The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Nevertheless, Paris seemed more beautiful in winter—the color of the city mellowed to mauves and grayness, its buildings mere lines softly looming in the fog or suddenly overwhelming and rigid on a black freezing day—a day which rings in the ears like cast iron flung down on cobblestones. That is the Paris I love, the Paris of gray and lilac washes—winter Paris, the Paris of twilights, and the Paris of late, late night and early morning—the great places, the Vendôme, the des Vosges, the Concorde as still as when all the world is finished, put away, and the gods have gone on to other business and other planets. No other city has this teeming vacancy, late, late at night—not London, not New York, not Vienna—this thick velvet beauty. But yesterday, even in tourist-thronged summer, Paris was frequently beautiful—a robust, thriving, blowzy beauty—a rampaging beauty—but beauty undeniably.

  JUNE 30, 1955 • THE HAGUE The sun shines hotly through the big windows of our room [at the Hotel Des Indes] above the tree-topped square. Swift impressions: utter cleanliness, dignity, the quiet beauty of the old houses (many now embassies) which surround this large green, for it is more a town green than a square. The houses seem early Georgian, and some are in fact earlier (and one has a step-front roof, which should make the heart of any New Yorker beat with joy, for at one time Nieuw Amsterdam was composed of houses precisely like this one). The houses are of brick—different tones of red—flowering into beauty at their fanlights (never have I seen such a variety, never such beautiful ones) and at their white shutters. Sometimes they are washed with buff or yellow as in Austria. They are always spotless, formal, homey, and look comfortable.

  JULY 3, 1955 Claudio [Arrau, pianist] stepped out of the lift last night as I was about to go in. He had been to Paris for the day and looked at the Picasso show. He thought it wonderful; great crowds as usual, he said. Just then John Gielgud came up. He has a kind of dazzle about him—like silver ribbons, he gives a light—bright and tinselly. He is neat, slender, tall—a charmer with a heartbreaking, feather-in-the-wind smile. An air of knowing something wickedly gay and entrancing—a good-humored, high-comedy devil. How I doted on his Hamlet photos in Theatre Arts years ago, up in Richard's furnished room on West Eighty-eighth. I thought, knowing neither, that in the rain he looked like Marlene. John said they'd not had good notices in Vienna (he made comparisons with the German way of acting Shakespeare), but were an enormous success, with huge mobs at the stage door, shouting in that way peculiar to Vienna. Not many actors or theater people had come, and anything to do with officialdom had been woeful. He thinks this is so because of the different parts—for U.S., English, and Russian—among the Austrians. This makes for three complete sets of officials, each watching the other and undoing the other's work. He said that he could slap Ruth Gordon, because she was so good [in The Matchmaker], but always the same and such a vaudeville. He would like to see Ruth play Beatrice [in Much Ado About Nothing]. He envied Claudio playing the Fenice, because he has always hoped to play there. He said he could never go abroad on holiday because of finances; he had spent two months in Jamaica and that had broke him. He'd heard of a Hofmannsthal play in which he was told that he would be very good—high Edwardian life. Neither Claudio nor I had heard of this one. Claudio is marvelously read. He seemed to grow tired and pale. He wilted so. I wonder if he's well. We talked of plays and theaters. John talks in sentences—complete and punctuated.

  I do love what I have experienced of Holland. The sky is magnificent, with volleys of clouds and the special gray-silver light one sees in Dutch paintings. Oh, the pleasure of seeing paintings in life as one rides to the museums and then seeing the same life in paintings. So Holland is double-imaged (like Venice), to be seen reflected in the green waters of its canals and rivers and lakes, to be seen again (as in looking glasses placed opposite one another) into perpetuity in its paintings. Between Haarlem and Amsterdam, Holland is very flat and very green and very beautiful, with trees blown all in one direction— away from the sea—and the beasts of Holland fat and placed in their green paradises. A gray-haired man sharpened his scythe at the margin of a field. He had a finely, vertically blue-striped shirt, black pants—very flared out, caught tight just below the knee, really like certain tulips, black long stockings, and bright yellow wooden shoes. The shipping cranes of Amsterdam, like raised dinosaur heads on long, long necks, over the meadows and haystacks—also factory chimneys, but none of this industrialization “hurts” the timelessness of the vistas. To keep the birds away from the fat, small, good, rich little kitchen gardens in which vegetables, fruits, shrubs, and flowers commingle, they put out tiny windmills, like those we used to have on houses in country places years ago, all busily revolving, better than rag strips or strips of newspaper or tin foil to blow in the wind.

  JULY 5, 1955 John Gielgud says that Ustinov, Welles, and Laughton are all very good but not what Mrs. Patrick Campbell and that generation were. They don't fill the stage, although large. This Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most lucid performances I have ever heard or seen. John has directed mar-velously. Of Peggy Ashcroft [touring with him], John said, when we went back: “She is not really a comedian, but she gives it such dash.” Brilliant in a sort of dart-and-tickle-me manner—delightful. The audience loved it, the Dutch obviously seeing more than something in it. John, with his nut-brown makeup half off and his wig off, looked an American Indian. Many good dresses in the house—Dior, Balenciaga—good Paris haute couture. The audience stood up to cheer. John said plaintively, “I wish I could take this to America.” But I suppose he won't be permitted in. He was in frisky humor after the premiere. He spoke of knowing that there are some clubs here, but he said he thought he'd better not.87

  JULY 7, 1955 John says Edith Evans thought that she had cancer, but that wasn't so. Then she decided to do this play—awful Nina [by André Roussin]. She couldn't remember her lines. She became very ill and left for two weeks. She hated the other actors. Then she returned from the nursing home and got into the play's dresses, went up onstage. She just couldn't do it. Went offstage, put on her own clothes. Went onstage, stood silently there for two minutes, and left the theater. Later she said that was saying farewell to the theater. This was a magnificent exit, but she wasn't leaving. She's genuinely ill, sits in bed crying that she's lost her religion (Christian Science). If she feels that she has, she's indeed lost, for she had nothing else—no real friends save the daughter of the rich woman who sent John [Gielgud] and Edith, mysteriously, twenty-five pounds [sterling] every so often, because they had given her such pleasure. The daughter (the woman is now dead) has taken Edith off somewhere to try to help her. Edith has had only two good friends (one is Betsy [Thurman]).88 John says she's so larky and gauche and unhappy. She even took dancing lessons because she wanted to be popular. This is all very sad, when you realize that she is the greatest living actress on the English-American stage. She has been unhappy in her work for years and loathes the idea of getting old, character parts.

  John's trying to behave. This is just as sad as Edith. He says that if he hadn't gone on the stage to perform two years ago—that night—he could never have acted again.

  JULY 8, 1955 Diana [Adams] came after dancing [Balanchine's excerpts from] Swan Lake. She says the stage is so impossibly narrow that she can almost not do an extension on it. She looked younger and happier and altogether like one of those pink-yellow sort of tea roses just opened a little bit— and after what she's been through. She loathed the Left Bank but Hugh [Laing] made her live there when they were married.89 At dinner we went to the Bali Scheveningen, and there the rijsttafel was elaborate, including baked bananas, fried peanuts, and all sorts of dark meats in darker sauces and something which was surely broiled Brillo, but delicious, and we made jokes about Fania being in the kitchen, for this is the sort of food the Van Vechtens tend to—and how delicious it is. During this she asked sort of tentatively and a little tremulously about whether Hugh had a success and about Nora [Kaye], and she said how happy she was about it all when we tol
d her that they had. Diana has a good heart, and although they all gave her a rough time, she finds it impossible to be mean about them, and really does wish them well. She says that Maria [Tallchief] arrived twenty pounds heavier and seems to be suffering some sort of private grief and has become strident and loud—very vulgar and also very discontented—what with all she has, technique and success—again like Edith Evans.90

  JULY 10, 1955 John's Lear too hysterical in the way a young man is hysterical—too fretful and pettish. Lear needs to be heavier, to fill out the vast tides, not to be a cockleshell upon them. Lear is overwhelmed by the tides; he is also their instrument. Through him they speak. Also this Noguchi[-designed] production is too desiccated, too Japanese. There is no reason to play Lear in an abstract Japanese decor and in a lion's wig and beard, both of which got into John's way continuously. There is nothing epic about this portrayal. You never once feel sorry for Lear.

  JULY 14, 1955 • EN ROUTE TO BRUSSELS Isn't it horrifying, to discover at forty-one that if I had my life to live over again I would not have lived these last seven years as I have lived them? I have had much to be joyful with and about, but this evening, because joy has collapsed, I see again even more relentlessly that the cost has been prodigious. I must be tired, for I have been able to take outbursts over nothing for what they were—nothing. But this evening's outburst seems to have struck me dumb and sent me into some awful deep place. No blood, no pain, no visible scars, only inability to make conversation and isolation, in which I feel secure, but uneasy. It is not in my nature to be still like this—silent—and it is not in my nature to talk when I have been deeply wrenched. In these last seven years I have been given much pleasure, but the cost has been too great. I have indulged myself in a luxury, and now there is no way out. I should never have remained, for in essence that is what I have done. This was unfair to the other person from the very beginning, and I have only myself to blame for permitting my masochism to be so bountifully nourished.

  NOTE: After a day's wandering in Bruges, Leo and Gray learned they had missed the last train back to Brussels and were stranded. Finding no hotel room, they finally stopped a policeman to request help and were offered beds in the city's jail. In a nearby cell, a drunken older man, arrested by the police, died during the night.

  JOURNAL • july 17, 1955 • brussels Each of our journeys has its mysterious heart-cracking and probing experience: in Italy, at Caserta, a little lost dog; in Belgium, at Bruges jailhouse, a drunken man suddenly dead. I said my prayers and asked God to help his soul. I returned to saying my prayers after the little dog in Caserta. That dog made me miserable for days.91 This man seems to have some significance yet unrevealed to us. I am sad for him, and in this sadness is anguish for myself, for all of us, but I am not undone as I was by the helplessness of the dog, and our helplessness to do anything save run away on the bus and be miserable at the unjustness and cruelty of the world and at the trust of the little beast.

  The man was conclusively dead. We saw him drunken and—not knowing this—dying. He probably did not even know that he was dying—or that he died…. The abruptness of this death and the pathos of an old man, dying drunk—with roars and vast sighs and writhings and tumult—on a miserable cot in a room behind a door (half glass and half wood, like one leading to the yard at home) … the pathos of this, the immediacy… this must surely have a deep, still, somewhat submerged effect on us.

  All of my dealings with people in the streets have been good here. Only trying to get off a train, coming into Brussels, I had to push men out of the way. They insisted on getting on. I lost my temper and, for the first time in my life, shoved a man in the chest and made a mob stand back. I do not think that travel improves manners or graciousness or any of the amenities. It broadens one's comparisons and enriches one's experience and appreciation, but it is hell for the temper and the everyday morale.

  NOTE: Marlene Dietrich met Leo in Belgium and then flew Leo and Gray to London round-trip to see her perform at the Café de Paris.

  JOURNAL • july 22, 1955 • London The words which I thought as I watched Marlene's performance were: insolence, efficiency, token. Also she seemed during the earlier part to be rushing. And she was, for she had to go on to a big ball at which the queen was to be present and where she, Marlene, was to sing. Before the show, she looked scraped, tired, emaciated. Then on she came, looking incredibly youthful and beautiful—especially during the latter half and dressed in tails. The audience's enthusiasm gave her youth and beauty, nourished it until she blossomed visibly before our eyes. Her range of gestures is a limited one. Her voice, save when she sings in German, is even more of a freak than ever before. But she makes you feel that she is the woman of the world's lewd dreams, the unobtainable always beckoning and promising, but insolently. Her accent is more marked during this performance than it is in her everyday life. She removes the glitter drapery for one set of encores, has the wind machines turned on, and seems even younger when less clothed. Everything she does she does camp, save the real heartfelt—by her heart— bits. She says to the audience: See how good I am? She kids the audience and her songs, but not ever underlining that she is better than her material—like Pearl Bailey and Paula Laurence do.92 When Marlene sits or rather strides a chair and growls “One for the Road” she is very beautiful in two sexes simultaneously. This is a performance, in this number, on a par with Judy Garland's at the Palace. Sometimes she's fun. Always she's beautiful. Too much she makes token gestures and expressions. And always she is fascinating to watch and so very professional. I have never seen a performer take bows in such an efficient way.

  JULY 23, 1955 A bright Saturday morning. We came up Piccadilly in a pale gray mist—like fine French suede. Looking up from our deep and scattered chortling—sometimes howling—could it be called talk?—we saw dawn standing like still, pallid pewter, waiting for life and color from a somewhat vagrant sun. We left Marlene at six in the morning, left her pointing to the vastness of the egg-yolk-colored bed Oliver had designed so optimistically for her, and crying hoarsely, “I lay here, in this small, little, tiny corner.”93 She ran down the long passage of the penthouse to help us out. Her white-trimmed cloak, which created the sensation at Las Vegas and Blackpool and the Café de Paris, lay under a dustsheet, on the bed we should have occupied, and the “naked” dress was folded like Medea's fatal veil on a large case top. So we came away in the dawn light and were asleep by seven, and I was awake, feeling fine, at eight.

  PAL JOEY AND MARLENE Marlene knew who she was, who the public thought she was, who she could have been, and sometimes succeeded in making [herself] believe all about herself: “Cohn, at Columbia, was casting Pal Joey, and he asked me would I come and see him, because he had a wonderful part in Pal Joey for me. And at that time nobody was offering me any wonderful parts, so I went to see him. So he said to me, ‘Marlene, you play this part, you will be a bigger star than ever.' So you know what he wanted me to play … ? He wanted me to play that woman who was always chasing after that awful boy called Pal Joey. I said to him, ‘Harry, who would believe that me, Marlene Dietrich, would chase after any man?' And I went away and that was that.” Actually, who would believe that Marlene would chase after any man, or that Marlene would be a woman attached to a telephone…. Who would have believed the Marlene on the screen would be a real woman? Of course, she was a real women, any number of real women. (1993)

  1. The Guermantes Way, an occasional boyhood walk in Remembrance, winds by grand houses and symbolizes social progress. In Proust, the Méséglise Way represents the innate, familial self, the Guermantes Way the acquired self.

  2. In Remembrance of Things Past, the Duchesse de Guermantes answers “like a parrot, with ‘Fitzjames is waiting for me' “ to the narrator when he tries to engage her on the Avenue Gabriel.

  3. Karl “Peter” Vollmoeller (1878-1948), a German screenwriter and playwright (The Miracle), was a lover of Ruth Yorck's in the twenties. In 1933 he rented two floors in Venice's Renaissa
nce palace Ca' Vendramin Calergi for six months. Ruth and her husband, Count David “Sohni” Yorck von Wartenburg, came to live there with Vollmoeller. (The Yorcks divorced amicably in 1937.)

  4. Serge Lifar (1905-86), formerly of the Ballets Russes, was then leading the ballet of Paris Opéra. Princess Natalie Pavlovna Paley (1905-81), granddaughter of Czar Alexander II, married fashion designer Lucien Lelong, then producer John C. Wilson. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (1897-1983) painted the transformed portrait of Dorian Gray for the 1943 movie.

  5. The British dancer and choreographer Anton Dolin (1904-85), formerly with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, was then principal guest artist with the Vic-Wells Ballet. He and Brigitta Hartwig danced together in a West End play called Ballerina in 1934, after which she joined Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo as Vera Zorina.

  6. The ballerina Nora Kaye (1920-87) danced many roles of dramatic intensity created by Antony Tudor.

  7. Frank Merlo (1922-63), a Navy veteran, was the lover (1949-63) of Tennessee Williams.

  8. GF: “Elizabeth had a dreadful stammer, utterly stopped by words until she could substitute others.”

  9. The Kate Depew Strang Clinic specialized in cancer prevention and treatment. Leo had several cancer scares.

  10. Earlier in the year, playwright William Inge (1913-73) had won the Pulitzer Prize for Picnic.