Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  But one can not sum up Alex’s curious libido, which was already curtailed by the Puritanism of his schooling and by his potentially fatal illnesses, without emphasizing the torturous blend of affection and revulsion he felt for his mother. For whatever limited erotic proclivities Alex developed were a form of rebellion against his mother’s highly charged sexuality. Whereas Henriette’s sensuality had a distinctly Oriental aura, until a few years before his death Alex usually went for blond, Nordic women—he uses the euphemism “an aureole of blondness” when describing many of his infatuations. Whereas Henriette, a shameless exhibitionist, had brandished her grossest appetites, picking up her men in cafés, at bullfights, in the Bois de Boulogne, Alex, an early devotee of Arthurian legend, tended to impose chivalric ideals on whatever women he courted, idealizing them into spiritual nymphs barely tainted by physicality. Whereas Henriette had paraded her lovers before the world, Alex flaunted his chastity and his capacity for marital fidelity, attributes that eventually became judicious, highly original tactics in his rise to power. Whereas Henriette’s femaleness was of the most heavy-handed kind, abounding with lacy lingerie, extravagant makeup, and all the hip swaying and eyelash batting that can compound feminine kitsch, Alex was drawn toward tomboyish women who cultivated a streamlined, athletic look.

  I can now turn to whatever Alex had of a love life in the early 1930s.

  Alex always said that his “first serious love affair,” as he called it, was with Irène Lidova, the Russian émigré with whom he shared the art direction of Vu. The affair was complicated by the fact that Alex was clearly supplanting Lidova as the boss of Vu’s art department; by the fact that she was married to a rather jealous ballet photographer; and by her great dread of getting pregnant. And it is a striking indication of Alex’s sexual hang-ups that the physical particulars of this “first serious love affair,” which he carried on between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three in a social and professional milieu noted for its promiscuity, consisted of very heavy petting.

  His romance with another of his “lovers,” his boss’s brilliant, beautiful, politically radical daughter Marie-Claude Vogel, was equally chaste. He admired her as he had admired few women in his life and might well have married her if her politics had not been so left-wing. (Soon after her brief romance with Alex she married a prominent French communist, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, and became a standard-bearer of the party.) Chaperoned by Marie-Claude’s maternal uncle Jean de Brunhoff, of Babar fame, Alex and Marie-Claude went skiing in Megève together in the winter of 1935–1936, when his liaison with Lidova was waning. They eluded her uncle’s supervision to snuggle in Alex’s hotel bed, kissing and hugging. Again, for reasons that are not clear (sexual morals in France’s left-wing circles were notoriously relaxed), their erotic activities did not extend beyond the heavy-petting stage. Alex returned to Megève alone the following month, having decided that skiing was an excellent way to meet pretty girls. It was then that he met the beauty who was to become his first wife, a fashion model and star skier of German provenance named Hildergarde (“Hilda”) Sturm, whose “aureole of blondness,” as he put it once more, immediately seduced him.

  Like Lidova, Marie-Claude, and most every woman in his life, Hilda, at twenty-five, was older than Alex, albeit by only two years. She made no secret of her numerous former liaisons—at the time she met Alex, she had just finished a romance with a wealthy newspaper publisher and was involved with an American sports promoter, Charles Michaelis. These affiliations did not seem to bother Alex, who proposed to her three months after they met, defying his parents’ violent opposition to the match. They were married in August 1936, in a civil ceremony in Paris, with no friends or relatives present. Hilda, a good-hearted and totally unpretentious young woman, was the daughter of a Bonn schoolteacher, and one suspects that her prim family background made the respectability of marriage seem all the more appealing. She also appeared determined, to Alex’s great embarrassment, to “make a man” out of him and whip him up to a very sophisticated level of sexual performance—she stripped the bed free of all sheets and blankets every night, turning it, as Alex put it, into “a sports arena.” During their honeymoon in Annecy, he took numerous nude photographs of Hilda, photos of a sentimental artiness that later would make him blush, but this did not seem to increase his libido. And although one may assume that she was the first woman who enabled the twenty-four-year-old to achieve the principal stages of sexual success he was clearly humiliated by his failure to advance to greater levels of refinement. A few months after their wedding trip, when he had resumed his job at Vu, he came home to find Hilda playing with a white poodle. It was a present from the American sports promoter, and from then on he was plagued by suspicions that she had renewed her affair with “the poodle man.”

  The autumn of 1936 was a difficult period for all of France. The political events of the past three years—Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the subsequent beginning of Germany’s rearmament program—had already caused considerable alarm. The massive strikes staged in the spring of 1936, throughout the first months of Léon Blum’s tenure as premier, had greatly weakened the nation’s economy, cutting France’s productivity by half and causing widespread unemployment. By the fall of the year, support for Blum’s Popular Front had much waned. The Spanish civil war had become of increasing concern when Germany’s and Italy’s fascist governments started sending men and supplies to support Generalissimo Franco. Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland that year and the signing of the Hitler-Mussolini pact made French centrists wary of forming closer ties with the Soviet Union and led the right to campaign for “peace at any price” and for pacification with Germany.

  These political crises were bound to have their repercussions on a periodical like Vu. Its conservative Swiss backers had been made increasingly edgy by Vogel’s openhearted support of Blum’s Popular Front and by the magazine’s forthright attacks on Nazism. This concern came to a head when, in the September 16, 1936 issue, Vogel decided to publish a political document of unprecedented boldness: a map of Germany marking the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Headlined Répartition des camps de concentration, maisons de correction et prisons en Allemagne,” this map located several of the fatal sites, including Dachau, in which some twenty million persons, in the following decade, went to their deaths.

  Within two weeks of publishing this document, Vogel received notice that Vu had been sold to a right-wing businessman (he later turned out to be a close friend of Pierre Laval, the future architect of collaborationist policies under the Vichy government). Vogel saved his honor by resigning, and the new owners promoted Alex to the rank of managing editor. Alex, short of cash, eager to advance his career, and little concerned with political leanings, stayed on for a few months. He continued to design covers, to streamline the magazine’s typography, and to sign movie reviews. To appease his mother, who continually pestered him to publicize the new children’s theater she had started, he even wrote a tongue-in-cheek review of one of her shows, heaping praise on “the ravishing costumes and sets designed by Alexandre.” But in the beginning of 1937, with his ulcers growing worse and the magazine’s political orientation moving—even for him—uncomfortably to the right, he too resigned from Vu. He hoped that he could persuade his father to offer him some means of financial support and that he might finally devote himself full-time to painting.

  Alex’s photograph of Hilda with her poodle, Sainte Maxime, 1937

  That same winter, Alex went to Kitzbühel with Hilda, hoping to recapture the bliss of that February a year earlier when he had met and courted her, but the vacation was disappointing: She paid little attention to her husband, being constantly surrounded by handsome, deeply bronzed ski instructors who whizzed down slopes far faster than Alex. When they returned to Paris, Alex, devoid of a job, spent a few months making a film—on the theme of women in French art. He redecorated a larger, handsomer apartment for Hilda in Villa Montmorency. On weeken
ds, the couple went to the country house Alex’s parents had recently bought in a suburb of Paris, Chatou. This increased Henriette’s opportunities to sabotage her son’s marriage: She hired detectives to follow Hilda, and they reported that Hilda was indeed seeing “the poodle man” again.

  Alex’s ulcers, and his anxiety about his marriage, grew worse, and in the fall of 1937 he suffered a total physical and nervous breakdown, as his father had a decade earlier. He spent three months at a sanatorium in Switzerland, sleeping and reading Tolstoy, Balzac, and Gone with the Wind. Hilda came to join him at the end of December, and, trying to get their marriage off to a new start, they traveled together to Simon Liberman’s seaside villa in Sainte Maxime, near St. Tropez. While convalescing in Switzerland, Alex’s determination to be a full-time painter had grown even firmer. This decision was enthusiastically approved by his mother; and his father, though his finances were still being drained by the whims of the omnivorous Henriette, gave Alex a small allowance to this end.

  Alex’s portrait of Hilda painted that same month.

  Alex had hardly painted at all for five years, since he had gone to work at Vu. He had surprisingly little contact with the avant-garde art of the past decades—Picasso, Braque, and Matisse were still ciphers to him. He took his palette and easel out of doors for several weeks and did some plein air landscapes of the countryside near St. Tropez, trying to emulate the only “modern” artist he truly loved, Cézanne. He was still hampered by the sense of inferiority imbued in him by Iacovleff’s virtuoso draftsmanship, and he despaired of ever equaling it. After a few weeks, he sensed Hilda’s restlessness, and to keep her busy he asked her to pose for a portrait with her poodle. The painting was slickly realistic and terribly stiff, direly failing to depict the charms of the blond goddess who had so staggered him two years previously; as he finished it, he despaired of what he could do to keep Hilda from being bored. She loved jigsaw puzzles, and in the past weeks he had already kept her supplied with the largest puzzles available in the south of France. So in desperation he called Brentano’s in Paris to have the largest puzzle they had in stock shipped to Sainte Maxime—composed of several thousand pieces, it took up a good part of the villa’s living-room floor.

  Alexander Liberman, self-portrait, 1938

  As Alex used to tell it, Hilda disappeared the morning after she had finished the largest puzzle in France. She rose before dawn, packed her dog and her belongings into her Peugeot, and drove off without so much as leaving a note. She never made any demands, then or later, and in many ways Alex was relieved by her departure. Although their divorce was not legalized until the summer of 1940, they never saw each other again. Shortly after her divorce papers came through, Hilda married the poodle-loving sports promoter, had a son with him, and enjoyed a very long and happy life.

  That spring of 1938, Alex supervised the renovation of the gardener’s cottage that stood below his father’s villa in Sainte Maxime, so as to have a house and studio to himself. He also traveled to London to begin making a film on British art and there reencountered one of his childhood friends, Liuba Krasin, the youngest of the diplomat’s three daughters. A peppy, high-spirited young woman with “a wonderful animal grace and extraordinary lavender eyes,” as Alex described her, she had recently divorced Gaston Bergery, a left-wing deputy in the French parliament. To be close to her widowed mother, she had moved to London with her son, eight-year-old Lalo, and was working as a fashion model at Schiaparelli. Alex, who had entertained romantic fantasies about all three of the Krasin girls, had had a particular crush on Liuba since he had been nine and she was eleven, when she had bossed him around and tied him up in his bedsheets. “Just wait until I get older!” he had told her then. And fifteen years later, in 1938, the provocative, quasi-erotic teasing game they had indulged in as children resumed. For years, she had failed to take him seriously, calling him with the childish diminutive Shurik, but now she seemed ready to be seduced by him.

  So without becoming lovers, Liuba and Alex started living together in the same apartment. Alex, once more, was terrified to take the initiative sexually. When they traveled to Paris for a few days on their way to the south of France, he slept in his own apartment, while she stayed at a hotel. He learned that during this brief time she found occasions to entertain former lovers in her room, and this revelation seems to have paralyzed him sexually even more. Then they got to the south of France, where the situation grew to be even more complicated.

  Alex’s photograph of his childhood friend Liuba Krasin, 1938.

  Alex’s villa in Sainte Maxime was barely furnished. And upon going antique-shopping with Liuba, soon after arriving, he saw a pair of arm-chairs that he decided he must have. But the antiquaire said he couldn’t sell them because they were reserved for Vicomtesse du Plessix, who was just moving into a new apartment in Paris. “That’s Tata!” Liuba exclaimed. “We must call her!” Alex remembered having met Tatiana at Iacovleff’s studio when he was a youngster and having subsequently glimpsed her—tall, blond, imperious, a model of Parisian elegance—at a few of his mother’s cocktail parties, he was equally pleased to see her again. Liuba and Alex inquired further and found out that Tatiana was staying near Sainte Maxime in the company of a Russian-born American plastic surgeon, Eugene de Sawitch. Liuba and Alex contacted them, and the very next evening Tatiana and Dr. de Sawitch came to dinner with them.

  De Sawitch had come into Tatiana’s life two years earlier, in the south of France, when she was riding in a friend’s convertible on the way to a lunch at Aldous Huxley’s. The driver, who had lost a leg in World War I, took a turn too fast, the car overturned, and Tatiana’s larynx was pinned under a seat. Her life was saved by the fact that the driver’s artificial limb, which had been torn off and lodged near her neck, was thick enough to protect her larynx from being crushed. She was blue in the face from lack of oxygen, however, and the inept local police, upon arriving at the scene, decided she was dead and took her to the morgue at Hyères. My father, who was then in Paris, was contacted immediately. He hired a plane and within two hours arrived in the company of de Sawitch, a friend of his. They felt her pulse and had her transferred to the Toulon hospital. De Sawitch immediately performed the first of many operations that would save Tatiana’s arm, which had been severely burned by acid that had dripped onto it from the battery of the car. He continued his work two weeks later when she was transferred to the American Hospital in Paris; in the course of the following year, he rebuilt her limb through a series of eighteen grafting operations, falling in love with her in the process.

  So there was Tatiana, back in Liuba’s and Alex’s lives. She had emerged from her ordeals with a hoarse voice, a crippled right hand, which she kept swathed in a silk scarf, and an acute case of claustrophobia that was to last her entire life. But her joie de vivre and ebullience were undiminished. She had successfully resumed her career as a hat designer and continued to enjoy a friendly relationship with her husband, Bertrand du Plessix. Tatiana had grown enormously fond of de Sawitch (their friendship remained undiminished until his death two decades later) but had made it clear that she was not in the least drawn to him romantically. The four new companions—Liuba, Alex, de Sawitch, Tatiana—saw one another frequently during the next two weeks, sharing trips to the beach, trying out new restaurants and nightclubs. Tatiana was attracted by Alex’s cosmopolitanism, elegance, and, as she put it later, “upper-class good manners.” Alex may have been all the more captivated by the bold, statuesque blond beauty because of her kinship to Iacovleff, the recently deceased hero of his youth. One night, when they were returning from a restaurant, the two were sitting by each other in the backseat. Alex touched Tatiana’s arm and said, “You have wonderful skin.” She may have responded with a smile; that is when he felt the first surge of desire for her.

  August 1938 came to an end. Tatiana went home to her atelier and her social life in Paris; de Sawitch returned to the United States; Liuba went back to her London home, her son, Lalo, and
her job at Schiaparelli. Alex also returned to London to live with Liuba and Lalo. He spent the following weeks painting, as usual; one of his projects was to finish a portrait of eight-year-old Lalo, who had grown very fond of him. Liuba seems to have decided that Alex was going to marry her, but two circumstances got in the way. One was a warning issued to Alex by Liuba’s mother, Madame Krasin, who had been devoted to him since he was nine years old and was all too aware of her daughter’s instability. She cautioned him that Liuba might well hurt him if he became any more deeply involved with her. “Just leave, Shurik,” she told him. “It would be better for you.”

  There was an even more important reason for the breakup of Alex and Liuba’s romance: A letter from Tatiana arrived in London, asking Alex whether he was interested in purchasing any books from the library of her uncle, Alexandre Iacovleff, who had died in the spring. Tatiana was the executor of his will; it was normal that she would think of Alex, who had adored her uncle Sasha, as a potential buyer.