The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  84. Libby Holman (1906-71) had been a celebrated torch singer on Broadway in the twenties and early thirties, until her trial (and acquittal) for the fatal shooting of her tobacco-heir husband. Jane Bowles, then a lover of Holman's, may have taken Leo to meet her.

  85. Leo had met lifelong friend Eugenia Halbmeier (b. 1916) during a showing of the film Dra-cula in 1931, when he and his brother terrified her by leaping into her row over the seat backs.

  86. The novelist, playwright, and essayist Gore Vidal (b. 1925) met Leo through Anaïs Nin around 1946. The Vidal novel that rankled Leo is probably his homosexual-themed The City and the Pillar (1948). His unhappiness with Vidal's novel did not long dampen Leo's gregar-iousness (or perhaps it inspired mischief). According to Robert Davison, “In 1948, Leo took a table at a Halloween drag in Harlem given by Phil Black, expressly inviting both Gore and Truman Capote.” The famous jealous feud between the two writers had probably begun earlier that year.

  87. Far Harbour, an opera with music by Baldwin Bergerson and book by William Archibald, was a failure that had only two performances at Hunter College in New York. It had been produced by Lincoln Kirstein (1907-96), the influential dance patron, historian, and critic. Kirstein had brought George Balanchine to New York in 1933 and with him cofounded the New York City Ballet.

  88. Capote's letter described Richard as obsessed by his entanglement with Howard and Leo: “Indeed we discussed practically nothing else. He talked of you with a heartbreaking tenderness … meanwhile H. remains something of a sexual idée-fixe…. But [Richard's] ego, still a feeble thing, draws from it some poisonous nourishment.” Howard would arrive there in two weeks.

  89. The film was Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, the first of several landmark silent films that F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) directed.

  90. George Davis (1906-57) was a novelist, fiction editor at Harper's Bazaar (1935-41), then at Mademoiselle (1941-48), and features editor at Flair (1950-51). He was the act that Leo would follow at Mademoiselle.

  1453 LEXINGTON I came to 1453 when my friend Robert Davison found an apartment in this tall, gaunt, pigeon-desecrated, 1870ish brownstone “town house.” In 1948 the family brownstones of my childhood were coveted town houses. It stood on the east side of the avenue, third [south] from the Ninety-fourth Street corner. It was, as it had then been, one of a row of typical brown-stones, but now they looked leftover, left behind, some almost abandoned to roomers, impecunious lost descendants, young dwellers on their way to more presentable elsewheres.

  From the moment I climbed 1453's crumbling steps, pushed open its heavy wooden door (more a memory of black-green than a color), and smelled its close, thick, overripe atmosphere I knew that I had come home. I had been born in just such a house, a typical Manhattan brownstone side-street house, thirteen blocks north. 1453 was an avenue house and wider than Momma's father's place. But the floor plans were identical citywide.

  Robert and I raised two or three thousand dollars one morning. I found in my mailbox an envelope containing a note: “Darling Leo. Please accept this [$1,000] check with my love. Pay it back when you can or don't or give me essays for The Tiger's Eye. You must have your house.” Ruth [Stephan], born Wal-green, was our fairy godmother. She looked the part: a spare blond beauty, she brought radiance into our lives. She lived for literature (especially poetry), art, the sharing of her wealth. She “helped” where she could. She had an enormous joy in life and letters, and I became a part of that life and joy.

  We bought the lease from the dubious little man who had owned it, and for $125 a month and a signed promise to keep this house in good repair and pay our utilities monthly, there we were—beholden to the family who really owned “our” house, Czechoslovakians rumored to have been in the fur business. To our house, on April 1, I brought from the fifth-floor walk-up where I lived some oddments of furniture, a battered family-office desk, a chaotic mess of files, a typewriter, a heterogeneous mass of objets trouvés, boxes of photographs (loves and hates—I had papered two of my bedroom walls and the ceiling with these), the enormous research for a book about the d'Este sisters (which I would never write, but of which I would reap and even play forever), and I brought books, books, books. We did not have much to sit on until, two weeks after I moved in, Carmel Snow gave me a wall-long, screaming-red-lipstick satin sofa from, she said, “a brothel in Paris!” But what we brought most of was spirit, a sense of the ridiculous, fantasy, curiosity, and delight. We both loved to work hard, and we each had lives fat with work we loved. (1993)

  JOURNAL • APRIL 20, 1948 Now begins my new regime in this house. It is deeply pleasant here. Early in the morning, even in the current unfinished, dishabille state, with echoes of cook and maids in caps and uniforms—I love it. Now it is warm and private. I must make it rich in work and love and goodness.

  NOTE: During the forties and fifties, Leo tried several times to write a novel with a central character based upon Eleonora von Mendelssohn. Passages for it are scattered in his journals, and the following is one of them. The “she” in it would be Leo, “E” is Eleonora, “E.B.” probably Elisabeth Bergner, and “S” possibly the risqué nightclub singer Spivy LeVoe.

  JOURNAL • MAY 1, 1948 So she perceived that once having discovered someone took dope or was homosexual or had been institutionalized, she soon met or found someone linked in the same aberration. This was the ancients' birds-of-a-feather, but these feathers were from darkling birds, and almost always unsuspected—until some initial evidence briefed her for the clues, which were everywhere to be found. When she knew that E doped, she discovered the reason for E's passionate devotion to S (who was ugly, vulgar, rude) and her three-decade devotion for E.B., the actress. A great network, as secret as veins—and as busy—was exposed to her awakened perceptions. She could follow their tortuous meanderings as easily as cartographers read maps that were quite obscure to uninformed eyes.

  NOTE: Gray Foy had been an eighteen-year-old studying art at Los Angeles City College when he and fellow student Robert Davison fell for each other in 1940. It was Gray's first romantic affair. “I learned,” he has said, “more from him than almost anybody—the neo-Romantic painters, García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, ancient music— Robert was encyclopedic.” That relationship ended with Robert's army induction and the outrage of Gray's mother, who intercepted some of his letters to Gray.

  By April 1948, both men were living in New York, but they hadn't seen each other in some five years. Robert was designing scenery for the theater, including Galileo for Orson Welles and O Mistress Mine for the Lunts. Gray was taking art instruction at Columbia University, living on $75 a month, and showing his visionary, minutely detailed drawings at Kirk Askew's gallery, Durlacher Brothers.

  When Gray and Robert met again, Robert sought a rekindling, but Gray didn't pursue it, feeling disenchanted by Robert's then life, which he recalls was “very untram-meled, to say the least.” Gray was growing lonely in New York, however, and resolved that his life had to change. At about this time, Askew introduced him to the modernist architect Philip Johnson (1906-2004), then better known as the founder of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art. Johnson began pursuing Gray avidly, if discreetly. Then Robert invited Gray to a party that he and his new housemate were giving.

  GRAY FOY On April 30, 1948, Robert and I had a party at 1453. As the years went on the pattern became a familiar one—inexpensive flowers to fill the rooms, multitudinous candles to make a glorious glowing, and not, at least until much later, notable refreshments. No one came for the drink or the baked meats. For a very long time all that was served—and that is a euphemism—was a huge block of cheddar-cheese-in-port and gallons of jug red wine. People came because they wanted to be with us and with one another. That first party was to honor Pierre Balmain, the Parisian dress designer, canonized by Gertrude Stein and passed on by her to [music critic and novelist] Carl Van Vechten.

  I can smell the cheese, lilacs, candle wax, and perfumes. There is a certain mome
nt in party-giving when the host knows that this will be a momentous, memorable, talked-about occasion. This moment happened to me when I came upstairs to the landing on the first floor and saw in the front parlor a young man standing shyly. He stood there—looking. I said to him, “I know who you are.” Then I said, “That's a very good blue blazer, but I don't think you should have those silver buttons.” Since I am writing some forty-five years later, I must tell you that I have those silver buttons in a box in my bureau's top drawer. I have cherished them for those forty-five years. (1993)

  JOURNAL • MAY 8, 1948 Now there are footsteps above me, and it is Robert on naked feet, and I know that, after seven years, he has been lying beside the only one he has ever loved, and this is as it should be. Now there are voices—and laughter—and I wish him the serenity he deserves—but I cannot dissever that long winter of sitting in the attic room [in Middletown] and hearing love at its tide in the room beneath me—but what complaint have I save that induced by self-pity? I have a home and its security. I have the possibility of work. Richard loves me and of this love I have all that is possible. He cannot give me more. Why do I then begrudge the little payment that his love for Howard demands from me? It is because I do not work enough, because tonight Robert and Gray lie above me and, without even knowing it decisively, are entering again a common future. For me there is no common future—not really with anyone— and I must accustom myself to this. For a month now this house has helped me. Now it must take its proper place in proportion, and my writing must again usurp any other thing. This is my only salvation. I love Richard: He is part of the blood which flows in my veins, part of the veins themselves. But I am not utterly good—useful—to him unless I work.

  The little creakings a bed makes when it is occupied by lovers… How to become accustomed to the central solitude? How to be alone in aloneness without being lonely?

  NOTE: Robert Davison has said that it was apparent from the first moments of their meeting that Leo intended to woo Gray. Leo worked at it throughout May 1948, and by the end of the month a romance began. In the meanwhile, Gray's involvement with Philip Johnson continued.

  JOURNAL • MAY 25, 1948 Gray would lie down beside anyone who offered him affection—because affection is his deepest need.

  MAY 29, 1948 Philip Johnson, a very evil man, has come to the end or a termination in his relationship with [House & Garden copy editor] Jon Stroup (who was a “good” boy when he took up with Philip). Philip is now seeing Gray. He needs his freshness, his energy, his goodness, his unspoiled youth, his creative talent, his very soul (the old Mephistopheles-Faust-vampire ratio). Gray, like Jon, has strong scrupulous reactions, but he is attracted. Philip commissions a portrait, also one of Theodate [Philip's sister]. He tells Lincoln [Kirstein] that he is in love with Gray. Lincoln commissions a painting. So the net is drawn over the “unspoiled.” Philip and Lincoln represent the museum world, the world of “names” who will be Gray's patrons. Kirk [Askew] dislikes this, but he is powerless. Gray is almost in great danger.

  Glenway had an affair with Bernard [Perlin, silverpoint artist], but Bernard could not continue. Now he [Glenway] has the atmosphere of a retired stallion. [The painters] Jared French, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, and Mrs. French [Margaret Hoening] all live together. French paints such obscene pictures so exquisitely that he cannot even show them. Lincoln Kirstein is married to Paul Cadmus's sister, Fidelma, but he loves boys.1

  Lincoln Kirstein and Philip Johnson seem to be great friends.

  MAY 31, 1948 Howard Rothschild attempted a relationship with Ward, the [Rothschilds'] new gardener, who had been a lineman and has a wife and two children. Howard does not love Richard, but wants him so as to satisfy his ego by discarding him, and he behaves exactly as Swann with Albertine2—goes to queer bars to tell Richard, so Richard will be jealous, and all Richard is concerned about is venereal disease and blackmail, while Howard wants him to be bug-eyed with passionate jealously. Howard inflicts constant hurt on himself in an effort to hurt Richard.

  JUNE 9, 1948 Mondrians are unbearably lonely, because they depersonalize. It is the depersonalization I hate, and this is why I am against so much of “modern” art and psychoanalysis.

  JUNE 14, 1948 I shan't be able to sleep—even though I am tired—and I wonder whether I shall be able to sleep alone in this house again. At about fifteen to eleven, someone broke the window to the right of my bed. It apparently was done with a stick or bludgeon of some sort. It has frightened me. I can't believe this was done to me—for who would do it?—but the idea that there is some unknown malevolent person (or persons) who would do this—seems to make sleep impossible. I reported to the police. Two came. They asked did anyone dislike me in the neighborhood. I thought instantly of the three boys in the upholstery [shop], but said nothing. I have nothing really to say about them. They jeer—but since I have done nothing wittingly to offend them why would they do this? Perhaps it was a drunk or some malicious boys—or someone who hates [the previous tenant] Drawant and thinks that he still lives here. I was hurt that Gray wouldn't come over and stay, but now I am pleased, for this is something I must do my myself—as I have tried to vanquish darkness—but tonight I shall leave one light burning.3

  JUNE 15, 1948 Laci is ending as a Steckenkünstler [costume tailor], as he started—traveling over the country, playing fifth-rate theaters with his girls, sticking pins into them because he hates them. Laci is rouged, sleeked up, still has some of his “good things.”

  JULY 1, 1948 1:15 A.M. This has been a wretched three hours again: Gray hasn't come home; Richard is with Howard. I think that something has happened to Gray—but perhaps he is staying with Philip. How can I continue this life of crumbs? I have been in pain as hurting as last week's toothache. Empirin [painkiller] relieved that, but what will relieve this? Resolution? How can I do this to myself? I am sick—but… There is more to living than this.

  Now he's here and life begins again. I must protect myself against myself—I must do this—I must not burden others—I have no right.4

  JULY 4, 1948 I came to Momma and Poppa's last night and stayed here. Surprisingly it is quite pleasant. The room is brilliantly light, wonderfully airy, and it smells with all the summer smells I had lost these years. I am stuffed with my favorite dishes, surfeited with Momma and Poppa singing and quarreling, and I read Ouida incessantly ([the novel] Moths, which I adore). There are beautiful leaf shadows. If this house had just a little more privacy in it, I would stay a bit. It is lovely to be waited on, fed, and to make believe there are no worries— for at least this day. The radio blares old operetta tunes. There is a fricassee cooking. I am quite pleased. There is a wire screen on the windows. This makes all the outside look as though Seurat had painted it. Now the sunlight diminishes. The air has the tint of a new copper kettle. In this room, I have fainted; I have first been in love; I have almost died; I have planned dream houses and dreamed dreams that have now been realized. I first came into it when I was about nine and a half or ten. That was twenty-four years ago. Again, it is we who pass, but not ever time—and soon, in two or three months, this will all be gone—ah well.5

  The flowering hedges remind me of all sorts of young agonies and loves and hungers. Now I begin to worry about Robert's return, and how can I give up my life with Gray—such as it is. I begin also to want for myself a strict morality. Perhaps being in love makes me feel this. I have never, in many years, been promiscuous, really, but now I should prefer a single faithfulness to Gray, but this is premature, and I must not plan it now. I risk nothing, for what have I to risk? I wish that I could go away to write—and Gray with me. I know that we could be contented. It is only natural to want this now, but still I love Richard. He must know this, but I cannot go on with the wretched part-life we have, where everything is measured and tainted by Howard.

  I love knowing that Momma and Poppa may buy that place back of the library. I love it there, and I have a feeling that it may provide a little something for my old age and Jerr
y's. That would be heaven to know. Now I shall read some more of Babbitt.

  JULY 20, 1948 I will stop a bit from writing Bazaar captions and rest in this notebook. I would like to rest my back by lying down, but I can't because deep inside I am frightened. I don't quite know of what. It's since Robert's insane tantrum on Friday morning, and it is because I see that he is not quite balanced. He is in Detroit, but I am frightened of falling asleep—with the same awful terror I had when I was younger. Twice today, someone has rung up on the phone and not said a thing when I answered. If only someone were here, I could sleep. But could I sleep, if I were alone with Robert in this house? As I feel now, I could not. Now it is four a.m. I must finish this work. Somewhere the house creaks, settles; a fly zooms through the rooms; in the garden a branch taps; a cat screeches—I shake with terror. I am horrified. It is a steaming, torrid night. I am wet with icy sweat—these are the saltwatery beads of terror. Juliet glittered with them when she remembered Tybalt. How can I continue to live here? At least there was nothing incomprehensibly terrifying at Eighty-eighth Street [with Richard]. I will stretch out the writing of these two captions until the sun has risen. The reflection of my hand in the window glass—seen out of the corner of my right eye—startled me—my heart jumped. I must control this. I must somehow rest my back. It is all pain. I wanted this house because it was the surest out—the swiftest—because I was greedy for a house—because I could no longer remain at Eighty-eighth Street. This house is a bad bargain. I must turn it into a good bargain, must manage to master it rather than permit it to master me.