The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  I am crossing Madison Avenue with Eudora Welty, who has just lunched with me in the Carlyle. We are talking animatedly about some photographs she's taken of the circus, and about what she has written, and as we step into the gutter, for the traffic is stopped, Eudora clutches my arm. She is breathless, incredulous, a little girl opening a Christmas surprise: “Look!” she whispers. I look, but I do not see anything, and suddenly the lights change, the traffic rushes, and so does Eudora. She is gone, sprinting up the avenue after some invisible figure. Later that day I ring up the Algonquin. “Eudora, where in hell did you go?” She says, “I followed her!” I say, “Who in hell's name did you follow?” A silence. Eudora says, “Didn't you see her? Garbo!” I laugh. “Did you meet her? Did you talk to her? You would have scared the devil out of her!” Eudora says, “I followed her up Madison Avenue and she went into Jensen's and she looked at things and picked them up, but she didn't buy anything, and she went up the avenue and looked into most of the windows, and I looked at her and her reflection—didn't dare talk to her, and—oh—what a wonderful afternoon.”

  I am going up the Gunthers's stair, this is in the late evening after a Broadway opening. I am in my black tie and my old black suit. As I go up the stair, toward sounds of revelry, I see on the landing, where I know there is a sofa, two beautiful, very large, black satin evening shoes. The shoes are on legs that swing. I can only see the ankles, rather heavyish ankles, utilitarian ankles, but they swing in a girlish way, under endless minute ruffles of black lace. As I get higher, there are more and more ruffles of black lace. I get to the midriff where the black lace ends tightly and where a stalwart bodice rises to a face surrounded by Camille-like blondish ringlets. I see Miss Garbo, whose hands are folded neatly in her lap. As I get to the landing, I see that behind Miss Garbo is, posed impassively, disguised as a handmaiden, arms folded like Ftatateeta [Cleopatra's nurse], cloaked in a voluminous flux of beige, head to foot, Valentina…. As I stand there about to extend a hand, two girls rush by, clutching one another's hands, obviously Mäd-chen from some provincial German finishing school, giggling away. These girls drag me between them, rush me into a back parlor, and sit me down on a small sofa where three people could hardly sit. The girls are Marlene Dietrich and Vera Zorina. We sit there clutching one another, and I laugh. The girls look up, then I look up, and in the corner is a solid bank of backs in black evening suits, impenetrable men standing in a semicircle, and as one of them goes away the circle parts, and we can see clearly, in the corner, a young woman, a rather smoky blonde in a somewhat worn-seeming white evening dress. She is Grace Kelly. None of the men look at Dietrich, Zorina, or Garbo.

  I am lunching again in the old dining room of the Plaza. Suddenly a great quiet. All talk and clatter ceases and all eyes are looking at two women who walk swiftly, almost stealthily, between the tables. One has a great big hat clamped down over her face and a great big coat covering herself and a very determined stride. The other is Jane Gunther, who is very pretty. She does not even give me a glance, and I have known her since she was sixteen. They both go to the far end of the room. The room resumes its chatter-clatter. Suddenly, there is an enormous rush from the far end of the room, and Miss Garbo runs the full length of the room and is gone. Later in the day I ring up Jane, who says, “She didn't really like all that attention.” I say, “Well, if she didn't like all that attention, she certainly managed to get it, didn't she?” (1993)

  JOURNAL • december 11, 1976 • bethel, connecticut Having showered, breakfasted, gaped at the wooded vistas and the rolling hills and the windswept skies [at Mina's], having eaten them hungrily—oh—how I crave trees and skies and nature's own voices—winds, silences… I am so happy to have my eyes again. The fogs of these last years—are they vanishing? Will this help me to put the horrors of Liberman's Vogue in true proportion? I must alleviate them. I coped with this last operation—physical and mental pain. Surely I can cope with this. I must.

  DECEMBER 27, 1976 [Senator] Eugene McCarthy at a Christmas party: “I don't like Jimmy Carter; he uses too many adverbs. I didn't like McGovern; he used too many adjectives. And I don't like any of the senators; they're all fools.”

  JANUARY 2, 1977 Anita [Loos] says Vivien Leigh came to her just a few months before she died and said, “Anita, can't you think of a play for me? Can't you? They don't write plays for pretty women anymore.” Larry [Olivier] brought Vivien to see Anita when they first came to Hollywood and Vivien told Anita: “You know how I managed the press? I told them everything Larry and I did and in such four-letter words—four times an hour I told them—that they didn't dare print a word of it!”

  Stella Adler, when Ned Rorem22 told her that he had been introduced to her five times and she still did not recognize him: “To me all goyim look alike.” Stella was stopped by a man who said, “I knew your mother when you were born. I know her age then, so how can you be forty-five now?” Stella: “My mother had her age, and I had mine.”

  JANUARY 15, 1977 • WASHINGTON, D. c. Kay Graham and [political columnist] Joe Alsop's dinner for the Kissingers and Rockefellers in Kay's house, a coldish seeming (at least in the rooms I saw) largish house, set behind a circular drive—sheets of ice. I think this would all be more gemütlich in spring and summer. The dinner—a “family affair” for sixty or seventy. Many I. P. s (International People)—Rockefellers, Guinnesses, [William] Paley (she is too ill?), Harrimans, Agnellis—that chic—all in grand tenue—the hostess distrait in purple chiffon—and magazine guests as pawns. Evangeline [Bruce] in lion's mane hair and masses of gold coin;23 Marietta [Tree] always a bit bimbo; Mary Alsop in Alix Grès—masses of folds and pleats;24 [Mrs. Nelson] Happy Rockefeller in burgundy chiffon—and so much assurance everywhere. Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller talked to me about plane versus train travel. She hadn't been on a train in years, since “We have our planes,” but she is a kindly faced older woman, in discreet diamonds and well-brushed black velvet. I wish I knew where everyone's from and why they came. Sally Quinn knows, and there she was with her American-girl atmosphere—a real campus-date flavor—very hug-bunny.25 Also Meg Greenfield—small, smooth as a sea-smoothed pebble—in a harlequin-patterned and colored tight-skin dress.26 Kissinger very late-German-Empire and asking couldn't I persuade Nancy to stop smoking. “Only,” I said, “by appealing to her concern for others… telling her that it was bad for those around her.” “What a diplomat you are,” he said, laughing. Nancy in white shirt with deep neck ruffles and black full skirt and tossing fifties American-girl hair—always an immediate good-girl chum. It was a scattered evening with spot exchanges, “witty” speeches, family badinage, and everyone sure of everyone else—a sort of Whig establishment (Holland House in the late 1790s, early 1810s). Washington has, indeed, been taken by the South. So they have, dear Margaret Mitchell, won the war at last. Scarlett's day has come—but a little on the trashy side.

  MAY 10, 1977 • NEW YORK CITY The va-et-vient of our Liberman weekend [in Connecticut]. Marella Agnelli—the young girl still shining through the wear of time—something flowerlike in her. She said: “So we fly to the skiing and then the helicopter takes us to the yacht for the swimming—and from the ice to the warm sea—all in a few hours—horrible. I did it three times and I told Gianni, ‘Never again'—too boring.”27

  MAY 11, 1977 Joan Crawford is dead, the first of “those” ladies to go— Marlene, Garbo left. Marlene crippled, bitter in Paris; Greta Garbo wandering, and, when made to laugh, a luminous glimpse of her old self. But Joan Crawford made us all laugh. She never quite knew how much hilarity she gave, with her huger-than-life self, her belief in her Movie Queen infallibility. She never knew why, when Mitzi [Newhouse] introduced us at a gala years ago (a gala in which J.C. was one of the threesome who chaired [the Mayor's Committee for Free] Shakespeare, the antithesis of what she represented) why I laughed and laughed out of delight at my memory of what she had been to us. I roared, as I shook her strong hand, “Oh—you've given me so much pleasure….” and she took this as
her due, her eyes shining narcissistically, all glowing with self-pleasure. Her enormous eyes always semaphored a Morse code of good-humored mockery and “I know what pleasure is all about.” Light danced in her eyes. Early in her career she was a good actress and, of course, she was a beauty, who projected her self-knowledge of this. She also projected the vulnerability of a strange creature—always touching. And in her was a strong element of transvestitism: She was a model for female impersonators. Do not forget how she summarized her era—the twenties and thirties. She was one of the authentic Screen Stars in our world of movie make-believe.

  MAY 30, 1977 Yesterday, during lunch at the Cahans,28 Bill suddenly said, while talking about how tired he and Grace [Mirabella] were, “Goddard died at two a.m.” The shock was knife-jab sudden—a sharp slice of hot-cold unexpected pain from an unpremeditated knife. I suspect that he had been wondering how to tell us—but perhaps he told us this way because he can have no idea of the place Goddard and Brigitta had in our lives, in the earlier years of our life together.

  I came home, rang Brigitta—no answer—and no answer into the night. At ten, I suddenly knew that Brigitta must be at Felicia's. I rang, Lennie answered. (How curious if Goddard's death returns Lennie to Felicia.) He said that Brigitta was indeed there, in the bath. How extraordinary (and how only Proust could have anticipated this convolution)—the envy, even hatred of Goddard & Brigitta for Felicia & Lennie twists their relationship. Brigitta detested Felicia and raged about her because Felicia had usurped Brigitta's role, sailing on Lennie's reputation onto concert stages, delivering the [performance] works Brigitta had made her own…. That moment in Brigitta's room at Lenox Hill [hospital] when Felicia rang to tell her that she was doing Jeanne d'Arc au Bücher and to ask her advice on dress—and Brigitta's explosion of rage and hatred after she rang off.29 … Goddard sitting in the Columbia box, at Carnegie Hall, following the score Lennie was conducting—following it sardonically. (How Goddard envied Lennie's success as conductor and composer.) … Felicia saying to Goddard, in the Plaza dining room, while lunching: “God-dard—look—at—me!” because he had wandering eyes, and never could, until recently, content himself with being with the person he was with30… all of this… and the birthday dinners. Somehow we were inevitably involved—on both sides. The Liebersons were the enviers—no matter what they achieved—until recent years, when not only did the envy seem to diminish, but the competitiveness between Brigitta and Goddard seemed to cease. Did Brigitta's religion help? Or was this age?

  Brigitta rang me and was worn, quiet, affectionate. She said that the evening had been quiet, that he had gone to sleep at about midnight, that Peter [their son] had woken her at about one—all quiet, Goddard breathing quietly—then about 1:40 Goddard stopped breathing…. She hugged him and he started breathing again. At two he stopped breathing as she held his hand, and he was gone. “Peter opened the window, for the first time in weeks, and a great cold wind came up, roaring away in the night,” she said. Now here she was stopping with Felicia, and Lennie answering the telephone, and their lives even more deeply entwined…. Rain fell all night long, last night.

  The last thing Goddard said to me, a week ago, when I told him that I had seen his television show and how good it was, “When I wake up … if I wake up … they put me to sleep so much … we'll see one another….” He did not wake up, and will we see one another? That is the great adventure.

  JUNE 5, 1977 The end first: A deep, as deep as chasms in the sea, nightmare. I remember only my screaming, howling—a far-off monstrous noise—and Puss rushing into this room. “Thank you for rescuing me,” I told him, without even surfacing from this deep deep. Was it the result of suddenly suspecting a conspiracy of women—a conspiracy that they do not plan, but is part of the fabric of their being? At [interior designer] Melanie Kahane's to pay our “obligations,” I suddenly, looking about at table, realized that we are now surrounded by widows. Why? Why do women survive their men? At Goddard's memorial, we sat with Diana [Trilling]—a widow, Sylvia Marlowe—a widow, Marion Field, Sylvia Lyons—widows. Did I scream in the night because I felt hunted? (Image here: Jerry Robbins's The Cage.) I see Eileen Maremont, a widow to be.31 Will Tatiana survive Alex? In homosexual relationships which partner survives? Momma survives—but here I pause. Poppa slept his life away.

  The little circle of friends quite obliterated as a circle in the larger manifestation of Goddard's “formal” obsequies in the Beth El chapel of Temple Emanu-El. Some 350 invited “guests”—all chosen by Brigitta, who had started these arrangements a week before Goddard died. So Goddard had, at last, the party he had always wanted. Diana Trilling said, on the blower, “Truman had his party while alive, but Goddard had to die to have his.” The composition of both parties was similar—indeed overlapping—but this time we sat with Diana, who had asked us to sit with her. When I settled in, Diana whispered, “Lillian [Hellman]—five rows directly in front of me …” Indeed, the blondined head beneath a fierce hat was there. Row on row: Mrs. Onassis, Princess Lee [Radziwill], Charlie Addams, the Richard Rodgers (all three), Mai-mai [Sze] and Irene [Sharaff], the little circle, everyone … and all quite cold … not a party of genuine convives, but “guests.” This was the place to be at 10:45 a.m. on Friday morning, June 3. These were “party” people, on view to other “party” people. I felt that the lights would dim, the overture strike up, and the “piece”—a play with music, would get under way. A quartet filed in, the “speakers” came on—Lennie, Bill Schuman,32 [Walter] Cronkite, two temple men. One came to the lectern, opened his mouth, and out came a sure, sweet, simple song. I couldn't have been more surprised…. Then followed the usual tributes (oh, yes—Betty [Comden] was the only woman onstage, a visibly nervous Betty—so unsure). The acoustics—awful. The atmosphere not hottened up even by Betty's sincerity, Lennie's Hebrew sallies… nothing dispelled the chill. Then we stood, endlessly, in line to kiss the widow, who stood pale, exhausted, and determined to do her duty, as Mrs. O had done.

  The next morning I rang Brigitta, and Felicia's housekeeper told me that she had gone to Europe. When I told Puss, he said, “She's swimming to the next raft.” And that is what she's done all of her life: All survivors do that.33

  JUNE 8, 1977 The Anita Bryant “outcry”: When I read that she “even danced a little jig,” I saw Hitler dancing his little jigs of “victory.”34 This country is full of latent and dramatized hysteria. Jews, blacks, Indians no longer can be kicked about to release these hysterias, so homosexuals are “fair game.” What if we stopped paying income taxes: no civil rights, no income-tax payments?

  JUNE 10, 1977 Irving Penn photographed me for an hour today. It was intercourse on the highest level of being. He nourishes, unlike Dick Avedon, who consumes, who psychs himself. Irving brings out the finest in his subject. This was like a two-man meditation.

  NOTE: In 1977, Leo and Gray traveled abroad for the first time in two years. The summer was particularly memorable. They attended a gala weekend party, at the end of June, to mark the closing and death-duty sale of Crathorne Hall, the largest country house built in Edwardian England. Then from London they went to Paris, where they stayed until the Bastille Day holiday, visiting both Callas and Dietrich on July 6. Zurich, then Venice followed, with some days in the Veneto at the palatial villa of Evelyn Lambert. Through Lambert, and their friend the glass designer Charles Lin Tissot, a new level of Venetian society now opened to Leo. For the next ten years, each summer brought an extended trip to Europe, always including three to four weeks in Venice and its environs. Although these stays seldom had a specific business purpose, they often paid dividends in story ideas, leads, or connections, and Condé Nast reimbursed Leo's expenses.

  A PERSPECTIVE OF SACRED MONSTERS35 July in Paris. We all know that everyone is gone, but this July Maria was there in her apartment and Marlene was there in her apartment.

  In an afternoon, Gray and I went to spend some hours with Maria. We went into her very proper residence in the Avenue Georges Mend
el, and her very proper servant let us into a very large apartment full of things and emptiness. It was one of the least occupied places I have ever been.

  Maria came in. She was in an ample, bottle-green dressing gown. Her hair sleek, her eyes large and questioning. Her smile loving. She was fragile— something was missing. I think it was her spirit. I could no longer hear the sound of applause. From the first moment I had seen Maria, all those long years before in Venice, I had always heard the sound of applause. She settled into her sofa. We settled down beside her. She took out her eye drops and dashed them into her eyes. Maria smiled at us, and, for a moment, she was the old Maria. This was the wide, uninhibited, trusting smile of a very young girl. It was the Maria smile that had always managed to obliterate any anguish, any uncertainty, any intuition that all was not radiant, in which she could, for at least some moments soar beyond time. “Tell me all about everything,” she said.