The real John Callahan: the politically incorrect quadriplegic cartoonist who inspired Joaquin Phoenix's new film

It was a quite understandable complaint. Sent by a Boston resident whose brother was a quadriplegic, it was addressed to the cartoonist John Callahan and expressed outrage at a newspaper sketch featuring a sheriff’s posse in the desert looking at an empty wheelchair. The sheriff was saying: “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot.”

“Until Mr Callahan can understand the emotions behind such a life of struggle, I feel he should not [be] poking fun at the disabled,” thundered the correspondent.

What the letter-writer did not know was that Callahan himself was a quadriplegic. Blessed with acute self-awareness and the zeal of a former addict, the wheelchair-bound Callahan had transformed himself into one of America’s most successful cartoonists, following a battle against alcoholism and the devastating effects of a car crash when he was 21.

In 1989, he published a memoir that borrowed its title from the cartoon that had so incensed his Boston correspondent. And now, eight years after his death, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot has been made into a film by director Gus Van Sant, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

“John really was an American original. He was a highly unusual artistic talent,” says Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week, which ran his cartoons for 30 years. “His work ethic was phenomenal. He wrote books, he made albums, he worked on TV shows. Sometimes he’d come to the office to deliver a cartoon and drawing it had exhausted him so much that he didn’t have the strength to write the caption. He’d ask me to do it.”

Callahan was also outrageously impolitic. As well as many irreverent cartoons about people with disabilities and diseases, he also took pleasure in slaughtering liberal sacred cows, poking fun at racial and sexual politics. (One cartoon features a bookshop assistant telling a customer: “This is a feminist bookstore – there is no humour section!”)

But Zusman insists Callahan was “an equal opportunity offender. His humour was so wonderfully dark, he was willing to go places most of us weren’t willing to go.” This got the cartoonist – or, more often, his publishers – into trouble. Thousands complained about a cartoon showing a dog impaled by a window pane, with a passer-by asking, “How much is that window in the doggy?”

On another occasion, a highly controversial cartoon featuring Martin Luther King was summarily rejected by editors at the Miami Herald, only for it to be published accidentally; half a million copies of the paper had to be destroyed.

In his day-to-day life, too, Callahan unleashed his excoriating wit on anybody who presumed to patronise him. He was once approached in Portland, Oregon, his home city, by an evangelical Christian who asked, “Can I cure you? Jesus will help me cure you if you have enough faith.” Callahan replied sweetly, “Gee, mind if I wait just a few months? I just bought this wheelchair and it cost me five grand.”

His sense of humour was also obvious to anyone who reached his answerphone. “Hi, this is John,” it said. “I’m really depressed right now so I can’t come to the phone. Please leave a message after the gunshot.”

But it would be wrong to imagine Callahan was a depressive misanthrope. “In person he could not have been a more gentle, lovable, kind soul,” says Zusman. “He was soft-spoken, he’d never raise his voice, he had a lovely laugh, and a charming personality. Not at all the kind of abrasive stick-his-thumb-in-your-eye kind of personality that comes across in his artwork.”

Callahan’s life story was made for Hollywood.

Born in February 1951, he was given away as a baby and adopted at the age of six months from a Catholic orphanage. As a teenager he felt like an outsider – freckled and red-haired, he did not resemble his adoptive siblings – and, for many years found himself sabotaging relationships if he found he was getting too involved – “to get back at my birth mother for abandoning me”, he claimed.

He medicated his unhappiness with alcohol, beginning when he was 13, and snuck away from his grandmother’s funeral with a bottle of gin. His drinking was already out of control when he went to a pool party on 22 July 1972 and struck up a conversation with a man called Dexter (played by Jack Black in the film) who suggested moving on to another party.

They crashed into a pole at 90mph, on the way. Callahan later drew a cartoon of himself lying paralysed at the scene, telling a policeman that there was a $5 bill in his pocket and asking him to get him a drink. Dexter, who had been driving, escaped with a broken leg; John never saw him again.

He ended up as a C5-6 quadriplegic, paralysed from the diaphragm down, with severely circumscribed use of his upper body. But, as he later admitted, the accident probably saved his life by helping him to stop drinking – or at least only drink as much as he could bribe hospital staff to smuggle in.

Six years later he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and, with their support, threw himself into cartooning.

Despite the effort it took to draw, he sent dozens of cartoons to magazines on spec until he managed to make a name for himself. He could not move all of his fingers but after extensive therapy he was able to hold a pen in his right hand; by guiding it with his left hand and swivelling his shoulders he was able to produce cartoons in prolific numbers.

Joaquin Phoenix, who learned to play guitar sufficiently well to pass as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, has said that it was even harder to learn how to draw like Callahan.

And, in fact, for a long time, it was not Phoenix who faced this task, but Robin Williams. The late actor and comedian was a great admirer of Callahan’s – he called him “the funniest man on four wheels” – and longed to play him on screen. In the late Nineties he suggested to Van Sant that they film Callahan’s memoir as a follow-up to their much-admired collaboration on Good Will Hunting, but the project never took off, with the studios unable to visualise Williams as a brash, politically incorrect, Republican-voting stomper on people’s sensitivities.

Phoenix, who played the villain in Gladiator and has done a fine line in tortured souls, is a better fit – although he is aware that Williams was the favoured choice. “John himself wanted to make this movie 20 years ago with Robin Williams, and he wanted Robin to play it,” he has said. “So in some ways it was really important to me... that if you’re doing a biopic that the subject of the film is someone who feels good about who is portraying them.”

In the end Callahan did not live to see the biopic, nor pick its star, but Phoenix’s meticulously researched performance goes some way to bringing back to life this brilliant maverick.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is in cinemas from tomorrow