by Larry Tye
By 1949 the cash registers were ringing nonstop in Harry and Jack’s offices at 480 Lexington Avenue. National Comics Publications, the new name for Detective Comics, had a bullpen of heroes from Batman and Wonder Woman to Hawkman, Flash, and Green Arrow. None could match Superman as a box office headliner or newsstand heavyweight. Nobody was consulted as faithfully by kids across America before they got dressed, decided which game to play, or picked a cereal for breakfast. It was on the Metropolis Marvel’s muscled shoulders that Harry and Jack were constructing their empire in the 1940s and that they would withstand the comic book scare of the 1950s. Ka-ching had become the soundtrack for Superman, Inc., much the way “Up, up, and away” was for Superman himself.
The impact went well beyond comics and kids. Disney may have been the guru at building Mickey Mouse and its other four-legged celebrities into long-lasting brands, but Superman, Inc., was becoming master of the fad. It didn’t have Disney’s patience yet it knew how to bottle the zeitgeist while it was happening. From the five-and-dime to movie houses and corner newsstands, the Man of Steel had been welded into the American consciousness. That model would be applied later, by many of the same marketing whizzes, to clients ranging from James Bond and Dobie Gillis to Major League Baseball. For now, all eyes were on Superman.
There were pitfalls. Push too cavalierly to commercialize your hero and you might threaten his integrity and his moneymaking potential, much the way Aesop’s greedy cottagers killed their golden goose. That almost happened with the serial movies, which lacked the radio show’s creative scripting and technical wizardry. Thankfully, kids laughed with Superman’s cartoonish bid to fly even as the critics laughed at it. Managing Superman across media posed its own challenges: On paper Superman merely leaped even as he was flying across the airwaves, while his super-fueled adolescence in one comic book contradicted his adult-onset power-up in another. Product placement posed a risk, too. It might have been visionary when cellphones, holograms, and even biological weapons turned up in the comics decades before they did in the real world. But what about when writers came up with a three-part series on why Superman needed a Supermobile to promote a toy car the licensing people had dreamed up?
The line between art and merchantry got blurrier still in the case of the Krypto-Raygun. The new toy “looks exactly like the KRYPTO-RAYGUN used by SUPERMAN in his never-ending fight against crime … like the one SUPERMAN had made of KRYPTONITE—that amazing metal from SUPERMAN’S birthplace—the planet KRYPTON!” read an ad from the back cover of Superman 7 in 1940. It would have been an interesting tie-in to the comic book and radio stories except for one thing: Kryptonite wouldn’t appear in comic books until 1949, or even on the radio until 1943. It was there on Detective’s library shelves, in Jerry’s never-used script, but he had called it K-Metal, not kryptonite. Was the ad part of an anticipated marketing campaign for K-Metal or kryptonite on the radio, in the comics, or both? Was it an instance of selling overtaking storytelling?
Jerry and Joe had fantasized from the first about Superman’s merchandising potential for everything from box tops and T-shirts to billboards. This was an obvious way to extend his fame and inflate their incomes. But they were torn: Wouldn’t commercializing their hero diminish him? They had sounded that alarm just five months after Superman’s debut, in the November 1938 issue of Action. A fictional con man named Nick Williams claimed to be Superman’s personal manager and used his “client” to sell movies and breakfast cereals, gasoline and physical fitness programs. All were items that Harry and Jack had Superman selling, or soon would. And so it was with glee that Jerry and Joe took a shot at the avarice of their bosses by not just exposing Williams and his henchman, but tossing them in a cartoon jail.
JERRY WAS HAVING LESS LUCK in the real world. His home movies offer a lens into his life in the 1940s. He filmed his excursion to the World’s Fair in New York, and he filmed the Macy’s parade, where he and Superman were treated like royalty. Jack and Harry were there, with Harry riding an elephant and afterward clowning with Jack, who was somber as ever, and both trying to pay attention to the boys from Cleveland. Other surviving tapes show Jerry and Joe in a crowd of kids and a harem of women, with Jerry looking thinner than he ever had and Joe loving being the center of attention. There are movies of Jerry and Bella, too—as newlyweds, then with their son Michael, who was born early in 1944. Jerry was in the Army but got a leave so he could be home for the birth of his baby, who came out weighing a robust nine pounds. He was home again to take movies of Michael’s first few birthday parties, each showing the boy getting a bigger gift than he had the year before. There was Michael sitting on his big red truck, riding his scooter, dressed in an aviator’s suit climbing aboard his chrome toy airplane, and trying on his dad’s Army cap. Mostly it was Michael alone, looking overwhelmed. Jerry seemed equally awkward, more a visitor in Bella’s home than a part of his son’s life.
Michael never got to meet his grandma Sarah; she died three years before he was born. It happened on a Sunday at the family home on Kimberly Avenue, a place Jerry didn’t visit much after his marriage to Bella and his success with Superman. The newspaper listed Sarah Siegel’s cause of death as a sudden heart attack, but family members say her descent was more gradual and began the day Jerry announced his wedding plans. Seeing what their married life was like “led to her death,” says Jerry Fine, the cousin who introduced Jerry to Joe.
Sarah was right about the marriage: It soured early. Jerry was absorbed in his work, what with all the deadlines for Superman and his other creations, celebrity appearances in New York and elsewhere, and his battles with his bosses. Then came the war, which took him away from Bella when she was four months pregnant—although Jerry’s VIP status spared him any combat. The biggest blow came in 1946, when Michael was nearly three and Bella was getting ready to deliver their second child. “Bella went to the hospital a month earlier than expected,” Jerry wrote Jack Liebowitz in November 1946. “The boy child that was born lived only eight hours, for somehow the cord had gotten about its throat and cut off its air supply.” For Jerry, his son’s death was like his father’s: He never talked about the pain, not even in his memoir, where he chronicled his many turmoils, and he never got over the feelings of loss and anger.
Jerry’s angst was made worse by his inability to bottle lightning again with any of his new comic characters. He had tried in 1940 with the Spectre, a murdered cop whose spirit returned to Earth to battle evil. That flopped, and he was back two years later with Robotman, who had the brain of a murdered scientist inside the body of a robot. In between came the Star-Spangled Kid, who reversed the usual formula by pairing a boy hero with an adult sidekick. Detective Comics rolled the Kid out with a four-page house ad ballyhooing the plotline and the fact that it was the brainchild of the creator of Superman. Instead of becoming Jerry’s next big thing, the Kid was yet another ho-hum, spawning whispers that its author was a one-trick pony. Funnyman fueled the doubts. It wasn’t nearly as funny as Jerry thought, and Detective wasn’t about to grant him the ownership rights he demanded. “I never indicated that we would take your Funnyman feature,” Jack wrote stiffly in February 1947, “but as long as your ego tells you that anything you do must be a preordained success, I would be interested, just for the record, in having you name one feature—other than Superman—out of the numerous ones you’ve developed, which has enjoyed even a modicum of success.”
Even Superman was no longer his alone. It wasn’t just that other writers were turning out many of the biggest stories now, but that the superhero had left behind his creator as he moved to other media. Jerry played little if any role when it came to writing scripts for the radio drama, the serials, the cartoons, or the endless promotions of the sort Jerry had been spinning out in his head since he dreamed up the character. Whether or not Superman’s fans noticed Jerry Siegel’s absence, Jerry himself did, and it hurt.
In the meantime, his relations with Joe were turning frosty. He had always resented
Joe’s wavering work ethic, and it got worse over the years, as Joe went from drawing his own sketches, to filling in with ink his assistants’ pencil work, to supervising other artists and rendering just Superman’s head, to doing what Jerry said was “practically none of the actual art.” It was true that Joe wasn’t nearly as diligent as Jerry, but what really ate at Jerry was the suspicion that his childhood buddy was conspiring with another writer on new comics and other creative works. No matter that Jerry himself had been working with other artists since they were kids and still was, collaborating with Hal Sherman on Star-Spangled Kid and with Bernard Baily on the Spectre. “In line with your negotiating increases for yourself alone on ‘Superman,’ and working on ‘Superboy’ without first consulting me if it was all right for you to work on my comic, you are now preparing to collaborate on comics with others,” Jerry wrote Joe in September 1946. “In the past we’ve operated under a gentleman’s agreement, with mutual trust, but in view of what has occurred since I went into the Army, and your apparent unwillingness to continue our association as it was, I’m afraid that continuing to work with you under just a gentleman’s agreement, would be hazardous.” To underline his point, Jerry added a postscript: “Since Detective Comics, Inc. is involved in this situation, I am mailing a copy of this letter to Jack Liebowitz.”
Jerry likely did not know just how involved Jack and Harry were. They despaired of Jerry’s increasingly angry tone with them, too—a rage that, according to Harry’s children, saw Jerry and Bella picketing in front of Harry’s Long Island home, following the kids around in their car, and writing neighbors to say how unfair Harry had been to Superman’s creator. While Harry and Jack knew that Joe was no longer doing the work he was being paid for, they liked him more than they liked Jerry and felt it couldn’t hurt to curry favor with him. Harry’s son, Irwin, claimed that his father—apparently without Jerry’s knowledge—paid for Joe to have an operation to help his failing eyesight, a terrible affliction for an artist. Harry also joined with Joe in an improbable partnership: In December 1946 they filed a certificate to do business as Shuster & Donenfeld in the hamlet of South Fallsburg in New York’s Catskill Mountains. While there is no evidence that they actually launched a business, it is fun to wonder what a dreamy artist like Joe Shuster could have cooked up with a wheeler-dealer and pornographer like Harry Donenfeld.
Three months later Jerry and Joe were once again partners, this time for the purpose of suing Harry, Jack, and their Superman empire. Money was a central narrative in the more than one thousand pages of transcripts from the proceedings. Jerry forever regretted that he and Joe hadn’t copyrighted Superman for themselves, believing—justifiably—that the oversight had cost them millions of dollars. Now their lawyers made the case that what Harry and Jack had bought for $130 was the ownership rights not to Superman but to the first thirteen-page story alone. Then there was Superboy. “No compensation has ever been paid for this. No permission has ever been secured for this,” argued their attorney. “It was purely and simply an act of appropriation of this script.” Ditto for Batman and other “union suit characters” who were mere knockoffs of Superman, for comics built around Wonder Woman, for George Lowther’s book on Superman, and for the Superman radio show, animation, and accessories, a share of the profits for which had been promised (but never delivered) to Jerry and Joe. “While we are interested in being paid for these past misdeeds,” the lawyer said, “the most important thing is this: to satisfy your Honor of the fact that we are entitled to be rid of these people once and for all, and of this contract which keeps these people from sleeping nights and keeps them from earning an honest living.” Harry and Jack were the people the boys wanted to be rid of, Jerry and Joe the ones who couldn’t sleep. What it would take to make it all better was a round $5 million.
The comic book company had a different take on the law and the numbers. Jerry and Joe weren’t the aggrieved schlubs they made themselves out to be but thankless self-seekers. National, the company claimed, had turned over to them everything they were entitled to, which is what enabled them to live the high life. In the ten years from 1938, when the first Action was published, to the filing of the suit in 1947, Jerry and Joe were paid $162,627.08 for their work on comic books, $205,998.21 for comic strips, and $32,569.56 for other uses of the character they had dreamed up, for a total of $401,194.85. That was a king’s ransom—more than $5 million in today’s terms—even after they split it in half.
Whether or not that was enough wasn’t something the Supreme Court of New York ever weighed in on. Its referee affirmed Harry and Jack’s ownership of Superman but not Superboy. After further legal wrangling, Jerry and Joe signed an agreement in May 1948 selling the rights to Superboy and related characters to Harry and Jack for $94,013.16. Once the lawyers and broker took their shares, Joe and Jerry each walked away with $29,000—barely one one-hundredth of what they had hoped for. Even then there were onerous terms: The creators had to agree that Superman and Superboy—in all their forms and forever—belonged to Harry and Jack. Gone were Jerry and Joe’s jobs writing and drawing the characters. Gone were the bylines indicating that the Man of Steel and Boy of Steel were theirs. Gone even was their right to claim a historic connection if it “may be likely to induce the belief that such past connection still exists.”
The lawsuit had always been about Jerry’s grievances—the ones he had been carrying around since Superman caught fire a decade earlier, along with the gripes that remained from his forlorn Valentine’s Days in grammar school. The suit was never about Joe; although his life would be painfully reshaped by the outcome, he still let Jerry call the shots. In fact, this was the first in a series of lawsuits that would play out over the decades, none of which gave Jerry anything close to what he was after. He could have had more money if that had been all that mattered: Batman founder Bob Kane proved that when he renegotiated his deal with Jack instead of joining Jerry’s lawsuit. What Jerry seemed to want was not only for Jack and Harry to give him the money he felt he deserved, but also the homage for having dreamed up the most successful hero in American history. What he couldn’t grasp was this: He had already gotten more of everything than any of his peers in an era when comics writers got no bylines, no royalties, and nowhere near the kind of payouts that Jerry and Joe had been enjoying. Jerry, in fact, couldn’t enjoy any of it. All that was left was the anger.
Jerry’s biggest miscalculation was failing to understand who Jack was—a bean counter so hard-nosed that even his adoring daughter was afraid of him—and failing to deal with him on those terms. In a decade of letters between them, Jerry essentially dismissed his boss as a shyster and Jack branded his scriptsman an ingrate. But there also were heartbreaking moments in the exchanges, like when Jerry confided to Jack—as he might have to his father—news of the wrenching death of his newborn. Jerry’s loss in the courtroom was Jack’s enormous gain. He walked away with unfettered access to Superman and freedom from a writer who had become a dreadful nag. In the process Jack sent a message to the rest of his writers and artists: Beware. If I can fire the creator of the mighty Superman, any one of you who steps out of line could be next. But in the end Jack lost, too. The narrative had been written: Jerry was the martyr, Jack the bully. What he had done to Siegel and Shuster would remain part of Jack’s legacy, as Al Capp, America’s most read satirist, made clear in a Li’l Abner strip in 1947. Rockwell P. Squeezeblood, head of the corrupt Squeezeblood Comic Strip Syndicate, was a stand-in for Jack Liebowitz, head of the bare-knuckled National Comics Publications. Squeezeblood published a bestselling feature about a crime-fighting strongman named Jack Jawbreaker, whose creators even looked like Jerry and Joe. “Those boys created ‘Jack Jawbreaker’ in poverty!!” Squeezeblood told Abner. “Poverty is the greatest inspiration to creative genius!! I won’t let all this wealth spoil those innocent boys!!”
Two months after Jerry settled with National Comics, Bella sued him for divorce. During their nine years of marriage, her complaint read
, Jerry “absented himself from their home in Cleveland for long periods of time without giving any excuse or reason” and “during the short periods of time he was at home in Cleveland, he displayed a moody, quarrelsome and argumentative attitude toward the plaintiff.” Jerry didn’t respond. The marriage had been dying for years. Bella had a right to be mad, and he didn’t want to fight. He just wanted out. The judge pronounced him guilty of “Gross Neglect of Duty” and said it was “impossible for them [any] longer to live together as husband and wife.” Bella got her freedom, custody of their son, all the household furnishings, and 60 percent of their joint assets, which included the house in University Heights, $98,000 in cash and bonds, and a year-old Chrysler. Jerry got the remaining 40 percent, along with his typewriter and Dictaphone. He said he would pay alimony, child support, and 20 percent of his annual earnings once they hit $10,000, which was less likely now that he was jobless. He also said that, with help from Bella, he would pay the Internal Revenue Service $24,000 in back taxes along with whatever extra levy was owed for the settlement money he had just received from Jack.
Jerry would have agreed to anything. He was crazy about a woman he had rediscovered just months before at a Cartoonists Society costume ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel. This wasn’t just any woman: It was Lois Lane, or at least the young model Jerry and Joe had hired more than a dozen years ago to help them envision what Lois should look like. Joanne Carter was back in his orbit and he was smitten, the more so when she came to the ball dressed as the dreamboat comic strip showgirl Dixie Dugan. In the years since she had posed as Lois, Joanne had lived on both the East and West coasts and gotten married and divorced. It was Joe who fell for her first. He had tumbled more than a decade before, when she spent most of the winter posing for him. He had been corresponding with her ever since then and had invited her to the New York gala, even renting her an elegant gown. No matter. Once they got to the ball, she was drawn to Jerry and he to her. No surprise. With her slim figure, piercing dark eyes, and tightly coiled shoulder-length hair, she was far more attractive than the matronly Bella. Joanne, meanwhile, was eager for a second shot at love and life—not with an artist like Joe, whose type she was weary of after a frustrating career in modeling, but with a celebrity writer. “Jerry and I started dating,” she recalled years after, “and a few months later, we were married.”
