Using a Drawing of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Talk about How Patrick Nagel Died
I spent way too many hours on that joke.
I realize it’s not the smoothest transition, but I created that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Nagel piece because I needed a reason to talk about Patrick Nagel’s death. It’s very important. But first, who was Patrick Nagel? He was an American illustrator whose work or influence you’ve most definitely interacted with before.
His look and style defined a large swath of the 1980s design aesthetic. In the early 90s his style was usurped by hair and nail salon window painters across the country. It’s also the look used for Scott Gairdner’s delightful Comedy Central show Moonbeam City.
Scott told the Hollywood Reporter:
“I was actually more familiar with the salon knockoffs before I realized [that] a specific artist pioneered this aesthetic. It may have done Nagel a disservice to have bad cover versions fading to blue in laundromat windows.”
So, now that you’re slightly more familiar with Nagel’s work, I have to make a quick pitstop at his lifestyle before I get to his death.
Christie’s Auction House described him like this:
“Like a vampire, by all accounts, he was primarily active at night painting and drawing till the wee hours of the morning, smoking too much with a steady diet of cheeseburgers.”
That’s in his official bio on the Christie’s website! The fact that being a chain-smoking vampire feeding on cheeseburgers was such a big part of his personality that they couldn’t not put it in his bio is fantastic.
His apprentice Barry Haun had this to say about him:
“He was a check grabber at restaurants, he loved to drink martinis, he was hungry for trivia.”
Staying up late, chugging martinis, gobbling candy, and pounding fast food is a common refrain when his friends speak of him, and that’s why his death is so absurdly humorous to me.
The LA Times summed up his death as follows:
“On Feb. 4, 1984, after participating in a celebrity aerobics fund-raiser for the American Heart Assn. in Santa Monica, Patrick Nagel–out of shape from too many martinis and frozen Snickers–died of a heart attack. He was 38.”
Karl Bornstein, Nagel’s publisher and best friend said this about his death:
“When I think of the way he died I realize it was typically Nagel. He never used to work out, but eat cheeseburgers and candy bars and laugh at people who would think about being healthy. He used to smoke, stay up all night, and paint. The night before he died we were having dinner with a client and talking about doing Mick Jagger's album cover with a portrait of Jagger, somewhat like what he had done with Duran Duran. Anyway, at that dinner, I asked him what he was doing the next day, and he said he was going on a benefit show to raise money for the Heart Association–jump around and be on TV and do some aerobics–and I said, ‘Patrick, you're going to do aerobics? You never work out!’ He replied, ‘Don't worry about it,’ So the next day, there he was, jumping around on television. Afterward, he walked out to his car and had a heart attack and died.”
I have this picture of Nagel, a hard-drinking, junk food-loving, chain-smoking, insomniac who never exercised getting asked to do something akin to the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championships and being like, “Yeah, this is something I’ll be fine doing.” Then he goes and does this:
Sweating, panting, and riding the fundraising high, he sits down in his car in the parking lot and suffers a fatal heart attack triggered by fifteen minutes of celebrity aerobics aimed at preventing and raising awareness for just such an event. It’s tragic. It’s ironic. But it’s also pretty funny.
Anyway, isn’t it interesting what you can learn because of silly a Ninja Turtle picture?
II. Cutting Room Floor
If you’re interested in seeing Nagel talk, here’s a 30 minute chat between Nagel and Bornstein discussing their work together.