Superman

by Larry Tye

  That was the reaction kids across America had when a new version of an animated Superman turned up on their TV screens in 1966, two months after Bob Holiday’s Man of Steel took his final bows on Broadway. Youngsters who knew the hero from the comics thrilled at seeing him take on new shapes as well as new adventures. Those seeing him for the first time felt the glow of first love that their parents and grandparents had with Max and Dave Fleischer’s cartoons a quarter century before. The show was aimed especially at young children but its title, The New Adventures of Superman, was chosen to appeal to older viewers who remembered popular programs of the same name on the radio in the 1940s and on TV in the 1950s. Much of what they heard and saw this time was brand-new: the first appearance in TV cartoons by Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, and Mr. Mxyzptlk; the first time the cartoons came in six-minute features; and the first packaging of Superman shorts with ones starring Superboy and other DC stars, a twist that brought with it name changes to The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, The Batman/Superman Hour, and finally back to reruns with the familiar if ironic title of The New Adventures of Superman.

  The New Adventures borrowed more from the past than they changed. Filmation Studios, the producers, used the same low-budget rotoscoping technique the Fleischers had, tracing real-life characters frame by frame. Collyer was back as the voices of Clark and Superman, Joan Alexander reprised her radio role as Lois, Jackson Beck was again the narrator, and Jack Grimes returned in the role of Jimmy, which he had played during the last year of the radio show. Allen Ducovny, Bob Maxwell’s partner on the radio show, was executive producer of these cartoons, which may explain why “Up, up, and away” was heard so often. The animated series conjured up one more specter from the past: the censors. This time they took the form of a grassroots group called Action for Children’s Television, and their primary target was a worthy one: commercialism aimed at kids. The group, founded in 1968 outside Boston, hated being branded a censor, but that was the effect when it complained that there were too many punches thrown on the Superman cartoons. The result: The series was canceled in 1970, after its third full season.

  Given the alarms being sounded by do-gooders, the last place one would have expected to find the Man of Steel was in the schoolhouse. But he had been there for twenty years, helping teach grammar to kids in thousands of classrooms. The number of unique words in a year of Superman comics was twice the vocabulary of the average fourth grader, studies found, and reading his adventures could help adolescents expand their language. Working with a high school teacher from Lynn, Massachusetts, National Comics in the early 1940s had prepared a Superman workbook with lessons on punctuation, grammar, and usage. Teachers across the country jumped aboard. As for the kids, “they loved it,” reported Magazine Digest. “Children who had been bucking English grammar for years found themselves painlessly answering such questions as ‘What punctuation mark ends Superman’s speech?’ and ‘What kind of sentence does he use?’ The sugar coating had been found for the pill.”

  Ron Massengill remembers the first compound word that he learned: Superman. “I couldn’t read bye-bye but I could read Superman. There was the big S leading to the small n. I was sure I had seen that at the drug store or the grocery store,” says Massengill, who was born the same year as the Superman comic book and has been a fan since he was a toddler. “Within four months I could read a Superman comic book all the way through. My mom had bought a dictionary, a huge dictionary that weighed like twenty pounds. She explained to me when I saw these groupings of letters in the comics that I could go through and find that grouping in the dictionary.” Even more kids might have been using Superman in even more classrooms had it not been for Dr. Wertham, who convinced many parents and teachers in the 1940s and 1950s that it was dangerous to let comic books anywhere near their children.

  By the 1960s, as the age of peaceniks and flower children gained steam, Wertham’s influence had waned and Superman’s had risen to the point that even the White House was laying out the red carpet. The Kennedy administration wanted the hero’s help spreading the word about its campaign to close the “muscle gap.” Mort Weisinger put two of his best writers on the story, which he called “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy.” The Champion of Democracy flew across America pushing young runners to run harder, hurdlers to jump higher, and flabby journalists at the Daily Planet to do fifteen minutes a day of calisthenics. When The New York Times got wind of the preparations it scooped the comic book with an article headlined SUPERMAN MEETS KENNEDY ON VIGOR.

  Weisinger’s story was all set to run but was pulled back when the president was assassinated in November 1963. Shortly afterward, Weisinger got a call from President Lyndon Johnson saying, “We’re waiting for the story. When’s it coming out?” Mort explained his worry that running it might be in bad taste, at which point, as he recalled the tale, Johnson interrupted: “Horsefeathers. You can run it with a posthumous foreword, explaining that I ordered it!” Mort did.

  It was not the first time President Kennedy had teamed up with Superman. That was in 1962, when Superman was ready to introduce his cousin Supergirl to the world and brought her to the White House to meet the president. High drama, indeed: The Camelot president on the same stage with the Lancelot of comic book heroes. More than a year later Superman took Kennedy into his confidence, sharing his dual identity as Clark Kent. “I’ll guard your secret identity as I guard the secrets of our nation!” JFK promised, to which Superman replied, “If I can’t trust the President of the United States, who can I trust?” The exchange took on a special poignance when the comic book, which was printed while the president was alive, showed up on newsstands just after he was gunned down in Dallas. There was one other time when the name Jack Kennedy had appeared in Superman’s comic books. It was in the very first of the Superman series, in July 1939. A character named Kennedy was murdered and the newly minted Man of Steel saved a wrongly accused man from being executed.

  Inside Jack and Harry’s business operations, there was a flurry of activity that kept the cash registers ringing in the 1960s, though Harry was less involved than ever. Ivy Leaguer Paul Sampliner, who had supplied Harry with much-appreciated cash back during the Depression, remained the definition of the compliant partner, more interested in being a socialite and civic leader than a business executive. Jack, as always, was looking for ways to boost profits and minimize risks. As early as 1945 he had explored taking the company public, and he would have done so if the stock market had been more bullish. He tried again in 1961, but his broker said the stock exchange would approve the arrangement only if Harry wasn’t part of it. “His reputation,” Jack wrote, “was not too good. His way of life was quite well known in New York.” Jack offered to make Harry, technically still his boss, a millionaire if he resigned from the company. Harry took the bait. Jack became president, with Sampliner still on the board. That night, as Jack recalled, “I guess he [Harry] celebrated, he was drunk and he fell on his head, was in a coma for weeks. He never knew that we went public. Never knew.” Doctors operated on Harry but there was nothing they could do. He spent the last four years of his life with round-the-clock nurses and no memory. He learned to recognize his two children, his sister-in-law, and his mistress, but that was the extent of his engagement with the world. Harry died in February 1965, when he was seventy-one and the comic book hero who made him famous was twenty-six.

  It was no way to go, and forty years later theories still percolate that Harry’s death might not have been an accident. That is what happens when you live life as hard as he did and mix with people who make accidents happen. Harry had spent his adult life in a marriage he wanted out of and he had finally found a way. Gussie, his wife, had just died and he was set to marry Sunny, his mistress. His fall put an end to that. Peachy, his daughter, agrees with Jack that Harry’s fall was a drunken accident, but she adds, “We all said that momma came down from heaven and kicked him.”

  Jack was no sentimentalist but he, too, celebrated the
company’s listing on the stock exchange, not by getting drunk but by having a chauffeur drive him to his old haunts across Manhattan. There was the Lower East Side tenement where he had slept on the roof and shared a bed with brothers Harry, Lenny, and Mac. He helped out all three over the years with money and advice. (None did anything with his largesse, or even said thanks.) Next stop was the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ office, or at least the building where it used to be, and where Jack used to be an idealist. On to Greenwich Village and New York University, which taught him that he could be more than a bookkeeper and gave him the skills and worldview of an accountant. It was a This Is Your Life–type revisiting, shared not with a TV audience—that was not Jack’s style—but by himself and reconstructed later for his two girls. His was an American success story—a Jewish success story, of a boy from the Ukrainian ghetto making not good but great. All accomplished, as he told older daughter, Linda, with “no help from anybody.”

  After the nostalgic tour it was back to business. Jack’s distribution arm, Independent News, had always been his biggest moneymaker and had helped National stay afloat in the 1950s when other comic book companies were dying. Being a book distributor not only meant that Jack trucked publishers’ products from printer to wholesaler, it made him their banker and gatekeeper. Major Wheeler-Nicholson had seen what a vise that could be in the 1930s and now National’s biggest competitor, Marvel Comics, was learning the lesson. Independent had taken over as Marvel’s distributor and Jack limited the publisher to a dozen titles a month—a third of its peak output and too few to unseat National as king of the comics. “We didn’t want the competition,” Jack explained in his memoir. He handled Playboy, too, which added thirty-five thousand dollars a month to his bottom line, along with Mad magazine, whose sales he boosted from two hundred thousand an issue to one million. By the 1960s, Independent was America’s largest distributor of magazines and paperbacks, and it soon became a player in Europe, too. Jack’s nephew Jay Emmett was doing almost as well with his licensing business, cashing in on the success not just of the over-the-top Batman TV show but of James Bond’s über-adventure movies. The numbers no longer were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even the millions. “These were large accounts,” Jack said of National’s diversified holdings. “Tens of millions of dollars.”

  That money was pouring in to the newly christened National Periodical Publications, Inc., which included both the distribution and publishing operations. Revenues rose still higher in 1961 when National raised the price of its comics from a dime to twelve cents. But the bookkeeper in Jack couldn’t keep his eyes off the expense side of the ledger. He knew from his days with the Ladies’ Garment Workers how unions could boost employees’ wages and benefits, and he wasn’t about to let that happen in his shop. So when his workers had talked about a union in the 1950s, he had squashed the effort. When union talk resurfaced in the mid-1960s—talk of veteran freelancers getting health insurance, higher page rates, and partial ownership of the comics characters they created—Jack took a more subtle approach. He turned what became known as the Writers’ Rebellion over to his lawyers to study. He said he’d go along with a union if Marvel’s publisher would—knowing he wouldn’t. Jack gave bonuses to artists who steered clear of the activists, knowing that artists were harder to replace than writers. “[Jack] turned to me at one point during the negotiations to say: ‘You don’t understand, I’m very sympathetic to the points you’re making. When I was a young man, I was a Socialist, too!’ ” recalled writer Arnold Drake. “The problem was that Liebowitz had a youth of twenty minutes.”

  The rabble-rousers disappeared, slowly enough that it wasn’t until years later that anyone realized how thorough the housecleaning had been. Few old hands were fired outright; rather, they were assigned to lesser comics, given fewer assignments, and supplanted by younger writers who had no idea they were scabs. Mort sided with Jack, as he always had, unaware that he, too, would one day be expendable. Not even Harry had been immune. It wasn’t just National that was taking a hard line. Comic book publishers, as Drake said, had always run their businesses like brothels: “They were the madames, and the writers and artists were the girls.”

  To anyone who accused him of miserliness, Jack could tick off the names of all the employees and relatives he had helped buy a home or pay for a daughter’s marriage. What better sign of his generosity could there be than lending yet another hand to the biggest ingrate he had ever hired? It happened in 1959, when Jerry Siegel once again was desperate. He had worked for other publishers, but these jobs never lasted long enough or ended the way he wanted. He and Joanne had been living in a one-bedroom apartment in Great Neck with their baby, Laura. The landlord had threatened eviction, the milk company and diaper service had cut off deliveries, and he couldn’t make child-support payments for his and Bella’s son, Michael. He went on a hunger strike. He wrote to the media. He touched up friends and neighbors for help. Finally, after years of her pleading on Jerry’s behalf, one of Joanne’s letters to National got a reply. With Jack’s blessing, Harry’s son, Irwin Donenfeld, brought Superman’s creator back, as a freelancer, at what Jerry said was ten dollars a page, forty dollars less than when he’d left a dozen years before.

  Jerry wrote with passion and precision, scripting stories about Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Lois, Jimmy, and the Legion of Super-Heroes. He invented characters for Mort Weisinger’s new universe, from Colossal Boy to Triplicate Girl, Chameleon Boy, Ultra Boy, Shrinking Violet, Sun Boy, and Bouncing Boy. He got along with Mort as well as he could and avoided Jack as much as possible. The arrangement lasted until 1966, when it was clear that Jerry and Joe were planning another lawsuit to try to reclaim the Superman copyright. It took three more years for the suit to be filed and the court didn’t rule until 1973. The result was the same “no” as before, only this time Jerry didn’t ask for his job back, and if he had Jack wouldn’t have given it to him.

  Joe never made it back to National as an artist, but he did as a delivery boy. “I was the oldest messenger boy in New York City,” he recalled years later about the jobs he had had as a sales clerk, janitor, or gopher. “One day I had to deliver a message to an office located in the same building as the publisher of DC Comics. Someone from their office saw me in the hall, asked me what I was doing there, then told the publisher about it later. He called me that night—very upset—and asked me to come into his office so he could help me out a little. ‘How does it look,’ he said, ‘for the artist/creator of Superman to be running around delivering messages—you’re giving us a bad name!’ ” It looked worse to see Joe milling in front of the Alvin Theatre the night It’s a Bird opened, watching ticket holders head in to see his superhero onstage and wishing he had the money to join them. Another time police picked him up in Central Park as a vagrant. After he lost his 1947 lawsuit and his artist’s income, he moved in with his invalid mother in Forest Hills, Queens. Later he and his brother shared an apartment in Queens, among broken venetian blinds, sofas with springs poking through, and boxes of yellowing Superman comics.

  The best measure of Joe’s state of mind, and his finances, was the work he had taken but never breathed a word about: drawings of bare-skinned or nearly naked women being whipped, spanked, and humiliated by men and by other women. Joe didn’t sign the illustrations, but they were his. Comics historian Craig Yoe knew it right away when he found the booklets stuffed in an old box at a 1989 antique book sale, and Shuster experts have confirmed it. Most of the women looked like Lois Lane. Some men were dead ringers for Jimmy Olsen and Slam Bradley. The co-publisher was Joe’s neighbor. One set of pamphlets, Nights of Horror, was said to have inspired the 1954 rampage by a group of teens known as the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. Dr. Fredric Wertham visited the gang leader in jail, carrying a copy of Nights of Horror but not knowing who had illustrated it. Neither, apparently, did the Supreme Court of New York when it ordered in 1955 the destruction of all copies of the inch-thick pamphlets, which it said were “porn
ography, unadulterated by plot, moral or writing style.… The many drawings that embellish these stories are obviously intended to arouse unnatural desire and vicious acts.”

  Why did Joe do it? “Neither he nor Jerry could get work for anything decent, so he had to tender that stuff to make a buck,” says his friend and Batman illustrator Jerry Robinson. “I don’t think that’s the work he would like to be remembered by.” Yoe, an author and former creative director for the Muppets, agrees but offers two additional theories: Depicting Superman characters in compromising poses might have been a way to strike back at Jack and Harry for firing him and Jerry. It also could have reflected Joe’s fantasy life. “My guess,” Yoe concludes, “is that it’s probably some of all three of those things.”

  Jack almost surely never saw the pornographic drawings and he probably never saw Joe after the lawsuit. His preoccupation, starting as early as 1960, was with who would take over the empire when he retired. He was turning sixty and his only heirs were his daughters, whom he didn’t want to see working in his business or any other. “I spent all my life accumulating some wealth,” he said in his memoir, “but I have nobody to leave it with.” So he hired Felix Rohatyn, a high-powered investment banker who would later help save New York City from bankruptcy, to start looking for a takeover partner. It took until 1967 to find one: Kinney National Services, which owned funeral homes, parking lots, rental cars, and an office-cleaning company. It seemed an unlikely match to everyone but Jack, who wrote that “I liked the people, they were hamisha people. Jewish, Jewish oriented. And they had a business that was prosperous.” What he didn’t say was that Kinney carried the same whiff of not-so-kosher underworld connections that Jack and Harry’s businesses had. What mattered in the end was that Kinney paid National $60 million and National gave Kinney the toehold it wanted in the entertainment business. Two years later Kinney bought the Warner Bros. movie studio, and two years after that Kinney renamed itself Warner Communications, Inc.