Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (76 page)

The other eleven founders of the Famous Artists School were Norman Rockwell, Jon Whitcomb, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, John Atherton, Ben Stahl, Al Parker, Harold Von Schmidt, Fred Ludekens, Peter Helck, and Austin Briggs. All were commercial artists making substantial incomes as illustrators for magazines, books, and advertising, and all were household names. Their familiar signatures were found on the pages of the top magazines of early and mid-20th-century America:
Saturday Evening Post
,
Life
,
Harper’s Monthly
,
Boy’s Life
,
Cosmopolitan
,
Esquire
,
Fortune
,
Good Housekeeping
,
McCall’s
, and many others. Their success stories proved that anyone with talent and drive could make it in the world of commercial art.

Dorne promised that he and his very successful colleagues would share the secrets of their studios and the tricks of their trade. For a tuition fee (nonrefundable), the Famous Artists School promised enrollees a set of special textbooks written by the founders, a series of sequential mail-in assignments, and return-mail critiques of the completed work. Here’s where things got a little fuzzy: it sounded, from the ads, as if students were going to get evaluations from the famous founding artists. Not true: Instead, less-known and totally
unknown
freelance artists wrote the critiques. The founders periodically dropped by the office to review the
instructors’
work, but aside from those brief visits, their main role was simply to profit hugely from their stockholdings in the school. Dorne himself kept a pristine mahogany drawing board at the school’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut—not to work at, but just to show off to the visiting students who regularly toured the premises.

Dorne and his co-founders all worked in realistic style, and he figured that was what students wanted to learn. So the school offered three courses: Painting, Illustration/Design, and Cartooning. Each course comprised 24 lessons. The instruction books began with basic techniques and worked up to more complex ones—the first few lessons, for example, were on materials and their use, simple anatomy and figure drawing, and perspective.
These are all subjects a student would find at any fine-art school. But the Famous Artists School was selling fame and fortune—not fine art—so the lessons quickly moved into subjects that reflected their students’ interest in the commercial art world: draperies, costumes, animal anatomy, the human figure in motion, one called “Pretty Girls,” and another called “Today’s Men and Women.”

The Famous Artists School put a lot of money into magazine ads, each featuring one or more of the famous founders of the school. Dorne’s pitch:

We found that many men and women who should have become artists—didn’t. Most of them hesitated to find out how much hidden art talent they had. Others who knew they had talent simply couldn’t get topnotch professional art training without leaving home or giving up their jobs. My colleagues and I decided to do something about this.

Dorne was appealing to the timid, the fearful, and the stuck-in-arut—exactly what he and the founders had
not
been when they’d launched their own careers. But it worked, not least because the rest of the ad was packed with success stories (undocumented) of FAS “graduates” who had embarked (supposedly) on lucrative careers in ad agencies, art studios, and design departments, or worked as freelancers for greeting card companies, galleries, newspapers, and magazines. The same success stories were repeated, ad after ad, but thousands of people still took the free art talent test to qualify for admission to the school. Rarely was any test-taker revealed to have no talent.

In 1948, the founding year, a two-year course in Painting, Cartooning, or Illustration/Design cost $300, payable in monthly installments (plus an extra $11.50 for art supplies). To an aspiring commercial artist, that would have seemed like a small investment compared to the possible returns, since the ads also claimed that the market for illustrators and designers was wide open, waiting to be tapped. “Never before has there been such a demand for artists to fill high-paid jobs,” read an ad from 1954, ostensibly written by Jon Whitcomb, “famous illustrator of glamour girls and faculty member of the Famous Artists Course.”
There’s no evidence (other than the dubious endorsements in the ads) that FAS students ever actually found those highly paid jobs.

The financial success of the Famous Artists School got Dorne thinking about more ways to make money using the FAS model. Moving from the world of art to the world of writing seemed logical, so in 1961 Dorne and two luminaries from the publishing world, Bennett Cerf (Random House’s publisher) and Gordon Carroll (a
Reader’s Digest
editor), came up with the Famous Writers School (FWS). This time they had a “guiding faculty” of 15, including Rod Serling (of
Twilight Zone
fame), Bruce Catton (Civil War historian), Faith Baldwin (best-selling romance novelist), Mignon G. Eberhart (best-selling mystery writer), J.D. Ratcliff (nonfiction author), Red Smith (popular sports writer), and others. They offered “an opportunity to have your writing talent tested by a group of America’s most successful authors” by taking the Famous Writers Aptitude Test.

“What every creative person should know about writing for money” was the come-on in the ads, and the pitch for the FWS was basically the same as the one for the FAS: Discover your hidden talent, take the home study course, get a great job in the field, and make a bundle of money. The ads assured budding writers that jobs were plentiful, salaries were high, and markets were numerous. And there were the usual success stories “documented” in the ads as well. The only problem: None of it was true.

In 1970 muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford wrote a piece titled “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers” for the July issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
. She didn’t mince words.

“How,” she asked, “can Bennett Cerf and his renowned colleagues find time to grade all the thousands of aptitude tests that must come pouring in, and on top of that fulfill their pledge to ‘teach you to write successfully at home’? What are the standards for admission to the school? How many graduates actually find their way into the ‘huge market that will pay well for pieces of almost any length,’ which, says J.D. Ratcliff, exists for the beginning
writer? What are the ‘secrets of success’ that the Famous Fifteen say they have ‘poured into a set of specially created textbooks’? And how much does it cost to be initiated into these secrets?”

The answers to Mitford’s questions were shocking, as her research clearly showed. The 15 guiding faculty members had absolutely nothing to do with either grading the aptitude tests or teaching anyone anything about writing. The admission standards were nonexistent beyond an ability to pay for the course, and high-pressure salespeople weren’t above coercing gullible would-be writers into forking over their money once they’d passed the “aptitude test.” According to an Authors League study, at the time the average freelancer was earning not the big fees promised by the Famous Writers School but roughly $3,000 per year—an income barely above the poverty level. And the cost of one course was $785 ($900 if paid in installments). That may not sound like a lot, but compare it (as Mitford did) with the $35 that the University of California Extension at Berkeley charged for a 15-lesson home study short-story-writing course. Mitford wrote:

What have the Famous Fifteen to say for themselves about all of this? Precious little, it turns out. Most of those with whom I spoke were quick to disavow any responsibility for the school’s day-to-day operating methods and were unable to answer the most rudimentary questions: qualifications for admission, teacher-student ratio, cost of the course. They seemed astonished, even pained to think people might be naïve enough to take the advertising at face value.

In 1969, only a year before Mitford’s article came out, the FWS had tuition revenues of $48 million, and the school’s stock hit $40 per share. The article was picked up by newspapers and circulated to high schools and had national television shows clamoring to interview Mitford. Result: The Famous Writers School’s stock steadily lost value, and in 1972 it filed for bankruptcy.

But only a few years later the school was, Mitford lamented,
“creeping back,” and in 1981 both the Famous Artists School and the Famous Writers School were acquired by Cortina Learning International, a company that specializes in home study courses for foreign languages. They still offer the instructional textbooks and the critiques by professional artists and writers. But now students who are “stuck or need some answers” can contact their instructors by e-mail, snail mail, or toll-free telephone number. The advertising for each school emphasizes the acquisition of skills rather than the pie-in-the-sky financial success and publication that figured so largely in the advertising of the past. “Unleash your inner artist. Learn the secrets of famous artists; study at your own pace,” reads a current online ad for the FAS. Cortina isn’t making any unrealistic claims for its courses. There’s not a word about jobs, markets, or stardom.

Do you know Mays? He’s the burly, bearded man in a denim shirt who hawks products on TV commercials, infomercials, and home shopping channels, usually shouting superlatives about the product. Here’s a sampling of the stuff Mays has sold:

• HandySwitch: a remote control for a lamp

• Mighty Putty: strong glue

• Steam Buddy: a handheld clothes steamer

• Fix It: a car scratch remover

• Liquid Diamond: car polish

• Samurai Sharp: a knife sharpener

• Engrave It: an engraving tool

• OxiClean: clothing detergent

• Six Shooter: a cordless electric screwdriver

• Lint-B-Gone: a lint removing brush

• Awesome Auger: a hole-digger/weed-wacker

• Zorbeez: super-absorbent towels

• Hercules Hook: a superstrong hook that holds up to 150 pounds

• Turbo Tiger: a vacuum cleaner

• Orange Glo: an all-purpose cleanser made from orange oil

• Kaboom!: tile cleaner

A few more “tails” of elected officials who weren’t quite human
.

B
OSTON CURTIS
On September 13, 1938, in the small town of Milton, Washington, 52 citizens voted for Boston Curtis to serve as their Republican precinct committee member. Curtis hadn’t bothered to campaign, but since he ran unopposed, he won 52 to 0. When results of the election were announced, the town was shocked to learn that they’d voted for a mule. Milton’s mayor, Kenneth “Catsup” Simmons (a Democrat), was the mastermind behind the election. He’d brought Boston to the courthouse, inked one of his hooves, and used the mule’s hoofprint as a signature for all the legal documents needed to register a candidate. Boston was registered as “Boston Curtis” because he belonged to Mrs. Charles Curtis, who lived in town. Simmons told the press (including
Time
magazine) that he ran Boston to make a serious point: Primary elections were a problem because voters often didn’t even know who they were voting for. But people who knew the mayor claimed that he’d also done it to trick the town’s Republicans into voting for an animal that resembled the donkey—the mascot of the Democratic party.

If animals can run for office—and win—what happens when they actually get to serve out their terms? The answer lies in the hamlet of Sunol, a tiny rural community located east of San Francisco. In 1981 two locals were arguing over which of them would make a better mayor and decided to hold an unofficial election to settle the dispute. Another local, Brad Leber, entered his dog Bosco, a Labrador-Rottweiler mutt, who ran as a “Puplican” with the platform of “A bone in every dish, a cat in every tree, and a fire hydrant on every street corner.” And when all the votes were counted, Bosco was the new honorary mayor.