100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 23

WESTSIDER LeROY NEIMAN America's greatest popular artist

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Like Norman Rockwell before him, LeRoy Neiman has the distinction of being one of the very few American artists whose work is familiar to practically everybody in the country -- rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural, educated and illiterate.

This is as far as their similarity goes, however. Rockwell, who died in November, 1978 at the age of 84, was known for his meticulously detailed, placid portraits of American family life, while Neiman has built his reputation on action-filled scenes composed of bold splashes of color.

Rockwell's career started and ended at the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_; Neiman's began at _Playboy_ and has reached its zenith in an entirely new medium -- television. His televised mural of the 1976 Olympic Games was seen by an estimated 170 million people.

One of the most commercially successful artists in the world, LeRoy Neiman has spent the last 18 years living and working in a huge apartment/studio just off Central Park West. His original paintings command up to $50,000 each, but the larger portion of his work comes out in the form of limited-edition serigraphs (silkscreen prints). A single piece of silkscreen art generally yields some 300 prints, each of which sells for about $1,500.

Neiman's eye-catching style is admired everywhere. His posters and calendars are best-sellers in j.a.pan; several of his painting are on permanent display at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. He was the official United States artist-in-residence for the last two Olympics and will be for the 1980 Games as well. Although best known for his sports pictures, Neiman is also a renowned portraitist who specializes in famous faces. He is attracted by drama and excitement of any kind, whether found in a tavern inhabited by the Beautiful People, in a heavyweight fight, in a world chess championship, or, as television viewers witnessed last January, in a Super Bowl. Neiman sat on the sidelines of that contest drawing pictures of the game in progress, using a computer-controlled electronic pen and palette. The pictures were then flashed onto the television screen.

"It's painting with light," explains Neiman one morning in his studio, taking a break from the half-dozen oils and acrylics he is working on. "It gives you the same sense of creation as any other art medium. You're building and creating an image of your own that wasn't there when you started. The only limitation you ever have in doing a work of art is yourself."

Starting this month, Neiman's work has become a regular feature of _CBS Sports Spectacular_. At the beginning and end of each program, Neiman's paintings are interspersed with photographs of athletes to form a moving collage of colors and shapes. The artist has been contracted to make six or seven personal appearances on the program over the next year, in which he will demonstrate the art of drawing sports in action.

Neiman is a suave, sophisticated man who loves his work and loves to talk about it. Dressed in a fancy denim-style suit, with a long, thin cigar protruding from under his handlebar moustache, he expounds on a score of subjects as if he had all the time in the world. In the adjacent room, the telephone rings almost unceasingly. It is answered by his a.s.sistant, who calls out the message to him. More likely than not, it is a request for Neiman's artistic services.

"I sketch all the time," he says. "A sketch is not necessarily a study to me. It's a record -- something to consult with. I sketch an awful lot in public. Because when I go someplace and I get bored, I sketch.

Everybody forgives me for it. They think I have an uncontrollable desire to draw."

His style, says Neiman, "came out of nowhere. It happened very suddenly, about 1954, just before I started with _Playboy_." That magazine recently honored him with an award for being one of the five most important contributors in its 25-year history.

During his childhood in Minnesota, recalls Neiman, "I was always drawing pictures and getting special treatment at school -- showing off, copping out of other things. ... I lived a couple of years in England and France." since moving to New York, he has been a constant Westsider.

Central Park, says Neiman, "is the West Side's front yard, but the East Side's back yard."

Neiman's latest one-man show is an exhibit of approximately 50 serigraphs, etching, and drawings at Hammer Graphics on East 57th Street. Part of the proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

"I turn most things down, because they're not stimulating and inspiring,"

says Neiman matter-of-factly. "Money isn't enough stimulus to do something I don't like. ... I work very hard. I fool around a lot too, but I don't go on vacations. I don't have hobbies. I put my vices within my craft."

WESTSIDER ARNOLD NEWMAN Great portrait photographer

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When the _Sunday Times_ of London decided to hire someone to photograph 50 leading British citizens for a show at England's National Portrait Gallery, the venerable newspaper caused something of an uproar by choosing an American for the job -- Arnold Newman, one of the world's most important portrait photographers for the past 30 years.

The 50 portraits, whose subjects include Sir Lawrence Oliver, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Henry Moore, Lord Mountbatten and Harold Pinter, were exhibited last month at the Light Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and have just opened in London. Meanwhile, the book version of the prints, with extensive commentary, has been published this month as _The Great British_ (New York Graphic Society, Boston, $14.95). The photographs, like those found in Newman's three previous books and in his hundreds of a.s.signments for _Life_, _Look_, _Newsweek_ and other publications, are far more than mere portraits. Rather, they are profound artistic statements, in which the background of the picture often symbolizes the person's achievement.

"I don't use props: I use reality," explains Newman, taking a break at the West 57th Street studio he has occupied since 1948. On the wall are pictures -- he prefers that word to "photographs" -- of Marc Chagall, Pablo Pica.s.so, Eugene O'Neill and four American presidents; Newman has photographed every president since Truman.

Big, burly, mellow-voiced and casually dressed, Arnold Newman at 61 looks like an aging beatnik. His quick wit and ready laugh mask a perfectionism that has characterized his work ever since he turned to photography in 1938. His ability "to make the camera see what I saw"

showed itself almost at once. In 1941 he held his first exhibition and sold his first print to the Museum of Modern Art.

"I could have made, over the years, a h.e.l.l of a lot more money than I have, simply by doing more commercial work and cashing in on my reputation. But that doesn't interest me," he reflects, puffing on his ever present cigar. "I mean, money interests me, but I'd just see my life being wasted."

Specializing in portraits of artists, he studies the work of each subject intensely beforehand so that the essence of the artist will be distilled into the photograph, by subconscious as well as conscious effort. On the side, he does enough commercial work to support his own artistic efforts. But over the years, the two have somehow merged: "I'm forever being commissioned for things I'd give my eye teeth to do, and paid very well for it. Recently I went out to do a photograph strictly on my own of somebody I admired, and I hate the picture. Yet the day before I did a picture for money which I think is one of my best pictures in the last three years."

In 1953, he went to Washington to photograph 15 U.S. senators for _Holiday_ magazine, including John F. Kennedy -- then a political unknown who was sometimes labeled the Playboy senator. "Years later,"

recalls Newman, "I was photographing President Kennedy on the White House lawn. He turned to me and said, 'Arnold, whatever happened to that first picture you took of me?'

"I said, 'Well, Mr. President, we did 15 senators, and they found out they had one too many for the layout, so they dropped the one least likely to succeed.'

"And you have to understand: we were surrounded by secret servicemen, and Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, was there. Well I thought I'd get a big yack, because Kennedy had a marvelous sense of humor. But instead, his face went rigid. And I -- I absolutely turned ice cold. The Secret Service men turned around and gave me a 'How stupid can you be?' look.

"A bit later I managed to get into Pierre's office and started stammering and apologizing. Suddenly Pierre started breaking out in laughter. I said, 'What the h.e.l.l's so funny?' He said, 'He was pulling your leg! He's been walking all around the White House for the last 30 minutes, telling that story on himself.'"

After the a.s.sa.s.sination, Newman was called to the White House again to photograph the official portrait of Lyndon Johnson. "He could give an angel an ulcer. ... I didn't get paid for the picture, not even my expenses.

It cost me a fortune."

Arnold and his wife Augusta have been married for 31 years; she runs the studio and works closely with him. Their two sons, Eric and David, are professionals in neurology and architecture, respectively. The Newmans'

favorite neighborhood restaurants include Rikyu and Genghiz Khan's Bicycle on Columbus Avenue, and the Cafe des Artistes on their own block.

Asked whether he eventually plans to pursue other areas of photography besides portraits, Newman shakes his head. "The whole history of painting was changed by a man who used the same materials as everybody else did -- the same brushes, paints, canvas, and subject matter," he explains. "So why do we say that Cezanne revolutionized painting? It's his ideas. I deal with ideas too."

EASTSIDER EDWIN NEWMAN Journalist and first-time novelist

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"When you achieve a certain prominence on television," says NBC's Edwin Newman, "publishers come to you and ask you to write books.

Then you go round in circles for a while, and finally say, 'Gee, I'd like to write a book, but I don't have the time.'"

Six years ago, the award-winning broadcast journalist decided to find out if he was bluffing himself. He spent seven months of his spare time writing a book called _Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English?_ Published in 1974 when Newman was 55 years old, it became the nation's number one best-seller for non-fiction. His follow-up book, _A Civil Tongue_ (1976), was another best-seller.

Now Edwin newman has written his first novel, _Sunday Punch_ (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95). Published in June, it has already gone through two printings in hardcover, totaling 60,000 copies. The _Atlantic_ has described the book as "a Wodehousian excursion that is lighter than air and twice as much fun as laughing gas."

In a leisurely interview at his Rockefeller Plaza office, the author comes across very much as he does on television. His leathery features expand easily into a smile as he delivers, in his slow, concise, foghorn voice, comments that are as thought-provoking as they are witty.

_Sunday Punch_, he says, "is the story of an extremely thin, tall, British prizefighter named Aubrey Philpott-Grimes who comes to the U.S. to fight because he can make more money here than in Britain. The more money he makes, the higher taxes he can pay, and Aubrey is a great believer in paying taxes. He is tremendously interested in economics, so that if he is brought to the microphone after a fight, he'll probably start talking about structural unemployment and floating exchange rates, rather than talking about fighting. ... The book allows me to comment on the United States from the view of an outsider."

His fascination with the cultural and linguistic differences of the U.S. and England dates back to the late 1940s, when Newman left his job with the Washington-based International News Service and moved to London.

There, he found work as a "stringer" for the NBC network, and when he was invited to join the full-time staff in 1952, he remained at the British capital for five more years. In 1961, after serving as NBC bureau chief in both Paris and Rome, he returned to his native Manhattan and settled into his present Eastside apartment with his English wife, Rigel. The Newmans' daughter Nancy was educated entirely in England.

A harsh critic of the state of the language in America today, Newman is the head of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary. He is always being sent examples of poor English. "Do you want to know what accountability is?" he says, his eyes crinkling with amus.e.m.e.nt as he takes a letter from his desk. "This is from a teachers' committee in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 'Accountability is a concept that, when operationalized, finds the interrelatedness and parameters of responsibility shaped by individuals within the system.'

"It seems to me there are two movements going on that affect language in the United States, and it's curious that they would be going on at the same time, because in a way they conflict with each other. One is the increasing use of jargon and pomposity, which can partly traced to the size of the government. As the government grows, this kind of language grows. ...

The more technical they make the language sound, the more money they're likely to earn.

"Then you have the influence of the social sciences, where exactly the same thing goes on. People attempt to take familiar ideas, small ideas, and in some cases no ideas, and make them sound large by wrapping them up in grandiose language.

"The other movement that is going on is based on the notion that correct, specific, concrete language doesn't matter very much. What matters is that your heart be in the right place. ... This idea was thoroughly welcome to many people in education. For one thing, it means that you have less written work to correct. And also, of course, if you don't have to teach correct English, you don't have to know it."

During his 28 years as an NBC news correspondent, Edwin Newman has excelled in so many areas that he has become known as the network's "Renaissance man." One of the most quick-thinking ad-libbers on the air, he is frequently called upon to do live "instant specials" of breaking news.