Becoming Mrs. Vreeland
First there was a short diversion to upstate New York. At the time of the Vreelands’ wedding, Reed was assistant to the president of the National Commercial Bank and Trust Company. This meant that the newly married Vreelands were obliged to set up their first home near the bank’s headquarters in Albany. Instead of being dismayed by this, Diana threw herself into Albany life, away from Emily and away from scandal, while she concentrated on being hopelessly in love. Life was delightfully provincial. Reed’s fine tenor voice was soon in demand. He joined the local Mendelssohn Club, where his star turn was “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” while Diana did very little except play house. She liked Albany’s domestic Dutch style—“this environment of good food, good housekeeping, polished floors, polished brass”—but their house was small and there were servants to attend to it. “I loved our life there,” she said. “I was totally happy. I didn’t care what any other place was like.” It was the beginning of a very long period of leisure: “I had nothing to do—but nothing. I never had an idea.”
Everyone whom they met socially in Albany was older, but Diana had a supporter in a local grandee, Louisa Van Rensselaer, who found her way of doing things amusing. “During this phase when I lived in Albany I’d walk around in a mackintosh and a béret basque with very extreme, very exaggerated makeup—I’ve always had a strong Kabuki streak.” The Vreelands lived in a mews house at the back of the Van Rensselaers’ mansion on State Street. It had a red front door and blue hydrangeas in its window boxes. “Reed and I were like the little children down the garden path, and we’d be asked to dinner in their great house on the hill on State Street.” Far from having no ideas, however, Diana had been dreaming about the decoration of her own house for years. When the moment finally came, her design sense was so ahead of Albany taste that it piqued the attention of the local press. Under the heading “Labor Economy” the Albany Evening News reported that Mrs. T. R. Vreeland was following a fashion that had begun in New York and Boston. She had knocked down the wall between the living and dining rooms of her small house, making life easier with fewer servants. The furniture was arranged “artistically,” and the predominant color was yellow, offset by a black couch and a lion-skin rug stretched before the fireplace.
Diana soon had other matters to occupy her, since the Vreelands’ first child, Thomas, known as Tim or Timmy, was a honeymoon baby. He was born on January 1, 1925, and she was enchanted by him, even if his baby book suggests an unusual degree of maternal focus on his clothes. “He still wears his little wooly [sic] nightgowns all the time and has not yet gotten all dressed up in his dressiest petticoats except to come home from the hospital.” After the first heady rush of enthusiasm, Diana gave up keeping the baby book—once again she showed very little appetite for a long-haul literary project. The incongruity of Emily as a grandmother and Diana living in Albany was noted with delight by Town Topics, which contemplated the possibility that this new state of affairs might finally calm Emily down: “Now that Diana, who married Reed Vreeland last winter, and, like a dutiful wife, went to live with him in Albany, is a mother, will Emily, the Diana of the Hoffman clan, continue to stalk wild animals in Africa?” Ignoring these mutterings about how unsophisticated she had become, Diana completed the migration to American housewife by taking U.S. citizenship in April 1925, an event trumpeted in the local newspaper as “Albany Society Matron Eligible to Citizenship.” The Albany matron was twenty-two; and she was only twenty-three when she gave birth to the Vreelands’ second son, Frederick, known as Freck or Frecky, on June 24, 1927.
Freck’s safe arrival in 1927, which coincided with a move back to New York City when Reed briefly joined the Fidelity Trust Company, turned out to be a bright moment in an otherwise bleak year. Once again it was Emily and the Ross divorce case that caused the misery. It was clear from the outset that the matter would be protracted. Sir Charles was an enthusiastic litigant and was determined to avoid paying a penny more in alimony to his embittered wife than was necessary. Conceding her charges in the Scottish courts also meant conceding that he was British and thus liable to British taxation. He fought a long-drawn-out double battle both against the charges and against being taxed in Britain, opining that his family home, Balnagown in Scotland, was part of America. Frederick Dalziel, meanwhile, fiercely denied any possibility that his wife was guilty of adultery and vigorously defended her against all slights, real and imaginary. In 1925 he even forced apologies from the New York Herald, the New York Post, and the Boston Evening American for printing a story that Emily had started a fad for walking barefoot on the golf course at White Sulphur Springs.
Thanks to Sir Charles Ross’s appetite for time-wasting litigation, the Ross divorce case was heard at the Court of Session in Edinburgh only in June 1927, the year of Freck’s birth. Sir Charles insisted on defending the charges, which meant that all Lady Ross’s allegations finally came out in court, a most unwelcome development for the Dalziels, who were plagued by the gutter press. Since Lady Ross’s case revolved entirely around whether Sir Charles and Emily had or had not indulged in “guilty passion” in the African jungle, it naturally attracted a great deal of attention. In the end Lady Ross was refused her divorce partly because the Dalziels compelled Alexandra and Kay Carroll to travel to Edinburgh and swear in the witness box that Emily was always at home in the afternoons and was therefore not available for love affairs. Alexandra knew very well that this was not true and later described the experience as deeply traumatic. Emily was cleared of adultery, but there were many beyond the courtroom who begged to differ, including Lady Ross.
Meanwhile, three years of scandal took a great toll on Emily’s health and, by extension, her looks. She had returned unwell from East Africa in 1921, and illness was given as the reason she was unable to attend the Court of Session in person in 1927, though this seems to have been a recurrence of the “nerves” that had long plagued her, rather than a tropical illness. For all her public repudiation of New York society in Harper’s Bazar, she was brought low by salacious allegations in the newspapers and cold-shouldering from people who should not have mattered. “None of her African experiences . . . affected her more than when Lady Patricia Ross filed suit for a divorce,” said society columnist Maury Paul when he looked back on the story some years later. The Dalziels’ rich Bohemian friends simply went abroad when disgrace threatened, but Emily was unable to escape very far. After the scandal broke in 1924, she spent time alone on Nantucket, where the Dalziels had a house. In the end Emily proved too fragile to cope with the consequences of her bid for freedom in East Africa. Three months after her name was cleared in the Court of Session in Edinburgh in June 1927, she died of pneumonia on Nantucket at the age of fifty-one. But that was not the end of the story. Ignoring the impact of their behavior on her bereaved husband and daughters, the furious Rosses battled on. In 1928, a year after Emily’s death, Lady Ross produced evidence more sensational than anything that had gone before, involving air beds on open decks and side trips into the heartlands of Africa with only porters for company. This time their lordships decided that regardless of the defense argument that the couple were simply hunting mad, “the madness was attributable to something more personal” and that Emily had indeed committed adultery. Frederick Dalziel continued to dispute this. The case was finally settled only in 1930, and the matter of Emily’s “guilt” was never formally resolved.
Emily’s death in 1927 shut a door on a most unhappy chapter in Diana’s life. It would be many years before she talked much about her mother. Of her death she remarked: “She lived only for excitement. When she died . . . I think it was because she could find nothing to interest her.” After Emily died, Nanny Kay became Frederick Dalziel’s housekeeper. He never married again and developed such a hatred of popular newspapers that housemaids were threatened with dismissal if they brought them into the house. Both his daughters escaped from New York and, finally, from their mother’s overbearing perception of their respective natures. Alexandra left Bryn Mawr to complete her degree at Barnard so that she could be closer to her widowed father, and then married Alexander Kinloch, heir to Sir David Kinloch of Gilmerton in East Lothian, Scotland, in a small wedding in the chantry of Saint Thomas Church on September 11, 1929. She remained British, rejecting the label of “goddess” imposed on her by Emily, finding a way through life that centered on her family and houses in London and East Lothian and taking very little interest in high society, though it was certainly available to her. Diana traveled in a different direction. Eventually she was able to say of her mother: “She was quite young and beautiful and amusing and mondaine and splashy, all of which I’m glad I had in my background—now. But I’ve had to live a long time to come to that conclusion.” It is not clear that she grieved for Emily at all. Instead of grief (and in common with Proust, Freud, Joyce, and Max Weber), Diana had a different reaction to the death of a damaging parent. A short time after Emily died, her imaginative powers took flight.
Diana often declared that her real education took place during the six and a half years she spent with Reed in Europe; and sometimes, when she spoke of her “European upbringing,” it was to this period that she referred. “All the things that happened to me there were the foundation of my whole adult life,” she said. The year after Emily died, Reed accepted the post of assistant manager of the Guaranty Trust in its London office. The Vreelands moved to London at the beginning of 1929 and left Europe again in the early summer of 1935. The impact on Diana of their stay was partly a matter of timing. In the late 1920s, in spite of the emergence of the Flapper, real elegance still began after marriage and childbirth. Diana was twenty-five when she arrived in London; she had captured a notably handsome husband; and she was ready to join the ranks of chic married women who were beyond the exigencies of pregnancy and tiny babies and had years of active life ahead of them. She also had some money of her own. In 1929 the Vreelands came to London armed with the proceeds of the sale of the Villa Diana in 1922, on top of Reed’s salary from the Guaranty Trust. They were able to employ a nanny, a cook, and a butler and had at least one Bugatti. As they immersed themselves in London life, Reed’s good looks and charm were a great asset, but the pace was set by Diana’s hungry eye and a growing faith in the power of her dreams.
Diana was the first to acknowledge the extent to which her fantasy life in this period was nourished by fashion magazines. “I lived in that world, not only during my years in the magazine business but for years before, because I was always of that world—at least in my imagination,” she said. In the late 1920s magazines were the single most important means of circulating new style ideas. Diana had stared at their pages for hours when she was younger, and her one surviving scrapbook shows the extent to which Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue continued to influence her in the 1920s and 1930s, Vogue above all. The scrapbook suggests that she was actually more interested in interiors and photographs of society women than fashion at this stage, and in one sense this was no accident. By 1929 Condé Nast was revolutionizing the way Vogue made money by transforming it from a New York society magazine to one that appealed to the indefinable yearning of young women like Diana, who wished both to express their individuality through fashion and live the magical life of fashionable people.
Condé Nast reflected this back in Vogue’s pages through the images of Edward Steichen, Baron de Meyer, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Cecil Beaton. He then delivered readers like Diana to advertisers, as a “class” that advertisers could not otherwise reach. Nast and his first editor in chief Edna Chase played a successful double game, ostensibly producing Vogue as a house magazine for the world’s most beautiful and privileged women, while knowing that its real success lay in its appeal to middle-class women with spending power, who lived at some distance from the life in its pages but nevertheless aspired to it. But Diana did not see it quite that way. As far as she was concerned Condé Nast was, quite simply, a visionary: “Condé Nast was a very, very extraordinary man, of such a standard . . . he had a dream. The fact that people don’t still dream, I don’t understand.”
Diana, of course, knew Condé Nast slightly already, and on arrival in England at the beginning of 1929, she determined to turn the fantasy world of Vogue into reality for the Vreelands. Her first step was to create a stylish backdrop for her family on a much larger canvas than before. The Vreelands moved into 17 Hanover Terrace, one of several rows of magnificent white stucco houses on the edge of Regent’s Park designed by John Nash in the early nineteenth century. They took over the lease of 17 Hanover Terrace from the widow of the writer and critic Sir Edmund Gosse via a Mr. Leitner, neither of whom had given it any attention for years. In spite of its dilapidation the Vreelands were enchanted by its Georgian proportions, and its large elegant rooms that looked out over Regent’s Park. To Diana’s delight the house had a proper British larder and a small garden. (“Greenery, you know, is as much a part of England as a nose is part of a human face.”) Her upbringing had always been more European in tone than that of most of her New York contemporaries, but even she was horrified by the discrepancy between the quantity of water pouring down from London’s skies and the lack of it inside the house. She immediately set about putting matters to rights, installing extra bathrooms and radiators for servants who informed her it was quite unnecessary.
Well before she moved to London, Diana snipped articles from magazines about the English decorator Syrie (Mrs. Somerset) Maugham’s “White House” in Chelsea and the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe’s use of “old pieces in modern ways.” She was interested in those who mixed the old with the avant-garde, such as Princess Guy de Faucigny-Lucinge, whose medieval apartment in Paris had black rubber floors. While Diana took on many of these modern ideas, the decoration of 17 Hanover Terrace was very much her own. The walls were painted dull ocher, a color she located on the face of a Chinese figure on a coromandel screen; the chintzes were the color of Bristol blue glass with bowknots and huge red roses; and every door inside the house was varnished Oriental red. Correspondence that survives from this period shows her great attention to detail and her insistence on the most luxurious and the best: Porthault in Paris for linen, glass from Lalique, advice from Connoisseur magazine about where to obtain good-quality prints. Diana’s perfectionism showed everywhere in the house, as the writer Phyllis Lee Levin reported: “Friends who visited never forgot the bowls of bulbs blooming white in midwinter, the perfection of the food, the children in gray flannel shorts and red silk shirts, nor the time their mother sent out to the Ritz for some special soup for them.”
Despite such evidence of maternal concern, the two boys in gray flannel shorts and red silk shirts saw little of their parents, for the years in Europe resulted in a huge expansion of the Vreelands’ friends and acquaintances. Many of the people whom Diana met for the first time in Europe in the early 1930s exerted a great influence on her and became friends for life. A number of them were rich or led lives of a particularly European kind of glamour, and several appeared decades later in Allure. It was Diana’s relationships—rather than Reed’s—that held the key to the Vreelands’ rapid entrance into the ton in the early 1930s, for Reed’s job at the Guaranty Trust appears to have been less than high-powered. One important new English friend was Kitty Brownlow, who, as the sister of Alexandra’s husband, Alexander Kinloch, was almost a relation. Her husband, Perry Brownlow, was an aide at Court, and they were a sociable couple. After the Vreelands arrived in London, a warm friendship with the Brownlows developed. Diana accompanied Reed when he went to shoot at Belton House in Lincolnshire, the Brownlow family home. At Belton they joined house parties for local balls attended by the Duke and Duchess of Rutland and Lord David Cecil. Diana was no more enthusiastic about killing pheasants than she was about bagging wild beasts in Wyoming, but she thoroughly enjoyed reading by the fire, picnics with the shooting party, and observing the way in which staggeringly competent Englishwomen ran their huge country houses.
Friendship with different parts of the international d’Erlanger family was even more decisive in accelerating Reed and Diana’s entry to fashionable circles in both London and Paris. The d’Erlangers were members of a banking family, originally from Germany but with banking establishments in Paris and England and a strong transatlantic connection through marriage with the Slidells and Belmonts. Robin d’Erlanger, the eldest son of Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger and Baron Frédéric, trained in New York with Frederick Dalziel in the foreign department of Post & Flagg. “I first met him there,” said Diana. “Then, when Reed and I went to live in London, he was the first person to look us up. Then we met the other d’Erlangers—all of them—and from then on, you might say, we joined the d’Erlanger family.” It is noticeable that when the Vreelands appeared at London parties, there was often a member of the d’Erlanger family there too, suggesting that it was probably a d’Erlanger who effected the introduction in the first place.
When it came to educating Diana’s taste, it was Robin d’Erlanger’s mother, Catherine, and his sister, Baba, who first opened her eyes. Their originality and imaginative panache were quite unlike anything Diana had ever encountered in New York. Baroness Catherine was a scarlet-haired amateur artist whom Beaton described as an “avant-gardiste” of interior decoration. “The family house in Piccadilly (which once belonged to Lord Byron) was full of witch balls, shell flowers, mother-of-pearl furniture, and startling innovations picked up for a song at the Caledonian Market,” he wrote. Baroness Catherine’s flair for achieving high style with inexpensive paint colors, shells, and baskets of wool had an immediate influence on Diana. Baba d’Erlanger, meanwhile, was a remarkable sight even as a child, for she was sent out on walks in St. James’s Park by her mother, accompanied not by a nanny but by a Mamluk in robes and a turban, with a sword and a dagger, looking as if he had stepped straight out of the Ballets Russes. Baba, said Diana, “was an absolutely fascinating, marvelous-looking, totally extraordinary creature—without question the most exotic-looking woman, white or black, I’ve ever met.” Baba came to represent a particularly recherché 1930s chic. She wore dresses made from gold tissue paper and briefly opened a shop in Paris that sold nothing but Tyrolean beachwear.
By the time the Vreelands arrived in London, high society was becoming more international and more diverse. From the 1920s onward, Vogue itself increasingly focused on that elusive, amorphous group of artists, socialites, aristocrats, and persons of high style known as “café society,” reporting on their frenetic activity as they moved around Europe and across the Atlantic, capturing them in the contributions of Cecil Beaton and the society columnist Johnnie McMullin in “As Seen by Him.” A mention in Vogue was a mark of acceptance in these circles. In the Vreelands’ case one society friend from the pages of Vogue led to another. By 1929 Baba d’Erlanger was married to Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, partygiver and partygoer extraordinaire. They were probably responsible for introducing Reed and Diana to another Vogue favorite, the beautiful Mrs. Harrison Williams, who became a lifelong friend. Mona Williams (later Mona Bismarck) was American. The daughter of the manager of a Kentucky farm, she married five times, striking gold with utilities millionaire Harrison Williams in 1926, who provided her with the largest yacht in the world and vast establishments including Il Fortino on Capri, an island she did much to make fashionable. The most pressing problem of rich Americans like Williams was staving off boredom, and the film stars, painters, actors, photographers, and other creative types who made up the new international gratin were only too happy to provide friendship and amusement in return for patronage. Café society was therefore characterized by a web of commercial relationships between the rich, especially the American and South American rich, and the artists who needed their money.
Diana’s friendship with Cecil Beaton began in true café-society style with a professional commission. She had never met him, but she telephoned to ask whether he would draw her as a Christmas present for Reed, probably in the autumn of 1929. Beaton came to 17 Hanover Terrace and started work. Ten days later the drawing arrived. Diana was horrified: Beaton had drawn not just her face but her hands, with one hand holding a cigarette, which was reasonable, and the other wearing a wholly imaginary diamond, which was not. The diamond was “the size of an ice-rink” and all the rage at the time. “I was terribly offended by this,” said Diana. “I got him on the phone and I said, ‘Look here, Mr. Beaton, I don’t own a diamond. I don’t want a diamond like that. And if you think this is a suggestion for my husband to give me for Christmas—who’s loony now?’ ” Beaton replied that he had not meant to be offensive, he simply thought it might be amusing. “I said, ‘There is nothing amusing about vulgarity, nothing. And it’s the most horrible vulgar fashion, the average hand is hideous—and the average hand is the one who wears those.’ ” She was, she said later, somewhat stuffy at this stage in her life. Immediately realizing he had misjudged Mrs. Vreeland, Beaton removed the offending diamond, and they became close friends.
It is possible that Diana saw something of her own father in Cecil Beaton’s determination to make a life at a distance from his modest middle-class background (Beaton’s father was a timber merchant). Beaton, whose photographs were themselves highly composed fantasies, took the lease of Ashcombe in Wiltshire in 1931 and turned it into another setting for decorative flights of the imagination, giving it a veneer in the grand aristocratic manner that was far removed from his origins. It was an impulse Diana understood; and for his part, Beaton held back the curtain to reveal an English social vista that was of much greater consequence than a few more names in Diana’s expanding address book. Beaton led both Vreelands into the company of English artists and writers whose lives were charged by the same kind of imaginative energy as Diana’s. In her book Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris presents a picture of an English renaissance in the 1930s and early 1940s, composed of a network of gifted individuals who, in different ways, were intent on exploring the nature of Englishness and reconciling its present with new readings of its past. It was a movement that played itself out in a myriad of different modes, but fantasy, especially historical fantasy, was enacted in a particularly English way by Beaton and his circle of “Bright Young People” in the late 1920s as they fashioned themselves “both as silver-suited futurists and as eighteenth-century squires.”
If the aesthetic explorations of Beaton and his friends fortified Diana’s belief in the power of fantasy as a bulwark against the prosaic and unpleasant, the American expatriate Elsie Mendl taught her that dream making and the continuing quest for the Girl required meticulous discipline of an order different from anything Diana had yet imposed on herself. London society in the early 1930s was a small galaxy, and there was much overlap between its star clusters. Diana had been slightly acquainted with the great interior decorator in New York, while she was still Elsie de Wolfe, but it was only after Diana came to Europe that they became friends. Elsie was much older and became a mother substitute for Diana, the kind of mother who recognizes and fosters a child’s particular genius. In many ways they were kindred spirits: Elsie had also thought of herself as an ugly child and had vowed to fight her way out of it. Like Beaton, she was determined to leave a colorless upbringing well behind her. She first tried her hand at interior decor at the home she shared in New York with the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, but after the First World War Elsie turned her back on Bessie and wed Sir Charles Mendl in a mariage blanc. (“For all I know the old girl is still a virgin,” he said as he continued pursuing young women.) Elsie, meanwhile, had a gallant who kept her company, Johnnie McMullin, the Vogue columnist who became another friend of Diana and Reed’s. As with café society’s great party organizer Elsa Maxwell (whom Frederick Dalziel knew in New York and could not abide but whom Diana adored), it was said that Elsie Mendl took payment for arranging introductions. Those who did not pay were simply taken under her wing, though they were often invoiced in the end—Elsie was famous for forcing presents on her friends and then charging them.
However, if, like Diana, one was on her list of favorites, most of international high society was only an invitation away. Elsie often asked Diana to stay at the delightful Villa Trianon, where a short walk through an immaculate ornamental kitchen garden led to a door into the park of Versailles. Diana admired Elsie’s style and her self-discipline: her health regimen famously included standing on her head every day. But it was Elsie’s precision that Diana liked most. “I adored her because she was so . . . methodical,” said Diana. “I was only romantic, imaginative and my mind was always far away. . . . Of course Elsie frightened me a lot. I was quite young. And I was always learning from her to be exact. To be definite. To be on the ball. Never to put up with nonsense. Not that she sat and told me these things, but I watched her.” In Europe, Diana took in everything about the stylish Europeans and Americans she was meeting. “I started to get a little education,” she said later. “Just from listening to the language and seeing the manners and the views of people who were highly educated. . . . That was the time that I took to see as much as I could. I was avid to learn.”
Diana’s social success in England was noted by the New York press. “Diana has made an enviable niche for herself in top-lofty social, artistic and musical circles,” reported Maury Paul in an article about her in the New York American that he thought of calling “Home Town Girl Makes Good in London.” Emily, he thought, “would have been intrigued by the manner in which Diana Dalziel Vreeland dresses up her exotic looks,” and he commended Diana on continuing to entertain visiting Americans, unlike some of her female compatriots. These visitors included Condé Nast himself, who took to inviting himself for tea at 17 Hanover Terrace when he was in London. It was a sign of Diana’s standing that she was invited by the wife of the American ambassador to join a group of socially prominent Americans in being presented to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1933—an afternoon of pageantry she never forgot. It left her with lasting respect for both royals, particularly Queen Mary, whose regal style she much admired.
“There was something about the way she sat and her proportions and the size of her hat which was immediately recognizable and never changed. A very, very, good idea, especially for queens,” Diana said later. “I’m mad about her stance—it was up up up and so was she.” In spite of the fact that Queen Mary was Edward VII’s daugher-in-law, Diana thought of her fondly as an Edwardian. “The Edwardian influence in England lasted long after Edward’s death and blossomed like a cherry orchard in the best sun. That’s my period, if you really want to know. You might think it was my mother’s period, but it’s mine. One’s period is when one is very young.” Her respect for King George V and Queen Mary rose further when she noticed that they had extended the hand of friendship to Nubar Gulbenkian. Gulbenkian was an Armenian petroleum magnate and playboy who had formed the habit of greeting Diana extravagantly in fashionable places, to the horror of her more aristocratic friends, who thought he was seedy. On the day of Diana’s presentation at Buckingham Palace he was present in a formal capacity, and he cut her dead. “He passed me by like so much white trash,” said Diana. It was obvious to her that he had been given his position behind the dais in the throne room because of his money. “ ‘Listen,’ ” I said to my English friends afterward, ‘you just don’t know what your empire has to go through. King George and Queen Mary do. No flies on them!’ ”
As the Vreelands made their way into international high society, Diana encountered a new incarnation of the Girl: the 1930s woman of fashion. This woman was a fashion dictator, one of an elite group of women who wielded power outside the home as tastemakers, compelling other women to follow in their footsteps. “It was not an era of gentle friendships or simple living,” wrote Bettina Ballard, who came to know several of these women while she worked for Vogue in Paris in the 1930s. “The small egocentric group of women about whom fashion revolved accepted or rejected ideas with ruthless capriciousness, maintaining their leadership by making fashionable what they chose for themselves.” In many ways this tiny circle of very rich women was as important to fashion as the couturiers in the 1930s. These were the people for whom the designers created their greatest pieces, knowing that such clients could make or break their reputations; and they were known as “Les Dames de Vogue” in contrast to a less elegant group who were known as “Les Dames de Femina,” an inferior fashion magazine.
“Les Dames de Vogue” included Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge, famous for her hats and headdresses, for starting a fashion for Cartier blackamoors, and for painting the tips of her nails; and the preternaturally poisonous Daisy Fellowes, daughter of the Duc Decazes, and heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. Daisy Fellowes epitomized hard thirties chic. She possessed, said Diana in Allure, “the elegance of the damned.” Daisy Fellowes made Elsa Schiaparelli’s fortune by wearing her most surreal fashions. When she appeared bare legged at the Paris collections, all fashionable women removed their stockings. At her bidding women ordered jewelry in pairs; adopted leopard-print pajamas; and sported cotton dresses in the summer. The American fashion pack included Millicent Rogers and Mona Williams, who rejected Daisy Fellowes’s fashionable hard chic in favor of the softer silhouette of Madeleine Vionnet and her paler pastel colors. “Don’t forget,” said Diana later. “None of these were stupid women, these were all very privileged women who very carefully sifted out the luxury, the privilege, the time allotted, the care in the house once [the clothes] were delivered, where and how you would wear them, with what jewels, what gloves, what slippers, what stockings, how your hair would appear. . . . It’s a world that’s so remote from today it’s ludicrous.”
It did not seem so ludicrous to Diana at the time. Fashionable clothes and makeup had long been of vital importance in her quest for the perfect version of herself; and soon after the Vreelands settled in London, she embarked on an apprenticeship as a connoisseur of fashion and an “editrice” in the manner of “Les Dames de Vogue.” She began making regular trips to Paris where she stayed in a cheap hotel and ate lunch in her room so that she had more to spend on dressing. She felt her way with some caution, following “Les Dames de Vogue” in her choice of couturier. Looking back, she remembered her clothes of the 1930s with affection: “I can remember a dress I had of Schiaparelli’s that had fake ba-zooms—these funny little things that stuck out here. When you sat down, they sort of went . . . all I can say is that it was terribly chic. Don’t ask me why, but it was.” She admired Schiaparelli’s adventurous use of new synthetic fabrics, threads, and fasteners, even when this led to a dry-cleaning disaster. “I had a little string-colored dress—it was like cotton but it was also like something out of a garden. . . . I wore it quite a lot, and well, it was time for it to go to the cleaners because nothing stays immaculate forever. It didn’t come back, you see, because there was nothing to send; there was a little, tiny, round piece of . . . glue. . . . This fabric wasn’t totally tested.”
Diana also patronized Madame Vionnet, and Vionnet interpreted by Mainbocher. An American by birth, Main Rousseau Bocher was born in Chicago and eventually became editor of French Vogue by a circuitous route. He set himself up as dressmaker in Paris at 12 avenue George V in 1930 until the outbreak of war forced him to leave. He was unusual for a couturier in several respects. He was an American; he was a fashion editor who became a designer; and he taught himself to cut and sew. Backed by Elsie Mendl, Kitty (Mrs. Gilbert) Miller, and others, he greatly admired the work of Madame Vionnet and deployed her bias-cut technique to great effect, producing exquisite evening dresses and other fashions of deceptive simplicity that were a runaway success with the American patronnes he condescended to dress.
Fittings with these Paris couturiers constituted the basis of Diana’s fashion education. For the rest of her life she never wavered in her conviction that Paris was the wellspring of all great couture. Ferocious concentration was required of the client. Women of fashion fussed until every aspect of the garment was perfect. Customers like Diana became connoisseurs of cut, fabric, and technique. Talking to George Plimpton about this later, Diana had difficulty conveying the effort that went into it. Whether a shoe, a hat, or a dress, it was, in essence, a highly focused collaboration: “It’s one thing I do care so passionately about—this wonderful, privileged world in which I lived where, literally, actually, it was almost a compliment to a man to drive him absolutely crazy every afternoon with fittings. But of course you were expected to give him as many fittings as he needed.” Being fitted for couture clothes in Paris was not cheap, but Diana was able to obtain them as a mannequin du monde—someone who went to the right parties, was seen at the right places, and wore a designer’s creations to advantage.
In Diana’s opinion, however, the greatest designer of all was Coco Chanel. Twenty years older than Diana, Coco Chanel was already famous—and expensive—by 1929, so being fitted by her was a rare treat. Diana started by going to her shop at 31 rue Cambon, where Chanel sold scarves, handbags, and a few prototypes of what would later be called ready-to-wear. “She’d come in to see about a skirt; she’d always pat me on the back and say, ‘It looks very nice on you, I like you wearing that.’ ” In the 1930s Chanel was in a romantic phase. “Everyone thinks of suits when they think of Chanel. That came later. If you could have seen my clothes from Chanel in the thirties—the dégagé gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros, the roses in the hair, the pailletted nose veils—day and evening!” One of the best presents of Diana’s life came from a member of the d’Erlanger family who generously offered her anything from Chanel that she wanted. The result, said Diana, was a “huge skirt . . . of silver lamé, quilted in pearls, which gave it a marvelous weight; then the bolero was lace entirely encrusted with pearls and diamanté; then, underneath the bolero was the most beautiful shirt of linen lace. I think it was the most beautiful dress I’ve ever owned.”
A dress of this complexity was made in the couture salon of 31 rue Cambon, which was up several flights of stairs. “First, there was the beautiful rolling staircase up to the salon floor—the famous mirrored staircase—and after that, you were practically on a stepladder for five more flights. It used to kill me.” Once she had landed safely, the fitting with Chanel herself was another strenuous experience. There was not much sense of collaboration, though someone as curious as Diana about the technicalities of couture could learn a very great deal. Chanel was a designer who knew exactly what she wished to achieve, and despised drawings. She cut and pinned the model on her clients and was a driven perfectionist.
Coco was a nut on armholes. She never, ever got an armhole quite, quite perfect, the way she wanted it. She was always snipping and taking out sleeves, driving the tailors absolutely crazy. She’d put pins in me so I’d be contorted, and she’d be talking and talking and giving me all sorts of philosophical observations, such as “Live with rigor and vigor” or “Grow old like a man,” and I’d say, “I think most men grow old like women, myself,” and she’d say, “No, you’re wrong, they’ve got logic, they’ve got a reality to them”—with my arm up in the air the whole time! Then if she really wanted to talk, she’d put pins in under both arms so I simply couldn’t move, much less get a word in!
Diana was in awe of almost everything about Coco Chanel. Chanel, she wrote later, was the Pied Piper of contemporary fashion: “Chanel saw the need for total simplification. Corsets, high heels, skirts dragging in the dust had to go. She anticipated the women of the twentieth century.” She loved the way Chanel responded to the natural, unconstrained female body and designed for women who dashed about; and her “fantastic instinct” for arranging clothes for women who sought luxury at the same time. “Smart women went to her shop for short, wool-jersey dresses, tailored suits, slacks, simple black evening dresses short to the knee, and pullovers much like those worn by English schoolboys,” she wrote. But it was not just Chanel’s designs or inspired costume jewelry that Diana admired. “The art of living was to Chanel as natural as her immaculate white shirts and neat little suits.” Talking to George Plimpton later, Diana described Chanel’s wit, the completeness of her taste, the rooms in her house that glowed with beauty. And there was also, of course, the sense of smell, the perfume, the perfection of Chanel No 5. “Chanel was the first couturier who added scent to the wardrobe of the woman. No designer had ever thought of such a thing.”
While Diana thought Coco was entirely fascinating, she did not think she was very nice. She also did not think it mattered. “I’d always been slightly shy of her. And of course she was at times impossible. She had an utterly malicious tongue. Once, apparently, she’d said that I was the most pretentious woman she’d ever met. But that was Coco—she said a lot of things. So many things are said in this world, and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman, she was a monstre sacré. But she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
Diana and Coco Chanel had much in common beyond fashion: dysfunctional but mythologized childhoods, a love of horses, dance, coromandel screens, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and the same blend of artistic vision and pragmatism. More important perhaps, Coco Chanel informed Diana’s thinking about the nature of inspiration itself. Diana admired the way in which Chanel derived ideas from everywhere—from Breton sailors, from the tailoring of her English lovers to the sumptuous jewelry, ropes of pearls above all, of the Russian czars, to which she was introduced by her lover Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the putative murderer of Rasputin. A Chanel suit that Diana bought in the late 1930s was inspired by a Watteau painting; and years later she was certain that the classic boxy Chanel suit of the 1950s was inspired by Russian ethnic clothes during Chanel’s affair with Dmitri. For all that she designed clothes for very rich women, Chanel believed in a democracy of taste, refusing to copyright her designs, and delighting in the idea that she was making duchesses indistinguishable from stenographers. Like Diana, Chanel reveled in trompe l’oeil, the theatrical perspective. “Faking it” was not a question of making cheap copies, but interpreting the original in one’s own inspired way, within the fashion structure of the time.
In the early 1930s it helped Diana greatly that the look of the period played to her strengths. As British Vogue put it rather rudely: “Today, an old boot of a face can win all along the line, since our present standards demand beauty of figure and finish, rather than mere prettiness. . . . If there is any animal today that is the beau idéal for female charm it is probably an otter emerging wet from the stream or a chestnut horse glittering with grooming.” The high fashion of the 1930s required a sleek, slim figure and willingness to devote oneself to the care involved in achieving a gleaming, streamlined surface. Fortunately for Diana it did not call for conventional loveliness. What mattered was one’s style, and that—as Diana had noted in her diary as early as 1918—meant every aspect of one’s image, including the way one stood and walked.
However, “style” went much further than one’s exterior appearance. “Personality” was just as important. When a group of Paris dressmakers drew up a best-dressed list in 1935, they made a point of judging the winners on personality and charm as well as the knack of dressing to best advantage. (One enterprising type went as far as advertising herself throughout the 1930s as a “personality specialist” in the back of Harper’s Bazaar: for a consideration she could modernize the reader’s personality to match the latest fashions.) It was essential to be amusing, and failure to pass the test could lead to a critical reaction. In 1930 Beaton found himself seated next to Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge. He had long admired her from afar but was deeply dismayed by her at close range, dressed in “conventional Chanels” and interested only in gossip. “What a disappointment that woman is,” he wrote in his diary afterward. “She might have been so amusing.”
Aware of the dangers of becoming a gossipy bore, and with time on her hands, Diana embarked on an energetic campaign of self-improvement, catching up on the reading she had neglected at school. “I’d spend days and days in bed reading and think nothing of it. There were so many books. I learned everything in England. I learned English.” This was not reading as understood by an academic student of literature. Diana made long lists of writers including Freud, Spinoza, Nancy Cunard, Isak Dinesen, biographies of Lady Hester Stanhope, and work by Gertrude Stein. Her response was highly visual. She dipped and scanned, and what she took from world literature frequently landed back in the world of fashion: “When I think of Natasha in War and Peace, when she’s just seen a young lady kiss a young man she was obviously having a walkout with . . . I know exactly what she’s wearing. It’s actually known as the ‘Natasha dress.’ ” Reed and Diana would read books together, out loud, which had a further impact on her feeling for language: “When you’ve heard the word, it means so much more than if you’ve only seen it.” Beaton was the first to capture the manner in which Diana spoke in the 1930s, noting her “poetical quality,” her insistence on accentuating the positive, and the way in which she gave color and life to the most quotidian event:
“What a bad film,” one might remark. “Yes, but I always adoare [sic] the noise of rain falling on the screen.” To me, beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins is beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins, but to Mrs. Vreeland: “My dear, she is the star in the sky.” A swarthy brunette may seem ordinary to me, but to Mrs. Vreeland she is “exceptional, my dear, she’s wonderful! A wonderful sulky slut.’”
Around this time Diana threw off the name Emily had given her, with all its fraught associations, for something more in keeping with her grown-up, 1930s European self. Friends in international society began to pronounce her name differently from the English “Die-anna” to something more frenchified: variously “Dee-anne,” “Dee-anna,” and sometimes “Dee-ahna.” This intensified her air of European sophistication, and had the additional advantage of distinguishing her from Diana Cooper and Diana Mosley, though her first name continued to shift around forever more, and English friends called her “Die-anna” until she died. As well as making adjustments to her name, Diana took steps to capture her new image, commissioning a drawing of her European self by Augustus John; and in 1931 she was painted by the society painter William Acton, who took a series of preparatory photographic studies that capture Diana’s European persona almost better than the portrait itself. At one point she slipped one of Acton’s photographs into her own fashion scrapbook. For a moment in the 1930s, in her own mind at least, Diana stood comparison with the writer Princess Marthe Bibesco, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo.
Above all, Diana observed l’art de vivre as practiced by the international beau monde, leaping on the smallest details of their savoir-faire with delight and carrying them home. This was a world in which the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles kept a houseboat with shiny green shutters on the Seine, and took to the rivers when the cares of the world became too much for them; in which Princess Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge dressed her two little girls in hats with skyrocketing feathers to set off her dead-black dress; and in which Lady Mendl dictated memorandums ordaining that her most successful sandwiches should be photographed for Vogue. Diana developed a taste for great luxury, and she was quick to learn the ways of rich friends. “The vision of Diana Vreeland arriving at a friend’s quattrocento villa in Fiesole with her own sheets and with so much luggage and so many books on the de Medici that she nearly overflowed the guest room, has, if anything, grown more vivid in her hostess’s eyes in the past thirty years,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin. But at the same time, following the inspiration of Chanel, she adopted cheap and cheerful Breton tops, Neapolitan trousers, espadrilles, and the thonged sandals she saw on the feet of locals when staying with Mona Williams in Capri in 1935. The most important lesson of her time in Europe was that in the end, style had little to do with money. What counted was the divine spark.
In 1931 Diana and Reed were invited to stay with Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger and his wife at their house Dar Nejma Ezzahra in Tunisia because they were friends of the couple’s son Leo and his wife, Edwina. A composer and eminent musicologist who made the study of Arab music his life’s work, Baron Rodolphe was the odd one out who never went into the d’Erlanger family bank, “which was as queer as if you decided to walk on your hands rather than on your legs.” Dar Nejma Ezzahra was a beguilingly beautiful palace, painted in blue and white, perched on the top of a cliff above the Mediterranean, with terraces of orange, lemon, and oleander all the way up from the sea, where Diana stunned her fellow visitors by swimming in a pink rubber swimsuit. The manservants were dressed in pantaloons with gold and silver brocade and lamé boleros, and little birds flew in and out of marble columns in the hall, where water trickled in a rivulet and gardenias floated. There was a muster of silvery white peacocks. “The top of the palace was flat, and on hot nights we’d go up there after dinner to get the air and look down at the peacocks with their tails spread and their tiny heads against the reflection of the moon shining on the sea.”
Baron Rodolphe did have one disconcerting habit, however. On the first day of the stay, Diana was placed beside him at lunch. As they made light conversation and he paid her compliments (“you know, the sort of business that men say to women by the sea”), Diana noticed that he held a beautiful linen handkerchief. It was “like an absolutely transparent cobweb” that never left his hand and he sniffed constantly. “You’re the night’s morning (sniff) . . . you’re the sun, the moon and the stars (sniff, sniff).” With a growing sense of panic she realized she was sitting next to someone addicted to ether, said to relieve pain and produce intense exhilaration. “ ‘Reed,’ I once said, ‘What happens if I really get a blast of it?’ ‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘Just remember—when he breathes in, you breathe out.’ ” Their fellow guests included Kitty Brownlow, Elsie Mendl, and Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger. They were photographed in a row with Diana in the middle, looking notably chic in a linen dress and white gloves. The photograph appeared in British Vogue in July 1931, and it marked a turning point. Diana had moved from looking in at Vogue to looking out, surrounded by some of international high society’s most fashionable people. The Vreelands had arrived.
In the early 1930s society was constantly on the move, and Diana often slipped over to Paris, taking advantage of the fact that it was now possible to fly from Croydon in the early morning and arrive by lunchtime. Disentangling what actually happened on these trips is not easy. Diana liked to tell a story about sitting next to Josephine Baker at the cinema in Paris in the early 1930s. She had, of course, encountered Josephine Baker before, in New York in the 1920s, and memorably at Condé Nast’s party. But in 1932 Diana met her again when she went to a screening of L’ Atlantide, starring the German actress Brigitte Helm, in a small cinema in Montmartre. Caught up in the film, Diana barely moved a muscle. “I have no idea if I actually saw the movie I thought I was seeing, but I was absorbed by these three lost Foreign Legion soldiers . . . their woes . . . the fata morgana. That means that . . . if you desire water, you see water—everything you dream, you see. But you never reach it. It’s all an illusion.” In the film the desperate soldiers crawl into an oasis to find a very wicked Brigitte Helm surrounded by cheetahs. Spellbound, Diana allowed her arm to drop down beside her in her cinema seat while Brigitte Helm and the cheetahs dispatched an unhappy ending to all concerned. “The lights went on, and I felt a slight movement under my hand. I looked down—and it was a cheetah! And beside the cheetah was Josephine Baker! ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you’ve brought your cheetah to see the cheetahs!’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly what I did.’ ”
On the street outside the cinema there was an enormous white-and-silver Rolls-Royce waiting for Josephine Baker. “The driver opened the door; she let go of the lead; the cheetah whooped, took one leap into the back of the Rolls, with Josephine right behind; the door closed . . . and they were off!” L’ Atlantide appeared in 1932 when Josephine Baker had moved to France, and she did indeed go about Paris in the company of a cheetah called Chiquita. It is perfectly possible that Diana came across Baker and Chiquita leaping into a Rolls-Royce together. They may all have been in the cinema at the same time. But the idea that Diana was able to keep her hand on Chiquita throughout L’ Atlantide collapses when one considers Chiquita’s character. In common with several others in Diana’s new European world, Chiquita was not quite what she seemed. She was a he, of independent disposition, and prone to terrorizing the musicians during Baker’s shows. On the other hand, the possibility that Chiquita was stunned into good behavior by the sight of fellow cheetahs on the silver screen should not be entirely discounted.
Stories told by Diana against herself often revolved around the sense of unreality that pervaded high society in the 1930s. In the face of economic depression and the rise of dictators in Germany, Italy, and Russia, there was more than an element of denial in the gratin’s obsession with trivialities, its intense inwardness, its fancy dress parties, and its constant movement from one modish resort to another. Astonishingly, spas in Germany and Austria continued to be fashionable until the end of the decade. Although Diana said later that she could feel everything “weakening, weakening, weakening” in the 1930s, she and Reed were among those who continued to prefer resorts in Germany and Austria to those in the south of France, and they regularly visited a spa near Freiburg in the company of the Brownlows and d’Erlangers. During one of these sojourns Diana had her only encounter with psychoanalysis. Curious about what this might involve, she consulted an eminent German psychotherapist who had a consulting room at the spa where she was staying. He saw her for three or four sessions, at which point they mutually called a halt. Each consultation left Diana flattened with exhaustion. “I simply had . . . to sleep for twelve hours I was so exhausted talking about myself,” she said. She resolved never to repeat the experience, a point of view allegedly shared by the eminent German psychotherapist. “You can’t handle it. Because you’re not ill,” he is supposed to have said. “It’s a bore for you and me.”
In June 1934, inspired by reading Henry “Chips” Channon’s The Ludwigs of Bavaria, Reed and Diana embarked on a tour of the castles and important places in the life of King Ludwig II. By her own admission Diana and Reed took very little notice of German politics, though there was a moment when Diana peered at Hitler over the edge of a theater balcony and thought his moustache was just plain wrong (she also sent Freck a postcard saying, “Watch this man”). Otherwise the Vreelands were enchanted by everything they saw. But one evening they arrived at their hotel in Munich to find goose-stepping soldiers on the street outside. Diana pushed her way past them to get into the hotel, and even Reed was annoyed with her. “ ‘Really,’ Reed said to me. ‘You’ve got to behave yourself. You simply cannot push your way past these men saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, I’ve got to get into my bath!” ’ ”
It was Diana’s maid who realized that something was terribly wrong. The following morning she rushed into Diana’s room crying, insisting that they must leave at once because something horrible was happening, though she was unable to explain what it was. Diana told her to pull herself together. “But Julie was getting more and more upset until she couldn’t even fasten a hook. She was a very sensible Frenchwoman, nothing simpering about her. She knew she was in very, very bad company.” It was only two weeks later that the Vreelands realized that Julie had been upset on the morning after the so-called Night of the Long Knives, which began on June 30, when Hitler moved against both the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and other critics of his regime. In her memoir Diana asserts that fourteen murders took place in their hotel that night. There is no record of this at all: the murders took place outside Munich at Bad Wiessee. Nonetheless there was a terrifying atmosphere of violence across the city, with hundreds of bludgeonings and arrests. But, like her father before her, turning away from ugliness and unpleasantness had become one of Diana’s habits. As she said: “The curious thing about me is that I only listen to what I want to hear. It’s not all deliberate. It’s just a sort of training of mine because I try to concentrate totally on what I want to hear.”
This trick of positive thinking, of blotting out ugly behavior and ugliness, and dreaming the beautiful, the “duh-vine” into existence had, of course, started years earlier during Diana’s childhood. The dream-come-true atmosphere of the early years of the Vreelands’ marriage and the delights of their new life in Europe had the effect of reinforcing what Diana described as “a sort of training of mine.” But it was not always easy being the children of a mother with this approach to life. Tim and Freck passed time in the nursery with Nanny at the top of 17 Hanover Terrace or in the basement with the butler. Their relationship with their parents was so distant it would now be regarded as neglectful, though such domestic arrangements were typical of the period. Diana’s notion of putting up world maps on the walls of their bedrooms so that her sons would know where she and Reed were traveling was not perhaps entirely helpful in this respect, even if it did discourage a provincial point of view. When Reed and Diana were at home there were privileged visits at stated hours, with occasional unscheduled glimpses of Diana in the distance when she had her rumba lessons. Reed often appeared to say goodnight, beautifully attired in evening dress, before he and Diana went out for the evening.
Neither son remembered being allowed into the gorilla cage at London Zoo on Nanny’s day off so that they would learn not to fear noble animals, as asserted by Diana later. On the other hand, the boys did have a genuine connection to the London Zoo, for Emily had presented it with two bear cubs after one of her hunting trips in the Rockies; and there were excursions with their parents to less glamorous destinations in Britain including the English seaside and a hotel belonging to a cousin of Diana’s in Devon. They also accompanied Reed and Diana to Belton and stayed with their aunt Alexandra at Gilmerton in East Lothian, where Tim Vreeland’s abiding memory was of a girl being dangled upside down after she swallowed mothballs. Tim Vreeland was four when he and his parents arrived in England, so much of his early childhood was spent there. “It was never very comfortable, I will say that. Little boys are very conventional. I often wished she was like other mothers. I wanted the kind my friends had, just an ordinary old mother.” Being raised by someone who minded so much about external appearances was “terrible—in both senses of the word.” Diana loved English clothes for little boys, putting her own in long dressing gowns and small monogrammed slippers with pom-poms. She insisted on dressing her two boys so alike that the visors on their little caps had to be at precisely the same angle.
It was the other side of her positive attitude, her denial of anything negative, that made the boys’ lives particularly difficult. Diana admired Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge’s approach to child rearing: “Her little girls are enchanted by her. Around them everything moves, everything is gay. They live in a continual fairy-tale, conceived by Baba, not Grimm,” said Harper’s Bazaar. “I had made a solemn vow to myself never to allow my children to know that anything in the world was frightening, impure or impossible,” said Diana. But this approach to life reached a pitch of absurdity in the terrifyingly gruesome Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. “That was a bit of all right for them,” she opined. “Nothing wrong for them to see. Everybody had to go! All I can say is that my sons had a very healthy upbringing.” This view was not shared by her sons. Once they went to school, humanity’s darker side came as the most terrible shock. “I feel now that I was deprived of fifty percent of human existence,” said Freck much later.
In November 1933 Diana enjoyed a triumph: She became a “Dame de Vogue” in her own right. The November 1 issue of American Vogue included a drawing by Cecil Beaton of Diana lounging on a garden seat. It was intended, said Vogue, to comfort the reader and put her mind at rest. Mrs. Reed Vreeland was one of “the European highlights of chic” but here she was, sitting in a garden. It all went to prove “that even these glamorous women—these focal points—of Parisian fashion—have their off moments. . . . They loaf, they read, they sleep—even as you and I.” Such reassurance was probably necessary, given Johnnie McMullin’s description of Diana at Mainbocher’s atelier a few pages later:
Mrs. Reed Vreeland . . . is considered one of the most chic of the international set living in Europe. In London, where she has a house in Regent’s Park, she is much admired for her taste in dress, which, because of her striking, exotic personality, is extremely conservative. She is tall and thin, with a profile of a wife of the Pharoahs, a beautiful figure, and jet black hair, which she arranges like a cap on her head, curling at the nape of the neck. She knows what she wants at a glance—a thing that not all women are supposed to know.
As McMullin looked on, Diana chose a black wool Mainbocher coat as the basis of her winter wardrobe. “Under the coat she will wear different crepe de Chine dresses, mostly in colors, together with several different hats, all black.” Diana then turned her attention to evening dresses. “How delighted I am,” she said, “to see black satin again.” She favored an evening dress with two ostrich plumes placed like flowers on its bodice. “It is a new idea,” she remarked. But then her eye lit on a dark blue double-faced satin dress with a train over an underskirt of pleated blue tulle, with blue curled osprey feathers as a corsage decoration. “It will be my grand party dress, because it makes one think of footmen on the stairs,” said Diana, who was sketched wearing Mainbocher’s creations in the same issue.
In spite of her sterling efforts, however, Diana’s Arcadia was not to last. Once again beauty proved to be treacherous. She was, she discovered, not the only woman who considered Reed handsome: English society women could be breathtakingly predatory. “I made great friends among the English during the time I lived there but, then, I wasn’t there to get their men,” she told Christopher Hemphill. “Those English women look after English men like nobody’s baby has ever been looked after. On the other hand, they’ll go after anyone’s husband themselves. Brother, what I saw left and right! I certainly had a more attractive husband than most women have. He wasn’t that flirtatious, but they were, and, naturally, it was flattering to me . . . up to a point.” If an instinct for denial was one price paid by Diana as she fought back from her childhood, Reed’s role in giving her self-esteem was another. “Anyone who has been emotionally wounded is prepared to pay a very high price to preserve the stability of a bond that protects him,” writes Cyrulnik. Reed was kind as well as handsome and the extent to which he resisted as desperate Englishwomen flung themselves at him is not clear. Diana rarely spoke of this, coming closest with: “At times they liked him a bit too much for comfort but we can . . . forget it.”
Money was another disagreeable problem. Diana later maintained that the Vreelands were able to live well but inexpensively in London in the early 1930s, thanks to the relative strength of the dollar against the pound. At some point in 1933, however, their finances suffered a reverse. America was still in the grip of the Great Depression, and although recovery began slowly during 1933, stocks remained volatile and Reed appears to have made some poor investments. Moreover, Reed and Diana, like her parents before them, were mixing in very rich circles, on a relatively modest income, and had spent a great deal of money on 17 Hanover Terrace, believing that they would be there for many years. A favorable rate from the couturiers as mannequin du monde—like the generosity of richer friends—went only so far, and it would have been very difficult for them to live as they did in London without eating into their capital.
From the time she was fourteen and wrote to the “pin-money club” of the Woman’s Home Companion, Diana responded to financial problems by taking small practical steps to relieve the pressure. In London in 1933 she reacted by following the example of other wellborn women, especially Americans, by opening a small exclusive shop for a rich clientele. Diana’s shop sold lingerie, a small selection of scarves, and some fine household linens and was based in a mews near Berkeley Square. Lesley Benson, who had recently divorced Condé Nast and married Rex Benson, helped her to set the business up, but Diana supervised all the work thereafter, causing some amusement among her friends. “I should love to see you among your delicate lines of lingerie,” wrote William Acton from Florence. Running a shop made new, interesting demands on Diana. It drew on her sense of style, her love of luxury, and her perfectionism. The search for designs and fabrics took her frequently to Paris, while most of the sewing was done in a convent by the Sisters of Marie Auxiliatrice in Bow Road, in London’s East End, and the young women in their care. “I was never not on my way to see the mother superior for the afternoon. ‘I want it rolled!’ I’d say. ‘I don’t want it hemmed, I want it r-r-r-rolled.’ ”
Commissioning lingerie called for precision. Discounts had to be negotiated with suppliers; there were irritated exchanges about canceled orders with the fabric house Simonnot-Godard in Paris; and even the nuns were businesslike. While Diana may have been meticulous when commissioning lingerie, sound arithmetic was not her strong point, unlike her friend Mona Williams, who scrutinized every penny in the way of the very rich. Records for the business at the end of 1933 show that Diana’s customers were largely drawn from her friends—Mona Williams bought chemises and sheets, while Edwina d’Erlanger, Syrie Maugham, Kitty Brownlow, Kitty Miller, and Lesley Benson all placed orders, as did Lady Portarlington and Mrs. Fred Astaire. The nightgowns were so beautiful that Edwina d’Erlanger’s sister Mary bought one and wore it as a ball gown. “I was very thin. I was about twenty-three and I saw the most beautiful nightgown which I bought and wore backwards because it was low in the front and in [the] back. It was pink, so I wore it and I had great fun at the ball.” And according to Diana, it was the nightgowns that brought a new acquaintance into the shop, one Mrs. Ernest Simpson.
Diana only knew Wallis Warfield Simpson slightly, though she had been to lunch at her flat at Bryanston Court, where the food was memorably delicious thanks to Wallis’s tutor, Elsie Mendl. Wallis Simpson ordered three luxurious nightgowns and was exact about the deadline—three weeks. Diana remembered that she had already left Ernest Simpson, that she was feeling poor, and thought she splurged on the nightdresses in anticipation of her first weekend alone with the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, a timetable that has led some to suppose the story must be apocryphal because the dates do not tally. Like many of Diana’s stories, however, this one is probably true in essence even if some facts require fine-tuning. It has recently been suggested that the relationship between Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales warmed up much earlier than either of them later suggested, while Wallis was still living with Ernest Simpson, and that their close circle was well aware of it. Mrs. Simpson’s union with the Prince of Wales was probably not consummated until later in the year, but she had good reason to think she might need glamorous nightdresses in the spring of 1934, while Diana was running her lingerie shop.
Then there came a most unexpected blow. “When Reed and I got to Regent’s Park, it was going to be our life. We thought we’d live there for the rest of our lives. You always think you’re going to live somewhere forever. It’s the only way to live—it’s forever!” But it turned out that their life in London was not going to be forever. In what Diana later described as the most ghastly single moment in her life, Reed came home from work one evening and delivered a bombshell: his role had changed, and unless he wished to lose his job with the Guaranty Trust, they were returning to live in the United States. “It was a fait accompli. There was nothing to discuss. There was nothing to do but get dressed and go to dinner.” For once Diana’s brave face deserted her. The Vreelands had been invited to the Savoy by Mona Williams, and Diana was wearing a beautifully pressed pink Vionnet dress with a long banner of pink crepe de chine. By the time they arrived at the Savoy, she looked a mess. “You’ve never seen anyone in such a condition. I was a disgrace. I can still remember Mona’s face when she saw me walking in, looking as if I’d fallen out of bed in this thing. All I’d done was drive from Regent’s Park to the Savoy but I’d had what you’d call a total chemical change. It was a shock. I was absolutely, literally, totally crushed.”
Friends commiserated on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesley Benson wrote to say that Diana had been wonderful about the lingerie business, that she had a real genius for it, and that it was a tragedy that she was leaving. “I am pleased about Reed staying with the Guaranty, and I know you must be, that’s the bright spot.” Another friend wrote: “It is really too dreadful—I know so well how you feel—but you are such a marvelous person I know you will be able to cope with the situation and as long as you have Reid [sic] and the children it doesn’t matter much where you are.” Diana slowly pulled herself together. She wound down the lingerie business. The Vreelands gave notice to Freck’s prep school, taking him out at the end of the spring term in 1934, and they terminated the lease on 17 Hanover Terrace so that it came to an end in June 1934. Then there was a reprieve. Reed, who was suffering from a mysterious debilitation that he seemed unable to shake off, was sent to Switzerland to recover. The Vreelands stayed for several months in the opulent Hotel Beau-Rivage at the lakeside resort of Ouchy near Lausanne, a stay that stretched into the early months of 1935. The change of scene did Reed good. By September 1934 a friend, Ben Kittredge, was writing: “It is wonderful to have seen Reed so much better and to know that he is getting well so rapidly and thoroughly, that at last you have found both the cause and the cure,” and by the end of the year Elsie Mendl remarked: “I am so glad about Reed and how much better he is.”
Diana was fascinated by Lausanne in general and the Hotel Beau-Rivage in particular. “Switzerland before World War II was much more mysterious than it is today. It was full of Greeks and money.” The Aga Khan (who would also appear in Allure) used to bring his girlfriends to the hotel: “always with a different girl but always with the most beautiful girl you’d ever seen in your life. . . . He was a dreamboat, he’d be announced: His Highness, the Aga Khan!—and a personage really entered the room!” A banker from Lyon kept his second family in the hotel, unknown to his first, who lived elsewhere. Even when he was absent his mistress would dress for dinner, covered in jewels. Tim Vreeland was already at prep school in Switzerland by the time his parents came to Lausanne. Reed read Hans Christian Andersen stories to his sons in a large sitting room in front of a fire, and later he and Diana would go downstairs for dinner.
I was so happy in Ouchy, on the water. My bed faced Mont Blanc. . . . Every day was totally and completely different. I can remember thinking how much like my own temperament it was—how much like everyone’s temperament. The light on Mont Blanc was a revelation of what we all consist of. I mean, the shadows and the colors and the ups and downs and the wonderment . . . it was like our growing up in the world.
In May 1935 Diana went ahead to set up a home in New York, with the boys following a month later in time for the long summer vacation. “It’s strange, isn’t it—the things that happen in life over which one has absolutely no control? I thought my life was over. I couldn’t imagine anything other than the totally European life we led.” But as it turned out, a different kind of life was just about to begin, thanks to a slight, clear-eyed, and unusually determined woman called Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar.
On a summer evening in New York in 1936, in a nightclub on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, Reed and Diana Vreeland rose from their table and began to dance. As they eased into a slow foxtrot to the sound of Victor Lopez and his orchestra, heads turned and whispers fluttered round the room. Mrs. Snow’s eye was drawn to Mrs. Vreeland, who was wearing a white lace Chanel dress with a bolero, and roses in her blue-black hair (the better dancer of the pair, she moved with sinuous grace). Carmel Snow was not acquainted with the Vreelands, but she soon found out who they were. She was famous for her intuition about talent, and the next day she telephoned and offered Diana a job. “But Mrs. Snow,” Diana replied, “I’ve never been in an office in my life. I’m never dressed until lunch.” This reaction was tactically correct. Carmel Snow liked her lady fashion editors well connected as well as stylish and talented. “But you seem to know a lot about clothes,” Snow replied. “Why don’t you just try it and see how it works?” In spite of her apparent hesitation, Diana had no choice but to accept. In reestablishing her family in New York, she was going through money like “a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you’re an alcoholic.”
That was how the story was later told. In reality Carmel Snow, who worked at Vogue in the 1920s, had known of Diana as a fashionable New York debutante and had occasionally mentioned her in the magazine. After the Vreelands returned from Europe in 1935, Snow probably did not spot Diana in a white dress by Chanel in summer but in a pink dress by Vionnet in the winter of 1935, at a party where New York society paid for its tickets, a new trend. And Diana had in fact known she would have to earn a living somehow in New York well before she left England. The Vreelands had spent money on 17 Hanover Terrace that would never be recovered. She had been obliged to close her lingerie shop. Reed had been ill. Several months in the sumptuous Beau-Rivage could only have further depleted their funds. At the same time she was unsure of her direction. Before she left Europe, Diana took tentative steps toward becoming an interior decorator by signing an agreement with Syrie Maugham that she would receive a commission on “Syrie” furniture she sold in New York. By the time Snow approached her in New York, Diana had already started work for a small Hearst magazine, Town & Country, that would have involved her in society journalism.
But the outcome of the story was the same. Until this point Diana’s divine spark had been directed at herself and her household. From now on, with her faith in the power of dreams and dream making vindicated, and her “European upbringing” complete, it would be transmitted outward to many thousands of readers. Carmel Snow did not yet understand this, but she knew she had spotted a woman of rare taste and originality who deserved a broader canvas. She telephoned the editor of Town & Country and ordered him to hand Diana over to Harper’s Bazaar. He did as he was told—and another legend was born.