Empress of Fashion (37 page)

However, the die was only finally cast once Liberman decided that it was no longer in his best interests to protect Diana and that it was time to move against her. Diana had made Liberman uneasy from the outset. Though he hired her from
Bazaar
, he had never really succumbed to her charm. He later described her as a “disciplined savage” and appreciated her meticulous side, but he never understood her way of motivating
Vogue
's readers and her conviction that the best way to persuade women to spend money on clothes was to interest and inspire them. He disliked the “whole sort of court of admirers” who surrounded her. A man of little humor, he thought the atmosphere in her office was downright weird: “Games were played. I remember Cecil Beaton and Capote trying on different hats in Vreeland's office.” Diana's close relationship with
Vogue
's photographers particularly dismayed him, for she carried on liaising with them closely, just as she had done at
Bazaar
. “I was not involved in planning. Vreeland would plan sittings in her office. And would tell whatever she would tell to inspire the photographer or say what she really hoped to get. And I think I never participated.” This was not how Liberman had worked with Edna Chase or Jessica Daves; and it made Diana his rival and altered the balance of power.

The arrival of Avedon, for which Liberman had also campaigned, made matters worse. Used to his own way at
Bazaar
, Avedon took a tough line at Condé Nast after Liberman prevented him from taking a black model to Japan because he was concerned about
Vogue'
s advertisers in the south. After this, Avedon tended to deal directly with Diana. But this worried Liberman intensely. “Frankly, they're both very strong personalities, Avedon and Vreeland. And they sort of became in cahoots.” Carol Philips thought that if Diana and Avedon did appear to be “in cahoots” it was unconscious: “I think it struck her as an efficiency. . . . I don't think power was on her mind ever. . . . I think she thought about getting through the day. I think she thought about doing something exciting. I think she thought about being turned on.” But Liberman did not see it this way. “She was given too much power; she took too much power,” he said. She was out of control “like a wild horse.” He often found the images in Diana's
Vogue
troubling, particularly the work of Avedon. The pages “were stronger than they should be,” with an undercurrent of violence. “I think there were two aggressiveness [
sic
] at work—Vreeland's and Avedon's. . . . It was too daring for its time.” While
Vogue
was riding high, Liberman kept his reservations to himself, and he was in any case occupied with problems on other Condé Nast magazines. But increasingly Liberman became concerned that Diana was just too avant-garde for
Vogue
's readers: “The extremes of her taste that were beginning to be beyond the limits. You know, high fashion, high style, extremes in sophistication as opposed to practicality, availability. All of that was ignored. I kept saying, Diana, this is going too far.”

As revenues dropped and
Vogue
sailed into more trouble, Liberman moved to ensure that none of the blame was directed at him. He attempted to exert the control he felt he should have exercised from the beginning. But it was too late: Diana refused to listen. Mistakes that might previously have seemed nugatory now loomed larger. One of the worst, about which Diana was deeply embarrassed, involved Lord Snowdon and an assignment for the 1970 Christmas issue. She arranged for Snowdon to photograph the racehorse Nijinsky, one of the great racehorses of all time and the property of Diana's old friend Charles Engelhard. But somehow the head of another racehorse, Minsky, was substituted for Nijinsky's in the final article. Diana was devastated, even though Charles Engelhard wrote a kind letter telling her not to worry. Soon afterward a very expensive shoot in Newfoundland was ruined by Diana's decision to ask the highly unconventional Italian fashion editor Anna Piaggi to style it. Piaggi covered models wearing American sportswear classics with feather boas. Liberman thought she had made the fashion look ridiculous, the shoot was written off, and the expense of yet another costly failure played right into his hands. In building a case against Diana he also insinuated that she was drunk in the afternoons. He managed to convince Si Newhouse, but this view was not shared by anyone else, even those who had mixed feelings about her. As Carol Phillips remarked: “I tell you the truth, a woman like that, you can't tell whether she's drunk or not. How are you going to tell? . . . She didn't smell of it. . . . She believed in water . . . she believed in health.”

I
ntent on the romantic view, Diana failed to understand that she was in serious trouble until the day she was fired. When the moment came, in the spring of 1971, it was Condé Nast's president, Perry Ruston, who did the deed while Liberman lurked in his office. Diana reacted by asking to hear the news from Si Newhouse himself. By now Newhouse, too, believed that Diana's philosophy of fashion, however exciting, was relevant to only a small handful of people. He went to her office and sat down. “And we sat there for what I remember as being almost ten minutes,” he recalled. “She was waiting for me to talk and I was waiting for her to say something.” He eventually repeated what Perry Ruston had said. Diana stayed very cool. “She just kind of watched, just kind of watched me deal with her. Perhaps in amusement, perhaps in shock. I don't know.” There was no argument of any kind. That night, Newhouse had a terrible nightmare about their meeting.

Once the news sank in, Diana was furiously angry with Liberman, both for firing her and for his cowardice in not giving her the bad news in person. “I've met a Red Russian, a White Russian but I've never met a Yellow Russian,” was one of her more polite remarks (“a yellow rat” was how she described him to Leo Lerman some years later). According to David Bailey, she added: “Alex, I've been staring at your profile for ten years. Look me in the eye for once.” For his part Liberman continued to insist that he had warned Diana but that she refused to hear what he had to say. In appointing Grace Mirabella as her successor, Liberman clearly thought he would be working with someone more amenable to his point of view. But because Diana was deaf to his pleas it is also unclear what else he could have done, for in the end there was no arguing with the sales figures.

Under the leadership of Grace Mirabella, who represented precisely the younger professional woman whom Diana ignored,
Vogue
took off again in the 1970s. Mirabella championed elegant, functional clothes for busy, dynamic women, the “real” women whom Diana had disregarded. The clothes Mirabella favored were often in new fabrics from American sportswear designers. Ironically, they were descended directly from the clothes Diana herself had championed during her “glory days” in the Second World War but later found wanting in imagination. While the business decision to go from twenty issues a year to twelve in 1973 contributed hugely to
Vogue
's return to profitability, Mirabella's formula worked outstandingly well for a decade until she too found herself out of step, this time with the ostentatious spirit of the early 1980s.

S
o why did Diana's “myth of the next reality” stall as it did? She had no sympathy for doctrinaire feminists. Like many powerful women who had succeeded before female success was commonplace, she had difficulty understanding what the problem was, particularly since, in a perfect world, she would have enjoyed a life of leisure. She thought that professional young women of the 1970s were conformist and conservative. But she had lived through duller style periods before in the 1950s and produced brilliant pages. Liberman thought that with the benefit of hindsight, Diana should have been made fashion director, leaving analysis of the market to others. But this was not a view with which his boss, Si Newhouse, concurred: “My recollection of Dianne [
sic
] is that she . . . was quite prepared to deal with the realities of magazine publishing. And I don't remember her in any way as being a kind of arrogantly destructive force who said, the only thing we're going to put in the magazine is Giorgio Sant Angelo [
sic
] . . . she was quite realistic about the fact that the magazine lived in a commercial world.” Other colleagues thought that in the end, the problem was her age. As well as believing that Diana became carried away by her own importance, Babs Simpson thought that at sixty-eight, she was, like Carmel Snow, simply too old for the job. A fashion editor should be “much, much younger,” she argued. Grace Mirabella concurred. “She herself was becoming older—approaching seventy—and the fantasy of youth and exuberance seemed to blind her.” Mirabella's view was that ultimately it was Diana's compulsive need to maintain the mystery of the “Vreeland legend” that undermined her: “She could not allow the world to see her intelligence, the method behind her madness. She preferred to remain true to her image, to sink with it, than to compromise it by defending her vision.”

Perhaps, however, it was not the “Vreeland legend” that Diana was determined to defend, but something else to which she could not possibly give Newhouse or Liberman access. In the end she refused to articulate, let alone abandon, her vision of the world of the Girl, that alluring being who had allowed her to survive her mother, who had carried her through life with such success, who had brought her a handsome and adored husband, and who had been the basis of her extraordinary career. Liberman said that Diana was an amateur from a previous generation whom
Vogue
could no longer afford. Diana would have agreed. She always preferred to think of herself as a woman of leisure who wandered into the world of work by mistake, propelled by a vision that allowed her to frame a playful, imaginative view of fashion where transformation and reinvention was possible for any creative woman prepared to dream, and which reached its apotheosis in the 1960s. But in the end the Girl who brought her such triumphant success undermined her too. As feminism took hold, and
Vogue
's readers began to think differently about identity, Diana's attachment to her romantic ideal of female power made her inflexible. In 1971 it suddenly felt old-fashioned, the thinking of an elderly woman, a hangover from a previous generation. A view of fashion as a means of self-expression, as ludic, creative, and empowering, would, of course, eventually resurface strongly alongside other late twentieth-century ideas about female identity, but that time was some way off. For the time being, Diana and the Girl were in
Vogue
's way; and a short time later they were both gone.

T
he year that followed was very hard. Though Diana kept up a dignified front, she was devastated, humiliated, and hurt. She insisted privately that it was all a duplicitous power grab by Liberman and talked about him venomously to confidantes, lacing vituperation with an ample seasoning of anti-Semitism. She was devastated, believing that colleagues she had befriended, mentored, and inspired, like Polly Mellen, had failed to support her in any way that counted. She never forgave Mellen, and refused to sign a copy of
Allure
for her years later. Freck flew to New York to assist with negotiations over severance terms, which were generous. Condé Nast Publications took account of the fact that Diana was a few months short of pensionable service. She was given the title of Consulting Editor. She remained on full salary for the rest of 1971. For that year her expense account, clothing and entertainment allowances, and a portion of the rent on her apartment remained intact. She was offered half her salary—and half her allowances—for two years thereafter. Diana was free to take on additional consulting work provided it did not compete with
Vogue
; and had an office and a secretary for as long as she remained consulting editor. She was not kicked out. But she was most definitely kicked upstairs and the moment it happened all creative authority drained away from her, and into the hands of Grace Mirabella.

Faced with no alternative, Diana moved to a smaller office, had it painted blood-red like her old one, and then stayed away as much as she could. Liberman, meanwhile, swept into her old office and ordered all signs of blood-redness, “
tee-
gray,” and Rigaud candles to be expunged. In public, Diana put on her customary brave face. She made sure she did not behave like Carmel Snow, who had continued to pull rank in similar circumstances and made life as difficult as possible for her successor. She arranged to be out of the country on a four-month tour of Europe when the news broke publicly in May 1971. On the day, she sent a cheerful cable from Paris to the office, saying she missed them all and wished they were sharing the Paris spring day, “which is my marvelous and good luck.” But friends knew that she was very unhappy. She went from Paris to stay with Kitty Miller in Majorca. Her old friend Edwina d'Erlanger infuriated her by remarking that at sixty-seven, Diana had to understand that her future was behind her. While it was wise to be away from New York and the chatter of the fashion press, Diana discovered that she hated traveling alone, and she was delighted when her old friend Kenneth Jay Lane, who was coming to Europe anyway, agreed to join her at the Ritz in Madrid. It was an old-fashioned establishment where female guests were still forbidden to wear trousers and Lane found Diana amusing herself by getting in and out of the grand entrance in slacks without being caught. But there was one evening when he was invited elsewhere. Before he went out, he sat with her in the dining room while she ate an early supper like a little old lady. The band struck up “Fascination,” and she started to cry—not just a little sniffle but great heaving, noisy sobs. Once she started she was unable to stop. She was utterly miserable: no Reed; no job; no one to travel with; worried about money all over again.