Moreover, Henriette, like all adventurers, loved challenges. Les Roches was notoriously difficult to get into unless the applicant came from an ancient aristocratic family or from one preeminent in commerce or the sciences. But Henriette, undaunted, pulled some strings with a former suitor whose brother was a deputy in Parliament and managed to get Alex an interview at the school. Although Alex spoke very little French, the headmaster was so impressed by the impeccably mannered youth with melancholy green eyes that he accepted him. Alex began to board at Les Roches at the age of thirteen, in March of 1926. Photos of him at that time show a slender, fine-featured boy with wavy black hair, his mother’s full, voluptuous mouth, a large, hawklike nose, and rather prominent ears. Shining through the photograph is already a grace and ease of manner, a polished elegance of stance, that strikes one as precocious and must have greatly added to the charm he exerted over others. Young Aleksandr Lieberman, who had briefly been known as “Alexander” during his stay in England, would now be known to his French classmates as “Alexandre” or Alex. He was said to be the first Jew ever admitted at Les Roches.
Les Roches had no official spiritual affiliations, but it put great emphasis on both Protestant and Catholic students’ adherence to their religious practices. Catholic students took Communion daily and did the Stations of the Cross on Fridays. Protestants had prayer meetings every morning and were encouraged to engage in frequent study of Scripture. Henriette was more than cognizant of Les Roches’ religious inclination, and upon filling out Alex’s application form for the school she had shrewdly written the word “Protestant” on the line asking for her son’s religion. So it is natural that within a few days of Alex starting at Les Roches the school’s Protestant chaplain, a Swiss Calvinist pastor, took him in charge and started preparing him for his First Communion.
French Protestantism is a reformed brand of Calvinism. It’s the austere liturgy and denuded places of worship are considerably chillier than the gilded, incense-swinging High Church Anglicanism that prevailed in Alex’s British boarding schools. Commanding a piety among its adherents more fervent than that of most Catholics, it stresses rigorous purity of heart and of morals and extensive daily study of the Bible. There is a proud, dour, defiant aura about the personality of many French Calvinists or Huguenots, as Catholics used to refer to them, which may have to do with the history of persecution that plagued their ancestors. “As a result of all the attempts made to bend them, they retain a great interior stiffness,” wrote André Gide, who as a pious Protestant youth carried a Bible on him at all times and immersed himself into an ice-cold bath every morning before beginning a two-hour session of prayer and scriptural study.
Communion, in the French Calvinist rite, is not offered until the aspirant is fourteen or fifteen years old, and it has a dual identity as Communion and Confirmation of Baptism. Alex became very attached to Les Roches’ Protestant chaplain, who offered him, as a First Communion present, the copy of the Holy Bible which remained by his bedside for the rest of his life. The pastor had inscribed his gift with a line from the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew: “You are the salt of the earth, and if the salt loses its savor how shall it regain it?” (This passage may well be the quintessence of the French Calvinist sensibility, for it is cited by Gide, in his memoir Si le grain ne meurt, as the verse on which the page of his family Bible was always opened.) Throughout his school days, Alex was a devout young man who prayed a great deal and took his religion, particularly its emphasis on sexual purity, very seriously: When the majority of his class trooped to the eminent Parisian brothel Le Sphinx, a rite of passage for well-heeled French adolescents, he was the only boy who abstained from bedding a whore and only pretended to do so, to save face.
The Protestant pastor’s instructions had been Alex’s first experience of spiritual life; given the milieus in which he was to spend the following many decades, they were perhaps his last. And without ever denying or belittling his Jewish identity, Alex always emphasized that his intellectual heritage, his entire culture, “was exclusively based on a Protestant, Calvinist ethic.” For a few decades following his graduation from Les Roches and particularly throughout the war years, references to God and to prayer recur throughout his correspondence. Until the end of his days, he retained great admiration for the very concept of religious commitment, and once he linked his life to my mother’s and mine it was he who adamantly insisted that I remain a practicing Catholic and forced me to go to church every Sunday. One might well trace other facets of Alex’s personal life—his tendency to sexual abstemiousness, the denuded neatness of his studios and workrooms, the stark, priestly uniform he wore to his office for over a half century—to the austerity of the French Calvinist ethos he had taken to heart as an adolescent.
Although its emphasis on athletics, unusual in the French school system, was based on the British model, Les Roches was characteristically French in its rigorous intellectual demands. Its motto, “Well-Armed for Life,” referred to the formidable intellectual weaponry it provided its students, such as an ability to memorize and recite hundreds of lines of Racine or Molière. As the school’s headmaster had guessed, Alex was intensely motivated and a very quick study. He learned French in a matter of weeks and soon began to excel in several subjects. Already displaying that mercurial adaptability which would distinguish his entire career, he was also extremely popular with his teachers and his fellow students. One of his two closest friends at Les Roches was Jean-Pierre Fourneau, now a retired chemist and a very lucid ninety-one when I recently spent time with him. He has these memories of Alex and of his family setting: “He was a middling to good student, with amazing facility for every branch of learning. We were always surprised to see how well he could do with a minimum of work. He was graciousness exemplified and spent a lot of his time networking, cultivating friendships with his fellow students…. He was terribly spoiled by his mother, she saw to it he was always equipped with the very latest technological gadget. My first memory of Alex involves the luxurious new three-speed bicycle he arrived with at Les Roches, it was the first bike any of us had ever seen which was equipped with gear shifts.”
Alexandre Lieberman in Paris, age nineteen.
In addition to being popular, while at Les Roches Alex proved to be a superior athlete and became a star rugby player and hundred-meter dash runner. This impulse to excel in all fields may well have been heightened by the anti-Semitic slurs that occasionally confronted him outside of his immediate school milieu: He once overheard a conversation between members of a visiting track team in which one boy said to another, “I didn’t know they had Jews here.” And shortly before graduating, as he was renewing his Nansen passport alongside his father, a clerk looked up at the two Liebermans and said, “Alors vous n’êtes que deux youpins,” “So you’re just two kikes,” leading Alex to feel that he would be forever ostracized from French society. But within Les Roches’ liberal, sheltered aura, Alex’s social life remained dazzlingly successful. In his last years, he was elected prefect, head boy, of his house. His two closest friends, with whom he often spent weekends, came from extremely eminent families. François Latham, whose stepfather was the popular right-wing writer Jean de la Varende, lived in a grand seventeenth-century château near the school. Jean-Pierre Fourneau, whose father was himself a prominent chemist, spent his summers in an equally expansive family domain in the Basque country. Alex’s own home in Paris was no less privileged: By 1926, when Semyon definitively left Russia and settled in Paris, the Libermans themselves enjoyed fairly luxurious quarters in a brand-new building on avenue Frédéric Le Play, near the École Militaire.
Yet notwithstanding his parents’ privileged life, there was one aspect of Alex’s family life that caused him to suffer considerable social unease while at Les Roches: the flagrant disparity between his school’s exalted elegance and the hoydenish aura of his brazen mother, who remained, as Fourneau put it, “une gitane jusqu’au bout des doigts,” “a gypsy through
and through.” This incongruity could never have been easy to live with. It came to a head on one particular weekend in his second-to-last year at Les Roches, when his friend François Latham, a sexually precocious boy who had lost his virginity in his early teens, ended up in Henriette’s bed. Although Alex always dismissed the impact of this dalliance, saying it had no emotional effect on him, it may well have contributed to the severe physical breakdown he suffered a year later.
Considering the psychological complications she created for her son, it was just as well that Henriette farmed Alex out to tutors or to friends for the major parts of his summers. One such mentor was a Russian émigré who taught biology at Les Roches, Monsieur Imchenetsky, of whom Alex was very fond. He was engaged in summer to reinstruct Alex in his native Russian, which Alex had in great part forgotten while learning English and French. Their first summer vacation was spent in a pension in Brittany, the second one in Cannes. Imchenetsky, a bookish, deeply religious bachelor, made Alex read reams of Russian poetry and fiction and managed to rekindle in him a passion for the Russian language, which Alex was to retain for the rest of his life. He assigned him to read the Russian classics—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Pushkin; and he taught him a very pure, aristocratic form of Russian, untainted by Semyon Lieberman’s Jewish-Ukrainian intonations, which would long be admired in émigré circles for its prerevolutionary elegance.
Other summers were emotionally more complex. On one vacation, Alex was packed off to St. Jean de Luz in the care of Ludmila Krasin, the oldest and most responsible of the Russian diplomat’s three daughters—she was six years older than Alex, and he developed a crush on her. Another summer, he went to Italy with his mother and Alexandre Iacovleff, who greatly encouraged Alex’s nascent artistic ambitions. When they returned to Paris, Iacovleff invited Alex to his studio to give him lessons in drawing and painting and, eventually, to do Alex’s portrait. (During these visits, the youngster was very taken with his teacher’s art library, a collection of books opulently bound in red leather, which had an important impact on Alex’s life.) In addition, the painter always looked in on Alex when he came to visit Henriette, carefully observed whatever drawing he was working on, and commented, “Go deeper!” Alex, in fact, so revered Iacovleff that once he started painting seriously, he spent a good decade trying to imitate his virtuosic style; and like Iacovleff, he would particularly excel at hyperrealist portraits.
It is during a visit to his mentor’s studio in Montmartre, when he was fourteen, that Alex briefly met the painter’s niece, a beautiful twenty-year-old named Tatiana who had recently arrived from Russia. One of the interesting aspects of this encounter is that although Alex always described it with much relish, my mother preferred to avoid any mention of it, since it emphasized the six-year difference in their ages. All we know of the episode is that although the gawky youth barely out of knee pants stared with admiration at the adult belle, Tatiana, who had been swept up into the highest circles of Paris and émigré society, could not have been more bored by the boy. In those “Années Folles,” when the French lived in euphoric delusions of perennial prosperity and peace, “Tata,” as she was called by many of her acquaintances, was attending Josephine Baker’s appearances at the Café de Paris and hobnobbing with a glamorous set that included steel magnates, prominent artist friends of Iacovleff, and the beautiful, promiscuous Krasin girls.
Shortly before meeting Iacovleff, Alex had attended an event that would greatly influence his choice of vocation: the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs held in Paris in 1925, which promoted that era of modernism to a wider audience than any other event of the decade. Alex was particularly impressed by the graphic arts in the Soviet pavilion designed by Konstantin Melnikov, where Constructivist experiments in typography, architecture, and poster design were prominently featured. The exhibition was “one of the most important events” in his life, he later said to his earliest biographer, Barbara Rose, “its futuristic forms, structures and shapes made an incredible impression on me.” This 1925 Art Deco show, his mother’s pressure for him to be a painter, the example set by his treasured friend Iacovleff, and the further encouragement of Alex’s art teacher at Les Roches were the principal influences which, in his midteens, were drawing him to art. In his last years at Les Roches, he particularly excelled at industrial drafting, displaying a great ability for working with severe geometric forms, a predilection that would be amply displayed a quarter of a century later, in his first exhibitions of hard-edge paintings in New York.
By the fall of 1926, Simon Liberman (he westernized “Semyon” and dropped the first “e” in his surname at about this time) had recovered from the nervous breakdown he suffered after his last trip to Russia. He had resettled into his new Paris apartment, on avenue Frédéric Le Play, and his family was finally reunited. It was the first time they had lived together since 1921, when Alex was nine years old, and certainly the first time since the Russian Revolution that they had lived in great comfort. In this new home, Henriette entertained the crème de la crème of émigré society and of the Paris art world—beyond Iacovleff, her intimates included Jean Cocteau, the painters Fernand Léger and Natalia Goncharova, the ballet luminaries Sergei Diaghilev and Bronislava Nijinska. But glamour did not necessarily mean harmony. Romances were never the issue of disagreement—Simon and Henriette had long accepted each other’s dalliances. (Many of Simon’s liaisons, which were considerably more discreet than his wife’s, were with opera singers, including a brief one with my cherished great-aunt Sandra, Iacovleff’s sister.) A far more pressing incentive for quarrel was money: Mamasha, as Henriette was referred to by her husband and son, always wanted more cash for her extravagant wardrobes, and even her affair with Iacovleff collapsed when she sent him a bill for a very expensive set of Vuitton luggage.
Equally troublesome was Henriette’s tortured relationship with Alex, which, she was the first to admit, was rooted in her violent, uncurbed love for him. Her fictionalized memoir is revealing on this issue, exposing with unabashed candor her hysterical, para-incestuous infatuation. She admits that “all that comes from [my son] enchants me,” that “this love absorbs, possesses and torments me,” that “what I feel for him I have never experienced for any other being on earth.” Beyond the delirious maternal love which she displayed in her book, Henriette also had an innate need for violent psychodrama; throughout Alex’s teenage years, she created scenes in the most exploitative manner. He recalled her saying dreadful things about his father, swearing that she was about to leave him forever, tearing off her clothes and threatening to throw herself off the balcony. When he was thirteen or fourteen, he came home from Les Roches and found her sobbing. He stood his ground, not showing any emotion, and she slapped his face repeatedly for not showing her more sympathy. He smiled and said, “Do you feel better?” “That was my British training, never to show emotion,” he recollected decades later. “This, of course, drove her mad…. I was sorry for her, but I’d seen her cry like that too often.”
As for Simon Liberman’s company, it offered Alex little solace. For however close they had been throughout his childhood, Alex found it difficult, from his adolescence on, to communicate with his father, whom his classmates remember as being silent, even taciturn, during family visits. Notwithstanding their separate lives, Simon doted on Mamasha, and he was intensely jealous of her consuming passion for Alex. “I’m not like Mother, I don’t spoil you,” he would say when reprimanding Alex about anything. Moreover, Simon was as stingy about his son’s spending allowance as he was lavish with Henriette’s; for decades, he played a wickedly sadomasochistic game with Alex on the issue of money, forcing him to beg hard for every franc or dollar, enjoying his son’s abject pleas for financial aid and his tormenting filial dependence. The silences and the lack of warmth between the two men made Alex all the more vulnerable to Henriette’s manipulations.
However, none of these family tensions affected Alex more deeply than the enormous embarrassment he experienced whe
never his mother performed on the stage. For her theatrical ambitions had grown with the years. From the time the family had moved to the apartment on Frédéric Le Play, she frequently staged dramatic numbers in her salon for a small group of invited guests—performances derived in part from Isadora Duncan’s choreography, in part from the French mime tradition. But in time, her ambitions required a larger stage, a wider audience. And in the spring of 1929, Simon agreed to finance a performance at the popular Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; Henriette’s friend Marc Chagall designed her body-revealing costumes for the show as well as its decor; her friend Darius Milhaud wrote the music. In Alex’s view, it was this event that set off the health crisis which, at the age of eighteen, nearly killed him.
Nineteen twenty-nine—his senior year at Les Roches—was the year Alex was preparing to take the most difficult examination the French government has to offer, a double baccalaureate: In addition to the examinations every French schoolboy has to take to pass his bachot, Alex had opted also to take a special exam in mathematics and philosophy, the matelem. These grueling tests required many additional hours of study. Moreover, an entirely new complication had arisen as Alex dealt with a sexual problem: Still a virgin, he had spent months trying to seduce the pretty twenty-four-year-old French girl, Louise, who served as his mother’s maid. Louise, too, was a virgin. When the moment came, both young people proved to be totally incapable, and the episode, as Alex put it, was “a complete disaster.” (From the way he spoke about his subsequent sexual failures, by “disaster” Alex seems to have meant that he did not even manage the act of penetration.)
This fiasco, which, curiously, strengthened his friendship with Louise, occurred in the very weeks when Alex had been preparing his exams and shortly before Henriette’s spectacle at the Champs-Elysées. He had helped Iacovleff to design the posters for the event, which had been successfully advertised throughout Paris for weeks in advance. The only problem was the performance itself. Henriette had insisted on going through with it notwithstanding a recently broken knee, incurred while skiing, which left her with a limp. The stocky, garishly dressed forty-three-year-old woman slowly, awkwardly walked around the stage striking pretentious attitudes, and Alex, who already suffered from a tortured blend of affection and revulsion for his mother, found it to be the most embarrassing vision he had ever seen.
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