by Leo Lerman
Eleonora existed in a grand tradition of women madly in love. Such women breathe folly. They are protected. How else to explain Eleonora, who, having somehow secured a latchkey to Toscanini's house, would leave me sitting under a tree in his garden while she crept soundlessly into the dormant house, crept to his bedroom door, there to crouch listening to his coughing in the night, his breathing, his very being. Having accomplished this madness, she would return to me, under my tree, fall down beside me in what I could only call an orgasmic state, crying, “Liebling! Liebling! You should hear him! He is like a great storm! He is an element! You should hear him!” And, truth to tell, I did hear him, even there, out in the garden. I could hear him coughing, sometimes calling out, sometimes even moving about, sometimes—oh, ecstasy for Eleonora—coming to a window and peering out.
How to explain this woman? How to explain any legend, for she was essentially legend. Born into the fabled Mendelssohn family, descended from musicians, bankers, scholars, hostesses, madmen, collectors of prodigious works of art and of exquisite furniture. Generations mingled their blood with Italians, Basques, Russians, and fellow Jews (some of them converted) of many classes. Eleonora somehow became for us (and this “us” included some of the most distinguished minds and creators of this century's first six or seven decades) a symbol of European culture and civilization then fast being trampled. She assumed heroic stature, for we knew she could, in her frail, star-driven person, endanger herself out of loyalty, she having ventured, with her name high on Nazi lists of those wanted, in and out of Germany, helping friends and ex-lovers in peril.
Duke or dustman's daughters, none of that much mattered to Eleonora. What mattered to her was genius. She was a pushover for genius and, of course, for charm. She was Duse's goddaughter.8 She married four times, not even once for love. She married Edwin Fischer because he was such a glorious pianist; she married [cavalry officer] Emmerich von Jeszenszky because he bullied her into it; she married Rudolf Forster because he was such a great actor and charmer; she married her last husband, actor Martin Kosleck, because there was no one else around to sit up all night talking to her. She was a night person. She slept in dribs and drabs. Ela had a way of laughing uncontrollably, peal on peal welled up from somewhere deep inside. She screamed with laughter, until she cried hilariously. And sometimes, like Niobe, she was all tears. Her life was crescendos: The diminuendos—sometimes they were not pretty.
After she had been forced to flee Europe, Ela lived in one small rented room in a house where the back of the Whitney Museum now stands. The “great” crowded into this small room—mostly bed, photographs of Maestro, and cooking on a couple of gas rings. I remember a night after some event when there were Toscaninis in her little room, Barrymores sitting on the floor in the hallway, Morgans sitting on the stair, Astors at the front door, dancers of all kinds out in the street waiting to get in. They came like bees to suck up the sweetness of this frail flower of the finest European culture, clinging so optimistically, so irrefutably to the remains of her shattered world.
Later she lived in a larger room over a woodworking shop on East Seventy-third Street. This time she was somewhat affluent, for she had sold a Van Gogh and some other paintings that she managed to get out of Germany (by wrapping them around a broom handle and claiming them to be her own works). This time, she had a drawing room with piano, a bedroom, and even a rooftop with a screened-in dining room on it. In the house next to Eleonora's, to the east, in the basement, lived her brother Francesco—addicted to “drink,” addicted to his Stradivarius cello, addicted to the glories of the theater—his basement rooms a welter of fine books in tatters, stage designs by Eugene Berman, letters from [music hall singer] Yvette Guilbert, a Picasso “Blue Boy” … much of this scattered about the floors.9
When the opportunity came her way, Ela was a hardworking actress. She was not a very good actress, but she acted. I think her best acting was always offstage. Onstage, on-screen she had extraordinary atmosphere, especially when she was playing some poor victim, for in her life, although she never knew it, she was sometimes a victim. She acted because she hoped that would enhance her in the eyes of the men she loved. When, for some fifteen or so years, she was in love with Max Reinhardt, she acted for him. In all the years she was in love with Toscanini, she always hoped to show him that she was Duse's true godchild. The Maestro came to see her perform La Voix Humaine (in a translation by our friend John Latouche). I wonder whether he recognized that the heartrending words Cocteau gave to this poor character were in no wise different from words sometimes murmured by our Eleonora into the telephone from her own bed when talking to him, in the long, dark nights when she was alone—or almost alone.10 (1993)
LACI'S OTHER MAN Resting my left leg on the right knee, removing my sock… and a sudden, stomach-wrenching sure knowledge that there was someone else. A bit of broken tie chain, which Laci's porter had thought mine and so given me, belonged to this unknown. I felt that my life was ebbing away, that I was bleeding inside. I could not sit. I could not stand. I went out into the street, a deluge of tears dammed behind my eyes, and I went to Elsa Snapper's rooms to seek some solace, some comfort—only to find that she already knew the supplanter, had even had him, Laci, and the supplanter's friends in these rooms that now sheltered me.11 Suddenly, I was insane—that is, I knew the deepest meaning of that hackneyed “insane with grief” I saw in our past a whole series of betrayals—not only his of me, but, curiously, mine of him. That I had “betrayed” him did not now compensate. He needed me—but only for business, for his comfort. He needed the other person for all of the reasons—the sensual reasons—he had once needed me. Laci threatened me: “If I drop you, everyone will drop you. Eleonora will drop you. Lili [Darvas] will drop you.”12 But they didn't. They saw him as a “little” man, and by that time I was their American friend, never ceasing to amaze them with how I was “just like a European boy.” I had charm for them. They found me useful, and they were ready, these women, to help me restore myself after this accident of love. (1981)
NOTE: Leo had continued to live with his parents throughout drama school and several homosexual affairs. Richard had moved through a succession of rooming houses, leaving town whenever he felt too guilty about his relationship with Leo, his first male lover. During one of those voyages, when Richard went to Miami, Leo had fallen for Laci Czettel. When that affair ended, eighteen months later, Richard was living, lonely, in Greenwich Village. Their friend Elsa Snapper convinced Leo that he'd be happier going back to Richard, and he did, but it was some months before they lived together.
Leo had been reading manuscripts for the literary agent Elizabeth Otis and reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1940, Bobbs-Merrill published his Leonardo: Artist and Scientist, a biography for young readers. Thanks to that income, Leo could afford by the summer of 1941 to move into the rooming house where Snapper lived on Manhattan's East Seventy-first Street. At the age of twenty-seven he finally left home.
JOURNAL• JUNE 14, 1941 One day returning from the doctor, Laci told me that he had said that any excitement in the next week would be fatal. He then forced me to do this thing, knowing that I could not resist when he said he could go elsewhere. This made me a murderer, which is what he wanted and needed. He constantly induced me to give him overdoses of sleeping medicine. He seemed to live in a constant state of terror, but only at night after his medication did he talk. He was frightened of death, for he expected to meet his mother. He loved and hated her. She had been married to a Spaniard. He had died on the honeymoon. The first year she had only their son, Laci. In the next two, she was in with Mr. Czettel. Thereafter she married him, and took Laci from all those things he loved—the pictures of his father, the medallions, his grandfather, everything—thereby murdering him. Sometimes at night, she took this three-year-old child through the house, sword stick in hand, and made him defend her by plunging the sword into the draperies and dark places. He became her councilor, but saw her rarely. He, ho
wever, listened when she was in bed. He knows he must kill himself with a razor or knife. He has once tried to kill someone, but never himself. He waits at night for his mother and death to come through the door.13
JUNE 16, 1941 When one is waiting, all sound is an enemy. The creaking of a door, a fancied step upon the lower stair, the delicate shuddering of the window glass, the moaning of the buses upon the avenue beneath the windows— everything is portentous. All the senses sit bound and tense, waiting. Yesterday I woke in the early morning and thought, even before my eyes were opened, when I was conscious of light and waking: This evening Richard will come. My heart and my stomach twisted within me, and I clutched the pillows to my breast, hung my face among them, burying myself in the very thought of Richard—the way his jacket smoothes upon his shoulders, and his trousers, through which I can always, thousands of miles away, feel his skin, but more than these—the smell of him. All day I ran toward evening, performing the mechanics of laughing and thinking and philosophizing and admiring, but all day I ran toward evening, and in the evening he did not come.
JUNE 28, 1941 Toscanini saying: “If I weren't what I am I'd be a lust-killer.”
AUGUST 10, 1941 • vnew york city
TO RICHARD HUNTER • PORT SEVERN, CANADA
You had better sit down now, because you will doubtless be upset. I am sitting with Elsa, who is growling over a bowl of cornflakes. I worked very hard all day. Somewhere about 7:30,I heard a noise and I turned. There was John, the man who runs the house—dead drunk. I asked him what he wanted, and he muttered about disliking my face and how he was going to choke me. I got up—I thought it would be more pleasant to be choked standing. Then, for two hours, he sort of menaced, and once we tussled, and he broke the lock on my door and tore my Chinese thing. I couldn't get out from the corner. It was an ordeal. He said he had a knife and he would throw me through the window. And so it went. Finally, about ten o'clock, when I thought I would faint, I heard Arnold [Hoskwith, theatrical agent] whistling. I managed to throw him the key to the front door, and he got me out of the house to his place. A fine policeman came and took me home to get my manuscript and some things.
I will want to move because I wouldn't sleep there again. Now, I wonder: Do you think we can manage Jo Washburn's place? Jo said she would give us some furniture including beds—but I could live and work there this month.14 Please don't be too distressed and don't be pressed into this thing because of me. I feel like someone who's forcing a boy to marry because she's going to have a baby. If you feel all this impractical, you must say. Leave us not railroad ourselves into something we will regret.
NOTE: The troublemaker was sent away, and Leo returned to his room on Seventy-first Street.
The manuscript he mentions was his second biography for young adults, Michelangelo: A Renaissance Profile, which Knopf would publish in 1942. Leo earned $300 for writing it, and Richard did the illustrations for nothing.
AUGUST 12, 1941 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • PORT SEVERN, CANADA
I had to go to the army [draft-board physical]. I went. It seems there is nothing wrong with me according to the sloppy doctors, who looked up my rear and couldn't even find those pesky piles that gave me so much pain! Unfortunately my own doctor was one of them. I will go on Monday to ask for a deferment— so to try to put them off until next May. I had to stand, along with some fifty others—stark naked—from eight o'clock through 11:30, in the rear part of a store, which had not been cleansed in days. The Wassermann [test for syphilis] was painless. I got so interested in watching the others getting theirs—some boys passed out!!! They did not test my reflexes. I had a horrid doctor who said I looked pregnant while he gleefully patted my belly. I was not bashful about being naked—most of the boys seemed to have as small or smaller!!! If they send me away in some months (they said surely not before a month), I will be over thirty when I return, and all this striving will have been in vain—but leave us be happy now and not consider it. Oh—if I could tell you what trembles in my heart and flies to my lips so deftly—but these things are for you to hear— and letters are so goodly, but unsafe things.15
JOURNAL• AUGUST 20, 1941 It is by some casual and exuberant confession: “I have three rings. I put them all on in the morning and lie in bed and smoke cigarettes.” Or by a gesture—slight—almost imperceptible. Or by the break and pitch of a voice. By such trivial tokens do revelations come. Many times it is merely sensed—the easy meandering along the avenue; a sudden, veiled inquiry from someone walking in the opposite direction; the somewhat veiled looks cast backward over shoulders while the attitude is one of disinterest but the body is too elaborately casual; the frequent pausing to look into shop windows, wherein repose objects utterly unrelated and unseen; the gradual reversal; one proceeds to retrace his steps while the other appears nonchalant, waiting or strolling leisurely onward—thus at times losing the reward of all his careful actions—but more frequently the words “Have you a match?” or “Do you have the time?” as though this had been the sole motive for a delicate chase of some ten or twelve streets.
Recently I have had no money at all, barely managing to scrape together the few pennies needed to go home to dinner. Only because of blithe faith I found an anonymous nickel in an old suit yesterday. My library books are now overdue—and no way to return them, for I cannot pay the fines. Hunger does not seem to bother me—only toward evening when I know that soon I will have oh so much to eat [at Momma's] I frequently feel that my stomach has been shrunk so much it will hold nothing. Soon after, when running eagerly down Madison Avenue or on the subway, my head aches—but oh the bliss of many rolls with butter. This seems to be my hunger—rolls with extremities of butter. A dinner composed of vegetables and meat and soup is nothing without rolls and butter—bread, not potatoes—but bread to stuff into one—and butter, fresh and salt, to savor. I love to eat. I love to read about food. I love to look into shop windows at food. If I were hungry this moment I could not write about hunger so energetically, but today I shall not be hungry—and tomorrow holds an excitement all its own, and this is why I will never commit suicide, for I am constantly curious about what is around the corner.
NOTE: On November 1, 1941, Leo and Richard moved into a one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up apartment at 64 East End Avenue (near Manhattan's Eighty-second Street). “Forty-five dollars a month, bedbugs and all,” as Richard recalled.
LUCIEN ANDvogue Lucien Vogel was in love with Ruth Yorck, and she was in love with him. Lucien was the creator of the Parisian magazines Vu and L'Illustration des Modes, and he was the brother-in-law of Michel de Brun-hoff who was the editor of French Vogue. Lucien's wife, Cosette (called “The Duchess”), was formidable as both a woman and a cook. I preferred her as the latter.16 My friend Ruth was strictly Berlin—the latter part of the Weimar Republic—intellectual, a woman of many arts, and avant-garde all the way. In the autumn of 1941, Lucien led me to Condé Nast. “You know,” he said, “so much about women, Italian women in the Renaissance. Why not write about these women for Vogue? I will take you to [its editor] Mrs. Chase. She will be interested.”
I went with Lucien because I wanted to see what Elsie Mendl had done with the Condé Nast Publications reception room, which I had heard she had decorated. Stepping out of the elevator, I was enchanted immediately with the inlay of gold (brass, actually) stars that paved the floor. When Lucien planted me in the empty reception room, I saw that, in true Elsie Mendl style, it was all “Fine French Furniture” or reasonable facsimiles thereof. I also saw that it looked out onto an ample terrace, fantastically verdant for New York on a mean November day.
As I sat there, I heard from stage right—for this was all theater to me—a woman's voice, high, carefully modulated, uttering one word, “Divine …” It trailed off. Then she came into view. She was tall, Chaneled, hatted, white-gloved, and she moved with a curious kind of hippy glide. Then I heard another female voice—postmenopausal, attractively sexy, sandpaper had worked it
to a permanently growling invitation. This voice said, “Debauchery!” I instantly knew that a life of “divine debauchery” should be mine.
Lucien returned. I murmured, “Divine debauchery…” He looked faintly alarmed-amused. Then I found myself in a good-sized room unlike any office I had ever seen. At a table sat a sweet-faced woman, somewhat designed by Beatrix Potter. Her glove-encased hands were folded neatly before her on the table, and, from beneath a toquelike hat, large, kind eyes peered—demurely?—at me. There was an unoccupied chair in the room, to which I was motioned, and then I realized that all about the room there was a Winterhalter frieze of women—very fashionable women in hats, in gloves, in furs. Real ladies. All of them, including Edna Chase, were looking at my ankles. I looked at my ankles and saw that, as was my habit, one ankle was in a red sock and one ankle was in a green sock. I looked at Mrs. Chase, and Mrs. Chase looked at me. Mrs. Chase made a small, dry chuckling sound and said, “Stop … Go …” I said, “Right you are, Mrs. Chase.” The ladies all laughed politely and faded away. I was alone with Mrs. Chase.
Mrs. Chase then said something into a telephone and soon in came an exotic-looking man and an even more exotic-looking woman. These were the art director, Dr. [Mehemed Fehmy] Agha, and his assistant, Cipe Pineles. She was the kind who smoked reflectively through a very long cigarette holder. She was turbaned and done up in an excess of fine woolen fabric. (Many years later, she was the kind who dressed in artful hand-painted peasant clothes and was an Earth Mother.)17 They looked me over, and Dr. Agha said something complimentary about my book reviews he had read in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. Cipe said nothing, and they went away. Then Mrs. Chase sent for a small, rather plump, round-eyed, smiling woman who was ungloved and unhatted— very bouncy, very perky. Mrs. Chase said, “Allene, this is Leo Lerman. Lucien brought him in. He's yours.” Mrs. Chase looked at me and I knew that she meant for me to get up. Allene said, “Come with me.” So, fortified by Mrs. Chase's smiles, I went with Allene.
