Empress of Fashion (21 page)

It all looked very decorative, but Diana had her own worries to contend with, for she had very nearly lost Reed to another woman during the war, and as she said herself, “He was never withered. He never struck age—
ever
.” Rumors of his infidelities during the postwar years need to be treated with caution, for Diana's power made her the target of malicious talk; and there is no evidence that he ever philandered with the trail of beautiful young women who worked and fluttered through
Bazaar
and the Vreelands' lives, however much he may have enjoyed looking at them. Gossip that has lingered centers once again on the Vreelands' social circle, especially Cordelia Biddle Robertson, a long-standing friend of both Reed and Diana's. But it is a little puzzling: Cordelia Biddle Robertson was five years older than Diana, and looked rather like her, “but without the makeup,” according to one friend. She was certainly not short of personality. Her father was the inspiration for the play
The Happiest Millionaire
, based on the memoir she wrote of him. He taught her to box and threw a huge wedding for her when she dropped out of school at fifteen to marry her first husband, Angier B. Duke. Reed was a much kinder man than most of his tycoon friends, with time for long lunches while his wife was at work; and Cordelia Biddle Robertson may well—at least for a time—have joined the line of women who found Reed attractive and made Diana uneasy. Those who knew the Vreelands well, however, did not doubt that theirs was a real marriage, based on deep mutual affection. Neither of them made the other suffer like some of their multiply married rich friends, and Billy Baldwin, who subsequently became their interior decorator and was in a position to know, observed that the feeling between them ran very deep: “It must be understood that Diana and Reed were a very happy couple, and it was because of her real infatuation for him and his great appreciation of her that they sailed this wonderful boat so beautifully together. Until the time that he went to the hospital to die they slept together in an enormous double bed.”

By the mid-1950s Vreeland family life had moved on as Tim and Freck became adults with lives and families of their own. On their return to New York from Europe in 1935 the Vreelands lived first at 65 East Ninety-Third Street and then at 400 Park Avenue. By 1946 both Timmy and Freck were at Yale and lived more independently thereafter. Though Emi-Lu returned from England for a few months in the late 1940s after leaving a finishing school in Switzerland, she became engaged to Hugh Astor in 1949 and settled in Berkshire. In 1950, Freck married Elizabeth Breslauer (known as “Betty”) and joined the CIA, a career move that took the newly married couple first to Washington and then to the first of several foreign postings in Europe in conjunction with the U.S. Foreign Service. After some hesitation about his future career, Tim joined the Yale School of Architecture. He eventually became engaged to Jean Partridge in 1958 before qualifying, taking up posts in New Mexico and in California as an academic and practicing architect.

The role of Diana's daughter-in-law was demanding, even at long distance. Diana was not alone in wanting to see her sons married to perfect women, but the potential for conflict was greater when what she implicitly wanted for them was the Girl. But all sides made an effort, and both her daughters-in-law wrote regularly. Betty, in particular, sent long, affectionate letters. She was a graduate of Vassar who would later become a published poet, and her letters were often delighted evocations of the early years of married life with Freck, written to a mother-in-law she admired and regarded as a kindred spirit. Freck's first European posting was to Geneva in 1951. Diana clearly anticipated that Betty would find the European way of life in the 1950s as thrillingly inspiring as she had in the early years of her marriage in the 1930s. Betty seems to have hoped so too but she was sorely disappointed. “Geneva isn't inspirational,” she wrote. “The people look very nice very conservative & nothing special it is a time for me to experiment but there's no one here to look up to—no one who is really the top. . . . But I shall try to keep standards higher than high.”

In 1954 Cecil Beaton published
The Glass of Fashion
. “Any number of contemporary critics have devoted volumes to Picasso or Stravinsky, Le Corbusier or James Joyce, but little has been said about those people who have influenced the art of living in the half century of my own lifetime,” he wrote. “This book is a subjective account of them and their achievements, as well as of the current of fashion against which they more often than not swam.” Alongside profiles of his aunt Jessie, the fin de siècle socialite Rita Lydig, and Coco Chanel, he included an affectionate portrait of Diana that lit on her “walk like a rope unwinding,” her voice with its “almost Rabelaisian roar,” her “pimentoed expressions,” her all-embracing taste, and surroundings reflecting a “haphazard genius.” Her habit of leaving the room for a vitamin B injection was, wrote Beaton, “all part of her scientific way of preserving inspiration, so that when you do see her she is always, like an athlete, at her best, talking as one would write a poem, allying her verbal brilliance with the novelist's true gift of description and a tremendous sledge-hammer emphasis.” If she was exaggerated, the excess was natural. “Everything that has cropped up along the line has been absorbed by her, until she is like a fine tea mixture of orange pekoe and pekoe. There is nothing artificial about her.”

It was almost too much for Betty Vreeland. “The main point of this letter is that we have just received Cecil Beaton's book and read his absolutely wonderful & perceptive description of you—it is quite remarkable that in such a short space he has found
so
much of you and written
it
so completely. We both really had tears in our eyes when we finished,” she wrote. The problem for someone beautiful, intelligent, and well educated like Betty, living in a poorer and duller Europe in the 1950s, was that the female standard was still set by the 1930s and by women like Diana, and it was so difficult to reach. “It is such an inspiration and yet I feel so weighted down by the banalities of my generations & so unable to be for myself what you have been for yours. This sounds so egotistical to read the Beaton piece & immediately talk of myself—but his book is really besides being a tribute to the elegance & originality of the women he describes—a depressing and altogether accurate picture of the banalities of today's women—it is a lesson to us—but a difficult one. . . . I feel so stupid and
banal
—& clothes & thoughts are all part of it. How I should love to see you, and get another shot of inspiration.”

By the mid-1950s, with both their sons grown up, Reed and Diana were no longer obliged to house anyone other than themselves. They bought 550 Park Avenue in 1955 and asked Billy Baldwin to help them transform it, a process he later described as “almost an entire winter of pure satisfaction and pleasure.” Because they were all working during the week (“even though Diana and I didn't know what Reed was working at”), they met in a restaurant for Sunday lunch throughout the year, and would often still be sitting there at four o'clock, talking about the apartment. Working with Diana on 550, said Baldwin, was like being at a fantastic party. The lunches were not prolonged by alcohol. “There was plenty of prolongation on the part of Diana, but it had nothing to do with drinks. It had to do with her wonderful imagination, which she translated into reality in such a way that it really was quite hard to tell sometimes what she was doing.”

Both Diana and Reed contributed ideas that made the apartment at 550 Park Avenue one of New York's most famous interiors. It was Reed's idea to eliminate the hall, turning the living room and dining room into an L shape. “Diana attacked the whole apartment as though it were a perfectly divine little palace,” remembered Baldwin, and it was she who defined the spirit of 550. “I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell,” she said. “I want everything that can be to be covered in a lovely cotton material. Cotton! Cotton! Cotton!” Baldwin found a scarlet Colefax and Fowler chintz for her in London. “I raced home with yards and yards of it and we covered the whole room—walls, curtains, furniture, the works.” A solid red wall-to-wall carpet covered the entire floor of the apartment. The bedroom was papered in the same Colefax and Fowler pattern in blue and green. Apart from the enormous bed, loaned to Diana by Syrie Maugham in 1935 but still in her possession in 1989, there was a comfortable chair for Reed when they had supper there; a Chinese screen and some red lacquer furniture; and a closet for Diana's clothes. “In it were the most beautifully made shelves for shoes, many of which she had had for several years and were unworn until they had been polished year after year so that they would have the quality of eighteenth-century leather.” In Reed's bedroom (“where he never slept because first of all there wasn't a real bed in it”) there was a “mausoleum” for his clothes, “certainly the most beautiful overcoats and topcoats of any man in New York.”

The most celebrated space in the apartment, however, was the L-shaped room where the Vreelands entertained. It was not, as the diplomat and writer Valentine Lawford subsequently pointed out, remotely hellish or particularly horticultural but it was certainly red: “red carpets, red lacquered doors, closet linings and picture frames.” The apartment was not very large—apart from the living room, dining room, and kitchen, and two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, the only other room was a small space where Diana's maid took care of her clothes and polished her bags, belts, and shoes, including their soles. Diana's main concern when discussing the arrangement of the furniture with Baldwin was that there should be plenty of flat spaces for her photographs and
things
. These had jostled for space in the Vreelands' old apartment: “Piero della Francesca rubs shoulders with drawings by Christian Bérard, while gold-mesh fish paperweights curve their tails on her desk. . . . It is a full room, almost a Victorianly stuffed room, but it does not seem so, for every last shell is polished,” wrote Beaton of 400 Park Avenue. The principle was taken even further in the new apartment. “I don't want you to show me one Chippendale chair or one French commode,” Diana instructed Baldwin. “I want lots of flat space for photographs of my beloved friends. I want plenty of room for flowers everywhere, growing plants as well as cut flowers, and I want plenty of space for ashtrays because I smoke. At one end of the room I want banquettes and at the other end will be my sofa . . . when I am in a room I want to sit close to somebody.” Baldwin thought that this room was the most definitive personal statement that he had seen in all his years of decorating. Fur and needlepoint pillows covered chairs of all heights and of many epochs. Diana's collection of Scottish silver snuff horns nestled among dozens of photographs. There were drawings by Beaton, Bérard, and Augustus John. In the spirit of “Why Don't You?” there was a flowering tree, as well as flowers in vases on every surface.

This oft-described apartment became the backdrop for much entertaining. The Vreelands' close friends were largely the people they first met in Europe in the 1930s, and those they came to know thereafter: there was little sign of the friends from school and debutante days amid the dozens of lunches and parties scribbled in Diana's engagement diaries. Kitty and Gilbert Miller had a much larger apartment at 550 Park Avenue, and they all moved in similar circles. The Vreelands knew “everyone.” The New York of the 1950s was a world of such stylish socialites as Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, C. Z. Guest, and Babe Paley; of artists and writers including Cecil Beaton, and Truman Capote; and such café society stalwarts as Cole Porter, Johnny Schlumberger, Serge Obolensky, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: a world of “Va-Va” and “Mona” and “the Engelhards.” It was a private world of dinners and parties on the Upper East Side that spilled over into El Morocco, the Stork Club, the Colony Restaurant, and the Côte Basque. But amid all this, an invitation to dinner chez Vreeland was much coveted. Reed and Diana were good at mixing people. Guests were generally limited to twelve and ate at round tables pushed up against banquettes. One visitor remarked that Diana's parties were the nicest in New York because she had the knack of inviting the most entertaining people in town. And the apartment, said the visitor, was just like Diana: “outrageous, individual, but warm.”

M
eanwhile there were changes at
Harper's
Bazaar
. New talent came rushing to
Bazaar
's door to join Snow, Brodovitch, and Diana after the war, propelling the magazine into another brilliant phase that lasted until the early 1960s. The stampede was led by Richard Avedon, a young photographer who was determined to work with Brodovitch and headed in his direction as soon as he left the merchant marine in 1944. By 1944
Bazaar
and
Vogue
were almost level in terms of circulation, but
Bazaar
was the lodestar in terms of graphic design. Avedon had to persevere to secure his dream job. He maintained later that he tried to see Brodovitch at least fourteen times before the great art director agreed to meet him and grudgingly conceded that he might show some promise. Even then Avedon had to attend Brodovitch's classes at the New School for six months. It was only after this that Brodovitch was prepared to introduce him to Carmel Snow. She sensed at once that Avedon was exceptionally gifted. “I knew that in Richard Avedon we had a new, contemporary Munkácsi,” she wrote. Avedon's arrival was featured in the October 1944 issue, though initially most of his work was for a new supplementary publication,
Junior Bazaar
.

Avedon had his own studio a few blocks away from
Bazaar
, and it took him time to find his feet. Early on, he wandered into Diana's office unannounced. She was sitting behind her desk, watching intently while Baron Nicky de Gunzburg tucked and pulled at a wedding dress on a beautiful fashion model. “Mrs. Vreeland never looked at me. She cried, ‘Baron!' Beside her stood Baron de Gunzburg, the only male fashion editor in the world, a pincushion hanging like a Croix de Guerre from a ribbon at his throat. . . . She cried, ‘Baron! Baron, the pins!' She took one pin and walked, swinging her hips, down the narrow office to the end. She stuck the pin, not only into the dress, but into the girl, who let out a little scream. Diana returned to her desk, looked up at me for the first time and said, ‘Aberdeen! Aberdeen! Doesn't it make you want to cry?' Well, it did. I went back to Carmel Snow and said, ‘I can't work with that woman. She calls me
Aberdeen
.' And Carmel Snow said, ‘You're
going
to work with her.' ”