Word: hirschfeld
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...consensus of those interviewed in "The Line King" is that Hirschfeld was a genial fellow who mingled freely with the subjects he scratched at, or caressed, with his pen. In as much as his illustration would typically be published while a show was in previews, and then he would attend the opening-night performance, he could hardly hide from the producers and angels. But why would he want to? Hirschfeld seemed perfectly at ease with himself, his work and his Great White World. He knew how hard it was to create a good play. In 1947 he had worked...
...Hirschfeld and his boon companion Perelman made an oddly complementary couple. Their mutual friend Philip Hamburger of The New Yorker recalled that "Sid would go into depression, and then he would become very excited. And I've never seen Al go very far off course. He's a pretty steady pilot." He had to be, considering that he and Mood-swing Sid spent nine months circling the globe for the series of Holiday magazine articles that became the book "Westward, Ha!" Perelman, in a paean to his pal, described Hirschfeld as "a pair of liquid brown eyes, delicately rimmed...
...Like any good waiter, Hirschfeld would offer advice to theater producers. Once or twice he advised them to close what he considered an inauspicious show. He urged Lawrence Langner to shut down a musical called "Away We Go!" (it did all right as "Oklahoma!") and begged Moss Hart not to take the fruitless job of staging a musical based on Shaw's "Pygmalion" ("My Fair Lady"). But his generosity of spirit compelled him to help out struggling theater folk. He had gone to Bali in the late 40s and made a silent movie of the dancers there; on his return...
...couldn't have felt as simpatico with more recent "hardware" musicals - all those flying chandeliers and whirring helicopters. (He pointedly left the chopper out of his "Miss Saigon" drawing.) But Hirschfeld was no Luddite; he was ever open to the Next Thing. As Anais Nin apostrophized to a lover in "Henry and June": "There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation." Hirschfeld was anti-stagnation too. Like his thin pen-lines, he was lithe, blithe and on the move...
...gives the title character a little lesson in art as theology: "Here's how you see God. He's a Columbia recording artist. ... You got your idea of God from where most gay kids get it - the album cover of ?My Fair Lady.' Original cast. It's got this Hirschfeld caricature of George Bernard Shaw up in the clouds, manipulating Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on strings, like marionettes. It was your parents' album, you were little, you thought it was a picture...