Hirschfeld: The Biography by Ellen Stern

Hirschfeld: The Biography
by Ellen Stern
Skyhorse, 2021

It began with innocent intentions: In 1945, celebrated artist Al Hirschfeld, already a popular fixture in The New York Times for his buoyant and effervescent sketches of theater folk and other pop culture notables, became a father to a daughter, Nina. He immediately added her name to the sketch he was preparing, one that captured the cast of the long-forgotten show Are You With It? The title alone shouts commercial oblivion, but the drawing holds a place in theatrical history for a poster on the wall that shows a baby reading a book called “Nina the Wonder Child.” Sweet, and yes, innocent, but according to Ellen Stern’s recent biography of Hirschfeld, he later looked back with dismay at the whole enterprise: “This little folly was, over the decades, to turn into a monster,” he said. “[But] there was no way to stop it!”

Hirschfeld himself fed the monster by insisting that going forward that “Nina” be included in all of his drawings—artfully hidden in the corners and swirls of his characters—their hairstyles, their clothing, their body parts, the furniture and walls around them. The more ingenious, the harder to find, the better. But the monster was also empowered by Hirschfeld’s public. As his fame grew, so did the game of “Finding Nina’s,” avidly embraced by readers of the Sunday Times, where more often than not the Arts & Leisure section would devote the entirety of its above-the-fold page to a Hirschfeld work previewing a major new play or musical set to open that week. This at a time when Broadway was in full creative flower and potency as a cultural influence; the Great White Way was bursting with writers and performers of historic importance.

So feverish were the Nina cultists that any straying from tradition was a cause for alarm—and piles of angry mail. Eventually, Hirschfeld provided a study aid by adding a number to the lower right corner of his iconic vertically ascendant signature (seen on the biography’s cover) that represented how many Nina’s were waiting for investigative eyes.

But not everyone loved the Nina’s, especially Nina herself. She hated being in the spotlight, hated being pointed out as “that Nina,” and regretted a father more interested in her as a gimmick rather than a daughter. Stern goes to great lengths to chronicle Nina’s troubled life (she is still alive); her multiple marriages and her futile search for a satisfying career are dealt with by Stern with unnecessary harshness.

As for Hirschfeld himself, born Albert in 1903, he missed the centenarian distinction by a mere 6 months when he died, but he left Stern a very long trail of experience and eccentricities to chronicle. Of the former, there were three marriages, multiple affairs, an passion for foreign travel, and a privileged perch that allowed him to witness (and sketch) the glorious cavalcade of history and culture that defined the 20th century. Of the latter, pick your favorite: the vibrant pink townhouse on the Upper East Side, complete with gargoyle; the Biblical, anachronistic beard (begun as a young man in order to save money on shaving supplies); the antique barber chair that he used for decades in his studio, calling it “the last functional chair made.” (It’s now preserved in a museum.) He was also a frighteningly reckless driver, and a forgetful one, even as a young man often forgetting where in Manhattan he had parked and being forced to take the subway home. In later life, he parked at his exact destination, parking zone or not—with nary a traffic violation to his name.

Stern, a writer best known for her magazine journalism, writes with gusto (if occasionally overeager banter) and an admirable fondness for her subject, although telling his story in the present tense throughout often seems too informal. But her research is exhaustive and her command of detail impressive. Although she interviewed the artist only once, before she had considered writing the book, she contacted hundreds of his friends and associates for their reminiscences. And almost all of them had a reminiscence, fond or otherwise, of his idiosyncratic personality.

Born in St. Louis, Hirschfeld and his family moved to New York City when he was young; there he stayed for the rest of his life, save for influential excursions to Europe, Russia, Iran (then Persia), North Africa, and Tahiti, among other destinations, where he often fast-painted and sold artworks to keep himself solvent. An expert artist from childhood, he preferred sculpting and watercolors, but pen-and-ink sketches were his true métier. Luck and pluck and precociousness got him work with the early movie studios based in New York, and astonishingly at 18 he was head of the art department for Warner Brothers. His first published caricatures appear in 1925 in the newspaper The World, a daily paper, on behalf of two of Warner’s forgotten flicks.

But it is the theater that truly warmed his heart and nourished his art. (His one attempt at writing, collaborating on a musical called Sweet Bye and Bye in 1946, ended in disaster—a Broadway musical so bad that it died before it got to Broadway.) It was Hirschfeld’s ability to catch the essence of an actor and a performance with a minimum of graceful lines that were to many the source of his genius. (“Live theater on newsprint!” exulted Nathan Lane.) From Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1981: “His drawings are dynamic creations in moving line and form. The line is alive; it leaps, races around curves, zooms with whiplash speed. Every line has rhythm and plays its precise part in an overall linear ballet.” The 1996 documentary on his life is aptly titled “The Line King.” Many contemporary artists cite his influence, among them Disney animators.

Simply put, Hirschfeld had a mad keen skill at sketching a celebrity with a few lines that made the stars easily identifiable at first glance. It was a great honor to be so immortalized, and many wealthy nonentities paid handsomely for a custom sketch. Today, original signed Hirschfeld lithographs fetch pretty prices, and his works are included in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Hirschfeld famously said, “If you live long enough, everything happens.” Not to mention everyone. Stern was blessed with a bountiful array of characters who spun in his orbit: Houdini, Chaplin, O’Neill, Josephine Baker, Dietrich, Bankhead, Ferber, Minnelli (Liza and Vincente), Rodgers (with Hart and Hammerstein), Stein and Toklas, the Marxes (Groucho and Harpo), Dreiser, Hemingway, Styron. They make for good company.

One welcome recurring presence is Hirschfeld’s fast friend, S.J. Perelman, a New Yorker mainstay and Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 1957 film Around the World in 80 Days. (I had long thought Perelman was lost to literary history, but was pleased to learn that the Library of America has a forthcoming volume of his work.) Perelman contributes the occasional mischievous aperçu that livens the party: On Dolly Haas, Hirschfeld’s second wife of 51 years, a pixie-like actress who frequently worked the nerves of their friends: “I am forced to admit that the cumulative weight of Dolly’s personality affects me like a fishbone in the throat. . . [Al] has the patience of Job, because in his situation, I should have long ago slipped a shiv between her ribs.”

Hirschfeld’s reach and influence extended beyond his theater work. Those who never read The Times might well recognize his style from many covers of TV Guide (for a long time the best-selling magazine in the country); for a series of U.S. postage stamps honoring silent film stars and comedians; and for the playful logo that adorned the original cast recording of My Fair Lady. Not only was the show the most successful musical of the mid-century, but the album itself was a staple in many a middle-class living room. Hirschfeld’s ingenious concept pictured a puckish George Bernard Shaw on a heavenly cloud, pulling the marionette strings of Henry Higgins, who in turn held the strings of Eliza Doolittle—a perfect distillation of the work.

As much as Hirschfeld lavished his talent and affection on Broadway, Broadway returned the warm feelings, honoring him with two Lifetime Achievement Tony Awards (it appears that living long enough allows you multiple honors in this category), as well as naming a theater after him to mark his centennial, a tribute afforded to very few. He died before the dedication, but was aware of the distinction.

This biography has a peculiar history. Review copies were sent to the press in 2017 from the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but the book was pulled from publication somewhere along the line. A report in the New York Post suggested a rift with the Margo Feiden Gallery, which sells and distributes Hirschfeld’s art (Feiden herself comes in for scathing criticism in the book); or the objections of Hirschfeld’s widow, who was painted as something of an opportunist in her almost immediate wooing of Hirschfeld after the death of his second wife. Whatever the reason, the biography was published this year by Skyhorse Publishing, recently infamous in going where angels fear to tread by taking up Woody Allen’s memoir and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth.

Skyhorse has done the book no favors. The finished copy is drab, the paper stock feels substandard, the typeface less elegant, and worst of all, a book representing an artist of supreme style and limitless exuberance reflects little of that legacy. Shockingly, there is but a single representation of Hirschfeld’s later great work in the photo well, a large mural of celebrities from Sinatra and Monroe to Toscanini and Eleanor Roosevelt having a raucous good time. (To be fair, perhaps FSG were equally hamstrung by rights issues.) Even the book cover is sadly dour, given the subject’s signature style, and markedly different from that of the elegant advance copy. Stern makes no mention of the hand-off in her acknowledgements, beyond thanking two men at Skyhorse for “taking the reins and riding my book to the finish line.”

Whatever the story behind the book, Hirschfeld and Stern deserve better.

Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.