Hirschfeld

The Biography

Ellen Stern

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781510759411
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

The definitive biography of Al Hirschfeld, renowned caricaturist and artist. Al Hirschfeld knew everybody and drew everybody. He occupied the twentieth century, and illustrated it. Hirschfeld: The Biography is the first portrait of the renowned artist's life—as spirited and unique as his pen-and-ink drawings. Beginning in the 1920s, he caricatured Hollywood actors, Washington politicians, and—his favorite—celebrities of the stage. Broadway belonged to Hirschfeld. His work appeared in the New York Times and other publications, as well as on book jackets, album covers, posters, and postage stamps, for more than seventy-five years. He lived in Paris, Moscow, and Bali, and in a pink New York townhouse on a star-studded block where his closest friends—Carol Channing, S. J. Perelman, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooks Atkinson, Elia Kazan, Marlene Dietrich, and William Saroyan—flocked in and out. He played the piano, went to jazz joints with Eugene O'Neill, and wrote a musical that bombed. He drove until he was ninety-eight years old and always found a parking space. He worked every day, threw dinner parties twice a week, and hosted New Year's Eve soirees that were legendary. He had three wives, a formidable agent, and a daughter, Nina, the most famous little girl that no one knows. Hirschfeld died in 2003, at the age of ninety-nine. "If you live long enough, " he liked to say, "everything happens." For him, it did. And good and bad—it's all here. Through interviews with Hirschfeld himself, his friends and family (including the mysterious Nina), and his famous subjects, as well as through letters, scrapbooks, and home movies, Ellen Stern has crafted a delightful, detailed, and definitive portrait of Al Hirschfeld, one of our most beloved, and most influential, artists.

1

MEET HIM IN ST. LOUIS

He first appears on a Sunday, as well he should.

June 21 is the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, and the date most often assigned to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the setting of Al Hirschfeld’s birth is no bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. It’s a steamy back bedroom in St. Louis.

Blocks away from the two-family brick house on Evans Avenue, preparations are relentlessly underway for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, originally scheduled to open this year but nowhere near ready, no matter how much pomp attended Teddy Roosevelt’s dedication in May. It is 1903.

While the St. Louis Post-Dispatch boasts of exposing corruption at the post office, the Globe-Democrat offers a solution for overcrowded trains, and the Republic glorifies a dead cardinal, a sweating midwife brings forth the Hirschfelds’ boy. While East St. Louis, across the river, remains awash after a mud levee slid into the Mississippi two weeks ago, baby Albert slides into the world and is swaddled.

He is the third boy for Rebeka and Isaac Hirschfeld. The first, Alexander, is eight. Milton is a year and a half. All three are named for Isaac’s late mother, Mildevine Alexander Kirschbaum Hirschfeld. It’s a pretty extensive tribute, because there are now two Als.

Alexander has claim to “Al Hirschfeld.” Young Albert is “Babe.”

Rebeka is Russian, Isaac is American. She’s been imported to St. Louis by her younger brother, Harry, a tailor. Quite a force in immigration, he’s also brought their parents to settle in the Jewish quarter and live the Orthodox life. Harry keeps a close eye on everyone and lives a few doors away with his wife and five children.

As tailoring threads through the history of Jews without the means to do more, it threads through this family on both sides. Isaac’s father and Babe’s grandfather, Marcus Hirschfeld, came to New York from Prussia in 1867 and found his way to Albany. A twenty-seven-year-old tailor sailing from Hamburg on the Teutonia, he’d left his bride and infant daughter behind until he could afford to bring them over in May 1869.

In Albany, Mildevine became Malvina, and Marcus ran a tailor shop, moving the family from home to home, always upward, Broadway to South Pearl, to Arch, to Broad.

Isaac, their first child born in America, was born on Broadway.

Other than more space for the growing brood, the greater incentive might have been a one month’s concession, meaning a month’s free rent with every move. The Hirschfelds’ most impressive stop was the little brick house on Catherine Street directly across from the splendid Schuyler Mansion. Not only did George Washington sleep here, but so did Alexander Hamilton, while wooing Schuyler’s daughter.

The Hirschfelds attended services at the Romanesque Temple Beth Emeth, where Isaac Mayer Wise, the father of Reform Judaism in the United States, took the pulpit. He introduced such unorthodox practices as praying in English and German as well as Hebrew and allowing men and women to sit together. Too much too soon—he was soon out.

Marcus kept sewing. But Isaac, his oldest son, had no interest in joining him, so he left home to become . . . a cowboy. In 1892, he hitched to a Texas town so resourceful that toads were employed to wipe out roaches in the corner saloon. The Albany City Directory listed Ike that year: “removed to Marshall, Texas.” Why Marshall? A mystery unlikely to be solved, but there he was. And with few skills in most things, least of all cowpoking, he was forced to rely on the family trade.

Despite little affinity for it, he got set up with his own needle, and the locals brought him their duds. He had no knack, but they kept coming. One day, the sheriff brought in his dress suit and said he’d be back for it later. Lickety-split, Ike hung a sign on the door, OUT FOR LUNCH, skedaddled to the station, and headed north.

Wherever he had it in mind to end up, he stopped at a St. Louis boardinghouse on Carr Street. There he bumped into the newly arrived Bekie Rothberg. She spoke only Russian and Yiddish. He didn’t. She was plump and warm and twenty. He was a slim twenty-five. Or twenty-six. However they communicated, sparks flew, love bloomed, and in January 1894 they were married.

The midwife who delivers Al Hirschfeld probably doesn’t speak English too well either, so while she’s good at birthing, she’s not so hot at reporting. More than a month after Hirschfeld is born, a clerk enters the birth date into the St. Louis registry—not as June 21, 1903, but as July 25.

This, for keeps, is Al Hirschfeld’s official birth date, the one he’ll be compelled to use on passports and other legal documents for the rest of his life. And not only that. The name is misspelled: “Hirschfield.”

Downtown, and out of their reach, is theater—plenty of it—at the Olympic, the Imperial, the Gayety. There is opera and vaudeville. And finally, in 1904, there is the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the World’s Fair. Like everybody else, the family Hirschfeld joins the hullabaloo. Pulled along in a wagon, baby Babe licks Milton’s ice cream cone and nibbles Al’s hot dog and gets his fingers sticky with “Fairy Floss,” the maiden name of cotton candy, which goes for twenty-five cents the box.

At one, he’s round-faced and puckish with dark curls and a strong gaze. He gawks at pygmies and contortionists, Apaches and ostriches, glass weavers and cow milkers. On “the Pike”—a thrilling arcade of fantasy and reenactment—he sees a bullfight and the Galveston Flood. Under the dome of Festival Hall, he takes in the world’s largest pipe organ; in Machinery Gardens, a band concert; ragtime at the Grand Basin; and on every lip a new song called “Meet Me in St. Louis,” written for the occasion.

For his first two years, Hirschfeld resides on Evans Avenue without electricity, gas, or running water, except for a pump in the kitchen and a privy in the yard. “I come from a very poor background,” he’ll later say when explaining his resolute work habits, “and the business of paying the room rent is not imaginative. It stays with me forever.”

Over the next seven years, the family will move five times—just like the St. Louisan Tennessee Williams, whose family also skips from flat to flat, and David Merrick, who ends up hating the place so heartily he won’t even fly over it.

Mom is the family force. In 1908, she runs a confectionery on the ground floor of the house at Goodfellow and Page, selling penny candies and ice cream, smokes and soda pop, and probably in-and-out calls, because a private telephone is a rare bird in these parts. Pop is listed in the city directory as a tailor, cutter, even a cigar salesman—which puts him behind the counter of Bekie’s shop—but his primary contribution to the family’s support is tending the boys.

Babe and Milton are at Dozier, a grammar school on Maple Avenue, a block from home. Big Al has a job. They get around on foot or by horse-drawn streetcar; the electric tram costs a nickel in any direction. Ike rides a bike and joins the local branch of the Columbia Wheelmen. As always, the former cowpoke does what he likes, taking things at his own speed.

When a fire breaks out one night, Ike’s in bed while Mom’s yelling and trying to throw the mattress out the window. “Take it easy,” he says, placing his hand on the wall. “It isn’t even warm yet.”

Bekie’s parents won’t come for dinner, because she won’t keep kosher. She goes to shul on the high holy days, lights Sabbath and yahrzeit candles, and uses the Passover matzo for ham sandwiches. “She had her own religion,” Hirschfeld recalls. “She made up her own laws as she went along, and we all followed them.”

In 1911, she leads the family to Kensington Avenue, into a redbrick, semidetached house with flanking bay windows. They’re in the downstairs flat.

In Meet Me in St. Louis, as moviegoers well know, Judy Garland lives in a pretty house on a pretty street and in “The Boy Next Door” sings, “I live at 5135 Kensington Avenue, and he lives at 5133.”

Hirschfeld lore, perpetuated by his family and factotums, claims that Garland’s address is Al Hirschfeld’s address. That when he was doing the poster campaign for the movie, the songwriters were so charmed to hear this that they put it into the song as an inside joke.

In fact, Judy Garland’s address in the movie belongs to the writer Sally Benson, who lived there with her own family until 1910 and later celebrated it in a five-part series—“5135 Kensington”—in The New Yorker.

But Hirschfeld is not the boy next door, nor the boy in the house. He’s the boy across the street. At 5124.

New neighborhood, new school. Now he and Milton attend Clark Public School, an imposing redbrick elementary on Union Boulevard. Erected in 1907, the place is named for William Clark, the Clark half of Lewis and. Here young Hirschfeld learns the day’s basics, including arithmetic, geography, and cursive writing—but mostly he draws.

A pen-and-ink drawing, known as the earliest Hirschfeld work of art, is said to be a portrait of Clark. But it’s not. The building looks like a school all right, but authorities in the St. Louis public school system don’t recognize it.

Whatever the subject, he keeps drawing. “It never occurred to me I could do anything else,” he’ll say years later. It’s all he wants to do. Rebecca (she has now anglicized her name) sees the gift and takes him to the museum in Cass Gilbert’s sumptuous Palace of Fine Arts built for the World’s Fair. She also enrolls him in a Saturday-morning children’s class at Washington University’s School of Fine Arts.

As she stands, now behind her counter at Stix, Baer & Fuller, the city’s foremost department store, she thinks about Babe’s obsession. And when she takes her break in the employees’ sitting room, she becomes friendly with a portrait artist named Charles Marks.

From genteel salons to the Missouri State Fair, Marks shows his work around. He’d come to St. Louis from New York when he was twenty-one, studied at the School of Fine Arts, and established an artistic photography firm with a partner in 1890. “They make high-class oil, pastel and crayon portraits a specialty and aim to do this at popular prices, counting no work as well performed that is not satisfactory to the sitter,” explained a city guide of the time. Now at Stix, Baer, Marks is producing display cards and price tags. After Bekie shows him Babe’s drawings, he agrees to give him lessons and takes him out sketching every Sunday.

And he urges her to get out of town, gloomily predicting that otherwise her talented Babe will be forever stuck in St. Louis, turning out the same display cards and price tags at the same store. So whether it’s faith in his future or merely keeping a step ahead of the landlord, Bekie pulls Albert and Milton out of school in October and takes them all—Ike and the three boys—eastward.

In 1912, the Hirschfelds hit New York.

2

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

From Pennsylvania Station they walk to Sixth Avenue and board the No. 39 streetcar. With no destination but the future, they ride it to the last stop, Amsterdam Avenue and 193rd Street . . . and nearly trip over the edge of Paradise. This is Fort George Amusement Park—or Paradise Park—a sprawling wonderland overlooking the Harlem River, where kids run free and the mother of Lillian and Dorothy Gish runs a candy-and-popcorn stand. But no stopping now. First there’s a roof to find.

The pilgrims straggle south through orchards and fields. When Bekie sees a two-story frame house to rent on 183rd Street between Audubon and Amsterdam, she grabs it. The upper floor costs four dollars a month. Within days, she gets herself a job at Wertheimer’s, a department store on West 181st Street, while Pop enrolls Albert and Milton at PS 132, a redbrick elementary on Wadsworth Avenue.

This is rural terrain in 1912. Mom buys her fruits and vegetables at Willie Serana’s farm on Broadway at 181st—right where the Blue Bell Tavern once stood, doing a brisk bed-and-bar business during the American Revolution, and where the Coliseum Theatre will arrive in 1920, doing brisk show business with the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Gertrude Berg, and Harold Lloyd. In the meantime, there’s the Wadsworth Theatre nearby, offering photoplays and vaudeville.

Vaudeville’s sweeping the country, and anyone with a modicum of flair—or a mama with a dream—wants to shine. And thanks to an expert named Frederic La Delle, anyone can. “I hope you will be a credit to the stage as well as to yourself,” he states in his mail-order primer, How To Enter Vaudeville. “Special talent is not necessary for acting any more than it is for any other profession,” he assures suckers, making the art of freak acts and “chapeaugraphy,” bell ringers and barrel jumpers, trick cyclists and knife throwers seem a cinch. Even for handcuff, chain, and trunk acts, he adds, “No experience or special ability is required.”

Tell that to Harry Houdini.

Martin Beck won’t. Beck’s the boy who discovered young Ehrich Weiss disentangling himself in a St. Paul saloon and became his manager. Now they’re top of the heap. Weiss, famous for his Chinese water-torture cell escape and underwater box escape in the East River, has become Houdini. Beck, now a big shot on the vaudeville circuit, has just built the Palace—the jewel in Keith-Albee’s crown, the house every headliner has to play. Later, Beck will build another theater on Forty-fifth and name it for himself.

Al Hirschfeld enters the world of Broadway in 1914, when he sees his first musical at the Casino Theatre, a Moorish Revival fairy-tale castle at Thirty-ninth Street. For a lad of ten, High Jinks is a jolly introduction. The score, by Rudolf Friml and Otto Hauerbach (later Harbach), is frothy; the setting is France in springtime. “It begins with a laugh, ends with a frolic, and is punctuated by a considerable amount of rollick in the course of its three acts,” states The New York Times.

Once again taking advantage of a rent-free month, the Hirschfelds move to a six-story apartment building at Audubon and 178th, with the added income of two young German boarders. While Mom’s at the store, Alexander is selling men’s hats, and Albert and Milton are memorizing state capitals, and Pop is feeding the birds.

Ike’s not the provider. He’s a bachelor at heart with a Houdini-like yen to escape. And one day, he does. Kissing the family goodbye, he takes off for Boston—by streetcar, no less, one after the other—so the story goes. It takes him a week! And then he comes back, where Mom holds things together and moves them all once again, now a block south, to 598 West 177th Street. The new place has an elevator operator, switchboard operator, canopy, and doorman. The rent is fourteen dollars a month, and that’s it for moving. She and Ike will remain there for the next fifty years.

Al remembers that “all the kids in the neighborhood always came to our house. We never went to their...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• At the Top
• 1. Meet Him in St. Louis
• 2. Manhattan Transfer
• 3. Poster Boy
• 4. Flo
• 5. An American in Paris
• 6. Lines in the Sand
• 7. His Infinite Variety
• 8. Babe in the Woods
• 9. To Russia with Love
• 10. The Times of His Life
• 11. Bali High
• 12. The Girlfriend
• 13. Black and White and Read All Over
• 14. Fiddling on the Roof
• 15. Party Lines
• 16. Hello, Dolly
• 17. War and Pieces
• 18. The Wonder Child
• 19. Show on the Road
• 20. Travels with Sidney
• 21. House and Home
• 22. On the Block
• 23. Wall to Wall
• 24. Facing Facts
• 25. A Heavenly Host
• 26. Game of the Name
• 27. Behind the Scenes
• 28. How Many Ninas?
• 29. A Piece of Work
• 30. Wheeling, Dealing
• 31. Lone Star
• 32. Out of Line
• 33. Changing Times
• 34. Sing Out, Louise!
• 35. Pointing Fingers
• 36. End of the Line
• 37. Ever After
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index