by Leo Lerman
OCTOBER 4, 1961 • NEW YORK CITY
TO GRAY FOY • DALLAS
The [Metropolitan Opera] opening was marvelous, with Leontyne [Price]46 singing gloriously, but not quite as gloriously as she did at dress rehearsal. La Fanciulla is such a strange opera musically, Puccini so deep in wondering whether Debussy and Fauré and Wagner and R. Strauss couldn't be right.
[Composer] Chuck Turner turned up backstage and asked wouldn't I like to drop in at his apartment. Lennie Bernstein's chauffeur (!!!) would drive me. He has a beautiful gray, upholstered in scarlet, huge foreign (I think) motor (could only be called that) and a liveried, huge chauffeur, and he [Lennie] dragged himself about conspicuously, of course, in a Dracula outfit. So off we went to this tenement very like the one you lived in years ago. As we were climbing the stairs to the top floor (naturally), Lennie, demonstrating how like Dukas some of La Fanciulla is, sang out—at which a door opened, and a wizened, rightfully wrathful man shouted, “People are sleeping! We have to get up in the morning. You don't have to go to work!” By this time, no one in the entire house was sleeping, I am sure. Lennie said, “Who doesn't have to go to work?” as we vanished into Chuck's very neat railroad flat. Here was a cold “spread” and [art patron and collector] Henry McIlhenny in white tie and a very nice man (fortyish) with him. So we sat and chatted. Henry asked why did we (you and I) never call him in Philadelphia, and I said that we were shy, and he said not to be. Soon, in came [pianist] Earl Wild and a jazz piano player, Paul someone, apparently an important jazzman, who sat down and talked to me about his wife and little girls. Then Marc Blitzstein [composer and lyricist] appeared and four or five young “people” and [actor] Mindy [Wager]. So I saw what this was going to be and got my coat, just as a large bed, upon which were seated and sprawled those luminaries and some of the jeunesse dorée, crashed to the floor. They flopped behind it, legs waving in air like overturned insects. At this I fell into loud, manly blasts of glee, thus momentarily incurring wrathful faces, more red from blood rushing to their heads. So Earl Wild and the jazz pianist said, “We'll drive you home….” As we left, Lennie was clutching his hammy head and mourning, “Why did I do this—why?”
OCTOBER 21, 1961 • NEW YORK CITY
TO GRAY FOY • burbank
I did bills and chores and picked up Rut and trundled off to Maya Deren's funeral service in a huge, enormously high, Corinthian-columned hall. A most peculiar but fitting service—voodoo rattles and a long eulogy about her and quoting from her writings on voodoo and moviemaking and a small but ample-haired versifier reading his “Ode” to M.D. and her request that Haydn's “Trumpet Rondo” be played carried out by a “live” trumpet—brazen and corrosive. Her husband thanked everyone for coming, and that was deeply touching. I sat looking at the profiles and backs of heads of Antony [Tudor47] and Hugh [Laing]. They looked like Edward Gorey people—that was awful. Then Marguerite [Young] materialized, looking like a bloated caricature of Hero-dias in the Wilde play, but done by a provincial Dutch company, and she told me that Ruth Stephan had divorced John, and that Ruth was in India. Then Carol Janeway came up and proffered her cheek—raddled and worn.48 Others out of the long-ago appeared, and Rut and I flew out into [Washington] Square and went to Ken [Elmslie]'s house. I like it—old, buried away behind another house, once a brothel, now the mansion of that beautiful [whippet] Whippoor-will, who cuddled against me and made sleepy-dog noises. So to an Italian dinner in a little, ugly place—inexpensive but good and the people friendly and all remote from New York. A place with a table around which sat the habitués— all middle-aged and elderly Italian men—singing softly, talking, reading papers. I longed for us to be in Italy. It is the routine of these days—getting up, brushing my teeth, clump-clumping downstairs, dressing, no one calling, each day identical—that does me in—the barren, necessary, unadorned, solitary, aging routine.49
Last night I rang [Tatiana] Mrs. Liberman (you don't like her and she is a horror) and found her weeping like a huge, badly made building falling apart. At about this time Alex is having his [stomach ulcer] operation; it takes a minimum of four hours.
The Goddess of Massachusetts [Mina Curtiss] writes (in strict confidence) that [Marcel Proust's niece] Suzy Mante-Proust has sold all of the Proust manuscripts to the University of Texas for $300,000. The French scholars who know about this are in a state. The only possibility they have of keeping them in the Bibliothèque Nationale is by raising the money to buy them for France. How strange—Proust in Texas, and how fascinated he would have been— horrified—I am not so sure—but absolutely fascinated, yes. I see how possible it is to live in a fantasy world and become stranger and stranger. See! I've lived that way all of my life.50
JOURNAL • November 1, 1961 Leontyne sang gorgeously [in La Fanciulla], but all during Act I her voice had an underlying unwell sound, especially phlegmy in that sore spot in her lower register, although the performance was magnificent. A jammed house adored her. Then suddenly, toward the end of Act II—rasp-rasp and her singing voice was gone—only a sandpaper ghost talking the piece. Tremendous, successful dramatic intensity sustained her through the card scene and the end of the act. I have never felt such horror in a theater—the entire, huge, audience breathing with her, willing her to finish the act and find relief. Torrents of applause for her. She was absolutely gray— her face and arms literally gray. But the needless gallantry of finishing that act. Dorothy Kirsten was routed out of sleep and dashed down and into the house for Act III. Not bad, but certainly no atmosphere—more Doris Day than Minnie [the heroine].
Geraldine Page had missed Act I. I found her in her seat when I returned after the interval. Although she had not heard a single note, she was weeping. “I always weep at Puccini,” she said.
NOVEMBER 4, 1961 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
You must promise me that if I die first there is to be no me left exposed in a gruesome coffin, and I must not have a funeral in a small, sordid room with plain, impersonal prayers. I would like to be buried from home or Millhauser's [mortuary, across the street] if I live here. I want the “Ode to the West Wind” and “Oh World I Cannot Hold Thee Close Enough,” and someone who really knew me—or lots of someones—to tell little happy things, the prelude to the last act of Traviata, the two arias from Figaro (on the gramophone), and cheer—not horror.
[Dancer and actress] Joan [McCracken]'s funeral was dreadful—with this wax creature exposed in what seemed a party dress. You could not avoid it—the room so small, many could not get into the mediocre, awful place—the sick sweet stench of perishing flowers—an utterly ordinary-voiced, black-smocked preacher reading prayers and nothing about her—all lasting some fifteen minutes—oh, it was awful—all save the turnout: Richard Rodgers, Agnes de Mille, Jerry Robbins, [Theatre Guild producer] Lawrence Langner, dozens of dancers who had been in shows with her (so many older), [actress] Mabel Tal-iaferro, the [Robert] Lantzes (whose [production] Kean opened last night), so many, many aging actors, wardrobe mistresses, and men who looked like stagehands—everyone weeping—but most pitiful was the boy who lived with her, all alone and comfortless, and her mother. In church you can, at least, remove yourself from the weeping and, perhaps, be comforted by the church itself— but not here. I stood in the street until her coffin was tucked into a poor hearse—but why go on about it all? I am still baffled—what are we to profit from all this? And did you know that Vertès died in Paris? I am sad, thinking of that long-ago Northport summer when we first knew him and [his wife] Dora and sat upon the beach and he reminded me of Pat Dolin as [Fokine's] “Bluebeard.”51 So many deaths this week and last. I dread to open the morning paper. Joan died in her sleep. Many seem to think this a good way, but how do we know the terror in the night?
Dear, please write me a long, gay, legible letter, full of cheerful tidings. Please comfort me with laughter the way we used to laugh years ago. I always think of the mornings when we polkaed. Oh, we were gay in our unhappi-nesses. I
cannot believe that those who die go before us to prepare a lovely house, as I heard today—but now I am too disturbed to go on about it all. I signed your name in the book at the funeral, because of our youth together. I signed yours and Gray's and Truman's and Jack's, because I knew that was what Joan would have wanted, but I signed yours and Gray's with mine because I knew that we should all be together in that book.
NOVEMBER 10, 1961 • NEW YORK CITY
TO GRAY FOY • BURBANK
Today girls who never heard of Joan McCracken look the way they do because she looked the way she did—bangs; sometimes a ponytail; full, full skirts; flat, flat slippers. It was the ballet girl look Degas loved. Agnes de Mille launched it [with her in Oklahoma!]. Joan McCracken epitomized it, gave it a sort of sad-eyed, flapper appeal. Beneath her gaiety, her funniness onstage and off, there was always this sadness. You cannot be a clown without it.
You are so very patient with me when I ring you and chatter away, but this is my only lifeline to certainty—my mooring rope and anchor. I know that you cannot talk freely, and how difficult that must be, and how uncomfortable it must make you. But selfishly, I persist, so as to be able to breathe from day to day. I went to see Alex [Liberman] this morning, and he seems fragile, but almost recovered, and he asked me how I could bear it here without you. I was surprised at this question. So, I said that time was cement-footed indeed.
NOVEMBER 15
I am so happy to have talked to my own Puss. Please, please do not weep. Something lovely will happen. You went to Europe twice and got a Guggenheim and found me (or vice versa) so you should believe in lovely things happening. Do not work so hard. All that matters is for you to keep well—and for us to be together again! I think of you every moment of the time—and worry about you—and try to think of how we can help Maebelle. Maebelle has earned something lovely, and I know that it will happen, so do not despair.52
JOURNAL • december 11, 1961 Lincoln came to lunch and we chatted along amiably. He telling me that everything I had prophesied about his Chinese venturings came true—an attempt at blackmail, all of it—but this had resulted in a happy ending. He'd met (through all of this) a boy who gave him “bliss,” was a “god,” was “not very bright,” but has an amazing conception of life: thinking that since he was useless, he was the kind who should do the dangerous things, like sea demolition. He did it. Lincoln took him to Dumbarton Oaks, and there he is now a gardener. He had been in gardening for a year while in the service. We chatted along and got to talking about Wystan [Auden]—oh, yes, through Lincoln saying that Lennie had lost some of what made him; Aaron [Copland] hadn't; Virgil [Thomson] was utterly deteriorated. I said Chester Kallman had grown but Wystan had deteriorated.53 Lincoln flew into a quiet passion, almost weeping, saying that I shouldn't talk about my betters, that I wasn't an intellectual (which I never thought I was), that I couldn't analyze anything, that I was a very stupid man, that the only reason he ever saw me was to gossip, and so on. Then he leapt up and said I should pay for his lunch (which I had intended) and flew out, still teary and enraged. I felt deeply quiet, and this means I was having a bad time. I wondered whether this precarious “friendship” is now ended. I doubt it. I also wonder why he flew into this passion about Wystan and whether that is what it was about.
NOTE: Leo joined Gray and Maebelle Hughes in Burbank for Christmas and headed north on his own to New Year's Eve in San Francisco. He went ultimately to Seattle, where for Mademoiselle he toured preparations for the 1962 World's Fair.
DECEMBER 18, 1961 • EN ROUTE FROM CHICAGO TO LOS ANGELES
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
I lunched with the opera people and heard all about opera in Chicago. Then I trundled to the Blackstone, where I was drowned in cups of strong tea and plied with cookies made by Orson and Virginia Welles's now married child, Chrissie (she lives in Chicago) and regaled with news and gossip and screams by Paula [Laurence] and her Chucky [Bowden] about their vicissitudes with The Night of the Iguana,54 having now, at last, discovered that Frank Corsaro (a Method director and Tennessee's choice) is no good (I could have told that to them months ago). Having rid themselves of him, they seem happier. Also Bette Davis has calmed down, and Margaret Leighton and Alan Webb behave very well, and only the Method actor who is their lead [Patrick O'Neal] behaves badly. So they are optimistic. Chucky has taken over the direction. Tenn and Frankie [Merlo] came in and visited, and the great American author and I disagreed about all sorts of things. Why are those creatures—T. Williams, Carson [McCullers], etc.—so contrary-minded, so really degenerate-minded?
DECEMBER 28, 1961 • SAN FRANCISCO
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
It was immediately and pathetically clear that Maebelle intended Gray to stay as long as possible. So to lessen the tension, we abandoned our carefully made plans, and here I am jaunting north quite alone and desolate. Gray has been under incredible strain these five months and is in a state for which he cannot be blamed. The result—one huge, incredibly beautiful scroll drawing such as he has never before accomplished, related in little ways—very little—to [Charles] Demuth and the Chinese, but totally and characteristically his own. It is a masterpiece, of that I have no doubt—all rocks—deriving from that Sands Point shore [on Long Island] —quite without life but suffused with it. He has developed a taste for strong drink, but this will depart, and I know of at least two in love with him. My curious reaction is that of a parent who wants the best for his child combined with the knowledge that none of it matters because I am the most important creature in his life—actually the tough thread which binds him to it.
Surprise—Anaïs Nin gave a party for me. She lives, as Mrs. Rupert Pole, in Los Angeles high over Silverlake, in a large Japanese–Frank Lloyd Wright house (bare and beautiful and comfortable) with a good-looking youngish husband, who adores this “new,” blond, quite pretty Anaïs. Back in New York she is still Mrs. Hugo, spending time there and time here, and although everybody knows of this bigamy no one seems startled.55 The view was a mountainside, like a Christmas tree superimposed on a thirteenth-century Chinese screen and seen double—in the lake and above it—the reversed constellations like seeing the heavens from above them—extraordinary. But the surprise of Mrs. Rupert Pole was not finished. All week long I had heard of Tracey Roberts—a young, beautiful, vigorous actress-director who conducts a thriving acting, directing, playwriting unit on the Desilu lot. So, then Tracey Roberts arrived at Anaïs's. I automatically said to Puss Foy, “That is a woman named Blanche Gladstone who was in Behind Red Lights twenty-five years ago….” And Puss said, “You're wrong. She's too young….” “That's her daughter, then,” said I. So then the creature came up to me and it was Blanche Gladstone! Just the same but tougher and resolute. Now I do believe that everything—bric-a-brac, Marie Antoinette's writing table (a man said it was when I visited him in a paneled nest high somewhere), bodhisattvas—everything ends up here.
Oh—what I've seen!! A day at MGM: We saw the big party scene in Two Weeks in Another Town being shot. A fantastic re-creation of the Corso in Rome, with dozens of women in Italian, French, and American haute couture—and international, sullen, and insolent expressions, while Edward G. Robinson makes a speech to Claire Trevor (eighth anniversary) and Cyd Charisse (all coq feathers and sequins, a very Marlene getup by Balmain) smiles spiritlessly—also Kirk Douglas and an Italian “find” with a most beautiful back, looking more Boldini and Lina Cavalieri than the originals.56 “Who's that man looking like Erich von Stroheim?” said Gray. “Erich von Stroheim, Jr.,” said I. [Director Vincente] Minnelli, older but somehow nicer. [Costume designer] Walter Plunkett acting as though we had been boyhood chums on the same block. A copy of Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years on the cameraman's shelf. Joan Houseman playing class in black velvet.57 All of this make-believe somehow more real than the city around it. So it went…. Suddenly finding Barbette coaching a troupe of girls and boys, marvelous balletic acrobats for Jumbo.58 The tremendous Bounty awash i
n another studio. A menu featuring Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup and Lana Turner Salade!!! And hidden in the hills Fritzi Massary, with Galli-Curci nearby.59 Streets suddenly thronged with last-minute Christmas shoppers—but in summer sports clothes, over which sable or chinchilla clutches and shrugs were flung.
