Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Within the tight, small world of New York fashion, Diana’s reputation spread; and in 1941 she was parodied again, although this time it was onstage rather than in the pages of the The New Yorker. Episodes from life at Bazaar in general and Diana’s bons mots in particular were collected by one of its fiction editors, Beatrice Kaufman, who related them with glee to her husband, the writer and theater director George S. Kaufman, and his frequent collaborator Moss Hart. The upshot was that stories about Bazaar made their way into Lady in the Dark by Moss Hart, set to music by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

  Lady in the Dark went through many changes after it first opened on Broadway in 1941. Set in the offices of a fashion magazine called Allure, the earliest version opens with Allure’s editor Liza Elliott (played by Gertrude Lawrence) suffering from panic attacks and finding it hard to make decisions. Against her better judgment she agrees to see a psychoanalyst who addresses her complex love life. He focuses on tension between Liza and Charley, the advertising manager who wants her job and accuses her of being “married to her desk” and “having magazines instead of babies.” Diana was the model for Alison Du Bois, Allure’s eccentric fashion columnist. Ideas tumble out of Alison Du Bois. The Easter issue should lay an egg; a Bonwit-Teller dummy, male, should fall in love with a Saks dummy, female, and pursue their love affair in the store windows. “Saks is so conservative,” declares Alison. “I think they sometimes mix themselves up with St. Patrick’s, they’ve been next door so long.” Intriguingly, there are moments when Liza Elliott’s unhappiness is explained by a childhood exactly like Diana’s. It transpires that Liza Elliott’s beautiful mother was cruel to her about her ugliness. “I ran to the nursery and looked in the mirror. I felt ugly and ashamed,” says Liza to the psychoanalyst. Liza remarks that she found it impossible to grieve when her mother died. In fact it was liberating because the taunts about the gap between what she was and what she longed to be finally stopped. Lady in the Dark closes with Liza agreeing happily to share her job with Charley, an ending that is only marginally less irritating if allowances are made for male anxiety in 1941 about the dominance of women in New York fashion in wartime.

  In 1942 an article called “No Place Like Home” appeared in the October issue of Bazaar. The Vreelands featured in it incognito as a united family enjoying simple pleasures at a difficult time for the country, a picture of family unity that was only a partial version of the truth. By September 1939, both Tim and Freck were boarders at Groton School in Massachusetts, returning home for occasional weekends and school holidays. Reed was hardly at home at all. Soon after the outbreak of war he finally parted company with the Guaranty Trust and took up a new job running part of the d’Erlanger financial empire in Montreal. In the summer of 1940, a new arrival joined the family to compensate, when Diana’s niece Emi-Lu Kinloch, the twelve-year-old daughter of her sister, Alexandra, was evacuated from Britain. Diana later claimed that she “adopted” Emi-Lu and “brought her up” during the war years. But although Emi-Lu called Diana “Mom,” she spent the week with her grandfather and Kay Carroll during term time, following her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother to Brearley. On weekends and holidays, she was sent to stay with Aunt Diana. This arrangement had the effect of reigniting the old antipathy between Diana and Kay Carroll, who was wont to say “You’re going to your Aunt Diana this weekend,” in tones of such loathing that it affected Emi-Lu’s feelings about her aunt.

  Diana’s reaction to Emi-Lu’s arrival suggests that the traumas of her childhood had by no means played themselves out, even though she was now in her thirties. There is no doubt that Diana minded very much how her substitute daughter looked. She was having lunch with Dorothy Shaver when Reed met Emi-Lu from the boat and telephoned to say she had arrived. By her own account Diana’s first question to Reed was “Is she good looking?” Reed was able to reassure Diana that Emi-Lu was very good looking. “Well, she wasn’t good looking, she was divine looking,” said Diana later. “She was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. I’d be so proud when I’d walk down the street with her.”

  With Emi-Lu cared for by Frederick Dalziel and Kay Carroll during the week, Diana continued working at Bazaar throughout the war. This could potentially have been the source of some tension with her father, for Frederick Dalziel disapproved of Diana’s job, not because he disliked the idea of women working but because he loathed everything to do with Hearst, whose newspapers had caused the Dalziel family so much misery during the Ross scandal. But, as ever, Frederick Dalziel dealt with unhappiness by refusing to mention it. “After I went to work, he never asked me how I was getting along, or how much money I was making, or whether they treated me well . . . the subject was never referred to—ever—because of his disapproval,” said Diana. Frederick Dalziel was seventy-four when war broke out. He lived quietly on a small income until 1960 and died aged ninety-two, so it was a long silence. In the meantime he continued to do a little work at Post & Flagg and changed lady friends approximately every six months. (Occasionally Emi-Lu would surprise him and his latest inamorata canoodling on the sofa.)

  Regardless of Frederick Dalziel’s feelings on the subject, it was essential that Diana keep her job at Bazaar throughout the war because the Vreelands were very short of money. In 1941 Reed was obliged to write to the headmaster of Groton requesting scholarships for both his sons, citing the difficulties of getting cash out of Canada, and extra freight from Britain in the form of Emi-Lu. Reed and Diana had also taken on an additional financial commitment. They bought Turk Hill, in Brewster, New York, in June 1940, keeping a visitor’s book from June 1941. An enchanting house, where every internal door was painted a different color, it formed the background to several Bazaar shoots and led to one last “Why Don’t You?” on the joys of country living before the column finally stopped for good. “Everything is this color around here,” scrawled one of the Hearsts in red crayon in the visitors’ book. Diana was given a helping hand in its decoration by Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger, who had left England at the outbreak of war and created for her a fantastic fireplace with shells. “While it looked nothing more than a remodeled farm on the outside, the interior was painted magenta and the walls, two ceilings high, were lined with 10,000 books,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin. “Buckets stowed with hanks of beautifully colored wools were composed as carefully as though they were flower arrangements and, as with flower arrangements, guests were not supposed to touch them.”

  Friends and colleagues streamed through the Brewster house in the early part of the war. They were often friends escaping from Europe. The jewelry designer Johnny [Jean] Schlumberger came to recover after Dunkirk. Edwina d’Erlanger was a frequent visitor, as was Kitty Miller. Elsie Mendl appeared with Diana’s cousin Pauline Potter, who would later become Pauline de Rothschild. Isabel Kemp, who had been a childhood friend of Diana’s and one of her bridesmaids, was another regular guest: she may have reappeared at this point in Diana’s life because she had a close relationship with Pauline Potter. Syrie Maugham came to stay. So did the fashion editor Nicolas de Gunzburg and the journalist Janet Flanner; and Virginia Cowles scribbled in the visitors’ book that she had decided to move in for good. Colleagues from Bazaar, including George Davis, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Frances McFadden, all signed the visitors’ book. Elsa Schiaparelli’s sense of humor failed her when Emi-Lu, for reasons best known to her twelve-year-old self, referred to her as “the Great French Cleaner” during a parlor game.

  Later Emi-Lu wrote to Diana: “I did love it so much there—everything about it—the flowers—your wonderful bedroom and the divine living room with Timmy and Frecky playing their records. The gorgeous food I never appreciated.” There was, of course, the occasional squall: “Frecky slapping my face for saying you were too swanky—me writing Grandpa—he saying it was dreadful and doing nothing.” And she certainly found tiptoeing around her intimidating aunt’s sleep schedule at Brewster a little tiresome. “You—who were very nice—but te
rrifying—you know the thing one always had to be quiet in the morning for.” Looking back Emi-Lu realized she might not have been so very easy herself: “Gosh I thought I was badly treated and how you spoilt me!! Brewster always was divine. In fact I teenaged through it—which always is—Hell but heaven!”

  The war years were often much closer to hell than heaven for Diana. Like thousands of other mothers, she had to see a son off to war when Tim graduated from Groton in 1943. He was utterly astonished when she burst into tears as she waved him good-bye. He was rather excited about taking such a step into the unknown, and was taken aback by her reaction. Feeling like a grown man, he had no idea how young he looked to his mother. Tim did not reach Europe until the fighting was over, and Freck only joined the merchant marine in 1945, but Diana could not foresee that in 1943. “You don’t know what it was for a mother to see her sons off,” she said. “The only thing that made it possible was that you weren’t alone. Every person you’d pass on the street was in the same boat.”

  But there was another reason why the war years were difficult, in spite of all Diana’s professional success. “During the War years, during the soi-disant best years of my life—the soi-disant best years of my life, not the best years of my life—I spent them entirely alone working,” said Diana to Christopher Hemphill. On her own in New York, she sensed a degree of prejudice. “I knew that I wasn’t very important. I wasn’t really what they were looking for at that important spot at the table.” Moreover, the men who were left behind were distinctly second rate. “They had no exaltation,” said Diana, “or they wouldn’t have been around town.”

  But the real reason for her misery was Reed. When he first started running the Moorgate Agency for the d’Erlangers in Montreal in 1939, Reed returned to New York every month, but early in 1940 this pattern changed. His return visits became fewer and fewer, though he was in New York to meet Emi-Lu off the ship from England in 1940, and he reappeared each Christmas.

  Work was not the reason for these long absences. Reed was having a very serious affair with an unnamed married woman with children of her own. By all accounts Diana never spoke of this to anyone. (“Are some things better left undiscussed? Can a duck swim?”) Indeed she rarely discussed his absence at all, other than to say he was in Montreal and working for British interests. If the Vreelands were invited somewhere together, she would refuse on his behalf as if his absence were temporary. But she knew at the time that Reed was in love with someone else, and for much of the war the survival of their marriage was in doubt. Later she was a little more forthcoming about the toll this took on her. “He was there for seven years. We were married for 43 years and this is only seven of them but it was a very vivid period in my life. For seven years, I was by myself, by myself.” Even Emi-Lu, who was little more than a child, could sense how much her coiffed and lacquered aunt Diana loved her uncle Reed. Emi-Lu thought it was Diana’s saving grace, the one great thing about her. “She really, really knew how to love.” Yet even this was unable to hold Reed. It is perhaps not surprising that as the war progressed, the women dramatized by Diana in collaboration with Louise Dahl-Wolfe metamorphosed from romantic figures staring at themselves in rococo mirrors to industrious women who were always alone, enigmatic, often gazing into the middle distance in some kind of private reverie, probably thinking of an absent man—a mood that captured the feelings of thousands of Bazaar’s readers in wartime and contributed to its success.

  In the end it was energy and dreaming and making surfaces beautiful that got Diana through:

  One morning, I said “Betty, I’ll tell you what I do whenever I’m depressed: I clean my shoes and out of that energy comes a gleam of survival.”

  I cleaned my shoes every morning to keep my mind off. . . .

  Listen, the great thing was to get out of St. Augustine.

  Chapter Five

  New Look

  In spite of their encouragement of American designers in wartime, Carmel Snow and Diana continued to regard French couture as the wellspring of all fashion inspiration, and no amount of American inventiveness could persuade them otherwise. As soon as Paris was liberated in August 1944, Snow made her way to France to discover whether the couture had survived. She discovered that it had, but at a price. The dressmakers of Paris had resorted to every kind of behavior from breathtaking courage to frank collaboration in order to pull through. “I’ve never taken any side in anything that went on in Paris during the war . . . because I was not there. I didn’t have hungry children,” said Diana. But news that the couture had actually thrived by purveying rounder, fuller shapes to rich women went down badly in Allied countries, where fabric and clothes were severely rationed and volunteers were still sending clothing parcels to the poorer parts of France. In New York, American designers objected fiercely to the possible return of Paris influence, maintaining that American taste and technique had so improved during the war that U.S. manufacturers were producing better-quality garments than the French, and for a fraction of the price. For a time, continued L-85 restrictions, distaste for what was seen as collaborationism on the part of French designers, and a feeling that it was unpatriotic to wear extravagant clothes meant that the return of the Paris couture to its former dominant position hung in the balance.

  This cut no ice with Snow. “I was no more willing to concede the permanent fall of Paris than was General de Gaulle,” she said. She was helped by a change of mood that gripped America as soon as the war ended. By late 1945 women were yearning for something different from the straight, boxy, L-85 fashions associated with the trauma of war—and so were their menfolk. “Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history,” writes the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. In this instance, however, the answer was quite straightforward: “Men want women beautiful, romantic . . . birds of paradise instead of hurrying brown hens,” said Bazaar in October 1945. As families were reestablished, there was a move toward a celebratory fashion of fecundity, with closer-fitting waists and rounder hips. Rebecca Arnold notes that this response to peace was as prevalent in the United States as it was in Paris. U.S. sportswear designers, led by Claire McCardell, also began to move in the direction of a different, more curvaceous silhouette between 1945 and 1947, developing an idea introduced by Mainbocher just before the outbreak of war.

  It was the new French couturier Christian Dior who successfully captured the change of mood. Snow identified Dior as a rising star as early as 1946. A few months later he was backed by the textile magnate Marcel Boussac in a self-consciously patriotic campaign to restore French design to its prewar ascendancy. A nervous Dior was urged to proceed on behalf of France by his friend, the artist-designer Christian Bérard: “There is no other way,” said Bérard. “You must be Joan of Arc.” Excitement about Dior’s first collection in February 1947 built up for weeks, much of it stoked by Bérard. It was made known that the designer would be taking fashion in an extraordinary new direction. Tickets for the opening sold on the black market and a huge crowd assembled outside beforehand. Dior left his most dramatic new idea until the end of a highly theatrical show. This was the “Corolle” line, crystallized in “le Bar”: a huge, full, deeply pleated black wool skirt that dropped to midcalf, with a light-colored silk shantung jacket closely fitted to the bust. The jacket was padded below the waist, emphasizing curvaceous hips and a tiny waist, and the outfit was designed to be accessorized with high heels, a broad-brimmed hat, white gloves, and a small clutch purse. Some of the skirts in the Corolle line measured as much as forty yards in circumference, their hemlines just twelve inches off the ground. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the extravagance astounding. The applause started almost as soon as the show began, and grew louder and louder. Dior burst into tears. Carmel Snow remarked, “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look,”
producing the catchphrase that encapsulated the whole phenomenon.

  In the New York office of Harper’s Bazaar, anticipation mounted. Babs Simpson was a junior fashion editor at Bazaar in 1947. “I remember everybody being so excited. These telegrams would come in, these cables from Paris . . . the new look . . . changed everything, and she [Carmel Snow] sort of stopped the press kind of thing. It was very exciting.” The office waited breathlessly for Snow’s return since no one there had yet seen Dior’s New Look at close range. She walked in wearing it. As ever, Diana found the words. “Carmel, it’s divine!” she cried. “It makes you look—drowned.” The New Look started an international fashion craze. Foreign buyers who had returned home before Dior’s show, believing it to be an irrelevance, found they had ordered outdated models. Furious manufacturers were left with unwanted stock. And politicians beyond France fulminated in vain at the extravagant new French fashion in a time of postwar austerity. American designers like Claire McCardell, who had already sensed the change of mood, found themselves in demand. Nonetheless the old Paris magic worked against them. With the New Look, Dior successfully reasserted the supremacy of Paris couture. “Dior saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne,” said Carmel Snow.