The Grand Surprise

A conversation with Stephen Pascal, editor of The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo LermanQ: You wrote that Leo was often disconcerting at first meeting–someone who seemed from the past, yet always on the scent of trends. What was it like to work for him?A: When I interviewed to be Leo’s assistant at Vogue‘s feature department in May 1981, Leo seemed unlikely to me, this devotee of high culture holding court in a fashion magazine. But Vogue had a long history of covering art, design, and all varieties of entertainment. Leo wanted to know what was unrolling everywhere. The features staff worked hard. Phones rang constantly with calls from agents, photographers, writers, gossips. What I always remember first about Leo’s office was the laughter. We never went longer than a couple of beats without a laugh. Meanwhile, Leo threw all kinds of opportunities to the junior staff—interviews, photo sessions, writing assignments, invitations to galas and openings and black-tie dinners. We learned fast and tended to stay in the field. Many magazines today are run by editors who first worked with Leo at Mademoiselle or Vogue. Q: The Grand Surprise combines journals and letters with memoir, excerpts from articles, and even party-invitation lists. Why such an eclectic mixture?A: From the early eighties, Leo had a contract with Random House to write an autobiography, but he had stalled on page one. Then he hit on the idea of dictating the memoir with me. He began by describing his early family life and introduced some of the prime characters in his story. When he died in 1994, only about two-thirds of what he had outlined was in manuscript. Then Gray Foy, Leo’s surviving lover, began discovering these notebooks, bushels of them, tucked away around their apartment. Deciphering and transcribing these took months, but we knew within weeks that we had in them Leo’s real story—They were so vivid and surprising. Leo’s first serious lover had been Richard Hunter, with whom he was from 1936 until 1948. Richard died in 2000. Soon afterward, I received a cardboard box, mailed by Richard’s nephew, containing nearly 500 letters written by Leo to Richard. These spanned fifty years of love and friendship and supplied all sorts of stories, in a voice very close to that in Leo’s notebooks. Gray Foy, Leo’s lover from 1948 on, then also gave me over a hundred letters, which Leo had written during their first twenty years together. In this book, I wanted to have Leo tell as much of his own story as possible. An obvious downside to editing journals posthumously is that the author cannot supply missing details or anecdotes. Here the draft memoir helped. For example, in Leo’s journal, Dietrich and Capote simply appear on a first-name basis one day. He had made no note of first meeting them. Fortunately, in the dictated memoir tells those stories. So, as it turned out, Leo himself wrote much of the annotation for his journals. Q: What was it about Lerman that allowed him to maintain friendships with so many famously difficult personalities?A: He certainly took knocks now and again, but Leo was a very resilient friend. In 1948, Capote published a story with a sharp caricature of Leo—in Vogue, no less. Dietrich sometimes gave Leo the cold shoulder when his magazines’ articles disappointed her. Leo had a gift, with celebrities, for seeing both the created persona and the authentic person, and avidly appreciating both—with humor and compassion. People often spoke very frankly to him. He was a very encouraging, down-to-earth listener. Callas confided that she hated opera: "So old-fashioned," she said. Dietrich said things like, "My life would have been so easy if I’d really been sexy." Capote told Leo that he was "the kindest unkind person" he knew.Q: Lerman started making outlines for an American Remembrance of Time Past while still in his thirties. Why didn’t he write it?A: One of the things that stopped Leo from writing a book was his journal. Keeping it gave the illusion of compiling material. Everything was research. He was an extrovert, a partygoer who wanted to write about the changes occurring in society around him. So, he had a superb rationale for heading out whenever an invitation arrived. Then, when he arrived home, there was nearly always a magazine deadline to meet. He often worked through the wee hours–sometimes days in a row. Then, if he were between assignments, and alone, Leo would pick up his journal, a letter, or the telephone. There was a battery of friends–Anita Loos was one–who would call at dawn, because they knew Leo would be up. He was always going, but without a deadline he had no discipline. Q: What was he like as an editor?A: I’d say he was more a coaxer than a corrector. Leo left fixing grammar and style to the copy department. By the time he became features editor at Vogue, in 1972, Leo could pay top dollar, and he commissioned pieces whenever a good idea came to him. Much of his time was spent on the phone, at lunch, or in meetings flattering and browbeating authors into writing for him. For twenty-five years at Mademoiselle, Leo had contributed most of the feature writing himself, so he knew what writers want to hear. John Leonard of Harper’s, in an early review of this book, recalled that Leo appealed both to a contributor’s practicality (Vogue was paying top dollar, after all) and professionalism (a writer writes, whatever the subject). Another of Leo’s lessons, spelled out in this book in a letter to Marlene Dietrich—of all people—is to trust one’s own gift and not to let it be ruined in imitation of others—always flattering to hear. Although he utterly failed in setting aside his own desire to be Virginia Woolf or Proust, Leo’s own magazine writing was quite distinctive—ebullient and celebratory, if sometimes breathless. It worked well in fashion magazines. Still, I’d say that the Leo Lerman who inspired his writers and staff is the one who comes across in his journals—witty, canny, self-knowing, and spontaneous. Q: Considering his background–a typical lower-middle class Jewish immigrant family, only a high-school diploma–was Lerman the "cultural guru" of Condé Nast ever perceived as a phony?A: Leo never pretended to be other than he was, a Jewish boy, son of a house painter, who did surprisingly well. Our standards of dress and social behavior have changed so dramatically in fifty years that it’s easy to exaggerate how grand Leo seemed. Men used to wear suits to the ballpark….But in the early years he was so poor that he bought all his suits in shop for priests. There’s no denying that he enjoyed cutting a figure, and in later years, after his experience of London in the mid-sixties, Leo could be a bit flamboyant at times. He delighted in mixing high culture and grand style with bawdiness. "Let me tease you!" was one of his common refrains. By letting people know that he wasn’t fooled by their pretense, he let them see who he really was, in a way.Q: Lerman grew up in working class neighborhoods in Harlem and Queens, New York. How did this upbringing influence him?A: Leo’s childhood days had been a hubbub of relatives and neighbors. It was easy to get lost in the crowd, and, as he would say, Leo learned early on that "if you weren’t pretty you had to be funny." He also learned how to create his own space, at least mentally. Perhaps a latently homosexual child (although a precocious one) in a conservative Jewish family also must have felt himself apart. I feel that some of the richness in Leo’s journals is a result of his being both an extrovert, eagerly observing the carnival around him, and a man who keeps his own counsel and has a fertile interior life. Q: What about Leo’s description of New York in mid-century did you find surprising?A: At Leo’s memorial service in 1994, theater director Harold Prince spoke of the parties Leo threw in the fifties, and how leaders of every field—theater, dance, music, photography, young and old talents both—mixed there. Stars and their producers could be off-stage then, and they mingled in public and private in a way that’s unimaginable now, when cameras monitor a celebrity’s every breath. As Robert Davison, the artist with whom Leo first shared a townhouse in 1948 told me, "People didn’t come to our parties to be seen. They came for the conversation." Leo preferred to call them open houses. In the early years, the mid-forties, friends simply knew that Leo would be at home on Sundays after 9 PM. In the early forties, he lived in a fifth-floor, walk-up apartment. It became a place to be. The parties really gathered steam after midnight, when the theater crowd arrived. Everywhere in those rooms, you would find people who made art or who paid for it. No one wanted to leave, and people would stay until dawn. Late in his life, Leo gave me a few pointers about playing host. He said that every party needs a sense of occasion—invent one on the spot if you must—and every party needs to have a center—a guest of honor, a birthday girl, a Christmas tree, or if all else fails, its host. He also preferred to mix the guests up—the up-and-coming with the has-been. The first of the six invitation lists that I put in this book—from 1946—has Max Ernst, Anaïs Nin, and Imogene Coca on it. Who else could have put them together? Q: Despite a virtual marriage of nearly fifty years to the artist Gray Foy, Lerman’s first lover, Richard Hunter, remains very much on the scene, both physically and emotionally. How would you describe this triangle?A: Within six months of Richard’s departure for another man in 1948, Leo met Gray and immediately fell for him. He loved Gray’s creativity, style, and humor—not to mention beauty. But sometimes Leo found the relationship’s intensity trying. Leo was a nostalgist. He missed the easy companionship of young romance that he had had with Richard, who in any case was fairly undemanding—and wanted little demanded of him. Richard was habitual and quiet in his daily life, yet he was an unfaithful lover and prone to sudden exits. On the other hand, although Gray was a much more volatile companion, he was very faithful and a hardworking homemaker. Richard remained continually in Leo and Gray’s domestic life, however, often staying in their home between his travels. Gray tolerated a lot that most second wives would not. In his first months living with Leo, for instance, when they visited Richard in the country, it was Gray who slept alone. But it was never a sexual ménage a trois. I think the correspondence shows that Leo and Richard were each other’s emotional security nets. Q: Lerman remarked that no one had written about relationships such as his with Gray Foy. Yet, for most of his life, Lerman was extremely discreet and did not want to be publicly identified as a gay man. How would you explain this discrepancy? A: Leo never had any compunction about being gay. You couldn’t have "outed" him: He lived openly with another man—first Richard, then Gray—from the early forties, meanwhile entertaining the great blabbermouths of New York. At Mademoiselle and Vogue, colleagues treated his relationship with Gray as a marriage, without irony—very impressive for the time, to say the least. The world changed, however, and in 1971 Leo wrote that he felt a bit ashamed, as all he had done "to get out the vote" was to lead "the kind of life which denies nothing while making no show of it." For much of his life it took some bravado then to go that far, it must be said. The public life he prized required—and in many places still does—a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Leo lived into the 1990s, however, when many prominent homosexuals came out publicly—Philip Johnson comes to mind—but Leo always bristled at the idea. I think that he also felt very grateful to those who had welcomed him and Gray without edge or smirk over the years and might have felt that coming out aggressively now would be rude or dismissive of them as well. Simply put, he considered his private life nobody’s business and thought that what happened in private stayed private. Some could say that such silence condoned prejudice or showed self-hatred. It may also have allowed Leo to live a homosexual life overt to a degree that may surprise younger readers today.Q: You’ve said that Lerman would not have identified himself as a gay writer. Will readers consider this book a "gay history?"A: Many gay men over forty have told me they were moved to see Leo’s relationship with Gray Foy develop in The Grand Surprise. There are not many portrayals in print of gay relationships that have this complexity and durability—or truthfulness. Twenty years ago, I imagine this book would have been pegged as a homosexual’s story. Now most readers seem to regard Leo’s relationships as rather conventional and look beyond them to the larger narrative, which I think is a very American one about self-creation and hopes—some fulfilled, some dashed. Q: Your title, The Grand Surprise, is a phrase that appears half a dozen times in the book. What were Leo Lerman’s grand surprises?A: In a May 1956 journal entry Leo describes a childhood discovery of a glorious butterfly trapped indoors that he eventually frees. Leo came to think that butterflies were perfect examples of the ephemeral, dazzling beauty that one pursues, but cannot possess, something one can only have in memory or fantasy. That butterfly’s name was the Grand Surprise. After learning that in 1956, if life suddenly revealed something unexpected or paradoxical Leo might call it a "grand surprise." By the early sixties, Leo wondered whether his real grand surprise might be that his pursuing a livelihood in fashion magazines, his ticket into society and culture, had deflected him from becoming a serious writer. I expect, however that the grandest surprise for him in the end might have been that his journals and letters, which he considered at best research, may actually be the vital portrait of society that he aspired to write.Q: Who might be seen as a 21st-century Leo Lerman?A: It’s hard to imagine anyone today having the centrality, the breadth, and the clout—never mind the erudition—which Leo Lerman combined in his prime. Anyhow, the spotlight nowadays is less on the culture that Leo mastered—opera, ballet, literature—and more on film, television, and blogs. The reporting of arts and entertainment seems increasingly disjointed and momentary. Yes, we have figures in various fields who have Leo Lerman-like aspects, although not many have his personal expansiveness and humor. Certainly there are editors in Manhattan who, as Leo did, match talents to projects, commission good work, track New York’s culture, nurture writers…in short, fueling our culture much as he did. As with Leo, however, most are virtually unknown outside of the profession. I hope they’re keeping journals!