Oh Life! Oh Art! Oh Glamour!

Gray Foy with Leo Lerman, circa 1949.

An embarrassment of riches in “The Journals of Leo Lerman”

BY MICHAEL EHRHARDT

Leo Lerman was the brilliantly queer Conde Nast editor during its legendary mid-20th century golden age. Lerman was a gay bear of a man, whose unique, Proustian sensibilities appeared in columns and articles in Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Dance Magazine, and Playbill.

He was also an avid journal keeper, and left behind a treasure trove of documents when he died in 1994. These, journals along with a hefty selection of letters, have been tidily edited, compiled, and annotated by Lerman’s faithful former assistant at Conde Nast, Stephen Pascal.

Casually skimming these entries and missives is like opening a wardrobe to a magical Narnia — a window onto a vibrant New York City, when the arts, letters, and high fashion merged and thrived, and the bold face names weren’t Britney, Diddy, Trump, or Paris, but Truman, Callas, Jackie, Kitty, and Rudy — not Giuliani, but the divine Nureyev!

The title “The Grand Surprise” refers to the alternate name for the Camberwell Beauty, a very rare butterfly Lerman had coveted as a youngster, which miraculously appeared one day. He caught it, but let it flutter away. Later, he would turn his collector’s eye toward exotic examples among the human species.

A boundless self-made arbiter of taste in the arts, Lerman began his unique career in post-war New York as a stage manager and book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune. Through his work there, he soon made acquaintances with many of the movers and shakers of the era, such as John Latouche, Anais Nin, Carson McCullers, Carl Van Vechten, Gore Vidal, Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee. They would hike up the five flights of stairs to his convivial Sunday night open houses in a cramped one-room apartment on East 88th Street, and form an impromptu salon, consuming cheap Chianti and rat’s cheese canapés.

Later on in life, Lerman would live in a well-appointed apartment at the deluxe faux Renaissance Osborne.

With his Proustian appetite for art and fine-tuned curiosity about social behavior, Lerman was far more than a social butterfly, publicity seeker, or star fucker.

“What made Leo’s parties extraordinary was not only the caliber of the guests, but also the mix of them,” Pascal observes. “He brought together different sets of people on a spectrum that included art, music theater, literature, film, society, and demi-society, as well as the shopkeeper down the street. Parties were the laboratory where he would encourage people to take an interest in one another’s work… Lerman grew legendary as a man who knew everyone and had seen everything… He peddled his knowledge of the late great and the up-and-coming to a dozen publications…[and] helped steer American culture.”

Lerman’s sharp eye for detail and intolerance of low brows — whatever their persuasion — is evident in his November 5, 1944 entry after attending a ballet performance.

“…[A]t Columbus Circle and the Ballet International, which, save for [Menotti’s ballet] ‘Sebastian,’ was outrageously bad and almost entirely peopled in the house proper with a particularly repulsive species of (homosexual) bitch — the over-plump, over-forty, baby-talking (they really talk so mincingly to be refined), gray-faced kind, who need not open their mouths to give themselves away, for their posteriors do it, but I don’t want to tell about them, nor the unhealthy pallor which hung palpably on their faces…’It was all too nauseating.”

Interestingly, in a self-analyzing August 23,1945 journal entry from Nantucket, Lerman articulates this yearning to surround himself with inspiring, animated crowds, as the tamping down of sexual urges of a queer outsider and a fear of abandonment.

“One comes to a place where talking ends. It is like reaching the end of a street… the rest is a dirt track ultimately trailing off into meadows or a town dump. When talking ends there is only the first person very singular, a species of chaos, a progressive rabbit run in structure and shape. For the first time in some years, I find myself confined — that means no telephone and little or no possibility of escaping into bevies of people. I have consequently become sex-ridden, or perhaps over-conscious of sex…But I now know that it is not the sexual act, no matter what it forms, but the sexual excitement which surrounds this act… I must sublimate much of this quiet desperation in entertaining, in that sort of mass flirtation that I so enjoy. Giving parties, rushing about for people (really for myself), the endless telephone conversations, all must absorb so much of this lusting…”

Although he never achieved his life-long ambitions as a novelist, as a critic Lerman displayed eloquence and natural wit that stopped short of facile bitchiness; his incisive miniatures of personalities of the day are as informative as they are fun to read, and hold up with the best of Cecil Beaton, Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote.

Lerman was a passionate lover, and chronicles his affairs and long-time domestic relationship with the prepossessing Gray Foy, affectionately called “Puss.” Being openly gay in his creative milieu was not only tolerated, but also unremarkable.

Although not particularly political, Lerman and his lover marched to protest the Vietnam War and nuclear arms. His June 8, 1977 comments on Anita Bryant’s homophobic “Save Our Children” campaign in Dade County, Florida, which led to the repeal of an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, presciently refers to our current political environment.

“When I read that she’ even danced a little jig,’ I saw Hitler dancing his little jigs of ‘victory.’ This country is full of latent and dramatized hysteria. Jews, blacks, Indians no longer can be kicked about to release these hysterias, so homosexuals are ‘fair game.’ What if we stopped paying income taxes; no civil rights, no income tax payments?”

In February 16, 1985, he expresses a view held by many Americans today. “I have lost my respect for the people of this country, who have elected that demon [Reagan] and his scum to power. Where should we go? I who have been in love with America as only a first generation Jew can be?”

As the years and decades pass, Lerman takes stock of the highs and lows in culture on both coasts. On Diana Vreeland, he writes on June 14, 1981, “The [Metropolitan] museum distrusts, probably even dislikes, [DV] — the peacock among the domestic fowl — but this exotic brings golden eggs [money]. Her legend and sure glamour attract funds, so the museum, so greedy, must ‘put up’ with [her]… Diana is the antithesis of the museum world. Curators and librarians usually feel their ‘charges’ belong to them. They frequently resent any public use, forgetting that they are the public servants, and behave like proprietors.”

In a February 11, 1985 entry, Lerman reminisces about listening as a boy to an opera broadcast on an old Gothic-style Philco, and hearing the announcer proclaim, ‘This is Milton Cross from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City,’ he writes, “Oh Life! Oh Art! Oh Glamour!” That’s exactly the sentiment the reader shares, as Lerman’s journals recall an era of New York culture long gone, and yet to be rivaled.