Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Photograph courtesy of ChipKidd.com

September 12, 1964– Chip Kidd:

“Never fall in love with an idea. They’re whores: if the one you’re with isn’t doing the job, there’s always, always, always another.”

You kids know Kidd’s work even if you don’t realize it. He designed the covers for the original hardbacks of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, David Sedaris’ Naked, plus my many of my own favorites like Donna Tart’s The Secret History and The Goldfinch.

No one who is in the publishing world would actually say that you can’t judge a book by the cover. The industry spends a great deal of money hoping that is exactly what readers will do. Artist/Graphic Designer Kidd is probably the biggest star in the rarefied world of graphic design, regarded as our pretty planet’s foremost designer of the special niche of book jackets. In his 30 years at NYC publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Kidd has created more than 2000 book jacket designs, averaging 75 a year. His always ingenious, vivid, audacious covers helped revolutionize and revitalize the art of book packaging.

I am a big fan and I have wondered about Kidd’s design process. It’s crazy, but it turns out that he reads the book first. Then he says that he uses:

“The magpie method of picking, choosing, borrowing things that have been done before. The process is driven by nothing.”

“A really good book cover has to work regardless of what it’s about, on a visceral and emotional level. I’m a matchmaker, not a pimp. I design jackets that are elaborate versions of name tags at singles parties. I introduce the prospective buyer to the text, and they either hit it off and go home together or they don’t.”

Kidd’s many influences include graphic design legends Alvin Lustig from the 1940s and 1950s, and Peter Saville, who did super album covers in the 1970s through 1980s. Kidd also is inspired by Soviet era Russian propaganda art. Kidd learned that often the best style is no style.

“A signature look is crippling. Often, the simplest and most effective solutions aren’t dictated by style.”

I guess Kidd’s signature look is smart, striking, sly, bold design.

Crichton’s Jurassic Park is a perfect example what he does so well. It is probably Kidd’s best known cover, with its illustration of a dinosaur skeleton that then became the central image of the hugely popular film’s own marketing campaign.

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Kidd puts together and writes his own books too. He then provides the covers. His first book was Batman Collected (1996), a volume for those with a proclivity for that Caped Crusader. Since then he has edited and designed other superhero coffee-table collections, including Superman (2001) and Wonder Woman: The Complete History (2012). Kidd’s first novel, the screwy, comic The Cheese Monkeys (2001) is a slightly disguised story of his time studying design under a sadist professor at a Penn State. His second work of fiction, The Learners (2008), is a sort of sequel to The Cheese Monkeys with an intriguing exploration of the interplay between words and images and how we relate, and again, it is funny. His newest, Judge This (2015) is lighthearted examination of the importance of first impressions in design and in life.

In 2015, Kidd published Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and The Art Of Peanuts, a collection of the art of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, curated with the cooperation of the late artist’s wife. Kidd spent a week exploring in Schulz’s studio. The concept for the book’s design promises to make the reader feel as if they are rifling through Schulz’s sketches and drawings.

You most likely have many of Kidd’s artful covers in your own shelves or piles of books, but I highly recommend Chip Kidd: Book One, Work: 1986-2006. Stylishly designed and richly produced, this witty volume works both as a retrospective of Kidd’s renowned book covers gorgeously reproduced in lush color plates and as a memoir of his career in publishing. This autumn, Rizzoli will publish Chip Kidd Book Two: Work 2007-2017, with introductions by Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman and Orhan Pamuk!

“I did not grow up yearning to become a book designer. What I wanted to be was Chris Partridge on The Partridge Family.”

Carter in Gimme A Break!, NBC (1981), photograph from YouTube

September 13, 1948– Nell Carter:

“You know what’s a cliché? A black woman serving pancakes to a white kid.”

Nell Carter was a series of contradictions and conundrums: Black, Southern, Jewish, Lesbian, Right-Wing Conservative. Carter was a giant talent in a tiny (4 foot 11 inch), if expansive frame. Those contradictions in Carter’s personality made her a unique performer. She possessed a little girl voice that was capable of belting to the back row of the balcony. An exponent of stomping Soul or Blues in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Bessie Smith, she could be quiet and heartbreaking singing Mean To Me, a ballad by Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk from 1929.

Carter had a mischievous sense of what was comedic and she used it in both her singing and her acting styles. She was a big girl, but she was light and nimble on her feet. In the classic television special Baryshnikov On Broadway (1980), she shimmied and shuffled, holding her own with the most famous dancer in the world to Honeysuckle Rose.

Carter first received a lot of attention from critics and fans with her Tony Award winning performance in the musical revue of songs by and associated with Fats Waller, Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), where she stopped the show nightly. She also won an Emmy Award in 1982 for her performance on a special television broadcast of the Broadway musical.

Carter got interested in cocaine during the run of Ain’t Misbehavin’. She later claimed that at one point, she was spending $2000 a day on drugs. In the mid-1980s her pal Liza Minnelli, like a shimmering guardian angel, personally accompanied Carter to rehab at Hazelden in Minnesota. Carter got clean, and she later said:

“Thank God I got help. God and Liza Minnelli.”

And I thought God was Liza Minnelli.

Carter was cast as Effie in the original production of Michael Bennett’s 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls based upon the show business dreams and triumphs of R&B acts like The Supremes and The Shirelles. She left the production just before rehearsals were to start to take a role on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope. We all know how that turned out.

Carter starred for six seasons playing the “mammy” role to a white family on the off-putting, obnoxious and oddly popular sitcom Gimme A Break!. The cast included a young and closeted Rosie O’Donnell, who fought with Carter on the set.

During the 1990 run of the moppet musical Annie, playing Miss Hannigan, Carter attempted suicide. Even though she had been given a brand new musical number added to the score just for her, she was distraught when ads promoting the show used a different actor, a white actor, as Miss Hannigan. The producers claimed that the commercials, which were made during an earlier production, were too costly to reshoot. Carter cried racism:

“Maybe they don’t want audiences to know Nell Carter is black.”

Carter lived a trouble filled life. Born Nell Ruth Hardy in Birmingham, Alabama, she began performing professionally when she was 11-years-old on a weekly radio show in her hometown.

When she was 16-years-old, Carter was raped and became pregnant. She give birth to a daughter who was raised by her aunt. Carter moved to NYC when she was 19-years-old and found work right away as a nightclub singer appearing at spots like Reno Sweeney’s and The Village Gate.

Carter had always wanted more family, but she experienced three miscarriages. She tried to adopt on two occasions; once the young woman changed her mind and once there was an attempt to get cash by extortionists. In 1989, with her career in an upswing, she successfully adopted two baby boys within months of each other.

She tried to do well for her family, but Carter was dogged by drug and alcohol addictions, two divorces, and she twice had brain surgery to remove an aneurysm. During that time Carter learned she had diabetes. In the late 1980s, her brother died of HIV complications. Troubles aplenty, Carter twice declared bankruptcy.

She picked herself up, got sober again, and found a perfect role in a revival of the 1973 Tony Award winning Raisin, a musical adaptation of Lesbian writer Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin In The Sun (1959). Just as rehearsals began in January 2003, Carter checked-out for good, taken by diabetes, heart disease and heartbreak. She was just 54-years-old.

When she left this world, her friends and family were surprised to discover Carter had just $200 in her bank account. They were further shocked to discover that Carter was a lesbian. She had been living with her partner Ann Kaser for more than a 15 years and that custody of her daughter and two sons had been left to Kaser.

The Husband and I saw Carter live on stage in Ain’t Misbehavin’ two times, on Broadway and on tour in Seattle, plus the television version. Her performance was astounding in skill and charisma. Her vocals were hair-raising. I remain a very big fan.