The Grand Surprise Read online

  To Gray Foy

  For letting Leo tell his story

  I am reminded that for a long time, in my childhood, in my adolescence, I made up histories about myself, my family, my “friends.” I still believe some of these stories and even find myself telling them, and those who hear them also believe them, for the fantastic world of the “smart” magazines and social columns of the rotogravures of my childhood—what is left of them—are now as open to me as those ruins that one finds everywhere in Rome. Like those ruins, some of it has disappeared—forever; some of it has been used to erect other structures or for ornament; some of it is lived in.

  —JOURNAL • FEBRUARY 8, 1953

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PREFACE

  CALL IT FRIENDSHIP, CALL IT LOVE

  I KNEW I HAD COME HOME

  EVERYONE'S GIVING PARTIES

  THEY HAVE ALL HURRIED AWAY

  THE MIGRATION OF TREASURES

  OPENING NIGHT EVERY DAY

  A GLORIOUS SOJOURN

  RATHER LIKE BEING JILTED

  WHO DO THEY THINK I AM?

  THE OTHER END OF THE STREET

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Transforming the materials left by Leo Lerman into this volume required the encouragement, guidance, and contributions of many—archivists and editors, freelancers and friends. I cannot list all of them here, but my gratitude to each is nonetheless genuine.

  First among the work's supporters stand S. I. Newhouse, Jr., and Victoria Newhouse, whose enthusiasm helped launch this project and whose aid and cooperation never ceased. Also crucial to accomplishing the task was Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, to which Leo bequeathed his papers. Jean Ashton and Bernard Crystal there showed remarkable adaptability by leaving this archive in my custody until the job could be finished.

  Leo's files held a great deal, but many of his letters, photographs, articles, and unfinished projects required searching. In these quests, I relied on the guidance—and often the toil—of archivists. Exemplary were those at the Bei-necke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, both the Condé Nast Archive and Library, the Deutsche Kinemathek–Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, the Fairchild Archive, the Getty Research Institute, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, and, again, Columbia University. Working with each of these institutions was rewarding, whatever we finally found.

  Ultimately, I drew a large share of this collection from letters written by Leo, and most of them came through the generosity of his friends or their descendants and trustees. My sincere thanks go to Forest Hunter (for Richard Hunter's letters from Leo), Kenward Elmslie (Ruth Landshoff-Yorck's), Peter Riva and Silke Ronneburg (Marlene Dietrich's), Amy Gross (hers), and Alan Schwartz and Gerald Clarke (Truman Capote's). For providing rarely seen photographs from family collections, I am indebted to Emily Harding, Alexandra Plaut Hekking, Nancy Lerman, and Jane Imbs Trimble.

  Dozens of Leo's friends and family members told me stories and answered questions. Among the most generous were Robert Davison, Eugenia Halb-meier, Joel Kaye, Leo's cousin Allen Lippman, and Leo's niece Janet Lerman-Graff My own colleagues and friends also helped continually in this effort. I went for expertise and advice repeatedly to Gini Alhadeff, Christopher Baswell, Charles Rowan Beye, Micah Bucey, Cynthia Cathcart, David Cronin, Joan Feeney, Christopher Gates, Lucinda Karter, Lisa Moore, Deirdre McCabe Nolan, Jane Sarnoff, and Tommy Tenhet.

  For Knopf's expert handling of this very complicated book, I am particularly indebted to its editor, Robert Gottlieb; his assistant, Alena Graedon; designer Iris Weinstein; production manager Tracy Cabanis; and my production editor, Kathleen Fridella.

  This endeavor lasted more than a decade. Some of the most helpful people have not, alas, lived to read it. Heartfelt thanks must go posthumously to Richard Hunter, for many hours of delightful reminiscence, and to Elian Pascal, for years of encouragement and deep insight.

  Thanks, of course, but also truly deep gratitude go to Gray Foy. He remembered everything and withheld nothing. In preparation of this book, Gray was ever helpful, thoughtful, and frank—as he was for so many years with Leo. Without him, much less would have been accomplished, then or now.

  INTRODUCTION

  When Leo Lerman appears in other people's memoirs, it is often as the host of some all-star gathering in postwar Manhattan. His parties began in the early forties, with dinners for a few smart friends whom he had met working as a Broadway stage manager or through reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune. By the autumn of 1947, these gatherings had grown into a Sunday-night open house in his book-strewn apartment on East Eighty-eighth Street. Then a writer for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Glamour magazines, he was earning only enough to buy jug wine and rat cheese, but Truman Capote and Anaïs Nin were not walking up five flights for the canapés. They came, as did scores of what today we call boldface names, for the conviviality, for Leo's ribald and mischievous fun, and to meet people they wouldn't meet anywhere else.

  All his life, Leo minted new friendships at a brisk pace. Stage-managing in the Catskills and on Broadway he had met Imogene Coca, John Houseman, and lyricist John Latouche; a German refugee, Eleonora von Mendelssohn, introduced him to a stellar circle that included Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward, and Luise Rainer; through writing a Vogue feature called “Before Bandwagons,” he befriended avant-garde architect Frederick Kiesler and literary critics Lionel and Diana Trilling; a summer of late-night games (and very little writing) in 1946 at the Yaddo artists' colony brought friendships with Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Katherine Anne Porter. But Leo also knew how to work a room, and friends beget friends. On any given Sunday evening at Leo's, Jane Bowles, Gore Vidal, Gypsy Rose Lee, Dawn Powell, or Carl Van Vechten might appear…. Suddenly, that little one-bedroom apartment—and the stairway climbing to it—became a weekly attraction.

  What made Leo's parties extraordinary was not only the caliber of the guests, but also the mix of them. He brought together different sets of people on a spectrum that included art, music, theater, literature, film, society, and demisociety, as well as the shopkeeper down the street. Parties were the laboratory in which he encouraged people to take an interest in one another's work. What friends often remember most fondly about Leo is how he changed their lives by a casual introduction or an offhand suggestion.

  Among New York's movers and makers of art, Leo Lerman grew legendary as a man who knew everyone and had seen everything. For fifty years, it seemed he attended every debut, opening, and vernissage in the city and had the crowd at his place to celebrate afterward. He peddled his knowledge of the late great and the up-and-coming to a dozen publications. Through decades of reporting on art and entertainment and, perhaps more important, years of counseling, introducing, and prodding talent, Leo Lerman helped steer American culture. His lasting significance, however, may lie in his role as an observer of the lives and art swirling around him.

  Shortly after high school (the end of his classroom education), Leo started reading the works of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Their novels forever altered his outlook and delivered him to a life of literary ambition and frustration. As many writers have done, Leo dreamed of becoming his generation's Proust, a seismograph of the social upheavals in his lifetime. Some of his earliest journals outline his imagined novel's content and plot, and a prime motive for his keeping a notebook for decades remained documentation, as he dashed down observations and quotations to use in an eventual tribute to his time and his friends.

  But by temperament Leo was more a collector than an artist.
His fragmentary attempts at fiction he himself dismissed as contrived and overwritten. He felt that the work he had published, if occasionally inspired, was largely second-rate, and the unlikelihood that a fashion magazine editor could equal Proust was not lost on one who spent so much of his life enjoying such ironies. He constantly wrote to space and against a deadline, and although he worked on his journals with alacrity and insight, he never summoned the perseverance and confidence to realize the modern historical tale he envisioned.

  Yet Leo seems always to have viewed life in retrospect. To him, time was a thief, not a benefactor. A central theme of his notes is recollection, or, as he calls it at one point, “allusiveness”—creating continuity by finding the connections between events. He could see an entire personality in a single encounter, with all its ganglia of private and historical connections. He loved literature, especially the long novels of nineteenth-century England and Russia (and of course Proust's Remembrance of Things Past), but it is anecdote, more than narrative, that caught his interest. The manners, gestures, styles, and affectations of people fascinated Leo. Ironically, it was his propensity—and gift—for summing others up in a few strokes that probably made him ill suited to be a novelist. The journal—impulsive, frank, unrevised—was an ideal medium for him.

  A sensualist and an extrovert, Leo left a uniquely sharp record of his time. He shows the cultural machine of New York as it actually worked, fueled by scores of talented and clever editors, agents, and producers. As someone immersed in this history, who learned most of it anecdotally, I know that many of those connections between the bright dots of celebrity are fading from the record. They were the real fiber of New York's golden age, and Leo was one of them.

  By the time I arrived, Leo was nearing the crest of his lengthy career in magazines. In June 1981, Condé Nast Publications hired me to be his assistant at Vogue, where he had been the features editor since 1972. Within that magazine's glossy confines, he maintained a fiefdom where serious books and painting could be discussed alongside snappy reports of the latest television shows or new restaurants. He ran the office as a sort of salon—or perhaps as one of his open houses. During my interview with him, editors wandered in with questions, article ideas, and gossip, while he took telephone calls from agents and writers, occasionally rolling his eyes and making droll asides in my direction. The interview scarcely touched on the present. Instead, we discussed what he called “Mr. Hitler's War” and the émigrés it had brought to New York, especially his adored friend Eleonora von Mendelssohn—heiress, actress, addict, lover of Rathenau, Reinhardt, and Toscanini. She had been dead thirty years, yet he was still talking about his “Ela” as though she had just left the room. I had never heard of her before, but had spent my college junior year in Germany and did know something about the powerful men she had loved. So I sat there at Vogue, amid all the laughter and interruptions, talking about Berlin in the twenties, unwittingly becoming one of Leo's tenuous links to his past. Suddenly he bellowed, summoning the magazine's personnel manager, Sarah Slavin. Leo extended his arm regally and, pointing at me, said, “Give notice where you are.” Then, pointing at Sarah: “Work out the details.” We were dismissed.

  Leo often disconcerted people at first meeting. He was at once a fashion magazine editor obviously itching to spot the next trend, a wit—sometimes saucy and often very funny—and a collector, who would wax nostalgic over societies and cities he could never have known. His imitation regality was enhanced by a genuine elderly manner. From his start (out of the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in 1933) to his finish (in 1994 as editorial adviser to all the Condé Nast magazines), everyone thought of him as a generation older than he was. During that first meeting with me, Leo said of his going to work at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar in the forties: “I was their darling. They thought that I was this sweet old thing. Little did they know how long you can stay old!”

  When he had entered the field, American magazines for women were changing rapidly. More young women were attending college, looking for jobs, and working after marriage. To many of them the life and fashion displayed in the pages of Bazaar and Vogue appeared chic, modern—and unattainable. As a no-nonsense alternative, a struggling serial-novel publisher called Street & Smith founded Mademoiselle magazine in 1934. From its launch, it set a new trend for frank writing about career, money, education, and health. From the start, Mademoiselle's editor in chief, Betsy Blackwell, with an attitude that clothes were not enough, made arts coverage part of her formula. In 1941, she hired George Davis as features editor. This onetime novelist had recently made Bazaar into a venue for innovative fiction, and his daring soon gave Mademoiselle real muscle in the artistic arena. Mademoiselle was, for example, the first to publish Saul Steinberg's cartoons (in 1941) and a story by Truman Capote (in 1945). Then, late in 1948, the free-spirited and tempestuous Davis suddenly quit. On the way out, he telephoned Leo Ler-man, suggesting that he apply for the job. Leo rang Betsy Blackwell and casually invited her to a party, then called in the troops. She was dazzled and signed him on as a contributing editor, starting on January 1, 1949. Within months, he was effectively editor of all Mademoiselle's arts coverage.

  Leo created a monthly section in Mademoiselle called “Something to Talk About,” a venue for him to announce discoveries to the magazine's audience of collegiate and young working women. Writing with delight and a dash of humor but without condescension, Leo sought to make these young ladies feel like guests at one of his soirées. In those pages, he would be the first to tell them about Margot Fonteyn, Edward Albee, Leontyne Price, Harold Prince, Jim Dine, John Updike, Liza Minnelli, Betty Friedan, and on and on. He worked very hard, scribbling endless pages of research for each piece, believing that he wrote well only when immersed. Fortunately, once under way he wrote quickly, producing a surprising number of articles and often meeting several deadlines in rapid succession. In the forties he also reviewed for The Atlantic Monthly, Tomorrow, and The Saturday Review of Literature; in the fifties he was regularly contributing to Playbill, Dance Magazine, and the New York Times.

  Leo could have bylines in so many publications because he remained freelance throughout his career. His Mademoiselle contract only guaranteed him a small expense account and a monthly check ($500 in 1949, when his rent was $125. In comparison, the New York Times and The Saturday Review were then paying $25 per review). In return, Leo would produce several columns for each issue of the magazine. Later, his arrangement with Vogue was virtually the same. Although he worked until after his eightieth birthday, Leo never took employee benefits. Remarkably, he always regarded journalism as interim work, a way to keep afloat until he could dedicate himself to the books he longed to write.

  He had been born in May 1914 into the thick stew of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants in New York City, with both sides of his family lower-middle-class but on their way up. The Goldwassers, his mother's relatives, had already (in thirty-odd years) gained a foothold in real estate and owned the house where he was born, on 107th Street (in what today is Spanish Harlem). The Lermans operated a house-painting business out of a small paint shop under the elevated railroad on Second Avenue. Leo's two grandfathers probably first met there over paint chips. By his parents' generation, the grandparents' Orthodoxy, tempered by America into holiday observances and kosher kitchens, no longer ruled the family. Moving even further from that background, Leo rarely set foot in a synagogue after his bar mitzvah and saw himself as “more Yiddish than Jewish.” He was a secular Jew who vividly recalled family circles and household rituals and who felt richly imbued with the tumultuous, pleasurable life of his early youth among aunts and uncles crowded into apartments in New York's East Harlem.

  For someone of this background, coming to maturity in the early thirties, Leo handled his homosexuality with remarkable ease. He writes frankly in his journal of being a highly sexual man and shows no shame or regret over preferring the same sex. Such gay self-acceptance, decades ahead of its general circulation, was surely ro
oted in his family, which was extraordinarily tolerant of an idiosyncratic son. Leo believed that his mother recognized his sexual preference early and possibly foresaw an advantage for her in his never marrying. “So he's a mother's boy,” she once said. “I'm his mother.”

  In the mid-thirties, Leo's parents, uncles, and aunts welcomed his first long-term lover, the painter Richard Hunter, into their family. In the late forties, they accepted his new lover, artist Gray Foy, just as cordially. That each of these men was not only homosexual but also gentile seems to have caused no friction in his home. Leo's family, Richard told me, were pleased that Richard and Gray looked after him. In contrast, neither Gray's nor Richard's parents ever fully warmed to Leo. Although dissimilar in many respects, their mothers found his urbanity intimidating, his Jewishness foreign (Mrs. Hunter, a Methodist minister's wife, referred to Leo as Richard's “Hebrew friend”), and his evidently intimate relationship with their sons illicit. In forty years, Gray's mother, Maebelle Hughes, never openly acknowledged that he and Leo were a couple, although she grew to accept the arrangement.

  In fairness, one should say that our society's notion of how to acknowledge gay couples has changed utterly in recent years. For most of Leo's life, people proved their tolerance by behaving as if they saw nothing. In the artistic circles of New York, homosexuals were hardly a rarity, of course, but it was well into the seventies before most associates and friends (even some gay ones) would treat Gray as Leo's spouse. Notably, hosts often invited Leo assuming he would come alone, and he did not press the issue. On the other hand, at the offices of Mademoiselle magazine, Gray and Leo's relationship was treated, Gray recalls, “as ordinary, with absolutely no impression or smirk—ever.” Betsy Blackwell, whom Leo described as “the complete Republican lady,” evidently set that tone from the start, having met Gray at the party Leo threw to impress her in November 1948. Although Gray had begun sharing Leo's apartment only a couple of months before then, to Blackwell they already appeared to be domestic partners.