The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JOURNAL • DECEMBER 14, 1951 • BEVERLY HILLS Those tag ends of time— the oddments of minutes between leaving a hotel room and the moment when one should be on the way to the car that carries one to the train or plane. At such times—the open seams, the unmortised joints—depression seeps in— anarchy—for the continuity is broken. This is a little limbo: a bird making its morning toilette in the gutter of this hotel, the sounds of breakfast carts wheeling-jinkling, crockery clattering over the garden paths—but death creeps in the betweens. The light in the palms is so Winslow Homer. All those months when Ela was here—miserably—and how wonderful if she had been here now.

  DECEMBER 15, 1951 • EN ROUTE FROM LOS ANGELES Diner—The head-waiter is a foreign gentleman with the rimless, round-spectacled look of being engaged in some concentrated, studious enterprise. His accent is German. He could be in cahoots with the tall, thickening-in-the-midriff, gray-suited, nonobjective-patterned tie. They give me another abrupt reading-between-the-lines (or is it sheets?) looks. The tall one is the dark-skinned, curly iron-gray-hair sexy type so popular since Pinza [in South Pacific]. Something slightly vulgar about him—perhaps his ruby ring—and the show-off way he holds his cigarette.

  A funeral in a desert pueblo—the burnished winter sun on all the brown adobe; the little houses attended by corn shucks baled on high ricks; the brown church and the thick skein of people, in dark clothes, moving into the church, while the black hearse waited. This, seen wholly for a moment, framed in the dining-car window, which reflected luxury tangible in linen, silver, and rich breakfast food was not sad. It was tragic.

  Pueblos do not seem mean and poverty-stricken, the way all those little horrors do in the San Bernardino Valley (trailers, shacks, etc.). Pueblos are indigenous and exactly right. I love their compactness—everything belonging to each house right there—but I would rather not live in a pueblo.

  DECEMBER 16, 1951 • EN ROUTE FROM CHICAGO “North Philadelphia!” John the porter cries, which returns me, having been thousands of miles…. What comes first to mind: the hours at Marion Davies's [in Beverly Hills], for this was the seamy side of a certain kind of high life—the inside story.55 She looked like an advertisement for the Carlin Comfort Shop [at Saks], for she was all in tufted and quilted blue, velvet crepe de chine, and her blond (surely fixed) hair every which way. Her mouth and chin Carol Channing's. Her complexion good. Her eyes sharp and secretly gay. She had been drunk for years and had Marie Dressler's gestures, but she knew what was going on. Nothing escaped her. Drink had addled her gestures, but sharpened her wits, there in that little leftover room, in that huge leftover house—empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays on the huge “Renaissance” table before her, its wood scarred and stained by drink and cigarette. In the chairs about her: thugs, millionaires, a novelist, a society reporter, her new husband Mr. Brown, in brown clothes, wordless, glowering. And always traffic through the room, “characters,” and the telephone clangoring in the kitchen beside it. A nurse instantly helped her out of her chair and bore her into the kitchen. “Yes, Hedda—yes.” “No, Louella—no.” The house felt as though many parties of a low character were going on in many other unseen rooms.

  In a huge, long hall, decorated by double-life-sized portraits of Marion Davies in her best-known screen roles (for fun and diversion she nightly showed these movies), all sorts of hangers-on and visitors walked about or talked in groups. (Old carpets, massive furniture still about, the gold dinner service said to be in the cellar, and millions of dollars of diamonds in vaults in the Bank of America at the foot of the hill.) Off the huge hall, little rooms, dressing rooms. In one, a brazen blonde (peroxide) in Prussian-blue satin pajamas, shrilling at a trim but drunken woman in tight black skirt and white silk shirt. Perhaps this woman was Marion's mother.

  A man who had constantly ambled through the rooms saying, “Has anyone seen my basket?” appeared. “I found my basket!” he exclaimed. His wife, a well-known radio entertainer, grabbed it—a white covered basket, decorated with canceled American postage stamps on its handle and pansies (in full color) on its white sides.

  Then Marion talking endlessly at the table, and finally her husband saying something sullen. She replied snappily, gave a look of disdain. He rose, went away. The phone rang. Marion's secretary whispered to her. The nurse and the secretary guided her into the kitchen. The secretary returned and asked Hunt [Hartford] to come in. In five minutes he returned. “She wanted me to listen in. Her husband's laying her out.” Then the phone clattered. Marion returned. In a few minutes so did Mr. Brown. He sat opposite her, glowering. Then he went into the kitchen. He called: “I want to speak to you!” She pretended not to hear. He called again. She continued her pretense. He grabbed her arm. She shooed him off. With the majesty common only to drunks and playacting children and Negroes, she went into the kitchen. In a moment, a sound like a slap. Then she hoarsely chanted: “How dare you! How dare you!” Silence. The secretary said she'd had to retire. Would we forgive her? Would we care to wait and see [her 1933 film] Going Hollywood? A hooligan said, “Come on back, folks, wanna see you…. A party's going on….”

  We went back through the servants' rooms into a small room filled with the kind of people you see when Hollywood does Raymond Chandler (all L.A. and Hollywood seems written by Chandler). On the bed, another big dyed blonde with skirts above her navel, and a tall dress-extra kind of run-down sexy man (later he would be a bum; now he was a drifter) stroking her between her thighs. She singing: “Nothing wrong. We're married. He's my husband. He's good. That's why I married him.” And thick smoke and nasty laughing and smell of rye and vomit. It was evident that a fight was in the making—and all sorts of nastiness. We went—under protest. In her garden, rose trees—pink and yellow and crimson—bloomed eerily beneath synthetic electric-light moons.

  In the car, Speed [Lamkin] said: “They found a scorpion in Marion's bed last week. Luckily she decided not to sleep in her own bed that night. Something she'd never decided before.”

  NOTE: Upon his return, Leo wrote to Huntington Hartford saying that he was ill-suited to run a modeling agency. He suggested that he represent Hartford in other business, but nothing resulted.

  JOURNAL • JANUARY 19, 1952 • NEW YORK CITY How [society columnist] Elsa Maxwell looked at Truman's reading of The Grass Harp: a Kewpie-doll face left out in the rain and snow these last fifty years and now lost in a vast flabby face. Her velvet blouse top was embroidered with sequined and diamantéd butterflies. She is an old woman, almost at the age when male and female appearance blur together. She has the appearance and atmosphere of a well-to-do abbot, just right for Robin Hood plundering. She said: “This is the last refuge, dear Mrs. Crane, the last refuge. You have the only saloon [sic] left in New York.”56

  Carlo [Van Vechten]'s tale about Isadora [Duncan] at the Plaza: She had danced at Carnegie Hall, and then she gave a dinner at the Plaza in her suite. The round table was so vast that it almost filled the room. She said she would dance naked on the table. Mrs. Walter Damrosch instantly told Mr. Walter that it was time to go home. Isadora later danced, naked in her bedroom, a hymn to the sun as it rose over Central Park. Then everyone crowded into a cab, Isadora in her nightdress and a fur coat (chinchilla?) and off to the sailing, with everyone clinging to the cab, atop and astride it—shrieking and singing.

  JANUARY 20, 1952 Ela killed herself a year ago. Some evenings ago, at midnight, Alice came here and she told me how Ela had come to lunch to meet Dr. Rinkle a year ago. She had been in a dreadful state, and while the other guests had talked amongst themselves, Eleonora had poured out in German to Dr. Rinkle, a stranger, her agony: She didn't sleep. She had taken dope—many years—now she couldn't sleep. She seemed to be asking him to help her. He said he would see her when next he came from Boston. He returned in a week, to find that she had killed herself. I did not, a year ago, believe that she had killed herself, but I do now.

  JANUARY 23, 1952 Plaza Dining Room 1:15 p.m. Having come full cycle, I find myse
lf quite by accident (or are there accidents?) at this corner table in the big dining room where precisely a year ago we came—Gray, Richard, Eugenia, and I—to lunch, in memoriam after Ela's funeral. The trampled crimson roses in the cruddy gutter… petals shocking the eye to attention … Now I do not talk to Eugenia; Richard has, at last, been unfaithful to Howard; I love Gray every day more, and he is working hard.

  MARCH 3, 1952 I have wasted my life. A sloppy, sloppy life—mostly notions and remarks and little achievement. My reason for being seemed, until about three years ago, to make other people feel wanted, gay, confident—to make them laugh and feel able to go on. These last three years, I have permitted my personal gloom and tension to show, and more and more I have become selfish—so selfish that the “I” has swamped all else. Of course, in those years of being private while helping (or whatever it was), I was repaid magnificently, for my ego was nourished, and I battened upon the reciprocity of it all. It has been a long sickness, which I have not realized, and somehow this morning it begins to lift. Or is this the little calm before greater rigors? One fact: I must not sit in gloom and give myself away. This is spoiled and childish and so horribly unattractive. Even jotting this way is more negative than positive. I murmur the surface.

  MARCH 10, 1952 In the night, at four, screams and then terror mounting the stair, horror in the hall—but little Gray, all tousled and rosy, rushed to my rescue. I read Proust until six and so to sleep again—slipping the Méséglise Way, among pink hawthorns and lilacs.57 The body remembers pain that the mind, asleep—anesthetized—did not let one “feel.” I mean, when I woke screaming, I felt, in all those places from which teeth (etc.) had been removed, the dimmest, most vestigial ache—an ache I remembered from those times when teeth had been pulled without anesthetic.

  APRIL 29, 1952 I called Peter [Lindamood]. He was drunk—lucidly, vociferously drunk. “Do you remember when you first found me?” he asked. “On Julian [Levy's] sofa? In the back room? That was the beginning.” He is brokenhearted over a man. Peter as a character is a real study in degenerating.58

  MAY 9, 1952 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • HAMBURG, NEW YORK

  T. S. Eliot is an odd-looking giant. He made those little semidry jokes (like a second-best, watered-down-for-the-children pale sherry) and the audience played right along—rapturously. He said things like he could give them a soprano cough and a bass cough and that his poem “The Hippopotamus” was hated by Edmund Gosse, who thought Eliot's talent declined then and there, but that Arnold Bennett loved it, and this provoked titters.59 It was all so sycophantic, like kids in school buttering up the teacher. Then he read some poems—”Prufrock.” Some fifteen months ago, when he was asked to read this, he said he thought it too immature … but now he read it, saying that he thought that he was now ready for it. The hall was packed. He said that his two best poems were “Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding.” That sounded like a parody. He reads in a light, faintly self-ironic voice, and he drinks lots of glasses of water (rendered golden by the stage lights and so seeming some precious light golden wine) … and he stoops and wears heavy black shoes. Right in the middle of his reading, I thought how indecent this all was—this reading of passionate poetry by its author. Marianne Moore, googly-eyed like the crusty (but popular) professor of a girls' college (one of the big ones), flanked by Monroe Wheeler (that little simian).60 So that was T. S. Eliot in the Theresa Kaufman Auditorium [at the YMHA].

  MAY 15, 1952 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RUTH YORCK • WEST BERLIN

  I will hastily write this little note to you before I go off to my operation. I can't remember whether I told you that my face (bones and teeth) is infected from that old cab accident, and this year has been hell. I had one big operation about two months ago and now, today, I am to have a bigger one. They will take out bits of bone, all remaining uppers and roots, and some in the bottom and bone. Of course, I am scared. Constant pain and intimations of pain make one more frightened as it goes on. I now dread anesthesia, needles, and dope more than I did six months ago. This is odd, for I now know that after the initial pain (the needle prick, the eternal but miraculously swift suffocation—with that feeling of having solved all the riddles of the universe) after this pain—painlessness and return, recall. But I miss you: You would (said he selfishly) mainstay us.

  MAY 27, 1952 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RUTH YORCK • PARIS

  This is the first typewriting I have done in over two weeks, the last being to you just before I had my last operation. This was hell. But what hell. I woke up right in the middle and could not let them know, and they went right on cutting. Finally, I fluttered my eyelids very fast, like a jazz-baby Clara Bow. They all stopped and said, “He's awake!” and quick they needled me … but it was awful. Then I was out, but, oh, the agony and shock when I came to in Gray's arms. So, he had the problem of coping … and he did. I was taken home, and for three days and three nights I was delirious from drugs not mixing right. One of these drugs contained something which is used in the truth serum, and so there was truth here all those days and nights. I flung myself about, and made like I was riding a bicycle, and was a windmill, and I looked at Ela's photo and said, “Such a pity … You were such a silly girl” and other such truthlike sentiments. Darling, you would have been impressed with my four-letter vocabulary, or so Gray says. I really went to town. And all the time, all those nights and days, it seemed a bright blue, white, and lilac enamel day. Now I have not an intact bone in my face, not one upper tooth, and many lowers departed, and I look pretty much the same. The details (save the teeth) are more emphatic.

  JUNE 10, 1952 NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • SIASCONSET, MASSACHUSETTS

  Gray got two covers to do, from Columbia Records. So, he and Pavlik [Tche-litchew], [Eugene] Berman, and Stuart Davis are the chosen ones. Gray gets $500 for the two. The contract is now signed. Hosanna! We saw Choura [Danilova], and she looks wonderful and is so gay and asked us to come to visit her in New Jersey, so we probably will. Gray has always adored Choura, and she and he will now have Dallas in common. She said, “But Dallis is de cruss-ruds uf de woild.”61

  JOURNAL • JUNE 12, 1952 Yesterday, in the evening, to the Van Vechtens for dinner, and after this excellent repast, in came Frieda Lawrence (now married to an Italian).62 She is en route to England to see the children she abandoned when she ran off with [D. H.] Lawrence. She will also see her grandchildren. In all these years, she has not seen any of them. “Should I take with a ham to hot them up?” she anxiously asked. She is the most German of women. Not since [contralto Ernestine] Schumann-Heink have I seen a woman so Frau-ish. At any shopping moment she can be found in quantity, string bag in hand, in Yorkville, or wherever Germans exist. She is frumpy with age, but her ankles are slim. Her longish, narrow feet were in black wedgies, single strap (Gertrude Stein always wore Mary Janes). She wore a gray cloth suit, white-polka-dotted long skirt, a heavy-cream satin (much folded and detailed around the collar) blouse, and great quantities of turquoise and silver Indian (New Mexican) jewelry. Some of the stones were beautiful, but all of the jewelry was touristy. Her blond-gray hair—in a longish bob—looked as though, when she rose in the morning, she inevitably exclaimed: “What should I—ach—do with it!” She uses ach as punctuation, as temporizing, as padding. She has a country-clear complexion, a nervous Hausfrau- hostess laugh (a sort of chuckle, out of wanting to appear convivial), a matriarchal air of complicity (to be found in all Earth Mothers), and nowhere the dynamic beauty that inflamed and inspired Lawrence. “All the time—ach—Lawrence grows. I who after all knew him — everything—how he sat at table—everything—am finding constantly new things in Lawrence. I hate the Viking Portable [D. H. Lawrence]. It is awful. This woman doesn't know anything about Lawrence. How should she? She knows only what she hears. Lawrence is too big for these little books—but she has a talented son. He is a good writer. She is not altogether bad—but she doesn't know.” Frieda
Lawrence met Diana [Trilling, the Portable's editor], and thought Lionel was her son. She was interested in everything, especially the beautiful lamplit vista of the park. She said Lawrence would have been so pleased about the enormous Penguin sales. He always wanted the man in the street to read him.

  JUNE 22, 1952 On Friday evening, the college editors being here and a party being given for them, it was necessary to go to MacDougal Street [in Greenwich Village].63 It has been over three years since I crossed Washington Square and walked along MacDougal Street, and in that time all the houses, in which Valeska and Bravig Imbs and their world lived, have vanished, leaving emptiness. The Imbses are dead, and all those who lived in these houses are dead, divorced, or gone from this city. I thought: Not even the solid fact of a dilapidated house to which to cling—were any of them to return—not only at the vacant, debris-cluttered lot upon which once their house and dreams stood, but all about the square whole blocks have been torn down to make way for a pseudocolonial law-school building, an aerial apartment house. In the square itself, the human flotsam and jetsam still drifts and clots, but always I see Valeska limping across the square, her arms loaded down with books. Valeska in a suit—five or ten years old (blue, it seems) and still good. And the Imbses, long, pale room, with night seeping in on summer-breezy white curtains, moth-pale and fluttering, and outside the summer evening gaiety of the square.

  NOTE: In September 1952, Gray and Richard sailed to Europe. The two would be together for several months before Leo joined them in December (coming to Italy from Copenhagen). They began with a stay in Paris, toured the Loire Valley, and then went on to Venice and Rome. Gray and Richard's nearly two months in Rome fell during a time when Truman Capote, Marguerite Young, Ruth Stephan, Carson McCullers, Frederic Prokosch, Stark Young, Charles Henri Ford, and Pavel Tche-litchew were all nearby.