Irwin Chusid met with Flora at the artist's home in Rowayton, CT, May 14, 1998


Jim Flora: James Flora is my name, born and bred in Ohio.

Irwin Chusid: Where in Ohio?

JF: Bellefontaine. The natives call it "bell fountain." I wrote and illustrated 17 children's books. [points to reference book on table] This is an encyclopedia of children's authors and this is my autobiography. It has very little about Columbia Records in it though; it's mostly about writing children's books. Let's talk about how I managed to come to Columbia Records. I was living in Cincinnati, newly married to Jane Sinnickson. We went to Cincinnati Art Academy together, and she was a magnificent woman in all ways—talent as well as pulchritude—and we had quite a romance going. We finally married and we had a little apartment in Cincinnati. I was always buying records and Columbia was beginning to reissue jazz. They have a magnificent collection of old jazz. This would be in 1940. I thought they weren't promoting them enough. I didn't see them in local shops. So I made up some ideas and sent them to Columbia.

IC: These were 78 rpm albums, with several records in a booklet?

JF: Yes.

IC: The covers weren't very imaginative back then.

JF: In those days, record stores displayed only the spines. Until 1940, this is what you saw when you went into the record store [points to black album spine with title in block letters]. But Pat Dolan, the advertising manager, had the great idea that we should decorate the albums and show them face out. This was a radical departure. Alex Steinweis was at Columbia, and he was doing a little bit of everything. After I sent these ideas, they called and offered me a job. I said, 'How much are you saying?' They said, '55 dollars a week.' I said, 'I can't do it. I'm making more than that here.' This was in March, 1941. Shortly after that, the war came to Cincinnati. Proctor and Gamble went to war. I was doing a lot of their stuff, and freelancing just dried up.

IC: You were doing advertising? That's how you were making your living?

JF: Mostly, yeah. Then along came Pearl Harbor, and Pat Dolan called me again and said, 'What's your draft status?' Well, I'd worked my way through art school working out on a railroad, and I'd had pneumonia three times, and damned near died two of 'em, and I had a big shadow on my lung and I said, 'I'm 4-F.' He said, 'God, we need you.' And I said, 'Well, how much you paying?' And he said, '55 dollars a week.' And I said, 'I'll take it.' So I moved. Columbia then had executive offices and manufactur- ing in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The A&R department was in New York on Seventh Avenue. So I moved to Westport, and started working with Alex Steinweis. I can't tell you how much I adore that man. He really put himself out. I was so stupid about commercial art. I didn't know how they got type in the thing. I thought you had to do your own lettering. Alex loved to do the classical covers and I loved the jazz, so it was a perfect mating. We had a nice thing going there. Alex was so helpful to me in every way.

IC: Do you remember the first album cover you did—was it the Kid Ory?

JF: Yes, I would imagine. Can you read that down there? [points to bottom of Kid Ory cover]

IC: It says C-126..... 1947? But you had said you started doing designs in 1941-42?

JF: I went to Columbia Records on February 1st, 1942

IC: And started designing covers.

JF: Yes. But the war came along, they stopped reissuing everything, because the government needed the shellac. We went into a winter all during the war. Then the labor union went on strike for a year and a half and there were no musicians, so you couldn't record anything except choral. It wasn't until after the war all this became active. George Avakian and John Hammond set up a little department and dug out all of this stuff. By 1947, I was art director. I had hired Bob Jones and Jim Amos. I came up with the idea of doing this little [promotional] magazine Coda, a little booklet of the new Columbia releases we put out every month.

IC: Did you design the entire book? Using all your sketches?

JF: Yeah, I took 'em home and did them. This was my fancy and I wasn't going to let anyone else do it In addition to the albums, we did all kinds of promotion, point-of-sale stuff. We had a busy shop there, and we had a bullpen of about three people and the art director and me.

IC: How long did Coda run?

JF: It ran long after I left the company. I did a few covers. They made a slick sort of thing out of it.

IC:How many issues did you do?

JF: I did maybe 30, 40....

IC: So, your album covers started running around 1947?

JF: Yeah, after the war, I think, late '46 and '47. And at the same time, we were working on long playing records. Long playing records were introduced in '47 or '48. By this time I'd been promoted to advertising manager—which I didn't much care for, because I wasn't doing any art work. Then they promoted me to sales promotion manager—which I liked better, but I still had to do a lot of traveling and I was doing no art work. Finally, I couldn't stand it. My wife too. She was [laughs] having a hard time with me being away a lot. In June of 1950, I quit Columbia Records and we went to Mexico.

IC: How did you happen to end up in Mexico?

JF: Oh God, I loved Mexico even when I was going to art school.

IC: Had you traveled there?

JF: Never been there before. I just picked and moved, with two little kids—3 and 6 years old. I had a wonderful old Hudson sedan, so in June 1950, we rented out the house here and drove down 'til we got to Mexico City. Columbia Records had a factory in Mexico City, and there was a guy named Mike Kessler who was in charge of the whole Mexican operation. Every time I met him at a convention, he'd say, 'You just gotta come down to Mexico.' Since I loved the art work and the whole damn movement, including the revolution—my wife didn't like it as much as I did, but she was patient—we went to Mexico City. Mike Kessler said you got to go to Taxco, which was an absolutely magnificent old, old silver town, with great architecture. He sent his right-hand man down with us and we found a castle. It was three stories high, and had about four bedrooms and a patio on the top of the second floor with a fountain. We had a staff of three, and it cost about 11 dollars a week or something. I can't remember, the prices were ridiculous for all that luxury. We met an American named Sully who had had two restaurants in Indiana. He sold his two restaurants and came to Mexico, and bought the ruins of an old silver mill and a hacienda that had been ruined in the revolution. Very picturesque ruins. He built little rooms in there—self-contained, one-room guest houses, and put in a swimming pool. There was a marvelous bar called Paco's right on the square of this beautiful town. Oh God—I can't begin to tell you how marvelous it was to be there for that time.

IC: Were you working there?

JF: I was painting pictures and making drawings. Woodcuts, too. And I coulda stayed down there, except we had these two little kids, and it just—well, to go back to this fellow Sully with the old silver mill, he said, 'If you'll come out to my place, I'll build you a house.' And I said, 'Alright, you got it. [chuckles] I'm with you.' So he built a house and we moved there. He had accommodations for maybe 20 people, maybe a little more if you stretched it. But he was adding all the time, and nobody ever came to that Hacienda del Chorillo, he called it—'House of the Little Spring.' He'd bring them over to see the artist working. And he was shameless—he'd put the arm on them and sell them a picture right on the spot.

IC: One of yours?

JF: One of mine, or my wife's. Man, we just had a ball down there. It was marvelous. As luck would have it, a writer had rented a house there, too, and his wife was a school teacher, and she was teaching her 6-year-old daughter by the Palmer method. She agreed to teach my daughter, and in exchange my wife painted a portrait of her two kids.

IC: How long were you in Mexico?

JF: From June of 1950 to September of 1951. 15 months, I believe. If it hadn't been for the children, I could still have been there. One of the guests—they were all fairly wealthy people, because he charged outrageous prices generally—there was an entrepreneur from Chicago. I had a lot of woodcuts, and he bought all my woodcuts. He said, 'Why don't you do cards for me? I'll split it with you. I'll pay all the start-up costs, you do the cards.' I would cut the woodcuts, then I would line up maybe six or eight Mexicans—one to put red on, one to put yellow on, at a long table.

IC: These were like greeting cards?

JF: Yes. But anyway, that was the hiatus in my record career. When I came back from Mexico, I had to start freelancing. I had a house and a mortgage, and I had to do it in a hurry. At the time, CBS owned Columbia Records. I had become good friends with Bill Golden, who was then art director of CBS. I loved Bill—he was a really remarkable man. I'd already done a lot of work for him at CBS. I went to Bill with my samples and whatnot. He said, 'Come, put your coat on.' He put his coat on—it was a cold, wintry day—and he walked me from Madison Avenue to Rockefeller Center, and we went up to the 40th floor or whatever, where Fortune magazine was published. Leo Leone was the art director there, and Bill went in and said, 'This is Jim Flora. He's got some great stuff here, and I want you to give him some work.' And [laughs] he left. Leo Leone looked over my things and gave me a front cover of Fortune for January 1952. How can you get a better introduction into the business? God, I love both these men dearly, Alex and Bill Golden, who's long dead. I kept a place in town with various other artists. We'd rent an apartment and split the rent. I did a lot of album covers for Bob Jones, who had been my art director at Columbia. He was then art director of RCA Victor. I was freelancing, so I went to Bob and he started feeding me album covers until 1956. I had been art director of Park East magazine from September or October of '51 until early '53. I got so busy, I had to leave Park East, and I gave it to Bob Jones, who was freelancing [laughs]. It shows that you want to be kind to people on the way up. He had the Park East job for about a year, then he got the job as art director of RCA Victor. I would say for two years, maybe three at the most, I did a lot of covers for him. Finally in 1956, with the advent of early rock and the RCA Victor policy, everything went photographic. They put in a photographic studio in Rock Center.

IC:The Elvis years...

JF: Yeah, and within 6 months I lost that account. It was gone. As a matter of fact, Bob Jones told me years afterward that every time he would come in with a cover, they'd say, 'I thought we said we weren't going to have any more Flora covers' [laughs]. So he protected me for quite a while. But after 1956, I was out of it completely. I went into children's books. I went into Harcourt-Brace to sell the art director Gary—I've forgotten his name, a very nice guy—I wanted to see if I could get some children's book covers. I had five children then, and I loved drawing for them, and I had a lot of ideas. He looked at my stuff, and he said, 'Wait a minute.' He went out and brought back Margaret McElderry, who was a children's book editor. She said, 'I need a Latin American type book. Can you write one for me?' And I said 'I'm not a writer, I'm an illustrator.' She said, 'Well, will you give it a try?' And I said, 'Sure.' A few days later I sent her a script for the Fabulous Firework Family, which is a family I knew when I was living in Mexico. The whole family, Grampa on down to the kids, worked on fireworks. It was a family business. She accepted it immediately [laughs], and I was launched into the children's book business. I was writing and illustrating. I didn't have to split the royalty. But after that, nothing came easy. I bet I wrote three books for every one I got accepted. I finally did 17 or 18. She's still my editor, but I don't do children's books any more. My kids grew up, and I've lost the touch. Writing for children is completely different than anything else.

IC: When you were doing covers at RCA, were you consorting with musicians?

JF: No, no.

IC: They'd say, 'Here's an album we're putting out,' and they'd want you to design the cover. Would you actually hear the record before you did the art?

JF: Most of the time, no.

IC: Did you know who the artists were? Sauter-Finegan, Nick Travis....

JF: Oh yeah, sure. If they had something to give me to listen to, they would. But mostly I just did them from the top of my head, and they gave me a great deal of freedom. Of course I was going to New York all the time, and I would go see jazz. I remember I spent about four hours at a Duke Ellington recording session, sketching. He came in with Billy Strayhorn and the whole band. Duke and Billy were working on a tune—wish I could remember what it was—and they couldn't get it right. They would write it, and then they would call the band—who were reading or smoking cigarettes—and the band would get together and they would play. But it wasn't right. After four hours, they had not recorded one sound.

IC: But you had a bunch of sketches.

JF: Yeah, I had a bunch of sketches. At the end they did record one side of this new piece they had. It was fabulous. I didn't get to know many of them intimately. Benny Goodman I knew better than any of them. I did some photographic sessions with Benny. He was always difficult to get along with, but I never had any problems. So they would ask me, 'Will you take this to Benny to get it OK'ed?' I remember going with a photographer to Frank Sinatra while he was a prisoner at the Palace in 1943 or thereabouts. The screamers—the girls were blocking—he had to come under police escort. And he could not leave the theater until late at night. We went in and photographed him backstage, and he was very testy.

IC: Why were photographs part of the process?

JF: For posters and things. It wasn't all art work. We kept a big library of photographs, and I had a photographer on call at all times.

IC: That's when Sinatra was on Columbia.

JF: Yeah. Then they promoted me to sales promotion, which was mostly how you promote records in the record shops. That was mainly my business, and I'd do no art at all. But I learned all about the record business. This was just when sales promotion was beginning. We had racks that we would sell to each record store, but they were very reluctant. Dealers wanted to do business the same way throughout their lives. We had one hell of a time getting them to properly display the new record albums. But when they did, they sold like hell.

IC: The Columbia 78 albums?

JF: Yeah. And of course, shortly after these, long playing records came out, and they just had a sleeve, so they had to be shown with the cover outside. These covers were really works of art, like posters.

IC: How much did RCA pay you for cover art?

JF: 300 bucks.

IC: Was that good money in those days?

JF: This was 1952, which is like $1,200-1,500 now. It wasn't big money, but it was not money you sneezed at either, if you were raising 5 children. And I loved to do it anyway.

IC: Were there other artists you admired who were doing album covers?

JF: Oh yes, Steinweis was very good. He did all the classical things. He's very well known in that business. And David Stone Martin. He was so much better than me.

IC: Is Martin still around?

JF: No, I think he died last year. He lived up in New London. He got old and crotchety—just like me. I think he died, I'm almost certain he did. I never knew him personally, but I admired his work. I have quite a few samples of it.

IC: You were doing magazine covers. Were you following any of the cartoonists of the period, particularly the ones who were in the Mad magazine orbit: Kurtzmann, Bill Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis... Did you know these artists at all?

JF: No. The only ones I knew were magazine illustrators.

IC: [pointing to Columbia album cover] Were these paintings?

JF: Gouache. Opaque watercolor, brushed.

IC: Where is the original art? Did they keep it?

JF: Oh God, that's long been destroyed. In those days, we separated art. I would make one master drawing of the black, then I would put an overlay on it and draw in all the red, then another overlay and draw the blues, so it was already separated.

IC: Did that also apply to the RCA Victor covers?

JF: Yeah, pretty much so.

IC: [pointing to Park East magazine cover] This was a different technique; it has so many more colors than the album covers. This was an actual painting, without separations?

JF: Yeah, by then you could paint it and then you could separate it.

IC: And what happened to that art?

JF: Oh God, who knows where that is!

IC: They would reproduce it, but they wouldn't think to give it back to the artist?

JF: Yes, they would—if the artist wanted it. But most artists didn't even think of getting it back in those days.

IC: And you didn't?

JF: No, I didn't, mostly. Later on , I did mountains of work for lots of magazines.

IC: Covers?

JF: No covers—all on the inside. I did a lot of stuff for the New York Times—and they'd say, 'We got about 6 months of your artwork here. Do you want it, or shall we throw it away?' And I'd say, 'Throw it away.' I had a lot of it, but I threw away 500 pounds of it. Just little drawings. I still left quite a few for my kids—and they will have to fight over them, I guess.

IC: When you created them...they're like your children in a way, they came out of your fertile mind. But you didn't feel any sort of parental....

JF: No, I know what you mean. I didn't think of them as masterpieces. They were illustrations for one-time only articles.

IC: You didn't think of them as something you would cherish?

JF: No. Uh-uh.

©1998 Irwin Chusid

   

 

All images © Jim Flora Art LLC, except where noted. All rights reserved.