Some mornings I wake up to odd and strange but true little facts about my life — and since Diana Vreeland was born today, July 29, 1906, this is one of them.
Diana Vreeland — born Diana Dalziel, old world name, old world money — came at the world sideways, like somebody kicking open a door everyone else politely knocked on. She didn’t “cover” fashion — she ran it. Half the industry bent around her like metal under heat. You read her quotes — “Elegance is refusal,” “Red is the great clarifier,” “Exaggeration is my only reality” — and you can hear that sharp, aristocratic snap in her voice, the kind that could make a whole room sit up straighter without knowing why.
She wasn’t selling clothes. She was selling nerve. The permission to be strange, bold, loud, impossible. She wore sweaters backwards because it amused her. She praised bikinis like they were scientific breakthroughs. She thought blue jeans were as beautiful as gondolas. She pushed editors, photographers, designers — hell, anybody who got near her — right up to the edge, because that’s where she lived. In that electric zone where taste becomes vision and vision becomes myth.
And she did it all with that wicked little smirk — the one that said she knew something you didn’t, and she wasn’t about to explain it.
Now here’s where my life, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, brushes up against hers in the strangest way — the kind of detail you only tell when you’re leaning over the bar at Kelly’s, waiting for your number to be called.
My first wife, Joannie — in the book I’m rewriting because, yeah, after reading it myself I know I can do even better — before she got lucky and married me, was married to James Ferguson Vreeland. And the reason the last name matches is simple: James was Diana Vreeland’s brother‑in‑law. Diana Dalziel married Thomas Reed Vreeland, and James was Thomas’s brother. Same family, same name, same weird little thread running through the whole thing.
And if you’ve read the book, you already know the punchline: he was the guy who walked straight through the sliding glass door in McLean, Virginia. In his own way he was kicking in a few doors.
And here’s the part that still hits me in the chest when I think about it — the part that isn’t funny, isn’t strange, just true: the son I gained custody of and moved to Boston with was James’s son.
Postscript: I didn’t use these names or this information in my book the first time around because I was afraid, I’d get sued. I tiptoed around the truth, changed details, softened edges — all because I didn’t know any better. But I’ve since learned something important: you can’t be sued for telling the truth about your own life. Memoirs use real people all the time — family, ex‑spouses, bosses, teachers, celebrities, neighbors, even the guy who walked through the sliding glass door in McLean, Virginia. It’s normal. It’s allowed. And it’s part of the story I’m finally ready to tell the right way.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Rambling Harbor 
Leave a comment