The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  MARCH 15, 1986 I wrote Allene's obituary all yesterday morning. Today a little cold thing was published [in the New York Times]—not a word I had written—nothing.

  APRIL 13, 1986 • NEW YORK CITY Last night, at seven, in Saint Bart's [church], Arianna Stassinopoulos in the most elegant silhouette, a molded-to-her-body Galanos in white lace, a cascade of lace falling from a cap of large white flowers in her chignon, the lace falling over her long train, a little glinting here and there—all most Queen Alexandra (the shoulders), the bodice built on a basque—such pre-1914 intimations of royals, but not her behavior in the recessional, when she made dry kissing moves, at the chosen (such as Henry Kissinger), and her huge, dark eyes glowed with triumph.53 The church jammed to the doors, all black-tie and echt hightums, last year's Oscar de la Rentas and this year's Galanos and Saint Laurent. Very Byzantium. Bay leaves (Victory!), wreathing the rows out into Park Avenue. The aisles—tall poles surmounted by flickering fairy lights and trays of gardenias. A video man done up in clericals was stashed in the altar or discreetly proceeding up and down the aisles by dim flashes of light. Librettos provided. The bridesmaids, including Barbara Walters and Selwa Roosevelt, were in periwinkle blue, very modest costumes (but Arianna's Galanos cost, I should think, about fifteen or twenty thousand). Glorious music, specially an interlude from The Magic Flute while the bride and the groom walked about the altar under massive crowns (Greek-Orthodox).

  Matron of Honor—and Backer—[the socialite philanthropist] Ann Getty read, badly, from the Song of Solomon; the groom's best man read Shakespeare's 116th Sonnet; [Arianna's sister] Agape read from the Bible, very well. (“Don't put your sister on the stage, Mrs. Huffington,” I hummed.) Arianna pecked at her groom's cheek or whispered to him during the long intervals while they stood before the altar. We sat in a nest of sharp tongues. Nan Kemp-ner [socialite] murmured, “She's sold the hair rights.” So it went, for over an hour and a half. I was reminded of the Countess Greffulhe's heavy, brocaded, beaded, and pavéed gown (similar in silhouette), which she wore to her daughter's wedding, outshining the bride. I looked about Saint Bart's, saw our New Society, some six hundred of it, and thought: For this Lily Bart killed herself [in The House of Mirth]? Women's Wear Daily called it the “Wedding of the Week.”

  APRIL 26, 1986 The sadness I felt when I saw the astronauts walking on the moon, planting our flag there. At that moment my childhood had ended. The little boy who stood in a window, in his grandfather's house, peering up at the moon, wonderment enveloping him like a protective cloak, vanished. So when, after an afternoon's intense, brief rain, a glory of light streamed from the west out over the Hudson and into the streets of Manhattan, and I wondered at this miracle, at what poet would perceive eternity there in that effulgence, I suddenly knew that no poet could ever again perceive eternity in any natural beauty known to us, known to Shakespeare or Euripides or Shelley or the young Auden. The bomb had ended our eternity. My sadness as I was being driven north on Madison Avenue was more devastating than that sorrow I had felt sitting in Mina's “den” in her Bethel house, in Connecticut, peering at the astronauts' triumph on the moon.

  MAY 3, 1986 Dining last night at Dolly and Al Hirschfeld's, because Maria Riva is here staying in Marlene's apartment on Park Avenue. “It's like Great Expectations… the curtains in shreds, the big looking glass over the bed crashing down…. I pulled the bed away from the wall. No, it doesn't light up from underneath anymore…. Yes, the lipsticks are still there in the bathroom, but—oh—falling apart, falling apart…. She never lied, always believed everything. She always believed she was in love…. I never thought that she would choose this end to her life. She had a choice—to get into bed or to try to walk, to lead an active life. She chose getting into bed because then she didn't fall down drunk. When she is high she is brilliant, when she is not high she doesn't make sense.” Maria looks marvelous—very kempt, classy, fined down, no trace of Marlene, not a trace, save, now and then, a mannerism, but—surprise—her tone, inflection is very like Marti Stevens. Ironic.54 Maria is enormously competent. She exudes competence the way some people exude moral authority or intellectuality or humanism. She is battling Simon & Schuster about “her” book [about her mother], since it is not her work, but a “cheap, sentimental” thing written by a couple. “You know, I found, at sixty-two I can write. I can really write.”

  At the Hirschfelds, we discovered that the basement floor of 1453 has now become an English food emporium. A woman from Northumberland bought 1453 and lives there, on the parlor floor, and rents out the top floors. How appropriate that 1453 has become an English food shop. I see Edith Evans crouching by our fireplace in what was, at that time, the downstairs dining room, stuffing herself with magulala (an all-purpose stew) made by our tyrannical cook Gladys. Edith was ravenous after appearing in Daphne Laureola, but she always tucked in. (Gladys left us for Josephine Baker, and we were thrilled.)

  Monday, the Capezio Award to Antony [Tudor]. For some two hours, I forgot terrorism, nuclear warfare, and breakdown. I forgot the world of today. Age and time were annihilated. On a dais sat Antony (his face—the granite look, the straight line from nose to chin tip, the humorous light lurking in the depths of his unblinking eyes); to his right, Nora; to his left, Hugh [Laing]; and, variously, Donald Saddler, Alicia Markova, Agnes de Mille, Bill Schuman, Oliver Smith, Jerry Robbins, Misha, Natasha [Makarova], Paul Taylor, Martha Hill55 (she and I sponsored Antony when he was becoming a citizen, but he didn't because he would not swear that he would bear arms) … and others.

  Agnes spoke the longest and the most rewardingly about the early days with Marie Rambert.56 Alicia thanked him for “a great job,” meaning [the role of] Juliet. Hugh wept throughout. Nora looked very well-to-do. Paul [Taylor] told about being a bad student and how Martha Graham had kicked Antony hard in the shins because he had said that she was guilty of “choreographic compromise.” Antony talked about how he loved toe shoes.

  But none of this is as important as the pure love that was the atmosphere we breathed in that room. For almost two hours, this was the ballet world in all of its former glory—that tightly meshed world of magical, dedicated people, ultimately as ill-fated as butterflies, the living symbols of transience, these dancers and even choreographers and historians. Memory opens cracks in time everywhere. Hugh kissed me, held me, and suddenly said, “But who are you?” I looked at him, at his thick white hair, his worn face, his ravaged looks, and said, “I'm Leo! Leo Lerman!” He grabbed me tighter, kissed me hard, and wept even more vigorously: “I've never seen you with a white beard! Never!” So that is how time was recaptured.

  When I say, for those two hours we were all young, that is not the truth. We were old—and young. But I think that even though, years ago, we did not physically show age, we were even at that time young and old. Now we are old and young. That is the kernel of our special magic. We are not Peter Pan or Wendy. We thought that we were. Or perhaps if we were, most of us are no longer. We recognize and even hug our shadows tight to us, and our shadows are enveloping us…. Is that why I love to look down into the street (I first discovered this in Munich) watching the passersby going west in the early sunny morning, their shadows preceding them; going east, their shadows behind them?

  MAY 20, 1986 In the thirties I went up to City College of New York, and I looked at it for several months, and I loathed it. What did I want? I wanted to have my own way, to read and read and write and write. So, I got into bed and refused to come out.

  Our high school group was the most brilliant—no drudges—and our high school teachers marvelous. We inherited modernism. We lived in the throes of experiment—not so sexually. What did we know of Freud? Not one of us was psychoanalyzed. The homosexual element was apart from this group, not within. We lived for words, cherishing them as only first-generation children could.

  JUNE 6, 1986 Marlene called: “But put on Leo Lerman. You aren't Leo Lerman…. You're a young man. He's old and sick. You're young and healthy. Put on
Leo Lerman!” Then we were cut off.

  JUNE 19, 1986 “You'll love them,” Carl Van Vechten said to me. “Dorothy [Gish] is the witty sister; Lillian is the pretty sister.” Then, one evening, I sat watching them, while we all sat eating our dinners, at various tables, in the Woman's Exchange on Madison Avenue, and I saw Lillian say something to Dorothy, and Dorothy threw back her head and shook with laughter, rippled with it, and she was beautiful. And Carlo was right: I loved them.

  JUNE 21, 1986 Franco Rossellini visited this week. He came to talk about a worldwide commemoration of the death of Maria, ten years ago, on September 16, 1977.57 But mostly we talked about the Maria each of us had known so intimately, the woman who was essentially a bourgeoise, inhabited by that dybbuk-genius. When the genius left her, when the dybbuk left her actually, she died. She had the grace not to survive her dybbuk too long. Was Marlene's dybbuk her beauty? She had assorted talents, but she did not have genius. Her talents having deserted her, or been eroded by her own arrogance and time. She gracelessly lingers on, outstaying the self, the public and sometimes private self she once was. Or is she, poor dear, lost in time? People lost in time: an idea new to me…. I know about reputations lost in time and then discovered—a good example is Lionel, now beginning to be rediscovered as one of our most potent, critical forces and shapers. “I hope that I can get my book out before Lionel's reputation goes into a decline again,” Diana said last night. We assured her that his reputation wouldn't and that her book would.

  JULY 5, 1986 Early on—even before Twilight Men (and its revelations about men in blue shirts and black knitted ties)—I knew Oscar Wilde.58 In the early thirties, high school students were not permitted to “research” in the Forty-second Street library. I lied about my age. It became my haven, my home away from home; it gave me protection—and sexual wondering at the men I saw. Nothing ever came of any of that fantasy, but I spent my summers there with Elinor Wylie, vampires, English, American, French, and German murderers and their trials—and reading everything I could find about Oscar Wilde—the court records, everything. I could not understand how so brilliant, so successful a man, so full of humor and wit, could land himself into so horrible a place. Finally, I realized that a supreme arrogance had done him in, a disdain of the everyday, the commonplace. He had underestimated the masses. Art, he thought, made him sacrosanct, but épater [to shock] le bourgeois—that did him in. He could not resist showing off.

  Nora about Jerry Robbins: “I just can't talk to him anymore. He's so self-absorbed. He really doesn't have anything to talk about. We have these long silences. He's so boring. We were once so very close … so close.” They were engaged to be married, until he went before the McCarthy people and talked.59 Then Nora, a week before the wedding, walked out. What time does to friendships, to love—to “close.”

  Herbert [Ross] believes in the ritual obligation of old, now worn-out friendships.

  JULY 12, 1986 The only words I know in Polish translate into “Fuck yourself,” which I learned as a child from Momma, when she was watching the family newsstand, and I thought they meant “Thank you!” That is all I know of that aspect of the family history.

  Not a day passes without moments of wondering is this it, now, stepping carefully down a step, tottering across this room, trying to see—just trying to see…. What an agony light, which I love, has become. How I long for sunless days. How I fear cold. How heat now does me in. How my physical world has changed. But I devise little ruses to cope. I wet my pants and make believe that this has not happened. I hate smelling of urine: a telltale old man smell. I make believe that I am as fragrant as anyone in his fragrant prime. In short, I go on—trying to make more than the best of it all. I know that I am helped by a now long life lived, mostly, in fantasy, a life lived so unrealistically that it has taken almost everyone in. But the life has all been extra, all borrowed time, all never to be, and holding it up today, this man, these eyes are not the ones who lived that life.

  JULY 13, 1986 Bleak, sunless morning, quiet but for the usual skin of city-summer hum: air conditioners. Far easier to accustom the ear to the furl, even tumult, of an onrushing stream, like the one that ran almost under Jo Wash-burn's shack, where we spent so much time in the thirties and during the early years of the Second World War. “Roll Out the Barrel” on that stony little beach at Westport, and how we polkaed and fell about almost destroyed by laughter… but at what? Those were dreadful times—yet we were so happy. I think that we were happy because we lived in an optimistic world, where the misery was not real to us. We heard, we even saw (in films), we were told, but we did not feel in our bones. Nothing actually happened to us. We were patriotic. We rallied and contributed and made our little efforts and were part of the bravado and the hope. We wanted the Nazis annihilated, but—still—we were all emotion and effort and having a wonderful time despite restrictions. This was a high time for us at home—almost fictional, more imagined than realized. We could not feel the agony in Europe. We were not part of it, only apart from it. We could feel for it, but not feel it. And we were in the center of a world of escape. Also, to be in the center of a world of escape, and the Europeans here had all escaped, was not conducive to agony, but to exhilaration.

  Some mornings ago, I was telling David [Holland in the office] something, and suddenly lost all thought. I could not think of anything except to keep on talking about how I could not think of anything and to joke, in a vacant, bright electric-bulb vacancy, about senility. This slot-dropped-out feeling lasted a long time. David helped by smiling throughout. I smiled constantly, waiting for memory to return, and that butterfly finally fluttered into place again—as if it had never vanished.

  JULY 18, 1986 Same hot July days, same Noël Coward voice on recordings— but that was 1943 and 1944, and that was in Ela's bedroom on East Seventy-third Street, above the carpenter shop and next to Fritz and Hellmut's queen-place (a leap from roof to roof), with Cesco on the other side in the basement of the house, and Rut and Elsa [Snapper] and Annettchen Kolb60 in the next block west, and Ilse [Bois] still on Seventy-fifth Street, [Ilse's room] next to Lotte Lenya, and all of that world intact. Now this is 1986, and I sit here, four streets north, forty-three years away, at Joan [Buck]'s desk in our home away from home, and all of them — in that 1943 world—are gone, dead, or vanished…. The late-night secret Maestro visits, the intense consultations, the long, laughing hours, the rages, the loves and hates, the private passions, the unrequited pains, the intense pain, on a different scale, at what was happening in our world … all gone … all here in that reedy, misplaced, sentimental, somehow courageously sad Noël voice … following his “secret heart,” “We must have music,” “If love were all,” “Don't let's be beastly to the Hun” (how Ela gurgled with laughter) … and in Private Lives, Noël and Gertie, very clipped, very bright young people, very protected and—oh—so brittlely aching … thin, high voices with a caress like a crease in it, sentimentality breaking through, while the fake moonlight never fades… never. (“Oh— darling, darling!” Ela would breathe, her green eyes brimming) … while the small, heart-cover, witty small talk washes up like seadrift—bits of colored glass, little exotic feathers, fluted shells—and the deep heart suddenly, convincingly, breaks through. That is the power; there is the truth—the sad-glad optimism. “I'll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again.” And here I sit… the same July Friday afternoon heat, the same empty street feeling … everything, everything … except nothing left… voices on records, images on screens, and the past present in my heart… but even that past is changed … recaptured in the form of my present.

  Sitting in the vast redbrick area outside the theaters in Purchase61 —hearing echoes from the Così Fan Tutte, The Robbers, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Haydn Quartet, the many public television screens with their sitcoms— sitting at a table in the restaurant “area” near a splendid buffet of sandwiches, cornucopias of fruit… watching the milling crowds of summer people in their summer de rigueurs
and dishabilles… coagulations of people of all ages… constant movement, constant sound … having left the almost two-hour first act of The Robbers (the celebrated company from West Germany in a neo-Brechtian production notable for its absurdity and pig-headedness, its amazing body movements remotely rooted in Wigman and Kreutzberg,62 kin to [current choreographer] Pina Bausch)—hating it, because I could see no Schiller, no Sturm und Drang. (Amalia played by a boy; the brigand band more Mahagonny than eighteenth-century revolution.) I saw that this complex could become a concentration camp instantly. I can see New York “intellectuals” being bused in by the thousands to this awful place that [modernist architect] Edward Larrabee Barnes “designed.” I saw a man intently counting out money, popping it into a bright scarlet bar. I [imagined I] saw Marguérite Moréno seated at her table, at the entrance of a Cocteau-imagined Hell,63 and that gave me the clue: We had passed over, and this was our eternity, the afterlife of culture-vultures, destined forever to lurk in this Bartholomew's Fair of maltreated masterpieces, all of the goodies ersatz, all beauty debased, humiliated, mired … ceaseless Kultur… this was, indeed, HELL. So I got on the electrical-[chair] lift throne and descended majestically out into the night and was sped home through pelting bursts of rain that yielded not freshness, but steam, evaporating when it came to earth.