The Grand Surprise Read online

  A lifetime of Leo's scrawling in notebooks and hunt-and-pecked letters to chums—can it come to more than all of his hard work for magazines? Yes. The trouble was that Leo idealized writing, but did not trust his own, although he saw its potential. He repeatedly compares himself to a lepidopterist, a butterfly collector, capturing and mounting rare specimens for display. A journal entry during the fifties recalls the boy Leo chancing upon a glorious butterfly—the Camberwell Beauty. He was transfixed by desire. The moment was transformative. That singular creature became Leo's version of Proust's madeleine. He continued to pursue powerful beauty, performance, and character through a long life, yet with a premonition from the outset that such things could finally be kept and re-created only through memory and fantasy. As a boy, Leo had paged through Vanity Fair magazine and scrutinized rotogravure supplements in the Sunday papers, aching to somehow slip into the recherché world shown there. He succeeded, transforming himself in their image, and he did so without disavowing his family, his ethnicity, or his sexuality. To many eyes, Leo Lerman achieved the glittering life that little Leo had dreamed of. But did his vehicle—the glamorous, ephemeral business of fashion and publicity—actually take him to a different place? Did so many years of trumpeting the latest starlet and hot spot trivialize his quest? Had he succeeded in transmuting himself into the golden image he had seen in childhood, only to find that world vanished, along with the rotogravure? Had his nerve failed? At the end, Leo wondered. The same appraising instinct, the collector's eye, that he had used on others Leo could turn on himself. But did he do so too late? These ambiguities are some of the beauties to be found in these pages. In his journal, Leo is at once the child bedazzled and the aging lepidopterist ready with his pin.

  —Stephen Pascal

  January 1, 2007

  MAY 28, 1956 Some weeks ago, looking at [the BBC's weekly] The Listener in the early morning, I suddenly, upon turning a page, saw a photograph of a butterfly—a Camberwell Beauty. Instantly, I was about ten years old, on a hot, delicious day in early summer in Jackson Heights. We had recently migrated to Jackson Heights from Grandpa's in New York. Never before had I been anywhere in a world which was not Yiddish and not entirely composed of my relatives. I had been sent to a public school, where my odd accent and my individuality had incited a teacher to rouse up the boys against me, and one recess they had kicked me into insensibility, after which Momma had removed me for a time from that school. But now summer vacation had come. I madly collected insects and butterflies (desiring them for their beauty, the glamour of them) and also living secretly as Laurie (Little Women) or in the French Revolution as gleaned from the movies. Most of all, I desired to enter one of the great Victorian houses, which still ranged along Broadway, a cobbled and trolley-tracked thoroughfare between immense ancient trees, the houses set back, topping lawns where iron deer stood transfixed by the jets of water which sprung from their nostrils and gaping mouths. The closest I came was Dr. Combe's office. He lived in an 1820ish house in a park. I knew the office part of this house and that portion of the park, which stretched on the other side of the drive, a green and copper world of immense trees, a world of sudden sightings and creakings and splintered sunlight. Anything could happen there—and one day did.

  I heard Momma and Poppa talking about how Dr. Combes had sold his enchanted park and his house. (I did not realize that this was the first crack in what was until then a perfect Victorian world, at least in appearance.) He had operated on me for a blood-poisoned toe, performing the operation on our dining room table, while Momma fainted in her bedroom closet, pulling her dresses down upon her, sinking into the painting of a male nude (back to the beholder, but still considered too indecent to display with our treasured lithograph of Wagner, tam-o-shantered at the keyboard, while his “characters” floated in a soupy green all about him). Now Dr. Combes, I heard, was to move into one of the huge Victorian houses, and Poppa was to housepaint it. Instantly I concentrated on how to go with him on this job.

  We were the first Jews in that neighborhood. I never spoke to the children and they never spoke to me. We were poor, although I lived high and rich interiorly. But still I wanted to see, to be part of, the great elegant, laughing, safe world these houses represented. I could hear the children of these houses laughing or screaming in their gardens behind their hedges of althea and hydrangea, and sometimes I could see dresses pale as luna moths fluttering in the dusk, beneath the trees on the great old lawn. Never did any of these magical creatures seem to notice me, as I walked toward the local library, which sat snug and enticingly at the far end of the avenue (now Momma and Poppa live behind it). So, when Poppa said that he was going to paint Dr. Combes's new house, I had only one desire: to go with him on the very first day of the job. And magically, on the Monday morning when Poppa was to begin, he got into the truck and suddenly called out: “Leo, wanna come along?” Leo hopped right in.

  It was an immense house, completely empty save for sunlight—so thick and moted that I tried to touch it. Poppa said for me to get out of his way, but not to open any windows, and so I wandered through the house, living my Laurie life, until I came to a little golden room, high up in a turret. And there I suddenly felt a presence. On a wall, near a diamond-paned, dusty window, a squint-eyed window, was a butterfly—wings flattened against the peeling, creamy, watery paper. It was a Camberwell Beauty—the butterfly I most coveted and had never before seen, save in butterfly books in the library. It rested, all spread out—plum-brown and buttery-golden bordered, its wings cut as if by pinking shears, its head furry like some fantastic beast. So still it was. And as I came closer I saw that its wings were not plum-brown, but the purple of marvelous ancient Chinese silk (later I knew that).

  I wanted that butterfly. It was the most beautiful, and a book had told me that it was extremely rare. This butterfly, the life in the great Victorian house— I stretched out my hands, stealthily, to take the prize, and suddenly I knew that I could not take it. It was too beautiful. It made me feel the way I felt sometimes in synagogue, or at tender moments with cousins and Momma, or the way I felt one milky winter day as I crossed the railroad bridge from Aunt Rose Klein's house to our house, and suddenly I was rent and bereft by the trees, stark against high, thin, pale sky. (I had seen these trees many times before, but now they were something else. They made me yearn and ache and be confused and sad and lifted, and later when I fell in love, that feeling was identical with the one I had experienced on the railroad bridge.) So now I felt this about the Camberwell Beauty and, feeling so, desired instantly to set it free. Poppa had told me not to open a window, but Poppa, childlike and kind as children are, would not want me to leave this butterfly to perish. So I tugged open the window, and the room was inundated with the peppery fragrance of climbing roses. They were great yellow blossoms, buzzing with huge black-and-gold bees. Then I tried to shoo the Camberwell Beauty to the window, but it remained obdurate, clinging tenaciously, somnolently to its wall. Suddenly, as I stood, hands outstretched, supplicating, it raised its wings languorously (as later I was to see Margot Fonteyn raise her arms numerous times), fluttered onto my right hand. I can feel the kiss, the almost imperceptible kiss of its feet, and the sweet tingle of the little stirrings it made as it raised and lowered its mysterious purple-brown wings several times. Then I flung it from the window, worrying whether it would be hurt, alarmed because my hand was all dusty, purple-brown, the powder from the Camberwell Beauty's wings.

  So sitting there, thirty-five or so years later, I read about this butterfly and discovered that it has another name. Sometimes it is called the Grand Surprise.

  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 gath
ered 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

  ELEONORA 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, shortsighted 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 landlocked 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 Rudolf Forster, your husband. I have seen him in the movie of the Threepenny Opera. I saw him when Max Reinhardt brought him here with the company. He is a great actor….” I was not talking in the overemphatic, extra-loud voice one uses when talking to the hard-ofhearing or foreigners: I was talking in the comforting, reliable voice one uses to soothe, to assure a frightened old friend.7 “But,” murmured Laci, “such a child and so Austrian. He could not exist anywhere else but in Austria.”

  So, I—in many ways a craven beast—found myself in a very dark house in the upper East Eighties in New York's Nazi Yorkville. I stood in the shadowy, cabbage-smelling lower hallway, and on the landings above me so many frowzy-haired, scarf-headed, smoke-mired women leaned over banisters, all shouting in German, “Go away! We know nothing! We don't know what you're talking about! No Mr. Forster was ever here! Go away.” Was this The Blue Angel or M? There is something exhilarating in being frightened. I went down the brownstone steps, and ran back to the house on East Sixty-seventh Street and told them that Rudolf Forster, I thought, had been in that house and was no longer there. Late the following morning I heard, “Forster got on a boat and he is on his way to Austria now.” I did not know, then, that I was to have at least twelve sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating years entwined with Eleonora von Mendelssohn's life.

  I am jolting north, in the early-wartime forties, in a ramshackle cab driven by a Mr. Miller, whose head under a floppy black cap (I never saw him without that cap) was mostly two enormous jutting ears, his laggard speech a rich seedcake full of jokes and malapropisms. He waited day and night to serve Eleonora, no matter how penniless she was. He waited, he served. She was also his excitement. We were, stealthily, at one or two or three or four in the morning, on our way to sit under a tree in Maestro [Toscanini]'s garden in Riverdale.