It is also possible to detect elements of positive thinking in Diana’s adolescent philosophy. Positive thinking was an idea that flourished during this period in books for teenage girls like Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The cultural historian Ann Douglas suggests that the insistence in these highly influential books on accentuating the positive and turning one’s gaze away from the “horrors of life” emerged from a uniquely American mixture of self-help attitudes and quasi-religious, late-nineteenth-century movements such as Mind-cure, Spiritualism, and Christian Science. One common characteristic of these therapies, which were dominated by powerful women, was the assertion that the disciplined conscious mind could win the battle over the dark workings of the unconscious, and that doing so was the key to a happy and successful life. “It’s not just nightmares I can’t stand,” Diana once said to Christopher Hemphill. “If you really want to know . . . I don’t like waking up with an idea stronger than . . . than my own day.” But for all that positive thinking was an American idea, it was also remarkably close to Frederick Dalziel’s resolute denial of his wife’s affairs, his definite preference for the bright side, and his very British insistence that “worse things happen at sea,” when they were going very badly indeed.
After Diana’s death in 1989, a view of her emerged as someone damaged early in life by a great “complex” about her looks, intensified by her sister’s beauty and her mother’s antipathy. In this interpretation Diana became “Diana Vreeland” because of emotional injury inflicted in childhood. “Changing herself covered up a deep wound,” wrote Eleanor Dwight. Insecurity and pain about her ugliness was so great, ran Dwight’s argument, that it induced a lifelong obsession with external appearances that eventually propelled Diana into a position of control where she punished the world by deciding what constituted beauty and ugliness. “In later life,” wrote Dwight, “Diana’s models, her magazine pages and her Costume Institute shows would all benefit from her deep need to wave her wand and transform the ordinary and the flawed into the mesmerizingly beautiful. And one day, rather than being the object of criticism by her classmates and her mother, Diana, the powerful fashion editor, would be the judge and decide who was and who wasn’t beautiful.”
There is, of course, an element of truth in this. But there is also a danger that this view of Diana unfairly pathologizes her as someone who was driven mainly by a profound and somewhat negative emotional flaw.
It is perhaps more fruitful to pose a different question and ask: What was it that allowed Diana to survive her mother’s destructive treatment? An alternative answer is that Diana was a vulnerable child who was saved by the power of her imagination. She deployed it with great intelligence to defend herself against Emily’s negative view of her, escaping over and over again to the parallel world of her inner eye in a way that became the basis for much of her later success, which would eventually enable her to challenge conventional ideas about female beauty.
In the meantime, in the six months between January and June 1918, Diana also discovered that when she took tentative steps to align her fantasies with the real, outer world, the real world saw her so differently that her perception of herself changed too.
Boris Cyrulnik and others have observed that one of the most common defense mechanisms in unhappy but resilient children is “splitting”—a dividing of the self into a socially acceptable part and a hidden, unacceptable part. “If I can change the way you see me, then I can change the way I feel about myself,” writes Cyrulnik, describing this frame of mind. “I can prove to myself that I am once more in control of my past and I am not such a victim after all.” In 1918 Diana seemed to understand that rather than transform herself, she needed to become the most perfect version of the highly original, imaginative self that she could be. At fourteen she already understood that this would require the courage to stand out, not to mention constant attention to detail and a philosophy of continuous improvement. “I simply must be more perfect. Although I am getting better every day I am not ‘there’ yet,” she wrote. “The damn fool,” she scribbled years later beneath the last entry in her diary, which, apart from one short sentence, fizzled out midsentence in June, incidentally suggesting that the long-haul literary endeavor was not for her. But in this instance Diana was wrong. Rather than a “fool,” the diary suggests a creative, unhappy child whose resilience stemmed from a growing belief in the power of dreaming, harnessed to the determined effort of the conscious mind. “It’s very touching—the things that exist and come true if you believe and insist,” she said years later. “If you just have an idea. . . . If you just have a dream.”
Throughout the period covered by the diary, Diana had two supporters. One of them was Frederick Dalziel. A rare note of encouragement came from her father on January 10, 1918: “Yesterday I painted my brackets black and today put a blue lampshade on it which makes it look too lovely against the bright blue wall. . . . Daddy says my room looks ‘nifty’ which encourages me greatly as I simply love interior decorations.” (Years later “nifty” would reappear as one of Diana’s favorite adjectives in Vogue.) Frederick Dalziel was clearly able to ease family tensions when he was at home. “He had that thing about him, having to do with a sense of humor, which is the most cleansing thing in the world,” Diana remarked. “My father was so much easier and closer to us.” Family photographs often showed Diana and her father together, while Alexandra and Emily were photographed elsewhere. “We weren’t exactly what you’d call a tidy little group,” said Diana. But Frederick Dalziel was an Edwardian father who had work to do at Post & Flagg and a male New York life. He was also devoted to Emily, so however much Diana loved him, the extent to which her father was really able to protect her from her mother is debatable.
The person who rescued Diana was Ama—her grandmother Mary Weir. It has already been noted that it was Mary Weir, not Emily, who came to watch Diana in ballet class. Throughout the period covered by the diary Diana went to see Ama so often in the afternoons that it is possible that Weir actively intervened on her behalf against Emily and Kay Carroll after Diana was expelled from Brearley. Mary Weir would certainly have had no compunction about interfering if she thought it necessary, for by 1918 she had turned into a ferocious elderly woman. “My grandmother could be appalling. . . . She was domineering. . . . The Victorian grandmother was the matriarch,” said Diana. Cast in the mold of a formidable generation of white middle-class women excluded from political power, Mary Weir was a founding member of the Colony Club, the first exclusive club for society women in New York; her servants did not stay long; she feuded with her relations; and she was perfectly capable of sending all six and a half feet of Frederick Dalziel from her table for unspecified offenses. (“He thought it was a riot,” said Diana.)
Formidable or not, Ama gave Diana the kind of appreciative affection denied to her by Emily, and the bond grew stronger as Diana moved into her midteens. Weir seems to have been pleased by Diana’s idiosyncratic intelligence, imagination, and strength of character. (Diana may have looked like Weir, too, for Frederick Dalziel once thanked Diana for a photograph remarking she was “a dead ringer for Ama.”) Diana was alert and amusing, and she won her grandmother’s respect, while the less confrontational Alexandra, in contrast, did not. The feeling was mutual. In an unusually bitter aside years later, Alexandra said that she really did not like her grandmother at all. This was a family of volcanic emotions; in another instance of the strong feelings that convulsed it, Weir named her house in Katonah Villa Diana. After the miserable summer of 1917, Diana spent vacations with her grandmother while Emily and Alexandra went back out West. Her grandmother’s household at Katonah provided another source of comfort in the farm animals, especially the horses, which did not have the power to hurt, unlike human beings. “My grandmother had a huge farm horse in the country outside of Katonah. . . . After lunch I’d run off, get on the horse. . . . I’d sit there all afternoon, perfectly happy. It would get hot, the flies woul
d buzz. . . . That’s all I wanted—just to be with the steam and the smell of that divine horse. Horses smell much better than people—I can tell you that.”
In 1920, when she was sixteen, Diana spent most of the summer with Weir before she died on September 8. There was another emotional upheaval when it emerged that Mary Weir had left Diana far more than all her other grandchildren, in the form of the Villa Diana, its contents, and twenty thousand dollars for its upkeep. Given the brutal value system of the day, Weir may have felt that Diana needed a dowry in a way that the beautiful Alexandra did not, and that by leaving her some money she was making up for a poor hand dealt by nature. It is also possible that over the years Diana had confided in her grandmother about her need to become “self-supporting” and that Weir thought it wrong of Emily to insist on this, since to her such a notion was both inappropriate and implausible. There was certainly an implied rebuke to Emily about her handling of Diana in Weir’s will; and Emily’s indignation at the slight to Alexandra can be felt in the wording of her own will, in which she left Diana almost nothing in an attempt to even things out.
However, Mary Weir’s bequest meant that when the Villa Diana was sold two years later Diana had some money of her own. Emily also inherited a trust from her mother that finally gave her a substantial independent income. This was followed by another legacy to Emily from Diana’s godmother Anna Key Thompson in 1921, though the will was contested and the matter remained unsettled until 1923. In the late autumn of 1920, however, the Dalziel family finances were already less stretched. Soon after her grandmother died, seventeen-year-old Diana was dispatched to a liberal arts boarding school on Staten Island for a final year of education. Meanwhile Emily had enough money of her own to pursue what she most enjoyed on a much grander scale. In what would prove to be a fateful move, she departed a few weeks later on a hunting expedition to Africa with Sir Charles Henry Augustus Frederick Lockhart Ross, ninth Baronet of Balnagown, plunging her family into years of bewilderment about fact and fiction.
Unlike Frederick Dalziel, Sir Charles Ross (1872–1942) was an authentic British aristocrat and a genuine British bounder. He was known as a “stinker” throughout his life by tenants, wives, and his own mother, whom he ejected from the family home, Balnagown Castle in Scotland, either by stopping up her bedroom chimney and smoking her out, or by setting fire to her hair, depending on which account one prefers. Even this behavior paled into insignificance beside the matter of the Ross rifle. Invented by Sir Charles, the Ross rifle was ideal for sport but had lethal shortcomings in battle. Nonetheless Sir Charles pressed it on the Canadian government before and during the First World War, making a fortune by causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Canadian soldiers before Field Marshal Douglas Haig personally intervened. None of this deterred Emily. She and Sir Charles Ross first met in New York in 1896, around the time of her debut. There is no sign of any further communication between them till 1919–20, when Ross, by now a very rich man, was living for many months of the year in the United States to be close to his business interests. He was a renowned sportsman, and given Emily’s enthusiasm for hunting and penchant for charismatic men it is not surprising that they struck up a friendship.
Two versions of what happened next later emerged. In one version the relationship between Sir Charles Ross and Emily was innocent, and the notion that they should go off hunting together was enthusiastically supported by Frederick Dalziel. The greatest of their expeditions was to East Africa in 1920, in a group that included a distinguished naturalist, a pioneer of wildlife photography, Emily’s maid, Sir Charles’s chauffeur, and Sir Charle’s Rolls-Royce. The party sailed from New York to Marseille, and then from Marseille to Mombasa. After a period in Kenya they made their way south to what is now Tanzania. There they plunged into virgin territory for Europeans, the Ngorongoro Crater. The expedition eventually broke up in May 1921. By this time Emily was ill. She returned to New York and to her husband, who later deposed that her affectionate feeling toward him had in no respect abated. In an alternative version of the story, the attraction between Sir Charles and Mrs. Dalziel was blindingly obvious from 1920 onward, especially to Sir Charles’s wife. Their behavior aboard the ship from Marseille to Mombasa, which included Mrs. Dalziel lounging en déshabillé in Sir Charles’s cabin at breakfast time, obliged the stewards to conclude that they were on unusually familiar terms. In this version of the story this sort of thing was but “a natural preliminary to the guilty use of opportunities such as awaited them in the solitude of an African forest,” opportunities they put most energetically to use.
These stories did not circulate for some years, however. In the meantime Emily’s return to New York from Africa in 1921 caused a mild sensation. The New York Times reported excitedly that her “bag” included one elephant, two rhinoceroses, one buffalo, seven lions, one leopard, one cheetah, and three hippopotamuses. On July 27, 1921, Emily gave an interview in the paper to a bedazzled Walter Duranty, of particular interest because it is the only record of the way Emily spoke, suggesting that Diana developed her eye and poetic turn of phrase by listening to her mother. Emily talked of watching, entranced, as a herd of elephants played in a narrow ravine, “squirting water from a stream over one another like schoolboys splashing in a swimming pool”; and of turning around to face a wounded elephant, who, “Like a shadow . . . drifted through the jungle without breaking a twig.” In the bush there were “metallic beetles, whose whole being seemed made of beaten gold and silver or bronze.” Diana’s love of color is detectable in Emily’s description of the great soda flats of Lake Manyara: “The dry season had dried up part of the water, leaving exposed the brilliant colored mineral and soda deposits—amethyst, ruby, yellow, green, crimson and snow white,” and the language used by Emily when talking about safari catering is oddly reminiscent of Diana talking about the horse she loved at Katonah. “Elephant trunk didn’t please me, though supposed to be a delicacy. To tell the truth, it tastes just like the circus smells.”
Unaware of anything that might or might not be happening in the Ngorongoro Crater, Diana spent her last year of formal education at Dongan Hall on Staten Island. (Her sister Alexandra remarked in an interview that Diana had to keep changing schools because, regardless of all her good intentions in her diary, she never did any work.) Dongan Hall’s records were destroyed in a fire in 1975, and all that survives from Diana’s time there is a handful of compositions that again reveal her creative flair, and the development of an idiosyncratic way with words. By 1920 she had acquired a taste for the gothic. In “The Very Blackest Night” a boy dies outside in the cold as the sounds of the great organ fade away in the howling wind and the nuns pass slowly by across the cobblestones. In another story a Spanish child bride sits “tragically alone in her huge and magnificent bedchamber, listlessly watching the tame nightingales in the jewelled cage splash around in the little silver bathtub.”
These female “types” of Diana’s imagination were, in 1920, clearly influenced by the first screen siren, Theda Bara, who had launched herself on an unsuspecting world a few years earlier as the Vamp in A Fool There Was and spawned a host of imitators. In Diana’s essays, vampish girls lounged, spoke with a sleepy drawl, and loved to have unsuspecting men confide in them about business difficulties. Lola, a vampire girl, “had long pale eyes. The kind that were sometimes green and sometimes blue, it depended on her frame of mind. She loved to slide these over you & then turn dreamily away and slide them over someone else.” Diana’s vamps, vampires, and other creations were not original, but these essays do convey the rich and precise detail of her gaze at seventeen, her sense of the zeitgeist, and her interest in the way clothes and objets projected a woman’s persona. She submitted one essay for publication in the school’s magazine, titled simply “A Type,” about a woman she clearly longed to be, and whom she described largely in terms of fashionable shopping circa 1920. The Type’s loves were
taffeta, telephone screens, round la
ce handkerchiefs, French silk stockings & squashy sofa cushions. . . . She was always discovering new specialty shops, and hated the big houses for her clothes, they were so wholesale. . . . And was always wanting to know where you got your darling blouse. Her favorite color for herself was gray blue, but she often mentioned that vermilion inspired her. . . . Pearls she considered her correct setting, bracelets and lingerie her passion and Oscar Wilde her idol.
(Oscar Wilde, had, of course, proposed an aesthetic ideal of the supremacy of art in every aspect of daily life.) Diana’s Type still bore traces of Theda Bara, by now an Egyptianized Vamp after a succès-fou as Cleopatra. “She was simply crazy for anything Egyptian,” wrote Miss Dalziel of her creation. “In fact at times she saw herself only as Cleopatra, surrounded by leopards, black slaves & silver white peacocks. She seldom smoked . . . but could rarely resist a gold tip & always managed to have the trusty black enamel holder aloof.”
Unlike Theda Bara and her screen sisters, who were silent, the manner in which Diana’s Type spoke—or chose not to—was most important: “She had taught herself to have quite a facility for words, but she seldom used it.” This Type “abhorred the woman who could not rely on herself to be smart & had to get their distinction by means of a Pekinese or chow chow.” In fact, wrote Diana, if you thought she was a woman with a lapdog you had missed the Type completely. Writing in the margin, a tin-eared teacher responded, “It’s your fault if anyone misses the type at this point.” Yet again Diana received almost no encouragement for her efforts, and the essays came back with low marks and complaints about dashes, paragraph indentations, and monotonous sentence construction. However, a corrected version may have appeared in the school magazine as Diana’s first published writing; and both Cleopatra and the “trusty black enamel holder” would reemerge later to great effect.
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