her biggest source of pleasure. “My kids and I visited practically every day,” her grandson Alexander says. “Technically, she had lost her vision, but, strangely, she seemed to see everything. When I went during the weekend, she’d demand ‘Why don’t you shave on Saturdays?’ And I’d tell her, ‘You’re supposed to be blind!’”
Those who received the full force of her influence speak of Diana Vreeland as a kind of seeress, a philosopher whose subject happened to be style. She had an almost religious fixation on certain things, Penn said. “The most insignificant things—the back of some Hollywood actor’s head, or Fred Astaire’s shoes—became holy objects for her.” Harold Koda reflects, “She was an idealist—chasing after fantasies, going beyond material boundaries, visited by visions of white churches and white horses and poppies on the verge of dying. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that her grand son Nicky [Alexander’s brother] became a Tibetan-Buddhist monk.” She sought her revelations in surfaces, but that did not make her pursuit of beauty and her need to be ravished by it any less deeply felt—though it did sometimes make her appear ridiculous. At an embassy party she sidled up to Jonathan Miller, the British director, and inquired, “Tell me, Dr. Miller, what is your Holy Grail?” To a dinner companion who had been complaining that her issues of Vogue had grown to outré for his wife, Vreeland finally said, exasperated, “Don’t you know? Exaggeration is my only reality.”
