The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  AUGUST 1, 1986 I have been reading again, after thirty-five years, The Way We Live Now. Trollope is not Dickens—no comedy (although Trollope seems to have heard of irony); no poetry of the commonplace—only the commonplace; no deeps and depths of London, only the surfaces, the necessary sets for his look at life. I do not hear, smell, see the city in Trollope. I do not think Trollope loves London the way Dickens does. Trollope is about, not from within. Trollope is chromolith; Dickens paints. There's Rembrandt in Dickens. I cannot think of a parallel life for Trollope.

  At the Players [Club] last night, Helen Hayes said that John Barrymore was the best Hamlet she'd ever seen: “He didn't act the Prince. He was the Prince. I will never forget the look of sweetness that came over his face when he spoke to the Player King. John Gielgud—yes I liked him, but he was acting…. Barrymore was the Prince.” About her dress: She wore a large, almost huge, oval opal of distinct colors, like marbleized paper, set in a sizable diamond-studded cross. “You see, when I wear this, I have to wear a simple dress. Lillian [Gish] gave it to me. Griffith gave it to her after she almost died on the ice floes in Way Down East. And Lillian said: ‘You have it, Helen. He got the opal from Russia, and he had Tiffany set it, and you're Catholic. You have it!' It's the most extravagant thing I've ever had. But you have to wear it on a plain dress. I can only buy simple dresses now.” The dress was quietly Elizabethan—the color of deep, almost Japanese-red-maple leaf. It suited her beautifully. I never thought Helen a beauty when she was younger—or witty. I never really liked her onstage—too goody-goody, almost “fake” goody-goody, I thought. She has become beautiful, very funny, and I dote on her.

  I cried a lot at [Francis Ford Coppola's film] Peggy Sue Got Married. It sent me straight back into Momma's kitchen, on Seventy-fourth Street, long, long ago on Thursday baking nights. Almost all night long Momma baked and I aided—mixing butter-yellow or honey-brown batters in huge, pale yellow crockery bowls, whirling the wooden spoon to bits from Hänsel und Gretel, cracking and shelling nuts, picking over dried fruits. And the fragrances: cinnamon, honey, raisins plumping in brandy, flour, hotting-up sugar (brown and white), chocolate in all stages. Momma, her arms in twenty-button gloves of flour, cheerfully bustling, kneading, calculating, slicing, pounding, rolling out, chopping. The baking sounds: sputterings, cracklings, steamings—and, always, the perfume of the cakes growing lustier and lustier. Then the bowls of icing and the rewards—licking the bowls clean! Then the cakes and cookies and rugelach and mandelbrot closed away in huge tins begged from fish and grocery stores, hidden away in secret places where we always found them … and so to bed, at dawn, and frequently no school. Baking was more important than school. What did we talk about all night long? We did not really talk. I mixed and cracked and chopped and sang, and Momma rolled out with her volgar holz [rolling pin] and punched and pounded and stirred and poured and tested. And we both tasted—oh—we tasted a lot. Those were the happiest times.

  AUGUST 4, 1986 Last night, in the Tent Room of the Regency Hotel—Carol Channing and Charlie [Lowe]'s dinner—about twenty-four at brilliantly appointed tables—nosegays for the women, red-rose boutonnieres for the men, placecards (gone-past tickets to Legends, now in Boston).64 Carol in last year's white longish Vionnet-influenced handkerchief hemline and Bea Lillie “Marvelous Party” ropes and ropes of pearls.

  Carol's long toasts-to-each-of-us speech, during which she somehow managed to sweetness-and-light us all into fractured egos: She was so funny—specially about “My little costar Mary….” Miss Martin grew smaller and smaller with each loving word … until she was so small that she almost disappeared into the mouse-box. “Oh—that lovely little Mary … my darling, darling, dear, sweet little, little costar…. She so did want to be with all of us here tonight… all of us loving friends … but she is surrounded at the Ritz in Boston by her darling children and grandchildren and even a darling little great-grandchild … so adorable … and she just—” At which point, Linda Janklow [chairman of the Lincoln Center Theater], in her raucous voice, shouted at Carol: “Did you invite her?” Carol, unperturbed, proceeded to sweetly demolish with knife-blade compliments, the rest of us—absolutely enchanting, delicious, and hilarious…. Carol on how Al [Hirschfeld]'s first, Lend an Ear, caricature of her [in 1948] set her makeup for life … How the “most wonderful agent in the world—he set everything I've ever done—Lee Stevens—didn't get me my contract until the 1,999th performance of Hello, Dolly!… How “I'm sure, Kitty, that darling Moss [Hart], who thought you were so beautiful, would think it—if he could see you now …” She never finished that one. “Darling Morty [Janklow] and Gray and Leo—they are my blood kin, because they were so wonderful to my darling Anita. She would call and tell me the filthiest gossip, and I would say, ‘Oh—Anita—who ever told you that?' And she would say, ‘Darling—Leo and Gray and Morty' and she loved you and I love you forever and ever….”

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1986 There is no bad taste—only taste and no taste.

  1. The British critic and novelist John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) was married to Katherine Mansfield. Their relationships with the Lawrences are reflected in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love.

  2. As Gray Foy recalls, John McHugh and Trumbel “Tug” Bartan, a male couple, were wealthy balletomanes.

  3. Great-grandson of Czar Alexander III, Prince Alexander Romanov (1929-2002) was married to the jewelry designer Maria Valguarnera di Niscemi (b. 1931), who was descended from a noble Sicilian family.

  4. A Communist heroine of the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989) was known as “La Pasionaria.”

  5. Dorothy Norman (1905-97), a wealthy advocate for causes of civil rights and India, had a long affair with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, while he was married to Georgia O'Keeffe. “Dorothy said: ‘Georgia O'Keeffe always hated me. There were always young girls around him—except I became the girl. But she was all over in 1929. She went to the Southwest—that was inevitable. She wanted adulation. She wanted to be the only one.' “ Journal, March 28, 1982.

  6. Critic Kenneth Tynan's second marriage was to Kathleen Halton (1937-95), early on a journalist and later her husband's biographer. Matthew was their son. Carl Bernstein (b. 1944) had won the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting of the Watergate break-in. His ex-wife, Nora Ephron, based the plot of her novel Heartburn on their marriage.

  7. Lucia Davidova, a Russian actress who came to New York with the Parisian vaudeville troupe Le Chauve-Souris, was a great friend of Balanchine's. Brigitta Lieberson had been married to him from 1938 to 1946.

  8. André Gregory (b. 1934), an actor (My Dinner with André) and avant-garde director, was married to the filmmaker and experimental theater producer Mercedes “Chiquita” Gregory (1935?–92).

  9. “The new Betty Bacall, inexplicable—a modulated voice and a kindliness that strikes terror in those of us who have known her for years.” Journal, December 30, 1984.

  10. The ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq (1929-2000) had been married (1952-69) to Balan-chine, who created roles for her in two dozen ballets before polio crippled her in 1956.

  11. The actor Jeremy Irons had recently played Proust's character Charles Swann in the film Swann in Love.

  12. Anna Wintour was creative director at Vogue (1983-86) while Grace Mirabella was editor in chief.

  13. Leo had become friendly with comic actress Lily Tomlin (b. 1939) after an introduction in the early eighties by her producers Paula and Charles Bowden.

  14. Norman's book was published later in 1985 as Indira Gandhi: Letters to an American Friend, 1950-1984.

  15. The novelist and short-story writer William Maxwell (1908-2000) edited fiction at The New Yorker for forty years.

  16. The British critic John Addington Symonds (1840-93) was among the first to write historical studies of homosexuality, but Leo and his friends were undoubtedly reading his Renaissance in Italy and his biographies of Whitman and Shelley. Arthur Symons (1865-1945) was a British poet and
essayist who wrote on Baudelaire and Rossetti, among others.

  17. Leo had put the name “The Rioters” on this group of high school friends.

  18. In the early forties, Leo had signed with the publishers Reynal & Hitchcock to edit a series of books on different highways and their regional histories. When Curtice Hitchcock died in 1946, the project apparently ended.

  19. Sadie Curiel, a friend of Leo's mother in Jackson Heights, was a cellist and sister of the Met's concertmaster, Michael Svedrofsky. No one in the family recalls why she sued Leo.

  20. The actress, dancer, and singer Jessie Matthews (1907-81) was a major star of London musical revues and prewar British films.

  21. After performing, in 1933, a cabaret act portraying Hitler as homosexual, Max Hansen (1897-1961) fled to Scandinavia, eventually settling in Denmark, where he continued to be a popular singer and movie actor.

  22. Leo's memory may have made Judith Anderson a dame prematurely. These events probably occurred in the fifties, but she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1960.

  23. Ten days before, Leo's friend Lin Tissot had told of going to dine at Valentina's and finding her apartment helter-skelter and Valentina virtually “in rags.” She spoke directly to Tissot only once, when their desolate dinner was finished, saying, “I don't care.”

  24. Leo and Gray had attended the unveiling of the gravestone of Leo's sister-in-law, Ellen Greenfield (1925-84). Molke Goldwasser was Leo's great-aunt.

  25. Victoria Benedict de Ramel Newhouse (b. 1938), architectural critic and historian, had married S. I. Newhouse, Jr., in 1973.

  26. In New York magazine, critic Simon had called The Octette Bridge Club “faggot nonsense.”

  27. The fashion designer Lloyd Williams and his lover Joel Kaye, son of the Russian Tea Room founder Sidney Kaye, were frequent companions of Leo and Gray from the early seventies. Kaye became co-executor of Leo's estate.

  28. Johnson was playing opposite Hearn in the musical La Cage aux Folles.

  29. Edith Mayer Goetz (1905-88), the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, was the wife of movie producer William Goetz. In 1981 Leo had featured the home of nineteenth-century American art collectors Jo Ann and Julian Ganz in Vogue.

  30. Eleanore Phillips Colt (1910-99) was the longtime Los Angeles editor for Condé Nast Publications. She was married to Ethel Barrymore's son, Samuel Colt.

  31. “TK” is editorial parlance for “to come.” Talmey did not in fact die until March 4, 1986.

  32. “Yul crept up behind me on Touche's terrace, high up over Washington Square, in the early morning, skimmed-milk winter light whispering, ‘I'll throw you off if you don't….' I didn't and neither did he.” Journal, October 8, 1985.

  33. “At Oxford, Diana kept saying that ‘It has been decided that we are amenable.' Gray and I now call them The Amenables.” Journal, November 26, 1964.

  34. A hotel in midtown Manhattan that was hospitable to homosexuals.

  35. Roder died of meningitis in 1959, by which time the couple had separated. The editor doesn't know how Mosell died.

  36. Merz is the name Schwitters (1887-1948) gave to his Dada-inspired collages of pocket trash—cards, ticket stubs, gum wrappers, etc.

  37. “The palazzo [Treves dei Bonfili] is unique in Venice because the Treves family came out of the Venetian ghetto in the very early nineteenth century and, in 1820-22, completely redid this fourteenth-century structure.” Letter to RH, July 9, 1979. The baronessa told Leo the Canova sculpture was Castor and Pollux. Guidebooks say Hector and Ajax.

  38. Walter Berry (d. 1927), American expatriate, was best known as the close friend and travel companion of Edith Wharton.

  39. Eva Gauthier (1885-1958), a Canadian-born mezzo-soprano, became the leading teacher of the French art-song repertoire in New York.

  40. Italian-born publishing executive Natalia Danesi Murray (1901-94) was the lover of The New Yorker's Paris correspondent Janet Flanner for thirty-eight years.

  41. The transvestite high-wire artist Barbette had been disfigured by a fall in 1929.

  42. Duse played in The Lady from the Sea at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1923. She died the next year. Leo would then have been nine and a half.

  43. Coming upon an object that he coveted and could not have, Leo liked to mutter, “Greed and envy, greed and envy!”

  44. Although a painter, the short-lived Marie Bashkirtseff (1860-84) is usually remembered for her lively, frank journal.

  45. Richard had taken his first Broadway bow there, as a walk-on in Searching for the Sun, which ran for five performances in February 1936. Leo's debut had been a year earlier, at the Vanderbilt Theater, in the drama Creeping Fire. He played a corpse. It was his only Broadway acting role.

  46. “Orson on the evening I went to ask him to take Joe Cotten back—enormous, petulant, wild-humored, in constant hulking motion, and somehow grand-seigneur agreeable—in a vest (not a waistcoat), short sleeves, cigar in mouth.” Journal, February 20, 1971. Leo had supervised casting and was stage-managing Places, Please in November 1937. Richard Hunter was his assistant.

  47. Four years ahead of Leo at Newtown High School, according to Lerman family legend, was an Esther Rabinowitz, who became Estée Lauder.

  48. Florence Nightingale Graham was the owner of the Elizabeth Arden beauty-product brand. Fannie Farmer, a culinary writer with a cookery school, taught precision and standardization of recipes.

  49. George Kirstein (1906-86), Mina Curtiss's other brother, published The Nation.

  50. Nora Kaye had been undergoing treatment for cancer.

  51. In 1981 Baryshnikov had a daughter, Alexandra (“Choura”), with the actress Jessica Lange.

  52. Alessandra Ferri (b. 1963) had joined American Ballet Theatre the year before. Herbert Ross would soon direct her and Baryshnikov in the film Dancers (1987).

  53. The biographer, later political commentator, Arianna Stassinopoulos (b. 1950) was marrying the Texas oilman, later congressman, Michael Huffington (b. 1947). They would divorce in 1997.

  54. Soprano and actress Marti Stevens (b. 1931) and Marlene Dietrich were living together in London when Gray and Leo were there in 1964-65. To some at the time, Stevens appeared to become a facsimile of Dietrich.

  55. The Russian dancer and actress Natalia Makarova (b. 1940) had been a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, but she performed with many companies. Paul Taylor (b. 1930), one of America's preeminent choreographers, founded his own company in 1954. Martha Hill (1901-95) was a dance teacher and the director of dance at Juilliard (1951-85).

  56. Polish-born dancer Marie Rambert (1888-1982) founded the first British ballet company and nurtured Antony Tudor (as well as Frederick Ashton). Laing and Tudor met in her company, Ballet Rambert.

  57. Producer Franco Rossellini (1935-92), nephew of the director Roberto Rossellini, had persuaded Callas to star in Pasolini's film Medea (1969).

  58. André Tellier's Twilight Men (1931), a novel about New York's homosexual world in the twenties, was well known to gay men of Leo's generation.

  59. In 1953, Robbins testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming others with Communist connections.

  60. German Annette Kolb (1870-1967), biographer, memoirist, and novelist, was a wartime refugee in New York.

  61. A state university campus thirty miles north of Manhattan, site of a summer theater festival.

  62. German dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman (1886-1973) and her student Harald Kreutzberg (1902-68) were both exponents of spare Expressionism.

  63. Marguérite Moréno (d. 1948) was a star of the Comédie-Française.

  64. Channing and Mary Martin had recently toured in the vehicle Legends, by James Kirk-wood. Channing's husband, the producer Charles Lowe (1911-99), managed her career.

  JOURNAL • October 12, 1986 Just some words—I am parched for words. Marlene's call last week: a long, sometimes incisive ramble—always very Marlene—the color edged in Berlin black—self-mockery. “I
know that Maria loves me. She really loves me—but she hates me—maybe because, when she was little and fat, I was so be-oo-tee-ful…” syllabling “beautiful” into something that existed apart from herself and of which she was a worshipper. Then, “Why am I so burdened by memory? I remember everything—everything….” Then, “Money—if you have money, that is everything—money….”

  NOVEMBER 16, 1986 One wet early November late morning, about 1934, I was out hunting jobs. Walking beside the Cort Theatre, on West Forty-eighth Street, I noticed a door slightly open. I instantly stole in, enticed by my passion to at least see, feel, be some little part of Broadway theater life. The theater was huge in its gloom, as mysterious as a Rembrandt etching…. Far off a single work light on a standing stem blazed onstage—a star in this satisfying night, which was fragrant with scenery paint, makeup paint, an effluvia of smell so potent that it rivals Proust's madeleine. In that circle, or nimbus, of light, I saw a figure—turbaned, a huge, V-shaped coat (broad dark fur on a brilliant, smoldering orange cloth that tapered to a tightness below the knees)—and this figure was so drawn to its own being that nothing could have distracted it. Her carriage—one gloved hand clutching coat, other on hip—was superb. As I watched, she walked some six paces upstage, made a half turn, stood a moment, obviously delivering some speech soundlessly, then moved downstage in a straight, sure line … stood a moment, head cocked, listening to some unheard speech, pivoted … moved precisely upstage again. She repeated this over and over again—aiming for some perfection known only to herself. I had recognized her immediately—Beulah Bondi, a veteran with theater in her veins rather than blood. And here she was in this wet, cold, awful November morning practicing more rigorously than any novice. Her sternly aquiline features, her huge painted eyes intent on one goal—some perfection, some miracle of timing, some miraculous effect which when the house was filled and the lights blazed would look effortless. I stood there marveling. This, I knew, was the rigorous, quintessential essence of theater. I learned more, standing there, hardly daring to breathe, than in a year at the Feagin School.