Michael Maslin - Peter Arno: The Mad, Mad World of The New Yorkers Greatest Cartoonist

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO LIZA DONNELLY
MY WIFE, FRIEND, AND FELLOW CARTOONIST
AND TO OUR DAUGHTERS, ELLA AND GRETCHEN.

I n early March of 1929, The Los Angeles Examiner reported: Like Paul Revere, the entire staff of waiters at the Hotel Ambassadors Cocoanut Grove spread the alarm last night: Peter Arno is coming! Peter Arno is coming! Anyone who has seen Arnos satirical cartoons can appreciate the awe and fear that such a warning can inspire...

Five years before the Cocoanut Grove waiters spread the alarm, Peter Arnos work was unknown to anyone outside his circle of family, friends, former schoolmates, and teachers. Living in Manhattan, tryingand failingto sell his drawings to the popular magazines of the time, Arno busied himself painting nightclub backdrops and doing ad work for a small company that produced silent films. He led an on-again, off-again jazz band, biding his time until something happened.

And finally something did happen: a failing three-month-old weekly humor magazine, The New Yorker , bought his work. The magazine opened its doors wide to Peter Arno: seventy-two drawings and a cover in 1926, seventy-nine drawings and two covers in 1927, seventy-three drawings and six covers in 1928.

Within a remarkably short period of time, Arno, with Harold Ross, The New Yorker s founder and editor, firmly in his corner, brought American cartoon art onto higher ground. It is safe to say that without Arno, a New Yorker cartoon would merely be a description of a cartoon appearing in The New Yorker , and nothing more. Arnos brush, and the way he used it to report on his times, led the way to cartoons that resonated for more than a nano-second. Arnos work for the magazine raised the graphic bar so high that New Yorker cartoon became synonymous with excellence in the field.

The New Yorker became Arnos weekly showcase, where his trademark full-page cartoons, constructed of confident swooping ink lines and bold washes, wowed and teased the readership. His drawings of husbands and wives cat-and-mouse games, and husbands and lovers, and wives and lovers, crooked politicians, less-than-Godly ministers, the common man and the cowardly man, the wealthy, the show girl, the scantily clad wife, aunt, jaded call girl, the wide-eyed college girl, the battleship grand dames, the sugar daddies, the precocious young, and clueless elders all rained down upon a grateful nation. In the pre- Playboy era, he was The New Yorker s and Americas guilty pleasure, his work openly and gleefully celebrating sex.

Arno became a celebritya namejust as the Roaring Twenties were fizzling out. Six-feet-two inches tall, darkly handsome, hazel eyes, patent-leather hair slicked back tight, his mouth usually set in a slight smirk, small ears set close to a massive head, a Batman-like square jaw, Arno was a poster boy for the well-to-do young man about town. If he wasnt working all through the night on his drawings, then he was out on the town, on the prowl, moving easily through the social hurricane known as Caf Society, photographed during those champagne and tuxedo days seated at cloth-covered nightclub tables with young, attractive women.

From the late 1920s through the mid 1940s, he bathed in the limelight: flashbulbs popped in his face and newsreel cameras swiveled in his direction. During those years, he seemed constantly on the moveand even when he sat still, as he did when newspaper reporter (and soon to be New Yorker contributor) Joseph Mitchell interviewed him in 1937, his foot constantly tapped.

Who could be blamed for confusing the man with his work, and perhaps even believing that the man was his work? The writer Brendan Gill said as much in his unsigned obituary of Arno in The New Yorker :

... people who read about him in Winchell and the other newspaper columns imagined him dressed in a top hat and tails, dancing in Gatsbys blue gardens among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

That was one side of Arnos image, but there was another side: the devil-may-care bad boy, the cut-up; the man, according to a female reporter, whose dark eyes... twinkle at all the wrong times.

For forty-three years, from 1925 through 1968, Arnos art was as essential to The New Yorker as the Empire State Building is to the Manhattan skyline. Throughout his life, Arno wore many hats: playwright, set designer, automobile designer, author, composer, painter, and musicianbut what he did best, what brought him fame and enough money to live as he pleased, was drawing cartoons for The New Yorker .

Its often said that the first thing people look at when they pick up an issue of The New Yorker are the cartoons (its not uncommon to hear people say the only thing they read in The New Yorker are the cartoons). Its not unreasonable to suggest that this habit began as early as 1926 when Americans began to develop an appetite for Peter Arnos work. Once the readership became hooked on Arno, it soon discovered the worlds of such cartoonists as Helen Hokinson, Gluyas Williams, Barbara Shermund, James Thurber, and later, Charles Addams, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, and so many others. Its a habit that continues to this day, as the twenty-first century New Yorker readership heads straight for the cartoons.

In December of 1928, Time magazine noted Arnos first New York gallery exhibit by running a three-quarter-page article, including a comical photo of Arno, brandishing a wide paintbrush as if it were a weapon.

This article was perhaps the first to crystallize the image of Arno as

In the article, Arno says of himself, My art studies have been principally pursued in back alleys... at the age of three I was seduced by an old lady with a long grey beard.

Not the declamations of a shy wit, but of a young manhe was twenty-four, with a head full of steamprovoking, tweaking, teasing; poised to swat at the establishments silly asses with his big dipped brush.

A s the Naughty Ninetiesthe 1890sended and the new century began, the real action in the United States was in and around New York City. Ellis Island was welcoming waves of immigrants and just upriver, workers were drilling through bedrock

Where he was born: 222 West 128th Streetthe middle building.

It was the year New Yorks Polo Grounds opened, and New York Citys first subway line began operation. It was the year Longacre Square was renamed Times Square and The Ansonia Hotel, the largest hotel in the world, was completed. And it was the year the humorist S.J. Perelman, the writer A.J. Liebling, the musician Thomas Fats Waller, and the cartoonist Peter Arno were born in New York City.

Arno, born Curtis Arnoux Peters Jr., and dubbed Arnoux by his mother and father, was delivered at home on Friday, January 8, 1904. Home was in the area due north of Central Park, known as Harlem. The four-story building at 222 West 128th Street, with its pronounced bay windows and arched roof, was tucked between an ugly sister (essentially an identical structure, but lacking the cornices and decorative facade of 222) and a typical six-story tenement building fronted by fire escapes.