Lee Salem, the syndicate's president, is ecstatic. Two creative minds like that getting together! The Wizard of Oz! Winnie the Pooh! Peter Pan! Excited, he calls Watterson at home in Chagrin Falls, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. Would he talk to Spielberg?
No, Watterson says.
"Bill simply was not interested," Salem remembers now, the sound of lost millions in licensing revenue like so much static down the phone line.
It turned out Watterson wasn't interested in doing anything other than the strip. After the first couple of years, no interviews. No "Calvin and Hobbes" dolls -- even if Hobbes was, at least as adults see it, a doll himself. (There's no telling how much a Hobbes doll could have made. The syndicate originally had licensing rights, but Watterson's opposition was so vehement that Salem ultimately "caved in completely'' and gave all the rights back to Watterson. "Otherwise, I'd be on the beach somewhere right now,'' Salem says.) No animated specials. No calendars, notebooks, pencils, backpacks or lunch boxes. (Those car decals of a Calvinesque brat whizzing on one thing or another are rip-offs.)
In 1990, Watterson gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. It was about fleeing the "real world."
He apparently hasn't appeared in a public forum since.
Very few photographs, too. These are old now, but show a slender, bespectacled man with a Marine buzz cut and a thick, somber mustache. Dark eyes, maybe friendly, maybe just tired of you.
He's 47 now. Lives in Cleveland proper with his wife, Melissa, in a house tax records show the couple bought last year for less than you can get a condo for in Washington. In the introduction to the book, he says he paints and studies music.
"He's a pretty regular guy who lives on a regular street," says West. "His neighbors know who he is. He visits his family, but trotting around the world never interested him. He doesn't live significantly different than he did 20 years ago."
Watterson was born in the District and grew up in the droning normalcy of Chagrin Falls. His mom, Kathryn, was on the city council and his dad a patent attorney. He would use the family house as the model for Calvin's, Kathryn Watterson says in a telephone interview, and his dad as the model for Calvin's. ("I'd be happy to talk to you all day long, but Bill's been so private," she says. "He's a thoughtful, introspective person, so it sort of goes along that he wouldn't seek out publicity.")
At Kenyon, Watterson wanted to be a political cartoonist. He got a job as one for a paper in Cincinnati after graduation, but wound up in the unemployment line six months later. He designed ads for a weekly shopper in the windowless basement of a convenience store.
After hours and on weekends, he developed comic strips no one wanted. He eventually drew one populated by a dozen characters including a kid named Marvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. On the suggestion of one syndicate, Watterson kept the stuffed tiger, gave Marvin's Beatlesque mop a haircut, changed his name and dumped the rest of the cast.
