Empress of Fashion (9 page)

B
ut if Diana was enjoying success for the first time in her life, it soon became obvious that Emily was much less happy. The place Emily chose to make this clear was
Harper's Baza
r, spelt with one ‘a' until 1929. This was one of two American magazines aimed at affluent women, though unlike its rival
Vogue
,
Bazar
covered more than fashion and was designed to appeal to an educated female elite. In February 1922, in the middle of Diana's debutante year, Emily published an article in
Bazar
bemoaning her return to New York in terms calibrated to undermine Diana. “She assures us that she would rather discharge a Winchester than a chef; that bringing up a leopard for a good bead is easier than bringing out a debutante daughter. As she has done both within the last twelve months, we assume that she knows,” concluded a snide editorial preamble. The gist of the article, titled “Ten Thousand Miles from Fifth Avenue,” was that the pleasures of so-called civilization in New York were inferior to “primitive” life in the African forest, where in spite of the dangers one was protected from all cares. On her return to the modernity of New York, Emily wrote, she was swamped by problems with servants and irritated by inane comments about Africa at society parties. The message was unmistakable: Emily would rather be in Africa, the amusements of New York society were trivial, and those who enjoyed them were foolish. By inference this included her debutante daughter.

Just over a year later
Vogue
published a major article about big-game hunting in the Rockies, in which Emily featured prominently. The effect, whether it was intentional or not, was to reposition the Carmencita of New York society as the beautiful and daring goddess of hunting, and to deflect attention from Diana as a social success and young woman of style. Before long, however, Emily's public rejection of the modernity of New York for the “authenticity” of the wild came back to haunt her, for she was far less secure about social acceptance than her article implied. After Diana made her debut, Emily put it to her that she should become a member of the exclusive Colony Club. There was a strong family connection: Mary Weir had been a founder member, Emily had belonged for many years, and Diana's debutante lunch party had taken place there in December 1921, so membership should have been more or less automatic. Diana was not much interested in what she saw as a middle-aged establishment, but Emily persuaded her that it was somewhere to have her hair done, that it might be useful to her in later life, and that she should at least agree to attend an interview. Emily then received a letter telling her that Diana had not been admitted. It transpired that she had been blackballed because she was “fast”—a fine example of a 1920s intergenerational clash. Diana was a “jazz baby,” a young woman who dressed well, wore makeup, smoked, and had boyfriends, and this had apparently been read as a sign of loose morals by the committee ladies.

To Diana's astonishment, Emily was exceedingly upset by this rebuff. It was one of the few times she ever saw her mother in tears. What Emily perhaps suspected was that the committee's rejection of Diana was aimed more at Emily herself, as punishment for her all too public comments in
Bazar
—and for being fast. Diana, on the other hand, was quite untroubled. At a party at the end of her first post-debutante year she met Thomas Reed Vreeland.

“I
believe in love at first sight because that's what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry. I simply
assumed
that—and I was right,” said Diana. They met at a Fourth of July party in Saratoga in 1923 and were formally engaged the following January. In falling in love with Reed Vreeland, Diana was following the pattern of her own parents' marriage, where the man married upward. The Vreeland family was not in the “Four Hundred” or
The Social Register
. By the time of their engagement, Reed's father, Herbert H. Vreeland, had been a distinguished and sometimes controversial president of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, but he had left school at fifteen and worked his way up from the bottom of the streetcar business, starting as a gravel shoveler. Unlike Diana's British father, however, Herbert Vreeland and his family regarded his humble beginnings with pride.

As always
, Town Topics
was on hand to ponder such matters. Diana was positioned as one of the elite, as the great-granddaughter of the late John Washington Ellis. Choosing to disregard both Herbert Vreeland's career and the fact that Reed was a graduate of Yale, a member of the prestigious Scroll and Key society, not to mention President of the university's famous Glee Club,
and
Popocatepetl (director) of its
a capella
group the Whiffenpoofs,
Town
Topics
hinted sadly that Diana was marrying beneath her: “I am sorry I cannot go on record, for unfortunately I have never met the young man who will lead Diana away from the altar,” sighed its anonymous correspondent. The fact that
The Social Register
was “strangely silent” on the matter of Diana's fiancé was a cause for concern, though the author took heart at the revelation that his family was resident at 135 Central Park West and had a country house in Brewster, New York. This seemed to suggest, said
Town Topics
, that young Vreeland was “financially O.K.”

Oddly,
Town Topics
did touch on an aspect of the relationship between Diana and Reed that would never really change. Almost from the beginning it was Diana who made the life into which Reed stepped, though this already had less to do with her family background than her stylish originality, which was attracting wider attention. Shortly before they met she had been invited by the owner of
Vogue
, Condé Nast, to one of his celebrated New York parties where he famously mixed up guests who intrigued him but who would never otherwise have stood in the same room. Being invited—without one's parents—to a party by Condé Nast was a very great honor. The evening more than lived up to its promise, for the guests included Josephine Baker in a white Vionnet dress cut on the bias with four points and not much more. “Everybody who was invited to a Condé Nast party stood for something,” said Diana. “I was so thrilled to be asked. There was no living with me for days.”

For her part, it is not surprising that Diana sensed she had found a soul mate in Reed the first time she saw him, for even as a child, Reed, like Diana, possessed an intense aesthetic sense allied to a fascination with presentation. (Years later his brothers recalled how they teased him about his youthful fondness for fashionable narrow neckties by coming down to supper with their shoelaces tied around their necks.) If Reed knew he was marrying a young woman with the power to open doors to entrancing, beautiful worlds, the most important thing for Diana was Reed's gorgeous appearance. “He was the most beautiful man I've ever seen. He was very quiet, very elegant. . . . I loved all that. I thought it was beautiful to just watch him . . . just be— B.E.” Being chosen by such an attractive man transformed Diana's sense of herself. Landing a husband within two years of her debut brought considerable cachet, but it was even better that her fiancé was older by four years with the visage and physique of a film star. Much as Diana had enjoyed the nascent flapper scene in New York in the early 1920s, she never lost sight of her main aim. Years later she described netting Reed as an “achievement,” and it was. Her engagement to him justified all the determined and secret work involved in making the very best of herself; and her belief in the power of dreaming and making real the imaginary proved to be reasonable. Her extraordinary success was noted by her contemporaries too. Years later one of them was still saying that she could not understand how the ugliest girl in society had captivated the most handsome man.

But Reed's attractive features introduced another dynamic into the relationship that never really changed. On the one hand, Diana finally relaxed about the way she looked. “I never felt comfortable about my looks until I married Reed Vreeland,” she said. On the other, his good looks introduced a new kind of inhibition—and anxiety—into Diana's life. “Isn't it curious that even after more than forty years of marriage, I was always
slightly
shy of him? I can remember him coming home in the evening—the way the door would close and the sound of his step. . . . If I was in the bath or in my bedroom making up, I can remember always pulling myself up, thinking, ‘I must be at my very best.' There was never a time when I didn't have that reaction—
ever
.”

The wedding date was set for March 1, 1924, at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, and preparations were put in hand. Then Emily's life erupted all over Diana's one more time. As Diana remembered it, she was out lunching with friends when the telephone rang and she was called to it. To her astonishment, the call was from a woman journalist who affected to admire Diana's style and claimed she did not wish to see her hurt. The journalist told Diana that her mother was about to be named in a divorce case and warned her of a blaze of publicity. She was right. The news that Lady Ross was suing Sir Charles for divorce and citing Emily Dalziel as co-respondent was carried on the front page of New York's leading newspapers on Thursday, February 27, 1924, two days before Diana's wedding on Saturday, March 1, vindicating the gossips who were unable to believe that over the years Emily had really exchanged hunting men for hunting animals, since she had clearly been doing both. As soon as the story broke both Emily and Frederick Dalziel stepped forward to deny the allegations strenuously. “Lady Ross has evolved a very interesting fiction in her mind—far from the scenes where she imagines it to have taken place,” said Emily. Frederick Dalziel scoffed at the charges and said it would make no difference to the wedding plans. Behind the scenes he was equally adamant, reacting with total denial. “ ‘All these stories about your mother,' my father said to me later, ‘are untrue. You must simply rise above them.' . . . Daddy was British in a very healthy way: he could get over things. ‘Worse things happen at sea.' That was his great expression. It summed up any unpleasantness.”

Diana's memory was that the scandal did have an impact on the wedding, and that before she went into Saint Thomas her father warned her that attendance would be sparse. “It wasn't sparse—it was practically empty.” But here, it would seem, her memory was playing tricks. Diana seems to have forgotten that a big wedding was never planned. The Dalziels were not rich, and only a small number of guests were invited to the tiny chantry of Saint Thomas and to the reception afterward at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street. It was also the custom to send out cards of invitation to one's wider acquaintance for the church service. The list that survives indicates that most of these were dispatched to people living miles from New York and were probably sent only as a courtesy. Those invited to both church and reception signed their names in a book; and while it is possible that a few people on the church-only list decided against going after the story broke, there were no mentions, even in the newspapers reporting the scandal, of an embarrassing boycott of Miss Dalziel's wedding. On the contrary, even
Town Topics,
which was watching closely, had to admit that it all went according to plan.

On the morning of the wedding itself, Diana went to see her unofficial godmother, Emily's friend Baby Belle Hunnewell, who was lying in bed drinking gin and “having a marvelous time.” Diana noticed that she had a little black bell embroidered on her nightgown. “Oh, everything I own has my baby bell on it,” said Mrs. Hunnewell. Escorted to the church by her father, Diana wore a dress that had “a very strict line and a very high neckline—very
moyen âge
. There was lace strapped round my head and face, and the train was all
diamanté
and encrusted with pearls.” Alexandra was her maid of honor, in apple green satin and tulle, and her bridesmaids were friends from Diana's debutante circle, wearing orchid satin and carrying bunches of sweet peas. The groom's ushers included Godfrey S. Rockefeller, a friend from Yale. “Everything about the wedding of Diana Dalziel and Thomas Reed Vreeland in St Thomas's last week measured up to the exacting standards of the younger set,” reported
Town Topics
. There was a generous supply of champagne and a good sendoff for the newlyweds. The nearest
Town Topics
came to a dig was its note that “although Mrs. Dalziel's face was shaded by a large black hat, she mingled with the guests very gayley [
sic
].”

Years earlier Diana had longed to grow up and get away from home. She had dreamed of men asking her to drive with them in cars. “In other words it means that I am popular,” she had written. “I have heard it said that dreams do not come true but I will make this one come
true
!” On her wedding day, she succeeded in making two dreams come true at once. On March 1, 1924, she managed her escape from a family engulfed in lies, scandal, and denial (“We're all exiles from something,” she would later remark). And she drove away with an astonishingly handsome husband, to start, finally, the European upbringing that had so far eluded her.

Chapter Three

Becoming Mrs. Vreeland

F
irst there was a short diversion to upstate New York. At the time of the Vreelands' wedding, Reed was assistant to the president of the National Commercial Bank and Trust Company. This meant that the newly married Vreelands were obliged to set up their first home near the bank's headquarters in Albany. Instead of being dismayed by this, Diana threw herself into Albany life, away from Emily and away from scandal, while she concentrated on being hopelessly in love. Life was delightfully provincial. Reed's fine tenor voice was soon in demand. He joined the local Mendelssohn Club, where his star turn was “The Bells of St. Mary's,” while Diana did very little except play house. She liked Albany's domestic Dutch style—“this environment of good food, good housekeeping, polished floors, polished brass”—but their house was small and there were servants to attend to it. “I loved our life there,” she said. “I was totally happy. I didn't care what any other place was like.” It was the beginning of a very long period of leisure: “I had nothing to do—but
nothing
. I never had an
idea
.”

Everyone whom they met socially in Albany was older, but Diana had a supporter in a local grandee, Louisa Van Rensselaer, who found her way of doing things amusing. “During this phase when I lived in Albany I'd walk around in a mackintosh and a
béret basque
with
very
extreme, very exaggerated makeup—I've always had a strong Kabuki streak.” The Vreelands lived in a mews house at the back of the Van Rensselaers' mansion on State Street. It had a red front door and blue hydrangeas in its window boxes. “Reed and I were like the little children down the garden path, and we'd be asked to dinner in their great house on the hill on State Street.” Far from having no ideas, however, Diana had been dreaming about the decoration of her own house for years. When the moment finally came, her design sense was so ahead of Albany taste that it piqued the attention of the local press. Under the heading “Labor Economy” the
Albany Evening News
reported that Mrs. T. R. Vreeland was following a fashion that had begun in New York and Boston. She had knocked down the wall between the living and dining rooms of her small house, making life easier with fewer servants. The furniture was arranged “artistically,” and the predominant color was yellow, offset by a black couch and a lion-skin rug stretched before the fireplace.

Diana soon had other matters to occupy her, since the Vreelands' first child, Thomas, known as Tim or Timmy, was a honeymoon baby. He was born on January 1, 1925, and she was enchanted by him, even if his baby book suggests an unusual degree of maternal focus on his clothes. “He still wears his little wooly [
sic
] nightgowns all the time and has not yet gotten all dressed up in his dressiest petticoats except to come home from the hospital.” After the first heady rush of enthusiasm, Diana gave up keeping the baby book—once again she showed very little appetite for a long-haul literary project. The incongruity of Emily as a grandmother and Diana living in Albany was noted with delight by
Town Topics
, which contemplated the possibility that this new state of affairs might finally calm Emily down: “Now that Diana, who married Reed Vreeland last winter, and, like a dutiful wife, went to live with him in Albany, is a mother, will Emily, the Diana of the Hoffman clan, continue to stalk wild animals in Africa?” Ignoring these mutterings about how unsophisticated she had become, Diana completed the migration to American housewife by taking U.S. citizenship in April 1925, an event trumpeted in the local newspaper as “Albany Society Matron Eligible to Citizenship.” The Albany matron was twenty-two; and she was only twenty-three when she gave birth to the Vreelands' second son, Frederick, known as Freck or Frecky, on June 24, 1927.

Freck's safe arrival in 1927, which coincided with a move back to New York City when Reed briefly joined the Fidelity Trust Company, turned out to be a bright moment in an otherwise bleak year. Once again it was Emily and the Ross divorce case that caused the misery. It was clear from the outset that the matter would be protracted. Sir Charles was an enthusiastic litigant and was determined to avoid paying a penny more in alimony to his embittered wife than was necessary. Conceding her charges in the Scottish courts also meant conceding that he was British and thus liable to British taxation. He fought a long-drawn-out double battle both against the charges and against being taxed in Britain, opining that his family home, Balnagown in Scotland, was part of America. Frederick Dalziel, meanwhile, fiercely denied any possibility that his wife was guilty of adultery and vigorously defended her against all slights, real and imaginary. In 1925 he even forced apologies from the
New York Herald
, the
New York Post
, and the
Boston Evening American
for printing a story that Emily had started a fad for walking barefoot on the golf course at White Sulphur Springs.

Thanks to Sir Charles Ross's appetite for time-wasting litigation, the Ross divorce case was heard at the Court of Session in Edinburgh only in June 1927, the year of Freck's birth. Sir Charles insisted on defending the charges, which meant that all Lady Ross's allegations finally came out in court, a most unwelcome development for the Dalziels, who were plagued by the gutter press. Since Lady Ross's case revolved entirely around whether Sir Charles and Emily had or had not indulged in “guilty passion” in the African jungle, it naturally attracted a great deal of attention. In the end Lady Ross was refused her divorce partly because the Dalziels compelled Alexandra and Kay Carroll to travel to Edinburgh and swear in the witness box that Emily was always at home in the afternoons and was therefore not available for love affairs. Alexandra knew very well that this was not true and later described the experience as deeply traumatic. Emily was cleared of adultery, but there were many beyond the courtroom who begged to differ, including Lady Ross.

Meanwhile, three years of scandal took a great toll on Emily's health and, by extension, her looks. She had returned unwell from East Africa in 1921, and illness was given as the reason she was unable to attend the Court of Session in person in 1927, though this seems to have been a recurrence of the “nerves” that had long plagued her, rather than a tropical illness. For all her public repudiation of New York society in
Harper's Bazar
, she was brought low by salacious allegations in the newspapers and cold-shouldering from people who should not have mattered. “None of her African experiences . . . affected her more than when Lady Patricia Ross filed suit for a divorce,” said society columnist Maury Paul when he looked back on the story some years later. The Dalziels' rich Bohemian friends simply went abroad when disgrace threatened, but Emily was unable to escape very far. After the scandal broke in 1924, she spent time alone on Nantucket, where the Dalziels had a house. In the end Emily proved too fragile to cope with the consequences of her bid for freedom in East Africa. Three months after her name was cleared in the Court of Session in Edinburgh in June 1927, she died of pneumonia on Nantucket at the age of fifty-one. But that was not the end of the story. Ignoring the impact of their behavior on her bereaved husband and daughters, the furious Rosses battled on. In 1928, a year after Emily's death, Lady Ross produced evidence more sensational than anything that had gone before, involving air beds on open decks and side trips into the heartlands of Africa with only porters for company. This time their lordships decided that regardless of the defense argument that the couple were simply hunting mad, “the madness was attributable to something more personal” and that Emily had indeed committed adultery. Frederick Dalziel continued to dispute this. The case was finally settled only in 1930, and the matter of Emily's “guilt” was never formally resolved.

Emily's death in 1927 shut a door on a most unhappy chapter in Diana's life. It would be many years before she talked much about her mother. Of her death she remarked: “She lived only for excitement. When she died . . . I think it was because she could find nothing to interest her.” After Emily died, Nanny Kay became Frederick Dalziel's housekeeper. He never married again and developed such a hatred of popular newspapers that housemaids were threatened with dismissal if they brought them into the house. Both his daughters escaped from New York and, finally, from their mother's overbearing perception of their respective natures. Alexandra left Bryn Mawr to complete her degree at Barnard so that she could be closer to her widowed father, and then married Alexander Kinloch, heir to Sir David Kinloch of Gilmerton in East Lothian, Scotland, in a small wedding in the chantry of Saint Thomas Church on September 11, 1929. She remained British, rejecting the label of “goddess” imposed on her by Emily, finding a way through life that centered on her family and houses in London and East Lothian and taking very little interest in high society, though it was certainly available to her. Diana traveled in a different direction. Eventually she was able to say of her mother: “She was quite young and beautiful and amusing and
mondaine
and splashy, all of which I'm glad I had in my background—
now
. But I've had to live a long time to come to that conclusion.” It is not clear that she grieved for Emily at all. Instead of grief (and in common with Proust, Freud, Joyce, and Max Weber), Diana had a different reaction to the death of a damaging parent. A short time after Emily died, her imaginative powers took flight.

D
iana often declared that her real education took place during the six and a half years she spent with Reed in Europe; and sometimes, when she spoke of her “European upbringing,” it was to this period that she referred. “All the things that happened to me there were the foundation of my whole adult life,” she said. The year after Emily died, Reed accepted the post of assistant manager of the Guaranty Trust in its London office. The Vreelands moved to London at the beginning of 1929 and left Europe again in the early summer of 1935. The impact on Diana of their stay was partly a matter of timing. In the late 1920s, in spite of the emergence of the Flapper, real elegance still began after marriage and childbirth. Diana was twenty-five when she arrived in London; she had captured a notably handsome husband; and she was ready to join the ranks of chic married women who were beyond the exigencies of pregnancy and tiny babies and had years of active life ahead of them. She also had some money of her own. In 1929 the Vreelands came to London armed with the proceeds of the sale of the Villa Diana in 1922, on top of Reed's salary from the Guaranty Trust. They were able to employ a nanny, a cook, and a butler and had at least one Bugatti. As they immersed themselves in London life, Reed's good looks and charm were a great asset, but the pace was set by Diana's hungry eye and a growing faith in the power of her dreams.

Diana was the first to acknowledge the extent to which her fantasy life in this period was nourished by fashion magazines. “I lived in that world, not only during my years in the magazine business but for years before, because I was always
of
that world—at least in my imagination,” she said. In the late 1920s magazines were the single most important means of circulating new style ideas. Diana had stared at their pages for hours when she was younger, and her one surviving scrapbook shows the extent to which
Harper's Bazaar
and
Vogue
continued to influence her in the 1920s and 1930s,
Vogue
above all. The scrapbook suggests that she was actually more interested in interiors and photographs of society women than fashion at this stage, and in one sense this was no accident. By 1929 Condé Nast was revolutionizing the way
Vogue
made money by transforming it from a New York society magazine to one that appealed to the indefinable yearning of young women like Diana, who wished both to express their individuality through fashion and live the magical life of fashionable people.

Condé Nast reflected this back in
Vogue
's pages through the images of Edward Steichen, Baron de Meyer, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Cecil Beaton. He then delivered readers like Diana to advertisers, as a “class” that advertisers could not otherwise reach. Nast and his first editor in chief Edna Chase played a successful double game, ostensibly producing
Vogue
as a house magazine for the world's most beautiful and privileged women, while knowing that its real success lay in its appeal to middle-class women with spending power, who lived at some distance from the life in its pages but nevertheless aspired to it. But Diana did not see it quite that way. As far as she was concerned Condé Nast was, quite simply, a visionary: “Condé Nast was a very, very extraordinary man, of
such
a standard . . . he had a dream. The fact that people don't still dream, I don't understand.”

Diana, of course, knew Condé Nast slightly already, and on arrival in England at the beginning of 1929, she determined to turn the fantasy world of
Vogue
into reality for the Vreelands. Her first step was to create a stylish backdrop for her family on a much larger canvas than before. The Vreelands moved into 17 Hanover Terrace, one of several rows of magnificent white stucco houses on the edge of Regent's Park designed by John Nash in the early nineteenth century. They took over the lease of 17 Hanover Terrace from the widow of the writer and critic Sir Edmund Gosse via a Mr. Leitner, neither of whom had given it any attention for years. In spite of its dilapidation the Vreelands were enchanted by its Georgian proportions, and its large elegant rooms that looked out over Regent's Park. To Diana's delight the house had a proper British larder and a small garden. (“Greenery, you know, is as much a part of England as a nose is part of a human face.”) Her upbringing had always been more European in tone than that of most of her New York contemporaries, but even she was horrified by the discrepancy between the quantity of water pouring down from London's skies and the lack of it inside the house. She immediately set about putting matters to rights, installing extra bathrooms and radiators for servants who informed her it was quite unnecessary.