The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  NOTE: For Mademoiselle, Leo wrote an article about the “lady editors” who had created or were running the leading women's magazines of the day. Betsy Blackwell, Edna Chase, and Carmel Snow were included. The following are his notes from an interview with Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor of Bazaar.

  JOURNAL JUNE 20, 1951 Diana Vreeland on Carmel Snow:40

  The best glands in the world.

  Terrific early-morning clarity.

  She's not like a person who lives in actuality.

  A contemplative, mystical woman.

  The thing that makes her tick is her mystical Catholic quality.

  Her mystical essence is the beginning and end of Carmel Snow.

  Whatever the Catholic Church gives in its complete essence.

  Those miniature bones, which attain elegance.

  The most divine knees.

  There's very little elegance in the world, and you can't acquire it.

  She doesn't have great elegance of mind.

  She's still a child.

  Her Irish characteristics.

  The Blarney Stone's her desk, her bed, her everything.

  The best sense of humor.

  Her wonderful sense of gossip.

  She's educating herself all the time.

  Her cleanliness, her sweetness, her naïveté.

  When you lose your naïveté, God has left you.

  Carmel is the most divine woman.

  It isn't respect, it's kind of like spoiling somebody—or thing—to upset her.

  People keep her so carefully.

  She does needlepoint, reads everything, is voraciously interested in all.

  She's always in the midst of a great flirtation.

  JUNE 28, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  Tibby, we had a bad happening. Gray received a special-delivery late last night from his aunt Alice. She told him that his stepfather has been trying to divorce his mother for some seven months now, and he seems to have lost his mind or something, and Maebelle has lived away from her house for a month, and now Earle [Hughes] (Gray's stepfather) has disappeared, and it is such a mess.41 So Gray must go to California next week, and he doesn't know how long he will be gone. Ah me. It's most upsetting, and I am exhausted from working so hard. So, it is a consolation to think of you having a beautiful time. This broken-down house has been offered to me for $20,000, but I can't think of that now. What a year. I'm worried about Gray going out there. What if Earle is jealous of him, as I know he is, and tries to do something to him?

  JOURNAL • JULY 1, 1951 This evening, Gray said that I was such an impractical dreamer, always saying I would get $10,000 for an article or some such thing and never doing anything about it, and I'd better stop. I was so depressed at dinner that I could not eat for a time. It was as though he had wiped away all my substance for a moment, for I know how much I am of dreams made. My whole fabric is of dreams. But he meant it well, and it is because he feels that I do too much work. I've tried to explain that this is how I must do, but he doesn't understand this. I am utterly selfish, for all I do is to assure my own comfort, my own ego. Is there such a thing as a selfless action? I doubt it. The good is when the action accrues to another's constructive benefit. We're all of us cannibals. But nobody has the right to destroy another's dreams, unless the dreamer and his dreams are destructive to others and even to himself.

  JULY 1, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  I wish I could recapture the wonderful safe feeling I used to have years ago when I knew where you were resting your head and where Eleonora was resting hers and Rut [Yorck] hers and Sylvia [Hunter] hers.42 In so short a time all dispersed, all gone … but if I go on this way it becomes bathos and self-pity … and that's silly and life is less difficult for me than for many others so I should be trusting and believe that always sooner or later happiness descends. The most depressing and most uplifting thing one learns as one grows older is that time really moves more rapidly than light. Lo—you are here; lo—you are not. The longest moment is nothing, absolutely nothing, and the briefest hour is forever. This may be corny but it is true and reassuring and, as I say, depressing.

  I wonder if I have anything cheerful to report…. I shall get some money from the Times, inasmuch as they asked me to write 1,200 words on the new Cecil Beaton book [Photobiography]. And they said that I was the person who did the best social history pieces they had. So that's indeed a gay thing to report.

  JULY 14, 1951 • 6 A.M. • WESTHAMPTON, NEW YORK

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  I am sitting here at a little writing desk, before a little window that is so very similar to Quidnet, because from it on one side is a vista of tumbling ocean, and on the other is a bay, beach grass, sweet little birds, and dawn. I am in Alice's house in Westhampton, and it is so relaxing. I couldn't bear to sleep tonight because of being right beside the ocean—for this is a long, old, big, rambling house right in the dunes. The fragrance of salt and wild roses and sea grasses all commingled is so wonderful. This is a genuine Mary Roberts Rine-hart house.

  11 A.M.

  Now I am awake again in a light by-the-sea morning. Waking, the sound was autos rushing and whooshing along a highway—far away—coming closer— close—right here—and fading. Then I realized these motors were all waves rolling in and breaking on the shore. Then I heard long, high-up voices calling only as voices sound at the shore, and, my eyes still shut, I thought: Soon I will open my eyes, and Richard will be here in the bed next to me—all scrunched up, maybe holding one of his ears. Then, for this was suddenly unbearable, I opened my eyes—and, of course, you weren't, and the seashore voices went right on calling. And I thought: How can anyone live too long, for life is intolerable, and even the medicine that one knows he must take is, still, medicine. I must tell you, and it is best to tell you when you are far away, so as you will not forget this when you are here, that I love you as I never could love anyone else. Gray is a child to be protected and loved in another and—God forgive me— unlike way, but you are my true love—and now, like a man who has once lived in a paradise (or so it seemed to him, though he saw the poisonous plants and vipers in it) and has been forced by life itself to leave it, I am always walking there—all the time—while apparently I am here, or in my office, or lying in bed at home beside Gray, whom I do love—but not in overwhelming, annihilating passion. I am telling you this because you already know it—and probably even surmise how many times I sit miserably in a room or a train or at a meeting—because I find life so relentless and hope so in danger—know that I carry it within me like some precious globed fruit—treasuring it, eating of it sparingly but incessantly.

  But now china clatters, ice tinkles in glasses downstairs, and I know that I must put on a shirt and trousers and socks and shoes and be sure to take my wallet—and hide this letter away—and go downstairs where other people, who have probably been miserable in their rooms, will also sit waiting and being every day beside the sea, now meekly creeping up the shore and just as silkily, suavely creeping away. I must tell you briefly and without being a would-be writer while doing it, that I love you as deeply and madly and painfully as the first time you kissed me in Central Park—while that bloody beautiful robin tootled. And I am so very pleased about it, because each life must have a continuity and this isn't a bad one—is it?

  JULY 19, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • BURBANK, CALIFORNIA

  Did I write to you about Brigitta and Goddard [Lieberson] and the magnificently situated house in which they summer rent-free with butlers and maids and a vista like a Patinir [Dutch landscape]?43

  Brigitta looks tan and lovely and the little boys are wonderful. I ate a sparse dinner and came home and ate a little more. It was a pleasant, unfraught evening during which I discovered Brigitta and her mother had once been befriended by Rut, who had them living in her [rented] palace in Venice, where they were broke. Brigitta se
ems to like Rut very much and didn't know that she was [nowadays] always broke. Isn't that odd? Just now Marlene calls. I mean I am typing with one hand and listening to her with the other. She's in a state of being over that Siamese [Yul Brynner], and she's upset, and she talks about you a great deal. She wanted to know whether you would spend any time with her if she comes to California.

  YUL BRYNNER Marlene asked: “Who is this Yul Brynner?” “Oh, he is very big at Columbia television, and he is going to be the lead in the new Rodgers & Hammerstein show, the one with Gertie Lawrence, and I've known him a long time, and you know very well who he is because Claude Alphand was his mistress….” “Oh … Claude … all of those white curtains … She really needed all of those white curtains.44 …” The next day Marlene called, “Noël knows your Yul Brynner, and he feels I must know him, so he has arranged it….”

  So then she got to know Yul Brynner. She was lost in a deep, lady-waiting-at-the-telephone, all-pervasive passion. This amused me very much, for the Yul Brynner I knew had been so like the silky boy, Chéri, whom Colette's aging courtesan Lea had adored, and who had not only given himself to her, but had even more enjoyed wallowing in her pearls. This began my life as an emissary between her and Yul, whom I had known ever since he had come to America with the Chekhov Theater Studio.

  The boys and girls of the Chekhov Theatre had burst upon me one late afternoon when sitting in Eleonora's room, her single crowded cell on East Seventy-fifth Street in a converted town house. I heard a hullabaloo across the landing. There in two large rooms lived Ilse Bois, once the reigning star of Berlin vaudeville houses. Ilse was a small, faded fiery redhead, compact, tightly muscled, and as Berlin as her neighbor Lotte Lenya. Lotte kept the tiniest room, a pied- à-terre where she led a life she thought private, between Ilse's spacious quarters and Eleonora's meager housing. There were no tempestuous sounds from Lotte's lair. Eleonora was securely in her bed, attached to her telephone, plotting ways and means to share in Toscanini's whereabouts—the closer, the better. But Ilse's rooms seethed with wild, enthusiastic greetings.

  I crossed the landing into the tumult and found a tall, loquacious, keen-faced, bright-eyed boy, who said his name was Hurd Hatfield.45 I also saw a catlike young man, sinewy—was he Oriental? Part Oriental? Kurdish?—something so exotic I could not say quite what he was, but what he definitely was, and knew it fully, was a charmer. He had dark, flirty eyes and an attractive, sullen, come-hither-ifyou-dare manner. His friends whirled about, but he sat cross-legged on the floor. Ilse had known them all in England.

  Soon after meeting Yul at Ilse's, I went, one evening, to visit two young women who lived in what I fondly believed was the last house in Manhattan lit by gaslight. Jonatha and Paquita lived on the parlor floor of an old brownstone just off Fifth Avenue, west on Forty-sixth Street. A strange, mythical beast, very large, carved in stone, guarded the steps of this erstwhile mansion.

  Paquita played the piano—a very concert-jazzy piano—under a gaslit chandelier. Jonatha looked as if she knew all the weird spells of the world.46 The atmosphere in that very large parlor (furnished, I think, only with the grand piano, since we all sat on the highly polished floor) was equivocal. It was in that gaslit room, a great fire leaping in the fireplace, with shadows so dark and so deep, that I found Yul again, sitting on the floor plucking at a strange stringed instrument and singing a slow Slavic song. Years later, when the legend of Yul had convinced vast numbers of paying customers that he was some exotic from a far-off place, I understood it. Yul was always more legend than self.

  Marlene could not get enough of him. She could not give him enough. She gave herself, of course. She plied him with shirts made specially to his measure. She bought him expensive trinkets. She baked him wonderful German doughnuts full of apricot jam, and these I carried to the stage door of the St. James Theatre and these he ate voraciously. There was an awful time when his wife, [the actress] Virginia Gilmore, rang me up and laid me out for being a go-between. But I was Marlenes friend. I was her Rosenkavalier. I was amused by Yul, and I was even more amused by Marlenes entanglement.

  To the best of my knowledge, this passion of Marlenes for Yul had little of the intensity of her love for Jean Gabin. It was her love for Gabin that transformed her into a true slave who sat in bistros of his choosing, who took any crumbs he would fling her, who felt that she had no life other than one with him. I knew that Yul never wanted to marry Marlene. I knew that it would have an end. It did. I never knew when her obsession ended. I do not think that Yul was ever obsessed—with her. (1993)

  NOTE: In early July 1951, Gray went to California and Texas for five weeks of visits with relatives.

  JULY 26, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • BURBANK

  Now, for a world-shaking bit of news: Our little Pearl [Kazin] will leave us come late August. I hope you are sitting, or even reclining…. Pearl is getting married to Victor Kraft in Brazil in late August! She is flying there to do this and living there forevermore! He photographs for a Brazilian magazine called Vision! Pearlie is now to be our aunt from Brazil, where the nuts come from. So, that's quite a bit of news. I bet she's doing this, at least partly, as a reaction—on the rebound sort of—from being disappointed in love with Harper's Bazaar.47

  JULY 31, 1951 • PHILADELPHIA

  TO GRAY FOY • BURBANK

  Some nasty mosquito bit me and it itches so that I woke, and now I can't sleep—what with that, the heat, being alone, being still so stimulated by Nancy Mitford's [novel] Love in a Cold Climate and also baffled by parts of the Faulkner [play Requiem for a Nun]—I think that it's real dopey. A child seems to have been murdered by a dope-fiend, drunkard Negro governess. It's set today and Ruth [Ford will play] the mother of the child, the only other female being the governess. It's all so fraught and written in some sort of pretense at verse. It seems arty and foggy and the parts between the three acts of the play frequently make little or no sense. Sometimes the writing seems to have a hot beauty … but it don't communicate to me. Then again, I am so illiterate. Maybe it will be a big success.48

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 6, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY Suddenly desolation, like the irrevocable clang of a tower bell. Heed this hour—one. Loneliness is this hour. The sound is definitive. It confines. The radio sings: “I love you so much; it's a wonder you can't feel it.” But I have had many solitary nights. And I should be accustomed to them. No, all the rich nights of being loved and sharing sleep do not prepare for these vast solitary nights. I must read, or try to sleep, or keep on writing, writing. Six more days [until Richard arrives] and at least the solitude will be ended—for a time. But I want Gray here beside me. This is selfish, but that is what I want.

  AUGUST 9, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • burbank

  Truman came home today [from Italy], and I saw him. He looks fine and sends his love and he brought us a lovely present—a putti head, replete with wings, from a church in Sicily—sort of iridescent metal. You will love it. He is much better than he used to be.

  Then Truman called to say that I should go to California. He would get me the money—a sweet idea. It's pleasant to think about. Truman is so improved and I think that we will like Jack [Dunphy]. You would have been most amused to see Truman unpacking his toys and running over to the bookshelves— peering—saying, “Where's the American edition of my book?” He's getting deaf.

  AUGUST 22, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • BURBANK

  When I came home today, I found Howard [Rothschild] here. This evening Richard announced that he probably would never see Howard again. Ten minutes ago, he dashed down here, having fully dressed, and said he hoped that I didn't think ill of him, but he was going over to Howard's and would be here before his model gets here at nine. Oh—little Gray—couldn't this house be restored again to its proper inmates?

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 25, 1951 Marlene: “My life would have been so easy if I had really been sexy.”

  SEPTEMBER
3, 1951 Marlene says Garbo has only two suits of underwear. They are made of men's shirting. She wears one for three days, then washes it, does not iron it. Then she wears the other. Marlene says she doesn't mind the not ironing, but three days! Garbo uses only paper towels in her bathroom, has two pairs of men's trousers, two shirts, and little else in her wardrobe. She is very stingy. Marlene says John Gilbert hated Garbo.49

  SEPTEMBER 23, 1951 Gray comes, at last, and suddenly spring is in the air, all fragrant and new green. The house is spruced up. Marlene says, “If I were going to sleep with someone, it wouldn't be between five and seven (cinq à sept). I would be in love, and I would stay the night. I am too vain for five and seven— all the curl gone.” Gabin was said to be so suspicious, to tear the clothes from her and try to choke her, and his gold (like all the French) buried in the South of France. Then six days after he met this model brought to a party by a garage mechanic friend, he married her, got her with child (his?). She looks superficially like Marlene, and she turned out to be a violent collaborationist—the final irony.

  On a Sunday morning, rain, fresh and early, and going to meet one's love. Train time an hour away, so leisurely savoring every rich moment. What were these past fourteen weeks? Nothing. Everything—but now passed.

  Abruptly, I see a hero-sized but sodden figure, flung down before the change booth—one hand clutching an oozing something—sprawled—inert. Is he breathing? Doubt—then confirmation. A small boy stealthily moves from behind a pillar. He is in his go-to-Sunday-School clothes, and in his hand is a toy revolver. He grins, looks about for adult approbation, points his revolver at the fallen man: “Bang-bang, bang-bang. He's dead.”