The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  The deep disorder in the upstairs bedrooms, with her many, many dresses hanging in closets, on their doors. A house much too small for the family and its situation. “I gave up on furniture … because I decided that the children should feel they could come and go … and bring their friends… and cats and dogs….” Mrs. Ford has made many compromises. Her family and husband always come first. “I never see him … at night….” Mats—his name on one, hers on another—either side of the huge bed. I felt that she has some vision of the house as “decorated,” some sense of a color scheme, obscure to any eye save hers. She is a most lovable woman. I wanted to protect and help her. She hugged and kissed me and stood waving a long time when I went away. Her hulking, nice daughter and the good relationship between them. The Secret Service in isolation booths and “They know all about us, so we like to know all about them … specially the good-looking ones….”

  The sense of this family: his Siamese cat, Chan (“Momma got the name when they went to China”), [Michael] the son who will be a minister and his wife-to-be Gayle [Brumbaugh] (who will be interested in his “work”). All of this is a typical American family, perfectly cast, even Mrs. Ford as the bright wife who is deprived of her husband because of his “business.” She loves to dance—social—and reveres Martha Graham. (She had two years of Martha.) “When I saw Mr. Ford—his way, his inspiration. I thought of Martha…. She was my inspiration…. I went to her when I was twenty…. That's when you get inspiration….” She loves to tango, foxtrot, and polka. (“Mr. Ford's a marvelous dancer.”) Her high time was when she returned to Grand Rapids and taught “colored children to dance … the way Martha taught me…. She would put a knee in my back….” This all ended (dancing, skiing) because of a pinched nerve. Mrs. Ford said, “I love art… paintings, sculpture, and, strange enough, I like modern art—Gottlieb, Rothko—but I don't get the time to go to museums the way I would like…. So, I get art books and I look at them and look at them….” In this woman Carol Kennicott [of Main Street] always lurks.

  JUNE 8, 1974 • NEW YORK CITY Dr. Wiseman said, yesterday, that this is a “progressive” sickness—and going, now, at a very slow pace. That behooves me to consider some, I hope, remote future—when I can't use my leg even as I do now—and this, I suppose, will include my hands. The only way I can confront this unimaginable (meaning my own reluctance to look squarely) future is to teach myself that this also is an adventure and, as with all adventures, must be taken as it comes, the only preparation being courage, and the basis of this is patience and faith—absolute faith, the will to see life through. Curiosity will help me. The future can be downhill, but I will try to make this seem so gradual that we will seem to be on a solid plateau. I worry only about how to make financial security. Now we will have a sort of whistling in the dark. An adventure.

  AUGUST 1, 1974 Mikhail Baryshnikov yesterday morning. He came to be photographed by Avedon, who came from Fire Island and his illness to do this. He could be any boy on a street corner—pale, stockyish, blond, retiring, but friendly, slight [presence]. If he were in a room with other people, he would not be noticed save for his deep-set, heavily shadowed, sad, somewhat doomed blue eyes—eyes curiously related to Marlene's now that she is old and lost, her world gone quite awry. His dancing strength comes from his feet—beautifully shaped feet of enormous strength and flexibility. You feel that he could write with his feet. (Rudi's dancing strength comes from his buttocks, Eddie Vil-lella's from his thighs.) When this boy stands on the floor, peering into a long glass, warming up, he becomes noble romantic—a tremendous presence, not flashy but magical. Then suddenly he is airborne: There is no visible preparation. He is so masculine that there is a sort of feminine quality that flavors his dancing. He could be a marvelous Spectre de la Rose or Harlequin or Petrouchka—all of the Nijinsky roles—but with a different sensibility. Baryshnikov has humor, a sense of fun. Also, he has a sense of atmosphere in stage works.

  AUGUST 5, 1974 A day in the country at [dermatologist] Alvin Friedman-Kien's. Louise Nevelson talked about her early days in Maine, how I took her home from a party thirty-five years ago, how she wondered did her life have a design, how she knows that it did, and how she and Diana [MacKown, her assistant] find oddments of wood from which she makes her sculptures. “We look like two gypsies,” Louise said. “Two gypsy women.” She is aware, at all times, of the effect she is making, always calculated, even when an accident of art or malice or appearance. Her orderly disorder: “There must be order,” she said firmly. “My kind of order.”

  OCTOBER 27, 1974 The decline of Momma—She sounds like a motorboat setting out to sea, and frequently she makes noises like a long-distance runner on his last lap. Mary [Callabras, her aide] is mysterious because she seems so good.

  I have just realized that some fifty-five years ago, in 106th Street, there was a black Mary—the “fire-goya,” a unique thing145 —a mammy-kind, in turban and print dress and white apron, survivor of antebellum days. She always led the annual June Walk, which I believe came in late May, a sort of spring ritual that sent costumed children marching through Harlem's streets and into the vast (so they seemed) meadows of the park, there to dance around maypoles and throw up with excitement.

  NOTE: Leo found the pressure of working under Alexander Liberman's direction frustrating. In his journal, he mentioned being double-crossed, fully growing distrust, and worrying that the job would grow even tougher as his eyesight worsened, but he provided few details. He seldom recounted office events at length in these notebooks.

  JOURNAL • November 30, 1974 This has been, in the office, a horror. I now know that Alex is evil—a dreadful being, a wretched, murderous Russian of the blackest blood. As Diana [Vreeland] says, “A yellow rat.” Since I need to hold on to this job, I must try to build a fortress about my being. I have played hypocrite these many months: I must intensify this. “Use him,” Diana advises. I must. But he must suffer some horrible payment. And I must find some path out of this horror. I love doing the work, but I will not be able to do the work with his machinations depleting me. I have inevitably managed to survive: I must manage now. Such a waste.

  DECEMBER 9, 1974 I must stop complaining. I must stop eating. I must try to hear what I do say—if I say bad things. I cannot believe that I do—but I must stop complaining. I wasn't aware that I did to excess—but if I do, I must hear this and stop doing it. I am full of grief.

  DECEMBER 24, 1974 These have been bad times for me at Vogue. I felt that I could no longer go on there, that the price is too high for me, that I have sold myself to the devil. But, of course, how can I give that moneymaking up? So much more is needed now. And this morning, I feel almost better.

  Last night, at the Hirschfelds, [photographer] Peter Basch's mother146 told how Freud was their house doctor and came weekly on Friday: “A nice quiet man. He wasn't yet a psychiatrist, but he knew everything about the whole family, so he was a psychiatrist—but we didn't know about any of that.” She also explained why Hänsel und Gretel and Rosenkavalier (1893 and 1911) are so similar in musical ideas, atmosphere, and color: “They were always together in Vienna—in cafés all day long. They grew, Humperdinck and Strauss, together. They breathed the same air—like Haydn and Mozart.” An amazing old lady, once notable on the Mitteleuropa opera stage, now living in her own flats in Munich and Vienna—climbing mountains in the spring—with rich high humor, spirits, and awareness. She knows all of the young voices in Europe.

  MARCH 31, 1975 The [Russian soprano] Vishnevskaya's Tosca at the Metropolitan—incredibly provincial and awful. She emoted—intensely 1917 silent movies. She was (is) mean-faced. She planted herself stage-center, folded her little hands, and sang “Vissi d'arte” as if in recital. And her voice was, at all times, shrill and never on key. She was horrible during rehearsal—wanting sets repainted and constantly demanding new costumes—seven from Karinska, and not one pleased her. A part of the audience cheered: I am tired of political demonstrations instead of reactions to works of per
forming art.

  Yesterday, Momma said to me, “Can I make a request? When I pass over, promise me you'll bury me with your book (The Museum—a large, heavy tome). In case there's anybody around I'll be able to show it to them.” We were all flabbergasted and ruefully amused. Apparently, she hopes for an afterlife.

  77. Two months later he wrote, “concluded the Vogue business—$10,000 only [for consulting] plus writing fees as the writing goes.” Journal, May 20, 1972.

  78. In 1972, the Norwegian actress Liv Ullman (b. 1938) starred in the British film Pope Joan, based on medieval chronicles reporting that a woman disguised as a man was elected pope in A.D. 855. Ullmann often starred in films directed by her lover, Ingmar Bergman.

  79. Dietrich had given them a set during the fifties, to watch her appearances, but it had not come to the Osborne apartment.

  80. Several friends had been arrested recently during an antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.

  81. In Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a teenager masturbates with raw liver.

  82. The composer Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78), cousin of Vladimir Nabokov, had written the score for Balanchine's Don Quixote in 1962.

  83. Douglas Cooper (1911-84) was a British art historian and collector.

  84. Edward Villella (b. 1936) was one of the first American-born male ballet stars. He danced at New York City Ballet from 1957 to 1975.

  85. Violette Verdy, Melissa Hayden, and Richard Tanner were all dancers with New York City Ballet.

  86. Jed Harris (1900-1979) directed and produced many plays for Broadway (The Front Page, Our Town, The Crucible).

  87. Ruth Gordon and he had a son, Jones Harris, in 1929.

  88. A prominent theatrical club in New York.

  89. “Frequently I did not understand a word uttered amongst them, but I could read the turn of a head, the tilt of eyes during listening or silences. I had known these in my infancy. I had had to perfect my instinctive knowledge, and now, because of my long-ago great-aunts and -uncles, I was not a foreigner to these foreigners.” Journal, July 27, 1981.

  90. Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (pseudonym Saint-John Perse, 1887-1975) was a Nobel Prize-winning French poet, diplomat, and consultant (1940-57) to the Library of Congress. “Mina and Alexi were lovers some seventeen years. The evidence, a shred of it, is the signboard on Alexi's house [in Giens] on the Riviera. Mina gave him that house.” Journal, February 2, 1980.

  91. Betty Parsons (1900-1982), a watercolorist, was most influential as an art dealer who nurtured Abstract Expressionists.

  92. The conjunctivitis that had temporarily blinded him in November 1953.

  93. Mary Jane “Jerrie” Maxwell, a friend from Leo's high-school theater group, had then been killed in an auto accident soon after finding that photograph. It had been taken when he was stage-managing Behind Red Lights, in which he got her a part.

  94. “Answered Prayers” was to be the title of Capote's magnum opus about New York society, toward which he had begun making notes as early as 1958.

  95. Jean Stafford (1915-79) was a novelist and short-story writer. She married poet Robert Lowell, then journalist A. J. Liebling.

  96. Baron Federico von Berzeviczy-Pallavicini (1909-89), a Swiss-born set designer and magazine art director (Flair), started out in the twenties dressing windows at the luxurious Viennese confectionery Demel. During the thirties, he made a mariage blanc with the niece of Demel's Jewish owners, which allowed her to enter a convent under his name and survive the war. She died in 1965, leaving Demel to Pallavicini.

  97. Gabrielle Réjane (née Gabrielle-Charlotte Réju, 1857-1920) was the leading player of light comedy in Paris at her time.

  98. Barnett Newman (1905-70) had been one of the initiators of Color Field painting. He and Alex Liberman became friends in the early sixties, when Newman's work inspired Liberman to instill a spiritual element into his own minimalist paintings.

  99. Dietrich's show I Wish You Love had been filmed in London for television. It appeared first in America.

  100. Rudi Sieber's longtime lover, Tamara Matul, had died in 1965.

  101. The freelance writer Robert MacBride collaborated with Capote on several unrealized television projects in the early seventies.

  102. Cecil Beaton's decade-long romance with a San Francisco high-school teacher (identified in his diaries simply as “Kin”) began in 1963.

  103. The previous day the New York Times had published an account of the CIA involvement of Cord Meyers (1920-2001), begun in 1951.

  104. Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-64) was an artist, her sister Rosamund Pinchot (1904-38) an actress.

  105. “Mary was killed while strolling along the banks of the canal near Georgetown, where she lived. Her diary, which possibly contained revelations of an intimacy with John Kennedy and of his murder, was never found, Ben [Bradlee] being suspected of having taken it.” Journal, June 21, 1986. Bradlee, Washington Post executive editor from 1968 to 1991, confirmed in his autobiography that the diary had been found by another and later burned by Bradlee's wife, Mary Meyer's sister Antoinette.

  106. Fashion and costume designer Valentina Schlee (1894-1989) and Garbo had been friends until Schlee's husband, George, became Garbo's constant companion. After his 1964 death, Schlee and Garbo didn't speak.

  107. Aristotle Onassis's son Alexander died in a plane crash on January 22, 1973.

  108. Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), young wife of the prime minister Melbourne, became notorious for her affair and romantic obsession with Lord Byron.

  109. British painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) is known for his engravings satirizing contemporary politics and morality (A Rake's Progress).

  110. Wealthy Ruth Obre Dubonnet (d. 1992) was friend to many in New York's theatrical community.

  111. The film actress Paulette Goddard (1905-90) married Charles Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich Maria Remarque.

  112. Beginning in November 1970 and for the next twenty years, Leo chaired a monthly luncheon that he christened “The Friends of George Spelvin.” (George Spelvin is the name traditionally used when a playwright wishes to disguise the fact that one actor is playing two roles.) Leo would invite the cast and creators of a current play to lunch with some of Playbill's advertisers.

  113. Auden sent an unpublished poem (“Thank You, Fog”) and then wrote a piece for Vogue about his opposition to recent revisions to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (“I Have a Precious Bee in My Bonnet”). Leo published both.

  114. Mary Reynolds (1891-1950), an artisanal bookbinder, lived in Greenwich Village with Duchamp during the war.

  115. Nicolas Calas (1907-88), a Greek-born art critic and Surrealist poet, fled Paris for New York in 1940.

  116. The painter Maurice Grosser (1903-86) wrote art criticism for The Nation. He was also the longtime lover of Virgil Thomson.

  117. He wrote, in part: “She is as honest and lucid as children and just sufficiently intoxicated, and like them she speaks the truth with an astonishing, amusing, and innocent clairvoyance quite regardless of consequence.” The New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, April 25, 1943.

  118. Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven (1926) was a sympathetic, realistic depiction of various strata of Harlem life.

  119. A hugely popular comic on radio and television, Fred Allen (1894-1956) used a deadpan, nasal delivery.

  120. Dona Guimaraes (1926?–89), then executive editor of Mademoiselle, had arranged the meeting in order for Leo to propose a Mademoiselle feature to Charles Addams.

  121. The essays of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), a French poet and critic, were a foundation of modern literary journalism.

  122. Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) was the Italian librettist who wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così Fan Tutte. He lived from 1805 in New York City.

  123. Ida Lerman was convalescing after some medical treatment. She soon returned home, and Leo arranged for her to have daily assistance.

  124.
A section of Pentimento, published as a memoir, in which Hellman claimed to have smuggled money to antifascists in Nazi Germany, subsequently proved to be a fabrication.

  125. “Lillian Hellman has lesbian charm, which she uses on weak males, not, I believe, on females.” Journal, April 12, 1961.

  126. In May 1973, owner and publisher Kay Graham's Washington Post had won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting of the Watergate affair.

  127. The British stage actress Cathleen Nesbitt (1889-1982) had a career spanning seventy years (The Cocktail Party, Gigi, My Fair Lady). As a young woman she had been the love of poet Rupert Brooke (d. 1915).

  128. Fred Niblo (1874-1948), who took over directing The Temptress (1926) from Mauritz Stiller, made many costume spectacles in the silent era (The Three Musketeers, Ben-Hur).

  129. Leo had hired reporter Sandra McElwaine as Vogue's Washington correspondent. Beatrix Miller was editor of London Vogue (1964-86).

  130. A sofa that had come from the set of a production of J. M. Barrie's play Mary Rose.

  131. THE SCREENWRITER AND NOVELIST RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA (B. 1927), THE DIRECTOR JAMES IVORY, AND THE PRODUCER ISMAIL MERCHANT WERE THE CREATIVE PRINCIPALS OF MERCHANT-IVORY FILMS. JHABVALA WAS BORN IN GERMANY. HER FATHER WAS A POLISH JEW.

  132. Deuce Coupe, set to The Beach Boys by choreographer Twyla Tharp (b. 1941), had recently marked her turn to the mainstream.

  133. Gloria Emerson (1929-2004) was a correspondent for the New York Times in Vietnam (1965-72). Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940) had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1972 for her book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake.

  134. On November 7, 1973, on her final bow at a theater in Maryland, Dietrich had fallen into the orchestra pit, reinjuring an already badly damaged leg.

  135. After the television broadcast of Dietrich's show, Leo ran an article about it by Jim Sir-mans in the February 1973 issue of Vogue. Although flattering about the performance, Sir-mans led with Dietrich's reluctance to discuss her age, then went on to describe the large sums she was earning and how difficult her producer Alexander Cohen had found her. It's not difficult to imagine that Dietrich had been irritated.