by Leo Lerman
DECEMBER 9, 1971 Yesterday was momentous. Alex rang, and I went in to see him. We both laughed at the oddity of life. He practically told me that I might become the Vogue features editor, and then he suggested that “we go along quietly.”60 I asked for $15,000, including one piece a month, after which anything I write is paid at the going Vogue rate. He said that he might have trouble with the money. Alex is so bloodless. He would do much to benefit Vogue and even more to keep his art-life going. He and Tatiana seem to have grown closer— more in alliance. He has a huge, painstakingly neat, black table—an enlarged Parsons table kept at grand-piano polish—and on one of his walls a poster of one of his exhibits. So we parted—he a severe, thin, dark-suited figure, in his brilliantly white office, an office like a burst of light, standing behind his black table. “Good day, Eminence,” I said. I have that strange calm which, coming from somewhere, isolates me when I am pushing through danger.
In Kessler:61 “July 9, 1929— Max Reinhardt's new production of Die Fleder-maus at the Deutsche Theater. Press and gala performance, by invitation only. Tout Berlin …” Laci did the costumes. I read this book knowing the awful end [brought by Hitler], and that makes for a kind of greatness bestowed on Kessler's document by history. Reading Kessler, I understand much better that in all of Ela's deepest relationships—Reinhardt, Rathenau, Toscanini—she was only an episode, but she, believing each to be the whole world, worshiped them throughout her life. I envy Kessler his succinct pinpointing ability. I haven't read the unedited version—however, I miss the personal. His diary, in this form, is externalized. Where is the passionate man? Such an ability to catch personages, so many specimens, but Kessler describes more than interprets. He is a chronicler, but does he also create?
DECEMBER 18, 1971 Morning with Marlene. Yesterday the beat of a sob— fright—in her voice—constant. The scene between Rudi and Marlene in the farmhouse, in the [San Fernando] Valley, when he told her that she had alienated everyone, and so had no friends—only those because she had been Dietrich, and she said almost everyone had died. “I went into my room and lay down without undressing, and in the morning, very early, I went away without saying good-bye…. He is sick … I see it in his eyes… You can always tell by the eyes… I have a crying jag… I never had that… I don't give in.” She is frightened for the first time in her life—nothing more to sell.
Mrs. Pat Campbell, viewing the Gielgud Hamlet [in 1936], asked why Judith Anderson, the queen, sat on her bed during the closet scene. “Only housemaids sit on the bed,” said Mrs. P. C. A little anecdote that summarizes a whole way of life.
DECEMBER 26, 1971 • BETHEL, CONNECTICUT An organ playing jazz is an elephant doing a soft-shoe.
Talking last night [here] to Mina, I said, “The American Revolution was not a revolution: It was a rebellion. All revolutions, starting with Cromwell's, destroy or deteriorate all levels of society, making an upheaval during which new social levels rise. The motion is inevitable—up from below and down from above. Rebellions can fail. Revolutions cannot. They are triumphant failures.”
I have long wanted to write a book about Pauline Viardot-García. Berlioz adored her. She was Turgenev's mistress, the prototype of the woman in A Month in the Country. If Ela had been a good actress, she would have been perfect in that role. Ruth Gordon [in 1950] was amazingly good—rather Gar-boesque. (Garbo would have been too shut-in—too surface right.) Viardot was sister of Malibran, daughter of García.62 She seemed to live forever—actually spanning the nineteenth century. Pianist, actress, great voice (both soprano and mezzo), intellectual, no beauty, but of great fascination, an enchantress— Dickens, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz all were captivated by her. Her grand-nephew and pupil died in London, 1946. Viardot composed songs, taught, and at a great age sang exquisitely in a drawing room. She sang the premiere of Berlioz's La Captive and, I think, Meyerbeer's Le Prophète (the blind woman). She sang both Orpheus and Alceste (Gluck) with Berlioz and sang Cassandra in the only public performance of [the Berlioz opera] Les Troyens. She was also a painter and linguist. She's in the Pasta-Callas line—a great monument.63 But her correspondence is held by nieces who won't release it.
DECEMBER 28, 1971 Maria on blower: “Someone's been in town. I've been seeing him. He's awful… sad … in a bad time. And who wasn't even touched? Me! He needs a shoulder to cry on, so he came to me. He's not so young anymore.” (a note of triumph) “But I know what I'm after—my voice, Tosca's not what it was—but I'm getting there…. The skunk!”
DECEMBER 29, 1971 Sam Green 64 about Garbo: “When I spent the weekend with her and Cécile [de Rothschild] and Cecil [Beaton], I hadn't even seen a Garbo movie…. I'm beglamoured…. I was so embarrassed by Cecil.65 Why did he do it? He says he's never coming to America again.” Sometimes Sam seems so Yiddish. “Well,” he said, “most of my friends are Jewish.”
Sam is an inheritor of my search for the Grand Surprise. He carries on the continuity into the twenty-first century.
JANUARY 1, 1972 Having just finished (for the eighth or ninth time) the “Overture” to [Proust's] Á la recherche, I am overwhelmed by the beauty, the profundity, the limpid mind, the eyes, in that morsel of the grand whole, that scrap of miraculous terrain—especially the final pages, from the duchess's entrance at the wedding in the church, to the last word, “day.”
Meanwhile, another miracle continues its torrential outpouring by my side—Das Rheingold. Those Spanish rhythms, so sharply accented in this recording. These voices, women's, which shoot up out of the dark earth like flowers, flowers now born in my ears, never before born anywhere in time, in space … I can hear their radiant, pale colors (how wrong most of the descriptives are in these last scribblings). There is such a madness in this music, such a tenderness. Wagner made audible the caress. Yet his tensions, even when small by design, are monumental. Listening to Wagner is always like traveling through ranges of mountains, each more overwhelming, through size or beauty or sheer being, than those traversed—the sudden, sweeping vast forests—the shimmer, the sheen, all sunlight fluttering—a vastness of soaring, wings in motion—running, that happens in Wagner constantly—the sound of a single bee enlarged to a magnificent thunder—sense of alarums. In Proust's opening pages, night—hurrying through the night. Certain pages of Proust, Beethoven, and Wagner are linked by this sense of distant hurrying, by carriage, by horse, through night. And in Wagner such a sense of covert evil, snide evil, the evil beneath the winking eye, the grimace that is mistaken by the unwary for an open smile.
JANUARY 2, 1972 [The painter] Ellen Oppenheim said: “We stopped fighting, my mother (Stella Adler) and I, when she bought a house one mile down the road. You can fight with your mother, but you can't fight with your neighbors.”
JANUARY 5, 1972 The rituals practiced by my family, and everyone we knew in Jewish [East] Harlem, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the Bronx Grand Concourse, Washington Heights: No one went to visit anyone without “taking a little something.” No one went anywhere unless “their” underwear was clean. “What if you fall down in the street? What if something happens?” “It's a shanda and sport for the neighbors!” Always, everything “for the neighbors,” meaning you lived up to their dicta.
No one bought from the hokey-pokey man.66 No one played with matches, hitched rides on ice wagons or anything else, “ate Chinese” or anything else not kosher. Of course, many children did the first two (even some tomboys), and my father most certainly did the last. (He sucked clams, eggs.) When you saw nuns from the church (“cathedral”) down the street, you made the sign against the evil eye and chanted “7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” Nuns were seen to become terrified before our eyes, and the more timid fled like crows along 106th Street, flying east to their nests. The significance of goyim: “Such a nice man …” the voice filled with amazement that a goy could be a nice man, a voice brimming with distrust.
The mishpoche [clan]—they were all the world, no one else mattered, and the mishpoche included kissing cousins, honorary uncles, and even aun
ts— machetunim [extended in-laws]. A range of personalities in which individuality was necessary for survival, and honor thy father and mother and grandparents and all uncles was the rock upon which the system was solidly built: “My son— what he's gonna do for me.” “Mrs. Levi's son, the dentist, he makes his mother a paradise!” “A golden girl, she does everything for her mother—everything. She doesn't make a move, without her mother's say-so.”
The week was systematized. Each day's eating followed week after week, identical food on its night—a basic, solid, ritualistic system. The family weekly cycle—washing on Monday, baths on Friday (in the daytime) or Saturday (at night), etc., fitted into larger, seasonal cycles—spring cleaning, covers on furniture for the summer, October moving day, straw hats on telegraph poles on Labor Day, June walks with maypoles. These larger cycles were common to middle-class families—both yiddim and goyim.
JANUARY 11, 1972 A friend took me to the only pornographic movie I have ever seen. Intensely heterosexual and unbelievably sexless and repetitiously dull. I was titillated only at seeing large cocks, but not for long (no pun), and once at a cock being rubbed on a cunt… too dreary…. Yet the actors, almost all present, seemed usual, rather nice, young people. That interested me. The boys get $50, the girls $100. There are more boys available. Stars get $100. It all resembles early movie days.
JANUARY 17, 1972 Puss on his return [from California] came to sleep here again, and how lovely this is.67
JANUARY 31, 1972 Robert Phelps on Glenway: “Not until he was thirty-five did he face what he really liked and wanted. One day, at Stone-blossom [their home in New Jersey], he came downstairs and, through a slightly open door, he saw Monroe and George Platt Lynes making love. He watched, fascinated, and then ran off into the woods and was sick and masturbated and realized that this is what he wanted most—voyeurism. So, thereafter he lived in triangles. Then Dr. Kinsey came along and laughed Glenway into complete realization.” Did Glenway think I would be part of a triangle with Robert Davison? Is that the explanation? Will Robert Phelps find the explanation while preparing his Glenway book?68
FEBRUARY 4, 1972 Jerry [Robbins's] new work [Watermill]—genius.69 He is the only first-rate creative force now working at full strength in that world. This is a total departure, and so only time will make it comprehensible. I was utterly absorbed, so much and so deeply that I ached—actually ached all over. Some brutish dowds booed this work that leads to a new world. I must see it again. The long Balanchine discipline gave Jerry the [New York City Ballet] dancers, but only Jerry's genius made them into this superb creation.
Then to Lincoln [Kirstein], after these years of silences. Fido more distraught than ever. No change in Lincoln, save he seems more fragmented (not the right word—disjointed? agitated?) and more ruefully smiling. Impossible to know whether he is drunk or pilled. The cupboards jammed with pussums [cats], where once his mother's pink china had gloried—now all broken. Lincoln is an overwhelming presence—his bulk and the knowledge that he is unpredictable. Puss says of Lincoln: “Such a strong man. Very childlike, like you and your mother, and so petulant and crazy—a child ogre.”
FEBRUARY 5, 1972 A lovely evening. Maria, after dinner: “Let's face it. I'm not gonna hit the road again!” In her new teeth, Maria really confirms The Makropulos Affair.70 She looks younger than she did fifteen years ago. And: “I hate opera—so old-fashioned. I detest it—but it is what I do—what I can do— what I'm good at.” Later: “I'm a very literal woman.”
Jennie Tourel: “Look, you know Maria's voice. You know she can't do it. Actually, I was instrumental in her coming to Juilliard. I don't expect her gratitude. We're not friends. She isn't a voice teacher. She should have told them how to be an artist, not how to open the throat.”71
FEBRUARY 17, 1972 Peter Lindamood's death—alone, fallen over a telephone, in a squalid room in an even more squalid hotel, the Henry Hudson.72 He was found after four days of being dead, alone. All the life—once so central to New York—the parties and gaieties and jealousies, pride lifted and pride fallen—that whole world almost gone.
FEBRUARY 18, 1972 Peter's funeral was delightful—from the detail of [restaurateur] Johnny Nicholson putting a vase of daisies on the floor near the coffin, immediately provoking a quiet man into picking this up and surreptitiously placing a saucer under it to save the carpet. Peter would have loved this little stealthy irony and constructed a baroque fantasy out of it, all a comment on manners and mannerisms. Puss said that Peter told him that he wanted his epitaph to be: “I was never bored.”
Puss said: “I've lost every single illusion I've ever had. I want to get out of this place! I want to go so far away….” But how can he go so far away, or even a little distance, from himself? He says: “Why must I take everything, even things that don't concern me, so personally, so seriously? I know, you'll say it is Calvinism, but it isn't. The world is rotten…. What we need is a Beaumar-chais crossed with Genet…. I'm not wise enough to know how to live sans illusions.”73
FEBRUARY 20, 1972 I said that how lovely if I could stay here and write my book. Puss said, from his bath, “Which book?” This immediately set up guilt and such. “The one I'm working on …” “Like everything else,” he said, “it gets away from you. Do you even know where you would start?” I thought: Nobody needs the truth all of the time. I have known for a very long time where to start. This scribbling is temporizing. I must start. I get very tired—but only at sudden low moments do I doubt. I have not ever lost faith in my writing this book.
FEBRUARY 24, 1972 Beverly Sills's art, and it is considerable, when viewed in the context of opera today, it is almost on a level with Maria's. I am talking of her acting—ritualistic, as Elizabeth I, very Oriental—underlined by her white makeup, her mask.74 Maria's comes from within, strained through deep wells of suffering—harsh, torn-out sufferings. Beverly's comes from a lighter temperament. Beverly is more known; I can read it easily. Maria is mysterious. I feel that Beverly's vocalistics are in the Patti-Lind tradition—with some coloring from the Pasta tradition, this having come to her through Maria.75 Beverly in her being is a great artist. Joan Sutherland isn't an artist: She is a Trilby.76 God gave her the crystal, Ricky [Bonynge] filled it—all quite natural, but limited— no real musical intelligence or dramatic sensibility—a phenomenon. Beverly and Maria each represent a tradition that ultimately joins in Beverly, as great rivers pour into a bay and so into the vast seas. Both are works of art. Maria has a natural dignity—all of her art pours from this. Beverly hasn't this dignity, naturally. She has gaiety and joy and determination—and she can assume dignity. She can act it. But what about such vulgarities as her waddle in Roberto Dev-ereux? And her table rapping—assumed stage business not assimilated into the seeming life being created before your eyes? Compare Maria's actions in Tosca, Act II: Maria unexpectedly touches the knife, and the whole bloody consequence flows from this accidental touch. You see it happening. You are glued to life happening in a room—across a gulf, but a real room pulsing with real life. Watching Beverly, you are always conscious of Beverly acting—isn't she wonderful at this—as you are conscious of her brilliant technique, her range. Maria makes you feel that she is. Beverly makes you feel that Beverly is being.
MARCH 17, 1972 Puss told me about her, Maria's, last class—how radiant she was; how she apologized for her behavior the last times; how a line stretched around the block to get tickets; how people sat on the floor; how Elizabeth Schwarzkopf flew in to hear it and how Howard [Gilman] thought that she was Maria's cook; how Maria made a spontaneous speech about the delights of the class, the virtues of the students, praising each individually; how she said that she didn't know whether she would come back, and she didn't know whether she would ever sing again, but that didn't matter—whether she ever sang again or not—the young mattered, these future voices.
Maria's life at a crossroad: It went in a straight line until Onassis—then the hiatus—then Juilliard and a new life. I asked her did she ever want
a child: “More than anything.”
1. The Cosmopolitan Club is a private women's club in Manhattan.
2. Gray was nicknamed “Bud” by his family.
3. One of the first Americans to design innovative clothes in the sixties, Betsey Johnson (b. 1942) started as a guest editor at Mademoiselle, where she made sweaters for the staff.
4. Francine du Plessix Gray (b. 1930), novelist and biographer, is the daughter of Tatiana Iacovleva by her first husband, Bertrand du Plessix, hence the stepdaughter of Alexander Liberman.
5. A celebrated poet of the early Soviet Union, and the lover of Tatiana Iacovleva in the twenties, Vladimir Mayakovski (1893-1930) committed suicide soon after Tatiana's marriage to Count Bertrand du Plessix.