Escape Artist

(See Cover)

In the big white house on Tor Ridge, west of the Hudson, a light burned all through the winter night. Inside, in a cavernous studio, it glared down on a drawing board where a heavyset, black-haired man put careful strokes on a paneled page. He ignored the accusing clock at his back, but sometimes paused for sips of coffee. Once he dozed off, and his 'pen scratched a crazy zigzag down the sheet. It was daylight when Milton Caniff took off his glasses, pushed his work away and stumbled off to bed.

Behind him, on the desk, he left his night's work: the last Sunday comic page of Terry and the Pirates he would ever draw. Its frames held deftly drawn figures, caught in the restrained gestures of a farewell. The fadeout was appropriately up-to-the-minute: a transport plane lifting into a sky that was streaked like the wan sunrise outside his studio.

Whether Terry Lee and Jane Allen would ever meet again, their creator did not know. He had surrendered his godlike right over them and their actions, which he had guided for eleven years past. Next week, in 220 newspapers including papers as far away as the Times of Seoul, Korea, Milton Caniff's byline will appear on a new comic strip, to be known as Steve Canyon.

In the never-never world of the funnies, this was the news of the year--comparable to Henry Ford quitting his motor company and setting up shop in competition across the street. It was a move involving three of the biggest U.S. press lords: the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick (who lost Caniff), and Marshall Field and William Randolph Hearst, who gained him. For Caniff himself, it meant a guarantee of $520,000 for his next five years' work, and a stiff challenge--to outdo the best of his past.

There may be professors of journalism who have never heard of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, but every U.S. newspaper publisher has. Many a publisher spends more effort shaping up his comic page than he does in seeing that Palestine or North China is properly covered. Highbrows had once dismissed the comics as the poor man's literature; now to read at least one of them (usually Terry) was proof of being a regular fellow. (After all, hadn't Dickens begun Pickwick Papers as a text for a cartoon series?) Only the New York Times, among major U.S. dailies, refuses to run comics.

Innocents & a Broad. Cartoonist Caniff's contribution to the industry was to throw in some curves and give it glamor. Long before he came along the "comics" had generally ceased to be funny. They had learned a thing or two about narrative from Sidney Smith's chinless Gumps and Frank King's morality play about the Wallets of Gasoline Alley. But mostly their idea of action was to have a character jump out of his shoes. Into Terry and the wartime Male Call (for the G.I. press) Caniff poured fast-breaking dialogue, credible adventure -- and one touch of Venus. He knocked himself out to make his brain children (he has no others) seem real. His Dragon Lady, Burma and Miss Lace were fashioned after lush, living models. (Steve Canyon's mean and sexy villainess, Copper Calhoon, was drawn from a model, Carol Ohmart, "Miss Utah of 1946.")

Undergrads, Upper Classes. In the readership polls Caniff seldom beats out Ham Fisher's hammy Joe Palooka or Chic Young's just-folksy Blondie. But his comparatively small (31 million) audience is, comparatively speaking, a class audience. It includes collegians (from Harvard to Siwash) and their professors, the Duke of Windsor, Margaret Truman, John Steinbeck/--- and, significantly, hundreds of newspaper executives. Two years ago, when a score of syndicate salesmen began to spread the word of a new, as yet unnamed and undrawn comic by Caniff, they had nothing to sell but Caniff's name. For U.S. publishers, that was enough.

Dig, Dig, Dig. In the last months of his '305, Milton Arthur Caniff is a handsomely hefty (195 lbs.), blue-eyed, relaxed man with an indoor look and a sociable nature. He is almost never seen in the Stork Club or at El Morocco, although many a G.I. or plain reader might naturally assume that Terry's generally sophisticated dialogue was clutched from some such glamor-scented air.

Actually, it comes out of Caniff's head. Among cartoonists--fellow members of what he calls "the pariah profession"--he is well liked, but seldom seen. He lives and works (12 to 18 hours a day) on the outer suburban ring of New York City, in a town with the confusing name of New City, N.Y. (pop. 992). Neighbors in the New City intellectual colony include Playwright Maxwell Anderson, Artist Henry Varnum Poor and Author J. P. McEvoy.

A year ago, clearing his decks for the big change from Terry to Steve Canyon, Caniff swore off smoking and drinking. Though he hates to exercise, he even went for walks on brooding Tor Ridge (the locale of Anderson's 1936 play High Tor), to keep his weight down. Says he: "All I could think of was 'God, I wish I were inside!'" So he reminded himself that the ridge was full of copperhead snakes anyway, and gave it up.

No Idle Hands. A man who hates to know the time of day (it is always later than he thinks), Caniff gets to his studio late in the forenoon, spends his daylight hours writing with his right hand, drawing and drinking coffee with his left. "It's hell being your own master," he says. "You work a 40-hour day instead of a 40-hour week." His pretty blonde wife, Esther--he calls her Bunny--brings the coffee, gets the meals and keeps guests from gumming up the production line. Slim, slack-clad Bunny Caniff doesn't have much to say when her talkative husband has visitors. Says she: "I'm afraid people will miss something Milt is saying."

The production line cannot stop, but Caniff, a dreadful procrastinator, does his best to slow it to a calm, unhurried pace. He seizes on any excuse--like the postman's arrival with fan mail--to break off work. To his assistant, Frank Engli, he is a casual boss who slings the slang along with the strips they hand back & forth for inking, lettering and checking.

To keep his story as fresh as the news on Page One, Caniff shamelessly picks the brains of his pals, and even copies their faces. Colonel Phil Cochran, an old college chum, gave him a correspondence course in flying--and won more fame as Colonel Flip Corkin than for leading the glider invasion of Burma under his own name. Red Cross and Army nurses midwifed Caniff's yellow-tressed Nurse Taffy Tucker. Caniff had been to Britain, Europe and Africa, but never to the Orient, where all the action in Terry took place.

Keep 'Em Guessing. Caniff's house on Tor Ridge, a spectacular modern affair-designed and owned by Neighbor Henry Varnum Poor, was a port of call for scores of flyers during the war. The tabletalk kept Caniff abreast of servicemen's slang; the grateful flyers paid their bread-&-butter calls by buzzing the house. As a favor, the Army flew him across the U.S. in a jolting 6-24, to give him the feel of it. He can "still hear the nyaaa-aaaa-aaaa of those motors--and feel the cold, going on hour after hour. Jeez, it was cold!"

To keep his audience on the edge of their chairs, Caniff, a frustrated actor, has borrowed many a trick of stagecraft. He is a staunch Alfred Hitchcock fan, fond of the director's way of opening a suspenseful sequence with a silent sound track. He has aped the best Hollywood techniques (and some of the worst) by switches from closeups to long shots to trick camera angles--and fadeouts with profiles turned to a corn-tinted sunset. He depends on Leo Ardavany, a neighbor who manages the movie house at nearby Haverstraw, to tip him off when a useful picture comes along.

By building up to a lovemaking crisis and not letting it come off--as Hitchcock did in Notorious--Caniff has become the best tantalizer in the profession. It is the same heartless treatment that keeps housewives suffering daily with radio's Young Widder Brown, and it has the same crass commercial purpose. "It forces 'em to buy the paper," says Caniff, "to find out what the hell is going on."

At night, alone in his studio or his bedroom, he wrestles with dialogue, penciling it into the blank strips he will sketch next day, and erasing it over & over until it rings true. Somehow he finds time to contrive bright new baubles of incident to hang on his thin thread of plot.

Ink & Grease Paint. Like millions of boys who wanted to be cartoonists when they'grew up, Milt Caniff never missed a day of Mutt & Jeff or Polly and Her Pals. But the Chicago Tribune's prize old political crosshatcher, John T. McCutcheon, was his ideal. Milt's, father took him west in 1916 and nine-year-old Milton worked for a short time as a child extra in two-reel movies. At twelve he created (for family circulation) his first cartoon, something known as Si Plug.

At Ohio State he saw Harold Lloyd in The Freshman, bought a yellow slicker and an open Ford, and was pledged by Sigma Chi, which never got over it. The fraternity has since elected him--like Cartoonist McCutcheon before him--to its select group of "Significant Sigs" (others: Booth Tarkington, Roy Chapman Andrews and George Ade).

While still an insignificant Sig, Caniff imitated John Held Jr., tried editorial cartoons for the Columbus Dispatch. He was jobless in 1932 when the Associated Press Feature Service beckoned him on to New York.

Caniff's dear, dead A.P. days will never be beyond recall. In the artists' bullpen on Madison Avenue, where Alfred Gerald Caplin (now Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner) was also fenced in, Caniff launched a "kid strip" called Dickie Dare. A.P. artists got $60 to $85 a week and the greenest hand had to block out "the damn crossword puzzles." "They wouldn't even tell us how many papers were using our stuff," Caniff complains. "They were afraid we'd get big ideas."

A Lady Pirate. One day in 1935 brown-haired Mollie Slott, mother-hen of the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate, marched in to the late Captain Joseph M. Patterson, the P. T. Barnum of the U.S. comic strip. "There's a young chap in my office," she told him, "with a letter from John McCutcheon." Patterson groaned: "What, another fraternity brother?" Said Mollie: "But this is the one who does Dickie Dare" Her sons had sold her on Dickie, and she had given the boss a batch of the strips to look at.

Patterson stalked out to her office, stared coldly at Caniff and asked: "Ever do anything on the Orient?" Caniff hadn't. "You know," Joe Patterson mused, "adventure can still happen out there. There could be a beautiful lady pirate, the kind men fall for. . . ." In a few days Caniff was back with samples and 50 proposed titles; Patterson circled "Terry" and scribbled beside it "and the Pirates."

Better than any other press lord, the moody genius of the Daily News knew how to make the modern mass-circulation daily an attractive grab-bag, with prizes to please either sex and every taste. Critics might object that newspapers should be newspapers, and censure anything else in them as a regrettable defection from duty. But Patterson recognized that readers wanted something that was part almanac, shopping guide, magazine and variety show as well as news bulletin board. Like U.S. radio, the press dealt in news, entertainment and commercials; the amount of each might differ, but the ingredients were the same. Patterson's mixture called for health hints and horoscopes, patterns and etiquette, advice for the lovelorn and tips on the horses--and compelling, habit-forming comics. Most of the strips that helped his lusty tabloid grow were named by him (Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, Moon Muttins, etc.), often after a thoughtful thumbing of the telephone book. All the artists felt his sensitive, shrewd touch. From Caniff he wanted adventure, suspense, and pretty women.

Keep It Crisp. "I didn't know how to draw women at first," Caniff, admittedly no anatomist, recalls. "Women are always harder to draw than men. And there's the nudity problem . . . you just have to know how much is in good taste. Once in a while, if I hadn't had a good-looking babe in the strip for a while, Patterson would send me a note saying how about bringing in the Dragon Lady or some other chick. And he used to hate it when the balloons were too long. ... I didn't agree with many of the things he did in his last years. He seemed to feel that in wartime there's a place for a newspaper that is the voice of the disgruntled--and he became that voice. But he was a great guy."

One of the few times Caniff ever preached to his readers was when he had Terry Lee win his wings in China. Terry and the readers got a long, stern graduation speech from his commander Flip Corkin on courage, skill and honor among airmen. That Sunday page was read into the Congressional Record. An aide showed it to Patterson, who growled: "Who does Caniff think he is, Robert Emmet Sherwood?" ("He had to go and name a playwright I admire," says Caniff.) Once Caniff, excited by the morale value of his strip, suggested that the Daily News be sent free to remote post exchanges. He got a curt no from Captain Patterson.*

Caniff seldom heard more than querulous peeps out of Colonel Bertie McCormick's Chicago end of the Tribune-Daily News axis. Sample: early in 1941 he was informed that Colonel McCormick "objects to Defense Bond stamps being used in the comics, so will you please refrain from using them." And once McCormick and Patterson, reading Terry together, came to a sequence where the lissome Burma was carrying on with a German named Keel. "Why," said the Colonel, turning to his cousin in alarm: "Burma is living with that man!"

"I'm sure," says Caniff, "that Patterson had known it for a long time."

Chained Seal. At 37, Milton Caniff was a widely imitated, $70,000-a-year success. His Terry strip was on the radio; a Douglas Fairbanks Jr. movie was in the works. Why give it all up? For a reason of his own, Caniff wanted more. In Florida, when he was 18, he was bitten by a mosquito and got phlebitis, an inflammation of the veins that made the Army--and insurance doctors--turn him down. Because of his quick-clotting blood, says Caniff, "even a bad bump on the leg could bump me off."

It made him more aware than most men of the nearness of death. He owned not a hair on Terry's head, and if he died his wife would get not a cent of Terry's future income. Like nearly every trained seal in his line, he was held prisoner by the "shop rights" system. Its major premise: comic strips are owned, not by their creators, but by the syndicates that sell them.

In the fall of 1944 Millionaire Marshall Field, whose young Chicago Sun had not succeeded in rising above the commercial horizon, decided to grab the best talent his money could buy--preferably by taking it away from his rival, Colonel McCormick. Field invited Caniff to his apartment at 740 Park Avenue, blandly asked him: "What do you want?" Caniff hardly needed to answer: ownership of copyright. "I'm out to emancipate you," smiled Field. Then he added comfortably: "I imagine you're a well-paid slave."

Caniff was the first cartoonist who ever left Joe Patterson, though not the first to abandon his brain children.* Patterson and Caniff never spoke or met, after Caniff joined Field. (In Patterson's Daily News, and in most of the other 310 papers that print Terry, the strip was being drawn last week by George Wunder. Wunder, like Caniff--whom he has never met--is a left-handed graduate of the A.P. Judging by his first week, his drawing was a reasonable facsimile of Caniff's, but his dialogue was a long way below it.)

Caniff's new five-year contract with Marshall Field calls for a $2,000-a-week minimum. The Field organization was not equipped to sell the new strip nationally, so left-winger Field, who shudders at William Randolph Hearst on his editorial page, made a deal with the old lord of San Simeon. For selling Steve Canyon, Hearst's King Features Syndicate got first rights to run the new strip in all Hearst papers outside Chicago (including the tabloid Mirror in New York, instead of Field's small PM).

Retooling for Steve. In the airy, book-lined studio at New City, Milton Caniff cleared away the oriental props that had served Terry. The morgue was crammed with Americana, for a change of scene: state guides, the Rivers series, hundreds of photographs of city streets and airports. Marshall Field, no comics expert, had no advice to give, but Caniff knew what the publishers and readers wanted: a strip with all the thrills of Terry and nearly all the sexiness of Lace rolled into one.

His new hero, Steve Canyon, would be a lean and squinty, older version of Terry; a fellow with an easy, insolent, Gary Cooperish grace that marked a breed of plainsmen, and airplanesmen. Canyon knew the world and its airlanes--and its women--as his granddaddy would have known the way stations on the Overland Trail. So he went into business on a shoestring as Horizons, Unlimited, and took for his trademark an old Navajo double-eagle design (see cover). His first customer would be a tough one: a wolverine of Wall Street, slinky Copper Calhoon.

Caniff plotted his new characters as carefully as any fiction writer. "The guy, now, had to have a name that would stick," Caniff explained. "It had to be three syllables, Dead-eye-Dick, or John-Paul-Jones. . . . Steve-Canyon. Not a real name, or one you could turn into a dirty word. But a guy who'd have a girl in every port, and could do all the things that a youngster like Terry couldn't. Why, Terry couldn't even smoke. And with people in the Orient we couldn't use those casual, normal insults that pass between Americans."

Beginning his new strip, Caniff was confident and cool: "It's almost a mathematical equation," he said. "If I don't know my trade by now, I'd better quit."

/- Wrote Steinbeck: "When my grandchildren speak of their sugarplum eroticisms I can say, 'You see? This is how it was in my day. This Dragon Lady, with the figure of a debutante (if debutantes have figures) was one of your old man's girl friends.' "

* "We have had many requests to put the News on a freee list," wrote J.M.P., "but. . .the Government has money enough to provide subscriptions if it wishes to do so." He later relented a little.

* Crockett Johnson abandoned Barnaby last year, and Roy Crane gave up Wash Tubbs. Major Hoople, star boarder of Our Boarding House, did better after his creator Gene Ahern was replaced by a group of N.E.A. artists and writers.

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