Empress of Fashion (12 page)

“What a bad film,” one might remark. “Yes, but I always adoare [sic] the noise of rain falling on the screen.” To me, beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins is beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins, but to Mrs. Vreeland: “My dear, she is the star in the
sky
.” A swarthy brunette may seem ordinary to me, but to Mrs. Vreeland she is “exceptional, my dear, she's wonderful! A wonderful sulky slut.'”

Around this time Diana threw off the name Emily had given her, with all its fraught associations, for something more in keeping with her grown-up, 1930s European self. Friends in international society began to pronounce her name differently from the English “Die-
anna
” to something more frenchified: variously “Dee-
anne
,” “Dee-
anna
,” and sometimes “Dee-
ahna
.” This intensified her air of European sophistication, and had the additional advantage of distinguishing her from Diana Cooper and Diana Mosley, though her first name continued to shift around forever more, and English friends called her “Die-
anna
” until she died. As well as making adjustments to her name, Diana took steps to capture her new image, commissioning a drawing of her European self by Augustus John; and in 1931 she was painted by the society painter William Acton, who took a series of preparatory photographic studies that capture Diana's European persona almost better than the portrait itself. At one point she slipped one of Acton's photographs into her own fashion scrapbook. For a moment in the 1930s, in her own mind at least, Diana stood comparison with the writer Princess Marthe Bibesco, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo.

Above all, Diana observed
l'art de vivre
as practiced by the international beau monde, leaping on the smallest details of their savoir-faire with delight and carrying them home. This was a world in which the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles kept a houseboat with shiny green shutters on the Seine, and took to the rivers when the cares of the world became too much for them; in which Princess Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge dressed her two little girls in hats with skyrocketing feathers to set off her dead-black dress; and in which Lady Mendl dictated memorandums ordaining that her most successful sandwiches should be photographed for
Vogue
. Diana developed a taste for great luxury, and she was quick to learn the ways of rich friends. “The vision of Diana Vreeland arriving at a friend's quattrocento villa in Fiesole with her own sheets and with so much luggage and so many books on the de Medici that she nearly overflowed the guest room, has, if anything, grown more vivid in her hostess's eyes in the past thirty years,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin. But at the same time, following the inspiration of Chanel, she adopted cheap and cheerful Breton tops, Neapolitan trousers, espadrilles, and the thonged sandals she saw on the feet of locals when staying with Mona Williams in Capri in 1935. The most important lesson of her time in Europe was that in the end, style had little to do with money. What counted was the divine spark.

I
n 1931 Diana and Reed were invited to stay with Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger and his wife at their house Dar Nejma Ezzahra in Tunisia because they were friends of the couple's son Leo and his wife, Edwina. A composer and eminent musicologist who made the study of Arab music his life's work, Baron Rodolphe was the odd one out who never went into the d'Erlanger family bank, “which was as queer as if you decided to walk on your hands rather than on your legs.” Dar Nejma Ezzahra was a beguilingly beautiful palace, painted in blue and white, perched on the top of a cliff above the Mediterranean, with terraces of orange, lemon, and oleander all the way up from the sea, where Diana stunned her fellow visitors by swimming in a pink rubber swimsuit. The manservants were dressed in pantaloons with gold and silver brocade and lamé boleros, and little birds flew in and out of marble columns in the hall, where water trickled in a rivulet and gardenias floated. There was a muster of silvery white peacocks. “The top of the palace was flat, and on hot nights we'd go up there after dinner to get the air and look down at the peacocks with their tails spread and their
tiny
heads against the reflection of the moon shining on the sea.”

Baron Rodolphe did have one disconcerting habit, however. On the first day of the stay, Diana was placed beside him at lunch. As they made light conversation and he paid her compliments (“you know, the sort of business that men say to women by the sea”), Diana noticed that he held a beautiful linen handkerchief. It was “like an absolutely transparent cobweb” that never left his hand and he sniffed constantly. “You're the night's morning (sniff) . . . you're the sun, the moon and the
stars
(sniff, sniff).” With a growing sense of panic she realized she was sitting next to someone addicted to ether, said to relieve pain and produce intense exhilaration. “ ‘Reed,' I once said, ‘What happens if I really get a
blast
of it?' ‘You won't,' he said. ‘Just remember—when he breathes
in
, you breathe
out
.' ” Their fellow guests included Kitty Brownlow, Elsie Mendl, and Baroness Catherine d'Erlanger. They were photographed in a row with Diana in the middle, looking notably chic in a linen dress and white gloves. The photograph appeared in British
Vogue
in July 1931, and it marked a turning point. Diana had moved from looking in at
Vogue
to looking out, surrounded by some of international high society's most fashionable people. The Vreelands had arrived.

I
n the early 1930s society was constantly on the move, and Diana often slipped over to Paris, taking advantage of the fact that it was now possible to fly from Croydon in the early morning and arrive by lunchtime. Disentangling what actually happened on these trips is not easy. Diana liked to tell a story about sitting next to Josephine Baker at the cinema in Paris in the early 1930s. She had, of course, encountered Josephine Baker before, in New York in the 1920s, and memorably at Condé Nast's party. But in 1932 Diana met her again when she went to a screening of
L' Atlantide
, starring the German actress Brigitte Helm, in a small cinema in Montmartre. Caught up in the film, Diana barely moved a muscle. “I have no idea if I actually saw the movie I thought I was seeing, but I was absorbed by these three lost Foreign Legion soldiers . . . their woes . . . the fata morgana. That means that . . . if you desire water, you see water—everything you dream, you see. But you never reach it. It's all an illusion.” In the film the desperate soldiers crawl into an oasis to find a very wicked Brigitte Helm surrounded by cheetahs. Spellbound, Diana allowed her arm to drop down beside her in her cinema seat while Brigitte Helm and the cheetahs dispatched an unhappy ending to all concerned. “The lights went on, and I felt a slight movement under my hand. I looked down—and it was a
cheetah
! And beside the cheetah was Josephine
Baker
! ‘Oh,' I said, ‘you've brought your cheetah to see the cheetahs!' ‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's exactly what I did.' ”

On the street outside the cinema there was an enormous white-and-silver Rolls-Royce waiting for Josephine Baker. “The driver opened the door; she let go of the lead; the cheetah
whooped
, took
one
leap into the back of the Rolls, with Josephine right behind; the door closed . . . and they were off!”
L' Atlantide
appeared in 1932 when Josephine Baker had moved to France, and she did indeed go about Paris in the company of a cheetah called Chiquita. It is perfectly possible that Diana came across Baker and Chiquita leaping into a Rolls-Royce together. They may all have been in the cinema at the same time. But the idea that Diana was able to keep her hand on Chiquita throughout
L' Atlantide
collapses when one considers Chiquita's character. In common with several others in Diana's new European world, Chiquita was not quite what she seemed. She was a he, of independent disposition, and prone to terrorizing the musicians during Baker's shows. On the other hand, the possibility that Chiquita was stunned into good behavior by the sight of fellow cheetahs on the silver screen should not be entirely discounted.

Stories told by Diana against herself often revolved around the sense of unreality that pervaded high society in the 1930s. In the face of economic depression and the rise of dictators in Germany, Italy, and Russia, there was more than an element of denial in the
gratin
's obsession with trivialities, its intense inwardness, its fancy dress parties, and its constant movement from one modish resort to another. Astonishingly, spas in Germany and Austria continued to be fashionable until the end of the decade. Although Diana said later that she could feel everything “weakening, weakening, weakening” in the 1930s, she and Reed were among those who continued to prefer resorts in Germany and Austria to those in the south of France, and they regularly visited a spa near Freiburg in the company of the Brownlows and d'Erlangers. During one of these sojourns Diana had her only encounter with psychoanalysis. Curious about what this might involve, she consulted an eminent German psychotherapist who had a consulting room at the spa where she was staying. He saw her for three or four sessions, at which point they mutually called a halt. Each consultation left Diana flattened with exhaustion. “I simply had . . . to sleep for twelve hours I was so exhausted talking about myself,” she said. She resolved never to repeat the experience, a point of view allegedly shared by the eminent German psychotherapist. “You can't handle it. Because you're not ill,” he is supposed to have said. “It's a bore for you and me.”

In June 1934, inspired by reading Henry “Chips” Channon's
The Ludwigs of Bavaria
, Reed and Diana embarked on a tour of the castles and important places in the life of King Ludwig II. By her own admission Diana and Reed took very little notice of German politics, though there was a moment when Diana peered at Hitler over the edge of a theater balcony and thought his moustache was just plain wrong (she also sent Freck a postcard saying, “Watch this man”). Otherwise the Vreelands were enchanted by everything they saw. But one evening they arrived at their hotel in Munich to find goose-stepping soldiers on the street outside. Diana pushed her way past them to get into the hotel, and even Reed was annoyed with her. “ ‘Really,' Reed said to me. ‘You've got to behave yourself. You simply cannot push your way past these men saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, I've got to get into my bath!” ' ”

It was Diana's maid who realized that something was terribly wrong. The following morning she rushed into Diana's room crying, insisting that they must leave at once because something horrible was happening, though she was unable to explain what it was. Diana told her to pull herself together. “But Julie was getting more and more upset until she couldn't even fasten a hook. She was a very sensible Frenchwoman, nothing simpering about her. She knew she was in very, very bad company.” It was only two weeks later that the Vreelands realized that Julie had been upset on the morning after the so-called Night of the Long Knives, which began on June 30, when Hitler moved against both the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and other critics of his regime. In her memoir Diana asserts that fourteen murders took place in their hotel that night. There is no record of this at all: the murders took place outside Munich at Bad Wiessee. Nonetheless there was a terrifying atmosphere of violence across the city, with hundreds of bludgeonings and arrests. But, like her father before her, turning away from ugliness and unpleasantness had become one of Diana's habits. As she said: “The curious thing about me is that I only listen to what I want to hear. It's not all deliberate. It's just a sort of training of mine because I try to concentrate totally on what I want to hear.”

This trick of positive thinking, of blotting out ugly behavior and ugliness, and dreaming the beautiful, the “duh-vine” into existence had, of course, started years earlier during Diana's childhood. The dream-come-true atmosphere of the early years of the Vreelands' marriage and the delights of their new life in Europe had the effect of reinforcing what Diana described as “a sort of training of mine.” But it was not always easy being the children of a mother with this approach to life. Tim and Freck passed time in the nursery with Nanny at the top of 17 Hanover Terrace or in the basement with the butler. Their relationship with their parents was so distant it would now be regarded as neglectful, though such domestic arrangements were typical of the period. Diana's notion of putting up world maps on the walls of their bedrooms so that her sons would know where she and Reed were traveling was not perhaps entirely helpful in this respect, even if it did discourage a provincial point of view. When Reed and Diana were at home there were privileged visits at stated hours, with occasional unscheduled glimpses of Diana in the distance when she had her rumba lessons. Reed often appeared to say goodnight, beautifully attired in evening dress, before he and Diana went out for the evening.

Neither son remembered being allowed into the gorilla cage at London Zoo on Nanny's day off so that they would learn not to fear noble animals, as asserted by Diana later. On the other hand, the boys did have a genuine connection to the London Zoo, for Emily had presented it with two bear cubs after one of her hunting trips in the Rockies; and there were excursions with their parents to less glamorous destinations in Britain including the English seaside and a hotel belonging to a cousin of Diana's in Devon. They also accompanied Reed and Diana to Belton and stayed with their aunt Alexandra at Gilmerton in East Lothian, where Tim Vreeland's abiding memory was of a girl being dangled upside down after she swallowed mothballs. Tim Vreeland was four when he and his parents arrived in England, so much of his early childhood was spent there. “It was never very comfortable, I will say that. Little boys are very conventional. I often wished she was like other mothers. I wanted the kind my friends had, just an ordinary old mother.” Being raised by someone who minded so much about external appearances was “terrible—in both senses of the word.” Diana loved English clothes for little boys, putting her own in long dressing gowns and small monogrammed slippers with pom-poms. She insisted on dressing her two boys so alike that the visors on their little caps had to be at precisely the same angle.