Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

  A hit, the program was picked up later for national saturation by the Mutual Network. In 1942 the Kellogg Company signed on as exclusive sponsor, and the relationship between Superman and the cereal maker (more specifically between Superman and “super delicious” Kellogg’s Pep) lasted just under two decades. Eventually the program moved to the ABC network, remaining on the air for eleven years.

  By the time radio’s Adventures of Superman came to the end of its broadcast life in March 1951, television’s Adventures of Superman was already in the works.

  That April, Jack Liebowitz sent Maxwell to California. The plan was to shoot an inexpensive Superman featurette that could serve as the TV pilot but also be distributed as a theatrical B-picture to recover costs. Liebowitz hoped to get the featurette plus fifty-two half-hour television episodes all for about $400,000. Maxwell convinced him otherwise, and they settled on one featurette and twenty-four episodes. Even so it was a miserly budget (the flying effects cost a whopping $175 per episode), but first things first: who was going to play Superman?

  Bud Collyer, radio’s Superman, was a voice, not a presence; besides, he was too old and wasn’t a screen actor. Kirk Alyn, who had played the character twice before in the serials, the second time scarcely a year earlier, apparently wasn’t considered for the job. According to the serials’ codirector Tommy Carr, it was Alyn’s histrionic acting style that disqualified him—too broad, it was felt, for the intimacy of TV (Grossman, Superman, 80). That’s one explanation.

  Another is Alyn’s trim, lithe, whippetlike build and bearing, which no longer matched National—or as the company was better known by then, DC — Comics’ Superman ideal: aloof, self-assured, and big. Massive.

  Casting scouts checked out bodybuilders and wrestlers, the Mr. Universe pageant, Venice Beach, anywhere with free weights and cocoa butter, but eventually, after two hundred auditions, Maxwell hired the thirty-seven-year-old George Reeves (born George Bessolo): tall, dark, handsome—and decidedly thick around the middle.

  A pretty good movie actor, Reeves had been headed for stardom (so he thought) during the 1940s, but never got there. He’d landed a tiny part in Gone with the Wind (playing one of the Tarleton twins), later acted opposite Claudette Colbert in So Proudly We Hail, and appeared in two B-pictures directed by Fritz Lang. He was on the brink—one good part would do it, all he needed was The Call—when the war came and he was drafted. He missed his shot. Afterward, the best George Reeves could get was playing Buffalo Bill in a garish Technicolor second feature and Sir Galahad in a crummy-beyond-belief serial from Columbia Pictures.

  Then Bob Maxwell’s coproducer—Bernard Luber—spotted him (or, more likely, his profile) at a Hollywood restaurant and thought he’d make the perfect Superman.

  At that point Reeves couldn’t afford to turn down work, even when he wanted to. Superman, though. Ay yi yi.

  When he got the role, soft-bodied George Reeves (cocktails at four, then drinks before dinner and after-dinner drinks) in no way physically resembled Superman in the comic books—except in profile. His six-times-broken nose (he’d boxed professionally) had the same Roman arc as Wayne Boring’s Superman, and his jaw the same confident thrust. Otherwise, even the wool costume’s foam-rubber padding, twenty pounds of it, couldn’t make him look buff. Yet for more than two decades—until Christopher Reeve, in the late 1970s—it was most likely/almost certainly knock-kneed middle-aged George Reeves with his brilliantined hair (no spit curl for him, just a slight pomp) and obvious tummy girdle that most of us saw as a momentary flash in our minds whenever the name Superman was mentioned.

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  Superman and the Mole Men, the sixty-seven-minute black-and-white featurette intended for theaters, began filming in mid-July 1951, mostly around the rocky and alkaline back lot at the RKO Pathe Studios in Culver City. Directed by Lee Sholem, it wrapped in eleven days. Following a one-day break, Sholem and Tommy Carr divvied up the TV scripts, many of them based on

  Superman radio programs (just as many of the radio programs had been based on comic book stories), and shot those at a rate of five or six every two weeks, Saturdays just another workday. There were always a couple of episodes, at least a couple, filming simultaneously, which, according to Gary Grossman in his book about the series, explains (and frankly I’d always wondered) why the actors wore the same street clothes all the time: “so that footage from different episodes could be shot at the same time without having to worry about matching costumes” (Superman, 164).

  Nat King Cole’s “Too Young” played across the radio dial that summer, and every week there were roughly five hundred more American casualties—killed, wounded, missing, or captured—in the bogged-down and increasingly unpopular Korean War. That summer in Cicero, Illinois, there was also a race riot (black man, rented house, white neighborhood, National Guard), worst one of those since before the war. That summer, too, G.M.’s rocketlike experimental convertible LeSabre, three feet low, bristling with switches and gadgets, and powered by a three hundred-horsepower V-8 engine, reached a speed of 110 miles per hour at a proving ground in Milford, Michigan. And that summer Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op, was jailed in Washington, D.C., for contempt of Congress after he refused to give up the names of Communist acquaintances. By summer’s end, a first season’s worth of episodes for The Adventures of Superman was completed.

  A year and a half passed before the series premiered on television, even longer before it was seen coast to coast, but Superman and the Mole Men arrived in theaters just four months later. November 1951. Cowritten by Whitney Ellsworth and Bob Maxwell under the pseudonym Richard Fielding, it included only two members of the television cast, Reeves as Clark Kent and Superman, and Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane.

  A former movie-serial scream queen, Coates plays Lois straight out of the earliest comic books: sharp-tongued, efficient, cool under pressure; a crack reporter, a pro, a pistol, a broad—”quick,” writes Joseph McCabe (in “Speeding Bullets and Changing Lanes,” his homage to the First Lady of Comics), “to call Clark or any other man a fool” (164). She gives good scorn.

  George Reeves, on the other hand, entirely disregards Jerry Siegel’s (and everyone else’s) fumbly, craven Clark Kent persona, instead playing Kent as a hardboiled newshound straight out of some rat-tat-tat film noir. No stammering g-gulps, w-wells, or r-rights for him. With bluntly aggressive body language, this Kent talks fast, looks sharp in his snap-brim fedora and boxy gray suit, and takes charge. Firing questions, acting skeptical, refusing to be budged, blocked, sidetracked, or intimidated. A no-nonsense postwar he-man.

  Reeves snaps out Kent’s dialogue, then presses his lips into a grim line. He does the same thing as Superman. Never—not here and not later in the television series—does he play Clark Kent as Superman in disguise. He plays him as Superman in street clothes, out and about in his cool fifties threads, the tortoise-shell eyeglass frames merely a fashion accessory. Both personae speak the same way, glare the same way, move and stride and gesture and abruptly pivot the same way. Of course they’re the same guy. But nobody notices. And Lois Lane especially doesn’t: Kent faces down a lynch mob and still the woman snipes at him as contemptuously as she’d been doing in the comics for thirteen years.

  It wasn’t as if Reeves had simply decided to play Clark Kent the opposite of how he’d always been played. The new macho Kent, completely at odds with the one familiar to comic book readers and radio audiences, had been written into the script. With little money for special effects, even cheesy ones, Maxwell decided early on to make Superman’s appearances brief and confine them mostly to the picture’s (and later the TV program’s) climax and conclusion. “Reeves eschewed stereotypical bumbling as Clark Kent,” Grossman says, “which worked particularly well because Kent had to carry most stories” (Superman, 116).

  Unlike the two Columbia serials, Superman and the Mole Men was intended for general audiences, not just balconies acrawl with Raisinettes-box-honking
twelve-year-olds, and despite a dipsydoodle premise, the movie — like Invaders from Mars, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like The Day the Earth Stood Still—fits neatly, if not notably, into that oddball subgenre of midcentury science fiction, the ambiguous political parable.

  After a well six miles deep is drilled near the western town of Silsby, two bald, glow-in-the-dark mole men (think Munchkins with bear claws) clamber to the surface for a peaceable look around. Spotted, they’re pursued by a posse of armed xenophobes and accused of everything from murdering an old night watchman (they didn’t touch the man, he had a heart attack) to menacing a little blonde girl (they were just playing catch with her) to poisoning whatever they touch (they’re phosphorescent, not radioactive). After one mole man is shot and another trapped inside a cabin that is set on fire, a handful of brother subterraneans come skulking out of the well, dragging a ray gun that looks like a stainless steel Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Pick your metaphor. Class? Race? Communism? They all work. Sort of.

  In Silsby to write about “the world’s deepest oil well,” reporters Kent and Lane try defusing the crisis. They fail. At which point Kent slips away (the first of many, many sprints Reeves will take down a happily convenient alleyway) to become Superman. When he appears, not even Lois finds it peculiar. He just happened to be flying over the neighborhood—twenty-five hundred miles from Metropolis? Oh. Okay.

  During the ten or fifteen minutes Superman actually is on screen, he bends a bar of steel, lets bullets ricochet off his chest, disarms a crowd, peers through a couple of walls, and catches a mole man after he has toppled from a hydroelectric dam. (Smudgy animated flying effects kick in the moment Reeves is clumsily hoisted away on “invisible” wires. Your legs, George, pick up your legs!) Primarily, though, what Superman does is talk—delivering testy lectures about tolerance to a bigoted, parochial 1951 American lynch mob. “They look strange to us, it’s true. But we must look just as strange to them. Be reasonable. Stop acting like Nazi storm troopers!” Whoa.

  George Reeves suited up for the first time in Superman and the Mole Men, the 1951 B-film that also served as the pilot for the television show (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)

  In the end, with Superman’s protection, the mole men collect their wounded and retreat to the center of the earth, protectively blowing up the shaft behind them. The flames die, the smoke (naturally a midget mushroom cloud) dissipates, and the dust settles around Silsby. While Superman nods soberly, Lois Lane, centrally positioned and foregrounded, speaks the final line of dialogue: “It’s almost as if they’re saying, you’ve got your home and we’ve got ours.”

  Hooray for peace, love, and understanding, and let’s hear it for universal brotherhood—so long as things are kept “separate but equal.” Or is that not the point? Then what is the point? The script hedges its humanism and plays things safe, managing to be both preachy and vague. But at least it has more on its mind than cheap thrills and the Boy Scout motto. (Which couldn’t be said for any of the Superman stories being churned out for comic books in 1951.)

  Like Jerry Siegel, Robert Maxwell—who in his capacity as show runner had repeatedly unleashed radio’s Superman on religious bigots and the Ku Klux Klan during the late 1940s—pre-ferred his Man of Steel with a liberal (although perhaps not a flaming liberal) conscience.13 As Superman’s primary handler for radio, television, and the movies over the course of a decade, Maxwell, not Siegel, may well have been the most responsible for establishing the character as an American icon embodying common decency, civility, and the democratic ideal—whose persona fuses decency, civility, and the democratic ideal.

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  In the fall of 1952, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye were published. Fred Zinnemann’s subversive “adult” western High Noon was released. The State Department canceled Charlie Chaplin’s visa pending investigation of his alleged “un-American” activities. And on Friday, September 26, just two days after vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon humbly delivered his famous/infamous “Checkers” speech, The Adventures of Superman finally premiered, on the fledgling ABC television network’s Chicago outlet. The Davenport, Iowa, affiliate picked up the program in October, followed by Buffalo, New York, in November, the same month Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. By the following spring, it could be seen every week coast to coast. The first season consisted of twenty-six half-hour episodes, twenty-four originals and a two-part season finale entitled “The Unknown People,” which was actually the theatrical Mole Men featurette reedited.

  Bob Maxwell created a program whose look, content, pacing, and tone derived almost entirely from postwar Hollywood noir. Homunculi-from-the-center-of-the-earth notwithstanding, these were tough little one-camera crime melodramas. “Gone were the mad scientists and supervillains of the comics and animated shorts,” writes Joseph McCabe, “and in their place marched an endless procession of mobsters and hit men. The world of Metropolis, so full of color in the Fleischer cartoons, was now rendered in the moody black-and-white hues of such films as Double Indemnity and Night and the City. Superman found himself battling a grittier, more realistic criminal element” (“Speeding Bullets,” 164).

  Despite the naturalness, amiability, and rapport of the permanent cast (which in addition to Reeves and Coates included a nineteen-year-old Jack Larson as a gulping Jimmy Olsen and John Hamilton as the ill-tempered Perry White), Maxwell’s show, with its frequent spikes of cruelty (a cocker spaniel gassed to death, a little girl’s polio braces torn off by gangsters, an old biddy in a wheelchair pushed down a flight of stairs), caused the keenest distress both in Battle Creek, Michigan, and New York City. Kellogg’s believed that it had signed up to sponsor a show for kids, a kiddie show, and DC Comics—well, DC wanted to keep Kellogg’s happy and Superman unobjectionable.

  Jack Liebowitz was displeased that Maxwell had produced the kind of pulpy, preachy crime stories he thought he’d seen the last of when Jerry Siegel got the hook. “I always wanted to do the films myself,” he said. “I didn’t want to send them out to subcontractors” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 95). Suddenly Bob Maxwell was a “subcontractor.” His days masterminding the Man of Steel were over. Maxwell quit, or (more likely) was fired, after the first season (he went on to produce the Lassie television series) and was replaced by DC’s editorial director Whitney Ellsworth.

  When he left New York by train for California to take charge, Ellsworth brought along an assistant, another longtime DC editor named Mort Weisinger. “Together,” said Ellsworth, “we knew as much about Superman as it was possible to know. So in advance of production we’d lock ourselves in a room and work on stories. By the time we were ready to hand out writing assignments we were able to give the writers outlines of what we wanted—not just so-called premises but complete step-by-step story lines” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 95). Step-by-step story lines that, beginning with the second season and continuing through the sixth and final one, made The Adventures of Superman closer in spirit to The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show than to Dragnet.

  Ellsworth was the anti-Maxwell and filled his version of the program (seventy-eight shows, the majority presciently filmed in color) with boxy blinking robots and fake swamis, ditsy inventors and two-bit con men as sinister and capable as the Three Stooges. Over four years — 1953 through 1957—the Ellsworth-stamped Adventures of Superman sold an awful lot of breakfast cereal and inspired millions of American kids to knot Turkish towels around their necks and leap from the Castro Convertible to the coffee table to the armchair to the floor (but none to leap fatally from a roof or a high window, contrary to popular legend).

  Each fall’s new batch of shows was slighter and sillier and schmaltzier than the last, but the audience stayed loyal, the ratings held, and, like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the Superman cast became something new in American popular culture. They became TV Stars, showing up on the covers of TV Guide and middlebrow magazines, quoted in syndicated gossip columns, recognized
on the street, and paid to appear in character at state fairs, amusement parks, and supermarket openings.

  Meanwhile, none of the actors was paid more than a few hundred dollars an episode, their take-it-or-leave-it contracts denying them residuals following the seventh rerun. Jack Larson and Noel Neill (who replaced Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane beginning with the second season, and softened the role to the point of wide-eyed innocence) had to watch their budgets, and John Hamilton, despite increasingly poor health, walked or caught a bus to the studio every morning from his apartment in a rundown residence hotel. Even George Reeves—who’d sued for more compensation halfway through the first season, and lost— lived in a modest bungalow in Benedict Canyon.

  Another world, no? Another time. When you could be a television celebrity, your face so recognizable you draw crowds of gapers at the ballpark and the A&P, but still find yourself strapped for the rent two, three times a year.

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  In 2006 Focus Features released Hollywoodland, Allen Coulter’s film about the problematic death of George Reeves. Although Paul Bernbaum’s script presents the guy, played by Ben Affleck, as a likable loser, a lush, a bit of a blowhard, and a case study in self-deceit, it’s neither unfair nor unsympathetic—and let’s face it, Reeves’s violent end, the whole sad and smarmy business of it, did resemble a quick read by Horace McCoy: kiddie-show actor finds himself typecast, unemployable, a joke around the industry; dumps his aging and jealous mistress (who’s married to a mobbed-up MGM big shot) after falling hard for a sharp-tongued young femme fatale from the East Coast; then in his bedroom one night in June 1959, bombed on cocktails and under the influence of painkillers (prescribed after a recent car accident—had his spurned lover tampered with the brakes?), he shoots himself, or is shot, in the temple with a Luger pistol. TV’s Superman Dead at 45.