Man About Town

There is an old joke about a man named Sam, who knew everyone and was known by everyone, so that, Easter morning, on St. 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?”

For nearly 50 years a writer and editor for various Cond Nast and other slick magazines, Leo Lerman was a lot like Sam. Born in 1914, Lerman was a New Yorker by spirit, temperament, and outlook. He was also unabashedly Jewish, gay, and very smart. 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 you were not worth knowing.

The great frustration of Leo Lerman’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. 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.

Lerman did make a number of abortive runs at writing his phantom book. He was also the keeper of a journal, in the form of many notebooks filled with gossip and introspection, found after his death. In these notebooks he chronicled the lives of the talented, with a special eye toward their character, not excluding their foibles. Now, through the good and patient work of Stephen Pascal, for many years Lerman’s assistant at Cond 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. 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. 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.

“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. 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.”

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. His circle of friends and acquaintances was also highly Europeanized, and included Marlene Dietrich, George Balanchine, Maria Callas, No l Coward, Margot Fonteyn, and Gertrude Lawrence.

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. 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.

Lerman lived with two men during his adult life, both painters, the second, a man named Gray Foy, who is alive today. 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. 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. 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.” Lerman died at 80.

The Grand Surprise is a very homosexual book. At its center are portraits of powerful women–monstres sacr s–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. 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. 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). 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. This Lerman was willing to do, which didn’t preclude his taking the measure of their gloriousness and wretchedness both. “Adoration nourished her,” he writes of Marlene Dietrich, “the way health food sustains others.”

The gossip quotient in The Grand Surprise is marvelously high. Lerman cites Capote for genius in this line, remarking that “Truman told so many dreadful things about everybody. It’s wonderful how Truman acquires bits of information and then passes them off as his own.” Whether Lerman confined his own best gossip to his notebooks or passed it out along with the canap s at his parties, is difficult to know.

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 lunches with Dame Rebecca West, claiming it was if he had dined “with the most brilliant gossip columnist in the world.” He reports that, in conversation, Cary Grant went in heavily for four-letter words. 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.

A lot of the gossip is about people’s sex lives. Nice to know, for example, that while Leonard Bernstein chased boys, his wife Felicia had an affair with Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records. Yul Brynner, we learn, was bisexual, as was Vladimir Horowitz. 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; another piece of second-remove gossip features Claudette Colbert as a lesbian. Maria Callas tells Lerman that Aristotle Onassis slept with Lee Radziwill before Jacqueline Kennedy napped him (and his money) off for herself. She also tells him of Onassis’s sexual proclivities with women; 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.”

“I adore gossip of all kinds,” Lerman writes in 1970, but then adds that “I gossip less and less, save to myself. Of course these notebooks are extreme narcissism. This is a search to find myself and my times in my own looking glass, and in looking glasses held up by others.” 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. But he was more than that–he was a serious person, caught between his ambitions and his fantasies. His fantasy was to live among the famous and talented; his ambition to prove himself as a member among them in good standing by giving evidence of his own talent. His was a rare case of a man able to realize his fantasy but never–unless now, posthumously–achieve his ambition.

“I am a born voyeur,” Lerman wrote in his journal, “which in the most positive sense means: I love life.” His curiosity was wide and so was his appreciation. “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. “I detest negativism and destructiveness and niggardly-stingy ways. Energy exults me.”

Enamored of the high life though Lerman was, he was also skillful at seeing beneath its sheen. In Mary McCarthy he recognized “a self-afflicted scourge,” ungenerous, heartless, chiding. He views Alvin Ailey’s famous work Revelations as entertainment passing itself off as art, an interesting distinction. Ballet, which he loved, he perceives as “dedicated people, ultimately as ill-fated as butterflies, the living symbols of transience.” He spots the avariciousness of Stravinsky: “Always the eater, not the eaten.” Gore Vidal he finds “complacent, pompous, assured that his every platitude is an apothegm, a witty wisdom.”

Self-doubt plays through these pages. Lerman regularly blames himself for the self-indulgence of his life. “I have wasted my life,” he wrote, when still in his thirties. “A sloppy, sloppy life–mostly notions and remarks and little achievement.” The “dressy life I now experience,” he realizes, keeps him from doing the serious work he ought to be doing. What good, after all, would Proust be without the justifying achievement of Remembrance of Things Past?

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. 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. The pursuit of artificial glamour at times gets to him. “Suddenly,” he writes, “I am bone-tired–from coping with neurotics.”

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. See! I’ve lived that way all of my life.” 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.

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 depersonalization I hate, and this is why I am against so much of †modern’ art and psychoanalysis”). His relentless sociability reveals not a social climber but a truly gregarious soul.

That a social life of the kind Leo Lerman lived is no longer possible is more than a touch sad. Politics today are too divisive to make such a life any longer likely among artists and intellectuals; 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.

Leo Lerman discovered the Grand Surprise. 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.” His rich book provides charming and irrefutable testimony that this is so.

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide.