Drawing Power

Back when sitcoms were a bold new experiment and every network had a variety show on the air, illustrator Robert Thompson was a household name among the art directors of New York.

At the time, the prolific West Coast illustrator was producing wildly inspired images that heralded the coming of TV classics, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to All in the Family and Three's Company. His portraits introduced Carol Burnett to audiences and announced Elvis's return to TV after his stint in the army.

More than 50 years later, his work offers more than fond nostalgia — it chronicles a dynamic time in television when TV's Golden Age of the 1950s was giving way to something more experimental and groundbreaking.

Thompson died in 1997 at 71, but his lively portraits are garnering renewed interest since his sons, Jeffrey and Stephen, stumbled on a cache of more than 300 examples of their father's cover illustrations in a closet in his apartment in Costa Mesa, California,

For 25 years, starting in 1959, Thompson illustrated covers for Showtime, a national syndicate that distributed material to local newspapers. Inspired equally by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney, Thompson displayed a scruffy levity in his work, which spoke to the dominant youth culture of the era and the irreverence of Pop Art.

"The style [then] was really pen and ink with background color," says Jeffrey, who works in print production. "None of it is very complex. But the simplicity reflects that age."

Line drawing was a deadline-driven business, and Thompson made his name by being fast and clever. In studios in downtown Los Angeles and Newport Beach, he kept his head down at a drawing board scattered with stills of TV's biggest names.

Roger Folk, a fellow Showtime artist, sat next to him. "He was a good-natured person, quiet and very conscientious," Folk recalls. "He worked hard at his projects."

New York editors would send Thompson photos of actors and other TV types — say, cast members from Gilligan's Island or director Alfred Hitchcock — when they were launching a new show or syndicating an old one. Quick as he could, he would send back his painted sketches. Each image had to amplify the star's persona, giving it relevance and style.

"He didn't really like things to be perfect," Jeffrey says. "He liked them kind of broad and unfinished, like you could keep working on them if you wanted to. His favorite style was loose and fun."

Thompson's upbringing was unorthodox for the time. He was the youngest son of East Coast intellectuals — his father was a professor at Cornell University and his mother, a onetime traveling stage performer, sometimes took Thompson to Communist Party meetings as a boy.

When Thompson was young, the family relocated to Los Angeles for his father's health. Thompson immersed himself in Hollywood's jazz scene as a teen, sketching live performances and offering his work to the musicians at intermission. He also sketched cartoons for his school newspaper and played drums.

As a young man, he joined the navy, where he was recruited to paint insignias on warplanes and even on the flight jackets of his fellow sailors. Back on land, he was asked to tour with famed-conductor-to-be Andre Previn, then a jazz pianist. Thompson declined, deciding he was better suited to family life and the visual arts than the life of a touring musician.

"He was very fast and could capture a lot of really fun stuff," says longtime friend, Santa Barbara sculptor Bud Bottoms. "He was a live wire as a drummer and cartoonist. Everybody loved him."

After his navy service, Thompson spent two years at art school in Santa Monica and, in the late 1940s, landed a job as a technical illustrator for Hughes Aircraft. But after a year of feeling like the lone liberal thinker among conservatives there, he left to become a freelance illustrator. By then, advertising was becoming big business,

Now his sons are cataloguing his work, with plans to offer limited editions on their website, VintageTVart.com.

"It's a chronicle of what was happening in culture through television," Jeffrey says. "This really tells the story of television after the Golden Age."