Nell Brinkley, by Trina Robbins

2008-08-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

In 1907, 21 year old Nell Brinkley came to New York City from the town of Edgewater, Colorado (population 311), to work for William Randolph Hearst’s syndicate. When New York Evening Journal editor Arthur Brisbane discovered her, she had already been drawing for The Denver Times and The Denver Post for four years. She already had a reputation for creating beautiful women, and had come a long way since her first job at the Post at the age of 17, where the still not-quite-ready-for-prime-time teenager had earned the unfortunate nickname of “Little Smearo.”

Brisbane decided to put his new find to work drawing comics, but Nell objected. “...I won’t make comics” she told him, in words that sound like lyrics from a song of the period, “I’ve got a good daddy back in Denver and I’ll go back there to him.”

Brisbane put her on the women’s page instead, in the company of such sob sisters as Beatrix Fairfax (Advice to the Lovelorn) and Dorothy Dix (“Can a Man and a Woman Know Each Other Before Marriage?”). There she portrayed actresses like Valeska Surrat and Ethel Barrymore and drew the latest gowns, all accompanied by her commentary (“Nell Brinkley Tells of Gowns and Women in ‘Peacock Alley’”).

It took less than a month for Nell to leave the women’s page ghetto and move up to page two, where she covered the Six-Day Bicycle Race (“Six-Day Race As a Woman Sees It”) and reviewed the latest blockbuster musicals like The Merry Widow. By January, 1908, she was ready to cover the Trial of the (very new) Century. Millionaire Harry K. Thaw stood trial for shooting architect Stanford White (among White’s accomplishments: the Washington Arch in New York’s Washington Square Park) in front of God and a few hundred witnesses, at a popular restaurant. His defense was that White was a rogue and roue who had drugged and raped his wife, and that in killing White he was saving hundreds of other girls from fate worse than death in the architect’s hands.

The real star of the show was Thaw’s beautiful wife, ex-Floradora girl and Gibson Girl model, Evelyn Nesbitt. For the first time women journalists covered the trial, moved to tears by Nesbitt’s testimony, writing passionate articles about her every remark and every move. And Nell was there each day, sitting with the girl reporters, an oversized sketch pad in her lap, producing portrait after portrait of Nesbitt for the Journal. By the end of the trial, Thaw was ruled insane and Nell’s reputation was made. That year, the second ever Ziegfeld Follies included a tableau called “Nell Brinkley Studies,” featuring a chorus line of Ziegfeld girls dressed in black and white, arranged to look like Nell’s newspaper art. Their act was accompanied by a song, “The Nell Brinkley Girl:”

I’m the latest craze on Broadway

Sweet Nell Brinkley Girl

Eve’ry fellow sighs to kiss me

Fair Nell Brinkley girl,

If you ever found one like me

You would have a pearl

So if you’ll be my Nell Brinkley boy

I’ll be your Nell Brinkley girl.

It was no “Begin the Beguine,” but it meant that Nell had, in one year, become a household name.

She would stay a household name for the next thirty years, with at least two more popular songs written about her. Writers called her the new Charles Dana Gibson and said her Brinkley Girls had supplanted the old-fahioned Gibson Girls. By the 1920s, her name even sold a line of hair curlers.

In the beginning, Nell’s daily art had been printed in black and white, but by 1918, while continuing to produce her daily panels, she added weekly full-color covers for The American Weekly, Hearst’s syndicated Sunday magazine section, to her voluminous workload. Here is where her art truly shines. Her exquisitely detailed art nouveau style reproduces perfectly on the huge newspaper pages of the day, with not an eyelash-thin pen line dropped out. Each page is a masterpiece.

Among the subjects of Nell’s color pages was Hearst’s mistress, film star Marion Davies. Talented as she was, Nell was also a shrewd businesswoman who knew which side her bread was buttered on, and she drew beautiful portraits of Davies in her screen roles (not hard; Davies really was a stunner), accompanied by breathless reviews: “The greatest motion picture ever produced, as seen by Nell Brinkley,” “...perhaps Miss Davies’ greatest triumph,” “a heaven-meant comedienne,” “Miss Marion is...just a - RIOT!”

A grateful Hearst invited Nell to his 146 room castle at San Simeon, California, and even put her into a movie, along with other Hearst cartoonists George McManus, Billy DeBeck, Fay King, Winsor Mckay, and Harry Hirshfield.

But Nell was at her best when she wrote her own stories, featuring plucky American heroines. Serialized for The American Weekly in the form of one page a week, they read like rip roaring Pearl White silent movie serials on newsprint. Her first serial, “Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill,” which ran weekly from April 1918 through February 1919, related the adventures of plucky American girl Golden Eyes, who goes overseas with the Red Cross (along with her faithful collie, Uncle Sam!) when her sweetheart, Bill, joins up. Once in France, she steals secret plans from a German officer and is about to be shot for spying when she’s rescued by Bill. When he returns to combat, she turns an abandoned chateau into a refuge for war orphans. In the last episodes, Golden Eyes, hiding in No-Man’s Land, overhears German plans to attack her fiancé’s division. She runs through the snow to warn them -- too late! -- finds Bill wounded on the battlefield and drags him to safety.

From November, 1920 through March, 1921, Nell followed up Golden Eyes with a serial called “Kathleen and the Great Secret.” This time plucky American girl Kathleen has a scientist fiancé who has discovered something that sounds vaguely like atomic power: “He had ‘tamed a star’, ...discovered a ‘star-dust’ that would enable the world to do without coal. Jim had roped energy himself.”

But Kathleen’s tycoon stepfather, who wants the formula, sends a red-haired vamp to seduce Jim, and has him kidnapped onto an ocean liner bound for the South Seas. Plucky Kathleen grabs a dinghy, gives chase and climbs up a rope ladder onto the ship. Near Hawaii, the lovers leap overboard and swim to safety. Kathleen trades her by now fetchingly torn dress for a grass skirt and a lei, but they are kidnapped by pirates, who mistake her for “a pretty native.” Their fortunes take them to Mongolia, the Gobi desert, “a rocky pass on the arid borders of India and Afghanistan,” Egypt, Venice, and Switzerland, each time in danger of their lives, being captured and escaping, losing and regaining the precious formula, until they finally return home, where Jim gives his formula to the government for world peace.

Her next serial, “Billy and Betty and Their Love Through the Ages,” ran through 1922. It’s probably the one best known to her small circle of fans, and Nell at her lushest. The plot is simple: modern-day lovers Billy and Betty see themselves through a crystal ball in all their previous incarnations. Always lovers, they’ve been cave dwellers and Vikings, ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens and Aztecs. Things always end badly for the couple, but they gamely reincarnate to become lovers again in the next lifetime.

By the middle twenties, something happened to Nell’s Sunday pages. Though course still gorgeously drawn (Nell couldn’t do less) her new Sunday pages, no longer written by Nell, starred airheaded flappers with names like Prudence Prim, Pretty Polly, and Sunny Sue. It’s the art that saves them. Nell’s style had changed with the times, and her mouth-watering art nouveau had become a very stylish deco, obviously inspired by flapper artist John Held, Jr.

And the woman who 15 years before had threatened to go home to her “good daddy” if forced to draw comics was now drawing comics! These Sunday pages are definitely comics. They have the continuity, if not the speech balloons or panels.

Nell retired in 1937, but she went out in a blaze of glory with a series, once more written by her, called “Heroines of Today.” In a style that had again morphed and now resembled illustrations from pulp magazines, she returned to her special brand of feminism with tales of real heroic women: a forest-fire spotter, a police detective, a soldier, a woman who rescued four drowning people, and a white “jungle queen.”

Nell died in 1944, the same year as her contemporary woman cartoonist, Kewpie-creator Rose O’Neill, and Gibson Girl artist Charles Dana Gibson, who had drawn Evelyn Nesbitt before Nell did. The January, 1945 issue of American Artist magazine had this to say:

The late Nell Brinkley, who died in October, attracted more amateur copyists than did Charles Dana Gibson, Like Rose Cecil O’Neill, who came before her, she was quite an eyeful herself and past master as a cheesecake artist.

This essay, in slightly different form, originally ran in The Comics Journal

Trina Robbins’ full color book, The Art of Nell Brinkley, will be coming out in December, 2008, from Fantagraphics

Nell Brinkley, Pioneering Female Cartoonist

Nell Brinkley, by Trina Robbins