by Leo Lerman
6. Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969), the Austrian-born film director, had been Dietrich's mentor and lover.
7. Elsa Maxwell (1883-1963) had been a devotee of rival soprano Renata Tebaldi. Callas, after her October 1956 New York debut in Norma, encountered Maxwell and swiftly resolved to enchant this powerful columnist. The arrival by Callas at a costume ball (January 11, 1957) dressed as Hatshepsut and wearing $3 million in emeralds apparently clinched it. Maxwell introduced Callas to Aristotle Onassis in the summer of 1957.
8. “Getting to Know You” had been written for Lawrence in The King and I. She died of cancer in 1952, during its Broadway run.
9. Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus were all seminal dancers, choreographers, and teachers in modern American dance.
10. The actor Julian Eltinge (1881-1941) had huge success early in the twentieth century as a convincing female impersonator.
11. Tatiana Liberman's sister, Ludmila Iacovleva, and brother-in-law claimed to be the Duke and Duchess de Caylus.
12. Alexandre Iacovleff (1890?–1938), a favorite portrait artist of the Parisian beau monde in the twenties, had a three-year-long affair with Henriette Pascar, Alex Liberman's mother. Alex Liberman met Tatiana through Iacovleff, her uncle. Leo's remark about Iacovleff trading thirty paintings is mysterious.
13. George “Grischa” Gregory (1896-1983) once had the button concession for the USSR. By this time he was a real estate investor. He and his wife Lydia were a central point in New York's Russian community.
14. “Now I remember how she disappeared into a ‘clinic' after that. Her bed was filthy, her nightdress torn, her face was a screaming darkness under hair as wild as Medea's.” Journal, December 12, 1989.
15. In Greek mythology, Heracles is burned to death by a robe that his wife has been persuaded to smear with the vengeful centaur Nessus's blood as a love potion.
16. Callas did not join the faculty of the Juilliard School. Leo soon suspected, however, that she and Peter Mennin (1923-83), its president, were carrying on an affair.
17. Natasha (previously Fanya) Fliegern married a very rich man who claimed the title “baron” and lived out her last years at the Paris Ritz as the Baroness de Wolfe. Leo was fond of saying, “Anyone who lives long enough becomes a White Russian.”
18. In Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), the villain is identified by a missing finger.
19. Vogue editor Kate Lloyd had referred to Talmey thus, a reference to the 1956 film Funny Face, which was about a fashion editor and photographer.
20. In 1967, ten years after a severe stroke, deteriorating health had required that Jane Bowles be committed to a clinic.
21. Aphrodite is an opera (1906) by Camille Erlanger, in which Garden had given an acclaimed performance as Chrysis.
22. When Nin's novel Ladders of Fire (1946) appeared Leo told her to “lie low.” “Because she was all set épater [to shock] le bourgeois … to send out dykish photographs of herself.” Journal, April 23, 1982. Her journals called it a betrayal.
23. Heir to a paper-manufacturing fortune and an arts philanthropist, Howard Gilman (1924-98) also amassed an important photography collection.
24. Elizabeth “Lydia” Gregory (1898-1973?) had also been a lover of the poet Mayakovski. Her father was a prominent Russian lawyer imprisoned by the Soviets.
25. Ernest Schelling (1876-1939), pianist and composer of the popular symphonic poem A Victory Ball, was also conductor of the Young People's Concerts of the New York Philharmonic. As a boy, Leo won awards for his musical knowledge from the organization in 1928 and 1929.
26. The rhythm-and-blues artists Ike and Tina Turner recorded their album What You Hear Is What You Get at this concert.
27. The Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper.
28. Many Jewish immigrant men in America joined Landsmannschaften, lodges of men from the same place and culture. Jacob Goldwasser's was named for Lodz, in central Poland.
29. Around the end of April 1954, Leo urged James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim Museum, to see the work of Liberman. Sweeney did so, and put a painting in the museum's “Younger American Painters” show. It became Liberman's breakthrough.
30. Leo's friend Norman Singer (1921-2001) directed New York's City Center, then the Chamber Music Society.
31. Martin Goldwasser (1915-85) was the son of Leo's uncle Harry and aunt Ida. He became an air force colonel in the Strategic Air Command, a husband, and a father.
32. The actress and pianist Felicia Montealegre (1922?–78) had married Leonard Bernstein in 1951.
33. The San Fernando (Sylmar) earthquake had occurred in Los Angeles on February 9, 1971.
34. In Proust, Berma is a grand actress of the older generation.
35. Tamara Matul (1909-65), a Russian-born former dancer, lived with Rudolf Sieber for forty years while he was married to Dietrich.
36. After Broadway success in the teens and twenties, the actress Laurette Taylor (1884-1946) entered a long alcoholic seclusion, then returned to the stage late in life to deliver landmark performances in Outward Bound (revival, 1938) and The Glass Menagerie (1945).
37. Dietrich would soon be performing at Copenhagen's Tivoli, and later giving a command performance for Queen Elizabeth at Covent Garden.
38. Luigi “Ouj” Gasparinetti (1942-2002) was a chorus boy who became an actor and the lover of Howard Gilman. Later he directed Gilman's philanthropic foundation.
39. Within the week, Gilman would throw a party in his penthouse for Leo's fifty-seventh birthday.
40. This 1936 Broken Blossoms was a remake of the great D. W. Griffith-Lillian Gish silent film.
41. Emlyn Williams performed in his own psychological thrillers. In Night Must Fall, he created the part of a homicidal young man. In the fall of 1936 Leo went to see the play after he and Williams had had their roll and was terrified retrospectively.
42. This expression, “one extra day,” recurs in Leo's journal, meaning some transcendence of life's limits, especially time. He fantasized briefly escaping time, as characters had in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Writing about his past and experiencing great art were two ways in which Leo thought he had found that “day” for himself.
43. Mina Curtiss had an oversize Rolls-Royce nicknamed “The Glory.”
44. The curator of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature was Lola Szla-dits (1923-90).
45. For Diaghilev, Russian ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein (1885-1960) had created Cléopâtre and Scheherazade, in which her striking appearance carried more than her technique.
46. The British poet laureate John Betjeman (1906-84) became a champion of preserving the Victorian scale and style of London. Osbert Lancaster (1906-86), British cartoonist, theatrical designer, and painter, had satirized architectural excess.
47. Dietrich was reading, not sleeping with, the mystery novelist Rex Stout.
48. The poet, playwright, and author Mercedes de Acosta (1896-1968) is reputed to have been the lover of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, and Ona Munson, among others. Mauritz Stiller (1883-1928), one of the greatest directors in Swedish silent movies, is remembered as the first to use Garbo.
49. Irene Lentz (1900-62), credited simply as “Irene,” designed costumes for several movie studios.
50. Every summer from 1907 through 1914, Marcel Proust visited the Grand Hotel in Cabourg on the sea in Normandy, where he had first gone in his teens. For Remembrance of Things Past he reinvented its population and setting as a resort called Balbec.
51. Le Grand Meulnes, the one novel by Henri-Alban Fournier (1886-1914, pseudonym Alain-Fournier), tells of a young man who discovers love in an enchanted, ephemeral land, then searches his life long for that lost happiness.
52. GF: “I was exhausted, thought the hotel would be sad, and didn't want to face it.”
53. Callas very likely played for him the Verdi arias that she had recorded for EMI in 1969. They were not then co
mmercially released.
54. The irony is partially that Leo, a failure in theater, is escorting the “First Lady of the American Stage,” actress Helen Hayes (1900-1993), but also because her husband, playwright Charles Macarthur, had pursued Eleonora von Mendelssohn while he was married to Hayes.
55. Baroness Cécile de Rothschild (1913-95) was a wealthy socialite: “Drooping, almost sagging, expensive fabric and glitter, an effect of jewels and bountiful mouse hair, guttural voice, raspy, an atmosphere of calculated eccentricity, withdrawn almost to deafness, two shrewd wizard eyes, peering. Obviously Cécile de Rothschild was a privileged being. She gave that off as a palpable odor, a kind of disdain, which her closest [friends] probably explain as shyness.” Journal, March 25, 1973.
56. Callas gave twenty-four master classes at the Juilliard School (October 11, 1971-March 16, 1972).
57. Magda Olivero (b. 1910), an Italian soprano, did not make her Metropolitan Opera debut until four years later, at the age of sixty-five.
58. The modernist poet Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933) gave readings internationally but continued to live in the USSR.
59. Lucia is the pretentious central character in novels by E. F. Benson about the melodramas of small-town life in England.
60. Liberman was intimating that Leo could have Allene Talmey's former job.
61. Leo was reading the recently translated diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), an Anglo-German writer and patron of modern art.
62. Pauline Viardot-García (1821-1910) was daughter of Manuel García (1775-1832), a Spanish tenor, teacher, and the composer of nearly a hundred operas, and sister of Maria Mali-bran (1808-36), a celebrated and volatile mezzo-contralto.
63. Italian soprano Giuditta Pasta (1798-1865) had, as did Callas, a wide, if uneven, vocal range and a gift for poignant dramatic interpretation.
64. The private art broker Samuel Adams Green (b. 1940) later became director of the monument-preserving Landmarks Foundation.
65. A month earlier, Newsweek had revealed that Cecil Beaton's forthcoming volume of diaries would contain explicit accounts of his affair with Garbo in 1947-48.
66. Hokey-pokey was cheap ice cream sold by street vendors.
67. From 1956, when Gray and Leo took over 1453 Lexington entirely, they had kept separate bedrooms but slept together in Leo's room, excepting when they had an overnight guest, one of them was ill, or an argument stood unresolved.
68. Leo is seeking the explanation for Wescott's brief flirtation with him in January 1948. Biographer Robert Phelps was editing the journals of Glenway Wescott. This story as retold by Leo is incredible, as Wescott's companion Monroe Wheeler had brought the photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-55) into their relationship a decade earlier. Wescott and Wheeler did know Dr. Alfred Kinsey, even assisting in his research by setting up homosexual orgies for observation.
69. Influenced by Noh theater and set to music by Teijo Ito, the ballet Watermill had premiered the evening before.
70. Janácek opera of 1926, in which a famous singer, revealed to be three hundred years old (the result of an experiment), is now bored and burdened by life's pleasures.
71. Mezzo-soprano Tourel (1900?–1973) had been on Juilliard's faculty since 1963 and given master classes at Carnegie Hall.
72. Lindamood underwent several major intestinal surgeries and had been convalescing in a hospital's housing for outpatients.
73. The French dramatist Beaumarchais (1732-99) wrote The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. Jean Genet (1910-86) was a French novelist and dramatist whose works (such as The Maids) defied both popular and radical moralities.
74. Soprano Beverly Sills (b. 1929) had performed on the previous evening as Elizabeth I in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux. Leo claimed cousinage (through his Lerman grandmother) to Sills, who was born in Brooklyn.
75. The sopranos Adelina Patti (1843-1919) and Jenny Lind (1820-87) were both songbirds, famous for the range, purity, and control of their voices, rather than for their dramatic technique.
76. The singer hypnotically enslaved by the musician-mesmerist Svengali in George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894).
NOTE: On March 25, Leo was master of ceremonies for a tribute to Richard Rodgers at Broadway's Imperial Theatre. There were songs and reminiscences from most of Rodgers's musical scores, with Mary Martin, Celeste Holm, Leonard Bernstein, and Agnes de Mille among the performers.
MARCH 28, 1972 • NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER • madrid
Well, I did it. I co-starred with Mary Martin and the others, at the Imperial Theatre. I was onstage over two hours, and I never felt more at home, and I made people laugh and cry, and I had the loveliest time being a Wampas [rising star]! You would have had stage fright for me, and you would have been proud, as would have Miz Feagin. Now that I've been a musical comedy favorite, I can retire—as I did from my movie career. I'm down to everyday life again, although I've even had an offer from the Stratford company (in Connecticut) to come play any of the Bard's clowns I would. I laughed merrily and suggested that they mount the all-male Macbeth for me—I to be Lady Macbeth, and Zero Mostel to be Lady Macduff. They didn't think much of this notion, so I guess I've retired in reality. Here we have the longest winter and the shortest money in years. I haven't even paid my taxes. Somehow my little success has given me some courage: I've even made a date to ask for a raise at Condé Nast. I've started reviewing books for Vogue. They pay $300 for 600 words. That is a lavish fee. So it goes, and I with it.77
JOURNAL • April 4, 1972 Liv Ullmann—excellent English, accented charmingly, a wide, genuine, smiling nature. She should play comedy, but no one gives her comedy. “Bergman is always saying: You will play comedy. Then the script comes and I am sad and ugly.” She is not pretty but beautiful. She believes in the Pope Joan saga. “Oh—you are the first in America who even knows about it,” she said, the delight welling up into her honest eyes.78 She is entirely womanly. Her gestures are as you see them in Degas. Colette would have instinctively been in accord with her movements, her feeling. Everything Liv Ullmann does composes—the way a cat composes—instinctively. She has found Proust. “Swann,” she said, “Swann loving … I love it…. I cannot get out of Proust now.” She is deeply literate.
MAY 19, 1972 Television came to our house.79 I find something, at least one presentation of deep interest, daily. Several nights past, I saw Stage Door [1937], which made me teary. It is incredibly real—as I knew theater in those days—harsh, glamorous, optimistic, despairing, but with a future—wisecracking, good-looking, highly individual, and young—amazingly, gloriously young—so much the way we were at Feagin's, but even more one year later, spread out in rooming houses (Mrs. Cornish's on West Fifty-fourth and West Fifty-second, Anni Oakley's [sic] on West Fifty-fourth), at the Footlights Club, in the Penn Astor drugstore (oblivion now—gimcrackery on the site of the Astor) … that world gone—but roaring away somewhere in time-space and in Stage Door.
Five-hour dinner at Le Pavillon with George Balanchine. Barbara Horgan [his assistant] also present. George pyrotechnical, the way Pavlik [Tche-litchew] was. When George told about Diaghilev, his voice grew higher, broken, had a kind of feminine curve and register. This was obviously Diaghilev being heard by George: “I knew nothing—He took me to museums, churches—He say—Perugino—I look—I see nothing—He goes away— I look—still nothing—nothing—a blob orange—a piece blue—He comes back—'So, tell me. So, you see?' ‘No,' I tell him, ‘nothing. I see nothing.' ‘So, stay here until you see. We go lunch. You no lunch. You stay….' He go— I stay—Later—much later—I see—beautiful—beautiful… And always, I look, everywhere for Perugino. Perugino is the only one I know, so I look for him. We came to the Sistine—everyone—Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky—look and look…. I say, ‘See, up there, high—Perugino—small, but Perugino.' ‘What Perugino!' they all say. ‘No—Raphael, Michelangelo—no Perugino here.' Diaghilev opens Baedecker, which he always carried, and there says—
Perugino. Later, I saw Michelangelo, Raphael, everyone—but always Perugino first.” His talk was nonstop—garlands of words, fantasias of words, floods of thought—all linked by ribbing as delineated as rib constructions of butterflies, darning needles [dragonflies]. George's talk was hoarfrost upon the window-pane. “You must write about art,” I said. Sometimes we engaged in duets, but mostly he was solo—and tremendous. “I can't write,” he said. “But out of this jungle,” I told him, “… patches of this jungle are gardens.” The gestures — modified wizard gestures—nothing baroque about his gestures, more etched on air. But his talk—a sort of neoclassical base, pure—the thought and words meshed—not padded with images—but pure constructions—imagined facts… Five hours of this.
MAY 23, 1972 My birthday—fifty-eight—a beautiful morning. I am waiting for celebration to begin. Yesterday, T came to lunch at the Lafayette. He was properly dressed. “I'm very proper,” he said. “I'm the most proper person you know….” He is heavy, even more wise and ageless—to say froglike is not exact—rather, in his face, the way his mouth shapes when within him a smile or laughter grows is ancient frog-elder wisdom. His laugh is still absolutely untrammeled when he loosens it—a rare upward cascade of burnished, diskshaped joyful noises—pure as it was thirty years ago. I sat looking at this middle-aged, watchful man, and I tried to find Little T. When he laughed he was Little T. When he suddenly hotted up with nostalgia and love he was Little T. We talked about his “affair.” “I know it was all wrong,” he said. “Everything about it. But it came out of nostalgia—out of longing. I'd known hot, loving, sexy boys when I was young…. That kind of memory … I can hypnotize myself. I met him at the Spa, that place in Palm Springs—you know …” (His voice has a frequent question mark in it, requiring no answer.) “He was everything those boys had been, and irresistibly I was in it—consumed by it, exhausted, exhilarated by it. I could stop…. I didn't love Jack less…. What?… Yes, I think someone told him, but we've never talked about it. Never. I think he tried to approach it several times, but I never let him…. No, he's never had anything like that. He has his French. He's wonderful at French…. But that affair put me in the hospital…. That was two years ago. Last year…” His voice was full of self-raillery, recollected emotion, and a little despair. He told me about his young cousin and Steve McQueen, who came every day and ultimately took the twenty-nine-year-old off into a canyon and blew him against a tree. T says he loves living in “our little enclave in Bridge-hampton most.” He loves his dog, Maggie. “You know, I think female dogs— Maggie (a big English bull) is the first female I've ever had—female dogs are smarter, more intelligent.” About his novel: “It's a big book. It grew and grew. Every section—it's all in sections—is novella length. I'm doing the links now— and in one place sixty-seven pages to come—that sort of thing. I don't know if I want it published at all before it comes out. I don't know if it diminishes the surprise. Writing it is like riding a high wire all the time. It's going to shock and blow everything sky-high.” He looked highly pleased, amazed, delighted. “I had it read by the lawyers…. When [editor Joe] Fox read it, he took to his bed for two days…. There's a section called ‘Côte Basque,' a two-way dialogue…. I don't know what the moral consideration is… the legal…. I'll talk in confidence first, and then we'll talk all about it….” (For Vogue, with whom he has an agreement, which I have now seen—$25,000 given him in 1964, $25,000 to come upon delivery.)