The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman Hardcover - 2007

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 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-of-hearing 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 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.

Eleonora existed in a grand tradition of women madly in love. Such women breathe folly. They are protected. How else to explain Eleonora, who, having somehow secured a latchkey to Toscanini’s house, would leave me sitting under a tree in his garden while she crept soundlessly into the dormant house, crept to his bedroom door, there to crouch, listening to his coughing in the night, his breathing, his very being. Having accomplished this madness, she would return to me, under my tree, fall down beside me in what I could only call an orgasmic state, crying, “Liebling! Liebling! You should hear him! He is like a great storm! He is an element! You should hear him!” And, truth to tell, I did hear him, even there, out in the garden. I could hear him coughing, sometimes calling out, sometimes even moving about, sometimes—oh, ecstasy for Eleonora—coming to a window and peering out.

How to explain this woman? How to explain any legend, for she was essentially legend. Born into the fabled Mendelssohn family, descended from musicians, bankers, scholars, hostesses, madmen, collectors of prodigious works of  art and of exquisite furniture. Generations mingled their blood with Italians, Basques, Russians, and fellow Jews (some of them converted) of many classes. Eleonora somehow became for us (and this “us” included some of the most  distinguished minds and creators of this century’s first six or seven decades) a symbol of European culture and civilization then fast being trampled. She assumed heroic stature, for we knew she could, in her frail, star-driven person, endanger herself out of loyalty, she having ventured, with her name high on  Nazi lists of those wanted, in and out of Germany, helping friends and ex-lovers in peril.

Duke or dustman’s daughters, none of that much mattered to Eleonora. What mattered to her was genius. She was a pushover for genius and, of course, for charm. She was Duse’s goddaughter.[8] She married four times, not even once for love. She married Edwin Fischer because he was such a glorious pianist; she married [cavalry officer] Emmerich von Jeszenzky because he bullied her into it; she married Rudolf Forster because he was such a great actor and charmer; she married her last husband, actor Martin Kosleck, because there was no one else around to sit up all night talking to her. She was a night person. She slept in dribs and drabs. Ela had a way of laughing uncontrollably, peal on peal welled up from somewhere deep inside. She screamed with laughter, until she cried hilariously. And sometimes, like Niobe, she was all tears. Her life was crescendos: The diminuendos—sometimes they were not pretty.

NOTES
[1] Eddie Goldwasser was one of Leo's scores of cousins. Samuel Lerman (1886?-1958), Leo's father, was one of eight siblings to survive childhood; his mother, Ida Goldwasser Lerman (1898-1980) had five brothers.

[2] Jerome Bernard Lerman (1921-2002), Leo's brother, was seven years younger and his only sibling. After returning from army service in World War II, he would become a plastics entrepreneur who often worked with toy manufacturers.

[3] Hungarian-born costume designer Ladislas "Laci" Czettel (1894?-1949) worked in Europe until 1938, then in New York at the Metropolitan Opera and on Broadway (in Rosalinda). In the mid-forties, Leo helped him begin designing women's clothes for New York department stores.

[4] Ilse Bois (d.1961) had been a comic actress in German silent films. Ruth Landshoff-Yorck (1904-66) was a novelist and a playwright, a quintessential Berliner of the Weimar Republic. A 1930 marriage to Count David Yorck von Wartenburg (1905-85) had afforded her, a Jew, some protection from the Nazis, but eventually she immigrated to Paris, and then in March 1937 to New York. Leo and she disliked each other at first meeting, but they grew very close, and she became Leo's most trusted critic.

[5] John Latouche (1914-56) was a lyricist (Cabin in the Sky), librettist, and poet (Ballad for Americans).

[6] In La Voix Humaine, a one-act play by Cocteau, actress Eleonora "Ela" von Mendelssohn (1900-1951) played a woman pleading on the telephone with her disenchanted lover. "She played La Voix Humaine in her own bed linens, on furniture with which she had grown up. The telephone aws an erotic instrument for Ela." Journal, February 2, 1971.

[7] The events Leo recalls probably occurred early in 1940, when Rudolf Forster (1884-1968) returned to make films in the Third Reich. Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) was the preeminent German theater director and producer between the wars, with whom many of Mendelssohn's friends had worked, including two of her husbands, Forster and the German-born actor Martin Kosleck (1907-94).

[8] The Italian tragedienne Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) had been a lover of the banker Robert von Mendelssohn. He and his wife, the pianist Giuletta Gordigliani, named their daughter for the actress.

“Engrossing . . . In his review of Period Piece [a memoir by Charles Darwin’s granddaughter], Lerman endorsed ‘wit’ and ‘humor’ in books of recollections, and there is no shortage of either here. . . . The Grand Surprise exemplifies the qualities that Lerman himself sought out in the autobiographies and life recollections that he–an astonishingly successful autodidact with no more than a high school education–so avidly read: wit, respect for time past, profound feeling, a lack of cheap sentimentality, and above all an abiding sense, when others might have become jaded, of deep ‘wonder’ at the haut monde (as he liked to put it) of Art and Society to which he had struggled so hard to gain access. . . . To my mind, what makes The Grand Surprise most worth reading for anyone interested in the substance, rather than the coruscating surface, of the times and culture it describes is the scintillant quality of Lerman’s critical acumen. To read this book is, as it were, to witness a meteor shower of casually tossed-off insights into dance, theater, film, music, art, and literature of his day, and of the past. . . . I savored every page of his remarkable private writings . . . . “
–Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books

“The Grand Surprise [is] a magnificent arrangement of [Leo Lerman’s] unpublished memoirs and correspondence. . . . Stephen Pascal, Lerman’s assistant for more than 12 years . . . deciphered and edited his former mentor’s journal’s with [Lerman’s longtime partner Gray] Foy’s help and privy knowledge, and hunted down hundreds of Lerman’s letters. In The Grand Surprise, Pascal resurrects and imposes order on a dazzling life in the scene-stealing language of the man who lived it. . . . Lerman [once complained] ‘I am fat with words.’ Pascal has reshaped Lerman’s reminiscences into a heroic physique, and given his subject the posthumous consolation that a hope he confided to himself late in life, in a notebook he did not know would be found, was true: ‘I did do something extra: I lived. I will live.’ . . . . Lerman’s parties attracted everyone from magazine editors and writers to Maria Callas, Anaïs Nin, Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Cecil Beaton, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Aaron Copland, Gloria Steinem and Leonard Bernstein. . . . Lerman knew absolutely everyone, and what’s more, absolutely everyone knew him. . . . In his notebooks, he could convey an entire life in a sentence, in a clause, or even in one word. . . . Anaïs Nin wrote of him in a diary entry that he ‘talks like Oscar Wilde, but has a warmth in his glittering dark eyes,’ and that his conversation evoked a ‘magician’s tour de force.’ . . . ‘And all you remember is the fantasy, the tale, the laughter.’ In these pages, Lerman’s words put the fantasy on paper. . . . Lerman mused late in life, ‘the final desolation comes with the realization that life is like fiction.’ His certainly was. But even as The Grand Surprise invites the reader backstage to revisit the illustrious dramatis personae of his memory, it also reveals the private heart of a public man. . . . In 1948, in an acid vignette he published in Vogue, [Truman] Capote gave a thinly veiled portrait of Lerman, disguising him as a popular party-giver named Hilary. . . . ‘Hilary so wants everyone to be glamorous, to be a storybook creature; somehow he persuades himself that the grayest folk are coated with legend-making glitter.’ But reading this book, you are tempted to conclude that it was Capote’s gray that was an illusion; the glitter was real. You just had to be Leo Lerman to see it.”
–Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review, cover

“You couldn’t have written for a living in New York during the last third of the twentieth century without having heard of–and probably from–Leo Lerman. The bearded and ebullient features editor of Vogue was forever on the freelancer phone, putting out a fire or starting one . . . And when he wasn’t on the phone, he was discovering something marvelous or meeting someone sexy at the ballet, the theater, the opera, or the ‘Fashion and Surrealism’ exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology . . . Lerman–born poor in Spanish Harlem; raised ambitious in Jackson Heights, Queens; done with classrooms after high school, a graduate of fashion magazines, émigré salon culture, and a 1930s New York underground of drag clubs and homosexual speakeasies; Jewish, gimpy, autodidactic, and ‘queer’ (his word); a quick study and glad hand, with his Turkish cap, purple sheets, and ‘royalist fantasies’–this Leo embodied upward mobility, class transgression, and theatrical reincarnation . . . And for more than half a century, from his first Vogue assignment in 1941 to his deathbed in 1994, he kept brilliant notes on what Beauty and Legend looked like before vulgarians stormed glam gates. Naturally, when some of your best friends are Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, and Truman Capote, the gossip is salacious. Naturally, if you invite Imogen Coca, Lionel Trilling, and Anaïs Nin to the same party in 1946, or Robert Motherwell, Leontyne Price, and Si Newhouse in 1964, or Martha Graham, Woody Allen, and Lillian Hellman in 1976, some chairs will be broken, and some hearts too.”
–John Leonard, Harper’s

“Lerman’s diaries, interspersed with his correspondence and an unfinished memoir, form a rich, occasionally rueful mosaic of a man who collected friendships the way those around him collected wealth or accolades, and who, most of the time, seemed to find his life the better for it. . . . Lerman was at the center of fashionable New York society for almost fifty years, thanks to work at such magazines as Vogue and Mademoiselle. The son of a housepainter in East Harlem, Lerman was drawn to ‘the surface glitter’ of the élite, and he helped launch the careers of countless singers, writers, actresses, and artists. He was known for frugal but grand soirées–Marlene Dietrich emptied the ashtrays at one; William Faulkner stood in line with Maria Callas for Chinese food at another–but he never entirely lost his sense of being an outsider, or his feeling that magazine work was a distraction from ‘a life of letters.’”
–The New Yorker

“The Grand Surprise, with an intoxicating mix of gossip, anecdotes and character sketches, will be for many a grand surprise. Lerman writes with just the right touch of brio and bite as he evokes a vanished time.”
–Robert Osborne, The Wall Street Journal

“[Lerman] knew everyone who mattered among the culturati of the mid-20th century, and his personal observations of them, and of the nature of art itself, form a chronicle that Proust might have envied. It truly is a grand surprise.”
–Amanda Vaill, Town and Country

“A literate, gossipy read about the rich, famous and talented.”
–Forward

“Remarkable . . . Witty, sometimes mordant, and often revealing . . . [Lerman’s] journals make for dishy reading . . . Yet titillating as they are, [they] amount to more than a miscellany of star-centric gossip. The Grand Surprise is also a chronicle of artistic Manhattan during the postwar years, written by a man who was not only a figure at the heart of this milieu, but a tastemaker who had a hand in shaping its evolution. . . . The prose here is immediate, spontaneous, candid, funny. . . . Most people will read The Grand Surprise for its tales of celebrities and their foibles, for its portrait of postwar cultural aristocracy–and why not? But it is also a de facto autobiography of an immensely charismatic man.”
–Amanda Fortini, Slate

“Lerman’s once secret journals are dish to die for.”
–Advocate

“For more than 50 years, Lerman collected notable boldface names the way some people collected colorful butterflies. . . . [He] wrote about these celebrities for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Mademoiselle, or Harper’s Bazaar. He befriended everyone who was anyone, and they came to his weekly salons and regular parties . . . . After his death in 1994, long-time assistant Pascal discovered hundreds of notebooks squirreled away in desk drawers and stored boxes. Together with dozens of letters and scraps of a memoir never finished, he has shaped Lerman’s gossipy late-night jottings and astute morning-after reflections into a box of irresistible anecdotal bonbons about New York’s cultural demimonde, Lerman’s gay circle of friends, and his years as Condé Nast editorial director, when he was a center around which revolved epochs of glitter and glam.”
–The Bottomline

“In every city, in every era, there is always one socialite who throws the best parties . . . New York, as might be expected, [is the city that] trumps them [all]. That is because New York had Leo Lerman, the writer, magazine editor and socialite who knew thousands of the world’s most interesting people and didn’t mind writing about them. In The Grand Surprise, a collection of Lerman’s journals, letters and excerpts from articles and his never-completed memoir, an engrossing image of Lerman’s singular force and resounding influence in post-war Manhattan is revealed in exquisite detail. The book gives [readers] of a later generation the distinct feeling of [being] a child perched at the top of the stairs late at night to eavesdrop on the adults talking about wondrous and unknown things. Great bits of gossip–about Truman Capote, Yul Brynner, Margot Fonteyn–pop up among much deeper social reflections, vignettes and letters to Lerman’s lovers. . . . Lerman was many unique phenomena rolled into one fascinating phenomenon: an idiosyncratic editor, a fluttering socialite, a deeply expressive lover and a man alternately stifled and motivated to greatness by deep insecurity. . . . [His] quirky and glistening prose can’t help but induce a sense of nostalgia [for his lost world], even among those who come to know it only through his descriptions. If Lerman’s prose is often glittering and romanticized, it is because his world was, too–and so much the better.”
–Colin Dabkowski, The Buffalo News

“Lerman knew everyone . . . [The] range of relationships Lerman had with luminaries of his day is both intimidating and informative. Truman Capote even based a character in one of his novels directly on Lerman. This writer spent his career spreading his knowledge of, it seems, everything worth knowing. Lerman was outgoing and smart. . . . [His] diaries highlight the life of a deeply passionate and caring thinker.”
–Philadelphia Gay News

“The Grand Surprise, selections from the journals of the late critic Leo Lerman, is in bookstores now. Included in the collection, edited by Stephen Pascal, are several choice anecdotes about some of Lerman’s favorite divas, from Maria Callas and Beverly Sills to Marlene Dietrich.”
–"Opera Watch" column, Opera News

“A royal flush of dish . . . A trove of gossip from the 40s through the 90s awaits in The Grand Surprise, with its many-splendored entries edited by Leo [Lerman’s] assistant Stephen Pascal, who’s undertaken the exhaustive, mind-blowing job [of] documenting Leo’s Proustian-like commentary. Is there anyone Leo didn’t know? Or dine with? Or party with? Those hallowed names are here, and The Grand Surprise isn’t a book to race through, although it’s wildly addictive. Best to dip into it as you would a box of chocolates and savor a little at a time. [The Grand Surprise is] a social history like no other with its frank, descriptive and derriere-slapping observations of haute New York, the capitals of Europe, and Los Angeles.”
–George Christy, Nob Hill Gazette

“Compelling . . . full of wit and insight. . . . Many of us fantasize about having dinner parties with favorite icons as our guests, but this was reality, not fantasy, for Leo Lerman, a gay writer and editor at Condé Nast from 1941 until his death in 1994. He became renowned for the parties he hosted for the luminaries of his day. . . . While hobnobbing with the cultural elite, Lerman wrote detailed journal accounts of his life, and those writings have been compiled by Stephen Pascal, [Lerman’s] assistant for 12 years, into The Grand Surprise. . . . [The] book paints a clear picture of the writer’s life and cultural observations. Born in 1914, New York, Lerman grew up in a lower middle-class Jewish family. High school was his only formal education, but he devoured books, avidly reading everything from Virginia Woolf’s novels to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Lerman ‘dreamed of becoming his generation’s Proust,’ Pascal writes in the introduction. He wrote journals for ‘documentation,’ Pascal says, to use later as source material for a Proustian novel about his time. While Lerman never achieved this monumental task, reading his journals, written between 1941 and 1993, reveals a fascinating impression of not only his life but also the cultural landscape of the latter half of the 20th century . . . Lerman leaves behind an entertaining legacy, and a valuable remembrance of things past.”
–Kathi Wolfe, The New York Blade

“Lerman [was once] the features editor for Vogue, and the editor of Vanity Fair, as well as a guiding eminence for the Conde Nast organization, but what he really wanted to be was a writer. As this exhaustive but never exhausting collection of [Lerman’s] journals and letters proves, that’s exactly what he was. As a matter of fact, he was a better writer than many of the people he was editing. The Grand Surprise is a glittering assembly of the intellectual and theatrical elite of the post-war era, caught and transcribed by one of their own, a man with a superlative eye for character and detail. There is also astonishing gossip. Much of the dish derives from three close friends Lerman worshipped for their talent but whose human failings he regarded with a sharp but essentially loving eye: Maria Callas, [Marlene] Dietrich and Eleonora von Mendelssohn, who was mistress to both Toscanini and Max Reinhardt. Lerman was very much a creature of high culture; his preferred habitat was New York and Paris, with yearly excursions to Venice . . . [On] his chosen turf of the beau and gay mondes, Lerman seems to be one of the great diarists, interested in candor, in emotional intimacy. . . . He also had a genuinely provocative critical mind. . . . Throughout his 80 years, Lerman was comfortable with his homosexuality, comfortable with nearly everything except tedium. He had a deeply romantic, enthusiastic personality, and he was drawn to larger-than-life characters who could transform quotidian reality into something glittering and neo-operatic. . . . The achievement of this book, of this mountain of journals and letters that editor Stephen Pascal has cobbled together, is that it gradually becomes the work that Lerman felt he never wrote–a panoramic picture of mid-century life and times . . . A Proustian work.”
–Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post

“Gossipy, ribald and fun. Lerman was a man who liked to go out every night, and his journals are filled with tasty morsels. . . . You will have to buy [The Grand Surprise] to read what Lerman says about Yul Brynner; I simply can’t repeat it here.”
–Wendy R. Williams, New York Cool

“Lerman [once] told [Paul] Bowles that his stories were like Chinese boxes, each opening into another–and that at the end there was nothing. Bowles remembered that sharp sting [for 30] years. That was the power of Lerman’s reach as a critic and tastemaker, a power he had exerted through magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. Now his diary, The Grand Surprise, shows us not only the Lerman of glittering parties, openings, first nights, and famous friends, but a private man with an inner core far deeper than his surface life would ever have suggested. . . . ‘Leo’s book was a revelation to me,’ I said on a visit to Gray Foy, Lerman’s lifelong companion. ‘It was a revelation to me too,’ he said.”
–Frederic Tuten, New York magazine

“There is great dish here and also great heart. . . . Leo Lerman knew everyone from Cary Grant to Diana Vreeland to David Hockney to Steve Martin. Among his closest friends were Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, and Diana Trilling. He has great stories to tell about them all. He is always, even in these private journals (and letters), more courteous than catty, a curious and humorous observer. . . . He wrote about his world of art, theater, celebrities, glamour, for several Condé Nast publications from the late 1940s to the early 1990s in short bursts of lively prose. . . . [Yet his] greatest accomplishments were as an inspired party giver, grateful guest, loyal friend, and sympathetic confidant. . . . He remained attached to his powerful New York Jewish family, faithful to his life-long partner, and true to his own personal vision.”
–Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

“The Grand Surprise provide[s] a frank and lively crash course on contemporary culture.”
–Echo magazine (May 2007)

“Lerman, a contemporary of Truman Capote, was a larger-than-life figure in the magazine world who also gave great parties.”
–New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

“Pascal began his career at Condé Nast Publications in 1981 as assistant editor to Leo Lerman, a longtime features editor at Vogue. Toward the end of Lerman’s career, Pascal recorded the writer/critic/editor’s dictated reminiscences for a proposed autobiography that was never completed. However, following Lerman’s death, a cache of journals and letters surfaced, which became the impetus for this book. Working with Lerman’s former lovers Richard Hunter and Gray Foy, Pascal compiled journal entries, letters, an unfinished memoir–even guest lists from Lerman’s legendary parties–to give insight into the life of this remarkable and influential New York socialite. . . . Readers will delight in the observations, stories, gossip, and humor concerning New York cognoscenti, literati, entertainers, and artists of the 1940s to the 1990s (e.g., performer Judy Garland, writer Truman Capote) . . . [The] book also divulges Lerman’s insecurities, doubts, and ruminations about being openly gay and Jewish and the loss of the European émigré culture. An enjoyable and insightful read recommended for all public and academic libraries.”
–Mark Williams, Library Journal

“Leo Lerman was the last of the Condé Nast mandarins–an industrious aesthete with a lapidary eye for the latest nugget of high culture that could be polished up for the slick pages of Vogue. For more than a half-century, he knew everybody in the incestuous world of the arts and the rich in Manhattan and beyond, entertained most of them, and gossiped about all of them. . . . Confected by Mr. Pascal from [hundreds of Lerman’s] notebooks, along with snippets from letters that [he] wrote to Marlene Dietrich and others he loved the most, The Grand Surprise is an evocation of a lost world of the arts that rivals the Goncourt brothers’ portrait of 19th-century Paris. Through Lerman’s pages parade Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, Hemingway and Faulkner, Maria Callas and Greta Garbo, Norman Mailer and Dietrich, a drunken Marion Davies, a gaga Evelyn Waugh and a flabby-armed Nancy Reagan. . . . Delicious giblets bob in the soup of names. . . . At once charming and insufferable, Lerman was a rhapsodic collector of pals, lovers, knickknacks, talent, wit and memories. He never hid his lower-middle-class Jewish roots or his homosexuality, but he could be bitchy. . . . [Lerman] was a brilliant and authentic self-invention–son of a house painter, born on East 107th St. in Manhattan and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens . . . [He] lived the life he dreamed of, and wound up leaving us a superb secret history of the culture of our times.”
–Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

“The Grand Surprise is drawn from the journals and letters of Leo Lerman, a fixture in New York publishing for 50 years. Lerman generally worked behind the scenes to keep magazines that specialized in glamour in the forefront of what was important in the arts. . . . A dozen years ago, at Lerman’s memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amy Gross, who had been his assistant at Vogue in the early 60s, read a letter he had written her when he lived in Rome. The letter was a revelation–full of wit, penetrating observations and a dazzling urbanity. . . . This Leo Lerman is on display in The Grand Surprise, edited by his last assistant, Stephen Pascal. Lerman knew everyone, as you can see in the guest list of a party he threw for Maria Callas . . . Many of the letters are to Marlene Dietrich, a few to Truman Capote. [Lerman’s] comments throughout are delicious.”
–Howard Kissel, New York Daily News blog

“The publication of a major new diary is cause for celebration . . . [More] than any recent gay book, The Grand Surprise gives a look at the day-to-day, almost picturesque, artistic and sexual journeys of a capital-c Cultured gay man through New York in the middle and end of the 20th century–and covering years when the city was the West’s cultural capital. . . . [Lerman’s] journals bring to life for us what it was like to be an openly gay man obsessed with metropolitan culture–particularly the intersections of its varieties American and European and high and low. . . . The Grand Surprise fascinates most with its vigilant and ever-accumulating accounts of the plays, films, dance, opera singers, and artists he encountered. . . . There’s great gossip here. . . . [and the] notes and gossip are really the soul of the book . . . . [A] brilliant, detailed, and important window into a gay life over many decades.”
–Michael Bronski, Guide

“A compulsively readable storehouse of outrageous anecdote and sexual revelation, of shrewd comment and keen-eyed description . . . Leo Lerman spent his adult life working for glossy fashion magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. Late in his career, he was briefly the editor of Vanity Fair during its difficult rebirth. . . . [He] essentially devoted his adult life to the New York social whirl. . . . His Rolodex was the envy of lesser mortals. Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Lincoln Kirstein, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland and dozens of other eminences would call him up to chat. . . . A dazzling life, it would seem . . . And yet the pages of The Grand Surprise reveal a man assailed by the conviction that he has frittered away years on over-rich lunches at the Russian Tea Room and sold his talent for a mess of pottage. . . . Though he clearly worked hard at his articles, profiles and book reviews, Lerman’s secret ambition was to be a novelist, possibly even a great one like his beloved Proust. . . . Nothing ever came of [his] efforts. . . . But over the years Lerman did squirrel away notes, diaries and letters, not to mention party invitations, and these Stephen Pascal has ably edited in The Grand Surprise. . . . Lerman is adept at capturing a passing figure with an apt smile or comparison. . . . Sometimes, you can hardly believe the shameless name-dropping or the catty remarks. . . . The Grand Surprise is full of delicious anecdotes about shallow, venal, power-mad, sex-crazed and often unlikable people.”
–Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

“‘Marlene [Dietrich] asked me whether I would ghost her memoirs,’ writes Leo Lerman in his journals, ‘but I thought it over and decided that she would never really tell what the public wants to know.’ But in his own private material, now being published after his death in The Grand Surprise, Lerman dished on all the stars he had access to as a legendary editor at Condé Nast.”
–George Rush and Joanna Rush Molloy, New York Daily News

“In [Leo Lerman’s] role [as Editorial Advisor at Condé Nast], he entertained and inspired those writer-editors lucky enough to score an appointment, myself included. During your meeting, the bearded legend-in-residence, wit and eyes sparkling, might share a Saltine washed down with a juicy backstage anecdote about his buddy Maria Callas, pausing to take a call from Steve Martin or S.I. Newhouse. In 1994, Lerman died at 80, but the pleasures of his company come alive in this collection of his journal entries, letters and reminiscences spanning over 50 years. It’s a delicious, gossipy read, studded with tales of the luminaries he befriended while ‘minding [his] own and everybody’s business’ . . . . Yet the most fascinating figure at this gala turns out to be the host, a housepainter’s son who miraculously [became] a worldly aesthete. Lerman never outgrew his childlike enthusiasm, which makes his running commentary on aging and death heartbreakingly funny. Alas, this ardent Proust admirer . . . failed to emulate his idol’s productivity, which along with his packed schedule explain why ‘the Book’ to which he frequently alludes never got done. Happily, this one did get done, thanks to the hard work of editor Stephen Pascal, Lerman’s assistant for 12 years. . . . At long last, the smart social butterfly is pinned down, in print. Sit with him and spend as long as you like–no appointment necessary.”
–Julia Szabo, New York Post, four stars

“The Grand Surprise [is] 700 pages of high-toned, elegant and both nasty and tasty dish from a behind-the-scenes magazine lifer, largely at Condé Nast, featuring some famous names in and out of the media. Lerman–plump, bearded, party-throwing, insecure but a snob, cultivated, gay, quotable–worked everywhere, Vogue, Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Glamour, the Herald Trib, did book reviews for the Times and stage-managed on Broadway. . . . Leo’s gossip is timeless. . . . Start reading if you want to know the dirt about Toscanini’s mistress, about [Marlene] Dietrich’s affair with Yul Brynner, about ballet dancers, opera divas (Callas was a buddy), [and] about how and why they revived Vanity Fair and why it flopped at first. . . . Stephen Pascal has done a brilliant editing job on his journals, the wit, the dish, the fun and the nastiness. Was Lerman’s a rich, full, complicated life? Or was it hollow, superficial, waspish? The reader must, deliciously, decide for him- (or her-) self.”
–James Brady, Forbes.com

“The Grand Surprise is crammed with insights from the man who made his name synonymous with Mademoiselle, Vogue and eventually the revived Vanity Fair. There is so much great gossip in this book that it just cannot go unnoted.”
–Liz Smith, Baltimore Sun

“Critic, editor and man-about-town Leo Lerman wrote reviews for publications from The New York Times to Mademoiselle, was a features editor at Vogue and then editor in chief at Vanity Fair. He seems to have known everyone of note and The Grand Surprise is filled with gossip about the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Judy Garland and Cary Grant. His wit proves Truman Capote’s observation that Lerman was ‘the kindest unkind person I know.’”
–WWDScoop magazine

“For the perfect summer read, I can think of nothing better than “The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman. Lerman was the ultimate New Yorker, charmer extraordinaire, and a writer and editor for Condé Nast, who knew simply everyone, threw the best parties, and scrupulously kept diaries, which Stephen Pascal, Lerman’s former assistant, has edited into pure enthrallment.
Warning: if you pick this book up, you may not want to put it down again, as I lost two nights’ sleep in a row, poring over its mesmerizing celebrity/anecdote-stuffed 616 pages.”

–David Noh, Gay City News

“An embarrassment of riches . . . like opening a wardrobe to a magical Narnia – a window onto a vibrant New York City, when the arts, letters, and high fashion merged and thrived, and the bold face names weren’t Britney, Diddy, Trump, or Paris, but Truman, Callas, Jackie, Kitty, and Rudy – not Giuliani, but the divine Nureyev!”

–Michael Ehrhardt, Chelsea Now



“Fabulous writer and editor Leo Lerman (1915-1994) left behind a vast trove of letters and journals, now collected in The Grand Surprise.”
–Adam Begley, The New York Observer

“[The Grand Surprise] is sequined with [Leo Lerman’s] dazzling friends, but Leo himself is the best company, startlingly self-aware, ecstatic in the presence of beauty, abidingly tender about the love of his life, the artist Gray Foy, and gallant in the face of pain. Anyone at all familiar with what the Buddhists call the vicissitudes of living–gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and sorrow–will hear in his sensible talking to himself the voice of the wise uncle he was to so many.”
–Amy Gross, Vanity Fair

“[For Leo Lerman, an] ordinary day might include gossiping with Marlene Dietrich (or Maria Callas or Truman Capote), watching Eudora Welty sprint up Madison Avenue in pursuit of Greta Garbo, or entertaining William Faulkner, Noël Coward, George Balanchine, Jackie Onassis, Gypsy Rose Lee (the list goes on). Until his death in 1994, the insatiably sociable, voraciously literary Lerman, editor at Vogue and later Vanity Fair, longed to produce a memoir of his life at the brilliantly beating heart of mid- to late-20th-century New York; now his amanuensis and editor Stephen Pascal has done it for him. The Grand Surprise is a constellation of journal entries that revive a shimmering gone world.”
–O, Oprah Magazine

“[The] book that is what [Truman Capote’s] Answered Prayers aspired to be.”
–James Wolcott, Vanity Fair blog

“Lerman, longtime features editor at Vogue, later editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and all-round arts devotee . . . was omnivorous in his desire to experience the full range of culture and entertainment. This broad selection of Lerman’s journals is filled with great gossip (on everything from Ruth Gordon’s eating habits to architect Philip Johnson’s sex life) and some astute remarks on art. Lerman is a great diarist: the details are precise, the information careening from idiosyncratic to important, and his tone endlessly amused and amusing. While he can be peevish and even mean, he is also frequently funny and generous . . . [If] you are moderately conversant with high art and high society–or just want to know what Princess Marina, duchess of Kent, wore to the Metropolitan Opera in September 1956, Lerman’s journals are perfect.”
–Publishers Weekly