The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  “Like what?” we inquired.

  “You must admit,” said M. Clair defensively, “that it is not suitable to CinemaScope.”

  1958

  CARICATURIST — Geoffrey Hellman

  ALBERT HIRSCHFELD, the theatre caricaturist of the Times, forty of whose drawings and gouaches are now on exhibition at the John Heller Gallery, is a calm, friendly, brown-eyed, luxuriantly spade-bearded man of fifty-five with a magisterial air. He was born in St. Louis, where his father, on his way home to Albany after a junket to Texas, had stopped off, married a girl who had just arrived from Russia, and settled down. “Mom didn’t speak a word of English at the time, and Pop didn’t speak a word of Russian,” Mr. Hirschfeld told us over a mushroom omelet one recent afternoon. “He got a job as a travelling salesman. Mom worked in a store. I had two brothers, and we were poor, but I was never aware of it. I studied art in St. Louis; I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw, paint, or sculpt. Mom felt that I had talent, and thought that St. Louis was no place for it, so when I was twelve she packed up Pop and the rest of the family and came here. We got on an Amsterdam Avenue street-car, went to the end of the line, started walking back, and picked out—and moved into—a house at a Hundred and Eighty-second Street, which was then farmland. We later moved to a Hundred and Seventy-seventh Street, where my parents still live. Pop is ninety-one and Mom is eighty-seven. He retired at fifty and took to the park—J. Hood Wright Park. He’s been sitting in that damn park for forty years. He and some friends founded a club, the J. Hood Wright Men’s Club, to keep kids off the street. He got the city to appropriate two hundred thousand dollars for a clubhouse. Robert Moses sometimes asks his advice on matters of community welfare. A month or so ago, Pop gave a lecture at Carnegie Hall in favor of increasing old-age pensions. Pretty good for a man who never knocked himself out working.”

  We asked Hirschfeld fils how about himself. “Well, I went to public school and studied at the Art Students League,” he said, “and at seventeen, since I had to make a living, I got a job as an office boy with Goldwyn Pictures. Two years later, I became art director for David Selznick. I moved over to the Warner Brothers art department, and in 1924, having saved a little money, quit to spend a year in Paris, where I did painting and sculpture. That was a salutary thing. Back here, I continued to paint, began to do caricatures for the Times, and sued Variety on behalf of my beard, which I’d just grown. Variety ran a page-one story about people who weren’t able to get any work growing beards in order to get work, elevator boys growing beards to give them stature, and so forth. My name was the only one in the whole story. My lawyer, David Schenker, advised me to sue, and after a three-year delay the case came up before Judge Peter Schmuck. Schenker tried the case as though it was murder. The jury brought in a verdict of six cents against Variety, plus costs. My lawyer wanted compensatory as well as punitive damages, and urged me to appeal. I had discussed the difference between humor and satire at great length on the witness stand, and found that the appeal would have cost four thousand dollars, much of it going toward printing my remarks, double-spaced, on handmade paper. You have to do this for an appeal. It’s as though you were Max Beerbohm! Well, I wouldn’t do it.”

  Mr. H. had a one-man sculpture show at the Newhouse Gallery in 1928, and since then his work, mostly drawings, has been bought by, among others, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum, the Fogg Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan. His caricatures of new shows appear in the theatrical section of the Sunday Times thirty or forty times a year.

  As part of his job, Hirschfeld, who has written a play himself, faithfully attends out-of-town tryouts and Broadway openings. He is married to a red-haired actress, Dolly Haas, and they have a red-haired thirteen-year-old daughter, Nina, who plays the piano with authority and hopes to become a red-haired actress herself. The Hirschfelds live in a big house, on East Ninety-fifth Street, that was once owned by Jacob Ruppert, the brewer. Nina’s father works her name into all his Times drawings, often concealing it in curlicues of curtains and the folds of costumes. “I started that in a circus poster, on which I wrote ‘Nina the Wonder Child,’ when she was born,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t find the name without a microscope. Nina has a microscope, and she always finds it. I’m told her classmates, at Brearley, look for it every week. I worked ‘Brearley’ in a few weeks ago. The engraving department at the Times has a kind of pool on this; the first to spot ‘Nina’ is the winner. ‘Nina’ is hardest to find when it’s large; sometimes I make the whole design say it. I hardly ever go out during the day. I work in my studio, on the top floor of the house, until the sun is down; then I go out and raise hell. I’m a late stayer-upper. I read from 1 to 3 A.M.—anything that’s in print. I’ve written and illustrated a couple of books—‘Manhattan Oases,’ about speakeasies during prohibition, and ‘Harlem,’ about Harlem.”

  Mr. Hirschfeld finished his omelet and lit a cigar. “I believe that there’s been a subtle change in my style in the last few years,” he said, “and that the reason for this is that people are changing. They’re becoming more standardized. They’re getting to look more and more alike. You used to be able to immediately identify the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, William Jennings Bryan, and even such leading men as John Barrymore and Lou Tellegen. Now things aren’t that clear. Politicians and actors and Presidents all look like advertising men. People all over the world look alike. Americans and Frenchmen and Englishmen all look alike. Twenty years ago, Soviet statesmen looked like Soviet statesmen, but today they look like Bernard Baruch. People don’t write their own books, and Presidents don’t write their own speeches. What does a man leave of himself except a photograph? What would we think of Lincoln if it turned out that the Gettysburg Address was written by C. D. Jackson?”

  On our way to the coatroom, Mr. Hirschfeld told us that he first met his present wife when she was with the Jitney Players, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and he did a summer-theatre drawing of her. “I was smitten with her the minute I saw her,” he said. “A year later, dining at the Samson Raphaelsons’, in Hollywood, I asked Sam if he’d ever heard of Dolly Haas. ‘Ask this fellow. He’s her husband,’ he said, indicating another guest, John Brahm. They’d separated, and I looked her up when I got back, and married her.”

  1958

  PLAYWRIGHT — Lillian Ross

  WE had a talk recently with Lorraine Hansberry, the twenty-eight-year-old author of the hit play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Miss Hansberry is a relaxed, soft-voiced young lady with an intelligent and pretty face, a particularly vertical hairdo, and large brown eyes, so dark and so deep that you get lost in them. At her request, we met her in a midtown restaurant, so that she could get away from her telephone. “The telephone has become a little strange thing with a life of its own,” she told us, calmly enough. “It’s just incredible! I had the number changed, and gave it to, roughly, twelve people. Then I get a call from a stranger saying ‘This is So-and-So, of the B.B.C.’! It’s the flush of success. Thomas Wolfe wrote a detailed description of it in ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I must say he told the truth. I enjoy it, actually, so much. I’m thrilled, and all of us associated with the play are thrilled. Meanwhile, it does keep you awfully busy. What sort of happens is you just hear from everybody!”

  Miss Hansberry gave a soft, pleased laugh. “I’m going to have some scrambled eggs, medium, because, as far as I know, I haven’t had my breakfast yet,” she went on. “I live in the Village, and the way it’s been, people sort of drop in on me and my husband. My husband is Robert Nemiroff, and he, too, is a writer. Yesterday, I got back to writing, and I wrote all day long. For the first time in weeks. It was wonderful. We have a ramshackle Village walkup apartment, quite ramshackle, with living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath, and a little back workroom, and I just stayed in that little old room all day and wrote. I may even get time now to do some of my housework. I don’t want to have anyone else to do my housework. I’ve
always done it myself. I believe you should do it yourself. I feel very strongly about that.”

  The medium scrambled eggs arrived, and Miss Hansberry sampled them vaguely and went on to tell us something of what life has been like since her play opened, a few weeks ago. “I now get twenty to thirty pieces of mail a day,” she said. “Invitations to teas, invitations to lunches, invitations to dinners, invitations to write books, to adapt mystery stories for the movies, to adapt novels for Broadway musicals. I feel I have to answer them, because I owe the people who wrote them the courtesy of explaining that this is not my type of thing. Then, there are so many organizations that want you to come to their meetings. You don’t feel silly or bothered, because, my God, they’re all doing such important work, and you’re just delighted to go. But you’re awfully busy, because there are an awful lot of organizations. The other morning, I came downstairs to walk my dog—he’s sort of a collie, and he’ll be six in September—and there, downstairs, were the two most charming people, a middle-aged couple who wanted me to have dinner with the New Rochelle Urban League before it went to see the play. I just couldn’t say no. Meanwhile, I’d been getting telegrams from Roosevelt University, in Chicago, which is a very wonderful institution back home, asking me to come and speak. I kept sending telegrams back saying I couldn’t come, and then they got me on the phone, and they had me. Once I’m on the phone, I just can’t say no. I sometimes find myself doing things for three or four organizations in one day. The other morning, I started the day by taping a television program. Then I went to the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs Founders’ Day Tea, at the Waldorf, where they were giving out Sojourner Truth Awards— awards named for Sojourner Truth, who was a very colorful orator who went up and down New England and the South speaking against slavery. Then I went home and went to the Square with my dog. When I got back home, I fed the dog and put on a cocktail dress, and my husband and I had dinner in a new Village steak house. Then we went to a reception for a young Negro actor named Harold Scott, who had just made a record album of readings from the works of James Weldon Johnson. A very beautiful album. Then we went home and had banana cream pie and milk and watched television—a program with me on it, as a matter of fact. It was terrifying to see. I had no idea I used my face so much when I talked, and I decided that that was the end of my going on television. The next day was quiet. I had only one visitor—a young Negro writer who wanted to drop off a manuscript for me to read. We had a drink and a quick conversation, and he was off. I actually got to cook dinner—a pretty good one, with fried pork chops, broccoli au gratin, salad, and banana cream pie. I’m mad for banana cream pie. Fortunately, there’s a place in the neighborhood that makes marvellous ones.”

  Miss Hansberry told us that she had written her play between her twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh birthdays, and that it had taken her eight months. “I’d been writing an awful lot of plays—about three, I guess—and this happened to be one of them,” she told us. “We all know now that people like the play, including the critics. Most of what was written about the play was reasonable and fine, but I don’t agree that this play, as some people have assumed, has turned out the way it has because just about everybody associated with it was a Negro. I’m pleased to say that we went to great pains to get the best director and the best actors for this particular play. And I like to think I wrote the play out of a specific intellectual point of view. I’m aware of the existence of Anouilh, Beckett, Dürrenmatt, and Brecht, but I believe, with O’Casey, that real drama has to do with audience involvement and achieving the emotional transformation of people on the stage. I believe that ideas can be transmitted emotionally.”

  “Agreed,” we said, and asked Miss Hansberry for some autobiography.

  “I was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago,” she told us. “I have two brothers and one sister. I’m the baby of the family. My sister Mamie is thirty-five and has a three-year-old daughter, Nantille, who is divine and a character. She was named for my mother, whose name is Nannie, and her other grandmother, Tillie. My older brother, Carl, Jr., is forty, and my other brother, Perry, Sr., is thirty-eight and has an eighteen-year-old daughter, who is starting college and is very beautiful. Carl, Perry, and Mamie run my father’s real-estate business, Hansberry Enterprises, in Chicago. My father, who is dead now, was born in Gloster, Mississippi, which you can’t find on the map, it’s so small. My mother comes from Columbia, Tennessee, which is on the map, but just about. My father left the South as a young man, and then he went back there and got himself an education. He was a wonderful and very special kind of man. He died in 1945, at the age of fifty-one—of a cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, but American racism helped kill him. He died in Mexico, where he was making preparations to move all of us out of the United States. My brother Carl had just come back from Europe, where he fought with Patton’s army. My father wanted to leave this country because, although he had tried to do everything in his power to make it otherwise, he felt he still didn’t have his freedom. He was a very successful and very wealthy businessman. He had been a U.S. marshal. He had founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago. He had fought a very famous civil-rights case on restricted covenants, which he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, and which he won after the expenditure of a great deal of money and emotional strength. The case is studied today in the law schools. Anyway, Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time. I’m afraid I have to agree with Daddy’s assessment of this country. But I don’t agree with the leaving part. I don’t feel defensive. Daddy really belonged to a different age, a different period. He didn’t feel free. One of the reasons I feel so free is that I feel I belong to a world majority, and a very assertive one. I’m not really writing about my own family in the play. We were more typical of the bourgeois Negro exemplified by the Murchison family that is referred to in the play. I’m too close to my own family to be able to write about them.

  “I mostly went to Jim Crow schools, on the South Side of Chicago, which meant half-day schools, and to this day I can’t count. My parents were some peculiar kind of democrats. They could afford to send us to private schools, but they didn’t believe in it. I went to three grade schools—Felsenthal, Betsy Ross, and A. O. Sexton, the last of them in a white neighborhood, where Daddy bought a house when I was eight. My mother is a remarkable woman, with great courage. She sat in that house for eight months with us—while Daddy spent most of his time in Washington fighting his case—in what was, to put it mildly, a very hostile neighborhood. I was on the porch one day with my sister, swinging my legs, when a mob gathered. We went inside, and while we were in our living room, a brick came crashing through the window with such force it embedded itself in the opposite wall. I was the one the brick almost hit. I went to Englewood High School and then to the University of Wisconsin for two years. Then I just got tired of going to school and quit and came to New York, in the summer of 1950. The theatre came into my life like k-pow!” Miss Hansberry knocked a fist into the palm of her other hand. “In Chicago, on my early dates, I was taken to see shows like ‘The Tempest,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Dark of the Moon,’ which absolutely flipped me, with all that witch-doctor stuff, which I still adore. In college, I saw plays by Strindberg and Ibsen for the first time, and they were important to me. I was intrigued by the theatre. Mine was the same old story—sort of hanging around little acting groups, and developing the feeling that the theatre embraces everything I like all at one time. I’ve always assumed I had something to tell people. Now I think of myself as a playwright.”

  1959

  1960s

  VIDAL — Richard Rovere

  NOTHING is easier nowadays than to get a feeling of being entirely surrounded by Gore Vidal. His political drama “The Best Man” fills the Morosco nightly. His film adaptation of T
ennessee Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer” was recently reported to be doing the best business of any movie in the country. “Ben-Hur,” whose script is mainly the work of Mr. Vidal and Christopher Fry, won eleven Oscars. The movie version of his “Visit to a Small Planet”—described by him as the unauthorized version—is being offered in dozens of neighborhood houses. Stay home at night, and like as not you’ll be assailed by Mr. Vidal on television. He is one of the busiest of the panelists, and a while back he appeared in his own television play “The Indestructible Mr. Gore,” which dealt with the life of his grandfather, the late Senator Thomas Gore, of Oklahoma. Pick up a magazine, and if it happens to be the Reporter, you will see that Mr. Vidal is also a theatre critic. Pick up a newspaper, and you will find that he is a Democratic candidate for Congress in the Twenty-ninth District of New York, which is composed of the counties of Dutchess, Ulster, Columbia, Greene, and Schoharie.