Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  He was further antagonized by the trend of shrinking newspaper comic strips, which had been so reduced in size as to render them almost unreadable. “Li’l Abner” required more panel space than the average strip, yet by the mid-1970s it had shrunk to a size that limited Capp’s options as a cartoonist.

  As if in retaliation, Capp had opened the seventies with an entirely new artistic endeavor: he’d begun painting on large canvases, acrylics of almost life-sized figures from “Li’l Abner.” Each painting was the equivalent of a single panel.

  “I hadn’t painted since art school,” he explained to a reporter from the New York Post. “It was fun to work in all that space, instead of small scale.”

  Catherine had been painting, off and on, over the years, working in a makeshift studio on the New Hampshire farm. She had abandoned her work as an illustrator after the children were born, and her painting, like that of her husband now, had been a creative release. She had been initially upset when Al set aside his painting to work in comics; she’d always envisioned him as a gallery artist. Whatever her feelings about her husband’s new series of paintings, she kept them to herself.

  Capp might have sold his paintings for a handsome amount of money, but he was too busy with the strip, his writings, and other projects to even consider it. He was gratified, then, when the New York Cultural Center assembled forty of his paintings for an exhibition running from April 15 through May 11, 1975. The showing, receiving wide media coverage, boasted a large overall attendance and featured a gala opening night party; attendees were given the choice of dressing in black tie or Dogpatch style. Capp, who would have preferred being strung up in the town square to being seen in blue jeans or coveralls, donned the black tie.

  Speaking to the press, Capp expressed his pleasure in seeing his work being viewed as fine art.

  “A work of art is a work of art, regardless of form, size or material,” he said in an interview published in the exhibit’s catalogue. “People have been brainwashed into thinking that if it appears in a comic strip and in your daily newspaper, and done with pen and ink, it is a contemptible trifle, it isn’t art. That is self-swindling snobbishness.”

  “It occurred to me that my work is being destroyed almost as soon as it is printed,” he said in another interview. “One day it is being read; the next day someone’s wrapping fish in it. The American comic strip is as unique and as precious an art as jazz. I think it should be preserved.”

  Capp, of course, was describing the newspaper reproductions of his art. His actual unique comic strip originals were often treated cavalierly, sometimes left on the studio floor to be walked upon, and left abandoned at the syndicate office to be pilfered, while his high-priced gallery paintings and silk screens, being touted as the real thing, were effectively just framed, larger, and more brightly colored versions of the reproductions used for wrapping fish.

  On September 13, 1977, Capp was still fighting off a deep depression when he sat down with his family for their customary evening meal. Dinner had always been family time in the Capp household, dating back to the time when his children were growing up and continuing to the present, when Cathie was the only one living in her parents’ house. The meals were no longer the loud, rambunctious family gatherings they had once been, when Capp would come home from the studio and regale everyone at the table with his up-to-the-minute plans for “Li’l Abner.” Now, the future of the strip was uncertain. Its circulation numbers were still dropping, and Capp, beaten down by emphysema so far that walking had become a chore, was seriously considering retirement. He’d always figured he would give up the strip at sixty-five, but that day had come and gone. Now, less than two weeks from his sixty-eighth birthday, he was rethinking his dedication to the strip.

  At one time, he had idealized his retirement years. He had hoped he might still be able to set matters right with Catherine, and that the two of them might finish their lives together in relative ease. This, he now realized, was not going to happen. They didn’t quarrel so much as they coexisted, and having their divorced, mentally unstable daughter Cathie living with them added to the strain. Cathie had been troubled for years, as far back as her adolescence, and she had reached a state where she needed people to keep an eye on her. She was still self-sufficient, but marginally so. She could drive, go shopping, and otherwise take care of herself; however, her psychological issues made her unable to hold on to a job. She was heavily medicated and, on some occasions, claimed to hear voices.

  After dinner with her parents, her boyfriend, and Julie, Cathie drove her boyfriend home, and Al and Catherine retired for the evening. The next morning when reporting to work, the Capps’ maid found Cathie slumped over at the wheel of her car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, the Volkswagen’s key in the ignition.

  The family would question whether she truly intended to commit suicide. This would not have been her first attempt, but in the past, whenever she attempted to end her life, someone had been around to rescue her. When her former husband, Michael Peirce, learned of her death, he wasn’t at all surprised. “She finally did it,” he said.

  Cathie had inherited her mother’s looks and her father’s rebellious disposition and artistic inclination. Sally Kuhn, who met Cathie in 1952, when both were ninth graders at the Beaver Country Day School, a private all-girls school in the upscale Boston suburb of Brookline, described Cathie as being “talented but not particularly disciplined,” interested in boys and getting her driver’s license as soon as she was old enough. Cathie’s closest friend and an everyday visitor at the Capp home, Sally lived two doors away from the Capps on Brattle Street. She spent a lot of time with Cathie in her room, which was always “messy,” with open dresser drawers spilling over with clothing—a sloppiness that irritated her father no end. “There were cashmere sweaters all over the place,” Kuhn said. Later, when Cathie began acting out, Sally wondered if this was a sign that she was “more disturbed than any of us knew.”

  “We considered ourselves Left Bank, bohemian, artistic,” she said. “Cathie always dressed with a style—but her own style.”

  Kuhn remembered an occasion when Capp took the two of them to a taping of his guest appearance on the Today show in New York. When host Dave Garroway spotted the three of them walking down the hall, he made a remark about Capp and his girls, drawing an irritated response. “They’re not a couple of girls,” Capp fired back. “This is my daughter and a friend.”

  Cathie never attended college, and Capp, who placed the highest value on education, finally ran out of patience with her lack of direction and sloppy demeanor. He wasn’t going to stand for her living a lazy existence and sponging off him. He threw her out of the house, and she took an apartment in Cambridge. Unhappy with the arrangement, Cathie asked Sally Kuhn to intercede on her behalf. Capp listened as Sally presented Cathie’s case, but he wasn’t backing down.

  “My daughter’s a pig and I won’t have her in the house,” he growled. He relented when Sally started to cry. “Don’t cry,” he told her. “I can’t stand it when women cry. I’ll take her back.”

  Cathie met and married Michael Peirce, the son of painter Waldo Peirce. Michael was a fashion photographer, and Cathie worried that she wasn’t as bone-thin as the models he shot. She dieted and, after failing to slim down to her satisfaction, began taking diet pills, which contributed to erratic behavior. Capp sank a substantial amount of money into finding her psychiatric treatment, and she was hospitalized for psychological observation, but nothing worked. Peirce eventually left her and they divorced, with Michael taking primary responsibility for their children, William and Gabrielle.

  Capp worried about how best to handle her, his thoughts influenced by his own struggles with depression. At first, before the problems became too great for her to handle, Capp paid for an apartment and offered her an allowance. He resented the sheer amount of money her day-to-day living expenses and medical bills were costing him and talked to Al Hochberg, his attorney, about cutting her paymen
ts and allowance, but he ultimately returned to his lifelong belief that he had a responsibility to see that her needs were met. He and Catherine, recognizing the severity of her “nervous difficulties,” as Capp described her condition, invited her to move in with them. “She is a silent, ghostly presence, heavily loaded with lithium, and pleasant,” Capp wrote about her.

  Neither Capp nor Catherine, paralyzed by shock in the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, could handle the disposal of Cathie’s remains, so their maid, Dicey, called a funeral parlor and had her body taken away. The graveyard funeral service was for family only.

  Tragedy struck again, before Capp had time to recover from the loss of his daughter, when he took an early-morning call informing him that Tammy Manning, his favorite grandchild, had been killed in an automobile accident. Tammy, Julie’s daughter, had been a rising star. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she had taken a job with a newspaper in Newark, New Jersey, and established herself as a top-flight reporter. She and another reporter were out on an assignment when the Toyota driven by Tammy’s co-worker was slammed into by a drunk driver running a red light. She was killed instantly. The accident occurred on November 24, just over two months after Cathie’s death.

  Capp would never recover from the loss.

  Capp found a reason to fight with almost everyone during the years of discontent near the end of his life. He could detect a slight in the most innocuous comment, a case of thievery in any discussion about money. He could not understand why an assistant couldn’t see that a pay reduction was a simple business decision and nothing personal, or that an employee had every right to inquire about why Capp was so slow in paying a debt owed. The slightest provocation sent Capp to the typewriter, where he’d pound out an angry letter to whoever he felt had offended him.

  Harvey Curtis, an employee for forty years, caught the full brunt of Capp’s anger—“you are a vicious, indecent, dishonorable ingrate, who, in the end, stabbed the best friend he ever had in the back”—but Bob Lubbers, Larry May, and Bill Gordon, a well-known inventor and psychologist who was Capp’s friend and neighbor and did occasional scripting work for him, also caught flak. Al Hochberg found himself mediating payment disputes.

  In a letter to Hochberg, Gordon summed up how difficult it was to work with a man weakened by such heavy medication that he had a hard time thinking straight. In the past, Gordon explained, he and Capp worked quickly; now it was taking nearly six hours to prepare him for an hour’s work.

  “It is extremely difficult to plan around his condition,” Gordon told Hochberg. “As often as not, by 11 his eyes begin to close and we have to come to a halt. Or he calls a few minutes before 10 to set a new time. Or he calls a few minutes before I leave to say that he just must go up and sleep for a while.”

  Hochberg was caught in the middle. He had encouraged Gordon to work for Capp, and now he was hearing from a disgruntled employee making perfect sense in his complaints.

  “Frankly, I am a little hurt by what I consider unfair treatment,” Gordon continued. “I am flabbergasted by his refusing to pay me for the last month but it may tell me something about the way Al is thinking.”

  Studio employees weren’t the only ones that Capp found too expensive for his bank account. The household help, including Dicey, a fixture in the house since Capp’s children were young, were suddenly under Capp’s scrutiny. They were too expensive, he felt; they weren’t pulling their weight. On several occasions, he considered cutting them loose, only to relent after considering it further.

  It was a familiar complaint, dating back to the formation of Capp Enterprises and his initial disputes with his brother Bence. Capp felt, with some justification, that others were being too loose with his money. He was the creative force behind the different enterprises, from the strip to the marketing, earning a small fortune, the man who worked and traveled and worried about all the projects connected to his name, yet others ripped through his money as if there were no end to it. His earnings had dropped off substantially in recent years, and Capp was concerned that he might not have enough left to remain comfortable in his advancing years and, after he died, take care of Catherine.

  He wasn’t about to watch it frittered away without raising some hell.

  The deaths of his daughter and granddaughter, coupled with his failing health and bouts of depression, wounded Capp beyond recovery. It was bad enough that he was spending almost all his time off his feet, often in a wheelchair; the decades of heavy smoking had destroyed his lungs to the extent that he could no longer take more than a few steps before being overcome by shortness of breath. He was having trouble with his wooden leg and was still racked by phantom pains in his missing limb. His medications left him dull and drained of energy, and almost unable to stay awake beyond midmorning.

  Capp’s mood swings intensified. He bounced back and forth between rage and depression. After spending a lifetime as a teetotaler, he began to drink, never in large amounts, but enough and often enough, when combined with his medications, to numb him even further.

  “Li’l Abner” had reached the end. The strip hadn’t been anywhere near approaching the standard Capp set in its early years; only occasional flashes of humor remained. The art, at one time as strong as any in comics, had slipped noticeably. Capp had fooled himself into believing that he could recover enough of his previous inspiration and energy to make the strip relevant again, but it didn’t happen. The number of subscribing newspapers, in the neighborhood of a thousand during the strip’s salad days, had dwindled to just a few hundred. Even the Boston Globe, Capp’s flagship newspaper, stopped carrying the strip.

  Rather than face further decline in the strip’s quality and more cancellations from subscribing papers, Capp announced that he was retiring the daily “Li’l Abner” strip effective November 5, 1977, with the final Sunday entry to run on November 13. No one would be taking over the feature, as often occurred when an artist retired, and there would be no fanfare at the end. He would simply conclude the current continuity and the proverbial stage would go dark after a forty-three-year run.

  Capp insisted that there was no direct correlation between the recent tragedies in his life and the ending of the strip. He’d reached his decision, he told People magazine, weeks before Cathie’s death.

  “I talked with my syndicate, my brother, my lawyer,” he explained. “I knew sooner or later I’d have to stop. I knew it was time. In a way, it’s a relief.”

  “Li’l Abner,” he admitted in interviews leading to the strip’s last day, had been fading for years—maybe as far back as 1973. He’d quit traveling during that period, and travel had always goosed his inspiration and ideas. He’d never been afraid of work, but “Li’l Abner” had become sheer labor, more job than joy.

  “I grew more and more tired of drawing the strip,” he said, “and the strip began to show it. So finally I said, ‘What the hell’ and quit.”

  Capp wondered if he shouldn’t have taken a hint from the strip’s declining circulation, but he hesitated to walk away from forty-three years of working on something so totally connected to his own identity. He’d been too proud and stubborn to acknowledge that he had no comebacks in him.

  “If you have any sense of humor about your strip, and I had a sense of humor about mine, you knew that for three or four years Abner was wrong,” he said. “Oh hell, it’s like a fighter retiring. I stayed on longer than I should have.”

  Capp’s announcement drew international attention. Newspapers and magazines printed articles tracing his long, successful career; television newscasts gave it respectful treatment. Fellow cartoonists weighed in on Capp’s importance.

  “He’s like a Dickens,” said Dik Browne, creator of “Hagar the Horrible,” drawing a comparison that undoubtedly pleased Capp. “He was ahead of his time. He forecast the age of irreverence, and he was a technically fabulous cartoonist.”

  In its waning years, the quality of “Li’l Abner” spiraled
downward. In this strip from 1976, Capp attempted to revive his once enormously popular shmoo as a winged creature. The art, probably ghosted by Bob Lubbers, little resembles Capp’s classic style and lettering. Even his trademark signature is unrecognizable.

  Charles Addams, whose New Yorker cartoons earned him a position among the greats, placed Capp’s importance in a historical perspective.

  “He’s created some characters that will go down in the history of our times,” he told the New York Times. “The names and general connotations have become a part of the language.”

  Capp was leaving characters who, over the years, had become as real to him as living people. For more than four decades, he’d let his mind wander through Dogpatch, Skonk Hollow, Lower Slobbovia, and all places in between; it was a good bet that he’d be wandering long after his final strip had been sent to the engraver.

  “I keep thinking of all kinds of things to do with Li’l Abner even now,” he stated after his announcement. “But he’s had the most fantastic run for 43 years. I think this is a decent way to end it all.”

  The demise of “Li’l Abner” left Capp in an unfamiliar position. He’d not only been working since he was in his early twenties; he’d been famous for the better part of a half century, a dominant presence in American popular culture. Less than a decade ago, he’d sparred with students on college campuses; now he was mostly imprisoned in a wheelchair, silent a good portion of the day, and lacking the audience that had boosted his sense of self-importance. His health had declined so sharply that he knew he didn’t have long to live.