The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  We went to Tivoli, arriving just in time to see and hear the boys guard marching, and the music was so gay, the little boys so serious in their red, white, and black replicas of the King's Guard, and a lovely young white horse in the center of the procession. I saw a little blond boy in a coat the color of the summer morning sky, this child held aloft in his father's arms with fingers jammed into its ears and an expression of interest and rapture and trouble on its face. I felt that way at the approach of drums: I still do. I had to gulp to keep from crying, I was so stirred. We walked about among the orderly Danish people and finally chose La Belle Terrasse, which has a dining room where time stood still circa 1910, the atmosphere of boat dining rooms with trellised walls. Shanghai Chow-Chow on the menu, and its little dishes filled with raisins, grated coconut, pickle, chutneys, pickled beets, bananas, chopped hard-boiled egg (yolks and whites separate). Also a good papadum and rice and fried chicken and curried beef, and onion and curry powder to add. The best Indian curry I have had in years.

  MAY 31, 1955 Last night, the king and queen of Denmark attended the ballet, for it was Bournonville's 150th anniversary. (His great-great-granddaughter was present, but no one could point her out to me.) The queen [Ingrid] sat as today's queens sit, with great dignity, a rather pretty woman because of her blondness and clean looks, in a royal-red satin stole and a flowered formal summer gown, almost no jewels, not even earrings. The king [Frederick IX] was of the boyish variety. He sat quite bent forward, eagerly looking at [Bournonville's ballet] Napoli and apparently enjoying it very much. They quickly vanished in the intervals. No ceremony attended their comings and goings, unlike that attending Elizabeth's when she went to the ballet at Covent Garden— unannounced. There the audience stood at attention whenever she rose and went out or she came in. The queen of Denmark applauded wanly—token applause; the queen of England had applauded with dutiful determination. The prince consort had applauded boyishly; the king of Denmark applauded with evident pleasure. The only moment of Royal Family, old-style feeling here was when the king and queen left the Royal Box. Then a uniformed (but not splendidly uniformed) man, in blues and silver, medaled, swiftly opened the door, inclining his head. This seemed a moment of glory, but more in recollection than in the present, more reminiscent than contemporary. These are the heads of a middle-class state and they are also middle-class. Denmark is a family state, a place where middle-aged and older people should be very happy, and children joyful. I saw black velvets with added homemade lace collars, a little sailor-suited boy nestling his head in his granny's blue-brocade bosom — that kind of atmosphere of our world of thirty or forty years ago up in Harlem.

  NOTE: In Copenhagen, Gray developed a fever and then a persistent streptococcal throat infection that kept him in bed for much of the next weeks. Dietrich's doctor in Paris ultimately delivered antibiotics of sufficient strength to finish it.

  Meanwhile, the pair went from Denmark to Austria. Leo had arranged their tour to coincide with performing-arts festivals in Vienna and, later, The Hague. In the Austrian capital, Russian, English, and American forces still occupied sectors.

  JOURNAL • june 4, 1955 • Vienna The types here in Vienna: twee, sad, ancient persons with packs on their backs; the well-dressed, smooth-mannered people; the Viennese high-style ladies; the big city hairdos… Sometimes, the Vienna one expected, the magical, haunted Vienna, suddenly reveals itself— in the way a fountain falls; in the fragrance of lilacs in a carriage racing along the Graben; in Haydn played under a full moon in der Burg [the imperial palace]; in the lighting up of the Rathaus [city hall]—window after window, spire after spire, while a big orchestra lilts The Blue Danube and dancers whirl through it, and the Viennese, by the thousand, applaud; in the way the enormous crowd all went to walk along the Ringstrasse and through the courtyards of the Hofburg and peered at floodlit monuments; in figures silhouetted in windows, high up in the Burg; in the manners of the patricians behind the desk; always in the decor of the Sacher [café], always in the decor and confections at Demel, always in the baroque ecstasy of the churches, always in the endless functionaries through which one's life oozes away before one gets to do what he has come to do (the procrastination here is worse than in Italy. Viennese officialdom are old, old hands); in the moldering palaces and in the glimpses of crystal chandeliers (cascades of congealed petals and frost and raindrops and stalactites); in the waltzes discreetly tinkling at the Ambassador [hotel]; in the very delicious food; in the little winding streets and in the decorations on windows and cornices and over doorways; in the street café life; in the gardens with lilacs and peonies and chairs (white and carnival-decorated with dagging, quite different from Paris or London); in the enormous Burg seeming to spread over a great city; in the groups of singers, talking and emoting on the sidewalk at the Sacher or the Café Mozart; in the tinkling of a piano heard late at night; in the booming of an organ heard from the far end of a square while light faded from the sky behind the turbaned steeple; in how the clock chimed ten while the orchestra worked away at Haydn, the clock shredding it, diminishing it, for a moment. (Glamour here is still opera stars, more than stage or screen.) How quietly the enormous crowd went away, and how unlike the Vienna of Laci's dreams this city almost always has been.

  JUNE 7, 1955 As I sit at breakfast, the sound of the wind—as if huge wet sheets are flapping. That's what I like about being up in our bedroom at home when there's a great wind: I feel closer to God then. When the world is still, the world is a bit frightening.

  JUNE 8, 1955 The Russian soldiers walk like bruisers, after years of plodding. They look sidewise at one and seem so cut off. When I inadvertently went toward the soldiers stationed at one wing of the new Hofburg, they laughed and looked up and so did I, there seeing the Soviet sign with Lenin and Stalin shoulder to shoulder. I realized from their gesticulating and laughter that they were reminded of Lenin when they looked at me. Going away, I asked a pretty blonde in German (she was boxily, heavily dressed, but in a nice light-colored woolen tweedy suit) where to go. She laughed a lot and tossed her head and answered in Russian. Then she went to the soldiers, and they all laughed and looked at Lenin and at me. She vanished into the Soviet part of the Hof.

  JUNE 12, 1955 Last night's Intermezzo was superb. [Soprano] Hilde Zadek gave the sort of performance Lotte Lehmann gave in Rosenkavalier. I have now heard eight [Richard] Strauss operas. He is the greatest and most delicate of our contemporary opera composers. I love Puccini, but Strauss seems to have written more that plays today; Puccini's repertoire is less than Strauss's. This opera is such a construction, such a delicate structure for robust and ravishing sounds. He is the composer who best knows regret. Sometimes I was reminded of [Charpentier's] Louise, but I like this better. Strauss knows middle age. Arabella, Christine (in Capriccio), the Marschallin [in Rosenkavalier] all are ladies who look at themselves. How imperative to sing Strauss in German, for the music absolutely follows the line of the speech, the rise and fall of the inflection. Christine sung and spoken is so similar to the inflections of those Viennese women who sit in the Sacher or at Demel chatting lightly with one another and occasionally bursting into robust words or tinkling laughter. This is charm made palpable. In Intermezzo, the people sometimes talk, sometimes sing, sometimes do both almost in the same word. This is so beautiful and so “real” in giving the dimension, which is always in life, between the lines. Also the episodic design, upon which it is all strung, is a fascinating one.

  JUNE 21, 1955 • SALZBURG Turning the radio on and hearing an old Ray Noble recording, I sit here with the world caved in—longing for the telephone to ring and Ela to whisper swiftly “Darling.” But this can never be. And now the song ending, a female German announcer makes the world brighter. We arrived in a great storm. Salzburg is always dripping—wet and gray and dripping—but I love it here, for it is like a toy (the old town) and so comprehensible after Vienna. Although, peering into streets in the early morning and watching the Salzburgers stepping along swiftly
with their baskets and briefcases—aproned and lederhosened—they seem secret—like people in stories about villages where something goes on beneath the “holiday resort” surface—something almost Golden Bough, ancient rites and beliefs and ceremonies. These are a reserved, carved-dark-wood sort of people.

  The Mozart industry is rushing into high finance here—windows full of Mozartkugeln [candies], boxes and bags with Mozart in peruke on them, a Mozart Kino [movie theater], a Mozart Café, of course. We came upon Mozartplatz near the Residence—vast-seeming in the watery evening light. (The rain pelted all evening as we trudged. How very Italian this town is at times—the outskirts with tan and buff and cream-colored villas set as they are in Italian towns of similar size, and then the narrow streets and vast-seeming squares.) A large Mozart dominates the Mozartplatz. He is in robes and glorified to a sort of elder statesmanship, looking more judicial than musical. There is a Café Figaro—mostly U.S. servicemen—and a Mozart Bridge and a Così Fan Tutte Kondítereí [café] run by one of the men who makes Mozartkugeln. There is Mozart on gingerbread and Mozart candy boxes and Mozart on braces (I saw that today) and Mozart at six shillings per in his Geburtshaus and the Mozarteum—and probably children named after him and horses and dogs after him and his works. In Salzburg, of the Mozart industry there is no end.

  JUNE 24, 1955 • PARIS In no state to make notes, but notemaking will soothe me. Gray being ill again, and the expense of all this, disheveled me. Our hotel is made for lovers who want to be clandestine and have the curtains down, the bed, and the bidet. It is a very inexpensive, very young-people's hotel; for the middle-aged or old it means disaster. Only the very young or incontestably transient could be happy there. It has the atmosphere of being the last jump, or being a hideout (despite a great profusion of flowers in the entry and the pregnant, sweet-faced, forever sleeping, fat gray-and-white cat named “Sit On”). I loathe its part of the Left Bank, as I loathe Greenwich Village and all that it signifies. That life is for the young, and I am no longer that young.

  JUNE 26, 1955 I think that Clouzot [director of Diabolique] thought this “hotel” up. It is designed for the discomfort of its “guests.” … But the Quarter's life is fat around us: A soprano, quite good, with a dark, rich voice, practices over and over some French art-song phrases; some little boys toot on high piercing whistles, like French trains (when I didn't know that they were made by little boys, they seemed the music of strange birds); then there are the clat-terings of pot lids upon pots; the shuttings, groanings, and creakings of doors; the constant sounds and tumults of water and water closets; the tinkling of metal on glass; the wild, disheveled clatter and clanging and tumult of too many church bells all clamoring simultaneously and producing one of the most horrible discordances I have ever heard; the rattling of keys; the rut-chug-putt-putt of motorcycles; and, late last night, shouting and fighting and screeching of “American go home!”

  Édouard [Roditi] lives in the heart of a little market.86 Here one sees Paris of the lower classes mixed with Bohemia, squalor, and dirty-faced children. There a supper table set out neatly with a checkered green-and-white cloth, and napkins folded primly on green-and-white plates and even a little bunch of flowers, all very precise and almost like an advertisement for country table settings. Leaning out of a garret window, naked as far as one could see, the handsome, utterly masculine torso of a man, dark and rosy and vigorous. When a young girl came to lean beside him, she in a slip, you knew that they had been in bed together, for she leaned against him with the catlike satisfied languor that means only one thing. He placed his big arm around her, drawing her against him tightly and passively. In the trembling blue twilight, they leaned upon the casement ledge, looked down from their mansard into the narrow rue St. Gregoire, saying not a word to one another. Occasionally he brushed her hair or ear with his full, red, passionate mouth, and we did hear her sigh with pleasure and see the tremors which agitated her sleazy slip. His hand pushed down under the stuff of her slip. We could see his knuckles outlined as he pressed her breasts. They vanished into the oblong of pale yellow light. Much later he returned and again leaned, naked as far as the eye could see, against the casement ledge. Sometimes he smiled … and sometimes he murmured a little song, for now there was music in the rue St. Gregoire, a violin and an accordion, bal musette music, and children jumping up and down to it, and fat, worn, coarse women sitting in the doorways, enjoying the hot night air and the stenches and the music, and the young man up in his mansard close to the wavy night light and the pallid stars.

  Édouard lives in his usual sloppy way. His Arab, whom he loved for seven years, was killed in a bar brawl while Édouard was abroad interpreting. When Édouard returned and discovered that the Arab had been murdered, he had a nervous breakdown, but now, after “help,” he seems better than he has been in years. He writes diligently—now about Maurice Saxe, or was Herman Melville homosexual (no, says Édouard), such exotic subjects. He has a general air of doing jobs for anyone who will pay and for some who won't or can't. I thought of how he had written forty pages on how he had not met Proust.

  JUNE 27, 1955 Ran off through Sunday streets yesterday to lunch with Édouard, a comte who has written a novel and edits the mondanités [society-news] page of a magazine, and a rather nice pickup of Édouard's. The pickup is a manservant. He said he had been “mal baisé” [badly laid] by Édouard, who said, “That is how it is the first time with me, always.”

  I bought some cherries from a cart for Gray and some for Édouard. The cart man spoke English and gave me some extra cherries for myself, because he seemed to like me. I was pleased because I needed someone to like me just then. I also bought, from a cart man, a bunch of poppies—many-colored: papery white, pink, orange (like lanterns for twenties pajama parties), red, mauve… all for a few cents. The market in which Édouard lives was just closing—butchers in bloody aprons pushing stands in, women with [fish-] scaly hands, the sun whipping them into jeweled hands (you could see full fathom five), and carts blazing with cherries and autumnal with apricots, like the banks of the Hudson in a good October, and everywhere families decked out in Sunday clothes and carrying packages and bags, which could only mean visiting relatives in the country, and the sun like fresh country butter.

  The pickup wore a blue-purple speckled silk dressing gown and smelled of a peculiar powder or toilet water, the kind one imagines is used by certain whores in French movies and novels, like melted candied violets mixed with a more belligerent purple smell. This was so unpleasant as to be exciting, but not enticing. Certain foul smells have a potency that excites. The comte had turned-down eyebrows, liquid, brown, almond-shaped French eyes—like those to be seen in Boldini's portraits of French “society” women—also like Anaïs Nin's, but kinder. He had manners verging on tango-tea daintiness. He was slight and gay and wanted to come to America because “American boys are so wonderful,” enunciated like a slow masturbation. He can come to teach a summer session at Harvard and probably will—French conversation. “In New York, there are many sailors?” he wanted to know. The pickup's name was Lucien— a very polite, fine-featured, virile type, but with a delicacy, almost female, which one finds in very virile men. He had a snub nose and smiled very prettily. He will probably marry, but this is more convenient for him now, and probably he picks up easy comforts this way. So they all spent part of the time trying to get into conversation with the naked torso of the night before. He is Spanish and wasn't interested in talking with them. The pickup was tender with the Siamese, and one could see that he and the cats were kindred.

  NOTE: Marlene Dietrich saw Leo in Paris and asked for his editorial help with something she had written. He returned it with the following cover letter.

  JUNE 28, 1955 • PARIS

  TO MARLENE DIETRICH • paris

  I have read the piece, as you will see, many times. I have made many minor “fixings” and some suggestions. What you have to say is pretty much there, in your rough piece. But what is not there, is yo
ur own special rhythm—the flow of imagery and the rhythm of your other writing. Take this piece, sit down at your typewriter, and let what you have written sieve through—always hearing it, for the sound of the phrases. Elaborate—or make it flower, as you do so beautifully. Make images—not too many, but just enough to give the prose your own color.

  This piece, yours, as it now stands, is too impersonal, too “set.” The reason no one else can write it for you is that, as you know, no one else is you. No one could possibly capture your inflection. The facts are all here: Sieve them through your fantasy. You can run this through your machine in one good day or two, at the most. Then please send me the carbon. Please try this piece, letting yourself go. Let the images go. Look in the looking glass—you will find the most nourishing image in the world there. Merde. [“Break a leg.”]

  JOURNAL • june 29, 1955 Paris is one of the most uncomfortable cities in the world, unless you have lots of money. You walk blocks in search of a mailbox or chemist's shop. Comfort consists of endless cafés, but you must have money to sit in one. The city is enormous—a teeming, feverish, shrieking metropolis like New York. Yesterday, in the morning, we went out and along the rue Bonaparte and to the Seine. The people in the streets of St. Germain des Prés were like dogs in a dog show. The people took on unexpected shapes, guises, haircuts, malformations, and arrays. They became freaks. The atmosphere here in this quarter is more intensely freakish than that of Greenwich Village.

  We went to ask for letters and to breakfast at the [Hotel] Quai Voltaire, sitting out in the hot sun while we ate our bread, croissants, fraises jam, and good butter, and sipped our not bad tea. Gray lamented the obliteration of the old parlor, now replaced by a “cocktail lounge” and a “salon de thé.” But I do not think that this recent arrangement can dispel the charm of the little hotel, not even the constant influx of tourists mars the atmosphere there. I know that if we had been able to stop in the Quai Voltaire rather than in the flophouse, we would have been much happier with Paris.