Empress of Fashion (10 page)

Well before she moved to London, Diana snipped articles from magazines about the English decorator Syrie (Mrs. Somerset) Maugham's “White House” in Chelsea and the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe's use of “old pieces in modern ways.” She was interested in those who mixed the old with the avant-garde, such as Princess Guy de Faucigny-Lucinge, whose medieval apartment in Paris had black rubber floors. While Diana took on many of these modern ideas, the decoration of 17 Hanover Terrace was very much her own. The walls were painted dull ocher, a color she located on the face of a Chinese figure on a coromandel screen; the chintzes were the color of Bristol blue glass with bowknots and huge red roses; and every door inside the house was varnished Oriental red. Correspondence that survives from this period shows her great attention to detail and her insistence on the most luxurious and the best: Porthault in Paris for linen, glass from Lalique, advice from
Connoisseur
magazine about where to obtain good-quality prints. Diana's perfectionism showed everywhere in the house, as the writer Phyllis Lee Levin reported: “Friends who visited never forgot the bowls of bulbs blooming white in midwinter, the perfection of the food, the children in gray flannel shorts and red silk shirts, nor the time their mother sent out to the Ritz for some special soup for them.”

Despite such evidence of maternal concern, the two boys in gray flannel shorts and red silk shirts saw little of their parents, for the years in Europe resulted in a huge expansion of the Vreelands' friends and acquaintances. Many of the people whom Diana met for the first time in Europe in the early 1930s exerted a great influence on her and became friends for life. A number of them were rich or led lives of a particularly European kind of glamour, and several appeared decades later in
Allure
. It was Diana's relationships—rather than Reed's—that held the key to the Vreelands' rapid entrance into the
ton
in the early 1930s, for Reed's job at the Guaranty Trust appears to have been less than high-powered. One important new English friend was Kitty Brownlow, who, as the sister of Alexandra's husband, Alexander Kinloch, was almost a relation. Her husband, Perry Brownlow, was an aide at Court, and they were a sociable couple. After the Vreelands arrived in London, a warm friendship with the Brownlows developed. Diana accompanied Reed when he went to shoot at Belton House in Lincolnshire, the Brownlow family home. At Belton they joined house parties for local balls attended by the Duke and Duchess of Rutland and Lord David Cecil. Diana was no more enthusiastic about killing pheasants than she was about bagging wild beasts in Wyoming, but she thoroughly enjoyed reading by the fire, picnics with the shooting party, and observing the way in which staggeringly competent Englishwomen ran their huge country houses.

F
riendship with different parts of the international d'Erlanger family was even more decisive in accelerating Reed and Diana's entry to fashionable circles in both London and Paris. The d'Erlangers were members of a banking family, originally from Germany but with banking establishments in Paris and England and a strong transatlantic connection through marriage with the Slidells and Belmonts. Robin d'Erlanger, the eldest son of Baroness Catherine d'Erlanger and Baron Frédéric, trained in New York with Frederick Dalziel in the foreign department of Post & Flagg. “I first met him there,” said Diana. “Then, when Reed and I went to live in London, he was the first person to look us up. Then we met the other d'Erlangers—all of them—and from then on, you might say, we joined the d'Erlanger family.” It is noticeable that when the Vreelands appeared at London parties, there was often a member of the d'Erlanger family there too, suggesting that it was probably a d'Erlanger who effected the introduction in the first place.

When it came to educating Diana's taste, it was Robin d'Erlanger's mother, Catherine, and his sister, Baba, who first opened her eyes. Their originality and imaginative panache were quite unlike anything Diana had ever encountered in New York. Baroness Catherine was a scarlet-haired amateur artist whom Beaton described as an “avant-gardiste” of interior decoration. “The family house in Piccadilly (which once belonged to Lord Byron) was full of witch balls, shell flowers, mother-of-pearl furniture, and startling innovations picked up for a song at the Caledonian Market,” he wrote. Baroness Catherine's flair for achieving high style with inexpensive paint colors, shells, and baskets of wool had an immediate influence on Diana. Baba d'Erlanger, meanwhile, was a remarkable sight even as a child, for she was sent out on walks in St. James's Park by her mother, accompanied not by a nanny but by a Mamluk in robes and a turban, with a sword and a dagger, looking as if he had stepped straight out of the Ballets Russes. Baba, said Diana, “was an absolutely fascinating, marvelous-looking, totally extraordinary creature—without question the most exotic-looking woman, white or
black
, I've ever met.” Baba came to represent a particularly recherché 1930s chic. She wore dresses made from gold tissue paper and briefly opened a shop in Paris that sold nothing but Tyrolean beachwear.

By the time the Vreelands arrived in London, high society was becoming more international and more diverse. From the 1920s onward,
Vogue
itself increasingly focused on that elusive, amorphous group of artists, socialites, aristocrats, and persons of high style known as “café society,” reporting on their frenetic activity as they moved around Europe and across the Atlantic, capturing them in the contributions of Cecil Beaton and the society columnist Johnnie McMullin in “As Seen by Him.” A mention in
Vogue
was a mark of acceptance in these circles. In the Vreelands' case one society friend from the pages of
Vogue
led to another. By 1929 Baba d'Erlanger was married to Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, partygiver and partygoer extraordinaire. They were probably responsible for introducing Reed and Diana to another
Vogue
favorite, the beautiful Mrs. Harrison Williams, who became a lifelong friend. Mona Williams (later Mona Bismarck) was American. The daughter of the manager of a Kentucky farm, she married five times, striking gold with utilities millionaire Harrison Williams in 1926, who provided her with the largest yacht in the world and vast establishments including Il Fortino on Capri, an island she did much to make fashionable. The most pressing problem of rich Americans like Williams was staving off boredom, and the film stars, painters, actors, photographers, and other creative types who made up the new international
gratin
were only too happy to provide friendship and amusement in return for patronage. Café society was therefore characterized by a web of commercial relationships between the rich, especially the American and South American rich, and the artists who needed their money.

Diana's friendship with Cecil Beaton began in true café-society style with a professional commission. She had never met him, but she telephoned to ask whether he would draw her as a Christmas present for Reed, probably in the autumn of 1929. Beaton came to 17 Hanover Terrace and started work. Ten days later the drawing arrived. Diana was horrified: Beaton had drawn not just her face but her hands, with one hand holding a cigarette, which was reasonable, and the other wearing a wholly imaginary diamond, which was not. The diamond was “the size of an ice-rink” and all the rage at the time. “I was terribly offended by this,” said Diana. “I got him on the phone and I said, ‘Look here, Mr. Beaton, I don't own a diamond. I don't want a diamond like that. And if you think this is a suggestion for my husband to give
me
for Christmas—who's loony now?' ” Beaton replied that he had not meant to be offensive, he simply thought it might be amusing. “I said, ‘There is nothing amusing about vulgarity, nothing. And it's the most horrible vulgar fashion, the average hand is hideous—and the average hand is the one who wears those.' ” She was, she said later, somewhat stuffy at this stage in her life. Immediately realizing he had misjudged Mrs. Vreeland, Beaton removed the offending diamond, and they became close friends.

It is possible that Diana saw something of her own father in Cecil Beaton's determination to make a life at a distance from his modest middle-class background (Beaton's father was a timber merchant). Beaton, whose photographs were themselves highly composed fantasies, took the lease of Ashcombe in Wiltshire in 1931 and turned it into another setting for decorative flights of the imagination, giving it a veneer in the grand aristocratic manner that was far removed from his origins. It was an impulse Diana understood; and for his part, Beaton held back the curtain to reveal an English social vista that was of much greater consequence than a few more names in Diana's expanding address book. Beaton led both Vreelands into the company of English artists and writers whose lives were charged by the same kind of imaginative energy as Diana's. In her book
Romantic Moderns
, Alexandra Harris presents a picture of an English renaissance in the 1930s and early 1940s, composed of a network of gifted individuals who, in different ways, were intent on exploring the nature of Englishness and reconciling its present with new readings of its past. It was a movement that played itself out in a myriad of different modes, but fantasy, especially historical fantasy, was enacted in a particularly English way by Beaton and his circle of “Bright Young People” in the late 1920s as they fashioned themselves “both as silver-suited futurists and as eighteenth-century squires.”

If the aesthetic explorations of Beaton and his friends fortified Diana's belief in the power of fantasy as a bulwark against the prosaic and unpleasant, the American expatriate Elsie Mendl taught her that dream making and the continuing quest for the Girl required meticulous discipline of an order different from anything Diana had yet imposed on herself. London society in the early 1930s was a small galaxy, and there was much overlap between its star clusters. Diana had been slightly acquainted with the great interior decorator in New York, while she was still Elsie de Wolfe, but it was only after Diana came to Europe that they became friends. Elsie was much older and became a mother substitute for Diana, the kind of mother who recognizes and fosters a child's particular genius. In many ways they were kindred spirits: Elsie had also thought of herself as an ugly child and had vowed to fight her way out of it. Like Beaton, she was determined to leave a colorless upbringing well behind her. She first tried her hand at interior decor at the home she shared in New York with the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, but after the First World War Elsie turned her back on Bessie and wed Sir Charles Mendl in a
mariage blanc
. (“For all I know the old girl is still a virgin,” he said as he continued pursuing young women.) Elsie, meanwhile, had a gallant who kept her company, Johnnie McMullin, the
Vogue
columnist who became another friend of Diana and Reed's. As with café society's great party organizer Elsa Maxwell (whom Frederick Dalziel knew in New York and could not abide but whom Diana adored), it was said that Elsie Mendl took payment for arranging introductions. Those who did not pay were simply taken under her wing, though they were often invoiced in the end—Elsie was famous for forcing presents on her friends and then charging them.

However, if, like Diana, one was on her list of favorites, most of international high society was only an invitation away. Elsie often asked Diana to stay at the delightful Villa Trianon, where a short walk through an immaculate ornamental kitchen garden led to a door into the park of Versailles. Diana admired Elsie's style and her self-discipline: her health regimen famously included standing on her head every day. But it was Elsie's precision that Diana liked most. “I adored her because she was so . . . methodical,” said Diana. “I was only romantic, imaginative and my mind was always far away. . . . Of course Elsie frightened me a lot. I was quite young. And I was always learning from her to be exact. To be definite. To be on the ball. Never to put up with nonsense. Not that she sat and told me these things, but I watched her.” In Europe, Diana took in everything about the stylish Europeans and Americans she was meeting. “I started to get a little education,” she said later. “Just from listening to the language and seeing the manners and the views of people who were highly educated. . . .
That
was the time that I took to
see
as much as I could. I was avid to learn.”

Diana's social success in England was noted by the New York press. “Diana has made an enviable niche for herself in top-lofty social, artistic and musical circles,” reported Maury Paul in an article about her in the
New York American
that he thought of calling “Home Town Girl Makes Good in London.” Emily, he thought, “would have been intrigued by the manner in which Diana Dalziel Vreeland dresses up her exotic looks,” and he commended Diana on continuing to entertain visiting Americans, unlike some of her female compatriots. These visitors included Condé Nast himself, who took to inviting himself for tea at 17 Hanover Terrace when he was in London. It was a sign of Diana's standing that she was invited by the wife of the American ambassador to join a group of socially prominent Americans in being presented to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1933—an afternoon of pageantry she never forgot. It left her with lasting respect for both royals, particularly Queen Mary, whose regal style she much admired.

“There was something about the way she sat and her proportions and the size of her hat which was immediately recognizable and never changed. A very, very, good idea, especially for queens,” Diana said later. “I'm mad about her stance—it was up up
up
and so was she.” In spite of the fact that Queen Mary was Edward VII's daugher-in-law, Diana thought of her fondly as an Edwardian. “The Edwardian influence in England lasted long after Edward's death and blossomed like a cherry orchard in the best sun. That's my period, if you really want to know. You might think it was my mother's period, but it's mine. One's period is when one is very young.” Her respect for King George V and Queen Mary rose further when she noticed that they had extended the hand of friendship to Nubar Gulbenkian. Gulbenkian was an Armenian petroleum magnate and playboy who had formed the habit of greeting Diana extravagantly in fashionable places, to the horror of her more aristocratic friends, who thought he was seedy. On the day of Diana's presentation at Buckingham Palace he was present in a formal capacity, and he cut her dead. “He passed me by like so much white trash,” said Diana. It was obvious to her that he had been given his position behind the dais in the throne room because of his money. “ ‘Listen,' ” I said to my English friends afterward, ‘you just don't know what your empire has to go through. King George and Queen Mary do. No flies on them!' ”