Otto finally lost his patience when he returned from a sales trip and learned that Al, Bence, Don, and Gus had taken off for Asbury Park, New Jersey, where they’d somehow managed to find summer jobs. Otto found Don on the Boardwalk, working as a carnival barker for a shady character selling a fruit and vegetable slicer called the “Wonder Slicer.” Al was hanging around with an alcoholic portrait sketcher. Otto blew up when Al told him that he was enthusiastic about doing this kind of work.
“So it’s your ambition to become a street-corner faker and carnival tramp!” Otto shouted at Al, predicting that he would wind up on a corner, tin cup and pencils in hand. “A beggar,” he continued. “A filthy, dirty bum, sleeping in flop houses, eating scum out of garbage pails! You say you don’t like drink, but you’ll drink whenever you can get it, just to get away from yourself, and finally end up on Skid Row.”
The boys weren’t that far removed from the life Otto was describing. Gus had found a flophouse hotel, and the four had stayed there, two sleeping on a mattress and two on the floor, until they had been evicted. They wound up sleeping under the Boardwalk. Food had been scarce.
Despite the hardship, Al preferred it to the prospects of returning to school. High school, he concluded, was a waste of time. Why sit in a classroom pretending to apply yourself to studies you had little use for, when you and your buddy could be thumbing rides to more exciting places, such as Montreal, where you could tour the city’s whorehouses?
He never did graduate from high school, mainly because he couldn’t pass geometry, a required course. He excelled in English and history, but Latin and geometry made no sense at all to him. He couldn’t fathom how he would ever apply anything he learned from these disciplines to real life. Latin was a dead language, never heard except in Roman Catholic churches; geometry was equally useless unless you aspired to be a mathematician or scientist. After becoming a celebrity cartoonist, Al would boast that he flunked geometry nine times—a school record.
He decided that any future education would have to focus on art. If he was going to be a cartoonist, he required classical training. The nearby Yale Art School offered such training. Al scheduled an appointment with the dean of admissions and assembled a portfolio of the best of his drawings.
The dean didn’t examine a single sheet of his work. The visit was over as soon as he asked Al where he had graduated from high school. Al, perhaps remembering the debacle at the hospital two years before, told the truth: that he hadn’t actually graduated. The dean immediately handed back the portfolio and told him to return when he had a diploma in hand.
Al stewed over the rejection. He wouldn’t make the mistake of honesty again.
4 Uncle Bob’s Generosity
The failure to be accepted into the Yale Art School taught Al Caplin all he needed to know about his primary disadvantages: he had no money for tuition and no high school diploma. He knew he had the talent to grab the attention of an art school’s director of admissions, but he’d have to be much smoother during his interviews if he ever expected to get into a school.
In other words, he’d have to manufacture a good story and stick to it.
Handling the diploma issue didn’t require a lot of thought. He would simply tell the administrator that he had forgotten to bring it with him but would show it to him as soon as possible. He guessed, quite correctly as it turned out, that no one was especially interested in seeing proof of his graduation. These were busy men.
The money issue demanded a plausible story. The schools asked for at least a partial tuition payment at the time of enrollment; Al didn’t have enough money to pay for a sack of groceries, let alone tuition at a good school. There had to be a convincing promise of money, and for this Al invented a new family member, a wealthy “Uncle Bob” who supposedly sent him a substantial amount of cash—more than enough to cover tuition—every Christmas. It was here that the young Al Caplin’s enviable gift for storytelling paid off. He was so convincing that no one questioned the validity of his story or demanded any proof of Uncle Bob’s existence.
His first stop was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Not only was the Academy one of the most prestigious art schools in the East; it also happened that Otto Caplin, back on the road after another failed business, was now in Philadelphia. As Al perceived it, his father would be happy to see him and provide him with a place to stay.
Ironically, all this was predicated on Al’s belief in a less than truthful story that his father was telling his family. Everything was going swimmingly, according to Otto’s letters. He was living at the Clinton Hotel, a huge apartment/hotel complex, chock-full of little old ladies and young students from the Jefferson Medical School. Within a matter of months, he promised, he’d be finding a place and moving the family to Philadelphia.
Otto was on one of his sales trips when Al arrived in Philadelphia, but the hotel’s manager supplied Al with a key to his father’s room. Al visited the school and sold his Uncle Bob story to the unsuspecting director of admissions, meaning Al would get nearly a full semester of classes before he was expected to cough up his tuition. Encouraged by the turn his life was taking, Al dashed off a note to his old traveling companion, Don Munson. The city, he told Don, was just like Paris.
Otto Caplin showed Al around the Clinton Hotel neighborhood, and Al quickly developed a routine for attending classes, finding cheap meals in nearby eateries, and hanging around the hotel lobby. He displayed some of his early charcoal sketches and basked in the praise of the hotel residents.
Not long after moving into the Clinton, Al stopped by a neighborhood tailor and laundry shop called Dubinsky’s. He’d seen Morris Dubinsky, the shop’s owner, and his wife working late in the evenings, their store lights on long after every other business in the area was closed. The older couple took a liking to Al. They were impressed when he showed them his art, and even more impressed when they learned that he was the grandson of Rabbi Davidson. During one of his visits, Al met the Dubinskys’ daughter, Esther, who, though still in high school, was as attracted to Al as he was to her. On their first date, they attended a local production of Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee. In no time, they were seeing each other every day.
Esther played violin and dreamed of studying music in Europe. Al told her he wanted to study art in Paris. Esther drove him around Philadelphia, showing him the historical sites, and the two began plotting a future. The following summer, Al promised, he would hold down a job in Asbury Park, drawing caricatures and saving his money; she could find work there, too, perhaps performing in a local orchestra or, more likely, waiting tables. They would save their money for their move to Europe.
But their relationship ended one evening in a very sudden and unexpected way. Esther was in an especially ebullient mood, and without thinking about what she was saying, she told Al that she wanted to go dancing.
“I want to dance all night!” she said. “If only you could—”
The unintended insult tore through its victim. Al pulled away from her and sulked; he would have nothing of her apologies. When she dropped him off at the hotel, it marked the last time they would see each other.
It was probably just as well. His attendance at school had dropped off, and he had a new friend in town: Gus Levy had dropped in, unannounced, at the hotel. Otto Caplin was unhappy with the intrusion. Leaving on another sales trip, he said he wanted Gus out of the hotel when he returned, but the living arrangements grew even more complicated in Otto’s absence when Don Munson turned up, motivated by Al’s earlier letter and the talk of Paris.
Gus fully intended to move on, but Don hoped to stay. He had designs on enrolling in a business school. Like Al, he had not graduated high school, but this tiny detail did not concern him in the least. As Al might have expected, Don had put together a scam of his own: he’d paid a shady high school administrator a hundred dollars for a diploma bearing his name. He could go to the college of his choice.
In this confederacy of well-intentione
d sleight-of-handers, Otto Caplin presided as chief. Al depended upon him for his room and a small weekly stipend, and believed he would continue to provide with Don staying on. Otto suggested that his room was much too small for three men; it would be much better if the two boys had a place of their own. He managed to find them a small suite on another floor, in a different wing of the building, and Al and Don moved in, scheming almost immediately about the parties and young women they would be hosting. Within a week, Otto was gone—permanently. Al and Don thought he was coming back, and the landlady certainly believed he would be returning, but as the weeks passed and no one heard a word from him, the truth sank in. The landlady would run into Al and ask if he’d heard from his father, but after a while, she quit inquiring. And she never asked for rent.
Al would say that he learned a great deal from the time he spent attending the Academy and other schools. His drawing improved, though he didn’t see it at the time.
“The Academy was a daily defeat for me,” he’d remember. “We would draw figures from life or a plaster cast … My figures looked worse and worse. I grew so ashamed of them [that] I stopped greeting or saying goodbye to my fellow students. I didn’t want to give them any chance to say anything about my work. Fifty years later, I look back at these drawings. If they weren’t first rate, they were at least a gallant if tormented effort to be first rate.”
Al knew all along that each day brought him closer to the end. He’d leave to return home for the holiday season, the school would eagerly await its share of the money Al would be receiving from his wealthy and generous Uncle Bob, and Al, like his father at the rooming house, would become a ghost.
While on vacation, Al wrote the director of the Academy with the sad news that Uncle Bob had suffered a regrettable reversal of fortune, and for the first Christmas, he had been unable to send him money. It was all very tragic, of course. Al would have liked to continue his education at the school, but he couldn’t expect officials there to trust him any longer. He promised to pay the tuition one day, but for the time being, it was probably best to part ways.
Despite his struggles the previous summer, Al had every intention of returning to Asbury Park and pursuing a job as a Boardwalk caricaturist. The same four would be going, and before he left for New Jersey, he understood that it was going to be even tougher this time around. He had no guarantee that he would be able to compete with the sketch artist he’d met the previous summer and scratch out enough money to get by. Don was returning to his job barking for the salesman, but Bence and Gus had no idea what they would be doing.
This time, however, they didn’t have enough money between them for a flophouse room. On their first night in Asbury Park, they slept under the Boardwalk. Al was mortified when he awoke the following morning. He had sand in his hair and on his clothes, and he was in desperate need of a shower and shave. The best he was going to be able to manage was to sneak into a hotel and use one of the men’s rooms to clean up. He couldn’t be assured that this would help: it was overcast and looked as if it might rain at any minute.
On his way to a hotel, he ran across Anderson, the Boardwalk sketch artist he’d met the previous summer, who informed him, first, that he looked awful, and, second, that rain would most assuredly wash out their day’s work. Anderson suggested that Al drop by his rented room and wash up, an offer that Al gratefully accepted. Once there, Anderson offered Al a drink, but Al, a conscious teetotaler, declined. Anderson’s room was a dive, and Al quickly retreated to the bathroom for a shower. By the time he’d showered, dried off, and redressed, it was pouring rain and Anderson was prepared to cancel his workday. Nobody would be out and about, he told Al. He might as well stay in and have a few drinks.
Dispirited, Al left Anderson and walked back to the Boardwalk in the rain. This wasn’t at all what he’d planned, and to witness how Anderson lived put him face-to-face with a grim reality. Al had envisioned Asbury Park as a place where he could use his art to earn money. Instead, he’d seen how pathetic that existence could be—if Anderson was any indication. He couldn’t see himself walking around like Anderson, smelling like a combination of booze and cheap cologne, hanging out on the Boardwalk and hoping he might earn enough scratch to afford a room and food, only to slip home at the end of the day and take slugs directly from a quart bottle of liquor. The thought depressed him.
His father had been correct when he suggested that Al was only pushing himself for the life of a bum.
The news was no better for Bence and the others. Don’s job fell through when the salesman decided that Asbury Park could survive without his brand of vegetable slicers. Don had dropped by a few places and found work at a soda fountain in a drugstore. Bence and Gus had come up empty in their job searches. They couldn’t count on Otto to look for them, chew them out, and take them home, as he had the previous summer.
Al concluded then that he’d have to find a way to attend an art school the forthcoming term. The starving artist’s life, Boardwalk style, wasn’t for him.
The four lasted three weeks before returning home, broke and hungry, defeated by their latest efforts to head out on their own. Bence quickly found a job similar to the one Don had in New Jersey, but Al had nothing. He was trapped in the house, forced to listen to his mother’s lectures about the uncertainty of an artist’s life. Al would quarrel with her on occasion, but most of his time was spent skulking in his room, where he could at least be alone with his black moods.
Uncle Bob surfaced again the following fall, this time in Boston. Otto Caplin had started up another business and moved his family to 96 Wellington Hill Street in the Mattapan section of the city, and after investigating the art school availability and discovering that the city boasted of a huge selection, Al decided to try the Museum School, another prestigious institution developing young artists. He visited the school, reprised his Uncle Bob performance, and showed the officials his portfolio.
This time around, Uncle Bob had a wife, Aunt Diana, who had passed away at a very young age. Bob and Diana had been unable to have children, and Uncle Bob treated Al as a sort of surrogate. Moved by the story, the admissions director told Al that she would really like to give Uncle Bob the grand tour of the campus, in the event that he ever found himself in Boston.
Al loved the city and would be connected to it, in one way or another, for most of the rest of his life. His experience at the Museum School, however, was no different than his earlier experiences in Philadelphia. He took in everything his instructors had to offer, worked hard and suffered from a lack of self-confidence, and dropped out when Uncle Bob had another downturn in his business fortunes.
Fortunately for Al, the schools didn’t trade information about their former students. Al found another school, the Vesper George School of Art, before the next term began. He had to adjust his story about Uncle Bob—he’d now be getting his check in May—but otherwise he was learning that he could get an education in art, a little bit at a time, for no financial investment.
His time at the Vesper George School ended suddenly and unexpectedly. For reasons he would never be able to explain, he had been working on a sketch of a hideous woman—“the most awful woman I could imagine,” as he’d later say—and he left it on his easel when he stepped out for lunch and a smoke. When he returned, the sketch was gone. He was ordered to report to the office of Miss George, the ancient daughter of Vesper George. She had the sketch and she was very unhappy. The gift of caricature, she informed him, was a blessing, but—
She couldn’t continue. She broke down in tears, returned his drawing, and expelled him from the school with no further explanation.
Al didn’t understand the reason for his expulsion until he was out in the corridor and glanced back down at his drawing. The sketch bore a close resemblance to Miss George. Al would never admit to creating the caricature on purpose, but it didn’t matter. He was barely nineteen and he’d managed to be tossed out of three art schools.
The fourth would be the charm.
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When Al Caplin ran into Catherine Wingate Cameron, he knew almost instantly that this was his type of woman. She was bright, attractive, creative, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few people he’d ever met who could match wits with him.
Catherine Cameron and Alfred Caplin at Seabrook Beach, New Hampshire, in 1931, during their courting days as art students.
The meeting would have never taken place if Caplin hadn’t enrolled in still another school, the Designers Art School in Boston, where Catherine also happened to be a student. As he would learn, her family was from Amesbury, a town about an hour away, and while attending school, she lived in Brooke House, a girls’ dormitory. He’d noticed her in one of his classes, and he hoped he would find an occasion to talk to her.
“She was so beautiful,” he wrote, “and I wanted so painfully to know her, I acknowledged her not by an indifferent grunt but by a menacing growl. Yet she smiled a radiant smile at me every day as if she knew what I really meant.”
Al Caplin and Catherine Cameron did not become a couple immediately, despite Caplin’s yearnings. They maintained a distance you might expect from two co-workers who smile and nod as they pass in the hall. He was either too shy or too intimidated to ask her on a proper date.
All that changed dramatically when Al accidentally tore the seat of his pants on the way to school one morning. He would later claim that this was his only pair of pants, which seems unlikely, but in any event, he ripped his trousers, and rather than return home and miss a class, he continued on to school and took a smock from the locker of a student who rarely attended class. He had already taken his place in the classroom when the normally absent student, angry about the missing smock, made his appearance. Rather than hand the smock over in front of everyone in the room, Al asked his fellow student to follow him out to the hall. As he was returning the smock, he felt someone slipping another one over his shoulder. It was Catherine. She had followed the two into the hall.
Al Capp Page 5
