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'Our most important political cartoonist'
DUNCAN Macpherson drew with glee! Indeed, at his peak, he drew better than any other artiste in Canada.
By Terry Mosher
     Imagine asking Jack Bush, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Alex Colville and Duncan Macpherson to draw a recognizable foot in, say two minutes. While Bush was still reaching for a big watercolor brush, Riopelle for a spatula and Colville for his camera, Macpherson would be delivering his drawing to the engraver.
     Some museum curators might disagree. But they can't draw feet either.
    Political cartoons first began appearing in English-Canadian publications in the 1850s. The evolution of the art form paralleled that in the United States, or was, perhaps, a few days behind, depending on how long it took for the American newspapers to get there. Cartoonists in Halifax often drew like their counterparts in Boston. Toronto scribblers looked to New York, and those in Winnipeg to Chicago. A handful - Bengough, Henri Julien, Arch Dale, A.G. Racey, Bob Chambers - were actually very good.
     There were no great ones, however, until Macpherson started drawing cartoons for the Toronto Star in 1958. For the next 20 years Duncan rewrote the rule book. Americans, indeed, cartoonists from around the world, were now looking to Canada and Macpherson who is simply the most important political cartoonist Canada has ever produced and probably ever will.
      I'm convinced that if Duncan hadn't happened along, Canadian newspaper editors would still be looking for dutiful cartoonists who would competently copy the Americans.
     Mind you, when I started out in this business in the late 1960s, I didn't know any of this. All I knew was that Macpherson was God and that a lot of cartoonists seemed to be copying his style. So I was determined not to draw like him, I just wanted to drink with him.
     Inevitably, I did.
     Frankly, while drinking, I found Duncan to be a pain in the butt, heavy-handed, malicious, arrogant, self-centred and a devious troublemaker. He agreed - but always told me I was worse.
     Then, in the early-to-mid'80s, I quit drinking (these things sometimes take awhile). According to rumor, so did Dunc.
      I haven't seen him since. What's the point? Would we talk soberly about rapidograph pens or something?
     If I bumped into him, though, I'd tell him that, despite all the yelling, his cartoons - his daily nose-thumbings as the powers that be - were an inspiration. And if I learned something from him, it is that you "yell back at the machine" for those people who can't. I'd thank him, too, for paving the way - and tell him he still owes me 47 bucks.

'In the rich fabric of Canadian life Macpherson's is the pure platinum thread'
By Roy Peterson
YES! The 40-ouncer of Ballantine's Finest Scotch was still there, at the back of the cupboard - dusty, half-full, untouched for 13 years.
     The Chateau Laurier Hotel's little "red key" sticker was still attached to the bottle's label between the words "fully matured" and "quality guaranteed." The screw-top lid was still sealed with masking tape and written on the tape were the faded, felt-penned words: "Duncan Macpherson Memorial Scotch - For Editorial Cartoonists' use only."
      The bottle had been a 3 a.m. parting gift from Dunc back in 1980, as I left his Ottawa hotel room. We had talked well into the early morning, long after all the official ceremony and dinner and festivities that had opened a stunning National Archives exhibition of his work. It had featured a retrospective selection from the 1,220 cartoons donated to the archives by The Toronto Star.
      The exhibition was a roaring success and led eventually to the opening of the Canadian Museum of Caricature. Without Duncan Macpherson, I'm sure there would never have been such a showcase for Canada's unusually high standard of editorial cartoon.
      But this is not another drinking story about Macpherson. God knows they are legion and many are true but, curiously, you don't hear these stories from Dunc himself. Others will tell you embroidered stories of their adventures with Macpherson, revelling in the reflected glow of his legend. But the Macpherson I know is a little different - a genius and all, but also a very generous and gracious man, with interests that vary from boating (he once owned a tugboat) to wildlife (the symbol on his stationery is a Canada Goose).
      Generosity? In the mid-1970's Dawn Martin, wife of "Pavlov" cartoonist Ted Martin, co-owners of Canada's first cartoon gallery, dropped by Dunc's office at The Toronto Star with a cheque for the first of his cartoons sold at their gallery.
      Dawn had parked and locked her bicycle at the entrance of the Star building and, after the visit, returned to see a couple of youths making off with her bike. Dunc, on his way out to lunch, found Dawn bikeless and commiserated with her.
      The next day, Dawn received a brand new Raleigh - courtesy of Duncan Macpherson.
      Editorial cartoonists have a strange habit of 'retiring' twice. This is, after all, Macpherson's "second going" as the Vancouver Sun's Len Norris phrases it. Len, who has retired twice himself from the same drawing board, has referred to Duncan Macpherson as the best political cartoonist Canada has produced and ranks him among the best in the world, "head and shoulders above anybody else in North America."
      After Dunc's first retirement in February 1980, he opened a beautifully appointed gallery on Mt. Pleasant Rd., exhibiting his watercolours and oils as well as his cartoons. His spacious private apartment was on the second level connected by a private stairway.
      Now, it's true he suffers few fools for very long, but graciousness has always been an underlying Macpherson trait whenever I've been with him. When my wife Margaret and I arrived unannounced at his gallery with a bottle of champagne to celebrate his recent opening, he was the perfect host. While we admired the paintings on the walls, Dunc slipped out to the grocer near his gallery and then prepared a delightfully impromptu gourmet luncheon.
      We spent a glorious afternoon toasting his new venture and talking about many things. He mentioned that in his early days he had once rented a studio that had been used by a member of The Group of Seven.
      The cultural linkage of Canada's best-known group of artists to Canada's best cartoonist seems only appropriate, even though The Group of Seven sought to eschew the European style of painting and Duncan descends naturally from the line of Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank and Low. Indeed, while serving in the RCAF in Britain during the war, young Macpherson studied the cartoons of Sir David Low that were on the walls of a room used by military personnel in the Express building on Fleet St. where Low worked.
       OF COURSE, had Canadians any real grasp of their culture, everything in Macpherson's gallery would have sold out on the first day. But Canadian culture is a sports culture. We have deified and made multi-millionaires of rather moderately talented men who chased pucks or balls, but, oddly, we tend to accept as routine the genius that has appeared on The Toronto Star's editorial page.
      While a family of four might pay more than $100 to see a mediocre hockey game, they only pay a dollar for a newspaper - so how important could an editorial cartoon be? If drawn by Duncan Macpherson it is certainly more culturally significant than any athlete - Olympic, pro or both.
      In the rich fabric of Canadian life, Duncan Macpherson's is the pure platinum thread - the singular woven stitch somewhere between Oscar Peterson, Terry Fox, Sir John A. and Jack Shadbolt.
      No other cartoonist could, can or will be able to match his range, depth and breadth of talent. His mastery of technique is unsurpassed. His logic and analysis have distilled issues of the day to their quintessential nut and revealed their essence, however serious or ludicrous.
      Other cartoonists specialize and are known for specific areas of editorial cartooning - caricature, social comment, symbolism, direct political, shock, or joke-a-day, and their work is, was, and will be brilliant. It's just that Macpherson did it all so masterfully, in that wonderful time, before political correctness, when we were allowed to laugh and common sense was common currency.
      So, here's a toast to you Dunc, from that dusty, 13-year-old "Duncan Macpherson Memorial Scotch" bottle.
      Straight up - "Fully matured . . . Quality guaranteed!"

CELEBRATING Macpherson Award-winning Star cartoonist retires after 35 years
By Jack Brehl
Everyone has a Macpherson story. Scary stories, bizarre, funny. Macpherson is enraging, hilarious, maddening, unpredictable, explosive, sudden, usually charming and always vital. Some of the stories are even true.
      One of Macpherson's own is about a time he went duck-hunting near Uxbridge, one of the small Ontario towns he has lived in. Macpherson dislikes big cities: "Civilian life has no nobility. Gray people snivelling and whining their way through life looking for a windfall." He is engaged by smaller places, where there's light and space. "And everyone knows each other. 'Oh, that son of a bitch,' that is the way of it."
      He and Buff, his retriever, and some Uxbridge locals, including a plumber, went hunting in a very wet place. "We were skunked but a funny thing happened to me. I had fashioned a pair of truncated skis with inner tubes attached to the bottoms. My theory was that I could move across bog that wouldn't normally hold my weight."
      Macpherson strapped on his skis and ventured forth. After a dozen steps he was upside down in the bog, feet up, head down.
     "Through six feet of water and guck I could hear the plumber howling with glee. Some fun; I was drowning. I have nearly drowned three times, and there comes a moment when you have to breathe out and then involuntarily breathe in. There is no stopping it. Just as I was choking, the laughing plumber, with a couple of others making a chain, grabbed my ankle and surfed me into shallower muck. When I got back my breath, I removed my inner-tube skis and heaved them as far into the bog as I could.
     "The laughing plumber established the incident in the folk lore of Uxbridge. The title of his tale is 'Big Mac and his Jesus Boots'."

      All that is a long way around to get to a hard place.
      Macpherson is retiring after drawing editorial cartoons for The Star for nearly all the last 35 years. He has let the air out of politicians and other rascals, in thousands of drawings clear enough to be understood in any pub and to be risible in Buckingham Palace, the White House and the "upwardly mobile" suburbs which raise his greatest ire.
      What the hell, out with it. Two months ago Macpherson and his wife Dorothy learned he has terminal cancer of the pancreas. An operation would be of no avail. His time is limited. Macpherson is 68.
     "Sure, write it," Macpherson agreed last week. "That's the way it is."
      And that's part of the way Macpherson is. He is intensely private; even Dorothy has not glanced inside a bulky journal in which Macpherson a decade ago set down some observations about his life. At the same time he is so open and visible, through his work and antics, that hundreds of thousands of people know part of him and think they know most. Not bloody likely.
      "The few people that know me know that I do not put up with horse-shit," Macpherson wrote in the private journal.
     "Well, Duncan, how many people know you?" he was asked the other day. Macpherson thought. Finally, he named two, though there must be more.
      One is an ordinary former journalist who shared some revels and whose companionship could be of no material benefit to Macpherson. The other is Beland H. Honderich, the chairman of Torstar, who turned the ramshackle Toronto Star around a generation or two ago.
      An odd choice, on the surface, for Macpherson's camaraderie. Honderich is not noted, as the cartoonist is, for jollity. Many fear him deeply. He opens the drapes for few.
      But Macpherson, a rebel who takes no one's orders, is fond of Honderich. "He's an honest guy."
      So is Macpherson. Compulsively so.

      TORONTO-BORN Duncan Ian Macpherson is a tidy anarchist, or perhaps an unpredictable conservative (small c, please), a radical centre of emotional chaos to whom order is essential. He's never joined a union and believes people should be self-reliant. He is, he thinks; some friends are not as sure. He thinks people should not hurt each other.
       He is the best editorial cartoonist in Canada's history and one of our best visual artists, disciplined and hard-trained in use of pen or brush or knife, a sure draftsman.
       A voracious reader, in classics, history, the mechanics of his work, he writes and speaks simply and directly. He teases the wordsmiths but beats them at their own game; he knows the guy in the pub, likes his company, speaks his language. He's a moralist and a brawler and a gentleman, as the word once was used. He is shy, modest, bruising, moody.
      He has been an alley fighter all his life. He told a friend to make sure to stand on an opponent's feet when the action starts, to hamper the fellow's movement.
     "Get in the first blow and then trip him," he said with an air of authority.
      Money means a lot to him, or, rather, being fairly treated when it comes to money. He is proud that he broke ground in getting fairer deals for artists from skinflint publishers. He's a hard bargainer. But he is absurdly personally generous.
      He is contemptuous of sham. When suspicious of pretension, he has said hurtful things. But dealing with individuals, he is courtesy manifest.
     He is often rude to strangers. Once waiters chased him down the Champs d'Elysees after he subtly hinted dissatisfaction with the wine by spitting it out on the floor.
      With a gentle smile, he would, figuratively and sometimes literally, deliver a rabbit punch or a kick to the groin.
      In liquor, he was a menace. He quit drinking years ago. He was four times given lifetime suspensions from the Toronto Press Club - not much of a disgrace - and later got an honorary lifetime membership. In his drinking days, he would try, unsuccessfully, to whip the tablecloth from under dishes in Harry Barberian's steak house without damaging the china. He'd done it once, out on the west coast, he insisted. At Barberian's, he dumped the dishes into the lap of a visiting Russian diplomat. He doodled on Barberian's linen; Barberian saved the drawings.
      That didn't happen in Quebec's Chateau Frontenac hotel nearly 30 years ago. Police, you recall, used batons on separatist students during a visit by the Queen. That night, deep in booze, Macpherson put a dramatic charcoal mural depicting the violence on the wall behind the basement bar. The next morning when we went there for breakfast, it was already whitewashed over.
      Also in Quebec city, he was about to try his tablecloth trick in a second-floor restaurant. We were surrounded quickly by waiters and bouncers. They didn't touch us but it felt as though we were walking on eggshells as we left, back to back to guard each other. They watched us down the block.
      That was part of Macpherson's fascination. He would lure ordinary guys into exciting situations.
     "I wish I'd known Dunc when he was a mischievous adolescent," I once said to Rita, my late wife.
     "You do," she replied.
      He is a simple and complex man, and the only way to describe him is to say he is Macpherson.
      Macpherson had adventures with unknowns and celebrities. There was the time, for example, when Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook invited him to England. The Beaver was near the end of his spectacular career and was looking for a cartoonist who could finally replace his beloved Low in the Express.
       Macpherson went, without commitment, to hear what Beaverbrook had in mind. He found the Express Aalready had a story in print, ready to go, stating its new cartoonist had arrived.
       He found himself at Beaverbrook's country home for dinner. Macpherson, the Beaver, the Beaver's wife and a giggling niece had a huge dining room and vast table to themselves. Her ladyship served chicken, which, she told Macpherson, she'd had the devil of a time getting at the local grocer.
       The cheese made on the Beaverbrook estate was much superior to the best Canadian cheddar, she observed. Macpherson demurred. The argument became intense, rousing Beaverbrook to laughter so strong that his dentures popped out into his napkin.
       After the ladies left the table, Beaverbrook and Macpherson emptied several bottles of champagne, while Beaverbrook lamented that Lord Thomson of Fleet had beat him to the money available through private television, and spoke fondly of the RCAF.
      Ushered briskly away by Beaverbrook's wife, Macpherson escaped gratefully to London and back to Canada. The whole Beaverbrook/Express scene was too eccentric and unstable for a sombre Canadian.
      Macpherson and his boat - an old garbage tug called Chiquita - travelled much of Ontario. Once Macpherson brought her to Lake Couchiching where I was covering the prestigious annual summer conference on public affairs and we lived aboard, shaking morning cobwebs by diving off her deck.
     Eventually, she went aground off Beaverton and broke up. Half a dozen Beaverton youngsters sent letters of sympathy to Macpherson. They spoke of her almost as a person.
      Soon after Macpherson got Chiquita, Gerry Hall, then Star travel editor, and I were waiting for a streetcar at the corner of York and King Sts. after an editorial department conference at the Lord Simcoe Hotel.
     Macpherson's Volkswagen Beetle screeched up. Well, squeaked up. Macpherson jumped out. We must see his vessel. We insisted we were going home. Both Rita and Margaret were within a month of giving birth. Macpherson picked me up and tossed me in the front seat. Hall, a portly fellow, needed the entire second seat to himself. Macpherson drove the wrong way down one-way York St. to the waterfront.
      Once aboard, we decided to cruise the harbor. Hall drove DChiquita Ain and out of channels at Toronto Island. Then he gave me the wheel and lay down on a bench below decks to doze. Macpherson pointed to the beacon on the old Bank of Commerce. "Steer straight for it," he said.
      For a dozen minutes we were dead on target. I was declaiming Masefield's poem. Macpherson exuded patronly pride. Hall appeared. "Why aren't we moving?" he complained, "That streetlight from the Island keeps shining in my eyes."
      It turned out we were stuck on a sandbar. We didn't get off until 7 a.m., when a work boat from the Royal Canadian Yacht Club appeared, and nudged us off. We were due for work at 7 a.m. Through the night, our wives and The Star had checked every hospital and police station.
      Going on the wagon hasn't changed Macpherson's basic personality. Drink wasn't a creator of his traits, just a stretcher of them.
      Macpherson says many stories told of him simply are not true. Or he doesn't remember them.
      Many did happen, however. It is true that Macpherson once removed a dignified oil portrait of Star owner Joseph E. Atkinson from the newspaper's lobby. "But I returned it."
      It is not true, he says, that he planned to borrow the portrait nightly and touch it up slightly so the publisher's minute slight smile would gradually become an unbecoming smirk over an extended period of nocturnal adjustment. At least he doesn't remember it so.
      And it isn't true, he says, that he drew a necktie on his bare chest to get into a night club. One story goes that he had given his shirt to a security guard whose own shirt was covered with blood from his nose, punched by Macpherson. Macpherson legends get complicated.
      It is true that he forged a press pass he'd been denied, so he could get into the trial of Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of President John Kennedy. No problem, said Macpherson, copying the credentials issued Star reporter Ray Timson. The enchanted Texas judge even let him sit in the jury box.
      Those are a few of the journalistic war stories which play a part, too big a part, in the Macpherson legend.
     Macpherson is beyond them. He is, in his field, a genius, and he is a constant student and disciplined, well-trained artist, who thinks big thoughts in chaotic, digestible ways.

      ONE certificate-laden wall of Macpherson's small but nearly perfect home, overlooking an acre of back yard down to a river, shows how the world honored the artist. By the time he reached middle age, Macpherson had won an unprecedented six National Newspaper Awards. He was named to the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1976, when he was only 52. He was named to the Order of Canada. There is the Royal Academy Medal for distinguished work in the visual arts. And the Molson Award from the Canada Council "to eminent Canadians who by their work in the arts, humanities or social sciences have enriched the cultural or intellectual heritage of the nation . . ."
      That one was awarded, with full soup and fish ceremony, and a special mention of Macpherson as a "stylist in chastisement," in 1971 when the artist was 47.
       Macpherson's wall reminded a recent visitor that "hey, Duncan, you never seemed to give a damn about awards."
      The familiar bark of a laugh, and his reply: "Public relations was never my game. But I thought enough of them to keep them."
      Macpherson has his own knowledge of awards, and places in history. He is a student of Hogarth, Daumier and Gillray, pioneer editorial cartoonists of Britain and France.
      In 1972, when a Macpherson exhibit opened at the McMichael Gallery at Kleinburg, a reporter noted that while Premier William Davis praised the work, Macpherson seemed to derive most pleasure from an overheard comment by Group of Seven painter A. J. Casson. Casson told a companion "It's his technique, the marvellous control he has of the line that makes Macpherson's work so great."
      Macpherson is a serious workman who has always insisted the elemental skills are essential before the imagination can take off.
      Pierre Salinger, Jack Kennedy's press secretary, relayed a request for a Macpherson original cartoon for the White House. Prince Philip got one during a visit to the Toronto Press Club, Macpherson's life ban being relaxed at the time. It showed Macpherson's raggedy everyman holding a poster "Monarchy to the Wall" and giving Philip a bomb.
      Olive Diefenbaker, the wife of Macpherson's best target, berated him during a conversation at the Diefenbaker home in Prince Albert, Sask., as "unfair" and "cruel" to her husband. Diefenbaker, however, whose public image was dashed by the famous Marie Antoinette cartoon, invited Macpherson to go along on a fishing trip.
      The boisterous old city hall gang at the time of Macpherson's arrival at The Star in 1958 were immediate targets. "You couldn't miss with Nate Phillips (the mayor pictured as charging, knife and fork in hand, napkin round neck, through a Royal York Hotel union picket line to get to a free dinner) or with Lampy (Mayor Allan Lamport), or Gardiner," says Macpherson.
      Phillips collected as many Macphersons as he could get. His son, Howard, eventually passed them on to the city archives.
      In 1985, Macpherson himself sold 2,485 originals to the Public Archives in Ottawa. The Star had earlier donated 1,220 of what the Archives called a "national treasure."
      Recently he turned over 130 drawings on U.S. subjects to the Public Library of Boston, the city where he got some of his most elemental training in art.
     The original of the most famous cartoon, Diefenbaker as Marie Antoinette, was given by Macpherson to his only sibling, his sister Fiona. The drawing, captioned "Then let them eat cake," was done in one quick sketch, in anger over the cavalier treatment of A. V. Roe workers when Diefenbaker suddenly cancelled the Arrow project. Ironically, Macpherson probably would have agreed with abandoning the costly project but was angered by the way in which it was done.
      In spite of honors, Macpherson has never been a braggart. However, he clearly knows the worth of his talent and the hard work involved in basic perspective, design, draughtsmanship.
      In his private journal he wrote a decade ago that there were two basic reasons for his edge on other editorial cartoonists:
      "One, I am a creative thinker.
      "Two, I am a far superior artist due to my training than my contemporaries. When one discusses facts, one does not brag."
      As often, Macpherson is right.

     DECENT CARTOONS are not drawn by committees. Sometimes they are not drawn, really, by cartoonists, one gathers from Macpherson. Sometimes they were drawn by Diefenbaker himself, for instance, by his actions, by his words.
      Macpherson said once he'd watched Dief on television for a long time and "he has always given me the feeling of a Billy Sunday, a circus barker and a third-rate actor, all put together." The guy in the pub might vaguely feel the same way but couldn't express it.
      Macpherson saw himself from the start as a heckler, whenever he sees "wrongness." He would read the paper, and when he saw sham or pretension, he would draw.
      One of the brightest editorial page editors, Bob Nielsen, wrote that Macpherson was "strictly non-partisan - against them all. All who hold power, that is, or who pursue it . . .
     "Macpherson's cruelty to the mighty is matched by a keen sense of justice on behalf of the lowly. But the lowly had better watch their step; if they join loud protest movements, he will ridicule them. He's no social reformer - how could any of those knaves and fools in office, or seeking office, be expected to improve matters?"
      Macpherson says much the same thing in discussing Honderich. He likes Honderich, and credits him with sincerity as a reformer seeking the New Jerusalem.
      "If one is the engineer of a propaganda machine I suppose it is necessary to hold strong beliefs about changing society for its own good. I don't hold that view. I know better.
      "Ironically, my education was the deprivation of the Depression. I, as an artist, emerged as a realist; Honderich, as chairman of a powerful free enterprise machine, emerged as a dreamer.
       "Odd."
      The results of Macpherson's 35 years of heckling are seen throughout this section. They are grabby and powerful.
      Ironically, though, in some ways he is as much a sham as his targets are.
      For all his toughness and announced cynicism, he is a loving person. He has made friends feel special, better than they are. But give the old bear the last word. He ends his journal: "A word of advice. If a biography in print (or other media, or all) is ever contemplated. The publisher must be American - no goddam pennywhistle Canadian bankrupts or English incompetents. - D.M.
     " Do you stand by that still, Macpherson? He ponders, gives that mischievous grin. "Of course."
     Of course.

TRIBUTES TO DUNCAN MacPHERSON
On the occasion of his retirement, April 25, 1993
Source: The Toronto Star

Source: The Toronto Star