by Leo Lerman
APRIL 17, 1966 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • london
The Met gala was, curiously, not at all moving—save Elisabeth Rethberg quietly weeping when a trio started the Don Carlo that Pinza was wont to sing so beautifully—then a moment when the back-to-your-seats bell rang, and ladies in long, trailing gowns all jammed onto the stairs. I saw them from behind—a magical moment of total remembrance of things past. Leontyne sang superbly. She was best. But when all of the “former” stars sat on the stage, it was rather like the graveyard scene in Our Town. I think my own grief was at losing a place where you and I had gone when we were so poor and stood and sat upstairs— you paying.28
JOURNAL • june 4, 1966 This morning, I was to go to Sam's Barber Shop, and just as I was about to go away I saw the Shabbes morning congregation come out of the “French” synagogue, three houses away. I was overwhelmed by Saturday mornings long ago in Woodside [Queens, near Jackson Heights]. Nothing, save dress, has changed. These French-American Orthodox Jews were the relations and friends and acquaintances of my remote childhood. The same basic types, faces, gestures, groups. Older young couples, solitary grandmothers, men walking together, women together, children popping about, teasing, being “naughty,” admiration for new outfits, talk of weddings and bar mitzvahs and houses and food. Some of them stood on the pavement before this house, and I stood eavesdropping and being long ago and right now indivisibly, not knowing where past became present…. Ultimately, “Gud Shabbes,” they said one to the other—the rabbi (a little, very trim white beard, a French-accented Yiddish-English, a red ribbon on his lapel), the rebbitzin (all straw and grosgrain ribboned bonnet), the Régine-Crespin-looking woman in her bright green, flary jacket, the two upstate New York Christian-seeming youngish women (very ardently girlish), white-gloved women, felt-hatted men, little girls and boys and grown-ups in their neat, special, Shabbes, gleaming clothes…. Long ago and dead legions, you, this morning: Good Shabbes. Good Shabbes to uncles and aunts and little cousins and the family “next door.” Good Shabbes, good Shabbes to life and love and long ago and now…. I wish that I could re-create that long ago and show what it has become…. All the thick Yiddish soup … then the thinning out… now almost nothing…. Part I-Grandpa … PartII—Momma … PartIII-Me …
JULY 1966 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT
TO MARLENE DIETRICH • paris
This is the long, long hot summer when local tension intensifies, and we wonder if and when comes the explosion in Harlem, and will it, this time, spill south below Ninety-sixth Street. So it goes here—almost everyone gone, and days and nights seem utterly wasted to me, because you are not even nearby on the telephone. There is no one here who really speaks our language. Surrounded by civilians—will life be this now and forever? I cannot urge you to come back to New York. It is more a machine, almost totally a marketplace, and so utterly destructive, killing slowly the people who try to survive here. And the expense! There is nothing to nourish one here, and the city becomes increasingly frightening—terrifying.
I suddenly was asleep, waking only at 4:30 a.m. with terror, because of my still unfinished (and mostly unwritten) [Sotheby's] book. But I think I have found a form for it, a shape quite my own and one within which I can, at last, work. This is a journal form, a sort of very fluid diary of those six London months, but a journal so flexible that it leaps ahead or back into the past when necessary. I have been trying to write a sort of epic, a history of taste and culture, but I am not that kind of intellect, nor am I that kind of writer. I am very good at creating atmosphere, teaching, and rather blithe. I am best at short things. Therefore, this diary form—so open to gossip and all sorts of trivia—is good for me. If only I could sit day in and day out and never have to go near the magazine. But a boy has to live, and a boy's ma has to live, and his chums have to live. You know all about that.
Well, you were at Chanel, so I know, at least, that you are in Paris. How did you find Truman? He does not change—basically cornball, curiously provincial, and always intent on one goal—success.
THE BLACK AND WHITE BALL Truman said, “Oh, you're back. In this heat! Well, come on up and we'll talk.” I leapt into a taxi and sped down to the U.N. Plaza [apartments], where, high up, T had one of his residences.
“Bless your little heart!” His voice seemed both deeper and higher than when I had last seen him in that early spring of 1966. No more little-boy, corn-silk bangs—Truman's hair was thinning. But behind his heavy, horn-rimmed glasses his blue eyes sparkled. Everything in that reddish room sparkled: the heap of color-suffused glass paperweights (“Colette gave me those!… Well, she gave me one of them”); the Tiffany glass lamp with its shade patterned in cascades of blossoming wisteria (“Fabulous, n'est-ce pas?“). He grabbed my arm, swung me around—a wall of shimmering afternoon light, a vastness of light and sky and city and river. “Yes,” I said, “you have it all. You're leading a life like a Cole Porter lyric.” “Champagne?” he asked, as I settled into a deeply comfortable, flowery sofa. “Non?” He now sprinkled his talk with bric-a-brac of fractured French. He raised his glittery goblet. “Toujours gai, always a lady!” (We all loved Archy and Mehitabel.)29 Then he downed the bubbly, perched himself in a sort of yoga position on a black, papier-mâché chair, intricately inlaid with mother-of-pearl (“I think I found it when I was staying with Juliet at Wilton”), and pulled a pile of notebooks to him. “Is this a new story?” “Yes. Except this one is not written. It will, my dear, be written about… but that is not why I'm giving it. That's only part of the fun of it. You know how hard I've worked all these years…. That musical and the play and six ball-breaking years working on In Cold Blood … and now I want a reward, a great, big, all-time spectacular present. I want to get all my lives together, all of the people I really love and some I just respect and some I want to show off to…. And it is going to be a work of reaaalll art.” (VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 1987)
JOURNAL • DECEMBER 1, 1966 The guest list was written in the sort of children's notebook in which Truman painstakingly handwrites his stories, articles, books—a 10-cent, black-and-white-mottled cover enclosing lined sheets of homework paper. On the front cover of this notebook, on the label, Truman had neatly written DANCE. He said, “Look inside and see….” I did. Name and address, name and address… front to back of the notebook and then back again, on the reverse of each sheet. “What,” I asked, “is this for? The new Four Hundred?” “A little party I'm giving … a ball… for Kay Graham …”30
The approaches to the Plaza seemed Hollywood Boulevard on the night of a glorious movie premiere at Grauman's Chinese. The ballroom, seen from the corridor and foyer, was a room glimpsed in the background of an eighteenth-century Venetian painting. In the foreground, beside a pillar, Truman and his guest of honor—a receiving line of two. T's absolute devotion to each of his guests: He made you feel that you are the one for whom this entire entertainment had been devised. Each one of some 540 guests was the only person in Truman's world, at least for as long as he shook hands, kissed (females and males, all were kissed), and wafted them into his ballroom.
He was, Truman, the least intrusive of hosts. For hours he was so assimilated by his chums that seeing him on the floor dancing with Mrs. Guinness or Mrs. Paley was a shock—an agreeable, soft shock of deep pleasure.31 He was having the time of his life and so were we—all of us. There wasn't a person in that ballroom who wasn't enchanted to be there, somehow deeply fond of the host and even of one another. This good-sized party was intimate, delicious, and private—genuinely private despite being the most publicized social event in years. It had a single, loving, worldly-wise spirit at the heart of it—the same spirit that had written out the most fabulous guest list in years in a child's school notebook and thought out the conceit of black and white masks and dress. In every sense this was a real party—old chums, newer chums, those to see, and those to be seen (many more of the latter than the former). It had the black and white, clean tones of Beardsley's drawing
s, the corruption of his special line and massed detail. The prettiness of the party came not from the decorations, which were minimal—red tablecloths, candelabra, token floral decorations (smilax)—but from the guests—what they wore and how they wore it—their joyous energy and animation.
Two memorable moments: Jerome Robbins embellishing the Peter Duchin [band's] beat, with the special Robbins-syncopated beat while dancing Lauren Bacall across the floor, only to be cut in on by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. [historian and social critic], who after a moment of staid Harvard hopping abruptly left Miss Bacall on the floor, rushed up apologizing to Mr. Robbins, explaining that he hadn't realized. The new Astaire-Rogers resumed the Robbins-Duchin beat. At 2:45 a.m., when I was leaving, the intelligentsia (Partisan Review, Commentary, Norman Mailer, Norman Podhoretz, etc., etc.) took over the dance floor, forming a folksy ring around the Paris Review (George Plimpton seated on a chair), and as they circled him, the Plaza ballroom became every high school gym in the U.S.A. There hasn't been anything like it since the Crash. Nevertheless, you didn't feel that the host had spent $200,000. Not one person didn't want to be there (or was scornful. Even Norman Mailer).
Many of the women looked embalmed—but by the most perfect morticians in the world. Mrs. Paley in five flat strands of rubies (which others thought fake, but I knew were real) sort of sewn on to the dress. She's not aging very well. She seemed laid out magnificently. A woman with the most extraordinary voice said hello—Tallulah Bankhead. It was the great world, it really was. Spectrum ranged from Alice Longworth in paillettes and the most extraordinary dignity32 to Marianne Moore sans tricorn hat to Janet Flanner in perfect tailleur to Amanda Burden, really quite extraordinary,33 to Jean Stein [writer and publisher], who looked like all the wicked women. The only badly behaved person was Frank Sinatra, cretinish stupidity—in the men's room, outposted Mafia abused the man. He's vulgar. Oh, he's so awful. Glutted with power. The youngest person there was not Mrs. Frank Sinatra [Mia Farrow] but Penelope Tree, seventeen years old, very intriguing because you wondered, is she a virgin? You suspect she isn't.34 Princess Pignatelli in enormous leaves threaded through her hair.35 The Barzini girl, in enormous ruffles, ate fifteen buns by actual count.36 [McCall's literary editor] Barbara Lawrence walked her round. A most intimate, delicious (to use Allene's word) party. Nobody was being bitchy. Food was breakfast—chicken hash and scrambled eggs—bad.
The spectacular moment was just before midnight when the floor was dense with black and white plumes—a really great masked-ball moment conceived by a master designer and draftsman. Moments after midnight all of the tables were massed with flung-down headdresses and masks. This was like the terrace of a Stately after a long day of shooting, when all of the bags have been emptied—gorgeous panoplies of feathers everywhere.
Years ago we played “Celebrities.” Truman would say, “She's a first-rate celebrity….” Then we would all argue about the “she” or “he.” T assembled more first-rate celebrities from varied worlds… social, literary, political… very few theater… no music, no ballet… spiked this with Kansas37 … his old, old chums. As Diana Trilling said on the blower the morning after, “It was beautiful and extraordinary and fascinating, but basically it was a very nice dance for friends….”
MARCH 11, 1967 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • ATHENS
A Saturday so warm that the garden door is open. A gentle ghost rain drops meagerly—not a full rain, but an intimation or an afterthought. Do you know what Onassis gave Maria for a present? A tanker! This amuses me muchly. This week I have worked so very hard on that magazine [Mademoiselle]—a wretched hundred-day calendar I had to make—many events each day, fitted into little squares—endlessly trying to do, especially when so many events are only probable. Last week I came out of my office late, in the hallway only workmen and a scruffy messenger boy, his back to me—dirty black leather, awful, messy, bleachy hair. I said to the back, “I am happy to find you here. I hope that you will take me down. I never go in the lifts alone.” The back said, “Of course, I will take you down, Leo,” turned and roared with laughter. It was Tony Armstrong-Jones—looking awful. So we had a long visit, driving about in a taxi. He said that the past year has been the strangest ever—what with his being off so much and life odd at “home” and how he could never finish anything. Then he said that he envied my being able to work so hard and seeming able to finish things (little does he know).38
THE OSBORNE In 1967, on the last Friday in March, 1453 was sullen. 1453 was apprehensive. A house, especially a much-loved and lived-in house, is like an animal who knows, not being told, what his people are thinking, and even more certainly are feeling. 1453 felt that something was happening, something that 1453 did not like. Gray and I, seated in the back parlor, the afternoon pewter light seeping in, dulling the pinks and greens of the 1870s carpet I had bought during the sale of the Grand Union Hotel's effects in Saratoga to a hazy remembrance of enchanted gardens. It did not help lift the feeling of alarm, almost the sense of depression, which seemed to drape every loved object. “Yes, I will call him,” I said to Gray.
Then I got heavily up and moved reluctantly into the front parlor and to the long American Empire sofa, which stood next to the table upon which stood the Tiffany glass lamp with the long, honey-colored fringe of lusters bought years ago in Philadelphia. I dialed. A man's voice, a sort of middle European inflection, answered. I said, “This is Leo Lerman, your tenant. We have lived here now for some nineteen years. You know that this house is the center of our lives. We love it. And now the time has come for us to buy it. At last we can afford it, and we want it…. We want to own it. We cannot go on living here, no matter how much we love it, because it has become almost uninhabitable. The stairs seem to be hanging by a thread. The furnace needs to be renewed…. Well, you know how it is…. The whole house needs restoration, and we want to make it into the house it once was…. We have to buy it…. What do you mean we can't buy it? Why can't we? … What do you mean we can't move? I don't have any signed agreement with you about staying here…. Oh! You think we can't move because we have so many things! So many books! What's that got to do with it? … The roof has to be done over. The rain comes in the skylight!… Why can't we buy it?” A very long pause, while I listened with my mouth wide open like a face in some Sunday-paper comic strip. Then Gray says he heard me say, in a voice of complete shock: “What do you mean you don't like me! What's that got to do with it? I am offering you money to buy this house, where we have lived and been very good tenants for nineteen years. What do you mean you don't like me? … You want the house? For yourself? For your mother? For your family? … You don't want the house for yourself? … You want to make it into a social club! What do you mean a social club? … Well, if you don't want us to live in your house, we'll move…. Thank you, I will now look for another house!” Gray and I sat side by side on the long, hard, brown velvet seat of the sofa. We held each other's hands.
We sat, Gray and I, looking about at the bookcases and cabinets lining the two halls facing into that room and at the overstrung square piano at which Marc Blitzstein one early morning had played hits of the day while Eileen Herlie sang them. We looked down at the bosky carpet, at the old-fashioned, bittersweet-red, deep-walled children's sledge that Buford Chisholm [an antiques dealer] had fashioned and given us on a Christmas Day long ago: It held dozens and dozens of LPs—all Christmas music. Looking out at the sledge was a battered old record player, which Eleonora had given me years before. It had played endlessly Toscanini, Eleonora sitting in an orgasmic rapture as she sang loudly to the empyrean surge of the Maestro's Beethoven.
I heard what I always thought were the new sounds of Lexington Avenue outside. New, because they were not the sounds of my ever longer and longer ago childhood, when Momma and I had walked along the west side of the trolley tracks and looked at these, we thought, forever secure brownstone houses … forever secure. Then Gray said, “What do we do now?” The phone rang. I said
, “Maybe it's the beast calling up. Maybe he's changed his mind!” Gray said, “He hasn't.” I picked up the phone. It was Barbara Kafka. She said, “I can hear that something's happened. What's the matter?” I said, “He doesn't want to sell the house to us!” There was a low animal moan in the phone. Barbara said, “Come for dinner on Sunday night. There will be some other people, but maybe we can all help. We all know that you love that house, but there are other houses.” I said, “Barbara, I have a deadline. Barbara Kerr [at Mademoiselle] will kill me if I don't get the copy in.” Barbara said, “Let her kill you, it won't hurt as much as moving out of the house.”39
Sunday evening, Gray and I went to dinner at Barbara's. I sat next to a woman with the most beautiful hands. That is all I remember about that woman—except she gave me the name of an agent and said I must call that agent up on the following morning. The following morning was April 1, April Fools' Day. What was there to lose? I rang the agent and the agent said, “Oh, Mr. Lerman, I know you very well, don't you remember that some years ago, when you thought you might move, we talked about a house?” I did not remember. “I think you had better get rid of the idea that you are going to live in a house. You won't be able to live in a house. You will not be able to afford a house now.” I considered this idea, and I said, “If I can't live in a house, what am I going to live in?” She laughed. “Do you know the Osborne?” I said, “Of course I know the Osborne. I've known the Osborne since sometime in the mid-thirties. It's where Imogene Coca's mother-in-law lived, and my darling friend Frances Zoline [Wormser], formerly Frances Dewey of the Broadway theater, and Imogene s best friend, would go to see her, and I would go along. And then, of course, Lennie and Felicia Bernstein live there, and Paula Laurence lived there, and the Hirschfelds lived there, and Sidney Kaye—he's very important there.40… Do I know the Osborne!” She said, “Meet me in the Osborne and I'll show you an apartment if you think you might want to live there….”