Customer Reviews

The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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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 and enthrall you. And you will reach for it again on a cloudy day, to bring some sparkle to your mind, and make your day a lot more brighter. But this book must be savored, as you would a precious glass of rare burgundy.

Fascinating gossip about EVERYBODY famous in the 50'60's and 70' in the New York creative arts scene.

Like watching insects crawling around

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.

No doubt about it: Leo Lerman knew everybody who was anybody in New York's arts & literary scenes for almost 50 years. The cast of characters who stroll through his journals and letters (Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein, this list just goes on and on...) provides an amazing snapshot of life among the most notable figures of the 20th century. I wish this book was a more compelling read. When I recently read Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham by Carolyn Brown, I came away dazzled at the opportunity to get close to key figures in music and dance, and felt tmy understanding of their work was enhanced. I felt no similar sense from Lerman's book, perhaps precisely because of the range of his acquaintances. For example, he meets Truman Capote when both are quite young, and Capote is writing his first book. The glimpse of the young author at that moment is priceless, but then the two lose touch, and Lerman moves on to other people. Moreover, Lerman's dizzying social life largely prevented him from completing any major work of his own, and his partner Gray Foy gave up a successful career as an artist. There are definitely some choice stories here, things that made me laugh out loud or gasp with a mixture of delight and dismay. But frankly, the best thing in the book is the introductory story about the butterfly called The Grand Surprise that gives the book its title. Almost nothing else has the texture and depth of that one vividly recounted anaecdote. As a result this memoir is a swirl of social activity without a center. If you don't mind frosting with no cake, you'll enjoy this.!

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...

Fascinating recounting of recent times past and a personality desperate to stay at the top of them, along with the glittery, famous people. But the book is more than a bit like a high school diary: a bit overwrought and totally self-absorbed. Emotional commentary is the rule; serious analysis of anybody or anything, including his beloved Proust's works, is the exception.

Eloquent, entertaining, frequently poignant. The book is less about the great characters of mid-century New York, glitterati and literati, than about Lerman's place among them. He is his own favorite subject, but that doesn't make him any less likeable or the book any less fascinating.

If you love gossipy books about the NY arts scene (music, theater, publishing, fashion etc.), this is compulsively readable. Seems like Leo knew everyone who was anyone for decades during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, from Maria Callas to Marlene Dietrich to the founders of the New Yorker. Loved this so much after I read it from the library I bought a permanent copy!

The diaries of Leo Herman are an excellent source for anyone who wants to know more about the unknown life of gay-jewish intelectuals in the us-american society over many decades.

A monumental undetaking both rewarding for Lerman's thoughts and fine editorial notes sorting out the wide variety of Lerman's friends and acquaintances.