Irving Penn, March 1960. Family photograph with Cleve, his mother, and grandmother. Behind Tatiana is her father, Alexis Jackson.
As for his social life, it was more publicly glamorous than ever, though he was never quite honest about the extent to which it might have damaged his reputation as an artist. In 1967, Princess Margaret and her husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, whom Alex had befriended and begun to work with five years earlier, came to stay at Seventieth Street. My husband and I were evicted from my childhood room for the fortnight of their stay, which became a veritable publicity circus and was heavily documented in Suzy’s New York Daily News column. “My dear they were all at the Libermans,” Suzy emoted in one report. “Faye Dunaway…Penelope Tree, the huge-eyed modeling sensation, was there…. Then there was Caterine Millinaire, the Duchess of Bedford’s daughter, and the cute young Marquess and Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava…Irene Dunne…Françoise de Langlade de la Renta…. The Charles Revsons, Salvador Dali and his ocelot and, well, you get the picture.” Alex’s hospitality, however, did not cut much ice with the royal couple, who seemed to resent my parents’ social hustling. “It was hard for Margaret to take to Alex because he was so pushy,” Snowdon, who refers to Alex as “the curator of all that’s hot and shallow,” recalls today. “Margaret was a very shrewd woman, and she sensed that he liked her for all the wrong reasons—she saw through the Libermans’ snobbism and didn’t give them the time of day.”
Mother’s Yves Saint-Laurent gowns, which she began to receive as presents from the young couturier when she transferred her loyalties from Dior, seldom failed to be noticed in similar society columns. As for Alex, his sumptuary style remained one of Calvinist austerity: gray or dark-blue suits made for him for decades by Stovel and Mason in London, narrow, hand-knit, navy silk ties, and pale-blue shirts, which he bought by the dozens from a shirtmaker across the street from Rome’s Grand Hotel. Notwithstanding the monotony of these uniforms, he, too, won fashion-plate distinction in the mid-1960s by being named to Eugenia Sheppard’s best-dressed men list, along with Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Oleg Cassini, and the duke of Windsor.
Office, studio, society drawing rooms, and most particularly home—Alex seemed to have a mysterious capacity for being everywhere simultaneously. “He was such an enigma,” says Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, who loved Alex and looked on him as “the biggest influence I’ve had on my journalistic career,” as “the man who believed, more deeply than anyone I’ve ever known, in the high quality that journalism can attain.” “He was so unpredictable,” Wintour recalls, “we never knew what he was going to say and do, whether he’d say yes or no to anything. He’d leave without telling anyone, arrive on the sly…. His uniform was both an armor and a mask; it added to his inscrutability and mystery.”
“He was finickety as hell and had to control everything in sight,” says Charles Churchward, another protégé of Alex who since the 1970s has served brilliantly as art director of several Condé Nast magazines. “For instance, every single photo that was to be used in an issue had to be printed to ten different sizes before he walked into the art department to supervise a layout…. And his appetite for work was astounding. He spent his days running up and down the stairs to supervise every one of our thirteen magazines—he had to read every manuscript, every caption before it went to press, he even insisted on approving all cover proofs.”
But Churchward also corroborates that Alex’s mean streak remained unabated throughout the decades. “I remember him calling in one new editor and yelling at her,” Churchward relates. “‘You don’t know anything about fashion,’ he shouted, ‘will you explain what you’re trying to do?’ This was shouted out quite loud, and he’d on purpose kept the door of his office open and asked me to stand right outside, as if to ensure that this would be a public dressing-down.”
Yet if the nasty Mr. Hyde in him terrified many of his coworkers, at home Alex remained the benign Dr. Jekyll and lived in a state of alarm that quite equaled the dread he inspired at Condé Nast. Throughout his decades at the company, his colleagues were amazed by the look of utter terror that came to his face when he rushed to the phone to answer a call from my mother. “She really cracked the whip, he looked on her with a blend of adoration and great fright,” Wintour recalls. “It was the fate of his life to seek out the dominatrix in all his relationships with women.” Most of the time, Mother was phoning to complain of some malfunction at Seventieth Street—an icebox or air conditioner not working properly—and such an incident would impel Alex immediately to race home to handle the problem.
One particular instance of the grand, superefficient manner in which he handled every manner of domestic crisis comes to mind: On a winter evening in 1978, when out alone in New York, I broke my leg slipping on ice. Determined not to wake my parents, upon coming home I crawled up the two flights of stairs on all fours and went to bed, having taken every painkiller I found in my room. The following morning, at around 6:00 A.M., a very dear family friend phoned, close to hysterics, telling me that her husband had just died. I pacified her as best I could—the Libermans kept the phone in their room shut off at night to protect Mother’s sleep—and as soon as I heard Alex’s first familiar morning sounds I crawled to his door and said, “Alex, dear, Nicolas just died, and I broke my leg.” Within half an hour, Alex had arranged an 8:00 A.M. appointment for me with a prominent bone surgeon; bundled me into a limo and taken me to the doctor’s office; ordered another limo to take me home to the country after my leg was set; and had gone downtown to Chelsea to take care of funeral arrangements for our lost friend—all this, of course, without Mother ever waking from her drugged sleep, which usually lasted until at least 11:00 A.M. (“Didn’t you and I have luck finding him!” Mother always said to me when recalling that episode. “Didn’t we have the luck of the devil with Superman!”)
That Alex never broke down, especially during the ailments of my mother’s last years, when he himself was already deeply ill, that the stresses of his numerous duties and vocations failed to destroy him, was in itself astonishing. It was quite an act, and the phenomenon of his resilience may be in part explained by the fact that he took enormous pride in flaunting it. His colleagues never ceased to marvel at the sheer fund of energy he was drawing on for his multiple vocations. “With that background of lifelong illness, where did he find the time for all he did?” asks Grace Mirabella, who was Vogue’s editor in chief throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s. “We never figured out where that energy came from.”
As a young country woman raising my children, doing my own housekeeping, and struggling to find time for a nascent vocation as a writer, Alex’s everywhereness struck me as Faustian, a tad demonic. It made me uneasy: Was he perhaps spreading himself too thin somewhere? I kept recalling a puerile quatrain, popular in the 1940s among the elite of Spence’s eighth grade, which we used to spout to one another with an icily exaggerated British accent:
They seek him here, they seek him there
The Frenchies seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel!
Mother did not ponder such issues. She just referred to her husband as Superman, assumed that Superman’s energies were infinite, and treated him accordingly.
TWENTY
Tatiana’s Decline
After her retirement, Mother read more than ever, an average of three or four books each week in French and Russian. She went to Kenneth’s every other day to have her hair done. For at least an hour of the morning she talked on the phone to Lydia Gregory, with whom she continued to share memories of Mayakovsky. And she also began to drink heavily. Upon my almost weekly visits to New York, I soon noticed that she was becoming one of those hard-core tipplers who develop an array of tricks to cover up their addictions. She may have picked up the habit from Marlene, who started drinking substantially in the early 1960s, when her movie career had waned and she was supporting herself through cabaret acts in L
as Vegas. Whenever I arrived from the country on an afternoon when Marlene was in town, I’d see the two of them sitting in the library, enjoying their Scotches together as they shot the breeze. And on the days when I came in the morning, at 11:30 or so, I’d already find a few silver tumblers around the house half filled with concoctions of Dubonnet and vodka. (The latter, Mother may have thought, would leave less of a trace on her breath.) She would still be in her housecoat, uncombed and flushed, watering can in hand, pretending to tend her plants. “I only take this very occasionally!” she’d exclaim if I caught her sipping from one of the tumblers. “It so helps my arthritis!” She went out to lunch at La Grenouille almost daily, where I suspect she had still more Dubonnet and wine, and almost every afternoon she came home to play canasta.
On late afternoons when Marlene was not in town, Mother sat majestically in her living room as she sipped on yet more Scotch or Bordeaux, receiving former clients who, bereaved by the loss of her millinery and counseling skills, continued to seek her out and open their hearts to her. Moreover, from the mid-sixties on, the many Russian artists and writers who came to the United States as visitors or exiles looked on Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman as a revered cultural icon: Andrei Voznesensky, Evgeny Evtushenko, Mstislav Rostropovich all flocked to Seventieth Street to pay tribute to Mayakovsky’s muse, Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov became particularly close friends. The poets returned for innumerable visits to hear her remarkable recitations of Russian poetry, to ponder her orphic judgments on Russian literature, and to read verse at her social gatherings. The readings were not without incidents: When in her cups, Mother would often interrupt Evtushenko’s or Brodsky’s recitations of Russian classics to shout, “You’ve got that line wrong!” She would correct their mistakes and go on to finish the stanza for them, leaving only the more stalwart men to resume their reading.
Yet however eager she was to discuss his verse, she continued adamantly to refuse talking about her relationship with Mayakovsky, and she shunned all press interviews. In the 1970s, a Soviet television crew managed to trick her into speaking a bit about the poet by pretending they wished to do a show on Alex, who loved publicity of any kind and had a subtle resentment of my mother’s renown. Great was his dejection when he discovered that their true purpose was to interview Tatiana, who “in order to teach those communist fools how Mayakovsky should be read,” reluctantly agreed to recite the poet’s verse for ten minutes of Soviet TV time.
The Russians started to flock to New England, too, for in 1968 the Libermans bought a house down the road from our own in Warren, Connecticut. From the beginning of my marriage to Cleve, Mother and Alex came to stay with us at least one weekend out of two, usually with a friend or more of their own in tow—what Russians travel without a retinue? They had always dreamed of a country home of their own but were never able to afford one, and ours met all their expectations. They did all they could to be helpful, bringing delicious concoctions of Mabel’s to save me from too many hours at the stove, urging us to let them baby sit the boys. But the psychological weight of their presence was heavy on me. For a few years after her retirement, Mother’s energies remained undiminished, and she attempted to totally run my home, even trying, on occasion, to clean my house. On a January Sunday, I came home from church with my children and found that she had swept some two inches of snow from my driveway into my living room, entirely covering the floor, and was now busy sweeping it out. “What’s happening?” I cried out. She put her broom down and, hands on hips, turned her most disdainful glance on me. “Didn’t you know that this is the only way to clean rugs? That’s how we did it in Russia.”
Hillside, the Libermans’ weekend house in Warren, CT. Photographed by David Massey for the cover of House and Garden.
Alex’s new vocation as a sculptor of welded metal and the idleness of my mother’s retirement made the Libermans’ visits increasingly frequent. From the midsixties on, much of the time the houseguest they brought along was Jacques Tiffeau, a then very fashionable French-born couturier. He headed a prosperous Seventh Avenue firm, Tiffeau and Busch, and won the Coty Award twice in that decade for his streamlined suit and coat designs. The son of farmers in western France, Tiffeau had learned his trade with Christian Dior, whose protégé and occasional lover he had been in the early 1950s—very few men wanted to sleep more than once with the ungainly Dior, but the kindhearted patriarch remained grateful and always helped to advance their careers. The Libermans found Tiffeau extremely useful because of his extensive cooking skills: Whatever gaps there were in Mabel’s care packages were filled by his exquisite gigots aux flageolet, clafoutis, and crèmes caramel. A handsome man with powerful, hairy limbs, a macho swagger, and a marvelous sense of humor, Tiffeau was a heavy cruiser—he found his dates on Times Square or in bathhouses or in Central Park—and clearly enjoyed regaling his intimates with the seamier details of his sexual exploits, which greatly titillated my parents.
Tiffeau loved the country as much as the Libermans did. Sensing my unease at their almost weekly invasion, he talked them into seriously looking for a house of their own near us. Cleve found it for them within a few months: a spacious enough three-bedroom of 1930s vintage with a superb view, three hundred yards down the road from us. Alex so trusted Cleve’s judgment that upon Cleve’s description he bought it over the telephone, sight unseen. Mother and Tiffeau channeled their energies into its redecoration, painting the entire interior white, buying bright-hued chintzes for the guest bedrooms and Lucite tables and white plastic furniture for the living room—“Plastic ees forever” was one of Mother’s favorite dictums. Needless to say, Alex, who had no scruples about promoting any aspect of his life, soon splashed his garishly bright Connecticut living room, which featured a couple of his paintings, onto the cover and thirty-six ensuing pages of House and Garden. (Our neighbor Philip Roth, who thoroughly disliked my parents, said the house reminded him of “an operating room at Mount Sinai hospital.”)
Tiffeau also masterminded the landscaping of Hillside, as my parents called the house. As skilled a gardener as he was a cook, he could be found every weekend up to his wrists in dirt, planting bushes, trimming the wisteria, putting in new rose beds. The house and grounds grew to be so attractive that my parents easily convinced various friends from the couture industry—Françoise and Oscar de la Renta, Diane Von Furstenberg were among the first of them—to buy weekend houses in the Kent–New Milford–Warren area. “Isn’t he a marvel?” Mother cooed every few weeks about Tiffeau. “Have you ever seen such energy and talent?” “He keeps Mother so happy!” Alex would whisper to me with that air of grateful relief he took on when all went well in his household.
By 1968, the year the Libermans started spending weekends at Hillside, Marlene was spending most of her time in Paris, so Tiffeau had also become Mother’s drinking companion. The problem is that like many powerfully built men, he could hold his liquor marvelously well, whereas she got high very soon and yet insisted on drinking at his pace. He tried to boss her around, commanding her to limit herself, but she refused. “See what boys in back room will have, tell them I want same,” she would say, bungling the lines of Marlene’s famous song. On weekend nights in the country, when she’d been at it, on and off, since lunchtime, Mother’s drinking became most evident, and it was on these occasions that Alex’s nasty response to her problem first came to light. After an episode during which she’d stumbled from the kitchen, laughing uproariously, and spilled a whole pot of borscht on the dining-room table, I gathered up my courage to discuss the boozing with Alex. I cornered him as he was coming down the stairs, and said, “Is it good for her health to drink this much?” “Leave her alone and never mention it to me again,” he snapped, with that same nasty snarl of his mustache I’d seen a decade earlier when I’d questioned her excessive use of Benzedrine, and walked away.
Startled and hurt, I brought up the issue with Tiffeau. He said he’d received an equally rude answer from Alex on the topic: “Min
d your own business.” So we understood that Alex wanted to deal with Mother’s problem his own way, all by himself; and in his handling of it I first witnessed the sadistic streak in his character that some office colleagues had reported, for his only tactic was one of repeated, private humiliation. I was the only one to observe it, for it was all done in Russian. As she stumbled and spilled one more dish, or as her voice grew intolerably loud, he would lean toward her and angrily mutter, “Snova nadràlas!” “Drunk again!” There are several ways of saying “drunk” in Russian, but “nadràlas” is ruder than most, and, however often she’d misbehaved, I was pained by the startled, humiliated look in her eyes as she heard him speak those words.
I witnessed such covert family scenes in a state of helpless sorrow, unable to help the parents I loved, not daring to talk again to Alex in fear of alienating him. Why couldn’t he have her consult a doctor, I lamented, or why couldn’t he get to the root of her problem, which was idleness? Her social concerns were limited, but couldn’t he suggest some philanthropic work that helped Russian émigrés, such as the Tolstoy Foundation? I now know that this was all daydreaming. I wasn’t facing up to the fact that the Libermans’ monumental self-absorption left them little emotional space in which to care for any social cause. I also wasn’t admitting the extent to which Alex wished to remain the only center of Mother’s universe. During a tête-à-tête lunch with him a few years after her retirement, I had already suggested that it would be good for her to get out of the house and get involved in some charity work. He’d shaken his head in the negative with a mysterious, sly smile and said, “No, after all these years I love the idea of her just being home, waiting for me.” I thought back to a Parisian friend’s comment about Alex being “very Oriental, like some sadistic grand vizier.”
Them Page 45
