Free Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart Page A

her. But in this instance Diana was wrong. Rather than a “fool,” the diary suggests a creative, unhappy child whose resilience stemmed from a growing belief in the power of dreaming, harnessed to the determined effort of the conscious mind. “It’s very touching—the things that exist and come true if you believe and insist,” she said years later. “If you just have an idea. . . . If you just have a dream.”
    T hroughout the period covered by the diary, Diana had two supporters. One of them was Frederick Dalziel. A rare note of encouragement came from her father on January 10, 1918: “Yesterday I painted my brackets black and today put a blue lampshade on it which makes it look too lovely against the bright blue wall. . . . Daddy says my room looks ‘nifty’ which encourages me greatly as I simply love interior decorations.” (Years later “nifty” would reappear as one of Diana’s favorite adjectives in Vogue .) Frederick Dalziel was clearly able to ease family tensions when he was at home. “He had that thing about him, having to do with a sense of humor, which is the most cleansing thing in the world,” Diana remarked. “My father was so much easier and closer to us.” Family photographs often showed Diana and her father together, while Alexandra and Emily were photographed elsewhere. “We weren’t exactly what you’d call a tidy little group,” said Diana. But Frederick Dalziel was an Edwardian father who had work to do at Post & Flagg and a male New York life. He was also devoted to Emily, so however much Diana loved him, the extent to which her father was really able to protect her from her mother is debatable.
    The person who rescued Diana was Ama—her grandmother Mary Weir. It has already been noted that it was Mary Weir, not Emily, who came to watch Diana in ballet class. Throughout the period covered by the diary Diana went to see Ama so often in the afternoons that it is possible that Weir actively intervened on her behalf against Emily and Kay Carroll after Diana was expelled from Brearley. Mary Weir would certainly have had no compunction about interfering if she thought it necessary, for by 1918 she had turned into a ferocious elderly woman. “My grandmother could be appalling. . . . She was domineering. . . . The Victorian grandmother was the matriarch,” said Diana. Cast in the mold of a formidable generation of white middle-class women excluded from political power, Mary Weir was a founding member of the Colony Club, the first exclusive club for society women in New York; her servants did not stay long; she feuded with her relations; and she was perfectly capable of sending all six and a half feet of Frederick Dalziel from her table for unspecified offenses. (“He thought it was a riot,” said Diana.)
    Formidable or not, Ama gave Diana the kind of appreciative affection denied to her by Emily, and the bond grew stronger as Diana moved into her midteens. Weir seems to have been pleased by Diana’s idiosyncratic intelligence, imagination, and strength of character. (Diana may have looked like Weir, too, for Frederick Dalziel once thanked Diana for a photograph remarking she was “a dead ringer for Ama.”) Diana was alert and amusing, and she won her grandmother’s respect, while the less confrontational Alexandra, in contrast, did not. The feeling was mutual. In an unusually bitter aside years later, Alexandra said that she really did not like her grandmother at all. This was a family of volcanic emotions; in another instance of the strong feelings that convulsed it, Weir named her house in Katonah Villa Diana. After the miserable summer of 1917, Diana spent vacations with her grandmother while Emily and Alexandra went back out West. Her grandmother’s household at Katonah provided another source of comfort in the farm animals, especially the horses, which