Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland

Empress of Fashion

A Life of Diana Vreeland

Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

www.harpercollins.com

Dedication

To Michael

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Paris Opening

Chapter 2: The Girl

Chapter 3: Becoming Mrs. Vreeland

Illustrations 1

Chapter 4: Pizzazz

Chapter 5: New Look

Chapter 6: Youthquake

Illustrations 2

Chapter 7: Wilder Shores

Chapter 8: Old Clothes

Chapter 9: Endgame

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Permissions

Photo Credits

Index

About the Author

Also by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

My maid here at the Crillon is driving me crazy. . . . I’ve been having fittings in the morning all week long and Betty, my maid, is down on her knees sticking pins in my hem—but she won’t look in the mirror.

Ah madame, she’ll say, Quelle belle robe.

Betty, I’ll say, Don’t look at me, look in the mirror.

Mais madame, comme c’est jolie.

Betty! I said, Look in the mirror! What I want is in the mirror. What you want, you can’t see because you won’t look at it.

Diana Vreeland (1903–89) believed in the power of the reflected image with something close to religious fervor. She once observed that without a mirror, you lose your face, you lose your self-image. When that is gone, that is hell. Her faith in the magic of the looking glass propelled her through a long life, and into a distinguished career at a time when it was unusual for a woman from her background to work at all. She joined Harper’s Bazaar in 1936, officially becoming its fashion editor for twenty-three years from 1939; she was editor in chief of American Vogue from 1963 until 1971; and from 1972 she was special consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she launched fifteen groundbreaking costume exhibitions. She was regarded, at her peak, as the empress of American fashion, or as one admirer put it: the High Druidess of fashion, the Supreme Pontiff, Perpetual Curate, and Archpresbyter of elegance, the Vicaress of Style. She is thought—by some—to be the cloth from which twenty-first-century editors in chief of fashion magazines are cut.

However, Diana often insisted that she was really an amateur at heart. Her resistance to being defined by her working life was noted by the British photographer Cecil Beaton while she was still at Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s: She is indeed such a powerful personality in her own right, and so little dependent on the fashion world for her terms of appeal, that many of her friends never think of her in connection with printer’s ink, he wrote. Growing up as cubism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, Diana had the appearance of a multifaceted artifact herself, a creature of planes, angles, and polished surfaces, interpretable from multiple viewpoints, frequently in motion and in vivid color. She may have favored her reflection in the mirror; but she was remembered by many in vibrant three-dimensional reality as she erupted into a room. She didn’t merely enter a room, she exhilarated it, wrote Nicholas Haslam, who worked in the art department of Vogue in the early 1960s. And all eyes immediately locked on her, hypnotised. . . . Her actual presence was like a sock on the jaw. You knew you were seeing a supernova.

Her face was the most famous part of her. Mrs. Vreeland’s head sits independently on top of a narrow neck and smiles at you. Everything about her features is animated by amused interest, wrote Beaton. Provided she was engaged or charmed, the overwhelming impression was of a brilliant glint that spread outward from narrow brown eyes, beneath Vaselined eyelids, across high cheekbones exaggerated with great streaks of rouge, with which she also powdered her ears, turning them a shade of terra-cotta. The centerpiece of this face was a very large beaky nose above a huge, wide crimson mouth and a pointed aggressive jaw. The effect was framed by jet black hair, sometimes in a snood, veneered into place from her hairline with such a high metallic sheen that it is said to have clinked when a waiter bumped it with a tin tray. Beneath her head Diana maintained the slender, supple body of a dancer until the end of her life, but she held it in a curious sloping posture. When she moved, her pelvis thrust forward and her upper body sloped backward as she glided ahead. Once she gained momentum she assumed the lolloping gait of a dromedary, topped with a light sashay, a walk she said she copied from the showgirls of the Ziegfeld Follies. Even when seated she was animated: jabbing, pointing, prodding, and kneading the air, the fingers of one hand spread outward, a cigarette clasped in the other, displaying to advantage long, red, perfectly manicured talons. Like everyone else, I was not introduced to her but to her index finger, extended as a kind of barrier to trade, wrote Jonathan Lieberson, who met her in the 1960s when Diana was in her sixties too. She was improbable in the extreme: a strange figure, sitting closed cross-legged, with erect spine, stroking the arch of an extended foot, her fingers stretching . . . her mouth and out-thrust jaw in constant motion.

Those trying to describe her often reached for avian imagery. An authoritative crane, said Cecil Beaton. Some extraordinary parrot—a wild thing that’s flung itself out of the jungle, thought Truman Capote. An Aztec bird woman, suggested Vogue feature writer Polly Devlin, though she also proposed a Kabuki runaway. Diana’s appearance could cause confusion. On a trip to Kyoto, it was said that her Japanese hairdressers thought she was a man before they decided she was Chinese. ("As you know, that’s not the most popular thing you can be in Japan . . . but they were very polite. And once you get a person totally wet with half their make-up off, you see something.) It is less often remarked that Diana Vreeland was actually ugly, an ugliness made worse by having mild astigmatism which could make her squint. Polly Devlin was forcefully struck by Diana’s unattractiveness on their first meeting, and equally amazed by how quickly the ugliness seemed to melt away. There’s a word not much used nowadays, ‘limned,’ which is to illuminate, to edge in color, she wrote. She was always limned, set in shock against her background."

One reason Diana had such a mesmerizing effect was the sound, as well as the sight, of her. When she laughed, she slowly and deliberately intoned each ‘ha’ of ‘ha-ha-ha,’ much, I imagined, as one of the denizens of Hogarth’s Gin Lane might have done, wrote Lieberson. Bystanders were rooted to the spot by the peculiar swooping cadences of her gravelly bass voice, which could rise to a booming bark and fall back down to a whisper in the course of one sentence, its colors darkened by years of smoking. The rhythm of her speech was unpredictably emphatic, punctuated by the throaty laugh, a descending scale that went M-m-m, and (since she took a positive view), the word duh-vine. She could generally be relied on to light upon at least one italicized word every few seconds, more often when telling a story. She had a predilection for rolling her rs as in "rrrighto; and faux French pronunciation, so that corduroy became cord-du-roi, tiger became tee-gray, and video was pronounced as in Montevideo." Though she could bridle (or worse) at unrefined language, she had an acute ear for gamey slang and reminded Beaton of Falstaff, a very different physical type. But even her manner of speech was less interesting than what she actually said.

By the time she joined Harper’s Bazaar, Diana had cultivated a verbal brilliance that was all her own, her talk interspersed with Delphic remarks that were captured by listeners like butterflies, only to flutter weakly on the page. "Pink is the navy blue of India was one much-quoted aperçu with which she became bored. Blue jeans are the most beautiful thing since the gondola, was another, and there were thousands more in the manner of One thing I hold against Americans is that they have no flair for the rain. They seem unsettled by it; it’s against them: they take it as an assault." She attributed her oblique point of view to the astigmatism:

I have astigmatism, like El Greco. I’m not comparing myself with El Greco for a minute, except that we both have the same physical disability. Partly because of his disability he saw things that most people don’t see. I see all sorts of things that you don’t see. I see girls and I see the way their feet fall off the sidewalk when they’re getting ready to cross the street but they’re waiting for the light, with their marvelous hair blowing in the wind and their fatigued eyes. . . .

Not everyone admired her. Some people thought she was frightening, abrasive, disagreeable, a bully, and even a freak. Others did not forgive her for her social life in her seventies, when she was photographed with Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and Jack Nicholson. Coco Chanel said she was the most affected woman she had ever met. Salvador Dalí maintained that she lied all the time, a charge echoed less fiercely but nonetheless insistently by others who knew her better than he did. Polly Devlin thought that her slanting knowing eyes missed much about the soul but nothing, nothing to do with the body. The designer Charles James, whose work she overlooked, excoriated her. The first time he met her Jonathan Lieberson thought she was not exactly fake but artificial in the extreme: At the time, though, I recalled a remark made about Max Beerbohm: ‘For God’s sake, take off your face and reveal the mask underneath.’ Many more people thought she was plain eccentric, though this was one charge she rebutted. "I have not one eccentricity—that I know of. . . . I think most eccentrics are just go-ahead kids, like Hank the Yank, Henry Bath, the Marquess of Bath and owner of Longleat, who went through the whole War with a duck on a chain . . . praying for bombs to fall so that his duck would have a pond. To me, that’s not eccentricity—that’s how he felt about his duck."

Others adored her and thought she was extremely funny. Cecil Beaton described her as having the humane wit of Madame de Sévigné. The art historian John Richardson loved her for her worldly tolerance, her powers of perception, and her engaged friendship. Nicholas Haslam did not take long to discover that behind her astounding exterior lay a much-heralded mind not only of dazzling fantasies . . . but of originality of thought, and a carefully shrouded or, rather, disguised loving tenderness. At Diana’s memorial service in 1989, it was observed that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sobbed from beginning to end. Vogue Contributing Editor André Leon Talley regarded Diana as one of the two most important women in his entire life. A host of creative and talented people in the world of fashion, including models, photographers, designers, and some actors, not only credit her with launching their careers but have said they felt better for having known her. Ferle Bramson, Diana’s secretary during her tenure at the Costume Institute, echoed the feeling of many when she said that her boss was so creative and original that liking or disliking her was, in the end, irrelevant.

Diana Vreeland was such a substantial presence while she was alive that there is a perception that much has been written about her since her death. Surprisingly, however, she has never been the subject of a full-length biography. There have been many profiles, articles, and one highly critical book. In 1982 she published a memoir, D.V., which she happily described as faction, developed from her earlier photo essay, Allure. After her death in 1989, the Costume Institute mounted a brilliant and illuminating exhibition about her, accompanied by a publication that included many reminiscences by friends and colleagues and an essay that focused on her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s book, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, is a beautiful evocation of images from Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and her exhibitions at the Costume Institute, a timely reminder of the extraordinary work Diana stimulated as well as her own; and Lisa’s documentary of the same title captures Diana with great verve and nuance with the help of those who still remember her. Eleanor Dwight’s superbly illustrated Diana Vreeland revealed new material about her upbringing and marriage, but its text was of necessity short and its focus external.

There is therefore a case for a longer account, partly because fashion itself has changed. It has vastly expanded its reach, insinuating itself into places unthinkable half a century ago. There has also been much fresh thinking about it as a phenomenon in academic circles, across several disciplines. Where fashion was once regarded by academics as too trivial for serious examination, or too mired in false consciousness for feminist scholars, it is now being reinterpreted more subtly. This is leading to a reevaluation of those involved in its making. The job of editor in chief of a fashion magazine is a century old; the women who have done it successfully have exercised enormous power at the center of a vast web of production and consumption, and the scale of their power is unusual even today. Quite as important, there is reassessment of fashion as the phenomenon that encapsulates what Baudelaire called the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent nature of modern life. If this is true, it raises a question about Diana herself: is it possible that her achievements have been seriously underestimated? Some friends and colleagues certainly thought so. One of them was the Hollywood agent Irving Swifty Lazar, as Diana later recalled:

Swifty Lazar took me with him to buy something in Bloomingdale’s basement. And at every counter, he said, "This is one of the greatest women of the century! This is Diana Vreeland!"

Who could this be that we’ve missed? I could see people thinking, It’s not Chanel, it’s not Garbo, it’s not Monroe.

The puzzled reaction of the Bloomingdale’s shoppers was understandable. A long career on fashion magazines, a series of innovative costume exhibitions, and a trail of Sphinx-like remarks do not explain Swifty Lazar’s assertion that Diana was one of the greatest women of the twentieth century, and Diana herself thought it was nonsense. Look, nothing I’ve ever done is extraordinary, she said to one interviewer. Truman Capote, however, also thought she was a genius. Mrs. Vreeland, he wrote, was one of the great Americans who had contributed more than anyone to improving the level of taste of the American woman. This was not an assessment of the American woman with which Diana agreed. Alas, I am afraid she looks worse than ever, she wrote to an old colleague in 1972. But Capote was adamant (if self-serving): She’s a genius but she’s the kind of genius that very few people will ever recognize because you have to have genius yourself to recognize it. Otherwise you just think she’s a rather foolish woman.

This book is for nongeniuses interested in the nature of Diana Vreeland’s talent and achievements. For all the fanfare of her appearance and her personality, her gifts were elliptical. Yet they were real. They were consistent. They were visible early in her life, and what happened to her in her early years, and as a young married woman, lent them a particular intensity, giving her what the make-up artist Pablo Manzoni called a leitmotif, a continuity that lasted throughout her professional career and until she died. Diana regarded a chronological approach to anything as consummately tedious, but hers was a life in which chronology counted for a great deal. Far from agreeing that she constantly reinvented herself, as some have maintained, this book contends that her later achievements can better be understood by looking at those early years, by paying close attention to her omissions and evasions about her past, and by peering into the interstices between the facts of her life and her later fictions. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of her fashion enthusiasms, or her friendships, which would run to several volumes.

It is not clear whether she would have welcomed much probing beneath her dazzling lacquered surface, for Diana Vreeland was a very private person. Keep your secret, she once said. That’s your power over others. On the other hand she greatly enjoyed recognition when it finally came to her, particularly if it arrived unexpectedly. It was sweetest of all when it enabled her to get the better of her most critical friend, Jerome Zipkin. Jerry Zipkin was a celebrated man-about-town in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, best known for being Nancy Reagan’s walker after she became first lady in 1981. He was famous for his ability to undermine his fragile society-lady friends and reduce them to tears. But he underestimated Diana’s standing in the world of fashion, not to mention one of her abiding characteristics: the ability to jump, in just a few seconds, from the negative to the positive while keeping an open mind about the latest trend, before swooping triumphantly to a perspective that was all her own:

I want to tell you that a few years ago Jerry took me down to Palm Beach, which at that point, I knew about as well as I know Bloomingdale’s, not having been there in 40 years, and the first thing we do is tour Worth Avenue. . . .

You haven’t seen anything yet, he said. "I’m going to take you to a place where I doubt you’ll get in."

So we go to a place called Mitzner Court, I think it’s called, and Jerry said, Let me explain it to you—you have to be a member.

But Jerry, I said, I thought you were taking me to a shop.

It is a shop, he said. "But the chances are—don’t be offended—that you won’t get in. We’ll just have to see what we can arrange. . . ."

Then . . . we ring a bell and a man comes out. Oh Madame Vreeland, he said—it couldn’t be more American, the Madame Vreeland . . . well, I’m In Like Flynn. He gave me a year’s free membership.

I couldn’t believe it—you have to pay to buy?

This, I have to say—is new.

Chapter One

Paris Opening

There is no doubt that Diana Vreeland disdained an inconvenient truth in a manner that could be startling. She once ejected a friend from her apartment, the jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane, for suggesting that her beloved England had been invaded by the Normans; and she enjoyed polishing up birth moments when she thought they needed it, a compliment extended even to the most exotic of her acquaintances. In the 1960s the model and actress Vera von Lehndorff, known as Veruschka, told a story at a New York party about noticing the time as she was born. I said, ‘The first image I saw of this world was an enormous round watch with a black frame, black numbers, and black pointers. It was 6 o’clock and 10. I was born at the hospital in Königsberg, East Prussia, now called Kaliningrad.’ Everyone laughed. But a little while later Diana took Veruschka aside and gave her some advice in a low whisper. Veruschka darling . . . when asked where you are born, never say East Germany, Prussia, Königsberg, or Kaliningrad, that’s boring, just say ‘I am born on the border, right on the border, between Germany and Poland, in the swamps of the Masurian lakes.’

Diana liked to spread a little mystery about her own arrival in the world too. She was coy about her age, and genuinely perplexed in later life by the discovery of an apparent discrepancy between the dates of her birth on two official documents, her French bulletin de naissance and her actual birth certificate. However, Diana was indisputably born on September 29, 1903. She was born in Paris; and apart from moments when it amused her to outline more extreme birth scenarios, such as appearing to the sound of Berber ululations in the Atlas Mountains, she liked to maintain that her French beginnings set her apart. People born in Paris were different from other people, she once said. The event was registered at the British consulate in Paris because Diana was the daughter of a British father, Frederick Young Dalziel. Dalziel is a Scots name, with a range of spellings that derives from the barony of Dalziel, in Lanarkshire, and pronounced dee-ell. People used to say to me, why don’t you cut out all that and just put the ‘D’ and the ‘L’? said Diana. "I’d say—do it yourself. For me, it’s the whole way because I love the spelling. I love Zs. She delighted in her medieval Scottish clan origins throughout her life. As a girl she took the clan motto, I Dare," seriously. As an adult she owned a print of the Dalziel coat of arms and sported the Dalziel tartan at the right sort of parties.

Her father, Frederick Young Dalziel, however, was not quite what he appeared to be. He was not very Scots—his line of Dalziels came from England—and his background was much more modest than he found socially convenient. His family lived in Haringey in North London, where he was brought up by a stepmother and a father who worked for the General Post Office, alongside a younger half brother named Edelsten. This was a family in which even middle-class status hung in the balance. Frederick and his half brother were sent to Highgate School, a school educating young gentlemen from North London, but they went there late and all the evidence suggests that money was extremely tight. Though Frederick gained a place at Oxford University and started at Brasenose College in 1888, he left just a year later at the end of 1889, probably because that was as long as his family could afford. A year at Oxford was enough to give him a marked fondness for aristocratic tone. It also allowed him to describe himself as Oxford educated forever more, sidestepping the fact that he never actually obtained an Oxford degree.

Diana’s father was tall—over six and a half feet—strikingly handsome, and she loved him. He was so wonderful looking—so charming. For every daughter, the first love of her life is her father. To this day I just adore him. He was wonderfully affectionate. . . . A great beauty; and really nothing to do with the modern world at all. Totally Edwardian, you know. In 1890 the obvious destination for an Oxford educated young man with good looks, energy, charm, no private income, and a socially undistinguished family was some part of the British Empire where lack of pedigree was not an impediment and there was no prejudice against earning money. Frederick Dalziel was so evasive about the five years that followed his departure from Oxford that it started a family myth that he became a spy. It is more certain that from 1895 he worked as a representative for South African gold-mining interests and lived in Paris. Speculation in the discovery of gold and diamonds was extremely risky and was only for the spectacularly rich. In the 1890s some of the wealthiest people in the world were rich Americans of the Gilded Age who regarded Paris as both their playground and their second home. These were his clients, and eventually his friends too.

By 1901 Frederick Dalziel was mixing with American millionaires in Paris in a manner that suggests he was already migrating from a suburban middle-class to an upper-class persona. Those who remember Frederick Dalziel in old age confirm Diana’s description of her father as the model of an Edwardian English gentleman; but he projected this image quite self-consciously, cultivated smart acquaintances, and masked his background with a grand mien, having himself photographed at this period in hunting pink by French society photographer Numa Blanc. There’s only one very good life and that’s the life that you know you want and you make it yourself, said Diana later. It was an attitude she inherited from her father; and in 1901, the solution to the gap between Frederick Dalziel’s background and the life he knew he wanted presented itself in Paris in the form of Diana’s American mother, Miss Emily Key Hoffman.

Diana’s mother arrived in Paris by a very different route. Born in 1877, she was the daughter of George Hoffman, a lawyer from a prominent Southern family. The surname has led to claims that this side of Diana’s family was Jewish, but Hoffman is also a non-Jewish name, and there is no record of Judaism in the family tree. Diana’s Hoffman forebears were gentlemen farmers in Virginia, and at least one of her Southern great-grandmothers was socially distinguished. We’re top drawer from Baltimore, went a family expression, and Key holds the key was another. The Key was George Hoffman’s mother, Emily Key, a member of a well-known family of the American South whose lineage connected Diana to Francis Scott Key, composer of The Star-Spangled Banner. The only thing that Diana knew about her Baltimore great-grandmother was that she and her sister went to law over a dining-room table, so exasperating the judge that he Solomonically ordered a carpenter to cut it in two and give each of them a half. Judged by bloodline rather than passion or pigheadedness, however, Diana Vreeland’s colonial antecedents on her mother’s side were impeccable.

In New York society this kind of pedigree mattered, and after the Civil War ended in 1865, it was also essential to have riches. In Diana’s case the family money came from her maternal grandfather, John Washington Ellis, who made his first fortune as partner of a wholesale dry goods firm in Cincinnati before helping to found the First National Bank of Cincinnati and then moving to New York, where he ran a private investment bank. As New York became America’s financial and cultural capital after the Civil War, the city drew in hundreds of families made newly rich by the extraordinarily rapid postwar boom that soon came to be termed the Gilded Age. New York’s finest reacted by becoming much more self-consciously elitist, with resistance led by Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, who could famously fit only Four Hundred top people into her ballroom, a notion that then became shorthand for New York’s most exclusive clique. However, Mrs. Astor welcomed those with money of whom she approved, to the extent that after 1865 a large fortune became the sine qua non for joining her circle. On arriving in New York, the well-to-do Ellis family were among the lucky ones, quickly joining the Four Hundred. The family rode to hounds and hunted with the right packs. The New York family home was just off Fifth Avenue, and John Washington Ellis helped by building a huge Shingle-style summer cottage called Stone Acre on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1882. Newport was well on its way to becoming New-York-Society-by-the-Sea in the 1880s. The Ellises became closely identified with Newport’s growing exclusivity; and they were listed in the first edition of the social bible, The Social Register, in 1886.

Diana’s mother, Emily Key Hoffman, was therefore brought up at the heart of the New York world of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. Her father died young in 1885, and thereafter Emily was raised by her widowed mother in a house on West Fiftieth Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, she was sent to the highly academic Brearley School, soon after it was founded. But that was as far as her education went, and in 1896 Emily’s mother launched her into New York society. The 1890s marked an era of great transatlantic marriages, when hundreds of daughters of well-to-do Americans married impoverished European aristocrats, enriching noble families in Europe and ennobling the plutocrats back home. Young women from New York’s gratin who did not marry European nobility were expected to make good matches with scions of American dynasties. Their stories were lapped up by press and public alike, with the result that any attractive young society woman in New York was minutely scrutinized by even respectable newspapers, which ranked a debutante in terms of appearance, family connections, and likely dowry.

The newspaper columnists were enchanted when Miss Emily Hoffman became a debutante. They waxed lyrical about her dark brown eyes, fine features, chestnut hair, charming conversation, and exceptional elegance. Even before her formal debut, she was regarded as the most beautiful young lady on the floor at the Newport ball given by Alva Vanderbilt for the Duke of Marlborough when he came courting Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895; and she was frequently referred to as the most beautiful of the belles of Newport once she was out in society. Throughout the second half of the 1890s, Emily appeared with her mother on the guest lists of every important Four Hundred event of the late 1890s. She was one of three hundred guests at Mrs. Astor’s annual ball. She had her portrait painted by the very fashionable Adolfo Müller-Ury, who was so overcome by her pulchritude that he was inspired to paint her as the Virgin Mary, leading to dazzled descriptions of her as the Madonna of the 400. In 1898 Emily was reported to have been the success of the season in Rome, too. She loved hunting, riding out with the Monmouth County hounds. She was sportif, playing her way to victory in tennis tournaments, and she was often to be found leading high jinks from the front. A merry party of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s guests took a midnight bath at Bailey’s Beach last night led by Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Warren and Miss Emily Hoffman, read the News of Newport in 1900.

What really set Emily apart from other socialites of the day, however, was the way she danced, a natural talent that would later have a great impact on Diana and an indirect influence on twentieth-century American fashion. Had she been born two generations later, Emily might well have succeeded in a professional career. As it was, she was celebrated as the society exponent of Spanish dances, which she performed with grace and fire, a talent that was regarded as all of a piece with her dark Spanish coloring. She had a pronounced theatrical streak. Dubbed the Carmencita of New York society by the press, her star turn as an amateur was a dance called the cachucha. This involved Emily in much clicking of castanets and flashings of ankle in public. The high point of her dancing career was a performance of the cachucha for charity in January 1900 at the Waldorf-Astoria, which earned her a standing ovation, fan letters, and rave reviews in New York’s newspapers. One critic noted that although it was near midnight when she came on the masculine enthusiasm that she aroused was of the most unmistakable sort. It was reported afterward that the great vaudeville impresarios Weber and Fields offered her hundreds of dollars to perform her Spanish dances at their music hall on Broadway—an offer that caused her circle much hilarity and that she naturally had to refuse.

There was no pressure on Emily to make a grand European marriage. But with colonial ancestry on one side, Gilded Age riches on the other, and great beauty and vivacity into the bargain, she should have been wed within a year or two to a young man from a distinguished American family; and her name was often linked by gossips to New York society’s more eligible bachelors. Four years after Emily’s debut, however, the smart marriage plan seems to have gone offtrack. By 1899 Emily had drifted toward a group of louche society bohemians who called themselves the Carbonites. Their leader was the handsome James Lawrence Breese, a man who developed a new photographic carbon-printing process at the Carbon Studio downtown at 5 West Sixteenth Street. He was well known for his effect on impressionable young ladies. Another figure in the Carbonite group was the architect Stanford White, whose sensational murder by Harry Thaw a few years later would expose him as a serial womanizer and the owner of a red velvet swing on which semi-dressed young women, including Thaw’s wife, entertained him. Before this came to light, the press loved the Carbonites for being a little wild and for holding what were described as weird midnight suppers. There was a budget of fun for every second spent in the studio, said one newspaper and Emily was at the heart of it, dancing the cachucha.

It seems likely that Emily’s predilection for Carbonite company and her refusal to get on and marry the right sort of husband caused considerable tension with her widowed mother; but during the Newport summer season of 1900, a candidate for Emily’s hand appeared who fulfilled every maternal dream. Eugene Higgins was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Higgins had sold his father’s carpet-manufacturing business for an estimated fifty million dollars, leaving him free to pursue life as a sought-after gentleman of leisure. (One New York newspaper gave him precedence in the eligible bachelor ranking over George Vanderbilt and a brother of the khedive of Egypt.) The budding relationship was closely watched, and tongues wagged even harder when Emily, chaperoned by married friends, was one of the party aboard Higgins’s enormous yacht the Varuna when it set sail for the Mediterranean on November 14, 1900.

At the same time there were rumors that the true reason for Emily’s sudden departure from New York was a serious rift with her mother. It was whispered that the upset was about potential husbands but in this instance the gentleman in question was not Emily’s but Mrs. Hoffman’s. In 1900 Mary Hoffman finally ran out of patience with Emily’s obstinate behavior and announced to her stunned family that she was planning to marry again herself. It was said that the news came as a great shock to Emily and her brother, Ellis, neither of whom could stand their stepfather-to-be, Charles Gouverneur Weir, the implication being that the man had his eye on Mrs. Hoffman’s considerable private income and luxurious style of life. Looking back on what happened a few months later, the gossip sheet Town Topics opined: Miss Hoffman did not approve of her mother’s marriage to Mr. Charles Gouverneur Weir, and she went abroad consulting her own wishes solely. On the evening before she sailed she told an intimate that she wanted never to come back.

Whatever the true reason for her departure from America, Emily arrived in Nice aboard the Varuna in March 1901 and made her way to Paris with Higgins and his other guests. But at that point the idea of an engagement between Emily and Eugene Higgins faded away. Emily may never have had the slightest intention of marrying Higgins. It is also possible that even if she entertained the idea at first, a long cruise with him on the Varuna changed her mind. At close range, said Town Topics, Higgins was such an intolerable fusspot that he robbed life aboard his yacht of much of its charm. However, the end of the much-vaunted romance meant that in the spring of 1901, the dazzling Miss Emily Hoffman found herself in Paris in an unexpected position. She was essentially on her own, back on the marriage market in her midtwenties in a world where a woman was thought to be on the shelf at twenty-five. She seems to have had no wish to return home to live with a new stepfather whom she found uncongenial. Whether she liked it or not, Emily was under pressure to find a husband. She did not return to New York or Newport during the summer of 1901 but stayed on in Europe.

In September 1901, just six months after the Varuna docked in Nice, it filtered through to the society press in New York that the beautiful Miss Emily Hoffman was to marry a dashing Englishman, whom no one knew anything about, called Frederick Young Dalziel. Diana was certain that high-voltage physical attraction played its part. Frederick Dalziel was Oxford educated, handsome, kindly, and adoring. He not only solved Emily’s marriage problem but held out the possibility of an extended stay in Belle Epoque Paris. Subtle class differences that might have been important in a different city mattered less in its expatriate community. Even if Emily’s mother, Mary Weir, was appalled by her daughter’s engagement, she was unable to act, grounded in New York by her own recent marriage. It may also be that Frederick Young Dalziel’s lack of a grand pedigree was part of his charm as far as Emily was concerned, allowing her to checkmate her mother in a tussle about wedlock.

They married in London, in the presence of Emily’s brother and his wife rather than her mother, who appears to have been absent. Although the Dalziel family was in evidence, and Frederick’s father signed the marriage certificate, there was no question of a ceremony anywhere near Haringey. Frederick Dalziel rented a room in Mayfair, and the wedding took place by special license on September 28, 1901, in one of London’s richest areas, and at one of its smartest and most fashionable churches, Saint Peter’s Eaton Square. After a honeymoon in the South of France, the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Dalziel set up home in Paris at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The following year, in 1902, Emily and her new husband went to New York on a visit that lasted well into the autumn.

They stayed with Emily’s grandfather John Washington Ellis at Stone Acre during the Newport season and appear to have been considering a move from Paris to New York even then. Up to the time of the Boer War (1899–1902), Frederick Dalziel earned a good living in Paris (Mr. Dalziel has plenty of money, pronounced one gossip columnist). But the war in South Africa dragged on unexpectedly, which could have made life difficult for a man charged with attracting investment to the Transvaal’s gold mines. The style of life on display that summer in New York and Newport was attractive and amusing; many of the Dalziels’ friends already had houses on both sides of the Atlantic; and although the young couple might have preferred not to articulate it thus, there were arguments in favor of moving closer to Emily’s powerful family, who could open doors in New York in a way that was impossible elsewhere. If marrying a socially undistinguished Briton in 1901 offered Emily a way of hitting back at her mother and a route out of a predicament, marrying the beautiful, well-bred Emily Key Hoffman marked an extraordinary change of fortune for Frederick Young Dalziel—a straight pass to the heart of one of the world’s most exclusive elites, the New York Four Hundred.

However, the newlyweds seem to have been in no great hurry to make the move from France. When Diana called her parents racy, pleasure-loving, gala, good-looking Parisians who were part of the whole transition between the Edwardian era and the modern world, she lit on a poetic truth. The Dalziels—and particularly Emily—were indeed Parisians in the sense that Paris was their spiritual home. It was a feeling that affected many rich Americans so profoundly from the late nineteenth century onward that to quote one of their number, it was possible to feel homesick on both continents. Provided one averted one’s gaze from its dark underbelly, Paris at the turn of the century was a difficult place to leave—the Paris of Maxim’s and the Opéra Garnier; of the couture of Worth, Doucet, and Paquin; of grand dukes and demimondaines; and of children in sailor suits sailing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Shortly after Emily and Frederick Dalziel returned to Paris from the United States in late 1902, Emily became pregnant with her first baby. It is possible that this became a further excuse for lingering on. Diana’s was a breech birth, but in spite of the risks she was born at home at 5 avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The name she was given was fashionable at the time. It recalled the goddess of hunting, an activity close to the heart of both her parents, though Diana preferred to believe she was named after Diane de Poitiers, the hunting beauty who was mistress to Henri II of France. If there had been a rift between Emily and her mother, it had now healed enough for Mary Weir to come to Paris to be on hand. Frederick Dalziel noted proudly in Diana’s childhood album that her first visitor was one of his most aristocratic friends: Douglas Walter Campbell, heir to the 10th duke of Argyll, who brought a gift of a silver cup on behalf of his four-month-old son Ian, eventually the 11th duke. On October 25 Diana was christened at home by the vicar of Saint Luke’s Chapel in the Quartier Latin. Her godmothers were her grandmother and a relation of Emily’s, Anna Key Thompson. Her godfather was her uncle Edelsten, but since he was unable to be present one of New York’s aristocrats, Henry Clews, Jr., stood in for him.

The Dalziels spent some time in San Remo that winter with their baby daughter. When they returned to Paris in March 1904, they stayed with friends for a few weeks before they finally gave up living permanently in Europe. On March 31, 1904, Frederick Dalziel’s father and Edelsten went ahead to Boulogne so that they would be there to see the party off. From then onward a gap opened up between Frederick Dalziel and his suburban background. (Diana paid at least one visit to her uncle Edelsten—in Pangbourne, England—many years later, but she never mentioned his existence to her own children.) In 1904 Frederick Dalziel, who could not have been included in Burke’s Peerage or Debrett’s in England, was listed in the American Social Register for the first time; and on April 2 of that year, seven-month-old Diana Dalziel sailed on the SS Ryndam with her mother and father to begin a New York childhood.

When she talked about her upbringing later, Diana invariably maintained that her family left Paris for New York only in April 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In this oft-repeated version of her early years, she took daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne in the company of a nursemaid called Pink; she was taken to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre ad nauseam and was one of the last visitors to see the painting before it was stolen in 1911; Nijinsky came to the house and sat around like a pet griffin (he had nothing to say); and the great demimondaines of Paris swished past her in the Bois, inspiring a lifelong love of footwear. "Their shoes were so beautiful! Children, naturally, are terribly aware of feet. They’re closer to them."

But Diana did not grow up in Paris. She grew up in New York. Frederick Dalziel became a Wall Street broker, running the foreign securities desk of Post & Flagg; and the press noted the reappearance of the bewitching Emily soon after the family arrived back in 1904. The Dalziels proceeded to occupy a number of houses before finally settling in an agreeable Upper East Side town house at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street in 1910; and Diana lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan until she married. In 1907, the Dalziels had a second child, a daughter named Alexandra, who was known in the family as Teenie, and whom Diana called Sister. Diana and Alexandra enjoyed an upper-class New York upbringing that was similar to Emily’s: a world of governesses, walks in Central Park, skating clubs, dancing classes, and children’s parties. A costume party at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street was attended by the offspring of grand families including the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Potters, and Goulds. There were summers in houses in the Hudson Valley, and holidays with their grandmother Mary Weir in Southampton and on her farm in Katonah, New York.

In common with other children from New York’s plutocracy, the two little Dalziel girls with their beautiful mother appeared from time to time in studio photographs in the society pages of the better parts of the press. There are several photographs of Diana herself before her twelfth birthday, marking her as a child who, like her mother, lived at the heart of New York’s social elite. She starred as the leading lady in a widely reported colonial pageant enacted by two hundred society children, a somewhat obnoxious event ostensibly organized by the Lafayette Fund to help wounded soldiers in France but mainly designed to let social interlopers know where they stood, since casting