Gracious Money-Making
Always in Vogue.
by Edna Woolman Chase and Ilka Chase.
Doubleday. 381 pp. $3.00.

 

If you are only casting a covetous eye at the Scotch tweeds, Paris cloches, and proud bearings that parade through an issue of Vogue magazine, you may believe that you have entered a woman’s world of privilege and taste, where the feminine graces ride high as ladies step crisp and cheerful into suburban days, slim and intimate into city nights. But if you are peering methodically through its bulk of ads in search of a spring dress, you begin to shift uneasily in front of the hollow cheeks and zombie stares of the Vogue models, and to feel the generally chilly atmosphere of this publication. As its pages offer up bosoms disrupted by military pleats and swooping folds, stomachs disguised by sudden pockets, folds and drapings, you fear that the designing Diors, Molyneuxs, and Patous cherish some deep-rooted animus against the natural lines of a woman’s figure. These uncertainties are all cleared up in the autobiography of Vogue’s editor, Edna Woolman Chase, written with entire candor and strong self-righteousness by herself and her daughter, Ilka Chase. It turns out that Vogue has nothing against women, it simply recognizes that their welfare and good looks must recede before the high principles of commercial enterprise: the inspirational sales idea, the all-out effort to produce, and the nasty dig for anyone misguided enough to leave the fold.

Mrs. Chase (then Edna Martin) joined Vogue’s staff in 1895 when she was eighteen and it was mainly a small society journal with fashion pointers. She turned out more envelopes with subscription forms than anyone else in the circulation department, soon was entrusted with layouts, and steadily plodded her way up the managerial ladder until she was editor-in-chief of the American, French, British, and (short-lived) German Vogues. During its early years, Vogue developed from a gazette of social activities into a large-scale fashion magazine and shopping guide for women. When Condé Nast took over in 1909, he built its circulation policy on what he called its appeal to people with taste and money, and the magazine sported expensive things on expensive ladies. Profits were based on moderate circulation but a high value of advertising space, and the tone switched from gossipy provincial to authoritative, setting $155 dress styles for millionaires and $40 approximations for those less well-heeled readers whom the magazine coyly calls “Nillionairesses.” Throughout this expansion, Mrs. Chase remained firmly entrenched. In 1928 Nast offered her a gift of $100,000 toward the “embroidery” of her Long Island home, in gratitude for her having helped him to become a rich man.

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Describing the gulf she felt between herself and her non-professional friends once she was secure in her job, Mrs. Chase adds, in the firm way she seems to take pride in: “I couldn’t talk to them about Vogue, and when you came right down to it, what else of real interest was there?” Though business is pleasure and even romance for many people in America, and there is nothing particularly unwholesome in this situation, Mrs. Chase’s iron, humorless dedication to the values as well as the profits of business has operated like the efficient drop of a Venetian blind, blotting out without ceremony or regret the uncompetitive world that treasures its leisure as much as its labor. On one occasion when she is defending Vogue against Ralph Ingersoll’s accusation that the magazine was a frivolous waste in a war period) she solemnly claims that Vogue was preserving the arts of civilized living, in which she includes opera, writing, and painting. But these aspects of civilization only come up when it is a matter of Vogue’s honor or profit, and one can imagine that Mrs. Chase had little time or interest to spare for them. If for many people making money means living, for Mrs. Chase living is making money. It is not so much what money can buy that holds her in thrall, as what the work of getting it can do for you. The sense of involvement, the meetings, the contacts, the executive power—these are life. Marriage and divorce are mentioned only incidentally, even her own and her daughter’s, and the only family that is real to her is the office family with its late hours, interdependence, and secretaries loyal until death.

Always in Vogue omits no tale of defection to a competing publication, and Mrs. Chase writes in what she believes is a sympathetic way about the photographer De Meyer, who left them for Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar. He lived royally on the Continent until he was fired, then came back chastened to Vogue, but was considered unusable because he was now known as a “Bazaar personality,” and finally came upon difficult days and died. “The news of his death saddened us,” writes Mrs. Chase in memoriam, “for we had been fond of him. He and Vogue had been mutually helpful in the building of each other’s prestige and his desire for more money was a natural one.” In the same way, everyone is judged in terms of his relation to this flourishing organization, which was so much bigger than its members or their private lives. Describing two young women on the staff, Marie Lyons and Grace Hegger, who later married Sinclair Lewis, she mentions that “there was a great rivalry between them of which I was aware, but as it only stimulated them to greater efforts from which Vogue benefited, I ignored it.”

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Many celebrities flicker through this autobiography—Dorothy Parker, Edward Steichen, Clare Booth Luce—but somehow they do not shine much in the context of Vogue’s daily schedules, although Mrs. Chase does her best to snag some reflected light from them. One thing can be said for her integrity: she does not believe that business people should toady to artists. There is a classic story about the time the magazine was running an Americana issue and it was decided that Thomas Wolfe would be a suitable contributor. Mrs. Chase invited him to the Cosmopolitan Club for tea at four. She was told that he would probably not show up until a quarter to six, and was advised to have her husband call for her at seven. The idea apparently was that an hour would be all she could bear of this erratic genius, who might do something unpredictable and tarnish her reputation at the Club. She tells us with great relief that this arrangement worked like a charm. Wolfe, though he slipped from tea to cocktails, did not take off his shirt (as was feared) or otherwise shame her, and Vogue printed his article.

It is always fun to read about people rich and powerful enough to make and break their own conventions, to imagine wealth magically opening doors, like the electronic devices in modern buildings. But Vogue takes its cue from the gray and stilted rich who are confined to their own narrow corridors, and urges us to have our conventions, tastes, and hungers determined by such idols as filter through its pages. Does anyone really take seriously the Vogue image of gracious living: some sinuous lines and strings of pearls for a proper woman, some silver, pale pink and roses for a presentable table? I hope not, but Mrs. Chase can always point out with dignity that hundreds of thousands of loyal patrons are willing to pay fifty cents an issue to make sure they are always in vogue.

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