The Groening Of America -- `Simpsons' Creator Started Jabbing At Life's Lessons During His Days At Evergreen

CUTLINE: BART, ER, MATT AND YOUNGER SISTER LISA ENJOYING THE OREGON COAST IN YEARS GONE BY.

CUTLINE: MATT BORROWED FAMILY NAMES FOR HIS SIMPSON CHARACTERS. THE GROENING FAMILY THAT MATT GREW UP WITH INCLUDED OLDER BROTHER MARK, MAGGIE, MOTHER MARGARET, MATT AND LISA.

When Steve Willis, a McCleary cartoonist and librarian, thinks of his former Evergreen State College cohort and now-famous ``Simpsons'' animator Matt Groening, a recurring image comes to mind.

It is of Groening, who was then editor of the campus newspaper, bent over his desk, head in his hands as though suffering from terminal depression, repeating over and over, ``I didn't mean for it to come out this way.'' If the situation were to be depicted in a cartoon, it might bear the caption: Groening groaning.

It would happen in the aftermath of a Groening cartoon in the campus newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal. In those mid-'70s days, Groening was constantly sending up some aspect of Evergreen's piously progressive educational philosophy. One cartoon showed a cereal box labeled ``Evergreen Flakes'' with a collection of Grateful Dead look-alikes huddled around a bowl of ``leisure cereal of the state of Washington.'' Their motto: ``Achievement without Effort.''

The unsuspecting Groening anticipated that Evergreen's enlightened students, an untraditional amalgam of post-hippie, ex-urban, laid-back experimentalists from throughout the country, would chuckle with knowing amusement at such satiric excursions, while the faculty and administration would be mortally offended.

Instead the faculty would snort with laughter and post the cartoons on bulletin boards and classroom walls, while self-righteous students would write letters to the editor such as the one from Terry Wright, published in the Feb. 10, 1977 Journal, thanking Groening for making the Journal so bad that Wright would never again have to be distracted from his studies by it.

``After a cartoon of Matt's satirized communes, 100 students signed a protest petition and sent it in as a letter to the editor,'' recalls Leo Daugherty, a literature professor and Groening mentor who still teaches Shakespeare at Evergreen. ``It said, `Dear Mr. Groening: Communal struggles are not funny!' ''

Pompous snits like this are mother's milk to most cartoonists. But Groening took them personally, to the point of hours-long soul-searching sessions with Daugherty over where he was going wrong. ``He was always surprised and sad and a bit worried that this would affect his peers in such a negative fashion,'' Daugherty says. ``I could tell a mile away when Matt had had one of his run-ins. But I always looked forward to the ensuing conversation, because I knew it would be interesting.''

Things are not much different today. As illustrator and a creative force behind the Simpsons, the chart-busting cartoon series on the Fox television network, Groening finds himself under fire for such vague crimes as undermining American values and spoiling The Youth of Today - even as the saucer-eyed clan in dire need of orthodontics cavorts on the covers of Newsweek, TV Guide and Rolling Stone, and sweeps TV ratings for its time slot.

A popular T-shirt of the notorious Bart (an anagram for ``brat'') carrying the slogan ``Underachiever and Proud of It, Man,'' was banned in Ohio, California and Kentucky, by school principals calling it damaging to pre-adolescents' self-esteem. And drug czar William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, advised recovering addicts not to watch the Simpsons - although he recanted when Bart's amazing popularity became obvious.

``I'll have to sit down and have a talk with the little spike head,'' Bennett said. ``There's nothing wrong with him that a Catholic school, a paper route and a couple of soap sandwiches wouldn't straighten out.'' All of which drew a response from the Simpsons camp that ``if our drug czar thinks he can sit down and talk with a cartoon character, he must be on something.''

Obviously without intention, Bennett merely fanned Bart's rise to fame. Within a week after the incident, Fox announced that the Simpsons would run the coming fall season opposite television's sacrosanct No. 1 family show, ``The Cosbys.'' Groening has hinted he may even be able to work in a Catholic school, etc. episode of the Simpsons.

At 37, with an income approaching seven figures, a ``Life in Hell'' cartoon empire embracing 300 newspapers and 22 new episodes of the Simpsons on tap, Groening no longer buries his head in his hands when opposition such as the Simpsons backlash strikes. But echoes of regret lace his tone when he talks about adult repression of American youth reflected in the controversy.

``What bugs me about it is that it's the kind of petty, stupid exertion of authority by intellectual boneheads that kids encounter every day,'' Groening says. ``The real tragedy is that it breaks the spirit of a lot of them. I was lucky, with me it just made me more set in my ways.''

It seems to be Groening's destiny that for every cartoon he draws, some element of society will denounce it as offensive. It was that way growing up in Portland's school system, where teachers would tear up Groening's early scrawls in disgust. Then at Evergreen, where ``the further his editorship progressed, the more Matt cherished his anonymity,'' Daugherty says. Punk rockers destroyed early ``Life In Hell'' panels displayed in record stores, although it was unclear whether that meant they liked it or hated it, Groening points out.

Then there's Bart, who Groening denies is a Young Matt surrogate but who has his same penchant for obstreperousness. Growing up, Groening repeatedly crossed swords with authority figures, who somehow immediately divined his unwillingness to knuckle under. A spiral notepad from Groening's elementary-school days in Portland contains entries listing ``people who got in trouble today, including me.'' One says, ``I have to write, `I must remember to be quiet in class,' 500 times and turn it in tomorrow.''

At age 5 Groening was chased by

police officers through Portland's Washington Park after they spotted him riding an abandoned flatcar. In sixth grade he was sent to the principal's office for throwing an encyclopedia out the window. As a Boy Scout he was prevented by a sadistic bus driver from leaving the vehicle on an Air Force Academy tour because of India ink stains on the pocket of his uniform.

This is all vintage Bart, a cross between Dennis the Menace and Beaver Cleaver who can turn the tamest situation into something fit for a crisis clinic - the same knack for troublemaking that young Matt displayed.

``He had some problems adjusting to school, mostly because the teachers weren't very sympathetic to his cartooning,'' says Matt's father, Homer Groening (pronounced ``graining''), a former cartoonist and advertising executive who still lives in Portland with Matt's mother, Margaret. ``We'd periodically have to go in for a talk with Matt's teachers to straighten things out.''

Overall, his parents recall Matt as a good student, and the record shows he was student body president at Lincoln High School in Portland, where he ran a parody campaign on the Teens for Decency ticket under the motto, ``If you're against decency, what are you for?'' He also turned out for sports, although he ``wasn't particularly talented in any of them,'' his mother says.

``Actually, he did well in school - he was popular and had good grades,'' Margaret points out. ``Although he doesn't particularly want anyone to know that.'' The only thing she worried about was the amount of time her son spent alone in his room, listening to rock music or reading one of his father's innumerable periodicals - The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire.

``I'd ask his father, `Don't you think Matt's a little lonely down there?' and Homer would say, `Don't worry, he's having the time of his life!' ''

But for Groening, the childhood memories which stand out most - as they do for many of his generation - involve ``my history of getting into trouble,'' he says. He would sit on a bench outside the principal's office and vow to himself that someday he would make up for all the wasted time adults had cost him. In a way, his comic strips ever since, from the guilt-plagued Bongo, the one-eared kid rabbit always getting pounded on in ``Life In Hell,'' to smart-mouthed Bart Simpson, who is quick to admonish, ``Don't have a cow, man!'' have been Matt Groening's revenge against the forces of self-righteousness in American society.

``I always wanted desperately to be normal,'' is the way Groening puts it, ``but the culture cried out for abnormality.''

Whatever aspirations Groening held for cartooning got their chance to congeal at Evergreen, where as newspaper editor he headed a ``comics mafia'' of talented cartoonists that included Lynda Barry, of Esquire magazine and ``Ernie Pook'' fame; Charles Burns, today an artist in New York; the aforementioned Steve Willis and numerous others. Ironically, most of them pursued cartooning as a side interest to their chosen field: Groening wanted to be a writer, Barry and Burns were interested in fine arts, Willis used cartooning for ``recreational purposes'' while he sought out a career path that eventually led him to the Western Library Network, a Lacey-based computerized bibliographic utility providing on-line information to libraries throughout the Northwest.

Groening had applied to just two colleges - Harvard and Evergreen - choosing the latter when Harvard ``for some reason didn't recognize my talents.'' Evergreen, an experimental college with teacher evaluations instead of grades and integrated studies in the place of majors, suited him because it went beyond ``just paying lip service to progressive education. I knew I wasn't going to do anything that would involve credentials for the rest of my life. Evergreen didn't put up the kinds of roadblocks of traditional colleges - I ended up editing the college newspaper without ever taking a class in journalism.''

Even in the unstructured setting of Evergreen, cartooning - at the time the cliche-ridden bastion of ``Dagwood'' and ``Gasoline Alley'' imitators in the daily newspapers, and psychedelic LSD-inspired rock-culture scrawlings in counterculture rags - seemed an unlikely vocation. Groening didn't think he could draw very well: ``I also didn't see anything that looked like my stuff out in the marketplace.''

But Barry showed him he could do cartoons about anything he wanted to, Groening says, and Willis, a dorm neighbor, recalls ``Matt going wild in the stairwells. You could always tell his contributions.'' Happy faces were a specialty - Happy Face on Acid, Happy Face Meets Godzilla, the Yin-Yang Happy Face.

Still, Groening wasn't much of an iconoclast. Willis feels he was ``one of the most normal people I know who was also a cartoonist,'' and Daugherty calls Groening ``one of those rare people you run into in life who on the surface is real straight, almost preppy, but underneath was always thinking of unusual and outrageous things.'' Barry concurs, calling Groening ``so militantly straight he was hipper than the hippies.''

Groening inaugurated a comics page in the Cooper Point Journal and regularly ran cartoon illustrations of lead front-page stories (one of Barry's efforts illustrated a piece on illiteracy). ``Matt's at least partly responsible for Lynda's interest in cartooning,'' Willis observes. ``But he was known more for his writing then.'' Even today Groening feels his strength is his writing: ``I like to draw cartoons because editors can't edit them,'' he says.

There was little indication that success loomed anywhere on Groening's horizon after he left Evergreen for an uncertain future in Los Angeles. ``We knew Matt would choose a creative line of work, because he was a creative person,'' his mother says. ``But cartooning . . .well, frankly, I would have been happier and more settled in my mind if he'd been a doctor or a lawyer.''

Groening started inauspiciously, his '72 Datsun breaking down at midnight on the Hollywood freeway his first night in L.A. He worked sporadically as a movie extra, a chauffeur and a free-lance cartoonist before latching on as circulation director with the Los Angeles Reader, an independent weekly. It wasn't glamorous: Groening delivered newspapers in his own car, which had changed from a beat-up Datsun to a beat-up Dodge Dart.

It wasn't long before Groening worked his way into a weekly rock column called ``Sound Mix'' and in April 1980, produced the first ``Life In Hell'' panel starring a rabbit named Binky, a preachy, wordy, somewhat condescending punster who was more snide than funny. But after Groening changed Binky to an angst-ridden questioner of Reagan materialism and the religious right, a cult following started to build. ``I realized I had to make him a victim whom people could identify with,'' he says.

It was at the Reader that Groening also met Deborah Caplan, a sales represen-

tative with a background in publishing and a head for business - all qualities notoriously absent in Groening's psychological framework. ``Matt didn't particularly have a reputation for discipline,'' says Randy Michael Signor, a former Reader editor who today works in Seattle for a crafts trade publication. Groening kept late hours because of the rock beat and was always pushing deadlines. ``We'd have to call his answering machine and yell into it, `Can you hear! Wake up! Call in!' ''

Caplan proved a good left brain to Groening's classic right-sidedness. Although Groening refused to review rock bands that Caplan persuaded to buy ads in the Reader (``Editorial and advertising should be separate,'' he insisted), they soon were romantically entwined. By 1984, Caplan put together a book, ``Love Is Hell,'' managing to sell 20,000 copies for the Christmas rush.

Not long afterward Jane Levine, the Reader's founding publisher who now is vice president in charge of marketing and advertising for Seattle-based Sasquatch Publications, left the publication. Others soon followed, including Groening and Caplan, who later wed and today have a year-old son, Homer.

The book's success convinced Caplan to beat the syndication bushes for ``Life in Hell.'' Initially it met with little success, partly because of the name itself. ``It turned off the conservative editors and stores,'' she says. A Portland editor even suggested changing the name to ``Life In Heck,'' which Groening took seriously. Later the editor said she'd just been joking.

Today ``hell'' is such an ingrained part of American lexicon that it's hard to remember a time when it was considered unprintable on a par with the ``f'' word. People talk about dates from hell, parties from hell, bosses from hell - but Groening's series predated them all and even led the way to transforming the word's meaning. In a way, he created the perfect post-'60s answer to the vacuity and selfishness of the '80s by making a biblical term a countercultural philosophy: ``Life In Hell'' was every ex-campus protester's, every Boomer idealist's, conception of what adult existence in the '80s had turned out to be.

In one of his strips titled ``Life In Hell Explained,'' Groening calls it ``a crude little comic strip full of alienation, angst, fear and grief, not to mention self-loathing and laughs'' whose major themes are ``love, sex, work, death, doom and rabbits.'' One of the strips, titled ``What Not to Say During Moments of Intimacy,'' lists ``O My Lord in Heaven forgive me for this vile sin I am about to commit,'' ``Remember: I don't want to get involved,'' and ``Have you gained some weight?''

Still, the irony remains lost on some authority figures, particularly religious rightists ``who keep trying to convert Matt because they're worried he's going straight to hell - the real hell,'' Deborah Groening says. On the flip side are fundamentalists who actually like the strip because it raises issues surrounding the existence of God. ``Republicans and religious fanatics don't always get Matt's intentions,'' Deborah notes.

Groening has become so identified with the Simpsons that hard-core fans - many of whom cite the Simpsons as a pale version of the more eclectic rabbits in ``Hell'' - worry he will abandon the panel, or that it will suffer from inattention. But Deborah, who already heads a ``Life

In Hell'' syndicate staff of seven persons (Fox owns the rights to the Simpsons) and a mail-order business in spinoff accessories, says the Simpsons' success has rejuvenated interest in Groening's panels. A new line of T-shirts and greeting cards is on its way as well.

`` `Life in Hell' has never been better,'' she says.

Neither has life on Venice Beach in L.A., where Bart T-shirts are all the rage and the Groenings' new home is under construction. ``The good part about fame is driving down the street and seeing Bart Simpson graffiti on an underpass,'' Groening says. ``The bad part is seeing Bart Simpson graffiti on the side of my house.''

Groening stumbled onto the series fortuitously, his ``Life In Hell'' panels having caught the eye of James L. Brooks, the Simpsons' conceiver who also created ``The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ``Taxi'' on television as well as directed the films ``Terms of Endearment'' and ``Broadcast News.''

``I'd always wanted to do animation but never thought I'd have the chance,'' Groening says. ``I have a limited attention span and don't have the patience to do all those drawings.'' Despite advances in computer technology, animation still involves considerable tedious redrawing by hand.

Groening, Brooks and Sam Simon, a sitcom writer who produces ``The Simpsons,'' decided from the start they wanted something different from other cartoon families akin to the Flintstones and the Jetsons. What they wound up with was a series that pays partial visual acknowledgement of its predecessors - Homer Simpson (named after not Groening's father but the character of the same name in Nathanael West's ``Day of the Locust'') has Fred Flintstone's perpetual five o'clock shadow, and Marge is a Jetsons-like mom - but approaches family dynamics more akin to Roseann Barr or Archie Bunker.

Dad is a well-intentioned but often insensitive bumbler, mother Marge a homily-ridden, saccharine presence with a spiraling beehive and a gift for malapropism, sister Lisa a precocious saxophone player and Maggie a pacifier-sucking prop. All have the same names as Groening's real family (although older brother Mark, a Vietnam veteran who drives a cab in Seattle, and sister Patty are left out), leading Groening to joke that he has no comment about similarities ``until the lawsuit is settled.''

``A lot of our friends feel kind of sorry for us because our names are being used in a cartoon,'' says Groening's mother, who denies she has three-foot-high blue hair. ``They feel we might be insulted, but we're not. It is kind of weird, but we stand it just fine.''

Still, all the Simpsons are basically foils to Bart, the irritable, back-talking hellion whose incantations and follies mark the show's biggest departure from conventional animation - and easiest target for cultural bluenoses.

``All that Bart stuff, that's pure Matt,'' says Deborah Groening. ``He's always enjoyed annoying others, but he's wanted to have it both ways, too: He's both compelled to annoy others and repelled by the reactions his work provokes.'' She invokes the Village Voice's phrase of ``sneakily radical'' to describe Groening's gift for making the philosophically outrageous, somehow palatable to the minions of Tubeville.

The Simpsons' success is partly due to its focus on Bart - a made-to-order hero for youngsters everywhere - and partly because of its essentially human realism, says Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. ``Exactly at the moment when young kids are trying to discover their own voice, along comes a cartoon character they can identify with,'' he says. ``The realistic language is one key - I remember how delighted my own kids were at the film, `The Bad News Bears,' because the kids swore.'' A recent episode featuring Bart calling a bar and asking if I.P. Freely is there ``is an example of giving legitimacy to kids' experience,'' Nachbar adds.

But adults find things to identify with as well - deceptive nuclear-plant bosses, lying business executives, even crassly misleading commercials on the Simpsons' TV set, Nachbar says. ``It's as much anti-authority for adults as it is for kids,'' he points out. ``Everyone's had the humiliation of being stepped on at work, everyone's had a rotten teacher at some point in their life.'' The irony, he says, is that a cartoon series ends up reflecting life more realistically than true-life sitcoms.

The Simpsons' pinhead pupils and massive overbites are carryovers from ``Life in Hell'' characters, although Bart has a far more aggressive

personality than the sorrowful Bongo. Both characters, however, share an indomitable spirit that marks the appeal of Groening's work. One of Groening's more memorable ``Life In Hell'' panels features Bongo cowering before a giant shadow in the living room of his home. The walls are defaced with graffiti, including a drawing of his father with an arrow through his head. The floor is strewn with foodstuffs, toys, broken dishes, shoe tracks. Bongo is saying to the grim figure looming over him, ``Mistakes were made.''

Bart, on the other hand, would snarl, ``Eat my shorts, man!''

``I'm really proud of what we've come up with for the Simpsons,'' says Groening, who credits the Fox network for a strict hands-off policy. ``If the show was a flop, we'd have no one to blame but ourselves.'' The reverse doesn't hold true, however: Groening credits Brooks, Simon and other Simpsons collaborators for its success as much as himself, and tosses in a dash of old-fashioned luck for good measure: ``This really is a team effort,'' he says, advising doubters to check the long list of credits at the end of each show.

``Perhaps naively, I always thought the show would be a success,'' Groening says. ``But from the inside I've really come to appreciate how flukey it all was, and I never could have imagined that it would get as big as it has.''

Virtually no one associated with Groening over the years - from his Evergreen mates to L.A. associates to his family - worries that the stage lights of success will change him. ``The only difference I've noticed is that now Matt calls us from his car phone,'' says Signor, who used to loan Groening quarters to buy gas during their L.A. Reader days. Groening's car is also a step up - a 1987 Honda Accord - but, mindful of leaner times, he resists the showy Hollywood lifestyle. ``I don't drive a fancy car,'' he says somewhat defensively, as though even raising the issue implies selling out.

Groening, who also maintains his artfully unkempt appearance with an assortment of Hawaiian shirts, baggy pants and tennis shoes, says fame has brought him only partial relief: ``I know that if my car breaks down I have the money to get it fixed right away. But I still have the constant trauma of meeting the next deadline. The acclaim is not the same as the work, and the work still needs to be done.''

There is lots of work to do each day. With everyone from cultural pundits to TV magnates watching what promises to be television's biggest fall-season news - the head-to-head showdown between Bart and Bill - the pressure is on.

Groening typically rises at 6 a.m. ``to play with baby Homer - that's when he's up.'' By 9 he is hitting the freeways and by 10 is at his first meeting at the Fox studio. The rest of the day is a whirlwind of Simpsonia, either drawing or planning or coordinating the episode at hand. Groening doesn't arrive home till 9 p.m. and usually relaxes for an hour before working in his home studio on his ``Life in Hell'' panel, often past midnight.

``There's no end in sight at the moment,'' Groening says of his fast-forward lifestyle. ``But it can't go on forever, that's for sure.''

While success may not have changed Groening, fatherhood has, his wife says. ``It's one thing to remember your childhood, it's another to see it before your eyes in a little being,'' Deborah points out. ``For Matt, having Homer was an act of faith - you don't really want to have a child if you think the world's a crummy place or is going to blow up. With perestroika and the Berlin Wall coming down, we really are living in a hopeful time.''

Such sentiments might surprise Simpsons critics who fail to see the liberating truths expressed in the series. But fans, like his former literature professor Daugherty, feel Groening is emerging as his generation's master satirist, a Swift or Thurber of his time.

``I always felt Matt was even better than Thurber,'' says James Vowell, editor of the L.A. Reader during Groening's tenure who, after a hiatus is back at the same post today (ironically, Groening's cartoons now run in the competition, the L.A. Weekly). Associates, citing Vowell's early support, recall his saying about Groening, ``Someday this guy is going to be famous.''

Matt's father tells a story about his son which perhaps sums up Groening's approach to writing, cartooning and life. When Matt was a youngster they went for a father-son hike along the Columbia River gorge. Seeing a woman drop a candy wrapper, Matt, a Boy Scout, picked it up and ran after the perpetrator saying, ``Excuse me, did you know you dropped this?''

The embarrassed woman attempted to deny the wrapper was hers, but Matt insisted. ``He wasn't going to let the truth off the hook,'' Homer Groening says.

Today Groening, like all humorists, still refuses to let the truth off the hook, whether drawing rabbits or miniature Boz act-a-likes. Somehow, though, he extends the truth beyond the traditional pratfalls and comedy of manners into the more unconventionally daring terrain of social values, morality, sexuality, religion and the meaning of life.

Daugherty cites one of the Life In Hell panels called ``Forbidden Words of the '90s'' as ``proving Matt is a brilliant social critic who sees through the cant and B.S. of the words we use. He's brilliant and sensitive and outrageous at the same time, and those don't often go together.''

Ultimately, all that burying his head in his hands turned out to be worth it. ``When I was drawing cartoons at Evergreen, I never dreamed I could make a living at it,'' Groening says. ``In fact, I never dreamed I could make a living at it until I was actually doing it.'' Now that he is not only making a living but riding a bronco of fame and fortune, Groening says with typical understatement, ``things have turned out better than I might have suspected.''

BOB SEIDEMANN IS A LOS ANGELES-BASED FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER.