Empress of Fashion (19 page)

One of her most remarkable shoots, at which Diana was present and played a central role, took place in Arizona in 1941. At certain moments in the shoot, Dahl-Wolfe exploited the graphic sculptural qualities of the cacti in the Arizona desert. On another day she took Frank Lloyd Wright's house in Scottsdale, Taliesin West, as a backdrop—a building that itself represented a uniquely American integration of indoors and outdoors. “Dahl-Wolfe's use of colour and light to create form and texture in a photograph could produce a unifying aesthetic that provided a visual and stylistic link between city and nature,” writes Rebecca Arnold. This happened at Taliesin West; and when the model Wanda Delafield fell ill, Diana stepped in herself to model “cigar-brown” Jay Thorpe slacks, a black fringed shawl, and goggle-shaped sunglasses with white rims, against the background of the house. She also stepped in as model during a shoot on a disused movie set of an old Western town, in a different kind of all-American blurring of appearance and reality.

Some of their best work together came from photographing the designs of Claire McCardell, who was a close friend of Dahl-Wolfe's. But in spite of her occasional excursions into emergency modeling, Diana was well aware that American designers projected their ideas onto an idealized version of the modern American woman—who did not look like Diana. Instead, the fashion historian Valerie Steele suggests, she was rather similar to Claire McCardell herself—youthful, long-limbed, and glowing with health—a new American body. During the war Diana became aware for the first time that the face and body of the model were just as important as the clothes in projecting the mood of the times. After Pearl Harbor, American designs in American landscapes were not enough. American fashion needed a new kind of all-American girl to propel it forward; and in 1942 Diana found just the person she was looking for.

I
n November 1942 a sixteen-year-old called Betty Bacall was trying to break through as an actress in New York when she met an Englishman, Timothy Brooke, who thought she would make a good photographic model. He introduced her to Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who was working with Diana at
Bazaar
and who took Bacall to meet her. Bacall thought Diana looked quite extraordinary, remembering that she was covered in bits of jewelry and scarves, was extremely thin, and was clad from head to toe in black. Her manner was very direct. Before Bacall knew what was happening Diana put her hand under her chin and turned her face left and right. When this terrifying inspection was over, Diana told Betty that she wanted Louise Dahl-Wolfe to see her. “I was scared to death. The efficiency and matter-of-factness of the whole magazine operation and particularly of Mrs. Vreeland were intimidating,” said Bacall. The next day Betty presented herself at the photographic studio, where Diana met her and Dahl-Wolfe took a few snaps. After this sitting Diana called back and asked her to come in and pose formally. “Mrs. Wolfe was there—and Mrs. Vreeland. She put a suit on me, told me which make-up to use—but very little. ‘Betty, I don't want to change your look.' (Whatever
that
was.) When all was done she put a scarf round my neck—knew just how to tie it, a little off-center—and I was ready for my first sitting for
Harper's Bazaar.
” Diana was there throughout the sitting, making constant adjustments to Bacall's hair and clothes.

Shortly afterward Diana asked Bacall to join a two-week shoot of summer clothes with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and her husband in St. Augustine, Florida. The shoot went without a hitch. “I remember going into Diana Vreeland's room one evening as she was sitting in her one-piece undergarment—not a girdle, it was all easy, like thin knitted cotton or wool. . . . We talked of how the work was going. I talked more of my ambitions, my dreams.” The problems started when the
Bazaar
team tried to get back to New York. By this time it was pouring with rain and the town was full of young servicemen desperate to get home for Christmas. The staff of a fashion magazine was not a transportation priority. But Diana had promised Betty's mother she would bring her home safely, and she was also thoroughly fed up. “We were staying in a ninth-rate hotel,” said Diana. “Every day it poured rain . . . but I mean it poured
buckets
. And every day I walked to the train station in the rain, trying to get us tickets to go home to New York. You couldn't
move
, you understand—it was
Wartime
. I've never been on a Pacific Island at war but I've been in St. Augustine and it was the most ghastly town.” In the end Diana lied her head off, telling everyone that Betty was her pregnant daughter, that she was liable to miscarry, and so had to return to New York urgently. “Talk of acting—what a character!” said Bacall. “She got the tickets. . . . That's why she flourished. Talent—her gift of creativity—is not enough—determination, perseverance, resolution, that's what makes the difference.” All went well until Betty insisted on going to hear the comedy performer Martha Raye entertaining the servicemen in the club car. Filled with trepidation that her lie would be discovered and they would all be put off the train, Diana went, too, finally persuading the “pregnant” one that she had to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning.

The first St. Augustine picture appeared in January 1943. In March, Betty Bacall appeared on the cover of
Bazaar
and Hollywood came calling. Alerted by his wife, the director Howard Hawks took note, Betty went for her first screen test and followed advice to change her first name to Lauren. Diana said later: “Betty's always been what used to be called a ‘good kid.' It's rather a period phrase but it's the way I always think of her. I didn't think about her—I loved her. She was my special friend. She's always kept her own thoughts and her own dreams. . . . She literally had nothing to offer but her
existence
. But I was so
interested
in her.” After the war, when Bacall was married to Humphrey Bogart, Diana went to see her in Hollywood. She approached unobserved as Bacall gave instructions to a gardener about laying out a flower garden beside a swimming pool: “This is the little girl from 22nd Street and
Second
Avenue
. She was taking dried flowers out of a little envelope and her eyes were filled with stars. I've never seen anyone so happy, so adorable, and so in love. It was a dream come true . . . these things are so touching. You see them so rarely, so
rarely
. . . but they stay with you always.”

It has been suggested that the Second World War was the greatest period in Diana's fashion career. “She was in her glory,” Babs Simpson said. “Dee-Ann was a
major
force then.” It was indisputably a time of great success. Under Snow's watchful but delighted editorial eye, Diana learned her way around Seventh Avenue, fought to raise standards, created fashion as well as reported it, and pushed back the boundaries of fashion photography with Louise Dahl-Wolfe. She learned about typography and layout from Brodovitch. She understood the power of the model for the first time and discovered Lauren Bacall; and she learned a vital lesson about the extent of fashion's power to transform itself in the face of social change.

Within the tight, small world of New York fashion, Diana's reputation spread; and in 1941 she was parodied again, although this time it was onstage rather than in the pages of the
The New Yorker
. Episodes from life at
Bazaar
in general and Diana's bons mots in particular were collected by one of its fiction editors, Beatrice Kaufman, who related them with glee to her husband, the writer and theater director George S. Kaufman, and his frequent collaborator Moss Hart. The upshot was that stories about
Bazaar
made their way into
Lady in the Dark
by Moss Hart, set to music by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

Lady in the Dark
went through many changes after it first opened on Broadway in 1941. Set in the offices of a fashion magazine called
Allure
, the earliest version opens with
Allure
's editor Liza Elliott (played by Gertrude Lawrence) suffering from panic attacks and finding it hard to make decisions. Against her better judgment she agrees to see a psychoanalyst who addresses her complex love life. He focuses on tension between Liza and Charley, the advertising manager who wants her job and accuses her of being “married to her desk” and “having magazines instead of babies.” Diana was the model for Alison Du Bois,
Allure
's eccentric fashion columnist. Ideas tumble out of Alison Du Bois. The Easter issue should lay an egg; a Bonwit-Teller dummy, male, should fall in love with a Saks dummy, female, and pursue their love affair in the store windows. “Saks is
so
conservative,” declares Alison. “I think they sometimes mix themselves up with St. Patrick's, they've been next door so long.” Intriguingly, there are moments when Liza Elliott's unhappiness is explained by a childhood exactly like Diana's. It transpires that Liza Elliott's beautiful mother was cruel to her about her ugliness. “I ran to the nursery and looked in the mirror. I felt ugly and ashamed,” says Liza to the psychoanalyst. Liza remarks that she found it impossible to grieve when her mother died. In fact it was liberating because the taunts about the gap between what she was and what she longed to be finally stopped.
Lady in the Dark
closes with Liza agreeing happily to share her job with Charley, an ending that is only marginally less irritating if allowances are made for male anxiety in 1941 about the dominance of women in New York fashion in wartime.

I
n 1942 an article called “No Place Like Home” appeared in the October issue of
Bazaar
. The Vreelands featured in it incognito as a united family enjoying simple pleasures at a difficult time for the country, a picture of family unity that was only a partial version of the truth. By September 1939, both Tim and Freck were boarders at Groton School in Massachusetts, returning home for occasional weekends and school holidays. Reed was hardly at home at all. Soon after the outbreak of war he finally parted company with the Guaranty Trust and took up a new job running part of the d'Erlanger financial empire in Montreal. In the summer of 1940, a new arrival joined the family to compensate, when Diana's niece Emi-Lu Kinloch, the twelve-year-old daughter of her sister, Alexandra, was evacuated from Britain. Diana later claimed that she “adopted” Emi-Lu and “brought her up” during the war years. But although Emi-Lu called Diana “Mom,” she spent the week with her grandfather and Kay Carroll during term time, following her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother to Brearley. On weekends and holidays, she was sent to stay with Aunt Diana. This arrangement had the effect of reigniting the old antipathy between Diana and Kay Carroll, who was wont to say “You're going to your
Aunt Diana
this weekend,” in tones of such loathing that it affected Emi-Lu's feelings about her aunt.

Diana's reaction to Emi-Lu's arrival suggests that the traumas of her childhood had by no means played themselves out, even though she was now in her thirties. There is no doubt that Diana minded very much how her substitute daughter looked. She was having lunch with Dorothy Shaver when Reed met Emi-Lu from the boat and telephoned to say she had arrived. By her own account Diana's first question to Reed was “Is she good looking?” Reed was able to reassure Diana that Emi-Lu was very good looking. “Well, she wasn't good looking, she was
divine
looking,” said Diana later. “She was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. I'd be so
proud
when I'd walk down the street with her.”

With Emi-Lu cared for by Frederick Dalziel and Kay Carroll during the week, Diana continued working at
Bazaar
throughout the war. This could potentially have been the source of some tension with her father, for Frederick Dalziel disapproved of Diana's job, not because he disliked the idea of women working but because he loathed everything to do with Hearst, whose newspapers had caused the Dalziel family so much misery during the Ross scandal. But, as ever, Frederick Dalziel dealt with unhappiness by refusing to mention it. “After I went to work, he never asked me how I was getting along, or how much money I was making, or whether they treated me well . . . the subject was never referred to—
ever
—because of his disapproval,” said Diana. Frederick Dalziel was seventy-four when war broke out. He lived quietly on a small income until 1960 and died aged ninety-two, so it was a long silence. In the meantime he continued to do a little work at Post & Flagg and changed lady friends approximately every six months. (Occasionally Emi-Lu would surprise him and his latest inamorata canoodling on the sofa.)

Regardless of Frederick Dalziel's feelings on the subject, it was essential that Diana keep her job at
Bazaar
throughout the war because the Vreelands were very short of money. In 1941 Reed was obliged to write to the headmaster of Groton requesting scholarships for both his sons, citing the difficulties of getting cash out of Canada, and extra freight from Britain in the form of Emi-Lu. Reed and Diana had also taken on an additional financial commitment. They bought Turk Hill, in Brewster, New York, in June 1940, keeping a visitor's book from June 1941. An enchanting house, where every internal door was painted a different color, it formed the background to several
Bazaar
shoots and led to one last “Why Don't You?” on the joys of country living before the column finally stopped for good. “Everything is this color around here,” scrawled one of the Hearsts in red crayon in the visitors' book. Diana was given a helping hand in its decoration by Baroness Catherine d'Erlanger, who had left England at the outbreak of war and created for her a fantastic fireplace with shells. “While it looked nothing more than a remodeled farm on the outside, the interior was painted magenta and the walls, two ceilings high, were lined with 10,000 books,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin. “Buckets stowed with hanks of beautifully colored wools were composed as carefully as though they were flower arrangements and, as with flower arrangements, guests were not supposed to touch them.”