D.V. (9 page)

The next morning, Perry told us, a call came through from
the King. The hotel was very simple, and Mrs. Simpson had to take the call at the concierge's desk. By this time the
whole
of Rouen knew who Wallis was. They were standing in the hall, in the street, in the square
—hundreds
of them—while Perry and the maid and the driver who were traveling with them tried to shield them so that she could have a little privacy in which to talk.

The next day they hit Cannes. There, the King would call two and three times a day. The lines were tapped so they could literally hear twenty clicks as they came on. “Is
everybody
listening?” Mrs. Simpson would say. “
Now
we're going to start to talk.” That was the only way to handle it—to let people
know
that they knew that they were being listened to. And then Mrs. Simpson spoke to him: “You will never
ever
see me again. I will be lost in South America.” Don't forget, South America was still a place you could get lost in in those days. “
Never
leave your country! You
cannot
give in! You can
not
! You were
born
to this, it is your
heritage
, it is
demanded
of you by your country, by the traditions of nine hundred years….”

And et cetera.

Anyway, the King took absolutely no heed, and the abdication took place. Perry was called to Windsor from Cannes. He saw the farewells.

“Edward went up to Queen Mary,” Perry told Reed and me, “and kissed her on both hands and then on both cheeks. She was as cold as ice. She just looked at him. Then he said goodbye to Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and to Prince George, Duke of Kent, who both broke down in tears. Then he approached the new King, King George VI, who
completely
broke down. ‘Buck up, Bertie!' the Duke said. ‘God save the King!' And with that, he turned, walked away, and that was it.”

Perry accompanied the Duke of Windsor on the battleship that took him to Calais. From there, the Duke went to Vienna, where he stayed in a castle that belonged to Eugène de Rothschild. Perry went to Cannes to see Mrs. Simpson and to bring news back to the Duke. He told us that he had arrived at about 6:00 a.m.—the sun was just coming up—and that he had been met by a footman who took him
through this cold, lonely castle to a room. He went into the room and there he saw the Duke—who looked just like a little schoolboy, sound asleep, with sun coming across his blond hair. His bed was surrounded by chairs…and on each chair was a picture of his beloved Wallis.

“It was an obsession,” Perry said. “No greater love has ever existed. I stayed there two days with him. Now I'm back in London, and this is my reward—I am completely,
totally
alone.”

We never talked about it again, Perry and I. It obviously affected him very much. He must have paced five miles up and down as Reed and I listened to him. Reed and I never said one word. Perry was a charming, erudite gentleman who was forever tainted by being involved with a King at the wrong moment.

Do you know what time it was when Reed and I walked out into Seymour Street? Seven-thirty in the morning. It was
bright daylight
. That's why I remember what I had on: a beautiful dress, I think Chanel's—this was the thirties, so it must have been—of navy-blue crêpe de chine, and from the knees down it was white organdy. Reed was wearing a dinner jacket. Here we were, walking through the streets of Mayfair in the early morning…dressed absolutely to the
nines
.

I never discuss politics—they're beyond my ken. But I do know that the rise of Hitler—which more or less coincided with the abdication of the Duke—was the passing of the empire.

Several years ago, right after
The Damned
was released, I had dinner with Luchino Visconti in Rome. I told him that a part of the Night of the Long Knives—which he does so marvelously in
The Damned—
had actually taken place on three floors above me in the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel in Munich.

Reed and I had been down in the lovely Swan Country—the valley below Munich—that day, and we returned to the hotel in the early evening in a terrific hurry to change our clothes and get to a concert. At first, all we could make out was this tremendous agitation in front of the hotel—cars, cars,
cars—
huge Mercedes-Benzes with the great silver pipes on the outside, tops down so that the populace could see the grandeur of the people they carried—the captains of Hitler's new order. Out of the cars emerged Röhm's officers, with spiked helmets, swords jangling, and overcoats to the ground. Everything was metallic. Just sticking out from beneath their long coats were spurs—though, of course, they got about as close to a horse as you and I are right now. In the street, a regiment of goose-stepping
soldiers went by—the clap, clap, clap of their leather boots as they hit the pavement—and they were shouting, “
Heil! Heil! Heil!
” but to the
heavens
!

I pushed my way past all of this, into the hotel, to get up into my bath. “Really,” Reed said to me, “you've got to behave yourself. You simply cannot push your way past these men saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, I've got to get to my bath!' You've got to realize that you are in somebody else's country and it's been taken over by this special breed of people.”

We got through that evening all right. Actually, we were having the time of our lives. Every day we went out into the lovely, sweet-smelling countryside—which was quite untouched then—having picnics and revisiting the castles of mad King Ludwig, which we could never see enough of.

This is the tour: First you go to Nymphenburg. Ludwig was born there. You get a little bit of
early
Wagner here.

Then…you go to Neuschwanstein. You leave your car, get in a carriage, and then eventually you have to walk, because it's really on a mountain peak. Inside, it's all
Tannhäuser—
all of it—and the outside is so beautiful, with these towers like candles on the top of the mountain. It's a child's dream of a castle. There is no countryside like the Swan Country was then. Grass waist-high, turrets everywhere, the sky blue.

Then—these are the steps of Ludwig's life—the next stop is Linderhof, which is divine—it's the most perfect example of kitsch in the history of the world. You see a huge gold throne at the head of a dining table. There, draped in ermine tails, Ludwig would dine with the busts of…Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon or Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour or whatever combination struck his fancy on that particular night. Their busts were set on chairs. The table came up through a hole in the floor with the meal on it so that
they
never had to see a servant. The meal would come up; they'd eat; they'd of course enjoy the conversation, the mad Ludwig and his busts
—tous les trois
or
tous les
whatever, and then, at midnight, he'd leave them and go outside. Every time he'd pass a statue of Marie Antoinette
in the gardens he'd sweep off his hat and bow. They were all royal, of course. Then he'd wander over the countryside because he couldn't sleep. There's a marvelous painting I once saw of Ludwig alone on a small sleigh pulled by eight peacocks—two by two by two by two. I don't think that Ludwig actually did this—whoever painted it was probably madder than he was—but it's a pretty idea.

Also, at Linderhof there's a small door you go through and you're in the Blue Grotto! There is this extraordinary
aura
of light, and there Ludwig would float on the water in a golden seashell of a boat, while from a balcony within the grotto an orchestra performed everything they knew of Wagner for hour after hour after
hour…
.

Then…
there's Herrenchiemsee, where he's getting into a more “classical” period, shall we say—and it's the
end…
. He tried to build something finer, larger, and more splendid than Versailles. He was totally gone by then, having had so many talks at dinner with those marble statues.

I think it was Goethe who said, “There is a glory to madness that only madmen know.” It's a beautiful statement, but I'm afraid I may have made it up. If I did, it's better than his.

These were our days around Munich. Then we'd go back to the Vier Jahreszeiten in the early evening, and at night we'd hear some music, which was always remarkable—the best music in the world is in Germany, after all. The stars would come out, we'd listen to this music…our life was a dream of beauty.

But the contrast of this beauty with the absurdity of those comic-opera bullies we encountered….

One morning, Julie, my maid from London, came in late with the breakfast, shivering, shaking, and weeping. She said, “Madam, madam, madam…we must leave today.”

“What do you mean, ‘leave today'?” I said. “We've got another four days here, and you know it—and you love Munich.”

“Madam,
please…
something terrible is happening in this hotel!”

“Well, if it's
that
terrible, couldn't you tell me what it is?”

“That's just it—I don't know what it is! But I know that
when I leave this room—I've been twice to this floor this morning trying to bring you your breakfast—everything's delayed. Something's happening on the three floors above you. Something's going on up there.”

“Listen, Julie, there's nothing to get upset about as long as you can get from your room to—”

“Oh, madam, madam…”

“Listen, Julie, cheer up and let's get on with it!”

So she got me dressed and out and everything seemed normal enough. But Julie was getting more and more upset until she couldn't even fasten a hook. She was a very sensible Frenchwoman, nothing simpering about her. She knew she was in very, very bad company.

Then we returned to London. Ten days later,
The Times
gave an account of the fourteen murders that had been committed that night upstairs at the Vier Jahreszeiten! It was the Night of the Röhm Murders—the Night of the Long Knives, which took place all over the country.

I've learned a tremendous amount from maids in my life.

Do you remember the scene in
The Damned
of officers in women's underwear? Elsie Mendl showed me photographs of exactly the same thing going on at her house—pictures that had been snapped by her wonderful old caretaker and his wife. They managed the gate lodge of her little house at Versailles, the Villa Trianon, and they stayed on when the Germans occupied the house.

First, you must imagine the beauty of Elsie's house. It had belonged to one of the members of the court of Louis Philippe, and there was something in the lease that gave her permission to open a door and walk right into the park at Versailles—the palace grounds that no one sees, way, way beyond all the canals and the formal gardens, farther away than the eye can see. You opened the gate of Elsie's little
potager—
her vegetable garden—and there you were under the big live oaks that had been there since the Kings of France. The live oaks were spaced very far apart, and there were sheep grazing underneath. It was like stepping into the eighteenth century.

Now imagine, if you can, the German officers, so obscene with their helmets and their mustaches, running around in this garden in Elsie's underclothes! Somehow or other, the caretaker and his wife found the ways and means of taking the pictures—the officers were too drunk to notice, I suppose. There weren't many of them, but
those
, I can tell you, were some
pictures
.

Let's suppose you were a total stranger
—and
a very good friend. That's a good combination. What would you want to know about me? And how would you go about
finding
it out?

To me, the books I've read are the giveaway. My life has been more influenced by books than by any other one thing. I stopped reading
—seriously
reading—years ago. But what I read before then has remained forever secure in my mind, because I used to read and reread and
reread
. The real seriousness of my youth—by which I mean my young married years—was that I devoted myself totally to learning. From the time I got married at eighteen until the time I went to work in 1937, twelve years—I read. And Reed and I would read things together out loud, which was
marvelous
. That was the charm of it—when you've
heard
the word, it means so much more than if you've only seen it.

Reed and I had seven thousand books, between our own and the boys', that we had to sell when we sold the house in Brewster. It was cash on delivery, because it was a house that was not easily sold. Our lives in the city were too full to properly use the house and its garden. It was on three levels, which is what made it hard to sell,
but that's also what made it so romantic. When we decided to sell it, it was one of those things you don't think about. It was done. And these awful people would come and they'd say, “Now what
period
would you call this?”

“Well, it's many periods,” I'd say, “many thoughts….”

It was far and away the most romantic country house you could ever imagine. The top of my bed was over twenty feet high
—à la polonaise
. And I had every door inside painted a different color—pale lavender, pale blue, pink, strong yellow—I had such a color sense in those days. But we rarely went there. I suppose that's why we sold it. You see, I've always been a gypsy. I mean, by the time we lived there I'd lived in Europe and then America and then Europe and then America
again
. I can never have the feeling other people have about their roots, their own soil, as I remember telling Reed when we sold the house. I have no sense of soil—at all. But for the same reason, it was mad to sell the books.

There've been several constants in my reading from the start. The Russians were the first.

Tolstoy! Tolstoy, naturally, was always my favorite. And when I think of Natasha in
War and Peace
, when she's just seen a young lady kiss a young man she was obviously having a walkout with and then she sees a young lieutenant and she follows him into the conservatory and she
grabs
his hand…I know
exactly
what she was wearing. It's actually known as the “Natasha dress.” Where would fashion
be
without literature?

Japan
was another constant.
The Tale of Genji
and
The Pillow Book
of Sei Shonagon have been Japan to me since I first read them and reread them in Albany and in Regent's Park. This is my cult. Some people have their Proust; I have my
Pillow Book
. I still keep it next to my bed. Meanderings of the mind, very charming. Little vignettes of wisdom and beauty.

I met Arthur Waley, the translator of
Genji
and
The Pillow Book
, in London. He was the handsomest man. And his translations of Chinese poetry are exquisite: “The birds are flying high, the swal
lows are flying low, knowing that it's going to rain….” Just three or four lines. This is my paraphrase, you understand, not the
poetry…
which is
to die
.

It was Chips Channon's book on the Wittelsbachs,
The Ludwigs of Bavaria
, that got me going on my Bavarian and Hungarian kicks. This was all in Regent's Park and on rainy weekends in the country in England. I'd spend days and
days
in bed reading and think nothing of it. But there were so
many
books. I learned
everything
in England. I learned
English
.

Maybe it's because I've been such a gypsy that I associate my reading so closely with the houses I was living in at the time. But, curiously enough, the hours of reading I remember most vividly are the months we stayed in Switzerland at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage when we'd left London but before we moved to New York. The boys were at school just down the lake, and every afternoon they would come for tea. We had a big sitting room with a fire and a huge table covered with jams and eggs, which the boys would eat, and then Reed and I would go downstairs for our dinner. But before then Reed, in this marvelous,
sustained
voice he had—he was a singer, you see—would read to them from Hans Christian Andersen and from Chinese fairy tales and from Russian fairy tales—out loud: It's midnight, and the white polar bear is carrying the Princess to see the man she loves the most, and that's all that's on her mind, and she really
is
a Princess. And the polar bear is white, and the ice is blue, and the sky is
midnight
blue….

I was so happy in Ouchy, on the water. My bed faced Mont Blanc. Every night, I'd leave a small space open between the curtains so that I could see Mont Blanc in the morning when I woke up. And some mornings—this was in the winter, when the snow lay very,
very
thick on it—it would have a pink glaze. Other mornings it would have a blue glaze to it. I would sit and watch the pinks and blues change during the day as the light changed and the clouds constantly moved across the sky. Every day was totally and completely different. I can remember thinking how much like my own tempera
ment it was—how much like everyone's temperament. The light on Mont Blanc was a revelation of what we all consist of. I mean, the shadows and the colors and the ups and the downs and the wonderment…it was like our growing up in the world.

I think people forget that I have a family. In London people never thought of me as having any children. They thought I was only involved with clothes—and I
was
. But the family was
very
close. And though I did think terrifically about my sons, I wasn't that close to them. I had an English nanny by then and the best French nurserymaid in London, so they were always speaking French. For them it was a very conventional upbringing of the period—up to a point.

Wednesday was the nurse's day off, and also the nurserymaid's, and that was my afternoon with my sons. If the weather was good, I'd take them across the street to the zoo in Regent's Park with its ducks and flowers. Timmy and Frecky would go
straight
to their friends the gorillas. The boys knew the keeper, so we'd go into their quarters behind the cage and he'd bring in the gorillas. He'd leave us
alone
with these three
enormous
gorillas…and no cage! I had made a solemn vow to myself never to allow my children to know that anything in the world was frightening, impure, or impossible. Therefore, the gorillas were
divine
, and I had to sit and admire the slaps and pats they gave my two miniature sons. My boys would sit there with their arms around them, kissing them from time to time…they were no more frightened of those gorillas than they would be of you.

Then…if it was
really
raining, we'd go to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and see the beheadings. That was a bit of all right for them. Nothing wrong for them to see. Everybody had to
go
! All I can say is that my sons had a very healthy upbringing. And they've gone through life the same way. They've never been afraid of anything…physical or strange or bizarre.

On the walls of each of their rooms—they had separate rooms, which is
very
important—I put maps of the world. Then, when Reed and I would go abroad for several days to some delicious place like Tunisia or into the long grass of Bavaria, I'd show them exactly where we were going. It's not that they were that interested in where
we were going…but they'd connect the
place
with the
idea
. They never grew up with a provincial point of view.

People such as myself who've had no education are hungry…reaching out for something, as long as they don't have to do it in a schoolroom with a gong going all the time. But I was determined my children wouldn't be brought up that way.

In London we sent them to Mr. Gibbs's school, which was very good and very conventional. They learned to read and write before they were four or five, which is
essential—
all children should. “Give me a child for seven years…” as the Jesuits say.

When Timmy was eight, we sent him to school in Switzerland. I hated doing it. But we didn't keep them in London, because in those days the only boys who didn't go away to boarding school were tubercular or something.

After we moved to America, the boys' education didn't cost us much. They both went through Groton on scholarships. I said, “Your
father
works, your
mother
works….” Nothing like a good push!

In many ways, I was a very conventional parent, though perhaps I never
looked
like a conventional parent. I can remember visiting the boys at Groton. Naturally, I was dressed to kill, and as rouged as I am now—if not
more
. The first little boy I saw said, “How do you do, Mrs. Vreeland?”

“How do you do?” I said. “But tell me, how did you know I was Mrs. Vreeland?”

“Because,” he said, “Timmy and Frecky said, ‘If you see a woman with red ears—that's our mother!'”

I don't think it bothered them. Eventually you learn to live with your parents. In London, in the days when people used to play parlor games, we played a game where you'd choose your parents. Once, I remember, someone decided to be very clever and chose Mussolini and Emerald Cunard. Well, the place broke up into such a
row…
I never even got my turn. But I can remember saying, “Do you know what you'd be with parents like that? You'd be the smallest coin at the bottom of the basin!”

I didn't have a clever answer ready for myself. If I'd had the chance, I knew that I'd have chosen my parents
exactly
as they were.

And I had splendid godparents. Wouldn't change them for the world! I've told you about Baby Belle Hunnewell. Bob Chanler was my godfather—Uncle Bob. He painted. That's a lovely screen of his out in the front hall. He was a great big man with huge gray curls always filled with paint—gold and silver. He often came to our house with green hair and wild spirits and shouted up at us. Mad for girls and all that. My father was best man at one of his weddings. He was very much of the Diaghilev school of “Let's-go-all-the-way-all-the-time!” He had a beautiful house on Nineteenth Street.

Bob Chanler once said, “Send the children down. They can have lunch here. They can walk around the garden.” So we arrived. No one answered the bell. Bong! We could hear it ringing inside the house. No one answered. Finally the door opened a crack. It was a Chinese cook. He said, identifying himself, “Mr. Bob's cook! Mr. Bob's cook!” He looked terrified. He kept saying “Big, big, big, big!” and spreading his hands as if he were showing us a monstrous-sized fish. It turned out there was a large boa constrictor loose in the house. Something had gone wrong the night before, and the boa constrictor was roaming around and no one could find it. We left immediately. We never discovered if Bob Chanler was loose in there too. No, I think it was just this Chinese chef and the boa constrictor.

My other godfather was Henry Clews. He always had wives who were great beauties and great ladies. When he came to dinner he had to sit in a rocking chair, because that was his style. He simply didn't like a straight-backed chair. Sometimes, if he felt like it, he wore his hat to the table—a beautiful, loose, floppy black fedora.

He was my father's best friend in the world. My father hadn't seen him in, say, thirty-five years, and so in his late eighties he decided to cross the big pond, the Atlantic, to see his old friend in La Napoule in the south of France.

My father arrived early in the morning on the Riviera, but he wasn't met. He managed to get to this magnificent castle out on
a neck of land that stuck out into the Mediterranean. He was told: “His Majesty will see you at quarter to three, Mr. Dalziel.” It took about four of these announcements to get my father into the mood that he was in the hands of madness—which he didn't like. He didn't have a thing to do. He walked in the gardens. He smoked cigarettes. He went up to his room two or three times. Then he came down. Finally a servant approached him—probably a very reliable sort—and said, “Would you come, sir, to the throne room, where Their Majesties will receive you.”

So my poor darling Daddy went to the “throne room”…I mean, like a child is taken to the leopard house or something. And there were the two of them on their thrones—dressed to the nines, crowns and everything—and Mrs. Clews came down off the dais: “Fred! How wonderful to receive you. This is such a pleasure for Henry and myself. Please sit down. We're going to have a little lunch in a few minutes.”

My father had consumed about four breakfasts by this time. He was not amused. He was not amused
at all
! He asked to have a car, and he left for Paris before dinner. He couldn't go through with it. He was too old to fool around with. He came back and said to me, “You see, my dear Diana, if Henry had said, ‘Look, I've got the biggest spoof on the whole Riviera. Got this magnificent castle…and we're having the time of our lives. Most people our age don't have the time of their lives, but we're having it! Join us!'”—that might have been all right. Instead of that, he played his spoof
off
my father, his best friend. No, my father was not amused; he was terribly hurt. And when he told me this, his eyes flooded with tears. Because, naturally, when you're almost ninety, you've lost all your friends, no? I'd say he was eighty-nine or ninety then. Oh, it's such a sad story. And it was so sweet.