by Tom De Haven
Throughout the 1970s, Superman and several of his equally stiff Super Friends showed up every Saturday morning in a series of lackluster Hanna-Barbera limited-animation cartoons (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)
For children born around the time of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival and the Manson murders, this was the imprinted Superman: the blue-haired, small-headed stiff guy on Super Friends who told everybody what to do in a pompous baritone (by then, Danny Dark had replaced Bud Collyer) but hit the ground like a felled ox the second some cackling villain produced a hunk of kryptonite ore, which seemed as plentiful as boulders in Maine.
Who do you like better, Superman or Batman?
What’re you, kidding me?
33
Most people I’ve mentioned it to have been surprised to hear there had once been a full-blown musical about Superman. A Broadway show about Superman? Are you sure? I’m sure, yeah, and it premiered at the Alvin Theatre in New York City on March 29, 1966. Those handful of people who vaguely remember hearing about It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman always “seem to recall” its being a major flop, something along the lines of The Moose Murders or Carrie. But it wasn’t. Most reviews were positive, Patricia Marand won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Lois Lane, and while the production ran only through the middle of the following summer—129 performances—it hardly ranks among notorious show business fiascos. I was seventeen, a junior in high school, when the show opened, and even though I lived just an hour and a half from midtown Manhattan, it never crossed my mind to go see it. That winter I was still playing Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited over and over and couldn’t imagine myself enjoying a musical, even it was about Superman.
Many years later, at the end of the 1980s, when I was a member of the BMI theater workshop in New York and drafting (floundering, trying to draft) a libretto (those things are hard!) with two songwriter friends of mine, somebody mentioned the Superman musical one evening and immediately somebody else started to sing:
Every man has a job to do and my job is doing good
Every night when the job is through, I fold my tights, proud
to know I’ve done all I could
It’s a satisfying feeling when you hang up your cape
to know you’ve avoided murder, larceny and rape
Every man has his job to do
(Well, back into the old Clark Kent disguise)
I’ll never stop doing good! (Adams, “Doing Good”)
After he’d gone through all of the verses, I asked the singer if he’d seen the original production; no, he said, but when he was a kid he’d gone to a revival in St. Louis in 1967 or ’68 (Bob Holiday, who’d played Superman on Broadway, reprised the role there) and grown up listening to the cast album, which his parents owned. I left the workshop that evening with the song lyrics rattling around in my head, although the tune had vanished utterly, my first clue why the show had played just five months in New York and then been generally forgotten.
The songwriting team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who’d been successful with Bye Bye Birdie in 1960 and the musical adaptation of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy in 1964, were looking for a next project when they asked the magazine writers David Newman and Robert Benton whether they had any interest in producing the book. And if so, did they have any good ideas? It was Newman’s wife, Leslie, who suggested Superman after picking up a bunch of Action Comics from their kid’s bedroom floor. Newman and Benton thought it an inspired recommendation—this was, after all, the Pop Art era of Warhol lithographs and Lichtenstein paintings—and so did Strouse and Adams. Although usually it had taken the composers at least two years to write a score, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman was finished in just thirteen months.
After listening half a dozen times to the original cast recording, available again on CD, I think maybe they should’ve taken those extra eleven months. A few of Strouse’s melodies are middling catchy, but most are shapeless and forgettable, the kitschy production numbers so dated you could frug to them. Adams’s lyrics are flat and thudding, syllables missing notes far more often than they hit them.
Directed by Harold Prince, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman at first enjoyed good box office, particularly at matinees, whose audiences were filled mostly with children. But after several weeks, writes Jake Rossen in Superman vs. Hollywood, “ticket sales slowed to an absolute crawl. … In all probability the matinees infected the show with the stink of juvenilia; adult theatergoers likely dismissed it as little more than a place to take listless kids on rainy afternoons” (47). At least until Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Disney organization colonized the street, audiences for musicals generally considered themselves a fairly sophisticated bunch. Superman was no Henry Higgins, Lois Lane no Dolly Levi—and besides, the competition on Broadway that season included Man of La Mancha, Cabaret, Sweet Charity, and Mame. The Man of Steel was no match for a deluded prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, a couple of party girls, and a wealthy bohemian with flair.
Bob Holiday belting out a tune by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams as he swoops across a Broadway stage in It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman, 1966 (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)
“We thought we had caught the crest of the Pop Art trend … but we were wrong,” Charles Strouse said many years later about the show. “Broadway audiences were not aware of the trend, and, as a matter of fact, Pop Art did not have the effect a lot of art critics thought it would have. At the time, everyone thought that it was such a breath of fresh air, but it became only a passing trend, and riding a trend can be a very dangerous thing. … Audiences took the story at face value and didn’t respond to it the way we thought they would” (quoted in Scivally, Superman on Film, 69).
It’s also likely that the success of Adam West’s Batman series, which by a fluke had premiered on ABC-TV only two months before the show’s opening, shortened Superman’s Broadway life-span. “Audiences,” writes Rossen, “may have considered it redundant to go pay for the same kind of camp attitude found on TV for free” (Superman vs. Hollywood, 48). As David Newman put it at the time in his postmortem, the show was killed by “capelash” (Scivally, Superman on Film, 69).
I don’t know about that. Maybe, but after reading the libretto, lyrics, and book, I can’t help thinking the root cause of the show’s failure boiled down to simple bad faith. Nobody involved seemed to have any real idea of who and what Superman is, or what makes him tick. What makes him work. What the fable is.
Newman and Benton’s book takes every opportunity to shift the focus away from Superman to the tiresomely stock character of gossip columnist Max Mencken (played on Broadway by the scene-stealing Jack Cassidy, the only undisputed “star” in the production) and a cornball villain named Dr. Abner Sedgewick, who seeks vengeance upon the world for not awarding him the Nobel Prize. (Why the whole world? Why not just Sweden?) The main plot, such as it is, revolves around Sedgewick’s scheme to destroy Superman’s fragile ego and self-esteem and break his heart by turning all of Metropolis against him—the wrongheaded assumption being that Superman does what he does because he needs to be loved.
But Superman does what he does because it’s what he likes to do. It’s a job he invented, a profession he made up. It has nothing to do with any ferocious need to be loved and worshiped as a celebrity. Superman “knows instinctively,” says Mark Waid, “that it is only when he puts his gifts to use that he truly feels alive and energized. Only by acting to his full potential … can he genuinely participate in the world around him. … When he lives as who he really is, in full authenticity to his nature and gifts, and then brings his distinctive strengths into the service of others, he takes his rightful place in the larger community, in which he now genuinely belongs and can feel fulfilled” (“The Real Truth,” 10).
What’s love got to do with it?
34
In the first Superman adventure that Siegel and Shuster presented to Vincent Sullivan during the early w
inter of 1938 for inclusion in Action Comics number 1, it was a single “passing motorist” (a grim, hook-nosed ringer for Dick Tracy in a fedora and trench coat) who risked life and limb to pull the extraterrestrial “sleeping babe” (sleeping? after that impact?) from the burning rocket ship, then delivered him to a nameless and nearby orphan asylum, where presumably he grew to adulthood. In that purest of origin stories, Superman the hero invented himself. No mention is made of anyone loving him or guiding him, attending to his social or moral instruction. Why does Clark Kent decide, upon reaching adulthood, to put on a tight-fitting caped costume and do good in the greater world? Because he wants to; because his benevolence and altruism are congenital, constitutional. (The debut storylines for both the daily and Sunday Superman newspaper strips that McClure launched and syndicated in 1939 and which Siegel scripted reiterate the single-motorist account.)
With National Comics’ publication of Superman number 1 in the summer of 1939, the origin was expanded and reimagined, and now it was an “elderly couple, the Kents” who find the infant swaddled inside of a small, safely landed rocket ship (no fire this next time). The craft resembles an old-fashioned cradle plonked down in the middle of a grassy meadow. The Kents turn the baby over to an orphanage, where he wreaks immediate havoc, so much so that when the Kents later return, wondering whether they might adopt him, the director of the place is only too glad to hand him over. (Siegel’s first, but probably unconscious, slap at institutional bureaucracy: you have in your care a baby that hangs from chandeliers and you don’t notify anyone?)
In the following panel (Joe Shuster’s drawing depicts the seated couple addressing Clark, who looks by then to be around seven or eight years old) a caption informs readers that “The love and guidance of his kindly foster parents was to become an important factor in the shaping of the boy’s future.” Mr. Kent (he wouldn’t be designated “Pa” or his missus as “Ma” for nearly another decade) rests a hand upon Clark’s shoulder and says, “This great strength of yours—you’ve got to hide it from people or they’ll be scared of you!” Which displays a pretty bleak notion of human nature he’s passing on to his son. Mrs. Kent (her name is Mary, we’re told, although Mr. Kent remains first-nameless) adds what will be Siegel’s only nod to the humanizing benefits of his hero’s having been raised in a good American home: “But when the proper time comes, you must use it to assist humanity.” Humanity consists of a grim and suspicious bunch of creatures, Clark, but spend your entire life helping them out anyway, why don’t you?
And that’s it for Siegel and Shuster’s take on family values. The rest of the first story in Superman number 1 is devoted to Clark’s discovery of his abilities as an adolescent and a teenager—leaping moderately tall buildings, lifting sedans, racing trains, breaking vaccination needles—and it’s interesting to notice that his early adventures occur in an urban milieu. Apparently these Kents, the ur-Kents—like the Siegels and the Shusters of Cleveland—are city dwellers. Not until the late 1940s would Superman’s heartland upbringing become central to the story line. By the close of the two-page origin, the gray-haired Kents have passed away; Clark is fully grown, and a caption explains that while their deaths “greatly grieved” the young man, they also “strengthened a determination that had been growing in his mind. Clark decided he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind. And so was created Superman, champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!”
Siegel and Shuster’s meaning seems clear: while the Kents were kindly and had obviously steeped Clark in their compassionate values, they were only “one factor” in his deciding how to comport himself as a grown man; their example only “strengthened” the idea that already “had been growing” in his mind. Consider the use of the past perfect tense there, and here too: “And so was created Superman … who had sworn to devote his existence to helping others in need” (my emphasis). Had sworn even before his foster parents passed away. (Jerry Siegel may not have been the most felicitous of prose writers, but the guy knew his English grammar.) The original Superman made his own choices; he invented himself. He was a creature of free will. That was the hero a million American kids seized upon as their avatar, their hero, in the final years of the 1930s.
Once the original Superman made his career decision, he never looked back; the Kents were not mentioned again in the stories that Siegel and his first ghostwriters turned out during the initial run of the series—nor were they referenced at all in the popular radio program: in the broadcast series’ peculiar spin on the origin, Superman left Krypton as a baby and arrived on Earth an adult with a deep baritone voice and a superb grasp of snappy American speech.
It fell to George Lowther, the program’s original announcer (and later its producer) to introduce and finesse the idea that Clark Kent became Superman primarily because of the moral instruction he received throughout childhood from his foster parents, a farming couple who embodied the ideal Jeffersonian rural life.25 In The Adventures of Superman, a children’s novel published in 1942 by Random House (with drawings and paintings provided by, or at least credited to, Joe Shuster), Lowther presents the Kents, Eben and Sarah, as the shapers of Clark/Superman’s altruism while also larding the story with overt New Testament elements: “Destiny perhaps played a part in directing the rocket to the Kent farm, for the Kents were childless and desired a child above anything else on earth. And here, like a gift from Heaven, was the infant Kal-el. The old couple took him into their home and raised him as their own” (24). Lowther also created a detail, a bit of business, that has carried across seven decades: the boy was named Clark because that was his foster mother’s family name.
It was Lowther, as well, who invented and first dramatized the now-famous deathbed scene between Clark and his father that has been recapitulated numerous times since in comic books, films, and television. As he lays dying, Eben, sounding more like a nineteenth-century man of the cloth than a Depression-era farmer, tells his son, “Y’re a—a modern miracle, that’s what ye be. ’Tis not for you nor me to question the ways of God. But these powers ye have, lad, and it rests with you whether ye’ll put them to good use or to bad! There’s great work to be done in this world, and you can do it. Ye must use these powers of yours to help all mankind. There are men in his world who prey on decent folk—thieves, murderers, criminals of every sort. Fight such men, son! Pit your miraculous powers against them! With you on the side of law and order, crime and oppression and injustice must perish in the end.”
By the time Lowther invented Eben Kent’s entreaty that Superman should always act on the “side of law and order,” over in the comic books, the character’s first years of vigilantism already had drawn to a close, and when the character’s origin was retold there again in 1948 (Superman number 53, script by Bill Finger), his paralegal mission was once again embedded in his foster father’s deathbed soliloquy: “There are evil men in this world … criminals and outlaws who prey on decent folk. You must fight them … in cooperation with the law!”26
In 1961, when DC Comics decided it was time again to trot out and present their flagship hero’s origin for yet another generation of readers, Otto Binder, scripting “The Story of Superman’s Life” (Superman number 146), virtually paraphrased Lowther’s deathbed scene: “No one on earth has your amazing super-powers. And you must always use them to do good! You must uphold law and order, and those in need, and save lives.” Two years later, Leo Dorfman (in “The Last Days of Ma and Pa Kent,” Superman number 161) did his own deathbed scene, again with identical stress: “You must always use your super-powers to do good … uphold law and order.”
By then, and ever since, Clark Kent becomes Superman principally because he was instilled with the viewpoints of plain American heartlanders who stressed the value of legal authority. He has no choice but to be good and to do good, and while it surely makes him a hero, it does strip away the majesty of self-invention, and goes against
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s initial creative impulse: that Superman does what he does because he chooses to; that his greatness is a matter of will rather than of expectation and a promise.
In the spring of 2008 (Action Comics number 870), Jonathan Kent, who’d been alive again in the comic book series since 1986, father was slippery and ever-changing, until 1971, when he was definitely and forever after referred to as Jonathan. The same flip-flopping (sloppy?) indecision caused Clark’s adoptive mother to be called variously Mary, Sarah, and Marthe, till she was officially named Martha.
died of a heart attack in his wife’s arms, this latest time without having imparted to his son, who wasn’t even present, the traditional urgent fatherly advice.27 But because of how it’s all been played in Superman comics for the past twenty-odd years, no such scene seemed any longer necessary. Current canon has had it that Clark Kent’s foster parents raised him through childhood and adolescence and then remained alive and healthy (usually) well into his adulthood and deep into Superman’s career. This time, lucky guy, Clark got the full-blown all-American family package deal, the whole megillah.
Still, I think I miss the passing motorist.
35
By 1970 Superman: The Property was in bad shape. He’d been around for more than three decades, and while he was, along with Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, Mickey Mouse, and Tarzan, still one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, his popularity was in a steady decline. These were the Superman Doldrums. He continued to appear month after month in devitalized comic books and on Saturday mornings in cheesy half-watched television cartoons. Fans who now called practically all of the shots in mainstream comic books preferred Batman, no contest, and compared to Marvel’s roster of hipster heroes like Spider-Man, X-Men, and Dr. Strange, the Man of Steel seemed dull-normal, middle-aged. Establishment. Strange visitor from another time and nation.