The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Miltie Goldman told me that [British comedian] Hermione Gingold, thinking that she is dying, asked for a rabbi to come. He did, and she seemed to be consoled or resigned. When she talked to Miltie, he mentioned that Gigi was being done in London. Suddenly, the old warrior Hermione was there— breathing fury: “Gigi! And they didn't ask me! Why didn't they ask me!?” This spirit never dies first. Does it after the body dies?

  NOTE: Leo and Gray went to Los Angeles to do a feature on the house that had been George Cukor's and to scout other houses for possible stories in House & Garden.

  JOURNAL • APRIL 22, 1985 • LOS ANGELES The DeMille house—the shock of its plain ugliness; the contrast between his grandiose, opulent, epic films and this almost colorless austerity. “Mrs. DeMille liked only pink flowers in the house,” said the eighty-five-year-old housekeeper. “She didn't like to see them being cut or carried in. She just liked them to be here.” A Cherry Orchard feeling in the dusty velour and endless memorabilia. Which were the movie props and which the real furniture?

  Then George Cukor's house, still intact (flowers in vases), but haunted— specially in his office, beginning in the passage where all of the photos are huge—so sad—tears—such mementos of Cecil [Beaton] and everyone in their glory—a sad photo of Marilyn Monroe. George's bedroom, so unloved. A house with no center.

  APRIL 26, 1985 In Los Angeles artworks are purchased according to reputation and sized according to income. The rooms are like hotel rooms waiting for visitors to stop a day or two.

  Gray: “The tendency now is to have a gallery, not just to have things hanging around. [Talent agent Michael] Ovitz has one; [television producer] Doug Cramer will. They all have their little collections of primitive art, authenticity depending on the people who are buying it for them. They all have their little collections of classics, ‘Old Masters'—like Jack Youngerman and [James] Rosenquist, and all the tiny Rothkos! I didn't know that Rothko painted such tiny paintings—like bathroom windows. Then there's always an Agnes Martin. She doesn't interfere with the decor or the upholstery—a decorator's dream. They always have the painter on the wall that they have just walked into a gallery and discovered—usually local—and ‘just bought,' and he just happened to turn out to be worth a fortune, usually touted to fame by a dealer. They can't believe their luck, ‘getting in on the ground floor.' Occasionally there's a Monet, some hope for a Léger. ‘Well, if I found a Mondrian I wouldn't turn that down,' a collector who'd plunged in four years ago said. They say: ‘This is an old [Frank] Stella,' which means it's got to be two or three years old, and add apologetically, with a tone of I-don't-really-care-I'm-courageous, ‘Not his latest.' Sitting around on coffee tables, the latest art books. Then—this has been forever—the painting that covers the movie screen. I haven't see any profoundly felt eccentricity, anything that isn't safe or negotiable—only at Nora and Herbie's.”

  The closest thing to Old Masters I've seen on this trip are [producer] Ray Stark's sculptures (genuinely knowledgeable, he invited us to stroke them); Edie Goetz's superb collection (second- or third-generation Hollywood— thirties prime), and of course the Ganzes.29

  APRIL 28, 1985 We're on the way to Palos Verdes and Elin Vanderlip's [Friends of French Art] “do” for the French Nobility, when Eleanore [Phillips], one of the most worldly people I have ever known, in lilac, pale mauve, and white said, “You never know what you'll find at Elin's—horror or comedy.”30 About to go up from the highway to Elin's cloud-cuckoo-land, Evelyn Lambert (the reason for our entrapment), flashed by: “I'm just going to little Mrs. Miller's. She's so nice and she's a $4,000 member.” Here was the full Evelyn: in bright yellow eyelet dress, shocking-pink scarf and stockings, red shoes, huge shocking-pink scarfed hat. She looked like an emerging nation's flag. We drove into the courtyard, to find the gate festooned in red, white, and blue balloons and buntings. We sat roaring with laughter at the cries of the peacocks, now grown so numerous, since the original six Grandpa Vanderlip brought. They are a menace—maniacal with screams of “Hooray! Hooray!” (most patriotic, these birds) as they lunged at the guests and proprietors. “You know,” said Eleanore, “they jab you in the most frightful places!” This then was to be titled “Wanna See Where the Peacock Bit Me?” So, we sat and roared and were mean tongues to arriving guests. “What's that?” startled “ladies” screamed. “Oh—the peacocks. They just love human hair,” I told them. [Philanthropist] Mary Lasker's stepdaughter asked, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Matisse?” “Everyone,” I told her, although more think Monet. The local gentry, in going-to-church attitudes, fled in. We followed, into Nat-acha Rambova's idea of Tivoli-cum-Alhambra.

  The French Nobility finally drove up in a yellow bus, labeled “The Tiffany Line.” The sounds of pistol fire were balloons exploding. Somehow, Evelyn and we became the receiving line as the Nobility sashayed past: the Prince and Princess Napoleon, the Princess de Ligne, the Count and Countess de Bois-gelin, Count Charles André Walewski. I finally ending up in the throne of honor. Here were ancient French names, Napoleonic nobility, aristos … all on the huge terrace, under giddy umbrellas, facing the sea, at a promotion to save their châteaux, manipulated by a former secretary [Vanderlip], her lover [assistant film director Lee] Katz, and Evelyn Lambert—the senior heroine. All filmed by NBC. The spirit of Margaret Dumont is not dead!

  APRIL 29, 1985 • LAGUNA HILLS, CALIFORNIA The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna—another American dream of a French château (like Newport and Palm Beach). Splendors of marble, Chinese carpet, nouvelle cuisine in a mediocre California way, Pacific vastnesses, and flora galora. It is all Hollywood Movie Millionaire fin-de-siècle whorehouse. What could this throwback decoration signify? Social levels are all mixed up, but a caste system remains. The cultural possibilities are vaster. What Main Street's Carol Kennicott thought she wanted is so abundantly available that we could, like the Duchess of Malfi, die of a surfeit. What is Main Street today, when all the world is Main Street, and boosterism is equated with morality? Here in Orange County, the developer is God, and culture is the Social Ladder, as it is in Manhattan and everywhere else. I am chicken-soup aristocracy—with noodles, of course, even with matzo balls.

  MAY 7, 1985 • NEW YORK CITY This afternoon [Allene Talmey's sister] Georgia Colin rang: “Allene is fading fast…. Would you write her obituary for the Times? You are the only one who could do it.” I said “Of course.” I thought of our long years together: that first meeting, when Mrs. Chase sent for her, and we became chums… how she said one day, “Now I'm going to put this copy in the typewriter and comb all the raspberry jam out of it” … the evening she said, “I know the kind of mind you've got—full of spaghetti with a lot of good chunks of meat in it” … all of those walks through the city, from theaters and concerts, stopping at Schrafft's for sodas… the night I sat in her cabbage-rose-wallpapered living room, and she cautiously asked me about Noël's sex life … the night she first had Alex and Tatiana to dinner…. All of this was during the war. I could go on and on and on, but this is not an obituary, more a love letter, to a small, sharp-eyed, plumpish, lethal woman, fascinated by the show, a woman who always knew when the show was perfection and that it was always passing. Some girls went away in hysterics, some in glory. No one forgot her who had ever felt her editorial pen—or, as some felt, her editorial sword … much more—as she would write—”tk.”31

  This request was immediately followed by Paula Laurence asking would I be on the committee to honor Yul. I laughed, telling her about the early, early morning when he had tried to kill me, because, as he reminded me eight years ago, I said, “No.” Yul, flung back in Touche's bed, Narcissus naked, murmuring, “Why won't you? Why won't you?”32 And this some three or four floors above Eleanor Roosevelt. That was the morning I saw the nuns, in their long black habits, dancing in the snow, a black circle in the blue-white morning of Washington Square.

  MAY 12 2, 1985 “Oh—you're the great intellectual and arbiter, Diana Trilling,” said [cartoonist] Bil
l Hamilton, coming up with his chum. “Yes, indeed,” said our Di, “that is who I am. You are absolutely right.” Diana: “My whole life has been based on logic and reason—none of that mysticism, not for me. Even when I was a little girl. I remember my brother saying: ‘Oh that's Diana— reasoning it all out!' “ She will be eighty in July. She is absolutely sure of her moral position in all matters and she is clear-eyed about who are Amenables and who are not. Nothing mystical—that is our Di.33

  Conversation with Claudette (age eighty-three or -four) on the blower (her vitality, great good humor—a radiance), after which I know that “keeping busy” is the clue—until one is so eroded by time that only the shell is left. Claudette told me: “Oh—I have such a good time. This play [Aren't We All, by Frederick Lonsdale] is so easy and such fun!” She has a round, full voice, constantly colored by some bright source of inner laughter.

  MAY 17, 1985 The School of American Ballet board met—eight members plus Lincoln. Four, including Nancy Lassalle, voted that he should be hospitalized and four against. Lincoln had the deciding vote: He voted against. What a farce!

  MAY 18, 1985 In the [Plaza's] Oak Room, on the leather banquette, Goddard said to me: “You know, I'm not that way, but I understand.” But I knew that he had “roamed” with [conductor] Lehman Engel. Lehman had told me certain dimensional facts. I also knew that (this was rumored) he visited the Hotel Elysée.34 … But what difference does any of that make now? All of that passion and frustration and planning … What difference if he had an affair with Felicia or let Lehman go down on him? The fact of his being a good friend, a sharp, witty tongue, an omnivorous reader, a shark of an executive businessman, a passionate admirer of quality and of glamour and of fame, a frustrated composer and novelist… and this only a makeshift catalogue—all of that is of importance. The good he did, the pleasure he gave, that is what matters— and—oh—how little time that will survive—only as long as memory. His grandchildren will hear of him, a legend, and so memory will transform him, and who can tell what, or whether, he—or I, having no posterity—will be in a little while hence.

  MAY 23, 1985 Last night, as Richard and I sat at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, formerly the Mansfield (which had been the center of my life so long ago, and where I nightly stood in the wings [during Behind Red Lights], prompt book in hand, stage right, signaling curtain up, curtain down, dim this, douse that, joking with the electrician—but all the while hungering to go to England where Richard was already), Richard said: “Well, we made it into our seventies!” Then the play [Aren't We All] began, and we were charmed, and here was Claudette on a free ride and Rex [Harrison], with a sly, eighteenth-century sort of humor, very Du Maurier seeming. We had first watched and laughed at Rex in 1937, in a theater in Piccadilly Circus, where he was playing French Without Tears. Knox Laing was his stage manager (I got over that). And Lynn [Redgrave now] reminding of Penelope…. And—as always—my whole past with me, and all I have loved, always there, while the “present” goes on happening.

  My birthday celebration, not yet ended, rampaged, and so engulfed that at last the floral tributes almost undid the joys. What got me through, when the joy suddenly ran out like sawdust from a punctured play-pretty doll, was Katherine Mansfield saying: “The only thing you can give someone you love, when in a state, is your calm.” But underneath I sank deep into the slough.

  What is the worst that's happened to me? Not being able to do all sorts of little things for myself, not even being able to go about by myself, needing help in so many little ways, which cannot help but exhaust and so irritate. I try to cope, but I am not successful. I am also piggishly sloppy. I am a great trouble, but I have too much joy in life and too deep a sense of obligation to life and those who, at least temporarily, depend on me, to depart while the going is still good.

  This is the best time. Silent, alone in my bed, a hum outside, the world not yet obliterating this wholeness, not even Mozart on the wireless—no wireless, nothing save the scratching of this pen as I talk to myself.

  The most touching present was from Mina: the copy of Elegies that Alexis [Léger] gave her when they were so deeply in love, with his inscription, their “secret” names, snapshots of Alexis and cats and Mina, all at Ashfield. Mina with her passions and her terrors and thick love for Lincoln, who now punishes her by telling her that he will never speak to her again. “Yes,” she says, “the board has voted confidence in him, but he is crazy…. I try to take it, but it does hurt!” She is so loyal to those she loves.

  MAY 26, 1985 I suddenly realized—I must be retarded—that so many of that little band had come to horrible ends: Ela murdered or accidentally a suicide—possibly pleased to sink into oblivion; Alice found frightened to death on her bathroom floor; Rut dead of a heart attack while Marat-Sade began, her life snuffed because she was thought to be part of the action of the play, while Ellen Stewart vainly called for help; Touche in his own blood on the loo in Vermont, Harry [Martin] inexplicably burning the bedclothes; Hellmut [Roder] and Fritz [Mosell] sordidly;35 Laci a suicide; Bravig [Imbs] in an overturned Jeep on some road in France; Valeska [Imbs] in obscurity in New Mexico; Maggie Dunham [of polio] on a ship and buried at sea; Lili Darvas living through bad days cooking into better days and then dying of cancer; Max Rein-hardt really euthanized by Ela.

  JUNE 6, 1985 I would rather have made Kurt Schwitters's collages than written anything I have ever published. We ate up the morning with looking at “him” [in a retrospective at MoMA]. The works are the closest representations of my life. Here is a formula for my life, these fabulously arranged bits and pieces—detritus. He has made a work of art—a Merzweld order—of my chaos.36 I am held by the richness of [writer] Bobbie Ann Mason's observation of the inner poverty of her people. They have “things,” but they have “nothing” save their material world. Carson, Truman, Eudora's people have glory in their past, hope in their pasts and futures. Bobbie Ann and Jay McInerney have no glory. They have Vietnam and Nixon in their pasts and the Reagan world in their present. So, they have nothing—no trembling—although they have touching observation—but not the deeps of Chekhov, or even the deep light and dark in Carson, Truman, and Eudora. These children of the television screen are less by magic endowed than those children of the “shadow.” The young writers write about emotions, but they are never emotional in their writing. They're visual, screen trained to see, not to feel. They are part of the destruction of reality begun by the camera.

  Tina Brown said at a meeting that she wanted to make Vanity Fair “high-class trash,” and that she can, and in doing that VF has the possibility of success.

  Elsa Treves [di Figlia] is dead. She died (a month ago) of old age, in the bed in the room in the palazzo in which she was born. She had been in the hospital, came home, went to bed, called that sharp-nosed, villainous butler for champagne, and while sipping her wine she died. I know of no death more appropriate. She was a short, stubby, round-headed woman, a series of vigorous curves. She spoke all of her languages swiftly, with almost a liquid castanet rhythm. When I stood in her Art Nouveauish bedroom, peering at the painting-packed walls, and asked whether that one was Henry James, she said: “Oh, no, Mr. Lerman. He is not your Henry James—oh—those novels. I don't like them. I can't stand them—except that one about that foolish American girl who went out into the night air in Rome and died of it—so foolish! But…” and here her round, light eyes sparkled, “Do you know his letters and his notebooks?” Then she quoted from the notebooks extravagantly.

  The last time she gave me tea, we sat munching small, delicious Venetian cakes—sugary, dense, dry—the breeze drifting in from the lagoons, drifting through those rooms congealed in time, the oval dark green and silver-white cave where Canova's Castor and Pollux, huge and white, wait while the painted history of their most glorious moment rests (can so crowded a painting so pulsing with pomp and praise and enthusiasm rest?) on an easel: The Austrian emperor and his entire court transfixed as they view with awe, in that very hidden cha
mber, Canova's masterwork.37 That day in July, she sat pouring out tea, and suddenly I realized that she was speaking not really to me, but to Thomas Jefferson. Her mind had slipped, and we were in some pocket of history which she fancied and which I adored.

  I remember Mrs. Murray Crane, for whom I became Walter Berry.38 For ancient Mr. [Mark Anthony De Wolfe] Howe in Louisberg Square in Beacon Hill, I became Henry James. And with Eva Gauthier,39 for one moving moment, I became, in that little room jammed with papers in the Woodward Hotel—Debussy, the Debussy she had known and loved when she was very young and very beautiful, before she journeyed in the “exotic” Far East and returned from Java mounted in jade.

  JUNE 8, 1985 Yesterday Marlene rang, at last, but I was not at Condé Nast. She called and talked a long time to Stephen, who was thrilled. He said she was clear, but toward the end a little muddled, obviously lonely, and said she'd rung us many times, but always the wrong number, someone gabbing Spanish. Then she mimicked (a trick she always had) the Spanish. “The phone is the only extravagance I have left,” she told Puss about three years ago.

  Diana Trilling talked on the blower about how squeamish the young are today, and how vomiting was something “we all did—during Prohibition—all that bootleg liquor. We held one another's heads and were proud of throwing up.” She is nine years older, but we have become the same generation. She is writing about vomiting in her day. “Such an adorable subject,” she said, meaning it, with all the memories this “adorable” subject seems to have brought her. Obviously vomiting holds the glamour of her past in the twenties and early thirties. I will immerse myself in The House of Mitford [Portrait of a Family] — that's my glamour.