Glitter, Glitter : Magazine Man : ALEX: The Life of Alexander Liberman, <i> By Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 385 pp.)</i>

Can you tell a book by its index? Tina Brown, Picasso, Maeght, Miro, Penn, Paley, Suzy and Ivana Trump are just a few of the names appearing in the well-populated index--equal parts People, Town & Country and Art Forum--behind “Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman” by Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins.

Ultimately, the index says everything and it says nothing. Liberman is the eminence grise at Conde Nast magazines, none of which happened to be mentioned above. To those orbiting in and around the Conde Nast galaxy in New York; its chic, fashion- and celebrity-driven publications--today including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, Glamour and The New Yorker--Conde Nast is simply the center of the world. If you are one of those blessed to work there--as is the case of the wife and husband authors (Kazanjian writes for Vogue, Tomkins for the New Yorker)--you breathe a different air, or at least travel by superior transportation (company limousines are among the well-known perks for upper-echelon staffers). The more one becomes immersed in Liberman’s compelling life and remarkable career, the easier it is to forget that Conde Nast is only one of many publishing galaxies, including Hearst’s, whose Harper’s Bazaar was Vogue’s long-time rival.

But Liberman, 81, stands alone in the publishing world. He’s simply outdistanced everyone, including his publishers. Rejected for a job at Harper’s Bazaar, he went to work in Vogue’s art department in 1941. (One week on the job, Conde Nast’s reigning art director fired Liberman after seeing his first double-page spread, but the following week, Nast rehired him.) Two years later, Liberman was promoted to Vogue’s art director. Thirty-one years ago, he was crowned editorial director of the organization, and throughout the years, his visual and journalistic senses have neither aged nor stagnated. Early on, he banned “visions of loveliness” in favor of exciting, of-the-moment, occasionally gritty photographs that reflected changing attitudes toward women and the world. He has continually rethought and reinvented the company’s growing stable of magazines through the decades, nurturing many of the era’s finest photographers along the way.

“In the highly volatile world of big-time magazine publishing, where editors and art directors are as expendable as first wives,” explain the authors, “it was astonishing that anyone had managed to stay on top as long as Alex had. One possible explanation was that there had never been a clearly definable Liberman style--no signature look to the magazines he directed, nothing you could point to and decide was out-of-date.”

But back to the index. In the process, Liberman met, partied, hired and fired just about every stylish and artistic creature in New York, Europe and his native Russia, although, be forewarned, some make only perfunctory cameo appearances. (The Ivana is but a blip, mentioned only because she appeared once on Vogue’s cover.)

Far more involving, though, is Liberman’s complex nature (never entirely resolved here, nor could it be), his deep artistic frustrations and his baffling relationship and lifelong devotion to Tatiana, his second wife, a Russian dragon lady who was his kindred soul. Together, they lived beyond their means as glamorously as the beautiful people Alex celebrated at work. Narcissistic, controlling, “famously difficult” (Babe and William S. Paley dumped her after one lunch) and occasionally cruel, Tatiana nevertheless was completely dependent on Alex and his devotion to her in return was legend. “Alex himself once admitted that there were times when Tatiana’s rudeness and her boisterous sallies made him cringe, but he never showed it, and he never tried to change her. His public attitude was that she could do no wrong.”

Alexander Liberman was born in Kiev five years before the Bolshevik revolution. His father, Semeon, a Jewish Menshevik, became a high-ranking, non-Communist timber specialist in the new regime. When Alex had become a seriously unmanageable child, Semeon managed to enroll him in a series of strict private boarding schools in England and France, where his unruliness was quickly dealt with, but he felt understandably abandoned.

At L’Ecole des Roches, off-limits to Jews, Alex was listed as a Protestant and took communion. Against the backdrop of New York’s anti-Semitic high-society swirl, Liberman’s religious identity is glossed over with one sentence: “I never wanted to deny my Jewishness,” he says, “or to pretend that I’m not what I am. But the truth is that my life, my culture is based very much on Protestant, Calvinist ethics.” His mother, half Jewish, half Gypsy, was an exotic creature and a flagrantly unfaithful wife with a bent for theater who kept her maiden name of Henriette Pascar. She eventually joined Alex in England, though the source of funds that supported her comfortable lifestyle and Lanvin and Poiret wardrobe was never clear. Henriette, and one of her lovers, society portraitist Alexandre Iacovleff, both encouraged Alex’s artistic side. He was briefly enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before his mother’s newest lover, Lucien Vogel, a well-known publisher, hired him to work in the art department of his cutting-edge photographic news weekly, Vu . On a personal side, after a brief, failed marriage to a “blond goddess” and model, Alex fell madly in love with Iacovleff’s blond, “glorious” looking niece, Comtesse Tatiana du Plessix, several years his senior and otherwise engaged in a non-functioning marriage. Alex vigorously pursued her, and after the count’s death during the war, Semeon, now known as Simon, a capitalist living in New York, helped Alex, Tatiana and her daughter, Francine, emigrate to the United States.

Weekdays, Liberman was building the careers of photographers like Irving Penn and exposing Vogue’s society readers to features on great artists (which he photographed himself); weekends were consumed with Tatiana and art. For a good part of his life, Liberman was an unhappy artist, unrecognized by people who counted and even by people who didn’t count. “Oh, Alex, they’d make such beautiful sweaters,” opined Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, upon viewing his circle paintings. Not even his wife’s disinterest in his artistic output deterred him; she “grudgingly” hung one of his paintings at home. He was unable to leave Conde Nast, though he often wanted to and realized that his fashion-world credentials worked against him where critics were concerned. But even as Liberman became more entrenched in the company, earning just under $1 million a year, he never gave up his yearning to be acknowledged, which finally came in the ‘70s. Liberman’s monumental metal sculptures were bought by major museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but he was still frustrated because his paintings were overlooked.

One senses that chunks of Liberman’s Conde Nast life was captured with the equivalent of a photographer’s soft focus and back-lighting, especially given the credentials of the authors (they maintain Liberman gave them total control over the book). In the office, he comes out unscathed, a perfect gentleman, even though he has a well-known reputation for making editors quake in their Chanel pumps. There is only a hint of his “icy coldness.” And we don’t hear from those who were summarily fired. But there’s no question that anyone serious about fluffy magazines would revel in Liberman’s world and kill to have the opportunity to work with the master.