Superman

by Larry Tye

  When Ellsworth called to offer her the role, Neill was ecstatic even though all he was paying was $185 per episode, or half what Coates said she got. The perks were even fewer than in the serials. She had to dress her own hair, bring her own shoes and socks, and shoot scenes in such quick succession that she had no time to learn her lines or to socialize. She got no royalties when the shows were rebroadcast. She was never invited to appear in the commercials for Frosted Flakes, which more than doubled Jack and George’s salaries. Kellogg’s, she says, worried about how scandalous it would look if she turned up at the breakfast table with Jack or George. Teenager rock and rollers surely would have been delighted, but not their priggish parents.

  Neill found it troubling enough to have bosses who were “very, very, very, very cheap,” and worse to have a director, Tommy Carr, who gave her a hard time from day one. He didn’t like the way she said her hallmark line, “Gee, Superman, am I ever glad to see you!” and had her repeat it until she started to cry. That’s when Superman stepped in. “George saw what was happening and immediately asked for a break. He walked over to Tommy and calmly said, ‘Why don’t you give the kid a break?’ ” Neill remembered. “After George intervened, he eased up and let me do it my way.”

  Neill’s Lois reflected more than anyone the change from Maxwell to Ellsworth. She was easier on Clark than Coates had been and more dazzled by Superman’s rescues. It is no accident that none of Coates’s pictures show her smiling, whereas Neill is smiling in every shot. It also is understandable that they didn’t like one another. Neill denied ever meeting Coates, whom she called “whatshername.” Coates said George introduced them and that Neill told her, “I hate you!” Which Lois was the better fit and whether the show headed downhill after Maxwell’s first season are matters still hotly contested. The truth is that the Neill-Ellsworth version had less punch but more warmth than the Coates-Maxwell episodes. Take your pick.

  Lost in all those arguments is all that remained the same. Superman still took on third-rail issues like atomic power and political corruption, as he had in the comics, radio shows, and Maxwell TV shows, and he still got skewered by the National Association for Better Radio and Television. Ellsworth had to do the same dance that Maxwell had on the phone every week with Jack Liebowitz. Ellsworth: “Jack, I got no money.” Liebowitz: “Well how much do you need?” Ellsworth: “I need $25,000 this week.” Liebowitz: “So much?” Ellsworth: “Well yes, so much. Maybe a little more.” Kidnappings still were part of Adventures of Superman plots, along with hauntings and rough times for ladies and dogs. There were even killings. What was different with Ellsworth producing the shows is that the dogs survived. In the one Ellsworth episode in which the villains didn’t, their deaths happened off-screen. The show knew whom it wanted to reach—kids—and it aimed squarely at them with fare designed to placate their parents and Ellsworth’s sponsors.

  That same kid-friendly ethic was being applied in the Superman comic books, and for the same reason. Wertham had the entire industry running scared. In just two years, from 1954 to 1956, the number of comic book titles published in America plunged from 650 to 250. It was “like the plague,” observed longtime comics artist Carmine Infantino. “If you said you drew comic books, it was like saying you were a child molester.” Editor Al Feldstein worried that “the industry’s dying, the comics industry. All they need is a spade to bury it.” By the fall of 1955, a Comics Code Authority had been set up, and its black-and-white seal appeared in the upper right corner of every book it had approved. Without a seal, most distributors wouldn’t carry the comic. Winning the Code Authority’s approval meant scrubbing titles and stories of horror and terror, along with anything that could be seen as disrespectful of police, parents, and government. No vampires or werewolves, references to physical afflictions, or exaggerations of the female anatomy. Illicit sex couldn’t be hinted at and characters could not be divorced. No ads for liquor, tobacco, fireworks, or weapons. It was the kind of self-policing the motion picture industry had been practicing for twenty-five years, only more so. These restrictions were less severe than the outright bans Wertham and other critics wanted, but they meant much more censorship than printed publications, with their First Amendment protections, usually agreed to. It was a strategy of self-preservation, which made sense given that a dozen publishers had already been forced to shutter their doors and more than eight hundred comic book artists and writers were looking for work.

  No publisher pressed the stay-pure strategy on more fronts than Harry and Jack did. They distanced themselves from the “mercenary minority” who were producing most of the violent and vulgar material. They established a “Distinguished Advisory Board” of child behavior experts who gathered the latest evidence of how comic books were helping kids read, helping teachers teach, and, as one panel member told Time, offering “the same type of mental catharsis to their readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama.” Harry and Jack adopted their own standards of editorial purity, as spelled out in a memo from Ellsworth when he was editorial director, that went even further than the Comics Code. The inclusion of females in Superman stories was discouraged. “Expressions having reference to the Deity” were forbidden, and so were bloodletting and killing, even of killers. “The use of chains, whips, or other such devices is forbidden. Anything having a sexual or sadistic implication is forbidden,” the guidelines said. “HEROES SHOULD ACT WITHIN THE LAW, AND FOR THE LAW.” Ellsworth had to sanitize his productions even further, banishing killings even offscreen, dumbing down the bad guys, and steering clear of controversial social issues. There was one last move Jack and Harry made in the mid-1950s that Wertham would have found interesting had he known: They quietly acquired the distribution rights to America’s sexiest magazine, Playboy.

  Stories of kids who tried to take wing and fly, as Jerry Siegel had as a child, were always a sore spot for Superman, and never more so than in that era of the inquisition. Newspapers glommed on to the tales. Eight-year-old Larry King of Columbus, Ohio, spread his homemade cape over his back and jumped from his second-floor fire escape, explaining from his hospital bed that “I thought the air would get under my towel and float me down like it does Superman.” James Henderson, another eight-year-old second-story boy, took off in his Superman suit and landed with a sprained ankle. “The darned thing wouldn’t work,” the Des Moines youngster complained of his costume. Twelve-year-old Robert Van Gosig of New York wasn’t so lucky: He slipped on a wet ledge while playing Superman on his tenement roof and plunged to his death.

  After Jerry read articles like those, his comic book Superman warned readers that only he could perform such feats of derring-do without getting hurt. Superman costumes carried similar cautions. It was one thing for young fans to break their beds as they pretended to fly; it was quite another for them to break their necks. “We were very conscious of that,” recalls Jay Emmett, who oversaw the licensing of Superman products. “We couldn’t have kids buying costumes if they were going to jump out the window.” George Reeves felt a special burden with kids who mimicked him. He gave up smoking and drinking in public. He pushed National Comics to stop selling costumes and capes. And, in a 1955 episode of Adventures of Superman, he warned listeners that “no one, but no one, can do the things Superman does. And that goes especially for flying!”

  National’s multi-front multimedia campaign worked. Making Superman more squeaky-clean on the printed page—and lightening up on the TV show’s noir—eventually inoculated him against the attacks of critics like Wertham. The censorship campaign also backfired by turning Superman stories into the kind of forbidden fruit that made kids more determined to read on and tune in. Jack and Harry’s most brilliant stroke was launching the new TV series in the middle of the assault on comic books, when other superheroes were running for cover. The publishing partners had always played better offense than defense. Their radio show, film serials, and animated movies had boosted rather than diminished the popularity of Superman comi
c books and comic strips, and TV did that in spades. Call it synergy, or just street smarts.

  Another measure of success was the way Superman merchandising was taking off. It had always been done well, but in the early 1950s National capitalized on the popularity of its television series and “licensing income soared,” says Emmett, who oversaw those sales. Building on his Superman success and his relationship with his uncle Jack Liebowitz, Emmett in 1960 launched a broader-based product-management operation called the Licensing Corporation of America, whose clients would eventually include Pat Boone, Batman, and the National Basketball Association.

  TV also spread Superman’s fame the rest of the way around the globe. Dubbed into Japanese, Adventures of Superman became that country’s most popular TV show, with Emperor Hirohito writing George to say that Superman was his ninkimono, or fave. The show was playing in Paris, too, with simultaneous subtitles in French, Arabic, and Japanese. And all this was happening during the height of the comic book scare. Fredric Wertham had gone to war with the Man of Steel and, like so many Superman foes over the years, the venerable psychiatrist had been humbled.

  THERE WAS ONE ADVERSARY SUPERMAN couldn’t defeat: himself. Not that anyone imagined the Man of Tomorrow, the world’s preeminent Pollyanna, trying to take his own life. The notion was so abhorrent that National Comics had banished any depiction of suicide—by Superman or anyone else—from its pages and airwaves. Yet on the morning of June 17, 1959, America woke to the headline TV SUPERMAN KILLS SELF. Parents tried to hide the paper from their kids. Kids were sure the reports had to be mistaken, since everyone knew bullets bounced off the Man of Steel. But the media spelled out the all too real and gruesome details: Friends had found George Reeves’s naked body splayed across his bed, faceup in a pool of blood, with a bullet hole in his temple and a German Luger nestled between his feet.

  To his admirers, George had everything to live for. Adventures of Superman had been reaching thirty-five million TV viewers a year, only half of whom were kids. After 104 episodes, there was practically no one in America who did not recognize George Reeves. He delighted moppets with a 1956 appearance on Romper Room and two days afterward he thrilled their parents and grandparents on Tony Bennett’s variety show, the first time those with color TVs could see what he looked like in his radiant red-and-blue costume. Later that year he achieved the ultimate measure of celebrity: a guest slot on America’s most-watched show, I Love Lucy. It was true that Adventures of Superman had stopped production in November of 1957, but reruns were still airing and earning him as much as $1,000 a week, he had been approached about shooting twenty-six new shows, and, having already directed three episodes, he was bullish about directing more.

  At the time of his death, George was due to be married in just three days. He was two weeks away from an Australian tour, in which he would play guitar in a band, then wrestle his sidekick Gene LeBell, a judo champion who dressed up as the evil Mr. Kryptonite. He had an offer to star in Wagon Train, a TV western that would go on to run for nearly ten years. “Nothing was bothering him,” LeBell says of his friend, who was only forty-five. “He wasn’t going to shoot himself.”

  Other observers offered a less rosy portrait, starting with George’s offscreen appearances, which were part of his deal with National. They were the kind of thing Jerry Siegel had loved doing, but George never found them easy. In 1954 a young fan socked him in the eye “to see if he would flinch.” Another pointed a loaded Colt .45 at him. The gun story became part of his legend and he played the hero, saying he had convinced the boy to put down the gun because, while Superman could fend off a bullet, a bystander could be hurt by the ricochet. His own variety shows, like the one planned for Australia, were financial disasters, and Noel Neill said he had been staying in his room more on these tours and drinking by himself. The low point was a stop in North Carolina where only three people showed up—a young boy and his parents. George’s other investment schemes didn’t fare well either, including one for a “Motel of the Stars” run by a con man who defrauded not just George, but Mickey Rooney, Burl Ives, and Debbie Reynolds.

  At the time of his death, George hadn’t had an acting job since Adventures of Superman went on hiatus nineteen months earlier. “Here I am wasting my life,” he told Ben Welden, who played a thug on the Superman series. George had almost died twice in car accidents. The first was in March 1956, when a truck loaded with construction materials reportedly ran a red light and rammed into his sports car, sending him wheeling into another truck and leaving him in the hospital for a week. Three years later he took a curve too fast and skidded into an embankment, leaving him with a concussion and a five-inch gash on the forehead.

  The last of his six Superman seasons was aimed more than ever at a young audience and had weak scripts as well as tired execution. He was looking and acting middle-aged now. Clark wore eyeglasses with actual lenses. Lingering pain from the first car crash prompted him to take pills and made it tougher for him and Superman to keep in shape. He strapped on a girdle these days before stepping in front of the camera. His hair was noticeably thinner, whiter, and in need of more frequent touch-ups with food coloring along with hair dye. Karate chops, which were easier to deliver and to fake, had replaced punches. George had always liked his olive, but now he liked it in the morning, too.

  His love life was even more unsettled. It had begun promisingly and conventionally when, in 1940, he married a young actress named Ellanora Needles. They were separated first by his enlistment in the Army, then by separate careers and waning interest. The divorce was formalized in 1950, a year before he became Superman. The next year he started an affair with Toni Mannix, a former Ziegfeld Follies beauty who was eight years older than he was and fifteen years younger than her husband, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vice president and enforcer Eddie Mannix. She called George “the Boy.” To him, she was “Mother” or “Ma,” Eddie was “Pop,” and the unorthodox relationship among the three churchgoing Catholics was “the Arrangement,” which suited everyone perfectly. Eddie got to be with his exotic mistress and, given his weak heart, he had the security of knowing that Toni would have George to look after her. Toni got the man she loved, George, and an exhilarating lifestyle that brought her to the Superman set every day with a picnic basket brimming with gin, vermouth, olives, and hors d’oeuvres that made her a favorite with cast and crew. George got a house in Los Angeles’s exclusive Benedict Canyon, an Italian sports car, a Minox camera, a sauna, and an open tab at his favorite restaurant, Scandia—all delivered by Toni and paid for by Eddie. It was a love triangle as tangled as Superman’s with Clark and Lois.

  The arrangement worked for everyone until George called it off early in 1958. One night at Toots Shor’s Restaurant in New York he had met Leonore Lemmon, a barfly infamous for being the only woman ever tossed out of the Stork Club for fistfighting. George couldn’t take his eyes off her ample breasts, jet-black hair, and white skin. When she turned up at his hotel room at two the next morning with wine and squab, they became inseparable. She moved to California and into his Benedict Canyon home, alienating his old friends and inviting new ones to what seemed like an around-the-clock party. “She makes me feel like a boy again,” George told everyone. Toni called her “the whore” and allegedly had Eddie’s yardman make harassing calls to George and Leonore. The two were due to be married three days after his death, or so Leonore said.

  She rarely said the same thing twice and never seemed credible to George’s friends, especially when it came to what happened the night he died. She told police that George had gone to bed about midnight, after which friends stopped by. George appeared in his robe and got into a squabble with one of the guests, then apologized and went back to bed. As he did, Leonore predicted that “he’s probably gonna shoot himself.” She could hear him open the dresser drawer and get out the gun. Minutes later, she said, a shot rattled the house. Those basic details remained relatively consistent in her retellings to investigators and friends until thirty years lat
er, when she told a dramatically different version. George never came downstairs that night. She thought he might have planned to kill her, too. And given his difficulty finding work after being typecast as the Man of Steel, “the only thing that killed him is something very simple, very easy: Superman killed him.”

  The forensic details of the case were sketchy and spilled out haphazardly, fueling suspicion that the crime scene had been tampered with and casting doubt on the suicide declaration by the coroner and police. Why, researchers who have reviewed the evidence wonder, did the embalmer sew together George’s head wounds before the coroner thoroughly analyzed them? How did the bullet casing end up under his body? Why were there no fingerprints on the gun or powder burns on his face? What about the extra bullet holes discovered in the floor under a rug in the bedroom? Why did it take forty-five minutes for anyone to call the police and why, in those anxious minutes, did Leonore phone high-powered Washington defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams? He told her to call the cops and keep her mouth shut, and later told friends that “only Lem can turn a suicide into a homicide.”

  The weeks after the shooting were a circus, with George’s mother, Helen, as the ringleader. She came to town in a wheelchair, telling anyone who would listen that her son hadn’t killed himself and hiring a prominent criminal attorney, a detective agency, and new pathologists to pore over the evidence. Toni visited the house with Jack Larson and—“to exorcise this evil”—used the heel of her shoe to nail tiny prayer cards over the bullet holes. Leonore went separately, with a friend who ripped the bloody sheets from George’s bed and tossed them into the bathtub, then helped Leonore bundle up her things and leave L.A. for good. George’s will bequeathed most of his fifty-thousand-dollar estate, including his home and car, to Toni and nothing to his fiancée, leading Leonore to insist there must have been a second will.