Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Tatiana in the early 1940s, publicity shot for Saks Fifth Avenue.

  Tatiana in 1948 making hats in the hot, cramped workroom at Saks Fifth Avenue. Photo by Constantin Joffe.

  However lavish the decor and opulent the customers of her Salon Moderne, my mother’s workshop at Saks Fifth Avenue was more akin to a Dickensian nineteenth-century sweatshop. Located in the extreme right corner of the third floor, close to the elevators, not far from where Gaultier, Ungaro et al. currently hang their wares, it was a dark, low-ceilinged room, with no cross-ventilation, that in summer became barely tolerable. At either end of two long horizontal worktables there sat some twelve seamstresses who executed my mother’s designs. Tatiana had to produce sixty models each year, thirty for the spring collection, thirty for the fall. The atmosphere of her atelier was made electric by her concentration and her awesome speed of execution, but it always remained serene. She was notoriously generous and thoughtful with her assistants, immediately sending them home when they were beginning a cold or had child-care problems; they were awed and endlessly amused by her. And each time I came into Tatiana’s peaceful, industrious workroom, I felt a comforting sense of continuity from seeing that she designed her creations in precisely the same way she had in Paris: Ethereal, ruby-lipped, black-clad Mother sat alongside her workers at one end of the long tables, holding a bunch of pins in her mouth, staring at her reflection in a large stand-up mirror as she cut and sculpted felts and draped voiles and jerseys onto her blond hair. My most striking memory of Mother at work has to do with the delicacy and uncanny swiftness of her fingers. However crippled and clawlike her right hand, which remained misshapen by her nearly fatal car accident, it flew over the cloth as rapidly as a hummingbird, fashioning the most delicate pleats, crimps, flutings, and tucks with the deftness of a microsurgeon.

  By the fall of 1942, a few months after Tatiana had started to work at Saks, Alex’s career at Condé Nast also began to take off. Once again, he received a crucial promotion by playing all the right cards, charming all the right people.

  In the spring of 1942, Condé Nast, who had a serious heart condition that he wished to keep absolutely secret, dictated a confidential letter to his secretary naming Iva Patcevitch to succeed him as president of the company in the event of his death. I suspect Alex was informed of the contents of that letter, or perhaps he simply sensed what was in the air. All I know is that he must have started to pay his court to Patcevitch that very spring, for it was in June of 1942 that Pat and his regal, British-born wife, Nada, materialized in my life. I was staying at the house near Port Jefferson we had rented that particular summer, being minded by our housekeeper, Sally, and had gone out for a walk to the village. “The Patcevitches have arrived!” Sally called out to me as I returned. “They’re looking for you! Go down and find them at the beach.” The house was set on top of a high dune, and I ran down the steep flight of wooden stairs to the beach, excited to have some company on a weekday. A few hundred yards down the shore, a handsome couple was walking toward me, waving. As we reached one another, they stooped down to embrace me, expressing great joy in my company, and I remembered having seen them once or twice at Alex and Mother’s earlier that year. From then on, Uncle Pat and Aunt Nada, as I was bidden to call them, became an indissoluble part of our lives.

  April 1945, a few weeks before the end of World War II, Vogue cover with Tatiana hats. Photo by John Rawlings.

  It was already clear that Pat, once he had assumed the directorship of Condé Nast, would rise to a higher social and economic position in New York society than any other Russian émigré of his generation. So no wonder that Alex saw to it that he and Pat become best friends and no wonder that he urged Mother to become best friends with his boss’s wife, the notoriously difficult Nada. The Patcevitches spent a great deal of time at Port Jefferson that summer of 1942, where Pat taught me chess and Nada helped me with my summer homework—they were yet another of those child-loving, childless couples who looked on me for some years as an adopted daughter. The result of this new intimacy was that shortly after Condé’s death on September 19, 1942, when Pat became president of the company, Alex became one of Vogue’s two art editors: The other one—Arthur Weiser, the longest-tenured person in the art department—had been there for a whopping twenty-three years. In view of the fact that Alex had worked at the magazine for only twenty months, the promotion Pat offered Alex was remarkable.

  Having seethed at Alex ever since his decision to fire him had been unintentionally countermanded by Nast, and having been further enraged by Alex’s privileged standing at the magazine, Vogue’s art director, the Terrible Turk, Dr. Agha, was of course incensed by this promotion. Agha nursed his griefs in silence until December of 1942: A military draft was expected in those months, and Agha hoped that Alex, like many other young men at the magazine, might be called to military service. But alas for Agha, in December Alex was classified 4F because of his ulcers. So early in 1943, Agha marched into Patcevitch’s office and issued an ultimatum: “Either Liberman goes,” he said, “or I go.” Agha, however, seemed to have vastly overestimated his popularity at Condé Nast, which, to his surprise, turned out to be zilch: It had been undermined by his cynical and haughty manner and by the extravagant salary he had been demanding—$40,000, the equivalent of nearly a half-million dollars in our time. Pat’s decision was a rapid one. A few days later, he announced Agha’s resignation and offered the thirty-year-old Alexander Liberman another promotion by appointing him to take Agha’s place as Vogue’s art director.

  Within a few months, Vogue had acquired a far more modernist style. To use Alex’s own phrase, it had more of a “cinematic flow.” Titles and captions, now printed in tabloid-style typeface, became far more immediate and more informative—as Condé Nast had wished, Alex was moving Vogue in the direction of a news magazine. Alex was helped by the historical moment, for the United States’ entry into war necessitated more serious content, brought hundreds of thousands of women into the workforce, and imposed a novel informality and democracy on women’s clothes. American designers such as Claire McCardell and even, in the higher price brackets, Valentina were emphasizing fluidity and spontaneity over elitist hauteur. Alex, a protofeminist if ever there was one, believed in making a magazine for women who worked, and he was the right man at the right time, for, as he put it, “the war destroyed old fantasies of leisure.” Alongside staid European talents such as George Huyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst, Alex hired young American photographers such as John Rawlings and Frances McClaughlin to give zest to the new, informal fashions.

  Alex also recruited a Life magazine news photographer, Gjon Mili, who had been boldly exploring the technique of strobe lighting, to do fashion shoots. Startled readers suddenly saw models pushing shopping carts in supermarkets or running down the beach beneath an arc of water drops. In the following years, he equally encouraged Erwin Blumenfeld, another European refugee who like Alex had rebelled against “visions of loveliness,” to apply his bold techniques of solarization to fashion photographs, resulting in some of the most avant-garde covers Vogue had yet run. Above all, the entire magazine became more politicized, more in touch with current events. As soon as he began to run the show at Vogue, Alex talked the cautious, tradition-bound Edna Chase into publishing Cecil Beaton’s pictures of bombed-out sites in London. He assigned the great photographer Lee Miller, a friend of his and of Tatiana’s since prewar days, to cover the war in Europe. She became one of the first correspondents to document, in pictures, the tragedy of the Nazis’ death camps, and perhaps Alex’s finest, most courageous act of persuasion was to convince Mrs. Chase to publish them.

  Country lunch in France, early 1950s. From left to right, Gitta Sereny Honeyman, Irving Penn, Tatiana and Francine, Don Honeyman, Aunt Sandra Iacovleff.

  Finally, there was Alex’s discovery and advocacy of a young American photographer named Irving Penn, whose career was one of Alex’s finest achievements. In the early 1940s, Penn, a very privat
e man with a gentle, self-effacing manner, was an aspiring painter who had been supporting himself as art director of Saks Fifth Avenue, a job arranged for him by his favorite teacher at art school, Alexei Brodovich. With an uncanny sense of Penn’s great gifts, Alex hired the diffident young artist in 1943 as his personal assistant, with the special assignment of thinking up ideas for Vogue covers. However the photographers to whom Penn presented his suggestions—Horst, Blumenfeld, Rawlings, Beaton—kept turning his ideas down. So Alex suggested that Penn take those pictures himself, gave him a space in the Vogue studio adjoining the Condé Nast office, and hired an assistant who would help him master the eight-by-ten studio camera. The resulting pictures—marked with Penn’s fastidiously premeditated compositions, his austere clarity of vision, and his highly innovative methods of printing—turned out to be the most groundbreaking images of the 1940s. Alex’s astute insight into Penn’s potential gifts as a photographer and his championing of him were all the more remarkable because of the formidable opposition initially shown to Penn’s work by Mrs. Chase and the rest of the magazine’s editorial staff. It took only a few years to prove Alex right: By the 1950s, Penn was being recognized as one of the most original and powerful photographers of his time.

  Throughout the following decades, Alex continued to offer Penn unflinching support as he branched out from his early still lifes to a great variety of genres: There were his portraits of celebrities—also thought of as “shocking” by the rest of the Vogue staff—taken against backdrops of worn, scuffed carpets. There were the documentary photos of ethnic groups from all over the world—Peru, Extremadura, New Guinea, Tibet—posed against the stark white walls of the portable studios with which Penn traveled throughout four continents. (“Go to the other side of the world and bring us back something delectable for the Christmas issue,” Alex told Penn every summer. “I’ll save you fourteen pages.”) And there were the fashion shots with which Vogue more violently subverted traditional notions of the “ladylike” than did any other women’s magazine of its time: a girl sitting on a bar stool, her shoes kicked off, her hair as rumpled as if she’d just gotten out of bed; a woman delicately removing a shred of tobacco from her tongue. Praising such typical images of Penn’s oeuvre for revealing “the imperfections of actual life,” Alex championed, and helped to create, a great American artist.

  Over the years, Penn also became as close a friend as Alex had in the world, although in Penn’s view it was very difficult to be “close” to Alex. “He wasn’t a person of true relationships,” Penn told me a few years after Alex’s death. “We were professional friends. It was a relationship of mutual need…. People were useful to him or they were not…. I was useful. But did I really get to know him in our fifty years of almost daily collaboration? At those moments over lunch when I felt we’d finally made some kind of close contact he’d look at his watch and get that funny look in his eyes which let me know that he had to see someone more important.”

  “However, what a wonderful collaborator he was, I miss him terribly,” Penn added. “We could laugh together at the absurdity of the world we worked in, and I so enjoyed it when he told me off: ‘Why did you send me that lousy picture?’ He was usually right. Now I live alone in a tower of success, with no one to laugh with me.”

  One odd aspect of my parents’ careers was that Mother never had an inkling of what Alex’s life at Condé Nast was like and did not want to know. Not once during Alex’s half century at the company did she ever visit his office. “Why go, I know just what ees like,” she’d growl when asked about her lack of interest in his work life. “Ees like one beeg ice cube.” And Alex’s office was indeed a bare white cube, the glacial austerity of which I always associated with his Calvinist upbringing. There stood nothing in it beyond a few chairs and a black Parsons table swept clear of everything but a pad of white paper and one sharpened pencil; there were seldom any mementos or artworks in sight (in the earlier years he kept a photo of Mother in a drawer, and in later decades he hung a few pictures of his public sculptures on the wall.) Alex was notoriously fussy about maintaining this icy order. Si Newhouse, who in Alex’s last thirty years was his closest associate, reports that the only time he experienced Alex’s bad temper was on an occasion when he put his coffee mug on Alex’s desk. “Take that away!” Alex cried out. “There was a strange Puritan squeamishness about him,” Si recalls.

  There was an instance in which Mother’s Oriental aloofness from Alex’s working life worked to her detriment—the one time in their decades of married life when Alex was rumored to have an affair. The lady in view was Brigitte Tichenor, Vogue’s accessories editor, a long-stemmed British-born beauty with large azure eyes and sumptuous black hair. I was then a young working woman just out of college, and, having set her cap at Alex, she did everything to use me as a bridge to him, lunching and dining me assiduously to find out which breach in his marriage she could rush into. This tactic having utterly failed, Tichenor started the rumor mill going by inviting Alex repeatedly to very long lunches at Chambord—the then most-fashionable restaurant—at which she held him for more than two hours by talking to him exclusively about his paintings, which no one else in those years seemed interested in discussing. (“Here was this cultivated, beautiful woman paying court to me,” Alex candidly recalled years later. “It was novel, and rather agreeable.”) One summer, unable to get him out for a night on the town after a year of wooing, Tichenor boarded the same boat to France as the Libermans. This is where Tatiana finally received news of the lady’s assault—she heard about it from Philippe de Croisset, a very close friend who headed Condé Nast’s French branch and who had heard an office rumor that Alex was about to divorce Tatiana for Tichenor. Mother’s shrewd countertactic was to be utterly charming to the interloper, who, seeing no hope in sight, finally abandoned her pursuit and partied for the rest of the sea voyage with a younger crowd in cabin class.

  Even though Alex was probably the youngest art director in New York when Patcevitch entrusted him with the design of Vogue, he exuded self-confidence and was popular with the great majority of the staff. The ultimate democrat, he was unfailingly thoughtful and prodigally generous toward the more menial workers on the staff—secretaries, technicians, company chauffeurs—who all revered him. There were two particular terms in Alex’s charm factory that he used as tools of seduction: one was “noble,” the other was “dear friend.” “This is a noble cover,” he’d say to John Rawlings in praise of a shot of bathing suits for a summer issue. “This is a noble layout,” he’d say about a pleasant double page of winter boots executed by an underling in the art department. (“Every time he used the word ‘noble’ I felt, yuck,” said the late Richard Avedon, who had no love lost for Alex and was one of several who derided the word.) As for the dreaded phrase “Dear Friend,” it was used by Alex when he had a particularly harsh criticism to dole out. “You curled up in your boots as soon as you heard those two words,” says Lord Snowdon, who as Anthony Armstrong-Jones worked extensively with Alex in the 1960s and ’70s. “They might take the following form—‘Dear friend, you know how deeply I admire you, but those last photographs of yours were a total disaster.’” “When he said ‘Dear friend,’ you knew you were in deep shit,” said Helmut Newton, one of the many experimental photographers whose work Alex championed early in their careers, and who appreciated Alex’s love for pornography. (Alex’s hero was Larry Flynt, Newton reports, and Alex often repeated Flynt’s motto, “Show the Pink,” when sending Newton out to a shoot.)

  Alex’s relations with persons in the company’s higher power structure were more complex. Within a few years, several of the Silver Fox’s colleagues detected darker sides of his character, which had to do with the extremely calculated way in which he kowtowed to people who were useful to him. “Alex instantly jumped into the lap of anyone who enabled him to increase his power,” says Rosamond Bernier, whose friendship with the Libermans went back to 1944. “His charm was in operation full-time toward tho
se whose support he needed.” “No one knew better than Alex which way the wind was blowing,” says Daniel Salem, a close associate who was Condé Nast’s chief financial officer for some thirty years. “He rarely displayed any true conviction or loyalty of any kind, he tended to go for whatever was useful to him, and perhaps this is what made him so indestructible.”

  Gitta Sereny was struck by Alex’s extreme emphasis on every kind of outward appearance. In 1949, Gitta married an American photographer working for Vogue in London, Donald Honeyman. After Honeyman was called back to the magazine’s New York office in 1952, soon after their first child was born, the young couple, whose finances were strained, took an apartment at Riverside Drive and West 101st Street. “Alex was totally appalled by that address,” Gitta recalls, “‘You’re mad, Gitta,’ he told me over lunch the day after we’d signed the lease. ‘Do you want Don to make a career at Vogue? He’ll never make it if you’re not living on the east side.’” “How do you expect us to live on the east side on our tiny income?” Gitta asked Alex. “There’s always the bank,” coolly answered Alex, who for many years lived on loans from his company and his friends.

  Colleagues were also struck by Alex’s byzantine talent for self-promotion. “He was as arduous a self-promoter as you can meet,” says Snowdon, “very slippery, like an eel, always wheeling and dealing for himself.” Even Si Newhouse, his boss of later years, who for four decades was inseparable from Alex, admits that there was “much calculation and self-interest” in the way the Silver Fox ran his life. And some midcentury colleagues in the fashion world who truly disliked Alex even denied—not very convincingly—that he had any originality in his career as art director. “He was a totally false, utterly unoriginal man,” says Pierre Bergé, the brilliant Parisian who founded the Yves Saint-Laurent couture house and ran it for many decades, and was a close friend of Tatiana’s. “He never had an idea of his own. He swiped ideas from everyone else. Even his typography, his journalistic ideas—he got them all from Brodovich. Now there was a man with vision!”