Empress of Fashion (43 page)

The idea of a memoir resurfaced again after
Allure
was published. Hemphill had recorded far more for
Allure
than he needed and had edited some of it into a short “autobiography.” George Plimpton was commissioned by Knopf to add some material and knit together Hemphill's manuscript with his own.
D.V.
became the version of Diana's life that persisted unchecked until Eleanor Dwight's 2002 biography, though Diana kept reminding Plimpton that she was “terrible on facts” and that someone needed to check all dates and times. A benighted copyeditor started the process but appeared to give up in despair after one chapter, so that even the date of Diana and Reed's wedding was wrong. When Freck responded to the manuscript with a large number of queries and asked George Plimpton what sort of book he was trying to write, Plimpton replied “A bestseller.” Plimpton later said that he really did not care whether any of it was true: the interesting thing was the way Mrs. Vreeland told it. And when it came the way Mrs. Vreeland told it, boring facts were not the point. “Did I tell you that Lindbergh flew over Brewster? It could have been someone else, but who cares—
Fake it
!” she said. “. . . There's only one thing in life, and that's the continual renewal of inspiration.”

D.V.
was reviewed favorably and sold very well. The effect was to make Diana even better known and the object of some teasing by her relations. When one of her grandsons found a note telling her secretary that Mrs. Vreeland had now signed a copy of
D.V.
for Elizabeth Taylor, he added in his own hand: “Also a book for Queen Elizabeth and one for Pope John Paul. Did the books for Rosalind Carter and Madame Gandhi get sent? As for Fidel Castro, it shouldn't be too difficult to send him his book. He wants two copies, as he wants to send one to Chernenko, so do make sure Mrs. V. dedicates it appropriately.”

D
iana's family came and went in the 1970s and 1980s. Tim and Jean Vreeland had two daughters, Daisy and Phoebe. After his marriage to Jean ended, Tim married Nancy Stolkin in 1982 and continued to live in Los Angeles. Freck and his second wife, Vanessa Somers, divided their time between Rome and Morocco. Freck's younger son, Alexander, lived in Australia for much of the 1970s where he helped to run the Inner Peace Movement. Nicky continued to live in New York, but departed on a different kind of journey around 1980, toward life as a Buddhist monk. Diana found it hard to come to terms with his growing interest in Buddhism. She battled to keep her feelings under control though the only time he ever saw her cry was when he shaved his head. She made no secret of the fact that she felt Buddhism was keeping him from participating in the life he ought to be leading. She went to the lengths of asking a neighbor and friend, the Reverend John Andrew, who was rector of Saint Thomas Church, to talk to him. Even when John Andrew reported that Nicky was very serious and that his decision to pursue his monastic studies in India was not just a phase, Diana made one last attempt to turn him back.

Near the time he was due to leave for India, she asked him to dinner with some people she wanted him to meet. Nicky had given up dinner parties by this stage, but he agreed to attend. When he arrived at 550 Park Avenue he was greeted by a butler with the news that Diana was ill and had taken to her bed, but that the dinner party would be going ahead without her. The “dinner party” turned out to be a table set for two, for Nicky and a young woman who was not only ravishingly beautiful but was studying Chinese and Tibetan at Columbia and liked art movies, just as he did. It was a grandmotherly fix-up. Afterward an unrepentant Diana wanted to know all about the dinner—
and what the girl looked like
. Though it took time, Diana did eventually accept Nicky's decision. He knew that Diana had come around to it—more or less—when she said in an interview some time later that she liked people with a twinkle, and that the Dalai Lama had a twinkle.

Fred Hughes, on the other hand, caused Diana much sadness. The first intimation of trouble came in Andy Warhol's diary at the end of September 1977. He reported that Diana had called him and said someone “should talk to Fred about his drinking problem, to tell him he's so attractive but that when he's drunk he's so unattractive.” A few weeks later there was a nasty scene. “All the way down in the cab Diana and Fred had been fighting like they were a screaming old married couple,” wrote Warhol. There were reports from other sources of a very public row between Diana and Fred in Paris, in which Yves Saint Laurent had tried to intervene. Warhol thought that Diana was jealous of Hughes's friendships with younger, more beautiful women. “She thinks Fred's making it with Lacey [Neuhaus] and I think she wants him to make it with
her
. Can you believe it? It's so crazy.” Bob Colacello fielded many long, worried telephone calls from Diana that suggested she was simply concerned that Fred was going off the rails and nothing was being done to stop him. “She and I had had several talks about his behavior; in fact, it was hard to get her off the subject when we were alone,” he wrote. “One night, she went on about the beard that Fred had just shaved off. She hated his beard. It was ‘slovenly' she said. But she was disappointed after it came off, ‘because Fred
still
doesn't have that look I loved him for: well-proportioned, simple, good clothes, worn perfectly, everything just so. No accessory other than
neatness
. You know exactly what I mean, Bob. Well, I'm afraid he's lost it.' ” It would later turn out that Hughes was in the early stages of multiple sclerosis. At the time his behavior was attributed to heavy drinking and a great deal of cocaine. “Style was more than surface for Diana; it expressed the very essence of a person. And Fred's style had changed,” wrote Colacello. Hughes, who had once been on the Best Dressed List, took to going around with shredded linings in his suits. “Diana saw the decline in Fred's appearance as a sign of an inner collapse. ‘His
spirit
is broken, Bob.' ”

In his own way Fred Hughes adored Diana. “I do, I do, I do love you. Happy birthday, Fritzie Pie,” he scribbled in one note. But one of the ways it showed was that he ventriloquized Diana when he was drunk, apparently without realizing, but to such an extent that Warhol called him Dr. Hyde and Mrs. Vreeland. Diana attributed Hughes's decline to Warhol's exploitativeness and manipulativeness, and, as he reported it, she was not above telling him what she thought. “She started screaming and belting me, and she really
hurts
!” he wrote of one particularly dire evening. “She said that she just couldn't stand to be around old people, including herself.” Andy Warhol hated being touched, and an irate Diana may only have poked him once or twice hard with her famous index finger but Warhol was angry that Diana encouraged Hughes to assert himself. There was also something about Diana's defiance of old age and weakening that made him uneasy. She fought against it by “running and jumping and dancing and humming and pushing forward with her tight body and her beautiful clothes.”

It is undeniable that Diana also took on some of the qualities of her terrifying, matriarchal, dark-haired grandmother in her seventies, the only example of old age in her family that she knew and loved. She had a rough manner with her staff at times; and when she was angry it showed. At the same time she knew how to proffer grandmotherly concern and kindness. Diana was appalled that Warhol stood back and took no action as Hughes appeared to self-destruct, for she sensed that his decline was caused by something no one could identify. By late 1980, however, the problems caused by Hughes's antisocial attitude had gone well beyond either of them. Hughes offended Jacqueline Onassis very publicly; he turned up drunk at Cecil Beaton's memorial in New York, too late to be an usher; and was so obnoxious at the prewedding dinner for Courtney Kennedy that he was thrown out by her mother, Ethel. Diana had Colacello on the phone for two hours after that incident. “I never thought that Fred would end up as a bum,” she said.

Unlike many of Fred Hughes's so-called friends, Diana continued to provide moral support as he fell from grace, and did not give up on him after his illness was diagnosed. Although the intensity of their relationship slackened, she continued to have him to supper alone at 550 Park Avenue about twice a month for as long as it was feasible. There was no shortage of other company. There were constant dinners, lunches, movies, and outings, including concerts by Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan. From 1970 onward, Diana spent a few days each Christmas with Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in Santo Domingo, in the company of John Richardson, Boaz Mazor, and others. She caused a sensation when she visited the local pharmacy, her favorite place in the resort, maintaining that it sold pills and potions she could only get by prescription in the United States. She made a point of going there every afternoon around five o'clock, wearing a caftan. After a day or two, a crowd assembled to watch her arrival. Once she realized that she was the event for which they were waiting, she took to dressing up in ever more outré outfits to please her public, and eventually had to go home when she ran out of clothes.

F
riendship and decades of experience in fashion continued to overlap. Carolina Herrera first met Diana as a friend in the early 1970s and was enchanted by her wit, extravagance, and style. In 1980 it was Diana who inspired and prodded Herrera into becoming a designer, giving her much encouragement in private, supporting her collections in public, and setting yet another great New York fashion designer on the path to success. There were new friends too. Bruce Chatwin had dinner with Diana in 1982 and watched her inner eye scanning away, with no sign of slackening, at the age of seventy-nine:

Her glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask tablecloth. Beyond the smear of lipstick, a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette.

“What are you writing about, Bruce?”

“Wales, Diana.”

The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees.

“Whales!” she said. “Blue whales! . . . Sperrrrm whales! . . . THE WHITE WHALE!”

“No . . . no Diana! Wales! Welsh Wales! The country to the west of England.”

“Oh! Wales. I
do
know Wales. Little grey houses . . . covered in roses . . . in the rain.”

A
s she became more famous, criticism of Diana's exhibitions became more vocal. As Koda and Martin wrote later, Diana's version of history was history of “the grandest memory, a sweep through the elegances of the court of Versailles, a promenade through the grand silhouettes and extravagant textures of the Belle Époque, and the colorful Russia of the Czars.” She liked to express the mood of an era through oblique, impressionistic details: a bouquet of violets on a winter sleigh stood for czarist indulgence (a Russian grand duke once paved an avenue in St. Petersburg with violets to welcome his Italian mistress); Alice in Wonderland, holding a flamingo, implied the topsy-turvy world of the Belle Époque. This approach to the past was extremely popular with the public; and Diana's early exhibitions were so innovative, and their atmospheric lighting, music, perfumes, and backdrops so dazzling, that objections were muted. Three of Diana's first five exhibitions—
The World of Balenciaga
;
The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties
; and
Vanity Fair
—all played directly to her connoisseurship. But after
Vanity Fair
the chorus of complaints grew louder.

Criticism by Nesta Macdonald in
Dance
magazine of the
Diaghilev
exhibition that followed was typical of much to come. “Diaghilev created theatrical magic—illusion.
Vogue
created fashion magic—delusion. At the Metropolitan, the exhibits come from one side and the presentation from the other . . . the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum seemed to me to resemble a battlefield.” Macdonald believed that mixing up the costumes from different ballets and failing to offer any kind of chronology or context made Diaghilev's impact difficult to understand; and she was infuriated by errors in an accompanying brochure that was too sketchy. Diana Vreeland, she wrote, revolutionized fashion magazines with an instinctive and exhausting perfectionism: “The sad thing is that she seems to have thought that the showy nature of Diaghilev costumes could stand up to window-dressing technique.” Some critics found
Fashions of the Hapsburg Empire
, which followed, just as obscure. This was perhaps not surprising, since Diana explained to George Trow that what she liked best about the Hapsburgs was the gleaming brass turnout of their horses, a point of view only comprehensible to those who knew her very well indeed. “What Mrs. Vreeland likes is a source of simple energy so powerful that something rather excessive can be elaborated from what rises to the surface,” wrote Trow, manfully doing his best. “ ‘It's important to
get
the point,' she said. ‘The point is the
gleam
. It's what the nineteenth century knew. The gleam, the positiveness, the
turnout
.' ”

There was criticism from overseas too. When the V&A reopened its dress collection to the public in 1983, its director, Roy Strong, wrote in
The Times
: “The thing that unites the textile department is a deep loathing of what is being done at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. . . . We are all totally opposed to Diana Vreeland's degradation of fashion. Instead of exulting in technique, she debases it.” This was a trifle unfair since Diana's veneration of Vionnet's bias cut in
The Tens, the Twenties, the Thirties
inspired New York's designers to experiment. Nevertheless she certainly thought that costume exhibitions predicated on dressmaking technique were excruciatingly dull. However, there were further objections: “The Metropolitan's Costume Institute has turned its exhibitions into social events and crowd pullers under the guidance of the autocratic and eccentric Mrs. Vreeland. . . . Her style is to create the mood of a period with dash and verve, even if it means cutting two inches off an eighteenth century petticoat or adding unauthentic gloves. The international museum world criticizes her for lack of scholarship.”