Superman

by Larry Tye

  Wertham and his allies conceded that not all comic books were menacing. It was easy to agree on the increasingly popular and macabre horror books, with titles like Out of the Night and Weird Thrillers and stories about a human head that doubled as a bowling ball and a wife roasting on a barbecue her husband’s head, legs, hands, and feet. They had to go. But even ones that seemed harmless might not be, Wertham warned: “You find that what all the little animals are doing involves undue amounts of socking over the head and banging in the jaw, and that the toys that come to life at night sometimes put in the time strangling one another.”

  Superhero comics were a different animal entirely, focused not on the lurid but on the ennobling, and having aided the nation in its patriotic war against the Axis. To critics, however, that was a bygone era. What mattered now were the crimes depicted in these comic books, their heroes’ resort to force, and the very notion of superpowers, which had the stench of fascism. Superman, as king of the superheroes, was especially reviled. He was one of four characters put on trial in 1949 by students at St. Mary’s High School in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, no matter that the boy who played him in the mock tribunal had never read a comic book. The Colossus of Krypton was often the first onto the funeral pyre at comic book burnings and was singled out for special scorn at public hearings. He also was Wertham’s favorite target. “I would like to point out to you one other crime comic book which we have found to be particularly injurious to the ethical development of children and those are the Superman comic books,” the psychiatrist told members of Congress. “They arouse in children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex.”

  THIS WAS NO TIME to launch another Superman experiment. Not in 1951, when the whole comic book world was running scared. Not when the medium into which he was being catapulted, television, was so callow that it was unclear whether it would succeed, and it was perfectly clear that actors with real promise would opt for Hollywood or Broadway. Not when Superman himself was being labeled a sociopath.

  But that wasn’t the way National Comics or Robert Maxwell thought. They knew that there were more children than ever in America, where soldiers had come home from Europe and made up for lost time by igniting an unprecedented boom in babies. They also knew that radio was dying as a venue for children’s adventure and that movie serials wouldn’t be far behind. While TV might be new and untested, so were comic books when Superman broke through in that medium. Now was precisely the time when the battered Superman of the static page could use a lift onto the small screens that were turning up in America’s dens and playrooms. For Superman’s owners, the question wasn’t whether but when to push ahead, and whom to sign up as the Man of Steel for this most up-close of media.

  Maxwell and his director, Tommy Carr, screened nearly two hundred candidates. Most made their living as actors, although some were full-time musclemen. Nearly all, Carr said, “appeared to have a serious deficiency in their chromosome count.” So thorough—and perhaps so frustrating—was their search that the executives stopped by the Mr. America bodybuilding contest in Los Angeles. One candidate they never seriously considered, despite his later claims, was Kirk Alyn, who had done well enough in the serials but had neither the acting skills nor the looks around which to build a Superman TV series. The search ended the day a barrel-chested B-movie actor named George Reeves showed up on the studio lot.

  Maxwell’s co-producer, Bernard Luber, had recognized Reeves in a Los Angeles restaurant, seeming “rather forlorn,” and suggested he come in for a tryout. He did, the next morning, and “from that moment on he was my first choice,” said Tommy Carr. “He looked like Superman with that jaw of his. Kirk had the long neck and fine features, but although I like Kirk very much, he never looked the Superman Reeves did.” His tough-guy demeanor was no put-on. Standing six foot two and carrying 195 pounds, Reeves had been a light-heavyweight boxing champ in college and could have gone further if he hadn’t broken his nose seven times and his mother hadn’t made him step out of the ring. It wasn’t the first or the last time she would interfere. A headstrong and self-focused girl from Illinois, Helen Lescher had eloped with a pharmacist, Don Brewer, in Iowa in 1914 and within five months they had a son, George Keefer Brewer. The marriage didn’t last long and George didn’t learn about his real father or his real birthday until he was into his twenties. Helen altered his date of birth to make it look like she was married when he was conceived. She hid his father’s fate, telling George he had committed suicide, until Brewer turned up one day. Helen’s second marriage wouldn’t last, either, nor would the second version of George’s name, George Lescher Bessolo.

  After giving up boxing George landed a job at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse, which was more to his mother’s liking. It was then that he learned to act and that nearby movie executives got to see what he could do. They liked him enough to give him the modest role of Stuart Tarleton, one of the Tarleton twins and a suitor of Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Even before the film came out, George had been signed by another studio, Warner Bros., where Jack Warner pushed him to change his name to one he felt would look better on movie theater marquees: Reeves. George didn’t see his name in lights for anything but lesser films, but he did land minor roles alongside major actors. In the 1949 Samson and Delilah, Victor Mature was Samson and George was a wounded messenger, while that same year, in Bob Hope’s The Great Lover, George was a gambler killed in the first three minutes. Between acting jobs, he dug cesspools at the rate of one hundred dollars a hole.

  When the offer came in 1951 to play the TV Superman, George was torn. He had barely heard of the Man of Steel, knew that the six hundred dollars a week he was offered was a pittance, and realized that the chance of getting a real acting job would be harder once the movie studios saw him playing a comic book character or any role in a medium that Hollywood disdained. Yet he needed the money, and, as his agent advised, there was a slim chance that the new show would even be broadcast and a slimmer one that anyone in Hollywood would notice. Television, after all, was in its infancy, with the nation just witnessing the first-ever coast-to-coast broadcast in the form of a speech by President Harry Truman. “Take the money and run,” George’s agent said. Reluctantly, George did. “I’ve played about every part you can think of. Why not Superman?” he told a friend. To Phyllis Coates, the new Lois Lane, he confided the first time he met her, “Well, babe, this is it: the bottom of the barrel.”

  Like many in Hollywood and in the growing Superman family, Coates was using a pseudonym. In her case it sounded more like a real name than the one her parents gave her: Gypsie Ann Evarts Stell. The tall, slim brunette had gone from chorus girl on vaudeville to actress in second-tier movies. She was glad to land the role of Lois less because of the professional opportunity—“I’d never read Superman comics, never heard the radio show, never heard of the character”—than because of the paycheck, which she needed to pay doctors’ and physical therapists’ bills for a daughter born with a displaced hip. Getting the job was easy. Her agent called and told her, “Wear a suit and low-heeled shoes.” The next morning at the RKO studio, “I met Bob Maxwell.… I read for him and he said, ‘I think you’re perfect for the part.’ It was that simple: I didn’t even get a call-back on it, they just decided that I was it. And there were a lot of good gals up for it.”

  The first production was a fifty-eight-minute movie called Superman and the Mole Men that was a way to tease as well as finance the TV series. The story was set in the small town of Silsby, where the National Oil Company had just drilled 32,740 feet to create the deepest well in the world. Up came not just petroleum but four small humanoid creatures whose home was in the center of the Earth. The residents of Silsby, stirred to a frenzy by a shotgun-carrying rabble-rouser named Luke Benson, assumed the worst about the subterranean beings and vowed to find and exterminate them. Luckily, Clark Kent was rep
orting on the oil drilling and did a quick change when he saw the gathering mob. “I’m going to give you all one last chance to stop acting like Nazi storm troopers,” Superman lectured the townspeople. When his words were unheeded, he disarmed Benson and the others and helped the underground creatures return down the well. It was exactly the sort of morality tale that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had brought to their early comics and that Maxwell tackled on the radio. Having Superman take this stance was especially brave coming just as Senator McCarthy—striking a pose like Luke Benson’s—was beginning his meteoric rise. It also sent a message to Dr. Wertham and his followers: The real threat was the Nazi-like citizens of Silsby, not the superhero roused to violence as a last resort.

  Mole Men was a classic Superman enterprise—done on the cheap but at full throttle. The original idea was for children to play the mole men, but Maxwell and crew decided that dwarfs—two of whom had played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz—would be more believable. Their heads were enlarged to make them scarier, they wore fuzzy jumpsuits to ensure that kids wouldn’t be too scared, and their laser weapon was the handiest and cheapest the crew could come up with: a handheld Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Maxwell tried to make the “flying” more realistic than in Kirk Alyn’s serials, with George Reeves being hoisted with a harness and piano wire for takeoffs and landings. On-screen, it was believable. Off-screen it was a near-disaster; the wire broke early in the production and George crashed to the ground. Maxwell’s first reaction was to cry, “My God—the star!” He knew, given a shoot of just eleven days, what it would mean to lose his Superman. “We went lickety-split,” recalled Coates. “I took my money and went home! It was nice working together and everybody liked everybody, but in the final analysis it was a crock of crap!” Mole Men opened in 1951 and for the next year and a half it appeared as a Saturday matinee in movie theaters across America and as far away as Scotland, where a vacationing Coates was shocked to see her “crock of crap” playing at a local movie house. The verdict for National Comics was unequivocal: The movie pilot was a success, so upward and onward to television.

  The TV series opened the way every Superman project did, with a creation story. It welcomed back old fans of the comics and radio productions and introduced new ones to the narrative. The opening narration was word-for-word the same as in the radio series, which isn’t surprising since Maxwell oversaw both. On Krypton, Jor-El tried and failed to convince the ruling council that its planet was about to be sucked into the sun, then he sent his infant son rocketing to Earth. Here, a young Clark watched his powers slowly surface the way they did in the Superboy comic books, and he heard his mother explain, when he was twelve, why he could see through rocks and do other things that set him apart. His adoptive parents were the Sarah and Eben Kent dreamed up by novelist George Lowther and brought back to life on the radio. The storyline was familiar, but TV added a decidedly new kick to the myth. Here was Superman in real life, and he was sturdier and more steadfast than kids had pictured from the cartoons, imagined on the radio, or seen in the big-screen serials. Here, finally, was a flesh-and-blood Superman worthy of Jerry and Joe’s hero.

  The pace of filming for TV was even more frenetic than it had been on Mole Men, with just twelve days to complete each batch of five half-hour episodes. That meant working from seven in the morning until dusk six days a week, with no time for retakes. The undertaking was saved by George’s photographic mind, which let him memorize the twenty-four pages of dialogue that came his way every day. Scenes were shot in blocks. Monday might be Daily Planet sequences. Tuesday all eyes would be on the gangsters in their boxy suits and rumpled fedoras. It drove the actors mad, reading lines without knowing the context of the story, or even which story it was. The newspaper never had a newsroom—that would have required too many desks and extras—just cramped private offices. Other money-saving precepts: No need for more than two gangsters; limit crowd scenes to the opening, where everyone was looking skyward; and make sure the actors never changed clothes so stock scenes could be spliced in anywhere. Clark stayed in his gray double-breasted suit with padded shoulders. Jimmy wore out his sweater and bow tie. Lois had one hat, one suit, and one set of earrings. On Krypton, Jor-El used Buster Crabbe’s old shirt from the Flash Gordon serial while other ruling council members recycled costumes from Captain Marvel and Captain America movies. So what if they were the competition? What mattered to the Superman team, as to most other TV crews back then, was being on budget, which was just $18,500 per episode, or barely enough for a single set in a B picture.

  Special effects also were done on the cheap. The bullets that bounced off George were blanks and the revolvers he bent were made of soft lead. With a mere $175 budgeted for each episode’s flying sequences, it is not surprising that George took another spill. It was the pulley that gave way this time. “That’s enough of that,” he announced after he dusted himself off. “Peter Pan can fly with wires, but not Superman!” In another episode, George was set to burst into a room. The cast had rigged a door of balsa wood held up by two-by-fours, but they forgot to take out the extra lumber. “George came running up the stairs right into the frame,” recalled Lee Sholem, who directed that show. “The balsa wood barely gave way because George bounced off the heavy wood, and fell to the floor—unconscious.” George wasn’t the only one taking his knocks. Playing Lois, Phyllis Coates, who prided herself on ad-libbing rather than following a script, moved closer than called for to a thug she was confronting and “he decked me! I was knocked out cold, and they sent me home—that left me a little black-and-blue, but I was back at work the next day.” A knockout blow was no reason to stop filming; the director reshot the scene before Lois’s face started to swell.

  Just getting dressed was a challenge for Superman. George’s costume came in two gray-and-brown wool pieces that he dubbed the “monkey suit.” It had to be sewn into place on him every day, which meant standing still for an hour and suffering the indignity of having clothespins hold his suit together when the sewing didn’t. “What is a man my age doing running around in my underwear?” he would mumble as his personal dresser worked on him. There was a silk cape, too, along with rubber latex padding that he wore under his shirt to lift his sloped shoulders and thrust out his chest. Altogether the outfit weighed twenty pounds, and the materials in it gave him a rash. Imagine effortlessly battling villains with that on, under hot studio lights, with no air-conditioning in the heat of a Los Angeles summer. No wonder he never smiled as Superman.

  That also explains why, between takes, George would sit in front of blocks of ice with a wind machine aimed at them and him. The effort of shooting was enormous, so it was a blessed relief when the action came to a temporary halt at precisely four every afternoon and George would pour himself, Phyllis, and sometimes Robert Maxwell what he called “my olive”—a martini or, for a change, a brandy. “This drove the production office crazy, and George would say to them, ‘Go shit in your hat!’ ” said Coates. “George’s face was like a baby’s butt—he never did show it when he would drink.” Another way the actor let off steam was telling stories, which was especially entertaining when his audience included John Hamilton, the gruff white-haired actor who played Perry White. Hamilton liked his olive at least as much as George did, although he did his drinking after work at the Brown Derby. The off-camera scene that first year of filming was worthy of its own shoot: Superman holding court from a director’s chair, a cocktail in one hand, a cigarette in a silver-and-black holder in the other, his cape tucked neatly behind his back.

  All this was exhilarating to Jack Larson, who was just twenty-three when he signed up to play Jimmy Olsen. Reconnecting with Superman was a boyhood dream come true for Larson, who had adored the character back when he read Action comic books at Campbell’s Drug Store in Los Angeles, slurping a cherry phosphate and hoping his parents would keep talking so he could keep reading. His real ambition was performing on the stage in New York. A short stint on the Superman TV show, for which he was
offered $250 a week, seemed like the surest route to pay his way to Broadway. But doubts set in for poor Jack on day one, which he spent locked in a safe, sweating while he waited for Superman to rescue him. “This,” he explains, “is not what I had been preparing to do in life. I was young and energetic and innocent and eager and dumb as could be. I didn’t know that Clark Kent was Superman because he had on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.” Larson was six years older than the radio Jimmy, yet his version was more boyish and innocent. The straight-out comedy didn’t come until later. In the first season he was mainly getting in trouble (he did most of his own stunt work, “which meant I sprained a lot of things”), getting wet (“they were always trying to drown me, and the water was cold and dirty”), and getting rescued (in the nick of time). On the radio and in the comics, Jimmy had been one in a series of supporting roles around Superman. Larson’s TV Jimmy connected so completely with viewers that the copyboy became a star—such a star that today his trademark bowtie is enshrined at the Smithsonian.