The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  MAY 19, 1984 • NEW YORK CITY Reading a proof of Bill Weaver's Duse: A Biography, I hear Ela's voice as I read Duse's fraught letters—so like Ela's. And hear Duse's voice in her goddaughter Ela's. I feel that Duse influenced Ruth Draper's voice and “delivery,” and that Evangeline [Bruce]'s voice was influenced by Ruth Draper. I saw Duse. I remember her atmosphere, her stillness, her sorrowing pervading the huge theater, not her sound but her being took that theater and imprisoned it. I spent an afternoon with Ruth Draper (having seen her many times onstage) and I felt that Duse hush, that perfume of grief, distilled, in that memento-filled flat overlooking the Society Library. Now the echo of Duse in Evangeline's voice.47

  MAY 20, 1984 I recall watching Maria at four a.m. in the Ambassador Hotel, while she sat, bespectacled, in her bed. Meneghini tapped away, bookkeeper insect, in a corner. Maria, deep in the score of Lucrezia Borgia, flicked her pencil at this red morocco-bound volume that I had given her, a first edition from the Mendelssohn library.

  MARIA AND LUCREZIA BORGIA She hopped into bed, took up a pencil, opened the score, and she was gone, completely immersed in the score. Occasionally, she looked at me and she smiled, but she didn't see me. This went on for a very long time, and I was enthralled. Mr. Meneghini's typewriting stopped. He seemed to be dozing over his typewriter, and I was sitting there absolutely fixed. Maria took off her glasses, closed the book, put down the pencil, looked at me, and said, “It's wonderful. It's really wonderful.” And I said, “Do you know it all now?” And she said, “Well, you know, you have to know it all, so that when you go out on the stage for the first rehearsal, you know who you are. Then I am free,” she told me, “to breathe onstage. You know who that girl Lucrezia Borgia is. You know that what people say about her is either lies or not lies, but you know that you are Lucrezia Borgia. You also know that you are Maria Callas.” … “You know who everyone else is?” I asked. (1993)

  JOURNAL • june 2, 1984 Why have I spent a great part of my life working for and with fashion magazines and all of their ramifications? I no longer believe in what they offer: I have not believed for a long time. Vanity Fair gave me an opportunity, I thought, to elevate, illuminate, confirm those splendors of intellect, taste, grace … the charm of living. I thought Vanity Fair could signal: “Look, there are others like you…. Don't despair. Here is a signal fire, a home fire in the dark night.” When I was very young and came upon Vanity Fair, Vogue, Theatre Arts, Theater, the Civic Rep, certain people—they were the signal fires. Even in the features pages of Vogue I felt that I was doing this—but I wasn't always pure or “impractical.” I lived by the rule of: “Give one, or even two, get one, or even two.” That is, partially, how I coped with Liberman. I felt like Robin Hood, one of my basic heroes. But, of course, my fashion magazine job (not work but job, a distinction) has given me that rich bourgeois life, or the trappings of it, so seemingly necessary to my well-being, that life which my mother and father would have wanted for me—able-to-boast-about-it success. Even the most “bent” life is “straight,” at least in the married world in which we live. I did not, as a child, want to be the myselfs I saw about me. I wanted to be those others out there, up there. I became one of those others, but I remained the myself I did not want to be.

  JUNE 7, 1984 “Do you realize how Proustian movies are?” said Puss. “You see a whole life. We saw Alain Delon years ago as a juvenile and last night, as an aging creature.”48 That is why I find Los Angeles so fascinating: the closest to hereafter—immortality in the mortal world. That's the illusion we seek, and the illusion which makes living bearable.

  JULY 1, 1984 • VENICE Here in the Gritti, in our room, now redecorated beautifully—pale yellow, pale gray. Puss exhausted, unpacking. Falstaff on the radio. So strange, here we feel most at home, most having-come-home. I said to the waiter, “At last, here in Venice, I feel that I can feel tired.”

  Falstaff is Verdi's most glorious. What inspiration—his having composed this marvel so late, late, late…. I breathe hope from it—from its variety, its “newness,” its lyricism, its flow proliferating as branches and foliage from an ancient tree, the tree of life itself. Here's Falstaff in which Verdi is as pure and as perfect as Mozart: They share laughter—every variety save the cynical.

  JULY 5, 1984 What other people consider unreality is my reality. Venice is my reality. Here all seems fantasy, but here all is realistic. Time is in constant flux: in the water's wash, the bells, the people herding, the buildings crumbling forever. Everything is immortally mortal.

  JULY 19, 1984 After Herbert Ross elucidated the Bettelheim [psychoanalytic] interpretation of Cinderella, Nora said matter-of-factly: “No, Herbert. Cinderella is just a girl with a broom, and she sweeps,” making a firm, horizontal sweeping gesture.

  JULY 20, 1984 We children did not know the word “anti-Semitism,” but we knew that Miss Lyons, a local schoolteacher (a “mick”), hated us. I found this out during the flu epidemic of 1919, after a fight between Miss Lyons and Momma in the street, while kettles of boiling water were constantly being emptied onto the slate pavements in attempt to fight the contagion. She called us “sheenies.” Sometime later, during the high holidays, as I stood on the steps of the shul house in my holiday blue serge suit and hat, some wild Irish boys tried to choke me, yelling: “Get the sheenie!” I did not experience this as anti-Semitism, but as the micks not liking the Jews. We didn't like them either.

  MISS GRIGGS She was a tall, dithering, spectacled, old-maidish body, who sported long, long skirts (even in 1925) and held even longer-nosed views. One day [in Jackson Heights] she twanged, “Leo Lerman, stand up!” I did. Miss Griggs had never been unfriendly. I liked her because each Friday afternoon she gave out library books and I was allowed to choose which I wanted. On this morning, Miss Griggs brightly smiled. “Now I want you all to look at Leo Lerman. Jews are very different from the rest of you.” I was deeply interested. Nobody had ever told me this before. “Jews smell different.” There was a lot of laughter. Even I laughed. So she went on in this wise for quite some time, about how Jews dressed differently and ate different foods and thought differently. I was really, really interested. This was most instructive. I didn't feel that she was talking about me. So, I went home and told my mother. This produced an entirely different effect than I had intended. My mother marched off to school the next day. “I want Miss Griggs out of this school. I want my son transferred to another class…. Or…” Somehow, peace was made, and I remained in Miss Griggs's class. And Miss Griggs never again said another word about Jews.49 (1993)

  JOURNAL • july 21, 1984 This morning, as we stood on the vaporetto going to the [palazzo] Ca d'Oro, I realized that the Goldwassers, and to some extent the Lermans, never felt that we didn't belong. We were the center of that little world of immigrant Russian, Polish, Hungarian Jews. Others came to ask Grandpa's advice. The women of our family set a sort of pace, specially in matters of the table, cooking bountifully, even prodigally. We spoke Yiddish, lived in a kosher world, but already we had at least one foot in America. We belonged, because this was our world: the Miss Lyons, the Irish roughnecks, the Italians were the outsiders, the oddities. Only later did I discover that I did not belong, that there was, alas, a world from which I was excluded. We were not exotic like some foreigners, but we were undesirable.50 Jesters got in everywhere. Here we find why, perhaps, from a very early age I was entranced with “stars.” Even in high society, in the world aborning in the kaiser's war: Society breaking down—Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe opening the doors; [hostess] Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish mixing classes and cultures; Duse, Bernhardt, the Diaghilev Ballet all “got in;” Otto Kahn and other Jews began to infiltrate, and we in our 106th Street congeries knew this. Grandpa and his brothers didn't believe it could happen, but Aunt Minnie didn't doubt it for a moment. She was the American aunt, working in some shirtwaist place as the bookkeeper; her sister working in an auction house. They believed—even that German Jews would one day “receive” Russian Jews. The impro
bable was always probable to Minnie. And the magic wand of theatricality always somehow touched us in our little, intact, tempestuous, tears-and-laughter world.

  JULY 25, 1984 Maria was essentially middle class in her view of living; even her seeming to break out (Onassis, etc.) of the middle class was middle class. Meneghini was definitely middle class, Italian middle class, and it was this Maria was fleeing.

  JULY 26, 1984 There was Jan Morris, winsome, in Harry's Bar. [Opera coach] Randy Michaelson at the next table thought her flirtatious, even a little naughty, but wanting not sex but the dress and the brassieres—the drag. He said all the drag queens he knew in the fifties wanted to be Mother or Nanny. The drag queens I knew in the thirties all wanted to be movie stars. James Morris may have wanted other men sexually, but I think he wanted womanliness more—the freedom of femaleness, of being just another girl. When I said that we had been here a month, Jan, aghast, said: “But I'd go mad!” What's put her off Venice, when he wrote the best book about it—a loving, cherishing book?

  JULY 31, 1984 • MUNICH I am most at peace in the countryside. At Ettal [outside Munich], for example, the protective skin is dissolved, and I sit or stand enraptured. But I am now more baffled than ever: I cannot understand that mass madness. How could it have happened in this Bavaria? I see mean faces. I hear “Grüss Gott” constantly. I see this gleaming, abundant, beautiful land. I stand in a sort of exultation in the Baroque and Rococo German churches, amazed at the ecstasy, at one with the worldliness—specially in the figures. (In Ettal, the practicing organist thundering and pealing—what passion in that church.) The sameness of words in Bavarian German and Yiddish—I expected this, but not as much. And the sameness of the cooking—so much of it I knew at home when I was young. So seductive. I feel no homecoming here as I do in Venice, yet I will long to come back when I am away…. The violet stockings on our waitress, and the perfection of the food, on onionskin-patterned dishes (made in East Berlin) … How could the madness infect these people in these sublime surroundings? This must be the basis of my bafflement in Bavaria. Glorious churches and monasteries in vast meadows—at Ettal were chickens and the green fragrance of haymaking, the lowing of cattle, and a steady concourse of visitors—but always I find someone in me calculating how fast I could get across the border to some assumed safety. This does not leave me. And always I am accompanied by Ela and Alice and Rut and even Tilly. A sign on the way to Vogue: “Dachau”—in yellow! What did this mean to me after days of gradual seduction? Can anyone believe in “reasonableness” after 1934?

  AUGUST 10, 1984 • NEW YORK CITY I am a burden. I will become slowly, if fortunate, more and more a burden. I must face this. I must not become an oppressive burden. Ralph Colin51 and I talked about this at lunch, and whether we would have the courage to make a “graceful” exit. Neither of us could face the positive answer. Yet, I know that there is only one solution.

  MY LIABILITIES—PHYSICAL:

  unstable legs

  knees that cave in

  three sicknesses in my left eye, impaired vision

  two sicknesses in my right eye, impaired vision

  a cyst on my right lid

  a goiter, which has hemorrhaged internally

  an odd “connection” from my heart

  kidney stones—left and right

  vascular problems

  something wrong with my sense of touch and some reflexes

  unable to button and tie (I can manage neckties and apron bows, but I cannot button or unbutton my shirts; I cannot tie my shoelaces; I have difficulty cutting meat)

  sometimes peeing frequently, with loos surprisingly up or down stairs, which are very difficult for me

  [allergies to] Demerol and iodides, which make for an impossible medical situation

  MY ASSETS:

  I still think in my muddled logical way

  my memory is good

  I can, with my operated-upon eye, see distances, and I can read!

  my hearing is good

  my sense of smell is good

  pulse, heart, etc. all seem normal

  my spirits are usually good (but when I know that I am a burden, the slough of despond opens, I fall in; if I am courageous, I will one day—when being a burden becomes intolerable—open that little narrow exit in the bottom of the slough)

  AUGUST 11, 1984 Anxiety like a distant ship, very far off. What is it? It rises like a miasma from my deep feeling that I am not working enough to earn my pay. All those years of unceasing work, and now—shreds. Diana Vreeland said: “Listen, buster, you must get used to leisure!”

  AUGUST 17, 1984 Last night's play, Hurlyburly [by David Rabe], loathsome. I didn't care (in the most acute sense of this word) for anyone in it. All worthless. The play padded into three acts—and filthy! I do not remember being shocked in the theater until I saw Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt in their first scene together. His head under her dress, then she starkers with him straddling her. I do not understand how these good actors can do it. The audience, specially the women, roared with laughter throughout. This is genuine decadence: Hurt hopelessly asking Weaver to “suck my cock,” the audience roaring. When are the rest of the Roman games?

  AUGUST 18, 1984 At the Frick, I sat looking across the room at Bellini's Saint Francis in Ecstasy. I sat marveling at the solidity of this work, wondering at its color, amazed again at its detail—both physical and spiritual. No heavenly messengers in this lucid work, only low-lying light and the almost passive acceptance by St. Francis of the state of ecstasy. No celestial hocus-pocus here, exquisitely winged angels visibly bear tidings from the Lord. No—each stone, blade of grass, cloud, ray of light is a messenger, an instrument, and the saint himself becomes an instrument. A fraught tree in the upper-left—tormented by the Divine Spirit? Has this painting been cut down? I could sit for hours bathing in this painting, becoming one with it.

  I can no longer go from painting to painting, as I can no longer sit in a concert hall through a program of diverse works by different hands. I want one or two works or an exhibit or program by one creator, or connected works (e.g., Ferrarese paintings or a musical program of Weber and early Wagner). But even the orderly jumble of a museum or a concert—no. A theme—yes. Showing how paint has been applied to a surface, e.g., Hals, Manet, Kline, but this a viewer should invent as an approach when a gallery hasn't devised it.

  AUGUST 22, 1984 Faux marbre is becoming the boeuf Wellington of the decorating world. Emptiness casts a heavy shadow, because of the passion for faux marbling everything, and this signals a need to seem rich, but artificially. Another evidence of the decline of reality. With what consequences? Not even to eyes accustomed to disaster on the television screen is disaster real. Inhumanity creeps over us like the Ice Age creeping down from the North, a hardening of the sensibilities.

  AUGUST 26, 1984 • PALM BEACH, FLORIDA Si [Newhouse] came back to the dinner table [yesterday] in the fake Belle Epoque restaurant (an epidemic of this now) and said bluntly: “Truman died today.” He'd heard this from someone. “How?” I asked, automatically. “Why do you ask that?” he asked. “Do you think he killed himself?” “He could have. He could have died of an auto accident, dope and drink, cancer. He said he had cancer.” All the while I tried to hide that I was in deep shock, feeling our first meeting at Mary Lou [Aswell]'s. This close friendship lapsed about three years ago. I believe that he could not bear to see his old friends. The Black and White Ball was his last genuine work of art.

  News now: He died in Bel-Air. He was with Johnny Carson's ex-wife [Joanne]. She went into his bedroom and found that he had died in his sleep. There were drugs in his room, but this is not thought to have caused his death (what stilted words). What a déchéance, Little T's life. That doomed generation: Tennessee, Little T, Harold Halma. Little T was his own victim: Even if he died a natural death, he killed himself.

  AUGUST 26, 1984 • NEW YORK CITY Home [from visiting the Newhouses in Palm Beach]. Told Si about Truman as we drove into the city
, where Little T wanted to be emperor-empress, and was, for a very little time. I think of Jack [Dunphy]—What is he doing?—and of that winter night when Jack and Todd [Bolender] came to visit us in the darkish back parlor, and T drifted in, unexpectedly, trailing a mile-long scarf, and then we all five went to see T's first apartment—one room, fading photographs, a little rocking chair. T tapped and put on a vaudeville show, rocked away to Bessie Smith on the record player, and we all went out into the awful cold at two a.m. “Doesn't anyone want anything to eat?” Very little boy. No one wanted anything, so he went. And at the corner, Jack looked back, and we saw that Little T was standing at the far corner looking at us. The next morning, very early, Todd rang up—rage and tears: “He's gone. He left me for Truman!” Jack never, never went back, and no matter what T did, Little T came back to Jack. T strayed, but Jack was his, and he was Jack's.

  AUGUST 28, 1984 I think, underlying all my visible actions, of Truman constantly, and those earliest days: evenings at Harold Halma's, before Other Voices, and how we planned that photo which made him, almost instantly, a media event;52 times with Mary Lou or our then family at the Russian Tea Room; Yaddo and hearing through the wall, when he was having his affair with Howard Doughty, “Can you do it laying down?” (the ungrammatical question making the sexual part even more hilarious coming from T, who was so worldly as to be naïve); late-night games of Murder, when I was the murderer and I murdered him, who went hiding about with me because he thought I was his safest protection; parties in East Eighty-eighth Street at my place (with Richard and after); the morning at about four a.m. when he rushed up my stairs, threw dozens of envelopes on my bed, T twitching, exhausted: “Nina's drunken mad. She threw all of Newton's letters out of the window on to Park Avenue!;” the nights we sat in the cafeteria on Madison between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth Streets, and the lunches in the Eighty-eighth Street Schrafft's, roaring with laughter at the yentas and their bobbed-nose daughters; that time when a woman came up to us and said to T: “I know who you are. I have a son who's a writer, too,” and that son turned out to be J. D. Salinger! So many moments, so many intimacies.