Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  The essay elicited the predictable angry responses from the left, but a few readers were quite pleased. Reagan sent a complimentary letter to Penthouse, praising Capp’s perception. Nixon, embroiled in the increasing revelations about Watergate, was grateful for Capp’s support. He had distanced himself from Capp in the wake of the sex scandals, when he was running for a second term in the White House, but he was touched by Capp’s defense of him, in Penthouse and elsewhere, while he tried to stave off the disapproval that seemed to be growing with each new Watergate story.

  “I very much appreciated the high marks you gave me,” he wrote. “You have never been one to mince words or ideas, and you put across your views with no less effectiveness than you have been doing for years as a cartoonist.” In another personal letter, written five months later, after Capp had written a piece defending Nixon in the Watergate fiasco, the president expressed gratitude for Capp’s taking what was becoming a very unpopular position. “It has always been my experience in my political career that you learn who your friends are—not when the road is smooth, but when it is sometimes rocky,” Nixon told Capp.

  Yet in this same year, Capp also corresponded personally with his political rivals, the Kennedys. Teddy Kennedy Jr., the twelve-year-old son of his old rival Ted Kennedy, had contracted osteosarcoma and had to have his right leg amputated. On November 19, 1973, two days after Teddy had lost his leg, Capp sent off a letter of encouragement that revealed the rarely seen sweet side of the curmudgeonly cartoonist.

  After introducing himself as the creator of “Li’l Abner,” Capp wrote of how he’d lost his leg when he was a boy, and how difficult it had been for him to deal with well-meaning people trying to cheer him up. He was frank but gentle.

  “It’s much better to have two legs,” he wrote. “But having one is no tremendous disorder. I’ve lived an active life and I’ve accomplished mostly everything I set out to do on one leg.”

  Capp went on to advise the young Kennedy on how to handle an artificial limb, and how to contend with the psychological trauma that accompanied learning how to walk on the limb and dealing with a permanent limp. People might notice, Capp allowed, but it wouldn’t mean anything. In fact, his friends would adjust automatically to his walking pace.

  “It’s not your missing leg anyone much will notice,” he said, “but the rest of you. The rest of you is your character, your intellect, your manliness, and none of that is gone—it’s all there to make you and your family happy.”

  From the tone of the letter, Capp might have been advising his own son, rather than the son of an adversary. The elder Kennedy, taken by Capp’s act of kindness, scribbled a note of thanks at the bottom of his son’s response to Capp.

  Capp kept this strongly personal side of himself private. His work with charitable organizations had been highly touted over the years, but the public knew little about his quietly donating his lecture fees to families of fallen police officers or others just needing help.

  Capp guarded his sensitive side as if its revelation would destroy it. His grandson, Will Peirce, would remember watching a television newscast of the Jonestown massacre with his grandfather. Capp sat silently, transfixed as the television reporter related the story of how Jim Jones had ordered his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid, and how parents had administered it to their children. When Peirce glanced over at Capp, tears were coursing down the older man’s cheeks. Capp wept at the sheer horror and sadness of what he was watching.

  Capp’s behavior was becoming delusional. He wrote excoriating letters, some to friends and family, some of which he mailed, some of which he crumpled and threw in the trash, almost all lashing out for perceived betrayals, slights, and misdeeds. He fought with his longtime assistants Bob Lubbers, Harvey Curtis, and Larry May, angered when they tried to collect money that he claimed they didn’t have coming. He ordered May to destroy much of his art, financial records, correspondence, photographs, and books that were in storage. He became obsessed with his belief that Ted Kennedy had been behind the events in Eau Claire and that his longtime friend, columnist Art Buchwald, had turned him over to Jack Anderson in the University of Alabama scandal.

  Some of this behavior might be attributed to the medications he was taking. Although Capp never fully trusted doctors or psychiatrists, he saw plenty of them in the seventies. With more than one doctor writing him prescriptions, it’s possible he ingested drugs that, taken together, could have produced adverse effects leading to his actions. He was taking daily doses of lithium (a medication meant to help control depression and manic behavior), Tofranil (an antidepressant), Haldol (a drug prescribed to help a patient distinguish reality from the imagined), chloral hydrate (a sedative used as a sleep aid), Ritalin (prescribed to help in focusing), and Artane (used to control trembling caused by other drugs).

  Al Capp, photographed in 1977, the year he retired “Li’l Abner,” and two years before his death.

  Neurologist and bestselling author Dr. Oliver Sacks expressed surprise when he heard the list of medications prescribed to Capp. Although they were second cousins, they had not met until 1966, after Sacks had moved from London to New York, and while he was quick to point out that he had never treated Capp, he agreed that the combination of medications constituted “a hell of a cocktail,” possibly toxic and certainly capable, depending upon the constitution of the user, of producing unusual, even psychotic, behavior. Sacks, who characterized Capp as “warm-hearted, generous, and someone I enjoyed talking to,” also described him as being “contrary,” but his anger had always been manifest in his work. His rage as seen in some of the letters was entirely something else.

  Although he declined to make a definitive statement about Capp’s specific tolerance for a mixture of medications, he did know something of Capp’s medical history. His father, Dr. Samuel Sacks, had treated Capp for symptoms of lupus when Capp and his family were visiting England in the early seventies. In all likelihood, the lupus was drug induced: when Samuel Sacks learned that Capp was taking Apresoline, a drug prescribed for hypertension, along with other medications, he ordered Capp to quit taking it, and the symptoms disappeared.

  Capp could be a very resistant patient. His regular physician begged him to quit smoking, but he ignored the order—despite his persistent shortness of breath—until 1977. He was placed on an exercise regimen designed to help him strengthen his ailing leg, lose weight, and improve his overall health; he would follow the regimen until he grew bored with it or pains, real or imagined, convinced him that he should stop. He raged when the medical bills rolled in.

  “Al became a very nasty and irascible guy in the period just prior to his death,” Larry May remembered in 1981. “I knew him on a daily basis for years and easily ascertained his personality quirks, and followed his descent mentally to the acrimonious bed-ridden and guilt-ridden guy he became.”

  According to May, Capp’s depression was so severe and persistent that he contemplated suicide on several occasions. He would type a note, change his mind about committing suicide, toss out the note, and he and May would discuss it later, when Capp’s mood had improved enough to allow him to analyze his reasons for wanting to end his life.

  One such suicide note, never completed, survives. The letter was unbelievably vitriolic, even by Capp’s standards. After citing the problems he’d had with his health—the nonstop pain he’d endured from wearing his wooden leg, the fact that he could barely breathe, the increasing amount of time he was spending in a wheelchair, and his unhappiness with his physical therapy, which he called “a lot of crap”—he turned his anger toward his family: “one of the reasons I want to go.” He offered no criticism of Kim but called the women in his life “pitiful and unbearable.” He went on to list his complaints about Julie, whom he called “the most promising” of his children, and thus “the most astonishing disappointment.” He hated Julie’s second and third husbands, both Argentineans—“two of the most detestable frauds I’ve ever met,” “the scrapings of Buen
os Aires gutters,” who, to hear Capp tell it, were only trying to extract money from him. He ended the note in midsentence, so his feelings about Catherine and Cathie went unwritten.

  Not that they were spared in other far less vicious, but still very fierce, letters. In a 1973 business letter to Al Hochberg, he informed his attorney that he intended to move to England and write. He wanted to sell either his Brattle Street home in Cambridge or the New Hampshire farm—Catherine could choose which she wanted to live in—and as far as his money was concerned, he wanted Hochberg to determine a monthly allowance for Catherine, which Capp would provide. As for his children, there would be no more handouts or loans; they were on their own.

  “Aside from providing for them, I have no interest in them,” he declared. “Their interest in me has been in what they could get out of me, and that has never been so apparent as it has been in the last year. But I’m not doing this out of any bitterness or resentment. I just can’t give them any more of myself.”

  “I am leaving for England,” he told Catherine in another letter. “I am sick of all of you, sick of my drudgery to finance Cathie’s million-dollar psychiatric binge, Julie’s movie ventures, the innumerable trips you all take without a thought as to who pays for the gas or cars … Mostly, I am sick of being included only when the money flows, but cursed and abandoned when it stops.”

  These letters might have been written in moments of extreme rage, when Capp used them as a means of venting his frustration and anger, or they might have been written under the influence of medication that pushed him beyond his normal boundaries of restraint. True, however many suicide notes he wrote, Capp never followed through on his threat, just as he did not mail every vicious letter that he wrote. Still, the letters and notes were specific enough to indicate that Capp had given their content more than a small amount of thought, and that he was very earnest about his complaints. He had indeed given or lent his children large sums of money, and they lived the life of privilege. He’d invested in the movie made by Julie’s filmmaker husband, only to cringe when he saw the final product. His daughters’ medical bills were enormous.

  However, as Larry May indicated, Capp’s mood swings were extreme. He could be overheated one minute, tender the next. He still had powerful feelings for his family. In a letter to his brother Elliott, Capp spoke of wanting to provide for Catherine, “to keep her warm.”

  “She has had a painful life with me,” he acknowledged.

  In another letter, he praised Catherine as “a triumph of strength and sanity. She deserved a better life.”

  Catherine agreed. She had dealt with her husband’s infidelities, his lengthy trips away from a family while she was raising three children, and his recent rages; she’d even heard, through his attorney, that he wanted to leave her. They were two very different people, politically and socially, and they had constructed two very different lives that happened to intersect in a house on Brattle Street. But there was a limit to what anyone could be expected to endure. By 1974, she had concluded, in her diary, that he was the “worst creature I ever could have spent my life with.”

  Capp might have summed it up best in a 1975 letter to Milton Caniff, when he conceded that the controversies of a few years earlier had whipped him badly and left him feeling “totally helpless.”

  “I withdrew from damn near everything,” he told Caniff. “I think I may be coming out of it. And I’d better hurry if I am. I’m going to be 66 this month.”

  For all his love of talking about himself, Capp avoided writing his autobiography. He’d written brief memoirs for magazines, but he never attempted a book-length work. There had been a demand for it at one time, but Capp was too tied up by the strip and other projects to block off the period of time needed to write it.

  “About 15 years ago, Bennett Cerf gave me an enormous check to write my autobiography,” Capp told the Chicago Tribune, referring to the publisher and cofounder of Random House, a longtime Capp acquaintance. The offer had been made in the early sixties, and, as Capp recalled, he had to return the advance. “I couldn’t write a thing,” he admitted. “I was still living it then.”

  With “Li’l Abner” winding down, his declining health prohibiting travel or any kind of strenuous physical activity, and more time on his hands than he’d had in the past, Capp decided to give the autobiography a try. He had no publisher but, as he told the Tribune, all that mattered was the writing itself. He would cover his life beginning with a look back to his ancestors in Lithuania, speak of his parents’ meeting and marrying, and move forward in his own life from his birth to the beginning of “Li’l Abner.”

  This time frame was also covered in a memoir written by his father. Otto Caplin had divorced Tillie, remarried, and moved to Illinois, where he had taken a creative writing class and decided to write a book about his famous son. With the exception of Asa Berger’s 1970 Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, the first book-length critical study of a comic strip artist, there had been no books about Al Capp.

  If nothing else, Otto Caplin’s manuscript demonstrated where Al Capp’s storytelling abilities had originated. Otto had a smooth, engaging style, but his account was overflowing with exaggeration, half-truths, and outright fiction, all mixed together with the truth. Otto cast himself as the all-knowing, always understanding family figurehead, a real-life Ward Cleaver, always ready with instant wisdom or a dollar when needed, a man with a solid work ethic, a successful career, and the patience to guide a strong-willed son like Alfred to the best possible solution to any given problem. When he had completed his manuscript, Otto turned it over to Elliott, hoping that he might find a publisher. Despite strong misgivings about the book, Elliott agreed. Simon & Schuster, to Elliott’s relief, rejected it. Elliott found a way to let his father down easily, but the next publisher, Prentice Hall, accepted it. Otto died before the book was issued, and the manuscript was filed away and forgotten.

  The Al Capp story, narrated by the person who lived it, wasn’t any better than the Otto Caplin version. Capp’s version, much less detailed than his father’s, conflicted with the elder Caplin’s accounts of many of the stories.

  It hadn’t come easily, either. Capp was always a man with a story, but the discipline of framing the stories eluded him.

  “You ask yourself, what is there about my life that makes it worth writing about?” he wondered. “The basic facts of mine seem mighty ordinary: I married a girl I went to school with, same as most everybody; I had three children, which most everybody has; I spent the next forty years supporting them and trying to lay away enough to feed and shelter my widow, and I don’t know anybody who hasn’t.”

  Capp, of course, was being modest. Soon enough, he was writing about everything that set him apart from everyone else, and his voice, grumpy at first, when he dragged his audience through his familiar rants about being an outcast conservative, softened as he went, and he became the Al Capp remembered by “Li’l Abner” fans familiar with the strip at its peak. It was as if thirty years had been stripped away and he was young again.

  When he finished his second draft, Capp asked Elliott to read it and offer constructive criticism. Elliott, reminded of his troubles with his father’s manuscript, reluctantly agreed.

  He was stunned by what he read.

  “Nowhere in the 70-odd pages did I find the man I knew,” Elliott stated in his own memoirs. The book, he told his wife, was “unreal … concealing … defensive.” He approved of many passages, which he found charming and compelling, but the book was largely fiction. He wondered how he could ever discuss it with his brother.

  He decided that diplomacy was his only option. He would highly praise the portions of the manuscript that he liked and avoid bringing up his reservations about all the fiction.

  The meeting went well—or so Elliott thought until he heard from his sister later in the day. Madeline had spoken to Al, and he’d informed her that Elliott had hated the book.

  “My less than stunning performanc
e as a counterfeit critic hadn’t fooled him for a minute,” Elliott concluded.

  Capp never worked on the autobiography again.

  In the early days of comics, aspiring commercial artists attended the best art schools in the East, only to learn upon graduation that there were no jobs open to them. Steady freelance work was similarly difficult to find. For Jewish artists there was the additional matter of prevailing anti-Semitism: top-notch jobs were simply not available to Jews. Needing to earn a living and wanting to use their talents to do so, they would take jobs with comic book publishers, hoping to move on to the more lucrative commercial art and illustrating jobs when times were more favorable.

  There had been a pecking order among these artists in terms of their attitudes toward those working in comics. Those in the fine arts deemed all types of comics to be inferior, if they were art at all. Illustrators and commercial artists weren’t much kinder in their assessments. Comic strip artists, receiving maximum exposure and, in some cases, huge sums of money for their work, looked down upon comic book artists, whose work was generally produced for young readers on an assembly-line basis and for lowly flat per-page rates. The National Cartoonists Society in its formative years refused to admit those working exclusively in comic books. Comic strip and comic book artists alike resented the lack of respect, but they had little choice except to grind out their work and accept whatever admiration they could garner from their readers and peers.

  Al Capp had fought these attitudes from his earliest days in comics. His work was being enjoyed by tens of millions on a daily basis; he was a very high-profile artist, earning more than just a good living. By his own estimation, he was putting a lot more effort into his work than, say, abstract expressionists, who enjoyed international reputations and saw their work hanging in some of the most prestigious galleries and museums in the world. Capp held this kind of art in contempt, grousing that it was “produced by the talentless, sold by the unscrupulous, and bought by the utterly bewildered.”