From 1986: Sketching a Sketcher

Al Hirschfeld’s distinctive signature, and the caricatures above it, have graced the theater pages of the Times for 61 years

By Dick Anderson

Hamptons Newspaper/Magazine (August 1, 1986)

There’s a grand old tradition of christening theaters in honor of Broadway’s brightest lights: the Gershwin, the Barrymore, the Lunt-Fontanne, and the Atkinson, to name but a few. Times Square should be so fortunate to add the Hirschfeld to that roster one day—provided that Al Hirschfeld doesn’t outlast Broadway, as more than one person has suggested.

The choice of theater would be difficult. Hirschfeld has been associated with all of them, by virtue of his pen and paper, in his 61 years of delighting New York Times readers with his inimitable caricatures. Yet it’s almost by accident that an 18-year-old, beardless artist got involved in the field to begin with.

“During a performance I nervously sketched on a program,” he recalled, “and Dick Maney [a noted Broadway press agent who later wrote several books on the theater] told me to put this sketch on a clean piece of papers and he would take it around to the papers and see if he could place it. That following Sunday there it was, big as life, in the Herald Tribune. The following week they called me and asked me to do another. From then on, I’ve been doing drawings for the theater—all senseless, and all accidental,” he said, laughing.

“The papers didn’t pay for the drawings themselves; the producers did, and they would pay by the column.” At $15 a column, Hirschfeld managed to eke out a living, if only because of his prolific nature. At one time, he was drawing for as many as nine papers, including the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram, the Telegraph, the Brooklyn Eagle, and of course, the Times. “The Times came to me one day and said I was drawing for too many papers, and couldn’t we make some kind of arrangement. Since the Times was the only paper that paid for the drawing, I settled for them. I’ve been with them all these years with no contract, just a handshake.”

And a wise choice it was. Hirschfeld’s drawings continue to appear in Friday’s Weekend section and Sunday’s Arts and Leisure section. The Friday drawings usually focus on a single personality in an ongoing production, while Sunday’s illustration is earmarked for a show opening that week—provided there is one. “Whole months go by without a single opening,” he said. “The next was supposed to be Rags, but that’s been postponed for a couple of days, I hope I went up to Boston to see that.”

Hirschfeld still drives to Washington, Boston, or Chicago to catch an out-of-town tryout, but with productions such as Me and My Girl, which opens August 10 at the Marquis, he must rely on photographs. “That was done in California, which is a little far for me to go since I don’t fly. I just hope they look like the people in the show,” he said, staring at the near-finished illustration on the drawing board in front of him.

Favorite Hirschfeld subjects include Carol Channing and the late Zero Mostel. “I love to do actors like that. They’re exploded ventricles—bigger than life. They’ve invented themselves, and they know what they look like: Chaplin, Ed Wynn. There are fewer of those around, by the way; most actors now are smaller than life.

“They’re very good,” he said, “but the people on the street look more theatrical than the people on the stage. I see gals walking along Broadway, dressed in their underwear with blue over their eyes. You don’t see anything like that in the theater.”

However theater people have changed over the years, Hirschfeld’s work habits have not. Poised in a barber chair that he has had for more than 60 years, he draws at a desk that is just as old. “I bought the desk in the Bowery years ago for $10,” he said. “Wherever I’ve lived, this has been my home. I work seven days a week, usually from about 10:30 or 11 a.m. until the sun goes down. I don’t work at night, and I never have.”

Unless you consider drawing in a dark house to be work. “One of the handicaps of working in the theater is that I’m always in the audience,” he said. “For years I practiced drawing in my pocket, doing little hieroglyphics. Along with a fading memory, when I get back to the studio I try to correlate these things together, and try to recapture the image so that the lines join.”

Hirschfeld traced his relationship with the line back to his days in Paris in the early 1920s, after he had become art director at Selznick Studios—at age 17. “When they went bankrupt, I went to Europe, vowing never to work for anyone again, he recalled, chuckling. “I wanted to be a sculptor in those days, and then I latched onto the line. I became enchanted with what the line can convey or communicate, and I’m still stuck with it.”

He found his medium, pen and ink, during a sojourn in the Far East. “In that part of the world, the sun is so bright that it eliminates color. Then you’re left with shadows and almost pure line.”

Hirschfeld has never strayed far offline since, although a brief foray into playwriting in 1946 sent him back to the drawing board before the final curtain came down. Pointing to a yellowed poster of a musical titled Sweet Bye and Bye, he said, “I made the mistake of writing that with [S.J.] Perelman. It died in Philadelphia, and we had to leave the country.”

Once he returned he settled down to his work in a four-story brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he had remained ever since. His stairwells are lined with favorite caricatures over the years, including Lena Horne, Chaplin, and Shirley MacLaine. The bulk of his work, however, is on permanent display at the Margo Feiden Galleries at 51 E, 10th Street in New York. Hirschfeld met Feiden almost 20 years ago when he attended her exhibit of emigrant painter Raphael Soyer.

“He had been there a long time and hadn’t said a word,” Feiden recalled. “In the final room of the gallery, he ran across a photo of me and my airplane. The first thing he said was, ‘Is that you?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He asked me, ‘Why are you dressed like this?’ and I said, ‘I fly airplanes.’ He finally said, ‘Any woman who can fly an airplane can sell my art.’”

From then on, Feiden became Hirschfeld’s friend and representative. She accompanies Hirschfeld and his wife, Dolly, to the Tony Awards every year, but even then finds it hard to get away from business. “I made five sales of Al’s works in the ladies’ room last year,” she said, including sales to such theater notables as Stockard Channing and Joanna Gleason.

Half of Hirschfeld’s sales are made to people involved with a production, which occasionally poses problems for Feiden. “The only time it isn’t fun is when several people want the same drawing,” she said. “When two people become violent about it, it’s like walking on eggshells.”

There’s no pat solution, but Hirschfeld’s drawings are often sold long before he draws a single line. A deposit has already been placed on the illustration for the upcoming revival of South Pacific—a show that hasn’t even been cast yet.

At 83, does Hirschfeld show any signs of slowing down? “Oh, gosh, no,” Feiden said, “I think he’s getting better all the time. He’s constantly inventing, constantly trying new things. He gets terribly excited when he does a drawing he likes. He’ll call be as soon as he’s finished it, saying, ‘I’ve got something new.’”

Does Hirschfeld see any change in his work? “I’m more assured now,” he said. “I don’t have that frustrating feeling that I won’t be able to make the deadlines. Sometimes it comes very close. Since I’ve always managed to do it, somehow I’ve come to believe that I really can.

“You gain a security if you live long enough,” he said. “The whole trick in all this is to live long enough.”

One enduring Hirschfeld trademark is the inclusion of his daughter Nina’s name somewhere among the lines. “That was an innocent gesture that wound up in the Pentagon, where they use it for map reading. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania got a $60,000 grant to research the NINAs in my drawings,” he said, amused by the thought. “If you want to know where your tax money is, that’s where it goes.”

The NINA search is half the fun of a Hirschfeld drawing. If there’s no number by his signature, it can be assumed that there is one hidden in the drawing—but there are often more. “I was temporarily bereft of my sanity and put in, at one point, some 50-odd NINAs,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t remember what the occasion was; it must have been the heat.”

Nina, incidentally, is 40 now and living in Texas with her 10-year-old son Matthew. Has Hirschfeld ever considered working a MATTHEW into his drawings? “I’ll never make that error again,” he said. “You’re entitled to one foolishness in your lifetime; you shouldn’t repeat it.”

Of all the magazines Hirschfeld has appeared in, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, and Look, the one he hasn’t graced, oddly enough, is The New Yorker. There’s a foolishness behind this explanation.

“Life had a section called ‘Speaking of Pictures,’ four to six pages in front of the magazine, and they asked me to do doodles. I did one of Harold Ross [co-founder and legendary editor of The New Yorker]. I drew a mustache on him—and he looked just like Stalin,” Hirschfeld recalled, laughing. Ross, he said, “was furious. He never did forgive me.

“I drew another on Mary Pickford—and she looked like Hitler. It’s funny how these things turn out."

Postscript: Hirschfeld died January 20, 2003, at age 99. On June 23, 2003—two days after the centennial of his birth—the Martin Beck Theatre on West 45th Street was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre (where Moulin Rouge! The Musical is currently playing). One more thing; In its June 28, 1993 issue, a full-page self-portrait of Hirschfeld appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.