My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (4 page)

I finally got my first job answering phones in a fashion photography studio, and, oh, those gorgeous models—Suzy Parker, Nina DeVoe, Jean Patchett, Dovima! They were trooping in and out of the office all day. I loved the charged atmosphere in that studio, the snits, the glamour of it all.

There were passing references to this powerful editor, I didn’t catch the name, but I was an extremely style-conscious young woman and it was because of her that my hemlines went up or down by a fraction of an inch from year to year, to just below the knee, to the knee, or at the knee. One millimeter off from this year’s hem spelled disaster: you were a total frump. The little sheaths I wore, the low-heeled pumps, short white gloves, a ribbon in the hair, these were hers, all hers. She told me when I could go without stockings in the spring, and how to tie a little scarf over my hair and behind my ears in the summer heat; she introduced me to thong sandals and, later on, the bikini.

At the same time this nameless source was being quoted in the confines of Fuchsia Moon:

Hugh and Philip often quoted these infamous suggestions from the “Why Don’t You?” column in
Harper’s Bazaar
. Some people were horrified by the blatant trumpeting of excess. Humorist S.J. Perelman even published a lampoon of them. Our set understood Vreeland’s intentional hyperbole. I still wasn’t aware of who she was, though

I
T WASN
’
T UNTIL A DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD OF HER NEWLY DESIGNED
living room appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
that I registered her name. Diana Vreeland’s “Garden in Hell.” I went nuts. This living room knocked everybody’s socks off. You have to understand that in the fifties, the ruling décor of the day was beige; everything was beige or gray or modulations of beige and gray. The cardinal sin was to “clash.” Now here was a veritable jungle of clash, crash, smash, brilliant red: red lacquered chairs; red floral chintz crawling up the walls and over the sofa and around the mirror, mixed with paisley, needlepoint, plaid, checks, and bargello; candelabra, pink tulips, paintings, blackamoor heads, gilt putti, horn snuff boxes, giant conch shells, and silver framed family photos littering every tabletop. Floral mixed with stripes! Leopard skin with crochet! You simply couldn’t do that. It wasn’t allowed.

When I thought about it later, I realized it was actually French decor. You only had to look at a room by Vuillard to recognize the patterns on top of patterns. But we didn’t have jet planes back then. Nothing like it had been seen this side of the Atlantic before. For decades afterwards, this décor was so widely imitated by gay blades about town that it became a cliché.

I became more vividly aware of Vreeland in the early sixties, when she left
Harper’s
to become editor-in-chief of
Vogue
. Hugh’s girlfriend, Phyllis, was a copyeditor at Condé Nast at the time and came home with stories about her, swooping into the copy room on her first day purring, “
I want you all to write with quill pens!
” Another time she had a layout for little zippered satin jackets she planned to headline “The Windbreaker” until she was told at the last minute the word was patented. This time she roared into the copy room shouting, “
Quick! What’s another word for breaking wind?
”

I
DON’T RECALL WHEN
M
ARK AND
I
DECIDED ON THE TITLE FOR OUR
Vreeland play. I know it was pretty early on, and even when pressure was put on us to call it
D.V.
or
Think Pink
, or something equally as boring, we stuck with
Full Gallop
.

We started meeting on a regular basis, usually at my apartment. I always enjoyed being with Mark. He has a gift for empathy: any maddening or embarrassing incident I describe, he seems to instantly recognize and identify with. He has a biting sense of humor and a taste for the bizarre, for exaggeration. We kept our paying jobs, but for both of us, Mrs. Vreeland became our main thing.

The last thing we wanted to write was a bio-play. We didn’t want to box this fantastic creature in with fact recitals. And it wasn’t our goal to try to please her family. I didn’t think we could do that. We even thought they might object to our version. My first idea was to write a sort of variety show with two handsome guys in tuxes on either side of her as she spouted her deathless pronouncements. This idea bit the dust almost as soon as it was out of my mouth. I remembered that one of the most annoying things about a one-person show is when he or she floats around in space. We decided, no matter how larger-than-life we wanted this to be, we had to anchor her somewhere, and the obvious choice was her wild and woolly living room, her Garden in Hell.

Not that this was going to be a one-woman show. There was no way we were going to do that. We despised one-person shows; in fact we originally got together to write a take-off of one, mocking the absurdity of the lone character having to supply their own exposition, talk to the air, make excessive use of the phone, and pretend that people were hovering just off-stage. There was the cautionary tale, perhaps apocryphal, of Tallulah Bankhead on tour in her one-woman show, stepping off left onto her balcony to talk to an unseen friend, and a voice from the audience calling out, “Invite him in!”

Besides, it’s a well-known fact that one-woman shows, like comedy, and cats, get no respect. When it comes to awards, they’re put in a separate category from plays. The Tony Awards don’t even have a category for them. To avoid this stigma, we wrote a part for a maid, Yvonne. Mrs. Vreeland actually had an Yvonne, i.e., Françoise, for many years. The part was small but telling, she came in with drinks, shut and opened windows, brought in flowers, and emitted an occasional
“Oui, Madame.”

Beyond that, we believed that all we really had to do was select some of her stories and have her sit on a sofa and tell them.

Mark was prodigious. He put every single story in the book on a separate index card. We went over and over them, trying to decide which ones to use; we absolutely had to have her tell the one about entering the El Morocco on the arm of Clark Gable and his saying to her, “Hold on to your hat, kid, this place is gonna blow,” and “as he said it, the place went berserk! … it was almost
animalique
….” And I insisted on the one about announcing to her staff that she was going to devote a whole issue of
Vogue
to showing how to eliminate handbags, how women could keep their powder and lipstick and cigarettes in pockets “like a man does!” only to be reminded that two thirds of the magazine’s income came from handbag ads. But in the end the story didn’t fit. It was a heartbreaking process, because there were so many great ones that we couldn’t use. We suffered from a surfeit.

S
OMEBODY CASUALLY MENTIONED THESE
M
ETROPOLITAN
M
USEUM
videotapes to me, of two costume shows that Mrs. Vreeland had curated: “The Eighteenth-Century Woman” and “La Belle Epoque.” I immediately went to the Met and bought them. I knew what she looked like, but I wasn’t prepared for the impact of seeing her on these tapes. She was what the French called
jolie laide,
translated literally, “ugly pretty.” Now in her seventies, she resembled a magnificently coifed camel. Her slicked-back black hair, her big rouged ears, her broad, expressive mouth, and her long, red-nailed, gesticulating hands were mesmerizing. Her strange Mid-Atlantic cum Brooklyn accent, her gravelly voice and her delivery, not to mention what she was saying, induced in me a mixture of awe and hilarity. This was a revelation of her personality. She was so much more than her pronouncements. Whenever the camera cut away from her I went crazy. Couldn’t they see what they were looking at?

George Plimpton gave us copies of the audio tapes of his conversations with Mrs. Vreeland that he used for
D.V.
This was a veritable cornucopia. There were about twenty tapes, hours and hours of her talking, including asides to the maid, “Take this mess away,” and genteel belches. I spent all of one winter listening to these tapes while painting my kitchen. For five years I walked along the country road by my house practicing her voice and speech patterns, telling her stories to the trees.

Mrs. Vreeland’s friends spanned three decades; names that may be lost to time now but were once great: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cole Porter, Elsa Maxwell, Coco Channel, Helena Rubenstein, Richard Avedon, Mick Jagger, Lauren Bacall, Jack Nicholson, Andy Warhol, Clark Gable, Jackie Kennedy, and she told wonderful stories about them. This was the beauty part; these were her spoken words with her own idiosyncratic syntax. She made up her own slang; Cecil Beaton remarked, “One would think she spent hours in ambiguous Times Square drug stores.”

I
LOVED GOING TO NIGHTCLUBS IN THE FIFTIES
. T
HE GLAMOUR
! New York in the fifties and sixties had a great club scene. I saw Dorothy Loudon at the Blue Angel and Kaye Ballard at the Bon Soir, both gorgeous singers as well as superb clowns. I yearned to be up there myself, my face framed in the spotlight, the dark room full of piano music, cigarette smoke, and “women at their tables loosening their sables,” as Bea Lillie once sang.

I saw a new act at the Blue Angel, Nichols and May. Elaine May’s quavering voice and Mike Nichols’s nasal whine were funny enough on their own, and their sketches were brilliant satires. There was something else utterly unique about them: they seemed to be making the lines up as they went along. This was New York’s first exposure to improvisation, which was a new thing coming from Chicago with a comedy group called the Second City. This was also the first time I saw people performing skits in a nightclub with no singing, which was encouraging because I didn’t want to have to sing in order to be funny. It seemed at that time that you couldn’t do one without the other.

Most intriguing of all were these Julius Monk revues I kept hearing about. I fixated on them. I mooned over their write-ups in
The New Yorker
. They sounded like the ultimate in wit and sophistication. I finally found a date who could afford to take me to see one. The Upstairs room was shaped like a shoebox with red velour walls and a tiny stage at one end. The show consisted of clever musical numbers and funny sketches about New York life. The guys wore dinner jackets and ties and the girls wore black cocktail dresses and white gloves. So
insouciant
! So
soigné
! And all the time they were smiling out at me as if they knew me. Everyone, even the two pianists seated upstage at their spinets, seemed to be having the time of their lives—it gave me the notion there was a party going on just offstage, and any minute I might be invited in. The whole show passed by so swiftly and seamlessly, it was like a perfect soufflé. I thought it was the wittiest, most stylish thing going.

N
EAR MY HOUSE IN UPSTATE
N
EW
Y
ORK, SOME PLAYWRIGHTS
, screenwriters, and actors I knew were forming a group to perform readings of their work. Their chosen name was straightforward enough: “Actors and Writers.” Mark and I signed on for our first reading of
Full Gallop
.

At this point it was pretty simple: me as Mrs. Vreeland on a couch telling stories and giving orders to the maid. Mark wrote a fantastic prologue:

We had a battle over whether the audience would be able to read that the maid was ironing dollar bills; Mark insisted they could, and kept demonstrating, holding them up and waving them around. I didn’t think her red mouth in the magnifying mirror would read either. Ultimately it was a nonissue, since at no point in our attempts to get the play produced was this prologue taken seriously.