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

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.”