The Grand Surprise Read online

  Leo always required a great deal of assistance in the form of emotional support and household management, and he relied first on Richard and then on Gray to provide it. Richard did all the cooking and cleanup for Leo's first parties (and it was Richard's small private income that kept the pair financially afloat). Gray cooked, cleaned, and organized. He also sold drawings at a fine-art gallery and took on illustration assignments, but his works—hyper-detailed pencil drawings of intense, hallucinatory scenes—could never fetch enough for his hours of labor. Then Leo's journalism paid the grocer. Although in the beginning it was all very exciting and seductive to Gray, the unceasing social round that Leo followed was dizzying, and holding it all together could be exhausting. Leo once proposed to The New Yorker that he become its columnist on parties, and he could cheerfully have attended or thrown one every night. Gray fought, sometimes sharply, to keep Leo in the comforting home he had created and to stem the cascade of visitors. Leo's journal records his pondering whether he and Gray were temperamentally suited and of what their love and years together might have cost each of them. He sometimes felt that Gray was both his lover and his child. Yet it was Gray who shouldered all the real maintenance at home, thereby allowing Leo, in some ways, to remain the child. We have him to thank for fencing in Leo's driving extroversion enough so that he had quiet hours to write in his notebook. With all that they shared— sharp senses of humor, delight in eccentricity, romance with the innocence of childhood—Leo and Gray often lived on what one friend, the actor Simon Callow, has described as “the knife-edge of passionate incompatibility.” Leo's last working title for his memoir was Call It Friendship, Call It Love. Call it what you will, these men had a marriage.

  In a world that denied their relationship's legitimacy, Leo did see the irony of its conventionality. He enjoyed such career and social success that one can forget how many places and sets must have been closed to him, a Jew and an openly gay man. Surely he suffered bigotry or exclusion, even in the cosmopolitan circles in which he ran. In the summer of 1946 at Yaddo, for example, he learned that its director, Elizabeth Ames, had been gossiping about his homosexuality. Affronted and bewildered, he wrote to Richard Hunter that “being Jewish (and so exotic, flamboyant), being quite uneducated both socially and formally in any sense, it requires so little to shake the facade I've built up.” The nonchalance with which he lived was shored up by a belief that others would respect his private life, and that he could determine where the boundary lay. Leo never disguised the fact that he was a house painter's son, but from an early age he practiced dressing for other parts. Leo picked up, chameleon-like, the manners, accents, and tastes of cultures (past and present) to which he aspired, ignoring the fact that the prejudices or restrictions of those cultures might have excluded him. With the upheaval of World War II and the arrival in New York of its refugee artists and aristocrats, the world seemed as open as Leo had once fantasized.

  Leo's world became more and more “Europeanized.” His view of Europe, which had been formed first by books and theater, became increasingly shaped by his contact with refugees. As Leo later recalls, those friends were so relieved to have found safety in America, that their outlooks were more positive than we might assume today. Still, it seems odd that Leo's surviving journals, which begin in 1941, scarcely refer to the war (although Leo's brother fought in the Italian campaign) and do not mention Nazi Germany's racial policies or concentration camps until long afterward. Perhaps, as with his later health problems, Leo simply denied something so fundamentally catastrophic as long as he could.

  Young and optimistic in those war years, Leo also did not then fully appreciate how much of the artistic scene mesmerizing him in Manhattan was fueled by artists in exile. The émigré society in New York vanished with the end of the war. He mourned it, but—then barely thirty-one years old—he also took up the reins and made his own life and career as closely in its image as he could. In his last years, once again Leo saw the society and culture he loved disappear, overrun by vulgarity, discarded as obsolete, or simply reaching the end of its run. His notes are filled with tales of people, real players and creators of their day, who have vanished from stage, print, and even popular memory. So it goes. One person's legend is another's footnote, a fact that Leo understood quite well: At one point he considered titling his memoir A View from the Footnotes.

  Random House had, in fact, signed Leo to write an autobiography in 1982. After nine years, when he had not written past the first page, Leo devised a plan: He would dictate reminiscences onto tape, without using notes or outlines (his time, he said, had grown too short for research). Having then worked a decade for him, I would serve as audience and tape-machine operator. On quieter afternoons at the office, with the door closed and his phone unplugged surreptitiously by me, Leo told his tales slowly and deliberately, obviously having incubated each passage mentally over the intervening days. For revisions, his failing eyes required that the manuscript be printed in a huge font on 11 × 14 sheets of paper. In his last nine months, with his legs too weak for the arduous trip to the office, I carried the pages to his bedside and read aloud for his corrections. Leo's health had always been fragile. Through a succession of ailments (plus a lifelong dislike of exercise and delight in being helped by others) he had often worked in bed. But at this point his body really had begun to give out. Gradually our work on the book came to a halt. He left it unfinished.

  As he felt the end of his life approaching, Leo extracted a promise from Gray that after death his body would be kept at home for two days. He wanted one last party, a laying-out at which friends could bid him adieu. We were scarcely surprised—it was just another of Leo's ways of clutching every extra moment of pleasure and inviting us to share in the game. On August 23, 1994, word went out by telephone, Teletype, and a memorandum to the Madison Avenue offices of Condé Nast Publications that Leo Lerman had succumbed at last, aged eighty. He would be at home, however, for those who wished to pay their respects.

  Home, since 1967, had been the Osborne Apartments on Manhattan's West Fifty-seventh Street, a ponderous nineteenth-century pile of brownstone entered through a lobby garnished by Hollywood-Byzantine mosaics. A towering pair of mahogany doors opened into the apartment's grand foyer, its mauve walls hung chockablock with gouaches of erupting Vesuvius. Out of habit, I took the role of leading mourners (and a few gawkers) down two corridors and a half-flight of stairs to Leo's room. There stood Gray, as he often had, a reassuringly still focus point. He embraced each visitor and then made the moment unexpectedly easier by turning to tell Leo who had just joined him. Leo, embalmed, seemed to sleep as he had in life, propped up in a mahogany sleigh bed, wearing a Turkish needlepoint cap, guarded by a pack of dog portraits on the wall above. His fingers were laced across his chest under deep purple sheets. His beard, snow white and patriarchal, brushed his nightshirt. For many of us it was an indelible, atavistic, oddly comforting moment, and one that interwove major themes in Leo's life—le style ancien, theater, family, royalist fantasies, hospitality, and, of course, a cavalcade of celebrated figures.

  A few weeks after Leo's remarkable farewell performance, Gray mentioned to me that, while searching for Leo's tallis, he had discovered dozens of notebooks filled with “jottings.” More surprises lay in store. Notebooks squirreled away by Leo over the years kept appearing—in the downtown warehouse where he stockpiled books he could not bear to sell, in an ancient wicker trunk under the piano that he had converted to a desk, in the attic over their pantry, at the back of his study's file drawers. He had filled literally hundreds of notebooks of all sorts, finishing in the late eighties with reams of canary foolscap covered in his signature purple ink.

  Although it was a year before we realized it, the notebooks proved to be a remarkably continuous account of Leo's life, stretching from the months before his first Vogue assignment (in 1941) to a year before his death. What the diverse books had in common was illegibility. Leo's handwriting was always difficult to read; he may de
liberately have made it worse in the journals to discourage prying. The difficulty was compounded by personal abbreviations, shorthand, haste, his failing eyesight, and an occasional jouncing railroad bed. Faced with this mountain of scribbling, Gray and I decided to tackle the books together, at first simply looking for enough material to complete the memoir.

  Years of having to take action at the office based on Leo's scrawled notes had prepared me, yet on every page certain words might as well have been inkblots. That we came upon these journals out of chronological sequence was in a sense a blessing, because we began with the eighties, when I had known many of the players and events that Leo was describing. Still, one small notebook could take a week to untangle. For me to get through it at all—never mind understand what Leo was talking about—would have been unimaginable without Gray at my side to decipher names, arcane terms, and, most important, to provide context. Still grieving when we began, Gray naturally found reading chronicles of times they spent together, written in his lover's hand, both comforting and upsetting. He broke down over the job more than once but always came back for another try. As we continued to collate and decipher, our purpose changed. The writing in the journals was so immediate and sharp that we set aside the manuscript that Leo had dictated to me and began envisioning a more comprehensive book.

  Gradually we worked our way back to the years before Leo had met Gray. Fortunately, Richard Hunter was often in New York while we were working and had superb recall. He and I spoke often and I taped hours of our conversations about his life with Leo. Patient with my queries, revealing, and kind, Richard became my good friend, and I was deeply saddened when he suddenly died in January 2001, at the age of eighty-eight. The following April, I received a cardboard box in the mail from one of Richard's nephews, Forest Hunter. Inside, I found 458 letters written over fifty years from Leo to Richard (the original frequent flyer) in cities all over the globe. They had been uncovered in various corners of Richard's house near Augusta, Maine. A cursory turn through this box showed Leo's tone in the letters to be unguarded, affectionate, playful, and remarkably close to his private writing. They also told some marvelous stories missing from the notebooks.

  Richard was an artist and would-be actor two years Leo's senior when they met as fellow students at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in Manhattan. Their friendship, initially a shared interest in theater, galvanized into love in the spring of 1936. After nearly a dozen years together (with occasional separations), Richard left Leo for another man, Howard Rothschild. Deeply pained by their breakup, Leo vowed to stay single and to direct his energy into writing. Then Gray Foy came along. On April 30, 1948, he attended a gala party that Leo was giving for the Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain. By summer's end, Gray was living with Leo.

  Gray became the love of Leo's life. Yet Leo's letters to Richard seldom drop the flirtatious, bullying, longing tone of a separated lover. Peripatetic Richard is always being urged by Leo to return, reminded that he has a place to stay with him and Gray. Richard's frequent voyaging lent a very peculiar rhythm to their friendship. He might be out of touch for months, letters to him returned as undeliverable, and then abruptly appear on their stoop to occupy one of Leo and Gray's bedrooms for weeks. If he was in New York when Gray was traveling, Richard sometimes came to stay and cook for Leo. Did they sleep together? Leo never mentions that they had, and Richard never gave me the slightest hint of it. His letters to Leo, despite often saying that he loves both Leo and Howard and signing off with their habitual baby talk, always remain at a rather courteous distance—fond, somewhat paternal, and fatalistic about their separation. It was Richard who had left, after all. Leo never really ended it, never stopped missing the old Richard—his playmate. Perhaps if Leo had realized his literary ambitions, conceived in those years with Richard, he might have relinquished some of this nostalgia for their earlier life together.

  Now that Leo's letters had become part of the project, I asked Gray whether he had kept his as well. He promptly handed me 166 of them, written in the first twenty years of their relationship. Many of these were romantic—rapturous, teasing, and beseeching Gray to come home from his travels—in a sweeter and less petulant tone than Leo took with Richard.

  For his other friends, Leo was an erratic correspondent—in fact, many of the letters he received either complain of his never writing or exult in finally getting a few lines. Nevertheless, I searched. Leo did not keep carbons of personal correspondence. Business letters written from Mademoiselle or Vogue, when copies survive, are succinct. Fortunately, there were two major finds: his letters to the writer Ruth Landshoff-Yorck (most of them still owned by her friend, the poet Kenward Elmslie) and those to Marlene Dietrich (today in the Marlene Dietrich Collection in Berlin). Dozens of letters are now interwoven in this book, often filling in where the journal had skipped.

  The earliest letter from Leo to Richard that survives, the first in this collection, is dated April 14–15, 1939. Leo is twenty-four and living with his parents in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York. He and Richard have been lovers for almost three years, both of them pursuing theatrical work. Richard has tried acting, Leo stage-managing, and together they have been designing costumes for small productions. Leo is also critiquing manuscripts for agents, reviewing books, and writing Leonardo: Artist and Scientist, a biography for young readers that will appear the following year. In the autumn of 1939, he will launch into an affair with the costume designer Ladislas “Laci” Czettel. Leo's journals at the time speak of this romance's pitfalls, but do not really tell how it came about. For that story, we have only what Leo wrote about it some forty years later.

  Inserted into the chronological flow of journal and letter are vignettes Leo wrote long after the events. These passages appear in italics, to alert the reader that here Leo is writing with hindsight. Many come from his unfinished memoir; a few he published as tributes or delivered as eulogies, and others he wrote later in the journal. They are placed where it seems readers will want to know more, particularly at the beginning, as the principal players arrive.

  In the progression of excerpts, I have provided dates whenever possible. The location where Leo is writing his journal, however, is noted only if it has changed since the preceding entry. While writing, Leo—his thoughts quite freely associating—often interrupted himself by inserting a reminder, jotting down an overheard line, or recalling a similar event. As I am not a paleographer, and Leo's papers are not the Dead Sea Scrolls, I see no point in torturing the reader by being overscrupulous. If moving a clause or a parenthesis could make a line more sensible, I intervened. When deletions would clarify or expedite without altering Leo's meaning or tone, I cut. These minor omissions are not indicated in the text. Small errors and inconsistencies (of date, for example) have been corrected without remark. More controversially, perhaps, I have occasionally woven pieces together when Leo split a story within an entry or between two dates, although I have made such shifts only when the parts fell close together in the journal. If the related passages were more seriously separated, I might put one, usually the later, in a footnote.

  Leo's spelling, very creative and leaning toward Briticism, has been corrected and standardized to American usage. With punctuation, I have taken a rather free hand. Leo had little use for the full stop, preferring the dash in his journals and the ellipsis in his letters. In the original, pages can pass without a single period; semicolons are rare; colons are often misused. But frequently these ubiquitous dashes and dots are simply indications of Leo pausing for thought. When his thoughts are hurried, anxious, or random, I felt the dashes fit and left them. Elsewhere I have substituted more standard punctuation.

  Annotation of Leo's busy life has proved a challenge. Wherever facts and grammar permit, brief information is supplied in brackets. When more is necessary to identify a person or understand a circumstance, details appear in a footnote. Leo's close friends also receive lengthier descriptions there, and occasionally a note sets the record
straight or offers commentary by Richard Hunter or Gray Foy. Because Leo followed virtually every line of culture in New York and often pulled them together in his features, his parties, and now in this book, the notes are written for a general reader, not for the aficionado of any particular art. The editor apologizes to anyone whose substantial achievements have shrunken here to a meager word or two.

  As one who came along long after the heyday of Leo's party-throwing, I had shrugged off most accounts of them as exaggerations. Then, while sorting out Leo's ramshackle files, I uncovered scores of yellowing guest lists, stretching from the late thirties into the nineties. Six of these remarkable documents of their time (and of Leo's web of acquaintance) are reproduced here. The invitees are not annotated, although many of them have notes elsewhere, and they remain in the order that Leo wrote them.

  Each element—journal, letter, and memoir—contributes to this tale, but Leo's journal really drives the story and provides many of its most arresting moments. Therefore, it seemed fitting to let “The Journals of Leo Lerman” stand as the subtitle for the whole. The excerpts that comprise this book are only a fraction, perhaps 10 percent, of the original. Needless to say, any number of books could have been cut from this material. Other editors would have found different stories and characters more worthy of inclusion, as would I, no doubt, if I were to begin again. In making these selections, I have been fortunate in receiving frequent guidance from my editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb. He knew most of the people Leo mentions, by reputation if not personally—an inestimable benefit in editing such a crowded work—and offered abundant suggestions after reading each revision of the manuscript. Finally, it was he who persuaded me that I ought to publish before we all perish.