by Leo Lerman
His dissolution began with the success of In Cold Blood, or rather with his falling in love with one of the murderers. But the real blow was the day Babe Paley refused to see him anymore. He could not bear that. He could accept more easily Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau shutting him out—all others—but Paley was his duchess and he never could understand her reaction to what he had written about Bill Paley in “Answered Prayers.” All those chums knew that he was a writer. They made him their confidant, their pet, their jester, their vitality, their escape, because writing, and a certain freakishness, sexuality, and ability to be news had brought him celebrity and brought him to them. How did they not expect to be in his work?
This is a closed, shut-in city. I almost never see any life in the great block of modern flats opposite my bedroom windows or in the old building opposite our drawing room on Fifty-seventh Street. I tell the weather, see the sunrise, reflected on the sky-tall flank of the building over on the north side of Columbus Circle. I see oblongs of lighted windows, sometimes beaming all night long, a sort of code signaling vacant rooms, but I almost never see people, domestic animals, in any of the rooms or on any of the terraces of the roofs surrounding me. These cliffs are filled with secret lives. I go out into Fifty-seventh Street—cars, buses, carriages, trucks of all sizes, taxis with fantastic company names, and raucous annihilating noise. People like lava from a sudden volcanic explosion—but almost never anything personal. Misery, yes, rending arguments even, sometimes a jangle of laughter, but always the impersonal brush and trudge, more purposeful than desultory. I wonder: is this inhuman, or is the inhumanity in me? I laugh a lot at what I see. I am horrified. But still these are detached reactions, so much the opposite of what I feel in Venice, Munich, even London. I feel personal in what I continue to feel is my neighborhood—that area on the East Side, especially above Eighty-sixth Street, ceasing about Ninety-sixth on Madison, Park, or Lex, and continuing up to 106th on Fifth. Streets haunted by my childhood. I see Momma climbing up the iron steps, in her bright yellow coat and hat (dyed black after Grandma died). Momma, me in hand, crossing 106th Street to Grandma and safety from whistles blowing in celebration of what we later knew was the False Armistice. I was terrified, because I had overheard grown-ups talking about those German dirigibles dropping bombs on us: “Okay! Okay!” Momma told me, “Grandma will take you down to the cellar….”
AUGUST 28, 1984 Choura Danilova to lunch with Holly Brubach at the Café des Artistes. Choura punctual, punctilious, meticulously neat and mannered, in a good white suit, her hair tinted quietly brown and blond, round agate-brown eyes sometimes speaking more than her mouth, hands folded—the ballerina severe, but the Russian smiling—everything suited to her age, in the eighties. The mischief, the comic is still here. Everyone always said she had the wittiest legs in the world (“dainty, jocund, and sure”), but that was a misunderstanding, the wit was in her head and her legs expressed that wit. “Nora hated Alicia [Markova],” she said, “You know when [choreographer Léonide] Mas-sine asked me to do Beau Danube, Eugenia Delarova said, ‘But the costumes are awful! We must have new costumes.' ‘Let me see,' I said.” Her look held all the old shrewdness of ballerina versus ballerina: “I sew … I give a little lift to the skirt… a little puff… I like.” That is how that insouciant movement was born, which the world adored. Choura's skirt worked [to embody] the whole of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, as Nina Novak's teeth did.53 “Massine … he hated me,” Choura said. What a wonderful, sapient, great lady she is. The fun bubbling as quietly as boiling water. Holly “secretly” scribbled it all down.54
AUGUST 31, 1984 Little T came home to Bridgehampton, in a golden Tiffany-made book labeled Truman Capote. This book containing his remains will be, Jack hopes, buried in the cemetery there. But the real remains will be “Answered Prayers.” For surely we will now have some book, some accumulation titled “Answered Prayers,” and some of it will be brilliant, wrought with his special malice and poetry.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1984 A little, girlishly playful voice on the blower: “Do you know who this is? Can you recognize the voice? You don't remember a little Italian girl—a wop?” This went on for a time. Finally, sweetly: “It's Wanda…. I've been in hell for the last years. I couldn't go out. I was like somebody living in a boardinghouse.” She seemed to think that I knew of some awfulness in her life. This could only be Volodya—the Petrouchka Horowitz himself. “Now I'm beginning to look out again, and I think of you so much, so much of the old times. I hear you were in Venice—Venice! I rang Tatiana [Liberman] one time. Not happy. She got so old. She always said, ‘You're so much older than me.' Older!” Wanda laughed, but all of this had a kind of sad, slow, low tone, a faraway sweetness to it. “Wasn't very interesting, Tatiana. She smiles a lot. She never was very intelligent…. Wally [Castelbarco] goes out every night in Milan—beautiful, she looks so beautiful. If you sit on a sofa and talk about forty or sixty years ago, she's wonderful, talks and talks, as if it's now … but talk about now and she's gone….” So she went on reestablishing old ties. This is what's become of the Toscanini girls.
I am reading Hilary Spurling's life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, so filled with cat's-cradle connections to us…. In 1955, when Gray and I were in London, we sat one day in the “lunch” room of the Victoria & Albert, and there, at a table two removed from us sat A Brooding Presence—dark, out of some turn-of-the-century print with touches of the twenties. She should have sported amber beads, but she did not. A sort of modest chamber-pot hat fitted closely over her mousy fringe (or perhaps that was a hairnet?). She sat, permeating aloneness, intent. Years before, I had seen Georgia O'Keeffe so intent, watching the antics of Kiki Imbs [youngest daughter of Bravig and Valeska], a child inhabited by some mischievous spirit, which carried her—no one knew how— to the tops of inaccessible armoires, where she sat like a gargoyle, and set to mouthing curious lines like: “There's a yink in the tizzie!” … Now, here, in London, in the unexpected quiet of the V & A commissary, sat this seemingly malign presence, more alone than anyone I had ever seen, but inside concentrated on the dark side of the moon, on the black side of human nature, on the freakishness of people. And this Presence, Puss and I knew immediately, was Ivy Compton-Burnett.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1984 My night was peopled by my Lerman grandparents. He: small, ungenerous, rheumy-eyed, bearded, very meager. She: raisin-eyed, plumpish, sheiteled [in a wig], and smiling—in that little flat on Second Avenue, between 99th and 100th Streets, where the convenience (one to a floor) was in the public hallway, a sort of earth-closet, and the tub was in the kitchen. She made tough poppy-seed cookies. I liked that. And she had, on the oilcloth-covered, round table a dish of bubs and a plate of buck. Oh, yes—they lived over the store: a dark, greasy shop that sold paint, wallpaper, and products for the painting of places, and was redolent of resinous smells—turpentine, kerosene. Something in me liked the shop, and when that Grandpa was in it (white bearded, rimless glasses on pale blue eyes, a woolly vest hanging over his tieless shirt), he seemed some strong and even magical creature. I adored color cards—solid little rectangles of pure color. I craved them the way I craved chocolate, and I lusted after the wallpaper sample books. I still do.
SEPTEMBER 23, 1984 I woke thinking of Little T and of [gossip columnist] Liz Smith's distorted view of his feelings for Lee Radziwill. The heart of the matter isn't quite where Liz places it. Little T's heart did not have Lee or Babe on it. More likely Newton, or perhaps Jack, or one of those men—fathers of four or five—whom he picked up and made part of his private (almost, at least semipublic) life. He was loyal. He never let anyone really go. But Truman was a great mythomaniac, and his myth now enlarges.
SEPTEMBER 25, 1984 The memorial was very much Little T's triumph. The irony was unnoted, but at last he had a success, and a nearly full house in a Broadway theater. But it didn't answer any of his prayers…. As I toddled across the Shubert stage from the wings stage right to the lectern, I felt deeply, helplessly old for the first time.
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OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS Last night I took off the shelf the copy that T gave to me of Other Voices, Other Rooms. The dust jacket, with the photograph of the boy with the invitational face, has vanished, but the yarn inside is intact. And here, on the flyleaf is what T wrote, in his best hand: “For Leo—and what does the following bring to mind? Piggyback, snakes, The Cow, grapefruit, the all-night café, a bunch of love letters, Nantucket, Poor Butterfly. Ah Hilary” (I am Hilary in Truman's Local Color; I am not Turner Boatwright in “Answered Prayers,” although his brownstone does house some of my tatty furniture and a gaggle of my chums), “when the time comes to go, should we simply laugh? Mille tenderesses [sic] (which is after all another landmark)55—T”(VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 1987)
1. “I remember Hester taking me to lunch when I was still in high school. I thought Hester the most worldly of women. She worked at Random House, and she was the first woman I had ever heard talk about sex and even homosexuality. My, I thought her the bee's knees, and now I don't even know where or what she is.” Letter to RH, March 17, 1954.
2. In his later years, the glass designer Charles Lin Tissot (1904-94), who lived six months each year in Venice's Palazzo Polignac, introduced Leo to many in Venetian society.
3. The Venetian aristocrat Vendramina Brandolini d'Adda Marcello del Majno (1902-91) was, understandably, known more simply as “the Vendramina.”
4. Many considered Lady Diana Cooper (1892-1986) the great aristocratic beauty of her generation in Britain. She made some appearances onstage (Max Reinhardt's The Miracle) and screen, married Alfred Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich, and wrote engaging memoirs.
5. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) was a British writer, broadcaster, and journalist.
6. The Austrian architect and designer Joseph Urban (1872-1933) created sets for the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 to 1931.
7. Actress Dina Merrill (b. 1925) was the daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton.
8. Leo later recalled: “Katherine Anne said to me as the first-act curtain fell on Dylan: ‘They can distort it, a little, but they can't exaggerate it,' after a scene during which he carried her off the stage over his shoulder.” Journal, January 18, 1964.
9. Lane, Gilliat, Ure, and Bennett had all been married to John Osborne (1929-94). His play Look Back in Anger (1956) is cited as the start of a new wave in postwar British theater, whose playwrights were often dubbed “angry young men.”
10. The British journalist Helen Dawson Osborne (1939-2004) later became arts editor of the Observer.
11. Mabel “Muffie” Brandon Cabot, then Nancy Reagan's social secretary, was worried because the first lady had acquired for the White House a four-thousand-piece set of china valued at $200,000, even as the Reagan administration was calling for cuts in domestic programs.
12. Leo had commissioned two articles and a photograph of Hepburn to run in Vogue that November, when her film On Golden Pond opened.
13. Henry Luce (1898-1967), the politically conservative founder and chairman of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, married Clare Boothe Luce (1903-87). She had been managing editor at Vanity Fair, as well as a playwright (The Women), a politician, and an ambassador to Italy. Margaret Case Harriman (1891-1971) was the society editor of Vogue for nearly fifty years.
14. Eugenia Delarova Doll (1911?–90) danced with de Basil's Ballets Russes while married (1927-38) to its choreographer Léonide Massine. Later, she married industrialist Henri G. Doll and became a dance patron. The Russian-born ballerina and actress Tamara Geva (1906-97) was the first wife of George Balanchine.
15. Irina Baronova (b. 1919) began as a “baby ballerina” of the Ballets Russes, eventually marrying the theatrical impresario and aristocrat Cecil Tennant.
16. The suffragist Anne Morgan (1873-1952) was the daughter of financier J. P. Morgan. Elisabeth Marbury (1856-1933), a theatrical and literary agent, shared a house near Gramercy Park with the decorator Elsie de Wolfe.
17. Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991), actress, director, and producer, is said to have had many affairs with women, including Nazimova and Mercedes de Acosta, and her relationship with the actress Josephine Hutchinson was a public sensation in 1927, when it was revealed in Hutchinson's divorce proceedings.
18. Late in life, the silent-film actress Louise Brooks (1906-85) had been recognized as one of the first to master screen performance (Pandora's Box). Her memoir Lulu in Hollywood had then just appeared.
19. Leo is quoting Carmel Snow, who had once flashed her new dentures and said, “Look, my new dining-room furniture.”
20. Danish-born socialite Claus von Bülow (b. 1926) was prosecuted for attempting to murder his wife, heiress Martha “Sunny” Crawford von Bülow. A guilty verdict was overturned on appeal. Von Bülow had been involved with the actress and filmmaker Alexandra Isles (b. 1947) overlapping the time that she was seeing critic John Simon (b. 1925), then reviewing theater for New York magazine.
21. Lucia Cristofanetti (1902-74) was a designer, jewelry maker, and painter.
22. As an executive and later board member of the School of American Ballet, Nancy Lassalle, the daughter of Dorothy Norman, worked closely with Lincoln Kirstein.
23. In most of these lectures, Leo spoke about reading and the state of writing in America.
24. Chatsworth, home to the Cavendishes, dukes of Devonshire, is one of the greatest stately homes of England. The then-duke, Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish (1920–2004), had married Deborah “Debo” Mitford (b. 1920), the youngest of the celebrated Mitford sisters.
25. Pamela, Lady Harlech (b. 1934), was the daughter of Allene Talmey's sister Georgia Talmey Colin. Both Lady Harlech and Judy Brittain were editors for British Vogue.
26. The French banker Baron Elie de Rothschild (b. 1917) managed the Château Lafite vineyards.
27. May Davenport Seymour (1884?–1967) directed the theater and music collections at the Museum of the City of New York.
28. Romance novelist Judith Krantz's 1978 book, Scruples, had been a huge seller.
29. Tiffany & Co. annually invited guests to style tabletops displaying its wares. Gray had done one that year.
30. Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a British novelist, poet, and short-story writer.
31. Diana Trilling's book Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor (1981) depicted the trial and conviction of headmistress Jean Harris for the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnover.
32. “She leaned forlornly and quite hopelessly, as though to warm herself, against me in the cab. She was very, very sad—not like her at all.” Letter to RH, October 24, 1955.
33. Vidal's 1968 satiric novel about the adventures of a transsexual.
34. The actress Maureen Stapleton (1925-2006) had starred in several Williams plays on Broadway, including a legendary performance in The Rose Tattoo (1951).
35. Tennessee Williams's older sister Rose (1909-96) had been placed in an asylum in 1937, declared schizophrenic, and lobotomized. After Tennessee Williams's death, Paula Laurence and Charles Bowden managed her personal care.
36. The hall bedrooms Leo is recalling were in boardinghouses.
37. The antiques dealer Ariane Dandois was the longtime mistress of Elie de Rothschild. They had a daughter, Ondine, in 1979.
38. Casque d'Or is a Jacques Becker film set in Belle Epoque Paris.
39. Journalist and editor Tina Brown (b. 1953) had resigned on January 1, 1983, as editor in chief of the British monthly The Tatler. She had reinvigorated that moribund society publication in three and a half years, with Condé Nast acquiring it in 1982. In the spring of 1983, rumor had her a contender to replace Richard Locke at Vanity Fair. Instead, when Leo took over the magazine, she signed on as an editorial consultant.
40. Donald Newhouse (b. 1930), the chief executive and co-owner (with his older brother, S. I. Newhouse, Jr.) of Advance Publications, married Susan Marley.
41. Princess Aspasia of Greece (1896-1972) married Greece's King Alexander shortly before his death but never cla
imed the title of queen. Her daughter was Princess Alexandra.
42. Geoffrey Charlesworth, a gardening expert, was Singer's long-term lover.
43. David Holland worked in Leo's Condé Nast office from 1983 to 1986. He later became a jewelry artist.
44. Carol Marcus Matthau (1925-2003) had been an actress and had twice married the playwright William Saroyan before marrying Walter Matthau. Known as a madcap, she had been one of Capote's models for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
45. Novelist and biographer Joseph Hergesheimer (1880-1954) told Richard Hunter that he had that response to trying homosexuality.
46. Leo had attended rehearsals and given My One and Only an enthusiastic feature spread in Vogue.
47. In 1956 Leo had arranged for Ruth Draper to be photographed by Mark Shaw shortly before her sudden death.
48. They had just seen Delon (b. 1935) playing the Baron de Charlus in Volker Schlöndorffs 1984 film Swann in Love.
49. When the Lermans moved to Jackson Heights in the early twenties, the corporation that was building most of the neighborhood excluded Jews, Catholics, and African Americans from its model housing. Jewish Jackson Heights grew on the lots surrounding it.