Superman

by Larry Tye

  The chief coroner personally helped perform an autopsy a week after the death and confirmed it was suicide. George’s funeral was held July 1; an open casket revealed his body dressed in a Clark Kent suit, with his head looking as if it had been hastily stitched back together. It would take another seven months for Helen to complete her probes and have her boy cremated. She tried to drown her grief in drink, which was the one thing she shared with Toni and Leonore. Helen died five years after George and her remains lie alongside his in a crypt at the Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. There are no gravestones, just her simple plaque honoring MY BELOVED SON “SUPERMAN.”

  Neither his burial nor the deaths of witnesses and investigators have quieted the storm. Was it murder, suicide, or accident? Arguments for all three have been made in fifty years of newspaper and magazine investigations, hours of TV exposés, and a trio of books, with more in the works. George’s business manager died before he could complete his tell-all. So did Leonore. A 2006 movie called Hollywoodland, starring Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody, hedged its bets by imagining different death scenarios: Leonore shooting him accidentally, George killing himself, and Eddie Mannix hiring a hit man. Eddie had the contacts to do it but there is no evidence he did—and no motive, since he liked George enough to get him a cherished membership in the movie directors’ guild and hoped he would get back together with Toni, who was driving Eddie crazy. Toni was mad enough at George to want him dead, and a young public relations man who was living at her mansion said he heard her confess to a priest that she was part of a murder conspiracy. But that didn’t fit with her hope that George would come crawling back to her, or with the shrine she built after he died, where George’s picture hung next to Jesus’. Leonore, with her mob friends and gutter diction, would have made a convincing bad gal if this had been a Superman TV treatment: Imagine George calling off their engagement, then Leonore shooting him on purpose or by mistake as they struggled over the gun. But even scriptwriters would have had a difficult time explaining how that happened with three witnesses in the house who vouched for Leonore.

  George’s young fans advanced their own theory after watching the rerun of Adventures of Superman that aired the day after he died. In “Disappearing Lois,” Milton Frome played a thug who fired his pistol at Clark Kent at close range. Since Lois and Jimmy were present Clark was forced to play dead, hitting the deck with a thud. “That night,” Frome recalled, “some neighborhood kids came by our house and told my son Michael, ‘Hey, your father killed Superman.’ ”

  No one will ever know for sure who or what killed the TV Superman, but good starting points are the typecasting that extinguished his film career and the three unhinged women in his life—Leonore, Toni, and Helen—each of whom wanted him as hers alone. He was aging and slowing, afflictions especially difficult for Superman to handle. On his last night he argued with Leonore and her house-guests, which boiled his blood. None of that would make a self-contained man like George do something he couldn’t have imagined otherwise. But he had apparently talked about killing himself as far back as high school and as recently as a year or two before his death, according to one Reeves historian who has spent decades on the case. What might have pushed him to do it this time was the incendiary mixture of alcohol—the coroner said his blood level was .27 percent, three times today’s legal limit in California and the equivalent of six martinis—and the painkillers he was taking for the migraines he had suffered since his car crash. His clothes were off because he slept in the buff, and the gun was within reach in the dresser. Whitney Ellsworth, who knew firsthand what dipsomania could do, labeled it temporary insanity. George’s admirers then and now call it a tragedy.

  There were silver linings even in that calamity. His fans adored him so much that many still remember where they were and what they were doing when they got the news of his death, the same way people do about John F. Kennedy’s. Losing George meant being robbed of a touchstone of their youth. But decades of reruns—along with videotapes, DVDs, and an elegant and worshipful fanzine called The Adventures Continue—have let devotees visit with him again and have ensured that George, like President Kennedy, will remain forever young. The actor also seemed to say his own regretful goodbye on the last episode of the TV show. Waking from a dream in which he imagined he had superpowers, Jimmy said, “Golly, Mr. Kent—you’ll never know how wonderful it is to be like Superman.” After a considered pause, Clark answered: “No, Jimmy, I guess I never will.”

  As for Superman, the Reeves suicide could have disillusioned fans and tarnished the icon. Jack and Harry were worried enough that they contemplated bringing on another actor to play the part, or centering a series around Jimmy Olsen. Either move would have seemed panicky and neither was needed. While it would take thirty years for the superhero to make his way back to television in a fresh live-action series, he thrived in other media. The 1950s TV show, even more than his radio and film work, had taken Superman beyond the rarefied world of comic books and made him a centerpiece of popular culture. Television was now the medium that mattered in America, and no TV show mesmerized kids of all ages more than Adventures of Superman, which didn’t surprise anyone who had watched the Man of Steel conquer comic books, radio, serials, and cartoons.

  George’s death also spawned a hypothesis called the Superman curse, which argued that misfortune befell anyone who was creatively involved with the Man of Steel. Jerry and Joe had been barred from their creation. Kirk Alyn couldn’t land an acting job. Now George was gone. Any news, even the bleakest, added to the legend.

  CHAPTER 7

  Imagine This

  FROM THE BEGINNING SUPERMAN FANS had longed for a story like this: “Mr. and Mrs. Clark (SUPERMAN) Kent!” Now here it was, in the new comic book devoted just to Lois Lane, with a cover sketch of her in an apron and pearls as her humdrum husband hurtles off in cape and tights to save the planet. “Hurry home, dear. Supper will be ready soon!” she chirps, thinking, “Would our neighbors be astounded if they knew my husband Clark is leaving our home through a secret tunnel, as … Superman!”

  It started when Clark proposed and Lois said she couldn’t, not if there was the faintest hope Superman might someday pop the same question. That did it. To her amazement, he doffed his spectacles, his business suit, and his covert identity. “Why did you wait so long?” she asked as they embraced. Superman: “I feared that if I married you, my enemies would seek to strike at me by harming you! But I’ve thought of a solution … as far as the world will know, you’ll be marrying meek, mild Clark Kent! You alone will share the secret of my real identity!” And so it was, as they said their nuptial vows, then set up a snug household in the suburbs. Even her sister Lucy had to stay in the dark, telling Lois, “I’m glad you and Clark get along so well! Frankly, I thought you’d never get over your crush on Superman.”

  The tale, published in August 1960, was the first in a series of “imaginary stories” that helped define Superman during America’s decade of discontent. This was a bid by National Comics to create fresh and arresting threads for writers who were running out of them. It also was an attempt to tap into the era’s capsizing of conventions, even if the comic book outcome was more happily-ever-after than New Frontier. The very notion of tackling heretofore unthinkable topics and offering zany flourishes to timeworn plots was revolutionary, at least to the adolescent keepers of the Superman flame. When Jerry Siegel had proposed a working partnership between Lois and Superman in the K-Metal story in 1940, it was hushed up. Now those two were life partners, upending not just the love triangle and Clark and Superman’s bachelorhood but the sacrosanct secret of Clark’s alter ego. Romantics cheered, as did all the four-eyed boys who dreamed that a pretty girl would fall for the hero in them. Radical indeed, and vital to keeping Superman atop the sales charts. Yet the powers that be at National knew there were limits. Titillate readers, yes, but not to the point where it toppled the pillars of the Superman biography and canon, which comic book co
nnoisseurs called the “continuity.”

  So they labeled this story and scores of others imaginary, as if the rest of the comics weren’t. In the very first panel they made clear that they were looking into a future “several years hence, on a day that may or may not ever happen.” The story ended on a comparably cautionary note, urging readers to “see future issues of this magazine for more stories about the imaginary marriage between Lois and Superman … that may come true … or may not!”

  Other titles in the Superman family offered their own counterintuitive narratives. What would Superman have been like if his Kryptonian parents had come to Earth with him? How about if he, like Tarzan, had been raised in the jungle? Or if Ma and Pa Kent had adopted Bruce Wayne as well as Kal-El, making Superman and Batman brothers? We even met Superman’s children, whether or not we knew their mother. There had been “imaginary” stories like these since the beginning, but the label was coined and the best of them were published during the Silver Age of comics, from 1956 to 1970. This was the most high-spirited, rules-be-damned Superman storytelling in decades and maybe ever. The World’s Mightiest Citizen was letting his hair down.

  There was one more unexpected twist to “Mr. and Mrs. Clark (SUPERMAN) Kent!”: It was written by Jerry Siegel, or so he claimed, although another writer claimed the same thing. There were no bylines in the Superman comics once Jerry and Joe left, so no one can say for sure. But Jerry was back at Jack and Harry’s publishing house, quietly working as a freelancer. It was the first in his series of bids to renew his ties to Superman. Imagining outlandish stories about the Man of Steel is what Jerry had been doing since he was a teenager, and now he needed the work and money more than ever. He brought to the task the insights of the battle-weary adult he was along with those of the lonesome boy who would forever define him. Now he had an opportunity to shape the future of a superhero he had brought to life, even if his legal settlement with National prevented him from whispering it to anyone.

  EVERY ERA OF SUPERMAN had a defining medium. In the late 1930s and early 1940s it was comic books and comic strips that introduced the character and generated the buzz. Radio made a splash in the 1940s, with cartoons and serials building the wave. George Reeves and his TV adventures were the center of gravity from the beginning to the end of the 1950s, the decade of McCarthy and conformity. The 1960s were back to the future. The only action on TV was reruns of the Reeves series along with a new batch of cartoons that didn’t start until 1966 and lasted just six minutes each. Superman had gone silent on the radio and was off the marquees. The big thing, again, was the comics.

  Each medium likewise was defined by one or two creative personalities—from Jerry and Joe in the early comic books and strips, to Bob Maxwell and Bud Collyer on the radio, to Whit Ellsworth and George Reeves for most of the television boom. They were the handlers who tinkered with his biography, shifted his delivery mechanism, and made whatever other changes were needed to keep him alive and compelling. In the 1960s the towering figure was Mort Weisinger, one of the most inspired and influential of Superman’s midwives, and hands down the most obnoxious.

  This son of Russian-Czech immigrants was born on April 25, 1915—six months after Jerry and nine after Joe—and he matched them both in his passion for space-age fantasy. At sixteen he was being published in science fiction journals, and a year later he helped start the pioneering fan magazine The Time Traveler. By eighteen, he and his friend Julius Schwartz had launched Solar Sales Service, the first literary agency to specialize in fantasy and the first to sign up science fiction icons Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft. Weisinger’s sensibilities were formed by the same forces that shaped other early comics leaders: roots in the rough-and-tumble Bronx, the worldview of a Jewish outsider, and teeth cut on the pulp universe of bug-eyed monsters. His parents, who had made a fortune in the shoe business and then lost it when their factory burned, pushed him to be a doctor. He pushed back. In 1941, Mort signed on as an editor with National and Superman—hired by Whit Ellsworth on Jerry Siegel’s recommendation—and he stayed for three full decades. That was longer than Jerry, Joe, Whit, or even Harry Donenfeld lasted, and it was time enough for Mort to oversee the production of two thousand stories about Superman and his friends.

  Weisinger framed TV and movie scripts and he had edited comics almost from the start, but his watershed came in 1957. That was when Ellsworth, who for years had been focusing on the broadcast world of Los Angeles, formally yielded to Weisinger the Superman realm in New York. Like any good potentate, Weisinger consolidated his authority and pressed ahead with his edicts. Mort’s Rule No. 1: Know your readers. Superman’s, he thought, were boys aged eight to twelve, a readership that turned over often enough that it was okay to recycle old storylines or reprint old stories. Rule No. 2: Don’t let the kids get bored. Imaginary stories with epic sweep were just the beginning. He knew that everyone loves a party, so every six months he gave his youthful followers another reason to celebrate. It might be a new comic book (the two he liked most, even if his bosses didn’t, were Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen and Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane), a new character (Supergirl, Superbaby, Krypto the Superdog), or a new explanation for an old conundrum (our yellow sun gave Superman his superpowers). The one enigma he couldn’t explain away was why anyone bought Clark’s disguise of a battered pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Mort called it the Cinderella Fallacy: “Everyone knows that at midnight all of Cinderella’s finery changed back into rags. Yet has anyone ever asked why one of her slippers remained glass?”

  Weisinger’s last and golden rule was: Listen to your customers. That was why Jimmy got promoted from cub to full-fledged reporter. It also was why Lois got a bouffant hairdo like Jackie Kennedy’s and, for her high-altitude flights with Superman, a spacesuit like Alan Shepard’s. Not only did Mort publish adolescent fans’ letters in all his Superman books, but he printed their home addresses so they could correspond with one another. It helped that he had been an avid science fiction fan as a kid and had never really grown up. He “glowed with an over-the-top enthusiasm for every meal, movie, or book he loved,” recalled his daughter, Joyce Kaffel. “He was childlike in his exuberance in that everything he enjoyed was ‘the best one’ of its kind, even if the ‘one’ before it had been ‘the best.’ ”

  Before Mort came along, Superman’s world was ad hoc and seat-of-the-pants, with Jerry and other writers adding elements as they went along without any planning or anyone worrying whether it all hung together. That worked fine when all the books centered around Superman and all the writing was done by a small stable. Now the pool of writers had grown and there were eight different comic books with hundreds of Superman stories a year to worry about. It would take a master choreographer like Weisinger to pull it together. He came up with story ideas and parceled them out to scripters, the way Ellsworth did for the TV shows. He divined a fairy-tale universe with its own laws of nature. Superman got a coherent past. He also got an extended family whose stories were scattered among the various books and collectively accounted for a quarter of National’s output. “My greatest contribution to Superman,” Mort explained after his retirement, “was to give him a ‘mythology’ which covered all bases. All this makes Superman credible.”

  Mort was good for Superman, but he wasn’t popular. Everyone had a story about the editor’s beastliness. He stole plot proposals from one writer and handed them to another, informing the first that it was a crappy idea and the second that it was Mort’s. He took underpaid employees to lunch only when he had a two-for-one coupon, and his tie carried caked-on reminders of mashed potatoes, ketchup, and everything else that happened to be on his plate. He told one protégé, Jim Shooter, to be more like another, Cary Bates; told Bates to be more like Shooter; and told everyone that the people working for him were idiots. He had such trouble telling the truth that Julie Schwartz, his lifelong friend, joked that Mort’s gravestone should read, “Here Lies Mort Weisinger—As Usual.” Jack Adler, a colleague from the early days
, recalled that “I had to bring something to him for approval and he wanted to know whether I was having an affair with someone. He said, ‘If you tell me, I’ll approve everything you bring to me.’ ”

  Mort couldn’t help himself. He was trying to make the important point that Superman, not the writers or artists, was the star. He was born with a heart made for storytelling and a tin ear for dealing with people. He wasn’t well, as anyone who met him could see. Weighing three hundred pounds, he had developed a series of maladies: gout, inflamed ulcers, hypertension, insomnia, and what he said was a psychological hang-up that grew out of his being jealous of Superman. Blessedly, he hadn’t lost the capacity to laugh at himself. Neal Adams, at the time a young artist, remembered asking Mort why he was so grumpy. “I’ll tell you,” the editor explained. “Try to imagine that you get up in the morning and you go into the bathroom to shave, and you look into the mirror, and you see this face.”

  Mort was a lot like his boss and benefactor, Jack Liebowitz, with whom he often commuted to work. Both knew the Man of Tomorrow was in a rut by the late 1950s, with storylines that seemed too yesterday and without the boost the franchise had gotten from George Reeves and Adventures of Superman. The newspaper strip was still going, but its nearly thirty-year run would end in 1966 as a growing number of outlets did not renew their contracts for Superman and other superheroes. Dr. Wertham and his watchdogs were making parents reluctant to shell out the money for comics, and television, now soaring in popularity, was competing for kids’ time and interest. Superman needed a makeover and Mort delivered it. So what if he wasn’t popular? Neither was Jack. The questions that mattered to bottom-line guys like them were Would it work? and Would it last?