I think to just have little bites out of the fashion world
is a sort of a starvation diet myself.
I would rather keep right out and eat ice cream cake all day,
look terrible and feel fine,
or I would like to be bang in it as I have been for so many years.
When we think about an iconic person in a magazine, an editor,
we always say Diana Vreeland.
Diana was just so far ahead in terms of seeing fashion as an art form,
seeing photography as an art form.
When people call her the Empress Vreeland,
it's not by hazard
because she did have this incredible kind of auteur and grandeur to her.
She was upside-down original.
She was never a very rich woman.
She was never a very beautiful woman,
but she created beauty and she created wealth.
Come on, for heaven's sakes!
Let's get that movie going!
Diana: I loathe nostalgia.
I don't believe in anything before penicillin.
George: I can imagine.
How would you like to tell the story of your life then?
Diana: It's got to have some bite.
George: It's all your voice, Diana, it's all you.
I'm not doing anything.
All I'm doing is editing.
Diana: Don't give me that.
I was an editor for 40 years.
I know who's boss.
I don't give a damn what's in it, as long as it sells.
Listen, I'm as practical as Bloomingdale's.
George: All right then, Diana.
Of course, we are going to talk about your years at "Harper's Bazaar"
and at "Vogue,"
but first I think we should start with your childhood.
How does one become Diana Vreeland?
Diana: I certainly didn't learn anything in school.
My education was the world.
Where do I begin?
The first thing to do, my love, is arrange to be born in Paris.
After that, everything follows quite naturally.
I was brought up in a world of great beauties,
a world where lookers had something to give the world.
Paris was the center of everything!
I saw the whole beginning of our century there.
It was the Belle Époque.
It was a great moment.
Great, great!
Of course, I was always mad about the Ballet Russe, mad about it,
Diaghilev and his dancers.
George: Was he a friend of your parents?
Diana: Diaghilev?
Of course.
I remember him and Nijinsky coming over all the time.
George: What an enviable and wonderful childhood.
Did you realize at the time that you were lucky?
Oh, yes.
We adored them, they were so exciting.
Everyone who came in the house was exciting.
A great deal of my upbringing was in all those evenings
when I saw a lot of fun.
I've always sort of been in a theatrical ambience, so to speak.
I mean, I'm using Paris as sort of a theatre
for certain things for a woman, you know?
My parents thought of the most wonderful things
for my sister and me to see.
They sent us to London once and we sat in the bleachers
and watched the coronation of King George V!
It was marvelous.
The elephants, the horses, the regalia, the trappings.
Oh, it was gorgeous.
Horses were perfectly natural in those days.
Is there someone who personifies your idea of great style?
When you see a race horse being led out,
I think they've got something, hmm, that no one else has.
Race horse.
Why do you use the race horse as a metaphor for style?
Because the race horse has a little extra.
A little extra pizzazz.
As children during our summers in the Rocky Mountains,
we were brought up on horses.
I did, of course, ride a lot with Buffalo Bill.
And I loved him, he was very sweet, sweet to my sister and myself.
He was essentially a cowboy, you see.
That was his sort of dazed experience in life,
this languid, plunging, wonderful, marvelous-looking man, you know.
We thought he was beautiful.
And what did you think you wanted to be?
Or were you just out to experience?
I never wanted to be in the Rocky Mountains again,
that was sure.
I knew that it was about the loneliest place in town.
I wanted to get where the action was.
When did you first have a sense of how you wanted to look?
Um...
First time today or first time, when?
In your life.
Were you always pleased by the way you look?
Good God, no.
I should say not.
I mean, you can't go around like a smug mademoiselle
from about seven years up.
Uh-uh.
George: Diana, could I ask you some rather personal questions?
Diana: Mm-hmm.
George: Your mother, tell me about her.
Diana: I admired the fact that she was very good-looking.
George: Yes, but how did you get along?
Diana: We were not sympathetic.
- Very few daughters and mothers are. - Yes.
She used to say, "It's too bad that you have such a beautiful sister
and that you're so extremely ugly. "
So much of her character was formed when, as a little girl,
her mother treated her as her ugly duckling.
Diana: I was always her ugly little monster.
George: Well, how... how did that make you feel?
Now, George, I don't think we want to go there.
Let's just say Mom was a wild woman.
You know, she used to hunt rhinos.
George: And, your father, was he an adventurer as well?
Diana: Oh, no.
Daddy was an Englishman.
He raised us to be British in a healthy way.
That's the kind of family we were.
Very little visible emotion.
We were also gypsies.
We finally settled in New York when I was about ten.
I was ready to hit the streets, but my parents insisted I go to school.
So, they enrolled me at Brearley.
I lasted three weeks at the Brearley School.
No, three months, months.
And really they kept me there out of sort of kindness to my parents,
who obviously didn't know what to do with me
because I didn't know any English.
I never had time to learn English.
I wasn't allowed to speak French, and I had no one to talk to.
And I started to stutter and the whole thing became really a very serious...
And stuttering is quite a serious thing.
And then one day I went to a Russian school and then I was happy.
It was the only school I was ever happy in because all I did was dance.
And it was a great education.
I realized if I was going to make it, I must stand out.
My last name was Dalziel.
D- A-L-Z-I-E-L.
Gaelic for 'I dare. '
There's only one very good life and that's the life that you know you want
and you make it yourself.
I think when you're young,
you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings.
Then one day you get out when the sun shines
and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.
It came together for me in New York during the Roaring '20s.
I was going to make myself the most popular girl in the world.
The Roaring '20s, that was great.
The dancing, the music, the artists.
The world was alive with everything new.
It was the start of the 20th century, actually.
What were you like in your teens?
When the rest of us were going around gawky and...
I was dancing.
That's all I cared about.
By the time I was 17, I knew what a snob was.
I also knew that young snobs didn't quite get my number.
I was much better with Mexican and Argentine gigolos,
the odd ducks around town who liked to dance as much as I did.
Naturally, I was considered a bit fast.
The story got out.
But I didn't care what anyone else said.
I was never out of Harlem in those days.
The music was so great,
and Josephine Baker was simply the only girl you saw in the chorus line.
All you could feel was something good coming from her.
She had that... that thing... that pizzazz.
My mother didn't approve of my behavior,
but she had her own flirtations, so to speak.
She'd even flirt with my boyfriends,
and occasionally, one would fall flat for her.
I never felt comfortable about my looks
until I met Reed Vreeland.
He was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen, very quiet, very elegant.
I loved all that.
I met him on the Fourth of July at a party in 1924.
I believe in love at first sight because that's what it was.
Woman: And did you anticipate getting married?
Or, again, was this...
Oh, yes, because I was romantic.
Anything that was romantic was great.
Nothing could have spoiled my happiness.
Reed made me feel beautiful no matter what my mother made me think.
Reed and I moved to London just before the Crash in 1929.
Now, London ran the world, don't forget!
I learned everything in England.
I learned English!
But, of course, the best thing about London is Paris.
It was the '30s.
Strangers were dancing with strangers, girls were dancing with girls.
It was always raining.
It was hideous... and marvelous.
The clothes!
That's where I really learned about fashion.
No one had a better sense of luxury than Coco Chanel.
She really had the spirit of the 20th century.
She really understood what women's lives were going to be,
that they were going to take subways, they were going to walk in the rain.
- Man: Uh-hmm. - She was very rigorous and vigorous.
And, she was...
She would always fit me in her private atelier;
we were very close, you know.
George, you don't know what a part of life fittings were for me.
I used to have three fittings on a nightgown
and I'm not that deformed.
At the same time, I was opening up my own lingerie business in London.
We had some women who sewed in the shop,
but the most beautiful work was done in a Spanish convent by nuns.
One day, Wallis Simpson came into the shop and ordered three nightgowns
for a very special weekend.
She was off for a rendezvous with Edward, the new King of England.
And the rest, well, you know, is history.
My little lingerie shop had brought down the throne.
Edward: You all know the reasons
which have impelled me to renounce the throne.
George: Amazing story, Diana.
Were you still living in London at the time?
Diana: Good God, no.
The empire was finished and the war was about to break out.
We were spending most of our time with our family upstate in Brewster, New York.
I was so depressed, leaving Chanel, leaving Europe,
leaving all the world of my world.
George: But you had your family.
I grew up wishing I'd had any mother but this mother.
I didn't understand why I couldn't have just an old nice mom
- like all my friends had. - The other guys.
Tim: Yeah, what...
I didn't want the other boys to associate me with this woman.
Frecky: She always made it clear that she wanted us to be originals.
You've got to be either first in your class or the bottom of the class.
Don't be in the middle.
That's a wretched piece of advice to give a school kid.
Diana: George, why all this family talk?
Shouldn't we get to the more exciting stuff?
George: I find your family life very interesting.
Diana: Well, did I tell you about the time when me and my son Frecky
were sitting in Brewster, and you'll never guess who flew over our head.
Lindbergh!
Man on radio: Charles Augustus Lindbergh
will attempt what no man has ever dared.
He will attempt to fly the Atlantic non-stop.
New York to Paris alone, all alone.
Diana: He flew right over us, en route to Paris!
I always thought this was a very lucky sort of sign.
George: Had you already started working at "Harper's Bazaar" at this time?
Diana: We had just moved into the city, and I was going through money
like someone goes through whiskey if you're an alcoholic.
George: Yes.
How important is money?
Vital!
Absolutely vital.
Anyone who thinks otherwise must be insane.
Of course it's very modern to say it,
I mean, well-bred people didn't talk like this about money at one time,
but today, by God, they do!
We never really had that much money, so I realized I had to go to work.
It hadn't crossed my mind to work,
because I'm really basically quite lazy, you see.
But, I loved it, loved it!
I was so mad about working in those days, so mad about taking the train,
I was so mad about everything that was happening.
Man on radio: Of the 60 million Americans who hurry to their jobs
on workday mornings, one in every four is a woman.
More and more women are rising to top-flight executive jobs.
Mrs. Carmel Snow of "Harper's Bazaar. ' '
George: Tell me about Carmel Snow. How did she find you?
Diana: Well, you see, she saw me dancing at the St. Regis one night.
She admired what I had on... Chanel, of course.
So, she offered me a job.
I said, "But I've never worked before. I've never dressed before lunch. "
She said, "But you seem to know a lot about clothes.
Why don't you try it?"
"Why don't you try it?"
So I started a column called "Why Don't You. "
It was rather frivolous.
I don't remember too many of the ideas, thank goodness,
but they were all very true and tried ideas, mind you.
"Why don't you have the most beautiful necklace in the world
made of huge pink spiky coral and big Siberian emeralds?"
"Why don't you rinse your blond child's hair in dead champagne
to keep it gold as they do in France?"
Frecky: It was the recession and in the middle of it,
here is somebody advocating that you do way-out things.
It was a voice crying in the wilderness.
Olivia: "Why don't you paint a map of the world on all four walls
of your boys' nursery
so they won't grow up with a provincial point of view?"
"Why don't you wear violet velvet mittens with everything?"
Woman: It appears as though she didn't edit herself, but of course,
she knew what had the sound of rhythm,
she knew what had the sound of madness and surprise and all of that.
The important thing is that it was the first step into a career in fashion.
Diana: You know, I quickly became fashion editor at "Harper's Bazaar. "
It was quite an important role at the time, meaning that I wasn't 'a' fashion editor;
I was the one-and-only fashion editor.
George: So you stopped doing "Why Don't Yous"?
Diana: Well, we went to war.
I mean, that Europe went to war.
George: And "Why Don't You" seemed so silly.
Diana: Ridiculous, absurd.
Did I tell you about the night I saw Hitler before the war?
I was at the Munich Opera.
My friend whispered to me, "It might interest you, Madame,
to see the man who wishes to be dictator called Herr Hitler. "
So I looked down, that mustache was unbelievable.
It was so hilarious, it was just wrong.
Woman: Mrs. Vreeland's major contribution to the magazine
certainly was imagination and a very, very original point of view.
She simply didn't think like other people.
Diana: Do you know what came out of the war, George?
Peace at last, and the bikini!
It was the biggest thing since the atom bomb.
America wasn't ready for it, but I'm a reporter.
I know news when I see it.
Barbara: She had the first bikini, and she put it on a model.
And, we were all in her office and we were all aghast.
You know, we had never seen such exposure of skin and she said,
"With an attitude like that, you keep civilization back a thousand years. "
Mrs. Vreeland was not only responsible for the fashion look of the magazine,
but, I think, of fashion at the time.
George: Is it true you also popularized the blue jeans?
Diana: To me, since the gondola,
there's never been anything like the blue jean.
They're the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
I've done six or seven articles on them, you know.
George: And do I have it right that you discovered Lauren Bacall?
Diana: Oh, Betty was great.
Woman: What did you first think when you saw that very first picture
of Betty Bacall?
She came smiling into my office with this, um...
Someone had found her on the street corner,
looking for a cab or something with this wide Russian face.
I don't know how keen she'll be about being called a Russian,
but that's what she looked like to me in those days.
Lauren: Anyone that knows Diana Vreeland
knows that one has never seen anyone that looks like Diana Vreeland.
I mean, she wore flats and black tights before anyone ever thought of it,
you know.
We couldn't take a bad picture of Betty, not possibly take a bad picture.
I've never seen a model quite like that.
After I put her on the cover, she got a call from Hollywood.
You know you don't have to act with me, Steve.
You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything.
Not a thing.
Oh, maybe, just whistle.
I graduated from Wellesley in 1960,
thinking that I wanted to be in the fashion business.
I was a "Harper's Bazaar" magazine reader, voracious reader.
And to my amazement, I got a job with someone I had never heard of,
and it was Diana Vreeland.
I got the picture right away that I was working for someone
very, very creative, very, very demanding.
Women: Good morning, Ms. Prescott.
When Mrs. Vreeland came storming into the room,
she'd start barking orders, "Girl, get me some pencils. "
That would be me.
"A letter, I need Cecil Beaton!"
Woman: Now, hear this!
Lillian: She always gave her assistants a very hard time.
They always cried during the day.
Came back the next morning loving her.
- Were you an easy woman to work for? - No.
I had that reputation of not being easy, and I am.
I'm charming, I'm very easy.
But naturally, I expect someone to do as much work as I do,
which I believe is not usual, I'm told, I don't know.
One day, she stormed into the room after a particularly good lunch
and she chucked her huge coat at me.
And I chucked it back at her.
I mean, it was just knee-jerk, it was like volleyball.
And she said in a loud voice, "That is the rudest girl I've ever met. "
And I was not.
I was not, but it was, it was pretty... annoying, I think.
On the other hand...
Stop it!
Everyone was threatened by Diana Vreeland.
I mean, she was threatening, she was awesome,
she was one of the only people... There were two people...
I used to say to say there were only two people in the entire field
that ever intimidated me.
One was Diana Vreeland and the other one was Dick Avedon.
I was terrified of both of them.
Boy, was I lucky that I would have Carmel Snow as my editor
and Diana Vreeland as my fashion editor.
And I was 19 or 20
and I went straight from the Merchant Marine,
which meant straight from my home
to my mother, father, and crazy aunt.
Brilliant crazy aunt who just exploded with imagination.
Instead of saying, "Do this, we need that" in the issue, she'd tell an anecdote.
She'd... for example, I went to Egypt with Dovima
and she sent me a memo that said,
"Dick, before you plan these pictures, just think about Cleopatra,
think about those hot nights.
She was walking on the roof, everybody is so old
and she's this young beautiful girl pacing that roof!"
She just sort of threw your way of thinking.
Woman: Nobody did pure female glamour like Dick Avedon,
and no one knew it like Diana Vreeland.
She had this taste for the extraordinary and for the extreme.
Richard: Vreeland invented the fashion editor.
Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies,
now it's promotion ladies who compete with other promotion ladies.
No one has equaled her, not nearly.
Anjelica: The magazines before she came were all about how to fit in
with your husband or cook a pie or,
you know, even glamorous women.
But she said, "Pie?
Who cares about pie when there's Russia?"
man: She gave "Harper's Bazaar" its pep, that was her big contribution.
She gave fantasy to fashion and romanticized it
because basically deep down, it's not romantic.
Fashion is very boring subject.
I mean, she gave the energy and the pep to anything she touched.
That's important, even when you talked to her, she gave you... pep.
Tim: She talked about spreads.
She talked about visions that she had of a particular spread.
They always sounded kind of fantastical to me.
I mean, they would all go off to some remote part of the world
with the photographer and glorious models
and invent fantasy.
Man: We need adventure and she was the lady that would go anywhere.
If you said to Diana Vreeland we're going to put you in a space ship
and you're going to the moon, she'd go!
Tim: I remember when she did this fashion shoot in Arizona
at the Pauson House by Frank Lloyd Wright.
She even modeled herself during the shoot.
Lillian: I must say, I used to love to get an assignment from her
because she would get in front of the mirror
and become the model that she wanted you to photograph.
I remember I had a group of kimonos to do.
She got in front of the mirror and showed me how
in a kimono you didn't stand straight, you curved your body.
And she just took on the whole aura.
You... you really felt that she was a geisha girl
in front of that mirror.
Diana: Every girl in the world should have geisha training.
The idea is that you learn from exaggeration.
The way they move, their voices, their faces, the makeup!
God was fair to the Japanese.
He gave them no oil, no diamonds, no gold, nothing,
but he gave them a sense of style.
Style is everything, George.
It helps you get up in the morning.
It helps you get down the stairs, it's a way of life.
Without it, you're nobody.
And I'm not talking about a lot of clothes.
She was very aware of which girl had... had something that wasn't just dress,
you know, how do you say, clothing horse.
The posture, the body, the movement.
- She might do. - Might do what?
The bones are good.
There were this little kind of washed out, little Irish girls,
from, you know, Yonkers, and she turned them into queens.
They have to do a great deal for themselves... their skin, their posture,
their walk, their interesting things, their education.
She said, "Even if you're wearing closed shoes and boots,
your toenails have to be perfect. "
You know, it was like every single detail.
She knew that if your toenails were painted, maybe you would
walk in a different way.
So I don't know, but it was there.
You know, a special woman, who... who...
Which other women...
Name any of the ones you interviewed.
Do any of them have any sense like that?
No!
No.
What does it matter how people look and how they dress?
I should think it'd only matter to them.
Yeah.
I don't see that it matters to anyone else.
- Do I look all right? - You look great!
And that matters to me.
- You look great. - I do?
Yes, yes.
China: One can make fashion or one is.
Diana was fashion.
It's different.
Do Americans, as a rule, have good taste or bad taste?
They don't have any taste or any desire for taste.
The Kennedys are... have... have style, don't they?
Sure, Kennedy style.
Jacqueline Onassis is...
But she wasn't born a Kennedy, don't forget.
She's got her own special style.
Woman: When did you first discover Jacqueline?
Always known her, always known her.
- Love her. - You remember her as a young girl.
Yes, she just had that wonderful pizzazz of youth.
She was avid, out for everything.
She was enthusiastic, something she's never lost.
Frecky: When Jack Kennedy ran for President,
Jackie had no qualms about asking Mom for advice
on what clothes to wear to the inauguration in case he was elected.
In fact, Jackie wrote to mom, "Dear Mrs. Vreeland,
it sounds as if you know exactly the right things.
You are psychic as well as an angel.
I feel it is presumptuous and bad luck to even be thinking about it now,
but it's such fun to think about.
I would be imagining it even if my husband were a garbage man.
I'll just have to get it anyway and wear it to watch TV if things don't work out. "
But of course, Jack was elected and Jackie looked beautiful.
The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.
Frecky: Because of her friendship with Mom,
"Harper's Bazaar" was the first to publish a picture of the Presidential couple.
And she wrote, "Dear Diana, everyone is wondering
why we chose 'Harper's Bazaar' and they invent a million reasons,
and no one says the real one, which is you. "
George: Diana, it seems like you were on top of the world.
Why on Earth weren't you made editor-in-chief of "Bazaar"?
Diana: You know, George, after 26 years of making $18,000 a year,
the Hearsts finally gave me a raise.
$1,000! Can you imagine?
So when Alexander Liberman at "Vogue" came to see me,
I suddenly made up my mind to listen to him.
Woman on PA: Number one...
Magnifique!
Diana: I don't think anyone has ever been in a better place at a better time
than when I was editor of "Vogue. "
It was the '60s and it all started in London.
woman: The Beatles opened up enormous new channel
of excitement and life.
You didn't have to have certain kinds of manners.
You wore your miniskirt up to your crotch.
In England, you wore what you want.
What Diana Vreeland did was she channeled a certain kind of energy.
Mrs. Vreeland felt that the fashion
that was coming off the streets of London was the way forward.
Man: It was the time of the youth revolution
and she was so unbelievably intrigued by it.
And, uh, so she just wanted to have the whole...
a whole new brew of young photographers,
like Patrick Lichfield and David Bailey.
David: I think that sleeve would look better down on the right side.
Uh-uh, that's the left side.
It was a very London thing, in a way.
I mean, the youth and the vitality, and it was so different from America.
Well, say "lesbian" a few times.
- Lesbian. - Good.
- And again. - Lesbian.
- With more feelings. - Lesbian!
- That's more like it. - Lesbian?
David: Vreeland sent for me and Jean.
I thought all of us were going to get the elbow.
I thought she'd bring all the "Harper's Bazaar" photographers.
It was raining and Jean didn't want to go and she was crying.
All her mascara was running.
We looked like a couple of drowned rats.
We walked into the office and she said, "Stop!"
And Jean, tears came down, she just stopped.
We looked like a couple of drowned rats standing in a puddle.
And she said, "Stop! The English have arrived. "
I love the '60s, it was the Youthquake.
Man: "Vogue" was a very sleepy magazine when she took it over.
She really had to propel it forward into being a cutting-edge magazine
that people saw as "the key fashion magazine. "
Mrs. Vreeland was the perfect oracle
for what was happening in the world.
I think she understood this whole Youthquake.
She understood this influence of music and films
and photographers and models and understood the change
and really presented it to a bigger audience.
Man: She was waiting for the '60s.
It was a revolution and probably brought back the '20s to her.
Because that was her period, again,
where everything was thrown out and it was the new.
There was a social, there was a sexual, there was a political revolution.
You know, Civil Rights and "Black was Beautiful. "
And, you know, all these things that she could just jump all over.
Diana: It was a revolution, and for the first time, youth went out to life,
instead of waiting for life to come to them.
Boys and girls could do anything, it was true freedom!
And, of course, the music! Isn't Mick marvelous?
Those lips!
We did his photograph in '64 when he was quite plump!
The first picture ever published of Mick was with Vreeland
because I offered it to British "Vogue" and they said,
"No, who is this guy?" And I sent it to Vreeland.
She said, "I don't care who he is, I'm going to publish it,
it's such a great picture. "
As long as people know about it, they have to know that you exist,
which is a very important part of if you are somebody new starting out.
Mrs. Vreeland really brought us into a modern period.
I think, you see, we are living in a scientific age
and I don't think that...
That's the only thing that brings us forward, is science.
Anna: She just really got it
and knew that fashion and the world were on their way
to something much more global than what had been happening.
Not just fashion, but also the arts,
performers, entertainers, and new models.
Diana: We had Polish, we had English,
we had girls from all the different countries of Europe all coming here.
You know, they were so happy to be somewhere else
and they were wonderful.
They were so charming.
I adored Twiggy! She's just such a personality.
She's such a kid, such a girl, such a wow!
When she first came to us, I think she was about 16,
and this Cockney kid walks in
and she's a bit of all right, I tell you.
She almost killed me!
I thought she was so great! She was wonderful!
For the first time, models, like Twiggy, became personalities,
instead of simply mannequins.
Joel: She would say, "push their faults. "
If they have a space between their teeth,
make it the most beautiful thing about them.
Make an asset of your faults.
If you're tall, be taller, wear high-heel shoes.
If you have a long neck, be proud of it, don't try to hunch over.
If you have a long nose, hold it up and make it your trademark.
Joel: She celebrated Barbra Streisand's nose
and made it into, you know, a Renaissance statue or painting.
Diana: It was my idea to use Barbra Streisand as a mannequin.
We shot her in profile with that Nefertiti nose of hers.
Her success was overnight!
Then there was Cher! That girl was a dream!
No one had ever heard of her, so I tracked her down, sent for her,
and boy, did we use her!
She modeled for us forever.
You see, George, at the same time
mannequins became personalities in the '60s,
personalities became mannequins.
Ravishing personalities are the most riveting things in the world.
Conversation, people's interests,
the atmosphere that they create around them,
these are the only things worth putting in any issue.
Some of those girls that she turned into models, people would say, why?
You know, they look so strange.
And... but she saw something.
And that's what was extraordinary about her.
She saw things in people before they saw it themselves.
Woman: My aim was to use fashion to be a transformer.
I think that Vreeland must have sensed it, that she...
she said, "I want you to have your own ideas and visions
about how you want to transform yourself,"
because that was my wish: To be different characters.
For her, the most important thing was that it wasn't boring.
Don't be boring!
Don't tell a story, even if it's true, if it's boring.
Invent something!
Mrs. Vreeland invented this period herself.
I mean, through the pages,
she used people, like Veruschka, looking like a leopard...
I mean, this world without a leopard, who would want to be here?
Manolo: Marisa Berenson with wigs, with this, with that.
I think I was quite daring at the time.
You know, I was the first one to do naked pictures in "Vogue. "
I was, uh, quite a free spirit.
She used people like Penelope.
Penelope was not what I call the look of a model.
Penelope: I remember she looked down on my shoes and she went,
"I wonder what you're going to do with your life.
I don't think you'll be in fashion. "
She would fix her gaze on somebody and then they'd start to blossom.
I think she saw that I was one of these new things.
I wasn't one of these swans,
these European put-together '50s swans.
I was sort of this new American idea.
Anjelica: She made it okay for women to be ambitious,
for women to be outlandish and extraordinary,
and for women to garner attention.
Manolo: Vision!
"Vision" is the word I just wanted to tell about her!
She had a vision. Did I say that already?
She really launched a whole generation.
She started me off, she encouraged me with words.
She put the clothes in magazines.
She said to me, "Young man, why don't you do extremities?
Do shoes or something like that. "
I say, "Oh!"
"Young man, tell me what is... what you want to do. "
And she very quickly looked at my sketches.
So that really, in a way decided sort of my career.
Diana: All these people invented themselves.
Naturally, as the editor, I was there to help them along.
It starts always with the person who's in charge.
That's the editor-in-chief.
And clearly, Vreeland had a very strong impact
on the people that she chose to do the editing.
The men and women who she chose to do the sittings.
She hired them, she inspired them and worked with the photographers
in a way that there was a creativity that came through on the pages.
David: She was a nightmare!
She wasn't really interested in photography in a way.
It kind of got in the way of the dresses.
And I wasn't interested in dresses; it kind of got in the way of the photography.
So, we were always at the other end.
She quite liked it when Bailey was combative towards her.
Bailey and I shot a story about three times.
And each time, she said she didn't really like it.
And, finally, we did it in a completely different way
and we were both really happy with the results.
And she looked at the contact sheets...
Divine.
- Dee-veen. - Dee-veen!
"These are divine! I've never seen Penelope look like it!
She looks fantastic! How divine she looks!"
She said, "But, of course, I can't use these. "
And I'm going, "Why? Why?
If they're great, why can't we use them?"
She said, "There's no langour!"
"There's no langour in the lips! You can't hardly see the lips!"
And I think I called her a blind old bat.
I mean, you know, stuff like that, it just made you want to strangle her,
but, you know, at the same time, it was...
she had this sort of instinct about how things should look.
She would say, "Bob, you are not supposed to give people what they want;
you're supposed to give them what they don't know they want yet. "
And that was, I guess, the essence of her philosophy.
Diana's "Vogue" had this great sense of curiosity.
I mean, it wasn't just about fashion.
It was about art, it was about nightclubs, it was about music and,
I mean, it was society, it was all woven together.
Woman: "Vogue" was a wonderful features magazine then.
If you go through the people who were writing for "Vogue" then,
it's astonishing...
Diana: "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.
Diana was really almost the epitome of what New York was about,
this melding of Europe and America.
And, this openness to everything that was new and different and wild.
I mean, you know, she... she liked all the wild stuff.
I mean, she was not shocked by people taking drugs
or people being gay or people...
You know, I mean, she thought it was all amusing.
She understood the genius of vulgarity.
She was fascinated with pornography.
She was fascinated with... with plastic surgery, you know,
the fact you could take a woman's face and completely reshape it.
She didn't see that as immoral or anything.
She thought, "Why not?"
Though she never had it done herself.
Joel: She hardly was a traditional beauty.
You know, she was a very eccentric-looking woman.
And what she did was, instead of trying to fit into some mold,
she absolutely went, you know,
in the way of designing herself
so that she was an extraordinary work of art in herself.
Every detail was perfect.
This is a woman who put rouge on her ears
because she saw Kabuki performers do it
and she thought it looked very chic, which it did on her.
I love rouge.
- Totally artificial. - Totally artificial, yes.
We lead an artificial life.
We lead certainly an artificial life in an artificial town.
So, I mean, why all this naturalness? It's bloody boring.
A form of laziness, hmm?
That was her view of... of life.
That life is artifice.
Tim: It's not until a woman gets completely dressed up
with all her make-up on and all the artifice,
then she's glorious!
She saw the whole business of preparing yourself
and presenting yourself as being almost ceremonialized.
Alexander: From 8:00 'til noon,
she'd be in her bathrobe, taking phone calls, reading her mail.
You know, people used to joke the fact that she never had any staff meetings.
She didn't have staff meetings... she just told everyone what to do.
She used to send out dozens of memos a day.
She'd send a memo saying,
"Marisa's neck has grown two inches this year.
I want you to photograph her neck, that small head. "
"Go to Venice and hire a thousand gondolas!"
"Can you go to India to photograph a white tiger?"
Diana: The strong face comes not only from the bone construction,
but from the inner thinking!
Those memos were so intelligent and fun
and they explain so much her... her mind.
Diana: I'm extremely disappointed that no one has taken the slightest interest
in freckles on the models!
She had blogs with her memos, so she was the first blogger.
Diana: In case any of this is of interest to you,
Brigitte Bardot travelled halfway across the world to get married, barefoot!
You'd be constantly sort of breathless from, you know,
things that she would say and the way she thought.
And you could never permeate her thoughts.
She brought you back to wherever she was interested in.
It was just like surfing or something when you were with her;
you sort of, you just had to ride that wave.
Diana: But you know, I'm really only envious of one thing and that is a surfer.
I think it's the most beautiful thing... see, I'm mad about water.
I think water is God's tranquilizer; to be in it, to drink it, to look at it.
And to be a surfer, between the sky and the water
would be to me the most wonderful thing.
I'm sorry I just didn't make it.
Also, skateboards I think are great.
Great!
I think any form of rhythm is absolutely essential.
I mean, we are a physical people.
We do count on action, mood,
and wit of the body and so on to survive.
Ingrid: Her understanding of rhythm is huge
because you see it with the sentences.
In the same way,
she understood that in magazines why a magazine has to have a pause.
Why then it has to have a crash, why then it has to have a blast of color,
why then it has to have a big headline.
Diana: Does anyone read a picture book from the beginning?
I don't.
The eye has to travel.
I tell you, George, I think I'm more proud of the December issues
than anything else.
Everything attractive that I could think of in the world
we would put into the December issues.
It was Diana's idea to make the December issue
a really extraordinary, unusual feast for the eyes.
Diana: We had the eyes of Deneuve,
the eyes of the gothic, the kites, the Beatles!
We even had crossed-eyes!
And, of course, we had Irving Penn and his beautiful flowers.
The fantasy and the dreaming was something she wanted to give the reader
and she wanted to bring these exotic places
into the reader's mind.
We would spend three weeks photographing 20 pages
and it would be the big story of the December Issue.
Anjelica: In those days, it was a real story.
That's how you referred to a layout.
You didn't refer to it as just a series of photographs, it was a story.
Everything was so precise and there was such a luxury to it.
The Japan trip was, I think, the most luxurious ever done in fashion.
Ingrid: We were in Japan for five weeks.
We were completely left to do whatever we wanted,
but we had a synopsis.
Man: Mrs. Vreeland says, "The Tale of Genji,"
the first novel in the world written by a woman!
Ingrid: Mrs. Vreeland had the idea that we wanted it to be an epic of a love affair
between a Caucasian woman and a Japanese man.
Dick had the idea to find for me as a partner in the pictures
a man taller than me.
And that was, of course, right away, we all said,
"How could that ever happen?"
Ingrid: Maybe he should be a sumo wrestler.
We went to all of the wrestling matches to find this man,
which was very difficult.
And then, we heard about this man
and he was seven feet and some inches.
Veruschka: He was a sumo wrestler who was thin and much taller than me.
I mean, he was so tall that he couldn't fit in the car.
I mean, we had to take out the front seat,
so he had to sitting in the back of the car.
He had such a powerful breathing
that he would take a cigarette.
It was finished, the cigarette, and the next one came.
And we were just looking at this man.
We had never seen anything like that.
Ingrid: And that is the man you see in the pictures.
Isn't he wonderful?
That's the one thing about Vreeland,
she knew her job as an editor is you've got to give people
what they can't get at home,
you know, give them something that will just make them travel
in their minds.
Take them somewhere.
Polly: "Vogue" was very rich at the time,
so they could go to the Himalayas if they wanted
and she would be behind them.
I don't think that Alexander Liberman, her boss and the boss at "Vogue,"
was particularly keen on that sort of expenditure.
He was holding the reins, but she could gallop quite fast.
There was a pride about being a woman of a certain age with knowledge,
with sexiness, mother, career woman.
Not somebody necessarily born beautiful,
but somebody who had something up here.
Women were embarrassed about working, or it was a sign of poverty,
she made it something chic to have somewhere to go in the daytime.
Are you a feminist, Mrs. V?
I don't even know what you're talking about.
- I really mean that. - Explain that.
I don't understand what all this talk is about women
and being different from the way they ever were.
Are they different from the way they ever were?
She was a self-invention...
the will, the strength, the determination, the risk-taking.
She was tough and she was strong.
She was a star.
She was a huge superstar.
We found out she hadn't seen "Chinatown"
and she was always madly in love with Jack Nicholson.
So, we looked in the newspaper
and it was only playing at a theatre deep in Harlem.
So, we go into this Great Hall Theatre and it's packed.
And, of course, we are the only Caucasians in the audience
and we sit down in the middle of this aisle.
And...
...this is so Mrs. Vreeland.
And Jack comes on the screen and it's dead quiet.
Okay, pal, let's have us a big smile.
And I will never forget it, Mrs. Vreeland raised her hand
with her red fingernails and at the top of her lungs shouted,
"Isn't Jack attractive?"
Did you wear a uniform?
Sometimes...
She met Jack and because of Jack, she met all kinds of people in Hollywood
and it was a big enrichment to her life.
Tim: Warren Beatty would come down in his little sport car and pick her up
and she would spend the evening with Julie Christie, Jack Nicholson,
Anjelica Huston, and Cher.
They were all great friends... I think.
When I first went out to California, she said,
"You know, I'd love to introduce you to people out there,
but all my friends are so much younger than you are. "
And today, you're seen with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.
What do all these people have in common?
The people I know, I know through work usually,
and that's what's so stimulating.
That's the best way to know people, I think.
Bailey was always flirting with Vreeland
and would say the most outrageous things to her.
I said, "If you were 20 years younger, I'd give you one. "
She said, "If I was 20 years younger, you'd have no choice. "
She would go mmm, mmm, mmm!
She loved that.
She was becoming a celebrity.
One was reading about her all the time.
She was at The Factory, she was at Studio 54.
And this all came as a great surprise,
and that, yes, that did affect me.
I was rising in the Foreign Service,
but I don't think she took any great interest in it
and that... that hurt me somewhat.
She just didn't have time to have conventional anything left in
her life at that time.
Diana: You do realize that from the age of 30,
I've worked every day of my life, and that goes for Saturdays and Sundays.
George: Well, I was just going to ask about your family.
We've not talked about your husband,
we've not really talked about your children,
we've not talked about grief or disasters.
I don't think we really want to.
You know, curiously enough, those things haven't touched me much.
I don't mean my husband, that's a different story.
Reed and I had a great life together.
He had fantastic glamour for me and he always retained it.
Isn't it curious that even after more than 40 years of marriage,
I was always slightly shy of him?
What do you mean?
Well, don't you think all women are slightly shy of all men?
But your husband of 46 years, you always remained slightly shy.
Of course.
I wouldn't have suspected that of you.
But you're not supposed to suspect.
I can remember his coming home in the evening.
If I was in my bath or in my bedroom making up,
I can remember always pulling myself up, thinking,
"I must be at my very best. "
Frecky: Think of it as a male dancer in a classical ballet.
He gave support to her, he's there to make sure that
if she jumps in the air he has... he catches her.
Diana: But then he got sick.
Naturally, we didn't discuss it.
Why would we discuss cancer?
When he was ill, it was very difficult
because she wasn't really admitting that he was ill.
And...
So it was very, very hard for anybody, I think, to help her, at the time.
I saw a totally unemotional person.
That's when you... when you never express any negatives.
You also never get too emotion...
After the funeral service, there was this lunch
at our home at 550 Park Avenue
and she wore white, which was a statement.
She then totally immersed herself in her work.
Reinaldo: She was of the era of elegance.
She was of the era of imagination, and at a great expense.
She was the most expensive thing, I think, that the new houses ever had.
I mean, she cost a fortune, you know.
It didn't matter to have 500 orchid plants shipped to...
to Alaska for a shoot.
You know, that was perfectly normal for her.
You could tell that she was often sailing very, very close to the edge.
Sometimes, what Diana did didn't please all the advertisers.
The magazine had hit a plateau, people were complaining too much.
And there were only two people to blame.
There was Alex and there was Diana.
Somebody had to go.
You were canned from your editing job.
Diana: That's right.
And why was that, by the way?
Because they wanted a different sort of magazine.
When Vreeland was asked to leave "Vogue," she was...
I think she was angry that Liberman didn't do it himself.
She said, "So, I sent for Alex. "
And he came up, she said, and he's standing there in profile, she says,
"Alex, I've looked at your profile for ten years;
for once look me in the eye and tell me I'm fired. "
She said, "He wouldn't look me in the eye. "
And I said, "Alex, I've met red Russians, I've met white Russians,
but you're the first yellow Russian I've ever met. "
And that was the end.
Everything changed... the music changed.
The atmosphere changed, the pictures changed.
That was the end of an era.
Frecky: Mom went into a sort of collapse.
She was feeling very, very sorry for herself.
In effect, her life had become conventional, and she...
it was unbearable to her
that she didn't have some intense thing that she was doing.
She was out of work and nobody really knew what she could do
after "Vogue" because that was such a hard act to follow.
The person I saw that day was not the autocratic,
sure-of-herself star.
I could see there was some brokenness.
man on radio: Turn back, turn back? Should we turn back?
The weather behind is as bad as the weather in front.
Lindbergh goes on.
Diana: I was only 70... What was I supposed to do?
Retire?
And then one day I got a call from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Oscar: Tom Hoving was then Director of the Metropolitan Museum.
He said we would love to have Diana as a Special Consultant,
but we don't really have the funds.
Bob: Francoise de la Renta, who was a real organizer,
got on the phone to all the ladies and said, "We've got to help Diana.
She should be taking over the Met. "
And so they all said that they would give money to the Costume Institute.
You continue to amaze people by the fact that you keep going
and anything that knocks you down,
you rise again and start over... uh, do you have any personal philosophy?
I don't start over.
You see, I just go on from one thing to another.
They're all really the same.
You could easily have said, "Well, that's it, I've done enough. "
But, you took over this Costume Institute at the Met, put it on the map.
Man: At the time, the Costume Institute was a rather sleepy place.
It was all about the costume, the conservation,
publishing them, studying them, thread-by-thread, whatever.
And what did she want to do?
She wanted to get them out of those shelves, onto dummies,
bring in the people, show them, get the excitement going.
Diana: George, I was so excited. Back in business!
I could show everything I have loved all my life.
I started with Balenciaga.
His clothes were devastating.
One fainted... One just blew up and died.
The exhibition went on for six months and there were one every year.
Nicky: It was greater than a magazine.
It was a magazine that was alive and three-dimensional.
Alexander: They had music, they had artwork.
They had these huge horses in the middle of the exhibit.
I mean, there was always vitality.
Harold: She painted all the walls these glossy colors.
She painted the mannequins, and she pumped in,
through the air conditioning vents, fragrance.
What this did for the critics was evoke Bloomingdale's.
What it did for most of the public
was it created a kind of freshness to the past.
Calvin: Everything changed.
And, suddenly, it became an event.
It became...
The show was a very big deal.
And it was a great success.
Lines, I remember!
For the Russian exhibition, I went to it, André got us tickets or whatever,
I went five times anyway, so.
You couldn't get into it.
The lines were around the block, it was amazing.
And she wanted everybody to understand her shows.
She used to say if an eight-year-old-girl from Harlem doesn't understand
what she's looking at, then I'm wasting my time.
It sounds a bit un-PC... that girl was important to her.
That was just as important to her as having Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner
jumping up and down.
She wanted everybody to jump up and down.
And then, of course, it made the opening night
of that a celebrity, social, you know, event.
And the first party was a huge success.
People came from all over the world.
This was really the party of the year, but all due to Diana
because she knew how to mix the people.
Philippe: Well, the party of the year was resented by a lot of the curators
and the staff of the Met.
When you see your porcelain start to walk on a shelf
because of the deep basses of the rock bands...
And we said, "What is this, a museum or a nightclub?"
I mean, make up your mind.
Frecky: When Philippe de Montebello took over, he very ostentatiously said,
"And now, Madame Vreeland,
tell me what are your diplomas
and preparation for being... "
And she sat absolutely quietly for a count of 60,
and then she got up and she looked at him and she said,
"You know perfectly well that I have had no education whatsoever,
that I am here, I've done one thing,
and that is bring in the people to the museum. "
Man: Well, I think that she was not academic in any respect.
And that's what, that's what was so interesting about her
approach to fashion.
She knew the history of fashion, but she didn't get bogged down in it.
And she was about ideas and about the magic of fashion.
Katell: Diana, forever, was an editor.
She had a vision.
She will say of 18th-century woman, she will say,
"Oh, that won-der-full Marie Antoinette, that poor Queen.
That wonderful French way. "
Everything French was fine, you know.
"The minuette, the beauty!"
I'm Marisa Berenson.
I'd like to welcome you to the 18th Century.
The Met is busy gathering together for the first time
the greatest collection of costumes, jewelry, and accessories.
Please, don't stand there!
All right, thank you.
Simon: I think the conservation people had heart attacks
when they saw her going into the archive.
She would grab things and whack the back of them.
Woman: How 'bout this color?
- Now, are we waiting for something? - Man: The lavender feather.
Man: It was like asking a football player to stylize the mannequin,
but she always had a concept.
They're all fighting with each other, they're all flirting with each other.
There's a story of who was having an affair with who, and she would say,
"If they're not having any fun, how can the visitors have any fun?"
Harold: I don't think she had the average person's relationship
to the English language.
She would give you these oblique haiku things
that gave you a sense of where she was headed or where her idea was.
My favorite was when I was called in to make a wig for her.
She had this idea of a hairdo which had a frigate in it.
She said, "You know, Harold, the 18th century is all about proportion. "
So, I measured the dress.
I found portraits from the period.
People would come into my loft and they would say, "What is that?"
And I would say, "Oh, it's an 18th-century wig. "
They say, "It is?"
I brought it to the Met in a Checker Cab, nothing else would fit.
As soon as I took the garbage bag off, I knew she was disappointed.
She went, "Hmmmm. "
It was accurate, and that's not what Mrs. Vreeland wanted.
What she wanted was the surprise of this grotesquely huge hairdo.
I began to create a new hairdo,
which was based on the height of the ceiling.
She came back and she said,
"Mmm, now she can go to the guillotine!"
Diana: "Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design. "
This killed Tom Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan.
It killed him!
He's on the floor.
And he said, "In the name of God, why do we have to drag Hollywood
into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?"
For the first time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
is honoring a living designer.
Diana: George, the controversy, the outrage over nothing.
A living designer, with a store down the street.
"You're promoting his business with a show in the museum. "
Woman: Is it art?
There is great art in what he does... used as a verb, yes.
If that is a verb, I don't know enough about grammar.
It was the first show she dare.
Philippe: The field was entirely transformed because from then on,
all other museums with great collections,
seeing how popular and how successful were costume shows,
began to mount great exhibitions of their own.
Man: She didn't have a college education.
She learnt history, art, literature.
She learnt civilization through fashion
and she wanted to share it.
George: Fashion is not just clothes, is it?
Diana: No, it isn't.
It's part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events.
You can even see the approaching of...
a revolution in clothes.
You can see and feel everything in clothes.
Of course, now that I work at the museum,
I'm only delving into my past.
You've lived through so many eras of fashion.
Do you have a favorite?
I think the '20s were superb.
Of course, it was terribly exciting to me because I had just
started to wear clothes.
I was just starting to live in Europe and I thought that the whole revolution...
There has never been a woman without a back in her dress in history.
There's never been a woman with her clothes chopped off
at the knee in history.
Bob: She was educating us about periods in history that,
you know, came before our time:
The 1920s, the 1930s, the '40s, the '50s.
I mean, she kind of knew it all.
Woman: I loved to get her on a riff about something that appealed to her,
and above all, the Diaghilev era.
Woman: We'd go back into her office and she would tell me the story
of when she saw Nijinsky dance The Spectre of the Rose.
And the... you know, I even get a chill now talking about it.
The description of the stage and the window blowing open
and Nijinsky flying through the room.
Diana: He didn't leap up.
He leaped across the stage to the far end.
We knew it was amazing
because it was so amazing that it appeared amazing.
Not all things that are amazing appear, perhaps, you know?
The Belle Époque, the era in which I was born,
the last era of absolute luxury.
Ah!
The Bois du Boulogne of my childhood,
the demimondaines with their hats and parasols.
I was young, but I remember the most wonderful excitement
all the time.
And, there was a great deal of, I suppose, what we call decadence,
but, of course, I didn't see any of that.
I only saw the horses.
Woman: Mrs. Vreeland had her own view of history.
She would pick up certain characteristics of an era
and perhaps magnify it too much.
Harold: There were these kinds of moments where perhaps
she was not representing the historic truth.
But, in a strange way, for example with the 18th-century headdress,
she was capturing the real truth, which is the integrity of the idea,
that the idea is something that is bigger than the actual facts
and it just sort of breaks through the facts.
Fantasy sometimes is applied to Mrs. Vreeland in a derogatory sense,
that the fantasy eclipses the reality,
the authority, the academic,
and I think it's a skew that is wrong.
I think the fantasy for Mrs. Vreeland was like a pulse.
When she felt the pulse, it... it kept, it kept everything alive for her.
Reinaldo: She was a great inventor.
There was something rather charming about that.
And she didn't pretend that she was not inventing.
It just turned out that it was a better story than the other one.
How could Diana Vreeland write that she saw Lindbergh flying over Brewster?
That wasn't even his route.
Uh, well, Diana, is that fact or is it fiction?
And she said, "faction. "
And, uh, that's pretty much where it is.
Because, there are various stories which are historically not true,
but in her mind, that's the way life should be.
Simon: I remember her saying that she'd never been to India
and had no real intention of going,
because if she went, it wouldn't match the vision in her head.
And I think it was the same with Russia, too.
Maybe she had been to Russia.
I really wouldn't know anything about Russians.
What I love is Russia.
It was all storytelling and I think that's where she and I met,
is that we both liked to tell stories.
Her vision of the way the world could be,
of the way it possibly should be,
of when it's at its best, when a woman is at her most beautiful.
Diana: I believe in the dream.
I think we only live through our dreams and our imagination.
That's the only reality we really ever know.
You know, I can't stand seeing shows being taken down.
They have to do it when I'm gone.
You know, I get very, very attached to Josephine Baker
and to the Princess Murat walking in the Bois with her boyfriends.
I find them very attractive women.
But you know, George, you have to let go at some point.
I'm not creeping around.
I once heard someone say, "I shall die very young. "
"How young?" I don't know.
Maybe 70, maybe 80, maybe 90.
But I shall be very young.
It was my privilege to help Diana Vreeland with her memoirs,
a book called, "D.V."
One night, Diana Vreeland told me this...
"Oh, I am mad about armor. Mad about it.
I love the way it's put together.
I love the helmets with the feathers out the back.
Milanese, you see.
Have you ever seen a Tilting Green?
It's the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
There are great banks that rise up on either side
like giant steps terraced in grass...
grass, grass, green grass, with the knights in armor,
banners, and these great horses.
You can say, 'Well, give me a good game of football. '
But, that must have been the most beautiful contest to see in the world.
You can't imagine it until you've seen a Tilting Green,
all green, green, green right to the sky. "
I like to think that's where Diana is at this moment.