Michael Schreiber - One-Man Show (flipbook)

C H A P T E R

9

CONNECTICUT 1959-1969

Victor E. Muniec, Bernard Perlin in his studio, 1969. Print from color slide, 8 x 10 inches.

“It’s lonely not to be in vogue. I’m a man alone, yes. Lonely, no. I’m very happy. I have supported myself for 25 years painting what I really want to paint.”

Bernard Perlin in the Bridgeport Sunday Post, June 6, 1965

LEAVING THE ART WORLD As a working artist, it’s been necessary for you to show and sell your work. I’m curious about your long experience dealing with the art world – the curators, the dealers, the galleries, the museums?

The culture of the art world. It’s one of the reasons why I’m sitting here in this house, because I got the hell away from it. I hated it. But part of that, I have to honestly admit, was the fact that I wasn’t part of the art world. I wasn’t good at it. I wasn’t a celebrity or a household name and all that. It’s characteristic, alas, that I’m an easy quitter. I cut my losses and pick up my marbles and go home. And I don’t blow my own horn – at least I didn’t used to, until you came on the scene. And I haven’t done the things that would have possibly kept me in that world, kept me in that culture.

after, go to a gym and build myself up, and I was looked pretty good and had real muscles and things. But at a certain point you give that up, too, because what’s the point? At a certain age, you stop entering beauty contests. Or at a certain age, also, if you’re at all sensible, you acknowledge your age and stop competing in gay bars. And at some point in your life, you accept the fact – or some do, I guess – that you’re gay, and it’s not only your sexuality, but conditions every part of your life: the way you live, the way you dress, the way you eat, the way you cook. Indeed, a lot of us are in the arts. Why? God knows there have been intensely butch men who were marvelous, magnificent artists. I keep thinking of Edward Hopper, for me the number one American artist, who was a very straight man, so he didn’t have the sensibility that we have.

Do you think it’s that we just naturally have another way of seeing, standing apart, as we do, from the “norm”?

For me, it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s that we compensate for children and family and so forth by living better than most straight men do. Most gay people live – or try to, or pretend to – in beautiful surroundings. We try to make beautiful houses, apartments. The coldest water flat in the worst slum gets

What would have been required of you?

The Park Avenue treatment?

Well, for example, after Catherine Viviano closed shop, and being in the position of now not having a gallery or being represented, one would get a portfolio and make rounds of the galleries, trying to sell oneself. Not I. I sat here and waited for them to come to me. But as I say, it’s not in my character to compete. It’s ridiculous, and it’s not admirable.

Yes, as best as one can, and as much as one can afford. We learn to cook with sour cream and wine, and we don’t just settle for bacon and eggs. And we elevate ourselves. We dress. Indeed, my God, the men’s clothing industry depends a lot on selling, inventing new fancy clothes for us to buy at exaggerated prices. But also, why are there so many gay people who become extremely successful as women’s designers? I don’t think it’s that we – they – want to be drag queens. I think they love the beauty.

Well, and/or is it that you just didn’t have the passion and interest to pursue that world in that kind of way?

Well, it’s also that like most all of my life, I was always the last kid to be chosen on a basketball or a baseball team because I was so shitty and lousy at it. I mean, I was just guaranteed failure.

And so I have a very, very low estimation of myself. And not really – and I say this quite truly – not until you appeared on the scene and started finding all of these paintings which I had largely forgotten about or ignored, did I even begin to think that I had value as an artist. Now, by God thanks to you – I mean this very truly – you’ve given me a lot of self-esteem. Ed accuses me always of being intensively self-centered, and I guess probably that is true to a degree, but I think that the flaw in my personality is that I am not self-propagandizing. I don’t push myself, and I never have, because I expect to be the last chosen on the team, and I accept that as a fact of life. And it’s not admirable. But it goes along with my sexuality and everything else. My “sincere self-commiseration”! But you know, “gay”: in the animal kingdom, the weaker of the dogs or the wolves surrenders; gets on his back and presents his vulnerability. And a lot of us gay men do exactly the same thing, and accept it and expect it, because we’ve been conditioned to it by other boys who are the first to be picked on the team. It’s a very interesting and touchy and awful, but nevertheless true, condition, situation. I daresay it’s still happening. I remember as a teenager, even before, I was sending away for muscle-building devices for myself. And nothing ever worked, of course. But I wanted to be, you know, a man – I wanted to be muscly, gorgeous. I did, finally, generations

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And the pure theater of it.

But it’s substitutive, also. Well, I would not wear sequins. Chuck Howard was a successful designer who made beautiful, simple clothes. I remember being at his shows and thinking, “Oh God, I wish that I could wear that!” And I’m not remotely interested in being a drag queen! But it’s just like when I go to a gallery and see a gorgeous painting, and I know that I couldn’t paint that – I wish I had, I wish I could, but nevertheless, it’s a gorgeous painting.

And, so anyway, again, it’s part of the compensation thing.

So, speaking of how you live: you’ve now spent a great many years and put a great deal of work into your beautiful house here in Connecticut. What led you to this particular place?

Our friend Freddie Melton had a place here, and it was very pleasant getting out of New York and coming up to God’s country on weekends. So Chuck and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a place where we could also do a little bit of gardening and sunbathing on the weekends? I had no intention of moving away permanently. Ed had a different idea.

You two were still living together in the Chelsea apartment?

Yes, and I think that both of us tacitly realized we wanted to live separately. So he saw this as the solution: namely, I would move out here and get the hell out of the city and his hair. I don’t know

if it was that cut and dried, but there was an element of that. I In the whole animal kingdom, I don’t think anybody has the was ready to get out of his hair, and get him out of mine. But privilege of falling in love except us. Indeed, along with the it took some persuading – there was a lot of fear on my part. falling in love is the misery that goes with it sometimes. But is It was a big jump the positive equal to from living in the the negative? Very city for most of my probably.

Mostly, life to a place in the yes, I guess – I hope. country.

Anyway, But there it is. Ed one weekend in May and I could not be of ’59, we came up more different. He’s here and got a real a hermit. estate agent to take us around. This was Yet, somewhat the last place we ironically, you’re saw, and it was really the one who left pretty crummy: New York for the it had been the country, where caretaker’s cottage you’ve continued when it was part of to lead a very a larger estate. The active social and upstairs had been creative life. Chuck an apartment, and Howard bought the downstairs was a property adjoining garage and stable yours, so between Ridgefield house exterior, 2013. where they used your own varying to keep horses and social circle and goats. The place was a wreck, and overgrown; it hadn’t been Chuck’s, there was quite a glittering New York social scene inhabited for some years. I was ready to pass on it, but Ed saw the happening between your two properties for many years. possibilities. He twisted my arm to buy it. He has since said, “I Oh, Chuck got into society of no thank you’s. Have you ever would’ve broken your arm!” heard of Joe Eula? Joe was kind of the central organizer, the circus He’s told me the idea of having this place was that you’d master, the ringmaster – and he collected celebrities. He didn’t both have the best of both worlds: a pied-à-terre in the have much talent, except self-advertising. For my 50th birthday, city, and a country retreat. You’d spend the week apart, and he gave me a party at his apartment in New York, and it was one then weekends together either in the city or out here in of those drop dead parties. Everybody was there. Do you know Connecticut. anything about Halston, the hat maker?

Oh, sure. I used to go into New York all the time, until recently.

By whom you mean Halston, the fashion designer? You call him “the hat maker” because he famously designed Jacqueline The overflowing boxes of theater, ballet, and opera playbills Kennedy’s pillbox hat? in your studio are evidence of that. So would you say that the

arrangement you and Ed have maintained for all these years – He was a piece of work, God! Talk about a queen! He was a very mostly living separately – accounts for why you’ve been able big, grand lady. And you couldn’t tell if it was just dope that made to sustain your relationship? him out of orbit. But he was not jolly, not friendly.

We’re very attached to each other. It’s not remotely physical, and hasn’t been for fifty-odd years. It’s a very strange kind of love affair. We need each other, but he’s had his love affairs, and I’ve had my love affairs. And here we still are.

It’s been a very open relationship, which has for the most part been accommodated by both sides – if not always without the occasional drama.

I daresay I’m as much a pain in the ass as he is to me, and I hope he doesn’t have as much grief for me as I do for him. But you know, life is very strange. It’s not what you want; it’s very often what you get. And you adjust to it, or you don’t.

How and why we love a particular person is a very individual, complex combination of emotions and personal history that often defies any kind of logical sense.

It must have been very colorful up here in Ridgefield in those days, between the menagerie of friends and lovers at your place, and the celebrities Chuck was entertaining next door.

Yes, it was just heaven, it was just wonderful.

But it wasn’t always that way. You’ve evidently put in a lot of work over a great many years to make this place as enchanting as it is.

And over many years – well, since ’59 – it’s still evolving. I’m not done with it. I’ll never be done, and that’s amusing in itself. But I adore this place. You know, there are years that were fallow in terms of my painting. I didn’t do fuck all – nothing! But some of those years weren’t wasted, because I built and improved my house, which is my jewel box. My house is my final work of art – it really is. It’s a total self-indulgence.

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Portrait of Felicia Bernstein, 1965.

Oil on canvas, 44 x 39 inches.

Collection of the Bernstein Family.

Pearl Onion, 1963. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Collection of Dr. Norman Orentreich.

Succot, 1963. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches. Collection of Donna Barson Schwab.

Photo Credit: Marina Pierre

Greens, 1963. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Collection of Dr. Norman Orentreich.

FLOATING

In the early 1960s, you turned your attention once again to still lifes, suspending everyday objects against backgrounds of luminous colors, as you had done some years before in your work on Capri.

Quite so, right.

Now, you focused on “floating” vegetables and fruit, and presented a series of them in your next one-man show at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in 1963. What brought you back to this sort of subject matter, to further exercising this technique and perspective?

It may have begun with the Greens, which were floating. They don’t cast shadows; they are suspended, as though. And so are the other pictures in this series.

So that was a conscious decision, to eliminate the shadows.

Yes. I wasn’t trying to emulate Cezanne or anybody. They are still lifes, floating. They’re objects, as though abstract things, and you push them around. I must say, and it sounds immodest, but after seeing these things after so long, I don’t know how I achieved those colors.

The wash under these is lovely, subtle. And then you built up and layered more color on top of it?

Yes. It’s kind of a dry scumble, smoothed out. I don’t paint wet.

So your return to this unique way of viewing everyday objects in “magical” ways: it could be argued that these again are works of magic realism.

Yes, without labeling it. I was never constrained by saying, you know, “I can’t do this; I cannot do that.”

Because it wouldn’t follow the strictures of the particular “school” that critics decided best identified and categorized your work. But still, this sort of suspension of objects has been a pattern in your work since your Capri pictures.

That’s true.

Objects are magically floating.

It isn’t magic. It’s objects demanding attention of themselves, instead of it’s being still life on a table.

The technique and the perspective almost create, in some ways, a three-dimensional effect around the object, yet without shadows. The object is removed from, or is coming apart from or floating past, a radiant background of color.

Yes. I can’t analyze it.

I know. You don’t need to do that, nor should you do that.

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It’s not the painter’s role, and I just hate it when a painter has to describe his paintings and justify them or rationalize them. It’s up to you intellectuals to analyze these things.

But again, even that is a very subjective process, because as with any person viewing a piece of art, I can’t help but see it in my own unique way, with my own emotions and knowledge and connections guiding my interpretation. If not your intention, are you comfortable describing your process?

It’s totally whimsical, in a way, and kind of abstractly willful. The pictures kind of paint themselves. In a way, the objects, which are very changed over the period of painting, kind of dictate because of the relationship of one to the other to the size of the frame. I know this seems relative, but I think that analyzing it is like painting by numbers, and it takes away. But OK, that word, “magic.” I reject that word because it denotes something that I think that I’m not a party to. But then maybe I am. I think that I am dumber than people looking at the pictures. Cozzolino, again: I was astounded by his analysis of the war as represented by The Leg, and The Garden being representative of peace. It never occurred to me That those two pictures could represent such a relationship. It was not your intention to paint The Garden in direct response to The Leg in that way.

But I enjoyed his analysis. I like it very much. I just had nothing, willfully or intentionally, to do with doing that at all. It just happened as it happened. Maybe that’s the magical thing.

WEST SIDE STORY

Your friendship with Leonard and Felicia Bernstein deepened during this time, particularly with Felicia, who in 1965 commissioned a portrait painting from you for their apartment in the Dakota Building.

It was her birthday gift for Lenny, presented at one of those huge parties in which if a bomb had dropped, current culture would have been wiped out. The person I most remember being there was Lee Remick. She was in Steve Sondheim’s show and was his girl at the time, so he brought her. She and I got along nose-to-nose. She was so beautiful, and so sweet; a wonderful actress and just a marvelous woman. So she and I had a love affair for one evening. You know, New York stuff. Felicia told me that my picture was a really great success and everyone loved it – except that I don’t believe it.

Their son Alexander told me that it is still “much adored” by the family.

Well, that’s good. I’m glad they still like it, that they still have it, as a matter of fact. It was written up in the New York Times once: whoever wrote “A Visit to the Bernstein Apartment at the Dakota” remarked on the “serene portrait of Mrs. Bernstein” that hung in the dining room. But trying to capture Felicia was difficult. She was just so terribly sad. I made a number of drawings of her for

that portrait, and they’re all so tragic, which she was. My portrait of her kind of bridges periods in her life. It’s not one of my glorious successes, I’m sorry to say. You can see she’s contemplative and sad, but it’s not tragic yet. It was before Lenny took off on his freedom.

I don’t know if Lenny was in or out of his admitted “gay” lifestyle at the time.

It was somewhat later, in the mid-1970s, that Bernstein decided he could no longer conceal his bisexuality, and left Felicia for a young man.

He moved in with Tommy, who was described as a sort of Olympic sexual athlete. All I know is that he helped alienate Martha Gellhorn from the Bernsteins. She had invited Lenny to dinner at her flat, and Lenny came with Tommy, who had not been invited.

She didn’t like any part of him, but worse, Felicia thought she’d been betrayed by Martha, because Martha had entertained Lenny and his boyfriend.

And yet it had been foisted upon Martha. But to Felicia, it must have looked like complicity.

Felicia was really hurt by Lenny’s behavior. Maybe it’s particularly female, but she told me that the thing that hurt her the most was that he had done it so brazenly in front of their friends: the Adolph Greens and their intimate social circle. And that he was shameless, because in that society, an awful lot depends on behavior and appearances. You keep it behind closed doors, and you don’t frighten the horses. But, you know, Lenny broke the rules. He indulged himself in anything that he wanted at the moment. But then I did, too.

Painting The Crisis in the Courts, Malibu, 1961. Estate of Bernard Perlin.

“Fortune sent me out to Los Angeles to illustrate a story on the court system, so I sat in on the trial for a particularly grisly murder case, which should have been tremendously exciting, one would think, but it was so boring!”

Although without a wife and children to consider, not only emotionally, but socially.

I’ve got other silverpoint drawings of Felicia, and they’re just too sad. But she could also be very gay. She was a very attractive person, a beauty, and a very good actress. And she had everything going for her, except for a nice, accommodating husband. She had a famous husband, a genius husband. God knows, he was entertaining. But he was a showman. He could do anything, and indeed, he did. He was always “on.” The last time I saw her was right after Bud and I had taken a big trip around the world.

Bud was Dr. Bernhard Lisker, a later lover of yours.

When we got back, the first thing I did was to call up the Bernsteins, because I knew she was ill, and I kept hoping that I’d get back before she died. So I went up to the Dakota, but Lenny soon burst into the room and he took over. I found it untenable, so I left. He took me to the door, and on the way out, he said, “You don’t know what I’ve suffered! This is the most terrible thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He, him! His suffering, which indeed I understand, but it was just so crass and so selfish, with this beautiful, darling woman dying in the bedroom behind! It’s just incredible how shitty we humans can be.

Painting Toilette, 1965. Estate of Bernard Perlin.

“I took Will Chandlee and Bernard Perlin to the ballet last week with supper afterward. The latter in great looks, excessively lean and vulterine, like one of T. E. Lawrence’s awful Arab band in Seven Pillars of Wisdom; but how heavy drinking, how punitive toward everyone, how conscience-stricken, how sorrowful – I am worried about him. But he reports that his nudes are going forward now apace. It is almost intolerable for an artist to be unfashionable during a boom, the one Jew on whom no manna falls.”

Glenway Wescott, July 22, 1963 (from A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956-1984)

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He had returned to her when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and after her death often spoke about his terrible guilt about her.

But you know, for a man of such exquisite manners and everything, he could be such an asshole. He bought a little still life of mine at Viviano, which was on 57th Street, just east of Madison. They were living at the Osborne then, which is just opposite Carnegie Hall on 57th Street, but a number of blocks away, so Lenny and I walked there from the gallery with me in a headlock. He kept his arm locked around my neck the whole way. And people of course recognized him. Well, it was just acutely embarrassing, and not comfortable. But it was his way of showing intimacy.

In what could be publicly considered, I suppose, a “manly” way.

It wasn’t manly; it was idiotic! And the next to last time I saw him was at their daughter Jamie’s wedding reception, in December of ’85. Bud was here dying, and Felicia had died already. There was a huge reception at the Waldorf, and everybody was there. You turned around and bumped somebody – “Excuse me” – it was Beverly Sills. And so forth. I hadn’t seen David Diamond in years, but he kept looking over my shoulder to see if there was anybody more important to talk to than me. That was at the cocktail party, and then there was the reception we went into to greet the new bride and groom. As people entered, they passed by the bridal couple and attendants. Lenny took a corner by the exit, and he grabbed me, and so I was part of the bridal party, or so it seemed. And he wouldn’t let me go! And dumb people evidently saw a resemblance between Lenny and me, so they presumed I was his brother, and therefore I was due some kind of honor.

It just gets even more surreal.

Oh, and then some. Lenny got shorter in time, and he was dressed – the father of the bride – in a little black bolero with embroidery.

It was attractive, but it wasn’t right somehow. Bud and I went to Palm Beach once, and there was a revival of West Side Story. I had seen it a hundred times, but Bud hadn’t seen it, so we went to a rehearsal, and Lenny was there at the sound board. This was after Felicia had died. I couldn’t believe it. He’d gotten even shorter and fatter! And he was bulging in tight denims and boots, with an overflowing denim shirt – and the necessary red bandanna. There was a time, you wouldn’t know, when bandannas labeled you. You know, depending on which pocket it was in, it spoke to whether you were a giver or a taker.

Interesting. So it was code.

I think a blue bandanna was cocksucking, a red bandanna was fucking. And it depended on which pocket it was in as to whether you were giving or taking. It was a whole thing. And it went through the gamut of colors. Brown: guess what that was for!

Anyway, Lenny was like an overstuffed toy of some kind – and with a bandanna. But the thing that was remarkable to me was that he was wearing a brooch. A piece of female jewelry, to go along with

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all of that denim. It occurred to me years later that it must have belonged to Felicia, and it was part of his demonstration of his memory and grief and all, which he was entitled to, indeed. But.

LOVERS OLD AND NEW

In your studio, there’s a portrait of a man named Vinnie, along with several drawings done by him of you at work at your easel.

That’s Vinne Prochilo. It’s a very good likeness. Vinnie was very sweet: a Long Islander, 100% Italian. He was so butch, and he had three children and a very pretty wife, Billie, from the Deep South somewhere. Comparatively a trashy lady. At what point he discovered that he was gay, I forget, but he sure as hell was!

And so you two were lovers for a time?

Indeed. We met at the baths, and then I even went out to Long Island to see him again. He was a florist by trade. Such a strange man. Very, very tough and grizzled. That didn’t prevent his desirability.

And then shortly after your affair with Vinnie, a man wonderfully named Dick Wood came into your life.

Maybe I’ll take a half day off and tell you about Dick Wood. He was a blue-eyed, blond iceberg. He was a beautiful man, in a way, but in a way, he was forbidding. The story of my portrait of him is cute. I’d gone to bed, and he began tinkering with it. And finally in frustration, he just smeared, erased it. So what had been a pretty good painting was just a plate of mud, mixed up together. It was an act of sheer shittiness.

How had you met him?

At the Everard Baths in New York on Halloween night. There was this blond – I had a thing for blonds – in the pool, and he gave me a big smile, so I joined him. And we teamed up, so to speak. He was exotic, an absolute straight down the line Yankee, and I guess that appealed to me. Anyway, we had a thing. He worked in an antiques shop. Of course, Newell disapproved, being extraordinarily perceptive. He could see it was a marriage made in hell, because Dick and I couldn’t have been farther apart. He was cruel and withheld himself from my tender embraces. We never really got it on together, except that I was absolutely entranced by his body. And indeed, one of the nudes I did, of Orpheus and Eurydice: the long, white nude male is Dick.

Did you model any of the other nudes on real people?

The rest were all imagined, all the nudes. I didn’t have any models.

Some of them turned out very well, like the Adam picture.

I love that.

The Adam is one of my favorites of your work.

There was the Siesta, of a female hovering over a male, showing

how we poor males are gobbled up by predatory females. It’s a statement, but nothing madly important. The Rising and Falling is part of a memory of Dick’s white, hard body. As I can remember, as is often the case in my life, he was not a particularly good lover. I have a good portrait drawing of him that is very like him: all the intermittent internal peculiarities show. He could be an unpleasant man and very frustrating, because I would want him and come on like gangbusters, and he was somewhere else.

His regular lover, Dick told me, referred to me as “your Jew.” That wasn’t pleasant.

You have a couple of his later canvases of male nudes, along with some drawings of a “fuck chair” he was designing.

You know, I keep them for sentimentality. They’re not good pictures, not good painting. Part of his hot stuff butch men. He did cowboys and other types.

He might have done better to stick with the tropical fruits.

And then later, he and Bill moved to Connecticut, so I made a trip out to their place to spend a weekend with them, which was just jolly, for old times’ sake, and then Drew starting come here. And then I got a call from a good friend telling me that Drew was in a downtown hospital, and so I rushed down there. It was very shortly after Bud had died. So I went into Drew’s room, and he was lying there, with enormous edema in his feet, as in the Leg picture, and with a line drawn across his middle where he was going to be cut. And I just couldn’t bear it. I just could not.

It was so shortly after Bud.

I should say not.

Anyhow, that went on for a year or so, with Ed on the sidelines disapproving very much, and correctly, because it was guaranteed unpleasantness. Rejection is not a bag of monkeys. Being rejected is not fun. But I really was gaga for Dick for awhile. I look back in silliness.

But in the moment, the relationship served you somehow.

Well, it was important. It was what I wanted. And again, it Bud had died of AIDS in 1986. goes back to my insecurity or And so I went to the cafeteria – my self-hatred or whatever. I’m with one of his “numbers,” Ridgefield, ca. 1964. a miserable little place – and I so grateful – I can be and have stayed away for a long time. It been so often in my life – for a was terrible, because I had come to see him. Eventually I went back crumb or two of love. For “I want you.” But on the other hand, up, and he was cross because he had looked forward to my visit, and Glenway wanted me: I could have become Glenway’s lover, but then it didn’t last long. I’m not sure if I went back. And he died, Glenway was not equipped! And Drew: I really still have a kind not of cancer, as I had thought, but also of AIDS. I didn’t know it. of shitty feeling about myself about my treatment of Drew.

I have a note from him that I keep because it’s so heartbreaking – heartbreaking because it’s as though I had a pound of roses and threw In regards to your extracurricular activities with Glenway them away for thistle. I think he really loved me. I think I was the and then Randy Jack? love of his life. And I think he was the love of my life. I loved him more than any of the other three thousand men. Anyhow, another Yeah, there was no excuse. I just behaved badly. And then my tangent in this gaudy thing called life. scholarship was for 2,000 bucks, and I knew I simply couldn’t out of my own pocket support a second person, so I dropped It’s all a part of the fabric of it. him. It was cruel.

As you did with many of your lovers, did you also remain friendly through the years with Drew?

My life, yeah. Being with you, I dredge up these things I’d forgotten about – I thought I’d forgotten about. Evidently not!

For a long time, no, because he wasn’t around. He lived in Hawaii with a poet named William Meredith.

It’s all still there.

William Meredith was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and the first gay poet to become the United States Poet Laureate.

A very nice guy, who was also in the U.S. Navy. He was a carrier pilot and was shipped out to Hawaii, and Drew went with him, and he painted out there. He did lush still lives of tropical fruits, and they were really beautiful; very simple, unpretentious, as was he.

It’s all still there. I was going to say, it has been, but it still is an interesting life, and I really don’t want to give it up. I enjoy talking to you, and not because it’s about me, really. And oddly enough, there’s all this precise memory and all, and it’s not all that interesting for me.

I’m glad it happened; I’m glad I can remember it; I’m glad that I don’t forget everything; and I’m amazed at my memory, in fact – the things I remember. It’s all through pictures: if I’ve got a picture of whatever happened, then I can talk about it. Things that I don’t have a picture of, I can’t talk about. Interesting.

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Hospital Corridor, 1961. Illustration for “What the Doctor Can’t Order – But You Can,” Fortune, August 1961 issue. Tempera on illustration board, 12 x 18 inches. Collection of Edward Insull.

Univac Check, 1960. Illustration for “Sperry Rand: Still Merging,” Fortune, March 1960 issue.

Tempera, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Edward Insull.

Tombolare, 1961. Illustration for “What the Doctor Can’t Order – But You Can,” Fortune, August 1961 issue.

Tempera on illustration board, 18 x 24 inches. Private Collection.

Photo Credit: Wendy Carlson “A later Perlin work, Tombolare, with its distant echo of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, shows a group of medical students looking on in an operating theatre as their professor prepares to wield his scalpel. The students are all men, but a woman, caught perhaps in the attitude of Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene, sits in the front row while, above, an enormous classical statue of a naked man dominates the proceedings. The Italian title, suggesting a fall or tumble, does little to enlighten the viewer, who is left to wonder at the distant nature of the procedure set against the individual concerns of those who it is supposed to enlighten.”

The Times (London), March 8, 2014

Mayor Daley, 1968. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: The Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Cary Grant as Henry Ford, 1965. Illustration for “How to Get Rich in Washington by Really Trying,”True: The Man’s Magazine, February 1965 issue.

“There have been three important women in my life, quite apart from my family: Martha Gellhorn, Felicia Bernstein, and Betsy Drake. Betsy really is dear. It’s a shame she didn’t act more, because she was a natural for the Margaret Sullavan type of role for an actress. She was very good and beautiful, with this quirky voice – and she still has it.

She was really in love with her only husband, Cary Grant, who after seven or so years of a good marriage broke her heart by dumping her for Sophia Loren. Betsy left Europe, where Grant and Loren were making a movie, and returned to America aboard the Andrea Doria, which was sunk in an Atlantic accident with a Swedish liner.

“I did once directly address with Betsy the subject of Grant’s alleged homosexuality. Betsy, who can be direct, said that she never noticed; they were too busy fucking! But I don’t think that he was ever a monogamous heterosexual.

One of his great friends was Lenny Kirsch, who was a big influence: an agent and producer in Hollywood. I met Lenny Kirsch in the baths, and he was staying at the Pierre. I had very recently come back from Italy, and we had a date, so I went up to his room and he was on the phone to Cary Grant. I remember he told me that Cary Grant wore women’s underwear, before jockey shorts, because they kept him in. I tried to get Betsy to tell me about Mr. Grant’s dick and so forth, but she wouldn’t go there.”

The Divorce, 1963. Illustation for “Divorce: The Swindle That’s Breaking Men’s Backs,” True: The Man’s Magazine, May 1963 issue. Tempera on illustration board, 24 ½ x 18 inches. Private Collection. Photo Credit: Courtesy Brock & Co., Concord, Massachusetts

Woman on Pebbles, 1962. Illustration for “Faces of Love,� Redbook, November 1962 issue.

Tempera, 22 x 26 inches. Private Collection.

Photo Credit: Michael Carlebach

Beach, 1962. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches. Collection of Sandy and Shirlee Matthews. Photo Credit: John Sanford

Aphrodite, 1965. Oil on canvas, 34 x 30 inches. Estate of Bernard Perlin.

Marriage, 1965. Oil on canvas, 40 x 32 inches. Estate of Bernard Perlin.

Day dream, 1966. Oil on canvas, 16 x 14 inches. Author’s Collection.