In interviews, Capp refused to connect Russell to his comic strip character, saying only that Shaw had been the model for the way Adam Lazonga looked. In the end, it didn’t matter. Lazonga had become a vehicle for another lighthearted romp.
Nina was in San Antonio when Capp arrived in California for his latest attempt at screenwriting, but they continued to exchange letters. Her stance on moving to Boston was softening, catching Capp a little by surprise—enough to give him his own second thoughts about what things might be like if she followed through. He had to admit that the arrangement was very one-sided, with Nina sacrificing a lot in exchange for very little in return. In a brutally frank letter to Nina, Capp listed the downside of a move to Boston in such plain, unfavorable terms that Nina must have wondered why she was ever considering it. Boston, Capp wrote her, was “a grim city,” populated by unfriendly people and offering very little excitement; the people she would be meeting at the Y would differ significantly from the type of people she hung around with at the Antheils’. Because their relationship had to remain a strict secret, she would be isolated, stuck working a job lacking the glamour of singing in a nightclub.
“You’ll be chucking your career,” he warned. “You’ll chuck everything but me. That’s all there will be, Gaye—just me.”
Nevertheless, when he and Nina finally saw each other in Hollywood, they moved forward with making plans.
Nina flew to Boston on August 19, 1940, but lasted less than three months in the city. She moved into the YWCA and found a job at a retail store. She registered for a class at the Boston Conservatory and Capp spent as much time with her as possible, but between his time at the studio and his family obligations, he wasn’t around nearly as much as either of them would have liked. By the time the temperatures were starting to drop and autumn was fading into winter, Nina was ready to move back to California.
A disagreement over money precipitated Nina’s final decision to move back. Nina required emergency dental work costing $310, and that, along with her tuition fee at the Conservatory of Music, was more than she could afford. She had left for Boston with $150 in her purse; $100 of it went to the dentist. When she asked Capp for help, he was reluctant. He gave her a small amount, but when she asked for more, he turned her down, saying he wanted to preserve the independence he loved in her—he didn’t want her to have any obligation to him. Capp paid her bills after she left Boston, but, as he wrote her, he felt humiliated by the letter she’d sent him two weeks after leaving Boston and heading to San Antonio.
“It was all about money,” he said in the letter, not even attempting to hide his disgust. “Maybe it was never you I loved,” he continued. “Maybe you never existed—maybe you were just a character I created. Whatever it was—there is so much left that, however much you destroy it from now on—you cannot wholly destroy the lovely thing you were to me.”
Nina fired back in a strongly worded letter of her own.
“I came to you against my better judgment,” she confessed. “I should have listened to my intuition, which told me to settle up my affairs before coming. But I wanted you so much and I didn’t think the expense I was to you would be so important. I’m so sorry that came between us—I’m humiliated that I had to need anything but your love, which was plenty. If you really think I used you for a good thing you can dismiss the thought …
“I’m going to take a year out,” she continued, “buckle down and try to get my house in order … Then I’m going to find someone who can make me happy and I’m going to marry—I won’t pretend that I can go through life alone—but the next time I love I’ll leave no chance for the object of my affection to feel he has been taken, for I won’t need anything.”
9 Merry-Go-Round
Capp made his way back to Hollywood shortly after Nina left Boston. He would spend slightly more than two months away from home, caught up in the Hollywood “merrygoround,” as he wrote it, working on projects that never saw the light of day. Nina was again in San Antonio, and Capp missed her desperately. The ghosts of their past haunted him wherever he went.
He wrote a flurry of letters, a few of which he mailed to Nina in San Antonio, most of which he destroyed. He would start a letter, often late at night, only to abandon it, start fresh the next day, and send them together when he was satisfied with what he’d written. The Al Capp self-assurance, a personal trademark dating back to his youth, had disappeared. In one letter he’d say that he realized they’d reached the end as a couple, then in another he’d write of all the times he’d wept over memories of their time together, and he’d insist that they were far from finished. Nina, by all indications, remained silent.
Capp also wrote letters to Catherine and the girls, but he wasn’t eager to rejoin them. Despite his mournful, pleading letters to Nina, he was anything but a hermit while in Los Angeles. He socialized, and, as he would shamelessly admit to Nina, he spent nights with beautiful women drawn to his money and celebrity.
Capp left Hollywood, unsure that he would ever return, on February 4. An hour before leaving, he dashed off one final letter to Nina—a frank, tender, heartfelt love letter that expressed, in no uncertain terms, his deep love for her, but that also conceded that they would never be together.
This photo of Al Capp in the middle of ten Hollywood beauties appeared in at least one Boston-area newspaper just three days before Nina Luce secretly arrived in the city.
“Whatever my paths may be from now on, inevitably I will return home,” he told her. “My ties are too strong, I know now, ever to break.”
Capp unhappily resumed his familiar routine after his return from California. A new “Li’l Abner” featured Moonbeam McSwine, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. The character, modeled after Catherine, gave him little pleasure at a time when Nina occupied his thoughts. Catherine, he felt, was living in a dream world, unaware of her husband’s love for another woman, of the many one-night stands he’d had in the recent past. She believed he was living an ideal life focused on work, home, and family.
“I am trapped, darling,” Capp wrote Nina three weeks after his return from California, “trapped by Catherine’s faith in me, her love for me, trapped because if ever she was awakened from the dream she lives within—she would, I think, die.”
At one time, Nina had accused Capp of wallowing in misery, of hanging on to the sadness in his life rather than embracing the joy that came his way. This was true in the early months of 1941. He and Catherine had hit a rough patch in their marriage, and Capp had moved out of the house and into his studio; Don Munson, in the midst of problems with his own love life, had moved in with him. Even the continuing growth of “Li’l Abner” offered no happiness, since Capp worried that he would slip from the top and suffer a blow to his vanity.
“I’m desperately unhappy,” he told Nina, “and whereas, before, I could live a kind of cockeyed, funny, wish-fulfillment life in my comic strip—I can no longer. The joy has gone out of it. It is a job now.”
Only his children seemed to make him happy.
“My kids are asleep in the next room to this studio. It’s a sweet little room—it’s all yellow and every inch of floor space and bureau space and chair space is covered with their things,” he wrote in a wonderfully descriptive passage to Nina. “Julie’s thick nut-brown hair is spread all over her pillow—it’s long and wavy and beautiful. Cathie is blonde and her hair is all over the pillow—she wears her hair long because Julie does. Julie’s very much like me, Nina—arrogant, and with a violent temper and ever-hungry for excitement, impatient, vain, desperately and absurdly melancholy and hilarious by turns. She’s a difficult kid at times—but, because, in her, I see so much of myself, I love her best. Cathie is like her mother, mild, gentle, shy.”
Although she was his most passionate and long-term dalliance, Nina would certainly not be the last. Capp was obsessed with sex. He would never be satisfied with one woman, not because he couldn’t find one woman to satisfy him sexually, but because he was co
nstantly driven to look elsewhere. His obsession with women was evident in the voluptuous women he created for “Li’l Abner” over the years, in his randy shop talk with his assistants, and, most of all, in his pursuit of extramarital flings that began, by his own admission, not long after he and Catherine were married. His passionate letters to Nina Luce belied the fact that he was bedding still more women when they were apart.
At least he could be honest about it with Nina. In one letter, in which he spoke of his unwillingness to leave his family, and of his love for her, he also described in detail the different women he’d been with while he was in Hollywood.
“Inside of me there is a restlessness, a badness, that will never—I know that—give me peace,” he wrote. “It’s a restlessness that makes playing as vital to me as breathing. It is a restlessness that makes for episodes like my two months in Hollywood—two months of steeping myself in lechery, in insincerity, in insane wildness.”
Capp offered no apology for his behavior. He recognized the dangers but was unwilling (or, as he would have Nina believe, unable) to harness his desires.
“The more I feed on it, the greater my appetite grows,” he admitted in what, in the years ahead, would seem a prophetic letter. “Someday, perhaps, it will destroy me. Perhaps already I am being destroyed. Maybe that’s my goal in living—to destroy myself.”
After Capp finally conceded that he would never leave his wife, Nina eventually stopped responding to his letters. Her silence made Capp desperate.
“Your silence has made me wonder if everything is well with you,” he wrote in a somewhat transparent attempt to force a response. “If in your wisdom you have determined to cut this dead thing down—don’t do it with silence, dear Nina. Let me know. You may have gotten married up or you may be ill—or you may no longer be in Texas. Don’t drop out of my life too suddenly, Nina—let a fella know.”
Nina didn’t answer.
Hollywood beckoned. Capp’s natural ear for dialogue and his theatrical aptitude made him a valuable asset in the film business. Even with Nina gone, Capp pushed himself to work ahead so he could afford to take a month away from “Li’l Abner.” This time, he would be taking a car, riding with a young pianist and composer named Frank Glazer and a Romanian conductor, both of whom wanted to write music for motion pictures.
He left on July 2, 1941. The three men took their time driving out, enjoying a trip that, for Capp, was a brief vacation before another prolonged period of working on scripts and treatments. Capp enjoyed the work in Los Angeles. In letters home, he told Catherine about all the starlets he’d met, all the trendy, upscale restaurants he visited, and all the lavish parties he attended, sounding more like a starstruck tourist than someone working in the business. When he arrived in California, he’d failed to secure a room in the Beverly Wilshire, his favorite hotel in Beverly Hills; the management put him up in a small rooftop room that, Capp delighted in telling his wife, was usually reserved for a diamond smuggler and had been used in the past by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. He was thrilled when he met Dorothy Lamour and posed for pictures with her.
Once again, Catherine planned to join him after he completed some work. This time, Capp looked forward to it, and he wrote home regularly, keeping Catherine informed on everything happening in his life.
“I’ve been working very hard and I was happy to get your letter,” he told her at the top of a typically chatty letter. “You are a nice girl, a sweet and gentle wife, and a beautiful lady and a loving, patient momma.”
The work went much more slowly than Capp anticipated, and to his dismay, the studio asked him to hang on and help develop a musical for Bert Lahr, fresh off his starring role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Rather than vacation with his wife, Capp made arrangements to have Don Munson drive Andy Amato cross-country so they could work on “Li’l Abner.” In breaking the news to Catherine, Capp sounded truly apologetic. “You should have had my nut examined before you married me, darlin’,” he said. “I loves yah.”
Despite the warmth in his letters home, Capp still longed to see Nina. His letters to her were now only intermittent.
In mid-November, long after he had returned home and resumed his work routine, Capp finally heard back from Nina. He’d asked her to send a photograph of herself, which she did, along with a cautious letter. Encouraged, he suggested that he drive down to San Antonio to celebrate New Year’s Eve with her. Nothing, he said, would stop him now. Nina reluctantly agreed.
History itself wound up coming between them. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States declared war on Japan, Germany, and the Axis. These events had no immediate effect on Capp’s plans until the very end of the year, when he heard from government officials wanting him to begin a wartime project for them. He was in Washington, D.C., rather than San Antonio, on New Year’s Eve.
For Nina, this was just one last instance of Capp letting her down. Again, she asked him to leave her alone.
The rejection hurt Capp, but he was finally ready to abandon his pursuit.
“I won’t intrude into your new and good and sane life again, Nina,” he promised.
The affair, this time, was really over. Capp and Nina would meet in the months ahead, Capp traveling to San Antonio and Nina to Boston, but the visits were brief, with no chance of reconciliation. Both were ready to move on. Capp would contact Nina occasionally over the next two decades, and he would even visit her in Tennessee, where she was working and had met her future husband, but both realized that a sustained relationship was just not possible.
Capp had an important decision to make when the United States entered World War II. His missing leg would keep him out of active duty, but he would still be required to serve in some capacity. He expected this much. From an artistic standpoint, however, he had to decide what he would do with the title character of his comic strip. Abner Yokum, frozen in time at nineteen years of age, would be a prime candidate for the draft—if Capp chose to address the war in his strip.
Other comics artists, caught up in the patriotic riptide following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war against Germany, Japan, and their allies, quickly moved to include the war in their work. Ham Fisher, Milton Caniff, Chester Gould, Harold Gray, Frank King, and others found ways to involve their characters in the global conflict, whether at home or overseas. And the daily strips weren’t alone in their patriotic zeal. A new comic book character, Captain America, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, wore a red, white, and blue costume and was designed to be a symbol of democracy in the battle against fascism.
“Li’l Abner” proceeded through the early months of 1942 with no indication that a war was on. Life in Dogpatch continued as always. Capp stayed current in his satire and parodies, sending up Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane in the first “Li’l Abner” story of the year, but he remained silent about his plans for the strip during wartime. Readers sent letters, some satisfied with the status quo, others wondering about how Capp planned to work Li’l Abner into the war.
Capp waited until July 4 to deliver his answer. He interrupted his ongoing continuity with a two-panel message, written and signed in his own hand, the panels bookended with Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae sitting on the ground, apparently without a care in the world.
“Dear Friends,” the strip began,
This seems the right day to answer a question many of you have asked me—
“When is Li’l Abner going into the Army?”
Li’l Abner isn’t going into the Army. And here is why.
Perhaps Li’l Abner and his friends, living through these terrible days in a peaceful, happy, free world will do their part by reminding us that this is what we are fighting for—to have that world again—a world where a fella can do pretty much as he pleases as long as he doesn’t bother his neighbors—a world where a fella can worship God in his own way—and where the next fella’s got the same right—a world where a fella and his gal can l
ook up at the moon just for the foolishness of it—and not because there may be planes up there coming to blast ’em both off the earth—a world where a fella is free to be as wise or foolish as he pleases—but mainly—a world where a fella is free!!
That world has disappeared—until we win this war. Perhaps this small section of our daily newspaper can do its part best by helping us to remember that a free world once did exist—and will again!!
Al Capp
The next day, the “Li’l Abner” story continued where it had left off. Capp never used his strip to address the issue again.
Capp hated being second in circulation numbers or prestige to any other comic strip artist. It was, as he once told Nina, a “blow to my vanity.” Ranking among the top five in circulation, he allowed, should have been sufficient, but he did anything within his power to push aside the competition and move to the top. Several strips near or at the top were gag strips, which threatened Capp less than the ones that, like “Li’l Abner,” ran as continuing stories. “Dick Tracy” and “Little Orphan Annie” could bring out the warrior in Capp.
The fact that he liked a comic strip’s creator meant nothing. Capp was on friendly terms with Chester Gould, whose “Dick Tracy” always occupied a spot near the top of the list of daily strips. Gould, Capp repeatedly told reporters, was an exceptional writer and artist, well deserving of his popularity; he had set a standard of excellence that other cartoonists aspired to achieve.
For all that he admired about the artistry of “Dick Tracy,” Capp was galled by its success. “Li’l Abner,” he felt, was every bit as entertaining and creative, and certainly as well drawn. Capp, by his own admission, had borrowed some of Gould’s storytelling techniques in the early days of “Abner,” but he believed that the injection of humor, absent in “Dick Tracy,” and stronger characterization had moved him past Gould in overall quality.
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