In New York the old boy never came down from the top of the Ritz Towers—apparently there were always creditors downstairs. But I often went up to see Marion. By this time, she’d lost a lot of her looks—she had one of those champagne chins which you don’t see much anymore, because people have nips and lifts. She was a woman of great character—tremendously protective of W. R. He’d always said, “People with brain power never die. George Bernard Shaw and I will never die.” When Shaw did die, Hearst was old and dying himself. That morning, Marion had the news cut out of all his newspapers that came in from the West—Hearst only read his papers from west of the Mississippi—so that he never read about Shaw’s death.
Once Marion asked me if I had my breakfast in bed. I told her I did. “Oh, I wish I could,” she said. “It must be so nice. I have to get up right away.”
“Why?”
“Because…” she said, “he says it brings mice.”
So the day the old boy died, in my mind’s eye I saw Marion sitting in a pretty bedjacket in her pretty bed in her hotel suite, eating a leisurely breakfast…surrounded by tiny mice! It’s never left my imagination. I still see it so clearly.
I never met the old boy. But once, when I’d just started writing “Why Don’t You?” for Harper’s Bazaar, he sent me a note in his own hand: “Dear Miss Vreeland, It is always a pleasure to read your columns. I reread them all the time. I am a particular admirer of yours.” I was so touched. Don’t you love the “Miss”? He never dictated a letter, you see. He was an old-fashioned gentleman—in the sense that royalty never had anything typed.
That column “Why Don’t You” first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in the summer of 1936. It was rather frivolous. I don’t remember too many of the ideas, thank goodness. “For a coat to put on after skiing, get yourself an Italian driver’s, of red-orange lined in dark green.” That was one of them. “Have a furry elk-kid trunk for the back of your car.” They were all very tried and true ideas, mind you. We had a trunk like that on the back of our Bugatti. “Knit yourself a little skullcap. Turn your old ermine coat into a bathrobe.” The one that seemed to cause the most attention was the one about dead champagne. “Wash your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, as they do in France.” That even got S. J. Perelman stirred up. He wrote a very funny parody in The New Yorker. Carmel Snow wrote Perelman a letter saying he shouldn’t do such things, that it was very upsetting to such a young girl to be criticized! Good heavens! I was in my thirties at the time and was very flattered.
At first nobody gave me ideas for the column, but then they said to me, oh, put in your column that Daisy Fellowes’s daughter drove away from the church in Paris in a two-in-hand. Well, I would have none of it, and besides, war was declared, which, thank God, put an end to the whole absurdity anyway.
But it was nice to know that old W. R. enjoyed them.
I never went to San Simeon when he was there. His son Bill often asked Reed and me, but for some reason or another we never went. One day, long after his father’s death, Bill called from San Francisco and told us that it was our last chance to visit San Simeon as private guests. So we went. I remember calling the night before to say, “Be sure to have the zebras out.”
Bill Hearst said, “Zebras. Good God, we haven’t seen zebras around here in ten years!”
I said, “I’m coming for the zebras; I’m not coming for anything else.”
You won’t believe this—we arrived and there they were, this whole row, all the way up the two miles of the driveway into the mountains. Bill Hearst had probably forgotten he even owned zebras. We stayed about two and a half weeks, and we didn’t see another sign of the zebras. And then, the morning we left to go to San Francisco, every zebra was back out to say goodbye, lining the road. Bill Hearst was astonished. I took it very personally. They had come out for me.
San Simeon was delightful—an extraordinary place. “But it’s so vulgar,” my friends said to me at the time. “How can you say it’s extraordinary?”
“Because it’s a man’s dream,” I said. “It’s a particularly American dream. And that dream of W. R.’s came true. And in that way it is splendid.”
San Simeon was not built for Millicent or Marion. Oh, no —it was built for W. R. himself. Think of it: acres of roses, going for miles. A man’s castle. Richelieu’s bed. There was only a trace of the woman’s touch there—barrels of bleach in the hairdressing department.
I believe women are naturally dependent on men. One admires and expects things from men that one doesn’t expect from women, and such has been the history of the world. The beauty of painting, of literature, of music, of love…this is what men have given the world, not women.
As you can tell, you’re not exactly talking to a feminist. I stand with the French line—woman and children last.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Do you realize how many times a week I hear about the thirties? Hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t say to me about something, “Oh, you’ll love it, Mrs. Vreeland—it’s so thirties.” It’s always déjà vu to me, but then a lot of things are. The point is that it was déjà vu to me then.
You never learned anything in the thirties. That’s a terrible thing I’ve never said out loud to anyone before. But don’t forget, we were going into the most appalling war in history, and you felt it in everything. Everything was weakening…I knew that we were heading toward rien.
Still, I loved the clothes I had in the thirties. I can remember a dress I had of Schiaparelli’s that had fake ba-zooms—these funny little things that stuck out here. When you sat down, they sort of went…all I can say is that it was terribly chic. Don’t ask me why, but it was. Another of my Schiaparellis that sticks in my mind was a black sheath with a long train in the form of a padded fishtail—I gave it to Gypsy Rose Lee, and she performed in it at the World’s Fair—stalking the runway six times a day.
I loved my clothes from Chanel. Everyone thinks of suits when they think of Chanel. That came later. If you could have seen my clothes from Chanel in the thirties—the dégagé gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros, the roses in the hair, the pailletted nose veils—day and evening! And the ribbons were so pretty.
I remember my great friend Leo d’Erlanger saying to me in Paris, “Diana, I want to give you a present. I know that what you love more than anything in the world is clothes, and I know that you love Chanel’s clothes more than anyone else’s. So I want you to go to Chanel and buy anything you want.”
So I went to Chanel on the rue Cambon and I said to my vendeuse—the vendeuse is a kind of maître d’hôtel in a maison de couture—“Perhaps I’ll buy something a bit more…mmm…luxurious then I usually do.”
This was the dress I ordered: The huge skirt was of silver lamé, quilted in pearls, which gave it a marvelous weight; then the bolero was lace entirely encrusted with pearls and diamanté; then, underneath the bolero was the most beautiful shirt of linen lace. I think it was the most beautiful dress I’ve ever owned. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for a present.
Then the war came.
Reed and I had been in Capri, and on the way back from Capri we’d stopped in Paris. My husband was a man with such a marvelous sense of…how women are. He got on a ship with a lot of American friends leaving France, and he left me behind.
“You mean you’d leave your wife,” they said—you know, that bourgeois spirit—“in a country that’s at war?”
“Look,” he said, “there’s no point in taking Diana away from Chanel and her shoes. If she hasn’t got her shoes and her clothes, there’s no point in bringing her home. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it has to be.”
I stayed on alone at the hotel—the Bristol, which was quite new then—for about two weeks. It was very quiet. The Phony War. Then, one morning, Leo d’Erlanger arrived there from London. “Diana,” he said, “tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock you must leave. I’ve got you a place on a train, and it will take you to Le Havre, wh
ere I’ve got a cabin on a ship that will take you to New York. You’ve got to get out of France, you’ve got to get out of Europe—this is your last chance. It’s the last passenger ship with private cabins out of Europe. This was my promise to Reed—when the time came to go, I’d get you out.”
I’ll never forget that afternoon, coming down the rue Cambon—my last afternoon in Paris for five years. I’d just had my last fitting at Chanel. I don’t think I could have made it to the end of the block, I was so depressed—leaving Chanel, leaving Europe, leaving all the world of…of my world.
And then I saw this type coming up next to the Ritz, and it was my friend Ray Goetz, the most amusing man who ever lived. He had on a blue felt hat. He was married to Irene Bordoni. He was big in the theatre. He brought over that divine Spanish singer Raquel Meuller, who sang “Who Will Buy My Violets?” And that afternoon he could have taken me in his arms and looked after me for the rest of his life—not that he knew it.
“Oh, Ray!” I said. “Isn’t it awful about the war?”
He turned. He looked at me for just a minute—just a split second—and asked, “What war?” And with that, he walked right past me, like a shadow.
How strange…it’s always the same. Anyone can knock you over with a remark—or they can set you right up, which is what he did. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful to a human being.
It was September. The days were getting shorter. It would be getting dark by six. That evening I remember walking up and down the Champs-Elysées with Johnny Faucigny-Lucinge. The weather was balmy, it was quite crowded with people, and it was absolutely quiet. I can remember exactly what I had on: a little black moiré tailleur from Chanel, a little piece of black lace wrapped around my head, and beautiful, absolutely exquisite black slippers like kid gloves…it’s curious to visualize yourself like this, isn’t it? But I always have to think about what I had on. Just today, I thought of those slippers and I remembered everything.
How long is the Champs-Elysées? At least a mile, wouldn’t you say? We must have walked ten miles that night. All the tables were taken up from the sidewalks. There were no bands playing the “Marseillaise”—there was nothing. One hardly spoke. There was only this unearthly silence of hundreds of people strolling out of doors under the stars.
I asked Johnny to come up to my room at the Bristol for a last drink. In those days, I always traveled with a nécessaire. Oh, it was so beautiful—made to order, naturally—and inside was a little fitted crystal carafe, in which I always kept some brandy. Everyone traveled with a little brandy, because you were so often in railroad stations, where you could get waylaid in the rain and the snow and the cold and the damp, waiting for trains.
So when we got up to the room, exhausted—but this was deep exhaustion, not just physical exhaustion—I opened the nécessaire, took out the carafe with this brown liquid in it, opened it, and poured it into one bathroom glass for Johnny and then into another bathroom glass for myself—we didn’t ring for glasses, because by this time it was very late. I brought the glass to my lips…and it wasn’t brandy. Someone had emptied out the carafe and refilled it. It was tea—cold tea!
It was a heartbreaker. It was so letting down. I think it was the single most anticlimactic moment of my life. Cold tea!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
What amazing attitudes those marvelous people the English can conjure up! Especially when they’re in trouble. Think of the Marquess of Bath, who owned Longleat. He went through the whole war with a duck on a lead, praying for bombs to fall so that his duck would have a pond to swim in.
Henry Bath was about as far as you can go in appeal—certainly for an Englishman. He had a lovely nose. He broke it breaking a bronc in Texas when he was very young, but a beautiful nose it remained. He joined the American forces—did you know that? Hank the Yank. Sort of like joining another table at El Morocco. He’d be asked, “Why are you here with the Americans?” and he answered, “Well, don’t think I don’t like the British—I mean, I am English.” And he was too. He was quite somebody. As Marquess of Bath he wasn’t some alley cat. He always had that duck, looking skyward, the two of them, and if they heard the crunch of a nearby bomb, they would set off on the dead run to see if the bomb crater would fill up with water so the duck could swim.
The British bat their best friends in the face, but that’s all right because their friends can take it. Very tough society, the English. Of course, it’s only if you’re both English that you can dish out this kind of behavior. An Englishman would take great exception if an American said something insulting to another Englishman. The English never let each other down. They’d never quite say, “Shut up!”—much too polite for that—but they’d say, “My dear sir…” quite slowly, and go on in that department and put you right on your back.
Ah, the Englishness of the English! The cold feet of the English! The kind hearts of the English! And never mind the bad teeth of the English!
In 1926, before we lived in London, we’d come over to England for a visit. Now London in 1926 was a big, good-natured town—it ran the world, don’t forget. There wasn’t the mixture of blood and nationalities that London has today and which I find terribly exciting. In those days, you were either a Cockney or you were a West Ender—period. And then suddenly the whole country went on strike. The General Strike. Do you realize nothing worked? There were no trains, there were no taxis, there were no telephones, there were no cables, there were no newspapers, there was no food—there was absolutely nothing. Everything was at a dead still.
The swells picked up the slack. In Oxford and Cambridge, the boys started manning trains and got the milk delivered for the babies in London. Eventually there was milk and food for everyone, and the old town ran quite well. We discovered that these charming old dowagers in black lace dresses we’d meet—in those days, people who were older looked older, dressed older, acted older, were older—were all working around the clock—as telephone operators at the Evening Standard, for instance—to keep things going.
But what I remember best about the General Strike was motoring down to Maidenhead one day. We went in an open Bentley, and I was sitting in front with the driver when a man jumped on the running board.
“Don’t be frightened, madam,” the man said. “It’s quite all right. But may I please suggest that perhaps you might…you see, we’re just turning a bus over down the road, and I thought you might be more comfortable if you made a slight detour.”
I’ve never forgotten it. Oh, but I think that thoughtfulness and manners are everything.
I’ve known the English. I’ve known their hearts and their courage and their fascination and their conversation and their ways and their means—the whole bit. Did you know Lord Astor of Hever? Quite a good artist. You’ll remember that Churchill said that all English gentlemen were taught how to read, write, and paint. Lord Astor was enchanting, absolutely divine. His children were friends of ours, but a wild lot. They used to stay out in London too late, and he’d say: “If you’re not back at Hever at such-and-such a time, the drawbridge is up. You don’t get in!” So they’d stay in London a wee bit late, and when they’d arrive the drawbridge would be up. So there they were. Damn cold, as I don’t have to tell you, in the middle of the night in the English countryside…no place to stay. What were they going to do? No way of getting the bridge down over the moat except from the castle’s side. While a wet moat is considered most luxurious, it’s nothing to be on the wrong side of at four in the morning. Fortunately, Lord Astor’s passion in life was his dogs, so the children out there beyond the moat would start to bark, and that would get the real dogs barking. They’d all bark together, which would wake up the old boy, and he’d stump—he’d lost one leg in the First World War—through the castle, down through the great hall, through the corridors, past the great armory collection, the Holbeins, then an Elizabeth, then a Henry VIII, and then some of the wives he beheaded, and let down the bridge: “My darlings!” Here’s this divine old g
entleman in the middle of the night freezing to death in a nightshirt.
Then, of course, taxes made it impossible for him. He took it very quietly, left England, gave Hever to the eldest son, and moved to the south of France and painted his days away until he died. Then they had that great sale: finest armor in the world.
I have a passion for armor. To me, a gauntlet is the most beautiful thing. The golden fingers, the wrist line.
I always have armor in my Metropolitan shows. You don’t notice them? In “Vanity Fair” I had a very beautiful lace room, and in the middle of it I had a gold breastplate. It was swollen gold…and out of the neck poured point de Bruxelles, the most beautiful lace in the world. The combination of gold and steel and lace!—no combination as beautiful.
Oh, I’m mad about armor. Mad about it! I love the way it’s put together. I love the helmets with the feathers out the back. Milanese, you see. Have you ever seen a tilting green? It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Once I went down to Dartington Hall in Devonshire to see the tilting green, and I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I don’t know how long a tilting green is, half a mile or so, but it’s the most beautiful grass you’ll ever see. There are great banks that rise up on either side like giant steps terraced in grass—grass, grass, green grass—where they set the silken tents dripping with tassels and gold…trouvères and troubadours strolling the grounds and beautiful women sitting out in front to watch. And all this wonderful green ground, with the knights in armor, banners, and these great horses. You can say, “Well, give me a good game of foot-ball.” But that must have been the most beautiful contest to see in the world. You can’t imagine it until you’ve seen a tilting green. All green, green, green, right to the sky.
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