The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  JULY 5, 1988 Up and down [the canyon road], very Corniche, sometimes scary, to David Hockney's. This eyrie set in huge trees, and these house [enameled-steel mobiles] an aquatic tribe of sea creatures all painted by David in his joyous colors: children's paint-box sky blue, the yellow of yellows, the most orange, the primary green, and here and there lavenders, mauves. “I don't understand why artists want to lock themselves in buildings, when they can live on the ground floor with a garden,” David said of artists who work and live in breweries and sweatshops. The studio rife with recent paintings—all joyous— foods, fruits, a Mexican inn. Color! Color! Color! David the most vibrant (a quiet blaze, a fire of giving, of humanity, of life) dispensing a real English tea— cucumber sandwiches, pound cake sliced thin, Marks & Spencer tea in a lavender-blue, gold-flecked tea service—all improvised, a henchman pouring. The glorious glitter and shimmer of sunlight and leaves—gold and green—in the slanting, near-ceiling windows—a glory of flashing light and color.

  David reading in his Yorkshire voice—beautiful. He spoke of how “impoverished” Jasper Johns's work is, of how architects know not how to ornament and how architecture should be taken away from the architects, how humanity is gone and art must be organic. David is a teacher, a great talker, and a master reader.

  AUGUST 5, 1988 • NEW YORK CITY In each being there are occasional unshed tears and fountains of unsprung laughter.

  AUGUST 12, 1988 I am fighting some sort of nadir of my spirits. I am trying to rise. Such awful times. All that I built at Vogue dismantled—vanished. Trumpery Time.

  Herbert [Ross, directing] rang from Steel Magnolias: “What should I call the sale? I'm auctioning everything….” Me: “The Nora Kaye Ross and Herbert Ross Collection!” H: “Oh—good.” Me: “Are you married to her? [Lee Radziwill] ?” H: “No—but I think pretty soon …” A pause … “You know, I think Lee was disappointed not to be editor of House & Garden” Me: “Was she asked?” H: “No—she feels she's not being used to her full potential at Armani….” As I said, Trumpery Time, time of the carpetbaggers again—the Slatterys take over Tara.

  Autobiography is as much telling oneself about oneself as it is telling the “world.” I think of the lost skies of my long-ago youth, those flaming, early-evening western skies we saw across the emptiness of sulfur-bright fields in what is now slummy Jackson Heights. Then the great—poplars?—lining the new-laid streets roared like the sea in the wind-turmoiled night. I can smell the green sharpness. I can hear restless birds. I can hear the distant desolation of a trundling train and the nearby clip-clop-clop and gentle clang of the early, early milk cart. He was very sexy, that ruddy, big-beaked, prune-eyed, Irish-faced milkman, his bottles clinking against our back door sill. I thought about him a lot—a lot—as I plunged myself into ecstasy in the skim-milk everyday dawning.

  AUGUST 23, 1988 When Jack Houseman rang several days ago, he calmly told me that he had cancer, that this was (his words) “the Big C,” that his legs were paralyzed. His voice was smaller, but it had lost none of its decisiveness or inherent irony, humor. He had been in the hospital three weeks, had had an operation. He was planning to read The Decline and Fall and Dr. Johnson. Then I spoke to Joan, and her voice was the same, a bubble of ironic laughter. “I'm all right… all better,” she said, “at least now … I've got to go back in six months….” The courage! No hysteria …35 Paula Laurence said: “So many people owe their lives to him. He set them on the way.” Last night, there he was in Woody's film [Another Woman] looking, as Puss said, one hundred years old. He has always been a loving friend.

  AUGUST 27, 1988 To Stella [Reichman]'s nest—all red and patterned and leoparded (fake) and kitsch and window treatments and a touch of pale For-tuny and fantasy and jokiness and made for sex and food and fat and life and so pink with living and so echt Viennese, so Stella—massive ego but self-comedic.36 She: “We had eighteen servants, four cars, a Rolls-Royce uphol-stered in petit point.” Evening's high point: Stella and Donald Saddler dancing in that small, stuffed “living” room (a Bambi Vienna). Donald dances as high-spiritedly as ever. A good, happy, laughing evening.

  Mitzi Newhouse is one of the twenty-five richest women in the world— $8 billion. Her mother, Mrs. Epstein, forbid her to “see” that no-good young man. Mitzi: “But he has a Cadillac!” Mrs. Epstein: “Borrowed!”

  AUGUST 29, 1988 Herbert rang yesterday to say he was marrying the princess [Radziwill], would we come on the twenty-third to their “reception” [in New York]. We will be in Los Angeles. Herbert said, “You don't approve?” I said, “No.” But we were amiable. I quoted Márquez about time bringing changes, etc.

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1988 Reading Cocteau's diary—”Every singularity suppressed is a mistake: the first hole in a fine fabric. The hole quickly grows bigger. So big that it takes up all the space and the fabric vanishes.” Despite his constant yammering about how the world doesn't appreciate his true self, Cocteau frequently makes passionate, penetrating, dismaying sense and, of course, he astonishes with his acute atmospheres, his portraits.

  Yesterday at lunch—intimations of mortality—a sudden lifting up inside of me—almost ousting all my life—the horrible iron ceiling not descending to crush out life, but—oh—so unexpectedly—ascending. Then a flood of heat where the ascending iron ceiling almost did me in. I was as suddenly free of the horror—vacant. The restaurant, Jim McMullen's, returned—the shattering sunlight. This was a minute—perhaps less—of terror. Puss, observing me, burst into tears. For a time, five minutes or more, I felt removed. I saw the life around me. I saw it, noted it in its details, but I was not part of that life. I was alive. I was emptied out, but alive.

  NOTE: Leo and Gray spent two weeks in September in Laguna Hills and Los Angeles.

  JOURNAL • September 13, 1988 • los angeles To Malibu and the House-mans. “House” looked better. His skin actually looked healthy. This benign face looked as if all save sweetness had emptied out. All the hauteur fined away—the loving smile—all goodness and interest in that face. He said he'd been reading Michelet's French Revolution—and then his mischievous look: “He says it was the clergy!” Only one mention of his state: “This is such a relief from twenty-four hours of pain.” He is interested in news, gossip, books—but, oh, we could see Houseman slowly separating. Joan is superb. She now looks like a Russian figure of stature. When we went away, I suddenly burst into tears. I thought of Mina constantly, and how her face had grown so ugly. Houseman's face is now full of a beauty.

  OCTOBER 19, 1988 • NEW YORK CITY The upset at hearing Jack Houseman's nurse, on the blower, “We're losing him…. He's gone….” Meaning that his telephone connection was breaking down, not that he, on his deathbed, was forever gone. What is keeping him alive is his book [Unfinished Business] coming out. He is living paralyzed from the neck down—by sheer will. The astonishing surge of spirit, which gives him the strength to read programs [for radio]. So long as he works, he will—until his machine gives up—live. Astonishing.

  NOVEMBER 9, 1988 Jack Houseman gone [on October 31]. Joan said: “I'll have to find something to do now….”

  DECEMBER 28, 1988 I reread my Little Women chapter in the early morning of this “holiday,” always finding the freshness of that intact, laundered, steadfast, loving world, that lost American world, vivid, Even the sentimental parts—the parts like the anecdotal paintings of its day—are alive.37 Then I read along in John Cheever's letters and was split over “boy meets boy” parts.

  Puss said, “I never remember having to do so much for a party—ever.” But we are now older. I dodder. Puss finds difficulty remembering. We are not what we were; we are not even what we will be. Latest bulletin: “I spilled half a bag of sugar into the cutlery drawer!” Puss in anger. Then he stumbled over a chair. “It happened again! I went into the kitchen and it was full of smoke! The potato dish boiled over! There was no reason for that to happen. I'll cut my throat!” Puss really distraught. I can do nothing save try to soothe, but soothing is less and l
ess effective. Now the downstairs bell… This will be the last “big” party. We're no longer up to giving even a party for twenty-six.

  JANUARY 8, 1989 Maebelle goes home tomorrow. She clings to vitality, to life (“I don't want to leave it,” she murmured almost to herself yesterday), makes a symbolic tragic figure. She tries to help, but of course she can't. She is courageous, valiant, loving—but, oh, how the self-centered Maebelle takes over at times—the all-for-me girl she once was, the never-resisted Southern-belle— and poor Puss—almost impossible for him to bear. This has been, however, the best of the visits, and for that we are grateful.

  JANUARY 29, 1989 [Novelist] Sybille Bedford's memoir, of her earlier days, came, in bound proof. One of her superscriptions or epigraphs is: “The way things looked before later events made them look different. And this is as much a part of history as the way things actually were” [Robert Kee]. That is why I do not go back to old scribblings. That is why I start over and over again.

  FEBRUARY 2, 1989 At the Gone with the Wind fiftieth-anniversary celebration in Radio City Music Hall, a very preponderantly young audience—wildly enthusiastic, joining in on the popular “lines,” almost giving standing ovations on “entrances,” i.e., Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, who is so undated (compared to Malkovich, to the latter's disadvantage). But we have become a cynical people. They laughed (good-humoredly) at Melanie's “goodness.” “How could she be such a fool?”—that was their sentiment. They laughed at “manners.” But this GWTW is a cherished icon, studded with icons (very popular Butterfly McQueen). I cried at the unrolling cast of characters because of what happened to so many of them—poor Ona [Munson], a suicide (that dripping faucet in the black-walled apartment, and Genia [Berman] with his nose running38); Vivien Leigh clutching my hand in a windswept October night, in Eaton Square; Leslie Howard shot down during the war—never found; even Butterfly trying to get a job and then working in Macy's, etc., now seventy-eight. When she appeared on the Music Hall stage—so small, her voice so hers, reciting her little homage song and verse—everyone stood and cheered. The young, despite cynicism, adore it. “Gorgeous!” That was the word.

  FEBRUARY 15, 1989 Herbert said we must not tell that Margot is in Texas— cancer, “very bad.” She wants no one to know. Again, I do not understand the necessity of this cruelty. Margot who gave the world so much pure beauty, so much ecstasy, such perfection … No final reward, since we must go off? No glorious exit? So much grace to come to such pain, such degradation?

  MARCH 5, 1989 I must go into dinner in five minutes. I fell in the slough when Gray said, “This could be such a nice room….” I have failed to make this “niceness” all of these long, loving years. The love undiminished, not even tarnished—but still—”nice room.” Everyone who comes here loves this study, but…

  Well, I do bills. I do my job. I do not write my book. In the street, below, the law rushes east, clucking—more chick-in-a-snit than relief-for-some-need. In this room—my room?—the radio soars Mozart. I poultice my gloom with those words. Now Beethoven's Spring Sonata—sweet, flowing, pellucid sound. Hoping that despair falls away like some worn veil, I will go to eat the good food which Puss has prepared so patiently.

  APRIL 1, 1989 • LOS ANGELES Vanity Fair party at the Museum of Contemporary Art—I arrive upon a series of open lifts and then via a rattletrap wheelchair, like a secondhand Carabosse39 whose mouse-footmen have gone off on a cheese hunt. The shock: almost two hundred “guests” and hostesses in black and pearls. Gloom! A set piece for a first-act finale, in which the begetters have “dared” to “try something new.” Perhaps the murder onstage of virtue, honor, morality, reality. Jean Howard [Hollywood hostess and photographer] was a loving exception—white and a touch of scarlet. Joan Juliet Buck in vivid green. Masses of “starlets”—even those thought of as stars are starlets. I do not mean the “serious” would-be “great ladies” of the screen (Streep, Anjelica Huston, et al.), but I do mean the tough fondants now adored by the public. Joan said, “I don't know how she's done it, but Tina [Brown] has made the Hollywood ‘stars' try to live up to her magazine.” [Art historian] John Richardson's excessively nervous, meandering, longish, sometimes offensive (to women) talk. However, this evening was an event and there was a sense of occasion, a sense almost lost in Manhattan. Vanity Fair was the star of what, to many who were not present, was a star-studded evening. This “affair” was so typically the contents of Vanity Fair—a mix of sleaze, bumpkin, “serious,” sham, emptiness—all bound together by a high-gloss surface. This was the place to be last night.

  APRIL 18, 1989 • NEW YORK CITY When the airplane attendant turned Gray's chair, the back to me, I was suddenly in a panic. I had a revelation. I always thought that I gave “strength” to Gray. Now I abruptly realized that he gives as much strength to me as I do to him. I found that by tapping the underside of his seat with my shoe we were “in touch,” since he waved his hand and passed me sucking candies to avert ear troubles.

  In the seat facing Gray sat a woman in a bad Ungaro—black, asymmetrical rounded neck—unbelievably plain. Her nose job was a disfigurement— pinched, puckered, disproportionately small. She had the eyes of Children of the Damned. She read a paperback titled How to Make ESP Work for You, and she occasionally, with a little jab and a flourish, made markings with a huge, primary yellow–colored, bulbous plastic pencil. Sometimes she peered into outer space, seeking to commune with Visitors from Another Planet. When we had gone a good distance, she said to Gray, “I don't want to intrude on your privacy, but I must ask you a question: Is He (She referred to me in uppercase) your brother?” Gray looked at her soberly and quietly answered, “No-ooo.” Almost a thousand miles later, she said to Gray, “Please pardon me, but I must know. Is He your father?” Gray looked reflectively. “No-ooo.” Much later, after all of [the movie] Working Girl, as we began to descend, and Gray was passing candies to me, she burst out: “I've never seen such love!” Here she sobbed— tears and mascara rivulets. “Such love!!! I don't love anybody! Nobody loves me!” She was in an agony of grief as we landed, crying out about our love for one another and her loveless life. “I don't want to know your names! But I had to tell you! Such devotion, such consideration!” While I was being a man in extremes of senility, she left the plane sobbing.

  MAY 16, 1989 I cannot make myself feel old, except in unexpected, sudden glimpses.

  MAY 26, 1989 Today I saw a parallel: Maria & Onassis; Cleopatra of the Arts & Caesar of Commerce. I saw them in a sort of Inigo Jones mythological-historical spectacle, a Renaissance ceiling painting, a gorgeous masque. The Conquest of Art by Commerce—all in a Venetian, storm-tossed sunset splendor. I see Maria in full stage triumph—more Norma than Medea, more Amina than Violetta. Cascades of flowers, cataclysms of acclaim, the whole world enraptured, exulted by her art. I see Onassis—yachts, oil tankers, governments opening secret doors—money! money! money! His power drawing her power—a collision inevitable and neither triumphant. (Note: Commerce is an inadequate word.)

  MAY 29, 1989 The ocean of my seventy-fifth [birthday] is now an eddy—the successive tumult now a sustained, sustaining loving sound. This morning I, who almost never feel guilt (or perhaps I do and, as with so much in my life, I do not recognize that for what that is) felt a twinge (I think the Gods tweaked) and said to Puss, “I feel well—and guilty that I feel so incredibly young!” “Good!” said Puss. “I don't feel young, so you have to feel young for both of us.”

  JUNE 14, 1989 Final result of the French Revolution: Marielle [Hucliez, design journalist] from Paris: “I went to the town hall yesterday. There was a big feast for the Revolution—its descendants. We had to wear badges, my sister and I, saying ‘Victims of the Terror,' and there was a man who came up to us whose badge read ‘Danton Descendant'!” Marielle's mother wore a red string around her neck!

  JULY 3, 1989 I haven't written about Brigitta and her son Jonathan's death. His memorial in the Trustees' Room at the Forty-second Street Library was laid-on by the N
ew York Review of Books. [Its editor] Bob Silvers's finale— a wrapping-up, but heartfelt, mind-felt. Brooke Astor gushing about Jonathan's lunch, pre-Christmas, when he came to her, gave her the greatest “gift” anyone had ever given her. (“Gifts are from God,” said Mary Jane [Poole, editor in chief] years ago to the House & Garden staff, “presents are from people.”) “The greatest two hours of my life.” I wonder what Vincent gave her, other than the millions, which she has given away wonderfully, expertly. Lizzie Hardwick tried hard not to make a “true” assessment. Torsten [Wiesel, a neuroscientist], Jean Stein's chum, came closest to the truth about how not-too-easy was Jonathan, and how AIDS (covered up by the family) did him in. And Avedon, wild-faced, but intimate—at least he was personal. All about that stately room were women who did adore Jonathan—and others. They didn't get a chance to make this a “living” memorial. I love Brigitta, and I was devoted to Goddard, who (even though he also was fugitive) was more the man talked about at Jonathan's memorial than was Jonathan, without those talking knowing it. Jonathan could not reconcile his standards. After he testified against me [in the Adler lawsuit], I despised him, I having been so “helping” of him. But this is still too painful.

  We supped with Brigitta and Paul [Wolfe] twice after the memorial.40 She is haunted by Jonathan's last days. “Everybody should die at home,” she says. The irony is that after years of alienation, Jonathan came home to his mother to die, and she then had him—after all the “bad” years. Some think he came home as a vengeance. I can't think that, no matter how shabby I think him. Brigitta is comforted by Jonathan's coming home, by how he gave himself to her during these last months. But she is haunted.