Man About Town

...This is a search to find myself and my times in my own looking glass, and in looking glasses held up by others...

...This Ler-man was willing to do, which didn't preclude his taking the measure of their gloriousness and wretchedness both...

...Energy exults me...

...I detest negativism and destructiveness and niggardly-stingy ways...

...The gossip quotient in The Grand Surprise is marvelously high...

...The title is a good one, its point being that Leo Lerman's days were given over to the endless pursuit of another grand surprise, this one in the form of the perfect social life...

...If Truman Capote is to be believed—a case of gossip at the second remove, of which The Grand Surprise contains a fair amount—so was Steve McQueen...

...His rich book provides charming and irrefutable testimony that this is so...

...Ballet, which he loved, he perceives as "dedicated people, ultimately as ill-fated as butterflies, the living symbols of transience...

...Peter's Square, when Sam appears on the balcony of the Vatican, a number of people in the crowd are heard to murmur, "Who's the guy in the white yarmulke with Sam...

...He was also the keeper of a journal, in the form of many notebooks filled with gossip and introspection, found after his death...

...The first of the powerhouse women in Lerman's life were Betsy Blackwell, Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, the editors of Mademoiselle, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other women's magazines...

...The pursuit of artificial glamour at times gets to him...

...Born in 1914, Lerman was a New Yorker by spirit, temperament, and outlook...

...His circle of friends and acquaintances was also highly Europeanized, and included Marlene Dietrich, George Balanchine, Maria Callas, Noel Coward, Margot Fonteyn, and Gertrude Lawrence...

...Lerman died at 80...

...Off on one journalistic project or another—he was, briefly, the second editor-in-chief of the revived Vanity Fair, between the original editor, a man named Richard Locke, and Tina Brown—and with endless social engagements intervening, Lerman really hadn't the sitzfleish, or bottom patience, to sit down to the composition of this book, which was at first to be a novel, then an extensive memoir, then an autobiography, and ended being nowhere near a reality...

...Among New York's movers and markers of art," Stephen Pascal writes in his Introduction, "Leo Lerman grew legendary as a man who knew everyone and had seen everything...

...Self-doubt plays through these pages...

...He spots the avariciousness of Stravinsky: "Always the eater, not the eaten...

...he turns out to have been a servant's entrance man, a program along with which Jackie O. wouldn't go, though Maria Callas did, finding that it "hurt and was boring...

...Many of the usual suspects were among his guests: Truman Capote, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers, Virgil Thomson, Anais Nin, Katherine Anne Porter, the Trillings, Diana and Lionel, the Bernsteins, Leonard and Felicia, and several others...

...Of course these notebooks are extreme narcissism...

...his ambition to prove himself as a member among them in good standing by giving evidence of his own talent...

...and then there are the further divisions, even in the hollow world of celebrity, into youth culture, black culture, academic culture, and more, all working against the formation of a coherent world of the smart and talented such as Lerman enjoyed...

...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...

...To take up with such women, divas of the spirit, is to put oneself in a permanently secondary, largely subservient position—subservient, that is, to their own tireless self-absorption...

...A sloppy, sloppy life—mostly notions and remarks and little achievement...

...If Leo Lerman were a retailer (and re-teller) of gossip merely, or a Vogue magazine scribbler only, he would not be of much interest...

...Leo Lerman had a seat in the dress circle of the fashionable life of his time, though he knew that he paid a high price for it...

...Adoration nourished her," he writes of Marlene Dietrich, "the way health food sustains others...

...Politics today are too divisive to make such a life any longer likely among artists and intellectuals...

...His relentless sociability reveals not a social climber but a truly gregarious soul...

...What is of much greater interest is, in Stephen Pascal's words, Lerman's continuous pursuit of "powerful beauty, performance, and character through a long life...

...Perfectly at ease with his homosexuality, his Jewishness, his autodidactical education (he went to Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York, where he trained to become a stage-manager, though he always read widely and with taste and penetration), he seemed altogether at ease in the world of high fashion, performing arts, visual art, and smart journalism...

...Commenting on the sale of Proust manuscripts to the University ofTexas, he notes how fantastic is the very notion of Proust in Texas: "I see how possible it is to live in a fantasy world and become stranger and stranger...

...I admire industry in people and courage and quiet and devotion and humor and a sense of irony and laughter and a loving heart and optimism and genuine douleur and style and panache," he wrote...

...Lerman regularly blames himself for the self-indulgence of his life...

...In Mary McCarthy he recognized "a self-afflicted scourge," ungenerous, heartless, chiding...

...For nearly 50 years a writer and editor for various Conde Nast and other slick magazines, Leo Lerman was a lot like Sam...

...Gore Vidal he finds "complacent, pompous, assured that his every platitude is an apothegm, a witty wisdom...

...He views Alvin Ailey's famous work Revelations as entertainment passing itself off as art, an interesting distinction...

...What good, after all, would Proust be without the justifying achievement of Remembrance of Things Past...

...I've lived that way all of my life...

...Nice to know, for example, that while Leonard Bernstein chased boys, his wife Felicia had an affair with Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records...

...I have wasted my life," he wrote, when still in his thirties...

...His curiosity was wide and so was his appreciation...

...Enamored of the high life though Lerman was, he was also skillful at seeing beneath its sheen...

...Those portions of his book that take up the emotional complications of his relationships with these two men are the dullest parts of The Grand Surprise...

...He lunches with Dame Rebecca West, claiming it was if he had dined "with the most brilliant gossip columnist in the world...

...The Grand Surprise is a very homosexual book...

...That a social life of the kind Leo Lerman lived is no longer possible is more than a touch sad...

...Now, through the good and patient work of Stephen Pascal, for many years Lerman's assistant at Conde Nast, the bits of Lerman's uncompleted memoir, many items from his journal, and parts of his correspondence, the book Leo Lerman longed to write has now come into the world in a form its author would never have imagined...

...She also tells him of Onas-sis's sexual proclivities with women...

...It's wonderful how Truman acquires bits of information and then passes them off as his own...

...And he was smart enough to recognize that behind the Grand Surprise was, as he put it in his notebook one night, the home truth of "how gay and sad life is simultaneously...

...I adore gossip of all kinds," Lerman writes in 1970, but then adds that "I gossip less and less, save to myself...

...A lot of the gossip is about people's sex lives...

...His partners tended to do the heavy lifting of organizing his domestic life, while he paid the brunt of the expenses and brought in the great names for his famous parties...

...you were not worth knowing...

...I am a born voyeur," Lerman wrote in his journal, "which in the most positive sense means: I love life...

...Leo Lerman discovered the Grand Surprise...

...Ler-man cites Capote for genius in this line, remarking that "Truman told so many dreadful things about everybody...

...In these notebooks he chronicled the lives of the talented, with a special eye toward their character, not excluding their foibles...

...Yul Brynner, we learn, was bisexual, as was Vladimir Horowitz...

...He reports that, in conversation, Cary Grant went in heavily for four-letter words...

...At its center are portraits of powerful women—monstres sacres—whom he cultivated and who were attracted to Lerman in great part because of his kindness and charm, in lesser but not insignificant part, one supposes, because he posed no sexual threat to them...

...Whether Lerman confined his own best gossip to his notebooks or passed it out along with the canapes at his parties, is difficult to know...

...Such was his glittering web of acquaintance that one could almost say that, if you lived in Manhattan between 1940 and 1994, and Leo Lerman didn't know you, you have to consider the possibility that Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide...

...The "dressy life I now experience," he realizes, keeps him from doing the serious work he ought to be doing...

...But he was more than that—he was a serious person, caught between his ambitions and his fantasies...

...He fears he may be no more than a naches-schlepper, a Yiddish phrase meaning a hanger-on, someone who trails after the gifted and fortunate...

...Lerman lived with two men during his adult life, both painters, the second, a man named Gray Foy, who is alive today...

...But Lerman was also a close friend and confidant of Eleonora von Mendelssohn (herself the lover of Walter Rathenau, Max Reinhardt, and Arturo Toscanini), Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Diana Trilling, and Mina Curtiss (sister of Lincoln Kirstein...

...The great frustration of Leo Ler-man's life was a long-planned but never executed great book, a Proustian chronicle of his life and times...

...Lerman was a devoted admirer of Proust, and thought himself well positioned to be the American Marcel Proust...

...His was a rare case of a man able to realize his fantasy but never—unless now, posthumously—achieve his ambition...

...Bald early, heavyset (weight was always a problem), wearing a beard because of a serious car accident that scarred the bottom part his face and left him with serious health problems as he grew older, Lerman in midlife resembled the Henry James whom others have described as looking like a sea captain...

...Maria Callas tells Ler-man that Aristotle Onassis slept with Lee Radziwill before Jacqueline Kennedy napped him (and his money) off for herself...

...another piece of second-remove gossip features Claudette Colbert as a lesbian...

...Lerman did make a number of abortive runs at writing his phantom book...

...Here, from a letter to his brother, is a perfect three-cushioned name-drop: "I had a lovely, lively enounter with Princess Margaret last week at Cecil Beaton's party for Audrey Hepburn . . ." The index to The Grand Surprise reads like the Yellow Pages of intellectual and artistic society between 1940 and 1990...

...Suddenly," he writes, "I am bone-tired— from coping with neurotics...

...And yet there is something redeeming in Lerman's kindness ("tactlessness," he writes, "is always cruel") his ardor for life (his constant curiosity, he felt, made suicide an impossibility for him), his preference always for the personal and the palpable ("It is deperson-alization I hate, and this is why I am against so much of 'modern' art and psychoanalysis...

...He realizes that one of the major aspects of his life has been building up other people, "trying to make everything and everyone glamorous, a star" through the efforts of his journalism in Vogue and elsewhere...

...His fantasy was to live among the famous and talented...

...The title The Grand Surprise is taken from the second name of the Camberwell Beauty, a rare and exotic butterfly, lepidoptery being a boyhood love of Lerman's...

...Some of the gossip is purely amusing, such as Lerman's reporting that Frieda Lawrence, widow of the novelist, mistook Lionel Trilling for Diana's son...

...He was also unabashedly Jewish, gay, and very smart...