Old Clothes
Not far from the hospital where Diana lay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was going through its own upheaval. It had acquired a charismatic young director called Thomas Hoving five years earlier and was still reeling from his arrival. Hoving was thirty-five when he was appointed. He had presided over a celebrated series of “happenings” in New York parks before taking the job, and he was determined to shake up the museum in the same way, informing its trustees that he regarded the place (and by implication, them) as “moribund,” “gray,” and “dying.” Hoving set about enlarging the building and the museum’s collections in a manner that might politely be described as piratical, but he revolutionized its attitudes, insisted that a populist approach was compatible with scholarship, introduced blockbuster exhibitions, and withstood much criticism for being a huckster as well as a visionary. He caused a stir early in his tenure by declaring that running the Metropolitan Museum of Art was no different from running General Motors, and that it had to be melded into an efficient business enterprise. He quickly lit on its Costume Institute as a potential money-spinner and crowd puller, but it turned out to be a headache.
The Costume Institute had started life independently in 1937, as the Museum of Costume Art, founded by Irene and Alice Lewisohn. Their aim was to raise awareness of dress in human history and to make the case for fashion as one of the decorative arts. The sisters built up a collection of about seven thousand pieces before Irene Lewisohn’s death in 1944. Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor then stepped in with a campaign to bring the collection to the Metropolitan Museum, insisting that it would inspire American designers and act as a spur to independence from Paris in the postwar years. Shaver deployed this argument so successfully that she raised $350,000 from Seventh Avenue to finance the transfer. The Costume Institute enjoyed semiautonomous status from 1947 before it was formally absorbed into the museum in 1960; but activity was low-key and patchy, a state of affairs Hoving was determined to change when he arrived in 1967. His first move was an exhibition called The Art of Fashion. To keep Seventh Avenue happy and involve living designers, he hired the leading fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert to work on the exhibition alongside its curator, making her the first outsider to work on a major show in the history of the Metropolitan. He soon discovered that this was not a good idea when he dropped in late one night to discover Lambert pushing mannequins attired in the clothes of her clients to the front of each display case.
Public relations as a curatorial concept was a step too far, even for Hoving. He closed the doors of the Costume Institute for much-needed building work between 1968 and 1971 and thought about what to do next. Small galleries in the north end of the museum basement were bulldozed to open up larger exhibition spaces; state-of-the-art storage for the ever-expanding collection was installed. After his brush with Lambert, Hoving went to the other extreme and appointed the scholarly Adolph Cavallo to oversee the renovations, but Cavallo’s first exhibition fell flat. The trustees of the Costume Institute’s new Visiting Committee, drawn from the city’s social elite and from Seventh Avenue, decided he lacked the common touch. For his part Cavallo was confronted by a committee who thought that Patricia Nixon’s wedding dress was just the thing to draw the crowds. These tensions resulted in the waning of Cavallo’s star and a vacuum that Hoving found difficult to fill. The Costume Institute had an outstanding curatorial staff led by Stella Blum, but it needed someone to give it the right sort of pizzazz.
In the first instance, however, neither Hoving nor Diana was very keen on the idea that it should be her. The idea of approaching Diana came not from Hoving, but from his curator in chief, Theodore Rousseau, and the museum’s secretary, Ashton Hawkins, both friends of the Vreelands and occasional guests at 550 Park Avenue. Diana’s lawyer, Peter Tufo, also claimed to have had a hand in the matter. After his experience with Eleanor Lambert, Hoving remained extremely nervous about installing anyone from a commercial background. Diana, meanwhile, was not at all sure she was the right person for the task. She had no interest in an academic approach to clothes; her professional instinct was to look for what was fresh and new; and even though she drew on decades of looking at beautiful things as Vogue’s editor in chief, she loathed nostalgia. Her initial reaction to Ted Rousseau’s proposition was unenthusiastic. However, he refused to give up. “He came to see me four or five times . . . and he sat right where you are now and argued with me. I’d say, ‘Ted, I’ve never been in a museum except as a tourist.’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you change around a bit?’ ”
By the time Diana fell ill in March 1972 she knew that no one at Condé Nast was interested in her point of view, and for all the bravado with which she wrote to Pauline de Rothschild, it is not clear that she enjoyed chasing around after consulting work with its attendant financial uncertainty. The proposition from Ted Rousseau was attractive. It came with an office, a secretary, and an annual salary. There was wisdom in going where she was wanted rather than where she was not; and some of her glamorous hospital visitors almost certainly persuaded her to think again, emphasizing that she was not being approached as a conventional curator but precisely because of other, creative talents. The sight of Diana so reduced had a galvanizing effect on her circle, and behind her back they sprang into action. Hoving overcame his reluctance when a group of Diana’s most powerful friends, including Marella Agnelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Babe Paley, and Mona Bismarck (now Mrs. Umberto de Martini) offered to contribute almost half her salary for the first year. It has been suggested that those who agreed to contribute subsequently did not do so; it has also been said that there were some who were asked to contribute but declined. However, with the exception of Mrs. Paul Mellon, who pledged one thousand dollars and had still not produced it at the end of 1972, a file note from the museum makes it clear that all Diana’s friends who agreed to support her paid up.
Diana signed a one-year agreement with the Metropolitan Museum in July 1972 (though she wrote at least one letter that suggests she had decided to take the job by the end of May). It was renewable annually by mutual consent. Her title was Special Consultant, and she was responsible for generating ideas for exhibitions, organizing them, and seeing them through; suggesting sources for additions to the collection and financial gifts; and acting as a link between the Costume Institute, the fashion industry worldwide, and the fashion press. She would report directly to Hoving. For all this she would receive $25,000 for the year, up to $10,000 in expenses (a closely guarded secret), a full-time secretary, and an office, which she proceeded to have painted blood-red all over again. She had work to finish for Vogue in Paris in September, but she would start at the museum on September 5. The apartment at 550 Park Avenue was to be completely spring-cleaned in her absence. Her battered old desk chair would be sent from Condé Nast. “I have been rebuilding my life for the last two months,” Diana wrote to Mainbocher in August. She was full of excitement, tinged with apprehension. “I am ecstatically happy,” she told Ted Rousseau on August 11, 1972, “and I only hope that I don’t let you down or the museum.” In her engagement diary she wrote: “Life is a fine performance. There are entr’actes.” Elsewhere in the diary she scribbled: “Believe in the total authority of the imagination.”
Her first assignment for the Costume Institute was delicate. The Duke of Windsor had died on May 18, 1972, a few weeks before Diana signed her contract. A short time later the duchess agreed to give some of his clothes to the museum. The point of contact had been Ashton Hawkins, who had a connection with the Duchess of Windsor’s private secretary in Paris, John Utter. At some point the idea emerged that there should be an exhibition alongside the gift, though it is not clear whose notion this was. On July 10, 1972, Diana wrote to Hawkins, enclosing a list of the duke’s clothes as she remembered them and saying she thought the men’s cosmetic industry and wholesale tailors could be asked to put up money for the show. In August, Hawkins reported from Paris that Utter was giving the project his full support and he thought they might be able to announce the exhibition and Diana’s appointment simultaneously. He emphasized that the duchess was “changeable” but was sure Diana would sort everything out splendidly. Diana arrived in Paris in early September determined to rise to the challenge. She spent part of every day during her first week in Paris with the duchess and Sydney Johnson, the duke’s devoted Bahamian valet, picking out items of civilian clothing of particular interest.
Then something went wrong. Much later Diana wrote to Hawkins that “the news came from the Palace that we were to stop the proceedings.” As she recollected the affair, she telephoned the duchess’s solicitor in London, who said it would be impossible to do the show. The idea that Buckingham Palace blocked the exhibition then became the accepted version of events. The evidence that survives, however, suggests that it was the “changeable” duchess who had second thoughts, and that Buckingham Palace was greatly relieved. The duchess seems to have decided quite suddenly that it was too soon after the duke’s death for an exhibition. While she had been enthusiastic about the idea while sorting through the duke’s clothes with Diana and Sydney, she appears to have changed her mind within a few days and decided that the museum was behaving dishonorably in proposing the idea. The biographer Hugo Vickers paints a picture of enormous strains in the household in the months after the duke died. As the duchess’s health deteriorated, she became increasingly unpredictable, turning against Utter, who supported the idea of an exhibition, and sacking the loyal Sydney Johnson when he asked for more time off to look after his children after his wife died. “It was like a small court, with little for anyone to do and all kinds of machinations going on in the background,” writes Vickers.
Given their long-standing friendship, however, it was easier for both the duchess and Diana to blame the palace while keeping up the pretense that everything was going beautifully. When Diana heard that the president of the Metropolitan Museum, Douglas Dillon, was in Paris, she enlisted his help in sustaining this illusion because by now the duchess was having second thoughts about the gift itself, let alone an exhibition. “Please forgive me tracking you down in Paris as you probably are here on a flying trip,” Diana wrote in some panic. “It is my suggestion that you call and see the Duchess of Windsor if you can possibly manage it. I have struck some rather sticky wickets and I think you could clear the air so easily by just assuming all was going beautifully.” In an attempt to restore harmony, Diana and Douglas Dillon both wrote to the duchess assuring her of the museum’s honorable intentions and saying that they would wait until the time was right, reassurances that suggest that it was the Duchess of Windsor, rather than Buckingham Palace, who blocked the show.
However, the collapse of the Windsor exhibition put Diana under real pressure. She was in Paris on her own, and had little idea how to do the job for which she was now being paid. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was an unfamiliar institution with its own ways; and she was working, at long distance, with colleagues to whom she had barely been introduced. The role of special consultant was an experiment in itself. Expectations were running high. While not explicitly hostile to her appointment, the curatorial team at the Costume Institute was watching to see what she could add. It was already starting to look as if she had failed her very first test, and she had to change tack fast. But there was no one on hand to advise her and she had to feel her way.
The Spanish couturier Balenciaga had died on March 23, and Diana’s correspondence suggests that she began tentatively to explore the idea of an exhibition of his oeuvre as early as May 1972. To her great relief her first formal meeting on the subject was productive. The Museum Bellerive in Zurich had mounted its own Balenciaga exhibition two years earlier. Diana flew from Paris to see its curators, whereupon they offered to lend her anything she wanted, including Balenciagas from the Bellerive’s own collection. Their exhibition had been imaginatively mounted and made Diana think afresh about backdrops, mannequins, and lighting. She returned to Paris, hired a temporary secretary, and set about some detective work from her room in the Hôtel de Crillon. She met Madame Felicia, the dressmaker in Balenciaga’s atelier who finished his last work. Her secretary tracked down Balenciaga’s right-hand man, Ramon Esparza, who agreed to lend documentary film of the master at work; Diana unearthed unpublished photographs by Tom Kublin; and Susan Train at Vogue’s Paris office rode to the rescue with much practical help.
What proved unexpectedly hard, however, was the task that should have been easiest: persuading friends in Europe who owned Balenciagas to loan them to the Metropolitan Museum. This was partly because the friends who responded quickly and efficiently had quite as efficiently given away their unwanted Balenciagas years earlier. Pauline de Rothschild, on the other hand, still had her Balenciagas but was not as cooperative as she might have been. “Please Pauline do not be bored,” begged Diana in one letter from the Hôtel de Crillon. “As I told you it is agreed that you had the most interesting clothes from Balenciaga and it is important that you be well represented in order to make the exhibition complete.” Even when they were cooperative, Balenciaga owners did not seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation—an understandable reaction when it was urgent for Diana only. “Everyone loves and adores Balenciaga but are very lazy about finding the one or two dresses that would make such a difference. . . . Do say a little prayer for me as I need the support at the moment very badly,” Diana wrote to Cecil Beaton. Beaton had mounted a costume exhibition at the V&A the year before, and agreed to look in its collection on her behalf. But it was all a great change from Vogue, where Diana had only to pick up the phone to get what she wanted. Sitting alone in the Hôtel de Crillon with one temporary secretary, Diana felt her initial exhilaration give way to anxiety and frustration as she began to understand the scale and complexity of the task ahead. “I am now beginning to wonder how you ever put your show together,” Diana sighed to Beaton on October 6.
Confronted by such unexpected difficulties, she postponed her return to New York twice. Shopping for Kay Graham was canceled unceremoniously by telegram: “Things moving very slowly in Europe . . . feel terrible letting you down . . . know you will get along famously . . . any trend that looks well on oneself is fashion please forgive me.” But slowly the tide began to turn. Mrs. Gardner Bellanger agreed to take over administrative arrangements in Paris. Countess Aline Romanones, who had been Madrid editor of Vogue, undertook to approach a group of aristocratic Spanish women on Diana’s behalf. Romanones was successful in unearthing Balenciagas in Spain that had never been seen before, including a child’s communion dress, and in helping to secure the loan of the wedding dress of Queen Fabiola of Belgium. Diana soon realized that she would have to round up more designs than she could actually use, and from every period of Balenciaga’s career. In New York, Mrs. Paul Mellon, Mrs. Joseph Kennedy, Doris Duke, and art collector Mrs. Charles Wrightsman all agreed to lend significant garments. After her grumpy first reaction Pauline de Rothschild produced no fewer than eighteen pieces, including some that were very rare. The Musée de la Mode et du Costume de la Ville de Paris loaned a dress belonging to Daisy Fellowes from 1949; and Diana herself contributed a “baby doll” dress from 1957, a black lace overdress with ruffles at the hem, worn over a closely fitted sheath dress.
However, it soon turned out that locating the right sort of Balenciagas from the important moments in his career was only half the battle. Hoving agreed that a show could take place in March 1973, barely six months after Diana started. This left her very little time to work on the way the exhibition was presented, and there was a huge amount to do to make it look arresting. Diana hated the Costume Institute’s mannequins, maintaining that they were too lifelike, gave her the creeps, and made the museum’s costume exhibitions look like a display in Saks. She battled to use mannequins made by the Swiss manufacturer Schlappi, which were taller than the average person, were produced in different finishes, and had an abstract quality about them that Diana greatly preferred. Furthermore she insisted they be as close to the visitors as possible, and not behind glass, and should be grouped together above head height for maximum drama.
The main problem, however, was that surrounded by inert mannequins, Diana badly missed the Girl. Where was the woman who actually animated Balenciaga’s designs, with her thoughts, her dreams, her inner world? Deeply frustrated by her absence, Diana drew on years of experience in fashion to re-create the impact and drama of Balenciaga at his most spectacular. She demanded subtle lighting effects on the dresses, insisting that background was as important as foreground and that color was critical to creating atmosphere. The connection between Balenciaga’s designs and Spanish culture was highlighted in paintings from the Met’s collection by Goya, Velázquez, and Picasso; and Diana prevailed upon the museum to loan a magnificent suit of Spanish armor as a centerpiece for the show. Ramon Esparza’s documentary films were cleaned up, dubbed with new music, and looped, a process paid for by Halston. Working in three dimensions for the first time, Diana was able to appeal to other senses. The exhibition was accompanied by flamenco music, and Balenciaga perfume was sprayed through the galleries two or three times a day. When it came to dressing the mannequins, it was Mrs. Vreeland the fashion editor who prevailed, not the scholars. Diana was interested in conveying the tactile qualities of Balenciaga’s universe. In the process, she had no compunction about stepping on curatorial toes, and her instinct for what would have impact now led to some wild anachronisms. Curatorial staff looked on appalled as Diana improvised a sleeveless Balenciaga sack designed in 1956 as a minidress on a tall Schlappi mannequin.
As she went through the process for the first time, Diana discovered that putting on a costume exhibition involved an enormous amount of unexpected and invisible work, not to mention an aptitude for hustling. She had to talk many people into providing everything for nothing. She and her secretary handled a multitude of details, from clearing permissions, checking the spelling of names, keeping in touch with every donor to the exhibition in the United States and Europe, acknowledging the clothes as they arrived, and finding the right accessories for every outfit, not to mention editing, mounting, and grouping the displays. A habit of hard work and thirty-seven years in the world of fashion stood Diana in good stead as the opening drew closer. She pulled in all the outside help she could, most of it given out of friendship. Kenneth Jay Lane provided jewelry; Priscilla Peck designed the catalog; Richard Avedon, David Bailey, and Bert Stern contributed photographs. Ara Gallant helped with wigs. Pauline de Rothschild and Gloria Guinness wrote articles for the accompanying program. Oscar de la Renta, fashion illustrator Joe Eula, and Eleanor Lambert all lent their assistance. This set up tensions that lasted for a very long time. “She’d never say what it needed,” said one long-term member of the Costume Institute staff. “Then, just before the opening, she’d call in every famous person she knows . . . to save the show.”
Though modest compared with what followed, the preview party for Diana’s first exhibition included New York’s plutocrats and Diana’s friends as well as Balenciaga donors and many Seventh Avenue designers. Kitty Miller lent a Goya as well as a dress, though she complained loudly that she was taking it home because no one could see it in the wretched subtle lighting. Press reaction was favorable, and the exhibition stimulated a debate about the importance and relevance of the clothes in 1973. Halston, for one, found it inspiring though Calvin Klein thought that most of the clothes looked out of date. Standing beside a raincoat of 1962 that was shown with boots and patterned stockings, Diana remarked once again that she often saw what people thought of as street fashion for the first time at Balenciaga. Bernadine Morris, senior fashion writer of the New York Times, observed how fast the world had changed since the late 1960s. “Balenciaga closed his house in 1968, when fashion, like other institutions, was splintering,” she wrote. “It’s a shock to realize it was only five years ago.”
The Balenciaga Exhibition attracted more than 150,000 visitors, making it—as far as the museum was concerned—a success. But Diana was slightly disappointed by the low-key press reaction and became anxious about the renewal of her contract. Under the terms of her severance agreement with Vogue, her full Condé Nast pension was payable only from 1975, and she had given up the salary and expenses otherwise due to her as consulting editor. She needed to keep going at the museum for at least one more year to bridge the gap. According to writer Michael Gross, the turning point came at a lunch party in 1973 at the Connecticut home of Oscar de la Renta, when Diana’s friends rode to the rescue once again. Kenneth Jay Lane and Bill Blass were among the guests and conversation turned to Diana, who was not present. They knew she was worried about the lack of press coverage and about the renewal of her contract. The Balenciaga exhibition showed just how capable she was; and she had also made a case that benefited them all, for the couturier as artist. They knew she had exciting ideas for other exhibitions. As it happened, Oscar de la Renta had just been made president of the dressmakers’ lobby, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), founded a decade earlier. At lunch that day, the guests decided to support Diana by making the CFDA a benefactor of the Costume Institute.
This was helpful, but it was even more helpful when Oscar de la Renta, president of the CFDA and thus cobenefactor of the institute, turned his attention to the Party of the Year. The Party of the Year had originally been conceived by Dorothy Shaver and Eleanor Lambert as a way of adding to the Costume Institute’s endowment in 1948, but in its early years it was essentially an industry event. “It was basically Seventh Avenue, a lot of Jewish people,” recalled an institute staffer. “A rabbi’s wife who knew everyone did the seating.” From the moment Oscar de la Renta became involved, the Party of the Year changed. Its focus swiveled toward circles where fashion and high society intersected. All guests, regardless of fame or fortune, were obliged to buy high-priced tickets. To make it attractive to New York’s finest, it had to be exclusive. To make it exclusive, its committee had to be drawn from New York’s elite, which in turn bound them into supporting the Costume Institute. As far as Thomas Hoving and the Metropolitan Museum were concerned, this was a most welcome development, not just because the Party of the Year brought glamour and social distinction but because the strategy was such a success that revenue from party tickets helped to finance the Costume Institute exhibitions thereafter. For example, expenditure on one exhibition in 1974 was estimated at around $100,000; but costs were covered before it opened by sponsorship of $35,000 and Party of the Year ticket receipts of $78,200.
One effect of the CFDA’s support for the Costume Institute and its close involvement in the Party of the Year was to boost the influence of fashion industry figures at the Met more widely, to the dismay of some who regarded the emergence of this new circle of influence and power as sinister. This was not, as alleged later, an aristocratizing plot orchestrated by Diana from her basement office on behalf of her fashionable friends. Apart from being insufficiently strategic, she was far too busy to undertake such a project. In attracting new sources of money to the Met, she was doing what she had been asked by Thomas Hoving; and in any case support from the fashion industry had been central to the development of the Costume Institute since 1944. She had little direct involvement in the Party of the Year, which was run by the museum’s development office. She gave away as few tickets as possible and regarded making her friends pay as a way of raising some money for the Costume Institute. “Mrs. Vreeland was actually quite discreet about her involvement in the development of the actual guest list,” her assistant from that period remarked. “She did not talk about who she considered ‘in’ or ‘out.’ ”
By the time of Diana’s second exhibition in 1973, Bernadine Morris of the New York Times noticed that the party’s character had subtly changed. Each of 450 people paid $150 to dine in the Great Hall, surrounded by the Chinese porcelains on permanent display, upon tablecloths of an Oriental pattern chosen by Oscar de la Renta himself. As president of the CFDA he had sent the fabric around to some of his members’ workrooms to be stitched into tablecloth shape. He was also credited by Bernadine Morris with the design of at least three of the most eminent guests’ dresses: the mauve satin-back crepe worn by Mrs. Douglas Dillon, the flowing aqua chiffon dress of Mrs. de la Renta, and a red chiffon worn by Mrs. Jacob Javits, though Morris noted with some alarm that both the chiffon dresses sported small burn holes by the end of the evening, which suggested that they constituted a major fire hazard. At least some of the guests, according to Morris, managed to tear their eyes away from each other and look at the exhibits.
The exhibition was called The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties: Inventive Clothes 1909–1939. The real stars of the show were the clothes themselves, chosen by Diana not just for their beauty but for the extent to which they exemplified new ideas: the new freedoms heralded by Poiret; the simple relaxed suits of Chanel, and her embrace of male fashion for the lives of modern women; the craftsmanship and inventiveness of Vionnet, the first to cut fabric on the bias so that it moved with the female body; the wit, artistry, and surrealism of Schiaparelli; the romantic fantasies in lace of the Callot Soeurs; and the Orientalism and the colors of the Fauves and Ballets Russes. Each design represented experiments in length and line that would play themselves out over and over again throughout the twentieth century. There were pieces in the exhibition that Diana remembered well from Europe in the 1930s, lent by other collections at the urging of donors such as Mona Bismarck and Millicent Rogers. Once again Diana called for assistance from every direction, and battled to ensure that each exhibit was beautifully staged and lit. Exhibition visitors wandered through the galleries to the strains of Gershwin, Erik Satie, Stravinsky, and Duke Ellington. Chanel perfume was sprayed in the galleries twice a day. Contemporary paintings, by Guy Pène du Bois and Kees van Dongen among others, helped to set the scene.
This time, the reaction was unequivocal. The press called it a “dazzler,” and the designers were enthralled. Apart from remarking that it was the best costume exhibition he had ever seen, Bill Blass was convinced it would have “the most shattering effect on fashion.” Valentino, who was closer to French couture than most of those present, was stunned by the Vionnet dresses at close range. The show had such an impact on Issey Miyake that he arranged for it to go to Japan, believing that it would open the eyes of Japanese designers. Harold Koda and Richard Martin later wrote: “The foremost accomplishments of Halston in the mid- and late-1970s seem so clearly predicated on his interpretative engagement with this show.” The exhibition was credited with introducing a new generation of New York’s designers to the possibilities of the bias cut; and it revealed Diana as a connoisseur as well as a catalyst of fashion. It also inspired Irving Penn to shoot a photographic essay: he greatly preferred photographing clothes on uncomplaining Schlappi mannequins to working with temperamental models. The exhibition and its staging caught the imagination of the public too. The Balenciaga show had been a commercial success, with more than 150,000 visitors. This one broke records. Almost 400,000 people went through the galleries, vindicating Diana’s perspective, her showmanship, and her taste, and ensuring that there was no further question about her position at the Met.
Thus far Diana’s exhibitions had focused on the couture. The show that followed took her back even further to years of adolescent dreaming as she gazed at the goddesses of the silver screen. Hoving maintained later that most of her best ideas came from him, but that this one was an exception. “She uttered one word, ‘Hollywood.’ It was my turn to shout, ‘Consider it done.’ ” Diana recollected—probably more accurately—that when she first mooted the idea, Hoving’s response was “Why are you dragging Hollywood into the Met?” Once Hoving came around to the idea, Diana went to Los Angeles and embarked on a major search, assisted by costume designer Robert La Vine. This time, the chief difficulty she encountered was Hollywood’s lack of respect for its own past. Costumes were cut up and reused, and many studios did not keep or catalog them. The people who preserved Hollywood costumes were all too often obsessive private collectors who refused to let Diana over the doorstep, let alone borrow the clothes.
She eventually broke through. Paramount and Warner Brothers had kept their more significant items. The family of David O. Selznick had preserved the costumes of Gone With the Wind. Mary Pickford had somehow managed to hold on to the costumes from all her films and allowed Diana to explore the attic of her house, Pickfair (faithfully accompanied by Tim Vreeland, who was banned from going to see Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty with his mother in the evenings on the grounds that he was too middle-aged). Mary Pickford had not been quite so successful in hanging on to her curls, which Diana found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, along with Mae Murray’s costume from The Merry Widow. She was stunned by the quality of the workmanship. Carmel Snow and Diana had given the designer Adrian very little support when he moved from Hollywood to Seventh Avenue, but Diana raved about him as a costume designer, along with Travis Banton, Walter Plunkett, and a host of less-known names. “The basis was perfect designing and incredible workmanship—the cut of décolletage, the embroidery, the mounting of a skirt, and miles and miles of bugle beads,” she wrote. In Diana’s view the best Hollywood costumes were as good as anything produced by the couture.
On her travels around Hollywood Diana met a fanatical collector of movie stills. He allowed her to search through thousands of images until she found costumes she remembered from her youth that had disappeared from view. This resulted in one of the most controversial aspects of the exhibition—Diana’s audacity in commissioning replicas when she was unable to find the original, or where the piece in question was too damaged to have any impact. Furs were often “fur interpretations” by Max Koch, from pelts supplied by Diana’s old friends in the fur district; jewelry was made especially by Kenneth Jay Lane; and most of the accessories were new. Designers who helped with replicas of Hollywood costumes for the exhibition included Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Arnold Scaasi, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, and Stan Herman. They were fully acknowledged, and every copy was faithfully spelled out in the accompanying catalog. But there was a feeling in the curatorial world that it was not done to mix up replicas with originals in this way; that when it came to the point the difference was not made sufficiently clear; and that it was somehow misleading for uninformed visitors who might not bother to read the small print.
The uninformed visitors did not seem to mind one bit, as they lost themselves in a shimmering world of tinsel and marquee lights. They found Marilyn Monroe on an elephant loaned by Andy Warhol. They saw her skirt catching the breeze in The Seven Year Itch. They encountered Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and Greta Garbo. They gazed at Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady with its fabulous black-and-white designs by Cecil Beaton. They wandered through galleries scented with “Femme” by Parfums Rochas to soundtracks from Top Hat to Dr. Zhivago. Judy Garland sang “Get Happy.” “That’s the best advice anyone can have,” said Diana on the audio guide. “Movies were the big trip of the twentieth century and put magic in our lives.” They took people to worlds of which they could only dream. “It is about the dreams, the grandeur of Hollywood. It’s Travis Banton taking you across the Sahara in flowing chiffon. It’s Queen Christina dressed historically, romantically, the way you’d prefer history to be. That’s the idea of Hollywood. Do it Big. Do it Right. Give it Class.”
Backstage, Diana’s working routine remained the same. After Ferle Bramson became her secretary in 1974, she telephoned with a raft of instructions from home first thing in the morning and then left her undisturbed until after midday, whereupon she would sweep in and leave Bramson with no further time to herself. There was an enormous amount to do, and Diana was meticulous in the way she set about it. Once Diana had an exhibition in view, it naturally became the focus of much of her work. But she had to think ahead too, and just as she had worked on several issues of Vogue simultaneously, there were always two or three other ideas in the pipeline. It took time to establish what was available and to work out whether the clothes that existed really added up to a major exhibition. Research for Fashions of the Hapsburg Empire in 1979–80, for example, began three years earlier in 1976. “It was,” said Bramson, “a great editing process, a sifting.” Bramson had the greatest respect for Diana’s creativity. “The ideas poured out of her,” she remembered. Though the museum’s personnel department warned her that Diana was difficult, her boss’s whims became too much for her only once: Bramson had diligently arranged a large number of photos for the Hollywood exhibition when Diana came in and mixed them all up again because she was in a bad mood. Bramson was so upset that she broke a pencil in half and said, “I quit” before running off in tears. Diana, who rarely thanked staff members for anything, never apologized either; but this time she realized she had gone too far. Her way of making it up was to soothe her secretary with an interesting story about a beautiful person: “I say, Miss, did I ever tell you the story about Cher?”
“It could be terrible even if she liked you,” said Bramson, but it was naturally even worse if she did not. Stella Blum and Diana had a very strained relationship in the years that they worked together. As associate curator, Stella Blum’s responsibility was to ensure the historical accuracy of each exhibition. When Diana rode roughshod over the facts, Stella Blum’s professional reputation suffered, something Diana willfully failed to understand, implying that Blum was a dreary little mouse and that her constant emphasis on scholarship was dull. “You had to do things Mrs. Vreeland’s way. And be prepared for the way to change from day to day,” Bramson recalled. “Mrs. Vreeland’s way” was somewhat fluid. Nothing was ever decided until the moment an exhibition opened. Even the night before the preview, Diana was capable of moving everything around and starting again, just as she had insisted on reshoots until the last minute at Vogue. However, Diana was frequently rescued from crass mistakes by the curatorial team, who went around the exhibits making alterations in her wake, doing their best to ensure, where they could, that the costumes were presented with accurate information. There were those who felt that Diana would not have survived her first year without this. On the other hand, there were others who believed that Stella Blum could have tried harder to understand Diana’s point of view. “They kept it pleasant on the surface,” said Bramson. “But they really butted heads.”
From the time of the setup for Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design onward, Diana was also assisted by large teams of volunteers, many of whom went on to have notable careers in fashion. In 1974 her helpers included Tonne Goodman and André Leon Talley of Vogue. Once she trusted an intern, she trusted him or her implicitly, though, as always, that intern had to be capable of running off with Mrs. Vreeland’s more gnomic remarks and bringing something back. Some volunteers were terrified by her fierce growl and imperious, shouty manner when she was displeased. For others working as a volunteer was a life-changing experience. Diana had complete confidence in Tonne Goodman, and André Leon Talley earned her trust quickly too. On his first morning Stella Blum handed him a box full of purplish metal disks and informed him that it was the chain mail dress worn by Lana Turner in The Prodigal and that his task for the day was to put it back together. After struggling with it for a while, he worked out what to do and assembled the dress on a mannequin. At lunchtime Diana glided in. He watched her from behind a pillar. Diana’s Vogue had inspired his own dreamworlds as a very tall African-American teenager with an eccentric interest in fashion in North Carolina. He had admired her passionately from a long distance for years, but it was the first time he had ever seen her at close range. “She was a solo pageant,” he recalled. Diana stared at the Lana Turner dress for a long time. Then she sent for him and, in a dream-come-true for Talley, kept him by her side for six weeks. Once she was sure he was committed to a life in New York fashion, she exerted herself mightily to find him a job. “He knows about every couture dress of the last fifty years and he’s worn ’em all,” she said by way of recommendation to Oscar de la Renta’s right-hand man Boaz Mazor.
George Trow of The New Yorker caught up with them all just before the Hollywood exhibition opened in November 1974. Diana was still fulminating about the mannequins but had been taking corrective action:
Well, first of all we knock off all the bosoms. All the ba-zooms go. We had a little Japanese carpenter with a tiny little saw—exquisite instrument—and he goes rat-a-tat . . . boom! Rat-a-tat . . . boom! I mean, he was doing fifteen ba-zooms a minute. Ba-zooms were falling. The guards were going absolutely dotty.
Diana walked Trow through the exhibition. “This is from Madame Satan,” she said, pointing to a remarkable red cape embroidered with silver and gold. “She seduces her own husband at a party on a dirigible.” This came as Trow was recovering from Diana’s exegesis of Greta Garbo. “Garbo. Garbo! . . . she has the en plus of amoureuse, and she has a little gray monkey with a scarlet hat and coat. Oh! How I have worked on that monkey’s little hat.” Stuart Silver of the museum’s display department trailed around miserably behind them. The exhibition was due to open in two hours, all the bases had to be painted, and each time Diana moved a mannequin, it had to be relit. “Stuart works upstairs, in the more refined part of the museum,” said Diana, patting him on the back. “But don’t forget, boys, this is where the money is!’’ The exhibition was not perfect, thought Trow. The odd mannequin joint was exposed and the program was sketchy. But Mrs. Vreeland had something in common with the great Hollywood producers: she knew how to make people like what they saw. “The message of her shows at the Metropolitan . . . [was] ‘It’s Good! It’s Better! It’s Best! It’s a million miles away! But it’s all yours! Come and get it!’ ”
Numbers had helped to drive Diana out of Vogue. Less than four years later, numbers put her into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s record books. After the The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties broke one set of records, Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design broke them all over again. Nearly 800 thousand people visited the exhibition between November 21, 1974 and August 31, 1975, four times more than the most successful exhibitions anywhere else in the museum. “No curator in the history of the Met ever had a more successful run than Diana Vreeland,” said Hoving. She was back in The New Yorker, back in business, and back in fashion.
Beyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its exhibitions, New York was changing fast. Many who lived in the city through the 1970s thought its decline terminal. Its manufacturing industries dwindled away, causing rising unemployment and spiraling social problems. The city teetered on bankruptcy, and was overwhelmed by a crime wave and a murder rate that made it notorious worldwide. As mugging and robbery spread uptown from the city’s poorer enclaves, many of New York’s well-to-do elderly were driven indoors by fear. Diana felt the fear too, quite acutely. “When people ask me what the greatest change in my life is, I always say it’s being afraid. . . . I used to be afraid of nothing.” However, she addressed the matter by taking taxis, and advantage of her friends’ chauffeurs. Indeed, she could be a bracing sort of chum to timorous types of her own age. Kenneth Jay Lane recalls that one of her acquaintance went blind, and then regained her sight after five years. Anxious to catch up on what she had missed, she asked Diana, as her most switched-on friend, to take her to a movie. They set off to the cinema and settled back in their seats. After about ten minutes the friend began to hyperventilate with horror. The film was Deep Throat. “ ‘Why did you take me to that, Diana?’ she said, clutching the wall of the foyer outside. ‘Well,’ said Diana. ‘If you haven’t seen anything for five years, wouldn’t you want to see something you’ve never seen before?’ ” (At a lunch party where this story was reported, the butler is said to have dropped his tray.)
Far from lurking fearfully in her apartment, Diana became a dominant social force in New York in the 1970s. This was partly because of her job at the museum. “This is a working man’s town,” she once observed. “Nobody can sit here and do nothing.” She was perceived to have great social and professional power because of her role as special consultant to the Met, but she was also sought after because she was stimulating and amusing company, with a vigorously open mind and an equally open eye. David Bailey noticed that she had a habit of changing the subject when a conversation strayed into an area she knew nothing about, but others were less astute. “In the space of twenty minutes she becomes ecstatic over subjects that include surfing, country rock, meditation, the food at Ballato’s, Equus, water (‘It’s God’s tranquilizer, I enjoy just watching it flow.’), young designers (Calvin Klein, Stephen Burrows), sky, a new health food, her masseur, the Mediterranean life, brandy snifters, Floris scent, a persimmon, waterskiing, Rigaud candles, new potatoes (‘tight-skinned,’ like Chinese ivories), fresh air, the cooking course at the YWCA, and the look of post–World War II girls,” wrote one astonished observer. “Her capacity for enthusiasm is astonishing. ‘My God,’ she declares, ‘What have we got in life? Love, friendship, work, guts, and all these delicious tiny fragments that can be the most attractive things in the world.’ ” Diana was delighted when her grandson Nicky came to live with her for a time in 1973 while he was at NYU. “There was real intimacy, partly because she didn’t settle for any idea of age,” he said. “She had lots of ‘old’ friends. But ultimately, ‘vitality’ was what interested her, regardless of age.”
In the 1970s New York’s energy flowed through new channels. The Colony restaurant was eclipsed by the rustic floors and tables of Mortimer’s. El Morocco made way for Régine’s nightclub down the block from Diana at 502 Park Avenue. Often dressed in black, arms extravagantly covered in bangles, lips and cheekbones redder than ever, Diana was difficult to miss. She was seen at Régine’s in the company of Warren Beatty, Iman, Jack Nicholson, and Anjelica Huston. Her social life expanded to take in whole new party sectors. “I was never an embassy girl,” she said to George Trow. “And now! The French! The Persians! The Italians! . . . I am constantly at the consulates.” At the same time she went to parties that would have made most people in their seventies dive for cover. Andy Warhol watched her arrive with Lucie Arnaz at a party given by Halston’s friend Victor Hugo: “He had lots of liquor and beautiful boys I’d never seen before . . . and there was a drag queen there, a former Cockette named I think Jumpin’ Jack and he had about 18 pounds of tit.” George Trow spotted Diana at a dinner given by the founder of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, and his wife, Mica. The guests included Mr. and Mrs. William [Chessy] Rayner, Kenneth Jay Lane, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Eberstadt, Andy Warhol, Maxime McKendry, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, and Baby Jane Holzer.
The same people, and many others, appeared for dinner at 550 Park Avenue. “What she did was mix people up,” said Bob Colacello of Interview. “It was partly connected with the museum but not entirely. . . . She had the curiosity of a truly great hostess.” Diana was at Studio 54 with Halston for Bianca Jagger’s birthday party when she rode in on a white horse, and a year later Bob Colacello found her there again, shimmying away at Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday party. “It really becomes more like pagan Rome every day,” said Colacello. “I should hope so, Bob!” replied Diana. Leo Lerman, who was there too, was less convinced it was all for the good. “Supplicating figures on the pavement kneeling, begging to come in,” he wrote in his diary on the same night. “The Studio 54 rings of Hell. Beardsley out of Moreau. . . . Diana Vreeland on the floor gyrating and swaying and shaking. A red, green, gold, glittering blackness.”
Diana’s friends and acquaintances flowed through the Costume Institute, and often joined her for a sandwich lunch. It was “a world of wonders” for Ferle Bramson, who found herself being kissed by Mick Jagger one minute, and rescued by the boys from Warhol’s Factory the next. (“Mick is the most attractive man in New York when he’s had one or two days’ rest,” said Diana.) Annie Hopkins Miller, who had worked with Diana as an accessories editor at Bazaar and was now a volunteer at the museum, worried protectively that Mrs. Vreeland’s courtiers saw her as a camp joke. There may have been those who did, but neither Nicholas Haslam nor Bob Colacello agreed. “She was too strong a personality to be camp,” said Haslam, who called her frequently, long after life took him away from New York. Colacello agreed: “I really felt very close to her—she was like a grandmother and though at least one of my grandmothers was also rather original, it was difficult to find anyone as sophisticated and original as Mrs. Vreeland.”
Diana could become so wrapped up in her friends’ lives that she became positively bossy. One friend thought she had missed her calling as a doctor, given the frequency with which she recommended pills, laid out health regimens, and cracked her friends’ backs. She gave most people she liked a nickname. The photographer Priscilla Rattazzi was known as “Wopola.” She was not politically correct. “This was before the days of political correctness but it was refreshing even then,” said Bob Colacello. “You’re so lucky you’re a wop,” she was fond of saying to him. “Because, when a wop walks into a room, it lights up.” (Richard Avedon, on the other hand, found Diana’s anti-Semitic tone extremely distasteful.) She became involved in friends’ problems. “If you told her about a difficulty over dinner she would follow up a day or two later,” said Haslam. “She certainly didn’t forget.” “She was very good at pep talks,” said Colacello, who noted that she could be disapproving, too. “She was not an intellectual. Most of the conversation when you went to dinner consisted of her telling stories about the past or about people we both knew. It was, really, gossip.” Amid all this, one friendship in the 1970s stood out—with Andy Warhol’s business partner Fred Hughes.
Against a 1970s background of huge deficits and spiraling crime, the avant-garde acquired a new edge and intensity. Its ringmaster, Andy Warhol, moved his Factory from East Forty-Seventh Street downtown to 33 Union Square West in 1968. Diana had known Warhol for years, since the days when he came into Bazaar with his drawings of shoes, but the relationship was always uneasy. Diana found Warhol a puzzle; and as he became an international star, Warhol preferred not to be reminded of the days when he was just “Andy Paperbag.” Though Diana was pleased by Warhol’s success, she did not warm to the Factory scene until she met Fred Hughes, whose name first appeared in her engagement diary in the summer of 1973, when he came for dinner with the interior designer Sister Parish. Though Diana was in her seventies and Fred Hughes in his early thirties, the bond became very close—so close that friends thought Diana was infatuated—or even in love—with him. Hughes reminded many people of Reed, and she adored the way he looked. “Fred was unbelievably elegant,” said Colacello. “He modeled himself on the Duke of Windsor—or Fred Astaire—and it suited him! He invented a kind of Factory uniform—pressed jeans, suit jacket, expensive shoes, which meant you could sit on a loft floor one minute and be uptown for dinner the next. Everyone copied him, including Andy.”
Hughes was mysterious about his origins, but he later turned out to be the son of a furniture salesman, to have been born in Texas, and raised in Dallas and Houston. He was not related to Howard Hughes, though this did not stop him sporting black armbands when “Uncle Howard” died. But he was also an impressive autodidact who was capable of absorbing large amounts of information in a very short time, and he was a delightful and stimulating companion. He studied History of Art at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a department almost entirely financed by the philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Menil, who were art collectors and beneficiaries of the Schlumberger oil-equipment fortune. The de Menils were charmed by Hughes and helped him into a job with the Iolas Gallery in Paris. In return, Hughes helped out the de Menils with their art collection in Manhattan when he was back in the States. During one of these visits he was introduced to Warhol. They struck up an instant friendship (there is no suggestion of anything more), and he started working at the Factory shortly afterward.
Hughes was just the sort of business partner Warhol needed. He was a catalyst for new ideas and a point of equilibrium in the Factory’s unbalanced world. His polished manner, politesse, and intellectual curiosity did much to counteract the creepy impression made by Warhol. One of his first acts was to persuade the de Menils to sit for portraits by Warhol, along with their friend the architect Philip Johnson. During the 1970s, Warhol’s portraits generated a great proportion of the Factory’s income, while Interview magazine became the vehicle for drawing the young, the famous, the rich, and the interesting into Warhol’s orbit. Hughes was responsible for ensuring that money flowed into the magazine and for seeking out portrait commissions. Colacello, Interview’s editor, has said that it was Hughes who set Warhol on the road to riches, and that without him Warhol would not have turned into the global superstar artist he subsequently became. “Fred engineered the rise of Andy Warhol from the demimonde to the beau monde,” he observed. Hughes was very attached to Diana—he “loved the idea of her,” said one friend—but she also gave him a great deal of business help because she so adored him. She critiqued issues of Interview and issued advice to which Hughes and Colacello listened. Just as important, Diana went to great lengths to help Hughes find patrons for Warhol’s portraits, bridging the gap between the downtown avant-garde and uptown riches in a way that set her apart from anyone else of her generation. “Despite the underlying ambivalence and mistrust between the Empress of Fashion and the Pope of Pop,” wrote Colacello, “it was her stamp of approval that put him in the middle of Park Avenue society in the middle of the seventies. It was Mrs. Vreeland, more than anyone else, who pushed Andy, and Fred and me, by introducing us to her swell friends at her small dinners and by bringing us to the small dinners of her swell friends.”
In time Diana’s passion for Hughes would lead to serious tension with Warhol; but when she asked Hughes to accompany her to Japan in 1975, Warhol was enthusiastic, saying it would be good for business. Diana was invited to Japan by the Museum of Costume in Kyoto, which was showing The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties at the suggestion of Issey Miyake. Diana was asked as guest of honor and encouraged to bring a friend. She asked her grandson Nicky to accompany her, but when it became clear he wanted to bring his girlfriend, Priscilla Rattazzi, Diana asked Hughes as well. They all stayed in a sumptuous hotel in Kyoto and were treated like visiting royalty. Diana looked at Japan in “wonderment,” said Nicky. There was nothing jaded about her reaction. She breathed it all in. She particularly liked the sight of men in kimonos. There was only one moment when she was thrown off balance. At a reception in her honor a huge box was carried in and flung open to reveal two Sumo wrestlers who tumbled out onto the floor. She collected her wits and proclaimed: “The pink babies!” Privately concerned that they might be feeling humiliated, she subjected the Sumo wrestlers to an in-depth interview about their training, their diet, and how they kept their skin so soft. On another evening they all had dinner in a geisha house. Diana was fascinated by the geishas’ clothes and hair and thrilled to discover that their makeup was all from Revlon. She thought her Japanese hosts’ use of color in the exhibition was bewitching.
Each morning of their stay Diana remained in her bedroom till lunchtime. Hughes went off walking on his own, while Nicky and Priscilla, both aspiring photographers, spent every morning in Kyoto taking pictures. This led to one disagreement between Diana and Nicky. She had no interest in the way twentieth-century Japan jostled with traditional Japanese life and was horrified when Nicky pointed his camera at ugly objects. When he argued that the ugliness of Japan was part of its unique quality, as much as its beauty, Diana replied that it was a moral responsibility to focus only on what was beautiful. “Her life insulated her from much that was difficult and ugly,” said Nicky. But when it was unavoidable, “she looked away.”
After the Hollywood exhibition Diana returned to another subject close to her heart. American Women of Style, which coincided with the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, was an exhibition of the great stylists who had animated and created fashion before the Second World War. André Leon Talley thought that it was her masterwork, “a true expression of her own personal history and tastes.” He particularly liked the fact that she included Josephine Baker in the show. “This was an important moment; no African-American woman had ever, until then, been placed in the same stylistic league as, say, Isadora Duncan.” As well as Duncan and Baker, the women in the exhibition included Rita Lydig, Elsie de Wolfe, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, and Millicent Rogers. They all “created themselves,” said Diana. In one way or another, all the women included had inspired her. They met, said Stella Blum, “on the common ground of excellence,” and all of them “had an inordinate aesthetic sensitivity—a strong creative drive that looked for a perfect expression for their highly charged motivations.” American Women of Style was another box-office success, attracting numbers comparable to The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties.
The Glory of Russian Costume, which would break all box-office records, took place against the background of détente with the Soviet Union. It was one of a series of cultural exchanges arranged by Hoving and an “exuberantly corrupt” undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture on the Russian side. The exhibition could never have happened, wrote Hoving, without the involvement of Diana and the recently widowed Jacqueline Onassis, who had taken an editorial job at Viking Press. Diana, Fred Hughes, and Hoving went to Russia to discuss the show early in 1975. Diana told George Plimpton that her reaction to her new surroundings was love at first sight: “When I’d been in Russia for only forty-eight hours, I thought to myself: of all the countries I’ve known, if it were my country not to be able to come back to this one would be the most terrible.” Her enthusiastic reaction paid dividends. A meeting was arranged with Russian officials far too early for Diana, at nine o’clock in the morning the day after they arrived. She told Hoving to talk to them about “museumy” details like shipping and promised to appear at eleven o’clock. Tension mounted as Hoving managed to extend the “museumy” conversation to a full two hours. But Diana did not let him down. “A minute before eleven the door to the conference room opened and in she swept, radiant in crimson and shiny black, her hair pulled back so tightly it looked like a painted surface, neck arched.” Hoving knew she could see very little without her glasses, but realized she had taken them off for her grand entrance. “The Russians blinked first. ‘Ah, Mrs. Vreeland, what do you think of the Soviet Union?’ It was a kind of Last Judgment moment. Diana breathed deeply. ‘Ah marvelous! God! marvelous!’ she said. ‘I have been up walking since dawn, ab-so-lute-ly revelling in the vast beauty of this city. God, the women are so beautiful. I mean these complexions! The land is so vast. So . . . awe-in-spir-ing! So grand. The women are so gorgeous!’ ”
While Hoving choked quietly in the corner at the idea of Diana on an early-morning walk, the Russians fell for her completely. After her peroration Diana was given everything she asked for. She was determined to find a peasant costume that she believed had been the inspiration for the Chanel suit during Chanel’s affair with Grand Duke Dmitri. “The item was triumphantly displayed for her. Diana had been right. There was the garment Chanel had clearly adapted for ‘her’ classic design,” said Hoving. By this time the Russians were hanging on Diana’s every word. She spent hours patiently sifting through hundreds of drawers, and thousands of costumes immaculately folded away in acid-free paper, impressing Hoving once again with her powers of concentration and her capacity for sheer hard work. “She would praise lavishly—and, in time, would criticize, very gently but with needle-like effect. By the time Diana Vreeland left the Soviet Union, she had become legend there, too.” Hoving returned to Russia again with Jacqueline Onassis, who was editing a book titled In the Russian Style to accompany the exhibition. The joint efforts of the two American czarinas persuaded the Russians to lend the winter sleigh of Princess Elizabeth, Catherine the Great’s wedding dress, and Peter the Great’s three-foot-high boots.
The spirit of détente was rather less in evidence when the costumes finally arrived in New York, however, accompanied by several KGB agents and three Russian curators: Tamara Korshunova, costume curator at the Hermitage, in Leningrad; Luiza Efimova, costume curator at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, and Nina Yarmolovich, a costume restorer at the Kremlin Museums. If Diana “butted heads” with Stella Blum, she locked horns with her Russian counterparts. There was no getting around Russian insistence that the clothes must be behind glass; there was great concern about Diana’s idea that the dummies should be painted red; and complete bafflement at her wish to braid them with green and blue Dynel hair. At this point George Trow caught up with Diana again. “ ‘We have to—ummm—consult. The whole issue of the Dynel braids is being analyzed now.’ Mrs. Vreeland is not entirely used to the processes of consultation and analysis.” There was even greater consternation at Diana’s scorn for chronology. In the event the bemused Russian curators gave way, though not without great misgivings, shared by Stella Blum. “Stella took me around the exhibition the night before it opened and talked me through the way it ‘should’ have been done,” said Harold Koda.
Diana was not greatly interested in the vernacular peasant clothes provided by the Russians. She solved the problem by grouping them together, where they made a brilliant display in two separate rooms, one for poorer peasant clothes and the other for clothes belonging to richer peasants, who used brocade and fur in place of coarse cotton. Ironically it was the embroidery, the ribbons, the vivid reds, the pearl detail, and the layering of these clothes that had the greatest impact on American designers, influencing the New York collections a short time later. For this exhibition Diana persuaded the house of Chanel to revive an old perfume, Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather), and went to work on a tape of Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. What the Russians made of Diana’s decision to throw furs around to give the idea of savagery is not recorded. But once again the exhibition was a blockbuster success, exceeding even the Hollywood show in terms of numbers. And a truce was finally achieved with the Russian curators once the exhibition opened. Diana took them out for a lunch where formidable quantities of alcohol were consumed and then invited them back to 550 Park Avenue for tea with Serge Obolensky, who had been a pageboy at the court of Czar Nicholas. This potentially disastrous encounter ended with all the Russians in one another’s arms.
The committee for the Party of the Year that accompanied the Russian exhibition was led by Pat (Mrs. William) Buckley and included a shifting cast of social luminaries such as Leonore Annenberg, Lee Radziwill, and Gianni Agnelli. Once Jacqueline Onassis agreed to become president of the committee, the party swelled again in size and social importance: “the biggest one of these things the museum has ever had,” according to Warhol, who went with Halston’s party in a fleet of limousines. The 650 guests paid $150 each for a reception and dinner at the museum, and about 1,000 more arrived after dinner to see the exhibition, paying $40 for the privilege. Outside, photographers and journalists lined up to report on the guests. Inside, Jacqueline Onassis received them with Oscar de la Renta, Douglas Dillon, and the chargé d’affaires from the Soviet embassy. Meanwhile, Marella Agnelli and Jacqueline de Ribes circulated in dresses on a Russian peasant theme, while C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill, Mica Ertegun, and Françoise de la Renta chose to sport ruffled taffeta dresses from de la Renta in the same vein. Diana spent part of the evening hawking In the Russian Style at top volume: “Buy a book! Buy a luvverly book!” The evening was regarded by almost everyone as her show. “The trick of having a regal New York social life is not to go to distinguished parties but to go to distinguished parties publicly,” said George Trow. “And in New York at the moment only Mrs. Vreeland has the skill to provide a public event with enough authority to withstand the dissolution implicit in publicity. For one night, she takes over the machinery abandoned by Caroline Astor and the machinery abandoned by Flo Ziegfeld and, combining them into one machine, she makes it go.”