Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  But then, a few weeks after his arrival, Alex heard that his old friend and boss from Vu magazine days, Lucien Vogel, had also immigrated to New York in recent months. He was working as an adviser to Condé Nast, the powerful founder and director of Condé Nast Publications. Vogel had been a friend and collaborator of Nast’s in prewar days. (Nast had bought Vogel’s fashion magazine, Jardin des modes, and had added it to his own roster of publications, House and Garden, Glamour, and Vogue, the last of which already had several foreign-language editions.) Alex knew that Vogel might provide a good introduction to the country’s preeminent publisher of luxury magazines. Alex and Vogel had lunch together, and on the twenty-eighth of January Vogel wrote Nast the following letter, which gives interesting insights on how Mother and Alex wished their relationship to be perceived in New York society. (The many misspellings are attributable to Vogel’s notorious absentmindedness.)

  Dear Condé:

  Alexandre Liebermann [sic] was one of the best of my former collaborators, and was with me for many years as art director and lay-out man for VU.

  He has just arrived in New York, and I think I should let you know about him, since he is a young artist who has a great deal of talent, sound technical knowledge and excellent taste.

  Alexandre Libermann was educated in the most aristocratic of the French collèges, École des Roches. He speaks English as well as he speaks French.

  He arrived here with Mme du Plessis [sic], who is the niece of the painter Yacovlev, a great friend of mine before his death. Mme du Plessis lost her husband at the time of the collapse of France. He was an officer in the Air Corps and was brought down by the Spanish over Gibraltar when he was on his way to join the de Gaulle army….

  Mme du Plessis, who had been separated from her husband for several years, is a talented hat designer. She found a position as milliner with Bendel two days after her arrival.

  Perhaps you would be interested in knowing Alexandre Liebermann. He intends either to reenter the publishing field or to go into window display, in which he is also very gifted.

  Cordially yours

  Lucien Vogel

  Alex Liberman’s portrait of his father, Simon, finished in New York in 1942.

  Alex was not very optimistic about the outcome of Vogel’s introduction. How could Alex’s brief stint as art director of Vu impress Condé Nast? As they waited for an answer from the publisher, Alex and Mother went to a dinner party where Alex renewed his acquaintance with another Russian émigré, Iva Sergeyevich Voidato-Patcevitch, “Pat” for short. A strikingly handsome Russian aristocrat with a great talent for finances, Patcevitch had served as Nast’s principal financial adviser for more than a decade and had single-handedly rescued the company from its post-Depression doldrums. Until 1940, Patcevitch’s home base had been in Paris, where Nast had large investments, and Alex had briefly met him in Paris’s prewar publishing milieu. Patcevitch immediately told Alex that he should join him at Condé Nast and promised to arrange an interview with the legendary art director of all three Condé Nast magazines, Mehemed Agha.

  Dr. Agha, as he insisted on being called, was known at the Condé Nast offices as the Terrible Turk. A portly, monocled graduate of the Bauhaus who had been born in Russia of Turkish parents, Agha was brought to the United States by Condé Nast to modernize the look of his magazines. And from 1929 on he was as respected for his avant-garde views as he was dreaded for his sarcastic wit and violent temper, which led him to alienate numerous coworkers. Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair’s urbane editor, complained that Agha had so inflated his power that “an additional floor had to be engaged in the Graybar building in order to prevent him from bulging out of the windows, growing through the roof, or occupying the elevator shafts.” Carmel Snow, Vogue’s New York editor until 1932, found Agha’s sarcasm intolerable, and her dislike for him may have been a major factor in her defection to Vogue’s chief competitor, Harper’s Bazaar. This was the awesome individual—“Agha the Terrible Turk”—who upon Patcevitch’s recommendation curtly received Alex in his offices, and in an arrogant and disdainful tone told him to report for work in the art department the following Monday.

  Monday came, and Alex was assigned a double-page spread of fashion drawings. He spent most of the week on this assignment, and on Friday was called into Agha’s office. Agha pointed out several dreadful flaws in Alex’s layout and tersely told him that he was “not good enough for Vogue.” Crushed, Alex collected his paltry paycheck and went back to the Windsor Hotel in midafternoon, despondent. It might be even more difficult than he had feared to find a job in the United States. But shortly before 5:00 P.M. a call came from Condé Nast’s own office. Patcevitch had apparently urged his boss to interview Alex himself, and Alex was asked by Nast’s secretary to report to Nast’s office first thing Monday morning.

  A short, painfully shy, balding man with small eyes and rimless pincenez glasses, Condé Nast, who was then in his sixties, was later described by one of his mistresses as having “the vivacity of a stuffed moose head.” But in spite of his dire lack of personal charisma, Nast’s revolutionary views of journalism were as influential as those of his principal competitor, William Randolph Hearst. His own publishing career had begun at the turn of the century, when, as a manager of Collier’s Weekly, Nast was responsible for the magazine’s original twenty-thousand-subscriber circulation passing the half-million mark. When he left Collier’s in 1909 to build his own empire, the first magazine Nast bought was Vogue. It had been founded a decade and a half earlier with the backing of Cornelius Vanderbilt and other wealthy socialites and had announced itself as “the authentic journal of society, fashion and the ceremonial side of life.” Thirty years later, by the time Alex first met him, Nast had built up a publishing empire rivaled only, in its time, by Hearst’s and Time-Life.

  Sitting at his desk in an immense office in the Graybar Building, at 420 Lexington Avenue, Nast received Alex with exquisite politeness; Alex instantly realized that Nast had no idea that Agha had already hired and fired him. They talked about various cosmopolitan issues—Alex’s experiences at Vu, the fall of France, French publishing in general. After a half hour of cordial conversation, Alex showed Nast a gold medal diploma he had won in the 1930s for magazine design, upon which Nast said, “Well, a man like you must be on Vogue!” He asked to have Dr. Agha sent for and told him he wished Alex to be in Vogue’s art department. “Yes, Mr. Nast,” Agha said. “Dr. Agha never said a word, I never said a word, and that’s how I started at Vogue,” Alex said later. Having been hired, fired, and rehired in the space of seven days, Alex started working in Vogue’s art department in February 1941 for a salary of $150 a month—precisely half of what Mother was earning at Bendel. Sitting in the layout department on the nineteenth floor of the Graybar Building—there were six other designers in the room, all of them senior to him—he was to cohabit in Vogue’s art department with Dr. Agha for almost two more years. And throughout much of that time, the two men sustained civil but very cool relations, never letting anyone know about the encounter they’d had before Nast’s intervention.

  Notwithstanding his thoroughly asocial manner, Nast was a keen judge of personality, and another secret of his success was his judicious choice of editors. In 1914, he had assigned Edna Woolman Chase to be editor of the magazine, and she reigned over it, the Queen Victoria of twentieth-century fashion publishing, until well after World War II. A small, formal, iron-willed puritanical woman who had been brought up by her Quaker grandparents and had begun at Vogue in a clerical position when she was eighteen, she had an unfailing instinct for her very elitist readers’ tastes. Under her rule, the latest fashion reports from Paris alternated with news of who had died, was born, married, or made a debut into New York’s WASP gentry. Until the 1940s, the magazine even devoted a section to this society’s domestic pets. Most editors were themselves well-born women working for tiny wages (among them were Barbara Cushing Mortimer, later known as Babe Paley, and the future New Jersey co
ngresswoman Millicent Fenwick). And they readily abided by Mrs. Chase’s stern sumptuary codes, which demanded that all editors wear hats and white gloves in the office and that they never be seen, even on the hottest day, in open-toed shoes.

  It is chiefly to the personal relationship he quickly established with Vogue’s principal forces—Condé Nast and Edna Chase—that Alex owed his swift promotions within the ranks of the magazine’s art department. He immediately charmed both of them by that formal yet cordial Brittanic manner he had acquired at British public school—it impressed Americans as being very “aristocratic,” and he could turn it on and off like a faucet. “He had a great gift for jumping into the lap of power, he very soon became Mrs. Chase’s pet,” said former travel editor Despina Messinesi, recently deceased at ninety-three, who joined the magazine a year before Alex. “Why I even remember Alex working in his shirtsleeves in summer, he was certainly the only person on the floor whom Mrs. Chase ever allowed to work in his shirtsleeves.” Alex equally impressed Nast because he was a veteran of French news journalism, and the publisher knew that Vogue should start placing far greater emphasis on world news and cultural events if it was to survive the stiff competition being offered by Harper’s Bazaar. So as he worked in the layout room on the nineteenth floor of the Graybar Building, Alex was frequently called into Nast’s office, where he was asked to join Mrs. Chase, Agha, and several other top editors in picking out a Vogue cover. Nast would ask Alex which of the possible photographs he preferred. Upon hearing the junior staffer’s verdict, Nast would say, “I, too, like this one best,” and that’s the photo that was inevitably used.

  Alex charming the ladies at a Vogue party, November 1943. At center, editor Bettina Ballard; at right, editor Muriel Maxwell. Photograph by Serge Balkin.

  Moreover, within a few weeks after Alex had arrived at Vogue, one of his own layouts was accepted for the cover, which at that time did not have a fixed logo. For the May 15 edition, the editors had chosen a Horst P. Horst photo of a girl in a bathing suit balancing a red beach ball on her feet. Alex, playing around with the image, suddenly realized that the beach ball could substitute for the “o” in Vogue. Today, his design may look corny and utterly inane. But in 1941, Frank Crowninshield, whose Vanity Fair magazine had been incorporated into Vogue in 1936 and who now served as Vogue’s cultural editor, was terribly impressed by the image. He complimented Alex on it as he walked by Alex’s desk and then popped into Nast’s office and told him that there was a new “genius” in the art department. So Alex, with a cover on his record, now had a far firmer foothold in the hierarchy of the art department. And he had a new friend in Frank Crowninshield, known as “Crowny,” who often invited him to lunch at New York’s most exclusive men’s club, the Knickerbocker, and thoroughly briefed him on who was who in New York’s social and cultural scene.

  Alex’s first cover design for American Vogue , spring of 1941. The photograph of the model is by Horst P. Horst

  But curiously, Alex’s brilliant debut at Vogue in no way satisfied his parents. A few months after he joined the magazine, Simon Liberman, probably egged on by Henriette, whose visions of Alex-as-great-artist were being undermined, must have announced that he was discontinuing the two hundred dollars a month he had been sending his son. This withdrawal of support seems to have been followed by statements of concern about Alex overworking himself at Condé Nast. (In the following thirty-five years, his mother constantly stated such worries—“You’re killing yourself through your magazine work.”) For in the late spring of 1941, Alex wrote the following anguished letter to his father.

  Moi rodnoi,

  I’ve just received your letter. It is a pity that you worry about me, I don’t look all that bad. Unfortunately, in the last three days I got ill with laryngitis and couldn’t talk. Now it’s also turned into a sinus infection and it all tires me.

  Speaking about work and exhaustion, I disagree with you and with Mother. We live in such hard times that one is happy to have some kind of firm support; it is important for me to work on something definite, to belong to a large organization—God only help me to succeed. For then I can start painting again and live a different life. Believe me, 80% of my exhaustion has nothing to do with Condé Nast, but with my financial problems. It’s hard for me to admit, but psychologically I always need a feeling of security. When I started working at Condé Nast and still had your support I felt “free.” I felt independent and didn’t worry whether the bosses liked my work or not. I took things lightly. But when you put a stop to all support I began to feel that every Vogue lay-out was a life and death question for me, and I’d spend sleepless nights worrying about the next day.

  This is one side to my worries, the other is less serious. It has to do with the current reality of our life. We can barely get by on $600 a month, we have to pay all our debts, buy clothes, we have to get settled…. [T]his puts me in a terrible situation. I thought of selling something, but I have nothing to sell. Tatiana also has nothing left.

  I think that when there is only one son, who never wants to hurt you or cause problems, then $200 a month for him and his family is not that terrible. It seems to me that you should not want to know WHAT I am doing with this money, painting or working at Condé Nast. I’m healthy in mind and body, I’m young, I’ll still create a lot.

  Rodnoi, I know that you’ve recently had difficult times…but why should we be the victims? T. and I work in order not to hang around your neck. Can you imagine what it would have been like if we depended on you and asked you to totally support us? I’m presently asking you for a loan of $500–$600. Look on it strictly as a loan, and in the next 6 months you need not give me anything. It will be the same as if you gave me $100 each month….

  Forgive the desperation of this letter, but it might help us to better understand each other. T. and I began with our reserves, but each time T. or F. go to the doctor, it is a shock to our budget. I have no coat, no shoes, I can’t afford such things. I have to pay the lawyer and the doctors. I can’t even buy myself a new easel.

  All right, enough! I’ll stay home another week because of my cold. I’m painting on weekends, Tatiana is working, Francine goes to school.

  I kiss you so tenderly, and I pray to God that you understand me and not make it hard on yourself when everything can be so simple.

  Yours,

  Shura.

  Needless to say, over the next few years Simon and Henriette’s constant blackmailing and bullying of their son only aggravated Alex’s ulcers, with nearly fatal results.

  In June 1941, a few days after classes ended at Spence, I was sent back to live with Mother at 230 Central Park South—Pat Greene was going to Salt Lake City to see her family, and Justin was to join her there for a few weeks of vacation. After the challenge and excitement of school and all the amusements Pat had generated after school hours, Central Park South felt very dreary and lonely. Our little flat looked out on the bottom of Columbus Circle, and on a building that displayed a ribbon of neon lights that gave the world news. Mother had set up a dining area in the tiny hallway, furnishing it with a glass-and-metal table and matching chairs purchased at Macy’s garden-furniture department. (The entire thirty-five-dollar set is in use to this day in my son’s country house.) A great part of our small living room was occupied by a deep, wide couch upholstered in beige damask that served as Mother’s bed—a gift from her friend Irena Wiley—and an upright piano. (“How can one entertain properly without a piano?”) Parallel to the living room was an even smaller space that was my bedroom, with twin beds covered in a beige leaf print I hated. The whole flat was painted a brash, blinding white and exuded an aseptic, chilly gaiety.

  When Mother left for work in the morning, a tall, warm black woman named Sally Robinson, whom she had hired as housekeeper, came to watch me; and within twenty-four hours of coming home I started wondering how Sally and I would manage to spend our time during all those hours alone. I instantly started reading Gone with the Wind. Having only
had a few months of schooling in the States, I still read English more slowly than French, and I remember starting shortly before 10:00 A.M., when Mother went to work, and continuing straight on until her return at 6:00 P.M., chewing on a sandwich at midday upon Sally’s orders. When Mother and Alex went out, which was four nights out of five, Sally and I either went to the movies or played dominoes, the only game I’d managed to teach her. Or else I just sat at the window, staring at the bright ribbon of world news circling about the top of the old General Motors building, anxiously studying the international events.

  For throughout those early summer weeks in New York, I was growing aware of the fact that I was reaching some kind of anniversary with my father—it was just about a year now since he had communicated with me. Even while reading or hanging out with Sally, I kept focused on that band of swirling news emanating from the tallest building on Columbus Circle: “Germany Invades USSR…. Mussolini announces he will occupy Greece…. Anti-Vichy riots in Syria.” Syria, Syria is the country Father had been posted to in the winter of 1939–1940, he was an expert on Syria, that might still be the site of his current mission! His assignment there might last the whole span of the war; his duty toward the Allied cause was far mightier than his duty toward me; I must retain my patience. He might be in hiding four, five years—he might not come back for a decade! Or else he might come back sometime soon, any time now, for just one day’s leave, one day of perfect communion with me…. The phone would ring some evening as I sat alone in our apartment, staring at the headlines on the top of the nearby building—“Finland declares war on USSR”—it would be Father on the phone, he would beckon me to some secret meting place: by the side of a certain lake in Central Park, in front of a Vermeer at the Metropolitan Museum. He would have temporarily left his air-force uniform for a worn flannel suit, he would look thin and careworn, I would embrace him as I reassured him of the fervor of my faith in him…. We would talk thus for an hour, our hands clasped, discussing our future together, the end of the war, the happiness we would share together in our little house in the south of France…. I would be satisfied with such a brief meeting, I would be resigned to the idea that after a last embrace he would fly back to his mission the very same day…. “Pssst, miss, you’re not concentrating!” Sally would snap as I lost another round of dominoes. “What’s wrong with you, miss, you’re increasingly absentminded!” I startled back to reality, determined to maintain my silence, my holy silence, the essential, sacred silence that would help carry my father to safety.