by Bruce McCall
King Kong Call
January 23, 1995
A dream delivered this image to my brain in my sleep one chilly winter night in the country. It was so clear and intact that it had only to be transcribed. Shortly after it ran, I received a phone call from a very pleasant elderly lady, who told me how much she’d enjoyed it. Just before the end of the call she said, “Oh, by the way—my name is Fay Wray.”
Landmarks Commission to Meet in Special Session
April 1, 1996
The Land of the Pharaohs injected itself into my bloodstream in the Egyptian section of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on my first visit, in 1946. A mummified corpse was the main attraction (can’t beat a dead body for drawing crowds), but the hieroglyphics intrigued me more: pictures as language, but a language you can’t decipher. The Egyptian decorative tradition froze everything and everyone in identical one-dimensional poses. Every year, another ancient Egyptian tomb was found in some desolate place a long way from the Great Pyramid. These discoveries suggested a new vision for playing with scale. Fascinated during a Manhattan construction boom by old buildings demolished to dust, I looked for commercial signs buried in the gloom since 1899.
Lobsterman’s Special
August 4, 1997
The old switcheroo—in this case, a lobster family digging in at their table, while humans, wrists and feet bound, gurgle helplessly in a holding tank. Painting this cover flooded me with pity and disgust. Since then, I haven’t been able to stomach a lobster dinner.
Easter Morning
April 5, 1999
Françoise asked me to think about doing something with the huge new exhibit of prehistoric creatures that had just opened at the American Museum of Natural History. I immediately decided to paint an outdoor scene, the best way to identify the museum. Dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures seemed overfamiliar. Birds, less so. And because the scene needed movement, and birds flock, that was that. Pterodactyls were goofy-looking, nasty-tempered flying thugs. I drew a flock of pterodactyls grubbing for rats, cats, and small dogs on the sidewalk in front of the building early on a Sunday morning. In fact, Easter Sunday morning. Pterodactyls didn’t normally don rich purple coats, but the Artist felt that would better represent Easter.
I don’t like to rattle the Art Mart by recommending one of my paintings as a “personal favorite” and thereby setting up a run, hiking prices already condemned by art sellers and buyers as “a blatant fraud.” But I must tell the truth: “Pterodactyls” is my all-time favorite. I live a ten-minute stroll from the “Natural” (a fond nickname from the same loonies who tagged the Statue of Liberty “Stat” and the Chrysler Building “Old Walt”), but that day it looked like rain. I drove my car down Central Park West to Seventy-Seventh Street, U-turned, stopped the car facing north, and commenced to draw the Natural for half an hour from behind the wheel. I drove back up Central Park West to my cross street and parked in the garage. No rain the whole time; isn’t that always the way?
Photo Opportunity
May 8, 2000
Everybody knows that image of famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White perched behind a steel eagle’s head on the Chrysler Building, sickeningly high above Manhattan. I painted a cover satirizing the scene: an angry steel eagle’s mate, lifting photographer and camera (and beret) to float helplessly in midair. The joke was on me: almost nobody knew that famous shot. The cover was confusing and pointless—a flop, and a warning to never overestimate the reader. Even the New Yorker reader.
Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue
January 13, 2014
The two mature polar bears guarding the main entrance to the New York Public Library, a wintry replacement for the more summery lions, were donated by the man called “Polar Pete,” the Arctic legend who also runs Polar Bear Farm, a six-thousand-acre refuge where he hides out when chased by a pack of polar bears. The pair sitting at the main entrance to the library are the only identical twins ever known among the species. “Sure, they’re cute, but those rascals are even harder to train than octopi,” snorts Mrs. Polar Pete, the world’s sole licensed polar bear wrangler. “Took six months to get those two to sit and stay sat,” she bitches. Their sense of smell is so acute that one or the other—or both—will pounce on anybody passing by on the sidewalk who happens to be carrying a piece of meat in a bag. Their appetites are so avid that passersby sometimes toss them steaks even before they can pick up the scent and pounce. “It’s a small price to pay,” observes one veteran butcher. “Your polar bear is a carnivore. Better to let it gnaw on a chunk of meat than gnaw on you!’’
The World Tomorrow
(triptych foldout cover)
May 18, 2015
I had no grand vision of the idea of “Innovation” through history, so when Françoise gave me three successive pages—a foldout—on which to cover the matter, I panicked. Where to begin and where to end? And considering I had to work without using words, how would I convey the scale of the subject, even with a triptych? (Innovation itself isn’t self-descriptive; it can be applied to anything.) I arbitrarily began the picture on the far left panel. Just as arbitrarily, the discovery of fire seemed a symbolic dramatization of the beginning of invention. That provided the image I used to cap the piece: the fiery launch of a rocket to a distant planet. Between the two fires lay several centuries of developments. There’s no timeline to progress and no universal agreement on which innovations were decisive, so my own, personal triptych comprised the events most relevant to what I saw as meaningful in history, from Copernicus to Bob Dylan, the printing press to the personal computer.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Life in general has treated me better than I deserved. As a kid from nowhere, with no education, no guidance, no money, no formal training, I should have had no dreams, let alone an expectation to fulfill them. But to my continued astonishment, I’ve maintained a nearly four-decades-long romance with The New Yorker and accomplished the only dream I never knew I had: to be an artist. Plenty of kids who don’t take art classes or get diplomas or have parents who encourage their artistic talents still end up as artists—growing up poor and unworldly doesn’t sentence you to a mediocre, artless life (if it did, we wouldn’t even have the Beatles)—but it certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think being coddled by familial love and money would have necessarily made me a “better” artist, but it might have helped me see that I was one a few decades earlier.
If you ignore the value of your calling out of fear—regardless of what kind of fear it is—your greatest fears will likely come true: you will abandon your true calling.
For most of my life, I’d felt a lack of connection. Lack of connection to my parents, to the place I grew up, to the schools I attended, to the offices where I worked. But in the years it took to get here, working alone in my studio, I’ve felt a greater sense of connection than I had in all my life—to the world at large, and to myself as an artist.
Acknowledgments
This book owes its existence to the friends who stood by it (and me) through its long arc of production: Adam Gopnik, Sandy Frazier, Dan Okrent, Michael Kimmelman, Bruce Handy. Many other friends and colleagues have offered support and company throughout this protracted period: Ron Chernow, Lisa Ford, Graciela Meltzer, Andy Borowitz, Mark Singer, Roz Chast, Patty Marx, Paul Roosin, Richard Thompson, and Erik Nelson; the group—more of a polite gang—with whom I shared many lively lunches at Cafe Lux: Dan Barry, Dan Okrent, Michael Kimmelman, John Weidman, Chip McGrath, Marshall Brickman, and of course Cafe Lux’s benevolent Lynn Wagenknecht. The late great editor Dick Todd, taken far too early, and the magical Ricky Jay, who at this very moment is probably reaming out somebody Up There for whisking him away before his time. To Lynn Povich and Steve Shepard for their friendship and kindness.
My friends at The New Yorker: Françoise Mouly, Susan Morrison, and David Remnick; my generous, talented, and exceedingly patient editors Doug Pepper
at Penguin Random House Canada and Jill Schwartzman at Dutton, New York. My agent, David McCormick, for his support throughout this long process. Thank you to John Kennedy for his help winnowing down the selection of covers written about in chapter 11.
My daughter, Amanda, who oversaw every turn of events from day one and led this untethered group down the long trail of this book’s completion. My wife, Polly, generously proffered support, editorial comments, and more than a few meals, despite the pressures of her own demanding career and my own demanding personality.
This book exists because of everybody mentioned here. But before closing off my thanks, a few words of praise, admiration, and affection for two unsung heroes behind the project: My sister, Chris Jerome, copyedited (and so much more-ed) this book. She is sweet-tempered, industrious, funny, smart, and an excellent bullshit detector. And Jaye Bartell, a man of great editorial talent, patience, and an ability to make so many problems just go away. This book is his creative monument.
About the Author
Bruce McCall began his career in a commercial art studio, switched to journalism and then advertising, and began writing and painting humorous subjects in the seventies, first with National Lampoon and ultimately for The New Yorker. McCall has published six previous books, including This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me) in collaboration with David Letterman. He lives in New York City.
* A new twenty-eight-episode TV series, Babylon Berlin, a German production from 2017, re-creates Weimar, its panicky energy, corruption, and tangled politics, with dramatic power, uncannily capturing the atmosphere—and music—of that tragic historical moment. It lifts Weimar into the imaginations of a whole new generation. It is also the best twenty-eight hours of television you’ll ever see.
* Tragedy stalked the creative ranks: Heidi Meyer-Rothe killed herself shortly after I left Frankfurt. A year or so later, one of the agency’s account executives went berserk in a meeting and shot senior copywriter Manfred Klein and art director Franz-Josef Walter to death.
* Commercials on German TV could run only in clumps of a dozen or so, at two or three fixed times an evening. The order of placement was controlled by the broadcasters. This meant that campaigns couldn’t be built through scheduling frequency to increase awareness and impact. Many advertisers decided to forgo TV altogether rather than piss away their budgets on scattershot pokes at the consumer.
* But wait! What about the third Axis power? Mussolini had mugged and stomped around throughout the 1930s, bragging about creating an army worthy of its name, the New Romans. Fascist Italy and the New Romans invaded Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1935, bombers versus spears, and barely squeaked out a win. But where were the Italian armed forces after the real war began? A few Italian bombers hit Britain when she was down, fled back home, and stayed. The New Romans landed in North Africa just in time to surrender en masse to anyone who’d take them. If he’d created the New Romans, Hitler probably would have killed himself in 1941.
* I wonder how Dad and Mother would react today to the fact that to date, Walter, Chris, and I have published thirteen books among us. My daughter, Amanda, lists six publications.
* Many otherwise intelligent Americans believe that “sofa” is the correct word to describe a chesterfield. They are wrong. “Chesterfield” is the correct word to describe a sofa.
* Diana raced cars, as did Jerry. She was the fastest female driver in Canada, probably faster than Jerry, who took the sport very seriously and was quite quick himself; but running second to a female—particularly a girlfriend—surely nettled his macho Czechoslovakian soul.
