'Them': The Power Couple

By HOLLY BRUBACH

THEM
A Memoir of Parents.
By Francine du Plessix Gray.
530 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.

IT'S a lifetime's work to dismantle the illusions surrounding our parents, but in Francine du Plessix Gray's case, that may not be long enough. Her stepfather and her mother, Alexander and Tatiana Liberman, were not public figures, but they loomed enormous in the New York social landscape of their time. White Russian émigrés who had fled occupied France, they rapidly established themselves in America: he as the art director of Vogue, in time presiding over all the magazines in the Condé Nast empire, and as a painter and sculptor who met with some success; she as a hat designer and hostess.

The author of 10 previous books of fiction and nonfiction, Gray began holding her family up for scrutiny in 1967, with the first of a handful of autobiographical short stories published in The New Yorker (later incorporated into a novel, ''Lovers and Tyrants''). People who knew the Libermans claim they were deeply wounded by her unsparing portrayal. In ''Them,'' she returns to the same material, with the addition of biographical information and various hard-won insights into their complex personalities. This time, they come across as somewhat less opaque but frankly no more likable.

Born Tatiana Yakovleva, Gray's mother was assured a place in literary history when Vladimir Mayakovsky fell in love with her and dedicated a number of poems to her, conferring on her an aura of status and glamour she would wear proudly for the rest of her life. They met in Paris, where she was living after her escape from postrevolutionary Russia. ''He is the first man who has been able to leave his mark on my soul,'' she wrote to her mother. Their romance was surely facilitated by the fact that although her formal education was cut short at the age of 12, Tatiana had memorized hundreds of lines of Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok and, conveniently, Mayakovsky. And yet, when forced to choose between her two most cherished ambitions, she renounced her future as a muse and opted for a title, marrying a French viscount by the name of Bertrand du Plessix. Francine, their only child, was born in 1930. Though her parents remained on cordial terms, they were soon leading separate lives.

Enter Alex, whose father, a Jew from Ukraine and a Menshevik, had risen to prominence under the czar as an expert on the lumber industry. His mother -- part Gypsy -- was an aspiring actress and a ruthless manipulator. As a child, Alex traveled with his father in a Russian prince's lavishly appointed private train; for the rest of his life, Alex loved luxury and associated it with security.

In New York, Tatiana and Alex lived well beyond their means, entertaining the people featured in Vogue's pages. Over the years, the guest list for their parties included Claudette Colbert, Salvador Dalí, Marlene Dietrich, Christian Dior, Irene Dunne, Yul Brynner, Greta Garbo, Raymond Loewy, Charles Addams, Coco Chanel, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, Joseph Brodsky, Yves Saint Laurent, Mikhail Baryshnikov. A good time was had by some; others, it seems, were terrorized by their despotic hostess.

This book will do nothing to endear Tatiana to those who never knew her. Here her exotic pronouncements on style, literature and life, which once delighted her friends, fall resoundingly flat: ''Fireplace without logs is like man without erection.'' ''Everybody know women's brains are smaller than men's.'' A prude in her private life, she took pride in shocking her guests, announcing to a dumbfounded Andre Emmerich: ''I can tell by the way your wife walk whether she has clitoral or vaginal orgasm.''

If Tatiana's wit fails to come across in Gray's description, so, I can attest, does Alex's charm. Straight out of college, I got a job at Vogue in the late 1970's. Alex played the benevolent mentor to my Midwestern innocent eager to experience the world, and ruled over all the magazines with authority and a knack for flattery that kept the company's overwhelmingly female population in his thrall. We called him ''the czar of all the Russias.'' What a dismaying revelation it is to see this urbane arbiter of style as he was in his domestic life, blithely subjugating himself, his ambitions and his desires, to a woman whose megalomania eventually consumed him -- and her daughter -- in the bargain.

Even by the more laissez-faire standards of their generation, Tatiana and Alex proved appallingly deficient as parents, and ''Them'' is rife with examples of their obliterating narcissism. Having concealed from Francine the fact of her father's death on a mission for the Free French in 1940, the Libermans prevailed upon family friends to break the news one night, more than a year later, while they went out to dinner. After a riding accident at a camp in Colorado the summer Francine was 15, they phoned in their love, leaving her to undergo five rounds of surgery by herself. As an adult, she came across photographs of herself as an awkward teenager posing nude, at her parents' request, for Alex's camera. Gray recounts all this in a voice that is incredulous and curious, and the reader's heart goes out to her.

Having parsed the discrepancies between the devoted parents Tatiana and Alex purported to be and the self-involved, part-time guardians they were in practice, Gray seems oddly unwilling to question their own account of their standing in the world. She dutifully presents Tatiana as a fashion icon, although reliable contemporaries insist that few, if any, took her seriously in this capacity. Indeed, the hats she designed -- garnished with a thermometer or a revolving weather vane -- seem remarkable chiefly for a certain leaden whimsy. Similarly, Gray attempts to ratify Alex's contribution to 20th-century art. Intimating that his paintings were stigmatized by his position at Condé Nast, she fails to take into account the (equally plausible) notion that the recognition he did receive may have been in large part due to his position.

In the end, what proves most riveting about Gray's recollections is not the dual portrait of two outsize individuals but the almost incidental delineation of the dynamic between them -- the unspoken contract they entered into as a couple. Alex, a devotee of Arthurian legend, admittedly terrified of being alone, worships at the feet of the brilliant poet's former muse and takes pride in meeting the challenges she poses -- not the least of which is managing her volatile personality. He gets her approval; she gets his protection. A tyrant who feigns helplessness, she calls him ''Superman'' for his ability to negotiate daily life on her behalf. Both continued to insist that theirs was an epic love story, even as her demands grew increasingly shrill and his attempts to satisfy them increasingly desperate, as she retreated into alcohol and Demerol and he took refuge in his studio.

And then the denouement: Tatiana dies in 1991 and Alex promptly takes up with Melinda Pechangco, her live-in Filipino nurse, whom he marries the following year. Melinda dotes on him; he does as she commands. All traces of Tatiana are expunged, and the jet-set inner circle is supplanted by Melinda's girlfriends playing mah-jongg. The rigorous harmony of the surroundings that had served as the stage set for Alex's life -- a closed universe of white furniture and modern art -- is disrupted by a plastic recliner, a crystal chandelier, lace doilies and antimacassars. Wintering at their apartment in Miami, he accompanies Melinda to shopping malls and watches TV game shows. In New York, they ride in white stretch limousines. Seemingly overnight, Alex becomes unrecognizable, and Gray, for all her mixed feelings about her mother, interprets this as a betrayal of Tatiana's memory. Having finally come to terms with the dismal truth that Alex and Tatiana were too fixated on each other to focus on her own well-being, Gray now finds herself confronted with the prospect that their single-minded attachment may have derived not from a legendary romance, as Alex always contended, but from something infinitely more commonplace: his need to be dominated by a woman. Even after all this unflinching excavation, there are still some things it would hurt too much to know.

Holly Brubach has written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The Times.

COUNTYTIMES.COM

WEB SITE OF THE LITCHFIELD COUNTY TIMES

A Bittersweet Memoir

By: E.L. Lefferts

05/12/2005

There is a photograph of Francine du Plessix Gray taken by her friend Inge Morath that's hanging in an exhibit at the University of Connecticut branch at Torrington.

The black-and-white image was shot over Ms. du Plessix Gray's shoulder as she sat on a bench overlooking a large expanse of lawn. The picture illuminates only about a quarter of her face, yet from that glimpse of lash and chiseled cheekbone, one senses a wistfulness-a hint of longing as from an outsider looking in.
That same feeling is evident throughout Ms. du Plessix Gray's latest book, "Them, a Memoir of Parents," which she will be signing copies of tomorrow at the Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington.
The book traces the ancestry and rise to power of her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman, and stepfather, Alexander Liberman, while it tracks Ms. du Plessix Gray's own often minor role in their celebrated lives.
Creations by Tatiana of Saks were the headgear of choice for New York's fashionable set, and Mr. Liberman skyrocketed from a lowly job in the Vogue magazine art department to becoming the editorial director of the entire Condé Nast publishing empire.
The couple, both Russian émigrés who fled German-occupied France just after the outbreak of World War II, accumulated a glittering circle of friends as they rose to the top of New York society, but they were often negligent about the emotional and physical needs of the child in their care.
After fainting at school, 11-year-old Francine was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and malnutrition. Her parents, who spent their evenings out, failed to leave anyone at home in charge of feeding her.
Ms. du Plessix Gray further recalls in the book the emotional trauma she endured when her mother and stepfather-to-be shipped her off with a relative she'd never met on the day they arrived in New York from war-torn Europe.
She also relates her mother's choice to have a surrogate break the news a year after her father, Bertrand du Plessix, died.
The impact of this relationship with her parents is apparent in an incident that occurred when Ms. du Plessix Gray was an adult and accidentally broke her leg slipping on ice in New York.
"Determined not to wake my parents, upon coming home I crawled up the two flights of stairs on all fours and went to bed, having taken every painkiller I found in my room," Ms. du Plessix Gray writes. "The following morning, at around 6 a.m., a very dear family friend phoned, close to hysterics, telling me that her husband had just died. ... as soon as I heard Alex's first familiar morning sounds I crawled to his door and said, 'Alex, dear, Nicolas just died, and I broke my leg.'"
"Them" is an unflinching account of these and other incidents, but it is written without a trace of self pity. Ms. du Plessix Gray manages simultaneously to convey the reality of her battered emotional state and the extreme respect and affection she retained for her parents throughout their lives.
It's an extraordinary achievement, and it has not gone unnoticed.
When Ms. du Plessix Gray emerged for an interview Tuesday at her home in Warren, she quickly located a copy of a massive write-up by Robert Gottlieb she received in The Observatory section of The New York Observer, as well as a highly-favorable May 10 review in The New York Times.
"It's the best treatment I've gotten yet from the daily Times after 40 years of writing," she said. "Michiko Kakutani gave me a terrible review four years ago [for "Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet"], and I was terrified of what she would say. She can be so harsh; there's a saying among writers, 'Have you been Michiko'd yet?'"
The Times review generated a string of calls during the interview. Ms. du Plessix Gray, curled up on the couch with Flaubert, a French poodle whose coat matches the color of her hair, alternated between thanking well-wishers and answering the interviewer's questions.
For years, Ms. du Plessix Gray recalled, she had planned to write a book about her parents. Her mother was eager to have the story of her love affair with preeminent Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky revealed to the world, and writers with colorful parents are destined to put them in print, she said.
"We're hunter-gatherers," Ms. du Plessix Gray noted, "and parents are the easiest prey at hand."
The author knew, however, that for her depiction to be truthful she would have to wait for them both to be dead.
Tatiana Liberman died in 1991. After carefully excising Ms. du Plessix Gray and her family from his life, Alexander Liberman passed away in 1999.
Six months later, Ms. du Plessix Gray began researching the book.
She recalled the memories from her youth-standing all night in the bathroom of a crowded train to Lisbon as they fled Europe, the desolate months she spent in Rochester, N.Y., with her grandfather after they arrived in the United States-as if they happened yesterday.
"If you live that interconnected to history," Ms. du Plessix Gray said, "you remember the details of your life."
Those years were written with the voice of a child and from a child's perspective. "I consciously tried to emulate even the diction of the growing child," the author noted.
For the 1980s, Ms. du Plessix Gray consulted journals she'd kept since she was in college. Her earlier journals had already been given to Brown University. Having managed to rise above the emotional turmoil caused by her mother and stepfather, Ms. du Plessix Gray said she was startled while reading them, by her anger and passionate feelings toward them.
The most emotionally draining and labor-intensive part of researching the book, however, stemmed from Vladimir Mayakovsky's affair with her mother. Although Tatiana Liberman left his letters to her daughter, Mr. Liberman avoided giving them to Ms. du Plessix Gray for seven years.
Lying on his deathbed, Mr. Liberman still refused to tell his stepdaughter where they were. On a hunch, Ms. du Plessix Gray found them in the top drawer of his bedside table.
To read her mother's letters to the famed poet, the author had to fly to Moscow for three weeks. Curators at the Mayakovsky Museum refused to Xerox them or to allow anyone else to touch them.
Having read them, it was the first time Ms. du Plessix Gray realized that the poet, not her stepfather, was the greatest love of her mother's life.
It was one of the few things that surprised her during her research. Another unanticipated element for Ms. du Plessix Gray while she wrote "Them" was her own merciless approach to the story. "I guess I learned that I was more ruthless than I thought I was," the author said. "Some children might say, 'I can't say this about mom or dad.' I felt like I was a very good child to them, and brought them a lot of joy with Cleve [her husband, the noted abstract artist, who died in December] and the children [sons Thaddeus and Luke]. I felt I'd given them so much, I'd earned the right to tell the truth about them."
When Ms. du Plessix Gray completed the manuscript in early fall, she handed it out to her family for their perusal and comments. Her sons were shocked by their grandparents' treatment of their mother. She had never told them of their careless behavior toward her. "I've been watching with a kind of sardonic pleasure their education about my youth," the author said wryly.
Her husband, always Ms. du Plessix Gray's first editor on everything she wrote, had a chance to read "Them" before he died. It's a bittersweet consolation though, even in the flurry of glowing reviews and gushing attention.
"I'm happy and I'm very tired because I haven't been sleeping well," Ms. du Plessix Gray said, "and I'm just so sad Cleve isn't here to share what could be my most successful book. I feel that all the time."

July 1, 2005, 12:01PM

Parental puzzles

Them is a star-studded memoir of family dysfunction

By RACHEL GRAVES

THEM: A Memoir of Parents.
By Francine du Plessix Gray.
Penguin Press, 544 pp. $29.95.

Them: A Memoir of Parents is like Star magazine for the literary set. Jampacked with juicy gossip, Francine du Plessix Gray's book about her oh-so-fabulous Russian émigré mother and stepfather is guilty pleasure without the guilt.

In fact, Them is a probing, sometimes heartbreaking look inside the household of Gray's mother, famed hat maker Tatiana du Plessix, and stepfather, Alex Liberman, a sculptor and painter and the editorial director of the growing Condé Nast magazine empire.

Gray's story begins long before she was born, with du Plessix's solo voyage as a young girl from her Russian homeland to Paris, where she lived with aunts and uncles. Even the history of distant relatives is action-packed: A grandfather severed ties with the family and fled to the United States, probably to escape gambling debts; an uncle risked his life on expeditions across the Sahara and Asia; another uncle fell madly in love with a circus acrobat, only to lose her to a trapezist.

Living in Paris, du Plessix met and had a passionate (though unconsummated) love affair with Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, one of the Soviet Union's most treasured poets. Du Plessix inspired several of his poems and considered moving back to Russia to marry him, though ultimately Soviet politics and Mayakovsky's many lovers intervened.

Instead she married Bertrand du Plessix, Gray's father, who was killed fighting with the Free French in World War II. Gray was not told about her father's death until a year later, when one of the many family companions (all with relationships that hovered between staff and friend) broke the news because Gray's mother was afraid to.

Even before her husband's death, du Plessix had fallen in love with Liberman. The two and young Gray spent much of the war living in southern France, then were able to flee to New York, where the couple eventually married. Throughout Gray's childhood, the Libermans shuttled her off to whichever friends or family were available to look after her.

"Some eight hours after arriving in the United States," Gray writes, "I found myself in the third-class carriage of a night train bound for Rochester, New York, being taken by a total stranger, my grandfather, to a city I'd never heard of until that very afternoon, clutching, as my only reassurance, the little suitcase I'd brought from France."

Gray paints a confusing portrait of her mother: cold, arrogant, rude, yet the host of some of New York's most star-studded parties, with regulars such as Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dali, Christian Dior, Yul Brynner, Coco Chanel and Greta Garbo.

Du Plessix was one of the world's most stylish hat makers, eventually joining Saks Fifth Avenue, where company founder and president Adam Gimbel sought her out for her European cachet.

"Don't ever learn English; you'll sell more hats that way," Gimbel told her, and du Plessix complied.

Du Plessix was also notorious for her rude comments and rigid opinions on style.

"Take off raincoat! Eet look like contraceptive!" she yelled at one of Gray's college friends.

"Meeeenk is for football," du Plessix was fond of saying. "Diamonds are for suburbs."

Liberman is even more of an enigma. Devoted to du Plessix, he somehow managed to wait on her hand and foot, even immediately after suffering a heart attack while also running a magazine empire and creating massive sculptures displayed in public spaces across the country, including on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution.

Gray portrays Liberman as warm and loving at home but backstabbing and heartless in the business world. He fired his protégés and turned on his closest friends when they were no longer useful to him.

And as soon as du Plessix died, Liberman did the same to his family. He married his wife's former nurse, moved to Miami and traded in his fussy lifestyle for one overflowing with his new wife's extended Filipino family. Photographs of Gray and her children disappeared from his home, and he ceased talking about his beloved former wife.

Though Gray's reporting on her family's history is exhaustive, her parents remain largely bewildering to her. The reader — and Gray herself, it seems — are left puzzled by why her parents asked the teenage Gray to pose nude for them, by why they were incapable of making sure she got basic nutrition as a child, by their increasing heartlessness in old age.

Most families are baffling and tinged with hurt on the inside, of course, and perhaps the most remarkable thing is that Gray is able to learn as much as she does about her secretive parents. The mysteries about their behavior make their lives no less compelling.

Rachel Graves is a freelance writer in Portland, Maine.

THE

==== JERUSALEM POST

Aug. 11, 2005

The parent trap

JUDITH SOLOMON

Them: A Memoir of Parents
By Francine du Plessix Gray
Penguin
544pp., $29.95

On almost 95 acres in affluent Warren, Connecticut sits a sprawling 18th-century stone farmhouse. Inside, owner Francine du Plessix Gray is chatting about her 11th book, Them, a memoir of her mother and stepfather, New York's original power couple.

Dictatorial fashion icon Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman, "Tatiana of Saks," was a renowned hat designer in the 1940s and '50s - when hats meant class - crowning such luminaries as Claudette Colbert and Estee Lauder in lilac turbans and peacock-feathered boaters. Media legend Alexander Liberman, editorial director of Conde Nast from 1962 to 1994, revamped scores of magazines, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Vogue, all the while gaining a reputation as an artist and sculptor.

"When people ask me why I wrote this book, I answer that very few writers with colorful, exotic parents have failed to write on them," says Gray, a tall, lithe woman, casually outfitted, who speaks with a continental lilt. "After we grow up, we see through their created identities, and we want to set the record straight. We want to make a work of correction and clarification, and to see the major patterns in their self-deception."

The same extensive research, evocative prose and psychological sensitivity Gray brought to biographies of Simone Weil and the Marquis de Sade are coupled here with a daughterly whirl of indignation, anger, gratitude and love.

Them follows Tatiana and Alex from Czarist Russia, where both were born, into a bourgeois-bohemian-intelligentsia, hers Russian Orthodox, his Jewish; to their youthful deprivations during the Revolution; heartbreak and romance in high-flying Paris; frenetic escape from Nazi-occupied France; Machiavellian climb through New York's social and professional jungle; and finally, aged infirmities, addictions and deaths.

Tatiana was a lineage snob, quick to concoct descent from Genghis Khan when she met Gray's diplomat father, Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix. At the time, she was already deeply involved with Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Soviet Union's poet laureate. Deriving narcissistic pleasure as a celebrated poet's muse, Tatiana still knew where her bread was buttered and opted for Bertrand's diplomatic title.

According to Gray, Mayakovsky's suicide three months after the wedding was more due to his disillusion with the Revolution and Stalin's growing monopoly of power. "I, who tend to look negatively on suicide, think it's one of the most positive suicides in history," she says between bites of tuna in her sunflower-yellow kitchen. "A prophetic suicide. He's putting out a kind of warning to his compatriots, saying: 'Brothers, there's a rough way ahead.'"

Bertrand du Plessix's destiny was similarly cut short for his country. Despite his virulent anti-Semitism - "Jews are intelligent but detestable" - he eagerly joined the Resistance as a pilot and was shot down in 1940, when Gray was 10. By then, Tatiana was practically living with Alexander Liberman, who'd come to France as a teenager, attending the restricted and exclusive Les Roches boarding school. To win admission, his mother signed him up as Protestant.

Alex was as far from a shtetl Jew as any Eastern European Jew could be: His paternal grandfather was a prosperous tenant farmer, controlling 4,000 acres; his father, Semyon Lieberman, was a driving force in Russia's mammoth timber industry, who remained so even after Lenin took command; his mother, Genrieta Mironova, daughter of a wealthy Romanian Jewess and ne'er-do-well Gypsy, was a flamboyant, made-up actress who seduced one of Alex's Les Roches classmates, among endless others.

In counterpoint to Mayakovsky and Du Plessix, Alex was a solo player. The one person to whom he pledged fidelity and servitude was the deliberately helpless and commanding blond goddess Tatiana. Of their relationship, Gray writes: "[I]t had been his principal challenge and pride and joy to tame this formidable creature by fulfilling her each and every whim."

Where Little Francine stood within this threesome was off to the side: On her very first night in America, the 10-year-old is farmed out for a three-month stay with a grandfather she's never laid eyes on. She only discovers her mother has married Alex after finding a congratulatory telegram in their Upper East Side townhouse.

Not having heard from her biological father for a long while, Gray's anxiety builds as to his fate, but she's too accommodating to broach a subject she rightly senses is off-limits. Her cowardly mother finally has the news delivered - over a year late - through family friends. The completely devastated Gray transfers all affection to Alex, who becomes her primary caretaker, dealing with braces, report cards, curfews and boyfriends.

Such staggering lack in communication wasn't exclusive to the mother-daughter relationship. Alex conscripted an intermediary to see if his wife would agree to have his baby. "And why should I have another child," she retorts. "To bring another Jew into the world." According to Gray, Tatiana's inflammatory comments, whether racially or sexually loaded, were not felt sentiments, but a means to ward off intimacy.

"There was always a sense of my parents' silence to one another," says Gray, whose own marriage to abstract-expressionist Cleve Gray, nee Ginsburg, produced two sons (an investment banker and painter) in rustic bliss. "I came out of that as a very open, forthright person, who was always ready for confrontations. I mean, as far as verbal confrontations. I love to argue, and I've always done it. I will never avoid any difficult emotional topic. Just as my parents were incapable of going into analysis, I was the ideal analysand."

Disputing Gray's self-description is Robert Gottlieb, a former editor of The New Yorker, whose astonishingly long piece in the New York Observer has been the talk of the city. Despite the almost universally stellar reviews Them has received, Gottlieb essentially accuses Gray of being "deeply confused," unable to fully vomit out "her fury at her mother," looking every which way to "rationalize" Tatiana's pathetic behavior, and that despite the author's "self-exorcisms through fiction and analysis and a fruitful life," she's still longing, at 74, to suck on her mamele's bejeweled, Amazonian breast.

"I don't find his review hostile," says Gray. "He was projecting his hugely long psychoanalysis on me. And he was making a basic mistake in psychoanalytic theory. He was saying, 'You'd think by now she would have exorcised her childhood.' Anyone acquainted with Freud's seminal essay, 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable,' knows that analysis is never terminated. It's an ongoing process which you can stop when you feel you can cope with it yourself. But the exorcism works all your life."

Tina Brown, another former New Yorker editor, accuses Gray of being "snobbish" regarding both Alex's "vulgar manipulations" up the ladder - particularly given his war-ravaged past - and quick remarriage to Tatiana's Filipino nurse, Melinda, after her death. It was Melinda who introduced him to game shows, QVC, shopping malls, lace doilies, antimacassars and white stretch limos. "He was tired of all his high-minded friends - including Francine - and who can blame him?" writes Brown, who worked under Alex for a long stretch.

"Tina's an old friend," says Gray, who speculates Brown may've been feeling guilty and embarrassed over her own quotes on Alex, which are some of the harshest in Them, and so sought atonement by slamming a sister-scribe-in-crime. "As for her criticism that I was intolerant of Alex's new life with Melinda, she doesn't realize what kind of pain a child and grandchildren feel when they're cut off from a relationship based on half-a-century of love and trust. And when the grandfather, Alex Liberman, refuses to see one of his grandchildren anymore, these are slights and affronts and emotional shocks which do not incline you to be amused by the whole new lifestyle of huge chandeliers and antimacassars. It's all right for her, an outsider, to find his love of vulgarity amusing - because he did love vulgarity - but if you're an insider being deprived of love, trust, and warmth, you're not so amused."