by Leo Lerman
50. “On a Sunday morning walk, Grandpa Goldwasser said to his brothers and sons while I stared longingly at the great house [of Otto Kahn]: ‘This little mamser [bastard] will never know the maedlin [girls] who live in there. Mr. Kahn's tuchters [daughters] he will never know.' “ Journal, July 18, 1982.
51. Ralph Colin (1900-1985), a lawyer and trustee to arts organizations, was Allene Talmey's brother-in-law.
52. The controversial jacket photo, of a louche young Capote sprawled on a Victorian sofa, was taken by Harold Halma (1920-1968).
53. Nina Novak (b. 1927?) was also a ballerina with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. GF: “A strong dancer with a horsey smile that looked as though painted on.”
54. Holly Brubach, fashion journalist, consultant, and editor, worked with Danilova on her memoirs.
55. “The Cow” was Leo and Capote's nickname for writer Marguerite Young. Because Leo often dieted, many of his meals with Capote at Schrafft's in the forties consisted of grapefruit. “Poor Butterfly” was the theme song of their favorite thirties radio drama, Myrt & Marge. Local Color (1950) was an anthology of Capote's sketches of life in different places, which included his story “Tea with Hilary.” In their friendship's early years, many of Capote's notes closed, in ungrammatical French, with “mille tenderesses” (a thousand caresses).
JOURNAL • september 30, 1984 I rang Mina. She is in a hard-to-breathe bad way. Her mind is cluttered with trivial, irrelevant details: “I've never been that way,” she said. “I can't even sit up to read. Dying is so boring. I must get up to be given a bath. I must do that!” She talks of Howard Adams's Proust album [A Proust Souvenir], and how much better Ngaio Marsh is than Agatha Christie, and how marvelous Virginia Woolf's [diary] volume five is, and how kind she is to Angelica [Bell] and Bunny [David Garnett]. (He was Mina's lover. That is how I met this bone-selfish, talented man.) “Good night, dear, I wish I could work. Tell me things.”
OCTOBER 5, 1984 Arthur Miller's After the Fall: The most wonderful thing that happens in one's life is also the most awful. This great play is perhaps the greatest American play since the best O'Neill. (Our Town is the quintessential American play.) Fall is so close to the facts of Arthur and Marilyn's life. She said to me: “I can't even remember words!” He echoes this. These two wreck one another's natural lives, but he, in a sense, triumphs. Arthur's great play reveals its author's agonies, while confirming and elevating its audience's. Do all lovers kill and exalt simultaneously? Is this what Shakespeare and Wagner and Proust tell us is the essence of love? Only in Mozart is there clear, steady radiance? A very tired, young person inside, exalted by Arthur's play and the acting of it, suddenly caught a glimpse, in the looking glass above the basin in the bathroom, of a distinguished, white-bearded old man exterior, with inquiring eyes.
Mina's throaty voice is thickened but fast, a husky tumult, as if racing against fear, as if this rush of talk could hold back her night of pain and exhaustion and sleeplessness…. She throbs on about books and Proust and Philip Johnson (“That Fascist Nazi in the morning paper leaning over Jackie Onassis. That's what I think when I see him—now so respectable.”) I could not say: “But Lincoln helped make him respectable.” She said: “Oh, dear—you looked like a rabbi in the morning paper.” She laughed sweetly. “The painkiller lasts only fifteen minutes, then the exhaustion. Such a bore. I cling by reading. I find the only way to go on is reading.”
OCTOBER 7, 1984 Diana Trilling on D.H. Lawrence, about whose early novels she is writing 2,500 words for the Times … She went on about the revelation she'd had: Frieda Lawrence unfaithful to D.H. from the very beginning. She loved to bed down in the hay (literally) in a barn, with Bunny Garnett, some friend of his (Middleton Murry1) nearby listening, and she would pound away. (Or was F.L. doing it with Murry?) She made sure that D.H. knew about every one of her infidelities, and he always accepted them. She made dreadful scenes in front of people, jeering at D.H.'s sexual impotence or inadequacies. I was surprised that Diana hadn't known this. When I was about seventeen or eighteen, Hester Sporer told me all about this. Wasn't it Hester who described Frieda Lawrence raging at D.H. in Taos, screaming: “Show them! Show them what you don't have! Open your fly!”
OCTOBER 8, 1984 When I was a little boy, Momma would say to me: “Don't be a Leopold and Loeb!”
Why do I fight the happiness of writing? Reluctance to give birth, to part with—yet, I never have been reluctant to give myself. I have always been ardent—actually a pushover—for charm, for sex, for influence, for certain kinds of looks, for lovingness, for wit, for gaiety … even for certain smells or colors.
Since Friday late we have been here [three days at home] with— miraculously—almost no scratched or rubbed-wrong places. I have written very sparsely about our personal and private lives, the loving life we live here together, the life we have shared (and the parts we could not share without capsizing the boat). What of this rich, loving together life? Surely, if this is an honest book, our life (singular in every aspect, save the parts unshared) must suffuse it. Our life is the deep well that nourishes us. We have been married— what other way to look at our state?—for some thirty-four years, with all of the ups, downs, a midlife crisis (mine) any “normal” marriage engenders. How can this not be part of this book, if only to show the young that such a life is possible? Is this scribbling “doing it for the children”? I think of Stephen [Pascal] and all the family relations. I have one life, one center, and that is Puss. It seems impossible to be entirely truthful. Not so much about “big things”— never the pleasures, the joys—as about the little irksomes. Here, we seem to get into the Good Manners of Love, which make for calm and proportion. Knots, which, if I fumble persistently and long enough, I manage to untie. But sometimes my patience trickles away.
OCTOBER 14, 1984 We went out to the Kern gala in the refurbished Town Hall—a maniac taxi driver, a stinking Forty-third Street, Manhattan at its pestilential nadir. Then—Town Hall reborn and pristine, righting all. The gala enchanting, with laughter and tears, so much well-trained talent—especially the boys. Paula [Laurence] sang Kern's “Blue Danube Blues” from Hello Dearie (1921) with great delicacy, tenderness, wit, and charm.
Kitty Carlisle Hart came up to us. Always groomed, she looks good at all times. Paula was Moss Hart's [lover, before Kitty]. Kitty said to Paula: “Your dress, darling—probably very effective onstage.” At the reception, Paula, seeing Kitty with Lara Teeter (Kitty played in [the 1983] On Your Toes with this youth), said to Kitty, “Oh, darling, how nice that you've continued your summer-stock romance.” I like these The Women exchanges—”jungle red” exciting. Kitty: “You know, I worked with Kern in Hollywood at the Bowl. He was so irascible— with the accent on the rascible.” Kitty still has the New Orleans touch. She said to me: “My mother brought me to Town Hall. What did your mother bring you to hear?” “My mother,” I said, “didn't bring me. I brought her.”
OCTOBER 16, 1984 Lee Radziwill (understated, lean, face cheekbony, large dark eyes and wide-lipped smile) hosted a party for “The Adorables” (Fizdale and Gold) in John and Tug's old house on Seventy-fourth Street, now hers.2 So odd—shadows of parties for Margot and of Lili Darvas being launched as a cateress: She catered and came as a guest, her black cook having learned all of Lili's mother's recipes, marvelous Hungarian dishes (Laci and I dined there at least once a week). There I sat in Lee's drawing room, a deep mango-colored room, that past and me at this party.
OCTOBER 19, 1984 At dinner with [composer] Lukas and [painter] Cornelia Foss, Prince Romanov's sister-in-law told how her sister, the prince's wife, Mimi di Niscemi, sat on her chest and banged her head against the floor when they were children.3 Mimi beat her little sister [Maita]—now big in size, not tall like Mimi, but all huge curves like an Oriental view of a eunuch. Once, when Mimi bit her sister deeply on her arm, their nanny asked Mimi, “Did you enjoy it?” Mimi said, “Yes!” The nanny bit her deeply. Mimi never bit her sister again—but she beat the hell out of her with a hocke
y stick. “Island people suffer from inferiority no matter how exalted their position,” she said.
At the Fosses I suddenly played fiction, telling Mimi's sister and Earl [McGrath, art dealer] a version of my second try at running away when young: going off to London, at eighteen (!), with four trunks—based on solid blocks of truth, but decorated fantastically. This was elaborate and utterly believable, even by me—an experiment, which sprang full-blown.
OCTOBER 20, 1984 Because of painting the kitchen of our apartment, I have been forced into the “real” world. Yesterday, trying to flag a cab, having already to-and-fro-ed for breakfast, I was so undone. I felt salt-eyed and filthy and deafened and distraught. I, at last, fully realized what a sheltered life I have been living during these last years: taken down, put into a car (Stephen usually waiting), driven to the office (David usually waiting if Stephen isn't with me), taken up to the office, protected by Stephen and David, taken down to the car, driven to lunch at the Four Seasons or Hubert's, someone always helping, taken away again…. So I go—almost never alone, almost, literally, never touching earth. If I had not had years of earth—deep in earth—this would be unhealthy, this protected life.
OCTOBER 26, 1984 A human infant is being kept alive by a baboon's heart. How Edith Sitwell would flame that into a sun-gold poem.
Little startles, in the night… at suspended moments in the day … a little tremor, like a knuckle rapping the heart… a sudden knife in a muscle … breath rhythms altered … death nibbling away silently, unseen—but what a terrifying clamor, within … a tocsin perpetually warning … and after seventy the noise of oblivion is deafening. The blackness always lurking at the bottom is not frightening, in a sense, comforting and inviting obliteration….
NOTE: During these months, Leo devoted many weekends to organizing papers and sorting through his books for sale to a secondhand dealer. In the following, he reflects on several photographs he had come across, some of them from his childhood.
JOURNAL • November 17, 1984 Who then, am I, have I become? All of them, those boys and men: the one in Uncle Irving's camel-hair coat and green fedora, yellow wool scarf, very thirties, very young, very romantic leading man? The sweet-faced, big-eared stage manager in the twin-sweater set—blue and woolly—backstage at the greasepaint-fragrant Mansfield—the girls clattering down the iron steps in their mules, ready for Act I, heavily beaded eyelashes, satin kimonos, my hand raised to signal lights down in the house or footlights up—was I that stage-managing, theater boy? And what of the one who hungrily strolled the avenues or Riverside Drive in the late spring, early summer evenings, hungry for experiences, that lucky high school boy who never—God knows why—got into trouble, even in the upstairs speakeasies, in shadowy, sometimes totally black rooms on West Seventy-second Street? What of that boy—who somehow, no matter what he did, remained somewhere within innocent? Who then is this somewhat staid, sometimes priggish, always correct on the surface man? Who is this gray-bearded, gimpy-legged man? This public figure of a private man? Who was the man involved in setting this house to rights today, who ate pizza and pumpkin pie, who was petted and excoriated by the person he loves best, fell into blackness, climbed up into the light, who hears Lotte Lehmann, Oie Frau ohne Schatten, at the moment—but the moment is already gone, the voice still. And what of the future intimations of creatures in him? And mortality—this man trying to evaluate how much time is left and—surprise—how much time there was before? All those years— were they really a long time, a moment, or moments strung like beads? No, inextricably mixed—always—forming and transforming simultaneously. And I suspect so is personality: the sum total is a character? Another question: What attracts so many people? Who do they think I am? Death is the pin that fixes the moment. This I know. And I know this also: Any one life is one moment. Some lives are bigger, more intensely lasting—Shakespeare, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mozart… these are the fullest moments.
I tire more easily. I fall into sudden sleep—a brief, intense, dream world glimpsed through a slatted fence, shards of some familiar world gone unfamiliar in sleep. The stair creaks and I wake, prop my book up—a protection. All life long books have been my protection, but have I ever fooled anyone with this ruse?
I have no great gift for sharing, despite my apparent talent for almost immediate intimacy. I write to breathe.
NOVEMBER 22, 1984 Yesterday to Dorothy Norman's. I hadn't been for years. I hadn't seen Dorothy for years. Ascending in the little seat that glides up the handrail, very deus ex machina in classical drama, I saw, as in a faded photograph taken sixty years ago, Dorothy and the remains of her “circle”—a photo from which I had to blow the heavy, oily dust, some of the must of time never vanishing.
In this room I made Mary McCarthy cry. I saw [Arthur] Koestler pass across the far end, rather like [Albert] Bassermann in a film about Nazi Germany. I met La Pasionaria4 and the mayor of New York, Indira Gandhi and Nehru, [political theorist] Hannah Arendt and [artist] John Marin. I heard Edward [Norman] and Dorothy rage at one another and saw the adding-machine mind of Dorothy at telegraphic speed. Someone said: “Dorothy, all your lives, who knows them? Yours was the place the Europeans came, the one place we all gathered. Who knows your two books about Nehru, your anti-Fascist life?” Dorothy replied: “When I look back and see the shy girl I was, the innocent girl …” The turning point came early for Dorothy when, after her idealistic honeymoon at Harvard, she was disillusioned in [her husband] Edward's idealism. Then she found Stieglitz, Art, International Politics, causes, and herself.5 She found herself repeatedly. Dorothy's caviar's gone quite red with age, but the refreshments, the decor, and the cast haven't changed.
NOVEMBER 24, 1984 Thanksgiving at Diana Trilling's—the hard bone of the conversation was Diana's admiration for Lillian [Hellman]'s strength of character, in going out in public, when she was visibly and horrifyingly old, ugly, sick: “No one wants the old, ugly, and sick to show themselves. No one wants to be reminded.” Yet when Lillian died [on June 30], Diana said, “I've lost my most hated enemy.”
DECEMBER 2, 1984 Alex Liberman: “To be truly creative, to create anything, you must demolish first.” Trapped in the demolition, that was my life for a decade.
DECEMBER 8, 1984 Carl Bernstein brought Matthew Tynan, who is heart-breakingly his father, in the face and pallor and the way he holds his head and smiles—Ken's shy smile, before importance and self-certitude fixed that smile into a permanent skepticism and gloss on his own wit. Kathleen [Tynan, Matthew's mother] was born too late for what she is, and could have been any time pre-1939. Her abundant, flowing mane is her beauty. Her air of sexual languor, all the references are from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hightum layabouts. She would have had dukes, a brilliant playwright, and assorted frogs and wogs. I see her by Gainsborough teeming through St. James Park in one of those glorious hats. Edward VII would have had a go, between Daisy Warwick and Mrs. Keppel. Surely Kathleen would have been a triple duchess. Now she, discreetly, has a French lover (moviemaker) and stacks up men lustily, even has got Mr. Heartburn to play nanny-tutor to Matthew.6 She peers at one with those laughing, wide eyes, beneath that gorgeous tumult of Gainsborough hair. She is rather like marvelous poetry: I hear the sound, so beautiful that I forget to make sense of the words.
DECEMBER 9, 1984 I plunged into Virginia Woolf's final volume of letters, but not as rewarding to me as the diary. The bones are the same, but the letters are flashy. The diary, even though she seems aware that it will be read, one day, by others, is to and about the darling self. I am writing to be read, one day—I don't care when—but I am really writing to talk to myself. I am talking to my best friend, and I forget anyone else, forget future readers, am only concerned to question myself, interpret myself, re-create myself, my worlds and the denizens, monsters, angels (and combinations in each) in my jungles, to collect, save, and cherish, to confirm our being at least for a little moment longer… narcissistic, of course.
[Ballet critic] Dickie Buckle's b
een after Brigitta all week, filling in his Bal-anchine book. He remarks in the first eight chapters, which he gave her to read, something about Balanchine's “idiosyncratic sexual behavior.” Brigitta: “I asked him, ‘What do you mean?' ‘Impotent,' Buckle said. Oh, Lucia Davi-dova, she always is such an intriguante. ‘Who was married to him?' I asked.”7 Buckle went on about the evils of Bernard Taper and how he said Balanchine stood, unseen in the night, looking up at Brigitta's window. Brigitta: “I asked him, ‘What are your sources? I don't believe that.' It's all those old Russian women. I asked George what he thought of Bernard Taper's book [Balanchine: A Biography]. He said, ‘I never read that trash.' “ Gossip and rumor become fact and history. She went on about Jamie Bernstein's mis-organized wedding and [her father] Lennie's speech and tears: “Everyone trembled at what he might say next. Adolph [Green] made a speech all about himself.” That's that world—always all about themselves. They were singular, but they've lost their singularity—all except Betty [Comden].
DECEMBER 10, 1984 André and Chiquita [Gregory]8 gave a dinner for Nora and Herbert [Ross], which was historic because Steve Sondheim and Jerry Robbins talked to one another, the first time in years, and because Betty Bacall did not use one four-letter word all evening long and behaved softly and sweetly, not her usual imitation of a pistol-packing mama.9 Steve on early influences: movies of the thirties and forties colored his whole life. Betty on wanting to “show” Hollywood, hoping to do so when she returned there in [the musical] Applause: “I was more frightened than at opening night in New York, and you know what? Nobody cared. No one even came.” The desperate life of stars. Steve's ecstatic over his recently bought house and acres in Roxbury, things left him by [librettist] Burt Shevelove, and all of the things from his mother Foxy's apartment: “She's in a nursing home.” He intends to lead a very private life. The Gregorys put on the dawg: two maids in caps, aprons, and black uniforms.
