Capers & Creatures

According to James Montgomery Flagg, "doing an autobiography is something like getting undressed in your bedroom window." In his caper-cutting autobiography, published last week, he appears in his bedroom window, and, in literary underwear striped with exclamation points, strikes many an exhibitionist pose.

"Though I am not conceited," writes Flagg, "I am a vain creature." Whatever he means by the distinction, he has some excuse for vanity. He sold his first drawing (to St. Nicholas magazine) when he was twelve, went on to earn as much as $75,000 a year from his illustrations and posters. His famed "I Want You" poster of Uncle Sam pointing a fiercely demanding finger took millions of civilian eyes in World War I. The sulky-looking, full-bosomed Ideal Woman that he created and developed was seen in all the slick magazines in the flat-chested twenties. Now 69, he is still painting pictures that get about--such as his archly compassionate conception of Rosalind Russell in RKO Radio's Sister Kenny ads.

Left Ear Salad. Flagg's book is entitled Roses and Bucks'ot (Putnam;$3.75). The roses are reserved for himself and a multitude of boon and swoon companions; the buckshot flies in all directions.

His pet hate, modern art, gets both barrels: "You don't need a guide to explain Sargent's portrait of Marquand or Whistler's Mother. . . . But what do you need beginning with Manet's Olympia through Nude Descending the Staircase ... to the present-day Portrait of a Vacuum Cleaner having its Tonsils removed or Salad Bowl full of Left Ears? I feel that you need the Yale Bowl to be sick in!"

For his crony, Cartoonist Ham Fisher, Flagg has a thorned rose: "He is so keen, so well informed; his wit is sharp and his imaginative humor is boundless--it is incredible that none of all this ever gets into his strip of 'comic stuff' called [Joe] Palooka."

Author Flagg's roving eye also lights on the Barrymores, "the most self-centered, spoiled, irresponsible leprechauns ever to crawl out of a hollow tree--life would have been much duller without them. Jack and I had a lot in common (possibly the less admirable traits). . . . We were both agreeably astonished that each of us was a friend and admirer of Jeddu Krishnamurti or Krishna. . . ."

Sunk to the Eyebrows. Indian mystic Krishna "had been touted ... as an 'untouchable,' so much so that when I walked down Fifth [Avenue] with him he had to beg me to get him into a taxi since the females pestered him so." Flagg's own pestering gets considerably more space in his book. The story of his love life starts in low gear ("How was I to know that beautiful Nellie, voluptuous and sweet to look upon, was physically frigid?"), but soon shifts into high.

In recent years Flagg has feasted his eyes and practiced his art increasingly in Hollywood. Among his sitters: Greta Garbo ("I was immediately sunk; sunk to the eyebrows in adoration of this former Svenska barber shop assistant . . . the two of us paid scant attention to anybody else from that moment until midnight"); Hedy LaMarr ("She would be the only living woman I would forgive for not having full breasts"); and Joan Fontaine (she "has'everything]").

Flagg considers Jane (The Outlaw) Russell "perhaps the last word in sultritude . . . she slipped her arm in mine and said: 'I like you!' 'Yes--and why?' I asked. 'Because you remind me of my grandfather,' she beamed. Period."

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