The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  MARCH 2, 1987 Nora died. “Such wonderful timing,” said Deedee [Bail, Herbert's assistant], meaning that her death coincided with the Los Angeles opening of American Ballet Theatre's season. Yesterday, Herbert did some work. This is as Nora would want—life to go on.

  I told Geraldine [Page] that for years I disliked Helen Hayes, while admitting that her [Queen] Victoria, Harriet Beecher Stowe, her drunk, even Coquette were good. The first time I really liked Helen Hayes, as a woman, was when Ela told me that she had come to her and said that she would pay for an around-the-world cruise, if Ela would take [Helen's husband, playwright] Charlie Macarthur, on it, in the hope that this would get Ela “out of his system.” Ela roared with laughter when she told me this. She never wanted Charlie. He was so “hot” after her that he hid behind a snowbank, leapt out at Ela when she came down the steps to enter [Club] “21,” threw her to the ground, breaking her leg, and shouted: “Now you'll have to be in one place. Now I'll know where you are all the time!” And she was—for weeks, in a plaster cast much autographed, including by Charlie, in a room supplied by Alice [Astor] in the Gladstone Hotel (owned by Alice's brother, Vincent), Ela having a glorious, laughter-filled time.

  I was startled when Geraldine quietly asked, “Who was Eleonora von Mendelssohn?” “That's a very, very long story,” I told her. “And I will tell you one day.” The irony: how the most important person in so many lives can be no one in the life of someone who feels that she or he knows you very well. This is stated clumsily. It is the cause and heart of my book, the reason for my book: the sustaining of life and bringing to life of lost worlds.

  NOTE: During Renata Adler's civil suit against Condé Nast that had so traumatized Leo in 1985, Jonathan Lieberson, a philosophy teacher and critic, son of Leo's friends Goddard and Brigitta, had given testimony for the plaintiff, which Leo thought unforgivable.

  JOURNAL • march 10, 1987 Jonathan Lieberson's proposal to Amy [Gross at Vogue] that he demolish Susan Sontag: She has never, he says, had a thought of her own. She has stolen every one of the ideas for which she has become famous (i.e., camp).6 She is a plagiarizer. Jonathan is bad news. He is a hothouse traitor, a bone-deep malcontent, a Janus, a poor thing who has never been able to look in his glass, there to see himself as he is. He is a sick man, physically, and I believe bitterness is eating away his intelligence. He presents a question encompassed by the hackneyed designation “a born traitor.” Can a being be a traitor prenatally? Amy must not give up Vogue to the demolishing of Susan Sontag. If Vogue demolishes—Susan Sontag is not the monument, not the institution, not even the foible. She is not a crook, not a plagiarist.7

  MARCH 15, 1987 I finished Marie Vassiltchikov's Berlin Diaries 1940–45 this morning, having been obsessed with it8. I felt, finishing it, very much the way I remember feeling when I finished reading Gone with the Wind, but this is more personal, this tells what happened to everyone, and this is a natural masterpiece. Her record of the Berlin blitz ranks with Pepys's description of the Great Fire [of London]. I haven't felt so close to people in a book in years. I felt that I knew Vassiltchikov immediately.

  At the very center of Marie Vassiltchikov's Diaries is Loremarie Schönburg. I never knew that she had been deeply involved in the July 20 plot to kill Hitler. When she came into my life, soon after the war, brought by Rut, I saw a faded prettiness. I saw an obsessed woman, a sort of tormented victim, married to Joel Carmichael, living over a shop on Madison Avenue. I liked her, and when Puss got to know her he liked her, but we never knew of her devastating past. She, I think, had a child or two with Joel, who was, I heard, a philanderer, and very attractive to women. I never could see why. Later, Loremarie vanished back to her Vienna, where she got involved in manure. I remember Rut returning from a visit and describing Loremarie and her “exquisite old mother, the princess” in their little palace, with its oval ballroom (“enchanting”) in a big, wild park (“almost in ruins—they are so poor”). When we went to Vienna in 1955, we did not, although urged by Rut, go to see Loremarie. I was too shy. Now I find that she died in Vienna—in 1986.9

  Herbert rang. His voice is thick, clogged, grief eating away at his innards, gorging on his hurt, his being. His voice separated … thick strands of wool … then, suddenly clear as it was before this horror consumed him, when he broke out of his grief to say how happy he is that I am all right… then the blackness consumed him again—and sobs—and he rang off. Will he ever become himself again?

  MARCH 17, 1987 Thinking of Truman, Emma Bovary superimposed herself on his image. They are related, for T's and Emma's passion for “Society” was an affliction for both of them and did them both in.

  MARCH 22, 1987 I have always lived my life as a story, always lived in the reality of the fictional, the made-up. I don't even have a lifeline! Reaching my seventy-third year, I realize that the novel I have wished to write, I have written. My life is that novel. I have been writing it all of my life.

  I held some of Mrs. Simpson's [the Duchess of Windsor's] jewels in my hands: good stones, well cut and made, but no fantasy, no beauty in the design. These are the very expensive baubles of an expensive, surprisingly constant, woman. Rich women in Grosse Point, Locust Valley, and Palm Beach could have had them. They do not compare to high Renaissance, eighteenth-century, or Second Empire jewels. A woman said to a man, as they peered at two feathers, one made of rubies, one of diamonds, each of small quill-pen dimensions: “I know what I could do with that on a simple dress.” And that sums up Mrs. Simpson's rewards.

  MARCH 23, 1987 This part of being old I hate: the machinery breaking down. Seeing almost everything in a Sara Moon haze, blasted by light.10I love light; I fear the dark. I'm apprehensive, terrified of falling as I pull or am pulled and pushed and tugged by genuinely loving or helpful hands upstairs, downstairs— sometimes not even able to raise myself off this bed. I hate all of this. But then, I am thankful. I must remember to be thankful: I can read even when the printed page separates into dim pointillism; I can eat, even though my teeth are mostly fake and in the morning the food makes little miseries; my mind remains sound, even when little hiatuses make patches of not knowing who … I could go on—but now I am, as I sit here, quietly waiting for the next assault. I am optimistic again.

  APRIL 4, 1987 The Duchess of Windsor's common jewels brought $50 million, with some $40 million going to the Pasteur Institute. How fitting that the duchess's tight ass should bring this bounty to the “relief of AIDS research.

  APRIL 5, 1987 As I sat absorbed in Harvey Fierstein's [trilogy of plays] Safe Sex, I felt Puss and me to be Ancient Remains, surviving in a world taken over by Vandals, Visigoths, and Plague—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse triumphant. Harvey Fierstein is a mixture of Sarah Bernhardt, Laurette Taylor, and Jennie Moscowitz—that is Harvey Fierstein the actor. The playwright Harvey Fierstein is a female Tennessee Williams. Fierstein writes gorgeous arias, sans Tennessee's poetry, but nevertheless there is a bone-deep kinship. But most of all, Fierstein profits prodigiously from the “gains” of the modern theater (Ionesco, Beckett). He has absorbed them all and made them his own. They are his manure. Puss observed, “Isn't it astonishing? Not one four-letter word in the entire evening. It can be done without.” Note: Is AIDS our equivalent of the Deluge, destroying “good and evil alike”? See the Flood in Genesis.

  APRIL 17, 1987 The desolation, the feeling of ghostliness, yesterday at noon in the lobby of the Algonquin, centered in a child-sized, seated, very somber, still, still figure—[William] Shawn of The New Yorker, formerly and forever. I went up to him and, as he stood up, such a wee, sober, slightly bewildered little person in his habitual solemnity and usual dark clothes, saying, “Oh, Mr. Lerman, so good to see you.” I found myself patting him and saying, “Dear Mr. Shawn. I miss you.” The hotel is more than usually musty: The glow is gone. Shawn, sitting there solitary, left behind in dustiness, was a symbol of what has happened to the Algonquin and to all of our electric-light past.

  APRIL 20, 1987 Herbert,
weeping bitterly, rang to tell us that Antony [Tudor] had just died. Antony has been in my thoughts constantly, but I believed in “forever.” Perhaps now I no longer believe in forever. How Antony influenced our lives! What a wider vision he gave us. I have no tears about Antony, only wonderful memories. He takes a miraculous chunk of our world with him, but he leaves a world behind. How long will his world be perceptible? To have lived while he recalled this aspect of our world to us, that is part of the glory. The heritage is spread everywhere, even in movement that has never seen his movement.

  A version from Isabel Brown:11 Tudor and Hugh were in the kitchen, Hugh staying over because of early work at Grace [Costumes]. Hugh heard Antony call “Bugs!” (Antony's pet name for Hugh) and then some little sounds. Hugh rushed in. Antony was on his right side, dead. So almost sixty years of being together ended. So similar, the pattern—Antony and Hugh, Herbert and Nora—in each, Herbert, Hugh were Galateas.12… Not wholly true about Herbert, but both are lost and each will find himself through work. Hugh this morning weeping seemed so like Herbert weeping—no difference in tears or laughter. These three lives: Nora, Antony, Hugh, and their “ramifications”: Herbert, Isaac [Stern],13 Jerry [Robbins], Arthur [Laurents], Diana [Adams], etc. This is a fantastic book, but who could write it? It is so geometrical, basically, the design almost as clear as in a Renaissance masterpiece.

  Remembered from dinner at Diana [Trilling]'s: Goronwy Rees, staying at Bowen's Court, was Elizabeth Bowen's lover, and then along came [novelist] Rosamond Lehmann (“The most beautiful woman in the world,” said Diana), and that very night he left Elizabeth's bed for Rosamond's—and that is how Elizabeth Bowen's [1938 novel] The Death of the Heart was born.14

  APRIL 28, 1987 Last night went to the revivified [Club] “21.” I had a revelation: “21” was Ralph Lauren's ancestor. It exploited, early on, the same American dream of an elegant, timeless, secure, rich, heavily furnished past, a WASP past for “upwardly mobile” ethnics. All of it, including Devoted Retainers seemingly centered on Serving You. Social structure, by the time of “21”‘s opening had so broken down that in reinventing the “secure” domestic world of the 1880s, of the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers, “21” also caught the progenitors themselves. They flocked to “21.”15

  MAY 9, 1987 Gayfryd Steinberg said to Iris Sawyer, “Some people called Cabot are coming to the PEN dinner at the [New York Public] Library. Who are the Cabots? I never heard of anyone called Cabot.” Iris: “Every day The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country become more pertinent. We haven't gone anywhere.”16

  Even Proust wouldn't have conceived the significance of Shirley Lord, Mrs. Rosenthal, buying Iris Sawyer's apartment through the real estate midwifery of Alice Mason, or the significance of Shirley marrying Rosenthal in John Kluge's apartment, the marriage having been “engineered” by Barbara Walters and Bubbles Sills, who are her “bridesmaids”!!!17 Meanwhile, Arianna [Huffing-ton] “conquers” Washington with her Folger [Shakespeare Library] party—me oh my! Were the Astors and Vanderbilts any better on their climb?

  MAY 19, 1987 • LAGUNA HILLS, CALIFORNIA Puss is “cleaning” the terrace. Maebelle: “I thought I had everything so clean you wouldn't have to work!” No place will ever be tidy enough to please Puss. As he passes through Heaven's Gate, he will manage to give it a little burnish.

  Maebelle mused on how “nice” and “quiet” and “gentle” Bill [Inge] was. I thought about how deeply troubled he was and how sad, how he sent for boys, paying them to fulfill his sexual fantasies, how he was restless and never could sit through a play or concert, how drink took over and “drying out” took over, and how, at last, it all sent him into his garage where carbon monoxide obliterated the horrors of his visibly triumphant life. Bill, despite a pixillated smile, was a sad man. Snatches of memory: He loved Rachmaninoff; he never had histoires like Tennessee, Little T, or Gore; he was always a yokel in Manhattan, a kind, Midwest-faced man with watery blue eyes, a mouth that tried hard to be a cupid's bow, a heart that was loyal and desperate for love, but distrusted it. His passion was the theater: His was a world of hungry little people, lonely people who let life pass them by … because they trusted false gods?

  MAY 29, 1987 The “new” David Hockney: very civilian, gray buttoned-up suit, hair still dyed but not as blond, still trick [playful] shoes, and he's heavy, and, as always, loving. He came to [decorator] Rose Tarlow's marvelous house to see us, and he told us that Charles Ludlam was dead of AIDS—a devastating blow. This glorious actor and director—a total theatrical man, who made us laugh until we were delirious, and whose taste was almost always impeccable. I cannot go on now, but he was a loving, devoted friend. This is a disaster for all of us.18

  MAY 30, 1987 David Hockney in his studio—definitely toned down and no Baron Ochs crew. His magical conception of Tristan and Isolde—the most revealing conception since Appia's.19 David: “Space, painting, lighting doing it all, everything Wagner wanted”—thrusts into infinity. I had this feeling at Carnarvon Bay in 1937 (evening) and at Stonehenge at dawn in late December 1964. Hockney does it all with light, but not like Appia. I am worried about David. He is tense—a certain largesse of time is gone. In the studio light, a grayness underpainted his skin, the bone structure is more apparent. He hugged me more, as if he couldn't hug enough, an “in-case” hugging.

  JUNE 9, 1987 • NEW YORK CITY Antony Tudor Memorial at ten a.m. at Juil-liard. Isabel Brown waited for us in the lobby. Greetings as we went below from women who seemed to know me. People pat me now with the pats given to older people and little children. Two different kinds of affection? Or reassurance? Or is it respect for innocence and worldliness returning to innocence? Or wanting to tap the strength, the magic?

  Backstage: no light, but long-familiar shapes and voices and even glimpses of faces. The potency of this day began to fill (not the word), invigorate (no), enlarge (maybe) me. Donald Saddler, Nancy Zeckendorf [ballet patron] …more and more arriving … Jerry Robbins, Misha … the sound of the house filling. I “cased” the stage, because of my infirmities. Everyone so solicitous. Isabel resembles Nora. She's now administrator of a ballet school: “I have over three hundred, mostly Koreans and Japanese, marvelous dancers… so few Jews… If a Cohen or a Stein calls up I'm tempted to let them in without even an audition!” Isabel's joke.

  Then we went into the stage-left deep wing. As the mauve-pink stage light seeped from the stage, lighting our faces against the black of backstage, we peered out. The memorial began with the pas de deux from [Tudor's 1975] The Leaves Are Fading. In that fondant, satin light sat Agnes [de Mille] in her wheelchair, looking out at the stage (“Oh, darling,” she whispered, “I can't feel anything on my right side. I'm paralyzed!” So I touched her on her left shoulder as I was placed directly behind her on a high steel stool.) Jerry Robbins leaned over her whispering, the light turning his white beard mauve, and Misha leaned over to kiss me, saying, “I love you.” That was a surprise. Puss held me firmly from behind. On my head, my black “travel” hat, my white beard a dimness in the blackness. Donald Saddler was at my right, waiting to lead me on, and Herbert stood behind Puss—sobbing … and so many others, from my long-ago dance world. I could hear them breathing, anxiously waiting to go on. That is the best of the worlds—not book, art, music, theater—but dance—the most cohesive. This was a freeze-frame moment. The voices of the speakers oddly echoed through a backstage transmitter: Jerry's voice breaking with tears; Sallie [Wilson], who danced Pillar of Fire, weeping as she talked;20 Agnes, trundling to the podium and very Pasionaria: “We must preserve Tudor's legacy! … I go to the ballet these days, and on the stage I do not see people!” Agnes is truth.

  JUNE 14, 1987 Geraldine Page found dead in that Collier Brothers–Miss Havisham house on Twenty-second Street, alone when she died—that is the horror: this life of hard-won applause to end in solitary, perhaps choking silence. No standing ovations. I see her running down the steps of 1453, with Rosemary Harris and Ken Tynan. I see her whe
n she was asked how she would play Gertrude [in Hamlet], beaming: “Fat! Fat! Fat!” I see her in beautifully cut black satin in Separate Tables—such a surprise. And in Christmas Memory. I see Geraldine darting hatred across the table at A Big Executive: “You fired my brother!”

  She was the last of great leading ladies of that generation, but always, off stage, a bag lady. She exuded a kind of sunniness, a Midwest golden-grain aura. She made all of her inadequacies into elements of her art. She was always a little girl playing whatever part she lighted on. Here is where her special magic gave us back Laurette Taylor's: At some common or mutual point they met in innocence—wide, blue-eyed innocence. And Geraldine could make us laugh—howl—turning the howls into tears. She was utterly a woman—with all of her men. I remember, after an opening, I went back to congratulate her (she was one of the few I went back to see), and, not seeing Rip [Torn, her husband], made for her, only to be told in a fierce whisper: “If you don't pay attention to Rip, I won't talk to you anymore!”

  And she wandered off sometimes. So full of dreams. So easy to make fun of—all of those calculated, scene-stealing mannerisms, tricks of voice, ungain-liness, shifts in voice register, tongue and teeth clickings, ruminations that built conviction or pathos. All those awards. Born Kurzville, Missouri, married twice, two sons and a daughter.

  JUNE 18, 1987 She had her standing ovation! Yesterday morning at the Neil Simon Theatre (once the Alvin where Ethel Merman was queen). Packed! Jammed! Standing in the aisles out onto the fire escapes, winding through the doors onto the street. Then, on the stage, in the Blithe Spirit set, almost obliterated by floral tributes, sat a large man. “Who is that?” That was Rip Torn! And colleagues and family, even her little grandchild. Rip rose. He walked to the mike. He said, “She would have loved this.” The house rose to its feet. It roared for fifteen minutes! She had this standing ovation for two and one-half hours. No sadness. Tears, yes. And laughter, so much laughter. And love. Never for a moment was Geraldine absent. She was there, in that theater, where she last appeared, conjuring up the Dear Departed.21 And she was still at it. I wonder if the cast feels her, even sees her there? I am sure that she is there, every performance. I know that I saw her in the large pink gingham that she wore the rainy spring night when she brought [novelist] Nelson Algren to a party at our house, and she told us how to play the game of the garden-in-the-bottle. Your garden told your character. Her garden was, I think, roses, roses all the way, forever blooming roses.