by Leo Lerman
Dolly told about the glorious theater, movie, and culturally thriving life of Berlin, about the first night of The Blue Angel [in 1930] and the actress who said it had been written for her by Heinrich Mann and then never said another word after it began. Then, the most important: “A year after, Max Hansen, the greatest operetta star in German, beloved by millions, and I stood on a stage in Berlin, bowing to tremendous applause. Suddenly there were shouts and loud, dreadful words, things thrown. I looked down and there were rotten vegetables and fruit. I looked at that audience and I thought: ‘I have lost my respect for my audience. I must leave.' And I did.”21 This was the most significant statement. I thought: I have lost my respect for the people of this country, who elected that man [Reagan] and his scum to power. Where should we go? I who have been in love with America as only a first-generation Jew can be?
I feel that, in a sense, Dolly's life has been wasted. She had so much to give and our theater did not permit her to give it. She has had a difficult life, although good, I think with Al [Hirschfeld], and she has been a wonderful wife. But there is something implacable, forceful about Dolly, like a room already prepared—permanently clean in its most hidden places. I see no shadows.
Last night, helping to dry supper dishes, I tripped and fell down. I did not hurt myself, but frightened Gray, who has too much to bear with my ills and falls—and then I could not be got up. So I slid across the kitchen floor on my bottom, as I had when a small child, saying, “I haven't felt this way since I was five.” Gray was too concerned to be amused: “So we return to childhood. Is this, then, second childhood?” We tried to get me up by my clinging to the teacher's chair in the pantry, but that didn't work. Finally, Gray called [neighbor] Jerry Berger, and he, with one giant heave, raised me. None of this was funny, but I tried, unsuccessfully, to lighten the gloom. Gray said, “I don't know how to cope anymore.”
I now know that the necessary is letting go, in the sense of letting things, people, places, even works of art or nature go. Those can all be there, in house so to speak, and already let go. I do not mean to give up, but to let go—always retaining in one's skin the quintessential beauty, terror, irony, form, discipline of the let-go. I am sad about the necessity of let-go, but I recognize that age must, in order to be a fulfillment, bring wisdom, and let-go is a particle of wisdom.
FEBRUARY 18, 1985 I have made myths to make myself interesting. I made up all sorts of life: moving my family onto Fifth Avenue; inventing a maid being burned to death and Grandpa making us look at the charred remains, saying, “She played with matches.” All sorts of myths—Estelle [Klein, a cousin] coming home from tea dance in the Palm Court, crying, “Children! Children! Promise me you won't do that. You will have lived too soon!” and Grandpa punishing her by locking her in her room and taking all of her clothes away, leaving her stark naked. This was actually one of his punishments, when Momma and the uncles were little.
My mythmaking entranced Anaïs and Rut and Ela. All of my myths were grounded in some scrap of fact, some scrap that had happened or that I had heard as I hid under tables eavesdropping on grown-ups. Mostly Yiddish was spoken, only Yiddish by Grandpa and most of his generation (also some Russian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian), but the younger generation and the great-uncles (Grandpa's brothers) all spoke various kinds of English with heavy Yiddish accents. The young, of course, were slangy and tried not to speak Yiddish, but had to with Grandpa and his chums. I spoke a mixture, and finally, at a public school on 103rd Street, won a purple pencil box for writing a “perfect” sentence, in Miss Cohen's class. (I cleaned her shoes with the costumes from the Victory Pageant. That was an honor.) I was always scribbling, even before I could write. I did not, consciously, want to be a writer: I just wrote. Not wanting to be, but being. And I have worked on this all my life, even when I seemed to be diverted into other forays and byways, writing has always been the highway.
Poppa and his “mistress.” Is any of this myth? Maybe that Poppa slept with her. He probably slept, really snoring sleep. He went to see her in the afternoon. Momma did explain about a fur coat: “You father's friend gave it to me—a lovely woman.” Momma was, I could see and hear, relieved. “And, anyway, she's Catholic,” said Momma in a voice which meant: So it doesn't count.
FEBRUARY 22, 1985 I recall dinner on a bridge table at Fania [Van Vechten]'s when Judith Anderson came, gone quite blond from being Damed. Fania brought out a box and said, “Here are all my letters from Gene [O'Neill].” Then she read some long passages. She read in a tone that clearly was telling “Judy” that Gene had had a passion for Fania. So sucks to Judy, who—I gathered—had had “something” with Gene. After which I took Judy to the San Remo, where she stayed in [photographer] Gjon Mili's apartment. (“Raw meat!” she said to Puss, after her Medea, as she stood in a bloodstained apron in that little kitchen.) But on the way, I asked her if she didn't want to come to Lincoln's, where he was celebrating the Sitwells. Judy said yes. So I took her, and there in Lincoln's back parlor, surrounded by Manhattan crème de la crème, catamites, and dancers, was Edith—turbaned, Byzantine-jeweled, an icon in black “glasses”—enthroned. Osbert on a low stool beside her. I took Dame Judy up to Dame Doctor Sitwell (Edith was most particular about Dame and Doctor). Dame Judy, in her black glasses, made a deep court reverence, and as she came up, I clearly saw Dame Edith reflected in Dame Judy's glasses and Dame Judy in Dame Doctor Edith's. They never said one word to each other all evening, but Dame Judy was surrounded by the young until we left.22
FEBRUARY 23, 1985 The Arnold Glimchers [he an art dealer] gave a party for Louise Nevelson on her eighty-fifth in the Rauschenberg room of the Four Seasons. The difference between a dinner at the Guggenheim for Helen [Frankenthaler] and Louise's: Helen's was a museum-corporate sponsored “public” event, in the well of Frank Lloyd Wright's revenge on art. Louise's was a private party, a genuine celebration of an amazing, original, incredibly individual woman. Helen—minor, all narcissism. Louise has made her ego into important, if perhaps minor, art. Helen is a follower; Louise leads. Louise imposes order on chaos; her work is a portrait of my “interior.” At Louise's I saw no critics, save [architecture's] Paul Goldberger. I saw friends, collectors who seem friends. This was in every sense a private party, with loving tributes, very pretty with calla lilies, tuberoses, black and white settings, at most seventy-five “intimates,” not black-tie (like Helen's), nothing phony, no corporate and museum self-tributes, no Louise self-praise and aggrandizements.
And surprise: This was not the flamboyant Louise—no heavy, fake eyelashes (no eyelashes at all—constant application of those have done away with Louise's own over the years), but eyeliner, no makeup. Her skin was soft as chamois when I kissed her. She wore an old black rabbit-fur pointy hat, a Ralph Lauren–looking little figured faded China-red blouse, gray wool jacket and skirt, long of course, and her unimportant fur coat throughout the evening. She was her basic self. Not that the Louise in gorgeous and outré drag, the Marchesa Casati Louise, isn't herself, but this was the Louise out of Maine, who has worked inexhaustibly for decades. At eighty-five, she, without trappings, is more monumental than her sculptures, more playful. Her huge eyes are undimmed: She sees everything. Her tongue is as dry and as tart as a northern apple.
FEBRUARY 25, 1985 Saturday night we went to dine with George and Jennifer Lang [restaurateurs and writers], and my wish was granted—[soprano] Eva Marton and her husband Zoltán, a surgeon, sat there. I think her the greatest of today's divas. She is commanding in figure, not fat, but imposing. In dress, diva taste—a pink angora “evening” sweater, beaded somewhat and touched by marabou but somehow suitable, unnoticeable jewels, dark hair, not a beauty but beautiful, her skin the texture of a damask rose, and large, lustrous eyes. Her atmosphere very Hungarian. She is forty; Zoltán is forty-six, but in appearance is older. She talks with a profuse Hungarian accent, slipping into Hungarian and German, in and out of English rapidly with porpoise fluidity (recalled my years with Hungarians).
/> Eva Marton is the most intellectual diva I have met. We spent the evening almost à deux. I felt encased with her. My having no peripheral vision helped. She is so enmeshed in her work. She prepares by reading everything. I have never known any diva to do this. She has been working on the “Four Last Songs” [of Richard Strauss], reading Hesse, finding her own vision of them: “They are about death, but everyone thinks them negative. I find them positive. They are about acceptance.” She told me about them in enormous detail, singing softly. Then she talked to me about Salome, citing dates of Wilde's productions, and about the significance of it: “Salome was never loved by anybody—anybody. She is not sensual. She is a virgin. She is unloved. She wants purity from Jokanaan.” Eva Marton's movements are all serene. She knows who she is, where she is going. She is filled with grace, love, and reflectiveness. She knows what she can do: “I will never sing the Marschallin—not for me.” But she will do Lady Macbeth at the Met. “Make your voice ugly— like Verdi wanted it.” “Yes…” she said. All placid, deeply felt. She has lovely humor. She said: “I never felt I was a star until Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act II, at the Metropolitan Opera. Here there's generosity. We have everything in Hamburg: a beautiful house, a swimming pool, I sing my parts—but if you are not German in Germany you are not really important. Here in America you are a STAR.”
FEBRUARY 26, 1985 I remembered that [cardiologist] Dr. Freiman is Valentina [Schlee]'s doctor, so I asked him whether he knew how oddly she was behaving.23 He said, “Oh—I had to put her away to keep her from harming herself. I put her up in Westchester. It was pretty bad. She didn't want to go, we had a straitjacket there. Finally she went, and as she walked out of her apartment, she said, ‘I want to die in my bed.' “ One night she had opened her great cupboard and taken all of her beautiful clothes out, piled them in the center of the room, on the floor, and looked in her big looking glass and said, “Who is that?” I rang Lin [Tissot], and he said that she always did this stealthily at night, tearing everything apart.
I thought of Valentina in her glory, proudly striding down the aisle at the Shubert in a huge envelopment of heavy, silver-gray faille, only her eyes peering through eyeholes, the night of the Lunts' opening in Amphytrion 38…. And Valentina at the Gunthers' standing guard over Garbo, reclining on a sofa, one satin-shod foot tapping the air, dangling from masses of tiny black lace ruffles…. And Valentina in Venice … in her Fifth Avenue shop … in her Sixty-ninth Street building … in her own beautiful apartment … so many memories. Valentina climbed by her trade, as a Russian refugee who came with the Chauve-Souris and her exotic fled-the-revolution background, and could have been a duchess—who knew? Now, here she is at the other end of her street.
MARCH 2, 1985 I rang, my weekly call, to [Cousin] Marty. He answered, having difficulty completing thoughts with the appropriate words. “I want you!” he said. “You can have me,” I said, three thousand miles away, and we both laughed, both very young.
Now, sitting here, on the edge of my bed, in this deep red and pale violet room that I try not to love (I know the danger of loving rooms and houses— even more dangerous than loving people)…. I see the graveyard and the family plot (Molke's grave is covered with poison ivy!), and, at last, I feel what I did not feel as I stood there, shutting my eyes against harsh sunlight.24
MARCH 8, 1985 Brigitta on the blower around eightish. “You're the only one I know I can talk to so early in the morning.” She's been in tears, unexpected floods, as she sits writing. She feels keenly that the fascinating life she had with Goddard no longer exists: “But surely it exists somewhere.” I assured her that it doesn't. Brigitta is weeping at the low time in which we find ourselves, the airport and Dynasty world with costly emptiness at the top and attrition everywhere.
The Old Order Changes Department: Si rang at 3:45 p.m. “Hear anything about The New Yorker?” he asked. I knew before he said, since he sounded like a gleeful twelve-year-old: “The Board voted unanimously to sell it to us.” “Should I congratulate you?” “I don't know,” he said. “Well, mazeltov,” I said. We laughed a lot.
MARCH 9, 1985 If the Times is accurate, [editor William] Shawn has behaved badly, specially to the staff he cherishes. Why hasn't he gracefully made this inevitable transition easier for his staff? [Board chairman] Peter Fleischmann, dying of cancer, must want to make his family secure. The only possibility: a huge sum of money and sign this. Shawn, seventy-seven or seventy-eight, holds his chair in a vise. I understand this, but surely he could not expect the board of The New Yorker to withhold this prodigious sale, to permit him to—what? How could he match $142 million? Si has got himself some of America's glories, but also a nest of seething neurotics, making fantastical demands. I do not think that Si plans to touch The New Yorker editorially. He reveres it. But surely he will seek to improve business. The magazine has become increasingly dull. Shawn rousing up his staff is a wretched, stupid business. Natacha [Stewart] told tales of weeping in the corridors of the magazine, of mourning, gloom, apprehension.
Si acquired Random, Knopf, The New Yorker, and doesn't have to use any of it to climb. He is where he and Victoria want to be.25 Si is no Taubman, Trump, Helmsley, or Gutfreund. Si and Victoria are the least vulgar of today's rich people, as are Donald and Sue [Newhouse]. No flamboyance here—art, books, music, movies, and power, but a different power than the Dynasty ilk. Sam Newhouse bought for the joy of buying, building an empire. This, I feel, is part of Si's drive, the passion to own symbols of culture.
MARCH 18, 1985 John Simon's homophobic review of The Octette Bridge Club and his remark [leaving the theater] after Anatol (about his hoping that AIDS kills off all homosexuals) produces a powerful column in Sunday's Daily News from Liz Smith. I liked John Simon, but I would cut him now.26 If I had had a neighbor I liked and discovered that that neighbor was a Nazi, would I go on liking him? I did enjoy John; he is the most brilliant of the [theater] critics. (Stanley Kauffmann is less; Brendan Gill is not educated as broadly and deeply as John.) But John has in him the rage of certain leaders of the French Revolution. He has interested me: his tears over [Alexandra] Isles, who came and went in his life; his attacks on physical appearances (going too far, but these were on individuals—Liza Minnelli's face, Zoe Caldwell's breasts). Now he has become, or at last he has emerged, mad with homophobia, and I will not be a friend to anyone who says, in effect: “Some of my best friends are queens.”
MARCH 30, 1985 I never had a conversation with my father. We never talked about anything, not even sex, but he has become more a person since his death, many years ago, than he was while alive in my life.
Now I look at Puss and my heart faints and is fearful and I hold him as tightly as possible, even when I do not do this physically. I look at him and he is the total, he is the pure self that is my being.
APRIL i2, 1985 My stockings are now lavender, to lure spring hopefully. I should write about support hose and what they mean—and what trusses meant. Age, when I was very young, was symbolized by the truss (now obsolete?). The truss could be, when inverted, a headdress for An Invader from the North.
Yesterday, late in the day, I felt that I had been Struck a Mortal Blow. (How the books I loved when I was young—and still love—cling. Robin Hood and the saga of the Round Table.) We were told that, indeed, Saint Thomas [church] is going to build its choir school back of us, where a theater now stands, and that the structure will be twelve stories high. After that, Puss burst into such rage— a devastating, destructive, fruitless rage. The following hours I felt poleaxed, bludgeoned. What to do? Where could we go—not only during the blasting, but if we were entombed—the school at our windows, all light and sky and sun gone?
Part of me considers: Have all of these years been worth all of the anguish? I know that the answer is yes, but I also know that the price of my weakness is Puss stopping his unique, beautiful work. That is what he had to give, but instead he has thrown it away and put me in its place. Kirk [Askew] knew that this would happen. (“If you st
ay together, Gray will eventually not draw a stroke.”) Question: Has Puss been a happier person this way, or would he have been happier, more fulfilled, if he had been true to his genius? I think the latter. This is the bitterness.
APRIL 13, 1985 Long discussion with Stephen, Puss, Lloyd [Williams], and Joel [Kaye]27 about AIDS and how this will bring (and is bringing) social changes. In the homosexual world: celibacy, courtship, limited sexual encounters and practices, terror… In the heterosexual world: bewilderment, terror. I said, “When AIDS hits the heterosexual world that will be the time of devastating backlash at the homosexual world.” The signs are already visible: The selfish, I-don't-care fringe of the homosexual world and the already infected who want to revenge themselves by taking with them “sacrifices” are identical with their long-ago forebears in the Black Death. Thus far we have, to the best of my knowledge, no Poe [“Masque of the Red Death”]. We have would-be Wildes, Cowards, even Sheridansand Neil Simons. This plague, if it is a plague—draws closer and closer. Theater pieces try to show it; fiction, television, movies lag. I heard of the roommate [lover] who, at the service for his dead chum, thanked those who had come to see him and specially those who had touched him.
APRIL 14, 1985 Van Johnson—huge, extrovert, full of asides (“I'm not circumcised!”), campy (“I was married and have three children, two adopted. I really want to marry George Hearn!”28), taking the uneaten fish for his cats— seems to ENJOY! He is an unceasing flow of anecdotes. “I hate nostalgia!” he said, but when asked by one of the guests what “was the most glamorous,” he answers before she finishes the question: “Carole Lombard and Clark Gable coming into the commissary at MGM for lunch. That was when we all wore suits and ties to work. They glowed. She was so beautiful and he was so—oh— electric. He came up to us kids at our table and we all nearly died.” Van is a molting, enormous tassel flower at that sun-dazzling moment when the corn is higher than houses and winds sweep the sky pristine blue. Everything he does or says is on tippy-toes. I think that he must be compulsively neat.
