by Leo Lerman
When I was a small boy I slept and dreamed and was frequently ill in a brass crib. One side could be lowered or raised by my elders—all bars intricately knobbed and golden. I knew these bars to be fairy wands, so it was my desire to work one loose—then I could transform, make magic. One morning I managed this—only to have it snatched by one of the elders and to receive a stinging slap, but it pained only the skin upon which it fell—the spirit, still inviolate, continued to believe in the knobbed wand and the magic. Sometimes I saw the loveliest beings—people aureate and elms gorgeously distorted—in the plump, glittering knobs. When I drowsed, I slipped away into the brass-bars-and-knobs land—becoming something as elusive as the burnished light, being that light. No one ever knew. It was a simple escape, especially if I licked the brass—but this somehow seemed to give away my secret, with disastrous consequences to my corporeal. Thus I learned soon that any escape to fairyland must be a secret one. And it was.
NOTE: Leo again shifts into a narrative past tense in describing Eleonora von Mendelssohn.
JOURNAL • APRIL 30, 1950 Ela—From two sources she nourished herself— narcotics and love. For weeks she lay twisting in the arms of a lover not there—for a night he was. But where did the poppy dreams begin? The lover vanishing leaves the dream never ending? The needle—its thrust of release— and the lover—identical. The wonderful Italian lace bedcover with ducal arms upon pale green silk (the green of pressed spring leaves or faded, young green straw), the fabulous Mendelssohn jewels in cold-cream jars, the hats and veils, the furs, the ostrich coat…
MAY 2, 1950 What are the roots of these people—behind Grandpa, what fairy tale figure or legendary character? Behind Aunt Minnie, what lady in romance?22 My reading was Pioneers and Patriots of America, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes—but the people in my life (save for certain Prince Charmings, like “Uncle” Herman [Wald]) had little connection with what I had read.23 Did I then have deep atavistic Yiddish archetypes backing these people? Also, I was taken to the movies. “Cousin” Selma [Rosen], who did the shimmy in the kitchen the day Grandma was buried [in 1919], surely she represented some early jazz-baby movies siren—so the world of this sort of American child evolves—not from [medieval legend] Geneviève de Brabant, but from Douglas Fairbanks and ogre Germans and Jew haters and the boys playing epic figures in a pageant at school and the movie of Lincoln's assassination and death.
The situation of the world in 1914: the crossroad of displacement. A child born, as I was, in May 1914, got in right at the beginning of this displacement, but since the predisplacement world did not entirely vanish immediately, as Atlantis is said to have vanished, my world had islands, promontories, sometimes almost continents of pre-1914 world imbedded in it, as whole scraps of previous ages are to be found by archaeologists and students of history and decoration everywhere today. So, in the aging face of an old friend—when a birthmark or a scratch or a blond hair is suddenly encountered—it is possible to relive a moment long past. A single drop of the liquid of the past instantly drops into the liquid of this moment's impression, so muddling it that we do not for a time know is it now or yesterday, until the face before us reassembles as it is believed to be now, and we realize that memory, the repository of all, has beckoned us and we have followed.
MAY 12, 1950 Momma, about a plane shot down over the Baltic: “They were carrying that new thing they invented—personnel.”
NOTE: In May 1950, Leo stopped working for Vogue and Bazaar to concentrate on Mademoiselle. Editor in Chief Betsy Blackwell provided secretarial help and expected him at Mademoiselle editorial meetings, but usually Leo worked at home. When he could find assignments with magazines that did not directly compete with Mademoiselle, he often accepted them. For six months in 1951, Leo was supervising editor of a short-lived New York monthly called Park East; in the late fifties, he wrote a regular column for Playbill magazine; and the New York Times Book Review occasionally commissioned a piece. One of the latter was a review of a biography of the nineteenth-century novelist Ouida.
JOURNAL • JUNE 25, 1950 Hearts—that was Ouida's business. She was monstrously ugly, this small swart female, and desperately in love—with that desperation that only the hideous must sustain—relentlessly. Her heart broke and tears fell upon the endless pages, watering them so well that fortunes grew and blossomed magnificently. She made it—spent it. Who knew more about broken hearts in this period of perpetual semicolons? George Eliot with her illicit Mr. Lewes? Miss Barrett with her runaway Mr. Browning? Lord Tennyson with his amiable home life and the grief of In Memoriam—long passed?24 Compare Henry James's picture of society with Ouida's. Do they not overlap, especially in such books as Portrait of a Lady and Moths? The locales inevitably do, for fashion frequented the prescribed resorts. James's Madame Merle [in Portrait of a Lady] and Ouida's ultra-dames surely brushed gowns—perhaps even were intimates.
JULY 4, 1950 As I sit here writing, it is not known whether we shall be dead now, unexpectedly-expectedly. The headlines about [outbreak of war in] Korea make it so immediate. But if the Russians suddenly decided to do it with one bomb this would be Hiroshima—not knowing annihilation at all, just experiencing it. Gray will not even talk about it. I, the fatalist-optimist, have it here residing in me, and I abide with it—what else is there to do? It is waking high up in a house and hearing far below the persistent gnawing of a mouse.
NOTE: Gray went to Glenview, Illinois, to stay for several weeks with his aunt Alice to help her prepare for the wedding of her daughter, Barbara Cockrell.
AUGUST 17, 1950 • NEW YORK CITY
TO GRAY FOY • GLENVIEW, ILLINOIS
Goddard [Lieberson] took us to Sardi's tonight,25 and I saw a memorial table full—Margaret Truman,26 Jeanette MacDonald, and Jennie Grossinger!!! Three genuine pig-pusses. Margaret T is real common—or maybe it is just local. As for Jeanette MacD—you can't believe it. I wondered where Marion Davies is. I flirted with Jennie Grossinger and she looked angry-pleased. Finally, I told her who I was, and she said to the Mesdames Truman and Mac-Donald, “Isn't he a naughty child!” They looked real hard—in every sense of the word—and smirked. She got up and kissed me, and said again, “Oh—you naughty child!” Everyone in Sardi's stopped, and I felt like I should yell: “It's just my ma!” But I didn't. It was awful—and funny. Good night. I turn all the lights off. If anybody comments on letter frequency, this one came so soon because of sending you your mail.
THE GROSSINGER I can see myself sitting in what we called, when it was new, Radio City. I am sitting in an office, in a pool of warm electric light, waiting. I am waiting for a job. I am some two or three weeks out of acting school and I have heard that there could be jobs for a willing boy in a hotel called the Grossinger, way up in the Catskills, the star hotel on the Borscht Circuit.27 I wait patiently and, by and by, a door opens, and a thin, grayish man comes out, peers at me with tired, knowing eyes. He is followed by a woman whose composure seems slightly ruffled, but whose attire is immaculately correct—a very pretty, beautifully cut, delicately patterned-in-flowers silk daytime dress; a little, brimmed, dark straw hat perched firmly on her tight profusion of blond hair; a plump face, generously lipped. When her blue eyes look in my direction, they smile at me. The woman says, with a familiar Yiddish inflection to her soft, care fully modulated voice, “Are you waiting for me?” “Yes—I think I am.” The man says, “Jennie, do you know this boy? He probably wants a job….”
“What sort of job do you want?” asks Jennie. “I want to work in your theater. I hear it's a wonderful, growing theater. I want to work there.” She laughs; her eyes crinkle. “Oh, you already heard about our theater…. What can you do?” “I can sweep the stage floor. I can design scenery and paint it. I can design costumes and paint them. I can act if I have to. I can do anything in the theater.” She laughs. The man says, “What kind of experience do you have?” “I'm just out of acting school.” And the woman says, “Which one?” “The Feagin School of Dramatic Art… I had a schola
rship there for one year….” They both laugh. They laugh quite a lot. The woman says to the man, “He's very funny—isn't he?” “It's going to cost you something, Jennie….” Then he smiles wryly, and she says, “You could come to work for me, if you want—room and board, good kosher food—probably just like your mother's—two dollars a week… and everything you can possibly do around the theater you have to do.” I ask nervously, “Who pays for the bus trip up?” They both laugh again, a lot. He says, “You better watch out for this one.”
So I went to work for Jennie Grossinger. Those months that I stage-managed the Grossinger Playhouse could be subtitled “The Pleasures of Adversity.” I was envied by everybody else, all my classmates and all of their friends, because they were all hunting for jobs. For three seasons—1934, 1935, 1936—from before Memorial Day to after Labor Day, I lived, literally breathed the world of the Grossinger Hotel. Grossinger's was, when I first became a summer inhabitant of this cyclonic world, on the verge of becoming the greatest, indeed the grandest hotel in the Catskill Mountains. And in fact, in my first summer, the Grossinger enjoyed what was known as its first “1,000-guest” weekend. It is difficult today to think what an enormous, flourishing, intensely Yiddish enterprise, what a Jewish triumph the Grossinger was.
The core of the Grossinger was its main building, containing its check-in desk, executive offices, some of its most desirable apartments, a jumble of rooms in which to relax (lounges with English sporting prints on the walls, country furniture), a dining room with an enormous breakfast menu, which I really believe began “Good Morning, Pickled Herring,” and in which madam musicians sat playing during every lunch and dinner—potted-palm music, the kind that came from Vienna and Budapest and Old Broadway. The main building looked out over a big grassy place centered with English medallions of flowering plants, each looking like an aging opera singer. Then there were the buildings which seemed to grow each season and which contained an ever-increasing number of guests. As sunset approached on Friday nights, Jennie and her mother always stood on the landing above the front steps of the main house, looked heavenward, and moved their lips in prayer. I believe that part of this prayer was for the greater success of the Grossinger.
None of the health-giving amenities the Grossinger provided—the golf course, the tennis courts, the ploys of all sorts—really were for me. My life centered in the playhouse, where all summer long we did weekly concerts, revues, a big Saturday-night musical, and “dramatic plays,” these last by a resident company which came up seasonally for that purpose. The entire aggregation of “entertainers” sometimes numbered some 125 people. They included stage crew, scenery painters, costume ladies, and assorted agreeable or malevolent personalities, who had “things to do” with the proceedings.
The playhouse was run by a small, cartoon-faced gnome of infuriating energy: he “wrote” the shows. Much of the material was based on burlesque sketches, popular Broadway shows, madcap impressions of current events—basic revue material. The Catskills had, indeed, never seen such shows. A typical Saturday-night revue included a whooping overture, half a dozen comedy sketches played by Hank Henry (the top banana already famous on the burlesque circuit and later a big star in Las Vegas) and his diminutive partner Al Parker (he frequently worked in drag and was sometimes given to dancing on tables or even on drums in dark blue light). The show also included Sylvia Sims, not the one who became famous for her jazz later but a monologuist who did “dramatic” scenes and recited Dorothy Parker to the utter joy of the audience.
Then there was the opera wing. It consisted of three people. I think they were called Lazarin the Basso, Mario the Tenor, and Brema the Soprano. They did trios from Don Giovanni. Sometimes the trios had not started out as trios, but they ended up as trios at the Grossinger. They did an abbreviated version of Faust one season. This was done with slides. The basso was hidden below stage. Being somewhat unsure of when, as Mephistopheles, he should materialize, he would frequently raise the trapdoor, peer out into the audience—they seeing only the whites of his eyes—and mutter in his Russian-Yiddish voice, “Now?” Marguerite ascended to heaven backed by angels who were headed to hell, since I had put the slide in upside down. The 1,000-member audience screamed and shouted and wanted an encore. They loved Grand Opera.
The Grossinger audience got Cockney songs, a tryout by Danny Kaye, Yiddish theater with Jennie Moscowitz (a great Jewish tragedienne-comedienne, who had started her career when she ran away to join Sarah Bernhardt's troupe), even bits of Greek drama, sex talks, and six chorus girls done up in lavish beads and hand-painted grosgrains (we bought these at the Ziegfeld auction) swaying and stroking themselves to the sound of “Temptation,” or swirling girlishly to “Alice Blue Gown.”
Jennie Grossinger was fond of me, and sometimes in the late afternoon we would walk together down a path toward the playhouse, which sat there on the brow of a hill like some great ark. On a hill opposite the Grossinger eminence, in the late-afternoon light we could see an orchard of flowering apple trees. Under each tree was its prone shadow. One afternoon, I said to Jennie, “They look like ballerinas upside down….” Jennie turned her blue eyes at me and said, “I love dancers…. I never had time….” Then she looked around, and she smiled and she looked at me: “But look at all of this.”(1993)
JOURNAL • AUGUST 20, 1950 I am in bed—perhaps for two or three days— even a week—before the slight excuse of this cold evaporates and the magazine realizes that I have not appeared for some days and inquires whether I do not wish to work there anymore. A slight cold, when accompanied by a little fever, makes a legitimate oasis in the tumult of living from day to day. These few days in bed bring an illusion of forever, as when I was a little boy—ill for a year at a time—in the great brass bed set upon a platform so that Momma could see Fifth Avenue and the park beyond when she was ill, which was almost always.
NOTE: In January 1951, Mademoiselle sent Leo to London to research a feature on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
His only previous trip to Europe had been with Richard to England, Wales, and Ireland in the summer of 1937, for which Leo had taken a monthlong break from stage-managing a Broadway production called Behind Red Lights.
JANUARY 11, 1951 • LONDON
TO RICHARD HUNTER • NEW YORK CITY
I have just been out walking on Piccadilly and over all those streets which we knew so very well fourteen years ago. So many whores still, and Berkeley Square almost utterly modern apartment houses—but here I am in London, and I do truly love it more than New York. It again is coming home. I feel absolutely alive and marvelous here. Why is that? Oh, how I do love luxury! And no offices to go to. And how I do love flying. I am a bit tipsy, for I have had an excellent dinner at the current rage—Les Jardins des Gourmets. David [Webster, head of Covent Garden] and his friend Jimmy [Bell] took me—and then to something called the Buckingham Club (full of willowy English teeps), and, before all that, Peter [Wilson] came and fetched me to his huge eighteenth-century amazing house where he lives with a friend, Harry [Wright] (a charming boy).28 His little son Philip was there, because it is still holidays here, a sweet, beautifully mannered boy as only English children can be—very pretty, long-lashed blue eyes, blond, sort of Gray-like. We went to a wonderful circus, one-ring—and that is how it should be, not too complicated and huge. The Henry Greens are giving a party for me Saturday night.29 I feel like a regular little picture star. Peter sends his love to you. They are divorcing—and his house is large enough for all of us. He is giving a party for me on the twenty-third and David is taking me to the country all Sunday (and I think Brighton) and my head is in a gay whirl. This is exactly what I needed. Tomorrow I [interview with the] BBC. What a strange, wonderful-lucky man I am.
This is just a good night note to tell you that I could not come home without going to Clarges Street. Everywhere I find us—and somehow it is long ago and now all at the same moment. Only Virginia Woolf knew exactly this.30
JANUARY 12,
1951 • LONDON
TO GRAY FOY • NEW YORK CITY
Baby dear—It is very early in the morning, almost three, and after coming into this pretty room, with its enormous bathroom (such a luxury), from a party at Peter Wilson's, I sat reading the newspapers to bridge the interval wherein being alone makes me absolutely sick with longing for you. This is the awful time, the lonely time—but all the day long as I go about this really extraordinary city, which I do love so very much, you are with me, and I talk to you constantly— comparing and pointing out. So many things here you would love, but it is chilly almost all the time, because they have so little coal, and the [rationed] food is brave, and the women in the streets do look shabby, and places like broken teeth show where bombs fell—but so much has been all built up again. I went to the opera tonight—Pique Dame. It was so very good, so integrated. Why can't the Met do this? It is so shameful what we have. The English was all understandable, none of it embarrassing, and the Messel decor excellent, so accurate— 1792ish, a period almost never seen on the stage. This opera house is something out of Pollock's [toy theaters]—smaller than the Met, all pinkish, white, and gold, and everywhere the feeling of royalty, such a feeling of elegance with many people “dressed” and dukes and their ladies. Next to me—unexpectedly— Freddie Ashton, and not far off [theatrical designer] James Bailey.
I was occupied almost all day with BBC people. They are spread in some forty buildings throughout London. I visited some in what was formerly the very fashionable Hotel Langham, where Ouida lived when she was in London. I was terribly pleased to see it—even as it is now—all offices, but each office has a fireplace. People here unconnected with BBC—the public—seem so apathetic to radio, and some of them feel that it is too controlled. One never hears a radio here, as in New York, although over eight million have them. How still it is. My pen stopped scratching and the silence was appalling. Oh darling, I wish that you were here and could see London, because if you also loved it I would try very hard to make it possible for us to live here. I can't understand why it seems like coming home. It has big disadvantages, but so very many compensations. The eye always finds something to enchant it, and the city is filled with so many people out of books and with those who wrote them. It is so much all the past 250 years, with evidences of them everywhere, and the people are so very courteous. When I came into the lobby this morning, the lights were all dim and the porter asleep in his chair, and someone with violets had just passed along the passage, for perfume was heavy on the air. My key is huge and silver, the elevator is all gilt-and-looking-glass cage, the stairways circle huge wells, and the carpets are flowery red. You see, my love, why I am so enamored. I am still living like a very rich man—and it is fun, but how much more it would be if you were here, because I can just see your dear beautiful eyes—enormous with delight.