Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated "white Russian" who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian émigré community living in Paris in the 1930s, the two were destined to meet. They began a passionate affair, and the year after Paris was occupied in World War II they fled to New York with Tatiana's young daughter, Francine.
There they determinedly rose to the top of high society, holding court to a Who's Who list of the midcentury's intellectuals and entertainers. Flamboyant and outrageous, bold and brilliant, they were irresistible to friends like Marlene Dietrich, Salvador DalÃ, and the publishing tycoon Condé Nast. But to those who knew them well they were also highly neurotic, narcissistic, and glacially self-promoting, prone to cut out of their lives, with surgical precision, close friends who were no longer of use to them.
Tatiana became an icon of New York fashion, and the hats she designed for Saks Fifth Avenue were de rigueur for stylish women everywhere. Alexander Liberman, who devotedly raised Francine as his own child from the time she was nine, eventually came to preside over the entire Condé Nast empire. The glamorous life they shared was both creative and destructive and was marked by an exceptional bond forged out of their highly charged love and raging self-centeredness. Their obsessive adulation of success and elegance was elevated to a kind of worship, and the high drama that characterized their lives followed them to their deaths. Tatiana, increasingly consumed with nostalgia for a long-lost Russia, spent her last years addicted to painkillers. Shortly after her death, Alexander, then age eighty, shocked all who knew him by marrying her nurse.
Them: A Portrait of Parents is a beautifully written homage to the extraordinary lives of two fascinating, irrepressible people who were larger than life emblems of a bygone age. Written with honesty and grace by the person who knew them best, this generational saga is a survivor's story. Tatiana and Alexander survived the Russian Revolution, the fall of France, and New York's factory of fame. Their daughter, Francine, survived them.
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"Them" isn't particularly preoccupied with drama or revelation, indeed, sometimes it seems that the author barely participated in the family dynamic that she describes. It's not that du Plessix Gray didn't have enough material for a tell-all: the author's parents' lives were defined by emotional restraint the desire to impress others. "Them" is a much more difficult endeavor than a straight tell-all account of a messy family life, it's a meticulous description and dissection of her parents drives, neuroses and personalities. In the book's opening pages, the author suggests that she'd been waiting her entire life – until after her mother and stepfather had passed away – to start writing "Them," but even with a few decades to prepare, composing it must have taken considerable bravery. While her mother and her stepfather were, in some respects, ill-equipped to raise her, the account that du Plessix Gray gives of her parents contains a minimum of regret, recrimination, or bitterness, even forgiving, more or less, her stepfather's too-hasty remarriage to her mother's nurse. She readily admits that both her mother and stepfather were immensely talented and passionate, but also portrays them as calculating, money-hungry and egocentric. "Them" provides a remarkably detailed, well-rounded, and perceptive portrait of both her parents as individuals, spouses, and, finally, as parents. How many of us, authors or not, will ever see our own parents with such remarkable clarity and remove?
One of the blurbs on the back of my copy of "Them" commends it for succeeding both as a personal narrative and as a cultural history. This is an apt description, as "Them" describes a wealthy, educated, refined and, above all, exclusive slice of postwar New York life that fetishized European art and culture. Alex Liberman's Continental manners seems to have charmed just about everyone he came in contact with, even those who considered him a manipulative social climber, and du Plessix Gray's mother's refusal to improve her heavily-accented English probably helped her succeed as an upscale fashion retailer. The United States seems to be a more confident and unabashedly nationalistic place now; I'm not sure if I can name any part of American society that aspires to Frenchness the same way the Libermans and their confederates did. Times have changed, but, in a way, I'm glad that du Plessix Gray's memoir has preserved her parents fleeting, but admirably stylish, cultural moment for us. Recommended. (