Empress of Fashion (45 page)

T
he Met realized that Mrs. Vreeland was fading and that without the Costume Institute's great “auteur” its exhibition strategy would have to change. It was decided that the Party of the Year would be uncoupled from the exhibitions. In future it would be a separate benefit in aid of the operating costs of the Costume Institute. Instead of Diana's blockbusters there would be one or two smaller exhibitions each year in smaller spaces, lasting for a shorter time. There would be greater emphasis on seminars and lectures, and a more scholarly approach. The first restyled Party of the Year was to be a tribute to Diana herself, announced the chairman of the party committee, Pat Buckley. “A Dinner with D.V.” took place on December 7, 1987. A huge banner emblazoned with her signature “D.V.” hung outside over the Met's entrance; the guests arrived to a barrage of photographers and roving klieg lights; indoors, rooms were done up in Diana's colors of Chinese red and turquoise, the pillars were mirrored, and the guests danced to Peter Duchin's orchestra. “I need a great deal of fanfare, no doubt about it,” Diana once remarked to Jesse Kornbluth; but when the great fanfare came, she was already in retreat and too ill to attend.

She was in evidence, nonetheless. At eighty-four, and with a household staff that included day and night nurses, as well as Dolores Celi, she became worried about money yet again and decided to sell her “junk” jewelry. Kenneth Jay Lane estimated that her huge collection of pairs of cuffs, long necklaces, and earrings was worth about fifty thousand dollars, a great deal more than its true value because it was hers. On the day of the sale at Sotheby's, friends and admirers crowded into the saleroom and raised more than $167,000. “Is that all?” said Diana when Lane telephoned to give her the news.

T
hen Diana withdrew. It was a conscious decision. She finally called a halt to the grand performance, an end to being seen by others. The turning point came when she could no longer dye her hair. Once it became clear that it was difficult for Diana to leave her apartment, Alexander tried to arrange for her colorist to come to the house. But it turned out that the chemicals in the hair dye were so strong that they could not be used in a private home. So she finally allowed her hair to go gray. Alexander thought she looked magnificent, but from the time she stopped dyeing her hair, she would allow herself to be seen only by her staff and by members of her family. But she found some answers to this problem. Dolores Celi, who had long replaced Reed's secretary, Mrs. Wilson, ran the apartment—and occasionally Diana herself—with a firm hand, and she observed many of Diana's solutions at first hand. On February 8, 1987, Diana telephoned Leo Lerman and said: “I think we'll have a telephone relationship. I have three or four of those, and I find them most satisfactory.” She liked her museum secretary, Margaret, to read her
Eloise
on the telephone. Other friends, like Kenneth Jay Lane, were allowed to visit the apartment but had to converse with her through the bedroom door. For a time a select few were invited to eat supper in the dining room while she talked to them from the bedroom telephone. André Leon Talley was allowed into her bedroom for longer than most, though even he, in the end, had to read to her from the other side of a screen, strategically placed by Dolores Celi to protect her privacy.

She remained neat and groomed to the end. Tim made tapes of books she enjoyed and mailed them to her regularly. When he came to stay he read to her at length for hours, reviving and continuing a family tradition from his childhood. Freck, accompanied by his wife, Vanessa, came back and forth from Europe. Diana was delighted when Alexander and his wife, Sandra, called their son Reed, and she adored her two small blond great-grandchildren. “She seems more relaxed with the family around,” reported the nurses. Her family, who had been rather excluded from her busy, famous life, were pleased to have a chance to reclaim her. And although her nurses occasionally reported that she had been “disagreeable,” she was never difficult with anyone else. Alexander observed that she showed no sign of self-pity or rage. No one was very sure what her religious outlook was, but she did not seem to be afraid of death.

As the emphysema progressed, it led to bouts of pneumonia. Each time it happened, Diana had to go to the hospital for several days and she became—to his delight—touchingly dependent on Alexander, at one point refusing to leave the hospital until he was back from a business trip. “We got into a rhythm,” said Alexander, though getting Diana from Park Avenue to Lenox Hill Hospital was always a great performance involving Diana's Vuitton bag and much anxiety for Dolores Celi as well as Alexander and at least one nurse. There was invariably a long wait for a room with Diana on a hospital gurney in the emergency room corridor, surrounded by people handcuffed to their stretchers and blood on the floor. “It's like the back streets of Naples,” Diana said on one occasion. “Anything could happen.” Once she decided she wanted a drink at eleven o'clock at night. Alexander rushed from the hospital to Mortimer's on Lexington Avenue where proprietor Glenn Birnbaum poured her a last drink—a large slug of vodka disguised in a seltzer bottle that Alexander smuggled back in. Old habits died hard. She was so thrilled by the beauty of the hospital bedcovers that she asked Dolores to discover where they came from. She continued to take the optimistic view. She sent Dolores to renew her passport, insisting that it be returned that very day and flying into a rage when Dolores told her it was in the mail. “You have to learn to
demand
what you want,” roared Diana, before laughing at herself when Dolores stood her ground and said that even a telephone call to Henry Kissinger would not have made any difference.

A few weeks before Diana died, Margaret van Buskirk telephoned her on a Sunday afternoon. Diana often had ideas on the weekend, and she liked Margaret to note them down on a Sunday in case she forgot about them by Monday morning. She also liked Margaret to tell her what she had been doing and to describe the world beyond. It was not always easy to do this to Diana's exacting standards, and some of the assignments were demanding. Margaret was once required to report back on a drag show featuring Diana. However, in order not to be “dull from dullsville,” Margaret made sure she had interesting things to talk about. On one occasion she told Diana that she had come across a stray kitten and decided to adopt it. “Call it Thaïs,” ordered Diana. “If you don't know why, you can look it up.”

Margaret did as she was told. But she never discovered why her flea-ridden kitten had to be named after a seductive courtesan who repulses a confused monk. By midsummer, Diana had lost all interest in the world. Slowly the world withdrew, though Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Oscar de la Renta, André Leon Talley, and C. Z. Guest phoned Dolores frequently to find out how she was. On August 2 she went down with another bout of pneumonia. Dolores realized that matters were deteriorating rapidly when Diana sent for her, thanked her—uncharacteristically—for everything she had done, and started to cry. In her final hours, she often seemed to those around her to be hallucinating about her youth, to be back in a dreamtime before marriage and children and fashion and fame. “I'll call my father, I'll call my father,” she kept saying. “Don't stop the music. Don't stop the music. Keep dancing. Keep dancing. Keep dancing.” She was admitted to Lenox Hill. This time her body could take the strain no longer and later that day, on August 2, 1989, she had a heart attack and died.

“T
he last details of any story are never satisfactory,” Diana once said. There was a private family funeral followed by a memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 6, 1989. Stephen Paley, who had compiled the tapes for so many of her exhibitions, selected music that included a Scottish lament, the second movement of Schubert's Quintet in C, Mahler, Josephine Baker, Mick Jagger singing “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” and
Metamorphosen
by Richard Strauss. Speakers included Oscar de la Renta, C. Z. Guest, Richard Avedon, and George Plimpton. They told their favorite anecdotes, while Philippe de Montebello paid tribute to her work for the museum. Richard Avedon came closest to summing up her achievements as a fashion editor when he said that she had invented the job: “Before her it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies.”

Obituarists brought Diana back to life with varying degrees of success, presenting her first and foremost as one of the great personalities of twentieth-century fashion.
Newsweek
noted that the headline writers were “stumped over how to sum her up” and called her “the seismograph of chic . . . [whose] most famous creation turned out to be herself.” Several preferred to leave it at that. Such memorialists recalled her red mouth, her black turtleneck sweaters, the cranelike walk, the scarlet python-skin Roger Vivier boots, the Kabuki rouge, the red lips, the red nails, the black lacquered hair, and the snood. The more celebrated “Why Don't You”s were given another airing. The aphorisms, witticisms, and pronouncements were recycled, and the legend's legend was polished to a high gloss. Those with knowledge of fashion history credited her with popularizing, among other things, caftans, Gypsy skirts, leopard-print headscarves, psychedelic underwear, and the need for keeping fit long before it was fashionable.

The obituarists' memories tended to be short: Diana's great wartime fashion success, notably the Popover and her support of Claire McCardell, received barely a mention. Neither did her predilection for low heels, flat footwear, bare legs, and her introduction of Capri sandals. Dazzled by her persona, by a view of her as the great 1960s editor of psychedelia and flower power, those summing up her achievements in fashion overlooked her ceaseless, and sometimes unpopular, efforts to bring pizzazz to American fashion from the 1930s onward; her support for the craftsmen and -women of the fashion industry; and her conviction that “the eye must travel.” They also overlooked her steady championing of clothes that reflected the new silhouette, the new line of the twentieth century: clothes that liberated the natural female body, whether they came from Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Claire McCardell, the Ballets Russes, the dance studio, or the office messenger.

More subtle commentators rightly saw Diana as an extraordinary catalyst, as the Diaghilev of fashion. It was noted that she had inspired great photographers, including Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Richard Avedon, to some of their most imaginative work; made the careers of models like Lauren Hutton, Marisa Berenson, and Penelope Tree; and that she had put a fair breeze in the sails of many famous designers including Halston, Oscar de la Renta, and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, inspiring them not just as a fashion editor or as an editor in chief, but with her costume exhibitions as well. At her memorial Philippe de Montebello focused on Diana's contributions to the curation of fashion. “Thanks to her individual achievements, there is now broad public awareness of costume,” he said. “How many people are there who can actually be credited with having transformed a whole field?” In 1993 Harold Koda and Richard Martin of the Costume Institute returned to this theme with an exhibition called
Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style.
The exhibition noted how Diana's imaginative powers went hand in hand with a meticulous perfectionism, and it approached her sensibility thematically. It looked at her from the point of view of memory, exoticism, nature, artifice, opposition, and improbable affinities, and celebrated her as a gifted observer, an “entomologist of style,” as someone who understood the 1960s but who nevertheless “gravitated repeatedly to forms and styles saved from entropy or dervish by discipline.”

More recently Diana's exhibitions, and the controversies that came to surround them, have been reevaluated. As John Ross of the Metropolitan Museum of Art remarked when she died, “Mrs. Vreeland was a genius for understanding . . . that society expressed itself visually, whether it was through fashion, whether it was through photography, whether it was through the way that people lived.” By introducing the idea that society expressed itself visually in a way that cut across dichotomies like young/old, working-class/aristocrat, feminist/nonfeminist, and by placing this insight at the heart of costume display, Diana mounted a series of exhibitions that were undoubtedly radical. They were driven by her instincts, by her inner eye, and by what she knew; but she firmly believed that costume exhibitions were not primarily about historical facts or technique, or even
au fond
about the clothes themselves. Her exhibitions always attempted to reflect the woman, the man, the style of life, the dreams behind the clothes. Even though Diana herself might have been uneasy about it, the exhibitions thus staked a claim for fashion as art: the art of the dressed body. “Whatever their shortcomings, these exhibitions made a claim for fashion as an art, as a serious aesthetic movement worthy of display in the museum, and for contemporary as well as historical dress as worthy of critical attention,” writes the fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson.

The exhibitions coincided with, and made a contribution to, the emergence in the early 1980s of the idea that the dressed body was a cultural phenomenon in its own right, to be studied by academics and argued over by cultural theorists, a result that would have astonished—and quite possibly appalled—Diana. The work of this new generation of fashion historians and fashion theorists allows us to see Diana in a different way: as a fascinating exemplar of a small group of women who wielded great power in the fashion industry as designers, photographers, journalists, and businesswomen from before the First World War onward. They were breadwinners, wives, and mothers, too, but they derived their social and economic power from a prefeminist view of female identity. In the early 1970s feminists understandably objected to a view of female empowerment that focused too much on the body itself, pointing out the difficulties and anxieties attendant on a woman's body becoming her only site of control; and there has been strident and justified criticism of the industry since then for setting impossible and even unhealthy standards of female beauty, for the con tricks of the beauty industry, and for appalling working practices. At the same time feminist academics have looked with fresh eyes at an industry that gave many women long professional careers, and swept many of them into powerful positions as the industry became globalized. The language of fashion has been part of this reevaluation, and here Diana certainly deserves at least her own footnote; for during her tenure at
Bazaar
and
Vogue,
the language of the magazines was often as arresting as any photograph—and had a lasting influence. Contemporary theorists are also reexamining the idea that inspired Diana and so many of her contemporaries: of beauty and allure as empowering in themselves. They point out that it is an extremely powerful idea; that it is rooted in sexual attraction; that it has never gone away; and that it continues to jostle for space with more contemporary views of female identity. Moreover, it often jostles along with competing ideas of female identity in the same woman.