Living lives of glamour in the midst of chaos

One can imagine what Francine du Plessix Gray’s image-conscious parents would think of her 11th book, a spellbinding, warts-and-all double portrait of them. The author’s mother was Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman, the imperious fashion icon and Saks Fifth Avenue milliner whose gaze “had the psychic impact of a can of Mace.” Her stepfather was the influential art and editorial director of the Conde Nast magazine empire, Alexander Liberman, the “suave, peerlessly trilingual” painter, sculptor and “legendary publishing wizard.”

Fortunately for the Libermans, Gray waited until both were dead to begin “Them,” a dazzling account of their lives, written with love but also with critical scrutiny that unravels “the webs of deceits

Tatiana and Alex, as Gray portrays them, were less than ideal nurturers, but her recognition of their other gifts saves them from bitter carping. Just look at the material they’ve given her. One of New York’s first power couples, their inner circle included Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dali and Irving Penn. They survived two of the 20th century’s major upheavals: the Russian Revolution and the German occupation of Paris. These were the serially unlucky, caught repeatedly in history’s sticky web.

Gray captures it vividly, from 15-year-old Tatiana reciting Russian poetry on St. Petersburg street corners for Red Army soldiers in exchange for hunks of dry bread during the famine of 1921 to a nightmarish 1941 train ride from Madrid to Lisbon, fleeing panic-stricken Europe. She evokes her mother’s commanding “maximalism,” bedecked in massive costume jewelry and spouting fashion edicts in heavily accented rudimentary English (“Meeeenk is for football”), and her stepfather’s ruthless social climbing and drive toward monumentalism, even in his art.

In a book stuffed with colorful stories, one of the most remarkable is the long-suppressed tale of Tatiana’s passionate (yet carefully unconsummated) relationship with the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, which Gray calls “the central tragedy” of her mother’s life. They met in Paris in 1928. Gray characterizes the two powerful presences as fellow narcissists and exhibitionists who shared a passion for poetry. Tatiana became Mayakovsky’s last muse, inspiring two of his best lyric poems.

The Mayakovsky story is documented with the help of a packet of letters -- as carefully preserved as Tatiana’s premarital virginity -- that the author finally wrested from her stepfather on his deathbed in 1999, eight years after her mother’s death. Gray learns how close Tatiana came to following Mayakovsky to Soviet Russia to marry. Had she done so, her mother probably would have become “one of the twenty million persons lost in Stalin’s purges.” She describes how the repressive regime already was persecuting Mayakovsky when he committed suicide in April 1930.

Luckily for Gray, Tatiana gave up waiting for Mayakovsky and impetuously married the author’s father, Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix, a French diplomat and pilot. Francine was born nine months later, in September 1930. Within three years, her parents were leading separate lives from their shared Paris apartment. Anti-Semitic yet fervently patriotic, Lt. Du Plessix was flying to join Charles De Gaulle when he was shot down over Gibraltar in 1940, an early casualty of the French Resistance. His death was kept from his adoring daughter for more than a year, to her lasting resentment.

The second hero of Gray’s childhood was her mother’s lover and eventual second husband, Alexander Liberman. Born in Kiev in 1912, Liberman was the son of a flamboyant actress, Genrieta Mironovna, who was half Gypsy, half Romanian Jew, and Semyon Lieberman, a Russian Jew who became a highly successful authority on lumber, serving first the White Russian regime then the Soviets before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1926. As was typical among the Russian intelligentsia, Semyon, who would later drop the “e” in the family name, had sent his son to be educated in England and France.

Liberman played a central part in Tatiana’s escape with her daughter from occupied France, then became Francine’s primary caregiver and disciplinarian, relieving Tatiana of this and most other burdens -- “a principal dynamic of our family life for the following half century.”

Gray, who is clearly no stranger to psychotherapy, analyzes her parents with a practiced if sometimes reductive hand. She traces Liberman’s fondness for stark white decor back to his anachronistic all-white nursery in St. Petersburg; his orderliness and sartorial conservatism -- he wore an unvarying uniform of dark suits and knit ties -- to the Calvinist French boarding school he attended in his teens; his muted libido to his embarrassment with “the hoydenish aura of his brazen mother.” She stereotypically attributes Liberman’s least appealing qualities, which she describes as disloyalty, deviousness and volatility, to his Gypsy provenance.

Liberman’s mother took the stage name Henriette Pascar in Paris, where she also took dozens of lovers. By her son’s estimate, she had 17 abortions and seven plastic surgeries in her life. For three years in the 1920s, one of her lovers was Tatiana’s uncle, the dashing artist and explorer Alexandre (Sasha) Iacovleff. It was at Iacovleff’s studio that 14-year-old Alex first met Tatiana; the majestic blond, six years his senior, barely noticed him.

Reading Gray’s memoir, one is struck by the almost incestuous tightness of the Russian refugees’ world. Liberman’s first two jobs in France in the 1930s, in graphic arts, came through two of his mother’s lovers. Fellow Russian emigre Iva Patcevitch was instrumental in providing him entree to Conde Nast, which hired him for Vogue’s art department in 1941.

The Libermans were not altogether spared from seeing themselves written about by their fashion-model-beautiful but determinedly intellectual daughter, who veered from their stylish world when she married painter Cleve Gray and moved to Connecticut in the 1950s. Her autobiographical first novel, “Lovers and Tyrants,” depicts an aloof mother and an erratically attentive French father. As she notes when discussing her parents’ reaction to the 1976 bestseller -- pride mixed with “terror and vexation” -- her writing not only captured their generally wandering attention but “conferred the only measure of power I’d ever had over them.”

It is interesting to see a more mature, unfettered writer return to material she first presented under the protective guise of fiction. Although her mother’s lover is whitewashed from the fictional account of their escape from the Nazis, what remains consistent between the two books is the author’s heartbreaking sense of herself as an inconvenient package bundled off to other caregivers and desperately currying her parents’ favor.

The second half of “Them,” which chronicles the Libermans’ success in America along with Tatiana’s alcohol and drug use and Alex’s “brutal rules of social pragmatism,” is hard put to compete with the old-world chapters, although it is still a fascinating read. Gray’s writing is less sharp as the narrative hits home, weighted down somewhat by personal animus and several clunky transitions, such as “Back to my house tour.... “

“Them” makes it clear that Gray came to accept her mother’s flawed but “deep, timid love.” Curiously, she is less forgiving of Alex’s shortcomings. She smarts like a jilted lover when recalling how Alex, newly widowed, married his Filipino nurse and “fired his original family” in a denouement that reads like a Paul Theroux story. Fortunately, she keeps bitterness in check by infusing her book with awareness of the responsibility of her undertaking: “I’m the sole custodian of their memory.... How painful and bittersweet to be finally alone, in charge.”

Writing about the summer after Paris fell, Gray describes herself as “a tough, resilient, endlessly optimistic child” -- an impression borne out by many charming photographs scattered throughout the book. Her radiance brightens even the darkest aspects of this riveting, remarkable synthesis of calamities both personal and historical.