by Leo Lerman
136. GF: “We were sentimental always and brought along comforting things, a variety of miniature animals and small toys, to make hospital or hotel rooms more familiar.”
137. Mounted police had to be called to quiet some irate ticket holders.
138. Callas had overmedicated herself with sleeping pills the previous evening and was unable to sing.
139. Callas blamed her performance on distress caused by the sudden death that afternoon of her longtime tour manager Sol Hurok. “Maria's last recital here—the great magnificent blossom fell apart—like wax roses—all crumbled … So different from Maria's classes, she then distilling her art in phials of elixir for the young, for the future.” Journal, April 11, 1979. GF: “Maria was the last great heroine of the theater that Leo had. Her voice always had a flaw—gorgeous, but in the top register a bit scratchy. The flaw grew—like a crack in the sidewalk—and by the time she was that age she just couldn't step over it any longer.”
140. The “we” refers to her and Giuseppe di Stefano. The concert tour had begun with a romance between them but would end in acrimony.
141. Leo had continued to be a consulting editor for Mademoiselle, supplementing his income, after he started at Vogue.
142. Vladimir “Volodya” Horowitz (1903-89), the supreme Russian-born pianist, was married to Toscanini's daughter Wanda (1907-98).
143. Upon their first meeting, in August 1935, Mendelssohn had presented Toscanini with a small painting by Guardi. Of course, she may have given him others.
144. At the time, Betty Ford's husband was vice president. She would become first lady on August 9, 1974.
145. To perform chores on the Sabbath (such as lighting the furnace), some Orthodox Jewish households employed a gentile, more often called a “Shabbes goy.”
146. Grete Freund-Basch (1885-1982), an Austrian-born actress and singer, had opened a Viennese restaurant in New York during the Second World War.
JOURNAL • APRIL 5, 1975 In bed part of the day. Talk on the blower to Herbie Ross, and later Nora [Kaye, his wife], about the Sherlock Holmes movie [The Seven-Per-Cent Solution].1 I said absolutely no on Marlene, but definitely yes on Lotte Lenya, and will give them her number and address…. But part of the day—the tide out—actually since yesterday at Avedon's. I begin to loathe some photographers and their phony “star” ways. I have watched carefully. Irving Penn comes close, and Penn's really an artist. But Avedon—no. I saw suddenly and with utter clarity the emptiness, the waste of that [magazine features] part of my life. I've done it: I am the best there is at it. I want to be the best at writing this book—but I have obligations—always more and more.
APRIL 8, 1975 Beverly [Sills]'s Metropolitan Opera debut [in Rossini's The Siege of Corinth]—the mid-act tidal ovation was the most unusual ovation I have ever heard in any theater. (Remembering the one which greeted Vivien Leigh on her entrance in The Duel of Angels, the one which accoladed Margot at the end of her first Sleeping Beauty in New York, and ovations for Gielgud's Hamlet and Bergner's Escape Me Never and Maria's first Norma at the Met.) The ovation for Beverly, mid–second act, after she sang most beautifully, reclining, and, after the third part of the aria, stood with back to the audience— a slender, blue-cloaked, bright-haired figure—quite mortal. This ovation was unique, not so much for the length as for the shape. Its form was that of the ocean's waves before, during, and after a violent storm. It swept down and out, down and out. It was tremendous in its intensity; it was a whisper. It was the reward of virtue, goodness, survival.
APRIL 29, 1975 The perfect Giselle by the Bolshoi, the antithesis of their awful Spartacus. This Giselle immaculate in every detail. No one burst it at its fragile seams with “star” antics. All in a fine proportion—all lyrical, dreamlike—an incident observed at any time in history, these last hundreds and hundreds of years, not period and not especially now but eternal—all dancing of such lyrical, romantic excellence, such a high level. This was the greatest of ballet, making our domestic troupes and stars seem puny and shabby and showbiz. This Giselle a rapture. I wonder if Wagner knew the structure of this [Adolphe] Adam score, which the orchestra played marvelously. Here is a whole scheme of leitmotifs—a fabric so deftly woven. This Giselle a complete expression of the Romantic period, the romantic heart. I expected Lincoln Center's plaza to be fragrant and shadowy with enormous, flowery lilac trees.
NOTE: Gray went to California for several weeks to assist with his mother's move from Burbank to an apartment in a retirement community in Laguna Hills, fifty miles to the south.
JOURNAL • may 2, 1975 • bethel, Connecticut Yesterday, after Richard had gone [from Mina's], Mina said, “He's a different man when he's not with that awful friend of his [Howard Rothschild]. What could the attraction be?” I have wondered that for almost three decades. Mina talked of love, and almost all of her loves now seemed not love at all—only passion and curiosity. Only three—Alexi (Saint-John Perse), Harry Curtiss, and Henrietta [Bingham] were truly “love,” not [John] Houseman, none of those.2 I said that my whole life seems not to have been at all—only this moment, and all else—save Puss—had happened to someone else, all of it an experience remembered, as in a book— the miserable, now incredible, wallowings in strange rooms with odd men, the devastating passions—scarifying—I thought forever—now the traces are like those left by the passage of Ice Age tumults in Central Park boulders…. All of it happened, but to whom? To me and to those other me's, who preceded and formed this moment's man.
Later: I am not frightened of dying. Death is an adventure—a rebirth. But I am terrified of not being. I want my being—with Puss. I want that. I do not have the prop of religion—formal, organized, predigested religion. I am always fearful in the dark, but somehow the dark is blessed. I love, however, light— and sitting in the same place at table, no matter whose table. I feel sickish if I cannot face the room, if only by peering into a looking glass. But there does come that curious moment when I give up, slip into oblivion…. Is that how death will be? When Poppa died, holding his hand I saw him pass—shadowily— along his way…. He was gone. He was elsewhere.
MAY 4, 1975 Mina said, when Lincoln was in the hospital, having had his heart attacks, “If anything happens to Goosey, I'll kill myself.” Then, some days later, she said, “There are so many letters—so much to do. I will have to do that first.” I was wryly amused. Her emotionalism is as precipitous as a burst water pipe—sometimes a pipe of water-main size, sometimes a tiny ancillary pipe.
MAY 5, 1975 Ulanova3 told George Balanchine that no longer are “all the little steps, the pearls, taught at the Bolshoi or the Kirov.” Now only mass action, leaps, other athleticism are the mode, so that all of the “pearls” will be lost. She was fascinated with Donizetti Variations—”so full of pearls.” That is what she calls all of the little steps, the vrai vocabulary. “We no longer can do these.” So this is how fascism erodes the truth, the beauty….
I am bone-lonely for my Puss…. Now, this little wireless plays “Chambres Separées”—too much…. I will count over my feastings: crepes with loganberries; cheese soufflé and Canadian bacon; shrimp in a white dill sauce; turkey stuffed with a purée of chestnuts and sausage; hot asparagus cream soup; cold oxtail soup; strawberry meringues; rhubarb pie; breasts of chicken in a white-wine tarragon cream; a kidney stew…. I still miss my Puss, bone-deep I miss my Puss.
MAY 6, 1975 Mina is semi-solitary, after a long life peopled with remarkables. “Why,” she asks, “should it be that at 9:30 on June 1, 1926, a justice of the peace should have made my life what it is?” She has [her late husband] Harry Cur-tiss's nameplate on the door, so that if he comes this way, he will know that this is his house. “But he would know anyway…. He knew exactly how to handle me. Every day he gave me a list of what to do.”
MAY 27, 1975 • NEW YORK CITY A wedding in Philip [Johnson]'s glass house, with Aaron Copland giving Peggy Bernier away to John Russell [art historian], and Stephen Spender [poet and critic] (huge and Auden-un
tidy—shirttails out and an air of a wilting lily) standing up for John. Virgil Thomson senile and baby-lumbering. [Duo-pianists] Fizdale and Gold ushering. Then everyone, about 125, dotted and clotted in frazzled garden-party dress over the lawn, and so to the sculpture structure, which was all slats, levels, and shadows—like being inside a marvelous phantasmagoria of superbly delineated linears— utterly insubstantial, fashioned of light. Very like Norman Bel Geddes's modern-dress Hamlet but of blazing white.4 Here we played at Midsummer Night's Dream, with the bridal party throned on high, while the organ furiously jollied Bach. Trumpets clarioned. [Actress] Irene Worth read Shakespeare sonnets and the Millamant-Mirabell proposal scene [from The Way of the World] (surely the finest single comedy scene in all our literature), but the acoustics, fine for organ and trumpets, lifted only the awful timbre of Irene's clamor into the air. And the heat was devastating on this sudden summer day. Almost all elements of my life continued to echo during this curious wedding party, above the pond that Puss helped to excavate while he was deciding between Philip and me. The Proust touch was really in Minnie and Jamie Fos-burgh: She so eager to be kissed and so to recapture a past that she fondly remembered; he smiling benignly at another past, of which she possibly knew nothing.5
JUNE 16, 1975 My plunge through Virginia Woolf's letters left no scribbling in me. I finished this volume and felt both uplifted and desolate. I lived so intensely in that world: I now was beached in my world. And, like the thin, bitter, subcutaneous underskin of an orange lay the knowledge that I should have had a life of letters, not journalism. But the most prodigious emotion was exultation at having shared with such intensity and detail V. Woolfs day-to-day living. I felt nourished, able to carry on more elegantly and eloquently. I had had an immersion in literature, in the true literary life, and I was delighted, amused, edified, confirmed, and for that moment complete.
JUNE 24, 1975 Martha Graham gala on Thursday last: Mrs. Ford's embraces and small-town neighborly ways. Margot [Fonteyn] wearily taking off her makeup and, onstage, her air of a “lady”—sweet tempered and beautifully mannered, visiting some milieu in which she knew that she did not belong. Martha whispered to me, “Thank you for Halston.”6 Nancy Wilson Ross Young7 told me that when she went backstage she found Margot and Rudi [Nureyev]'s rooms empty save for great crowds of floral tributes. Then she opened a door and there were Martha and seven men all toking up. Lucifer looked like a fabric promotion: It is a bad work in which Martha permitted her “gorgeousness” to get out of hand—her hand.
NOTE: Leo and Gray went to Europe for a summer holiday, which would include their first return to Venice since 1953. During a gathering at Penelope and Carol Reed's home in London, Leo had some sort of seizure, which was taken for a heart attack, although later tests revealed no cause. Gray believes in retrospect that it may have been an anxiety attack. Penelope Reed had called in Dr. Patrick Woodcock, a physician to many in the London theatrical community, to care for Leo, and the men became friends. After a week's recovery, Leo and Gray went on to Paris.
JOURNAL • July 13, 1975 • london I have done with Pride and Prejudice, which helped sustain me during this bloody seizure. I found P & P even more exhilarating than ever before—such sustained complacency. I think Miss Austen the most superior student of manners in the world, but this is because she so obviously invented them.
The most terrifying moments of my sickness were the fainting and then the iron band, which sought to bind my chest in the relentless vise—that was awful.
JULY 14, 1975 Patrick [Woodcock] told of Noël—alone at night in the Savoy, shaking and rigid with vigor and chattering, “Oh, Patrick, do put my cock in my hand, so I can at least toss myself off.” He need not have died since nothing was wrong save his way of life—stopping in bed all day, eating chocolate incessantly.
JULY 19, 1975 • PARIS I have just finished The Vagabond (Colette), not having read it in years. What a master, but no man could have written any of Colette. This, today, is a feminist document. They will (have they already?) made it into an edict. But it is a sensuous, sentient book—more poem than prose—no—it is prose of deep, but cool intensity—a nectarine or peach in hot summer, its juices unexpectedly cool beneath its sun-hot skin.
Yesterday, Federico [Pallavicini] came and off we went to the Petit Palais— there to feast on Fuseli. Superb—his craftsmanship, his color, and his fantasy—the torment, the tension—the horror, the vigor, the force. And how clear the seeds of David and the Pre-Raphaelites, the kinship with Blake and Rom-ney (whom Fuseli befriended). It was a huge exhibit, which I drank in deeply in measured, slow drafts. I like the wit of Madame Fuseli, having the last laugh. She ends this exhibit, alone in a panel, smiling. What a curious home life they surely had. And how neurasthenic he was. Great depressions ooze like megrims [the blues] from these almost overartful drawings so fraught with phallicism. Then we saw the Vuillards—the marvelous panels—and the awful Cézanne “seasons,” which confirms me in my dislike of much Cézanne.
JULY 21, 1975 Versailles looked like a Frith painting of a holidaymaking— Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath. Enormous blue buses passing with tourists, dozens of buses like a logjam in the Kennebec. Africans, all sorts, selling heaps of goods laid out on clothes over the cobbles. Anthills broken open— what word descriptive?—of people—all agawk, agape. Horrid. We sped away through the quiet streets of Versailles (so secret a village) having circled paths in the park.
JULY 22, 1975 We went away to the Alcazar theater, so close to that described by Colette, so a part of that English music-hall life I knew in 1937 and in those vaudeville days in New York, and at one with my Grossinger years. But this was witty, lavish, ribald, talented—sometimes to genius—and above all joyous. The cancan in its Lautrec number made me drop a tear for my long-ago youth; the opening with the waiters made me drop a tear. Between tears I roared with laughter, was wide eyed and open mouthed at the exuberance, the gaiety— especially of the mad-mad waiters taking off the “artistes;” the Viennese waltzing—yards of tulle and lifts and swiveling; a soprano who elongated in her crinolines when she soared her scales; the capsule past of the musical with a black drag queen doing a superlative “Bill” while two male waiters wailed, fell sobbing upon one another; the grand finale (in a very long show of many finales) in which the whole company went Latin American and all sorts of other rhythmic wild, while cascades of rose petals, confetti, colored streamers, and huge balloons snowed into the audience; and—oh—the great snowstorm which descended upon one huge, mincing transvestite, who then kicked mountains of it into the audience, which sat there feathered thickly and roaring with laughter. There were even doggies.
The necropolis feeling of Paris comes because so many of the beautiful buildings are no longer used for their original purpose. There is no real life, no living in them. Where once huge families rose up in the mornings, lay down in the nights, ate, voided, loved, hated, did accounts, talked servant problems and steel blades, jewels and fans and foolishness and shared eternity—now commerce, a life for which these buildings were not made, from which they stand apart. Will the [high-rise] Défense quarter become this too? It will have a shorter life. When architecture became flat-topped boxes, our world was ended, this new world came into being, a debased world of machines and heartlessness. Therefore the Alcazar show and the necropolis beauty of this city are so wrenchingly poignant.
JULY 23, 1975 At the intersection of the rue St. Honoré and the rue Cambon—suddenly Federico trotting along, neat in blue, but plain and a little wan. He was carrying a wild plaid carrier bag:
“Where have you been, Federico?”
“My bank.”
“What do you have in that bag, Federico?”
“Eggies.”
We were astonished to hear that he had, obviously, found eggies in his bank—nest-eggies? Then he drew, from this quite ordinary sack, life-size eggs of [solid] sapphire, ruby matrix (“Ugly,” he said, “but…”)—Fabergé. He has two hundred of these “eggies.
”
JULY 24, 1975 Across Paris in the burnished gold of evening—the Corot light—to Susan [Sontag] and Nicole [Stéphane],8 who live in what Denyse [Dreyfus Harari] calls “such a dull, bourgeois neighborhood. How could they!” But the difference: They live with a great personal style—free; Denyse lives luxuriously, guilty of her money and privilege. Nicole (James-Henri de Rothschild's daughter) seems to have none of this. Her sister Margot is disturbed—but by what? “It's very typical, very French, this best-friend-being-your-sister,” said Susan, and her under-voice was tired and tinged by a little sediment of resentment and worn patience.
Nicole is plumply beautiful; Susan, lean and wildly beautiful with writing her book (On Photography), which warms her like a constant fever. She has that fever-worn, bony beauty. “Nicole is the most loving, patient, kind woman. She gives everything, but sometimes she can't help just turning the screw, pressing in the needle,” said Susan, when at dinner Nicole urged her to take a week to make a movie about Portugal. The former garden pavilion of Bébé Goldschmidt-Rothschild now houses Nicole—her floor with mullioned, trompe l'oeiled cupboards and some pretty Dutch paintings, Cocteau's drawing of her, a small Louise Abbéma portrait of Sarah Bernhardt with lust in it,9 comfy furniture, distinguished odd chairs “from a gondola. They were my grandmother's.” A pretty dining room. A large living room, looking out into a curtain of green. Up a ladderlike stair is Susan's floor, workmanlike, many books, piles of papers on the floor. “Each pile is a photographer. I really don't look at them, but they give me confidence.”