Edward Sorel's work at the reincarnated Monkey Bar

When Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and owner of the Village's regularly impossible reservation, The Waverly Inn, decided to take on the storied Monkey Bar in Midtown’s Hotel Elysée, it came as little surprise that he had plans for more celeb-populated murals. For the project, Carter again turned to famed illustrator Edward Sorel, who he worked with at the Waverly, and whose illustrations have graced the pages of everything from The New Yorker to The Atlantic. The Buzz caught up with Sorel to talk about who's depicted in the mural, and whether he still eats for free at Carter's spots.

Zagat Buzz: How did Graydon Carter persuade you to do the murals for the Monkey Bar?

Edward Sorel: He didn’t have to persuade me – I was eager to do it. I had done the mural at the Waverly Inn, which was the first mural I did for him. That was received very well – we did a book about it. I had always dreamed of doing a restaurant mural and didn’t know how to go about getting one, and nobody was doing restaurant murals anymore except Italian restaurants in Little Italy. So I jumped at it.

ZB: How long did the Monkey Bar murals take to execute? How did you decide who to include?

ES: People keep asking me that and I really don’t know. Graydon saw it when I first began doing sketches, and I can’t even remember how long the sketches took. The big problem with something like this is the composition. The other problem I had was that he wanted everybody who ever walked in New York City to be in the mural.

At first his idea was the New York cafe society between the wars, but that left us with people that nobody today ever heard of like [debutante] Brenda Frazier. So then it quickly became celebrities between the wars. But he still had too many. At his insistence I had to put in some obscure woman who was the first editor of Vogue, Edna Woolman Chase. Not only does no one know what she looked like, no one has even heard of her – but I never argue with the boss.

The [Monkey Bar's] heyday was the '30s and '40s, but we kept to the '20s and '30s with the one exception of Tennessee Williams. He not only stayed at the hotel the restaurant is in, but died there too. So Williams had to go in. He used to smoke cigarettes from a long cigarette holder, so I have the smoke from the cigarette and all the crazy characters that were in his plays.

ZB: How did you decide where to put people?

ES: There is no chronology to the thing – I thought that made it kind of fun. There's one section where you have the '20s with the Fitzgeralds and Benchley and Cole Porter. By and large, though, I mixed them up. One thing that did make [Monkey Bar's mural] a little bit easier [than Waverly Inn's] is that I had Google Image Search, so I didn’t have to go to the New York Public Library's picture collection every time I had to do somebody.

ZB: What other faces in the mural will be unfamiliar to some diners?

ES: I was shocked to find out that there really was a Condé Nast, and he was actually fun to do. He was a kind of prissy-looking guy, very proper – I didn’t mind that. There were a few others people might not know what they looked like, but they’ve heard of them. Sherman Billingsley – I don’t think anybody knows what he looks like anymore. Of course, I’m 80, so these people were at least part of my childhood for the most part.

I discovered in doing the murals that, first, the people I liked I made a little larger and, second, I found that my caricatures of them were the best in the murals. I had to leave out some of my favorite people like Harold Arlen – there just wasn’t room for everybody. When the last two panels were finished, Graydon saw them just before they were hung. He called me up and asked, "Who’s the singer at the piano?" The only guy at the piano was Richard Rodgers, so I thought he was kidding me and made up some joke. But he was serious because he didn’t know what Richard Rodgers looked like. I was horrified at this, and he said, "You know I’m not 80 years old."

ZB: Do you have a favorite character in the murals?

ES: I’ve always been in love with Fred Astaire.

ZB: I take it you eat for free at the Monkey Bar?

ES: If my experience with the Waverly Inn is any gauge, they always promise that you can eat for the rest of your life, but it really doesn’t work out that way. You get about two or three meals, and after that they hand you a check.

ZB: Do you have any more murals in the offing?

ES: No, this is absolutely my last mural. I don’t want to do any more murals, and happily no one has asked me to do any. They take too long!

– Garth Johnston