Empress of Fashion (25 page)

There was then another complication. However much Jacqueline Kennedy may have wished to retain Diana as her fashion mentor, others had her in their sights once Kennedy became president. In November 1960, Oleg Cassini, a family friend of the Kennedys, proposed himself as her personal couturier; and Joseph Kennedy, her father-in-law, offered to pay his bills should she accept, taking the view that her wardrobe bills could not then be exploited by Kennedy's political opponents. Jacqueline Kennedy accepted this offer, a move that was greeted with some astonishment by Seventh Avenue, where Cassini was not regarded as a designer of the first rank and something of a vulgarian as well. As it turned out, Cassini was a good choice in the new era of television politics, since he had already worked in Hollywood costume design. This turned out to be a great advantage in creating a style for the president's wife. Indeed, Cassini's understanding of the relationship between the camera and fashion was critical to establishing Jacqueline Kennedy's global image. “Cassini approached each project with a movie costume designer's eye, ‘envisioning how she would look in close ups or from a distance,' ” writes Hamish Bowles. “He took Jacqueline Kennedy's references as starting points, simplifying and then exaggerating lines and details.”

However, Jacqueline Kennedy worried that Diana would feel slighted by Cassini's involvement. She resolved the matter of the “big Eve” gown by wearing Diana and Bergdorf Goodman's creation to the inaugural ball while asking Cassini to design another for the inaugural gala. “Now I know how poor Jack feels when he has told 3 people they can be Secy. of State,” she wrote to Cassini on December 13, 1960. Both Diana and the temperamental Cassini behaved well, working together to give the new first lady the wardrobe she needed, including a pillbox hat by Halston, whom Diana much admired, and whose fortunes were transformed from that day onward. “The most incredible & helpful thing you have done is to stay in touch with Oleg,” wrote Jacqueline Kennedy, shortly after the inauguration, which took place on January 20, 1961: “It is very hard for him & me this 1st year—as we don't quite know the ocassions [
sic
] for clothes—so he makes 200 sketches—when all I want are 2 dresses! . . . He has such incredible admiration for you—it comes out in a burst of Italian English—he is so proud & touchy & quick to be rattled—not exactly the temperament one would pick for ones grand couturier—but he is devoted & can do lovely things.” She very much wanted Diana to stay involved. “But I hope you will guide him—one of his prettiest dresses is the shoulder black velvet you had him do—so if you can ever spare the time I would so appreciate your helping him—as anything you say he takes as scripture & would make me a dress of barbed wire if you said it would be pretty.” And regardless of Cassini's involvement, the muff that Jacqueline Kennedy wore to the inauguration itself, which was the topic of much charmed comment, was entirely Diana's idea.

Diana, along with others including Lee Radziwill and Nicole Alphand, the wife of the French ambassador to the United States, continued to advise Jacqueline Kennedy on her clothes, bringing her attention to new designers and coordinating a wardrobe by Pucci for a trip to Italy. In the longer term, advising the first lady on her wardrobe was important to Diana because it marked the beginning of a real friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy. More immediately it meant an invitation to the inauguration for Reed and Diana. Washington was engulfed in a snowstorm that day, and according to Diana she and Reed made it to the ceremony only by hitching a ride on a snowplow. To thank Diana, Jacqueline Kennedy agreed to be photographed with the president-elect and their children for
Bazaar
. The resulting photographs by Richard Avedon appeared in the February 1961 issue, precipitating a grumpy letter from Jessica Daves, the editor in chief of
Vogue
, complaining that Mrs. Kennedy had promised Cecil Beaton a sitting for
Vogue
but had called it off until after the inauguration. The sitting with Avedon produced images that the Kennedys liked very much. It also turned out to be an exclusive for
Bazaar
. Thereafter Jacqueline Kennedy decided that press intrusion into the lives of her children would be kept to a minimum, and there would be no more formal photographs of the first lady or the first family.

D
iana had brought
Bazaar
a considerable coup. When it came to the matter of a long-overdue increase in salary, however, even this was not enough for the men of the Hearst Corporation, and Nancy White lacked the authority and strength of personality to deal with them decisively. She may also have lacked the will. When Diana brought up the question of a raise, she took her time to respond, saying, “I think the chances of an increase at the beginning of '61 are pretty good. In the meantime any outside work that you wish to do seems to be okay if cleared with them first.” This was irritating. Worse, when “they” did finally respond, it was with an offer of a paltry one thousand dollars. Diana was furious: “So I said, ‘Would you please take that back. It upsets everything.' ‘Oh well, it will upset everything if you don't take it.' I said, ‘Then give it to the Red Cross, but don't send it to me.' Can you imagine—a thousand dollars! Would you give your cook that after she'd been your cook for 28 years?” Given this reaction, a change was inevitable.

By March 1962 the small fashion world of New York was humming with the news that Diana Vreeland was leaving
Bazaar
. She would be going to its archrival
Vogue
, not to replace Jessica Daves but to work alongside her. On March 28, 1962, the news was splashed all over the
New York Times
in an article by Carrie Donovan. For all her flamboyance, Diana was well known only in fashion and high-society circles, and Donovan's extended piece introduced her to a wider public for the first time. She was the fashion world's most colorful personality, wrote Donovan, as well as the most respected editor in the fashion business. Crediting Diana, along with Carmel Snow, for shaping the image of
Harper's
Bazaar
, and the look of thousands of American women, Donovan's article also kick-started myths including those of Diana's Paris upbringing, her parents' life of pleasure, and their total lack of interest in her education.

The Hearst organization dripped with tears, crocodile and genuine. Dick Berlin wrote: “You know we all wanted so much to have you stay. We consider you part of the
Bazaar
.” Richard Deems maintained that “the
Bazaar
without you is just never going to be the same,” though he did not say whether he thought this was a good or bad thing. Nancy White's note was nice but awkward: “So much of the magazine is your talent—your imagination your fondness for doing what you do with passionate belief your taste and your vision all these things and many more. . . . I do wish Carmel was here, I feel so inadequate.” John Fairchild of
WWD
sent a message from Paris that simply said: “You naughty girl.”

“Greatest relief since Mafeking,” cabled Cecil Beaton from London, alluding to the ecstatic joy in England that erupted at the end of the siege of a small town in South Africa during the Boer War. But it was not Diana he had in mind when he said this: he was talking about
Vogue
.

Chapter Six

Youthquake

I
n 1962
Vogue
was produced on the nineteenth and twentieth floors of the magnificent art deco Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue at East Forty-Third Street. The magazine had a larger staff than
Bazaar
, and its organization was much more formal. The executives and most senior editors had their offices on the twentieth floor, while the art department and junior hirelings, often from society families who could cope with the low wages, toiled on the floor below. The news that Diana was coming to
Vogue
to work alongside Jessica Daves had an electrifying effect on the fashionable juniors. One of them was Nicholas Haslam, who had recently arrived in New York from London, and was working in the art department. “Suddenly a rumour was buzzing around the corridors of the Graybar Building,” he remembered. “ ‘Mrs. Vreeland is coming. Coming
here
, coming to
Vogue
.' ” Diana's reputation ran before her. “It was said that her maid ironed her newspapers and her dollar bills, blackened the soles of her shoes to make them look like new, and washed and ironed her bed sheets . . . while she took her bath,” recalled Grace Mirabella. “Whether or not all of this was true, we ate it up.” There was nervousness about Diana's arrival among those in
Vogue
's high command who knew her by repute, but for the time being she was protected by Alexander Liberman, the person responsible for luring her away from
Bazaar
.

Liberman's title of Art Editor did not come close to describing his dominance within Condé Nast Publications. A talented sculptor and painter, Russian born and Jewish, he had arrived in the United States during the Second World War and been hired by Nast himself in 1941. “He had a great gift for jumping into the lap of power,” said one
Vogue
editor at the time. Liberman quickly displaced the dyspeptic Dr. Agha as
Vogue
's art director. He looked like the British film star David Niven, with an attractive manner to match, and he deployed all his charm with Edna Chase to transform the look of
Vogue
. One of his greatest discoveries was a self-effacing man called Irving Penn whose photographs began to appear (in the teeth of considerable opposition from Mrs. Chase) in 1943. Liberman was responsible for transforming and modernizing
Vogue
's design, and it was thanks to him, as much as to its fashion content, that Nast's flagship magazine maintained its authority from 1941 onward. Liberman also became the éminence grise of Condé Nast because of several characteristics that Diana would have done well to note when she first arrived. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, has described him as a Jekyll and Hyde character: generous, charming, kind, and flirtatious; effective, stimulating, and creative; and manipulative, disloyal, calculating, destructive, and consumed by driving self-interest in equal measure. “He was a strange man,” said the British photographer David Bailey. “Always immaculate, never a speck of dandruff, nothing on his desk.” When Condé Nast Publications was acquired by newspaper owner Sam Newhouse in the 1950s, Liberman maneuvered himself into place as his unofficial right-hand man and achieved a position of unassailable power within the organization. As an artist, he was ambivalent about the world of fashion. But he was wary of potential rivals, highly controlling, and difficult to read. Though he could reduce junior editors to tears, he rarely confronted Condé Nast's more powerful figures, preferring to set them against one another and stand back until one of them gave way.

Luring Diana to work alongside Jessica Daves, in the hope that Daves would slip away of her own accord, was typical Liberman behavior. Jessica Daves had been editor of
Vogue
since 1946 and had taken over as editor in chief when Edna Chase retired in 1952. Daves had originally joined
Vogue
from the advertising department of Saks Fifth Avenue, and the rigidly conservative Mrs. Chase came to depend on her, molding her in her own stiff image and pronouncing Daves her anointed successor when she finally stepped down at the age of seventy-five. Daves had certain strengths that the Condé Nast organization later found it missed. She was a good businesswoman. She introduced changes to
Vogue
that made it more useful to readers, especially when it came to finding the clothes that appeared in the photographs. She supported America's sportswear designers and ran a profitable magazine. Married to a writer, she commissioned fiction by artists of the caliber of John Updike and Arthur Miller. But it was not enough. Though Liberman introduced the work of Helmut Newton, William Klein, Bert Stern, and John Rawlings to
Vogue
alongside that of Penn during Daves's tenure, attempts at further innovation consistently foundered on her prim and unwavering insistence, inherited from Mrs. Chase, that
Vogue
was for ladies and must therefore be ladylike. Anything suggestive was taboo. Open mouths were suggestive. Rear views of models in swimsuits were suggestive. So were nightdresses photographed near beds. The photographer Horst once had to retake a whole sitting because he photographed a girl on the floor. When Nicholas Haslam joined the art department in 1962, one of his tasks was retouching fashion photographs to remove all vestiges of the untoward. “We had to touch out navels, such innocent features being then—unbelievable as it now sounds—considered obscene.”

By 1962 Jessica Daves's vision of style was widely perceived within the fashion world as uninspiring. It did little for confidence in her judgment that she was mystifyingly badly dressed herself. Round and dumpy—“like a bullfrog,” said Bailey—she favored a dowdy uniform of navy blue dress, white gloves, and a small veiled hat that she wore all day even behind the closed door of her office. In spite of occasional concessions to innovators like Rudi Gernreich, American
Vogue
became ever stodgier as Daves advanced through middle age. “NO to a skirt three or four inches above the knee,” she declaimed
in March 1962; “NO to most of the fashion proposals for the Twist.” “She believed in elegance, but her idea of elegance was that of the bourgeois who wanted it and thought they had achieved it,” said Horst. Youth fashion was treated with disdain, unless it came from Dior. In Daves's view, the reader was a well-to-do female who spent her husband's money and was likely to be “the sort of woman who takes a polite, but convinced and beleaguered stand against the current Youth Fixation.” She was already in possession of a little mink throw, and prepared to mark time until a really good tweed suit came her way. “You've cased the collections, French and American, made some major clothes-decisions on the basis of them, and your shopping list at this point rather resembles a half-solved crossword puzzle,” began one article in October 1961.
Vogue
's raison d'être was helping the puzzled reader spend her “clothes-dollars” on appropriate clothes for an upper-class lifestyle and nudging her away from expensive mistakes.

Diana arrived at
Vogue
in April 1962 and clashed with Jessica Daves almost immediately, just as Liberman intended. To begin with, her role at
Vogue
was ill-defined—she first appeared on the masthead in June 1962 with the catchall title of Associate Editor. Diana knew she had to proceed with care, and it was extremely frustrating. “We have thought of you so much in the first days of the new job,” wrote Betty on April 14, 1962. “It must certainly be wearing to know what one wants to do and yet have to pull oneself back & go slowly.” Egged on by Liberman, Diana increasingly took power into her own hands, bypassing Daves on important decisions and going straight to the Condé Nast high command for approval. Contributors found themselves caught in the crossfire. Horst, who had almost given up working for
Vogue
under Daves, was suddenly telephoned and asked to photograph Consuelo Balsan, who had been born a Vanderbilt, and later married and divorced the ninth Duke of Marlborough. He duly photographed Madame Balsan in color, whereupon Jessica Daves phoned him and protested, insisting that society women in
Vogue
were always photographed in black-and-white. Two days later Liberman and Diana both called Horst to tell him to go back and take as many photographs of Madame Balsan in color as he wished.

“I worried that you with your birdlike legerté would find your flights of fancy arrested in mid air and that your wings would have been spattered with heavy oil,” wrote Cecil Beaton to Diana. But he need not have worried. Four months after Diana arrived, Jessica Daves ran up the white flag. A disagreement over whether to publish photographs from Bert Stern's last sitting of Marilyn Monroe, taken just before she committed suicide, was probably the last straw, but by then the battle was already over. Although Liberman later pretended that he had never expected her to go, Jessica Daves slipped off, by way of a courtesy title of Editorial Adviser, and by mid-August 1962 negotiations had begun with Diana about her salary and expenses as editor in chief. Diana's appointment was announced publicly in November 1962, to the great relief of her family who had taken nothing for granted. “My goodness we are so proud,” wrote Betty. “Freck was so worried that a new Miss White would be a bête noir. . . . But Diana, what an exciting adventure! . . . What fun
to really have
the reins and not be an ‘eminence grise' . . . Frecky is just beaming! . . . He had been so worried for you—your news took a huge load off his shoulders.”

In January 1963 Diana appeared on the masthead as editor in chief of
Vogue
for the first time. Later she would be accused of wild, publicity-seeking egotism. But at this point it was Condé Nast Publications that exploited her persona to publicize the reenergizing of
Vogue
, circulating an interview with
WWD
that took the form of questions and answers. “What is fashion?” asked
WWD
. “It's a natural delight, stronger than pestilence, war and economic upheaval,” replied Diana. “What is the function of a fashion magazine?” asked
WWD.
“To instruct when possible, to delight, to give pleasure, to bring to the reader what interests her,” said Diana. “Everybody makes an appearance every day.” The imagination was of paramount importance: “Before even the technique, there is the dream. Chanel had it. The dream is everything.”

What she did not know, however, was that in the weeks before her appointment was secure, this kind of talk had been causing great concern. Freck had been right to worry that Condé Nast's owner, Sam Newhouse, and Liberman would lose their nerve at the last moment and appoint a Nancy White “bête-noir” instead. There were those, including
Vogue
's long-standing features editor, Allene Talmey, who argued that Diana would take the magazine in too frothy a direction, and that Liberman himself should take on the role of editor in chief. Liberman resisted, saying that he knew little about fashion, that
Vogue
had to be edited by a woman and needed strong medication. He nonetheless exploited these anxieties to his advantage. At the same time that Diana became editor in chief of
Vogue
in 1963, Liberman was made editorial director of Condé Nast, with the surreptitious brief of liberating Mrs. Vreeland from
Vogue
's most conservative forces while simultaneously keeping her under control. But Diana was too excited by her fresh start to scent any danger.

My God, when I think of my years on
Vogue
. . . I used to wake up every day of the week and I couldn't wait to get cracking. I mean, I was a nervous wreck until I'd done at least 43 things that morning. I had three, four and five secretaries taking dictation at once—ideas, ideas, ideas . . .

The new editor in chief took some getting used to. The greige tints favored by Jessica Daves were swept away, replaced by bloodred walls, “
tee-
gray” carpet, a sofa covered in leopard cotton, rattan chairs, Rigaud candles burning in silver saucers, and a black lacquer desk, where Diana kept a stack of lined notepads that were rarely filled beyond the first page. Those adjusting to life with Mrs. Vreeland soon understood that her exploding creativity went hand in hand with fierce attention to detail. She had a large bulletin board on her office wall, covered in swatches of fabric, illustrations, details of a Balenciaga cuff, photographs of Audrey Hepburn's shoes, an Italian Renaissance portrait, and notes with phrases like “luck is infatuated with the efficient.” Within a short time, the atmosphere throughout
Vogue
's offices began to change. “Diana Vreeland didn't just sweep down the hallway, she loped,” Grace Mirabella remembered. “A stream of orders, barks of laughter, and bits of commentary announced her arrival at each doorway she passed. Her voice was low and throaty. It projected, hornlike, into every office. . . . It didn't take long before half the office was moving, and standing and dressing and speaking, like Diana Vreeland.”

Admiration for Diana's style was one thing. A universally sympathetic reaction to the flood of “ideas, ideas, ideas” was quite another matter. Susan Train,
Vogue
's American editor in Paris, found Diana uproariously funny and was immediately on her wavelength. Priscilla Peck, the art director, adored Diana, relishing her imaginative iconoclasm and her preference for the visual image over the written word. Peck had been a painter of note in her youth, and part of the lesbian set that surrounded Joe Carstairs, a tattooed cross-dressing Standard Oil heiress. Several of her
Vogue
colleagues thought she fell in love with Diana, though there was no sign that this was in any way reciprocated or indeed that Diana even noticed. Others came around to Diana's way more slowly. Kate Lloyd was associate features editor at
Vogue
in 1962. She had worked hard on an article about the French ex-model Bettina, who was the mistress of Aly Khan, and had conscientiously covered every aspect of her life: her clothes, her makeup, her house in Paris, her trips down the Nile, and her exercise regime. Feeling rather pleased with herself, she sent the portfolio (the text and pictures) to Diana's office. A short time later Diana rang her and told Lloyd—who had been at
Vogue
for considerably longer—that she didn't quite seem to understand what
Vogue
was all about. “The steam started coming out of my ears at that point. I said, ‘Tell me, Mrs. Vreeland, what is
Vogue
?' She said, ‘
Vogue
is the myth of the next reality.' And I got it. I absolutely got it. Take the words apart and they don't mean a thing, but I saw exactly what she was driving at, and I never had a moment's difficulty with her again.”