THE AL HIRSCHFELD.(caricaturist remembered)

Al Hirschfeld, the great caricaturist, was to have reached the magic age of one hundred on June 21st. Myriad celebrations were planned, the culmination to be the renaming of the Martin Beck Theatre the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Death stepped in on January 20th, when Al died at home in his sleep. But, since Hirschfeld was Hirschfeld, only the centerpiece of the festivities will be gone. The Martin Beck will become the Hirschfeld on June 23rd. Since I can no longer talk to Al (we talked all the time), I have done the next best thing: I have had a chat with his wife, Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, a beautiful woman in her sixties. She came to see me the other day, and it was obvious that she has inherited one of Al's most mysterious traits: regardless of traffic or municipal mayhem on the streets, Al always managed to park exactly where he wanted to park, right in front of where he was going. One might consider this some sort of extraterrestrial intervention, or just good luck, but whatever it was it always worked.

Mrs. H. was eager to talk about Al. Hiding her sorrow, she seemed calm and collected. "He felt so tired that Sunday that I suggested he stay in bed. This was not easy for Al. He lived for his work, and the notion of not climbing to the fourth floor of our lovely house on East Ninety-fifth Street, and sitting back in his old barber chair, and beginning to draw seemed strange to him. But he followed my advice. He was propped up against the pillows and making strange circular motions with one empty hand--circles and lines and dots and faces. He was drawing something: we will never know what.

"Al always said that he had been down every street in the city of New York, with a special, odd affection for the borough of Queens,"she went on. "He always had special ways of ...