The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Recalling Tallulah at T's [Black and White] party—the public face had become the private woman. Conversely, the private woman had become the public face. She was nothing but the ruin of this notorious facade…. The vigor of her legend—the maintenance of it had eroded all else. This wreck of her public facade clear to see, even in the darkened crystal ballroom of the Plaza.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1981 After a certain age, meaning an age of self-knowledge, it is a sin not to know and even a greater sin to forget who one really is. Yesterday, after a walk with Alex, I forgot who I am—I mean the essential me, the mansion I have constructed of myself, for myself. The punishment for forgetting is depression, even death.

  This morning Alex really struck at a vulnerable place: “You have enough vitality,” he said, “to make these scoops.” He was talking about Architectural Digest getting the Reagan “private” rooms in the White House, giving them eighteen pages. This is trivial and trashy, but more than ever I want to go from that place. I don't want to have anything to do with him and those debased, sadistic creatures. He is an extraordinary man—crippled within and a minor monster, but destructive, a causer of pain.

  NOVEMBER 17, 1981 A whole world of new young people in [Sondheim's musical] Merrily We Roll Along, and this touched me. I saw, at the end, which was the touching part, all of those long-ago girls: Joan McCracken, Diana Adams, young Sono, young Nora, even Maya [Deren] and [dancer-choreographer] Valerie Bettis… a great garland of girls—all with starry futures, all destined to glitter and to shine and to sink into oblivion. Then at Hal [Prince]'s party in the Plaza, a tide of Merrily young people swept around my chair, obliterating me. I knew none of them. I was not part of their future, as I had been so many years ago.

  NOVEMBER 20, 1981 Claudette Colbert at lunch. I asked, “Who was the sexiest?” Claudette: “Clark Gable. Even my mother—who wasn't a pushover and never came on set, came when I was making It Happened One Night, and she swooooned.” (acting out swooned) “But for me—oh, Ray Milland! Oh, Ray Milland!” She murmured, as she sat down: “Don't ask me a question. I'm no good at that sort of thing. I won't say a thing.” I thought: “I must charm and keep afloat.” It did work.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1981 The privileged exist in each world, no matter what social level, even beggars, clochards. Each world is a microcosm of the great world. Poppa's people broke Momma's people's windows when Poppa married Momma. This was reverse snobbism. Poppa's people thought Momma's too rich and too advanced—too American.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1981 Tilly Losch's advice to Nora, when Tilly joined Ballet Theatre: “Always have a good little black dress, pearls, and stay in the best hotel, even if you can have only the worst room.”

  NOVEMBER 26, 1981 Heard from Morty [Janklow, literary agent] how valuable I am to Condé Nast, Morty having heard this from Si. This helps. I never believe in my true value, knowing how that can topple without even a warning crack.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1981 • LAGUNA HILLS, CALIFORNIA Philip Ziegler's [biography of Diana Cooper] Diana is all about privilege—its uses, abuses. Ziegler succeeds at the amazing task of making Diana Cooper not only a full-blooded creation, but a “real” person of fictional size, complete with eccentricities, awfulness, even hatefulness—and vulnerabilities—a sacred monster. Finally she is a total expression of a class, a series of moments in history, vanished eras. Rut had some of Diana Cooper's privileged ways. Rut said: “I am the aristocracy of originality.”

  Maebelle at dinner tonight to Missy [Cockrell, her great-niece]: “Tell me, has any of your little friends had anything unpleasant happen—like rape?”

  DECEMBER 1, 1981 Diana Vreeland's visual sense is that of the most sophisticated child in the world. She understands combinations of quality, and she can see quality in everything from the most everyday street life thing to the most exotic and most exclusive. Visually, she looks to the vibrancy of the moment. She adores to laugh; it starts from her intellect and descends to her belly button. She also has the ability to make people feel witty and worldly. Vreeland said stoically, “Don't you know that Vogue is the myth of the next reality?”

  DECEMBER 6, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY Momma's “unveiling” in an almost vacant, gale-swept, sun-washed Mt. Zion cemetery, the tombstones so dense as to almost obliterate all else. In the distance, the city skyline seemingly more tombstones. All the world, as far as we could see, a necropolis. There we huddled, all the remnants of our huge cousinage and friend circle. The rabbi never arrived. I took over, asked Rosalie [Goldwasser] to read the Twenty-third Psalm, said a few bits, making everyone laugh (Momma always wanted, on a cold day, everyone to hurry, because she wanted to get to the bathroom), and then asked each person present to say one thing that came instantly to mind about Momma. Mary [Callabras, the nurse] said, “She was strong!” Puss said, “She took me into the family and made me feel welcome.”

  DECEMBER 7, 1981 The cemetery stretched out like a floorcloth, pinned down by the three huge smokestacks, by the far towers of Manhattan, by the old, now delicate iron fence—rolling here, level there—and the dense graves energetic with dreams and hopes and despairs and plannings and such energy even in death and with death. I had such a feeling of pinned-down energy. Now I feel that cemetery out there as a constant—being there in all sorts of light and weather—immutable, unchanged, a densely populated unpopular place. So the family were again reunited! Those above ground and those in their vociferous, but empty graves.

  DECEMBER 15, 1981 Even circa 1931 or 32 we heard news that the famous triumvirate—Anne Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, and Elisabeth “Bessie” Mar-bury—were “Sapphic.”16 We also heard that as sacrosanct as the Morgan name was, walled behind wealth and immured in High Society, Miss Anne Morgan's “sumptuous” apartment was “watched” by the police. Such gossip sent frissons of surmise. Then there were Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein. But did we know of “men” as redoubtable as any of these female “leaders”? Whispers about Carl Van Vechten, Guthrie [McClintic, Broadway producer] (Katherine Cornell [his wife] was!), and Stark [Young]. Then George Jean Nathan's essay on lesbians in the theater that named names. The Eva Le Gallienne and Josephine Hutchinson scandal17… [Radclyffe Hall's novel] The Well of Loneliness … All of this was heady evidence and, in a sense, not only confirmation but approval. Here we touched, and seemed one, with—if not greatness— glamour.

  DECEMBER 25, 1981 Mina: “I never liked [Proust's] Albertine and the ‘little band.' They're too Monet for me. I'm a Manet girl.”

  Ela, living in German and Austrian palaces, always, even in Kammer-schloss, never had more than one room in her life. I—having no room of my own until I had a little room in a rooming house on East Seventy-first Street, then railroad flats—always lived in a great number of rooms. Even when I had a house (1453 Lex) and then this “apartment,” I lived as if I had a huge palace. We always lived “big.” That's why my uncles walked like princes.

  DECEMBER 26, 1981 I said to Toni Morrison, “I don't believe in any life hereafter, but I do believe in ghosts.” She looked at me, laughed, and said, “Honey, you sure are in trouble.”

  Marlene no longer permits flowers to be delivered. “No one is allowed to ring her bell to deliver flowers,” the concierge told the messenger. Flowers are too close to death.

  JANUARY 10, 1982 I gulped down whatever I found in print. I began this on 106th Street and read voraciously even before I could talk coherently. For years the aunts (Minnie and Rose) scornfully chided Momma: “Always, his head buried in a book he can't even understand! What'll he be, some kind of sissy?” Momma paid them no mind (as we later said at the Feagin School, in mimicking emulation of our southern cicerones). But Poppa sometimes would flower into his impotent, curiously quiet rages: “Be a man!” he would say in a strangled roar that never got higher than two steps. “Be a man!” I went on reading away, snipping magazines and papers, scribbling. No bats for me and the only balls I ever handled were my own or some of my male chums and relations. Not “to be a man,” not to hit a ball with a stick (kic
king it came later and at this time still seemed foreign) was to be un-American in this young immigrant world of my father and my older uncles. To be American was to be on the way up—hence, passion for prize (I thought “price”) fights, Masonry, even ragtime and jazz.

  JANUARY 16, 1982 My first Violetta [in La Traviata] was [Lucrezia] Bori. Cousin Dave [Goldwasser], the furrier, took me. We sat almost in the last row of the top balcony and were ecstatic. Part of the ecstasy came from being part of that world—if only for a Saturday matinee. We could read the names of the box holders in the program, and over the proscenium the gold oblongs deified Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, and Gounod. Bori in white flounces with six camellias off-center down the front. I think we could see this costume at other times in the window of the costumer Brooks, high up on Broadway.

  JANUARY 21, 1982 Yesterday Penelope died. That last time—watching the [Charles and Diana] wedding fireworks on the telly, she held my hand all through the long viewing—a last, long, heart-in-hand good-bye. All those years ago, in the Plaza, the center of her life was “getting” Carol to be in New York, to marry her. I think that after Carol died, after those years of living with her suitcase packed and on the ready, she was as diligent in pursuit of him as she had been long ago. Everyone says how wonderfully [her mother] Freda is “taking” this. But people of Freda's age feel differently about outside heights and depths. They have used up so much. They have little or no room for tragedy— their own old age being tragedy that they cannot bear.

  Penelope died on the same date on which Ela died. I think of the red rose in the gutter, after the hearse had gone from the Little Church Around the Corner [on Twenty-ninth Street]. What will be there in the gutter after the hearse has gone at midday on Monday, from the Old Chelsea Church [in London], Henry James's church?

  JANUARY 24, 1982 Watching a telecast of La Bohème, I realized that none of these young people would ever become anything. They would all be failures in what they set out to become. Franco [Zeffirelli]'s Bohème is closer to the original than any other: Mimi a realistic flowermaker of that day, Musetta an aging coquette, never to be a courtesan. (Clare Boothe Luce told me, some days ago, that the thirty-year-olds of Harper's thought a courtesan was “someone who hung out with famous men.”) The young men (Franco's onstage “kids”) would never be great creators. Theirs is the charm of so many groups of young people who came to “the big city,” an ageless true story.

  JANUARY 26, 1982 Faye Dunaway—very Okie—albino in atmosphere. She has determination. Her technique shows like some girls' slips or brassiere straps. Related, in a way, to Meryl Streep. Dunaway counterfeits larger than life—specially when handled by [Roman] Polanski (Chinatown) or when impersonating (Mommie Dearest). But she is not larger than life in the Crawford sense, or an abstract—and so a symbol, a quintessential—in the Louise Brooks sense.18

  JANUARY 30, 1982 Lillian Gish on the Scott Fitzgeralds: “You never saw people so young, so beautiful—young, blue-eyed, blond people … but you knew that she was crazy. You knew that she had to do what she was doing…. And Tallulah was always trying to copy her.” Lillian—so young herself today at lunch, talking with great spirit and total recall and strong convictions. Lillian, the most remarkable elder I know, exclaiming that [Blake Edwards's film] S.O.B. was the closest to Hollywood, that the death on the beach was based on Griffith, “who wandered from place to place, willing to work for $50 and no one would give him a job!”

  FEBRUARY 28, 1982 Betty Parsons burst into tears when I came away [from her gallery] not “seeing” (was it [painter] Clyff Still?), weeping passionately as we waited for the lift: “You won't understand! You won't see. All you want is Rembrandt!” Poppa's a great influence on me here: This master of the brush, my father the housepainter, revered art. He took me to museums. Did he see the beauty? Or was the beauty the money value of the work of art, the social meaning—kings, queens, tycoons—its “worldly” and “prestige” connotations? The coruscating visions of the power and the glory, the splendor—was that what got Poppa? That is what got me. Also, I got a sense of desolation, of all-gone, of anguish and inspiration.

  Is Alex Liberman a nihilist? He has a very low opinion of people and their motives. He extols the word “noble,” but he sees almost everyone as base. Schadenfreude—this joy of destruction.

  MARCH 6, 1982 Henry James to a young acquaintance who had just met Edith Wharton: “Ah my dear man, you have made friends with Edith Whar-ton. I congratulate you. You may find her difficult, but you will never find her stupid, and you will never find her mean.” This is so like Mina, whom I just rang up, finding her in a ferment of delight, surmise, and wondering where to publish an essay she would write based on a book just come from Paris—a book very long and chockablock with new material about Proust's family (his ancestry) and an essay by Suzy Mante[-Proust, his niece]: “So full of lies—as we could expect…” But the energy that came from eighty-five-year-old Mina … the vigor had interest. She had to ring off because Lincoln surprised her by suddenly appearing. “Who's that?” I heard her murmur. “Oh—it's Goosey!” she exclaimed, the delight suddenly shining in her voice like the glow of a freshly polished apple. Lincoln came to talk to her about their parents. Since he is also writing his memoirs. “It's so strange. We don't know anything about our parents' childhoods. I don't know anything about my father until he's about sixteen.” What do we know about parents' early days?

  Walking with my uncles and cousins, or riding on the upper deck of the bus with my aunts, I would marvel at those “palaces” lining the east side of Fifth Avenue, sometimes glimpsing an interior brightness through an open door, where a uniformed “man” stood for a moment waiting some arrival, or—bliss— finding an unshuttered window, its curtains and draperies agape, espied from my lofty but fleeting perch—splendor, dazzlement, gleaming surfaces adrift on tides of light, like telltale wreckage on a placid sea. I was instantly immersed in conjecture, visions of rooms thronged with treasures more gorgeously incredible than any I had seen, and even tried to touch, in the museum to which my father had taken me frequently. I even saw elegantes being helped into carriages (for in those days some New Yorkers still went out on their social rounds in their own carriages) and men and women in heavy furs climbing up and down steps to and from the pleasures, vanishing into the “palaces” or into highly polished motors, doors held ajar by liveried footmen, while at the wheel sat a visored and uniformed chauffeur. This was life secure, untroubled by screaming scenes, not undone by subterfuges. (“Don't let your grandpa know you had an egg this morning.”) For me in these early years, the glimpses into the mansions then lining the avenue, the works of art in the museum, symbolized the high romance of monarchy and court life. I had entered this world through the movies. I saw it existing. I was to pursue it all my life, this glitter of power, of lavish dress and house. This life larger than any I knew seemed the best of all the world's possibilities. I never wanted to be president. I wanted to be king—a star-crossed monarch in full panoply—divinely rightful, even doomed—but rescued, of course, just in time, as the “mob” (people) was about to tear me apart, rescued by the most stalwart, the most ravishing of men, just like in the movies I saw at the Garlic Opera or the Starlight The-a-ter.

  MARCH 13, 1982 There is no love between Lady Macbeth and her lord. There is adolescent exuberance between Romeo and Juliet. Ophelia is “mad” about Hamlet: He is actually indifferent to her, seeing only himself, aggrieved, in all eyes. Desdemona loves, to excess, her Moor, while he is in a complicated passion about her: She is a symbol of his emancipation, the brightest jewel in his conquest of a world in which he will never really be accepted—only used. Viola loves Orsino: This is pure love. I think all of the women in the comedies love the men of their choice; only in the tragedies are the loves complicated from within the people themselves. Difficult to assess Cleopatra—she is such an ornament, such a conscientious superstar in the Liz Taylor mode. Her passions are possibly sincere, but art-size—grand ge
stures. The others are human in size and intensity.

  APRIL 3, 1982 Last night, walking home from I Lombardi, we came upon Jack Dunphy. Gray had not seen him in over thirty years. I saw him several years ago (when I was still able—or allowed—to go about alone). Here, then, was Jack, waiting to cross Fifty-ninth Street and Columbus Circle. “Isn't that Jack Dunphy?” Puss whispered. “Jack?” I quavered. He turned, smiled hugely, presenting at arms a mouth of large, well-polished, obviously fake, gleaming dining-room furniture.19 He is an old man—very neat, civil, pulled together, his atmosphere still actually clinging to him like a perfume—an eternal, perdurable fragrance. He has a seaman feeling, a man who had been long at sea now having become—unwillingly, patiently—a landlubber … and Irishness. All very cordial; he very deaf. A pleasant encounter—not one word of Little T. But there with us was that dark winter night when he left Todd [Bolender] for Truman.

  APRIL 16, 1982 John Simon's consuming passion for Alexandra Isles. He's almost given up. Eating his heart out over the blower: “I must make up my mind that she doesn't love me. If I had ten million dollars, she would love me. She can't take me to her society friends, but she doesn't have anyone. She's an outsider, and what she wants most is to be inside, to be invited by society and be a hostess. She doesn't want me. Von Bülow was Alexandra's dream prince. He seemed to have everything I didn't have. She really hasn't decided that he killed [his wife], but from what she's told me, how can she doubt it?”20 John went on and on—quite pitifully—this man, considered so relentless, such a monster—now bleeding for a woman quite unworthy of his brilliance, even of his strange charm.