by Leo Lerman
Stage light strengthened Maria's features. Her myopia gave her movement a little mystery, even majesty. In opera—with its implied larger-than-even-the-largest life—this objectifying of movement, this ritualization of movement is even in domestic tragedy necessary. Maria's great art was that she could, as an actress, take this grandeur, this nobility of movement (as abstract a regality and beauty as seen in the maidens on the portico of the Erectheum) and make it as intimate as one's own tears and despairs. Maria onstage was the conduit between epic passion and despairs, ironies and everyday personal upheavals. She immortalized them for her beholders. She made beholders participants in the gigantic tumults she endured on stage. No one ever wanted to “protect” Maria. She exuded the strength of certainty, of intense and positive passion. There was nothing negative about her. She was definite in her likes, dislikes, and, most deeply, in what she felt about herself.
Maria had no great or profound intellect. She was intelligent—even shrewd—but none of this mattered, since she was a genius, and a genius is deep, in touch with the basic laws which govern our nature. A genius of the theater reveals those laws to us—the dynamics of passion and hilarity. A genius powerfully illuminates the mysteries of our being—while reminding us of our transience. This is why ballet (dance) is more touching than theater, why some song is more persistently touching than acted, non-operatic performance. The singer's career, the dancer's (which is the most poignant) are, by their very nature, more devastating than the actor's.
APRIL 17, 1979 When I was about seventeen, I fell in love with Elinor Wylie's verses. So much so that later I copied out her Collected Poems, since I could not afford to buy the book. I decided to write a “life” of E.W. and, because I knew nothing about either writing such a book or getting it published, I plunged into the Forty-second Street library and set to work all summer long to discover and write down everything I could find about E.W. This led me to the Gotham Book Mart, where I saw, on the left wall, a framed photograph of my divinity. After several worshipful visits (I bought nothing, since I had not money), I courageously asked the tousle-haired, small demon of a woman in this bookshop whether I could buy the photograph. “Yes,” she said, “for five dollars.” So off I went to earn the money, which I did in Best [department store] or Sarnoff-Nederlander. When I returned to the Gotham Book Mart, the woman squawked with laughter and said, “I wouldn't sell that to you…. Maybe for $15 or $25 … maybe never.” That woman was the literary doyenne Frances Steloff I loathed her.
Over time I went into the Gotham Book Mart rarely. She represented Cruelty to the Young. Several times Richard tried to buy the E.W. photograph for me as a birthday or Christmas present, but always F. S. scorned him. Then, last week, I needed a copy of Praz's The Romantic Agony (since I am trying to get together my Maria Callas [article]). So, I rang Andreas Brown [now owner], and during our talk he said something like why didn't I come in, and I told him about my E.W. picture. That afternoon I found the E.W. photograph waiting for me here. She is now on my worktable—all mine.
NOTE: Journal entries become sparse until Leo and Gray's annual arrival in Venice.
JOURNAL • june 25, 1979 • venice My father in later life was, in outline, a testimony to my mother's rich, Jewish cooking and baking, but at the time of my birth Sam was, apparently, a sensual man given to sudden spurts of unexpected energy, as revealed by family snapshots and by Rita Glasberg:56 “Sam was a nice-looking young man with a good figure and happy way with life. Sam loved to laugh, to dance, to sing, to drink, to eat. And he certainly went on a tear the night you were born!”
My father (whose father had opened a small paint-supply shop on Second Avenue), having been summoned from a house-painting job in Long Branch, stood drunk and waiting at the foot of the stair, the main spine of this house, to hear news of my birth, and when at last, on this quiet Saturday evening, he did hear a great bustle and a silence, his wife's desperate screams stilled, suddenly, he tore off his overalls, rushed to a parlor window, and stood naked for all to behold, shouting wildly into 107th Street, “I have a son! I have a son!”
Grandpa Goldwasser, on the way to his Saturday evening lodge meeting, ignored his naked, exulting son-in-law in the parlor window and, accompanied by his two eldest sons (one a deaf-mute), made off into the night. Nothing interfered with his Saturday Lodzer True Brothers weekly meetings and their subsequent pinochle games.
JULY 5, 1979 The departure [from the Gritti] of Valentina Cortese: The Actress.57 She [appearing] as the most old-fashioned, silent-movie star, based on les grandes vedettes of the nineteenth century, a real Lubitsch departure. Endless pages and porters and retainers bearing Vuitton bags of more sizes and shapes than ever existed before they were born for this moment; a (fake) leopard skin enormous pillow; a heavily furred coat; capes and shawls of dun and brilliance; armloads of flowers; a dog—shaggy, mysterious, his eyes under deep bangs, but determinedly independent; the two retainers—a vulgar frizzy blonde, very Bronx but heavy around the throat with an enormous golden and ponderous version of a charm bracelet, and then a quiet, severely (gray) coiffed woman in a white-dotted blue silk dress and a modified toque; the cicisbeo [gallant]—or lover—the man whose shoulders and back V.C. so expertly and persistently massaged at lunch, dapper in a pale suit, spruce handkerchief in breast pocket, portfolio under left arm … The blonde, the gray, and the lover all built up tension by running into the hotel and out. Finally, somehow he giving the impression that he was in full anticipatory movement while standing in one point-of-vantage place. So everyone, including a great part of the Gritti staff, waited, eyes on the main entrance.
The vedette then swept upon us—not from the expected exit, but from the bar door, this route giving her a complete cross, in full view of not only the Gritti, but the opposite shore of the Grand Canal and so a considerable section of Venice. She swooped—lavishing smiles of concern and shyness and gratitude—her whole panoply of “don't please notice me I can't bear it, this adoration, but”—very Miss Piggy—”if you don't I can't bear it even more.” She was swathed in bright yellow draperies, patterned in scarlet and green, garments sweeping on the boards of the terraces, shawls deeply fringed, wisps of this and that, heavy gold and turquoise jewelry, a heavy scarf holding her together, tied under her chin, the edge just above her eyes forming a bandeau and lending a silent-screen siren touch—and all of this topped by a souvenir de Venise straw boater (the typical gondolieri hat, the scarlet band stamped in gold “Venezia”). She did not exactly wave, but she somehow gave illusion that she was waving a sweet, somewhat despairing good-bye, pervaded with a promise of bright return, and then loped—broken-winged—off to be literally borne into the boat, now stacked with her luggage, and so disappeared from view into the little cabin—her dark eyes self-deprecating, while her lips parted to display a radiant triumph of dental art. We, of course, literally and heartily applauded this wonderful show and felt vacant when it ended. She must be a perfect Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard.
JULY 8, 1979 A heated discussion, at the Albrizzi, about “bluestockings.” Susan [Sontag] crying out that this is always pejorative. Susan jumps onto the back of an idea, a point, a passing remark—breaking the back, and then stamping the broken bones and flesh into shards and scraps. Susan is all reason, lined with a sort of self-passion, as certain tough fabrics are backed with other fabrics, perhaps of a more tender substance. Puss says that Susan is obsessed with me. I see that she is starstruck in an old-fashioned movie magazine way. She went on worrying this—as she does—crying out in deep, even profound, rage against abuse of women writers. “I've been intelligent since I was a child,” she said last night, “so I don't need anyone to tell people that I'm a bluestocking…. It can't mean anything else but that I'm being classed as a woman and because of being a woman, a freak … to be called a bluestocking because women aren't supposed to be intelligent… so it's freakish to be and so you're a bluestocking…. That's shit.” When I asked about “a maiden lady,” Susan was equally scornf
ul about that. She carries herself away to the point of pedantry, while Nicole sits or moves quietly—a silvery, pale gold presence wrapped in a kind of lunar sadness…. Susan reveres Sarah Bernhardt. Susan doesn't even greet anyone, but comes right into a room and makes for an object and touches it. Susan's obsession to touch—even she comments on it.
SEPTEMBER 4, 1979 • NEW YORK CITY The Kissingers' dinner for the Sinatras—Frank Sinatra's face puffed as though he's been taking cortisone. Those famous, shock-blue eyes now pig-points, and the sexy, boyish, clean-cut, jagged features obliterated, save in what memory restores (memory, the great restorer) in a shiny, artificially healthy roundness. Mrs. [Barbara Ann] Sinatra—big, blond, controlled blustery. At least ten ambassadors. To Nancy's right, Frank Sinatra, and to her left the Israeli ambassador. At Henry's table— [Robert] Strauss.58 Henry's diligently coy, constant self-commendations. The usual Henry speeches and toasts—welcoming to Frank Sinatra, an exegesis about Strauss—were cut short by Nancy shouting across the room: “Henry, do we want coffee served here or in the living room?” Everybody immediately crowded out of the dining room.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1979 Momma and Maebelle's birthdays [today]—Momma clutching the [customary age-plus-one] $91 I gave, became almost totally rational! Money in the hand seems to do this to the senile and deranged. I want to know more about this curious manifestation. How the blistering black hates pour from Momma's aged lips—so much lava exploding from her hidden, formerly protected deeps—all the sludge and long-buried monsters. Death is not the enemy; the enemy is senility.
Truman on the blower, this past week—his voice, beneath his laughter… his laughter is like a continual high-strung bridge over a vast, bottomless morass. He rings to report progress: “I'm writing you the most beautiful …” That sort of progress-promise. He said: “I'm putting my whole life on the line.” All of this makes me intensely nervous for him.
LITTLE T RETURNS An old man shuffled into my office at Vogue. … A scourged old man. Emaciated. His good clothes had gone bad on him. But his huge straw hat sat blithely on his head, a remembrance of Southern big-house life he, as a small unwanted boy, had never known. His blue eyes darted this way, that way: They never came to rest…. An after-midnight face. Life had had this man. He had also had life. And the fight wasn't finished—not yet.
“Little darling … my own little darling …” His voice came from some far and arid place. “I want Irving Penn to photograph me, and I want you to publish the picture in Vogue. I want this veeeeerrrry, veeeeeerrrry much.” This was Truman in a frenzy, his voice high and squeaking with anxiety. “And I'll write a piece to go with it, and, yes, little dear, I'll be interviewed.” The hysterical old man vanished. Little T materialized. “Yes, Myrt, Marge always knows what's going on in your little ole connivin' head. Now, if you will please excuse me, I will just have to leave this room for a minute. Which way is it?” Exit Little T doing a time step. During the hour he was with me, he exited some twelve times. (VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 1987)
JOURNAL • September 13, 1979 Truman yesterday afternoon taping. He looks as if he had been in a dreadful fire and come out of it scorched within himself and without, his face a wonderfully reproduced facsimile of Little T as a young man, but scarred—only the eyes blazingly alive. He is a walking death inhabited by a coruscating, willful spirit determined to remain vividly, even violently alive until it has fulfilled its destiny of being a great, even the greatest master of fictional-reality of our time. “Since I was seventeen I feel as if I lived in an electric light”—a blazing electric lightbulb, of course. He said, “I really have very little ego, but a great deal of pride.” His visit was tumultuous and deeply upsetting.
TRUMAN'S GIFT So Irving Penn took his picture … and his piece came in. I read it. I called T. “It is wonderful. It's the best thing you've written in years. You made me cry. And you made me feel hopelessly full of hope.” “I know. The end. That sure enough made you cry. Wham! The beginning: ‘When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.' Then that end … yes siree: ‘I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards and, of course, the whip God gave me.' “ (No one, absolutely no one, ever read Truman's prose better than he did himself, excepting Geraldine Page, and she was acting in A Christmas Memory.)
“How much do you want for this marvelous piece?”
“Nothing. Not one penny. It's a present to you. I will not take a penny.”
So I sat there, feeling guilty, hearing that flirty-skirty voice in the all-night cafeteria so many fraught years ago…. (VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 1987)59
JOURNAL • DECEMBER 8, 1979 The torture of not writing is worse than the rigors of writing.
The “Fashions of the Hapsburgs” [Costume Institute] gala, on Monday last at the Metropolitan Museum—A perfect moment came when the whole lavish crowd was traipsing the long, narrow, grenadier-scarlet carpet away from the wretched dinner, a quarter-mile path between black-tied musicians, who stood on either side effusing waltzes. So potent was this magic, that the diners swirled from the carpet, waltzing among the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan sarcophagi, broken-nosed statues, and dead dancers now immobilized in marble, in terra-cotta—a dazzling, unexpected moment. The most beautiful party of the year, with memories of long-ago parties. The reopening of the museum after the war, with ranks of royals standing beneath their remote ancestors in the medieval and Renaissance halls, when suddenly the lights blew— blackout—and when they suddenly blazed again, a moment of terror clearly frozen in time on every royal face. Then relief composed those history-worn faces into sureness—not yet—not yet. You could smell the terror. You could hear the exhalation of relief.
DECEMBER 24, 1979 “I have known White Russians. I have known Red Russians. But I have never before known a Yellow Russian.” Diana Vreeland about Alex Liberman.
FEBRUARY 2, 1980 Irving Penn about Susan Sontag: “She can't see. She has no eye. She sees flat.” Her book on photography: “She is not visual,” says Irving, in his quiet, slightly inflected voice, a voice of hill country—no, a country swelling into calm roundlings…. There are no heights to scale in Irving's voice … sometimes little hillocks of exasperation, with not even a hint of defunct volcanoes.
My life conceived as drama—since I have always existed in a theater of my imagination—so each person in my life has been a character. Indeed, entrances and exits of each of the important persons in my life have been theatrical experiences. Ela (her entrance having been built up, as we say in the theater, by Laci) throwing open the door to Laci's room and catapulting me into all of my later days, instantly plunging me into the nonstop fantastic drama of her life … Mina, in gray chiffon, seated on a sofa in Lincoln's Nineteenth Street house, asking could we drop her at the Ambassador… Marlene in Ela's upstairs East Seventy-third Street flat, on the bed in her khaki army fatigues… Rut, Hellmut, and Fritz crying out: “Ela! Ela! We are here!” and leaping over someone on the floor… Richard, in brown suede shoes, in the greenroom at Feagin's… Puss, in blazer, by Robert's drawing table … Maggie Henning, fat, rosy—in bobby socks?—very enormous Shirley Temple, striding along the corridor of Public School 89, Newtown Annex … Eugenia Halbmeier in the Jackson Heights movie house at Dracula … Alice … Evan-geline … Robert all making entrances… and some making exits—or disappearing: The crimson rose in the gutter after the hearse bore Ela away … So, my life as theater.
MARCH 12, 1980 I loathe Alex, at times actually hate him, although we have a deep sibling tie—a knotted cord binds us. He bares his lack of understanding of essential American ways and his dirty-man feral instincts, our “friend.”60 Grace Mirabella [now editor in chief of Vogue] has less culture than Alex does; he has almost too much—and most of it French, in the traditional Russian style.
MARCH 27, 1980 I rang up Anita [Loos] to make her laugh over the account in the appalling Errol Flynn “life” of how that jolly joker loosed a raccoon in the Brown Derby [restaurant] and how
that raccoon ran up [actress] Kay Francis's leg. What became of the beast is not told. Then I told Anita how relentlessly flaccid Tennessee's Fitzgeralds play [Clothes for a Summer Hotel] was. She said, “But the Fitzgeralds were so boring. Oh, they were boring—and so narcissistic. They thought they'd invented it. And that Zelda—she was always taking off her clothes—and you know—she didn't have a thing to show—not a thing….”
NOTE: As their summertime European holiday approached, Gray contracted chicken pox. They canceled the first leg of their trip and flew directly to Venice at the beginning of July, then after three weeks went to London.
JOURNAL • june 26, 1980 Poor Puss—just now beginning to come out of his tunnel of chicken pox misery. Horrid, devastating, useless agonies. Two weeks lost from our holidays, and the only rewards (but such a bounty!) being together (even in agony this is the most glorious delight) and I reading aloud [Robert K.] Massie's to-be-published life of Peter the Great—a book written like a silent movie, but with such gusto, such devotion, and out of such prodigious research and awareness of what a reader should get that it is irresistible. Peter the Great is so much like Lincoln Kirstein.
JUNE 30, 1980 This morning I looked at the great cliff of the Gulf & Western building to see the sunrise reflected on it. I must make the most of what I have: a tower of an office block in place of cliffs and mountains, a single ailanthus stripling rooted on the edge of an apartment-house terrace in place of a copse of trees, a little piping city bird in place of the flocks we fed at 1453. I must make my own nature. The green that springs to life on the roof of the theater below our windows, a green which nobody has planned or planted.
JULY 5, 1980 • VENICE Here we are in our room at the Gritti, after lunching on the terrace with the majestic chords of Basilica Santa Maria della Salute opposite. “I could look at it forever,” said tired Gray—invitations, floral tributes, fruit offerings, and genteel hullabaloo. My “good” leg seems to give out now. I did not make a noble entrance. I had to creep like a monster onto the dock. But we are safe in our beds, going to no parties, and I am relieved. Venice preserved—and that means unchanged.