The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  MAY 17, 1971 We brunched, really lunched, with Howard [Gilman], Luigi [Gasparinetti],38 and Remi. Quite splendid, all done by Ouj in a bright red apron, hair slicked back under a huge chefs hat, heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was marvelously handsome and excessively right. We talked about my gala birthday: Seventy-five have accepted.39 We lingered laughing and listening to [music-hall singer] Mistinguett (a rather big mouse being eaten by a cat) and various golden throats, with Joan [Sutherland] sumptuous and clear— even her diction—in the aria from Attila. Ouj: “She must have been in a rage that morning with Ricky [Bonynge, her conductor-husband].”

  Remember Maria's one a.m. call—strong, gay, serious (but this is always through a sort of grand-opera scrim), roaring with laughter over Onassis pursuing her and her rejection of him. “Let him have his two whores. I'll never forgive him for humiliating me in public and taking me away from my music. ‘What d'ya wanna work for?' he asks me…. So adolescent.” Then she went on about how she has told Onassis that only with a married man would she have an affair—safest.

  MAY 18, 1971 Reezl returned [from Africa via Europe]. I found him just arrived when I came home in the late afternoon. He is full of “giraffes like showgirls,” “flights of zebras,” Kilimanjaro in snowy remoteness, Victoria Falls zigzagging, myriads of petrol-slick-colored butterflies, cascades of bright birds, and decay of the world everywhere.

  We went to see Freddie [Ashton]'s Beatrix Potter, which is lovely: The dancers as beasties enchantingly like their originals and [dancer] Alex Grant spectacular. Fascinating how original styles of dancing come through, and how the work, as a whole, is a genuine and practical stage piece. Thinking of how Alice would have loved it, my eyes teared.

  Mike [Bessie, editor and publisher's tales about Tallulah: When he came to dine and to take away her proofs of the autobiography with which he had gotten [her press agent] Richard Maney to help, she said: “It's an honest book, isn't it? Of course … there was lesbianism, love among girls, but…” and she gradually, getting drunker and drunker, enumerated all the well-known underground of her life—the dope, the drink—reiterating, “But it's an honest book, isn't it?” Do omissions make autobiography dishonest if everything in the book is honest?

  NOTE: After months of losses in circulation and advertising at Vogue, its publishing director, S. I. Newhouse, Jr., resolved in May 1971 to replace Editor in Chief Diana Vreeland. She was abruptly made a consulting editor, essentially a sinecure. Vreeland was replaced by her associate and frequent deputy Grace Mirabella.

  JOURNAL • may 23, 1971 A talk with Allene: “What's going on at Vogue?” she quavered, “I haven't been able to talk to anyone.” Irony. I was sad for her. Rachel [Crespin, fashion stylist] on Alex Liberman: “He's the villain. At last he's the czar of the fashion magazine world. He's power-crazy,” she says. “God gave him his worst attack of ulcers.”

  JUNE 23, 1971 Dolly Haas Hirschfeld screening, at MoMA, of her Broken Blossoms with Emlyn Williams.40 “Very interesting,” said Puss, anent my fling with E.W, some years ago. “I went steady,” as Ouj would say, meaning one brief tumble, late in the night. The cries of “Daddy! Daddy! Fuck me….” which I did, and the terror of his perfect murderer acting after.41

  JUNE 26, 1971 Lotte Lenya singing Weill is the epitome of that world—as Rut was. The perverted innocence of Lotte's voice. I can see Ela's smile in it. Their perversity was deep, so raffiniert, that it was pure. Ruth Gordon has some of this—a common willfulness, a willful perversity beyond perversity, so that she has innocence, no matter how sinister (meaning left-handed).

  Lotte Lenya … That little hall bedroom between Ela and Ilse [Bois] (she had the grandest) in East Seventy-fifth Street, where Lotte had her threesomes, always young queer “poets,” while in the great house, up river near Nyack, little, thick-lens-bespectacled Kurt, a sort of minor functionary or servant in appearance, worked away at his minor-major masterpieces (the masterpieces had been done before he came to Amerika—now he made money). Music— always music before money—and Lotte supreme, the daughter of a coachman and a laundress, born in a Viennese slum, who at four walked the tightrope in a little circus.

  The gallantry of these Weill songs—the fling of them, the optimism—and Lotte's voice has that. The music assimilates the jazz idiom, the Yiddish idiom, the German idiom, and the result is an original language, Weill's own—the music of the twenties and early thirties, gone by the mid-thirties, and not exportable. The source—Weill. He, himself, as a creative (how I hesitate to use that word) didn't travel well. Lotte did. Lotte sings. She has a little girl quality—Lucrezia Borgia and Marilyn Monroe and Mitzi Newhouse in one. Lotte has such a sense of rhythm—or Kurt Weill had a sense of her rhythm. The tango was twenties—Valentino and Novarro—and Kurt's.

  JULY 3, 1971 • HARBOURTON, NEW JERSEY On this bed [at the Samuel New-houses'], reclining in the long twilight, pop tunes softly on my little radio, and all of me in love this Fourth of July—not with anyone or anything save the long years behind me—the boys and girls and places and happenings… in love with that long life. Is this, then, the most hopeless love or the most fulfilling? Jagged shadows on the window screens of this quiet, chintz-hung, country-house room, so far removed in time and place and being from those years ago when I was a little boy in Grandpa's house or Aunt Silly's or Uncle Harry's or Aunt Annie's or even in Momma and Poppa's. How difficult being alive must be for Momma, with her even longer burden of years. Was she ever in love with that past? What does she remember? The aches, pains, sicknesses, slights—and how she gave herself.

  JULY 12, 1971 • NEW YORK CITY Women in hot pursuit of homosexual men are doomed before they start, for they seek to make over the objects of their pursuits, to make them into men, while not desiring this transformation at all. It is the inadequacy that they “love”—the feminine, nonheterosexual qualities. Are these women then a form of lesbian? I know that they are sick women, who are terrified of preponderantly heterosexual men. They are the real moms— the son-fucking moms—for they want to consume the male-female. Women like Ela—or even Marlene (to a degree)—who pursue great men (Toscanini, Reinhardt) are also doomed, but this is a different species. The homosexual-loving women pursue death through negatives; the Elas pursue doom through positives—seeking what seems life at its most intense, seeking that one extra day this route.42 There is no Northwest Passage. Both are pitiful (as we all are), but the Elas are alive, interesting, the others are ridiculously pitiful—well, not quite: Anyone who is sincerely sick is, basically, not ridiculous.

  JULY 14, 1971 Mina came into town, in “The Glory,”43 toting a brown paper sack. First, she went to the Morgan Library and sent for Charles Ryskamp [the director], who grabbed at the sack. “No,” she told him, “it's not all for you.” Then she gave him Manet's letters written during the 1870 war. After which she made off, sack in hand, to the New York Public Library and the Berg Collection, to which Mina gave the rest of the sack's contents—even David Gar-nett's love letters to her. “Forty years of letters from Rosamond [Lehmann, novelist] and David and all those, and I had such a nice conversation with the woman who heads the collection—I can't remember her name, but she was nice.44 I did enjoy snubbing Charles.”

  JULY 18, 1971 Robert Davison said, “I always thought I was the one that got away, but when I thought tonight, I wondered whether they got away. Not that I left them, but they left me?” (When I told Puss, he said, “How sad. That's one of the saddest things I ever heard.” He looked on the verge of tears. Since our troubles—early in 1970, Puss is very secret.) Robert enjoyed his birthday, two days ago, but it made him think, and being Robert he will think positively. He is a remarkable creature. “The word is escaped, not left,” says Robert on the blower. “I hate entanglement. It's so graceless. I always wonder now, if I've missed anything. I don't have any entanglements. All this identity seeking. I abhor that. But I can't help thinking about it now.” Robert is genuinely elegant. Robert always had style, even [with Gray] in Los Angel
es City College.

  JULY 21, 1971 Margot Fonteyn's performance of the Scriabin Extase, a work that could have been devised (basically) for Ida Rubinstein's debut with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes—but which she could not have danced.45 A gaudy, gorgeously corny, transition-into-maturity John Cranko [choreographed] opus redeemed into extraordinary art and spirit, not so much pure dance, by Mar-got. Her technique is assimilated to such a degree that it is almost invisible. Cranko (in pale gold, muchly jeweled kaftan out in the house) protects her vulnerabilities, covers her with soaring hands, frantic, leaping male bodies— five glorious dancers, and exquisite costumes. The decor is Klimt. Swirling hundred-foot-long curtains drop from the flies. But it is Margot—her femininity, her technique, her spirit—that triumphs. She makes the acrobatics (difficult lifts, turns while upheld by the males, Maxfield Parrish poses, the whole apparatus of Cranko's vulgarities and virtues) define the human condition. She enlarges us, as we marvel and are then lost beyond marvels at the miracle of this fifty-two-year-old woman revealing the perfect beauty of her art and beauty (inner and outer).

  Backstage, as she went to and from her tumultuous ovations (fifteen minutes?) she was lined, corded, wet from the prodigious exertion—but still her great inner and outer beauty—her goodness—prevailed over age and its erosions. A high moral quality shines from her playful eyes—her radiance. I do not mean that she is good. I mean that she conveys goodness, belief in life, continuity of spirit, reassurance of immortality—although we know how fragile she is— and we are—all of our culture. I see us all, en masse, moving through to extinction … yet while I watch Margot I see death but I do not believe in death.

  JULY 24, 1971 E. M. Forster told Gore about his hidden novel, Maurice.

  Gore: What happens in it? F: Well—two boys are in bed together…. G: What do they do? F: … Talk —

  Reading Maurice suddenly made my eyes tear. It is such a young book— sometimes a patch of purple, but so young. Those poor boys. It is the way I felt—so very much—but I was deep in practices only not coinciding my [sexual] actions with the miseries and splendors of falling and being in love. Like [Maurice] Hall, I waited for letters and carried them about with me, never letting them off my person.

  How could any young person understand Maurice today? This book has been hidden, secreted my entire lifetime! Can a homosexual man wake up from a physical sickness (flu) and declare, “I am no longer homosexual!” as Clive does in Maurice? I doubt this—at least I doubt the simplification. But I know that Maurice's subsequent hell is written with agonizing accuracy. Did this happen in Forster's life—this being rejected, after several years of mutual love—even passion—by his lover? Maurice is sometimes a queen's dream, but at all times a deep look into the past, when “the passion that knows no name” was just that. I still see [British actor] Oliver Reed as Maurice. There is considerable art in it.

  NOTE: Leo went to London (with Gray) to research a feature for Mademoiselle about Ken Russell, the British film director. Russell's flamboyant film The Devils, about apparent demoniacal possession in a nunnery, which starred Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, had just been released.

  JOURNAL • july 28, 1971 • en route from new york to london In plane en route to my interview with Ken Russell. Oliver Reed came in to see me. He is mad on Art Nouveau, and is even more what I thought he was. He talks marvelously—mostly, this time, about Ken Russell. The basics of his talk: Russell destroys actors to remake themselves into the creatures of his own sickness. Rather like Michelangelo annihilating the layers of marble in order to make a work of art. He works by a creative destruction. Oliver believes that Russell is growing quite mad. He has been known to fling an actor against the wall. “He makes us bleed….” Russell wanted to do a film of Nijinsky, in which Oliver was to play Diaghilev. So, Oliver studied Diaghilev and feels that, having talked to dancers who danced with Nijinsky, Russell is showing some of the early signs of Nijinsky's madness—the signs after Le Dieu Bleu. (When Russell talked to Nureyev about playing Nijinsky, Nureyev said, “Why should I play an inferior dancer?”) Oliver's talk is rich in nighttime imagery, although he says, “I'm illiterate.” But he isn't. His eyes are incredibly fixed, fathomless blue. His bottom is ample. He's a great toucher. He knows the intensity of his sexuality and he knows how to use it—on male, female. He feels that New York has betrayed him in not understanding The Devils. “The one thing that woman will never forgive man is that he is the penetrator. Ken is trying to find the penetrator. He finds that in me, a little bit in me. I'm only a weapon in his tearful story. I'll only continue when he feels that he needs a penetrator again.”

  AUGUST 7, 1971 • LONDON Yesterday morning, a lovely talk with Glenda Jackson, high up in 52 Mount Street—the architecture so intensely Betjeman, now I see it drawn or painted by Osbert Lancaster.46 She is thin to scrawniness, her tallish, slight, no-waist figure, in a faded brown-and-white foliage print, nondescript-length dress, illuminated, really lighted, by her somewhat Halloween-pumpkin smile. There is an intelligent ruefulness in her. And she makes a sound case for her acting being gone at through her intelligence, sieved through the decision she must make of how to project what she feels about that character, the person, that situation, this involvement. Vanessa [Redgrave], Glenda says, is able to make her decision without intellectualizing. Vanessa has immediate response to her emotional reaction to the person she is being. Glenda is immensely intelligent, well-read. “The Russians should make Proust. They'd have ten hours…. I couldn't play anyone in Proust….” She has a teacher in her. “Yes… but I would want to teach five-year-olds…. No, I can't write anything: There's too much time between my thought and my pen….” This was the most rewarding interview. She has no side. She agreed that Elizabeth I (having just played her to Vanessa's Mary Queen of Scots) was an hysteric. She tried to get under history's embalming, and so found Edith's [Fanfare for] Elizabeth the greatest stimulus. “She was a poet. That helped the most. This historian says one thing about Elizabeth, and about that identical thing another historian says the opposite. Edith Sitwell's intuitions—that gave me the clues I needed.” Now she's off to Spain to play Isabella: “She's not as dull as you think.”

  NOTE: Through the twenty-two years since Robert had moved out of 1453 Lexington, Leo and Gray had seen him only during his trips to New York on assignment for the Parisian decorator Valérian Stux-Rybar. In 1971, however, they stayed with him for ten days, on their first return to Paris in nearly sixteen years.

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 11, 1971 • PARIS The evening and early morning at [decorator] Jean-François Diagre's. He in carefully torn blue denims, with his father's medals—a solid block of virtues and courage's rewards—over his heart. He is a somewhat lost boy, who adores his mother—but healthily. I like him, knowing exactly how treacherous he could be. He is the one who designed the Baron de Redé's party, and is doing the Rothschilds' Proust party near the Guermantes château in December.

  Puss and Robert vanished, and Puss told Robert that he was sorry for these years, etc. This happened in the kitchen. They were gone a long time. And Robert said over and over, “Could he have said it fifteen years ago, when it would have mattered?” But, of course, it did matter. I don't know quite what Puss said. They were both drunk.

  AUGUST 12, 1971 Gray to Robert: “Richard [Hunter] is eccentric in every respect. In fact, he is one of the oddest people I've ever known. You would have to have him to stay with you to know.” Robert: “For seven months! You have excessive kindness.” Gray: “I don't. Leo does. He's the kind one.”

  AUGUST 13, 1971 Gray's temper is just beneath the skin—almost showing at all times—scorn and temper and contemptuousness. There must be a French phrase for this condition—just barely covered by skin. The American expression thin-skinned covers (pun intended) all sorts of acerbating conditions. Sometimes I cannot bear this. Most of the time, I cannot but I do. Will this ever blow up? It must not. Too much would pour out too late.

  AUGUST 14, 1971 Marlene's flat
and her preparations for tomorrow's party— Orson [Welles], Tony Perkins, and [director Claude] Chabrol. Marlene leaning on the balustrade of her minuscule, bright-red-geranium-lined terrace, just a ledge upon which to stand, looking down in the Avenue Montaigne, into the trees and out at the lighted church, the motors fleeing down the avenue—great rushes of autos—saying, “I was too dumb when I was young—too shut away. All I knew was nightclubs and hotels.” She has just come from her Copenhagen triumph (“Better than ever”) by way of Switzerland, where she had Neiman's injections. She looks better than she did in New York: The famous beauty—the bones, the smile—is apparent again beneath the erosions, the scratches and scourges of time, which, like the prehistoric glacier, has moved across her face.