Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  “The fact that Li’l Abner always managed somehow to escape Daisy Mae’s warm, eager arms provided me with a story that I could tell whenever I couldn’t think of anything better,” Capp explained. “I never intended to have Li’l Abner marry Daisy Mae.”

  Over the years, Capp was inundated with letters from readers wondering when Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae would finally tie the knot. Students formed clubs to lobby Capp with petitions. Women, Capp noted, were almost without exception the ones disappointed by Li’l Abner’s latest close shave; men, he joked, were so confident in the stories’ outcomes that they would promise their girlfriends that they’d get married the day Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner stood willingly before Marryin’ Sam.

  All this changed on March 28–29, 1952, when Li’l Abner awoke to the sight of Daisy Mae standing at his bedside, with Marryin’ Sam standing at the foot of the bed and Mammy and Pappy Yokum off to the side. Before he realized what was happening, he and Daisy Mae had been declared man and wife.

  Capp’s lead-in to the wedding was an episode of “Fearless Fosdick.” Li’l Abner had joined a Fearless Fosdick fan club, in which members vowed to follow the hapless detective’s example. What Li’l Abner didn’t realize was that Fosdick’s creator, Lester Gooch, while driving near Dogpatch, had nearly hit Daisy Mae with his car, and after Daisy Mae told him that Fosdick, by not getting married, was setting a bad example for American youth, Gooch decided the time had come to marry him off to his longtime fiancée, Prudence Pimpleton. He dreamed up an episode in which Fosdick’s police chief announced that, due to tough times, only married officers would be retained on the force.

  Li’l Abner was horrified to read about all this in his favorite comic strip. He remained confident that Fosdick would escape matrimony at the last minute, but he didn’t, and soon Li’l Abner, after all those years, was forced to keep his word and follow his example.

  After stretching the central tension of his comic strip for nearly twenty years, Al Capp did the unthinkable in 1952: he married Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae.

  The wedding story was greeted with great fanfare. Time magazine gave it the full treatment, complete with two panels from the story and an explanation from Capp. Life went much further. The wedding was its cover story, and Capp wrote a lengthy essay, “It’s Hideously True: Creator of Li’l Abner Tells Why His Hero Is (Sob!) Wed.”

  Capp blamed a national climate of fear for forcing his decision. “Li’l Abner” had, by that point, evolved from a suspense strip to a no-holds-barred satire unlike anything the funny papers had ever seen. He’d been free to lampoon anyone and anything, from politicians to the movies. “I was exhilarated by the privilege this gave me to kid hell out of everything,” he wrote.

  But times had changed. Criticism of the government was frowned upon. Communism was found lurking in the most innocuous places. Even something as seemingly innocent as the shmoo or the kigmy was under attack in some quarters, where critics saw them as negative criticism of the American way of life. In Capp’s opinion, the fifth freedom—“the freedom to laugh at each other”—was under siege.

  “That was when I decided to go back to fairy tales until the atmosphere is gone,” Capp told Life readers. “That is the real reason why Li’l Abner married Daisy Mae.”

  Capp hoped this would open new creative possibilities for the strip. Li’l Abner had never held a job; now, as head of the household, he’d have to find a way of supporting Daisy Mae and, God forbid, any children they might have. Would Daisy Mae’s attitudes about Li’l Abner change, now that she had finally won him over? And what would become of Pappy and Mammy Yokum, now that their only child had moved away and left them alone together? Capp looked forward to exploring these new storylines.

  Not everyone felt the move was a good creative choice. Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts” and one of the comics industry’s rapidly rising stars, thought the marriage was “probably the biggest mistake ever made in comic-strip history.” Comics readers, he said, weren’t open to such drastic change; they were comfortable with the characters that initially attracted them to the strip and could only take change a little at a time. With the marriage of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, “the premise of the strip collapsed.”

  These were not thoughts that Capp wanted to hear, especially since he felt he was pushed in that direction by circumstances beyond his control. It didn’t help, either, that “Peanuts” was on its way to pushing past “Li’l Abner” in readership.

  Capp Enterprises, under Bence Capp’s guidance, was constantly searching for new ways to expand its operations. It continued to profit from the strip’s international popularity, but aside from the disastrous feature-length motion picture in 1940 and a series of insipid animated cartoons a few years later, “Li’l Abner” failed to crack the potentially lucrative film and television markets. When Bence was approached with a proposal to put “Li’l Abner” on television, he was initially skeptical. The group approaching him wanted to use marionettes, rather than produce it as a live-action show with actors and actresses, and he feared this aimed squarely at the children’s audience, while “Li’l Abner’ had never been just for kids. Bence took the idea to his brother, and Al had reservations of his own. The comic strip had its own distinct look, and he would not agree to the project unless the program’s creators were able to make the puppets look like the characters in the strip.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t dealing with amateurs. Mary Chase, the designer of the marionettes, had been pulling the strings professionally on her creations for a decade, beginning with small productions in her native Chicago and, in time, progressing to bigger commercial projects in New York. She was quite capable of designing marionettes that looked like Capp’s characters. Her prototypes for Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, and Mammy Yokum impressed the Capp brothers, but Al was still hesitant to sign over the rights to “Li’l Abner” to what he felt was “a novelty like a TV puppet show.” He had higher plans for “Abner.” He countered with a suggestion of his own: why not make the show about Fearless Fosdick?

  This would be no easy task if the program was to be aimed at children. “Fosdick,” in “Li’l Abner,” was anything but kiddie fare. It was violent, and its satirical content was too advanced for young minds. Further, it was a parody of “Dick Tracy,” and while Capp had been able to get away with mimicking Chester Gould’s character for the sake of comic strip satire, a television production might present copyright problems. Finally, there were questions about how marionettes would hold up in action sequences. Still, both parties agreed to produce a pilot.

  For the pilot, the puppet designer changed Fosdick’s facial features just enough to distinguish him from Dick Tracy and had him wearing a bowler rather than Tracy’s trademark fedora. To temper the violence and adult content of the strip, Fosdick was recast as more of a slapstick character, more apt to step into an open manhole than get shot full of holes—the kind of character Peter Sellers would perfect two decades later as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies. Experienced professional actors and actresses were brought in to dub the characters’ voices. The Capps approved the pilot, and the project was given the green light.

  The first installment of the series aired on June 15, 1952, on NBC, and the network ordered thirteen episodes for what would be a summer replacement program. But Fosdick was telecast on Sunday afternoons, at a time when kids were rarely sitting in front of a television, and, for all its silliness, it was still too adult in content and tone for children. Not a single sponsor signed on for either the trial run or a projected fall season. Other than TV Guide, major newspapers and magazines pretended the program didn’t exist. NBC pulled the plug.

  In the summer of 1952, Fearless Fosdick, a puppet show, debuted on NBC on Sunday afternoons. The summer replacement show found no sponsor for renewal and ended after thirteen episodes.

  For Al Capp, it stood as further proof that, for all its popularity, “Li’l Abner” was still a disappointing distance from being accepted as anyth
ing but a comic strip.

  Some good did come out of the experience, however. As a tie-in to the TV show, Capp published The World of Li’l Abner, a selection of his best strips. He’d asked John Steinbeck to write an introduction. The novelist had known Capp socially for years, and he admired Capp’s satires and parodies, even when the cartoonist was sending up his classic The Grapes of Wrath.

  In his introduction, Steinbeck claimed that he had not seen the contents of the book, that Capp had merely told him that “it was going to have hard covers and dignity,” This, as far as Steinbeck was concerned, was sufficient. Capp, he suggested, was more than a mere cartoonist; he was a literary practitioner.

  “I think Capp may very possibly be the best writer in the world today,” he wrote, comparing Capp to Cervantes and Rabelais in his ability to make the butts of his satire “accept and enjoy the criticism.

  “In my claim that Capp is probably the greatest contemporary writer, and in my suggestion that if the Nobel prize committee is at all alert they should seriously consider him, I run into people who seem to feel that literature is all words and that those words should preferably be a little stuffy. Who knows what literature is?”

  Of course, Steinbeck himself would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His endorsement would stay with Capp for the rest of his life.

  Capp’s objections to the way his brother handled Capp Enterprises had simmered down over the past two years, but they reached an explosive point in late 1952, when Capp took out his frustrations over contractual and business matters on Bence and their attorneys. This was anything but new. In the early months of 1950, when Al and Bence seemed to have reached an impasse over Bence’s work with Capp Enterprises, Bence had tendered his resignation as Capp’s personal manager. The tension and fighting, Bence said, were causing him more grief than the job was worth. Al’s attorney, alarmed at the confusion that might result from Bence’s walking away from the job, had intervened, and the two brothers had come up with a working arrangement amenable to both. There had been problems over the ensuing two years, but they had been resolved with minimal bickering.

  Still, by the first week of December 1952, Al was dissatisfied enough with Bence to demand that he leave Capp Enterprises. Capp’s initial feeling, put in writing in a letter to Bence, lacked the bile of his letters in the past. He was disappointed more than angry. He could not fathom why Bence habitually ignored his orders and went about business as he saw fit, even if he did so with the best of intentions.

  “No one on earth would have gone along so long with your practices of setting your own hours, your own policies in handling work, your own handling of finances that do not belong to you,” Capp said, stating that he believed that Bence was too set in his ways to change. “Let’s make this pleasant and quiet,” he concluded. “I will help you all I can—you need only name what. This time it’s final.”

  Capp asked that Bence complete a few tasks, set the Capp Enterprises financial books in order, and otherwise turn everything else over to him or Elliott. Capp’s patience disappeared when Bence moved more slowly than he thought necessary, but he still kept an even, if more formal, tone in his correspondence.

  The politeness came to a halt when Capp received a chippie call from an editor at Life magazine. Capp had set up an arrangement with Life granting the publication the right of first refusal of his essays. The high-circulation magazine had treated Capp very well over the years, including the cover story on the marriage of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae just a short time earlier, and Capp valued the association. The relationship, however, was now in jeopardy. Bence, it turned out, had not only marketed an Al Capp piece to another magazine; he had sold the same piece to two competing magazines—Pageant and Coronet—and it was running concurrently in the magazines’ issues cover-dated March 1953. Life had approved of Capp’s selling the brief essay to Pageant, but the same piece to two magazines was way over the mark. Capp attempted to explain that he knew nothing of the Coronet sale, but the Life editor found it difficult to believe that he wouldn’t know where his work was being submitted.

  Capp was apoplectic. He’d been trying unsuccessfully to remove Bence from his professional life for months, and this latest mishap was one of Bence’s worst transgressions yet. If Bence wouldn’t leave Capp Enterprises quietly and voluntarily, as Capp had hoped, drastic measures would be required. Capp contacted Elliott and Madeline, explained the situation, and looked for some kind of support. Bence, he told them, meant well, but he was useless. Further, since Capp had received no payment for the two magazine articles, Bence must have pocketed the money.

  “There must be some way I can rid myself of the thieving, crazy sonofabitch,” he railed in a letter to Madeline and Elliott. “There must be some way I can disinfect my life and work of his lunatic influences.”

  In a separate letter to Elliott, he went back over the details of the Life magazine fiasco and proposed that Elliott declare bankruptcy for Toby Press. They could re-form the publishing house later, with Bence written out of the company. In any event, Al wanted out.

  “Every prediction I made about Bense [sic] has come luridly true, truer than I expected,” Capp complained. “He is a cancer.”

  The real fighting, as one might expect, involved Al and Bence. Al flung insult after insult at his brother, accusing him of everything from incompetency to thievery, but Bence had heard it all before. This time, however, he was not going to sit back and silently take it.

  “You are and have been to me a malicious, vindictive monster,” Bence told Al. “I’ve stored seven years of such accusation—‘indigent, unemployable, crook, chiseler, back stabber, slothful,’ and the rest of it.” Bence challenged Al to call a meeting of Capp Enterprises’ board of directors, at which time both he and Al could present their sides of the dispute, once and for all. At that meeting, Bence would formally request the establishment of a mediation commission to gather evidence and testimony and decide what would happen to Bence and Capp Enterprises.

  Capp responded with a relentless attack, first by letter, followed up by a phone call. Capp was vicious, even by his standards, and it’s possible that he hoped that, in taking this approach, he would finally persuade Bence to walk away from the dispute. In his letter, Capp repeated the familiar charge that Bence would be destitute without him—or, at least, a “charity” for Elliott and others. He reiterated his threat of pulling out of Toby Press and bankrupting it, leaving Bence with nothing from that company. Further, he was withdrawing all support from other family members on the Capp dole because he could no longer be certain that Bence wouldn’t turn to them for financial assistance. In the end, Capp had no one to blame for Bence’s dependency but himself.

  “The last six years have been the most hideous of my career, the most expensive in my emotions and my savings,” he said. “You can lie and fake and trip me up as much as you like, you pig, and I deserve it for ever having permitted you to infect my hard working life.”

  The phone call was even more vituperative. Bence listened for a half hour as his brother unloaded on him, telling him that he hoped Bence would be run over and killed by a truck, that his violent death would be a blessing to Capp’s children, who would otherwise have to grow up and “suffer the mortification that [Bence’s] stubborn continuance of breathing would bring to them.”

  Bence held his ground. He again demanded a hearing to vindicate himself, and he counterpunched his way through his brother’s assault.

  “Are you so swept by anti-human hatred that you have to vilify your friends’ integrity, your associates’ principles, and your family’s honor?” he wondered, admitting that he was now prepared to fight him to the end, though it gave him no pleasure or satisfaction.

  “I understand that the genius that you have and the unhappy background makes a number of these flights in dastardy an almost automatic reaction,” he said, “but in this thing you are injuring yourself almost mortally.”

  Bence was weary of the slugfest, though.
He ultimately relented and agreed to leave his positions in the miscellaneous Capp family businesses and sell off his stock, which—one of the few things he and Al could agree on—was virtually without monetary value. In exchange, Bence wanted a buyout of his interests in the companies. The Capp lawyers stayed busy, especially when Bence, convinced that Al was not honoring his end of the agreement, repudiated his earlier arrangement. The battle had become so intensely personal that it spread to include anyone daring to take a side—or even to show a shred of understanding or sympathy for one of the combatants. Lawsuits were threatened, company assets and accounts frozen. What had begun as a strong disagreement had degenerated into a territorial dispute, with each brother defending a turf of indeterminate value; it threatened to devolve even further, into a warped form of blood sport.

  The quarreling was bound to distract Capp from his work, though “Li’l Abner” continued without any apparent evidence of the strain. After nearly two decades of turning in strips and honoring other commitments under deadline pressures and personal issues of every type imaginable, Capp and his assistants could handle anything that came their way. Still, the troubles with Bence pushed Capp to the limit.

  “It is tragic that my energies must be eaten up by these machinations of yours,” Capp wrote Bence. He went on to include a list of crushing obligations threatened by the time he spent dealing with fighting with his brother. “Your actions,” he continued, “have greatly disturbed my mind and my peace, and have endangered and will continue to endanger my ability to carry on my many public and private responsibilities.”