The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  7. The events Leo recalls probably occurred in July 1940, when Rudolf Forster (1884-1968) returned to make films in the Third Reich. Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) was the preeminent German theater director and producer between the wars, with whom many of Mendelssohn's friends had worked, including two of her husbands, Forster and the German-born actor Martin Kosleck (1904-94).

  8. The Italian tragedienne Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) had been a lover of the banker Robert von Mendelssohn. He and his wife, the pianist Giulietta Gordigiani, named their daughter for the actress.

  9. Eleonora's younger brother Francesco “Cesco” von Mendelssohn (1901-72), a cellist, actor, and theater director, suffered mental illness and according to Leo was eventually lobotomized.

  10. Toscanini had met Eleonora von Mendelssohn in 1935. In letters at the time, he complained about her persistence, portraying her as a constant, uninvited houseguest, but by the forties her devotion had prevailed in making him a lover.

  11. The Dutch Jewish émigrée Elsa Snapper Czebotar was a painter and close friend to Leo in the forties.

  12. Hungarian-born actress Lili Darvas (1902-74) was a star of Reinhardt's theater and was married to Ferenc Molnár, who wrote several plays for her.

  13. “I discover, this evening, that Laci was a morphinist. I never knew. Was that then the link with Ela? Were they all dope pals?” Journal, January 6, 1969.

  14. Josepha Washburn, a friend from Leo's stage-managing days, had married and was living in Connecticut.

  15. Eventually, Leo told the inspectors that he was homosexual. “I was turned down on Governors Island by the army (‘Not pathological, but psychological').” Journal, February 18, 1986. Richard Hunter's asthma had disqualified him from service.

  16. Lucien Vogel (1886-1954) and Cosette de Brunhoff (d. 1964) had managed the French publications of Condé Nast, including Vogue, through the twenties and thirties. She was also sister to Jean de Brunhoff, creator of Babar.

  17. In 1943 Cipe Pineles Burtin (1908-91) became one of the first women art directors when she took the job at Glamour, and in 1958 and 1959 she was art director when Leo was at Mademoiselle.

  18. Leo was probably writing his article “Reading for Democracy,” about books on that subject for young people. The Saturday Review of Literature would run it on July 18, 1942.

  19. “Before Bandwagons” was intended as a regular column on artists in the vanguard. In the end Leo published only one further, unsigned, in the Vogue of February 1, 1947.

  20. Leo was teaching a summer course at NYU called “Juvenile Writing.” The American writer Bravig Imbs (1904-46) and his wife Valeska (1905?–49) had been part of the Stein-Toklas circle in Paris before the war. In mid-1943 Bravig Imbs joined the Office of War Information and began radio broadcasts of jazz to the French. He was killed in a jeep accident in France in 1946. Valeska then became a translator and, briefly, a restaurateur.

  21. This professed clairvoyant, Pierce Harwell, also said Leo looked as though he “were soon to go into exile.” Harwell (1916-85) was introduced to this crowd by the writer and diarist Anaïs Nin (1903-77). In her published diary for September 1941, Nin wrote: “I met Leo Ler-man, who talks like Oscar Wilde, but has a warmth in his glittering dark eyes. Behind his constant game of wanting to amuse, I sense a sorrowful human being. But the door is closed to this aspect of himself. He parries with quick repartee, he is the man of the world who practices a magician's tour de force in conversation, a skillful social performance, a weather vane, a mask, a pirouette, and all you remember is the fantasy, the tale, the laughter.”

  22. When Leo refers to Grandma and Grandpa, they are his maternal grandparents. The names on their gravestones are Joseph (1852?–1930) and Edith Sugarman Goldwasser (1859?–1919), but the family called them Jacob and Yetta.

  23. “I had believed (poor city child that I was) my cousins when they told me it was chocolate.” Journal, March 2, 1981. Rosalie, Martin, and Norma “Nonny” Goldwasser were the children of Leo's uncle Harry and aunt Ida. Leo's father's older sister Anna Lerman Germain had a farm in Colchester, Connecticut.

  24. Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-61) cast both Leo and Richard in her works, including the fifteen-minute silent At Land (1944).

  25. Leo and Richard shared a love of nonsense language. Many of Leo's letters to Richard are sprinkled with such words: snunc, ugh-wumph, topmiff, nib-tip, etc. Most of his letters also close with “ity-ity-ity,” probably an allusion to a robin's song heard when they first kissed.

  26. “V” was Fulco Santostefano della Cerda (1898-1978), Duke of Verdura, an Italian jewelry designer. Richard Hunter: “Fulco was very amusing, very intelligent. It went on for a couple of months. Then he met Leo at a party, and asked Leo if he was in love with me. Leo said, ‘Yes.' Then I never saw Fulco again.”

  27. Leo's familial heritage on both sides was mostly Polish and Russian Jewish. Leo said that the Goldwassers had originally been called Schneidover and the Lermans named Simon-Berghaus. Originally, “Lerman” (acquired at some point) had been spelled “Lehrmann,” but “Grandpa could not write an ‘h' and the extra ‘n' was lost.” Journal, December 1970.

  28. “Cousin Eddie” here is probably Martin Goldwasser (d. 1985), a cousin who became an Air Force colonel. Leo probably invented “Cousin Larry,” the stage-designing paratrooper.

  29. The Vienna-born actress Luise Rainer (b. 1910) had married the publisher Robert Knittel just a month before. Although she is the only actress to have won back-to-back Oscars, her Hollywood film career was over by 1943.

  30. Richard Dreyfus (1913-2004) was a banker and art collector; his wife Denyse Mosseri (later Harari, 1918-91) had degrees in philosophy and mathematics. Each was descended from an important Jewish family: His were bankers in Germany and Switzerland, hers prominent and wealthy Egyptians.

  31. Frances Dewey Wormser (b. 1902) was a former musical comedy actress, a friend whom Leo had met through Imogene Coca.

  32. The novelist (The Member of the Wedding) and short-story writer Carson McCullers (1917-67) was frequently at Yaddo during the war. Leo had met her previously through the writer Edita Morris.

  33. The novelist Marguerite Young (1908-95) took some of Leo's features and experiences for the character of Mr. Spitzer in her magnum opus, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965).

  34. In December 1944, Curtice Hitchcock (1892-1946), director of the publisher Reynal & Hitchcock, had signed Leo to edit a series of books on American highways and their regional histories. The project was never realized. For the publisher Julian Messner, however, Leo did begin editing a Cities of America series. Volumes on Chicago, Louisville, and Indianapolis were published.

  35. A brief affair with the beautiful Swiss novelist and journalist Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach (1908-42) had left McCullers obsessed and later devastated by Schwarzen-bach's death following a bicycle accident in Switzerland.

  36. Leo had met the married writers Edita and Ira Morris on Nantucket in 1945, but dropped them a few years later, when Leo read her lips saying dreadful things about him at one of his parties. Leo's deaf cousins had taught him this skill as a boy.

  37. “Elizabeth [Ames, 1885-1977] said: ‘I remember the thirties, when the leftists were here…. You couldn't get them to go into the garden.' I answered her clear, deaf-woman tones: ‘And now, when the queens are here, you can't get them out.' Little T squeaked with joy.” Journal, February 1, 1986.

  38. Mary Louise Aswell (1902-84), fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1945 to 1949, had opened that magazine to Leo by introducing him to Carmel Snow.

  39. The players in the game Murder drew cards: The ace of spades designated one the murderer; the jack of hearts made another the detective. One night, Leo was the murderer and stalked Capote: “I lured Truman into my closet. I strangled him. He screamed, Oh, you, I'll get you for this! I'll never trust you again!' It was absolutely thrilling; his scream went up several octaves above and several octaves below: It was the full range of Truman. It was the manly Tru
man, the female Truman, it was the works. I think the scream haunts Yaddo still.” (As quoted in Truman Capote by George Plimpton [Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997].)

  40. Diana Trilling (1905-96), essayist on literature and social issues, had been at Yaddo in the summer of 1931; Leo met the Trillings in the fall of 1943 by writing for Vogue about Lionel, who would become one of the country's leading critics.

  41. Leonard Ehrlich (1905-84) had published a novel, God's Angry Man (1932), about the violent abolitionist John Brown. Leo's and Ehrlich's mutual dislike was instantaneous. On May 6, Leo had written to Richard that Ehrlich was “like all the Jewish boys who belonged to clubs in the local synagogue—serious and sallow visaged,” and then on May 30: “I really find it difficult to believe that he has any Jewish blood in him whatsoever. He's so boche.”

  42. Although married, Howard Doughty (1904-70), biographer of historian Francis Park-man, had been the sometime lover of Newton Arvin (1900-1963), who was a literary critic and professor of American literature at Smith College. In the two weeks before Arvin's arrival in 1946, Doughty had begun having sex with Capote. When Doughty departed, Capote and Arvin started a romance that continued erratically until the summer of 1948. Arvin is also remembered for his 1960 arrest for possession of homosexual pornography. To escape a prison sentence, he named other collectors including two young Smith College colleagues, later convicted.

  43. “Being so” was then gay slang for being homosexual.

  44. Richard had an erotic fascination with men's ears.

  45. Zita (1892-1989), last empress of Austria-Hungary, had married Archduke Karl in 1911. They were crowned in 1916 and dethroned in 1918.

  46. Grace Moore (1898-1947), a soprano who sang at the Metropolitan Opera, also appeared in Broadway revues and in popular films (One Night of Love).

  47. Leo could not swim. On a visit to Miami early in their relationship, Richard coaxed him into the ocean, inadvertently leading him beyond his depth. Richard had to pull Leo, who fought him all the way, back to shore. Leo believed that Richard had saved his life.

  48. The Russian-born Belgian poet, art critic, and journalist Léon Kochnitzky (18927-1965) introduced Leo to many refugees (including Bravig and Valeska Imbs) and art world figures (such as gallery owner Kirk Askew). To escape the Nazis, Kochnitzky had reportedly disguised himself as a nun.

  49. According to Richard Hunter, the affair was with Prince Charles (1903-83), the king's brother.

  50. In 1919 the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio declared a revolutionary government in the Adriatic port of Fiume. Kochnitzky served as its foreign minister until December 1920, when the Italian government ousted the rebels.

  51. Billy Price and Winifred Ingalsbee were both female classmates of theirs at the Feagin School.

  52. “Tib” or “Tibis” was an affectionate name between Leo and Richard. Usually it referred to Leo, whom Richard's letters greeted as “Tibi” or “Tibface” or “Tiblabel.” For Richard, Leo often used “Reezl,” a nickname from childhood begun when a brother dubbed the asthmatic Richard “Wheezer.”

  53. In Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Odette is a beautiful courtesan who eventually marries Swann and bears him a daughter. Henriette Pascar (1886-1974) was an occasional chanteuse and actress who had frequent affairs during her marriage to Simon Liberman. She was devoted, however, to their artistic son, Alexander.

  54. Tatiana Iacovleva du Plessix (1906-91) was the Russian émigrée widow of Count Bertrand du Plessix (a French aviator killed early in World War II) when she married Alexander Liberman in 1942. Lucien Vogel, one of Liberman's mother's past lovers, had persuaded Condé Nast to hire him as an assistant art director at Vogue in 1941. Alex Liberman (1912-99) became art director at the magazine in March 1943, a post he held until becoming editorial director of all Condé Nast publications in 1962.

  55. Ballet Society was founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in July 1946 to perform new works. Two years later it became the New York City Ballet.

  56. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) took several impromptu portraits of Leo during the late forties and early fifties.

  57. Leo is referring to the February 1947 “Before Bandwagons” column, which ran unsigned. Others mentioned in the piece were Robert Davison, Paul Bowles, Valerie Bettis, and I. Rice Pereira.

  58. Gielgud was starring in The Importance of Being Earnest, which played concurrently in New York with Cecil Beaton's production of Lady Windermere's Fan.

  59. The Vortex, a play written by Coward in 1923, portrays a son attracted to his mother. His jealousy of her affairs leads him to drug use.

  60. According to Richard, Leo also once proposed to Eleonora, but she took it as a joke.

  61. “A friend, subletting Ela's flat over the carpenter shop, demurred at the two flights of stairs. The owner of the building said, ‘What's wrong with you? Toscanini climbs ‘em twice a week.' “ Journal, February 22, 1971.

  62. Leo had become heavy and didn't appeal physically to Richard. When he shaved that summer, everyone agreed that Leo looked much more benevolent with the beard. He wore it the rest of his life.

  63. The father of Iris Barry's child was the painter Wyndham Lewis. Barry (1895-1969) was the first chief of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art.

  64. “First glimpsed Connie as a little girl, when I sat on the polished wooden countertop in her father's store, where my uncle Irving was a ‘coming' young clerk. Then as John Huston's mistress.” Journal, July 21, 1972.

  65. Elisabeth Bergner (1900-1986), great star of theater and film in Germany and Austria, was a friend of Eleonora von Mendelssohn. Her 1935 stage and film performance in Escape Me Never launched her American career in the thirties and forties.

  66. “Label” was Leo's familial nickname. He preferred it to “Leo,” which he thought sounded like a cat's cry.

  67. Poet and art patron Ruth Stephan (1910-74) published a quarterly of art and literature called The Tiger's Eye from 1947 to 1949. Leo's work never appeared in it, although pieces by many writers he sent to her did.

  68. Ruth Yorck called Richard “Mister Honey.”

  69. Edwin Denby (1903-83) was a poet and influential dance critic.

  70. Leo was writing “Fresh Paint,” a feature article about recent paintings by a dozen contemporary artists. It would run in the magazine's December 1947 issue.

  71. Pavel “Pavlik” Tchelitchew (1898-1957), a Russian-born set designer, painter, and draftsman, was the lover of editor Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002). Tchelitchew's 1940-42 painting Cache-cache (Hide-and-Seek) had enormous influence on Gray Foy's work.

  72. Editor and book reviewer Pearl Kazin (b. 1922) and Leo were friends in the forties, when she worked at Harper's Bazaar. He called her “Cultured Pearl.” Her brother Alfred Kazin (1915-98) was a literary critic and memoirist.

  73. The Mexican painter and sculptor Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) and his wife Olga, a pianist, lived in New York from 1936 to 1950.

  74. R. Kirk Askew, Jr. (1903-74), owner of Durlacher Brothers, who showed neo-Romantic and Surrealist artists (selling Old Master drawings to pay the bills), and his wife Constance (1895-1984) were known for their afternoon cocktail parties. They gathered many literary and musical leaders in the thirties and forties, plus a few of Askew's painters. The socialite Grace Zaring Stone (1891-1991) also wrote novels under the pseudonym Ethel Vance. Benjamin Sonnenberg (1901-78) was a prominent publicist and philanthropist. John Gunther (1901-70), the author of best-selling sociopolitical studies (Inside U.S.A.), married Jane Perry Vandercook (b. 1916). Leo describes the Askews, Normans, and Van Vechtens in the journals that follow.

  75. A peculiarity of Leo's letters to Richard is their frequent continuation over days, even weeks, while Leo awaited a mailing address for his wandering friend.

  76. Leo doesn't elaborate. There may have been Mendelssohn money in Holland, but Eleonora's mother, Giulietta Gordigionia, had reportedly been an early supporter of Mus
solini.

  77. By “gay people” Leo meant carefree and lively ones. He later disliked the use of the word “gay” to mean homosexual.

  78. Her husband, Leo's uncle Charles Goldwasser, had died suddenly the previous day.

  79. Capote had recently departed for Haiti on assignment for Harper's Bazaar. His collection of vignettes titled “Call It New York” appeared in the February 1, 1948, Vogue. In it, the section “Tea with Hilary” depicts a character clearly Leo: “Playing host is his cure-all. […] Hilary, with his large, spectacular appearance and roaring, giggling monologues, gives even the dreariest occasions a bubbling glamour. Hilary so wants everyone to be glamorous, to be a storybook creature; somehow he persuades himself that the greyest folk are coated with legend-making glitter.”

  80. In the summer of 1948, Capote's confidant and fellow Southerner Andrew Lyndon (1918-89), an unsuccessful writer, would have an affair with Newton Arvin. It brought an end to Capote's relationship with Arvin, but not his friendship with Lyndon.

  81. For “Before Bandwagons” in the February 1947 Vogue, Leo had interviewed and swiftly befriended scenic designer Robert Davison (b. 1922). Then living on West Fifty-sixth Street, Davison soon moved into two floors of an Upper East Side brownstone at 1453 Lexington Avenue. By the spring of 1948 he would be sharing them with Leo. The two men enjoyed each other, but their attraction was never physical.

  82. Myrt & Marge was a radio serial (1931-46) about a chorus girl (Myrt) and her chorus girl daughter (Marge), who competed for men and roles. Leo and Capote often addressed each other as “Myrt” (Leo) and “Marge” (Truman).

  83. The novelist and critic Glenway Wescott (1901-87) and his lifelong companion, Monroe Wheeler, had very open arrangements (including a ménage from 1927 to 1943 with the photographer George Platt Lynes). Although Leo never knew why Wescott pursued and then promptly dropped him, a letter dated January 21, 1948, from Wescott to the artist Bernard Perlin explains: “I have committed an act of darkness, at last—with one most undesirable [Leo] whose desire for me I chanced to observe; [done] in my way of cool decision, not good though well meant…. With also the characteristic problem of disentangling myself from further engagement without wounding the self-esteem of my poor friend.”