Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  In my beloved Mabel’s lexicon, my mother was known as “The Madam,” I was referred to as “The Baby,” and Alex was known as “The Boss.” Boss indeed he was, for my mother was as incapable of calling a carpenter or plumber or hiring a cleaning woman as she was of overseeing my homework. And so with the same cool aplomb with which he checked on my report cards, booked all our dentists and doctors, imposed my curfew hours—a severe midnight all the way through high school—it was Alex alone who dealt with the occasionally decomposing roof, peeling walls, leaking pipes, and sometimes derelict domestic help. A true househusband before the word came into being, performing all the duties that Mother was too impatient or too bored to carry out, he would continue to function as the exclusive head of household into the final decades when he became chairman of Condé Nast, all the while nurturing his flourishing careers as painter, sculptor, and photographer. He clearly relished being both my mother’s Superman and the absolute slave of her whims. He also enjoyed brandishing his virtues of domesticity and fidelity—though some of his colleagues found it in dubious taste, it always remained part of his PR image to vaunt his marital constancy and to boast that he had “never, never once,” as he always put it, been tempted by another woman. (“How quaint to brag that he’s never even looked at another woman!” the editor of French Vogue burst out once in the 1960s, when his devotion to Mother had become something of a publishing-world legend. “There’s something rather vulgar about such a boast.”)

  One of Alex’s domestic achievements, after the departure of Matthew Moses, was to hire a series of male household helpers who were as trustworthy as Mabel and could survive her imperious manner. Matthew’s first replacement was a reclusive Frenchman from Brittany named Jean, a mysterious creature with no apparent friends or mistresses. A man of painstaking neatness and cleanliness, he came to us in 1951 or so, the year Elena Shuvalov’s family vacated the fourth-floor apartment they had been renting from us since we’d moved into Seventieth Street. Jean lived in one of the two little bedrooms up there, a space he maintained in a state of monastic order. After returning from an outing of an hour and a half on his one day off, Sunday—we presumed he’d gone to Mass—for the rest of the day he remained in his room. The only sound we ever heard emerging from that space was a mild fluttering of little papers, as if he were wrapping many tiny objects in tissue or leafing quickly through a book of very thin pages. He was highly literate, with a rich store of biblical quotations that were applicable to any number of situations and often served to express his disapproval of the occasionally messy state of my own quarters. My college friends, when they came to stay at Seventieth Street, were hardly models of neatness. Upon such occasions, Jean would stand at the doorway of my room, examine the mayhem with a horrified air, and then, hands clasped, eyes turned skyward, exclaim, “Sodome et Gomhorre!”

  The dining room–and-kitchen complex presided over by Mabel and, during part of her long tenure, by Jean was the true power center of the house, the site that was crucial to my parents’ social ascendance. For the noontime Saturday meals that were held at the Libermans’ from the late 1940s on may well have been New York’s first “power lunches” in the contemporary sense of that phrase. At their table, graced by Mabel’s spectacular cuisine and our fine collection of wines (which were acquired, mostly as presents, from French vintners of our acquaintance), my parents charmed the prominent Parisians and New Yorkers who helped them to rise into the highest circles of the art and fashion world. Salvador Dalí, who notwithstanding his poses was a far nicer man and a more loyal friend than he’s been made out to be, was trotted out every few weeks for show. Soon to be added was the Hollywood set, such as the designer Gilbert Adrian and his winsome, diminutive wife, Janet Gaynor, whose sweet voice had the pitch of a twelve-year-old’s and who upon becoming Tatiana’s client brought more of her silver-screen acquaintances to the salon: Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Madeleine Carroll. By the late 1940s, there was also the international fashion, art, and entertainment crowd: Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Zizi Jeanmaire, Roland Petit, Patricia Lopez-Willshaw with her husband, her lover, and her husband’s lover, and eventually “le génie Saint-Laurent,” upon whom Mother doted. And there was the enduring roster of moneylenders, wealthy New York couples who periodically bailed out Alex at times of particularly straitened finances. Among them were the Levals; finance tycoon George (“Grisha”) Gregory and his wife, Lydia, who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1932—Lydia’s friendship with Tatiana was made all the closer by the fact that she had been an acquaintance of Mayakovsky in the year previous to his death; and Charlie and Genia Zadok, who served a double purpose: Charlie, who as chairman of the Saks Fifth Avenue/ Gimbel’s complex was Mother’s boss, was also one of New York’s most prominent collectors of contemporary art and so was particularly fawned upon by Alex.

  The living room at Seventieth Street, late 1950s.

  Alex began to paint again on weekends in the late 1940s, and as he attempted to place his works in galleries, bands of art critics and dealers started to appear at their weekend lunches: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Betty Parsons, Andre Emmerich, Thomas Hess. And in the 1960s, as Alex began to show his work and strove to be accepted as an artist, the Libermans also began to collect the Big Artists at their table. Such were some of the guests who were “réchauffés,” “warmed up,” as my parents put it, at the dining-room table, before being taken upstairs to the living room to be finished off with coffee and liqueurs.

  East wall of the library at Seventieth Street, mid-1950s. The Légers were given to Alex when he photographed the painter for The Artist in His Studio.

  As you walked up the first flight of stairs at 173 East Seventieth Street, your hand perhaps gliding on a round banister gleaming with high-gloss white enamel paint, you came upon a landing that gave, on the right, onto a spacious living room and, to the left, onto a room that over the years alternated as a library and as Alex’s studio. The living room, accessed by a large oval-shaped doorway into which were set two large sliding doors, was an almost square room. Its three large windows, which looked out north upon the garden, were hung with a translucent gauze curtain that gently filtered the abundant light. Immediately to the left of the entrance was a love seat upholstered in white vinyl, and in the middle of that wall was a fireplace, which was used often in winter. (“Fireplace without logs,” so ran one of Mother’s axioms, “is like man without erection.”) An eighteenth-century Louis XV armchair that had stood in my father’s study in our Paris apartment was set between the fireplace and the window, underneath which were bookshelves filled with volumes exclusively in French. (Their covers were all white or beige, as French editions still tend to be—Mother allowed no American books in that room because most would have ruined her beige-and-white color scheme.) To the right of the window there stood, from 1943 on, a large three-panel screen by Marcel Vertès depicting scantily clad women sporting Mother’s hats. Most of the room’s right wall was taken up by a large, deep Chinese-style settee upholstered in ivory damask and the two low, matching chaises flanking it—gifts from the Wileys, who had brought the set back from Beijing. These seating arrangements provided a perfect foil for mother’s love of being photographed. Dressed in black satin pantsuits and hung with clanging jewelry, she often reclined on that couch, odalisquelike, as she posed for most every photographer of note who ever worked for Alex—Horst, Rawlings, Blumenfeld, Beaton—looking, in turn, bemusedly tender, icily impassive, or downright menacing.

  Tatiana at home at 173 East Seventieth Street, photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld in the early 1940s.

  Tatiana and Francine in the living room at Seventieth Street sitting in front of a Dalí signed to Tatiana, 1944.

  Works by contemporary artists began to accrete on our walls within a few years of our moving to Seventieth Street. In 1943, Alex acquired an ink and-wash abstraction entitled She-Wolf by a little-known painter named Jackson Pollock: He had attended an auction held at Knoedler t
o benefit a charitable cause and was appalled to hear the crowd tittering with laughter as the work came up. Infuriated that any artist’s work should be derided, Alex bought it on the spot for $150. The collection grew by leaps and bounds after 1947, when Alex and Mother started to return to France for six weeks of the summer to attend the Paris fashion collections and to take a few weeks’ vacation in Italy and at Va-et-Vient. It was then that Alex began his project of photographing the studios of all the major twentieth-century French artists (and the artists themselves, if they were still alive). Most of the photographs were published in Vogue and eventually were assembled into an epochal work of art-historical documentation, The Artist in His Studio.

  Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Villon, Léger were just a few of the scores of artists to be documented by Alex in the following decade. Most of these masters gave Alex a “souvenir” or two in exchange for the privilege of seeing their work published in Vogue. (Léger, being an old friend of his mother’s, was particularly generous: He told Alex to choose any black-and-white works he wished for fifty dollars, and he let a large gouache study for La Grande parade go for five hundred.) In the case of the stingier artists, such as Matisse or Picasso, Alex usually managed to wheedle something out of them for a few hundred dollars. Thus, by the late 1950s the walls of the Libermans’ second floor were hung with a powerful collection of pictures, mostly works on paper, from which decades later, after my mother’s death, Alex was able to make an immense profit.

  But apart from the pleasure I took in these artworks, the living room was my least favorite part of the house. It had unhappy associations with my first year at Seventieth Street. In early December of 1942, soon after moving in, I’d nurtured a fantasy of our first Christmas in the new house, a fantasy admittedly as corny as the popular images—the covers of The Saturday Evening Post and of Ladies’ Home Journal—from which it was derived. I imagined walking down Fifth Avenue just before the holiday carrying beautifully wrapped gifts for my parents, setting them prettily under the tree, carrying up the logs from the basement for a perfect fire. On Christmas Eve, we’d have some dinner brought in by the charming, impoverished Russian nobleman, Prince Trubetskoi, who eked out a tiny living catering Russian food such as blinis or cutlets Pozharskie. (His ways were as improvident as ours—upon delivering the food, he’d accept our invitation to tea and keep his taxi waiting for a half hour, ensuring the lack of any profit whatsoever.) We’d take our dinner up on trays—so my daydream continued—and share it as we sat in front of the blazing fire, just loving one another and taking turns opening our presents and reading Dickens. (How I thought my mother and Dickens were compatible remains a mystery.)

  As Mabel used to put it whenever I was harboring an illusion, “Wake up, girl!” From that first Yuletide at Seventieth Street, I realized that such a fantasy was strictly chimerical; that Christmas, to them, would be yet one more occasion to heighten their status in society by holding large, glitzy gatherings. Our Yuletide parties, in fact, came to be particularly noted for Mother’s insistence that everyone who set foot into our house receive a beautifully wrapped gift. So beginning on December 22, Alex and Mother and I gathered at the dining-room table in front of scores of sensibly priced presents—baubles purchased at Saks with Mother’s discount, freebies acquired by Alex from Vogue’s beauty or jewelry departments. We sat there into the wee hours, wrapping the goodies and writing out the accompanying cards. Mother, who insisted on this frenzy but continued to plead her bad right arm as an excuse never to write again, would dictate to us: “Boubouziki, écrivez! ‘A Jane, Joyeux Noel, Tatiana et Alex.’ ‘A Cher Fernand, nos voeux les plus affectueux.’” Alex and I would translate the greetings into English if need be and write long past midnight, while she wrapped the baubles in gold foil paper and finished them off with fancy knots of white satin ribbon. (The style of her Christmas wrappings remained the same until the end of her life—over the decades she hoarded so much white satin ribbon, so many dozens of gold paper rolls, that their leftovers stand in my closet to this day.)

  So from the 1940s on, our Christmases became among the most fabulous in town, further enhancing the Libermans’ reputation as the city’s most charming and generous hosts. Living, in time-honored Russian fashion, in a state of perpetual debt, subsisting on the Levals’ or the Gregorys’ borrowed money, our dentists, doctors’, and carpenters’ bills yet unpaid, we placed beautifully wrapped gifts for some eighty persons under our ten-foot Christmas tree. Toward midnight, when the distribution des cadeaux, as we called it, began, I would constantly be sent into the bathroom to rewrap and relabel, for an unannounced friend, a gift someone else had brought us a few minutes earlier. So fabled, in fact, was the discrepancy between my parents’ penury and their lavishness that fellow exiles even invented a Russian word to describe their zany form of prodigality: “Libermánshchestvo.”

  By the early 1950s, when the original Yuletide party had set the model for gatherings held on many occasions throughout the year and “East Seventieth” had become a three-star Michelin stop on the international set’s road map, the array of celebrities assembled at one of the Libermans’ gatherings might include the following luminaries: Yul Brynner, a full-blooded Russian who had immigrated to the United States via Constantinople and had taken a great shine to Mother; Viola and Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who had altered the look of midcentury America, from its Coca-Cola bottles to its Studebakers; Charles Addams and his ethereal harpist wife, Daphne; the writers John and Jane Gunther, who were summer neighbors and close friends of the former director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr Jr. (the connection would prove most useful when Alex would relaunch his painting career); the birdlike Russian-born fashion designer Valentina, who lived for decades in a ménage à trois with her manager/husband, George Schlee, and his notoriously reclusive mistress of long standing, Greta Garbo; and from the fifties on, when her reputation as a collaborationist and as Spatz’s wartime lover had faded, nasty-faced Coco Chanel, from whose mean little mouth a Gauloise was perpetually hanging. Whatever other Paris fashion tycoons were in town—Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, Jean Balmain, Jean Dessés—would also attend. (The only exception was the aristocratic Cristóbal Balenciaga, who thought the Libermans were arriviste rabble and was seen solely in the company of Alex’s archrival, Diana Vreeland of Harper’s Bazaar.) This very partial listing should not exclude Marlene Dietrich, Mother’s closest friend throughout the 1950s and 1960s, who made a point of appearing at the Libermans’ parties in the plainest working clothes—jeans and a turtleneck, or even the white nurse-maid’s uniform she donned when wheeling her grandchildren’s stroller to Central Park.

  As for colleagues of Alex’s from Condé Nast invited to Christmas Eve and any other parties, beyond the ever-present Leo Lerman, they would inevitably include Jessica Daves, a plump, plain, shy woman who in the 1950s succeeded Edna Woolman Chase as Vogue’s editor in chief; Jessica used to absentmindedly chew canapés through the veils of the little black hats she always wore, creating a gooey mess of tuna fish or chopped liver, her hat gradually descending upon her face until she realized her gaffe and ran into the nearest bathroom, moaning, to clean up. There was also Babs Rawlings, Vogue’s chief fashion editor, whose mouth was a gash of electric pink, whose platinum hair—touched up with a soupçon of clear boot polish to give it extra sheen and tightness—was swept vertically upward, like that of a cartoon character undergoing electric shock. She had extraordinarily beautiful, narrow feet, which she exhibited in open sandals throughout the coldest winter days, and always came in the company of her two long-haired dachshunds and of her husband, the gifted photographer John Rawlings, a man of exquisite physical beauty and immense politeness. Babs’s manner was to jostle, strut, and clatter her way through any crowd, playing to the hilt the role of fashion oracle, making dramatic announcements about the season’s fashion trends: “Small heads are in this year!” “Hems up by at least three inches this fall!” Also in evidence was photog
rapher Horst P. Horst, a solidly built, genial German refugee with a crew cut who was the first to give me lessons in ballroom dancing; having discovered, when I was still a preteen, that I loved the fox-trot, he would have me put my feet on top of his own very wide, size-eleven shoes whenever one of our house warblers strummed a guitar, and off we’d go. Far quieter guests were Irving Penn and his beautiful, angelic wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, a couple of legendary devotion, who rushed home after half an hour to their son and their secluded Long Island house; and the equally reclusive Erwin Blumenfeld, an intellectual with a barbed black wit who never spent more than twenty minutes at any such philistine gathering.

  And at the center of this multitude, of course, there was Mother, the group’s centrifugal force: she whirled among her crowd like a tornado, beckoning the waiters to refill guests’ glasses, making flamboyantly provocative cultural pronouncements—“Dostoevsky ees nothing but journalist” “Everybody know women’s brains are smaller than men’s.” She also bullied and advised: “Your hair awful thees natural color, return to platinum” “You found dress at Bloomingdale’s? Bloomingdale’s ees for sheets.” She often made shockingly outré comments: “I can tell by the way your wife walk,” she declared to the dumbfounded Andre Emmerich, “whether she has clitoral or vaginal orgasm.” Seldom had any such declarations made me feel more wretched than on a rainy evening during my college years, when I was trying to sneak upstairs to my room in the company of my Bryn Mawr roommate, who was still wearing her plastic raincoat. Mother immediately spied us and called out to my terrified friend in her most commandeering tone: “Take off raincoat! Eet look like contraceptive!”

  The kinds of music played at our parties changed in the late forties, when Zizi de Svirsky, Claude Alphand, and Sasha de Manziarly returned permanently to France. After their departure, Mother’s singing star was Prince David Chavchavadze, whose mother, Nina, was née Romanoff—“David is therefore of royal blood,” my mother never tired of stressing. He often spent the night on our living-room couch when he was on army leave in the 1940s and later, when he finished his education at Yale. He was a handsome, impish second-generation émigré, six years my elder, on whom I had a fierce crush throughout my early adolescence; accompanying himself on guitar, he sang a stirring repertoire of Russian songs, mostly martial, patriotic ones such as “Moskva Moia,” “Katiusha,” and “Stenka Razin.”