The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Invigorating Vanity Fair, as circulation and morale continued to fall, demanded speed, organization, and indeed ruthlessness of a sort Leo may never have possessed. Certainly it proved beyond his reach as he approached his seventieth birthday. Years of working autonomously for Mademoiselle and Vogue had not equipped him to manage such an unwieldy project. It had been a long-held dream, however, and he went at the task bravely.

  Leo made very few notes unrelated to work during the next six months.

  JOURNAL • july 31, 1983 Eyesight failing. I can hardly see what I am scribbling, but I am optimistic. I am almost always optimistic.

  Chucky [Bowden] rang, early yesterday, to tell that Lynnie [Fontanne] had quietly died. So glamour is almost all gone, fades away early in a summer morning. This affected me deeply. I cried. (Why does wept sound so melodramatic?) I think of Lynnie's forever mature, womanly being, her quintessential style, her presence, a deep, laughing humor, humane and worldly … all gone, this world of make-believe, this miracle of “class.”

  NOTE: Leo and Gray went to London in mid-November 1983. Their return was delayed by a kidney-stone attack that hospitalized Leo. During this crisis, he realized that the Vanity Fair assignment was overtaxing. He had tired of contending with the magazine's fractious editors, although he was fond of many of them individually. Liber-man's constant watch and counsel, to which Leo customarily deferred, was not making leadership easier.

  JOURNAL • November 17, 1983 • london I wind up my mind: I will “stand” as much as I can, and then I will go. I've done what I wanted to do. I need prove myself no longer to myself. I must plan my own graceful exit. I cannot take much more of Liberman, and I know of no reason for taking him. I see fully that he is bad in his heart: I want none of it. I have done what I wanted to do. No life for either of us, this one with Alex.

  DECEMBER 7, 1983 • NEW YORK CITY A choice on Tuesday between dining with the Donald Newhouses or the king and queen of Spain. Having promised the Newhouses months ago, I regretted the royals. A vengeance on the Inquisition.40

  The Vreeland Saint Laurent evening [at the Costume Institute]—grand tenue—and all the grand French ladies, thinking themselves grand duchesses, seemed more Grand Horizontals [courtesans] aping grand duchesses—a right hand to a place above the left breast and head held “regally” but graciously, almost enquiringly, to the right and all pivoting from the solar plexus. The fashion groupies shouted “Jacqueline!” “Jasmine!” “Catrine!” Almost every woman wore black, and the silhouettes looked superb as they moved about the museum's great halls and along the red carpet through the defiles of white lilac, white orchids, great white screens after dinner toward the waiting mobs— very Scenes from the French Revolution. Dancing in the Temple of Dendur room was very decadent.

  NOTE: Leo was not alone in feeling that Vanity Fair was not jelling. Over the New Year holiday, S. I. Newhouse, Jr., told Leo that Tina Brown would replace him as the editor in chief at the magazine. At the week's end, Leo departed its offices.

  His new assignment would be Condé Nast editorial adviser, a corporate position created for him. Alex Liberman's title was editorial director. There was never any question of Leo competing with Liberman's authority at the magazines, but in the next ten years, the company's editors in chief came often to ask Leo's guidance on features and to seek his help in securing some personality, house, or artwork for their magazines.

  JOURNAL • January 6, 1984 Now I can begin my notebooks and my book again. On this day my brief, but consuming, Vanity Fair life ended. I feel regret, some residue of anger, but most of all relief: A gigantic burden has been lifted from me, and another adventure begins.

  The glorious farewell party the Vanity Fair staff literally threw—great torrents of confetti as thick as heaviest snow—and the love, which I never suspected, that filled my room; the remarkable “book” that the staff made. No other departure—not from Vogue, not from Mademoiselle, was so rich, so loving, so riotous an “affair.” But, of course, this departure was an unwilling going-out and that helped make these (I thought cold) people love me.

  JANUARY 8, 1984 Rather like being jilted, or having a lover run off with someone else … not the same pain, but a similar anguish … all too short a time … why not a chance to have developed … that sort of irritation … and much mulling over what the new “one,” the supplanter, will do … deep wishes that she not survive, that she go down in ignominy, while at all times (save when with intimates) one maintains an “I-don't-care” surface. My guardian angels have been calling, all seemingly relieved.

  JANUARY 15, 1984 We lived as if we were privileged in Grandpa's house. We never equated being Jewish with poverty. We were upwardly mobile (awful designation), and heaven-bent on having a good time—a rich time on the way to the top. Grandpa wanted his sons to get to that top, but he also wanted them to remain in the Pale—strictly Orthodox—and this, I now see, made him a monster. For years I saw only the monster, but in writing this I discover the tragic figure, the figure in which the old and the new warred, with the winning side predestined even before the war began.

  JANUARY 21, 1984 At last I see the shape of my life as a parabola: the level, seemingly forever, of my earliest years, burgeoning into the curve, more fully, and then, when the swell, the breast-shape, seemed most full, leveling to the last great plain. Time alters the view. Time bends straight lines and straightens bent ones.

  JANUARY 24, 1984 Lunch with Prince Michael [of Greece, historical novelist] and Dan Harvey [book publicist], the latter butternut and coonskin-hat America, the former anclen régime touched by modernisme—liquid, deep, Vienna blond's eyes, fluid hands and wrists, all absorbed interest, very private. So much to note: The fisherman who told Prince Michael's father: “I saw a vision—the madonna, all in white in a long white boat sailing swiftly off of Corfu.” “Not the madonna, the Empress Elizabeth [of Austria],” said Michael's father; the tale of his great-aunt who saw a gardener slash off the head of a rose with such delight that she fired him: “There is a murderer!” she told someone. And later he murdered the Empress Elizabeth. Prince Michael touched me in so many moments of my life: “I had a relative, so evil I could never go near her. She bought the house in Venice with thirteen windows on each floor.” Aspasia, whose daughter wanders mad in Venice.41 Prince Michael is in constant communication with a psychic in Paris. He dotes on historical mysteries, and she “feels” solutions to these mysteries, tells them, almost enacts them: Lincoln and Booth, Jeanne d'Arc and the fake Jeanne, Anastasia, the death of Ludwig [II of Bavaria]. He suddenly extends his whole arm, stretching it from shoulder to fingertip, imperiously. Royal gestures in everyday life.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984 Norman [Singer] (now closer to the shape of his father) talking about the gathering Inevitability murmured: “I guess the only thing to do is to gather poison. You know, Geoffrey and I think: Well, we're two hours away….”42 “There's no away,” I said. “So … poison …” he murmured even more quietly. As we talked, another scene unreeled in my head….

  Rebecca West, years ago, 1964, when I was staying with Henry and her in the country, pausing for a moment in the corridor, before we went into lunch, peering at a large, blue and saffron-yellow patterned ancient majolica dish, and murmuring, “We all knew that we were on Hitler's list, and we'd be the first to be taken, so we all had pellets of poison in readiness.” Autumn smoldered outside in the Chilterns Woods, and there was a feeling of secret gypsy fires. I wondered: Would I believe so strongly in my mortality—I mean immortality—that I would refuse to take poison? I always feel that I will have another chance. I suspect that mad Virginia Woolf felt that all of her chances were gone. She was utterly without hope.

  For a moment, just now, I smelled Czettel's smoky, cologney room. At any moment, one's entire life is there, more impatient than objects (how very patient they are), waiting to be lived again. The sorrow of things, their histories so mortal; the mortality of memory, entirely dependent on longevity, dead when all receptacles
have vanished, transmuted to some other state, even when recorded.

  FEBRUARY 11, 1984 Yesterday, starting with a walk from Twenty-second [Street] and First Avenue along Second Avenue, where all is now sordid and the few “little” old shops linger hopelessly midst enormous apartment blocks. Not poor and optimistic and an adventure, as it was, but vulgar and inhuman and depersonalized, the pavements filthy and graffiti on even the newest surfaces.

  Starting here, as we walked in the cold wind, I knew that I had to face a future in which I must choose between my eyes and my kidneys. To control the glaucoma, I will have to take pills that help “manufacture” kidney stones. As simple as that, with as little possibility. Perhaps some manipulation of drops can avoid such a choice, perhaps a “not too dependable laser” can help. But all grim.

  Also, I am trying to adjust to my new office life. Perhaps, if I am patient, this can be fulfilling. It doesn't use much of what I do best (and I wonder how to fill [assistants] Stephen [Pascal] and David [Holland]'s energies and hours).43 I have, I must face it, been “kicked upstairs” with all that implies. I am trying to make the best of that. I must be patient. I must take it all as a sickness to be lived through. But how hard this is, all of it, on Puss, who has, partly because of my perils and my recent life (Vanity Fair), more of his own health troubles.

  FEBRUARY 22, 1984 Mrs. Onassis came to lunch, and we verged on intimacy for the first time. As I sat waiting for her a few minutes, Philip Johnson came up and suddenly kissed me—after all these years! Mrs. O talked of death. “Men think more of death,” she said, “than women do…. Perhaps it has to do with potency,” she ruminated. So our long, quiet lunch.

  FEBRUARY 25, 1984 Lee Radziwill rang Tina Brown, saying, “I can't be on a magazine that has Taki on its staff.” Alex Liberman instantly concluded that I had told Jackie the news of Taki [Theodoracopulos, society columnist] in Vanity Fair, which has been told in newspapers, even on television. A sudden realization that what caused our wretchedness at Condé Nast was Alex Liberman's increasing paranoia. The sickness is that of all Russian “leaders,” which leads to the destruction of multitudes. In these last years, this sickness has spread to some American “leaders.”

  FEBRUARY 26, 1984 Dinner at Diana Vreeland's—she has a passion for quality and an appreciation of vulgarity. She hates teasing: “I believe in reality. I'm too real for teasing.”

  MARCH 3, 1984 Have I kept myself a child, a Peter Pan, by my life with Puss? Grandpa the monster is equaled by Alex the monster. (Alex: “Well, I'm off for two weeks, now it's all yours!”) As a child, I had not to cope with money, except knowing that it bought goodies. I pay the bills, but that is, in a sense, a fantasy. When the accountant talks about taxes, my mind shuts clam-fast.

  MARCH 18, 1984 Dinner at Diana Trilling's—Ned [Rorem] came back from the loo and solemnly declared: “There's a cello back there!” This led to the fascinating saga of James Lionel Trilling and the cello, which, although he was tone deaf, he did play so adroitly that he could have had a brilliant musical career, not as a soloist, but as a member of a quartet. This never happened because he could not tune his instrument. Diana, with her perfect pitch, tuned it for him—sans piano. He found this unbearable and stopped playing the cello, but will not permit Di to give it away: “I tried to get him to tune it by listening to his teacher over the telephone. That never worked. Jim didn't know how to go down or go up. He simply couldn't bear for me to tune his cello.” So the instrument remains—a permanent monument to this son's hatred of his mother. “There's something in me he really loathes,” Di told me months ago. “We're friends, but he hates me.”

  NOTE: Gourmet had been acquired by Condé Nast in the autumn of 1983. Leo regularly advised its editor in chief, Jane Montant, how to tailor the magazine to the company line. Leo began writing cookbook reviews for her magazine. He also wrote for House & Garden, particularly on houses in Los Angeles, where business trips could always combine with a visit to Gray's mother in Laguna Hills.

  JOURNAL • April 25, 1984 • los angeles How to write the way lives have crisscrossed without our knowing it? For instance: If Lewis Galantière hadn't asked Jack Houseman to go with him to one of the Askews' Sunday afternoons, Jack wouldn't have met Virgil Thomson and so would not have been involved in the Hartford production of Four Saints in Three Acts, and so would never have come into the world which became “our world.” Here, then, we also have people of importance, the Askews, the center of a world, whose members and additions become more important than the center. Today, Houseman is world famous, the Askews utterly unknown.

  APRIL 26, 1984 A real tea with Carol and Walter Matthau—a little girl's dream come true—little chicken sandwiches, little watercress sandwiches, little lemon-meringue pies. She was one of three competitive friends: Carol, Gloria [Vanderbilt], and Oona [O'Neill]. “Oona … she's bad now. You know that O'Neill blood.” Carol was Gloria's bridesmaid.

  She's like a woman in a Restoration comedy: Plenty beyond plenty. She explains the enormous, almost empty bedroom: “I like to see Walter coming toward me.” The house is more cushions on more sofas, all roses, all frills, all lace—all illusion. Those glass fruit and flowers lighted from within that hostesses once used for centerpieces on West End Avenue, Carol started collecting, Gloria followed, and America now collects. She did some sort of secret work against the Nazis. She has a whole closet given over to boots; a room the size of a normal Manhattan living room for her clothes; the bathroom stocked like a drugstore. The help, mammies, love her. She's so [face-powdered] white. “This is why it's good to be rich!” says Carol blithely. She has humor about it all.44

  APRIL 28, 1984 Nobody here is building anything under the cost of a major Broadway musical. So much building and decoration, because money is coming out of hiding (see Spengler, Decline of the West). Each new house is built on a site that was occupied by a previous house. During Hitler's War we heard: “He was… She was…” In Los Angeles we hear: “That was the so-and-so house.” They live for the moment but, like the Egyptians in death, have life's trappings in excess and richness to see them through the journey. A world of replaced and displaced persons. The Reagans are the perfect expression of this world. I feel that maybe all of this is illusion and we are on the other side of the screen. The quality of the light here is part of the illusion—the knobs are all turned to a different angle. And living rich, as we do here, is all part of behind-the-screen. [Critic] Nora Sayre says Edmund Wilson was a man of the twenties. Am I a man of the thirties?

  MAY 3, 1984 • NEW YORK CITY Mina: “I have no pain. I just wish I could go to sleep soon. I feel cast up on an island of indifference.”

  MAY 8, 1984 Norman Mailer at lunch at the Four Seasons: “Women are essentially cold—killers.” He intends this marriage, “unless Norris runs off with a younger man,” to last. He says that he has ten years left in which to write novels. “So now I must be careful about what I choose. I want to write two more of Ancient Evenings; a book about Russia; a book about the Nazis.” He talked about us (“We must be related—fifth cousins, maybe”); about his children, lovingly; about how he has nothing in common with Norris's family, and when they come he doesn't know how to talk with or to them; about Christians—he feels that they are cold people, alien to him. “But I've never felt,” he said, “that I'm American. I feel European. I've never felt that I belonged here.” He told about Voltaire visiting the male brothel. I told him about Joseph Hergesheimer enjoying the experience, but not liking the view.45 He gets restless, even in this marriage sometimes, but he's “too tired” to do anything about it. He talked about his way of writing—exhausting himself, always writing in longhand. “Writing poisons me, it poisons my system.” Right now he's signing single pages for the Franklin Mint. For this he's paid two dollars per. (“Pays the rent.”) This horrifies me. He feels that Updike could write a great novel and will. “Oh, his prose, that beautiful prose … only Truman's early things… I suppose they'll bracket Updike's book and mine.” We lunched
for almost three hours. He said: “I know you're saying all these witty things, but I'm getting deaf—move closer.” I said: “You want me to make a scandal?” He loved that.

  MAY 9, 1984 The first anniversary of [the musical] My One and Only—all the true words: enchanting, charming, wonderful. Twiggy older, visibly, by a hard year, but adorable; Tommy Tune [dancer and choreographer] now a superb performer, breaking (I can see him as through a paper hoop he springs) into being an artist. I took Puss onto the St. James stage, and as we peered into the empty theater, a special magic particular and peculiar to this theater—so defenseless—specially in this city—so open-armed and eager, almost doglike. And then all those glorious ghosts thronging that stage—such optimisms and hopes fulfilled and hopes dashed, such instant splendors…. My heart broke and unleashed torrents. I thought of Joan McCracken and Diana Adams [both in Oklahoma!]; Gertie [in The King and I] waltzing with Yul and teaching the little Siamese children; me delivering Marlene's New Year's Eve doughnuts to Yul; Johnny Gielgud haunted as Hamlet; Maurice Evans superimposed as Richard II, then as John of Gaunt—oh, so many ghosts. And I wept. Then Tommy and everyone hailed me as the godfather of the show.46

  MAY 13, 1984 • WASHINGTON, D.C. Bess Myerson [New York City comissioner of consumer affairs] today said that when Jackie married Onassis she said that she did it not so much for the money, but because she thought that the money would bring her the privacy she craved and the protection for herself and her children. Indeed, the money brought, as we all know, the notoriety she did not want. I am haunted by her intense, almost-to-herself cry, when we last lunched: “If only I had made the most of the years in Washington. There were so many brilliant people. I could have learned so much more. But it all went so fast… so fast….”