Frank Caruso, Longtime Betty Boop Artist, Is Excited for Betty's Broadway Moment

Thirty-eight years ago, an ambitious young cartoonist named Frank Caruso turned up to the Manhattan offices of King Features for what was meant to be a single day’s freelance work. The company owned the rights to several golden-age cartoon characters and needed someone to do a few drawings of the lithesome, flirty, baby-voiced flapper Betty Boop.

The one-day gig turned into a few days; those few days turned into a few decades. First as an art director, then a creative director in King Features' licensing department, lately as the creative director of Fleischer Studios, Caruso has been drawing Betty Boop ever since. His Betty Boops have graced T-shirts, baseball caps, enamel pins, stickers, posters, coffee mugs, throw pillows, phone cases, keychains, socks, notebooks, water bottles and countless other items. “It was the longest one-day freelance gig ever,” he said.

In Monroe Township, New Jersey, Caruso's home, too, is busy with Betties. Several of them decorate the replica ’50s diner that occupies a spare room. But his basement studio—where he is surrounded by art supplies, animation books and cartoon paraphernalia—is where Caruso has spent endless hours coaxing Betty Boop into existence on the blank page with pungent black ink: Zombie Betties, Biker Betties (hugely popular in the ‘80s), Warhol Betties, Waitress Betties and more.

More than the keeper and purveyor of Betty’s likeness, Caruso is also a passionate champion for Betty. “I’ve talked to young people in art schools. I’ve said, ‘Look, I just want you guys to go to YouTube and watch some of the cartoons.’” They always come back, Caruso said, eager to talk about the wild, inventive humor of the cartoons and the gorgeous sassitude of Betty herself.

It’s possible that Caruso is more excited than anyone about Betty Boop starring in her own Broadway musical: BOOP!, now in previews, opens on April 5 at the Broadhurst Theatre. (The theater happens to be a quick walk away from 1600 Broadway, where Grim Natwick, one of the artists working under animation visionary Max Fleischer, first drew the character in 1930.) He was a regular audience member during the show’s run in Chicago. “Huge fan. Huge fan. I mean, I didn't want to leave Chicago. I could have stayed for the whole run.”

Caruso has been obsessed with cartoons his whole life. Many a Saturday morning was spent sitting on the floor in front of the television set, eating a bowl of Quisp with Hanna-Barbera characters as company. Top Cat was a personal favorite. “He was a cool cat with the best theme song.” His favorite characters to draw—and he was drawing nonstop—were Popeye, Fred Flintstone and the Pink Panther.

As for Betty Boop—the first-ever female and fully human cartoon star—Caruso discovered her 1930s cartoons later, when he was in high school, on VHS. “One hundred miscellaneous cartoons for a dollar! Great investment!” Betty’s exquisite, gently suggestive curves were more fun to draw, he realized, than the relatively straitlaced lines of Wilma Flintstone.

Caruso went on to study cartooning at the School for Visual Arts under such luminaries as MAD magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner. In art history class, Caruso spent half a semester studying Fleischer cartoons. After graduation, Caruso worked at Cracked magazine for a stint before that fateful “one-day freelance job” with King Features.

He fondly remembers those early days, perfecting Betty’s look. “Betty is a tough one,” Caruso admitted, demonstrating his process for a visitor. “You have to feel the volume, the weight of the character, and the roundness. The head is built out of ovals and then circles—everything's very circular, but not like Disney. Max [Fleischer] was always squashing things and bouncing things around.”

There are other essential details. The eyelashes: five atop each eye, four on the bottom. The curls in her hair: four on the outside, four on her forehead. The calligraphic daintiness of those eyebrows. The eyes are trickiest of all: “Everyone wants to give her human proportions and put the eyes up here,” said Caruso, indicating the center of her face. “But it's not going to be Betty Boop. The eyes are way down where the two ovals intersect—you need a lot of real estate in that forehead area because you have the eyelashes and you have the eyebrows, then you have the curls cutting down into that area.”

Beyond Betty herself, compared to the Disney shorts of the time period, the Fleischer Studios cartoons are striking for their urban feel, exuding the grit and groove of Depression-era New York. “You went into a diner in a Mickey Mouse cartoon, it's all sparkly and shiny, and there's palm trees and the sun's coming through, and it's beautiful. You go into a diner in a Fleischer cartoon, the chairs are knocked over, there's skulls in the corner, there's rats. It was New York City. I could only imagine what it was like back then, going down to the Bowery or going up to the jazz clubs. It must've been a wild scene. And Fleischer poured that into everything he did. That's the vibe I get.”

(Caruso of course has no shortage of ‘30s cartoon recommendations for anyone interested in witnessing Betty in her full animated glory. Check out “Bimbo’s Initiation,” which features a phantasmagoric bevy of Betties, or “Red Hot Mamma,” wherein Betty journeys to Hell and takes on Satan. If there’s a message in these shorts, it’s this: “As crazy as the world gets, Betty just marches right through it.”)

Caruso has thought a lot about the secrets to Betty’s enduring appeal over the years. “What I've learned—and I'm just getting warmed up—is she could be anything. In her early cartoons, starting in 1930, she was everything. She was a pilot, she was a judge. She ran for president.

“Part of the success of the character is people project themselves onto Betty. They see themselves in Betty. Betty could be a cheerleader, she could be a surfer, she could be a hula girl. She could be the Statue of Liberty! She could be whatever you want.” Plus, Betty has always been a fiercely independent woman. “It was like she didn't need a boyfriend. Mickey had Minnie and Donald had Daisy and Bugs had Babs or whatever the hell it was. Betty never had a boyfriend. She didn't need it.”

Capturing that personality and that spirit is way more important, Caruso said, than studiously recreating her exact proportions or perfecting the curlicues of her hair. “A good drawing is a good drawing, but capturing the heart and soul of Betty Boop is what makes it art.”

That challenge, of properly understanding and conveying Betty’s essence, was one shared and taken seriously by Bob Martin, the writer tasked with penning the book for the musical. “She's really full of life and joy,” Martin said in a phone interview. “She's an extremely positive character. She's beautiful and sexy, and she's not ashamed of that. Her main problem is that she's being chased by men all the time.” (Yes, that is something that happens in the show.) “She's always been unapologetically female and very proud of her body and her situation.”

At first, Caruso was nervous about the long-gestating idea of a Betty Boop musical. “It reminded me of when I first started having to uphold the mantle of Fleischer and the integrity of this character. It's not just taking a character and giving her songs. You really have to get into the head of Max first and then of Betty and what she represents. So yeah, I mean, I was definitely anxious.”

But now, when talking about the show, Caruso has the air of a proud parent, thrilled at Betty’s Broadway moment. He digs the songs by David Foster (“You're coming out dancing”) and, crucially, he has been thoroughly won over by Jasmine Amy Rogers’ embodiment of Betty. “She’s incredible. Really incredible. An incredible singer, dancer, actor, but, above all of that, she’s just an incredible person. Her laugh is infectious. She's sweet and kind. And a lot of that is what I've seen and felt in Betty."

Seeing a living, breathing Betty Boop entertain a captive theater audience—much as the animated, celluloid version of her did nearly a century ago—has been the thrill of a lifetime. “How this character, who has literally been in my head every single day of my life for almost 40 years now, is really resonating with everyone that goes to see the show... It gives me chills.”

Check out the full gallery below for more from Frank Caruso's Betty Boop-filled studio and home.