The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  OCTOBER 13, 1982 An advantage: I never had to talk to my mother or father about being in love. I never had to get them to agree to my marriage.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1982 [Writer Harold] Brodkey came to Diana Trilling bringing [his] forty-page manuscript written in “defense” of her, against critics of her Mrs. Harris.31 He insisted she read this; she retaliated with the first chapter of her memoir. Harold then told Diana that she had no taste, she lived with “mail-order” furniture, and a collection of “cheap” third-rate drawings and Japanese woodcuts typical of academe house furnishings. He ended, as he left, saying out of nowhere, “Give my love to Leo Lerman!”

  NOVEMBER 19, 1982 The visit, in a vast dark-glassed limousine, to a restaurant on Mulberry Street [in Little Italy], and the “natives” standing agape, their activities suspended, precisely as we did sixty years ago when “someone” descended on 106th Street in a highly polished carriage or touring car. Here at this moment time was transfixed: 1919 and 1982 fixed precisely together, a single identity emerging from their merging. Even the sounds became a single moment, all senses fused. This was, then, a moment where the tracks do meet. Here I was in infinity.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1982 I have been reading Proust's letters in the early morning, thinking about how much of the recipient is reflected in the writing of the letter. I feel each letter mirrors the person to whom it is addressed, each letter is colored by that person, since the writer of the letter must automatically, if he is a sensitive person, a feeling being, must in his letter accommodate the future recipient. We always try to please, and in trying put on some little semblance of the one we are trying to please.

  DECEMBER 23, 1982 Diana [Stainforth], Rebecca's secretary, said: “Dame Rebecca is very quiet, very quiet. On her [ninetieth] birthday she only woke when her favorite nephew came down. Then she seemed so sad when he went away.” I said, “She knows that she is saying good-bye.” I can almost feel what must be happening in her head and heart. I know that she knows. It is Ela leaning against me, in that brocade dress, after I took her to see Twentieth Century and was dropping her off as I was off to London in January 1951.32 It is Penelope holding my hand, so quietly all the long while we sat watching the wedding-of-Diana-and-Charles fireworks on the television and then insisting that she see us to a cab on the King's Road. All instinctively saying good-bye—but forever?

  DECEMBER 31, 1982 Mina asked Antoine Bibesco: “Did you really love Proust?” And he said, “No—my brother and I just knew that he was a great man.”

  JANUARY 14, 1983 Yesterday I asked Gore (he in Ravello, I in 350 Madison [Condé Nast]) to write a piece about drag. He, in a fat, cushiony, wine-manipulated (as a breeze manipulates a weathervane or a mobile) voice, his measured, elder-statesman voice: “But I know nothing about drag.” “Booshwah!” I wanted to say to him, “Myra Breckenridge!”33 Then, he soon came to “What about little Troosey? You know, I don't know why, but I am sorry about him … his life….” Gore went on about how sorry he was and about how he didn't know why he should be; how Gore had the lead article in Vanity Fair's first issue; how “they” had had to get rid of “little Troosey” because his first column was unpublishable: “So dated … the Duchess of Windsor… all that… so obsolete … so sad.” Then Gore extolled his Ravello life: “After dinner—and it's so good—and vino, Howard and I just go down into the little village and sit with our bottle of wine in the square, where we know everybody. We just sit in the quiet. I can't take New York anymore … the backbiting, the filth, the noise…. Why don't you and Gray come for a month, anytime … anytime you want.” Gore said that maybe his feeling for “little Troosey” was because “we all started out together,” an old-school-tie sort of feeling, and all in his fruitiest, late-night voice, spliced by wine. I had a feeling of endless bottles of red wine and nights so late that splendid dawns gorgeously streaked Mediterranean skies—purple prose nights, sentiment oozing like red juice from pomegranates.

  JANUARY 15, 1983 Mina: “I'm so old! I don't understand about heartbreak anymore. I don't remember what heartbreak is. Don't they know that it passes?”

  JANUARY 23, 1983 • KENT, CONNECTICUT At Brigitta Lieberson's, reading Ian Hamilton's Robert howell, untangling when I first knew Cal [Lowell] (his terrible, raging, black-black beauty) and Jean Stafford (her battered-wife life as plain to read on her face as any clear-set type on a printed page; her temples scarred by Cal's violence). But I must not forget Jean's sense of the ridiculous, irony eating at her misery, in the mid-forties at Ruth and John Stephan's West-port property. Cal Lowell and [editor] Albert Erskine sunned and lolled in a walled garden (shards of glass encrusted the garden walls, glittering and gleaming like dragon teeth), while Jean and Rut [Yorck] and Marguerite Young and Ruth dressed up in Ruth's extravagant evening dresses. Richard and I lurked in the enormous attic library–guest room (Pareto and Spengler, Veblen and James in first editions), peering down at Cal and Albert.

  During the thirties I had a horror of being involved in causes. I was committed to poetry, actually to the word. I was muddled over the Spanish Civil War, hating Communism but also knowing that Franco was not “my side.” I was rabid against Nazis. When that ruination first stuck its head out of its Wagnerian cave, about 1932, I was still in high school, “having an affair” with a man I met in one of “those” speakeasy, upstairs places on West Seventy-second Street. Hans Anselm he called himself. He lived in the Village, in some rooms with Turkish latticework covering the walls, and he claimed to be the Duc de Rhône. His head was skull-like, and he sat strumming some vibrant guitarlike instrument, and sang, in a soft southern German, his high, very pretty voice fraught with longing, “Rose of the World” and other songs from Viennese-Berliner operettas. One early morning, he said, “I must back to the Germany, to the Schwarzwald where are my people, and I must do something about those murderers.” And he vanished. Then I read every word I could find about what was happening in Germany. When I could I tried to help: first the few, then the trickle, then the flood of refugees. I was not committed to a Cause. I was committed to Living, to Art. I was committed to devouring the High Life—this instinct having started in my grandfather's house, before I could talk. Causes came much later—marching against the Vietnam War, against nuclear testing. I followed the road. I don't think that I set the direction. And I continue to follow it, as one who wanders along, never knowing save by instinct, what is around the bend. This is predestination, but to me this is the adventure, with— always—the possibility of the Grand Surprise.

  JANUARY 28, 1983 • NEW YORK CITY I gave a dinner at Hubert's [restaurant] on Wednesday night for four widows, all over sixty-five: Diana Trilling, Jane Gunther, Betty [Comden] Kyle, Brigitta Lieberson. Diana says on the blower: “So special—I don't know if you realize how special that evening was—four women so respectful of one another, so courteous and generous with one another.” “It was like chamber music,” Puss said. Individual talk is always strung upon threads. Some thread what they have to say on perpetual nervous laughter (not real laughter, but a simulacrum which occasionally bursts the thread and splatters all over the place). Some thread their talk on silence.

  JANUARY 29, 1983 “I became disenchanted with Hollywood when I discovered that the greatest movie star in the world was a mouse!” Lillian Gish to Lily Tomlin.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1983 This morning at Memorial Hospital, Bill Cahan told Dr. Brya: “It's congenital.” Meaning this goiter that descends into my upper ribs. So, Momma is trying to have the last word. What a strong woman! “Why must you always have something so complicated?” Bill asked, echoing Puss's “Why must you always be so different? I wish you would stop having friends who ‘do' things!” The last word of this book should be “congenital.” Aren't we all congenital?

  FEBRUARY 23, 1983 I must write about falling apart. But should this not be a time of approaching wholeness? All of the tests are, basically, endurance tests. My claustrophobia is becoming much more acute. [During a scan,] Puss read Iris Murdoch aloud for over an ho
ur. He stood in a lead apron weighing forty pounds. The kindness of the technicians, doctors, and yentas in the waiting room. You can become more and more innocent, as life goes on, and ultimate innocence is senility.

  FEBRUARY 25, 1983 I have more of a sense of foolishness than of humor.

  Paula Laurence on the blower to tell me—her voice minimal, cut clean of sarcasm, innuendo—that Tennessee had been found dead in his room at the [Hotel] Elysée, presumably having died in the night of a heart attack. This, we both agreed, was sad and glad. He always feared a long painful illness; his career had ended—seemingly. He had (I learned from Miltie [Goldman], whom I reached at the Four Seasons, where he was lunching) just finished a short story (so hope had surely not died). Paula most feared that Maureen [Sta-pleton] would suffer (“flip out”), but Miltie said that she was, at that moment, probably getting off a train in Florida, where “She's going to a fat farm, and she'll be all right.”34 Miltie has been all morning there, at the hotel, “and the police won't let the body be moved, or anything touched. He had a lot of money in his wallet. His ‘new' boyfriend had been there in the night. His brother [Dakin], to whom he hasn't talked in a long time, is on the way. I talked to him. He wants a big funeral. I think that he should be cremated, and a big memorial service should be held in a theater.” Paula: “You know, Chucky [Bowden] produced his last hit [Night of the Iguana]. Chucky must be on the stage at that memorial…. I was up and out today at dawn to audition for a commercial—a grand dowager. There was a woman all done up in twenty-button gloves, a tiara…. I'm sure she's got it….” So life ends, or transmutes, and life goes on and on.

  FEBRUARY 26, 1983 When Tatiana (an ancient Russian woman who takes care of Rose [Williams]) went to Rose and told her that Tennessee was dead, Rose said: “But I really love bacon.” Paula thinks that Rose—lobotomized—is, in her “condition,” crafty, and said “Dakin,” realizing that now she would have to look to him for her keep.35 “Tennessee,” said Paula, “would have been a bum, these last years, if it hadn't been for Rose. He had two fears: that he wouldn't have enough money to keep Rose and that he would die of a heart attack. Well, he always had enough to keep Rose; he drove himself to make the money. And he did die of a heart attack.”

  I remember coming away from Streetcar, to which I had taken [photographer] Harold Halma. We left the theater in some sort of fierce weather, and I was in a state. This was during the time when Richard was leaving me for Howard and I was having those Sunday nights of mass affection [January 1948], and I said to Harold, “I cannot bear any more. I cannot bear any more,” weeping uncontrollably and leaning, what surely looked drunkenly, against a storefront. Harold said, “You'll bear it, and you'll be all right. You will come out triumphantly.” And, of course, I did.

  We now discover that Tennessee died from choking. He inadvertently swallowed a bottle top, possibly from a nose spray. Odd, very odd. I see one of his bedrooms, years ago, with his few neckties flung over the supports to his bureau looking glass, very hall bedroom. He had a hall-bedroom personality.36

  MARCH 5, 1983 Chucky [Bowden] told me how Tennessee, returning from the baths on West Sixtieth or Sixty-first saw an attractive Oriental: “I always was curious how an Oriental would be,” Tennessee told Chucky, “so I cruised this one and finally, looking into a shop window on Broadway, I realized he was actually cruising me. He caught my eye and I caught his. I took him home and it was fine, and then he told me who he was and I told him who I was. He was Mishima, and he hadn't even known who I was!”

  Tennessee was a deliberate mischief maker. Carson [McCullers] was that, but different, sort of spiteful. I don't think that Tennessee was spiteful.

  Tennessee was all the women he ever wrote, and the men he wrote were his wet dreams. He did get a bit Big Daddy. Also Rose was Blanche and Laura. She is so many of his women. His mother, who signed a male name the last eight years of her life, is the mother in The Glass Menagerie, of course. Tennessee is buried in her grave—or that was Dakin's plan.

  MARCH 19, 1983 Rebecca died during this past week, after her three-month decline and decay. A mercy. I am tired of saying that. How do we know what goes on in the deeps of an “unconscious” body? Other than feeling that I have lost someone I loved very much, someone I valued for her glorious mind and wit, and her legend, I somehow felt that I have lost a sort of mother. Very odd that.

  What undid me were her last weeks—Diana, Rebecca's secretary, telling me, each Monday, that the apartment had become unbearably filled with Rebecca's weeping in her terror at dying. (“You couldn't get away from it.”) “She's so frightened…. She never stops crying unless we put her to sleep.” If this great, flashing mind was terrified at death, who am I not to be horrified? I am scared—not of after death, but of that death itself—then I have terrors at the claustrophobia of being shut in. Now this grows more acute—in lifts, during tests in machines, even in small rooms with doors closed. The terror is sudden, self-enlarging, and self-perpetuating.

  I had a strenuous nightmare the night before Rebecca died. I could hear Puss crying out “Wake up! Label, wake up!” I could feel him shaking me, but all of that became part of the nightmare, part of the tug-of-war. Would I make it out of the evil that was invading me from some heretofore friendly “person” now dying on the floor wherever I was… or would that evil take over, annihilate me. I could see the transformation of the “person” into something awful, and I could feel me becoming even more awful… changing… but Puss saved me just in time.

  Then, after Diana rang, I went to my office, where later in the day I began to have the most awesome pains in my lower right side. These were sundering, intermittent, awful. I did not tell Puss, because I did not want to upset him, which actually upsets me. Out of love, he becomes explosive. I told no one until they became unbearable late in the evening. So then Puss rang up the doctor, who told him to do this and that, and finally I fell asleep, waking at about three a.m. feeling healed. Oh, the bliss engendered by the cessation of pain. I believe all of this was one manifestation, nightmare and pains— Rebecca's death.

  MARCH 26, 1983 Lillian Gish told me today, when she rang to ask me what Heat and Dust was really about, that when Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill returned from India, Gene said: “Don't ever go, Lillian. Everywhere, everywhere it smells, it reeks of death. Death is the atmosphere of India.” But Lillian went twice, and each time found that Gene had been “Oh, so right, dear!”

  NOTE: The much-publicized relaunch of Condé Nast's Vanity Fair magazine occurred in March 1983. Reaction was swift and negative; advertising pages plummeted immediately.

  APRIL 16, 1983 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london

  We had a lovely visit from Elie de Rothschild and his amour, Ariane Dandois.37 Marvelous diamonds on her, superb tailoring on him—all very Odette and Swann, except Swann was not on the top of that heap, and Ariane is one of the great Orientalists (fantastic objects in her gallery). He is very gallant with her and she very Casque d'Or with him.38 Meanwhile his baroness lives in Rothschild splendor in London, and he jaunts from wife to mistress…. All very old time and somehow pleasing—the way reading Proust is pleasing.

  I have had an “interesting” proposition from Alex Liberman and S. I. New-house, Jr., anent Vanity Fair, and when I see a definite commitment I will tell you. A.L. said: “A marriage has been arranged.” To which I answered: “When you get married, rings are exchanged and presents start pouring in….” We will see what we will see.

  JOURNAL • April 16, 1983 Tina Brown says she could not work with the Groke (Richard Locke), but she would take on the job if I did it. I will now wait for Alex and Si's next move.39

  APRIL 21, 1983 Today Alex offered me Vanity Fair. I wanted that more than anything…. Too late? I would [also] have to “uncle” Vogue and write my book. Si, he says, opposed because this could harm Vogue. I should feel good, since they think that I am the only one who can edit Vogue—my part of it—and I am obviously the only one who
could edit Vanity Fair.

  APRIL 23, 1983 Today Alex and Si definitely gave me the job of editing Vanity Fair. So I got what I wanted. Now what do I do with what I got?

  NOTE: On April 27 S. I. Newhouse, Jr., announced Leo's appointment as Vanity Fair's editor in chief. He began there five days later. Whatever his initial agreement, Leo did not keep his hand in at Vogue.

  JOURNAL • may 27, 1983 I went to Vanity Fair at last, fulfilling some fifty-five years of wanting this job. So much happened these last weeks that I haven't been able to write or read a word, other than for this job. I even seem to have lost my fear of death. One morning, when I was on the fourteenth floor, alone, the lift doors opened and—surprise to me—I went into that lift, descending fourteen floors—alone! I could not do that, all of these years, with my terror of lifts. But suddenly, having got what I wanted (all but finishing my book), I lost my fear. I see death as an adventure. What an unexpected result of realizing a lifelong dream!

  NOTE: At Vanity Fair, intense and long workdays ensued. Leo essentially kept the staff Richard Locke had hired, augmented by a few of his own. Alex Liberman visited daily, often conferred with Leo or the art directors, and telephoned continually with suggestions.

  Leo struggled to create a magazine evoking the spirit of its Jazz Age predecessor. He encouraged the editors to have fun with it, to search for talent rather than pander to celebrity, and to commission sharp essays on social issues. “Our platform would promise an astonishing thought in every head, an irreverent song in every heart,” said his letter in the September 1983 issue.