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The Grand Surprise

Page 58

by Leo Lerman


  NOTE: During the seventies, Leo and Gray were occasionally invited to the Connecticut home of Alex and Tatiana Liberman or to that of Cleve and Francine Gray, whose property adjoined the Libermans'. Cleve Gray, an abstract painter, had married Francine du Plessix in 1957, and both he and Alex had studios there.

  JOURNAL • may 26, 1972 • Cornwall bridge, Connecticut Francine on her eight hours in jail:80 Felicia Bernstein, standing at the bars of her cell in Washington, chain-smoking, her eyes hot with rage; her thin, frail body quivering with rage all night long. That is how Francine told this to me, she trembling, slicing her homegrown asparagus smoothly but violently. Her control is superb. Larry Rivers was a shit, taking pictures. Women were treated more harshly than men, but no one was treated badly. One painter said to another, behind bars, “Do you know what Helen [Frankenthaler] would say if she were here?” “Yes,” said the other, “I'm here because of my paintings.”

  The countryside teems with New York horror. Three more “darlinks” will be coming to lunch. [Then] today's dinner—Grace Mirabella and “man.” Tomorrow's dinner: Claudette Colbert and “man.” Tatiana said to Puss, “You garden in that?” (white duck, etc.). “that Deauville—save for Claudette …” Tatiana spent the summer of 1926 with Colette. This visit is more like novels I've read than even Juliet [Duff]'s weekends at Wilton. Rut would be deeply amused. Alex calls Tatiana “Babooosh” (all o's are forever here). Tatiana shows her young legs and thighs. “What would the New Englanders think?” asks Puss. “It's a long way from Desire Under the Elms,” I say.

  MAY 28, 1972 Alex's workshop—I could not believe the Stonehenge quality of his work, the religiosity of his work. He is an important sculptor. How horrible to be tied to his Condé Nast job. Alex's sculpture is the memorial to contemporary decay, obsolescence. He makes it out of gigantic mechanical (technological) parts, components found when huge, overland vehicles die in the nearby highroads, when ships collapse. His sculpture transforms the planned obsolescence into memorials. The most tremendous one is an authentic monument to junkyards, scrap heaps, auto garages.

  MAY 29, 1972 Claudette Colbert is a nice woman: practical, a little maidenly raunchy in her talk, well-read, well-lived (a flat in Paris, a flat in New York, a house in Barbados). “She recently looose her girlfriend,” says Tatiana. Talk last evening about theater, Claudette and I contributing anecdotes. Claudette always wanted to play Joan of Arc, but had to do Three-Cornered Moon instead. She talked about Mary Boland, who, reeling down a corridor while on location, said to Claudette, “Do you know what's wrong with me?” (“I knew,” said she, “so did everyone else.”) “My body is too big for my feet.” Claudette Colbert has a gamine warmth and easy, responsive laughter.

  The [Francine and Cleve] Gray party is going to lunch at Philip Roth's. “Are you going to have liver for lunch?” Puss sweetly asked. Tatiana: “Yeah, he fooked the liver all night before—full of vitamins.81 Dis was Rasputin's sickness. It could never go down. Could do it with everyone—and all women of Petro-grad think it personal compliment—even my mother. It never go down. I know.” Later she said: “Green—chief psychiatrist of Roosevelt Hospital— I said to Francine—the rich people never knows. Let's have him for friend—for godfather. So he come every day for tea—drinks—at five o'clock—and we no need psychiatrist. We have it.”

  JUNE 24, 1972 • NEW YORK CITY George Balanchine is interested in staging ballets for people now—not in the future. “I'm absolutely not concerned. There will be different people then. I don't want my ballets preserved for people to laugh at what used to be….” George Balanchine's ballets have not been recorded. What about the film of Midsummer Night's Dream?

  JUNE 26, 1972 Nicolas Nabokov on Stravinsky:82 “This non-melodic man, later, never got away from basic, vulgar, corny Russian melody.” Nicky about Balanchine: “The fun is how musical he is—making the piano reduction himself. He goes into every room of the music, into every bed, every cupboard. Jerry [Robbins] listens and listens to tapes and makes movement.” “Yes,” said Lennie. “We were in Jamaica a few months ago, working on our project (The Dybbuk, a ballet) and I worked in one part of the house, as Jerry was working on Canticles (Stravinsky), in another part, from a cassette, listening over and over and over. Then he would run in and say, ‘I've got such a movement!' and show it to me.” Nicky: “But George works from inside the music. He is the music.”

  JUNE 30, 1972 [Publicist and biographer] Patrick O'Higgins on Somerset Maugham. His plans for a book—really a novel. Douglas Cooper told Patrick that he called on Maugham at the Villa Mauresque and found Maugham rising from behind a sofa, where he had been shitting in the drawing room. When he saw Cooper, he scooped up the shit and handed it to him—a fair exchange.83 The key to Maugham is that he was excessively middle-class, always making the proprieties. He was also a nasty, mean man, part of that backbiting world in which friends were more vituperative than enemies. Someone describing a man said, “He is second-rate Glenway Wescott.” Maugham, a friend of Glenway's, said, “How can that be? Glenway is himself second-rate.” Apocryphal? I doubt it. Maugham was, of course, a sacred monster.

  JULY 14, 1972 • SARATOGA SPRINGS Balanchine went on quietly (he is always quiet-spoken) about how he does not think, talk, live the past: “Karin-ska—she has good ideas. She makes beautiful things. She works hard—but she lives in the past. Always she is remembering—living past—what happened thirty years ago, forty years ago—this little thing—that little thing. I live now. I am not interested in the past.”

  JULY 22, 1972 Eddie Villella at three a.m. on the pavement:84 “This is where it is right now. This is where I want to be—lucky to be. Ballet's here with the New York City Ballet—the center—the living center—Balanchine—George's given us glory—the glorious opportunity.” Millie [Hayden] said it. Violette [Verdy] said it. Everyone said it. Richard Tanner: “Balanchine's said it all. There's nothing left for me…. I've come too late….”85

  JULY 23, 1972 • NEW YORK CITY Villella, driving me home, said, “Tonight I had a real trip [Watermill]. … I went in so deep. When I came off Jerry grabbed me and shook me. He said, ‘I want that trip. I want that trip.' “ Eddie has Italian humor, deep funniness, and sadness. So many ballet people are Renaissance in looks—from early to high Renaissance.

  JULY 28, 1972 Jed Harris—very quiet, carefully enunciated immense erudition, spilling cigarette ash, a constant ebb and flow of marvelous stories, color washed out by his long age.86 He wore no tie, but his pale lemon-yogurt-colored shirt, silky, was buttoned up under his chin. Harris:

  “When I was at Yale, I always wanted a shore dinner at Lenox's (?), but I couldn't afford it. Then years later I had money and I was seeing a lot of Ruth [Gordon]—but I didn't really like her. I told her that I had always wanted a shore dinner at Lenox's. She said, ‘Why not?' So we went up there in a car. It was an enormous menu. I am a very abstemious man. I eat very little. Shrimps came in…. Ruth ate every one. Lobster… soup … vegetables… steak … fresh corn … enormous dessert…. The more she ate, the more I loathed her. Finally I couldn't stand her. I got up to pay the bill. She stood, leaning against a post—so small, nothing she'd eaten affecting her—so tiny, picking her teeth with a toothpick. I hated her. I wanted to get away from her as fast as possible. Suddenly she shouted ‘Wow!' All delight, happiness, triumph was in that ‘Wow' and I fell in love with her that minute.87

  “John and Lionel Barrymore hated the theater. Lionel was in Paris, learning art, and John was living in a furnished room, over a nightclub on Forty-second Street—Leonard's?—with [journalist] Herbert Bayard Swope. John was an assistant cartoonist. Ethel [his sister] wanted him to go into the theater. Finally he said all right, and she gave him a small part in a play she was touring. By the time they reached Philadelphia, he was leading her on for curtain calls. He dominated the stage. So when they came back to New York, he went to see his father, Maurice, who was living at The Lambs.88 Maurice always stayed in bed. He slept only in a pajama top.
John said, ‘Father, should I be an actor?' Maurice hopped out of bed. ‘He had the biggest balls I've ever seen,' John told me. He walked up and down scratching his scrotum. Finally he said, ‘Son, if you want to be an artist—you'll be an artist and pick, pick, scratch, scratch. If you want to be an actor—you'll act and you'll fuck. There's nothing better,' then scratching his balls and hopping back into bed….

  “Lillian [Gish] never knew that she was inaudible on stage, rehearsing Uncle Vanya. She never, never knew. And I didn't tell her….” He provided her with a silent entrance and everyone thought that was genius. “She was no actress. She got by on character.”

  Jed Harris also told me about how meticulous [drama critic] George Jean Nathan was—and how his rooms in the Royalton [hotel] looked like a college boy's, with a pennant pinned to one wall. “Everything was laid out carefully. Such aridity. I'd read a story in [Nathan's magazine] Smart Set, which I worshiped. I believed this story. In it the man had a rain machine attached to his window, so when a girl said she had to go home, he pressed a button and rain poured down and she stayed and … well, when I went to see George Jean Nathan, I looked for that rain machine. Of course, he didn't have it….”

  He talks excellent Yiddish, quotes Hebrew beautifully, loved Leonard Woolf's books, smokes incessantly, wants Maria C (with whom he's obsessed as a comedian and character) to make a movie of Dark Eyes with him. She would be the Russian diva. He says so many of his best effects were accidents. He works on a play even years after it's closed. Ten years after The Front Page closed, he suddenly thought that Hildy should have been sniffing a bouton-nière gardenia while all the murder excitement and suicide, etc., were going on.

  Paula Laurence is having her teeth redone. I said to her, “At last your bite will be worse than your bark.”

  Did Toscanini or Beecham say to the female cellist: “Madam, you have between your legs one of the greatest instruments devised for the pleasure of man. Can you do nothing but scratch it?” Probably Beecham.

  AUGUST 13, 1972 • WASHINGTON, D.C. I sit, naked, scribbling away on a rickety faux Louis Quinze table, looking out at the redbrick-pathed park at the White House (so cardboard). “Is it a short story,” Gray asks, never knowing how thin-skinned I am about scribbling … as he inevitably misjudges my wanting him to enjoy things I have seen without him. Yesterday, when I was sad at not being able to show him the interesting iron stair and vista at the Renwick (it shut off on Saturday), he said, “Never enough. You never have enough.” I had seen it. I didn't want it for myself.

  AUGUST 22, 1972 Today Alex made a concrete offer (even in the gangster sense), lunching me at the Century Club, in the library. He wants me to become features editor of Vogue. In a sense, I've been waiting for that for years.

  AUGUST 25, 1972 I told Alex I would come to Vogue if the money, etc., could be arranged.

  NOTE: In 1972, the Swiss art historian Manuel Gasser, editor in chief of the art magazine DU, had the Osborne apartment photographed. Leo wrote the following letter at the time to describe Gray and his decorative style.

  AUGUST 28, 1972 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO MANUEL GASSER • switzerland?

  Two decades ago, these objects (furniture, bibelots, lamps, fabrics, books… everything that could, in a sense, reproduce the past, from about the 1840s until the 1914 war) were quite inexpensive, actually to be found in junk shops, in cellars and attics. Many visitors to the house, a typical 1870ish New York brownstone on upper, then unfashionable, Lexington Avenue, found the contents funny. Some even thought the Tiffany glass lamps ugly. Nothing in the collection cost much—the kinds of things one generation adores, the next scorns, and some succeeding covets.

  The collections range from horn cups to Staffordshire cottage ornaments to depictions of firework displays to a series of Russian views to Tiffany and other Art Nouveau lamps and glass and furniture to majolica to bucolic and “forest” beast wood carvings to Neapolitan gouaches of Vesuvius to toys (especially dolls) to over 15,000 books. There are, literally, hundreds and hundreds of objects, mostly European or American: (glass [bells over]) waxed fruits and flowers and paper construction arrangements, walking sticks, beadwork cushions, Russian lacquer boxes, dozens of paintings of dogs… And all collected out of love for the solid past they represent, collected to return the life in these objects to the times in which we live.

  NOTE: Their friend Eileen Maremont enlisted Gray's help to decorate her home in Barbados. Leo and Gray had known her first as Eileen Adler in 1955 London, wife of the harmonica artist Larry Adler, years before her marriage to the wealthy businessman Arnold Maremont. Gray would travel to Barbados five times in the next year. On August 31, 1972, Leo flew down to join them for a week, his only visit.

  JOURNAL • august 31, 1972 • Barbados The fisherman, who has been out in the sea ever since—last night?—is near the spearheaded jut of the beach, standing in his low-lying rowboat. I can hear his oars in their locks. His shirt, raspberry-and-cream color, hangs halfway to his knees. His ancient shorts are sawed-off, Italian blue—the color with which they paint their rafters. On his head, a tall peak of straw, which weather has twisted into elegance. This man, I could see through my opera glasses, works exceedingly hard, never stopping. The long-breaking, ever-changing in color and form tides and the sound of them—smoothing, unwrinkling, flashing and flashing and tumbling on the pale, silvertan beaches…

  The fisherman is onshore, met by a woman in a black-striped, brief frock— tight to her ample body—her head is turbaned in a smear (at this distance) of scarlet. (I would add coin dots of pumpkin yellow, but that is the fiction of her dress—Strachey's half inch.) Also a male, whose gestures are regal (the inherent regal quality of movement here) and whose dress is pale, much-washed lemon. The three stand examining—the catch?—all akimbo, all animated, busy with onshore matters. The fisherman's hat, now seen closely, is suddenly a flat squash of straw, almost two-dimensional upon the black, cropped head. This, again, makes me wonder: What does one actually see? How much is there and how much do we think is there?

  From the house come Eileen and Puss's voices, incessant in “doing” the house. Somewhere shovels scrape against the coral-stone … hammering… anonymous voices, shreds of them … the constant inhalation and exhalation of the tide upon the shore…. This house, these gardens and terraces and beaches—a Riviera I have never really known save from a distance. Colette described them. I love overcast days by the sea. These are kind to my eyes. This is the most rewarding place to scribble, on a jutting terrace, overhanging the sea … sufficiently divorced from immediate living, but within earshot and eyesight of it.

  NOTE: Leo was reading Before the Deluge, Otto Friedrich's history of Berlin in the twenties.

  JOURNAL • September 5, 1972 I built cities and eras out of what I heard and what I read. So the Berlin of the twenties, this Hochzeit [golden era] was alive in me, fed by endless tales from the brilliant people who had been—those were the key words—had been Berlin's glory and now were New York's refugees— more scorned than venerated, in buses, in taxicabs, on the streets, and in the shops—who drove or fed or waited upon us… but to me the refugees were my friends and, indeed, my lovers. They were the living history, in which their past was to be heard constantly—and which inevitably, inexorably, became my past—a past I knew only from their mouths, their gestures and movements, their ways of living, the beautiful princely things they did or no longer knew they did, their embraces and lovemaking. Their Berlin of the twenties, their Viennas and Budapests, became the Berlins, the Viennas, the Budapests of my mind and heart. I absorbed their movements and appearances and became part of them—a mittel-European echo in my mustache, my black homburg.89

  OCTOBER 7, 1972 • NEW YORK CITY [Alexis] Léger showed Mina two letters he'd written to her—one in 1958 and one in 1959. These would have saved her anguish. But he never sent them. “Why?” she asked. “I forgot,” he said. They would have made all of the difference in her life. She says: “Maybe he w
rote them recently, just to fill in….” She will never know. They will appear in the Pléiade edition of his works. He clung to her. “Such a small, frail, clinging man now,” she said, of this man who had been the last giant in her life.90 Dot [his wife] cannot leave him alone—he's so infirm, but his mind is unimpaired, and “he talked incessantly—so many tales of his childhood and youth. Old people do that. I almost died after an hour—so exhausting. Also my hearing aid couldn't take more….” The spectacle of these two grands amoureux in this plight.

 

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