Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  The dynamics of Alex’s new world did not always ease relations with the friends and the family he had shared with Mother. Living in great idleness, often feeling slighted by the world at large, the new ménage tended to harbor petty grievances. With the exception of Leo Lerman and of Marti Stevens, a chanteuse who had been a close friend of Marlene and of Mother’s and who lavished affection on Alex, by the third year of his marriage to Melinda most of his “old friends” were denied access to him. The ostracized included such ancient pals and family mainstays as Beatrice Leval, whose Yorkshire terrier, Alex complained, “yapped too loudly” and, to my great sorrow, Alex’s once adored own grandchild, my oldest son Thaddeus, who was eventually blacklisted for failing to invite the Libermans for Thanksgiving dinner at a time when they had already left New York to spend the entire season in Miami (and whose own children might possibly have been seen as competition to Alex’s newly adopted brood). Finally, there were also those former acquaintances whose usefulness was not self-evident anymore, such as Andre Emmerich, who had long considered himself to be one of Alex’s closest friends. “I used to worry that Alex was harboring grudges against me,” says Emmerich, who never heard from Alex after he’d closed his gallery in 1994. “Then one day I realized that with my gallery gone, I was of no use to him anymore.”

  For diverse reasons, the entire slew of Alex’s Parisian acquaintances had equally been dropped. For he had taken his bride abroad in the summer of 1994—it was her first trip ever to Europe—to show her the sights and introduce her to his friends; due, in part, to a few gaffes Alex committed, the expedition had not quite worked out as he would have wished. One such faux pas occurred as Alex was introducing his new wife to Pierre Bergé, the fastidious Parisian who had founded the house of Saint-Laurent in the 1960s and had become, over the ensuing decades, Mother’s closest friend in Paris. “I opened the door,” as Bergé tells it, “and there Alex was with his lady, saying to me in English, ‘Pierre, I want you to meet the love of my life.’ I answered him in French, I said, ‘Ne te fous pas de moi mon vieux, j’ai bien connu l’amour de ta vie’” (roughly translatable as “Don’t shit me, man, I knew the love of your life”). Another close friend, François Catroux, reports that Alex had phoned everyone days ahead of time to tell them that Melinda only ate fish. “We all went out of our way to take her to fish restaurants, but inevitably she sat at her plate, eyes cast down, not making any effort whatever at communicating with anyone, and not even touching her fish.” So Alex’s experiment had not worked: Having tried to draw Melinda into his old world and finding her not willing to enter it, he had discarded that world as readily as he’d already discarded much of his old self and dedicated himself exclusively to the goal of making her feel secure.

  In this process, the lavish, prodigal Alex of old quite disappeared. His new household was run on principles of frugality and vigilant suspicion. The wine closet was kept under lock and key, and every liquor bottle and box of cookies was carefully observed. “Have you been nipping out of that bottle of brandy in the bar?” Alex once asked me as he and Melinda and I rode uptown in a cab.

  “My palpitations, Alex, dear, remember? I haven’t had anything stronger than wine for over thirty years,” I replied.

  “I forgot she has palpitation problems, babycakes,” he repeated sheepishly to Melinda. “She hasn’t been allowed brandy for decades.”

  Having grown up in that former household of Alex’s in which no locks existed beyond the one on the front door, in which everyone was far too busy to nurse griefs or aggrandize others’ failings, I was often left astounded. “Alex watching” became a fatiguing new sport among the meager remains of his family and friends: Whom is he going to drop next, and who will be the next flavor of the week?

  For there were so many new friends and diversions to amuse our gypsy’s chameleonic new persona! Beyond Melinda’s relatives and fellow nurses, Alex’s new family up north consisted of two couples who got along smashingly with his bride. They were Dodie Kazanjian and her husband, the distinguished New Yorker writer Calvin (“Tad”) Tomkins, of whom Mother had been unfairly dismissive, perhaps because she’d sensed that they would be central to the post-Tatiana phase of Alex’s life; and another couple who had never met Mother but whom, ironically, she might have much liked, Denise Barbut and Murk-Hein Heineman. The latter were both multilingual medical doctors, a profession amid which Alex had long found many friends (he’d always enjoyed having an extra doctor to access around the clock in times of crises). Thirty-foot-long white stretch limousines were a great new delight in his life—the bad-boy side of him had long enjoyed the vulgarity never permitted him by Tatiana—and now he could hire them to take his new friends for a little gambling in Atlantic City or to pseudo-Asian eateries in town. (“Tout ce que je déteste!” one might again have heard Mother whispering.)

  But why should we allow Mother to be our ventriloquist, and listen to her cackling sarcastically from the beyond at the populist novelties of Alex’s surroundings? Melinda’s devotion to Alex was heroic, Melinda was Alex’s ticket to a few more months, a few more years of life. Grandiose, imperious Mother was a hard act to follow. Melinda did her own act with admirable dignity and dedication and tenderness, and the toughened old exile, the archsurvivor, hung on with gratitude unbounded to every extra shred of time she offered him. After a half century of playing Superman to whatever female held him in her sway, he was finally enjoying the luxury of being utterly self-centered. It often occurs that when a nurse-and-invalid partnership is dissolved by death, the former nurse swiftly becomes an invalid and finds a partner to be nursed by. Precisely such a reversal of roles had occurred in Alex’s life—Melinda was now to him what he had been to Mother. The cherished “baby” she had hovered over in the recovery room was now all her own, to be nurtured and preserved with every ounce of energy in her powerful body. She tied his shoes in the morning, knotted his ties, meticulously directed his extremely complex schedule of medications, cut his meat, put a napkin around his neck when she saw his hand trembling more than usual before meals. “It’s so wonderful to have someone tie your shoes in the morning,” Alex exclaimed. “It’s something I’ve been longing for all my life!” She was leonine, fierce about his not touching any sweets, and when she caught him cheating she growled, “Babycaaaakes” at him so threateningly that he did not dare try again for many days. In fact, the only small flaw I could detect in her nursing is that like many a doting mother she allowed Alex to indulge his love for food and grow rather fat.

  Alex and Melinda at home in Miami, late 1990s.

  What was interesting to witness was the speed with which photographs of the former Mrs. Liberman vanished from view. Upon moving to the UN Plaza flat, Alex had placed, on a bookcase facing his bed, the same family photographs he’d kept on his desk at Seventieth Street: one each of his mother and his father, one of Cleve and me and our kids when they were little, and five or six pictures of Mother at various moments in her life. My family and I were the first to be put away, a process that didn’t take more than a few weeks. Then little by little, Mother started to wane. She had first occupied center place on the bookcase, but then the whole collection was gradually moved to the extreme left, and one by one the pictures of her disappeared. In the same manner did Mother eventually fade from conversation. In the first year after her death, Alex had brought her up nearly every time we were together. “When are you going to write about Mother?” he’d ask, trying to look ingenuous. “She always dreamed of your writing a book about her.” Aha, I said to myself, he wants me to do it as fast as possible so he can be sure to control it! In fact, I had a totally different agenda: I wished to do this book about Mother and Alex, and having recently had a few problems with my own health I was hoping to survive him long enough to write it after he was gone. So I nodded my head mysteriously, saying it was too soon yet, the topic was too emotional, I had to wait.

  When two years had passed, however, Tina Brown encouraged me to write an essay for
The New Yorker on my mother as fashion icon. So I phoned Alex, who by that time had ceased to make any more mention of Mother, to talk it over with him. “I’m going to do a piece about Mother for Tina, as you’ve been wanting me to,” I said. “Oh wonderful, dear, very nice…. Babycakes, what’s wrong with that coffee?” he replied, absorbed in delicious domesticity. “Do you think I can still find people who knew her at Saks?” I persevered. “Of course, dear, of course you can…. Babycakes, why can’t I have a good cup of coffee?” So I wrote the piece without his help. And having heard several friends praise it—he remained a publicity hound, still loving to get feedback on anything written about the family—he seemed delighted with the results. “Any more comments about the piece on Mother?” he’d ask when I came into his room in New York as he lay on his bed next to Melinda, looking at magazines. I prattled on about the notes I’d gotten from Si and Victoria Newhouse, Pierre Bergé, Andre Emmerich. “Good, good, anyone else?” he said eagerly. As I began to tell him about a few other notes I’d received, valiant Melinda reached for her eye mask, clamped it over her head, and pretended to go to sleep.

  That was one of the last times Alex mentioned Mother. There was another ironic occasion. It occurred after the publication of Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins’s biography, Alex, reviews of which he found in sufficiently admiring. This time, I could tell he wanted to talk as soon as I entered his apartment. He came toward me in his slow, now halting step and immediately asked me to sit down—Melinda, that afternoon, was not around. And it was clear that he wanted to speak out his regrets about the book. “We’ve become the three clowns of the media world,” he said bitterly, referring to himself, Mother, and Dodie. “Take my advice, never, never allow a book to be done about you while you’re alive. Your mother was always right!” he added with emphasis. “What I can’t stand is how those reviews demean your mother,” he continued (it was the first time he’d mentioned her that year). “That grand woman, why people came all the way from Norway to see her, from all over the world.” For the rest of our talk, he engaged in an effusive rehabilitation of Tatiana.

  It is only fair to add that throughout the years following Mother’s death, there were a variety of tiny, covert ways in which Alex expressed the remains of an affection for us and of a nostalgia for Mother. Even if he displayed his feelings in ways that evaded Melinda’s attention, on such occasions the doting, extravagant Alex of old fleetingly resurfaced. Upon hearing about Thaddeus’s engagement, for instance—it was the very day after his angioplasty—he got hold of a phone in the recovery room and called La Grenouille, long our family’s favorite restaurant, to order a posh dinner and an extravagant bottle of Bordeaux for his grandson and his fiancée. When my friend Joanna Rose had a book party for Gitta Sereny or me, he would struggle to his feet and attend it, if only for ten minutes. Both he and Melinda maintained excessively close bonds with our younger son Luke, whom he admired beyond measure and who was living that hazardous artist’s existence that Alex had never dared to choose. When I had hip-replacement surgery in the mid-1990s, the bouquet of flowers he sent me was accompanied by a note in which the phrase “I love you” was written in Russian, “Ia tebia liubliu.” (Once my drillmaster in the Cyrillic alphabet, he now seemed to be forgetting it—he’d gotten two of the letters wrong and had painfully overwritten them.) He occasionally remembered to phone on our birthdays, and upon hearing the greeting accompanied by the word “Frosinka,” my heart bled for the love we’d shared in decades past.

  Moreover, might the spate of books Alex published in the decade after Mother’s death—compendiums of photographs, most of which he’d taken with her at his side—be a way of retaining some form of contact with her memory? The first such publication was Marlene, issued in a great rush in December 1992, seven months after the death of Mother’s star pal. (As it went into production, Alex’s increasing self-absorption came strikingly in evidence—he asked his assistant, Crosby Coughlin, to postpone his honeymoon by six months to help him put Marlene together. But the admirable Crosby, whose honeymoon was booked in difficult-to-reach Zimbabwe, stood his ground and refused to alter his dates, forcing Alex to find another assistant for the book.) After Marlene came Campidoglio, a slender volume of Alex’s photos of Michelangelo’s superb piazza in Rome, which he’d visited innumerable times with Mother; the text was by Tatiana’s close friend Joseph Brodsky.

  Alex on his eighty-fifth birthday, September 1997: at left, Luke Gray with his future wife, Dorke Poelz. At right, Thaddeus Gray with his sons Oliver and Austin.

  Alex’s most substantial volume of the decade was Then, a handsome though occasionally self-serving anthology of photographs he’d taken of just about every friend or art-world figure he and Mother had known since their youth. Among them were Henri Cartier-Bresson, who after viewing the 1959 exhibition of Alex’s photographs at MOMA “came in a very formal French way to congratulate me and express his admiration for what he had seen” Robert Hughes, “a staunch supporter of my art” Pablo Picasso, who was so charmed by Alex that he asked Alex to “stay and live with [him] for two or three months” Yves Saint-Laurent, “a man of taste and refinement” who “loved Tatiana and always tried to find clothes that would fit her from his collection” Tina Brown, “the brilliant editor of The New Yorker…whose admiration for my work gives me a new courage” Alex’s first wife, Hilda Sturm, “the blond goddess” whom he married “as quickly as possible” because of his parents’ opposition to her; Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix herself, “my great love,…descended from minor Russian nobility,…who continued to fascinate and astonish for half a century” our sons, Thaddeus and Luke Gray, “Tatiana’s and my great joy” and Melinda Pechangco Liberman, about whom he wrote: “Her presence, laughter, intelligence and love give me the courage to live. She is beautiful, a sculptured beauty that is softened by her innate tenderness and deep wisdom…. She presides over her very large family in the Philippines like a firm and generous aunt. We can talk for hours about a way of life that I will never know.”

  Then was followed by Prayers in Stone, photographs that chronicled various places of worship in Italy, France, and Greece. A sense of rehashing, recycling, often pervades these volumes. But if they helped Alex to maintain the balance he seemed to be seeking in those years—retaining some flimsy contact with his past while making it the goal of his life to offer the gallant Melinda constant reassurance—their purpose was well served.

  The communication that started churning through my fax machine on the morning of January 25, 1994, was from Si Newhouse, and its most significant sentences read as follows:

  I have asked Alexander Liberman to assume the new title of Deputy Chairman and I have asked James Truman to assume the title of Editorial Director of Condé Nast…. Alex joined the company in 1941 and for 31 years has served Condé Nast as Editorial Director with extraordinary distinction…. In his new role, Alex will continue to make available to us his vast experience…. As the second Editorial Director in Condé Nast history, James Truman succeeds Alex to one of the most significant titles in American magazine journalism.

  Si’s decision, I realized, had been made inevitable by the increasing indolence with which Alex had attended to his office work since Mother’s death—even as the announcement came through, he was whooping it up in the Miami malls and had not been in the office for some months. (As Anna Wintour put it to me later, “Si distinctly felt that Alex was disengaged.”) But I feared this might be a depressing event for him, so I immediately phoned him and was surprised to hear him fairly jolly. “It was time, I’m tired,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I’m keeping my office and my staff just as it was!” he added with emphasis. I was grateful for Si’s legendary generosity to the company’s elder statesmen: Alex and Si had been talking about this changing of the guard for the past months; and Alex’s devoted and superefficient office team—Crosby Coughlin, Susan Peters, and Lorna Caine—would indeed keep their jobs as his staffers for the remainder of his life.

>   Alex’s successor, James Truman, was a thirty-five-year-old Englishman who had made his name as a writer and editor of the influential British magazine The Face, which was heavily geared to underground style and music. The rock scene was one that Alex had particularly detested, and had always resisted chronicling in the Condé Nast magazines. But Si Newhouse had considerable faith in Truman; and in 1990 he had put him in charge of Condé Nast’s newest magazine, Details, which by 1993 had made a huge success. A self-effacing, vaguely counterculture, beautifully mannered man with gentle eyes and a strikingly sophisticated literary culture, Truman was invited to call on Alex at his UN Plaza flat a few weeks after the changing of the guard was officially announced. He received a two-hour briefing about the various problems he would be facing. It was indeed a strange meeting of minds—the venerable Old World wizard of high-class fashion publishing and the young Brit who describes himself as having come from “a violent, abrasive, confrontational street culture.” But the two got along splendidly and had already become good friends. “There were five major principles that guided Alex’s remarks that day,” Truman related a few years later. “They went something like this: ‘Be extremely Machiavellian at all times.’ ‘Act as if you’re the proprietor and your colleagues are the hired help.’ ‘Flattery is the only way of getting your way.’ ‘Don’t worry if people oppose you, sit it out and they’ll fall by the wayside.’ And ‘Don’t make this job the center of the world or you’ll go mad.’” (Within a few months of succeeding Alex as editorial director, Truman became a very serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Eleven years later, he resigned from Condé Nast, citing “boredom.”)