D.V. (18 page)

Ah, the plainness of life!

I can remember Jackie Kennedy, right after she moved into the White House, telling me what it looked like. There were no flowers anywhere, there was no place to sit, no one was expected…it was awful. It wasn't even like a country club, if you see what I mean
—plain
.

All that changed with the Kennedys. As you know, the White House changed. And the whole country changed. I couldn't believe it happened so quickly, so beautifully—and so easily. How did it happen? Jackie Kennedy put a little style into the White House and into being First Lady of the land, and
suddenly
“good taste” became good taste. Before the Kennedys, “good taste” was never the point of modern America—at all. I'm not talking about manners—standing up when a woman comes into a room. The Kennedys released a positive attitude toward culture, toward style…and, since then, we've never gone back.

I had a
small
part in this. I occasionally gave Jackie advice about clothes. I did suggest that she carry a sable muff on Inauguration Day. It was only for practical reasons—I thought she was going to
freeze to death. But I also think muffs are romantic because they have to do with
history
.

Reed and I went down to Washington for the Inauguration. We went to the ceremony on a snow plow. It was
so
cold that day, as you'll remember, and the snow was
that
thick—there wasn't a branch that wasn't entirely encrusted with ice. And of course, there wasn't a sound. The monuments of Washington stood out in this
white
, white atmosphere. But what I remember best is the blue of the sky.

Don't forget that a low-
ceilinged
town is quite different from a high-ceilinged city like New York, all cluttered up with bricks and mortar and hideous glass skyscrapers. New York is really quite meager in a snowstorm. But Washington that day was so
clean
. And the dome of the Capitol stood out against this
blue
sky—blue like a China blue. I'll never forget that blue—or that day.

The experience was identical to the impression the coronation of George V had made on me as a child. It didn't have to do with grandeur, of course, but it had to do with something very special…. I know too little about America, but that day, for the first time in my life, I felt like an American.

My son Frecky, who really knew the Kennedys better than I did—he and his wife, Betty, knew them from Washington—was with the American Embassy in Rabat when Jack Kennedy was assassinated. He told me that when they woke up that morning—the news had come through to Rabat during the night—the front steps of their house were
absolutely
covered with little bunches of flowers. Then…when my two grandsons went to school that morning, every child stood outside and waited for them to go inside first.

The manners of Eastern countries are so refined.

Shortly before the assassination, my friend Whitney Warren had called me from San Francisco. He's a rich connoisseur of beautiful things and has a charming collection of paintings and porcelain and a ravishing house on Telegraph Hill which looks out on Chinatown. His father was a famous architect who had a scandalous affair with Cécile Sorel of the Comédie-Française—their love letters are in the
Bibliothèque Nationale. She was a woman of the great gesture. When her husband ended up in the bankruptcy courts, she left the Comédie-Française for the Casino de Paris to make money. She spent hours, this great actress, learning how to come down the long curved staircase of the Casino stage, just to walk down at the right speed, with the plumes waving, and the diamonds
in
the plumes, and her arms stretched up, and when she reached the bottom step she called out across the footlights, “
Ai-je bien descendu
?”—Did I come down well?—and the audience went
insane
.

Well, that was Whitney Warren's father's love, and we must not get too far afield or we'll forget where we began. Which was that Whitney Warren called me from San Francisco and said, “I admire Mrs. Kennedy so much that I want to give her the most I can give. I want to give her the Sargent.”

I knew the painting
so
well. A few years before, Whitney had loaned us his house on Telegraph Hill for two weeks while he was away in Europe. I had his bedroom, which was built almost like the prow of a ship, with round windows on three sides framing the most extraordinary views. Between the windows was the most
amazing assemblage
of divine paintings and drawings, including Boldini's wonderful sketch of the Duchess of Marlborough with her youngest son, and then…on the fourth wall, over the bed, hung the Sargent.

It's a painting of a woman in a yellow-white dress, almost faint banana, lying under a black net. The picture is called
The Mosquito Net
. The painting of the dress is marvelous—the way the fabric is draped and the way the light falls on it.
Then…
the expression on the woman's face is the most delectable thing. She's half smiling and half asleep, and you don't know whether she's really worried about mosquitoes or whether the whole thing is a fantasy. That's not the point. The point is the aura the woman gives, and the shadows and the lusciousness and the lightness and the whole allure of it, which is
too
beautiful.

So that day Whitney told me he'd like to give the painting to Mrs. Kennedy. “The thought is wonderful,” I said, “and a woman who has given this country such an inspiration of style, of beauty, of
everything our civilization stands for certainly deserves it, but Whitney, what a
present
. You're giving your right arm, your right leg, your right eye—it's the most beautiful and, in a way, intimate possession I know of anyone having!”

“That's why I want to give it to her,” he said. “That's what I think of her.”

So he started the negotiations to give it away. And then, the President was killed just about the time this extraordinary gift arrived. Mrs. Kennedy left the White House.

It totally got to me—the whole
histoire
of this painting. I had a reproduction of it published in
Vogue
. This is the caption we ran with it:

I can't remember how much of this is mine. Usually, I'd write out a few ideas and give them to the caption writer to work in. I know I wasn't responsible for the reference to
The Tempest—
although I approve totally. But I'm sure I suggested Alain-Fournier. I was always trying to get
Le Grand Meaulnes
in.

The painting now hangs in the Green Room on the State Floor of the White House. It has the title
The Mosquito Net
and the donor's name on a little plaque, but of course it doesn't have anything about
why
it was given, or Whitney Warren's feelings about what the Kennedys had done for the country. I'm not sure it didn't arrive the day he was killed. In fact, I'm sure she's never even seen it.

I've organized twelve exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum. Ted Rousseau got me involved with my Metropolitan shows originally. He came to see me four or five times—he was an old friend and an official of the Museum—and he sat right where you are now and argued with me. I'd say, “Ted, I've never been in a museum except as a tourist.”

He said, “Well, why don't you change around a bit?”

I was free to do it, certainly. I'd been fired from
Vogue
. They wanted a New Deal there. And they got it.

They were not very good at letting people go. One of the great editors at
Vogue
was Margaret Case. She threw herself out a window because she was eighty, she was out of work, she had no money—and she'd been dismissed in the most terrible way. She lived in this building we're sitting in now. From here she'd walk over to Lexington Avenue in the most awful, terrible weather—storms and so on—and take the bus to Forty-second Street to the Condé Nast offices, where when they decided they didn't want her, no one bothered to speak to her…for years.

She had been a great editor. Her gift was Society. She really could smell you out. It was a time when there was a lot of prejudice
everywhere. You have no idea. I'll never forget photographing Baby Jane Holzer—the glorious blonde of the sixties, wonderful looking!—in Paris. The early sixties. Can you remember what the world was like then? Even someone as sophisticated as Tatiana Liberman said, “Do you know who she is?” I said, “No, who is she?” “She's
Jewish
, Diana!” “Well,” I said, “really, Tatiana, this is a sort of a paper for the people. You know, we've put up the circulation by five hundred thousand in three years because we're touching on everybody, so long as they're exciting and glamorous and fashionable…that's our business.”

“Well, so long as you know what you're doing.”

I thought to myself, “I know exactly what I'm doing.”

Margaret Case was part and parcel of this snobbish attitude, but she knew what she was talking about. She came from Ithaca, New York, and the story was that she was part of a dance team. You might ask how Margaret Case, coming out of a provincial environment like that, could become so acute in sniffing out Society. Well, have you ever known a lady's maid? Have you ever known a butler? Try to beat
them
. Not that I'm putting Margaret in the same category. She was a very dignified, good woman. She was very good at fashion. She was Condé Nast's right arm there for a long time. And then they decided to get rid of her. She didn't get the hint. One day she was at her desk, which she'd had for forty or fifty years, and some moving men came and said they had to take the desk away. She said, “But it's my desk. It's got all my things in it.”

Well, they took her desk away and dumped everything in it out. Boxes and boxes arrived here at this building. Isn't that awful? Papers, letters, photographs. I couldn't go upstairs to her apartment, I couldn't look.

Very early one morning my maid, Yvonne, came through the court in the back and found her. She'd gone out the window, sixteen floors. She was as neat as a pin. She was in a raincoat fastened to here, a little handkerchief, all the buttons to the very bottom, and a pair of slacks. I mean, she had thought everything out!

Well, I was fired somewhat more courteously, I must admit. When he heard the news, Ted Rousseau of the Metropolitan Museum
came to see me. I was terribly fond of Ted. What a marvelous man he was. Raised in Paris. He
was
the Metropolitan. He installed me there in an office in the Costume Institute, which has been in the Met for years—founded by the Lewisohn Stadium people. A really fantastic collection had been donated to start things—shawls, wonderful laces, the clothes of the Directoire, et cetera, et cetera, eighteenth-century dresses…it's not only an incredible collection but wonderfully preserved. I took Marie-Hélène de Rothschild there and she said, “Oh, God, Diana, if
my
clothes could be kept like
these
!” Everything, you see, is
breathing
in there; the clothes are behind Venetian blinds in these huge cabinets—the temperature, humidity, and lighting are all carefully controlled.

Balenciaga was the first exhibition. That was the sort of spectacle that the Museum officials expected. But then for the third show we put on one called “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design.” Tom Hoving, who was the director then, got on the phone. “In the name of God, Diana, why are we dragging
Hollywood
into the Metropolitan?”

I said, “Tom, I've been looking at French couture for the last forty years, and I can only tell you that I have
never
seen clothes made like these.”

It was true. They were unbelievable—the clothes those actresses wore. Of course, I'm talking about the glamorous years of Hollywood designs…what Garbo wore as Camille or Mata Hari. The Dietrich dresses in
Angel…
the costumes of Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind
.

I went all over the place to find those clothes. I got them out of the honky-tonks in New Orleans and the warehouses where they sell dresses for the Mardi Gras, and throughout the country. Of course, I went out to the studios in California…sending word to the costumers that I was interested in that period. Each one said, “Oh, Mrs. Vreeland, we have the
biggest
surprise for you! We have the one and only green curtain dress that Scarlett O'Hara wore in
Gone With the Wind
. We've been saving it for you. Everyone's after it. It's just for you.” I always said, “Thank you
very
much, but it's much too nice
of you,” because I had gone to see Danny Selznick, who had given me the key to his father's closet, in which there was a gigantic safe. “Diana,” he said to me, “in there are
all
the clothes from
Gone With the Wind
.” And hanging in a neat row were all the beautiful clothes of Vivien Leigh. I must have been shown twenty “originals” in Hollywood, but at last I came away with the true article.

I always remember about
Gone With the Wind
that when Reed and I were staying in Manhasset, Jock Whitney's sister, Joan Payson, sent her chauffeur down with the manuscript of the book. She asked that I read it quickly because the next morning she was going to send the book off to David O. Selznick in Hollywood. That book made the telephone directory look like a pocket handkerchief. I told the chauffeur to explain to Mrs. Payson that I preferred to sleep at night, or at least part of it, and that what had been handed to me would have kept me up for two or three weeks. Actually I can't stand novels—I don't care what happens to people on paper.

One of my favorite Metropolitan exhibitions was “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungary.” Unfortunately Hungarians don't impress the world anymore—they've never been successful, and success is the only thing the world we live in now understands and remembers.

I'd never been behind the Iron Curtain. I've been to Moscow and Leningrad, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the satellite countries like Hungary. And when I went back to Hungary to arrange for the exhibition at the Metropolitan, I was so dismayed that I couldn't
wait
to do my work and pull out. There
were
a few compensations: no high-rises, so they've won a battle
there
. The baroque contours of the eighteenth-century palaces along the Danube remain. The two museums I was taken to were absolutely immaculate and beautifully lit. But the poverty! The lack of anything for anybody to do. What upset me the most were the men. It was March when I was there—chilly and gray—and the men were walking along in rusty overcoats and carrying black bags. What do you suppose they were carrying in those bags? I could never guess. Certainly not work, because I never had the sense that anybody
was
working.
Wills, perhaps. Or a bottle. They all seemed slightly stooped, which is what happens to people if there is nothing toward which they are walking.

But if you could have been in Budapest before the war, you could have learned history, you could have learned
romance…
Budapest before the war was the most chic city in Europe.

Budapest! Buda-
pest
! There's Buda and there's Pest, with the Danube running in between. When you smell the Danube, you know you're no longer in the West. It's an undefinable smell that comes from the
East
.

The Danube still smells the same. That was the
only
thing that hadn't changed when I went back to Budapest to get clothes for the Hapsburg show. Now it's a gray city with gray buildings, gray people…but the Budapest I remember was the last city of pleasure. It was simply charm and life and violins, and you'd look out a window and see a barefoot gypsy girl leading a bear walking on his hind legs with a ring in his nose, or a beautiful officer in a pale blue jacket with sable cuffs and collar slung over one shoulder. Embroidered boots! The dash of Budapest!

Animals were once a great part of life. They certainly were in Budapest. We'd often have lunch in the zoo among the animals allowed to walk around loose—all sorts of beautiful horned animals and peacocks, cranes, and pelicans. The zoo in Budapest was the most romantic thing you could possibly imagine. Did you know that my favorite movie is
Zoo in Budapest—
with Loretta Young and Gene Raymond. Not many people know there
is
such a movie.

Other days in Hungary we'd drive out to the country just above Budapest, which is like the steppes of Russia, where we saw something we'd seen only in Tunisia. We saw mirages of water, the fata morgana. There we saw cowboys with great wide-brimmed hats.

In the evening we'd go back to the Duna Palato Hotel, where we always stayed. Ah, the total refinement of the Duna Palato! M. Ritz had stayed there with his wife late in the nineteenth century and had decided to copy it.
Every
Ritz hotel, starting with the Ritz on the place Vendôme in Paris, was copied from the Duna Palato,
which was
without
question the best and most luxurious hotel in Europe until it got a direct hit during the war.

We dined in the wine gardens about nine o'clock. On the way in you grabbed a tartan blanket—fluffy, woolen—off a tall stack by the door. I took two or three. They were to keep on your lap and to put over your shoulders. Candles were set throughout the gardens, and there were
lots
of waiters, more of them as the evening went on, hovering over you and changing this and that, and
no
suggestion from them that it was time to finish the drinks and move on. And violinists, treating you as if you were someone in a fairy tale.

There were two other extraordinary places in Budapest—the Parisienne Grille, a big ballroom with a royal box to sit in at each of the four corners of the room, quite far up, and dancing below, and you'd sweep down and join in. The other was the Arizona. There was nothing in there that could remind anyone in Budapest of Arizona unless it was that the floor came up, very mechanical, very modern, with a girl on it wearing gray slacks and a wide felt hat and singing “Stormy Weather.” Why that reminded the Hungarians of the state of Arizona I haven't the slightest idea. Certainly if you went into a place in Arizona named the Budapest you'd find a dozen or so strolling violinists and waiters in red pantaloons.

The
mud baths
of Budapest! Every morning a woman would come to the Duna Palato with some mud from someplace up the Danube, and I'd sit there all morning, perfectly content, with this lovely mud all over my face and neck. Everyone's face in Budapest was so wonderfully
clean
. Don't forget, this is a city where no one had any money—but everyone was in
love
, everyone was so beautifully
dressed
, everyone had such beautiful
shoes….
The best shoe and boot makers in the world were there—the
very
best—so all the women's feet were wonderfully shod and elegant, like ballet dancers' feet.

And the
men…
ah, they were so dashing! And they were still dashing at eighty, because they never tired of pleasure. They had the beauty of age. We often went to the races with the swells of the racing world—I mean the Big-Timers, like the Hungarian equivalent of Lord Derby. Now
this
is interesting: the grand seigneurs in their
striped trousers and cutaways and
always
a touch of makeup, under their gray toppers. It was just a matter of a little kohl here, a little black grease there, a little this and a little that…I'm talking about the expression of the face being brought out. Apparently, this is a Slavic thing—I think it comes from Rumania—but it was as
comme il faut
as an older woman wearing a lace collar. I never took it as anything extraordinary. I just took it as something one saw when one went to the races in Budapest. This was all part of life in those days.

You can call this a “peacock complex”—I
approve
of that. Show me a dandy and I'll show you a hero, as Baudelaire said. I've never seen dandies like the dandies I saw in Budapest. Very Hungarian thing. And in the nineteenth century it was
more
. When I went back to Budapest, I went
mad
over the nineteenth-century men's uniforms. They're the aristocracy of elegance. It's the leather, it's the placement of the gold embroidery, the small casques with one egret feather; the tasseled boots, the sables…. Of course, they're all slightly absurd, because though they were seldom at war they were always in uniform—it was the rule of the Emperor that no man at court could be dressed in anything but the uniform of his own regiment. They have the real absurdity of style.