Unfazed (or pretending not to be) by the bad press generated by Vreeland’s dismissal, Alex then enjoyed a relatively peaceful fifteen years during the tenure of his protégée, Vreeland’s successor, Grace Mirabella, a breezy, down-to-earth all-American beauty who sent Vogue’s sales soaring upward by featuring a return to stylish, easy clothes. “Naturalness is a kind of nobility,” Alex said when praising the fresh, new style initiated by Mirabella, with whom he enjoyed one of those very close, paternal, playfully flirtatious relationships on which his ego thrived. “His munificence was so winning and wonderful,” Mirabella remembers today. “He’d call you in to talk about a Paris assignment and say, ‘Take the Concorde, spend a lot of money, get yourself there in the most expensive way possible, take pictures over ten times if you need to, do it all grandly.’”
Alex and Si Newhouse at the Condé Nast offices, early 1990s. Photo by Crosby Coughlin.
Alex’s legendary editorial largesse was based on a process of expansion, which from the mid-1970s on vastly increased Condé Nast’s prestige and profit. (“We’d have lunch every week at the Four Seasons,” Si Newhouse recalled nostalgically two decades later, “and discuss what magazine we’d start or redo next.”) The first magazine launched by the company in forty years—Self, of 1979 vintage—was an immediate success. Next came the total revamping of House and Garden, the purchase and makeover of Mademoiselle, Gourmet, GQ, and Details, and the founding of Condé Nast Traveler. All of these new ventures were exclusively masterminded by Alex; the most dramatic of them all was the resurrection, in the early 1980s, of Vanity Fair magazine, which throughout the 1920s and 1930s had been looked on as the flagship of high-class American taste. Vanity Fair caused particular problems because it had the image of its predecessor to both capture and transcend, and it again called upon Alex’s suave firing style: Its first two editors, Richard Locke and Leo Lerman (the latter one of Alex’s oldest and closest friends) were highbrows who tried to continue the original magazine’s tone by publishing such writers as Clement Greenberg, Gabriel García Márquez, and Susan Sontag. They were each given notice after a few months. Lerman was replaced by the famous Tina Brown, editor in chief of Great Britain’s Tatler, who made the magazine into a huge success by adhering to the Andy Warhol dictum that “Celebrity is the Nirvana of the masses” and by shrewdly capitalizing on the dual appeal of Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Lerman, who enjoyed referring to Alex as “that housemaid’s delight,” was deeply hurt by the episode. And even Tina Brown was amazed by the icy resolve with which Alex went about firing his old friend. “There did not seem to be a trace of sentiment in the way Alex turned on Leo, it struck me as deeply scary that he had no conscience about it.”
Alex’s next major firing was even more painful. Even though Vogue’s circulation had thrived under Grace Mirabella, tripling in a decade, Alex and Si somehow thought the magazine needed a new look. They had begun to dread the strong competition being offered by Elle magazine, which Alex praised for having “no feature content, just page after page of flash” and also for making “Vogue’s earnestness and nobility, its respect for women’s intelligence, look a bit quaint.” And in 1988 they had become enamored with yet another beautiful, alabaster-skinned British press wizard, Anna Wintour, who was then the editor of British Vogue. Her distinct style—1920-ish flapper hair and an impassive manner that unfairly earned her the name “Nuclear Wintour”—had precisely that aura of “flash” Alex wanted for Vogue.
Those were the years when British women were beginning to be the Korean grocers of American journalism, and it was arranged, through complex and secretive negotiations, that Wintour would come to Vogue to replace Mirabella. But somewhere along the line, the secrecy code was bungled: One evening, Mirabella’s husband, the distinguished surgeon William Cahan, learned about his wife’s forthcoming dismissal from Liz Smith’s report on the five o’clock TV news. He instantly phoned her. “Gracie,” he said, “Liz Smith says you’ve been fired.”
“I was stunned, Alex was my closest friend. I truly don’t remember suspecting that anything was wrong,” Mirabella remembers today. “I went down to his office, and he looked up from his desk and said, ‘Grace, I’m getting old.’ Did he let me down? Yes, he was a coward.”
But as chairman of Condé Nast, it was Alex’s job to make sure that all of his editors in chief maintained their “flash,” that each of the magazines was periodically refreshed. Self ’s circulation was slipping? Fire its original editor and replace her with another zippy Brit, Anthea Disney. Disney did not heed Liberman’s advice closely enough? Fire her and hire the peppy author of How to Make Love to a Man and Great Sex, Alexandra Penney. Si wanted a magazine for men and another for trendy young males? Buy and revamp GQ and Details, then place a brilliant young British editor, James Truman, at Details’s helm. Next to come in the company’s list of successes was Allure, which Alex concentrated on exclusively for six months of 1991. Within that short span of time, Allure became the fastest-growing magazine in the Condé Nast empire—a sign that Alex, almost eighty and racked by several life-threatening illnesses, was still the wizard of American fashion journalism.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Alex had also been playing God in his sculpture studio. Bill Layman took Alex on foraging trips to Connecticut’s junkyards, where heaps of discarded metal parts were always to be found. Automobile exhaust pipes were among the first elements they collected, and assemblages of twisted and bent pipes began to sprout up all over his lawns and ours. But it was the larger pieces—the rusted cast-iron boilers and gas storage tanks—that particularly caught Alex’s imagination. By this time he was looking a great deal at the work of Mark di Suvero and was aspiring to make huge public sculptures. He immediately saw the possibility of cutting up the discarded boilers in various ways—horizontally, vertically, at a slant—and welding them together into very large-scale pieces. Layman was imaginative about all the ways one could bend, twist, shape metal objects. He crushed boiler tanks by running over them with his bulldozer. He placed sticks of dynamite into discarded boilers to blow them apart—upon one such experiment the Warren Fire Department arrived—and one of the forms created by such an explosion inspired Alex’s biggest piece to date, the forty-four-foot-tall Eve. Eve and its companion, Adam (28 x 30 x 34 feet), were among the first in a series of monumental works that would require cranes, I beams, and other industrial machinery to be produced and were specifically made to be seen in public spaces. His work would eventually more than double in size: one of his biggest sculptures, The Way, measured one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide by fifty feet high. By the end of the 1970s, it could be safely said that only Robert Smithson and a few other earthworks artists had been making art in a larger scale.
Alex’s venture into sculpture took a huge toll on his finances. Fabrication expenses vastly exceeded sales prices. What with the three Laymans and a crew of part-time hired hands working seven days a week, it took $360,000 each year—over half of his 1978 Condé Nast earnings—to keep the operation going. The self-confidence initially needed to make these costly works is all the more striking in view of the minimal recognition Alex had received for his art. With the exception of bouts of sarcasm from Hilton Kramer, who once referred to him as “a third rate modernist pasticheur,” his almost yearly exhibitions of paintings at the Parsons Gallery were seldom if ever reviewed. A show of his work at the Corcoran Museum in Washington in 1970 had poor press—The Washington Post’s art critic thought it had “something that recalls the sleek and stunning pages of the magazine [Liberman] works for.” Less negatively, the critic John Russell referred to Alex’s sculpture as “phallic artillery.” (Indeed, they were extremely sexual, with an obsessively repeated theme of penetration.)
One of the ironies of Alex’s life is that although his painting meant much more to him, his sculpture gave him far greater recognition. Andre Emmerich shrewdly capitalized on the fact that the works of the two most famous public sculptors of the postwar era, Henry Moore
and Alexander Calder, had become far too expensive for most American collectors. He marketed Alex’s works accordingly, pricing them at modest six figures and exhibiting dozens of them at his country house in Putnam County, New York. Commissions began to come in the early 1970s after a real-estate developer borrowed six works for an installation at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, at Second Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets. One of them so impressed Nelson Rockefeller that he bought a large piece for his home in Pocantico Hills. By the mid-1980s, Alex had become one of the two or three most prolific public sculptors in the country. I saw his creations in city after city when I went on book orlecture tours—in front of airports and office buildings, in the midst of shopping malls. By then, there were Liberman sculptures (the list is partial) in New Haven, St. Louis, Phoenix, Albany, Seattle; in Miami, Grove Isle, and Coral Gables, Florida; in Stamford, Connecticut; Rockford, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Granville, Ohio; at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, the Greater Buffalo International Airport, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. And Adam, the big red sculpture that museum director Carter Brown chose to stand in front of the National Gallery in Washington in honor of the opening of the museum’s east wing, had already made its own headlines: Richard Nixon, offended by the massive modernist structure when it stood at the Corcoran within view of the White House, asked that it be removed.
Alex’s Adam on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
To what biographical sources can one attribute this artist’s impulse to monumentality? Alex himself used to trace his obsession to his early youth in revolutionary Russia: the huge, legendary cannon standing on Red Square was one particularly vivid childhood memory; another was the sight of the temporary monuments put up in Moscow to honor heroes of the 1917 revolution—immense improvised structures, connected to the Agitprop movement, the aim of which was to inform illiterate masses through spectacular, ultra-accessible art. Bill Layman, who was at his side throughout twenty-five years of sculpture making, feels that “the challenge of that hugeness” was also an emotional outlet for all the frustrations Alex experienced at the office and at home—frustrations that were vividly reflected in the artist’s everyday dealings with Layman and his team of workers.
“Early on in the 1960s, when everything seemed fine in his home life and no one else would have taken on this work, Alex was a model of courtesy and graciousness,” Layman reflects today. “In the late seventies and eighties, when Tatiana became seriously impaired and his problems accumulated, he began to be far more snippy and demanding—he’d come in on a Friday night after we’d worked an eighty-hour week and say, ‘I’m disappointed, nothing is ready!’ We seemed to serve as his pressure valve…. As Tatiana’s health got worse and he grew increasingly burdened, Alex would often be very brusque and cutting.” Bill Layman’s wife, Elaine, of whom Alex was very fond, reports that when she saw him at the shop and said words to the effect of “You seem perturbed today,” he replied, “Oh, darling, if you only knew.”
Nineteen eighty-seven was the most dreadful year ever experienced by our family. Early that spring, Alex was found to have a cancer of the prostate and increasingly serious cardiac problems. (He shared this diagnosis with no one beyond his immediate family and led his colleagues to believe that his long absence away from the office was caused by acute pneumonia.) A few months later, Cleve learned that he would have to undergo open-heart surgery. And in May of that year, Mother, struggling to put on her trousers for one of her afternoon canasta games, stumbled, fell, and broke her hip. There were more hospitalizations, more complications, and once again she was away for a span of weeks.
Already decimated by the effects of her addiction—her refusal to walk, her capricious diet—she now became a true invalid. Alex had allowed her Demerol dosages to escalate since Melinda had left, and they were increased yet further to manage her new level of pain. Melinda soon returned to nurse Mother full-time and was appalled by the huge increase. “When I’d left her in 1982 she was getting a 25 mg injection every four hours,” she says. “When I returned in eighty-seven, it had been increased to 50 mg every two hours—that was the unfortunate result of having had Alex in charge: He kept capitulating to her demands of increasing her doses.” In addition, electric chairlifts had to be installed on the stairways at Seventieth Street and Hillside. The difference in her demeanor was obvious to me from the moment she came home from the hospital. I was waiting for her in the hallway, stretching out my arms to embrace her. Stooped and turbaned, leaning heavily on her cane, she swept by without acknowledging me, solely obsessed by her next dose, impatiently waving her frail, veined hand toward the stairway as she called to the nurse for her injection. I thought of the mad principessas who shut themselves up in their Venetian palazzos, ordering the closing of shutters and doors and windows, the firing of majordomos…that wave of the clawlike hand was saying, Leave me be, fuck the world, I want less of it than ever, bye-bye reality I’ve never had much use for you but now I’m leaving you altogether, it was a gesture that marked her entrance into a tightly shuttered space structured exclusively by the geometry of her addictions.
Mother had hardly been out of hospital for a month when another grief befell my parents: They learned that Genna had AIDS. Mother’s reaction to the news was very unexpected; it was one of resentment and anger. The dying are not winners; as soon as she heard that her friend was doomed, she became brusque and irritated with him—she snapped at him during meals, ordered him to eat his meat faster or wipe his mouth more often, answered his queries in a gruff, monosyllabic manner. Quite abruptly, she stopped praising him to others, ceased her habitual litany of how brilliant, remarkable he was. For he had not fulfilled her expectations, in failing to prove his genius he had caused her to lose face, and she was furious.
So the aura of Hillside grew even more dispiriting: Morose Genna flanked by brooding, wasted Mother and increasingly weary, preoccupied Alex—in addition to Mother’s health problems and his own, he now had the responsibility of making Genna’s appointments with specialists, booking limousines to get him to doctors. I now sensed an increasing somberness, a cynicism in Alex’s demeanor. He was beginning to go about his multiple family duties with a stern, tight-lipped efficiency, with little of that tenderness which had marked his manner in our earlier years as a family. Perhaps, I often mused, this was part of the bargain he had struck with the devil, as it were, in exchange for his Faustian versatility. Perhaps the answer to his colleagues’ astonished query—“How does he do it all?”—was that he’d gradually severed himself emotionally from most domestic tasks, turned that part of his heart to ice. In sum, he was resigned grimly to endure whatever human beings or substances kept Mother happy, for the simple reason that what he increasingly wanted at this stage of his life was a bit of time and peace to himself.
“I had rotten luck,” Genna whispered to me when I last went to see him in the little Ninth Street flat we had found for him a decade earlier. He died in August 1988, after weeks of being constantly visited by his closest friends—Joseph Brodsky, “Misha” Baryshnikov, the journalist Liuda Shtern, the Libermans—and tended by the kind nurses Alex had hired for his round-the-clock care. After Genna had passed away, I realized that Mother’s earlier rage had simply been a form of denial, an emotional mode she excelled at. She soon withdrew into grieving silence and barely ate anymore. She had lost her best friend, her symbolic son, the deepest link she’d yet found to her lost Russia. Throughout the following months, I tried to console her with as much Russianness as I could, bringing her new items from the Russian bookstore, occasionally cooking Russian food for her. Without being devout, she was something of a romantic about religious matters: She loved all traditional holiday rituals and always argued that Russians were quite right in looking on Easter, rather than Christmas, as the center of the liturgical year—“Everyone’s born,” she’d say, “but who else rose again?”
So at the Russian Easter afte
r Genna’s death, I ordered the traditional sweets, which he had been providing her for the past decade—the rich, creamy, white paskha and the golden fruit-filled kulich cake—and brought them to her at Hillside. She had lost so much weight that her dentures did not fit anymore; throughout the winter, she had refused to go to the dentist to have them adjusted; her muscles were greatly weakened by her insistence on spending an increasing amount of time in bed; and by this time she could eat only soft food at best. Yet that Easter Sunday she sat up on her pillows and very, very slowly ate a goodly portion of her sweets, occasionally looking up at me with the smile of a malicious, scheming child, as if to say, “You see, I can eat if I want to, if it’s Russian, and if it’s made especially for me.”
Tatiana’s last Christmas, 1990. From left to right: Neighbor Claire Bloom, Thaddeus, Francine, Cleve, Andrew Kamins, Luke, Tatiana, and Melinda.
But Alex’s woes did not stop at the death of Genna, who had managed his Connecticut home life for more than a decade. That same year, he had seen fit to end his relationship with the Layman family and to reorganize his entire system of producing sculptures, assigning them to a foundry on the Hudson. And that same year, his chief of staff at Condé Nast, Bob Lehmann, who had run his office for nearly twenty years, had to cease working because his own case of AIDS was progressing so fast: He died within a few months of leaving his job. Last but hardly least, a few weeks after Lehmann’s death, Alex learned that his domestic helper, José, who had managed Seventieth Street for two decades, was also stricken with the disease, and that Mabel, who was approaching seventy, had to retire for her own reasons of health. So in the space of a few months, the intricate, multileveled life Alex had balanced for decades with such Machiavellian diligence—his studio, his office, his home—had collapsed. In addition, there was a delicate work of deceit to perform at Seventieth Street. (How long had he and I been at this game!) Upon briefing me about José’s diagnosis, he’d decreed that for the time being Mother must not be told the truth about him.
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