Strictly Grade B

Yup, she's dead. I've been wracking my brains trying to remember something I'd read about the woman that resonated, that really explained the truth about her particular kind of pinchbeck allure. I'm ashamed to admit that it took until this afternoon to remember that it was, predictably enough, from the writings of the marvelous Mr. Leo Lerman.

This Much is Tru

Things fall apart.  That may be a title devised by Chinua Achebe, but it's as good a description of the life of Truman Capote as I know.

Three Notes on an Ill-Spent Life

The Dook and his Duchess arrive in Manhattan, October 22, 1941.  If there was a war on, you wouldn't know it...

Self/Image

One actress, two takes.  Funny how we can think of ourselves so differently from how we may seem to others...

My Book Crush

What joy it is to have my books around me.  The only thing I'm really liking a lot about our new digs is that the books are once again a part of daily life.

Birthday Diva (and Friends)

There must be something about the day (or a day about nine months ago), for the little girl born Sophie Cecilia Kalos some 89 years ago today is only one of a bouquet of geniuses who celebrate today.

Joining the diva who became Maria Callas are everyone from M. Georges Seurat (who had such a memorable Sunday in a Park) to the fetching Miss Lucy Liu (a remarkable actress still, I think, in search of a great role, although the Kill Bill pictures came close).  Adding to the festivities are Broadway Divo Adolph Green, jazz thrush Sylvia Syms, stage luminary Julie Harris, and couturier/martyr Gianni Versace.

Of course, every silver lining has its cloud, and with all this richness we must also accept the regrettable Alexander "I'm in control here" Haig, television staple Cathy Lee Crosby (whom I've just learned is not, in fact, Bing's daughter, and who therefore makes even less sense than I'd thought), and onetime poptart, now pop-zombie Miss Britney Spears.

I was going to try and come up with something clever about Miss Callas, and when I thought of her, I thought (as I often do) of dear Mr. Leo Lerman, about whose marvelous journals published as The Grand Surprise I've often waxed rapturous.  The book is downstairs, and I am up; being lazy, I therefore Googled the pair, Callas and Lerman, and was startled to see in today's New York Times the obituary for Lerman's longtime companion, artist and looker (it was practically a second career, as it was for other 20th century luminaries like Ned Rorem) Gray Foy.  It's a lovely thing, this obituary, and I recommend it highly; it may not say much about Miss Callas, but it says a great deal about her world, which has, with Foy's passage to Fabulon, receded just that little bit further from our lesser days.

Read All About It

I'm going through a bookish phase - what else is there to do in Ramadan, really? - and have been having a wonderful time. Diaries, mostly, but also dipping into favorite books of essays (it strikes me that there's not nearly enough shouting about Sarah Vowell, for example, let alone David Rakoff, who appears to be that rare creature, someone who doesn't write enough).

Our Sultanate got its first really good bookstore (a Borders, quite incongruous in these parts) a year or so ago, and as a result my reliance on Amazon has declined (it's cheaper, yes, but I'm all about the instant gratification). Nonetheless, when I linked to the site earlier this month it made me feel good to know it's still there.

Also gratifying: when I did add the link to Mr. Lerman's The Grand Surprise, it was loitering somewhere in Amazon rankings below 500,000. Since then, I've seen it as high as 125,000 or so, although it's as of right now down a shade. Now, I'm not claiming to have sold all that many copies, but it's nice to feel I've played a part.

So what are you reading?

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.

The King and He

Ramadan, if nothing else, does make time for reading, and I've just finished a book that's both fascinating in its own way and a dramatic contrast to the glittering writing of Leo Lerman. It's the wartime diaries of Sir Alan "Tommy" Lascelles, who served the British royal family in various capacities for much of his long career from the '20s to the '60s.

During the war years, he was Private Secretary to the King, and from that vantage point he gives a thoughtful and acute insider's view of the waging and winning of the war, in both of which George VI played a substantial role. Unlike Lerman, however, who tells all most amusingly and occasionally with a sharp little twist, Lascelles is the perfect courtier, and frankly unless you have a genuine appetite for the minutiae of court life and an almost total lack of personal detail, you may find his unfailing discretion rather dull (given my own leanings, I of course was riveted from start to finish).

Despite (because of?) the lack of gossip, the author's own admirable character shines through. He was a highly intelligent man if not an intellectual, a music lover and voracious reader, and very much a gentleman of his class and time, one whose life seems to have been divided among court, clubs, and family, in something like that order.

There's only one moment when his mask slips ever so slightly, when you get the sense of how wearing at times it must have been to be advisor, confidante, factotum, and endless encourager of a King who, while he grew admirably into his role after his unexpected elevation in 1936, would never be described by an outside observer as the subtlest or most sophisticated of sovereigns.

It it is Boxing Day 1943 at Windsor Castle, and Lascelles has had an exhausting time of it facilitating communication between the King and his Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, at a time when it seems all too possible that Germany will launch a desperate final large-scale attack on Britain. A festive dinner, which included much in the way of royal jokes, charades, and capering, ran very late. In what is absolutely the only direct observation regarding his employer in some 300 pages, Lascelles ends his account of the day with:

"The King was wearing his tuxedo made of Inverness tartan, which is a source of much pleasure to him."

And in that one clipped sentence, I think, there is a lifetime of "Oh, my God, what is he going to do next," that I find funny and touching.

Swing Out, Sister

"The princess also talked about piano playing (she does it well), did a few intimate impersonations (she does those well), and babbled on and on. So we were chums... She has a beautiful complexion. Her diamonds were small flower clusters on ears and on her hands. She's kind of jazzy and looks like her father struck it good in the female-shoe business."

- Leo Lerman (who else?), on an evening out in London in 1965

Little T

Capote by H. Cartier-Bresson, 1947

"...there, in a shadowy room, I found a strange, smallish-creature - a sort of changeling, I thought, like the one Titania and Oberon fought over - fragile, but tough. He regaled us with gossip, jokes, little dances. Later, when I went away, down a dim stair, someone suddenly landed on my back and with a high, treble cry demanded: 'Give me a piggyback ride!' I did."

- Leo Lerman (but of course), on meeting Truman Capote

In Old Manhattan

In the New York Times on Friday appeared a remarkable obituary, for a woman, more or less entirely unknown, at least in recent years, called Ruth Ford, dead at 98. If nothing else, she was the sister of the poet, editor, and man-about-town Charles Henri Ford, and as such likely one of the last links back to ever more distant figures of the first half of the twentieth century - Stein, Djuna Barnes, the Sitwells.

But she was much more - a Manhattan model in the '30s, she survived a profoundly unrewarding film career (28 films between 1938 and 1946, most of them meaty parts like "Cadet Gladdens' Sweetheart" in Men of the Sky or "Pretty French Girl" in Divide and Conquer. It's hard to imagine more forgotten pictures), became a fixture of the New York stage, and found her real calling in life as a saloniste. Married to sometime-film-star-himself Zachary Scott, she settled into a rambling flat at the Dakota and spent the next four decades introducing people - people like Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, who ended up writing West Side Story with another eventual Dakotan, Bernstein.

Oh, and guess what? She was a good friend of Leo Lerman's (I really am starting to harp, aren't I?), even though he called her "as loud and as raucous as a ballyhoo truck on a dim night and even harder." She's seen here at a fitting - with Balmain.

As these folks go, you know, we shan't see their like again...

La Stupenda

"Joan Sutherland is a cross between Margaret Dumont

and a high-school pageant." - Leo Lerman

I really can't tell you how much I'm enjoying Lerman's journals, published a few years ago as The Grand Surprise. And I have to warn you - there will likely be more of these, as it turns out that some of his best friends are some of my favorite ladies...

Goddess in the Afternoon

There is always something illicit about any photograph of Garbo taken after '41. So few were taken, as apparently this one was (Beaton? I'm not sure, but it seems likely), willingly, and they all show a woman who spent so much of her energy not being seen.

They are, even more than other such pictures, innately voyeuristic; you find yourself searching the face for signs of age, for indications that she made the right choice by retiring, or for vindication of your belief that she should have gone on forever, secure in the knowledge that, for better or worse, she was given the most architecturally perfect face in recorded history.

I'm reading, these days, the journals (more of which, I hope, anon) of Leo Lerman, a bon vivant of the last century who knew everyone and everything. He writes about an incident related to him by his friend Marlene Dietrich. Sometime in the late fifties (I'm lazy; the book is not at hand), she became convinced that she and Garbo should star in an adaptation of Isak Dinesen's wartime novel The Angelic Avengers, a tale of two sisters, one beautiful and one brilliant.

She took the book to Garbo, who was not uninterested. But, came the question, who would play which role? Ah, says Marlene, you should be the brilliant one, it's a far more interesting part. Mmm, says Garbo - I don't think I make this film...