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Them: A Memoir of Parents
Francine du Plessix Gray
By
Published: Mar 26, 2009
Category:
Memoir
Once upon a time, Alexander Liberman was my role model. He was a tall Russian thoroughbred who wore tan linen suits in summer and grey flannel suits in winter weather. He spoke three languages. He called you “dear friend.” Nothing flustered him.
Alex was, for 50 years, the Editorial Director of Condé Nast Magazines — you know: Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Self, Allure and more. That made him the most powerful publishing executive on earth. He used that power creatively; he was a brilliant art director and designer, and he had a cheerful appreciation of vulgarity, which he believed gave magazines texture and the feel of the street. And he used that power brutally; Alex was notorious for ending the careers of editors who thought he adored them. It says everything about him that, in all his time at Condé Nast, he wrote not a single memo. He left no fingerprints. His victims never saw the blade coming.
Francine du Plessix Gray — Alex’s stepdaughter — waited until Alex and her mother, Tatiana, were dead to start writing her memoir. I gave it a few more years before picking it up. And I understand why. This is not a book about a loving mother. Nor is it a wet kiss to the stepfather who provided security. It’s very much a book about needy monsters. And, almost by definition, it’s a book about glamour, celebrity and money.
Them: A Memoir of Parents begins like this: “My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan.” You may imagine the level of charm, pretense and privilege that follows. At a tender age, Tatiana was the muse of the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. And yet, tellingly, she chose as a husband a French viscount by the name of Bertrand du Plessix. When he died, she was rescued from Europe by Liberman.
Alex Liberman had an elite Russian childhood. He traveled with his father in a prince’s private train; when he needed to leave Russia, Lenin signed the letter. At 19, he was the assistant art editor of a top-rank French magazine; in New York a few years later, he began a meteoric ascent. And at a snobby shop like Condé Nast, why not — he was a gifted White Russian émigré married to a woman with a title.
For all their social skills, parenting was not a priority. Tatiana and Alex were slow to tell Francine about her father’s death; they left the details to family friends. At 15, Francine had a riding accident at a Colorado camp and needed five surgeries; Tatiana and Alex telephoned their concern. And Alex had her, as a teen, pose nude for his camera.
Gray tells these stories with a detachment that’s rare in memoirs — you might almost mistake her for a biographer. But she definitely has access to her feelings:
My twinkling surface gaiety made my inner chasm all the more secret, all the more my own, like a cave that only I could enter. So I smiled, curtsied, danced, made charming dinner conversation, twinkle, twinkle, little star, praises whirled and sparkled like a rainbow about me, my mother glowed with pride. Meanwhile, there lay inside me a private chamber in which I’d carefully buried my fears, a chamber that no one else could enter.
Fame came with a cost. Tatiana became addicted to Demerol. Alex, addicted to Tatiana, continued to be her “Superman”. But after she died in 1991, he married her Filipino nurse. What happens from there is too good to spoil — and is so boggling you’ll be glad you didn’t stop reading when the diet of famous names, chic spas and media greats became so rich you feared you might have to retreat to a warm bath with a copy of Vogue.
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