by Leo Lerman
NOTE: Leo sailed to Copenhagen on November 18 to research a piece on the Royal Danish Ballet. Instead he ultimately wrote a two-installment article on Denmark itself for Mademoiselle.
During the trip he met Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, the writer better known as Isak Dinesen. As he would write in January 1971: “I met Blixen through [the actress] Ruth Elizabeth Ford. [Her brother] Charles Henri Ford had written to Karen when he was still a boy in Columbus, Mississippi, when his momma was the hostess in the local hotel coffee shop and Ruth Elizabeth was the campus queen, singing with the bands.”
NOVEMBER 30, 1952 • COPENHAGEN
TO GRAY FOY • rome
It is four o'clock, and the chimes and bells all over Copenhagen are sounding and re-sounding—the one from the great church (a baroque marvel which once seen spins in the head for hours) and the one from the Russian church (with three golden-green onion towers and glittering ropes draping its curious crosses) and the clocks in the Amalienborg—a great octagonal square. The palace surrounds its cobbled vastness on all sides—every inch of it completing the inch preceding, the one succeeding, and all garlanded and scrolled—with maids in white nurse-cap-like hats peering from between snowy curtains, and men in uniforms only worn elsewhere in operettas about Alt Wien also peering out, but on the floor above. A maid setting the table, dimly seen to be lit by pink-shaded candles. Many doors have china plaques on which an owl sits on two keys crossed—he and the keys are blue, the plaques white.
Here the queen goes shopping like anyone else, and the king loves to conduct the symphony orchestra. The Danes all stop whatever they are doing when the quite modest royal car passes, uncover their heads and smile sweetly and fondly at it—like people who have some oldish friend whom they love—a sort of half-smiling-at-a-child protective smile.
Today I have been walking from 10:30 until a few minutes ago—oh, the beautiful, unexpected, remote-in-time sights I have seen! Here the sets for the royal theater—the big one where ballet, opera, plays are performed—are dragged in by two beautiful ancient horses—from the shipyard where they are kept. Also, it being Sunday, almost no one is on a bicycle or in an auto—but on foot—and more friendly dogs (of all kinds) are about—also sweet-faced blond children, some in white goatskin coats like little girls used to wear at the turn of the century. They look like old-fashioned white poodle fur, and with Kewpie-doll hats of the same fur. But most in blue—all of the blues in the world— embroidered in scarlet—and now and then a scarlet one worked in blue.
It is on Sunday that every child (it seems) in Copenhagen and many dogs and quantities of adults flock to the Amalienborg Square. There an elaborate changing of the royal guard happens. The guard about to work lurks in the entry of its guardhouse (like a chorus in an operetta in the wings) now in long black coats and white-and-silver trim; sky blue trousers peep from beneath, on their heads even larger busbies than the guards at Buckingham. All the while, through the great gate more and more children arrive—all sizes, girls and boys both, dogs and gulls and large black birds—but not performing bears. (They have one in Petrouchka which was wonderful last night—with the [Diaghilev Ballets Russes'] original Benois decor.) Everyone is in great good humor and no one shoves and the police make jokes and pick up the littlest children and give them friendly kisses—it is lovely. Now everyone has made an irregular circle from the Frederick Quintus statue in the center of the square (a huge flourish of an equestrian statue—high baroque—it echoes and echoes as you look at it), so they all are in fanned line with one opening at the gate and the other near a door to the palace. It is an octagon, broken in four places by passageways, but giving an illusion of continuity—save where the harbor is to be seen through one passage—and the great cathedral surmounted by its shattering star of a spire (oh, how beautiful, topping the green dome) and garlands. Faint music—and a tremendous influx of people (like in any opera when the crowd comes on), and this means the people who've been marching with the guard through the city are arriving. Then in come the guard—to very gay and silly toy-soldier music (very Von Suppé), and they march and do formations. The music is so spirited, the children all so serious, and the dogs stand or some sit smiling and wagging (what well-behaved beasts)—I thought of you even more, and suddenly I began to cry, so then I made believe I had something in my eye, in case anybody was looking, but nobody was. Then the doors of the palace opened, and a majordomo in scarlet and gold (early eighteenth-century costume and cockade, with a great gleaming staff of office) held doors open, and out came the king in the palace windows (deep-silled—all windows here are, and all have great quantities of plants on them) and the Danish royal flag. Loads of presenting arms, and a dignitary, with a huge, felt-looking, sky-blue sash across his shoulder, took the Danish royal flag. (The steps of this man and his companion were the same as we have seen in movies showing royal personages following royal coffins.) And so more marching, and the king retired, and then still more marching—always to ever-changing gay music. Then within all the guards all the people stood in a hollow square, within this a double set of musicians and—do you know what?—for one half hour they gave a program of music which surely Von Suppé, the Strauss boys, and Offenbach had collaborated on. It was ravishing—and all the children and dogs and the policemen and the guardsmen just stood there visibly loving it!!! Then the whole previous ceremony was repeated at each of the guard booths, those narrow kind, four pairs, Danish red with white royal initials. After this, off they marched with everyone following them through the rest of Copenhagen.
ISAK DINESEN A large, square, highly polished room, and there she sat, incredibly elegant, behind her lace-draped tea table. She had never before seen me: I had never seen her. Almost two hours later, I realized that we had not stopped talking from the moment she said, “Sit down here, Mister Lerman,” beckoning me to a huge chair beside the table. What did we talk about? Friends. Those she did not know, she knew about. She was a mesmerizing listener. It was impossible not to tell her the sort of detail you note in a very private diary or do not dare to set down at all. Her immediate and singular magic transformed you into a teller of the tales she wanted to hear. There she sat, swathed in pale woolen stuffs, minutely perfect, erect like czarinas and empresses in nineteenth-century picture books, her enchantress eyes so alive that it was impossible to imagine them still even in sleep. Within their luminous depths, an ironic humor glittered. Her wizard hands poured out tea, dispensed buttery little cakes filled with preserves. “These cakes, what are they called?” “Jew cakes …” She had the voice of a great diseuse. You could hear Paris of La Belle Epoque in it. Yvette Guilbert sounded this way when she sang, Colette when she talked. “Jew cakes,” she said again, suddenly looking not at me but into me. “Oh,” I said, “my mother makes them. I have known them always. Her mother made them.” “Yes,” she said, “I know because your mother and her mother must have come from Russia. Russian Jews make them. I had the recipe many years ago from one of them.” (She had the power of evoking a long-lost moment in time, a host of people, not only by what she said but by what she did not say.)
From the gray wall opposite, a small, storybook-dressed boy of amazing presence came. He was, obviously, not a real little boy, but a child out of a Gothic or a Winter's Tale. He wore the garments of some long-ago day: Children in The Nutcracker are dressed this way. Put him in a Kate Greenaway [children's] book and you could not find him. He bowed to the baroness. She said something in Danish, giving him a smiling look, which overflowed into love and pride—as though she had achieved him and was deeply pleased. The baroness beckoned the little boy to the cakes. He took one, retreated, said something in Danish, looked at me merrily. “He says you look like the men in the paintings.” Her walls were covered by enormous nineteenth-century canvases of military formations and battles, interspersed with small paintings of flowers. “He admires your beard,” the baroness continued. The little boy backed away to the hidden door, made his little antique bow, and vanished. She ga
ve me a mischievous look. “You are mystified, are you not.” This was not a question but an expression of pleasure. “And you are a curious man … so curious. Well, this little fellow is not an apparition. He is not an automaton. He is the son of my cook. Some years ago, soon after she first came to me, I was at my dinner. I felt someone was in the room. He was. Lurking in a dark corner—watching. So I told his mother that he and I would dine together every Thursday evening. We would have an evening suit made for him and have champagne and make the social graces. And we do, every Thursday evening at eight o'clock.”
Much later, I went away out into the November night, out into the falling snow, which cascades from the skies in Denmark as it did when I was a child in New York… or even now when Petrouchka is danced upon the stage of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. There was not a light to be seen in Tania's house, not a sound came from it save the high, thin tinkle of a bell—a silvery tintinnabulation. Then nothing. Did she write her tales first or live them? (FROM ISAK DINESEN: A MEMORIAL, 1965)
NOTE: On December 6, Leo left Copenhagen by train for Florence, where Gray met him. After a few days, they went to Rome, where Leo did interviews and research about the Italian film-studio complex Cinecitt à.
DECEMBER 25, 1952 • ROME
TO BETSY BLACKWELL • new york city
Rome is resplendently beautiful today, with more theater and opera transpiring in the churches than on any stage, ever. I have been laboring over our features here strenuously, so this has been my first sightseeing day. I have filled some fourteen notebooks with material for use in the three features and later “notions.” This albergo is freezing cold and I am writing to you clothed in four sweaters, a flannel pajama top, my hands in knitted gloves, two pairs of socks on the usual appendages (obviously all four of them).
BETSY BLACKWELL Mrs. Blackwell was that old-time American lady, a thoroughly modern woman, superbly hatted and impeccably gloved. She believed that her readers should be informed, delighted, surprised, cultivated— admonished when necessary—literally from foot to head, inside and out. The complete Republican lady, she was one of the most curious women I've ever known, and she loved to be first. That made life as one of her editors a frequent paradise. She had that superb editorial sixth sense that told her when an editor's most freakish notion would work to the advantage of her magazine. Her door was always open, and I would rush into her office. “Mrs. B,” I would shout, “Copenhagen is going to be the place next year.” She would look at me quietly and say, “Does that mean a trip?” “Sure,” I'd answer, and she would say, “If you can keep the expenses down you can go.” That trip was typical of all our decades together, because it eventually evolved into traipsing from Copenhagen to Rome (to write about the then-flourishing Italian cinema), to Venice (I wired: MRS B CANT COME HOME WHEN PROMISED MUST GO TO VENICE TO HEAR WONDERFUL NEW SOPRANO MARIA MENEGHINI CALLAS WE WILL BE FIRST). T he years went by and we were first, to her utter delight, with Margot Fonteyn, Sadler's Wells, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (published entire), the Beatles.75 The excitements piled up. Mrs. B loved gossip and a joke. I remember coming back from a fashion sitting in which we used Manhattan's most famous nude model, and Mrs. B said, “How did it go?” and I replied, “Well, it went very well, but the naked lady seemed so prim. When she saw us slapping paint on the girls, she firmly said, ‘You can look, but you can't touch.' “ Mrs. B laughed so hard that she fell into a paroxysm of coughing. The coughing always terrified us, but Mrs. B's laughter was pure, unadulterated, forever-young joy. (1985)
JOURNAL • December 30, 1952 Tuesday. Having been ill since Sunday evening, I now feel well enough to go out, and sun makes it more desirable. Gray has also been ill with the current Roman cold epidemic. I read Out of Africa and fell deeply, painfully in love with it. I know of no other book like it.
Here in Rome, I am constantly beset by an at-sea feeling. The baroque churches, with their facades in sea-wave curves, seem indeed sea waves at the very moment of their breaking, tumbling, topping the churches of Rome. And the many bells are, especially at night when I lie awake, forlorn bells of the sea, and everywhere, even on a windless day, great sea winds fill the billowing, swaying draperies of the statues, while cupids (putti) clutch them, hoping to restrain them from being blown by these winds from nowhere, save the hearts of those who shaped them invisibly. And here, in this city, Triton reigns, not the eagle or the wolf, but Neptune and his Tritons, his Nereids and seahorses and the very fish of the deep sea—all limey and salt-sparkling and seaweed green in the fountains. Nowhere are there so many jets of water iridescencing [sic] a city.
In the [Protestant] graveyard, the small cats that guide one stand discreetly among themselves while you stand weeping, in the rain beneath black umbrellas, reappearing when the moment of departure comes.
On the marble-topped bureau in this room:
a feather-framed photograph by Sheila [Ward] of Gray and me in their pool in New Hope (and Peter [Lindamood] sitting beside it); it is also holding a postcard view of Sleeping Beauty's château (Blois)
a little insect playing a cello, mounted atop a flower (its base a calendar)
a double leather frame containing Ela and Maestro, Cecil Beaton's snap of Ela at Kammerschloss, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe's photo of Penelope [Reed]
a little rabbit peering at the Sheila photo
a befana76
six vegetable dolls
the little bear from New York
a flashlight
two kaleidoscopes
two bottles of snuff
a large plastic bottle of bay rum
a jar of fixing cream [mustache wax] from the Ritz in London
a peasant riding a white cow
the hair and eagle top from [a marionette] Tancred's helmet
a bobbing, long-necked, blue-hair-bowed bird
seven painted-tin flower trees (three sizes) in gold pots
a little colored holy card from the Bernini church on Christmas Eve
an 1840ish bisque figure from the junk shop on Via del Babuino
a lovely green-flowered carton of chocolates from Perugia
a hairbrush, black-tail comb, beard brush, two beard shears, and nail scissors
Dorn's capsules for colds
a baby-faced sphinx from the Piazza Borghese junk market, with a bit of mistletoe offering from the Piazza di Spagna
a two-faced hand looking glass found in Ela's boxes
a ball-shaped and an egg-shaped wooden sock darner—very beautiful
seven tangerines—orange with gold lights and interior skins like honey and ivory-colored nougat, some with green leaves at their hearts
a folder from the American Express about Hotel Amstel in Amsterdam
two linen handkerchiefs marked R
a first-aid kit and a thermometer
a chocolate pear and a chocolate lime, each wrapped in tinfoil and leaves
my engagement book
my little account book
four bone-colored rods
a white-spotted, large blue bandana, folded
a balancing Pinocchio
a large wooden Pinocchio
a gay Buon Natale card
a pack of doppie Tedeschi carte [playing cards]
a pile of notes, reminders, and Perugina candy bands
a glass jar in the form of a grape cluster
a basket of yellow beans
a little pig, a little cat, the Negro Magi, and a cupid from the Piazza Navona—all of these say “Buon Natale”
And one Ray Co. #2 pencil—in yellow painted wood—that I took and am using—and will now replace because we are going out to lunch!77
NOTE: According to Leo, the first report of a new singer named Maria Callas came to him in 1947 or 1948. More rumors followed, and in him a “hunger set in, like Marcel's for Berma” (Journal, July 18, 1981). While in Rome, they spotted a placard announcing a gala La Traviata in Venice with Callas on January 8, 1953. After Twelfth Night, always their favorite holida
y in the Christmas season, Leo and Gray took the train to Venice. Gray recalls that they made their way to the Hotel Bauer-Grunwald in a gondola, with excesses of luggage, and Leo in a homburg hat and shearling-collared coat, holding a walking stick. They swiftly pulled themselves together and went to the performance that evening at La Fenice.
CALLAS Upon a stage thronged the surging crowd of laughing, chattering, wildly gesticulating ball-goers—women's wide skirts making a sound like leaves on a windswept day, their steps as they twirl and twirl heard above the mounting waltz-beat lilt in the orchestra. Upon the stage, downstage left, quite apart, in solitude to be found in dreams, sits a monumental, Titian-haired, marmoreal figure, encased in her flounced but simple white gown, as she sits there casually, almost indolently, tossing white camellias toward the dancing guests. Am I imagining her? From her… the most haunting voice I have ever heard. It is filled with lost joys, permeated with present despairs. Here is desperate frivolity, and here is unavoidable tragedy.
I do not think, on this night of that early January day in 1953, the 100th anniversary of La Traviata being celebrated in the theater where it encountered disaster (for it did, at its premiere in Venice), I do not think I saw anything or anybody save Maria Meneghini Callas.78 Only when the lights came up, Act I ending, after I had lived with Violetta through her tumultuous falling in love, only then—it was a matter of some minutes and considerable nudging from Gray—I came back to see all about me the glory of La Fenice. Here was an opera house obviously scooped out by mysterious seaborne architects … all green and pale gold, brimming with aqueous light—a sea-washed grotto, a secret place in a coral reef (for this gala occasion festooned top to bottom with blush-pink and blood-red carnations).
