It was strange if you stopped to think about it—a plush, midtown restaurant right oft Fifth Avenue at dinnertime, yet only three diners in the place. The sign out front read “Bearnaise.” And stranger still, the doorman, a smiling monster in gold and blue uniform, was bowing customer after customer out of lumbering Yellow cabs and chauffeured limousinescustomers who walked through the restaurant, passed the three diners, and disappeared.

But if it was dead upstairs, the basement was bedlam. Big, overstuffed lounges lined the walls behind marble-topped cocktail tables. There were potted palms in the corners and artificial leaves all over the place—on trellises, up pillars, and across the ceiling. Actors and actresses, artists and writers, brokers and debutantes, judges and gangsters, college boys and flappers, were all laughing and shouting over their Pink Ladies, a disastrous concoction of bathtub gin, applejack, grenadine, and egg white served in fancy, longstemmed glasses. The Béarnaise was where I first met John Held, Jr.

He was tall, dark, and tweedy, and I found him sitting with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was the fall of 1925. I remember it especially well because we had so much to talk about. There was Harold Ross’ new magazine, and what effect it would have on Life —then and until 1936 a lively humorous weekly—and on my magazine, Judge; we figured The New Yorker would last another four months. There was the boom in Florida; the Scopes trial; Chaplin in The Gold Rush ; Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; Red Grange turning pro; and Scotty’s new novel, The Great Gatsby .

I didn’t know it then, but there I was smack in the middle of the Jazz Age with its two creators—Fitzgerald and Held. Fitzgerald wrote it, Held drew itdrew its Hat-chested flappers with their shingled hair, flapping galoshes, and high-riding skirts; drew their saxophone-playing boy friends in coonskin coats, pocket flasks bulging from bell-bottom trousers. In marvellous wash and pen-and-ink sketches, Held caught them making whoopee. The scenes were football games, fraternity houses, speakeasies, cocktail parties, tea dances. The step was the Charleston or the Black Bottom, and the picturesque means of transport the Stutz Bearcat, the Marmon roadster, and the Model T. And at all these places, in any car, stairway, and alcove, one main, almost relentless recreation was necking.

Actually Held was considerably older than the generation he depicted. He was born in Salt Lake City on January 10, 1889. His boyhood, every spare minute of it, was spent in an unfinished room above his father’s stationery store learning to play the cornet, the banjo, and the mandolin; sketching, drawing cartoons, and making woodcuts. He sold the very first woodcut he made—when he was nine years old, and for nine dollars.

In high school, where Harold Ross was a schoolmate and worked with him on the school paper, Held contributed cartoons to the