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 Fashion
Icons of the 20th Century
It may be age or accumulated wisdom that compels people from older generations to lament the loss of some intangible quality from the past. As I slide towards the nebulous and unmentionable post-middle age, I too find myself complaining that people today are not civil or cultivated or that they have no manners or charm. I am particularly critical of today's celebrities. To me they appear prosaic and one-dimensional whereas celebrities from the past have personalities, mystique, charm, charisma and some indefinable thing that makes reading about them compelling. Paris Hilton? Donatella Versace? Their lives could be summed up in one paragraph, but it would take reams and reams of paper to decipher Greta Garbo or Colette. "Them, A Memoir of Parents" by Francine du Plessix Gray is one of the two most interesting and compelling books I've read this year, the other one being "The Orientalist" by Tom Reiss (reviewed April 3). "Them" is a biography of Alexander and Tatiana Liberman by their daughter Francine du Plessix Gray. Alexander Liberman was the artist, sculptor and editorial director (or is it dictator?) of the Conde Nast publishing empire. "For four decades he told American women how to look, where to travel, what to read," writes the author in way of introducing him. His wife Tatiana was the celebrated Saks Fifth Avenue hat designer. But she was most famous for being the muse and the love of Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution who shot himself when he was denied a visa to return to Paris to marry his aristocratic, anti-revolution White Russian émigré love. The lives of Tatiana and Alexander Liberman are entwined with the pivotal events of the twentieth century. They also shared life's stage with some of the most interesting, influential and notorious players of that century. Alex's flamboyant and domineering mother was determined to turn him into an artist. She engaged a famous Russian émigré artist also her lover to be her son's art teacher. That artist was Tatiana's uncle and it is in that uncle's studio that the teenager Alex glimpsed from afar the statuesque beauty who was to become the love of his life. Both Tatiana and Alex came from the Russian intelligentsia. They met in Paris in the 1920s to where their families had escaped from the Russian Revolution. Tatiana was a blond and statuesque beauty that had the entire Paris beau monde at her feet. Alex's flamboyant and domineering mother was determined to turn him into an artist. She engaged a famous Russian émigré artist also her lover to be her son's art teacher. That artist was Tatiana's uncle and it is in that uncle's studio that the teenager Alex glimpsed from afar the statuesque beauty who was to become the love of his life. After Mayakovsky was denied exit visa to Paris, Tatiana married the French Vicomte Bernard du Plessix. Their daughter Francine (the author) was born in 1930. Bernard was killed in WWII on his way to join the Free French while Alex, Tatiana and Francine made their way to America. Tatiana and Alex had dynamic personalities and were extremely ambitious. They set out to conquer the New World, or at least its hub - New York. They put their considerable charm and talents to work into cultivating friendships with those who could be useful to them. Frequently, Francine too fell by the wayside, the distance between parents and child widening and expressed so aptly by the title of this book, "Them." Many of Alex's friends and colleagues interviewed for this book comment on his ability to ingratiate himself with people in power as well as his ruthlessness when it became expedient to fire good friends. "He was as arduous a self-promoter as you can meet," Lord Snowdon is quoted as saying, "very slippery, like an eel, always wheeling and dealing for himself." And according to Leo Lerman, "Alex's warmth was often Machiavellian and feigned." Once he climbed to the top of Conde Nast, Alex had no qualms about firing or dismissing those who had helped him get there. The first casualty was Iva Patcevitch, his "best friend, his brother," the aristocratic Russian émigré who had become publisher after the death of Conde Nast and on whose coattails Alex had ridden. Later on the ax fell on Diana Vreeland and then on Vreeland's successor - Grace Mirabella and on Alex's "oldest best friend" Leo Lerman. Tatiana and Alex and everybody who was anybody in the world of fashion during the middle decades of the 20th century dance through time over the 500 pages and then become old and ailing, their time and place usurped by a new generation. It is this inconsolable passing of time and place that the author describes most poignantly.
Ophelia Georgiev Roop
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