Empress of Fashion (3 page)

At the same time there were rumors that the true reason for Emily's sudden departure from New York was a serious rift with her mother. It was whispered that the upset was about potential husbands but in this instance the gentleman in question was not Emily's but Mrs. Hoffman's. In 1900 Mary Hoffman finally ran out of patience with Emily's obstinate behavior and announced to her stunned family that she was planning to marry again herself. It was said that the news came as a great shock to Emily and her brother, Ellis, neither of whom could stand their stepfather-to-be, Charles Gouverneur Weir, the implication being that the man had his eye on Mrs. Hoffman's considerable private income and luxurious style of life. Looking back on what happened a few months later, the gossip sheet
Town Topics
opined: “Miss Hoffman did not approve of her mother's marriage to Mr. Charles Gouverneur Weir, and she went abroad consulting her own wishes solely. On the evening before she sailed she told an intimate that she wanted never to come back.”

W
hatever the true reason for her departure from America, Emily arrived in Nice aboard the
Varuna
in March 1901 and made her way to Paris with Higgins and his other guests. But at that point the idea of an engagement between Emily and Eugene Higgins faded away. Emily may never have had the slightest intention of marrying Higgins. It is also possible that even if she entertained the idea at first, a long cruise with him on the
Varuna
changed her mind. At close range, said
Town Topics
, Higgins was such an intolerable fusspot that he robbed life aboard his yacht of much of its charm. However, the end of the much-vaunted romance meant that in the spring of 1901, the dazzling Miss Emily Hoffman found herself in Paris in an unexpected position. She was essentially on her own, back on the marriage market in her midtwenties in a world where a woman was thought to be “on the shelf” at twenty-five. She seems to have had no wish to return home to live with a new stepfather whom she found uncongenial. Whether she liked it or not, Emily was under pressure to find a husband. She did not return to New York or Newport during the summer of 1901 but stayed on in Europe.

In September 1901, just six months after the
Varuna
docked in Nice, it filtered through to the society press in New York that the beautiful Miss Emily Hoffman was to marry a dashing Englishman, whom no one knew anything about, called Frederick Young Dalziel. Diana was certain that high-voltage physical attraction played its part. Frederick Dalziel was “Oxford educated,” handsome, kindly, and adoring. He not only solved Emily's marriage problem but held out the possibility of an extended stay in Belle Epoque Paris. Subtle class differences that might have been important in a different city mattered less in its expatriate community. Even if Emily's mother, Mary Weir, was appalled by her daughter's engagement, she was unable to act, grounded in New York by her own recent marriage. It may also be that Frederick Young Dalziel's lack of a grand pedigree was part of his charm as far as Emily was concerned, allowing her to checkmate her mother in a tussle about wedlock.

They married in London, in the presence of Emily's brother and his wife rather than her mother, who appears to have been absent. Although the Dalziel family was in evidence, and Frederick's father signed the marriage certificate, there was no question of a ceremony anywhere near Haringey. Frederick Dalziel rented a room in Mayfair, and the wedding took place by special license on September 28, 1901, in one of London's richest areas, and at one of its smartest and most fashionable churches, Saint Peter's Eaton Square. After a honeymoon in the South of France, the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Dalziel set up home in Paris at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The following year, in 1902, Emily and her new husband went to New York on a visit that lasted well into the autumn.

They stayed with Emily's grandfather John Washington Ellis at Stone Acre during the Newport season and appear to have been considering a move from Paris to New York even then. Up to the time of the Boer War (1899–1902), Frederick Dalziel earned a good living in Paris (“Mr. Dalziel has plenty of money,” pronounced one gossip columnist). But the war in South Africa dragged on unexpectedly, which could have made life difficult for a man charged with attracting investment to the Transvaal's gold mines. The style of life on display that summer in New York and Newport was attractive and amusing; many of the Dalziels' friends already had houses on both sides of the Atlantic; and although the young couple might have preferred not to articulate it thus, there were arguments in favor of moving closer to Emily's powerful family, who could open doors in New York in a way that was impossible elsewhere. If marrying a socially undistinguished Briton in 1901 offered Emily a way of hitting back at her mother and a route out of a predicament, marrying the beautiful, well-bred Emily Key Hoffman marked an extraordinary change of fortune for Frederick Young Dalziel—a straight pass to the heart of one of the world's most exclusive elites, the New York “Four Hundred.”

However, the newlyweds seem to have been in no great hurry to make the move from France. When Diana called her parents “racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians who were part of the whole transition between the Edwardian era and the modern world,” she lit on a poetic truth. The Dalziels—and particularly Emily—were indeed Parisians in the sense that Paris was their spiritual home. It was a feeling that affected many rich Americans so profoundly from the late nineteenth century onward that to quote one of their number, it was possible to feel “homesick on both continents.” Provided one averted one's gaze from its dark underbelly, Paris at the turn of the century was a difficult place to leave—the Paris of Maxim's and the Opéra Garnier; of the couture of Worth, Doucet, and Paquin; of grand dukes and demimondaines; and of children in sailor suits sailing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Shortly after Emily and Frederick Dalziel returned to Paris from the United States in late 1902, Emily became pregnant with her first baby. It is possible that this became a further excuse for lingering on. Diana's was a breech birth, but in spite of the risks she was born at home at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The name she was given was fashionable at the time. It recalled the goddess of hunting, an activity close to the heart of both her parents, though Diana preferred to believe she was named after Diane de Poitiers, the hunting beauty who was mistress to Henri II of France. If there had been a rift between Emily and her mother, it had now healed enough for Mary Weir to come to Paris to be on hand. Frederick Dalziel noted proudly in Diana's childhood album that her first visitor was one of his most aristocratic friends: Douglas Walter Campbell, heir to the 10th duke of Argyll, who brought a gift of a silver cup on behalf of his four-month-old son Ian, eventually the 11th duke. On October 25 Diana was christened at home by the vicar of Saint Luke's Chapel in the Quartier Latin. Her godmothers were her grandmother and a relation of Emily's, Anna Key Thompson. Her godfather was her uncle Edelsten, but since he was unable to be present one of New York's aristocrats, Henry Clews, Jr., stood in for him.

The Dalziels spent some time in San Remo that winter with their baby daughter. When they returned to Paris in March 1904, they stayed with friends for a few weeks before they finally gave up living permanently in Europe. On March 31, 1904, Frederick Dalziel's father and Edelsten went ahead to Boulogne so that they would be there to see the party off. From then onward a gap opened up between Frederick Dalziel and his suburban background. (Diana paid at least one visit to her uncle Edelsten—in Pangbourne, England—many years later, but she never mentioned his existence to her own children.) In 1904 Frederick Dalziel, who could not have been included in
Burke's Peerage
or
Debrett's
in England, was listed in the American
Social Register
for the first time; and on April 2 of that year, seven-month-old Diana Dalziel sailed on the SS
Ryndam
with her mother and father to begin a New York childhood.

W
hen she talked about her upbringing later, Diana invariably maintained that her family left Paris for New York only in April 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In this oft-repeated version of her early years, she took daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne in the company of a nursemaid called Pink; she was taken to see the
Mona Lisa
at the Louvre ad nauseam and was one of the last visitors to see the painting before it was stolen in 1911; Nijinsky came to the house and sat around like a pet griffin (“he had nothing to say”); and the great demimondaines of Paris swished past her in the Bois, inspiring a lifelong love of footwear. “Their
shoes
were so beautiful! Children, naturally, are terribly aware of feet. They're closer to them.”

But Diana did not grow up in Paris. She grew up in New York. Frederick Dalziel became a Wall Street broker, running the foreign securities desk of Post & Flagg; and the press noted the reappearance of the “bewitching” Emily soon after the family arrived back in 1904. The Dalziels proceeded to occupy a number of houses before finally settling in an agreeable Upper East Side town house at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street in 1910; and Diana lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan until she married. In 1907, the Dalziels had a second child, a daughter named Alexandra, who was known in the family as Teenie, and whom Diana called “Sister.” Diana and Alexandra enjoyed an upper-class New York upbringing that was similar to Emily's: a world of governesses, walks in Central Park, skating clubs, dancing classes, and children's parties. A costume party at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street was attended by the offspring of grand families including the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Potters, and Goulds. There were summers in houses in the Hudson Valley, and holidays with their grandmother Mary Weir in Southampton and on her farm in Katonah, New York.

In common with other children from New York's plutocracy, the two little Dalziel girls with their beautiful mother appeared from time to time in studio photographs in the society pages of the better parts of the press. There are several photographs of Diana herself before her twelfth birthday, marking her as a child who, like her mother, lived at the heart of New York's social elite. She starred as the leading lady in a widely reported colonial pageant enacted by two hundred society children, a somewhat obnoxious event ostensibly organized by the Lafayette Fund to help wounded soldiers in France but mainly designed to let social interlopers know where they stood, since casting was by pedigree. (Diana headed the cast as Martha Washington because she was thought to be a collateral descendant of George through the Key connection.) Diana's insistence that she was brought up in Paris was also sharply contradicted by an album recording her New York childhood, assembled by her father as a wedding present, and confirmed by entries in
The Social Register
from 1904 onward.
The Social Register
suggests that the Dalziels may have held on to their Paris house at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne for two years after they moved to New York in 1904, but no longer. Alexandra would later say categorically that she and Diana grew up entirely in New York—but that it seemed to matter very much to Diana to believe otherwise. In public Alexandra loyally refused to discuss the whereabouts of their upbringing. “I'd better leave memories of childhood to Diana,” she said later. “Sisters remember things differently.”

O
ne point on which both sisters did agree was that behind the facade of their pleasant house on East Seventy-Seventh Street the atmosphere was often strained; and that the problems revolved entirely around the moods of their ever-more-volatile mother. The decision to move from Paris to New York in 1904 affected Frederick and Emily Dalziel quite differently. In an unusual version of the American dream, America gave Frederick Dalziel the freedom to live as the upper-class Englishman he wanted to be, though he talked up his wife's family connections while keeping quiet about his own. “My father,” Alexandra said, “was a tremendous snob about my mother's relations.” His income from Post & Flagg and Emily's trusts from the Ellis family combined to give them a life on the Upper East Side of which he could only have dreamed as a boy in Haringey. For its part, New York society took Frederick Dalziel at face value. By 1910 he was a member of the invitation-only Brook Club, said to be the most exclusive gentleman's club in the United States, let alone New York.

For Emily, however, the move back to New York from Paris came at some personal cost, returning her to the world of her mother and the claustrophobic, gossipy, even vicious social elite in which she had grown up. To make things worse, there was now a certain degree of slippage in Mrs. Frederick Dalziel's status and position. While she was growing up Emily was associated with the social power that came from money. By the time she returned from Paris in 1904, riches mattered even more, and many of her friends had either married into great means or inherited vast fortunes. (The Dalziels' friends included rich bohemians such as Diana's stand-in godfather, the sculptor Henry Clews, Jr., the painter Robert Winthrop Chanler, and the former actress Mrs. George Gould.) Emily, meanwhile, had married an impecunious Englishman. It was a loss of power with which she struggled. Emily felt poor compared to their wealthy friends. Living in a world where making any money herself was out of the question, she worried about it all the time. “He never had any money,” Diana later said. “Never made any money, never thought about money; it killed my mother, who was American, though she was very European. She saw things rather square, which most women do.”

Another reason for Emily's unhappiness was that she suffered as her youthful bloom began to fade, a loss that was all the more potent in the inward-looking world of New York's elite, where great importance was placed on appearance and display. She became increasingly neurotic about her power to attract, compensating with extravagant makeup that caused her daughter much embarrassment at school. “Whispers would go around: ‘Look, she's painted,' ” said Diana. “She was
very
made up for those days.” This anxiety manifested itself in a constant need to be the center of attention, and some very uninhibited flirting. “I remember this: my mother wouldn't have a chauffeur or a footman unless he was infatuated with her—he had to show enormous
dazzle
for her. Everyone had to or she wasn't interested.” This attitude would later extend to Diana's own boyfriends: “She had to be on stage, often making a show of herself.” Diana sensed that of the two of them, her mother was by far the more fragile character: “I think she was someone who was possessed by a great fear.”