by Larry Tye
Robert Shayne was another regular in the cast, as Metropolis Police Inspector Bill Henderson. Maxwell had just one condition for hiring the fifty-year-old character actor: that he dye his hair gray so he would look older than George Reeves, who dyed his hair to hide the gray. The true test of Shayne’s forbearance, and Maxwell’s, came near the end of shooting for the first season, when real-life federal agents came onto the lot with a subpoena ordering Shayne to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was a self-described “rabid union man,” but denied being a communist and surely wasn’t a subversive. Reeves and the rest of the cast, along with Maxwell and the honchos at National Comics, stood behind Shayne when he came under fire, first from congressional inquisitors, then from the show’s sponsor. They weren’t in a position to take on Wertham and McCarthy, but they could stand up for a man they knew and liked.
Impressive as the supporting cast was, the TV show, like the other incarnations of the story, turned around Superman himself. Bud Collyer, the first flesh-and-blood Man of Steel, had set the standard. Collyer lowered and raised the timbre of his voice as he switched between Superman and Clark, making the changeover convincing. Maxwell’s wife, Jessica, who was the dialogue director for the TV show, would follow George around the set urging him to do the same—but he just couldn’t master the switch, and soon he stopped trying. The result: a Superman who sounded just like his alter ego. They both swallowed their words. They looked and acted alike. There was no attempt here to make Clark Kent into the klutz he was in the comics. No slouching, no shyness. George portrayed the newsman the way that he knew and that Jessica’s husband told him to: hard-boiled and rough-edged, Superman in a business suit. As Clark Kent, George would shed his rubber muscles and add thick tortoiseshell glasses with no lenses—that was the sum total of the switch.
But it worked. It worked because fans wanted to be fooled, and because of the way George turned to the camera and made it clear he knew they knew his secret, even if Lois, Jimmy, and Perry didn’t. This Superman had a dignity and self-assurance that projected even better on an intimate TV screen than it had in the movies. George just had it, somehow. He called himself Honest George, the People’s Friend—the same kind of homespun language Jerry and Joe used for their creation—and he suspended his own doubts just as he wanted viewers to. He looked like a guy who not only could make gangsters cringe but who believed in the righteousness of his hero’s cause. His smile could melt an iceberg. His cold stare and puffed-out chest could bring a mob to its knees. Sure, his acting was workmanlike, but it won him generations of fans. Today, when those now grown-up fans call to mind their carefree youth, they think of his TV Adventures of Superman, and when they envision Superman himself, it is George Reeves they see.
In this first season on television, Superman’s fans were not just kids but adults, who were now more of a focus for Maxwell than they had been with the radio show. That became especially apparent in the content of the first year’s twenty-six episodes. Phyllis Coates’s Lois was, as she said, “a ballsy broad” who never let up on Clark or on chasing down a story. The plots were film noir, with enough kidnappings, murders, suicides, and men slugging women to alarm not just parents but Maxwell’s bosses. It was dicey to pull the leg braces off a crippled girl, the way heavies did in an episode called “The Birthday Letter,” but gassing to death a cocker spaniel? Another episode tested the no-kill decree: Superman deposited two crooks who had learned his secret identity on the top of a snowcapped mountain and, just after he flew away, both fell to their deaths. In “The Evil Three,” the most aptly named and nail-biting of the shows, Perry and Jimmy spent the night in the ramshackle Hotel Bayou. Its proprietor had already killed his uncle, and he tried to do the same to the editor and copyboy. That failed, but he did manage to viciously silence a wheelchair-bound old lady named Elsa by shoving her and her chair down a ramp to the basement. Splat.
The melodrama didn’t win any fans at the PTA. A self-proclaimed watchdog group, the National Association for Better Radio and Television, listed Superman among seventeen children’s series it found “objectionable,” and that was before “The Evil Three” had aired. “Monitored programs,” the group wrote, “included a demonstration of how to cripple a wrestler, a doctor using drugs to hypnotize patients, torture, and the kidnapping of a child.” Wertham would be harsher still in Seduction of the Innocent: “Television has taken the worst out of comic books, from sadism to Superman.… The television Superman, looking like a mixture of an operatic tenor without his armor and an amateur athlete out of a health-magazine advertisement, does not only have ‘superhuman powers,’ but explicitly belongs to a ‘super-race.’ ”
The brewing controversy didn’t help in the search for a company willing to underwrite the broadcast. It took just two and a half months for the production team to shoot twenty-four new episodes, with the Mole Men film cut into two parts and renamed “The Unknown People” to make a total of twenty-six. It took nearly two years to find a sponsor. Flamingo Films, a firm made up of twenty-somethings, bought the distribution rights early on from Harry Donenfeld, paying thirty million dollars for a thirty-one-year deal. Flamingo pitched the production to Kellogg’s, which remembered all it had earned from Superman on the radio but, like other would-be sponsors, was afraid of the new medium of television. Higher production expenses meant that it cost ten times more to underwrite a show on TV than on radio. The commercials also were much more expensive to make, since film was needed in addition to audio. Most disquieting of all was the worry that this new medium, with its more explicit format and more intimate entry into people’s home, would offend buyers of breakfast cereal and anything else sponsors were peddling.
That last apprehension was especially daunting with Adventures of Superman, which Kellogg’s wanted to pitch to children but couldn’t with the kind of violence Maxwell was filming. The end result was a painstakingly engineered compromise: Maxwell shortened the mountain death scene, eliminated drive-by shootings, and watered down other elements that were especially offensive to the cereal maker. Elsa and her wheelchair still made their way into the cellar, but it was left to the imagination of viewers how they got there. Ads also had to be shot, including one with George dressed as Clark and telling the children who flanked him about “that favorite new cereal of mine, Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes.” Finally, in September 1952, the show aired on its first station, in Chicago. Small cities lined up after that, with Los Angeles coming aboard the next February. By April, the show was airing in New York, the biggest market, along with fifty metropolitan broadcast areas, and it had become the gauge for measuring the success of adventure TV.
The press cheered. “At long last, Superman!” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle, with Variety agreeing that “this one’s a natural for TV.” Kellogg’s signed on for two more years. The reaction on the street was even more bullish. Larson recalls that he couldn’t walk down Madison Avenue without cabbies yelling, “Hey Jimmy, where’s your buddy? Where’s Superman?” One day Larson was in a restaurant on Eighty-second Street having lunch with a friend when he noticed that hundreds of kids had gathered outside, peering through the window. “The police came into the restaurant and apologized. They said I was creating a public nuisance and they had to get me out or something bad could happen. They gave me an escort into the Metropolitan Museum around the corner. I was followed by a mob of kids but the museum refused them entrance and I was given refuge. That’s the first time I realized I was in a lot of trouble. I was the first TV teen idol.”
Phyllis Coates realized her own newfound celebrity less than a week after the show started airing in Los Angeles. “I had to change the color of my hair! From auburn to blonde. And you know why? I couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed. Not only boys and girls but big, grown-up women. They’d spot me in the super-market or just taking a walk with Crinker,” her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, said Coates, who had grown up on a cattle ranch in Odessa, Texas. “The first thing they want
ed to know was how it feels to be held in Superman’s arms.”
THE FIRST SEASON OF THE TV Adventures of Superman was Maxwell’s last. Jack Liebowitz, ever the accountant, said the departure was a simple matter of money: Maxwell had promised to spend just fourteen thousand dollars on each episode, which would have ensured a substantial profit, but instead each ended up costing twenty-eight thousand, “so he was out as producer.” Maxwell also could be dogmatic, which meant he burned bridges at National as well as on the set, and he was ambitious, to the point that even as he was working on Superman he was negotiating with another company to produce a TV show about Lassie, the heroic Rough Collie. Yet what ultimately did him in, after four years as one of Superman’s most influential movers and shakers, was a cultural shift into an era when Americans liked Ike, hated Bolsheviks, and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. The same way Jerry and Joe couldn’t resist their bosses’ order to rein in their crusading Superman in the 1930s, so Maxwell was fighting a battle he couldn’t win against an image-conscious Kellogg’s and a public riled up by Fredric Wertham and his allies. The consensus at National Comics was that it was time for a kinder, gentler Man of Steel on TV and for a loyal company man to handle him.
Whitney Ellsworth brought a fresh perspective and a Superman pedigree even longer than Maxwell’s. Ellsworth was the token goy in the National brain trust, having grown up in the Congregational Church, but he shared the Brooklyn background of many comics pioneers and, like Jerry Siegel, he lost his dad as a teenager and it left him bereft. Ellsworth was an editor for Major Wheeler-Nicholson for nearly three years starting in 1935. Harry and Jack brought him back in early 1940 as their first editorial director, a job that included overseeing the Superman books. He picked up some of the writing duties when Jerry was in the Army, penning newspaper strips and the inaugural Superboy story, and helped oversee the Fleischer cartoons, the Kirk Alyn serials, and the radio show. Then his bosses wanted him to ride herd over Jerry and Joe. He did, pressing the creators to “de-sex” Lois, downplay Superman’s jockstrap, and generally understand “what sort of censure we are always up against, and how careful we must be.”
That background made Ellsworth the perfect choice as Maxwell’s successor. He knew Superman. He knew Harry and Jack. He knew what it would take to keep them off his back and Wertham off theirs. He even knew about the televised Adventures of Superman, having written, edited, or otherwise contributed to many of Maxwell’s episodes. His budget was nearly 40 percent higher than Maxwell’s, and he had the kind of backing from Kellogg’s that Maxwell never did. He arrived with so many ideas, and drew up such detailed outlines of how the stories should begin and end, that, as he said, “We never had a writer who had to come in with his own idea.” There also was less pressure on the production by the time he moved to Los Angeles. It had proven it could be a blockbuster, the actors knew their roles and their lines, and Superman was the number one reason to turn on the TV for millions of American kids and their parents.
From the start, Ellsworth’s shows differed from his predecessor’s in ways that were easy to measure. The storylines were ripped more from the comics, which is what Ellsworth knew best. Humor mattered now as much as dark drama. So did science fiction. There were more feel-good plots, like “Around the World with Superman,” where, in thirty minutes, the Man of Tomorrow helped a blind girl regain her sight, patched up her parents’ shattered marriage, and flew the wide-eyed child around the world. Ellsworth’s Superman could make himself invisible and split into two. Crooks had fewer shootouts and wrestling matches with him and were more likely to run into each other or a wall. “Maxwell’s first twenty-six shows were a lot more violent than my shows,” Ellsworth said looking back. “My concept was that the enemy should be played, for the most part, as semi-comic—and a little bit stupid.… I think the kids liked this better.”
More than any episode of his five years, “Panic in the Sky” was Ellsworth at his best. Superman lost his memory trying to stop an asteroid rocketing toward Earth in this show, the last of the 1953 broadcasts. It wasn’t the plot that grabbed his audience but the subplots. With Clark not remembering he was Superman, his everyman persona took center stage and the fans loved it. Their hero was manly as always, but also tender and vulnerable. Less alien and more human—more like us. The threat, meanwhile, was not just a bank being robbed but the world being destroyed, an increasingly plausible fear in an era of intercontinental missiles, hydrogen bombs, and flying-saucer sightings. Pint-sized viewers yelled at their TV screens: “I know who you are, Mr. Kent, you’re Superman and the world needs you.” The show, the most expensive of the 104-episode series, was probably based on a recent comic book and the program’s popularity would inspire another comic book forty years later, along with a future TV show and cartoon. Even Superman groupie Jerry Seinfeld would count this episode as his all-time favorite. The key to all that acclaim was simple, says Jackson Gillis, who wrote the script: “Pure fantasy,” which was “what I thought the show should be.”
Popular, yes, but “Panic” had more than the normal flaws. If you listened closely you could hear the hollow sound of Metropolis residents lumbering down the sidewalk with plywood underfoot, not concrete. Tune your ears when Superman landed on the streaking meteor and you could make out birds chirping. Clark showed himself to Jimmy, Lois, and Perry without his glasses, the centerpiece of his disguise, and without any of these inquiring journalists wondering why Superman disappeared at the very moment Clark had amnesia. Had they been in a mood to question, they might also have asked how viewers were supposed to trust newspeople like them who never carried a notebook. Or how Clark could head for the newspaper storeroom with no hat in sight but be wearing one when he arrived.
One premise that got more credible as the series went on was that a man could fly. After the early mishaps, a mechanical arm was rigged up and Superman lay on an attached Plexiglas pan that had been fitted to his chest and thighs. The tray could be turned and tilted, with twenty stagehands pulling to lift and lower the lumbering arm and the camera following it on a hydraulic dolly. There were no more wires, although there still was a wind machine and compressed air to give the feel of Superman whooshing through the air when really it was the filmed background that was moving. George was skeptical. “I had to get in first, then my helper, and still one other guy to make sure it held,” said Thol Simonson, who was brought in to manage the special effects. The aerial action happened now in three phases: George got a running start, jumped on a springboard positioned out of sight below a window, and dove head-first through the opening and onto a pile of wrestling mats. Then came film of the mechanical arm moving him through the air. The last sequence showed him hitting the ground feet-first as if he were landing. This all-human, no-animation approach made more convincing not just the flying but the science fiction itself.
Spicing up the fantasy, upgrading the aeronautics, and toning down the violence weren’t the only changes Ellsworth wrought. The action was shot in color starting in 1954, although high costs meant that it would be several years before the color film was aired and it wouldn’t be until the 1960s—when color TVs began to proliferate—that most viewers actually saw Superman in his new blue and red costume. The actors were evolving, too, because they felt more comfortable in their roles and because the new producer and his team insisted on it. Perry White was less grizzly and more teddy bear, showing his young journalists how to do their jobs rather than just yelling at them. Inspector Henderson was more relaxed. As for Jimmy, “I loved and admired the first twenty-six shows under Maxwell, but when they lightened up they turned me loose and I got to do comedy,” says Larson. “That is exactly what I wanted to do.”
The biggest transformation in the cast was a new Lois. Phyllis Coates left after the first season, despite what she said was an offer from Ellsworth to pay her five times what she had been earning. She had the chance to co-star in a new show and was concerned about being typecast as Lois Lane. She also worried abou
t all the drinking on the Superman set, especially by George, and given her family history of alcoholism she felt staying could have a “devastating effect.” Looking back, she also had no doubts about what the transition from Maxwell to Ellsworth meant for the show: “I’ve had people write to me to say that as kids they watched those early shows where the heroes were clear, the bad guys got it. Superman was really Superman.… The new gang came in and turned it all to pudding!”
Her successor, Noel Neill, was a lot like Ellsworth, softer-edged but steeped in the Superman tradition. Daughter of a chorus girl and a journalist, the Minneapolis native had acting in her blood and newspapers in her home. Her résumé included singing for Bing Crosby, playing in westerns and bobby-socks movies, and sharing an agent with Jack Larson. A leg-art poster of her in a bathing suit leaning seductively against a rock ledge was a favorite for GIs. But what really caught Ellsworth’s eye was that she had been the first live-action Lois, alongside Kirk Alyn in the serials. She hadn’t read Superman growing up—“comic books in those days were a boy thing”—but as soon as she landed the serial role “I rushed out and bought a book to see what Lois Lane looked like. I wanted to see what she wore, how her hair was, this and that.”
