The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JULY 29, 1975-VENICE The moment we walked along the quai to the Gritti [hotel]'s launch we felt as if we had been here always. We sit on the terrace, under the blue-and-white striped awning off the bar. The terrace life grows thicker. If we sit long enough, we will see everyone.

  After our long day's enchanting rest, yesterday we went down and found Gore [Vidal]—big, complacent, pompous, assured that his every platitude is an apothegm, a witty wisdom. But despite this lifelong dry rot, he has charm and a certain attractiveness. He said that he didn't eat much, but drank a lot. “I'm an alcoholic….” Later, when [New York Review of Books editor] Barbara Epstein joined him (they are motoring to Salzburg together), he said, “The reason alcoholics are so boring is that they are always thinking of the next drink.” Of course, he ultimately asked about T and said, “Truman hasn't written anything in years, and what's more, he hasn't read anything in years.”

  At a certain moment, Puss passed me a note on a paper coaster: “C. P. Snow behind you.” So, I animated the flow and finally turned to [his wife] Pamela Hansford Johnson.10 After introductions, I said: “But you have written such scenes on terraces, and that handicaps you, since your scenes are so much more witty than our moment here.” She sat gimlet eyed, sallow, dark browed, plump cheeked beneath implacable hair—a woman of spare—almost no—words (never a one between them), with the look of a bone from which all sustenance has been gnawed. Actually, she seems more moorscape than any other image. Her lord (his face Edna May Oliver's blown into a balloon11) rose with instant affability—a courteous man. We made the civilities and off they went, with hopes (the lord's and mine) that we would talk again and assurances that we all loved the Trillings, “Such good friends…” Meanwhile, Caroline Kennedy (rather pretty now that she has unlumped) and a traveling chum ran in and out like demented animals. Later, in the night, they ran (the chum barefooted) out into the gondola end of the pavement that side of the Gritti—their long American hair streaming behind—but a Secret Service man and plainclothes police drove them back into the hotel. Puss, going up to bed, talked to Caroline, who he says is just like all girls that age— vernacular, chewing-gummy, overflowing with adolescent energy and certain uncertainty.

  JULY 30, 1975 • VENICE

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • augusta, maine

  Venice has been radiant. A glorious sojourn—with weather such as one has in childhood quite without even noticing it, but which as one grows older becomes a gift. We hired a car and spent most of a day at the Villa Maser. La Contessa was away (she and her sister), but preparations had been made for us, and we were given the “house” to lurk in and around by ourselves with the doggies. Well, it is the most beautiful Palladio house and church, and best of all is the quality of life which the Lulings (She's a Volpi) live in it—so many wonderful collections—and, on a richer more enormous scale, so much of what I've accumulated.

  JOURNAL • AUGUST 3, 1975 • MONTE CARLO Last night, the town, especially the Hotel de Paris and the crowd filling the opera house (a riot of decoration) was intensely carpetbagger. I think of Maria and her life here—her joys and her miseries and how her career really ended when Elsa Maxwell (that round, sick, archly painted clown's face, the face of a procuress) came into her life—with her party, her perverse smile, and her passion—black steel rods from her dark eyes. That moment [in 1956] was the end of the Callas glory.

  AUGUST 4, 1975 Yesterday's almost daylong visit with Lesley [Blanch], in that villa above the tracks [in Menton]. Lesley's made her little house into a Turkish corner—it is hidden in vines, creepers, crushing green growths, and flowering shrubberies—heavy with jasmine, jacaranda, scented geraniums, and that fragrance peculiar to Mediterranean places—a mixture of olive oil, sun heat, vegetable growth, and salt sea. “The most polluted bit of sea on the entire coast, my dears,” Lesley cries. She is unchanged—her head swathed in muslins, her body robed in mysterious garments from Afghanistan and Egypt and Persia and Tuareg countries, and her cupboards bulging with splendors from the Near East—robes given by sheikhs after passion, robes bought from the backs of workers in kitchens and fields and palaces, robes scrounged in souks. “Oh, my dears, I don't know why I'm alive—the life I've led. Why aren't I riddled with dread diseases?” Lesley cries, her retrospective raptures those of an intrepid English amoureuse who has achieved repeated exotic triumphs. All so Lesley—and her constant stream of talk—complaints, conjectures, gossip, thought, romances … now the fill is Pierre Loti—her work in progress.12

  In her “extra” kitchen a huge fridge gleams, un cadeau from [French banker] Pierre David-Weill: “With whom I had a little do in New York. You know Nicole was mad about him, they were lovers for years, and he gave her everything—that fortune and that house and that grotto and that impeccable green lawn … everything. She adored him. My do was while she was ill in New York. I was there … and I knew that this was just a little … Well, when I was going away, and it was at an end, he said, ‘You are a very impractical woman, and instead of a brooch, I am going to give you a refrigerator—the biggest and the best.' At that time, they were impossible to get in France—and the duty! So it was arranged to send it diplomatic—and that all went wrong. One day a small child rushed up, from the poste in Roquebrune, crying that the douane [customs officer] in Marseilles wanted me. So off I went, and they said an enormous shipment had arrived for me from America, and the duty was $600. I didn't have that money, and how to explain to Romain?13 Oh—my dears… So, I went away and thought and thought, and finally I went back to the douane and wept and told him, through my tears, that it was a cadeau pour l'amour, and he smiled and said ‘Mais non …' and understood. So, there was 100 francs to pay—and then the trauma, my dears, of getting it up the mountains and into the house, where it stood, dead center in the kitchen—for months—and when Romain came, all he said was that he needed ice—and never even noticed it!” The most contemporary Maupassant I have ever heard.

  AUGUST 18, 1975 • NEW YORK CITY Last night in the Magic Pan [restaurant] we found Martha [Graham] and her dark amanuensis, Ron Protas. Martha looks frail—a flame burning to death-thin brightness—but she is overflowing with that intensity peculiar to herself. She has projects to outlast another lifetime. “History is the garment of God,” she said to me: “That's Blake, I think…. ‘A seed must dissolve in the earth, fall apart before it begins to give life again.' You know who said that to me? You mustn't tell—that's Doris Duke [the reclusive heiress]. She takes class sometimes. She's been doing it for years….” She enveloped me in her radiance, her blazing self shutting out the world, while keeping it all within our luminous pavilion. When we came out, there she was, looking up at the moon from the filthy Manhattan pavement.

  AUGUST 26, 1975 T called yesterday to regale me with his future movie-star career. “I'll be dressed [for Murder by Death] by Dunhill—three outfits, and I'm going to Canada for a week to get in place. There's a marvelous place there. I'm a real star. How's my sweet, darling Gray?” Also he told me that Esquire will publish the section of “Answered Prayers” we turned down. T was being adorable.14

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1975 Avedon's opening [at the Marlborough Gallery]— Hundreds of marginal persons and many looking like stars but anonymous. Avedon's entrance, with mother and Nachschleppers [hangers-on], then comes from Avedon, “Where's Louise Dahl-Wolfe?” as through the Red Sea of wide eyes he cut (followed by [photographer] Milton Green) bellowing, “I was her assistant!”15 When Avedon got to Louise, at the far end of the main room, he clutched her to his bosom, deftly hiding her face there, while cameras clicked and other lens “stars,” now safely entombed in books, looked sourly on. This was a “star” performance—the vedette on the crest, seeking, vociferously, the nearest, safe, living legend, and tailed by a fallen star, one not on the crest. The exhibit (really the “show”) tells that Avedon hasn't a shred of humanity in him. I mean each person photographed is maimed, sick, ugly. There is no warmth here, certainly no nobility. Again the camera lies—or at b
est tells a smidgen of the truth.

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1975 Visit to Tilly Losch on Saturday afternoon. Tilly dying. Does she know? She says that she is, but she then says, “I'm regressing, not improving….” She laughs a lot, is very Tilly. I think of Rut, and how when Tilly was mentioned, Rut softened, as if the color of delight was tingeing her entire being. Tilly talked about how Richard Strauss had discovered her, a small child at the barre in Vienna, and how she had progressed from helping to carry on the veils (Salome) to Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater and so to Cochran.16

  So the echoes of Rut and Ela went on, and Tilly sipped a little borscht that Puss had made for her, and we went away leaving her all alone. I was so deeply overcome—beyond depression—that I did not go to [publicist Earl] Black-well's party for Liza [Minnelli]. I could not. Here was the past, the smell of it, the feel of it, in those huge cat eyes of Tilly's so world famous years ago.

  OCTOBER 18, 1975 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • paris

  Marlene is here in the hospital and asked would I call. Her choices are: an operation during which she could die (plastic hips) or three months in traction and remain crippled the rest of her days.17 Meanwhile Rudi [Sieber, after a stroke] is paralyzed in California. He can speak a few German words and cannot move at all! Awesome. When I rang Marlene in the hospital, she had her little-girl voice and tried to act “well” and sounded deathly bright.

  JOURNAL • October 31, 1975 My telephone “chat” with C. Z. Guest [socialite garden columnist]: “Those girls were fools to tell Truman everything. He told me everything they told him. What did they expect? I've traveled with him over the country—I've never told him anything….”18

  NOVEMBER 3, 1975 [New York Times writer] Charlotte Curtis lunched with Alex and me at La Côte Basque. She knew Jackie Onassis at Vassar, and two of Charlotte's roommates knew her very well. Charlotte's summing up of J.O.: “Rapacious.”

  I fell, crossing Forty-fifth Street, walking with Alex. Me: “Did I tear my suit? It's my favorite suit!” Alex: “Don't do this to me. It's bad for my heart…. It's been so wonderful working with you….”

  NOVEMBER 11, 1975 Lionel Trilling's funeral in an academically filled Columbia chapel. A smiling grad student led us through a secret passage into the old campus and so by an American medieval stair into the chapel. The penetrating stench of dying flowers—chrysanthemums … the plain coffin under the pale blue, white-bordered, and crown-blazoned pall of Columbia— a last royal vestige … the assembly of Trilling friends, relatives, colleagues, and the discreet, the educated air of this assembling. Only those who knew the individual rancors and rigors could see the visible signs on faces, in movements. Much of the service in Hebrew, a cantor singing beautifully settings I have never heard. Later, Diana said, “Li and I wrote that service out a year ago. He found the texts: I wrote it. Then he shrugged….” She said this sitting in their bedroom at the foot of the “fantasy” bed they had both occupied so many years. In the crematorium, a moment when Diana took the pall from the coffin, folded it neatly, and gave it to James Lionel. This was, I felt, the silent commemoration of a Victor in Academic Wars. Then Diana and James Lionel walked swiftly up the brief aisle and out of the little room—very like Adam and Eve going from Eden in the Masaccio in Florence.

  NOVEMBER 12, 1975 James Lionel on the blower: “She's organizing everything. She's so busy organizing—and me most.” His air of exasperated amusement at Diana. I suggested that she be given New York City to organize.

  NOVEMBER 16, 1975 At Momma's. How sharp she is: As I peered covertly to see which cheese-and-onion sandwich had the most filling, Momma said, “That one.” We had the same deeply interested look.

  DECEMBER 1, 1975 When Laurence Olivier told Alfred Lunt, over the blower, that he (Olivier) was seventy, Alfred responded, “Well, now it's time to take up Spanish dancing.” When Alfred told Noël Coward that he was going blind and asked Noël what, if he were going blind, he would do first, Noël said, “I'll have to sleep on it.” The next morning he came down to breakfast and said, “Alfred, the first thing to do is not to have whitebait on a white plate.” The savagery of this joshing and the relentless chin-up.

  DECEMBER 31, 1975 When next I write, that will be in 1976. I have had a long silence. I do not know why, but now I must continue. Remember— December 24— the unexpected dizzy spell. This week—the clot. So I must continue. Tilly died the day before Christmas. She was the last of the really vie de scandale ladies. I sit on the side of my bed listening to The Gypsy Baron and the finale of Fledermaus and now will make the list of flowers for Christmas, and telephones [calls] for New Year's—so pitifully small. Marlene's being chums again. Jerry Lerman hasn't rung in two months. Little T mentioned me on “national” television. I have Miss Mapp suspicions about that.19 So life goes—but I must complete my book before I go with life. So off to [the ballets] Lilac Garden and Spectre de la Rose and Woody [Allen]'s party and the Moth-erthalers' [Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler] and so into 1976.

  I said to Paula Laurence: “If you don't write a book, I'll put on your tombstone, ‘Guess Who's Here!' “ Merriment.

  FEBRUARY 9, 1976 I must do something about this prison [Vogue]. It is becoming airless. I enjoy the writing—such as it is—when I am writing—and even planning, but I am stultifying. The deepest places are becoming arid, parched. What can I do? I knew that I was selling myself into some sort of servitude, but I did not know the price. I now begin to know the price. I can pay it still, but not for long. What can I do?

  MARCH 1, 1976 Marlene yesterday—a hank of hair, swollen legs, walking with a walker from which hangs a Saint Laurent bag. Too awful. “You never know anything,” she said, “about anyone….” This is the total of all that glamour, that experience?

  MAY 14, 1976 Paul Bonner [director of Condé Nast Books] recalled today that Alec Woollcott had once told his mother that she had to go and see Ela, who was “desolate” in a hospital. His mother didn't like Ela “much,” but she went—and returned wrathful: “Desolate! Einstein was sitting there. Casals had just left. Toscanini was on his way in….”

  NOTE: After five years of delay, Leo underwent cataract surgery on his right eye in July 1976. The procedure dramatically improved his perception of color and distance.

  JOURNAL • july 10, 1976 The semi-stillness of this hospital night—my little radio delicately diffusing quiet eighteenth-century music—the nearby low chatter of nurses and aides—early morning shufflings and scufflings—four a.m., the dying hour. The tide goes out, carrying with it. A golden, puffy biscuit of a moon in the southern sky. A nurse, with the friendly ghastliness of a skeletal head, came in. “No sleep,” she stated. She had little English, but she was full of grisly, amiable smiles. [Private-duty] Nurse Coles, having never read Henry James, plunged into my little paper-covered copy of The American and devoured it. She said, “I never get to meet this class of people on a case.”

  7:50 A.M. All quiet. Stockinged and socked, my legs are still good-looking— such is vanity! But all of my “good” features have been walloped—mouth, teeth, eyes—even nose dented. So a little vanity about legs—although vari-cosed and blood-clotted—that little vanity is permitted!

  JULY 12, 1976 I know the operation happened to me, but it is as if it had not happened to me. I can hear the remarkable characters talking as they snipped and stitched—and I lie here bandaged—but, as in so much of my life, it partook of me. I know it. I was “in being” through it—and in some state of extension. Perhaps paper is a good image: I write upon this paper; that experience wrote upon me.

  AUGUST 5, 1976 Meeting Francis Robinson, last night—he seemed tight (and was). He's lost (temporarily) his fiendish laughter. He said, “I can't write a truthful book. Why, if I wrote the truth about Bing—the publisher's lawyers wouldn't let them publish. Of all the people I've known, he was the most evil. He was pure evil.” Francis said this with a detachment born of experiencing this evil, a detachment that was horror frozen into a
semblance of detachment. But I knew this the first time I saw Bing. I came home and told Puss, “I have just seen a truly dreadful man.”20

  AUGUST 23, 1976 “Rudolf, this is where we throw the baby to the wolves.” Martha Graham while the photograph was being taken for “What Becomes a Legend Most?”21

  NOVEMBER 1, 1976 Saturday lunch at Jane Gunther's. All summer joy in an autumn afternoon swept clean of clouds by great gusts—and tumbles and seesaws of laughter. Then the doorbell rang and in came an unidentifiable woman. “Valentina [Schlee] seems changed,” Puss and I thought. She had changed: She was Garbo—the only (?) authentic legend left. Garbo is beautiful (or we thought her beautiful) when she laughs—throwing her head back and becoming, suddenly, the essence of laughter, golden laughter, pure joy before any of us knew of pollution, contamination. She has abrupt shifts— almost like an actor who has been directed to speak thoughts in a character submerged until this moment. She murmured to herself: “I don't talk to anybody…. I don't talk over anything…. So I am forgetting…. I forget the past.” She is full of wide-eyed incredulities and amazements. She is sometimes so similar to Marlene, in a kind of German down-to-earth impregnable confidence. And she is permeated by self-raillery. She seems almost always poised for flight—solitary—so solitary. She was dressed in men's clothes, very good, tans and browns, outdoor clothes made for walking. She walks everywhere. She is startled at things we all know. Example: The Trade Center. She had instant visions of Indians trading their pelts and baskets.

  GLIMPSES OF GARBO If I can manage to say something that amuses this Swede, she will become the Garbo we have all loved. She is addicted to asking what I think are foolish questions. She says that she walks an enormous amount, and how long would it take her to walk from her place, East Fifty-second Street, to those new buildings down in the harbor. I do not think for a moment that she does not know how long. She asks questions about places, and I'm sure she knows what those places are. The voice is lovely, quiet, Swedish-inflected—a voice with reservation in it. But when she laughs, everything is there. By and by, it is three or four hours later, and she gets up, goes to the door. We all follow to see her go down the street. She walks off swiftly, a single straight line slightly veering to the left as she fades into the distance. It was laughter that revivified her, that nourished her into being Greta Garbo. It was audiences that nourished Marlene into being the Marlene of legend.