The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  15. Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) had been Bazaar's fashion photographer for eight years before Avedon came to the magazine in 1944. He immediately became editor Carmel Snow's favorite, but Dahl-Wolfe stayed until 1958, often doing Bazaar's covers. She regarded Avedon as a usurper, not as an apprentice.

  16. The British impresario of revues C. B. Cochran (1872-1951) had Tilly Losch choreograph and dance numbers in his show Wake Up and Sing (1928). She also starred in Balan-chine's Les Ballets 1933.

  17. Dietrich had again collapsed, this time with a broken femur at a performance in Sydney, Australia. The leg would be put into traction for some four months.

  18. Capote's “La Côte Basque” appeared in the November 1975 Esquire. The thinly fictionalized society figures in his story were humiliated and outraged by it. Ann Woodward, whose real-life shotgunning of her blueblood husband had been recycled by Capote, committed suicide. Worse for the author, many society friends (including his idol, Babe Paley) cut him off afterward.

  19. Miss Elizabeth Mapp is a small-town busybody in E. F. Benson's Lucia novels.

  20. Francis A. Robinson (1910-80), assistant manager (1952-76) of the Metropolitan Opera, was writing a book on the company, as was its retired general manager Rudolf Bing.

  21. Graham was speaking to Nureyev, with whom she and Margot Fonteyn were being photographed in furs for an advertisement.

  22. Ned Rorem (b. 1923), an American composer of art songs and choral music, gained some notoriety in the sixties and seventies by publishing his frank journals.

  23. Leo's friend the socialite and writer Evangeline Bell Bruce (1914-95) was married to David Bruce, who had been U.S. ambassador to France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom.

  24. Susan Mary Alsop (1918?–2004), considered the grande dame of Washington, D.C, society, was also a historian who had been married (1961-73) to columnist Joseph Alsop.

  25. Sally Quinn, a journalist, became the second wife of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in 1978. “Hug-bunny” was Leo's term for an amiable, informal eatery, typically with a collegiate atmosphere.

  26. Mary Ellen “Meg” Greenfield (1930-99) was editor of the Washington Post's editorial page.

  27. The Agnellis owned Fiat. Giovanni (“Gianni”) Agnelli (1921-2003) and his wife Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto (b. 1927) were for years the personification of jet-set industrialists.

  28. In 1974, Grace Mirabella had married Dr. William Cahan (1914-2001), a thoracic surgeon who would later oversee Leo's medical treatment.

  29. Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher [Joan of Arc at the Stake] is a dramatic oratorio by Arthur Honeg-ger and Paul Claudel. Much of Brigitta Lieberson's later career had been narrating such works.

  30. What Leo had never heard, until the ensuing days, was that while Leonard Bernstein had pursued extramarital homosexual pleasures, his wife Felicia at one point had an affair with Goddard Lieberson.

  31. A prophetic remark, as Arnold Maremont would die suddenly of a heart attack the next year, with only his wife and Gray present. Marion Field was the widow of a Hollywood producer and Sylvia Lyons of Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons.

  32. Composer William Schuman (1910-92) had been head of Juilliard and Lincoln Center.

  33. Gray is alluding to the young Brigitta's chance meeting of Serge Lifar in Venice, which launched her ballet career.

  34. Anita Bryant (b. 1940), pop singer and onetime Miss Oklahoma, promoted the anti-homosexual “Save Our Children” campaign in Dade County, Florida, which led to repeal of an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

  35. Leo later gave this title to the events.

  36. “Maria's dream: She and Onassis were in a hotel suite, and they were putting many things into suitcases. They looked out the window, and it was absolutely desolate. As far as they could see, it was just a landscape of mud. They were deeply affected by it and depressed. Then the telephone rang, either a voice on the end of the telephone said it was ‘a call from Churchill' or it was a call from Churchill himself. The whole atmosphere was pervaded with despair. Maria felt acute desolation, and then she woke. She had the same dream, or variations, many times. She thought it an ill omen. She told us this quietly, measured out, and seemed so serene.” Journal, August 5, 1980.

  37. GF: “Marlene's psychic told her to tell Carole Lombard not to go on that plane trip. Marlene did tell her; Lombard did go, and died when it crashed.”

  38. The family of the textile businesswoman Patricia Curtis Vignano acquired the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice in 1885.

  39. On the third weekend of July in Venice, for the Feast of the Redeemer, a wooden pontoon bridge is rapidly thrown across the lagoon to the Church of the Redeemer (Il Redentore) on the Giudecca.

  40. British writer Freya Stark (1893-1993) was a heroine of Leo's for her intrepid travels (often solo, still riding horseback in her eighties) and for her productivity (dozens of travel books, autobiographies, and eight volumes of letters).

  41. The singer and actress Georgette Harvey (1882-1952) and Leo met during the run of Behind Red Lights, in which she had a small part. Harvey then enlisted Leo to write a book about the adventures of female African American performers in czarist Russia. Around 1937 they produced a manuscript, but it has vanished.

  42. Callas had collapsed after arising from bed in the morning.

  43. Leo had Jim Henson's puppet Miss Piggy and Frank Oz, who voiced her, photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue. He then suggested that she be put on the cover. Liberman's response is not recorded.

  44. The French Symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826-98) painted mythological subjects in a hallucinatory style.

  45. The writer Mary McCarthy (1912-89) became notorious for her sharp judgments and public skirmishes with Lillian Hellman, Philip Rahv, and Diana Trilling. Bowden Broad-water, writer and school administrator, had been McCarthy's third husband. They divorced in 1961.

  46. “Of course, Mary McCarthy didn't know Elsie Mendl's dictum: ‘Dear, never ignore the wives.' Advice to climbers in any milieu.” Journal, December 10, 1989.

  47. Kitty Miller (1900-79), the daughter of banker and painting collector Jules Bache, married the theatrical producer Gilbert Miller.

  48. GF: “It was Felicia who persuaded Lennie to move to the Dakota, leaving the East Side, and she made an exhausting effort to create what she hoped would be a sort of Chekhovian atmosphere. Everything was worn, not necessarily pretty, but ‘meaningful.'”

  49. Her husband, Göran Gentele, had died in an automobile accident in 1972, three weeks after succeeding Rudolf Bing as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.

  50. Living Newspaper was a program of the Depression-era Federal Theater Project to create theatrical documentaries.

  51. The artist's daughter, Paloma Picasso (b. 1949) became a businesswoman and designer of jewelry and leather.

  52. Success was a theatrical production coauthored by Paloma Picasso's then husband, the Argentine playwright Rafael López-Sanchez.

  53. The poet and biographer John Malcolm Brinnin (1916-98) had been at Yaddo with Leo and Truman Capote in the summer of 1946.

  54. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), was one of the great diarists, vividly recording the court at Versailles.

  55. In 1961, Stephen Sondheim had made a home-movie version of the second act of Tosca, with Felicia Bernstein in the title role and Leonard Bernstein playing Scarpia.

  56. Rita Glasberg (1890-1985) had been a neighbor on 107th Street during Leo's first years, and she remained a lifelong friend to the Lermans.

  57. The Italian film actress Valentina Cortese (b. 1925) is best remembered as the fading film star in Truffaut's Day for Night.

  58. Robert Strauss (b. 1918), a Democratic Party fund-raiser, was then President Carter's personal representative to the Middle East peace negotiations.

  59. The piece referred to is “Truman Capote by Truman Capote,” the story of his evolution as a writer, which appeared in the December 19
79 Vogue. Random House reprinted it as the preface to his Music for Chameleons in 1980.

  60. “My friend” was an expression often used by Alex Liberman.

  61. Toscanini used the soprano Herva Nelli (1909-94) for several opera recordings, and she was one of his last mistresses.

  62. The Vienna-born British publisher Baron Weidenfeld (b. 1919) had been married (1966-76) to Sandra Payson, a New York society figure.

  63. Henry Maxwell Andrews (1894-1968), a British banker, married Rebecca West in 1930.

  64. Jacques Barzun (b. 1907), a cultural historian, was on the faculty of Columbia University. GF: “Diana wanted an affair with Barzun, or was hot and heavy after him. She told me that Berlioz was her and Barzun's sexual music.”

  65. Jacqueline Onassis was an editor at Doubleday.

  66. When Nora Kaye was five, the Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer Mikhail Fokine (1880-1942) was working in the United States with his own company.

  67. This was probably in 1928. Ernestine Svedrofsky was the wife of Michael Svedrofsky, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. Neighbors to the Lermans in Queens, they had musical evenings that enchanted young Leo: “How I waited desperately for the Svedrofskys to ask me to the opera. I arrived to sit in the Morgenthau box, the center one, in Uncle Irving's cast-off ‘white tie,' my stiff shirt projecting from my fly, unbuttoned. All were not gods, not creatures of the netherworld, just earthlings, but I sat in an effulgence which, so long as the old Met stood, never dimmed for me.” Journal, December 8, 1984.

  68. The Irish actress Patricia Collinge (1892-1974) played Birdie in the original production of The Little Foxes in 1939.

  69. “The Italian Lesson” was a Ruth Draper monologue in which a society lady's life was encapsulated by a fruitless session with her Italian tutor.

  70. The singer Lena Horne (b. 1917) had starred in Vincente Minnelli's 1943 film Cabin in the Sky.

  71. Leo began his literary career in the late thirties reading for Elizabeth Otis and Mavis McIntosh Riordan's agency, McIntosh & Otis, where Annie Laurie Williams was then an associate. Later Otis was Leo's literary agent (until 1977). Howard Fast (1914-2003) was a leftist journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. Rachel Field (1894-1942) was a novelist (All This and Heaven Too), poet, and author of children's fiction.

  72. First published as James Morris, the travel writer and historian Jan Morris (b. 1926) had had a sex-change operation in 1972.

  73. The French-American novelist and memoirist Julian Green (1900-1998) wrote somber stories of psychological struggle. The Romanian-American writer Konrad Bercovici (1881-1961) depicted life in the Balkans and among the Gypsies.

  74. Henriette Pascar embarrassed her son Alex by tarting herself up and flirting with men well into her old age.

  75. Vanity Fair closed in 1936. Allene Talmey was moved to Vogue and given a few feature pages to fill monthly. Until 1983 Vogue bore a line reading “Incorporating Vanity Fair.”

  76. John Koch's 1953 painting Interior: Leo Lerman is now at New York's National Academy of Design. Leo also appears as a guest in Koch's The Cocktail Party (1956).

  JOURNAL • june 29, 1981 • paris A week ago we had the Vogue car (the first day after Mitterand was definitely in office and had appointed his four Communist cabinet officers), picked up Stephen Jamail (here as Diana Vreeland's emissary), and were off to Versailles to arrange the loan of the replica of the Oris diamond necklace and some “important” portraits for D.V.'s eighteenth-century woman exhibit. Stephen regaled us with the decline “international society” had fallen into on learning that Cappy Badrutt was dying of cancer.

  Cappy actually is the best example of what is now known as “society.” She was born Caprice Capron in Hollywood, was a “dancer” in a low joint, the Florentine Gardens, in Hollywood, became notorious when she was seventeen, having been lured—according to her mother—into the Hollywood Hills and there raped by an army pilot (this during World War II). The mother sued. The case was splashed in the headlines. Caprice was off and away, climbing through studio execs (her best chums were two strippers—Jet Black, a pale beauty, and Beverly Hills) and through a rich Chinese connection to Saint-Moritz and Badrutt, who owns the Palace Hotel there. This is where she became “international society” (actually Women's Wear [Daily] riffraff). So she passed on, accumulating jewels and wealth, her hoarse voice, her foul mouth, her “good heart,” and her “stinginess.”

  This day also included the Peter Brook [directed] Cherry Orchard—the most glorious I have ever seen. So, I saw two worlds already ended: Versailles like flowers pressed between the pages of a book; The Cherry Orchard like life observed through a glass that renders the large view microcosmic and so even more potent. This Chekhov is the central play of modern times. Each of us had a Cherry Orchard—or even several—and the whole world is the result of a Cherry Orchard. The orchard has become an airway terminal or a parking lot.

  JULY 12, 1981 • VENICE Was my family, then, what set me apart, made me different from all the other boys and girls I knew—whose families didn't walk so proudly (“Why do they walk like princes?” Puss asked when he first saw them, en masse in Seventy-fourth Street [Jackson Heights]), whose families weren't so much a clan, a single everyday force? (By family, I mean Momma's people.) When I see a Venetian family, coming away from Sunday lunch, I see that family in our sense still exists, and that past comes into being—the way stage scenery materializes in a transformation scene [is how] that Manhattan past returns in a sunstruck Venetian calle.

  Here, in Venice, I recapture the family I thought lost after Momma died, while feeling no ties to that America in which we were saved, in which I was born and grew—corporeally—while living my life of the imagination here, in Paris of the Revolution, in Russia of the 1870s, in a Belle Epoque world wherever it was rich and high and effulgent.

  JULY 13, 1981 When Hester Sporer gave me those first volumes of Proust, and I sat reading them at the kitchen table—in a state of intense excitement, filling with surmise—the world I wanted became diamond-solid.1 It was more available then, since this was late 1932 or 1933, but it was available to me only in fantasy—in books, music, magazines—so I organized a gang. I became a young Fagin, and sent them foraging for magazines in the cellars of the apartment houses now beginning to surround us.

  I walked the new streets and longed at the skyline, seen clearly across the meadows, now become empty lots, and knew that New Ilium, those giddy, topless towers must one day be mine. I wished to be a sort of Trojan horse in this world—to penetrate the surface glitter, to get behind the dazzle, and there to experience its reality. I wanted, although I did not then know this, to collect it. For sitting here in my wing chair in this room overlooking the Grand Canal, I understand that I am basically that little boy, who went very early on certain workdays with his hated grandfather, carrying bags to collect such loot as he could find—a cut-glass bowl, a battered silver serving dish, a porcelain or even paste dancing figure—slightly chipped in the nose but en pointe—oh ecstasy— poised to fly into some richer air where a world of grandeur glittered and tinkled, and the only sound heard was a joyful applause. I hated my grandfather, but because of him I became a collector—my collecting being a sesame to my dream world. The Jewishness of the Harlem market and Orchard Street— more lost worlds. So the Proustian world became a lost one as much as the immigrant world of my grandfather—both lost save in my memory, revived here in Venice, when a family came out into a calle after Sunday lunch.

  One evening, I found at the door of a huge apartment in which I had been invited to dine, Alice [Astor]'s old butler, who immediately whispered, as he took my coat, “What, Mr. Leo, are you doing here?” And what, indeed, was I doing here, in rooms upon which more money than taste or heart had been lavished, where all was for show that told of the host's riches, where little I pondered could be understood—but where my “legend” was still appreciated, where I was thought to be worldly and learned and clever and “in the know,”
and where when my usefulness diminished I would no longer be welcome. This new world lacked all sense of continuity—that continuity which I was to find in Venice—long tentacles, veins, reaching back into the remotest past, a past as alive as the future—a world in which that past and the possible future made an almost imperceptible present.

  The importance of the hemorrhage is what was decided for me as I lay upon the tiled bathroom floor: “I've always been late for deadlines, but this is the latest I've ever been.” For the first time, I was frightened at a sickness. Death was in that room. I could have gone with him, but I resisted because I wanted to stop a while longer with Puss and I wanted to make a memorial to all the lost worlds that I have known and all of the people who made up those worlds. I want to add to continuity. Continuity is the only reassurance, the only immortality: Ela lives, Alice lives, Laci lives, my family lives—in me, in these pages….

  JULY 16, 1981 My “return” to Europeanization, I learned much from Laci, not recovered until I found it again in Venice.

  About Laci: I was hungry for his past. I needed that past, that Europe, that glamour, the people of that past—some of what the papers called the “best people, the best minds, the greatest creators” now beleaguered in my Manhattan. So, instinctively I became, even before I knew what I had become, part of this past, his present—even outreachinghim, in the years ahead going beyond him. As he needed my youth, my Manhattan savoir (as he called it), as he marveled at my broad knowledge of European theater and dance and opera and design and literature, so his (now my) Europeans appreciated me for these very “qualities” with a greater understanding. They were “deeper” than he was, neurotic in different ways; they were not mad. And it was only years later, when I was quite detached from the sensual, the voluptuous part of Laci and my affair— when I was no longer in love with him, but felt for him as one feels for a relative—a kind of blood love and hate—that I realized how intellectually shallow he was, how his heart was incapable of any but (for me) surface feelings, how he was interested in me for services—sexual and physical—how he was actually a man. But by that time none of this mattered. And when, one day, I read in the morning paper that he had killed himself (sitting in his bathtub, pills, a knife), I was sad for him and a little furious that I, who had worked so hard to help make him a success, to give him the triumphs his talent and his art deserved, did not inherit a thing. Not a trifle, let alone any of the $80,000 he left to the crippled boy who had replaced me. Laci had told me how much I meant to him, how I was the “love” of his “life,” how he could not go on without me— even as I lay in his arms, did the things he loved and which I grew to need. I had fallen in love with a bias-cut white dress and ended up with a European education, a glory of great Europeans as my true friends, and upon my upper lip a black mustache. His father had sported a black mustache; he was excited by a black mustache; for him I grew a black mustache. Even when we were “mad” about one another, we could not be physically monogamous. But he did open the world of his past, which became my future, a world of exultation and sundry pain, a confirmation that for each shard of knowledge received, each bead of ecstasy received over years (how I would finger, count this rosary in the future) payment was not only expected but exacted. I knew, when all the furor had ended, that I would always have to pay as I went—not one tittle of experience was free. An education in the high finance of experience.