The Asylum Read Online Free PDF Page B

the conservation department. Obeying the stringent guidelines issued by the teams of lab-coat-wearing, white-gloved conservation ladies was not in the Vreeland wheelhouse. Though much of the Met fashion archive was antique and disintegrating, Vreeland loved nothing more than to drag an eighteenth-century coat out of its tissue-paper coffin and—
quelle horreur!
—try it on for size!
She would then strike period-appropriate attitudes. As far as the conservation department ladies were concerned, this was the equivalent of throwing acid at the
Mona Lisa
.
    I remember Vreeland’s office, with its blood-red walls and leopard carpet. The cork board behind her desk was smothered with inspirational photos: Maria Callas screaming, Veruschka vamping, Nijinsky leaping. DV was a cultivated broad whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. She had met everyone from Buffalo Bill to Brigitte Bardot. (She once insightfully observed that Brigitte’s lips “made Mick Jagger’s lips
possible
.”)
    I remember Vreeland’s personal style. She wore kabuki-style rouge on her ears and massive black rosettes on her shoes. Her nuanced look was a palimpsest of all her previous incarnations: a thirties hairdo, a fifties manicure, a sixties go-go boot. There’s a lesson there for us all: If something suits you, hang on to it and drag it with you into the next decade.
    My mother did the same thing. In the 1940s she adopted a Bette Davis pompadour (circa
Now, Voyager
) and the very same hairdo adorned her head when we buried her forty years later. There was a brief moment in the sixties when she experimented with a trendy updo of tunnel curls, accented with dangly earrings. She came home from the hairdresser, took one look in the mirror and declared, “I look like a tart.” She then stuck her head under the kitchen faucet and reconstructed her
Voyager
pompadour.
    I remember how much Vreeland loved Bill Cunningham. DV was convinced that every Met costume installation needed to have a contribution from the bicycle-riding photographer-milliner-fashion sage. On the occasion of the Royal India show, I was instructed to leave space for a white peacock in one of my maharajah dioramas. Bill, an amateur taxidermist, had promised DV that he would deliver a specimen, stuffed and preening, in time for the opening.
    Days passed. The clock ticked. No peacock. I stared anxiously at the empty space, already spotlighted, which awaited the arrival of Bill’s bird.
    On the last day of the installation Bill careened into the parking lot on his bicycle. On the handlebars was a large object in a trash bag. Yes, it was Mr. Peacock. Hugely relieved, I indicated the allotted space and left Bill to unwrap, fluff and install his creation. Returning half an hour later, I was greatly amused by what I saw.
    Bill’s bird was a real
mieskeit
, a total Marty Feldman of a peacock. It was a strangely unmajestic bird, an enigma, a mutant.
    I asked Bill where he found this unpeacock.
    â€œOh, young fella, it’s not a peacock. I was cycling through Central Park and I found a dead seagull, and I thought,
Perfect! For Diana’s show!
So I took it home and stuffed it and added goose feathers and peacock feathers! Voilà!”
    With a little careful lighting and judicious angling, Bill’s seagull delivered a remarkably good impersonation of a regal peacock. There is yet another lesson for us all: When in doubt, make sure you are totally backlit.
    More memories . . .
    After the opening, I remember having dinner with DV at her apartment. This was the exquisite red-lacquered Park Avenue aerie which Billy Baldwin had created for Madame in response to her request for “a garden in hell.” The living room was a decadent, fabulously overdecorated opium den. The walls and upholstery were a hallucinogenic sea of blazing red patterns and foliage. Every horizontal surface was jammed with objects: turtle shells,