The Grand Surprise
Page 44
JOURNAL • april 2, 1965 • ss queen elizabeth en route to new york city Deck chair—silver sheen, gunmetal gray (such a bogus color word), ruffling-in-the-breeze vastness beneath the watered blue, a rubbed gray-white glowing dome above. Very smooth. The calm before? I must confess that I have had deeply serious perturbation about this sea voyage and at one time said we would go by air. A woman just clutched at her hair as though (should this be if?) she were about to lose it to the breeze. The weather is changing—great clouds, sort of sleeping clouds, indolent like white tigers, a kind of watchfulness beneath lowered lids. All of the “characters” Ruth Draper would have realized are on board. She had the genius to bring fiction into life—or life into the fiction she created, meaning that what she saw became life. Henri [Cartier-Bresson, on board] discovered me. At first, he looked older, washed out of his perennial youth, a golden, fined-down, old-gold-leaf fragility. Then he was suddenly Henri again.
APRIL 3, 1965 On closed deck, in chair, during fantastic (in the accurate sense) storm—waves crashing against this fleeing ship, sunlight annihilating all to a Turner madness, the beauty of it, the beauty obliterates the danger, rather like the beauty of any powerful cat beast—and the oddity of dazzling sunlight and the slate-gray, foam-white storm. Poor Puss is queasy and frightened in his bed. And I sit scribbling here—not believing in it, save its glorious, howlingly frantic beauty. There must be a meaning to such beauty. It cannot be purposeless, which is why Greeks and other ancients personified it. Great blotches and patches of molten silver, such as those dropped by gigantic ladles in smelting works—and suddenly all the world unbearably radiant—while this enormous vessel shudders and shivers and trembles like a strong man swept away into passion—sublime intimacy.
NOTE: Financial pressures apparently had compelled Leo to return to New York. After six months, the British government would have required that he pay taxes. Also, Condé Nast may have grown discontent with paying Leo as a consultant to Mademoiselle while he resided in London working on his own book.
Gray had felt very reluctant to leave London, and then finding their home in New York deteriorating—stairs coming apart; plumbing pressure failing—did not improve his outlook. The house's many stairs had also become more arduous for Leo to climb. In the face of these realities and the renewed pressure of New York's social life, Gray's nerves broke. He stopped drawing. Although Leo hopefully notes Gray's sketching again in coming years, he never resumed an artistic career. Leo described the situation briefly in letters, but he did not diligently resume his journal until the early seventies.
JOURNAL • may 23, 1965 • new York city In my bed, still on the fourth floor of 1453. Today is my birthday. It is my first “old” feeling birthday. I cannot write a list of resolutions, self-promises. I know what must be done. It is the doing of it I do not know. I do not believe in any God—in man's image. I cannot. This makes me solitary. Now I will read in the Bible Maggie Henning gave me so many years ago. That fat, fat hirsute face, those doubtful blue eyes. Maggie had a passion for sentiment, which expressed itself in tremulous but searing renditions of the Indian Love Lyrics (“Less Than the Dust” and “Pale Hands I Loved”) and readings from the Great (Shakespeare, Milton, Tagore), but from her [a high school English teacher] I learned poetry and graceful living and Christianity. She opened the door—and I zoomed through it. She understood more than I knew. She understood and made it all right because, as she said, “God did it—so it must be right.”
Fortitude, patience, deathlike love does not come until—but always there is the open door, which must be recognized and the threshold crossed, never let anyone know, and they will know if they do. The signals are unmistakable, explanations unnecessary, as are passports, when the moment is the moment not to be avoided—fear only the minor and unimportant—but love—a loving heart, that is the saving grace. Gray has a loving heart, so does Richard.
NOTE: Leo and Gray would visit Richard Hunter's house in Maine several times for summer or holiday visits, including twice with Gray's mother.
JOURNAL • july 13, 1965 • augusta, maine The blissful, sun-soothed endless summertime of childhood. I am reading volume two of [George] Painter's Proust. All those enormous stirrings again, suddenly focused by clearly seeing Cousin Frieda, with her enormous plait of dark-honey hair, twined with black, dull-surfaced, neatly ribbed ribbons, sitting under the gaslight, snipping royalties from the rotogravure.22 I see the page—whole upon the table, then held with the gaslight wavering upon it. This was in 1917 or 1918. Now these royalties—their descendants, “high” society, the environments of these exalted— have all become available. The basic seesaw in all individual and social relationships: Ruth Ford a headwaitress at Ella Barbour's circa 1934, now “high” society. Little T unexalted. The personages in the rotogravure became, during Hitler's war, beleaguered grand remains in New York.
I am haunted by Frieda's snipping royalties and by my constant, lifelong snipping—opera stars, dancers, society en fête, art collections, oddities. In a rage, Grandpa Goldwasser flung all of my cuttings out into the driveway. He hated my snipping. But is this cut-paper world I have made not the real unreal world in which I exist? This pursuit of artificial glamour, the discovery of what it is—the emptiness, but the sounding board aspect, as the sea in a shell: The shell is insensitive, but within is the sound of the sea. Am I that sea-sound heard within the ravishing shell?
Elizabeth Chanler says she was looking at some antique jewelry in the [Sotheby's] showroom, and one of the porters said she shouldn't touch this Egyptian jewelry, because some fifteen or twenty years ago, a man brought in a mummy in a case. Then he didn't call for it for about five years. It was put on a top shelf. Finally, he wanted it. When the porter tried to get it down, it broke open, and a mess of “black” matter fell on the porter, who became sick immediately, went home, and died that evening. Ever since, the porters believe that “antiquities” are cursed. Elizabeth is marrying Bruce [Chatwin]. We couldn't be more astonished at this Sotheby romance.23
AUGUST 9, 1965 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT At Mina's, in my bed waiting for [the maid] Nicole to bring breakfast, but not a sound in the house—stillness like dust sheets spread upon the rooms everywhere, and birdsong and bird chatter so loud that it almost makes my head ache.
Yesterday we lunched at Philip [Johnson]'s fantastic—what to call those structures, all born of pavilions and follies?—not seeming there at all— nonexistent, magical, capricious. The greenness of the lawns ($4,000 a year to keep them in that condition) on which Philip's “houses”—pavilions—seem set by a master wizard. The new museum, underground, which must be ready by November when Mrs. Whitney is “bringing Princess Margaret and Tony to lunch.”
One tiny sentence said to me by Philip darts like a well-plied needle through all my thinking, feeling, and being: “He always locked the door of his room and wouldn't come out.” I am amused at Philip thinking Gray knew me before he knew Philip. I have always thought that Gray made a choice between Philip and me. I found Philip attractive, as smoothed as Oriental sculpture of the best periods.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1965 Here I sit again in my bed at Mina's, weeks later, experiences later (not many). Mina knew many of the Proust legendage. She had a passionate affair with Antoine Bibesco, who wrote her letters. (“So dirty, I must destroy them.”) These past two evenings she has been tearing and burning letters from Lewis Galantière and others. Some feel of social history, but she says she doesn't want anyone to read them. How very odd for a biographer to do this—and how selfish.24
JANUARY 4, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • cairo
This morning, when I went out on the steps in my Christmas robe, the traffic jam stretched as far north and as far south as I could see. A driver shouted: “Go back to bed, grandpa! You won't get anywhere!” And another driver inquired, “How many beds yuh got?” Everyone is very jolly, while business alone loses at least $40 million! I wish I could find even a little of it.25
JANUARY 21, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • cairo
Amy [Gross] ran up to me in the reception room at Condé Nast and said, “Rut Yorck just died….” Oh Reezl, it would be far worse for me if you or Puss or Jerry died, but this is awful—really awful. Not like when Eleonora died (which was fifteen years ago today or yesterday), but awful. When I went to the Bellevue [hospital] morgue to identify Rut, it wasn't bad in any fearsome way—just antiseptic and awful. I was relieved to see her, because she looked so fierce and listening and intent. She was trying to understand something amazing, astonishing—something she almost could not believe. Astonishment had forced her mouth wide open—not in a scream or terror—but in utter amazement, incredulity. Yesterday I went to a funeral place with Werner, her brother [a cellist], and he wasn't much use—nice, but he has no money, so I arranged the cremation and hired a hearse to take her to it and a car for us to go with her as far as we can.
JOURNAL • January 23, 1966 • sands point, new York Here we are at Sono's—snow falling thickly, great tides sending waves all askew and shattering into metamorphic shapes. Only now do I see the solid sadness of that little funeral—Puss, Werner, Ellen [Stewart], and Hertha somebody (a friend of Rut's childhood) taking that simple pine coffin to Union City, New Jersey.26 I had a huge bunch of violets on the coffin and there were some carnations— pink and bright, fresh-paint red, still in their wrappings. So it ended, a kind man reading the Twenty-third Psalm, and we went away. I think cremation's better than burial. I do not think of her loneliness, deep in the earth. There is that meager consolation. Ken [Elmslie] took the ashes to Vermont to scatter, and this seems right. I do not think that I shall know anything more about the whys of life.
RUTH YORCK Some years ago, I wrote a weekly column for Playbill. It was due each Monday in the afternoon. And at 6:30 each Monday morning, I was at my typewriter, clacking away. At twelve noon, I pulled the final sheet of copy from my typewriter, dialed a telephone number, and read what I had written, each word of it, each punctuation mark, to Ruth. She was always there—at first in a cold-water flat whose basic ugliness she cozened into Reynolds Wrap dazzle-ment. Yards of gleaming silver foil papered the walls, ceilings, even patches of the floor. Her furniture was mostly fruit crates—but such fruit crates! She witched them into simulacra of eighteenth-century painted works of Venetian cabinetmakers' art. She was a sorceress, our Rut. She magicked poverty into make-believe splendor, prosaic prose into strong, moving, unhackneyed writing—at least for the moment she prodded you into writing, really writing. If you had a spark, the merest glimmer, she bellowed it into a roaring fire. She did not suffer mediocrities: She endured geniuses. She had the power of making you greater than yourself.
Her legend preceded her. I remember hearing about her long before she appeared, superbly sunbrowned in a marvelous white swath of a dress someone rich had given her. (She had pulled it here, tucked it here until it became uniquely her own—her style was George Sand out of the Victory of Samo-thrace.) She strode into Eleonora von Mendelssohn's room and inquired with a kind of velvet sharpness, “Why do you laugh so much?” After which we disliked each other for a year and loved one another for almost thirty. How to tell you Ruth?
One evening, when she walked down the grand stairs of the Paris Opéra, Jean Cocteau beside her, her friend Léon Kochnitzky said, “An eagle in woman's dress.” She was eagle-strong and fierce. If eagles are tender, Ruth was tender like an eagle. She was so strong that she wore Hitler-created poverty like a splendid decoration. When the men and women she loved died, she wrote them: They became poems, stories, plays. I do not think that I ever saw Ruth weep, but I read her tears many, many times. She was a wonderful laugher, a wonderful, very Jewish laugher, and Jewish laughter is deeply watered by tears.
During her last years, she lived in the Village, on Cornelia Street—a floor-through that looked like a permanent Dada exhibition. And she worked constantly against time. But no matter what work, what writing she was pounding away at, she always gave herself to anyone of talent who needed her loving wisdom. The vanguard came to her as if she were a trysting place. And indeed she was, for here they got cakes and coffee and sausage and petting and slapping (when needed) and glamour and wine and always the best advice—for work, heart, finances, politics. Everyone came—singly and to the parties she managed to give by lantern light (outdoors, in her neighbor's garden), indoors…. I say managed—she never, in her post-Berlin years, had much money. Sometimes she had none. But even when she had none, she gave to those who needed something. We always knew that if Ruth had 50 cents, a hard-up chum would get 60 cents of it. So she came to be the living, gallant, courageous expression of pre-Hitler vanguard Europe to generations of post-Hitler-war American boys and girls. And the miracle of it was that she never dated: She was always younger than the youngest rebel, speaking their language because she had already invented it years ago for them. (1967)
JANUARY 30, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO MARLENE DIETRICH • paris
This is the sort of day when the bell would ring, and there you would be—the most beautiful creature in the world, with snow thick on your fur—and then we would roar with laughter or racket with conjecture. Oh, what an ache all that makes. And where are you now? Working, I guess.
Last night, I sat at the opening of Sweet Charity. Gwen Verdon really a one-woman show, with a bone (picked bare) thrown occasionally to the other “performers,” and staged by her husband, Bob Fosse, to make her an instant star. But only God can make a tree. It was full of the dustiest memorable moments. I sat there, in the Palace (now opened, with this musical, as a musical-comedy house), and I thought about you so much.
I really have no news—save sadness. Rut Yorck died suddenly, much as she would have wanted to die, at a matinee of Marat/Sade. I am so rebellious at what life does, and I do not seem to understand one thing about it, so I go right on trying to be merry and cope and love at least you and Gray and one or two others. I haven't laughed the way we used to laugh since the last time we laughed.
Oh yes—You must not miss Madame X with Lana Turner, produced by Ross Hunter, the funniest movie since The Egyptian. I do not think that Universal will let me into its screening room again, but it's worth being banned. She has forty-six changes of Jean Louis dress and David Webb jewels in the first twenty minutes. And when she is down in the gutter in Tijuana drinking absinthe from the bottle and says to Burgess Meredith, “I had a son—No, he was not a son—He was a prince—He was a squab—under glass….” Darling—I laughed, I screamed for both of us and wept with joy, which is the only way I ever want to weep. Come soon and we will weep for joy together.
JOURNAL • February 12, 1966 • new York city I am in pain, a little every day. I am in despair every day, sometimes overwhelmingly. Now, with Rut dead, to whom do I go with all sorts of puzzlements and problems and despairs and joys?
FEBRUARY 20, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • beirut?
Yesterday I sat in Rut's flat and went through her effects. I found, carefully kept, between sheets of blue tissue paper, a large, fine photograph of you. I put this with all of her papers. They are being sent to Boston University. They asked for them. A long, melancholy day. I was given some nine boxes—three Russian Tula-work. She left them to me in a scribbled paper found
in her desk. That note was dated 1954, and everyone else mentioned is dead. I also have Rut's bedstead—very good cast iron—just right for the little room where I sleep in Augusta. Also Eleonora's small table came to me, and some fireplace tools and some logs—melancholy, melancholy. I do not really feel fifty-one, almost fifty-two—only at certain times—and although I have not had days for a long time without pain or anguish, I feel full of life and positiveness. This must be God's gift to me, and for that I am truly grateful. I wish that I could give some of my optimism and vigor to those I love. Puss is making a beautiful drawing. Rut's death seems to have started him up, so that is the sort of good she would have wanted.
APRIL 2, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
I went to a great specialist, the one who healed my knee years ago. And, at last, found what is wrong. I have a rare sickness (wouldn't you know!). It is named “march fracture.”27 Only about eight or ten cases a year are seen. Cause is usually unknown. Thirty years ago, it was considered a malignancy and the afflicted foot was instantly amputated, to save the rest of one. Now, thank heavens, the treatment consists of being in a cast from the top of toes to knee (which I am). Dr. Graham says that during the last war this strange sickness was finally determined because soldiers got it after enforced long marches (hence march fracture). He likened it to metal fatigue, the kind that makes a jet plane collapse. Something happens in the metal, inexplicable—so it happens in the bone. It is nothing to do with weight. Anyway, I am thinner. I don't really have any news, because I go nowhere, and just sit in this house and try not to move too much.