by Leo Lerman
AUGUST 13, 1962 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • helsinki
Yesterday, Momma was talking about cooking and she said suddenly, “I don't make it anymore, because I can't remember the recipe, and I never wrote it down.” This seemed infinitely sad, but she didn't seem sad about this—to her it was an inevitable fact. I am constantly amazed at how valiant people are— those who do not go on out of habit. I had Eileen [Herlie] to lunch at the [Plaza's] Edwardian Room. She is sad. Her beloved brother died. Only forty-five and he died suddenly, leaving three children and a wife. Eileen seems so capable, and really she is so good.70 I find, as I grow older, that the goodness in people matters to me more than almost any of their other virtues or even defects—real goodness—the kind that is outgoing and helpful to both others and oneself.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1962 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
I have read and reread your sad letter—and that is how life sometimes becomes, especially when one is sick in body and soul, one sometimes nourishing the other into total misery. Also, the drugs today inflate sicknesses of the spirit as they, presumably, alleviate those of the body. My dear darling Reezl, there is only one way to go on, and that is to think of those who love you and depend on your being. I do, and although he does have peculiar ways of manifesting, so does Howard—selfish, spoiled—but still, there he is. I am sitting in the big red chair in the back parlor, having done all of the bills and written to the shipping people for you, and … What if there were no you to write to? All about me are the presences of so many who are not here anymore. There Eleonora sat, and over there Alice and even Hellmut [Roder], and my dear Poppa slept over there many times—but I could go on and on, for this has, indeed, become a house of memories. I cannot believe that all of the people who came here ever did—so many, many people and so many of them went away feeling better than when they had come. For some reason I see [film actress] Elsa Lanchester on the front steps in a long-ago dawn—and Dame Edith Evans gorging herself next to the fireplace downstairs—and Maria in a corner of the sofa up here with Carmel Snow and Lillian Gish—and Alma Clayburgh [soprano] and Muriel Draper71 and [actress] Margaret Anglin and Carmel all in one long, curved seat (all dead now)—and Osbert celebrating his birthday with Auden pouring champagne as sister Edith and Marlene ogle one another—and Isak Dinesen eating pistachio ice cream while Carlo [Van Vechten] beaus her72 —and the first time I found Eileen Herlie here, like the beautiful heroine in an Edwardian drama while Puss sat transfixed—and Melina Mercouri and Geraldine Page comparing how each played Sweet Bird of Youth—and Maurice Goudeket talking about Colette to Anita Loos73 and Mar-got Fonteyn and Nora Kaye and Alicia Markova and [French dancer Jean] Babilée and Choura Danilova … But why go on?
Well, because I have been thinking of my life and realizing that ever since I wrote the Rev. Kilvert essay I have not written one word which I can say is writing as I honor it, not one word which I can say realizes my basic gifts. I have also failed because I have not even helped people as I used to do. So, I have been taking stock—and the shop is pretty empty.
1. Marcel Proust had written the novel Jean Santeuil before Remembrance of Things Past, but it was published posthumously in 1952.
2. After singing Madama Butterfly on November 17, 1955, Callas was presented with a summons. A former manager, Eddie Bagarozy, had sued her. Callas excoriated the process servers in operatic style.
3. Leo's brother Jerry had two children, Janet (b. 1952) and Nancy (b. 1954).
4. Playwright Stanley Preston Young (1906-75) and Leo did complete a Jane Eyre script, but it appears never to have been staged.
5. Gray found her overbearing. What Mina Curtiss thought of him is not recorded, but she never invited Gray to her home.
6. Leo's January 1951 stay in London had ended with him in bed for several days with a “Norwegian Rat Flu.”
7. Theodora “Teddy” Griffis (1916?–56), of a prominent investment-banking family, a lesbian, had married and divorced John Latouche. Latouche's friend the photographer and film editor Harry Dunham (1910?–43) was killed in World War II. Dunham's wife Marian (1889?–1951) then died from polio on a transatlantic crossing.
8. “Touche took handfuls of quieting pills and goblets of brandy—Did Harry kill him?” Journal, February 22, 1971. Leo speculated that something untoward was involved in this death, particularly because Harry Martin (a painter who was one of Latouche's lovers) admitted burning a bloody mattress. An exhumation and autopsy, demanded by Latouche's relatives, confirmed a coronary thrombosis.
9. Leo and Gray had rented out the top two floors of 1453 to a psychologist and her female lover. Later in 1956, they took the entire house for themselves.
10. This tea occurred on October 21, 1956, eight days before Callas opened the Metropolitan Opera's season in Bellini's Norma.
11. “The audience so devastated, that I could hear their horror, although not a sound came from them—the soundless shriek of frozen terror.” Journal, May 20, 1984.
12. Of Faulkner's visit to a previous party at 1453, Leo wrote: “Faulkner stood in the center of the back parlor, while the literary world grew more and more timid and only Henry (Green) Yorke braved him.” Journal, March 16, 1982.
13. Because of his history with Eleonora von Mendelssohn and Toscanini, Leo never ceased thinking of the conductor's daughters, Wally and Wanda, as “the Toscanini girls.”
14. In eight years, Leo's monthly salary had only gone from $600 to $700, but it had been supplemented by a $200 per month expense account (plus $50 to buy recordings). Street & Smith had been tightening its belt, however. Two years later, the struggling company would be sold to Samuel I. Newhouse.
15. Scenic designer Ben Edwards (1916-99) had been a classmate of Leo and Richard at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Although British, Knox Laing had studied in America and also enrolled at Feagin. It's unclear when his affair with Leo occurred, but when Laing returned to Britain in 1936, Leo was saddened and turned to Richard. RH: “Then we began to be interested in one another.”
Leo had a penchant during his acting school days for older British men in the theatrical trade: Playwright Hubert Osborne, director Teddy Fitzgerald, and actor-playwright Emlyn Williams also had affairs of varying brevity with Leo in his twenties. He met all of them through the Feagin School. “I was irresistible because I gave myself so completely. All of me was hunger, desire,” he later said.
16. Nora Kaye did not marry MacMillan (1929-92), a dancer who in 1953 had begun an important choreographic career with the Royal Ballet. Kaye would retire from the stage in 1961.
17. Playwright and novelist Arthur Laurents (b. 1918) had been Nora Kaye's lover intermittently in the forties and wrote his screenplay for The Turning Point (1977) based on her experiences.
18. In 1921 entrepreneur and feminist Jane Grant (1892-1972) had cofounded the Lucy Stone League, a women's rights organization.
19. Leo's affectionate nickname for Gray was Pussum or, more frequently, Puss.
20. Sam Lerman was then about seventy-one years old. A lifelong exposure to lead-based paint may have led to his developing blood ailments.
21. The Philadelphia Fashion Group honored Dietrich for “continuing impact on the world of fashion” on October 26, 1957.
22. Costume and sportswear designer Bonnie Cashin (1908-2000) had designed for the Grossinger Playhouse when Leo stage-managed there in 1936.
23. German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) was the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and the great-great-great-grandfather of Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn.
24. Leo's frequent term for the telephone, “the blower,” is British slang originating in the twenties.
25. Sol Hurok (1888-1974), the Russian American talent agent and impresario, produced tours for many performers and companies. He arranged all of Callas's domestic tours.
26. The mural, of New York's opening-night audience departing a theate
r, decorated the Manhattan Hotel's “Playbill Room.”
27. Ruth Lindley was a friend of Gray Foy's from his young years in Dallas.
28. Rudolf Bing (1902-97) was general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (1950-72). A notorious autocrat, he sent a telegram on November 5 insisting that Callas commit by the next morning to his proposed schedule for her at the Met. Callas responded the following morning with a counterproposal, but that telegram crossed another from Bing that canceled her contract.
29. Leo would meet socialite Evelyn Lambert (1918-99) again in Venice in the late seventies, when she had become one of the Veneto's busiest hostesses and preservationists. She did everything on a generous scale.
30. Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri (“The Italian Girl in Algiers”) was also presented in Dallas that season; “The Beckoning Fair One” is a ghost story by Oliver Onions, in which a feminine spirit gradually leads the protagonist into madness.
31. Mary Reed Carter and David Stickelbar were heirs to family manufacturing firms. GF: “Mary Reed caught up with Maria everywhere. She was known as Maria Seconda.”
32. In his own manuscript, Leo later inserted here: “Her facial appearance—skull, kohl-lined eyes, all white face.”
33. Italian heiress Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957) was renowned for her eccentric style. In her younger years, she was lavishly dressed by Fortuny and Poiret.
34. Pellegrina Leoni is an opera singer in Dinesen's short story “The Dreamers.”
35. Helen Hoke (1903-90), writer and publisher of children's books, was married to the publisher Franklin Watts. Kitty Messner was head of the publishing house Julian Messner, for which Leo had edited several books in the early forties.
36. Eleanor Perényi (b. 1918) had recently replaced Cyrilly Abels as managing editor at Mademoiselle. She had married a Hungarian baron as a teenager.
37. Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915-2006) had been a Nazi party member during her wartime years at Berlin's Deutsche Oper. When Leo attended Callas's Chicago debut in 1954, Schwarzkopf was also in the audience. He wrote then: “I sat looking with hatred at Schwarzkopf. One of those cold, pale-moon beauties, whose voice is ravishing, especially in Capriccio, but how can she produce anything of beauty after that Nazi life? How can [record company executive] Walter Legge, a plump, benign English Jew, be married to her?” Journal, November 2, 1954.
38. The diary of British clergyman Robert Francis Kilvert (1840-79) provides a detailed account of Victorian provincial life. Leo found the innocence and observation of it quite moving. “The Gloomy Dean” (of St. Paul's Cathedral) was William Ralph Inge (1860-1954), journalist and author, a pessimist about progress and democracy.
39. Marlene Dietrich's friendship with Leo occasionally lapsed, usually when she had taken umbrage at something he had—or had not—written about her. Leo does not say what this recent rift had been.
40. Gray's father had emphysema. He did not die, however, until April 1969.
41. This cousin of Mina Curtiss, Catherine Filene Shouse (1896-1994), was a philanthropist and activist who would establish the Wolf Trap Foundation in 1968.
42. The prima ballerina assoluta of Russia's Maryinsky Theatre, Mathilda Kchessinska (1872-1971) had been the mistress of Nicholas II when he was tsarevitch and then of the Grand Duke Andrei, whom she married in 1921.
43. In the summer of 1953, Leo had written a novella around an Eleonora von Mendelssohn character. The manuscript does not survive.
44. GF: “Leo was in bed with a cast. Carmel had got herself together in a beautiful Balenci-aga outfit, and she came and visited him for about an hour, never alluding to her illness. She was definitely in the last weeks of her life and really very gallant.”
45. GF: “Leo could be fascinated with his terror. He would dissociate himself and see it in a comical or satirical way, almost as a cartoon not actually happening to him.”
46. The soprano Leontyne Price (b. 1927) was a superb performer of Verdi roles, particularly Aïda. Her 1955 television performance in Tosca was an African American milestone.
47. Antony Tudor (1909-87), the British dancer and choreographer, worked after 1939 primarily with American Ballet Theatre and is best known for ballets that explored psychological motives (Lilac Garden, Dark Elegies). He was the lover of dancer Hugh Laing.
48. Ceramist Carol Janeway (1913?–89) had been close to Leo and Richard during World War II, when she was the lover of the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. Leo had sent Maya Deren to photograph Zadkine for his 1943 “Before Bandwagons” feature.
49. In a letter dated September 7, 1956, Deren had written to Leo: “You should do a book on Our bunch'—this pressured bunch that is dying off so early because upon them lay the burden of bridging over from the exhilarations and spectacular rebelliousness of the ‘Lost Generation'—to the ones who are coming after us now—the first Cosmopolitans in the best sense of the word…. We are the atomized generation.”
50. The Bibliothèque Nationale did gather enough money to acquire the Proust manuscripts.
51. Marcel Vertès (1895-1961), a Hungarian illustrator, designer, and painter, frequently contributed to Bazaar in the late thirties.
52. Gray's mother, after working many years as a saleslady, was approaching retirement age.
53. The poet, librettist, and translator Chester Kallman (1921-75) was for thirty-five years the companion of W. H. Auden.
54. Charles Bowden (1913-96) began as an assistant to the Lunts and, after this Tony-winning production, worked closely with Tennessee Williams on much of his later writing.
55. In 1955 Anaïs Nin had married Rupert Pole (actor, forest ranger, science teacher) in Cal ifornia, while still married in New York to Hugh Guiler (banker, then, as Ian Hugo, an experimental filmmaker). She would have her marriage to Pole annulled in 1966.
56. Leo is thinking of a dashing painting (ca. 1901) of the Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri by the society portraitist Giovanni Boldini.
57. Joan Courtney Houseman (1916-2001), Countess de Foucauld, was playing a small part in Two Weeks in Another Town, produced by her husband, John Houseman. He had invited Leo and Gray onto the set.
58. Barbette (né Vander Clyde, 1904-73) was a female impersonator and high-wire artist. Born in Texas, he had a great success in Paris before World War II.
59. These two sopranos were contemporaries: Fritzi Massary (1882-1969) was a great star of operetta in Berlin and Vienna before Hitler; Amelita Galli-Curci (1882-1963) was an Italian coloratura.
60. In 1936 the actress Mary Astor's diary detailing indiscretions in Hollywood and New York made a sensation when read in a divorce court.
61. Entertainment lawyer L. Arnold Weissberger (1907-81) and his lover, talent agent Milton Goldman (1915?–89), were known for hosting parties filled with famous faces. GF: “If you wanted to meet stars, that's where they were. Arnold was usually their lawyer, and Milton was the one who found jobs for them.”
62. The case of Alger Hiss (1904-96), a former State Department official convicted in 1950 of perjury for denying his involvement with Communists, had dramatically divided public opinion in the fifties.
63. In the fifties, Marilyn Monroe had attended the Actors Studio, where she was instructed personally by its director, Lee Strasberg, and his wife, Paula Miller Strasberg.
64. A year later, Zeffirelli would cast their daughter, Susan Strasberg (1938-99), as Marguerite Gauthier in The Lady of the Camellias on Broadway.
65. Leo had become friends with the novelist, historian, and critic Rebecca West (1892-1983) after an introduction by editor Pascal Covici during the fifties.
66. The writings of archaeologist and art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) were seminal for eighteenth-century Neoclassicism. Painter and illustrator Rex Whistler (1905-44) was a fanciful pasticheur of eighteenth-century style.
67. “Garlic Opera House” was a common name when Leo was young for movie theaters in immigrant neighborhoods.
68. Rudolf Kommer (1885-1943) had begun as dire
ctor Max Reinhardt's managing agent, parlaying very little real expertise into a web of influence. By the time of his death in wartime New York, Kommer was Alice Astor's business manager and rumored to be a Nazi spy.
69. Leo was reportedly stillborn and only brought to life by the delivering physician's strenuous efforts.
70. Actress Eileen Herlie (b. 1919) and Leo met in London in 1951, when he was dazzled by her in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She is now best known for a three-decade run on the soap opera All My Children.
71. Although she worked as an interior decorator in the twenties, Muriel Draper (1886-1952) was better known as a hostess and patron of artists and then, in the thirties and forties, as an advocate for causes of women and the left.
72. GF: “Carlo acted as though they were in love. Always flirting with her and nuzzling.”
73. Author Maurice Goudeket (1889-1977), Colette's third and last husband, would have known Anita Loos as the adaptor of Colette's novels into two Broadway plays, Gigi (1951) and Chéri (1959).
NOTE: In the autumn of 1962, change seemed in the offing for Leo, both at work and at home. On October 2, Condé Nast's president Iva Patcévitch promoted Alex Liber-man to editorial director of all the company's magazines. Then, on November 29, Patcévitch announced that Diana Vreeland would become Vogue's editor in chief the following January.
Meanwhile, the landlord at 1453 Lexington threatened not to renew the lease, then relented. Although Leo and Gray would continue living in the house until July 1967, Leo saw that the days of living there might be numbered and looked at alternatives. Richard Hunter, with a modest inheritance from his mother, began shopping for his own place. He soon bought a nineteenth-century Greek Revival house near Augusta, Maine.
