by Leo Lerman
AUGUST 23, 1985 The demolition men shout to one another as they turn at the theater [behind our building] and torch it into refuse to be carted away, any old garbage. I make these shoutings into some far-off bucolic sounds—in the Veneto, or in the Pyrenees—trying to make this all somehow bearable—this little holocaust of the past. When I told Richard, he said, “There goes my whole theatrical career!” I saw his mother and his sister, Nancy, and his aunt and cousins in their velvet evening capes, stunned at his one line, as he ran across that stage now being ravished: “Wait for me, you dirty bastards!”45
The death of a theater—a special desolation. The magic despoilers, men in layers of muddy colors, murky blues, mucky hard hats, and huge goggles— insect eyes. The roar and creak and whine of the future. Raw gaping wounds, blacker than crusted old blood, the whimperings and groanings, the wrenchings and sudden outbursts of innards—corroded, twisted. Doré saw this, as did Piranesi. The anguish of this theater, the melancholy, the hopelessness where once aspiration and hope were the center of being, where once an enclosed world had managed to be forever. Then the unexpected moments of beauty: One of the rat-men dangling a stiff rope or rod, with a little star of blue light at its gently swaying tip, softly touching his blue star to this grimy wall, that bleak girder—volcanic showers of sparkler fires, huge Fourth of July sparkler fires, then flickers, and the wall crumbles, the girder melts, a patch of the firehouse, unseen from these windows for fifty or sixty years, appears across Fifty-eighth Street. The rat-men clot in scheming knots, hack, pound, wrench. These blackened, grimed, blue hard-hatted creatures, these from-the-Earth's-interior creatures contrast with the Venetian sun- and waterborne workers who inherently assume, while building, while manipulating garbage scows, while in repose, classic poses, antique configurations. Death and destruction here, life-giving individualities there, a contrast as dramatic as that between the Forces of Evil and the Forces of Good in some Biblical representation.
Barbara Epstein, at lunch, told me that when she stepped out of her taxi, at Gore's in Ravello, there he was with a big mustache. “Tennessee left it to me,” he said, “in his will.”
SEPTEMBER 1, 1985 • PALM BEACH, FLORIDA Tornado watches, sullen skies, windows full of torsioning, weaving, plunging … every variation of movement. Luncheon [at Si and Victoria Newhouse's] in an all white, blue, black, full-of-light house. All very laughing and blithe and civilized and happy-serious, a luncheon full of sudden understandings. Talk of Mishima. I told how silent he was, and neat, and how I took him to lunch at Sardi's because he wanted to see a theater “place,” and found Graham Greene (who could write Mishima's life) two tables removed and introduced them. Mishima met everything with identical probity, a solemn smile. Graham was large, somewhat explosive. Mishima liked to walk me home from places. Then he would come in and sit. I chatted endlessly, while he was monosyllabic—a small, finely formed, intensely still man. Or so I thought then.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1985 • NEW YORK CITY Wrote reviews of about five cookbooks today—slow, very slow, but somehow reassuring. I can sit for hours and I can pound it out. These months, ever since the hours of grilling in June, have been an impoverished writing time. Impossible to write down most of what I see and hear, the social behavior that nourishes me. So this long grind at the cookbooks makes me, at least, clamp myself to my typewriter.
I wanted to write about how Number One looked yesterday in the morning, as he was coming out of 350 [Madison, Condé Nast], but how can I do that now? I cannot write it until the gag [the lawsuit] is removed. I dare not write down my feelings about this horror.
OCTOBER 8, 1985 At the Met Museum, stores everywhere sell not only reproductions, but men's ties. “Next, shoes,” said Puss. “I wouldn't be surprised,” replied a girl, bitterly, from behind a counter. The Met has become great (in collections) and—an awful shock—a total monster, bloated with beauty and sick with commerce.
OCTOBER 10, 1985 Now Orson [Welles] is dead. All of that frustrated, thrown-away greatness, that genius, dead. I find myself standing almost fifty years ago on a fire escape pleading with him to take Joe Cotten back into his company, because that awful [playwright] Aurania Rouverol made me fire Joe from Places, Please. “No,” she said, “no real charm, no real looks, no real talent, no future. You'll see!” I saw. I hope that the cunt saw.46 Orson took him back [directly into Julius Caesar], and Places, Please flopped. But Joe never again talked to me. Even when I stumbled over him as he sat on the floor at Judy Garland's party in the Waldorf-Astoria after the opening in Manhattan of A Star Is Born.
This brings me to Irene [Sharaff] (who did costumes and scenery for Star Is Born) and Mai-mai, and so back to Yul. When I told Paula that Yul had died at four this morning she said: “He had everything and he did it all, and he was so generous with himself and he was such a loyal friend.” Of Orson, who gave Paula “Helen of Troy” in his never-equaled Dr. Faustus (one of the most flabbergasting theatrical experiences I have ever had) and made her the scampering woman in Horse Eats Hat, Paula said: “Oh, darling, he'd grown so monstrous. He'd become unemployable.”
OCTOBER 14, 1985 The [William] Buckleys gave a celebration of Estée Lauder at Mortimer's, and all the gratin was in gushing attendance. Estée (wasn't she Esther Rappaport of Middle Village in cousin Estelle's class at Newtown?47) in lipstick red—everything save stockings—the rig in which she is photographed on the dust jacket of “her” new book. This photograph was enlarged to poster dimensions, hung here and there in full blazing color. All of the ceilings were hidden beneath thickset Estée red balloons. Glenn [Birn-baum, Mortimer's owner] and Pat [Buckley] had planned rooms after Cecil's Ascot, but—no—Estée commanded her red, and Estée got it. There she stood, at the head of her receiving line, glowing, an affirmation of the positive. She actually deserves this canonization: She labored mightily for it. When she saw me being helped out of the car, she and two minions rushed out and propelled me in. She made me feel that she meant this. Quite an art, this hostessing as the guest of honor. Then Pat, one shoulder bare, took over and ensconced me in a chair. I received Mitzi [Newhouse], intact in quite a few of her emeralds, looking marvelous, and her mind sharp as her eyes. Then Donald, Sue, and Si [Newhouse]. (“Estée did everything—the jacket, size of the book, typeface— everything. Maybe I should hire her to see the books through at Random House.”)
If one doesn't go out into this world, they are much more “pleased” to see you when you do. You become an event. The party for Estée did not flow, it coagulated, confined to Mortimer's two rooms. Rivulets of guests trickled here, there, bogged down in clumps of “peers.” Playing entomologist, we spotted the rare specimens. (“There's Malcolm Forbes,” murmured Joel [Kaye] glimpsing the short, rare power bug.) A silted-up pond, which is becoming a quagmire, the vegetation, the mud, the dragonflies and other insect life, the inhabitants of the water, the cloud reflections, the bugs peering at themselves in the looking glasses.
Estée transforms her bulk adroitly, a soft jacket falling just so around the ample hips and her neatness almost excessive. But the essential, determined Jewish mother is always there. “Take your present!” she screamed as we left. Her ambition, no matter how fulfilled, is not ever fulfilled. The round, blue eyes open wide, I think even in sleep. She does not, and she will not, miss a thing. It's easy to make fun of her. She is larger than life, like old movie stars, but she survives the jibes and the jokes because she has a kind of grit, as they did. Estée is the ultimate immigrant triumph—more than Helena Rubinstein, because the princess was always a foreign Jewish woman. Elizabeth Arden was always a monster American. Fannie Farmer was home industry brought to high economic triumph—but Estée is first-generation American, as I am.48 She says she came out of an already “emancipated” family. I came out of a family supreme in their ghetto and breaking out of it.
OCTOBER 31, 1985 Mina died at seven p.m., suddenly, laughing and joking. The previous night she tore the oxygen mask off and the tubes out and shouted, “God, let m
e die!” But today, Lynn [her secretary] was told that she was lively, good-humored, and had something to look forward to. Mina left her body to Yale. Yale demurred, not wanting a body that had been operated on, but finally Yale accepted Mina's body. George [her brother], seemingly choking, said his thank-you, and Lincoln, absolutely dry-eyed, said he thought it was good luck. George is rude; Lincoln is crazy. Puss said the most helpful words: “It's just silence. And I've come to love silence.” The most astonishing thing Mina has ever done is to vanish. I have no one with whom to talk about her. I can see her, a body, in the mortuary at Yale, but that isn't reality. Real is Mina in her bed in that house in Weston.49
NOVEMBER 24, 1985 Jeanne Moreau, when she came to lunch at Mortimer's, [when] asked what Cocteau and Colette talked about said, “Oh—the laundry and the maid and eating … ordinary things. I was meeting so many famous people in those days. I don't remember it all.” I see Jeanne as autumn—the tawny, overblown blossoms of autumn, going almost to seed, those great, multi-petaled, dark-brown centered, deep red sometimes seeping into the dark honey-colored petals. People as seasons—Puss is winter, the winter seen in late-seventeenth, eighteenth-century personification garden sculpture, carried on to Victorian Christmas cards. Jack Frost silver. “That's why I love to polish silver,” he said yesterday. “It calms me.”
I still cannot come to terms with Mina's death, with that shut door. In all the years Mina and I were close, we never were harsh with one another. I saw her terror, her anguish, and I knew her self-absorption (especially about Lincoln), but also I knew her deep generosity, her acute sense of obligation. “You know,” she said frequently, “I'm no intellectual. I'm not one for ideas.” Yet Henry Adams was her god and Proust was her passion, other people's lives and letters her delight, detective stories her easy relaxation. She loved works of decoration even more than works of pure art. She made beautiful houses and ran them decisively. She roared with laughter, rage, and compassion. She gave more than she took. She believed in character and she worked hard on hers. The night before she died, she begged for death: I do not know if the minute when she died she wanted to die. She had learned, in her last, bedridden years, acceptance. I talk to myself. Who knew her “better” than I did these last years? So much more to talk about: her liberalism; how she loved to hear about worldly “doings;” her great love—Lincoln and how much grief he gave her, even when he sat talkless she waited for his Saturday visits during these recent years; the whole matter of her taking to her bed; her incessant reading and her fulfilled hunger to write. She knew her limitations. She had a sense of proportion (emotional proportion? I wonder…) and a sense of appropriateness, this last was a second skin. She loved everything to do with gardens and gardening. She adored her cats (“Here's Ibsen,” she would croon) and her dog. She loved Ashfield, but she gave it up. She was hurt by Smith [College]. She never forgot anyone who served her; even when she couldn't afford to spend, she did send money constantly, and the standbys, even those she hadn't seen in years, are in her will.
NOTE: Demolition and construction progressed on the choir-school building adjacent to the Osborne and their apartment grew intolerable. Leo and Gray took a room for a couple of weeks at the New York Hilton, looking out to the Hudson River.
After going to southern California for the holidays, they then checked into the Gramercy Park Hotel, downtown, an affordable but rather carelessly managed place. Finally, the two of them borrowed the Upper East Side apartment of a friend, the writer Joan Juliet Buck.
JOURNAL • December 14, 1985 Brilliant morning, like the sound of a burnished golden bell. [Seen from the Hilton,] the river has the blue of seafaring eyes, of Irish eyes, but this is a sad river: It is deprived of a part of its birthright. Even before Henry Hudson, it bore canoes and rafts… but now almost nothing where once such a teeming traffic, such a hooting and roaring and whistling and honking, such a constant celebration (midnight sailings!). Then the river was Alive. Now it lives in some forlorn dream…. But what of the turbulence beneath?
DECEMBER 15, 1985 Reading Philip Larkin's “Aubade” I am reassured. On the thirty-nineth floor, I came to understand—no, to appreciate—Death, the promised peace of Death—no problems, a forever of no problems, of nothing. I am sad only for Puss—that breaks my heart, but for myself, I have become reconciled to Death. Indeed, I see Death as the answer. “Aubade” is a very, very great poem, the greatest of this poet.
DECEMBER 29, 1985 • LOS ANGELES Carol (Matthau) said, “Thank you for all these years of trying to make me a star!” That has been one of the major aspects of my life, trying to make everything and everyone glamorous, a star— even when I was a little boy “putting on plays”—that was star-making. All of the fantasy—all life long. Now I have my vision of the river—smooth, aquamarine, still, eternal, no traffic upon it.
JANUARY 28, 1986 • NEW YORK CITY This ancient, wandering Jew and his Huguenot life-companion have at last come to an interim resting place. This room, Joan's workroom, is quiet, white, soothing, curiously removed, and I feel her loving presence—a balm. Music furls from the bedroom … rivulets of music … Beethoven … as healing as a wide vista of sky and ocean, after the turmoil these past weeks.
FEBRUARY 1, 1986 Hurd [Hatfield] took me to Yul's memorial. “We should be titled: The Had and The Hadn't, with you starring in your original role of The Had,” I teased him. Dorian Gray is in his seventies. The memorial in the Shubert was drab.
As I am led about, I become alarmingly like my mother. My fur hat could have been hers. I lunge over as she did. I peer with large, harelike, wondering eyes through my specs the way she did. I wonder if I think, if I feel the way she did? She takes over, having, as she inevitably had, the last word. When I see what becomes of radiance, my heart breaks, and I am happy for those who died young.
FEBRUARY 8, 1986 I buy “things” and then investigate them, and so find myself out. I accept “experiences” and the process is identical. I fell in love with Puss the moment I saw him. I have spent my life in finding him and finding me out.
In the beginning, the warrings are taken as challenges or ignored, because the emotion—falling in love—overwhelms all other emotions, even portents. Love will, must, conquer all. But love does not. The most love can do is understand, and to understand is to compromise. There is no such state as A Perfect Marriage. The degree of perfection is the measure of the compromise. Lesson in old age: To love is sufficient unto itself—no need to have that love returned. Strange lesson to learn at this time.
NOTE: Leo and Gray went to Laguna Hills for the wedding of Melissa “Missy” Cock-rell, Gray's cousin. From there they went to Los Angeles to supervise the photography of Herbert and Nora Kaye Ross's house, a feature that Leo would write for House & Garden.
JOURNAL • february 28, 1986 • laguna, hills, california We heard that [poetry critic] David Kalstone has AIDS. I think of all his quarried learning—then of that ultimate apathy, emptiness, removal from life in life that Gerry Stutz [president of Henri Bendel] has described: “They become totally removed. They are there, but only the remains are there. They seem to have left their bodies….” She sees this when she sits with AIDS victims. Judy Peabody [socialite AIDS activist] got some fourteen women to sit with AIDS victims, to go to them and comfort them. I try to console myself with Ruth Gordon's dictum: “Never accept facts!” But that does not help me.
MARCH 3, 1986 The wedding of Missy [Cockrell] put me into such a rage. The minister was the direct cause of my fury. He made the ceremony into a travesty. He translated the Bible into some sort of sub-talk: The Marriage at Cana became the lowest happening. This young cretin told the well-wishers, “They put out some of the good stuff first. Then they got the cheaper stuff out….” So he went on—debasing the miracle. “So, Jesus Christ said, ‘Okay!' “ Absolute assassination of language, violation of spirit. He told the couple that Jesus Christ was going to be in bed with them. This bespectacled young horror made a mockery of some of the most beautiful langu
age we have.
MARCH 7, 1986 • LOS ANGELES We have been busy getting the Ross project under way. Herbert is deeply worried about Nora. Yesterday afternoon, when he asked that she be sent a set of the pictures, Puss and I, without even telling one another, thought, “Does she know how long she has to live? Is that it?” Nora, in bed, looked wonderful, pleading a cold.50
MARCH 8, 1986 Edie Goetz has a Degas, one of the bronze ballerinas, the only one with the original tutu (only five were made and this is the only one that will come on the market). She bought it at the Edward G. Robinson auction, and originally it came from Marie Harriman's [Impressionist] gallery, and that means my seeing it in the rotogravure, when I was about fifteen, set me to climbing the stairs of that gallery, hoping to get a glimpse of it. I was too timid to go in because I thought that I had to pay. “Come on in. It doesn't cost anything,” she said to me.
We saw Misha [Baryshnikov] and his little Choura.51 She is very beautiful, at five, and is a water baby, splashing about for hours in it. She looks as if she would marry great wealth. Sitting in the white sofa, eating a big dish of ice cream, she said, peering about, “They must be rich….” And Nora, overhearing, said, “Yes… we are.”
MARCH 11, 1986 Somehow, in these eleven days we all seemed, although so much later in years, to be working away to future goals: Julie [Harris] on [her solo show] Countess Tolstoy; Carol [Channing] on [the play] Legends; Herbie and Nora on new movies, theater pieces, and acquiring for their house; Hurd [Hatfield] for movies and television. We all seemed at beginnings, and Alessan-dra [Ferri] was a symbol of a dazzling future52—even Choura, with her future in the twenty-first century, when I will no longer be here. A radiant eleven days.
Like Lucien de Rubempré [in Balzac's Lost Illusions], when Lousteau initiated him to the Panorama-Dramatique and the supper at Florine's, I too stood, unwittingly, at the parting of two ways when Lucien Vogel took me to Vogue in the autumn of 1941. “The one, represented by the circle at the Quatre Vents, honorable and sure; the other—that of journalism … a perilous path, among muddy ditches, where his conscience, inevitably, must be spattered with mire.” Did my character impel me “to take the shortest, and to all appearances the more pleasant way, to snatch at the quick and decisive means,” as I sat waiting in that Elsie de Wolfe decor, staring at those gold-starred pavements and heard those two words: “Divine” … “Debauchery”?