The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JANUARY 8, 1964 On Monday, I discovered myself presenting Barbra Streisand her Mademoiselle Merit Award at Ray Diffin's costume-executing emporium—a shop whose walls are composed of windows and wherein magic is created. This time blueprinted by Irene [Sharaff], who stood amid the brilliant mounds of finery like a determined, worldly Bo-Peep midst the meadows and sheep on a gala shearing day. Barbra was on a podium, done up in American Beauty [deep red] velvet, huge black hat, and pink-satin blouse, all very, very hobble skirt. When I came in, an owl-eyed hulk (male) was interviewing her, but getting nowhere. Then I stepped up and, since to me this was a game, we did splendidly. She is a plain, Jewish-looking girl, huge eyes, huge voice, huge zany smile, naturally offbeat, and conventionally out-of-bounds. She takes instant likes and dislikes. She will obviously be a star. She is very, very Jewish—almost with the spirit of a dancing Hasidic boy. I even looked to see whether she had payess.12

  JANUARY 18, 1964 “Mr. Bing likes me to do it: He saves on the makeup,” Leontyne when a Brazilian said something about her Aïda. Leontyne after a disastrous Pamina: “Well, that'll teach Mr. Bing I'm not an ingénue.”

  Brigitta: “I would like to be married to Balanchine again, if I didn't have Goddard and the family and all that. Balanchine is the most interesting man….”

  JANUARY 21, 1964 Carol Channing loves her audience so much that they find her irresistible and mass demonstrations of affection take place. To be part of this is overwhelming. She is old-time theater. Her “art” is based on that look of apologetic, hopeful anguish seen on the face of a little girl who has just peed in her pants.13

  “Singing's like sex. You never know whether you'll make it after fifty.”

  —Maria Callas

  MAY 2, 1964 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london

  I had a “boy and girl” date with Joan Sutherland. She met me at the Plaza (Oak Room) and then, for dessert, we went to the [hotel's] Palm Court. Joan Sutherland is a cross between Margaret Dumont and a high-school pageant. She has one wonderful little “act”—being a pouting baby girl—ugum-mugum—but she also has loads of humor about herself, is very candid about the tight fit of her husband [conductor Richard Bonynge]'s pants, and she loathes Bing and worships Maria C. It was a bright, hilarious, not too expensive evening.

  Then there were my two encounters with Liz [Taylor] Burton. Have I written about those? She has nothing in her head save vanity. She is the most self-consumed narcissist I have seen, and I have seen the supreme examples of our time. You feel that if she sat staring into nothingness, that absence of anything at all becomes a looking glass. I also feel that he will leave her one day—and that she may well commit suicide.

  JUNE 24, 1964 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london

  The great surprise of the season is the Actors Studio Three Sisters, much the best one I have ever seen, and the glorious one in it is—Kim Stanley! Unforgivable!!!14 It is carefully directed to exhibit Chekhov, and since it does that, it is most satisfying. You hear him so clearly and so immediately. This is a new translation (or adaptation) by Randall Jarrell—unarchaic and good for contemporary actors. The diction, the voices, not all “classic,” but of a piece, so one is never reminded by a “good” example of how bad the others are—like putting a new piece of furniture in this house and so showing how shabby it actually is. This Three Sisters lacks audible poetry, but is visually lovely. Most of all, here is this heartbreaking, shining play—a present, it seems. Oh, how rich it is and how influential it has been. V. Woolf comes out of it and even [Bergman's film] Wild Strawberries. Chekhov sees life as it trembles—here it is, now it isn't—all in the same moment. Miss Stanley is heavy, marmoreal, very funny, and full of pitiful snobbish pretensions and horrible wrenching anguish. This play is so deeply aware of “good” people playing by rules. They have to. But “bad” people—awful, common people—do not play by rules, so they win out over the “good” people. Materially. The spirit, one hopes (and must believe), triumphs ultimately—but, oh dear, how lonely and frugal and woeful that the “bad” should enjoy material victory. How many of us are constituted to be saints?

  JOURNAL • July 19, 1964 • sands point, new York It is not that I have lost my scribbling, but it seems to lie doggo, until such moments as these, the loosened moments, the unwound minutes. Part of me is in Alice's house at Rhinebeck, having read in yesterday's newspapers that Ivan [Obolensky, her son] has sold it to be used as a “home” for “fallen” women. How Alice must be smiling, and Ela roaring with laughter, each having “fallen” so many times. I wonder whether the new fallen will sleep in my bedroom?

  The sound of a knife clattering against a porcelain dish, the sound I heard as a very small child in my grandmother's kitchen on 107th Street, almost fifty years ago, here this moment, past. When then, does it all go? Where? I go—it goes? Is it all really forever, needing only the right combination to make it clear, audible at any moment in time? Not the ship itself, but the wake of the ship … Not the tree itself, but the tree's shadow … Not the loved one himself, but the loved one's love—and there both the loved and his love are indivisible.

  AUGUST 4, 1964 • NEW YORK CITY [Publisher] Roger Straus's party for Paul Horgan [novelist and historian] in that Westchester Tudor mansion: the wicker sideboard, the mixture of Westchester “gentry,” pretty “girls” from the office, daughters of friends, literary gents and their ladies, literary ladies and other ladies' gents, literary ladies sans gents. Ruth Elizabeth [Ford] as loud and as raucous as a ballyhoo truck on a dim night and even harder. [Harpsichordist] Sylvia Marlowe, pale gold beside Ruth Elizabeth's blatant stridency. An ancient puss and a venerable spaniel. Anne Fremantle [writer and editor of Commonweal] in rusty, grimy black complete with shooting stick and any-which-way Ceres hair. Horgan was faculty-meeting dapper: “I've so many books, formal books planned out”—with a gesture like a nursery gardener demonstrating growing boxes—”waiting to be filled in. I don't have time to write an autobiography.” He was well-acolyted.

  NOTE: On September 29, 1964, Leo and Gray sailed for England. They leased an apartment in London from their friend Eileen Maremont. Leo conducted interviews and gathered research for his book, tentatively called The Seismograph of Taste: Sotheby's, 1744-1964.

  He felt hampered from the start by the lack of business archives at Sotheby's. The auction house also did not intend that Leo write honestly about auctioneering practices, which involved a great deal of obituary watching and sharp dealing. The following October, disillusioned, he would write: “I must not trust people whose lives are centered in gain: They are different from me, totally different in intention.”

  For the months in London, however, Leo went at it hammer and tongs, interviewing employees, many long retired, and rummaging through the Bond Street offices in search of material.

  The life in London at this time gratified both Leo and Gray. The combination of arduous research, memos home to Mademoiselle about upcoming articles, and many social pleasures resulted in fewer journal entries.

  OCTOBER 3, 1964 • LONDON

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • augusta, maine

  Oh, Reezl, you must come. Because this is such a lovely place—central heating, burning hot water, and even more room than we were told. We live in a sort of wide-awake dream. How will we ever settle down again. Thus far everyone at Sotheby's is friendly and helpful.

  OCTOBER 4

  Yesterday went to lunch at Ken Tynan's and discovered that he was the man I've been watching across the road! The Osborne play [Inadmissible Evidence] is endless and dispiriting. The actor [Nicol Williamson]—a new man—gives a tour de force of memory and endurance. But again, who wants to sit through a nervous breakdown lasting almost three hours? The audience thought it all most comical and roared with laughter. I could not—save a bit of horrified choking. He's written a list-of-current-problems play—carefully checking them off and crowing, “Well, I got that one in!” Everything from perversions to p
olitics—and that's the range of emotion from p to p.

  JOURNAL • October 3, 1964 • London Ken [Tynan] says he will demolish Truman's book. He feels that T could save the killers' lives, and wouldn't because he has to have them dead to finish his book.15

  OCTOBER 13, 1964 When Hobson [head of the book department] talks to me about incunabula, very rare bindings, etc., I must say honestly that I know nothing about this and do not even understand him. But, of course, he probably knows this and he is snobbing me. The great spirit so instantly perceivable at Sotheby's—everyone deeply interested, mad about their work, which does not preclude jealousy, unrest, ambition, and anger.

  NOVEMBER 18, 1964 • LONDON

  TO AMY GROSS16 • new york city

  My arm becomes so very tired because of the endless note-taking. I do all the interviews “by hand,” scrupulously taking down each implied punctuation mark. These last weeks I have been querying the local ancients, for fear that they will abruptly demise and so the past be obliterated. I have also been on the town (or in the country) nights and weekends and lunchtimes. I am starting this (at least) in Siberia—the name I have given my freezing office (although London is springlike today and was yesterday, a sort of warmth of death—ugh). This cell, with three enormous windows looking onto scenes from Dickens, is in a new part of Sotheby's and so still remote from all other human and inhuman elements.

  I took yesterday afternoon off because Sylvia (Danny Kaye's wife and a childhood chum [at the Grossinger]) is here, and she took me to Margot Fonteyn's gala at Drury Lane. The whole dance world—English, French, even from Mitteleuropa and Scandinavia, also Freddie Ashton in a box with Princess Marina and everyone done up…. Fonteyn superb, as always these days; Nureyev very odd and lost—deeply introverted in Paquita (a dull piece, two circusy dancers from the French Opéra—superconfident, all flashing smiles and Gallic teeth, sort of like bad French jokes, and such leapings, cavortings, and one-hand lifts, rather like a nightclub act years, years ago, but everyone loved it).

  Last night we were taken by some lads to see life in the East End and along the Thames docksides—pubs such as one only sees in well-documented fin-de-siècle movies. First we trooped through a series of houses lived in by English chums (houses which seemed to long for The Madwoman of Chaillot17) and then the pubs jammed with every sort of creature, raucous with music and singing and conviviality and strange life. This does not exist in New York anymore.

  JOURNAL • JANUARY 22, 1965 This is the day of the Clive Bell valuation.18 Met at Victoria [Station] for a train to Lewes. I didn't realize where I was going. I see a woman with heavy, open shopping bag or rucksack, so like Virginia Woolf Thus the enchantment begins—a voyage into the past. When Jamie [Dugdale] meets me at Lewes, I discover this woman is [Angelica Bell] — V. Woolf's niece, Vanessa Bell's daughter, David Garnett's wife.19 Here is a great living tradition, an Omega day—Vanessa Bell's decorations carefully preserved by Duncan Grant, who lives there; the books and letters and notes in them; Duncan Grant's studio; the lunch at the Omega table. The colors— greenery-yallery [Art Nouveau]. The designs were all so Roger Fry.20 A bust of Virginia Woolf. I was deeply tempted to steal a scrap of Lytton Strachey manuscript that fell out of Clive Bell's [book] Proust. The moldiness of all this establishment. The good bread and bits of roast or ham. David Garnett, who had his eightieth the previous day, was sexless. [Ballets Russes dancer] Lydia Lopokova a brown bear in her window, the great paintings thick on her walls. The sun's beams, from behind clouds, spotlit the Woolfs' house. A thin, silver ribbon in the distance—here she [Virginia Woolf] wandered into the waters and was gone. When I was going away and saw Mrs. Garnett and Duncan Grant in the doorway, I thought: “She's his daughter.” Later, as I was telling this all to Yvonne Hamilton [wife of publisher Jamie Hamilton], she said, “Of course! Everyone knows that….”

  JANUARY 25, 1965 • LONDON

  TO JERRY LERMAN • new york city

  I had a lovely, lively encounter with Princess Margaret last week at Cecil Beaton's party for Audrey Hepburn (who looked wonderful in a short, puffed-skirt, bright green, tightly bodiced dress from Givenchy). The princess came up to me, held out her hand, and said, “How are you, Mr. Lerman?” So I held out mine and told her. Then she went on for about half an hour about how awful Maggie-May (the musical) was—mostly because Rachel Roberts (Mrs. Rex Harrison) was bad in it. Mrs. Rex Harrison was standing within earshot! The princess also talked about piano playing (she does it well), did a few intimate impersonations (she does those well), and babbled on and on. So we were chums. She wore a long, rather full dress—pale silver-gilt embroidery on white gauze, fashioned from a sari. The bodice very tight and lovely. She has a beautiful complexion. Her diamonds were small flower clusters in ears and on her hands. She's kind of jazzy and looks like her father struck it good in the female-shoe business. That is the end of my society column today.21

  NOTE: Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965. He would be the only commoner in the twentieth century honored in Britain with a full state funeral.

  JOURNAL • January 31, 1965 On Friday, before [the opera] Arabella, the Crathornes picked me up in Bond Street and, all squinched together, we went off to the special entrance reserved for friends and important people (Lord Crathorne was very close to Churchill) and so into Westminster Hall. The soundlessness of that—thousands of people all moving slowly, sedately through the brown-velour light, past the amber candles and the Union Jack–draped coffin, with its guardians, their heads bowed over their swords. Great skeins of people—all ages, all kinds—and not a discordant sound—looking back. They came as Emma Lazarus envisioned the poor of Europe pouring into America— hordes—not a feeling of sensation-seeking or hysteria, but love, respect, loyalty, gratitude. Over all of these ceremonies and these days I have never been without the feeling that Churchill was watching and enjoying every moment.

  Just random jottings on Churchill's funeral: We went early in the bleak morning to Trafalgar Square, where thousands were gathered beneath Nelson's Column and the glorious lions, not jammed upon the monument but orderly and still beneath it, some behind iron railings and some perched on those railings. The feeling was that of respect—prodigious respect and dignity. All ages—babies on shoulders, sometimes grown women on men's shoulders, and many women holding their compact looking glasses high aloft to see the procession. The clean sweep of pigeon-wing sound when the cannon saluted. The black tide in the Strand—busbies all moving toward St. Paul's. The sudden scarlet of coachmen's caped cloaks and tall hats on the first coach. The elegance everywhere throughout the procession. A work of pure art functioning miraculously, nothing left to chance, and even chance become part of the work of art: the sun suddenly making the lowering of the coffin from the gun carriage to the shoulders of the Grenadiers a triumph. The Grenadiers looked, as they carried the coffin, in love, as though they were listening. The funeral tread, but never for one moment sad. No sorrowing. A sense of Churchillian humor, for he had planned Operation No Hope for a decade. This was the nineteenth century departing, the afterpiece to Victoria's funeral, when the crowned heads packed into the special bound-for-Windsor train; the kaiser in his gold armor clinging on at the very end. (All dashed from the train into the conveniences at Windsor station.)

  Watching the television at [Peter Wilson's secretary] Elizabeth [Chanler]'s: This is what television does best—events. Alexander the drum horse with his cascading mane and clop-clop steps—The cranes on the riverside bowing as the cortege passed—The great splurge of light on the untrafficked river—The bridges and the Thames as Canaletto could have seen it—Then the long, freshly painted line of dining cars and the baggage car and the coffin slowly, slowly, slowly into the special darkness (all baggage trains are dense with that darkness)—And the door inexorably closing—Suddenly a feeling of emptiness, of vacancy, the special life had gone out of that day and the usual Saturday feeling could not be summoned or even wooed into the emptiness—The sound of the piping
, the shrill, thin sailor's piping—The bagpipes lamenting—a sad-happy tune, a loving tune—the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—all of its verses, and how delighted Julia Ward Howe would have been. I remembered that old Mr. [Mark Antony De Wolfe] Howe of Boston told me that Mrs. Howe, who also lived to be very ancient, would disrupt dinner parties by announcing, “I am now going to sing my hymn …” and then she did—all verses and more— The feeling that Sir Winston himself was enjoying this celebration, which he had planned and was giving—The most marvelous party in the world.

  SOTHEBY'S I wanted the atmosphere of the book to be enchantment with auctioning, a great feeling for the migration of treasures. I had never considered the wear and tear of daily immersion in mortality—the 3,000 or more canvases stacked in the cellar at Sotheby's. I wanted not a dreary listing of sales, but the potency of lists—Sitwell lists—names like exotica, like lists of old roses or stage properties—a list of the panorama of living…. But an auction house demonstrates the permanence of impermanence. Mortality.

  The very beginning—confusion, the lack of an archive—was also the very end. The final question, as I departed, from Fred Rose [their jewelry and silver manager]: “What has been the biggest surprise in these six months?” “That a firm which has made its fame and fortune from the past has no regard for the past.” Long pause. “Well, we've had no time.” (1971)