Cartoonist Has a ‘Starr’ Role Again : Dale Messick, 80, Helps Promote Movie Based on Strip

In a trip around town, the self-styled Little Old Lady drew the spotlight away from the world-class beauty.

Dale Messick, 80, was helping Brooke Shields promote the actress’ latest movie, “Brenda Starr,” to be released next summer and based on the gorgeous redhaired newspaper reporter that Messick created for the comics 46 years ago.

After they appeared together on television, Messick was stunned--and delighted--to find that she was the one who was pursued by photographers and reporters. “They all flocked around me,” she recalls. “They wanted to know the secret of my being young.” Her answer: “I cover up all the bad parts.”

A Winning Effect

Maybe. Certainly the effect is winning. On a recent morning, Messick showed up at her studio in downtown Santa Rosa elegant in a beige-and-black checked suit, dripping bangles and bracelets, every strawberry blond hair in place. She says that when people ask her if Brenda is a redhead because she is, she has to admit that “No, I have red hair because she has.

“People say to me that I am very photogenic, but that is because I know what to do with myself. Brenda and I were always fashionable.”

She walks a brisk two or three miles a day and says she watches her diet. (Sometimes she watches from a distance; lunch on this day consisted of apple pie a la mode.)

Messick grew up near Gary, Ind. As a girl she says she was “a little sickly” and didn’t graduate from high school until she was 21. After two years at art school, she went to work for a greeting card company in New York and spent her spare time peddling her comic strip.

Changed ‘Dalia’ to ‘Dale’

The idea that a woman could also be a cartoonist was met with a certain amount of hilarity, she says, so she changed her name from Dalia--”which made me a she”--to Dale. Still, it took her 3 1/2 years to launch Brenda. Art directors would look at her drawings, lay them aside and ask, “How about lunch?”

“I would say that Brenda Starr was a soap opera on paper with a few laughs,” Messick says. “Brenda could go out in a storm, be dumped in the garbage and still look gorgeous. It was not realistic, really.”

Indeed not. Ever since 1940, an eternally 23-year-old Brenda has traipsed across exotic landscapes solving crimes, saving lives and being romanced by glamorous suitors with names like Timber Woods and Cash Wallstreet. “Her boyfriends were always millionaires,” Messick says. “She always had some millionaire in love with her, so she was never hard up.”

Named for Debutante

Messick says that “I’d get letters from big-time reporters asking, ‘Who are you trying to kid?’ My answer was, ‘Well, heck, if Brenda lived the kind of life you reporters live, nobody would read it.’ ”

Brenda was named for Brenda Frazier, the top debutante of the 1940s, and her looks were inspired by Rita Hayworth. In its heyday, Messick says, Brenda Starr ran in 250 newspapers. Messick stopped drawing it in 1980, but continued writing the story line until 1983. Now it’s drawn by Ramona Fradon and written by Mary Schmich.

Messick suspects that television has undermined the popularity of strips like hers. “They are not as popular anymore because it takes too long to tell your story,” she suggests.

Brenda’s romance with “mystery man” Basil St. John, who rescued her from a burning building and then disappeared, went on for 31 years. “I wanted her to marry long before she did,” Messick says, explaining that the wedding ceremony had to wait until the head of the syndicate distributing the strip, who thought that readers would object, died.

Searching for Rare Serum

So Basil, tall, dark and handsome, with a black patch over one eye, kept dropping out of the story to search for a serum made from rare black orchids, the antidote with which to protect himself from the madness that ran in his family.

“I always said that if you took the patch off, you could probably see all the way through his head,” Messick reminisces.

When she finally married off Brenda and Basil, in 1976, some of her readers apparently were impatient with the amount of time they spent in bed.

Change the Sheets

“Their bed had sheets with roses,” Messick says. “I got a letter from three young women who said, ‘They have been married for more than three weeks. Don’t you think they should change the sheets?’ I changed the sheets.”

Messick herself quickly got impatient with the pace of her own life after she stopped drawing Brenda. “Most retired people have a hobby like golf or bridge or bingo. I never did anything like that,” she says.

She moved to a Santa Rosa retirement community to be near her daughter, Starr, and two grandchildren. “When I reached the age of 75, the syndicate retired me,” she explains. “I probably would have kept right on. For maybe two months, I said, ‘Ha, I am free, free, free.’ But then I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

‘I Like It Better’

She was disdainful of her routine where “the biggest deal of the day is seeing what the mailman brought or going out to empty the garbage. I decided I was too swinging, so I got a pad in town.” That really wasn’t satisfactory either, so last spring she moved back to the retirement community and says “I like it better now.”

Still, she has no interest in what she calls the CCCC Club there--Cadillacs, Cocktails, Cataracts, Cardiacs”--and complains that “if you live in a retirement center and are fairly attractive, the women with husbands won’t let you near them.”

Not that Messick, who has been married and divorced twice, is in the market for other women’s husbands. “No way will I marry an old man and take care of him,” she says. Currently she has three boyfriends, one for every mood, even though “all three wouldn’t make one good man. But at my age, you can’t be too choosy.” She believes her career was probably the reason her marriages failed. “I personally think women shouldn’t get married,” she says.

To give her life some structure, Messick rented a studio in the center of Santa Rosa and goes there faithfully three days a week. She is developing three spot cartoons and paints miniature watercolors as well as portraits for which she charges $50. “You would be surprised how many people try to get three or four people or the whole family in the picture,” she says.

Even more maddening are those who say they’d love a portrait but just can’t afford to pay the price of a sitting. “They wouldn’t go to a plumber and say, ‘I can’t afford to pay you, but I would love you to repair my leak,’ now would they?” Messick asks. She puts her earnings into $1,000 scholarships for top art students at three local high schools.

A Little Forgetful

She complains that getting older has made her a little forgetful, but then adds that her daughter says she always has been. Once she drew Basil’s patch over the wrong eye and another time, drawing Brenda’s baby in a fluffy bassinet, she decided she didn’t like the position of one of the infant’s legs and redrew it. Unfortunately she forgot to erase the awkward limb, and the baby appeared in print with three legs. “That got more letters than anything I ever did,” the artist says, adding, “A couple of times, I got Brenda into a scrape and didn’t know how to get her out, so I just had her wake up.”

She recalls that after a television appearance years ago, she was rushing down the hall from her hotel room to catch a plane and got halfway to the elevator before she noticed she didn’t have a skirt on.

Obviously, Messick loves to spin a story, even on herself, but the material in Santa Rosa was not as rich. So she was delighted when Teri Shields, Brooke’s mother, invited her to help launch the film last summer.

“I said, ‘Sure I would like to come to New York and be on TV,’ ” Messick says. “But they wouldn’t let me travel alone. They said, ‘You get an escort.’ ”

So she invited a 38-year-old cartoonist who had been her assistant, and who “is like a son,” to accompany her. “I didn’t want to take another little old lady,” she explains.

Given Honeymoon Suite

She had asked to be put up at the Plaza Hotel, where she and her second husband had honeymooned, but expects she was “misunderstood,” since they landed in the honeymoon suite. Says Messick: “They never realized I was just a little old lady traveling with an assistant drawer. It worked out very well, though--there were two bedrooms.”

Back home again, she found that publicizing the film had brought her into the spotlight, too, with calls coming in from people wanting to involve her in new projects. One she has taken on was suggested by a 95-year-old woman who asked Messick to illustrate her autobiography, which the woman has been working on since 1917.

Next month, Messick will travel to Kansas City to help promote a horse show. “I told them, ‘Sure, I’ll do it, if I can put on a costume and have my photograph taken sitting on a horse,’ ” she says.

“After all, I’ve been on a horse once or twice before. It’s the getting on and off that’s hard.”