by Leo Lerman
JULY 7, 1980 Mary McCarthy's Venice Observed [1956] preserves in the cookery sense, in a vinegar that she exudes in place of perspiration. Despite her cleverness, even brilliance, this book has no heart, and ultimately reveals Mary, while she opens steely eyes on Venice. Such an ungenerous, chiding book. Mary is a self-afflicted scourge: “Venice is not made to be seen in the round. Venetian architecture, indeed, is stage architecture.” But very few of the sets have been struck.
JULY 12, 1980 Puss says: “Isn't it unlikely that we should be photographed with the sister (Jean Smith) of an assassinated president in a back alley in Venice, along with Adolph Green (“The Prince of Showbiz”), and by his son, Adam?” and then that upon hearing that Maestro's house was “behind there,” Jean Smith should say, “Oh, my cook will be pleased. Did you ever hear of Herva Nelli?” I could not believe my ears: Maestro's favorite (she gave Ela such pain) is Jean Kennedy Smith's cook!61
JULY 20, 1980 Venice is a truly sexy city. During the fireworks, my terror at the cannonading diminished from fingers in my ears to absolutely unterrified enjoyment. The fireworks dyed the canal a flux of lost Victorian colors—those strange-to-our-eyes changeable colors—brazen, burnished, unhealthy colors, which led to greenery-yallery [Art Nouveau] depravities and gaslit sins. (All so much more pleasurable for being “secret,” in the closet.) The new firework color was mauve. Is this a lavender, purple, mauve time again?
All day long the footsteps on the [wooden Redentore] bridge make our room a new setting from the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. After the fireworks, late last night, with Prince Enrico Esterházy and the Paloma Picassos, all of us standing on the [Gritti] terrace (so like a ship's deck) and looking at the great gush and glut of lantern-festooned boats streaming back, we were so like the group of ancien régime personages that, in Pola Negri's Madame DuBarry ([a silent film] seen at the Garlic Opera when I was perhaps six), stood peering out and commenting on the peasantry at their games—cut to the Conciergerie and the guillotine. Why do I remember this so clearly? And the dark woman in the vertically striped, perfectly cut, 1792(?) dress, complete with hat, reading a little book calmly as she was called, turning the page for one last look and then serenely proceeding to her death.
JULY 22, 1980 To Patricia Curtis Vignano and the Barbaro: Almonds and grapefruit juice and so much to see—from the great staircase (up which I crept) to the glorious rooms, specially the Henry James, with the eighteenth-century green lacquer chinoiserie desk on which he wrote The Wings of the Dove; the dim looking glasses; Patricia's grandmother [Mrs. Ralph Curtis] by Sargent, such esprit, never loaned out; the ballroom fantastic under sheets; their Tintoretto is a sweet-faced Madonna and child.
JULY 29, 1980 • LONDON Lord George Weidenfeld, alone, in his library— sprawled, pale, a sort of blancmange, well-cut clothes—but that is only outward. Inward—force, power, wit, anecdotage, self-made, as an ébéniste makes Fine French Furniture, a certain charm, and a cultivated grand seigneur played by a gifted German actor. He talked about his memories, his social life, the secret language by which society signal to one another, his political life, his mother (she is still alive), about his “debt” to me: “You were so kind, always, to me when I was very young. You introduced me to Callas.” He was tired geniality itself. He talked about his life with the Payson woman,62 and the awful Christmases in Manhasset “with mountains of Cartier and Hammacher Schlemmer,” and a Vanderbilt or Whitney cold blue eye or lock of blond hair gleaming through a crevice in the mountains, as they unwrapped presents…. No heart, no love. “But we remained great friends.”
AUGUST 2, 1980 David [Hockney] lives in Pembroke Studios, lost in a private place of gardens and studios. His high-ceilinged (actually two or three stories high) rooms are rowdy with light and color (his free, child-eyed colors), crammed with the detritus of his frenetic life. And since he is working on the three pieces for the Met [Opera] (Parade, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, and L'En-fant et les sortilèges) his big studio is like a brilliant genius child's imagination—huge canvases of ideas for these three.
David is a master showman. He has the music play and he tells his ideas of his production, meanwhile moving the results of his idea about a toy theater, which he has constructed, with a tiny lighting system and all—the envy of any young person mad on the theater. David is soft-spoken, Yorkshire accented, dry humored, twinkle eyed. He moves with a certain precision. He has nanny qualities with his ideas. He talked about his trials with Nureyev (the Russian arrogance and the vulgarity: “He wanted to build a whole set, a nightclub set with a huge stair!”). David intends to have Colette typing away in Parade as an overture—but Cocteau wrote it and Colette, I believe, did not type.
AUGUST 3, 1980 Penelope [Reed] is very decided, very aloud, nowadays, about likes and dislikes: “I hate Proust. Oh, how boring.” This is what worries others, but this is her aging and evolving character, the emotional topography emerging as those unexpected islands propelled from sea or land depths by unseen cataclysms. Penelope—now sixty-seven and a widow of the man she so desperately wanted to marry.
AUGUST 4, 1980 A birthday visit to Rebecca West. She is almost blind, quite deaf, and altogether witty, in a vastness of Laura Ashley, surrounded by tea, scones, and white-frosted little cakes. Rebecca seemed improved over last year, but very brimming and sparkling with gossip, observation, history, personal anecdotage. Her talk is being aboard a speeding coaster, which flashes in and out of tunnels and sometimes leaps a loop and lands you in an unexpected terrain, from which it flies through the air to some cloud-plateau and then off again to a mire, from which it extracts itself and rushes full speed into safety and the station, all wheels revolving triumphantly. Rebecca West bears comparison to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and The Wind in the Willows. She talked vindictively about Jane Gunther and Greta (“Greeta”) Garbo. (How Greeta was fascinated with Egyptian things, and Henry [Andrews] said he would show her the special objects she fancied (from photographs) in the British Museum.63 Garbo said she would walk down the street and he would pick her up, and he said firmly, “I will be waiting here at Claridge's.” So it happened.) Rebecca talked about having to evacuate when the [Irish Republican Army] bombings happened. She talked about how desperate life is here and everywhere and about politics—a real Rebecca splurge.
AUGUST 11, 1980 • NEW YORK CITY A call from Diana Trilling, on Martha's Vineyard and much provoked by Jacques Barzun's marriage to a Texas professor (English) of fifty and about the inequality of women: how older men find younger women to marry—indeed, how women seek out older men. How an older woman can have a lively social life—but marriage or a sex life!!! So on … Diana is rampageous about this.64
MOMMA GOING Two weeks after her ninety-second birthday, and after eight years of tormenting senility, at six o'clock one Indian summer evening my mother told Mary [Callabras], her angelic housekeeper, to take her to “my kitchen.” There she sat in her wheelchair, peering into the whiteness of what had once been a source of her power over her relations and friends—her superb, abundant, and typical cooking. Then she said, “Take me back.” Six hours later, having made up her mind (for even in these last years of mindlessness we suspected her of having a mind), she shut her blue eyes and died. And that, save for my tenuous hold, was the end of the family as a family. Our center had gone. We were no longer a family—merely relations who soon grew to be strangers. (1981)
JOURNAL • October 24, 1980 Long silence, in which Momma died. “Going,” she said, and she went. Every evening at about six, I start for the telephone. This is habit, but she seems to be there, in her flat in Jackson Heights, where the autumn smells as it did when I ambled to and from school, to and from the library, seething with curiosity, plans, and passion. I loved the world. I still love the world. I made Momma's eulogy, and I made everyone laugh and tear, and Momma would have had that look: mingled pride at her achievement and baffled understanding at my achievement. Then she would have said, “That's my Label!”
NOVEMBER 15, 1980 D
iscussion about why Puss doesn't work: “Because we are headed for complete annihilation,” he says. “Don't you understand about annihilation? I don't want to contribute to the debris. That's my choice.” Me: “Then why put drops in my eyes, if we're all doomed?” Puss: “Because I want you to see it.”
DECEMBER 1, 1980 Lillian Hellman, expensively grotesque, seen at lunch in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. She, as her elderly escort led her away, was Pique Dame—malign, a terrible face.
Maria Callas is the only Violetta I have seen who died with her eyes open.
DECEMBER 12, 1980 Ultimately all of this life must be a comedy. It is to avoid the realization that all life is a black comedy that most people take to religion. How much a creator realizes the black comedy of life is the measure of greatness: Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Mozart, Proust, Goethe, and then the poets—in a single explosion of verse (Shelley, Keats). I suspect there can be no “masterpiece” without this realization of life as black comedy. The final irony: Death. I think of Spain and the Spanish temperament, the distillation of this bitter knowledge (which breeds Spanish elegance).
FEBRUARY 2, 1981 Alex, in secrecy, told me that Si [Newhouse] plans to revive Vanity Fair. “Who to be editor?” he asked. “Me!” I blurted…. I felt a surge of youth, vitality … but isn't this too late for me?
NOTE: Leo and Gray went to the White House with Grace Mirabella and Horst to photograph new First Lady Nancy Reagan.
JOURNAL • February 5, 1981 • Washington, d.c. Off we went into the brilliant white light of noon to the White House and Mrs. Reagan, the state rooms looking better than they did when the Fords were there (I never went while the Carters were in residence). The buildup to Mrs. Reagan's entrance. “She'll feel the chill.” So, a roaring fire in the Red Room. “She loves red. That's her color.” Extravagant preparations for Mr. Reagan's “surprise” birthday party. We hear careful planning to meet the early-morning editions.
Mrs. Reagan—everything save her shoes wrong. The Galanos [dress], really cruel, exposing her sixty-year-old flabbiness. (The White House rang to tell us that she has “an upper-arm problem” and she does—also sags under the chin, no figure, no bosom.) Mrs. Reagan widens her eyes into hypnotic hugeness the way she was taught in Hollywood. She takes direction the way a novice star does. She said to Horst: “I'm depending on you to erase the last six months of my life.” When Horst said, asking her to sit on an arm of a chair, “Now you look as though you are at home,” she instantly answered, “That's what I am supposed to be.” She has a useless, vacant laugh—mirthless. “Tomorrow I'm wearing a very old, long, white-beaded dress because Ronny loves it. It's so old I don't even know who made it. “ Everything is according to script. She gave expected smiles and words of pleasure. She said to Horst, “I'm such a great fan of yours,” and somehow implied that she was entirely and trustingly in his hands. She seems an empty vessel—but not one easily filled. She is a poor actress in a four-year starring role. She needs help—scheduled surprise, planned spontaneity. The basic image is moviemaking, and the movie from the start is strictly Grade B.
FEBRUARY 7, 1981 President Reagan is an actor who can work best (perhaps only) from a carefully prepared script, with artfully disposed props, crafty staging. Proof: his “impromptus” for press or a television show—bad. His scripted, staged “economics” message to the nation—superb, his “finest” hour. And this morning, the president and the first lady on the front page of the Washington Post, a gleam and a smile at his four-tier birthday cake, another episode in the Grade B movie, in which we are now all involved. But Ronald Reagan does radiate confidence and agreeableness and gentlemanliness. Mrs. Reagan does glitter with American-woman charm and wide eyes—ever-widening, sherry-colored eyes, ingenuous and appealing for understanding, while promising understanding with her “nice-woman” smile.
FEBRUARY 15, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY Marlene [on the telephone]—old, sick, drinking, penniless, and full of her peculiar Berlin humor. “So, I sold my piano, and I took a $75,000 mortgage on this place, and there's nobody here with whom to rehearse, so I don't get out of bed to walk…. If I could rehearse walking …” Marlene's young-girl voice, slurred by drink, but, suddenly ballooning into a marvelous exhilaration and splintering into roulades and trills— a baroque display—of laughter, all the more joyful because of the darkness beneath it. “Sometimes I think: Why do I hang on? Promise me that when it happens, you'll see that I'm taken down the back way—right into the cellar. I don't want anybody to see me.” Then the voice shrugs. I can see her shoulders shrugging off despair, lifting gloom into a brighter air. No more coq feather disguises, no filmy veils—just her naked will to linger a little longer….
FEBRUARY 28, 1981 Never noted that Mrs. Onassis came to lunch on Wednesday last. Tall, slender as a girl playing a boy in the school play, her dark hair flying in calculated disarray, she suited in perfectly cut narrow pants, a windbreaker-looking jacket—all woodsy-in-winter colors (no, late, late autumn, just before the countryside goes winter white and black). She raced through the Grill Room, swooped down, kissed me…. Not a fork, spoon, what have you, moved in the room (only Bubbles [Sills] caused this silence and suspended animation) as Mrs. O made her swift, apologetic passage. Then she fell into immediate talk. She was interested to hear about Mrs. Reagan and was the White House shabby. But mostly she loved hearing about Lesley Blanch, about books, music, actresses. In the middle of my flow, she asked didn't I really want to write a book about it all. I said yes—but not really for Doubleday.65 She has Vivien Leigh's ability, by looking intently at you (but is Mrs. O nearsighted?), by never wavering as she looks, to make you believe that you are the only one in the world, you are the most glorious dramatizer of life. Anaïs had this, too—but her look also contained a pinch of skepticism and a long dose of amusement. Mrs. O is the girl with the fairy tale absolutely transporting her out of the real world.
NOTE: Leo again went to Los Angeles with Gray, this time to supervise the shooting of a Vogue feature on Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, collectors of nineteenth-century American art. They also scouted several other homes for the magazine.
JOURNAL • march 2, 1981 • los angeles The last time I ever saw Lady Mendl [Elsie de Wolfe], she held a porcelain cabbage gently in her lap as her companion (were they all called Edie?) wheeled her along Fifty-seventh Street and into the doorway of 11 East, going on to Kirk Askew's gallery. She royally inclined her head, as she peered at me from beneath hooded eyes—a small, slender, upright, toqued figure on her last foray into the marketplace.
Herbie Ross—so queenly. Herbie and Nora [Kaye] (who has a robust humor) check each other. They live a rich, working-together marriage. Nora on her very early days: How, at five, she got diabetes because her mother was a Tolstoy follower and fed Nora on fruits and nuts. How Nora was taken to Fokine and got a scholarship—but arrived weekly with huge tins of caviar, her father working at that time for a caviar supplier.66 Now, Herbie can scoff: “Scholarship! It was the caviar!” Nora: “He had that little room at the top of the huge mansion and he didn't like to give barre. That didn't interest him…. So he'd say, ‘Go up—do exercises—come down—I teach!' And he did—his complete repertoire…. But even at five I knew that I had to know steps to dance the repertoire, so I told my mother, and she took me to the Met. That was the best place for steps.”
So when I, with Mrs. Svedrofsky, saw [Respighi's opera] The Sunken Bell, I saw Nora—one of five little girls. She was an elf. They all peered into the well, as Elisabeth Rethberg emerged like some huge, very odd creature—garlanded, festooned, and a quivery mountain of rosy flesh.67
MARCH 11, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY Return, yesterday, to the [Plaza's] Edwardian Room—thronged with the past. This (and the [hotel's] Oak Room) is the public place where I first felt “known.” Here I knew Cary Grant and [film actress] Jean Seberg and had my annual birthday parties—only women—and lunched with Schiaparelli after Carmel's funeral and lunched after Ela's funeral…. So much in this now sh
abby—no—worn, a kinder word—room, where yesterday I was still “known,” greeted by Tonio, who long ago was a bus-boy there.
APRIL 4, 1981 A scrap of a phrase, a wisp: “The gardens were filled with violets. I thought of Eleonora,” writes Richard on a postcard of Aranjuez, and this swift, almost indistinguishable, little string of words becomes an enormous net, in which my whole life wiggles. I am a fish, an enormous Biblical monster, caught in a fragile net of simple words.
APRIL 16, 1981 “I know what I know by experience; you know it by imagination.” Henry James in The Bostonians. In the beginning I knew everything “by imagination,” and now, having lived about seventy years, I know less by experience.
NOTE: On April 26, Easter morning, Leo suffered a rectal hemorrhage. Although the rupture was nothing ordinarily serious, he bled profusely and stanching it required paramedical aid.
JOURNAL • april 28, 1981 At last I feel well this morning. After a night threaded with worriments—”raveling up the sleeve of care.” I was “the sleeve.” That horror on the floor of the bathroom, when I knew that I was almost gone … I was so aware, even when fading in and out…. I saw sharply, and I felt (not reasoned) with a sharp irony—the tense, fraught attempt to save me— four men working furiously fast, concentrated, murmuring. All sound was a murmur or a sudden intensification of a murmur. I felt my life coming and going … tidal… ebb and flow … became that ebb and flow, somewhere deep within me knowing that I could go out with the ebb, and so somehow clinging to being as a tide-tossed man clings to a spar.