The Season of Rosalyn Drexler
At first glance, “The Cosmopolitan Girl,” Rosalyn Drexler’s hilarious and irreverent 1974 novel, reissued this fall by Hagfish (which focusses on neglected and out-of-print works by women), might be mistaken for a satire of Cosmopolitan magazine. Helen Jones, the novel’s first-person narrator and its titular woman-child, is a free-spirited young Manhattanite living in the Buckminster, a once grand, now faded residential hotel. She’s searching, in no particular order, for a job, adventure, and what her father, an herbalist with a cult following, might call “self-actualization.” (The novel, Drexler’s fourth, was a follow-up to her third, “To Smithereens,” a deliciously vulgar sendup of two subcultures she knew well—the New York art scene and the touring life of “lady” wrestlers; that book, originally published in 1972, was reissued by Hagfish last year, to critical acclaim.)
Still, although Helen describes herself as “a pretty person” and does her hair “the way women in Cosmopolitan do theirs,” she’s not the typical Cosmo girl. Take her approach to her wardrobe: “I have few clothes, and they must go everywhere: shopping, on-the-town, job-hunting, man-hunting. . . . What I wear decides who I am. This is elementary psychology, but true. I once wore a tiger-striped nightgown and clawed a man to death.” The hackneyed ruminations on feminine style are punctured by an image of violent female rage.
And it’s hard to imagine a magazine advice columnist grappling with the central dilemma of Helen’s love life, which concerns Pablo, the talking dog—“part collie, part police”—whom she adopted two years earlier. The novel’s first pages find Helen reeling, following Pablo’s confession of his love for her. “I knew he was fond of me, the way he licked my hand and slept at the foot of the bed,” she muses. “But a declaration of love! . . . My God!”
Unmarried adult women, particularly in urban environments, have often been the target of hand-wringing by society’s conservative forces. Early in the twentieth century, the New Woman’s pursuits—of a career, of a good time, of married men—were perceived as threats to the established social order. By 1974, the spectre of the flapper had morphed into the cliché of the “Suffering Single”—an unhappy feminine byproduct of the sexual revolution, whose failed search for a mate threatened to last in perpetuity. “Rosalyn Drexler’s new book . . . doesn’t so much lay that type to rest as put it to sleep,” an admiring reviewer in the Times wrote of “The Cosmopolitan Girl” when it was first published, “with an injection of wit right to the heart.”
Drexler, who died last year, at ninety-eight, was not only an iconoclastic novelist, a multiple-Obie-winning playwright, and an Emmy-winning comedy writer. She was also a pioneering Pop-art painter. She moonlighted (briefly) as a night-club chanteuse, and, in the most notorious chapter of her long career, for a few months in 1950, she went pro as a “Mat Queen”—a professional female wrestler. (She was also a film critic for Vogue, and she wrote novelizations of screenplays, including Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky,” under a name borrowed from Stendhal, but feminized—Julia Sorel.) Like other multi-hyphenate creators such as Miranda July or the late Joe Brainard, she seems to have been game to try her hand at almost anything.
This fall, Drexler’s wild, maverick sensibility is cropping up all over New York. Visitors to the Whitney Museum can find her haunting canvas “Marilyn Pursued by Death,” from 1963, hanging among recent acquisitions in the museum’s seventh-floor galleries. In SoHo, Garth Greenan Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, has mounted a major exhibition of her paintings from the nineteen-sixties: images from magazines, newspapers, and B-movie posters, which she cut up and otherwise manipulated, pasted on canvas, and painted over, infusing the emerging style of Pop art with intimations of violence and darkly feminist preoccupations. Fashion has also caught Drexler fever. The New York-based designer Rachel Comey’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection was inspired by Drexler’s “spirit of experimentation, independence and cleverness,” Comey’s team told me. And, if you want to see her in action, “Who Does She Think She Is?” (1975), a sometimes giddy, quasi-Surrealist sixty-minute documentary portrait of the artist by Patricia Lewis Jaffe and Gaby Rodgers, will be screening at Anthology Film Archives on October 22nd, along with a selection of home movies shot by Drexler and her husband, Sherman.
The documentary captures her in a whirlwind of activities: cooking an omelette for her taciturn teen-age son; hamming it up with friends like a low-rent Zero Mostel; leading a women’s group in a discussion of sexual fantasies (could they be empowering?); and being interviewed about the writer she’d most want to be. “Colette,” she answers, without a moment’s hesitation. “She was a full woman in every sense of the word. She knew the smell, texture, and name of every flower in her garden. . . . Also, she was a great writer . . . A person who knew her time.”
This would-be Colette, who knew her time and speaks to ours, was born Rosalyn Bronznick in 1926, and grew up in the Bronx. Her father, who worked as a pharmacist, was American, the son of Russian Jews; her mother was an immigrant from the Russian Empire whose first language was Yiddish. She attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, for voice, and got her diploma from a night school in the Bronx. Chico Marx (of Marx Brothers fame) was her cousin by marriage.
Drexler’s comedic sensibility was shaped, early on, by the vaudeville acts that performed in movie theatres in between screenings. “The comedians were part clown, part aristocrat: poorly dressed, bummy. Calamity was funny. Calamity was deep. I could dig it,” she recalled, in an essay she wrote for the Times, in 1971. Her taste in theatre had expanded radically by the time she turned thirty, after encountering Eugène Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano.” “It made me want to write plays because it was so weird and I was, too,” she wrote.
She dropped out of Hunter College, at nineteen, and married Sherman Drexler, an Expressionist figurative painter for whom she would frequently pose. The couple had two children and remained married for sixty-eight years, until his death, in 2014. He introduced her to an art world that was tiny by today’s standards, and whose major figures, like Willem and Elaine de Kooning, you were then likely to meet simply by hanging out at the Cedar Tavern.
Sherman was also a “fight fan,” and though Drexler hated boxing she developed an interest in the culture of violence. She began training in judo at George Bothner’s Gymnasium, alongside a collection of characters out of a Fellini movie—acrobats, an elderly ballerina/aerialist, and a troupe of tumbling little people. Before long, a promoter recruited her for his stable of touring female wrestlers. So, very early in her marriage, Drexler left her husband and almost three-year-old daughter for a few months, to travel and fight under the sobriquet Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire. Andy Warhol, working from a photograph that had appeared in a pinup magazine featuring Mat Queens, created a silk screen of Drexler as Rosa, mid-lunge, at once menacing and seductive. The violence and rivalries that played out in the ring were mostly phony, yet she came to despise that world, which she describes in “To Smithereens” as being rife with sexual abuse and corruption. Still, it must have been about as far from the domestic sphere as a young Jewish wife and mother in nineteen-fifties America could go.
The family was living in Berkeley in the mid-fifties when, in free moments, Drexler began putting together sculptures from the contents of her junk drawer. The art of assemblage, a cobbling together of things with glue, glitter, and grit, became a way of life. Her first show, at a gallery in Berkeley, featured her sculptures and her husband’s paintings. A few years later, back in New York, the art dealer Ivan Karp (whose support would be instrumental in the development of Pop art) visited her home studio. He introduced her to Anita Reuben, who ran a gallery at Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street that showed artists like Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, and hosted “happenings” by Allan Kaprow and Robert Whitman. Drexler participated in a happening and had her first solo exhibition of sculptures there, in 1960.
When the Reuben Gallery closed, in 1961, many of its male artists found other galleries to represent them, but not Drexler. She assumed that her sculptures were the problem, so she turned to painting. The fact that she didn’t know how to paint didn’t stop her. She would “cheat,” she later recalled, by using found imagery as a first layer. Her collage technique in painting seemed to be an extension of her earlier “junk” assemblages; with it, she created a noirish, tabloid-inflected vision of the underbelly of American popular culture.
In the meantime, the boundaries between art-making and performance were breaking down. Encouraged by the drama critic Richard Gilman, Drexler started getting her experimental plays produced at the Judson Poets’ Theatre, on Washington Square. In 1963, Harper’s Bazaar included her in a roundup of “New Faces, New Forces, New Names in the Arts,” alongside such future luminaries as Donald Barthelme and Warhol. By 1965, when her first novel, “I Am the Beautiful Stranger,” was published—the fictional diary of a sexually and literarily precocious Bronx teen-ager—Nora Ephron would write in the New York Post, “There is a feeling among Rosalyn Drexler’s friends . . . that she is carrying this Renaissance Woman bit a little too far.”
Multitasking, collage, and fragmentation have long served as survival strategies for women saddled with domestic duties and harboring artistic ambitions. But, although she was active in feminist circles, Drexler expressed hesitation about the label “woman artist.” Beyond the specific content of her work, perhaps it is her refusal to be pinned down to a single medium of expression—her insistence, when the cultural decks were stacked against her, on her own ability to create—that is the true feminist takeaway here. It still requires courage to take up space as a woman—whether enlarging one’s body through weight lifting or laying claim to a substantial slice of the cultural pie.
On my jaunt through the Drexler universe this fall, I attended Comey’s Spring/Summer 2027 show, which was held in downtown Manhattan, in the historic Judson Memorial Church, where several of Drexler’s plays had been performed. The models (including a few striking older women) walked to the live accompaniment of an electric guitar and a snare drum, wearing layered, flowing garments, often featuring the bold, high-contrast colors—cobalt blues, vibrant persimmons—found in Drexler’s collaged Pop-art paintings. A few of the models carried copies of Drexler’s novels and plays. “Techniques like capturing sequin fringe between two layers of tulle somehow grew out of the push and pull of desire and escape we observed in her work,” the show notes informed us. There were silky gym shorts and a studded belt that evoked her time in the wrestling ring, and a long, low-slung skirt printed with a hand-scribbled announcement of her 1960 exhibition at the Reuben Gallery. Freedom and bricolage, magpie eclecticism and uninhibited fun appeared to be the order of the day.
At Garth Greenan, where more than forty of Drexler’s paintings and drawings from the sixties were on display, I was struck, once again, by the astonishing freshness and psychological bite of her work. (The exhibit also includes movie posters and other recently discovered source materials for the paintings, while a series of vitrines showcases the artist’s feverish notebooks and assorted ephemera: a powerlifting patch; a copy of Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit,” heavily annotated by Drexler; a tabloid account of an infamous 1947 Mob murder.) Visiting this exhibition—on view through October 24th—was like taking a tour through Drexler’s mind, a place haunted by frozen gestures of sexual violence and couples surprised in flagrante delicto. She conjures a world where sinister cliques of executives, gangsters, and G-men in dark suits float against brightly colored backgrounds, where America’s business and criminal cultures are rendered equally seedy and unnerving.
Was Drexler drawing, once again, upon personal experience in “The Cosmopolitan Girl,” a reader may well wonder, as she watches the novel’s heroine stumble, like Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City,” through a series of encounters with potential love interests? These include a handsome but megalomaniacal harmonica player; an affable pyromaniac with a fondness for feminine facial hair (he likes mustaches and is “bi-hirsute”); a despotic celebrity shock jock of talk radio; and an elderly Peeping Tom. Small wonder, then, that “man’s best friend” turns out to be a serious contender for Helen’s affections.
And, in truth, what married woman, finding herself on the front lines of the gender wars—as Drexler did in the nineteen-seventies, with her energies divided among housework, child care, earning a living, and the demands of a burgeoning career in the arts—hasn’t dreamed of a partner capable of summoning a canine’s unwavering loyalty and devotion? But “The Cosmopolitan Girl” is no feminist fairy tale. Pablo is a sly dog, and sometimes a bad one. He’s also fully equipped with human foibles, including a longing for celebrity.
Helen’s initial impulse is to keep Pablo confined to her room. Pets are not allowed in the Buckminster, so she disguises him in “wide velvet trousers, Hawaiian shirt, gaucho hat, and a wig,” and turns his face to the window when anyone comes to the door. (William Wegman’s intensely photogenic Weimaraners, Man Ray and Fay Ray, come to mind.) But the dog, relentlessly carnal, will have none of it. “Life is fighting for territory, smelling another dog’s shit and knowing it’s not yours, pissing high on the tree trunk, and fucking a bitch! . . . I love you but you’re not enough,” he tells Helen, sending up a howl of machismo that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
Yet the question of whether Helen will succumb to Pablo’s advances provides the merest soupçon of suspense in a book whose greater delights lie in Drexler’s wordplay, her razor-sharp one-liners, and her vivid evocation of a lost New York—at once raunchy, grand, and ridiculous, a city on the skids and a breeding ground for seemingly endless creative possibilities. ♦