Tatiana, by contrast, was seen as a far more authentic person. “Whereas Alex’s warmth was often Machiavellian and feigned, Tatiana’s warmth was totally genuine,” says Gray Foy, who as the lifelong companion of Leo Lerman, Condé Nast’s principal cultural adviser, was close to the Libermans for more than fifty years. “Tatiana was frequently hurtful but utterly forthright, she was incapable of subterfuge…. Hers was a straight road with a few cul-de-sacs, whereas Alex followed a map full of secret labyrinths.”
Finally, most of Alex’s colleagues can elaborate on his extreme capriciousness and on his occasional streak of nastiness. “He was an incredible perfectionist, but this perfectionism could make him terribly volatile,” says Mary-Jane Poole, who worked in Alex’s office in the mid-and late 1940s and even remembers bringing him, at 11:00 A.M., the daily glass of milk he needed for his ulcers. “He enjoyed tearing up an entire issue of Vogue on a Friday afternoon, forcing the editors to work at the office throughout the weekend to abide by his whims. And he also had his moments of cruelty—to create excitement, he would torture editors by pitting them against each other and watch them fight it out.” Tina Brown, whom Alex chose to be editor of Vanity Fair, speaks of his “destructive, Salieri-like streak.” “Just as Salieri was jealous of Mozart,” she notes, “Alex was often envious of people of true talent…. When he sensed that someone had risen too high in the esteem of Si Newhouse, for instance, he’d say to me, ‘So-and-so is second-rate, I must go and plant the poison.’ And inevitably, he’d achieve a measure of success.”
The more sensitive Condé Nast staffers could be deeply wounded by Alex’s machinations. “There was a definite streak of sadism in him,” said Despina Messinesi.
He was the most underhanded man imaginable, and he could also be brutal, he could say terrible things to you face-to-face, his voice, his expression never changed as he criticized you, which made it all the worse, he’d make you feel very stupid, make you feel like a worm. It was not unusual to see people coming out of his office crying…. At times he would humiliate people publicly, too, he would make them sink to the floor…. It may all have been donein order to make them work harder, but he did have a highly unusual ability to be intentionally mean.
“And yet the following day,” Messinesi added nostalgically, “he could be very sweet and remember that your mother had been sick.”
Needless to say, it is only the Dr. Jekyll aspect of his character—the prodigally kind and tender one—that Alex displayed to Mother and me when we began to live as a true family in our new home, at 173 East Seventieth Street. “Didn’t we have the luck of the devil finding him,” Mother whispered tenderly to me every few months for the following many decades, when he was out of earshot. “Didn’t we have the most amazing luck?”
SIXTEEN
Our Home I
Our brownstone on Seventieth Street, which we moved into in December 1942 and in which Tatiana and Alex remained for nearly a half century, was the first place in which I came to know a genuine, relatively traditional two-parent family. It was the house in which I celebrated all Christmases between my twelfth and my twenty-third year, the house in which I studied for all school exams and wrote out my college applications, the house in which my friends and I had our first drinking bouts and nursed our first hangovers, the house from which I evicted my first rejected lovers, the house in which I was courted by my husband, the house in which we celebrated our marriage, the house from which I left for the hospital to give birth to each of our children. It was also the house from which Alex and Tatiana, in their last decades, left for their numerous stays in hospitals, the house from which my mother would leave a final time to die in the solitude of an intensive-care unit. It was the site in which I experienced most rites of passage, and to this day 173 East Seventieth Street remains a radiant center of my universe, the place where most of my dreams occur, a habitation I still cannot pass, sixty years later, without a pang of intense nostalgia. For it is the house in which three nomads, scattered for decades by wars and revolutions, found their first resting place and their first roots.
173 East Seventieth Street is one of those traditional east-side brownstones of 1920s vintage, the first floor of which lies slightly below street level: One descends three steps toward two doors that, in our time, were painted white—on the left was the service door, flanked by a window that gives into the kitchen. To the right was the entrance door, through which one accessed a vestibule, the right wall of which held a large mirror, under which was set a small baroque console. This piece of furniture already brings up a precise memory, because it is on that console that I first read the news of Alex’s and Mother’s marriage.
I believe we spent our first night at Seventieth Street on a Sunday of November 1942. The following afternoon, as I came home from school a bit later than usual—at 4:30, after ballet class—I found a half dozen or so telegrams on the console, a few of them already opened. I glanced at them and saw phrases such as “Felicitations on your wedding day and all affectionate wishes” and “All fondest wishes dearest Tatiana and Alex and decades of happiness.” I was stunned, hurt, enraged. They’d off and gotten married earlier that very day, without telling me a word, without inviting me to the ceremony—once more they’d excluded me! I was angry rather than sad, but in my habitually diplomatic way I concealed my feelings, composed myself for their arrival, and greeted them with smiles and my own tender felicitations. It is only years later that I realized how hilariously Mother’s often hypocritical sense of protocol had dictated the timing. Now that she was about to live virtually under the same roof as Alex, share the same entrance door, it was de rigueur that they be officially married.
There’s another detail of Alex’s and Mother’s wedding, related by their only witnesses, Beatrice and Fernand Leval, which is telling of my mother’s compulsively workaholic nature: To follow the brief legal ritual downtown, the Levals had organized a little wedding lunch at the Pavillon restaurant. My mother did not attend it. She was expecting a “very important client” at 2:00 P.M.—a Hollywood producer who, she hoped, would commission her to make hats for his next film–and she did not want to run the risk of being a second late. Sentiment be damned! Alex, Beatrice, and Fernand held the wedding celebration without her.
Back to my house tour: Walking past the console down a short corridor, straight ahead of you was the dining room, a space mostly furnished, for the next decade, with the same white metal table and chairs that “my parents”—I can finally call them that—had bought at Macy’s upon our arrival in the States. The floor of the dining room was covered in a vinyl that emulated marble; walls were painted a stark white, as they were throughout the house; at the far end of the room was a large, multipane window that looked out onto one of those charming little gardens common to Upper East Side houses. Its windowseat was upholstered in, of course, white vinyl, and to the left of that was a large comfortable chair, covered, uncharacteristically, in a gray cloth fabric, in which Alex took his breakfast every morning.
Alex, Tatiana, Francine and the housekeeper Sally, shortly after moving to Seventieth Street.
Shortly after we had moved to the house—I was then twelve—it became a habit for Alex and me to have breakfast together in the dining room on Saturdays and Sundays—my mother would linger in bed until noon or so, reading a book or catching up on world news through French-and Russian-language newspapers. So it was Alex and I alone, he sitting by the window with his little tray of Cream of Wheat and tea, and I at the round white metal table in the middle of the room. And the occasions we shared in that dining room were the most cherished moments of my youth. For over the years, as he listened with intense interest to any issue I brought up, fixing his green gaze on me as if my problems were the only ones that would concern him throughout that entire morning, I increasingly looked on him as a confidant as well as a role model, and offered him a kind of blind trust that I would not confer on anyone else for a long time to come.
At times, the
se were mainly educational encounters, at which Alex quizzed me on diverse facts of history or literature, searching out just how much I was learning at Spence; once his queries were answered, he’d recommend a few books he felt I should read that semester to round out my education. (They were often hopelessly dated duds, such as R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, which had captivated him as a romantic thirteen-year-old in British boarding school.) At other times, our reunions in the dining-room became joint ventures of exploration and decision making, such as that spring morning of 1951, before my last year of college, when he suggested I take a break from the summer jobs I’d had since graduating from Spence and go to summer school instead. As we were discussing this over the Sunday papers, our eyes simultaneously came across an ad for Black Mountain College’s summer session: That’s it! we exclaimed together upon perusing the roster of artists and writers who were teaching there that year: Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Charles Olson among them. The Black Mountain experience was to change my life.
As I grew older, the dining room served as a ground for Alex’s attempts to explore my inner state of mind: It was there that he inquired into my relationship with such-and-such a man and, later, probed my attitudes toward my work and, after my marriage, posed questions concerning my children’s conduct and education. This room was indeed the site of our most private, sensitive encounters. I cannot forget, for instance, the sight of Alex, in the autumn of 1956, sitting in his chair by the dining-room window every morning, waiting for me to return from my daily 7:00 A.M. sessions at the psychoanalyst’s. I was twenty-six and had just spent two tormented years in France that had been plagued by poor health, unrewarding jobs, and a disastrous love affair. Having decided I must go into treatment, Alex had arranged for me to see a rigorous Freudian. Although he’d developed a habit, as his position at Condé Nast grew more exalted, of leaving the house before 8:00 A.M. to get to the office before any of his colleagues, during those months he somehow felt a need to check up on me each morning. As I came home he sat on his chair by the window, his hands meekly folded on the briefcase that rested on his lap. He would look at me a bit shyly, as if to say, “I hope you won’t think I’m probing,” and ask, “How did it go today?” “Oh excellently,” I’d inevitably reply to make him happy, even after I’d lain on the couch bawling for an entire hour or raging silently at the doctor. Only after such an exchange did Alex pat his briefcase firmly, saying, “Good, good,” and go off to Condé Nast after giving me a kiss, looking very satisfied. The deep interest Alex took in my sessions with Dr. Norvell Lamarr, of blessed memory, led me to think that notwithstanding his assertions that he had never felt the need for analysis, he might have secretly missed it and had a vicarious satisfaction from carefully observing the progress of mine.
Upon my getting married and moving to Connecticut, Alex and Mother decreed that my old childhood room on the third floor was to serve as my growing family’s pied-à-terre whenever we came to New York. They would turn out to be the most fanatically devoted of grandparents; and the Seventieth Street dining room became the training-ground for my own children’s manners and provided the setting for many legends about the uncouthness of their early youth. Recalled and giggled about until Alex’s last months of life, for instance, was that lunchtime when my younger son, Luke, a noted carnivore even at the age of five, signaled his rebellion against the rigorous this-fork-that-spoon protocol imposed by my mother, who had been trying to teach him how to serve himself daintily from the platter when it was passed to him by her butler. When the platter finally reached his left shoulder, Luke simply leaned down and sank his teeth into the leg of lamb, lifting it a few inches off the platter. For a few more years, my mother decided to fix the children’s plates herself, but Alex, who greatly enjoyed recalling the anarchic moments of his own childhood, gleefully belabored the incident for decades.
The dining room at Seventieth Street was of course indivisible from its adjacent kitchen. Both were run by the marvelously stern Mabel Moses, who in the company of her seductive husband, Matthew, took over the household the day we moved in. Mabel was then thirty-one—as of this writing she is ninety-three and thrives in retirement in Las Vegas. She was a spectacled, slender-waisted, yet solidly built woman with hair neatly tucked into a big, round bun, who exuded energy and determination. Mabel was laconic and chronically distrustful. She did not have a ready smile and could be very dour, preferring to signal her approval or disapproval through facial expressions, such as mimicking people’s uppitiness with a raise of her brow and a twitch of her mouth. But if you truly pleased her with some good news, she would burst into peals of throaty, jovial laughter, stomping her feet and shouting, “Get out of here!” (“I just became editor of the school paper, Mabel.” “Get out of here!” Stomp stomp. “Cleve and I just got engaged, Mabel.” “Get out of here!” Stomp stomp.) Like most good cooks, Mabel was maddeningly set in her ways: Every spoon and fork had to be left precisely in their habitual places—“Don’t you mess with my kitchen” was her refrain to me for over four decades whenever I’d come in to have a taste of her delicious fare. For Mabel was an exceptionally talented chef, versatile enough to have assimilated any number of French and Russian dishes into her originally Yankee repertoire. Within six months of being in our employ she was making the most succulent beef Stroganoff in town, cutting up the highest-quality fillet into long, thin strips which she sauteed very briefly before finishing them off with strong broth, sour cream, and dill. Her gigot aux flageolets, punctuated with enough paper-thin slices of garlic to faintly perfume the entire roast, was also a marvel. Her roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were of equal perfection, the batter rising to five brown inches. Needless to say, her American staple dishes, such as southern fried chicken, which Mother adored, were as peerless as her robustly fragrant apple pie, the flaky and featherlight crust of which haunts my culinary imagination to this day.
As a teenager, I was not interested in kitchen skills, believing that they would be unfitting to my “liberated” woman’s life. But how many other skills did Mabel teach me in the bargain! She was yet another adopted parent to me, stern but doting—“There hadn’t been much mothering in her life,” she’d explain to my friends decades later, “so I decided to take over.” She taught me how to rinse my hair with vinegar to give it proper sheen; to handle my periods, an issue my mother would have been hopelessly evasive about; and to keep boys at bay. (“Don’t you do no foolish stuff with my baby,” she would growl at any suitor who looked as if he might have a trace of libidinal impulse toward me.) She was the only driving teacher I ever had, and I still think of her when I tap the brake pedal very lightly when going down a snowy hill or dim my lights when driving through a thick fog. She taught me to moderate my alcohol intake, and upon episodes that she found out long before my hectically busy parents, she gave me my first scoldings about using it to excess. Although she herself was a teetotaler, when I hadn’t managed to hold my booze properly—a frequent problem among my peers in the Eisenhower era—she became a walking encyclopedia of hangover cures. Mabel even taught me to write thank-you notes, offering me, the Christmas I turned sixteen, my first set of engraved stationery. This was a skill I could never have learned from my seignorial parents, who actually enjoyed boasting—such was their arrogance—that they had never once written a thank-you note to anyone. (This uncouthness hardly went unnoticed by their acquaintances. Many were the January evenings when, sitting alone at home, I’d have to field calls from Mrs. So-and-So, irately asking whether the Libermans had received the chocolates, the begonias, the crystal vase, which had been shipped to them at Christmas. My parents greeted my reports of such calls—I’d usually cover for them, saying, “Why I’m sure they didn’t receive it”—with disdainful shrugs.)
The one and only, beloved Mabel Moses.
Mabel did not initially come to us alone. Her husband, Matthew, was an ultrasuave, very pale Negro with considerable intellectual aspirations, as hedonistic and unctuously ingratiating as
Mabel was offish and austere. He took painting lessons with Alex and asked me to lend him all the novels I’d read for school, of which Maupassant’s were his favorites. He was very fond of his drink, a habit perhaps abetted by the considerable amount of leisure time he enjoyed when my parents were at work—a typical vision of the Moseses in our kitchen had Matthew sitting at the table by the window that gave out upon the street, smoking and reading his literary classics, while Mabel, all in white, stood by the stove, chopping, peeling, stirring. Matthew was also a reckless womanizer and was booted out of our household during my college years when my parents discovered that he had seduced, or been seduced by, one of my mother’s canasta partners. (Mabel divorced him shortly afterward.) He lasted long enough, however, to cultivate my lifelong interest in black popular music, which began in my fourteenth year, when Matthew and Mabel started taking me to the Savoy Ballroom on Saturday nights. By the time I was fifteen, the Savoy—still off-limits for most whites in the late 1940s—had become my way of initiating many friends into the Harlem experience. John-Michael Montias, a favorite escort of my early adolescence, recalls one such Harlem adventure: “We were gyrating deliriously on the dance floor, the only white couple there, when I suddenly pulled you aside and pointed to the entrance and said, ‘Watch out!’Your parents were standing at the entrance of the Savoy with a tall, cape-swathed Englishman, Cecil Beaton.” John-Michael reports that we beat it to a side exit just in time, and my parents remained certain, for the rest of their lives, that they had been the first white New Yorkers to “discover” Harlem in the 1940s.
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