Bill Mauldin: Drawing Fire
Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care so much what papers write about me — my constituents can’t read, but damn it, they can see pictures. — William Marcy “Boss” Tweed
Gilbert”Scoop” Giles stared at the one with the delicately etched face and the hirsute grin. It wasn’t every 13-year-old cartoonist who was asked to cover the Republican National Convention for the Children’s Express news team — and far fewer could ever have had this happen.
Scoop was sitting in a Kansas City bistro with some of the best political cartoonists around — and the one with the grin was looking at his latest convention cartoons. He tried to look comfortable as tables of Republicans peered toward their table to see who was making all the noise. In another part of town the convention was being brought to order, but the rounds of drinks kept coming to the rowdy table in the corner. The volatile profusion of talent continued to carouse and tell stories about their lives as professional troublemakers.
The one with the grin has been making trouble all his life. In over 5000 cartoons drawn over the past 35 years, Bill Mauldin has produced a steady stream of inspired trouble. He is known as a consummate master of an art that is practiced professionally in America by fewer than 130 people, and done particularly well by only a handful of them.
Gilbert Giles hadn’t known why he was bouncing into the bar in the Muelbach Hotel that evening, but Mauldin had specifically asked to meet him. Mauldin would comment several times over the ensuing weeks that he’d seen something special in Giles’ eyes.
“Don’t you ever let anybody tell you how to draw,” Mauldin told him. Then Giles got up reverently and said goodbye to the other cartoonists. He took a few slow steps toward the door before breaking into a wild sprint. Mauldin nodded at Oliphant and passed him one of Giles’ cartoons. “The kid’s all right,” he said, and he should know. Mauldin had decided to become a great cartoonist when he was only eight. Mauldin says he could draw before he could talk. “It came so naturally,” he once wrote, “that when a teacher would berate me for drawing in class, I would reply that I had only been thinking.”
Editor’s picks
Pat Oliphant, undoubtedly one of the hottest young political cartoonists today and, in Mauldin’s opinion, a “bone-ah-fide-dee” genius, picked up a clean bar napkin and uncapped his felt-tipped pen. The conversation at the table had deteriorated, so when Oliphant took out his pen, they all knew what was going to happen.
Ralph Steadman grabbed another bar napkin and quickly drew a bizarre bovine figure with horns. The creature was pure Steadman — it wore a three-piece suit with a button on the lapel. Nobody needed to say a thing — they all knew it was a Republican. Ralph passed it to Oliphant. “Steadman,” he said, “you’re an evil son of a bitch.”
Oliphant finished his cartoon and handed it to Steadman. Ralph handed it to me and beer shot into my sinuses. I handed it to Village Voice cartoonist Stan Mack, and Mack handed it to Mauldin, who frowned at Oliphant’s outrageous depiction of Jimmy Carter violating a GOP elephant. Mauldin grabbed his pen and drew action lines behind the crouching candidate and Carter was suddenly in motion. That incredible grin spread over his face again.
The drawings were coming faster and faster, each more brilliant than the last in its utter obscenity. No one spoke until Art Buchwald joined the group and started to tell a story.
Mauldin has known Buchwald for a long time; they’d hung around Paris together in the early Fifties. But after the punch line, it became clear that Buchwald, a professional troublemaker himself, was not quite attuned to what was going on. Ralph Steadman had run out of bar napkins and begun drawing faces on peanuts. He handed Buchwald a peanut and asked for his autograph. Buchwald threw it back at him and said, “Troublemaker.” Then he left.
As we walked away from the bar much later, I felt the bar napkins bulging in my pockets and knew that I’d witnessed something special. The political discussion that preceded the drawing had been rare in its highly opinionated clarity. Every day Mauldin and Oliphant draw cartoons that appear in over 300 papers around the country, making public statements without the luxury of verbal equivocation — something most people will never do. Their well-known signatures appear in the corner of each drawing, thus ensuring the power and audacity of their incessant bitching.
“This really isn’t a business,” Oliphant explained, “it’s a cause. I’m an outcast because of it. A writer can’t really say, ‘This man’s an idiot,’ because the law holds him back. We can say it.
“That guy over there,” Oliphant said, “Mauldin. You be good to him. He’s not just a cartoonist — he’s a legend.”
The night before the barroom cartooning contest, Mauldin had dragged Oliphant to Kansas City’s venerable Savoy Grill to have dinner with the “Brass Hats” of the Chicago Sun-Times and the directors of Mauldin’s huge cartoon syndicate. Mauldin sat at the big table amid the Victorian elegance and marbled meat in a wrinkled Chinese fishing shirt. Oliphant puffed on his pipe and looked bored.
Mauldin’s hobbyhorse for the evening was the fate of Harry Reems, who’d been arrested for costarring in Deep Throat. Mauldin contended that Reems’ only crime concerned his hypertrophic anatomical attributes and that he deserved public support. “I’m gonna draw a cartoon about it,” he said.
And abruptly the conversation shifted to less embarrassing topics. Several minutes later Mauldin sat upright, grinning: “I’ve got it. I’ll show him hangin’ himself by his own dick.”
He had said it so naturally that there was a distinct gap between statement and reaction. One executive’s wife left for the ladies’ room. Several reporters shaded their eyes. I began thinking about all manner of pain and death to avoid laughing. Oliphant shook his head — and Mauldin just grinned sheepishly at the whole thing.
At the end of the meal, Mauldin said goodbye to his editors. He hadn’t seen them in weeks and had no specific intentions to see them in the near future. His desk at the Chicago Sun-Times is almost always empty. He likes it on the fringe: “I’m living away, sending stuff in, and being as independent as a hog on ice.”
“You have to be your own man in these things,” he said later. “I’ve never attended an editorial conference in my life. A political cartoon is signed opinion — unlike an editorial — and I don’t think that it should ever be subject to editorial direction. If a cartoonist needs editorial direction, then he is simply inadequate.”
Bill Mauldin: Drawing Fire, Page 1 of 9