Life and Leo Lerman

Leo Lerman, by John Koch

I am still thinking about The Grand Suprise, the journals of editor, bon vivant, and aesthete Leo Lerman, into which I've been diving repeatedly in recent weeks and which I have inveigled, as a result of previous posts, at least two dear Café regulars to buy (you can, if so inclined, get one for your very own, here. I think you ought to).

Over the years, he knew everyone, went everywhere, and was caught up in the midst of what I've always thought of as The Great Wide World - Maria Callas in Venice, Princess Margaret in London, Lily Tomlin in Los Angeles, on and on, a waterfall of names and evocative locations, parties, late-night phone calls, premieres, confidential luncheons on banquettes at the Ivy and La Côte Basque. His is a sensibility drenched in love for beautiful things and interesting people, deeply informed by literature (Proust above all), music, theatre, art. At the same time, entwined all through and inextricable, are both his own inner life - wry, often unhappy, deeply hopeful - and the private life of family (extended, colorful, impossible as is the wont of families) and of love - of friends, of a small number of greatly beloveds, and of life itself. To write all of that together, as one chain of being, is to me something of an astonishing feat.

I love the book, in the end, both for the quality of the writing and the insight it gives into Lerman's life and times and also for the way it makes me think about my own life, and the life I craved in my New York days, and the ways in which that life intersected, at times, with Lerman's own Grand Surprise.

I met him, you see, now and again, long ago. Some of the people he writes about were known to me, and a very few of them fairly well. I've even stood at the door, though never, alas, further, of his beautiful apartment at the Osborne just cattycorner from Carnegie Hall. When he writes a flip, dismissive anecdote about the pretensions of an '80s trophy-wife socialite, I remember visiting her fabulously atrocious Upper East Side triplex, where an enormous and wholly inappropriate Francis Bacon triptych dominated the foyer (and the powder room had an exquisite little demi-Cranach) and not only the lady of the house but the nanny and the baby were fully made up at two in the afternoon. When he writes about the long, sad decline of Marlene Dietrich, I remember a time I sat waiting in an office while someone sat, listening to a long-distance call, with a face like stone, before softly putting down the phone and saying to no one in particular, "The Lady. Perfectly fine in the mornings, but talk to her after that and..." as he made a drinking gesture.

It still amazes me - all the more after a decade or more overseas, and living here so quietly in our little house on the Arabian Sea - that I once knew parts of Manhattan in the same familiar, intimate way as he (the stretch up Central Park West between Columbus Circle and the Natural History Museum, bits of the West Village, the restaurants and bars of 46th Street), and that I was, albeit in a vastly smaller, satellite sort of way, a part of it all as was he.

My New York is almost as much a memory as his, for the places are often gone or unrecognizable and many of my lodestone people (my own version of Capote's "swans") are, too. It seems, at times, quite unreal that I knew them (and even more so, somehow, that they knew me, if that makes any sense at all). I hardly ever talk, now, of those days; I'm always afraid it will seem like namedropping - or even worse, that no one will have any idea at all of who or of what I'm talking about.

That, really, is one of the reasons I like writing here so very much. It's a way to reconnect, to reconsider some of the people I knew either in themselves or through the people and things and phenomena they loved, and to feel - through this new, digital, high-tech medium - again a part of The Great Wide World. As far as I'm concerned, it's all still a Grand Surprise.

Picture This: A New York Painter

Ages ago, in talking about a little fête chez Muscato, I used this painting, Cocktail Party, by American painter John Koch to illustrate the post. I don't know when, exactly, I first ran across it, but I remember it being much on my mind all those years ago when I was throwing far more modest parties in my own little New York flat, for it has long seemed to me to sum up a certain kind of very specific New-Yorkiness.

As, it turns out, did much of the life of this remarkable and highly underappreciated painter. Almost wholly self-taught, he dedicated himself to a thorough exploration of the pleasures of life, in their more moderate and civilized forms.

His partner in much of this was his wife Dora, a music teacher and fellow aesthete. Together, they transformed their rambling Upper West Side apartment, in the words of one essayist, into "the stage for a play-in-progress, in which furniture and friends alike were props and Koch was the director and lead actor. Everything was placed just so as evidence of his exquisite tastes, in anticipation of an admiring audience..."

The apartment appears, in various guises, innumerable times in his works, as both a setting for their social life and a workspace; this 1974 painting of a model watching the artist work captures the winter light of Manhattan better than any painting since Childe Hassam.

Koch used portraiture to help pay the bills; his picture of HRH The Princess Margaret captures far more of that lady's amused good humor than is normally seen; she seems almost to be supressing a giggle.

Perhaps she was, while sitting, looking at one of Koch's nudes, for they are very pleasing indeed, and show a healthy interest in both genders (as, apparently, did the painter in his private life). Here we have The Sculptor, showing a private moment between painter and model (and the most superlative ass, I would say, to appear on canvas in the 20th century).

If you like, you may read an excellent pair of essays on Koch here and here, written in connection with a 2001 exhibition of his works at the New York Historical Society. I really think you ought to.

An Evening in September

John Koch, The Cocktail Party, 1956

Mr. Muscato and I gave a party last night. We hadn't thought about the date when we decided to have it, and it was only in sending the invitation that I realized, and just said "do come this Thursday," rather than putting in the date.

All day, getting ready, during those hours when thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway hover 'round as one buys flowers, discovers that one of the glasses is cracked, worries that the food won't be enough or won't taste well together or simply will be vile, on and on, I thought about about the day. Mr. Muscato is the cook, so front-of-house is my responsibility, and I kept stopping to remember, as I moved chairs around and tried to recall where I'd put the candle-lighter, the way seven years before had felt.

Of course, it was not encouraging. We cannot - blessedly - go back to the raw horror of it, the visceral fear (I was in Washington, close enough to hear the boom and feel the shake a mile or so away even as we watched, puzzled, what was happening in Manhattan). In the years since, God knows, we've had enough additional nastiness, large and small, to almost obscure what seemed at the time the Great Dread Moment that would define us for a very long time.

As the evening wore on, the guests arrived, we waited - for this was a Ramadan dinner, an Iftaar, the breaking of the fast at sunset - for the evening prayer call before starting, and I looked, as one does, at the rooms full of people brought together (with the flowers and the candles, the polished silver and even the cracked glass), and did feel encouraged. Here we were, mostly far from home, one way or another, from half-a-dozen countries, almost as many faiths, 8 to 70-something, eating and drinking (juice only, for we are very proper this time of year), Koko buzzing excitedly around scrounging scraps, talking and laughing and carrying on with our lives.

Call it a Whoville Moment, sentimental, foolish: they tried to take all this away, and failed. So there. But it's so. And tomorrow it's back to work, and on with life, and perhaps, if we're lucky, come November the Greatest Nation will make decisions that will prove helpful, and we shall see. In the meantime, we have flowers in the dining room and the poor dog, replete, will likely sleep for days.