Capp basked in the publicity that the shmoo brought “Li’l Abner,” and Capp Enterprises, celebrating its first anniversary, pushed hard to accommodate the increasing demand for shmoo-related commercial products. Capp complained, tongue in cheek, that the shmoo was costing him his sanity: he was constantly badgered in public, by everyone from waiters in restaurants to people in the street, all wanting more shmoo stories than he could provide, all quick with jokes and puns about the little creatures.
“My first sensation was the joy of having made the shmoo,” Capp told Time. “Then came the feeling of annoyance. I’ve been subjected to all the shmoo jokes in the world, like ‘there’s good shmoos tonight,’ and I mustn’t say go-to-hell to anybody. Now I’m delighted again, having read that the shmoo has all sorts of economic meanings.”
The shmoo story continued until December 22, making it one of the longer-running “Li’l Abner” continuities yet—and there would be more to follow. The annual Sadie Hawkins festivities were absorbed into the first shmoo story, as was another item that attracted great reader attention. Beginning on October 11, 1948, Capp hid the words “Nancy O” in almost every daily strip. He remained silent on what it meant, but the “Nancy O” mystery continued, unbelievably enough, until May 1951. Every day, readers would scan the rocks, trees, buildings, and even characters’ clothing until the words appeared. In the past, Capp had demonstrated that he would go to almost any lengths to gain a reader’s attention and fidelity to his strip; the “Nancy O” mystery continued the tradition.
Although he would feign annoyance over the overwhelming response to the shmoo, Capp couldn’t wait to follow it up. The shmoo had been generous to death—literally—and this generosity had offered Capp countless ways to comment on human laziness, greed, avarice, and other foibles. What else was out there?
The answer was the kigmy, a short, squat, hunched-over creature whose biggest joy in life was a strong, swift kick in the hind end. The kigmy was the answer to human anger, frustration, aggression, disappointment, hostility, and sorrow. Rather than lash out at other human beings (or even inanimate objects), people could kick kigmies in the rump, relieving tension and pleasing their targets at the same time.
The kigmy was introduced in the last will and testament of Uncle Honeysuckle Yokum, before he was hanged for murder. The document offered what he called “mah Sure-Fire, It-never-Fails plan fo’ peace.”
There was a flaw in human thinking, Yokum claimed. People everywhere assumed that humans wanted to be nice to one another when, in fact, the opposite was true. People loved to kick each other around; it gave them a feeling of superiority. But therein was the rub: the kick demanded retaliation.
“And there yo’ has the cause of all Trouble, and War,” Honeysuckle Yokum concluded.
As a parting gesture, Yokum was leaving humanity fifty million kigmies, “a handy-sized li’l critter I have developed, who loves to be kicked. A kigmy is built for kicking—he yearns for it. The harder and more viciously you kick a kigmy, the happier the li’l varmint is.”
But what would such a creature look like? Capp drew dozens of prototypes, rejecting his first idea almost immediately after he sketched it. The first kigmy was human, smaller than average, with a black face, large nose, and beard. It was guaranteed to offend just about anyone.
“Since the Kigmy was to be a kickable minority,” Capp wrote in notes about the evolution of the kigmy, “it was only natural that the True Kigmy be a colored Jew.”
After setting aside that idea, Capp developed other very human-looking models, some clothed and some not, some with targets on their butts, others not. Capp tossed these ideas aside because they looked too much like people, “and the whole idea of the Kigmy,” as he saw it, “was that he was to be a substitute for people.” It was imperative, he felt, “to get away from the human look and still retain the pitifulness and lovableness of little and kicked-around humanity.”
He ruminated over how he would distinguish between male and female kigmies, and whether they would have children. Weeks turned into months.
“I doodled Kigmies on trains, at the phone, on table-cloths, and on menus,” he’d remember. “None of ’em seemed to come out right. The IDEA was completely formed in my mind. I had known for a long time about the function of the Kigmy.”
He finally settled on a small, rotund creature with such human features as a face capable of expression, and hands and feet, but it was also furry, except for a bald patch on its butt. Its gender was determined by its clothing. It might have been a distant cousin of the shmoo.
Readers did not respond to the kigmy the way they had to the shmoo. Capp and the United Feature Syndicate saw to it that this new creation received plenty of publicity, but the reception was, at best, lukewarm. Capp even brought the shmoo and the kigmy together in a holiday strip published at the end of the year, but the kigmy just didn’t take off like its cousin.
One of Capp’s greatest strengths had been his keen understanding of what amused his readers, but he must have known that it was unrealistic to expect the kigmy to be another marketing sensation like he one he’d enjoyed with the shmoo. He had no reason to complain. At a time when comics had taken a dip in popularity, “Li’l Abner” was riding the crest of a wave of reader interest—and for good reason. “Li’l Abner” had reached creative maturity, in story and artwork alike.
In 1949, a year after the shmoo phenomenon, Al Capp created a new creature, the kigmy, who loved to be kicked. His initial concept drew on stereotypes of Jews and African Americans—two minorities frequently kicked around. From this starting point, the kigmy evolved into a much more generic creature.
Capp might have been disappointed by the kigmy’s reception, but he had other things on his mind. He was in love again. For the first time since his prolonged affair with Nina Luce, Capp had found a woman who caught his attention in a way that made him consider, although only briefly, whether he should leave Catherine and his children for life with another woman.
The woman, Carol Saroyan, wife of the writer/playwright William Saroyan, was vivacious, passionate, bright, and beautiful, and her New York City proximity made Capp’s pursuit of the affair logistically much less troublesome than his previous long-distance relationship with Nina Luce. The Saroyans had a tempestuous marriage, and the two were separated in July, when Capp met Carol through Leila Hadley, a publicist who counted Capp Enterprises as a client.
Capp was in love, but there were complications. The Saroyans had two children, and the couple’s relationship, although fractured to the extent of their filing for divorce, was mercurial. The two barely spoke to each other one day, and on the next they were considering reconciliation.
Capp ignored the potential pitfalls. He concealed the affair from Catherine, but it was hardly a secret elsewhere. William Saroyan, for one, was well aware that Capp was involved with his wife, and jealous of the man who might become his replacement once the divorce became final.
However, Capp was not to become Carol’s next husband. Once again he couldn’t bring himself to leave his family. He loved his children and, if he was being totally honest with himself, he still had strong feelings for Catherine. For all of his wandering ways, he still missed his family when he was away for any length of time, and he still sent Catherine letters expressing his love. Whenever he thought of leaving her, he knew it wasn’t possible.
He also knew he couldn’t carry on with Carol indefinitely. This was quite apparent when the holiday season rolled around, William Saroyan returned to New York, and Capp found himself jockeying for Carol’s time. Saroyan wanted to spend time with his children during the season, and the scheduling of picking up and dropping off the kids conflicted with some of the time Capp allotted for Carol. As it was, he was trying to keep a low profile around Carol while Saroyan was around, but for all his efforts, the comings and goings were sloppy, leading to unpleasant scenes between Carol and her increasingly jealous and distraught husband. Carol had custody of the children,
but she could ill afford to upset her husband in ways that would look bad if he decided to challenge the arrangement in court.
Capp had never been in such a volatile situation. Saroyan would write a letter to Capp, stating that he was willing to let Capp marry his wife for the sake of their children’s welfare, but then he’d have second thoughts and refuse to send it. The Saroyans would go out together for an evening, conclude it with sex, and then consider traveling to Europe together the following summer. It was dizzying.
On January 24, 1950, Carol called her former husband from the hotel room where she and Capp were staying, and Capp wound up being dragged into a long, bizarre conversation with Saroyan. Capp told him that he loved Carol and intended to marry her after he divorced Catherine—a course of action he had no intention of taking. After considering the conversation, Saroyan wrote a letter to Carol, which he copied and sent to Capp, in which he protested the affair as being a negative influence on the children. He allowed that he expected Carol to move on with her social life after the divorce, but carrying on “an open and notorious affair with a married man” was an entirely different matter. The children, he maintained, were confused.
“With the immeasurable harm already inflicted on our children, I cannot stand by impassively and permit a continuation of these destructive conditions,” Saroyan wrote, concluding that he wanted custody of the children and was reluctantly willing to take Carol to court.
Saroyan enclosed a brief cover letter with the copy he sent to Capp, in which he implored Capp to use his influence “to help her to make the important decision which confronts her.”
Capp bowed out of the relationship shortly after receiving the letter.
Work, as always, stabilized his life. “Li’l Abner” and “Abbie an’ Slats” kept him busy on a daily basis, and the surge in merchandizing demanded more attention than ever. Shmoo merchandise was still selling at a brisk pace, and new kigmy items were being developed. Capp would have preferred to let his brother Bence oversee the day-to-day operations of Capp Enterprises, but he never trusted him to make crucial decisions on contracts and new products.
Capp Enterprises presented a convincing case for the complaint Capp had voiced in his lawsuit against United Feature, that the syndicate had neglected to exploit the full marketing potential of “Li’l Abner.” The early postsuit returns were modest, mostly the result of “Li’l Abner” comic book sales, which had previously been licensed to Harvey Comics, with a tiny net return to Capp. Elliott Caplin, a comics writer himself, with connections to Parents magazine, supervised the comic book production via the Capp-family-owned Toby Press, and while sales figures on these reconfigured and colorized reprints of the syndicated “Li’l Abner” strips were respectable, they were hardly earth-shattering. The shmoo marketing blitz reached a whole new level. According to figures published by Editor & Publisher, by July 1949, just under a year from the shmoo’s initial appearance in “Li’l Abner,” Capp Enterprises boasted of nearly one hundred different products made by seventy-five different manufacturers, with more on the way.
Bence Capp—or Jerry, as he was often called—Capp Enterprises’ treasurer and general manager, sounded much like his older brother when joshing with reporters about the company’s success. The shmoo items, he moaned, were “nothing but a menace … They’re making us millionaires. And nobody likes millionaires.”
The creativity in the marketing of the shmoo set a standard for comic strip merchandising. There were shmoo clocks, purses, wallets, dolls, salt and pepper shakers, air fresheners, key rings, nesting dolls, ashtrays, glasses, clothing items, and greeting cards; only Walt Disney could boast of a comparable marketing style. The shmoo balloons alone sold more than five million units. New products were constantly being developed. The shmoo, Al Capp noted, had taken on a life of its own—a positive development, undoubtedly, for Capp Enterprises but a bit of an albatross for the cartoonist, who was now dealing with a constant clamor for more shmoo adventures in the comic strip. As if to remind the Capp Enterprises staff of priorities, the walls and desks in the Capp Enterprises offices bore signs proclaiming, “The strip comes first.”
There were bound to be glitches as the strip crossed over into commercial territory. United Feature Syndicate, recipient of a percentage of gross merchandise sales under its settlement with Capp, was not pleased when, during the celebration of the first anniversary of the shmoo’s appearance in “Li’l Abner,” Procter & Gamble and Al Capp announced a shmoo-naming contest, with $50,000 in prizes to be awarded to contestants turning in entries using only the letters present in “Ivory Snow,” “Duz,” and “Dreft”—all Procter & Gamble soap products. An ad for the contest, inserted in all but one newspaper subscribing to “Li’l Abner,” as well as in 340 nonsubscribing papers, featured a “Li’l Abner” strip specially created for the ad, along with the promise from Capp that he would include hints on how to name the shmoo in his regular strip.
As Capp saw it, the contest was another reader participation event, not unlike the previous Lena the Hyena competition—in short, good publicity for the strip and the syndicate. United Feature disagreed. The syndicate had received what it described as “a flurry of letters” from subscribing newspaper editors protesting the crossover from comic strip to advertisement.
The protests began as an answer to an innocuous July 16, 1949, article, “ ‘Li’l Abner’ Sideline Is Shmoopendous,” in Editor & Publisher. The reporter had gushed about the steamrolling success of Capp Enterprises and Toby Press, the Capp-run publisher set up in March to handle the publication and sales of “Abner”-related comic books. The article, appearing before the shmoo-naming contest was announced, drew the ire of A. H. Kirchhofer, the managing editor of the Buffalo Evening News. In separate letters to United Feature and Capp, Kirchhofer strenuously objected to Capp Enterprises’ profiting from comic strip characters appearing in newspapers. The subscribing papers were already paying for the strips; they felt that their exclusivity to “Li’l Abner” as a feature had been diluted and compromised, and now they were acting as advertisers for other highly profitable endeavors.
“We think this is commercialism gone hog wild, and cashing in on the popularity of a strip which is brought to the attention of the public through newspaper publication,” Kirchhofer complained.
He was just as pointed in his letter to Capp: “We think that an editorial feature should not be mixed with an advertising scheme. It is a matter of very great regret to us to see that this has been done in the case of ‘Li’l Abner.’ “
The announcement of the contest set off angry letters from others. Editor & Publisher covered the flap with four lengthy articles. Capp Enterprises waited until the third had appeared before responding. Bence Capp, writing the rebuttal, defended the contest as a benefit to newspapers. The publicity, he argued, was good for everyone.
“If through the use of a campaign instrument such as the Procter & Gamble contest through a period of five slow circulation months we can excite, humor and interest millions of people in Li’l Abner and consequently in the newspaper that carries Li’l Abner, then we think we are assisting the newspaper which is the home of the Li’l Abner strip,” he wrote.
Ironically, although caught in the middle of the dispute, United Feature received no remuneration in connection with the contest, and prior to the objections from the newspapers, the syndicate had prohibited Capp from making any mention of the contest in the daily and Sunday strips. United Feature was in no position to prohibit Capp Enterprises from pursuing income tied into “Li’l Abner,” but there had to be a line drawn between editorial and commercial content.
The contest showed just how fine that line could be.
Turbulent waters figured heavily in the future of Capp Enterprises. For all his creativity in cartooning and genius in marketing, Al Capp was, at his best, a mediocre boss. He had strong business acumen, but with employees he could be demanding, unreasonable, impatient, and, on occasion, cruel. On the creative side, he
and his studio assistants were extraordinary in generating ideas and following them through to production; day-to-day operations ran smoothly, and the studio was a happy place.
Capp Enterprises, based in New York City, in an entirely different atmosphere than Capp’s Boston studio, did not operate as smoothly as Capp hoped, and at least a portion of the problem could be placed on his brother Bence’s shoulders. Bence was very bright—perhaps the most intelligent of the three brothers, according to Louis Gardner, Madeline’s husband, who had observed all three brothers over many years—but Bence, like Al, could be very strong-willed. Besides holding significant stock and officer positions in four family corporations—treasurer of Capp Enterprises, president of Dogpatch Styles, treasurer of Toby Press, and director of Pictorial Advertising—Bence served as Al’s personal manager, an amazing list of positions and responsibilities, given the fact that Tillie Caplin had to badger Al into hiring Bence in the first place, after his discharge from the service. Bence and Al had been close since childhood, when Bence would cart his brother around in a wagon after Al had lost his leg, and as adults, they shared many views, including their liberal political leanings. Bence even followed suit and formally changed his name from Caplin to Capp when Al legally changed his name in 1949.
This closeness might have been the main reason for their incompatibility in business. Al would ask Bence to perform a task, and Bence would carry it out in his own way and at his own leisure—if, that is, he deemed it worth his time and effort. Sometimes he would delegate the responsibility to another Capp Enterprises employee; other times he would ignore the request entirely. Al would repeat his request, politely on occasion, forcefully as often as not, and it burned him when Bence didn’t seem to recognize him as his employer, as well as a brother. The grumblings began almost as soon as Capp Enterprises was founded, coinciding with the favorable settlement of Capp’s lawsuit against United Feature Syndicate in the late 1940s, and they increased as the company took on more and more work. By 1949 and the Procter & Gamble shmoo promotion mess, Capp was becoming downright testy when dealing with Bence.
Al Capp Page 16