You expect to find witty artwork in a book titled Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist, especially if the publisher is Fantagraphics, the gold standard when it comes to anthologizing classic comic strips. (The house is also a patron saint of contemporary graphic novels.) But as someone unfamiliar with Carew—like most everyone else alive today, I’d wager—I was not expecting a turn-of-the-past century Nora Ephron.
It turns out Carew was also a writer of breezy profiles, tart theater criticism, and eccentric first-person rambles about town, and if you think that novelistic, pointedly subjective newspaper and magazine reportage was invented in the 1960s by “new journalists” such as Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, excellent as they were, or that Spy magazine invented snark in the 1980s, this book is an entertaining corrective. (Disclosure: I worked at Spy and never claimed to have invented snark.)
Graphic novelist Eddie Campbell has done heroic archival work assembling this collection of Carew’s art and writing from old tear sheets and microfiche. He adds commentary and a biography, which required further sleuthing given that its subject seems to have left fewer traces than you’d expect of a once star newspaperwoman.
Kate Carew was the pseudonym for Mary Williams, who was born in Oakland in 1869 and studied painting as a young woman. She got her start in print in the late 1890s, with William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, before moving east to work for big-league outfits such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York American. Campbell details marriages, divorces, a son, and golden years spent daubing Impressionist landscapes in Monterey. But the focus is on “Aunt Kate,” as Carew referred to herself in cartoons and prose across the first two decades of the 20th century.
I can’t vouch for the “first” in Campbell’s subtitle—I’ll take his and Fantagraphics’ word for it—but Carew was undoubtedly a fine cartoonist, as well as an American and a woman, with a special gift for caricature. The format that best showed off the breadth of her talents was the illustrated profile, a combination sitting and interview usually conducted over lunch or tea. She landed some impressive “gets”: Mark Twain, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jack Johnson, Ethel Barrymore, Guglielmo Marconi, leading suffragettes, daring aviators (including the Wright brothers), and, during a stint in Paris, a leonine Auguste Rodin and a Pablo Picasso in his enfant terrible phase. Barbara Walters, if she’d been haunting the same decades, couldn’t have done much better.
She landed some impressive “gets”: Mark Twain, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jack Johnson … and Pablo Picasso in his enfant terrible phase.
One reason Carew is not better known might be that she never quite settled on a signature style as a caricaturist, but her finest drawings suggest a missing link between Aubrey Beardsley and Al Hirschfeld. I have a feeling Miguel Covarrubias, the great Vanity Fair caricaturist from the 1920s and 30s, also studied her line. Her grouchy, wild-haired Twain is an animate presence, captured in a series of drawings hunched over his hotel breakfast in an ill-fitting suit, fastidiously cutting his food, then glaring at an errant waiter. Her statuesque, long-necked Barrymore defies anatomy to bend in a single elegant arc along the entirety of her body as she reaches to open her dressing-room door, gracious but imposing, a column somehow fitted to a French curve.
Yet I found myself even more enchanted by Carew’s fresh, breezy, sometimes cutting prose, informed by the same perceptive eye. Her sit-down with Twain, from 1900, is a foretaste of Gay Talese’s famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” written six and a half decades later, in which Talese created a pointed portrait of the singer and his cronies while spending weeks in Los Angeles and Palm Springs failing to land an actual interview. Twain had maybe even more disdain for the press than Sinatra. Carew’s ploy was that, ostensibly, she was only sketching him. Even in casual conversation, he proved a difficult partner, though she saw his gruff exterior as something of an act. One awkward moment:
“A pause. A longer pause than usual. An abominably protracted pause. A pause hovering on the abyss of irretrievable silence. Heavens! Would he say no more? He whom it had been so much trouble to coax into speaking at all?… Twain took a mouthful of coffee and carefully dabbed his mustache with his napkin. I was admiring his hands–delicate, pinky-white hands matching the pinky-white cheeks of a wholesome old man.”
Here is her first impression of Picasso, whom she met in Paris, in the winter of 1913, at the salon of an unnamed hostess (a not-yet-famous Gertrude Stein, Campbell suspects), even as his Cubist Woman with a Mustard Pot was causing a sensation in New York at the Armory Show:
“He looks very young. He is thirty-one, really, but he does not seem anywhere near that. He is built like an athlete, with his unusually broad shoulders and musculine frame.... His hands look older than his face, for they are veined and knotted like the hands of the aged, yet they are artistic with long, pointed fingers and sensitive delicate finger tips.
“His face is another contradiction. It is the face of a Spanish troubadour.... It isn’t the face of a fanatic or dreamer. It isn’t the face of a practical businessman who sees possible sales in sensationalism. It isn’t the face of a humorist who would enjoy spoofing a guileless public.
“No, it is the very handsome face of a simple, sincere artist. How he can ever paint such ugly figures as he does, when he has only to look in a mirror, copy what he sees, and turn out something worth the trouble, I can’t understand.”
Twain had maybe even more disdain for the press than Sinatra. Carew’s ploy was that, ostensibly, she was only sketching him.
Carew also dabbled in architectural criticism; at least she did in a 1904 piece on the “haughty” St. Regis hotel, an urban would-be wonder built that year by John Jacob Astor IV for a kingly five and a half million dollars:
“The St. Regis is a tall building at the southeast corner of Fifth avenue and Fifty-fifth street. It and a twin monster at the southwest corner are the only skyscrapers in that part of the avenue. Between them they have played the very mischief with the skyline and made a pair of churches nearby look like a pair of deuces; but that’s a mere detail in the northern march of what they call in Paris ‘le higlif’ [the highlife].”
Change the height variances—the St. Regis was/is a stocky 18 stories, as opposed to, say, 98 and spindle thin—and she could have been observing the neighborhood today. Carew was reporting on a stunt she’d pulled, checking into the just-opened hotel undercover as a random “millionairess.” Her goal: claiming the first-ever stay in the St. Regis’s royal suite, which featured a much-hyped antique French bed from the Louis XV era that Astor had purchased for $10,000, or something more than $300,000 today. “It was a bed with a past,” Carew wrote. “Seigneurial limbs have stretched upon it—perhaps even royal—and doubtless it has pillowed heads that later the guillotine sheared off.”
Not a portent of sweet dreams. And yet, Carew continued (employing all caps decades before Tom Wolfe, not to mention you-know-who), “THE BED snatched me off instantly to slumber.” She awoke the next morning refreshed, though seemingly intimidated by the “gilded plump ladies” carved into the bedposts “still simpering their Louis XV simpers.” The bill came to $171.10—approaching $6,000 in our denuded dollars. So, yes, the writing remains breezy, but where journalism is concerned, expense accounts like that are mostly gone with the wind.
Bruce Handy is a journalist, children’s-book writer, and the author of a forthcoming history of teen movies, Hollywood High
