The Grand Surprise

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The Grand Surprise Page 19

by Leo Lerman


  Waiting in the station. The anonymity is satisfying. Meeting Little T adds to it. In ten minutes, my summer life of sleepless nights and terrors is ended.

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1951 Two different ways of life—or motivations. Richard says how can anybody make plans; I say I can't live unless it's forever. So it is a final irony: that which I thought to find in Richard—permanence, a sense of forever in residence now and always, living in each moment as forever—that I have more than he. And he is rootless, a wanderer, impermanent. To know this after eighteen years, having known it somehow always.

  OCTOBER 5, 1951 When Alice saw Eugénie [widow of Napoléon III] in Spain, the year before Eugénie died, Eugénie was a little, spry, blue-eyed (but cataracted) woman who had a man and a maid, Carlotta, with her. At a great state dinner when she wished her orange peeled, she threw it the length of the table to Carlotta.

  OCTOBER 5, 1951 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RUTH YORCK • FRANKFURT AM MAIN

  My darling—guess what—I have a check for you—$150 !!! I scrounged it out of Park East. They fired me months ago, but at last I have this money for you. What to do with it? Please let me know at once. These last months I have been poorer than in a very long time, but we cling to this house and one another. So, I am a rich man hungry for you and Ela—with the possibility of you—which is reassuring. Please do not die.

  Here, in town, the season slowly begins—a fat bird, somewhat growing extinct—a dodo?—an auk?—preening itself, gently ruffling what looks to be glittering costume-jewelry plumage.

  Darling, I haven't written anything save to earn a living, captions and all that, in over eight weeks. It is lovely to write, but having a job is mostly a pain in the bottom and almost nonpleasurable because of how appalling people frequently are. Also, money is practically out of the pocket before it is in the hand. But this house is extremely pleasant. You will love it in its more recent evolutions.

  Gray was gone all summer, and so were the tenants, and Richard was in Istanbul and Greece and France and the Netherlands and Italy, and here I was alone in this big house with the rats and Marlene. The last was a great help— and very pretty. She cooked and tried to be Ela—so the summer passed, and I did not quite.

  JOURNAL • NOVEMBER 6, 1951 Ours was a house in which extremes were all. Grandpa [Goldwasser], in the left bay window in the front room, sat the day through—and most of the night—frequently swigging long gulps of whiskey. This bay was his lookout, his point of advantage. From it, he noted the comings and goings of his enormous family. With a sudden, startling rap upon the pane he could alter or foil any plan, no matter how ardently desired, how long prearranged. It was the canniest, luckiest son, daughter, or in-law who could slip past his sharp bleary-blue eyes, and into this house after midnight (his imposed curfew for inhabitants of all ages). Many times, Momma and Poppa burst into our bedroom, tumbled into bed, tugging their feather bed up over their heads and breathing with exaggerated rhythm, the way people do who are trying to convince that they are and have been asleep for a long time. Then Grandpa opened our door (the gaslight on the landing outside flickering, distorting his huge shape). He stood listening. Sometimes he even came into the room, carrying his glass of tea (or was it whiskey?) with him, and stood over their bed as they lay there feigning sleep. Finally, when he went away, they lay beneath the feather bed giggling and chuckling and kissing. They loved one another very much, and like all the family, they demonstrated this best by kissing, hugging, and bitterly quarreling.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1951 Alice said that last year her mother [Lady Ava Ribbles-dale], having bad circulation, had to lie in a bed that was gently kept in constant side-to-side motion by a little motor. Somehow the gadget went berserk and gave off a noxious gas of the kind used to gas cities—deathly. Lady Ribbles-dale woke, struggled out of bed, opened a window, and went into her sitting room, where she sat reading the night through—until her servants, wakened by the smell, rushed into her room…. Her bed vacant, the window open: They thought that she had jumped. But, of course, she had not. No matter how many strokes, she totters to teas and society lectures, and rages against fate, which has brought her to this pass—beauty gone, friends and contemporaries all dead. She reads everything, tyrannizes over her family, sometimes suddenly calls into being a ladies' tea. She judges all things as to whether they will be fun for her guests.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1951 Our family quarrels—they were nothing, everything. They happened abruptly, crashing into whatever other humor or mood prevailed. They were only a suggestion one day, a sort of heaviness in the air. A week later they exploded, involving everyone. Sometimes only carried on fiercely in whispers between two members. Frequently Grandpa instigated them, enjoying the whole course—from distant cloud in the sky to the torrents of tears that finally flooded, quarreling from floor to floor, doors banging, the screams and rages out of the house and into neighborhood houses. The neighbors, in the big quarrels, always participated.

  DECEMBER 2, 1951 The usual crazy thing happened yesterday. Speed [Lamkin] called. Then Mr. Huntington Hartford. He wants me to run his New York modeling agency and such.50 He will pay all my expenses to Hollywood and back, so I can talk to him there. I am much tempted to go, for I have long wished to see California, and I love traveling. But I do not think running a model agency is for me. Maybe this is the rescue I know must happen, but not the exact shape of the rescue. I will listen and then try to make him open an office for the Huntington Hartford Foundation in New York. If he were to do this and make me eastern director, and pay me ten or twelve thousand plus expenses, that would be fine. Perhaps he could pay the rent for the house as part of the expenses. This office could supervise the model agency and serve as an eastern focus. Eventually we could get out a magazine.

  DECEMBER 7, 1951 On train now pulling out for Hollywood and Mr. Huntington Hartford. This is even more of an adventure than flying to London, for this is more improbable. Out into the night and smoothly fleeing over the Jersey marshes. What luxurious privacy this room, to be my home for the weekend.

  DECEMBER 7, 1951 • EN ROUTE TO CHICAGO

  TO GRAY FOY • NEW YORK CITY

  I have just come from my little turkey dinner, served in the dining car some three blocks behind. The car was (and is) full of menfolk. That is the only descriptive word for them. All of them wear these wildly patterned and colored ties which my uncle purveys at Saks. Now we know who wears them. Also, they speak to one another about “trips down to …”and muchly about “the boys” and “They entertained us. I mean—they entertained us at their home.” This seems very important. Sometimes they grasp one another's large and paradoxically well-tended paws in tight, man-to-man friendship. This is, of course, a side of America which I almost never see, so I am fascinated—a naturalist naturalizing. These men have all either been to conventions or are going to conventions—have just got it in the bag, are just on the verge of pulling it off, are having lucky breaks handed out mostly by these “boys” down and/or up there (who are these deities?). Sinclair Lewis, in his best work, knew it all. It is raining sparsely as we leave Harris-burg and “Austins—The Gilded Leaf in raw green and phosphate orange makes a bleary smudge…. Now it is night again—black pinned together higgledy-piggledy by electronic lights. We ride smoothly, soporifically—and, oh, the lovely, solitary privacy of this room with not a telephone nor a doorbell nor even a radio to disturb—the pulsing monotone rail-wheel sound.

  The train is grunting in Altoona [Pennsylvania]—real pig grunts—and I am sitting in my bed with the blind up and porters giving shocked looks as they pass. But I don't want to miss anything—even “Blatchford's Park Lane Furniture for Better Living” directly opposite, all in white letters on a scarlet ground. So many houses are lighted, over doors and on porches, with curious virulent yellow bulbs. These must be to fend off summer insect hordes. It's lovely to crouch here in this little bed and hear a big hog grunting beneath this train. Being in this room is like being in a secret box—so soothing�
�and soon the mind perfects a Braille, reading the variations in sound. Now we are leaving Altoona—now crossing a trestle—now rushing through wide open countryside—now approaching a town—rain slaps the windows—while all the houses, patched in window lights, seem something in a Russian novel—but towns burst like rotted fruit—with neon colors—rain makes it all even more lurid—for color runs everywhere through the deserted streets—and taillights fleeing down anonymous highways seem portentous. I will stop now while the whistle signals (“Coming—coming—”). How lovely to be part of the whistle—of the dream. Good night—my love—I found your letter—and of course I cried.

  DECEMBER 8 • 7 A.M.

  For the past half hour I've been peering at Indiana in the pale pink dawn. Quite flat it is, with little towns of widely spaced, dirty-white houses. The street-lamps (they are globes—replicas of the full moon or sun—very beneficent looking) are still aglow. Just beyond a town named Plymouth, in a stubbly field, live many black-and-brown-spotted pigs!!! They were having a fine time and sent love. Here is a delegation of white geese. They are too intent on committee meetings to do anything save give level, sharp looks. Now I must dress.

  I've been breakfasting through the Chicago environs. Isn't it dreadful, how ugly most American cities and towns are from a train window? This—and ever since Gary [Indiana] — is just like Long Island on the way to Momma's, perhaps even uglier. Only industrial architecture has some distinction—and even beauty. This is a smeary sort of morning—Love to little Richard—”Chicago! Chicago!” I have my Bette Davis [Beyond the Forest] wig on.

  DECEMBER 9, 1951 • BETWEEN CHICAGO

  AND GREEN RIVER, WYOMING

  TO GRAY FOY • NEW YORK CITY

  Terrific snow! Forests deep in it, cows all huddled together in it, and all the meadow grasses flowered white with it. Suddenly it is winter—like in [Willa Cather's] My Ántonia.

  Later: I guess I have just seen the Mississippi—very brown, prolific, and islands riding it like many-masted ships. I am in my bed, peering out at the deep snow. And now this train wails ever westward. I guess the train wails so much because of the snowstorm, and it must be very cold, for the train men, when we pause, have little breath balloons attached to their mouths. We travel through Nebraska all this night. I read Leverson.51

  8 A.M.

  Now, here in Wyoming, all rivers and ponds are solidly frozen, and the plains and mountains winter-locked in frost and snow. A solitary watertower is a single lambent icicle, a frozen flame, for the sun has undone its icy heat and transformed it so. Now the sky is every shade of blue—from forget-me-not to the deepest delphinium. In this world only flower colors describe. Here horses and cattle stand in the snow—and now automobiles begin to appear more frequently on the single highway, which parallels our route. All houses (not many to be seen) are as dripping with icicles as a [Radio City] Music Hall production of The Night Before Christmas. We are passing through a vast plain—with the sort of mountains I have heretofore seen only in glorious Technicolor Westerns.

  It is the Wyoming landscape that I think most boring—only an occasional distant mountain range relieves it, or a cluster of ochre-yellow painted shacks and houses—so desolate—and sometimes brown-red cliffs whose crests have been expertly turned out by a French frilling or ruffling iron. Now we are passing through a vast gray-silver-white waste—perhaps in summer it is more beautiful. Everywhere the minute tracks of beasts crisscrossing.

  DECEMBER 9, 1951 • BETWEEN GREEN RIVER,

  WYOMING, AND SALT LAKE CITY

  TO GRAY FOY • NEW YORK CITY

  I think we are entering Utah, for we are veering southwest and we are in mountainous country, apparently high up and following the crest, with even higher ones in the distance. Wyoming grew endless—great, unrelieved fields of snow coruscating—and only one flock of gray sheep tended by a little covered wagon like in a children's storybook. Then, just before Evanston [Wyoming], a lovely valley with many trees (poplar, like home, I think) and some children sleighing and two dogs. What relief to the eye's tedium.

  The trees and grasses are all encased in ice. The snow is all shadowed blue. It is twenty-nine minutes past five, according to Mason the porter. We are crossing a great flat place—but how different from Wyoming and Iowa. This is so “friends.” Even in this winter twilight, far-off lights, way away over the blue snow, those winking red kind that palpitate in the dusk, signaling radio stations, airports, civilization. The trees now have a heartbreaking loneliness— each twig defined in the dusk, just before night consumes tree and twig and world. On the left, even higher mountains—just discernible and lunar in this evening light.

  DECEMBER 10 • SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  Out in desertlike country. The sun is just risen, and here the colors are all washed reds and earth colors—like the first sculptured hills I ever saw. The vegetation is different—strange sorts of pine and sagebrush. Everywhere in the distances stand worn-out hills. The architecture is similar to the twenties in Jackson Heights and other New York suburban areas, because it is Californian— which is where I now am! In the distance, wonderful snow-topped mountains. Everything is brown—all the shades of brown.

  I have seen my first really growing cactus, and we are coming down into the San Bernardino Valley. The mountains are beautiful, but I would not want to live in this part of California (around Victorville), through which we have just been riding. It's so mangy and so impoverished looking. Also, there must be so many serpents. Strange black foothills all creased and folded like heavy carpet flung down and not set in place. Above the black hills, the snow-topped mountains. A flock of startling-white birds (perhaps pigeons).

  At Cajon, just passed, many Indians, mostly looking like my cousin Sadie and Marguerite Young—and smelling probably the same. As we descend farther and farther into the valley, trees are all green (or touched with autumn) species of willows, but straight like poplars, flashes like silver-backed green ribbands in the wind. I have run the whole cycle of seasons in these brief days. Now we seem to be running into a terrific dust storm, through which the distant mountains are just washed-in—their tops visible—as fine lines are in Oriental watercolors. This is the land of the jerry-built, the trailer come to ultimate rest and rounded by two barrels—one for water, one for fuel. I would not want to live here either. It's hideously ugly and ramshackle. And here are many palms! No camels. Much foliage of Robert Hichens's novels!52 “Parks Dressed Poultry—Dressed While You Wait.” Ugh. Loads of Indians. And the station—four squat Islamic (really Shriner) towers holding down an oblong gray building. I don't really believe that I am here. “Crane Pacific—the Preferred Plumbing.” I wonder if Mrs. Crane puts little instructive messages on the back of each seat?53

  DECEMBER 11, 1951 • BEVERLY HILLS

  TO GRAY FOY • NEW YORK CITY

  So I went to Paramount and lunched with Jane Wyman and Bing Crosby and [choreographers] Donald [Saddler] and [Helen] Tamiris and others. At the next table was Cecil DeMille and his entourage, and it was all just like in Sunset Boulevard, and the place full of all sorts of men and women in elaborate formal dress. Actually it looked like some strange, surreal ball for charity. Jane Wyman is sort of giggly and razzmatazz. Bing Crosby talks a lot, very seriously, and almost always in a sort of Variety argot.

  The extravagance of making movies—those sets of rooms in the home of a successful composer! Not even Mrs. Vanderbilt's Breakers was ever that ostentatious (later I saw a “real” house which was). I saw everything at Paramount—a whole building full of period paneling and fireplaces, a whole shed full of lamps (some very beautiful). And all the time it was hot, blazing summer.

  About Jane Wyman again: She seems fundamentally a most unhappy girl, so full of a kind of gayest-girl-in-the-senior-class vigor and is sure to say: “It used to be better when I was a whore in Peoria.” Or “hot as you can scald a cat.” She has a twelve-year-old daughter whom she adores. She took this child and some of her little friends to a sneak previ
ew of Blue Veil. The little girls sat there sniffing and saying how sad. Later, at home, Jane Wyman picked up a telephone and heard her child say, “Well, you know, Momma doesn't really understand much about drama.” Bing Crosby's sad because of his wife [singer Dixie Lee], who took to drink when he was away entertaining the troops. She had previously helped him cure himself. A friend of their young and poorish days came to live opposite, and when Crosby was away Mrs. Crosby took to visiting her and taking a little drinkie. So, she became a dipso, and one day she kicked one of her little boys in the stomach so hard that he had to have an operation. I tell you all these gruesome things because I am always interested in the disparity between the surface and what goes on underneath. Crosby likes to sneak off and drink beer in bars while watching television.

  Cecil B. DeMille and his entourage were obviously the royal family—the emperor or president of some Latin American country (not too big) with his cabinet and henchmen surrounding him at luncheon, with equerries and messengers coming and going all the time. He sits not at the head of the table, but, in true old-fashioned regal style, center. It all has a semimilitary atmosphere, his world. He seems to have long silences while his followers sit looking at him lethargically, and then the great man says something and everything's all carefully weighed, judicious animation about that unfestive board.

  At one table sat most of Paramount's “Golden Circle”—starlets both concave and convex.54 Those starlets—oh, so typical American boy and girl—plus. The whole commissary was actually more like a lunchroom at a big, good college. You could even pick out the school stars and the dullest boy in the school and the female cheerleaders and the popular professor and the coach and his team. Then those hundreds, all in elaborate dress and makeup, just standing or sitting and waiting on those supermagnificent sets.

 

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