The most vivid memories I have of our Seventieth Street living room, in fact, are associated with its Russianness: the music that filled it from the late 1940s on; the White Russian colonels Mother engaged, in my teens, to make me memorize Russian poetry (to this day, thanks to her precaution, I can still recite the first stanzas of Pushkin’s “Ruslan i Ludmila”: “Na lukomoria doub zelenyi/zlataia tsep na duby tom”); and last but hardly least, the marathon weekend gambling sessions that took place on weekends. By 11:00 A.M. on any Saturday the Libermans were not holding a star-studded lunch, two bridge tables were set up in the near end of the living room. A half hour later, there would be Alex and Tatiana and Sophie Gimbel and Grisha and Lydia Gregory and a rotating roster of other players, slapping at the cards until 6:00 P.M., when everyone dispersed to run off to their respective evenings on the town. Silence reigned in the house throughout such Saturdays, interrupted mostly by the gentle whirring of cards being shuffled and an occasional shout, in any of three languages, of “I double!” or “I pass.”
The favored games were bridge and, later, canasta. Extra guests occasionally came to play backgammon with Alex. Unlike Mother and Uncle Pat, who were fairly cautious players and dreaded losing money, Alex loved to gamble for high stakes and boasted that he was one of those desperate Dostoevskian gamblers who (not unlike my grandfather) are always ready to stake their last dollar on earth. Oscar de la Renta, who found the Libermans to have more “mystery and magic” than anyone he’d ever met, played weekend backgammon with Alex for many years and reports that the thrill of taking terrible risks far outweighed any discomfort he may have felt over losing large sums. “For over a decade Alex regularly and with enormous cheer lost several hundred dollars a week to me,” says Oscar, a notoriously brilliant player. “He liked to joke that over the years he’d just about paid for my swimming pool.”
This compulsive gambling, which also persisted from morning to night on summer weekends on Long Island during the years in which the Libermans shared a vacation home with the Patcevitches, had the result of somewhat severing me from my parents during my adolescence: Realizing that they had no time for me on the only two days on which we could have enjoyed some family life, I happily grafted myself onto other families, first those of my school chums and, during my first two years in college, the tribe of my sweet, handsome fiancé, Peter Burgard. Peter was the stepson of the great baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who had raised him as his own child. There were so many children by so many marriages in this prodigal, hard-drinking clan that the Tibbetts found it easiest to give total precedence to their offsprings’ proclivities and whims. The Tibbetts’ household was my first experience of a youth-centered family; and for two years their genial hospitality offered me the sense of nesting I’d missed with my busy parents and enough expensive dining, hangovers, and front-row opera seats to last me a lifetime.
Back to our own living room: the Libermans’ prodigality toward outsiders led Seventieth Street to be known as a “typically Russian” household. And yet, did their hospitality give their parties that ambience of coziness, of gemütlichkeit, which Russians are so fabled for? Not in everyone’s view. Kathleen Blumenfeld, whom Alex had hired to run the Vogue studios (she was the daughter-in-law of Erwin, the photographer), felt that my parents’ gatherings were “totally artificial, exclusively devised to impress New Yorkers with the Libermans’ hit parade of acquaintances.” “Those functions were devoid of any sense of intimacy whatever, they were made glacial by everyone’s terror of Tatiana,” she told me recently. “Everyone I know felt very estranged. And yet you kept going because it had become central to the New York scene.”
Finally, how did Alex truly feel about such gatherings? During these events, he usually hovered at the edge of the room like a high-class maître d’, looking affable and yet utterly detached, and after Mother’s death I realized that he, too, had loathed them. That he considered himself to be a man with no friends. That most other humans bored him to death. That he had a chilling lack of interest in them. That he looked on hospitality as merely serviceable, as another boring expedient that humored Mother and helped him to climb the power ladder. Later, he seems to have particularly hated the way my mother had encouraged my husband and me to have our own friends to Seventieth Street whenever we were in town. For throughout those years in which my childhood room remained our New York home, upon those innumerable occasions when we were going out to a restaurant with friends, Mother would be virtually offended if we did not invite them to Seventieth Street before dinner. One of the first phrases Alex spoke to me a few hours after my mother’s death—it was barked rather than spoken and served as my first intimation of the terrifying changes that were about to come over him—was: “No more inviting people to my house, ever again!”
This leads me back to the time I was sixteen, when I was being courted by the only Russian beau I ever inherited from my mother’s milieu and who, ironically, tested Alex’s patience more than any of my other gentleman callers. Prince George Vassiltchikov was a twenty-eight-year-old Russian émigré who like most Russian noblemen had been brought up by French, German, and British nannies and was equally fluent in all four languages. First exiled in Lithuania and then in France, he served in the French resistance during the war. And after the liberation his linguistic skills brought him to the attention of the military authorities establishing the Nuremberg trials, of which he became one of a team that pioneered the system of instantaneous interpretation. His sister, Princess Tatiana Metternich, was a close friend of Elena Shuvalov, who introduced him to the Libermans in 1946 when he arrived in New York to serve as an interpreter at the newly founded United Nations. “Georgie,” as he was known to all, was a compact, leonine man with a mane of blond hair and long-lashed blue eyes, handsome in a slightly dissolute Slavic way; his intelligence, culture, and wit remained unmarred by his tremendous stutter in four languages. The marvel about Georgie, however, was that as soon as he began to speak into a microphone, the stutter totally disappeared and he wound in and out of French, Russian, German, English more mellifluously than any other member of the UN’s large staff of translators: He apparently needed an audience of thousands in order to perform the simplest linguistic act.
Our difference in ages, twelve years, and the fact that Georgie belonged to a very fast social set, which I enthusiastically adopted—divorcées with shady Latin American lovers, frequently drugged central European nobility—seemed to bring Alex no end of worry. I went steady with Georgie for the last two years of high school, and—seeing the hours we kept and the amount of alcohol we consumed—I myself am amazed that I made it out of Spence and into Bryn Mawr. Although it would have been extremely easy for Georgie to take advantage of me, and although he acted toward me, in my mother’s favorite phrase, like a “perfect gentleman,” we did indulge in some very heavy petting. Mother must have been fully as cognizant of that fact as Alex, but for the simple reason that Georgie was a Prince and that his older sister, to boot, was Princess Metternich, our dalliance did not bother her in the least. Confronted with the possibility of such a brilliant match (“It’s more than nobility, it’s almost royalty,” she said when talking of the Vassiltchikov family), crests and coronets danced with such frenzy in her imagination that she did not seem to care a whit about what the rascal did with my body.
So it was Alex who took the brunt of all the worrying. I suspect that his father’s past as a socialist militant made him secretly distrustful of high-ranking Russian nobility. And beyond his unease about Georgie’s aristocratic origins, he was clearly terrified that his teenage daughter might be seduced by a twenty-eight-year-old roué. “Czarist rabble!” I once heard him mutter about Georgie as he shooed me upstairs at the stroke of midnight. Never did Alex behave as a more possessive paterfamilias, in fact, than during the two winters I went out with Georgie. Upon our return from each one of our dates, he was up and waiting for us, sitting on the white plastic settee to the left of the living-room door, his mustache t
witching impatiently as he pretended to read a book. As soon as we came up the stairs, he would dismiss Georgie icily with a “Proshchaite” (“Good night”) and direct me, with a severe nod of the head, to go straight upstairs to bed. Over a half century later, Georgie, who is now living, wheelchair bound, in a small village in Switzerland, told me that in all his years of courting young women he had never encountered a father as aggressively possessive about a daughter as Alex. “I always imagined he kept a shotgun under his bathrobe as he sat there in the living room,” he recalled dreamily. As I looked back on these episodes decades later, I realized that Alex had worried increasingly about me as I grew into womanhood and that this depth of concern was not only linked to his affection for me: It also had to do with his great unease about all things sexual, whomever they pertained to—an unease that could occasionally border on the hysterical.
So the living room at Seventieth Street at which my parents’ parties and Alex’s policing of my love life took place was not a cozy room; it was on the contrary a showroom of sorts such as couturiers or car dealers have, both glacially impersonal and somewhat kitschy. It was a place for ogling and evaluating the products at hand, be they beauteous guests, their hideous or divine clothes, their adequate or tragic men, or my own boyfriends.
For Mother, too, would make her tours of inspection in the living room. Nothing entertained her more than meeting new people and showing off her often laser-sharp insights into human character. Year after year, she would sweep down the stairs with feigned casualness when I entertained potential beaux—or later, as a married woman, my husband’s and my friends. During our predinner Cokes or martinis, she pretended she was going down to the kitchen to get some tea yet kept her eyebrows suggestively raised, as if to say, “Can I just look in for a minute?” I buckled under her gaze and inevitably asked her in. “I’ll only stay a second,” she’d coyly say. And she’d plunk herself on the white plastic settee, exchanging a few mundanities about the weather or about the kind of restaurant or party we were headed for. After a few minutes, she would go upstairs again, and there would be some discreet muttering in my parents’ room: She was giving Alex her report. Unlike Alex’s rigid scrutinies, there was nothing possessive about Mother’s investigations. They were solely incited by her endless curiosity about human beings and her desire to impress me once more with the infallible veracity of her insights. “Nice enough,” she would say the following day, or, “They’ll bore you to death in two weeks,” or, even more threateningly, “Be careful!” If the visitors turned out to fall into either of the two last categories, she would exclaim triumphantly, “You see, you see, I’m always right!” “Your mother’s always right,” Alex would meekly repeat if he was in the same room, this phrase being one of the easiest ways of pacifying her.
It was just this kind of maternal perusal that the thirty-nine-year-old American artist Cleve Gray underwent in the fall of 1957, a few weeks after I’d returned from my wretched few years in Paris. I was then twenty-six. We’d met at a Sunday lunch in Connecticut, where he lived, and had gone out a few times since then, meeting in midtown for reasons of convenience. By the time he made his first visit to Seventieth Street, Mother just had a suspicion that something was up. Perhaps because his French was far better than that of other callers, Cleve Gray was the only one to decipher the reports Mother gave to Alex upstairs. “Boubous,” he recalled hearing her say upon his first visit, “il est charmant, et pas du tout pédéraste!” Some three months later, in February of 1957, Cleve Gray stood by the window of the same living room, asking Alex for my hand in marriage. “It is a marriage made in heaven,” Alex said, his mustache trembling with emotion, and this time, he, too, was dead right.
Irving Penn: “Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Liberman with Francine du Plessix, February 1948.”
SEVENTEEN
Our Home II
Whenever you climbed from the second to the third floor at Seventieth Street, you’d pass one of Mother’s frequent touches of decorating whimsy, a charming Neapolitan cherub of painted wood, nestled at the bend of the stairs. On the walls of the stairwell were hung black-and-white works by lesser masters of the Libermans’ milieu: portraits and Vogue illustrations by René Bouché, Eric, Felix Topolski, and even drawings of mine from my days at the Art Students’ League, which I had attended in my late teens. Once at the landing, you saw, at the right, the door to my parents’ room, which gave onto the garden, and, at the left, the one to my room, which looked out on Seventieth Street.
Whereas the living room was a place for public scrutiny, for flaunting and impressing, I associated my parents’ room with Alex’s inner gazing and with my mother’s narcissism. For its altar and centerpiece was the glaringly lit dressing table that stood dead in the middle of the far wall, between the two windows hung in thick pale-gray linen. The very surface of the table was mirrored, the wall all around it was mirrored, and on either side of the table were multitiered lamps of leaf-patterned white metal that each took three lightbulbs. The dressing table was made all the more shrinelike by the fourteen-piece silver cosmetic set, engraved with the viscountal crest, that had stood in Mother’s electric-blue bathroom in Paris and had followed us into exile. At either side of the room were two identical double beds, the sideboards of which were upholstered in gray satin damask. At the far end of Mother’s bed were bookshelves holding her large collection of Russian-language books. At the far end of Alex’s was a desk upon which he kept memorandums about the week’s engagements and also his more sentimental possessions: photographs of his mother and father and of Mother and me and also an album of photographs of Venice I had taken when I was sixteen, during our first trip abroad after the war, and which remained on his desk until he vacated the house in 1991. Photography had been the first art for which I’d had a strong inclination, and I’d dedicated the album to him, on the flyleaf: “A mon Alex adoré, mes premiers efforts.” This object’s sentimental appeal, I imagine, was that it served as one more link between us: In his early adolescence, as in mine, photography had served as a first artistic calling.
The pictures hanging about the walls of my parents’ room had exclusively to do with the family: the one sanguine Alex had done of me, age eight, when I had gone to his Paris studio to pose for him in my tutu; by the 1960s, Alex’s photos of my sons, and portraits of all six of us by friends such as Bouché, Vertès, Irena Wiley; and still later, my own children’s first artistic efforts. When I open the door of my memory to this room I see, first of all, Alex lying on his back on the bed to the right, his hands folded on his stomach, his eyes half closed in rest but never in sleep or else wide-open, gazing straight at the space ahead of him. He would take this rest every day of the week between six and seven, regardless of whether or not he was going out to dinner. He would seek refuge upstairs for even lengthier times on the nights he and Mother were not going out to avoid the stream of visitors she entertained in the predinner hours. I respected this retreat of Alex’s. I remained aware that he was an invalid who’d several times struggled for his life and whose health needed to be protected from my mother’s insatiable need for human company, human noise.
The same door of memory, when it focuses on Mother, frames her as she sits at her dressing table, painting her face, or arranging her hair with the same absorption as she had in her Paris bathroom, except that as she gets older she looks at herself more critically, with diminishing satisfaction. There are night tables by each of their beds: His is very neat and denuded, holding merely a glass of water and whatever magazines he’s reading that week, for whatever medications he takes are kept hidden in a closet of his bathroom; he does not like to have it known that he takes them—never once have I seen him swallow a pill in public. Her night table, however, is laden with foreign-language magazines and prescription drugs. The French publications she keeps by her bed are Match, Evènements de Paris, and Jours de France. (The latter are heavily laced with gossip concerning the high jinks of European nobility—the engagements and divorc
es of the Spanish or Belgian royal princesses, the ball gowns worn by the queen of Holland during the king of Sweden’s visit.) Mother will never learn English well enough to peruse The New York Times or to read more than a few paragraphs of any book I’ll ever write, and as she will get older the language of exile will annoy and weary her increasingly. As for Mother’s medications, they are all kept on the second shelf of her night table, dozens of them: Their principal intents are to wake her up, to allay her migraines and other real or alleged pains, and to help her get to sleep. She has been addicted to this sequential regimen—stimulant, powerful painkiller, sedative—ever since I can remember, possibly beginning it after her near-fatal car accident of 1936. She is notoriously addicted to her pills, she hides nothing of her habit, in fact she flaunts it and proselytizes it. Upon hearing any friend complain of fatigue in the morning, she will say, “But just do as I do! Take a Dexedrine in the morning—there’s nothing like it! You’ll feel on top of the world!” “You’re afraid you won’t sleep at night?” she adds if her acquaintance voices hesitations. “Well then, take a Nembutal when you go to bed—you’ll sleep like a log! I’ve been taking both for most of my life!”
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