Empress of Fashion (13 page)

It was the other side of her positive attitude, her denial of anything negative, that made the boys' lives particularly difficult. Diana admired Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge's approach to child rearing: “Her little girls are enchanted by her. Around them everything moves, everything is gay. They live in a continual fairy-tale, conceived by Baba, not Grimm,” said
Harper's Bazaar.
“I had made a solemn vow to myself never to allow my children to know that anything in the world was frightening, impure or impossible,” said Diana. But this approach to life reached a pitch of absurdity in the terrifyingly gruesome Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. “That was a bit of all right for them,” she opined. “Nothing wrong for them to see. Everybody had to
go
! All I can say is that my sons had a very healthy upbringing.” This view was not shared by her sons. Once they went to school, humanity's darker side came as the most terrible shock. “I feel now that I was deprived of fifty percent of human existence,” said Freck much later.

I
n November 1933 Diana enjoyed a triumph: She became a “
Dame de
Vogue” in her own right. The November 1 issue of American
Vogue
included a drawing by Cecil Beaton of Diana lounging on a garden seat. It was intended, said
Vogue
, to comfort the reader and put her mind at rest. Mrs. Reed Vreeland was one of “the European highlights of chic” but here she was, sitting in a garden. It all went to prove “that even these glamorous women—these focal points—of Parisian fashion—have their off moments. . . . They loaf, they read, they sleep—even as you and I.” Such reassurance was probably necessary, given Johnnie McMullin's description of Diana at Mainbocher's atelier a few pages later:

Mrs. Reed Vreeland . . . is considered one of the most chic of the international set living in Europe. In London, where she has a house in Regent's Park, she is much admired for her taste in dress, which, because of her striking, exotic personality, is extremely conservative. She is tall and thin, with a profile of a wife of the Pharoahs, a beautiful figure, and jet black hair, which she arranges like a cap on her head, curling at the nape of the neck. She knows what she wants at a glance—a thing that not all women are supposed to know.

As McMullin looked on, Diana chose a black wool Mainbocher coat as the basis of her winter wardrobe. “Under the coat she will wear different crepe de Chine dresses, mostly in colors, together with several different hats, all black.” Diana then turned her attention to evening dresses. “How delighted I am,” she said, “to see black satin again.” She favored an evening dress with two ostrich plumes placed like flowers on its bodice. “It is a new idea,” she remarked. But then her eye lit on a dark blue double-faced satin dress with a train over an underskirt of pleated blue tulle, with blue curled osprey feathers as a corsage decoration. “It will be my grand party dress, because it makes one think of footmen on the stairs,” said Diana, who was sketched wearing Mainbocher's creations in the same issue.

I
n spite of her sterling efforts, however, Diana's Arcadia was not to last. Once again beauty proved to be treacherous. She was, she discovered, not the only woman who considered Reed handsome: English society women could be breathtakingly predatory. “I made great friends among the English during the time I lived there but, then, I wasn't there to get their men,” she told Christopher Hemphill. “Those English women look after English men like nobody's baby has ever been looked after. On the other hand, they'll go after anyone's husband themselves. Brother, what I saw
left
and
right
! I certainly had a more attractive husband than most women have. He wasn't that flirtatious, but they were, and, naturally, it was flattering to me . . . up to a point.” If an instinct for denial was one price paid by Diana as she fought back from her childhood, Reed's role in giving her self-esteem was another. “Anyone who has been emotionally wounded is prepared to pay a very high price to preserve the stability of a bond that protects him,” writes Cyrulnik. Reed was kind as well as handsome and the extent to which he resisted as desperate Englishwomen flung themselves at him is not clear. Diana rarely spoke of this, coming closest with: “At times they liked him a bit too much for comfort but we can . . . forget it.”

Money was another disagreeable problem. Diana later maintained that the Vreelands were able to live well but inexpensively in London in the early 1930s, thanks to the relative strength of the dollar against the pound. At some point in 1933, however, their finances suffered a reverse. America was still in the grip of the Great Depression, and although recovery began slowly during 1933, stocks remained volatile and Reed appears to have made some poor investments. Moreover, Reed and Diana, like her parents before them, were mixing in very rich circles, on a relatively modest income, and had spent a great deal of money on 17 Hanover Terrace, believing that they would be there for many years. A favorable rate from the couturiers as
mannequin du monde
—like the generosity of richer friends—went only so far, and it would have been very difficult for them to live as they did in London without eating into their capital.

From the time she was fourteen and wrote to the “pin-money club” of the
Woman's Home Companion,
Diana responded to financial problems by taking small practical steps to relieve the pressure. In London in 1933 she reacted by following the example of other wellborn women, especially Americans, by opening a small exclusive shop for a rich clientele. Diana's shop sold lingerie, a small selection of scarves, and some fine household linens and was based in a mews near Berkeley Square. Lesley Benson, who had recently divorced Condé Nast and married Rex Benson, helped her to set the business up, but Diana supervised all the work thereafter, causing some amusement among her friends. “I should love to see you among your delicate lines of lingerie,” wrote William Acton from Florence. Running a shop made new, interesting demands on Diana. It drew on her sense of style, her love of luxury, and her perfectionism. The search for designs and fabrics took her frequently to Paris, while most of the sewing was done in a convent by the Sisters of Marie Auxiliatrice in Bow Road, in London's East End, and the young women in their care. “I was never
not
on my way to see the mother superior for the afternoon. ‘I want it rolled!' I'd say. ‘I don't want it
hemmed,
I want it r-r-r-
rolled
.' ”

Commissioning lingerie called for precision. Discounts had to be negotiated with suppliers; there were irritated exchanges about canceled orders with the fabric house Simonnot-Godard in Paris; and even the nuns were businesslike. While Diana may have been meticulous when commissioning lingerie, sound arithmetic was not her strong point, unlike her friend Mona Williams, who scrutinized every penny in the way of the very rich. Records for the business at the end of 1933 show that Diana's customers were largely drawn from her friends—Mona Williams bought chemises and sheets, while Edwina d'Erlanger, Syrie Maugham, Kitty Brownlow, Kitty Miller, and Lesley Benson all placed orders, as did Lady Portarlington and Mrs. Fred Astaire. The nightgowns were so beautiful that Edwina d'Erlanger's sister Mary bought one and wore it as a ball gown. “I was very thin. I was about twenty-three and I saw the most beautiful nightgown which I bought and wore backwards because it was low in the front and in [the] back. It was pink, so I wore it and I had great fun at the ball.” And according to Diana, it was the nightgowns that brought a new acquaintance into the shop, one Mrs. Ernest Simpson.

Diana only knew Wallis Warfield Simpson slightly, though she had been to lunch at her flat at Bryanston Court, where the food was memorably delicious thanks to Wallis's tutor, Elsie Mendl. Wallis Simpson ordered three luxurious nightgowns and was exact about the deadline—three weeks. Diana remembered that she had already left Ernest Simpson, that she was feeling poor, and thought she splurged on the nightdresses in anticipation of her first weekend alone with the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, a timetable that has led some to suppose the story must be apocryphal because the dates do not tally. Like many of Diana's stories, however, this one is probably true in essence even if some facts require fine-tuning. It has recently been suggested that the relationship between Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales warmed up much earlier than either of them later suggested, while Wallis was still living with Ernest Simpson, and that their close circle was well aware of it. Mrs. Simpson's union with the Prince of Wales was probably not consummated until later in the year, but she had good reason to think she might need glamorous nightdresses in the spring of 1934, while Diana was running her lingerie shop.

T
hen there came a most unexpected blow. “When Reed and I got to Regent's Park, it was going to be our life. We thought we'd live there for the rest of our lives. You always think you're going to live somewhere forever. It's the only way to live—it's forever!” But it turned out that their life in London was not going to be forever. In what Diana later described as the most ghastly single moment in her life, Reed came home from work one evening and delivered a bombshell: his role had changed, and unless he wished to lose his job with the Guaranty Trust, they were returning to live in the United States. “It was a fait accompli. There was nothing to discuss. There was nothing to do but get dressed and go to dinner.” For once Diana's brave face deserted her. The Vreelands had been invited to the Savoy by Mona Williams, and Diana was wearing a beautifully pressed pink Vionnet dress with a long banner of pink crepe de chine. By the time they arrived at the Savoy, she looked a mess. “You've never seen anyone in such a condition. I was a disgrace. I can still remember Mona's face when she saw me walking in, looking as if I'd fallen out of bed in this thing. All I'd done was drive from Regent's Park to the Savoy but I'd had what you'd call a
total
chemical change. It was a shock. I was absolutely, literally, totally
crushed
.”

Friends commiserated on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesley Benson wrote to say that Diana had been wonderful about the lingerie business, that she had a real genius for it, and that it was a tragedy that she was leaving. “I am pleased about Reed staying with the Guaranty, and I know you must be, that's the bright spot.” Another friend wrote: “It is really too dreadful—I know so well how you feel—but you are such a marvelous person I know you will be able to cope with the situation and as long as you have Reid [
sic
] and the children it doesn't matter much where you are.” Diana slowly pulled herself together. She wound down the lingerie business. The Vreelands gave notice to Freck's prep school, taking him out at the end of the spring term in 1934, and they terminated the lease on 17 Hanover Terrace so that it came to an end in June 1934. Then there was a reprieve. Reed, who was suffering from a mysterious debilitation that he seemed unable to shake off, was sent to Switzerland to recover. The Vreelands stayed for several months in the opulent Hotel Beau-Rivage at the lakeside resort of Ouchy near Lausanne, a stay that stretched into the early months of 1935. The change of scene did Reed good. By September 1934 a friend, Ben Kittredge, was writing: “It is wonderful to have seen Reed so much better and to know that he is getting well so rapidly and thoroughly, that at last you have found both the cause and the cure,” and by the end of the year Elsie Mendl remarked: “I am so glad about Reed and how much better he is.”

Diana was fascinated by Lausanne in general and the Hotel Beau-Rivage in particular. “Switzerland before World War II was much more mysterious than it is today. It was full of Greeks and money.” The Aga Khan (who would also appear in
Allure
) used to bring his girlfriends to the hotel: “always with a different girl but always with the most beautiful girl you'd ever seen in your life. . . . He was a dreamboat, he'd be announced: His Highness, the Aga Khan!—and a
personage
really entered the room!” A banker from Lyon kept his second family in the hotel, unknown to his first, who lived elsewhere. Even when he was absent his mistress would dress for dinner, covered in jewels. Tim Vreeland was already at prep school in Switzerland by the time his parents came to Lausanne. Reed read Hans Christian Andersen stories to his sons in a large sitting room in front of a fire, and later he and Diana would go downstairs for dinner.

I was so happy in Ouchy, on the water. My bed faced Mont Blanc. . . . Every day was totally and completely different. I can remember thinking how much like my own temperament it was—how much like everyone's temperament. The light on Mont Blanc was a revelation of what we all consist of. I mean, the shadows and the colors and the ups and downs and the wonderment . . . it was like our growing up in the world.

In May 1935 Diana went ahead to set up a home in New York, with the boys following a month later in time for the long summer vacation. “It's strange, isn't it—the things that happen in life over which one has absolutely no control? I thought my life was over. I couldn't imagine anything other than the totally European life we led.” But as it turned out, a different kind of life was just about to begin, thanks to a slight, clear-eyed, and unusually determined woman called Carmel Snow, editor in chief of
Harper's Bazaar
.

O
n a summer evening in New York in 1936, in a nightclub on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, Reed and Diana Vreeland rose from their table and began to dance. As they eased into a slow foxtrot to the sound of Victor Lopez and his orchestra, heads turned and whispers fluttered round the room. Mrs. Snow's eye was drawn to Mrs. Vreeland, who was wearing a white lace Chanel dress with a bolero, and roses in her blue-black hair (the better dancer of the pair, she moved with sinuous grace). Carmel Snow was not acquainted with the Vreelands, but she soon found out who they were. She was famous for her intuition about talent, and the next day she telephoned and offered Diana a job. “But Mrs. Snow,” Diana replied, “I've never been in an office in my life. I'm never dressed until lunch.” This reaction was tactically correct. Carmel Snow liked her lady fashion editors well connected as well as stylish and talented. “But you seem to know a lot about clothes,” Snow replied. “Why don't you just try it and see how it works?” In spite of her apparent hesitation, Diana had no choice but to accept. In reestablishing her family in New York, she was going through money like “a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you're an alcoholic.”