The Harrys, convinced that Durning wasn’t motivated to prosecute, continued to push. They called the National Student Government Association and learned about other allegations involving Capp. Pat Harry took and passed a polygraph test. Despite the police and district attorney’s efforts to talk her into dropping the case, she persisted.
Stephen Caflisch, who covered the developing story and eventually attended Capp’s court hearing, said that Pat Harry’s problems went beyond an official reluctance to prosecute. Eau Claire, he remembered, was overrun with outsiders with a strong interest in the case—people determined to prove that Pat Harry was a student agitator trying to ruin Capp’s reputation. Harry belonged to campus groups and knew officials in Madison, but, as Caflisch pointed out, she had never been a member of, nor had she consorted with, such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society or the Weathermen. She was well informed about political matters and would attend rallies, but Caflisch insisted that she was “a straight-arrow type of person and absolutely not a radical type.” According to Caflisch, the investigators looking into her background made the Harrys’ lives “a living hell.”
Everything changed with the appearance of Jack Anderson’s column on April 22. The Eau Claire paper ran the piece. Durning decided to prosecute. Capp was charged with two felonies and one misdemeanor: with sodomy, for forcibly engaging her in oral sex; for indecent exposure; and, the prosecution having pulled up a rarely enforced law, for adultery.
The charges set off a firestorm of coast-to-coast media coverage. Newspapers that had refused to carry the Jack Anderson column had no choice but to publish accounts of Capp’s visit to Wisconsin. AL CAPP IS ACCUSED OF MORALS OFFENSE, the New York Times noted in its May 8 edition. AL CAPP IS CHARGED WITH MORALS LAW VIOLATIONS, the San Francisco Chronicle declared on that same day.
Capp, issuing a statement from his bed in Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where he was supposedly recovering from exhaustion, continued his conspiracy-tinged denials.
“The allegations are entirely untrue,” he insisted. “I have been worried for some time now the revolutionary left would try to stop me by any means from speaking out on campuses. My home has been vandalized and I have been physically threatened. This is also part of their campaign to stop me. Those who have faith in me know that I will not be stopped.”
He vigorously maintained this position for the rest of his life, insisting that any sex that had taken place was consensual, and that efforts to ensnare him in the legal system and a web of humiliating publicity stemmed from his enemies on the left. In a long, rambling 1974 letter to his old friend Milton Caniff, Capp bitterly repeated his defense.
“If you recall,” he wrote Caniff, “I was charged with sodomy (in Wisconsin if a dame goes down on you it’s sodomy, if you try to fight it off, an idea that never did occur to me, you are guilty of disorderly conduct).” If not for the intervention of the woman’s husband, he further asserted, he would have had sexual intercourse.
Caniff needed no convincing. From the beginning, he believed that Capp had been set up, and immediately following the published reports of the Eau Claire incident, Caniff sent Capp a telegram: “Who do we slug?” Caniff would later characterize his friend, mildly, as a “womanizer,” saying that “a womanizer womanizes, he doesn’t need to have a reason for it.”
While Capp’s case worked its way through the legal system, Lawrence Durning learned just how well connected Al Capp was. President Richard Nixon, who would have all sorts of legal problems of his own over the next couple of years, worried about the ramifications of the case, given his public friendship with Capp and a looming reelection campaign. The president conferred with Charles Colson, his special counsel. Colson dispatched an assistant to Eau Claire to try to persuade Durning to dismiss the case “as a favor to Nixon,” but the district attorney refused. He reminded his visitor that the White House didn’t have the authority to make the request.
There was another far more insidious attempt to save Capp from the embarrassment and expense of a court date. According to Dr. Alvin Kahn, a psychiatrist friend and confidant of Capp’s during this period, he was at Capp’s Brattle Street home in Cambridge, hanging out and talking as he did on a regular basis, when the telephone rang and Capp became engaged in a loud, animated conversation. Capp, visibly upset, handed the phone to Kahn.
“You talk to him,” Capp told Kahn.
The call was from Bernie Cornfeld, the controversial international financier, internationally known playboy, and friend of Capp’s. Kahn knew Cornfeld only marginally, as a onetime benefactor when Kahn was visiting England and needed a place to stay. Cornfeld had provided his English home.
As Kahn recalled, Cornfeld offered an incredible solution to Capp’s problems: he would arrange to have Capp’s Eau Claire accuser murdered before the case came before a judge. There would be no possibility of its being traced back to Capp, Cornfeld said, assuring both that he knew capable hit men. Capp would have no part in it, and while Cornfeld sounded serious enough when making the offer, Kahn questioned whether he would have really gone through with it, even had Capp agreed.
Art Buchwald had a better—and totally aboveboard—solution. Buchwald was close friends with Edward Bennett Williams, the high-profile Washington, D.C., attorney and future owner of the Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles. Buchwald arranged to have Capp and Williams meet, and Capp wound up retaining Williams’s firm to represent him.
He would have his day in court.
There were other victims, too, aspiring actresses duped into auditioning for Capp, unaware that he was operating his own version of the casting couch.
Goldie Hawn dealt with Capp back in her modeling days in New York, before she became a household name on television’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or earned top billing in the movies. Hawn was still new in the city, on her way to a modeling audition when she ran into a man in his mid-twenties calling himself Bobby. She was carrying a large bag and heading to the subway station at 72nd and Broadway.
Bobby offered to carry her bag, telling her, “You have a very unusual face.”
“If he had told me I was beautiful, I would have known he was full of shit,” she recollected in a 1985 interview. “But he said the right thing and he gave me a whole line of bull.”
Bobby told her he had an aunt named Goldie, that he had a girlfriend who had given him the watch he was wearing. He asked if Goldie had ever heard of a cartoonist named Al Capp, and when she told him that she had, he informed her that a “Li’l Abner” TV movie was about to be made, and they were looking for someone to play the part of Tenderleif Ericsson.
“She’s not classically pretty, but she’s interesting-looking,” Bobby said. “You’d be just perfect for the part.” He took her address and phone number and promised to be in touch.
Capp had tried this approach on others.
According to biographer James Spada, Grace Kelly was just starting out as an actress when she learned that a Broadway musical production of “Li’l Abner” was casting for the role of Daisy Mae. Although advised by her manager that she wasn’t right for the part, Kelly set up an audition with Capp.
“I took her to Capp’s office,” her manager, Don Richardson, told Spada, “and waited for her in a little coffee shop nearby. About a half hour later, she came back with her hair messed up, her lipstick smudged, and her dress ripped. Capp had tried to rape her. He physically attacked her. She was in tears and told me how she had tried to flee his office to get away from him. Well, I was ready to kill him, but she pleaded with me not to do anything about it. ‘I’m okay,’ she said, ‘the poor man has only one leg—leave him alone.’ “
When Goldie Hawn finally heard from Bobby a couple of weeks after her initial meeting with him, her hopes for landing the role in the “Li’l Abner” television project had faded. Bobby reassured her that Capp was enthusiastic and set up a meeting at the cartoonist’s apartment.
Capp arrived late—the butler had let her i
n—and his first order of business was to slip out of his suit and into a silk bathrobe. Hawn, nervous about meeting the famous cartoonist to begin with, grew more anxious. Capp, perhaps sensing her apprehension, tried to gain her confidence by having her read from the script and commenting on her performance.
“Goldie, I would now like you to read the part of Daisy Mae,” he instructed. “I think you could be very good in that part.”
Hawn couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“But she’s the lead,” she protested. “She’s beautiful and sexy and large-breasted! Mr. Capp, I really don’t think I look like she does.”
“Nonsense!” Capp shouted. “I created her!”
Capp asked her to walk across the room, looking stupid like Daisy Mae might look. Hawn, who had worn an orange-beaded necklace to the audition, dangled the beads from her mouth and pranced around the room, acting, as she later put it, “like a jackass.”
Capp’s next request was more provocative.
“Go stand in front of the mirror and let me see your legs.”
Hawn had mixed feelings about Capp’s directive. As a dancer, she worked hard to keep her legs in top condition; she was proud of the way they looked. On the other hand, she wasn’t comfortable with Capp’s request. Nevertheless, she walked to the full-length mirror and pulled her dress up above her knees.
“Higher,” Capp said.
She hiked her dress up another inch or so.
“Higher.”
Again she lifted her dress for his approval. She told herself that she would go no further.
“Come over here, Goldie.” Capp patted a position on the couch next to him.
As Hawn hesitantly approached, she noticed that he had parted his robe and was exposing himself to her.
“Mr. Capp, I will never, ever get a job like this,” she told him.
Capp sneered at her. “You’ll never get anywhere in this business,” he declared. “I’ve had them all, you know, much better-looking than you. Now go on and get the hell out of here!”
As a parting insult, he tossed a twenty-dollar bill at her.
Hawn rushed from the building, badly shaken and crying, but her integrity intact. Bobby, she realized, had been nothing but a pimp. It was the type of lesson that would prepare her for future encounters in a business that could be very demeaning.
Neither Capp nor his victim in Eau Claire looked forward to an open-court airing of the details of their encounter, with the attendant media coverage.
Lawrence Durning worked out a plea agreement: the indecent exposure and sodomy charges would be dropped if Capp pleaded guilty to the attempted adultery charge. Maximum imprisonment for attempted adultery was eighteen months; the state was recommending probation.
Al Capp, left, an unidentified man, and Capp’s attorney, Al Hochberg, right, attending rendition proceedings in Massachusetts’ Suffolk County Courthouse in May 1971. Capp pleaded innocent to morals charges originating in Wisconsin, but was ordered by the judge to retain counsel in that state. Nine months later, Capp pleaded guilty.
Capp appeared in Eau Claire’s Circuit Court on February 11, 1972, and to anyone paying attention, it was clear that prosecution and defense alike just wanted the case to go away. The events that brought Al Capp into the courtroom were skimmed over with very little detail; the discussion of resistance was argued in such a manner as to move the case away from an act of aggression toward one of consent. When Judge Merrill Farr asked if it was true that he intended to have sex with the coed if they hadn’t been interrupted by the phone call, Capp said, “I am afraid it is.”
The judge, conceding that a fine would have little effect on Capp, nevertheless found him guilty by the terms of the plea agreement and fined him $500, plus court costs. No prison time was imposed. If Capp felt any remorse for his actions, he never showed it.
“In Wisconsin, it costs 500 bucks not to score,” he later complained.
16 Descent
The response to the sex scandals was swift and decisive. The invitations to appear on college campuses evaporated. A planned television show was dropped. A steady stream of newspapers dropped their subscriptions to “Li’l Abner.” A career four decades in the making had taken a severe hit from which it would never recover.
Capp remained unrepentant. He told everyone listening, from family members to the press, that he had been set up by enemies hoping to silence him, most likely the Students for a Democratic Society. He couldn’t deny that he, once a harsh critic of “the New Morality,” had misbehaved in a way that stripped him of that voice; pleading guilty of attempted adultery in Wisconsin had seen to that. He could only hope that, in saying that he had succumbed to temptation by the enemy, he might be understood and eventually forgiven.
Not that the negative publicity forced a change in his behavior. The Jack Anderson column and Eau Claire incidents in 1971 did not appear to dampen Capp’s modus operandi, according to one prominent writer. Harlan Ellison was staying with a friend in New York City in 1972 while writing his award-winning short story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” His friend, whose name he would not disclose, was a professional photographer who worked for major magazines and provided the still photography for numerous motion pictures.
Ellison said one day the friend went to Al Capp’s Park Avenue studio apartment with her equipment on an assignment. Not long afterward, she returned to her own apartment very distraught, telling Ellison that Capp had attacked her. She had not been raped, she said, but Capp had groped her and grappled with her. She fled his apartment, abandoning her camera, tripod, and other equipment.
The notoriously hotheaded Ellison said he immediately stormed over to Capp’s place with her and confronted Capp. “How dare you molest her?” He quoted Capp as retorting, “I’m Al Capp. I draw the most beautiful women in the world, and I can molest whomever I want!”
“What an asshole!” Ellison said many years later, when recollecting the incident.. “I punched him out. I hit him with my left fist in the ‘V’ of his neck, just above the rib cage.” Capp lost his balance after the punch and tumbled to the floor. “Then we grabbed her equipment and ran off.”
In the wake of all the publicity, and despite the goings-on in his private life, Capp tried to keep a grip on his public image. He had no choice but to maintain the tone of lofty moral superiority that had driven “Li’l Abner,” his writings, and his college appearances for years, despite the switch in targets throughout the sixties. A satirist had to clutch a lofty position in order to be effective.
But would the public care? Readers certainly had little use for The Hardhat’s Bedtime Story Book, a slender volume of musings, scraps from his college lecture tours, reactions to the political foment of the sixties and first year of the seventies, and philosophical meanderings through the minefields of the right. The tone of these brief pieces was cantankerous, but more annoying than convincing; the subject matter offered no surprising insights or memorable salvos. Overall, the miscellany seemed tired and too familiar.
Some of Capp’s discontent with America’s youth may have stemmed from his ambivalent feelings toward his own adult children. It wasn’t merely politics, although Julie, Cathie, and Kim were all liberal in their thinking. Capp had encouraged his children to think freely, and he showed a lot more tolerance toward their views than he ever afforded the students he met on college campuses.
Capp’s children depended upon him for different types of support, from housing to cash, and he secretly resented the way they drained his bank account. Even at the height of his success, when money seemed to be gushing in faster than he could count it, Capp never lost his Depression-era fear that it could all come to an abrupt halt and leave him back where he began. He was rightfully proud of the fact that he was a self-made success story, and if he worked himself to the point where he seemed to have run out of time and energy, he did so to meet the needs of all those depending upon him, from his assistants in the studio to his family back home. He could get te
sty or downright belligerent if he felt he was being taken advantage of, as he had with Nina Luce long ago.
This resentment was also at the core of the pugilistic statements he made on college campuses. His problems with students, he would insist throughout his contentious years of speechifying, did not involve the overwhelming majority of students, who studied hard, worked to help pay their tuition, and treated their learning institutions with respect. It was the tiny minority who felt entitled—to the finest education their parents’ (or, worse yet, the state’s) money could buy, to the privilege of being able to lash out at their parents, their colleges, their professors, their government. After the deaths at Kent State of four students at the hands of the National Guard mobilized to keep order in the May 4, 1970, demonstrations, Capp declared, in one of the most controversial statements he would ever issue, “The martyrs at Kent State were the kids in National Guard uniforms.”
Capp continued to support President Nixon as he began his second term in office. He extended his support to other polarizing conservative figures as well.
“My reaction to Richard Nixon is that he is a towering intellect,” Capp wrote in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” an essay published in the January 1973 issue of Penthouse. “My reaction to Spiro Agnew is that he is a crusader with more courage and usefulness than Ralph Nader.” Capp was just getting warmed up. He called Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, “the savior of higher education” in the state. George Wallace, Capp concluded, was “more of a friend to blacks than John Lindsay or Le-Roi Jones”—using the birth name of Amiri Baraka in a deliberate insult. Wallace, of course, as governor of Alabama during the civil rights movement, had acted in a way that had been anything but friendly to African Americans.
Al Capp Page 26