The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Richard has a list—everyone he knows, the oldest at the top, with boxes in which letters sent and received are checked off. You are dropped from this list if you don't answer Richard's missives. Richard and Howard know old ladies everywhere. Richard's thoroughness is a form of obstinacy. Once he starts something, he must finish it. I always think that this obstinacy will do him in one day.

  DECEMBER 24, 1970 I have always had a sense of rootlessness, and I have always been in love with the America of my childhood, the America I first knew as seen through the windows of the books I read (Pioneers and Patriots of America, Little Women), the America of saluting the flag and singing national songs (“Old Black Joe,” “Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,” “Tonight on the Old Camp Ground,” “Juanita,” “After the Ball,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Swanee”), the America fantasized by my father, the America of Stephen Foster and Irving Berlin and Francis Scott Key, the immigrants' dream America and the palaces along Fifth Avenue, the America that died with the year of my birth, 1914.

  The life I found in Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, especially the schoolteachers, was that of an older America, where the flat ruler was still used as an instrument of justice or vengeance. That ruler was the visible symbol of might, autocracy. My deaf-mute uncle Benny [Goldwasser] plied the cat-o'-nine-tails, my father a wide leather belt, my grandfather his heavy walking stick, his hand, even his feet. I have seen teachers hit out with a blackboard pointer, a switch, a knotted rope, and a length of rubber hose (twice in Hebrew school).

  DECEMBER 26, 1970 The year rushes to its end. At its close, we have shattered remains. Some of these are rich shards, whole designs intact. And it is from these complete fragments that we reconstruct our life. As in all archaeological reconstruction, we cannot actually re-create, we can only approximate. So, we must use our findings not to try to build what we once knew, but to erect slowly, painstakingly, a fresh structure, hoping that it proves more durable than the previous one. Future Schliemanns [archaeologists], reading this document, will find clues to our previous lives.

  The difference is between those who laugh at “tragedies” and those who cry. I mean domestic mishaps, minor catastrophes. A really great soul laughs rather than cries at all reversals. This does not mean that tragedy should be diminished by laughter—but laughter is positive in a way tears can never be. Worry is a destroyer, like all pollutants. Worry is not even a sincere emotion. It is a poison. I abhor worrying because of my long life with Momma, a calamity-howler.

  DECEMBER 27, 1970 People who minutely analyze their own lives to one another, this is destructive. Some part of oneself must remain secret—for self-nourishment and for the nourishment of the relationship. There must be informed blindness in any close relationship.

  DECEMBER 29, 1970 Personality—that is what I want to pin down, no matter how fleetingly, for personality of a man is component to personality of his era. A single personality contains the residue of all that has gone before (like certain wonderful rooms) much of what is going on, and seeds of the future, incipiency….

  I do not write in these notebooks: I scribble. My energy is almost inexhaustible, my energy filled by a kind of gay despair, which opens my eyes to the ridiculous and to the allusive. And my curiosity, a form of energy—these are the foundation. I am not intellectual, but I am intelligent. I have a passion for nature, but not for all things natural. I adore gossip of all kinds, trying to disguise the Jewish Puritan in me by animation. But I gossip less and less, save to myself. Of course, these notebooks are extreme narcissism. This is a search to find myself and my times in my own looking glass, and in looking glasses held up by others. In finding myself, I must find everyone, every place, and everything that has been part of me, my own voice and the resonances in my voice of all those others—people I knew, wanted to know. When [William Dean] Howells reflected, “I wonder why you hate the past so?” Mark Twain said, “It's so damned humiliating.” I am little humiliated by my past, much by the world's.

  I have been on an eating binge. Just like an alcoholic, I am in great danger again. I must taper off. I do not eat chocolate, ice cream, butter—but I have been stuffing everything else. I will stop. This has been a constant war. Eating to excess and alcoholism are identical. I am eating now because of the strain— constant goading, bickering, tension, and no sex. But I must not eat my way into annihilation.

  DECEMBER 30, 1970 I want one extra day to spend with those I love, have loved. Who would I be with that extra day? My mother and father when they are young—perhaps that night when Poppa pulls me, on my Flexible Flyer, given by Uncle Herman, who is here—tall, so good-looking and sexy, wavy white hair of his latter days thatching his younger-days face. This is in the kitchen of our runaway, hideaway flat on the Boston Post Road, where the last firehorses still roar around their corner, Momma still has one leg in the air, pulling up a stocking, and I have, forever, lost a mitten somewhere on the trolley-car tracks, which gleam in the snow like ribbons, tautly binding this gift of memories together.

  Availability—so rare today. Perhaps this has been one of my attractions. I have been so available. Perhaps I am sought because I am there.

  “Le grand goût, le goût veritable” [“Fine taste, true taste”] (Leopardi). Ela had that for her friends. She was their seeing-eye dog. Rut was better at advice and criticism than she, but Ela was a life-giving force, and, oh, how I felt after being with her. (Unless another jealously consumed, dragonlike, the comfort she would give. We were all fiendishly jealous of one another.) Like all such deep friends, she gave solace: She was the perfect looking glass, lying if you wished that, but showing you your true face if that is what you wished, and ultimately she was a magician's looking glass, enlarging you, magnifying the best you. It is this oversize image of oneself that sustained us, nourished us, made us try to be that size rather than the puny creature bleeding from life who had crept up her threadbare stair and into her room. Her smelly room (cooking, expensive scent left over from decades of topsy-turvy high-low life), always overheated, always teeming with personalities, but somehow with a chasm of love and quiet and understanding for you alone.

  DECEMBER 31, 1970 My devotion to Grand Central—How I love railroad stations, lobbies of hotels, centers of intense energy. I find them nourishing. I love watching. Some part of life must be vicarious, especially if one loves being alive.

  1. Leo had perennial difficulties with managing editors, whose task it was to force frugality and compel him to meet deadlines.

  2. In 1960-61, Leo had written a column titled “Down the Avenue of Arts and Letters” reporting current happenings for that bimonthly magazine.

  3. Emlyn Williams (1905-87), the Welsh actor and playwright (The Corn Is Green), had published an autobiography two years before.

  4. Samuel I. Newhouse (1895-1979), owner of Mademoiselle, was married to Mitzi Epstein Newhouse (1902-89), whom Leo had met separately by the early forties. Their sons are Samuel I. (“Si”), Jr., and Donald (born in 1927 and 1930, respectively). Si Newhouse would become chairman of Condé Nast Publications in 1975.

  5. Sono Osato (b. 1919), a dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, then Ballet Theatre, and a musical-comedy actress, had married the businessman and painter Victor Elmaleh (b. 1919) in 1943. During the sixties, Leo and Gray often visited their house in Sands Point, on Long Island, and were sometimes invited to stay there alone.

  6. Paul Bigelow (1905?–88), a consultant associated with the Theatre Guild, edited several of Tennessee Williams's works.

  7. Leo was writing this entry while sitting in the lobby of London's Ritz.

  8. Zeffirelli's Tosca at Covent Garden in January 1964 would be one of Callas's great, and last, triumphs.

  9. Mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens (b. 1913) had been known by Leo as Risë Steenberg at New-town High School. She had retired from the Met in 1961.

  10. The outstanding Danish dancer, choreographer, and director Erik Bruhn (1928-86) was a frequent guest artist in New York.
<
br />   11. The Austrian journalist and writer Raimund von Hofmannsthal (1906-74) became Alice Astor's second husband in 1932. Vienna-born Tilly Losch (1904-75) turned from dancing to exotic film roles after a scandalous divorce from Edward James in 1934 London.

  12. Leo timed this photo shoot with Streisand so it would appear in Mademoiselle three months later, when she opened in Funny Girl.

  13. She had triumphantly opened in Hello, Dolly! a few days before. Leo had been among the first to spot Channing (b. 1921), in the 1949 revue Lend an Ear, and suggested her to Anita Loos for Lorelei Lee in the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which really launched Channing's career later that same year.

  14. An ironic remark, meaning it was “unforgivable” of Kim Stanley (1925-2001) to defy Leo's low appraisal of her talent. Chekhov's Masha would be the last role she played on Broadway.

  15. The killers portrayed in Capote's In Cold Blood would be hanged on April 14, 1965.

  16. Amy Gross (b. 1942) began her career as Leo's assistant at Mademoiselle (1964-66), then worked with him at Vogue from 1978, and succeeded him as that magazine's features editor in 1983. Later she edited Mirabella and O: The Oprah Magazine.

  17. The title character in a satiric play by Jean Giraudoux, she dispatches greedy businessmen via the sewer under her cellar.

  18. Sotheby's was valuing the estate of Clive Bell (1881-1964), the Bloomsbury author and art critic. Leo filled out this journal entry after his return.

  19. Artist Angelica Bell (b. 1918) was married (1942-61) to novelist and editor David Garnett (1892-1981). He had previously been the lover of her father, Duncan Grant. Mina Curtiss also had an affair with David Garnett, during the thirties. Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), elder sister of Virginia Woolf, was a painter and designer. Charles James Dugdale (b. 1939), later Baron Crathorne, worked for the Sotheby's Impressionist department in the sixties.

  20. Omega Workshops was a decorative arts company founded in 1913 by critic and painter Roger Fry (1866-1934). It closed in 1919. Painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell had joined the endeavor. Grant was basically homosexual, but he lived happily with Vanessa Bell (and her husband, Clive) from 1916 and fathered Angelica Bell.

  21. Leo later noted that Lady Juliet Duff remarked of Cecil Beaton's house, “Like a very successful Parisian madam had decided to give it all up, moved to the English countryside, and took all her bordello belongings with her.”

  22. Frieda (later Flo Grossinger) was the daughter of Leo's aunt Helen and uncle Benjamin Goldwasser (his mother's eldest brother), who were deaf, as were two of their children, Frieda and Louis (“Lew”).

  23. Leo had believed Bruce Chatwin (1940-89), later a novelist and travel writer, to be homosexual. Chatwin and the American-born Chanler, who also became a writer, had both been working at Sotheby's.

  24. The Romanian prince Antoine Bibesco (1878-1951) was a diplomat and a writer who had been a friend of Proust's. Lewis Galantière (1893-1977) worked for Radio Free Europe and then the Federal Reserve Bank, while also being a translator, playwright, and critic.

  25. The municipal transit union in New York City was on strike January 1-12, 1966.

  26. Hertha Steinhart had gone to school with Ruth Yorck in Berlin. Ellen Stewart (b. 1920), the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1961 and one of the leading producers off-off Broadway, was with Yorck at Marat/Sade when she died.

  27. Now known as a stress fracture.

  28. Leo is describing the gala closing of the old Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, after which the company moved to Lincoln Center. The soprano Elisabeth Rethberg (1894-1976) had retired in 1942.

  29. Characters in a column by Don Marquis of the New York Sun: Archy, a free-verse-writing cockroach and Mehitabel, a dancer reincarnated as an alley cat but “always a lady.”

  30. Capote had chosen Katharine “Kay” Meyer Graham (1917-2001), owner of the Washington Post, as his guest of honor to cheer her after the suicide of her husband.

  31. Gloria Guinness (1912-80) and Barbara “Babe” Paley (1915-78) were among the dozen or so rich, stylish beauties whom Capote called his “swans.” He ranked Paley first among them.

  32. Alice Longworth (1884-1980), daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was a socialite and hostess known for her sharp wit.

  33. Amanda Mortimer Burden (b. 1943), daughter of Babe Paley and her first husband, oil-heir Stanley Mortimer, was wearing one of Cecil Beaton's black-and-white costumes from My Fair Lady.

  34. Penelope Tree (b. 1949), daughter of society families, sister of the writer Frances Fitzgerald, appeared at this event in a risqué dress by Betsey Johnson that launched Tree as a hip fashion model.

  35. The Italian fashion model and designer Princess Luciana Pignatelli (b. 1935) attached a sixty-carat diamond to her headdress for the ball.

  36. Benedetta Barzini (b. 1943), daughter of writer Luigi Barzini, was a super-thin model.

  37. Capote had befriended people in Kansas during the writing of In Cold Blood.

  38. Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon (b. 1930), a British photographer and designer, was married (1960-78) to Princess Margaret.

  39. Leo had launched the culinary writer Barbara Poses Kafka (b. 1933) when he sent her to review restaurants for Playbill in the early sixties.

  40. Sidney Kaye (1914?–67), owner of the Russian Tea Room, organized the conversion of the Osborne to a cooperative building.

  41. Mina Curtiss gave Leo half of the $40,000 that he paid for the apartment. He wrote at the time: “I got $10,000 from Momma, agreeing to pay the interest she would have had from the savings bank. Almost at once she inquired had I figured up the interest.” Letter to RH, May 18, 1967.

  42. Because relatives filled the tenement building where Leo lived during his early childhood, he didn't recall it as apartment living. By “town” he means midtown's crowds and high-rises.

  43. Carol and Penelope Reed owned a portion of the house where British decorator Sybil Colefax (1874-1950) had famously entertained in the twenties and thirties.

  44. Leo did make a pass at constructing a narrative of his days at Sotheby's. Ironically, he was hampered by not having kept a journal diligently when in London.

  45. Songwriter Burt Bacharach (b. 1928) hit the big time as conductor and musical director of Dietrich's world concert tour between 1958 and 1961.

  46. Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi (1922-2004) was Callas's main rival and somewhat her vocal antithesis, with great tonal richness. She sang mostly the Italian repertoire.

  47. The acclaimed actress and influential acting teacher Stella Adler (1901-92) married first the director Harold Clurman, then the science writer and novelist Mitchell Wilson (1913-73).

  48. Novelist Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) wrote The Country of the Pointed Firs and other subdued portraits of New England communities.

  49. Lincoln Kirstein had cut both Denby and Leo out of his life.

  50. The British writer and painter George Nicholas “Valentine” Lawford (1911-91) quit the diplomatic service in 1950 to live with his lover, photographer Horst P. Horst (1906-99).

  51. GF: “Cesco had a Picasso that he offered to Leo for $100. Leo refused, saying that it was so little and he couldn't do that to Cesco. Horst did take it, however.”

  52. Bulbridge was the house of Lady Juliet Duff, near Wilton House, the renowned home of her relative Sydney Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.

  53. Several women performers would evoke the legendary British actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928) for Leo, although he could not have seen her in person. Terry had worked with the great actor-manager Henry Irving, and she was widely adored, famously by George Bernard Shaw.

  54. Curtiss ultimately published eight of the letters in her memoir Other People's Letters (1978). Proust had written them to the French historian Daniel Halévy (1872-1962) while they were planning an unrealized epistolary novel.

  55. Leo doesn't elaborate, but it seems unlikely that the literary critic Alfred Kazin (1915-98) and the weal
thy columnist and political activist Dorothy Norman were more than friends.

  56. Leo was deathly allergic to some painkillers and anesthetics and was terrified by all of them.

  57. Mildred “Mama” Watkins Chandler (1899-1995) was the wife and adviser of Kentucky governor and senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler.

  58. Howard Rothschild collected art and letters related to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

  59. Photographer Peter Beard (b. 1938), a friend of the Kennedys, lived in the Osborne Apartments.

  60. Leo's paternal grandparents were Isaac (1854-1937) and Naomi “Jenny” Simon Lerman.

  61. During the French Revolution, Marie Jeanne Bécu Du Barry (1743-93), mistress of the late Louis XV, was charged with treason and guillotined.

  62. Oona O'Neill (1925-91), daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, was eighteen and Chaplin thirty-seven years her senior when they married in 1943.

  63. The actor and director Walter Hampden (1879-1955) starred in many New York productions of Cyrano and Shakespeare.

  64. “Those years I slept in the dining room, and Richard and Knox [Laing] came and went, quite unknown to anyone else in the house—or so I thought.” Journal, February 18, 1971.

  “I wonder about my mother's reaction. Of course, I was very secret—but how curious. Was Momma so self-absorbed, or did she instinctively know that the only way that she could hold me was to let me go?” Journal, July 4, 1986.