Ol' Black Eyes Doonesbury Vs.

By James Kelly

As a cartoonist, Garry Trudeau has earned a reputation for throwing punches as often as punch lines. The creator of Doonesbury once led readers on a comic tour through Ronald Reagan's brain and lanced House Speaker Tip O'Neill for protecting Congressmen who were chummy with South Korean lobbyists. Last month a sequence ridiculing the antiabortion documentary The Silent Scream so worried the Universal Press Syndicate, Doonesbury's distributor, that the artist agreed to withdraw it. Trudeau was back in the headlines (and his strip briefly out of several papers) last week for giving a black eye to Ol' Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.

In a six-day series, Trudeau depicted Sinatra as a vulgar-mouthed pal of mobsters, undeserving of the Medal of Freedom recently given him by Reagan. The most debated strip quoted a citation that accompanied an honorary degree Sinatra received last month from New Jersey's Stevens Institute of Technology. The final panel carried a mid-1960s photo of Sinatra with Aniello Dellacroce, who was described as an "alleged human . . . later charged with the murder of Gambino Family Member Charley Calise."

Of the 835 newspapers that carry the strip, about half a dozen, including the Los Angeles Times, canceled the Sinatra series, despite assurances that Universal's libel lawyers had reviewed the cartoons. A dozen other papers, among them Long Island's Newsday, refused to run the Dellacroce installment on the grounds that the caption failed to point out that Dellacroce had been acquitted of the 1974 killing. Editors at the New York Daily News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune blue- penciled mention of the Calise murder. The Daily News, for example, simply called Dellacroce "underboss of Gambino family," a designation the paper based on past testimony by federal prosecutors.

Some editors who dropped or altered the strip expressed concern about libeling Sinatra, but most felt the issue was one of fairness, not of law. Said Daily News Managing Editor James Willse: "If you say someone is charged with a crime in the past and don't give the disposition of the case, that's not complete reporting." Other editors viewed the episode as a tempest in an inkpot. "This doesn't seem to be one of the greatest issues of our time," said Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, whose paper ran the series with a separate story explaining Dellacroce's acquittal (and his recent indictment on racketeering charges). Many papers also printed Sinatra's response criticizing Trudeau for "his attempts at humor without regard to fairness or decency."

Though some Doonesbury fans might view Trudeau's treatment of Sinatra as heavy-handed, friends of the cartoonist speculate that the attack reflects a delib erate change of tone. When Trudeau returned from a 21-month sabbatical last September, his favorite target, Reagan, was heading for a thunderous re- election. Instead of poking fun directly at the President for four more years, Trudeau is taking a harsher satirical stance against issues and people close to Reagan. Trudeau, as always, declines comment. "I haven't been able to sit still for an interview for some time," he says, "and I don't think I'm inclined to start again over this particular issue."

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York, with other bureaus