D.V. (2 page)

“Vreeland—with a V!” I say whenever I have to give my name over the telephone. “V as in ‘victory'! V as in ‘violent'!”

But I can remember a telephone operator saying to me when I was living in England, “No, madam—V as in ‘violet.'”

I loved the put-down. She put me right back where I belonged. “Yes,” I said, “you've got a
point
.”

I liked the violet touch.

My sister, Alexandra, has violet eyes. She's four and a half years younger than me, so she was still a baby when my family moved from Paris to New York in 1914. I can remember she was The Most Beautiful Child in Central Park. In those days it was a very small world, and there were all sorts of little titles like that. She'd sit in her pram—she was terribly dressed up, you understand—and people would stop just to look at her. As soon as I'd see people looking, I'd run over to the pram, because I was so proud of her.

“Oh, what a beautiful child!” they'd say.

“Yes,” I'd always say, “and she has
violet eyes….
”

Then there was the most terrible scene between my mother and me. One day she said to me, “It's too bad that you have such a
beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This, of course, is why you are so impossible to deal with.”

It didn't offend me
that
much. I simply walked out of the room. I never bothered to explain that I loved my sister and was more proud of her than of anything in the world, that I absolutely
adored
her…. Parents, you know, can be
terrible
.

My mother and I were not really sympathetic. Very few daughters and mothers are. She was very good looking. I'll tell you who we are on the American side: Hoffman and Key from Baltimore. Francis Scott Key was my great-great-uncle. My mother was born Emily Key Hoffman. Her father was a man called George Hoffman. I know nothing about Baltimore; I know nothing about my background. I know that my great-grandmother and her sister had a lawsuit over a dining-room table, and the judge was so fed up—this was in Baltimore—that he had a carpenter come in, cut the table in two, and say: “You two women get out of here and stay out, each with your own slice!”

My parents met in Paris. My mother's family, though American, was always in Europe. My maiden name is Dalziel—pronounced Dee-el. Dalziel was once listed in
Reader's Digest
as one of the three most difficult names in the world to pronounce. One of the others was Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley); I can't remember what the third was, but I'm sure it was English. Impossibly difficult language. Dalziel goes back to 834, Kenneth II of Scotland. It means in old Gaelic “I dare.” That's me.

My father, Frederick Y. Dalziel, was a totally continental Englishman; he had no more to do with New York than I would with Persia or Siberia. My mother was very brunette. As brunette as I once was, but of course she was a beauty. I didn't look like her at all. She was one of the beauties of La Belle Epoque in Paris, no question about it.

I was terribly fortunate—don't think I'm not grateful—in that my parents loved us very much. They were racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians who were part of the whole transition between the Edwardian era and the modern world. Money didn't seem to be of any importance to them, and they were wonderful in the way they surrounded us—not because of us, but because of the life they
led—with fascinating people and events. All kinds of marvelous people came to the house, Irene and Vernon Castle. Nijinsky came with Diaghilev. He wasn't impressive, exactly, but he was there—you were aware of him. Diaghilev was very impressive. He had a streak of white hair and a streak of black hair, and he put on his hat in the most marvelous way. I remember him very clearly. But little Nijinsky was like a pet griffin. He had nothing to say. Of course, we knew we were seeing the greatest dancer in the world. We just knew it—you can't fool kids.

My nurse, though, was appalling. Naturally, nurses are always frustrated. They may love the children, but they're not
theirs
, and the time will come when they will have to leave them forever. I couldn't stand mine. She was the
worst
.

But I have to say there was one terribly attractive thing about her which I've always remembered. Her name was “Pink.” I've always thought that name had great style.

Every day in Paris, except Wednesday which was her day off, Pink would take us from our house on the avenue du Bois, now avenue Foch, to the Bois de Boulogne to play. On Wednesday, my grandmother would lend us her secretary, Miss Neff, this ghastly, godforsaken, broken-down, American old thing—but
old—
who always wore the same ancient black lace dress. On Wednesday, Miss Neff would take us to the Louvre to see the
Mona Lisa
. Always the black lace dress, the Louvre, the
Mona Lisa….

One day for the hundred-and-tenth time we were shown the
Mona Lisa
. We had to stand here and then there,
here, here
, and
here
, because, as Miss Neff used to explain to us every time, “she is always
looking
at you….”

My sister and I always did as we were told, so we
did
get to know the
Mona Lisa
rather well. This particular Wednesday afternoon, we saw it from so many angles that the guard had to come and tell us to get out because we were the last people in the Louvre. I can remember our hollow little footsteps as we walked through deserted marble rooms trying to get outside. The next morning it was in all the newspapers that the
Mona Lisa
had been stolen during the night.

I think they eventually found the poor old girl in a trash-can in the dank bathroom of a poor artist, cut out of her frame and rolled up. For two years she hadn't been unrolled. Don't forget, it was the most famous painting in the world, and don't forget how small the world was in those days. It was a
total tragedy
. It was like the kidnaping of a child you love more than anything in the world.

It was a big story when they got her back, but it was a
bigger
story when she was stolen. My sister and I were the last people to see her before she disappeared. For one day we were the most famous children playing in the Bois de Boulogne. The next Wednesday, when Miss Neff was supposed to take us to the Louvre to see the
Mona Lisa
, of course it wasn't there. Do you think at that age we cared very much? No, to us it was all a great relief. We were taken instead back to the Bois, which I
much
preferred.

Actually, my dreams are in the Bois. I was brought up in a world of “great beauties,” a world where lookers had something to give the world, a world where the cocottes, the women of the demimonde, were the great personalities of Paris. They were the great hostesses, the great housekeepers, the great women of glamorous dress. They were in their own half-world and that half-world was
very
important. And the Bois was where they paraded early in the morning. That was the secret of the beauty of the demimondaines. They took the morning air. They were there at eight-thirty in the morning. Then they went back home to rest, for a massage, and to arrange the menus of the evening for their gentlemen friends. They went to bed much earlier in those days, you know…these midnight dinners such as we attended in the last few years are for the birds. So these demimondaines were extraordinary beauties.

Naturally, I've always been mad about clothes. You don't get born in Paris to forget about clothes
for a minute
. And what clothes I saw in the Bois! I realize now I saw the whole beginning of our century there. Everything was new.

Of course, much was the influence of Diaghilev. The flavor, the extravagance, the
allure
, the excitement, the passion, the smash, the clash, the
crash…
this man smashed the atom! His influence on
Paris was complete. The Edwardian era before it had been as strong as steel. It was going to stay until something else came along. Well, that something else came along and swept
everything
in its wake—including fashion, because fashion is a part of society and a part of life.

The colors! Before then, red had never been red and violet had never been violet. They were always slightly…grayed. But these women's clothes in the Bois were of colors as sharp as a knife: red red,
violent
violet, orange—when I say “orange” I mean
red
orange, not yellow orange—jade green and cobalt blue. And the
fabrics—
the silks, the satins, and the brocades, embroidered with seed pearls and braid, shot with silver and gold and trimmed with fur and lace—were of an Oriental
splendeur
. There's never been such luxury since. These women
looked
rich.

Their silhouettes were totally new. Almost overnight, the trussed, bustled, corseted silhouette of Victorian women disappeared. Poiret was the designer responsible for the shift in fashion—from “La Belle Epoque” with its beautiful Edwardian women with their gigantic eyes and their hard corsets. Women then had a waist and bazooms, and I suppose they had a stomach and everything else. But Poiret removed everything. The corset went. In place of curves there was a straight line. It seemed that everyone became streamlined to the ground. The naturalness of these women's bodies was what was new. But often their skirts were so tight they could hardly walk. I can remember them balancing
enormous
hats trimmed with birds of paradise, cockades, and aigrettes, walking through the Bois with tiny, mincing steps….

Their
shoes
were so beautiful! Children, naturally, are terribly aware of feet. They're closer to them. I remember shoe buckles of eighteenth-century paste, which is so much more beautifully cut than rhinestones are—so much richer looking. I love decor on the foot. To this day, that's the way I like shoes.

And
horses
! The automobile was new, but these women maintained horses, and always in pairs or in tandem. In my childhood, their beauty and the beauty of the women who owned them were inseparable.

Think of the Champs-Elysées—it's still the same…though there are fewer trees, and they don't seem to grow as lushly as they did then. It's still so restful to the eye—its straightness and length…. I can remember races up the Champs-Elysées to see whose teams—a pair of grays or bays—could make it up the last hill at a trot without breaking—that was a bit of news! It was all part of the glory of these women—and of the men who kept them.

Do you know who knew all about these extraordinary women? How well do you know Maxim's? Well, as you come in off the street, naturally there's the doorman. Then there's the head
chasseur—
or there used to be. The
chasseur
was a runner. He was the one you'd ask to go out and buy three copies of
Paris-Soir
or whatever—there were always runners—and they'd be delivered to your table.

Several years after World War II, an important
chasseur
at Maxim's, a very old man, offered his
cahier—
his little notebook—about these demimondaines of the Belle Epoque—to
Harper's Bazaar
. Don't ask me how it fell into our laps. But
Harper's Bazaar
had a great name in Paris in those days. Also, Carmel Snow, the editor in chief, was a great personality in Paris then; everyone knew this crazy, brilliant Irishwoman. Drunk or sober, they adored her. She was always marvelously dressed. And she was often very drunk—I don't mean tipsy. She would talk absolutely brilliantly—but she couldn't get up and walk.

But that's not the point. The point is the
cahier
that Carmel passed on to me. I had it translated and published in
Harper's Bazaar
. And do you know that not one person on the magazine, and not one reader, mentioned what an extraordinary social document it was.

It was a tiny, odd-looking notebook. You know how economical the French are with paper. You and I leave the first page of a notebook blank and start on the right-hand side. This
chasseur
was a real French peasant: he started on the left, so far up that there wasn't any paper left above the first line. In this notebook was a list of all the available women of Paris, with complete descriptions—things like “mole on left hip” and “
pas tout à fait de premier ordre
” and “born in
Chaillot” and “Baronne not to know” and…et cetera. This little old man…just
think
of it: he was the only person in the world who knew that there was a girl with a mole on the left hip very much desired by the Duc de Quelque Chose at one time but who, since his passing, was not perhaps
assez connue—
and therefore should bring a big price! I mean, this was something fantastic. You couldn't make it up, because, as everyone knows, truth really is stranger than fiction.

The great ones were the English. They were marvelous. Their demands were very, very firm. The demimondaines could have as many lovers as they wanted as long as
nobody
knew it. The demimondaines had their own newspapers; they had their own hairdressers; they had their own dressmakers. You've seen
Gigi
. They knew how to test a cigar; they knew brandy, and they knew wine; they could pick out chefs. Many of the men did not live in Paris, but they maintained great houses there. A marvelous old girl who used to work for Christian Dior told me, “And don't forget, Madame Vreeland, that we were often the front for the Englishmen who only came for the boys. The girls were the front. We ran the house; it was
apparently
for us. We'd get a pink pearl from an archduke and a gray pearl from a grand duke, and it was all very luxurious and wonderful. The gentleman had to be kept absolutely immaculate in the eyes of his friends…putting on a show with the new sable coats and the new pair of grays and the beautiful carriages, and the whole bit.” She used to tell me a lot, because she had been so magnificently well kept herself.