When you think of the men who helped shape Broadway over the last century, you probably think of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, and Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and on and on.
Yet it seems obvious that another man — less famous, certainly less wealthy — did about as much to shape the public’s perception of the Great White Way: caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003), whose fluid, comely drawings of individual performers and creators, as well as entire shows, surely reached more cumulative eyeballs than even the biggest hit on Broadway.

Hirschfeld’s much-vaunted line, those pen strokes with which he conjured the essence of figures ranging from Moss Hart to Barbra Streisand, is a case study in the union of form and content: Just as the quivering, tentative style of cartoonist Jules Feiffer was well-suited for his drawings of disconsolate urbanites, the smooth, swooping line of Hirschfeld epitomized the elegance of the larger-than-life personages of his epoch.
Yet, in one of those bizarre ironies in book publishing, an otherwise exemplary new biography of Hirschfeld offers barely a glimpse of its subject’s actual work. Ellen Stern’s Hirschfeld: The Biography was to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2017. But, according to a contemporaneous account in the New York Post, issues surrounding the right to use his illustrations caused the book to be delayed. Now the biography has at last emerged from Skyhorse, the same house that came to the rescue of Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing and a recent posthumous collection of Norman Mailer — but examples of Hirschfeld’s art are sparing: Included are, bizarrely, two drawings of Hirschfeld by others, but the closest we come to his own signature caricatures is a photograph in which he is seen posing in front of a fabulous mural of his work, sharing the space with his high-cheek-boned Frank Sinatra, googly-eyed Bette Davis, and intensely mustachioed Groucho Marx. That’s pretty much it, though.
All the same, Stern manages to paint a comprehensive, even definitive portrait of her subject. A veteran of New York magazine, the author writes with a feature writer’s flair for pithy one-liners and rat-a-tat-tat descriptions. “The 1920s are roaring, and Al is in their midst,” she writes at one point. “He draws Stanley Marcus for his 90th birthday, Rosie O’Donnell for something or other, the agent Sam Cohn as Annie,” she writes later on.
Stern wrote the entire book in the present tense — when Hirschfeld and others are quoted, they haven’t “said” things but “say” things — but the choice, far from an affectation, brings a welcome snappiness to a book the main figures of which come with the faint scent of mothballs. In fact, an author’s note confirms the book’s distant origins: Stern interviewed Hirschfeld just once, for a profile of the artist in GQ in 1987, although her book draws on far more recent research and interviews.
The third son of Rebeka and Isaac Hirschfeld, Al was born in St. Louis, Missouri. There, his love of drawing was inculcated with weekend classes at Washington University’s School of Fine Arts. On the advice of a local portrait artist who worried for the talented lad’s career prospects in the sticks, the Hirschfelds picked up stakes for New York, where the boy was introduced to the milieu he would spend a lifetime committing to paper. “What with moving pictures, the circus, and vaudeville stirring things up all around,” Stern writes, “he becomes a vaudeville kid gazing down from his twenty-five-cent seat at the Palace on Ed Wynn and Nora Bayes, Lillian Russell and Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Bobby Clark, and always Houdini.” He took in his first Broadway show, a piece of nonsense called High Jinks, in 1914. At age 16, Hirschfeld had caught on at the art department of movie producer Samuel Goldwyn; two years after that, he found himself toiling as an art director for movie mogul David O. Selznick.
The game-changer came in 1928, when Hirschfeld, invited to attend a run-through for a double bill written by and starring Sacha Guitry, dashes off a drawing of the Frenchman in costume. Then, at the instruction of a savvy press agent, Hirschfeld produces a fresh copy to be dispatched to the New York Herald Tribune. “It is Hirschfeld’s first published theatrical caricature,” Stern writes. And, since stage shows were covered so generously in the daily press, there were plenty of opportunities to illustrate them. “It was not uncommon in the twenties to have eight or nine drawings in one drama section,” Hirschfeld said.
The quantity of theater journalism has ebbed and flowed since then, but the market for Hirschfeld’s pen-and-ink masterpieces, which came to include sketches of film and TV stars, too (no snob, he drew the casts of Seinfeld and Party of Five), remained strong. Commissions came from publications as diverse as Time and TV Guide, and he maintained a long-long-long-term association with the New York Times.
The pleasure of looking at Hirschfeld’s pictures is not unlike that of listening to a great impressionist — say, Dana Carvey: The viewer is waiting for that shock of recognition — the defining trait or characteristic that suggests, yes, the artist has reproduced that something special about someone famous. Stern is attuned to Hirschfeld’s ability to home in on a particular performer, such as Carol Channing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: “Hirschfeld gives her eyes like doorknobs and a mouth full of lips.”
There was enormous cachet in being drawn by the great man — “I realized that most aspiring actors and actresses wanted to be Hirschfelded,” said an associate of Margo Feiden, his art dealer of many years — though some notables were unhappy with their likenesses; Julie Andrews felt her chin was not that prominent.
Stern assiduously documents the personal life of Hirschfeld, who was married three times and fathered one child, Nina, whose name was surreptitiously embroidered in her father’s illustrations, and effortlessly evokes his circle, encompassing everyone from critic Brooks Atkinson to humorist S.J. Perelman to literary madman Joe Gould.
Was Hirschfeld’s ubiquity an invitation to indifference? Stern ably recounts Hirschfeld’s hot-and-cold relationship with editors at the New York Times, who, perversely, repeatedly tried to sideline him. In 1990, an editor curtly wrote Hirschfeld about a “change in format”: “This will mean, therefore, that we will not be using your drawings in this Friday space from now on.” Hirschfeld’s demotion didn’t last long, but this book proves, if nothing else, that more damage has been done by editors looking to renovate sections or pages than we can know. Hirschfeld’s partnership with the enigmatic Feiden provides a peek into the nuances and oddities of the art market.
In the end, the reader is thoroughly persuaded that American theater’s most glorious luminaries were lucky to have been translated into cartoon form by this titanic talent.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the American Conservative.