by Leo Lerman
Irony as a vertebra in the Jewish skeleton. A sense of irony has sustained Jews throughout their entire history?
MAY 17, 1978 Teatime with Vera Stravinsky (sans tea). This ninety-year-old woman seems, in a white, simple, curiously flowing, “short” dress, a girl. Her incredibly beautiful smile brimming with a sad, but triumphant (too big a word) wisdom. She has been kind to time. Her apartment is again a playhouse. She has the innocence of wisdom—or has she the reverse?
MAY 28, 1978 • WESTON, CONNECTICUT In my bed in Mina's “new” house. Here, in Weston, Mina sits on four or five acres, undeniably suburban, with a privacy that is suburban in all of America, and now even in England or France. The privacy of a little land—roadways visible and audible through gaps in “plantings,” neighbors' voices heard, off-island sounds polluting the privacy. This is a step, not even giant, into the ordinary. Bethel was hundreds of acres— real privacy. Ashfield [Chapelbrook Farm] was of an even grander privacy. How did Mina get here? By a mixture of goodness and fantasy. The goodness: largesse to friends, pensioners, “artists.” The fantasy: born rich, raised richer, married rich, she lived rich. “Oh,” she says now, wryly, “I do miss being rich….” Then: “But I have enough….” And indeed she does, at this moment a sufficiency to keep this very pretty house, a tumble of in-and-out helpers, and, at last, the kind of success for which she longed: [her memoir] Other People's Letters, the result of her true being, her real character—this a mixture of retailing blood, young American woman, dollar-princess dreams, hard work, and romantic imagination. Her face and person altered by age (eighty-two), her circumstances reduced from intense privacy to near-privacy, from elegance to prettiness—but she always craved acknowledgment, at least from her peers, seeing her peers as very few.
Goosey and Fido lunched and visited. He sitting folded into his huge self on the sofa next to Mina, Fido straight up on a stiff chair. Both looked like peasant creatures plainly dressed to go to town. They had the atmosphere of those hideous people badly carved from wood—browns, greens, urine colors. After they left, Mina said: “Well, the three of us sitting there certainly looked like three normal people!” She said this in faint exasperation, a sort of depressed voice—Lincoln having been put away for violence, Fido having been put away for paranoia. (She thought Lincoln and [her brother] Paul Cadmus were trying to kill her—were they? I doubt it.) Now Fido is on nine pills a day. So, one footnote to the decline and fall.
Here is another: Sometime in this past week, Depy [Messinesi, Vogue travel editor] told me that she'd received a telephone call from Kitty Miller, who is in Roosevelt Hospital, eleventh floor, corner room, the biggest, but still… “Kitty asked me to stop in and dine with her. I went. The door was opened by her butler. Inside, Kitty sat in her own linens, Bache pictures on the walls, her maid and a footman unloading hampers full of her own beautiful table linens, silver, china, exquisite, for each of five courses, a superb meal cooked by her own chef. When this was finished, Kitty said, ‘Well, now, Depy, run along home. You've seen how the rich do it.'”47
I think of Bea Lillie (now in an institution) leaning down to say an ostensible “good night” at one of the Millers' New Year's parties and suddenly biting Kitty (who was always a beast) on her naked shoulder, then twinkling and clattering with laughter, swiftly exiting—while Kitty fainted.
How different writing is from thinking, even from planning what one is to write. This is a small microcosm of each enormous life…. I should be able to say this succinctly. I balloon with words. I grow lardy with words. I am fat— hideously fat—with words.
MAY 29, 1978 Mina told me last night about Dot Léger's courage. Dot was told, in 1967, that [her husband] Alexi was mortally cancerous. She immediately swore the doctor to secrecy, never told a soul (“You know what a tyrant he was,” said Mina. “He insisted on seeing every letter that came into that house!”), and for eight years she pretended [to him] that he suffered only from the ills of aging. Dot said that he'd changed completely in those years. From being fanatically private, wanting no réclame, he hungered for it—tributes, celebrations of his importance. (Mina: “What if I'd married him!”) Now, an English scholar researching Alexi has discovered what Dot, Mina, and I knew: Alexi made up letters, changed those he'd written years ago, making the ones from China prescient of future politics. He invented the letters to Mina, now published in the Pléiade edition. Mina has the real letters here and will leave them to the Morgan Library. Alexi had a hypnotic charm, the charm of an authentic tale-teller. Blixen had it. They mesmerized you. You believed anything that came from their lips. Being with them was being in a dragon's cave, Moreau mysterious—jewels, loot, mysteries, unfathomable, sinister but addictive, voluptuous, scary the way rooms in gaslight were.
I realize how shadows have changed. In electric-lighted rooms they have lost their richness, their possibilities of beauty and terror. Robert Louis Stevenson would not recognize today's interior shadows, nor would Peter Pan. Peter Pan has almost literally lost his shadow.
JUNE 17, 1978 • NEW YORK CITY Felicia's death [yesterday]—I had a dream at five a.m.: Me shaving (improbable), a door opened, and I saw Felicia in a beautiful dress, swathed, pseudo-Grecian in striated grays. Then I learned later that morning she had died at about the time of my dream. Did she visit on the way?
Yesterday, we went to the Dakota to visit Lennie and the children. Glorious flowers, food, and many chums, the whole apartment reeking of Felicia. It is hers. She haunts it—as she must.48 Lennie distraught. The chums wearing cheerfulness like fancy dress. Mindy [Wager] hysterical, that is, more hysterical than usual. When Marit [Gentele] was told that “it had been for the best,” she asked sharply, “What is the second best?”49 Brigitta, in a foulard—I saw that with her from-the-land face, her hard-worked face, which now has a certain aspect of nobility and ballet-girl fused, she could play Ouspenskaya roles.
The irony: Felicia and Goddard gone; Brigitta and Lennie left.
JUNE 26, 1978 • LONDON Reading The Awkward Age and bewitched by Henry James's penetration, his indirection, in which always is a direction—like peering for signposts in a dense, high-summer garden, signposts almost totally obliterated by the thickset boskage. I read it with Cortès excitement at the inference, the submerged evil, the wit and social observation, the worldliness, the profound Puritan sense of frivolity. The most Edwardian of novels.
JUNE 27, 1978 To Penelope [Reed]'s enchanting garden. There is always the first moment of relief that time has not ravaged excessively. Such a beautiful “wild” garden, all blue and silvery green, sudden spurts of golden-flower yellow, and white roses. Penelope, unadorned. Her mole job for [the photo agency] Blau allows her to see the world through the photographs that pour in: “I pass on the porn and the violence.” This little girl, who, on her seventh birthday, said the only thing she wanted was to go to the Embassy Club, where her mother had danced with the Prince of Wales. So Freda took her child, and when Penelope saw the daytime desolation she sat down on the floor and wept bitter tears of disappointment.
JUNE 30, 1978 Evita was a surprise: words banal, music Jesus Christ Superstar in form and sometimes content, but everything in the performance redeemed by Hal [Prince]'s superb, flawless direction. Tremendously agitprop, very thirties and WPA and Living Newspaper50 and Theatre Guild, it could have been found in Theatre Arts [magazine] of that day, but so remarkable now. Hal again the best Broadway musical director. The musical is more about showbiz than politics—but all stops out. The Evita a very ordinary girl [Elaine Paige], but ordinariness is what's wanted.
JULY 3, 1978 Diana Vreeland in the [hotel] dining-room door with Bianca Jagger and child. Diana intact: Her voice is ripe, not metallic, a little aged, but as in fine wood: “I've had a setback this morning…. Call me, darling, tomorrow morning.” The child sweetly polite. Bianca Jagger, insolent or uninterested, very much Old Hollywood's idea of a half-caste woman transformed into a “lady,” but the original, marketplace Central American showing through the
good dress, refined shoes, placed hair, and makeup.
JULY 6, 1978 • PARIS Daniel Salem [director of Condé Nast in Europe]: “But you always know that we want you here. You can have anything you want.” But I cannot make a move because of parents—Puss's and mine.
JULY 7, 1978 Gray: “It's like an endurance test—every day.” The flight too brief to eat the cold lunch, which was Pussy's pieces [scraps] of charcuterie, with huge, whiskered strawberries, a blue-tinfoiled wedge of Camembert-chalk, and champagne as bitter as tears of departure. And there, on the curb at the Ritz, was Robert [Davison], all delight and “Thank God you're here!” His morale has been low. We are in the [Ritz] hotel's rue Cambon mansard, somewhere in Chanel's nest. The bedroom—with its brass beds; deep embrasure of oeil-de-boeufs [circular windows]; ivory-painted, typically Ritz furniture; a pink, shiny bathroom—all breathes “illicit.” This whole “apartment” is more in someone's imagination than in any other region of reality. We love it. It would be bliss and passion in winter. It is, of course, bliss and (will be) passion now. Very secretly.
JULY 8, 1978 To Paloma Picasso's flat, next to the American Church, high up, vast, and very much fin-de-siècle.51 Grand vistas of Paris from a little terrace, the Seine nearby, stillness and amplitude of haute bourgeoisie wealth. Rollicking, skidding, never still, sausage-fat Martha, a nine-month-old English bull. And Paloma herself: slight, elegant—enormous dark eyes, mellow skin, generous reddish lips, marvelous slender, strong worker hands—very elegant, a great lady in the making, but most of her already there—wit, observation, purposeful in a relaxed way. She showed us all her costume sketches for Success, explaining the entire “spectacle” as she showed, all with humor and detail.52 The sketches owe much to her early copying of funny papers. Her voice is quiet always, sedimented with laughter, always reasonable, deep—like good, very heavy silk, this voice, darkish and rich. High up in her workroom, Picasso's little swift watercolor of her. Then another, in the bedroom—all distinctly his, distinctly loving.
Nicole [Stéphane] and Susan Sontag and David [Rieff, Sontag's son, a writer] and we had dinner in the most exquisite restaurant dining room I have ever seen, at Beauvilliers. The tan lacquer ceiling and the “horsehair” black walls; the flowers set about in tremendously full vases on the floors—paling purple heath, pink peonies, yellow roses. [Restaurateur] Édouard Carlier is a genius.
JULY 9, 1978 The presentation at Beauvilliers: ice cream (rhubarb, cinnamon) brought in tight silver cylinders, the lids removed at table and the ice cream spooned into the plates; the sugar—seven varieties, each in its small, doily-lined basket, all on a silver tray, a bouquet of sugars. My dish of sweetbreads (which I usually abhor) a miracle of seasoning, cooked (but how?) delicately, five different veggies, each primeur, two cheeses, one the inevitable chèvre, a dazzling chilled light red wine. The tables, each individual, scattered, very at-home, but the flowers as glorious as the cuisine. Vuillard could have created this exquisite room (there are two others). In the color-geometrical loo the sconces are pappagallos [urinals]. The proprietor is rotund, a linking of broad ovals—head, body, even legs—has the sure smile of success and the ability to overthrow any preconceived notions of what one wishes to eat, substituting his ideas of what one should eat in his restaurant. Comfort, luxe, and glorious gastronomie served with perfect detail (at least five breads) and discretion. At dinner Susan suddenly announced that Roger [Straus, the publisher] and she found Puss “sexually attractive.” And Nicole said: “It was very hard to be lesbienne in the fifties.”
JULY 20, 1978 • VENICE One morning at about four, the [Gritti's concierge] desk had a call from Valentina [Schlee]: Someone must come up immediately. Someone did, to find her cutting up her sheets: “I will do this,” she told him, “until you give me pure linen … pure.” How patient people here are with Valentina. Every night she goes to say good night to San Marco. The gondoliers kiss her hand.
JULY 21, 1978 So here is Little T in the newspaper again: drunk, pills, not able to finish a television appearance, saying he “would probably end up killing himself accidentally.” Adding, “nothing has ever jelled” in his life. What does he really mean? What is this about? The result of having tried for something he could not achieve? His gift was anecdotal, atmospheres, nuances of terror and mystification. He was a remarkable storyteller with a sensitive heart. He was (is, I believe still) an intuitive. The extent was journalism, which made him believe (In Cold Blood) that he was a “great” writer, one of the greatest. In his genre (and it was always genre fiction or reporting), he was very good, sometimes first-rate (“Children on Their Birthdays,” “Christmas Memory”), but to become this American Proust—I think impossible for him. He has broken himself upon this wheel. He has come undone. And only yesterday John Malcolm [Brinnin] asked me, as we sat in a trattoria on the [island of] Murano, if I thought that T would kill himself53 Is this clipping then the answer? T believed the legend that he made, which the American way of publicity aggrandized. Publicity—media—identical. In a sense, he is Marilyn Monroe. The Strasbergs [Actors Studio] tried to educate her into something she could not be. T could be the Marilyn Monroe of literature.
JULY 29, 1978 • THE VENETO For a long time, I was unable to find a key, peculiarly my own, to my past. I was frustrated by Proust's madeleine, by Virginia Woolf's river of time. But now, here in the Palladian villas of the Veneto, here in Villa Lambert, remote in place and time from the Manhattan thick Jewish soup in which I was born, here in Venice, in its palazzos, on the Gritti's terraces, in its campos and calles and Jewish quarter, I have found my key—not in an odor, nor a texture, but in voices and gestures, in the angle of a cheekbone, the slant of an eye, the curve of a smile. Here, in beings who never knew the lost creatures of my past, the dead, the disappeared, are echoes that reverberate into being my long-lost life. Echoes, then, are the key.
AUGUST 1, 1978 • NICE Hotel Negresco, overlooking the gray [Mediterranean], tinged with a blur of blue, a memory of blue. The flags, the stone balustrade, wind-frayed palms, the plage-attired summer people—all intensely Dufy. Dufy conditions the eye here, since I saw him before Matisse. Matisse sees with an agile, swift humor, a tinge of malice in his sensuality; Dufy views with a fat sensuality, a passion. The difference: Matisse is intellectual; Dufy is elemental.
This hotel with its costumed retainers looks like a misplaced Mississippi steamboat. The enormous oval hall with its huge copies of portraits of Louis Quatorze luminaries and the bust of Louis as one enters: What would Saint-Simon have written about it all?54 The imitation of Belle Epoque in the grill, with the waitresses done up as a fin-de-siècle notion of bucolic eighteenth century. The vitrines, with full-sized eighteenth-century-attired [mannequin] pages proffering the vend of Givenchy's boutique. The Vasarely-inspired [Op art] carpeting of the endless corridors. But the “help” is good-humored. We are spoiled by the petting of the Gritti and chums in the Veneto. That was the real world. This is the unreal real world—everything rooted in the material.
SEPTEMBER 23, 1978 • NEW YORK CITY Felicia Bernstein's memorial [on September 18]—Maria's voice as Felicia acted “Vissi d'arte,” that was the eerie moment.55
In Mexico, Felicia had sparkled, and Lennie had never seen her like that. She went to a doctor to be sure that she got pregnant. “I'm gonna keep him down there until I get pregnant.”
Lennie married Felicia because he needed a wife when he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic; Felicia married him on the rebound after the death of Richard Hart, an actor ([the play] Dark of the Moon) whom she had loved. Their marriage was a business arrangement: He got the Philharmonic; she got his charge plate. But with all the money and the analysis, she couldn't handle it. The age when everything unfolds.
JANUARY 5, 1979 An important factor in the greatness of Middlemarch is that we have no assurance of happy endings. We do not know that Dorothea will marry Ladislaw, that Lydgate will emerge triumphantly from his troubles. So Middlemarch is life itself, the world a
s we live it—knowing no “end” to any life—not even the condemned life. Indeed, knowing that we are, each of us, condemned or, depending on religious or superstitious belief, elevated ultimately into the great light after life. I almost put the last in quotation marks.
MARCH 17, 1979 Maria wanted to be a movie star ([via Twentieth Century-Fox's head] Spyros Skouras), an international society star (Onassis), even though she knew that what she had done on the opera stage was forever. She had gone as far as possible with it. Floria Tosca claimed that she lived for art and love. This sums up Maria—with one difference: Maria lived for art; she died for love.
Was she ever any other than Maria Callas? No. Not onstage or in life apart from the stage. Yet, upon the armature of her self, she layered the imaginary substance until you saw these victims of operatic passion, realized fully in all of their tragic being, while perceptible within them was, visibly, Maria Callas herself. In no wise did this Maria diminish the creatures of her creation, nor did they diminish her, since they were, while in her being, their own alive beings, as corporeal to the eye, to the ear, as she herself was. At no moment were we unaware of this tremendous woman or of those other, more enduring creatures to whose reality she gave herself. This was like looking into an enfilade of facing looking glasses and seeing there an infinity of Marias, Normas, Violettas, Medeas, Toscas—seeing an eternity of past anguished, ecstatic women, until in the remotest glass, the future, Maria and her beauty became a single incandescence.
APRIL 11, 1979 Tebaldi: “I don't know about any feud. There's room for all sorts of singers in opera.” Then she smiled sweetly.
