Journalism's Wild Man: The Cartoonist   

A Pulitzer Prize winner sketches himself as a practitioner of the slam dunk and the cluster bomb and a point man for the First Amendment.

If Elvis had drawn, he would have drawn cartoons. - Good cartoons are like visual rock and roll. They hit you primitively and emotionally, turning you every which way but loose. There is something wild and untamed about the best of them, raw and vaguely threatening, like Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis. Just as rock and roll made the disapproving parents of the '50s raise their eyebrows and call it jungle music, cartoons are jungle art to the guardians of today's journalistic decorum. Unruly, impertinent and bristling with attitude, they just won't mind. - That's why the fastidious New York Times refuses to run them. As Times Editor Max Frankel said, sitting across from me at the Pulitzer Prize ceremonies, "The problem with cartoons is you can't edit them." Exactly. They're out of control and do not willingly serve as handmaidens to finely tuned and delicately calibrated editorial policies. They're a "problem" for control freaks and for the editors at the Times, which is precisely the source of the cartoon's power and its glory. - A cartoon cannot say "on the other hand," and it cannot be defended with logic. It is a frontal assault, a slam dunk, a cluster bomb. Journalism is about fairness, objectivity, factuality; cartoons use unfairness, subjectivity and the distortion of facts to get at truths that are greater than the sum of the facts. Good cartoonists are also the point men for the First Amendment, testing the boundaries of free speech. If they are doing their job, their hate mail runneth over. - Who can ever forget David Levine's caricature of Lyndon Johnson at the height of the Vietnam War, pulling up his shirt to show us his scar: a map of Vietnam. That single image stays with us long after the thundering editorials about the war have wrapped fish and lined bird cages. Bill Mauldin's image of a bereaved and weeping Lincoln Memorial unforgettably captured a nation's grief over President

Kennedy's assassination. Herblock's drawing of Richard Nixon emerging from a sewer defined the president in a way that neither we nor Nixon can ever shake.

I draw on deadline, so I can't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. It doesn't always show up on schedule, so I have to stalk that sucker, hunt it down and ambush it. We wrestle and grapple until I force it, like Jacob's angel in the Old Testament, to bless me. I can't go home until I pin the son of a bitch. And I do this every day.

I split my days between the Newsday office in Manhattan, where I draw the political cartoon in the morning, and my studio at home, where I draw a comic strip in the afternoons. I guess I could draw them both at home, but I like going to the office to do the political cartoons; the energy and excitement of the newsroom, where breaking news is coming in all the time, are stimulating. I feel closer to the pulse of events there, and I enjoy being around other journalists.

I reach the office at 7:15. I pick up a cup of coffee from the deli downstairs and greet the security guard. As usual, nobody is stirring. I'm pretty much the only one here until 9:30. Like an empty football stadium, an empty newsroom doesn't feel quite right.

As I unlock my office door the phone is ringing. Odd. Nobody calls this early.

"New York Newsday," I answer.

"Mr. Marlette?" Oh, no. It's Mrs. Mackey, the abortion lady. Why is she calling this early?

"Do you know how many unborn babies died in America last year?" Mrs. Mackey has been writing and calling me steadily ever since I drew an anti-death penalty cartoon years ago. She sends me literature and leaflets to persuade me to do pro-life cartoons.

"Good morning, Mrs. Mackey," I sigh.

"Mr. Marlette," she begins, in a soft, whispery voice that is meant to ooze Christian charity and patience but is actually pushy, insistent and much like a fork on a blackboard. I have become Mrs. Mackey's personal responsibility. Her mission, for which she will no doubt reap rewards in paradise, is to convert the wayward cartoonist, or at least force him to use one of her cartoon ideas.

"Do you take ideas for cartoons?" she asks, even though she already knows the answer.

"No, ma'am," I explain once again, trying to get her off the phone, "I have a policy. I make them up myself."

She launches into it anyway. "I was washing the dishes when it hit me out of the blue. Why don't you draw this pile of – "

"Mrs. Mackey," I interrupt, "I don't take cartoon ideas. You're wasting your time."

"No, see...you have this pile of fetuses, see – "

"Mrs. Mackey, I told you," I interrupt again. "I'll be happy to listen to your ideas later on today, but right now I'm on deadline!"

People seem to get seized with cartoon ideas, like fits or demons, and feel they just have to get them off their chests. This happens to most folks only once in a blue moon, but Mrs. Mackey seems to be struck every few seconds.

Today my mission is strong. Soviet tanks in Lithuania are big news. I sketch and scribble on my yellow legal pad, jotting down key words or phrases...glasnost, perestroika...drawing the onion-domed Kremlin, Soviet tanks, Gorbachev. What if the Soviets go back to being their old nasty selves?

I want to focus on Gorbachev and his apparent betrayal of glasnost. I begin searching for ways to depict Gorby's turn-around. I start with his face. His bald head could look like a missile...His birthmark!...What if I draw it as Lithuania?...He's acting like Stalin...What if he slowly metamorphoses into Stalin...the return of Stalin...maybe a movie poster, "The Return of Stalin." I free-associate to "The Return of FrankenStalin." That works, but there's more here...

What happened? He changed. He's not what he seemed...We're like disillusioned lovers. He's more brutal than we thought...I think of marriage counselors...wife beaters...wait!...He's a sadomasochist...

Suddenly, I see Gorbachev in leather with a whip or chains. I sketch him that way, but is he the husband or the wife? America is Uncle Sam...No, it's funnier if Gorby's a man in leather drag. So how about America as Lady Liberty? I sketch Gorby sitting in a marriage counselor's office next to Miss Liberty. Gorby, decked out in leather corset, fishnet stockings and boots, is holding a cat-o'-nine-tails. The doctor stares as Liberty says, "He's changed, Doc. He's not the man I married!"

That's it! But wait, I need to tinker with the caption. Make it "Gorby's changed..." If I've got him in women's garb, he may need more identification than his birthmark and bald head, but I solve that by naming him in the caption. "He's not the man I fell in love with." Got it. It's 8:05 a.m. and I know what will fill the hole tomorrow.

At the height of the Watergate scandal I drew a cartoon of Richard Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, with his tongue hanging out, tied in knots. The caption read, "Sorry, gentlemen, but Mr. Ziegler won't be entertaining any more Watergate questions – will there be anything else?"

This was during the time when John and Jim Knight, the owners of the Knight newspaper chain, were pressuring the Charlotte Observer to get rid of me. My editor called me into his office. Clearly the Ziegler cartoon was a last straw, and it was time for a little talk.

"Y'know, son, I have always believed when it comes to cartoons the rapier works better than the sledgehammer," he began.

"Yessir," I agreed.

"And you don't go after a mosquito with an elephant gun," he added. "You use a flit gun."

"What are you driving at, sir?"

He was obviously annoyed with me for putting him in this situation with the Knights, so as my punishment he launched into a critique of my work. As it happened, this editor had one glass eye and cataracts in the other one; he even needed a magnifying glass to read the paper. Knowing this, I couldn't really take his art criticism too seriously, but I did want to know why I was being disciplined. He pointed to the Ziegler cartoon.

"None of us is bigger than this newspaper," he concluded. "Not you. Not me. Nobody. The Charlotte Observer was here long before we came along, and it will be here long after we're gone."

"Yessir."

"...And another thing. You've got to work on your caricature. That just doesn't look like Nixon," he said, pointing to the fat guy with the round nose, bald head and horn-rimmed glasses standing to the side of the press secretary.

"That's not supposed to be Nixon," I explained.

He grimaced, tossed the paper down and muttered, "Well, if it was supposed to be Nixon, it certainly doesn't look like him."

I couldn't argue with that. But it just went to show: The only way to screw up a Nixon caricature was to not draw him at all.

Caricature is the art of capturing someone's likeness by exaggerating and distorting the features – a kind of overextended portraiture. The word caricature comes from the Italian word caricare , which means to load or overload. Caricature therefore is a charged portrait, a shorthand likeness that expresses the artist's feeling about the subject. If a person has big ears you make them bigger; beady eyes become beadier, a high forehead is drawn even higher, and a large nose is gigantic. Good caricature is more than the selection and distortion of features; it also involves the overall relationship of those features to each other. Cartoonists pick and choose, and the selection is the key.

Cartoonists look for distinctive features that define the subject's face: Richard Nixon's nose, Jimmy Carter's smile, Ronald Reagan's hair. Everybody has something we can use. One of the basic rules of caricature is that the uglier your subject is, the easier he or she is to draw. And American political cartoonists have been truly blessed over the years. Lyndon Johnson had an overabundance of caricaturable features; in fact, if you put in everything you ended up with a grotesque gargoyle.

Some of us exaggerate George Bush's high, narrow forehead, others concentrate on his sideways-figure-eight mouth. And though each artist's drawing may be as different as a fingerprint, the results will all be recognizably George Bush.

During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Jewish groups said my drawings of Menachem Begin were anti-Semitic because I gave him a big nose. But I drew him that way because he does have a big nose. As so often happens, my caricature of him evolved; over the next few months I noticed that I was making his ears more prominent, which made his nose seem smaller. The complaints ceased.

If anybody ever complained about Nixon's nose, it certainly wasn't a cartoonist. Nixon was to cartooning what Marilyn Monroe was to sex. His face was more than we could ask for. You couldn't go wrong with a caricature of him. If you got the eyes or the nose or the jowls, you had Nixon. By the time he resigned, anything a cartoonist threw down on paper looked like him. Seldom has a politician's appearance so truthfully revealed his substance. Nixon looked like his policies. His nose told you he would bomb Cambodia. The way his eyes shifted, you knew he had bugged the Democrats' national headquarters. He had the jowls of an obstructor of justice, and his face was the kind you wanted to impeach. The reason his upper lip was so long (this is a medical fact known only by a few cartoonists and the researchers at Johns Hopkins) was that all his perspiratory glands were concentrated in his upper lip.

There were two schools of thought among cartoonists about Nixon's eyes. One said you did not show them at all; you simply drew the heavy eyebrows and let the reader imagine the eyeballs lurking down there underneath. I preferred to show the eyeballs barely peeking out from under the thick brows. It added a sinisterness, and besides, I liked knowing what those eyes were up to.

Ronald Reagan was a different story. He should have been a piece of cake, but his face was a problem to caricature because you had to do more than just capture the pompadour, the rouged cheekbones, and the protruding lower lip line. A true professional isn't satisfied with a caricature that doesn't nail the essential spirit of the man.

Cartoonists are after that certain quality that comes through despite everything the makeup artists, speechwriters, spin doctors and press secretaries do to hide it. We're after the whole of a person's being that is greater than the sum of the parts. We're after that intangible something that lets you recognize someone walking down the beach before you can make out his features. We cartoonists are after more than the physical traits of a politician; we want his soul. The trouble was, Reagan didn't have one.

The early Reagan caricatures just didn't cut it. They showed a mean-spirited Dickensian ideologue, all wrinkles, crow's feet, and turkey neck, baring his age and his Alaric the Visigoth politics. But something was missing. These cartoons didn't jibe with the Reagan the public thought they had elected. Ronald Reagan was capable of snatching school lunches from the mouths of our children, setting James Watt loose on the environment, cutting aid to minorities, the elderly and handicapped, building more and bigger bombs, yet he still came across as...well...the Gipper. Nixon couldn't even do that. Reagan was amiable, affable, grandfatherly. Every time he gave a speech, people wanted to crawl up into his lap. Or worse, go out and vote for him. His image did not match the moral content of his policies.

The early caricatures missed this aspect of the man, and cartoonists were thrown into a tailspin of self-doubt. We were being tricked. Reagan was a decoy, a stand-in for himself. Not only was he a hands-off manager who delegated authority to his staff, he even delegated his cartoonability. His minions were the administration's mean of spirit, and they made wonderful cartoons. Watt, Meese, Abrams, et al. were Reagan's designated bullies.

But what about the president? Sometime around his visit to Bitburg it finally clicked that we weren't dealing with a traditional president – that is, a human being. What we had was a special effect. It was as if America had put something from George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic into the White House. Capturing Reagan's essence in a drawing was like trying to put your finger on a hologram. The more we drew, the more we discovered there was no there there.

In desperation I zeroed in on the eyes, the mirror of the soul, and finally I made it work. I gave him that look of perpetual cheerful obliviousness that has become his trademark, a kind of Zippy the Pinhead quality. Now we were cooking with gas. It was those vacant, have-a-nice-day eyes that came finally to stand for the Reagan era, and for me, nailed his caricature.

Now Ronald Reagan has ridden off into the California sunset, and of course we don't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, but their cartoon images are still with us, branded into our minds. When Gertrude Stein complained to Picasso that his famous portrait of her didn't look like her, the great artist told her not to worry, that in time she would resemble her portrait. In the same way, presidents end up looking more like political cartooon caricatures than their photographs or official White House portraits.

Pinocchio's nose elongated with each falsehood he told. Likewise, the longer politicians stick around, the more their noses grow, and the bigger their ears get; their features actually distort themselves into their caricatures. Cartoonists would like to take full credit for the accuracy of our handiwork, but we can't. We have help. When the authorized biographers, presidential librarians and other keepers of the flame who flack for former presidents write their histories and make their cases for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, they'll be right about one thing. Those two definitely grew in office. l