The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Lincoln arrives soon. Philip Johnson came to dine yesterday, with his “friend” David Whitney, a goiter-eyed lad of perhaps twenty-nine, who, when I asked him something about a painter whose name I could not remember (David owns a SoHo gallery of note), a painter who hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, said, “If he's before 1960, I don't know anything about him.” The degradation of it all… the lack of blood … ugh. Philip has the lean, maniacal, self-pampered look of something Jesuitical—nameless sins—and all of that incense—musty flummery.

  JULY 20

  After midnight. So this lovely, free-within visit comes to an end. The tips are in their little envelopes, complete with dainty, illegible notes. My little comfort of a radio is spewing late-night music. The country is alive with night sounds— the intense kind heralding rain. Lincoln was mild, funny, flirtatious. I wonder what he wants. He's huge, incredibly aged, and old-fashioned. He'd done himself up in whites, blue jacket, tie, and white shirt. I said, “You look like you're giving out diplomas—or getting them….” I look very soigné in my uncle's white pants, my white Bloomy shoes, my classic Italian light-knit, body-fitting shirt, and white cap—”Yachting, anyone?” Lincoln is also deeply curious to know what Howard owns.58 He says he's recently bought three hundred pieces of Diaghilev correspondence—fascinating letters. I must nip into my sack— tomorrow is today, but the lark's not yet in his heaven, and only the owl terr-wit-terr-woos. If only this up-from-the-depths feeling will continue for a little lovely while. It feels good to feel so very good, and I am making the most of it, because this is more the way I really am than that man drooping and amputated and frightened so bleakly in the Osborne. I like it [the apartment], but I never really think that it is mine, the way I thought about 1453. Maybe I will. I do think that life with Gray may be taking a turn for better (his?).

  JOURNAL • October 30, 1970 • new York city It is not years that age one, but recurrence—the same coming into “fashion” over and over again.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1970 Living is cycles of evil days and good days. That is the source of my optimism. I know that good days (moments actually) will come, if I survive the bad days. And sometimes, the good days can be years. But while I have my good day, I know that somewhere, even in the next room, perhaps even in the same room with me, someone else is having a bad day. I am a realistic optimist given to moments of exuberant optimism and moments of black hell…. But even in the black hells of my life, some spar of amusement, hilarity blazed—my native optimism preserving me. When I lay, almost annihilated by pain, on that operating table [in 1952], having woken too soon while the doctor was still cutting, I laughed deep within my being at the irony, at the ridiculousness of being helpless, in incredible pain, while far below on Fifty-seventh Street there were people who knew me, who would have helped me. The incongruity of this made me laugh. Also, I felt: This must be how to withstand pain in a concentration camp—at least for a brief moment.

  NOVEMBER 12, 1970 Earlier in the evening talked to Caroline Kennedy about what is medieval and what is marvelous about the Middle Ages. She is thirteen-ish, laconic, and sort of tough-voiced. Doesn't sound like her ma and certainly not like her father. Peter [Beard] says she's very sharp, bright. She's to have an exam tomorrow, and could not go to the Cloisters [medieval collection].59

  Shopping bags, in my grandfather's day, were necessities for the poor and lower-middle classes, or for the very eccentric. No lady or middle-class person would carry one. They were not of paper then, but of oilcloth or strong canvas. Grandfather Goldwasser carried two ofthem—oilcloth—to contain fish, greens, tea, coffee, cocoa. And this is where I first saw their virtue. Many years later, I carried shopping bags of cloth instead of briefcases or attaché cases. Then I wrapped Christmas presents in paper shopping bags. I believe that I was the first to do this. Now almost everyone, even the rich, carry shopping bags— paper, string, plastic, cloth. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an evergrowing collection of them. Shops give them away, since these bags advertise.

  Grandpa Lerman was a small sour man with sore-rimmed rheumy eyes and always wracked by asthma. Grandma Lerman was a potato dumpling of a woman who always slept in her dirty diamond earrings and was embraced only by her seal stole. I never saw her without her shekel [wig], save once, and then found her hair a beautiful white wavy crop. I was slapped by my father for exclaiming at the shekel: “Look! Grandma's hair!” The old lady (she was probably in her fifties then, younger than I am now) was in her bath, in a tub in the kitchen.60

  A sense of joy, élan, and vitality is incredibly attractive and even transfigures into beauty people who are actually quite plain. That is why it is almost impossible for one generation to understand certain beauties of the preceding generation. Rut was thought beautiful by so many who saw her in the twenties and thirties. She wasn't. She captured the vitality of that moment. Had she continued to convey that specific vitality during her later life in New York, she would have been a dated, ridiculous woman, but she matured it into a style suitable to those latter years.

  NOVEMBER 15, 1970 Mimicry, in my world, is a social phenomenon. Those who climb in society, or seek to be assimilated on any level, attempt to take on or automatically take on the outward characteristics of the level sought. I automatically take on bastard accents. I instinctively talk with an English accent when speaking with an English person; I take on a mzfteZ-European one when speaking to a Hungarian (“You go to Hutschnecker, no?”); I have even been heard taking on a ridiculous Chinese accent. When I try to speak French— rarely—I speak with a very midwestern American accent. Thus I auditioned for [acting school with] Lucy Feagin in a fancy, would-be English accent, and when she talked to me, I took on from her a fake Southern accent. I try to stop this, but almost never can, since my need to identify and so gain a measure of social security is apparently so deep. This is because no matter how assimilated I have become, I have never been certain that I am firmly entrenched. The rifts in the disguise, the deficiencies in the mimicry—these interest me. Unintentional mimicry is always more complete than the most carefully planned, for it comes from within in a flash.

  There's a past within me, a link from Aunt Minnie to Mitzi [Newhouse], which I can never elude, nor do I want to elude it. The richness of being Jewish, the very specialness of being queer—these are two of my foundations, and, whether false foundations or not, I have erected quite a structure upon them.

  Momma, when I told her that Mrs. Onassis came with her two children to see me today: “You should make time. Sometimes it's good to cultivate people like that, who are so prominent.” Momma also asked did Mrs. Onassis invite me to visit her!

  NOVEMBER 16, 1970 Mrs. Onassis seemed as concussed as ever, given to pretty-girl smiling and very much a girl in a funny-paper or out of Walt Disney—Snow White grown up and tended by the worldliest. She loved this flat, and in the spare room and Gray's room exclaimed, “Oh—if only I could have a room like this!” She could buy hundreds. Gray said, later, “You should have said everything's for sale.”

  Irony: Maria Callas was the first not-close relation to come to this flat. Maria, Gray, and I stood in the kitchen, eating ice cream out of its container. Mrs. Onassis lurked over the desk, where, unbeknownst to her, Maria's letters are. Maria hates Mrs. Onassis. Mrs. O was in Marlene color—sand—a beautifully cut dress and coat—no jewels.

  Caroline Kennedy is a lump of an adolescent with a pretty profile, but sort of hockey-playerish. John [her brother] doesn't say much but picks everything up. Both children have good manners, carefully drilled in. I tried to help Caroline with her homework. She was confused at the information she had from Dalton [School] anent the differences between medieval and Renaissance art (what a way to teach!) as personified by four paintings—two frescoes, the Piero St. Simon, and the Bellini St. Jerome, the latter being truly Renaissance and the Piero (one of the panels) being a transitional painting. What she wanted were facts. I don't believe in these, save as a calcifying foundation. What I wanted to giv
e her was a joy in these works of art, and what they really signaled—religious spirit, economic status.

  What the visit was about: Mrs. O cast her legend to net two hours of help for her Caroline, while she, Mrs. O, was able to view not only a unique environment, but one in which her rival and predecessor, Maria, had been. Mrs. O wanted to see for herself Maria's closest American chum. This is conjecture, but not impossible. There were, unknown to us, three limousines and secret service men in front of the Osborne.

  NOVEMBER 20, 1970 Why do I seriously jot things down? I have been jotting this way since my earliest youth. Because I collect. This is like wandering the margin of the sea and filling a sack with pebbles, shells, bits of glass, and wood—the detritus. Why? A deep need for security? Acquisition—but that is a result, not a cause. The passion for living—perhaps that is the reason. Has it all been a sort of breathing, a confirmation of living, a will to be permanent, to go on forever, one with not wanting to go to sleep, the longing for that one extra moment, one extra day, that one moment more pleaded for so poignantly and pitifully by Madame Du Barry. (I think it was she.)61 All I ever wanted was one extra moment, and then another, and another… to read to the end of the chapter before the lights went out.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1970 Oona O'Neill, rushing into Truman's mother's living room, cried out, “I'm rich! I'm rich!” her hands aloft, clenching into greedy fists and unclenching over and over. This is when she told Truman that she was to marry Chaplin.62

  Chaplin told me at the Liebersons' about Marion Davies, at a Hearst dinner given by her, looking up into Einstein's face and asking, “Why don't you get a haircut?”

  NOVEMBER 24, 1970 John Coveney [artists' representative at Angel Records] says Maria's practically signed to do master classes. Onassis is in bed, needing babying, and he is very much in her life. So she canceled lunch, wanted dinner, but I couldn't. She's attached to her telephone like Ela for Maestro. So, Maria is a damnée—possibly déchéance—a Madame Bovary. I wonder if Mrs. Onassis isn't a sort of innocent.

  Sex, by itself, was a basic force in my life. I would and could do it with a great range of men, even when I was sincerely in love with one man. I have never lost my amazement at other people being the way I am—sometimes verging on inexplicable naïveté. Is this an unwillingness to face it—that I am not unique?

  I figured out (a vulgar expression) while crossing Roosevelt Avenue [in Elmhurst], when I was about fifteen or sixteen, that everyone was both male and female, all went through a homosexual stage, and some stuck there. I knew that I had stuck there. I always loved girls and fucked boys. I had some adolescent probings, hands only, of girls: Sylvia's breasts, Mildred's breasts and canetta [privates], an anonymous girl in a rumble seat, while driving down from the Grossinger (I made her come by fucking her with a finger, awkwardly, under her clothes, while I came just by rubbing myself against the tight surroundings of my clothes and the auto). I didn't know who this “guest” was and never saw her again, since I did not even see her face while I was doing this, rushing through the night. However, I remember the many times I jerked Bruce M while we were being driven to New York from the Grossinger. I remember how he looked, the shape of his cock, and my pleasure.

  Boys I went to bed with almost indiscriminately, in a world of pickups I knew even when I was fifteen. But I did not coincide love with sex—fully— until that spring and summer when I was seventeen (circa 1931) and deeply in love with John K, who was the best actor in Newtown High School and glamorous (a real queen, but I didn't know this then), and whom I overwhelmed with my love—sitting on rocks in empty lots and reading Cyrano in French, while I tightly clutched him. When at last he did come to bed with me, I was outraged. Having fucked some boy almost every day from the time I was about five, I did not coincide sex and love and suffered the only crise of that kind in my life. The moment I threw him out of our house I was sorry, knowing instantly how very wrong I had been. But he was haughty with me and, with an implacable gift for vengeance, stuck pins into me when we played a scene together in our school play. I thought this the least punishing revenge he could take and adored him. Only after months of punishing me by being distant did we become chums (not lovers, but more like girlfriends).

  The year before John K, I was in love with Kenneth S, but he didn't want to go to bed with me—out of moral scruples. He was both queer and strange, in retrospect a touching man. We began our nonaffair, after seeing Maggie Hen-ning off on her first voyage to Europe. Maggie knew him through William See, Risë Steenberg (Risë Stevens)'s closest friend in school. Maggie made a midnight sailing, after which we walked in Central Park and finally fell to hugging and kissing on a park bench set on a green rise in a great wash of early July moonlight and shadow. That was what we know as an Art Deco world (1930), and in memory the moonlight and shadows have the sheen I now see on Art Deco decoration, that silver and that black, geometric, subdued in color. I didn't know what was happening to me, but I did know that I wanted to go on kissing and clutching—with a hard-on. As that summer unrolled its hot, heady self, I would meet Ken in Maggie's one-room flat, which she had let me have hoping I would write a book there (even then!), and I would agonize at him, even unbuttoning my fly and taking my pants down. He let me sit on his lap, and sometimes held my cock. He kissed me, but he never went any further. He liked me and loved to talk about books and theater. He seemed much older to me than he was. He'd toured with Walter Hampden and he had that glamour,63 and he knew a famous male dancer and his queer father. He gave me Virginia Woolf s Orlando and Mann's Death in Venice. I was hopelessly enamored of his stolid manliness, his knowledge, his theatrical (he'd only been a walk-on) past. We walked miles along the Greenpoint, Long Island City, dock-side at night, the great factories silent, unworked because of the Depression. Occasionally someone would call out from a docked houseboat. We were loving friends more than lovers, but since I was (and am) so sexy, I wanted that— not to consummate my love, but for the pleasure of sex.

  John K, ridiculous Conrad G [another classmate], and I bonded by theater love, being queer, a passion for reading (and all of the arts), perfume—all small-town queenly interests and pursuits. Connie was the first shoplifter I ever knew. He painted his bedroom black (with chocolate-brown woodwork and touches, very elegant at that time) and drenched it and himself with Nar-cisse Noir.

  Into this little enclave wandered John L, my next passion, with whom I necked, whose beautiful prick I manipulated, but with whom I never experienced an orgasm. I was poetry-writing madly in love with him. Connie had him; I never did. I wrote a series of verses to him, kissed him passionately in backyards during graduation parties, made wild, starstruck love to him in the local Lover's Lane (now massed with apartment houses), and after graduation lost him.

  I can only think that my passion for John K was genuine love—young love, and that is why when he finally wanted to go to bed with me I rebelled—still considering sex a thing apart from love. Years later, we did go to bed, in Connie's room, but it was a disaster at which we both laughed. This happened while John was visiting during one of his appearances at [the Club Richman, bandleader] Harry Richman's drag club. John became, as “Roni Warren,” a popular drag queen entertainer—New York, Miami, Saratoga. He also worked as a call “girl.”

  John introduced me to the drag world, the pickup world, the real underbelly of homosexuality. He introduced me to queer speakeasies. These were in flats on West Seventy-second Street, where males met, more to pick one another up than drink. Some of these places had rooms in which quickies took place. I did one, in the blackness with someone I never saw. The risks I took. I was seventeen. All of this while living a studious, artistic life at home.64

  THE DRAG WORLD Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Sophie Tucker, Gloria Swanson, and the newcomer, Marlene Dietrich, are all sitting in a small, windowless, tired-brown room, somewhere in a tenement, old when the century was new, slightly north of Bloomingdale's. They are sitting on an assortment of battered
kitchen chairs, crates, and feather-oozing cushions. It is impossible to tell which are the stuffing feathers of the seats and which are the feathers cascading from the sitters' arms and heads as they arrange them—off a bridling shoulder, lavishly around a preening neck. The floor is a litter of sequins, beads, straight pins, hooks, eyes, and snippets of fabric—satins, crepes, tulles—no autumn foliage gleamed so brightly on a high-noon, wind-wild New England day.