The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  AUGUST 16, 1971 A happy evening with Marlene—such laughter and talk and reminiscences, the kind we used to have years ago in New York. “If only somebody had told me that it was only glands… years ago … not love … only glands. All of that misery and that waiting and that meaning—Did he mean that? Did he turn his face this way or that? Now it's better—to bed with Rex Stout. No worrying.”47

  Marlene on Garbo: “That blankness, that beautiful blankness behind that face … that was it…. So touching. She was no actress…. I was in the hospital with a strep throat, and she was in a room above me … with the clap. She got it from [director Rouben] Mamoulian. And Mercedes [de Acosta] was running between us with food. The hospital food was so bad…. Mercedes said Garbo used everybody. She wrecked [Mauritz] Stiller and she killed [John] Gilbert…. She was a monster.48 When Stiller was dead, she thought she became Stiller—and she raped men. That is why she had queer men. She unzipped her fly and jumped on them…. I was making crayfish … which I had flown in from the Midwest… with dill, the way I learned in Hamburg…. You were never in Hamburg? I don't remember…. Mercedes was running with them to Garbo, saying she had made them. She couldn't cook anything…. Garbo was so stingy. She made Mercedes pay for the littlest thing. When they were together, she made Mercedes count the sugar lumps every morning. ‘You have to know how much your breakfast costs,' she said. And she put things in certain ways on the little tables to see if the maid cleaned…. She was awful…. I never knew her. We met at parties. But when she went away with Mamoulian into the mountains on a camping trip, they bought cheap things in the Army & Navy store…. Oh, she was stingy…. He paid for everything…. That was when they were making Queen Christina and the police ran after them at the border, because they drove through it, not wanting it to be known that they were together. There was going to be a scandal, and nobody wanted that—not Garbo, not Mamoulian, not Mercedes, not MGM. I offered to go to where they were and to get into the car and Garbo could get away and I would return quite openly with Mamoulian, and she would be saved … but she said no and they all had a field day—Louella Parsons and all of them….

  “Oh, I was a pretty girl, but I never knew it. I didn't believe it…. In those days, when I first came to Hollywood, and I had a big waist, and I was with Von Sternberg, we all wore dressing gowns—long, trailing dressing gowns with all sorts of frou-frou on the sleeves and the bottoms. Irene made them for me.49 And Von Sternberg always had to be playing golf in the early morning, and [daughter] Maria had always to open the door so she could see that he was coming from playing golf, and he would say, ‘Did you have a good night?' and I would answer, ‘Oooh yes. I dreamt of Greta Garbo—oooh, yes….'” Von Sternberg had been sleeping with her all night during those years.

  “When I was at the Reinhardt school, we all adored Garbo—and Bergner. I remember Garbo as Anna Karenina, the silent one [Love (1927)], when she sat by the side of her son's bed and she swallowed—oh—that was beautiful. And when Bergner stood on the landing, at the top of the stair, in a white coat with a big stand-up collar. She always wore dark makeup, and the makeup was on the collar. I was in the play—an English play—and I was one of the girls who sat with my back to the audience—only the back of my dress was embroidered. ‘You don't turn around, so you don't need an embroidered front.' And I said, ‘I pass.' That was my part… but I was where I could see Bergner and that—oh, that was everything.”

  The woman who follows Marlene everywhere—Margit, the speechless one (“She's not a lesbian”)—and the Canadian, who gave her a diamond necklace. Marlene is so funny and human about them. Women who follow stars: “Tallu-lah always had them, but she made them into useful creatures—secretaries. I can't do that. I'm too well brought-up. I always have to do everything myself. I can't have a secretary because I don't lead that kind of life. What if I told her to come at eleven, and Maria called? Or I wanted to do something else? So, I type my own letters” on a bogus fourteenth-century enormous table complete with machine and all sorts of writing materials, neatly arranged. The podge of the flat, which I find touching and that Gray says is so unlike her New York controlled elegance. I like both and find both very much the way she is.

  AUGUST 19, 1971 Marlene—mostly on her maid, who seems to be having a change of life, and for whom she prepares three meals a day and serves them to her. She went on about how stupid this maid is. This is boring, but it was all told with the greatest, marveling joy. She talked about her first maid, Rezi, who had been her dresser for The Blue Angel, a woman of about fifty who came to America with her, and during the voyage on the German ship, Rezi lost her uppers down the drain and into the Atlantic. Rezi refused to emerge from her cabin. “In those days, maids were always seasick. Everyone was sitting together in first class and worrying about their maids. But Rezi was not only seasick, she lost her teeth—and was the reason I was late for the first interview. It was all men—not a woman. Paramount arranged it that way, and when the man came aboard from one of those little things—chug choo choo … a tug boat—he took one look at me and said, “Oh, no … I can't let America see you like that. They'll think you're a lesbian.” I had on what any German wore when traveling—a gray flannel suit and a slouch hat, very manly, and gloves. All the Americans had black dresses and pearls and mink coats and the orchids, ropes of orchids, they had been saving in the icebox all through the voyage. So my trunk had to be brought up again, and I had to get dressed all over. But Rezi, she wouldn't come out from her cabin until I promised to take her to a dentist immediately. So, we went to the Ambassador [hotel], where they put me, and I found a dentist, and Rezi said she would stay there all day or two or three days until she had teeth. I left her and went to the interview and was an hour late. I am never late.”

  AUGUST 21, 1971 Cabourg-Balbec, the Grand Hotel:50 It was precisely as I expected it to be—large, cozy-stately, empty, rain-swept, deferential—the same youths—a high, white dining room—but all of that life gone out of it. I could feel Proust there. I could see the frieze of girls (a gaggle of schoolchildren, in my today's view, in scarlet and blue and green macs) and the long, rain-fractured front. Which had been his room? I wondered, looking up at the 1880s or ‘90s baroque facade. But, oh, the feeling was there, precisely as I knew it must be. And coming up in the Channel mists and fogs… the occasional tall steeples punctuating the fog… that was very Proustian. What a marvelous day. How just and generous, this day.

  Now, the last day. And always the gone feeling which [Alphonse] Daudet has in his story “The Last Day of School.” I read it first when I was in school and very young. I have in me, even stronger, the Alain-Fournier feeling of yesterday:51 That lost world in the mists and rain. That desolation—a happy regret. And, typically, when we finally arrived at the Grand Hotel, Cabourg, Robert came, but Gray did not.52 Perhaps he was desperately tired by then, but he had been doing his usual destruction for some time—a sort of sneering—a kind of contempt—charmless, infuriating—the sort of thing he does when he's not getting his way. I must develop this from its beginnings in my life, when I fully realized that I must not get caught by it, through being caught by it, to not feeling much, save anger against the negativism in it, and the horrible continuity of his self-destruction. This does not kill love, but it does draw me in upon myself. Love must be outgoing and out-giving. From each of these pouting rages, I go on—growing ever more isolated, but somehow keeping alive my affection—albeit feeling less and less about anything save my scribbling and beauty. I admire industry in people and courage and quiet and devotion and humor and a sense of irony and laughter and a loving heart and optimism and genuine douleur and style and panache. I detest negativism and destructiveness and niggardly-stingy ways. Energy exults me.

  I must not forget the description of my tone of voice with Gray, which Robert said is quite dead and like a patient mother, i.e., when I finally asked, “Why didn't you go into the Grand Hotel?” or “Is something wrong? Are you sick?” A dead, irritating patience. “Don
't hover,” Robert said to me.

  AUGUST 30, 1971 • NEW YORK CITY Maria to dinner [at the Plaza] and hearing her recording.53 (Tennessee at the next table—older, but seems better, more in control—dazzled by Maria.) Her voice is better, more together, rounder. There is no vengeance in it. Later, listening to her early recordings confirms that the 1970ish voice is glorious—more sustained and intact.

  Maria was girlish, but not coy, amiable and funny about “Aristo” and the “sisters.” She has Lee Radziwill's letters to use in case Mrs. O tries to declare Aristo mentally undone and tries to put him away. “She's a gold digger…. His servants and family—they love me.” Olympic Airways still flies her errands. There are close ties, but: “I finished with him in Nassau. He's sick, destructive. He brainwashed me. ‘You with that whistle in your throat, on your high horse.' But when I played him the record, he was astonished. He knows nothing about it—but he, too, said there is no vengeance in it…. If I had stayed with him, he would have killed me or I would have killed him: ‘You can't break me,' I told him. ‘You can kill me, but you can't break me.'… Oh, those Orientals! He's Greek, but born in Turkey. They can't let anything out. It's in the head, and they can't let it out. They can't go to a doctor and say, ‘Help me. I can't sleep. I have anxiety. I am nervous.' I am born in America, so I know these things. You have something wrong in the head, you go to a doctor, and he helps you—like with a broken toe. The first duty is to cure the brain…. I have the hernia, in my diaphragm, but I don't do anything, since the doctor told me that if I had an operation, I couldn't sing. I will sing. I must show myself that I can do it— and I will do it….” The determination is fantastic.

  SEPTEMBER 9, 1971 • WASHINGTON, D.C. How ironic that this evening I am taking Helen Hayes to the opening of the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall.54 She will have to be presented to the president during the intermission. No, I didn't want to go up with her, which was just as well: “Maybe that is something you would want to forgo …,” she wisely said.

  SEPTEMBER 10, 1971 “There are two things I don't like about Mr. Nixon: Vietnam and his personality,” said Miss Hayes. Later, when she was going up the stairs to be received by Mr. Nixon, she said, “I don't believe in being snotty to the president….” Sometimes the tempo and pitch and the color of her voice is very Ruth Gordon—the slant of it. Is this a common period thing? People reach out automatically to touch her—obviously to touch magic, vitality, life. Mamie Eisenhower looked drugged. Mr. Nixon looked clothing-store-dummy bright. Mrs. Nixon was pretty.

  NOTE: Leo returned briefly to New York, then flew south with Howard Gilman for a stay with him in Georgia.

  JOURNAL • october 1, 1971 • saint marys, georgia Momma [younger] was full of hospitality. That is, she aggrandized herself, another view of realizing herself, with perpetual hospitality. This was her sphere of creativity—her hold on family and friends, her active life and her future legend. Her reputation for common sense came straight from her diligence and, indeed, excellence, with pots, pans, volgar holz [rolling pin], stove (wood-burning, then gas) … from her way with cakes. She was a household goddess, and all because she knew her proportion, confining it to cooking, housekeeping, and a vivacious way of family life—within her home and any other home open to her. Her sisters-in-law detested her, while admiring her jealously. Her brothers adored her with a kind of underskin of loathing. She was a laughing bully, given to excesses of self-pity, hypochondria. Her weapons were health and sickness. She was the most vigorous sick woman I ever knew—plunging into the kitchen or the hospital with equal vigor. Momma was what in the Argentine is known as a “knife.” I mean that she killed almost anyone who crossed her path—not physically, but spiritually or mentally, and this ultimately meant physically. The body inevitably is shaped or misshapen by what goes on within itself.

  Truman in red shirt, orange tie, and leather, at lunch at the Colony [Club], yesterday. Truman: “Jack's having dinner with Todd [Bolender] tonight!” Traces of the young T come through this fat, blubbery, middle-aged, hanging-on man. Talk of his film script of The Great Gatsby and his upcoming television show. (“I'll just talk.”) T: “Garbo has been married for seven years—to Cécile de Rothschild—the best of them.55 She even has a ring. Cécile is very rich, which Garbo loves….” On Mrs. O: “There's nothing devious about her. That's not the way she thinks. She has curiosity. She heard that you had a beautiful apartment and that's why she wanted to see it.”

  OCTOBER 12, 1971 • NEW YORK CITY Maria's first class: “Don't call me a teacher. I hate that!” M [Mennin]: “You illuminate….” She: “Eh!” (She says this like a peasant woman) “Yes—anything—not a teacher. I don't teach. I advise.” She was extraordinary. Her patience and consideration and smiling encouragement of the young. Her knowledge. She reminded me of Maestro—some vague resemblance—perhaps the degree of consecratedness and dedication.56

  OCTOBER 13, 1971 The Bernstein party for [art authority] Peggy Bernier. She in silver-thread, flowered, sulphur-yellow Saint Laurent. “My name is really Rosamond,” she explained to me, who knew this about thirty years ago. I sat on a beaded gros-point stool, talking (too much) to Diana Vreeland through the evening—mostly about Ken Russell, [actress-model] Twiggy, Jesus Christ Superstar (D.V.: “I loathed it. I was really shocked. I've seen everything, but I was really shocked at the blasphemy. I thought Trash was marvelous, Hair turned the page, but this … I'm very square. Everything in its right place.”) She told me that Truman had rung her up and come to see her one night last May and sprawled on a sofa and he'd talked and talked—telling her that he'd lost his Amagansett house with all of his manuscripts. A storm had eaten away the dune, and the house had broken and fallen into the bay: “I just couldn't wait to get to the phone to ask my daughter-in-law why she hadn't told me of this unbelievable catastrophe. I couldn't understand it. We never have violent storms like that at that time of year. Finally, after about four hours, Truman left. I rushed to the phone…. None of it was true…. I suppose he was trying to end something, to close out something … and this was his way.”

  Puss: “I'm full of anger. I wake up angry left over from the day before. It's all right when I'm on my feet, but when I open my eyes, I'm angry.”

  NOVEMBER 12, 1971 Maria talking more to the class—even involving me. I was funny. She told them I was her most loyal admirer. When a soprano really got brilliantly pyrotechnical, she said to her, “What was that all about?” but said it so darkly amazed that the comment was kind, constructive. She then explained all about how excessive fireworks were tasteless in that place, also redundant. The soprano had done it all earlier in the [Barber of Seville] aria “Una voce poco fa …” Maria's lessons are always lessons in taste, proportion, balance, in the architecture and climate of singing. She wore a rich red, longish tunic, belted broadly in patent leather, over flaring black pants. She talked to the soprano about her excessively short skirt: “Remember, the audience always sees more….”

  NOVEMBER 13, 1971 At night to Newark, with Howard [Gilman] and Ouj [Gasparinetti], to Fedora with Magda Olivero—at sixty-one or sixty-two amazing, pretty, restrained but not stylized, the fragments of a tour-de-force voice.57 A huge claque of faggots and local Italian society. (Note a specific homosexual anguish: One's chum not being invited, whereas if he were my wife, he would have been.)

  [Soprano Maria] Jeritza in white satin, white fox, ropes of real pearls, diamonds, white hair heavily waved (precisely as her blond hair had been), makeup identical with her makeup in 1932, when she was the subject of the first interview I ever did (for the X-Ray at Newtown High School) and a figure of incredible glamour—now the queen of this opera gala in Newark (where she lives, as did Von Sternberg). Passing me in the Mosque [Theatre] corridors (now Symphony Hall) she could, of course, not recognize that boy in this gray-beard. Laci told me tales about her. (Jeritza always sewed a wedding ring in her white satin gowns where her navel is.) Always these women have ladies-in-waiting. She had them.

  NOVEMBER 2
1, 1971 Waiting for our Callas festivity to begin [at home], thinking of 1956, when we gave our first gala (“Attire mystical”) for Maria. We had food arranged by Pearl's [Cantonese restaurant] then, and pink tablecloths and napkins (and rice puddings galore that I made on the Monday following), and roses, and hysterics. We still have hysterics and food arranged by Pearl, but almost everything else has changed.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1971 The Liberman party for Andrei Voznesensky—a small, very compact, dark, pale, potato-nosed man in very fine French clothes, a round, trim head, a sort of cadet atmosphere. He has a firm, somewhat friendly voice and a little, warm hand.58 Tatiana—a huge bonfire, so much scarlet satin. Her eyebrows go higher and higher to affirm her face lift—two thick black, slightly cartouche lines, painted high on her blond face—permanently aghast.

  Around eight, Tatiana finally bellowed everyone into silence. When everyone sat on the floors, on the stair rail, on the steps, on the chairs and sofas and arms of same, jammed into the two rooms and the landing, the poet—chinless, but rife with vitality—rose in his chic Parisian leather outfit and announced that his translators would read first in English, his poems, and then he would say them in Russian (“to let hear the sound of the Russian”). This was frequently interrupted by shouts from Tatiana, who was stationed volcanically at the far end of the back parlor. When the translator, a gray-haired man of nineteenth-century dignity, rose and uttered, he was immediately exhorted by Tatiana, “Lowdah! Lowdah! Cannot hear yuh …” The translator went desperately on through these frequent assaults. When the poet spoke, this was sounded in English and Russian, “Lowdah!” Finally, he said that if his hostess would permit, he would recite—and at that moment, Tatiana's chum (actually Alex's—I feel Tatiana detests her) [painter] Helen Frankenthaler, exclaimed quietly but audibly through all of the rooms, “If you'd shut up, Tatiana, we could hear.” Tatiana, somewhat quelled, continued to make sounds like a flock of cawing rooks. And so this Lucia-like event proceeded desperately to its end.59 If Tatiana wished to hold a poetry recital, she should not have given a party. “It will be only one or two people,” she told those invited, meanwhile sending out dozens of telegrams summoning her faithful.