Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [70]
She also found herself attracted to Eisner. He was six years her senior and very unlike the young men she was accustomed to dating. He was sophisticated, not stuck on himself, good-looking, mature—and funny. As she would remember, she laughed heartily throughout the drive, and this, in turn, loosened him up and ultimately made him notice her. “I was having a marvelous time, and Will said that’s what did it: I laughed at all of his jokes.”
When they arrived in Holyoke, Arthur ran ahead and, for the sake of appearances, made certain that Ann had a room on a separate floor. The three then went their separate ways, Ann figuring that she wouldn’t see either of the two men before the following morning, when they started out for the remainder of their trip to Maine. Although she was still hungry, Ann intended to clean up and turn in for the night.
“I was hot and tired,” she recalled, “and I was starting to get undressed, and the phone rang. It was Arthur. He said, ‘Will and I are downstairs in the bar, having a drink. Would you like to join us?’ I got dressed very fast and came down, and we had a very good time. By the time we got to my sister’s place, the boys had had a good time, too, and they stayed overnight there before they went on.”
Eisner rarely spoke in detail about meeting his future wife, so it’s impossible to say if he was trying to attract her attention with all his stories and jokes, first on the drive and later at Ann’s sister place, where, as Ann remembered, he was also the life of the party. It must have been obvious that he was interested, because he instigated Arthur’s call to Ann and the invitation for drinks. At one point Arthur asked him, “You like her, don’t you?”
Eisner answered coyly, “She’s okay.”
Ann, on the other hand, wasn’t about to let this one get away without at least one formal date. When she returned to New York, she called Arthur, and under the guise of wanting to call and thank Eisner for the ride, she asked for Eisner’s number. She also learned from Arthur that they had taken a young woman named Margot back to New York when they returned.
“When I got him on the phone, I said, ‘Hi, Will, this is Margot,’” Ann recalled with a laugh. “But Arthur had forgotten to tell me that Margot had a German accent. Will played along, and he finally said, ‘Ann, what are you doing Saturday night?’ And that was the beginning.”
To that point, Eisner had said very little about what he did for a living. As Ann would learn, this was not at all unusual. Decades later, after her husband’s death, Ann hosted a special screening of a documentary on Eisner at an auditorium on the grounds where she and her husband lived, and many of their acquaintances were startled by the extent of Eisner’s fame. “We knew what he did,” they told Ann, “but he never talked about it. We never knew he was famous. He never talked about his acclaim and how he had an award named after him.”
“He just didn’t talk about it,” she said.
Not that it would have mattered in those early days. Ann couldn’t draw and she had no interest in comics. In fact, she didn’t even see Will’s studio until after they were married, and she wouldn’t read one of his Spirit stories until they had been married for more than twenty years. They connected through their interest in other arts. Both enjoyed music, ballet, movies, and theater, and their dates almost always began with dinner, which, Ann recalled, was something she wasn’t accustomed to. They spent a lot of time just talking, learning more about each other.
Their backgrounds couldn’t have differed more.