CHAPTER 2 The Early Period (1948–1962)

When Blake Edwards’s media career began in the late 1940s, his ambition was limitless. This was a lifelong inclination of his. In 1987 his uncle, Owen Crump, told us that as an adolescent he had been “urgently inventive,” adding,

You absolutely could not keep him from going in nineteen different directions. He always had some tremendous instinct for doing something, making something, and not like children do. He was into all kinds of odd things. His mind was just clickety-clack, even when he was growing up. When he was still a very young, young teenager, he and a friend out here in California decided they would go into the cartoon business and they drew a whole series of strips with cartoon characters that were really quite wonderful. They were just excellent and looked very professional and he was just absolutely out of his mind about being a cartoonist. Well, he was always into some kind of thing like that and he has such a restless mind, which is the same today. He just can’t sit still. He has to be writing another script or getting involved in some kind of a work that today is theatrical. But, he absolutely has a possessiveness about doing something all the time and not for just being busy, but for creating something. With Blake it’s just a complete restlessness that he has to this day.

Edwards’s creative urgency moved him to engage many modes of expression. Aside from his adolescent cartoon strips, his friend, the popular singer ...

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