Superman
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Next up was Captain Marvel, a far more formidable foe who flew onto the comics scene early in 1940 with a chiseled face that looked just like actor Fred MacMurray’s. His costume was a stunning red, with a white cape trimmed in yellow. His alter ego was Billy Batson, a radio newsboy who had only to say the magic word “Shazam!” to transform himself into the World’s Mightiest Mortal. So compelling were the storylines and illustrations that by mid-1943 Captain Marvel would outsell even Superman. Jack perceived the threat early, and in 1941 he sued Fawcett Publications, alleging that it had stolen Superman’s life, looks, and even his shawl. To Jerry it was a slam dunk: “A Mongoloid idiot would have come to the same conclusion, because they both did the same things. They both had super-strength, they both wore costumes, they both had similar identities.” A judge agreed that Marvel had infringed on Superman, but in a ruling delivered a full ten years after the suit was filed, he added that Detective had failed to properly copyright its character and therefore had no case. A year later the esteemed jurist Learned Hand overturned the copyright part of the ruling and sent the case back to the lower court. By then Captain Marvel had lost his luster, and rather than pay for another expensive trial, Fawcett gave Jack and Harry four hundred thousand dollars and agreed to retire the Captain.
Jack had made his point. While the superheroes who followed continued to be Superman knockoffs (from Captain America to Plastic Man, Doll Man, and Minute-Man) or purposefully un-Superman-like (Spider-Man), their creators disguised and denied any ties. No one, least of all Jerry, acknowledged the chutzpah in Detective’s claims of plagiarism in light of how close Philip Wylie had come to charging Superman with plagiarizing Hugo Danner and the strong case Lester Dent could have made on behalf of Doc Savage. Otto Binder, one of Superman’s best scripters in the 1950s, claimed that it was he who in the 1930s had planted the seed with Jerry and Joe for an interplanetary, super-powered orphan, although he never talked about suing. Jerry himself would point an angry finger at surprising targets in 1947, charging that his bosses along with his friend Bob Kane had stolen their Batman brainchild from Superman, and that Wonder Woman was a rip-off of his idea for Superwoman. “It is perfectly clear to the youth of the nation that Batman is really Superman with a mask on,” Jerry’s lawyer told a judge. And it was not just Batman, but “twenty of these features, all of whom are like Superman.” The truth is that Batman was as human and somber as Superman was infallible and uplifting. If the Dark Knight and his second self, Bruce Wayne, stole from anyone, it was from Jerry himself: The death of Bruce’s father during a robbery was eerily like what happened to Michel Siegel, and Bruce and Jerry both spent a lifetime trying to get over their early losses.
Shoring up their superhero cartel made it easier for Harry and Jack to live in a manner that their Lower East Side upbringings had not accustomed them to, but had made them crave. How rich was Harry? Jack told The Saturday Evening Post in 1941 that his partner had paid income taxes the year before on “more than $100,000.” Harry, according to the Post, “once told a reporter that he netted $500,000 from Superman alone.” The low-end projection would be $1.5 million in today’s terms, the high end $7.7 million. Both are likely conservative estimates, given all the commerce Harry conducted above the table and under it.
What is clear is that Harry had all the money he needed to keep his wife, Gussie, his son, Irwin, and his daughter, Peachy housed first in a seven-room apartment on Riverside Drive and later in a large duplex on the Upper West Side with a thirty-foot terrace facing Central Park. His and Gussie’s last stop was 710 Park Avenue, one of the first apartment houses erected after World War II on America’s most prestigious promenade. There was enough money left over to give jobs to nieces, nephews, and others who came looking during the Depression, and to keep his mistress, Sunny Paley, happily ensconced twenty blocks down Park Avenue in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. He slept in George Pullman’s plush hotels on wheels when he traveled for business, and when he arrived he stayed in the best accommodations in town, sometimes having Frank the chauffeur meet him there with his car. The excursions he preferred were purely pleasure—to Miami Beach, Havana, and the circuit of speakeasies and strip clubs of New York City. One hand would lay claim to Sunny’s midriff, the other cradled a glass of scotch, but his gaze was planted on the minions gathered round waiting for him to tell a story or buy another round. No one listened harder than his old friend Frank Costello, whom reporters had taken to calling “Prime Minister of the Underworld” and whom soldiers in the Luciano crime family called boss.
Harry savored his contradictions: a mobbed-up publisher whose superhero was the mob’s greatest nemesis, a family man whose wife and children accepted that he had a mistress living down the street, a purveyor of adult erotica and kiddy comics who read neither. “He was many things—a heavy drinker, a womanizer, he gambled and he knew Costello—but you’re talking to a daughter who absolutely adored him,” says Peachy. “He was a very generous, caring, loving man, and he was very progressive.”
Holding together his dissolute life was easier with Jack there to mind the businesses and pick him up if he fell apart. Sometimes Jack would have to shout to be heard, telling Harry he couldn’t go on spending, or drinking, the way he was. But he never forgot that it was Harry who had brought him into the business when he had nothing. Harry also helped him set up a partnership with Maxwell Gaines to launch All-American Comics, and later helped him buy out Gaines for what Jack said was a million dollars. Jack regularly reminded his kids what it had been like at the beginning, when he and Harry had four or five different companies but “very little cash in the till.” They would take whatever there was from one firm to cover the debts from the rest. Now loot was flowing in from everywhere, and especially from Superman, who by 1942 was starring in three comic books with a combined circulation of one and a half million and an estimated readership of four and a half million. Twenty-five million more followed him in 285 newspapers nationwide. For Jack, that cash flow bought him the freedom to launch new companies in the morning and weigh in on how big to make Superman’s fanny or Lois’s breasts in the afternoon. In the evening, just before the long drive home, he always sat down with the boys from the office for a hand or two of his favorite game, gin rummy. Not a bad life for a boy from the shtetl.
Jack also made investments of his own, in the stock market and in the five-bedroom house he owned on Long Island. Rose and the girls lived the good life in Great Neck—prep schools, their own sitting rooms next to their bedrooms, as many as three servants to tend to their needs—but it hadn’t always been that good. They were in the Bronx when Jack was getting started, then moved onto Long Island and up the ladder as he and Superman did—to Laurelton, then Lynbrook, then a smaller home in fashionable Great Neck, and finally to the mansion. Jack was a founder of the Jewish Federation and had a box at the opera. Uncle Harry drove out with Aunt Gussie for family gatherings and games of pinochle, like in the old days; ties between the families were cemented when Harry’s only son married Jack’s niece. But Jack handled Harry the same way you would any relative you loved but knew wasn’t a good example for the kids. “My father was so refined, so un-Harry,” recalls his daughter Joan. Jack, Joan adds, was intimidating enough that his family was as afraid of him as his workers were, but when she needed him he always was there. He also always was clear about his expectations for her and her sister, Linda: “A young matron doesn’t go out of the house without a hat and gloves. And he wouldn’t let us work, it was not what a refined young lady should be doing. If you worked it meant your father wasn’t taking care of you.”
EVERY KID IN AMERICA knew that Superman could win any war he fought in five minutes, which posed a conundrum when the United States went to war in December 1941. The nation’s fleet was in ruins at Pearl Harbor. Germany was holding the line in Russia and pressing ahead in North Africa. Normally bullish Americans were not sure this was a war they belonged in or could win. Adults argued about strategy and tactics at work and
over the dinner table, and stayed up nights fretting about their teenage sons who were being drafted to fight. Adolescents had a simpler question: Why not send in Superman?
It made sense. In the space of the first two issues of Action Comics, he had reformed an arms dealer and made peace between warring forces in the fictional South American republic of San Monte. The stories left no doubt that he had clout, or that the conflict in San Monte was a stand-in for the ongoing Spanish Civil War. The vision of all that he could accomplish had become clearer still in the February 27, 1940, issue of Look magazine, in a cartoon story by Jerry and Joe entitled “What If Superman Ended the War?” World War II was at an early stage then and America still was officially neutral, but that did not stop Superman from twisting Nazi cannons into useless metal, intercepting Japanese fighter planes, and hauling Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations for judgment. “Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin,” the presiding minister announced, “we pronounce you guilty of modern history’s greatest crime—unprovoked aggression against defenseless countries.”
But once the war heated up and America was forced in, Superman stepped back. It was not for lack of patriotic role models. Hop Harrigan, comic book America’s Ace of the Airwaves, took to the skies “to rap the Jap a slap on the yap that’ll corrugate his map!” Another comic starred Blackhawk, a crackerjack Polish pilot who had been shot down in 1939 and was back in the cockpit exacting his revenge against the Nazis. Rip Carter and the Boy Commandos did comparable damage on the ground, alongside Captain America, Captain Marvel, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch. So why was Superman, the monarch of American heroes, sitting out the war?
That was a question being asked not just by juvenile fans but by letter writers to The Washington Post and editors at Time magazine. Jerry and Joe were fretting as well, along with Jack and Harry. They knew they had created that expectation by fashioning a hero powerful enough to intervene and righteous enough to recognize that the Allies were the good guys. They also knew that all anyone expected from non-super-powered heroes like Blackhawk was to shoot down an enemy fighter. With Superman the bar would be infinitely higher. Once he entered the fray, readers would demand real-world results that no make-believe character could deliver. Even having him try would make him look like a paper tiger and could damage morale among American soldiers who were fighting for real. “As the mightiest, fightingest American,” Time wrote in a story called “Superman’s Dilemma,” the Man of Steel “ought to join up. But he just can’t. In the combat services he would lick the Japs and Nazis in a wink, and the war isn’t going to end that soon. On the other hand, he can’t afford to lose the respect of millions by failing to do his bit or by letting the war drag on.”
The solution: Clark Kent tried to enlist in the Army in 1941, but during his eye exam he inadvertently read a chart in the adjoining room with his X-ray vision. “You’re physically superb,” the doctor told him, “except that you’re obviously blind as a bat.… The Army doesn’t want you.” It was a remedy attributed to editor Murray Boltinoff, but it may have been cooked up in collaboration with Joe, who failed his own preinduction eye test and was declared unfit for duty. It got Superman off the spot in a way that satisfied everyone from youthful comic book readers to the editors of Time. But not Lois. “I might have known the Army would turn you down,” she told Clark. “How you summon up enough strength even to peck at your typewriter keys is beyond me!”
He may have been out of the Army, but he was bent on helping. “The United States Army, Navy and Marines are capable of smashing their foes without the aid of a Superman!” he told readers in that same 1942 cartoon strip. “Perhaps I could be of more use to my country working right here at home, battling the saboteurs and fifth columnists who will undoubtedly attempt to wreck our production of vital war materials!” And so it was that his direct confrontations with Hitler, Hirohito, and what he called the Japanazis were confined to comic book covers, which were attention-grabbing but unrelated to the stories inside. The stories had him joining war drills, battling “Japoteurs,” and standing up to “Mr. Schickelgruber” and his “so-called master race,” making the case without having to say it that the real Übermensch was on our side.
The U.S. military knew that Superman was a flying Uncle Sam—an embodiment of the red, white, and blue virtues for which America was sacrificing its sons—and it used him to solicit blood donations, spur drives for scrap iron, and sell savings bonds. After just one radio appeal from their hero, 250,000 young patriots mailed in pledges to buy war stamps. The British Admiralty named its most powerful oceangoing tug Superman. U.S. servicemen had done the same with jeeps, tanks, landing craft, and the planes of the Air Corps Reserve’s 33rd Bombardment Squadron. The Navy strove to end illiteracy within its ranks in part by having the dialogue in a Superman comic shaved to single or double syllables, then rolling out to its sailors 15,000 copies a month of the easy-to-read books. After D Day, an anxious infantry officer told war correspondents, “When I saw one of our boys in our landing craft nonchalantly reading a copy of Superman, I knew everything would be all right.”
Superman’s biggest contribution to the war effort was setting free the imaginations of America’s warriors. They got all the blood and guts they needed on the battlefield, and all the run-ins with the Nazis and Japanese. Watching Superman battle with Lex Luthor and other fantastic villains let them escape. It offered them a way to feel like kids again and reminded them of the lives back home that they were fighting to protect. No gift could matter more.
How do we know that? At U.S. military bases, comic books outsold Reader’s Digest, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post combined. Estimates said 80 percent of the Army’s reading matter was comics, and Superman was tops among the comics. It was a two-way street for the Man of Steel: He helped sell America on the war, and the war pumped up his sales. Kids who had grown up on him were heading overseas, and they brought the knight from Metropolis along as a security blanket. The Navy found Superman so soothing that it tucked his comic books into ration kits bound for the Marine garrison on embattled Midway Island. So concerned was Canada about Superman’s influence on its troops that in 1940, when he convinced both sides in a comic strip war between Blitzen and Rutland to temporarily lay down their arms, censors ordered the Toronto Star to leave it out.
U.S. censors didn’t step in there, but they were worried four years later when Superman got too close to the sensitive subject of an atom-smashing cyclotron. “The FBI came into the office,” Superman editor Jack Schiff recalled years later. “They told us to change the syndicated Superman strip then running in order to eliminate a cyclotron that was featured. For reasons unknown to us then, this was a no-no. We really should have suspected what was happening: the A-Bomb was being developed and this was a possible leak.” A 1945 document from the War Department, declassified after the war, downplayed the concern, saying that the very fact that the cyclotron story was playing out in the funny pages would ensure no one took it seriously. The war planners, however, had taken the matter seriously enough to mark their memo SECRET, and Harry’s marketing team later used the crackdown to boast that “Superman readers had a comic strip preview of the world’s most carefully guarded secret.” Two other Superman stories—one with a cover of him watching an atomic bomb test, the other where Lex Luthor tries to use an A-bomb to do away with Superman—saw their publication postponed until after the war.
Superman’s owners were good at keeping secrets. They made sure that no one knew that Jerry was not scripting the character at the time of the FBI visit in 1945 and hadn’t been for two years, although his was the only writer’s name on every story. Jerry had been drafted into the Army in the summer of 1943 and sworn in on July 4. Ghostwriters who had done an occasional story before now were writing nearly everything. Jerry’s proxies and Joe’s made a motley crew. There was Alvin Schwartz, a Trotskyite who loved debating over lunch with his editor, Jack Schiff, a Stalinist. Leo Nowak, a musician as well as an artist, had been
sent Joe’s way by a whiskey salesman he met in a bar. Paul Cassidy was a schoolteacher before he drew Superman, and afterward. Nearly everyone who joined up in Cleveland and later in New York backed FDR and the New Deal. Many were in their twenties—only slightly older or more worldly than their readers—and most didn’t tell family or friends that they had fallen so low they were writing for the funny pages. They called it Hungry Money; once they had enough, they would find real jobs writing magazine stories, novels, or film scripts. Their tightly packed workspace was a cross between a newsroom and a sweatshop, with an unremitting stream of pages passing from pencillers to inkers, sandwiches sufficing for lunch and dinner, and deadline pressure intense enough to breed ulcers and nervous breakdowns.
Alvin Schwartz had been co-editing a literary magazine that published luminaries like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but the Depression upended that career. One day he tried to bum a quarter off an old friend; the friend, a comics artist, said there was writing work to be had in his field. Alvin penned his first Superman comic strip in 1944 and his last in 1952. In between he earned enough money to buy a house, even though he was making $250 for a strip that earned Jerry $800. And while he didn’t get a byline, he did get a New York Times story revealing that he was one of Superman’s writers. He also got to put his stamp on the hero: “I tried to change Superman from being a meathead who simply had a harder punch into something more human and philosophical.”