In her memoir, she hardly comments on her mother’s antipathy to her beyond saying, “My mother and I were not really sympathetic,” but her being judged extremely ugly by her beautiful mother was obviously the central trauma of her life all she knew as a child, she tells us, was that “my mother wasn’t proud of me.

Her father ignored it: “Worse things happen at sea.” He was an Edwardian gent-Frederick Dalziel (pronounced “Dee-el,” Diana tells us). Her mother was a spoiled American beauty, who became embroiled in a scandal just as Diana was getting married. This, of course, is why you are so impossible to deal with.'” One day she said to me, ‘It’s too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. has already told the story, chillingly, in her memoirs: “There was the most terrible scene between my mother and me. In a new biography, Diana Vreeland by Eleanor Dwight, we get the whole picture, but D.V. she invented was a triumph of personality and will, but why should she have to invent herself in the first place? As usual, the roots go back to childhood, and in particular to her mother’s rejection of her. Dalziel-I dare, therefore I dare, I dare change today, & make myself exactly how I want to be.” The D.V. In the diary she kept when she was about 15, she wrote, “I am Diana, a goddess, therefore ought to be wonderful, pure, marvelous, as only I alone can make myself ….

Even at 14 she wanted to be a Chinese princess, and though she didn’t quite make it, she did turn herself into some kind of Kabuki figure, surrounded in her red apartment by swags and sconces and torchères and fur throws and blackamoors. Lies, or exaggerations, or tall tales, or self-mythologizing are essential to anyone who completely invents herself, as Diana Dalziel Vreeland did.

It’s too boring ! You have to always be dramatic …. Or in the Atlas Mountains-“in a nomad community, accompanied by Berber ululations.” To the famous model Veruschka she insisted, “If somebody asks you about where you are from or where you were born, never say what is true. Fantasy, imagination, glamour were her stock in trade why bother saying you were born in Paris when it was so much more amusing to have been born in Vladivostock, as she insisted one day to her grandson that she had been. Vreeland-D.V.-wouldn’t have objected to an invented, orexaggerated, story about herself: She had made it clear from the start that a good story was more important to her than a goodfact. We can’t use her in the magazine!”? (I’m not sure I do believe that, given her long friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.)īut then Mrs. And do you know (and do you believe) that when President Kennedy was shot, her first reaction was: “My God, Lady Bird in the White House.

D.V. by Diana Vreeland