Empress of Fashion (40 page)

Thus far Diana's exhibitions had focused on the couture. The show that followed took her back even further to years of adolescent dreaming as she gazed at the goddesses of the silver screen. Hoving maintained later that most of her best ideas came from him, but that this one was an exception. “She uttered one word, ‘Hollywood.' It was my turn to shout, ‘Consider it done.' ” Diana recollected—probably more accurately—that when she first mooted the idea, Hoving's response was “Why are you dragging Hollywood into the Met?” Once Hoving came around to the idea, Diana went to Los Angeles and embarked on a major search, assisted by costume designer Robert La Vine. This time, the chief difficulty she encountered was Hollywood's lack of respect for its own past. Costumes were cut up and reused, and many studios did not keep or catalog them. The people who preserved Hollywood costumes were all too often obsessive private collectors who refused to let Diana over the doorstep, let alone borrow the clothes.

She eventually broke through. Paramount and Warner Brothers had kept their more significant items. The family of David O. Selznick had preserved the costumes of
Gone With the Wind
. Mary Pickford had somehow managed to hold on to the costumes from all her films and allowed Diana to explore the attic of her house, Pickfair (faithfully accompanied by Tim Vreeland, who was banned from going to see Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty with his mother in the evenings on the grounds that he was too middle-aged). Mary Pickford had not been quite so successful in hanging on to her curls, which Diana found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, along with Mae Murray's costume from
The Merry Widow
. She was stunned by the quality of the workmanship. Carmel Snow and Diana had given the designer Adrian very little support when he moved from Hollywood to Seventh Avenue, but Diana raved about him as a costume designer, along with Travis Banton, Walter Plunkett, and a host of less-known names. “The basis was perfect designing and incredible workmanship—the cut of décolletage, the embroidery, the mounting of a skirt, and miles and miles of bugle beads,” she wrote. In Diana's view the best Hollywood costumes were as good as anything produced by the couture.

On her travels around Hollywood Diana met a fanatical collector of movie stills. He allowed her to search through thousands of images until she found costumes she remembered from her youth that had disappeared from view. This resulted in one of the most controversial aspects of the exhibition—Diana's audacity in commissioning replicas when she was unable to find the original, or where the piece in question was too damaged to have any impact. Furs were often “fur interpretations” by Max Koch, from pelts supplied by Diana's old friends in the fur district; jewelry was made especially by Kenneth Jay Lane; and most of the accessories were new. Designers who helped with replicas of Hollywood costumes for the exhibition included Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Arnold Scaasi, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, and Stan Herman. They were fully acknowledged, and every copy was faithfully spelled out in the accompanying catalog. But there was a feeling in the curatorial world that it was not done to mix up replicas with originals in this way; that when it came to the point the difference was not made sufficiently clear; and that it was somehow misleading for uninformed visitors who might not bother to read the small print.

The uninformed visitors did not seem to mind one bit, as they lost themselves in a shimmering world of tinsel and marquee lights. They found Marilyn Monroe on an elephant loaned by Andy Warhol. They saw her skirt catching the breeze in
The Seven Year Itch
. They encountered Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and Greta Garbo. They gazed at Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady
with its fabulous black-and-white designs by Cecil Beaton. They wandered through galleries scented with “Femme” by Parfums Rochas to soundtracks from
Top Hat
to
Dr. Zhivago
. Judy Garland sang “Get Happy.” “That's the best advice anyone can have,” said Diana on the audio guide. “Movies were the big trip of the twentieth century and put magic in our lives.” They took people to worlds of which they could only dream. “It is about the dreams, the grandeur of Hollywood. It's Travis Banton taking you across the Sahara in flowing chiffon. It's Queen Christina dressed historically, romantically, the way you'd prefer history to be. That's the
idea
of Hollywood. Do it Big. Do it Right. Give it Class.”

B
ackstage, Diana's working routine remained the same. After Ferle Bramson became her secretary in 1974, she telephoned with a raft of instructions from home first thing in the morning and then left her undisturbed until after midday, whereupon she would sweep in and leave Bramson with no further time to herself. There was an enormous amount to do, and Diana was meticulous in the way she set about it. Once Diana had an exhibition in view, it naturally became the focus of much of her work. But she had to think ahead too, and just as she had worked on several issues of
Vogue
simultaneously, there were always two or three other ideas in the pipeline. It took time to establish what was available and to work out whether the clothes that existed really added up to a major exhibition. Research for
Fashions of the Hapsburg Empire
in 1979–80, for example, began three years earlier in 1976. “It was,” said Bramson, “a great editing process, a sifting.” Bramson had the greatest respect for Diana's creativity. “The ideas poured out of her,” she remembered. Though the museum's personnel department warned her that Diana was difficult, her boss's whims became too much for her only once: Bramson had diligently arranged a large number of photos for the Hollywood exhibition when Diana came in and mixed them all up again because she was in a bad mood. Bramson was so upset that she broke a pencil in half and said, “I quit” before running off in tears. Diana, who rarely thanked staff members for anything, never apologized either; but this time she realized she had gone too far. Her way of making it up was to soothe her secretary with an interesting story about a beautiful person: “I say, Miss, did I ever tell you the story about Cher?”

“It could be terrible even if she liked you,” said Bramson, but it was naturally even worse if she did not. Stella Blum and Diana had a very strained relationship in the years that they worked together. As associate curator, Stella Blum's responsibility was to ensure the historical accuracy of each exhibition. When Diana rode roughshod over the facts, Stella Blum's professional reputation suffered, something Diana willfully failed to understand, implying that Blum was a dreary little mouse and that her constant emphasis on scholarship was dull. “You had to do things Mrs. Vreeland's way. And be prepared for the way to change from day to day,” Bramson recalled. “Mrs. Vreeland's way” was somewhat fluid. Nothing was ever decided until the moment an exhibition opened. Even the night before the preview, Diana was capable of moving everything around and starting again, just as she had insisted on reshoots until the last minute at
Vogue
. However, Diana was frequently rescued from crass mistakes by the curatorial team, who went around the exhibits making alterations in her wake, doing their best to ensure, where they could, that the costumes were presented with accurate information. There were those who felt that Diana would not have survived her first year without this. On the other hand, there were others who believed that Stella Blum could have tried harder to understand Diana's point of view. “They kept it pleasant on the surface,” said Bramson. “But they really butted heads.”

From the time of the setup for
Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design
onward, Diana was also assisted by large teams of volunteers, many of whom went on to have notable careers in fashion. In 1974 her helpers included Tonne Goodman and André Leon Talley of
Vogue
. Once she trusted an intern, she trusted him or her implicitly, though, as always, that intern had to be capable of running off with Mrs. Vreeland's more gnomic remarks and bringing something back. Some volunteers were terrified by her fierce growl and imperious, shouty manner when she was displeased. For others working as a volunteer was a life-changing experience. Diana had complete confidence in Tonne Goodman, and André Leon Talley earned her trust quickly too. On his first morning Stella Blum handed him a box full of purplish metal disks and informed him that it was the chain mail dress worn by Lana Turner in
The Prodigal
and that his task for the day was to put it back together. After struggling with it for a while, he worked out what to do and assembled the dress on a mannequin. At lunchtime Diana glided in. He watched her from behind a pillar. Diana's
Vogue
had inspired his own dreamworlds as a very tall African-American teenager with an eccentric interest in fashion in North Carolina. He had admired her passionately from a long distance for years, but it was the first time he had ever seen her at close range. “She was a solo pageant,” he recalled. Diana stared at the Lana Turner dress for a long time. Then she sent for him and, in a dream-come-true for Talley, kept him by her side for six weeks. Once she was sure he was committed to a life in New York fashion, she exerted herself mightily to find him a job. “He knows about every couture dress of the last fifty years and he's worn 'em all,” she said by way of recommendation to Oscar de la Renta's right-hand man Boaz Mazor.

George Trow of
The
New Yorker
caught up with them all just before the Hollywood exhibition opened in November 1974. Diana was still fulminating about the mannequins but had been taking corrective action:

Well,
first
of all we knock off all the bosoms. All the ba-zooms go. We had a little Japanese carpenter with a tiny little saw—exquisite instrument—and he goes rat-a-tat . . . boom! Rat-a-tat . . . boom! I mean, he was doing fifteen ba-zooms a minute. Ba-zooms were falling. The guards were going absolutely dotty.

Diana walked Trow through the exhibition. “This is from
Madame Satan
,” she said, pointing to a remarkable red cape embroidered with silver and gold. “She seduces her own husband at a party on a dirigible.” This came as Trow was recovering from Diana's exegesis of Greta Garbo. “Garbo. Garbo! . . . she has the
en plus
of
amoureuse
,
and
she has a little gray monkey with a scarlet hat and coat.
Oh!
How I have
worked
on that monkey's little
hat.
” Stuart Silver of the museum's display department trailed around miserably behind them. The exhibition was due to open in two hours, all the bases had to be painted, and each time Diana moved a mannequin, it had to be relit. “Stuart works upstairs, in the more
refined
part of the museum,” said Diana, patting him on the back. “But don't forget, boys, this is where the money is!'' The exhibition was not perfect, thought Trow. The odd mannequin joint was exposed and the program was sketchy. But Mrs. Vreeland had something in common with the great Hollywood producers: she knew how to make people like what they saw. “The message of her shows at the Metropolitan . . . [was] ‘It's Good! It's Better! It's Best! It's a million miles away! But it's all yours! Come and get it!' ”

Numbers had helped to drive Diana out of
Vogue
. Less than four years later, numbers put her into the Metropolitan Museum of Art's record books. After the
The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties
broke one set of records,
Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design
broke them all over again. Nearly 800 thousand people visited the exhibition between November 21, 1974 and August 31, 1975, four times more than the most successful exhibitions anywhere else in the museum. “No curator in the history of the Met ever had a more successful run than Diana Vreeland,” said Hoving. She was back in
The
New Yorker
, back in business, and back in fashion.

B
eyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its exhibitions, New York was changing fast. Many who lived in the city through the 1970s thought its decline terminal. Its manufacturing industries dwindled away, causing rising unemployment and spiraling social problems. The city teetered on bankruptcy, and was overwhelmed by a crime wave and a murder rate that made it notorious worldwide. As mugging and robbery spread uptown from the city's poorer enclaves, many of New York's well-to-do elderly were driven indoors by fear. Diana felt the fear too, quite acutely. “When people ask me what the greatest change in my life is, I always say it's being afraid. . . . I used to be afraid of nothing.” However, she addressed the matter by taking taxis, and advantage of her friends' chauffeurs. Indeed, she could be a bracing sort of chum to timorous types of her own age. Kenneth Jay Lane recalls that one of her acquaintance went blind, and then regained her sight after five years. Anxious to catch up on what she had missed, she asked Diana, as her most switched-on friend, to take her to a movie. They set off to the cinema and settled back in their seats. After about ten minutes the friend began to hyperventilate with horror. The film was
Deep Throat
. “ ‘Why did you take me to
that
, Diana?' she said, clutching the wall of the foyer outside. ‘Well,' said Diana. ‘If you haven't seen anything for five years, wouldn't you want to see something you've never seen before?' ” (At a lunch party where this story was reported, the butler is said to have dropped his tray.)

Far from lurking fearfully in her apartment, Diana became a dominant social force in New York in the 1970s. This was partly because of her job at the museum. “This is a working man's town,” she once observed. “Nobody can sit here and do nothing.” She was perceived to have great social and professional power because of her role as special consultant to the Met, but she was also sought after because she was stimulating and amusing company, with a vigorously open mind and an equally open eye. David Bailey noticed that she had a habit of changing the subject when a conversation strayed into an area she knew nothing about, but others were less astute. “In the space of twenty minutes she becomes ecstatic over subjects that include surfing, country rock, meditation, the food at Ballato's,
Equus
, water (‘It's God's tranquilizer, I enjoy just watching it flow.'), young designers (Calvin Klein, Stephen Burrows), sky, a new health food, her masseur, the Mediterranean life, brandy snifters, Floris scent, a persimmon, waterskiing, Rigaud candles, new potatoes (‘tight-skinned,' like Chinese ivories), fresh air, the cooking course at the YWCA, and the look of post–World War II girls,” wrote one astonished observer. “Her capacity for enthusiasm is astonishing. ‘My God,' she declares, ‘What have we got in life? Love, friendship, work, guts, and all these delicious tiny fragments that can be the most attractive things in the world.' ” Diana was delighted when her grandson Nicky came to live with her for a time in 1973 while he was at NYU. “There was real intimacy, partly because she didn't settle for any idea of age,” he said. “She had lots of ‘old' friends. But ultimately, ‘vitality' was what interested her, regardless of age.”