My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Lotte Lenya (1898): Divine Weltschmerz

40 Lotte Lenya Divine Weltschmerz David Bergman We always gathered at Mary’s house because hers was biggest and her mother only came back to make dinner and her father was never home. The place resonated with defiance, for here her brother had done what to us appeared unimaginable: thrown his Princeton diploma in his parents’ faces, saying, This is what you wanted. What he wanted I hoped was someone like me, because in the pictures he was beautiful and Mary loved him. We were teenagers in the mid-’60s, and our afternoons had their rituals. First we listened to the Velvet Underground and the Fugs, who felt, as we did, like “homemade shit.” We were teenagers 41 after all and felt required to be unhappy. Then Mary played a onehanded version of Debussy’s “Blanc et Noir” on the baby grand. It was the only thing she seemed to know, and she played it beautifully . I would watch her reflection in the smoky-mirrored back wall, her eyes half closed. Then Wendy, her best friend, whose face was covered with a fine coating of hair and who would become a lesbian (we all knew she was in love with Mary; we all were), then Wendy would put a joint out in the ashtray and say, “Lotte Lenya, it’s time for Lotte Lenya.” The LP would be changed, and we waited for our lesson in the fate of incommensurable passion. We preferred the recordings in German. We were all Jewish, and German was the forbidden language, and we felt that anger, weariness, and defeat—emotions we were also forbidden since we were supposed to be nice, well-adjusted children—could be sung only in German. We sensed that we held within ourselves something forbidden. It was true that some of us were A students, and that we always went to class and didn’t get into “trouble.” But we liked to think we were only good because we had found no one yet worthy to lead us to the bad, the bad that Lenya seemed to hold like a high note. Certainly, we had found no one who loved us with the desire we yearned for, no Surabaya Johnny. (If only we could be used for money!) Yet it was important to know the irrationality , the helplessness, the completeness of loving that we heard somewhere lodged between the coarsely worn timbre of her voice and its naïve purity. Lenya had the world-weariness we aspired to, and the innocence we were stuck with, and she made the former seem possible and the latter less embarrassing. “Yes, the sea is blue, so blue,” she sang as if she had never noticed it before and it might suddenly be taken from her. How I loved the way she pronounced blau, with the mouth opening up as if to take a bite out of it. Lenya sang with her teeth. That was part of the steely toughness that I knew I would never have. Her cold vengeance seemed to me then exclusively feminine, which is why it was so frightening and so fascinating. I never imagined I could send a lover to walk the plank on a black-masted ship. Lotte Lenya 42 I would never be a Pirate Jenny for whom the only port was the one she was leaving. I feared, instead, that I might always be stuck at home. She had the exile’s iciness, the survivor’s ruthlessness. She and the world moved on. I stood still. We couldn’t tell when she stopped singing and the record began scratching in its perpetual groove. The two gritty, gravelly sounds seemed strangely alike. But at some point Mary would stand up, her thin arms in the air, too much lipstick on her puckered lips. “Hoopla!” she shouted, imitating the flat, dull, unforgiving voice of Lenya’s unremitting but indispensable love. And then it was time to do homework. Lotte Lenya ...