The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Allene Talmey's office was small and dark, tucked away. It consisted of a large desk, a heavy typewriter, a sturdy visitor's chair, her swivel chair, and books. She was the Features Department of Vogue. She seemed to me, at that time, a much older woman—meaning much older than I was: She wasn't much older, just some. She said, “What do you know?”

  For the next forty years, I spoke to her almost every day and saw her sometimes almost every day and loved her all of the time to the day she died. I learned from Allene Talmey, and later from Carmel Snow, editor of Harper's Bazaar, more about magazine craft than from anybody else in the world. From [Vogue s editorial director] Alexander Liberman, later, I learned to take risks, to go all the way out on a limb until it almost broke under the weight of my certainty, and I learned to outwit.

  I had arrived, I soon discovered, in a world of surface glamour supported by hard, almost unceasing, endeavor. I heard that [its publisher] Mr. Condé Nast had said that he believed in a Vogue that housed some—let us say arbitrarily— fourteen intensely singular people, each of whom held the key to something very special, and these fourteen would bring to Vogue the very being of that very special something, bring it all to perhaps seven intensely industrious, brilliant people who sat at their typewriters and pounded out the sometimes recherché fantasies and the increasing realities that Vogue sold. So many of these “fantasies” sumptuously cloaked the hard facts of life—and merchandising. I found that I had been led by Lucien into a royalist world of practical make-believe. (1993)

  JOURNAL• DECEMBER 8, 1941 The president asked Congress to declare war on Japan some minutes ago. The national anthem was played. The wrinkle-faced woman continued to pin her crumpled and dripping clothes onto the line. I could hear the pulleys screeching, and the flimsy gray-topped, black-skirted dress flapping. The sun has come out in a blinding white-light glare, but the sky is gray with snow held back. Yesterday morning, a destroyer—battle-mented, turreted, and bristling (this word has become a convention) with guns went up the river. People looked at it with curiosity and delicious tremors of safety and vicarious danger—and some pride—not realizing it was the last truly free morning we shall know for a long time. Doris [Uhlman-Mayer, choreographer] said, later in the afternoon [yesterday], when we knew of this thing, that it could be no shock to refugees because they have been through this so many times. I rang Eleonora, and she had heard but was busy dressing to go to Toscanini's. And the world was the same.

  When I was born, the first war was some days old. When I was to go to college, the Depression was here. Now that I am about to get on my feet—at last— having so carefully planned and striven, here is this war. But I knew it, and there is no shock or depression, for the accomplished fact is a point of departure, never a resting place.

  NOTE: Virtually no journals exist for the following six months.

  JOURNAL • JUNE 27, 1942 I want to write about a few days at Montauk [Long Island]. How we went there—the three of us—each with his sickness. The train ride out—Elsa was sick on it. We were excited at the green of the countryside, at the chocolate-splotched creamy white cows standing knee-deep in daisy-starred grasses, at the infrequent glimpses of the cobalt-blue sea, and once— ecstasy—a windmill, incredibly ancient in the rain-washed fields and gray-silver-green with haggard mosses. Drawing on the way out. The walk to the lodgings. Gray, gray-blue, cobalt, worn green—no bright colors save an orange scarf, a yellow-red scarf, the brown-red dotted cap. The sea and cliffs and white mist and Elsa's urge to go into the sea. The strange black heads and portents of magic. The dancing at night. The walk back. The broken English house. The walk alone. The Tyrian purple beach—not worn with age as in Wales—there had been no Romans here. The shells—naked. The raffiniert man on the way home. Going to the city, quite healed, carrying all the stones.

  JUNE 28, 1942 I do not know what keeps me from writing this so important article.18 I need the money. I need the prestige. Perhaps I have not tried hard enough. I make so many bad excuses about it to myself. Everything I have done seems to have been less difficult than this, and I do not think I am tired. My drive seems also to be on a holiday. Now I will telephone, and then I will read in Ouspensky, just a little, and then I will write this piece—or bust.

  AUGUST 2, 1942 The most important thing, perhaps, is how transitory all things are. Now Richard has been in a room where I have never been and lain in arms that I have never known, but he has given to me the major part, and I am troubled hardly at all, but his other's face intrudes when his lips press mine, and I hear him say, “His lips are soft and sweet to kiss, but I love yours,” and I believe him.

  THE ACCIDENT I wrote my first “Before Bandwagons” column for Vogue and delivered it on July 1, 1943;19 then went down to New York University to give my weekly lecture on children's books; then walked across Washington Square, where on what was once a parlor floor lived Bravig and Valeska Imbs. They were, that evening, giving one of their many, many parties.20

  From the great tangle of white curtains drifting into the parlor, a tall, slender, youngish man I had never seen before advanced toward me. (“I found him sitting under a tree in a park in Los Angeles,” Anaïs later explained. “He worked in a beauty parlor!”) He stopped close to me and said, “You're going to have a very serious accident.” I said to him, “I know. I've been hearing a crash for one week now. When will the accident be?” The man said, “I don't know that—maybe tonight… maybe sometime this week….”21 Someone strummed a guitar… someone Spanish and accomplished. Slowly Anaïs raised her bare arms, her emerald-green taffeta dress falling in ample folds about her, and she began to quiver, to swirl, her skirt making wide arcs…. So the night went on typically.

  Eloise Hazard said, “It's after midnight, and I have to be at The Saturday Review at 8:30 this morning, and I have to go home.” I said, “I'll get a cab and drop you.” Everybody kissed everybody, and Eloise and I went down and out into the Square and into a taxicab. The taxi made off into browned-out (for that is what it was during these early war days—dimmed low down) New York, and I dropped Eloise. She said, “Don't drop the pot of basil that Valeska gave you, and, for heaven's sake, don't lose Wilson's Shock of Recognition! You're going to have to write about it soon.” She got out. I stayed in.

  We sped up Park Avenue. There was nobody anywhere in view. I said to the cabby, “Please stop, I want to get out.” He did not stop. An enormous crash. I heard myself say, “Well, there's the crash.” I know so little about mechanical things that my next thought, after the first oblivion, was: I must get out of this. Dimly, dimly I sensed disaster. I felt blood before I saw it. I clutched what was in my left arm—The Shock of Recognition. I hefted myself, out of what I did not know, into what I did not know, feeling that whatever it was would explode if I did not get clear of it.

  Then, on this very hot July morning, I was very cold—freezing, and I had a secret. My secret was that my top teeth were in the top of my head and I must not tell anyone because to get at them they would cut my head open. I heard me murmuring, “Someone please hold my hand, or I will die.” I heard a woman say, “We're not allowed to touch you. That is law.” Somewhere in me was the thought that all about me surely there were friends, people who loved me, who would be delighted to touch me…. Then I felt a strong hand holding mine and a man said, “It's all right now.” And I laughed, because I realized I was being covered over, and I realized that, unbelievably, I was almost naked, flat-out on Park Avenue. Then I went somewhere else. Then I came back. Then I went somewhere else again. This to-and-froing and laughter went on and on for what seemed to me a very long time, until I saw flaring gaslight, which I believed improbable, but which later I was told lighted the way into the subterranean depths of Bellevue [Hospital] (Or did I make this up?). Then I went out—very far out. These little deaths, along the way, are most restorative. (1993)

  NOTE: This crash permanently scarred Leo's face, hence the beards that he wore for the next fifty years. How much else of him was
smashed up is not clear today. Leo later often needed a cane to assist with what he called his “gimpy legs,” and he blamed the 1943 accident. Richard, who went to the hospital that night, laid more of Leo's future difficulties on circulatory problems and his aversion to exercise. In any case, Leo had a lifetime of troubled walking after the accident.

  On October 1, 1943, Leo and Richard moved to a somewhat larger walk-up apartment at 20 East Eighty-eighth Street (between Fifth and Madison Avenues), where they would live until the spring of 1948. Here, first by continuing the dinners that Richard had been cooking for six or eight on East End Avenue and then with open houses on Sunday evenings and increasing crowds, Leo began giving the parties that became legendary. Richard later speculated that Leo's Sunday at-homes might have been a replacement for his family's weekly gatherings in Jackson Heights. Richard, however, soon felt unappreciated by the many guests and tired of the routine.

  JOURNAL• AUGUST 17, 1944 Today I lunched with Touche [John Latouche], whom I love very much for his gentle little-boy qualities, and we talked of our hauntings and of panic, each of us having such enormous panic.

  The heat was intense, and in the late afternoon such a storm beat on my head. What other storms? In Interstate Park [near Jackson Heights], when a great oak flattened [cousins] Rosalie and Nonny's shoes and we all ran screaming through the torrents to hide in insubstantial privies. It was soon after Grandma had died22—all the women in black, with it dying their skins. And the storm when the children had got me to eat horse manure on Aunt Annie's farm.23 That night I was anguished with pain, a doctor an impossibility, and everyone terrified in a house all lit by oil lamps and flickering, a great storm raging at the little-paned windows (but it helped my stomach). And the storm in Grandma's house—sitting on the kitchen table—oh, it is all so lost in gaslight and the feel of a scratchy wooden table, and the black shirtwaists and skirts she always wore. But she was so beautifully safe-feeling, and there's an elusive fragrance to her which I shall come upon one day. She was spare, with silver hair piled and twisted high upon her head; she had lovely blue, kind, bemused eyes and her skin was exquisitely wrinkled; she spoke no English; her fingers were delicate and long, remarkable for a woman who came from Jewish peasant stock (of her family I know little); she was fond of the diamonds Grandpa hung upon her, but she gave them away to women, daughters-in-law, of whom she thought more. We all loved her exceedingly, and, when we were terrified, she always knew what to do. In that storm, she tucked me away from the lightning flashes in a room that had no window.

  AUGUST 29, 1944 As a small child, I was so hungry for flowers that I would beg them from people who had been fortunate enough to carry them into our stony, dirty street. There was an Italian family who brought masses of field flowers from some suburb. They kept them—daisies, black-eyed Susans, dandelions— on their parlor windowsills, and we would plead for them. They would fling them to us and that was heavenly. Even the most hard-boiled of us loved them. Once we stole carnations from wreaths being carried out to a hearse!

  I laughed aloud in my sleep last night, or rather early this morning, and Richard said it was much better than the screaming I usually do. Richard is exquisitely pale and thin. Touche says he's so beautifully complete, and that is so, but intact is more accurate.

  AN APPARITION One summer day, I went to see Eleonora. On entering her bedroom (above the cacophonous carpenter's shop), I found, stretched in blazing sunlight upon a pale lemon-yellow bed, an apparition I had only seen until that moment upon the screen. The apparition was done up in tan army fatigues, rumpled pants, a rumpled shirt open at the neck, marvelous blond hair spread in disorder on a corn-yellow pillow, matter-of-fact blue eyes staring straight at me. The bone structure of the face, seemingly clean of makeup, was fantastic. And out of the pale crimson lips came a husky voice. “Sit down,” she said. “Where?” said I. She said, “The bed, of course.” So I sat down. And then it was hours later. Because the apparition was Marlene Dietrich. And she had for some time bewitched me on-screen, enchanted me, made me laugh with and at her. Later, I realized that she knew when people laughed at her and she knew when people laughed with her, and that she exercised, at all times, total control. (VOGUE, july 1992)

  NOTE: Leo swiftly wrote a piece describing Dietrich's work on a USO tour, which Vogue published on August 15, 1944, titled “Welcome, Marlene!” Their interviews began a friendship that grew closest in the fifties, when she was often in New York.

  JOURNAL• NOVEMBER 26, 1944 Last evening we set out for a theater and found ourselves at Columbus Circle and the Ballet International, which, save for Sebastian, was outrageously bad and almost entirely peopled in the house proper with a particularly repulsive species of [homosexual] bitch—the over-plump, over-forty, baby-talking (they really talk so mincingly to be refined), gray-faced kind, who need not open their mouths to give themselves away, for their posteriors do it, but I don't want to tell about them, nor the unhealthy pallor which hung palpably on their faces and in the theater, that old-smoke pallor so omnipresent at theatrical and human disasters, nor the cankered yellow of the [company director] Marquis de Cuevas's face mounted over his extra-large dark bow tie. It was all too nauseating.

  NOVEMBER 27, 1944 Maya Deren's film [At Land],24 with Richard showing up in it: He is beautifully what he is—almost out of a [James Branch] Cabell Sorisande novel, and I with age, but not discretion, and the gestures of a rabbi exhorting or a ham actor of the old school, and Deren crawling her way through it all—but what sense to it? Lovely photography: A shot of great crystal chandeliers memorable, and the ocean surging on the shore, and footprints in the sand, their edges crumbling—these things are always effective—but what and why?

  It is 1:15 a.m. Richard makes go-to-bed sounds in the bathroom, and I am tired, but so filled with things I want to set down, things I want to empty out of me: I am so wound up! I hear the bathroom light click off and a slipper scuffle against the hall floorboard. I must get into bed. Sometimes a distant automobile on a rainy night makes an almost imperceptible fluttering. I ache to hear the summer wind in summer trees. “Nib-tip,” says Richard, “aren't you goin' to bed?”25

  MARCH 30, 1945 Richard is somewhat in love with V. He said that going to lunch with V made him feel as he did when he looked for a job in the theater and he was to come back the next day and that he would probably get the part. That is why this has to be: He almost never got those parts, but this part he must know that he can get if he wants it. Perhaps he will then be as secure as he can really be. Having no ability to feel jealousy about this makes me have the same amputated kind of feeling as when I knew that I had no feeling for any religion taught me. I just couldn't make bargains with God anymore, and I couldn't run to him. There was no refuge—none—jealousy is refuge, religion is a refuge. I have neither to sustain me here. I have only my profound curiosity in what happens and in recording it.

  It will be late morning, in the fragrant spring rain, when he returns, climbing the stairs wearily, looking naughty—but he has to do this, I know it, and he must know it, too. It is only this way that we can have some measure of mutual respect, and so some little joy.26

  APRIL 20, 1945 When I practiced the piano at home, the doors leading from the parlor (we called it that then; now Momma calls it a living room) were many-paned. (French doors they were called, and everybody had them put in.) When I banged on the piano, all the glass thrummed. Sometimes I thought there was a great gleaming horsefly in the room, but it was glass, always glass, and this enchanted me, and was one of the reasons why I banged away at made-up pianistics. The exercises never made as much glass shivering as what I made up. A curious thing about what I made up was that it was, and still is, very Yiddish-Russian, minor in mode and Slavic-Yiddish in rhythm and feeling even when in three-quarter time—atavistically. I can improvise nothing in any other style, and I love playing this. It is fun and relief and a kind of well-being-in-where-I-belong.27

  NOTE: Leo reviewed Wars I Have Seen, Gertrud
e Stein's memoir about the Occupation of France, for the magazine Tomorrow.

  WARS I HAVE SEEN … I was quite puzzled as to how I would really tell about this rich, good, homely, insistent, courageous, wise, ungrammatical, amusing, very personal book. And I thought of my mother's family meetings.

  Some years ago, my mother formed her kinsmen into a family club. Three weeks ago, for the first time in two years, I attended one of their monthly meetings. My mother's family is enormous and noisy. They all have the faculty of listening to and carrying on several conversations simultaneously. This is extremely irritating to outsiders, but to those in the know, it is the essence of their special gregariousness.

  Listening to the family in full flight, I heard long stretches of conversation which fascinated me because I knew the people, the anecdotes were personal and amusing, and I understood the family lexicon—that lexicon which each family evolves as its own shortcut to communication. Then there were conversational stretches which made no sense to me; they were so intimate in structure and thought, so derived from a wealth of experience in which I had not participated, that I found no basis of communication. These were stretches in which the participants seemed to enter into a conspiracy of willful obscurity. They began right where they had stopped a day or even a month previously, taking up right in the middle of a thought or a sentence, interlarding each phrase with allusions obscure to me but filled with apparently world-shaking significance to all the others. And, of course, there was a constant repetition—repetition for emphasis, repetition for insistence. And a lot of it was just talk for the love of talking, talk as a form of harmless exhibitionism.