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.

Diana vreeland memoir