D.V. (15 page)

When I went to Paris for the collections and to see Bérard, I stayed at the Crillon. The Crillon was quite an old-fashioned place when I was there all those years. I always had the feeling of total privacy. I mean that you come in and the place would be solid with people. You take the lift to your own floor, and that's it; you wouldn't know anyone else was in the place. Everyone looks after you beautifully. No one makes a mistake: you're not called at ten minutes to seven, you're called at exactly a quarter to seven. And a certain sort of splendor.

Some hotels are created not so much by splendor as by a great concierge. The Grand Hotel in Rome is attractive to me because of its divine concierge, Buzo. Do you know him? He's the best-looking, the sweetest, the most intensely interested…if there's one person on earth, it's
you
. Everybody gets the same treatment. And at the same time he's talking Arabic to somebody in Cairo, and he picks up the next phone and is talking God knows what to somebody in Borneo.

I've come in the middle of the night, I've just telephoned, and he is there and he has a room and everything is hunky-dory. But you wouldn't get that from the French or the English.

Do you know the Cavendish on Jermyn Street in London? Rosa Lewis was the proprietress. She was once the mistress of Edward
VII and was passed on to Lord Ribblesdale, who was painted by John Sargent—the beautiful one with the top hat. He left her this hotel, which was rundown but had great character. She had a somewhat arbitrary system of billing. If she liked you or she knew you were a student and didn't have much money, you could stay at the Cavendish for almost nothing. But if you had a rich name, and especially an American name, she could really sock it to you when the bill arrived.

Dolly Schiff, the daughter of Mortimer Schiff, the banker, and I were in London together—it must have been in '30, '31—and Dolly said: “Let's have lunch at the Cavendish.”

I said, “I never heard of anybody
lunching
there. I wonder if they have a dining room.”

“Of course they have a dining room.”

The doorman, a little short man, came up to us.

We said, “We'd like to have some lunch, a very light lunch.”

In a few minutes a little white terrier appeared. And then in another moment Rosa herself appeared. She was an enormous woman; she filled a lot of space. She had a bottle of champagne in her hand. “Now, you young ladies, you're both American, aren't you?” Very, very anxious to know our names. If Dolly says that she's a Schiff, we're just in for it; we'll get the bill for fifty quid to pay for the last hotel guests she charged a few shillings for a week's stay because she liked them.

She got out a card table in her private little sitting room and put down the champagne. There's never been such an attractive lunch, ever. But she kept prying, trying to find out who we were. Finally she said, “Now, how would you like to see some of my pretty rooms?”

“That would be lovely.”

Dolly said, “I have a lesson at the Royal School of Needlework”—she really did; it wasn't an excuse at all—“and I mustn't be late for it. So I'll leave you here.”

She took my car. I couldn't get out of the hotel. I began to panic. Rosa Lewis took me upstairs. She opened a door. “Major!
Major
! Are you there?
Here's an American girl for you
!” She pushed me in and then kept pushing me into the bathroom where the old boy—
you won't believe it!—was lying in his bath, staring up at me from one of those huge tubs with claw feet.

I said, “I beg your pardon. I guess we all know our hostess: she's very exuberant and very sort of…and good afternoon.”

And down I went, as fast as I could get there, to
anyplace
. I mean anyplace! Down the back stairs and out into Jermyn Street, where I hailed a cab!

What an adventure!

Did you know I'm always having the most extraordinary conversations with taxicab drivers? They have views, I can tell you, on
everything
. Just the other day I walked out to the corner of Park Avenue, hailed a cab, stepped into it, and asked to be taken to the Museum. It was a Monday and I was back in business, so I took out my papers and stretched my legs, as I always do when I'm alone in a cab. After five blocks or so, the cab stopped at a red light and the driver said, “Madam”—I knew he'd been looking at me in the mirror for the past five blocks—“would you mind if I asked you a question?” Do you remember in the middle of the war when I drove you and Clark Gable to the end of Long Island to visit your friend Millicent Rogers?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember it very well. And I remember you, too.”

Millicent had picked up this driver during the war. Because of the gas rationing she wasn't allowed a car and driver, but she took a fancy to this man and his taxi, and he practically became a member of the family. She'd send him out with her maid to match a pair of sandals, or if she needed her maid at home, she'd send him out to match this color shirt and this color cardigan…. Eventually, he became totally her employee, and anytime the two of us went anywhere, she'd send this taxi for me, and this man. Her one and only beloved taxi driver.

He never looked around at me. He looked through the mirror and we talked about Millicent Rogers the rest of the way to the Museum.

I didn't give him a big tip. That would have been patron
izing. But as I left him, I said, “Neither of us will ever forget that beautiful woman, will we?”

Talk about
style
! Millicent and Elsie Mendl were the two women in my “American Women of Style” show at the Museum I knew best. Millicent often lived in St. Anton, in Austria. What was so charming was that she used to go into Innsbruck to sketch all the nineteenth-century costumes in the museum and have them made up by the village tailor. Then she'd arrive in Paris wearing a really nifty black Schiaparelli suit…matching this with the shirt that she'd had made in the village and also some marvelous thing on her head. Or else she'd have on a very chic hat and a dirndl skirt.

Have I ever told you about the night I saw Millicent at a party at the old Ritz-Carlton here in New York? She started out the evening wearing a dress by Paquin—black silk with a bustle and a train. When dessert was served, she spilled some ice cream and left the room to change into another dress. When the coffee was served, she spilled some of
that
and went off to change into
another
dress. Millicent's pure American: Standard Oil—that's H. H. Rogers. After divorcing Millicent's mother he went through marriage after marriage to be free, and in a hurry, to marry yet another: one of his ex-wives was dug up because she had glass in her stomach, another because she had gunpowder in her something or other…one scandal after another.

Millicent liked beautiful men, and she was just
mad
about Clark Gable. Mad! They were having a big love affair. He wasn't all that handsome. His head was too big. She was seductive beyond discipline…a lot for Clark to handle. Perhaps a European could have done it, but he was an American and he was
very
naïve. He was meat and potatoes—and sex. I'm sure he was never terrible to her in the way of cheating on her in a common way, but he
drank
. Clark would order three cases of scotch, lock himself in his hotel room, and give orders that no calls were to be put through. He didn't shave, he didn't bathe—he
drank
. And ten days later, or
two weeks
later, he emerged.

But I wish I could give you a load of his
eyelashes
! He had
the most beautiful eyelashes I've ever seen on a man—on a
human being
. They were exactly like a Shetland pony's. Now you're probably not as intimate with Shetland ponies as I am. They're terrible little beasts—but they have the longest,
fuzziest
eyelashes of any creature you've ever seen. Clark's were
exactly
like that.

I remember one evening with him at El Morocco when it was at the height of its chic. We arrived; we stood behind the red velvet rope. By then, the word had gone out that Mr. Gable was in the house, and Mr. John Perona, the owner, came to take us to our table. Clark grabbed my hand. “Don't look left,” he said, “and don't look right—just keep walking. Hold on to your hat, kid—the place is gonna
blow
!”

As he
said
it…the place went berserk—I mean
berserk
! The stares! The people leaning out over their tables! These are “sophisticated” people I'm talking about…it was almost
animalique
, like a roaring zoo. All I can tell you is that that place
did
blow. Power has got to be the most
intoxicating
thing in the world—and of all forms of power, the most intoxicating is
fame
.

“Hold on to your hat, kid….” That's what Clark said. Exactly. I wasn't wearing a hat, as you can imagine. I was wearing what I always wore in the forties—a snood, like a little Goya, shall we say.

I think the Hearsts paid me eighteen thousand dollars a year for twenty-eight years for working at
Harper's Bazaar
. San Simeon must have been where the Hearst money went. I certainly never saw any of it.

I was the most economical thing that ever happened to the Hearst Corporation. Perhaps they loved me because I never knew how to get any money out of them. They were never known for their largesse. That's why I finally left.

Carmel Snow had been a wonderful editor. She was keen as mustard right up until the time in my last years at
Harper's Bazaar
when she simply stopped coming into the office. I think she could no longer stand the pressures. I think she lost the will. For two or three years she was fading away, and although it never occurred to me that I was running the magazine during those years, that's what I was doing. After twenty-eight years, in 1959, the Hearsts gave me a raise—a thousand dollars. Can you imagine? Would you give your cook that after she'd worked for you for twenty-eight years?

The only person to go to for a raise when I was with
Harper's Bazaar
was Richard Berlin. He ran the empire for old W. R.
Hearst. One night, fifteen years after I had left
Harper's Bazaar
, I was dining with Andy Warhol and some of the boys from the Factory at Pearl's Restaurant. Brigid Berlin, Richard's daughter, came over to the table. She's a bit of all right. Her father was at their table in the center of the restaurant. By this time he was living comfortably but completely in the past. He was still the handsomest thing. He had been a great friend of the Duke of Windsor's in the old days. Marvelously turned out. No one ever tied a tie like that, including the Duke of Windsor. I can remember the Duke saying, “Dick, no one can tie a tie like you.”

After Brigid came over to our table, here came Dick. He stood behind my chair and put his arms around my shoulder. He announced to the restaurant in general: “Without this kid”—speaking of me—“we wouldn't have a Hearst press. She runs everything.” Then he began shouting: “The most brilliant editor on the block…” et cetera, et cetera. He was living completely in the past.

At this point, Brigid interrupted and said, “Well, then, don't forget, you have to give Diana a raise. She wants a raise, Daddy.”

And so Daddy said, “Anything she wants, we
give
!!” He seemed to have no idea where he was.

When he was in his prime, the Hearst people had been nowhere near so forthcoming. So when the boys at
Vogue—
Pat Patcevitch and Alex Liberman—came to see me…suddenly I made up my mind to listen to them. They wanted me to shift to them. I said, “Listen, I like everything here. I like it where I am. You've got to offer me a lot.”

“We're offering you the moon and sixpence,” they said—and they did. They offered me a very large salary, an endless expense account…and Europe whenever I wanted to go.

That's what hooked me. Carmel Snow had always covered the Paris collections for
Harper's Bazaar
. As much as I'd seen of America, I wanted to get back to Europe. So I moved to the Condé Nast Press and
Vogue
.

I had loved Condé, you know. This terrible thing had de
feated him—stock market in '29. Eighteen million, which of course was his personal savings of a lifetime. He died in 1942. Sam Newhouse, whom I adored, told me that he bought
Vogue
for a million dollars from the Condé Nast Press to give to his wife, Mitzi, for Christmas, to see what she could do with it. Condé being dead, there was nobody there with any sort of ink in his blood. No one.

I was given Condé's office when I arrived. I was terribly flattered. His office was enormous. I did the most terrible thing. I said to Patcevitch, “Listen, Pat, I cannot sit at a desk and watch someone walk for that length of time into a room. I can't do it. I feel like saying, ‘Hurry up, get going a little faster.'” So I cut off the end of the room—can you imagine?—with a partition. I mean, this was like cutting off part of St. Peter's in Rome.

I made a big secretarial office and put three secretaries in there. I had wonderful English secretaries; they kept everything in perfect order, so when I came in in the morning it looked as if I were very neat. Some people have huge round tables, like dining-room tables, where they can have meetings. Because I never
have
a meeting and never
attend
a meeting and wouldn't know
what to do
with a meeting, I just had a big black desk for myself. Beyond it was a big, long table of the same black lacquer, where the photographs were stacked. I had my bulletin board. I had a leopardskin carpet, I think, and leopardskin upholstery. And scarlet walls. It wasn't at all exotic. I hate exoticism because it's so silly. I had two Swedish cane chairs that were simply beautiful—for guests to sit in—but only two of them. Then a little sofa. And the rest was all bookshelves. It was a very workaday office, no chichi, and lots of space and fresh air. I was there till about half past seven every night. It got awfully trafficky in there. All the London lads were coming over. All the divine girls from Czechoslovakia and Poland…and oh, my God, the girls were so good-looking! The photographers were going crazy—some more than others. Do you know the Italian photographer Penati? He sort of floated into our lives like a strange cloud. I had seen in an Italian magazine some photographs he'd taken of the children of royalty, who, of course, are always the most beautiful children in the world. The Italian
royalty may not have been
quite
in the beauty department, but then you must remember that the grandmother—I may be a generation or so off—was the daughter of a goatherd. But they're almost always wonderful looking, aren't they? They always seem to be in sailor suits. I took the photographs in to Alex Liberman and said, “This chap is a dream.”

An Italian friend told me a marvelous story about Penati. Apparently, everyone in Turin, in Milan, was crazy about his photographs of children. Once, he was asked by a very social Milanese family to photograph their children for a Christmas present for the father of the family.

Penati said, “All right; if you want me to photograph your children, I've got to be totally and completely alone with them.”

The family protested. They said, “Somebody must be there. The phone will ring; there will be parcels being dropped off from the market. And, after all, we have to eat.”

He said, “No, it's impossible. If people are going to be around, I can't photograph the children.”

They said, “Well, you've got to make one exception. We insist that the
governess
stay. We absolutely insist!”

So he said, “All right, I'll come at nine in the morning, and no one else is to come in until five.”

So the family and household went out then and spent the day wandering around Milan—they shopped; they went to the zoo. They finally returned about half past five. Quiet. Quiet as anything. They pushed open the door. All the children were sitting on the floor eating huge bowls, like basins, of ice cream, and there were cakes everywhere. And the governess was completely nude on the sofa being photographed by Penati!

Isn't it divine?

Well, you can imagine how
he
felt working for
Vogue
with all these extraordinary beauties pouring in from Europe.

I don't think anyone has ever been in a better place at a better time than I was when I was editor of
Vogue. Vogue
always did stand for people's lives. I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere;
it's the life you're living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.

Like all great times, the sixties were about personalities. It was the first time when mannequins
became
personalities. It was a time of great goals, an
inventive
time…and these girls invented
themselves
. Naturally, as an editor I was there to help them along.

Twiggy! I didn't discover her—not
actually
. I knew who she was and I sent for her. I'd seen her once in
Elle
in a very, very small picture—just the head. Then this strange,
macabre
little
bit
, like a waif, came to see me in New York with hair like cornsilk, the most wonderful skin and bones…and then she'd open her mouth and the most extraordinary English would come out. “Blimey!” she'd say, with the
face
of an English beauty. There's never been a Cockney like Twiggy—but then, the sixties were the great era for Cockneys.

Twiggy was never without a bodyguard. When she came to see me in my office or when we'd be fitting clothes, he'd always be sitting just outside the door with this big loose bag in front of him. His name was Monk, I recall, and we'd talk. One day I said, “What's in the bag? Guns?”

“Yeah,” he said, and opened it up. There must have been seventeen of them in there.

“Oooh…my word!” I said. “We
are
safe.”

Then there was Cher. I didn't invent
her
either—I don't think anyone ever suggested one
thing
to Cher—but it was certainly me who brought her into the world of
Vogue
. I must tell you where I found her—where I
discovered
her.

It was in Morocco on a little strip of beach between Mohammadia and Rabat. Reed and I had gone there to visit my son Frecky's little family. We were staying in a hotel with tiny rooms like monks' cells right next to where one of the king's palaces was being built, and every day our grandsons would visit and we'd go to the beach together. One day, on the beach, a piece of newspaper blew our way. It must have been from a Czechoslovakian paper or something, because I couldn't read the language—I know it wasn't Arabic, which, naturally, I read
fluently—
but on the scrap of newspaper was a picture
of this perfectly
marvelous
-looking girl. It was Cher. So I put her picture in my attaché case and took it back to New York with me.

“My God,” I said when I got back to
Vogue
, “this girl's a
dream
! I suppose you've already used her—tell me about her.”

No one had heard of her, at least not in my office—though they should have. So I tracked her down, sent for her…and did we
use
her! She modeled for us
forever
.

At the same time mannequins became personalities in the sixties, personalities became mannequins. It was my idea to use Barbra Streisand as a mannequin. Her success was
overnight
. I sent her to Paris with Dick Avedon to model the collections. We sent her twice. We shot her in profile with that Nefertiti nose of hers…the pictures were awfully chic.

What's that terrible phrase one used to hear? “Relate,” as in “
relate
to.” People were always relating to themselves, and that's where they went wrong. I think part of my success as an editor came from never worrying about a fact, a cause, an atmosphere. It was me—projecting to the public. That was my job. I think I always had a perfectly clear view of what was
possible
for the public.
GIVE 'EM WHAT THEY NEVER KNEW THEY WANTED
.

At the same time, I've always had an abhorrence of
popularity
. In fashion, you have to be one step ahead of the public. This was never more true than in the sixties. Sometimes I would take too large a step and fall flat.

Once I decided to lay an entire issue of
Vogue
out backward, like a Japanese book, because that's how I thought everyone looked at magazines—I simply
assumed
so. You always see people reading that way, flipping a magazine from back to front. We never published it. It would have been a flop. But the basic
idea
was right.

The management of
Vogue
never bothered me about what I did inside the magazine editorially. But covers I had little control over. When I first arrived, I did the covers for seven or eight months, including one with an Irving Penn picture of a mannequin with a finger on the bridge of her nose and wearing a pair of zebra-striped snake bracelets—and I was told it was a complete failure at the news
stands. I'm not saying that they made it fail to discourage me, but I know, when it come to covers, that they always wanted me to be
popular
.

I never fought it. I remember a man called Mr. Young who was in the getting-it-around-the-country department—“circulation,” I think it's called—who had a great effect on me. “You're in the provinces, Mrs. Vreeland,” he said, “you're in the small cities, the small towns, the villages and the hamlets…. Leave the covers to us. We'll sell it off the newsstands. Inside is your department.”

Inside, I once in the sixties ran a picture that couldn't get through the post office in some states.
That
was something. It was a picture from Courrèges's first collection of pants—a top, a bare midriff, and a
belly button
showing. The letters came in. “This is a house where magazines are put out on the coffee table, and now we find it impossible to put
Vogue
there. As the mother of a nineteen-year-old son…”

“My God, lady,” I thought, “let him go! Send him away! One night in Tangiers! Tunis!
Cairo
!…”

“Why did you run a picture like that?” the staff wanted to know.

“Because I'm a reporter,” I said. “I know
news
when I see it! What are we talking about, for Christ's sake—pleasing the bourgeoisie of North Dakota? We're talking
fashion—
get with it!”

That picture
was
news at the time. The curious thing is that if you look at it today, it's so square, so respectable—so
dated
.