A Life Revealed

Bruce Emond ,  The Jakarta Post - WEEKENDER   |  Thu, 02/26/2009 12:19 PM  |  Two of a Kind

Journalist Lily Koppel stumbled on a story in 2003 when she discovered a tattered diary dating back more than 70 years. Meeting the diary’s author, now in her 90s, helped her fill in the blank spots of her life – and write a best-selling book. Bruce Emond reports.

For many young people, it’s hard to imagine a time other than their own that is of interest. They look at old photos and see people with funny haircuts and outdated clothes, living their lives in drab black and white. They appear quaint, uncool, unfunky, irretrievably dull.

This was not true for Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary, who says she was always intrigued by the remnants of history.

“I loved vintage clothing and used to beg my grandparents to let me explore their attic, which they kept locked,” says Koppel, who grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park, now famous as Barack Obama’s neighborhood.

“I love any object that beckons one with a story it has to tell.”

Koppel, 27, moved to New York to attend Barnard College. After graduating, she landed a job at The New York Times, doing celebrity reporting at night (she was dubbed “the bravest gossip reporter” after The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini asked her out on a date).

“I was fascinated by the phenomenon of celebrity, but it’s really ordinary lives that attract me – and how extraordinary they are.”

She found the story she was looking for one morning as she left her apartment building for work in October 2003. Old steamer trunks were being cleared from the basement storage area, and Koppel joined the people sifting through them. She compares the experience to excavating an archaeological site laden with rare treasures.

“It was like a dream and I climbed right in. It’s a good thing I was willing to suspend my rational self and get my clothes dirty.”

In the flotsam and jetsam of the past, she found an old flapper dress that she now wears, old coats, an antique tube of lipstick and a cigarette, still unlit. There were stacks of old phone books, their numbers long out of use, and a faded telegram, addressed to a Miss Florence Wolfson

After she left, exhausted from a day of searching, a doorman tipped her off to a crumbling red leather diary that he had in his locker. It was written by the same Florence Wolfson, who dutifully wrote in the book from her 14th birthday to the eve of her 19th birthday.

“She never skipped a day in the diary’s five years. She was an artist and writer. We even looked alike,” says Koppel, who does indeed have the pale prettiness of another era.

She could not have wished for a more interesting heroine, an Elizabeth Bennett lifted from Jane Austen’s pages and transplanted to Depression-era Manhattan. In her search for love and with an independent streak based on following the Socratic oath “to know thyself”, Florence is a free spirit with a checklist of “firsts” – including her first kiss and first cigarette – who is bucking against the control of her domineering mother.

Koppel says she knew from the outset that the story was “magical” and often wondered what had become of its intriguing author. In 2006, a private investigator helped her locate the woman, still alive and living with her ailing husband, Nat Howitt, who was included in the diary as one of the author’s teenage dalliances.

The younger woman describes Florence in their first meeting as “an unexpectedly glamorous 90-year-old”. After she married and had two daughters, Florence was a journalist before making money playing the stock market. She also ran a hotel for a time and then settled into a comfortable retirement, with homes in Florida and Connecticut. After looking through the diary, Florence told Koppel, “You’ve brought back my life.”

Koppel originally wrote Florence’s story for the Times, before deciding to expand it into a book. Her subject was open and cooperative in discussing her colorful life, including two same-sex relationships and a fling with a bisexual European nobleman.

“I was floored when I first stumbled upon the entry ‘Slept with Pearl’. I thought, wow, Florence! She was much more adventurous than I had initially thought. And then when I met her and she told me about her love affair with the Italian Count Filippo Canaletti Gaudenti da Sirolo she met in Rome when she sailed to Europe in 1936.”

Koppel says she felt a connection with the young Florence that spans time.

“We were both looking for love and meaning in our lives. I think teenagers and young women relate to Florence’s problems, except I don’t know if they have carved out a space like the diary to reflect on the meaning of their lives. The Internet, email and Facebook are making private moments more elusive.”

Koppel remains in close touch with the now widowed Florence, who recently celebrated her 93rd birthday and is writing again, although now on a laptop. “Her daughters see her in a new light. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren think she is so cool.”

Private journals and diaries are becoming a thing of the past amid the rise of blogs. Her fateful discovery of a long-lost diary, Koppel knows, will not be happening 75 years from now.

But the main message of Florence Wolfson Howitt’s story will not have changed, she adds.

“The most important thing is to realize, as Florence did early on, that we are the star of our own show. Our story matters. Our life matters.”


The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel is published by HarperCollins (2008). Available at Aksara and other major bookstores.

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