Them
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Alex’s documentation of contemporary artists might never have had a public viewing without Irving Penn, who in 1952 encouraged him to publish some of these photographs in Vogue, along with accompanying essays, the first drafts of which I edited from Alex’s longhand notes. (In succeeding years, Alex never felt any scruples about publishing his own photographs or any chronicles relating to him in his magazines. “They begged me to do it,” he’d say coyly about his colleagues each time his work or photographs of his home came out in Vogue’s, House and Garden’s, or Vanity Fair’s pages. In the 1980s, Vanity Fair would devote twenty-four pages to a new edition of “The Artist in His Studio.”)
The “Artist in the Studio” series was eventually exhibited at MOMA in 1959 and acclaimed as unique documents on the pioneers of a heroic epoch who were on the verge of vanishing. They were also seen as the first photographic studies of contemporary artists that focused with equal intensity on the nitty-gritty details of artists’ methods and materials as on their personalities. The success of the exhibition led directly to the publication of a book in 1960 by Viking Press, which received enthusiastic reviews and went through numerous editions.
Portrait of Giacometti in his studio, from Alex’s book The Artist in His Studio.
As for Alex’s own view of these photos, it is important to note that he did not look on photography as a true art form. A photo, to him, was only a record of reality and did not qualify as art because it was incapable of evoking “the intangible, the visionary and the metaphysical.” The phrase was characteristic of Alex’s very religious view of art, which was grounded in the mystical aesthetics of early twentieth-century Russian thinkers such as Berdyaev, whom Alex had read a great deal in the 1940s. Religiousness indeed imbues most of Alex’s references to his photographic project. He saw his visits to the artists as a series of “pilgrimages,” and the painters he documented struck him as being dedicated to art like “men in religious orders. hese pilgrimages, he also felt, grafted his uprooted psyche back to its origins in Russian mysticism and allowed him to reestablish contact with the concept of art as spiritual transcendence, as part of “a search for the miraculous.” Alex’s sense of art’s spirituality may be most evident in his essay on Kandinsky: “Abstract art in its highest form,” he wrote, “is an expression of man’s desire to rise above subject matter into a higher realm which, like a prayer, will call upon his spiritual energy.” Barbara Rose reads a heavily Slavic context into the Circlist period of Alex’s work, linking it to the work of artists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Czech Frantisek Kupka, all of whom had reacted against the Cartesian, rationalist basis of French Cubism, all of whom searched for a cosmic or religious dimension in their art.
So Alex, ironically, had his first public success with an art form that he did not consider to be true art. As for his paintings, they were finally given a public viewing the year after the MOMA show, when his friend and near namesake William Lieberman, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum whom he had met through Marlene, persuaded the art dealer Betty Parsons to give him an exhibition. Neither the press nor the general public took significant notice of the show. However it was a succès d’estime among a few New York artists such as Barnett Newman (who had installed it), Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. And the one painting that sold, a tondo, went to an important source: Alfred Barr, Jr., chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art.
As for the Libermans’ social life in the 1950s, it was totally centered on Pat and Marlene. “They’re like sisters,” Alex said proudly about his wife and the star, as he had said, a few years earlier, about poor Nada. Mother and Alex were fascinated by the way Marlene combined the roles of glamorous seductress and industrious hausfrau, and they were captivated by the obsessive manner in which she did menial tasks for her friends: She boiled a piece of sirloin for ten hours to make a quart of beef tea for Alex when his ulcers kicked up; she insisted on repairing Mother’s evening gowns herself, with a special needle she had kept in her sewing kit since leaving Berlin in 1930.
The four were inseparable, spending country weekends and summers and Christmases together, and Marlene became yet another of my parents’ friends who occasionally played Mommy to me. On Christmas night of 1951, when a beau of mine from North Carolina was spending a week with us, Alex, Mother, and Uncle Pat were booked to go out to some glamorous party. “Those kids should not stay alone at Christmas!” Marlene exclaimed upon hearing our family plans. And she insisted on remaining at Seventieth Street to cook Christmas dinner for my guest and me, producing a menu which ever since has been indelibly engraved in Jonathan Williams’s memory: beluga caviar with Veuve Clicquot, filet of beef, and Marlene’s homemade lemon sherbet, drenched with Gerwürztraminer. “There were just the three of us, having that incredible Christmas meal in your parents’ kitchen,” he recalled nostalgically in a recent e-mail.
Mother’s intimacy with Marlene even led the actress to meddle—with disastrous results—in my own health. For Mother confided in Marlene that I had not menstruated until the age of sixteen and had menstruated only two or three times a year since then. Marlene’s Germanic sense of order was very disturbed by this news. “That is not normal!” she had exclaimed to Mother. “Marlene chérie, tell her that yourself,” Mother pleaded. So one day as I was cramming for an exam in my third-floor room—I was twenty-one, just about to graduate from Barnard—Marlene burst in on me, saying, “Only three periods a year, sveetheart, that is not normal!” She stood at my doorsill, hands on hips, wearing the white nurse’s uniform she’d donned that afternoon to wheel her grandsons to the Park. “That is not normal!” she repeated, wagging her finger like a scolding governess. “I take you to see Dr. Wilson!”
And so, the following week she packed me off to the office of the terrifying Dr. Robert Wilson, the Big Daddy of hormone-replacement therapy, who in his later bestselling book Forever Feminine proselytized that any hormonal deficiency was “a serious, painful and often crippling” ailment that “destroys [woman’s] character along with her health” and even threatens “her relation to her family and her community.” Appalled, like Marlene, by the “abnormality” of my schedule, he ordered me to come to his office three times a week for the following month for estrogen injections. Only those who have been forced to take heavy doses of pure estrogen for medical reasons will fully know the discomfort that can ensue. I put on some ten pounds in two weeks. My breasts swelled and became so painful that I could barely enter a subway at rush hour in fear that someone might brush against me. After a few days, I spotted blood around the clock, without having a true period. Without telling Mother or Marlene, I stopped Dr. Wilson’s treatment after a month. As for my periods, I let nature run its course—they became as punctual as a clock some seven years later, after my first pregnancy.
Pat’s idyll with Marlene lasted until the early 1950s, when the star ditched him for Michael Wilding, with whom she’d costarred in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. She went on to have flings with Yul Brynner and numerous other men. Marlene had been the great love of Pat’s life—he’d had liaisons with the world’s most beautiful women but none had hooked him as totally, as torturously, as Marlene. The severance had a devastating impact on him, and he began to rely increasingly on the Libermans for companionship. Alex encouraged him to take up painting as a therapy. Pat trudged up to Seventieth Street every Saturday morning and worked in a corner of Alex’s studio, which was now on the top floor of our house, in the rooms recently vacated by the Shuvalovs. He set up his easel at the opposite end of the room from Alex, who was then doing his big enameled circles on industrial board, and painted delicate little Grandma Moses–type renderings of the street below. By the mid-1950s, Pat had become so dependent on the Libermans that he sold his flat near the East River and moved into a town house Alex found for him a few doors down from our own. (The dwelling was paid for, and henceforth owned, by Condé Nast.)
Tatiana and Iva Patcevitch at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, mid-1950s.
In those years, Ale
x and Pat were more like brothers than they’d ever been. At Condé Nast, they went into each other’s offices for long conferences (part of their conversation focused on Pat’s recent heartbreak). In the summer, they took the same boat for France, where they attended the yearly collections and booked adjoining suites at the Ritz or the Crillon. In New York, they attended plays and concerts together and drove together to spend the weekends with Grisha and Lydia Gregory—Lydia had been a flame of Pat’s in the 1940s but was now content to have his devoted friendship.
Pat’s closeness to my family waned a bit, however, when he fell in love with Chesborough (“Chessy”) Amory, the wife of a genial playboy, Charles (“Chas”) Amory. The Amorys, who belonged to the most conservative milieus of East Coast WASP society, led distinctly separate romantic lives; and Pat, for a few years, entered into a pleasant ménage à trois with them. Notwithstanding Tatiana’s and Alex’s perennial distrust of the American elite’s anti-Semitism, they initially got along well enough with Chessy, a tall, elegant blonde with a ready laugh and a wicked sense of humor who had been a mannequin at Mainbocher and had immediately Anglicized her new lover by referring to him as “Patrick.” When I returned to New York in 1956 after two years in Paris, I found the Libermans giving undiminished attention to Marlene while trying to accommodate Pat’s new family, the Amorys.
When Alex enjoyed his first artistic success in the late 1950s, his mother began pressuring him increasingly to leave his job at Condé Nast and devote himself to painting. Henriette had been living in Paris since 1947. She’d recently had to close the cottage industry she had started a decade ago, a “school of charm and manners” at which she had taught women of dubious social origins the manners of the “grand monde”: how to sit down on a chair, how to hold a teacup (pinky daintily held up). “It was attended by a few women from the provinces, butchers’ wives,” Alex once quipped. Well into her sixties now, Mamasha had taken to wearing very short, Brigitte Bardot–type skirts and transparent tops. She still picked up whatever willing men she could find to sleep with her, and in order to maintain her quota of conquests she had numerous face-lifts. (Alex estimated that she had seventeen abortions and seven plastic surgeries in her lifetime.) The Libermans had to pay for all of Mamasha’s whims as well as her necessities and moreover continued to be bombarded by almost daily letters from her filled with accusations about Alex’s wasted vocation and the superficiality of the fashion world they lived in—“You are my only reason for existing…you who carry such treasures in yourself, don’t waste your energies on that inane world…. You only have one mission in life, that of an artist who may one day thrust his whole radiant clarity into his work.”
The responsibility of financing Mamasha’s caprices, added to the Libermans’ extravagant lifestyle and their largesse to other family members, put a severe strain on their finances; and there were limits to what Alex could borrow from his firm, the generous loans of which had already kept him going for many years. It is in the context of this continuing insecurity that Alex again chose self-interest over loyalty when his employer, Condé Nast, and his closest chum, Iva Patcevitch, were faced with the greatest upheaval in the company’s history.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, financial control of Condé Nast Publications had been held by Lord Camrose, the British newspaper magnate who had bailed Nast out of trouble after the crash of 1929. But in 1958, after Camrose’s death, his son sold most of the family’s press holdings to one Cecil King, publisher of the sex-and-scandal oriented Daily Mirror. Under the terms of an agreement between Camrose and Patcevitch, in the event of such a sale Condé Nast’s American publishers would have a six-month grace period in which they could repurchase the stock. At that time the Condé Nast magazines were not profitable, so this task proved to be difficult. With the aid of one of the company’s vice-presidents, the financial wizard Daniel Salem, Patcevitch approached companies such as Collier’s, Time-Life, and the Cowles publications, with no success. Five months passed with no deal in sight, Patcevitch and Salem were growing desperate…and then suddenly, in the very last weeks of the grace period, a prosperous newspaper publisher called Samuel Newhouse suddenly materialized.
The oldest of eight children born to a Russian immigrant, the five-feet-two Samuel Newhouse dropped out of school in 1908 at thirteen, when his father’s health failed, to work as a clerk for a police-court judge in Bayonne, New Jersey. His boss, Judge Hyman Lazarus, had acquired a 51 percent interest in an insignificant weekly publication, the Bayonne Times, with offices that adjoined his. Lazarus was much impressed with young Newhouse’s intelligence and imagination. After firing a series of incompetent editors, he appointed his seventeen-year-old clerk as editor of his newspaper, asking him to “take care of it until we can get rid of it.” Sam, who had worked part-time as a newsboy since the age of seven, had a keen sense for the operation and distribution of newspapers. Within a year, having indefatigably canvassed newsstands and planned aggressive advertising campaigns, Sam had gotten the Bayonne Times way into the black. Four years later, his paper was earning him twenty thousand dollars annually (the equivalent of $350,000 today), and he had put whatever of his siblings were of working age on his payroll. Within another decade, he had bought the Staten Island Advance and twenty-nine other papers in twenty-two cities, surpassing his principal rivals, Hearst and Scripps Howard, in numbers, circulation, and profits.
Early in his career, Sam Newhouse, a genial, self-effacing man, had married a beautiful, equally diminutive girl, Mitzi Epstein, who had considerable cultural ambitions and a particular passion for the theater. The daughter of a successful Seventh Avenue manufacturer, she had been brought up in comfort on Manhattan’s west side and was a graduate of the Parsons School of Design. Even when they were living on Staten Island, where they raised their two sons, Donald and Samuel (“Si”) Newhouse, Jr., Mitzi managed to get her husband to the theater as often as she could. In the 1940s, their fortunes flourishing, the Newhouses moved to 730 Park Avenue and fulfilled Mitzi’s dream by attending first nights at every important play and opera performed in New York—their seats were always in the front row, to make sure that their view of the stage was not blocked by taller citizens. Mitzi was as fond of couture clothes as she was of the stage, and by the early 1950s she had begun to dress exclusively at Givenchy and Dior. So Sam, who adored his wife, enjoyed saying that when on a morning in 1958 Mitzi had asked him to go downstairs and buy her a fashion magazine, he had “gone out and bought Vogue.”
Although Newhouse’s purchase of Condé Nast was rumored to be a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary present for his wife, it was also a shrewd business decision. In the same months, he closed down the tony Connecticut printing plant where Condé Nast magazines had been published since the 1930s and sent them to more modern, cheaper plants in the Midwest. As a result, within nine months of his having acquired Condé Nast, the company had totally turned around and was on pace to make a million and a half dollars each year.
As for Pat, ensconced in his new ménage with the snobbish Chessy Amory, he treated Condé Nast’s new owner with lordly disdain and referred to him in private as “a kibbitzer.” He had realized early on that the anti-intellectual Chessy would have no social chemistry with the culturally zealous Newhouses and had begun to use Alex, the Newhouses’ fellow Jew, as his principal social conduit to them. Upon first dining with the Newhouses at Pat’s, Mother, who readily knew which side Alex’s bread was buttered on and immediately declared Mitzi to be “irresistible,” was perfectly behaved. The Libermans and the Newhouses quickly became friends and soon were dining in tête-à-tête every few weeks. Mother and Mitzi chatted happily about books, children, clothes, and servants while Sam plumbed Alex’s mind on Condé Nast. As for Pat and Chessy, the latter of whom had begun to strongly dislike Tatiana because of her abiding friendship with Marlene, they were married, soon after Chessy’s divorce came through, on the afternoon Kennedy was assassinated—a joyous celebration was held notwithstanding the somberness
of that day’s events.
As the émigré survival artist Pat adapted like a chameleon to his new wife’s proclivities and pastimes—Southampton, Palm Beach, country clubs, canasta tournaments—the émigré survival artist Alex instinctively set his bets on Newhouse, becoming his confidant and right hand in the running of the company. He loved the company and the magazines, Alex explained three decades later, and he had to survive. Survive he did. In late 1962, when an overhaul of Condé Nast’s old guard came about and Diana Vreeland replaced Jessica Daves as Vogue’s editor in chief, Newhouse promoted Alex to be editorial director of the entire Condé Nast publishing empire. By this time, my parents’ estrangement from Pat was considerable. Both Mother and Alex felt that Pat’s treatment of Newhouse was grotesque, and Alex, moreover, worried that it would be deeply harmful to the company. His resistance to Pat stiffened, and those twenty years when Alex and Pat had been “like brothers” and Pat had poured out his despair over Nada’s tantrums or Marlene’s treachery seemed a lifetime away. The transformation in Condé Nast’s power structure began in the spring of 1967. One night, when Alex was having dinner at the Newhouses’, Sam took Alex aside and asked him if Pat was doing a good job. “I couldn’t lie,” Alex explained later.
Through another blunder, Pat precipitated his own downfall a few months later, in September 1967. A Bolivian tin czar named Patiñor was giving a weeklong series of festivities at the Portuguese resort of Estoril, and every European or American jet-setter of any note wangled an invitation. The Newhouses were there, mingling with other prominent American publishing, couture, and society magnates at the Palacio Hotel—this was the kind of event at which Mitzi loved to show off her wardrobe and talk about her husband’s knack for rebuilding publishing empires. There was a series of lunches, breakfasts, and cocktail parties, perhaps two dozen of them, given by various individuals from both sides of the ocean. The Newhouses were invited to every one of them, except to the cocktail party given by Chessy and Pat, which Mitzi learned about the following day from her manicurist.