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Helen
E. Hokinson
One of the New Yorker's Pace-setting Big Four Arthur
Brisbane was a tall man with an imposing forehead. He habitually wore
three-piece suits and a severe expression. He never worked in his
shirt sleeves, and his facial grimace, due to a slightly pugnacious
lower lip turned down at the corners and sadly hooded eyes behind
round horn-rimmed spectacles, seemed perpetually rather more sour
than serious. In his late fifties, he had been William Randolph Hearst's chief
editorial factotum for most of his working life, and now, in his office
at the New York Daily Mirror in early 1924, he
fixed his beagle-browed stare on two young women standing before him.
One of them, the one with the scarf around her neck, was slender and
smallish with a ruddy complexion, thin lips in a straight line, an
untidy (but not unkempt) mop of hair that clustered in bangs over
level brows, and, her dominant feature, large slightly frightened-looking
eyes, more hazel than blue-violet. I don't have a single notion of
what the other woman—they were both in their late twenties—looked
like. No matter; this is about her companion, Helen Hokinson, and
about her I have it on good authority that if she had been seated
in Brisbane's austere presence, she would have been nervously twisting
a handkerchief in her hands in a habitual gesture that betrayed the
self-consciousness a shy albeit quietly confident individual might
feel upon meeting such an august personage for the first time. Hokinson and her companion, her roommate
Alice Harvey (no relation), had heard that the tabloid Mirror, just launched into the New York
melee of newspapers to compete with Joseph Patterson's Daily News, needed comic strips. The News was famous for its comic strips, Gasoline Alley, The Gumps,, Harold Teen, Smitty, and Moon Mullins, and the Mirror was hoping to out-do the News. The two women had won an audience
with Brisbane by showing samples of their art work to a succession
of underlings whose function it was to make sure no unworthy candidates
ever got close to him. Brisbane, however, was preoccupied with the
moral nuances he planned to explore in his famous syndicated column
for the next day, and, seeking to make the interview as short as possible,
he asked how much the women expected to be paid for their work. "One hundred and fifty a week,"
they chorused, having agreed in advance on the amount. Brisbane nodded, signaling his agreement,
and left the office. A few minutes later, another man came in. This
was Walter Howey—a New York newspapering legend of such quirks and
eccentricities as to inspire Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in concocting
the turbulent managing editor in their play, "The Front Page";
he wore a straw hat and had a cigar clenched in his teeth. "Your audience," he growled,
"will be gamblers." Then he left. Subsequently, Hokinson and Harvey produced
a comic strip called Silvia
in the Great City. It amused their friends, but when Hokinson
noticed that shop girls reading the strip as they rode the subway
to work weren't laughing, she knew it wouldn't last. It didn't. Hokinson's
fame would spring from another venture in journalism that was, just
then, but a vague idea in the mind of a one-time itinerant newspaperman
with unruly hair and a gap-toothed grin. Hoky, as her friends called her, was,
like most New Yorkers, not native to the place. She had
been born on June 29, 1893, in Mendota, Illinois, the daughter of
Adolph Hokinson (original Swedish spelling, Haakonson), a farm machinery
salesman, and Mary Wilcox. Helen attended the public schools in Mendota,
and a year after graduating high school in 1913, she enrolled in a
two-year course at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, studying fashion
illustration and design. After completing her studies, she shared
a studio with another artist, the aforementioned Alice Harvey, and
secured assignments with art service agencies and department stores
in Chicago. In 1920, Hokinson moved to New York to pursue a career
as a fashion illustrator. Alice Harvey joined Hokinson in New
York in 1921, and they took rooms together at the Smith College Club,
which was billeted in a one-time Russian monastery on 17th
Street on Manhattan's East Side. Hokinson did work for such Manhattan
establishments as Lord and Taylor, B. Altman and Company, and John
Wanamaker; Harvey did cartoons for the humor magazine, Life.
They also conspired on that short-lived comic strip for the Daily Mirror. After the strip expired, they took a course at the School
of Fine and Applied Arts (Parson School), where Hokinson learned the
Jay Hambidge theory of dynamic symmetry under Howard Giles. Applying
this theory, an artist plans his composition around a geometric design
that determines the relative proportions of the figures in the picture.
Hoky was so smitten with the theory that she employed it ever after
even though it undermined her ability to produce effective fashion
art. Wherever she went exploring the city,
Hokinson took a small sketchbook and drew pictures of everything that
amused her. As her professional collaborator later wrote: "She
was forever sketching people in parks, in restaurants, in the lobbies
of hotels and business buildings, during theater intermissions, at
the special events held in Madison Square Garden and the Grand Central
Palace ... a man bending down to tie a shoelace, a woman rummaging
through her purse for the elusive bus fare, an impatient youth scanning
a hotel lobby for his date, a woman deliberating over a tray of pastries,
a man studying his new haircut in a slot-machine mirror, a father
hurrying a reluctant child past a petshop window—and with her soft
Erberhard pencil, Helen quickly drew a few wonderful lines on her
pocket-size sketch pad." Although it was often said that she
didn't realize that her drawings were funny, that was a legend that
she herself enjoyed perpetuating. In fact, Hokinson was highly conscious
of the comedy that she observed in the life around her. The comedy
and the pathos. Pierside one day in the spring of 1925,
she drew a picture of a slightly stout, middle-aged woman waving good-bye
to a departing ship. Although she depicted the woman from the rear,
Hoky captured the intensity of her desire to wish a loved one well
and the poignancy of their parting by showing the lady standing at
the edge of the dock on the lower rail of a fence to which she had
climbed in the excitement of the moment. When Hoky showed the picture
to Giles, he laughed in warm appreciation and told her she should
try selling such pictures to magazines that printed cartoons. As it
happened, illustrations of this sort were exactly the kind Harold
Ross was seeking to publish in the new magazine he began editing in
February 1925— The New Yorker. Urged by her fellow-students
as well as Giles, Hokinson submitted several drawings to Ross. Among
them was the woman waving on the pier. It was accepted and published
in the issue dated July 4, 1925. Hokinson hadn't even signed the drawing,
but it initiated her life-long association with the magazine. Thereafter,
nearly every issue of The New
Yorker until 1950 carried at least one of Hokinson's pictures.
Ross, a persnickety task-master who
recognized what he wanted when he saw it but couldn't describe his
ideal precisely enough in advance to elicit the desired performance
from any of his artists or writers, called Hokinson
"a first-class character artist"—one of only two
in the entire United States. (The other was Perry Barlow, who also
drew cartoons occasionally for the magazine.) Hokinson was quickly
numbered among The New Yorker's most valued cartoonists. Said Ross: "The New Yorker was pure accident from start
to finish. I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started
it. Within a year E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno and Hokinson
had shown up out of nowhere ... It just so happened, accidentally,
that all that talent was around, waiting. No other single year has
produced anything like as much, not, probably any five-year period." At first, her drawings appeared as
humorous illustrations without captions. She was frequently sent as
a visual reporter to cover such events as circuses, flower shows,
first nights at the opera, and the like. Eventually, her editors began
to caption her drawings themselves, and they also suggested situations
for her to draw. Then in 1931, she met a New
Yorker writer named James Reid Parker who lived on Gramercy Park
just around the corner from her apartment on 19th Street
between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Parker was introduced to Hoky
by a mutual friend, Gladys Telfer, who brought him one day to Hokinson's
abode. Almost at once, Parker realized he
had to find a way to start a conversation with this woman whose work
he admired: she seemed unduly tense and uncomfortable despite the
presence of the woman who had brought them together. He mentioned
a story he was working on in which he had a couple of suburban women
who seemed to talk in exactly the way he imagined Hoky's women talked.
When she asked him to explain, he quoted a few lines of dialogue.
"She stopped twisting her handkerchief," Parker remembered,
"and remarked that one of the lines in particular would have
made a good caption for a drawing and that the situation was exactly
the kind of thing she liked to do." Parker urged her to help
herself to whatever fragment of dialogue she thought would work best.
And she did. A few days later, she dropped by and
gave him a check, his "commission," she explained. Since
The New Yorker always paid a fee for cartoon
ideas supplied by persons other than the cartoonists, she did, too.
And this was his for the lines she'd appropriated from him. Parker
protested, saying "something mildly jocose to the effect that
I could accept only 'books, flowers, candy, or gloves' from the members
of the opposite sex. Helen didn't get the point of this Victorian
conceit and merely looked baffled." Afraid she might resort to
handkerchief twisting again, he suggested that they use his commission
money to have dinner together and go to see a play. "Helen thought
this a wonderful solution," and over dinner, Parker supplied
some other snatches of conversation he'd overheard that he thought
would make good Hokinson cartoons. And so began a collaboration that
lasted for the next eighteen years, Parker devising situations with
accompanying captions for most of her drawings. For some time after their first enterprise
together, they had dinner and went to the theater a couple times a
week on Parker's "commission," but eventually, they established
Friday afternoons and evenings as a formal working time. Hokinson
showed Parker sketches she'd made during the week, and he suggested
captions and shared with her ideas for humorous situations based upon
things he'd seen and heard during the preceding days. "I heard a man querulously ask
a waiter in his hotel restaurant if anyone had found the bottle of
pills he had left behind after breakfast," Parker told her once.
"'They were dollar-and-a-half pills,' the man grumbled. Remember
your sketch of Mrs. B looking triumphant about her first grandchild?
You could draw the same woman, equally triumphant, saying to a luncheon
companion at Schrafft's, 'My dollar-and-a-half pills are doing me so much good!'" When Parker began traveling extensively
in 1938, they communicated by daily postcard—she describing some of
the subjects of her sketches that seemed provocative, he suggesting
ideas and captions. They resumed the Friday sessions when Parker was
in the city. And after he married, his wife joined them for dinner
every Friday. About their partnership, critic John
Mason Brown wrote in The Saturday
Review of Literature: "Theirs was the happiest of collaborations.
Without any of the frictions of the lords of the Savoy, they found
themselves as perfectly matched as Gilbert and Sullivan. If Miss Hokinson's
was the seeing eye, Mr. Parker's was the hearing ear."
Hokinson was extraordinarily perceptive,
Parker realized: she saw things almost no one else ever noticed. "Investigating
the city with Helen was fascinating for a great many reasons,"
he said, but mostly because of her almost childlike enjoyment of aspects
of whatever scene they were passing through. "When Helen said
'Look!' in a tone of the utmost excitement, it generally meant that
she had discovered a tiny detail of some kind that she hoped I would
enjoy. 'The way that man is smiling,' she might say. ... Her talent
for helping you to see what she herself saw was a great gift. It was
as if the very genius of comedy took you by the hand and showed you
things. But if Helen regarded the small frustrations and humiliations
of life as comic, as her drawings prove that she did, I must record
that she never for one moment lacked respect for the fact that to
the person involved they were always deadly serious, if only temporarily." She was not, however, a vessel brimming
with knowledge of the information sort. We've already noted that she
missed the humor of Parker's "Victorian conceit" when she
offered him his first commission. It was that sort of knowledge that
she never bothered with. As Parker put it: "Helen was not one
to build up a large stock of general information." She was not
"addicted" to modern reporting. She flipped through newspapers
and magazines "with a kind of fretful haste, pausing chiefly
when she came to a picture." But for Parker, Hokinson's deficiencies
in this regard did not "detract at all from the fact that she
observed and then drew with innate comprehension and exquisite skill
so much of the America of her day." Perhaps to mask her lack of interest
in acquiring knowledge that she regarded as superfluous, Hokinson
invented a persona, the naif, that she put on display whenever she
was being interviewed. Said Parker: "She guessed correctly that
naivete would make good copy, and she became on innumerable occasions
a not-so-simple child who lightly drew her breath and felt her life
in every limb." In about 1933, Parker persuaded Hokinson
to concentrate their efforts on depicting the preoccupations and enthusiasms
of the somewhat matronly suburban women of the upper middle class—for
which they invented a sort of "women's club," as they termed
the concept. Working with the gray tones of a wash and a simple line,
Hokinson drew dumpling plump ladies with double chins (or no chins)
and perky noses and tiny feet dressed in modified Queen Mary fashions.
The artist became famous for these "Hokinson women" who
filled their otherwise apparently idle hours with club meetings, community
theatricals, gardening, shopping in book stores, and visits to the
beauty salon and flower and pet shows. The comedy with such characters arises
from the juxtaposition of their perpetual (though not at all fanatic)
concern for status and propriety with their naivety. In a liquor store,
one of Hokinson's women says: "What would you suggest for a small
group of ladies who meet every Tuesday to do needlepoint?" She
knows a wine should be appropriate to the occasion but doesn't realize
what constitutes an occasion. Another such woman reveals, as she shops for
her husband, that her comprehension of deer hunting is limited mostly
to appearances when she says to the sales clerk, "I want to surprise
my husband with one of those little red caps that lure deer."
As club women—women of dedication and purpose—Hokinson's ladies display
the same charming innocence of practicality. One of them arises at
a meeting to announce: "I'm
sorry, Madam President, there won't be any treasurer's report this
month because we have a deficit."
Although her relationship with the
magazine and its editor was, for the most part, "extremely happy,"
as Parker reported, there was an occasion of unhappiness when she
discovered that Peter Arno was being paid more for his cartoons than
she was for hers. This discrepancy doubtless arose because of Ross's
labyrinthian pay scale that resulted in higher pay for full-page cartoons—and
Arno was diligent in opting for full-page ideas every time. But Hoky,
put out by the perceived inequity, refused to send in any more drawings
until the playing field was leveled. Ross promptly did the right thing. Hokinson kept her pocket-sized sketchpad
with her at all times, and once, at least, after her celebrity as
the creator of the Hokinson Woman was established, her habit of drawing
wherever she was gave her a chuckle. She was sketching at a flower
show when she overheard a broad-beamed woman saying to her friends,
"Watch out. I understand Helen Hokinson comes here for material."
Hoky, who was at that very moment unobtrusively drawing the speaker,
giggled to herself but didn't miss a stroke of the pencil.
Some women may have objected to her
treatment of their breed, but most saw the affection in Hokinson's
pictures. One woman wrote, "My husband thinks you must have seen
me trying on hats." Another said: "Oh, you were drawing
me two months ago, all right. But not now! I've taken off twenty pounds!" Not even vaguely approaching the physical
dimensions of the Hokinson Woman, Hoky was like them in many ways.
She doted on pets, for instance. And she ran hot and then cold on
new projects—cooking, for instance, then bridge; then amateur theatricals,
which led, eventually, to a collaboration with playwright Nancy Hamilton.
The idea was that the popularity of the Hokinson Woman would make
a play showcasing them a big hit. Hokinson also hoped to give the
Hokinson Woman her due on stage—respect and affection. But Hamilton,
looking for enough dramatic conflict to make an engaging story, wanted
to make one or two of the women catty. "But my women are honest,"
Hoky cried, "—they're good. They're well-meaning." And as honest, good, well-meaning women,
they were insufficiently dramatic. She nonetheless worked with Hamilton
for quite a time, and once, when Hamilton was out-of-town, Hoky re-wrote
their endeavor—leaving out the plot. Parker may have written most of the
words Hoky's women say, but the cartoonist often sounded just like
one of the mildly dotty club women of their creation. Once, when with
friends in a cocktail lounge and asked what she'd like to drink, Hoky
said, "A glass of iced tea. Hard liquor makes me hot." Like her creations, Hokinson attitude
towards her wardrobe fluctuated between an obsession with frilly lace
raiment and a nonchalant disregard for the dictates of fashion altogether.
In the early years of her partnership with Parker, she indulged a
passion for bright colors. "She was addicted to gay Romany combinations
of orange, pink, scarlet, magenta, and cobalt," he wrote, "occasionally
enhancing the effect with a chrome-yellow hat and a cherry-colored
sweater." Later, she adopted a more sedate ensemble. For a time,
her affection for big floppy hats made it so difficult to see her
face that people who had just met her asked to be re-introduced in
the hope that they could, finally, get a clear enough view to remember
what she looked like. She almost always wore a scarf or neckerchief
to hide a large birthmark on her neck. Parker told her no one but
she ever noticed it. And in later years, she managed to forget about
it almost entirely, he said. Hokinson went diligently to work almost
every day. Afternoons she might work in her garden or wander the city
or attend exhibitions looking for subjects and sketching, but every
morning, she sat down at her kitchen table bright and early and took
up a task for the day. She kept her drawing implements on an adjacent
Victorian sewing table, which she used for the purpose "because
it was the right size." Noted for the accuracy of her depictions,
she resorted frequently to a copious reference file of rough sketches,
idea notes, and illustrations clipped from newspapers and magazines,
all organized under descriptive headings—"Children," "Dogs,"
"Elections," "Public Transportation," and the
like. With a kindred methodical thoroughness, she settled on a signature
that employed everything but her middle name—Helen E. Hokinson (the
"E" standing for Elna). Her women appeared slightly befuddled, but Hokinson never ridiculed
her creations for their inability to grasp the utilitarian world.
She was somewhat detached herself, as we've seen, but not in the same
way her women were: she knew the utilitarian and chose to ignore the
other kind of knowledge that seemed to exist for its own sake. She
loved women of the sort she portrayed. Said she: "I have always
considered them bright, sensible people and agreed with almost everything
they said." Her compassionate identification with them is displayed
in cartoons like the one in which a package-laden lady shopper pauses
at a beauty salon to inquire, "Have you a treatment that includes
lying down?" Her humor
was gentle and affectionate; portraiture not satire was her objective.
And the picture she (and Parker) painted of her women showed them
to be very human. In John Mason Brown's view, "They were worldlings
whom neither time nor exposure could make worldly. Foolish and self-indulgent
as they were, pretense was never one of their follies, [and] they
were never guilty of meanness. They were a friendly breed. This explains
why they made so many friends. Miss Hokinson's fondness for them was
transparent and contagious. Hers was the rarest of gifts. She had
no contempt for human failings. She approached foibles with affection.
She could ridicule without wounding. She could give fun by making
fun, and in the process make no enemies." Hokinson, who never married, maintained
an apartment in New York City and a rambling pink cottage in Connecticut—an
idyllic woodland retreat, Parker called it—first in Silver Mine, then
in Wilton (but which of them was pink, I don't know). There, she spent
the summers, sharing the accommodation with an elderly Canadian woman
named Henderson and a New York businesswoman named Lulu Fellows. For
a time, Parker took a cottage next door in the summer, and their guests
shared the pool between the two. They worked together on advertising
assignments as well as cartoons, and for a year or so, they did a
monthly cartoon for Ladies' Home Journal called The
Dear Man, "in which Helen could demonstrate regularly that
she could draw the male of the species as deftly as she did the female."
Although Hoky was quite shy and self-effacing,
in later years she undertook a public-appearance crusade to explain
her work because she felt people were laughing at her "girls"
rather than with them. On November 1, 1949, she was en route to one
such appearance in Washington, D.C., when the airliner in which she
was traveling collided over the capital's National Airfield with a
war surplus fighter aircraft on practice maneuvers. The big plane
flashed and broke in half, its two sections falling into the river.
All fifty-five of its passengers died. The pilot of the fighter plane
survived; he was Eric Rios Bridoux, Bolivia's most famous airman.
Every report of the disaster mentioned Hokinson; few named Bridoux.
While awaiting to board her plane at
La Guardia, Hoky had sketched a man and a woman arguing in the waiting
room. She posted the drawing to Parker just before she left, scribbling
beneath the picture, "Can't we do something with these people?"
When Parker received the missive, it was like a communique from the
afterlife. Of that tragic day, Parker wrote: "Ross
telephoned late that afternoon, when word from Washington had extinguished
his last hope. Talking was hard for both of us." To writer Kay Boyle, Ross wrote later
in the week: "We've had a terrible tagedy here, as I suppose
you know, the death of our artist Helen Hokinson in a damned airplane
accident at Washington. This has distressed everybody all week. I've
got to go now and see Helen's mother, who is leaving this afternoon
for her hometown in Illinois for the funeral." Hokinson was a "member of the
family," he told another associate. And to another, he wrote:
"That Hokinson thing was an outrage by fate. The poor little
girl never did a bit of harm to anyone in her life, and she brought
a great deal of pleasure to many people. The only close relative she
had was her mother." At last, facing the inevitable, Ross
wrote to Hoky's mother: "I, too, hope that Helen knows all that
has happened, and how the value of her work has been recognized in
print and otherwise. Her passing has left a great hole in our lives
and in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. If she knows,
she has the satisfaction of realizing that she left such an extensive
record behind her that she probably never will be forgotten." Ironically, she alone of the New Yorker's big four—Peter Arno, Charles
Addams, George Price, and Hokinson—received no individual write up
in the colossal tome of the magazine's cartoons that Robert Mankoff
produced in 2004. Bibliography.
For Who's Who in America, Helen Hokinson supplied just the street address
of her Manahattan apartment—145 East 52nd Street. The details
of her life are published only in two affectionate essays written
by John Reid Parker—one for the Dictionary
of American Biography, the other as the introduction to the 1950
collection of her cartoons. An appreciation of her work by John Mason
Brown appears in The Saturday Review of Literature, 10 December
1949; another by Dale Kramer, in The
Saturday Evening Post, 7 April 1951, rehearses her life story.
Hokinson's cartoons have been collected in six volumes: So You're Going to Buy A Book! (1931), My Best Girls (1941), When
Were You Built? (1948), The
Ladies. God Bless `Em! (1950),
There Are Ladies Present (1952), and The
Hokinson Festival (1956), which mined the previous volumes for
its contents. I've quoted Ross from Thomas Kunkel's Letters from the Editor. An obituary was published in the New York Times on November 2, 1949. |
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