The Grand Surprise

Home > Other > The Grand Surprise > Page 47
The Grand Surprise Page 47

by Leo Lerman


  There was Rut's young face and shoulders by Kokoschka, over Ken's mantel. Ken told us that Rut's whippet, Rossignol, seemed to go mad, and when Ken opened the auto door in Vermont, Rossignol raced away into the hills and has not been seen since. Rut's ashes are scattered in those Vermont hills. I spoke mostly with Edwin Denby, now two years A Widow of Lincoln Kirstein. How many of us are there?49 Edwin told me that in the Osborne, not too long ago, was one of New York's most expensive male brothels.

  I shall now fall into my bed, listen to the broadcast of Don Giovanni, and read [Harry] Wedeck's manuscript, “The Triumph of Satan.”

  FEBRUARY 2, 1969 • OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK With Horst and Nicholas Law-ford.50 I came here in the morning, yesterday. Actually I arrived, one-ish, in a downpour—most Anna Karenina, the Syosset station obliterated by densities of steam—but I adore any railway journey. Even the Long Island [Railroad] behaved brilliantly, depositing me one minute ahead of its scheduled time. I should sue, for this was unprecedented.

  The house: meticulously arranged (Cesco's Picasso was sold to help build this house, with its triple, transecting allées51), an index to Horst's and Nicholas's lives, each detail cluing the stops upon their journeys to this place, this time—Russian silver cups, batiks, photos of Maestro and so many others out of our Ela-Rut-Lucien past, drawings by Nicholas of his grandparents— these good and very English-German, sometimes a Juliet feeling here—very Bulbridge (especially in Horst's loo with a wall of Turner engravings),52 much blue-and-white—Japanese, Meissen, Dutch porcelain, and exquisite jade (the greens of high summer).

  This is a curious ménage à trois—Horst (very alt-Saxony), Nicholas (very county English), Hans (very son-of-Austrian-peasants). Hans, now twenty-eight, looking twenty, was brought here when he was eighteen. A child in a large family, a twin whose female counterpart remained in Austria, Hans was given to Nicholas and Horst by his father, and so came to America and an affluent situation. Hans cooks, drives, assists Horst, services both I am sure, and cats about on his own. He has considerable looks, the kind that run to fat later, and great charm. He is loving, amused, given to swift, cloud-fleeting depressions, and he is constantly in heat—a sort of abiding heat—perhaps he is centrally cold.

  Ultimately it was decided that I must spend the night here, and I have, but virginally, in the coldest bedroom since my weekends in the Statelies those long-ago six months in England. I love being here, because it is having one foot in my lost world of Ela and Rut and Ilse [Bois].

  FEBRUARY 16, 1969 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT I had a disaster with my [National] Theatre of the Deaf piece [for the New York Times]. “Wonderful atmosphere and enthusiasm,” said [arts editor] Sy Peck, “but not enough content …” I think that Sy is right. Also, he stood on the exact area, in my work and life, which makes me tremble: I do not have the kind of “content” expected. I am not intellectual; I am emotional, intuitive. I do atmospheres and surfaces and lightness with sincere deep feeling and genuine darkness beneath it all. I am decoration, not great art. The graces of life, not the webbed philosophies, are my domain. I work hard—incredibly hard—grasping solid facts the way the falling and drowning grasp straws.

  Last night we watched television for three hours. The color television discolors rather than colors. Most people on the screen were white-lipped with joy, and the colors were quite like those crude smears on Russian or Italian popular prints. Also very Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, the effect. Nevertheless, an enjoyable evening because of Laugh-In, with its own special mordant satire and fragmented rhythms. On Bob Hope's show, Mr. Hope and Mr. Crosby brought theatrical chills when they cavorted together—very old tyme. The Jack Benny show was not as good as the others. I expected Eddie Cantor to appear, as always faintly repulsive. The screen shows the techniques so clearly—the remarkable vaudeville timing; the utterly pro milking; the deadpan precisely adjusted to the lid; the ego; the deep gratification always lurking in the corners of the mouth, the corners of the eyes—no matter how passive the face, the hands, the body; the curious effeminacy of both Hope and Benny. It is where all vaudeville went. Television is vaudeville's gold-paved, gold-walled, gold-roofed heaven.

  Do I really want to fuck with others? Why? To the first—I seem to, but only to be “taken,” not to take. And that answers the second question. Do I do it with others? Almost never. Why? Too much trouble to go through it all over again, especially when I have it so much more gloriously and with real love at home—but monogamy is not a “normal” condition.

  MARCH 2, 1969 • NEW YORK CITY Last night, to Paula and Chucky [Bowden] to dine with the Lunts. What a wonderful evening, to be with Lynn (“Lynnie,” as she is called) and Alfred after years of adoring (I don't exaggerate) her. She is very old, but still has her beautiful, highly individual figure—the chin held high, the broad lids artificially lashed, the nacreous skin (so like Sargent's Madame X). She came in tottering a bit, but she has made this into a sort of wandering calculated glide, a sort of swing through a room (rather like Ellen Terry's walk).53 When she saw the Sargent drawing of Ruth Draper, she said that Sargent was a great portrait painter but this drawing was the worst Sargent portrait she'd ever seen. “Ruth wasn't a pretty girl. This is a pretty girl….” She slides her voice, which is quite high—like a high-pitched pale color, a rich lavender—and then falls an octave or more. Her lower register was always ugly—really unattractive—but she managed. She said (several times) that when she was a very young actress, just beginning, she had no lower register, her voice being incredibly high. She tells wonderful stories and suddenly forgets what she's been telling. One has to help get her on the central track, but it is all done with incredible charm and staging. Lunt is a great, genuine gentleman full of Scandinavian chuckles. He was delighted with the success of his modestly blue-and-white striped shirt, a departure for him, this coming to dine in a colored shirt. Lynnie rang Paula up to ask whether the last time they lunched Lynnie was wearing a dress with white sleeves. Paula said no. Lynnie didn't want to repeat the dress, which she had sewed, every stitch of it, herself, and a beautiful dress it is. The choice of Lynn's words is so fantastic. She is so right about the visual things.

  MARCH 22, 1969 On March 20, in came Hugh Laing. He says that he is sixty-nine! Small-sized, lined, not a gray hair, a body like someone who has been years on a ship, cat-footed, compact, tightly muscled—he's not too bright, but dear and sweet. Then came Antony [Tudor] on his way to Juilliard, with a clean-baby look, inextricably threaded with some curious malice, a sort of indigenous reversal in him of anything he hears: He makes you think that he doesn't really believe anything you say to him—an innate skepticism. But I love him dearly. Then Armina [Marshall, of the Theatre Guild] arrived, scarlet hatbox in hand, and in hatbox big white-and-green frosted cake for Fania [Van Vechten]'s eighty-second birthday. Fania, attended by [actress] Regina Wallace, arrived. Regina, a pretty woman in her late seventies or early eighties, is given to occasional song in German (perfect). Fania, almost blind (save miraculously clear-sighted when peering at our Russian silver), almost deaf (complete with the suspicions of the deaf), and shrieking (very Mrs. Siddons as heroines of high drama and low tragedy), was in a beautiful pleated tissuey silver dress made so long ago by her “little dressmaker” and still stylish. As always, style survives all fashions.

  JULY 21, 1969 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT Rain, rain, rain, and thicknesses of opaque light. The world is, paradoxically, sealed in this morning after man's first “walk” on the moon. We watched it on Mina's color television. It was utterly unreal—almost amateurish seeming in visual technique after these years of science-fiction preparations. I wonder with what “help” and how long it took the astronaut to work up his first remarks. I like Little T's quoted remark in Esquire: “So far, so good.”

  At luncheon at Philip Johnson's, talk was about all of Teddy Kennedy's curious [Chappaquiddick Island] mishaps—a slight word for what could be a devastating chapter in the Kennedys' House of Atreus history. Philip has no notion
of real comfort, and if he has an eye, it is so very different from mine that I find it almost nonexistent. How very strange that so thin a … no, this is wrong. I feel Philip's quintessential emptiness and his personal fascism. The part that insists on a very feminine woman agreeing to house herself in his totally unfeminine architecture.

  OCTOBER 8, 1969 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT Last night Mina showed me her partial translation of letters Proust wrote, in 1893, to [Daniel] Halévy. He signed them, almost all of them, Pauline. They were homosexual letters, mostly about a passion Proust had for a young man. I cannot remember the various code names, but in these unpublished letters the seeds of Remembrance are deeply rooted. She has offered them to [publisher] George Weiden-feld for inclusion in the Proust hundredth-anniversary volume. Proust was twenty-three when he wrote them and they are so immediate. I felt seventeen again, enthralled by Proust for the first time—all of that “secret” sharing.54

  NOTE: In late November 1969, Viking published Leo's The Museum: 100 Years and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a large-format, heavily illustrated book.

  While Gray visited his mother in California over that holiday season, Leo carried on an affair with a younger man, Eugene Fracchia, then a sales clerk, later a restaurateur. Leo and Gray had first met him through the retired dancer Alexandra Danilova, whom Fracchia sometimes escorted around town. When Gray returned from Los Angeles, Leo admitted the affair and ended it at once, but Gray was deeply hurt and angry, scarcely speaking to Leo for nearly a month. What particularly infuriated Gray was that Fracchia had stayed in their apartment from the day of departure until shortly before his return. In the journal for December and January, Leo later cut out pages and cross-hatched over some paragraphs.

  JOURNAL • January 1, 1970 • bethel, Connecticut I deeply, tenderly, irresistibly am and have been in love with Puss some twenty-one years. Our enmeshed lives have never been easy—now here is this twenty-eight-year-old. I do not love him. I must remember constantly what the twenty-four-year-old taxi driver said to me on Sunday last. I asked him where he taught. He said: “Elementary school, Brooklyn.” He asked me: “Do you have a family?” “No,” I said. “Do you miss one?” he asked. “No,” I said, “I wouldn't know how to help a boy your age … how to raise a family today. What would you want out of a parent?” “I would want you,” he said, “to lead a life I could admire.”

  FEBRUARY 16, 1970 • PHILADELPHIA I am sitting in a bakery and lunchroom just off Rittenhouse Square. I have been sitting in the station, then walking about these little streets, feeling again how living in these tall, slightly mortuary houses would be. As I crossed Rittenhouse Square, toward the Barclay, looking up at windows—behind which Gray and I once had been happy—the other side of the square, where Martha [Speiser] lived her last days—desolation, a heavy gray-black wing, a dense cloud the color of nothingness settled upon my very being…. But still this curiously anonymous morning is rich for me. I never am alone this way, and for many years I have not been in lunchrooms like this one, where everything is alien to the dressy life I now experience. I like it, and this place is one which Gray would dislike—pitiful. I see and feel him — so pitiful—helpless.

  I cannot write about these last weeks. For the “good” of Gray the best way would be for me to vanish—but I do not want to. How to survive in this desert of ice, which explodes volcanically, frequently without warning? I love sitting here midst the morning bustle of customers who know the waitresses, greeting them with long-lived catchphrases, and the waitresses bearing trays of poison-pink and poison-green frosted cakes to and fro. I must go to my television show peddling my book [The Museum].

  MARCH 8, 1970 • NEW YORK CITY We are so far out that this sea may never carry us back again. Gray rang at two a.m. to say that he would not return until morning. I understand this, but I find—or hear—awful little sounds of pain— and I do not sleep save fitfully, with my lamp lighted the night through. This is now excessive payment. I think if we parted I would be even nearer extinction than I have been during these seven dreadful weeks. We moved out of our house. Are we now moving out of our “life”—that life we accreted so carefully? “I cannot bear it,” my inner voice screams—but I can and I will.

  MARCH 9, 1970 Gray arrived home at noon. “Are you angry?” “No,” I said. But I am angry at the lack of any genuine affection—and his spurty temper and this veneer of living together—the waste—the awful waste—and I am jealous. Ah well, I must sublimate this in work.

  MARCH 19, 1970 On Sunday, drinking tea with Dorothy Norman, I heard footsteps on the stair in her house—but these were creakings, not footsteps. However, I was instantly flung back, some thirty years, to a summer's evening when Dorothy said no one was staying in her house and I heard footsteps on the stair and they were Alfred Kazin's steps.55 For a moment I thought: These years have all been a dream and now I shall have to live these decades. I would live them — even with the anguish—because then I was lovely and loved, even during the dreadful interims. Now I am in a limbo—loved but shut away from any love, hated and at all times exposed to this hatred. No one to reach out a loving hand I can take. What I mean is a loving body to hold—just for a recharging moment.

  For me to die would be the best solution—for everyone save me—and I am no longer certain that this isn't the best solution for me. What is the future? Perhaps one or two books and pain and old age and poverty and nothing—or is this because I am at a low, low tide—actually no tide, for the tide is so far out that I am almost a desert.

  NOTE: On April 21, Leo underwent long-delayed hernia surgery. During what became a ten-day hospital stay, his doctors investigated his evident neurological dysfunction (most apparent in his poor dexterity and reflexes). Whatever they concluded, he pursued no further treatment. In the weeks leading up to his hospitalization, Leo and Gray mended their relationship.

  JOURNAL • April 20, 1970 How odd that I will “fall asleep” in this room [at Beth Israel Hospital] and, if all goes well, wake in 1161, the room in which I almost died last time I was here. My little radio pours enormous tides and torrents of Wagner. The nurses are making their nightly rounds…. “Inhalation Therapist! Inhalation Therapist! Night Porter! Night Porter!” … So time passes, and the wonder to me is: Here I am—quite healthy, very much alive— then comes a chasm, a gigantic divide—then, here I hope to be again—where am I in-between?

  Last Tony [Awards] night I was kissed by Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Betty Bacall, Tammy Grimes, Cary Grant, Noël Coward, Brian Bedford— dozens of others. The Tony Awards party seemed my party—and here I am, awaiting oblivion, brief oblivion, I hope. So what does it all mean? Nothing? This living must mean—a little something. These last months of horror—they must mean … Puss and I love one another. I love Puss more than anyone or thing in the world. Still, I will be gone for a time…. “Dr. Sugar! Dr. Sugar!” … The meaning will be if I live to write my book, my one book that will open windows for others. George London is singing “Wotan's Farewell.”

  APRIL 27, 1970 One week later—Perhaps tomorrow I will be able to go “home.” This morning, my stitches should come out. I feel well—and even though part of me retreats from the problems in the world outside this sickness, the stronger part of me jumps with delight at having survived this blight—the poised disaster from my vagus nerve. Young Dr. Gross told me that my last words as I went under were: “If only I could know how to write this …” Since I can never be given any painkillers, when the pain became too intense (and that went on for two days), I sang “rain” songs.56 When nurse and doctors put tubes into my various orifices, I asked Richard [Hunter] to read aloud. He read from [Smollett's] The Adventures of Roderick Random (which he was reading), but that prose did not soothe. So I asked for Our Mutual Friend, and Richard swept into the opening on the Thames and that was better than any balm — marvelously soothing pain.

  APRIL 29, 1970 Yesterday, Howard Rothschild told the story of Mrs. Visher, who was first a dressmaker for some Jewish wo
men, then dressmaker for some rich Jewish German-extraction ladies, then up and up to a summit from which she deigned to work for very rich society women—Astors, etc. One day, Mrs. Rothschild went to her, being one of the very few Jewish customers Mme V allowed to call, and Mrs. R, hearing Mme V sneeze, asked if she had taken cold. “Ah yes,” Mme V beamed, “I caught it from Mrs. Vanderbilt.”

  Marlene as a continuity—the symbol of artifice. From the moment she emerges from behind the furniture, in the early thirties, no longer the plump, carelessly arranged hoyden of The Blue Angel, she becomes the permanent symbol of beauty's decay. While seeming to survive miraculously, her beauty is at first a work of art, and ultimately a triumph of artifice and spirit. She returns, in private, to the appearance of a German Frau—plumpish again—but in a Chanel suit and in superb wigs. As some great fortress, left unmanned, untenanted, gives itself up to the elements, which then gradually breach it, destroy it more swiftly than any enemy attack has in the past, so this hitherto impregnable bulwark of passion and love and emotion now uninhabited by any loving one, empty of any living thing, is sundered by emptiness, gradually destroyed.

  JULY 18, 1970 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • london

  Mina lurks within. Last night, she told me about a visit that she and Lincoln made, when they were young (he was still at Harvard), to Mrs. “Happy” Chandler (the one who wrote such engaging memoirs)57, and how there were pears on the table, as a centerpiece and for fruit at breakfast, and how, since Kirsteins never can peel fruit, they were sloppy eaters. (I should recognize that, since I am a pig eater.) When the Kirstein children took to peeling, the pears slid all over the immaculate lace breakfast tablecloth—leaving pear-snail paths glistening in the summer morning sunlight (all very Mary Cassatt). This prompted, or tumbled, Mrs. Chandler's memory into her past. She told how, spending a weekend in a country house with Henry James, she soon realized that “The Master,” as he was nicknamed by that set, was not happy in his sojourn. After three days of observing this troubled massive, she dared to ask would he tell her what was wrong. “Yes, yes…” The Master responded lugubriously… “Could you, would you, indeed, will you, please, please, request from our hostess…” Here he apparently went into a whole enclave of his parentheses, ring within ring, sonorous and now unremembered Jamesian rotundities, “please request our hostess to supply me with my dessert, for my dessert, for the better—um—oh—comprehension of this dessert—supply me with a fork and a spoon?” Isn't that quintessentially H. James—so much a little peephole into that world, that past? I suspect the most we can do in writing or talking past or present is make little peepholes. But oh—to make Proust peepholes or James peepholes or Turgenev—as for Dickens peepholes—and Tolstoy—they did make enormous apertures. I would cheerfully settle for the ability to make Virginia Woolf peepholes. I never could achieve the genuine apertures.

 

‹ Prev