The Press: Escape Artist

(6 of 7)

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."