Face Values

BETWEEN SITTINGS (369 pp.)--Jo Davidson--Dial ($5).

It was "the most stifling August day in history." In his studio in Manhattan's McDougal Alley, Sculptor Jo Davidson was modeling a World War I statue, to be entitled France Aroused. Gobbets of clay and drops of sweat impacted into a hot mulch in his bottomless black beard. "Why don't you shave it off?" tittered his model, who was posing coolly without a stitch. Davidson flew out to the barber, soon emerged as smooth as Tweedledee. When he got home, Mrs. Davidson took one look at the close-cut sward and shrieked: "You are awful--you are terrible--don't come near me--don't touch me!"

Ever since, Jo Davidson has let his beard grow. Today it is the finest growth of anti-freeze known to U.S. art since Walt Whitman's--in fact, New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses, unveiling Davidson's statue of Whitman in Bear Mountain Park, declared himself "not quite sure whether this is a statue of Walt Whitman by Jo Davidson or a statue of Jo Davidson by Walt Whitman."

Gandhi & Greatness. Hairy charm is not, however, Davidson's only contribution to art. His admirers believe that, at 68, he is the greatest living sculptor. His critics argue that this is true only if, by sculpture, is meant the art of making speaking likenesses. For jovial Jo has never been one to conjure up abstractions or depict the unseen "soul" of his sitters. He takes people, quite literally, at their face value. When the face wears a mask (as he finds most faces do), Jo waits for the moment when the mask slips--and pounces.

Between Sittings, Jo Davidson's autobiography, is just like his sculpture. Short on profundity, it glows with gusto and innocence. Those who come to it for dazzling impressions of people and places will find nothing but what they already know, e.g., that Israel is "the birthplace of our civilization," that Gandhi looked like "a holy man," that Will Rogers specialized in "nuggets of wisdom." Luckily, the bulk of Between Sittings is not about what Jo thought and did between sittings, at all. It is about the hell of a life he led cooping pawky big shots into a corner long enough to model them--and the fine time he had listening to them jabber away, once he had softened them up.

In his youth (which lasted for a good many years), Manhattan-born Jo was a true-blue Bohemian expatriate. He lived on the cuff in Paris, plunged into new "movements" like a spaniel into water. He thought nothing of walking from Paris to Lucerne with Leaves of Grass and a Great Dane. He joined the Paris circle of Gertrude Stein ("There was an eternal quality about her"), and later portrayed her as a modern Buddha; in return, Gertrude made "a portrait of me in prose. When she read it aloud, I thought it was wonderful . . . But when I tried to read it . . . to some friends, or for that matter to myself, it didn't make very much sense."

Jo's first big chance as a sculptor came in World War I, when he got the notion of modeling a "plastic history" of the times. Masaryk, Pershing, Foch, Clemenceau all sat to him.

Sardines, Dimes, Cheese. After the war, Jo took off for Russia, hoping to fill out his plastic history with a bust of Lenin. He never got Lenin, but he got a host of influential underlings. When Foreign Minister Chicherin, who lived in great splendor, heard that Karl Radek, who lunched off sardines on newspaper,* was being sculpted, Chicherin remarked to Jo: "What a curious man, Radek. Why does he go on living in such squalor? . . . After all, there has been the revolution." "He is a curious man, Chicherin," confided Radek. "Look at the way he lives. You would never know there had been a revolution."

When Jo came home, he "busted" the great John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller asked Jo about his pulse rate (his own, he said, remained steady at 57 under all circumstances), made him play cards for one of the famous Rockefeller dimes, and read the New Testament to him. "You know," sighed the aged magnate, "for years I was crucified. It is better now."

Jo never had a sitter he admired more than Franklin Roosevelt. It was not hard to get F.D.R. talking, and he once told Jo his secret ambition. "Do you know," asked F.D.R., "that cheese shop in Paris on the Rue d'Amsterdam? . . . When I get through with this job of being President . . . I am going to open a cheese shop like that."

* And was last heard from 14 years ago, when he drew a ten-year prison sentence in the Moscow treason trials.

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