D.V.

by Diana Vreeland

  My father was rather amused by her flirtations—it was all part of the scene. Flirtations are part of life, part of society—if one didn’t have these little flings, where would one be? I think my father realized this. He was devoted to my mother. She was in the arms of a strong man who saw to everything because he knew that she wasn’t strong.

  I was much stronger—with a stronger will and a stronger character—but I didn’t realize it then. All I knew then was that my mother wasn’t proud of me. I was always her ugly little monster.

  I never felt comfortable about my looks until I married Reed Vreeland.

  He was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. He was very quiet, very elegant. I loved all that. I thought it was so beautiful to just watch him.

  I met him on the Fourth of July at a weekend party in Saratoga, in 1924. I believe in love at first sight because that’s what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry. I simply assumed that—and I was right. We became friends, as they say. He was Robert Pruyne’s apprentice in the banking business in Albany.

  One day, about ten days before the wedding, I was lunching with some friends when the telephone rang and I was called to it.

  It was a woman’s voice. “Is this Diana Dalziel?” she asked. “I’m a newspaper writer. I’ve watched you at parties and I’ve always admired you. You’re different from any of the other girls and you have a style all your own. The world is your oyster. This is why I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  I couldn’t imagine what all this was leading up to. But the woman went on, “I have to tell you that your mother is being mentioned as a corespondent in a divorce suit and there’s going to be an enormous blaze in the newspapers.”

  I heard all this, thanked the woman, and finished my lunch. Naturally, I didn’t say a word to the people I was lunching with. But as soon as we’d finished, I telephoned home and found out that my mother had taken the dogs to Central Park. I’d always hated Central Park as a child. It has no secrets, no allure. But I took a cab to the Ramble, where I knew my mother usually went—imagine finding anyone in Central Park today—and when I saw our car and chauffeur, I stopped.

  I got out; I walked around behind a hill and found her sitting in the sun with one of our adorable little Scotties in her lap and the other one running around her. She was laughing and talking with them. I sat down beside her and told her exactly what I’d been told.

  I felt nothing. And that’s how she answered me—with nothing. She was smaller than me. Very quiet. Then she said, “I think we’ll go home. Don’t you?”

  I don’t think I saw her for two or three days. I was very sorry for her.

  “All these stories about your mother,” my father said to me later, “are untrue. You must simply rise above them.” The scandal didn’t affect my father nearly as much as it did my mother. Daddy was British in a very healthy way: he could get over things. “Worse things happen at sea.” That was his great expression. It summed up any unpleasantness.

  That was the end of the story as far as my family went. That’s the kind of family we were—very English. Very little visible emotion.

  I never saw the newspapers, but the story came out, and obviously it was true. From what I heard later, the man was rather a bigshot in munitions. His name was Sir Charles Ross—Ross Rifles—and he lived in London and Scotland and Africa; the story was filled with guns and excitement and elephants and trips to India and Africa…et cetera. It was quite dramatic, and it was in the newspapers every single day.

  I was only interested in getting married. The morning of the wedding I went to see my godmother, “Baby Belle” Hunnewell, married to Hollis Hunnewell of Boston. I went to see her because she couldn’t come to the church to see me. It was the thing to do. She was in bed. Divine. She supposedly had one less layer of skin than everyone else. Most extraordinary color. Tiny bit of pink under the white. Of course, no one was sunburned in those days. She was too beautiful for words. She used to lie in bed and drink gin. She wasn’t at all well. She didn’t care—she was having a marvelous time. She took two rooms here in New York—fed up with Boston. The big salon she made into a bedroom; at the foot of her bed she tied this great bouquet of balloons. She had the most beautiful nightgowns. They were white handkerchief linen with black lace and then pink satin ribbon threaded through. She was lying in bed with one of her beautiful nightgowns, and for the first time I saw something embroidered right over her left bazoom: a little black bell. And I said, “Oh, Baby Belle, I’ve never seen that.”

  “Oh, everything I own has my baby bell on it.”

  So that was the day of the wedding. I had on the most beautiful dress, which I’m sure I still have somewhere—I should give it to the Museum. The bride of this period was the most vulgar bouffant creature, but my dress had a very strict line and a very high neckline—very moyen âge. There was lace strapped around my head and face, and the train was all diamanté and encrusted with pearls….

  When I arrived at St. Thomas’s Church, my father met me and said, “Not too many people have come, so you will find the church rather…sparse.”

  It wasn’t sparse—it was practically empty. Not one invitation to the wedding had been delivered, I was told. They had all been thrown out by mistake. Or perhaps it was because of the scandal that the newspapers had so conveniently not announced it.

  To this day, because of this, I don’t believe in the free press. The only newspaper I’ve ever really approved of was The Times of London when they had canaries for sale on the front page.

  But this made as much difference to me then as it does to you right now. I just wanted to marry Reed Vreeland. Nothing could have spoiled my happiness. I was so proud. You see, I was very young—in every way—and I was marrying an older man. He was twenty-five years old, but to me he was an older man, and marrying him was an achievement.

  He had fantastic glamour for me. And he always retained it. Isn’t it curious that even after more than forty years of marriage, I was always slightly shy of him? I can remember his coming home in the evening—the way the door would close and the sound of his step…. If I was in my bath or in my bedroom making up, I can remember always pulling myself up, thinking, “I must be at my very best.” There was never a time when I didn’t have that reaction—ever.

  The beauty of him was that he looked the same when he died as he had when I married him. His whole stance, his whole allure, his chemistry…was that of a young man. He was never withered. He never struck age—ever.

  This is why I can’t stand old people. It never occurs to me to be attracted to anyone older, because I’ve never loved anyone older—except my older man.

  Of course, you learn everything from older people. After we were married, Reed and I moved to Albany, where he was training as a banker, and there everyone was older than us. The queen of the town was Lulu Van Rensselaer, who was married to Louis Van Rensselaer, one of the great fascinators of all time. 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, designed by Stanford White.

  One night we went to a dinner at Lulu Van Rensselaer’s at which there were two very famous Harvard professors. At the table the talk swung around to Shakespeare. Finally, one of the professors asked, “May I inquire, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, why you insist on pronouncing Cleopatra ‘Cleoptra’? It should be ‘Cleopatra,’ of course.” Mrs. Van Rensselaer drew herself up and announced, “I refer to her as Cleoptra because that is correct.” That would seem to have been the end of any argument, but she went on to say, “However, since you are obviously not convinced, I shall write to my old friend President Lowell of Harvard, and he will, of course, give the final word. Two weeks from today—which will give me time to write to the president, and him time to respond—we will all dine here again, exactly the same people at this table. And I will then read you Dr. Lowell’s response.”

  So we all dined two weeks thence. Lulu was in full form, full regal
ia, sailing like the Armada into the room to receive us. When we got to the dining table, she reached down and took out of her bosom—which could have held anything, it was so huge—the letter from the president of Harvard, which she proceeded to read to us.

  “‘My dearest Louisa, you are quite correct in believing that Cleopatra’s proper pronunciation is “Cleoptra.” How interesting to hear from you. I send you my very best regards, blah, blah, blah…’”—and with that she folded the letter and put it back into the vast cleavage of her bosom. Naturally, we never saw the letter, and certainly no one was going in there to look for it. She could have made the whole thing up. She was quite intimidating, and certainly no protest was forthcoming from the Harvard professors, who were shy and rather sheepish—and if Cleopatra had come up again in the conversation, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if both of them had begun referring to her as Cleoptra!

  Our house was in a little mews that belonged to Mrs. Van Rensselaer back of her State Street mansion. Every door in the mews was painted a different color. Ours was red, and we had blue hydrangeas in sweet little window boxes in front. In those days Albany was a pretty Dutch town—great style! As clean as a Dutch kitchen, and not the vulgar political city it’s become. I loved it—this environment of good food, good housekeeping, polished floors, polished brass, servants…. My first son, Timmy, was born there, and I was very, very domestic.

  Don’t think I was always the person you see now. Don’t think I was the same person before I started working. I was born lazy. 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. I’d be criticized, but Lulu Van Rensselaer adored it. I loved our life there. I was totally happy. I didn’t care what any other place was like. I’d still be there now if Reed hadn’t wanted to move to London. I only moved where he wanted to go.

  I had nothing to do—but nothing.

  I never had an idea.

  I was like a Japanese wife. When I got to Japan, I realized that someday there’s going to be a terrific female revolution there, because for the moment all the women do is housekeep. But a Japanese house, like my little mews house in Albany, can be cleaned in five minutes, so there’s very little housekeeping to be done. Of course, there’s the arrangement of flowers and so on, but the wife has nothing to do after her husband leaves the house in the morning. He works all day, and then he goes to a geisha house, which is rather like going to a club. He talks business with his cronies while the girls fan him. They have no eyes, they have no ears, they know nothing, see nothing…that’s a geisha. It isn’t sex, you know—it’s an entirely different thing. But when the men get home, their days are complete, and the wives have had nothing to do—but nothing.

  In Kyoto, I was the guest of the chamber of commerce, so I dined with the men every night. It was always in an inn, and we were always seated on the straw matting of the floor, which happens to be very easy for me. The geishas come in and bow to all the men; then they move like butterflies around the room and take their positions on their knees. There’s nothing quick about the way they move—it’s all very quiet. They laugh and they talk and you don’t feel out of it not knowing what they’re saying because, whatever it is, it’s all full of charm—their voices, their faces.

  Then…as soon as dinner was over, they’d leave the men and circle around me. I’d ask them about their makeup—this is all through an interpreter, of course—because I was so interested in how their skin looked after they took off all this heavy stuff which had been on their faces all day. I asked what makeup they used, where they got it—most of it turned out to be Revlon, to tell you the truth. But the point is that they were so charming and so amusing—to me, not just to the men.

  “Why are these girls so charming to me?” I asked one of the men.

  “Because,” he said, “the first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women.”

  I thought this was something we could learn in the West. Every girl in the world should have geisha training.

  I know what I’m talking about. I know. My God, when I moved to London after Albany, I made great friends among the English during the time I lived there. Those Englishwomen look after Englishmen like nobody’s baby has ever been looked after, but 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.

  The point is that Englishwomen are ruthless, whereas geishas aren’t ruthless at all. They’re totally safe within themselves—which is rather unusual, mmm?

  But those Japanese wives…You’ve read back through the centuries in The Tale of Genji and in The Pillow Book—you’ll remember that the women lived in beautiful compounds with latticework porches like those in Heian paintings where the women’s hair is threaded through the bamboo lattice and comes out in another part of the country. But they were pretty idle. They had servants to look after their clothes and their wigs and their makeup, to grind the white powder that they put on their faces—the whole bit. Everything was done for them.

  You can’t compare the Japanese with anyone else. They’re always being compared with the Chinese, who, as you know, were the greatest philosophers, astronomers, astrologers, chemists, the greatest—they go all the way! They invented ice cream, fireworks, spaghetti, macaroni, noodles, pug dogs, Pekinese, chows—everything. But all those things are something we totally understand. Something Japanese like hara-kiri, on the other hand, we find impossible to understand. Yet it’s as normal to the Japanese as smoking a cigarette.

  The whole Japanese thing is so total! Think of the sumo wrestlers. While I was there a party was held for me in a large Westernized house outside Kyoto. The high point of the evening was the opening of a huge red brocaded box as tall as you are. I couldn’t imagine what was inside. I was led forward and asked to open up the paneled door. Oh, brother! Out stepped two sumo wrestlers! They were in full regalia, which is very little, especially in the back. The two were totally glorious. But if looks could kill! They didn’t enjoy being on exhibition. I was so on their side. I felt very sorry for the boys…I mean, how could they stand being exhibited in such a way? They’re very proud, those sumo wrestlers, extraordinary heritage and history, national treasures, and here they were cooped up in a large box, the two of them waiting God knows how long in the darkness, waiting for me to open the box so they could step out—big surprise! Well, it was a surprise. After all, I’m a Westerner, and a heathen in their eyes, and it was all done for my pleasure to be able to discover these two sumos in a box, like a pair of shoes. They were far from a pair of shoes let me tell you. I pretended it was an everyday affair. I put on the biggest smile—as if isn’t it interesting to meet someone new? I stepped forward and shook hands with each of them. I certainly didn’t treat them as if they were stuffed. I mean they may have been miffed, but they were alive. I wanted to hear all about their diets, because they have such skin—apricot porcelain, and from the age of nine they eat the same meal, bowl after bowl of the purest ingredients of health. Three times a day.

  And then think of the Kabuki Theatre—the extremeness of that tradition, so utterly different. Actually, it’s only the instincts of acting, only the smallest nuances. But it must have great power, because it’s been the same since the eighth century.

  When I was in Japan, I saw the new star of the Kabuki theatre—a boy who must have been only twenty years old—do a dance in shadow and light that was absolutely extraordinary. I know the routine because I’ve always been crazy about Kabuki. But when I saw this boy, Tomasaburo Bando, it was as if I’d never seen it before—the coming forward, the going back, the coming forward, the going back, the coming forward, the going back, bringing people forward, pushing people back, bringing people forward, pushing people back…and then,
suddenly, with a twist of the wrist, he flicked open a fan. I was stunned with delight.

  He made it look easy, but it isn’t easy at all. It takes terrific muscular control—an extraordinary combination of tension and relaxation—and terrific strength.

  This is a woman he’s playing, you understand—as you know, all the actors are men. But the delicacy of this boy…it was all in the eyelid, which was more delicate than the first flower of spring. I promise you, if I had a daughter I would send her to him to learn how to become a woman.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We left Albany for London just before the Crash in 1929. We moved into the lovely house in Hanover Terrace. If you live just outside of Europe, as we did, you always find yourself on the move—the glories of the Continent are right at hand.

  Have you ever taken one of my little audio guides at the Museum? None of my friends have. My friends never see my shows. “Oh, Diana, it’s simply wonderful…marvelous.” End of conversation. To me, the audio guides are important, because what’s the point of going through the show unless you learn something? So you pay your money and you hear me talk. They’re really not bad. But the other day I put one on and started listening to myself and I kept going on about Tunisia. Tunisia—it was so absurd! Why was I saying this? Why couldn’t I shut up? I suppose it’s because when Reed and I went to live in Europe we often seemed to be going into a French colony.

  We rarely went to the south of France. We never went to the chic villes d’eau. You could sit down with other people my age and they could tell you about Deauville, they could tell you about Monte Carlo, they could tell you about…dining with the King of Spain! We never did any of these things. We’d go to North Africa. Or we’d go to Bavaria or to Hungary. We only went where the air was fragrant and life was easy. We traveled rather luxuriously in our glorious Bugatti with our marvelous chauffeur and my maid from London, and there was never any problem.