D.V.

by Diana Vreeland

  Then…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.”

  She was alone with the cheetah on a lead. She was so beautifully dressed. She was wearing a marvelous little short black skirt and a little Vionnet shirt—no sleeves, no back, no front, just crossed bars on the bias. Dont forget how hot it was, and of course the great thing was to get out of this theatre we were in. The cheetah, naturally, took the lead, and Josephine, with those long black legs, was dragged down three flights of stairs as fast as she could go, and that’s fast.

  Out in the street there was an enormous white-and-silver Rolls-Royce waiting for her. 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!

  Ah! What a gesture! I’ve never seen anything like it. It was speed at its best, and style. Style was a great thing in those days.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If I may say so, at least to you, I sometimes think there’s something wrong with white people. We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blacks are almost the only people I can stand to look at nowadays.

  I love to see the black schoolchildren who come into the Museum, marching in a neat little row, wearing immaculate cardigan sweaters their mothers have knitted for them.

  The young black girls I see in New York today are the most attractive girls—from top to toe! Their hands are the most beautiful things on earth—they always have been. But these girls’ legs are so extraordinary! They used to stand with their behinds out. You know the walk—they’d sort of sink into their stomachs and then stick out their behinds. But these girls today haven’t got a trace of it. They stand tall, and when they stride…they’re like a race of gazelles! They’re strong. They’ve got the strength.

  The world will go to lines of color—there’s no question about it. It won’t be just the Africans and it won’t be just the Arabs and it won’t be just the Chinese—it will be every part of the world that has any streak of color other than white. The Western world will go. It won’t happen in my lifetime, and it may not happen in the next five hundred years, but it will happen. The West is boring itself to death! And talking itself to death!

  I’m so aware of this change every time I go to Paris and stay at the Crillon. In the sixties when I was covering the collections for Vogue, I arrived one evening at the Crillon and the whole of Chad was there. They were totally biblical in their tiny caps and their long silver and gold robes to the ground.

  Then, the next time, a few years later, I arrived at the Crillon and there was the whole of Africa—but I mean the whole of Africa. We had the entourages of about forty countries. They all spoke French and English. The men all wore beautifully cut French suits and French cuffs, and their manners were marvelous.

  And the women at night! They were too attractive. They all looked like goddesses of the Nile. There’s something ancient and marvelous and wonderful about their beautiful gold rings and their beautiful features and their wonderful soft skin. They’ve got presence.

  Then…the next day, we got the big brass from the Third World—five presidents and one emperor! It was fantastico! The robes! The jewels! The security men! The security at the Crillon has always been something fantastic because there are always potentates staying there. I love security men—I just adore them. They’re hardly there for me, but when I get out of the lift and twenty men stand up, it makes me feel so safe.

  When the Africans left, there was a quiet around the place that was almost uncanny. Then…after two days, we got les arabes! My God, they were the most gorgeous things—all guests of the President of France. You have no idea how beautifully dressed they were. And they were so clean. It was the cleanest display of white robes I’ve ever seen. And under the robes they all wore these wonderful little sashes of scarlet and violet. They’re young, they’re narrow, they’re beautifully boned, with wonderful strong noses and beautifully kept beards. And the way they walk…! They’re quelqu’uns, no question.

  Then…that night, they were all wearing djellabas! They had on brown ones—hundreds of them! Well, not really djellabas…and not really caftans…they’re sort of an overcoat—these were in thin brown wool piped in gold…. I don’t know exactly what they are called, but I do know they all had them and I want one. I might write a little sort of fan letter to say that all my life I’ve wanted one in brown. I’ve got to get a message through.

  Ah! What men! They’re great gentlemen. They just look straight ahead—they never notice you. Of course, they’re rich—terribly. And never a woman in sight! Oh, how I’d like to be a concubine kept hidden away in the desert somewhere with nothing to think about….

  You may notice I’m talking about the blacks and les arabes interchangeably now. One day, while the Russian show was on at the Metropolitan Museum, my friend Whitney Warren from San Francisco called and asked if he could bring his friends the Romanovs from San Francisco to see it. So he arrived with his friends—charming, adorable people—and they went straight to the blackamoor that we had in the show. They stood in front of this beautiful, enormous mannequin, absolutely mesmerized. “Madame,” they said—speaking French, like all Russian émigrés—“c’est un arabe! Oh, how we loved our arabes!”

  Of course, this blackamoor was about as Arabic as I am…. But this is a very Russian thing. Remember that blacks played a very important part in the early ballets of Diaghilev, and remember that wonderful book of Pushkin’s, The Emperor’s Negro. Pushkin’s grandmother, as you know, was black. Beside every door in all the royal palaces stood a real blackamoor, gigantic, beloved by all the household, there to open and close the doors and keep out the appalling cold.

  They have been commemorated in jewelry, in Russia, Venice, very eighteenth and nineteenth century.

  Have I ever showed you my little blackamoor heads from Cartier with their enameled turbans? Baba Lucinge and I used to wear them in rows and rows…they were the chic of Paris in the late thirties. When I moved to New York, I made arrangements for the Paris Cartier to sell them to the New York Cartier, and all I can tell you is that the race across the ocean—this was by boat, don’t forget—was something so fierce. The Cartier ones were quite expensive, but then Saks brought out a copy of them that sold for something like, in those days, thirty dollars apiece, and it was impossible to tell them apart. So I bought the copies and wore them with the real ones, like decorations—I was covered in blackamoors!

  I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them. Why not? I think those blacks I see around town today would get a kick out of it…knowing they’re the most beautiful things alive. My escorts say, “What are you looking to do? What are you trying to prove?” But I think the blacks would be jolly amused. They’ve got sense.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I wore blackamoors the way Peggy Hopkins Joyce wore diamonds. She was a good-looking blonde—everyone’s favorite golddigger in the twenties and thirties. My God, you’ve never seen such quantities of diamonds as Peggy Hopkins Joyce had! They were great, flat baguettes all the way. My God, she was racy and attractive! Naturally, like everybody who drinks too much champagne, she began to get chins—but she kept her figure pretty well. She genuinely liked the boys.

  She was famous for getting money out of the men who went out with her. She’d have her car waiting—she wouldn’t drive in your car. You’d leave the Ritz in her car, go right to her place for supper or something, and then, back at the Ritz, as you got out again, she’d look at you. “Now what are you going to do for George?” George was the chauffeur who was holding the door open. She knew whom she was dealing with; she wasn’t taking this from the kids on the street. That’s what she’d say. “What are you g
oing to do for George?” Anything less than a hundred-dollar bill, forget it! At least seven or eight men told me that. Think what a hundred dollars was in those days!

  George must have been somewhat different from the usual chauffeur. He was more like what we refer to these days as a “driver.” Today it’s a privilege to have a driver. He looks after you. He’s a pretty good friend. He calls you by your first name, you call him by his. In those days, you dressed the chauffeur up—furs in winter, splendid caps—and you called him by his last name: Pollard, Perkins. Peggy didn’t, but then she had her own ways and means.

  What a generation that was! It was the martini era. In those days, people would get out of the car to see you home, and they’d weave around a bit and fall down on the sidewalk. You’d walk into your house, and they were out there on the sidewalk; and inevitably the chauffeur or the taxi driver would come after them. It was so appalling, the martini of the twenties. If I gave you some gin with a drop of vermouth that wouldn’t cover the head of a pin, that would be the martini. The people who drank them were carried home, usually unconscious. I’m only talking about the two or three years when I was kind of on the loose before I got married. I’ve never seen so much drinking in my life. That’s why it’s never been remotely attractive to me, but I do understand drunks.

  Then, of course, Prohibition came along. Insane idea. Try to keep me from taking a swallow of this tea, and I’ll drink the whole pot. Roosevelt knew what to do: repeal. It’s hard to believe now that Prohibition ever existed—it seems like a fairy tale.

  In 1931, right in the middle of all this, I’d come back from England to New York for a few days without Reed. I fell in love with a place called the Abbaye, which was what used to be known as a “bottle club.” That meant you’d be admitted by someone looking at you through an eyehole in the door; you’d go down a long, very dark flight of stairs, bringing your own bottle, which would then be served to you in bouillon cups. People in those days drank bouillon by the quart.

  It was after the Crash, but it was still a very opulent time in New York. None of the friends I went to the Abbaye with that night seemed to be affected by the Crash, and when I tell you who they were you’ll understand why: Tommy Hitchcock—the greatest polo player of all time—and his charming wife, Peggy; Averell Harriman; Sonny Whitney and his divine wife, Marie—the polo group—and a few extra men. So we arrived…the richest, swellest group—I’m talking about money-in-the-bank rich, not stockbrokers—and everyone was beautifully dressed for dinner. I was nuts about the Abbaye—the size of the room, which was very small, the music…and, of course, there was a certain element of danger because we were in a speakeasy, doing something that was against the law—which didn’t really interest me, but you can’t deny its appeal. It was chic and amusing, and I thought it was all very, very attractive. In there, in this one small room, were the best of all worlds and the worst—a delicious balance if you really like nightlife, as I always have.

  So in the Abbaye we were drinking bouillon, bouillon, bouillon—there was no end to the bouillon. One of the extra men, a charming Irishman called Jim—I can’t remember his last name—decided to get good and loaded. Don’t think this wasn’t attractive. He’s since disappeared off the face of the earth, but he was always loaded and always divine. So that night he looked across the room and said, “Do you see what I see?”

  What he saw was a girl with straight red hair to her shoulders, bangs in front, sloe eyes, a beautiful red dress. He crossed the room to ask her to dance. He was completely gone, but he could stand and walk and all that, so he kept talking to her because that’s how you handled a pickup in those days. You kept at it even when she’d say, “Oh, that’s so sweet of you, but, you see, I’ve just developed this terrible migraine….”

  “Really, Jim,” I said, when he came back to the table to get himself resupplied, “you’ve got to contain yourself. Have you any idea who’s sitting there with her?”

  “What the hell do I care who’s sitting with her?” he said. “That’s the girl for me.”

  So he went over to the table for the second time, and the man beside the girl stood up, and his goons stood up—and there were guns, guns, guns. It was Legs Diamond, and the girl was his famous moll, Kiki Roberts. Legs opened his coat. There on his chest were two guns in their holsters. He patted them. Beautiful timing. The elegance of the gesture! His friends all looked up. Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd…I can’t remember who they all were. But I did know that night. So did my friend. He came back very quietly and sat back down at the table and had himself another bouillon or so.

  The next night we all went back to the Abbaye—this same little precious crowd of ours—and all the gangsters and the Mafia of the town were in there too, except this time no one from our table bothered them. We knew better. We were sitting there, roaring with laughter, having the time of our lives…it may have been half past two, it may have been half past three—at that time I’d stay out all night and never know what time it was—when suddenly all the lights went out. They came back on again…then out—black. Then on again…then black. Now we all knew that three blackouts meant—the cops! So all the flasks disappeared, the bouillon was gulped down, everything was suddenly terribly comme il faut—we were all there having a little dinner. There were three cops standing in the middle of the room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the cops said, “there will be no checks issued—just go quietly. And when I say ‘quietly’”—all three cops had machine guns pulled—“I mean quietly.”

  So we walked out…through the little dark hall, through the door to the sidewalk, out the front, over three men lying there on the stairs, bleeding to death. Apparently, they’d been shot by guns with silencers—we hadn’t heard it. But there was no other way to walk out, carefully stepping over them to the street.

  I can remember exactly what I had on that night—a white satin dress and white satin slippers. Of course, one always dressed in those days. You dressed if you went to Harlem, you dressed if you went to a bottle club. Well, to walk home with blood-spattered white satin slippers…I’ve never forgotten it—the Night of the Abbaye.

  Of course, Prohibition was a time when there tended to be a lot of excitement. It was because you weren’t allowed to drink that you drank anything you could get your hands on. People would go into the bathroom and drink Listerine! Anything that might have a crrrumb of alcohol. They were such attractive men. So many, many died of drink. They didn’t last very long.

  Reed and I spent most of Prohibition in London, but in the summer of 1928 we stayed at my father-in-law’s house in Brewster, New York. I was out on the lawn with my little tiny bambino Frecky. It was simply divine! Well, you know how you feel about your children. He was lying in the sun and he was the color of mahogany and very chatty. Always good humor, always adorable. And huge! He was eleven pounds and a half, just imagine, when he was born. I am sort of a case, you know. It was apparently in all the medical research because of my slight size. I had two children: Timmy was born in fourteen minutes, and Frecky was born in seven minutes. No before pains or anything, just born. Over! It’s very handy. Apparently, my size didn’t affect me one way or the other; I simply knew it was the only way.

  Anyway, I was sitting there in the sun talking to my darling bambino, and this marvelous-looking man drew up in a car, got out, went straight to the house—I was out on the lawn—and took quite a big package and left it inside. Then he walked out and came by. He said, “Mrs. Vreeland?” And I said, “Yes?”

  He wore the most beautiful clothes, marvelous tailoring, beautiful hat; those were the days when men wore fedoras. Brewster was very rustic in those days: we were on three dirt roads and all that. He said, “I’m——” whoever it is—Joe Palooka. “I’m your husband’s bootlegger. Reed and I are great friends. I’m pleased to meet you. What a beautiful child you have”—blah, blah, blah. I was thinking: God, what beautiful clothes, Gee, these wops, they know how to put their tailors to work. He was very charm
ing. I said, “Oh, sit down with me. You don’t have to rush back to New York.”

  So we sat there, and talked, and guess what happened! There was a faint droning noise overhead, and we looked up and Charles Lindbergh flies over us! En route to Paris! Charles Lindbergh. I always said to Frecky that it was a very lucky sort of sign. We had looked up and seen this plane. Of course, the sky wasn’t filled with planes in those days. I said to Frecky, “Really, what a wonderful sort of hour: to be in the sunshine, to be totally happy, giggling and bubbling and carrying on like babies do, and I’m sitting there with your father’s bootlegger, and Lindbergh flies over!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  You should really be talking to Joseph, my masseur. There’s someone who knows the inside stuff. There’s someone who’s had a life. He was the masseur of Mistinguett, of Josephine Baker…listen, he lived at Buckingham Palace!

  When Josephine Baker had a very bad accident doing splits at the Casino de Paris, tearing all the ligaments up to here, Joseph got permission from Queen Mary to cross the Channel three times a week, and he melded her ligaments back to where they belong. He’s still the same today. He just happens to have healing power in his hands.

  “Now, Joseph,” I’ll say, “what did you do for Queen Mary?”

  “Oh, madame,” he’ll reply—speaking this heavy, guttural Alsatian French—“she opened every day sixteen bazaars—something terrible!”

  “Oh,” I’ll say, “well, then you just massaged her feet.”

  “Oh no, madame! I did everything! I had to start…here.”

  “And what did she wear?”

  “Oh, madame…”

  “Now, Joseph, what did she wear?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Now, Joseph, I don’t believe you. Queen Mary never, never was massaged with nothing on.”