AAEC - Editorial Cartoon News
| Click Here to View List of News Articles |
|
February 6, 2003
A Last Visit with Mauldin
By Dennis Renault[Editor's note: The following recounts the author's visit with Mauldin after his Alzheimer's disease had greatly advanced. It is a hard read, but the story does have a happy ending.]
In March of 2001, my wife and I visited Bill Mauldin and his first wife, Jean, in Newport Beach, California, as we started on a 4-month trip around the U.S. in our camper.
Jean, who had been divorced from Bill since 1946, was his caregiver (to use the current term.) The nearby house they shared had just burned down and the meeting took place at the Radisson Hotel, where they were staying.
Planning that trip, I had arranged to visit former newspaper editors for whom I?d drawn editorial cartoons over the years, including editors of military publications, so why not look up Bill Mauldin, too? Although fifteen years and vastly different experiences separated us, his influence on my generation of political cartoonists had been profound.
A month before, I had satirized the U.S. Army's replacement of its traditional garrison cap with the controversial black beret for my paper, The Sacramento Bee. [see below].
The customary acknowledgement, "Apologies to the great Bill Mauldin," accompanied the cartoon and it was later reprinted in the Army Times.
I sent a copy of the cartoon to Mauldin in advance of our prearranged visit, along with copies of two letters he'd written me in 1960, when he was still at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He had been responding to my questions about employment as a political cartoonist; his views were characteristically honest and direct, with pointed suggestions for improvement and references to his own recent experience.
I figured those items would make for an easy introduction. It didn't.
When Jean brought her former husband to the Radisson lobby, it became apparent that his physical and mental state was shaky and that he not only needed to hold onto his former wife but also onto his well-known abrasiveness. His son in New Mexico had warned me as much ahead of time.
What followed, after a brief introduction and my expression of appreciation, was a long, loud, non-stop denunciation of my reprehensible, unauthorized use of his characters, Willie and Joe. In addition to attacking me, he referred to others who had allegedly taken advantage of him over the years, all the while threatening legal action of one sort or another.
I was stunned, and so were hotel staffers peering anxiously from behind desks and partitions.
But, oddly, my admiration for the man and his work superceded any feelings of offense. Besides, after ten or twelve minutes of continuous insults and expletives, Mauldin provided a welcome opportunity for good-natured sarcasm -- and then he delivered a memorable response.
When he finally took a breath in the diatribe, I said, "Bill, will you please be a bit more direct and tell me what's really on your mind."
Pause -- and a flicker of malicious recognition entered those eyes that had seen so much in their seventy-nine years of war, peace, politics and personal turmoil.
"This asshole," he responded, turning to his former wife and gesturing toward me, "has the thickest skin of anyone I've ever met!"
With that backhanded compliment, he got up to leave. Jean did, too, saying with a smile, "Stay here, we'll be back. This has been a million dollars worth of therapy."
And they did come back, after a thirty-minute intermission.
It was as if nothing had preceded this second and final act -- which is the positive side of the Alzheimer's Disease that afflicted Bill in his final years.
The four of us chatted, photos were taken, handshakes and good-byes were given and my wife and I continued on our journey around the country.
The experience had been like visiting the Statue of Liberty and finding the door to her upraised arm and torch locked and boarded up. But as most visitors to that island know, simply standing next to her and feeling what she justifiably represents to so many people is sufficiently moving and memorable to make the trip deeply worthwhile.
Before retiring in 1998, Dennis Renault was political cartoonist at The Sacramento Bee for twenty-seven years.