Al was moved by this act of kindness.
“I resolved, that morning, to marry her,” he wrote, “and I did.”
When retelling the story in “Al Capp, by Li’l Abner,” the autobiographical comic book he created for the Red Cross during World War II, Capp concluded this episode with a romanticized scene involving Catherine actually sewing a patch on his pants while he stood modestly behind a dressing screen. This might or might not have happened—he fudged the truth on more than one occasion in the comic—but there is no question that Caplin, accustomed to having the upper hand on those rare occasions when he actually spent any time with a woman, was thoroughly smitten.
In his 1946 booklet for the Red Cross, Al Capp recalled a meaningful incident in his early relationship with Catherine at art school. (These panels and others throughout the text have been modified from original strip configuration for clearer reproduction in this space.)
From there on, their relationship developed very quickly. Caplin quipped that his mother’s sandwiches were as responsible as anything for the progression of their romance. Catherine had no more money than Al, and they’d split Tillie Caplin’s potato sandwiches over lunch. (“My mother could make symphonies of potatoes,” he’d joke. This was a nice humorous touch to the story, although Catherine and Elliott Caplin both remembered the sandwiches as being chopped liver.) To Caplin’s delight, Catherine had a devilish streak, and they worked out a scheme in which they’d manipulate a meal-ticket machine at a local cafeteria, buying their meals for a fraction of their cost and using the savings to go to the movies together. In no time, the two were virtually inseparable. With money so scarce, they spent hours just walking and talking, enjoying one another’s company, each learning as much as possible about the other. For the first time in his life, Caplin was deeply in love.
As the school term wound down, Caplin faced another expulsion. With summer ahead, and no intentions to attend classes anywhere during that period, he and Catherine made plans for their immediate futures. Catherine dropped out of school and returned home to live with her parents and look for work in Amesbury. Caplin, satisfied that he had learned all he needed to work in the world of newspaper comics, decided to end his formal education and take his talents to the Land of Dreams—at least for artists. With only a portfolio of drawings and six dollars in his pocket, no job prospects, no connections, and no place to stay, he caught a train to New York City. He and Catherine would reunite when the time was right.
5 Breaking into the Business
Al Caplin did some fast talking to secure an apartment on 12th Street in Greenwich Village, a place run by a Mrs. Ford, the widow of a New York City police officer. The landlady was willing to allow Caplin to stay rent-free in the apartment until he received his first paycheck, which, he assured her, would be forthcoming the following Friday. That he had no job didn’t deter Caplin from risking eviction with a lie. To endear himself to the lonely landlady, he did a charcoal sketch of her late husband. Creating the portrait, Caplin trimmed substantial weight from Officer Ford’s frame and gave him a youthful appearance. In Capp’s version of the tale, the landlady was overwhelmed. She never again brought up the topic of rent. In fact, she even gave him urgently needed money and left food and treats for him in his apartment.
This was fortuitous, because in Depression-era New York, there wasn’t much demand for young cartoonists with no prior experience. Caplin found a job doing hackwork for a small advertising firm marketing comic strips for newspapers. The strips were nothing but ads, but they were worth two dollars each. Although he hated the work, Caplin could crank out two strips a day, which meant that he cleared about $3.60 per day after he deducted his expenses for paper, ink, and round-trip subway fare to the agency’s offices. He would hole up in his apartment and work into the wee hours of the morning, deliver the strip early the next day, and spend much of the remainder of the daylight hours hoofing from newspaper syndicate to newspaper syndicate, trying to impress editors with his portfolio.
By his own admission, most of the work in his portfolio was derivative—Al Caplin versions of the popular comic strip artists of the day. He hoped to impress editors with his artistic range, but the drawings did nothing for the syndicates. They already had “Little Orphan Annie.” Why would they be interested in someone who drew like Harold Gray?
The imitations did eventually pay off. Caplin’s uncle Harry Resnick contacted an editor he knew at the Associated Press and arranged an interview. Wilson Hicks, an assistant features editor, liked Caplin’s imitation of Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, the renowned cartoonist and journalist, whose boxing comics set an industry standard. His brother, Dick Dorgan, was contributing a one-panel comic for Associated Press, an “Our Boarding House” knockoff called “Colonel Gilfeather,” using a style closely resembling his brother’s. Hicks examined Caplin’s samples, including his Tad Dorgan imitations, and though he would concede that the kid had talent, Caplin was, in Hicks’s opinion, “a long way from being a finished cartoonist.” Hicks thanked Caplin for dropping by. He wouldn’t be needing another artist imitating Tad Dorgan or anyone else.
On the way out, Caplin, unaware of the blood connection between the two artists involved with “Colonel Gilfeather,” saw some of the proofs for upcoming “Gilfeathers,” which he later dismissed as “sort of ruptured, blind Tad.” The poor quality set him off enough to return to the editor’s office.
“You said you had an imitation of Tad,” he told Wilson Hicks. “I hope you don’t mean this guy. He’s never seen Tad.”
“Look at the signature,” Hicks shot back.
Caplin looked but held his ground.
“I’ve got a brother, but he doesn’t draw like me,” he argued. “He doesn’t draw at all. That’s the kind of brother you’ve got.”
Hicks sent Caplin packing, but he contacted him a few weeks later. Dick Dorgan wasn’t satisfied with the salary that Associated Press was paying him, and he was bolting to the King Features Syndicate, which paid twice what Dorgan was earning at AP. If Caplin was willing to work for fifty-two dollars a week, the job was his.
This represented a hefty salary hike—more than double what he was earning at the advertising agency. Caplin took the job, making him the country’s youngest syndicated comic strip artist. In a joyful letter home, Caplin promised his mother that he would be sending her twenty-five dollars a week. He then wrote Catherine and proposed that she come to New York and marry him.
Catherine wasn’t so sure. She was all for getting married, but she had just started a job as a substitute music and art teacher in Amesbury and couldn’t see quitting it. Perhaps it would be better if they met in Connecticut, got married, and returned to their respective jobs. They would keep their marriage a secret until their future was more stable.
For the time being, they did nothing. Caplin applied himself to his new job without retaining anything recognizable from Dick Dorgan’s daily panel. He was making more money than he’d ever earned in his life, and the future looked hopeful. The nuptials could wait.
Caplin, signing his work “A. G. Caplin,” added his own distinct touches to “Mister Gilfeather,” as the comic was now called. He shifted the focus of the feature from the colonel, who, as far as Caplin was concerned, too closely resembled Major Hoople, the crusty main character of “Our Boarding House,” to the colonel’s equally obnoxious younger brother. He adjusted the style of artwork as well, from Tad Dorgan to Phil May, an underappreciated English cartoonist that Caplin greatly admired. Caplin had checked out a copy of May’s London from the Boston Library and was thunderstruck by May’s ability to combine great writing with equally compelling art. Caplin studied May’s work with more enthusiasm than he had felt when studying any artist during his formal schooling, and he struggled to bring elements of May’s style to “Mister Gilfeather.” May’s work was tinged with dark humor, which might have been acceptable from a creative standpoint, but not from a newspaper perspective. After all, these were the funn
ies. Subscribing newspapers began dumping the strip to the tune of one cancellation per week—a figure that added up to an unacceptable loss over the months.
Caplin’s days on “Gilfeather” were numbered, and he knew it. His colleagues advised him to return to the strip’s earlier style, when the comic was funny but, to Caplin, disappointing. “Gilfeather” had never been his idea, and he hated continuing someone else’s work. He liked the money, but as the months passed, he wondered how much longer he could hang on.
As he discovered, there was other talent in the room.
An unfinished “Mr. Gilfeather” panel by Alfred Caplin, ca. 1932. His title character is on the left. The lettering and background have not been inked, suggesting that this panel was either rejected midway through or abandoned when Caplin left to return to art school.
He had taken to working nights, occupying a desk on the thirteenth floor of the Associated Press building, enjoying the solitude and quiet that came after the day shift left and life slowed down in the big newsroom. Caplin’s desk was near the windows overlooking Madison Avenue, and he generally kept to himself, working on a “Gilfeather” and occasionally staring out into the night. In the middle of the room, another artist worked away, oblivious to everything going on around him. AP had hired him to retouch photographs, which he did during the daylight hours, but in the evening, after the newsroom had emptied out, he’d pull out what Caplin believed to be comic strip work.
The young man’s name was Milton Caniff, and in the years to come, he would become one of the brightest luminaries among newspaper comic strip artists. He would also become one of Al Capp’s lifelong friends.
The future creator of “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon” could not have been more different from Caplin. He was two years older, hailed from Ohio, and had been an Eagle Scout. He had attended Ohio State University and, for a while, considered a career in acting. His gifts as an artist were apparent at a very early age. At fourteen, he enrolled in a correspondence art course and took a job as an apprentice at the Dayton Journal. A year later, he was drawing a comic strip, “Chic and Noodles,” for his high school paper. While in college, he worked part-time (and eventually, after graduation, full-time) for the Columbus Dispatch, adding to a developing résumé that would help him later, in March 1932, when he took a job in the art department at the Associated Press. He began on April 1 and met Caplin on that same day.
Caniff and Caplin were initially very formal toward one another, both willing to grunt a hello if they passed each other in the halls or newsroom, but neither enthusiastic about volunteering any insight into his work or ambitions in comics. Caplin, accustomed to being on the receiving end of the older AP artists’ scorn, appreciated Caniff’s showing him any interest or respect, though he did maintain his gruff manner around the new hire. Caniff had dropped by Caplin’s drawing board on his first night on the job and looked at Caplin’s yet-to-be-completed “Gilfeathers.” He uttered a few words of praise and returned to his own drawing board. They would chat from time to time in the nearly deserted newsroom, but both held their distance.
Their real friendship began in an offbeat way—at least in the strange story that Al Capp would tell.
The AP building stood across the street from the Ritz Hotel, and to pass the time, Caplin would turn off the light at his desk and stare into the lighted hotel windows. One drama in particular caught his eye. Every evening, always at the same time, a young, attractive woman would prepare herself for her husband’s return from work. She’d stand in the bedroom and try on a variety of provocative negligees until she found what she wanted to be wearing when her husband arrived. For Caplin, this was the peep show of his young life. He’d watch as the woman’s husband walked through the door, his body language indicating nothing but defeat and depression. The man would sit on the edge of the bed, open his briefcase, and shuffle through papers while his sympathetic wife tried to seduce him, first by what she was wearing, and then by kissing and caressing him. They usually wound up making love. Caplin, utterly transfixed, as he would later put it, made this a part of his nightly routine at the Associated Press.
One night, to get a better look, Caplin attempted to climb out on the window ledge. Suddenly, someone was grabbing him from behind.
It was Milton Caniff.
“Don’t,” he implored, fearing that Caplin, like so many during the Depression, was about to jump.
“Quiet,” Caplin admonished. He directed Caniff’s attention to the action taking place in the room across the way. For the next half hour, the two stared silently at the spectacle unfolding before them.
“How long has this been going on?” Caniff finally asked.
Caplin explained that it had been going on for some time, but he hadn’t said anything to Caniff because he didn’t want to disrupt his work.
“No work is more important than the life study,” Caniff scoffed.
“I always thought so,” Caplin said, “but I wasn’t sure anyone else did.”
“I do,” Caniff responded, “and don’t you forget it.”
The story reached the unhappy conclusion that Caplin feared it might. One evening, while preparing for her husband’s return from work, the young woman answered a knock on the hotel door. Two men with grim expressions entered the room and spoke to her. The woman fainted. Caplin and Caniff never saw the woman or her husband again, and both quit watching the hotel. It took no imagination to see that these two young people, locked in a daily survival battle in a pitiless city, had become the Depression’s latest victims.
Caniff’s version of the early days of his friendship with Caplin was, as one might expect, much tamer. He never mentioned the episode about the young woman in the Ritz, and his accounts in interviews toned down Al Capp’s blustery talk about how he took the novice cartoonist under his wing. Not that Capp’s talk about helping out Caniff would have been accepted by those who knew him: acting as a father figure would not have been typical Capp behavior.
As Caniff remembered it, he had checked out the comics talent at AP, as one would size up the competition in the room. Caplin, he determined, was gifted, but he was turned off by Caplin’s loud, bloviating manner. Caplin seemed determined to gain the approval of the veteran cartoonists, even if doing so involved his constantly talking up the caliber of his own work.
Milton Caniff, left, the creator of “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon,” shares a laugh with Al Capp in this undated photo. The two met at the Associated Press in 1932 and remained close friends for life.
Caniff, by nature, wasn’t anything at all like this, and, as he wrote in a 1959 memoir for Life magazine, Caplin’s swagger might have arisen as a way to disguise the struggles he was having with “Mister Gilfeather.” Caplin worked at a painfully slow pace, sketching and erasing, sketching and erasing, until he had nearly worn through the paper on his drawing board. Unlike the other cartoonists, who methodically cranked out material with very little effort, Caplin was learning on the job, with virtually no encouragement, and it did nothing to ease an already disagreeable disposition. Despite his earnings being the greatest of his life thus far, he was obviously a kid with no money: he wore shabby clothes, and when leaving the office at lunchtime, he would peer into the windows of nearby restaurants, looking at menus and selecting his dinner by his meager ability to pay. Caniff claimed that on one occasion an old woman selling newspapers on the street took pity on Caplin and gave him the change he needed to eat.
“He was kind of a sad sack in those days,” Caniff told his biographer, R. C. Harvey.
Their friendship, he told Harvey, might not have happened at all if they hadn’t been working nights. “In an empty office like that, you talk about things you wouldn’t talk about if other people were there,” he said.
Perhaps their conversations would turn to a drama taking place in the hotel across the street—Caniff didn’t volunteer that information—but both agreed in their retelling of the story that they spent a lot o
f time discussing their hopes for the future. Both dreamed of having a syndicated comic strip, and both were confident in their ability to do so.
In a 1948 Cosmopolitan article about those early AP days, Capp said: “[Caniff] knew many theatrical people and agents in New York, and people like that are always throwing parties. The first time Milt took me along, I met Jean Harlow, Kay Francis and Jean Muir … In return for this kind of hospitality, I began giving Milt free lectures on art.”
Caniff disputed this claim. Years after Capp’s death, Caniff noted, “Al used to write about me—these wonderful exaggerations—that he used to advise me how to draw … Invariably the opposite of what happened. That I introduced him to movie actresses, none of which was true … He just forgot about facts whenever he was writing. He considered it promotion.”
Caniff was only mildly surprised in the fall of 1932 when Wilson Hicks plopped an envelope containing Caplin’s unfinished cartoons on his desk, informed him that Caplin had quit, and asked him to take over the strip. Caplin, Caniff learned, had returned to Boston.
Caniff continued the panel until the following spring, but he had no more enthusiasm for “Gilfeather” than Caplin. The panel went unsigned until November 7, 1932, and even then, some newspapers preferred to title the panel “Colonel Gilfeather by Dick Dorgan.” Caniff would rework the comic into a panel called “The Gay Thirties,” even as he privately developed what would become his seminal strip, “Terry and the Pirates.” He would resume his friendship with Al Caplin at a later date, when Caplin was working under the name of Al Capp and they both had attained some of the goals they had discussed while working for AP.
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