Neiman’s exhausted Joe Namath, 1970, paint on paper; and Wynton Marsalis, 2001.
LeRoy Neiman: Someone Who Didn’t Play the Game, That’s All
By JERRY TALLMER
There is, on the wall of an apartment in New York City, a black-and-white drawing, touched here and there with color, of a man scribbling something in a reporter’s notebook. The man is in fact a reporter, and the drawing shows him taking notes down in Florida in January 1969 a day or two before Super Bowl III, the one that Joe Namath guaranteed in advance the Jets would win over the 16-to-1 favored Baltimore Colts. And, thanks in large part to Namath, did win, thereby reordering the entire universe of professional football.
It is a perfectly normal drawing of a perfectly mundane journalistic moment until, on second on third glance, you perceive that the reporter in the drawing, who is obviously concentrating hard on his work – interviewing someone about this kid Namath – has one cigarette dangling from his mouth while smoke climbs from another coffin nail cocked between the fingers of his right hand.
The guy wasn’t really smoking two cigarettes at once. That was just LeRoy Neiman’s way of conveying an impression. (LeRoy Neiman, Impressionist painter! Ah hah!) The reporter wasn’t even aware at that moment that somebody was sketching him, much less somebody named Neiman whom the reporter had never met.
I guess by now the disguise has worn bare. The reporter was myself in younger and cigarette-stupider days (quit cold-turkey five years later), and the point is that LeRoy Neiman – who, when he enters a chichi setting or a hotel or wherever, looks not at the gilded guests but at the working people, the serving people, the hired hands – has a way of getting to the essence with an eye for offbeat detail and a few quick strokes.
In a capacious old studio not too many blocks from the above apartment – an Upper West Side studio just off Central Park that has been Neiman’s place of work and residence these 44 or 45 years – the magnificently mustachioed artist leads the way into a little interior chamber he calls The Retreat. On its walls are Metropolitan Museum-type 16th-century tapestries from Belgium. One of them is called “The Pleasures of Life.” In the main studio proper, maybe half the size of a basketball court, we have passed the huge canvas he’s been working on for some years now – 15 or 16 greats of jazz from Charlie Parker to Wynton Marsalis – and two smaller paintings, maybe 4 feet by 5 feet, of the nightlife at Rao’s, a historied Italian-family restaurant at 114th Street in East Harlem.
“I used to go there with Rocky Graziano in the old days, and I go there once in a while now,” says Neiman. “Did drawings there years ago. These are new. One I finished around five years ago, when Sinatra died, the other I’m working on now. Sinatra didn’t hang there or anything, but I used to go to places like that with Frank [who in fact died eight years ago]. It’s an old Italian neighborhood that’s pretty black today. A couple of Catholic churches. Used to be a place where the mob and mob-pretenders would hang around. They didn’t want to go to jail but they did like the life.”
What else are you working on at the moment?
“That’s all. That’s enough. What I’m really into pretty heavily these days is jazz. Well, I’ve always been into jazz, but I’ve sort of rediscovered it. When I was young and crazy in Chicago, I looked on jazz musicians as characters who were into drugs and all that stuff, letting themselves out. I used to go to parties and jam sessions, and didn’t realize these guys were not just competing for girls and stuff, they were also testing themselves and their music – like a heavyweight contender who always has some tough street guy hanging around to test him. Now Wynton Marsalis, a great musician right here at Lincoln Center, is the only one left. And now I’m thinking more about how they created their music. Take a guy like Coltrane, who was as strange as they come, even among jazz people. But Coltrane has a son [Ravi Coltrane – like his father, a saxophonist] who has his own orchestra, and that son has discovered notes left by his father that explain how the music was made. As I get older,” says Neiman, “it’s not that I see things clearer, just in another way than the first time – but with the same obsession.”
A year ago, in this same studio, on the occasion of the printing of the large (very large), very beautiful, and very expensive limited edition (500 portfolios only, $3,500 each) of his sketchbooks from the 1964 Liston-vs.-Clay and 1965 Ali-vs.-Liston heavyweight-championship fights, the artist had said with a certain intensity: “I don’t ever want to reflect on what I did. You’ve got to go forward, not back. I don’t want to go back.”
Now he said: “It’s interesting how the experiences keep rolling by. Something new every day, so you don’t have to look back. But you have to look back when you get older because people keep demanding it.”
And: “I would say my life began at mid-century.” It was in fact in 1953, just three years past the mid-century mark, that LeRoy Neiman, drawing women’s clothes for ads placed by Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. in Chicago, found himself at the desk next to a fellow named Hefner who was writing copy for those ads. When the fellow named Hefner not long later went off with some buddies to start a magazine called Playboy, he sent for Neiman, gave him a feature spot, “and that put me on the road.” The door to the future has never closed since.
“I was magnetized to the sporting world and the recreation world,” says Neiman. “All I represent is somebody who didn’t play the game, that’s all. I’ve survived. I’ve had a lot of fun, I’ve dealt with every level of society, from the proprietor to the bartender to the hatcheck girl to … ”
To the drunk?
It triggered his laugh. “Yes, the inebriator – backbone of the whole industry.”
The first athlete Neiman specifically remembers drawing was a football player on the Chicago Bears, long, long before Joe Namath.
“Some wealthy guy took me to a game at Chicago Stadium – first-row seats on the 50-yard line. All these guys were standing there, great big players in their big overcoats, you couldn’t see past them, or over them. I stepped over this low stone wall with my sketchbook and started drawing one of them. These were the days when you didn’t have all this security, just a few cops. A cop – a big cop – I’d been in the Army, so I wasn’t impressed by him – came over to me and said: ‘Whaddya think you’re doing?’ Just then George Halas [the formidable old founder/owner of the Bears] came over, glanced at the drawing, and said to the cop: ‘He stays,’” Neiman has been staying ever since at virtually every kind of public event known to man – or woman.
He drew Halas; he drew J.C. Caroline, a black Chicago Bears standout in the days when (a) Neiman was living in a generally black district of South Chicago, and (b) there weren’t all that many blacks in the NFL; he drew Chicago hockey player Bobby Hull. “There wasn’t any market for any of that, but I think I created the market. People said: ‘What are you doing that stuff for?’ I didn’t know. Some guy would take off his raincoat or his ring and give it to me for the drawing.” Today, some of those drawings and all of those paintings would command the equivalent of maybe fifty such rings or a thousand raincoats. A painting, for instance, of Joe Namath, No. 12, back-pedaling as he looks and looks for where to throw the ball to make good on his guarantee to beat the unbeatable Baltimores.
What about Joe Namath, LeRoy? Broadway Joe.
“Well, he runs around.” With shading that indicates he loves the guy: “There’s a man who’s never worked a day in his life.”
As for LeRoy Neiman, it was, he himself says, always his art that got him through.
“I had a natural talent to draw, and have never been able to shirk it. I was a representational painter, but have always been changing in a changing visual world. Things are never as good as you think they are, and never as bad as you think they are. If you come from a poor background, everything is new to you in life.”
How poor, LeRoy?
“Very poor. The Frog Town section of St. Paul, Minnesota, a real classic poor neighborhood, during the Depression. I’m Turkish-Swedish – about 75 percent Swedish. My father [he doesn’t name him, but Google says it was Charles Runquist] was a roustabout, a real heavy-drinking, heavy-living guy. He abandoned my mother. I had two fathers. I learned to draw, drew all the time. It was something to do. At about age 12 I started to do signs for the local grocery stores, for their sales. If it was a chicken sale, I drew a chicken; if it was a pork sale, I’d draw a pig.
“To be an artist in a poor family is to be belittled. ‘Why???’ [short for: Why does he do it?] When I went to art school [at the Art Institute of Chicago] my mom would say: ‘The girl next door’s into wax. Now that’s something practical!’
“When I started getting into money, that’s when we got friendly and had a lot of fun.”
Looks off into space for a moment. Then:
“My mother was a real character. She was Lydia Serline – that’s a Swedish name. Lived to be 86.” (LeRoy Neiman’s birthday is given everywhere as June 8, 1927 – “but I’m going to tell you the truth,” he’d a bit earlier said to me, a truth that has no need to be broadcast here.)
“One night I took my mom to dinner here in New York. Joe Torre, who was then with the Atlanta team, came in with a couple of players. He stopped at our table, said hello, then went to a table behind me. My mother kept looking past me, and finally said: ‘You know that man who just came in, the one you introduced me to? Well, he’s over there, flirting with me, turning his bedroom eyes on me.’”
The other important woman in Neiman’s life is Janet Byrne, Irish, from Chicago, to whom he’s been married for 48, 49 years. “She’s the one who’s seen me through the whole thing. A good wife, a good person, is a wonderful thing – because I’ve spent a lot of time with bad people.” Also important in this scene is Lynn Quayle, Neiman’s aide for many years. It is she who took the terrific photo, blown up along one of the studio walls, of LeRoy, all elegance and calm and handlebar mustache, seated on a Paris bench with Notre Dame just off and behind him to his right, our left.
When did you grow that mustache, LeRoy?
“Very early. I had to shave it off in the Army.” He was an Army cook who went through D-Day + 7, and then Paris, and then the Bulge. “Five battle stars. Drew and painted all the time. I was a good cheesecake artist. Let’s say that after that – the war, the Army – it was very easy to take the, let’s say, abuse as an artist.”
You can take the boy out of Chicago but you can’t take Chicago out of the boy.
“People forget that I taught ten years at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now I’m teaching what’s called a master class out there. High-school students, very exciting. I’m going out there tomorrow. Twenty kids, girls, boys, whites, blacks, everybody,” says the Neiman who, early on in his own schooling, was strongly affected by “a great black Chicago artist named Archibald Motley who nobody knew was great …
“So I start with the kids on Saturday, and on Sunday we’ll all go out to Arlington Park, a great track, where I used to sketch when I was an art student. Then I did those Chicago Bears, and then a jazz trio. After the track we’ll go to Charlie Trotter’s restaurant, where the class will draw Charlie Trotter preparing a meal and then having a meal – sort of a Draw Along With Mitch. Remember ‘Sing Along With Mitch’? I also go out to San Francisco once in a while to see kids age 4 to 14 drawing and developing at a school on a pier, the Good Tidings project. It’s a very forward thing, because I know I can’t now deal with the kids I went to school with then.”
He stops to reach down to disengage from his ankle a small white piece of four-legged fluff named Dolly. Or Dali, as the case may be.
“I’m a unique artist,” says LeRoy Neiman. “Nobody told me what to paint. They told me what not to paint.”
But how do you keep a jazz player from playing jazz.
