Bill Mauldin: Drawing on the Past

The time was the middle of the Great Depression in Mountain Park, New Mexico. Young Billy's fingers and wrists had grown strong from milking the family's scraggly goats and cows.His impoverished family studied those hands and tried to predict his career. Surgeon, suggested his grandmother. His father reckoned he ought to keep on farming. Billy himself believed he might become a preacher, a pilot, a diver, or a sheriff. But his mother knew. "You have the hands of a sculptor," she told her babyfaced 13-year-old.

Fifty-seven years later, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin, still roundfaced and full of life, is finally proving his mother right. Using the cartoons that first made him famous back in World War II, the gray-haired, bushy-browed cartoonist recently added sculpting to a long list of creative accomplishments.

Remember Willie and Joe? Even for

THE CREATOR OF WILLIE AND JOE, WHO GOT STARTED PAINTING TIRES IN PHOENIX, DISCOVERS HIS MOTHER WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG

baby boomers, for whom World War II is the ancient past, those slumped, unshaven, bleary-eyed infantrymen symbolized the gritty grimness of war. Like the real-life "dogfaces" they represented, Willie and Joe dripped mud and sweat, soaked their smelly, sore feet in their helmets, and annoyed officers because they refused to "ack like sojers."

Today, the same steady hands that drew Willie and Joe and an estimated 18,000 other editorial cartoons, the same strong hands that once milked goats and cows, flattening the teats with a final downward stroke to extract every drop, now work chunks of mud-brown sculpting material.

In the overflowing dining room of his Santa Fe, New Mexico, home, Mauldin stands by the corner of the antique pine table that serves as a makeshift three-footsquare sculpting studio. Books, papers, coffee cans, paintbrushes, table knives, modeling materials, and partially finished wax models litter that end of the table.

Here's the model for the second of the two limited-edition bronze sculptures he's completed so far: a war-weary Willie in a debris-littered foxhole turns to an equally benumbed Joe and asks, "Why the hell weren't you born a beautiful woman?"

Beside that sits the partially finished puttylike model for the sculpture he's working on now: Joe brews coffee inside a bombed building, of which nothing remains but the door, while Willie knocks outside.

Mauldin settled on a cartooning career at age 14, after seeing an advertisement for correspondence courses in Popular Mechanics. His grandmother, the only family member with cash, lent him the $20 tuition. His drawings have been making people laugh and think ever since.

Why would someone who has spent so many years cartooning, and loving it, suddenly start sculpting?

Mauldin holds out his thick, lightly freckled hands. "Feel my knuckles," he suggests. I do. It scarcely shows on the surface, but under the skin they're knobby and gnarled.

"I've had arthritis for over 30 years," he confides, bending his stiff limbs cautiously ashe sinks into a leather couch. It was partly because of the arthritis that, in 1970, he moved back to the Southwest, becoming one of the first of the new wave of professionals who toil at home and keep in touch with their offices electronically.

He still works full time as an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun-Times, fax-ing off three lovingly crafted editorial cartoons a week. "One of these days, they're going to ask themselves, 'What are we paying this guy for?' and that will be that," he prophesies. But in the meantime, the man whom Time once called "the hottest editorial brush in the U.S." and Look once labeled an "idea factory," overflows with thoughts for cartoons.

And that's where the sculpting comes in. Some observers suggested that his 1989 plunge into a new medium represents a major career change. Not so, insists Mauldin. It's just a hobby. "The whole reason I started sculpting was to make it easier to continue cartooning."

How could that be? Simple. Once he's settled on the idea for a cartoon, it takes about three hours of steady work with his hands: penciling in the sketch, going over that with a fine-point pen, shading with a crayon, and brushing in broad accent strokes. Often, now, the pain from his osteoarthritis distracts him, obliterating the pleasure of this process. He used to unstiffen his fingers by playing classical guitar, but recently he's discovered another antidote: kneading and shaping the heated sculpting material, a specially prepared professional mixture of wax and clay.

"After I've spent four or five hours working the warm wax, my arthritis is in control for two or three days." He also likes the tactile sensations that come from squeezing and forming the clay.

It takes only about 50 hours to transmute a cartoon into a clay-wax model. From these models, foundry artisans produce bronze sculptures 5 to 25 inches high in limited editions of 12 to 100, which sell for $2,500 to $40,000 apiece. But because Mauldin sculpts only a few hours weekly, his new avocation goes slowly.

Not that he doesn't enjoy it. In fact, he has another 20 or so cartoon-to-sculpture transformations lined up in his head. Such as the one in which a chaplain preaching in a foxhole tells his huddled congregation of soldiers, ". . forever, amen. Hit the dirt." Or the one in which a medic leads a wounded man down a mountainside on a mule, explaining, "I calls her Florence Nightingale."

The problem is that besides cartooning - which in 1990 took him to Saudi Arabia to visit the troops there's so much else he enjoys. Like his two young children by his third wife, Chris. Sam, 5, and Kaja, 13, constitute his "third litter," and Mauldin's pink face glows as he describes Kaja's artistic talents and Sam's Dennis-the-Menace tendencies.

Beyond that, well, you name it. He's an electrician, mechanic, plumber, machin-ist, photographer, actor, painter, writer, pilot.... Despite his two Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other cartooning awards, Mauldin's not one to brag; but he admits he wouldn't mind being remembered as a jack-of-all-trades and master of some.

He's also a true scion of the Wild West. His paternal grandfather served as an Army scout during last century's Apache campaigns. His maternal great-grandfather, George Bemis, traveled west by stage-coach and mud wagon with Mark Twain, who reported his chance companion's exploits in Roughing It.

Then there's Mauldin's own boyhood, spent following his talented but restless father from one impulsive, unsuccessful venture to another in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico. In his classic Southwest memoir, A Sort of a Saga, Mauldin recounts how he and his folks and his brother Sid homesteaded a half-section of desert west of Phoenix.

His rough-and-tumble Southwest heritage have recurred in his cartoons, from his first magazine sales (in 1939, to Arizona Highways) to cartoons he draws today.

In Mauldin's favorite cartoon from World War II, for instance, a grieving cavalry master sergeant shoots his beloved disabled Jeep, just as a grieving cowboy would once have shot a beloved disabled horse.

A miniature bronze version of that cavalry sergeant and his injured Jeep stands symbolic guard over Mauldin's home. It's the first of his sculptures, and the one of which he's fondest.

The complicated lost-wax process by which foundry workers transform Mauldin's models to bronze statuary dates to Roman times and before, to the days of those sleek warrior heroes whose sculpted busts emerge from archeological excavations.

I like to think that someday, maybe 2,000 years from now, someone will dig up one of Mauldin's iconoclastic three-dimensional bronze war cartoons and wonder about the hands that created these images and the man behind the hands.