Turning the Other Cheek

Margie Lawrence: Cover Artist

By Donald G. Evans

As Margie Lawrence circles Wrigley Field on her silver bike, people know her. She stops to flirt with the beer vendors assembled for a pre-game meeting inside the The Pen on the northeast corner of Clark and Waveland; she flags down the pedicab drivers to share gossip; she huddles with season bleacher ticket holders about possible extras; she pow wows with the ball hawks. She has stories about nights out with old Cubs and craziness at parties with the ground crew, and knows all the bleacher bums by their street names.

Margie Lawrence and Carmella Hartigan“The first time I went to the park in 1963, I was playing hooky from LeMoyne School with a friend from the neighborhood,” says Margie. “It was her idea. We got in for free and had a wonderful time. But my aunt was the principal of LeMoyne, so…”

Margie grew up at 531 West Addison, between Pine Grove and Lake Shore Drive, the daughter of an artist/school teacher mother and jewelry designer father. Rita worked in advertising before her marriage to Don, who started as a diamond setter on Jewelry Row then took his Goldsmith Ltd. design business to the Gold Coast.

In high school, Margie would go to Wrigley Field “basically to flirt with the boys and dream about the ones on the field.” She pursued an acting career in the early eighties, working with such luminaries as Second City’s Del Close and Paul Sills. She also designed theatre sets and lighting on the East Coast and here. Romance led Margie to Texas, but she returned, minus the beau, to accept a scholarship at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Margie journeyed home on August 8, 1988, and on the back end of a 12-hour trip from Topeka, Kansas she altered her route so she could go right by Wrigley Field. “It was the day the lights went on; I was ecstatic,” Margie says. “I thought to myself, I' m never going to leave Chicago again.’ ”

Don Lawrence died of Alzheimer’s in 1998, just a few weeks after Harry Caray passed, and Margie used a small inheritance from her Aunt Esther to get season tickets. That was the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had their much-ballyhooed season-long home run derby, and she doubled her typical Wrigley Field attendance, making all 81 games.

Around that time, she painted her first baseball portrait, Jackie Robinson, to impress a beer vendor/film director.

“I had a real crush on him,” Margie says. “I could always draw really well. I never took painting classes when I went to the Art Institute, but thought about giving it a try.”

Margie lived at Racine and Waveland in those days. Her full immersion in the Cubs culture inspired Margie to pursue a new artistic endeavor that included portraits of Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, Ron Santo, Leo Durocher, Jimmy Archer and Hack Wilson, among others.

“I did Photoshop portraits of Ron Santo and Ryne Sandberg,” she says. “I would literally take my baseball glove and scan that, and incorporate photos I took at the ballpark.” Margie says people sometimes think her portrait of Ryne Sandberg is Donny Osmond. “He was so young and innocent back then, he practically had a halo over his head. I see these players as people; I see their faults and their strengths. The funny thing is, I very rarely do modern-day players. I like the faces of the older baseball players, the real characters. I’ve painted a lot of players from the golden days of baseball, which was not the golden days of the Cubs.”

The cover portrait Margie painted for Cubbie Blues incorporates her intimate knowledge of Wrigley Field’s bleacher scene with portraits of anthology contributors like Don De Grazia, Dave Hoekstra, James Finn Garner, Sara Paretsky, and D.C. Brod. She also included renowned patrons such as Steve Goodman, Mike Royko and Carmella Hartigan, a bleacher regular who died in 2002 at the age of 100.

“I never had to try to do so many quick portraits before,” Margie says. “I had to stop myself. I wanted to put more people in the bleachers; I wanted to put all of my bleacher buddies in there.”

The process of creating the cover included intense research. Margie used dozens of books (from her own collection, the library, and friends), along with hundreds of Internet images, to study the look and feel of Wrigley Field bleacher denizens through the past century. She matched authors like myself with the era in which they seemed best to belong, thus I’m in the first row dressed in 1908 garb and smoking a cigar with the rest of the “motley crew.” Margie dramatized the tough lines in Don DeGrazia’s face and gave him a bow tie to place him among the roughian fans of that era. She gave James Finn Garner suspenders and Scott Simon a straw hat. She wrapped Sara Paretsky in a big fur coat and cradled an original 1908 Cubby Bear in her arm.

"I became so immersed in all of the research I realized I was running out of time to meet the deadline,” she says. “I was obsessed with researching people, sketching them out, putting the different era’s clothes on them. I did all those portraits in three days! I wanted to give the authors their props. It’s such a quality anthology, and because they’re fans I might as well put them in the stands.”

Margie says her favorite part of the cover is where the ball misses the glove. The symbolism is obvious, but at the time, with the Cubs holding the best record in all baseball and optimism high for a first World Series championship, it seemed as though it might be instantly obsolete.

“It was at a good time, too, because the Cubs were still in first place and they hadn’t choked,” Margie says. “So I was in real good spirits when I was drawing it. The Cubs were heading toward a World Series, I was volunteering full-time for Obama’s presidential campaign…all these great expectations went into it.”

Margie still lives within a mile or two of the park, and obsesses over her team. Soon, she will carry out plans to be tattooed with Jackie Robinson’s number.

“My poor Jewish mother!” Margie says. “She wanted to know why it couldn’t be Sandy Koufax. I told her that will be the other butt cheek.”

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Want more Margie?

• Read "Five Minutes with Margie Lawrence"
• Visit Margie's website
• Watch a video clip of her on ABC 7's "Someone You Should Know" with Harry Porterfield

Margie Lawrence, Someone You Should Know from Randy Richardson on Vimeo.