“Hold on to your hat, kid….” That’s what Clark said. Exactly. I wasn’t wearing a hat, as you can imagine. I was wearing what I always wore in the forties—a snood, like a little Goya, shall we say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I think the Hearsts paid me eighteen thousand dollars a year for twenty-eight years for working at Harper’s Bazaar. San Simeon must have been where the Hearst money went. I certainly never saw any of it.
I was the most economical thing that ever happened to the Hearst Corporation. Perhaps they loved me because I never knew how to get any money out of them. They were never known for their largesse. That’s why I finally left.
Carmel Snow had been a wonderful editor. She was keen as mustard right up until the time in my last years at Harper’s Bazaar when she simply stopped coming into the office. I think she could no longer stand the pressures. I think she lost the will. For two or three years she was fading away, and although it never occurred to me that I was running the magazine during those years, that’s what I was doing. After twenty-eight years, in 1959, the Hearsts gave me a raise—a thousand dollars. Can you imagine? Would you give your cook that after she’d worked for you for twenty-eight years?
The only person to go to for a raise when I was with Harper’s Bazaar was Richard Berlin. He ran the empire for old W. R. Hearst. One night, fifteen years after I had left Harper’s Bazaar, I was dining with Andy Warhol and some of the boys from the Factory at Pearl’s Restaurant. Brigid Berlin, Richard’s daughter, came over to the table. She’s a bit of all right. Her father was at their table in the center of the restaurant. By this time he was living comfortably but completely in the past. He was still the handsomest thing. He had been a great friend of the Duke of Windsor’s in the old days. Marvelously turned out. No one ever tied a tie like that, including the Duke of Windsor. I can remember the Duke saying, “Dick, no one can tie a tie like you.”
After Brigid came over to our table, here came Dick. He stood behind my chair and put his arms around my shoulder. He announced to the restaurant in general: “Without this kid”—speaking of me—“we wouldn’t have a Hearst press. She runs everything.” Then he began shouting: “The most brilliant editor on the block…” et cetera, et cetera. He was living completely in the past.
At this point, Brigid interrupted and said, “Well, then, don’t forget, you have to give Diana a raise. She wants a raise, Daddy.”
And so Daddy said, “Anything she wants, we give!!” He seemed to have no idea where he was.
When he was in his prime, the Hearst people had been nowhere near so forthcoming. So when the boys at Vogue—Pat Patcevitch and Alex Liberman—came to see me…suddenly I made up my mind to listen to them. They wanted me to shift to them. I said, “Listen, I like everything here. I like it where I am. You’ve got to offer me a lot.”
“We’re offering you the moon and sixpence,” they said—and they did. They offered me a very large salary, an endless expense account…and Europe whenever I wanted to go.
That’s what hooked me. Carmel Snow had always covered the Paris collections for Harper’s Bazaar. As much as I’d seen of America, I wanted to get back to Europe. So I moved to the Condé Nast Press and Vogue.
I had loved Condé, you know. This terrible thing had defeated him—stock market in ’29. Eighteen million, which of course was his personal savings of a lifetime. He died in 1942. Sam Newhouse, whom I adored, told me that he bought Vogue for a million dollars from the Condé Nast Press to give to his wife, Mitzi, for Christmas, to see what she could do with it. Condé being dead, there was nobody there with any sort of ink in his blood. No one.
I was given Condé’s office when I arrived. I was terribly flattered. His office was enormous. I did the most terrible thing. I said to Patcevitch, “Listen, Pat, I cannot sit at a desk and watch someone walk for that length of time into a room. I can’t do it. I feel like saying, ‘Hurry up, get going a little faster.’” So I cut off the end of the room—can you imagine?—with a partition. I mean, this was like cutting off part of St. Peter’s in Rome.
I made a big secretarial office and put three secretaries in there. I had wonderful English secretaries; they kept everything in perfect order, so when I came in in the morning it looked as if I were very neat. Some people have huge round tables, like dining-room tables, where they can have meetings. Because I never have a meeting and never attend a meeting and wouldn’t know what to do with a meeting, I just had a big black desk for myself. Beyond it was a big, long table of the same black lacquer, where the photographs were stacked. I had my bulletin board. I had a leopardskin carpet, I think, and leopardskin upholstery. And scarlet walls. It wasn’t at all exotic. I hate exoticism because it’s so silly. I had two Swedish cane chairs that were simply beautiful—for guests to sit in—but only two of them. Then a little sofa. And the rest was all bookshelves. It was a very workaday office, no chichi, and lots of space and fresh air. I was there till about half past seven every night. It got awfully trafficky in there. All the London lads were coming over. All the divine girls from Czechoslovakia and Poland…and oh, my God, the girls were so good-looking! The photographers were going crazy—some more than others. Do you know the Italian photographer Penati? He sort of floated into our lives like a strange cloud. I had seen in an Italian magazine some photographs he’d taken of the children of royalty, who, of course, are always the most beautiful children in the world. The Italian royalty may not have been quite in the beauty department, but then you must remember that the grandmother—I may be a generation or so off—was the daughter of a goatherd. But they’re almost always wonderful looking, aren’t they? They always seem to be in sailor suits. I took the photographs in to Alex Liberman and said, “This chap is a dream.”
An Italian friend told me a marvelous story about Penati. Apparently, everyone in Turin, in Milan, was crazy about his photographs of children. Once, he was asked by a very social Milanese family to photograph their children for a Christmas present for the father of the family.
Penati said, “All right; if you want me to photograph your children, I’ve got to be totally and completely alone with them.”
The family protested. They said, “Somebody must be there. The phone will ring; there will be parcels being dropped off from the market. And, after all, we have to eat.”
He said, “No, it’s impossible. If people are going to be around, I can’t photograph the children.”
They said, “Well, you’ve got to make one exception. We insist that the governess stay. We absolutely insist!”
So he said, “All right, I’ll come at nine in the morning, and no one else is to come in until five.”
So the family and household went out then and spent the day wandering around Milan—they shopped; they went to the zoo. They finally returned about half past five. Quiet. Quiet as anything. They pushed open the door. All the children were sitting on the floor eating huge bowls, like basins, of ice cream, and there were cakes everywhere. And the governess was completely nude on the sofa being photographed by Penati!
Isn’t it divine?
Well, you can imagine how he felt working for Vogue with all these extraordinary beauties pouring in from Europe.
I don’t think anyone has ever been in a better place at a better time than I was when I was editor of Vogue. Vogue always did stand for people’s lives. I mean, a new dress doesn’t get you anywhere; it’s the life you’re living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.
Like all great times, the sixties were about personalities. It was the first time when mannequins became personalities. It was a time of great goals, an inventive time…and these girls invented themselves. Naturally, as an editor I was there to help them along.
Twiggy! I didn’t discover her—not actually. I knew who she was and I sent for her. I’d seen her once in Elle in a very, very small picture—just the head. Then this strange, macabre little bit, like a waif, came to see me in New York with ha
ir like cornsilk, the most wonderful skin and bones…and then she’d open her mouth and the most extraordinary English would come out. “Blimey!” she’d say, with the face of an English beauty. There’s never been a Cockney like Twiggy—but then, the sixties were the great era for Cockneys.
Twiggy was never without a bodyguard. When she came to see me in my office or when we’d be fitting clothes, he’d always be sitting just outside the door with this big loose bag in front of him. His name was Monk, I recall, and we’d talk. One day I said, “What’s in the bag? Guns?”
“Yeah,” he said, and opened it up. There must have been seventeen of them in there.
“Oooh…my word!” I said. “We are safe.”
Then there was Cher. I didn’t invent her either—I don’t think anyone ever suggested one thing to Cher—but it was certainly me who brought her into the world of Vogue. I must tell you where I found her—where I discovered her.
It was in Morocco on a little strip of beach between Mohammadia and Rabat. Reed and I had gone there to visit my son Frecky’s little family. We were staying in a hotel with tiny rooms like monks’ cells right next to where one of the king’s palaces was being built, and every day our grandsons would visit and we’d go to the beach together. One day, on the beach, a piece of newspaper blew our way. It must have been from a Czechoslovakian paper or something, because I couldn’t read the language—I know it wasn’t Arabic, which, naturally, I read fluently—but on the scrap of newspaper was a picture of this perfectly marvelous-looking girl. It was Cher. So I put her picture in my attaché case and took it back to New York with me.
“My God,” I said when I got back to Vogue, “this girl’s a dream! I suppose you’ve already used her—tell me about her.”
No one had heard of her, at least not in my office—though they should have. So I tracked her down, sent for her…and did we use her! She modeled for us forever.
At the same time mannequins became personalities in the sixties, personalities became mannequins. It was my idea to use Barbra Streisand as a mannequin. Her success was overnight. I sent her to Paris with Dick Avedon to model the collections. We sent her twice. We shot her in profile with that Nefertiti nose of hers…the pictures were awfully chic.
What’s that terrible phrase one used to hear? “Relate,” as in “relate to.” People were always relating to themselves, and that’s where they went wrong. I think part of my success as an editor came from never worrying about a fact, a cause, an atmosphere. It was me—projecting to the public. That was my job. I think I always had a perfectly clear view of what was possible for the public. GIVE ’EM WHAT THEY NEVER KNEW THEY WANTED.
At the same time, I’ve always had an abhorrence of popularity. In fashion, you have to be one step ahead of the public. This was never more true than in the sixties. Sometimes I would take too large a step and fall flat.
Once I decided to lay an entire issue of Vogue out backward, like a Japanese book, because that’s how I thought everyone looked at magazines—I simply assumed so. You always see people reading that way, flipping a magazine from back to front. We never published it. It would have been a flop. But the basic idea was right.
The management of Vogue never bothered me about what I did inside the magazine editorially. But covers I had little control over. When I first arrived, I did the covers for seven or eight months, including one with an Irving Penn picture of a mannequin with a finger on the bridge of her nose and wearing a pair of zebra-striped snake bracelets—and I was told it was a complete failure at the newsstands. I’m not saying that they made it fail to discourage me, but I know, when it come to covers, that they always wanted me to be popular.
I never fought it. I remember a man called Mr. Young who was in the getting-it-around-the-country department—“circulation,” I think it’s called—who had a great effect on me. “You’re in the provinces, Mrs. Vreeland,” he said, “you’re in the small cities, the small towns, the villages and the hamlets…. Leave the covers to us. We’ll sell it off the newsstands. Inside is your department.”
Inside, I once in the sixties ran a picture that couldn’t get through the post office in some states. That was something. It was a picture from Courrèges’s first collection of pants—a top, a bare midriff, and a belly button showing. The letters came in. “This is a house where magazines are put out on the coffee table, and now we find it impossible to put Vogue there. As the mother of a nineteen-year-old son…”
“My God, lady,” I thought, “let him go! Send him away! One night in Tangiers! Tunis! Cairo!…”
“Why did you run a picture like that?” the staff wanted to know.
“Because I’m a reporter,” I said. “I know news when I see it! What are we talking about, for Christ’s sake—pleasing the bourgeoisie of North Dakota? We’re talking fashion—get with it!”
That picture was news at the time. The curious thing is that if you look at it today, it’s so square, so respectable—so dated.
What these magazines gave was a point of view. Most people haven’t got a point of view; they need to have it given to them—and what’s more, they expect it from you. I had this most curious thing happen—it must have been about 1966 or ’67. I published this big fashion slogan: THIS IS THE YEAR OF DO-IT-YOURSELF. Well, after that slogan appeared, every store in the country telephoned to say, “Look, you have to tell people. No one wants to do it themselves—they want direction and to follow a leader!” They were quite right. There was only one issue published with my slogan, but it certainly threw the country. After that, it was back to the more usual slogans: BEWARE OF PEARL GRAY WITH PINK—that sort of thing. And then the next month: PUT APRICOT WITH ORANGE. There’s not much serious planning in this sort of thing. It’s rather like a woman’s mind…you sort of feel it at the time. Carry on. Bash on. Keep ’em thinking. Keep ’em asking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I couldn’t take off for a few weeks to see, say, a bit of India. But I could send groups of photographers, editors, and models, and they’d be there the next day. If I wanted to send them to India, they’d be in India; if I wanted to send them to Japan, they’d be in Japan; if I wanted to send them to Tahiti….
Now I’ve never been to Tahiti, but I bet it’s much plainer than people imagine. Gauguin was such a romantic. Perhaps he lived in Tahiti, but he could have made the whole thing up. I’ll tell you why I say this. During the romantic years at Vogue, I organized a trip to photograph the models surrounded by what was there, and these were the orders: “Never mind the big girls who sit there with one flower in their hair. That you can’t photograph, because Gauguin did a good job of painting them already. Our line of country is the most beautiful white horse with a long white tail on a pink beach—no little horse like a Gauguin, but a big romantic horse like the ones they have in a big way in Friesland in Northern Holland—all tail and mane. Go all the way!”
They always had their orders before they’d leave on these trips. Everyone thinks I’m getting ill natured in my old age, but I was a terror then—just a terror. But everyone so beautifully understood. It wasn’t what they might find, it was what they had to find.
And if they couldn’t find it, fake it. Fake it. That’s a big thing with me. Many years ago I was riding on the Twentieth Century to Chicago. I was just a little girl. On the train was a wonderful entertainer by the name of Frisco. Frisco was black. He had a bowler hat and the most exquisite shoes. He came and sat in the dining car for breakfast and cracked open his newspaper; he looked great. The waiter, who was black, came up to him and said, “Good morning, Mr. Frisco, suh. What will you have this morning?” To which Frisco answered, “Ice cream and applesauce. Make it snappy.”
The waiter was very upset; he stood there and said, “You know, suh, this is breakfast, suh, and we haven’t got any ice cream or any applesauce.”
“Okay, fake it.”
That made a tremendous impression on me. It’s the way I’ve done so many things in my life. I’ll say, “Get co
mfortable, and tap the pillows under you there.” You’d say, “There are no pillows.” I’ll say, “Well, fake it. You know, bundle up with the rugs or something.” I’m damned if I remember what the waiter brought him! I was too dazzled at having seen Frisco with his walking stick and his bowler. I remember the crack of his paper, his getting completely submerged in it, the waiter interrupting him…“Good morning, Mr. Frisco, suh.”
Well, Kenneth was the hairdresser on the Tahiti trip. Some of the great men are hairdressers, and he’s the greatest of them. So I said to him, “The tail of a Tahitian horse may not be…enough. You may have to fake it. It may be too skimpy. Best to take along some synthetic hair.” Synthetic hair was better than real hair because you could get as much as you wanted.
So we had a horse’s tail made of Dynel for Kenneth to take along just in case. I was in the middle of my Dynel period then—one of the happiest periods of my life, to tell you the truth, because I was mad about all the things you could do with Dynel hair. We had the Dynel plaited with bows and bows and bows—these big fat taffeta bows, but rows of them…no Infantas ever had it so good! I was mad about what we’d done for our glorious tail. The bows were super, and the hair was thick with a sheen, very long, to the ground, like a train, just like a true horse’s tail—sexy, attractive….
So they went to Tahiti, supplied with this Dynel tail, to look for a white horse. Then the pictures came back, and I went to look at them with Babs Simpson, the fashion editor. Now Babs was the most marvelous editor in the way of knowing how to turn the girls out correctly—by “correctly” I mean in the mood in which they were sent—but she’s rather a somber girl.
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