Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

  After Weisinger retired, the separate titles in his once-mighty Superman domain were dealt out among several DC editors. Even the two major titles, Action and Superman, were split up, Action going to Murray Boltinoff and Superman to Julius Schwartz, the man always credited with (and who always took the credit for) reintroducing superheroes to mainstream comic books (thus inaugurating the “Silver Age” of comic books) when he successfully brought back the Flash in 1956. Schwartz followed that up with reintroductions of Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman, and then, in 1960, he launched the Justice League of America, a superhero club that supposedly inspired Stan Lee to create the Fantastic Four.

  Before Schwartz reinvented the Flash, the only regularly issued superhero comic books in the United States were published by DC and showcased the three major costumed characters who’d survived the industry implosion of the late 1940s: Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Following the adoption of the Comics Code, most comics produced and sold through the middle 1950s consisted of westerns and funny animals, teen comedies and romance.

  Schwartz had argued that superheroes could make a successful comeback, could even become the dominant genre again, if— if—they returned fitted to new times, and were styled for a transitioning America only just learning how to compartmentalize its Cold War dreads and yield to the (shallow but so what?) optimism of novelty and novelties: drive-in movies, calypso music, rock and roll, the cha-cha, hula hoops, yo-yos and Silly Putty, split-level (or “raised ranch”) houses, and the “open-floor” plans of Levittown starters.

  While he recycled the names of the primitive Golden Age heroes (might as well; the company already owned the copyrights and trademarks), Schwartz and his writers and artists created new origin stories, new personalities, new environments for their new superhero comic books. Gone were the bumbling proletarian and glib millionaire alter egos of yesteryear; in their place were sophisticated urban bachelors in sport jackets, slacks, and loafers, with the kinds of professional careers likely to appeal to middle-class white kids: police chemist, test pilot, university researcher, museum curator. And they were guys with girlfriends. Hawkman was even married, to a leggy redhead. In the new day of Peyton Place, Douglas Sirk movies, and Playboy magazine, even super-heroes liked girls. Schwartz insisted that the outdated “action costumes” of the 1940s — garish, baggy, booted, and usually encumbered by utility belts—be replaced by snazzy new skintight bodysuits. And with no capes. Why would anyone fighting crime in 1956 need four yards of fabric hanging from his neck?

  Schwartz developed a stable of strong writers and artists, and a reputation for putting out DC’s slickest superhero comics—

  Flash and Green Lantern offered plots that turned on physics and astronomy (scientific footnotes were a feature of Schwartz’s books)—and for a bright graphic look that seemed contemporary and polished; the figures were lean and balletic, landscapes and buildings resembled stylized architectural drawings.

  Told in 1970 that he had to take on the stodgy Superman title after Weisinger left, Schwartz wasn’t thrilled.

  I really didn’t want to do [it]. … So I said I would … if I could make changes. The way Mort did Superman, he could balance the earth on one finger. But when I did Superman, he would have to use both hands to hold up the earth. I said, “I want to get rid of all the Kryptonite. I want to get rid of all the robots that are used to get him out of situations. And I’m sick and tired of that stupid suit Clark Kent wears all the time. I want to give him more up-to-date clothes. And maybe the most important thing I want to do is take him out of the Daily Planet and put him into television.” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 132)

  As soon as DC’s new editorial director Carmine Infantino gave him the go-ahead, Schwartz invited Dennis O’Neil to join him in the Superman revamp. O’Neil had started writing for the company in 1968. At thirty-one he was significantly older and more worldly—he’d served in the navy, worked as a journalist— than most of the boomer fanboys entering the field during those years. Although O’Neil was far from being countercultural, the first time he had shown up at DC not wearing a coat and tie he’d found himself berated as a hippie. At DC cultural norms had frozen somewhere around 1957. The editors still dressed like bankers and ad men and played a few hands of gin rummy after work.

  Despite his long hair, T-shirts, and jeans, O’Neil established himself as a professional, contributing scripts to titles edited by Schultz including Detective Comics (featuring Batman), the Justice League of America, and, most famously, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, in which for the first time, real-world tumults of the late sixties—racism, war, environmental degradation, drug addiction—invaded the heretofore sunny world of DC’s blinkered super-characters.

  O’Neil, like Schwartz, wasn’t keen on doing Superman, considering him “a chummy, white-bready sort of fellow toting a complicated biography, a large extended family and godlike powers whose activities had become nearly as predictable as Dag-wood Bumstead’s.” Both he and Schwartz agreed the first thing to be done was to ratchet down the powers. “We weren’t cruel revampers,” says O’Neil. “We’d let him keep the X-ray and telescopic vision and much of the invulnerability—he needn’t sweat the exploding shells that would have done him in back in the ’30s — and we were willing to concede the flying, but the godlike stuff had to go. Stars were therefore to be considered safe from Superman’s breath. And while we were at it, we’d give his personality a good decloying, deep-six the white bread” (“Man of Steel,” 53).

  In late 1970, with issue 233 of Superman and the story entitled “Superman Breaks Loose,” Schwartz and O’Neil’s revisionism kicked in: not only is all of the kryptonite on Earth destroyed by a freakish laboratory experiment, but soon afterward Superman realizes that a secondary effect is a steady decrease in his abilities. According to O’Neil, the original intent was to scale them back “about to what Jerry and Joe started with in 1938. Actually, we never got that far back” (54). In the same issue, the new owner of the Daily Planet, an ethically sketchy media mogul named Morgan Edge, transfers Clark Kent from the newsroom to the anchor desk at WGBS-TV.

  Big changes, but the only one that caught the attention of American media was Clark Kent’s sharp new wardrobe. Gone was the thirty-year-old blue suit, replaced by a wide-lapelled tan one, dark blue striped shirt, white tie—and stylish (for the time: clear plastic frames) eyeglasses. GQ was impressed enough with the makeover to publish a feature about it.

  Nobody seemed particularly interested in Schwartz’s “new” Superman, and that even went for his colleagues editing the other titles making up the Superman line. In those comic books, kryptonite was still lethal and plentiful, Superman could still push around planets, and Clark Kent still reported for work every morning at the Daily Planet—where else would he go? After just thirteen issues writing Superman, O’Neil quit. “I was spending up to three weeks on … scripts and not enjoying the work. By contrast, Batman scripts took three days and were often fun” (55).

  By 1973 all of the tired Weisinger conventions—robots, Kryptonian immigrants, and lots of kryptonite, the old clichés that had stayed in service over at Action, World’s Finest, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Adventure Comics, and Superboy—had been absorbed back into the flagship Superman title.

  And the Doldrums continued.

  36

  Although Jerry Siegel left New York City in defeat, middle-aged bitter, he didn’t abandon his crusade after settling his family in southern California and taking a clerk-typist’s job. If anything, he felt more injured, more victimized, more committed to redress. But as his legal options dwindled—in the early 1970s, a federal court dismissed yet another appeal—the years of frustration and humbled pride took their toll. He suffered a serious heart attack. He turned sixty and looked ten years older. Like some existential howling man, he was filled by a righteous, honed, ferocious anger. He’d never give up, never!

  In April 1975 he was making plans to bring his case to the Supreme Court when his lawyer c
alled to say that Jay Emmett, executive vice president of Warner Communications, wanted to make peace—but only if Jerry for once and for all would lay the hell off. Siegel was understandably suspicious. After all, Emmett was the nephew of Jack Liebowitz, Enemy Liebowitz. Siegel and Shuster weren’t being offered anything specific, mind you, but Emmett promised that once Jerry dropped all legal claims against DC and Warner and agreed to quit seeking legal ownership of Superman, the company would offer an annual payment to each of them. Siegel said all right, let’s hear the actual offer. His lawyer said he’d convey the message. Just sit tight.

  He did. For six months he sat tight. But Siegel never heard back from Jay Emmett. However, during that time he did hear about the multimillion-dollar Superman movie being developed by Ilya and Alexander Salkind, and also about the $350,000 that Mario Puzo would be paid to write the screenplay. Those bastards! That’s why Jay Emmett had called. Warner just wanted to make sure Siegel didn’t throw any conniptions that could damage the movie’s luster; the company didn’t want some crazy old coot rending his garments in public. Screwed again!

  By the time Jerry Siegel got drift of the Superman movie, the project had been in the works for a while. The Salkinds, who had successfully produced Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, contacted Warner in late 1973 about acquiring the rights. It’ll give you some idea of how little the company held their flagship character in esteem by then when you hear the deal: the Salkinds picked up movie rights for twenty years at a cost of barely six million dollars, less than a million of which they had to pay in cash up front. Although by then a few superheroes—Batman, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk—had been translated successfully to television, it seemed ridiculous to Warner that anyone would make a movie with an A-picture budget about a forty-year-old has-been comic book hero.

  But the Salkinds weren’t stupid; they may have been sharks (virtually everyone who ever worked with them ended up suing them), but they weren’t stupid, and they saw where American movies were heading. The Vietnam-and-Watergate period of dark “socially relevant” films, films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Carnal Knowledge, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, showed signs of giving way to a new era of escapist films. Movies. Escapist movies. The comforting historical amnesia of Murder on the Orient Express, the special-effects glamour of Star Wars, the amusement-park simulation of Jaws. Less realism, less nihilism, fewer feel-bad pictures like Serpico, Klute, and Mean Streets. Hollywood brats, the film-school whiz kids Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were poised to re-create American movies into spectacles, seasonal “blockbusters” that eliminated pesky distinctions between children’s movies and movies made for adults.

  What the Salkinds seemed to know was that Hollywood movies were tending away from being “serious” things, leaning more and more toward becoming events—long before they were even filmed, if possible. Warner may have thought them crazy for being interested in Superman (the company wouldn’t even commit to distributing the movie, or put any money into the production), but it was impressed by the producers’ knack for public relations. The Salkinds announced that Superman: The Movie would be budgeted at an incredible (for the time) twenty million dollars; ads in Variety, blimps at Cannes, everything big, huge— including the talent. Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman. An A-list director, Richard Donner. And a big-name writer, Mario Puzo, already famous for The Godfather, who’d earned summer-movie cred for scripting the atrocious but profitable Earthquake.

  The talk—the buzz—preceded actual production by a couple of years, and kept getting louder.

  Till finally it drove Jerry Siegel right over the edge.

  In October 1975 he sat down at his old typewriter and composed a screed of malice and grief, a cry for recognition and justice, and a thundering imprecation: “I, Jerry Siegel,” it began, “the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie! I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.”

  It all gushed out, especially Siegel’s intestinal hatred for Jack Liebowitz, the “back-stabber” and “cheapskate” who “killed my days, murdered my nights, choked my happiness, strangled my career.” Calling himself and Joe Shuster “victims of a monstrous injustice … doubledealing … chicanery,” Siegel pleaded to the world to intercede and undo the wrongs that had destroyed him. “Joe and I suffer … we think of little else, and it makes us miserable to see how our families suffer, too” (Siegel, “Superman’s Originator”).

  Although full of quoted material, mostly from letters of Liebowitz’s dating back to the original submission of Superman to Action Comics in 1938 and ’39, Jerry’s cri de coeur was full of factual errors and distortions, misrecollections. It was, for example, never the case that “in the first year of SUPERMAN’S publication, when SUPERMAN earned a fortune for its publishers and became a smash hit, Joe and I earned less than $15.00 a week apiece for SUPERMAN. We were paid $10.00 per comic book page. That was $5 per page apiece to Joe and me.” Mmmm, not quite.

  After equating himself and Joe to “Oliver Twist asking for more porridge,” Siegel wrote, “We have been victimized by evil men and a selfish, evil company which callously ruined us and appears to be willing to abandon us in our old age, though our creation … has made and continues to make millions for them.”

  There was good and there was evil, there was right and there was wrong. It was simple. And evil, like Lex Luthor operating the controls of a giant plunder machine, had crushed him and Joe. “You hear a great deal about The American Dream. But SUPERMAN, who in the comics and films fights for ‘truth, justice and the American Way,’ has for Joe and me become An American Nightmare. … I can’t flex super-human muscles and rip apart the massive buildings in which these greedy people count the immense profits from the misery they have inflicted on Joe and me and our families. I wish I could.”

  The original of that thing belongs in the Smithsonian.

  Jerry Siegel’s anguish is frightening and heartbreaking (yes, a little embarrassing too; you’re embarrassed for him), and while it’s easy to imagine the expression on his face as he banged out the words, sentences, paragraphs, it’s impossible not to see it in the comic book idiom: sweat drops flying, grimace doubling the width of his mouth, tongue stretched out, radiating quiver lines. A miracle he didn’t suffer a second heart attack at the keyboard.

  After spewing, Siegel ran off a thousand copies of the press releases cum manifesto cum malediction. According to Gerard Jones, he “mailed them to every national news program, every big-city newspaper, every LA-area media outlet from the Times down to weekly giveaways.” Then he sat back and waited for calls from reporters. “The calls,” writes Jones, “didn’t come” (Men of Tomorrow, 317).

  37

  In 1978 I was a magazine staff writer working on East 42nd Street in New York City, directly opposite the Daily News building, which became the Daily Planet building that July during production of the first Superman movie. My editor had an office with a great view, and at some point every day the two of us would stand at the window with binoculars, trying to pick out Christopher Reeve in the crowd. Never could. We saw a lot of production people standing around, though, or suddenly scrambling, long vans and quilted aluminum trailers parked at the curb, cameras, cables, and other equipment, onlookers contained behind barricades, but no Superman. The cast and crew had flown over from London to shoot in Manhattan for several weeks before moving on to Canada. The movie had been shooting since March.

  Like everybody else, I knew about the Superman movie because of all the news stories and gossip columns about costly delays and bad blood between the director and the producers, Richard Donner and the Salkinds. The budget had ballooned from twenty million dollars to more than fifty million, with still no end of shooting near. I knew—who didn’t? — about Marlon Brando’s four million-dollar salary, which he was paid for less than two weeks of actual work, and ab
out the protracted Superman star search that had considered everybody from Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman to Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but had ended with the selection of an obscure but handsome six-foot-four off-Broadway actor and soap opera alum.

  There’d been pictures of Christopher Reeve in newspapers and magazines, many showing him in the famous red, blue, and yellow Superman costume, and even though nobody knew whether he would be any good in the part, he looked perfect. He was not at all like the barrel-chested Superman of the 1950s television series, or the linebacker Superman of recent cartoons and comic books, but everybody, including myself, already seemed to agree that if there really were a Superman, he’d look exactly like Christopher Reeve.

  When Superman: The Movie opened the following December, everybody finally got to see just how really good Reeve was in the part—boyish and confident, graceful and witty, “true to Jerry and Joe’s flamboyant, sanguine, self-satisfied hero of the early Forties,” as Gerard Jones puts it (Men of Tomorrow, 325). More than anything else, he played Superman as a regular guy, smart and sincere, who loved what he did, was glad to be alive, and delighted in his gifts; he was amused and amazed, intoxicated by them, but lacked utterly in hubris. He was all four Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. A smidgen self-satisfied, but that was okay, who wouldn’t be, just a little?

  You ask me, it was Reeve’s Superman that rescued the character from the irrelevance of so many other once-major fictional heroes. It’s a screen performance perfectly suited to its historical, its generational moment—definitive 1970s male American movie acting, the way Jack Nicholson’s achievement is in Chinatown, or Al Pacino’s in The Godfather, but played with optimism dominant, instead of fatalism and tragedy. There weren’t supposed to be selfless and unflawed heroes, not anymore, yet here’s one who can say things like “We’re all in this together” and leave an audience, then and now, disinclined to titter. He’s great in the part.