The New Issue: Leo Lerman
Leo at his cluttered ‘Vogue’ desk.
SP: Gray, did Leo ever talk to you about being unhappy working for the magazines?
GF: Oh, he thought it was a waste of time, I think he really did. I think he was misusing his intelligence and that he didn’t do something. It turned out he had to live that way. It was certainly not what he wanted.
SP: I think he was bothered by the ephemerality of it.
GF: That was part of it, yes. I think after a time he began to sort of despise it. At first he was interested – as time went on, I think he was very, he felt little about it. He had to do it. He had no alternative.
SP: I think he got tired. He wanted to – and a lot of this isn’t in the book – the journals are full of ideas for other books he wanted to write. He was constantly coming up with good ideas for books and articles that weren’t going to be published in Mademoiselle: more literary stuff and historical. He always wanted to write literary criticism and history.
GF: He was very keen to write about the Renaissance. There were places where he knew a great deal, but he didn’t have time to do it.
JK: Leo loved doing research. He studied and researched and find out everything he possibly could, and he wouldn’t do the actual writing until the very, very last minute.
GF: That’s because he didn’t trust himself.
SP: What didn’t he trust, Gray?
GF: He didn’t trust his ability to write a book as great as his desire to do it.
SP: I think, also, Leo saw all the ganglia that connected events and ideas. He saw how over determined events are and he had a hard time simplifying things into an argument that a book really needs. You have to be able to bring things down to – you have to be able to simplify things. He was always looking out at everything that complicated his argument. It was hard for him to bring something as big as a history of Sotheby’s, for instance, to boil all of that – the collecting, the social history – down into a book. It was very intimidating.
GF: He was very concerned with details, the possibilities around things.
Photo credit: (c) Ted Leyson.
This book is terrific!
Thanks for that…and yes, read the book.
I loved the current pictures too!
STB
What’s pretty extraordinary about Lerman’s journals — aside from the thoughtful writing and personal honesty — is his first-person candid commentary about still-fascinating cultural figures such as his buddy Marlene Dietrich (who tells LL that she doesn’t like sex, but since men seem to expect it from a sex symbol, however old she’s getting, Dietrich just gives in to get it over with) and Maria Callas (who spills the beans about Ari Onassis’s preference for anal sex and how Jackie O refused to go that far). It’s like an insider’s guide to the realities behind 20th-century culture.