by Leo Lerman
JULY 21, 1981 When one is writing, painting, composing, one is like a person in love—undependable as a social being, irresponsible in the daily concourse of time. Firm dates are broken, excuses made. A person in creation—whether love or any other creative work—is so dedicated to that work that he cannot give himself to social obligations. So when Maria was married to Meneghini she was a worker—they worked together. They were creating Maria—prima donna del mondo—La Superba—the glorious legend. But when she fell in love with Onassis—with his power, his world—she had to do that work. She had to abdicate her own throne, and because of the nature of her attachment had to become his vassal, his creature. That was part of their wager: Who was to be on top? Her center moved. She was no longer the vassal of music—the vestal—but the petitioner of heart—his heart. She had no pride—not about this. The fire and fury and pride of her opera days had turned to a pliant silken rope with which she was slowly strangling herself.
JULY 22, 1981 At Lin [Tissot]'s party,2 “the Vendramina,”3 a pale-complexioned woman looking as if she wears no makeup—the face of a Roman consul—chiseled, intense—but suddenly alive with interest—a small, spare woman of power. The power burned low. She had been the social arbiter of Venice—now fading into oblivion, but still the center of the oldest Venetian society. She was the leading Fascist woman in Italy. When the war ended, she was told that the partisans would kill her and to get out. She sent her family away; she went to her castello. In her garden with a grandchild when the partisans came, when they told her that they had come to kill her, she said, “But surely not before the child …” She sent him away. Then, “But before you kill me, surely, some wine …” She dispensed wine, and the partisans drank her wine until they finally decided that they could not kill this kind lady. So they went away—and she remained to rule Venetian society.
Marlene rang last night, but I was too “exhausted” to ring back. This morning I rang. At first she made believe that she was an old French maid. “Qui parle?” she croaked into the phone, in various rising, cracked voices. When she understood that this was her own Leo she became herself. Drunk or old, that voice?—which sometimes even now is the free sound, the buoyant sound of a confident and sure future for the most beautiful girl in the world. “I'm the same,” she said this morning, “in bed, with a book and a bottle.”
JULY 31, 1981 • LONDON At Evangeline Bruce's in Albany [apartments], in those cozy, pretty rooms, full of very personal choices, Vangy dispensing tea, looking large, lean, and a Fuseli beauty. Evangeline dispensing vodka to “Coop” (Lady Diana Cooper4), who, cuddling the smallest Chihuahua in the world (Puss: “So dangerous to have around. He's transparent!”), from under her very broad-brimmed straw dispensed wit and anecdote: “I never expect to live through the night….” She has traces of her beauty—or rather her beauty is there beneath a veil of age (She is eighty-eight: “Now that I am very old …”), much like the beauty of a face just before the sculptor chisels away the final layer of marble. She always had a marmoreal beauty. She talked about Hemingway, who came to see her in Paris while she was in bed, and who drank and drank: “I wasn't really frightened. I was bored. I'd heard what a lady-killer he was, but I never was alarmed—just bored in my bed.” She was full of interest, interested, then by-and-by tottered off, leaving a feeling of historic occasion in Lord Melbourne's old rooms, as she beetled away in a tiny brown auto.
AUGUST 2, 1981 The V. S. Pritchetts came to lunch. Victor has just written his Proust piece. He said: “You know, it's a group of short stories, connected by sermons.” Dorothy said that “when I typed his manuscript the second time, and it was still all about the joy of reading Proust and not a word about [the translator] Kilmartin, I asked him, didn't he think that he should say something about this edition? After all, that's why he was writing the piece. ‘… Oh,' he said.” Dorothy's very loving. The Pritchetts are the genial Captain Andy and Parthy Ann of the literary Show Boat.
AUGUST 6, 1981 Rebecca West, a highly disciplined renegade with the best manners in the world: “Ken Tynan was the worst—no, Malcolm Muggeridge5—no, Evelyn Waugh—yes—he was the worst man I ever knew!” She came to the door, peering out: “I just must look at you one more time.”
The odd realization that the time since Ela died is now longer than all of the time I spent with her.
AUGUST 8, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY I am overwhelmed by the “things,” the possessions that I have accumulated. This is new to me.
AUGUST 19, 1981 Yesterday Anita [Loos] died—a woman very small in stature, but immense in every other aspect—hilarity, interest, heart, catholicity, envy. Friend of Huxley and Colette and … to gangsters? She worked almost until the day she died. “No moroses,” she said, “at my funeral.” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the laughing, knowing, worldly, spirit of the mid-twenties. It could only have been written in America and only by a woman so intensely feminine that she laughed compassionately at other “girls.” Hardworking (at 4:30 a.m. at ninety-three in April) and planning for the fall this year. She is the only old person who is missed as if her death had been untimely—as if a young person full of future had died. She was full of future. “Whadya know?” she'd ask, and sometimes you made it up just to hear her wicked, worldly, girlish laughter. When she dedicated a book to me, I felt as though I had been awarded the Nobel Prize.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1981 Carol [Channing] about Anita: “Anita and I traveled in Europe together, and I didn't know what a bidet was. ‘What do you do with it, Anita? What's it for?' ‘Well, dear, the French are known to be the dirtiest people in the world, but they are clean—in only one place….' “
SEPTEMBER 5, 1981 • PALM BEACH, FLORIDA Mar-a-Lago, the Marjorie Post house, another American manifestation—plus the Cherry Orchard touch of the jets zooming overhead, the sound of the trees being chopped down. The house (its entire interior designed by Joseph Urban, who brought Viennese artisans to help execute his decoration6) is the link between movie palaces of the twenties and fantasies of how the rich lived. The whole place is such an act of vulgar, extravagant imagination. Dina [Merrill]'s room is consciously the chamber of Princess Aurora, Sleeping Beauty—with its silver canopied bed, its “posts” little beasts and thorns—the bed of a princess asleep until kissed into mortality by her prince.7 This vast “palace”—with its dining room and drawing room amalgams of Venetian and Roman palazzos and Strawberry Hill, with its nineteenth-century reproductions of Fine French Furniture—is the American dream in full frenzy. Now here it is on the edge of dissolution. Fourteen servants still “keep it up.” Even the vistas from the windows are movie-splendor American dreams. It all is what America imagined romantic and rich to be in Los Angeles and in Palm Beach—the greatest example of domestic architecture created in the fantasy theatrical idiom of the early twenties.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY Last night, while watching Chariots of Fire, a film which is a work of art (meaning a film composed on clearly defined aesthetic principles, disciplining the chaos of life, presenting certain moral considerations, permitting its characters to be people making moral decisions—a humane film in which the eye, the mind, the heart are all nourished), watching this gem, I suddenly, at the departure of the running team on a Channel steamer for France, was overcome by wrenching pangs of some deep and, for the moment, elusive memory—almost an anguish. What was this? Then I knew: I was experiencing again, after all of those years, ship sailings. My whole being was suffused with that ecstasy of departure, that reality, so unbelievable, of going—no, getting away—on a great ship, out into the unknown vastness of the sea, into a thick “extra” life, an intensification and liberation of life, a genuine adventure, with “new” people to meet, all sorts of experiences—maybe even perils. All of one's family to be left behind screaming or weeping on the dock. That moment when the plank went up and the ship finally pulled away, gliding into the river—the band blaring, the crowds cheering, tugs as full throated as a pack of hounds baying their quarry, confetti, streamers,
a delicious frenzy, a delectable release, with Europe five—or even eleven—days in the future. Europe. We would, we all knew, return from “Europe” transformed.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1981 Marlene on the blower—”Probably she [Maria Riva] is writing ‘Dearest Mommy.' “ I hadn't the heart to tell her that Maria, indeed, had already collected a half-a-million-dollar advance. “She doesn't talk to me anymore,” said Marlene—not complaining, but stating a fact of her desolate life. “But the boys [her grandsons] all write.”
SEPTEMBER 22, 1981 Diana Trilling, at dinner last night at Maurice, talked about something she's noticed for the last few years now: “So many of the men I know, who have been married for thirty-seven or so years, have come out as homosexuals. What does this mean? What have they been doing about their sexuality all of these years? What does this mean about our culture?”
Even twenty years ago, those men could not have “come out” so easily, in the social, artistic, literary (even political) world in which they and their families lived. Also, twenty years ago Diana and Puss and I couldn't have been discussing this so freely and so “generously.” I belong to the generation who screamed, “But he's married!” Diana says it's much more difficult for single women of advanced or even middle years—”alone” women. She went on about how insulting not being even flirted with was for these women. “So much easier for men,” she said, “because a man, no matter how grotesque, is always desired by some woman.” About lesbians: She said she didn't know of any women who, late in life, came out like men do today.
She also reminded me of Katherine Anne Porter and Dylan Thomas, the latter picking K.A.P. up, holding her, in his drunken state, aloft as if she were a totem … how “gracious” she was, how generous, how easy she made it for Dylan to put her down … smiling, masking it all into a sort of sexual triumph for herself, and she was, at that time, in her fifties, middle-aged: couldn't have been easy for her. Diana: “I never liked her until that moment. Years later she told me that as Dylan set her down she saw my face and it was full of horror!”8
SEPTEMBER 24, 1981 Didn't go to Paloma Picasso's party. After I decided to go and even arranged with Fernando [Sanchez, loungewear designer] to take me, Puss's outburst about “how very interesting” that I would go to [Studio] 54. I knew that I wouldn't hear the end of it, so the most expedient thing was not to go. I am in an inner tunnel, because I wanted to see this “event” in what I consider a Manhattan Hell. This would have been an important episode in my book. I am also depressed because I see that, in some way, we have, each of us, while adding to each other's lives, harmed one another. I have wrecked his, and permitted him, to some small extent, to impair mine. Is this lost time? Perhaps not. There are episodes important to a work in progress (I see now that my life has been a work in progress), and tonight was one of them. We have been wonderful for one another, and we couldn't have been worse for one another, and I wouldn't have not had this love for anything else in the world…. I will rebound again.
NOTE: Leo's unstable right leg increasingly gave way without warning, and he was sometimes unable to raise himself after a fall. He no longer went out unescorted.
JOURNAL • SEPTEMBER 28, 1981 Dinner at [journalist and novelist] Joan [Buck] and [drama critic] John [Heilpern]'s for John and Helen Osborne. He, this former angry young man, is now fifty-one, portly, gray-bearded, with two prominent front teeth, which give him a Bugs Bunny geniality, a sort of laughing inquisitivity (would Thackeray have enjoyed that word?). Helen is a surprise after Pamela [Lane] (whom I never knew), Penelope Gilliat, Mary Ure, Jill Bennett.9 Helen is a caretaker with sarcastic humor, a cutting edge. A good sport spiked with knowingness, “wifey”—plain and snappy-eyed, she would be perfect in an 1840ish bonnet, and Jane Carlyle would have understood—even liked—her.10 I surprised John by being “the man with Marlene” when she wrote him, in Sardi's, a note: “You are wonderful—Please call me—where? when?”—etc. “I sat by my telephone for four days,” this middle-aged man said, remembering those [1958] days of The Entertainer.
Actresses are so much more interesting than actors—except those with a double sexuality—Olivier, Gielgud.
OCTOBER 3, 1981 • WASHINGTON, D.C. At the White House, in Muffie [Brandon]'s office the great question to me: “Will this thing about China blow over? Will it haunt us for the next four years?” I thought: “China! What do I know about China!” So I temporized … and finally realized I was being asked about their extravagant dishes.11 “It won't blow over,” said I. “It will haunt you. Just go on and ignore it. The timing was dreadful.” “If only we'd announced last July,” Muffie moaned, meaning before Reagan began to do in the poor. “Well,” she said, “no more big extravagances—just little dinners—private and only state dinners which are a necessity—but an all-out program of helping the arts and culture—all-out. You're being invited for lunch on the fourteenth. That's when the program will be announced. We're having Ella Fitzgerald, the king and queen of Spain, and I hope to get Benny Goodman for King Hussein [of Jordan]….” Then her face hardened. “Why, oh why, is the Washington Post being so mean to Mrs. Reagan?”
OCTOBER 11, 1981 • NEW YORK CITY On Yom Kippur, a visit to Katharine Hepburn12—not a tremor, not a quiver (is she now controlled medically?) — seemingly younger than I. She said, “But, you know, I'm not an actress. I've never been an actress. People think that I'm different in each part. I've always been myself, only the writers are different… and I've been so lucky there, and so I sound different…. I have doubts about my whole life…. What have I done? Have I done anything? I don't think that I have.”
OCTOBER 17, 1981 Visit to Mina for her eighty-fifth birthday. “I don't know what my life means. I feel as if it all happened to someone else. Nothing much is close to me. For a moment, when Fido asked me last Sunday—she's madder and madder—whether I ever got up for breakfast at [the Chapelbrook Farm on] Ashfield, and I said that from the day Harry [Curtiss] died, I never got up for breakfast again—and then I realized that I did for [John] Houseman— Ashfield was close, touched me, it was part of me for that moment. Of course, I've tried to cut myself off from being close to Goosey. I've always lived entirely in the present.”
OCTOBER 21, 1981 The unexpected importance of Clare Luce in my life— Poppa painted her penthouse. Her silver-paper dining room and white drawing room were High Life glimpsed. Poppa saying to her, “This is my son….” She was the first woman I ever saw in a Chanel suit. Years later, a dinner Margaret Case gave to “bring together” the Luces and the senior Newhouses, when Sam was being “considered” for a Time cover story.13 The Luces and the Newhouses together—”old” dynasty, new “empire,” and the “old” not at all understanding the “new.” “But how, Mr. Newhouse,” asked Claire de Luce [sic], “can you have all of these papers and magazines and not inject your own opinions, your own politics in them?” I could see that neither Luce believed Sam when he explained that he liked having them, that he believed each one should remain itself regardless of Sam's own politics. He lusted for possessions—specifically “media.” He was a collector of media. That was his power. Si [his son] influences, originates; Sam shepherded.
OCTOBER 30, 1981 Nora on the blower: “Hugh [Laing] and Tudor cooked dinner for us, and in only a few minutes they were bickering over some minor thing—just the way they always have. Nothing ever changes.” Me: “Out of that bickering came your career and a whole revolution in dance.” She roared with laughter. In her laughter you can hear bells of pure enjoyment, amusement clanging.
NOVEMBER 8, 1981 A vision of ballerinas: Some rich, in splendid nests: Eugenia (Delarova) Doll, Tamara Geva,14 Sono (Osato) Elmaleh, Vera Zorina, Nora (Kaye) Ross (in Hollywood, a producer). Some moulting in little, memorabilia-littered flats, furnished rooms, or “institutions”—and who of their neighbors suspects their former effulgent glory, their litheness, their tributes of jewels? (the futures of flowers, the mutations of dreams) Then those who still teach or even drag themselves from “star” engagement
to “star” engagement. And those who preside—Margot [Fonteyn], Margrethe [Schanne], Alicia [Markova], Irina Baronova,15 Choura Danilova …
Thoughts of Marlene—the model for a whole generation of Germans today—in bed in Paris, with her bottle and her book and her extravagance. (“My only extravagance is the telephone.”) Maria [Riva] saying: “If only she would do the deals I arranged … hundreds of thousands of dollars for a voice-over … She doesn't have to be seen … not even seen … but no…. It suits her madness to say I'm no daughter, [that] I hate her.”