The Calligrapher's Daughter
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My father, Maury Nemoy (1912-1984), was a fine arts painter, respected graphic artist in the film and record industries, and beloved teacher who pioneered the revival of calligraphy in Southern California in the 1950s.
For thirty years he taught calligraphy at UCLA Extension, which was probably the most gratifying of his pursuits. He mostly worked freelance and had a studio behind our house, where he kept bottles of ink, all kinds of pens, sheets of exquisite paper in custom-made drawers, beautiful Prismacolor pencils, pastel chalks, and watercolor paints from Germany—all of which he let me use.
He and my mother never hesitated to encourage and equip me when it came to art, and on jaunts by ourselves, my dad and I frequented stationery and art supply stores in which we indulged our mutual fondness for sniffing pink rubber erasers and pencil lead.
The walls of our living room were lined floor to ceiling with books about philosophy, art, and film, and we had a huge collection of LP records: Frank Sinatra, pop, classical, and jazz, many of which were among the hundreds of album covers he designed for Capitol Records and became part of our listening collection.
He also gave private calligraphy lessons to a few celebrities, including actor Charlton Heston, whom our family jokingly referred to as Moses from his role in The Ten Commandments. My father did private commissions for kings and sultans, the Kennedy White House, the family of J. Paul Getty; and for iconic landmarks such as the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona and the Clock of Nations in Rochester, New York. Screen credit for title design was rarely given in those days, but later in his career, his work was recognized with a Primetime Emmy Award for Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women.
He was an advocate for teaching the craft of penmanship / handwriting in schools. I can only imagine his sorrow at the fact that this subject is rarely taught now, and many young people, having been raised to use two thumbs on the keyboard of their iPhone, don’t even know how to hold a pen or sign their name.
After the rebellion and misadventures of my teenage years, I realized how much I missed being an artist. So I asked my dad if I could come with him to UCLA and take his calligraphy class. We entered a season of bonding that served us well and brought restoration and wholeness to our relationship.
Every Wednesday evening my father would pick me up from my apartment in Hollywood, and we’d go first to Ship’s Coffee Shop in Westwood, where he’d buy me dinner, and then we’d head to class. My father was patient and kind with his students, never telling them their work was bad (even if it was) but rather giving them encouragement to improve. He invested the best of who he was in his students, inviting each class to a semester-end party at our home, for which my mother would show off her talent for hospitality and hors d’oeuvres.
Calligraphy added a new dimension to my search for the Big Truth. I sought high-minded quotations that spoke to my heart about eternal love, beauty, and hope—things I still believed in and wanted. Like a Medieval scribe, I sat for hours at my drafting table, almost in a trance, a lit candle nearby and music playing, immersed in perfecting my pen strokes and creating works of meaning and aspiration out of letterforms. I tried selling some of the pieces I made at hippie shops and craft fairs, and went with my father to the Menucha calligraphers’ retreat in scenic Oregon.
At the beginning of his UCLA teaching career, it was all fingers crossed that my dad would get the necessary twelve students to hold class. Thirty years later, everyone in Southern California who did calligraphy either learned it from my father or from someone whom he’d taught.
The offspring of public figures rarely have any idea who their parents are in the eyes of the world. After all of our family struggles and my declaration of independence from parental authority, I became whole enough to see more of who my father was, and to learn as so many others had from the undisputed master of the art.
Having done well in calligraphy, my father asked if I would like to become his apprentice. He was working for Columbia Pictures at their lot on Sunset and Gower in Hollywood designing movie titles, film trailers, and print advertising. Being the boss’s daughter (he, not the studio, paid my salary) also meant a free lunch every day at the restaurant around the corner. My father showed me how to use rubber cement, single-edge razor blades, and a T-square (with which I gave myself the classic mark of a craft apprentice: a missing slice of my left index finger). I learned to carefully line up and place movie titles onto squares of black cardstock. The type was set in white letters on black photographic paper so that color and background could be added when they were shot. If my work wasn’t perfectly straight, even a fraction of an inch would result in the title appearing crooked on screen.
Both of the arts my father taught me, calligraphy and paste-up—one revived from ancient times and one as modern as it got in the 1970s—would become obsolete when computers arrived. But that period of learning from and working with him provided us with our most special time together.
Earlier this year, the Society for Calligraphy, which my father co-founded in 1974 with Donald Jackson, scribe to the Queen of England, and over which he was bestowed the title of Mentor, celebrated the Society’s founding with a presentation that included marvelous storytelling (I did a bit of that) and photographs of breathtakingly beautiful work by calligraphers. The gracious souls in this community became my extended family when my father (and my mother a few weeks later) passed on.
Adapted from Since I Lost My Baby: A Memoir of Temptations, Trouble & Truth