Legendary Harper's Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was the inspiration for both the Maggie Prescott character in 1957's Funny Face and Miss Maxwell in 1966's Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? Now, courtesy of her grandson's wife, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, she gets to be the star of her own film, a documentary filled with what the icon once termed "faction." Six years before her death, Vreeland asked George Plimpton to help write her memoirs. Much of Vreeland's dialogue presented in this entertaining bit of hagiography comes from recordings made with Plimpton in her living room, a space she called "a garden in hell." Judging from the yarns she spins, that hothouse was a sinfully good place to be a fly on the wall. One of this film's many talking heads, writer Reinaldo Herrera, opines that "she was never a very beautiful woman, but she created beauty." Not bad for a gal whose own mother called her "my ugly little monster."
