The Man Who Brought Up Father

by Mary Stewart Cutting

The Man Who

Brought Up Father

In his teens George McManus was able to earn far more than most boys. At twenty-one he left a comfortable home in St. Louis to tramp the streets of New York, hungry and without carfare

 

by Mary Stewart Cutting, Jr.

 

Many very human anecdotes cluster around the pleasant personality of the creator of “Jiggs” and “Maggie.” The cartoonist’s two brain children are as popular in distant lands as they are here, and their reception reveals much about the fundamental appeal of human impulses that know no national boundary lines. Although “Jiggs” and “Maggie” have amused millions, their reception by the public has taught the artist, he says, to be humble, to observe, to learn and to apply.

 

THE first thing that impresses you about George McManus, the famous cartoonist is that his eyes are brown, and that he has a personality characteristic of those who are endowed with these big, human qualities. He is sure and definite, with no consciousness of himself, and he has a quiet, friendly way of meeting you with a smile that gives instant recognition of the kindly wit of the man.

Through many corridors with strange turnings and unexpected doors leading to more corridors, I reached his office and found him at work “Bringing Up Father.”

This comic strip, as it is technically called, published daily, including Sunday in a full page, and in upward of seven hundred newspapers throughout the entire world, has made a name unequalled in the history of American humor. I was bent on discovering from Mr. McManus, the creator of it, how his life had brought him to his present great success.

At once we fell into conversation—there was no getting into it, we just began—in a little room, glass on two sides. West and North, looking across Columbus Circle to Central Park, where he does much of his work.

“I was born in St. Louis,” he began, “and I’d like to have people know it, and that I’ve only been married once and to the same wife for fourteen years, because I’ve been born, according to report, in every city of the United States and Canada, and married in every one, especially those cities I’ve never been in. I am forty-two and my father and mother were Irish. My wife was a St. Louis girl. Funny thing—never knew her in St Louis. I met her in New York, and about a year and a half after that we were married.” He pointed to the photograph of a very pretty young woman upon his desk, and smiled—he always smiles when he speaks of Mrs. McManus. Later, he told me that she is an accomplished musician.

“I never took a drawing lesson in my life,” he said in answer to a question, “except at school. We had drawing lessons, and I always got 100. My book was full in an hour, and I could sit and loaf, while the others took the whole term to fill theirs. But I was really put out of school for drawing pictures. The teacher caught me in the class room decorating one of the books, and showed it to my father as a punishment. He showed it to the editor of the St. Louis Republican, then he asked me how I would like to give up school? The editor had offered me a job, and I went right to work. I was sixteen at the time.

“There was a peculiar comeback to that,” he went on with much amusement. “Some time later, after I had been in New York several years, my wife and I returned on a visit to St. Louis. We went to call on the teacher, who was still at the school. I thought all St. Louis must know about me, but the teacher didn’t say anything until just as we were leaving, then she looked at me and said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ My wife has never let me forget it!

[Illustration: Bringing Up Father]

“Jiggs," the much-harried Father in the comic strip, is the cartoonist's favorite character. Invariably the blundering husband comes off second best in his differences with an outraged spouse, "Maggie." Their amusing domestic difficulties have been printed in nearly every known language. Four theatrical companies have produced stage versions in the United States. It has been dramatized in Japan, and recently a musical comedy was written about the characters.

“I had never thought of pen and ink until I got on the Republican,” Mr. McManus continued with the story of his early years. “At first, they gave me different things to do, and of course I fell down on some of them. I was on trial, but they figured I’d develop. They did everything in the newspaper field in those days, and after awhile I had charge of the fashion page. I created fashions.” He laughed. “They’d ask me to create something, so I’d copy from pictures of all kinds of different dresses, put them together and add to them. When I got through, it looked like a crazy quilt—but it was a fashion dress just the same.”

I asked what he was paid for all this.

“When I first went to the Republican I drew six dollars a week. When I left, at the end of five years, I was manager of the art department at thirty-five dollars a week, and drawing seventy-five from the advertising department. There was a great deal of night work, and I was tired of it, so I accepted an offer from the Post Despatch. But I stayed with them only two weeks; I wanted to come to New York. I went, and celebrated my twenty-first birthday there.”

“Why did you want to come to New York?” I asked.

“I had practically reached the limit of my salary in the newspaper field at home,” he replied, “syndicates had not started, and I wanted specially to get into the comic game. Everybody was talking ‘New York,’ and I was at the age when I was so smart that St. Louis wasn’t big enough for me.”

“Had you any idea what you would do when you got here?”

“No, I hadn’t, but I had a little money, about twenty-four hundred dollars, and I didn’t do any work until I had spent every nickel of it. I even got rid of my overcoat.”

“How long did it take?”

He looked reflective, “Let’s see,” he answered, “I think about two months. I know that that amount was worth more than double what it is today, but I was determined to see New York, if I never saw anything else.”

When the last nickel was gone, on Christmas Eve, he slept the night in Bryant Park. He seemed to regard it as one of the funniest things that had happened in his life. He could have sent home for money and gotten it easily, for his father was one of the big theatrical producers of the West, but his pride had kept him from writing.

This pride had arisen at the time he asked for his first raise, after two years on the Republican, and had been given an advance of two dollars a week. He had complained to his father, who had replied, “If it had not been for me you would not be getting that.” From that day he had made up his mind never to be dependent on anybody, and this was his severest test. Also, there had been prophecy when he departed St. Louis to the effect that he would, inevitably, be forced to return.

I said that Bryant Park must have been somewhat less cozy twenty-one years ago than perhaps it was at present.

“It isn’t cozy at any time under those circumstances,” he replied with humorous emphasis.

THE next morning, Christmas, with a strong feeling that he would rather starve to death than be licked, he decided to go to the old Gilsey House, because it was run by a St. Louis man, and take a room, for which he would not have to pay at once. The following morning, he started downtown to the World office to see about some sketches that he had submitted. He had no carfare.

“I walked over to the Third Avenue ‘L’,” he said, “and told the man at the ticket window that I’d left my wallet in my suite of rooms at the Gilsey House, and that I had to get downtown on important business. I offered him the key to my room, it was marked with the name of the hotel, and I said I would be back in the afternoon with the nickel. He took it and I got to the World, but I didn’t sell anything. I couldn’t get anything to eat and I had to walk uptown. Then I had to think of a way to pay the man who had my key, so I drew a picture of the clerk at the Gilsey House handing me five dollars. This was my I. O. U. It worked. He liked the picture of himself and lent me the five. Later on when I returned it I gave him a better drawing.

“Things broke for me the next day. A syndicate ’phoned and made me an offer, and I got a wire from the World the same day. Syndicates were just beginning. The only idea there had been of that kind was when two newspapers under the same ownership used the same features. The World and the Post Dispatch were both Pulitzer papers, and much of the New York stuff was print in St. Louis. I knew mine would be, and though the World offered me fifty dollars less a week than the syndicate, I took the cheaper job to let them know at home in this fashion that I was working. As it turned out it was the best thing I could have done.

“Then, because I was fixed, I went to call on some of my father’s friends in the theatrical profession. They wanted to know where I had been and what I was doing, because my Dad had been wiring to them, but I wouldn’t tell them anything—I just said the town looked pretty easy to me.”

After six or seven years with the World, Mr. McManus went to the newspaper syndicate where he has been for fifteen years. He told me that he had created two comics with the World, “Let George Do It,” and “The Newlyweds.” For the latter he took his wife as model.

When he joined his present organization, he wanted something new, and originated “Bringing Up Father.” He said that “Father” was his favorite character, the type he knew most about, and that he was really a living person to him.

“Where do you get your ideas?” I asked.

“Everywhere,” he answered, “but it’s difficult because there are so many things you can’t use. For instance, I can’t have too much New York stuff—nothing that includes a New York apartment or a janitor. They’re not understood outside of this city. I must find general ideas that will have a universal appeal because, “Bringing Up Father” is circulated through the whole world. I can’t use any local material of any particular town, for if I drew one town I’d have to to draw them all. And then no seasons are allowed, for it’s summer in some places and winter in others. The comics come out simultaneously, and have to be made eight or nine weeks in advance. You can’t use anything that’s timely. Of course you get tired of it, like everything you do for a living, but when you get an idea you like—one that you want to put over—your pen will be ahead of you. Other days it’s just labor—you can’t get any where.

[Illustration: Frontispiece of the Japanese edition of "Bringing Up Father"]

This is the frontispiece of the Japanese edition of “Bringing up Father." When the picture first appeared in the Orient there was much anxiety over “Jigg's" hunger for corned beef and cabbage—a dish unknown to the natives. After deliberation they substituted rice in the translated captions.

Mr. McManus went on to say that his endeavor was to make his drawings clear and attractive to the eye and to get a laugh. “Wilton Lackaye once said to me,” he remarked, “‘You have to make 360 laughs a year—one every day. Even if you get them every other day, that’s 182¹⁄₂ laughs. There isn’t a show on Broadway that has that many—sometimes, not more than fifty.’”

He said that producing the comic was a good deal like writing a story, illustrating it, and then turning it into a play. He pays particular attention to the detail of his work, and has been known to tear up a whole strip of pictures showing “Jiggs” and his pal, “Dinty Moore,” in the Hawaiian Islands. He was dissatisfied with the way he had done the native costumes or the foliage of the palm trees. He has books full of sketches of places he has visited.

“What do you do when you are not working?” I asked.

“Think about it,” he laughed. “One of the terrible things about this business is that you never through with it. When I can’t sleep. I feel that I must not waste the time, so I get up and work. And there are days, when I just sit and think without getting anything done. I go home with it still on my mind. Then somebody drops in whose day finishes at five, and he looks at me and says, ‘Pretty easy!’ Apparently you’re not supposed to think, but I’m doing the hardest work when I appear to be enjoying myself. Ideas are as insubstantial as thin air, but they are the core and soul of cartooning.”

I wanted to know whether he had any unusual habits of work, for the place was in immaculate order, uncluttered—the drawing board, the tray full of pens, pencils and bottles of ink, and the desk at one side. A few of Mr. McManus’s cover designs, framed, hung on the wall.

“No,” he relied,“everything is so commercialized now that you don’t have time to be eccentric or work in any weird way.”

I asked if he received many letters, and he replied that the people who wrote in were usually out of work. He had had only one knock. An Irishman took umbrage at a cartoon showing “Dinty Moore” behind bars in the penitentiary, saying, “Hello, Jiggs.” This irate individual wrote at length, calling Mr. McManus down, and reciting all the great Moores of Ireland, and ended by saying that there were more McManuses in the penitentiary than there were Moores.

“Have you any aspirations?”

“No,” he answered at once. “My wife says I should have, but I think if I had it would be to loaf, and my idea would be to demonstrate how comfortable a lounge in a show window could be. If they would pay me enough, I think I could enjoy it.”

“WHAT are your recreations?” I asked next.

“I like salt bathing,” he said, “but I never take any exercise, if I know about it first. In the ocean the waves toss me about, and I get it in spite of myself. I like traveling better than anything. I’ve been all through Europe and this country. My wife has been around the world; she does a great deal of observing for me. Abroad, I prefer the little villages. Why, in London, standing in front of the Savoy and the Cecil, and in Paris in front of the Grand Hotel, you meet everyone you thought was dead! Even the shop girls seem to have been imported from New York.”

“What do you think about your work, do you feel that you are successful?”

“Not according to my wife,” he replied. “She would like to see me doing bigger things. She says you can’t stand still—you’ve either got to go forward or go backward.”

He went on to give his idea of success—that it depends on the individual—is something within himself. He said, “If a man has made a million in one business and wishes he’d made it in another, he isn’t a success to himself. I figure that an artist who may not have any money, but whom people call the most wonderful artist in the world—if he can live on that remark—is a success. Take every actor, even our greatest and most successful comedians, they never consider themselves great actors until they’ve played a Shakespearean part. It’s the same way in the comic field. The comic man never considers himself a great artist until he studies the art of painting. I don’t care about my name living after me, I’d rather eat now!”

I spoke of the success of “Bringing Up Father.” He said the public decided, and told me some of its latest developments.

The comic has appeared within the last few months in book form in China and Japan, but when it first ran in the newspapers of those countries there was much anxiety over “Jiggs’s” hunger for corn beef and cabbage. That dish was unknown to them. After deliberation they substituted rice for it in the translated captions. However, since the earthquake, large consignments of the American delicacy, in cans, have found their way to the Far East, and “Bringing Up Father” is now unchanged in the book.

Four theatrical companies for fourteen years have produced a stage version of the comic in the United States, but last year a Japanese adapter, seeing its enormous popularity in Japan, wrote it into a play on his own initiative, and found his judgment fully justified in the enthusiasm of the audiences.

“Jiggs” has also been welcomed heartily by his own in Dublin, on two counts—his own personality, and for the reason that he is the work of a McManus.

Mr. McManus laughed and said he thought the strip had been published in every language except, perhaps, Eskimo! Then he told the story of the Persian rug.

Six years ago, a fugitive copy of the China Press of Shanghai which has printed “Bringing Up Father” for a number of years, reached Teheran, Persia, and fell into the hands of Ahmad Khan, a Persian with an Oxford education. He was interested enough to write immediately to Mr. McManus praising the wit and art of the cartoon, and expressing the hope that they might meet. This was the beginning of a correspondence that ripened into warm friendship. In 1922, they met in Paris, and Mr. McManus gave Ahmad Khan several of his original drawings, among them a cover design in colors. This depicts “Maggie” in court dress ascending a flight of steps leading to the garden of the palace. Two girl pages hold her long, crimson train while “Jiggs” in an old flannel shirt and trousers stands aside in awed amazement.

Two years later, a reproduction of the cover arrived in the shape of a silk rug, six feet long and five wide, as a gift to Mr. McManus. It is hand woven, 990 knots to the square inch, and is a beautiful specimen from looms celebrated for years in weaving the Kazanshaw rugs, famed among collectors. Not the least part of Mr. McManus’s appreciation of the gift, was the complete surprise of its arrival. Though the two men had been in constant correspondence during the many months of its making, the giver had never mentioned the rug.

These are a few of Mr. McManus’s contacts away from home. But it is in the United States that he first won the wide reputation that makes his tremendous audience turn to his comic strip in order that the day shall begin with a smile.

Mr. McManus was brought up in the atmosphere of the theatre. His father was one of the great managers in the West of his day, and Mr. McManus’s voice changes to pride and respect when he speaks of him. It brings him keen pleasure now, to drop into one of the actors’ clubs and meet for the first time people who say, “Why, I knew your father well.”

THE elder McManus put on plays including the well-known actors, Gus Thomas, Digby Bell, Kyrle Bellew, James O’Neil, Henry Dixie, Julia Marlow, Sothern, Reid and Collier, Adelina Patti (in concert in St. Louis), Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Della Fox, Lillian Russell, De Wolfe Hopper, and many others.

Mr. McManus took from his pocket a gold match-case which he has carried for years. On one side of it is an inscription to his father from Henry E. Abbey and Maurice Grau, who built the Metropolitan Opera House, and on the other are four twinkling blue diamonds. The story that goes with it is that those two men presented to the Western producer a gift of value, of which this was a part, for his spirit of good fellowship in taking on tour of the country the French and Italian Opera Company, composed of the two De Reszkes, Emma Eames, Nordica, Sembrich, Melba, and Campanini, and refusing to be reimbursed. He did this as a favor, as his son put it, to demonstrate how the “show should be put on.”

George McManus talked frankly about himself, but quite as if it were another person’s list of achievements he were discussing rather than his own. It is seldom that you meet any one of so tremendous vogue and so little vanity. He takes his work with a fine seriousness, for all his humorous way in speaking of it. And it is a serious job, to be taken with the kind of thought that does away with things that will leave a bad taste. In his characters “Jiggs” and “Maggie” he delineates widely human impulses—“Jiggs,” the victim of his own desires, getting caught by “Maggie,” who is a perfect example of outraged sincerity, in her eagerness for their joint advancement.

Mr. McManus believes that a man must give to comic art, whether he feels like it or not, everything he has all the time. He outlined a formula for successful cartooning some time ago. It is work—be humble—observe—learn and—apply.

There is no greater proof of art, in addition to its presentation, than that it shall reach the world in terms that are universal. George McManus has done this with a spirit of go fellowship that has encircled the globe.