The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  I said to Gray, “She wants to show us an apartment in the Osborne. I think a very large apartment.” Gray said, “It's snowing on April Fools' Day.” I said, “You can't fool me! I know it's April Fools' Day, but you can't fool me.” I looked out of the window and it was snowing—great big, angel-wing white flakes. I said, “That is a good omen.”

  We went to the Osborne, and as we went into the lobby, which seemed as though it had been waiting not only for Sarah Bernhardt but for us, I had a feeling that Momma would like me to live in the Osborne. It is very odd still, even today, when I am almost eighty years old, how eventually I want to please Momma. We went up to the sixth floor with the agent, went into this apartment, and it was what my cousin Rosalie and her sister Norma would later call “Magnificent!” It has rooms of state on one level and, down eight stairs, very cottagey rooms. It has splendors and miseries. We looked at it. We bought it. We did not move into it until the July Fourth weekend that same year. Back home, 1453 did not once in those months regain its cheerfulness.41 (1993)

  MAY 18, 1967 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO DIANA TRILLING

  I am scrawling this on my lap, perched on a window seat while carpenters make a hideous noise in our new house—and that is why you haven't heard these long months. We are in the earthquake stages of moving. Have you ever tried to pack a house such as ours, in which you have accumulated (never throwing anything away) for twenty years? Don't. I bought a large (ten rooms— now eight because of two walls removed) apartment in the Osborne. Do you both know it? It is diagonally across from Carnegie. It is a year younger than the Dakota, sixteen-foot ceilings, in excellent repair, gloriously full of light, it faces Fifty-seventh south and the park north. It is an 1884 split-level, steps leading down to the three bedrooms. At last we can be civil again and feed you, etc., etc. Think of living on Fifty-seventh Street!!! I've never lived “in town” before and never in an apartment house.42 How to cope? Ah well, I can always sell it (I have had one offer already!) or sublet it and we can live penuriously in London—where I wish I was right at this moment. Even my skin is tired. We now pack almost twenty-four hours a day!

  AUGUST 12, 1967 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london?

  I came here [to Mina's] this time to be a listener. Lincoln went quite mad and almost did in some ancient people in a hotel in Cambridge. Thus far not a word in any paper, but Mina is in a state. Fidelma hasn't gone up to see Lincoln, because she feels she must stay with the cat! Lincoln ran amok—stark naked—in the Commander. Five policemen and four firemen had to quell him. How this has been kept from the public is inexplicable—but please, please don't tell Howard or anyone. L's play about Abraham Lincoln [White House Happening] opened the night after he went violently mad—not too good, I gather. (A. Lincoln has a bastard son in it, a Negro who is a butler in the White House!) So “charming” and “brilliant” was Lincoln K—having been locked up in a most expensive private institution—that he was able to prevail upon his doctors to permit him to attend a performance of his play at Loeb (the new theater at Harvard), where, it seems, he behaved so perfectly that he almost convinced them of his utter sanity. However, he is back in the sanatorium.

  JOURNAL • august 13, 1967 • bethel, Connecticut Over one year [without a journal entry]. I cannot believe this. But how wasteful. What sort of writer can I be? Here I am again at Mina's, having been scribbling letters—to Richard, to Penelope, to Marlene—in my bed, reading Edward Sackville-West's 1927 novel (Gothic he says) The Ruin, a book artistically constructed and fleshed—full of dark bodings, Jamesian inflections and innuendoes. I've read the “new” Agatha Christie—a diversion, most dependable, everything in its preordained gory place, business as usual, immaculately run. I've read Leonard Woolf's fourth volume—monumental but not inhuman. He is a sure, passionate, just judge—setting down truths, but recognizing all fallibilities— austerely hot against injustice.

  Mina reads patches of the Strachey [biographical] volumes aloud, and I find myself in Sybil Colefax's huge party room, at Argyll House on the King's Road, in Colefax's high time, and more recently a great furniture-and-things cluttered room owned by Penelope—no parties, no memories, save to one who knows what that room once was.43 And that is how 1453 must now be. I wonder whether our carpets remain upon the floors. I would go there, stealing in (I have the key) once more … but I do not think that I should indulge in so upsetting an experiment—not even with the excuse of finding letters.

  What a disheveling year this has been: We moved; Tiffany lamps (the dragonfly and the poinsettia) were heisted; Richard went abroad in October and has not returned; Sidney Kaye died; Truman gave his ball and thereby made detractors, even enemies, globally; I found that my Sotheby book was basically no good and so came to a form for it, but have not written it;44 upheavals at Condé Nast and Playbill…. I am being rained on, must retreat into this house.

  AUGUST 14, 1967 In the late morning, Mina came down, distraught. She had had a nightmare: Lincoln would be in the madhouse permanently; she could not live if he died; he is the center of her life and he had almost always been the center of her life. “I am a hysteric, you know. No one realizes that I am a hysteric….” She moved abruptly about, puffing away, huge with tragedy, eyes black with anguish.

  AUGUST 27, 1967 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london

  My, that Bloomsbury world—the gentlemen in it—were incestuous. Tell Howard that Maynard Keynes [the economist] took Duncan Grant away from Lytton Strachey and there was anguish indeed. Did you know that most of them were queer? Everyone told everything to the authorized two-volume life of L. Strachey. I sit reading it, wondering whether all of this is necessary—I mean the intimacies, etc.—for an appreciation of their works. But Michael Holroyd has done a superb job of research and arrangement—and what spurts of brilliance and he was still under thirty!

  JOURNAL • October 17, 1967 • new York city The radio spews identical gobbets of news—antiwar strikes nationwide, the strongest at Berkeley, singer Joan Baez among those arrested. The world destroys itself insistently … I meant to scribble about Marlene's naïve fury at being called by Time “the oldest girl in town.” Her rage and livid lack of understanding at reviews that accolade her (really glorious reviews), but are also blithe about her longevity. Ego-mad, a pain to all who love her or work with her—save for musicians (Bacharach45).

  OCTOBER 19, 1967 Arnold Weissberger took me to the Verdi Requiem at Carnegie, across the road (Von Karajan, La Scala [Orchestra], Leontyne, a marvelous contralto, etc.)—one of the stupendous performances, absolutely overwhelming. Von Karajan is probably the greatest conductor today, and his physical presence is stunning—his movements minimal, a sort of miniature gothic man almost imperceptibly magicking prodigious sound out of a concourse of musicians, each perfect, at least for the time they are under Von K's spell. I went back, and Leontyne was very blithe, very pretty, many larger-than-life cara motions and gestures, but still gay Negro girl withal. The divas crowded in to kiss the air either side of Lee's happy, achieved face: Tebaldi very erect, very mischievous schoolteacher. (When Lee introduced me, Tebaldi said, “Oh, Callas's friend …”46); [soprano Pilar] Lorengar, small, blond, pretty, neat, and shy-seeming—a delicious smile; [soprano Lucine] Amara: “Oh, Leontyne …” advancing on Lee, arms outstretched in commiseration, face all pity and compassion, “I felt for you when you tripped.” No one else had seen L trip. “The bitch …” muttered Leontyne to chums. So it went.

  Then I went away—and on Seventh Avenue found [set designer] Boris Aronson wandering in a cloud. He had experienced a great thing—this Requiem. He was in love with Von K. He was overcome by the tremendousness of Verdi's work and its execution. We sat in the Russian Tea Room talking the world away—how it is even past the Decline and now in the Fall. I said that when the theater died in its own place and took to the streets (as it has here— the theater in the streets is fantastic; the novels in the daily papers ar
e extraordinary; no fiction writer can compete with the daily news), when this happened revolution and war are inevitable. Boris agreed—all the while pondering the Verdi. He had been to view the Picasso sculptures and found them surface things. Everything in arts today, Boris feels, is surface, since nothing is the outcome, as the Requiem is, of greatness—no religion or faith, no belief. Today is the decorator's time. Stella [Adler] and Mitchell [Wilson] sat with us.47 They had been to [Stoppard's play] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—cold, heartless, brilliant, and ultimately doodling with words. So, we all sat talking the world away. Stella beautiful as always. She and Mitchell being like actors in a successful play—a long run—tired after the evening's work and the audience's vampirism. Stella raged against her students' utter lack of any comprehension, total lack of feeling, no culture. They bring nothing. I left Boris at one a.m. on the wind-roiled corner.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1967 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT Philip Johnson is “mad” about Israel—the war spirit, the military feeling. This is what made him so partisan to the Nazis and ultimately put him in jail. His deep girlishness does it, his feeling of being tumbled into blissful annihilation by the military, by brutality. He is one of the chained and beaten ones; he longs for chains and lashings. Is this what he hoped for from Puss? Mina says Philip suffered a dreadful nervous breakdown twenty years ago. He hid under tables. I know of other reasons than a nervous breakdown that sent him under tables.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1967 Anne [Morrow] Lindbergh came to lunch [at Mina's] — tiny, fragile, very stylish (which she isn't) in bright scarlet shoes and black stockings (patterned) and black-and-white-checked wool skirt and red shirt, a white Tyrolean jacket, a red-floral patterned little carryall (given by one of her daughters) very sensibly stylish. She has a beautiful profile, and she is a delight—feminine without clinging, thoughtful without boring, no pretensions, a most delicate sensibility and humor, reflective. We walked in the woods. She picked and plucked ground pine for me and saw everything, loving Mrs. Nature and her floral tributes, her bird constituents. She loves to walk alone, with her two cairns, in the woods. She said that [her husband] Charles Lindbergh really believes that everything will end—but that he will survive. What a strange, patient life she leads. He has no sense of comforts, will not spend money (always fearful that he will have none). He is off on his wildlife-conservation interests endlessly. Anne almost never hears from him and never knows when he will turn up. She is always ready—waiting.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1967 • NEW YORK CITY Maria at 12:30—until 4:30—the new, very young girl, loving, funny Maria—her life centered on a man, not music. “I am a better man,” she said, “than most of them you know.” Then to Hello, Dolly!, the great joyous [African American] Dolly! with Pearl Bailey—the house roused to an enormous standing ovation …

  And time tosses me like a ship in an arrogant sea. The radio tells “three o'clock in the morning.” Sleepless in time, I sit here, on the side of my bed, in this alien flat where all of my dead loved ones have never been…. But soon Richard will come and perhaps this will locate me better.

  An awful dinner at the [Alex] Libermans'. Bill Lieberman [the exhibition's organizer] had the Museum [of Modern Art] opened for us, and we viewed the Picasso sculptures. Marlene said: “He sculpts stupidity.” He does.

  MARCH 22, 1968 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • guadeloupe • west indies

  Two days ago, I was going through an enormous box of photographs in a picture-renting agency, and suddenly I came upon a yellow photo of a group of little boys, sort of seven-and-eightish, circa 1920 or 1921, on roller skates in Central Park. One little boy, in his short pants, looked so familiar—smiling away— and that little boy was Label Lerman. I felt that I had passed over. It was very odd. I smell the park and that moment.

  APRIL 6, 1968 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO PENELOPE REED • london

  I've had to put “The Highest Bidder” [about Sotheby's] aside until after December 31, 1968, because the Metropolitan Museum asked Viking Press to ask me to do the museum's hundredth-anniversary book—a huge picture book. I am now somehow led out of a dungeon into the daylight.

  We think that you will love our new refuge. We do get homesick—no trees, no birds, no squirrels on the window ledges—but also no ever-wearying stairs, and when the heat thumps in the pipes, I am joyous with not having to worry about the furnace. Fifty-seventh Street is curiously quiet this morning. Even when our radio said riots were on Fifty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue, we saw nothing from our windows. You know, my dear, this [Martin Luther King, Jr.] assassination is worse for us than the [John] Kennedy assassination. I have always known this to be a violent country. I also know that this is still the beginning—just the beginning. I saw fear in our offices and lifts and streets yesterday—fear at little groups of people who obviously stood fearing those who feared them. I could smell the terror in our editors' meeting, when a girl rushed in crying out about riots. I heard me say, “First, find out whether these reports are true….” Later, when our editor said that I had been so calm (I wasn't—my stomach ached), I said that I have been Jewish too long to be frightened. I suspect there is some logic in all this—but I'll not question it. Also it is easier for me: I have no children.

  JOURNAL • November 4, 1968 On Saturday we made off to view Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, an elaborately idiot movie alchemized into awesome-ness by the star's performance. She wins with her absolute self-conviction, her ritualistics, the stylization through which she semaphores tokens of the deepest passion and pleasure, the way she builds to a personal tumult—deluges of emotion and sound (the virtuosity, so amazing in so young a person), the voice (enormous, robust, musical—but of the streets and alleys), her affectations and, most importantly, her Jewishness. Saturday's matinee audience was 99 percent Jewish. They made Barbra their family celebration. She is the sacred monster of the moment. Obviously awful as a girl, but fascinating, enriching as a performer. The only genuine young star in America.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1968 • AUGUSTA, MAINE A lovely, lovely Thanksgiving. Exactly what such a day should be. Cooking. A walk to the little cemetery in the snow. The War Between the States graves always the saddest. This one has several such graves—including a boy twenty-three years and a few months and another who was a standard-bearer. I think of them going off from this still remote place and my heart breaks there in that hillside graveyard. Then dinner at four. [Richard's friend] Helen Matts, who knew [the dancer] Todd Bolender when he was a boy and they all lived in Canton, Ohio, came. She is a mixture of Fania and Geraldine Page and Una Merkel. Later, we sat around the fire, and Eleanor Morgan, who was born down the road a piece, came in. She is straight out of Sarah Orne Jewett.48 They would know one another immediately. She is dry and has humor, is honest and deliberate, and all of her yearning is controlled. She has life, and even if she is a virgin, she has lived. Such a clue to Emily Dickinson and the Brontës and all of those remote women who blazoned passionately beside hearths on moors in little villages.

  JANUARY 6, 1969 • NEW YORK CITY At dinner, Larry Kelly told a saga: Onas-sis rang Maria, asking for a date. Maria said no. Onassis said that after all they were in business together—the tankers. She said all right, come to dinner. After dinner, Onassis said that he had to pee. He disappeared into Maria's bedroom. Soon Bruna, Maria's maid, went into the bedroom—rushed out screaming that Onassis was in there starkers. Maria told him to dress immediately. Onassis refused. Maria's butler, Ferruccio, was too airy-fairy to do anything but scream and swoon. Maria sent for the police, who made Onassis dress and leave. Maria flung down the window and screeched, into the three or four a.m. Paris night: “Shame on you! And on the anniversary of your second wife's first husband's death!” This was on November 22, 1968.

  Onassis likes to fuck women up their asses. Mrs. Kennedy won't do it. Also, she will not sit in El Morocco with him and his three or four cigar-smoking Greek chums with their lavish, blondined females, while the Greek men talk busine
ss. Mrs. K likes “intellectuals”—Galbraith, Schlesinger—but this is not why he married her. He wants to display her; she won't be displayed. Hence, the rented house in Peapack, New Jersey [“Red Gate Farm”]. Onassis is bored with Mrs. K. They never planned a single day past their wedding day on [his island] Skorpios. Onassis planted it with a rain forest, and rain flows incessantly. Maria studied her role as Onassis's love. She would go to [the Parisian strip club] Crazy Horse and watch, preparing this new role as meticulously as she always had prepared her opera roles. She said to Larry and Mary Reed when they were all in Cuernavaca that being fucked up the ass hurt and was boring. Larry said, “After all, I should know….” Then for two hours she discussed this. Maria has been in the hospital having the bags removed, unpacking the satchels under her eyes. She canceled San Francisco because [its director Kurt] Adler wanted her to do eight Traviatas over two months—too long. Bing would give her only two “gala” Toscas. Maria wanted ten Medeas. So, no New York.

  JANUARY 7, 1969 • 1:15 A.M. Elsa [Snapper] came in this evening, before Puss and I went to Ken Elmslie's Twelfth Night party in his new house on Greenwich Avenue (diagonally opposite to the house in which, many, many years ago Eugenia [Halbmeier] said, “Ermine all day, fox all night.” We thought that racy and hilarious). Elsa came with her twenty-three-year-old, very Jokanaan nephew. Elsa appalled me. What has happened to her? She was hit by an auto on Fifty-eighth Street, just before Thanksgiving. She has suffered a concussion. But she is changed. Her eyes focus fitfully and with great trouble. She was in the room—all radiant and luminous—but amputated—as though someone had stolen part of her away. Too awful.