Evening star. [volume], March 26, 1961, Page 8, Image 144

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
COVER STORY
The Artist Who Dreamed Uo A Girl
By PHILIP H. LOVE
> St«r Staff Writer
SUPPOSE YOU were an artist, and you dreamed up a
beautiful heroine for your new comic strip, and you
kept drawing her over and over again, every day and
even some nights, until you knew her every line. mood,
expression and movement by heart. And then-sud
denly. inexplicably-you met her in real life!
That, uncanny as it may seem, is precisely what hap
pened to Leonard Starr, a young New York commercial
illustrator. The dream girl is “Mary Perkins." heroine
of “On Stage." which appears daily and Sunday in The
Star and other newspapers with a total circulation of
20 million. Her real-life double is an erstwhile profes
sional model named Betty
Was this a case of extra-sensory perception? Or
wish fulfullment? Or had the artist seen the girl, per
haps many times, without realizing it?
Whatever the explanation, Len Starr began dream
ing of Mary in 1956. He was 30 at the time, and he had
been “ghosting” several successful strips for other
artists. Now he determined to create a strip of his own.
And because he had always been fascinated by the
Broadway theater and its people, and had been closely
associated with many of them, he decided to call his
strip “On Stage."
“Every summer, after graduation, some 3,000 girls
come to New York to try their luck in show business."
he points out. “In order to support themselves while
waiting for their break, they take almost any part-time
work they can get. Those who are pretty enough become
models for photographers and illustrators. I knew many
such girls, and I decided to make one of them-not any
particular one, but a composite-the heroine of my
strip. I would bring her to New York from a typical
small town and put her through a series of adventures
which would be a composite of the adventures of all the
stage-struck models 1 had ever known."
Once his heroine had been perfected and her story
developed, Len got down to the exacting business of
drawing a batch of sample strips. It was at this point
that he decided he needed a model.
“That’s where Betty entered the picture," he says.
"Os all the models I interviewed, she was the only one
that resembled my conception of Mary Perkins. As a
matter of fact. Betty looked enough like Mary to be her
model-which she immediately became."
The first syndicate to which On Stage was offered
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J SOMEONE SF
A recent "On Stage" strip. Note the resemblance between the heroine, "Mary Perkins," and the girl in the photograph on the opposite page. (See "Star Dust.")
8
Artist Len Starr (right) and his model, stage and TV actor Larry Hagman, relax between poses.
rejected it with the explanation that there is a jinx on
stories dealing with show business. Discouraged. Len
worked out a few other strip ideas and took them, along
with On Stage, to Maurice T. Reilly at the Chicago Trib
une-New York News Syndicate. He chose On Stage.
“I mentioned the jinx,” Len recalls. “Never before
have people been exposed to so much entertainment.’
Mr. Reilly replied. 'Today, show business is everybody's
business.”’
On Stage made its bow on February 10. 1957, to a
newspaper audience totaling 16 million.
Since then, a 6-foot, dark-blond young man wearing
horn rimmed glasses and carrying a miniature camera
and a sketch pad has become a familiar figure along
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SUNDAY. THE STAR MAGAZINE. WASHINGTON. D C.. MARCH 20. 1961
Broadway, snapping pictures or making sketches of
auditions, rehearsals, tryouts, street scenes, buildings -
anything he thinks may come in handy for On Stage.
“That’s how a cartoonist must work," Len explains,
“if he wants a truly graphic representation of his sub
ject."
Len divides his work between his apartment on
Central Park West, where he keeps his theatrical re
search and does his writing, and a studio for his draw
ing and pictorial research.
“I maintain an extensive library on theater lore and
see as much of show people as my schedule will allow in
order to keep my dialogue idiomatic." he says. "I be
lieve that the ‘Jed Potter’ episode (June 6-29, 1958) con-