ED CERVONE (1945-2001)

      At a year-end party in 1996 or 1997 held for the staff and friends of Vice , I noticed a striking Teutonic-looking chap that I pointed out to a friend. "See the million dollar man at the far end of the room," I said. My friend who was visiting from Oregon looked to see who this might be. I had no sooner taken another sip on my Manhattan than I noticed, standing directly behind me, that very fellow.
   
         "I saw you from across the room," he said.

         "And I saw you, too," I replied, adding I had described him as a $1M man.

         "Well, hardly!"

        He proceeded to tell me that he is an artist who works for the magazine that was throwing the party .I remarked that my artistic ability is limited to drawing stick men of the same kind I had drawn in elementary school. We exchanged phone numbers and names. 

          "Smith? Do you know about heraldry?" he asked in one of his first queries.

          "Not much."  I avoided saying I thought of it as being in a category with astrology, for he said he drew heraldic designs.

         "So w hat do you draw for Vice ?" I asked.

           It was then that I met my first pornographic illustrator. 

       I refrained from repeating the tired old joke that I had no pornography, not even a pornograph to play it on. That this handsome chap was an artist, however, I found quite credible, but I was erotically curious about his other talents.  "Sure, I'll come see your etchings," I told him before the party ended and without having planned such a corny response.

         When I arrived weeks later at 241 West 71st Street, Ed ran down two flights of stairs to open the front door of the stately old brownstone. What I found upon entering his apartment, however, I had not foreseen. The apartment consisted of the entire floor, from the front, where in a large cluttered living room he had a big Steinway grand, to the back, where he did his drawing. He also had a number of cats and, to my surprise, in the center section was a bed containing a sickly man Ed was helping nurse, a person with throat cancer who could not speak, communicated by writing on a tablet, and was fed by Ed's placing nutrients down a tube into his stomach. Benny Schmidgall, a delightful person who had a knowledge of horses and valuable silver objects depicting horses, was paying a nominal rent to stay and receive Ed's nursing.

          "So you're really a humanist," I remarked about his commendably helping a sick person, explaining my interest in philosophy and asking if Ed was into religion or spiritual things. He definitely was not and did not hesitate to say he was a fellow atheist. Little by little, I found out more and more about him just as he found out more about me. The grand piano had belonged to his lover, the two having had many pleasant travels throughout Europe, having had a terrible wreck in a roadster, and the lover had somehow died. (The person who knows all such details is Hubert Porteners, a Dutch friend, a Catholic as humanistic as Ed himself, and I never delved much deeper.)  Ed never knew his own father, a German naval officer who commanded a submarine sunk by the Allies during World War II. Ed's Latvian mother, who had fled to Germany to escape the Soviet army, met Ed's father only briefly. When Germany was defeated, Ed's mother fell in love with an American soldier, followed him to New Jersey, and Ed was renamed by his Italian-American stepfather.

          Although I told Ed I had landed on Omaha Beach after zigzagging across the Atlantic to avoid Nazi subs, one of which likely could have been commanded by Ed's dad, the two of us never talked about the ironic situation. We did, however, talk about my various companions and my unwillingness to start any new relationships. For one thing, he hung out in bath houses and presumably was promiscuous, maybe even more than me.  But he definitely wanted a relationship although the two of us over the years never engaged in more than a goodbye hug.    






           For several years, the two of us ate regularly at Fedora's (he always chose prawns Rockefeller). We made a special effort to arrive on Fedora's birthday. Whenever we were together he chain-smoked. Cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

       He didn't draw or paint with models, to my surprise. He got his inspiration wherever he was, on the subway, on the street, in a bath house. He never used a live model? Not to my knowledge. He could copy from a photograph? Yes, and he took a photo of me and Fernando on a beach, painting us as if it were a nude beach. Did people call him Ed of Manhattan for his work was in a category with that of Tom of Finland? Yes, and he didn't like the comparison, for Ed's work was mainly in color. Did he carouse? Yes, I hope so.

       A time came when he asked me about getting a computer, so my friend Peter and I helped him set up the best Mac computer available, complete with scanner and printer. Peter then scanned hundreds of his heraldry, commercial, and erotic works, entering into a contract in which the two would go 50-50 on everything that Peter sold. Schmidgall had long since died, and Ed upon being diagnosed with a spot on his brain and problems in his lungs spent a lot of time signing reproductions Peter could make from material he had scanned.  A time came, however, when Ed was hospitalized. His friend Hubert was at his side daily, and Peter and I visited about once a week - the hospital was for the terminally ill and allowed patients anything, anything they requested. Ed's main request was cigarettes, which we had to leave the ward in order to enter a smoking room. On one occasion Peter and I brought a laptop and showed Ed how on the Web it would be possible to see his heraldry, his erotic works, and the artistic commercial material that a friend of mine thought would be great to be printed on Bloomingdale shopping bags, etc.  At this point, however, Ed was exceedingly ill. He loved holding hands, but I wasn't sure he was completely rational, fearing his mind had already been affected by the spot found on his brain.  On December 3rd, 2001, Ed died.  Hubert and his companion (now executor of Ed's estate) arranged a funeral. I had not been so sad since 1989 when Fernando died. I wrote the obituary that appeared in several magazines:

   
Ed Cervone, an internationally famous artist, died of lung cancer in New York City,  3 December 2001.  His homoerotic work occurred in such magazines as Machismo, Torso, All Man, Mandate, Honcho, Advocate Men, Playguy, and Black Inches.

Janssen Verlag in 1995 published Ed Cervone: Der Mann In Der Kunst (Men in Art).  Cervone also is featured in Phantasies of Gay Sex.

Cervone, whose mother was Latvian, his father German, and his step-father Italian-American, also erotically depicted the female in Over Fifty.

In the final weeks of his life, he labored furiously to sign original works of art. 

That signed work is available from the Ed Cervone Project.