Synopses & Reviews
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 Dalí, 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.
Review
"[I]n these pages [Gray] uses all her writerly gifts her skills of observation, emotional recall and, yes, detachment to give the reader an intense and remarkably powerful portrait of her mother and stepfather, and to do so with love, judgmental candor and at least a measure of forgiveness." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Famous names and juicy stories, served up with literary elegance." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"A rich pastry of a book, stuffed with information on the immigrant experience, parent-child relations, social climbing, the fashion, retailing, and publishing industries, and the art world." Cleveland Plain Dealer
Synopsis
At the height of their fame, Alexander Liberman and Tatiana du Plessix Gray were the grandest power couple in the New York City fashion world, gifted Russian émigrés who consorted with Dali and Dietrich and told American women how to look, where to travel, and what to read. As told by their daughter, the distinguished writer Francine du Plessix Gray, their saga combines romance, glamour, and pathos. Their adulation for success was as obsessive as their fierce, neurotic love for each other, and they treated everyone elseincluding Francinewith ruthless opportunism. Them is a work of Tolstoyan emotional power as well as a brilliant social history of its subjects age.
Synopsis
The dramatic, untold story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev, a doomed love story and a shattering portrait of an artist.
Synopsis
Serge Prokofiev was one of the twentieth centuryand#8217;s most brilliant composers yet is an enigma to historians and his fans. Why did he leave the West and move to the Soviet Union despite Stalinand#8217;s crimes? Why did his astonishing creativity in the 1930s soon dissolve into a far less inspiring output in his later years? The answers can finally be revealed, thanks to Simon Morrisonand#8217;s unique and unfettered access to the familyand#8217;s voluminous papers and his ability to reconstruct the tragic, riveting life of the composerand#8217;s wife, Lina.
Morrisonand#8217;s portrait of the marriage of Lina and Serge Prokofiev is the story of a remarkable woman who fought for survival in the face of unbearable betrayal and despair and of the irresistibly talented but heartlessly self-absorbed musician she married. Born to a Spanish father and Russian mother in Madrid at the end of the nineteenth century and raised in Brooklyn, Lina fell in love with a rising-star composerand#8212;and defied convention to be with him, courting public censure. She devoted her life to Serge and to art, training to be an operatic soprano and following her brilliant husband to Stalinand#8217;s Russia. Just as Serge found initial acclaimand#8212;before becoming constricted by the harsh doctrine of socialist-realist musicand#8212;Lina was at first accepted and later scorned, ending her singing career. Serge abandoned her and took up with another woman. Finally, Lina was arrested and shipped off to the gulag in 1948. She would be held in captivity for eight awful years. Meanwhile, Serge found himself the tool of an evil regime to which he was forced to accommodate himself.
The contrast between Lina and Serge is one of strength and perseverance versus utter self-absorption, a remarkable human drama that draws on the forces of art, sacrifice, and the struggle against oppression. Readers will never forget the tragic drama of Linaand#8217;s life, and never listen to Sergeand#8217;s music in quite the same way again.
www.hmhbooks.com/linaandserge
About the Author
Simon Morrison is Professor of Music History at Princeton, where he earned his PhD in musicology. A leading authority on composer Serge Prokofiev, he is the author of The People's Artist, along with numerous scholarly articles, and features for the New York Times. In 2011, Morrison was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.