BONUS NUMBER 99: A QUIET ARTIST, AND AN ASSERTIVE ONE

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

I don’t recall who sent these six Weston Rose images to Mandate. Was it the artist himself, or a gallery that was mounting an exhibit of his work? More puzzling, however, is the absence online of anything other than fleeting mentions of him and his work. If any reader can enlighten me, please do so.

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Paul Cadmus, on the other hand, is a major-minor in the art world, especially the gay division. Over a hundred thousand Google items; a long Wikipedia entry; and representation in such museums as the Metropolitan and the Whitney in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts…It might be easier to list the American museums that don’t own a Cadmus.

Mandate featured his work several times. I’ve included my own short essay from November 1982, and also Leigh W. Rutledge’s item from our “Mandata” miscellany section in May 1985.

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Further unanswered questions: Why was I not able to get color reproductions of “The Fleet’s In” and “Gilding the Acrobats”? Perhaps because the institutions that own the works were reluctant to have them appear in a gay publication. Or maybe the fees were too steep.

To use a photograph or an art reproduction without permission was a risky matter in those days, especially for gay publications. I’ve recounted in previous chapters the prejudice that all things gay often faced even in “liberal” New York. The bigotry quotient in other cities was at times surprisingly less.

George Mavety, our publisher, hated above all things to be sued. One of my duties as editor-in-chief was to remove all legal ambiguity from the pages of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy. Nevertheless, two or three lawsuits landed on our threshold. They seemed to go on and on, causing endless interruption to my work and loud recriminations from George, who calmed quickly when I threatened to resign. Not that I was indispensable; but I knew, and he knew, that he wouldn’t know where to look for my replacement.

The most egregious legal action resulted in a grimy process server at my office door brandishing a subpoena. The magazine had been sued owing to a company name printed on a hat worn by a man in an erotic photograph taken by one of our top photographers. I appeared in court, a drab, lower Manhattan venue that bore no resemblance to the production-designed courtrooms on “Perry Mason” or “L.A. Law.”

Nothing was resolved that day or later, and the case crawled along indefinitely even after I left the magazines. I suppose it was eventually settled out of court — unless it still drags on like the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House. That fictional lawsuit continued over several generations and eventually bankrupted all parties — everyone, that is, but the lawyers.

Back to Paul Cadmus, and one final unanswered question: Since he was alive and living in Brooklyn during the years I edited the magazines, why didn’t I make the effort to interview him, or have another writer do so?

I gaze into the past and wonder.

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“The Fleet’s In,” 1934

“Gilding the Acrobats,” 1950

Paul Cadmus in 1937. He lived from 1904 to 1999.

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