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I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings.
There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or di
My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, “The Englishmen have clubs they go to.” So it was something like my club.
There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn’t like them much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet—kind of ugly—a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.
Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7-Up. I’d watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I’d watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn’t want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Giano
The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, “Giano
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’d like to commission a drawing.”
“All right; what would you like?”
“I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head.”
“Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for.”
“I want it for my business establishment.”
“What kind of business establishment?”
“It’s for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses—get the idea?”
“Yeah, I get the idea.” I didn’t want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head, so I tried to talk him out of it. “How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get ’em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want ’em to treat the girls?”
He’s not convinced.
“Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you’re claiming it’s a massage parlor.”
“OK, OK,” he says; “You’re right. I’ve gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas.”
“OK,” I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!
Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman—a senator, perhaps. Since she’s a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what’s going to happen next, and she’s sort of resigned to it.
I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn’t care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she’s wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast—the other one was nude—and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.
I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage parlor when Giano
They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and told me things like “When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask for Frank—he’s a pretty good guy. If he’s not there, don’t go in.” Or “Don’t talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing.”
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself, “You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to have. Maybe it’s still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing.” I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw a girl’s eye. “Do we know you?” she asked.
“No, you don’t, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be appropriate for your entrance hall?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve already contracted an artist to make a drawing for us, and he’s working on it.”
“I’m the artist,” I said, “and your drawing is ready!”
It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.
The guy’s wife and his sister, who were now ru
One girl said she didn’t like the expression on the slave girl’s face. “She doesn’t look happy,” she said. “She should be smiling.”
I said to her, “Tell me—while you’re massaging a guy, and he’s not lookin’ at you, are you smiling?”
“Oh, no!” she said. “I feel exactly like she looks! But it’s not right to put it in the picture.”
I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and forth, they decided they didn’t want it. It turned out that the real reason that they didn’t want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people ru
My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’ ”
I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.
Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Giano
One day there was a police raid on Giano