ABSTRACT
Johns and Rauschenberg are tall. When they met, both were slim. With his wide forehead and wide, finely-formed lips, Rauschenberg was reassuringly handsome. Johns's high and delicate cheekbones gave his face a closed-off look. "I have photos of him then that would break your heart," Rauschenberg once told Calvin Tomkins. "Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean, and poetic. He looked almost ill—I guess that's what I mean by poetic." Rauschenberg was prosaic, if one limits the word to self-assured prose about enterprising heroes. In the fifties Rauschenberg could have played the part of a charming young man, poor but magnetic, in the sunniest of F. Scott Fitzgerald's early stories.
