The New Yorker Magazine

August 26, 1967, the complete issue in beautiful shape.

The wonderful Saul Steinberg cover imagines a gardener watering a fantastical tree that has sprouted an exuberant assortment of flowers, birds, ornaments, and other improbable growth.

Here are a few highlights from this issue, with the entirety of the contents detailed further down:

Anthony Bailey contributes an extensive Profile of celebrated sailmaker, yacht designer, and racing yachtsman Frederick E. “Ted” Hood, whose sails would power most of the Twelve Metre yachts competing for the right to defend the America’s Cup that September. John Updike writes about Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky, recalling a dinner with him at the Russian Writers’ Union in Tolstoy’s former Moscow mansion and considering the circumstances of writers and artistic freedom in the Soviet Union. James Stevenson and James James visit the legendary vaudeville song-and-dance performer John William “Bubbles” Sublett, of Buck & Bubbles. Fiction includes Elizabeth Cullinan’s “A Sunday Like the Others” and Calvin Tomkins’s very funny Expo 67 piece “Man And Whose World.” There is jazz from Whitney Balliett, movies from Penelope Gilliatt, art from Robert M. Coates, poetry by Muriel Spark, Theodore Weiss, and Sandra Hochman, and much more.

The Complete and Utter Contents of This Issue

COVER

Saul Steinberg — A wonderfully whimsical gardening scene: a man waters the base of a tall, slender tree whose branches have erupted into a magical profusion of flowers, birds, colorful ornaments, and fanciful botanical inventions.

COMMENT

John Updike — A substantial Comment on Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky. Updike recalls dining with Voznesensky in Moscow at the Writers’ Union, housed in Tolstoy’s former mansion, and discusses Soviet literary life, censorship, the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Doctor Zhivago, Stalin, Khrushchev, and the complicated position of writers within the Soviet establishment.

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Susan Sheehan — A tiny Central Park overheard: one eight-year-old informs another that “Moby Dick’s father is a bad guy.”

Bernard Taper, “Judges Party” — A visit to a cocktail party on the terrace of a Washington Square West penthouse for appellate judges from around the country, among them Warren E. Burger, then a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Julie Hayden and Philip Hamburger, “Qualified Obsolescence” — On a line of polyester dresses called Throw-Away, advertised by their maker as “semi-disposable.”

James Stevenson and James James, “Bubbles” — An interview with John William Sublett, better known as Bubbles, of the great song-and-dance team Buck & Bubbles. His recollections encompass vaudeville, Porgy and Bess, the Palace, the Lafayette, the Pantages circuit, the Ziegfeld Follies, George and Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, Ethel Waters, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, Bert Wheeler, and a remarkable stretch of American theatrical history.

POETRY

Muriel Spark, “Edinburgh Villanelle.”

Theodore Weiss, “The Life Of ...”

Sandra Hochman, “This Afternoon.”

FICTION

Calvin Tomkins, “Man And Whose World” — Visiting Expo 67, whose theme is “Man and His World,” Tomkins overhears a visitor announce that he is getting pretty damned tired of Man. He proposes some exhibits closer to everyday existence: “Man the Home Owner and/or Lessor,” “Man the Commuter,” “Man and his Office,” “Man the Parent,” “Man the Husband,” and finally “Man the Fairgoer.”

Elizabeth Cullinan, “A Sunday Like the Others” — Frances Hayes, an Irish-American woman from Boston, makes her customary Sunday bus journey from Dublin to Dundrum to visit Michael Callan, a Tourist Board employee and travel writer. Their dreary little Sunday together becomes a finely observed study of disappointment, jealousy, resentment, and the peculiar emotional weather of a relationship.

PROFILES

Anthony Bailey, “Sailmaker” — An extensive Profile of Frederick E. “Ted” Hood, the forty-year-old self-taught sailmaker, yacht designer, racing yachtsman, and first-class helmsman whose Marblehead company had grown into a million-dollar enterprise. Hood’s sails would power most of the Twelve Metre yachts competing for the right to defend the America’s Cup that September. Bailey traces Hood’s beginnings in sailmaking, his development of an influential new spinnaker design, his decision to weave his own sailcloth, his racing career, and the remarkable intersection of craftsmanship, technology, business, and competitive sailing surrounding him.

MUSICAL EVENTS

Whitney Balliett, “Jazz” — On drummer Elvin Jones, Wilbur Ware, Billy Greene, and jazz at Pookie’s Pub.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

Penelope Gilliatt, “Flim-Flammery” — Gilliatt considers The Flim-Flam Man, Up the Down Staircase, and The Exterminating Angel, with thoughts along the way on Louis B. Mayer, Greer Garson, and Hollywood’s conception of uplifting art.

THE RACE TRACK

G. F. T. Ryall, “Twenty-Two Lengths” — Horse racing, including Quick Pitch and trainer E. Barry Ryan, with Angel Cordero, Don Fair, Fortune P. Ryan, and Edith Woodward Bancroft also appearing in the piece.

THE ART WORLD

Robert M. Coates, “Big” — On “Large Scale American Paintings,” with artists including Paul Georges, Norman Bluhm, Martin Knox, Jack Youngerman, Joan Mitchell, Budd Hopkins, James Bishop, Robert Goodnough, Cy Twombly, Milton Resnick, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Friedel Dzubas, Raymond Parker, Lee Krasner, Gene Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Jules Olitski, Giorgio Cavallon, Ernest Briggs, Al Held, and others represented in the issue’s art coverage.

BOOKS

The Books section encompasses Dublin: A Portrait, V. S. Pritchett, photographer Evelyn Hofer, The Man Who Had Power Over Women, A Second Hand Life, Man the Reluctant Brother, and The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vol. I, among the works and writers considered.

CARTOONS

Dana Fradon — “You mean there’s no rain anyplace?” A Weather Bureau map indicates rain throughout the United States.

Lee Lorenz — “Mr. Poster, I never met a boy who accepted defeat as gracefully as your Borden.” A camp counsellor speaks to the father of one of his campers.

James Stevenson — “Good Lord, you’re right!” A man and woman look outside to discover a landed spacecraft disgorging a crowd of little men who are all replicas of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Donald Reilly — “Oh dear! I was hoping for something more in the way of wooden shoes.” A Beat couple emerges from a house in Holland, in a joke referring to the Dutch Provos.

Warren Miller — “I got a real great invention all figured out up here, but I sure ain’t gonna donate it to no college!” A man at a bar discusses invention and cigarette filters.

William Steig — “It looks as if our troubles are only beginning.” People stare upward at two suns in the sky.

George Price — “Make way for a pedestrian!” An elderly woman charges through heavy traffic.

Richard Oldden — A Spanish serenader performs beneath a window as a policeman passes approvingly; meanwhile a bandit emerges through the window and the pair run off.

Barney Tobey — “Never heard of him.” Two teenagers contemplate an equestrian historical monument, apparently in Central Park.

William O’Brian — “Gee, that is tough! I don’t mind too much, myself. I was just an ordinary workingman.” Two frogs discuss their past lives.

Robert Weber — “First of all, let me say it’s a nice little rice paddy you have here.” An American-style political campaign sound truck makes its way through a rice paddy in Vietnam.

Mischa Richter — “Dream the impossible dream, you slob! Fight an unbeatable foe!” A businessman gives himself a motivational speech in the mirror.

Alan Dunn — “Don’t you think you’re taking the Truth-in-Lending Act too hard?” The window of “The Honest Loan Shark Co.” promises “Your Friendly Usurers” at only 18½ percent per annum.

FASCINATING VINTAGE ADVERTISEMENTS

A colorful vintage print ad for Galliano places an enormous bottle of the brilliant yellow Italian liqueur beside a fashion model at Rome’s Arch of Constantine; the ad identifies her dress as an Eleonora Garnett gown modeled by actress Mary Arden.

Shreve, Crump & Low Company — A superb America’s Cup-related advertisement for its “Cup Defender,” a fully rigged, three-foot Twelve Metre sloop handmade in sterling silver and mounted on an English walnut plinth, fashioned from original drawings in London and priced at $15,000 — an especially appropriate companion to the issue’s extensive Ted Hood Profile.

American Can Company — A striking red-and-green graphic advertisement built around a matchstick puzzle: reduce four squares to three equal squares by repositioning three lines. The company turns the brainteaser into a corporate metaphor for branching out, product development, and growth.

Bergdorf Goodman — “A Chip off the old Bigi.” A black-and-white fashion photograph by Jeanne O’Brien presents coordinated patterned clothes for girls, described as the younger sister of Bigi fashion, in a period-perfect piece of late-sixties New York fashion advertising.

Knoll Associates — A spectacular full-color advertisement for Eero Saarinen’s Pedestal Chair, pairing the sculptural chair with a futuristic fashion model in metallic clothing and a mirrored visor. The copy notes that Saarinen designed the chair for Knoll Associates and that it could be seen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art or at Knoll showrooms around the world.