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Die große Überraschung: Die Tagebücher des Leo Lerman von Leo Lerman

by Leo Lerman | HC | VeryGood
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“May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend ...
Binding
Hardcover
Weight
2 lbs
Product Group
Book
IsTextBook
No
ISBN
9781400044399
Kategorie

Über dieses Produkt

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-10
1400044391
ISBN-13
9781400044399
eBay Product ID (ePID)
103023484

Product Key Features

Book Title
Grand Surprise : the Journals of Leo Lerman
Number of Pages
688 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Editors, Journalists, Publishers, General
Publication Year
2007
Illustrator
Yes
Genre
Biography & Autobiography
Author
Leo Lerman
Format
Hardcover

Dimensions

Item Height
1.7 in
Item Weight
38.4 Oz
Item Length
9.4 in
Item Width
6.7 in

Additional Product Features

Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2006-048735
Dewey Edition
22
TitleLeading
The
Reviews
"A compulsively readable storehouse of outrageous anecdote and sexual revelation, of shrewd comment and keen-eyed description . . . Leo Lerman spent his adult life working for glossy fashion magazines such asVogue, MademoiselleandHarper's Bazaar. Late in his career, he was briefly the editor ofVanity Fairduring its difficult rebirth. . . . [He] essentially devoted his adult life to the New York social whirl. . . . His Rolodex was the envy of lesser mortals. Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Lincoln Kirstein, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland and dozens of other eminences would call him up to chat. . . . A dazzling life, it would seem . . . And yet the pages ofThe Grand Surprisereveal a man assailed by the conviction that he has frittered away years on over-rich lunches at the Russian Tea Room and sold his talent for a mess of pottage. . . . Though he clearly worked hard at his articles, profiles and book reviews, Lerman's secret ambition was to be a novelist, possibly even a great one like his beloved Proust. . . . Nothing ever came of [his] efforts. . . . But over the years Lerman did squirrel away notes, diaries and letters, not to mention party invitations, and these Stephen Pascal has ably edited inThe Grand Surprise. . . . Lerman is adept at capturing a passing figure with an apt smile or comparison. . . . Sometimes, you can hardly believe the shameless name-dropping or the catty remarks. . . .The Grand Surpriseis full of delicious anecdotes about shallow, venal, power-mad, sex-crazed and often unlikable people." Michael Dirda,Washington Post Book World "'Marlene [Dietrich] asked me whether I would ghost her memoirs,' writes Leo Lerman in his journals, 'but I thought it over and decided that she would never really tell what the public wants to know.' But in his own private material, now being published after his death inThe Grand Surprise, Lerman dished on all the stars he had access to as a legendary editor at Condé Nast." George Rush and Joanna Rush Molloy,New York Daily News "In [Leo Lerman's] role [as Editorial Advisor at Condé Nast], he entertained and inspired those writer-editors lucky enough to score an appointment, myself included. During your meeting, the bearded legend-in-residence, wit and eyes sparkling, might share a Saltine washed down with a juicy backstage anecdote about his buddy Maria Callas, pausing to take a call from Steve Martin or S.I. Newhouse. In 1994, Lerman died at 80, but the pleasures of his company come alive in this collection of his journal entries, letters and reminiscences spanning over 50 years. It's a delicious, gossipy read, studded with tales of the luminaries he befriended while 'minding [his] own and everybody's business' . . . . Yet the most fascinating figure at this gala turns out to be the host, a housepainter's son who miraculously [became] a worldly aesthete. Lerman never outgrew his childlike enthusiasm, which makes his running commentary on aging and death heartbreakingly funny. Alas, this ardent Proust admirer . . . failed to emulate his idol's productivity, which along with his packed schedule explain why 'the Book' to which he frequently alludes never got done. Happily, this one did get done, thanks to the hard work of editor Stephen Pascal, Lerman's assistant for 12 years. . . . At long last, the smart social butterfly is pinned down, in print. Sit with him and spend as long as you likeno appointment necessary." Julia Szabo,New York Post(four stars) "The Grand Surprise[is] 700 pages of high-toned, elegant and both nasty and tasty dish from a behind-the-scenes magazine lifer, largely a, "Engrossing . . . In his review ofPeriod Piece[a memoir by Charles Darwin's granddaughter], Lerman endorsed 'wit' and 'humor' in books of recollections, and there is no shortage of either here. . . .The Grand Surpriseexemplifies the qualities that Lerman himself sought out in the autobiographies and life recollections that hean astonishingly successful autodidact with no more than a high school educationso avidly read: wit, respect for time past, profound feeling, a lack of cheap sentimentality, and above all an abiding sense, when others might have become jaded, of deep 'wonder' at thehaut monde(as he liked to put it) of Art and Society to which he had struggled so hard to gain access. . . . To my mind, what makesThe Grand Surprisemost worth reading for anyone interested in the substance, rather than the coruscating surface, of the times and culture it describes is the scintillant quality of Lerman's critical acumen. To read this book is, as it were, to witness a meteor shower of casually tossed-off insights into dance, theater, film, music, art, and literature of his day, and of the past. . . . I savored every page of his remarkable private writings . . . . " Daniel Mendelsohn,The New York Review of Books "The Grand Surprise[is] a magnificent arrangement of [Leo Lerman's] unpublished memoirs and correspondence. . . . Stephen Pascal, Lerman's assistant for more than 12 years . . . deciphered and edited his former mentor's journal's with [Lerman's longtime partner Gray] Foy's help and privy knowledge, and hunted down hundreds of Lerman's letters. InThe Grand Surprise, Pascal resurrects and imposes order on a dazzling life in the scene-stealing language of the man who lived it. . . . Lerman [once complained] 'I am fat with words.' Pascal has reshaped Lerman's reminiscences into a heroic physique, and given his subject the posthumous consolation that a hope he confided to himself late in life, in a notebook he did not know would be found, was true: 'I did do something extra: I lived. I will live.' . . . . Lerman's parties attracted everyone from magazine editors and writers to Maria Callas, Anaïs Nin, Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Cecil Beaton, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Aaron Copland, Gloria Steinem and Leonard Bernstein. . . . Lerman knew absolutely everyone, and what's more, absolutely everyone knew him. . . . In his notebooks, he could convey an entire life in a sentence, in a clause, or even in one word. . . . Anaïs Nin wrote of him in a diary entry that he 'talks like Oscar Wilde, but has a warmth in his glittering dark eyes,' and that his conversation evoked a 'magician's tour de force.' . . . 'And all you remember is the fantasy, the tale, the laughter.' In these pages, Lerman's words put the fantasy on paper. . . . Lerman mused late in life, 'the final desolation comes with the realization that life is like fiction.' His certainly was. But even as The Grand Surprise invites the reader backstage to revisit the illustrious dramatis personae of his memory, it also reveals the private heart of a public man. . . . In 1948, in an acid vignette he published inVogue, [Truman] Capote gave a thinly veiled portrait of Lerman, disguising him as a popular party-giver named Hilary. . . . 'Hilary so wants everyone to be glamorous, to be a storybook creature; somehow he persuades himself that the grayest folk are coated with legend-making glitter.' But reading this book, you are tempted to conclude that it was Capote's gray that was an illusio, "You couldn't have written for a living in New York during the last third of the twentieth century without having heard ofand probably fromLeo Lerman. The bearded and ebullient features editor ofVoguewas forever on the freelancer phone, putting out a fire or starting one . . . And when he wasn't on the phone, he was discovering something marvelous or meeting someone sexy at the ballet, the theater, the opera, or the 'Fashion and Surrealism' exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology . . . Lermanborn poor in Spanish Harlem; raised ambitious in Jackson Heights, Queens; done with classrooms after high school, a graduate of fashion magazines, émigré salon culture, and a 1930s New York underground of drag clubs and homosexual speakeasies; Jewish, gimpy, autodidactic, and 'queer' (his word); a quick study and glad hand, with his Turkish cap, purple sheets, and 'royalist fantasies'this Leo embodied upward mobility, class transgression, and theatrical reincarnation . . . And for more than half a century, from his firstVogueassignment in 1941 to his deathbed in 1994, he kept brilliant notes on what Beauty and Legend looked like before vulgarians stormed glam gates. Naturally, when some of your best friends are Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, and Truman Capote, the gossip is salacious. Naturally, if you invite Imogen Coca, Lionel Trilling, and Anaïs Nin to the same party in 1946, or Robert Motherwell, Leontyne Price, and Si Newhouse in 1964, or Martha Graham, Woody Allen, and Lillian Hellman in 1976, some chairs will be broken, and some hearts too." John Leonard,Harper's "Fabulous writer and editor Leo Lerman (1915-1994) left behind a vast trove of letters and journals, now collected inThe Grand Surprise." Adam Begley,The New York Observer "[The Grand Surprise] is sequined with [Leo Lerman's] dazzling friends, but Leo himself is the best company, startlingly self-aware, ecstatic in the presence of beauty, abidingly tender about the love of his life, the artist Gray Foy, and gallant in the face of pain. Anyone at all familiar with what the Buddhists call the vicissitudes of livinggain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and sorrowwill hear in his sensible talking to himself the voice of the wise uncle he was to so many." Amy Gross,Vanity Fair "[For Leo Lerman, an] ordinary day might include gossiping with Marlene Dietrich (or Maria Callas or Truman Capote), watching Eudora Welty sprint up Madison Avenue in pursuit of Greta Garbo, or entertaining William Faulkner, Noël Coward, George Balanchine, Jackie Onassis, Gypsy Rose Lee (the list goes on). Until his death in 1994, the insatiably sociable, voraciously literary Lerman, editor atVogueand laterVanity Fair, longed to produce a memoir of his life at the brilliantly beating heart of mid- to late-20th-century New York; now his amanuensis and editor Stephen Pascal has done it for him.The Grand Surpriseis a constellation of journal entries that revive a shimmering gone world." O, Oprah Magazine "[The] book that is what [Truman Capote's]Answered Prayersaspired to be." James Wolcott,Vanity Fairblog "Lerman, longtime features editor atVogue, later editor-in-chief ofVanity Fairand all-round arts devotee . . . was omnivorous in his desire to experience the full range of culture and entertainment. This broad selection of Lerman's journals is filled with great gossip (on everything from Ruth Gordon's eating habits to architect Philip, "The Grand Surprise[is] a magnificent arrangement of [Leo Lerman's] unpublished memoirs and correspondence. . . . Stephen Pascal, Lerman's assistant for more than 12 years . . . deciphered and edited his former mentor's journal's with [Lerman's longtime partner Gray] Foy's help and privy knowledge, and hunted down hundreds of Lerman's letters. InThe Grand Surprise, Pascal resurrects and imposes order on a dazzling life in the scene-stealing language of the man who lived it. . . . Lerman [once complained] 'I am fat with words.' Pascal has reshaped Lerman's reminiscences into a heroic physique, and given his subject the posthumous consolation that a hope he confided to himself late in life, in a notebook he did not know would be found, was true: 'I did do something extra: I lived. I will live.' . . . . Lerman's parties attracted everyone from magazine editors and writers to Maria Callas, Anaïs Nin, Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Cecil Beaton, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Aaron Copland, Gloria Steinem and Leonard Bernstein. . . . Lerman knew absolutely everyone, and what's more, absolutely everyone knew him. . . . In his notebooks, he could convey an entire life in a sentence, in a clause, or even in one word. . . . Anaïs Nin wrote of him in a diary entry that he 'talks like Oscar Wilde, but has a warmth in his glittering dark eyes,' and that his conversation evoked a 'magician's tour de force.' . . . 'And all you remember is the fantasy, the tale, the laughter.' In these pages, Lerman's words put the fantasy on paper. . . . Lerman mused late in life, 'the final desolation comes with the realization that life is like fiction.' His certainly was. But even as The Grand Surprise invites the reader backstage to revisit the illustrious dramatis personae of his memory, it also reveals the private heart of a public man. . . . In 1948, in an acid vignette he published inVogue, [Truman] Capote gave a thinly veiled portrait of Lerman, disguising him as a popular party-giver named Hilary. . . . 'Hilary so wants everyone to be glamorous, to be a storybook creature; somehow he persuades himself that the grayest folk are coated with legend-making glitter.' But reading this book, you are tempted to conclude that it was Capote's gray that was an illusion; the glitter was real. You just had to be Leo Lerman to see it." Liesl Schillinger,The New York Times Book Review, cover "Leo Lerman was the last of the Condé Nast mandarinsan industrious aesthete with a lapidary eye for the latest nugget of high culture that could be polished up for the slick pages ofVogue. For more than a half-century, he knew everybody in the incestuous world of the arts and the rich in Manhattan and beyond, entertained most of them, and gossiped about all of them. . . . Confected by Mr. Pascal from [hundreds of Lerman's] notebooks, along with snippets from letters that [he] wrote to Marlene Dietrich and others he loved the most,The Grand Surpriseis an evocation of a lost world of the arts that rivals the Goncourt brothers' portrait of 19th-century Paris. Through Lerman's pages parade Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, Hemingway and Faulkner, Maria Callas and Greta Garbo, Norman Mailer and Dietrich, a drunken Marion Davies, a gaga Evelyn Waugh and a flabby-armed Nancy Reagan. . . . Delicious giblets bob in the soup of names. . . . At once charming and insufferable, Lerman was a rhapsodic collector of pals, lovers, knickknacks, talent, wit and memories. He never hid his lower-middle-class Jewish roots or his homosexuality, but he could be bitchy. . .
Dewey Decimal
070.5/1 B
Synopsis
A remarkable life and a remarkable voice emerge from the journals, letters, and memoirs of Leo Lerman: writer, critic, editor at Conde Nast, and man about town at the center of New York's artistic and social circles from the 1940s until his death in 1994. Lerman's contributions to the world of the arts were large and varied: he wrote on theater, dance, music, art, books, and movies for publications as diverse as Mademoiselle and The New York Times . He was features editor at Vogue and editor in chief of Vanity Fair . He launched careers and trends, exposing the American public to new talents, fashions, and ideas. He was a legendary party host as well, counting Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, and Truman Capote among his intimates, and celebrities like Cary Grant, Jackie Onassis, Isak Dinesen, and Margot Fonteyn as part of his larger circle. But his personal accounts and correspondence reveal him also as having an unusually rich and complex private life, mourning the cultivated emigre world of 1930s and 1940s New York City, reflecting on being Jewish and an openly homosexual man, and intimately evoking his two most important lifelong relationships. From a man whose literary icon was Marcel Proust comes an unparalleled social and emotional history. With eloquence, insight, and wit, he filled his journals and letters with acute assessments, gossip, and priceless anecdotes while inimitably recording both our larger cultural history and his own moving private story. From the Hardcover edition., "Leo Lerman seems always to have viewed life in retrospect. To him, time was a thief, not a benefactor. A central theme of his notes is recollection, or, as he calls it at one point, 'allusiveness'-creating continuity by finding the connections between events. He could see an entire personality in a single encounter, with all its ganglia of private and historical connections. He loved literature, especially the long novels of nineteenth-century England and Russia (and of course Proust's Remembrance of Things Past), but it is anecdote, more than narrative, that caught his interest. The manners, gestures, styles, and affectations of people fascinated Leo. Ironically, it was his propensity-and gift-for summing others up in a few strokes that probably made him ill suited to be a novelist. The journal-impulsive, frank, unrevised-was an ideal medium for him. "A sensualist and an extrovert, Leo left a uniquely sharp record of his time. He shows the cultural machine of New York as it actually worked, fueled by scores of talented and clever editors, agents, and producers... Many of those connections between the bright dots of celebrity are fading from the record. They were the real fiber of New York's golden age, and Leo was one of them." Book jacket.
LC Classification Number
PN4874.L376A3 2007

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