Artists & Entertainers
The 20th century’s dominant artist, Picasso, makes an ephemeral sketch permanent with a light pen and multiple-exposure photography
Photograph by Gjon Mili
dave brubek
november 8, 1954 | Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff
A1925 TIME cover story on George Gershwin opened on a scene of the young “famed jazzbo,” recently returned from Europe, packing a suitcase for the weekend. Newspapers littered his cluttered, tiny Manhattan apartment, one of them noting that Gershwin, in the midst of composing a concerto for the New York Symphony Orchestra, was next going to write the score for a musical comedy. The lead paragraph set a tone of happy chaos, as the musician paused to take a phone call, then “tossed a last striped shirt into his bag.” This was the Jazz Age moment that TIME was born into: a period of changing styles and shifting boundaries throughout the culture when high art and pop art were being jumbled together into the same suitcase. Gershwin—whose jazz symphony Rhapsody in Blue debuted the previous year—would become one of America’s greatest classical composers and one of its greatest pop songwriters. He was one symbol of an era in art that was at once ambitious and democratic, that had its head in the clouds and its feet in a Lower East Side gutter.
Gershwin’s high and low sensibilities were not separate but informed each other, much as they informed other art of the time. The year of that TIME cover, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby mashed up literary fiction and flapper culture. Modern artists like Pablo Picasso were marrying the earthy and the abstract. Frank Lloyd Wright, named “the greatest architect of the 20th century” by TIME in 1938, made his legacy not only through massive edifices like the Guggenheim Museum but also with practical public buildings, homes like his masterpiece Fallingwater and populist projects like his affordable, well-made Usonian houses.
But it wasn’t simply a case of high and low art meeting in the middle; often, the same work would push in both directions. In a way, TIME itself was an example of the kind of culture shift it was chronicling. Its mission was to bring the great stories and ideas of the time to people smartly, accessibly, en masse. And the very idea of mass, national (and even global) media was changing how culture was made, consumed and talked about. New kinds of celebrities emerged after World War II, made popular not only by the movies but also radio and TV; just as TIME compacted the world for an audience of millions, so were millions experiencing the same art and entertainment simultaneously.
There was Frank Sinatra, a people’s singer and movie star, whom a 1955 cover story remembers as a “kid from Hoboken” who as a boy once turned on some street punks who made fun of his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit by chasing them down the street with a broken bottle. There was Marilyn Monroe, who emerged like a warm-up act for the sexual revolution that would come a decade later, offering, in TIME’s words, “the tease without the squeeze, attraction without satisfaction, frisk without risk.” When TV became popular in the 1950s, it was the largest communal stage the world had ever known, with I Love Lucy comedy out of a just-outside-of-ordinary marriage and Ed Sullivan playing middlebrow tastemaker.
In some ways, that midcentury period of mass media would be the high point of pop-culture unity, when TV shows, on a handful of networks, would regularly have audiences of 50 million people or more, when the Beatles (gracing TIME’s cover in Sgt. Pepper 1967) could be both music’s most popular performers and its most acclaimed experimentalists. The movies began to capture the ferment of the larger culture—sexual adventure, Vietnam-era cynicism and philosophical questing (in everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to the existential comedies of Woody Allen).
But in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st, the mass audience started to fragment, for reasons both cultural and technological. Radio and pop music subdivided into ever more formats. Movies like Jaws and Star Wars divided the cinema between blockbusters and critical hits. Television audiences—the most mass of mass culture—began to disperse among multiple cable and network choices. The mainstream became a delta; the demos became various demographics.
And along with that, TIME’s cultural mission shifted; with fewer universally anointed icons, the TIME cover instead found and identified those artists and entertainers who managed to cut through the culture’s divisions and find the universal. Sometimes it found them early in their careers: few biographies of Bruce Springsteen, for instance, will ignore the week in 1975 when he landed on the covers of both TIME and Newsweek on the same day, prefiguring a long reign as the Boss of rock ’n’ roll. Sometimes it profiled the handful of true giants who still conquer both critically and commercially—the John Updikes and Toni Morrisons, the Steven Spielbergs and Michael Jacksons. (Jackson was captured visually by fellow pop-art colossus Andy Warhol, who did his cover in 1984.)
Ninety years after its launch, TIME covers a very different creative world than it did when it profiled Gershwin. Yet its mission and that of the popular arts are still much the same. To connect entertainment to what matters in the rest of our lives. To ask what it is that makes an artwork linger with us after the credits roll or we close the book cover (or turn off the e-reader). To listen to all the jumbled notes that make up a diverse, vibrant culture—high, low and in between—and find the points where they resolve together into a rhapsody.
George Gershwin
July 20, 1925
Drawing on classical training, the blues and jazz, this master of American music composed for symphony orchestras, Al Jolson and Broadway, notably the score of Porgy and Bess.
He plugged songs on tin-pan pianos—those renegade instruments that stay up late, every night, in the back rooms of cafés, in the smoky corners of third-string nightclubs, till their keys are yellow, and their tone is as hard as peroxided hair. Gershwin’s fingers found a curious music in them. He made it hump along with a twang and a shuffle, hunch its shoulders and lick its lips. Diners applauded. “What’s the name of that tune, honey?” asked a lady of Gershwin one night. “No name,” said Gershwin. “It has no name.” The ditty in question, afterward entitled “I Was So Young, and You Were So Beautiful,” became Gershwin’s first hit. Within a few years, he had written “Swanee,” “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” “Yankee Doodle Blues,” “The Nashville Nightingale,” “Do It Again,” “I Won’t Say I Will,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Lady, Be Good,” “Fascinating Rhythm.” Last year, he composed his famed Rhapsody in Blue, a jazz concerto constructed after Liszt. It took him three weeks to write it. He played it through twice with Conductor Paul Whiteman’s celebrated jazz band. It was acclaimed in Carnegie Hall by a huge audience, hailed by daring critics as “the finest piece of music ever written in the U.S.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
January 17, 1938
Photograph by Valentino Sarra
Hailed in the late 1990s by his profession as America’s greatest architect, Wright’s aim was to design structures that were in harmony with mankind and nature.
Wright’s desert camp of canvas and boxwood, built by his apprentices in 1929, stands as one of his most brilliant pieces of geometrical design. Still ignored by conventional architects, never invited to take part in the Chicago World’s Fair, whose blatant “modernism” was an unconscious tribute to his pioneer work, Wright nevertheless found clients who allowed his designs to materialize ... One quality these new buildings have in common is the clarity with which their basic problems have been grasped and solved. In Racine, Wis., Contractor Ben Wiltscheck is now finishing a business building for S.C. Johnson & Son, which is unlike any other in the world. A few miles from Racine, President Herbert Johnson has let Wright build him a house which lies along the prairie in four slim wings. A huge chimney with fireplaces on four sides is in the focal living room. At Bear Run, Pa., Wright has just finished his most beautiful job, “Fallingwater,” a house cantilevered over a waterfall for Edgar Kaufmann of Pittsburgh.
Louis Armstrong
February 21, 1949
Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff
With his gravelly voice and jazz improvisations, he was the first black performer embraced by white audiences in the U.S. His 1964 “Hello, Dolly!” would knock the Beatles off the top of the charts.
Louis says: “Jazz and I grew up side by side when we were poor.” The wonder is that both jazz and Louis emerged from streets of brutal poverty and professional vice—jazz to become an exciting art, Louis to be hailed almost without dissent as its greatest creator-practitioner. A generation of quibbling, cult-minded, critical cognoscenti has called New Orleans jazz many things, from “a rich and frequently dissonant polyphony” to “this dynamism [that] interprets life at its maximum intensity.” But Louis grins wickedly and says: “Man, when you got to ask what is it, you’ll never get to know.” In his boyhood New Orleans, jazz was simply a story told in strongly rhythmic song, pumped out “from the heart” with a nervous, exciting beat. To Trumpeter Louis, jazz is still storytelling: “I like to tell them things that come naturally.”
Elizabeth Taylor
August 22, 1949
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
She was 18 when she appeared on the cover. In the next six decades she would be married eight times (twice to Richard Burton), win the Oscar twice and become an AIDS activist.
For three years of “awkward age” she had only minor roles, went to the studio school, rode horses, and played with her turtles, fish, mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, ducks and chipmunks. She wrote a little story about one of the chipmunks, called “Nibbles and Me,” which was published under her name but shows the tooth marks of some careful editorial nibbling. Then one day a Metro photographer walked up to Elizabeth and said: “I thought you’d like to know that the boys have voted you the most beautiful woman they have ever photographed.” “Mother!” gasped Elizabeth, “did you hear what he said? He called me a woman!” Biologically, she was—and biology is good enough for Hollywood any time. Elizabeth soon got her first screen kiss in Julia Misbehaves and returned it charmingly; her fan mail climbed. Some Annapolis midshipmen were suddenly moved to vote her “The Girl We’d Abandon Ship For.” Some Harvard boys added: “The Girl We’ll Never Lampoon.” As Elizabeth ripened, M-G-M ripened her roles. In Conspirator, not yet released, Robert Taylor (no kin) made love to Elizabeth so fiercely (said Hedda Hopper) that one of her vertebrae was dislocated.
Lucille Ball
May 26, 1952
Photograph by John Engstead
Her pioneering television sitcom I Love Lucy turned her into an American icon faster than anyone could say Vitameatavegamin. And reruns and downloads have made her immortal.
Like its competitors, Lucy holds a somewhat grotesque mirror up to middle-class life, and finds its humor in exaggerating the commonplace incidents of marriage, business and the home. Lucille’s Cuba-born husband, Desi Arnaz, is cast as the vain, easily flattered leader of an obscure rumba band. Lucille plays his ambitious wife, bubbling with elaborate and mostly ineffectual schemes to advance his career. But what televiewers see on their screens is the sort of cheerful rowdiness that has been rare in the U.S. since the days of the silent movies’ Keystone Comedies. Lucille submits enthusiastically to being hit with pies; she falls over furniture, gets locked in home freezers, is chased by knife-wielding fanatics. Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharanee or a toothless hillbilly, she takes her assorted lumps and pratfalls with unflagging zest and good humor. Her mobile, rubbery face reflects a limitless variety of emotions, from maniacal pleasure to sepulchral gloom. Even on a flickering, pallid TV screen, her wide-set saucer eyes beam with the massed candlepower of a lighthouse on a dark night.
George Balanchine
January 25, 1954
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Born in St. Petersburg, he fled to the West soon after the revolution, bringing with him a strict ballet training and an insistence on spare elegance that transformed American dance.
Though it is sometimes called “American” ballet, it pays almost no attention to “Americana.” The repertory leans heavily (about 60%) on the choreographic work of Balanchine himself. A typical program might contain his Symphony in C, set to Bizet and danced in simple costumes against a plain blue backdrop; his showy Pas de Trois (music from Minkus’ Don Quixote) as a sop to oldtimers who like to watch three top soloists show off their grace and strength; his grotesque fantasy of insect life, Metamorphoses (music by Hindemith) and perhaps one of popular Choreographer Jerome Robbins’ impudent romps such as Pied Piper (music by Copland). Balanchine style dispenses with elaborate sets. It concentrates on the rhythmic movement of trained bodies against plain backgrounds—whether the dancers are outfitted in feathers and fluffy skirts or simply in black bathing suits. “When you get older,” says George Balanchine, who is 50 this week, “you eliminate things. You want to see things pure and clear.” New York’s ballet company is remarkable in still another way: it is not simply a showcase for a few rare stars.
Frank Sinatra
August 29, 1955
Portrait by Aaron Bohrod
Ol’ Blue Eyes beguiled generations with his cool, from his days as a teen idol to the leader of that emblematic swinging ’60s bad-boy gang of pals known as the Rat Pack.
Francis Albert Sinatra, long grown out of his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, is one of the most charming children in everyman’s neighborhood; yet it is well to remember the jagged weapon. The one he carries nowadays is of the mind, and called ambition, but it takes an ever more exciting edge. With charm and sharp edges and a snake-slick gift of song, he has dazzled and slashed and coiled his way through a career unparalleled in extravagance by any other entertainer of his generation. And last week, still four months shy of 40, he was well away on a second career that promises to be if anything more brilliant than the first. “Frank Sinatra,” says an agent who wishes he had Frank’s account, “is just about the hottest item in show business today.” Sinatra, who in Who’s Who lists himself as “baritone” by occupation, has offers of more work than he could do in 20 years, and seems pleasantly certain to pay income tax for 1955 on something close to $1,000,000.
Ed Sullivan
October 17, 1955
Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff
Bland and without any discernible talent, he was nonetheless the great impresario of new talent on his “really big show,” bringing Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to America’s living rooms.
Sullivan started on TV in 1948. Where Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey had their time of glory and then fell back exhausted, Ed has thrived and grown stronger in the heat of conflict. The battleground of TV is strewn with entertainers who could not quite stay the course—Red Buttons, Wally Cox, George Jessel, Ed Wynn, Ray Bolger, Bing Crosby. Sullivan is the first to admit that any one of these entertainers makes his own talents seem dim indeed. On camera, Ed has been likened to a cigar-store Indian, the Cardiff Giant and a stone-faced monument just off the boat from Easter Island. He moves like a sleepwalker; his smile is that of a man sucking a lemon; his speech is frequently lost in a thicket of syntax: his eyes pop from their sockets or sink so deep in their bags that they seem to be peering up at the camera from the bottom of twin wells. Yet, instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family.
Marilyn Monroe
May 14, 1956
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Generations remain under her spell, fascinated by her tempestuous life and mysterious death. She was emblematic of both the little girl lost and the femme fatale.
A friend got her the big break: a chance to play the shyster’s house pet in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle ... She was an instant sensation. Letters came in by the sackful. All asked the same question: “Who’s that blonde?” Fox grabbed her back for $500 a week, raised her to $750 ... She was on her way to the top—when suddenly the bottom fell out. A columnist printed the news that the girl on the nude calendar was Marilyn, and the scandal broke full about her ears. She was terrified, but she decided to tell the truth: “I needed the money.” The press was delighted—especially when, in reply to ... a newshen (“You mean you didn’t have anything on?”), Marilyn delivered ... a famous Monroeism: “Oh yes, I had the radio on.”
Marilyn Monroe and her last husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, who would base After the Fall on their marriage and her death
Photograph from Bettmann/Corbis
Duke Ellington
August 20, 1956
Portrait by Peter Hurd
He ruled Harlem’s Cotton Club in the 1920s, but a midcentury appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival sealed his fame.
At 57, Edward Kennedy Ellington, jazzman, composer, and beyond question one of America’s topflight musicians, is a magic name to two generations of Americans. His “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and countless other dreamy tunes have become as familiar as any other songs since Stephen Foster. As jazz composer he is beyond categorizing—there is hardly a musician in the field who has not been influenced by the Ellington style. His style contains the succinctness of concert music and the excitement of jazz. His revival comes at a time when most bandleaders who thrived in the golden ’30s are partly or completely out of business, and few have risen to replace them. The big news was something that the whole jazz world had long hoped to hear: the Ellington band was once again the most exciting thing in the business, Ellington himself had emerged from a long period of quiescence and was once again bursting with ideas and inspiration.
Leonard Bernstein
February 4, 1957
Portrait by Henry Koerner
He was everywhere, leading the New York Philharmonic, introducing kids to classical music on TV, wowing Broadway.
Everybody still keeps telling him that he is doing too much, that he will have to choose between careers. Since nobody wants him for a competitor, the composers tell him he ought to be a full-time conductor, and the conductors tell him he ought to be a full-time composer. But he replies that he cannot choose between his loves, that he must remain an artistic polygamist. Says he: “I don’t want to give in and settle for some specialty. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life, as Toscanini did, studying and restudying, say, 50 pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write music for Broadway and Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can and still do justice to them all.”
Jackie Gleason
December 29, 1961
Portrait by Russell Hoban
Like the clown Pagliaccio, he hinted at tragic depths and aimed for a career as a serious actor. But TV wanted Ralph Kramden.
His talent, in fact, is so elastic that he could probably make a living in any form of show business except midget-auto racing. From his start in vaudeville as a boy in Brooklyn, he developed his galloping wit in a string of tough nightclubs before becoming the Jack of all television. Now, as a serious actor and no longer merely a situation comedian, he is surrounded by competing actors schooled in the Method, but he holds his own with unquiet confidence, bellowing, as he always has: “I’m the world’s greatest.” Entering his new career with appetite akimbo, he has already completed another film, Gigot, for which he wrote the story himself, and in Manhattan last week he was at work on still another, Requiem for a Heavyweight. Gleason does his new job with remarkable ease. He memorizes at first sight. While Method actors search their souls and “live” their roles, Gleason riffles through a script and is ready to go.
Buckminster Fuller
January 10, 1964
Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff
The cover artist said portraying Fuller, the architect of the geodesic dome, as his own invention was “a simple, wonderful challenge ... breaking up his head like that and still have it come out a likeness!”
Bucky produced his dome by cutting a hollow sphere in half. Unlike classic domes, Fuller’s depends on no heavy vaults or flying buttresses to support it. It is self-sufficient as a butterfly’s wing, and as strong as an eggshell. Fuller calls it a geodesic dome because the vertexes of the curved squares and tetrahedrons that form its structure mark the arcs of great circles that are known in geometry as “geodesies.” The geodesic dome, then, is really a kind of benchmark of the universe, what 17th century Mystic Jakob Böhme might call “a signature of God.” It crops up all over in nature—in viruses, testicles, the cornea of the eye. And for the time being at least, Bucky Fuller has this signature of God sewed up tight in U.S. patent No. 2,682,235, issued in June 1954. It is almost like having a patent on Archimedes’ principle.
Thelonious Monk
February 28, 1964
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
The creator of the bebop movement was idiosyncratic and playful, a prime mover of modern jazz’s dissonant sound.
In the mid-’40s, when Monk’s reputation at last took hold in the jazz underground, his name and his mystic utterances (“It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light”) made him seem the ideal Dharma Bum to an audience of hipsters: anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat and has a name like that must be cool ... Now Monk has arrived at the summit of serious recognition he deserved all along, and his name is spoken with the quiet reverence that jazz itself has come to demand. His music is discussed in composition courses at Juilliard, sophisticates find in it affinities with Webern, and French Critic Andre Hodeir hails him as the first jazzman to have “a feeling for specifically modern esthetic values.” The complexity jazz has lately acquired has always been present in Monk’s music, and there is hardly a jazz musician playing who is not in some way indebted to him.
Barbra Streisand
April 10, 1964
Portrait by Henry Koerner
Once she became a star, she never let go of the spotlight, proving herself a force behind the camera as well as in front of it.
This nose is a shrine. It starts at the summit of her hive-piled hair and ends where a trombone hits the D below middle C. The face it divides is long and sad, and the look in repose is the essence of hound. She is about as pretty, in short, as Fanny Brice; but as she sings number after number and grows in the mind, she touches the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor, and a bravery that is all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable. People start to nudge one another and say, “This girl is beautiful.” The show she dominates [Funny Girl] has a big New York sound, full of brass and sentiment, something that could have been written by Horatio Algerstein for the Ladies Home Journal. A poor Jewish girl with limitless fight and no visible assets claws, clowns and sings her way to the top of show biz. She marries a beautiful cardboard man and realizes her most soaring dreams of love, only to lose him because she is more successful than he.
Johnny Carson
May 19, 1967
Sculpture by Frank Lerner
The king of late-night television for 30 years, he succeeded by making his guests look good and dipping into vaudeville.
Carson’s bag is unpredictability, not only in his offhand humor but in his visual performance. He is General Eclectic himself, a master of a thousand takes. He’s got a Jack Paar smile, a Jack Benny stare, a Stan Laurel fluster. If a joke dies, he waits a second, and then yawns a fine Ed Sullivan “Ho-o-okay ...” A sudden thought—either his or a guest’s—will launch him into an imitation of Jonathan Winters imitating an old granny. He can spread his eyes wide open into a wow. Semi-emancipated puritan that he is (he was reared a Methodist), he can, when a guest goes off-color, freeze his face into a blank that shows nothing but eyes and innocence. He is performer and critic, rapping out a whole percussion section of effects to suit a funny line—a wince that clacks like a rim shot, a wagging paradiddle indicating consternation, a flam of the head that says go, baby, go. Frequently, he uses an expression that disassociates him from the proceedings: a visual sigh suggesting that this dame is boring the life out of him, too; or a shake of the head, wondering where the devil this geek got all that garbage.
The Beatles
September 22, 1967
Portrait by Gerald Scarfe
With their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fab Four from Liverpool had moved far beyond their mop-top pop period, taking rock into a whole new conceptual realm.
Rich and secure enough to go on repeating themselves—or to do nothing at all—they have exercised a compulsion for growth, change and experimentation. Messengers from beyond rock ’n’ roll, they are creating the most original, expressive and musically interesting sounds being heard in pop music. They are leading an evolution in which the best of current post-rock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before: an art form. “Serious musicians” are listening to them and marking their work as a historic departure in the progress of music—any music. Ned Rorem, composer of some of the best of today’s art songs, says: “They are colleagues of mine, speaking the same language with different accents.”
Bob Hope
December 22, 1967
Sculpture by Marisol
The comedian made light of his gifts as an actor, but he was a master entertainer—and tireless. Starting as a stage act, he moved on to movies and the medium that made him ubiquitous, television.
Bob Hope comes onstage with the cocky glide of a golfer who has just knocked off three birdies for a 68 and nailed Arnold Palmer to the clubhouse door. The crooked grin spreads wide, the clear brown eyes stay cool, and the audience roars its welcome; they can hardly wait for Hope to sock it to them. And so he does. Five, six gags a minute. Pertinent, impertinent, leering, perishing. And sometimes plopping, but only for an instant. When he misses, the famous scooped snoot shoots defiantly skyward, the prognathous jaw drops in mock anguish, or he goes into a stop-action freeze. Sometimes he just repeats the line until the audience gets it. They don’t have to laugh of course—but if they don’t, it’s almost treason. Probably nobody recalls the sprightly Hope ebullience and the Hope-engendered laughs so well as two generations of U.S. military men. For twelve Christmases straight, Hope has spent the holidays with the troops—in Alaska and Korea, in the Azores and North Africa, in Guadalcanal and London and Viet Nam.
Woody Allen
July 3, 1972
Photograph by Frank Cowan
Through fiction, screenwriting, directing and starring in his own films, he turned being a nebbish into an art form and the Woody Allen film into a genre of its own.
Peering dolefully at the world through weed-colored glasses, Woody Allen looks like a one-man illustration of the blind leading the halt. Nonetheless, at 36, he has become one of America’s funniest writers and certainly its most unfettered comedian. He is also among its most amply rewarded artists. He has produced three bestselling record albums, and written two Broadway hits. Six movies using the Allen talent have grossed more than $35 million. The New Yorker publishes his prose. His last movie, Play It Again, Sam, is doing brisk business in neighborhood theaters across the U.S., while he is feverishly finishing his latest film, soon to be released, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). The relationship to Dr. David Reuben’s bestseller is tenuous, and the movie will probably deserve an R rating (for Rabelaisian). In it, Gene Wilder plays a doctor madly in love with a sheep; and Allen plays, among other wonders, a sperm cell, a libidinous failure named Victor Shakapopolis, a spider, and a court jester caught by a king in the arms of a queen.
Marlon Brando
January 22, 1973
Portrait by Bob Peak
The near pornographic Last Tango in Paris introduced Brando to a new generation. But critics would soon hail his performance in The Godfather as the best of his varied career.
What little is known of his true nature comes from a handful of his friends and associates. By their testimony, he is intelligent, warm, charming, compassionate, humorous and unpretentious, as well as undisciplined, boorish, gloomy, supercilious, cruel and downright bent. About the only thing everybody can agree on is that he is a prankster. He delights in disguising his voice in his frequent phone calls to friends, assuming such identities as a job applicant, a woman, or a doctor reporting a comically grotesque diagnosis of some third party. He is also devastatingly adept at mimicry, something he does not only for laughs. “Actors have to observe,” he says. “They have to know how much spit you’ve got in your mouth and where the weight of your elbows is. I could sit all day in the Optimo Cigar Store telephone booth and just watch the people pass by.” In the other moods, though, his thoughts drift off—to one of his pet projects, perhaps, or to the South Seas. “Being in Tetiaroa gives me a sense of the one-to-one ratio of things,” he says. “You have the coconut in the tree, the fish in the water, and if you want something to eat, you somehow have to get it.” Brando still seems to need, as a friend once said, “to find something in life, something in himself, that is permanently true, and he needs to lay down his life for it.”
Bruce Springsteen
October 27, 1975
Portrait by Whitesides
Seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show inspired the Jersey boy to take up the guitar. And in rock ’n’ roll’s prophetic way, Presley the King prepared the way for Springsteen the Boss.
He has been called the “last innocent in rock,” which is at best partly true, but that is how he appears to audiences who are exhausted and on fire at the end of a concert. Springsteen is not a golden California boy or a glitter queen from Britain. Dressed usually in leather jacket and shredded undershirt, he is a glorified gutter rat from a dying New Jersey resort town who walks with an easy swagger that is part residual stage presence, part boardwalk braggadocio. He nurtures the look of a lowlife romantic even though he does not smoke, scarcely drinks and disdains every kind of drug. In all other ways, however, he is the dead-on image of a rock musician: street smart but sentimental, a little enigmatic, articulate mostly through his music. For 26 years Springsteen has known nothing but poverty and debt until, just in the past few weeks, the rock dream came true for him. (“Man, when I was nine I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley.”) But he is neither sentimental nor superficial. His music is primal, directly in touch with all the impulses of wild humor and glancing melancholy, street tragedy and punk anarchy that have made rock the distinctive voice of a generation.
Meryl Streep
September 7, 1981
Photograph by Francesco Scavullo
Nothing holds back the finest actress of her generation—not accents or age or whether she’s playing a Polish immigrant or the Prime Minister of Britain.
A viewer finds himself watching Meryl Streep much more closely than he is accustomed to watching actresses. More seems to be going on. It is not simply that she manages to make her face an astonishingly clear reflection of her character’s complexities. It is not merely that this pale face, with its small, amused eyes and its nose long and curved as a flensing knife (when she kissed Alan Alda injudiciously in [The Seduction of Joe] Tynan, this precarious nose displaced the flesh of his cheek up toward his eyeball), is poised fascinatingly between beauty and harshness. What makes the viewer sit forward in his seat is that Streep is so thoroughly a creature of change. Her expression is shadowed by a dizzying mutability. There is no doubt that in an instant this woman could take flight toward any state of emotion or mind. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a film in which the sanity of her 19th century character is in grave doubt, what Streep manages to convey when she is not speaking is extraordinary. She is pleased with the performance. “I luff effrythink I do, darlink,” she says, giving a brief Zsa Zsa Gabor imitation.
Steven Spielberg
July 15, 1985
Photograph by David Hume Kennedy
The director of E.T. and the Indiana Jones movies was turning toward more serious films like The Color Purple and, later, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
He hardly needs to be told that fables about know-nothing adults and feel-it-all children are not the only tales worth spinning; that adults must face such plot twists as pain, exultation and emotional compromise; that there is drama to be found in the grown-up compulsions of power and, dare we say it, sex. Sure, Spielberg knows there is life after high school. “But after E.T.,” he says, “people expected a certain kind of film from me, a certain amount of screams and cheers and laughs and thrills. And I was caving in to that. I knew I could give it to them, but I realize it made me a little arrogant about my own style. It was all too easy. The whole titillation I’ve always felt about the unknown—of seeing that tree outside my bedroom window and shutting the drapes till morning—was taken away from me. And I got scared. I don’t want to see where I’m going.”
Vladimir Horowitz
May 5, 1986
Portrait by R.B. Kitaj
With the Cold War thawing, the octogenarian pianist, who was born in czarist Russia, toured then-Soviet Russia for a series of concerts. The recordings topped music charts for more than a year.
The secret of Horowitz’s appeal is twofold. His phenomenal technique, regarded by piano connoisseurs as the most dazzling since Franz Liszt set the standard of virtuosity in the mid-19th century, gets the listeners into the tent. Horowitz could always do anything he wanted at the keyboard, whether pounding out octaves or rippling off scales in thirds. But mere technique is not enough. Just as Luciano Pavarotti’s high notes, in the tenor’s prime ... were backed up by a gorgeous liquid tone and a supple sense of phrasing, so Horowitz’s pianism offers many subtleties: the absolute independence of each finger, which makes it sound as though he were playing with three hands, and a rainbow tonal palette that realizes Liszt’s ideal of turning the piano into an 88-key orchestra, with every instrument from the flute to the double bass represented.
U2
April 27, 1987
Exploring American blues, gospel, country and folk, the Irish band makes cutting-edge music and, with lead singer Bono, uses the high profile to charge their brand of social activism.
The band’s commitment, to its audience and its music, sanctions and encourages the kind of social concern that in the Reagan ’80s became unfashionable, even antique. The album that The Joshua Tree displaced from the top of the chart is a revisionist rap record by the Beastie Boys, three well-born white teens copping street attitude but assuming social postures that teeter between preening smugness and snide irresponsibility. After arriving in Arizona, U2 discovered that Governor Evan Mecham had canceled the state’s observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. U2 considered canceling the concerts but did something better: made a contribution to the Mecham Watchdog Committee and played “Pride (In the Name of Love)”—a tribute to King—with a joyful vengeance. But it is not just that U2 is on the side of the angels. It has given a new charter and a fresh voice to conscience. “A sense of humor is something I value,” Bono says, “but we don’t play rock ’n’ roll with a wink.” Without sermonizing, they have become a rallying point for a new and youthful idealism.
Wynton Marsalis
October 22, 1990
Photograph by Ted Thai
By bringing jazz to Lincoln Center, the accomplished trumpeter gave the quintessential American genre pride of place with opera, ballet and classical music.
His glasses give him a scholarly look, partially offset by the sweat pants, T shirt and basketball shoes he favors when not onstage. He speaks softly, occasionally offering an impish smile or raising his eyebrows to make a point. He sips hot tea as he talks. Like most of today’s young players, he stays away from alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. Marsalis sees jazz as a metaphor for democracy. “In terms of illuminating the meaning of America,” he says, “jazz is the primary art form, especially New Orleans jazz. Because when it’s played properly, it shows you how the individual can negotiate the greatest amount of personal freedom and put it humbly at the service of a group conception.” He points to Ellington as the jazzman who best embodied the “mythology of this country” in his music. Over and over, Marsalis’ conversation returns to a key concern: education. His antidote for what he considers the cultural mediocrity that reigns in America today is to promote jazz-education programs throughout the U.S. “I know this music can work,” he says. “To play it, you have to have the belief in quality. And the belief in practice, the belief in study, belief in your history, belief in the people that you came out of. It is a statement of heroism against denigration.”
Jerry Seinfeld
January 12, 1998
Photograph by Firooz Zahedi
A co-creator of his namesake television show, Seinfeld reigned over the comedic landscape of the ’90s with a show about best friends who interrelated with the finesse of bumper cars.
As Seinfeld is the first to admit, it’s been an impressive and improbable run for a show he has famously said is about nothing, which, of course, is charmingly disingenuous. Because if Seinfeld—arguably television’s first genuine comedy of manners since Leave It to Beaver—is about nothing, then so are the works of Jane Austen and Noel Coward. If Seinfeld seems trivial, it is only because manners have so devolved over the course of our century. Like the rest of us, the show’s overly analytic foursome must pick their way through an increasingly chaotic social battlefield, forced to write their own etiquette for even the most insignificant encounters. And then there are the big questions, like what do you do when your girlfriend suggests sharing a toothbrush? But aside from jokes about masturbation and oral sex, the fundamental difference between Seinfeld and Pride and Prejudice, say, is that Seinfeld in its heart of hearts is concerned with avoiding romantic attachment, with repulsion (and its twin, self-loathing)—the starkest example being George’s relief when his fiancée dies licking the envelopes of cheap wedding invitations.
George Clooney
March 3, 2008
Photograph by Sam Jones
After a dozen years in supporting roles on various sitcoms, he was cast as Dr. Doug Ross on ER. Result: superstardom, Academy Awards and a platform for humanitarian causes.
It may look as if he is an effortless movie star, but he has actually given the job a lot of thought. He’s not manipulative, but he is calculating, following the rules he learned from his family. When his aunt Rosemary Clooney went from being on the cover of this magazine to seeing her fame burst because musical tastes changed, she battled depression and took pills for much of her life. He knows random luck will eventually take fame away, just as random luck made him a star. If NBC had put ER on Fridays instead of Thursdays, I might have had Jonathan Silverman over for dinner. And while Clooney didn’t get famous until his 30s, when ER hit, he had kind of always been famous because of his dad, a popular news anchor in Cincinnati. “From the moment I was born, I was watched by other people. I was taught to use the right fork. I was groomed for that in a weird way,” Clooney says. “You give enough. You play completely. You don’t say, I don’t talk about my personal life. People say they won’t talk about their personal life. And then they do. And even when the tabloids say really crappy things and it pisses you off and you know it’s not true, you have to at least publicly have a sense of humor about it.”
The 20th century laid waste to the most basic assumptions that earlier centuries had made about art. Not just what it should look like but what it should draw inspiration from, what it should strive to be and, for that matter, what it was. (A signed urinal, anybody?) Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism—the isms whizzed by, soon followed by Pop, minimalism and conceptual art. A magazine coming to grips with this explosion in the early 1920s, when the party was already in full swing, had to calibrate its responses, being open to innovation but skeptical of posturing and novelty.
In the earliest days of TIME, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were already accepted masters—unless you counted a few art-world reactionaries and a great many ordinary people, who still weren’t sure what to make of what they did. The magazine stepped gingerly into the cultural maelstrom. The first artist to make the cover was a commercial illustrator, Charles Dana Gibson, whose beautiful and spirited Gibson Girls were a fixture of turn-of-the-century magazines and advertising. The first painter was the swashbuckling but now largely forgotten Welsh portraitist Augustus John, who was admired for having secured “a triple allegiance with fashionable public, ultra-modernists and academicians.”
He was anything but ultra-modern, but he appealed sufficiently to the conservative taste of Henry Luce that he made the cover again 20 years later. Though Matisse, Picasso, and Salvador Dalí all appeared inside the red frame—Picasso three times, plus a fourth cover illustrated with one of his paintings—more conventional representational painters, including Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth were probably a better reflection of TIME’s comfort zone. And for that matter, of most people’s of those times.
A magazine cannot but celebrate the power of words. Even as graphics and photography took up more room in the magazine, TIME remained fascinated with the appeal of literature. The magazine gave over its sixth cover to Joseph Conrad, and though the story itself took up a mere 435 words, in part to herald his upcoming visit to the U.S., the brevity included an evaluation of the novelist’s place in the literary pantheon. It was a function the magazine would continue to play for the next nine decades, parsing fiction, poetry and drama to benefit an audience eager to figure what was most profitable to read next. In 1934 the cover story on James Joyce rejoiced that his masterpiece Ulysses, “a much-enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, [had] landed safe and sound on U.S. shores” after a court case decided it was not pornographic. Declared TIME: “He will be longest remembered as the man who made ‘unprintable’ archaic.” Words to celebrate, as TIME has done again and again with author after author.
