Empress of Fashion (38 page)

When Diana arrived in Paris in August, there was another brutal shock. Margaret Case, who was in her eighties and had been
Vogue
's society editor for forty-five years, had committed suicide. She was Diana's neighbor at 550 Park Avenue, a friend as well as a colleague. Case had been asked to vacate her office and work from home by the new regime a few weeks earlier, and had taken it extremely badly. She fell ill and became depressed. Rumors flew: Case had been asked to leave her office so as to make way for Diana; she had looked immaculate when she jumped from her bedroom window; the nurse who was caring for her had just left the room to make a cup of tea. For Diana, who flew home as soon as she heard the news, it was a blow upon a bruise.

It soon became clear that fulfilling her obligations as consulting editor would be anything but easy. Her relationship with Grace Mirabella suffered in a way that was all the more painful because they had once been so close. Mirabella was genuinely astonished to be offered the job of editor in chief by Liberman. But after she accepted, neither she nor Diana said anything about what happened, something Mirabella later regretted. Mirabella sent Diana pages that she had worked on and then cowered, “ashamed and afraid that I might one day run into her in the hallway and have to look her in the eye and
say something
.” Diana, meanwhile, never referred to her demotion. “Her sense of etiquette, her pride, and her inbred feel for the right way of doing things would tell her that it was my place to make the first stab at communication. She was right. But I simply couldn't do it.”

Diana had one great success in this unhappy period, though it was not obvious at the time. A young and unknown designer called Manolo Blahnik came to see her in her new office to show her his portfolio of drawings. His sketches were mainly of theater sets and costumes, and Diana saw him alone. “I was so frightened I could hardly speak,” said Blahnik. “She must have thought I was mad. I could barely walk because I was wearing tiny Victorian shoes, far too small, which were killing me. And there was the woman I'd idolized.” Diana turned the pages of the portfolio making polite noises until she came to Blahnik's drawings of shoes. “ ‘How amazing,' she said. Then, energized, she looked up and said, ‘Young man, do things. Do accessories. Do shoes.' ” Other than set one legendary shoe designer on the path to greatness, she continued to write memos: “Don't you think the beauty of Mia Farrow is fantastic. . . . I think she is definitely a personality,” and “The underlying ways of beauty: walking, talking, smiling . . . the careful enunciation of the language you are speaking.” The memos grew more and more halfhearted: “Sleeveless knit low oval front and back looks marvelously—I can show you the kind of top if you are interested.” But no one
was
interested, or listening, and she soon stopped appearing at the office altogether. “I am not proud of that particular chapter in my history,” wrote Grace Mirabella in her memoir. “But in my defense, I have to say that, professionally, I had no choice but to make Vreeland disappear. Her legend was so great, and the resistance to me as her successor so widespread and so insidious, that I had to push on, at whatever personal cost, to establish myself, because there were just too many people gunning to bring me down.”

Diana continued to fret about money and looked for consulting work compatible with the terms of her agreement with Condé Nast. Friends came to the rescue, and she swallowed her pride. In September 1971 she took on the role of personal shopper for Katharine “Kay” Graham, the publisher of the
Washington Post
, and was rewarded with discreet checks. She became an adviser to the costume jewelers Coro-Vendome, advising them on trends and new designs; and in January 1972 she even proposed herself as a consultant to Marks & Spencer in London, recommending that they extend their line of “little knitted undershirts,” advice the store would have done well to heed, given how fashionable these subsequently became. There was talk about a book for the publisher George Weidenfeld. But it was very difficult to adjust to the lack of structure. “This has been a very curious autumn and winter so far,” she wrote to Pauline de Rothschild on January 28, 1972. “Not because anything serious has happened but because after 34 years of total routine, I have had to create each day by itself, most of which has been in various parts of town which is complicated and difficult to get to. Nothing has been overstrenuous, it has been, I can only say, ‘different.' ” She was lining up jobs, she wrote, and had behaved “like a dream.” But there was much to think about: “It is just a question of my sorting out what I really am capable of accomplishing.”

Then there was a setback. In March 1972 Diana developed a vertebral infection that required treatment with intravenous antibiotics, and obliged her to stay in the hospital for several weeks until the end of April. It was an “ingenious, clever little bug,” she wrote to a friend. “Don't ever get anything in your spine.” But illness turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Too many acquaintances had slithered away when she was fired from
Vogue
; but in the spring of 1972, this fresh bout of misfortune triggered a wave of sympathy and support from dozens of people whose lives she had touched, improved, or changed, and who were unhappy at seeing her laid low. However forceful and demanding Diana may have been, she rarely said anything unpleasant about friends and colleagues behind their backs. On the contrary, her enthusiasm and encouragement had transformed lives. “To hear someone say that Diana Vreeland is a positive thinker, an evangelist of enthusiasm, is like seeing water poured over Niagara Falls,” wrote Jonathan Lieberson. “She has inspired and encouraged more people per cubic inch than Norman Vincent Peale.” This brought its own rewards now.

Her nurses gazed in amazement at the stream of glamorous visitors. “It seems to be a long Valentino parade,” Diana wrote to Valentino on April 24. Jackie, Audrey, and Babe had all worn Valentino when they came to see her, and they all looked marvelous. Even her hairdresser had worn Valentino at her bedside. The actor Terence Stamp paid her a visit. Friends formed the habit of dropping in on their way out to dinner. Caviar, delicious food, and luxurious bedsheets arrived daily. Seventh Avenue rallied: Norman Norell, Anna Potok of Maximilian furs, Marjorie Griswold from Lord & Taylor, and many others sent lavish flowers. In the thank-you letters she dictated to her secretary, Diana made being in the hospital sound like one enormous treat: “I happen to have a very beautiful room, overlooking the bridges and the whole of the city and at night when one starts to dream and think of other things, it looks like a modern Piranesi as the whole thing is so dreamlike and exalted.” But as she lay in her hospital bed looking out at the lights of Manhattan, not even Diana could have dreamed of the extraordinary last act that was about to begin.

Chapter Eight

Old Clothes

N
ot far from the hospital where Diana lay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was going through its own upheaval. It had acquired a charismatic young director called Thomas Hoving five years earlier and was still reeling from his arrival. Hoving was thirty-five when he was appointed. He had presided over a celebrated series of “happenings” in New York parks before taking the job, and he was determined to shake up the museum in the same way, informing its trustees that he regarded the place (and by implication, them) as “moribund,” “gray,” and “dying.” Hoving set about enlarging the building and the museum's collections in a manner that might politely be described as piratical, but he revolutionized its attitudes, insisted that a populist approach was compatible with scholarship, introduced blockbuster exhibitions, and withstood much criticism for being a huckster as well as a visionary. He caused a stir early in his tenure by declaring that running the Metropolitan Museum of Art was no different from running General Motors, and that it had to be melded into an efficient business enterprise. He quickly lit on its Costume Institute as a potential money-spinner and crowd puller, but it turned out to be a headache.

The Costume Institute had started life independently in 1937, as the Museum of Costume Art, founded by Irene and Alice Lewisohn. Their aim was to raise awareness of dress in human history and to make the case for fashion as one of the decorative arts. The sisters built up a collection of about seven thousand pieces before Irene Lewisohn's death in 1944. Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor then stepped in with a campaign to bring the collection to the Metropolitan Museum, insisting that it would inspire American designers and act as a spur to independence from Paris in the postwar years. Shaver deployed this argument so successfully that she raised $350,000 from Seventh Avenue to finance the transfer. The Costume Institute enjoyed semiautonomous status from 1947 before it was formally absorbed into the museum in 1960; but activity was low-key and patchy, a state of affairs Hoving was determined to change when he arrived in 1967. His first move was an exhibition called
The Art of Fashion
. To keep Seventh Avenue happy and involve living designers, he hired the leading fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert to work on the exhibition alongside its curator, making her the first outsider to work on a major show in the history of the Metropolitan. He soon discovered that this was not a good idea when he dropped in late one night to discover Lambert pushing mannequins attired in the clothes of her clients to the front of each display case.

Public relations as a curatorial concept was a step too far, even for Hoving. He closed the doors of the Costume Institute for much-needed building work between 1968 and 1971 and thought about what to do next. Small galleries in the north end of the museum basement were bulldozed to open up larger exhibition spaces; state-of-the-art storage for the ever-expanding collection was installed. After his brush with Lambert, Hoving went to the other extreme and appointed the scholarly Adolph Cavallo to oversee the renovations, but Cavallo's first exhibition fell flat. The trustees of the Costume Institute's new Visiting Committee, drawn from the city's social elite and from Seventh Avenue, decided he lacked the common touch. For his part Cavallo was confronted by a committee who thought that Patricia Nixon's wedding dress was just the thing to draw the crowds. These tensions resulted in the waning of Cavallo's star and a vacuum that Hoving found difficult to fill. The Costume Institute had an outstanding curatorial staff led by Stella Blum, but it needed someone to give it the right sort of pizzazz.

In the first instance, however, neither Hoving nor Diana was very keen on the idea that it should be her. The idea of approaching Diana came not from Hoving, but from his curator in chief, Theodore Rousseau, and the museum's secretary, Ashton Hawkins, both friends of the Vreelands and occasional guests at 550 Park Avenue. Diana's lawyer, Peter Tufo, also claimed to have had a hand in the matter. After his experience with Eleanor Lambert, Hoving remained extremely nervous about installing anyone from a commercial background. Diana, meanwhile, was not at all sure she was the right person for the task. She had no interest in an academic approach to clothes; her professional instinct was to look for what was fresh and new; and even though she drew on decades of looking at beautiful things as
Vogue
's editor in chief, she loathed nostalgia. Her initial reaction to Ted Rousseau's proposition was unenthusiastic. However, he refused to give up. “He came to see me four or five times . . . and he sat right where you are now and argued with me. I'd say, ‘Ted, I've never been in a museum except as a tourist.' He said, ‘Well, why don't you change around a bit?' ”

By the time Diana fell ill in March 1972 she knew that no one at Condé Nast was interested in her point of view, and for all the bravado with which she wrote to Pauline de Rothschild, it is not clear that she enjoyed chasing around after consulting work with its attendant financial uncertainty. The proposition from Ted Rousseau was attractive. It came with an office, a secretary, and an annual salary. There was wisdom in going where she was wanted rather than where she was not; and some of her glamorous hospital visitors almost certainly persuaded her to think again, emphasizing that she was not being approached as a conventional curator but precisely because of other, creative talents. The sight of Diana so reduced had a galvanizing effect on her circle, and behind her back they sprang into action. Hoving overcame his reluctance when a group of Diana's most powerful friends, including Marella Agnelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Babe Paley, and Mona Bismarck (now Mrs. Umberto de Martini) offered to contribute almost half her salary for the first year. It has been suggested that those who agreed to contribute subsequently did not do so; it has also been said that there were some who were asked to contribute but declined. However, with the exception of Mrs. Paul Mellon, who pledged one thousand dollars and had still not produced it at the end of 1972, a file note from the museum makes it clear that all Diana's friends who agreed to support her paid up.

Diana signed a one-year agreement with the Metropolitan Museum in July 1972 (though she wrote at least one letter that suggests she had decided to take the job by the end of May). It was renewable annually by mutual consent. Her title was Special Consultant, and she was responsible for generating ideas for exhibitions, organizing them, and seeing them through; suggesting sources for additions to the collection and financial gifts; and acting as a link between the Costume Institute, the fashion industry worldwide, and the fashion press. She would report directly to Hoving. For all this she would receive $25,000 for the year, up to $10,000 in expenses (a closely guarded secret), a full-time secretary, and an office, which she proceeded to have painted blood-red all over again. She had work to finish for
Vogue
in Paris in September, but she would start at the museum on September 5. The apartment at 550 Park Avenue was to be completely spring-cleaned in her absence. Her battered old desk chair would be sent from Condé Nast. “I have been rebuilding my life for the last two months,” Diana wrote to Mainbocher in August. She was full of excitement, tinged with apprehension. “I am ecstatically happy,” she told Ted Rousseau on August 11, 1972, “and I only hope that I don't let you down or the museum.” In her engagement diary she wrote: “Life is a fine performance. There are entr'actes.” Elsewhere in the diary she scribbled: “Believe in the total authority of the imagination.”

Her first assignment for the Costume Institute was delicate. The Duke of Windsor had died on May 18, 1972, a few weeks before Diana signed her contract. A short time later the duchess agreed to give some of his clothes to the museum. The point of contact had been Ashton Hawkins, who had a connection with the Duchess of Windsor's private secretary in Paris, John Utter. At some point the idea emerged that there should be an exhibition alongside the gift, though it is not clear whose notion this was. On July 10, 1972, Diana wrote to Hawkins, enclosing a list of the duke's clothes as she remembered them and saying she thought the men's cosmetic industry and wholesale tailors could be asked to put up money for the show. In August, Hawkins reported from Paris that Utter was giving the project his full support and he thought they might be able to announce the exhibition and Diana's appointment simultaneously. He emphasized that the duchess was “changeable” but was sure Diana would sort everything out splendidly. Diana arrived in Paris in early September determined to rise to the challenge. She spent part of every day during her first week in Paris with the duchess and Sydney Johnson, the duke's devoted Bahamian valet, picking out items of civilian clothing of particular interest.

Then something went wrong. Much later Diana wrote to Hawkins that “the news came from the Palace that we were to stop the proceedings.” As she recollected the affair, she telephoned the duchess's solicitor in London, who said it would be impossible to do the show. The idea that Buckingham Palace blocked the exhibition then became the accepted version of events. The evidence that survives, however, suggests that it was the “changeable” duchess who had second thoughts, and that Buckingham Palace was greatly relieved. The duchess seems to have decided quite suddenly that it was too soon after the duke's death for an exhibition. While she had been enthusiastic about the idea while sorting through the duke's clothes with Diana and Sydney, she appears to have changed her mind within a few days and decided that the museum was behaving dishonorably in proposing the idea. The biographer Hugo Vickers paints a picture of enormous strains in the household in the months after the duke died. As the duchess's health deteriorated, she became increasingly unpredictable, turning against Utter, who supported the idea of an exhibition, and sacking the loyal Sydney Johnson when he asked for more time off to look after his children after his wife died. “It was like a small court, with little for anyone to do and all kinds of machinations going on in the background,” writes Vickers.

Given their long-standing friendship, however, it was easier for both the duchess and Diana to blame the palace while keeping up the pretense that everything was going beautifully. When Diana heard that the president of the Metropolitan Museum, Douglas Dillon, was in Paris, she enlisted his help in sustaining this illusion because by now the duchess was having second thoughts about the gift itself, let alone an exhibition. “Please forgive me tracking you down in Paris as you probably are here on a flying trip,” Diana wrote in some panic. “It is my suggestion that you call and see the Duchess of Windsor if you can possibly manage it. I have struck some rather sticky wickets and I think you could clear the air
so
easily by just
assuming
all was going beautifully.” In an attempt to restore harmony, Diana and Douglas Dillon both wrote to the duchess assuring her of the museum's honorable intentions and saying that they would wait until the time was right, reassurances that suggest that it was the Duchess of Windsor, rather than Buckingham Palace, who blocked the show.

H
owever, the collapse of the Windsor exhibition put Diana under real pressure. She was in Paris on her own, and had little idea how to do the job for which she was now being paid. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was an unfamiliar institution with its own ways; and she was working, at long distance, with colleagues to whom she had barely been introduced. The role of special consultant was an experiment in itself. Expectations were running high. While not explicitly hostile to her appointment, the curatorial team at the Costume Institute was watching to see what she could add. It was already starting to look as if she had failed her very first test, and she had to change tack fast. But there was no one on hand to advise her and she had to feel her way.

The Spanish couturier Balenciaga had died on March 23, and Diana's correspondence suggests that she began tentatively to explore the idea of an exhibition of his oeuvre as early as May 1972. To her great relief her first formal meeting on the subject was productive. The Museum Bellerive in Zurich had mounted its own Balenciaga exhibition two years earlier. Diana flew from Paris to see its curators, whereupon they offered to lend her anything she wanted, including Balenciagas from the Bellerive's own collection. Their exhibition had been imaginatively mounted and made Diana think afresh about backdrops, mannequins, and lighting. She returned to Paris, hired a temporary secretary, and set about some detective work from her room in the Hôtel de Crillon. She met Madame Felicia, the dressmaker in Balenciaga's atelier who finished his last work. Her secretary tracked down Balenciaga's right-hand man, Ramon Esparza, who agreed to lend documentary film of the master at work; Diana unearthed unpublished photographs by Tom Kublin; and Susan Train at
Vogue
's Paris office rode to the rescue with much practical help.

What proved unexpectedly hard, however, was the task that should have been easiest: persuading friends in Europe who owned Balenciagas to loan them to the Metropolitan Museum. This was partly because the friends who responded quickly and efficiently had quite as efficiently given away their unwanted Balenciagas years earlier. Pauline de Rothschild, on the other hand, still had her Balenciagas but was not as cooperative as she might have been. “Please Pauline do not be bored,” begged Diana in one letter from the Hôtel de Crillon. “As I told you it is agreed that you had the most interesting clothes from Balenciaga and it is important that you be well represented in order to make the exhibition complete.” Even when they were cooperative, Balenciaga owners did not seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation—an understandable reaction when it was urgent for Diana only. “Everyone loves and adores Balenciaga but are very lazy about finding the one or two dresses that would make such a difference. . . . Do say a little prayer for me as I need the support at the moment very badly,” Diana wrote to Cecil Beaton. Beaton had mounted a costume exhibition at the V&A the year before, and agreed to look in its collection on her behalf. But it was all a great change from
Vogue
, where Diana had only to pick up the phone to get what she wanted. Sitting alone in the Hôtel de Crillon with one temporary secretary, Diana felt her initial exhilaration give way to anxiety and frustration as she began to understand the scale and complexity of the task ahead. “I am now beginning to wonder how you
ever
put your show together,” Diana sighed to Beaton on October 6.