Alex may have felt relieved by these changes, but from 1994 on I felt a certain arrogance and smugness about his attitude toward Condé Nast. The perks still offered—the chauffeured limos, the domestic staff—now seemed to be the most treasured aspects of whatever remained of his career: He was using his staff exclusively as a means of booking his flights between Florida and New York, hiring cars, and making restaurant reservations, and he dropped into the office only once or twice a year, when a story of considerable personal interest to him was being published.
Such was the sudden visit Vanity Fair’s literary editor, Wayne Lawson, remembers Alex making to the magazine when it was preparing a story on a group of Impressionist and modern paintings that had been in vaults since World War II, and were being exhibited for the first time in Moscow’s Hermitage Museum. “Alex got very involved in selecting the specific works that were to be shown in the magazine,” Lawson says. “He wanted personally to oversee the design of that story, and he did a brilliant job laying it out.” But such rare and indolent involvement could not possibly keep him abreast of the times or of the magazines. Anna Wintour particularly felt his growing insularity in the late 1990s, when she published a portrait of Hillary Clinton on the cover of Vogue—a historic first for the publication, which had never had a First Lady on its cover before. “He was in Miami when the Hillary cover came out, and he phoned me in great fury,” Wintour relates. “‘How could you do this?’ he said. ‘This is so appalling, this is so tacky, she looks like a housewife, where’s the glamour?’ I then realized that he’d lost some of his journalistic feel. People had begun wanting contact with that kind of reality, the issue was a greater success than anyone could have dreamt—in fact, when Alex realized how successful it was, he phoned me to apologize, and heaven knows he wasn’t big on apologies.”
So the same unfortunate tendency that had governed Mother’s last decade—an exacerbation of latent faults—seemed to prevail in Alex’s own advancing years. His innate egotism now bordered on total self-absorption. His vanity had swelled into smugness and unabashed conceit. Not only had he grown quite fat, but his psyche had begun to match his physique. A few weeks after the Condé Nast announcement was made, when I went to attend yet another exhibition of his paintings at the Emmerich gallery, I recorded the following impression of him in my journal: “A swollen, greying balloon of a man, totally devoid of his former elegance, comes towards us…. It is as if he is being constantly refilled with some inflating medium, the hot air of the endless flattery that surrounds him.”
A decade later, that is still the way I remember Alex in his last years. I keep being haunted by a phrase of Shakespeare’s, “catch the conscience of the King.” Mother had constantly pricked at his inflated ego, perpetually reminding him that he was a common mortal, that the world didn’t owe him everything. Now, uncurbed by Tatiana, fawned on by a wife whose life revolved around him, surrounded by adulating women who assured him that he was one of the great artists of his time, his entire personality was gradually disintegrating. He had developed a childish way of boasting about the importance he still had at Condé Nast: Upon one of his health emergencies, he broadcast the news that Isadore Rosenfeld had flown to see him in Miami at Si Newhouse’s behest in Si’s private jet. And just as he took it for granted that he could perennially keep a four-person staff at Condé Nast without ever going to the office, he seemed incapable of making a judgment without referring it to his grandiose self-image. “What do you think of Simon Schama?” he had recently asked me. “I loved Citizens,” I answered, “one of the best books I’ve read in years.” “I don’t need to read any Schama,” he said with half-mocking grandeur. “I like him because he told Tina [Brown] he loves my new book.” But the self-mocking tone didn’t work—it was clear that by now, his power eroded, he was readier than ever to be seduced by anyone who flattered him.
By 1997, I felt wretchedly isolated from Alex. I was briefly visiting with him a half-dozen times a year during the months he spent in New York, sharing no more than two or three meals each year with him and Melinda. I, too, was ready to fawn on him to recapture a bit of his affection. And to regain some contact, during a dinner we shared in the spring I offered to give him a party for his forthcoming book, Prayers in Stone. He hugged me more effusively than he had in years. I was his darling Frosinka again! No one I’d ever known so loved being celebrated, no one had a more childish need for any form of attention. However steeped he was in flattery, I began to sense the fundamental melancholia of his old age, its frequent sense of obsoleteness. “I miss my table at the Four Seasons,” he said to me wistfully a year or two after James Truman had assumed his job. What I knew he missed were not so much the fine food and service but the elite center-of-the-room table, available to only a handful of the city’s press moguls, over which he had reigned several times a week, “receiving homage from passersby” as Andre Emmerich described it, “just like a Mafia don.”
In the post-Tatiana years, Alex’s tastes and impulses grew even more capricious and volatile than ever. By the spring of 1997, over a dinner at Restaurant Daniel—his new favorite—he told us that Miami was becoming “boring.” The weather wasn’t what he had hoped it would be; there was so little to do. After four years in Miami, the Libermans were now flirting with the notion of selling their flat there and were looking for a place in the New York suburbs. And sure enough, within a few weeks, before even putting Miami up for sale, they found a house on Long Island—a grand ungainly dwelling in Sands Point—and borrowed a million dollars from Si Newhouse to purchase it. (“Why did you buy this monstrosity?” Rosenfeld asked Alex. “Because Melinda wanted it,” Alex replied.) Upon my first visit there, Mother’s voice cackled with particular derision as I stared at the entrance door of elaborately carved oak, the kitchen countertops flecked with gold. Alex was fond of justifying the purchase by saying Sands Point was the first vacation site that he, Mother, and I had shared in the United States. And indeed, as I drove there in the following months, I kept looking for some landmark that would point me to the ramshackle house that had so warmly sheltered our first American summer.
The Libermans had only a year in which to enjoy their new house. In the fall of 1998, Alex became truly, deeply ill. It is possible that his deteriorating health—the return of his prostate cancer, complicated by cardiac problems, diabetes, and chronic anemia—had been further aggravated by a severe psychological shock. In the spring of that year, Condé Nast was preparing to move from 350 Madison Avenue—its headquarters for a quarter of a century—to a new building at 4 Times Square. And Alex had learned that there would be no office space for him in the new Condé Nast building: Along with the office staff still maintained for the estate of Leo Lerman, who had died four years earlier, his assistants were to be moved, instead, to a puny room on East Forty-fourth Street.
Even though he had barely set foot into his office in the past years, the announcement that he had no place in the new building led Alex to a severe depression. He had such vainglory about his status at the company that he’d imagined it to be in every way untouchable. “They might as well drag me out of the stable and shoot me,” he told Melinda when he heard the news. Did he really expect that at a time when cost-cutting principles governed all corporate decisions, a semi-invalid retiree would receive a suite of his own alongside the company’s hardworking staffers? If so, the delusions of grandeur encouraged by his circle of flatterers had grievously misled him. When we arrived at his New York flat on a fall night that year, he was in a wheelchair, looking furious at the world. As we came toward him, he continued glowering at us, as if our presence, this time, was a dreadful annoyance. Had some new paranoia led him to the illusion that we had recently done wrong by him? Or was it a blow to his great pride that his original “family” was seeing him in this pitiful state? Ten minutes into our visit, Dodie arrived. How he loved his post-Tatiana coterie! As she came into the room, Alex managed a faint smile to greet her.
He was in Miami
through most of the late winter and spring, and in the summer of 1999 Melinda brought him back to New York to have his condition—which was now desperate—evaluated by Rosenfeld. By this time, Alex was so medicated that he was sleeping twenty hours out of twenty-four. There were times he was too weak to eat on his own and had to be spoon-fed. Throughout the day, Melinda had to keep slapping his thigh every few minutes, shouting “Hey, Babycakes!” to keep him from sleeping round the clock.
It is upon this trip of Alex’s to New York, on an occasion when Melinda had gone around the block to do an errand, that I confronted him one last time on the issue of the famous poet’s letters; that I asked him, “Alex, dear, could you tell me where the letters are?” that he answered “Oh, somewhere here,” waving his silvery hand in various directions of the room; that he then fell into another deep sleep. Those were among the last words I’d hear him speak in New York City. On the following afternoon, he flew back to Miami to wait for his death. And a few days hence, I returned to his flat, found my inheritance—Mayakovsky’s letters to Mother—in his bedside drawer, and began to plan the writing of this book.
However, in the years that it has taken me to write it, I have toyed with one more hypothesis about Alex’s need to retain Mayakovsky’s letters: Beyond his desire to remain the one and only love of a legendary woman, he may well have kept them because they had a considerable commercial, as well as a sentimental, value. For after my mother’s death, one of the more striking transformations manifested by this once prodigally generous man was frequently to act in a penny-pinching, niggardly manner. His impulse was to retain all those of Mother’s possessions that were of material worth, however legally bound he was to deliver them to me and however important they might have been to me emotionally. Thus had he failed to offer me so much as one memento from Seventieth Street. At the time, I was too sorrowful about the house itself to have emotions about its contents; only later did I feel rage at this omission.
The same miserliness guided a far shabbier action: Beyond a portrait of my mother, in his last will and testament Alex did not leave one of the many Iacovleffs he owned to me—all of this revered relative’s works passed on to his widow. Yet another sign of crass insensitivity: The day after Mother died, leaving all her personal effects to me in her will, Alex had asked me to bring him her jewelry tray, so that he might choose a gift for Melinda as a token of his gratitude. As I set the tray on his bed, he immediately pointed to a diamond-and-platinum brooch I remembered well from my earliest childhood: Not only was it the most valuable item still in Mother’s possession, it had been a gift to her from my father, Bertrand du Plessix, who, moreover, had inherited it from his own mother. On that day of mourning, I was too intent on cheering up Alex, on indulging every one of his whims, to demur. It wasn’t until a few months later that I asked myself, How did he dare? How could I have allowed this part of my inheritance—a precious memento of both my blood parents—to slip through my hands? And at such times I also wondered, was there a “true Alex” anywhere to be found? Could it be that at the center of this curious man was an icy, vacuous planet that had revolved around a succession of Women-Suns, reflecting each consecutive one’s traits and attributes?
The Libermans returned to Miami in the late summer of 1999, and over the following months Alex’s health declined even more rapidly. Melinda reported that she’d had to devise a halter device on which she tugged every few minutes to wake him up. I desperately wanted to see him, but she held me off, fearing, with reason, that the very sight of me would alarm him by letting him know his end was near. How much would I have given to hold his hand for a few minutes, to look into his eyes, even if to receive their blank nothingness in return! But I had to make do with imagining him in his last months in Miami—riding down the stairs of his duplex on his electric chair, falling asleep even as Melinda spoon-fed him, being wheeled to the window for a view of the Bay of Biscayne…. I phoned him every day or two, shouted, “How are you?” and listened to him slur out the words “I’m all right” so faintly that they seemed to come through a veil of fog.
Melinda was faithful to her promise to let me know when the end seemed in sight. She called me on a Wednesday in the second week in November. She doubted if he’d ever leave the hospital, she wept, she was counting on me to attend to the obituaries, she didn’t know how to handle such things, he had a week or two at the most. I dropped everything and flew to Miami, arriving at the hospital at 8:00 P.M. He lay very still on his bed, as pale and translucent as the plastic mask rising and falling over his face. As I sat down and took his hand, his mustache quavered, he turned his eyes toward me and then away again, with an expression that could as easily have been one of “Oh, God, not she” or “How happy I am that she’s here.” A half hour later, a doctor, making rounds and testing his cognitive level, asked him, “Who’s your visitor tonight?” “My daughter,” Alex whispered.
For the following two days, he mostly slept, occasionally communicating through nods of the head or tiny gestures. But then, on the evening before I was scheduled to leave Miami, he suddenly turned his eyes to me and with painful enunciation asked, “Did you go out last night?” It was the question he used to ask me every Sunday morning at Seventieth Street when I was in my teens. “I was here, darling,” I said in Russian. “It’s the only place I want to be.” “Spokoinoi,” “calm,” he whispered gently as he closed his eyes, perhaps trying to say “Spokoinoi Noch,” “good night.”
The following day, he seemed stronger, more lucid, and for a fleeting moment the gentle Dr. Jekyll, the ancient nurturing Alex of my childhood, returned. He opened his eyes and stared at me—it was a bit past noon—and asked, as if I were ten years old, “Frosinka, have you had your lunch yet?” Showing him my plate, which I’d just filled, I said, “Oh yes, thank you, look, I’ve just started.” In a barely audible, rasping voice he whispered, “Is it good?”
And upon those phrases I returned to the very first day I had landed in his care, to that morning in the south of France in 1940 when I’d wandered through his house, lonely and hungry, and Alex had come bursting out of the kitchen with a bowl of black-market cornflakes topped with a fried egg, and as he watched me devour my meal had asked me, “Is it good, Frosinka?” How many selves he’d been since we’d shared that moment: the ambitious young refugee, the pushy émigré editor, the dapper, best-dressed-listed man-about-town, the thriving paterfamilias, the venerable elder statesman of magazine publishing, the perplexed widower, and now the dying pensioner being tended by his last powerful woman. And how many selves I, too, had been since that shared moment of sixty years past: the docile, grieving child, the rebellious, wisecracking teenager, the tomboy journalist, the earnest workaholic bride, the striving author, the fragile matriarch. Yet in those phrases, “Did you have your lunch?…Was it good?” Time was dissolved in obeisance to a memory that was powerfully, uniquely ours. In that imperishable 1940 of our shared recollection, we became again the nurturing father and the hungry child, thrown together by the forces that had cleft our generations’ lives in twain, who were about to escape the greatest destruction of life in human history. And in that everlasting Now, which by dissolving time absolved whatever griefs might ever have stood between us, we offered each other the sweetest gift any parent and child can exchange–—that of total conciliation.
Portrait by Irving Penn of Alex standing near his sculpture studio in Warren, Connecticut, 1977.
He closed his eyes and slept once more. It was 1999 again. I had a half hour before leaving for the airport and sat by his side, waiting to catch his last hint of recognition, feeling certain that it would not come again. When I kissed him one last time before leaving, his forehead was of a surnaturel sweetness and freshness, barely human in its purity, as if he were some magical sleeping knight I’d come across in an enchanted forest or a freshly bathed child I was putting to bed.
The call from Melinda came ten days later, in the middle of the night. I flew back to Miami; it was up to me t
o do the final “recognition” at the funeral parlor. He lay on a stretcher of sorts, a green blanket drawn up to his chin, so silvery, so lyrical, so Greek. The head was thrust back, so delicate and noble and warrior like, I couldn’t get away from that heroic aura of the warrior on the battlefield—in a minor way, he had indeed had a heroic existence, living more lives than most of us would dare to take on in three rounds of reincarnation, fighting for his survival—and Mother’s and mine and occasionally that of others—in most every moment of his century. Yes he looked noble, the way he’d wanted all his creations to be. Love of my early youth, mentor and protector, my tears finally came for you. I touched my hand to your marble head—not freezing yet but fairly chill—and remembered that hot, pulsating, oh-so-warm still-tender flesh I’d put my lips to ten days earlier, when I’d kissed you in your sleep and sensed more keenly than ever before the preciousness of breath, the absolute uniqueness of each human person. I made the sign of the cross over you and went my way. I was the little kid to whom you’d given a life to live, and I’d run with it, run as hard as I could.
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