The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman - Hardcover
A remarkable life and a remarkable voice emerge from the journals, letters, and memoirs of Leo Lerman: writer, critic, editor at Condé Nast, and man about town at the center of New York’s artistic and social circles from the 1940s until his death in 1994.
Lerman’s contributions to the world of the arts were large and varied: he wrote on theater, dance, music, art, books, and movies for publications as diverse as Mademoiselle and The New York Times. He was features editor at Vogue and editor in chief of Vanity Fair. He launched careers and trends, exposing the American public to new talents, fashions, and ideas.
He was a legendary party host as well, counting Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, and Truman Capote among his intimates, and celebrities like Cary Grant, Jackie Onassis, Isak Dinesen, and Margot Fonteyn as part of his larger circle. But his personal accounts and correspondence reveal him also as having an unusually rich and complex private life, mourning the cultivated émigré world of 1930s and 1940s New York City, reflecting on being Jewish and an openly homosexual man, and intimately evoking his two most important lifelong relationships.
From a man whose literary icon was Marcel Proust comes an unparalleled social and emotional history. With eloquence, insight, and wit, he filled his journals and letters with acute assessments, gossip, and priceless anecdotes while inimitably recording both our larger cultural history and his own moving private story.
Lerman’s contributions to the world of the arts were large and varied: he wrote on theater, dance, music, art, books, and movies for publications as diverse as Mademoiselle and The New York Times. He was features editor at Vogue and editor in chief of Vanity Fair. He launched careers and trends, exposing the American public to new talents, fashions, and ideas.
He was a legendary party host as well, counting Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, and Truman Capote among his intimates, and celebrities like Cary Grant, Jackie Onassis, Isak Dinesen, and Margot Fonteyn as part of his larger circle. But his personal accounts and correspondence reveal him also as having an unusually rich and complex private life, mourning the cultivated émigré world of 1930s and 1940s New York City, reflecting on being Jewish and an openly homosexual man, and intimately evoking his two most important lifelong relationships.
From a man whose literary icon was Marcel Proust comes an unparalleled social and emotional history. With eloquence, insight, and wit, he filled his journals and letters with acute assessments, gossip, and priceless anecdotes while inimitably recording both our larger cultural history and his own moving private story.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Leo Lerman also wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, Harper’s Bazaar, Dance Magazine, and Playbill, among other publications. He served as editorial adviser at Condé Nast Publications until his death in 1994.
Stephen Pascal has worked for twenty-five years as an editor and contributor to Condé Nast Publications, beginning with more than a dozen years as Leo Lerman’s assistant through several assignments, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Stephen Pascal has worked for twenty-five years as an editor and contributor to Condé Nast Publications, beginning with more than a dozen years as Leo Lerman’s assistant through several assignments, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.
Chapter 1: Call It Friendship, Call It Love
RICHARD HUNTER
The first time I saw Richard was in October 1933 at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art, in New York, where my in-theater life had started. Miss Lucy Feagin began our day, at 8:30 in the morning, with readings from the Bible. Miss Feagin, for all her activity on the gaudy fringes of one of the world’s most ancient professions, was a god-fearing Southern lady. One day while we were all gathered in the greenroom, I saw a pair of brown-suede shoes and a young man whom I had not before noticed. There was something different about him: He did not look actorish. He looked removed, apart—there was no tempest in him. We became friends.
He wanted to be an actor; I did not. He was interested in designing for the theater, so was I. So he became part of a little group that sat up all night talking about the plays they wanted to do, or the plays they loved, and the actors they loved. We reveled in every aspect of being from, and almost of, The Theater. We fenced, we tap-danced, we painted our faces, we put on beards, we disguised ourselves according to play. We led strenuous theatrical lives. And, of course, I achieved one of the main goals of my becoming a scholarship boy at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art: I spent many, many nights in Manhattan and yet remained for a long time the respected, seemingly respectable son of an intensely organized Orthodox Jewish household.
Since the Feagin School, Richard and I have been devoted friends: First, my friend to whom I told all my love woes. Then, with a kiss (and a robin’s song) in Central Park on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1936, he became my permanent love woe. That lasted until 1948, with 1939 to 1941 the time of Laci. (1993)
APRIL 14–15, 1939 · JACKSON HEIGHTS, NEW YORK
TO RICHARD HUNTER
I was listening to the Delius In a Summer Garden for the first time, which seemed lovely . . . a bit Debussy. I say “seemed” ’cause my bitchy relatives decided they couldn’t shout at one another against so exquisite a background. They loudly said for quite some time, “I don’t see what you hear in this noise! What do you get out of it! My Eddie listens to the [radio show] Make-Believe Ballroom and does he shake! What do you hear in it?”[1] Since I didn’t take the hints, they acted on their own behalf and done it in. I sat on the front steps and grouched a time.
It is now past midnight, and I am extremely sleepy, but they show no signs of departure. In fact, Momma is about to serve a midnight meal, after which they will go back to the carouseling [sic], and she will wistfully murmur, “I wish somebody”—with a bleeding look in my direction—“would do these dishes! I’m so sick . . . My head . . .” Howsoever, I will seal this missive, drop it into the mailbox, take me my pillow, and plant me on Jerry’s bed. Fortunately, that monster is out dancing.[2] Good night. I’m starting a new set of verses—about being afraid of the dark . . .
LACI CZETTEL
In the late autumn of 1939, while I was hanging a costume-design exhibit in the basement of the New School for Social Research, I saw a short, stocky, elegant—almost too elegantly dressed—man come swiftly into the room, moving with the pert steps of a boulevardier in a French play. Coming to me, he handed me a portfolio of sketches. His large, brown, amused eyes—slightly the eyes of a dog wanting to be loved—peered at me as through a veil, seeking some sort of information, flashing signals. Suddenly, he clutched me, drew my head down, kissed me deeply. Then, drawing away, “Come to dinner . . .” I was already in love with the dress he had designed for Wendy Hiller in [the movie] Pygmalion (the white dress she wore to the ball). I was now enthralled. Some days later, as Laci looked down at me, he murmured, “How will this end?” his words coming, I realized years afterward, out of an immense sadness. I did not care. I no longer was able to care about anything except being with the strange, plump, exigent, manipulative, sex-ridden little man, being with him in the world he already represented and in which he was more and more involving me. So began my re-Europeanization (and that world’s Americanization?) and my finding a new family. (1993)[3]
JOURNAL · MAY 28, 1941 One should never pick himself up and go away in the night, after he has lain beside his beloved, his body all arranged until morning. It leaves an empty space. It is impossible to fill this space. It is how I so clearly see my life, and how it will always be, basically: no ability to pick myself up and go away in the middle of the night. Laci is a magnificent example of how one can be a child, an infant, all one’s life, and make a talent of it and survive.
I wish I could be a mother with these two men [Richard and Laci] for sons. I could then love them and they could always come and I would never have to choose. Laci is sick. One does not hate one’s child for cancer. How can I cease loving him because of his sickness?
JUNE 12, 1941 · NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER · MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK
Ilse [Bois] and Eleonora [von Mendelssohn]’s performance [in La Voix Humaine] turned out the most conspicuously and brilliantly distinguished audience in the year, with Countess Yorck drooping about in her fur-lined bedroom slippers, and everyone unmentionable standing in coves.[4] The best were Hélène Fischer (an Amazon like unto the Empire State Building sans its erection) embracing Spivy [LeVoe, nightclub singer] and both shouting “Daaaaarling” and Noël [Coward]’s momma, Violet, looking like an old English duchess and scratching her rear, and Princess Paley in a hat that hid, completely, the front of her face but left her back hair naked, and [milliner “Mr. John” of] John-Frederics surrounded by gilded youths in golden chairs and really everyone who ever was, or tried, and a few will-be anyones. [John] Latouche reminding me that he met me six years ago, when I was about to be the white-haired boy of Broadway, but then I didn’t have any hair at all.[5] On the stage, Miss Scarlet Mendelssohn—unusual, frequently superb, and absolutely magnificent in the last two minutes—very uneven—no direction. Ilse bad in her act, but marvelously heartbreaking in the badly written scene which surrounded it. The audience yelled and screamed and it was a succès fou, a succès d’estime, and a succès good-evening-friends.[6]
ELEONARA VON MENDELSSOHN La Voix Humaine . . . I seem to have had endless years with remarkable women who waited for men by whom they were ensorcelled to call. There was Marlene Dietrich who waited for Jean Gabin to call. There was Penelope Dudley Ward who waited for Carol Reed to call. There was Maria Callas who waited for Aristotle Onassis to call. There was Alice Astor who waited, at the end of a tumultuous life, for John Latouche to call. Before all of these, there was Eleonora von Mendelssohn who waited and waited and waited for Arturo Toscanini to call.
Eleonora . . . Almost half a century I have been haunted by Eleonora. Death does not still, nor does it diminish, love. I exist every day of my life in her climate. Her life (which she gave bountifully, without seeking payment at any point for it—except love) was spent like the waters of a great river. In my life, she was such a river, and I have yet to see the end of what came to me on its floods.
Eleonora had flung open the door—apparitional, all glittering brown and gold, twined and twisted taffeta, lace low around her white, white shoulders, her hair tossed about any old way, tendrils floating freely and charmingly, her sea-green, short-sighted eyes tight with withheld tears. The door was in a room where Laci and I were sitting, in his apartment in an East Sixty-seventh Street mansion. “Liebling!” She advanced with a sort of duck-footed gliding step (she seemed to swim as she moved, more a water creature than a land-locked being) directly to Laci, peering at him closely, “Liebling!” Her voice had a sound of deep bells in it and, at this moment, they were speaking full peal.
“Liebling! What should I do? He’s gone! He disappeared! Even his trunks are gone! They were in storage. . . . The storage is empty!” “You think,” asked Laci, “that he went back?” “That is what is frightening me. If he goes back, what will they do to him?” “Nothing. They want him. He is one of the most famous of German stars. They need him. He will probably live in his little house outside of Salzburg, and they wouldn’t dare to touch him. He will probably play in Vienna and in Berlin and he will make movies. . . .” “But they know that he escaped with me. They tried to get me. They wanted to kill me!” “But I am sure that they do not want to kill him. They want him to make movies for them.”
She, who had heard of me but never seen me, suddenly in one swift swooping motion bent over and kissed me on each cheek. I was lost forever. “Do you want me to look for him somewhere?” I asked her. “Oh . . .” (This “oh” was more moan than expletive.) “Oh . . . I want you to very much. . . . He lived in Yorkville in an old, awful house. I have the address here. . . .” She opened a little bag made out of some intricate Fortuny fabric. “But, liebling, you do not even know what we are talking about. . . .” “Yes,” I said, “I know a little bit. . . . You are talking about Rudol...
RICHARD HUNTER
The first time I saw Richard was in October 1933 at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art, in New York, where my in-theater life had started. Miss Lucy Feagin began our day, at 8:30 in the morning, with readings from the Bible. Miss Feagin, for all her activity on the gaudy fringes of one of the world’s most ancient professions, was a god-fearing Southern lady. One day while we were all gathered in the greenroom, I saw a pair of brown-suede shoes and a young man whom I had not before noticed. There was something different about him: He did not look actorish. He looked removed, apart—there was no tempest in him. We became friends.
He wanted to be an actor; I did not. He was interested in designing for the theater, so was I. So he became part of a little group that sat up all night talking about the plays they wanted to do, or the plays they loved, and the actors they loved. We reveled in every aspect of being from, and almost of, The Theater. We fenced, we tap-danced, we painted our faces, we put on beards, we disguised ourselves according to play. We led strenuous theatrical lives. And, of course, I achieved one of the main goals of my becoming a scholarship boy at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art: I spent many, many nights in Manhattan and yet remained for a long time the respected, seemingly respectable son of an intensely organized Orthodox Jewish household.
Since the Feagin School, Richard and I have been devoted friends: First, my friend to whom I told all my love woes. Then, with a kiss (and a robin’s song) in Central Park on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1936, he became my permanent love woe. That lasted until 1948, with 1939 to 1941 the time of Laci. (1993)
APRIL 14–15, 1939 · JACKSON HEIGHTS, NEW YORK
TO RICHARD HUNTER
I was listening to the Delius In a Summer Garden for the first time, which seemed lovely . . . a bit Debussy. I say “seemed” ’cause my bitchy relatives decided they couldn’t shout at one another against so exquisite a background. They loudly said for quite some time, “I don’t see what you hear in this noise! What do you get out of it! My Eddie listens to the [radio show] Make-Believe Ballroom and does he shake! What do you hear in it?”[1] Since I didn’t take the hints, they acted on their own behalf and done it in. I sat on the front steps and grouched a time.
It is now past midnight, and I am extremely sleepy, but they show no signs of departure. In fact, Momma is about to serve a midnight meal, after which they will go back to the carouseling [sic], and she will wistfully murmur, “I wish somebody”—with a bleeding look in my direction—“would do these dishes! I’m so sick . . . My head . . .” Howsoever, I will seal this missive, drop it into the mailbox, take me my pillow, and plant me on Jerry’s bed. Fortunately, that monster is out dancing.[2] Good night. I’m starting a new set of verses—about being afraid of the dark . . .
LACI CZETTEL
In the late autumn of 1939, while I was hanging a costume-design exhibit in the basement of the New School for Social Research, I saw a short, stocky, elegant—almost too elegantly dressed—man come swiftly into the room, moving with the pert steps of a boulevardier in a French play. Coming to me, he handed me a portfolio of sketches. His large, brown, amused eyes—slightly the eyes of a dog wanting to be loved—peered at me as through a veil, seeking some sort of information, flashing signals. Suddenly, he clutched me, drew my head down, kissed me deeply. Then, drawing away, “Come to dinner . . .” I was already in love with the dress he had designed for Wendy Hiller in [the movie] Pygmalion (the white dress she wore to the ball). I was now enthralled. Some days later, as Laci looked down at me, he murmured, “How will this end?” his words coming, I realized years afterward, out of an immense sadness. I did not care. I no longer was able to care about anything except being with the strange, plump, exigent, manipulative, sex-ridden little man, being with him in the world he already represented and in which he was more and more involving me. So began my re-Europeanization (and that world’s Americanization?) and my finding a new family. (1993)[3]
JOURNAL · MAY 28, 1941 One should never pick himself up and go away in the night, after he has lain beside his beloved, his body all arranged until morning. It leaves an empty space. It is impossible to fill this space. It is how I so clearly see my life, and how it will always be, basically: no ability to pick myself up and go away in the middle of the night. Laci is a magnificent example of how one can be a child, an infant, all one’s life, and make a talent of it and survive.
I wish I could be a mother with these two men [Richard and Laci] for sons. I could then love them and they could always come and I would never have to choose. Laci is sick. One does not hate one’s child for cancer. How can I cease loving him because of his sickness?
JUNE 12, 1941 · NEW YORK CITY
TO RICHARD HUNTER · MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK
Ilse [Bois] and Eleonora [von Mendelssohn]’s performance [in La Voix Humaine] turned out the most conspicuously and brilliantly distinguished audience in the year, with Countess Yorck drooping about in her fur-lined bedroom slippers, and everyone unmentionable standing in coves.[4] The best were Hélène Fischer (an Amazon like unto the Empire State Building sans its erection) embracing Spivy [LeVoe, nightclub singer] and both shouting “Daaaaarling” and Noël [Coward]’s momma, Violet, looking like an old English duchess and scratching her rear, and Princess Paley in a hat that hid, completely, the front of her face but left her back hair naked, and [milliner “Mr. John” of] John-Frederics surrounded by gilded youths in golden chairs and really everyone who ever was, or tried, and a few will-be anyones. [John] Latouche reminding me that he met me six years ago, when I was about to be the white-haired boy of Broadway, but then I didn’t have any hair at all.[5] On the stage, Miss Scarlet Mendelssohn—unusual, frequently superb, and absolutely magnificent in the last two minutes—very uneven—no direction. Ilse bad in her act, but marvelously heartbreaking in the badly written scene which surrounded it. The audience yelled and screamed and it was a succès fou, a succès d’estime, and a succès good-evening-friends.[6]
ELEONARA VON MENDELSSOHN La Voix Humaine . . . I seem to have had endless years with remarkable women who waited for men by whom they were ensorcelled to call. There was Marlene Dietrich who waited for Jean Gabin to call. There was Penelope Dudley Ward who waited for Carol Reed to call. There was Maria Callas who waited for Aristotle Onassis to call. There was Alice Astor who waited, at the end of a tumultuous life, for John Latouche to call. Before all of these, there was Eleonora von Mendelssohn who waited and waited and waited for Arturo Toscanini to call.
Eleonora . . . Almost half a century I have been haunted by Eleonora. Death does not still, nor does it diminish, love. I exist every day of my life in her climate. Her life (which she gave bountifully, without seeking payment at any point for it—except love) was spent like the waters of a great river. In my life, she was such a river, and I have yet to see the end of what came to me on its floods.
Eleonora had flung open the door—apparitional, all glittering brown and gold, twined and twisted taffeta, lace low around her white, white shoulders, her hair tossed about any old way, tendrils floating freely and charmingly, her sea-green, short-sighted eyes tight with withheld tears. The door was in a room where Laci and I were sitting, in his apartment in an East Sixty-seventh Street mansion. “Liebling!” She advanced with a sort of duck-footed gliding step (she seemed to swim as she moved, more a water creature than a land-locked being) directly to Laci, peering at him closely, “Liebling!” Her voice had a sound of deep bells in it and, at this moment, they were speaking full peal.
“Liebling! What should I do? He’s gone! He disappeared! Even his trunks are gone! They were in storage. . . . The storage is empty!” “You think,” asked Laci, “that he went back?” “That is what is frightening me. If he goes back, what will they do to him?” “Nothing. They want him. He is one of the most famous of German stars. They need him. He will probably live in his little house outside of Salzburg, and they wouldn’t dare to touch him. He will probably play in Vienna and in Berlin and he will make movies. . . .” “But they know that he escaped with me. They tried to get me. They wanted to kill me!” “But I am sure that they do not want to kill him. They want him to make movies for them.”
She, who had heard of me but never seen me, suddenly in one swift swooping motion bent over and kissed me on each cheek. I was lost forever. “Do you want me to look for him somewhere?” I asked her. “Oh . . .” (This “oh” was more moan than expletive.) “Oh . . . I want you to very much. . . . He lived in Yorkville in an old, awful house. I have the address here. . . .” She opened a little bag made out of some intricate Fortuny fabric. “But, liebling, you do not even know what we are talking about. . . .” “Yes,” I said, “I know a little bit. . . . You are talking about Rudol...
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- PublisherKnopf
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 1400044391
- ISBN 13 9781400044399
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages688
- EditorPascal Stephen
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