Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  The corporate consequences of this inane gaffe came two weeks later. Pat was demoted from publisher to chairman and was replaced by Sam Newhouse’s oldest son, Samuel (“Si”) Jr. The biggest blow to Pat, however, was to learn that he had to leave his house on Seventieth Street, after a decade there. In his habitual seignorial way, Pat had assumed that even though it was Condé Nast property, he could stay in the house indefinitely, and he had not even informed his wife, Chessy, that it did not belong to them. They were all the more mortified to hear that it was destined to be the home of Condé Nast’s new publisher, Si Newhouse Jr.

  In the midst of these rearrangements, Alex walked over to Pat’s office and offered to submit his own resignation as an expression of support. Pat, who knew full well that this was a rhetorical gesture, reassured his colleague that the palace revolution had nothing to do with him, but their twenty-seven-year-old friendship had clearly ended. Pat and Chessy retreated in helpless rage to their homes in Southampton and Palm Beach, where they resumed playing cards seven days a week and assiduously attended the functions of clubs such as Palm Beach’s Bath and Tennis Club, which, as late as the 1970s, maintained rigorous restrictions on the ethnic backgrounds of its guests, not to speak of its members.

  In the 1970s, Mother and Alex started going to Palm Beach, where the Patcevitches spent most of the year, for two weeks of the winter. But during the following decade they saw Pat only once, when they ran into him on Worth Avenue. I however managed to keep old bonds somewhat alive. My husband’s mother also lived in Palm Beach, and on my yearly tour of duty to her I usually looked up Pat and Chessy. Chessy inevitably welcomed me warmly, and he always effusively. In the first years of my two decades of visits, he was still the dapper Beau Brummell, tanned and silvery, ascotted and Sulka shirted, whom I’d remembered from my adolescence, lurking in corners to pounce on the next pretty girl (a sport he gave up for good when comely Chessy came into his life).

  The last year I saw Pat was 1991, a few months before my mother’s death and two years before his own. He was lying in his sickbed, his slender, chiseled face now as wasted as a mummy’s, his voice a faint rasp, recovering from a triple bypass, which he himself and an inattentive intensive-care nurse had botched. Twenty-four hours after leaving the operating table, some wild Slavic force in Iva Sergeyevich Patcevitch resurfaced. He tore off all the wires that had been plugged into his body and ran screaming down the corridors of the hospital, shouting imprecations at the medical profession. It took him months, and much severe sedation, to recover. “How is my friend Tatiana?” he whispered in a barely audible rasp of Russian when I saw him in Palm Beach later that year, as he gave me his wasted, still ravishing smile. “How is my brother Alex?” I told him that they were just fine, even though Mother was already deeply ill. As I kissed him good-bye, looking into the larger-than-ever azure eyes, smelling the familiar fragrance of his Knize Ten, I thanked him silently for the sweetness he’d brought my youth—the riding lessons, the flounced ball gowns that had made me feel so securely feminine, the cottage in Jamaica he had rented for my husband and me as a honeymoon getaway. Whatever blunders and grievances had severed him from my parents, Uncle Patsy had been a fairy godfather of my American childhood.

  Witnesses at Condé Nast have been commenting ever since on the breakup of Pat’s and Alex’s friendship. “I was enthralled with Patcevitch,” Si told me thirty-five years later. “He was the only true White Russian I’ve ever encountered, a man of phenomenal elegance.”

  Daniel Salem, who was then Condé Nast’s chief financial adviser, says, “I’m shocked to this day about how Alex behaved towards Pat. Pat had virtually created Alex’s career…. But then Alex never fought for anyone.”

  I imagine that Alex’s career was studded with many similar instances of disloyalty, most of which I don’t even know about. I do know of one such betrayal, however, which caused Alex immense anguish. It was the dismissal, ordered by the Newhouses in 1966, of the editor in chief of French Vogue, Edmonde Charles-Roux, who had held that post since the immediate postwar years. Edmonde, a stately, imposing woman with an aura of the Mother Superior about her—she coiled her dark hair into a severe bun and for decades wore the same austere Balenciaga chemise, cut in a variety of fabrics according to the season—was a highly respected intellectual who came from one of France’s most eminent families. Her cousins and brother had been at Les Roches in approximately the same years as Alex had. Her father, before the war, had been France’s ambassador to the Vatican. Family bonds between the Libermans and Edmonde were particularly close because Sasha Iacovleff, who for many years visited with the Charles-Rouxs in Italy every summer, had been one of Edmonde’s dearest friends. And until 1966, Alex had always referred to Edmonde as one of his two or three closest chums.

  Edmonde’s dismissal came about when she decided to use an African-American model, photographed by William Klein, on the cover of French Vogue. The cautiously conservative Sam Newhouse heard about the proposed cover from other staffers at the Paris office and asked Alex to insist that Edmonde use another cover. “I’m the editor of the magazine,” Edmonde is reported to have said, “and this cover is staying.” None of Alex’s art of persuasion and none of his skill for flattery were of any avail. Edmonde stood her ground, and a few days later she learned that she had been dismissed.

  This was in March 1966. In July of that year, Edmonde, whose novel, Oublier Palerme, was about to be published and was receiving rave advance reviews (it was already rumored to be the leading contender for the Prix Goncourt, which indeed it eventually won), received a phone call from Alex, who was on his yearly trip to Paris to attend the couture collections. He asked if he could come to see her at her flat on the rue des Saints-Pères. “By all means,” said Edmonde, whose curiosity prevailed over her pride. The rest of the story is best told in Edmonde’s own words.

  I hadn’t heard from him since I’d been fired, so I was curious to hear him out. And I wasn’t at all prepared for the scene that followed. He rang the doorbell, I opened the door, and there he stood looking at me, and even before crossing my threshold he burst into tears—truly tumultuous, uncontrollable tears. I didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t just a bout of weeping, it was more akin to a “crise de désespoir.” I led him to a chair and gave him a glass of water, he continued to sob, and finally he was able to blurt out, with great difficulty, the following words: “It was all out of my control, out of my control.” So I let him sob on, I soothed him and said we could always remain friends, he stayed half an hour, we talked very little, the weeping fit eventually subsided, we’ve seldom seen each other again.

  When Edmonde told me this story in 2002, I was flabbergasted. No one had ever seen Alex weep up to then, and my family and I are witnesses to the fact that he never cried even when my mother died. So how to explain the “crise de désespoir”? Perhaps this particular encounter led him to a painful realization of his own weaknesses: Edmonde stood for everything in European society that Alex could have achieved and either could not or cared not to attain: rigorous intellectual discipline, true intellectual achievement. The subtext of this episode: Alex was enough of a snob to experience great pain at the loss of an old friend—about to become famous—who was clearly his superior. He was decent enough to feel duty bound to come ask her forgiveness. And he was prideful enough to feel deeply humiliated by being impelled, for the first time in his life, to go through an act of mea culpa. Extreme snobbism, more than occasional decency, phenomenal vainglory—that was Alex in a nutshell.

  In the early 1960s, Alex’s art making underwent still another total transformation. This metamorphosis, like earlier ones, seemed once again to have been brought on by a grave health crisis—Alex’s third and last hemorrhage. It was the worst to date, but by then there was a surgical cure. The hemorrhage occurred in late August 1962 as my parents were sailing back from Europe on the Queen Elizabeth. My mother phoned me one evening from the boat. “He’s bleeding terribly,” she said with desper
ation, instructing me to call their doctor and have him meet the ship. We took Alex by ambulance straight from the docks to Columbia Presbyterian. He must have realized the gravity of his condition, for after he had been stabilized, and just before his surgery, he asked to say good-bye to both of my children—my youngest, Luke, was only sixteen months old. Having tenderly kissed us all, he underwent a four-hour operation in which the vagus nerve was cut and the diseased part of the stomach taken out. It was a total success. Within a few weeks Alex was home, and a month later, as he started going to the office again for a few hours, he was instructed to drink a weak Scotch and soda before dinner to relax his stomach muscles. My mother started drinking a bit alongside him. He was fifty, she was fifty-six, and it was probably the first time alcohol had ever passed either his lips or hers. Within some months, diet regulations were even further relaxed, and he was allowed to add red wine to his regimen. My parents soon became ardent oenophiles and began to collect fine Bordeaux.

  Once his health was fully restored, Alex returned to painting with increased verve, and the gypsy in him started roaming again: He made a 180-degree turn and rebelled against all that he’d stood for as an artist in the previous decade. He rejected the geometric clarity and intellectuality of his circles, seeing them as “a form of hypnotic withdrawal from the world,” and turned to a radically romantic, luxuriant style. The circles’ sleek, impersonal surfaces gave way to loose, jagged brushstrokes, freehand splashes, blurred, fuzzy-edged bands of color. His ulcers permanently healed, he was blessed with a whole new fund of physical energy, and his painting now became an arena for expressing private emotions. He rented a studio space a few doors down from our house, in a former funeral parlor, in order to make far larger paintings. By the mid-1960s, he was working with his canvas laid on the floor, flinging paint from buckets or swinging it around with janitors’ brooms. He had borrowed that idea from Pollock, whom he now idolized. My husband introduced him to Liquitex, a fast-drying acrylic pigment that can be applied evenly over large areas. And from Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman, Alex got the idea of using unprimed cotton duck, which is sold in huge rolls and enabled him to paint on a far greater scale.

  Through the radically emotive style he took on in the 1960s, the angry, stone-throwing street urchin of Alex’s early youth resurfaced again. This wild inner child lurking behind Alex’s polished surface had always been the persona he felt closest to and was the proudest of. Over the decades, he had repeatedly and with great gusto told us tales of the dozens of Moscow windows he had broken by hurling stones, of how he had attacked and mauled his teachers and continued to shit in his pants until the age of nine. This naughty child had been imprisoned for decades under a facade of diplomacy and decorum, and now it was suddenly liberated, allowing emotions bottled up for decades to erupt on canvas. The most estimable aspect of this tumultuous new body of work is that Alex was creating art with no concerns whatever for the market or for trends. His last show of geometric painting, in 1962, had sold out, and his dealer, Betty Parsons, was appalled to see him now abandoning the style for which he was beginning to be much esteemed. Moreover, Alex was turning to Abstract Expressionism at the time it was beginning to go out of fashion: The cutting edge was now at Pop Art and at the same austere “Op Art” Minimalism he had experimented with in the early 1950s.

  The first exhibition of Alex’s newly loose, romantic paintings—in 1963, the year after his surgery—sold poorly and was barely reviewed. Writing in Art International, the influential young critic Michael Fried referred to the new work as “refined, competent, but wholly unoriginal.” By failing to persevere in his original path, by giving in to his capricious, volatile nature, Alex only aggravated his life’s very greatest sorrow: the feeling that he was not taken seriously as an artist.

  By the mid-1960s Alex had acquired a small group of friends in the art world. Soon after our marriage Cleve and I had brought Barnett (“Barney”) Newman to visit him, and after several years of not seeing him, he quickly developed a great friendship with his colleague. While exploiting whatever useful contacts Barney could offer him, Alex did esteem and love him more than any other artist of his generation. In Barney he admired an intellectual who had plumbed metaphysical and aesthetic issues at far greater depth than Alex had ever had the patience to. He also admired a man who epitomized that frugal, true artist’s life, which Alex had never dared to take on—Barney got along on the salary his wife earned as a public-school teacher, lived in a drab west-side flat for twenty years without selling one painting, and did not give a hoot about what he ate or where he slept. Alex was awed and moved by the dedication and uncompromising quality which marked Newman’s life and art. Throughout the 1960s, his almost daily telephone conversations with Newman, who had many dense and grandiose ideas about painting and “the Sublime,” deepened Alex’s sense of art as an expression of “metaphysical and spiritual transcendence,” as “a call to spiritual arms.”

  Alex painting his “Volcano” series, late 1970s, photo by Dr. William Cahan.

  Cleve and I had also introduced Alex to Bob Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, whom my mother immediately swept into her circle of intimates because they were both “well bred,” as she put it, and Helen, a peerless hostess, spoke beautiful French. Alex milked the Motherwell/Frankenthaler relationship for all it was worth. In 1965, Helen generously arranged for him to have a show at Bennington College, and in 1967 she introduced him to the dealer Andre Emmerich, who began to show those sculptures of Alex’s that were too large for Betty Parsons to exhibit. “Alex was a great flatterer—he tried to buy his way into being accepted as a first-generation New York School painter,” Frankenthaler recently recalled. “There was an endless flow of champagne, flowers, limousines being sent for Bob and me…. It didn’t work, because after the mid-sixties Alex’s painting was utterly derivative, but we did have a good time enjoying his graciousness and allure.”

  Emmerich, who was to remain his dealer for a quarter of a century, didn’t like Alex’s later Expressionist works either and says he only showed them “out of friendship.” “Alex misjudged his own capacities, he made a huge mistake in abandoning his hard-edge circle paintings,” Emmerich says today. “In his arrogance he believed that all his art would be equally great, he was defeated by his own fickleness…if he’d stayed the course and persevered in that earlier vision he would have earned a considerable place in twentieth-century art.” (“Go deeper,” Alex’s first art teacher, Sasha Iacovleff, had often told him.)

  But Alex also had a new vocation as a sculptor of metal to attend to. It had begun while he was vacationing in 1959 at Va-et-Vient, when his housekeeper’s husband, a local craftsman who made iron balconies, introduced him to welding. Alex found the experience to be awesome and very “erotic.” He continued welding in the following years, whenever he and Mother spent the weekend with us in Warren, Connecticut, where my husband had lived since a decade before our marriage. We owned an old farm with several outbuildings, and Cleve, with characteristic generosity, offered Alex one of his barns and loaned him a few thousand dollars to set up a sculpture studio in it (we were all broke, but that particular year the Libermans were more broke than we were). Alex started working with his usual enthusiasm, welding elements from discarded farm machinery that had accumulated for years on the property. A year later, a local road builder and welder, William Layman, was enjoined by Cleve to help Alex make his increasingly voluminous sculptures, and eventually Layman and his two sons ended up working for him full-time. The results were promising. In 1966 the Jewish Museum, a lively showplace for cutting-edge art, gave Alex a one-man show of his sculpture.

  By this time, Alex’s circle paintings were also gaining in esteem. One of those canvases, Continuous on Red, the tondo that Alfred Barr had bought from Alex’s first show at Betty Parsons, was included in a pivotal MOMA exhibition curated by William Seitz in 1965, The Responsive Eye. There Alex was in the company of two artists who were to achieve the highest intern
ational acclaim, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly and Stella were so taken with Alex’s work that they each wrote him to suggest that they exchange pictures. Alex, habitually disdainful of correspondence, never answered their requests. With the exception of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, whose work he loved and began to support when they were young, Alex tended to dismiss painters who were less than very famous, which put him all the more at risk of being seen as a snobbish, dilettante socialite.

  But the mid-1960s to mid-1970s were among the happiest, most successful, most productive periods of Alex’s life. While being elevated to the second-highest position at Condé Nast, one rung below Newhouse, he had gained a considerable reputation as painter, sculptor, and photographer. He had seen me happily married. He enjoyed a particularly close friendship with his son-in-law—the two men visited each other’s studios every few weekends to offer critiques, and the meetings always ended with Alex assuring Cleve that he was his “closest friend in the world.” He had ready access, any weekend he wished, to a country getaway where he could pursue his new career in monumental sculpture. Finally, he adored his two grandsons, who worshiped him. “He had a way of talking to you that made you feel deliciously important, whether he was taking you to lunch at his power table at the Four Seasons or just chatting in the dining room at Seventieth Street,” my older son, Thaddeus, recalls today. “He had the capacity to be your parent and your friend at the same time…no one else I’ve ever met had this gift.” (However, the boys’ relationships with Grandpa Liberman grew more complex as they reached their teens, when Alex, displaying his voyeurist streak, tended to pry a bit too arduously into the details of their love lives. “Where are the girls?” Alex asked me with a worried, disappointed air when my sons had not brought any new young beauty home for a while.)