IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, August 22, 1954 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Miss Mizzou sings in a nightclub up north in Canada. Steve Canyon is “roughed up” by some of her adoring fans in the audience.

Did Caniff draw on films for plot elements of his stories? Let’s take a look at an example featuring Marilyn Monroe.

On April 30, 1954, “River of No Return” came out in theaters. At the beginning of the film Monroe plays a “nightclub” entertainer in a tent city full of gold prospectors. She quickly leaves the lifestyle for the main plot which involves a gold hungry boyfriend, a farmer recently released from prison, and a trip down a dangerous river in hostile Indian country.

In early August of 1954, the Steve Canyon strip started having another storyline featuring Miss Mizzou. The story finds Mizzou employed as a nightclub entertainer in a small town built around temporary workers constructing radar detection stations. Mizzou is in a similar position to Monroe in the film, so I think it’s possible that the film may have influenced Caniff to write the sequence. Considering that Caniff usually worked at least two or three months ahead around that time, the timeline for this theory fits.

It’s hard to say if Caniff would so brazenly borrow from “River of No Return” for his 1954 story. In 1986 he wrote that the 1952 Miss Mizzou story might have been sparked by the 1944 Alfred Hitchcock film “Lifeboat.” He also added, “Generally speaking, though, films are a subliminal thing. You have to be careful because you don’t want to copy or steal. Some readers won’t let you get away with it.”

IMAGE: Noah Bean and Nicole Rodenburg acting in William Inge’s BUS STOP (2010). Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson. From Huntington Theater Company on flickr. Some rights reserved.

In 1986 cartoonist Milton Caniff made a comment that Miss Mizzou had a “Bus Stop” kind of role. Caniff was probably referring to the film “Bus Stop” based on the play of the same name by William Inge. What Caniff probably didn’t know was that the genesis of the play was formed by Inge while he was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. More on that later.

The “Bus Stop” film came out August 31, 1956, and probably was interesting to Caniff because Marilyn Monroe’s character Cherie had a back-story similar to Miss Mizzou’s established story. In the film Monroe plays a small-time entertainer in an Arizona nightclub that piques the romantic interest of a sheltered Montana rancher. While this is a noted similarity to Miss Mizzou, who often worked in clubs singing and dancing, the character is also said to be from the Ozarks, an area which lies partly in Missouri. The film was considered one of Monroe’s greatest roles.

The film was based on a play of the same name by William Inge. Born in Independence, Kansas, Inge went to college at Lawrence, Kansas. After he got his masters degree he taught at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri from 1938 to 1943. In 1943 he moved to St. Louis to be the drama and music critic for the St. Louis Times. He returned to teaching at Washington University in St. Louis in 1946 before moving to New York in 1949. In New York he released plays such as “Come Back, Little Sheba” (1950) and “Picnic” (1952). The play “Bus Stop” was first preformed March 2, 1955.

“Bus Stop” was based on an earlier short play that he had written called “People in the Wind.” It’s hard to say when the play was exactly written though. A book by Ralph F. Voss suggests Inge was working on “People in the Wind” around 1948, and Inge himself said that he wrote it sometime during the early 1950s; one date I came across in a book by R. Baird Shuman indicated he wrote it in 1953. The name of the play itself was possibly taken from the name of a sculpture by Kenneth Armitage created in 1950.

“People in the Wind” takes place at a bus stop but the characters do not get stuck there in a snow storm like the longer play and film. In “People in the Wind” Cherie (only known as “girl” in the text) has quit her job at a nightclub and is on a bus headed to Hollywood. In the “Bus Stop” play, she quits her nightclub job, but is more aimless. In both plays, the setting is a small Kansas town instead of Arizona as in the film. Only in the “Bus Stop” play does Inge specify Cherie’s province: “Her origin is the Ozarks and her speech is Southern.”

In an Autumn 1967 interview in “The Transatlantic Review” with Digby Diehl, William Inge tells of how the idea for “Bus Stop” came about:

“I got the idea for that from an experience I had teaching at Stephens College, which is in Missouri halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. Sometimes I’d take a weekend trip to either city on a bus. Once I got on the bus to Kansas City and there was a young man, kind of a vagrant, who was pursuing this girl. They were both alone, and there were two or three rest stops between Columbia and Kansas City. At each stop he’d sit next to her and try to talk her into getting off the bus with him at Kansas City. I was attracted to the situation, but the characters were my own.”

Did the appearance of Miss Mizzou on the comics page influence the development of the Cherie character in “Bus Stop?” Given that Inge had taught at Stephens College for five years, it’s possible he was attuned to the appearance of Miss Mizzou in the comics. It’s hard to say if it was probable. We don’t know if Inge paid any attention to Caniff’s strip, and other influences existed around the time that could have suggested the possibility of the Cherie character to Inge. If the 1953 completion date for “People in the Wind” is correct, I doubt that Miss Mizzou’s first appearance in 1952 would have prompted Inge to create the girl character. Miss Mizzou’s employment as a nightclub entertainer is only hinted at in that opening Caniff story, and not firmly established until her second appearance in 1954.

William Inge did meet up with the inspiration for Miss Mizzou though. While filming “Bus Stop” Marilyn Monroe met Inge and they formed a friendship. Their names were occasionally linked in the years preceding the film, suggesting a romantic involvement, but this would have not been the case: Inge was a closeted gay man. Perhaps part of the appeal of Inge to Monroe may have been that he was not attracted to her, as so many other men were in the 1950s.

Research note: Thanks to the Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas for help with information in this blog post. The school houses the William Inge Center for the Arts and the William Inge Collection.

IMAGE: Marvel by user CODYody on flickr. Some rights reserved.

How did the Miss Mizzou skit shows get started? When the first Miss Mizzou contest was explained in an issue of the 1956 Alumnus Magazine, a calendar was mentioned but no skits. By the next year, the Savitar yearbook mentions that there were “Miss Mizzou Skits” in a couple of places, so they must have started that year. How elaborate were these early skits?

Take this photo from the 1957 Savitar yearbook, which shows what looks like a potential Miss Mizzou contender backed up by several other girls. The setting of this photo looks fairly informal with the men in the photo sitting on couches in some type of lounge environment. By 1957-1958, it looks like the skits had grown to include a stage show. A photo from the 1958 Savitar yearbook shows a photo of a women in a trench coat on a stage surrounded by several other girls.

The Miss Mizzou skits stayed as a stage show until the final show in the Fall of 1970. That year they actually did not produce a calendar; only the skit show. This means that in theory there should have been 15 calendars produced and 15 skit shows produced. Taken together, that’s 16 years total of the Miss Mizzou contest.