The Press: Escape Artist

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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).