Redeeming Features - Hardcover

Haslam, Nicholas

 
9780307271679: Redeeming Features
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307271676 ISBN 13: 9780307271679
Verlag: KNOPF, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The British designer and author of Sheer Opulence documents his frenetic life from the 1950s to the present, describing his experiences at numerous high-society events and his interactions with famous figures from Andy Warhol to Marilyn Monroe.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas Haslam is an interior designer and the author of Sheer Opulence. He has been a contributing editor at British Vogue and Tatler for many years and also writes for The World of Interiors and The Spectator. He lives in London and Hampshire.

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My daily routine at Vogue was about to be dramatically transformed. I had heard about Diana Vreeland, who was the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar (Vogue’s only and at that time more chic rival) from Cecil Beaton, who, having worked with her, and admired her unique style for several decades, was a confirmed fan, and also, on our flight across the Atlantic, from Claire Rendlesham, to whom Mrs. Vreeland was an idol. Suddenly a rumor was buzzing around the corridors of the Graybar Building. “Mrs. Vreeland is coming. Coming here, coming to Vogue.” Sure enough, a day or two later Serena Russell and I received invitations—flatteringly the only two members of staff below the rank of editor to do so—asking us to the party at the Colony Club to welcome Diana Vreeland into the bosom of Condé Nast.

Mrs. Vreeland’s appearance was breathtaking. She didn’t merely enter a room, she exhilarated it, and all eyes immediately locked on her, hypnotized. Her onyx black hair, sleeked back from a sloping brow, revealed ears powdered terra-cotta red with a hare’s-foot brush; her peony pink cheeks, the pronounced crimson lips below a long nose, her cranelike walk and pelvic-thrusting stance had all been described to me, but her actual presence was like a sock on the jaw. You knew you were seeing a supernova. It was not long before I discovered that behind this astonishing exterior lay a much-heralded mind not only of dazzling fantasies (and a sense of history, albeit often reordered to suit them) but of originality of thought, and a carefully shrouded or, rather, disguised loving tenderness.

Her immediate, astounding action on arrival at Vogue was to have Jessica Daves’s formerly dreary office lacquered shrieking scarlet, and carpeted in leopard skin—“tigre” (pronounced “teegray”), as she called any big-cat markings, whether tiger, leopard, or ocelot. There exists a photograph of her in the room, at her black desk below a vast pinboard smothered with drawings and notes, just visible among them the painted card I’d done to welcome her on her first day. I was to get to know this room well. One of my jobs as a junior in the art department was to attend to the retouching of any fashion photography, a serious matter at that time as, quite apart from there being no question of nudity, we had to touch out navels, such innocent features being then—unbelievable as it now sounds—considered obscene. Each morning, after the ritual of her eleven o’clock entrance, would come the summons: “Send for Rembrandt.”

Armed with my layouts, and Mrs. Vreeland with her red wax pencil, we would spend an hour improving on the beauty of those impossibly beautiful girls: Suzy Parker, Verushka, Dovima, Frederica (and before long, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy), as assistants trundled in racks of clothes for her approval, and hats, shoes, jewels, gloves, furs, cosmetics, wigs, and false hair: “It’s not fake anything, it’s real Dynel,” was a Vreeland remark that became an advertisement. Anything she liked was “diviiine,” while “Uuum?” meant Good God, no!

In between there would be digressions into the history of costume: “Sewing in a sleeve at that angle was first done in Poland in the 1770s,” or “Schiaparelli invented that wrapped skirt in her collection the summer before the war. Couldn’t wait to wear it.” Constructively critical, Mrs. Vreeland was never bitchy. She also had the brilliant knack of making one think one had just come up with the idea she had subtly put into one’s head.

Foreign lands, and especially the then-exotic ones like China, Russia, and Turkey, were a lifelong passion for Diana, due to her supposed birth in France and childhood in England. For Europe she held a special thrall, and she was particularly fascinated by “swinging London” and, by extension, me.

My father had sent me a newspaper clipping of a new pop group from Liverpool. Being from Lancashire himself, he’d been intrigued by them, though he was the least musical of men. I showed this article on the Beatles to Mrs. Vreeland: “They’re too adorable, get them photographed immediately!” She sent me to England to arrange it. The resulting portrait, taken by Peter Laurie after a gig in Northampton, was the first photograph printed of the Beatles in any American magazine. In those days the fans threw flowers, rather than bottles and knickers, onto the stage. I gathered these up into posies and passed them to the boys. Holding them, these wild young cannibals sat there looking as innocent as Victorian bridesmaids.

Young aristocrats, too, were grist to Diana, and the pages of Vogue soon had spreads on Nico and Alastair Londonderry in their David Hicks–designed house in Hampstead; of Desmond and Mariga Guinness with white-blond children at their Gothic Irish castle, Leixlip; or of Peregrine Eliot and his wife, Jacquetta, at Port Eliot, an intensely romantic country house on the edge of the sea in Cornwall—places and people surely as foreign to the American reading public as the inhabitants of Timbuktu. Her antennae being ever on the qui vive, she was intrigued to hear that my brother’s Eton contemporary Mark Birley was opening a London nightclub named after his wife, my friend Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart. She sent me over to arrange photographs of the unutterably English crowd that would be gathered for the opening night. While I was there, Margaret Case telephoned me in a panic.
“Help,” she said. “Main’s dying!” Heavens, I thought—had the electricity in New York failed? Then she explained. Her great friend the dress designer Mainbocher was in mortal danger unless I could collect the right pills for him from a doctor in London. I flew with the precious package back across the Atlantic and delivered it to Margaret. Mainbocher recovered and, in gratitude took me for dinner à deux at Le Pavillon. (It’s odd that the only two times I dined at Le Pavillon were with world-famous couturiers; the other was Yves Saint Laurent. This time the lights had failed, as it was during the great New York blackout.)

Diana’s and my working relationship soon became a friendship outside the office. Diana and her husband, Reed, often invited me to join them for Sunday lunch, a fixture of their weekend. The interesting and beautiful young, and especially at this time Italians, were meat and drink to Diana, and one could be sure that girls of the aristocratic calibre of Benedetta Barzini, Verde Visconti, or the model Luciana Pigniatelli would join us. Diana particularly enjoyed evening jaunts to odd things I’d discovered, such as Chinese operetta in a pagodalike theater way down on the East Side, or tango competitions at Roseland dance hall.

We sometimes met for lunch during the week, always in Janssen’s, the restaurant on the street floor of the Graybar Building. The most memorable of these was to come about a year later, on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. The first news came on my (illicit) radio in the art department, just as I was leaving to join her. Knowing her family’s friendship with Jack, and particularly Jackie, I stayed a few minutes to be able to tell what I heard, and rushed to join her at the booth in the tragedy-oblivious, bustling restaurant. I blurted out, “Diana-the-president’s-been-shot-and-they-don’t-think-he’s-going-to-live.” She looked aghast, paused for a moment, and then said only, “My God, Lady Bird in the White House! We can’t use her in the magazine.” Ever the canny editor—though it must be noted that, not long after, she...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307271676
ISBN 13 
9780307271679
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
338
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Verantwortliche Person
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