They stayed with Emily’s grandfather John Washington Ellis at Stone Acre during the Newport season and appear to have been considering a move from Paris to New York even then. Up to the time of the Boer War (1899–1902), Frederick Dalziel earned a good living in Paris (“Mr. Dalziel has plenty of money,” pronounced one gossip columnist). But the war in South Africa dragged on unexpectedly, which could have made life difficult for a man charged with attracting investment to the Transvaal’s gold mines. The style of life on display that summer in New York and Newport was attractive and amusing; many of the Dalziels’ friends already had houses on both sides of the Atlantic; and although the young couple might have preferred not to articulate it thus, there were arguments in favor of moving closer to Emily’s powerful family, who could open doors in New York in a way that was impossible elsewhere. If marrying a socially undistinguished Briton in 1901 offered Emily a way of hitting back at her mother and a route out of a predicament, marrying the beautiful, well-bred Emily Key Hoffman marked an extraordinary change of fortune for Frederick Young Dalziel—a straight pass to the heart of one of the world’s most exclusive elites, the New York “Four Hundred.”
However, the newlyweds seem to have been in no great hurry to make the move from France. When Diana called her parents “racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians who were part of the whole transition between the Edwardian era and the modern world,” she lit on a poetic truth. The Dalziels—and particularly Emily—were indeed Parisians in the sense that Paris was their spiritual home. It was a feeling that affected many rich Americans so profoundly from the late nineteenth century onward that to quote one of their number, it was possible to feel “homesick on both continents.” Provided one averted one’s gaze from its dark underbelly, Paris at the turn of the century was a difficult place to leave—the Paris of Maxim’s and the Opéra Garnier; of the couture of Worth, Doucet, and Paquin; of grand dukes and demimondaines; and of children in sailor suits sailing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Shortly after Emily and Frederick Dalziel returned to Paris from the United States in late 1902, Emily became pregnant with her first baby. It is possible that this became a further excuse for lingering on. Diana’s was a breech birth, but in spite of the risks she was born at home at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The name she was given was fashionable at the time. It recalled the goddess of hunting, an activity close to the heart of both her parents, though Diana preferred to believe she was named after Diane de Poitiers, the hunting beauty who was mistress to Henri II of France. If there had been a rift between Emily and her mother, it had now healed enough for Mary Weir to come to Paris to be on hand. Frederick Dalziel noted proudly in Diana’s childhood album that her first visitor was one of his most aristocratic friends: Douglas Walter Campbell, heir to the 10th duke of Argyll, who brought a gift of a silver cup on behalf of his four-month-old son Ian, eventually the 11th duke. On October 25 Diana was christened at home by the vicar of Saint Luke’s Chapel in the Quartier Latin. Her godmothers were her grandmother and a relation of Emily’s, Anna Key Thompson. Her godfather was her uncle Edelsten, but since he was unable to be present one of New York’s aristocrats, Henry Clews, Jr., stood in for him.
The Dalziels spent some time in San Remo that winter with their baby daughter. When they returned to Paris in March 1904, they stayed with friends for a few weeks before they finally gave up living permanently in Europe. On March 31, 1904, Frederick Dalziel’s father and Edelsten went ahead to Boulogne so that they would be there to see the party off. From then onward a gap opened up between Frederick Dalziel and his suburban background. (Diana paid at least one visit to her uncle Edelsten—in Pangbourne, England—many years later, but she never mentioned his existence to her own children.) In 1904 Frederick Dalziel, who could not have been included in Burke’s Peerage or Debrett’s in England, was listed in the American Social Register for the first time; and on April 2 of that year, seven-month-old Diana Dalziel sailed on the SS Ryndam with her mother and father to begin a New York childhood.
When she talked about her upbringing later, Diana invariably maintained that her family left Paris for New York only in April 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In this oft-repeated version of her early years, she took daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne in the company of a nursemaid called Pink; she was taken to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre ad nauseam and was one of the last visitors to see the painting before it was stolen in 1911; Nijinsky came to the house and sat around like a pet griffin (“he had nothing to say”); and the great demimondaines of Paris swished past her in the Bois, inspiring a lifelong love of footwear. “Their shoes were so beautiful! Children, naturally, are terribly aware of feet. They’re closer to them.”
But Diana did not grow up in Paris. She grew up in New York. Frederick Dalziel became a Wall Street broker, running the foreign securities desk of Post & Flagg; and the press noted the reappearance of the “bewitching” Emily soon after the family arrived back in 1904. The Dalziels proceeded to occupy a number of houses before finally settling in an agreeable Upper East Side town house at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street in 1910; and Diana lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan until she married. In 1907, the Dalziels had a second child, a daughter named Alexandra, who was known in the family as Teenie, and whom Diana called “Sister.” Diana and Alexandra enjoyed an upper-class New York upbringing that was similar to Emily’s: a world of governesses, walks in Central Park, skating clubs, dancing classes, and children’s parties. A costume party at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street was attended by the offspring of grand families including the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Potters, and Goulds. There were summers in houses in the Hudson Valley, and holidays with their grandmother Mary Weir in Southampton and on her farm in Katonah, New York.
In common with other children from New York’s plutocracy, the two little Dalziel girls with their beautiful mother appeared from time to time in studio photographs in the society pages of the better parts of the press. There are several photographs of Diana herself before her twelfth birthday, marking her as a child who, like her mother, lived at the heart of New York’s social elite. She starred as the leading lady in a widely reported colonial pageant enacted by two hundred society children, a somewhat obnoxious event ostensibly organized by the Lafayette Fund to help wounded soldiers in France but mainly designed to let social interlopers know where they stood, since casting was by pedigree. (Diana headed the cast as Martha Washington because she was thought to be a collateral descendant of George through the Key connection.) Diana’s insistence that she was brought up in Paris was also sharply contradicted by an album recording her New York childhood, assembled by her father as a wedding present, and confirmed by entries in The Social Register from 1904 onward. The Social Register suggests that the Dalziels may have held on to their Paris house at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne for two years after they moved to New York in 1904, but no longer. Alexandra would later say categorically that she and Diana grew up entirely in New York—but that it seemed to matter very much to Diana to believe otherwise. In public Alexandra loyally refused to discuss the whereabouts of their upbringing. “I’d better leave memories of childhood to Diana,” she said later. “Sisters remember things differently.”
One point on which both sisters did agree was that behind the facade of their pleasant house on East Seventy-Seventh Street the atmosphere was often strained; and that the problems revolved entirely around the moods of their ever-more-volatile mother. The decision to move from Paris to New York in 1904 affected Frederick and Emily Dalziel quite differently. In an unusual version of the American dream, America gave Frederick Dalziel the freedom to live as the upper-class Englishman he wanted to be, though he talked up his wife’s family connections while keeping quiet about his own. “My father,” Alexandra said, “was a tremendous snob about my mother’s relations.” His income from Post & Flagg and Emily’s trusts from the Ellis family combined to give them a life on the
Upper East Side of which he could only have dreamed as a boy in Haringey. For its part, New York society took Frederick Dalziel at face value. By 1910 he was a member of the invitation-only Brook Club, said to be the most exclusive gentleman’s club in the United States, let alone New York.
For Emily, however, the move back to New York from Paris came at some personal cost, returning her to the world of her mother and the claustrophobic, gossipy, even vicious social elite in which she had grown up. To make things worse, there was now a certain degree of slippage in Mrs. Frederick Dalziel’s status and position. While she was growing up Emily was associated with the social power that came from money. By the time she returned from Paris in 1904, riches mattered even more, and many of her friends had either married into great means or inherited vast fortunes. (The Dalziels’ friends included rich bohemians such as Diana’s stand-in godfather, the sculptor Henry Clews, Jr., the painter Robert Winthrop Chanler, and the former actress Mrs. George Gould.) Emily, meanwhile, had married an impecunious Englishman. It was a loss of power with which she struggled. Emily felt poor compared to their wealthy friends. Living in a world where making any money herself was out of the question, she worried about it all the time. “He never had any money,” Diana later said. “Never made any money, never thought about money; it killed my mother, who was American, though she was very European. She saw things rather square, which most women do.”
Another reason for Emily’s unhappiness was that she suffered as her youthful bloom began to fade, a loss that was all the more potent in the inward-looking world of New York’s elite, where great importance was placed on appearance and display. She became increasingly neurotic about her power to attract, compensating with extravagant makeup that caused her daughter much embarrassment at school. “Whispers would go around: ‘Look, she’s painted,’ ” said Diana. “She was very made up for those days.” This anxiety manifested itself in a constant need to be the center of attention, and some very uninhibited flirting. “I remember this: my mother wouldn’t have a chauffeur or a footman unless he was infatuated with her—he had to show enormous dazzle for her. Everyone had to or she wasn’t interested.” This attitude would later extend to Diana’s own boyfriends: “She had to be on stage, often making a show of herself.” Diana sensed that of the two of them, her mother was by far the more fragile character: “I think she was someone who was possessed by a great fear.”
It is not clear exactly when Emily tipped from a flirtatious manner into taking lovers. Having created a delightful new reality for himself in New York, Frederick Dalziel resolutely refused to spoil it by facing up to the fact he was being cuckolded, and Diana had difficulty coming to terms with the idea later too, maintaining that the worst her mother did was to travel everywhere with a good-looking Turk. “My father was rather amused by her flirtations—it was all part of the scene,” said Diana. “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.” It was Alexandra who faced Emily’s adultery squarely and acknowledged that in retrospect she was certain her mother had often been unfaithful to her father. “She had a great many men,” said Alexandra. “My father had to put up with a very great deal.”
Emily also dealt with the unhappiness that gnawed at her by escaping from New York. Until the outbreak of war in 1914 she returned to Europe frequently, and from the age of eight Diana went with her. Diana’s memories of a childhood in Paris were not, therefore, purely imaginary: they did draw on real experience. Between 1911 and 1913 she traveled with her family to England, Scotland, and France. Her grandmother Mary Weir went to Paris too, establishing her own household with servants and a secretary. These expeditions lasted for several months each summer, and there is no reason to doubt the impact of Paris on a sensitive child whose parents loved the city and impressed upon her the fact that she had been born there. Given her age at the time, some later confusion is understandable. Nonetheless, it is also the case that once an idea gripped Diana’s imagination, it became true even if it was not. “So many of the things in life that interest me the most I totally forget,” she once remarked. “They’re so intense they . . . burn off. Then, when I do remember them, they become stronger than memory—stronger, even, than reality.”
One example is her story that in 1909 Diaghilev brought the ballerina and Belle Epoque figure Ida Rubinstein to her parents’ house on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, whereupon six-year-old Diana hid behind a screen and took in every detail of what Rubinstein was wearing. “She was all in black—a straight black coat to the ground. . . . Under the coat she wore high black suede Russian boots. And her hair was like Medusa’s—these great big black curls, draped in black tulle, which kept them in place and just veiled her eyes. Then her eyes, through the veil. . . . If you’ve never seen kohl before, brother, was that a time to see it!” And then there was Rubinstein’s shape: “She was long, lithesome, sensuous, sinuous . . . it was all line, line, line.” Leaving aside the detail that Diana’s parents were not living in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne in 1909, parts of this story are credible for the prosaic reason that Diaghilev was searching Paris for money that year to launch the first season of his Ballets Russes; and he often touted Ida Rubinstein around rich people in the hope that they would back his productions of Cléopatre and Schéhérazade in which Rubinstein would star.
It is plausible that Diaghilev heard about Emily’s talent as an amateur dancer, sought her out, introduced her to both Rubinstein and the great Nijinsky, and treated her as a person of informed taste in the mistaken belief that she was in a position to write a large check. But given that Diana was only six in 1909 and that there is no record of her traveling outside the United States before 1911, it is much less plausible that she met Ida Rubinstein herself or that she hid behind a screen while her mother chatted with Diaghilev. It is more probable that Diana met or saw Ida Rubinstein when she was older, or heard the story from her mother later, for from the evidence Emily had a narrative gift. Diana’s vision of demimondaines parading in the Bois de Boulogne in the colors of the new century may well have been her mother’s description, at least in part: “red red, violent violet, orange—when I say ‘orange’ I mean red orange, not yellow orange—jade green and cobalt blue.” Diana’s story about visiting London for the coronation of King George V is another case in point. The coronation took place in June 1911 when the Dalziels were in Europe, and it is quite possible that the eight-year-old Diana was taken to stand in the crowds. But she later confessed to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that most of what she remembered came from gazing intently at photographs for hours on end much later. In reminiscing about Diaghilev, Diana left herself an escape route too. “That’s where everything happened, and 1909, that’s the year it happened, and they say that’s how it happened.”
It is also perhaps not surprising that memories of long sojourns in Paris, however confused or improved upon later, burned brighter than the mundane routine of New York childhood. The Belle Epoque Paris that displaced her Manhattan upbringing before 1914 certainly positioned Diana later as more romantic, more exotic, more “other” than she really was, and made her parents sound richer and more fashionable. In years to come this would become more, not less, important. By the time she was in her sixties, Diana placed such a high premium on imaginative power that she believed the romantic way she remembered her childhood was more significant than reality. Images of a Paris childhood nourished her imagination to such an extent that she almost came to believe her own stories while holding out the possibility that it was all “faction.” But there was more to blotting out her early years than this.
From an early age Diana’s American childhood was made miserable by beauty. She felt herself to be her beautiful mother’s unloved, ugly child, causing her great pain. She internalized a sense of herself as ugly when s
he was very young, though photographs suggest that she was not nearly as plain as she felt herself to be. She inherited attractive dark coloring from Emily but a big nose and jaw from Frederick Dalziel, features that worked less well on a little girl with slight astigmatism than they did on a large man. But it was also Diana’s misfortune that her younger sister, Alexandra, was enchantingly pretty. Alexandra had a fine bone structure, a petite nose, and extraordinary violet eyes. According to Diana, “Sister” was a sensation even when taken out in her pram to Central Park:
I can remember she was The Most Beautiful Child in Central Park. In those days it was a very small world, and there were all sorts of little titles like that. She’d sit in her pram—she was terribly dressed up, you understand—and people would stop just to look at her. As soon as I’d see people looking, I’d run over to the pram, because I was so proud of her.
“Oh what a beautiful child!” they’d say.
“Yes,” I’d always say, “and she has violet eyes.”
But in an incident that seared itself forever on Diana’s memory, pride in her little sister’s beauty became entangled with crushing blows to her self-confidence:
Then there was the most terrible scene between my mother and me. One day she said to me, “It’s too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This, of course, is why you are so impossible to deal with.” It didn’t offend me that much. I simply walked out of the room. I never bothered to explain that I loved my sister and was more proud of her than of anything in the world, that I absolutely adored her. . . . Parents, you know, can be terrible.
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