Empress of Fashion (4 page)

It is not clear exactly when Emily tipped from a flirtatious manner into taking lovers. Having created a delightful new reality for himself in New York, Frederick Dalziel resolutely refused to spoil it by facing up to the fact he was being cuckolded, and Diana had difficulty coming to terms with the idea later too, maintaining that the worst her mother did was to travel everywhere with a good-looking Turk. “My father was rather amused by her flirtations—it was all part of the scene,” said Diana. “Flirtations are part of life, part of society—if one didn't have these little flings, where would one be? I think my father realized this. He was devoted to my mother. She was in the arms of a strong man who saw to everything because he knew that she wasn't strong.” It was Alexandra who faced Emily's adultery squarely and acknowledged that in retrospect she was certain her mother had often been unfaithful to her father. “She had a great many men,” said Alexandra. “My father had to put up with a very great deal.”

Emily also dealt with the unhappiness that gnawed at her by escaping from New York. Until the outbreak of war in 1914 she returned to Europe frequently, and from the age of eight Diana went with her. Diana's memories of a childhood in Paris were not, therefore, purely imaginary: they did draw on real experience. Between 1911 and 1913 she traveled with her family to England, Scotland, and France. Her grandmother Mary Weir went to Paris too, establishing her own household with servants and a secretary. These expeditions lasted for several months each summer, and there is no reason to doubt the impact of Paris on a sensitive child whose parents loved the city and impressed upon her the fact that she had been born there. Given her age at the time, some later confusion is understandable. Nonetheless, it is also the case that once an idea gripped Diana's imagination, it became true even if it was not. “So many of the things in life that interest me the most I totally forget,” she once remarked. “They're so intense they . . . burn off. Then, when I do remember them, they become stronger than memory—stronger, even, than reality.”

One example is her story that in 1909 Diaghilev brought the ballerina and Belle Epoque figure Ida Rubinstein to her parents' house on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, whereupon six-year-old Diana hid behind a screen and took in every detail of what Rubinstein was wearing. “She was all in black—a straight black coat to the ground. . . . Under the coat she wore high black suede Russian boots. And her
hair
was like Medusa's—these great big black curls, draped in black tulle, which kept them in place and
just
veiled her eyes. Then her
eyes
, through the veil. . . . If you've never seen kohl before, brother, was that a time to
see
it!” And then there was Rubinstein's shape: “She was long, lithesome, sensuous, sinuous . . . it was all line, line,
line.
” Leaving aside the detail that Diana's parents were not living in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne in 1909, parts of this story are credible for the prosaic reason that Diaghilev was searching Paris for money that year to launch the first season of his Ballets Russes; and he often touted Ida Rubinstein around rich people in the hope that they would back his productions of
Cléopatre
and
Schéhérazade
in which Rubinstein would star.

It is plausible that Diaghilev heard about Emily's talent as an amateur dancer, sought her out, introduced her to both Rubinstein and the great Nijinsky, and treated her as a person of informed taste in the mistaken belief that she was in a position to write a large check. But given that Diana was only six in 1909 and that there is no record of her traveling outside the United States before 1911, it is much less plausible that she met Ida Rubinstein herself or that she hid behind a screen while her mother chatted with Diaghilev. It is more probable that Diana met or saw Ida Rubinstein when she was older, or heard the story from her mother later, for from the evidence Emily had a narrative gift. Diana's vision of demimondaines parading in the Bois de Boulogne in the colors of the new century may well have been her mother's description, at least in part: “red red,
violent
violet, orange—when I say ‘orange' I mean
red
orange, not yellow orange—jade green and cobalt blue.” Diana's story about visiting London for the coronation of King George V is another case in point. The coronation took place in June 1911 when the Dalziels were in Europe, and it is quite possible that the eight-year-old Diana was taken to stand in the crowds. But she later confessed to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that most of what she remembered came from gazing intently at photographs for hours on end much later. In reminiscing about Diaghilev, Diana left herself an escape route too. “That's where everything happened, and 1909, that's the year it happened,
and they say that's
how
it happened
.”

It is also perhaps not surprising that memories of long sojourns in Paris, however confused or improved upon later, burned brighter than the mundane routine of New York childhood. The Belle Epoque Paris that displaced her Manhattan upbringing before 1914 certainly positioned Diana later as more romantic, more exotic, more “other” than she really was, and made her parents sound richer and more fashionable. In years to come this would become more, not less, important. By the time she was in her sixties, Diana placed such a high premium on imaginative power that she believed the romantic way she remembered her childhood was more significant than reality. Images of a Paris childhood nourished her imagination to such an extent that she almost came to believe her own stories while holding out the possibility that it was all “faction.” But there was more to blotting out her early years than this.

F
rom an early age Diana's American childhood was made miserable by beauty. She felt herself to be her beautiful mother's unloved, ugly child, causing her great pain. She internalized a sense of herself as ugly when she was very young, though photographs suggest that she was not nearly as plain as she felt herself to be. She inherited attractive dark coloring from Emily but a big nose and jaw from Frederick Dalziel, features that worked less well on a little girl with slight astigmatism than they did on a large man. But it was also Diana's misfortune that her younger sister, Alexandra, was enchantingly pretty. Alexandra had a fine bone structure, a petite nose, and extraordinary violet eyes. According to Diana, “Sister” was a sensation even when taken out in her pram to Central Park:

I can remember she was The Most Beautiful Child in Central Park. In those days it was a very small world, and there were all sorts of little titles like that. She'd sit in her pram—she was terribly dressed up, you understand—and people would stop just to look at her. As soon as I'd see people looking, I'd run over to the pram, because I was so proud of her.

“Oh what a beautiful child!” they'd say.

“Yes,” I'd always say, “and she has
violet eyes
.”

But in an incident that seared itself forever on Diana's memory, pride in her little sister's beauty became entangled with crushing blows to her self-confidence:

Then there was the most terrible scene between my mother and me. One day she said to me, “It's too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This, of course, is why you are so impossible to deal with.” It didn't offend me
that
much. I simply walked out of the room. I never bothered to explain that I loved my sister and was more proud of her than of anything in the world, that I absolutely
adored
her. . . . Parents, you know, can be
terrible.

As a small girl, Diana could not possibly have understood why her mother lashed out in this malign way. In the years between 1904 and 1914, Emily Dalziel pitched between restless unhappiness and exuberance and finally tipped into a depressive state that she later described as “wretched health . . . nothing definite you know, just a nervous miserable condition.” Poorly understood in the years before World War I, and compounded by acute anxiety about her fading beauty and appeal, Emily's “nerves” resulted in histrionic and delinquent behavior toward her two daughters, with effects that stayed with both of them for years. Diana would later rationalize this by saying that mothers and daughters rarely got on well. But the truth, in the Dalziel family, was that the mother adored one daughter and not the other.

“
You ask ‘do I love you,' ” Emily once wrote to Alexandra. “My precious baby girl, I love you with all my heart & soul & body. . . . I love
you,
the air you breath [
sic
], the things you touch, the ground you walk on. Every little bit of me loves every bit of you. I love you so it hurts, so it frightens me.” At the same time Emily developed an antipathy toward Diana, who committed the cardinal sin of refusing to show her mother the unconditional love she demanded from everyone else. Diana probably did become exceedingly difficult, for she possessed a fierce temper that never quite went away. In childhood, however, Diana was convinced that the root cause of Emily's incontinent antagonism was her ugliness. While her mother reveled in Alexandra's beauty, Diana's looks were an embarrassment. “All I knew then was that my mother wasn't proud of me,” said Diana. “I was always her ugly little monster.”

Had Diana been luckier, an affectionate nanny might have compensated for her mother's hostility. But in this instance she was truly unfortunate, for the Dalziel children grew up with a nanny who also found Diana difficult and made the dysfunctional family dynamics even worse. This was not, as Diana claimed in her memoirs, the nurse called Pink who took her for daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne. (Though there was a nurse of that name, she left the Dalziel household when Diana was about a year old.) The nanny in question was Katherine (or “Kay”) Carroll, who appeared in the New York household in 1908, about a year after Alexandra was born. She was no passing nursemaid. Because Emily was often out or away, she left Kay Carroll in charge and ceded control to her. Nanny Kay acquired a great deal of power. She became the person who held the Dalziel household together, and she stayed for decades, becoming, in effect, another member of the family.

Kay Carroll adored her “baby” Alexandra, and Alexandra—and Emily—loved Nanny Kay. As far as Alexandra was concerned, Kay Carroll was the warm substitute mother who compensated for Emily's increasingly frequent absences. Yet Alexandra was also the first to say that Nanny Kay's attitude to Diana was completely different. “She didn't like Diana,” she declared. “Diana and she didn't get on.” Nanny Kay copied Emily by constantly comparing Diana unfavorably with her younger sister. Understandably Diana loathed Kay Carroll. “My nurse was appalling. Naturally, nurses are always frustrated. They may love the children but they're not theirs and the time will come when they will have to leave them. . . . I couldn't stand her. She was the
worst
.” Remarkably the loved and the unloved sisters remained fond of each other though they were very different, one bond in an otherwise fissile household.

I
n Diana's early adolescence, matters came to a head. Diana spoke of this fleetingly much later, though she generally only dropped hints, leaving the listener to put the constituent parts together. She told Christopher Hemphill, a New York writer who was custodian of Andy Warhol's tapes, that she had a terrible nightmare as a child about being obliterated, one that stayed with her for years. “It was a wall of water coming curling over me when I was alone in the water—this body of water moving, moving, moving, moving. . . . It was like
teeth
almost—
totally
consuming. . . . I was terrified of the Atlantic but I couldn't stay out of it. . . . It was always the same all-consuming war.” There are very few photographs of Diana in her early teens, so it is difficult to tell whether puberty wrought real damage to her looks. What is clear is that once she reached the age of self-consciousness and looked in the mirror, she hated what she saw; and what seems to have happened is that relentless labeling as ugly, and the denigration that went with it from the two female adults in the Dalziel household, conspired to reduce a fragile child to such a low emotional state that Diana later preferred to excise and rearrange much of the narrative about this part of her life, rather than remember that it nearly broke her.

I
n Diana's version of what happened, the problems began when the family returned from Paris to New York in 1914. In this account she could speak only French and was unable to understand what was said to her. “Actually, when I was brought to America from France in 1914, I didn't know any English. But what was worse, I didn't
hear
it. I was the most frustrated little girl.” She was certainly frustrated and miserable, but for a different reason. In 1914 (having actually moved to New York ten years earlier) both Diana and Alexandra followed their mother to the Brearley School, then as now a top private girls' school. As an adult Diana consistently maintained that she and her sister were barely educated, but this was wrong. Their education was taken seriously. Brearley aimed to give young ladies an intellectual education comparable to that of their brothers, and when Diana was there its head, James G. Croswell, was a professor of Greek from Harvard. But once again the beautiful Alexandra, who was blessed with brains and sporting ability as well as beauty and an even temperament, thrived in the atmosphere of Brearley and stayed there for thirteen years. She went on to study mathematics at Bryn Mawr, and finished her degree at Barnard.

Diana, on the other hand, hated Brearley and its academic ethos so much that she almost wrote it out of her life story. She loathed the school's rigid authoritarianism, felt isolated from her more teachable classmates, and learned nothing. “It's one time in my life I've always regretted—fighting my way through the place. . . . And those goddamn
gongs
! Everyone knew where to go when the gong went off except me, but I didn't know whom to ask. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anything—I couldn't
speak
.” Talking to the New York curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler years later, she described her time at Brearley thus: “I lasted three weeks at the Brearley School . . . three
months
. . . three
months.
And really, they kept me there out of sort of kindness to my parents who obviously didn't know what to do with me because I didn't speak English, I'd never had time to learn English, wasn't allowed to speak French and I'd no one to talk to.” Misery at Brearley may have led to an outbreak of stuttering. “English was decided on, which is why I speak such terrible French to this day.” This nonsense is best read as a metaphor for a time when Diana was so isolated and adrift that she could barely communicate. Her school records show that she was in fact at Brearley for three full years.