Seven years after her death, New York theater audiences are discovering the delicious answer: there is no such thing as enough Vreeland. The proof comes in a one-woman show called Full Gallop, in which Mary Louise Wilson recreates Madame V. in all her witty, Technieolor grandeur. The action is set on one vodka-soaked evening in 1971, just after Vree-land-despite having discovered Twiggy, the thong sandal and Oscar de la Renta–gets dumped by Vogue. She should be licking her wounds. She has to borrow $20 from the maid for dinner. Her beloved husband has recently died of cancer. And the snotty New York Post has just reported she’s searching, “cup in hand,” for a job; worse yet, it has called her “seventyish.” But what makes Vreeland – and “Full Gallop”-so intoxicating is that she refuses to surrender even when life turns ugly. In fact, the play is Vreeland’s nonstop gallop ’to the battlefront, armed with gloriously eccentric observations from her rise to the top. If people question her propensity to exaggerate (hence the rouge), she explains in her Lucky Strike alto: “We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I’m against.” When they complain about her volatile temperament, she quotes Joan Crawford: “If you want the girl next door, go next door.” And miss the next zinger?
You can’t make this stuff up, and, thankfully, “Frill Gallop” doesn’t try. Many of the play’s hilarious tales come from Vreeland’s 1984 memoir, “D.V.,” though Wfison and coauthor Mark Hampton include choice anecdotes from some never-released interviews. (Her reaction to seeing Hitler at the Munich opera in the early 1930s may be superficial, but it’s also spot-on: “That mustache was unbelievable. It was just wrong.”) And the attention to detail would delight the woman who had her Kleenex and dollar bills ironed. The play is set in Vreeland’s infamous all-red living room, reproduced down to the eyepopping Gauguin upholstery, the motley embroidered pillows and a politically incorrect blackface statue. Wilson spent six years researching, writing and studying for “Gallop,” and she captures Vreeland from her black-lacquer, swooped-back hair to the slim-hipped shuffle that photographer Cecil Beaton once described as “an elegant crane picking her way out of a swamp.” Wilson even remembered to polish the soles of her shoes. “Unshined shoes are the end of civilization,” Vreeland once said. What a pleasure to have Vreeland’s civilized, delightful presence walking among us again.
