Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/061592/06159934.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 6KB | 128 lines

                                                                                HUMOR, Page 63

A Perfect MAD Man


William Gaines' splendidly zany magazine taught irreverence to a
generation

By KURT ANDERSEN -- With reporting by William Tynan/New York


    Obituaries tend to be occasions for breathless hyperbole
and for reducing rich, messy lives to tidy summations. Why
should this one be any different? After all, no postwar American
literary institution has had a more profound cultural influence
than Mad magazine, and William Gaines, the aggressively
idiosyncratic impresario who launched and then ran the magazine
for four decades, is a singular character in 20th century
American publishing -- the anti-Luce.

    For such a happily unkempt man -- he wore shoulder-length
hair and bargain-basement clothes, and weighed an eighth of a
ton -- Gaines' death last week seemed curiously neat: he had
turned 70; his creation was turning 40; an exhaustive
coffee-table-book history (Completely Mad) was in the
bookstores; and, as if to reaffirm Mad's relevance, the current
issues of two other magazines (Esquire and Texas Monthly)
feature Alfred E. Neumanesque cover caricatures of would-be
Presidents (George Bush and Ross Perot). Is there any American
under 50 who did not as a youth experience Mad's liberating,
irreverent rush? Without doubt a certain New York Daily News
obituary editor did: WHAT? ME DEAD? was a headline -- tasteless,
allusive, funny -- worthy of the man who allowed Mad to happen.

    If Dr. Spock is responsible for a whole generation of
spoiled brats, it was Bill Gaines who propelled baby-boomer
smart-aleckism to giddy new heights. Long before the Nickelodeon
cable channel (whose sensibility is significantly Mad-derived),
before Father Knows Best seemed campy, before every other
ninth-grader wore sideburns and shades, Gaines' magazine was the
only place for children to have an uncensored glimpse behind the
perky facade of '50s bourgeois life. It was where they could get
clued in to the fatuousness of civics-book sanctimony, to the
permutations of suburban phoniness, to grown-up dissembling and
insincerely sincere hucksterism of all kinds. Mad infected
children with a healthy streak of antiestablishment skepticism,
a Dada-dissectionist attitude toward all media. Where else could
you see Donald Duck baffled by his three fingers and white
gloves?

    Mad readers eventually grow up, and thus Gaines bears
paternal responsibility for a large swath of pop culture from
the past quarter-century. Virtually every stand-up comedy
routine is a regurgitation of Dave Berg's Lighter Side strips.
Underground artists from R. Crumb on have taken inspiration from
Harvey Kurtzman (Gaines' editorial genius, who left after four
years to launch a doomed satirical magazine for Hugh Hefner) and
Mad's dense, rude cartoon style. Parodies of advertising and TV
did not really exist before Mad invented the form. Ernie
Kovacs, along with Bob and Ray, wrote free-lance for Gaines in
the '50s, and Kovacs and Mad begat Saturday Night Live and David
Letterman (who is, physically as well as spiritually, Alfred E.
You-Know-Who come to life). Without Gaines and Mad there might
have been no National Lampoon, no Maus, no Ren & Stimpy, no Spy.

    "I was a behavior problem," Gaines told Maria Reidelbach,
author of Completely Mad, "a nonconformist, a difficult child."
What a surprise. Yet Gaines was born and raised (in New York
City, of course) to be precisely who he became. His father had
been a comic-book publisher in the '30s, and when young Bill
took over the company after the war, he turned to lurid fun,
producing a line of successful gore-and-monster comics that 1)
subsidized less profitable publications in his stable, 2)
inspired and influenced future horrauteurs from Stephen King to
Wes Craven and George Romero, and 3) were the subject of a 1954
Senate subcommittee investigation into the causes of juvenile
delinquency.

    Gaines soon stopped publishing the spook stuff and staked
his fortune on Mad. Circulation peaked at 2.4 million in 1973,
when the last of the baby boomers were in grade school, but
today, with versions of the Mad world view available elsewhere,
it is only a third of that.

    Gaines sold Mad in 1961 but stayed as publisher and
paterfamilias through a succession of corporate overseers
(including its current owner, Time Warner Inc.). Gaines, says
editor Nick Meglin, who started at Mad in 1956, was "a very,
very casual person -- which is a euphemism for being a slob. He
became uncomfortable if people started to wear shirts and ties
and pinstripe suits, because he figured they were looking to
become corporate creeps, as he would call them." The money saved
on wardrobe went to subsidize Gaines' various follies, including
restaurant feasts, his collection of small-scale Statues of
Liberty (including one of Bartholdi's original models, which he
bought for $104,000) and his annual junkets abroad for Mad's
editors and contributors.

    Gaines didn't really invent the magazine, didn't toss in
ideas, didn't recruit new editors or writers or artists. Rather,
he carefully oversaw the details of the business and by the
(mainly) happy force of his personality helped whip up the
wiseacre clubhouse chaos from which Mad emerged. "He always
said, `You're going to have to carry me out of here,' " Meglin
remembers, "because he didn't have many interests. Mad was his
life's work, his hobby, his social life."