31 “Actually, when I was brought to America”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 20.
31 “It’s one time in my life”: ibid., p. 21.
31 “I lasted three weeks at the Brearley School”: “The Empress and the Commissioner,” a 1980 documentary for the Manhattan Cable series Andy Warhol’s Fashion, directed by Don Monroe, featuring Henry Geldzahler in conversation with Diana.
32 a level of expertise and degree of focus that was uniquely exhilarating: The writer Isak Dinesen described the chase as if it were a euphoria-inducing drug. “There is nothing in the world to equal it,” she wrote. Quoted in Fiona Claire Capstick, The Diana Files: The Huntress-Traveller Through History (Johannesburg: Rowland Ward Publications, 2004), p. 203.
32 the hunt “took possession of her”: New York Telegram and Evening Mail, February 10, 1925.
33 An epidemic of infantile paralysis swept through New York: On Saturday, June 17, 1916, the existence of a polio epidemic was officially announced in Brooklyn, New York. The names and addresses of confirmed cases were published daily in the press, and the affected families were quarantined. The epidemic caused widespread panic, and thousands fled the city.
33 “The last time I saw him”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 24.
33 “We were there in the wilds with the moose and the bears”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 1A.
34 “If I thought of myself, I wanted to kill myself”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” p. 42.
34 “But I think when you’re young”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 25.
CHAPTER TWO: THE GIRL
35 Fokine did not open his New York studio until 1921: at 4 Riverside Drive. Diana often muddled or forgot names when she was older and frequently confused Fokine with Chalif.
35 “I am simply crazy over dancing”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 22, 1918.
35 “Music can do something to me”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 14, 1918.
36 “I still don’t think mother thinks I dance well”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 14, 1918.
36 “Ama and Daddy Weir went to saw me [sic]”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 22, 1918.
36 “I suffered, as only the very young can suffer”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 23.
37 “I realize now I saw the whole beginning of our century”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 13.
37 “I like dancing with lots of noise”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 5, 1918.
38 the invigorated, well-stretched body and long, long limbs: See, as just two examples, photographs by Richard Avedon and Edward Steichen in Diana Vreeland, Allure, pp. 125 and 179.
38 “When I discovered dancing, . . . I learned to dream”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 25.
38 “Mother and I agree on practically nothing”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 19, 1918.
39 “Freud thought that a happy man”: Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past (London: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 276 and 277. I am most grateful to Frances Campbell for introducing me to the work of Boris Cyrulnik on resilience in childhood.
39 “I have always had a wonderful imagination”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 14, 1918.
39 “I keep constructing tableaux in my mind”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 140.
39 “There is something so wonderfull [sic] about a girl”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 23, 1918.
40 “I was much stronger”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 30.
40 “Some children have people they want to be”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 2.
40 “I want sometimes an artist”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 23, 1918.
41 “I am making a divine collection of pictures”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 23, 1918.
41 “Mrs. McKeever has lots of taste”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 15, 1918.
41 “The house is terrible”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 3, 1918.
41 “I would love a bedroom in French gray”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 20, 1918.
41 “She was perpetually scanning”: Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion,” p. 25.
42 “Some times I feel as if I did not want anything”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 14, 1918.
42 “I shall be that girl”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 12, 1918.
42 “Never to be rude to mother sister or anybody”: ibid.
42 “I have descoved [sic] I don’t look pleasant”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, January 23, 1918.
42 “I have decided that my vocabulary is very small”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, January 11, 1918.
42 “I shall please everyone in my appearance”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 5, 1918.
43 “Have smoked a cigarette & adored them”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 23, 1918.
43 “I am going to be able to sing at liberty”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 14, 1918.
43 “I dreamt of many men coming to me”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 14, 1918.
43 Triumph over youthful adversity: See Cyrulnik, Resilience, pp. 19–20.
44 “Sister’s music teacher told me”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 8, 1918.
44 “Emily said I talked very well”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 6, 1918.
44 “You know I’m vastly popular”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 21, 1918.
44 “Lots of things have happened”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 5, 1918.
44 “E Billings and I are going to get up a ballet”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 7, 1918.
44 “he lost them all & we had a wonderful time using slang”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 2, 1918.
45 “I fought for a long time”: Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion,” p. 22.
45 “I want art, pure art”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 14, 1918.
45 “Diana was a goddess”: ibid.
46 “It was the most tragic & harrowing thing”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 7, 1918.
46 The cultural historian Ann Douglas suggests: see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London: Picador, 1996), pp. 32–33. I am indebted to Ann Douglas for her analysis of New York at this period, and to Judith Mackrell for introducing me to this remarkable book.
47 “It’s not just nightmares I can’t stand”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 179.
47 “Changing herself covered up a deep wound”: Dwight, Diana Vreeland, p. 15.
47 “In later life . . . Diana’s models”: ibid.
48 “If I can change the way you see me”: Cyrulnik, Resilience, p. 11.
48 “I simply must be more perfect”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, June 23, 1918.
49 “It’s very touching”: Allure Manuscript, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 165.
49 “Yesterday I painted my brackets”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 10, 1918.
49 “He had that thing about him”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 22.
49 “My father was so much easier”: ibid., p. 21.
49 “a tidy little group”: ibid., p. 29.
49 “My grandmother could be appalling”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 177.
50 “He thought it was a riot”: ibid.
50 “My grandmother had a huge farm horse”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 20.
51 when the Villa Diana was sold two years later: on October 22, 1922, the New York Times reported that it had been sold for $125,000, approximately $1.6 million in today’s money.
51 He was known as a “stinker”: see Fritz von der Schutenberg, Balnagown, Ancestral Home of the Clan Ross: A Castle Through Five Centuries (London, Brompton Press, 1997), pp. 83–89.
53 “a natural preliminary to the guilty use of opportuni
ties”: The Scotsman, December 10, 1928.
53 Emily talked of watching, entranced: New York Times, July 27, 1921.
54 a handful of compositions: Diana’s compositions, which appear to have been written mainly in the fall of 1920, are in DVP, Box 60, Folder 1.
54 spawned a host of imitators: “Unabashedly flamboyant in sequins, lamé, feathers and transparent veils, the sultry charmers writhed and clawed and enraptured their victims, only to lose them, inevitably, to the ingénues with fluttering eyelashes and sugar-water curls.” Jane Trahey, Harper’s Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 34.
55 Diana’s Type still bore traces of Theda Bara: Bara’s real name was Theodosia Burr Goodman, and she came from Cincinnati, Ohio.
56 “debutantes’ first bow in town”: New York Times, October 15, 1921.
56 “You might do the work of ‘making’ outside the city”: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 15.
57 cigarettes began to be promoted as a slimming aid: see Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), p. 66.
58 “I adore artifice. I always have”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 27.
58 “When cosmetics began to be seen as an ‘affordable indulgence’ ”: Moore, Anything Goes, pp. 69–70.
58 New York’s newspapers: clippings in private collection, n.d.
59 Her dress for her coming-out: Vreeland, D.V., p. 28.
59 “I was always a little extreme”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 27. This coincides with Vogue’s report at the time: “Miss Diana Dalziel, at her coming-out ball, wore an all-white dress with a skirt of fringe, made of tiny ribbons. But she added a modern accent by wearing brilliant red slippers.” Her friends Ellin Mackay and Jeanne Reynal were even more extreme. Ellin Mackay’s dress was blue and silver, while Jeanne Reynal wore rose taffeta (Vogue, February 15, 1922, pp. 34–35).
59 “ ‘Circus people—where did you ever meet them?’ ”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 28.
60 “Since I was not interested in getting married”: Maud Morgan, Maud’s Journey: A Life from Art (Berkeley, CA: New Earth Publications, 1995), p. 45.
60 Her debutante year was a triumph: clippings in private collection, 1921, n.d.
60 She adored the newly fashionable lowlife: “picturesquely depraved” was a phrase used by Diana’s friend Ellin Mackay in an article she wrote about her generation’s preference for nightclubs and cabarets over debutante balls, which appeared in The New Yorker in November 1925. The article caused a sensation and made Mackay’s father furious, though he was even more furious when she married the songwriter Irving Berlin, an Orthodox Jew, a few months later.
60 “to avoid running into my mother and father”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 29.
61 “By the time I was seventeen, I knew what a snob was”: ibid., p. 28.
61 “one of the most attractive of this season’s debutantes”: Town Topics, clipping from private collection, 1921, n.d.
61 a “smart figure” and “one of the new notes in millinery”: Vogue, June 1, 1922, p. 45, and July 1, 1923, p. 58.
62 titled “Ten Thousand Miles from Fifth Avenue”: The article appeared in Harper’s Bazar, February 22, 1922, p. 31. Bazar presented it as a lead feature, and later ran a caricature by Ralph Barton of Emily in a sola topee in a montage of its outstanding contributors of the period. This was subsequently reproduced in Trahey, 100 Years, p. 84.
62 Vogue published a major article about big-game hunting in the Rockies: “When You Hear the Far West Calling: How to Slip the Leash of Civilization and Still Avoid Tenderfoot Troubles,” Vogue, June 15, 1923. p. 55.
63 “I believe in love at first sight”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 30-31.
63 Unlike Diana’s British father: by the time Diana met her future father-in-law, he was managing the tobacco, insurance, and diamond mining business interests of the magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan.
64 “I am sorry I cannot go on record”: Town Topics, January n.d., 1924, private collection.
64 “Everybody who was invited to a Condé Nast party”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 48.
65 “He was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 31.
65 an “achievement”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 33.
65 “I never felt comfortable about my looks”: D.V., p. 30.
65 “Isn’t it curious that even after more than forty years of marriage”: D.V., p. 33
66 The news that Lady Ross was suing Sir Charles for divorce: the New York press had been unusually slow off the mark. The divorce papers had in fact been served in early January, an event reported in Britain in The Scotsman on January 4, 1924.
66 “Lady Ross has evolved a very interesting fiction”: New York Evening Journal, February 28, 1924, p. 5.
66 “All these stories about your mother”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 31–32.
66 “It wasn’t sparse—it was practically empty”: ibid., p. 33.
67 “Oh, everything I own has my baby bell”: ibid., p. 32.
67 “a very strict line and a very high neckline”: ibid., pp. 32–33.
67 “Everything about the wedding”: Town Topics, March 6, 1924, p. 4.
67 “In other words it means that I am popular”: Diary, DVP, Box 60, Folder 2, January 14, 1918.
68 “We’re all exiles from something”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 184.
CHAPTER THREE: BECOMING MRS. VREELAND
69 At the time of the Vreelands’ wedding: see Lester W. Herzog, Jr., 150 Years of Service and Leadership: The Story of National Commercial Bank and Trust Company (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1975).
69 “this environment of good food, good housekeeping”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 35.
69 “During this phase when I lived in Albany”: ibid.
69 “Reed and I were like the little children”: ibid., p. 34.
70 Under the heading “Labor Economy”: Albany Evening News, April 26, 1926.
70 “He still wears his little wooly [sic] nightgowns”: DVP, Box 67, Folder 1.
70 “Now that Diana, who married Reed Vreeland last winter”: Town Topics, January n.d., 1925, private collection.
70 Diana completed the migration to American housewife: Albany Evening News, April 7, 1925.
71 Balnagown in Scotland, was part of America: the British government responded vigorously to this assertion, since allowing citizens unilaterally to declare their homes to be part of other countries would—among other things—have had dire consequences for tax collection. The official response to Sir Charles’s maneuver was to have him declared a legal “outlaw”(the last in the UK). This had the effect of preventing him from returning to Scotland legally and further delayed divorce proceedings.
71 In 1925 he even forced apologies: Frederick Dalziel could have responded in this way because he was tired of seeing lies about his wife in the gutter press, but he may also have construed “barefoot” as a subtle slur, linking Emily in the minds of those in the know with the scandalous behaviour of the Happy Valley set in Kenya, where the much-married Idina Sackville went barefoot and appeared naked at parties that turned into orgies at her behest. Clippings from HDFA, April 11–15, 1925.
71 “guilty passion” in the African jungle: see The Scotsman, June 6, 1927.
71 Alexandra knew very well: private interview, 1991.
72 “None of her African experiences”: Maury Paul was a syndicated gossip columnist for the New York American, who wrote as Cholly Knickerbocker; undated clipping ca. 1930, HDFA.
72 “the madness was attributable to something more personal”: The Scotsman, December 10, 1928.
72 The case was finally settled only in 1930: The Scotsman reported every twist and turn of the case in great detail from 1924 to 1931. Lady Ross eventually obtained her div
orce in 1930, though she was still pursuing Sir Charles through the courts for payment of alimony in 1931.
72 “She lived only for excitement”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 30.
73 “She was quite young and beautiful”: ibid.
73 reaction to the death of a damaging parent: see Cyrulnik, Resilience, p. 77.
73 “All the things that happened to me there”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 48. Diana often misremembered or miscounted the number of years the Vreelands spent in Europe. She told Christopher Hemphill they were in England for twelve years, but they spent five and a half years in England, and a further year based in Switzerland.
73 partly a matter of timing: see Bettina Ballard, In My Fashion (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 78. Bettina Ballard was American Vogue’s Paris editor before the Second World War. “A woman was not considered important in Paris until she was well in her thirties and had her children behind her so she could concentrate on the fashionable life,” she wrote of this period.
74 “I lived in that world”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 47.
74 The scrapbook suggests: Diana’s fashion scrapbook is in DVP, Box 62.
75 “Condé Nast was a very, very extraordinary man”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 60.
75 They took over the lease of 17 Hanover Terrace: I am grateful to Andrew Thomas of the Crown Estate for providing details of the Vreelands’ lease.
75 “Greenery, you know”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 8.
75 Diana snipped articles: in the scrapbook, DVP, Box 62.
76 “Friends who visited”: Phyllis Lee Levin, The Wheels of Fashion (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), p. 102.
76 Reed’s job at the Guaranty Trust: according to Hugo Vickers, biographer of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, it was Reed’s job to hand over the check when she called to collect her allowance from the London branch of the Guaranty Trust.
77 “I first met him there”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 63.
77 “The family house in Piccadilly”: Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), p. 141.
78 “an absolutely fascinating, marvelous-looking”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 62.
Empress of Fashion Page 39