Empress of Fashion (6 page)

Those who knew and admired Diana later were often astounded by the way she was never on vacation from her eye. “She was perpetually scanning, monitoring, reaching for some idea, sensation, or tangible item—a fingernail, a color, an eyesocket, a squashed banana, a jewel—that would, in her words, ‘thrill me to madness,' ” wrote Jonathan Lieberson in the 1960s. One friend later described her love of a beautiful object (which frequently opened the eyes of others to its beauty) as “almost fetishistic.” Not everyone who scans the world with such sustained concentration necessarily enjoys it; but from childhood Diana was undoubtedly made happier by looking, an act on which her misery bestowed a fierce intensity. In the manner of many unhappy children Diana learned early the trick, which stayed with her for life, of making herself less miserable by gazing at beautiful things to the point of euphoria. “Some times I feel as if I did not want anything but a wonderfull [
sic
] picture to look at,” she wrote in her diary. At the same time she started to deploy her great imaginative gifts to construct a carapace, a protective sleeve—beginning with the Girl.

T
he girl first appeared in Diana's diary in early January 1918. On January 12 she wrote: “You know for years I am and always have been looking out for girls to idolize because they are things to look up to because they are perfect. Never have I discovered that girl or that woman
. I shall be that girl
.” Denied a female role model, Diana elected to craft her own. She proceeded to list some of the ways she was going to set about it: “Never to be rude to mother sister or anybody. To improve my writing . . . I shall always try terribly hard in everything I do. I shall do things all the time (like make things etc).
Never be idle!
And so on. There are loads and loads of others.” In further diary entries the goal of achieving perfection crystallized around three aims. First, she had to battle her natural disadvantages and transform the way she looked: “I have descoved [
sic
] I don't look pleasant & and if I want to look as well as I do want to I must look pleasant and be sweet and look charming and be ‘the girl.' ” Second, she would improve her manner and the way she spoke: “I have decided that my vocabulary is very small & poor so I am going to try and broaden it.” Third, she would work very hard, although such resolutions were generally subordinate to becoming more attractive: “I shall please everyone in my appearance & my manner and shall work my hardest in everything I do.”

I
n June 1918, when she took her diary up again after a pause, Diana (who was still only fourteen) had an even clearer idea about who she wanted the Girl to be. Smoking, which was just becoming fashionable for stylish young women, was crucial to the effect. “Have smoked a cigarette & adored them. My ambition is to be a dancer or actress have wonderfull clothes and no clothes that aren't wonderfull, smoke and drink cocktails. Not drink hard of course just for the chic of the thing. Yes, those cigarettes were great, marvellous.” She appreciated that this would require a painstaking approach: “I want to look after detail and I simply must be perfect.” It should be noted that learning French was part of the master plan, another clue that Diana was not a Francophone in 1914 as she later claimed. “I must learn French and be able to speak fluently. I must be able to dance and be a belle everywhere I go.”

Diana dreamed of winning the same kind of admiration and intense attention that flowed toward her beautiful sister, Alexandra, whenever she entered a room: “I am going to be able to sing at liberty the song sister sings—‘they are wild, simply wild over me.' ” But rather than compete on Alexandra's territory, she decided to create an alternative, original identity, a different ego-ideal, so that “they” would be “wild, simply wild,” about her stylish appearance, her command of French, her chic smoking technique, and her extensive vocabulary. The young Diana firmly believed she could dream such admiration into existence: “I dreamt of many men coming to me & asking me to take drives with them in their cars. In other words it means that I was popular. I have heard it said that dreams do not come true but I will make this one come
true
!” The campaign would be directed at both sexes. “I shall make myself the most popular girl among boys and girls,” she wrote on January 20. “I'm going to make myself the most popular girl in the world. I know I can succeed. If I don't . . . it will be betrayal of my own self.”

Triumph over youthful adversity has been described as a process, a successful reknitting together of a sense of oneself in stages. Applying herself assiduously to the secret business of becoming the Girl at Mrs. McIver's school turned out to be just as good for Diana's self-esteem as doing well in Mr. Chalif's classes: “Sister's music teacher told me that one of the little girls in school said I was wonderful I'm going to try and make that impression on everyone. My skirt has been lengthened & my hair is held back with a comb and I feel new and fresh.” Her self-conscious attempts to develop her vocabulary and the way she spoke contributed to her success. Her classmates at Mrs. McIver's thought she was entertaining. A new friend, Emily Billings, found Diana particularly funny. “Emily said I talked very well and am very amusing. I'm awfully glad because I love people to talk in an amusing way.” It all led to the most gratifying success. By late January she felt able to write: “You know I'm vastly popular everybody wanted to walk near me & be with them. . . . Well that's just what I'm driving at. Popularity.” By June 1918 it was even better. The plan was working. Her efforts
had
made her more sought-after. “Lots of things have happened since I last wrote in this book—I have become much more popular with everyone. Emily Billings & I are best friends forever, and all the girls at school the latter part of April and May were awfully nice to me—I'm going to make myself the most popular girl in the world. I know I can succeed.”

By June 1918, Diana had her pick of friends, a heady experience after Brearley. Elizabeth Kaufman had asked her to stay; Anne had told Diana she was her best friend, a boost to the morale because Anne was sarcastic and fascinating; her friendship with Emily Billings soared as they exchanged weekly letters filled with mad plans for getting away from their parents and setting up home. “E Billings and I are going to get up a ballet and next winter we are going to have a studio somewhere and I'm going to dance and she is going to draw.” Diana made the important discovery that friendship was a powerful cure for misery caused by one's mother. Boys appeared in her diary too. Like Emily, she was allowed to mix with the opposite sex, without chaperones. Hollis Hunnewell, for example, had nice manners until they were left alone. At that point “he lost them all & we had wonderful time using slang and discussing women's rights.” (Hollis was against women having rights, while she was in favor, a rare instance of Diana arguing the feminist case.) By June, Chanler Chapman was writing her letters, and following her around on his bicycle asking her to marry him.

“I fought for a long time to be like other people,” Diana said later. However, it is clear from her diary that she had already decided to stop being like other people in 1918. Once tentative attempts to change the way the world saw her proved unexpectedly successful, she made up her mind to go one step further. She would finally fulfill the expectations that came with the name her mother had given her, and she would do it alone, for only she had the power to make her life as she wanted it to be.

At this point Diana wobbled back toward the idea of finding a great person on whom to model herself: “then by that I can become great.” She was reading a life of George Sand, and there was much she could learn from the life of Sand, she felt, since they were so alike. She would become an artist like her latest idol. “I want art, pure art,” wrote Diana. “I shall be as I what [
sic
] to be and no other. I am Diana Dalziel I am going to treat myself as a goddess, with respect and I am only for art and for the arts.” Reading about Sand left her in no doubt that becoming a goddess not only meant being different and original, but having the courage and determination to see it through: “Diana was a goddess and I must live up to that name, Dalziel = I dare, therefore I dare, I dare change today & make myself exactly how I want to be. I dare do anything on this earth where there is a will there is a way.”

It would be a mistake to read a sexual undertone into Diana's admiration for the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking George Sand, even if she did express warm feelings in her diary for her new friend Emily Billings. Any such undertow remained subterranean, sublimated in intense female friendships. Diana thought she might be in love with Chanler Chapman, she admired Sand for having many male lovers, and there is plenty of evidence of her interest in the opposite sex. The Girl was the goddess Diana wanted to be, rather than someone she longed to possess; and in 1918 she was an interesting and composite creature. She was bohemian and dedicated to the arts. She liked society and parties. She had many lovers, and flamboyant, daring style. She was in many ways remarkably like Emily and it is not hard to see that at one level Diana wanted to be like her mother and win her approval. As far as Diana herself was concerned, however, the Girl/Goddess was also like no one else at all. She was an idealized girl of her own creation, with whom Diana intended to snuff out the unlovable imperfect version of herself. She was her own hidden source of power.

In summoning an idealized version of herself into being, Diana absorbed several ideas floating in the American ether in 1918. The fashion for the first great U.S. female prototype, the Gibson girl, had passed, but the idea of the perfect woman was surfacing again with the sirens of early Hollywood whose eyes, hair, makeup, and dress (or lack of it) could be scrutinized in close-up for the first time. Diana paid rapt attention to the new screen goddesses. In January 1918 it was the refined beauty of Elsie Ferguson in
The Rose of the World
that made the strongest impression. “It was the most tragic & harrowing thing I ever saw,” she sighed to her diary. “There was only one moment of brightness in it and that was ruined by something happening.” Though the book that popularized the idea of the American dream would not appear until 1931 (James Truslow Adams's
The Epic of America
), there were elements of this, too, in Diana's faith in the power of possibility, and in the connection she made between wish fulfillment and hard work; and there was more than a dash of New England puritanism in her determination to drive herself on through effort and meticulous attention to detail.

It is also possible to detect elements of positive thinking in Diana's adolescent philosophy. Positive thinking was an idea that flourished during this period in books for teenage girls like
Pollyanna
and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
. The cultural historian Ann Douglas suggests that the insistence in these highly influential books on accentuating the positive and turning one's gaze away from the “horrors of life” emerged from a uniquely American mixture of self-help attitudes and quasi-religious, late-nineteenth-century movements such as Mind-cure, Spiritualism, and Christian Science. One common characteristic of these therapies, which were dominated by powerful women, was the assertion that the disciplined conscious mind could win the battle over the dark workings of the unconscious, and that doing so was the key to a happy and successful life. “It's not just nightmares I can't stand,” Diana once said to Christopher Hemphill. “If you really want to know . . . I don't like waking up with an idea stronger than . . . than my own day.” But for all that positive thinking was an American idea, it was also remarkably close to Frederick Dalziel's resolute denial of his wife's affairs, his definite preference for the bright side, and his very British insistence that “worse things happen at sea,” when they were going very badly indeed.

A
fter Diana's death in 1989, a view of her emerged as someone damaged early in life by a great “complex” about her looks, intensified by her sister's beauty and her mother's antipathy. In this interpretation Diana became “Diana Vreeland” because of emotional injury inflicted in childhood. “Changing herself covered up a deep wound,” wrote Eleanor Dwight. Insecurity and pain about her ugliness was so great, ran Dwight's argument, that it induced a lifelong obsession with external appearances that eventually propelled Diana into a position of control where she punished the world by deciding what constituted beauty and ugliness. “In later life,” wrote Dwight, “Diana's models, her magazine pages and her Costume Institute shows would all benefit from her deep need to wave her wand and transform the ordinary and the flawed into the mesmerizingly beautiful. And one day, rather than being the object of criticism by her classmates and her mother, Diana, the powerful fashion editor, would be the judge and decide who was and who wasn't beautiful.”

There is, of course, an element of truth in this. But there is also a danger that this view of Diana unfairly pathologizes her as someone who was driven mainly by a profound and somewhat negative emotional flaw.

It is perhaps more fruitful to pose a different question and ask: What was it that allowed Diana to survive her mother's destructive treatment? An alternative answer is that Diana was a vulnerable child who was saved by the power of her imagination. She deployed it with great intelligence to defend herself against Emily's negative view of her, escaping over and over again to the parallel world of her inner eye in a way that became the basis for much of her later success, which would eventually enable her to challenge conventional ideas about female beauty.

In the meantime, in the six months between January and June 1918, Diana also discovered that when she took tentative steps to align her fantasies with the real, outer world, the real world saw her so differently that her perception of herself changed too.