Superman

by Larry Tye

  With Superboy, the Salkinds opted for the small screen. The half-hour TV series featuring the Boy of Steel ran for one hundred episodes over four seasons, starting in 1988. The timing was paradoxical, since John Byrne had recently killed Superboy in the comic books. Yet many of the show’s best scripts were written by Cary Bates, Denny O’Neil, Mike Carlin, and other DC comic book writers who knew the character best. The TV Superboy was a college man, attending the Siegel School of Journalism at Shuster University. He also was pointedly not Christopher Reeve, especially in the first season, when John Haymes Newton played the part. “I just wanted Superboy to be a little introverted and insecure, not bumbling,” Newton says looking back. “But I didn’t make enough of a distinction [between Superman and Clark].… I went overboard not to do what Chris Reeve did.” Newton may have been trying not to think of Reeve, but Stacy Haiduk, the actress who played Lana Lang, couldn’t think of anyone else. “He was and always will be the only Superman,” she says.

  What was on Stan Berkowitz’s mind when he wrote scripts for Superboy was how many bosses he was answerable to and the contradictory notes they were sending him. The media conglomerate Viacom was the series’ distributor, the Salkinds were the producers, and DC Comics was the keeper of the flame. “DC people were the Jesuits, saying Superboy can’t do this and can’t do that,” recalls Berkowitz. “The single biggest one was killing. He couldn’t kill anyone, anywhere, at any time. Otherwise everyone would be afraid of him, even the good people.” While Superboy had an audience a hundred times bigger than any comic book, with “the Superboy show on your résumé you are just dirt,” the scriptwriter says. “It pretty much destroyed my live-action TV career. They think all you’re capable of writing for is children.” For producer Julia Pistor it had the opposite effect, especially in England, where she grew up and where “Superman was ubiquitous.” Superboy “was the most fun I’ve ever had in anything I’ve ever done,” she says, “and it did wonders for my career.” The show died after its fourth season less because of anything Berkowitz, Pistor, or any of the actors did than because Viacom had the hundred episodes it needed for syndication and amortization and because Superman’s owners wanted to reclaim the rights to the character they had turned over to the Salkinds two decades before.

  Alex and Ilya, meanwhile, were having a falling-out over money matters involving a movie they were making about another iconic figure, Christopher Columbus. Getting sued for breaching a contract and committing fraud was nothing new for Alex, but this time the plaintiffs were his son and daughter-in-law. She was Jane Chaplin, Charlie’s daughter, and she had loaned Alex nearly $7 million to make Columbus. When the film bombed, Alex said he had no money to pay her back. “This is a very delicate situation for me because he is my father and I am an only child. I can’t even talk to my mother,” Ilya said at the time. Alex felt equally aggrieved: “This is all very surprising, very upsetting to see my son come after his father.” Looking back, Ilya says he deeply regrets the split and never seeing Alex again before he died in 1997. Their breach also prevented Ilya from moving ahead with plans for a Superman V film, not to mention his dreams of a sixth, seventh, and even an eighth. Alex, he says, “immediately sold the rights for Superman back to Warner’s so I couldn’t get them.”

  The Salkinds weren’t the only ones whose lives were rocked by the Superman movies. Christopher Reeve grew up over the course of the four films, not always in ways he had wanted. He started out as a twenty-four-year-old actor in serious theater whose role model was Laurence Olivier, not Cary Grant or George Reeves. When the chance arose to play Superman, his mother recalls, he saw it as a “big breakthrough” that could launch his career, but he didn’t see himself staying for long in the unfamiliar world of popular culture.

  By the time Superman IV came out, Christopher was a thirty-four-year-old millionaire and pop culture icon. Fans’ first Superman is the one they hold on to forever, and for millions of young Americans Reeve was it. Typecasting wasn’t a problem for him: He had a personality strong enough to resist that, says Gae Exton, his partner at the time and the mother of his first child. “People would say, ‘Superman?’ and he’d say with a smile, ‘No, Christopher.’ ” The problem, those who knew him best say, is that those ten years had robbed him of energy and at least some of his idealism. He had to count on the makeup department now to keep his hairline youthful and he did painful sit-ups to rein in a bulging gut. He worried that he was offering a negative example to kids, some of whom tried to fly like him and ended up injured or worse, as an earlier generation of kids had when imitating George Reeves’s TV Superman. “By the time of Superman III and IV, Christopher didn’t see it anymore as his pathway to success and recognition,” says his brother, Ben. “It was much more a job and something he did to make money.” Christopher himself called Superman III “mostly a misconception,” and as far as the next one, “the less said about Superman IV the better.” His father, a professor of literature, says that Christopher “asked me not to see 3 and 4. What I saw happening to his career he later agreed with, but at the time he couldn’t help himself.” He was in a series of films after Superman, including serious ones such as The Remains of the Day, but never as the leading man and never with as much notice as when he was playing the Man of Tomorrow.

  One of the few people to play Superman who wasn’t transformed by it was Aaron Smolinski, who at age three had the part of baby Clark in Superman: The Movie. “When I was cold, Richard Donner would wrap me in a blanket and let me talk on his walkie-talkie,” Smolinski recalls. When he first met Christopher Reeve, which wasn’t until Superman III, “I thought, what a big man. My hand disappeared in his hand.… It wasn’t until I was four or five that it really dawned on me who Superman was and what I had actually played.” Is there a curse? “Let’s be honest,” Smolinksi says. “Having a ‘Superman curse’ isn’t the worst thing to happen. For me, it was and is an incredible experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

  Joanne Siegel had a different take on the curse and a different kind of trade in mind for her husband and his old partner. The three were doing better since they had moved to California, and Warner Communications had hiked Joe’s and Jerry’s pensions to sixty thousand dollars a year. But even with that, “the quality of our lives is so demoralizing,” Joanne wrote to Warner CEO Steve Ross early in 1988. The mailboxes at her and Jerry’s apartment building had been broken into, water seepage was rotting the walls, termites were eating their kitchen floor, and they had to haul their soiled laundry to a public Laundromat where “people’s dogs and screaming children run up and down the aisles” and “weird looking street people wander in and out.” As for Joe, “his rent, like ours has been raised regularly,” and if his building were converted to condos he could be evicted.

  What did Joanne have in mind? She had worked it out down to the penny and the publicity. “What I’m suggesting is a spectacular gift,” she wrote Ross, “presented by you, at a special media event, a gift in the area of 5 million dollars for each, in the form of tax free, gift checks. One million to represent each ten years of Superman’s success. In addition, lifetime incomes of $200,000 plus royalties to equal that of top writers and artists working at DC.” What if he refused? Joanne didn’t threaten the Warner boss, she just reminded him that, in the wake of the triumphant Superman movies and the fiftieth anniversary hoopla, “US, Canadian and Europian [sic] media of every kind, has been and currently are trying to get interviews from the three of us.” If those journalists were made aware of Jerry’s and Joe’s plight, Joanne added, it would be “obvious to the media that DC’s reform and ethical standards are a sham.” In the end the creators didn’t get checks for $5 million, but they did get another boost in their annual payouts, to $80,000 a year, with a one-time bonus for each of $15,000 and an agreement that thereafter the annuities would rise with the consumer price index. Ross, the ultimate gamesman, knew when he had met his match.

  CHAPTER 10

  Till Death Do Us
Part

  IT STARTED AS A JOKE. Every year Superman’s writers and illustrators would hole up in a conference room, sometimes high above Manhattan and other times as far away as Florida, to plot story lines for the next twelve months. Mike Carlin, the editor in charge, taped to the wall a giant chart divided into four columns, one for each monthly book of the interconnected Superman comics. Then the fifteen creators would shout out ideas. “Team Brainiac up with Bizarro,” one might say. “What about Lex running for president, and winning?” After a while Jerry Ordway would pipe up with a suggestion he had offered so often that it was a tradition: “Everyone dies—the end!” Ha ha ha.

  No one was laughing this time. The team at the 1991 summit wasn’t quite desperate, but close to it. The cartoonists had counted on Clark and Lois getting hitched, a story arc that had started six years before with the John Byrne reboot. Lois had fallen out of her infatuation with Superman and into love with Clark. He proposed, she accepted, and the road was paved to their wedding and a year of ready-made storylines. Now that was out. Warner Bros. was developing a television series called Lois & Clark and suddenly the DC honchos were insisting that the marriage wait for TV to catch up, which could take years. The comic book creators would need something new, and fast. So while few took seriously Ordway’s tension-breaking refrain, Carlin jotted it down and Ordway, who had been writing and inking Superman for six years, added a refinement. Let’s not kill everybody—“Why don’t we just kill him.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time. Just five years after he came to life, Superman was snuffed out by a second-rate crook, or so it seemed until we learned that it was a ruse to get the thug to confess. The Last Son of Krypton became terminally ill in 1950 in “The Last Days of Superman,” which turned out not to be, after all. And so it went, as he appeared to expire in 1957, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1968, 1984, and twice in 1987—with each story proving to be his inventive artifice or his writer’s imagination. But what if it wasn’t? What if Superman really faced off against a villain who was his equal and he couldn’t fight or reason his way out? What if he really did die? That would be more riveting even than his getting married, and comic book fans might regret having taken the aging hero for granted. At the very least, it would take the pressure off Carlin and his Super-Team to find a replacement for the wedding stories.

  “I’ll cop to the fact that I tossed it out there,” Ordway says looking back, “but I didn’t know how it would work.” Writer and artist Dan Jurgens walked into the meeting with two ideas on his scratch pad: “death of Superman” and “bestial foe.” Carlin kept the conversation going. “Okay, wise guys,” he said, “if we kill him, then what happens?” Next he scribbled on his story board “doomsday for Superman.” Others chimed in, trying to imagine a villain omnipotent enough to do in Superman and how a world without him would look. By the time they left the room they had a rough outline for a series of stories. Superman would duke it out with an all-new evil predator who was tearing apart Metropolis. What to call him or it? The answer was there on Carlin’s chart: Doomsday. Superman would die as he slew Doomsday. Metropolis would give its savior a royal send-off. Then, after months lying in the grave, he would be brought back to life through an unspecified combination of Kryptonian technology and human faith in resurrection. Good ideas, although all would need amending and none seemed especially radical for a hero who had died and been reborn a dozen times.

  Little did they know. Martha Thomases, DC’s publicity person, sensed something was brewing over Labor Day weekend in 1992, when editors from TV’s Entertainment Tonight tracked her down at the country club in Youngstown, Ohio, where she was celebrating her dad’s birthday. What was this about Superman cashing it in? They had read all about it in a front-page story in Newsday titled “The Death of Superman” and now they wanted the full scoop. Cleveland’s Plain Dealer provided context in its headline: SUPERMAN TO DIE SAVING METROPOLIS. The New York Times added a touch of whimsy: LOOK! IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S CURTAINS FOR THE MAN OF STEEL. The frenzy had begun, with nearly every paper and station nationwide and many worldwide picking up the story and late-night TV hosts having a feast. It was a distraction for a country mired in a recession and an endless presidential campaign. Having its longest-lived icon die said something about America, even if nobody could agree what. The stories made clear one more thing: Journalists, along with most of their readers and viewers, didn’t understand that heroes regularly perished in the comics and almost never stayed dead.

  Carlin, who was the only person on Team Superman authorized to talk, played it coy. “Never say we wouldn’t kill Superman,” he told reporters. “Never say we wouldn’t bring him back.” The truth was that DC was reeling at all the publicity. The higher-ups at Warner Bros. were caught by surprise when they saw a CNN report on the superhero’s impending death. First they were mad as hell. “How dare you kill him without consulting me?” Warner CEO Bob Daly demanded of DC president Jenette Kahn. Then they were embarrassed when a Superman ad for long-running Duracell batteries (“He runs like he’s on Duracell”) ran in People just before a story about their unflappable mascot meeting his maker. Finally they asked the same question as the people picketing their headquarters: Why would DC liquidate its most cherished character? “Of course he would survive—we weren’t stupid!” Carlin would explain later. “None of us wanted to write ourselves out of a job. Or worse, be labeled the people who really did end the Neverending Battle.”

  The corporate bosses stopped complaining when they saw the consumer response. Readers lined up on the street and around the block outside comics stores. Superman 75, the death issue, tallied the biggest one-day sale ever for a comic book, with more than six million copies printed. A special collector’s edition, at $2.50, came in a sealed black polybag and included an obituary from the Daily Planet as well as a black mourning armband. The spin-offs seemed endless, from a wildly successful graphic novel, novel, and young adult book to a beat-’em-up videogame and a tribute ballad from the Crash Test Dummies. T-shirts were flying off the racks, especially the one with blood oozing from a red-and-yellow S shield. It worked so well that DC tried the same thing with Batman, conjuring up a backbreaking assault that temporarily took him out of action. It was the kind of moneymaking lollapalooza worthy of Harry, Jack, and the Salkinds.

  For Kahn, this was why she had come to DC sixteen years before. “Our mission was to torture our readers,” she explains, “and the best way to torture them is to torture our characters.” For Carlin, it was a godsend. He was living out a childhood dream by overseeing Superman but was at a loss as to how to revitalize a character whose comics had resumed their free fall not long after the Byrne retooling. Now he had it. “Okay, world,” he told himself, “you want to embrace the antiheroes of the time … and you think Superman is old-school and corny.… Well, how about we take him away?” It was perfect. “To save him,” Superman’s guardian concluded, “we had to kill him.”

  KILLING HIM TURNED OUT to be the easiest and most predictable chapter of “The Death of Superman” saga, although it took ten weeks to play out. Superman had confronted a long lineup of evildoers over fifty-four years—from the Ultra-Humanite and Toyman to Lex the mad scientist and Lex the ruthless capitalist—any one of whom would have relished a shot at the ultimate retribution. No prankster or bad guy in a lab coat was man enough for this job. It had to be someone whose very name suggested he was more heinous, more powerful than any evildoer the world had known. His life story would come later, but at first he was a cipher, by design. His unexplained recklessness and unquenchable rage made him ominous in the style of the mindless action comics of the day. All we knew for sure was that he had broken through his burial chamber and cast off most of his chains, that his face and body were masked by a green rubber suit, and that he was a single-minded killing machine.

  His first victim was a yellow bird that he crushed in his fist, sending feathers flying. Next came big rigs and other vehicles that happened to be pa
ssing on the highway. “HAH … HA HA HAAA,” he bellowed, one hand still chained behind his back. The Justice League heroes got word of his rampage and vowed to stop him. Bad idea. The Blue Beetle and Bloodwynd were mere cannon fodder, but the glory-seeking Booster Gold at least put a name to the unrelenting creature when he wondered if it “is biological … or some kind of doomsday machine!”

  Then Superman stepped in. It wasn’t a fair fight from the start. Doomsday was not distracted by the voices of his victims the way the Man of Steel was. “Superman—you’re the only one—help us!” a boy cried as he, his mother, and his baby brother were ensnared. And so their hero did, giving a human dimension to his crusade and making his adversary seem even more maniacal. The stakes quickly became apparent, with Superman promising, “I’ll stop Doomsday … if it’s the last thing I do!” And so the slugfest proceeded toward Metropolis, with Doomsday turning uglier still as he shed his green covering to reveal stringy white hair and a body rippling with muscles and pocked with bony spurs. Superman’s family and friends offered support and concern. “That’s our son, Jonathan!” Martha Kent cried to her husband. “He’s being beaten to a pulp—and those TV reporters are treating it like entertainment!” In the tenth and last installment of the series, Superman 75, Superman embraced Lois, telling her, “Just remember … no matter what happens … I’ll always love you. Always.”

  That issue was a rarity in comic books, less for its storyline than its storytelling technique. Preceding chapters had scaled back their panels from four per page to three to two, building to the climax. In this last book, each of the first twenty-two pages was a single breathtaking panel documenting another stage of the bone-crushing, beat-to-a-pulp showdown. Fists were clenched, blows were landed, and fists were clenched again, like those of boxers; elbow blows to the body ended with arms interlocked, like wrestlers’. By the end hero and villain had shredded their costumes and battered their bodies. Forget about DC’s no-killing rule: This Armageddon was kill or be killed. As the narrator recounted, “In the years to come a few witnesses will tell of the power of these final punches … that they could literally feel the shockwaves.” The last two drawings were spread across four foldout pages showing an anguished Lois cradling a dying Superman. “You stopped him!” she said. “You saved us all! Now relax.” The narrator had the last words: “But it’s too late. For this is the day—that a Superman died.”