posted
“The Time I Gave Marilyn Monroe a Little Head”
I was working at my bench one day when Lenny came over with a Polaroid pic and said “What size is this - a 10x20?” He showed me a fuzzy colored trapezoid. Took me a minute to figure out what it was about. Somebody had taken a picture of a billboard leaning out the window of a passing vehicle. They had pulled way over and took a close up so it showed the lower left corner in great detail, the rest of it was out of focus. “I think this must be a 10x20, wouldn’t you agree”? Quoth Lenny.
Oh, now I got it; if I, in any conceivable way agreed it would be on ME for calling out the size of this thing. This was a common repeat offense of his. Lenny had grown up (so to speak) with about 16 brothers and being almost the youngest had learned survival by dodging responsibility and shifting the blame. If I even said something like “Oh, gee, Lenny I don’t know, yeah I guess it COULD be - why?” then later when the estimate turned out to be too low or the patterns were all done and the board was bigger than that it would be “Languein SAID it was a 10x20 when I asked him”. I had no idea how big it might be. I didn’t even know what sizes billboards were at this time. But I knew by now after working with this guy that there would be some blame coming for somebody.
In the late 50s Lenny had attended a sign school back east somewhere for a couple weeks until his pregnant girlfriend caught up to him so he dropped both of those like a hot potato and headed west again. Figured he’d learned enough about painting signs to fake it in “ the Land of Fruits & Nuts”. So he liked to refer to himself as “A pictorial trained man”. We heard this often but never saw an example. If his pictorial talents resembled anything else he did they must be awesome. This billboard was a pictorial with Marilyn Monroe in the pose where she’s holding her dress down as it’s blowing up from the air vent in “The Seven Year Itch”. It’s a perfect study for an extension sign because she has her shoulders pushed up and she’s wearing these big Cadillac hubcap looking ear bobs and it makes a good straight line across there and you can put her head on top of the board with her body on the board top to bottom, shoulders to shoes. Marilyn had lost her head, though. Looked like Jayne Mansfield, now.
The company that put these boards up had had a real pictorial artist do about 8 of them, then he retired and moved away. So somebody driving down the freeway saw this board with the headless MM, took a snapshot of it and brought it to the co. so they could repair it. Maybe the wind took it off, but it was gone. Now they had to find a pictorial guy and quickly. A picture of it had already shown up in the local paper. Their first mistake was asking Lenny if he knew anybody. “Well, yeah, I’m a Pictorial Trained Man, myself”. So he bid on this thing as a 10x20. Then he decided he had to get the head out of a piece of material no bigger than a 4x4, to maximize profit. Bear in mind, now that he would never ask the company what size the board was. And he was going to make just a head and attach it to somebody else’s art work out in the field, somewhere. And he took just the artwork for the head, not the whole Marilyn so there would be no way to scale it if he DID know how big to make it. And THAT was a several generations Xerox of the original - but he didn’t need colors to do this, being the professional that he was. The next thing he did was cut out one of those artist palette things like you see in the cartoons; a big oval with a thumb hole in it, only he made it 4’x8’. He cut it out all by himself on the bandsaw breaking 3 blades in the process. So his materials cost had gone up already. That’s O.K., though - he’d make that back in paint cost, not being one to buy artist’s oil colors. Then he went around the shop picking up all the cans of special mixed colors anybody had sitting around; all the pinks, oranges, etc. and of course this included the ones marked for touching up and matching jobs that had gone out.
It took him 4 days to paint this masterpiece that did, I must admit, look generally like a humanoid face in Porky Pig Pink. Petunia, rather, sorry, ladies. If you’ve read any of my posts you know by now that I’m a particularly sarcastic bastard and for ‘some unknown reason’ my inimitable sense of humor can (at rare times) tend to tic off my targets. So during this time I was riding the boss pretty hard. I probably didn’t get fired that week because EVERYBODY was laughing at the pink menace, including the customers. Lenny was painting it outside the shop and had it propped up close to and facing the windows so it looked like somebody looking in the window. A big pink cartoon King Kong with ‘56 Caddy hubcaps on his neck and a yellow fright wig.
When the gorilla crew came to install it even THEY were laughing, and no artists they! What they have to do is make the installation and take a picture of it or they don’t get paid. So they’ll do anything. If it has to get fixed later; COOL! More work= more $$.
Now the papers were having a ball! Everybody was taking pics of this vandalized billboard and publishing them. The newspapers were asking for the I.D. of the culprit! I bought 10 copies of the Daily Bulletin myself and stapled up on the wall the front page with this big lady on the board with a head the size of a small cantaloupe. The board was probably a 14x48 or bigger, I don’t remember, maybe a 20x60. Then more pictures came in. Photos of the board were being mailed in to the shop, some anonymously, for weeks afterward. I was even accused of aiding & abetting in this, I don’t know why. I like to visit other sign shops and meet the painters. Some of these had a picture of that board pinned to their walls, as nephew art or Brother-in-Law signs.
They had to get it fixed, though, and Lenny was on the hook to do it. He had to bite the bullet and put together a much larger piece and try a redo. As luck would have it a real pictorial guy showed up looking for work at this time, and he did a pretty good job considering he basically had pink and orange to work with. Still, more pictures came in. (It wasn’t THAT good). I don’t have any more of those newspaper pages; Lenny tore them down as fast as I could put them up and vice versa, ‘til they were all gone. Lenny kept pics of every sign he did no matter how they looked. Except those.
Another pictorial job came in while Lane worked there and Lenny got the bid at $1400.00. Lane said he’d do it in three days for $300 if Lenny would buy the colors in oil that he’d need for skin tones - green gold and quinochridone red. When Lenny found out it would cost $40.00 for the paint he balked and told Lane to use orange, instead, as that’s what he’d do. The pink was all gone. The artwork had a bunch of people on it and a stack of products in one corner. Lane had it done in 4 days, using orange for the skins and it looked pretty darn GOOD, considering. Lenny, of course, would have done it better and faster. Before it went out I painted a panel by the products that had this poem on it:
There once was a painter named Lenny Of pictorials he said he’d done many But when put to the test He made a big mess - It turned out he couldn’t do ANY!
It made me happy, and it ****ed off the boss, when he saw it, and THAT made me happy.
[ February 06, 2003, 03:49 AM: Message edited by: Mike Languein ]
Posts: 1859 | From: / | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
Mike, I love these stories! As I read thru this one, an image of Lenny came to me...
Carla's flakey husband on Cheers...... for me that's Lenny, voice and face.
John Lennig / SignRider
-------------------- John Lennig / Big Top Sign Arts 5668 Ewart Street, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada bigtopya@hotmail.com 604.451.0006 Posts: 2184 | From: Burnaby, British Columbia,Canada | Registered: Nov 2001
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I am beginning to see why the Lenny stories are legendary. Three reasons come to mind. They're special in the happening, the observing, and the telling. Thank you Mike! I'm so glad another one showed up. I had been considering to stand there with my empty plate and just say: More ?
-------------------- Myra A. Grozinger Signs Limited Winston-Salem, NC
signslimited@triad.rr.com Posts: 1244 | From: Winston-Salem, NC USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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Great story, well told. I smiled the whole way through. I've had the pleasure of working with al types of people, some more full of themselves than others. This Lenny certainly seemed full of himself. Must have been a great role-model hey?
[ February 06, 2003, 05:07 PM: Message edited by: Peter Schuttinga ]
-------------------- "Are we having fun yet?" Peter Schuttinga DZines Sign Studio 1617 Millstream rd Victoria BC V9B-6G4 Posts: 521 | From: Victoria BC | Registered: Mar 2002
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