2
Stage-Set French
Glimpsed from afar, Central Park was a peaceful expanse of green lawns, spreading trees and craggy rocks. But up close, seven-year-old Diane Nemerov faced something else, something alien. Holding the hand of her French governess, whom ten years later she would describe as having âa hard, sad, quite lovely face . . . as if she had a very sad secret and she would never tell anyone,â the small girl stared in fascinated bewilderment at a shantytown of shacks made of sheet metal and cardboard. It was 1930. Over a hollow that once held the cityâs thirty-five-acre reservoir spread New Yorkâs most conspicuous Hooverville, an ugly boil at the start of the Great Depression. (Later, it would be flattened into the Great Lawn.) But none of this was comprehensible to a child, and especially not to this child. Throughout Dianeâs early years, she was kept carefully guarded from the less fortunate aspects of life. âYou know, the outside world was so far from us . . . and one didnât ever expect to encounter it,â she once explained. âAnd for a long time I lived that way, as if there was a kind of contagion somewhere.â Because these strange creatures in Central Park participated in a life that was closed off to her, she looked on them with a kind of yearning: âI donât mean to say I would have envied those people, but just the idea that you couldnât get in there, you know, that you couldnât just wander down and that there was such a gulf.â
At the time, the Nemerov familyâwhich consisted of Dianeâs parents, older brother, and baby sisterâresided in a large Park Avenue apartment, a succession of chambers draped with heavy curtains to filter in a perpetual twilight gloom. In this protected nest, the Nemerovsâ needs were ministered to by three nannies, two maids, a cook, and a chauffeur. The furniture was reproduction eighteenth-century French, and there was pearl-pink Chinese wallpaper on the dining room walls. Theirs was a cushioned life that rested on a pile of furs. Frank Russek, Dianeâs maternal grandfather, was a Polish Jewish immigrant who opened a small fur store soon after arriving in New York in the late 1880s, when he was about fifteen years old. In 1897, he joined forces with two of his brothersâbacked, if family lore is to be trusted, by his bookmaker earningsâto expand to a larger shop. The Russek brothers thrived, and they were able in 1912 to relocate to a longed-for Fifth Avenue address, where they attracted an affluent clientele. By then, Frank and his wife, Rose, were raising two children: Gertrude, born in 1901, and Harold, who arrived a year later.
Gertrude was only about sixteen when she began noticing a young window dresser at Russeks Fifth Avenue. David Nemerov was also the son of Jewish immigrantsâless prosperous ones. His father, Meyer Nemerov, had come to New York from Kiev. Meyer was a devoutly pious man who, upon retiring from the real estate business, spent his days studying Talmud in the synagogue and promoting Jewish philanthropies in his Brooklyn neighborhood. âI always hated my father and his religion,â David would acknowledge late in life. Unlike his father, David moved smoothly through the material world. He had a keen sense of fashion and an even greater flair for marketing. Slim and well tailored, he presented a glamorous figure that was out of keeping with his poverty. The incongruity bothered him: he did not intend to remain poor forever. Although Frank and Rose Russek discouraged his interest in Gertrude, their daughter would not be denied. In late 1919, the charming, ambitious employee and the young, pretty heiress were married. They had given the Russeks no choice. Their first child, Howard, appeared in the world twenty-one weeks later. The family expanded to include Diane, born on March 14, 1923, and finally Renee, born five and a half years afterward. The two older children shared a special bond, into which the youngest did not enter.
The Russeks enterprise continued to flourish. Already one of the cityâs leading fur stores, it widened its mission to offer a full line of womenâs clothing and moved in 1924 into a Stanford White building on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Sixth Street that had been designed for Gorham Silver. The elegant but narrow eight-story structure eventually proved to be too small, and in 1936, the proprietors purchased and annexed a neighboring building. Over the next decade, they opened branches in Brooklyn and Chicago.
David Nemerov also progressed and prospered. He worked long hours at Russeks, first as merchandising director, then as fashion director and vice president, and finally, beginning in 1947, as president. A master at writing ad copy and a proponent of spending money to decorate store windows even during the Great Depression, Nemerov knew that a retailerâs first challenge was to attract customers into the shop. Once they were inside, he was adept at providing them with a reason to buy. He was among the first New York merchants to travel regularly to Paris to scrutinize the collections, which he would copy and sell at a cheaper price.
Gertrude loved sailing by ocean liner to France with David to see the couture presentations and to buy new clothes from French designers. (On one occasion, Howard, Diane and Dianeâs governess were taken along.) While the care and energy that David lavished on Russeks took place mostly out of the childrenâs view, the attention that Gertrude devoted to herself they witnessed daily. Mrs. Nemerov typically stayed in bed in the morning past eleven oâclock, smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, and applying cold cream and cosmetics to her face. At noon she liked to meet a friend to go shopping and to lunch at Schrafftâs. Some days she had the chauffeur drive her to Russeks, where she would bask in the deference that was her due. For her husband, the maneuvering of business was a form of art; after his retirement, he would take up painting, a long-held dream. As far as Gertrudeâs children could tell, their motherâs aspirations were narrower. She was a self-involved woman with conventional tastes and prejudices. âI wonder where you children came from,â she would say querulously to her artistically minded brood. The art forms she enjoyed were movies and theater. In a nod to these preferences, her older daughter was named for the leading character in a sentimental hit play, Seventh Heaven, that Gertrude saw during her pregnancy. The name was pronounced Dee-ANN, because that is how the Parisian heroine (who resists pressure from her wealthy relatives and marries the poor man she loves) said it. It was stage-set French, like the fake Louis furniture in the Nemerov apartment.
Not even the Nemerovs escaped the Depression completely. Pinched by the retail slowdown, they reduced expenses. Gertrude sold some of her jewelry. The family relinquished the apartment on Park Avenue and crossed town to a privileged exile in a fourteen-room apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West, with several rooms overlooking the park. Occasionally, less well-off relatives would stay with them; Gertrudeâs parents came to live in the apartment. None of this was outwardly visible, which was essential, because the Nemerovs were devoted to the world of appearances. âThe front would have to be maintained, because Iâve learned that in business, if people smell failure in you, youâve had it,â Diane later said. This was especially true in the fashion industry, which, after all, was dedicated to the cultivation and reshaping of the human image.
For the Nemerovs, the importance of appearances extended beyond the business world. Gertrude Nemerovâs sense of self was critically dependent on how others regarded her beauty and social status. She did what she thought was expected of her in public and then indulged herself privately. Although she subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera, as a cultivated New York lady should, she had no interest in attending performances. She would rather play cards with her friends or her mother. Howard used the tickets. âWe thought she was terribly artificial, concerned with outward appearances only, in how things looked to people,â Renee said, recalling how she and Diane regarded their mother. âPreserving an image that she wanted to present to the world: society lady.â âDiane was very scathing about it,â said Frederick Eberstadt, who knew her as an adult. âShe thought it was pretentious and fake. She felt her mother had money but no style. She saw it as a kind of tinny reflection of WASP glory.â Another friend from Dianeâs adulthood took a more sympathetic view: âI felt that most of what Gertrude had and did was representative of something rather than something she wanted herself, which is what made her a sad person.â
In her insecurity, Gertrude was vulnerable to spells of anxiety and depression, and when Diane was eleven, she suffered a nervous collapse. Gertrude later recalled that at that time, Diane would grab on to her handââclung to me, literally clung to meââbut the little girl could not keep her mother from descending into the underworld. Gertrude withdrew from family life in a depression that persisted for many months. Her children became alien to her. âI started thinking I donât love them, I didnât understand them,â she said. âThey were all so bright they intimidated me. I started thinking I couldnât care properly for my children. I felt helpless. I was so miserable that I could barely function.â She recalled sitting dumbly at the dinner table while her husband instructed the second maid to pack the childrenâs clothes for camp because Mrs. Nemerov was unwell. Diane would retreat into her own bedroom, lock the door and stay there for hours. âNobody knew what she did in there, and she never confided,â Gertrude said. Gertrude likewise never divulged the cause of her pain and anxiety, why she was so immobilized that she couldnât dress or wash herself. When a psychiatrist was consulted, she pulled herself out of this morbid torpor to avoid responding to his frighteningly intimate questions. Self-revelation was unthinkable. One relative thought she avoided alcohol for fear of making an inadvertent disclosure in an uninhibited state. She even tore up her grocery and shopping lists before discarding them.
Behind Dianeâs parentsâ closed doors, many secrets were being whispered. There were the financial strains of keeping a luxury business running during the Depression and the awkwardness of cutting back on expenses without drawing attention to the need. There was gossip about Davidâs philandering, which became painfully public many years afterward, with the identifying of a âMr. Nemeroffâ as a call girlâs client in a tabloid-sensation trial in 1955. (Reading her fatherâs name in the World-Telegram, Diane imagined that perhaps no one else had noticed.) The family mysteries flashed into view with the motherâs breakdown, which went unmentioned. Because all they saw was the surface, the children could only imagine what was being said, what was really going on.
To young Diane, the pretenses that characterized the familyâs life were mortifying. Her visits to Russeks in Gertrudeâs company were painful. Mother and daughter would arrive around noon and walk down the purple velvet carpet of the main floor (David Nemerov had determined the dĂ©cor), past fur coats that were displayed in the hushed, religious atmosphere that such expensive merchandise commanded. Feeling like âa princess in some loathsome movie of some kind of Transylvanian obscure middle European country,â Diane would walk by the salespeople, who âbowed slightly and smiledâ as if âthe obsequies were seasoned with mockeries.â Even the mannequins seemed to be leering at her.
She didnât want for anything. Less happily, she didnât want anything, either. âOne of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was that I never felt adversity,â she said, late in her life. As she described it, âI was confirmed in the sense of unreality which I only could feel as unreality. . . . I mean that sense of being immune, you know, was, ludicrous as it seems, a kind of painful one.â She smothered any desires for the future, believing that if she expressed them, even to herself, she certainly would be disappointedââthat fate is a trickster who tricks hope and that I will always stand to lose by wanting anything.â She recalled that...
