Empress of Fashion (30 page)

The spread was intersected with an article titled “The Exotic and the Erotic” by Lesley Blanch herself, in which she explored the idea that “in the East, they strive to awaken the senses, while we seek to extinguish them”; and she presented a world where “it follows that both the home and the woman acquire a special interdependence, complementing each other, creating together this enclosed, intimate world of beauty and deliberate withdrawal.” This was a theme close to Diana's heart, and
Vogue
picked up the idea and ran with it. “You will notice,” said Diana in a memo, “that this entire issue is dedicated to our feeling that at this time, this is 1965, the world of the seraglio is coming into the ordinary world of everyday's [
sic
] comfortable, decorative living.” The Scheherazaderie feature looked backward as well as eastward to the oriental fantasies of the Ballets Russes and recast them for 1960s America. “It's all here, deliciously translated in the modern idiom of at-home clothes, clothes for
la vie privée
, immediate, contemporary, with all the indolent grace of Turquerie to charm the sheik at home.”

In 1964 Freck was posted to Rabat, Morocco, and after the Paris collections Diana flew to see him, Betty, and their two sons, Nicholas and Alexander. She was beguiled by Morocco and by Moroccan caftans. She featured the Moroccan designer Tamy Tazi and her caftans as part of the Scheherazaderie issue in April 1965. A year later she introduced caftans as a trend, persuading those she identified as international “Beautiful People” to wear them. The caftan appeared in a five-page feature in July 1966, photographed by Cecil Beaton, Henry Clarke, Horst, and Vittoriano Rastelli. The Beautiful People wearing them included Lady Antonia Fraser, Antonella Agnelli, Susan Mary Alsop, Mrs. Leo d'Erlanger, Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Mrs. Ahmet Ertegun, and Lesley Blanch.
Vogue
sailed breezily past the fact that some of the garments it was appropriating for Western fashion were originally made for men. “Women relaxing into caftans; into caftan-like jibbas, yeleks, djellabas [
sic
] . . . nothing is more completely feminine.” In the September 1, 1966 issue there were two further interpretations, “Turquerie at Night” and “New Seraglio Lures at Home.” The September 15, 1966 issue featured a Galanos design of a jewel-sleeved djellaba, another instance of Diana's influence on Seventh Avenue in this period. The caftan epitomized an exotic luxuriousness, and it also signaled a break from structured fabrics, and a much greater fluidity for clothes. As Diana put it: “All float, nothing static—everything moves well, sits well. . . . This is the most feminine hour for a woman's figure—and psyche.”

V
ogue was theater, said Diana. Exaltation must preside. “She was the first editor to say to me: ‘You know, this is entertainment,' ” said Liberman later. “ ‘In many ways, she acted as a brilliant theatrical producer.” Diana was in many ways a creative impresario in the manner of Diaghilev. “You have no idea of the
freedom
I had,” she said. “The money! The trips! . . . But
I
never went on any of these trips. Two issues a month is a
hell
of work. . . . I was a terror then—just a
terror
. It wasn't what they'd find, it was what they
had
to find.” Diana attributed this philosophy to seeing the vaudeville performer Joe Frisco on a train. He asked the waiter for ice cream and apple sauce at breakfast time. When the waiter said, “But we don't have it,” Frisco said, “Okay,
fake it
!” “That made a tremendous impression on me,” said Diana.

But faking it did not always go according to plan. In 1965 Norman Parkinson was working for
Vogue
in New York when he was summoned to Diana's office. He had taken some photographs in Tahiti for
Queen
a few years earlier, and Diana recalled him saying that a white horse grazed in every field. She told him that she was sending him back to Tahiti with two hundred pounds of gold and silver Dynel. He was to find a veterinary surgeon on arrival and enlist his help in selecting the finest Arab stallion on Tahiti. The stallion was to be caparisoned in the finest manner, his mane and tail plaited to the ground with the gold and silver Dynel. “ ‘Use all the Dynel you want, you don't have to bring it back.' ‘I understand, Mrs. Vreeland.' ‘Secondly, we are sending you to Tahiti with a plastic city.' ‘A plastic city?' ‘Yes, you hear me aright. You will enter upon people's lands, you will dig holes, you will run concrete and you will erect this fantastic city of shining screens and tones against the solid dragons' teeth of the mountain ranges.' ‘Yes, Mrs. Vreeland, I understand perfectly, but what about the law of trespass?' ‘Don't bother me with incidentals,' said Diana. ‘Choose the two girls you wish to take. You are leaving on Wednesday week.' ”

The plastic city turned out to be too big for the hold of a Boeing 707, but Diana remained extremely enthused about the Arab stallion. She sent one of New York's great hairdressers, Kenneth Battelle, on the shoot. “For inspiration Mrs. Vreeland showed me an 18th century French picture of a horse all festooned and garlanded, with a long, curly white mane and a tail plaited with enormous bows. I packed loads of white and off-white Dupont hair,” said Kenneth. He had specific responsibility for the horse's tail, having been told by Diana that its magnificence might well have to be faked. “I was in the middle of my Dynel period then,” said Diana. “We had the Dynel plaited with bows and bows and
bows
—these fat, taffeta bows, but
rows
of them . . . no Infantas had ever had it so good! I was
mad
about what we'd done for our glorious tail.”

But there was a hitch. Parkinson duly found a veterinary surgeon on arrival, only to be told that the French had eaten every horse on Tahiti some years earlier. Just when all seemed lost, the vet remembered that a plantation owner up the hill had a young, nervous stallion that had somehow escaped the casserole. The owner was rather intrigued by the idea of his animal being made over for
Vogue
and stood patiently for hours holding its head while the crew stitched 150 pounds of Dynel onto its flimsy harness. In Parkinson's version of what happened next, the horse jumped in the air, with a leap “they would have recognised as something special at Cape Canaveral,” as soon as the owner handed the bridle to the model, destroying hours of work. In Diana's version of Kenneth's story, Kenneth made the mistake of brandishing the Dynel tail as he approached the stallion's rear end. “Now, apparently, if you go near a certain part of the anatomy of a stallion . . . well, he took off! He went
all the way
. He was gone for five days.” In Kenneth's version of his own story, the stallion “hadn't seen a lady in eight years: he was as horny as hell. As I was dolling him up with fake hair, taffeta bows and real flowers, he saw a donkey around the bend. He took off, flying toward her. All my decorations flew off, too, down the side of a mountain, where no doubt they remain today.” In the end Parkinson managed to photograph a model beside a little white pony with its head and mane in two stripey bows, just to show Diana that they had all tried. He noticed that she never held a grudge against anyone who attempted an idea and failed magnificently. “Mrs. Vreeland was always in there punching for the impossible and the unattainable. When her ideas succeeded, and they often did work out well, they were triumphant. She gave the roar to get something not attempted before and there were no post mortems if they did not succeed.”

M
eanwhile Diana widened
Vogue
's focus so that it featured new talent and Beautiful People across the international social spectrum. The phrase “Beautiful People” was coined by Carol Phillips while she was managing editor of
Vogue
before Diana arrived, and Diana never took credit for it. But it came to be associated with the way she captured a new social order in the pages of
Vogue
in the 1960s, one in which British working-class pop stars and photographers, New York fashion figures, and, increasingly, designers and hairdressers, could be found alongside Moroccan and Italian princesses, and the queen of Thailand. The houses, gardens, and daily lives of fashionable British aristocrats, often identified by Nicholas Haslam but largely unknown in the United States, appeared in a series of articles by Valentine Lawford, photographed by Horst, alongside the homes of Doris Duke, Emilio Pucci, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. All the people featured in these articles were, in Diana's view, “creative and warm-hearted human beings, with a sense of the romantic possibilities, as well as the practical demands, of everyday existence.” What interested Diana most, once again, was the philosophy detectable throughout her life: her faith in the divine spark, the complete worlds of imaginative people whose distinctive tastes and determination turned fantasy into reality. Horst and Lawford were enjoined to capture the way their subjects set about this in great detail—an idea that seems banal now but was an innovation in the 1960s. Those featured in
Vogue
often included Diana's friends, many of whom she and Reed had first met in Europe in the 1930s, and they were so frequently related to people who worked at the magazine that
Vogue
in the 1960s often had a family feel about it. The profile of Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan was easily arranged, for she was a neighbor of Horst's in Oyster Bay, and her grandson-in-law was Edwin Russell, publisher of Condé Nast. Marisa Berenson, who became one of Diana's favorite models, was the granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli. Pauline de Rothschild, married to Baron Philippe, and the subject of another Horst and Lawford profile, was a distant cousin of Diana's.

T
he job of editor in chief came with a substantial expense account for entertaining, and increasingly the Vreelands' private life became indivisible from Diana's work at
Vogue
. As Diana became ever busier, Reed took charge of the domestic arrangements, a role in which he seemed very happy—much happier, some thought, than in his business life. Secretaries noted that the only time Reed ever became irritated was when things were not done just as Diana liked them, when dollar bills were not folded correctly, for instance, or arranged so that she could tip easily. Their household accounts were managed by Madeleine Wilson, who had been Reed's secretary since 1941. She later said that all the costs of running the apartment were borne by Diana, who transferred money each week to Reed's account so that he could pay out checks. In one sense their role reversal was complete, though this was not quite how it seemed to Diana. “It's always been men with feminine streaks in them that women love—which has nothing to do with homosexuality, you understand. What I was always aware of was a very feminine thing of
protection
. This, naturally, is what I miss more than anything—I'd never have gotten it from a wholly masculine man.”

Yvonne Duval Brown, the Vreelands' French maid, was a particularly important figure in their lives, one who acquired a minor New York reputation of her own for her total dedication to the Vreeland way, particularly in the matter of footwear. “Unshined shoes are the
end
of civilization,” Diana was wont to say. Reed, she claimed, had the butler in Hanover Terrace polish his shoes for five years with cream and rhinoceros horn until the leather was “contented.” Yvonne used a rhinoceros horn to polish Diana's shoes, too. “A highly emotional French lady, she wouldn't lift a finger to polish the furniture, but she meticulously stained and polished all my shoes after each wearing—including the soles. Why, I wouldn't
dream
of wearing shoes with untreated soles. I mean, you go out to dinner and suddenly you lift your foot and the soles aren't impeccable . . . what could be more ordinary?”

Many of those photographed in
Vogue
—and many who were not—were invited to Sunday lunch or dinner at “the garden in hell” at 550 Park Avenue. By the 1960s the Vreelands were noted hosts, popping up in a book about entertaining by Florence Pritchett Smith. “Woman should be a creature who is inspired by ministering to the male senses,” proclaimed Smith, cheerfully ignoring the fact that chez Vreeland it had long been Reed who arranged the menus with their Spanish cook, Sen, noting them down in a book. Diana's rules for entertaining were: pay personal attention to the guests, save yourself for the event, have the room at the right temperature, make sure everything is sparkling clean and smells wonderful, and make the table look attractive. The room should be quiet. “Arrange a quiet room so your guests feel that the only thing happening on God's green earth is happening right there.” There should not be too many married couples either. This, apparently, was “suburban.” “Have pretty women, attractive men, guests who are
en passant,
the flavor of another language. This is the jet age, so have something new and changing.” The most important thing for the guests, she concluded, was a feeling of freedom. Everything should be kept fluid. “Let guests go home early if they want to. All you should ask of a guest is that he be enthusiastic, rested, interested in meeting new people and talking about the many fascinating things going on in the world. . . . Luncheons are a wonderful time to entertain because people arrive and leave on time and when they leave you can hear them laughing as they walk down the street.”

Behind the scenes, however, Reed's health started to deteriorate. He had colon cancer in 1963, the year that Diana became editor in chief of
Vogue
. The following year he had a heart attack. Diana said nothing about this to any of her colleagues. Nor did she say anything when Reed went into the hospital for tests in the summer of 1966, having lost all interest in food and thirty pounds in weight.