Reprise: 2016 Will Be Another Year of Biographies

What this woman lacks is discipline.  I obviously am capable of doing most things with single focus and compulsion, be it jig saw puzzles, baking holiday cookies, and yes even reading, but need a structure or end game.  So thinking back over the Blog and under what conditions were my reading and writing most prolific, it was those years when I anchored the books to the alphabet (I mean I garden that way too) and decided rather than States, it would be people.

With that pledge to myself, I even started already, three weeks before the new year.  So here is:

Diana Vreeland, D V

This really was a puff piece or better an amuse bouche to start off with.  Thirty two short, chatty chapters that essentially are transcriptions of conversations with George Plimpton!  You get the point, there are names dropped all over the place.

So why did D V sound like a good choice?  There she was, a picture of the wicked stepmother, introducing all the short term Cinderellas in Bazaar and Vogue once I grew out of Seventeen.  How dramatic the profile, how dark the hair, how imposing the figure, how exquisite the wardrobe.  Makes Anna Wintour, that devil in Prada, look like a Dutch boy bobbed Brownie.

Her qualifications for the job of editor were simply her ability to be everywhere and noticed.  Born a bit of an ugly duckling in a house of swans, as a child she was a late talker, a poor student, and a tad reckless as a teen.  She roared or rather tangoed through the 1920s.  At least she knew she needed to be fenced in and married at 18, married well, traveled and dressed the part.  Met everyone of any accord.

Starting with this dialogue type of life story brought back my two conclusions from my last venture into biogs:  first, a biography is always better than an autobiography or memoir; and second, no matter how diverse and apparently disconnected the lives and times of people on my "chosen" list, they have a habit of turning up in each others books.  And then there is always the little known, knock me back on my feet surprise:   D V lived off State Street in Albany as a young bride, probably the same time my mother was newly-wed.  They surely passed on the street although Diana hung out with the scions of the founding Dutch settlers.

I expected there would be lots of tales of couture and designers and there was but was looking for D V's signature.  Obviously, who can live by her counsel to have all one's shoes handmade, but her proclivity to paint all her inside doors each a different color made me feel like a dull farmer's wife staining all my new downstairs doors stable reminiscent  of fallen walnuts.

Just so I don't forget some of the preposterous encounters she chatted about, I will quote at length from the last chapter:   "... There's so much I haven't told you.  Have I ever told you about my obsession with horses (I forget who she met at Saratoga) ...I have?  About the little toy stall I used to have in my room and about how I used to water my little horses all night long?  I have?  Did I tell you about Josephine Baker and sitting next to her cheetah at the Mirabar?  I did?  Did I tell you about the zebras lining the driveway at San Simeon?  You believed that, didn't you?  Did I tell you that Lindberg flew over Brewster?  It could have been someone else, but who cares -- Fake it!  Did I tell you about the elephants at the coronation.  Of course I did.  .... I usually know when I'm repeating myself -- in other words, the inspirations aren't coming.  There's only one thing in life, and that's the continual renewal of inspirations ... But where do you begin?  The first thing to do, my love, is to arrange to be born in Paris.  That's how we began our little conversation.  After that, everything follows quite naturally."

Even though her conversational, random, anything that pops into her head approach to her life story grated on me, I have to retreat.  That's how I tell people about me.  Stories, events, anecdotes.  A life lived does not come with a script or an outline, just a timeline.  When I am feeling vain enough to suppose I could write my autobiography, as I introduced these 2016 blogs above, I force a structure.  My preferred reference and organizer would be the trope of a polyhedron, where me, the 3-D center of the story, would have been constructed by the linking together of facets and one dimensional men, predominantly men, who came with a talent or a characteristic that I assumed to flesh my personality out.  I still may do that but Diana writes of her life as a collection (well after all, fashion collections were her life).  Each escapade, each expedition, each encounter glitters like a favorite brooch in her jewelry box.  Trinkets, the shining things that stand out from years of daily duties.

Coincidentally, my next biography is Utopia Parkway, about Joseph Cornell, the Queens artist who made shadow boxes ... collecting things to depict being human.