Original subtitles

[ Indistinct chatter ]

WOMAN: Have you ever been drawn by Al Hirschfeld,

- the caricaturist? -MAN: No, I have not.

WOMAN: I define how I look by his drawings.

WOMAN: I've been to Sardi's. Does that count?

WOMAN: And here you are looking wonderful, I must say.

MAN: And he owes me a meal.

WOMAN: Yes, he does.

[ Orchestra warming up ]

[ Conducting baton tapping ]

MAN: The artist Paul Klee said that a line

is a dot out for a walk,

and without Hirschfeld, it's out for a dance.

It's out for a jump. It's out for a frolic,

and you just watch the line,

watch it sometimes, you'll see it curlicue around,

just like music.

[ Music playing ]

ROBERT GOULET: He's drawn me about 10 times.

We have about five Al Hirschfelds in our home.

ROBERT LOGGIA: Yes, he did in Toys In The Attic

and Boom Boom Room.

I did Showboata long time ago,

and he had this wonderful drawing of me dancing.

When I picked up my copy of the New York Times,

and I see your work in it,

it's home to me.

I have two of the most wonderful drawings

of yours, that I treasure.

Yes, I have a wonderful caricature by Al Hirschfeld,

yes.

And every Sunday, I counted Ninas.

I wanted to see how many times he wrote Nina,

and I'd try to find this marvel of mystery,

of where has he signed "Nina,"

"Nina, Nina."

[ Music playing ]

MAN: Hirschfeld represents the history of entertainment

in this country,

really, for the entire century.

I don't know if anybody who's chronicled it better.

LIZA: Thank you.

In the theater, a playwright can create a character

with a few brilliant lines.

The theater has been blessed

by the presence of a great artist

who can create a single brilliant line

and tell you everything about a character.

He's been doing so for close to 70 years.

One of the highest honors a member of our profession

can achieve is to be immortalized

with a stroke of the pen by this master of portraiture.

Just about every show that ever came to Broadway

has benefitted from his inspired drawings.

The Tony Awards joins his millions of fans

in wishing him such a happy birthday,

his 90th birthday this month.

Mr. Hirschfeld, will you stand up.

Ladies and gentlemen, Al Hirschfeld.

[ Applause ]

JULES: The only glamour left in the theater

is what Al Hirschfeld, brings to it

and he is to what he does

what Astaire was to what he did.

Al has the same effortlessness,

the same grace,

the same wit,

and that lighter-than-air quality.

KATHARINE: He certainly really does it well,

so he's great fun.

I mean, looking at his stuff is just--

it's a treat.

Hilarious, me playing the piano,

tells the whole story... terrifying.

[ Laughing ]

FLORENCE: When he went to see a show, he kept a little pad

in his pocket and made sketches in his pocket

of what he was later going to do

on a bigger scale.

CAROL: He's captured the performance

and the red blood corpuscles

going around-- that go around,

the adrenaline that's shooting off,

and the electricity -- he captures it,

right there on paper.

It's the magic of the theater.

STEFAN: Al is considered one of the very high art form,

and it's a pity that he has to be known as a caricaturist,

but that's the only word for what he does.

The word itself

comes from an Italian word, caricatura,

which means "to stuff a sausage".

And what that has to do with anything,

I don't know.

MAN: There's Al Hirschfeld, and then there are

the other caricatures.

It's like Sondheim

writes musicals, and there's Sondheim musicals,

and then there's everybody else's musical.

I mean, he does a different kind of art form.

[ Car honking ]

PHILIP: The other interesting thing about Al

is his driving.

He's in touch with some gods

that the rest of us don't know anything about.

MARIA: When Al drives a car,

everybody else

counts their rosaries or their beads

or says, "Have 'I made out my will?"

AL: Slower or keep it going?

MAN: Yeah, a little slower.

MARIA: Most of the time, they don't dare say

that they're scared to death.

WOMAN: Okay, just pull in here.

You're too close to the white car.

AL: You're gonna get your car hit.

-WOMAN: No, stop, stop, stop. -MARIA: Nothing ever happens.

Dear God, hear me, nothing ever happens.

MAN: Al Hirschfeld was aisle-struck early on.

Russel Crouse was a playwright

with Howard Lindsay who did a number of hits.

The one most memorable isLife with Father,

and he met Al Hirschfeld

early on when Hirschfeld was breaking in as a caricaturist.

He described him as a person

who had had a black beard

and very young eyes, and it reminded him of a--

of a little boy looking over a well-trimmed hedge.

And the hedge has gotten white,

but the little boy is still looking over it.

AL: Well, I've drawn ever since I could hold a pencil.

Actually, all kids draw.

I just never stopped.

[ Piano playing ]

I was the youngest of three brothers,

born in 1903,

oddly on the longest day of the year.

June the 21st.

My oldest brother was called Al.

I don't know why we were both called Al,

but we both were.

I was Albert, and he was Alexander.

It complicated our bank accounts as we grew older.

Al was a gifted pianist, and he hated the piano.

Never wanted to play the piano,

and he ran away from home and became a salesman.

He went on the road selling peanuts.

My other brother, who I was much closer to,

Milton, he died during the flu epidemic

in the first World War.

I was of that generation that missed both wars, actually.

It was a very odd thing, but people of my age

were too young for the first World War

and too old for the second World War.

When my parents met, they didn't speak

each other's language.

My father had come to St. Louis

from Albany, New York,

where his father was a tailor.

Pop spoke only English.

My mother who arrived in St. Louis from Russia

spoke only Russian and Yiddish.

I guess love or affection conquers all.

I attribute my longevity to my parents.

Pop lived to be 93.

Mom to 91.

DOLLY: Al grew up with this fierce woman,

fierce for life

and the knowledge

that she had a very talented son.

AL: As a kid in St. Louis,

there was an artist there,

and he used to take me out drawing

on the weekends,

and he convinced my parents

to come to New York, that there was no future for me

in St. Louis, and so my mother,

who ran the family, really,

picked us all up and brought us to New York.

Well, we arrived in New York, when I was about 12,

and we arrived at Penn Station

and got on the Amsterdam Avenue street car

and went to the end of the line,

and we started walking down through mostly farmland...

It was all apple orchards up there,

and we got to as far as about 183rd Street,

and there was a little house there,

and my mother went in

and then inquired about an apartment,

and we rented the top floor of this house

for four dollars a month.

Seems ridiculous, but my father never worked.

My mother worked.

And my father took care of the kids.

He was marvelous with kids.

He was the umpire of the ball game,

and that sort of thing.

My father was an original.

He started the trotting races on the Harlem River Drive.

In his later years, he invented the phrase

"senior citizen."

My mother was the breadwinner in our family.

She worked in department stores,

had a candy store in St. Louis.

She was the one who supported us.

[ Music playing ]

AL: When I was about 14,

my mother took me to see a musical comedy

called "Hijinks" at the Maxine Elliott theater,

and that was my first experience

in the theater, and I was enchanted with it.

It just transported me to another world.

And I had discovered vaudeville.

I became a buff at vaudeville,

went every Monday afternoon to the Palace theater.

Signs of a misspent youth.

MAN: From coast to coast stretched an endless chain

of vaudeville houses, forever prosperous.

Offering a lifetime of bookings to popular acts.

AL: You might say that I was stage-struck.

I was mesmerized by the stage.

I found myself sitting out in front

performing in my chair.

Actually doing a visual response to what I was seeing.

[ Music playing ]

AL: Almost everybody had to be in vaudeville.

That was their training.

Between burlesque and vaudeville,

all the comics came out of there, you know.

W.C. Fields,

Ed Wynn,

Marx Brothers.

[ Music playing ]

-MAN: Hey, hey. -AL: Weber and Fields.

MAN: Hey, buddy, stop, don't you-- don't lay it down.

You put the oyster in the milk.

And you drown the oyster.

No, you don't drown the oyster.

Hey, what is that you got there?

Why, that's a newspaper.

I thought it was wrapping paper.

That's the evening news.

It appears like a post.

AL: There was a thing called Scandinavia.

I doubt if that rings a bell at all.

It was done in a kind of a Swedish accent, you know.

♪ Scandinavia♪

♪ I love you♪

♪ I thank you, fine Swedish gal♪

♪ You know for you I would die♪

♪ But never ask me to try♪

♪ Those Swedish pastry of yours♪

♪ Because they think somehow♪

♪ I don't wanna die now♪

♪ Oh, Scandinavia♪

♪ As a cook... afraid♪

♪ You'll never do♪

♪ But when you sing those songs♪

♪ You'll make those music sing those songs♪

♪ And make those music♪

♪ Scandinavia♪

♪ I love you♪

He didn't really begin as a caricaturist.

He began as a sculptor.

I don't know if you have seen his two first efforts

when he was 14 and 17.

Well, I started out actually -- I wanted to be a sculptor.

Sculpture is really a drawing that you fall over in the dark,

but it's a drawing, it's a three-dimensional drawing.

Practically, all the mediums I worked in,

watercolor and oil

and then lithography

and etching...

I went to the National Academy of Art

at night, and the Art Students League.

But how to make a living was very difficult.

But I finally got a job,

quite by accident, like all things in life,

at Goldwyn Pictures,

Howard Dietz was the advertising manager there.

And I got a job there at four dollars a week

in the art department.

I worked at Metro Pictures

before it became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

and First National before it became Warner Bros.

At Metro, I did all the comedians,

Charley Chase,

Laurel and Hardy,

Buster Keaton,

and Charlie Chaplin

for Pathé Pictures.

It's hard to believe

but I was only 18 or 19 years old

when I became art director

of Selznick Pictures.

DANIEL: He worked for my grandfather, L.J. Selznick

in 1916, 1917.

It was his first job in New York

when my grandfather Selznick

was producing silent pictures.

AL: And the old man Selznick

and his son David

suggested that I could take over the art department,

which I did.

And I opened a separate place on 53rd Street.

I had a studio, and I hired all of the artists

that were on the payroll at Selznick.

And after about two months, I was getting trade acceptances,

and they went bankrupt.

And I found myself owing an awful lot of money.

I was then about 19,

so I took a job again at Warner Brothers

and paid off all my debts.

And once I had finished that,

that was the changing point in my life, really,

because at that point, my uncle came to New York.

And he was very proud of the fact

that I paid off all my debts, and so on.

He said, "How would you like you go to Europe?"

[ Music playing ]

AL: So, I said, "Well, I'd love to go,

but I've never thought about it."

So, he gave me $500,

and I bought a passage on the maiden voyage

of the SS De Grasse.

It was a French liner.

One-cabin ship,

and it was $65.

[ Music playing ]

AL: That whole romantic idea of Paris in the '20s

attracted most of the writers and painters at the time.

I rented a studio with two other fellows.

It was $33 apiece.

So, that was a hundred dollars a year.

We had running water but no hot water.

So, we all grew a beard

because it was impossible to shave.

It's so long ago, it never occurred to me to shave since.

Although on one occasion, I must say,

that I shaved off half of my beard

on one side and half my mustache on the other

and came around the dome,

thinking this would startle everybody,

and nobody noticed in the end.

I was the tap dancer and played the ukulele

in Zelli's, which was a night club

on the Right Bank.

Well, it was a wonderful time to be alive

and around in Paris.

Everybody was painting the great picture

and writing the great American novel.

There was Hemingway,

Dos Passos, Picasso, Maurice Chevalier.

MAN: [ Singing in French ]

AL: But the great toast of Paris in those years

was Josephine Baker.

[ Singing in French ]

MAN: Now we're on our way to the world-famous...

-AL: I came back to the States. -MAN: ...Madison Square Garden

- for the big benefit... -AL: One evening in 1926,

I went to the theater

and Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps

were performing.

And during the show, I made some sketches

on the playbill,

drawings, were very rough,

and Dick Maney,

the press agent who accompanied me

looked at it and said,

"Look, why don't you put that on a clean piece of paper

and let me try and sell it to one of the newspapers?

I did, and he placed it in the Tribune.

And the following week,

the Tribune called and asked me to do a drawing.

That's how it started.

And that was it.

It never occurred to me

that I'd be making a living at it.

WOMAN: ♪ Come on near♪

♪ Come on near♪

♪ It's the best band in the land♪

♪ They can play a bugle♪

♪ Like you never heard before♪

♪ They'll come at you if you wanna go to war♪

♪ They're just -- come on board...♪

PAULA: Al didn't have to lock himself up

in a room to do these drawings.

He was able to work with swarms of people around.

And he was using the ubiquitous barber chair.

AL: It's the last functional chair made, I think.

It goes up and down, becomes a chaise lounge,

it turns around.

You have to fight to work in a chair like this.

I worked on-- originally onThe Tribune

and thenThe Old World,

and theTelegram Telegraph,

andBrooklyn Eagle.

I remember the Brooklyn Eagle was $7.50 a column.

And they let me do whatever

I wanted to do on that first page.

And I devised a Machiavellian scheme for paying the room rent

by devising a... kind of a pie-shaped thing.

It came to a point at one end

and then stretched out for eight columns.

So, that came to, we'll say $40, you see, for the eight columns.

And then I have another banner

high on that side coming to a point on this side.

And I remember Dick Maney

said he's not gonna pay for those last three columns

because there's nothing in there.

It's just an empty space.

This went on for years.

I remember doing a drawing of Harry Kurnitz's play.

And it was a nude.

TheTimes wouldn't run it

unless I put a brassiere on her.

So, I put a brassiere on it,

and it ran inThe Times with a brassiere,

and it ran inThe Tribune without it.

And I think a lot of publications,

I thinkLife Magazine picked it up,

and had had, I think, called it "All the Nudes

That's Fit to Print."

WOMAN: ♪ Use...♪

♪ Your imagination♪

♪ Just take this motto for your theme♪

♪ And soon every night♪

♪ Will be crowded with delight♪

♪ And every day♪

♪ Will be a dream♪

[ Music playing ]

AL: I was very interested in politics,

as a young man.

And I think every young person should be.

And I went to the Soviet Union

to cover the theater.

And I stayed there a year.

This was 1927.

And I must say the theater was marvelous.

[ Music playing ]

AL: In those years, I was very left.

The only paper that would publish my political drawings

wasThe New Masses.

And so, I worked for them for a long time.

I remember doing a drawing one time

of the parliament in London bombed.

I had all the members of parliament in gas masks

and Chamberlain addressing them with peace in our time.

I brought it down to The Times

when the parliament was bombed.

Thinking it had some news.

Markel, who was the editor then, said,

"No, it's a communist drawing."

And I know what he meant by that because it's a--

was a lithograph,

and lithography was taken over

by the communist party at that time.

The symbols were very odd.

I mean, all the-- all the left-wing artists

working as-- in lithography.

He said, "Why don't you take it to The New Masses?"

So I said, "Well, okay."

And I took it to The New Masses,

and they used it in double-spread.

So he said, "I told you, it's a communist drawing."

So I said, "Okay, it's a communist drawing."

But, any rate, I decided then that that's not my field.

I wasn't capable of switching my viewpoint

as easily as it is editorially to do.

I like people, and customs, and manners, that kind of thing,

and that's my field, more or less.

STEPHAN: When Al Hirschfeld said he didn't have the venom

to be a political cartoonist,

it was not politics alone,

it was also his art form.

I don't think that a person who has as much affection

as he does for the people that he draws

could ever be mean,

and most people think of caricature as mean.

[ Music playing ]

PAULA: He's a social historian, and always has been,

in the same way that Noeël Coward was.

And people thought lightly of his plays,

but then the years go by,

and they're revived and you say,

"Hey, this fella really knew what he was looking at."

[ Music playing ]

STEFAN: Just take a look at his pictures and you'll understand

how much he knows about people.

Often people look like hunting animals

or hunted animals.

And hunted animals always have their eyes in the side,

like rabbits, and hunting animals

always have their eyes in the front like wolves,

and he understands that.

And take a look at it sometimes,

you see, particularly with young women,

they always look very vulnerable

and have their eyes in the side

because they're being hunted by men

who always have their eyes in the front.

And then as they got to be

in their late 20s or early 30s, and they wanna get married,

their eyes start to move toward the front, and then they become

the hunting animal,

and he understands that.

[ Music playing ]

AL: Well, after watching people for 90 years,

you pick up a few things.

[ Music playing ]

AL: In the late '20s, theNew York Times decided

it wanted first crack at my drawings.

The editor then, Lester Markel,

didn't like seeing them in competing newspapers.

Mr. Markel said, "Listen, can't we make some sort of a deal?"

And I said very simply, "Easy.

Just cross my palm with silver, and I'm your fella."

So we shook hands on that,

and I've been covering the arts for them ever since.

Well, the times in those years was very conservative,

and whenever I would do a drawing

that I thought had some merit,

I was called on the carpet by Mr. Markel,

and he would say, "Make it less caricature.

Can't you make people look a little more attractive?

I mean, when I go to the theater,

I see beautiful people,

but when I pick up theTimes on Sunday,

I see a lot of animals cavorting around."

He said, "Is there anything we can do about that?"

And I said, "Yes, there is.

You can get somebody else to do the drawing.

What you want is an eye, ear, nose and throat man,

you know, to make these drawings

and copy them academically

and anatomically, and make them pretty.

I find no wit in that,

and I don't like to do that kind of thing.

And we would always part

shaking hands, and he would tell me

that he'd liked my drawings and so on.

[ Music playing ]

PAULA: I met him and I would--

I think must have been 35-- 1935,

and I was working with Orson at the time

and '35, I did "Horse Eats Hat"

and in '36, we did "Doctor Faustus."

Al was legally married

but separated from his first wife,

whom I never met.

Her name was Flo Allen,

and she was a chorus girl in Earl Carroll's Vanities.

I met Al's mother,

whom everyone called "Mom."

Friday was Mom's day,

and she would come down and make a huge meal,

and a lot of people would come and eat it,

and that was sacrosanct, that belonged to her.

Al was not self-revealing,

in the sense of discussing things a lot.

In the years

when he was starting his career,

he had made wonderful watercolors

and lithographs, and nobody seemed really interested

in any of his work except the caricatures,

and I think that that was very hard for him,

but you'd never know it from Al.

How he feels is totally his business.

He had his own divining rod about the world

and the people he liked,

and I remember particularly George Braidwood McCoy,

I'll never forget it.

And I'm not quite sure what he did,

but he always had one night a week

that he slept on Al's couch.

He would check into my studio,

where he slept many nights a week.

He had two or three places like that

that he could cadge in.

During the 1939 World Fair,

he slept in the Royal Scot.

The expression "the real McCoy" is based on this fella.

[ Laughing ]

[ Music playing ]

PAULA: One of my great experiences

was going up to the Apollo Theater

within those days

to hear Louis Armstrong.

And I've never heard Louis Armstrong.

And he had a 14-year old

soloist on the program,

named Ella Fitzgerald.

[ Music playing ]

AL: In 1931,

I went to Tahiti with my first wife,

Florence Hobby,

whose stage name was Flo Allen,

and we stayed there for a couple of months,

and this very romantic adventure

broke up our marriage.

I had a friend, a caricaturist,

Miguel Covarrubias who was living in Bali at the time,

and we corresponded quite often,

and I was telling him

after being in Tahiti for about two months,

I found it to be terrible.

It was a rum-running port, corrupt,

horrible place to be, really.

Food was awful and pimply-faced,

syphilitic natives.

It was unbearable,

and Miguel was writing back to me,

telling me what a wonderful place Bali was.

So I said, "When you leave,

leave the bicycle, and plates,

and everything else, and I'll make it there somehow."

He did. He left his bicycle, dishes,

and it was very easy for me

when I arrived some months later.

[ Music playing ]

AL: Everything that Covarrubias had told me

came to be true.

The music was sophisticated,

marvelous, gamelan orchestras,

disciplined dancers,

wonderful food.

It was paradise, actually.

[ Music playing ]

PAULA: When he went to the Far East,

he saw this unbelievably strong light,

and he understood the line,

the black line.

[ Music playing ]

AL: I have discovered that I think in line so vividly

that when I paint, I'm thinking of drawing.

I mean, it's not accidental that the great graphic artists

come from the Far East --

Japan, China,

they're all graphic artists.

And in those countries, the sun bleaches the color out,

so that leaves everything in line.

It's all light and shadow,

and the shadow is pure as black and white.

MAN: I know he admires

the great Japanese woodblock artists

who were also masters of line,

people like Utamaro.

But Utamaro, for instance, wasn't really interested

in making portraits of people.

His were kind of idealized visions

of beautiful women.

I was running out of money then.

I had-- well, running out.

I didn't have any when I started.

But I didn't know how I was gonna get off the island.

I had been there for about a year,

and Chaplin arrived with his brother Sydney.

Charlie Chaplin.

And I had drawn him before in his earlier movie for Pathé.

Well, he bought a lot of watercolors of mine,

which managed to pay my fare back to the United States.

I don't know how I would've gotten back without that.

WOMAN: ♪ Nothin' but blue skies♪

♪ From now on♪

Al's strength

came early on when he went to Bali,

and he found this floodlight of sun,

and I don't think he could capture it again

until he came to the theater.

The theater is after-- totally artificial.

I mean, the light comes up from the klieg lights,

and the footlights, and the spotlights,

and there's nothing natural at all.

In fact, he has said to me, and I say he's said

to other people that nature is really terrific,

but he wouldn't wanna live there.

[ Music playing ]

Daumier is-- if you think of him

as sort of the quintessential Parisian caricaturist

of the 19th century,

was an artist who's primarily concerned with realism,

social protests,

and I think that Al Hirschfeld's work,

not as a tool of social protest,

but his way of drawing our attention

to the remarkable

and distinctive personalities of our time

and fixing them in some highly stylized form,

that enables us

to remember them forever.

You think of Hirschfeld as being one of the very small

and happy band,

there's David Levine,

there's Ronald Searle in England,

to some degree Ralph Steadman, in a much, much darker vein.

There's Covarrubias

in the beginning of the century of the-- in the '20s and '30s.

I suspect that the kind of key moment for Hirschfeld

was when he saw Covarrubias' caricatures forVanity Fair,

and saw the caricature didn't just have to be a kind of crude

knockabout political humor,

but could be something that was immensely

stylish and advanced.

So I think that Covarrubias is probably the kind of

the ghost in the machine,

the presiding spirit of Hirschfeld's work.

AL: Well, Covarrubias and I had--

at one point, shared a studio together,

and he was certainly a great influence on me.

And then later there was Johnny Held.

He was the first one to use the thin line,

actually, he and Laurence Fellows.

Some other artists out there were Al Frueh, Sam Norkin,

who imitated me.

[ Laughing ]

No.

My work is not in Sardi's Restaurant.

MAN: Well, I think Al really comes out

of sort of two sources, one is Aubrey Beardsley.

Aubrey Beardsley was a great Edwardian artist.

The other, really, is Max Beerbohm.

Max Beerbohm was a terrific caricaturist

of the Victorian Era

who lasted well into the '50s.

He used to do things like "The Old Self

Meets the Young Self", and he would have H.G. Wells

in his 20s meeting H.G. Wells in his 60s,

and the young H.G. Wells would say,

"All gone according to plan, I see."

You know, and Al would do the same thing, in a way,

he'll take two people

who look more or less alike

and have them share the same eye,

or he'll invent a position

for a character to be in that he or she

was never in, in order to show his design sense.

[ Music playing ]

[ Singing in foreign language ]

DOLLY: When I met Al,

I said, "I don't know who did it."

But I saw a wonderful drawing of Chaplin.

I think it was in The New Yorker.

"It was in The Times," he said.

"And I did it."

Well, we were enchanted with each other

when we first met, yes.

She was an extremely well-known actress in Europe.

She was a big star in Europe.

[ Music playing ]

AL: She made "Broken Blossoms" in London,

which was a very popular movie here.

DOLLY: He came to do a drawing of me

while I was doing "Summer Stock."

AL: She was doing a play called "Her Cardboard Lover."

I went backstage, which I rarely do.

I met her, and I invited her to have a coffee.

Dolly and I decided to get married,

and we were on our way down to the city hall

to get a license,

and it occurred to me on the way down,

I said to Dolly,

"I'm not sure that I am divorced, you know."

She said, "Well, you better find out, you know."

So, we got out of the cab,

I phoned my ex-wife,

and I said, "Flo, are we divorced?"

And she said, "No."

I said, "Well, I'm on my way to get a marriage license."

She said, "Well, better get a divorce first."

So, that was that.

Well, I met Dolly and Al because we were neighbors.

I have a house, three houses up from them,

and I always thought of Dolly

as a friend of my mother's generation,

of my mother's world,

being German,

being a famous, famous performer in Germany.

Dolly was already a star long before Dietrich was,

although Dietrich wouldn't like to admit that.

My mother never understood Dolly.

But then that's easy to understand.

Dietrich never could understand good people.

Dolly fulfilled the function that great wives sometimes do

with their husbands.

She made it possible for him to concentrate

entirely on what he was doing

all day long in that barber's chair

that he worked in upstairs and had--

had nothing to do

with the running of the household,

and so on and so forth.

Dolly took care of all of those measures.

AL: Dolly you wanna come here, take a look at this, will you?

Anything I left out or...

DOLLY: I miss... just a shade.

Where? Here?

Mm-hmm, altogether on her...

dress.

No?

Yeah.

Except she wears white, that's so difficult to do,

I could... yeah.

I have her approval because I have a tendency

to go overboard a lot and...

she straightens me out every now and then,

and tells me what to--

this doesn't look like the person

or if it's too exaggerated

or doesn't communicate.

And that's very helpful.

I listen to her very carefully.

[ Chuckling ]

[ Music playing ]

MAN: Zealous shows to remind us of our heritage

and the fighting origin of this nation.

The greatest production of them all,

the audience is highly selective.

WOMAN: ♪ We'll be singing♪

♪ Hallelujah♪

♪ Marching through Berlin♪

♪ We'll be singing♪

♪ Hallelujah♪

♪ Marching through Berlin♪

♪ Marching through... ♪

♪ Berlin...♪

[ Crowd cheering ]

[ Music playing ]

ALL: ♪ There is nothing like a dame♪

♪ Nothing in the world♪

ARTHUR: The theater was throbbing

with glamour and excitement

every night of the week,

there was a opening of a musical

or a play by the--

by the cream of the cream.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter,

they were all there,

there was no page,

no drama page anywhere

that sparkled the way ours did.

This was the time of Katharine Cornell,

Ethel Merman,

Helen Hayes,

of course, a Lynn Fontanne

who prided herself

on this glorious swan's neck

was delighted when Al

would draw the neck

and make it as long as it could be,

'cause Al sometimes did offend an actor,

and actors of-- are,

you know, they're-- some of them are primadonnas,

and they would complain and say they wouldn't go on,

there were histrionics and tears,

and this would be conveyed

by the producers and the theater owners

to the publisher, and it stopped there.

AL: I had one difficult period, I made a drawing of a dancer,

I forget his name, it seemed to me it'd be

a reasonable drawing,

very realistic, and they had some

kind of gaiety to it, and movement,

and...

but he took umbrage at it

and threatened to leave the show,

now the show was threatening

to pull all our advertising out,

of theTimes.

He just raised hell about that drawing,

and... but I must say The Times

paid no attention to it.

I feel with age

instead of becoming more of a curmudgeon

he became more benign.

AL: As a matter of fact, it's very difficult to offend

anybody anymore,

it's almost impossible.

I did a drawing of Merrick, producer, David Merrick.

And not one of my favorite characters,

and I had him as Santa Claus,

snaffletooth with a bell, book, and candle,

and I made it about as vicious as I could,

and Merrick bought the drawing and used it as a Christmas card.

So,

the days of winding up in the clink are over.

Brooks Atkinson

was the conscience

of our theatrical times,

and he wasn't going to let anyone

change Al's tone or his art.

Atkinson had great respect and regard for my drawings,

as I did for his writing,

it would never occur to me to tell him how to write,

and it never occurred to him to tell me how to draw.

MAN: Al went to the-- to the rehearsals

to do his drawings,

and, of course, Brooks went on the opening night.

He was totally on his own.

Hey, Morton.

Are we making a change?

Yes, Dick and Oscar wanna move this song

out of the first act.

Now you're going to sing it to your sister

just before our wedding.

He did the drawings before the reviews appeared.

So he never knew

what Brooks Atkinson was going to write.

♪ I want you♪

♪ You know who♪

People say to me, "Well, you've seen so many shows,

can't you tell whether it's going to be a hit or not?"

And I always tell them no,

and I have a classic story on that,

a show opened in New Haven, a thing called "Away We Go."

And after the show,

Lawrence Langner, who was the co-producer,

he was at the Theater Guild,

asked me to meet him for a--

have a cup of coffee with him in Taft's Hotel--

and so there was Billy Rose

and Mike Todd together,

and then Lawrence Langner said,

"Now, I ask you, fellas."

He's -- to level with me, he said, "I'm tone deaf.

I don't know anything about musicals."

And this is absolutely bankrupting

the Theater Guild,

and "What do you fellas think of it?"

"Do you think it has a chance?" you know.

There was a long quiet descended on us,

and Mike Todd said, "You want the truth, Lawrence?"

He said, "Yes."

He said, "Well, if it was my show,

I would close it,

take your lumps, forget about it,

you know, just close it, don't open in Boston,

you don't have a chance."

And Billy said, "Now, wait a minute,

there's a couple tunes in there that are not bad.

I would open it.

Rearrange the thing and so on."

I came back toThe Times

and told Brooks that I didn't think it might be--

it might not come in, you know,

it looked like it was going to close in New Haven.

And Ziegfeld Folly was opening the same week,

and I went up to Boston

the following day to do the Follies,

and I thought that was terrible, it was just awful,

and on my way out,

the press agent for the guild

said, "Change the title to 'Oklahoma'."

He said then, "That's not bad."

Now, we go to that opening

and the first song in the show

was the song that ended the first act

and now started it,

it was, "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning."

And you realized that you're in the presence of a-- of a hit,

it's unbelievable with a--

it's that kind of trenched insanity

that takes place,

no one can predict it,

you know, no one.

♪ Everything's going my way♪

AL: I remember sitting up

until about 3:00 in the morning

with Moss Hart, trying to talk him out

of doing "My Fair Lady".

I said, "You must be out of your head

and try to do "Pygmalion", which is a marvelous story,

and they just finished the movie with Wendy Hiller,

great movie...

I said, "How are you going to improve on that

by having somebody do a dance or sing a song?

I mean, it's so crazy."

And he said, "Well, I don't know.

I got a point of view about it, and-- so that was that,

now we go to that opening,

and I said to Dolly, my wife,

"You know, if you really believe in something,

in a musical,

you can write a musical about an ashtray, you know."

Playwrights are made in heaven,

I mean, you cannot--

you cannot just say, "I'm gonna write a play."

You can't drop a stitch when you're having a good play.

Once the people go like this, forget it, you've lost them.

AL: How on earth I got involved in creating a play

is beyond any form of rational thinking.

True, my collaborators were the best in the business.

I wrote a play with S.J. Perelman,

Vernon Duke did the music,

Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics,

Boris Aronson designed the sets,

disaster,

absolute disaster.

The show folded in Philadelphia,

and we had to leave the country,

that's how S.J. Perelman and I happen to go around the world.

We came back about nine months later,

and all was forgiven by then.

Al should never try to write a play,

with all due respect,

you know, shoemaker should stick to his last,

everybody has to stick to what they can do best.

Next to a sonnet, it's the most difficult art form

to write a good play.

PHILIP: Almost any image we have of S.J. Perelman

the humorist and writer

comes from caricatures that Al has done of him.

You get him in all kinds of moods,

the observation is fabulous.

I think he was a kind of balance wheel for Syd.

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.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

When I first joined the drama department,

Al always was on top of page one of the drama section.

We always thought our competitors

a little further downtown

at theHerald Tribune were eating their hearts out

because we had Al.

Al was ours.

[ Music playing ]

[ Car honking ]

WOMAN: Brooke's acting again.

She's a critic, for heaven's sakes.

MAN: Hirschfeld was really a--

he always felt he stood side by side with us,

on the other side of the footlights.

-Yes? -MAN: Five minutes, please.

Thank you.

Dim the curtain lights.

Curtain.

[ Applause ]

[ Music playing ]

AL: I made a lot of home movies,

and I made a film in Siam

of a Balinese dancer,

and the Princess Poon

allowed me to photograph

two of the royal dancers.

They were sewn into the costumes,

and I thought this would be very helpful

to Rodgers and Hammerstein,

I know were doing a musical about Siam,

and I called Dick Rogers, told him about it,

and both Rodgers and Hammerstein came here

with a set designer,

and I ran the film off for them,

and they were very grateful for it,

because I don't think it's ever been photographed before.

[ Music playing ]

You stay there. I wanna see what happens

when you kneel down

and look under Mrs. Anders' skirt.

Take it from your bow to the king.

Yeah, but look up-- look up. You're interested

in what's going on under that big hoopskirt, good.

[ Music playing ]

♪ When you see a Joe♪

♪ Saving half of his dough♪

♪ You can bet, they'll be minkin' it for some doll.♪

She makes me nervous to see her sitting there

sucking on them pigtails.

WOMAN: Braids.

Furthermore, there's no use our discussing

a certain party.

I ask you, sir, what sort of word is that?

MAN: ♪ It's "aoow"♪

♪ And "gaarn" that keep her in her place♪

♪ Not her wretched clothes♪

♪ And dirty face♪

[ Music playing ]

MAN: ♪ Boy, boy♪

♪ Crazy boy♪

♪ Stay loose, boy♪

♪ Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it♪

♪ Turn off the juice, boy♪

Oh, that's-- oh, that's grandpa.

-Grandpa? -That's my grandpa.

Grandpa drew that,

see that's grandpa's name,

and that's Luciano Pavarotti.

And he puts mommy's name in here,

and grandpa's gonna tell you where it is,

but there it is.

-AL: That's right. -NINA: There, see.

N-I-N-A,

he's been putting my name in his drawing

ever since I was born.

AL: Well, it started off as a very innocent little gesture.

To herald her appearance on the Earth,

and I didn't realize that anybody knew about it,

and when I stopped after about two or three weeks,

letters came in,

and I discovered

in the engraving department at the New York Times,

they were betting on who could find the Ninas,

and then I got a letter that there ought to be some way

of identifying how many there are

in the drawing.

So I put a number in after my signature.

Sometimes when Al has an exhibition,

an entire family appears

from the smallest three-or-four year old,

to a great grandfather.

I like finding the Ninas because it's like a puzzle

inside of a painting.

So it's always a challenge.

[ Laughing ]

♪ Nina, Nina, me, myself and I♪

♪ Oh, how you stick with us ♪

♪ Nina, Nina, can you tell us why you're so ubiquitous ♪

♪ It is likely you have friends in lofty places♪

♪ For I find your name adorning♪

♪ A famous faces♪

♪ That clothing and accessories their friendly...♪

MAN: It's a signature, it's a gimmick, it doesn't--

I don't feel one way or the other about it,

in fact, I think, if he had fewer Ninas,

people would take him more seriously.

I think that's part of the game,

it's like a crossword puzzle

that people look forward to.

MAN: Oh, I think you could spot a Hirschfeld

a mile away,

and it isn't all just because of that Nina business

that-- that's a diversion.

WOMAN: One time

Al put the name of Nina's best girlfriend

into the drawing,

and he got so many letters,

and congratulations, having had a second child.

But I can't stop it.

I don't know how to stop it, but I've tried,

and the mail comes in,

and people discover Ninas,

where there aren't any, you know,

I have to answer all that mail.

It's easier to put it in than leave it out.

Go to Grandpa, okay?

-Where's Grandpa? -He's in the kitchen

and ask for a little more apple juice.

I go back a long time,

you were three years old,

and I happened to play in London

with Yul Brynner in theLute Song,

and you didn't like the word "rehearsal",

it separated us, my darling,

but we caught up.

NINA: My parents were never home,

they were always out, and when they were home,

they'd have wonderful dinner parties.

Everybody from Laurence Olivier to Barbra Streisand...

Louis Jourdan walked up the stairs once,

and my best friend's name was Liza

in high school, and she fainted.

You know, just by being my father's daughter,

and all the opportunities that I feel I've had,

you know, I wanted to be an actress

at one point in my life.

DOLLY: And she was well on her way, but no.

Maybe her admiration for Al's work

was such...

unbelievable attraction.

NINA: But people used to come up to me, and they go,

"Oh, you're the Nina?"

And I'd go, "Yeah. Yeah."

[ Playing piano ]

DOLLY: No, I don't--

I don't think it made Nina happy.

It's very, very difficult,

still is difficult at times.

The question that I try to avoid,

she doesn't like it, I don't think.

Because it's-- she's become a...

celebrity without having

done anything to accomplish it, you know what I mean?

People say, "Oh, you're the Nina?"

And that's very tough to take, you know.

She's been taking that now for 40 years,

and that's a--

but there's no way to stop it.

NINA: It's actually

been the happiest times of my life,

because I have tried to do all kinds of things on my own,

and the only things I've ever really done

were have two children,

which is quite an accomplishment.

Every time I've tried to be independent,

I always wind up coming back here,

which is very odd.

Most people wanna be on their own no matter what,

and no matter where I go,

I always wind up coming back here.

I've been looking for my daddy all my life.

[ Laughing ]

I wish somebody could answer that for me.

[ Music playing ]

Why do I say that?

Because I've never met the right person.

Nobody's ever measured up.

I did-- I never married the right person.

♪ Mr. Henkel♪

♪ This is Harvey Johnson♪

♪ Can I speak♪

♪ To Penelope Ann?♪

PENELOPE: ♪ Is it true about Kim?♪

♪ Penelope?♪

PENELOPE: ♪ I just knew it somehow♪

MAN: ♪ About the prom♪

PENELOPE: ♪ I must call her right up♪

♪ I can't talk to you now!♪

Good girl.

[ Screaming ]

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw,

and resolve itself into a dew.

MAN: ♪ Whoa♪

♪ Lord♪

♪ I'm on my way♪

CHOIR: ♪ I'm on my way♪

♪ To a Heavenly Lan'♪

MAN: ♪ If I were a rich man♪

♪ You will boo, boo, boo, boo♪

♪ Will you voo, voo, voo, voo, voo, voo, voo, voo, voo, voom ♪

♪ All day long I'd vi , vi, vi, voom ♪

♪ If I were a wealthy man♪

[ Thunder clapping ]

Everybody has to make jumps

when you come from one generation,

and he was moving into this generation,

even though it was several years already that the hippies

were all over the place around here, down the village, and--

CHOIR: ♪ The age of Aquarius♪

♪ The age of Aquarius♪

♪ Aquarius...♪

♪ Aquarius♪

One trouble with Al's career

was that there was a period whenThe Times decided

to use photographs.

There wasn't this unbroken line.

I remember Sid Perelman,

who was a great friend of Al Hirschfeld...

Al did a lot of drawings for Sid's humorous books,

and he said, "Can't we do something?

I mean, Al isn't appearing in The Times every week."

Of course, he was right.

I think because people didn't see his drawings

for a while, they sort of lost touch

with what Al is and what he can do.

We used to get letters by the hundreds where,

"What happened to Al Hirschfeld?"

Because, you know, for a while, he was fired from the job.

And Mr. Atkins is saying,

"I mean, what is wrong with him?

Where's the-- there--?

He lost his senses or something."

[ Percussion music ]

I really wasn't fired.

I don't know what the reason was,

I don't--

I think a lot of people wrote in and wanted to see the drawings

and so they...

started asking me to do drawings again.

I never had any...

iron-bound contract with The Times,

and-- about two years ago, they asked me to sign a contract,

and I said, "You must be kidding.

I mean, after all these years?"

After 70 years, they wanted a contract,

and I signed it last year.

It's kind of insanity.

[ Car honks ]

AL: Way back, some 30 years ago,

my gallery was the Hammer Gallery on 57th Street,

one of the artists was Ludwig Bemelmans.

When either of us exhibited our work there,

it was as if we were stalking horses,

we would attract crowds to come into the gallery,

and then the gallery would push the expensive pictures.

Ours were selling for hundreds,

the others were selling for hundreds of thousands.

A change was in order.

Well, almost 20 years ago,

he came to the gallery,

and he saw this photograph,

and I said "Yes, that's me. I fly airplanes."

He went like this, and he said,

"Any woman who can fly an airplane

can sell my art."

He's done 10-- perhaps 12,000 drawings.

Almost every museum in this country

and around the world has a Hirschfeld.

Even the United States Postal Service

has issued postage stamps of Hirschfeld drawings.

AL: I did the comedians, and last year I did...

silent movie stars.

DOLLY: It's completely unpredictable,

the way Al creates.

And it is almost impossible to describe a drawing

can be ready in...

in a couple of hours.

At times it happens that he takes three days

in desperation.

He cannot get the essence of a human being

that he has in his head.

Erase this whole thing.

DOLLY: He would tear it up because it isn't right.

AL: I had a terrible time with Gary Moore.

Took the drawing downstairs and showed it to Dolly,

and I said, "Who is that?"

She said Buster Keaton.

Well, he came up, and I worked at this thing,

and I must have made a thousand--

I was about to phone and say, "Listen, I can't do it."

And then years later, I met Gary Moore,

I told him the difficulty I had with him,

and he said, "That's very odd."

He said, "Because as a young man,

I used to do Buster Keaton imitations."

You live long enough, everything happens, you know.

The problem is to avoid stereotypes,

not to get stuck, bored, or mentally constipated.

Allen Funt of TV's Candid Camera

bitterly complained about my drawing of him,

and though I did another, as fate would have it,

the first one he disliked got published.

And he said that I made him look like an ape

in that original drawing,

and I said I had nothing to do with that, that was God's work,

and that was the end of that.

[ Chuckling ]

I'm here at this drawing board at around,

I don't know, I'd say 10:00, 10:30,

and I stay here until the sun goes down.

He works seven days a week, goes to his studio

at 10:00 in the morning,

he eats lunch at noon,

he's back in the studio at a quarter to 1:00.

At 4:00 o'clock,

there's a knock on the door, and it's tea and cookies,

and he works until 5:30.

Hawking away and drawing and drawing and then,

something happens, it's a kind of magic

that takes place when the lines communicate

to the viewer

what you're seeing.

It's not anatomy.

It's a, it's a...

a whole business of how

one recognizes another person.

I suppose it's a combination of many things,

the way they walk, stand, move, and so on.

That's my contribution, I mean,

everybody has the ability to recognize someone.

But they don't all have the ability to communicate

that recognition through prose or through a line

to someone else.

MAN: ♪ C'est moi, c'est moi♪

♪ I'm forced to admit♪

♪ 'Tis I, I humbly reply♪

♪ That mortal who these marvels can do♪

♪ C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I♪

♪♪

You're the worst driver I've ever seen in my life,

let's go any place, the worst, Europe,

in any place, Asia.

-DIANE: Yeah. -WOODY: And I love

-what you're wearing. -DIANE: Oh, you do? Yeah?

[ Sighing ]

DOLLY: Go alone for a minute.

Please, for once, you-- sometimes go without me.

MARIA: He is not a lonely man,

he is an alone man.

He works alone.

He-- his art requires him to be an alone man,

a solitary figure.

[ Music playing ]

PHILIP: He will get many times

60 people into one drawing.

His intellect is such that he can compress

onto a small piece of paper

an enormous event.

I think you know his-- his intellectual capacity

through the memory of his work.

JOSEPH: But I remember he was sitting there one time,

and he's trying to sketch, and it starts to rain,

and he starts to cover up this,

there's a drop over here, he covers up that,

he's still working away, and he covers his thing,

so I had some of the people get an umbrella around him,

but by that time we're all off the stage,

and he was doing it from memory.

You had to be very concentrated

to gather the gist of the show,

in addition to what maybe

even the authors intended.

He very often got what they didn't know they had gotten.

I give you truth

in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

STEFAN: Tennessee Williams were to make a statement

about the futility of love.

He would catch that, but Al would not make a statement,

he would translate that statement

made by Williams

or if Arthur Miller showed a broken man

who was once a salesman

and is now out of work and deflated,

he would deflate him on that page,

but he would not invent the man to deflate.

Why, why, that question has been trailing me

like a ghost for the last 15 years.

But you have to be caught up in the emotion of the play,

and it's below the surface of the play.

So it's more than just a description

of the-- of an individual,

but it sort of encompasses everything we do.

I was fascinated when I met him

because I think his whole body

has all the spring and delight

and electricity

that his drawings have.

And we tried to get him up here,

I don't know, to do something

in connection with this particular movie.

I think I'm rather easier than some.

I got exaggerated, sort of,

nostrils... and the mouth goes down,

you know, and cheeks go hollow.

He'll sometimes say that somebody's eyes

are like fried eggs.

Mouths become pee holes,

caverns, slits.

Hair might be Brillo,

rope, string, thread.

When he wrote about Zero Mostel that he was like

a bundle of dirty laundry, you immediately see Zero.

You can just him on the stage as Tevye.

Streisand is not a homely woman,

but she is this kind of tropical bird

that he's made a note about.

Well, I'd like to draw people

who've kind of invented themselves.

They're like exploded ventricles.

The Carol Channings, Zero Mostels,

Orson Welles.

If you're looking for a beauty shot, forget it,

he's not going to make you beautiful.

He'll make you interesting but never beautiful.

Al did a caricature of me when I was inOn Your Toes,

and I looked at it and thought,

I wonder if he really doesn't like me,

I just wondered why he made me look

quite so unattractive.

Caricature is one thing,

but this abused the privilege.

[ Laughing ]

And it's not unflattering, really.

I'd like to look like that.

It makes us flattering even to be observed.

You know, say anything you want about me, but say something.

Certain faces lend themselves to...

well, I can say, the ridiculous caricature.

I think that Spencer was more difficult to do than Bogie.

"The African Queen" one is brilliant.

"The Abortion Queen," they call it now.

[ Laughing ]

Well, is that terrible?

Well, he is remarkable,

he runs up the stairs,

he runs down the stairs, does he still?

I don't exercise,

except going up and down the stairs

in my house.

I don't play golf.

I don't swim.

I never saw him lift anything heavier

than a coffee cup or a drawing pen.

He was almost totally sedentary.

I had been in the country with him,

I never saw him exercise,

not even swim.

[ Tapping ]

[ Music playing ]

Well, I've done movies

in the early 20s up until now,

TV,

all of the performing arts,

philharmonic, opera,

the theater, of course.

How am I ever going to play for the Yankees

with a name like Eugene Morris Jerome?

You got to be a Tony or Frankie.

When you think of

theatrical caricatures, certainly,

you don't think of Hirschfeld among others,

you think of Hirschfeld, and I always remember thinking

that if you can only get from Philadelphia,

where I was growing up, to New York,

everybody would look like a Hirschfeld.

[ Music playing ]

MAN: ♪ Love me♪

♪ That's all♪

♪ I ask♪

♪ Of you♪

A few years ago I was assigned of to do a drawing

on Eugene O'Neill's

Long Day's Journey into Night.

The caricature is crappy, I just got it,

and this guy fit me with new noses today,

I got all sorts of different faces he handed me.

And I say, "What is that guy doing?" And who is that?

God, I look like The Wandering Jew.

When Al draws my face,

he's very concentrated on the jaw.

[ Laughing ]

I said something about that the other day

to the fellas in the cast,

I said, "Do you think my jaw is like that?"

And everybody turned to me and went...

[ Laughing ]

I try to get a new interpretation each time.

I looked up my old drawings,

on the original one with Freddie March

and Florence Eldridge,

and Jason Robards.

[ Music playing ]

Detail of the table is driving me crazy.

[ Chuckling ]

Sometimes it's--

goes very quickly

and other times it's-- you just produce

an ulcer, that's all.

There was a professor, an old dean,

in the University of Pennsylvania

who got himself a $60,000 grant

from the Pentagon

to research the Ninas in my drawings.

DR. CALVIN: Hirschfeld's a master of camouflage

in the way he hides a "Nina" in the scenes

that he creates.

What we're trying to do is understand

how people detect targets

when they are camouflaged in scenery.

AL: Student pilots pick out the Ninas in the drawing,

because it helps them in reading maps.

It's used for bombing.

[ Laughing ]

I said, "Sheer insanity, absolutely."

[ Explosion ]

[ Gunfire ]

[ Music playing ]

ERIC: Hirschfeld really manages to capture the spirit

of a-- of a pose

in a very simplified and elegant way.

I was the first supervising animator on Aladdin.

So I thought who better to turn to than Hirschfeld

for good, simplified, shape

that you could kind of stretch around

and mangle, and twist, and turn,

you know, with the great deal of elasticity

and also simplicity.

AL: The Disney Company said that I had this great effect

on the designing ofAladdin,

that the Genie who comes out of the bottle

was inspired by my drawings of just pure line.

Al was not aware of any of this while we were making the movie.

AL: Oh, I was not aware of this until I went out there.

ERIC: It was like the arrival of the patron saint,

there was this crew of 600 artists

who just spent the last year, you know, looking at Al's work.

-MAN: This is Al Hirschfeld. -Hello.

Oh.

I recognize that immediately.

ERIC: I mean, you can see I've even used a little bit

of a Hirschfeld curly cue here

in the way these fingers are defined.

AL: I suppose everybody has their own kind

of thumbprint, you know.

ERIC: If you take a good Hirschfeld drawing,

what isn't a good Hirschfeld drawing,

but if you take any Hirschfeld drawing,

and you see the way that these lines lean

in such a supple way around the form,

you know to define what the silhouette is,

I mean you can see the same kind of supple

leading from, you know,

down the back around the shoe,

the same kind of form,

which Freddie Moore gave Mickey in 1941.

One thing that animators always look for

is a-- is a kind of clarity

to the silhouette of the character

that they're working on.

And since the Genie had to chain

from one character to the next,

that clarity was essential.

You had to be able to get it,

you know, in a split second and move on.

There've been lots of artists in the past

who have influenced the look of a Disney movie.

So I would say Mr. Hirschfeld, you know,

whether he knew it or not,

joined the ranks of many of those.

AL: I think the whole trick in art is to stay alive.

A young artist came up to me,

and I don't know where to send them.

I mean, there's no crying need for caricature

at the moment, it's a lemming profession, it seems to me.

I try to discourage them the best I can,

not because they don't have talents,

I mean, their gifts, they have, of course,

but, I tell you, that talent is a drug on the market,

really it is.

And my only respect is for the capacity for work.

I've always said that if you want to make a living,

open a delicatessen, you know,

but art is no way to do it.

♪ Never, never be an artist♪

♪ If you think you can make one cent♪

♪ Never, never be an artist♪

♪ If there's no one to pay your rent♪

Stuck.

♪ Never, never be an artist♪

♪ Unless you want to have a marvelous time♪

♪ Unless you want to have a marvelous time♪

AL: Well, I've been described everything

from a Messiah to a boulevardier

to a rabbi.

We are here in the Algonquin,

the perfect place to celebrate Al Hirschfeld,

and he has his own round table.

It's a very sentimental thing to be here.

MAN: Dearly beloved...

[ Laughing ]

We're gathered here in the sight of God and man.

I'm the man,

and Al is the god.

[ Laughing ]

Pagan god, appropriately bearded.

Let us imagine him as Zeus

with Dolly as his Hera,

a god armed with pens and pencils

instead of thunderbolts,

in order to keep proper care

of an unruly world.

KATHARINE: It's a wonderful comment,

on the curious trip

that civilization seems to be taking.

What's happened to Hirschfeld is

through the years, I mean, this guy's in his 90s,

and he-- he's like

Tolstoy and Verdi,

and Picasso, whose productions

got leaner, and leaner, and leaner.

I mean, Picasso eventually began to caricature himself,

but the others really burned away

all that was inessential

and left with this very refined art.

And there's one line that you can remove

without destroying the composition,

now he's gotten it down to that point.

Well, when my wife died, Dolly,

a remarkable lady, by the way...

Well, I haven't made peace with that,

I don't suppose I ever will, I'm furious.

But I've adjusted to it as best I can and...

because there's nothing I can do about it.

She always set this absolutely gorgeous table.

And almost a dramatic theatrical table

with red glasses

and flowers at each place.

A stage setting,

a theatrical dining room, in many ways.

And when she died, and Al started inviting people

to come to dinner again,

it was exactly the same,

he kept it, the table,

the only thing missing was Dolly.

MARIA: I think the fact that he was able to work

after her death was because she had already given him

how to handle her death.

She had given him the right not to feel guilty.

And so it's a great gift.

AL: My adjustment seems to startle people,

and thus, doesn't seem to be normal.

I don't know why it struck-- strikes me

as being completely normal.

[ Record playing ]

I remember reading as an article some years ago

about longevity, and there was an interview with Shaw

and they had asked him to what he attributed

his longevity, and he said,

"Well, I never drank, I never ate meat,

I'm a vegetarian."

And he said, "I assume that's it."

He said-- and that sounded reasonable.

Then I read sometime later an interview with Churchill.

They asked him to what he attributed his longevity,

and he said, "Well, I smoke about 10 cigars a day,

I drink a quart of brandy,

and I eat nothing but red meat."

[ Horns honking ]

I had my license renewed recently.

It's so ridiculous.

I couldn't see the eye chart, but got the license anyway.

I'm no good at being alone, you know.

After Dolly died, of course, I kept going to the theater.

And often I had company.

Well, I guess it's the theatre that we... we've had in common.

My late husband and I were friends of Al and Dolly's

for over 30 years.

Where are we going tonight?

You got to be kidding me.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

You have the tickets?

-Do you have the tickets? -No.

LOUISE: Where do we get them?

[ Indistinct chatter ]

LOUISE: It's unbelievable that we're so close now.

When I was playing a character,

everything about that character

came clearly through the drawing.

This is the first Dolly.

That was when I was nice and healthy and plump.

Look, he dropped 20 pounds off me

because I was thinking I was thin.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

Oh, Al.

I must tell you Al Hirschfeld first did,

he picked me out of one of 20 unknowns

in a little revue called Lend An Ear.

And he put me on the front page

of theNew York Times,

and that was the beginning of me.

[ Laughing ]

There's something about the continuity,

the unchanging virtuosity

of Hirschfeld's style,

that seems to fit the style of Broadway

as it evolved over the 20th Century.

WOMAN: ♪ Yes, everything's as if♪

♪ We never said good-bye♪

It's probably the most exciting opening night

that I have ever been to.

[ Car honking ]

BACALL: There's nobody like you, Al.

AL: Well, thank you.

BACALL: Never has been, never will be.

You're a national treasure.

-No, you are. -You are.

No, you are a national treasure--

come on and face it.

Relax and enjoy it, you've earned it.

It's incredible.

Well, it's almost impossible to control the way--

It's so crazy, I can't--

Well, in one lifetime to have the automobile,

the radio, the television,

and now the Internet.

And this CD-ROM thing is just too much

for one human being to absorb.

Well, it's like discovering paint, you know.

And the cave drawings of Altamira,

you know, up to this is quite a jump.

But I suppose it is possible to control it.

It just requires another lifetime to do it, that's all.

Living is an art, it's not a science, you know.

You make it up as you go along.

And I think that's what it's all about.

[ Birds chirping ]

I look forward to the future, actually.

I don't dwell on the past at all.

Although I've been yapping away

for all this time about the past,

but that is normal for me, really.

I look back and ought to be 90 again.

[ Music playing ]

BARBRA: ♪ Look at that face♪

♪ Just look at it♪

♪ Look at that fabulous face of yours♪

♪ I knew first look I took at it♪

♪ This was the face♪

♪ That the world adores♪

♪ Look at those eyes as wise♪

♪ And as deep as the sea♪

♪ Look at that nose♪

♪ It shows what a nose♪

♪ Should be♪

♪ As for your smile, it's lyrical♪

♪ Friendly and warm as a summer's day♪

♪ Your face is just a miracle♪

♪ Where could I ever find♪

♪ Words to say?♪

♪ The way that it makes me happy♪

♪ Whatever the time or place♪

♪ I will find in no book♪

♪ What I find♪

♪ When I look♪

♪ At that face♪

♪ There's no business like show business♪

♪ Like no business I know♪

♪ Everything about it is appealing♪

♪ Everything the traffic will allow♪

♪ Nowhere could you get that happy feeling♪

♪ When you are stealing that extra bow♪

♪ There's no people like show people♪

♪ They smile when they are low♪

♪ Yesterday they told you you would not go far♪

♪ That night you opened and there you are♪

♪ Next day on your dressing room♪

♪ They hung a star♪

♪ Let's go on with the show♪

♪ The costumes, the scenery♪

♪ The makeup, the props♪

♪ The audience that lifts you when you're down♪

♪ The headaches, the heartaches♪

♪ The backaches, the flops♪

♪ The sheriff who escorts you out of town♪

♪ The opening when your heart beats like a drum♪

♪ The closing when the customers won't come♪

♪ There's no business like show business♪

♪ Like no business I know♪

♪ You get word before the show has started♪

♪ That your favorite uncle died at dawn♪

♪ Top of that, your ma and pa had parted♪

♪ You're brokenhearted♪

♪ But you go on♪

♪ There's no people like show people♪

♪ They don't run out of dough♪

♪ Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack♪

♪ And when you lose it, there's no attack♪

♪ Where could you get money♪

♪ That you don't get back?♪

♪ Let's go on with the show♪

♪ There's no business like show business♪

♪ If you tell me it's so♪

♪ Traveling through the country is so thrilling♪

♪ Standing out in front on opening nights♪

♪ Smiling as you watch the benches filling♪

♪ And see your billing out there in lights♪

♪ There's no people like show people♪

♪ They smile when they are low♪

♪ Even with a turkey that you know will fold♪

♪ You may be stranded out in the cold♪

♪ Still you wouldn't change it for a sack of gold♪

♪ Let's go on with the show♪

♪ Let's go on with the show♪