Drawn to Classic TV

As a child growing up in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mark Bennett already was a veteran of weekend open houses. Even though his parents never moved, they loved to check out other people’s homes.

But for the most part, as the 40-year-old artist said recently, he felt ignored by his “very busy” parents. Shy and fearful of the outside world, Bennett idolized his older brother. When his brother began drawing pictures of houses, Bennett eagerly followed suit.

In 1965, the sitcom “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (based on the bestseller by Jean Kerr and the movie that starred Doris Day) debuted on TV, with Patricia Crowley as happy-go-lucky homemaker Joan Nash. Bennett couldn’t take his eyes off the staircase.

“I remember drawing it over and over,” he said. “It went up about 20 stairs and it had this little landing with kind of like a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ balcony, and then it went up again.”

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he’d sit in front of the television, leaning on an album cover, to copy the homes he saw in sitcoms on reams of scrap paper his father brought home from the office. (“It’s hard for me now to use a real drafting board,” Bennett said. “You get used to whatever you’ve grown up with.”)

Before the VCR era, he had to rely on memory, sketching madly during commercial breaks and frantically jotting down useful scraps of information, like household phone numbers.

At first, he simply made thumbnail sketches of the exteriors of the houses he saw on the tube. “I had to picture what the Petrie house [home of Rob and Laura on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’] looked like,” he said, “because they never showed it.” A high school course in drafting taught him how to draw house plans, which he made “off and on” for 20 years.

Bennett’s floor plans for 34 television homes and offices are collected in “TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes,” (1996, $19.95), published last year by TV Books and distributed by Penguin USA.

“TV was my addiction and my way of escaping,” Bennett said. “I always believed in it as a real thing--that Mary Richards really did exist and that Perry Mason really could be hired to represent you.

“I kind of bought into the idea that you bought a new car every year, that your best friends were not relatives but co-workers and that you had a new wardrobe every season.”

In grade school, when Bennett would hear other kids talking about his programs, he was silently outraged. “I didn’t realize everyone watched TV,” he said. “They were talking about something that was personal to me.”

One dilemma Bennett faced in drawing the plans--which feature detailed information on furnishings and accouterments--is that the interiors didn’t always look the same.

“One season they had a spinet piano in Rob and Laura’s house,” Bennett said, “and in the next season they didn’t. So do you add it or leave it out?”

Bennett says the “purest” image of a sitcom house is usually in the first episode. But sometimes he simply chose his favorite season.

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The house featured in the first season of “Bewitched” in 1964 particularly pleased Bennett. “It was very modern yet it had colonial touches,” he said. “They’d throw in a Windsor chair in this airport-type house.”

Career woman Mary Richards “kept the brown suede couch” from the first season of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Bennett said, “but she changed the little wicker chairs and she went to a French look and a more subdued carpeting [instead of] the shag. It would change with the times. She couldn’t keep a 1970 apartment look in 1977.”

Although Bennett studied art in college in the late ‘70s and spent a year in New York University’s graduate art program, he never really saw himself as an artist. Gallery rejections didn’t help, and years of depression, exacerbated by alcohol abuse, dimmed his drive.

Bennett, who lives in L.A. and works for the U.S. Postal Service, said he had “pretty much decided [the blueprints] weren’t art” when he found himself with a big Visa bill to pay two years ago. Cobalt Cantina, a Silver Lake restaurant, agreed to hang some of the drawings in the bar, and Bennett figured he could get $20 apiece for them.

It was a lucky move. Christopher Ford, director of the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, was sufficiently intrigued to offer Bennett a one-man show.

His original 47 blueprints are now priced at $3,000 each (half of this group has been sold) and his limited-edition lithographs (which are almost sold out) go for $300 to $500.

The national media’s love affair with Bennett’s drawings began last year and hasn’t abated, with articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, Harpers, TV Guide and Family Circle magazines and guest appearances on the “Today” show, “Good Morning America” and National Public Radio.

“I was really nervous when they first told me they wanted to put me on the ‘Today’ show,” Bennett said. “I’m not in the same place I was when I did these drawings. But if I look at it as a way of sharing with the public what I have cherished all these years, it’s OK.

“I haven’t gotten a big head. Two years from now, there’s going to be [another hot artist]. This is my time, and I want to be present for it.”

Bennett’s obsession has extended to collecting books on some of the furniture in the shows, like Fin Juhl’s designs for Baker Furniture, which appears in Perry Mason’s office.

“A lot of those brand names were my way of learning what to buy in life,” Bennett said. “As a teenager, I bought a Mary Richards Mustang. I also bought a Sony Trinitron because she had one.”

He identified so completely with the sitcoms that he insisted on positioning the couch in his first apartment in such a way the “audience” could see it properly.

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But Bennett’s sitcom fever peaked years ago. He got sober a few years ago with the help of therapy and replaced his fantasy life with a real one. (“When I was doing these drawings, I didn’t have friends.”)

Even before his recovery, he mourned the diminished supply of sitcoms with warmly sympathetic characters leading fantasy lives. “When the ‘70s and ‘80s rolled around, you had realistic television, shows like ‘Roseanne.’ Those houses weren’t anything to aspire to,” he said.

“People have asked me, ‘Don’t you have “Hogan’s Heroes”?’ Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. . . . The people whose houses I draw are a part of me.”

Bennett doesn’t draw the plans anymore, but he sometimes accedes to special requests from collectors.

Although he initially declined to do the Jetsons’ home (“They were on paper; they weren’t real people”), he relented and now considers that blueprint one of his best.

“If I can make people smile,” he said, “I feel I’ve done my job.”

Bennett’s dealer, the Mark Moore Gallery, is at 2032-A Broadway in Santa Monica; (310) 453-3031.