The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Yesterday, Al Greenwald [secondhand-furniture dealer] (I was there) said he would drive me home. Coming up Lexington, when we stopped for someone to get out, we were fixed in our tracks, wordlessly, by seeing Mr. Millhauser emerge from his [mortuary] place of business—face front, hands attached to a stretcher. As he moved out onto the avenue (the little Chinese girl twirling up and down the curb, dogs with women attached passing along the street), quite apparent beneath a bright scarlet blanket was a human shape, a man it seemed. Attached to the other end of the stretcher was a male (elderly, countrified, in a straw hat and short shirtsleeves). They trundled across the pavement to an estate wagon, named “Sunset Lodge,” and carefully thrust their burden in. Then Mr. Millhauser shook hands with the straw hat, and a lurking female in a countrylike blue-and-white print and a dark blue straw hat, shod in blue sneakers, came up and shook Mr. M's hand. All three were quite jolly, like acquaintances parting after a pleasant afternoon. There were suit jackets and shirts hanging in the wagon part, as in cars going on holidays along Route 17. I got out and went across to get some suits, thereby encountering Mr. M (as I knew I would). So, I said brightly, not intending levity, “Anybody we know?” and Mr. M thought that was about the funniest thing ever. He split his sides. “No,” he said. “You know, those two came in a couple of hours ago with their father, and it's a hot day, so I went to work, and just about when I got going, they came back, and they said they hoped they weren't being a trouble, but they just didn't feel right about the East Side. No—they wanted him on the West Side. They just couldn't get used to the East Side. So, I said okay, and we went to work and got him out of here. You never know, do you?” That was my first glimpse in these almost ten years of Mr. M's business.

  JULY 9, 1957 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  I have just heard Momma say to Poppa, “Remember when you could fall asleep on a picket fence? You could fall asleep on anything. You even fell asleep when making love.” I was startled to hear this. Said Poppa, “You even remember that. It was fifty-two years ago, on the sofa at Auntie's on Ogden Avenue….” So then they gave one another loving looks and continued to hold hands, which they have been doing for some three hours. Poppa seems somewhat better in this enormous hospital. He is in a room with two other men. Perhaps this cheers him, since he has no resources. Constantly I find myself in a state of amusement at being the child of these parents. There is almost no relationship mentally. Emotionally, yes. Hysterically, yes. But mentally … Well—we've known this for years.

  NOTE: Virtually no letters or journals survive from August 1957 through March 1958.

  MAKING AN ENTRANCE Marlene sat in a gray Rolls-Royce, leaning back against the gray velvet upholstery, while I sat beside her in a black coat and a dark homburg. She gnawed on an enormous liverwurst, and I laughed a lot and said, “Your public should see you now.” And she said, “They would like it, wouldn't they?” This was no question, it was a statement. We were on our way to Philadelphia, where she would receive an award for being the most glamorous woman in the world, and I would give it to her at the top of the grand staircase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  As we came to the Hotel Warwick, we heard a murmuration. Marlene pulled a blind down over the window on her side. The car stopped. The chauffeur opened the door. On the pavement was a pulsing mob of women and some young men, each one holding a rose. They all fell silent. Marlene extended one trademark leg. The crowd sighed. Marlene extended another world-famous branch. The crowd moaned. Marlene, the liverwurst, and a garment bag all went out together. She sashayed across the pavement and the women all screamed. I got out in my black coat, my black homburg—a sober, bearded, portly, older man lumbering after a flashing, laughing, fleeting young thing. There was instant silence. One woman blurted, “Is that her rabbi?”21 (1993)

  GYPSY AND GERI Bonnie Cashin lives in a two-layer penthouse in the West Fifties, intensely New York, with the new pie-tin crusted Fifth Avenue skyscraper dominating the flowering cherry trees on her south terrace and a vista of rivers and shipping, east and west, from the windows of her top layer…. When I first saw Bonnie Cashin she was deep in Rockettes, for she was designing costumes.22 That was many years ago. When I last saw Bonnie she was deep in chums, canapés, and convivialities. That was yesterday, on her terrace. The occasion: a cocktail party for friends from India. I loathe cocktail parties, those SRO corridors between exhaustions, but this was unusual. It had an excellent story line, was brilliantly cast, and the decor was masterly. Also, everybody sat on something. I sat on Gypsy Rose Lee. Miss Lee, with massive straw and wheat sheaves on her head and a casing of ombré stuff up and down her frame, talked a good streak. She usually does, mostly in Baroque, a tongue peculiar to her. “Oha,” she says, “aha …” She adds an “uh” here and an “uh” there. The result is irresistible and sexy, even when she was so relentlessly buttoned up as on Bonnie's terrace, with Bonnie peering up into her nostrils, her Brownie (so help me!) ready to fire when she sighted the whites of Gypsy's eyes. “Gypsy,” we inquired, “Gypsy, what about that barn tour?” “Barn tour! I'm goinga to London….” “Whatever for?” “To helpa,” said Gypsy, “with the translation of my book into British.” So then we got off Gypsy and went to another party.

  In his hotel room at the Lombardy, visitor-to-Manhattan Ken Tynan, mental ecdysiast, the neon-eyed youth who writes drama criticism rather than reviews for London's weekly The Observer, was talking Hamlet with Geraldine Page and Eli Wallach. “How” asked Ken, clipping it out and stammering just enough to make it all suspenseful, “how how would you pllllay the Quee quee—queen, Geri?” “Wellllll,” drawled Miss Page, whose syllables were suddenly and unexpectedly airborne, as though on an especially sunshiny day children are seesawing in her larynx. “Welllllllll, I would be (here the seesaw jumped breathlessly six stories up) FAAAAAT. (The seesaw instantly descended.) I would be very, very FAAAAAAAT. I would EAAAAAAAAT SWEEEEEEET things (the seesaw soared gradually and sneakily up) all the time, all the timmmmmme. I would be a PREEEETYYYY FAAAAAT WOOOMANNN (seesaw down again) very (seesaw way down) sex—y.” “Like Maxine Elliot latterly?” I asked. “Never knew her,” from Geri. So I recollected [Edwardian beauty and comic actress] Maxine Elliot grown enormous, sitting fabulously on the edge of her Riviera swimming pool, consuming huge chocolate cakes, surrounded by admirers of all ages—including Sir Winston Churchill. Her beauty, as it became immersed in fat, grew more concentrated, her exquisite face diminished to coin size and set in a vast flabby medallion. “Yeeeees,” Geri said. “Yeees …” And as she drawled she became a pretty, fat woman, a queen right there in Ken Tynan's hotel room in midtown Manhattan. (PLAYBILL, SEPTEMBER 1957)

  IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD The undertaker who lives and works opposite is, appropriately, the historian of this neighborhood. Having been in residence over half a century, he relates the local past… how carriages stood two deep along the avenue when No. 14 entertained at an evening party, and how the corner house was once the dining room of the Republican Club, and the brown-stone just north of it housed the club's ballroom, where every Saturday night the band played on and on. The delicatessen proprietor, his wife, and their many sons, the woman who runs the little stationery and lending library, the corner druggist and wife, all have occupied their premises for several decades, but they almost never recollect the past, preferring current local events—what the Kronen-bergers are having for dinner, and that Marlene has just gone by in her white nurse's uniform, pushing the new Riva baby [her grandson] in his beautiful car, and that Betty Field has just been in to buy a toothbrush or a nail file, and that Al and Dolly Haas Hirschfeld's Nina is growing into quite a young lady with hair the identical color of her mother's. When Viveca Lindfors, in her new plaything-sized foreign station wagon, came around the corner from Ninty-fifth Street where she also lives, there were fascinated eyes at every shop door. Even the drugstore cat, a diffident beast, was interested—for a moment. Sometimes there is talk of Alfred Drake's beard
, June Havoc's new coat, the color that the Vincent Sardis are planning to paint their front door (red). When the [George] Axelrods moved in and painted their front door—but the Axelrods are moving out of their brownstone and away from East Ninty-fifth … Curious that in the midst of this world of very public persons there live two, three, possibly four people about whom almost nothing save suppositions is ever related. They live in a brownstone whose upper floors have, these last ten years, fallen into ruin, windows quite disintegrated, wisteria vines tangled with remnants of once white curtains. But the ivy in the basement windows is carefully tended, and when one or the other of the sisters emerges she is usually wearing fresh white gloves. The contrast between their time-wrecked house and their neat, little white gloves, their tidy Edwardian lady ankles … Some mornings ago I went out to pick up a package, when suddenly I saw coming up the street a most fashionable figure, hatted, gloved, carrying a bouquet—chrysanthemums. So singular was this cavalier, on this ordinary weekday morning, that I stood watching him. Jauntily he passed my house, then neighboring houses, and he stopped. For a moment he considered the flooded areaway of the brownstone before him. Then he leapt over the stagnant water and pushed a button. After a long time he vanished, bouquet and all. In a moment he emerged, regained the pavement, gave a puzzled rueful look at the house, and moved nattily up the street. He had left his chrysanthemums behind him. I looked to see whether any of the local chroniclers had observed this most unique current event. But there were no interested eyes at any of the shop windows. For some low reason this gave me pleasure until, later that morning, I went into one of the shops and its proprietor said, “Did you see the man who brought the flowers for the recluses?” And now that is news up here in our neighborhood on the border between Yorkville and Harlem. (PLAYBILL, JANUARY 1958)

  CA. MARCH 31, 1958 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RUTH AND JOHN STEPHAN • old greenwich, connecticut

  Please forgive the long silence. Life has been complicated because Poppa died [February 26] after much hideous suffering—so you know how this has been these weeks. What to do with Momma's long empty days and nights, I wonder.

  APRIL 29, 1958 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • hamburg, new york

  Poor Gray did the best [Columbia Records] cover he had ever done, and they paid $350, and suddenly yesterday morning the salesmen said the cover had to have a female—an exciting female—on it or they could not sell the Sacre du Printemps to the hilt. When will America wake up? How adolescent we are made to be. So now Gray is trying to make a bosomy female.

  Oh—please don't breathe a word to anyone—but [the family's Elmhurst] property may be sold for $75,000. Momma bought it for about $11,000. If this happens, she should have enough to live on for the rest of her life, in a small apartment. I go there and sit around looking businesslike and commercially wise, while real estate people and Jerry Lerman talk endlessly. It all seems clear to me, but they do ritual dances and courtships and such. I am not going to get any of it, so I had best not get to feeling aggrieved.

  MAY 9

  I'm in a fit of delight—A girl here told the [Mademoiselle] meeting that at “our” Hawaiian-theme boat ride the Guest Editors would stand at the top of the gangplank and lei the men guests. When I fell off my chair, all the ladies gave me dirty-boy looks. Also, a new editor asked me to bait the trap by getting, for the same boat ride, Pablo Casals and Christian Dior. I said that my planchette would work miracles. But I think that she thinks Planchette is a new French painter or diseuse.

  JOURNAL • june 14, 1958 Leaving the Russian Tea Room, suddenly there was Rut calling my name, and with her Cesco. Ela's features in Cesco's face, he now very large, fat, and quiet—amputated—removed. He smiled his and Ela's smile. I dropped him, neither of us ever talking about all of the overwhelming matters. How could we, without drowning? We talked of books— Colette. And did he look out at anything? “No, nothing.” Nor did he want to look out. Later, Rut told me that he has a lovely Renoir still, the last of the Mendelssohn pictures from Grünewald, and he has the portrait of Moses Mendelssohn.23 When I kissed him, his skin was salty, not at all like Ela's—not at all.

  NOTE: In January 1958, Leo had appeared as a contestant on the television quiz show The $64,000 Question. He competed against the artist Larry Rivers, answering questions about the last hundred years in art. In the decisive round, their challenge was to identify all of the real-life models for the men in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. Leo correctly named all but the painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte. Rivers couldn't identify him either, so they split the $8,000 prize. All Leo's winnings went to pay his father's hospital and funeral bills.

  In August 1958, a former contestant on the television quiz show Twenty-One revealed that the game had been fixed. Scandal and investigations followed. Although The $64,000 Question had also been rigged, no one had coached Leo.

  OCTOBER 3, 1958 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • venice

  I am writing to you from a most peculiar situation—The [State] Supreme Court, I believe—where I sit in a green-walled (dirty, drab green), maple “furnished” room along with a truculent, frightened, fear-eyed, big-lipped Negro girl (now she droops as though she needs immediate watering) and a thickset, angry, white-socked middle-aged man. He disciplines his anger by chewing measuredly.

  Several days ago I innocently answered the house bell. A little apologetic creature thrust a grimy envelope at me. “Please, please take it,” he urged. So I did. It was a subpoena from the district attorney, telling me that I was to appear here as a witness in the action brought by the People of the State of New York (of which I thought I was one—and for forty-four years!) against John Doe. “Who,” I inquired from the little man, “is John Doe?” “I'm not allowed to tell yer,” he whispered. I gave him a hard but charming look, so he, with more apologies and beseeching me not to blame him and protestations that he knew I was OK, told me—quiz show. That is why I am here, feeling intensely miscreant, and gradually feeling sure that I'll not come out of here for forty years, and then everyone I love will be vanished, and I'll beg in the streets—or deliver subpoenas. A tall “lady” replete with tam, fake pearls around throat and in ears (threaded with glittery stones—the necklace is), a kind of macintosh, and general look of bon voyage despite a good week of rich mal de mer, has just queened in. She blows her nose a lot—a very red nose which her mummy assured her was truly aristocratic.

  So you see, my Tib, fame and some fortune does not pay. We were even woken out of soundly restless sleeps at about 5:30 by New York Post reporters hot for the big story. Maybe I should have stuck to blowing (I think that is the correct word) sages. I am told that for each day of my visit here I am to receive 50 cents plus 8 cents for each mile over three that I must travel. My little brother tells me that I am, at this extremely high remunerative rate, to get $1.06. Would you lunch with me, dear Tib, and we'll blow the sum on a tip to the hatcheck girl—thereby winning at least one friend among the people?

  Along with the lady who told me that she had studied with [Italian soprano] Marchesi “right after Melba,” I was ushered into the assistant D.A.'s office—a young man obviously come up the hard way. He has now asked me quite a few “background” questions and is baffled that I am not specialized in any one art. Now I am sitting outside while he talks “personally” on the blower.24 The light is awful—I feel more and more criminal. In an office nearby, a man drones, “She says she make representation….” The guard downstairs told me that many “sick” and “crazy” people come here. The guard at the desk up here is reading The Life of Warden Lewes. I asked him was it a textbook. This made him angry.

  OCTOBER 7

  I've had time to cool off. I was “grilled” for over three hours. They knew nothing about me and never understood anything I told them. They never believed that I hadn't gone to college. They said, “Name five things in your past that will tell us what you do.” Such things. It was hatef
ul and funny and depressing and wasteful. Mr. [Sol] Hurok called about Marlene and Maria Callas (who is here).25 Ah, well—If my phone is being tapped that should make headlines. I've been in the tabloids almost every day for a week—sometimes on page two with the call girls. Such is fame—ugh. They didn't prove anything and finally they sent me home, telling me to stand by.

  OCTOBER 23, 1958 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • paris

  I am sitting and awaiting guests for a small party which I am giving for Mrs. Curtiss's Bizet [and His World]. I invited twenty-four, but I think ten are coming. She is not exactly a public favorite—but I like her. Little Gray is leaving the premises while this transpires—where to I do not know—but he does seem cheerful(?). He has been painting and “touching up” the house for several weeks. I asked him was the Whitney going to hang the front hall.

  You will be amused to see your little fat friend (me) caricatured on the walls of a new restaurant, which hopes to take the custom away from Sardi's. Al Hirschfeld did the murals, and I look like a billiard-ball fiend with a dead cat around my throat (my fur tippet).26

  JOURNAL • October 24, 1958 Fourteen people came to my Mina party— including [writer] Anne Lindbergh and her sister Mrs. [Constance Morrow] Morgan—little wren women with sharp eyes for the most unobtrusive worm and a manner more Concord of Louisa Alcott's earlier days than of Manhattan now. Mrs. Morgan lives near Portland and Mrs. Lindbergh lives mostly in Darien [Connecticut]. I like them—and, of course, they loved my home. These small women are the strongest of the race.