Them Read online

  It was obvious to me that those forty pages about Mother as Fashion Icon were the germ of a book I must eventually write. But I knew that I could not narrate her story without also narrating that of my stepfather, her lifelong companion, the legendary publishing wizard Alexander Liberman, who was to outlive her by seven years. To write truthfully about anyone who is still alive is a Utopian task, suspect at best. So I bided my time, looking on a projected family memoir as one of several distant ventures, writing two more biographies of persons as eccentric, in their own ways, as my parents: the marquis de Sade and Simone Weil. And not until 2001, a year after my cherished stepfather’s own passing, did I reach a stage in the process of mourning that allowed me to write this book.

  While remaining deeply private, these two complex parents of mine, Tatiana and Alex Liberman, were publicity hounds who enjoyed being constantly on show, who splashed their glamorous lives, their nimble wisecracks, their ultrastylish interiors onto the pages of our country’s poshest magazines. And in view of the innumerable mementos they hoarded, I suspect that both of them always wished for a biographer. Beyond marriage and death certificates and the many thousands of photographs they squirreled away, my archives are now enriched by documents as diverse as my stepfather’s certificate of circumcision, signed in 1912 by the chief rabbi of Kiev; the letters he had written to his parents as a nine-year-old in a British public school; his report cards from his French boarding school; correspondence between his parents that dates back to the 1920s; love letters he had exchanged with my mother in the 1930s; the Nansen passport on which he traveled to America in 1941; his certificate of naturalization as an American citizen; orders he had placed, during his days as a chief executive of the Condé Nast Publications, for my mother’s wristwatch bands—a gilt leather model that remained unchanged over the decades and that he ordered by the dozen. Among my mother’s papers I found the various passports she held from the 1920s on—Russian, then French, then American; certificates for sick leave, of 1890s vintage, issued to her maternal grandfather, principal director of the Marinsky Imperial Ballet in her native St. Petersburg; a trove of documents concerning her uncle, the distinguished artist and explorer Alexandre Iacovleff, whom I chronicle in the second chapter of this work; love letters from the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—he looked on her as one of his two principal muses—which are now integrated into my third and fourth chapters; most every missive I had ever written her from camp, college, or abroad; the Ausweis (travel permit) that permitted us to leave Occupied France in the latter half of 1940. In sum, my parents seemed to have deliberately prepared many sets, props, objective data a biographer would need to limn a lavish portrait.

  I stress the word “objective.” For while living exceedingly public lives, these two émigrés who were one of New York’s first “power couples” both remained deeply guarded about their inner emotions; their last decades in particular were laced with a staggering number of deceits and subterfuges. And they had vastly different views of the kinds of biographies they each desired. My stepfather—a man obsessed with controlling all within his reach—wanted it written during his lifetime, by someone other than me. My mother, on the other hand, preferred that it be done after her death, by no one other than her daughter. And if I was able to fulfill her wish and also to discern some truth through the facade of ruses elaborated in late life by both my parents, it was due to my practice of keeping a journal, a habit I have had for over half a century. Because of the illnesses and addictions that growingly plagued them, in the last decades of my mother’s and stepfather’s lives I felt particularly impelled to record every nuance of their words and their deportment, and this documentation served to flesh out the narrative of those increasingly bizarre years.

  But I am the child of three remarkable parents. My earlier writings have several times dealt with my biological father, the heroic Bertrand du Plessix, whose death with the Free French in World War II was the central tragedy of my youth; yet I’ve often sensed that no portrait of him would be complete until I set him into the context of those two other parents, Tatiana and Alex, in whose lives his destiny played a pivotal role. Not until I finished this book did I ruefully sense that I had finally laid him to rest.

  As for my mother, who is this project’s original muse, shortly after I’d handed this book to my publishers I had another dream about her, which went this way: I am standing in front of my home, a brand-new house of dark gray stone, when Mother appears again, once more very meek and in every way different from the woman I knew: middle-aged and stockily built, with black hair and a wide, smiling, rather Oriental face. As she comes to my door, she kneels graciously before it, telling me how happy she is to make this visit, what an honor it is to be invited to my home. I in turn kneel before her, telling her how grateful and moved I am to receive her. Once more, there flows between us that great accord and serenity I’d experienced in her earlier appearance a decade ago. The “house” in this most recent dream, so my instincts tell me, is the edifice of words I have built to commemorate her and the remarkable man who shared her life—a text in which, like any proper biographer, I strove for a compassionate severity, for that balance of ruthlessness and tenderness that were at the heart of my mother’s own character and that she might have been the first to respect.

  A Note on Transliteration

  Transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet permits a variety of spellings. And the problem is compounded, in my mother’s family, by the fact that most every one of its members used a different form of transliteration when the Revolution of 1917 forced them to flee Russia. My great-uncle Alexandre chose to transliterate his name as “Iacovleff” but both my mother and his sister, Great Aunt Sandra, spelled their names on their French passports and other identity papers as “Yacovlef.” To make the issue even more perplexing, the vast body of critical and biographical literature published in the Soviet Union on the issue of my mother’s romance with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has consistently referred to her as “Tatiana Yakovleva.” That is the form of transliteration I have followed, if only because that is the one under which she entered Russian literary history.

  It is perhaps fitting that these translations from the Cyrillic have been so anarchically varied. This is a saga about different forms of exile, and the diverse phoneticizations of my Russian family’s name strike me as being emblematic of the forging of self-identity undertaken, throughout history, by all émigrés.

  Tatiana in her heyday in the mid-1950s, promoting her hats in Chicago. At her side, a Saks Fifth Avenue executive.

  PART ONE

  The Old World

  “We must feel everything, everything we can. We are here for that.”

  —HENRY JAMES,The Tragic Muse

  ONE

  Tatiana

  My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan. Having asserted that one eighth of her blood was Tartar and only seven eighths of it “ordinary Russian,” with a panache that no one else could have pulled off she proceeded to drop a few names in the chronology of our lineage: Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, and then the great Mogul monarch Babur, from whose favorite Kirghiz concubine my great-grandmother was descended, and voilà!, our ancestry was established.

  You couldn’t have argued the point with her, for in her quest for dramatic effect Tatiana du Plessix Liberman would have set all of human history on its head. Besides, you mightn’t have dared to risk a showdown: in her prime, she was five feet nine and a half inches tall and 140 pounds in weight, and the majesty of her presence, the very nearsighted, chestnut-hued, indeed Asiatic eyes that fixed you with a brutally critical gaze through blue-tinted bifocals, had the psychic impact of a can of Mace. And you may not even have wanted to call my mother’s bluff, for a kinship to the great Khan was so symbolically fitting: perennially adorned with large, blazing costume jewelry that recalled instruments of torture or insignias of archaic cults, she strode into a room, shawls spectacularly draped about her shoulders, like a trib
al war goddess and moved through life with a speed and fierceness that recalled the howling wind of the steppes. Tatiana was one of the most dazzling self-inventions of her time, a force of nature all right, and those of us who loved her may well remain under her spell until the day we die.

  By profession, my mother was a designer of hats—her working name was “Tatiana of Saks”—and according to many authorities she was the finest hat designer of the midcentury. For twenty-three years, she had her own custom-design salon at Saks Fifth Avenue, where over the decades she advised thousands of women how to lure their men, keep their husbands, and enchant their luncheon companions through the proper tilt of a beret or the sly positioning of a black dotted veil. She was hailed by The New York Times as “the milliner’s milliner,” lauded for typifying “the feminine elegance that makes her exclusive creations the crowning glories for discriminating women.” She was perhaps best known for her ethereal spring hats—casques of pastel-shaded veiling, leafy pillows of tulle speckled with violets, turbans of frothy gauze swirled beehive-style in shades of lilac, dynamite pinks, and grassy greens, bretons of rose-printed silk surah displaying bundles of silk roses underneath their rolled brims. She never did any preliminary sketching or drawing of her hats but created them by sitting in front of a large mirror, sculpting and draping felt, velours, organza, or satin onto her head, using her own reflected image, eight hours a day, two hundred and fifty days a year. Mirrors were the central metaphor of her life, and I can think of few women whose innate narcissism has been more perfectly fulfilled.

  Beyond being a renowned milliner, Tatiana was also one of a small handful of professional women who were looked on as New York City’s most commanding fashion presences—others were editor Diana Vreeland, designer Valentina, and Hattie Carnegie’s chief stylist, Pauline Potter, later Pauline de Rothschild. Yet Tatiana was by far the least orthodox trendsetter of those three, and no canon of fashion did she transgress more violently than Diana Vreeland’s decree “Elegance is Refusal.” One might say that Tatiana perfected the art of too-muchness: the great hunks of fake jewelry she flung on herself included eight-inch-wide imitations of pre-Columbian breastplates, four-inch stretches of rhinestone bracelets, candelabras of paste earrings, and—her most famous logo—a massive dome ring of quasi-rubies resembling the top of a bishop’s crozier.

  If the tape l’oeil of Tatiana’s style still managed to be renowned as one of New York’s most “elegant,” it is because elegance is above all a matter of consistency; and her gestures, her speech, her entire manner and presence were absolutely in line with the maximalism of her getup. She was brazen, brusque, intolerant, blatantly elitist, atrociously impatient, prodigally generous, and as categorical in her tastes as a Soviet commissar. She did not converse but proclaimed, and many of her decrees had to do with debunking and deriding conventional symbols of affluence: “Meeeenk is for football,” she said. “Diamonds are for suburbs.” No arbiter of taste I know of has so militantly proclaimed the gaucheness of displayed wealth, the supremacy of comfort and clean line. She took such pride in the thirty-five-dollar set of Macy’s garden furniture with which she equipped our first tiny rooms on Central Park South that it accompanied her wherever she lived for almost fifty years. Upon her death, I had to evaluate the very modest personal holdings she left me, and I discovered that the famous ring of “rubies” with which she had stunned New York for a half century was made exclusively of mediocre garnets and was estimated to be worth some twelve hundred dollars.

  The world had to come to Tatiana; she made very few steps toward it, particularly toward the United States. Despite her immense literary culture, in half a century she never bothered to learn more than fragmented English, and at the time of her death in 1991, she was still getting her world news from French periodicals and New York’s Russian-language newspaper, Novoye Russkoye Slovo. She detested traveling in any part of the Americas and had a 1920-vintage cartoon-strip view of our Midwest: “Butcher!” she shouted at a dentist she disliked after an emergency tooth extraction, “Go back to Cheeecago!” The faux pas she made in the English language were epic: she once went to FAO Schwarz, flanked by my eight-and ten-year-old sons, and announced to the salesman, “I want to buy kike.” “Kite, Grandma, kite,” the children pleaded.

  “I want kike!” she insisted. Her declarations about whatever she currently thought was The Best—be it in couture, resorts, food, medical doctors, literature—were as flamboyant as her savage jewelry. She had a Nietzschean faith in success (“One does not argue with winners”) and fervently believed in snobbism (“Snobs are always right”). Hers was an old-fashioned brand of elitism, in part corny and in part humanistic, indifferent to money and dually geared, like that of many Russians, to pedigree and to public achievement.

  An element of Mother’s dictatorial largesse was that she wanted to share (some would say impose) every one of her enthusiasms on her friends and loved ones. Her need to control and direct the lives of others extended to the most menial details. Arriving at a beach on the first day of vacation—she was a sun worshipper and a crack swimmer, beaches were her paradise—she would walk very fast ahead of us, her slender arms clanging with tribal gold, and patrol it at length: she critically examined the quality of the sand, the clarity of the water, the status of the population. And then, having found what she judged to be the finest spot on that stretch of seashore, she would holler to her group: “Venez ici tout de suite, c’est le seul endroit!” “Come here at once! This is the only spot!” And we would all troop along. For we knew that on issues of bodily comfort and of most anything that had to do with the wisdom of life’s pleasures she was usually right, and we feared that if we did not follow her orders the arrival of a busload of noisy Swedish nudists would subject us to her derisive “I told you so.” It is through this dictatorial spirit that Tatiana characterized not only the art of savoir vivre but also the essence of the fashionable mind, which inevitably issues its decrees in the imperative tense—“A must for the fall,” “The best look of the season”—and has to do with spreading, as swiftly as possible, the infection of style.

  Yet beneath Tatiana’s despotic manner, beneath her exhibitionism and flamboyance, there hid a shy, deeply private, very self-demeaning child-woman whose complexities were forged in the terror of the Russian Revolution.

  Tatiana’s maternal grandfather, Nikolai Sergeevich Aistov, a dancer and director of the Marinsky Imperial Ballet, late 1870s.

  I have photographs that show my mother in 1912 Russia, age six, an assertive tot with long blond curls dressed in a lavish Paquin frock and seated, Récamier-like, on an ornate velvet couch, already a commanding, shrewdly controlling presence, already fully aware of the effect she is having on her little public. (“Now you know why there was revolution,” she often quipped about the photo, pointing at the elaborate Parisian dress.) Born in St. Petersburg, Tatiana Yakovleva came from a family of intelligentsia—architects, lawyers, government officials, and also a great many performing artists—who were suffused with that craving for French culture and luxuries, and also with an adulation of pedigree, from which few upper-class Russians were exempt. She always claimed, for instance, that her maternal grandfather, Nikolai Sergeevich Aistov, one of our most colorful forebears, was “a prominent government official of noble descent.” The truth is far more interesting than her elitism would allow. Nikolai Sergeevich, whose father made his living as a singer, was in fact a distinguished dancer and a very successful ballet entrepreneur; one of our best-documented progenitors, he characterizes many of our family traits, most particularly in his affinity for striking poses.

  Nikolai Sergeevich Aistov, born in 1853, graduated from the St. Petersburg Theatrical School, where he earned grades of “excellent” for behavior; “good” for math, religion, fencing, history, acting, and singing; and merely “satisfactory” for ballet and ballroom dancing. This did not hinder him, however, from being accepted as a member of the Marinsky Imperial Ballet, where he remained a member
of the corps de ballet for over a decade, being ultimately promoted, at the age of forty-two, to the coveted rank of premier danseur. I have a cherished photograph of him, a tall, stately man with features of classical beauty, in full stage regalia. He is, I believe, in the role of the pharaoh in Pharaoh’s Daughter, one of those early extravaganzas of Marius Petipa, set at the Pyramids, which featured exotic Egyptian dancers, scheming British archaeologists, drug-induced dream states, and awakening mummies.