Al Caplin and Catherine Cameron married on August 16, 1932, while Caplin was still working for the AP. Caplin met her in Connecticut, as planned, and they followed through on their decision not to say a word to their parents about the wedding. For their “honeymoon,” they returned to Caplin’s New York apartment, where they hung out for what Caplin would call “a fairy tale week.” He showed her his “Gilfeather” cartoons, and she agreed with his assessments of their value. The early Dorgan imitations were amusing but uninspired; the more recent Phil May–influenced work, while more cerebral, was not the kind of work that would please readers eager for a chuckle during hard times.
Caplin felt like he was mired in quicksand; the more he struggled, the deeper he sank. He reached the end two weeks after Catherine returned to Amesbury, when his editor received a letter from the managing editor of the Brockton Enterprise. “Mister Gilfeather,” the managing editor complained, was the worst cartoon on the market. Caplin’s editor showed the letter to Caplin and told him not to fret, but Caplin knew the letter’s accusation was on the mark. He left a note of resignation on Wilson Hicks’s desk, picked up his belongings from his apartment, and caught a train back to Massachusetts. The last “Gilfeather” with Caplin’s signature appeared on September 10, 1932.
In all likelihood, Wilson Hicks was greatly relieved to rid himself of Alfred Caplin. As far as he was concerned, Caplin had been a burden from the beginning.
“Never have I worked with a more difficult person than Alfred Caplin,” he declared in 1959. “He rarely met deadlines. He would disappear for days. He was often gruff. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. It was simply that he loathed and despised ‘Mister Gilfeather.’ It was not his—and more than anything else he wanted his own cartoon.”
Caplin had no inclination of what he should do once he reached Boston. It certainly was not the time to tell the world that he and Catherine were married. Living at home would be a step backward; his brothers were now of college age and seemed to have their immediate futures better planned. There were no long-term jobs in comics, yet he gave little thought to doing any other kind of work.
His mother came to his rescue, promising to find a way to send him back to school. She sympathized with the artistic dilemma he faced at the Associated Press, though her understanding might have been tempered by the fact that Otto Caplin was enjoying what, for him, would have been a lucrative work period. He was still out on the road, selling oil, but he was sending money home regularly. The money still wasn’t enough to make all of the bills on time, but the ax of eviction and starvation wasn’t hanging quite as precariously over the Caplin family’s head, either.
Maybe Tillie Caplin supported her eldest son because she saw so much of Otto in him. Maybe she felt the special bonding between a mother and her firstborn. Maybe she truly believed in his talent. Whatever the reason, she approached one of her brothers and secured a “loan” for her son’s tuition.
If any of this bothered Al Caplin, he never indicated it, not then and not in future interviews or his autobiography. He attended classes, hitchhiked to Amesbury on Saturdays, stayed overnight, and returned home on Sundays. He managed to get by when he could barely scrape together the loose change needed for a pack of Camels. He found occasional freelance work, illustrating articles for the Boston Post, but his main focus was on school. He enjoyed knowing that, for once, he was attending classes on a real uncle’s money, that he wouldn’t be obligated to go through the humiliating explanations when it came time to pay tuition and he had to explain that Uncle Bob had just gone through a bad turn in his business.
He wound up dropping out of school for another reason. Catherine had been feeling poorly, and when she visited her physician, she learned she was a couple of months pregnant. She and Al had no choice but to confess their secret marriage. They came clean to Catherine’s parents, who were surprised to learn that their daughter had married a Jew. Caplin shrugged it off. They could raise their grandchild under the religious banner of their choice; he had no objection.
“The Camerons took it well for a family who had never met a Jew,” he quipped decades later, when looking back at the conversation.
With a family soon to support, Caplin left school, packed his bags, and headed back to New York City for one last shot at earning a living as an artist.
Caplin detested the entire process of peddling his wares. He was convinced that he was as gifted as anyone earning a living in comics, yet no one in New York, including his old boss at AP, would hire him. Every day was a repeat of the previous day: lug a portfolio around the city, watch an editor shuffle through the art, listen to the same story about how he had talent but there just wasn’t any work for him, and move on. Caplin had managed to secure his old apartment with Mrs. Ford, and life became unrelentingly repetitive.
His run of bad luck ended one day as he was leaving another of these rejections. In his version of the story, he was crossing Eighth Avenue, carrying his portfolio, when he paused to admire a fancy sports car headed in his direction. Two people occupied the car—a man, who was driving, and a woman seated next to him. Seeing that Caplin wasn’t about to move out of his way, the driver slammed on his brakes, narrowly missing Caplin, who had dropped his portfolio in the street. The angry driver jumped out of his car.
“You damned idiot!” he shouted at Caplin.
“Oh, balls,” Caplin muttered in response.
The man turned away as if he intended to return to his car. One of Caplin’s drawings lay at his feet. The man picked it up and looked at it.
“You a cartoonist?” he asked.
Caplin snatched his drawing and prepared to leave.
“I am Ham Fisher, the creator of ‘Joe Palooka,’ ” the man declared.
Caplin stared at the short, pudgy, red-faced man. He had very little use for “Joe Palooka,” but he knew success when it was standing in front of him. Fisher’s comic strip was one of the most popular of the syndicated dailies.
“You don’t know what a thrill it is to meet you, sir,” he said, pumping Fisher’s hand.
Fisher glanced at a couple more of Caplin’s drawings.
“You got a job?” he asked.
“No sir, I don’t,” Caplin said.
“Hop in,” Fisher said, leading Caplin to his car.
Both would come to bitterly regret the day they ever crossed paths.
6 Hatfield and McCoy
Al Capp and Ham Fisher would never agree on much of anything, including the circumstances swirling around their initial meeting that late-summer day in 1933. Fisher claimed that he saw Al Caplin walking down the sidewalk, carrying the samples of his art wrapped in the kind of heavy blue paper used by some syndicates of the day for returning rejections. Feeling sorry for what he perceived to be a down-and-outer, Fisher called out to him from his car window, inquiring if he was a comic strip artist. As Fisher remembered, Caplin had about a nickel to his name. He offered him a job because Caplin looked so utterly dejected.
Capp vigorously disputed Fisher’s account, though he told several different versions of their meeting. In his unpublished autobiography, he presented the account of Fisher’s almost running him over with his car, although the story seems dubious. It’s unlikely that Fisher would have stopped his car on a busy New York street, jumped out to yell at Caplin, paused long enough to look over his art, and then offer him a ride. Caplin apparently told his brother a story very similar to Ham Fisher’s, because Elliott Caplin’s retelling in his book, Al Capp Remembered, echoes Fisher’s account almost to the letter. Capp modified Fisher’s story when talking to a New Yorker writer in 1947, long after “Li’l Abner” had risen to the height of the comic strip world, although in this later permutation Capp said that Fisher mistook him for a McNaught Syndicate errand boy.
The two did agree on several details: Ham Fisher was driving his car, Fisher’s sister was seated in the car next to him, Caplin was somewhere outside, the two did exchange words, and Caplin wound up rid
ing with Fisher to his plush apartment in the Parc Vendome.
Fisher, a man who knew his limitations, needed help on his strip. He could work up a good storyline for “Joe Palooka,” but on his very best day, he was only a marginally talented artist. He had a taste for beautiful women, fashionable clothing, good liquor, expensive cars, and high-end vacations, all easily within his reach due to the fortune he was earning from his syndicated strip. Finding a young talent to help him with the art for “Joe Palooka” would only make his life easier and his comic strip better, especially if he could secure this kind of assistant for a modest wage.
When they arrived at his apartment, Fisher showed Caplin several penciled strips of future “Joe Palooka” entries. Caplin judged the boxing scenes to be excellently rendered, but he cringed at Fisher’s female characters, which, he felt, “seemed to [have been] drawn by a man who had never met one.” Caplin kept his thoughts to himself, even when Fisher confessed that the strips needed a lot of work.
“Think you can fix ’em up?” he asked Caplin.
This was an amazing question. Here was Caplin, desperately broke, with no immediate prospects of employment, being asked to improve the work of one of the most highly regarded names in the comic strip business. Caplin kept his composure and allowed that he could probably do a few things to improve the drawings.
Later in the afternoon—around five o’clock, as Caplin would recall—Fisher left Caplin alone with the work and went out for the evening. When he returned nine hours later, a little overserved at the local saloon, the improved strips were awaiting him. Fisher loved them.
“You doing anything tomorrow?” he asked.
When Caplin informed him that his schedule was clear, Fisher told him to report back at the apartment at nine o’clock the following morning. He’d be working all night on new material and would be sleeping when Caplin arrived, so Al should just go about his business on his own. New strips would be waiting on the table. He handed Caplin a ten-dollar bill—the first money Caplin had earned in a long while.
Caplin was elated. He was back in business.
Hammond Edward Fisher ranked among the lucky ones. In a move that would have made his protégé proud, he’d scammed his way into a syndicated comic strip, and he had taken full advantage of the opportunity. His rise in the business was swift and lucrative. For someone who liked to play, there was plenty of fame and fortune to exploit—when he chose to do so. He lived alone and, as Caplin learned early during his tenure with Fisher, he could be very parsimonious with his money, if it was being spent on someone other than himself.
Ham Fisher, creator of “Joe Palooka.”
Fisher had been born thirty-three years earlier, on September 24, 1900, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and, like so many other artists in the business, he had displayed a gift for writing and drawing at a young age. He toyed with the idea of a career in journalism, in which he might have done quite nicely, but he preferred drawing the sports comics that were popular features in newspapers around the country. He’d come up with the idea for his boxing strip, “Joe Palooka,” while working as a sports cartoonist for a paper when he was still in his teens, but his editor had no interest in it. Fisher never gave up on the idea. It took him seven years to find a taker for the strip, and even then, it took a slick bit of deception to make it happen.
Fisher had approached the McNaught Syndicate with the strip, but the editor there, like those before him, rejected it. However, the editor was impressed enough by Fisher’s knowledge of comics to offer him a job as a comic strip salesman. Fisher was resourceful enough to recognize the opportunity in front of him. He would be traveling around the country, hawking other cartoonists’ work, but he would also have the eyes and ears of editors who might be willing to take a look at his “Joe Palooka” samples and listen to his sales pitch for the strip. He took the job.
It worked. In 1928 Fisher lined up “Palooka” clients, one paper at a time, until he’d rung up twenty newspapers interested in picking up his strip. It’s uncertain whether Fisher presented “Joe Palooka” as a fait accompli, as a definite part of the syndicate’s future list, or if he ran the idea past editors as a possibility for something in months to come, but however he sold it, he reached a level of success that forced McNaught to reconsider its original rejection. “Joe Palooka” was in.
By the time he and Al Caplin met, the strip was one of the top five comic strips in syndication, perhaps as a result of its message delivered during the Depression: there was hope for the average Joe, if he was willing to punch his way through adversity.
Caplin had a scam of his own that he ran on Fisher. The afternoon after he had given Caplin his initial ten-dollar bill, Fisher got up, examined Caplin’s work from that morning, and offered him another five dollars. The ten dollars from the previous night had been a generous offering from a drunken man; the five offered the next day represented the tightwad intentions of a sober boss. Caplin pocketed the five without mentioning the earlier payment. This, he was delighted to discover in days to come, would be the norm. Fisher would come in bombed from a night on the town, pay Caplin, and promptly forget about it. He’d offer more the next day, believing he was getting exceptional work at a bargain price when, instead of being underpaid for his work, Caplin was actually enjoying a windfall profit. When they finally settled on a $22.50 weekly salary to produce the Sunday Palooka strip, Caplin was confident he’d see more than that.
Caplin found the early days of working on the strip “exhilarating.” He reveled in the knowledge that he was contributing to a comic strip reaching millions of readers, and his relationship with Fisher was cordial. He discussed story and character ideas with Fisher, who insisted that Caplin draw humane, rather than grotesque, characters. Caplin soaked up Fisher’s advice. Comic strip artists often relied on the humor in outlandish-looking characters to get their laughs, but under Fisher, Caplin began to see the value of strong storytelling. Despite the acrimonious split and years of backstabbing that would mark their future, Caplin was content with his working arrangement with Fisher. Had Fisher paid him more, he claimed later, he might have stayed with him for his entire career.
The Caplins’ first child, a daughter, was born on May 21, 1933. According to Catherine, she and her husband referred to their unborn baby as “Abner” through Catherine’s pregnancy. When she was born a girl, they named her Julie.
Al Caplin would return to the “Abner” name later.
Catherine and Julie Caplin joined Al in New York as planned. Caplin had found a two-room apartment at 20 West 69th Street on New York’s Upper West Side. Remembering how rough his mother had it when trying to raise her children without help at home, Caplin hired a part-time maid for six dollars a week. They weren’t living the high life by anyone’s definition, but, between his salary and the overages he enjoyed whenever Fisher paid him while drunk, Caplin was pulling in enough to support his family, pay the maid, send money to his mother, and mail six dollars a week to his brother Elliott, who was attending Ohio State University and living on scratch.
Sometime soon after settling in New York, Al and Catherine attended a vaudeville performance at a theater near Columbus Circle, where they witnessed a performance by a small group of hillbilly musicians and singers. Caplin sat entranced as the troupe, accompanied by fiddles, Jew’s harps, and other instruments, sang and danced with deadpan expressions that added elements of innocence and humor to their performances. The Caplins loved it. Catherine believed the performance might have been the catalyst for the creation of the comic strip that made her husband famous.
“We thought they were just hilarious,” she said. “We walked back to the apartment that evening, becoming more and more excited with the idea of a hillbilly comic strip. Something like it must have always been in the back of Al’s mind, ever since he thumbed his way through the Southern hills as a teenager, but that vaudeville act seemed to crystallize it for him.”
These were the types of characters that Caplin and Ham
Fisher had batted around in their discussions about what could make comics funny yet humane. Fisher had no interest in creating the kind of biting social commentary for which his young assistant would become so well known, but in their discussions about character and story, Caplin asserted a strong influence on the development of characters found in “Joe Palooka,” including some that came as a result of the hillbilly show.
Not that there was anything visionary about any of this: as comics historian M. Thomas Inge noted in “Al Capp’s South: Appalachian Culture in Li’l Abner,” “culture in the United States, high and low, had been obsessed with things Southern and Appalachian since the turn of the century.” Mountain music, integrated into bluegrass and country and western music, as heard in the work of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, enjoyed steadily growing popularity. Depression-era novels such as Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, published in 1932, and God’s Little Acre, published a year later, and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), were set in horribly impoverished rural southern communities. At the time when Al Caplin was developing his hillbilly characters, Laurel and Hardy were in production on their film Them Thar Hills. Caplin’s keen understanding of popular culture, blended with the memories of his own experiences in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, amounted to nothing less than a creative stewpot for a young cartoonist seeking a subject and setting for his work.
Out of all of this rose a legend, a myth created by Capp and perpetuated until his dying day, a story so convincing that comics scholars and critics would repeat it for more than three decades after Capp was gone.
Al Capp Page 7
