INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — As America's first woman caricature artist, Kate Carew gained almost as much notoriety as the notable subjects she recorded. Her renderings and interviews of Bret Harte, W.B. Yeats, Emile Zola and Jack London appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, where they were well received by an adoring public.

She loved her work — that is to say until October of 1900 when she was assigned to interview Mark Twain upon his return to America after a decade abroad. This would prove to be a daunting task, as it was common knowledge that Mark Twain would not consent to be interviewed. But Kate had her pencil and sketching pad to scribble words while creating line drawings of the man in white, so an appointment was made for them to meet for breakfast in a New York Hotel at ten o'clock in the morning.

That surreptitious interview was recreated last Friday in San Francisco for a documentary, “Remembering Kate Carew,” directed by the most amiable Barnard Jaffier of Jaffa Films. The attractive and able Dolores Gonzalez portrayed Kate Carew and I, by luck of the draw, was invited to portray Mark Twain…

“The trouble with us in America, Kate, is that we have not yet learned to speak the truth, and truth, being a high art and the most valuable thing we have ... well, we tend to economize it.”

“But I always thought that the art was in telling lies, and — and telling the truth seems so easy!”

“Oh, a good lie can travel twice around the globe before the truth gets its boots on, yes, I'll grant you that, but lying is not an art. I have taken medals at thirteen world fairs for lying, Kate, and I can tell you lying is a device of primitive intelligence. The best liars are savages and children. The most cultured people speak the truth, mostly, and enjoy hearing it spoken by others. In heaven I shouldn't wonder but they use the truth -most of the time. You cannot pray a lie, Kate ... Are you getting what you're after?”

“Not much,” I replied in confusion. “Only a few notes.”

“Notes?” Notes!”

“An artist's notes, you know,” I hastened to explain. “Just scratches on the paper — an eyebrow — a wrinkle — a coat collar.”

“Make all the notes of that kind you like, so long as you don't interview me — I won't be interviewed. You see, the interviewer has a timeworn custom of probing you with a long string of personal questions, which you try to answer as diligently as you can; then they go home and improve upon you. Oh, you can run over the printed result with a divining rod and not find yourself.”

And so the clever and creative caricaturist Kate Carew got her drawing and her interview too. We can only imagine that Sam Clemens must have spit his coffee on the ceiling the next morning when he read the interview in the New York World, alongside Kate Carew's line drawings of America's foremost author and most impossible public figure to interview — Mark Twain.

Following the filming of this non-interview by a cameraman who was a twin to Jack Johnson, my wife and I lounged around Union Square in the sunshine, where we were entertained by San Franciscans in pursuit of a good time, seemingly just as pleasure-bound today as they were when Sam Clemens arrived from Virginia City in 1864…

— McAvoy Layne is an Incline Village resident who visits area schools as the ghost of Mark Twain.