Media Musings: Famous cartoonists will be missed
It always began, for both men, with a sheet of blank paper, a drawing board, if available, a pen and black ink. Their deaths within two days of each other show how important Al Hirschfeld and Bill Mauldin were to the nation, as national news organizations gave their passages coverage.
Mauldin was an Army sergeant during World War II who invented Willy and Joe, who became symbols of the American infantrymen – soldiers who were cynical, dirty, dogfaces who won the war fighting Germans. To Mauldin, they were the only men who mattered.
In an interview given to NPR years before he began his long struggle with Alzheimer’s, Mauldin seemed to almost brag about how much Gen. George Patton hated him, but refused to use his power “to get him.” Mauldin’s obvious delight in using his pen as a lance to puncture the pompous Patton ran through out his “Up Front” series. One I remember most vividly was a single frame of Willy and Joe and their unit, obviously war weary and struggling, with the caption “Fresh Troops Are Arriving At the Front”, a obvious belittling of official war dispatches about the war.
One of my personal treasures is a signed copy of Mauldin’s cartoon just after the assassination of President John Kennedy. It’s called the weeping Lincoln, where the famous statute of the president shows him bent to his lap, holding his head in the hands, crying. I was able to get that copy after a speech Mauldin delivered in Chicago, where, by then, he was the cartoonist for The Chicago Sun-Times.
Mauldin drank too much, and it appeared he had again this day, but his speech showed his famous rough edge when it came to fame and glory and war. “I’ll tell you what heroes are, “Mauldin growled. “They’re the ones who came home in coffins.” His heroes were the ordinary men and women who really do fight the battles and he never betrayed them. At 81, he’d lived a life marked by holding close to his own convictions, publicly opposing the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and sharply criticizing President George Bush.
As Mauldin captured the war in a unique way, so too did Al Hirschfeld, who died at 99 in his sleep, of the world of Broadway.
For 75 years, the show biz Sunday section of the New York Times dazzled with his caricatures of the greater-than-life personalities of theater people. Hirschfeld love the theater and its people. They, in turn, loved him.
Loved him so much, in fact, they bought his works of them and the longer he lived, the more valuable they have become. His work was marked by the power of exaggerated line drawings, which captured each individual by the focus on a particular feature.
Barbara Streisand, The New York Times reported, was portrayed birdlike, all points with lidded eyes and her mouth wide-open,
Then there’s the Nina story. He began drawing his daughter’s name, “Nina”, in each work and then would then tell the reader how many there were in the work by a number next to his signature. Millions played the game with him.
Unlike Mauldin, Hirschfeld did not believe in the use of his pen for ridicule. He believed his role was to invent the play for the reader. There are estimated to be about 7,000 Hirschfeld’s. In his lifetime, he was so honored and respected by artists, the theater world awarded him two Tony Awards.
Both men had a deep feeling for people. One used his pen to fight for his Army buddies. The other, for those whose talents and gifts could illuminate the corners of the human condition or, simply, knock your socks off.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)