by Larry Tye
“So I posed for him, and his mother would look in, and I was turning blue,” Joanne confessed. “My sister’s bathing suit was too big, so I pinned it in the back. And he said, ‘Never mind. I’ll put a little bit more here, a little bit more there.’ But he used my face and my hairdo and my poses that just made me look more voluptuous—and older. I had to be older.” Jerry remembered that day even more distinctly and fondly: “ ‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘She’s terrific!’ But I was too meek and mild to let Joanne know how great I thought she was. She was a very attractive girl, and I was just a teenaged kid, with a giant sized inferiority complex, who had nothing but grandiose plans that seemed very far from materializing into actuality.”
Just how far is clear in hindsight. There they were, two young men who had just turned twenty, with no prospects of any kind nearly a year after graduating from high school. Both were shy of the grades and money needed for college. Neither had a real job, nor a place to live other than where they always had: with their parents. Yet they were paying money they did not have, to a teenage model who was not a model, to play a voluptuous newswoman who existed only in their imaginations. So far those imaginations had come up short, producing four renderings of a superhero who remained a closely held secret, not by design but because Jerry could not find anyone to buy his manuscript or Joe Shuster’s drawings. Now even they were having doubts. “I have a feeling of affection for those lost supermen of the comics into whom I tried to breathe life, but who never surfaced onto comics pages,” Jerry said. “On paper, they were the mightiest men on Earth. But in real life they were very, very fragile.”
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MAJOR MALCOLM WHEELER-NICHOLSON’S biography reads like a Jerry Siegel adventure strip. The son of an early suffragette, he grew up at the turn of the twentieth century in a household that counted Herbert Hoover’s wife and Teddy Roosevelt’s mother among its intimates. A horseman from boyhood, Wheeler-Nicholson attended a military academy and then enlisted in the cavalry. He was one of its youngest senior officers and led one of the African American units known as Buffalo Soldiers. In Texas, he operated under the command of General John J. Pershing and chased bandits back across the Mexican border. In the Philippines, his squad set a world speed record for assembling its tripod-mounted machine gun. In Siberia, he was an intelligence officer working out of the Japanese embassy. When he turned on the military, publicly denouncing the outmoded way it trained and promoted troops, he was court-martialed and became the target of what his family has reason to believe was an Army-orchestrated assassination attempt.
His life as a gadabout is just half the story of the man his children knew as the Old Man, his grandchildren called Nick, and the comic book world knows as the Major. One of the most prolific pulp fiction writers of his day, he published more than ninety novels, novellas, short stories, and serials, which turned up on shelves as far away as New Zealand. He was a historian and a visionary. He knew the long and fertile life that comics had enjoyed in U.S. newspapers, beginning in the late 1800s with the launch of strips such as The Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids. The titles made clear the young audience newspaper titans were going after, and Wheeler-Nicholson was fixated on attracting that audience, along with its parents, by blending the magazine form of pulps with the picture presentation of comic strips. What he really longed for was a graphic novel—the perfect way, this literary entrepreneur thought, to bring culture to the masses—but it would be another generation before anyone even imagined that format. Instead he settled for what was at hand, launching National Allied Magazines in 1934 and a year later publishing what many consider the prototype of today’s comic magazine. Unlike its progenitors, New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine featured comic strips that hadn’t already run in newspapers and it carried moneymaking advertisements. Its title was apt both because of its ground-breaking contents and because it measured a whopping ten by fifteen inches.
For America, New Fun helped kick-start the emerging medium of comic books. For Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, it was a career-launcher. The Major needed writers to produce his strips, ideally ones who came cheap. It was his shortage of funds as much as creative zeal that inspired him to include only original material in his books, rather than buying the expensive right to reprint what newspapers already had published. No matter that Jerry and Joe were young and untested, or that their heroes were an unlikely swordsman from seventeenth-century France and an even less likely private detective investigating the supernatural. The Major needed filler. The boys needed money. And so the October 1935 issue of New Fun featured two single-page Siegel and Shuster titles: “Henri Duval of France, Famed Soldier of Fortune” and “Doctor Occult, the Ghost Detective,” a story whose protagonist had not just Superman’s cape but his face.
It seemed like manna from heaven. For eight months, Jerry and Joe had tried to peddle their revamped superhero but found no takers. The Publishers Syndicate of Chicago turned them down. Owners of the Famous Funnies comic book returned their package unopened, Jerry’s knotted strings still intact. The Bell Syndicate wrote that “the drawings are well done and the idea is rather interesting, but we would not care to undertake the syndication.” So low were their funds that Joe was hawking ice cream bars on the street, and the only way Jerry could afford a movie was by selling empty milk bottles back to storekeepers. They had even started cannibalizing their sacrosanct Superman, with Doctor Occult getting his face and Henri Duval his penchant for adventure. Now, thanks to the Major, Henri Duval and Doctor Occult were being sold on the streets of Cleveland, with a promise of more work. Wheeler-Nicholson asked Jerry and Joe to prepare a four-page strip about a rip-roaring FBI agent, to be called “Federal Men,” which would run in one of the new comic books he was launching. He also had ideas for three new series—“Calling All Cars: Sandy Kean and the Radio Squad,” “Spy,” and “Slam Bradley,” a hard-bitten private eye who seemed like a dry run for Superman. Finally, in a move the young artists had been waiting for forever, Wheeler-Nicholson wrote that their idea for a Superman comic strip “stands a very good chance.”
The Major kept his promise about publishing nearly everything Jerry and Joe sent in, but there were red flags. His launches of books like Detective Comics were delayed. Promises of 15 percent of profits and half of syndicate sales remained promises. Some checks that were due never came, and one bounced. Early in 1936, Wheeler-Nicholson sent Jerry a payment with this postscript: “Do not be alarmed over the legal phraseology on the back of the checks. Our lawyers made us put it on after we had a couple of unfortunate experiences with chiselers who tried to hold us up after we’d paid them in full.” But the boys were alarmed, less by the request that they release their rights than by the mounting evidence that the Major was running out of money. So while they continued to write and draw for him, and to live off what payments they got, they determined not to trust him with their prize possession. Please, they asked him, give us back our Superman scripts.
The truth is that Wheeler-Nicholson really did believe in Superman. His was the kind of life the Major had lived, a freewheeling and crusading one, and he was convinced that Jerry and Joe were sitting on a gold mine. That is what the Old Man told his children over the dinner table, where, said his son Douglas, Superman “was a major subject of discussion.” The truth also is that the Major’s approach to money was a lot like Joe’s father’s: noble intentions, bungled execution. In another business and another era this literary entrepreneur might have squeezed by, but not in the middle of the worst economic downturn in U.S. history, nor in a fledgling industry populated by racketeers and sharks. Two with the sharpest teeth would swallow up Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing houses before he saw what was happening.
The first of that pair, Harry Donenfeld, was a survivor. Born in Romania in 1893 just as it was turning against Jews like him, he came to America with his parents and brother and made his way as a child on the pulsating streets of New York’s Lower East Side as a barker—pulling customers into clothing stor
es or dance halls, or hawking Yiddish and Russian newspapers. Harry neither denied nor embraced his Yiddishkeit roots, but he was hungry to leave his Jewish ghetto and determined never to go back. Money was his way out, and he made his through magazines with titles like Juicy Tales and Strange Suicides. Harry couldn’t write, edit, or draw. What he did better than anyone was the hard sell. “He could sell ice to the Eskimos,” said the now ninety-nine-year-old Jack Adams, who worked for him back then. “Once he got an order from Hearst for nine million inserts for magazines after he entertained their buyer by getting him drunk and laid in Canada.… Harry didn’t know from nothing except making money.” Some of that money was from printing the publications at his family’s shop, but over the years more came from distributing them to drugstores and newsstands. The delivery trucks and drivers were ones bootleggers had used to supply speakeasies with hooch during Prohibition. So were the whatever-it-takes tactics needed to build and sustain regional monopolies, of which Harry had plenty. They were what led him, by the early 1930s, to become a magazine publisher and owner. As long as people were buying, what went inside the publications didn’t matter.
The indictments changed all that. New York’s new no-nonsense mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was cracking down on public indecency, and nothing met that era’s definition so clearly as pictures Harry ran in Pep! that glimpsed a woman’s privates. A grand jury in Kentucky was equally offended. Harry beat the second rap and convinced an underling to take the fall for the first (the favor was returned when Harry gave the patsy, Herbie Siegel, a job for life). One lesson Harry took away was that while smut was profitable enough to sometimes justify the risk, it was best not just to sell it from behind the counter but to be a silent partner to avoid any potential embarrassment or jail time. The other lesson was to diversify.
Jack Liebowitz was everything Harry Donenfeld wasn’t. His roots were in the same Jewish ghetto, and both had ties to the rabble-rousing International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but while Harry merely printed the guild’s brochures and took its money, Jack was an officer and true believer. What Jack remembers most from his boyhood was not really having one. He was born in Ukraine in 1900, the year his father died. In 1904 his mother disappeared to America, leaving him and his older brother behind with their grandparents. By the time she came back his brother had succumbed to diphtheria. Five months before his tenth birthday, Jack, his mother, and his little sister stole across the border in the dead of night into Austria, then made their way to Holland and got tickets in steerage for the journey to America. In New York, Jack slept on the roof of his tenement to escape the summer heat and his stepfather. With other kids, he used trash can covers to fend off rival gangs. He never owned an overcoat, or slept in a bed he didn’t share with three brothers.
While Harry came away from his hardscrabble upbringing as a joyful backslapper, Jack emerged hardheaded and glum. Harry always had an expensive cigar in his mouth; Jack smoked cigarettes he bummed from friends, which was his way of disciplining himself not to smoke too much and to save money. Harry was the bluffer who showed his cards only when he had to and generally walked away with the jackpot; Jack was the house, getting a cut of every bet and never trusting to chance. His soul, like his training, was that of an accountant.
Jack went to work for Harry in 1935 after the Depression killed his hopes of making it on his own. Newly unearthed home movie footage of the two from those early years attests to the awkward pair they were—Harry short and thick, Jack six inches taller, thirty pounds lighter, and blanching as a beaming Harry, knowing the reaction he will get, reaches up and presses his face against Jack’s in a warm embrace. But their differences made them perfect partners. Jack worked out the details of deals Harry made with a handshake, turned down bribes Harry had trouble resisting, and tidied up Harry’s messes. Seven years Harry’s junior, Jack acted like his big brother. In the process, Jack Liebowitz made himself so indispensable that Harry Donenfeld promoted him from bookkeeper to second-in-command and then to partner, with Jack bringing little equity to the table and barely anyone noticing. Not even Jack noticed as his flirtation with socialism yielded to a fondness for money.
Neither Harry nor Jack cared about art or storytelling, but they did know more than the Major about how to make a buck, and they liked the idea of branching out from the smooshies and horrors to cleaner kids’ stuff. Not only did they print and deliver New Fun and Wheeler-Nicholson’s other comic books, they also loaned him the cash to publish them. And while the Major could stay a step ahead of his writers, artists, and process servers, Harry and Jack were pros at spotting a dodger. Harry had defied the Depression trend that was bankrupting other publishers, getting his financing from a quiet partner named Paul Sampliner and Paul’s indulgent mother, and buying up other presses as they teetered. In 1937 Jack became an uninvited partner in Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing house; by the next spring, the whole show was Harry and Jack’s. The Major walked away with his debts wiped clean, his wallet empty, and his heart broken. Harry and Jack had all three of the Major’s books, all published under the Detective Comics banner. They now owned the trucks, the printing presses, and the actual magazines, which gave them a foothold in this new world of kids’ literature along with the diversity Harry the pornographer had been seeking.
Were those shifts in ownership aboveboard? Absolutely, according to Jack Liebowitz, who in his unpublished memoir said it was a straightforward matter: Wheeler-Nicholson couldn’t pay his artists or writers or pay back his loans, creditors pushed him into bankruptcy, and “I went down to court and bought the two magazines.” What Jack doesn’t say but his company’s records show is that Harry had orchestrated everything. He bought up, for fifty cents on the dollar, debts the Major owed his printer and engraver, thus meeting the three-creditor standard needed to force Wheeler-Nicholson into bankruptcy. The backdrop was Dickensian. Harry and Jack feted the Major by sending him on vacation to Cuba, tried unsuccessfully to buy him out for seventy-five thousand dollars, then took him to debtors’ court during Christmas week. Harry made it happen; Jack dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. The Major, meanwhile, overcame bouts of booze and nerves and moved on. His wife, Elsa, never did. “She hated them,” said Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson, referring to Harry and Jack. “Any time any mention of them came up, she would spit fire.”
The upheaval in ownership touched Jerry, Joe, and Superman in two ways. It gave Wheeler-Nicholson’s old companies new bosses who could pay their bills, and it put the boys on notice that Harry and Jack relished playing hardball. Jerry spent 1936 and 1937 the way he had the two previous years, pitching Superman to anyone he thought might listen. Getting heard was harder than ever. United Feature Syndicate called the whole Superman concept “a rather immature piece of work. It is attractive because of its freshness and naïveté, but this is likely to wear off after the feature runs for a while.” The Ledger Syndicate was equally blunt: “We feel that editors and the public have had their fill for the time being of interplanetary and superhuman subjects.” By the end of 1937, copies of Jerry and Joe’s Superman comic strip could be found in the backs of filing cabinets and the bottoms of wastebaskets across the world of publishing.
One of those who received the strip years before and never forgot it was Maxwell Charles Gaines, a senior executive at the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. Gaines could not interest his bosses so he sent back the drawings. Three years later, in December 1937, Gaines was looking for new material and decided to take another shot at Superman. Jerry and Joe mailed him proposals for five strips—about a cowboy, an adventurer, a detective, a sports star, and a sci-fi scientist, all knockoffs of icons like the Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy—along with their latest rendition of Superman. The sketches still were on Gaines’s mind and in his office a few weeks later when he got a call from the new owners of Major Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing business.
Jack and Harry wanted to launch another book. They had a title, Action Comics, but no ma
terial. So, as Jack wrote in his memoir, he phoned his friend Charlie Gaines. “I said, do you have any material laying around. The newspaper syndicate usually had stuff laying around. Stuff that had been submitted to them which had been turned down. So he sent me over a pile of stuff. Among that pile of stuff was Superman which had been submitted by Siegel and Shuster to the syndicate which had turned it down like all other syndicates turned it down. It was six strips, daily strips, made for newspapers. Anyway, we liked it.” Charlie and Jack called Jerry in Cleveland. Gaines said he had bad news and good: His syndicate was not interested in any of the comic strips, but Jack might be. Would it be okay, Gaines wanted to know, if he turned over to Jack the scripts—including Superman?
It was the question Jerry had been waiting five years to answer. No matter that to the accountant-turned-publisher, the work of the young writer’s dreams was “a pile of stuff.” Vin Sullivan, an editor who stayed on during the transition from Wheeler-Nicholson to Donenfeld-Liebowitz, called Jerry in January 1938 to make plans. The boys would have to cut and paste their newspaper-style format into material that would fit in a thirteen-page comic book. And they would have to do it fast, Sullivan said, since Superman was destined for the inaugural issue of Action Comics. After lying around lifeless for what seemed like half a lifetime, Superman was on the fast track.
The matter of money was settled almost as fast. On March 1, Jack mailed Jerry and Joe a check for $412—$282 for work that had been done for but not yet paid by the Major, and, almost as an afterthought, $130 for Superman. It was double what they were used to and a fair rate—$10 a page—for the era and their experience, so Jerry and Joe cashed it and split it down the middle. It also was a swindle on the order of the Dutch West India Company’s 1626 purchase of Manhattan from the natives for $24, for Jack and Harry were buying not merely the thirteen pages of that first Superman comic, but the right to do what they would with the character. They could clip his powers or his hair, bring him to life in new media or kill him outright, or do whatever else they wanted. Harry and Jack were the honchos now, the boys mere hirelings. Jerry and Joe’s deal with the publishing house was for five years; Superman’s was forever.
