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As morning broke each workday last week over the pleasant St. Louis suburb of University City, an impish-looking, tire-waisted man gingerly eased himself into a tub of steaming hot water and submerged right up to his jug-handle ears. For most men, the solitary ritual of the tub means a chance to escape for a while from the cares and worries of the world outside—but not for William Henry Mauldin, editorial cartoonist of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In Mauldin's cauldron, the heat creates light—in the form of inspiration for his drawing board. The water of his bath is roiled with national and international crises, and in the rising steam swarm the wraithlike figures of politicians, statesmen and world leaders. While his skin turns lobster-red and he blisters his insides with coffee from a king-size cup, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin is hard at work.
Steam heat is, in fact, the ideal climate for Mauldin's style of searing creativity. In an art that often uses a shovel instead of a rapier, a backslap instead of a boot, Mauldin, 39, wields the hottest editorial brush in the U.S. Full of caustic and rebellious passions, he boils over onto his drawing board with the scalding effect of a well-aimed spit of lava. "You've got to be a misanthrope in this business," says Mauldin. "A real son of a bitch. I'm touchy. I've got raw nerve ends, and I'll jump. If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it." Mauldin's professional credo: "If it's big, hit it. You can't go far wrong."
The wonder is that this ordinarily mild-mannered, suburbia-chained father, who even admits that his swimming pool is "my status symbol," is able to punch so hard. Borne to fame in World War II on the shoulders of his famed G.I. cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, Mauldin seemed dashed and aimless once the smoke of war had cleared away. "My life has been backwards," he says. "Big success, retirement, and now I'm making an honest living." Starting a brand-new career three years ago at the Post-Dispatch, he has risen to the top of his profession, using as his ladder an inland newspaper that has always encouraged crusaders and viewed the nation and the world with "show me" detachment.
Voodoo & Vulnerability. Mauldin packs a wallop that can be absorbed in seconds—and seconds, as he well knows, are all his work will get from the Post-Dispatch's readers (circ. 406,947) and the other 10 million in his 99-newspaper syndication. He understands even better—as many of his colleagues seem to forget —that editorial cartooning is essentially an aggressive art, aimed at the belly rather than the brain. Mauldin never defends; he attacks. The difference between an editorial cartoon and the editorial across the page, he says, is "the difference between a sergeant's whistle and a Brahms symphony."