Redeeming Features

by Haslam, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780307271679
• ISBN10: 0307271676
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-10
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

From British interior designer Nicholas Haslam, a dazzling and witty account of a frenetic and full lifefrom the 1940s to the presentin Europe and America, in a crowd of friends and acquaintances that includes virtually all of the cultural icons of our time. Haslam has found himself at the center of some of the most interesting circles wherever he isat parties, opening nights, royal weddings. In London in the late 1950s he crossed pathsand morewith Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, Diana Cooper, Greta Garbo, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, David Bailey, and Noel Coward. A time living in the still unspoiled south of France was an education in everything from the work of Bunuel to the style of toreros like Dominguin and Ordonez. In Paris he met Jean Cocteau and Janet Flanner, and, in Saint-Tropez, danced with Brigitte Bardot. In the 1960s, in New York, he encountered Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Andy Warhol, Jack Kennedy, Joan Didion, and Marilyn Monroe while working in the art department atVogueand later as art director, following Henry Wolf, at Huntington Hartford'sShowmagazine. AfterShow,Haslam moved to a ranch in Arizona to raise Arabian horsesTruman Capote and John Richardson, among others, came to stayand he began designing and commuting to Los Angeles to decorate for the stars. Back in England in the 1980s, he worked on David Bailey'sRitzmagazine, attended the wedding of his cousin Diana Spencer, and designed for everyone from the financier James Goldsmith to rock star Bryan Ferry. Redeeming Featuresis about much more than documenting a life among the celebrated and the eccentric: it is a vivid, at times humorous and moving portrait of a way of life that has all but disappeared. Haslam has an exacting eye for the telling detail and his story is a compelling and wholly fascinating document of our times.

Author Biography

Nicholas Haslam is the author of a book about his interior design, Sheer Opulence, and has been a contributing editor of British Vogue and Tatler for many years. He also writes for The World of Interiors and The Spectator. He lives in London.

Excerpts

My daily routine atVoguewas about to be dramatically transformed. I had heard about Diana Vreeland, who was the fashion editor ofHarper’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 toVogue.” 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?” meantGood 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 partic

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Excerpted from Redeeming Features: A Memoir by Nicholas Haslam
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