by Leo Lerman
We fell to talking about who was singing what where. Maria said that she had heard this and that, and she'd been asked to do this and that, but she said, “Why should I? I've done it all.” She walked us over every inch of that apartment proudly and displayed it to us. It was all very luxurious, and it was of the emptiness of waiting—all expecting gone, dead. There was only one photograph in her bedroom. It was Meneghini, on her mantelpiece. She said, “I never disliked Jackie, but I hate Lee. I hate her. I have a dream all the time. I dream about him, Onassis, all the time. I want to help him, but I can't.” Her voice had that twang in it, a metallic sheen—almost brassiness. When Maria felt something deeply her talking voice was more in the brass section of the orchestra than in the strings or the woodwinds.36
. . .
In the evening of the afternoon we spent with Maria, we went to be with Marlene. She lived in a sterile apartment block facing the Plaza Athenée. Before the door of her apartment opened, we heard, “I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm here!” The door was flung open, and she was indeed there, her arms flung about us hugging as only she could, putting everything, all of her strength, into her delight at seeing us. The foyer, the living room beyond, the kitchen back of us boiled with life, with the heady, almost palpable smell of feasting to come.
Marlene in constant motion—putting hats here, tugging chairs there, pushing us this way, pushing us that way, shouting, “Here, here, sit here….” We were almost immediately at table in the foyer, a table loaded with caviar and toast. She stood for a moment, arms akimbo. She was wrapped in a sort of smock tied around her waist. It came to just below her knees and she stood as so many thousands had seen her standing, her left foot jutting out, one arm on the left hip, the other arm waving in the air, sometimes brushing back her hair, which was helter-skelter all over her head.
She never stopped talking. The talk was in Marlene English and sometimes in Marlene French and sometimes in Marlene German. It was a fine mix, and every single syllable of it understandable. It was a constant, all-persuasive aria. It was about what we were to eat, what was happening to her family, what was happening to all sorts of friends, what was not happening that should be happening to everyone. “Could have all been different… Could have come out the right way … If only they'd listened. Nobody ever listens. Carole Lombard didn't listen!”37 And as she talked, she ran back and forth into the kitchen and out came more and more things to eat. “I've been cooking for hours for you. I know how you love to eat. Eat!” It was her special schnitzel dinner with those extraordinary fried potatoes so packed with onion—very German, endless green vegetables (“So wery good for you!”), and endless huge goblets of the best red wine—endless. It was salad after salad and at least three ripe cheeses with a different wine. And then came one of Marlene's great specialties, a sweet dessert omelette, all puffed up and oozing apricot jam. All powdery with sugar. We ate and we ate, and she never sat down, never ate a thing, and never stopped swigging Scotch from a bottle, which she thought she kept a secret from us in the kitchen. But the talk was very, very good.
Then we waddled into the living room, Gray collapsed into a chair, and I collapsed into a sofa. Marlene leaned against the piano. Then the aria went on, and this time it was about Marlene bereft of her theater, and how she would give anything to be back on the stage. “Not the movies! I never want to make a movie again! Never! But if only I could be on the stage again! Look, look, under this piano, look, everything is there. Everything is packed. All the rags are there ready to go, but nobody asks me. If only I could be on the stage again!” I sat there looking at this creature so radiant still, so battered, so desirous of being excavated….
At about two o'clock in the morning, when Gray and I were sitting stuffed with her feast, she nipped into the kitchen for her swig of Scotch, nipped out and up to a card table piled high with manuscripts, and grasping a thick sheaf, nipped back to the piano, propped herself, proclaimed, “I will read you what I have written of my book! My life! Don't expect any revelations—there ain't any. There won't be any. Not that kind of book!”
She had been at this book for years: Marlene's Life According to Marlene. I had read a sixty-page beginning years ago, one long night, in her suite atop the Dorchester, while she was dazzling mobs at the Café de Paris. “It's like Colette,” I had told Gray, “It's beautiful and so touching.” Now Marlene plunged in….
I fastened to each word the way a drowning man clings to a repeatedly tossed lifesaving rope. Where was the magic? Where was the atmosphere? Where were the Marlene words, her Berlin wit, her self-mockery and mockery of others, her… I fell asleep, my eyes seemingly shuttered in appreciation, my left leg flung over my right knee swinging metronomically. Gray knew that I was asleep. Marlene only knew the Marlene she was disinterring, chapter after chapter. I woke suddenly and cried out, “But, darling, how much you've done! That's all there is? No more—even a little more?”… Out in the still, dawn-cool Avenue Montaigne I said to Gray, “That wasn't the book I read years ago. How was what you heard?” Gray gave me a look. (1993)
JULY 19, 1977 • VENICE
TO RICHARD HUNTER • vassalboro, maine
What is this rich fat life which I am delighting in? Last evening I sat in the Palazzo Polignac with Peggy Guggenheim on the left (she is very ill, but mellowed by it) and Miss Curtis (the Palazzo Barbaro inheritor) to the right,38 midst a throng of folk at a party so Jamesian that time stopped. We are thick in the center of Venetian life. I don't know whether I see it or I see the novels I've read, but it is all there to be sorted out. We are being kidnapped to weekend near Vicenza and to take various meals (along with the rest of a house party) at some of the villas I know only from books and movies. This is a high life—and so corny.
During the Redentore, a bridge was flung up in one day—just the way I saw it described by Leonardo in his notebooks.39 Then the following night: the most glorious fireworks we have ever seen. Only in eighteenth-century engravings have I seen such. In the early hours after the Redentore fireworks, a terrifying storm over Venice—but so luridly beautiful—like gigantic boxes of violet fire bursting asunder. We trudge enormously and my leg feels better than it has in years. I think exercise is the great therapy. But we are fatter!
JULY 25, 1977 • VENICE
TO RICHARD HUNTER • augusta, maine
We had the most glorious weekend in a remarkable villa near Vicenza. It's owned by Evelyn Lambert, a woman I knew in Dallas years ago, and it is perfection, set in a large English park created by an Italian poet in the eighteenth century and added to in the early nineteenth. One part has a Louisiana bayou and a sequoia (the poet went to America circa 1770). The park has incredible vistas to the Dolomites and—set like precious stones—distant, needle-thin campaniles. The villa has two Veronese-inspired rooms: one is distinctly inspired by the Villa [Barbaro] Maser's frescoes. We were, it seems, “on the Contessa circuit.” We lunched high above Asolo in the Villa de Galero, owned by the Count de Lord Rinaldi. Oh Reezl—the exquisite life in these villas— much-loved beautiful objects and such careful, loving attention; enchanting pale green, pink, lavender, and yellow rooms; the most delicate plasterwork; birds, cartoucherie, mythological heads; small, jewel rooms—much more beautiful than the Longhi remains in the Ca' Rezzonico; the food and service delicious; white-gloved footmen, maids; real silver conch-shell washbasins in the bathroom—and with all this: “Our most beautiful things are hidden away” because of the crooks. An elegant world tottering on the precipice of catastrophe: Russia in 1917, the old South just before Sumter. But the cultivation of these people—centuries of it.
The party last night in [the Venetian] Palazzo Barbaro—just to be in those Henry James rooms, those Wings of the Dove chambers, to see a moon over the garden of the Palazzo Polignac opposite … The current Miss Curtis casually said, “I will be here for some days, if I do not go to Singapore—but maybe I stay for two weeks while they make the movie.” The Curtises have no money, so they are permitting a movie
company to film there. “Never again,” said Mrs. C in trailing, faintly patterned white silk.
The “taxis” in Venice are striking—so much hardship [getting around]—but the canal waters are still and at night deepest black. I think this purgatory— with great crowds being shipped off to various Heavens and Hells.
I sat next to Freya Stark at [an Evelyn Lambert] lunch—a hope realized!!!40
AUGUST 22, 1977 • NEW YORK CITY While [Herbert] Kasper, [his wife] Sandra, Puss, and I ate in the Raga [Indian restaurant], all of our bags were stolen from Sandra's borrowed station wagon, which stood in front. That manuscript and all of my European notes—the first draft for my hoped-for book—gone. Also: my far eyes, my near eyes; my second set of teeth; my best buttonhooks; my beautiful silver soap box; my Penelope brass box; my new Italian blue-striped shirt; my new London cashmere pullover; all of my office papers … so much. Puss lost his traveling beasts and his moonstone ring and his keys…. Is this, then, a fitting end for my book … the epilogue? I feel hit over the head. Oh—I lost the Christmas presents bought for Puss … lost… gone … not my optimism … but almost that too…. Six weeks in Europe with nothing stolen, nothing lost, but here in this jungle—the immediate, written-down facts lost— this stroke—I must start over now.
NOTE: In Venice, Leo had written a memoir that interwove daily experience with memories of his childhood. As he later said, it was “my life caught up in the envelope of a summer journey.” Leo soon made some notes recalling their visits with Callas and Dietrich (and dictated that story during the early nineties for his memoir), but he never re-created the rest. Traumatized, he did not resume keeping a regular journal until late the following spring.
JOURNAL-August 24, 1977 I put ads in the “Lost & Found” in the Times and News. This could lead to recovery of my notebook and it could also bring me danger—so many criminal minds. We're not allowed to say “stolen” or even “taken.” “Lost” is the word. Also: not allowed to say “reward” or “no questions asked.” That would be an accusation. Said Puss, “Everything for the criminal!”
SEPTEMBER 6, 1977 The twilight of Madame Stravinsky, who goes on an annual visit to Monsieur Stravinsky [in a Venetian cemetery]. Mean tongues say that she has her money secreted at his grave. The fact: Stravinsky is her money and her legend.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1977 Maria did something unexpected last night: She died.
NOTE: Leo did not write again about Callas for three months.
NOVEMBER 13, 1977 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • edinburgh
Do you remember a black woman, Alberta Hunter, who was a glorious blues singer in the Georgette Harvey days?41 Well—at eighty-three she has emerged from retirement and is jamming the Cookery (a University Place hug-bunny) nightly—twicely and thricely. She is astonishing. Years ago, there were at least a dozen more of such remarkable voices—rhythm and feeling and enunciation—all beating out their joy and despair and hard-bitten humor. Now she is the only one. She's not affected—as Josephine Baker and [calypso singer] Josephine Premice and even Ethel Waters were. She's solid and hearty and honest and full of wisdom.
JOURNAL • DECEMBER 9, 1977 Franco Zeffirelli about Maria dead: “So beautiful, so beautiful… like Traviata.” He told me how she died: She called out to Bruna [her maid] and told her to put her on the bed. Her last words: “Put me on the bed.”42 The butler and Bruna moved her. This made the blood clot move, and she was dead when she was placed on the bed. If she had not asked to be picked up from the floor and moved, she, possibly, would not have died. Franco and Maria were planning a Merry Widow and Coronation of Poppea for Rome, 1979 season. Franco said Maria had no culture, but “created it.”
JANUARY 9, 1978 The complaints about my job have taken the place formerly occupied by the complaints about the house [1453 Lexington]. I got us out of the house—at great emotional cost—but I cannot get us out of my job. The reasons are obvious.
This morning with Miss Piggy, Irving Penn, and Frank Oz. A most extraordinary session, during a great blizzard.43 Oz looks—thin, upper-framed spectacles, svelte, intelligent, soft-voiced, generous eared, and mustached. Oz sublimates his transvestitism in Miss Piggy, and Miss Piggy has taken over Oz—almost 75 percent. Oz: “She started on the show the first year. We never really planned. She was an extra pig character, kind of a nondescript pig. Then I had some time with her, and I began to see something in her. It was about a six-week process. The first thing that happened, she hit Kermit with a karate shot. She can't hold on to her appropriateness. She goes over the edge. She has this facade of femininity, which women are fighting against. Women feel the dimensionality behind all that. To me, Miss Piggy has been tremendously hurt in her life—a lot of swine, a lot of pigs, and a lot of butchers.” Question: Miss Piggy can't stand the fact that she's dependent on Frank Oz?
MISS PIGGY: “I'm not mean. Life is cruel. I just have to survive. We girls know this.”
GRAY: “Isn't it extraordinary how beautiful things become when they are isolated.”
MISS PIGGY: “Thank you. I know how to please a man…. Are you getting the eyes, Irving?”
PENN: “Yes. That's good.”
MISS PIGGY: “I know…. Don't you ever try to look prettier than me…. I know coy.”
She knows the whole gamut of expressions—human and inhuman. She's really a pig after your own heart.
FEBRUARY 22, 1978 Diane Keaton came to Penn for a [Vogue] cover-try in black-and-white. This could be a little revolution if realized. Atmosphere of studio: tentative, since Penn does not believe that a black-and-white cover could ever happen. Call midway in sitting from Alex: “Since she was so cooperative, couldn't we do a color cover after we finish the black-and-white?” Typical of him, an arrangement having been made, by letter—strict, taking over a year to manage. He sees no reason why this would be chicanery. Couldn't be done, anyway, because it took over two and one-half hours to make up D.K. for the black-and-white. She behaved wonderfully—the antithesis of Faye Dun-away. Diane Keaton is unexpectedly small, has enormous eyes, a Regency delicacy and willfulness—when made up, a great and grave curiosity. Her speech is common—or, rather, regional. She knows this. When I asked, “Wouldn't you ever play The Way of the World?” she said, “But could I handle the language?” When handed a slip of paper on which was written “You've just been nominated for the Academy Award [for Annie Hall],” she said, “Oh, I won't get it. Vanessa should have it [for Julia].” She thinks Vanessa is the “greatest” actress.
MARCH 6, 1978 The Elizabeth Taylor birthday party: supplicating figures on the pavement kneeling, begging to come in. The Studio 54 rings of Hell. Beardsley out of Moreau.44 The emptiness behind Elizabeth's beautiful staring eyes. Diana Vreeland on the floor gyrating and swaying and shaking. A red, green, gold, glittering blackness.
MAY 14, 1978 Yesterday morning's talk over the blower with Diana Trilling, and she vehement about and against Alfred Kazin and his [memoir] New York Jew (the title gives all). Diana says: “I can't write about this, and his book will be history. Nobody will know the truth. This book will become the truth. I can't tell how at a Partisan Review party—in the fifties, not the early sixties— I came up to Alfred and Lionel and heard Alfred say: ‘Why don't you get rid of that wife?' I can't say that the real truth—I know this must be the real truth—is that Alfred had deep homosexual feelings for Lionel. Anybody who reads the book should be able to feel that, but who will?” So she went on, unhysterically, with plateaus of laughter, scaling successfully whole ranges of emotions. The truth is that Alfred has no grace and has never even been able to recognize grace in others. He is the bulvon (such a good Yiddish word [for “oaf”]) of American letters.
Diana also told me that Lionel was attractive to both men and women—or that should be reversed. I do not think that Lionel was homosexual. He was intellectual, understanding, a gent, and an ardent friend—but that is inadequate. As an example of Lionel's charisma (I used that word) Diana told me the saga of
Mary McCarthy's Lionel pursuit. Mary, returning to Manhattan from several years of living with her false meringue of a husband, Bowden Broadwater, in Newport, felt that she had lost the New York intelligentsia world. She felt that she had to make a comeback.45 Lionel being the lion of that moment, she set out to capture him. (Even to draw that thorn Diana from his foot? Surely Mary thought of Diana as a thorn.) So Mary invited the Trillings to dine.
Looking about her flat, in the East Nineties, Mary decided that it was not a sufficiently splendid place in which to receive literary Royals, so she borrowed paintings from [art dealer] Valentine Dudensing, insuring them for this one gala evening. Then she telephoned her “girlfriends” (Sylvia Marlowe, et al.) to discuss the menu. She invited one guest—Virgil [Thomson]. Then, on the special evening she made one mistake. (“Oh,” Diana said, “you know how Lionel almost never knew what was on the walls of a room. He was interested in the people, not the things.”) Mary's mistake: She never addressed one word to Diana. Diana, meeting Virgil for the first time, became great chums with him, and Mary was never invited back. “Lionel wouldn't let her into the house,” says Diana. “He loathed her because she had been so rude to me.”46
The Greek Tycoon [film about Onassis]—a drear, not even funny. Only one moment: when Jacqueline Bisset (Jackie Onassis) tumblesaults in the ocean, and Anthony Quinn (Onassis) takes one delighted, cock-rising look at her widespread ass in its scarlet cloth. But who will know why this is amusing? Onassis adored asses. He loved to bugger. This is the “it” the Greeks had a word for. I knew so many involved—Maria, Onassis (met once), [his first wife] Tina Livanos, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill… but most of what I know came from Maria.
I finished Alfred's book. How curiously parallel our lives and how wonderfully different—the lives of two housepainters' sons. The difference wells from who my father married and who Alfred's father married.
