“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

“OK, OK,” he says; “You’re right. I’ve gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas.”

“OK,” I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!

Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman—a senator, perhaps. Since she’s a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what’s going to happen next, and she’s sort of resigned to it.

I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn’t care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she’s wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast—the other one was nude—and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.

I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in the lobby.

They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and told me things like “When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask for Frank—he’s a pretty good guy. If he’s not there, don’t go in.” Or “Don’t talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing.”

The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.

Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself, “You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to have. Maybe it’s still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing.” I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw a girl’s eye. “Do we know you?” she asked.

“No, you don’t, but how would you like to have a drawing that would he appropriate for your entrance hall?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve already contracted an artist to make a drawing for us, and he’s working on it.”

“I’m the artist,” I said, “and your drawing is ready!”

It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.

The guy’s wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various rooms in the back and started to make comments.

One girl said she didn’t like the expression on the slave girl’s face. “She doesn’t look happy,” she said. “She should be smiling.”

I said to her, “Tell me—while you’re massaging a guy, and he’s not lookin’ at you, are you smiling?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “I feel exactly like she looks! But it’s not right to put it in the picture.”

I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and forth, they decided they didn’t want it. It turned out that the real reason that they didn’t want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was amusing, and I took the drawing home.

My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’”

I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.

Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my “studio” downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. “That one is two hundred dollars.” (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.

One day there was a police raid on Gianonni’s, and some of the dancers were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless dancing shows, and Gianonni didn’t want to stop. So there was a big court case about it; it was in all the local papers.