Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  It had been an eventful year, packed with business propositions. Capp had been pressing the New York Daily Mirror for a renewal of “Li’l Abner,” not only at a higher price but also with front-page placement in the color Sunday section. Bence was caught in the middle. Angered by Ham Fisher’s relentless attempts to damage his and “Li’l Abner’s” standing in the comics community, Capp sought revenge by demanding that his strip replace “Joe Palooka” on the front page of the Sunday Mirror, a prestigious placement that Fisher had enjoyed with his flagship paper for years. Bence did not share his brother’s deep hatred of Fisher, and he was reluctant to pressure the Mirror editors when they dragged their feet in caving to Capp’s demands. Capp, fuming from the back-and-forth between the editors at the Mirror and his office, blamed Bence for the lack of movement.

  “These matters are of immense importance to me. Why must I nag you to get action on them?” he scolded Bence, demanding that he find out whether a poll had been conducted to determine if “Li’l Abner” had taken over as the Mirror’s most popular strip. At the beginning of the year, the Mirror had promised Capp the front page of the Sunday comics section if “Li’l Abner” proved to be more popular than “Joe Palooka,” and Capp was incredulous that his brother had not forced the issue. “Have these things no interest to you?” he asked Bence.

  If Bence ever doubted the enormity of his brother’s ego, he was now receiving confirmation on a regular basis. Capp had never been content to be merely a famous cartoonist. He saw the rapid rise of television as another opportunity to show off his myriad talents, as well as to publicize his strip. Capp admonished Bence for failing to nail down a television or radio program he was generically calling Who and Why, a quiz show designed to play into Capp’s quick wit and outrageous sense of humor. Capp could not understand why Bence couldn’t close a deal on such a project. Then, in an unrelated matter, when Capp accepted an invitation to a state dinner in Washington, D.C., where he believed he was to give a speech, accept an award, and pose for pictures with President Truman, only to learn later that none of this was going to occur, Capp found himself in an awkward position. He’d set up a deal with the Boston Globe, which planned to run, on the paper’s front page, the text of his speech and a photo of Capp posing with the president. When none of it happened, Capp was, by his own admission, humiliated, and he lit into Bence. Capp was similarly chastened when Bence submitted a piece about the kigmy to such magazines as the New Yorker and Collier’s, only to be rejected, not because the work was subpar, but because this was not the kind of material these magazines published. All three fiascos had been bruising to his ego.

  “This is not what I hoped Capp Enterprises would be,” Capp informed his brother.

  Capp suspected, with some justification, that Bence viewed Capp Enterprises as an entity totally separate from “Li’l Abner” and the opportunities the strip presented for Al Capp’s other companies. Capp angrily reminded Bence that, without the strip, there would be no Capp Enterprises, no Dogpatch Styles, no Toby Press, and therefore none of the generous salaries being earned by members of the family. Capp relied heavily on Bence’s carrying out his orders, from keeping his contacts abreast of upcoming “Abner” events to sending along statements about earnings from “Abner”-related advertising, from checking into why some of the Sunday “Li’l Abner” entries were poorly rendered in some newspapers to executing new commercial tie-ins to “Li’l Abner” strips.

  The shmoo had proven just how successful the tie-ins could be; Capp developed new ideas and continuities to promote them, such as a clever campaign tied into a story about the “nogoodnik,” an evil, green shmoo look-alike hailing from Lower Slobbovia. The nogoodnik, whose name touched on the growing Cold War, McCarthyism, and the United States’ distrust of the Soviet Union, wreaked havoc everywhere it went and could not be destroyed. Blow it to bits and every piece became an individual nogoodnik.

  From this creative concept rose another Capp promotional idea. The story would continue through a half-dozen Sunday installments, and it would be revealed that the nogoodniks could be destroyed only if they were exposed to the sound of George Jessel’s singing. Capp urged Bence to move into action. He was to contact Jessel or at least buy the rights to one of his songs. Capp had little doubt that the aging vaudevillian, who made fun of his own limited singing skills, would go along with the idea or, going one step further, would consent to recording a song that could be made into an inexpensive record that could be inserted in an eventual comic book reprint of the nogoodnik sequence.

  “In the Sunday page of July 3rd, Arthur Dogflea”—the disk jockey of radio station SLOP—“announces that on the following Monday nite, on his talent show, he will have Jessel himself sing the song that killed the nogoodniks,” Capp told Bence. Dogflea was to be a send-up of radio and TV star Arthur Godfrey, a friend of Capp’s, and after giving it some thought, Capp decided to use Godfrey in the strip. It all worked as planned: Jessel appeared on Godfrey’s popular radio show and sang “Wagon Wheels.” The following Sunday, Capp devoted a panel of “Li’l Abner” to Jessel’s singing the same song. The nogoodniks keeled over from the sound of Jessel’s singing, and “Abner” had its happy ending. But too many of Bence and Al’s interactions did not.

  12 Demise of the Monster

  Al Capp’s feud with Ham Fisher reached a boiling point when the Atlantic Monthly published his autobiographical piece “I Remember Monster” in its April 1950 issue. In recollecting some of his unhappy days as Fisher’s assistant, Capp pulled no punches.

  When fans ask me, “How does a normal-looking fella like you think up all those—b-r-r!!!—creatures?” I always evade a straightforward answer. Because the truth is I don’t think ’em up. I was lucky enough to know them—all of them—and what was luckier, all in the person of one man. One veritable gold mine of human swinishness.

  It was my privilege, as a boy, to be associated with a certain treasure-trove of lousiness, who, in the normal course of each day of his life, managed to be, in dazzling succession, every conceivable kind of a heel. It was an advantage few young cartoonists have enjoyed—or could survive.

  Capp avoided mentioning Fisher by name, but for everyone in the comics business and much of the public (Newsweek had covered the feud just over a year earlier), there could be no question as to whom Capp was targeting. That same year Capp’s strip featured a swinish cartoonist named Happy Vermin, an unquestionable caricature of Fisher. Capp’s and Fisher’s fighting had been so public, for so long, that it had taken on the dimensions of a soap opera. Their intense dislike for each other was becoming a burden to cartoonists who had to listen to them loudly ramble on about their grievances.

  Fisher had never been much of a match for his opponent. He complained bitterly about Capp’s stealing his hillbilly characters—he even had a note, supposedly written by Capp, in which Capp admitted that Fisher had created Big Leviticus for “Joe Palooka”—but no one cared to know about it. With the possible exception of the evil Scragg family, Li’l Abner and his Dogpatch neighbors bore no resemblance to Fisher’s characters, and copyright laws did not grant Fisher exclusive rights to all things hillbilly. Fisher took his campaign to the public whenever his strip revisited the hills. These were the original hillbillies, he’d state in a message to his readers, and anything else was just a cheap imitation.

  The behind-the-scenes shenanigans were cruel and occasionally childish. Things boiled over when Capp and his family traveled by ship to France for a European vacation. Capp’s fame had made him a most welcome passenger, and he and his family were treated well—until, that is, the ship’s captain received a telegram from an “H. C. Anderson.” The telegram advised the captain that the police would board the ship and arrest Capp on “grave charges” as soon as they docked in Le Havre. Capp investigated the telegram and was at last able to prove that it was a fake. But the trip had already gone sour. The Capps suddenly went from dining regularly with the captain and his officers to being persona no
n grata.

  “I knew [that] when I returned, I must fight Fisher,” Capp wrote in his autobiography, “or let the tormented, addled soul destroy me.”

  Capp exacted his revenge by toying with Fisher in a variety of ways, always by phone. He called the supervisor of Fisher’s apartment building and, after identifying himself as the father of a fat boy living in the building, complained that a famous bachelor tenant was “constantly feeling my child up on the elevator.” Fisher was never confronted by the building’s super, but he couldn’t help but notice that the doorman was always on the elevator with the boy.

  There were other forms of retaliation. Whenever Fisher set him off, Capp found a way of exacting revenge. He paid people to watch Fisher. Once he called Fisher’s residence and, after presenting himself as Fisher’s psychiatrist, managed to convince Fisher’s Filipino valet that Fisher desperately needed help. The valet could do him a great service if he noted and reported to him all of Fisher’s phone calls; knowing the people Fisher was talking to, Capp said, would give him clues as to how to help him. Armed with the names and number of Fisher’s callers, Capp would call individuals, particularly Fisher’s dates, and rearrange appointments and meetings, causing an unsuspecting Fisher embarrassment and distress.

  Capp’s biggest victory, however, had been on the professional front. Fisher had always taken great pride in seeing “Joe Palooka” on the front page of the comics section of the Sunday Mirror, his flagship paper. When Capp convinced the Mirror to instead give the prized placement to “Li’l Abner,” proving its greater popularity, Fisher was apoplectic.

  Capp also worked his feud with Fisher into “Li’l Abner” episodes. When Fisher, whose vanity was legend in comics circles, had plastic surgery on his nose, Capp created a racehorse named “Ham’s Nose-bob.” In another “Li’l Abner” sequence, Li’l Abner found work as an assistant to a cheapskate comic strip artist who, rather than offer him a raise for his contributions to the strip’s success, rewards him with a new lamp after his strip becomes nationally renowned.

  One of Fisher’s few victories over Capp occurred when he managed to lure away Capp’s first assistant, Moe Leff. Capp heavily depended on Leff in the early days of the strip, and though he was able to hire new assistants after losing Leff to him, Capp never forgave Fisher.

  Fisher also made ongoing efforts to prove that Capp had hidden suggestive or pornographic images in “Li’l Abner.” With the cultural controversy surrounding comics, these were dangerous accusations, and they struck closer to the truth than Capp dared to admit. He would hear of Fisher’s expounding about the pornographic images at some of New York’s high-visibility watering holes, or bending fellow cartoonists’ ears about the topic at National Cartoonists Society meetings.

  “I Remember Monster” became Capp’s lengthiest public statement about Fisher. Rather than reveal the name of the man who, Capp explained, had become a model for so many “Li’l Abner” villains, Capp merely referred to Fisher as his “Benefactor,” the moniker put forth with all the derision Capp could muster. In Capp’s account, Fisher was miserly, insensitive, lecherous, and evil. At the end of the memoir, Capp sneered at the popular notion that Good would overcome Evil in a person’s lifetime. His Benefactor was living proof that this was not necessarily the case. He had gone unpunished.

  “He grew richer and healthier, more famous and honored,” Capp wrote. “He kept no old friends, but he made lots of shiny new friends. Nothing happened. He just grew older and eviler.”

  “I Remember Monster” created quite a stir, not because Capp had successfully nailed Fisher with some clever, well-placed zingers, but because the portrait was so spot-on accurate. By 1950, Fisher had alienated most of his fellow comic strip artists with his relentless complaining about almost everything in his life. Capp was engaging where Fisher was off-putting; people laughed at Capp’s jokes but laughed at Fisher behind his back. By some accounts, they enjoyed watching him wallow in his misery. His comic strip had risen to the top; it had made him a wealthy man, brought him fame, and set him up so that he could choose the life he wanted to lead. Why was he so unhappy?

  Capp would publish scores of newspaper and magazine pieces over the years, including other work for the Atlantic Monthly, but “I Remember Monster” would remain his best-known work of prose. His relentless attack had bruised and beaten Fisher; it offered concrete examples of Fisher’s nasty, parsimonious, self-centered disposition.

  For Fisher, “I Remember Monster” represented his most degrading humiliation at the hands of Al Capp. His obsession with Capp, unhealthy to begin with, rose to ridiculous heights, blinding him from the truth that, try as he might, he would never defeat his enemy. He had nothing ahead but loss.

  The campaign against comics had not disappeared. The brouhaha of the late 1940s, led by Fredric Wertham, had mobilized local civic and church groups, nudging them into meetings, protests, letter-writing campaigns, occasional book burnings, and a general dialogue about comics’ effects on their young readers. Comic books, particularly the more violent crime and horror titles, were still far greater targets for criticism than newspaper comic strips, but the unabated attempts to connect comics to juvenile delinquency kept the newspaper syndicates and subscribing newspaper editors on alert for any material that might be deemed objectionable. For Al Capp, McCarthyism, new in the political consciousness but gaining momentum with each passing month, was affecting his ability to satirize anything connected with the government. The last thing he needed was additional opposition to the content of comics.

  In May 1950, the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, aimed at organized crime, began still another investigation into the relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Estes Kefauver, a Democratic senator from Tennessee, chaired the committee comp0sed of two other Democrats and two Republicans. Kefauver had served five terms in the House of Representatives before winning his first Senate race in 1948, but his sights were set much higher—on a wide-open presidential race in 1952—when he led a committee guaranteed to garner a lot of publicity. His trademark, used in political campaigns, was a coonskin cap, making Kefauver look more like a Dogpatch resident than a U.S. senator to many. Serving as a consultant to the committee was one Dr. Fredric Wertham.

  Kefauver put together a seven-question survey, which was sent to a wide variety of professionals with knowledge and experience in comics and juvenile crime, from judges, probation officers, social workers, and psychologists to comics artists and publishers. The first four questions on the survey were designed to determine whether there had been an increase in juvenile crime since 1945 and, if so, whether the crimes had become more violent in nature. The final three questions on the survey focused on the possible correlation between comics and juvenile delinquency:

  Do you believe that there is any relationship between reading crime comic books and juvenile delinquency?

  Please specifically give statistics and, if possible, state specific cases of juvenile crime which you believe can be traced to reading crime comic books.

  Do you believe that juvenile delinquency would decrease if crime comic books were not readily available to children?

  The focus on crime comic books was misleading and certainly subject to problems with definition and interpretation. With the exception of comics aimed specifically at young children, such as those issued by Walt Disney, almost any comic could technically be tied in with crime, from the superhero comic books to such newspaper strips as “Dick Tracy” or even “Li’l Abner,” with its “Fearless Fosdick” entries.

  Fortunately for the comics industry, those filling out the surveys, as well as those testifying before the committee, reached a much different conclusion from the one expected and perhaps hoped for. Almost six out of ten survey respondents found no connection between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and nearly 70 percent believed that banning comic books would have no effect on preventing delinquency. Some of those testi
fying before the committee believed in a cause-and-effect relationship between comics and juvenile crime, but the majority, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, found nothing of substance to be worried about.

  Milton Caniff, one of the comics industry’s representatives offering his thoughts to the committee, scoffed at the belief that professionals could draw an accurate connection between comics and criminal behavior. “Practitioners of the inexact science of psychiatry,” Caniff said, “have long served as apologists for the present parental generation by attributing every childhood ill from the measles to shyness to the reading of comic books.”

  Capp applauded his friend’s observations. When reflecting on the days of attempted censorship and legislation against comic books, Capp offered a word of caution to those with short memories who might have seen Fredric Wertham as a minor player in the history of censorship. Wertham and his cronies, Capp said, had caused a hysteria that destroyed an art form before it had the chance to fully develop.

  “The doctor,” Capp said of Wertham, “was no creation of pen and ink; he was as real as any old Salem judge who ever ordered any granny burned alive as a witch.”

  Kefauver filed his committee’s report, and, for the time being, the formal government scrutiny of comics died down. But the issue would be revisited in three years, with some of the same participants, heavy media coverage, and Capp more involved than at any time in the past.

  Of all the certainties in life, “Li’l Abner” readers knew they could count on Li’l Abner’s escaping the matrimonial clutches of Daisy Mae Scragg. The one-sided romance had sparked many a story over the strip’s eighteen years, and the only real question was how Li’l Abner would escape the increasingly complicated and devious snares that Capp designed for any given story cycle. On one occasion, Abner was spared by an explosion; on another, by the moving of a mountain; on still another, by the sudden expiration of Marryin’ Sam’s license. The annual Sadie Hawkins Day stories had readers wondering whether Daisy Mae would finally run Li’l Abner down and present him to Marryin’ Sam for the obligatory nuptials.