Empress of Fashion (22 page)

“Boy was I lucky,” said Avedon later. “I didn't realize when [Brodovitch] chose me to work on the magazine that I would have Carmel Snow as my editor and Dee-Anna Vreeland as my fashion editor . . . my new chosen mother, father and crazy aunt—brilliant, crazy aunt.” Like others who worked for
Bazaar
in this period, Avedon was struck by the close working relationship between Snow, Diana, and Brodovitch. “It was a three-way vote on everything,” he said, though the final word was Snow's and Diana was quite often outvoted by the other two, particularly when it came to matters of photography. In the view of Adrian G. Allen (known as “A. G.”), who joined the art department as an assistant to Brodovitch in 1951, Snow believed that in Brodovitch and Vreeland she had the best. “It was a triumvirate and they all worked marvelously together. . . . There was so much creativity just going on every day. And everybody was very excited about what they were doing.”

As
Bazaar
's workforce expanded and working relationships were formalized, Snow and Diana became the grandes dames of the magazine whose arrival each morning had everyone on their toes. Junior serfs arrived promptly at 9 o'clock. Snow and Diana appeared somewhat later. Diana would generally march in first, having dispatched her first round of instructions by telephone from home. “It was always an entrance,” A. G. Allen recalls. “Every accessory was perfect. But it was always a relief that they were both there. You knew who was in charge.” She was fascinated by the way in which these two women, who made a living out of telling other women how to look, rarely varied their own appearance. “They had each found their look, Mrs. Snow by the time I got there, Balenciaga. . . . Always the same stand-up collar. The pearls, the loosely fitted jacket. . . . Mrs. Vreeland was in Mainbocher, cashmere sweater top, velvet straight skirt. Black, navy blue. And they did it summer, winter.” Writing about Diana in this period, Bettina Ballard recalled that somehow this look never dated. “Unmarred by a hat, she has a genius for looking contemporary without changing the brush of her polished blued-charcoal hair, the style of her ankle-strapped shoes, her own exotic way of wearing a Mainbocher costume that might be of any year, her loping camel's gait with her long neck thrust forward like an inquisitive tortoise's, or her way of holding a cigarette in a holder as if she were about to write with it.” One fashion editor, Laura Pyzel Clark, commented that the atmosphere of the office changed when Diana arrived. “Anyone who had any contact with Diana Vreeland caught something special,” she said. “In the morning she would sweep off the elevator and the whole floor would change. Diana gave off an electric charge. There was a mood you would catch. It wasn't anything that happened to just one person. It happened to all of us.”

The atmosphere throughout
Bazaar
was didactic. Brodovitch and Snow were both natural teachers. If Diana saw a spark in someone, she was an inspiring mentor too. “Mrs. Vreeland and Mrs. Snow were such incredible teachers. You got the most unbelievable training,” said the fashion editor Polly Mellen, whom Diana encouraged through a first disastrous sitting when she joined
Bazaar
in 1950. Ali MacGraw agreed: “I learned to ‘see' by listening to her. Whether or not her colorful life story was real or partly fantasy made no difference. I was mesmerized by the possibilities of her life, by the people she knew and the style she invented.” Some of those who worked for her adored her. “D. D. Ryan worshipped her,” said A. G. Allen. “When D. D.'s desk was moved away from just outside D. V.'s office she cried all day. She patterned her look and manner on her.” D. D. Ryan said later that four acolytes in the office, including her, all ended up wearing the same black cashmere Braemar sweater in imitation of their mentor. When the manufacturer heard about it, he sent a designer to the magazine offices to cut a special style just for “the girls at
Bazaar
.”

Others found Diana intolerable. By the mid-1950s she presided over a team of fashion editors and two secretaries. One secretary attended to serious administrative work, while the other was a special assistant, generally an extremely attractive young woman from a socially prominent family, who either worked for debutante wages or for nothing at all. Diana's childhood temper resurfaced in an occasional streak of ferocity; and since personnel in her office changed frequently she could not be bothered to learn names. “To Diana Vreeland, I was ‘Girl,' ” wrote Ali MacGraw. “ ‘Girl, bring me a pencil.' ‘Girl, get me Babe Paley on the phone.' . . . One day, as I struggled on the carpet to arrange violet snakeskin shoes for a photo shoot, Mrs. Vreeland swept dramatically by me, throwing her heavy Mainbocher overcoat at me, and I involuntarily chucked it right back at her.” When Barbara Slifka finally told Carmel Snow she could stand it no longer, she noticed that Snow understood and transferred her without comment to another job. Jacqueline Kennedy's sister, Lee Radziwill, on the other hand, enjoyed the variety of her short stint with Mrs. Vreeland. She telephoned her with gossip, accompanied her to Seventh Avenue, and chose hats for shoots. She never knew what was going to happen next. “Once Diana was hooked on a shade of orange that she wanted to put across at an editorial meeting,” writes Radziwill's biographer, “and she asked Lee to go out and buy some fresh carrots.”

Those who worked with Diana always had to adjust to her manner of getting what she wanted. “She had such interest in European culture so that she could talk about all sorts of obscure painters and use them to influence the make up or light of a sitting,” said Lillian Bassman who worked for Brodovitch as a junior photographer at the time. “She was really a wonderful catalyst,” said Richard Avedon. “She was terrifying, awful, but she had this thing of speaking in code in her way. And throwing the ball out and expecting you to run with it, and come back with something else.” People of Avedon's caliber found this extremely stimulating; and many thought that Diana's greatest gift was indeed as a catalyst of the work of others. She challenged them by obliging them to guess at what she had in her mind's eye while giving those she respected all the latitude they needed, with the result that they then came back with something even better. But one did have to be on her wavelength. Once, before a shoot in Egypt with the model Dovima, Diana wrote to Richard Avedon enjoining him to think about Cleopatra. “Cleopatra was ‘the kitten of the nile' [
sic
],' ” wrote Diana:

I have always seen her as a small boned child with an exquisite tiny boned face. . . . I see the head encased in small scales, like fish scales, shiny and slightly twisted toward the front . . . with the shimmer of a serpent. . . . She hated Egypt—surrounded by death—surrounded by tombs an exquisite child walking through dead streets. but a wild child inside. . . . Of course, anyone that slept with Cleopatra died in the morning, because there couldn't be
any
talk.

“She just sort of threw your way of thinking because of her erudition,” said Avedon, “and because of her imagination. . . . And that's why those pictures hold.”

It took new acquaintances time to understand that Diana's poetic manner of speech was not just empty verbiage. Those who came to know her well noted how meticulous she was and how hard she worked. “She was without exception the hardest-working person I've ever known,” said Avedon. They also came to understand that even her most peculiar statements were quite precise and often made perfectly good sense. When she said, “Pink
is
the navy blue of India,” Diana was noting that middle-class Indian women put on pink saris at certain times of year in the same way that middle-class New York women donned navy blue suits in spring. When she said, “The Bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb,” she was talking fashionese, but she meant that it was the first publicly worn garment to reveal almost the entire line of the body; and this had a major effect on body image and body line in both sexes from the 1950s onward. Taken alone, these epigrammatic quips came to represent Diana's
Lady in the Dark
zaniness, but friends noticed that they often made sense afterward.

“You think, of all the nonsense in the world, that's it,” said Billy Baldwin. “To your great surprise and sometimes dismay almost, an hour later or maybe a day later, you realize that she has uttered pearls of one hundred percent wisdom.” None of it was affectation, in Baldwin's view. “In her remarkable lingo she is speaking what she believes to be the truth and it almost invariably is. She believes entirely in those remarkable hurdles, curls, and gymnastics of speech that she indulges in.” Lillian Bassman could often hear Diana just down the corridor. “Her office was not so far away and we could hear it just rolling out of her. She could entertain you for hours.” She was incapable of talking to order, however. She hated speaking in public or giving speeches. “We tried to persuade her to go on radio or television, but she wasn't very good,” said Bassman. “When she had a camera on her she just froze.”

As the 1950s wore on, French and American fashion became more, not less, entangled. After the appointment of Marie-Louise Bousquet as Paris editor in 1947, Carmel Snow turned her attention to other centers of European fashion too, introducing readers to Italian designers such as Emilio Pucci, Simonetta, and Irene Galitzine. In spite of coining the phrase “the New Look,” Snow did not become a slavish follower of Dior. Though she supported the rapid twists and turns of the Dior collections through the 1950s, her single most significant contribution to American fashion was introducing the work of the Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga to the United States. Snow saved Balenciaga by supporting his “unfitted” suits during the fall collections of 1950. Snow loved Balenciaga as a man—so much that Paris gossiped about her unrequited crush. But she also loved him for his forgiving, semifitted, fluid couture (“Monsieur Balenciaga
likes
a little tummy,” said one of his fitters). Snow celebrated his designs, which included shift dresses, narrow skirts, tunic-line ensembles, and flattering jackets that happened to suit her own short neck; and it was Snow, rather than Diana, who met top American manufacturers during the Paris collections, talking to them about how best to “Americanize” the latest ideas, and took credit for the way in which these conversations played out in New York. “It was a satisfaction to know that during those evenings in Paris with Ben Zuckerman, or David Kidd of Jablow, or other Seventh Avenue friends, I had in some measure influenced the appearance of millions of American women,” she wrote.

Inevitably this led to tensions between Diana and Snow, though they were good at hiding them from the staff. “It was always very interesting to me that Mrs. Vreeland knew Mrs. Snow was the boss,” said A. G. Allen. Richard Avedon thought that not being allowed to go to the Paris collections for years on end in a professional capacity did in fact “gnaw” at Diana, and that there must have been moments when Carmel Snow's continued insistence on going alone seemed ridiculous. Diana's knowledge of the Paris couture came as a private client, through her rich friends, and secondhand from Snow. There were moments when Snow acted as if she felt threatened by Diana's talent. She tried, for example, to stop her from meeting Balenciaga when he was visiting New York, regarding him as “hers.” “In a curious way, I think she resented my taste,” said Diana. The one time she did find herself at the Paris collections as part of Snow's entourage, Diana told Bettina Ballard that she hated the experience. Where Snow thrived on the whirl, and trying to second-guess the market, Diana disliked the frenzy and had little appetite for psychological games with store buyers and rival editors. “How can you work in this confusion night and day?” she asked Ballard in dismay. “How can you understand fashion smothered like this?” (Avedon, on the other hand, adored the frenetic atmosphere of Paris openings, producing some of his most celebrated work, like “Dovima with Elephants,” for
Bazaar
on trips to Paris with Snow.)

In spite of their occasional tiffs, Snow and Diana were almost always in agreement about fashion itself. They both welcomed the return of Chanel and the updated Chanel suit with delight after 1953. (When rumors started that Chanel was planning a comeback, Snow immediately wrote offering
Bazaar
's support; it was American fashion editors who saved Chanel, rather than the French press.) Snow continued to believe in Diana implicitly and gave her all the freedom with American fashion she needed—though she still had to rein her in from time to time, countering Diana's instinct for exaggeration so that the idea of an entire issue devoted to magenta ended up as one lively magenta spread. Diana's strengths remained the strengths of the grand amateur, the 1930s woman of style who sifted, edited, and selected with great care every garment, shoe, handbag, piece of jewelry that was placed before her. Her task as defined by Carmel Snow was to help readers fascinated by the new to train their taste, by presenting “
the
best
in every field.”

During the 1950s Diana still regarded this as an uphill battle, particularly in relation to expensive formal clothes and evening wear. She continued to struggle with Seventh Avenue designers who simply regurgitated poor copies of French fashions. Her default view of Seventh Avenue designers was that they were second rate until proved otherwise. She no longer “covered the waterfront” as she once had. Indeed, as part of her drive for quality she took to maintaining a distance. At openings she adopted an enigmatic pose. Bettina Ballard commented that seeing her at a Seventh Avenue show was like seeing the “Wise Men, or Disraeli, or an Ingres odalisque sitting in a hard chair with an inscrutable expression watching clothes go by.” When she jotted down a number, others followed suit; and when she did consent to meet an up-and-coming American designer in person, it was memorable. Bill Blass recalled the moment when she came to see him while he was still working in the back room of Anna Miller in the late 1950s. “Diana was not then in the habit of coming to Seventh Avenue. On the day she did arrive (picture her: the raven hair, the pitched-back walk, the flaring cigarette), she brushed past the old boys in the front office, ignoring everyone, and announced: ‘I hear you have a young Englishman in your backroom. I must meet him.' ” Blass was from Indiana. “Vreeland could always be counted on for getting things slightly wrong, though perhaps for the right reasons,” he said.