July 5, 2021 • 47 mins
For an author constantly conflated with her most famous creation, would the real Cathy Guisewite please stand up? In this two-part interview, Jamie and Cathy talk about what the journey from unknown diarist to world-famous aack connoisseur was like, and all the misjudgments and road blocks that came up along the way.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My next guest comics Drip. But Cathew is indicated over
one thousand newspapers, and she is a very perceptible observer
of the male female relationships in our life. Would you
welcome Cathy guys white um as opposed to Johnny here,
(00:22):
who I saw the man all getting ready backstage, and
you know, they sit down, poof while I'm sitting there
in my forty five minutes, they sit down, poof, one
poof of powder and you're done, You're out of there.
You know, a woman, if it takes me twenty minutes
to dry my hair and it takes the man two minutes,
well he's already eighteen minutes ahead for the day. And
if it takes me fifteen minutes to do the makeup
and it takes the man zero minutes, now he's thirty
(00:44):
three minutes ahead seven thirty in the morning, he's already
got thirty three minutes on me. And so you start
multiplying this out day by day, week by week, month
by month. I figured by the end of the year,
a man has two and a half months of free
time that the woman has not had. Are a slight
(01:07):
undercurrent of resentment of jealous Well, I think most women
would just want to know from you the you know,
the perfect man. Why it is that? Why is that
if a man has this excess of time in a year,
then he cannot find three minutes, you know, to tell
us how wonderful we are. This is Kathy guys White,
(01:31):
creator of the Caffey comics in the nineteen eighties, making
Johnny Carson laugh his ass off. This may not be
how you would expect to hear her sound in this clip.
She is confident, she's funny, she is very Western beauty standards, thin,
she's wearing stylish clothes, and these are not necessarily qualities
we would associate with the Queen of So here's what
(01:54):
I need you to understand, and I need you to
really listen, because she's not going to tell you this herself.
Athy guys White is very fucking cool. I have all
kinds of questions about what it's like to be It
occurred to me that you are exactly two years older
then I was when I started the strip. So I'm
trying to remember my mindset when I was two years
(02:17):
into doing the comic strip and what what life was
like for me. And I think it's like ten tho
years difference a wife for you, This is Kathy guys
White on the phone with me in California. Kathy guys
White is not Kathy the character, although you could be
excused for assuming so. People get confused around their most
(02:39):
iconic characters quite a bit, especially when those characters are
named after them. Donna Reid will always be more closely
associated with the psi op nineteen fifties housewife than the
high powered Hollywood actor producer calling a lot of the
shots in her own career, she actually was Mary. Kate
and Nashley Olsen had a ba jillion dollar empire bill
(03:00):
upon carefully constructed versions of children they actually were not.
This phenomenon is the reason that a large swath of
the population thinks that Raven Simone can literally read their mind.
But when I was getting this podcast together, I was
finding a lot of people were surprised that Kathy, a
newspaper comic strip about to summarize a very stressed out
(03:22):
woman who says ac was actually created and illustrated by
a woman named Kathy. And that's because when Kathy, both
the artist and the actual character came into the newspapers,
she was the first female protagonist in the daily Funny
Pages who was written by a woman, And today we're
going to learn how that came to be and all
(03:43):
of the problems that came with it. Later in the series,
we'll be taking a look at the women who laid
the groundwork for her career. Because Kathy Geiswhite did not
come out of nowhere entirely. There had been women working
in the funny pages and comics in general before she
arrived whose presence didn't draw as much attention as Kathy's did,
And we'll also be talking about creators who came after her.
(04:06):
But by the time the Kathy comic debut in papers
in nineteen seventy six, the Universal Press Syndicate, one of
the leading funny page distributors at the time, was desperate
for a comic that was about a woman's experience. After
the early to mid nineteen seventies brought one of the
largest and most impactful women's rights movements in the history
(04:27):
of the United States. Here's Kathy speaking with me about
how she first got the gig as a completely untrained
artist in her twenties. So I always kept a journal
um about my my romantic misery and how bad I
felt about my way and one night, I one night
(04:48):
I just m, I just do a scribbled picture of
what I look like eating everything in the kitchen while
I'm waiting for the founder ring that never rang, and
um the scribbled picture, and then I drew another picture
of what I might look like, you know, if he
called them and laanted to come over, and then that
It was kind of like a two part scribbled picture,
(05:09):
and it was It just made me feel so much
better to see myself in picture for him. Suddenly it
was funny. Not I mean, it was pitiful, but it
was funny pitiful to see it in on on the page.
And so for a period of time, instead of just
writing the same sad thing in my diary every night,
I would drew a picture of the kind of the
(05:30):
worst of my day or the worst of my relationship moments.
I sent these very private, very personal cartoons to mom,
Okay and me in with letters. And it was my
mom who said, oh this, you know, after all those
years of teaching me to keep my feelings private, she said, well,
(05:51):
this could be a comic strip for millions of people
to enjoy. I certainly knew nothing about comic strips, but
mom uh went to the variously research comic strip syndicate.
She typed me a list of who she thought I
should approach in the order I should approach them, And
so to make her not do that, I sent a
(06:12):
group of these two the name at the top of
her list, just one name, which was Universal Presndicate. So
that's how the comic strip started. Was your mom the
only one seeing them? Or that you were kind of
interesting with them before? Yes? Oh yes, no, I wouldn't
have said nothing. I would ever show anybody. Wow. And
then there was a big and then there was a
(06:34):
big discussion when the comic strip Syndicate wrote me back
right away. I think never in history has a commercial
syndicate like sent a contract out so fast. But they said,
this was six and the world had was in this
massive shift for women and men, I mean, the arguments
(06:57):
between the sexiest. It was like, you can't even comprehend
what this time was like between men and women, and
everybody was at each other's throats during this time. And
they the syndicate said, well, you know that they had
really been hoping to find a comic strip that dealt
with how the world was changing for women. But that
all the strips they had seen had been, of course
drawn by men. And they said that they didn't really
(07:19):
have an emotional um honestly, that they felt I did,
and that they said they would. They said they were
confident that I could learn how to draw if I
had to do it three and sixty or five days
a year. Pretty fucking cool, right, So, even though the
foundation had been laid by other women for this to
(07:39):
happen in this industry, the choice of the Kathy character,
a woman who is open to, but not completely sold on,
progressive feminism, seemed pretty deliberate. So let's learn about her.
It's Kathy guys White day on accast. She passed into
the world, not in seventy six. She's at what, She's
(08:02):
out on dates and she don't like politics from mama
and herban too with feminist friends. She's fighting all the
stands with chocolate and head. Kathy, She's fighting back to
stress with success. Let's go slack, oh, Catherine bathyn Cafe.
(08:22):
She's got a luck, go in all. Kathy guys White
(08:43):
was born on September five in Dayton, Ohio, and was
raised with her two sisters, Mickey and Marianne. Her father
worked in advertising and eventually got Kathy the gig she'd
hold before becoming a famous comic strip artist in the seventies.
And her mom, like many women of the Silent Generation,
although this definitely varies considerably by race and class, her
(09:04):
mom stayed at home and Guys White will become the
inspiration for the Mom character in the Kathy comic and
is typically characterized as overbearing. She's constantly worrying about Kathy,
her marital status, her biological clock, and occasionally she'll start
small businesses with her friend Flow. The real and Guys
(09:25):
White is much more complicated and interesting. Right now, she
is nine years old, living in Florida and kicking. The
last time I spoke with Kathy, they were in Florida
together doing yoga classes on Zoom and preparing for Kathy's
daughter's wedding. Here's Kathy telling me about her mom. Um.
My mom was born in a tiny, remote village in
(09:48):
the Slovakian Booneys, and she immigrated to the United States
with her mom when she was three. Um she grew
up in a in an immigrant community and Cleveland. I
think my mom didn't speak English, so she family learned
in kindergarten, but her mom spoke English but never learned.
(10:09):
Her mom never learned to read or write. It was
kind of shocking to me to realize that, and realized
that that's, you know, that's just such a one little
generation away from opportunities that I had. But my mom
grew up at a My mom went to college. Um,
she got a little scholarship to go to college at
(10:32):
the at the urging of one of her high school teachers.
Nobody in my mom's family, no girl had ever gone
to college, so it was a great big deal. And um,
the relatives were angry that the woman's place was to
stay in the family and help out. And you know,
Mom was going to go to college. She got a
(10:52):
journalism degree. After college, her boyfriend, my dad went to war,
and Mom worked as a as a writer and loved,
I will say loved working. She like she's ninety nine now.
She lights up when she talks about having her career
and her work, which was ended, of course, when my
(11:15):
dad came home from the war and got they got married,
and then it was time for the women to not
be working anymore. I came along shortly after. And then
when my dad was trying to get a job in
a in an advertising agency, and my mom was the
one who knew how to do that, so she, you know,
she she hoped him write the things that got him
(11:38):
the job. She who would bring the assignments home every night.
For a long time, she did his work for him.
And then he, you know, he elevated and he did
very well in advertising, but he was trained. Mom. Mom
was the rock that started that. And along the way,
she got a master's degree that she never mentioned to
any of us until a few years ago, and I said, well,
(11:58):
where's the certificate? You know were why didn't you tell us?
You know? She just said, I didn't need everybody to know.
I knew that I earned it. But she's also a
product of a generation where women didn't really have a
say in very much at all, where the men were
the men were the loss of the universe. So Cathy
(12:23):
and her sisters grew up in this environment, in a
home where Mom taught dad how to do his job
and no one was really allowed to talk about it.
She told me that she wasn't encouraged to think about
what she wanted to be when she grew up very often,
but she did think about it on her own in
the fifties and sixties as a kid. She then went
to the University of Michigan at ann Arbor, where she
(12:46):
majored in Well, she'll tell you what, what did pique
your interest, even if that wasn't kind of what you
were what you were studying a boy named Dave. I
was good. She was a boy named Dave. And the
grill the con rolls at the at this coffee shop
where I worked. So that's I gained a lot of
weight in college stalking Dave and eating grilled the con roles. Well,
(13:10):
I tried to make money. Okay, So Cathy says she
majors in stalking a guy named Dave, But it is
my journalistic compulsion to tell you she actually majored in English.
And this was between the late nineteen sixties in the
early nineteen seventies when the women's liberation movement in the
United States was really starting to take off, and by
(13:30):
the time Cathy graduated in nineteen seventy two, the movement
was at its peak. So, as a young woman, where
was Kathy on women's issues at this time? I'm going
to say, at first, I was kind of oblivious to
it in the in when I started college. There was
such a transformation during the time that I was in college,
(13:51):
there was such a opening of minds where were all
dressing in the uniform of these beautiful, liberating blue James.
Men and women were the same ones, the same style,
six same cuts. They kind of opened up the world.
And I think that that, um, you know, I think
for me it was a gradual awareness of of a
(14:13):
different world for women than the one I had grown
up expecting. And my mom, who is just a remarkable
traditionalist and feminist at the same time, she would cheer
me on to do, be, do and be everything that
she hadn't had a chance to do. But she also
said things to me like, when you play tennis, you know,
(14:34):
always let the boy win because it's just more complicated.
If you win, you'll know that you're better. You know
you knew, you'll know if you could have won, and
that's all you need to know. A lot of the
first trips I was writing, I was writing from living
at a time when literally boys would not go out
with you if you made more money than they did,
(14:55):
or if they thought you had career aspirations. At the
University of Michigan, where she also meets classmate Laurence Caston,
who most famously went on to write some Star Wars
movies and The Big Chill. They remain friends to this day,
to the point where Kathy had her character go and
praised The Big Chill when it came out in to
(15:18):
support her friend's success. We love Kathy. It's while she's
in college that Kathy's issues with food, a thing that
comes up in the Kathy comics constantly, really solidifies as
a part of her life. Kathy finished college taking advertising courses,
and upon doing so, started working at the ad firm
(15:38):
that her father worked at in the early nineteen seventies.
And there is a lot to say about how women
and people of color were treated in the workplace at
this time, and will be devoting quite a bit of
time to it later in this show. But I wanted
to know how Kathy was treated in this position starting
in her early twenties. She said this. You know, it
(16:00):
was years later when looking back that I would say,
I realized, you know, the hierarchy at the office and
how it was not exactly pro women. But at the time,
you know, at the time, I was thrilled to be working.
I was thrilled to have a job. I didn't. Um,
I was not, uh, you know, harassed by anybody. Um
(16:24):
I was. I was just I was excited to be there.
I was thrilled to be there, and and I worked.
I worked really hard. I worked all day every day,
and then I always took work home with me and
worked in the night unless I was stalking somebody somebody else,
Dave was over there. So this is something that has
come up for me a lot interviewing women of this
(16:46):
generation about how they were treated at work and at home.
In a lot of cases, at first they'll be like, oh,
it was great, it was just great to have a
job at all, and then a few minutes later the
tone will switch a little too. There was this one time,
and that's what I was finding with Kathy as well.
It was great having a job and being in the
(17:07):
workplace at all, but yes, the environment wasn't exactly pro women.
In spite of this, Kathy worked her way up in
the company pretty quickly, and just a few years later
she had reached the managerial level. Pretty impressive stuff, but
she wasn't happy with her life in spite of this
professional success. Sound like a little cartoon. We know we're
(17:29):
getting there, and it's here in Cathy's life where the
genesis of the Kathy cartoons starts to take place, and
where one of the most rehearsed stories of her public
life comes into play. Kathy told me this story over
the phone, but over the last forty years she's told
different versions of it on late night TV and interviews
and in her book with very little deviation. Had absolutely
(17:54):
miserable love life. So I felt horrible about how I looked,
and I felt horll that nobody loved me. In some
versions of this story told over the years, Cathy's mom
threatens to send in a cover letter with her daughter's
comics herself. But that is essentially how it went. Bill Baker,
and assistant executive director at the Detroit Free Press, told
(18:17):
the paper in why he decided to pick the strip
up in nineteen seventy six. We made the decision fairly
quickly to carry Cathy. It was of good quality. The
gag and stories were all well conceived and well executed,
and it appealed to an important and growing segment of
young people who were starting out independent life. However, in
the summer of nine eighty. That same Bill Baker and
(18:39):
other editors at the Detroit Free Press discontinued this strip
due to, as Baker put it, indications that it was
becoming repetitive and cool and not as interesting. When this happened,
the readers of the Detroit Free Press were not having it.
There were seven hundred letters, a ton of phone calls,
(19:00):
and even some in person objectors who came to the
paper to complain to editors, until the executive editor, David
Lawrence Jr. Wrote in the paper, okay you when Kathy
will be back. One of the more interesting parts of
the Kathy Lord to me is that she came in
as a pretty untrained artist. And there are a lot
(19:21):
of famous cartoonists who didn't have formal training at the
time of their first syndicated comic strip. Scott Adams of
Dilbert Fame, Aaron McGruder of the Boondocks, and old school
comics gods like Jack Kirby all come to mind, and
Kathy is very much in their ranks. You can actually
kind of see her figuring out her illustration style in
(19:43):
real time over the course of the first several years
of the comic. As time goes on, Kathy's surroundings become
more distinct. Previously kind of nameless characters start to develop
their own personalities and stories and looks, and the Cathy
character herself transforms from a twentysomething with really stringy hair
and a long sleeve shirt with a heart on it
(20:04):
with no other outfits into a distinctive character who can
wear any hairstyle or outfit and still look like Kathy.
Here's what happened when the first comic strip came out
back in November. You know, it was maybe it was
a few months after I signed up with them, that
the comic strip was launching in the paper. And I
(20:26):
never told anybody that it was coming. It's just the
day that, you know, the day came when it appeared
in the paper, and um and pretty much I had
that day in the ladies room at the office, because
I was working in an office filled with artists who
would ridicule the artwork. You know, I had worked very
hard at that point to really, um present myself as
(20:50):
a you know, a self respecting, strong, you know, confidant
work woman, and my comic strips were the essence of vulnerability.
(21:16):
And this brings us to a question that has dogged
Kathy guys White for the majority of her adult life.
If she didn't want to be associated with her comics
so directly, why name it after herself. The short answer
is that she didn't want to name it after herself,
As is often the case for a new voice, Kathy
(21:37):
was partially given the gig in order to represent not
just herself but to an extent, her entire gender. But
the comic Trip had convinced me to name the main
character Kathy, which I had not wanted to do. Men
get the men get the protective shield around them a
lot more another and the other also the protective shield
(21:58):
of not being um presumed to be egomaniacs, you know,
if they're writing about themselves. And that was that's that.
I disliked that more than anything, because I felt like
a comic strip named Kathy by Kathy Guys who I
sounded like the ego Trip of the universe. And it
was the exact opposite that I mean. It was. It
was created from the place of the most my deepest insecurities.
(22:23):
For the first year of the comic, Kathy remained at
her office job at the ad Agency, but when it
became clear that the comic was going to be very successful.
She eventually left and began to work from home, even
as the comic was really starting to take off. These
first few years of cartooning sounded pretty isolating for her.
She was working alone, planning the strip out a few
(22:46):
weeks in advance, and teaching herself how to draw in
real time. The comic originally debuted in about fifty papers,
but syndication increased to two fifty papers by the early eighties.
The comics primary audience was, no surprise, young adult women
between eighteen and forty, as well as those readers mothers.
Kathy was well aware of her demographic, confirming in a
(23:10):
Chicago Tribune profile, Kathy is a fairly unique cartoon character
in that she has aimed totally at the adult woman.
Kathy became a more self assured media personality in the eighties,
but early interviews with her sounded a little more like this.
This is coming from the Detroit Free Press the week
the comic became syndicated in November seventy. People ask me
(23:34):
why Kathy spends so much time thinking about guys. It's
because I think no matter how successful woman gets, the
man in her life is still the most important thing.
Uh there's moments in this story where you have no
choice but to just be like Kathy uh ac truly ack.
(23:56):
But even present day Kathy cringes at the cathy of
this time. Here we are talking about this exact clip
unbeknownst to me a couple of weeks ago, when she
was in Florida with her mom. It's just like I
was looking through this mom house of course, reams of
scrapbook things on me, and I was I'm trying to
help her get organized, and I happened upon this article
(24:18):
with the big call out quote like made me want
to die. The big call out quote was, you know,
no matter what else a woman does, having a man
in her life is the most important thing that is.
That was a quote from me. Apparently this was like
in the late seventies, early eighties, and I read that now.
(24:39):
I mean it, truly, it's like reading your diary that
I just want to throw up our burner, you know,
or stump it out. But there it is in bold print.
This was the call out in the article that I
was probably proud of it at that time. I don't
know what to tell you except that's that's who I
was back then. That's who when the strip started at
least asked who a lot of women were. I mean,
(25:02):
it's a strip evolved. I hope people will will have
some compassion for the fact that Kathy sort of evolved
a bit and that she was not always a whimp.
But this was very much the role that Kathy filled
in the cartooning industry at this time. Her presence in
the pages indicated progress, but she wasn't necessarily launching the
(25:24):
radical feminist missives that other artists were in the late
nineties seventies with collections like Women's Comics and it Ain't
Me Babe. Those collections explored feminism, explicit sex, and queerness
as the rule, not the exception. More on that in
a future episode. But in her space, Kathy was singular.
(25:45):
She was the only woman spotlighted in a special that
aired on CBS called The Fantastic Funnies, hosted by Lonnie
Anderson and featuring creators from the most popular comic strips
of the day. In this clip, she is twenty something
with a gen Z middle park going, and she's wearing
an outfit that looks very much like the first iteration
(26:06):
of the Kathy character. She's slimmer with long hair and
a red long sleeve shirt with a heart, and she's
in her Michigan studio. Since comic strips have always reflected
the changing American scene for the past eighty five years,
it is significant that one of the newest comic strips, Kathy,
is one woman's look at her contemporary scene. But Kathy
(26:27):
guys White didn't start off to be a cartoonist. One night,
instead of writing in my journal about my problems, I
for some reason drew a picture of what my problems
look like. And when I saw them in a picture,
it was it was completely new experience for me. Suddenly
the things that seemed so tragic seemed funny to me.
How about if I put down that my goal is
to be the president of a major corporation and make
(26:49):
a hundred thousand dollars a year. I thought you wanted
to get married and live in a little white house
with two cute kids. That's my goal too. I want everything, Andrea,
I'm gonna do at all. All I need now is
a job in a date. In these early years, Kathy's
mentor in the industry was none other than Charles Schultz,
(27:10):
whose Peanuts comic strips had been running successfully since nineteen
fifty and grown into a television and licensing empire that
still exists today twenty years after his death. Schultz was
instrumental in legitimizing and elevating Kathy's work, early on, writing
the introduction to collections of Kathy Comics in the eighties.
(27:31):
To introduce the Kathy Chronicles, he writes this, to Kathy's
I suppose we could all use a couple of Kathy's
in our lives. The Kathy and Kathy Guy's White strip
is not really the Kathy Guys White. I know I
can tell them apart with no trouble at all. The
comic strip Kathy points out for us just how much
trouble life is for a young working girl. She shrieks
(27:52):
in agony, laughs with delight, and works very hard. I
don't know if Kathy Guys White ever shrieks in agony,
but I know she laughs easily and it works very hard.
It's not really difficult, in spite of what you may
have heard, to draw a comic strip every day, but
it is very, very difficult to make it better and better.
And this is what Kathy Guys might has been doing.
Kathy gets better every day. I like having too Kathy's
(28:14):
in my life. I read a little bit about how
supportive that Charles Shu was to you during that time.
Could you tell me a little bit about that and
about your relationship with him and how that friendship form.
He came to early on in this strip, I was
invited to come give a talk as a new cartoonist
(28:35):
to to a group in San Francisco, and he came. Um,
he lived at Santa Rose. He came to hear my talk,
which was a great big deal because he didn't like
to leave his house. Um. So that was the first
day I met him, and he was He is legendary
for being very supportive of other cartoonists, all cartoonists, but
(28:58):
he was extremely so port of to me. I think
he felt, uh, you know, residence with the kind of
writing I was doing. He was absolutely appalled by man
by my artwork and he um, he gave me drawing lessons.
I have some I have some sessions where he would
(29:19):
sit down and he would say, this is how you
show somebody walking, you know, and he have little drawings
where it looks like Kathy on the top, and then
it would be like chart like Charlie Brown, legs and feet,
you know, walking across the page. After a few years
of working successfully in comics, Kathy moved to southern California,
Santa Barbara and later Los Angeles in late nine and
(29:43):
she lives in the area to this day. I was
surprised to learn in those early years and now that
she didn't communicate with or consume the other comic strips
in the paper outside of Charles Schultz's work very often.
She was too busy, and artists at that time generally
only saw each other about a year. At the National
Cartoonist Society's prestigious Ruben Awards ceremony in the late nineteen seventies,
(30:07):
there were very few women at these events. The comics
pages were absolutely dominated by straight white American men. So
here's how Cathy described the culture among comic artists at
that time in the beginning, that it was a it's
a very male group, uh and very um I'm gonna
(30:28):
say male chauvinistic group starting out. But they were just uh,
I never had anything but massive support and love and
you know, kind of cheering me on. I mean, all
all cartoonists are, you know, facing the same monster every
day of the blank paper. And that's a bomb that
(30:49):
goes deep and it kind of wipes away any other
differences you might have. But I cannot stress to you
enough that it was these the the national cart in
a society was like amazingly supportive. They were delighted to
have women in their midst. They were delighted to have
a female voices. They were they were, um, you know,
(31:12):
proud of anybody, you know, being able to assustain you know,
themselves on the newspaper page, and they were This was
such was it was from still defending them because because
I love these guys. I love these wonderful men, and
looked they were like from many of them were more
like my dad's generation. And I got that, you know,
(31:35):
I got that there they grew up at a different time,
and this was they had a different way of paying tribute. Again,
this brought up the pattern I was describing before. How
many women start telling me that it was a very
different time and that the values were different, and that
the men in their midst were generally coming from a
(31:56):
good place. And then a few minutes later, something else
will come up, a story with a little more detail
and something that clarifies what growing up at a very
different time means in practice. In Cathy's case, at this
point in her career, I had read an anecdote in
a profile by Rachel Sime about something that had happened
at one of the National Cartoonist Society gatherings that involves
(32:19):
her and a handful of other women in the industry
at the time, including Lynn Johnston of For Better or
for Worse Fame interested you know, she Okay, there was
there was one year early on when this lovely group
of very supportive men declared at the Year of the
(32:40):
Woman Cartoonist. And it was it wasn't honor thing, It
wasn't a big graving thing. It was an honor. But
I'm going to say it was an honor in um
I um in a product like a little a bit
(33:01):
oblivious way. So they did have a skirt up in
front the women who were doing comic strips. They did
have a skirt up in front of everybody, and they
did place banners on us that said woman Cartoonists. So
I don't god, okay, it was at the time, it
(33:24):
never occurred to me to be offended by that, because
I had received such massive support from this group of cartoonists,
I mean wonderful support. And I saw that as just
and when somebody asked me about it afterwards, I just
laughed and I said, well, you know, it was just
like they're awkward way of trying to honor the women
(33:47):
who are cartoonists. Amazing men can do anything. Gary Trudeau,
the creator of the Pulitzer Prize winning Dunesbury comic strip,
is said to have walked out of the pageant king
behavior but more troubling than the fumbling, clueless men of
(34:08):
the funny pages of this era, Cathy told me was
getting her comic distributed by a nearly all male advertising department.
The content of what they were trying to sell was
so different. I mean, my artwork was so cryptic, and
the nobody, nobody was writing female characters, you know, talking
(34:29):
about the things that I was talking about at that time,
and they I was told it took a lot of
convincing for the salespeople to take it out on the
road and then they would face the male editors at
the newspapers. And years later, the salespeople, some of them
told me that they used to just like take uh,
(34:52):
you know, a couple of weeks of work that they
were supposed to show, and they would just cut out
a couple that they could stand to show to the
newspaper editors, and then they would try to make a
case for the strip based on those and not, you know,
not really show the other things. This was one of
the factors that motivated Cathy to not only begin to
(35:15):
merchandise her character, but to take control of the merchandizing herself.
There were several comic strip characters who had built licensing empires,
most notably Peanuts, but also think Garfield by Jim Davis,
Think Dennis the Menace, Think Popeye, think Archie. There was
already a huge precedent for success outside of the funny pages,
(35:37):
but Cathy's experience working with male ad execs made it
clear that she'd need to be intimately involved in the
process in order for it to be successful. She began
(36:01):
her merchandising company in the early eighties, thereby taking on
her second full time job as CEO of a licensing
company on top of continuing to turn out daily comic strips.
The two well the two big licensing forces were Charles Schultz,
who had of course a licensing empire, and Jim Davis
who created Garfield, and he had a licensing empire, and
(36:23):
I saw no reason why a female cartoonist couldn't have
a licensing empire, especially because you know, we love to shop.
Women love to shop, and there we go. But I
spent decades trying to make a work there. I know
that you you were extremely um involved on top of
doing the daily comic strip. What was that balance like
(36:47):
for you over the years? Um, I yeah, it was.
That was hard, I got it just was a lot.
I mean I eventually had to have an office full
of people who also worked on the licensing, who were
did sale, some marketing and all of that. Eventually had
to have some people helped draw the merchandise. Oh boy,
(37:10):
there's so much of that. I would not have done
if I had it to do over again. And it
was in the early eighties that Cathy's popularity really exploded.
Even if you weren't a daily follower of the comic strip,
the image of the stressed out career woman could be
found basically anywhere you turned, and she was covered by
(37:31):
the press a lot. Cathy herself was often framed as
the extension of the character, or sometimes a contradiction of it.
Considering her success, Pathy said this to the Detroit Free Press,
I'm self confident and insecure to the same degree. I
know exactly what i want to do and how to
do it, and I'm confident of my abilities to do it.
(37:54):
And at the same time, I'm not sure what i
want to do and I doubt my abilities. But sometimes
journalists would point out that the problems that Kathy wrote
about in the comic might not be actual problems she
had in real life. But Kathy is extremely consistent in
her public PERSONA piece by Sue Chastain and the Philadelphia
(38:15):
Inquirer sums it up perfectly. Kathy says this, if I
concentrate on one area of my life, the rest of
it automatically deteriorates. I can have clean closets, but then
that's it. I'll be behind in work, I'll have ignored
all my friends and relationships, and I'll be bouncing tracks
all over town. The writer comments immediately after this, Actually
(38:38):
it isn't all that bad for the thirty three year
old guy's wife, one of only four women with syndicated strips,
with Kathy now appearing in three hundred fifty newspapers. She
reportedly takes in more than a hundred thousand a year
from syndication alone. Chastain continues later in the piece, the
income enabled her to buy a two door style house,
(38:59):
Guy White says, two puny bedrooms, one puny living room,
one puny kitchen, one great attic in Santa Barbara, California,
three years ago. Still, it's not in guys White's best
interest to let success blind her to her neuroses. They do,
after all, provide her material. What does come out is
a humbleness that, in context may seem to deflect the
(39:23):
privileged status that her work attained her. And again, this
was not an uncommon thing for successful women to do
at this time, particularly by the nineteen eighties, when a
massive cultural backlash to the women's liberation movement of the
seventies resulted in a more generally chastened cultural attitude on
women's success in the American capitalist structure. Either way, Cathy's
(39:46):
public persona only served to boost the merchandise's popularity. Her
work appeared taped up in offices, on coffee mugs, on
oversized exercise t shirts. At different points in time, Cathy
did commercials for mcdowe donald's salad which is as gross
as it sounds, or McDonald's salads. Kathy, she's young, on
(40:07):
the goal, has it all together, no time in her
busy schedule. Ring, please Ring. But there's one thing she
really loves. McDonald's fresh cross salads get loaded with fresh
vegetables from loads of taste. Yeah, I'll take the Caesars.
The peppercorn decisions are no problem. She'll take the caesar.
Thanks Mom. She did a commercial for J. C. Penny
(40:31):
Get up early to power Walker power Jogs, but I'll
be into JP Penny after Thanksgiving Phillis seven a m. Friday.
She did one for Knudson Yogurt Ken a woman who
would sleep toward ten mile John her workout and beauty treatment.
Get up for the rich, delicious treat of nuts and
cow seventy yogurt. She did one for Betty Crocker Cake
(40:54):
Lovers Collection AC introducing Cake Lover's Collection how could you
We talk of? And then a cake mixed with a
big pouch of juicy carrots and slump raisins. And a
lot of this TV ad success was brought on by
the existing success of these eighties merchandizing efforts. Kathy is
(41:16):
liberated sort of, but Kathy lax hutspah, Kathy, Kathy, Kathy.
What Kathy doesn't lack is exposure. This is Peggy Lander's
talking about the Kathy character in the South Florida Sentinel.
In advertising the release of the first Kathy Ragdall. She
mentioned in her piece the existence of Kathy soap, Kathy
(41:38):
coffee mugs, Cathy beach towels, greeting cards, stationary placed mats, potholders,
toad facs, cookie jars, and clothes hell. There was an
entire Goddamn Cathy boutique at Neiman Marcus stores across the
United States in the eighties. This was a whole thing,
and all of this merchandise was marketed at adult women.
(41:59):
Kathy ran the company and also brought on one of
her sisters to help her do so. As the character
became more and more recognizable, Cathy guys White herself began
to appear on late night shows. She became a semi
regular guest on Johnny Carson and would usually discuss topics
similar to the ones she explored in the comic. Here's
a clip of her on Jay Leno, Do you always
(42:20):
have like a couple of bathing suit things, peaks of
baiting suit things. Well, women have two main figure problem
areas the top half of our bodies and the bottom
half of our bottom. And every year the fashion industry
finds a way to make things worse. You know, it
used to be that a woman could depend on a
one piece suit, which at least covered more. And now
the one piece suits that they have out there, I'm
(42:42):
sure the women in this audience have had that experience.
If you pull them up high enough to cover the top,
then the lengthhold comes up to the waist and the
entire rear end is on display. As the licensing empire
grew in the nineteen eighties, so did the comic and
creator's popularity. The South Florida Sentinel quotes Kathy guys Wide
(43:03):
commenting on how the comic changed alongside herself during its
first six years in print. Kathy tells the paper, I
have expanded my thinking quite a bit in the past
few years, and so is she. She spends most of
her time at work now and her biggest problem is
trying to find a balance between home life and work.
(43:23):
Although she's still vulnerable, she speaks, her mind goes out
with different people. She still fails, but in more enlightening ways.
This would have been right around the time that Kathy
the character would have been separated from Irving was dating
new guys and starting a whisper network at work after
getting sexually harassed by her boss. And I wish that
(43:45):
this more forward thinking phase of Kathy was translated into
the merchandise, but it kind of wasn't. The majority of
merchandise from the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties focused solely
on food issues and insecurities rather than any win that
Kathy would have. This fixation on Cathy's more insecure, fragile
(44:06):
self was also emphasized in the next phase of kathy Mania.
Three TV specials that aired in in eighty nine on CBS,
animated and produced by the same guy who did the
Peanuts specials, Bill Melendez. And That's where I'll leave you
for today. In part two of this episode, we'll get
(44:28):
into Kathy's animated specials from the late eighties and her
impact going all the way up to now. Also, she
asks me when I'm gonna have kids. That's this Wednesday
on ac Cast. A Cast is an I Heart Radio production.
It is written researched and hosted by Me Jamie Loftus.
Sophie Lichtman is the world's greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is
(44:51):
the world's greatest editor. Zoey Blade writes the world's greatest music,
and Brendan Dickert wrote the world's greatest theme Huge thank
you to Kathy guys White for this episode in particular,
and in today's episode, you heard the vocal talent of Anna, Hostna,
Julia Claire and Isaac Taylor. And after many requests, here
(45:12):
is the full theme song. It's good. She burst into
the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at book, she's
out on dates, and she don't like politics. From Mama
and urban to a feminiss friends, She's fighting all the stands.
It with chocolate and hand Kathy, She's fighting back. She
(45:37):
stressed with success. Let's got her to some slack. Oh, Kathy,
Mycathy fan Cathy. She is who she is. There's no
tonighting that she's up doing nag living in enemies world.
But speaking of mind, ain't no way to time, Cathey,
she's you and me. She wants to be scenes just
(46:01):
living the dream of Kathy my Cat. This week got there.
She's gotta like go in all she's money to find
(46:26):
wos uncles had to relieve. I feel like you worldless,
but look at you work this. Why shouldn't he? A
patriarchy crumbles the knee chocolate bolder. She's fey because she
(46:47):
finds she not to feel just gone on. The dad
wasn't listen to lead, feel like you will please for I.
I You see there was pay to Uggy. He comes
(47:14):
the knee child let
My next guest comics Drip. But Cathew is indicated over
one thousand newspapers, and she is a very perceptible observer
of the male female relationships in our life. Would you
welcome Cathy guys white um as opposed to Johnny here,
(00:22):
who I saw the man all getting ready backstage, and
you know, they sit down, poof while I'm sitting there
in my forty five minutes, they sit down, poof, one
poof of powder and you're done, You're out of there.
You know, a woman, if it takes me twenty minutes
to dry my hair and it takes the man two minutes,
well he's already eighteen minutes ahead for the day. And
if it takes me fifteen minutes to do the makeup
and it takes the man zero minutes, now he's thirty
(00:44):
three minutes ahead seven thirty in the morning, he's already
got thirty three minutes on me. And so you start
multiplying this out day by day, week by week, month
by month. I figured by the end of the year,
a man has two and a half months of free
time that the woman has not had. Are a slight
(01:07):
undercurrent of resentment of jealous Well, I think most women
would just want to know from you the you know,
the perfect man. Why it is that? Why is that
if a man has this excess of time in a year,
then he cannot find three minutes, you know, to tell
us how wonderful we are. This is Kathy guys White,
(01:31):
creator of the Caffey comics in the nineteen eighties, making
Johnny Carson laugh his ass off. This may not be
how you would expect to hear her sound in this clip.
She is confident, she's funny, she is very Western beauty standards, thin,
she's wearing stylish clothes, and these are not necessarily qualities
we would associate with the Queen of So here's what
(01:54):
I need you to understand, and I need you to
really listen, because she's not going to tell you this herself.
Athy guys White is very fucking cool. I have all
kinds of questions about what it's like to be It
occurred to me that you are exactly two years older
then I was when I started the strip. So I'm
trying to remember my mindset when I was two years
(02:17):
into doing the comic strip and what what life was
like for me. And I think it's like ten tho
years difference a wife for you, This is Kathy guys
White on the phone with me in California. Kathy guys
White is not Kathy the character, although you could be
excused for assuming so. People get confused around their most
(02:39):
iconic characters quite a bit, especially when those characters are
named after them. Donna Reid will always be more closely
associated with the psi op nineteen fifties housewife than the
high powered Hollywood actor producer calling a lot of the
shots in her own career, she actually was Mary. Kate
and Nashley Olsen had a ba jillion dollar empire bill
(03:00):
upon carefully constructed versions of children they actually were not.
This phenomenon is the reason that a large swath of
the population thinks that Raven Simone can literally read their mind.
But when I was getting this podcast together, I was
finding a lot of people were surprised that Kathy, a
newspaper comic strip about to summarize a very stressed out
(03:22):
woman who says ac was actually created and illustrated by
a woman named Kathy. And that's because when Kathy, both
the artist and the actual character came into the newspapers,
she was the first female protagonist in the daily Funny
Pages who was written by a woman, And today we're
going to learn how that came to be and all
(03:43):
of the problems that came with it. Later in the series,
we'll be taking a look at the women who laid
the groundwork for her career. Because Kathy Geiswhite did not
come out of nowhere entirely. There had been women working
in the funny pages and comics in general before she
arrived whose presence didn't draw as much attention as Kathy's did,
And we'll also be talking about creators who came after her.
(04:06):
But by the time the Kathy comic debut in papers
in nineteen seventy six, the Universal Press Syndicate, one of
the leading funny page distributors at the time, was desperate
for a comic that was about a woman's experience. After
the early to mid nineteen seventies brought one of the
largest and most impactful women's rights movements in the history
(04:27):
of the United States. Here's Kathy speaking with me about
how she first got the gig as a completely untrained
artist in her twenties. So I always kept a journal
um about my my romantic misery and how bad I
felt about my way and one night, I one night
(04:48):
I just m, I just do a scribbled picture of
what I look like eating everything in the kitchen while
I'm waiting for the founder ring that never rang, and
um the scribbled picture, and then I drew another picture
of what I might look like, you know, if he
called them and laanted to come over, and then that
It was kind of like a two part scribbled picture,
(05:09):
and it was It just made me feel so much
better to see myself in picture for him. Suddenly it
was funny. Not I mean, it was pitiful, but it
was funny pitiful to see it in on on the page.
And so for a period of time, instead of just
writing the same sad thing in my diary every night,
I would drew a picture of the kind of the
(05:30):
worst of my day or the worst of my relationship moments.
I sent these very private, very personal cartoons to mom,
Okay and me in with letters. And it was my
mom who said, oh this, you know, after all those
years of teaching me to keep my feelings private, she said, well,
(05:51):
this could be a comic strip for millions of people
to enjoy. I certainly knew nothing about comic strips, but
mom uh went to the variously research comic strip syndicate.
She typed me a list of who she thought I
should approach in the order I should approach them, And
so to make her not do that, I sent a
(06:12):
group of these two the name at the top of
her list, just one name, which was Universal Presndicate. So
that's how the comic strip started. Was your mom the
only one seeing them? Or that you were kind of
interesting with them before? Yes? Oh yes, no, I wouldn't
have said nothing. I would ever show anybody. Wow. And
then there was a big and then there was a
(06:34):
big discussion when the comic strip Syndicate wrote me back
right away. I think never in history has a commercial
syndicate like sent a contract out so fast. But they said,
this was six and the world had was in this
massive shift for women and men, I mean, the arguments
(06:57):
between the sexiest. It was like, you can't even comprehend
what this time was like between men and women, and
everybody was at each other's throats during this time. And
they the syndicate said, well, you know that they had
really been hoping to find a comic strip that dealt
with how the world was changing for women. But that
all the strips they had seen had been, of course
drawn by men. And they said that they didn't really
(07:19):
have an emotional um honestly, that they felt I did,
and that they said they would. They said they were
confident that I could learn how to draw if I
had to do it three and sixty or five days
a year. Pretty fucking cool, right, So, even though the
foundation had been laid by other women for this to
(07:39):
happen in this industry, the choice of the Kathy character,
a woman who is open to, but not completely sold on,
progressive feminism, seemed pretty deliberate. So let's learn about her.
It's Kathy guys White day on accast. She passed into
the world, not in seventy six. She's at what, She's
(08:02):
out on dates and she don't like politics from mama
and herban too with feminist friends. She's fighting all the
stands with chocolate and head. Kathy, She's fighting back to
stress with success. Let's go slack, oh, Catherine bathyn Cafe.
(08:22):
She's got a luck, go in all. Kathy guys White
(08:43):
was born on September five in Dayton, Ohio, and was
raised with her two sisters, Mickey and Marianne. Her father
worked in advertising and eventually got Kathy the gig she'd
hold before becoming a famous comic strip artist in the seventies.
And her mom, like many women of the Silent Generation,
although this definitely varies considerably by race and class, her
(09:04):
mom stayed at home and Guys White will become the
inspiration for the Mom character in the Kathy comic and
is typically characterized as overbearing. She's constantly worrying about Kathy,
her marital status, her biological clock, and occasionally she'll start
small businesses with her friend Flow. The real and Guys
(09:25):
White is much more complicated and interesting. Right now, she
is nine years old, living in Florida and kicking. The
last time I spoke with Kathy, they were in Florida
together doing yoga classes on Zoom and preparing for Kathy's
daughter's wedding. Here's Kathy telling me about her mom. Um.
My mom was born in a tiny, remote village in
(09:48):
the Slovakian Booneys, and she immigrated to the United States
with her mom when she was three. Um she grew
up in a in an immigrant community and Cleveland. I
think my mom didn't speak English, so she family learned
in kindergarten, but her mom spoke English but never learned.
(10:09):
Her mom never learned to read or write. It was
kind of shocking to me to realize that, and realized
that that's, you know, that's just such a one little
generation away from opportunities that I had. But my mom
grew up at a My mom went to college. Um,
she got a little scholarship to go to college at
(10:32):
the at the urging of one of her high school teachers.
Nobody in my mom's family, no girl had ever gone
to college, so it was a great big deal. And um,
the relatives were angry that the woman's place was to
stay in the family and help out. And you know,
Mom was going to go to college. She got a
(10:52):
journalism degree. After college, her boyfriend, my dad went to war,
and Mom worked as a as a writer and loved,
I will say loved working. She like she's ninety nine now.
She lights up when she talks about having her career
and her work, which was ended, of course, when my
(11:15):
dad came home from the war and got they got married,
and then it was time for the women to not
be working anymore. I came along shortly after. And then
when my dad was trying to get a job in
a in an advertising agency, and my mom was the
one who knew how to do that, so she, you know,
she she hoped him write the things that got him
(11:38):
the job. She who would bring the assignments home every night.
For a long time, she did his work for him.
And then he, you know, he elevated and he did
very well in advertising, but he was trained. Mom. Mom
was the rock that started that. And along the way,
she got a master's degree that she never mentioned to
any of us until a few years ago, and I said, well,
(11:58):
where's the certificate? You know were why didn't you tell us?
You know? She just said, I didn't need everybody to know.
I knew that I earned it. But she's also a
product of a generation where women didn't really have a
say in very much at all, where the men were
the men were the loss of the universe. So Cathy
(12:23):
and her sisters grew up in this environment, in a
home where Mom taught dad how to do his job
and no one was really allowed to talk about it.
She told me that she wasn't encouraged to think about
what she wanted to be when she grew up very often,
but she did think about it on her own in
the fifties and sixties as a kid. She then went
to the University of Michigan at ann Arbor, where she
(12:46):
majored in Well, she'll tell you what, what did pique
your interest, even if that wasn't kind of what you
were what you were studying a boy named Dave. I
was good. She was a boy named Dave. And the
grill the con rolls at the at this coffee shop
where I worked. So that's I gained a lot of
weight in college stalking Dave and eating grilled the con roles. Well,
(13:10):
I tried to make money. Okay, So Cathy says she
majors in stalking a guy named Dave, But it is
my journalistic compulsion to tell you she actually majored in English.
And this was between the late nineteen sixties in the
early nineteen seventies when the women's liberation movement in the
United States was really starting to take off, and by
(13:30):
the time Cathy graduated in nineteen seventy two, the movement
was at its peak. So, as a young woman, where
was Kathy on women's issues at this time? I'm going
to say, at first, I was kind of oblivious to
it in the in when I started college. There was
such a transformation during the time that I was in college,
(13:51):
there was such a opening of minds where were all
dressing in the uniform of these beautiful, liberating blue James.
Men and women were the same ones, the same style,
six same cuts. They kind of opened up the world.
And I think that that, um, you know, I think
for me it was a gradual awareness of of a
(14:13):
different world for women than the one I had grown
up expecting. And my mom, who is just a remarkable
traditionalist and feminist at the same time, she would cheer
me on to do, be, do and be everything that
she hadn't had a chance to do. But she also
said things to me like, when you play tennis, you know,
(14:34):
always let the boy win because it's just more complicated.
If you win, you'll know that you're better. You know
you knew, you'll know if you could have won, and
that's all you need to know. A lot of the
first trips I was writing, I was writing from living
at a time when literally boys would not go out
with you if you made more money than they did,
(14:55):
or if they thought you had career aspirations. At the
University of Michigan, where she also meets classmate Laurence Caston,
who most famously went on to write some Star Wars
movies and The Big Chill. They remain friends to this day,
to the point where Kathy had her character go and
praised The Big Chill when it came out in to
(15:18):
support her friend's success. We love Kathy. It's while she's
in college that Kathy's issues with food, a thing that
comes up in the Kathy comics constantly, really solidifies as
a part of her life. Kathy finished college taking advertising courses,
and upon doing so, started working at the ad firm
(15:38):
that her father worked at in the early nineteen seventies.
And there is a lot to say about how women
and people of color were treated in the workplace at
this time, and will be devoting quite a bit of
time to it later in this show. But I wanted
to know how Kathy was treated in this position starting
in her early twenties. She said this. You know, it
(16:00):
was years later when looking back that I would say,
I realized, you know, the hierarchy at the office and
how it was not exactly pro women. But at the time,
you know, at the time, I was thrilled to be working.
I was thrilled to have a job. I didn't. Um,
I was not, uh, you know, harassed by anybody. Um
(16:24):
I was. I was just I was excited to be there.
I was thrilled to be there, and and I worked.
I worked really hard. I worked all day every day,
and then I always took work home with me and
worked in the night unless I was stalking somebody somebody else,
Dave was over there. So this is something that has
come up for me a lot interviewing women of this
(16:46):
generation about how they were treated at work and at home.
In a lot of cases, at first they'll be like, oh,
it was great, it was just great to have a
job at all, and then a few minutes later the
tone will switch a little too. There was this one time,
and that's what I was finding with Kathy as well.
It was great having a job and being in the
(17:07):
workplace at all, but yes, the environment wasn't exactly pro women.
In spite of this, Kathy worked her way up in
the company pretty quickly, and just a few years later
she had reached the managerial level. Pretty impressive stuff, but
she wasn't happy with her life in spite of this
professional success. Sound like a little cartoon. We know we're
(17:29):
getting there, and it's here in Cathy's life where the
genesis of the Kathy cartoons starts to take place, and
where one of the most rehearsed stories of her public
life comes into play. Kathy told me this story over
the phone, but over the last forty years she's told
different versions of it on late night TV and interviews
and in her book with very little deviation. Had absolutely
(17:54):
miserable love life. So I felt horrible about how I looked,
and I felt horll that nobody loved me. In some
versions of this story told over the years, Cathy's mom
threatens to send in a cover letter with her daughter's
comics herself. But that is essentially how it went. Bill Baker,
and assistant executive director at the Detroit Free Press, told
(18:17):
the paper in why he decided to pick the strip
up in nineteen seventy six. We made the decision fairly
quickly to carry Cathy. It was of good quality. The
gag and stories were all well conceived and well executed,
and it appealed to an important and growing segment of
young people who were starting out independent life. However, in
the summer of nine eighty. That same Bill Baker and
(18:39):
other editors at the Detroit Free Press discontinued this strip
due to, as Baker put it, indications that it was
becoming repetitive and cool and not as interesting. When this happened,
the readers of the Detroit Free Press were not having it.
There were seven hundred letters, a ton of phone calls,
(19:00):
and even some in person objectors who came to the
paper to complain to editors, until the executive editor, David
Lawrence Jr. Wrote in the paper, okay you when Kathy
will be back. One of the more interesting parts of
the Kathy Lord to me is that she came in
as a pretty untrained artist. And there are a lot
(19:21):
of famous cartoonists who didn't have formal training at the
time of their first syndicated comic strip. Scott Adams of
Dilbert Fame, Aaron McGruder of the Boondocks, and old school
comics gods like Jack Kirby all come to mind, and
Kathy is very much in their ranks. You can actually
kind of see her figuring out her illustration style in
(19:43):
real time over the course of the first several years
of the comic. As time goes on, Kathy's surroundings become
more distinct. Previously kind of nameless characters start to develop
their own personalities and stories and looks, and the Cathy
character herself transforms from a twentysomething with really stringy hair
and a long sleeve shirt with a heart on it
(20:04):
with no other outfits into a distinctive character who can
wear any hairstyle or outfit and still look like Kathy.
Here's what happened when the first comic strip came out
back in November. You know, it was maybe it was
a few months after I signed up with them, that
the comic strip was launching in the paper. And I
(20:26):
never told anybody that it was coming. It's just the
day that, you know, the day came when it appeared
in the paper, and um and pretty much I had
that day in the ladies room at the office, because
I was working in an office filled with artists who
would ridicule the artwork. You know, I had worked very
hard at that point to really, um present myself as
(20:50):
a you know, a self respecting, strong, you know, confidant
work woman, and my comic strips were the essence of vulnerability.
(21:16):
And this brings us to a question that has dogged
Kathy guys White for the majority of her adult life.
If she didn't want to be associated with her comics
so directly, why name it after herself. The short answer
is that she didn't want to name it after herself,
As is often the case for a new voice, Kathy
(21:37):
was partially given the gig in order to represent not
just herself but to an extent, her entire gender. But
the comic Trip had convinced me to name the main
character Kathy, which I had not wanted to do. Men
get the men get the protective shield around them a
lot more another and the other also the protective shield
(21:58):
of not being um presumed to be egomaniacs, you know,
if they're writing about themselves. And that was that's that.
I disliked that more than anything, because I felt like
a comic strip named Kathy by Kathy Guys who I
sounded like the ego Trip of the universe. And it
was the exact opposite that I mean. It was. It
was created from the place of the most my deepest insecurities.
(22:23):
For the first year of the comic, Kathy remained at
her office job at the ad Agency, but when it
became clear that the comic was going to be very successful.
She eventually left and began to work from home, even
as the comic was really starting to take off. These
first few years of cartooning sounded pretty isolating for her.
She was working alone, planning the strip out a few
(22:46):
weeks in advance, and teaching herself how to draw in
real time. The comic originally debuted in about fifty papers,
but syndication increased to two fifty papers by the early eighties.
The comics primary audience was, no surprise, young adult women
between eighteen and forty, as well as those readers mothers.
Kathy was well aware of her demographic, confirming in a
(23:10):
Chicago Tribune profile, Kathy is a fairly unique cartoon character
in that she has aimed totally at the adult woman.
Kathy became a more self assured media personality in the eighties,
but early interviews with her sounded a little more like this.
This is coming from the Detroit Free Press the week
the comic became syndicated in November seventy. People ask me
(23:34):
why Kathy spends so much time thinking about guys. It's
because I think no matter how successful woman gets, the
man in her life is still the most important thing.
Uh there's moments in this story where you have no
choice but to just be like Kathy uh ac truly ack.
(23:56):
But even present day Kathy cringes at the cathy of
this time. Here we are talking about this exact clip
unbeknownst to me a couple of weeks ago, when she
was in Florida with her mom. It's just like I
was looking through this mom house of course, reams of
scrapbook things on me, and I was I'm trying to
help her get organized, and I happened upon this article
(24:18):
with the big call out quote like made me want
to die. The big call out quote was, you know,
no matter what else a woman does, having a man
in her life is the most important thing that is.
That was a quote from me. Apparently this was like
in the late seventies, early eighties, and I read that now.
(24:39):
I mean it, truly, it's like reading your diary that
I just want to throw up our burner, you know,
or stump it out. But there it is in bold print.
This was the call out in the article that I
was probably proud of it at that time. I don't
know what to tell you except that's that's who I
was back then. That's who when the strip started at
least asked who a lot of women were. I mean,
(25:02):
it's a strip evolved. I hope people will will have
some compassion for the fact that Kathy sort of evolved
a bit and that she was not always a whimp.
But this was very much the role that Kathy filled
in the cartooning industry at this time. Her presence in
the pages indicated progress, but she wasn't necessarily launching the
(25:24):
radical feminist missives that other artists were in the late
nineties seventies with collections like Women's Comics and it Ain't
Me Babe. Those collections explored feminism, explicit sex, and queerness
as the rule, not the exception. More on that in
a future episode. But in her space, Kathy was singular.
(25:45):
She was the only woman spotlighted in a special that
aired on CBS called The Fantastic Funnies, hosted by Lonnie
Anderson and featuring creators from the most popular comic strips
of the day. In this clip, she is twenty something
with a gen Z middle park going, and she's wearing
an outfit that looks very much like the first iteration
(26:06):
of the Kathy character. She's slimmer with long hair and
a red long sleeve shirt with a heart, and she's
in her Michigan studio. Since comic strips have always reflected
the changing American scene for the past eighty five years,
it is significant that one of the newest comic strips, Kathy,
is one woman's look at her contemporary scene. But Kathy
(26:27):
guys White didn't start off to be a cartoonist. One night,
instead of writing in my journal about my problems, I
for some reason drew a picture of what my problems
look like. And when I saw them in a picture,
it was it was completely new experience for me. Suddenly
the things that seemed so tragic seemed funny to me.
How about if I put down that my goal is
to be the president of a major corporation and make
(26:49):
a hundred thousand dollars a year. I thought you wanted
to get married and live in a little white house
with two cute kids. That's my goal too. I want everything, Andrea,
I'm gonna do at all. All I need now is
a job in a date. In these early years, Kathy's
mentor in the industry was none other than Charles Schultz,
(27:10):
whose Peanuts comic strips had been running successfully since nineteen
fifty and grown into a television and licensing empire that
still exists today twenty years after his death. Schultz was
instrumental in legitimizing and elevating Kathy's work, early on, writing
the introduction to collections of Kathy Comics in the eighties.
(27:31):
To introduce the Kathy Chronicles, he writes this, to Kathy's
I suppose we could all use a couple of Kathy's
in our lives. The Kathy and Kathy Guy's White strip
is not really the Kathy Guys White. I know I
can tell them apart with no trouble at all. The
comic strip Kathy points out for us just how much
trouble life is for a young working girl. She shrieks
(27:52):
in agony, laughs with delight, and works very hard. I
don't know if Kathy Guys White ever shrieks in agony,
but I know she laughs easily and it works very hard.
It's not really difficult, in spite of what you may
have heard, to draw a comic strip every day, but
it is very, very difficult to make it better and better.
And this is what Kathy Guys might has been doing.
Kathy gets better every day. I like having too Kathy's
(28:14):
in my life. I read a little bit about how
supportive that Charles Shu was to you during that time.
Could you tell me a little bit about that and
about your relationship with him and how that friendship form.
He came to early on in this strip, I was
invited to come give a talk as a new cartoonist
(28:35):
to to a group in San Francisco, and he came. Um,
he lived at Santa Rose. He came to hear my talk,
which was a great big deal because he didn't like
to leave his house. Um. So that was the first
day I met him, and he was He is legendary
for being very supportive of other cartoonists, all cartoonists, but
(28:58):
he was extremely so port of to me. I think
he felt, uh, you know, residence with the kind of
writing I was doing. He was absolutely appalled by man
by my artwork and he um, he gave me drawing lessons.
I have some I have some sessions where he would
(29:19):
sit down and he would say, this is how you
show somebody walking, you know, and he have little drawings
where it looks like Kathy on the top, and then
it would be like chart like Charlie Brown, legs and feet,
you know, walking across the page. After a few years
of working successfully in comics, Kathy moved to southern California,
Santa Barbara and later Los Angeles in late nine and
(29:43):
she lives in the area to this day. I was
surprised to learn in those early years and now that
she didn't communicate with or consume the other comic strips
in the paper outside of Charles Schultz's work very often.
She was too busy, and artists at that time generally
only saw each other about a year. At the National
Cartoonist Society's prestigious Ruben Awards ceremony in the late nineteen seventies,
(30:07):
there were very few women at these events. The comics
pages were absolutely dominated by straight white American men. So
here's how Cathy described the culture among comic artists at
that time in the beginning, that it was a it's
a very male group, uh and very um I'm gonna
(30:28):
say male chauvinistic group starting out. But they were just uh,
I never had anything but massive support and love and
you know, kind of cheering me on. I mean, all
all cartoonists are, you know, facing the same monster every
day of the blank paper. And that's a bomb that
(30:49):
goes deep and it kind of wipes away any other
differences you might have. But I cannot stress to you
enough that it was these the the national cart in
a society was like amazingly supportive. They were delighted to
have women in their midst. They were delighted to have
a female voices. They were they were, um, you know,
(31:12):
proud of anybody, you know, being able to assustain you know,
themselves on the newspaper page, and they were This was
such was it was from still defending them because because
I love these guys. I love these wonderful men, and
looked they were like from many of them were more
like my dad's generation. And I got that, you know,
(31:35):
I got that there they grew up at a different time,
and this was they had a different way of paying tribute. Again,
this brought up the pattern I was describing before. How
many women start telling me that it was a very
different time and that the values were different, and that
the men in their midst were generally coming from a
(31:56):
good place. And then a few minutes later, something else
will come up, a story with a little more detail
and something that clarifies what growing up at a very
different time means in practice. In Cathy's case, at this
point in her career, I had read an anecdote in
a profile by Rachel Sime about something that had happened
at one of the National Cartoonist Society gatherings that involves
(32:19):
her and a handful of other women in the industry
at the time, including Lynn Johnston of For Better or
for Worse Fame interested you know, she Okay, there was
there was one year early on when this lovely group
of very supportive men declared at the Year of the
(32:40):
Woman Cartoonist. And it was it wasn't honor thing, It
wasn't a big graving thing. It was an honor. But
I'm going to say it was an honor in um
I um in a product like a little a bit
(33:01):
oblivious way. So they did have a skirt up in
front the women who were doing comic strips. They did
have a skirt up in front of everybody, and they
did place banners on us that said woman Cartoonists. So
I don't god, okay, it was at the time, it
(33:24):
never occurred to me to be offended by that, because
I had received such massive support from this group of cartoonists,
I mean wonderful support. And I saw that as just
and when somebody asked me about it afterwards, I just
laughed and I said, well, you know, it was just
like they're awkward way of trying to honor the women
(33:47):
who are cartoonists. Amazing men can do anything. Gary Trudeau,
the creator of the Pulitzer Prize winning Dunesbury comic strip,
is said to have walked out of the pageant king
behavior but more troubling than the fumbling, clueless men of
(34:08):
the funny pages of this era, Cathy told me was
getting her comic distributed by a nearly all male advertising department.
The content of what they were trying to sell was
so different. I mean, my artwork was so cryptic, and
the nobody, nobody was writing female characters, you know, talking
(34:29):
about the things that I was talking about at that time,
and they I was told it took a lot of
convincing for the salespeople to take it out on the
road and then they would face the male editors at
the newspapers. And years later, the salespeople, some of them
told me that they used to just like take uh,
(34:52):
you know, a couple of weeks of work that they
were supposed to show, and they would just cut out
a couple that they could stand to show to the
newspaper editors, and then they would try to make a
case for the strip based on those and not, you know,
not really show the other things. This was one of
the factors that motivated Cathy to not only begin to
(35:15):
merchandise her character, but to take control of the merchandizing herself.
There were several comic strip characters who had built licensing empires,
most notably Peanuts, but also think Garfield by Jim Davis,
Think Dennis the Menace, Think Popeye, think Archie. There was
already a huge precedent for success outside of the funny pages,
(35:37):
but Cathy's experience working with male ad execs made it
clear that she'd need to be intimately involved in the
process in order for it to be successful. She began
(36:01):
her merchandising company in the early eighties, thereby taking on
her second full time job as CEO of a licensing
company on top of continuing to turn out daily comic strips.
The two well the two big licensing forces were Charles Schultz,
who had of course a licensing empire, and Jim Davis
who created Garfield, and he had a licensing empire, and
(36:23):
I saw no reason why a female cartoonist couldn't have
a licensing empire, especially because you know, we love to shop.
Women love to shop, and there we go. But I
spent decades trying to make a work there. I know
that you you were extremely um involved on top of
doing the daily comic strip. What was that balance like
(36:47):
for you over the years? Um, I yeah, it was.
That was hard, I got it just was a lot.
I mean I eventually had to have an office full
of people who also worked on the licensing, who were
did sale, some marketing and all of that. Eventually had
to have some people helped draw the merchandise. Oh boy,
(37:10):
there's so much of that. I would not have done
if I had it to do over again. And it
was in the early eighties that Cathy's popularity really exploded.
Even if you weren't a daily follower of the comic strip,
the image of the stressed out career woman could be
found basically anywhere you turned, and she was covered by
(37:31):
the press a lot. Cathy herself was often framed as
the extension of the character, or sometimes a contradiction of it.
Considering her success, Pathy said this to the Detroit Free Press,
I'm self confident and insecure to the same degree. I
know exactly what i want to do and how to
do it, and I'm confident of my abilities to do it.
(37:54):
And at the same time, I'm not sure what i
want to do and I doubt my abilities. But sometimes
journalists would point out that the problems that Kathy wrote
about in the comic might not be actual problems she
had in real life. But Kathy is extremely consistent in
her public PERSONA piece by Sue Chastain and the Philadelphia
(38:15):
Inquirer sums it up perfectly. Kathy says this, if I
concentrate on one area of my life, the rest of
it automatically deteriorates. I can have clean closets, but then
that's it. I'll be behind in work, I'll have ignored
all my friends and relationships, and I'll be bouncing tracks
all over town. The writer comments immediately after this, Actually
(38:38):
it isn't all that bad for the thirty three year
old guy's wife, one of only four women with syndicated strips,
with Kathy now appearing in three hundred fifty newspapers. She
reportedly takes in more than a hundred thousand a year
from syndication alone. Chastain continues later in the piece, the
income enabled her to buy a two door style house,
(38:59):
Guy White says, two puny bedrooms, one puny living room,
one puny kitchen, one great attic in Santa Barbara, California,
three years ago. Still, it's not in guys White's best
interest to let success blind her to her neuroses. They do,
after all, provide her material. What does come out is
a humbleness that, in context may seem to deflect the
(39:23):
privileged status that her work attained her. And again, this
was not an uncommon thing for successful women to do
at this time, particularly by the nineteen eighties, when a
massive cultural backlash to the women's liberation movement of the
seventies resulted in a more generally chastened cultural attitude on
women's success in the American capitalist structure. Either way, Cathy's
(39:46):
public persona only served to boost the merchandise's popularity. Her
work appeared taped up in offices, on coffee mugs, on
oversized exercise t shirts. At different points in time, Cathy
did commercials for mcdowe donald's salad which is as gross
as it sounds, or McDonald's salads. Kathy, she's young, on
(40:07):
the goal, has it all together, no time in her
busy schedule. Ring, please Ring. But there's one thing she
really loves. McDonald's fresh cross salads get loaded with fresh
vegetables from loads of taste. Yeah, I'll take the Caesars.
The peppercorn decisions are no problem. She'll take the caesar.
Thanks Mom. She did a commercial for J. C. Penny
(40:31):
Get up early to power Walker power Jogs, but I'll
be into JP Penny after Thanksgiving Phillis seven a m. Friday.
She did one for Knudson Yogurt Ken a woman who
would sleep toward ten mile John her workout and beauty treatment.
Get up for the rich, delicious treat of nuts and
cow seventy yogurt. She did one for Betty Crocker Cake
(40:54):
Lovers Collection AC introducing Cake Lover's Collection how could you
We talk of? And then a cake mixed with a
big pouch of juicy carrots and slump raisins. And a
lot of this TV ad success was brought on by
the existing success of these eighties merchandizing efforts. Kathy is
(41:16):
liberated sort of, but Kathy lax hutspah, Kathy, Kathy, Kathy.
What Kathy doesn't lack is exposure. This is Peggy Lander's
talking about the Kathy character in the South Florida Sentinel.
In advertising the release of the first Kathy Ragdall. She
mentioned in her piece the existence of Kathy soap, Kathy
(41:38):
coffee mugs, Cathy beach towels, greeting cards, stationary placed mats, potholders,
toad facs, cookie jars, and clothes hell. There was an
entire Goddamn Cathy boutique at Neiman Marcus stores across the
United States in the eighties. This was a whole thing,
and all of this merchandise was marketed at adult women.
(41:59):
Kathy ran the company and also brought on one of
her sisters to help her do so. As the character
became more and more recognizable, Cathy guys White herself began
to appear on late night shows. She became a semi
regular guest on Johnny Carson and would usually discuss topics
similar to the ones she explored in the comic. Here's
a clip of her on Jay Leno, Do you always
(42:20):
have like a couple of bathing suit things, peaks of
baiting suit things. Well, women have two main figure problem
areas the top half of our bodies and the bottom
half of our bottom. And every year the fashion industry
finds a way to make things worse. You know, it
used to be that a woman could depend on a
one piece suit, which at least covered more. And now
the one piece suits that they have out there, I'm
(42:42):
sure the women in this audience have had that experience.
If you pull them up high enough to cover the top,
then the lengthhold comes up to the waist and the
entire rear end is on display. As the licensing empire
grew in the nineteen eighties, so did the comic and
creator's popularity. The South Florida Sentinel quotes Kathy guys Wide
(43:03):
commenting on how the comic changed alongside herself during its
first six years in print. Kathy tells the paper, I
have expanded my thinking quite a bit in the past
few years, and so is she. She spends most of
her time at work now and her biggest problem is
trying to find a balance between home life and work.
(43:23):
Although she's still vulnerable, she speaks, her mind goes out
with different people. She still fails, but in more enlightening ways.
This would have been right around the time that Kathy
the character would have been separated from Irving was dating
new guys and starting a whisper network at work after
getting sexually harassed by her boss. And I wish that
(43:45):
this more forward thinking phase of Kathy was translated into
the merchandise, but it kind of wasn't. The majority of
merchandise from the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties focused solely
on food issues and insecurities rather than any win that
Kathy would have. This fixation on Cathy's more insecure, fragile
(44:06):
self was also emphasized in the next phase of kathy Mania.
Three TV specials that aired in in eighty nine on CBS,
animated and produced by the same guy who did the
Peanuts specials, Bill Melendez. And That's where I'll leave you
for today. In part two of this episode, we'll get
(44:28):
into Kathy's animated specials from the late eighties and her
impact going all the way up to now. Also, she
asks me when I'm gonna have kids. That's this Wednesday
on ac Cast. A Cast is an I Heart Radio production.
It is written researched and hosted by Me Jamie Loftus.
Sophie Lichtman is the world's greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is
(44:51):
the world's greatest editor. Zoey Blade writes the world's greatest music,
and Brendan Dickert wrote the world's greatest theme Huge thank
you to Kathy guys White for this episode in particular,
and in today's episode, you heard the vocal talent of Anna, Hostna,
Julia Claire and Isaac Taylor. And after many requests, here
(45:12):
is the full theme song. It's good. She burst into
the world in nineteen seventy six. She's at book, she's
out on dates, and she don't like politics. From Mama
and urban to a feminiss friends, She's fighting all the stands.
It with chocolate and hand Kathy, She's fighting back. She
(45:37):
stressed with success. Let's got her to some slack. Oh, Kathy,
Mycathy fan Cathy. She is who she is. There's no
tonighting that she's up doing nag living in enemies world.
But speaking of mind, ain't no way to time, Cathey,
she's you and me. She wants to be scenes just
(46:01):
living the dream of Kathy my Cat. This week got there.
She's gotta like go in all she's money to find
(46:26):
wos uncles had to relieve. I feel like you worldless,
but look at you work this. Why shouldn't he? A
patriarchy crumbles the knee chocolate bolder. She's fey because she
(46:47):
finds she not to feel just gone on. The dad
wasn't listen to lead, feel like you will please for I.
I You see there was pay to Uggy. He comes
(47:14):
the knee child let
Host
Jamie Loftus
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