The Grand Surprise

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The Grand Surprise Page 51

by Leo Lerman


  65. Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), a British actress and beauty famous for her amorous conquests, including Edward VII, was known as “the Jersey Lily.”

  66. Leo's lunch with Yukio Mishima (né Kimitake Hiraoke, 1925-70), the Japanese novelist and reactionary activist, probably happened in June 1964, when Mishima was in New York.

  67. Celia “Silly” (1874?–1960) and Maxl (1867-1948) Goldwasser were Leo's great-aunt and uncle.

  68. Caroline Lee Bouvier Radziwill (b. 1933) married the Polish prince Stanislaw Radziwill. She was widely reported to have had an affair with Aristotle Onassis in 1963.

  69. William Haines (1900-1973), a comic film actor of the twenties and thirties (Show People), later became an interior decorator.

  70. Rudolf Sieber (1897-1976) was an assistant director and a film production manager when he married Dietrich in 1923. They had a daughter, Maria, the next year. By the seventies they had lived apart for decades, he in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.

  71. The dancer and choreographer Lorca Massine (b. 1944) was the son of Léonide Massine of the Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The Russian-born Remi Saunder (b. 1923) was an interpreter and a friend to many expatriate Russians, particularly Baryshnikov and Rostropovich. GF: “We were much beguiled by Remi, who was an excellent hostess on very little and a superb raconteuse. Crossing the street would cause a story.”

  72. All of these women had worked at Mademoiselle: Bernice Peck as health and beauty editor (ca. 1936-58); Cyrilly Abels as managing editor (ca. 1943-59), later a literary agent; Wil-lena Todd “Toddy” Sturgis as executive assistant (ca. 1952-62) to Betsy Blackwell.

  73. Until the mid-sixties, Edith Lutyens Bel Geddes (1907-2002) designed and fabricated costumes for Broadway (The Grass Harp, The Crucible). Her last marriage was to the designer Norman Bel Geddes, which made her the stepmother of the actress Barbara Bel Geddes.

  JOURNAL • JANUARY 1, 1971 Apartment 6C makes me feel that I am merely a visitor there. 1453 was permanent, mine forever; I was non-transient there. Perhaps in a single lifetime we have only one permanent, forever habitation. What we lived in previously was on the way to that permanent home, that only home, and what we dwell in after is only a wayside stopover. The fortunate live forever in the one permanence. The most fortunate carry this permanence within.

  JANUARY 2, 1971 The little radio cheers away—Perry Como: “Just wrap your troubles in dreams…. And dream your troubles away…. Just remember that sunshine always follows the rain…. So dream your troubles away….” Those all-night dress rehearsals at the Grossinger—the orchestra boys—Eddie, who was a smooth trumpet, had a wife—I had him. (Later, after Maria's Il Pirata, and I had taken Blixen to a party and home to the Coz Club1, when Nora, Puss, and I were going to meet Maria and Larry [Kelly] and others, the taxi driver was Eddie.) Affairs while working in a show are the result of the magnetic field set up by the common, intense endeavor. The tangle of their lives: Henriette Kay [thirties actress] became a well-to-do matron—Grand Concourse or Westchester, I don't know; [actress] Lee Brody is dead, jumping fourteen floors to her death; [comedian] Sylvia Sims vanished into burlesque as a straight woman; Al Parker vanished into drag shows in Florida and other resorts; [skit writer] Richard Mack died; Hank Henry had a Vegas career, last seen in the Liz Taylor–Warren Beatty movie [The Only Game in Town]; [bandleader] Dave Schooler dead; Jennie [Grossinger] herself, senile, last seen, unexpectedly, tottering through hospital corridors. She knew me.

  JANUARY 4, 1971 We have exchanges again about detesting little birds, squab, Cornish hen for eating. Maebelle “just loves them.” Maebelle's currency, in talk, is exaggerated positives. That is her small change; she has no larger denominations. Sinclair Lewis could have, and did, write this character many times, and Tennessee did her his way. She tells about house parties, when she was sixteen, in Texas, where the darkies sang as they picked cotton and came up to the big house, in the forever evenings, plunking their banjos and singing ragtime. Bad novelists make fortunes this way. Hers is a constant effort to belong to what she considers “the best” while mooting that she's real old-time American. Maebelle doesn't like the candies in the little Christmas bag— gumdrops, etc. She doesn't like anything that she thinks beneath her. In this way she has helped ruin her child. But some tougher fiber, or younger generation, has alienated his appreciation of her idea of Southern Womanhood. Maebelle went to a plantation party as the Princess from Dallas. She requires attentions from her “Bud”2 —glasses of water, forgotten necessities. He is very Southern gentleman courteous with her. Anyone watching would be impressed, taken.

  JANUARY 6, 1971 • NEW YORK CITY I did not recognize Betsey Johnson yesterday. When she came to Mademoiselle, she was plump, cheerful, with a knowing desperation—fizzing like overloaded apple juice—a sort of sixties-vintage American champagne.3 Now, not even five years later, the fizz is deep down. She is emaciated. She looks like the best of the remains of the sixties. She is sort of put away within herself. But her talent deepens all of the time, while her life leaps from pinnacle to pinnacle of intensity, despair, and she seeks herself in India and Indianapolis, a typical child of these times. I gave her the hard, Federal sofa, which I bought from the Kochs when we were friends. Now she has lost it. How can anyone, save someone on a trip, lose a six-foot and more sofa, weighing over a hundred pounds? Betsey looks as though she's been on dozens of trips, but survived for future safaris.

  JANUARY 9, 1971 Dinner with Mina in the Stanhope [hotel] dining room with Lincoln and Fidelma. Lincoln's lies: “Goosey exaggerates,” says Mina. My surprise when Fido [Fidelma] talks cohesively about anything save cats (“pussums” as the Kirstein family always calls them). Lincoln so frequently seems on the verge of tears. This is alarming in a giant of a man. Mina now talks of moving into one large studio room and kitchenette at the Stanhope. She is still a millionaire, but poorer. I do not think that this is why she thinks of moving. She uses her flat rarely, never entertains in it, has her ample establishment near Bethel, and both age and her predilection for moving (and building houses, redoing apartments) dictate this move. She is almost incapable of social insincerity, and although her age, size, accomplishment (both intellectually—her books—and disciplining her character), family, and money cloak her in an awesome dignity, she can be as graceless as a forthright, brilliant young girl. Typical: “I don't want to stay for the reception,” so off she bounds, heedless of whether her guest wishes to stay or not.

  An actress with small eyes cannot be great.

  JANUARY 10, 1971 Robert Davison has great distinction, dark good looks, a slightly abstract bearing (this comes from his deafness), volatile spirit, and a genuine buoyancy. He is essentially a solitary. His hauteur, also partly because of his deafness, but even more from the characterization he has built. His deep sense of humor, which includes a deep sense of the ridiculous. His compassion. His reflex scorn at shams. His largely individual taste. He loved me—but we never slept together. He always has treated me like a wise, worldly, old man. He arrived at my bedside to be interviewed for “Before Bandwagons,” and immediately became part of my life. Through Robert I entered the ballet world, heard the Anthologie Sonore [early music] for the first time, moved into 1453, and met Gray. Now he goes to and fro between Paris where he paints, New York where he makes money, or other parts of the U.S.A. (Los Angeles) and Europe working for [decorator] Valérian Rybar. Robert's Russophilia— White, of course. He and Gray both have this. Robert's obsession with Gray— I moved in on it and broke it up. I willfully did this and have been reaping the rewards for over two decades.

  JANUARY 11, 1971 A party at Arnold Weissberger and Milton Goldman's—like a benefit for English actors. The whole party a pother of personal politics. The exaggerated personality of Van Johnson—his red socks. “I'll only come if your house is crowded. Tell me that it's crowded.” The curious, off-beat, his-very-own-rhythm personality of Ralph Richardson—an unfocused tremulousness, but a most precise mind. “Like the weaving of a Pe
rsian carpet,” he said of [David Storey's play] Home. “The design is there…. Oh, pardon me, I must go and make a grand obeisance.” Richardson's manner—the feeling that this well-dressed hawk-eyed old man, a person of quiet distinction, at any moment could burst into tears of recrimination—at you, at the party, at self—the feeling that he is on the verge of an unpleasant situation—but all of the time, his mind quests—realistically, solidly. Johnny Gielgud always promises much, but nothing much comes out.

  Dorothy Norman told me that one of her doctors adores Chinese food: “I sent him to Pearl's [restaurant], and he took Danny Kaye and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. When I asked him how he liked it, he said, ‘Forget it! She's impossible! She wouldn't accept my credit card, and she wouldn't take my check. She said her accountant told her not to take any more checks, and I didn't have any cash. It was embarrassing.' “ The doctor finally had to ask the duke to lend him the cash. In my version the duke doesn't have it, so finally Danny pays for all of them—the Jewish boy from Brooklyn paying for the ex-King of England and the ex-Baltimore girl who cost him his throne, in a Chinese restaurant run by an ex-vaudeville acrobatic dancer, an Oriental from San Francisco.

  JANUARY 12, 1971 I am really lost right now. No confidence this morning that this is worth the effort and the hurt it is inflicting…. But I will not be wrecked again. I am stronger. I am also whistling in an almost freezing limbo. It had to be said, and I understand it deeply, but the sadness and the pity of it. The pull of two people on one another. The giving of life and the giving of death. Is this the Grand Surprise: that old saw, “Each man kills the thing he loves”? Is that an inexorable law?

  JANUARY 14, 1971 Alex held Tatiana's hand and she, suddenly, looked exactly like Francine, making possible a prevision of Francine, her daughter, as an older woman.4 “The book (I cannot write her accent) about Mayakovski, by the Pole, it is horrible. What he says about me (she speaks a mixture of French, English, sometimes turning on the Russians a spate of that tongue), it is lies, all lies—and so vulgar. I am not like that. He says I married du Plessix because I was awed by his title. He was a nice, agreeable man, who loved me. I had no way to get back to Mayakovski….”5

  Marlene rang Alex to arrange for her to fly from Los Angeles to Paris for Chanel's funeral. She was at de Gaulle's, Colette's, Cocteau's—now Chanel's. She did not go to Von Sternberg's and not to Hemingway's.6

  Maria Kalogeropoulos [Callas] born in Flower Hospital [Manhattan] and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy born in Southampton, Long Island. These intersect because I persuaded Maria to be an Egyptian empress at a charity gala, and there she met Elsa Maxwell, who fell in love with her.7

  JANUARY 22, 1971 Shared experience—When this is impossible, death does do us apart. I am rebellious, when friendship abruptly ceases. That is why I grow broody when Richard goes off and away, and this whole year passed with a minimum of shared experience in this flat. Shared experience is a towering mountain in the range that Ivy Compton-Burnett conjured up (for she was a wizard!) when she said [to Wyndham Lewis at tea] that the most important aspect of friendship is “availability.”

  The net in which each of us must pass his adult days is that identical net in which we have passed our younger years, but then it was invisible—or, at most, only discernible in flashes—and defied or not believed: We knew, in those flashes, that we could leap out of that net. When we were children, anything was possible. Now aging, old, only the spirit contends, sometimes destroying the net—but only in flashes.

  JANUARY 29, 1971 Suddenly Gertie Lawrence singing “Getting to Know You,” and I am deeply moved at the youth of this thin, dying woman and the gaiety and trust (knowing that it was all part truth, part make-believe).8 I got out of bed and danced into Gray's room, and we held hands while he said, “Don't be sad,” and I said, “But life is sad,” (and I was also glad), “maybe we should give a party next week. Maria will be here … and Marlene….” And Gray said, “All I need is a great big party. We'll see….” I said, “It's so light outside, I hate to go to bed. It's so useless going to sleep.” I danced off to bed. That is the Grand Surprise you also discover—how gay and sad life is simultaneously.

  Alvin Ailey has good dancers but what they dance is showbiz, not concert, and the audience behaves as if they have just been part of an outpouring by the Nijinsky-Karsavina–led Ballets Russes. Revelations is theatrically crafty, mannered to bring audience reaction—just as the “Hello, Dolly” number was in Act II of that musical. It works every time, overwhelmingly, and nostalgia is as much an ingredient as the vigorous beat of the music and the dancing bodies in its immense success—a success which requires encores—makes the audience clap in rhythm to the music of each of these (Dolly and Revelations) theatrical peaks. Pinchbeck can be gold under the proper lights. But Alvin Ailey (now a huge black man with a dark-honey-colored smile in a tremendous thick-piled, black-gray coat, and a forest-green scarf) has dipped into Weidman and Humphrey and Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, coming up with this audience-whacker, Revelations.9 The other items programmed are trash— the sort of thing that brought revue audiences of the late twenties and the thirties out of the theater feeling that they had seen life and art. Last night's audience felt precisely that way. So we have been standing in one place for almost half a century—as not only demonstrated by Ailey's company, but the Australian [Ballet] and Béjart. Meanwhile Balanchine, Robbins, Tudor, even Freddie [Ashton] have all moved dance on—so has Martha. I suddenly thought, watching Ailey's company: Martha Graham is the Mae West of the dance.

  JANUARY 31, 1971 Andy Warhol more wraith than ever—the badly complected boy who never grew up, but became craftier and craftier, filling with a slow-seeming cunning and a positive destruction—lighting up like a tallow candle whose flame burns dimly within the candle rather than atop it. He lights shallow, surface places hitherto hidden.

  I do not believe, as Proust did, that all self is successively different. The core is permanent, or should be—the matrix. We extend—as a coral reef— accretions transforming the contours. We are not actually changed within— the kernel. We are each a metamorphosis—but the central, central being, that does not change. Image: those Russian dolls-within-dolls almost endlessly.

  When I lectured in biography at New York University [in 1945] and came into the lecture room, finding upon the blackboard, “Give the direct causes of the Italian Renaissance,” I laughed and erased this, because only one who has no understanding of the flow of life whatsoever could pose such a question. But Proust's intuition of himself as an absolute entity, that is the verity. The knowledge one must acquire that nothing is forever save the central truth. No love is forever but the idea of love is eternal. “The distortion of the self is a continuous death.” There is no greater reference than to self. All vanishes, but everything is here. That is my deepest conviction. We are obliterated, but we are not gone. I knew it when I saw the plum-and-gold dust [of the butterfly] on my hands, I knew this instinctively and I never forgot it. When I saw the wintered trees one afternoon, as I stood on the railroad bridge near the synagogue in Woodside when I was eleven, and, even then, Rembrandt's trees in my eyes—and now Pollock's Autumn Rhythm—confirming my continuity and the continuity of being. I know this is the essential truth—the Grand Surprise— and only by becoming art (through life the crucible) do we survive. What is the important motive in my life? Is it recollection or the allusive—a constant linking, thus forging a chain of continuity? I suspect that that is the important motive—recognizing the elements of continuity, re-creating them.

  NOTE: In January 1971, Leo told publisher Holt, Rinehart, and Winston that he would not complete his Sotheby's book, agreeing to repay a portion of his $9,000 advance. The project eventually went to the writer and publisher Frank Hermann, whose thorough history of the firm would appear in 1980.

  JOURNAL • February 2, 1971 [Jim] Bailey, the female impersonator, appeared on the telly, a family show (albeit from ten to eleven)—Carol Burnett, that paragon mot
her. Has it really come out of the closet? A return to transvestitism as family entertainment? Julian Eltinge was one of the town's toasts.10 Poppa took me to see vaudeville in which female impersonators shone, also those acts that were half-man and half-woman, the sexes carefully defined by a decisive line vertically down the middle. We were always amazed to be presented, by the man side, suddenly with the woman side—a swift turn to the left or to the right and the creature was man, was woman. Even then I knew life was not quite like that. But I was years away from discovering that in each of us exists man and woman, and I continue to discover and explore the degrees of masculinity in women, the converse in men.

  Maria, her voice deep mezzo, on the blower—the voice she has on the day before the performance: “To be warm in a house in the country in snow is fine.”

  Anaïs on the blower—the shadow quality of her voice, like a French country house built from a mill—a Cézanne house, complete with its shadow, late in the day, slightly worn.

  FEBRUARY 3, 1971 Remi Saunder's Russian colony is not White but off-White. Not the royals or the aristocrats but the Jewish middle class risen to wealth by artful deals while still in Russia (in the twenties or thirties). Some of them come from the lower classes. Now they mix with grand dukes or the posterity of the royals at charity balls, sometimes in private places—at the Gregorys. But this is symptomatic. The colony includes Angela and Marcel [Clairmont], Rumanian, and kindred very rich Slavs. Some of it comes from Russian bohemia: Tatiana Liberman (whose sister is a Duchess of France now, but common11) who was [Alexandre] Iacovleff's niece and was traded for thirty of his paintings and who then married du Plessix, having been Mayakovski's lover.12 Lydia [Gregory] moved in bohemia. Grischa [Gregory] was very middle-class. Some came from Bessarabia, Latvia—the movable places on the continental chessboard. Some are Jews from Poland, which was Russia in those days. To all of these, mostly Jews, the Revolution had been a godsend, tossing them from their never-secure tree and blowing them across dissolving borders into richer lands. Some of the first generation born in America, having been absorbed into this colony, made much of a Russian heritage which did not exist, save in the bloody Cossack assaults on their forebears in the various ghettos and Pales. Some of these firstborn were here only through the accidents of grandparents being at the bottom heap of murdered dead, and so surviving. Didn't Grischa [Gregory]'s fortune come from a button deal?13

 

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