Carew kate Carew
Introduction
I knew Grandma was an artist; her paintings were all over the house. But I didn’t understand about her newspaper and magazine work. I didn’t realize she had been famous.
Ginny and I were rarely in her part of the house, which was separated from ours by a dark corridor. Once she volunteered to teach us drawing, but I think there was only one lesson. I still remember what I learned. Instead of drawing trees with a lollipop shape, she showed me how to draw from the inside out, having branches that spawned new branches and covering them with leaves. I am sorry that the lessons ended, whatever the reason.
There are pictures of me following Grandma around the garden when I was a toddler, but few of her with Ginny and me in later years. She was 75 when I was born, so her health might have been declining over those years. She became a shadowy presence. She was probably lonely in her last years. She never formed a friendship with Mom, and she didn’t know how to be a grandmother. She had once charmed the world with her caricatures, but she wasn’t friendly or lovable.
When I was in my early teens, Grandma went into a nursing home, probably with dementia, and she died when I was 15. The only mourners at her funeral were my parents, me and Dr. Orms, the companion of an old woman who lived across the street. Someone sent early daffodils. Yellow was Grandma’s favorite color.
From the private memoir of Christine Chambers.
Kate Carew set out to be a painter in the California sun but became instead an ink-in-theveins newspaper woman. She drew all the kinds of newspaper art that there used to be, at first illustrating the news in the days before photos could be printed directly. Portraits were her specialty. She was in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, drawing theater sketches for Joseph Pulitzer’s EvEning World when the “Yellow Press” was in full beam and the Sunday comics tickled the national funny bone. She rubbed shoulders with George Herriman and other great figures of the early funnies. Her contribution to that genre of cartooning, “The Angel Child,” is mostly overlooked by the chaps who study these things and make serious exhibitions and books of them under such titles as “The Masters of American Comics.”
It was in the idiom of freestanding caricature that she created her most impressive work, combining it furthermore with the celebrity interview. She interviewed her subject and sketched their likeness at the same time. The celebrities teased by her crowquill included Mark Twain, J. P. Morgan, Jack Johnson, as well as Marconi, Rodin, Picasso and such people who do not need first names. It’s a head count of the famous in the morning of the modernity. Kate interviewed figures from many walks of life, the usual actors and writers, novelists, politicians, socialites, scientists, painters, sportsmen, business people, but also more ordinary figures who had something to tell us about the world, such as P. J. Scully, overseer of marriage licences at City Hall, W. J. Flynn of Uncle Sam’s Secret Service, and a fellow identified as “the professor,” whom she charged with “explaining the whyness” of the Coney Island amusement park (above)
Even if all she had left us were her insightful verbal descriptions of her subjects we would be enriched. Mark Twain was “A fresh, spotless little old man, good to look upon and suggesting spring water and much soap, with the more metropolitan advantages of shoe blacking and starched linen. On closer acquaintance he proved not such a very little man, not so very shrunken and not so very old as he seemed at that first glimpse. Great, unaffected dignity he has, great poise, great simplicity and strength. White hairs are not always admirable, I have heard, but Mark Twain’s are. They are also beautiful.”
For the most part she caught her subjects at the time they were doing the thing
A nicely composed page for August 24, 1902. The recurring stereotypical Italian is now named Tony, as were all his countrymen, and is selling balloons. A tendency to imagine these pre-movie comics as taking place on a small theatrical stage belies the action’s depth of field; Kitty is half a mile away by the end of it.
A page with many moving parts on September 7, 1902. The threatening bear turns out to be a dancing bear, the latest enterprise of Tony, the stereotypical Italian. There’s an odd magical-forest quality about this one that I didn’t notice until I colored it, and am therefore not closed to the suggestion that I may have caused it.
notice in the programme)” and the critics didn’t like it. “They loosed shafts at Capulet’s rough-house balcony,” said Kate, for whom the idea fit well with her sense of humor in its swerving past literalness: “Stage illusions don’t illooze. If they did—if Belasco could make you forget that you were in a theatre and believe that you were watching actual occurrences in Japan and Purgatory and Heaven—you would be a logical candidate for a keeper and a straitjacket. Which leads up to this—that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the interesting Elizabethan fake at Mrs. Osborn’s, without scenery or ‘effects,’ came as near to illoozing me as any stage spectacle I ever saw— infinitely more so than Mansfield’s steenty-billion-dollar ‘Brutus’... Some of the Elizabethans are quaint actors. Popper Capulet outcherries the Cherry Sisters, but Harry Leighton’s Mercutio is like a generous act in a pawn office.”11
“I hope the manager will do some more Elizabethan plays. Me and ’Lizbeth gets on awful friendly like. But I also hope he won’t print the program in red ink that transfers itself to kid gloves. ’Lizbeth wouldn’t a’ stood for that—not much she wouldn’t.”
Kate’s quiver of verbal projectiles included playful misspellings, invented words, mock accents and urbane wit. One might claim that it puts her at the pointy end of American journalistic wiseassery.
Kate Carew had piled up quite a volume of work. By the end of February 1905, ThE SundaY World had published 110 of her interviews and 67 of her comics and in the EvEning World there had been about 220 theatrical review cartoons of the various sorts. She had been appearing continuously for four and half years. After her final Angel Child half-page of February 19, she disappeared from the newspapers, with no explanation at the time nor any that can be unearthed now, other than that she wanted “to devote herself to her earlier work, portrait and landscape painting.”A pattern of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t is one we get used to finding in the biographies of married women who worked, so that a disappearance, however long, should not need an explanation.
One more event of this period, however, demands attention. It was a high water mark, with Kate playing the lead in her own story, an example of the “stunt journalism” much loved by the Yellow Press. In this story she was to pass herself off as a millionaire so as to be the first to sleep in the ten thousand dollar bed at the St. Regis hotel.
“I felt I was having a Parisian experience. I wasn’t a mere interviewer at all. I was a charming, cultivated woman, a sympathetic woman, a chosen confidante of one strong man.
“Isn’t it wonderful; what these Byronic personalities can accomplish?
“But the telephone didn’t stop, and I forgot myself so far as to exclaim: ‘Oh, fudge! You’re too popular!’
“He didn’t protest; he merely looked awfully sad, and mutely asked for a little more sympathy from me.
“But I only gathered up my belongings with a certain queenly air which I reserve for special occasions, and I held out my hand to the maestro, with a few conventional words of thanks for his kindness in letting me have a chat with him.
“He stooped down, and I thought he was going to pick up a pin. Not so. I’ll have you know he kissed my hand, glove and all.
“I realized then that I was in Paris, and just as I realized it, I stumbled down two steps of the stairs, while through my head was the haunting wish that I had worn my best white gloves.”
Kate sent him a copy of the printed page, in which he kisses her mitt, and De Lara responded with his autographed cabinet card, upon which he keeps up the gallantries: “A friend devoted, who for the sake of conventionality, signs himself, yours sincerely.” An older Kate has added a place and a date lest anybody get the wrong idea.
A line in her recollections tells how de Lara helped Kate make some Paris connections: “M. de Lara was so very kind to me. He got me an interview with Jean Richepin, Mme Cavalieri, Rodin, Rejane, Sara Bernhardt etc etc. and even got an interpreter to accompany me.”
Outside of this additional information we must assume that Kate was finding her subjects on the fly, no easy task in a strange city. There are a couple of pages where, for want of an interview subject, a celebrity of any sort, Kate has her own adventure in the fashion capital of the world. Of course, the TribunE already had its fashion correspondent, as Kate acknowledges, and this is not something she would try to get away with too often. But these pages are especially charming, with the focus on Kate herself, and in them she appears in all the pictures.
Kate’s self-depiction develops nicely during this phase. The observer is now taking part in the action. Aunt Kate had always been dressed the same. In the text of the Manhattan suffragist march we are told about the thirty cent hat she is to wear, by way of a uniform, but in the pictures she is still wearing the huge “Aunt Kate” hat, black dress, white gloves and “goggles.” And under her arm she is always carrying the big sketch pad, even on the deck of the ship while talking to the captain. These are her defining attributes, like Athena’s owl or Apollo’s lyre. She cannot dress differently any more than Popeye can appear without a pipe and
“Kate Carew Creeps into the Center of Parisian Gayety” New York Tribune, February 2, 1913
Isadore de Lara. photo in Kate Carew’s album