The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  DECEMBER 2, 1990 If only I could see more clearly. If only these scrims, veils, clouds… these opaquities [sic] would vanish—just long enough for a rampaging scribble. I want to write a big set piece about the Vogue AIDS gala [“Seventh on Sale”], an event which apotheosized this Manhattan world—the Vogue cum social cum fashion cum entertainment cum art-and-performance cum political and commercial worlds. There in the Twenty-sixth Street Armory, where the 1913 show broke the mold, on Thursday evening last, [party decorator] Robert Isabell created a vast, shimmering, white tent, tables elevated on stands, lighted by candles suspended in glass from above, embosked in a forest of green-leafed trees—only clichés come—a white, gold, and green beauty—miraculous springtime now. Manhattan had never seen a party of such inconceivable beauty and splendor. When the tent flew upward, the entire vastness was flooded with blue light, and a great sigh filled the enormous room, while all around this great, central dining space women in grotesquely jeweled scraps of sumptuous fabrics snatched bargains from the booths. Carolyn [Roehm, fashion designer] in her totally inappropriate get-up, an eight-year-old-girl's broderie anglaise smidgen of a frock, epitomized the “Dance of Death” aspect of the “gala.” The invitation's “come in festive dress”!!! Oh, the horror perpetrated to “do good.” This side of [designer] “leftovers.” I must really write this 1990 “Masque of the Red Death,” this Carnival of Greed, which will “help” AIDS. Raffle prizes. Designers getting rid of inventory, samples, and models never cut past this first number. A woman who screamed: “Look! Look! A Geoffrey Beene for $120!” Me: “Did you try it on?” She: “Who needs to try it on for $120?” I sat between Paloma Picasso and [Vogue's Paris liaison] Susan Train. Talked with Paloma about how she is her husband's greatest theater production. She agreed. Being with Paloma made the evening A Good Thing for me. This glittering celebration of materialism to ameliorate, even help prevent, the most devastating of plagues.

  DECEMBER 24, 1990 Jerry brought a photograph of Poppa. A shock—Poppa in his twenties, perhaps in 1906, the year before he married Momma. I had never seen this photograph. I had never seen this boy—so full of dreams, so beautifully dressed, so serious, so sensual. This boy I never knew became the sleepy man I knew. The boy is irreconcilable with the man. There is no visible connection. What happened? Puss said promptly: “Your mother!” I could talk to that boy; I never talked to my father.

  I just spoke to Bill Maxwell and told him about Poppa's photograph. He came directly to the heart: “Would you have fallen in love with him, Leo?” Bill asked. “Yes,” I said. “I don't understand many people,” Bill said, “but I understand you.”

  DECEMBER 28, 1990 Timing is all: Every day I think of the perfect exit. I have come to dread day: Night is beneficent; day brings turmoil, tension, tribulations. The little bodily pains of night are, thus far, bearable; the mental anguishes of day are unbearable. Latter obviously an exaggeration: Here I am. I read, with delight, V. Woolf's earliest diary. Nowhere have I so lived that late Victorian upper-middle-class domestic life, its to-and-froing, its daily aliveness.

  DECEMBER 31, 1990 I sit on the side of my bed scribbling the year away, wondering whether anyone would read A Lexicon of My Life—an autobiography in lexicon form. I could handle that—two bits of it are already mostly written—Truman and Marlene. I mean all of the “important” people of my life. I could tuck everyone and everything in. I am best at short forms.

  Passing our old house, Puss saw a big, lighted Christmas tree in the left window of the long parlor. This so pleased me, made me feel better about my beloved 1453. Someone cherishes it.

  JANUARY 1, 1991 I have less hope this New Year's morning than I have ever had. Little brightness ahead—but perhaps some light at the end of the tunnel, if this is, indeed, a tunnel, and not a permanent night.

  JANUARY 15, 1991 Awesome doldrum—a state of apprehension—a feeling that something beyond imagination pends. There are demonstrations, candlelight processions, great crowds shouting protests in Columbus Circle [against war in the Persian Gulf], in Midtown, at the U.N., below Washington Square. All over the city, massed cops silent, on the ready. Rumors. Bomb scares. Schoolchildren told not to drink the water in their schools—it's been poisoned. Traffic halted, and—always—New Yorkers rushing out of cars and buses—to hasten on foot… to annihilation? That is the question.

  JANUARY 17, 1991 At 9:15 our time—when Puss was talking to Maebelle, she said: “Who are all those people here? That little boy brought them. I must go home. But I am home.” This desolation … a confirmation. She is now elsewhere in her head. Her dream world is now part of her “normal world.”50

  JANUARY 27, 1991 The Gutfreund-Mossbacher party, as told to me by Anna Wintour with an air of “Well, that's the way of the world.” For their birthdays, for these two, the Gutfreund and Mossbacher “ladies,” the Hard Rock Café was taken. Robert Isabell makeover, victuals brought in—Le Cirque?—and the theme: a prize for the shortest skirt. “Guess who won?” Anna asked. “I did! I had a Versace I could lower or raise!” This as war was officially declared. That “world” is obsolete—the Gutfreund and Mossbacher and Anna Wintour world—but does not know that it is obsolete.

  FEBRUARY 18, 1991 Catherine [Dreyfus Soguel] rang from Paris: Denyse [her mother] is dead—last night. “She wanted to go, I think. Her mind wandered sometimes, and that bothered her.” Richard [Dreyfus, her first husband] was in Paris and they had a long talk in the afternoon. I think that she always loved him. I knew that she always loved me. I am consoled knowing that Denyse has been spared the degradations of old age, the loss of control over one's physical and mental being, the horror of increasing isolation—I could go on, but why unpack this bag? Denyse was the first to bring the highborn Jewish Egypt and the Egyptian-French culture to me. What an elegant woman … She was the best-dressed bluestocking … so strong-minded … a loving heart, but only given away—perhaps foolishly? … (I see her somewhat mournful face lightened into cascades of laughter. I could always make her laugh.) … her enchanting flat overlooking Place Vendôme…. How can I ever go back to Paris? I never realized how death limits geography.

  If I could talk my book to someone. The entries in the lexicon are so firm, but if I don't talk them soon, they will go.

  JULY 13, 1991 Perched on the slope-side of my bed where I have perched for some two weeks, because of a fungus irritation (so appropriate a word in every sense of its meaning). Then that “attack”—panic—not being able to breathe, intimations of mortality. Denis [the hired caregiver] sat up the night through…. I now sleep by “nightlight”—the greenery-yallery shaded lamp. Too much to scribble and not enough. I must dictate my book—the lexicon form—before others write from research what I know from experience.

  NOTE: Leo did begin dictating his book—not so much a “lexicon” as loosely associated memories of family and friends. (Many of those reminiscences have appeared italicized in this book.) Leo's journal then dwindled to brief reminders and impressions. His still worsening eyesight was making private writing more difficult.

  JOURNAL • January 24, 1992 Odd tryout—I am attempting to write in light that makes this page almost invisible. If I can do this, I will try to write my cookbook reviews next week—the new plan—not monthly, as proposed, but every other month. I must break this hiatus. I will break it. I have malingered. In this way I can, I hope, get back to my book. I must also conquer my fear of falling. Only one case of fraught nerves to a home. I will to [Harlot's Ghost by] Mailer now.

  NOTE: Marlene Dietrich died on May 6, 1992. In July, Vogue published a reminiscence by Leo, paired with photographs of her by Alex Liberman. It concludes with the following:

  MARLENE One evening we went to a party together. And she was done up with perfect simplicity. She always let her body speak for itself. There wasn't a woman in the room—and the room was filled with all sorts of beautiful women wonderfully dressed—who looked better than Marlene. And little Hope Hampton,51 a flurry of feathers, diamonds, crys
tal drop-beads, came up to her and peered at her and said, looking up at her face, “Who did it?” And Marlene said, “God.” (VOGUE, JULY 1992)

  NOTE: On November 9, 1992, the Fashion Group International presented a specially created variety show, “The Fashion Follies,” in Broadway's St. James Theatre, honoring Leo for his lifelong contributions to “fashion, theater, and all the arts.”

  NEW YORK CITY • NOVEMBER 16, 1993

  TO JANET LERMAN GRAFF • chicago, illinois

  On November 28, 1952, I was walking in the golden pre-snowfall light of a Copenhagen afternoon, when I looked up suddenly and saw, hanging on a peg in front of an antiques shop, these summer-sky blue beads. I instantly knew that I should buy them for the “new” baby [Jerry's daughter]. I took them home to Lexington Avenue months later, and I put them in the bottom of a Chinese box. Occasionally I would open the box and look at them, thinking, “These should go to Janet,” and revisiting that beautiful Copenhagen early afternoon. They were too full of Copenhagen to send, but now they are so full of love, sentiment, and memory that you must have them. They are, in substance, not valuable, but in love and sentiment they are boundlessly rich.

  NOTE: Leo continued going to his Condé Nast office on weekday afternoons, finally taken in a wheelchair.

  Friends surprised him with a large party for his eightieth birthday, on May 23, 1994. It would be Leo's last birthday. He died on August 23, from complications of the goiter, a swollen thyroid, that he had long endured.

  He inserted the following on a loose sheet at the end of his last notebook:

  JOURNAL • december 4, 1993 Each of us is an archaeologist. From the day we are born, we are engaged in Personal Archaeology, and we are born again and again, many times in a lifetime. We are constantly excavating the mansions of our dreams, the imagined palaces of our minds, the monuments dedicated to forever passions, to eternal loves as ephemeral as the towering cities in which they so impermanently stood—all now staunchly substantial, each solid stone, each love-laved face, in the moonlight of memory—

  All the preceding must be redone: Too fancy.

  1. The comedian Steve Martin had recently married the actress Victoria Tennant. Charles Saatchi, the advertising-agency director and modern-art collector, was then married to art journalist and collector Doris Lockhart Saatchi. Min Hogg was the editor of Condé Nast's World of Interiors magazine. John Mortimer, a barrister, is best known as author of the Rumpole of the Bailey stories.

  2. Interviewed in The New Yorker, Kirstein said Manet was “a simple bourgeois hedonist who thought painting was good food.” Mina Curtiss had long planned to write a book on the artist.

  3. Shirley Bernstein (1923-98), sister of Leonard, was an agent and producer who had arranged Leo's appearance on The $64,000 Question in 1958.

  4. Dietrich received a lifetime achievement award from the organization. Leo and Katharine Hepburn both wrote tributes for the souvenir program. Baryshnikov accepted on behalf of Dietrich, who was then a recluse in Paris.

  5. Joe Orton (1933-67), a British playwright of black comedies, was bludgeoned to death by his male lover.

  6. Sontag had published her influential essay “Notes on Camp” in 1964.

  7. In November 1986 The New Yorker had published Sontag's short story “The Way We Live Now.” It portrays a brilliant, difficult man mortally ill, as told through various friends' gossip. At the time many believed that it portrayed Jonathan Lieberson.

  8. A child of hard-pressed Russian nobility, Princess Marie Vassiltchikov (1917-78) worked at the foreign office in Berlin and Vienna through World War II.

  9. Princess Eleanore-Marie “Loremarie” Schönburg-Hartenstein fled Germany after the failed assassination of Hitler, in which many among her family and friends colluded. In later years, she became an activist for the environmental movement, which probably accounts for the manure. Joel Carmichael (1915?–2006) was an editor and a historian of religion.

  10. The kitsch photographs done by Sara Moon (b. 1940) often had a clear center but vanished into mist at the edges.

  11. Isabel Mirrow Brown (b. 1928) had danced with American Ballet Theatre (1946-53). Her husband Kelly and two of their children were also leading dancers in the company.

  12. Galatea was the statue brought to life by Pygmalion's love.

  13. Violinist Isaac Stern (1920-2001) had been married to Nora Kaye for five months in 1948.

  14. Goronwy Rees (1909-79) was a Welsh journalist, academician, and memoirist. He confessed on his deathbed to also being a Soviet spy.

  15. The “21” Club opened in 1922 as a speakeasy, at 21 West Fifty-second Street.

  16. Gayfryd Steinberg was married to a soaring insurance company mogul of the eighties, Saul Steinberg. Iris Michaels Sawyer had been Leo's secretary at Mademoiselle. She subsequently became the longtime mistress of Thomas Kempner, chairman of Loeb Partners, the husband of prominent socialite Nan Kempner.

  17. The monthly dinner parties of the hugely successful real-estate broker Alice Mason were then much publicized. Shirley Lord, beauty and fitness editor at Vogue and a novelist, had married A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and then executive editor at the New York Times. John Kluge was one of the richest men in America, largely from television production and syndication.

  18. Leo had vastly enjoyed the melodramas and travesties of Charles Ludlam (1943-89), playwright, actor, and founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, including Ludlam's impersonation of Maria Callas in Galas (1983).

  19. The Swiss scenic designer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) advocated nonrealistic, symbolic sets and lighting.

  20. The ballerina Sallie Wilson (b. 1932) had been considered a great dance actress, and she succeeded Nora Kaye in several of Tudor's ballets at American Ballet Theatre.

  21. As Madame Arcati, the role she had been playing in Blithe Spirit.

  22. Colonel Oliver North (b. 1943) had assisted members of the Reagan administration in their effort to fund insurgents in Nicaragua through sale of arms to Iran. Leo had been watching his testimony in congressional hearings.

  23. Madame Claude Caillot was married to the head of Morgan Guaranty Bank in Switzerland. He had previously been Swiss ambassador to London and Washington.

  24. Presumably Vice President George H. W. Bush.

  25. In 1919 Yetta Goldwasser had suffered a fatal heart attack during a visit to the Lermans' apartment on the Boston Post Road in the Bronx.

  26. What Leo's mother probably screamed was “This is our Reba!” Soprano Alma Gluck was born Reba Fiersohn in 1884, about five years after Leo's mother, and came to America from Romania as a girl, but she did not take the name Alma Gluck until 1909.

  27. The character in Davenport's novel was actually named Louis Goldwasser. Interestingly, however, the female protagonist asks him to take her on a slow, reminiscing drive up Orchard Street, on Manhattan's Jewish Lower East Side.

  28. GF: “A Child's Garden of Verses was among Leo's favorite books. It would make him cry every time he read it—at the loss of innocence.”

  29. Novelist Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, telling the story of the Jews of Ferrara and their exportation during World War II.

  30. His review of Simon Callow's book Being an Actor.

  31. At the Nora Kaye memorial, the British Royal Ballet dancer Lynn Seymour (b. 1939) had danced Five Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan.

  32. Couturier Christian Lacroix (b. 1951) had designed the costumes for an American Ballet Theatre revival of Massine's 1938 ballet.

  33. An anniversary and birthday ritual: a playful punch on the shoulder for each year passed, plus one.

  34. Dagny Janss Corcoran, an art collector and patron, became a dealer in art catalogs.

  35. Joan Houseman had cancer of the throat. She lived until 2001.

  36. Stella Jolles Reichman (d. 1997) was an Austrian-born painter. GF: “Her father had been the petit-point king of Vienna before fleein
g Hitler.”

  37. Leo reread the first chapter of Little Women annually at Christmastime.

  38. GF: “Genia Berman, her husband, was obsessed with Ona. Everything he did was for her. Ona told Leo shortly before she killed herself that she couldn't stand it any longer, he was so tiresome. After her suicide, Genia asked Leo to come and sit by the bedside, through the night, before he sent her to the undertaker.” Their walls were painted black to flatter Berman's paintings.

  39. The evil fairy in The Sleeping Beauty.

  40. The harpsichordist Paul Wolfe (b. 1929) would marry Brigitta Lieberson in 1991.

  41. Svetlana Makurenkova (b. 1958?) was a Russian professor of English literature in Moscow.

  42. They were visiting Si and Victoria Newhouse in Florida over the Labor Day weekend.

  43. He is recalling Rainer's best-known screen scene, in The Great Ziegfeld (1936).

  44. Richard's lover Howard Rothschild had died suddenly of heart failure, aged eighty-one, during a visit to London that October.

  45. Jule Styne (1905-94) was a composer of popular songs whose Broadway scores included Gypsy and Bells Are Ringing.

  46. Philip Kolb (1907-92) wrote many books on Proust and edited several volumes of his letters.

  47. “It was in Ela's room that Garbo came one late night and, picking up Noël's photograph, asked, ‘But why you?' as Ela lay back against her pillows, giggling.” Journal, October 16, 1984.

  48. GF: “Leo sat beside Marlene's bath, she having asked him in to demonstrate the female anatomy. She showed him her breasts, and said she was proud of her pink, delicate, and not-too-large nipples.”

  49. The editor and writer Mary Cantwell (1930-2000) worked at Mademoiselle (1953-76) before going to the New York Times.

  50. Gray was in California, caring for his mother, who died the following day.