"It's so crazy, it doesn't fit some pattern, it's not helpful to anybody," thus, chuckling affably through his long Santa Claus beard, does Al Hirschfeld sum up his more than 60 years as creator of the sinuous, masterfully succinct drawings of theatrical personalities that have made him the court portraitist of the Broadway stage (and have made his daughter, Nina, the most sought-after name in show business ever since he first began weaving her name into the cross-hatching and embroidery of his drawings).
Although his recent 85th birthday has seen him lionized as an institution of the New York theatre and hailed as the artistic successor to Daumier, Beardsley, and Toulouse-Lautrec, Hirschfeld himself remains unimpressed, less out of false modesty than as a bemused connoisseur of serendipity.
"It's not whether I like it, it's what happened, so insane and unpredictable," he muses, looking back on his career from his cozy, Hirschfeld-lined studio atop the Upper East Side townhouse he and his wife Dolly bought for a pittance in 1947. "I started out as a sculptor and then a painter, and I settled on the graphic - and I'm still trying to find out what I'm doing."
Whatever it is he's doing, he's doing it miraculously well. Each Hirschfeld drawing offers a delightful, Rorschach-like experience of recognizing the recognizable, suddenly discovering, say, that Carol Channing's nose and mouth can be perfectly represented by an umlaut hovering over a parking meter dial. His genius seems to lie in an ability to marry austere simplicity of form with a deep understanding of character. "The talent of recognition, everybody has," he explains. "people just schluff if off, but if you have your five senses, you're very talented. My gift, or whatever it's called, is the ability to communicate it to somebody else."
Art dealer Margo Feiden, who has represented Hirschfeld's work at her gallery (now on the corner of 11th St. and Univeristy Place in Greenwich Village) for nearly two decades, compares his skill at capturing the essence of his subjects to a legendary psychiatrist she'd heard about in college, a man of such insight that he only took the knotty cases other doctors couldn't diagnose. Each patient would enter his long office, she says, "and by the time the patient got to his desk he'd made the diagnosis."
Hirschfeld himself makes no such claims to his sight. (He even points out that sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed: Channing, an old friend, has told him she tries to emulate his depictions of her. So has Ray Bolger. "They begin to look more like my drawings than the drawings look like them.") He instead credits the uncanny aptness of his likenesses to patient trial and error. "Across many, many years you do develop an authority. Suddenly something happens, some kind of alchemy takes place, and you hang onto that. Suddenly you can see that what you're thinking of the person is translated into line, and then you simplify that and get it down to its barest minimum and finally you have a palatable drawing capable of standing on its own two feet."
Another aspect of Hirschfeld's authority is his mastery of pen-and-ink, lightly tossing his confident sweeping lines across the page like Christmas-tree tinsel, and upholstering each drawing in rich, subtle textures worthy of Vermeer. As New York Times art critic John Russell wrote in the introduction to a 1979 collection of the artist's drawings, "He can make us tell tweed from broadcloth, mink from sable, and a clip-on bow tie from one that is made by hand. His black inks can look blacker than black, and he can make the untouched white of the page work for him as a henchman and a friend."
Hirschfeld seems content to leave the explainations of his art to others, showing a characteristic uneasiness about letting academic analysis upstage the work itself. "How this alchemy takes place, I don't know," he says matter-of-factly. "You do what you think is best, and the fact that it looks like somebody is a mystery I've never figured out."
Hirschfeld has always been one more willing to see than to explain. As a young man, his knockabout's hunger for discovery brought him to the artistic cafes of Paris in the twenties ("You sat around and schmoozed and talked about how the world could be improved or how you yourself could be improved, and it never occurred to you that you had to make a living"), then to Bali for a time in 1931 (returning to the Depression "broke like everyone else"), and, in 1947, on a misadventurous world tour with his pal S. J. Perelman, hilariously recounted in Perelman's anti-travelogue 'Westward Ha!' (in which Hirschfeld is described as "a remarkable combination of Walt Whitman, Lawrence of Arabia and Moe, my favorite waiter at Lindy's").
He seems to have stumbled just as guileless into his life's work. "It's the thing I've always done, possibly because I couldn't do anything else. Subconsciously, it never occurred to me that I was entering a lemming profession and heading for disaster. But it just never happened." What happened instead was that Hirschfeld found himself back in New York in 1925, watching Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps perform on Broadway while nervously sketching on his Playbill. With him was his friend Richard Maney, who was impressed enough by Hirschfeld's Guitry to send it on to the New York Herald Tribune, where it was published in short order. Hirschfeld was soon supplying theatre drawings for a number of New York's then-abundant dailies, paid by the producers at ten dollars per column width.
Enter The New York Times. The paper of record "hired" Hirschfeld in 1929 in a handshake agreement that has never had to be formalized. Since then, his drawings have accompanied Sunday's drama page (since 1976 he also produced a drawing for the Friday edition). The marriage has only grown stronger over the years, and the weekly Hirschfeld is now as much a part of the Sunday Times as ink-smudged fingers and a lapful of travel inserts. For his part, Hirschfeld was given unique freedom for presenting his work, including carte blanche to draw whomever or whatever struck his fancy about the show.
His career at the Times also brought him into a fruitful collaberation with critic Brooks Atkinson, "a friend for 50, 60 years," one of the many friendships with theatre personalities he's forged over a lifetime of opening-night intermissions and after-hour gatherings at legendary Broadway watering holes like Ralph's, the Algonquin's Oak Room or the basement of LeBlanc's drugstore. "It's kind of a mutual admiration society," he says of his close friendships with actors the likes of Helen Hayes and Jason Robards. "I like to draw them, they like to be drawn. They like my drawings, I like their acting."
Just once was he lured on the other side of the footlights, when he collaborated with his friends Perelman and Ogden Nash on the 1947 musical, 'The Sweet Bye and Bye.' Broadway being Broadway, not even their prodigious talents (along with Vernon Duke's music) could prevent the show from summarily entering the hereafter. The experience wasn't wasted on Hirschfeld. "I learned there never to work in the theatre," he says. "That's insanity."
So he went back to the drawing board, where he seems most content to stay, occasionally glancing up to wave to a neighbor walking down 95th street. "I'm not frustrated in any way," he says. "The fact that I can do what i want to do and have somebody pay for it, well, that's nirvana. You couldn't ask for more."
