The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman

Fascinating gossip about EVERYBODY famous in the 50'60's and 70' in the New York creative arts scene. Like watching insects crawling around

Lerman, Leo (Stephen Pascal, ed.). The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Leman", Knopf. 2007. Dishy Dish Amos Lassen and Literary Pride Americans love gossip and Leo Lerman serves it up as a feast in his posthumous journals. He tells us about passion and love, art and theater, dance and parties, parties, parties. Lerman relates with elegance little secrets about people we have read about--the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Arturo Toscaninni. But "The Grand Surprise" is more than gossip--it is about life, understanding and philosophy. What a way to become aware of the world that you live in. Lerman is funny, and wise and h holds nothing back. He provides candor, wit and sarcasm. I learned that Lerman dreamed of writing a great novel but he died before he got the chance. His assistant for twelve years of his life, Stephen Pascal, has edited his journals and his letters from 1941 until 1994, the year before Lerman's death. Lerman's life spanned eighty years and forty of those years were spent in a publishing career. He was editor of that magazine of the "beautiful" people, "Vanity Fair" and also worked with "Harper's Bazaar", "Vogue" and "Mademoiselle" and he gave and was invited to fabulous parties. He knew all the who's who in society and the arts but he grew disillusioned with the glamorous life and kept wonderful notes. He knew, early on, that he was gay and he accepted that with no problem. He wrote with style and he adored being in love with his longtime partner, Gray Foy. His snippets about the people he knew contain all kinds of charm--whether he wrote about how Ruth Gordon ate or the sex life of an imprisoned architect. He kept wonderful diaries with precise detail. Like so many of us, he was fascinated by celebrities and spent his adult life as a devotee of the New York social scene. People envied him as he seemed to be everywhere. He helped Caroline Kennedy do homework, he took Helen Hayes to concerts, he seemed to know everyone and he accepted by them. Lerman led a dazzling life but he felt that he had wasted years going to luncheons and had sold his soul in order to be accepted. His missed his secret ambition--to be a novelist and worshipped the writing of Proust. The book is a warehouse of information--of anecdote and revelation. He had come far having been the son of working class Jewish parents. He had once turned down the invitation of the king and queen of Spain so he could have dinner with a publishing magnate. He rejected sexual advances of Yul Brynner who begged him to sleep with him. He saw Marlene Dietrich naked when she asked him to join her in her bath so she could show him the female body. He carried Truman Capote piggy-back down a staircase. What a magnificent gift this book is. It took Pascal more than ten years to decipher and edit his former boss's diaries and letters but he successfully resurrects a life with beautiful language. Lerman was a self-educated man who g

I started reading for the gossip - Toscanini, Callas, Dietrich, Capote; Kennedys, Rockefellers, Astors; sex (of every combination) , passion, true love; art, theatre, dance. And oh the parties. But I continued reading for the sense of life over time, the philosophy, the understanding: "It is not years that age one, but recurrence--the same coming into `fashion' over and over again.". Jammed packed, seemingly "easy reading", with worlds to broaden my world.

Oh, don't wait! Rush out and bring in this wonderfully elegant, gossipy book! It's about people those of us in the Little House on the Prairie do not know, and a man whose life was a far better one than we Bovary's in say, Beverly Hills, can hope to imagine. Lerman is wise and funny and generous: a social Lytton Strachey. The lists of his dinner party guests, alone, are more riveting, and tantalizing, than most full-scale biographies...

This book is so magnificent and expansive, and filled to the brim with startling, captivating, and amusing anecdotes and candid observations about an assortment of celebrities, divas of operas, movie stars, writers, and people who were famous for giving grand parties and also for being only rich, and written with such humor, candor, sarcasm and wit that it reads as if it were written by Truman Capote while he was sober. Leo Lerman dreamed of writing some day a grand novel. But he never finished it. Well, it's obvious that he wrote in his diaries and note books enough anecdotes, journals and juicy tidbits to fill this most captivating book. Stephen Pascal, who was Lerman's assistant for more than 12 years, has assembled these journals, memoirs and correspondence and bits and pieces, "stretching from the months before his first Vogue assignment (in 1941) to a year before his death," in 1994. During his 80 years long life and 40 years long career in the publishing world, at Vogue, Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, and as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and also at the parties he gave and was invited to, Lerner met and befriended innumerable celebrities. Celebrities such as: Diana Vreeland, Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Gish, Marlene Dietrich, the Kennedys, Louise Hirschfeld, Helen Hayes, the Newhouses and Paleys, and writers such as Yukio Mishima, Isak Dinesen, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, Al Hirschfeld, Anaïs Nin, Gloria Steinem, Lionel Trilling, and movie stars such as John Gielgud, Cary Grant, Yul Brynner, Julie Andrews, and Louise Rainer, and divas such as Leontyne Price and Maria Callas. This long list is certainly not exhaustive. Before the end of his career, however, he was thoroughly disillusioned by what he observed in the glamorous world of celebrities: "I had arrived, I soon discovered, in a world of surface glamour supported by hard, almost unceasing endeavor." It isn't surprising that even in his early teenage years Lerman knew that he was homosexual; but it is surprising, however, that his mother not only knew, but also accepted, that her son was gay. This was in the late 1920s, nearly 80 years before the acceptance of civil unions and even gay marriages (in UK and Spain, for example). When he was a teenager, he overheard his mother tell his aunt on the phone, "He will never get married." Her prediction came true indeed; Leo Lerman never married. He lived first with painter Richard Hunter, and after his romance with Hunter ended, with his longtime companion, the artist Gray Foy, in a sprawling duplex in Manhattan. Like his friend Truman Capote, Leo Lerman was a gifted writer. This is what he wrote to his second love, Gray Foy: "Now my heart is whole again - richer, fuller. It has been made whole for me, because I have been and I am loved." Only a very few times in my life have I been inspired by a book to sing so much praise and urge readers to run to the store and grab a copy. This book will captivate