By HOLLY BRUBACHMAY
IT'S a lifetime's work to
dismantle the illusions surrounding our parents, but in Francine du Plessix
Gray's case, that may not be long enough. Her stepfather and her mother,
Alexander and Tatiana Liberman, were not public figures, but they loomed enormous
in the New York social landscape of their time. White Russian émigrés who had
fled occupied France, they rapidly established themselves in America: he as the
art director of Vogue, in time presiding over all the magazines in the Condé
Nast empire, and as a painter and sculptor who met with some success; she as a
hat designer and hostess.
The author of 10 previous
books of fiction and nonfiction, Gray began holding her family up for scrutiny
in 1967, with the first of a handful of autobiographical short stories
published in The New Yorker (later incorporated into a novel, "Lovers and
Tyrants"). People who knew the Libermans claim they were deeply wounded by
her unsparing portrayal. In "Them," she returns to the same material,
with the addition of biographical information and various hard-won insights
into their complex personalities. This time, they come across as somewhat less
opaque but frankly no more likable.
Born Tatiana Yakovleva,
Gray's mother was assured a place in literary history when Vladimir Mayakovsky
fell in love with her and dedicated a number of poems to her, conferring on her
an aura of status and glamour she would wear proudly for the rest of her life.
They met in Paris, where she was living after her escape from postrevolutionary
Russia. "He is the first man who has been able to leave his mark on my
soul," she wrote to her mother. Their romance was surely facilitated by
the fact that although her formal education was cut short at the age of 12,
Tatiana had memorized hundreds of lines of Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok and,
conveniently, Mayakovsky. And yet, when forced to choose between her two most
cherished ambitions, she renounced her future as a muse and opted for a title,
marrying a French viscount by the name of Bertrand du Plessix. Francine, their
only child, was born in 1930. Though her parents remained on cordial terms,
they were soon leading separate lives.
Enter Alex, whose father, a
Jew from Ukraine and a Menshevik, had risen to prominence under the czar as an
expert on the lumber industry. His mother -- part Gypsy -- was an aspiring
actress and a ruthless manipulator. As a child, Alex traveled with his father
in a Russian prince's lavishly appointed private train; for the rest of his
life, Alex loved luxury and associated it with security.
In New York, Tatiana and
Alex lived well beyond their means, entertaining the people featured in Vogue's
pages. Over the years, the guest list for their parties included Claudette
Colbert, Salvador Dalí, Marlene Dietrich, Christian Dior, Irene Dunne, Yul
Brynner, Greta Garbo, Raymond Loewy, Charles Addams, Coco Chanel, Helen
Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, Joseph Brodsky, Yves Saint Laurent,
Mikhail Baryshnikov. A good time was had by some; others, it seems, were
terrorized by their despotic hostess.
This book will do nothing
to endear Tatiana to those who never knew her. Here her exotic pronouncements
on style, literature and life, which once delighted her friends, fall
resoundingly flat: "Fireplace without logs is like man without
erection." "Everybody know women's brains are smaller than
men's." A prude in her private life, she took pride in shocking her
guests, announcing to a dumbfounded Andre Emmerich: "I can tell by the way
your wife walk whether she has clitoral or vaginal orgasm."
If Tatiana's wit fails to
come across in Gray's description, so, I can attest, does Alex's charm.
Straight out of college, I got a job at Vogue in the late 1970's. Alex played
the benevolent mentor to my Midwestern innocent eager to experience the world,
and ruled over all the magazines with authority and a knack for flattery that
kept the company's overwhelmingly female population in his thrall. We called
him "the czar of all the Russias." What a dismaying revelation it is
to see this urbane arbiter of style as he was in his domestic life, blithely
subjugating himself, his ambitions and his desires, to a woman whose
megalomania eventually consumed him -- and her daughter -- in the bargain.
Even by the more
laissez-faire standards of their generation, Tatiana and Alex proved
appallingly deficient as parents, and "Them" is rife with examples of
their obliterating narcissism. Having concealed from Francine the fact of her
father's death on a mission for the Free French in 1940, the Libermans
prevailed upon family friends to break the news one night, more than a year
later, while they went out to dinner. After a riding accident at a camp in
Colorado the summer Francine was 15, they phoned in their love, leaving her to
undergo five rounds of surgery by herself. As an adult, she came across
photographs of herself as an awkward teenager posing nude, at her parents'
request, for Alex's camera. Gray recounts all this in a voice that is
incredulous and curious, and the reader's heart goes out to her.
Having parsed the
discrepancies between the devoted parents Tatiana and Alex purported to be and
the self-involved, part-time guardians they were in practice, Gray seems oddly
unwilling to question their own account of their standing in the world. She
dutifully presents Tatiana as a fashion icon, although reliable contemporaries
insist that few, if any, took her seriously in this capacity. Indeed, the hats
she designed -- garnished with a thermometer or a revolving weather vane --
seem remarkable chiefly for a certain leaden whimsy. Similarly, Gray attempts
to ratify Alex's contribution to 20th-century art. Intimating that his
paintings were stigmatized by his position at Condé Nast, she fails to take
into account the (equally plausible) notion that the recognition he did receive
may have been in large part due to his position
In the end, what proves
most riveting about Gray's recollections is not the dual portrait of two
outsize individuals but the almost incidental delineation of the dynamic
between them -- the unspoken contract they entered into as a couple. Alex, a
devotee of Arthurian legend, admittedly terrified of being alone, worships at
the feet of the brilliant poet's former muse and takes pride in meeting the
challenges she poses -- not the least of which is managing her volatile
personality. He gets her approval; she gets his protection. A tyrant who feigns
helplessness, she calls him "Superman" for his ability to negotiate
daily life on her behalf. Both continued to insist that theirs was an epic love
story, even as her demands grew increasingly shrill and his attempts to satisfy
them increasingly desperate, as she retreated into alcohol and Demerol and he
took refuge in his studio.
And then the denouement:
Tatiana dies in 1991 and Alex promptly takes up with Melinda Pechangco, her
live-in Filipino nurse, whom he marries the following year. Melinda dotes on
him; he does as she commands. All traces of Tatiana are expunged, and the
jet-set inner circle is supplanted by Melinda's girlfriends playing mah-jongg.
The rigorous harmony of the surroundings that had served as the stage set for
Alex's life -- a closed universe of white furniture and modern art -- is
disrupted by a plastic recliner, a crystal chandelier, lace doilies and
antimacassars. Wintering at their apartment in Miami, he accompanies Melinda to
shopping malls and watches TV game shows. In New York, they ride in white
stretch limousines. Seemingly overnight, Alex becomes unrecognizable, and Gray,
for all her mixed feelings about her mother, interprets this as a betrayal of
Tatiana's memory. Having finally come to terms with the dismal truth that Alex
and Tatiana were too fixated on each other to focus on her own well-being, Gray
now finds herself confronted with the prospect that their single-minded
attachment may have derived not from a legendary romance, as Alex always
contended, but from something infinitely more commonplace: his need to be
dominated by a woman. Even after all this unflinching excavation, there are
still some things it would hurt too much to know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/books/review/them-the-power-couple.html
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