“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw, isn’t that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley Wright suggested “Au Fait,” which means “It is done” in French. I spelled it O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for “whitey.” But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.

One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn’t have the money. (Models don’t have money; if they did, they wouldn’t be modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing.

“On the contrary,” I said. “I’ll give you three drawings if you’ll pose once for nothing.”

She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was getting pretty good now.)

Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra money by going around selling my drawings, saying, “There’s a new artist in Altadena …” It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have some of my drawings put on display at Bullock’s, Pasadena’s most elegant department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some drawings—drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn’t like)—and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.

Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I didn’t know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.

Once when I was over at Jerry’s, I said to his wife Dabney, “I can never get the girls to pose nude: I don’t know how Jerry does it!”

“Well, did you ever ask them?”

“Oh! I never thought of that.”

The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student. I asked her if she would pose nude. “Certainly,” she said, and there we were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.

I’ve done a lot of drawing by now, and I’ve gotten so I like to draw nudes best. For all I know it’s not art, exactly; it’s a mixture. Who knows the percentages?

One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a room, she’d be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally talked her into that.

Then she had another worry: she’s got “dents” near her groin. I had to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it’s the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can’t see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one.

My “agent” looked at it and wanted to take it around.

“You can’t sell that,” I said, “it’s on newsprint.”

“Oh, never mind,” she said.

A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden frame with a red band and a gold edge. It’s a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy—how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. “I think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed,” she said.

I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings.

There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top, and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I’d sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I’d draw one of the dancing girls or one of the customers, just to practice.

My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, “The Englishmen have clubs they go to.” So it was something like my club.

There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn’t like them much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet—kind of ugly—a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.

Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7-Up. I’d watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I’d watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn’t want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Gianonni.

The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, “Gianonni tells me you made that picture.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I’d like to commission a drawing.”

“All right; what would you like?”

“I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head.”

“Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for.”

“I want it for my business establishment.”

“What kind of business establishment?”

“It’s for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses—get the idea?”

“Yeah, I get the idea.” I didn’t want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head, so I tried to talk him out of it. “How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get ’em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want ’em to treat the girls?”

He’s not convinced.

“Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you’re claiming it’s a massage parlor.”

“OK, OK,” he says; “You’re right. I’ve gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas.”

“OK,” I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!

Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman—a senator, perhaps. Since she’s a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what’s going to happen next, and she’s sort of resigned to it.