by Leo Lerman
She told Fletcher that she had never known Proust but that he was “a gay boy,” and she meant, of course, queer. Also, that Proust was always trying to give parties for Debussy, but that Debussy never permitted that, since he thought Proust and his chums very queer and frivolous. Of Debussy, she said that she had never slept with him, but, said Fletcher, “What she knew of his sexual technique could only have come from someone who had slept with him. She said he wasn't very good in bed.” So we sat in the Tratt [Trattoria restaurant], while a storm roared in Forty-fifth Street and were sometimes in Mary Garden's fin-de-siècle Paris, sometimes in her loony bin in Aberdeen, sometimes in her wicked sister Helen's villa. M.G. was actually ninety-three when she died. She had lied about her age.
MARCH 4, 1971 All sorts of people, even comparative strangers, feel that they can criticize my whiskers, can tell me how to cut them, even that I should not have them. This latter advice has lessened over the years. When I first had a beard, in 1943, demands to cut it off were universal, save for Rut and Ela. The beard itself seemed to threaten people. Whole busloads would cackle with laughter and exhort derisively, “Git a haircut!” People act threatened by my whiskers—now by the shape and abundance. There are many who praise this shape, but almost every near-and-dear detests the shape—vociferously. Maria: “You are so nice looking, with a neat beard.” Mina: “You look like a bad Mikado actor.”
Example of how facts are heard the way the hearer hears: Siobhan [McKenna] told me that what she remembers most of all of the sagas I've told her is the one about Poppa not coming home all night, me finally finding him a bleeding mess in the dawn, then swiftly making back to my bed, leaping in, pulling the covers over my head, saying to myself, “I didn't see it! It didn't happen!” She says that this last helps her through life. Every time something is too much, she thinks, “It didn't happen!” The truth is that I told her about my finding Poppa and my telling Momma, who screamed, “Sam, what have you done to me!” Yet, Siobhan is honest and believes that I told her the version she told me. (That is also true of Anaïs and what she has written in her diaries about me.) I did not tell her that saga: She heard it or remembers it that way.22
MARCH 14, 1971 I woke poor Gray twice in the night with my howlings and screamings. These are mandrake clamors torn out of my innermost terrors. Sometimes I feel a time when I am the only one left. I shake with horror and flee from that moment, annihilated. I loathe the idea of going, leaving, but to remain alone with no one to comfort me in the night, no one who has been part of my going toward this awful moment. I cannot think of this, but I must teach myself to look at it and to face it with equanimity and with dignity.
MARCH 18, 1971 Howard Gilman23 on dinner at Leonard Sillman's house. (This is Leonard seeking backing for his project of New Faces of 1952 revival.) He took Howard and mother on a house tour—loads of [drawings by René] Bouché, since he lived in the two top floors. A brace of good, but in bad condition, Adams [Staffordshire pottery] pieces. A wall of pornographic drawings by Frank Loesser: “Mother didn't seem surprised or flinch. I think she thought that she was looking at mushrooms! They're all of these huge, crossed cocks with inscriptions like, ‘Jews should stick together.' “
This curious convolution by which a gossip columnist [Leonard Lyons], with a somewhat liberal reputation and kudos for never dealing dirty, brings rich Jews to Leonard Sillman. And this gently nurtured (sic) Jewish matron [Sylvia Gilman] peering at male organs, limned by a leading American popular composer, and thinking them mushrooms—grotesque manipulation— while her homosexual son lives with the son of an Italian short-order joint and is beloved to frenzy by the daughter of the Czar's dentist [Remi Saunder]—all in the home of a former hoofer and vaudevillian who produces only disasters.
MARCH 22, 1971 Lydia [Gregory] on Mayakovski and Tatiana: “He was in love with her. He was. I saw him every day in Moscow, and he told me.” (All of Lydia's o‘s are long, drawn out; her r‘s go on forever—har-r-rd—and she sort of does a trill on them.) “Mostly he loved her because she was so beeeg. The day before he keelled heemself I saw heem. He want I should come in café, but I was just goink my father with foood to jail, so I tooold heeem, leave me alone….”24
NOTE: Betsy Blackwell retired as editor in chief of Mademoiselle at the end of March 1971. In the following months Leo considered other employment. He did a pilot tape for a radio talk show, met with several publishers to discuss a memoir, and reviewed books for Vogue—his first work for them in two decades. After Allene Talmey's departure from Vogue, editor Kate Lloyd oversaw its features, but Alex Liberman often consulted Leo about matters at the magazine. Liberman was particularly concerned over Truman Capote, who had sold to Vogue the right to publish his next fiction but showed no sign of delivering.
JOURNAL • APRIL 2, 1971 The Ike and Tina Turner Revue—ugh—the stench of pot, the hysteria, the scene in Carnegie Hall—legs thrown over box fronts, the bright cigarette ends, the elaborate undress and dress undress, the constant migrations of the audience. “They have the attention spans of two-year-olds,” said Puss. The hustlers constantly active. The contrast between my early visits to Carnegie—To a Wild Rose, A Victory Ball, Walter Damrosch, Ernest Schelling,25 Maestro. Then, the glitter of rhinestones on women; now jewels on slim-hipped, breathlessly tight-pantsed boys showing everything they've got, prominently bunched and displayed. The elaborate rags today—Fats Domino in red velvet and satin and immense rings… slow, dim … “Get off! We want Tina!” some screamed. Tina and Ike are primitive, outdoor water-closet, behind-the-barn pornography. She has great energy, seems old, lacks any variation, and turns them on with stupid smut. My father would have found her provocative. These very young people find her a dirty joke, which they share vociferously. She received a standing ovation. In second-rate burlesque and at stag parties this went on when I was young. What was really depressing about Tina Turner's audience: They were turned on by her non-sexuality, her whore's manipulations. She gave facsimile service, laughing at her well paying audience-trade all the time she was giving them emptiness.26
APRIL 6, 1971 Great gales, snow, slush, thunder, lightning—portents and alarums. Stravinsky died this morning, here in town. An anti-sympathetic man, with a curious, clutching handshake (an avaricious clasp). A selfish, ungiving man, but he did write Petrouchka and Firebird and Les Noces and Sacre du Printemps and the haunting repeated theme of The Cage score. Nevertheless, I remember his penetrating owl stare, which made me feel a mouse being inspected for my nutritive values. He was always the eater, not the eaten. Mrs. Stravinsky was a lush, vigorous garden.
NOTE: For some months, Gray had been feeling constant pain in his right ankle. Diagnosis, a long time coming, was a degenerative ailment of the ligaments, for which little could be done.
JOURNAL • April 9, 1971 I got through this week—solidly—and even finished a feature. Puss hasn't cancer—but a permanent, painful sickness of the ankle muscle. He will have to learn to live with this—and so will I.
APRIL 19, 1971 My people were among the 2,650,000 Jews who came from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1925. We came in the 1880s and were here before the Great Blizzard of 1888. My grandfather Goldwasser and his brothers surely saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art being built on the deer park, and they could have stood, on that rain-drowned March day, watching the quality arrive for the museum's grand-opening ceremonies. My people believed that America was the “Land of Golden Promise.” They believed that all were equal here, and that this was a democracy in which anyone could become rich, famous. In America, no one was persecuted for his faith. They did not know about race. The Statue of Liberty was reality to them—not promises, not symbol, but portent and prophet. When did the disillusionment set in? When they had to make their living? When they found that they had to break the Sabbath laws, the dietary laws? Did the sweatshop do it? The life in the public schools? My father saluted the flag, with conviction. Saluting was one of the earliest things he taught me. He loved the U.S.A.
&nb
sp; The Forverts started in 1897.27 Grandpa read it, interminably arguing with such male chums as came in to drink a glasel thé with him, as he sat in his heavy black knitted cardigan (but he did not know that it was a cardigan), smoking the endless cigarettes he rolled, taking snuff… there in a tie, but col-larless, a gold stud in the buttonhole … with his yarmulke firmly on his head … spitting and hawking and blowing his nose between his fingers. He was bad tempered, irascible, suspicious, autocratic—and he had to know everything! He was in complete, despotic control—a violent man given to dreadful, hurting practical jokes. When he got himself up for shul or, on Saturday nights, Lodzer True Brothers, or for out-of-his-house card playing, he was neat and even smart-looking.28 When I knew Grandpa, he was living on what his children made.
APRIL 22, 1971 Alex Liberman spread across Time. Am I pleased that I started his public career in art? I must analyze this awful relationship.29
NOTE: On April 25, Leo and Gray joined a large march in Washington, D.C., to protest the war in Vietnam.
JOURNAL • April 25, 1971 I will brekkie [breakfast] and down and away to march for peace. This will do little general good, but I will be benefited hugely [by the exercise].
The people on the Metroliner to Washington were Jewish middle class and intelligentsia—such good humor. The march was really a friendly rabble, vast multitudes, blue-jeaned hordes. I think of Emma Lazarus. It was not disorganized; it was not organized. The hand-clapping. The occasional crying out for “Peace Now!” The feeling of being photographed for FBI files. The babies carried or toted papoose-style. Deeply touching when handmade signs said Woods Hole, Massachusetts, or any other remote place and, carrying these signs, bright-eyed young people—or a covey of middle-aged ones. The black man, oldish, carrying a huge pole, atop which was, “My son died in Vietnam. Stop the war.” The kindness of strangers. The bright, spring day petaled by cherry blossoms. The two streams of humanity converging from Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. The truck from which little ladders made of wood were being sold for seating and elevators, the proceeds to go to some war-stopping organization. The proper Hadassah-looking woman, blue bands— “End the War”—across her correct, ample bosoms.
APRIL 26, 1971 Norman [Singer] went to Trenton to a reunion with four people he hasn't seen in twenty years. They went to Cornell with him.30 The husband of one of the girls was out of the room, but in telling about our going to protest, Norman mentioned my name. The girl, a Mrs. Robinson, wife of a pediatrician, said, “Oh, my husband knew him years ago in Lakewood.” When Dr. Robinson returned, he told Norman that I had been a glamorous, tall, good-looking boy from the big city, and that I had wanted to go to bed with him, and that he'd liked me a lot, but he was frightened. He remembered that I had a sensuous mouth, that he had read one book by Galsworthy but that I had read all of them, that I had given him a long lecture on the value of Galsworthy, and that I had been brilliant and made no secret of my homosexuality. (This was during the time I was finding out and then being sure. I was sure by 1931.) Dr. Robinson said that I rang him and asked him to come to a movie and said that was what I wanted. I remember a tall, thin, aquiline-nosed boy, with a shock of black hair. We lolled on green hillsides, talked literature, and I wanted him desperately and poetically. Dr. Robinson now turns out to be that boy, Irving Rubinovitch. He's a white-haired man and husband, about whom I have not thought in forty years and who was the only charmer I ever found in Lakewood, when I was sixteen and seventeen. That was a time when excessive sexual energy led me to experimental necking with Helen T in the backseat of the auto and to nightly, and sometimes daily, sexual pleasures with [cousin] Martin (which we both enjoyed, like puppies, and never talked about, and which neither one of us connected with homosexuality).31
In those Lakewood days, I never knew that I was good-looking, tall, brilliant. I knew that I lusted mightily and that I read and wrote and fantasized all of the time—and was terrified, ecstatic, and loved beauty of all kinds and literature and music and theater and writing—others' and my own. I wrote odd, bad verse and gloried in it. I feared the full moon, but became breathless with its beauty when it drenched the lonely streets and yards…. The library, the movie house … reading, reading, reading, and writing—endless scribbling—and being romantically ill and taking long, afternoon baths, eating chocolate bars and reading in the bath through endless empty summer days.
APRIL 28, 1971 This is marriage, save no divorce. A most tenuous arrangement seemingly as free as the trust itself, but fraught with dangers. Definitely for better or worse, but, as in most such arrangements, no holds barred. I've come a long way from butterflies, but the Grand Surprise is, indeed, beginning and end. I am a married, Jewish, middle-aged man. I see that I am typical in so many ways, especially of my generation. In trying to avoid life's problems, I took them in heavily. “Now life ends and survival begins.”—Bertolucci.
MAY 3, 1971 Off to the “Y” with Felicia Bernstein (“Not steen, stein—like a beer mug.”)32 to hear Steve Sondheim's talk on being the most successful lyricist we have. There was an outpouring of famous chums—almost all sitting together in a Roman fighting square, as in my Gallic Wars years ago. He was disarmingly confident of his genius, disarmingly confident of his amateur platform technique, and so, taking his audience into his confidence, or lack of it, he made instant chumship. They adored him and his highly organized, now professional technique. Steve did not mention Lennie as an influence. Indeed, he mentioned no musical influences, but gave glorious due to Arthur Lau-rents, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser—not to Larry [Lorenz] Hart. What the audience got was a genuine view of how Steve works. And they heard songs not available to them. The evening was very long and hot. I dozed occasionally. The audience adored every moment because it felt that it was in on creativity, being part of this desirable process, this vivid world.
MAY 7, 1971 Maria: “I'm finished … last March was too much. He [Onassis] almost had me again—but he's such a pig. And what for?… I'm doing Juil-liard for nothing. I have enough. Not as much as before. They can't pay much—so I do it for nothing.”
Marlene in a good, oldish, Hausfrau mood—tired, gentle, worn by life: “My hands are so old. And Rudi is suddenly very old. The earthquake …33 He's a displaced person. His last friend, a rich man he loves, said we should make a bank loan and rebuild the house, but Rudi doesn't do anything. He doesn't move. He's rootless. I must work in July—and I'm so tired….” The voice low, slow, sweet, womanly, with the young golden girl always peeping from under the womanliness—all very Berma.34
MARLENE AND RUDI Men wanted desperately to marry Marlene, but she always had a wonderful excuse, the one that extricated her from the possibility of marrying any of them: “But darling, I am mawied. I am a mawied woman. I am always mawied to Rudi. I love Rudi.” And indeed she loved the Rudi she had married, when she was a very young girl. But hers was an astoundingly free life in which Rudi and her daughter Maria were constants. She paid for his life and his mistress, Tamara, who was a deeply neurotic woman, but who was fond of Marlene and of whom Marlene was very fond.35 Marlene would disappear suddenly, calling from Rudi's San Fernando Valley chicken farm, which she had bought for him, and enunciating in her forever Berlin-accented English, said, “I am here at Rudi cleaning up the place. You should see how much it needs cleaning. I have been here three days scrubbing everything.”
Rudi and Marlene were bound together by some intangible cord. She was a responsible woman, and he was her responsibility. Perhaps he was her way of making peace with the life she so arrogantly led. It is difficult to think of Marlene as a guilty woman, but in her excessive efforts to please her husband, in her inexhaustible giving to her daughter, there must be some seed of guilt, some scrap of remote Lutheran ethic? I think that Marlene and Rudi, through all the years of glitter and glamour and chicken farming and even misery, always saw one another as those two beautiful young people in Berlin who had first met and fallen in love in some strange, golden time be
fore Hitler. (1993)
JOURNAL • may 9, 1971 I rang Marlene's bell, and soon she opened her door—cautiously—a small, not awake, very, very old person—so old that the creature was sexless—bleary blue eyes, a straight line for a mouth. “Oh, who? What?…” She had obviously forgotten that she'd asked me to lunch. She was plastered—ancient and plastered and very small. I gathered her in my arms. She, fragile, relaxed gratefully. I saw that her hair was thin to baldness on top. And when I held her at arm's length and saw her legs—they were ugly, veins knotted. But somehow, deep within this wreck where not one glimmer of her beauty was visible, the young girl peeped out. I was reminded of Laurette Taylor in Outward Bound.36 She finally pulled herself together and swiftly cooked a hamburger, made a salad, peas, mashed potatoes—all with careful attention to what I could and could not eat. Thinking of Marlene exhausts me…. We ate in the kitchen, where a wig block, with Marlene's hair upon it, led an active life of its own. “They go their way,” she said, poking at the tight blond curls. I could see the future thousands, viewing this Blonde Venus apparition, “Isn't she marvelous!” She is. Her restorative powers are tremendous.
MAY 11, 1971 Marlene came to the Russian Tea Room. She talked about her forthcoming engagements:37 “What should I wear? Which dress? That is the question…. The gold, the feather coat? That is too much, too theatrical. The pear-shaped diamonds, the coat, and the dress gray-pavé? The Danes love it and call it the Electric Eel….” That one, I advised, will look wonderful against the penguin orchestra. Then she told about her various encounters with Prince Philip. “She [Queen Elizabeth] doesn't like me. She has a be-oo-tee-fool laugh” (Marlene says “beautiful” like no one else, almost crooning it, making it an adornment, a warm cover for herself. She makes it into a precious, cozy word). “When I was at the Café de Paris, the first time [in June 1954], she wanted to hear me and it couldn't be in a theater, so they showed me all the private houses, and I picked Astor's. They all came, and Philip danced with me, dance after dance, and finally I told him he must stop, and he was like a child. Then one time he made jokes and she told him to behave himself. And years ago, when I made a picture with Gabin, there was a big reception at Joinville, in the pouring rain. Philip was attached to the embassy. They were always trying to find jobs for him. We went, Gabin and I, and he was the star, but it was pouring rain … those French journalists and critics, always so poor and so hungry… all the way to Joinville, in the pouring rain … and Gabin wouldn't even come in. So, Gabin was sitting in the car, and I went into the reception. There was Philip, and I said, ‘What are you doing here in all this rain and everything?' I was be-oo-tee-fool in a gray dress by Grès… all tucks and … you know … be-oo-tee-fool… with a big hat….” She gestured the hat into being—a huge, soft swirl haloing her head. “And Philip said, ‘I came to see you….' He was so nice…. But he is naughty, very naughty…. No she doesn't like me…. But she has such a be-oo-tee-fool laugh….”
