My Fabulous Life

AP Photo; Getty Images In an excerpt from his new memoir, Redeeming Features, the designer Nicholas Haslam tells about hiding in a closet with the Duchess of Windsor and the wedding of his royal cousin, Princess Diana.

Many of the invitations Margaret Case issued during my daily visit to her office upstairs on the 20th floor were shouted unabashedly from the open-doored loo. One day she came up with the most thrilling offer possible.

“Would ya like to have lunch with the duchess?”

The Duchess? Of Windsor? Would I??

“Okay, then, Wednesday, one o’clock, the Colony.”

Diana, “with her shy, downward-lashed smile, badly cut hair, and hopelessly unchic clothes was thrust into a limelight glare stronger than anyone before her had had to endure.”

Wallis Windsor was a Vogue icon. Only a few weeks before I had laid out a spread on the Windsors in their Paris house. The photographs, by Horst, might have been taken, some wag said unkindly, through concrete, so wrinkle-free were the features of both duke and duchess. Her hard, lacquered head, the scarecrow body in its exquisite clothes—part Ming empress, part bang-up-to-date modern—totally dominated the beautiful rooms, the witty 18th-century furniture, the Meissen, the dogs, the duke, with a kind of sexual artificiality that was undeniably intriguing. I knew all the drama and anger of the abdication, of course, but by the '60s the royal family was so safely established that that particular can of worms had somewhat lost its shelf life; the king-and-Mrs. Simpson business was simply seen as a romantic love story for him or an understandable career move for her.

Redeeming Features: A Memoir. By Nicholas Haslam. 352 pages. Knopf. $30. But many East Coast grandees were proud of their American royal, worshiped her drop-dead chic, her sassy wit, her exaggerated jewels, her perfectionism. To others, she was a hardheaded go-getter, a haughty social cipher, cadging her way off two continents. Which?

The totem in the Horst photographs suggested both. The Colony, Thursday, 1 p.m. Margaret Case, with Kitty Miller and Cordelia Biddle Robinson, is already seated when I arrive. Our table is the best banquette, in the farthest corner, affording the longest walk to it, and the best view from it, in the room. These ladies are the duchess’s “set.” If she’s not natural with them...  I think. The commissionaires swing open the doors. There’s a sudden silence: Eyes swivel, forks fall onto asparagus (“Without butter, Gene, please”). Across the restaurant—cheek-kissing, air-kissing, winking, waving—comes this minute figure, the flat Cubist head made higher and wider by black bouffant hair parted centrally from the brow to the black grosgrain bow at the nape, dressed in an impossibly wideweave pink angora tweed Chanel suit, concertinaed white gloves, black crocodile bag and shoes. As she approaches, not stopping, not stopping smiling, her eyes greet her friends. Then, “Hi, I’m Wallis,” to me, and, “I’ll have the chicken à la king, Gene, thank you,” to the hovering maître d.

“We call Nicky our Beatle,” says Kitty.

“What on earth’s a Beatle?” says Cordelia, whose voice, appearance, and mannerisms hadn’t changed since the '20s.
 (The boys had just hit New York. I had had their first record sent over from England, and taken the cover to Kenneth—my and my sister’s and Mrs. Kennedy’s hairdresser—saying, “This is how I want my hair cut.” Andy Warhol, writing later about the period in his first autobiography, credits me with bringing the English “look” to New York, with my short Italian jackets, pointed shoes, and the curtain lace with which I improvised frilled shirt cuffs under my jackets—I used to stick it on with Speed-Sew glue.)

“Oh, the Beatles. Don’t you just love ’em? ‘I give her all my love, that’s all I do-oo,’ ” she sings. “Adore ’em. Do you know them? Oh, you are lucky.”