Empress of Fashion (2 page)

This book is for nongeniuses interested in the nature of Diana Vreeland's talent and achievements. For all the fanfare of her appearance and her personality, her gifts were elliptical. Yet they were real. They were consistent. They were visible early in her life, and what happened to her in her early years, and as a young married woman, lent them a particular intensity, giving her what the make-up artist Pablo Manzoni called a “leitmotif, a continuity” that lasted throughout her professional career and until she died. Diana regarded a chronological approach to anything as consummately tedious, but hers was a life in which chronology counted for a great deal. Far from agreeing that she constantly reinvented herself, as some have maintained, this book contends that her later achievements can better be understood by looking at those early years, by paying close attention to her omissions and evasions about her past, and by peering into the interstices between the facts of her life and her later fictions. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of her fashion enthusiasms, or her friendships, which would run to several volumes.

It is not clear whether she would have welcomed much probing beneath her dazzling lacquered surface, for Diana Vreeland was a very private person. “Keep your secret,” she once said. “That's your power over others.” On the other hand she greatly enjoyed recognition when it finally came to her, particularly if it arrived unexpectedly. It was sweetest of all when it enabled her to get the better of her most critical friend, Jerome Zipkin. Jerry Zipkin was a celebrated man-about-town in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, best known for being Nancy Reagan's “walker” after she became first lady in 1981. He was famous for his ability to undermine his fragile society-lady friends and reduce them to tears. But he underestimated Diana's standing in the world of fashion, not to mention one of her abiding characteristics: the ability to jump, in just a few seconds, from the negative to the positive while keeping an open mind about the latest trend, before swooping triumphantly to a perspective that was all her own:

I want to tell you that a few years ago Jerry took me down to Palm Beach, which at that point, I knew about as well as I know Bloomingdale's, not having been there in 40 years, and the first thing we do is tour Worth Avenue. . . .

“You haven't seen anything yet,” he said. “I'm going to take you to a place where I
doubt
you'll get in.”

So we go to a place called Mitzner Court, I think it's called, and Jerry said, “Let me explain it to you—you have to be a member.”

“But Jerry,” I said, “I thought you were taking me to a shop.”

“It is a shop,” he said. “But the
chances
are—don't be offended—that you won't get in. We'll just have to see what we can arrange. . . .”

Then . . .
we ring a bell and a man comes out. “Oh Madame Vreeland,” he said—it couldn't be more American, the “Madame Vreeland” . . . well, I'm In Like Flynn. He gave me a year's free membership.

I couldn't believe it—you have to pay to buy?

This,
I have to say—is new.

Chapter One

Paris Opening

T
here is no doubt that Diana Vreeland disdained an inconvenient truth in a manner that could be startling. She once ejected a friend from her apartment, the jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane, for suggesting that her beloved England had been invaded by the Normans; and she enjoyed polishing up birth moments when she thought they needed it, a compliment extended even to the most exotic of her acquaintances. In the 1960s the model and actress Vera von Lehndorff, known as Veruschka, told a story at a New York party about noticing the time as she was born. “I said, ‘The first image I saw of this world was an enormous round watch with a black frame, black numbers, and black pointers. It was 6 o'clock and 10. I was born at the hospital in Königsberg, East Prussia, now called Kaliningrad.' ” Everyone laughed. But a little while later Diana took Veruschka aside and gave her some advice in a low whisper. “Veruschka darling . . . when asked where you are born, never say East Germany, Prussia, Königsberg, or Kaliningrad, that's boring, just say ‘I am born on the border, right on the border, between Germany and Poland, in the swamps of the Masurian lakes.' ”

Diana liked to spread a little mystery about her own arrival in the world too. She was coy about her age, and genuinely perplexed in later life by the discovery of an apparent discrepancy between the dates of her birth on two official documents, her French
bulletin de naissance
and her actual birth certificate. However, Diana was indisputably born on September 29, 1903. She was born in Paris; and apart from moments when it amused her to outline more extreme birth scenarios, such as appearing to the sound of Berber ululations in the Atlas Mountains, she liked to maintain that her French beginnings set her apart. People born in Paris were different from other people, she once said. The event was registered at the British consulate in Paris because Diana was the daughter of a British father, Frederick Young Dalziel. Dalziel is a Scots name, with a range of spellings that derives from the barony of Dalziel, in Lanarkshire, and pronounced
dee-ell
. “People used to say to me, why don't you cut out all that and just put the ‘D' and the ‘L'?” said Diana. “I'd say—do it yourself. For me, it's the whole way because I
love
the spelling. I
love
Zs.” She delighted in her “medieval” Scottish clan origins throughout her life. As a girl she took the clan motto, “I Dare,” seriously. As an adult she owned a print of the Dalziel coat of arms and sported the Dalziel tartan at the right sort of parties.

Her father, Frederick Young Dalziel, however, was not quite what he appeared to be. He was not very Scots—his line of Dalziels came from England—and his background was much more modest than he found socially convenient. His family lived in Haringey in North London, where he was brought up by a stepmother and a father who worked for the General Post Office, alongside a younger half brother named Edelsten. This was a family in which even middle-class status hung in the balance. Frederick and his half brother were sent to Highgate School, a school educating young gentlemen from North London, but they went there late and all the evidence suggests that money was extremely tight. Though Frederick gained a place at Oxford University and started at Brasenose College in 1888, he left just a year later at the end of 1889, probably because that was as long as his family could afford. A year at Oxford was enough to give him a marked fondness for aristocratic tone. It also allowed him to describe himself as “Oxford educated” forever more, sidestepping the fact that he never actually obtained an Oxford degree.

Diana's father was tall—over six and a half feet—strikingly handsome, and she loved him. “He was so wonderful looking—so charming. For every daughter, the first love of her life is her father. To this day I just adore him. He was wonderfully affectionate. . . . A great beauty; and really nothing to do with the modern world at all. Totally Edwardian, you know.” In 1890 the obvious destination for an “Oxford educated” young man with good looks, energy, charm, no private income, and a socially undistinguished family was some part of the British Empire where lack of pedigree was not an impediment and there was no prejudice against earning money. Frederick Dalziel was so evasive about the five years that followed his departure from Oxford that it started a family myth that he became a spy. It is more certain that from 1895 he worked as a representative for South African gold-mining interests and lived in Paris. Speculation in the discovery of gold and diamonds was extremely risky and was only for the spectacularly rich. In the 1890s some of the wealthiest people in the world were rich Americans of the Gilded Age who regarded Paris as both their playground and their second home. These were his clients, and eventually his friends too.

By 1901 Frederick Dalziel was mixing with American millionaires in Paris in a manner that suggests he was already migrating from a suburban middle-class to an upper-class persona. Those who remember Frederick Dalziel in old age confirm Diana's description of her father as the model of an Edwardian English gentleman; but he projected this image quite self-consciously, cultivated smart acquaintances, and masked his background with a grand mien, having himself photographed at this period in hunting pink by French society photographer Numa Blanc. “There's only one very good life and that's the life that you know you want and you make it yourself,” said Diana later. It was an attitude she inherited from her father; and in 1901, the solution to the gap between Frederick Dalziel's background and the life he knew he wanted presented itself in Paris in the form of Diana's American mother, Miss Emily Key Hoffman.

D
iana's mother arrived in Paris by a very different route. Born in 1877, she was the daughter of George Hoffman, a lawyer from a prominent Southern family. The surname has led to claims that this side of Diana's family was Jewish, but Hoffman is also a non-Jewish name, and there is no record of Judaism in the family tree. Diana's Hoffman forebears were gentlemen farmers in Virginia, and at least one of her Southern great-grandmothers was socially distinguished. “We're top drawer from Baltimore,” went a family expression, and “Key holds the key” was another. The “Key” was George Hoffman's mother, Emily Key, a member of a well-known family of the American South whose lineage connected Diana to Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The only thing that Diana knew about her Baltimore great-grandmother was that she and her sister went to law over a dining-room table, so exasperating the judge that he Solomonically ordered a carpenter to cut it in two and give each of them a half. Judged by bloodline rather than passion or pigheadedness, however, Diana Vreeland's colonial antecedents on her mother's side were impeccable.

In New York society this kind of pedigree mattered, and after the Civil War ended in 1865, it was also essential to have riches. In Diana's case the family money came from her maternal grandfather, John Washington Ellis, who made his first fortune as partner of a wholesale dry goods firm in Cincinnati before helping to found the First National Bank of Cincinnati and then moving to New York, where he ran a private investment bank. As New York became America's financial and cultural capital after the Civil War, the city drew in hundreds of families made newly rich by the extraordinarily rapid postwar boom that soon came to be termed the Gilded Age. New York's finest reacted by becoming much more self-consciously elitist, with resistance led by Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, who could famously fit only “Four Hundred” top people into her ballroom, a notion that then became shorthand for New York's most exclusive clique. However, Mrs. Astor welcomed those with money of whom she approved, to the extent that after 1865 a large fortune became the sine qua non for joining her circle. On arriving in New York, the well-to-do Ellis family were among the lucky ones, quickly joining the “Four Hundred.” The family rode to hounds and hunted with the right packs. The New York family home was just off Fifth Avenue, and John Washington Ellis helped by building a huge Shingle-style summer “cottage” called Stone Acre on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1882. Newport was well on its way to becoming New-York-Society-by-the-Sea in the 1880s. The Ellises became closely identified with Newport's growing exclusivity; and they were listed in the first edition of the social bible,
The Social Register
, in 1886.

Diana's mother, Emily Key Hoffman, was therefore brought up at the heart of the New York world of Mrs. Astor's “Four Hundred.” Her father died young in 1885, and thereafter Emily was raised by her widowed mother in a house on West Fiftieth Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, she was sent to the highly academic Brearley School, soon after it was founded. But that was as far as her education went, and in 1896 Emily's mother launched her into New York society. The 1890s marked an era of great transatlantic marriages, when hundreds of daughters of well-to-do Americans married impoverished European aristocrats, enriching noble families in Europe and ennobling the plutocrats back home. Young women from New York's
gratin
who did not marry European nobility were expected to make good matches with scions of American dynasties. Their stories were lapped up by press and public alike, with the result that any attractive young society woman in New York was minutely scrutinized by even respectable newspapers, which ranked a debutante in terms of appearance, family connections, and likely dowry.

The newspaper columnists were enchanted when Miss Emily Hoffman became a debutante. They waxed lyrical about her dark brown eyes, fine features, chestnut hair, charming conversation, and exceptional elegance. Even before her formal debut, she was regarded as “the most beautiful young lady on the floor” at the Newport ball given by Alva Vanderbilt for the Duke of Marlborough when he came courting Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895; and she was frequently referred to as the most beautiful of the belles of Newport once she was out in society. Throughout the second half of the 1890s, Emily appeared with her mother on the guest lists of every important “Four Hundred” event of the late 1890s. She was one of three hundred guests at Mrs. Astor's annual ball. She had her portrait painted by the very fashionable Adolfo Müller-Ury, who was so overcome by her pulchritude that he was inspired to paint her as the Virgin Mary, leading to dazzled descriptions of her as “the Madonna of the 400.” In 1898 Emily was reported to have been the success of the season in Rome, too. She loved hunting, riding out with the Monmouth County hounds. She was sportif, playing her way to victory in tennis tournaments, and she was often to be found leading high jinks from the front. “A merry party of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's guests took a midnight bath at Bailey's Beach last night led by Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Warren and Miss Emily Hoffman,” read the
News of Newport
in 1900.

What really set Emily apart from other socialites of the day, however, was the way she danced, a natural talent that would later have a great impact on Diana and an indirect influence on twentieth-century American fashion. Had she been born two generations later, Emily might well have succeeded in a professional career. As it was, she was celebrated as the “society exponent of Spanish dances,” which she performed with “grace and fire,” a talent that was regarded as all of a piece with her dark Spanish coloring. She had a pronounced theatrical streak. Dubbed the Carmencita of New York society by the press, her star turn as an amateur was a dance called the
cachucha
. This involved Emily in much clicking of castanets and flashings of ankle in public. The high point of her dancing career was a performance of the
cachucha
for charity in January 1900 at the Waldorf-Astoria, which earned her a standing ovation, fan letters, and rave reviews in New York's newspapers. One critic noted that “although it was near midnight when she came on the masculine enthusiasm that she aroused was of the most unmistakable sort.” It was reported afterward that the great vaudeville impresarios Weber and Fields offered her hundreds of dollars to perform her Spanish dances at their music hall on Broadway—an offer that caused her circle much hilarity and that she naturally had to refuse.

There was no pressure on Emily to make a grand European marriage. But with colonial ancestry on one side, Gilded Age riches on the other, and great beauty and vivacity into the bargain, she should have been wed within a year or two to a young man from a distinguished American family; and her name was often linked by gossips to New York society's more eligible bachelors. Four years after Emily's debut, however, the smart marriage plan seems to have gone offtrack. By 1899 Emily had drifted toward a group of louche society bohemians who called themselves the Carbonites. Their leader was the handsome James Lawrence Breese, a man who developed a new photographic carbon-printing process at the Carbon Studio downtown at 5 West Sixteenth Street. He was well known for his effect on impressionable young ladies. Another figure in the Carbonite group was the architect Stanford White, whose sensational murder by Harry Thaw a few years later would expose him as a serial womanizer and the owner of a red velvet swing on which semi-dressed young women, including Thaw's wife, entertained him. Before this came to light, the press loved the Carbonites for being a little wild and for holding what were described as weird midnight suppers. There was a “budget of fun for every second spent in the studio,” said one newspaper and Emily was at the heart of it, dancing the
cachucha
.

It seems likely that Emily's predilection for Carbonite company and her refusal to get on and marry the right sort of husband caused considerable tension with her widowed mother; but during the Newport summer season of 1900, a candidate for Emily's hand appeared who fulfilled every maternal dream. Eugene Higgins was one of the world's most eligible bachelors. Higgins had sold his father's carpet-manufacturing business for an estimated fifty million dollars, leaving him free to pursue life as a sought-after gentleman of leisure. (One New York newspaper gave him precedence in the eligible bachelor ranking over George Vanderbilt and a brother of the khedive of Egypt.) The budding relationship was closely watched, and tongues wagged even harder when Emily, chaperoned by married friends, was one of the party aboard Higgins's enormous yacht the
Varuna
when it set sail for the Mediterranean on November 14, 1900.