Paris Opening
There is no doubt that Diana Vreeland disdained an inconvenient truth in a manner that could be startling. She once ejected a friend from her apartment, the jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane, for suggesting that her beloved England had been invaded by the Normans; and she enjoyed polishing up birth moments when she thought they needed it, a compliment extended even to the most exotic of her acquaintances. In the 1960s the model and actress Vera von Lehndorff, known as Veruschka, told a story at a New York party about noticing the time as she was born. “I said, ‘The first image I saw of this world was an enormous round watch with a black frame, black numbers, and black pointers. It was 6 o’clock and 10. I was born at the hospital in Königsberg, East Prussia, now called Kaliningrad.’ ” Everyone laughed. But a little while later Diana took Veruschka aside and gave her some advice in a low whisper. “Veruschka darling . . . when asked where you are born, never say East Germany, Prussia, Königsberg, or Kaliningrad, that’s boring, just say ‘I am born on the border, right on the border, between Germany and Poland, in the swamps of the Masurian lakes.’ ”
Diana liked to spread a little mystery about her own arrival in the world too. She was coy about her age, and genuinely perplexed in later life by the discovery of an apparent discrepancy between the dates of her birth on two official documents, her French bulletin de naissance and her actual birth certificate. However, Diana was indisputably born on September 29, 1903. She was born in Paris; and apart from moments when it amused her to outline more extreme birth scenarios, such as appearing to the sound of Berber ululations in the Atlas Mountains, she liked to maintain that her French beginnings set her apart. People born in Paris were different from other people, she once said. The event was registered at the British consulate in Paris because Diana was the daughter of a British father, Frederick Young Dalziel. Dalziel is a Scots name, with a range of spellings that derives from the barony of Dalziel, in Lanarkshire, and pronounced dee-ell. “People used to say to me, why don’t you cut out all that and just put the ‘D’ and the ‘L’?” said Diana. “I’d say—do it yourself. For me, it’s the whole way because I love the spelling. I love Zs.” She delighted in her “medieval” Scottish clan origins throughout her life. As a girl she took the clan motto, “I Dare,” seriously. As an adult she owned a print of the Dalziel coat of arms and sported the Dalziel tartan at the right sort of parties.
Her father, Frederick Young Dalziel, however, was not quite what he appeared to be. He was not very Scots—his line of Dalziels came from England—and his background was much more modest than he found socially convenient. His family lived in Haringey in North London, where he was brought up by a stepmother and a father who worked for the General Post Office, alongside a younger half brother named Edelsten. This was a family in which even middle-class status hung in the balance. Frederick and his half brother were sent to Highgate School, a school educating young gentlemen from North London, but they went there late and all the evidence suggests that money was extremely tight. Though Frederick gained a place at Oxford University and started at Brasenose College in 1888, he left just a year later at the end of 1889, probably because that was as long as his family could afford. A year at Oxford was enough to give him a marked fondness for aristocratic tone. It also allowed him to describe himself as “Oxford educated” forever more, sidestepping the fact that he never actually obtained an Oxford degree.
Diana’s father was tall—over six and a half feet—strikingly handsome, and she loved him. “He was so wonderful looking—so charming. For every daughter, the first love of her life is her father. To this day I just adore him. He was wonderfully affectionate. . . . A great beauty; and really nothing to do with the modern world at all. Totally Edwardian, you know.” In 1890 the obvious destination for an “Oxford educated” young man with good looks, energy, charm, no private income, and a socially undistinguished family was some part of the British Empire where lack of pedigree was not an impediment and there was no prejudice against earning money. Frederick Dalziel was so evasive about the five years that followed his departure from Oxford that it started a family myth that he became a spy. It is more certain that from 1895 he worked as a representative for South African gold-mining interests and lived in Paris. Speculation in the discovery of gold and diamonds was extremely risky and was only for the spectacularly rich. In the 1890s some of the wealthiest people in the world were rich Americans of the Gilded Age who regarded Paris as both their playground and their second home. These were his clients, and eventually his friends too.
By 1901 Frederick Dalziel was mixing with American millionaires in Paris in a manner that suggests he was already migrating from a suburban middle-class to an upper-class persona. Those who remember Frederick Dalziel in old age confirm Diana’s description of her father as the model of an Edwardian English gentleman; but he projected this image quite self-consciously, cultivated smart acquaintances, and masked his background with a grand mien, having himself photographed at this period in hunting pink by French society photographer Numa Blanc. “There’s only one very good life and that’s the life that you know you want and you make it yourself,” said Diana later. It was an attitude she inherited from her father; and in 1901, the solution to the gap between Frederick Dalziel’s background and the life he knew he wanted presented itself in Paris in the form of Diana’s American mother, Miss Emily Key Hoffman.
Diana’s mother arrived in Paris by a very different route. Born in 1877, she was the daughter of George Hoffman, a lawyer from a prominent Southern family. The surname has led to claims that this side of Diana’s family was Jewish, but Hoffman is also a non-Jewish name, and there is no record of Judaism in the family tree. Diana’s Hoffman forebears were gentlemen farmers in Virginia, and at least one of her Southern great-grandmothers was socially distinguished. “We’re top drawer from Baltimore,” went a family expression, and “Key holds the key” was another. The “Key” was George Hoffman’s mother, Emily Key, a member of a well-known family of the American South whose lineage connected Diana to Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The only thing that Diana knew about her Baltimore great-grandmother was that she and her sister went to law over a dining-room table, so exasperating the judge that he Solomonically ordered a carpenter to cut it in two and give each of them a half. Judged by bloodline rather than passion or pigheadedness, however, Diana Vreeland’s colonial antecedents on her mother’s side were impeccable.
In New York society this kind of pedigree mattered, and after the Civil War ended in 1865, it was also essential to have riches. In Diana’s case the family money came from her maternal grandfather, John Washington Ellis, who made his first fortune as partner of a wholesale dry goods firm in Cincinnati before helping to found the First National Bank of Cincinnati and then moving to New York, where he ran a private investment bank. As New York became America’s financial and cultural capital after the Civil War, the city drew in hundreds of families made newly rich by the extraordinarily rapid postwar boom that soon came to be termed the Gilded Age. New York’s finest reacted by becoming much more self-consciously elitist, with resistance led by Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, who could famously fit only “Four Hundred” top people into her ballroom, a notion that then became shorthand for New York’s most exclusive clique. However, Mrs. Astor welcomed those with money of whom she approved, to the extent that after 1865 a large fortune became the sine qua non for joining her circle. On arriving in New York, the well-to-do Ellis family were among the lucky ones, quickly joining the “Four Hundred.” The family rode to hounds and hunted with the right packs. The New York family home was just off Fifth Avenue, and John Washington Ellis helped by building a huge Shingle-style summer “cottage” called Stone Acre on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1882. Newport was well on its way to becoming New-York-Society-by-the-Sea in the 1880s. The Ellises became closely identified with Newport’s growing exclusivity; and they were listed in the first edition of the social bible, The Social Register, in 1886.
Diana’s mother, Emily Key Hoffman, was therefore brought up at the heart of the New York world of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred.” Her father died young in 1885, and thereafter Emily was raised by her widowed mother in a house on West Fiftieth Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, she was sent to the highly academic Brearley School, soon after it was founded. But that was as far as her education went, and in 1896 Emily’s mother launched her into New York society. The 1890s marked an era of great transatlantic marriages, when hundreds of daughters of well-to-do Americans married impoverished European aristocrats, enriching noble families in Europe and ennobling the plutocrats back home. Young women from New York’s gratin who did not marry European nobility were expected to make good matches with scions of American dynasties. Their stories were lapped up by press and public alike, with the result that any attractive young society woman in New York was minutely scrutinized by even respectable newspapers, which ranked a debutante in terms of appearance, family connections, and likely dowry.
The newspaper columnists were enchanted when Miss Emily Hoffman became a debutante. They waxed lyrical about her dark brown eyes, fine features, chestnut hair, charming conversation, and exceptional elegance. Even before her formal debut, she was regarded as “the most beautiful young lady on the floor” at the Newport ball given by Alva Vanderbilt for the Duke of Marlborough when he came courting Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895; and she was frequently referred to as the most beautiful of the belles of Newport once she was out in society. Throughout the second half of the 1890s, Emily appeared with her mother on the guest lists of every important “Four Hundred” event of the late 1890s. She was one of three hundred guests at Mrs. Astor’s annual ball. She had her portrait painted by the very fashionable Adolfo Müller-Ury, who was so overcome by her pulchritude that he was inspired to paint her as the Virgin Mary, leading to dazzled descriptions of her as “the Madonna of the 400.” In 1898 Emily was reported to have been the success of the season in Rome, too. She loved hunting, riding out with the Monmouth County hounds. She was sportif, playing her way to victory in tennis tournaments, and she was often to be found leading high jinks from the front. “A merry party of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s guests took a midnight bath at Bailey’s Beach last night led by Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Warren and Miss Emily Hoffman,” read the News of Newport in 1900.
What really set Emily apart from other socialites of the day, however, was the way she danced, a natural talent that would later have a great impact on Diana and an indirect influence on twentieth-century American fashion. Had she been born two generations later, Emily might well have succeeded in a professional career. As it was, she was celebrated as the “society exponent of Spanish dances,” which she performed with “grace and fire,” a talent that was regarded as all of a piece with her dark Spanish coloring. She had a pronounced theatrical streak. Dubbed the Carmencita of New York society by the press, her star turn as an amateur was a dance called the cachucha. This involved Emily in much clicking of castanets and flashings of ankle in public. The high point of her dancing career was a performance of the cachucha for charity in January 1900 at the Waldorf-Astoria, which earned her a standing ovation, fan letters, and rave reviews in New York’s newspapers. One critic noted that “although it was near midnight when she came on the masculine enthusiasm that she aroused was of the most unmistakable sort.” It was reported afterward that the great vaudeville impresarios Weber and Fields offered her hundreds of dollars to perform her Spanish dances at their music hall on Broadway—an offer that caused her circle much hilarity and that she naturally had to refuse.
There was no pressure on Emily to make a grand European marriage. But with colonial ancestry on one side, Gilded Age riches on the other, and great beauty and vivacity into the bargain, she should have been wed within a year or two to a young man from a distinguished American family; and her name was often linked by gossips to New York society’s more eligible bachelors. Four years after Emily’s debut, however, the smart marriage plan seems to have gone offtrack. By 1899 Emily had drifted toward a group of louche society bohemians who called themselves the Carbonites. Their leader was the handsome James Lawrence Breese, a man who developed a new photographic carbon-printing process at the Carbon Studio downtown at 5 West Sixteenth Street. He was well known for his effect on impressionable young ladies. Another figure in the Carbonite group was the architect Stanford White, whose sensational murder by Harry Thaw a few years later would expose him as a serial womanizer and the owner of a red velvet swing on which semi-dressed young women, including Thaw’s wife, entertained him. Before this came to light, the press loved the Carbonites for being a little wild and for holding what were described as weird midnight suppers. There was a “budget of fun for every second spent in the studio,” said one newspaper and Emily was at the heart of it, dancing the cachucha.
It seems likely that Emily’s predilection for Carbonite company and her refusal to get on and marry the right sort of husband caused considerable tension with her widowed mother; but during the Newport summer season of 1900, a candidate for Emily’s hand appeared who fulfilled every maternal dream. Eugene Higgins was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Higgins had sold his father’s carpet-manufacturing business for an estimated fifty million dollars, leaving him free to pursue life as a sought-after gentleman of leisure. (One New York newspaper gave him precedence in the eligible bachelor ranking over George Vanderbilt and a brother of the khedive of Egypt.) The budding relationship was closely watched, and tongues wagged even harder when Emily, chaperoned by married friends, was one of the party aboard Higgins’s enormous yacht the Varuna when it set sail for the Mediterranean on November 14, 1900.
At the same time there were rumors that the true reason for Emily’s sudden departure from New York was a serious rift with her mother. It was whispered that the upset was about potential husbands but in this instance the gentleman in question was not Emily’s but Mrs. Hoffman’s. In 1900 Mary Hoffman finally ran out of patience with Emily’s obstinate behavior and announced to her stunned family that she was planning to marry again herself. It was said that the news came as a great shock to Emily and her brother, Ellis, neither of whom could stand their stepfather-to-be, Charles Gouverneur Weir, the implication being that the man had his eye on Mrs. Hoffman’s considerable private income and luxurious style of life. Looking back on what happened a few months later, the gossip sheet Town Topics opined: “Miss Hoffman did not approve of her mother’s marriage to Mr. Charles Gouverneur Weir, and she went abroad consulting her own wishes solely. On the evening before she sailed she told an intimate that she wanted never to come back.”
Whatever the true reason for her departure from America, Emily arrived in Nice aboard the Varuna in March 1901 and made her way to Paris with Higgins and his other guests. But at that point the idea of an engagement between Emily and Eugene Higgins faded away. Emily may never have had the slightest intention of marrying Higgins. It is also possible that even if she entertained the idea at first, a long cruise with him on the Varuna changed her mind. At close range, said Town Topics, Higgins was such an intolerable fusspot that he robbed life aboard his yacht of much of its charm. However, the end of the much-vaunted romance meant that in the spring of 1901, the dazzling Miss Emily Hoffman found herself in Paris in an unexpected position. She was essentially on her own, back on the marriage market in her midtwenties in a world where a woman was thought to be “on the shelf” at twenty-five. She seems to have had no wish to return home to live with a new stepfather whom she found uncongenial. Whether she liked it or not, Emily was under pressure to find a husband. She did not return to New York or Newport during the summer of 1901 but stayed on in Europe.
In September 1901, just six months after the Varuna docked in Nice, it filtered through to the society press in New York that the beautiful Miss Emily Hoffman was to marry a dashing Englishman, whom no one knew anything about, called Frederick Young Dalziel. Diana was certain that high-voltage physical attraction played its part. Frederick Dalziel was “Oxford educated,” handsome, kindly, and adoring. He not only solved Emily’s marriage problem but held out the possibility of an extended stay in Belle Epoque Paris. Subtle class differences that might have been important in a different city mattered less in its expatriate community. Even if Emily’s mother, Mary Weir, was appalled by her daughter’s engagement, she was unable to act, grounded in New York by her own recent marriage. It may also be that Frederick Young Dalziel’s lack of a grand pedigree was part of his charm as far as Emily was concerned, allowing her to checkmate her mother in a tussle about wedlock.
They married in London, in the presence of Emily’s brother and his wife rather than her mother, who appears to have been absent. Although the Dalziel family was in evidence, and Frederick’s father signed the marriage certificate, there was no question of a ceremony anywhere near Haringey. Frederick Dalziel rented a room in Mayfair, and the wedding took place by special license on September 28, 1901, in one of London’s richest areas, and at one of its smartest and most fashionable churches, Saint Peter’s Eaton Square. After a honeymoon in the South of France, the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Dalziel set up home in Paris at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The following year, in 1902, Emily and her new husband went to New York on a visit that lasted well into the autumn.
They stayed with Emily’s grandfather John Washington Ellis at Stone Acre during the Newport season and appear to have been considering a move from Paris to New York even then. Up to the time of the Boer War (1899–1902), Frederick Dalziel earned a good living in Paris (“Mr. Dalziel has plenty of money,” pronounced one gossip columnist). But the war in South Africa dragged on unexpectedly, which could have made life difficult for a man charged with attracting investment to the Transvaal’s gold mines. The style of life on display that summer in New York and Newport was attractive and amusing; many of the Dalziels’ friends already had houses on both sides of the Atlantic; and although the young couple might have preferred not to articulate it thus, there were arguments in favor of moving closer to Emily’s powerful family, who could open doors in New York in a way that was impossible elsewhere. If marrying a socially undistinguished Briton in 1901 offered Emily a way of hitting back at her mother and a route out of a predicament, marrying the beautiful, well-bred Emily Key Hoffman marked an extraordinary change of fortune for Frederick Young Dalziel—a straight pass to the heart of one of the world’s most exclusive elites, the New York “Four Hundred.”
However, the newlyweds seem to have been in no great hurry to make the move from France. When Diana called her parents “racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians who were part of the whole transition between the Edwardian era and the modern world,” she lit on a poetic truth. The Dalziels—and particularly Emily—were indeed Parisians in the sense that Paris was their spiritual home. It was a feeling that affected many rich Americans so profoundly from the late nineteenth century onward that to quote one of their number, it was possible to feel “homesick on both continents.” Provided one averted one’s gaze from its dark underbelly, Paris at the turn of the century was a difficult place to leave—the Paris of Maxim’s and the Opéra Garnier; of the couture of Worth, Doucet, and Paquin; of grand dukes and demimondaines; and of children in sailor suits sailing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Shortly after Emily and Frederick Dalziel returned to Paris from the United States in late 1902, Emily became pregnant with her first baby. It is possible that this became a further excuse for lingering on. Diana’s was a breech birth, but in spite of the risks she was born at home at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The name she was given was fashionable at the time. It recalled the goddess of hunting, an activity close to the heart of both her parents, though Diana preferred to believe she was named after Diane de Poitiers, the hunting beauty who was mistress to Henri II of France. If there had been a rift between Emily and her mother, it had now healed enough for Mary Weir to come to Paris to be on hand. Frederick Dalziel noted proudly in Diana’s childhood album that her first visitor was one of his most aristocratic friends: Douglas Walter Campbell, heir to the 10th duke of Argyll, who brought a gift of a silver cup on behalf of his four-month-old son Ian, eventually the 11th duke. On October 25 Diana was christened at home by the vicar of Saint Luke’s Chapel in the Quartier Latin. Her godmothers were her grandmother and a relation of Emily’s, Anna Key Thompson. Her godfather was her uncle Edelsten, but since he was unable to be present one of New York’s aristocrats, Henry Clews, Jr., stood in for him.
The Dalziels spent some time in San Remo that winter with their baby daughter. When they returned to Paris in March 1904, they stayed with friends for a few weeks before they finally gave up living permanently in Europe. On March 31, 1904, Frederick Dalziel’s father and Edelsten went ahead to Boulogne so that they would be there to see the party off. From then onward a gap opened up between Frederick Dalziel and his suburban background. (Diana paid at least one visit to her uncle Edelsten—in Pangbourne, England—many years later, but she never mentioned his existence to her own children.) In 1904 Frederick Dalziel, who could not have been included in Burke’s Peerage or Debrett’s in England, was listed in the American Social Register for the first time; and on April 2 of that year, seven-month-old Diana Dalziel sailed on the SS Ryndam with her mother and father to begin a New York childhood.
When she talked about her upbringing later, Diana invariably maintained that her family left Paris for New York only in April 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In this oft-repeated version of her early years, she took daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne in the company of a nursemaid called Pink; she was taken to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre ad nauseam and was one of the last visitors to see the painting before it was stolen in 1911; Nijinsky came to the house and sat around like a pet griffin (“he had nothing to say”); and the great demimondaines of Paris swished past her in the Bois, inspiring a lifelong love of footwear. “Their shoes were so beautiful! Children, naturally, are terribly aware of feet. They’re closer to them.”
But Diana did not grow up in Paris. She grew up in New York. Frederick Dalziel became a Wall Street broker, running the foreign securities desk of Post & Flagg; and the press noted the reappearance of the “bewitching” Emily soon after the family arrived back in 1904. The Dalziels proceeded to occupy a number of houses before finally settling in an agreeable Upper East Side town house at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street in 1910; and Diana lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan until she married. In 1907, the Dalziels had a second child, a daughter named Alexandra, who was known in the family as Teenie, and whom Diana called “Sister.” Diana and Alexandra enjoyed an upper-class New York upbringing that was similar to Emily’s: a world of governesses, walks in Central Park, skating clubs, dancing classes, and children’s parties. A costume party at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street was attended by the offspring of grand families including the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Potters, and Goulds. There were summers in houses in the Hudson Valley, and holidays with their grandmother Mary Weir in Southampton and on her farm in Katonah, New York.
In common with other children from New York’s plutocracy, the two little Dalziel girls with their beautiful mother appeared from time to time in studio photographs in the society pages of the better parts of the press. There are several photographs of Diana herself before her twelfth birthday, marking her as a child who, like her mother, lived at the heart of New York’s social elite. She starred as the leading lady in a widely reported colonial pageant enacted by two hundred society children, a somewhat obnoxious event ostensibly organized by the Lafayette Fund to help wounded soldiers in France but mainly designed to let social interlopers know where they stood, since casting was by pedigree. (Diana headed the cast as Martha Washington because she was thought to be a collateral descendant of George through the Key connection.) Diana’s insistence that she was brought up in Paris was also sharply contradicted by an album recording her New York childhood, assembled by her father as a wedding present, and confirmed by entries in The Social Register from 1904 onward. The Social Register suggests that the Dalziels may have held on to their Paris house at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne for two years after they moved to New York in 1904, but no longer. Alexandra would later say categorically that she and Diana grew up entirely in New York—but that it seemed to matter very much to Diana to believe otherwise. In public Alexandra loyally refused to discuss the whereabouts of their upbringing. “I’d better leave memories of childhood to Diana,” she said later. “Sisters remember things differently.”
One point on which both sisters did agree was that behind the facade of their pleasant house on East Seventy-Seventh Street the atmosphere was often strained; and that the problems revolved entirely around the moods of their ever-more-volatile mother. The decision to move from Paris to New York in 1904 affected Frederick and Emily Dalziel quite differently. In an unusual version of the American dream, America gave Frederick Dalziel the freedom to live as the upper-class Englishman he wanted to be, though he talked up his wife’s family connections while keeping quiet about his own. “My father,” Alexandra said, “was a tremendous snob about my mother’s relations.” His income from Post & Flagg and Emily’s trusts from the Ellis family combined to give them a life on the Upper East Side of which he could only have dreamed as a boy in Haringey. For its part, New York society took Frederick Dalziel at face value. By 1910 he was a member of the invitation-only Brook Club, said to be the most exclusive gentleman’s club in the United States, let alone New York.
For Emily, however, the move back to New York from Paris came at some personal cost, returning her to the world of her mother and the claustrophobic, gossipy, even vicious social elite in which she had grown up. To make things worse, there was now a certain degree of slippage in Mrs. Frederick Dalziel’s status and position. While she was growing up Emily was associated with the social power that came from money. By the time she returned from Paris in 1904, riches mattered even more, and many of her friends had either married into great means or inherited vast fortunes. (The Dalziels’ friends included rich bohemians such as Diana’s stand-in godfather, the sculptor Henry Clews, Jr., the painter Robert Winthrop Chanler, and the former actress Mrs. George Gould.) Emily, meanwhile, had married an impecunious Englishman. It was a loss of power with which she struggled. Emily felt poor compared to their wealthy friends. Living in a world where making any money herself was out of the question, she worried about it all the time. “He never had any money,” Diana later said. “Never made any money, never thought about money; it killed my mother, who was American, though she was very European. She saw things rather square, which most women do.”
Another reason for Emily’s unhappiness was that she suffered as her youthful bloom began to fade, a loss that was all the more potent in the inward-looking world of New York’s elite, where great importance was placed on appearance and display. She became increasingly neurotic about her power to attract, compensating with extravagant makeup that caused her daughter much embarrassment at school. “Whispers would go around: ‘Look, she’s painted,’ ” said Diana. “She was very made up for those days.” This anxiety manifested itself in a constant need to be the center of attention, and some very uninhibited flirting. “I remember this: my mother wouldn’t have a chauffeur or a footman unless he was infatuated with her—he had to show enormous dazzle for her. Everyone had to or she wasn’t interested.” This attitude would later extend to Diana’s own boyfriends: “She had to be on stage, often making a show of herself.” Diana sensed that of the two of them, her mother was by far the more fragile character: “I think she was someone who was possessed by a great fear.”
It is not clear exactly when Emily tipped from a flirtatious manner into taking lovers. Having created a delightful new reality for himself in New York, Frederick Dalziel resolutely refused to spoil it by facing up to the fact he was being cuckolded, and Diana had difficulty coming to terms with the idea later too, maintaining that the worst her mother did was to travel everywhere with a good-looking Turk. “My father was rather amused by her flirtations—it was all part of the scene,” said Diana. “Flirtations are part of life, part of society—if one didn’t have these little flings, where would one be? I think my father realized this. He was devoted to my mother. She was in the arms of a strong man who saw to everything because he knew that she wasn’t strong.” It was Alexandra who faced Emily’s adultery squarely and acknowledged that in retrospect she was certain her mother had often been unfaithful to her father. “She had a great many men,” said Alexandra. “My father had to put up with a very great deal.”
Emily also dealt with the unhappiness that gnawed at her by escaping from New York. Until the outbreak of war in 1914 she returned to Europe frequently, and from the age of eight Diana went with her. Diana’s memories of a childhood in Paris were not, therefore, purely imaginary: they did draw on real experience. Between 1911 and 1913 she traveled with her family to England, Scotland, and France. Her grandmother Mary Weir went to Paris too, establishing her own household with servants and a secretary. These expeditions lasted for several months each summer, and there is no reason to doubt the impact of Paris on a sensitive child whose parents loved the city and impressed upon her the fact that she had been born there. Given her age at the time, some later confusion is understandable. Nonetheless, it is also the case that once an idea gripped Diana’s imagination, it became true even if it was not. “So many of the things in life that interest me the most I totally forget,” she once remarked. “They’re so intense they . . . burn off. Then, when I do remember them, they become stronger than memory—stronger, even, than reality.”
One example is her story that in 1909 Diaghilev brought the ballerina and Belle Epoque figure Ida Rubinstein to her parents’ house on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, whereupon six-year-old Diana hid behind a screen and took in every detail of what Rubinstein was wearing. “She was all in black—a straight black coat to the ground. . . . Under the coat she wore high black suede Russian boots. And her hair was like Medusa’s—these great big black curls, draped in black tulle, which kept them in place and just veiled her eyes. Then her eyes, through the veil. . . . If you’ve never seen kohl before, brother, was that a time to see it!” And then there was Rubinstein’s shape: “She was long, lithesome, sensuous, sinuous . . . it was all line, line, line.” Leaving aside the detail that Diana’s parents were not living in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne in 1909, parts of this story are credible for the prosaic reason that Diaghilev was searching Paris for money that year to launch the first season of his Ballets Russes; and he often touted Ida Rubinstein around rich people in the hope that they would back his productions of Cléopatre and Schéhérazade in which Rubinstein would star.
It is plausible that Diaghilev heard about Emily’s talent as an amateur dancer, sought her out, introduced her to both Rubinstein and the great Nijinsky, and treated her as a person of informed taste in the mistaken belief that she was in a position to write a large check. But given that Diana was only six in 1909 and that there is no record of her traveling outside the United States before 1911, it is much less plausible that she met Ida Rubinstein herself or that she hid behind a screen while her mother chatted with Diaghilev. It is more probable that Diana met or saw Ida Rubinstein when she was older, or heard the story from her mother later, for from the evidence Emily had a narrative gift. Diana’s vision of demimondaines parading in the Bois de Boulogne in the colors of the new century may well have been her mother’s description, at least in part: “red red, violent violet, orange—when I say ‘orange’ I mean red orange, not yellow orange—jade green and cobalt blue.” Diana’s story about visiting London for the coronation of King George V is another case in point. The coronation took place in June 1911 when the Dalziels were in Europe, and it is quite possible that the eight-year-old Diana was taken to stand in the crowds. But she later confessed to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that most of what she remembered came from gazing intently at photographs for hours on end much later. In reminiscing about Diaghilev, Diana left herself an escape route too. “That’s where everything happened, and 1909, that’s the year it happened, and they say that’s how it happened.”
It is also perhaps not surprising that memories of long sojourns in Paris, however confused or improved upon later, burned brighter than the mundane routine of New York childhood. The Belle Epoque Paris that displaced her Manhattan upbringing before 1914 certainly positioned Diana later as more romantic, more exotic, more “other” than she really was, and made her parents sound richer and more fashionable. In years to come this would become more, not less, important. By the time she was in her sixties, Diana placed such a high premium on imaginative power that she believed the romantic way she remembered her childhood was more significant than reality. Images of a Paris childhood nourished her imagination to such an extent that she almost came to believe her own stories while holding out the possibility that it was all “faction.” But there was more to blotting out her early years than this.
From an early age Diana’s American childhood was made miserable by beauty. She felt herself to be her beautiful mother’s unloved, ugly child, causing her great pain. She internalized a sense of herself as ugly when she was very young, though photographs suggest that she was not nearly as plain as she felt herself to be. She inherited attractive dark coloring from Emily but a big nose and jaw from Frederick Dalziel, features that worked less well on a little girl with slight astigmatism than they did on a large man. But it was also Diana’s misfortune that her younger sister, Alexandra, was enchantingly pretty. Alexandra had a fine bone structure, a petite nose, and extraordinary violet eyes. According to Diana, “Sister” was a sensation even when taken out in her pram to Central Park:
I can remember she was The Most Beautiful Child in Central Park. In those days it was a very small world, and there were all sorts of little titles like that. She’d sit in her pram—she was terribly dressed up, you understand—and people would stop just to look at her. As soon as I’d see people looking, I’d run over to the pram, because I was so proud of her.
“Oh what a beautiful child!” they’d say.
“Yes,” I’d always say, “and she has violet eyes.”
But in an incident that seared itself forever on Diana’s memory, pride in her little sister’s beauty became entangled with crushing blows to her self-confidence:
Then there was the most terrible scene between my mother and me. One day she said to me, “It’s too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This, of course, is why you are so impossible to deal with.” It didn’t offend me that much. I simply walked out of the room. I never bothered to explain that I loved my sister and was more proud of her than of anything in the world, that I absolutely adored her. . . . Parents, you know, can be terrible.
As a small girl, Diana could not possibly have understood why her mother lashed out in this malign way. In the years between 1904 and 1914, Emily Dalziel pitched between restless unhappiness and exuberance and finally tipped into a depressive state that she later described as “wretched health . . . nothing definite you know, just a nervous miserable condition.” Poorly understood in the years before World War I, and compounded by acute anxiety about her fading beauty and appeal, Emily’s “nerves” resulted in histrionic and delinquent behavior toward her two daughters, with effects that stayed with both of them for years. Diana would later rationalize this by saying that mothers and daughters rarely got on well. But the truth, in the Dalziel family, was that the mother adored one daughter and not the other.
“You ask ‘do I love you,’ ” Emily once wrote to Alexandra. “My precious baby girl, I love you with all my heart & soul & body. . . . I love you, the air you breath [sic], the things you touch, the ground you walk on. Every little bit of me loves every bit of you. I love you so it hurts, so it frightens me.” At the same time Emily developed an antipathy toward Diana, who committed the cardinal sin of refusing to show her mother the unconditional love she demanded from everyone else. Diana probably did become exceedingly difficult, for she possessed a fierce temper that never quite went away. In childhood, however, Diana was convinced that the root cause of Emily’s incontinent antagonism was her ugliness. While her mother reveled in Alexandra’s beauty, Diana’s looks were an embarrassment. “All I knew then was that my mother wasn’t proud of me,” said Diana. “I was always her ugly little monster.”
Had Diana been luckier, an affectionate nanny might have compensated for her mother’s hostility. But in this instance she was truly unfortunate, for the Dalziel children grew up with a nanny who also found Diana difficult and made the dysfunctional family dynamics even worse. This was not, as Diana claimed in her memoirs, the nurse called Pink who took her for daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne. (Though there was a nurse of that name, she left the Dalziel household when Diana was about a year old.) The nanny in question was Katherine (or “Kay”) Carroll, who appeared in the New York household in 1908, about a year after Alexandra was born. She was no passing nursemaid. Because Emily was often out or away, she left Kay Carroll in charge and ceded control to her. Nanny Kay acquired a great deal of power. She became the person who held the Dalziel household together, and she stayed for decades, becoming, in effect, another member of the family.
Kay Carroll adored her “baby” Alexandra, and Alexandra—and Emily—loved Nanny Kay. As far as Alexandra was concerned, Kay Carroll was the warm substitute mother who compensated for Emily’s increasingly frequent absences. Yet Alexandra was also the first to say that Nanny Kay’s attitude to Diana was completely different. “She didn’t like Diana,” she declared. “Diana and she didn’t get on.” Nanny Kay copied Emily by constantly comparing Diana unfavorably with her younger sister. Understandably Diana loathed Kay Carroll. “My nurse was appalling. Naturally, nurses are always frustrated. They may love the children but they’re not theirs and the time will come when they will have to leave them. . . . I couldn’t stand her. She was the worst.” Remarkably the loved and the unloved sisters remained fond of each other though they were very different, one bond in an otherwise fissile household.
In Diana’s early adolescence, matters came to a head. Diana spoke of this fleetingly much later, though she generally only dropped hints, leaving the listener to put the constituent parts together. She told Christopher Hemphill, a New York writer who was custodian of Andy Warhol’s tapes, that she had a terrible nightmare as a child about being obliterated, one that stayed with her for years. “It was a wall of water coming curling over me when I was alone in the water—this body of water moving, moving, moving, moving. . . . It was like teeth almost—totally consuming. . . . I was terrified of the Atlantic but I couldn’t stay out of it. . . . It was always the same all-consuming war.” There are very few photographs of Diana in her early teens, so it is difficult to tell whether puberty wrought real damage to her looks. What is clear is that once she reached the age of self-consciousness and looked in the mirror, she hated what she saw; and what seems to have happened is that relentless labeling as ugly, and the denigration that went with it from the two female adults in the Dalziel household, conspired to reduce a fragile child to such a low emotional state that Diana later preferred to excise and rearrange much of the narrative about this part of her life, rather than remember that it nearly broke her.
In Diana’s version of what happened, the problems began when the family returned from Paris to New York in 1914. In this account she could speak only French and was unable to understand what was said to her. “Actually, when I was brought to America from France in 1914, I didn’t know any English. But what was worse, I didn’t hear it. I was the most frustrated little girl.” She was certainly frustrated and miserable, but for a different reason. In 1914 (having actually moved to New York ten years earlier) both Diana and Alexandra followed their mother to the Brearley School, then as now a top private girls’ school. As an adult Diana consistently maintained that she and her sister were barely educated, but this was wrong. Their education was taken seriously. Brearley aimed to give young ladies an intellectual education comparable to that of their brothers, and when Diana was there its head, James G. Croswell, was a professor of Greek from Harvard. But once again the beautiful Alexandra, who was blessed with brains and sporting ability as well as beauty and an even temperament, thrived in the atmosphere of Brearley and stayed there for thirteen years. She went on to study mathematics at Bryn Mawr, and finished her degree at Barnard.
Diana, on the other hand, hated Brearley and its academic ethos so much that she almost wrote it out of her life story. She loathed the school’s rigid authoritarianism, felt isolated from her more teachable classmates, and learned nothing. “It’s one time in my life I’ve always regretted—fighting my way through the place. . . . And those goddamn gongs! Everyone knew where to go when the gong went off except me, but I didn’t know whom to ask. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know anything—I couldn’t speak.” Talking to the New York curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler years later, she described her time at Brearley thus: “I lasted three weeks at the Brearley School . . . three months . . . three months. And really, they kept me there out of sort of kindness to my parents who obviously didn’t know what to do with me because I didn’t speak English, I’d never had time to learn English, wasn’t allowed to speak French and I’d no one to talk to.” Misery at Brearley may have led to an outbreak of stuttering. “English was decided on, which is why I speak such terrible French to this day.” This nonsense is best read as a metaphor for a time when Diana was so isolated and adrift that she could barely communicate. Her school records show that she was in fact at Brearley for three full years.
To make matters worse, Emily found a new way of passing the time during the vacations that Diana truly hated. The outbreak of war in Europe put an end to family trips to Paris after 1914. Faced with being trapped in the United States during the long summer months, Emily turned to big-game hunting. She had long ridden to hounds, but from around 1916, when Diana was thirteen, Emily developed a passion for a sport in which upper-class women were slowly being allowed to participate. Although it was unusual for a woman to take up big game-hunting in North America, it gave those that did a rare opportunity to escape from society’s concerns and petty domesticity while remaining within the outer limits of social convention. It also gave women who could afford it a chance to develop a level of expertise and degree of focus that was uniquely exhilarating.
Emily told a newspaper that she first went to the Rockies as a cure for her nervous debilitation. It worked. Photographs show her communing happily with a mountain lion and posing with a patient elk. A fascination with open spaces, wild animals, and the hunt “took possession of her.” It all did her so much good, she said, that she sent for her daughters to join her, and at least one photograph shows that Nanny Kay went too, riding in the Rockies with her charges and Emily. Inevitably Diana’s claim that she was taught to ride by Buffalo Bill Cody has been regarded as one of her more outré assertions. However, this was true: like Diaghilev, Buffalo Bill entered Diana’s life because of Emily, though in this instance Emily was one of Cody’s patrons. If a woman from Emily’s background wanted to learn to track and shoot big game, Buffalo Bill’s establishment in Wyoming was the obvious destination. Buffalo Bill was part showman, part impostor, but he started out as a guide to European aristocrats and American millionaires on buffalo hunts. He traveled so widely that Emily and her daughters could have met him—and had an occasional riding lesson—at almost any time. However, it is most likely that Diana and Alexandra remembered him from the very end of his life, when they stayed at his Hotel Irma in Cody, Wyoming, in 1916.
An epidemic of infantile paralysis swept through New York and its surroundings in the summer of 1916, causing panic. This tallies with Diana’s memory of being sent out of the city with Alexandra and a hysterical French maid (Kay Carroll was probably on holiday). In common with children from thousands of other families, they found themselves on a train at very short notice, though Diana’s account of watching drunken cowboys shoot each other dead from the train window as they traveled west should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Like many other children, the sisters were kept away from New York until long after the start of the new school year, when all danger of polio had passed. According to his biographers, Buffalo Bill did make a brief visit to his beloved Cody in November 1916, just before he died in Denver in January 1917. Ill and almost bankrupt, he could well have taken a liking to Emily’s daughters, found them two little Indian ponies to try, and whiled away the time by teaching them to ride. If so, he probably came to see them off too. “The last time I saw him was when he came to see us off on the train that was to take us back to New York. I can remember standing with my sister at the back of the train with tears pouring down our faces, waving.”
She may have loved Buffalo Bill and his fringed jackets, but Diana hated everything else to do with this new world in which she found herself. She hated her mother’s enthusiasm for the wild. She hated Wyoming. She hated cowboys. She hated the great open spaces that ached of loneliness. “We were there in the wilds with the moose and the bears and the elks and . . . my word! It was so lonely. I remember lonely men, lonely spaces. . . . I couldn’t stand the loneliness of those cowboys.” Most of all she hated shooting and she loathed wild animals. In the grip of this new interest, which Alexandra shared enthusiastically, Emily ignored the reaction of her tiresome elder daughter. “I was just a nut. And a bore. But I didn’t declaim. I was very young. No one listened.”
Then there came a body blow. In the summer of 1917 the headmaster of Brearley wrote to the Dalziels asking them to remove Diana, saying that she was not considered to be Brearley material. It is safe to assume that at the time Emily did not react sensitively; that she was angry and exasperated with Diana; that the effect on Diana of three very stressful years in the wrong school was never considered; and that “stupidity” was now added to Diana’s growing list of failings. Years afterward Diana was fond of saying that she was looking for something that Brearley could not offer—allure. At the time the impact of expulsion was almost certainly terrible, coinciding as it did with so much else that was going wrong. In later life Diana dropped hints that in the summer of 1917 she was so miserable she was suicidal. She was most frank with the journalist Lally Weymouth in an interview for Rolling Stone in August 1977.
By the age of fourteen, she told Weymouth, “If I thought of myself, I wanted to kill myself.” Her mother had christened her Diana after the goddess of hunting, a name freighted with expectation. She was manifestly no goddess. “I thought I was the most hideous thing in the world. Hideous,” she said bleakly to Weymouth. She was isolated inside her own family, the only ugly child in a family of beauties; and her nanny’s power to hurt was as great as her mother’s. The top girls’ school in New York, which celebrated her beautiful, sporty, clever younger sister, had rejected her, evidently proving her mother’s point. It was a very low time. “But I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings,” said Diana years later. “Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.
“It all came together for me when I got back to New York.”