The New Issue: Leo Lerman
Leo and Gray in Orvieto, Italy, 1979.
February 16, 1969: [Written after NY Times’ arts editor Sy Peck criticized a review as not having enough “contentâ€.] I am not intellectual; I am emotional, intuitive. I do atmospheres and surfaces and lightness with sincere deep feeling and genuine darkness beneath it all. I am decoration, not great art. The graces of life, not the webbed philosophies, are my domain. I work hard – incredibly hard – grasping solid facts the way the falling and the drowning grasp straws.â€
AB:There’s a sense of desperation in this –
GF: I think he worried about money all the time. He was always terrified of running out of money. I think that it what fueled that desperation sometimes. If he didn’t have a job at one or two magazines, he was really terrified.
AB: Do you think it was just money?
GF: You mean emotional things?
AB: The emotional things and also… Was he forthcoming with his self-doubt?
GF: No. I think he had to hide it.
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.