October 5, 1984: I have written very sparsely about our personal and private lives, the loving life we live here together, the life we have shared (and the parts we could not share without capsizing the boat). What of this rich, loving together life? Surely, if this is an honest book, our life (singular in every aspect, save the parts unshared) must suffuse it. Our life is the deep well that nourishes us. We have been married – what other way to look at our state? – for some thirty-four years, with all the ups and down, a midlife crisis (mine) any “normal” marriage engenders. … I have on life, one center, and that is Puss.SP: Do you think he wanted to be married? GF: He considered that we were. He didn’t need any kind of authentication. There was never any question in his mind that we were. And even if we had been married, that doesn’t mean that it was going to last. We were just old fashioned. We didn’t feel that way. SP: I think, though, Gray, that he might have wanted it for financial, for inheritance security. GF: That is absolutely true. And there was no guarantee of that at all. JK: And that didn’t happen. GF: It’s true. If anything could have been done about that, he would have done it. He would have liked to have taken care of me when he was gone.
February 16, 1969: [Written after NY Times’ arts editor Sy Peck criticized a review as not having enough “content”.] 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.”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.
December 27, 1970: People who minutely analyze their own lives to one another, this is destructive. Some part of oneself must remain secret – for self-nourishment and for the nourishment of the relationship. There must be informed blindness in any close relationship.
April 29, 1973: I never worry about the percentage of feminine in me, the percentage of masculine. I am grateful for whatever percentages I have and try to use these. I am watchful only in outward manifestations. I am protective of the woman in me, and don’t permit her to show in my walk or in my hand movements or in my voice – because she is vulnerable in our world. Less than she was several years ago – but still I must be vigilant and try to keep her within myself, where she nourishes me – imbuing my masculinity with all sorts of wisdoms.GF: When I first met Leo, he had a beard. When we got onto a bus or something, people would laugh, because it was so unusual. After the hippies came along. Everyone else was flamboyant. He was never flamboyant. He didn’t dress in a particularly – he was a little more conservative. He wore black suits for many, many years. SP: So was it not until after the Sixties, Gray, that he began to become more – GF: Relaxed. SP: Relaxed or colorful or eccentric in the way that he dressed. I wouldn’t call it eccentric. GF: No, he wasn’t eccentric. SP: What’s the word – stylish. Up until then he kept it pretty conventional. GF: Well, he had no money to buy anything. He was very poor for many years. … SP: Did you or he, were you ever conscious that you had to disguise your [sexuality] – we talked about being accepted and feeling that you still kind of have to restrain your behavior. GF: Sometimes we would go to a restaurant – the two of us – and we’d go a number of times and people would say, “What’s going on with those two?” but it didn’t bother us. I never came out as they say. I thought, “Why bother,” in case people didn’t get it.
April 13, 1985: Long discussion with Stephen, Puss, Lloyd [Williams] and Joel about AIDS and how this will bring (and is bringing) social changes. In the homosexual world: celibacy, courtship, limited sexual encounters and practices, terror… In the heterosexual world: bewilderment, terror. I said, “When AIDS hits the heterosexual world that will be the time of devastating backlash at the homosexual world.” The signs are already visible: The selfish, I-don’t-care fringe of the homosexual world and the already infected who want to revenge themselves by taking with them ’sacrifices’ are identical with their long-ago forebears in the Black Death.AB: Do you guys remember this conversation? SP: Yeah, I remember it. We were in the kitchen. It’s only ’85, so it’s just barely begun. It had broken through in the consciousness within a couple of years and people are beginning to die at a pretty good pace. We still had no idea how it spread, or few ideas of how it spread. It’s now been identified as a gay – an epidemic within the gay community – and nobody knew if it will be contained within that or if it will spread. There were mixed feelings about whether it would be a good thing if it spread. Leo alludes to it in a negative way, but there were feelings that if it spread beyond the gay community, then perhaps there would be some national response. GF: Fortunately, Leo and I didn’t have many close friends who died. AB: Do you think that had something to do with the generational gap and the sexual revolution? GF: Possibly. I was more worried – Leo was always in the hospital and one of the times in the room next to him, there were people in and out with masks. JK: Whenever you went in, you had to get a mask. JM: They had signs on the door that said, “Do not enter”. SP: You know, that was another friend of mine, who was in the room next to Leo. Nicholas. Gray, you did have close friends who died, but they were often not acknowledged as AIDS deaths. JK: There were lots of people who died and they gave them all kinds of other reasons, because there was terrible shame. Very few of the papers referred to AIDS at all. SP: One thing I remember early in the epidemic is that The Times wouldn’t use the word – they certainly didn’t refer to gays. There was certainly a silence. There was a code to how you read the obits. JM: “Tragic illness”. “Pneumonia”.
January 31, 1971: I do not believe, as Proust did, that all self is successively different. The core is permanent, or should be – the matrix. We extend – as a coral reef – accretions transforming the contours. We are not actually changed within – the kernel. We are each a metamorphosis – but the central, central being, that does not change. Image: those Russian dolls-within-dolls almost endlessly.
July 8, 1973: Why autobiography? Mina says she can’t write her autobiography and wonder why. I saw I write this because I love to scribble. I am so curious about people, things. I know that the conclusions, either set own or inferred, will tell not one new thing – but the affirmation, my belief in people, in character (what we meant by a person having character), in beauty, in truth (Keatsian), in the glorious and in the terrible – as demonstrated in the extraordinary creatures I have been privilege to reflect, in my very deepest self – all of this is valuable, is a beacon in this world which needs constant confirmation of its miracle of existence. How or why we are all still here, I do not know, nor understand.
April 12, 1985: Part of me considers: Have all of these years been worth all of the anguish? I know that the answer is yes, but I also know that the price of my weakness is Puss stopping his unique, beautiful work. That is what he had to give, but instead he has thrown it away and put me in my place. Kirk [Askew] knew that his would happen. (”If you stay together, Gray will eventually not draw a stroke.”) Question” Has Puss been a happier person this way, or would he have been happier, more fulfilled, if he had been true to his genius. I think the latter. This is the bitterness.
Leo Lerman’s pillow.
AB: What was it like for you, Gray, when he died? What was the process like?
GF: It was like cutting off your hands. I knew it was the end of a very large part of my life. There was a great emptiness inside. It was very difficult. I didn’t think I was going to get over it, but I was tougher than I thought it was.
AB: How did you get over it?
GF: “Time”. That’s what people are always saying. “Time makes everything better,” but it doesn’t. It still hasn’t. I’m going to carry this to the grave, wherever I am. I still feel him a lot. Every night. Or close to it. All the laughter! He had a wonderful sense of humor. Wouldn’t you say, Stephen?
SP: Yes. That is one of things I remember.
GF: He loved to laugh and to make other people laugh. He was always the comedian. He was jolly. He loved that. It was one of his biggest social successes.
——-
All archive pictures from private collection, unless otherwise noted. Contemporary shots courtesy Zach Golden. Header image by John Koch courtesy Photo National Academy of Design.
All excerpts from The Grand Surprise by Leo Lerman Copyright (c) 2007 by Leo
Lerman. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Reader
This book is terrific!
sttropezbutler
Thanks for that…and yes, read the book.
I loved the current pictures too!
STB
djellabah
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.