LEO'S LAIR

Leo Lerman, for half a century a guiding spirit at Condé Nast, hosted a never-ending salon of New York's brightest lights, from Maria Callas to Truman Capote

Postscript

JOAN JULIET BUCK

There are certain people who give sense to life; Leo Lerman, for 26 years a contributing editor of Mademoiselle, for 10 years features editor of Vogue, and for 10 months editor of this magazine before becoming, for the last 10 years of his life, editorial adviser of Conde Nast, was several such people in one.

He brought to his work a kind of hungry delight, and his references stretched back to the night his father held him up in a theater so that he could see Eleonora Duse. He began a friendship with the British actorauthor Simon Callow based on their appreciation of Pavel Tchelitchew. He was the first to publish the young Truman Capote, and he was an intimate of Maria Callas and Marlene Dietrich. Emma Thompson was a recent protegee. His companion, Gray Foy, whom he met at a party he gave for Pierre Balmain in 1947, later gave up the remarkable drawings for which he was known to help run the rich life they shared. Their apartment was so full of books and pictures and Tiffany lamps and settees and bog-oak bears and 19th-century majolica and objects with histories that going there was like visiting the magical grandfather in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. There was a great deal of magic to Leo. Although he seemed to know others' inmost secrets, gossip was not his medium; insights and lightning-bolt judgments were. He had the gift of seeing both the gold and the flaw in the soul of everyone he came across. An eccentric— he favored purple in mufflers, sweaters, socks, ink, and, later on, little skullcaps—he made his friends define their individuality, too. This year, on his 80th birthday, celebrated at Nell's (she was another of his favorite women), his protegee Holly Brubach, fashion editor of The New York Times, performed a tap dance.

Leo Lerman had no lifeline; he'd hold up his hand and say, "See, I was bom dead." A cab accident in 1942 left his right side impaired, and his glaucoma grew worse with the years. "You look beautiful," he would tell women long after he had to be told by Gray Foy who had just greeted him. But wherever his judgments came from and whatever they were applied to—whether in the years when, with Alex Liberman, he decided who and what was fit to be in Vogue, or later, after he became the sage of Conde Nast—he was almost always right. Gini Alhadeff in The New York Times recently called Leo and Gray a pair of Victorian gentlemen of the 21st century; I think it goes a lot farther forward, and back, than that. As Kathleen Tynan once said of Leo, "He was all of our grandfathers rolled into one child."