Letter from the Archive: S. N. Behrman on the Art Dealer Joseph Duveen: The New Yorker The Profile has been a staple of New Yorker writing from the start. At least some of the best - Truman Capote on Marlon Brando; Janet Malcolm on the psychoanalyst Aaron Green; Mark Singer on Ricky Jay; Ian Frazier on Heloise - were published in the collection "Life Stories," which appeared in 2000. But since this feature is meant to rummage a little deeper into the archives, I hope you will not mind if I latch insistently on to your lapels and keep yanking until you agree to read S. N. Behrman's astonishing Profile of Joseph Duveen, the art dealer and cultural adviser to Rockefeller, Frick, Clay, and Hearst. Behrman (1893-1973) was born of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, who spoke little English. His father was a Talmudic scholar. In his time, Behrman won some fame as a playwright ("No Time for Comedy," "Fanny," "End of Summer," "Wine of Choice"), as a screenwriter ("Queen Christina," "Quo Vadis," "Anna Karenina"), as a writer for magazines like The Smart Set, and for getting fired from the Times after it came out that he had been writing phony questions for his "Queries and Answers" columns. He was lionized by Brooks Atkinson and close friends with Siegfried Sassoon. But while Behrman was a popular figure on Broadway and in Hollywood, his finest work was published in The New Yorker; he profiled George Gershwin, Eddie Cantor, Max Beerbohm, and Chaim Weizmann. The best was the Profile of Duveen, which came out in six parts - one, two, three, four, five, six - in the fall of 1951. Not a short piece, but it's a three-day weekend. It's not a heavy thing at all, but the elements here of social comedy and status anxiety and aspiration, the portraits of the mega-rich trying to acquire, via Duveen's expensive aesthetic advice, a glittering layer of culture, strike a familiar note in our times. It's a masterful, deeply enjoyable work.