The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  “Bring me your old beauties,” cried Diana Vreeland. “I hate the modern. But everyone said, ‘What's the old girl doing in the museum—dead things. She loves the alive!'… Well, this is where the action is…. Look at all of these young people…. When someone breaks a date with me, for luncheon, and says she has to be in Washington, and I find out she's been seen lunching in New York—that's nothing—that's arranging your life. But when she sits opposite and lies—lies about business—that's lying….” Diana in the museum—her silhouette—her aura. The technology of that place. “It's immaculate—surgical.” Diana: “I've thought about it, and there's no reason why, after a long life dedicated to fashion and beauty and fantasy …” (She went on elaborating—Salzburg baroque isn't in it!) “… no reason why I should not be photographed moving down the corridors of history …”

  FEBRUARY 6, 1973 Norman Mailer's fiftieth birthday party at the Four Seasons. Everyone there, but a bust—pay as you celebrate. A rabble of intellects, sycophants, Mailer groupies, politicals, Warhols—a paprika of hysterics— a bust. The chief ingredient—ego, in each and every performance and would-be performance.

  FEBRUARY 2 i, 1973 This afternoon to look over Mrs. Onassis's “new” library, shuffled by [decorator] Harrison Coultra and his partner. Nothing much, as interior decoration, but interesting because it is hers. John [Kennedy, Jr.] actually rules this “family” room now. But Mrs. O did say what she wanted: Indian fabrics on the visible walls, the bookshelves crammed with red leather bound books, the desk quite good early nineteenth-century English (the one on which the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, now used and ink-stained by John doing his “studying”), nothing too fragile, because he is always throwing pillows cased in old Liberty silk scarves and hiding behind the curtains. A reddish-brownish rectangular room looking out over the frozen reservoir—conversation-piece paintings on the walls—but somehow verging on impersonality. The “living” room quite pretty—all cream and rose, color splattered, masses of enchanting watercolors and drawings. Good Greek heads and a fine Egyptian figure. “I couldn't go into this room for two years. I hated it….” The year after the death [of Kennedy] she bought things—many. Now she's stopped—only clothes, jewels. “Onassis, who [otherwise] wasn't much in this flat, couldn't be pried from the library to work after his son's death.”107

  FEBRUARY 27, 1973 Mitchell Wilson dead. Poor Stella [Adler]. I think that he was the love of her latter years, the solace of her unacknowledged old age. Now she will be old—this miracle of youth, whose increasingly rare entrances into the “social” scene amazed all beholders. “How can she look so beautiful?” People stood in awe, gaping at her. Together, Mitchell and Stella looked like star actors “resting”—not because no one wanted them, but because they were wary about the play in which they would finally triumphantly make their appearances. They never made comebacks, since no one ever thought of them as away. They were always lights in this midnight of despair.

  MARCH 5, 1973 Just to note that I saw Maestro's house and grounds on the front page of the real-estate section and read that the grounds were being “devastated” by a modern school building (Jewish). Those long, long ago, during-the-war nights when Ela and I crouched under the mulberry tree. She trembling when Maestro cleared his throat or coughed in that late-night-shielded way. Ela thinking herself disguised in cap, pants, and tough's jersey— all trembling, giggling, and rapture … and madness—Caroline Lamb again and again.108

  NOTE: Gray was in Barbados for much of the spring of 1973.

  JOURNAL • march 10, 1973 • bethel, Connecticut I cannot yet decide whether the day is smeary or whether my eyes see it that way. But, oh, the joy of not having to have that operation now. Later always seems never. That is why death is never until death is now. Surely we know, if only for one horrible moment of pathetic regret—or one exulting moment of relief?

  MARCH 12, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY I fall in love with Puss over and over again. Should describe my pangs about marriage and thoughts of doing it, in some state in which this is possible—because of love and taxes and after life comes financial desolation. I write love letters to Puss, incessantly, in my head—a tempest of love letters in my head….

  MARCH 13, 1973 Mrs. Paley about T: “He's getting waspish lately.”

  MARCH 15, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • vienna

  You cannot believe under what terror we [at Condé Nast] work in this Graybar Building [near Grand Central Station]. The bank was robbed. Men with knives appeared and chased through the floors here and there until chased from the premises. On the seventeenth floor a whole office was locked up and the crooks took everything from them save their hysteria. The J. Walter Thompson office cashiers were robbed. So we now have private police—all so totteringly ancient that they couldn't do anything preventative, so they lock essential doors, thereby making escape in case of fire impossible, also causing me to walk almost all around the block because the door next to my door is locked. Very eighteenth century. Where is Hogarth?109

  NOTE: In July 1972, Diana Vreeland had become special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. The first major exhibit that she curated there was a celebration of couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga. Soon, the Institute's annual autumn opening would be the gala centerpiece of New York's social and fashion schedule.

  JOURNAL • march 29, 1973 The Balenciaga opening was the most elegant event Manhattan's experienced in years and all Diana Vreeland's doing. She rang up, late in the day (anxious about her Balenciaga photos, her “piece” [in Vogue]), unexpectedly revealing the truth about Truman and Robert MacBride. “How can he do that to a friend? Twenty years of friendship— sending that man to work with me—such a middle-class man—not anywhere in the limits of Truman's world—so dull—the father of five children—and Truman taking him away—in love with him!”

  How others, thinking you must know, because of your social ramifications, tell you what you have been (idly) curious to know, how they fill in your gaps.

  APRIL 10, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • paris

  We went to see Joan Crawford, in person at Town Hall. Her film clips were monotonous (not near as fascinating as Bette Davis's), but she was very homey, very funny, and looked remarkable—very cultivated in a discreet, pretty, black dress—pale, neatly piled blond hair—making no bones about age—talking salty. Her humor always comes out of her strong, realistic view of life. She said, “I worked for Joan Crawford for years; now Joan Crawford is working for me and Pepsi-Cola.” The jammed house pelted her with tawny roses. She picked up each and every one and trotted along the apron of the stage, shaking hands and beaming and tearing up. It was like a Jewish wedding. We couldn't help but admire this extraordinary creation: “I was born in front of a camera. Hollywood invented me. All I was—all I have—comes from Hollywood.”

  JOURNAL • April 15, 1973 • boston I must write down my rules of conduct between two people who have lived together for years. A basis: Never say anything recriminatory—never. Recriminations are best left unsaid, like unopened letters.

  APRIL 23, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY I must now grow a swift skin against the sadisms of Alex [Liberman]. He is as monstrous as I knew instinctively he would be. Curious to feel used-up in these few months, but from this moment I reassume the shell that helped me until I fell ill last week. I need to make this money, and I will, but I must not be sucked into the making of it. Alex is hard, hollow, cold, shrewd, and the enemy. I must not forget this—not for one moment. My anguish is that I cannot see easily. If I could be sure that my eyes would function as they did, I would have this operation during the week Alex is on the seas (on or about June 15). But for the time, now, I must put on my armor again.

  NOTE: At this time an ophthalmologist told Leo that the easiest color on troubled eyes was purple. Leo promptly began writing everything in that color and brought all hues of purple into his wardrobe and decoration. The color's royal ass
ociations—and its eccentricity—added to his pleasure in it.

  JOURNAL • April 27, 1973 Anita's eightieth yesterday. Ruth Dubonnet invited us to a party at which we knew no one actually, save our date, Anita, and she knew no one.110 They seemed some horsey set. Anita told us about the time she and Paulette Goddard were in a railroad station somewhere, and they wanted to call someone up: “Paulette was trying to find a nickel in her purse— that is what it cost in those days,” ruefully said A.L., “and this old bum just stood there gaping at Paulette. Finally he took out a nickel and offered it to her—and she took it! I said, as we went away, ‘You shouldn't have taken that poor man's nickel, Paulette!' And she said, ‘But that's all he had.' Paulette's gotten more loot than anyone I've known. And you know how? Positive thinking—not Norman Vincent Peale's kind—but her kind.”111

  APRIL 29, 1973 I never worry about the percentage of feminine in me, the percentage of masculine. I am grateful for whatever percentages I have and try to use these. I am watchful only in outward manifestations. I am protective of the woman in me, and don't permit her to show in my walk or in my hand movements or in my voice—because she is vulnerable in our world. Less than she was several years ago—but still I must be vigilant and try to keep her within myself, where she nourishes me—imbuing my masculinity with all sorts of wisdoms.

  APRIL 30, 1973 Mina called—Lincoln's gone around the bend again. This means brilliance unbelievable, so no one believes him bonkers—save the few who really know the signs and how dangerous he is to self and others.

  MAY 1, 1973 Jean Stafford on the blower—I can never decide whether she is drunk: “My father loved Job best. Whenever he was really down, he read Job and roared with laughter and slapped his thighs and shouted: ‘Give it to him again, God! There goes God giving him another boil!' So when I met Cal Lowell, in Boulder when he was in the army, and he said, ‘Don't you think Milton is the funniest poet in the English language?' I knew I had to marry Cal Lowell.” Her two blue beacon eyes beam. Her talk is metered with cackles and shouts of laughter, and afloat on tides of topless waves and troughs of gutturals.

  MAY 11, 1973 Alex said, “Bob Hughes [art critic for Time] was writing a piece on me, and he said: ‘He is a Fabergé box, which you open and find Boris Godunov inside.' “ That sums Alex up—to that stone wall—but leap over the wall and you find deep morasses and swamps in which even more bizarre monsters flourish more wildly than ever Boris Godunov did in that Fabergé box.

  The Women at [Playbill Spelvin] lunch.112 The little-girl attentiveness—no, the blond-cat attentiveness of Alexis [Smith]; the prettiness and deep quiet voice of Rhonda Fleming—a surprise—such pretty, pale autumn coloring; Myrna Loy (Morgan le Fay) and her quiet humor. “We never did know Asta. He was a professional dog. A nice dog, but he did his job [in The Thin Man] the way his master told him and didn't pay any attention to us….” So a myth drifts away. I told Puss and he was sad.

  MAY 30, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO W. H. AUDEN • pölten, bei neulengbach, austria

  I became features editor of Vogue last January, and I've been longing to publish you in these pages. I started a department here titled “On My Mind.” These are short pieces, from 500 to 600 words, and they can be about anything at all—anything you feel deeply about or anything you feel nostalgic about. Rebecca West wrote about the Virginia Woolf and [travel writer] Rose Macaulay she knew but did not quite find in recent lives of these ladies. Anthony Burgess wrote about how he cannot cash a check in New York despite the fact that his name is on theater marquees. Anne Fremantle wrote on dowries: how girls must be given them. Graham Greene wrote about the virtue of disloyalty. Jean Stafford wrote about the horror of being visited in the hospital. I am also trying to publish verse. Do, please, keep me in mind for that.

  And I have been publishing fiction: E. M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, the Flaubert Egyptian Journal, and coming out in a month or so will be a piece by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Also, fiction by Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Willa Cather—I found an unpublished manuscript! I am publishing a piece on bird-watching by John McPhee and a piece on flower-watching by May Sarton. Would you want to do anything about music-listening, or even more specifically, Mozart-listening?113

  JOURNAL • JUNE 1, 1973 Jane Bowles dead in this morning's Times (on May 4, in M àlaga). It was in 1943 that I wrote my review of [her novel] Two Serious Ladies for Irita [van Doren], and that was the stone upon which I stood to enter the carriage that has carried me to this far place, thirty years later. Jane—loving and lost—even then, long ago, in those early moments of her glory.

  AN IMBS EVENING, 1943 We are packed together around Bravig and Valeska's dining table, an outsize, white-painted, curlicue cast-iron, glass-topped garden table. Here were the remnants of the Imbs's Paris life now intermingled with Americans, mostly new, save known at times in translation or by reputation, to both the refugee American expatriates and native Europeans. We were in a reverse Henry James situation: Europeans being Americanized. Valeska was a superb cook, the kind who even with wartime restrictions set a bountiful table.

  Mary Reynolds (Duchamp's friend, who had worked in the French Underground [until summer 1942] and walked her way to safety),114 Nicolas Calas,115 Brion Gysin, Janet Flanner, Virgil Thomson, Maurice Grosser,116 Richard, and I were at the dessert (mousse au chocolat, new to some of us and always clamored for), when the door to the apartment was abruptly flung open. Two people almost ran into the room. He was tallish, seemed to be brushed by the reflection of a jumping flame, there was an artful dishevelment about him, an air of danger. I have felt this danger in an intricately incised eighteenth-century sword blade. Admire but do not touch! She advanced, hitching herself along quickly. She was dark, crop-headed curly, huge-eyed—later I saw the fun and compassion in their dark depths. She was steadfastly awry. She was very young and very old: Precocious children are like that.

  “Jane! Paul!” Everyone was excited. Paul Bowles I knew as a composer, and I had heard, years before, when I was casting Behind Red Lights, from Florence Auer (who came to audition for Madam of the Whorehouse) about her little niece, Janey. Jane wedged herself beside me. She spooned some of my mousse into her widely grinning mouth. She pulled out of a bag a book. She waved it. “I just got it!” Pandemonium! The next morning I called Irita van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review and asked, “May I please review Two Serious Ladies for you?”117 (1993)

  JOURNAL • june 8, 1973 Josephine Baker opened at Carnegie Hall. I have never seen as many black women in white-blond curly wigs—really platinum blond. Josephine Baker, at around sixty-eight, looks forty. H er figure, completely revealed in a body stocking (flowers here and there in sequins, the color of her skin), is slender to emaciation. “I'm so hungry,” she murmured, patting her razor-thin thigh, as she moved into the footlights, four feet and more of orange-red ostrich blooms on her head, like an imperial Russian escaping across the wintered steppes—fleeing from the last imperial ball before the Bolshevik hordes! Singers in the aisles like from My Fair Lady. The last of Carlo's Nigger Heaven was in Carnegie Hall that night.118 Diana Vreeland about Josephine Baker: “She was my you-th….” How wrong Andy Warhol is when he thinks Josephine Baker and Marlene are the same thing.

  JUNE 11, 1973 Bill Inge dead by carbon monoxide—after trying at an earlier time, having committed himself, and having signed himself out. His deep depression—long, long depression—took him into his garage, into his car, and so out of this world. He had been walking toward this death for years. I am saddened. A small hand momentarily blots out the huge sun…. And I sit upon my tidy, summer bed and scribble … scribble….

  Today's [Vogue photo] sitting with Carol Channing: “You are the only one who saw through that fat—saw me,” she said. She was fat, frightened, and funny when I first saw her, but she knew what she wanted—to be thought beautiful (or to think herself beautiful) and to be a star. She is the latter and she believes the former. “Everything,” she said, “
must come from the character. You must believe in her and then you are free. Nothing can happen to you—only to her.”

  JUNE 17, 1973 • WESTHAMPTON, NEW YORK A drear morning, following on a Sag Harbor graveyard picnic in a vast downpour. I felt that those lost at sea, done in by the “behemoths of the deep” (from an inscription on a monument there) were one with us, as we crouched over the excellent tarragon chicken, the brioche, the good butter, and bread-and-butter pickle. Charlie [Addams, the cartoonist] was a lamb—which girlish expression suits precisely his behavior. This six-foot-one dark-complected sixty-one-year-old from Westfield, New Jersey, is so essentially American—with his voice sometimes going very Fred Allen,119 his look of having been carved from good American oak, of having been weathered by time and across-continent peering, the preoccupation with horror (death) and his laughter in it. The mischief in him. I con him into laughter if I throw what I say just a little askew—into the impossible-possible. His barefoot-boy charm. His sexiness—I feel this and women adore him. “Doesn't he look like John Wayne?” one asked in the graveyard. Now, this long-famous man who's given a certain kind of house his name (many know immediately what's meant by an “Addams house” or “perfect Charles Addams”) seems to want this story. I don't think that he has, in his time, been garlanded with public praises the way [cartoonist] Saul Steinberg has.120

  JUNE 23, 1973 • NEW YORK CITY I rang up Puss [in Barbados at the Mare-monts] and said, “I've been trying to put off ringing so as to have the anticipation all day, but I couldn't. I love you so much.” That is in my bones, in my being. If Bill [Inge] had someone he loved that way, or vice versa, would he have killed himself? I am haunted by Bill's death. My feeling of well-being, after talking to Richard—knowing that he was there in Augusta, and that Puss is there in Barbados, but will be here. Suddenly I don't feel lonely—just alone—which is different.