The very next afternoon, shortly after returning to Les Roches, Alex started vomiting blood. The nurse at the school infirmary told him that “nobody vomits blood” and that he’d probably eaten too much currant jelly. But he continued to feel very ill and took the two-hour train ride back to Paris. The Libermans’ family doctor was called and dismissed the episode as indigestion, telling Alex not to eat any more game. But that night, after his parents had gone out to dinner and Alex had gone to bed, he started having a truly serious hemorrhage, with blood issuing from both ends. Not having the strength to get to the phone, he managed to throw a shoe up to the ceiling, which indicated to Louise, whose room was directly above his, that she was needed. She rushed downstairs and took care of him until his parents came home. Failing, perhaps providentially, to reach their family practitioner, who had left for the weekend, the Libermans called in a local doctor who finally made a correct diagnosis of bleeding ulcers. Alex had lost so much blood that for a few days his life was in danger. He spent the following month in bed, taken care of by the excellent local doctor and by his cherished Louise. And one is tempted to think that Louise’s role in saving his life made him all the more vulnerable, a half century later, to the charms of another affectionate nurse.
Numerous tensions had contributed to the outbreak of Alex’s nearly fatal illness: the anxiety caused by assimilating as swiftly as he had into French society; the pressure to excel in every possible way in his academic and social life; the unease he felt as a Jew in an overwhelmingly Christian society; his particular anguish about his double baccalaureate; his botched attempt at reaching sexual manhood. But over and above all these causes, Alex always singled out the intolerable dismay of seeing Henriette in her first public performance in Paris, a sight that nearly embarrassed him to death.
Having spent more than a month in bed, Alex accompanied his mother to Aix-les-Bains, where he studied for the easier portion of the bachot he had missed, having decided that he must take its two sections a year apart. He passed the exam in Paris in late July, receiving a mention bien, the equivalent of a B or B+. In the autumn, he returned to Les Roches to study for the philosophical section of the exam, or philo; and the following spring—May 1930—he again passed with the same fine grade. His good showing in these government exams qualified him to apply to one of the distinguished graduate schools—École Normale Supérieure, École des Sciences Politiques, Hautes Études Commerciales—that train young men for careers in government, industry, or the teaching profession. This is what his father greatly wished for him. But his mother was pressing him more than ever to be an artist, and since his apprenticeship with Iacovleff that notion had increasingly attracted him. While still studying for his second bachot, he had joined a class at the studio of André Lhote, an irascible, authoritarian second-rank Cubist who expected students to ape his own style. On one occasion, upon looking at a bright-hued painting of Alex’s, Lhote scrubbed away at the wet pigment, blending it into a mud hue, and drew some Cubist apples over it. (Fifteen years later, my own husband-to-be, who had enrolled in Lhote’s class as a GI, had precisely the same experience with the painter.) After that incident, Alex, appalled, left Lhote’s studio.
Trying another branch of art, Alex successfully passed the École des Beaux-Arts’ demanding examination for its school of architecture, and equally excelled at this discipline, achieving the distinction, in his first year, of being named “chef cochon,” head student. But he soon grew weary of the complex mathematical and scientific knowledge demanded by architecture. And he was happy instead to arouse the interest of the famous Russian-born designer Adolphe Cassandre—yet another fellow smitten with Henriette—whose posters and advertising strategies were transforming commercial art as radically as Picasso had transformed painting. (Cassandre’s most famed achievement was the renowned logo “Du, Dubon, Dubonnet.”) Alex started to work as a part-time assistant for the designer in 1931, going to his studio in the afternoons, after his morning architecture classes. It was, in turn, through Cassandre that he attracted the attention of France’s most famous magazine publisher, Lucien Vogel, a close friend of both Iacovleff and Cassandre who happened to be Henriette’s current lover. Vogel was a very tall, blond, blue-eyed Anglophile dandy, renowned for his amorous exploits, who dressed in flamboyant pale-yellow waistcoats and high, starched collars with bow ties. He was always on the alert for fresh new talent, and in 1932, upon beginning an affair with Henriette, he started insisting that her gifted son leave Cassandre’s studio to work for the art department of his magazine, Vu. The Great Depression had begun to ravage the French economy in the fall of that year, three years after it had struck the United States. All Vogel had to offer Alex in the way of a salary was fifty francs a week, the equivalent of some ten dollars. Alex accepted and became the assistant art editor of France’s most illustrious publication when he was still nineteen. He had no qualms about quitting architecture school and putting an end to his formal education. And many decades later, he came close to ruining several careers by counseling his young protégés to follow his shining example, leave college, and “learn through experience” by working for him at Condé Nast.
In the past decade, Vogel had published some of the country’s most distinctive luxury art editions—among them the drawings of Chinese and Japanese theater sets Iacovleff had made during his very first trips to the Far East and, later, the special editions of Iacovleff sketches for the Citroën expeditions. Vu, however, was his most innovative publication to date, a pioneering magazine with a stated purpose to “bring France a new formula—illustrated reporting on world news.” Its distinctly left-wing views were inciting it to document the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in groundbreaking special issues. It had also become a showcase for the decade’s most important photographers: André Kertész; Man Ray; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Robert Capa, who would cover the Spanish civil war for the magazine; and Brassaï, chronicler of Paris nightlife. A true modernist, Vogel was always looking for innovations. And the first photomontage covers Alex made for Vu, which were based on those very Constructivist principles that had enthralled him at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs when he was thirteen, delighted his boss. Alex, in turn, loved the quick decision making and capriciousness involved in the creation of a weekly news magazine. He shared the office with Irène Lidova, a Russian émigré six years his elder who taught him the basic elements of layout. He often remained in the darkroom until the dawn hours, sleeping on a narrow cot in his office, perfecting photomontage technique through endless experiments of cropping and juxtaposing images. Within a few months, he was given exclusive responsibility for all of the magazine’s covers, which he signed with the name “Alexandre.”
Alex’s cover design for Vu : March 1934, “Colonization.”
Always living grandly and needing cash, Alex plumped up his tiny salary by taking on numerous freelance jobs—window displays, department-store catalogs, and even some notably kitschy commercial advertisements: one of his creations, showing Santa’s sleigh being pulled by six Peugeot sedans, embarrassed Alex greatly when it was published as a double-page spread in Vu. A great fan of light, corny Depression-era Hollywood comedies, Alex also wrote film reviews for the magazine, which he signed with the pen name “Jean Orbay.” And although his political leanings, like those of most Russian émigrés, were distinctly conservative, throughout his years with Vogel he carefully concealed his distaste for his boss’s left-wing opinions. (He remained equally apolitical for most of his public life, usually pretending to hold the views of whatever mogul currently employed him.)
So as we might say in contemporary parlance, Alex was quite a package. What with his sleek good looks (a blend of Melvyn Douglas and John Gilbert, friends would say), his seductive cosmopolitan manners, his athletic skills, his considerable artistic and literary culture, his total mastery of three languages, his important job at France’s most illustrious news magazine, and the bylines he was already getting, age twenty-one, for his covers an
d film reviews, he had attributes—status and glamour—far more impressive to women than money. And he could well have bedded Paris’s most entrancing girls. Yet how far could he get, sexually, with all his attributes and charm? That was a different matter.
Alex’s cover design for Vu : April 1934, “Hitler Arms.”
SEVEN
Alex and His Women
My day-to-day recollections of Alex’s physique—which go back to my eleventh year, when my mother and I fled to America together after the fall of France and finally settled in Manhattan—have to do with his poor health, his rigid ulcer diet, and most particularly his glaringly white, many-mirrored bathroom. This was the exclusive site for his grooming rituals, for my mother’s took place in their bedroom, at a dressing table set a bit beyond, but symmetrically between, the two double beds—one at either end of the room—that constituted their sleeping arrangement. And my recollections of Alex’s cosmetic habits focus almost exclusively on the array of metal objects—tweezers, nail files, and an amazing variety of scissors and clippers, each with a slightly different curve to them—that were set in parallel order, with surgical precision, on the top shelf of the mirrored surface that surmounted his sink. From the time—1942—we moved into the brownstone on East Seventieth Street that our family was to occupy for forty-nine years, my mother and I were under orders not to touch these implements, for Alex looked on his grooming routine, which was carried on behind closed doors, with a particular insistence on privacy, as a significant ritual. Once or twice each year, when Mother or I needed one of these tools for a cosmetic purpose of our own, we’d whisper to each other, “J’ai emprunté ses ciseaux pour une seconde,” and indeed spirit them back as fast as we could. Every few years it would happen: He would notice one of his tools missing, and then he would roar out twice, once into the master bedroom, once into mine, “Qui a emprunté mes ciseaux?” And if we brought them back with a contrite enough air, he would wag his finger with mock severity, threatening punishment for our next transgression.
These metal objects (serious metal, metal deeply etched into his personality, metal that decades later would come to symbolize the surgical meanness with which he excised my family out of his life after my mother’s death) were central to Alex’s toilette, for they had to do with the heart of his personal cosmetic concerns: his mustache and the hair that grew abundantly in his ears and in his large, slightly beaked nose. Like many men determined to combat racial stereotypes, he was obsessed with controlling facial hair. And several times a year, as my mother opened the bathroom door to fetch herself a towel or some other object she needed, I saw him standing in front of his sink, his head bent way back as he cut delicately upward, with a special set of slender, curved scissors, inside his nostrils; or, his neck craned sharply sideways, he’d be cutting with still another kind of dainty implement the wayward hairs growing out of his ears; or else he’d be staring straight forward to lightly trim his thick, wavy eyebrows, which arched handsomely over his large, extraordinarily beautiful green eyes and were the only of his physical features to which he permitted a certain measure of lyrical disarray—an aesthetically wise decision without which he might have looked distressingly sleek.
It was the mustache ritual that was most secretive and that I somehow failed, year after year, to observe. Since, for a half century, he kept his hair cut at the same medium length, wore the same self-invented Calvinist uniform year after year—the same dark suit and knit ties, the same model of black rubber-soled loafers—Alex’s mustache was the only physical feature to which he allowed himself to apply some degree of choice or fantasy. Over the years, as I look back on it, Alex’s mustache took on distinct nuances and timbres of self-identity. As I see it in photographs taken in the 1930s and a few years beyond our arrival in the United States, it is a tad too thin and waiterlike, verging on the ridiculous. In my teens—the 1940s, when he became an increasingly active paterfamilias—it grew a bit in width and bushiness, in self-assertion. By the late 1950s and sixties, when I was a young wife and mother and Alex was an uncommonly engaged, adoring grandfather and had also grown famous in New York circles, it had begun to gray and become a distinctive social trademark. It intruded, in fact, into most every public description of him, leading to an abundance of phrases such as “the dapper, mustached art director of Vogue,” or later, when he took on the editorial direction of the entire company, “Condé Nast’s mustached, aristocratic director.”
But the mustache, beyond being a public token of Alex’s sophistication and cosmopolitanism, had a wealth of private meanings for us, his family. It was both a barometer and a concealing mask for his state of mind, for whatever he had of genuine emotions or opinions. “Alex’s mustache twitched” and, later, after my children had begun to analyze his moods, “Grandpa’s mustache twitched” became family passwords for those moments in which we were trying to decode Alex’s all-too-frequent refuges in inscrutability. “Grandpa’s mustache twitched” denoted his disposition upon the many occasions when he disapproved of something we’d done or said or felt ambivalent toward it but did not want his displeasure or even his equivocation to be on record. The mustache, in sum, was both a semiotic banner and a barrier between the public and utterly private Alex, a banner/barrier that, when it seemed in the least bit ruffled or transgressed, often helped us to chart our next course of action—which was usually to circumvent him. And I’m sure it had different meanings for each of us: Because of its touch of slightly ridiculous, groom-on-the-wedding-cake slickness and also because of its potential for masking his true feelings, Alex’s mustache became, to me, a dual token of his asexuality and his often byzantine slyness.
I return to Alex’s bathroom. It was a small, rather plain bathroom, with a floor of small, rough white tiles common to New York brownstones built in the 1920s and 1930s; the color of its towels, for a half century, remained light blue; since he shared it with my mother, its walls were lined with an unusual number of mirrors, and it was lit with very high-wattage bulbs. This space exuded an odor of plain cleanliness that, as a Catholic child, I somehow associated with Alex’s Protestantism; it was occasionally enhanced by the Yardley’s Lavender Soap, which he kept on his sink. The most immaculately scrubbed being I have ever known, Alex never took any baths or even showers, both of which he detested, but stood in front of the sink far longer than most men, meticulously sponging every inch of his body, barely splashing any water on the floor in the process. (Only in his last years, when I discovered the Jekyll and Hyde aspect of Alex’s character and realized the extent to which he had inherited his mother’s gypsy character traits—her deviousness, pushiness, inconstancy—did I start to read up on gypsies, learning that they loathe to be immersed in water and clean themselves in just the same way.)
In Alex’s closet at the right of the sink—the top half of it consisted of open shelves, the lower part of pull-out drawers—were arrayed several dozen identical white shirts, a tall pile of white cotton handkerchiefs, and a row of gray wool socks, all stacked with equal neatness by Mabel Moses, the housekeeper who remained with the family for more than forty years. (“He always needs socks and handkerchiefs,” my mother would answer, perennially stymied by the frugal limitations of Alex’s wardrobe, when I asked her what he wanted for Christmas.) Finally, there was a cabinet on the wall opposite the sink in which Alex kept his medications—he was forced to take a great many but did not ever want to be seen taking them and was covert about even having them in evidence. In sum, Alex’s bathroom was a cool, impersonal, ascetic space that I associated with his chronically frail health and in which I never observed any object in the least associated with sexuality or sexual enticement—except just once, when I was in my late teens and saw, pathetically curled up in a neat heap, a little yellowish condom, clearly unused, an observation that led me to reflect that my mother might once more have pleaded a headache or that he might have had another of the heartburn attacks caused by his ulcers.
Since 1940, when Tatiana and I s
tarted living with him full-time, I had always been aware of Alex’s fragile health. The strict diet he had adhered to since the age of eighteen, when he had that first, nearly fatal hemorrhage, consisted of broiled meats, fish, and poultry (preferably breast of chicken) and steamed or boiled vegetables; he was encouraged to splurge on mashed potatoes, rice, and Cream of Wheat. He was forbidden all raw vegetables or salads, all onions, spices, and garlic, and alcohol had never so much as passed his lips. The chronic seriousness of his condition was confirmed when he suffered his second grave hemorrhage in 1945 and another serious one some seventeen years later, for which there was finally surgery as a cure.
What these rambling glimpses of our early home life—and particularly of those illnesses of Alex’s that plagued it—add up to is that I never associated Alex with any sexual smell, gesture, or emanation. The chastely unused condom has remained symbolic to me: He was the most sexually neutral man I have ever known. Perhaps, as a teenager, I was disembodying him as a way of positing a barrier, of avoiding any possible attraction between us—he was, after all, only eighteen years older than I. But as I began to question Alex’s oldest friends a half century later, eliciting impressions and recollections of him, their memories were utterly consistent with the sexual void I had perceived as a child, a teenager, a grown woman. “He had the aura of a flirtatious eunuch,” said Zozo de Ravenel, who had known him since the 1940s. (She reported that upon being asked whether Alex was homosexual, Nicolas de Gunzburg, a Vogue colleague and equally old friend of Alex, replied, “He wouldn’t dare.”) “He was a man with a terribly limited libido,” said François Catroux, who had known him since the early 1950s. “He made a great spectacle of his adoration of Tatiana, but that was in part a useful image with which to promote his career.” “He was too fundamentally glacial to be capable of any great surge of sexual emotion,” said Bernard d’Anglejan, also a friend for a half century. So whereas other children speculate about their father’s philandering or alcoholism or irascibility, I speculated, with far greater serenity than I would have concerning any of those failings, about Alex’s curious lack of sexual presence.
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