That Old Feeling: The Fun in Al Hirschfeld

We thought he’d be around forever. After all, he’d been around forever: 82 years as a professional artist, 76 years as a chronicler of the theater. All that time, he’d never been inactive; never given up or given in. Al Hirschfeld had not only made it to 99, he seemed a cinch to hit 100. The Broadway establishment certainly thought so: it had set aside the day of his centenary, five months from now, for a ceremony renaming the Martin Beck Theater for him, with the guest of honor surely in attendance. (Who was Martin Beck? The man who built the Palace Theatre. And the Martin Beck.)

Hirschfeld also had genes and the stars on his side. He was born on the longest day of the year (June 21, 1903) to a mother who lived to 91 and a father who lived to 93 — a father who, Hirschfeld said, invented the term “senior citizen.” In America, or the more empyrean realm of art, few citizens were more senior than Al, none more youthful, cogent, articulate or productive. Over the years, his witty hand had fashioned some 12,000 drawings.

So it was with surprise, as well as a sigh, that the entertainment community greeted Hirschfeld’s death last week. (Of what? Surely not of old age!) Obituarians too easily write that one man’s passing marks the death of an era, but it can be written in Al Hirschfeld’s case that this is the death of two or three Broadway eras. He came to his calling — caricaturist to the stars — in the 20s, when Broadway was the face of American sophistication and sizzle. He was there when Gershwin presented “Porgy and Bess,” when Tennessee Williams drove his “Streetcar,” when “Guys and Dolls” and “Hair” and “Phantom” opened. And he was there as Broadway launched yet another season inattentive to the young generation, inadequate for the old. Hirschfeld outlived not only most of the people he drew but, really, the medium itself.

People still go to first nights in their tuxedos and evening dresses, but these are duded-up dinosaurs; today’s theater opening is the latest in a series of wakes. At one of these poignant occasions, filmed for Susan W. Dreyfoos’ vivacious 1998 documentary “The Line King: Al Hirschfeld,” fellow cartoonist Jules Feiffer rightly opined, “The only glamour left in the theater is what Al brings to it. And he is to what he does what Astaire was to what he did. Al has the same effortlessness, the same grace, the same wit, and that lighter-than-air quality.” True enough. Hirschfeld put motion and emotion in all his still-lifes, infused buoyancy and elan in a weighty Sunday newspaper — The New York Times, whose Arts and Leisure section he had adorned and, heaven knows, enlivened for three quarters of a century.

“DRAW LINES”

If Hirschfeld was using an obsolete art (what newspaper printed drawings any more?) in the service of an obsolescent one (who goes to the theater?), his work never grew senescent. His hand was as firm and supple as ever, the late drawings an ever-more assured symphony of fine lines. “Draw lines, young man, many lines,” the old painter Ingres had advised Edgar Degas in the 1850s. That’s what Al did: kept filling the page with many lines, many people, lots of furniture, until the image was as cramped as the cabin in “A Night at the Opera.”

The Hirschfeld’s lines had snap and swing — movement, like a jump-rope at top speed. Millions of lines over 80 years, and not one had an inappropriate stroke. There was drama in the contrast of those black lines on a white page — a bit less when it was reprinted on the Times’ gray newsprint. Which is why you should look at his work in book form: the handsomely illustrated autobiography “Hirschfeld On Line,” or, for about the price of a manicure, the Gotham-glorifying “Hirschfeld’s New York” and the all-movie “Hirschfeld’s Hollywood.”

At his death, this comic muralist had left the fullest scrapbook of a century dominated by entertainment. He drew, and drew out the spirit of, thousands of celebrities from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Anna Magnani, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and the captious craft of caricature was raised to character study.

NICE GUY IN A NASTY JOB

Caricaturists, whose pen is meaner than the sword, are supposed to believe that cruelty is an inalienable right. Hirschfeld didn’t hold to that creed. Or maybe his pen and his personality were too ebullient to be bilious; the Nast or nasty drawing, he seemed to think, didn’t demean the subject so much as the artist. He had an inability to find the jugular in a entertainment figure. He did go for the jungular, exaggerating facial features and specializing in a kind of reverse anthropomorphism: he turned men into beasts. To Mickey Rooney, Bert Lahr and Zero Mostel, he gave outsize snouts. Many women he saw as birds: Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Hepburn and others are long-necked swans. He was drawn to larger-than-life, larger-than-art figures, from the vaudeville clowns Weber and Fields to later, self-distorting creatures like Jerry Lewis and Roberto Benigni (naturally).

Even when he tried to pour scorn in a sketch, the malice didn’t always take. He drew the Broadway entrepreneur David Merrick, a particular bete noire, as a malevolent Santa Claus, complete with bell, book and candle. Merrick’s reaction: he bought the drawing and used it as his Christmas card. Seen today, that sketch has an eerie resemblance to a certain artist’s early self-portraits — for this Merrick looks like the younger, saturnine Al Hirschfeld.

Actors knew that a Hirschfeld sketch granted them immortality — at least for a week. So it was rare, maybe one occasion in a thousand, when a subject would take issue with the artist’s elaboration. Allen Funt, the creator and host of “Candid Camera,” complained that he was made to look like an ape (orangutan or baboon?) in a Hirschfeld drawing. Al’s response: “I had nothing to do with that. That was God’s work.”

EVEN AL WAS YOUNG ONCE

Albert Hirschfeld was born in St. Louis, youngest of three brothers; one older sibling was also named Al (Alexander — their parents had a sense of humor too), the other Milton (he died in the influenza epidemic of 1919). Mom worked, Dad stayed home and minded the kids. In 1915, the family moved to New York City, perhaps to get the budding draftsman-craftsman Al(bert) into an artistic milieu. He went to a few art schools and found remuneration in advertising departments of local movie companies. He worked for Samuel Goldwyn and Lewis Selznick (David O.’s father), becoming art director of Selznick at 19.

Young Al still had high-art ideals, and with an uncle’s largesse ($500, which for the mid-20s was very large indeed), he sailed for a year in Europe. With two other budding painters he rented a Paris flat; his part of the tab was $33 — a year. One day, after seeing a show with Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps, Al scrawled a sketch of Guitry on a menu. A friend told him the sketch might be publishable if on white paper it were redrawn. In a trice, Hirschfeld produced a clean version. In a fource, the Herald Tribune printed it. At 23, Hirschfeld was a theatrical caricaturist.

Like many intellectuals of the day, Hirschfeld flirted with Communism, visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 and contributing dank, poignant lithographs to The New Masses in the 30s. But fate decreed that Lenin and Bulganin, as worthy as they were of caricature, would not be Hirschfeld’s prime subjects. He would spend the rest of his career attending Broadway first nights, not Stalin inaugurals. He stayed out of politics; otherwise he might be drawing Jenin and Jerusalem today.

AL-LO, DOLLY

Hirschfeld’s first wife, Florence Hobby, was a showgirl from “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” whose stage name was Flo Allen. But his true love was his second wife, Dolly Haas. Dorothy Louise Clara Haas was born, in 1910, in Hamburg to a German mother and an English bookseller father. As a teenager she appeared in “The Mikado,” “The Merry Widow,” Wedekind’s “Franziska” and a Max Reinhardt spectacle. In theater or cabaret, the redheaded “flapper” was a beguiling presence. By the age of 20 Haas was starring in an Ufa movie with her own name in the title (“Dolly Gets Ahead”). From 1930 to ’35 she played the worldly waif, the child-woman, in about 18 German films, many for writers (Billy Wilder, Curt Siodmak) and directors (William Dieterle, Anatole Litvak, William Thiele, Steve Sekely, Henry Koster) who would fashion second careers in Hollywood.

Dolly’s destiny took a different turn. In an English remake of “Broken Blossoms,” directed by her first husband John Brahm, she played the Lillian Gish role; then she was offered a three-year Hollywood contract by Myron Selznick (whose father had hired the teenage Hirschfeld). But she made no films in California. She came to New York, appearing in plays by the German émigré Erwin Piscator. It was there she met, and in 1943 married, the man referred to in the Google translation of a German-language Dolly Haas website as “the well-known caricaturist aluminum deer field.”

Dolly and Aluminum made a glamorous, loving couple. She continued to act, notably in a “Crime and Punishment” with Gish and John Gielgud, and the wife of the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess.” But her main role would be as Hirschfeld’s muse and playmate, his elfin inamorata, the one editor to whom he paid devoted attention. The two would be inseparable until her death 51 years later.

THE NAME GAME

The fun in a Hirschfeld sketch increased after 1945, when Dolly gave birth to their daughter Nina. Hirschfeld began hiding her name within his portraits of famous men and women — in a Gwyneth Paltrow gown, in a Groucho jacket fold. (Good thing they hadn’t named the child Hildegarde.) Eventually he placed a numeral next to his signature — e.g., “Hirschfeld 5” — to indicate how often the Ninas appeared. Forty years before Martin Handford was playing “Where’s Waldo?”, Spotting the Ninas was the niftiest Sunday parlor game. I recall the little thrill I felt on first hearing of the ruse, back in college in the 60s, from our Music Appreciation teacher, who was also a staff member of the Times radio station WQXR. I felt as if I’d been elected to a secret society.

The Nina Name Hunt soon became an in-joke millions shared. The New Yorker ran a cartoon with a husband asking his wife, “When did you start putting ?Nina’s in your hair?” The singer Will Ryan composed his own anthem: “Nina, Nina, me, myself and I, oh how you stick wit’ us! / Nina, Nina, can’t you tell us why you’re so ubiquitous? / It is likely you have friends in lofty places, / For I find your name adorning famous faces.” The more Ninas hidden, the longer the lovely task took. A few nights ago, my wife was paging through the handsome collection “Hirschfeld’s Hollywood.” Suddenly her shoulders sagged. An unusually dense fresco of Broadway first-nighters bore the notation “Hirschfeld 1958.” It turned out to be the year, not the number of Ninas.

The craze had its sour side. It may have deflected Al’s daughter from a career in the theater (could she ever live up to her name being publicized weekly in the Times?). And because the search for Ninas occasionally got more attention than the drawing than concealed them, some Hirschfeldians argue that it reduced his standing from an artist to a puzzle-constructor. But he couldn’t stop and, as a giver of pleasure, he wouldn’t want to. Those ten strokes simply added to the density, as well as the delight, of a Hirschfeld drawing. They also answered the question, “What’s in 1 name?” with the more complex question, “What’s a name in?”

The sadness of realizing there will be no more Hirschfelds is compounding by the prospect of no more new Ninas. So as a tribute to Mr. A. and Miss N., we have concealed her cognomen in and around the text of this column. How many are there? Look at the subhed. How many can you find? That’s up to you.

MR. INSIDER

The consensus of those interviewed in “The Line King” is that Hirschfeld was a genial fellow who mingled freely with the subjects he scratched at, or caressed, with his pen. In as much as his illustration would typically be published while a show was in previews, and then he would attend the opening-night performance, he could hardly hide from the producers and angels. But why would he want to? Hirschfeld seemed perfectly at ease with himself, his work and his Great White World. He knew how hard it was to create a good play. In 1947 he had worked on a show — “Sweet Bye and Bye,” collaborating with S.J. Perelman on the book while Ogden Nash and Vernon Duke did the songs — only to see it expire out of town. Hirschfeld called it a mercy killing.

Hirschfeld and his boon companion Perelman made an oddly complementary couple. Their mutual friend Philip Hamburger of The New Yorker recalled that “Sid would go into depression, and then he would become very excited. And I’ve never seen Al go very far off course. He’s a pretty steady pilot.” He had to be, considering that he and Mood-swing Sid spent nine months circling the globe for the series of Holiday magazine articles that became the book “Westward, Ha!” Perelman, in a paean to his pal, described Hirschfeld as “a pair of liquid brown eyes, delicately rimmed in red, of an innocence to charm the heart of the fiercest aborigine, and a beard which could engulf everything from a tsetse fly to a Sumatra tiger. In short, a remarkable combination of Walt Whitman, Lawrence of Arabia, and Moe, my favorite waiter at Lindy’s.”

Like any good waiter, Hirschfeld would offer advice to theater producers. Once or twice he advised them to close what he considered an inauspicious show. He urged Lawrence Langner to shut down a musical called “Away We Go!” (it did all right as “Oklahoma!”) and begged Moss Hart not to take the fruitless job of staging a musical based on Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (“My Fair Lady”). But his generosity of spirit compelled him to help out struggling theater folk. He had gone to Bali in the late 40s and made a silent movie of the dancers there; on his return he showed the footage to Rodgers, Hammerstein and designer Jo Mielziner, and they incorporated some of his research into their show “The King and I.”

He couldn’t have felt as simpatico with more recent “hardware” musicals — all those flying chandeliers and whirring helicopters. (He pointedly left the chopper out of his “Miss Saigon” drawing.) But Hirschfeld was no Luddite; he was ever open to the Next Thing. As Anais Nin apostrophized to a lover in “Henry and June”: “There will never be darkness because in both of us there’s always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation.” Hirschfeld was anti-stagnation too. Like his thin pen-lines, he was lithe, blithe and on the move.

ST. AL

In Paul’s Rudnick’s play “Jeffrey,” a gay priest gives the title character a little lesson in art as theology: “Here’s how you see God. He’s a Columbia recording artist. … You got your idea of God from where most gay kids get it — the album cover of ?My Fair Lady.’ Original cast. It’s got this Hirschfeld caricature of George Bernard Shaw up in the clouds, manipulating Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on strings, like marionettes. It was your parents’ album, you were little, you thought it was a picture of God.”

To many lovers of drawing, Hirschfeld was a divine manipulator — not the God, but a god. Museums, which had once deemed the cartoon inadmissable to the Pantheon of seriosity, mounted retrospectives of his work. “The Line King” brought his amicable wit to a new audience. Disney animator Eric Goldberg, who had based his Genie in “Aladdin” on Hirschfeld’s protean line design, paid elaborate tribute to the Master in the recent update of “Fantasia.” The Goldberg variation on “Rhapsody in Blue” was a smartly syncopated homage that crawled with furtive graffiti: a few Ninas, a “Goldberg” apartment house and, everywhere, the word Doug (a tribute to Disney layout artist Doug Walker).

And at the end, the creator of an inadvertent history of 20th century entertainment was ready for the 21st. In “The Line King” we see him fiddling with computer drawing. At first he resists; then he gets the gang of it. “I suppose it’s possible to control,” he says of the mouse-pen. “It just requires another lifetime to do it, that’s all.” And he was game for that next lifetime. “Living is an art, you know, it’s not a science. You make it up as you go along.” Maybe Hirschfeld, who made it up while sitting in a barber chair in front of a drawing board, left a bit of his capacious spirit to inspire the rest of us. We can see it in his wrily amused smile. We can trace it in the joy of Hirschfeld’s seraphic graphic art.