The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JULY 11, 1987 Almost a week of intermittent Ollie [North] watching. He gives us a new verb: to ollie, ollieficate, olliefication.22 Who is on trial is the president. As I watch, “history” images flash: great courts in Elizabethan England, the court and Jeanne d'Arc, the Inquisition … but these are reflex images. Colonel North is a fantastic actor delivering a fantastic script—arousing sympathy for this man who was doing his job, and doing that by his grandstanding, his self-righteousness, his self-publicizing of his patriotism, his mightier-than-the-law as protector and defender of the American way of life. He is wonderfully well spoken, brilliantly self-directed (as a great actor is directed by a great director), superbly costumed for this superstar role of the all-American-boy hero who is being made a patsy (and so, in this “morality play” symbolizes the freedoms of the free American people), who is the protector of these American principles and these pure people, including the basic American tenet: If you can get away with it, fine, but if you can't, you are a “dead duck”—not forever. Lawlessness as righteousness as patriotism.

  JULY 19, 1987 Maria's Carmen—so right there in 1964. The first time I asked her to do it, she said, “Don't you think I'm too elegant for Carmen?” The second time, we were walking from the Ambassador, on one of the snow-dark winter nights that seem late even in early evening. She lifted her tapering, black skirt and said, “Look at these legs! Look at these legs! Are they legs for Carmen?” And here is her unique Carmen, one of the most extraordinary (recalling Supervia and Ponselle). Dark, lyrical, sensual, and so French—that acid twang—so French. Oh—foolish, foolish, driven Maria, who knew who she was and who wanted to be someone else.

  Yesterday to lunch, Victoria [Tennant] (so cool looking, such a mixture of highly bred English and Russian and something of Ruth Stephan) and Steve [Martin] full of amazement at how Roxanne is being exalted to a work of art: “I never thought it was that much,” he said. “Now they tell me I'm an artist!” He is such a quiet man, a face on which to paint.

  I read some Elizabeth Bishop poems. I heard her voice: a quiet, correct voice, ladylike, with a smile in it, level as a meadow is level when there is no wind, not a breeze, nothing, but a summer-green meadow and summer-blue, high, early-morning sky. And, as I read, I saw typewritten on a single, crowded sheet of paper “I feel that I owe you a letter….” Where, dear Elizabeth, is that letter? Somewhere. Somewhere in the tangled past of these deeply lived-in rooms where, mostly, I do not feel that I have lived very much at all.

  JULY 31, 1987 Maria [Riva] about Marlene today: “She's so strong—all her brains are so strong. She'll outlive all of us. I know now what makes alcoholics live long. If they don't eat, they live forever. Her grocery bills are $500 a week, but she doesn't eat. She gives it all away to the concierge. She hates me because she gave me those pictures. The Daumier was so corrupted that Christie's [auction house] wouldn't touch it, and the Corot wasn't right. She thinks I'm a billionaire and I don't send her any money….” Then Maria told me about [producer and writer Steven] Bach and how he bought some of Mar-lene's dresses and said that he would auction them in London, and anything over the price he paid, he would give her. Christie's wanted to put them in a movie-star auction, but she wanted them to be in a stage-star auction. She wanted to be with Ellen Terry. So the dresses weren't auctioned.

  NOTE: On August 1, 1987, Leo and Gray went to Geneva, Switzerland, to visit Denyse Harari. From there they went to the Hotel Gritti in Venice, where they stayed for a month, and then finished their holiday in London. Leo would not again return to Europe. His physical troubles made international travel an ordeal and Venice had become unnavigable for him.

  JOURNAL • august 9, 1987 • Venice [In Geneva,] Mme Caillot told us, after much prodding:23 “I don't want to say anything against your President's wife … but—oh—she is an awful woman—so cold, so empty. I was with her three days and part of each night… really her hostess, representing the state. She hardly said a word to me—Rude! Unfeeling! We drove in the car and she was furious that she couldn't call California from the car. She was trying always to get ‘George.' When she couldn't get George she was furious.24 Wherever we went she was given bouquets, and sometimes she threw one to me. ‘This is for you,' she would exclaim, not even looking, just throwing, like I was her maid. ‘This awful country!' she said over and over again in front of me. When we went where she was to make a speech, it was so cold I offered her my sable coat, my mother had given it to me. Oh, no—she made a rotten face at it. All she was interested in was showing her red dress or red suit. She never looked at any of the speeches. ‘What am I supposed to do here?' she would ask in her awful angry voice.” Then Mme Caillot remembered the fuss Mrs. Reagan had made at the royal wedding [of Prince Charles and Diana], when Mrs. Reagan discovered that all of the heads of state were to be picked up by a bus. “The King of Norway was delighted. He had never been in a bus before, but Mrs. Reagan—she made such a fuss. To her, this was an insult!”

  [Historian] Peter Lauritzen told us, on the plane from Lugano to Venice, all about Evelyn Lambert's great triumph. In June, the [English] queen mother came to Asolo and stayed at the [Villa] Cipriani: “The only person I want to meet,” she said, “is the American woman who has a villa near here,” she told everyone. So Evelyn had a great luncheon for her, and the queen mother rushed out into the garden and ate Evelyn's usual menu, and had the most marvelous time. Then Evelyn's ice-cream cart came up, and the queen mother had an ice-cream cone, as did her attending male, a cousin. “Why,” she asked him, “is mine melting faster than yours?” “Because, ma'am, you've been hopping around so much!” She loved every moment. When the two went to the Valmaranas' [Palladian villa], she bounded up the tremendous pile of steps and stood there laughing while her followers came plodding and panting up. The contrast between the queen mother and Mrs. Reagan is the contrast between the true democratic spirit (queen mother) and the parvenu carpetbagger (Mrs. Reagan).

  As we came across the lagoon, Venice restored my faith, my belief in solace. And here in the Gritti—with five men to raise me up [from the water taxi] and the genuine welcoming from everyone, perhaps even some strength is returning to my limbs. Yesterday morning, when Puss was not able to get me off the toilet, I was somewhat surprised to find that, because he was “ashamed,” he would not for a long time call for someone to help. I gave up that shame a long time ago. I try to face each assault of age with dignity. I thank the Life Force every moment for having given me so good a nature.

  AUGUST 10, 1987 We did not know on that Sunday night, in mid-November 1966, that this was our last party in our house on upper Lexington Avenue, and that by early July we would no longer live in that house, the last wholly occupied-by-one-family house on Lexington. “1453—Fall of Constantinople: All Culture Goes to the West,” I would say, quoting Miss Josephine Farrell of P.S. 69, my childhood school, not realizing how apt a quotation this was until we two had moved west on Fifty-seventh Street, leaving in me a hunger for that house which has never been assuaged. Sometimes we pass it. It stands there, stark, bitter, hungering.

  But all of this was months away, years away, that night of the last party, the house bursting with light, the lamp, whose summer-pavilion shade was inlaid with a splendor of improbable roses, stood luminous in the Red Room, the dragonfly lamp glowed greenly, goldenly, iridescently, in a corner of the back parlor, and poinsettias and poppies ran a crimson riot on Tiffany-glass-shaded lamps in other corners. A house furnished magically with accumulations that became in some nineteen years so accustomed to this place that they seemed to confirm its past and assure its future. What could menace this exuberance, this abundance, this living place where so very much had happened, was happening? We did not know that our world, our Manhattan, was fading as surely as my grandfather's had vanished, as surely as my father's had faded. We recognized that Manhattan was, is, always had been a flux, but what had that actually to do with us, with the impregnable brilliance assembled on all four floors of that house? On tha
t November night in 1966, we were all, well, almost all of us, intact, safe in that shining moment. Nora and Sono showing Rudi Petrouchka up in my bedroom, while Cathleen Nesbitt snoozed on my bed … Marlene emptying ashtrays… Diana Trilling pouring out tea to Kerensky … but no—all this becomes confusing. There had been so many parties, so many little dinners, so many heart-to-hearts, so many tears and so much—oh, so much—light. So many women sitting by the telephone waiting and longing …

  I could begin with another night, this one January 8, 1953, in Venice, a chill, black night. Gray and I are at the Fenice, having come from Rome, where a splotchy poster announced that Maria Meneghini Callas was to sing Traviata, the one-hundred-year gala anniversary, “original sets” etc., etc. At the Fenice, liveried footmen parting the curtains, and the sparkle, the gleam of the jewels, the satins rippling from the audience onto the party-thronged stage, where a woman in white flounces, seated downstage-left, tossed white camellias to a frenzy of waltz-mad guests. At that moment, as the tawny, almost tarnished, amber-gold poured out into the rapt house, as she sat there almost indifferently, I learned a harsh truth: The death of a huge, visibly healthy person from a broken heart (call it lung sickness, call it anything medical—but she did, does, perish eternally of the most complete loss of faith) was infinitely more upsetting than the death of a little, frail mist of a creature, expiring before her life begins. I could begin there—with what became years of friendship, of mutual admiration, of trust and love and eventually sadness. I could begin there on that dark Venetian night in the golden hollow of the Fenice.

  I could begin with the evening of my birth, on a hot, gleaming, May Saturday in 1914, with Rita Glasberg, my mother's oldest and most long-lived friend, moving briskly from her parents' house on East 107th Street, in Harlem, the brownstone adjoining my grandfather Goldwasser's house, in whose parlor window, the Battenberg lace curtains hunched behind him, she could plainly see my father, a usually quiet, sober man, stark naked, his arms triumphantly flailing about above his head, shouting: ‘I have a son!' “ And, of course, he did—upstairs, in the second-floor back bedroom, where Momma lay inert and I was being pummeled. Rita joyed in telling this story. “Oh,” she flowed, “for two and one-half hours that doctor worked over that poor, dead, little monster baby.” Here Aunt Ida would flatly intone: “Monster—worse—he was awful— hands and feet like a duck and a hole in his head you could put a fist into.” “Yes,” said Momma, “but look at him now—everything fine. Just a little mark in the middle of his forehead, and when he's an older man no one will notice—no one.” But the effect on me, of hearing that I was born dead, that I was doubtlessly the first baby to emerge screeching, wailing after hours of death—the effect of this has set me apart, made me feel singular all my long life. Everything, all of my days, has been triumphantly extra.

  AUGUST 13, 1987 Grandpa's “house” was not exactly a house: It was a tenement, in which we all lived, as if it were Our House. Momma and Poppa, and, later, little Jerry, my brother, and I occupied what had been Grandma's parlor, complete with its green velvet suite of Queen Anne revival side chairs and sofa, now disarrayed by a huge, baroquely knobbed brass bed and Momma's upright piano, upon which music rack “Smile the While I Kiss You Sad Adieu,” and “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” mingled with “Over the Waves,” and Beethoven's “Für Elise.” It was Momma who massacred the classics, and Uncle Irving and Aunt Minnie the favorite songs of those post–kaiser's war days. We had come home to Grandpa's [on 106th Street] to live after Grandma had died in a flat in the remote Bronx, where we had lived a free-from-Grandpa life some three years.25

  So we occupied Grandma's erstwhile parlor, looking out on the wide expanse of 106th Street, where huge horses pulled and clattered all day long and the street vendors called their individual wares among itinerant street singers, brass bands and hurdy-gurdy grinders, carousel and hokey-pokey wagons, strange wizened men in gaudy scarves prodding wizened monkeys into chatter or flashy, mean-eyed parrots into proffering fortunes. Once I even saw a huge, sad, chained bear lumbering along that street. And so many donkeys and ponies with enterprising men who took your picture for a pittance. Then there were the religious processions, the street suddenly thronged with dancing, jammed with long-coated, flat-hatted, chanting, pale-faced, men, with ritual curls dangling, beards flourishing, or men bearing Torahs to the synagogue on 103rd Street in throbbing, stately funeral procession.

  AUGUST 15, 1987 The piano that Grandpa bought for his golden-haired, blue-eyed, amply fleshed daughter, my mother, survived vociferously until my brother and I [literally] demolished it sometime in the early fifties in the house on Lexington Avenue. When Momma was a little girl, that piano dominated a room in a flat that the Goldwassers occupied on Second Avenue in the nineties, in a row of buildings owned by Grandpa and his brother, Uncle Maxl. It was this piano, an upright with STRAND calligraphically lettered in gold above its at-the-ready, knicked, ivory-coated teeth, that my future mother attacked, doubtless with flourishing vigor identical to that I later heard. She was a whiz at “The Maiden's Prayer” and a cross-handed tempest when stirring up “Waves of the Danube.” That attracted the attention of “the upstairs neighbor” who had “a musical daughter” named Alma. Alas, Alma who “sang” did not have a piano. Matter of fact, Alma and her mother had hardly anything except Alma's “extraordinary” voice and chutzpah, which was in these circumstances necessary. So, Grandpa suggested that Alma vocalize to little Ida's pianistics, and, somehow, Alma's mother “managed.” Alma trilled away, and Alma and her mother survived from day to day, until the day they and their very few possessions vanished…. At this point in the tale, my mother always announced, giving Significant Looks, “She did not pay the rent. Not one single red cent!” The implications were obvious: Grandpa had had a “soft spot” for Alma's mother.

  Some years later, Momma noticed that a new, much touted voice was to make its debut at the Metropolitan Opera—some girl named Alma Gluck. There was a photograph—a dark-haired girl with a big, almost disfigured nose. “This is our Alma!” Momma screamed. So the night of the debut some Gold-wassers went off to the upper region of the sacrosanct Metropolitan. “Yes,” they assured one another. “Alma!” Proud of their former “fly-by-night” tenant, rejoicing in Momma's agile hands, which had helped her along, they marched around to the stage entrance and stood waiting. Finally, out came the new star. “Oh—how we cheered: Alma! Alma! But that Alma never gave us a tumble!” Momma always vengefully told, “Never even gave us a look! Maybe,” said Momma, always one for paying back, “she couldn't see us because of that huge nose. It was enormous. I always wondered, when she was really famous, why she didn't do something about it.” I heard this saga many times and somehow distilled from it a golden glory, a glitter that made me look, with speculative, hopeful eyes at pictures in the Sunday rotogravure pages… those dazzling prima donna smiles behind barricades of prima donna roses—a magic which enthralled me. I believed—and did not quite believe—Momma's history of Alma Gluck.26

  Many years later, reading the novel East Side, West Side [1947], by her daughter Marcia Davenport, suddenly, a page after I had read it, I realized that I had just had what was surely a confirmation of Momma's story, for in that novel Marcia Davenport's heroine was being conveyed across town in a taxi cab driven by Jacob Goldwasser, my grandfather, or rather the name of the man who had been her grandmother's and her now world-famous mother's benefactor.27 That week, I sat chattering with a woman who said to me, “Oh— Marcia—Marcia Davenport will be here in a moment!” I was thrilled. In she came. I poured out Momma's saga. She turned her back. Thereafter, whenever she saw me—at the Berliners, at the Gunthers—she looked at me bleakly and never said one single word to me.

  AUGUST 20, 1987 The brownstone house in which I was born on East 107th Street broke up when Uncle Harry [Goldwasser], married to Aunt Ida, who already had added to the family Rosalie, became so infuriated with Grandpa and his ghetto demands that he exploded. After scald
ing cannonades of curses, howls of rage, red-eyed taunts, Uncle Harry and Grandpa lapsed into a seven-year silence. Grandpa was notorious for his boiling, protracted silences, and Uncle Harry gathered his little family and moved them off to some more verdant Manhattan on the Upper West Side, not far from the Hudson—or the North, as we came to know it—River, where his brothers, his sister, his mother secretly visited him. Oh—there were many secrets in that family—almost all of them kept from Grandpa, who was so sure of his power, or seemed to be, that he was oblivious to what went on so persistently behind his back.

  Uncle Harry gone, Grandpa was on the move [to 106th Street], and this is when, much to his surprise, Momma and Poppa told him they were also moving [to the Bronx]. Years later, I heard that he had screamed: “Go! Go! Take your little bastard and go. Don't come near me. I curse you! I curse you!” Then he retreated into his usual silence, for his daughter, his possession, had now twice betrayed him, first by marrying a man unworthy, whose people despised his people, he thought, and now by leaving her father for some place where doubtlessly she would not keep a kosher house, would eat trayf, and certainly would be of no use to her father, to whom after all she “owed everything.”