Empress of Fashion (42 page)

While Hoving choked quietly in the corner at the idea of Diana on an early-morning walk, the Russians fell for her completely. After her peroration Diana was given everything she asked for. She was determined to find a peasant costume that she believed had been the inspiration for the Chanel suit during Chanel's affair with Grand Duke Dmitri. “The item was triumphantly displayed for her. Diana had been right. There was the garment Chanel had clearly adapted for ‘her' classic design,” said Hoving. By this time the Russians were hanging on Diana's every word. She spent hours patiently sifting through hundreds of drawers, and thousands of costumes immaculately folded away in acid-free paper, impressing Hoving once again with her powers of concentration and her capacity for sheer hard work. “She would praise lavishly—and, in time, would criticize, very gently but with needle-like effect. By the time Diana Vreeland left the Soviet Union, she had become legend there, too.” Hoving returned to Russia again with Jacqueline Onassis, who was editing a book titled
In the Russian Style
to accompany the exhibition. The joint efforts of the two American czarinas persuaded the Russians to lend the winter sleigh of Princess Elizabeth, Catherine the Great's wedding dress, and Peter the Great's three-foot-high boots.

The spirit of détente was rather less in evidence when the costumes finally arrived in New York, however, accompanied by several KGB agents and three Russian curators: Tamara Korshunova, costume curator at the Hermitage, in Leningrad; Luiza Efimova, costume curator at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, and Nina Yarmolovich, a costume restorer at the Kremlin Museums. If Diana “butted heads” with Stella Blum, she locked horns with her Russian counterparts. There was no getting around Russian insistence that the clothes must be behind glass; there was great concern about Diana's idea that the dummies should be painted red; and complete bafflement at her wish to braid them with green and blue Dynel hair. At this point George Trow caught up with Diana again. “ ‘We have to—ummm—
consult
. The whole issue of the Dynel braids is being
analyzed
now.' Mrs. Vreeland is not entirely used to the processes of consultation and analysis.” There was even greater consternation at Diana's scorn for chronology. In the event the bemused Russian curators gave way, though not without great misgivings, shared by Stella Blum. “Stella took me around the exhibition the night before it opened and talked me through the way it ‘should' have been done,” said Harold Koda.

Diana was not greatly interested in the vernacular peasant clothes provided by the Russians. She solved the problem by grouping them together, where they made a brilliant display in two separate rooms, one for poorer peasant clothes and the other for clothes belonging to richer peasants, who used brocade and fur in place of coarse cotton. Ironically it was the embroidery, the ribbons, the vivid reds, the pearl detail, and the layering of these clothes that had the greatest impact on American designers, influencing the New York collections a short time later. For this exhibition Diana persuaded the house of Chanel to revive an old perfume, Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather), and went to work on a tape of Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. What the Russians made of Diana's decision to throw furs around to give the idea of savagery is not recorded. But once again the exhibition was a blockbuster success, exceeding even the Hollywood show in terms of numbers. And a truce was finally achieved with the Russian curators once the exhibition opened. Diana took them out for a lunch where formidable quantities of alcohol were consumed and then invited them back to 550 Park Avenue for tea with Serge Obolensky, who had been a pageboy at the court of Czar Nicholas. This potentially disastrous encounter ended with all the Russians in one another's arms.

The committee for the Party of the Year that accompanied the Russian exhibition was led by Pat (Mrs. William) Buckley and included a shifting cast of social luminaries such as Leonore Annenberg, Lee Radziwill, and Gianni Agnelli. Once Jacqueline Onassis agreed to become president of the committee, the party swelled again in size and social importance: “the biggest one of these things the museum has ever had,” according to Warhol, who went with Halston's party in a fleet of limousines. The 650 guests paid $150 each for a reception and dinner at the museum, and about 1,000 more arrived after dinner to see the exhibition, paying $40 for the privilege. Outside, photographers and journalists lined up to report on the guests. Inside, Jacqueline Onassis received them with Oscar de la Renta, Douglas Dillon, and the chargé d'affaires from the Soviet embassy. Meanwhile, Marella Agnelli and Jacqueline de Ribes circulated in dresses on a Russian peasant theme, while C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill, Mica Ertegun, and Françoise de la Renta chose to sport ruffled taffeta dresses from de la Renta in the same vein. Diana spent part of the evening hawking
In the Russian Style
at top volume: “Buy a book! Buy a luvverly book!” The evening was regarded by almost everyone as her show. “The trick of having a regal New York social life is not to go to distinguished parties but to go to distinguished parties publicly,” said George Trow. “And in New York at the moment only Mrs. Vreeland has the skill to provide a public event with enough authority to withstand the dissolution implicit in publicity. For one night, she takes over the machinery abandoned by Caroline Astor and the machinery abandoned by Flo Ziegfeld and, combining them into one machine, she
makes it go.
”

Chapter Nine

Endgame

This thing about being recognized in the street is truly fantastic. It amazes me every time.

I mean, I've been recognized by
cab drivers.
These things are killer-dillers! I just can't get over it. I've given this a lot of thought and I think that fashion must be even stronger than the lure of the stage.

I really have come to that conclusion. I think fashion must be the most intoxicating
release
from the banality of the world—in the world.

A
fter the success of
The Glory of Russian Costume
, the acting director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, made a suggestion. Diana's flair and taste were generating huge interest. The next exhibition should be nothing less than her personal edit of the thirty thousand pieces in the Costume Institute's closets. Diana called this exhibition
Vanity Fair
. Its title was derived from the town of Vanity in John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
, where pilgrims stopped on their way to Rome to indulge in “pleasures, lusts and delights.” To Diana, following Thackeray as well as Bunyan, Vanity Fair also meant “society, with its foibles, its weaknesses, its
splendeur
.” It was no coincidence, as Harold Koda and Richard Martin have pointed out, that Diana appropriated the title of a then-defunct Condé Nast magazine. The theme of the exhibition “was what she believed a magazine should be, and it exemplified the profile of her magazines.” Montebello warned in the accompanying publication that anyone looking for analysis or conventional costume history would be disappointed. “Why? Because we are not presenting an anthology of the collection but a personal choice, Diana Vreeland's choice.” Though capricious, her selection was anything but random: “This is not so much an exhibition of clothes as of what Diana Vreeland can show us about clothes.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave Diana all the help she could. She agreed to chair the Party of the Year committee for a second year, and she wrote an appreciation of Diana for the catalog. She also paid the “high priestess” a visit in her “temple” while she was assembling the exhibition. On the morning of this visit Diana had already collected together “follies and fripperies” from all over the world: tiny shoes for bound Chinese feet, bustles, parasols with intricately wrought handles, kimonos, men's waistcoats of rich brocade, towering hair combs fashionable in Buenos Aires for just one decade between 1830 and 1840, exquisitely tailored sporting jackets belonging to the Duke of Windsor, parachute-silk jumpsuits by Norma Kamali, and lingerie that would later become the talking point of the show. These objects had not been chosen for their historic interest but to show what the human mind could conjure up in the interest of allure. “These incredibly beautiful things,” said Diana. “You know, you have to demand them. You must wish for the most ravishing thing of beauty and quality because it's there to be had, even now. Keep the demand high. If there is no one who demands, then what the craftsmen know will disappear.” Koda and Martin saw
Vanity Fair
as “the truest reflection of Vreeland's commitment to the opulent expression of concepts; in it she allowed herself the freedom and flamboyance to select the best and most fantastic, as in fact she had always done.” But in
Vanity Fair
Diana went even further.

Mrs. Onassis observed that the objects Diana had selected were, for the most part, “from a rarefied world of court and capital, whose inhabitants had had the leisure and the money to indulge their fantasies and their vanities.” But Diana countered this.

“Do not be too hard on vanity,” Mrs. Vreeland cautioned. “Vanity has given a discipline. ‘Is that all you care about, clothes?' people ask me—as if I'd never had children, never had a husband.” She smiled. “I happen to think vanity is a very important sort of thing.”

She recalled Jean-Paul Sartre's play
No Exit.

“Do you remember, at the end, those three characters are standing in a room? There is glaring light, no shadow, no place to ever be away.” She turned her head and placed her hand to shade her face.

“This is forever, this is hell. And there is no mirror and you lose your face, you lose your self-image. When that is gone, that is hell. Some may think it vain to look into a mirror, but I consider it an identification of self.”

M
ore than half a million people went to
Vanity Fair,
which ran from 1977 to 1978. Diana's fame grew; and she was beside herself with delight when media magnate Jocelyn Stevens asked if he could name a racehorse after her. There were other honors, but the one that pleased her most was the Légion d'Honneur, awarded after
The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties: Inventive Clothes 1909–1939.
“We all have our dreams. We all want
one
thing. That little red ribbon . . . but to me, it was France, where I was born and brought up. . . . The night I got it, it was enfin, enfin,
enfin
—that night could have been the end of my life because it was
all
I ever wanted.” Nonetheless she disliked public speaking as much as she ever had, and when it came to accepting awards her acceptance speeches were short to the point of nonexistent. “I take my cue from the Gettysburg address,” she said. She never overcame the self-consciousness that gripped her when she was required to perform to order. When she made television appearances, they tended—with one notable exception—to fall flat.

The most successful attempts at capturing Diana's singular quality were inspired by Warhol and the Factory. It was Fred Hughes who finally worked out what to do. Andy Warhol had been entranced by the tape recorder since the 1960s and was in the process of composing his autobiography by tape-recording his entire life. Hughes thought that recording Diana in conversation as she moved through her day could be the way forward; and he began by asking Christopher Hemphill to listen to her voice. Hemphill reacted by saying that the tape recorder could have been invented especially for Diana. The listener could almost see her italics; her poetic choice of words was even more arresting than their delivery; and she gave the impression of inventing her own syntax as she went along. At Hughes's behest, Diana came down to the Factory to meet Hemphill. “My first impression of Mrs. Vreeland was distinctly startling . . . ,” he wrote. “Wearing a black sweater, black pants, a purple scarf knotted around her waist, and round sunglasses, gliding on the balls of her feet like a ballerina, she advanced several paces into the room before coming to a complete stop several yards from where I was sitting. I rose from my seat. Raising her sunglasses to her forehead . . . she fixed me with a gaze both critical and sympathetic. I waited for her to speak. She extended her hand. ‘
Hello
there,' she said archly.”

Hemphill recorded Diana everywhere: “In restaurants, in taxicabs, and at what she called our ‘séances,' sitting around a table on a banquette.” The method suited Diana perfectly. Paralyzing self-consciousness, which had plagued her since Mr. Chalif's end-of-term shows at Carnegie Hall, fell away. In fact the presence of the tape recorder had the opposite effect. “Once, during a rare conversational lapse, the machine turned itself off loudly at the end of a tape. ‘Poor little thing,' Mrs. Vreeland said sympathetically, ‘it has a mind of its own—it gets
bored.
We mustn't let the splash drop! We must be amusing
all the time
.' ”
Allure
, the book that emerged from this process, was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, now working for Doubleday. It was a book of images, accompanied by text edited from the recordings. Diana, the editor in chief, was in charge of the layouts, and Onassis very much wanted to understand how she set about it. Onassis, Hemphill, and Ray Roberts from Doubleday spent many Sunday afternoons at 550 Park Avenue while Diana assembled and reassembled the book. She credited Brodovitch with teaching her all she knew, and insisted they were working as a team. “Never say ‘I,' ” she instructed Hemphill. “Always say ‘
we
.' ”

As the images took precedence, Christopher Hemphill's text became shorter and more aphoristic. Diana was reluctant to let
Allure
become a chronological account of her own life, and eschewed pattern making of any kind. “Does anyone read a picture book from the beginning? I don't,” she proclaimed at the beginning, opposite a
Vogue
photograph of an Issey Miyake mannequin.
Allure
nonetheless reflected much that had inspired or interested her since childhood. It was the commonplace book of a visual rather than a literary mind. Many old favorites found their way in: the coronation of George V, Josephine Baker, Rita Lydig, Gertie Lawrence, Daisy Fellowes photographed by Cecil Beaton, de Gaulle, Pauline de Rothschild, Bébé Bérard, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, Elsie Mendl, and a photograph of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern that Jessica Daves had excluded from
Vogue
in 1962 because it was “too triste.” Diana included Irving Penn's close-ups of the face of a geisha; Penelope Tree with a diamond in her eye; the great Munkácsi photograph of Lucile Brokaw running on the beach; and she put an image of the Dolly Sisters appearing as the Little Gods in Diaghilev's
Le Train Bleu
next to “darling Alphonse”—a 1900 picture postcard of Alfonso XIII of Spain when he was fourteen. (“This has got to be our most
peculiar
spread,” said Diana.)

Allure
captured Diana's views on photography. “A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point. I had to have a point or I didn't have a picture.” On paparazzi photographs: “They catch something unintended, on the wing . . . they get that
thing
. It's the revelation of personality.” It lassoed her opinion of noses. “A nose without strength is a
pretty
poor performance. It's the one thing you hold against someone today. If you're born with too small a nose, the one thing you want to do is build it
up
.” In Diana's view the line and silhouette of the twentieth century started with the Ballets Russes, “the only avant-garde
I've
ever known. It all had to do with
line
. Everybody had the line.” It was the line that made blue jeans possible: “Blue jeans are the only things that have kept fashion
alive
because they're made of a marvelous fabric and they have fit and dash and
line
. . . the only important ingredient in fashion.” But the question that pulsed through the book was the mysterious quality of allure itself. On Garbo (“but don't let me go grand on you”): “I can't say what it is she does. If I could
say
it, I could do it
myself
.” Allure had nothing to do with conventional beauty, but was deeply entwined with personality. “The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell—
unquestionably
.” Elegance had the quality of gazelles and Audrey Hepburn. “Elegance is refusal.” She loved Deborah Turbeville's photographs of “worn out” girls in
Vogue
. “The girls keep looking in the mirror, which is all right by
me
. I loathe narcissism, but I
approve
of vanity.” And finally, allure could never be captured anyway. “Really, we should forget all this nonsense and just stay home and read Proust.”

A well-honed version of Diana's life story appeared alongside
Allure
, in interviews that had the effect of complementing the museum's public relations' machine, even when they were not necessarily part of it. Lally Weymouth was the first to bring together successfully the constituent parts of the Vreeland legend. She interviewed Diana for a long article for
Rolling Stone
in 1977 and rounded up the Paris upbringing, Diaghilev, the ugly duckling, the coronation of George V, Buffalo Bill, the return to New York in 1914, the lack of education, marriage at eighteen, a remarkable assertion that she trained with the English dance troupe The Tiller Girls, and being spotted on the rooftop of the St. Regis by Carmel Snow. If Diana was pleased to find herself in
Rolling Stone
in her seventies, she was even more delighted by Jonathan Lieberson's brilliant profile in
Interview
and by becoming its cover girl in December 1980 at the age of seventy-seven. “Diana Vreeland called and said how much she loved her cover story in
Interview
,” said Andy Warhol in his diary. “The cover makes her look about twenty, and she said, ‘The only problem is I'm beginning to think I look like that woman on the cover.' ”

Diana was much less pleased with Jesse Kornbluth's article for
New York
in November 1982, and was reluctant to cooperate with photographers and profile writers thereafter. She allowed Priscilla Rattazzi's images of her seventy-nine-year-old style to endure: black lacquered hair, scarlet lips, rouged cheeks, Vaselined eyelids, scarlet nails, matching ivory cuffs, an ivory tusk on a gold chain, and Roger Vivier scarlet snakeskin boots. But she was furious and upset that Kornbluth distorted a private joke. Years earlier, for the benefit of her grandson Nicky's new film camera, she claimed to have been born to the sound of Berber ululations in the Atlas Mountains. Kornbluth somehow got hold of this story and presented it as an instance of her propensity for self-invention. She complained about this bitterly to George Plimpton who was at 550 Park Avenue to record more conversation for the memoir that became
D.V
. The idea of such a memoir had long been discussed. Diana and Truman Capote had even talked of working on it together after she left
Vogue
; and Capote arranged for Robert MacBride, a married man with whom he was obsessed, to do some preliminary research. MacBride was ill suited to the task and eventually extracted himself from the arrangement, saying that Diana did not quite come through to him and he was therefore not the right person.