Empress of Fashion (5 page)

To make matters worse, Emily found a new way of passing the time during the vacations that Diana truly hated. The outbreak of war in Europe put an end to family trips to Paris after 1914. Faced with being trapped in the United States during the long summer months, Emily turned to big-game hunting. She had long ridden to hounds, but from around 1916, when Diana was thirteen, Emily developed a passion for a sport in which upper-class women were slowly being allowed to participate. Although it was unusual for a woman to take up big game-hunting in North America, it gave those that did a rare opportunity to escape from society's concerns and petty domesticity while remaining within the outer limits of social convention. It also gave women who could afford it a chance to develop a level of expertise and degree of focus that was uniquely exhilarating.

Emily told a newspaper that she first went to the Rockies as a cure for her nervous debilitation. It worked. Photographs show her communing happily with a mountain lion and posing with a patient elk. A fascination with open spaces, wild animals, and the hunt “took possession of her.” It all did her so much good, she said, that she sent for her daughters to join her, and at least one photograph shows that Nanny Kay went too, riding in the Rockies with her charges and Emily. Inevitably Diana's claim that she was taught to ride by Buffalo Bill Cody has been regarded as one of her more outré assertions. However, this was true: like Diaghilev, Buffalo Bill entered Diana's life because of Emily, though in this instance Emily was one of Cody's patrons. If a woman from Emily's background wanted to learn to track and shoot big game, Buffalo Bill's establishment in Wyoming was the obvious destination. Buffalo Bill was part showman, part impostor, but he started out as a guide to European aristocrats and American millionaires on buffalo hunts. He traveled so widely that Emily and her daughters could have met him—and had an occasional riding lesson—at almost any time. However, it is most likely that Diana and Alexandra remembered him from the very end of his life, when they stayed at his Hotel Irma in Cody, Wyoming, in 1916.

An epidemic of infantile paralysis swept through New York and its surroundings in the summer of 1916, causing panic. This tallies with Diana's memory of being sent out of the city with Alexandra and a hysterical French maid (Kay Carroll was probably on holiday). In common with children from thousands of other families, they found themselves on a train at very short notice, though Diana's account of watching drunken cowboys shoot each other dead from the train window as they traveled west should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Like many other children, the sisters were kept away from New York until long after the start of the new school year, when all danger of polio had passed. According to his biographers, Buffalo Bill did make a brief visit to his beloved Cody in November 1916, just before he died in Denver in January 1917. Ill and almost bankrupt, he could well have taken a liking to Emily's daughters, found them two little Indian ponies to try, and whiled away the time by teaching them to ride. If so, he probably came to see them off too. “The last time I saw him was when he came to see us off on the train that was to take us back to New York. I can remember standing with my sister at the back of the train with tears pouring down our faces, waving.”

She may have loved Buffalo Bill and his fringed jackets, but Diana hated everything else to do with this new world in which she found herself. She hated her mother's enthusiasm for the wild. She hated Wyoming. She hated cowboys. She hated the great open spaces that ached of loneliness. “We were there in the wilds with the moose and the bears and the elks and . . . my
word
! It was so
lonely
. I remember lonely men, lonely spaces. . . . I couldn't stand the loneliness of those cowboys.” Most of all she hated shooting and she loathed wild animals. In the grip of this new interest, which Alexandra shared enthusiastically, Emily ignored the reaction of her tiresome elder daughter. “I was just a nut. And a bore. But I didn't declaim. I was very young. No one listened.”

Then there came a body blow. In the summer of 1917 the headmaster of Brearley wrote to the Dalziels asking them to remove Diana, saying that she was not considered to be Brearley material. It is safe to assume that at the time Emily did not react sensitively; that she was angry and exasperated with Diana; that the effect on Diana of three very stressful years in the wrong school was never considered; and that “stupidity” was now added to Diana's growing list of failings. Years afterward Diana was fond of saying that she was looking for something that Brearley could not offer—allure. At the time the impact of expulsion was almost certainly terrible, coinciding as it did with so much else that was going wrong. In later life Diana dropped hints that in the summer of 1917 she was so miserable she was suicidal. She was most frank with the journalist Lally Weymouth in an interview for
Rolling Stone
in August 1977.

By the age of fourteen, she told Weymouth, “If I thought of myself, I wanted to kill myself.” Her mother had christened her Diana after the goddess of hunting, a name freighted with expectation. She was manifestly no goddess. “I thought I was the most hideous thing in the world. Hideous,” she said bleakly to Weymouth. She was isolated inside her own family, the only ugly child in a family of beauties; and her nanny's power to hurt was as great as her mother's. The top girls' school in New York, which celebrated her beautiful, sporty, clever younger sister, had rejected her, evidently proving her mother's point. It was a very low time. “But I think when you're young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings,” said Diana years later. “Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.

“It all came together for me when I got back to New York.”

Chapter Two

The Girl

T
he first change was educational. In the autumn of 1917, Diana, who was now fourteen, started at a smaller, less academic school run by a Mrs. Randall McIver. The atmosphere was friendly; there were no more “goddamn gongs”; and when she forgot to do her homework, no one seemed to mind. Mrs. McIver held classes only in the mornings, making a second change possible since Diana was able to attend Louis Chalif's dancing school in the afternoons. In later life she made it sound as if she abandoned academic education altogether in favor of a ballet school run by the Russian dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine. This was not the case, not least because Fokine did not open his New York studio until 1921; but in dispatching Diana to Chalif's school two or three times a week, Emily did enroll her with New York's leading dance educator of the time. Chalif was a distinguished Russian figure in his own right, the former ballet master of the Government Theater in Odessa. He wrote books for dance teachers and is credited with developing simplified ballet instruction for American children.

“I am simply crazy over dancing and over Mr. Chalif,” wrote Diana in a diary she started in January 1918. Chalif had the gift of creating an atmosphere that was both disciplined and encouraging. “He is so nice & never gets mad or anything and I wish I could do nothing but take a nice warm bath with loads of perfume & dance dance dance.” His classes proved to be a powerful antidote to her problems at home: “Music can do something to me that nothing else can. It just makes me forget everything.” Inspired by Chalif's classes, Diana longed to be a dancer when she grew up. By 1917 Isadora Duncan had opened up the idea of dance as an activity for noble, artistic women who hungered to connect the soul to spontaneous free expression of the body; and in her diary Diana wrote that she yearned to go to Duncan's school and become one of her semiadopted daughters, known as the “Isadorables.”

Unsurprisingly the notion that Diana should run off and become an “Isadorable” was not encouraged by her family. Neither was the idea that she should become a professional dancer. Her diary suggests that Diana would in fact have settled for much less, in the form of a kind word from Emily about her dancing, but even this was not forthcoming: “I still don't think mother thinks I dance well and I guess I don't but I won't drop it,” she wrote. Having put herself out to find a new school and enroll Diana in ballet classes, Emily seems to have left her to get on with it. There is no suggestion in Diana's diary that she came to watch her in class, although she was in New York at the time. Diana's grandmother Mary Weir, known to her granddaughters as “Ama,” and her husband did put in an appearance, though even their reaction was distinctly qualified. “Ama and Daddy Weir went to saw me [
sic
] and they say I'm awfully good but that I don't kick out my feet enough & I don't thro my head back enough.” In the end the daydream faded of its own accord when Diana was overcome by self-consciousness during Chalif's end-of-term shows in Carnegie Hall. “I suffered, as only the very young can suffer, the torture of being conspicuous,” she said.

I
n spite of Emily's lack of interest in Diana's new craze, her own love of dancing had a great impact on her eldest daughter and on her view of fashion in the longer term. The Dalziels knew Irene and Vernon Castle, creators of the Castle Walk and a host of other ballroom dances adapted for polite society from raunchy South American originals, which became the rage from about 1912. The Castles came to 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street, probably to give Emily and Frederick Dalziel private lessons. Irene Castle was a fashion phenomenon, much fêted for the slim, uncorseted look she developed so that she could dance unencumbered, and for her short haircut of 1915, known as the “Castle bob.” Emily's enthusiasm for the Ballets Russes had an even greater influence on Diana's ideas about the “modern” female body and the way it should be dressed. Diana may or may not have encountered Diaghilev fleetingly before the First World War; what is more important is that she was taken to see his ballets as she grew up and her eyes were opened at a young age to the work of Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Nijinsky and the greatest artists and musicians of the period. Even as a child Diana was encouraged to admire the bold and brilliant colors, the rich textures, and the new silhouettes of Diaghilev's vision, and the dress designers he influenced, Paul Poiret above all; and it is possible to trace her lifelong fascination with Cleopatra and Scheherazade to Diaghilev's mock-Oriental conceptions of 1909 and 1910. Diana was not grateful to her mother for much, but she did appreciate being allowed to witness the first great revolution in style of the twentieth century at close range when she was very young: “I realize now I saw the whole beginning of our century . . . everything was new.”

Emily also shared an outlook influenced by gymnastics, calisthenics, and the dress reform movement: aesthetic movements that emphasized healthy diets, fresh air, and exercise, as well, of course, as an attitude to sex that was anything but puritan. Paul Poiret claimed to have been the first to abandon the corset in 1905. In doing so, he captured a wider female mood that rejected restrictive clothes and embraced the pleasures of motion and rhythm. Diana sensed this when she tried to explore in her diary what dancing felt like: “I like dancing with lots of noise. I hate fluffy costumes. I like Spanish and gypsy costumes. I like diamond headed daggers and tambereens [
sic
]. I like it when you put your foot down hard on floor [
sic
] and the drum makes a boom.” Her diary offers a glimpse of her pleasure in the physicality of dance and the way dancing strengthened her sense of herself.

Diana's lessons with Louis Chalif in 1918 set her on the road to recovery after much misery, but her mother's love of dancing and her decision to enroll Diana with Chalif also marked the beginning of many long-standing passions: for rhythm and music; for ballet and ballet dancers; for leotards and ballet pumps; and for designs that worked with the natural body, rather than clothes that corseted and constrained it. Chalif's classes started Diana's preoccupation with posture, health, and fitness in a way that was years ahead of its time. Decades later, her delight in the attractiveness of the invigorated, well-stretched body and long, long limbs would resurface repeatedly on her fashion pages and in her photo-autobiography,
Allure.
But in 1918 the real importance of Chalif's classes lay elsewhere. “When I discovered dancing,” said Diana, “I learned to dream.”

A
lthough life improved after she left Brearley in 1917, Diana remained vulnerable to Emily's insensitivity, narcissism, and petty cruelties, and was often made very depressed by her. It is clear from her diary in January 1918 that her relationship with her mother was still dreadful. “Mother and I agree on practically nothing . . . I can't do anything but think & think about it.” Her unhappiness was palpable. “I cried this morning. I feel like crying now. I don't know what to do. It really isn't fair toward mother. If only I knew what to do. I do nothing but argue & contradict mother & it must stop. It's awful but I can't help it.” Not being able to talk to Emily made the problem far worse. “It's one of the big problems of my life today. I can't tell mother. I would not know what to tell her. If I went to her & told her that I was unhappy she'd never understand & say I was an ungratefull [
sic
] little wretch.” She kept many things from her mother, she wrote, and it was all the more painful because Emily insisted that she and her eldest daughter were chums. Diana regarded this as pure hypocrisy. “Mother always says we are good friends. We are not. It seems to me we never were & if we ever will be I don't know.”

However, the diary also reveals that Diana was learning to save herself from emotional evisceration by escaping to a world of her own. Boris Cyrulnik, a leading French expert on resilience in childhood, observes that sensitive, imaginative children often survive bad childhoods better than the tough and unimaginative young, precisely because of their aptitude for escaping from bleak reality by transporting themselves over and over again to a fantasy parallel universe. “Freud thought that a happy man did not need to dream and that reality was enough to keep him satisfied,” writes Cyrulnik, “[but] only children who can dream can save themselves.”

By any standard Diana was an exceptionally imaginative child. At fourteen she felt this intuitively and tried to explore how it set her apart from other people. “I have always had a wonderful imagination. I have thought of things that never could be found,” she wrote.

For instance I play the Polonaise. I feel the anger, the strife and pride myself with jealousy of a race of people that live in a cold barren country. It bring(s) before me the magnificence & glory of a great expanse of territory occupied only by peasants. A Spanish tango and any other Spanish music brings me strait
[sic]
to sunny warm Spain full of people in brilliant costumes . . . the music is full of coquetry as the girl that dances to it is flirting with a group of admirers.

Diana needed only to focus inwardly for a moment to visualize a scene in which she hovered at the center, remarking years later to Chrisopher Hemphill: “I keep constructing tableaux in my mind. Usually, they're of these memories—if that's what you can call them. Usually, they're of conversation. And usually, they're of something somebody said at dinner.” She was already doing this at fourteen, though in 1918 inspiration naturally came from the world around her rather than dinner parties. To take just one example, she flirted with the idea of becoming a Roman Catholic, like one of her friends at Mrs. McIver's, before deciding she was not sufficiently devout. Instead she settled for an image of herself saying her prayers before an ivory crucifix, a victory of style over substance for which she would later be much criticized: “There is something so wonderfull [
sic
] about a girl just a girl in a fresh white nightdress kneeling before a pure white crucifix in the candle light—I shall really be like that I want to be heavenly.”

Looking back, Diana thought she was also saved by a strength of character that her fragile mother lacked. “I was much stronger—with a stronger will and a stronger
character
—but I didn't realize it then.” She was a determined fourteen-year-old, and she was determined to become great. Keeping a diary was, in fact, part of the greatness plan. “All great people kept diaries so I think I will keep mine very seriously henceforth,” she wrote on January 10, 1918. Though she dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer, another potent daydream was, quite simply, showing everyone that they were wrong about her. If she could not be a dancer, she would be an actress or an interior decorator. But it was agony to think how long she would have to wait, and her diary was filled with daydreams of escape. As Diana said later, “Some children have people they want to be. I wanted to be anywhere
else.
” In 1918, however, she was in no doubt that marriage was the most realistic evacuation route, and she weighed her options. A creative sort was one possibility: “I want sometimes an artist, wild and fantastic, that will fall in love with my small white feet etc oh but very, very, wild and horribly good looking.” But a Wall Street chap was indubitably more sensible: “Then the next day I want a man with money, moustache, good looks . . . of course the latter variety is more practical but still I want a wild romance—wild, oh si, si wild—an Italian painter who will want to model me in marbl [
sic
] and paint me as the Bohemians did with a tambourine and a dagger.”

It was not all fantasy, however. Emily had impressed on Diana that she would need to be self-supporting when she was older. It is unclear whether in saying this Emily was worried about Diana's chances of finding a husband because of her looks or her lack of private income, or was simply trying to make her do her homework. Whatever the reason, Diana took Emily's injunction very seriously and worried about money for the rest of her life. Her first recorded attempt to do something about her financial situation—and to earn cash from a woman's magazine—appeared on January 23, 1918. She had written to the
Woman's Home Companion
“pin-money club” which offered readers the chance to earn a few dollars through the magazine. However, Diana then discovered that she would be required to sell subscriptions, which she did not think would be “quite correct.” On the other hand, at fourteen she also unknowingly rehearsed being editor in chief of a fashion magazine in the most intriguing way, not just by endlessly constructing tableaux in her mind but by spending hours cutting out images from magazines and catalogs and rearranging them. “I am making a divine collection of pictures from the penny picture catalogue. . . . I spend hours a day but very interesting hours picking out and choosing and disciding [
sic
].”

It is clear from her diary at this time that Diana was gifted not just with a prodigious inner eye but a way of looking intently at the world beyond her family that was already becoming second nature. She frequently talked to herself about the houses she visited: “Mrs. McKeever has lots of taste & the whole apartment is sort of dark and rich in coloring.” Ama, on the other hand, had no taste at all. “The house is terrible, it is so ugly. Ama knows a beautiful thing when she sees it but she can not create a beautiful thing.” In her diary she transposed these observations into plans for her grown-up bedroom on the happy day when she was finally in control of her own destiny: “I would love a bedroom in French gray and turquoise blue & then a boudoir opening off it. I would line it in a dull grey [sic] and dull grey blue. I'd like to have painted furniture & bowls of fruit and flowers. Also transparent plum colored glass and dried rose petals. Also incense.”