Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  “Of all the by-products of the strip, this is the one I’m most proud of,” he announced. “This is the one which will finally gain me some respect from my grandchildren, who until now have always thought of me as a silly man who just draws pictures.”

  Capp held a tiny percentage of ownership in the park, though he had little to do with day-to-day operations. His son, Kim, however, was hired to handle sales of the Dogpatch branch of Capp Enterprises. Kim was living in Miami when he received a call from his father: “You have forty-eight hours to be in Harrison, Arkansas.”

  Dogpatch USA opened for business in 1968 in northern Arkansas. The park’s designers did their best to translate the ramshackle hillbilly town from “Li’l Abner” into actual buildings, such as this ticket office.

  The first phase of the park cost $1,332,000 to complete. Capp was on hand, enjoying the festivities, when Dogpatch USA opened in May 1968, and before the park’s inaugural season was over, 300,000 visitors, paying $1.50 (half price for children) would see the 823-acre facility.

  “It is every kid’s dream to own his own amusement park, and here it is,” Capp said at the grand opening, calling the park “the greatest Urban Renewal project I’ve ever seen.”

  Capp never forgot Charles Schulz’s opinion that marrying off Li’l Abner to Daisy Mae constituted the biggest mistake in comics history. Schulz had been a young upstart, only two years into comic strip syndication, when Li’l Abner had taken the plunge. If Schulz’s comment bothered Capp as a violation of the unwritten rule that comics artists didn’t criticize one another in public (unless, of course, it was Capp doing the criticizing), it must have grated on him even more over the ensuing years, when it became evident that there was a fair amount of truth in Schulz’s observation. The strip hadn’t been the same after the wedding.

  The press, aware of Capp’s competitive nature, made a point of occasionally asking him for his opinions of other cartoonists’ work, including Schulz and “Peanuts.” Capp would offer a generic response (“I find ‘Peanuts’ not as exciting as some people do. It’s a trick that’s wearing thin—having kids speak like adults. It is damn well drawn, however”), but he would also state, as if there had ever been any doubt, that he and Schulz were very different and he wasn’t really interested in what Schulz was doing.

  You could not have found two cartoonists less alike. Capp, a loud, brash, aggressive East Coast Jew with an almost desperate need for attention, produced, in “Li’l Abner,” a heavily detailed, extremely talkative satire that thundered off the page like its creator in person. Schulz, a quiet midwestern Methodist who tended to stay away from the spotlight, produced minimalist panels, with very little background and sparse (in comparison to Capp, certainly) dialogue, the action on the page as reserved as its creator. “Li’l Abner” was set in a world almost devoid of children; “Peanuts” was set in a world almost devoid of adults.

  Although there was no open animosity between the two cartoonists, they were never going to be good friends, either. They’d met at a National Cartoonists Society function in the 1950s and maintained a professional civility, but, as Capp learned in October 1968, when he published “Peewee Unlimited,” a parody of “Peanuts,” Schulz could be touchy about criticism of his strip. He was not amused by some of the spoof’s nastiness, especially when Capp implied that Schulz couldn’t draw, or that the musings of the “Peanuts” gang were cheap pop psychology drummed up for financial gain.

  Schulz contacted Capp and asked him to stop.

  “I told him I was flattered by the attention,” Schulz told a reporter, “but I didn’t think it was very funny.”

  Capp pulled the plug on the parody, but he still walked away with favorable publicity when he stated that he dropped the sequence out of respect for Schulz and cartoonists everywhere.

  “I wouldn’t do that for Joan Baez or Lyndon Johnson,” he said, “or for any other group in the world but cartoonists.”

  Whether he intended to or not, Capp reinvented himself through his numerous college appearances, directing a barrage of insults at students. He could still be very funny and deadly as a satirist, as he proved in a “Li’l Abner” continuity in which a student activist group, Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.I.N.E.) finds itself in charge when a chemical gas accident paralyzes anyone who has recently bathed. The students have been so busy protesting that they cannot perform the simplest tasks, and they’re helpless when enemy troops arrive and threaten to take over Dogpatch. Fortunately for all, the effects of the chemical wear off and the un-paralyzed adults fight off the intruders, freeing S.W.I.N.E. members to do what they do best: protest.

  Defending his satire of students, he said, “It is the duty of those who know better to give them the sort of indulgent contempt they deserve, and keep them from doing anything either harmful to the world or themselves until they simmer down.”

  As the Vietnam War dragged on in the 1960s and protest grew on college campuses, Al Capp responded with his creation of the unkempt and clueless protestors of S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything).

  By the late 1960s, Capp had worked his campus appearances into a routine he could sleepwalk his way through. He would address his audience in a brief speech focusing on the particular issues of the day and then take questions from the audience. He met with students before his appearances, and he would survey their opinions on the issues that those attending the school might favor; he would distribute cards for students to use in questioning him. By the time he took the stage, he was ready for battle, and by the time he left it, he knew he had been in one. He joked that he charged Ivy League schools an additional thousand dollars for combat pay.

  Capp’s speaking fee of $3,500 to $5,000 was among the highest of the period. Millie Maffei, his personal assistant in the late sixties and early seventies, who answered his fan mail, paid the bills, and made his travel arrangements, was pulled into the vortex of Capp’s college engagements. Capp, who disliked paying for something when he could avoid it, decided that Millie could also arrange his speaking engagements, so he fired his speaking bureau and she added the colleges to her list of duties. But as Capp eventually grew tired of the campus grind, he hinted to Millie that he wanted to slow down the pace. “I took his cue,” she said. “When the next college inquired, I said that Mr. Capp’s rate was $10,000. To my shock they said ‘OK!’ “

  A May 24, 1969, appearance at Penn State University symbolized the antagonistic relationship between Capp and students. Capp had agreed to participate, along with Ralph Nader and Muhammad Ali, in an event sponsored by the student organization Colloquy. The committee planning the event intended it to be an open exchange of ideas between the students and the guests of honor, but any thoughts of an orderly exchange evaporated when Capp, the last of the three to speak, addressed the estimated audience of five thousand packed into the university’s Rec Hall.

  He had prepared for his customary jousting with his audience. He was ready to unleash his bon mots, one-liners, and personal darts. Capp roasted the student activists by ridiculing them as inmates running the asylum. He attacked the Students for a Democratic Society by calling the membership a leper colony, drew laughter when he approved of premarital sex “as long as it’s only practice,” and elicited boos of derision when he refused to allow students the opportunity to finish their remarks when they addressed him. It was the typical Capp performance, drawing mixed responses, the usual parade of walkouts, and enough controversy to give the local press something to report.

  The Colloquy Committee traditionally gave its guest speakers a small statue of a Nittany Lion, the Penn State mascot and symbol, but on this occasion, the master of ceremonies, Don Shall, announced that Capp would not be awarded his statue because his presentation “was not in the spirit of the Colloquy program.” Shall left the stage to a chorus of boos; a student rushed up to the stage and presented the statue to Capp, to the general approval of the audience; and Capp found himself answering u
nanticipated questions from the media.

  The event’s aftermath demonstrated how polarizing Capp’s provocative university appearances had become. Shall and the Colloquy Committee offered formal apologies to Capp—which he accepted—and he was formally presented with his statue. Students argued over the event in the Daily Collegian, the student newspaper. Although it was generally agreed that Capp was out of line—letter-writers called him disgusting, rude, and pompous—there was debate over whether he had been treated fairly. An editorial noted, “He did not come here under false pretenses. His manners may have been despicable by our standards, but our manners were worse.”

  In its official statement, the Colloquy Committee accepted blame for “errors in judgment.” Capp had been invited for his conservative viewpoints, they said. The committee’s mistake was that they had accidentally “hired a performer to entertain, and not a speaker to interact.”

  Capp fully expected to be treated as a guest, regardless of how deeply he insulted his hosts.

  “Any concerted booing, any rhythmic chanting that is an attempt to silence me is an attempt of animals,” he declared, perhaps forgetting that he made a habit of interrupting or shouting down these same people. “They cease to be humans at that point and I treat them as animals.”

  Capp’s theatrics did not go unnoticed or unremarked upon by his friends and peers. Friends such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. became former friends. William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative columnist and host of the television program Firing Line, invited Capp to be a guest on his show, but after his appearance, which largely featured Capp rehashing earlier campus remarks, Buckley wondered if Capp might be more effective if he toned down his act.

  “I think Mr. Capp, as undeniably hilarious as he is, might be a more effective advocate if he varied his technique a bit and eased the doses of ridicule he administers,” Buckley said. “His is a cause that needs persuasive advocates, and it is unfortunate that he dissipates the moral cogency of his position by overkill which at times borders on vulgarity.”

  Columnist Garry Wills was more pointed in his criticism of Capp. Writing a year after Capp’s Penn State appearance, Wills compared Capp to a clown clapping at a funeral. Capp, he noted, had set high standards for himself, and now he had to be judged by them.

  “Now we must pity him,” Wills concluded, “as he becomes ever more despicably ludicrous.”

  No one could accuse Al Capp of aiming his darts at low-level targets. He’d sparred with Ham Fisher; mercilessly lampooned Chester Gould and “Dick Tracy”; parodied Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles, Liberace, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Joan Baez, and a host of others when they were at the peak of their success; and carved up countercultural leaders during his television appearances and college campus visits. He never quit searching for targets, and as the sixties drew to a close, he set his sights on two of the biggest cultural icons of all: John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

  Lennon represented a target too good to ignore. The Beatles were reaching the end of their long and winding road, and Lennon, more than any of the band’s three other members, was using his celebrity status to advance a social and political agenda. He sought a peaceful resolution to war and violent times, and he was willing to wager that he had the audience necessary to push his vision forward. In cynical times, Lennon stood as a symbol of hope.

  Capp felt nothing but contempt for Lennon and his pronouncements. In Capp’s mind, Lennon was as phony as any figure to rise out of the sixties. The songs, the protests, the press conferences—all they represented, Capp averred, was a cheesy, poorly disguised way to earn more money.

  Capp decided to go to Montreal, where Lennon and Ono were engaged in their very public “Bed-In for Peace.” As a publicity stunt, it offered everything Capp could have yearned for: an internationally revered figure, fattened for the slaughter; a substantial group of starstruck hangers-on, all leaning forward to hear Lennon’s next utterance; and a hungry press, eager to record the confrontation for televised news reports and the next day’s papers.

  Capp arrived on June 1, and the game was on from the moment he made his way through the group standing in the doorway to room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The group spilled into the room and gathered around the bed, where John and Yoko were holding court.

  “I’m that dreadful Neanderthal fascist,” Capp began, extending a hand to Lennon and Ono. “How do you do?”

  Lennon shot an inquisitive look at the famous cartoonist, dressed smartly in a dark business suit contrasting wildly with the white pajamas he and Yoko were wearing.

  “We’re those famous freaks,” Lennon said in response to Capp’s self-deprecatory introduction.

  Someone brought Capp a chair, and he sat down at the foot of the bed. Lennon and Ono sat cross-legged at the headboard.

  “So far, you’ve been confronted mainly with admirers,” Capp said, “and I may wind up to be one, you never can tell.”

  “We’ve had all sorts in here, believe me,” Lennon said.

  “I’m sure you have,” Capp shot back.

  Capp opened the debate by questioning Lennon and Ono’s theatrical methods for publicizing their agenda for world peace. Perhaps, he proposed, the two could do more than just sit in bed; perhaps they could shower together. What would happen, Capp wondered, if Hitler and Churchill had crawled into bed together. Lennon proposed that lives might have been saved. The three sparred about Lennon and Ono’s being in Montreal, rather than in Peking or Hanoi, and Lennon grew annoyed when he perceived that Capp was ridiculing their hopes to defusing tense situations by dialogue, such as Lennon’s daily radio contacts with dissidents in Berkeley.

  Capp did not take the bait. He reminded Lennon that dissidents had been throwing rocks at the police. Lennon shrugged it off by saying that at least nobody had been shot.

  “What are you doing about it?” he challenged Capp.

  “I’m cheering the police,” Capp replied, returning to his consistent stance that he detested violence and bad behavior by activists.

  Suddenly, everybody was talking at once. When Ono tried to turn the conversation to Joan Baez, Capp tossed out the first personal insult.

  “Good God, you’ve got to live with that?” he asked Lennon. “I can see why you want peace. God knows you can’t have much, from my own observation.”

  Talking over Ono, Capp moved on.

  “I read something that—you said that you were very shy people,” Capp said.

  “Yes. We are, sir,” Ono answered.

  “And yet, these are …” Capp, with a slight smirk, held up a copy of Two Virgins, the controversial Lennon/Ono album featuring a cover of the couple posing nude.

  “Does that prove that you’re not shy?” Lennon wondered.

  “Certainly not. Only the shyest people in the world would take pictures like this,” Capp shot back sarcastically.

  The two traded verbal punches until Capp suggested that the photograph was “filth.”

  Lennon held his temper. “Do you think that’s filth?” he asked Capp.

  “Certainly not,” Capp said again. This was going to be his moment, and you could sense that he might have rehearsed the lines that followed. “I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair,” he continued, “and you’ve done it. You’ve done it and I tell you that I applaud you for it.”

  The audience in the hotel room became more animated. Some laughed at Capp’s remark; others muttered. These were people who subscribed to John and Yoko’s vision for world peace, and the tranquility of the “bed-in” was suddenly being interrupted by a visitor on the attack.

  Capp remained on the offensive. He brushed off the couple’s challenge to take off his clothes and “prove it” (that he had pubic hair) in front of all those gathered in the room, then concluded this portion of the exchange by proposing that Lennon and Ono’s posing in full frontal nudity was “one of the greatest contributions to enlightenment and culture of our time.”

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bsp; “I’m glad you noticed,” Lennon replied.

  Capp moved on to another source of irritation to him: the lyrics to “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” He began by misquoting the song’s chorus, with Lennon correcting him, and moved on immediately to dispute Lennon’s assertion that the lyrics about the trials of being a public figure could apply to Capp as well.

  “We are all together in this world,” Ono interjected, “married together in this world.” Capp retorted that the thought of being married to her would possibly produce nightmares that would awaken him screaming in the night.

  When Lennon attempted to bring the conversation back to the original topic, saying he was speaking for the human race, Capp refused to concede that he could write a song that represented the feelings of everyone.

  “Whatever race you’re the representative of,” Capp continued, “I ain’t part of it.”

  Lennon asked Capp who he created his cartoons for.

  “I write my cartoons for money,” Capp declared, “just as you sing your songs—exactly the same reason. And exactly the same reason much of this is happening, too, if the truth be told.”

  “You think I couldn’t earn money by some other way than by sitting in bed for seven days, taking shit from people like you?” Lennon was clearly angry. “I could write a song in an hour and earn more money.”

  This was the payoff for Capp. He had Lennon frustrated and defensive. Capp feigned to be hurt. After all, he was Lennon’s guest and Lennon was showing no manners.

  The meeting, however, was over. It had not gone as well as planned, and neither Capp nor Lennon acquitted himself well in the confrontation. As he prepared to leave, Capp turned to Yoko Ono and delivered a blow that crystallized all the venom she’d been hearing since she and Lennon had become a public couple three years earlier.

  “I’m delighted to have met you, Madame Nhu,” he said, referring to the controversial sister-in-law of South Vietnam’s slain president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who blamed the United States for the military coup and the assassination. Madame Nhu had become one of the most polarizing figures in the debate over the war.