Master of the arts
Harvey Schmidt is the rare breed who excelled as musician and artist
A s a boy who loved comic strips, Harvey Schmidt always wanted to learn the “tricks of the trade.” He’d doodle on scraps of paper his mother saved in her purse as his Methodist preacher father gave sermons on Sundays. In addition to keeping him quiet, it kept his artistic urges fed and his hands busy.
“Comic strips in the Sunday papers, I always loved them,” says Schmidt, who grew up in Dallas. “They were in color on the weekend. Flash Gordon was my favorite, because it was the best drawing, and I’d try to draw like that.”
Eventually landing at the University of Texas to study art, Schmidt’s busy hands also found purpose at the piano. Schmidt “couldn’t stand those little black notes,” and never learned to read music, but he had a knack for melodies nonetheless. Fellow UT student and drama major, Tom Jones took notice. After their time in Austin the pair ended up in New York City to pursue their artistic careers.
Their partnership was a mythic one, a result of which was “The Fantasticks,” the 1960 musical about parents who trick their children into falling in love that became the world’s longestrunning musical — spending 42 years as off-Broadway programming. Schmidt composed the score and Jones wrote the lyrics. The pair went on to co-create many more musicals, including “110 in the Shade” and “I do! I do!,” among the more commercially successful.
Yet, the 87-year-old Schmidt, who now resides in Tomball, talks just as much, if not more, about his parallel career as an artist than he does about time spent behind a piano or rubbing elbows with the likes of Carol Burnett, Rock Hudson, Glenn Close and Liza Minnelli.
“I just realized recently my whole life has been extraordinary,” Schmidt says. “It’s such a mixed combination of art and music. I was very successful in New York with both fields.”
Schmidt’s freelance art assignments
varied, many for well-known magazines like Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, as well as projects that overlapped with his musical career. His penmanship, with its angular, jutting cursive letters, is the basis for the iconic “Fantasticks” logo, and many of his illustrations were featured on album covers.
“He was famous in America and doing assignments that other artists would kill for,” says Jones, who was lyricist of “The Fantasticks.” “He was that before he was a successful composer. That’s what he was trained for. He had never trained for, or intended to be a composer in any way.”
Some of the less romantic art assignments are among Schmidt’s most memorable, including one where he traveled the country, painting highway construction scenes.
“One of the very first assignments that I got when I came to New York was when all these two-lane highways were turned into four lanes,” says Schmidt. “Standard Oil commissioned me to do that, to travel wherever the highways were being built. One of my locations was San Francisco, and I also went up to New England in the Boston area and even came back to Texas. The highways in Houston here were all just being built, so I saw it all being constructed, and I did many paintings of just that. It couldn’t have been more perfect for me.”
From infrastructure across America to strippers in London’s West End, Schmidt’s work was plentiful and extensive. It was a magical time for print and an equally magical time for a young, talented artist.
“It was so great working for all of these top magazines then because they were so healthy. Everyone had lots of money and was so successful,” Schmidt says. “Time Life, when you were sent out of the country, had all of their doctors and nurses in the New York office. You’d just head up to the 30th floor and get all the right shots. It was great. They always sent you first class everywhere.”
Gesturing to a sketch of Ed Sullivan, Schmidt explains how CBS hired him to spend time in some of their studios — often on the front row — on the West Coast and draw scenes from the shows airing on the network. The finished book of drawings was given to the network executives at the end of his gig.
But not all of his stories are quite as glamorous. The creative process can be a tumultuous one, as Schmidt can attest.
“One night I had to turn in a really big assignment for an advertising studio, a painting,” Schmidt says. “But I couldn’t get it going. It looked so terrible, and I was just standing there, looking at it on the floor, and I just decided to pee all over it. I wanted to destroy it, or get some new breakthrough.”
The unusual method worked, and Schmidt made his deadline, but also left him with a realization.
“If you can somehow attack it in a bold way, you can open the door. You can destroy it in a sense. When I was done, it was like a totally new painting, which was the great thing about it, but I had to destroy the smell of urine on it.”
That scent aside, Schmidt’s legacy in both art and music is so impressive and important to American culture that the Library of Congress is after him to donate manuscripts and artwork to their archives.
How’d he manage to come this far in one lifetime? Other than learning the “tricks of the trade,” through wholly opposite avenues — selftaught as a musician and collegeeducated as an artist — his answer seems almost too simple: “I always found I couldn’t say ‘no’ to people. I realized so much of my success is that I never turned anybody down.” Well, that’s not entirely true. Jones says there was a moment where Schmidt had to choose between working on the Broadway show “110 in the Shade” and a rare assignment for Sports Illustrated — to go on a tiger hunt with the Shah of Iran and paint the experience.
“He had his shots and his passport, and that was when we were starting rehearsals on our first Broadway show, ‘110 In The Shade,’ in that same week, so Harvey had to decide,” Jones said. “He decided to do the show.”
And walked into a celebrated career that many dream of, but few ever realize.