Mary Louise Wilson, after years of playing showy featured roles in musicals and plays, finally has a starring role: fashion doyen Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop. "And," she quips, "I had to write it myself!" Her one-woman show was six years in the works -- originating in Sag Harbor, NY, followed by a successful Manhattan Theater Club run before moving to the Westside Theater (43rd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues). "The hardest thing was to write and then perform it," said Wilson. "I'd often said to friends, 'Let's write a show.' Mark Hampton took me seriously.
We found Vreeland fascinating for years. When she died in 1989, we decided to try." They read her memoirs, titled, "D.V.," and found Vreeland touching -- not a word used to describe the powerful V., whom even friends found intimidating. Wilson and Hampton sought the blessings of Vreeland's two sons, and got them. What emerges in Full Gallop is a poignant, hilarious two hours with Vreeland at a vulnerable time, when she has been shamefully dismissed as editor of Vogue after literally putting it on the map as the first and last word in fashion.
V., vulnerable? "She kept her feelings to herself," Wilson replied. "It wasn't denial or repression. She just didn't believe in displaying them. If she got depressed, she'd shine her shoes. It wasn't like she didn't have depression. She fought it." Vreeland preached style in Vogue's pages, where she broke countless taboos but also felt we need a splash of bad taste. Her goal was to give women "what they never knew they wanted." She felt fashion was something in the air. Anyone could have it.
Alas, not everyone did. Vreeland had a reputation of being a snob. "Some thought so," said Wilson. "As much as she loved titles and glamour, she wasn't reserved. If you bored her, out you went. If you were interesting, you could be a punk rocker or cleaning lady. What pained her more than anything was the loss of beauty. Everyone was so terrified, thinking of her as some sort of Gorgon. They didn't give much thought to her femininity. Diana had character and humor. And when young, this great figure. Men adored her!"
This respected theater veteran debuted in 1963's Hot Spot by Mary Rodgers and Martin Charnin and starring Judy Holliday ("It's a famous bomb!"), and worked with Liza in 1965's Flora, The Red Menace. Other shows: the all-star revival of The Women (1973), 1974's Lansbury revival of Gypsy (her Tessy Tura was memorable), 1975's The Royal Family with Eva La Gallienne, Lincoln Center Theater's The Philadelphia Story (1980), Alice in Wonderland (1982), and, more recently, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, and as Elaine Stritch's first replacement in Show Boat.
She credits a unique aspect of her Full Gallop performance to cabaret impresario Julius Monk, whose hit revues she worked in after coming from New Orleans and finishing Northwestern University. "We were these kids gowned in Donald Brooks designs being witty and carefree, creating a world which didn't really exist. Glamourous! Stylish! Poorly paid! Julius was impossible to understand. Everyone thinks he was British, and he tried to be. But he was this model from North Carolina with the most incredible drawl. His biggest rule was that we had to keep audience contact. That sense of connection is happening again."
Wilson never met Vreeland and, the more she learned about her, she felt Vreeland might not have been interested in meeting her. "I would've been quite afraid because of my shoes. They wouldn't have been right!"
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