Diana’s reaction to Dior’s success was more ambivalent. She was thrilled by the survival of Frenchness and delighted that French craftsmanship, romance, drama, and artistry were making a comeback. But while she admired Dior’s talent she did not care for the New Look. “I always call it the guinea hen–look,” she said to Lally Weymouth later. Women of real chic looked marvelous in it, she thought, and the clothes by Dior were extravagant and beautiful. But unlike Chanel, who cut her models on live women, Dior designed his collections on stuffed dummies. However slim Diana was, she had a wide diaphragm, and the nipped-in waist did not suit her. Apart from the occasional strapless evening dress, she never wore the New Look herself, objecting to a fashion that required the wearer to don tight corsets, skirts that were heavy to the point of immobilization, and to totter around on very high heels that she thought damaged female posture. “Oh I couldn’t stand [the clothes] for myself—because I think all that wiring and what you call trussing. . . . You wore the cinch—you wore the Merry Widow—do you understand?” However, the mood in its favor was so strong that no mere editor could challenge it.
There were other aspects of the reemerging French couture that concerned Diana. As soon as she returned to Paris in 1946 she could see that the couture was changing in order to stay in existence, but not all the change was welcome. The society that had made the prewar couture possible, in which powerful female tastemakers had a close collaborative relationship with the couturier, had virtually disappeared. There was certainly no more mannequin du monde. “The first thing I asked after the war was: ‘Does it still exist—as an expression?’ I wasn’t hinting around. ‘Absolutely not!’ I was told, ‘It’s as dead as mud.’ ” Paris couture was rapidly becoming much more expensive. Designers needed very rich customers who could pay for the privilege, and that meant that most American women could only afford second-rate copies from American manufacturers who paid a license fee to copy the originals. This, in Diana’s view, meant inferior clothes. She wrote to Louise Dahl-Wolfe a few years later that it was all “awfully sad”:
Of course I look at all of these clothes of how [sic] they look when reproduced on Seventh Avenue as those are the only versions of these clothes we will ever see, and in the long run the only way they really ever count as so few woman [sic] in the world will ever be seen in originals that it is rather heartbreaking. It is a crime that Paris prices are so high making it impossible therefore for people to buy from them privately. . . . You may think I am on a minor note but it is something I feel so keenly and I think that the “masses” are being given really such vulgar clothes because any copy of a great thing is bound to look second rate unless it is especially designed to be watered down.
The return of the Paris couture also meant the return of Carmel Snow to fashion’s front line. The prewar division of labor at Bazaar was firmly reinstated. As editor in chief, Carmel Snow would continue going to the Paris collections. As fashion editor, Diana would focus entirely on the American market. At the same time the emphasis Bazaar had placed on the reader’s independence of choice, and her freedom to stride around in low heels, faded away. The “thrown-together” reader of Bazaar, who had forced manufacturers to adapt as she borrowed her brother’s topcoat, rolled up her dungarees, and ran around in moccasins and espadrilles, “the girl who knows what she wants, when she wants it, the dead-set, dead-right American girl” of Bazaar in August 1944, simply disappeared. Within three years it was back to command-and-control fashion again. “You Can’t Be A Last-Year Girl” a Bazaar editorial announced when the New Look appeared in 1947. “There’s not much in the old picture that survives. Not the hemline, waistline, nor the shoulderline.” The reader was going to love the new Paris fashion, the high heels and the hips. “Every woman has a waist, and this year she must find it.” If for some unfathomable reason the reader could not locate her waist, she must find a corsetière or do the exercises to be found in Bazaar. It all meant that for the time being the fashionable women of America—including Mrs. Vreeland—were back in their box.
For all the joyous reunions at the end of the war, there were those who had a more complex reaction to the Allied victory. An article in Bazaar noted that the whole country was in transition; that the return to family life was making some women unhappy; that everyone was coming to terms with the terrible new threat of nuclear annihilation; and that the strained mood was making even the most comradely women snap. In Diana’s case the cause of nervous tension was Reed. He did not come home from Canada as soon as the war ended, and she had to put up a real fight to get him back. “You can divorce me, Reed,” she is reported to have said. “But I’ll kill myself.” Gossip had it that she took matters into her own hands by going to Montreal, confronting Reed’s girlfriend, and forcing her to sit down in front of a mirror. “Look at you, you are young and beautiful, and you have everything ahead of you,” she is rumored to have said. “I am getting older and I have only my wonderful husband.” The woman in Reed’s life was married. Continuing the relationship meant breaking up two families. Perhaps it had already run its course. In the end both Reed and his mistress backed away from their wartime romance. Reed’s Montreal job came to an end in 1946, and by 1947 he was making entries in the Brewster garden book again. This outcome required considerable compromise on both sides.
On his return to New York, Reed, who did not fulfill his early promise in banking, turned to a range of financial activities with friends, including stints as president of a cement company and as chairman of the board of the International Trust Company of Liberia. His directorships were so closely related to his father’s business interests that it is reasonable to suppose they came through the family connection. Though he was always optimistic and convinced that he would make a fortune, his entrepreneurial projects were often mysterious and not as successful as he hoped. “Reed was always about to make a million dollars,” the interior decorator Billy Baldwin recalled. “He had the richest friends, men who made fortunes—Reed just never got around to it.” Reed may not have been very well suited to life in business, and it is quite possible that marriage to Diana came at some personal cost. He longed to be a singer, and with his looks, his connections, and his good tenor voice he might have succeeded at a time when Mario Lanza was having huge popular success. But this was a dream that Diana firmly quashed, perhaps for reasons of snobbishness, perhaps because of financial insecurity, and almost certainly because she was terrified of losing him. She wanted him to continue as a financier. “Showbiz breaks up families,” she said, and that was the end of it.
At the same time Reed greatly appreciated the dream world created for them both by Diana, provided that he was not required to engage with the more problematic aspects of the reality underpinning it. Diana once mentioned that she rarely talked about work at home, saying that Reed hated her bringing back office problems and that when she did, he threatened to leave. He does not seem to have been jealous of her success; but, like Diana, he preferred fantasy and a culture of denial, and never discussed his own business problems either. Though there was little that was fashionable about Seventh Avenue itself during the 1940s, there is no doubt that Diana’s job at Bazaar not only brought in a much-needed vital income but allowed the Vreelands to live like rich people. In fact Bazaar gave Diana herself a degree of fashion influence that was no longer possible for even the very rich. Reed liked the way of life and glamour of Diana’s job, and after he returned from Montreal he supported it wholeheartedly.
“Diana Vreeland’s home,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin, “is more original than any ever to appear on a magazine page, her husband is more polished and her friends are precisely the ones whose pictures are used repeatedly, whose menus, luggage, jewelry, furniture, paintings, sofa pillows, and children are avidly recorded by the fashion magazines, month after month, year in and out.” “I always looked rich,” Diana once said. “That was something Reed and I always had. . . . I’ve spent so much money in my life that it’s almost ta
ken the place of the real thing.” It was often remarked that Reed and Diana looked marvelous together. Reed, like his wife, dressed as elegantly in his fifties as he had ever done. Billy Baldwin remembered the Vreelands arriving late for lunch at Adelaide Leonard’s in Southampton in the 1950s. The hostess was on the point of proposing that the party should start lunch without them when they arrived over the dunes, with the sea behind them, “looking as though they had come out of some other world.” They were “dressed exactly alike in gray flannel knickers, suede waistcoats, and silk cravats. They were wearing the most incredible shoes and carrying golf bags.”
It all looked very decorative, but Diana had her own worries to contend with, for she had very nearly lost Reed to another woman during the war, and as she said herself, “He was never withered. He never struck age—ever.” Rumors of his infidelities during the postwar years need to be treated with caution, for Diana’s power made her the target of malicious talk; and there is no evidence that he ever philandered with the trail of beautiful young women who worked and fluttered through Bazaar and the Vreelands’ lives, however much he may have enjoyed looking at them. Gossip that has lingered centers once again on the Vreelands’ social circle, especially Cordelia Biddle Robertson, a long-standing friend of both Reed and Diana’s. But it is a little puzzling: Cordelia Biddle Robertson was five years older than Diana, and looked rather like her, “but without the makeup,” according to one friend. She was certainly not short of personality. Her father was the inspiration for the play The Happiest Millionaire, based on the memoir she wrote of him. He taught her to box and threw a huge wedding for her when she dropped out of school at fifteen to marry her first husband, Angier B. Duke. Reed was a much kinder man than most of his tycoon friends, with time for long lunches while his wife was at work; and Cordelia Biddle Robertson may well—at least for a time—have joined the line of women who found Reed attractive and made Diana uneasy. Those who knew the Vreelands well, however, did not doubt that theirs was a real marriage, based on deep mutual affection. Neither of them made the other suffer like some of their multiply married rich friends, and Billy Baldwin, who subsequently became their interior decorator and was in a position to know, observed that the feeling between them ran very deep: “It must be understood that Diana and Reed were a very happy couple, and it was because of her real infatuation for him and his great appreciation of her that they sailed this wonderful boat so beautifully together. Until the time that he went to the hospital to die they slept together in an enormous double bed.”
By the mid-1950s Vreeland family life had moved on as Tim and Freck became adults with lives and families of their own. On their return to New York from Europe in 1935 the Vreelands lived first at 65 East Ninety-Third Street and then at 400 Park Avenue. By 1946 both Timmy and Freck were at Yale and lived more independently thereafter. Though Emi-Lu returned from England for a few months in the late 1940s after leaving a finishing school in Switzerland, she became engaged to Hugh Astor in 1949 and settled in Berkshire. In 1950, Freck married Elizabeth Breslauer (known as “Betty”) and joined the CIA, a career move that took the newly married couple first to Washington and then to the first of several foreign postings in Europe in conjunction with the U.S. Foreign Service. After some hesitation about his future career, Tim joined the Yale School of Architecture. He eventually became engaged to Jean Partridge in 1958 before qualifying, taking up posts in New Mexico and in California as an academic and practicing architect.
The role of Diana’s daughter-in-law was demanding, even at long distance. Diana was not alone in wanting to see her sons married to perfect women, but the potential for conflict was greater when what she implicitly wanted for them was the Girl. But all sides made an effort, and both her daughters-in-law wrote regularly. Betty, in particular, sent long, affectionate letters. She was a graduate of Vassar who would later become a published poet, and her letters were often delighted evocations of the early years of married life with Freck, written to a mother-in-law she admired and regarded as a kindred spirit. Freck’s first European posting was to Geneva in 1951. Diana clearly anticipated that Betty would find the European way of life in the 1950s as thrillingly inspiring as she had in the early years of her marriage in the 1930s. Betty seems to have hoped so too but she was sorely disappointed. “Geneva isn’t inspirational,” she wrote. “The people look very nice very conservative & nothing special it is a time for me to experiment but there’s no one here to look up to—no one who is really the top. . . . But I shall try to keep standards higher than high.”
In 1954 Cecil Beaton published The Glass of Fashion. “Any number of contemporary critics have devoted volumes to Picasso or Stravinsky, Le Corbusier or James Joyce, but little has been said about those people who have influenced the art of living in the half century of my own lifetime,” he wrote. “This book is a subjective account of them and their achievements, as well as of the current of fashion against which they more often than not swam.” Alongside profiles of his aunt Jessie, the fin de siècle socialite Rita Lydig, and Coco Chanel, he included an affectionate portrait of Diana that lit on her “walk like a rope unwinding,” her voice with its “almost Rabelaisian roar,” her “pimentoed expressions,” her all-embracing taste, and surroundings reflecting a “haphazard genius.” Her habit of leaving the room for a vitamin B injection was, wrote Beaton, “all part of her scientific way of preserving inspiration, so that when you do see her she is always, like an athlete, at her best, talking as one would write a poem, allying her verbal brilliance with the novelist’s true gift of description and a tremendous sledge-hammer emphasis.” If she was exaggerated, the excess was natural. “Everything that has cropped up along the line has been absorbed by her, until she is like a fine tea mixture of orange pekoe and pekoe. There is nothing artificial about her.”
It was almost too much for Betty Vreeland. “The main point of this letter is that we have just received Cecil Beaton’s book and read his absolutely wonderful & perceptive description of you—it is quite remarkable that in such a short space he has found so much of you and written it so completely. We both really had tears in our eyes when we finished,” she wrote. The problem for someone beautiful, intelligent, and well educated like Betty, living in a poorer and duller Europe in the 1950s, was that the female standard was still set by the 1930s and by women like Diana, and it was so difficult to reach. “It is such an inspiration and yet I feel so weighted down by the banalities of my generations & so unable to be for myself what you have been for yours. This sounds so egotistical to read the Beaton piece & immediately talk of myself—but his book is really besides being a tribute to the elegance & originality of the women he describes—a depressing and altogether accurate picture of the banalities of today’s women—it is a lesson to us—but a difficult one. . . . I feel so stupid and banal—& clothes & thoughts are all part of it. How I should love to see you, and get another shot of inspiration.”
By the mid-1950s, with both their sons grown up, Reed and Diana were no longer obliged to house anyone other than themselves. They bought 550 Park Avenue in 1955 and asked Billy Baldwin to help them transform it, a process he later described as “almost an entire winter of pure satisfaction and pleasure.” Because they were all working during the week (“even though Diana and I didn’t know what Reed was working at”), they met in a restaurant for Sunday lunch throughout the year, and would often still be sitting there at four o’clock, talking about the apartment. Working with Diana on 550, said Baldwin, was like being at a fantastic party. The lunches were not prolonged by alcohol. “There was plenty of prolongation on the part of Diana, but it had nothing to do with drinks. It had to do with her wonderful imagination, which she translated into reality in such a way that it really was quite hard to tell sometimes what she was doing.”
Both Diana and Reed contributed ideas that made the apartment at 550 Park Avenue one of New York’s most famous interiors. It was Reed’s idea to eliminate the hall, turning the living roo
m and dining room into an L shape. “Diana attacked the whole apartment as though it were a perfectly divine little palace,” remembered Baldwin, and it was she who defined the spirit of 550. “I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell,” she said. “I want everything that can be to be covered in a lovely cotton material. Cotton! Cotton! Cotton!” Baldwin found a scarlet Colefax and Fowler chintz for her in London. “I raced home with yards and yards of it and we covered the whole room—walls, curtains, furniture, the works.” A solid red wall-to-wall carpet covered the entire floor of the apartment. The bedroom was papered in the same Colefax and Fowler pattern in blue and green. Apart from the enormous bed, loaned to Diana by Syrie Maugham in 1935 but still in her possession in 1989, there was a comfortable chair for Reed when they had supper there; a Chinese screen and some red lacquer furniture; and a closet for Diana’s clothes. “In it were the most beautifully made shelves for shoes, many of which she had had for several years and were unworn until they had been polished year after year so that they would have the quality of eighteenth-century leather.” In Reed’s bedroom (“where he never slept because first of all there wasn’t a real bed in it”) there was a “mausoleum” for his clothes, “certainly the most beautiful overcoats and topcoats of any man in New York.”
The most celebrated space in the apartment, however, was the L-shaped room where the Vreelands entertained. It was not, as the diplomat and writer Valentine Lawford subsequently pointed out, remotely hellish or particularly horticultural but it was certainly red: “red carpets, red lacquered doors, closet linings and picture frames.” The apartment was not very large—apart from the living room, dining room, and kitchen, and two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, the only other room was a small space where Diana’s maid took care of her clothes and polished her bags, belts, and shoes, including their soles. Diana’s main concern when discussing the arrangement of the furniture with Baldwin was that there should be plenty of flat spaces for her photographs and things. These had jostled for space in the Vreelands’ old apartment: “Piero della Francesca rubs shoulders with drawings by Christian Bérard, while gold-mesh fish paperweights curve their tails on her desk. . . . It is a full room, almost a Victorianly stuffed room, but it does not seem so, for every last shell is polished,” wrote Beaton of 400 Park Avenue. The principle was taken even further in the new apartment. “I don’t want you to show me one Chippendale chair or one French commode,” Diana instructed Baldwin. “I want lots of flat space for photographs of my beloved friends. I want plenty of room for flowers everywhere, growing plants as well as cut flowers, and I want plenty of space for ashtrays because I smoke. At one end of the room I want banquettes and at the other end will be my sofa . . . when I am in a room I want to sit close to somebody.” Baldwin thought that this room was the most definitive personal statement that he had seen in all his years of decorating. Fur and needlepoint pillows covered chairs of all heights and of many epochs. Diana’s collection of Scottish silver snuff horns nestled among dozens of photographs. There were drawings by Beaton, Bérard, and Augustus John. In the spirit of “Why Don’t You?” there was a flowering tree, as well as flowers in vases on every surface.
Empress of Fashion Page 17