Above: Lee Lorenz’s swivel chair at The New Yorker, 25 West 43rd Street, late 1980s. Cartoonists showing their work would sit opposite him. Photo: Liza Donnelly
Lee Lorenz: An Appreciation
Lee Lorenz, the former New Yorker art editor and cartoonist who passed away a week ago today at age 90, did me a huge favor forty-five years ago when he slammed The New Yorker’s door in my face.
Backing up a moment: I had begun submitting to The New Yorker in 1970, when James Geraghty, Lee’s predecessor, was the art editor.
Group photo: James Geraghty, Richard McCallister, Lee Lorenz, Charles Addams, in NYC, undated.
Geraghty rejected everything I submitted, and when Lee succeeded Geraghty, he rejected everything I submitted, at least for his first four years as art editor.
By 1977, having submitted thousands of cartoons – all rejected – I was beyond frustrated. I decided to call Mr. Lorenz. Our conversation was brief – it went something like this:
Me: “Thanks for taking my call, Mr. Lorenz. I was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve my chances of getting into the magazine.”
Lee: “No, there isn’t. You’re just not right for the magazine.”
I quickly backed my way out of the call. I didn’t know it then, but the slammed door was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Whether or not Lee meant to challenge me, I felt challenged. The truth is, I wasn’t ready to be published in early 1977. My work wasn’t ready. Had I sold to The New Yorker then, I believe my path forward would’ve been exceptionally difficult. My apprenticeship (even though I didn’t recognize it as that) needed to sharpen and improve a whole lot more. I continued to submit work, and Lee continued to reject it.
Things finally changed for me at The New Yorker about five months after that phone call, when Lee opened The New Yorker’s door to my work, and welcomed me in (but alas, only as someone providing an idea for an established cartoonist). Following that it took perhaps another five or six months before the magazine bought a cartoon from me. In those ten to twelve months I probably submitted a thousand drawings (my weekly batches were absurdly large: sometimes 50 or 60 drawings).
Thanks to an interview Lee did in 1996 for Jud Hurd’s Cartoonist Profiles, I learned that my weekly assault on the magazine’s art department (in the form of submitted cartoons) may partially have helped me press my case.
Hurd: “Do you advise people who want to submit cartoons to The New Yorker to send in perhaps a dozen roughs?”
Lorenz: “The number of roughs isn’t as important as the frequency. If someone sends in a huge batch and says, “I’ve been doing these the past three years,” that doesn’t give me any sense of how many he or she can do every week. Those who submit should be able to come up with a dozen a week.”
Lee wasn’t just looking for frequency – he believed that cartoonists should bring their own world to the magazine. Not just a style, but a voice. He immediately saw a voice in Jack Ziegler’s work, and later, Roz Chast’s, and in the work of forty-eight other cartoonists over the course of his twenty-four years as art editor (and later cartoon editor).
Once I had my foot in the door of The New Yorker, it would still be several years before I felt some degree of acceptance. Lee told me when I was awarded an artist contract in the early 1980s, “It doesn’t guarantee anything.” This was especially important for me to hear and to understand. A contract meant, as Lee told Jud Hurd, that the contract artist had “some special significance in the magazine.” An artist contract did not mean easy street for the cartoonist. Lee’s department did not operate on auto-pilot. Every week’s work was a new beginning. With fellow artists such as Charles Addams, Nurit Karlin, James Stevenson, William Steig, Steinberg, Edward Koren, George Booth, and Charles Saxon appearing the magazine, the bar couldn’t be higher. Lee looked at every cartoon that came into his office. He did not consider his stable of cartoonists hermetically sealed. He told me in an interview that he considered his primary job was finding new artists. He presided over an extraordinarily exciting era at the magazine with veteran artists’ work easily co-existing on the printed page with a newer generation’s work. Variety thrived, variety made the magazine graphically stronger.
I can tell you with certainty what kind of editor Lee was: he took his work seriously, and he took his cartoonists’ work seriously. He knew to leave his stable of cartoonists to their own creative devices. Geraghty’s trademark editorial instruction, “Make it beautiful!” was remembered by his stable long after he was gone. Lee, as far as I know, never went that far. I believe he wanted the cartoonists to figure out how they wanted their work to look. If it somehow seemed ajar in its early stage, he’d comment. In my 20 years with him he suggested a handful of changes to my work. “Suggested” is important. He did not ask for – he suggested. Over the years I can recall only a single instance of a suggested word change for one of my captions. I submitted the cartoon below (it appeared in the magazine December 23, 1985) with the caption: “Lights! Cameras! Presents!” Lee’s change to “Lights! Cameras! Christmas!” instantly elevated it.
In the tributes I’ve read since Lee passed away, the word “generous” has shown up a lot, and rightly so. His legacy as a cartoonist exists for us to inspect any minute of any day; his drawings were a fabulous parade of characters trying to stay in tune with the world. His legacy as cartoon editor exists for us as well: it’s there in the work of the cartoonists he brought into the magazine. Although Lee was the gatekeeper, responsible for keeping a stable of cartoonist careers afloat, he never pulled rank. It was never about him all those years — it was about what was good for the individual cartoonists and their work, and for the art of The New Yorker.
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Roz Chast’s “Farewell To Lee Lorenz”
Read Roz Chast’s “Farewell To Lee Lorenz” here on newyorker.com posted this morning.
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Note: Thurber Thursday will return next week.