THEATER : Fashioning a Diva Onstage : Playing Diana Vreeland is helping Mary Louise Wilson find herself. The role offers the perfect mix of <i> bon mots</i> and <i> chutzpah</i> .

The legendary fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland was famous for creating style trends by fiat. “Pink is the navy blue of India,” she proclaimed, on her way to establishing it as one of the essential colors.

And Vreeland was just as famous for creating herself in the same manner. It was reinvention, after all, that suffused the life of this homely Paris-born woman who came to epitomize American chic, first as the flamboyant editor of Harper’s Bazaar, then at Vogue and, after she was summarily fired in her late ‘60s from Vogue, as director of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Diana Vreeland was her own unique and marvelous invention,” says Mary Louise Wilson, the New York actress who is bringing her to life in “Full Gallop.” The one-person show, which she wrote with Mark Hampton, is currently in a well-received West Coast premiere at San Diego’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. “A lot of the people she admired made themselves up, like the singer Josephine Baker and Elsa Maxwell (the society hostess). They created a persona and continued to reinvent it at full tilt year after year.”

Vreeland’s flair for making the most of what she had has apparently rubbed off on Wilson, a veteran actress who before this star turn was relegated mainly to playing comic character parts. That the actress is vaguely familiar to the general public is evident from the second-takes she earns from passersby as she sits in the sun-lit courtyard of the Old Globe Theatre, just before a Saturday matinee performance. Perhaps they recognize her as Woody Allen’s mean alcoholic sister in “Zelig” or as the flirtatious immigration official in the Gerard Depardieu film “Green Card.” More likely in this venue, it is because of her widely acclaimed comic performance as Lady Wishfort in last summer’s Old Globe production of “The Way of the World.” She says she won the latter role because of the attention “Full Gallop” drew to her corner after its initial workshop production on Long Island in 1993.

“This role is beginning to get me parts that I really want to play--women of substance,” says Wilson, who made her stage debut as the Second Dead Lady in Jose Quintero’s 1956 Off Broadway production of “Our Town.” “She’s given me a confidence that I never knew I had.”

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Wilson could not have chosen a flashier role to jump-start her career than the commanding and original “D.V.” whose life spanned the century. The woman Truman Capote once described as “Jimmy Durante imitating the Duchess of Windsor” was a host of contradictions: a fashion arbiter who thrived in the anti-fashion ‘60s, an earth mother in a snobby universe, a warmhearted and generous friend who also flew into fierce rages, a gourmet who adored macaroni and cheese (“Delightful! Delicious! Divine!”).

As the actress points out, “There were many Diana Vreelands.” “Full Gallop” offers up the fashion diva at a critical juncture late in life. As the curtain rises, she is awaiting dinner guests in her East Side New York apartment. Vreeland has just returned from a globe-trotting holiday after the humiliation of being dumped from Vogue and she is bucking herself up--and entertaining the audience--with philosophical asides (“I’m a great believer in vulgarity”), inveterate name-dropping (Warhol, Diaghilev, Hitler) and anecdotal reveries: her girlhood as a rebellious ugly duckling, her devoted marriage to an Englishman and her bold strokes at Vogue, such as being the first to lift the veil on plastic surgery.

But there are ominous rumblings. Bill collectors are threatening, the help is rebellious, and there are snide tabloid items about the fall of the “famed beauty oracle with the cigar store Indian looks.” Worse, her grandson, Nickie, has shaved his head and become a Buddhist monk.

“It’s just too much,” sobs Wilson as Vreeland in a rare dramatic moment in “Full Gallop,” the character’s trademark Kabuki-like makeup merging with the actress’s prominent features to achieve a canny resemblance. “It’s just too much. No one had hair like that! “

Vreeland’s distinctive voice, and her habit of nattering on, are the building blocks of the onstage character, and they are also what attracted Wilson to her in the first place.

In 1987, the actress picked up “D.V.,” Vreeland’s autobiography. Reading it aloud to friends at her country home in upstate New York, Wilson says, often left the group convulsed with laughter. “At first it was camp,” she says. After all, this was a woman who, on seeing Hitler for the first time, could only think to say that the little man’s mustache “was just--wrong!”

But the entertainment value was undeniable, and in 1989 Wilson decided to make a sizable investment of her own funds to purchase rights to dramatize Vreeland’s life story. She then invited her longtime friends Nicky Martin, the director of “Full Gallop,” and Hampton, a writer and actor, to collaborate with her. The more they delved into Vreeland’s life through interviews with friends and close associates, the more they realized that there was quite a formidable woman there.

Capturing the complete Vreeland hasn’t been an easy matter for Wilson and company. Her flair for exaggeration and hyperbole, they have concluded, is as much an obstacle as a blessing for a playwright. All that bantering, says Wilson, is Vreeland practicing the “art of deflection,” defusing powerful emotions simply by rattling on.

“It was that Edwardian code of manners which dictated that you don’t talk about any of it,” Wilson explains. “That’s refreshing in an era where everything’s scarily out in the open. But this refusal to break down does leave one with the impression that the other shoe hasn’t dropped. We’re (still) working on that.”

“If anyone wants to think of Vreeland as ridiculous, she’s a sitting duck,” adds Hampton. Ultimately, he credits Wilson’s stage presence with preventing D.V. from lapsing into mere inanity.

“Not only does Mary Louise have a physical authority that is just right for Vreeland,” Hampton says, “she also has a rigorous intellect that is the underpinning for all of this. I can’t imagine you could pull off this role if you didn’t reflect the fact that this woman, for all her silliness, was blazingly intelligent.”

A ll her acting life Wilson has taken cues from her own background. For “Full Gallop,” the connections seem to be especially strong. Says Hampton: “Mary Louise had a first-rate and beautiful upbringing in New Orleans, so she understands and appreciates the tempo and esthetics of another time.”

According to Wilson, her family of five was part of polite New Orleans society. Her father was a doctor; her elegant mother hosted white-glove-and-red-fingernail bridge parties, complete with the kind of sophisticated chat that, like Vreeland’s, could cover up a multitude of troubles. There were, says the actress, hints of alcoholism and other destructive habits amid the Mardi Gras balls and the Southern gentility of the Wilson circle.

And whatever her family history contributes to the portrayal of Vreeland, it surely is what pushed Wilson into the spotlight in the first place. At risk of being rendered invisible among siblings and a mother who were “born actors”--”I could never get the stage at home”--Mary Louise took refuge as the class clown, first in high school and then at Northwestern University. There she quickly established herself as a leading Bohemian in the early ‘50s, wearing pants, playing Beethoven at full volume, and cheering on the guys who were conducting panty raids.

“An old college friend years later told me, ‘You were the first hippie!’ I was just shocking,” she recalls with a laugh, adding that her move to New York City to pursue an acting career seemed almost inevitable.

Wilson settled, naturally, in Greenwich Village, still on the run from her privileged background. “I didn’t have a sofa for years because I thought it was too bourgeois,” she says. In 1959, she landed a plum spot as a featured player in the famed Julius Monk comedy revues.

“I finally got a date who could afford to take me to the Monk shows,” she remembers. “I was enthralled and about five minutes later, I was in it. It was tremendously exciting, but I couldn’t handle the fame. Part of the problem was, being a funny woman was difficult. I didn’t want to conform to the cliche of blacking out teeth and putting curlers in my hair. I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed.”

In 1960, with her career moving a little too fast for comfort, she married a fellow actor, partly she says, as a retreat. She also, finally, acquired a couch. But the marriage ended five years later, and by then, Wilson was focusing on the legitimate stage. “I needed to learn to act,” she remembers.

She started with small roles in classics like “The Importance of Being Earnest,” contemporary comedies like “The Odd Couple” and revivals of “The Royal Family” and “Gypsy,” and ended up establishing her very respectable 30-year career as a character actress.

Nonetheless, in her own words, she was “a miserable bitch,” running around in large, clanging bracelets and necklaces that telegraphed, “Don’t come near me!” and hitting the bottle a little too much.

“I definitely had an edge,” Wilson says, “but then one day, about 11 years ago, I just decided to stop drinking. I became a lot less afraid to be a woman, to ask for what I needed. I became much more definite. Part of that is just growing older, and part of it is learning to trust your gut.”

It took a little longer for her to realize she needed to push herself off the character-role plateau as well. The moment of truth came in 1990 when she was playing the second witch in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Macbeth.”

“I figured nothing much could go wrong,” says Wilson, “and then at the first rehearsal, the director said, ‘Now, Mary Louise, I’m giving your chestnut speech to the younger, prettier witch.’ And then he gave me a tumbrel and I had to bring on Banquo in this tumbrel, and the harness didn’t fit well and I had back problems and then I had to play this tambourine, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to make something happen for me. What could be worse? What do I have to lose?’ ”

W hat happened for Wilson was “Full Gallop” and with it, a bracing dose of Vreeland-esque passion and optimism.

“She’s had a profound effect on me. I’ve always been kind of negative. But I don’t do that anymore. It doesn’t work. It’s not that you put a smile button on everything. It’s a question of being ‘gay’ in that old sense of the word. Vreeland knew that the continued renewal of inspiration was the only thing to be excited about. You have to keep recharging yourself because no one’s going to do it for you.”

Wilson is also extending that lesson to the play itself. “We’re still obsessively working on it,” she says. “It’s not yet where we think it has to be, but it’s coming along.”

Apparently, she has every right to be pleased with the progress. The Times’ theater critic Laurie Winer called it “delightful,” and since it opened on Jan. 14 in San Diego, “Full Gallop” has generated more than one call from New York producers.

“In fact, we’re doing some rewrites now to accommodate one producer who’s very interested,” says Wilson. Nothing is on paper yet, but Hampton, Wilson and Martin are hoping that the next stop for the production will be Off Broadway.

It’s just the sort of positive thinking that Diana Vreeland herself would have cheered on. As yet another version of the Vreeland character puts it, this time played by Kay Thompson in the movie “Funny Face”: “Banish the black, burn the blue and bury the beige. From now on, girls, think pink.”

* “Full Gallop,” Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theater, San Diego, Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends next Sunday. $22-$34. (619) 239-2255.