Superman

by Larry Tye

  HARRY DONENFELD AND JACK LIEBOWITZ affirmed their Jewish roots in ways that made clear they were children of the shtetl. They believed you should never deny your heritage, and they kept intact names as manifestly Jewish as Liebowitz and Donenfeld. You gave to Jewish causes (both did, generously) and favored Jewish entertainers (Gussie Donenfeld said what she liked most about clarinetist Benny Goodman was “that he never changed his name”). You hired fellow Jews as often as possible, and with the exception of Italian American artists, the roster at Detective Comics and on Superman especially was mainly Jewish. It started with Siegel and Shuster and continued with editors, writers, and illustrators with surnames like Weisinger, Schiff, Joffe, Binder, Dorfman, and a pair of Schwartzes.

  There was one more guidepost for children of the ghetto: You didn’t let ethnic identity get in the way of making money. That was why Harry overruled himself and opted to call his company not Donenfeld Comics but Detective Comics. “Donenfeld,” his daughter Peachy remembers, “sounded too Jewish to him.” He and Jack almost certainly would have intervened in the same way if they had felt that Superman, their number one moneymaker, was stepping too far into their Yiddishkeit world.

  He never did. Superman’s handlers from the beginning planted clues that Superman was Jewish, but that evidence was subtle and ambiguous enough that it convinced many readers that Superman was seriously Christian. Giving him a backstory straight out of the Bible also inoculated Superman against claims of being a false prophet, and those claims would have come, whether from priests, preachers, rabbis, monks, or imams. Presenting him as a moral man in a world of temptation made him compelling to people in search of ethical as well as religious direction. In the end, his appeal was his universality along with his particularity, which ensured his stories would live on the way most parables do. Here was an exemplar, one of the few, who was embraced with equal ardor by Jews and gentiles, believers and agnostics, and anyone else in search of a hero.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Speed of Sound

  IT WAS HOW AMERICANS SPENT their evenings in the era before TV—chairs and sofas pulled around the two-foot-high Philco radio console, the brown Bakelite dial carefully tuned to Fibber McGee and Molly, Ellery Queen, Amos ’n’ Andy, or, on sixteen history-making nights in June and July of 1946, Adventures of Superman. Listeners came ready to leap out of their corn-fed lives and into their superhero’s fantastic one—his slugfests with atom men and mind games with leopard women—which was what had made the Man of Steel such a smash when he debuted on the airwaves two years before the war. What they heard instead during that first summer of peace was a tale of real-life, home-grown fiends who masked their ashen faces with white sheets, twisted their followers’ minds with Nazi-like schemes of racial cleansing, and defied Superman or anyone else to try and stop them.

  The series was called “Clan of the Fiery Cross” and it was not an easy story to tell. Not then, when professional baseball, public bathrooms, and even the Army and Navy still were divided into white and colored realms. It would be another year before ex–Negro Leaguer Jackie Robinson toppled the color bar when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, and another eight before the Supreme Court declared that racially separate schools could never be equal. Jews, Asians, and Roman Catholics still saw signs saying they need not apply. The Ku Klux Klan wasn’t as powerful as it once had been, but it didn’t have to be. It already had planted doubts about anyone who looked or prayed differently; those who didn’t heed its warnings could always be reminded with a flaming cross or lynching noose.

  Robert Maxwell didn’t care. He detested the Klan and had been given the keys to the Superman radio kingdom by Jack and Harry. The wordsmith turned pitchman turned radio producer knew he had to get to the kids before the haters did. He hired one of America’s most trusted education experts to tell him how. They gathered all the intelligence they could on the Klan’s passwords and rituals, its ways of corrupting politicians and its means of wrapping itself in the flag. They consulted psychologists, psychiatrists, and propaganda specialists. They tested their approach with five weeks of broadcasts railing against a fictitious organization of anti-Semitic “hate mongers.” Now was the time to ratchet up the moralizing and zero in on a real-life hate group. They even had a name for their bold enterprise: “Operation Tolerance.” Their secret weapon—the surest way to win over the children and take down the xenophobes—was to sic on them, at the speed of a radio wave, America’s most trusted and ferocious do-gooder.

  “Clan of the Fiery Cross” ran for sixteen episodes of fifteen minutes each, built around a straightforward storyline. Tommy Lee, who was Chinese, rose to become the star pitcher on his youth baseball team, beating out a hot-headed white hurler named Chuck Riggs. Riggs took his beef to his Uncle Mac, who was secretly the grand scorpion of the Clan. The white-hooded Clansmen terrorized first Tommy and his family, then Jimmy Olsen and Perry White, whose newspaper had taken up Tommy’s cause. Superman stepped in just as Mac and his crew were about to finish off Olsen and White.

  Every chapter ended with a cliff hanger and most featured dueling sermons from the grand scorpion and Clark Kent. “We’re a great society pledged to purify America—American for 100 percent Americans only. One race, one religion, one color,” Mac told his nephew. “Are we going to stand idly by and see these scum weasel their way into our neighborhoods and our jobs.… We’ll strike back, and the time is now, so get set for action. The fiery cross burns tonight.” Not so fast, Kent shot back: “Intolerance is a filthy weed, Jim. I told you before—the only way you can get rid of it is by hunting out the roots and pulling them out of the ground.”

  Superman’s political evolution on the airwaves was the reverse of what had happened in the comics. There, Jerry and Joe molded their avatar into an agitator only to have editors in New York reshape him into something tamer and less likely to offend. Robert Maxwell sprang from the same Eastern European Jewish roots as the boys from Cleveland and he was at least as idealistic, but he was older and wilier, and in those years he had almost complete editorial freedom. His radio Superman carefully picked his enemies: Nazi saboteurs, jewel thieves, witch doctors, and others unlikely to generate sympathy or controversy. He built his audience of kids, stay-at-home moms, and dads who got back home from the office or factory in time to catch the early evening broadcast. It was a full six years into his show when he finally turned Superman loose on the Klan. Even then, Maxwell’s venom was directed not at the political corruption or corporate villainy that riled up Jerry and Joe, but rather at narrow-mindedness. The distinction was critical. The new focus might alienate listeners who identified with Mac Riggs, most notably the flesh-and-blood Klansmen who at that very moment were trying to recruit kids in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Superman’s Manhattan studio. That only helped the cause. Maxwell used the threatening letter he got two days after the series started to stir up publicity. More to the point for his bosses, “Clan of the Fiery Cross” posed little risk of upsetting the advertisers who paid the bills, especially since the focus was prejudice against Asians rather than the more culturally condoned bias against blacks.

  Kellogg’s, the primary sponsor, was over the moon. Operation Tolerance had given Superman a bump in the ratings. With an audience of 4.5 million listeners it was the number one children’s program in America, leaving in its wake old standbys like Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan. The Superman shows also were a boon for Pep Whole Wheat Flakes, the breakfast cereal ballyhooed by the narrator at the beginning, middle, and end of each episode. “Tolerance is rampant in Battle Creek,” Maxwell gloated to Newsweek after the airing of the hate mongers series. “Every bit of pep in Rice Krispies is tolerant.” The magazine added its own hurrah: “Superman is the first children’s program to develop a social consciousness.”

  The angle that gripped The New Republic was where Superman got his dope on the Klan. Newspaper reporter Stetson Kennedy had gone undercover in the hate group, the liberal journal reported, passing its
“code words” to the Anti-Defamation League, which forwarded them to Maxwell. “As a result, Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of the KKK, had to spend part of his afternoon with his ear pressed against the radio. As soon as Superman used a KKK password, Green had to send out urgent orders for a new one. The Grand Dragon is said to have taken this reverse very badly.” Kennedy picked up the story in his own book, saying he gave Superman’s producers “the Klan’s current password, and promised to keep them informed every time it was changed.” The scheme worked so well that kids invented a game they called “Superman Against the Klan,” rattling off secret passwords “a mile a minute!” Thanks to his work and the Man of Steel’s, Kennedy concluded, “I knew that the millions of kids who had listened to Superman were not likely to grow up to be Klansmen.”

  It was a seductive backstory, and much of it was true. Kennedy did provide invaluable intelligence on the Klan, although he embellished what he had done and blended his narrative with those of others. Did he pass secret passwords on to Superman? None that he cited were actually broadcast, and the only thing that came close to a code in all sixteen episodes of “Clan” is when “the robed figures solemnly placed their right hands over their hearts, crossing the first two fingers of their left hands,” and muttered an “anti-democratic oath.” Journalists and authors were so taken with Kennedy’s version that no one fact-checked it against the radio script. But compelling though they were, the media accounts missed the point. The wizard hiding behind the studio curtain was not Stetson Kennedy, it was Robert Maxwell.

  Siegel and Shuster’s comic books and strips already had made Superman a hero on every playground across America; Maxwell’s broadcasts made him one in boardrooms, too. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Veterans Committee awarded him special citations for leading the battle against bigots. The Mutual Broadcasting System said it was “prideful” to be Superman’s station. Sharing that glow were the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Newspaper Guild, and the Calvin Newspaper Service, most of whose readers were black. (Apparently none of his progressive boosters minded that a dining-car porter speaking dialect was about the only black face in Superman stories, or that the most prominent mention of Asians was the reminder to wartime readers to “slap a Jap.”) In New England, radio stations banded together to get permission to start their broadcasts fifteen minutes late, ensuring that young fans wouldn’t miss their hero while their parents listened to coverage of that summer’s pennant run by Ted Williams’s Boston Red Sox. “We had been getting a lot of complaints about the blood and thunder stuff until we decided to put in these social episodes,” said a spokesman for the advertising agency used by Kellogg’s, which recognized early on the dividends that could be earned from a crusade for tolerance. “Now all the parents’ organizations are congratulating us on the show. The psychologists tell us we’re planting a ‘thought egg’ in the kids’ minds.”

  Whether or not that egg actually hatched, it was clear that Superman and his handlers had staged another triumph. They had inoculated themselves against parents, teachers, and even psychoanalysts who worried about the impact of action heroes on young minds. Thirty-five million American homes had radios in 1946, and Superman was beaming into more of them than ever, entertaining entire families rather than just the kids who read comic books. At a time when nearly all the wartime superheroes were fighting for their lives, the Man of Steel was thriving. To Superman, Inc., crisis meant opportunity, just as it had during the war.

  This latest victory was particularly sweet for an old socialist like Jack Liebowitz, who approved Maxwell’s hiring and green-lighted Operation Tolerance. Jack had consciously assembled a team of artist-entrepreneurs who were youthful as well as inventive, with the audacity to presume they were shaping not just a fictional character but popular fiction itself. Jack understood that Superman’s success in radio helped ensure a growing market for his comics, and vice versa. He also understood that, as he had always said, if you were smart you could do good at the same time you were getting rich.

  MAKING SUPERMAN BELIEVABLE ON PAPER was a relative cinch. Good eyes were all that was needed to see him leap and fly, defy bullets along with alien invaders, and metamorphose from buttoned-down Clark Kent in a double-breasted suit to a soaring superhero in a pajama-like uniform. Radio was different. There were no alleyways in which we could witness his makeover, no costumes or hairstyles to show us there had been a switch. Listeners had to visualize for themselves what he looked and acted like to make it work. The fact that it did—from the very first broadcast on February 12, 1940—was a tribute to the skills of the actors and producers and, at least as much, to the supple imaginations of young fans who wanted to believe.

  The show’s first challenge was finding one performer who could play Superman and another for Clark Kent. The solution was Clayton “Bud” Collyer. The choice seemed obvious to everyone but him. Collyer had trained to be a lawyer, like his dad, but he paid his way through law school by singing and acting on the radio, following in the show business footsteps of his mother and grandfather, sister and brother. After two years as a low-paid law clerk he was back performing—using his mother’s maiden name of Collyer so he could preserve his birth name, Clayton J. Heermance, Jr., in case he ever resumed his legal career. By the time Superman was ready to air, Collyer was starring in two radio adventure series—Renfrew of the Mounted and Terry and the Pirates—along with a comedy, several soap operas, and three news features. That was more than enough. The idea of a comic strip on the radio was such a stretch that he made clear he didn’t even want to audition. Maxwell tricked him into doing that, twice, but still Collyer tried to get out of it.

  That he didn’t was a stroke of luck for both Superman and Collyer, since they made a brilliant match for 2,008 radio shows and for thirty years in various media. Collyer drew on his training as a crooner to underscore the difference between Clark and Superman, playing the former in a tenor that oozed milquetoast, then dropping several pitches midsentence to a gravelly baritone that was just right for the world’s strongest man, yet making clear that both voices came from the same man. That preserved the essential ego/alter-ego relationship and saved Maxwell from having to hire a second actor. Being the first to impersonate either character meant the only standard Collyer had to meet was the one he was setting. Performing on the radio, where no one could see him, meant he never ran the risk of growing too old for the role. It also reduced the possibility of his being typecast, which was a fear (and reality) that would later plague TV and film actors playing Superman. Even though they couldn’t see what he looked like and there were no credits naming him, his voice was rousing enough for female listeners to flood the studio with mash notes addressed to Superman. They might have been disappointed to know that he had a wife and three children and that he taught Sunday school on Long Island. Portraying Superman “was the ultimate in unabashed corn,” said Collyer, who would later become known to a generation of baby boomers as host of the TV game show To Tell the Truth. “So many people get the least bit embarrassed by fantasy when they’re directing it or performing it and it loses all the great charm it could have, but if played honestly and whole-hog all the way, it’s great.”

  Joan Alexander was Collyer’s co-star and opposite. She needed the work playing Lois Lane at first to support herself and later to provide for her daughter after she left a troubled marriage. She got the role early on, lost it when Maxwell decided he didn’t like her, then disguised herself in a wig and showed up at the audition for her replacement. “The producers hired her!” her daughter recalled sixty years later. “They were astonished to find out they had rehired the woman they’d just let go. This time she kept the part forever.”

  Jackie Kelk had nailed down the role of Jimmy Olsen by season two. Like Alexander, he needed the part, but like Collyer, he had to fit it around other acting jobs. The solution: Kelk’s Jimmy was written into the action four days a week, while on day five—Thursdays, when Kelk was rehearsin
g with The Aldrich Family—Jimmy was AWOL and a character named Beanie Martin took over as copyboy.

  As critical as those and other main characters were, the narrator was more so, especially after Jackson Beck took over the job. He saved Maxwell from needing to have his actors self-consciously stop the action to explain what they were doing or why. Beck set the scene and caught up listeners who had taken a bathroom break or sneaked into the kitchen for a snack. In between his narrations he played as many as four other roles in a single episode, from villains to Beanie the copyboy, which was even more impressive since most of the broadcasts were live. He also was an accomplished huckster, working with his sidekick, Dan McCullough, to weave into high-energy plots messages about Pep cereal, “the eighteen-karat breakfast dish that sparkles with sunny cheerfulness.” For Kellogg’s, those pitches were what the show was all about, and why they kept Beck around for some 1,600 broadcasts.

  The maestro who assembled that extraordinary cast and launched Superman onto the airwaves was Robert Maxwell, the orchestrator of Operation Tolerance. Who better to reconfigure Superman for a new medium and to refresh radio by introducing its first superhero than a thirty-two-year-old artist-entrepreneur who had reinvented himself? Born Robert Maxwell Joffe, this oldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants had taken the pen name Bob Maxwell to protect himself and his family when, in his early twenties, he wrote stories with titles like “He Had Push” for Harry Donenfeld’s bawdy and bloody pulp magazines. The brashness of the tales and their author caught Harry’s eye and he drafted Maxwell into Superman, Inc., first to oversee the licensing of toys and other products, then to bring the superhero into the world of broadcast. Before he hired writers or actors, Maxwell sat down with Harry and Jack’s masterful press agent, Allen Ducovny, to put together audition discs that would sell the show to prospective sponsors. They couldn’t have picked a better moment. Few families had television sets in the early 1940s and almost none had the money, gasoline, or motivation to go out. Radio was the era’s hottest medium, with its comedies, harmonies, and mysteries helping to take people’s minds off the lingering agony of the Depression.