The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  Tanny LeClercq came to the Gregorys, brought by Jerry [Robbins] who wheeled her in and out.10 She is now somewhat carved in a curious stone, all of her features elongated (mouth, eyes, hands) by age and suffering—no glimpse of the fragile, whimsical, droopy-handed ballerina (La Valse, L'Après-midi d'un Faune)—still her long flowing, straight, dark honey hair, but lusterless—that's it: She's lusterless. Jerry silver-bearded, jolly, full of giggles and chuckles, much more a chum. Nora gave no hint of America's greatest dramatic ballerina (Jerry did The Cage for her)—nota hint—but warm, lovable, and laughter all the way.

  DECEMBER 15, 1984 New York magazine tells me that I'm too famous to be identified, which I don't believe. You become a part of the other end of the street, even when you find that the end you saw when very young isn't there anymore, its palaces gone, only echoes of its glamour heard. Still, even in that shoddy street which replaced it (was it always shoddy?), I am as insecure as any historic monument marked for preservation. I can, and doubtless am, being demolished without even knowing it. Perhaps that perpetual Manhattan roar is the bulldozer. Writing this has made me somewhat cheerful. I will read Persuasion.

  DECEMBER 16, 1984 I was scribbling when Norman Mailer arrived. “Finish the sentence,” he said. I did. “I love to write,” I said. “I can see by the way you wrote that.” Norman is as familiar to me as boys with whom I slept or, more accurately, fucked around with when I was young. It is his Jewishness—his constant self-examination, his humor—that I find so appealing, it immediately lends a genuine family-feeling between us. I carry on as if I have written a great mass of superb books.

  Norman: “The apparatus is still as good as ever, but…” We were talking about desire. He had seen a girl—very blond, tall, slim. “I would have wanted to jump on her and fuck her,” he said. “You know what it is with me?” I said. “It is my absence of regret that I regret. I am so surprised by that—that I feel no regret at not wanting to jump on anybody.” We talked about being “over the hill,” and about male exchanges I heard when I was young. “Oh, like being a ‘comfortably married man,' “ said Norman, ruefully, but smiling, as though he had never expected that state, with its implied obligations and restrictions, but taking a quiet pleasure in it all. Then, as always, Norman talked money. How hard he must work to pay everything he is obligated to pay. “We'll be at home with all the children,” he said about the holidays. So, here we have Norman, the former wild boy of letters, a paterfamilias, a benign older man, a responsible citizen doing good works.

  DECEMBER 24, 1984 What a fortunate man I am. What a strange, disturbing year this has been. The Condé Nast part of what I am doing isn't, of course, satisfying. I am no longer doing what I alone do—or did (I must grow accustomed to the past tense)—superbly. I was uniquely an editor and a specialized Vogue (a symbol) writer. Now I am selling what I used to give away (Mae West): advice, certain catalytic tasks, booking this and that, and I am getting more money for this—ironic.

  DECEMBER 26, 1984 What a circle of odious people surround Anne, our heroine in Persuasion. How they serve Miss Austen, who sitting at her dining-room table was visibly, I am sure, A Living Reproach. As I read, I see our Judith Martin, [etiquette columnist] “Miss Manners.” Is she, then, our Jane Austen? She is more Jane Austen than Emily Post. How Miss Austen strikes flint on stone, and how sparks fly, sometimes igniting small, astonishing fires, sometimes bursting into conflagration. “He had an affectionate heart. He must love someone.” “Of course, they had fallen in love over poetry.” Just random examples. The amusement and shock of joy comes from how she views common-sensically, from some sharp eminence. She startles realistically—there's the link with Judith. The view from the same sharp eminence. The comedy comes from Miss Austen's microscopic scrutiny of vanities, prides, aggrandizements, pretensions.

  DECEMBER 30, 1984 At lunch on Friday we played “Who are Proust's characters today?” That's how we discovered that Jeremy [Irons] had never read Proust. “I never had time,” he pleaded, this Swann of a different color, this bird that really never went.11 Then Marisa Berenson [actress and model] at Joan Buck's (and memories of that long-ago lunch I gave her grandmother Schia-parelli, after Carmel died). Marisa: “I begged to play Odette, but he insisted on the Duchess de Guermantes, so I said no.” Anna [Wintour], behind her hair and perhaps shy, but certainly withdrawn and not deep, but dark.12

  DECEMBER 31, 1984 A grand champagne wallow, the house intensely alive, and memories of bygone New Year's Eves: at Ruth [Ford] and Zachary Scott's in the Dakota (Cecil [Beaton] and [actor] Laurence Harvey coupling in the courtyard, and Rex Harrison making spaghetti); at the Strasbergs'; at the Hirschfelds'; at Woody Allen's; at Kate and Zero Mostel's in London (so still, only the clangor of bells); with Marlene at Maria and Bill Riva's (jumping off chairs, pouring hot lead [to foretell fortunes], eating the raised, apricot-filled doughnuts Marlene made); at the Van Vechtens'; at Sol Hurok's (the most glamorous, on the St. Regis Roof—star-splattered, frost-laced, mysterious and luxurious. How beautiful and elegant you always felt in that pink room). We did the rounds. Has New Year's Day calling gone too? On New Year's Day we would hold open house: To the last one Betsy Thurman brought the entire cast and crew, twenty-one, of the Chekhov Theatre. The rituals depart. There seem to be no new rituals to replace the vanished. I was delighted to hear people blowing horns in the street.

  JANUARY i, 1985 Lily Tomlin acts out a thought, not completing a sentence, but acting it out, trying it out as one of her characters, looking at one for cor-roboration. Her silken darkness and appealing, coltish legginess has a kinship to Rut.13?

  I dipped into [Byron's] Don Juan, who immediately leaped off the page and socked me straight between the eyes: “Dead scandals form good subjects for dissection” (Canto I, XXXI). I dipped into V. Woolf's letters and she waved sodden hankies, [her nephew] Julian Bell having been killed in Spain. All of this life and lifelessness in that 1937 July when Richard and I were in London. I dipped into her Moment of Being and was told of the impossibility of capturing her mother—her gestures, her wit—on the page. I know this feeling. I think of Diana [Trilling] saying yesterday, “I sit here and think: Why should I write this book, why?” I dipped into Vita Sackville-West's love letters to Virginia Woolf and V.W.'s letters to Vita and somehow this glimmers, glows, bursts into sparks, intimations of flame. The forest will burn. Schoolgirlish. Little cat feet. But the courtship, courtliness, and courtesy is there. Life is there to reassure us.

  JANUARY 5, 1985 Dorothy Norman called: “They want me to do a book of Indira [Gandhi]'s letters.” I tell her she must do it, because how else will anyone know that Indira was human? Dorothy read one or two of her annotations: “But I can't do the introduction, because people will think I'm prejudiced.” I think of Indira, smiling while the Pandit girls giggled, sitting on the floor of the back parlor in our old house. Dorothy goes on confirming to herself that only she can make the world know Indira, the individual behind the public figure. Finally she gets me to say that I will be her “sounding board.”14

  JANUARY 6, 1985 I am plunging through, with immense pleasure, Victor Hugo's Things Seen, his journalism. I plucked this book from the shelf because Balzac was too high for me to reach. Such verve and gusto of observation, so detailed, such a joy in telling, hot steam rises from the pages. Talleyrand's brain thrown down the sewer of the rue Saint-Florentin; Napoleon's great, golden-bee strewn catafalque moving through the hard sunlight; Louis XVI in his white garments mounting the guillotine…. Oh—the irony, the wit, the observation, the breadth of the mind behind this seeing!

  JANUARY 10, 1985 In today's Times, a photograph of youngsters guiding sheep along 104th Street in an annual Three Kings Day parade. There, when I was a little boy, I saw the rabbis and congregation joyfully dancing the Torahs to their holy ark on Simchas Torah. So for some Puerto Rican youngster today is the beginning of his street, at whose end I am. I wonder if this little boy has the same vision I had: a vision of a golden world, a world of mira
cle lights, of gor-geousness. My dream world is a lost one, but his dream world is to come. I know that mine, for all its “real” glitter and glamour, was false as his.

  I am reminded of [photographer] Bill Caskey, Christopher Isherwood's chum, when he was stopping at Mary Lou and T's in Siasconset. They came every day to us at the Hagerdorn house, outside of Quidnit. Hadn't Caskey been in jail? He, in a tattered white shirt, was standing on the edge of our cliff, peering out over the sands, out across the tumbling Atlantic. “You can really see Portugal!” I thought, standing next to him in my heavy, blue linen pants. And he murmured: “Honey, my sables are dyed in shit.”

  Yesterday, Bill Maxwell came to lunch at the Four Seasons.15 “You know everything about me,” he said. “I've written it all.” “Almost all,” I said. “There are one or two things… but I don't really care….” We have laughing, loving, mutually nourishing times, each of us making the other feel whole and rich in experience and exceptional. Bill said, “I wanted to bring you a present, so I typed out this early poem of Louise Bogan's. I am reading the biography in proof. It's always (what was his word?) to find out things you didn't know about someone you know very well. She had a love affair.”

  We talked of death (always) and sickness and aging and books and writing and one another and love and just being…. We are the best mutual appreciation society in the world. Bill has a passion for naps: “I jump into my pajamas,” he says. He is so very young—a young man—seems so vulnerable and spiritual. And he has sensuality. Is this the wick of the lamp? He gives such a pure light. Actually, he has the purity of the good-worldly, by which I mean that of goodness beyond cynicism, indeed having assimilated cynicism.

  After lunch [today] at Mortimer's, a moment of pure love and sweet-sad pleasure. The tape played “Time on My Hands;” my guests had gone; I sat at table, having paid the bill; Puss stood by—just a moment, as pure and uncomplicated as a drop of honey. “What is it?” Puss asked. “Nothing,” I murmured.

  JANUARY 22, 1985 The Reagans cannot fail. They embody every element of the American drama: a supposed idealism tempered by the traditional. I am sure the Reagans feel that they are broadminded. They are intolerantly broad-minded, the middle-American way. Visually, they are everything America wants—dancing a few steps together, she in her visibly expensive garb, he slicked up—the perfect couple. The boy and girl whom the yearbook foretold would definitely be the most likely to succeed. “If you can get away with it, okay.”

  Alex and I had lunch today at the Four Seasons. Alex's ennui is a result of his having used up so much. He canceled his exhibit. “I don't need all that fuss and having at me. I am always aimed at. Why should I expose myself? I don't need the money…. I'm tied in. I would love to go somewhere, but Tatiana gets exhausted.”

  JANUARY 28, 1985 Last night Puss at last told me that Martin [Goldwasser] has an incurable brain tumor. I rang [his wife] Electa (“Lucky”), and she calmly told me that he has three months to a year. He is my favorite cousin. I have always loved him. Of all the cousinage, he is the one with whom, when we were young, I was most, in every sense, intimate.

  FEBRUARY 7, 1985 Newtown High School was a remarkable incubator, how remarkable none of us realized until later. We lived by Untermeyer [Modern American Poetry] and Dickinson and poets. The center of our lives was literature and drama and high life and passions requited and unrequited. Our little coterie lived exciting times—the twenties American literary scene. Everything from [Edgar Lee Masters's] Domesday Book and Amy Lowell to Lady Murasaki. All of the poets—Sappho to Edna Saint Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie, our great passion. And fiction—the Russians, the Germans, Gide— everything—even Pandit Istrati, Symonds and Symons,16 [John Livingston Lowes's] Convention and Revolt in Poetry, Burckhardt, Pater, Taine, Mau-rois… and Proust.

  Each day was packed with discoveries. We all wrote verse. We lived for it, writing in strict forms, with a passion for sonnets. We fought to set verse free, not yet realizing that it had already been freed by Amy Lowell. We wrote and wrote and talked and talked and laughed a lot and were superb in our elective-ness. We felt we led “romantic” lives—so many Byrons and Shelleys, longing for Europe, thinking we were the crème de la crème and would always be that. And of course we developed Passions and held Riots and made fun of one another.17 We had no money, but we had everything else, including the future. Books showed us that there were others like us. From the women poets we learned self-mockery and irony. We grew in a time when anything was possible, anything comprehensible—not like today when the world has gone beyond possibility and comprehension.

  FEBRUARY 9, 1985 Sauk Center, Minnesota, celebrates Sinclair Lewis in precisely the ways he derided in Main Street. The television cameras brush his gravestone clean of snow: “To get a clearer picture.” I remember my long— well, he was long, I didn't dare intrude—telephone session with Red Lewis. He was kind, soft-voiced, incessant, asked questions about me and the young, talked about B [Brion Gysin] (his “amanuensis”) and said that although he could not write a book for my series (“Highways of the World”), he was interested.18 He called frequently to give advice, egg on. He seemed lonely, a man with endless unfilled time.

  FEBRUARY 11, 1985 Our Philco radio, the Gothic box through which poured The A & P Gypsies [studio orchestra], Myrt & Marge, Lux Radio Theater, Bing Crosby, Morton Downey, Kate Smith (her voice as rotund as her person, and as farm-fresh as the eggs sent in silver-ridged containers by Uncle Harry and Aunt Ida [Goldwasser] from Lakewood, New Jersey), the Boswell Sisters, Amos and Andy … At seven from each house on the block the dulcet tones of [Amos and Andy's] Madame Queen poured under the sound of wind in the trees… [Metropolitan Opera] concertmaster Svedrofsky had, in season, already left his pale lavender simulated-brocade panels. Oh, their walls were rich in make-believe (sconces—we called them wall brackets), and they flew high, the Sved-rofskys and the Curiels, and crashed with the Crash. Sadie Curiel was made of disproportionate parts of choler, rage, and sweet neighborliness. She sued me when I was fourteen.19… So back to the Gothic box … on to [bandleader] Vincent Lopez and all those bands, Cab Calloway with “Minnie, the Moocher”—did we know this was about dope? No! And then there was Saturday afternoon and “This is Milton Cross from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.” Oh Life! Oh Art! Oh Glamour!

  FEBRUARY 13, 1985 The Times tells why Si is so interested in talk at The New Yorker: He's offered $26 million [for it]. Natacha Stewart [a staff writer] reports gloom there. I remember when Condé Nast bought Street & Smith [in 1959], and Mrs. Blackwell said: “Can't you please say something funny, Leo, to cheer us?”

  Long on the blower with Kennedy [Fraser, fashion writer]—everyone is frightened and uneasy at The New Yorker. Si came to ask what I had heard. I told him. He had a “What will be, will be” attitude.

  Eleanor [Lambert, fashion publicist] rang to say that I am on the International Best Dressed List again. This is the best joke ever! I have been worse dressed this year than ever before in my life.

  FEBRUARY 15, 1985 Last night to New York City Ballet to see Jerry [Rob-bins]'s new work. Clumsy programming, but a packed house delighted. Brahms's “Liebeslieder Waltzes” (Balanchine [1960]) were abstractions of sensuality, intimacy—distillations—exquisite mimicry of passions, youth, and gentility—all very beautiful, plus Karinska's magical dresses. Then Jerry's new, but so dated, work [Eight Lines]—frenetic, itchy. I liked how he transfixed the [Steve] Reich rhythms. I liked the primary colors. I liked it very much—until I saw the Balanchine-Stravinsky that came after. That made Jerry's opus look makeshift, too influenced both by George and by Jerry himself—a not-too-good, serious ballet in a lavish Broadway musical, the kind so breathtaking, so evolutionary—in the late twenties and the thirties.

  FEBRUARY 16, 1985 Last night at the opening of the films of the Weimar Republic festival at the Museum of Modern Art, Dolly [Haas Hirschfeld]'s Scampolo, ein Kind der Strasse. An early Billy Wilder script [1932] and slight. Dolly enchanting, b
ecause of her perky face, her beautiful skin, her smile, her innocence, and her naturalness. That girl not far removed: “I was never as young as I looked,” she told the enthralled audience. Today's Dolly had a greater success than her movie's. She played straight from her heart, sometimes reminding me of Jessie Matthews.20

  No film made in Germany before Hitler took over can be a completely joyous experience. We look at that Berlin, at those people, and sometimes we know their awful individual fates; always we are obsessed with their horrible futures. Dolly wore a protective, wide-brimmed hat, her beautiful furled and knotted red hair, a black velvet suit, a blouse of delicately patterned lace, high-necked, the whole somehow echt alte [true old-time] German. She talked wonderfully in that clear, resounding, almost unnuanced voice, the most important sound in our lives while she spoke, the voice and the personality obliterated MoMA, this time, this place.

  She was funny: “When Billy Wilder was in a Hollywood success, he thought his mother still in Vienna would realize this was her son's name on the screen [and not be pleased], so he wrote to her: ‘Momma, I have to change my name, here in America. Now when you see Thornton Wilder on the screen, that's me.' “ She was deeply touching: “Share with me a moment of silence in memory of those colleagues.” She carried the jammed house with her, nothing mawkish, as pure as her [screen] performance—straight from the heart. The audience held the remnants of the refugee community and spooky movie-obsessed creatures looking for “stars.”