“The TV show is a logical extension of Mr. Capp’s phenomenally successful endeavors,” Thayer stated in an October news release announcing the show. “Mr. Capp’s success communicating in person, in print, and on radio has already evoked much interest in all parts of the country.”
On November 12, Capp made one of his most highly visible public appearances when he emceed a $150-per-plate “Salute to the Vice President” fund-raiser at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the District of Columbia Republican Committee and the Republican National Committee and attended by 1,100 guests. Vice President Spiro Agnew and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken, controversial wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, were featured speakers.
Capp was at the top of his game for the occasion, schmoozing with attendees and Republican bigwigs, posing for pictures, and drawing some of the evening’s biggest laughs during his speech. He had become a kind of Nixon administration insider. Nixon and Agnew had been behind the idea of Capp running against Kennedy, and Nixon valued Capp’s opinion—so much so that he would call after a televised address and ask Capp for his take on the speech. When, on one occasion, Capp missed a speech, Nixon expressed his disappointment and Capp made a point of never missing another.
Capp’s speech at the fund-raiser lauded Agnew’s efforts in helping elect James Buckley, brother of conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.
“Whoever thought a conservative could win in New York?” he wondered. “I remember when you only confessed your conservatism to your rabbi, your priest or your doctor. But now it’s legal between consenting adults.”
It was a fitting exclamation point to a politically active year. With his public appearances, newspaper columns, and radio and television shows, Capp had reached the apex of his public career. “Li’l Abner” boasted a circulation of nine hundred million, its highest numbers yet. Capp’s lecture fee, he liked to say, ranked at the top of the circuit. His move to the right had cost him a share of his liberal fans, but those losses had been replaced by those who, like Capp, had grown weary of the pyrotechnics of the 1960s and were aiming at a quieter, more controlled way of daily life. There was still plenty of dissent on college campuses, and a core of liberal leadership pushing for change and an ending to the Vietnam War, but as the elections of the past two years seemed to indicate, the conservatives were making inroads in taking back the night.
15 Scandals
Despite his growing public profile, Capp had always kept his private life out of the spotlight. He was perhaps known to the public as a curmudgeon, but also as a solid family man, married to the same woman for nearly four decades, the father of three, a patriotic American and hardworking artist.
All this changed in April 1971, when nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson published a piece addressing serious sexual improprieties that Capp undoubtedly hoped would stay buried in his past. Anderson’s muckraking credentials had long been established. He’d gone after some of the most powerful figures on the political spectrum; his tenacity as a researcher was equaled only by his determination to publish what he discovered.
In Capp’s case, what he discovered was shocking. Based on interviews and sworn affidavits with four of Capp’s victims, Anderson’s column painted a grim picture of events three years earlier, in early February 1968, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Capp made an appearance at an annual arts festival sponsored by the University of Alabama. According to Anderson, Capp checked into the Stafford Hotel and arranged to meet four coeds, each at a separate time, each under what seemed to be innocent auspices. One of them was to deliver a yearbook that Capp requested; another worked for the university and acted as an official greeter to guest speakers, and Capp was supposedly going to examine his schedule with her. Once in Capp’s room, each found herself face-to-face with what, in charitable terms, could be described as a dirty old man who, according to Anderson, made “suggestive comments” leading to his “exposing himself” and making “forceful advances” toward the young woman. All four fled before the situation progressed any further, and all reported the incidents to university officials.
The officials found themselves in an extremely awkward position: Capp’s celebrity status all but guaranteed a glut of negative publicity that might further embarrass the young women involved and cast a bad light on the university. Since the coeds were reluctant to press charges, university president Frank Rose met with Capp, confronted him with the reports, and banished him from the campus. Campus security escorted Capp out of town, following his car to the city limits.
Nothing further came out of these incidents. Sarah Healey, the dean of women at the university, defended the school’s course of action by telling Anderson that “the young women were not physically harmed and we felt that the publicity and notoriety should be avoided.”
Years later, nationally respected television journalist Brit Hume, who worked as Anderson’s top assistant on the story, expressed dismay at the way Capp’s actions were covered up.
“We found out … that it had happened elsewhere,” he said in a 2008 television interview broadcast on C-SPAN, “and that the colleges, doing everything they could to avoid scandal, would not make a fuss about it, would not see that he was charged or anything like that. And they would also not warn the next stop on the tour. So, he was in the clear.”
The story was nearly tossed out before it was written. Anderson, as it turned out, had little stomach for it. A short time earlier, he had written a column, loaded with innuendo, about Randy Agnew, son of the vice president. Randy Agnew had split up with his wife and moved into an apartment with a male hairdresser, and though there was no proof that the two were anything but roommates, Anderson pushed Brit Hume into investigating the story. The vice president, Anderson argued, was setting himself up as a critic of the way parents were raising their children, and the public had the right to know what his son was up to.
Hume argued against pursuing the story but wound up looking into it. When the Anderson piece appeared, it was poorly received by readers, who felt the columnist had crossed the line in presenting what was little more than sleazy gossip.
So when Hume received an unsigned letter about Al Capp’s behavior at the University of Alabama, he didn’t immediately follow up on the letter-writer’s accusations. He wasn’t about to be burned again. He put the letter aside and moved on. Capp, in the meantime, continued to assail the country’s youths as being morally bankrupt, eventually giving Hume reason to reconsider his position. After a few preliminary calls convinced him that there was merit to the story, Hume approached Jack Anderson with the idea of investigating it.
Jack Anderson’s 1971 syndicated column brought the first national attention to allegations of Al Capp’s sexual misconduct. The report was researched and written by Anderson’s assistant Brit Hume, who later became a well-known TV journalist and commentator.
Hume’s first call had been to a former university official in Alabama, who confirmed that Capp had been involved in a series of sexual incidents on the campus. One of the victims, the former official said, had been chased around Capp’s hotel room, unable to escape, while a naked Al Capp, his prosthetic leg removed, pursued her. Hume’s source provided him with the names of others familiar with the assault, including the university’s police chief and the dean of women; he also supplied Hume with the information about how he might contact one of the victims. The former official, however, did not want his name included in the published article.
It wasn’t necessary. The dean and security chief corroborated the official’s account. Hume located the first victim, and her account was jaw-dropping, indicating that Capp’s actions had been carefully planned and even involved an assistant to help pull off the ruse. On February 10, 1968, the day before he arrived at the university, Capp had called and informed the coed that he hoped to tape interviews with students for an NBC program called Al Capp on Campus. Most of his previous interviews for the program had been with men, he told her,
so he hoped to speak to women while at the University of Alabama. When the young woman and several other students picked him up at the airport the following day, Cap introduced his assistant as an NBC employee and asked the young woman to deliver copies of the university’s yearbook and directory, supposedly so he could look at photos of and contact interviewees for the program.
The student returned to the university, picked up the requested materials, and met Capp in his hotel room. Capp began by complimenting his intended target, telling her that she was talented and efficient enough to work as an assistant on Al Capp on Campus. Capp’s assistant left, and once the two were alone, Capp grabbed the young woman and attempted to kiss her. She struggled to get away, but Capp blocked the door and undressed. When he had removed his artificial leg, the coed broke free and locked herself in the bathroom. She screamed from behind the locked door, threatening to turn Capp in to campus officials. He finally let her go. She wound up spending a few days in the university’s infirmary and, later, consulting a psychiatrist to address the aftereffects of Capp’s actions.
Hume was shocked and sympathetic.
“What had been described to me was a sex crime, an attempted rape,’ he wrote in his memoir, Inside Story. “Any doubts I might have had about the story were gone now. I was outraged.”
This first victim gave Hume two other names, and Hume interviewed them, hearing of similar, if less aggressive, attacks. Hume eventually located the fourth victim, now living on the West Coast, who initially resisted talking about her experiences; she relented after Hume repeated what he’d learned from the others and convinced her that a published account might result in some justice and closure to the cases.
There was, of course, one other person to contact, but before alerting Al Capp to his investigation, Hume sent affidavits to three of the women he’d interviewed. (The woman on the West Coast wanted nothing to do with legal proceedings.) This was one of the biggest stories of Hume’s early career, and before taking on someone of Capp’s reputation and popularity, he wanted to be certain that he was standing on solid legal ground.
When Hume called Capp on April 12, 1971, and told him what he’d heard, Capp served up a few denials, calling Hume’s listing of transgressions “sickening,” but Hume could hear apprehension in his voice. Capp eventually asked Hume for an hour to compose himself and place calls to his attorney and his former assistant—time Hume readily granted—but within fifteen minutes of breaking off the conversation, Capp was back on the phone, telling Hume that they couldn’t be reached. Would it be possible for him to catch the next flight to Washington, D.C., and meet face-to-face with Hume and Jack Anderson? Hume consented.
The meeting, held in Anderson’s office, opened poorly, with Capp making a direct if desperate appeal for understanding.
“You speak on college campuses, don’t you?” he asked Anderson.
Anderson replied that he visited university campuses nearly every week.
“Well,” Capp went on, “you know how these young babes come up to you and …”
Anderson cut him off with what Hume described as “an icy, indignant stare.” A devout Mormon, Anderson had nine children. One, a daughter, was a college student.
Capp knew that he was defeated. He repeated his earlier assertion that the details of the encounters sickened him; he categorically denied any involvement with the students. Then, contradicting his own denials, he appealed to Anderson for mercy. He would survive the bad publicity, he stated, but he worried about the effects the revelations might have on his grandchildren.
“I couldn’t bear to have something come out that would be an embarrassment to them,” he said.
Improbably, Anderson was moved. After Capp left, Anderson suggested that it might be best to drop the story. Capp, he told Hume, was “sick.”
The suggestion upset Hume, who had not only done considerable leg-work on the story but remembered, all too well, Anderson’s insistence on publishing the Randy Agnew column. He found Capp’s invocation of his grandchildren transparently manipulative.
“This guy’s a goddamn sex criminal,” Hume insisted, and as reporters, he and Anderson had a duty to publish what they had learned. Anderson, who had used this very argument to defend his decisions to print controversial columns in the past, agreed.
Hume consulted with Anderson’s attorney and, assured that they were on safe legal ground, spent the better part of a week drafting the story. He chose his words judiciously. There was only so much detail one could publish in a family newspaper, and caution had to be used in aiming accusations at a popular public figure, but he stated firmly that the public had a right to know about the actions of a man who, as a speaker, offered opinions that influenced millions of people.
Hume submitted the draft to Jack Anderson, who read and approved it, affixed his name to the column, and sent it out for syndication. Neither Anderson nor Hume was prepared for the feedback they would receive.
Anderson was accustomed to seeing his column occasionally censored or edited. The Agnew column had been heavily edited by some newspapers and cut by others. Such was a muckraker’s lot. The Capp piece, however, drew vitriolic responses from readers and editors alike. The Washington Post, Anderson’s flagship newspaper, declined to publish, claiming that it had a policy of refusing to publish sex stories unless arrests or legal actions had been taken. The Boston Globe, the paper of record in Capp’s backyard, also passed, as did virtually every major newspaper in the country’s big cities. The New York Post ran the column; the Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Daily News, and Baltimore News-American did not. According to Hume, New York, Miami, and San Francisco were the only major cities where the column appeared. Curiously, someone in Boston had visited a newsstand in the city and bought out the stand’s entire shipment of New York Posts.
Even so, letters from angry readers across the country poured into Anderson’s office, accusing him of going too far. Two letters, though, hinted at a larger problem than Anderson and Hume were aware of: both were from California women who had been similarly victimized by Capp.
Capp, in an interview with the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, brushed off the accusations as the workings of the radical left. These kinds of allegations—“wholly and ludicrously faked and untrue”—sprang from the minds of those trying to discredit him, or worse. He said he’d been physically threatened and lived in fear of someone, or some group, bombing his home or car. Furthermore, one had only to know of his physical situation to realize that the charges were false. He’d lost one leg and had a bad ankle on the other. How would he stalk these young ladies, as they claimed he had?
It was Capp’s word against the accusations of four young women, and since no complaints had been filed at the time of the offenses, no follow-up actions were taken.
The publicity died down, but Capp’s escape would prove to be very short-lived.
On April 1, three weeks to the day before the publication of the Jack Anderson column, Al Capp had made an appearance at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, a quiet campus near the state’s western border. At approximately five thirty that afternoon, he received a married twenty-year-old student named Patricia Harry in his Holiday Inn suite, supposedly to interview her in preparation for his lecture later that evening. The university had set Capp up with a female assistant, who was present when Mrs. Harry arrived, but Capp dispatched her on an errand.
What was supposed to be a twenty-minute interview stretched out to more than an hour. Capp grilled Harry, a liberal, on a number of topics, including the forthcoming presidential election, before steering the conversation to what he called “the new morality.” Capp’s questions became more personal and inappropriate, such as his query as to whether Harry was a virgin on her wedding day. Although uncomfortable, Harry answered his questions, and the interview concluded.
As she was preparing to leave, Capp asked her if she would give him a kiss good-bye. She attempted to kiss him on the cheek, but he pulled her tow
ard him and kissed her on the lips, forcing his tongue into her mouth. He then exposed himself and, grabbing her neck, forced her head into his lap until his erect penis had penetrated her mouth. He pulled her by the waist into the bedroom and was undressing her when the bedside phone rang. Capp answered it and learned that Patricia Harry’s husband, Steve, was waiting for her. Capp ordered her to dress, clean up, comb her hair, and leave.
Steve Harry and the university-appointed assistant were in the hall when Pat left Capp’s room. Both noticed that she was upset, and when Steve Harry confronted Capp and asked him what he’d done to her, Capp denied doing anything. Pat explained what had happened only when she and Steve were walking through the hotel’s parking lot.
Stephen Caflisch, the news and public affairs director at WBIZ-AM/FM in Eau Claire, saw Capp immediately following the incident at the Holiday Inn. Capp’s appearance at the university was a major event for the small town, and Capp had scheduled a press conference prior to his evening performance. According to Caflisch, Capp arrived on time for the press conference, but the normally impeccably dressed cartoonist was “rumpled” in appearance and “sweating profusely” as he met with reporters.
“He looked as if he was really ill,” Caflisch remembered. “I have never seen anyone as nervous before a performance as Al Capp was that night.” Capp managed to fulfill his engagement, but he was whisked away as soon as it was over, supposedly heading to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, where he was to appear the following evening.
Over the next three weeks, the Harrys struggled to find a way to prosecute Capp, with no success. Lawrence Durning, Eau Claire’s district attorney, felt that Pat hadn’t fought aggressively enough during the assault, even when she explained that, while she didn’t offer as much resistance as she might have, she’d been sodomized by a relative when she was eight and felt like a young victim in the hands of an older, stronger man. Durning, a conservative, sympathized, but Wisconsin law was clear: “ ‘by force and against her will’ means either that her utmost resistance is overcome and prevented by physical violence or her will to resist is overcome by threats of imminent physical violence likely to cause great bodily harm.” Since neither strictly applied during her ordeal with Capp, and since she didn’t have any bruises to suggest violence, Capp could have argued that he believed that the sexual activity, although rough, was consensual. Then there was the matter of extraditing Capp to Wisconsin for hearings and a trial.
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