Read Empress of Fashion Online
Authors: Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
I
n her lifetime Diana Vreeland published two autobiographical books,
Allure
and
D.V
.
Allure
(1980) was the first. It emerged from conversations between Diana and the writer and archivist of Andy Warhol's tapes, Christopher Hemphill. Hemphill recorded Diana over a number of months in 1978, and then produced an edited manuscript, the “Allure Manuscript,” referred to in the notes below. This was largely set aside when
Allure
developed in a different direction as a photo-autobiography.
The Allure Manuscript did, however, form the basis of Diana's second autobiographical book
, D.V
. (1984). George Plimpton recorded further conversations with Diana (Diana Vreeland Tapes below) and edited them together with the Allure Manuscript to create
D.V
. While writing this book I have drawn on both the Allure Manuscript and
D.V.
Sometimes the differences are slight but interesting. I have also used material from the Allure Manuscript that George Plimpton subsequently omitted.
Diana rarely “wrote” as commonly understood. She simply talked, or dictated from scribbled notes to secretaries, editors, and copywriters.
When remarks are not attributed in the notes, it should be assumed that they have been made directly to me.
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
DV: Diana Vreeland.
DVP: Diana Vreeland Papers, The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.
DK: Dodie Kazanjian.
DKP: Dodie Kazanjian Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
HDFA: Hoffman and Dalziel Family Albums.
Tomkins, II.A.108: Calvin Tomkins Papers, Series II, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
PCB: Papers of Sir Cecil Beaton, St. John's College Library.
RAF: The Richard Avedon Foundation.
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
INTRODUCTION
    1 “
My maid here at the Crillon
”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 170. This section of the manuscript is marked “Paris, Spring 1978.”
    1 “you lose your face”:
Vanity Fair
, publication accompanying
Vanity Fair: A Treasure Trove of the Costume Institute
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), Section 2, DV to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (n.p.).
    1 “the High Druidess of fashion”: quoted in Jonathan Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion: Diana Vreeland,”
Interview
, December 1980, p. 25.
    2 “She is indeed such a powerful personality”: Cecil Beaton,
The Glass of Fashion
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), p. 311.
    2 “She didn't merely enter a room”: Nicholas Haslam,
Redeeming Features: A Memoir
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 171 and 172.
    2 “Mrs. Vreeland's head”: Beaton,
Glass of Fashion
, p. 312.
    3 a walk she said she copied from the showgirls of the
Ziegfeld
Follies
: see Diana Vreeland,
Allure
(Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), p. 42.
    3 “Like everyone else”: Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion,” p. 25.
    3 “An authoritative crane”: Beaton,
Glass of Fashion
, p. 311.
    3 “Some extraordinary parrot”: Truman Capote quoted in Lally Weymouth, “A Question of Style,”
Rolling Stone
, August 11, 1977, p. 54.
    3 “An Aztec bird woman”: quoted in Eleanor Dwight,
Diana Vreeland
, (New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 146.
    3 “As you know, that's not the
most
popular”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 16.
    3 “There's a word not much used nowadays”: quoted in Dwight,
Diana Vreeland
, p. 146.
    3 “When she laughed”: Jonathan Lieberson, “Embarras de Richessse: The Life of Diana Vreeland,”
New York Review of Books
, June 28, 1984.
    4 “
I have astigmatism
”: Diana Vreeland
, Allure
, p. 45.
    5 “slanting knowing eyes”: quoted in Dwight
, Diana Vreeland,
p. 146.
    5 “At the time”: Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion,” p. 25.
    5 “I have not one eccentricity”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 3. There are no page numbers in Folder 3 of the Allure Manuscript.
    5 “lay a much-heralded mind”: Haslam,
Redeeming Features
, p. 172.
    5 At Diana's memorial service: by Simon Doonan, who had worked with her at the Costume Institute.
    6 one highly critical book: Debora Silverman,
Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America (
New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
    7 “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”: quoted in Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, eds.,
Fashion and Modernity
(Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), p.1.
    7 “
Swifty Lazar took me with him
”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 3.
    7 “nothing I've ever done is extraordinary”: Lieberson, “Empress of Fashion,” p. 22.
    7 “Alas, I am afraid”: DV to Marjorie Griswold, May 2, 1972, DVP, Box 3, Folder 6.
    7 “She's a genius”: quoted in Weymouth,
A Question of Style
, p. 38, and obituaries.
    8 a “leitmotif, a continuity”: this observation by make-up artist Pablo Manzoni can be found in the publication accompanying the 1993 exhibition
Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style
, by Richard Martin and Harold Koda (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). After the introduction by Martin and Koda there are no page numbers. Contributions are looseleaf so that they can be read at random, a compliment to Diana's dislike of the linear.
    8 “Keep your secret”: to Stephen Jamail, quoted in Martin and Koda, ibid.,
looseleaf.
    8 “
I want to tell you that a few years ago
”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 3.
CHAPTER ONE: PARIS OPENING
  11 She once ejected a friend . . . for suggesting that . . . England had been invaded by the Normans: it was, in 1066.
  11 “I said, âThe first image' ”: Veruschka in Richard Martin and Harold Koda,
Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), looseleaf. More recently, Veruschka has styled herself Vera Lehndorff, dropping the “von” when co-authoring books.
  11 She was coy about her age, and genuinely perplexed: Diana's confusion was the result of a misreading. The genealogist Philippe Chapelin of gefrance.com has clarified that there was no discrepancy and that Diana was born on September 29, 1903. The misunderstanding came from the abbreviation “7bre” in her
bulletin de naissance
, which Diana took to mean “July” but is actually shorthand for “September.” “7 does not mean July but seven, that is French âSept.' ” (Similar abbreviations are used for all the other months of autumn.)
  12 People born in Paris: Lally Weymouth, “A Question of Style,”
Rolling Stone
, August 11, 1977, p. 40.
  12 “People used to say to me”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, tape 2A.
  12 He was not very Scots: Frederick Dalziel's line can be traced to 1750, when one of his forebears moved over the border from Scotland to Northumberland in the north of England. Successive generations then moved southward toward London. They were mainly agricultural workers, apart from one London branch of the family that produced a startling streak of visual brilliance in the Brothers Dalziel, engravers and illustrators who worked with artists such as John Everett Millais and John Tenniel, and made the blocks for Tenniel's illustrations for
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass.
Years later Diana was wildly excited when the original Dalziel Brothers' blocks for
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
were discovered in a bank vault, hoping she might inherit them. There was little chance of this, for Frederick Young Dalziel was only a distant cousin.
  12 he left just a year later: Brasenose College Archives, University of Oxford. There is no mention of illness or failing exams in his record, two other possibilities.
  12 “He was so wonderful looking”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” p. 40.
  13 “There's only one very good life”: in documentary film
Bailey on Beaton,
directed by David Bailey, 1971. “Hunting pink” was, of course, scarlet red.
  13 Born in 1877: the 1880 New York census gives her age as three, which tallies with the age on her marriage certificate: twenty-four in 1901. Her family thought she was born in 1878, but in the late nineteenth century it was not unusual for women to “lose” a year or more.
   14 claims that this side of Diana's family was Jewish: in 1972 Truman Capote persuaded Diana that Robert McBride, a freelance writer with whom he was infatuated, should write her “autobiography.” After some so-called research, McBride put it about that Diana was Jewish on both sides. See Leo Lerman,
The Grand Surprise: the Journals of Leo Lerman
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 379.
   14 Diana's Hoffman forebears: George Hoffman's father, a doctor and gentleman farmer, moved his family to New York before the Civil War because he was opposed to slavery.
   14 The “Key” was George Hoffman's mother, Emily Key: Diana's relationship to Francis Scott Key connected her to Pauline de Rothschild and, more remotely, to Scott FitzGerald.
   14 where he ran a private investment bank: the bank was Winslow Lanier & Co. It specialized in handling large bond issues for railroads, helping to make New York City the center of American railroad financing in the 1870s. Its directors sat on railroad boards, enriching themselves in the process: John Washington Ellis was one of a group of financiers who helped to revive the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1873.
  15 The Ellises became closely identified with Newport's growing exclusivity: John Washington Ellis's son, Ralph, also became master of the Meadow Brook Hunt Club on Long Island in 1895.
  15 they were listed in the first edition of the social bible,
The Social Register
:
The Social Register
was first published in 1886, but was dated 1887.
  15 “the most beautiful young lady on the floor”: undated cutting from HDFA. Although Emily was not formally “out” in 1895, her family was preeminent in Newport circles and she attended the ball with her mother. Alva Vanderbilt, who was a powerful figure and had no time for inconvenient social rules, would have regarded youthful Emily's beauty as an asset.
   16 What really set Emily apart: all press quotations here come from an album kept by Emily, now in a family collection (HDFA). She tended to arrange her clippings by year, without specific dates. The
News of Newport
was a column in the
New York Times
. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, keeping such scrapbooks was a common hobby among young women from Emily's background.
  17 Stanford White's murder by Harry Kendall Thaw in 1906, in the roof theater of Madison Square Garden, became known as “The Trial of the Century.” Thaw, a man of volatile and possessive temperament, was jealous of White's earlier relationship with Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit (which involved the red velvet swing), and her continuing affection for him. Thaw was judged insane at the time of the murder trial, which was all the more sensational for what it revealed about the erotic tastes of Stanford White and his circle. Thaw's diagnosis of insanity was later reversed. The story was retold in the 1955 film
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing
, with Joan Collins as Evelyn Nesbit and Evelyn Nesbit herself as an adviser.
  17 “a budget of fun”: undated clipping, DVP, Box 10, Folder 14.
  17 One New York newspaper: “Eugene Higgins: Host to Society,”
New York Times
, May 1948.
  18 chaperoned by married friends: young American women from Emily's background were not as closely chaperoned as their European counterparts at this period. Indeed there was a certain patriotic pride in American plutocratic circles at the independence extended to well-born daughters. A mother like Alva Vanderbilt, who controlled every hour of her daughter's day, consciously adopted the European model and was the exception rather than the rule.
  18 “Miss Hoffman did not approve”:
Town Topics
, September 21, 1901.
  18 an intolerable fusspot:
Town Topics
, September 7, 1899.
  19 Frederick Dalziel rented a room: the bride's residence was given as in the parish of Saint George's Hanover Square, which meant that she and her family were staying somewhere in Mayfair. Frederick Dalziel's address was given as 50 Ebury Street, a lodging house for gentlemen. The register was signed by Emily's brother, John Ellis Hoffman, and his wife, Sybil, and by Frederick Dalziel's half brother, Edelsten.
  19 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne: now the Avenue Foch, and known as one of the most expensive residential streets in Paris.
  20 “Mr. Dalziel has plenty of money”:
Town Topics
, September 21, 1901, HDFA.
  20 “racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians”: Diana Vreeland,
D.V.,
p. 11.
  20 “homesick on both continents”: quoted in Kathleen Adler, Erica Hirschler, and Barbara H. Weinberg,
Americans in Paris 1860â1900
(London: National Gallery Company, 2006â7), p. 70.
  21 his four month-old-son Ian, eventually the 11th duke: Douglas Walter Campbell, heir presumptive to the 10th duke, died before he could inherit, in 1926. His son Ian became 11th duke in 1949. The latter would later be remembered chiefly for his scandalous divorce from his third wife, Margaret Whigham, in 1963 (cf. Thomas Adès's opera
Powder Her Face
).
  22 “he had nothing to say”: Vreeland,
D.V.
,
(New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 12.
  22 “Their
shoes
were so beautiful”: ibid.,
p. 14.
  22 The Dalziels proceeded to occupy a number of houses: including 22 West Fiftieth Street, in 1904; and 103 East Seventy-Ninth Street in 1906.
  22 There are several photographs of Diana: DVP, Box 63, Folder 1.
  23 “Sisters remember things differently”: Jesse Kornbluth, “The Empress of Clothes,”
New York Magazine
, November 29, 1982, p. 32.
  23 “a tremendous snob about my mother's relations”: private interview, 1991.
  24 The Dalziels' friends included: Mrs. Henry Clews, Jr., the former Louise Gebhard, was credited with launching the career of society jester Harry Lehr by splashing about in a fountain with him in Baltimore. She was also felt to have married Clews rather too quickly after her divorce from Mr. Gebhard. Robert Winthrop Chanler was an eccentric muralist who married the singer Lina Cavalieri after a whirlwind romance. The marriage lasted just long enough for Chanler to settle a large sum of money on her, whereupon she deserted him. Chanler's brother, who had been consigned to a lunatic asylum, sent him a telegram saying “Who's loony now?”, a story that enchanted Diana. “I am a child of this last, eccentric, independent age,” Diana said to George Plimpton (Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 2A).