The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  11. The actress Mary Boland (1880-1965) is perhaps best remembered today as Countess de Lave in Cukor's film The Women.

  12. Martha Glazer Speiser (1880-1968) and her husband (who had been Leo's lawyer) Maurice Speiser (d. 1948) were leading Philadelphia politicians, modern-art patrons, and hosts.

  13. Julie Harris (b. 1925) and Edna Best (1900-1974) would open in January 1954 in Anouilh's play Mademoiselle Colombe. Leo had gone out of his way to meet Harris earlier in the year after seeing her as Frankie in Member of the Wedding.

  14. Playwright Edward “Ned” Sheldon (1886-1946), stricken early in his career by arthritic paralysis, continued to collaborate on theatrical productions and entertain from his bed.

  15. In his review of the memoir by this beauty and hostess of pre-World War I Paris, Leo wrote: “To know her would, I am sure, have been to loathe her.”

  16. Leo's ophthalmologist Milton “Theo” Berliner (1893-1981) and his wife, Constance Hope (1908-77), an agent for musical performers, frequently hosted large parties filled with opera and concert personalities.

  17. Both Leo and his brother had always celebrated Christmas. He told a story of one childhood Christmas Eve when he and Jerry put out stockings for Santa to fill, only to find in the morning that their mother had washed and hung them to dry in the bathroom.

  18. These were two same-sex couples: the theater critic and novelist Stark Young (1881-1963) with the traditionalist architect William “Wales” Bowman (1895-1966), and Irene Sharaff (1910-93), costume designer for some sixty plays and forty movies (An American in Paris, The King & I), with the art historian and artist Mai-mai Sze (1910?–92).

  19. Leo had written about Scottish-American soprano Mary Garden (1874-1967) for both Bazaar and the New York Times Book Review in the previous six years.

  20. The singer Raquel Meller (1888-1962) was a top-billed act in the twenties with a repertoire of Spanish songs. The Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé (1890-1936) had been known as “La Argentina.”

  21. Seventeen years Draper's junior, Italian poet Lauro de Bosis (1901-31) disappeared after dropping anti-Fascist leaflets over Rome when his airplane ran out of gas over the Mediterranean.

  22. In the following, Leo is describing Oliver Smith's closing-night party for The Summer-house, by Jane Bowles, which set designer Smith (1918-94) had designed and produced.

  23. The actress Judith Anderson (1898-1992) excelled in tragic roles, notably as Lady Macbeth and Medea.

  24. Janet Flanner (pseudonym Genêt, 1892-1978) was Paris correspondent for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1975.

  25. Harold Arlen (1905-86), the popular song composer (The Wizard of Oz), saw a great deal of Dietrich in the mid-fifties, while his wife was institutionalized. When Arlen himself was hospitalized at one point, Dietrich was discovered in bed with him.

  26. Zorina and Welles had an affair (platonic, says her autobiography) in 1938, while Balanchine was repeatedly asking her to marry him, which Zorina did later that year.

  27. Nora Kaye was a founding member of Ballet Theatre in 1939. During a three-year interlude (1951-54) with Balanchine's New York City Ballet, she had recently premiered Jerome Robbins's dramatic ballet The Cage and Antony Tudor's La Gloire (1952).

  28. Ballerina Diana Adams (1926-93) created many roles, first for Antony Tudor at Ballet Theatre (1945-50) and then for Balanchine at New York City Ballet (1950-63).

  29. Woolf found Mansfield's experimental short stories “hard” and “shallow.”

  30. The musical House of Flowers (book and lyrics by Capote, music by Arlen) opened December 30, 1954, after months of backstage fighting.

  31. Leo was reviewing Persona Grata, with biographical essays by Kenneth Tynan and illustrations by Cecil Beaton. Through the fifties and sixties, Kenneth Tynan (1927-80) was arguably Britain's most influential theater critic and writer.

  32. Kenward Elmslie (b. 1929), poet and lyricist, was the lover of John Latouche, then of the artist Joe Brainard, and a close friend of Ruth Yorck.

  33. An adept painter of realistic New York City interiors, John Koch (1909-78) painted Leo several times, including a solo portrait in 1953. He married Dora Zaslavsky (1905-87), a highly regarded piano teacher.

  34. Count Lanfranco Rasponi (1914?–83), a prominent social figure, was a writer and public relations agent. As Enrico d'Assia, Prince Henry of Hesse (1927-99) worked as an artist and stage designer. Leo went to the party after all: “The Rasponi party: How that old ‘glamour' world, the remnants of Café Society, looked—some of the women still making token curtsies, a little collapse to royalty.” Journal, March 27, 1954.

  35. Fania Marinoff (1890-1971), married to Carl Van Vechten, was an actress whose last Broadway role had been in 1937, an attendant on Tallulah Bankhead's Cleopatra. GF: “Fania was a Russian Jewish woman—small, perspicacious, flamboyant, given to brocades— who came poor and sold newspapers, then became an actress. She had a fiery disposition, but was full of great kindness. Carlo and she happily disagreed about almost everything.”

  36. Zachary Scott (1914-65), an actor (The Southerner, Mildred Pierce), was married to the stage actress Ruth Ford (b. 1915).

  37. Orphans of the Storm (1921), directed by D. W. Griffith, had starred the sisters Dorothy and Lillian Gish.

  38. A joke: Elmslie's grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer, endower of the Pulitzer Prizes.

  39. In France, child ballerinas were called les petits rats.

  40. Jessica Daves (1898-1974) was editor in chief of Vogue from 1952 to 1962, between Edna Woolman Chase and Diana Vreeland.

  41. Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell's brother Osbert (1892-1969), the poet, novelist, and auto-biographer, suffered with Parkinson's disease in his last years.

  42. Novel by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Verge, Comtesse de Lafayette (1634-93).

  43. The preeminent stage actress Mrs. Patricia Campbell (née Beatrice Stella Tanner, 1865-1940) was famous for sharp comments, eccentricity, and bewitching G. B. Shaw, for whom she created Eliza Doolittle in 1914, when she was fifty. Bernhardt and Campbell were playing the 1892 tragedy by Maeterlinck. In 1902 Mary Garden sang Debussy's operatic adaptation in Paris, and she premiered it in New York in 1908.

  44. High Bridge is a Manhattan neighborhood near 173rd Street.

  45. Lali Horstmann (d. 1954) was a Jewish Berliner married to a wealthy German diplomat, with whom she had lived in the German capital through World War II. Dr. Max Jacobson became notorious in the early seventies as “Dr. Feelgood” when it was revealed that he had injected drugs, often amphetamines, into many celebrities. Leo later blamed him in part for the deaths of Ruth Yorck, John Latouche, and the photographer Mark Shaw. “Jacobson made Ruth feel good and bad for years; even Marlene went to him for a time, and Touche did for years. Perhaps this is a medical science for the new frenetic world. But I doubt that.” Journal, March 25, 1971.

  46. The first of these is probably Countess Anna de Noailles (1876-1933), a poet; Austrian Luli von Hohenberg (1901-51) briefly became the Hollywood actress Luli Deste before marrying Kollsman, a wealthy aviation-industry inventor; Louise Salm (d. 1951?) was a translator, an aristocratic German with whom Ruth Yorck had been enamored in the late forties.

  47. Leo's favorite portrait of himself by Richard depicts him reading in an easy chair, surrounded by towering mesas of books.

  Until Howard inherited his mother's apartment in 1974, Richard and he seldom kept a residence of their own in New York. Richard would stay with Leo and Gray, sometimes for months, using two rooms on their third floor, where he also painted.

  48. The only child of Marlene Dietrich and Rudolf Sieber, Maria (b. 1924) became an actress, married the scenic designer William Riva, with whom she had two sons, and published a biography of her mother in 1992.

  49. GF: “We went to the wedding at the Sherry-Netherland. All of his ex-boyfriends were there and astonished.” LL: “Charles James: His features—part gothic, part prune. His figure—a brief elongated oval, spare, on pipe-stem legs. His manner—v
ieux élégant. His dark eyes, always mischievous, veiling a deep melancholy. His purpose—single. His wit— all-pervasive. His dressmaking—genius.” Journal, January 6, 1990.

  50. Leo's aunt Ida had been married to Joseph Lerman (d. 1920), the oldest sibling of Leo's father.

  51. In the Bronx, where the Lermans lived for some three years in his early childhood.

  52. Margarita “Rita” Gachet Smith (1922-2005), Carson McCullers's sister, was fiction editor at Mademoiselle (1944-60).

  53. Margaret “Nin” Kahn Ryan (1901-95), the socialite daughter of financier Otto Kahn, was the mother of John Barry Ryan III.

  54. Journalist Diana Forbes-Robertson Sheean (1915-87) was a friend with many theatrical associations for Leo, including being the niece and biographer of the great stage actress Maxine Elliot.

  55. The 1937 London production of On Your Toes had been Brigitta Lieberson (Vera Zorina)'s big break. The choreography in both productions was Balanchine's.

  56. From 1922 to 1934, “Wampas Baby Stars” were those deemed most likely to succeed by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS).

  57. Moss Hart (1904-61), playwright (You Can't Take It with You) and director, married the singer and actress Kitty Carlisle (b. 1910), who after his death would become chairman (1976-96) of the New York State Council on the Arts.

  58. Giving Callas her American debut was a coup for Lawrence Kelly (1928?–74), manager for the Lyric Theatre opera (called the Lyric Opera after 1956) of Chicago. In 1957 he would found the Dallas Civic Opera, also bringing Callas there for some of its first productions.

  59. Callas had lost some sixty pounds since Leo had first seen her in January 1953.

  60. Six radio shows had interviewed Leo, representing Mademoiselle, regarding Callas.

  61. During his marriage to Callas from 1949 to 1959, Giovanni Battista Meneghini (1895-1981) was also her manager. In Puccini's opera Tosca, Baron Scarpia is the treacherous chief of police.

  62. In October 1956, two days before Callas was to make her debut at the Metropolitan, Time magazine ran a cover story about her, which quoted a blunt letter from Callas to her mother; telling her to make her own money or “jump out of the window.”

  63. “She descended to the desk, at four a.m., in full Edith Sitwell regalia—black-and-silver dogeressa robes, five-story turban, a loot of barbaric jewels.” Journal, July 20, 1978.

  64. Osbert Sitwell lived until 1969.

  65. Earlier in the year, their friend Lesley Blanch (b. 1904), a British biographer and historian, had published what would be her greatest success: The Wilder Shores of Love, about adventurous women finding their fortune in the East.

  66. An agent for musicians, Muriel Bultman Francis (1908-86) was from a New Orleans family made wealthy by an undertaking business.

  67. Helen Valentine (1893-1986), founding editor of Seventeen in 1944, had recently revamped Charm, Street & Smith's rival to Condé Nast's Glamour.

  68. “The girls” were Minnie's nieces Rosalie (1913-2000) and Norma Goldwasser (b. 1918), unmarried daughters of Leo's uncle Harry. Leo thus learned that his well-off uncle Irving and aunt Minnie would leave him no money.

  69. British composer William Walton (1902-83) had been a protégé and dependent of the Sitwells in the twenties and thirties, living in Osbert Sitwell's house for more than a decade.

  70. Firebird was a 1910 creation of the Ballets Russes and was Stravinsky's first commissioned ballet score. Leo is comparing Fonteyn's dancing in Serge Grigoriev's 1955 revival (with the original Fokine choreography) to Tallchiefs performance in Balanchine's 1949 production, which had been a sensation in New York.

  71. Les Noces (1923), premiered by the Ballets Russes, is a ballet with music by Stravinsky that depicts a Russian wedding. Scenes in Bronislava Nijinska's original were laden with revolution-of-the-proletariat implications.

  72. “The prince got the giggles at the girls throwing golden globes—oranges?—at one another. The queen gave him A Look and A Mutter, her diamond earrings trembling in her ears.” Journal, February 23, 1985.

  73. David Horner (d. 1983) and Osbert Sitwell were lovers for more than thirty-five years. “Edith Sitwell's lunar face as she cried, in the dining room of the St. Regis, over her luncheon, moonstone tears over David Horner's treatment of Osbert and how Osbert had taken him back. She was feminine in an epicene way, the way some high churchmen are.” Journal, July 8, 1981.

  74. Margaret Jourdain (1876-1951), a prominent authority on British furniture and decoration, had lived for three decades with the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969). Her sister Eleanor Jourdain (1864-1924) coauthored An Adventure, an Edwardian tale of two English ladies seeing ghosts at Versailles, a story Leo wanted very much to believe.

  75. Separate Tables (1954), by Terence Rattigan, consisted of two one-acts about characters staying at a rather tired English seaside hotel.

  76. The British illustrator, costume designer, and dandy W. Graham Robertson (1866-1948) had been portrayed full-length, wearing a slender black coat, by John Singer Sargent.

  77. Martin Wilson (1910-92), an antique collector and dealer, was Peter Wilson's (of Sotheby's) older brother. Bobby Howard was his good friend. GF: “Martin Wilson should have been carried around in a sedan chair. The most ineffable eighteenth-century fop I have ever met, with the most glorious silver and a man to take care of it.”

  78. Leo had probably seen an excerpt from Damage and Destruction, a film made by the U.S. military documenting the effect of nuclear-bomb explosions on soldiers and test models of civilian life.

  79. Lord David Cecil (1902-86), scholar and noted eccentric, was one of a distinguished English family that includes the earls of Exeter and Salisbury.

  80. “Herman Schrijver [British decorator, 1904-72] said that Ivy Compton-Burnett came storming up his stair shouting, ‘My man is dead! My man is dead!' on the day of Miss Jour-dain's funeral, saying that she could not bear to go to it and would he have her to lunch.” Journal, August 2, 1971.

  81. “He iterated to his pale, pretty, cold wife (only pearl gray and washed-out blue), ‘Don't stint yourself, darling,' as he sent expensive dish after expensive dish back. He was a beast—more sarcastic than witty.” Journal, March 2, 1969.

  82. Isabel, Lady Burton (1831-96), wrote a biography of her husband Richard Francis Burton, the renowned explorer and translator of erotic texts.

  83. Vera Volkova (1904-75), the foremost teacher in the West of the Russian Vaganova method of ballet, was a Russian-born dancer and artistic adviser to the Royal Danish Ballet.

  84. A couple, Schanne (b. 1921) and Noack (b. 1924) both danced with the Royal Danish Ballet.

  85. In the mid-nineteenth century, the choreographer and teacher August Bournonville (1805-79) had made the Royal Danish Ballet into a top company. Margrethe Schanne was a major exponent of the Bournonville repertoire.

  86. Édouard Roditi (1910-81) was a critic, translator, and Surrealist poet.

  87. In England in 1953, Gielgud had been arrested and convicted of soliciting sex in a public restroom. It made a major scandal.

  88. Betsy Thurman (d. 1974), the actress Elizabeth Farrar, was also a good friend of Leo and Gray (and the grandmother of Uma).

  89. Diana Adams had been married (1947-53) to the dancer Hugh Laing (1911-88), a principal at Ballet Theatre in the forties, who created many dramatic roles in ballets by Antony Tudor, his lover for some fifty years.

  90. Maria Tallchief (b. 1925) danced with New York City Ballet (1947-65) and was married to George Balanchine from 1946 to 1952.

  91. GF: “Walking to Caserta, we met this small tan dog, lots of terrier in him. He danced on his hind legs at meeting us and then accompanied us for hours. No one knew to whom he belonged. At the end of the afternoon, we had to board a bus, keeping him off, and he stood watching, apparently brokenhearted, as the bus pulled off.”

  92. During the previous theatrical season, the singer and comedian Pearl Bailey (1918-90) had starred in Ca
pote and Arlen's failed musical House of Flowers. Paula Laurence (1913-2005), the actress and singer married to producer Charles Bowden, was a friend whom Leo first met in 1936, backstage during her performances in the Mercury Theatre production of Horse Eats Hat.

  93. Stage designer Oliver Messel (1904-78) had decorated a suite for Dietrich in London's Dorchester Hotel.

  NOTE: Leo and Gray went to the opening of the Lyric Theatre of Chicago's 1955 season, where Callas would sing I Puritani and Il Trovatore and Renata Tebaldi performed Aïda and La Bohème. Afterward, Leo returned to New York, while Gray stayed through Thanksgiving with his aunt and grandmother in Glenview, Illinois.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1955 • CHICAGO

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • paris

  You would have been muchly amused. I did two television shows and four radio shows, and headwaiters in the Pump Room asked for my autograph, and elevator boys asked wasn't I a moving-picture actor or one of those opera stars—and, of course, I've been lapping it all up, ham that I am. It has been bliss being in a “foreign” city, in a hotel room alone and being able to leave all the lights on and taking cabs everywhere—because Mademoiselle was paying—and Brigitta is here (because she is doing a Monteverdi at the opera) and Alicia Markova and Callas, of course, whom I adore with a real star-smashed, little-boy passion. Even when she sings making ugly sounds, she is fabulous to watch. What a marvelous stage personality she is. She knows exactly how to handle the audience, whether it is 4,000 (in the huge Welt of an opera house here) or, one, me in a little room. I do hope that you can meet her one day, because I think she will give you that Gone-Garbo feeling we once had. Did I write and say that that one [Garbo] had pounced on me a week ago, at the Gunthers, and wrung my hand? I couldn't say a thing because she had aged so, and I resented having now to see this line-meshed and leathery face along with the beauty of Camille.

  JOURNAL • NOVEMBER 6, 1955 • Chicago The revelation of Maria Callas's art—her acting—or stage-presence artistry: No stage personality can be truly great unless, in the beholding of that personality on the stage, one receives not only the impact of the present but also the past is revealed concurrently. Maria is a great example, for in viewing her Leonora [in Il Trovatore] last night, I felt (and so did Brigitta) that here was the [French tragedienne] Rachel we had glimpsed in spotted representations, in written descriptions. Here was the classic tradition in stage art, at its present greatest. I told Maria this, this morning, and she laughed and said she didn't know what she did onstage. But this is perhaps what she believes and does have happen to her. There can be no art as powerful as hers without the art of knowing what one is doing and then transcending that knowledge and that technique.