Jonathan Winters For These Times
“In Lieu of a Carrot” by the great Jonathan Winters
Comedian-actor-artist Jonathan Winters would have turned 99 years old today.
Over the last week, I returned to Winters’ books, artwork, and a conversation with him. I needed an elixir.
Winters was very kind, very funny, and a curious listener. Just before the election, I re-read his 1987 book “Winters’ Tales (Stories and Observations for the Unusual).” The book is a collection of 25 years of Winters’ essays and thoughts. I bought “Winters Tales” for my father who was a huge Winters fan. They are both gone now but their considerable spirits come alive when I read this book.
The end of the book features Winters’s timeless reflections:
My Hobby: “I collect rainbows after a thundershower. I collect warm handshakes from complete strangers (I’m always, every day and every night, on the lookout for a smile.)”
Shadows: “The shadow a cross casts on an unmarked grave in a veteran’s cemetery.”
Love: “The poor so often have only their love to give, and when they receive love, it fills them with a richness no wealthy man can understand.”
Winters was born in Dayton, Ohio on Nov. 11, 1925, and he moved to Springfield, Ohio in 1932. He would have made a painting of the eating cats and dogs nonsense. In 1943 Winters dropped out of Springfield High School to join the Marines. He served in the Pacific during World War II. My father served in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. I’m thinking of these men today.
After the war, Winters attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio before transferring to the Dayton Art Institute.
In 1948 he met his wife Elaine Schauder, a Dayton native studying art at Ohio State University in Columbus. They married a month later.
He loved Ohio. He always carried a buckeye in his pocket. Winters was a lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan. When I met him in 1988 he wore a bright red Cincinnati Reds tie. Elaine died in 2009 after 61 years of marriage. Winters died just after opening day in April 2013. He was 87. He never grew up and that is how you stay young.
He was a decent man.
Winters was in Chicago in 1988 to promote “Hang-Ups,” a collection of 50 of his prints that combine playful themes with Native American textures. Winters was one-sixteenth Cherokee and he used bold colors to honor Native American strength. I pulled “Hang Ups” out of my library and his themes hold up.
“An Evil Woodpecker” depicts a woodpecker chopping away at a wooden cross atop a church. “A New Member” features six Ku Klux Klan members in white hoods behind a fence, followed by one in a black hood. Winters wrote, “I always thought the Ku Klux Klan was as frightening a movement there’s ever been in this country….Every movement needs a new member.”
With his painting “In Lieu of a Carrot” he combined the surrealism of Rene Magritte with the bold colors of Native American art as a knight rides a bird-like horse. He referred to his work as “painted verbal pictures.”
Although he spent four years at the Dayton Art Institute, Winters called himself a self-taught artist. He deployed the improvisational skills of comedy into his paintings. In the “Hang-Ups” foreword he wrote, “…school is terrific when it comes to giving students the tools they need. But I realize today the artist who are self-taught generally are more gifted (or get more gifted) than those with fancy degrees.”
At the time “Hang-Ups” came out some people were critical of Winters’ surrealistic style. He told me, “Because my work isn’t just a vase with flowers in it, people say that (for) a guy that doesn’t smoke or drink or who has never been into drugs, ‘Are you heavy into drugs?’”
“Fire on the Reservation” Jon wrote of the Native American, “He has lost so much, but he has never lost who he is. That is why I paint the Indian in his strength and his colors.” (From “Hang-Ups”).
The best known Winters off-stage bit was in the spring of 1959, when after appearing at the Hungry i in San Francisco, he allegedly scaled the rigging of a ship moored at Fisherman’s Wharf and threatened to jump. (He denied climbing the rigging.) But the escapade wound up with Winters scoring an eight-month stay in a California sanitarium. He also conquered alcoholism. His father was an alcoholic whose drinking cost him his marriage. Winters, an only child, was 7 when his parents split up which led to his move to Springfield Ohio.
He loved to make people laugh and no one was a stranger. A couple of times during our conversation rolled into random characters or monologues.
In a 1989 interview in New York City David Letterman told me he liked Johnny Carson because he was so effortless and Winters because he was uninhibited. “I just saw him at a restaurant in Los Angeles where he cornered a group of people and was relentless,” Letterman said. “He would not leave. At first they were amused because they were just tourists having lunch with Jonathan Winters while he performed for them. But he would not stop performing. He just went on and on and on. You could sense a collective anxiety like, ‘Gawd, how are we going to get on with our lives?’.” The late Richard Lewis had daily phone conversations with the effervescent comic towards the end of Winters’ life.
One of my first encounters with Winters was my father taking me to see 1963’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” in single-lens Cinerama at the since-razed RKO Grand Theatre in downtown Columbus Ohio. That road trip comedypaloooza included Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Spencer Tracy, Stan Freberg, the Three Stooges, Edie Adams and more. Winters played temperamental furniture truck driver Lennie Pike.
Jonathan in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”
He enjoyed portraying regular working-class people such as the 1970’s Hefty trash bag man. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was director Stanley Kramer’s (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Inherit the Wind”) first stab at a full-length comedy. A few months ago Eddie Murphy told Entertainment Tonight he had finished a script with Martin Lawrence for an “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” remake.
I also watched my DVD of the 2011 mockumentary “Certifiably Jonathan” which features Winters surrounded by a bouquet of fans like Jim Carrey, Sarah Silverman and Tim Conway. The elastic character humor of Winters was a major influence on Robin Williams who has an important role in the film. Winters played Robin Williams’ son on the hit television series “Mork and Mindy.”
The “Certifiably Jonathan” story line revolves around Winters getting painter’s block after one of his paintings is stolen from a gallery wall. I won’t tell anything more that through a 2024 lens Robin Williams talking Winters out of a suicide attempt at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is poignant.
The film was pretty much panned—Roger Ebert gave it one star–and has its own weird backstory. In 2014 the “Certifiably Jonathan” producers Richard Marshall and Matt Fortnow put rights to the final film, over 200 hours of footage, “Certifiably Jonathan” t shirts and 13,000 DVDs of “Certifiably Jonathan” for sale on eBay. The film took four years to make according to the Los Angeles Times. The asking eBay price was $199,000.
There’s no word if anyone purchased the collection. Posts on a “Certifiably Jonathan” Facebook page stopped in 2022. The film’s website is down. But hopefully, a polished-up version of the doc would be ready for the 100th anniversary of his birthday.
I asked Winters about his piece “The Survivors.”
The painting embraces a crying crimson pony sharing a small island with a trio of white doves and a barren tree holding an empty hanger–as in hang-ups. In the foreground are two smaller islands full of promising, blooming violets. The sky is punctuated by white lightning. There is hope.
“I’ve always thought I was a survivor at a lot of things,” Winters answered. “Not that other people aren’t. Hopefully, they’ve survived a lot more than I have. It sounds strange when people ask, ‘Well, what have you survived?’ The fact you might have been killed in the war? Did you survive hospitalization? Alcoholism? I’ve had a few major things hit me that jolted my life mentally and physically.
“But the thing that upsets me almost daily is the tremendous amount of people around me that don’t have any sense of humor. Any. Somebody asked me what I was afraid of the most. It’s the guy who has no sense of humor. And on top of that, he thinks he does. That’s the worst. So this is the drain. This is the time you say, ‘I am a survivor. I’ve lasted these storms’. The wind was yesterday and the snow is tomorrow. And I know what it is. It is sensitivity. There are two kinds of people. Color and religion have nothing to do with it.
“It’s always sensitivity.”
Happy Birthday Mr. Winters. You are not forgotten. We should all shake hands with a stranger.
“The Survivors”
The great thing about Jonathan Winters, which doubled when he was onscreen with Robin Williams, was the palpable sense that anything could happen in the next moment and EVERYONE would be surprised. It was beyond just improv skills. They were channeling an energy and sharing it through their talent.
Hi Paul, Excellent—let me know if you ever saw that mockumentary. Worth a look. Hope there’s a big thing for his 100th birthday–a smiling U.S. Postal stamp. Thanks!
My father, too, was a Jonathan Winters fan. I loved to watch him laugh at/with him and eagerly joined in. We had some of his LPs., which I listened to in the attempt recreated his voices and sound effects. Thanks Dave, once again, for bringing a great Anerican to the light they deserve!
Thank you Lee, hope to see you soon, Dave