The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Then, Act II, and we were in some country French place and the enormous woman was the essence of a young girl transported by her love for this so obviously charming, but not quite steadfast, young man. The opera—one I knew intimately—unfolded and I clung to it as if I never before had heard it. In Act III, this Violetta's great size completely vanished and even the voice was already in the other world and all dreamt. The destruction of this monumental woman by her monumental passion for a weak, conventional man: How much more devas-tatingly huge Callas made her destruction than did any more fragile Violetta. We went away, exhausted, into the dark Venetian winter night, a night full of retreating footsteps. We could not talk, for each of us knew that we had seen the greatest operatic performance in years, for me years which had included Flagstad's Isolde, Lehmann's Marschallin, Welitsch's Salome. I had seen Bori, Sayão, Albanese … but indisputably Callas's Violetta was—greatest is inadequate. (1993)

  NOTE: After Venice, Leo and Gray visited Paris, then sailed for New York.

  JOURNAL • january 27, 1953 • ss LIBERTÉ EN ROUTE TO NEW YORK Lucien [Vogel] and Cosette [de Brunhoff] took us to lunch in a small marvelous restaurant in Les Halles. Here the proprietor, a brisk, pigeon-breasted man, looks fifty, but is seventy-one, and the food and drink are magnificent. When I asked Lucien and Cosette why they did not come to America, Gray and I fell into one of the terminal tragedies of our time: He cannot get his visa because our State Department thinks him undesirable, thinks him a Communist. He went to Russia in the thirties and did an issue of Lu or Vu about Russia.79 He and Cosette are both violently anti-Communist. He has a daughter who was in the Underground and at Auschwitz (she is crippled) and is violently pro-Communist. She does not live with her parents because of their political differences. Her younger sister is violently pro-Communist, and doesn't live with her parents. Their brother, in the movies, and befriended during the Occupation by his older sister while his father and mother had to flee to America, is torn by devotion to her, devotion to his parents, and noninterest in politics. So this family is sundered and Lucien is kept out of America because they think him Communist. The mother is a heartbroken woman. All this played against a Faubourg Saint-Germain, Vogue-Jardin des Modes, high Paris life background, Lucien looking, as always, a French Pickwick, Cosette a grande dame. It needs Racine to write it.

  Oh how beautiful Paris is. Rome has big moments—hours—of beauty, but Paris is beauty. Venice exists in the mind, a transfixed moment, the only city to retain the freshness of a dream, to hold the nostalgia for the unexperienced even after it has been experienced, for Venice is improbable. It cannot be, yet it is. Venice, even when one is in it, is improbable. Paris is forever probable— an actual beauty.

  1. Fidelma “Fido” Cadmus (1906-91) was also a painter. Lincoln Kirstein was homosexual and subject to bouts of depression and violence, and she was recessive and troubled, but they remained married for fifty years.

  2. He is probably thinking not of Swann's relationship with Albertine in Proust's novel, but of the narrator's, which is filled with insecurity and jealousy.

  3. Leo was afraid to sleep alone in the dark for most of his life.

  4. Gray Foy: “I met Philip Johnson at a party at Mina Kirstein Curtiss's apartment, to which Kirk Askew had taken me. Philip was the first affair in which I felt equally attracted. Very sexual. He wanted to keep me, but as a kind of secret, because he was determined that people not think him homosexual. We went on for that summer, while he began clearing the land for his famous glass house in New Canaan, [Connecticut,] until I learned from Kirk that Philip had been involved before the war with the Silver Shirts, the Union Party, American Fascists. That ended it. And Leo offered me a home.”

  5. Leo had been born at 71 East 107th Street (between Madison and Park Avenues) in a house that his grandfather Jacob Goldwasser owned and where his parents were living. When he was a toddler, the Lermans moved to an apartment in the Bronx on the Boston Post Road at 165th Street. They returned to Manhattan, when Leo was about five, to live with his mother's father in a tenement building that he had recently purchased at 66 East 106th Street (again between Madison and Park). In 1923 they moved to a small house in the New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens (37-31 Seventy-forth Street). In the summer of 1948, his parents were selling that house to move to the adjoining neighborhood of Elmhurst, where they would then share a duplex with Leo's brother Jerry, his wife, and, soon, Leo's two nieces.

  6. For about a year Richard kept the apartment that they had shared.

  7. GF: “When I arrived, we lived downstairs, with Leo's bed in the front room of two and a makeshift kitchen without a sink (dishes we washed in the bath, shared with Robert). I first slept in the back room on a chaise longue. When I met Leo, he said, ‘I can't love you because I'm in love with somebody else.' “

  8. Leo wrote program notes for the Saturday children's concerts of the New York Philharmonic.

  9. Gray's aunt Alice McKay lived in Glenview, near Chicago. Gray would meet his mother there for holidays.

  10. Leo said his friend Ruth's name in the German way—”root”—and usually spelled it “Rut.” Jaqueline Errera was a wealthy Belgian Jew in New York in the forties.

  11. Mary Louise Aswell had married the novelist Fritz Peters (1913-79). The marriage did not last long. GF: “About 1950, Mary Lou came and rang our bell, said he was trying to kill her, and hid in our house for about ten days. Ken Tynan once said that Mary Lou was always ‘marvelously aghast.' Anyhow, she often looked terrified.” In 1956 a divorced Aswell left for Santa Fe, where she lived with the tapestry artist Agnes Sims until her death in 1984.

  12. Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt (1870-1953), the widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, was in her later years arbiter of the New York social scene.

  13. Alice Astor (1902-56) was the heiress daughter of John Jacob Astor IV. She had four husbands (with whom she had a total of four children): Prince Serge Obolensky, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, Philip Harding, and finally David Pleydell-Bouverie. Two other passions in her life were choreographer Frederick Ashton and lyricist John Latouche.

  14. The married writers Paul and Jane Bowles began living in Tangiers in 1948.

  15. In Paul Bowles's story “A Distant Episode,” a traveler in North Africa asks where he might buy boxes made of camel udders. He is led away, captured, and driven mad by brutality.

  16. A reference to Leo and Richard's first kiss.

  17. GF: “In my early days with Leo, when we went to visit Richard in Middletown, I slept in a guest room while he and Richard slept together. Leo really loved him; I didn't want to make him do without.”

  18. The MGM film, directed by Richard Thorpe, was released as Black Hand (1950).

  19. Leo thought Askew sold Gray's drawings too cheaply and withheld advances and payments.

  20. Later, Leo was enraged to discover that his parents had not truly needed the money raised by the sale of his library. Ida Lerman was notorious in the family for using many ruses to get cash.

  21. The full-length Sleeping Beauty of Sadler's Wells was a triumphal beginning for Margot Fonteyn (1919-91), remembered by many today for her hugely successful partnership with Rudolf Nureyev from 1961 to 1976. Leo met her through Alice Astor after the ballet's New York debut. His remark about “whatever mean streets she walked” refers to the Panamanian politics of Fonteyn's husband, Roberto “Tito” Arias. In 1955 Fonteyn would be briefly arrested in Panama during a botched revolution organized by Arias, who was later paralyzed in an assassination attempt.

  22. Minnie Poliner (1894?–1960) married Jacob Goldwasser's son Isidore (known as Irving, d. 1983), who prospered as the merchandising manager for men's clothing at Saks Fifth Avenue. Aunt Minnie was not always kind to young Leo, but she and Irving were the messengers who carried much Jazz Age culture into the Goldwassers' Orthodox home.

  23. “Tall, dark-suited, plump, smiling, beautiful blond (then silver) wavy hair, round-faced, marvelous blue eyes. We were all in lo
ve with him. I can hear Uncle Herman's voice this moment—deep, Yiddish-inflected beneath a New York overlay, but charming. His face was litmus paper for our love, because he adored us, had been Momma's beau, and was Poppa's best friend.” Journal, February 1, 1971.

  24. The writer George Henry Lewes was the married lover of George Eliot. The dedicatee of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam was Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet's Cambridge friend, travel companion, and perhaps lover.

  25. Goddard Lieberson (1911-77), president of Columbia Records, commissioned Gray Foy to design record jackets and Leo to write liner notes for classical music albums. In 1946 Lieberson had married the ballerina Vera Zorina (Eva Brigitta Hartwig).

  26. Margaret Truman (b. 1924), daughter of the president, became a best-selling mystery writer.

  27. It is likely that Leo had heard of this Catskills theater from his cousin Frieda “Flo” Gold-wasser, who had married Jennie Grossinger's brother Harry in 1927. The couple operated an antique shop at the resort for many years.

  28. Leo and Richard had met the British cataloger and auctioneer Peter C. Wilson (1913-84) through Denyse and Richard Dreyfus in the early forties, just as Wilson's career took flight. As chairman of Sotheby's from 1958 to 1980, Wilson would lead the auction house's global expansion, and it was he who, in the mid-sixties, would arrange for Leo to write a history of the firm. Harry Wright had been a servant in one of the lofty country houses when he and Wilson met. By the mid-fifties, he had become host in Wilson's house in Kent.

  29. Henry Green was the nom de plume of British novelist Henry Yorke (1905-73). His wife, Adelaide Biddulph, was called “Dig.”

  30. Richard and he had stayed in a cheap rooming house on Clarges Street in 1937. “That freezing winter of 1951I was living at the Ritz. I had not even dared to enter it in 1937, a war and fourteen years away, but stood looking longingly. When my sack split and fat greengages, bought from a barrow back of the Queen's and Globe [theaters] on a hot July afternoon, rolled into Piccadilly, I lost my dinner. I was very poor in 1937, but happy beyond sanity.” Journal, December 27, 1970.

  31. Leo had been sent to Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), author of novels (Death of the Heart) and short stories, by the Askews and Grace Zaring Stone.

  32. Alice Astor had been married from 1938 to 1943 to the British soldier and journalist Philip Harding (1906-74?). They had one child, Alice's fourth, Emily Harding. She had taken five-year-old Emily to America in 1946, and Harding did not see his daughter again until after her mother died in 1956. GF: “Alice had such varied tastes—Hofmannsthal to Obolen-sky to Harding. She was very asexual looking—elegant, brittle, very beautiful, almost like a Chinese painting. She had very black hair usually slicked back. I never heard her raise her voice, not even in laughter—very controlled, muted, but her passion was not and was misplaced.”

  33. Formerly a house of Lord Melbourne, in 1802 Albany was divided into bachelor's apartments. It has housed a distinguished succession of politicians and artists, including Edith Evans (1888-1976), a great British stage actress known primarily for her comic character roles (including Lady Bracknell).

  34. Leo's lover of a decade earlier, Ladislas “Laci” Czettel, had been found a suicide on March 5, 1949.

  35. The police made an investigation of Eleonora von Mendelssohn's death, but never brought charges. Leo recollected later that both her husband and his younger male lover were there when Mendelssohn died. A pillow was found over her face, and a bath mat in the apartment had been soaked with ether.

  36. Shortly before Mendelssohn's death, Kosleck had injured himself by jumping out the window of their apartment above the carpenter's shop. Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (1898-1958), also a German-born actor, was a friend of Kosleck. They often played Nazis in Hollywood movies, which intensified Leo's aversion to them.

  37. These women were all stars of silent films: Nita Naldi appeared frequently as a temptress, famously opposite Valentino in Blood and Sand; Gilda Gray is said to have introduced the shimmy; Carmel Myers often played vamps; Patsy Ruth Miller had many leading roles, notably with Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Lila Lee was a demure actress whose career lasted into the talkies; Leatrice Joy was a favorite player of Cecil B. DeMille; Gloria Swanson had resurrected her career by starring in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in 1950; Aileen Pringle made more than sixty films, retiring in 1939; Betty Compson was a top star, memorable in The Big City and The Docks of New York.

  38. Louis Kronenberger (1904-80), a drama critic, novelist, and translator, was married to Emmy Lou Plaut.

  39. In Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart commits suicide after a succession of misalliances and scandals end her chance for success in fashionable society. “Ela's dear absurdity—toward the end this grew wearisome, for the world had changed. We were no longer behind walls, and we had to earn our livings.” Journal, December 14, 1970.

  40. A legendary flamboyant personality of the fashion business, Diana Vreeland (1906-89) was fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar (1937-61), editor in chief at Vogue (1961-71), and ultimately became a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute (1973-85).

  41. Maebelle Durfy Hughes (1898-1991) was Gray's mother. Raised in Dallas, at seventeen she married Frederick Gray Foy, Sr., an alcoholic, whom she divorced in 1926, when their only child was four. Within a year, Maebelle and her younger sister Alice Woodyard (later McKay, at the time also recently divorced) moved to Los Angeles. There, Maebelle married Francis “Earle” Hughes around 1933. Maebelle worked for many years as a salesclerk at Magnin's, a fashionable department store, and lived in Burbank.

  42. Richard's sister-in-law Sylvia Hunter had been a close friend in the thirties, when they were all pursuing theater work. She moved to California in 1949.

  43. As Vera Zorina, Brigitta Hartwig Lieberson (1917-2003) danced with Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo (1934-36). Her appearance in the 1937 London production of On Your Toes led to a contract with MGM and roles on Broadway. Zorina's choreography was usually by George Balanchine, to whom she was married (1938-46). Soon after their divorce, she married the record producer Goddard Lieberson.

  44. Claude Alphand was a beautiful patrician Frenchwoman who had a brief career in the forties singing Parisian ballads to her own guitar accompaniment. She was married to a French diplomat.

  45. Leo learned later that Hurd Hatfield (1918-98), best known for playing the title role in the film The Picture of Dorian Gray, had had an affair with Yul Brynner when both were starting out at the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

  46. Paquita Anderson (1911-84) was a pianist, composer, and actress. Jonatha may have been her sister or her lover; Leo didn't say and Richard could not recall.

  47. Part of his astonishment was owing to the photographer Victor Kraft (1915-76) having previously been the lover of composer Aaron Copland.

  Leo's friendship with Kazin ended abruptly in 1952, after publication by the literary magazine Botteghe Oscure of her short story “The Jester.” It ruthlessly depicts a sharp-tongued, corpulent adviser to magazine editors, with a “spongey availability to shifts of taste and favor”—unmistakably Leo—and his lonely demise. Capote wrote before its publication asking Leo to go easy on Kazin, assuring him (January 1951) that he was “only the springboard for the main character,” and afterward (July 1952) saying it was “a disservice—but mainly an artistic one.” As Capote had recently republished in Local Color his own unflattering depiction of Leo (as Hilary), he might have been excusing himself as well. Certainly, for other friends Capote's defense was premonitory.

  48. A success in London, the production failed in New York.

  49. A leading man of silent films (The Big Parade), John Gilbert (1895-1936) made four films with Garbo and almost married her in 1927.

  50. A philanthropist heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, Huntington Hartford (b. 1911) was a friend of the novelist and playwright Speed Lamkin (b. 1927). In addition to making Leo a job offer, Hartford wanted his
counsel on other matters, including opening an artists' retreat near the Southern California coast.

  51. Ada Leverson (1862-1933), a novelist who wrote comedies of manners in London society, sheltered her friend Oscar Wilde during his trials.

  52. Robert Smythe Hichens (1864-1950) was the British author of Bella Donna, The Garden of Allah, and other popular novels of the early twentieth century.

  53. “Mrs. Murray Crane writes (or her secretary does) little directions to her luncheon or dinner guests. These appear on the backs of their place cards. On Thanksgiving Mary Colum's said, ‘Talk about Colette,' and Truman's asked, ‘What is your favorite play?' “ Journal, December 1,1951. Her family's money came from the Crane printing and stationery firm.

  54. In the forties, Paramount began promoting a group of rising young stars as “The Golden Circle.”

  55. Once a Ziegfeld star, Marion Davies (1897-1961) is remembered as the Hollywood actress whose pictures were usually bankrolled by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, her lover of thirty years. Shortly after Hearst's death in 1951, she married Horace G. Brown, a former studio bit-part player.

  56. A reading of the stage adaptation of Capote's second novel was given by Mrs. W. Murray Crane to attract backers. Leo bet its producer, Arnold Saint-Subber, that the show would close within a month, thereby winning four antique chairs from its extravagant set.