Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  Dempsey chatted with me while I checked my trench coat and snap-brim, then ushered me into the spacious dining room with its linen-covered tables and over to the prime real estate of a red-leather booth underneath the colorful if fading James Montgomery Flagg mural of my host knocking out Jess Willard in 1919.

  The room wasn’t full yet—it was noon now and the place had just opened—but other booths were already taken by sports writers, managers and fighters who were enjoying Dempsey’s standard boxing-pro discount, a shrewd move that kept the restaurant brimming with gawking tourists. The ventilation was good in there, otherwise all those cigarettes and cigars would have created a blue-gray fog.

  “By yourself today, pally?” Dempsey asked, raising thick fingers to summon me a waiter.

  “No,” I said. “Sam Fizer’s meeting me.”

  “We got an original page from Mug O’Malley framed in the bar, y’know,” he said with a grin and nod in that direction. “From the first time he stuck me in the strip.”

  Fizer made a point of putting real boxers and boxing-world celebrities into Mug O’Malley.

  “I’m sure that pleases Sam,” I said.

  “Oh, I know it does. He always mentions it. . . . Bring Mr. Starr a Coca-Cola with a twist of lime, on ice.” He was talking to a gray-haired red-vested waiter now.

  I had to wonder if this was Dempsey’s way of telling me that just because he’d called me “pally,” he nonetheless remembered my name; hell, he even knew I was permanently on the wagon and addicted to the drink I liked to refer to as rum and Coke without the rum.

  Dempsey wandered off and I considered the menu, which the waiter had dropped off before doing his boss’s bidding. The shades of red cover depicted my host thirty years ago, in trunks, poised to punch, next to an elaborate JD monogram.

  Steaks were good here, but not as good as the Strip Joint, and soon I had it narrowed down to the fish cakes with spaghetti at a buck or the pricier Jersey pork chop with sweet potato for a buck fifty. I was leaning toward the fish, not because of the half-dollar at stake, but out of a weird sense of guilt. I was Jewish but not Jewish enough to snub pork; the major hadn’t practiced Judaism and out of respect to the old man, I worshipped at the same altar as he did, church of the First National Bank.

  Still, I always felt funny about eating pork in front of a real Jew like Sam Fizer. Almost. . . guilty.

  Maybe I was a Jew at that.

  Fizer had grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, his father a successful local businessman, a dry cleaner; an older and younger brother went into the family business, but the closest aspiring cartoonist Sam came was designing some signs and posters for the store. Right out of high school he’d joined the army to do his bit in the Great War, but the armistice was signed soon after and he’d strictly served stateside. He’d got work locally doing editorial and sports cartoons. Then in the early ’20s, now a sportswriter, he met a dumb, good-natured prizefighter and got the idea for Mug O’Malley.

  Over a several-year period, the comic strip samples Fizer sent around to all the top syndicates were rejected. He’d gone in person to the fledgling Starr Syndicate and pitched Mug to the major, who did not buy the strip but was impressed by Fizer’s enthusiasm and salesmanship, and sent him out on the road selling other features. At the same time, Fizer—without the major’s knowledge, much less blessing—offered potential clients Mug O’Malley. Fizer sold twenty papers in three weeks, and the major signed Sam and his strip, which became Starr’s first hit property.

  So I’d known Fizer a long time, since I was a kid hanging around the major’s offices. My childhood take on Fizer was that he was smart and energetic and a force of nature. As I got older, I came to see him as a pushy, conceited loudmouth. That he was heavily art-assisted was well known in the comics world, and his prickly insecurity about his lack of any real artistic ability was legend. He tried to offset his heavy use of assistants by insisting only Sam Fizer himself could pencil and ink the faces of the main characters.

  When I was in college, I had a conversation with the major about Fizer, who I’d come to cheerfully, patronizingly despise, having encountered him at various nightclubs around town, the rotund cartoonist inevitably accompanied by some bosomy showgirl towering over him.

  “Starr Syndicate owns Mug O’Malley, right?” I said.

  “Right,” the major said in his boomy baritone.

  “And his assistants do all the drawing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So why not can Fizer, and hire the assistants, for less dough?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Story strips aren’t about art.”

  “Are you kidding, Major? What do you call Terry and the Pirates or Prince Valiant?”

  “Good stories. You can always find somebody who can draw, son. Finding a top writer, like Fizer? That’s where the magic is.”

  “Well, it is a good strip. Corny, but. . . the stories do keep you reading.”

  “Right. And Fizer writes them all himself. The only person who ever ghosted a Mug O’Malley script was Hal Rapp, and after the fiasco that ensued from that, Fizer never let anybody else touch the scriptwriting again. Say what you will about that fat little bundle of neuroses, Sam Fizer is a first-rate storyteller, as close to Damon Runyon as the funny pages have ever come.”

  Now that I’d been in the syndicate business some years myself, I’d come to appreciate Fizer’s work. Mug was a sweet, good-natured palooka, but his manager Louie was a Broadway cigar-chomping wise guy. The dialogue was snappy, the plots involving, the cliff hangers masterful.

  And Fizer’s prizefight sequences were particularly compelling, championship bouts that lasted for week upon exciting week, the exchange of blows and the literal ups and downs of a heavyweight fight parceled out in little four-panel daily doses, with narration echoing the way radio sportscasters reported fights on the air.

  I was asking for a second Coke when Dempsey came over with Sam Fizer himself in tow. The little guy was beaming, shooting waves and nods to the boxing pros in the booths, damn near strutting.

  I say little, by which I mean how many hands high Fizer was, which wasn’t many. If he was taller than five-four, I’d be flabbergasted, though he was about half again as wide, one of those round guys who somehow didn’t look fat, the way a beach ball doesn’t look fat—just round. Plus, he was a dapper gargoyle, his suit a yellow herringbone and his tie striped gold and white and yellow, his shirt a paler yellow; his brown Florsheims were polished like mirrors.

  Fizer, like a lot of cartoonists, had a sort of caricature face— under suspiciously black, slicked back, receding hair, a somewhat Neanderthal brow with very dark India-ink slashes of eyebrow lurked over tiny dark eyes, though his nose was small and even more suspicious than his hair color, so well carved was it. His lips were small for his face but full, and at repose formed a kind of kiss. His chipmunk cheeks and Kirk Douglas dimpled chin were blue with five-o’clock shadow (and it wasn’t even one o’clock).

  Dempsey brought the radiant Fizer over, guiding him with a big hand on a shoulder that hadn’t required the champ to lift that hand much at all to reach its destination.

  “Here ya go, pally,” Dempsey said to Fizer, and nodded to the booth where I was already seated.

  Then Dempsey grinned and nodded and strode off, while Fizer settled into the padded booth like a kid finding just the right spot on Santa’s lap. Poor Santa. The cartoonist’s eyes sparkled as he looked around the now well-filled restaurant, checking to see if people had been watching.

  “Well, kiddo,” Fizer said, skipping hello, his voice as high-pitched as Dempsey’s if not so squeaky, “what do you think of that? Did you see the way the champ himself walked me over here?”

  The way he’d walked me and half the tourists in town to their seats.

  “Yeah, Sam,” I said, “impressive,” and smiled, then sipped my Coke, wondering if the time to fall off the wagon hadn’t just arrived.


  He frowned, the thick black brows meeting, and shook a fat little finger at me. “You should keep that in mind, kiddo.”

  “Keep what in mind, Sam?”

  “Respect. The kind of respect Sam Fizer’s held in. Which makes a stark contrast, doesn’t it?”

  “Stark contrast to what, Sam?”

  “The way you and your stepmother treat me. Most people know the Golden Goose deserves a pillow to sit on, not a kick in the keister.”

  I held up one hand like I was swearing in at court. “Come on, Sam. You know Maggie thinks the world of you. Me, too. Mug is still our top adventure strip.”

  “I’m glad you remember. . . . Waiter! Waiter!”

  Fizer ordered the gefilte fish with boiled potato and mashed beets (buck fifty), despite which I damn near ordered the pork chop anyway; but then I remembered pork chops were hillbilly Tall Paul’s favorite food, and not wanting to hit a sore spot, stuck with the fish cakes.

  Fizer had a cocktail, a Rob Roy, as we waited. He was actually in a pretty good mood, smiling most of the time, big, white fake choppers gleaming in the midst of all that five-o’clock shadow. And he began with a concession of sorts.

  “Look, kiddo,” he said, and shrugged, and smiled like an understanding uncle, “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know why you and Maggie have been ducking me for the past few months.”

  “We haven’t been,” I said.

  We really hadn’t. Not that we’d been seeking him out. Day-today editorial contact with talent like Fizer, as pertained to the strip itself (deadlines, minor rewrite requests, art corrections, et cetera), was neither my bailiwick nor Maggie’s.

  He waved that off, generously. “I understand, kiddo, I really do. You’re embarrassed, Maggie is embarrassed, and rightfully so.”

  I said nothing, recognizing the words as English but not being able to make them add up to anything.

  When he frowned, the dark little eyes disappeared under the caveman brow. “Maggie taking a role in that ingrate’s so-called musical comedy . . .”

  Now I got it. That “ingrate” was Hal Rapp, the former Fizer assistant who had been so bold as to become a success himself. Fizer rarely referred to Rapp by name.

  “. . . she was tempted, and anybody can be tempted, right, kiddo? Let’s face it, Maggie’s getting on in years, after all. She’s not the young sweetie pie anymore who can go out on a stage and get away with peeling off her knickers for applause.”

  I was so glad Maggie wasn’t here.

  He continued: “If she wants to get back on the stage at her age . . . and don’t get me wrong, she’s very nicely preserved . . . I can see where she’s coming from. She can’t afford to wait around forever for the perfect part to come along. So she’s taken on a role in the ingrate’s play, more power to her. Tell her Sam says mazel tov, and we’ll let it go at that.”

  “Swell,” I said.

  The heavy beard made his face look dirty. “You do know my wife is in that stupid production, too?”

  I did know—I’d never met Fizer’s wife, a beautiful showgirl turned actress named Misty Winters, but anybody who followed the Broadway columns knew she’d bucked her husband to take the part of Bathless Bessie. And of course I’d heard all kinds of inside dope on the subject from Maggie.

  Also I knew that Fizer had vacated their town house to move his studio and living quarters to a residential suite at the Waldorf Towers, uncomfortably close to his rival, Rapp.

  “I thought she was your ex-wife,” I said.

  “No. We’re just separated. Estranged, as they say. Just a little bump in the road. I love the child. Talented girl, you know. But it was an evil thing for that ingrate to do, even for him.”

  “Evil?”

  His chuckle was mirthless. “Don’t be naive, kiddo. You don’t think Misty would have been cast in that role—a speaking role, a singing role, too. . . . I mean, as I say, I love the child, but she was just a Copa girl when I found her, just so much window dressing.”

  What happened to “talented girl,” I wondered?

  He almost answered my unspoken question: “Not that she doesn’t deserve a break, I mean, Broadway is tough, you need more than ability, you need luck and connections.”

  “And Hal Rapp was a sort of connection.”

  “Now you get it. Now you see. He had the director hire Misty just to rub my face in it. The ingrate thought it would anger me, that it would drive me crazy! Doesn’t seem to dawn on him that Sam Fizer’s a bigger man than that.”

  “So . . . Misty has your blessing, like Maggie does?”

  The tiny eyes grew large. “No! My wife should know better than to play into the ingrate’s hands.”

  “This isn’t. . . why you’re separated, is it, Sam?”

  He twitched something that was neither smile nor frown. “She’s angry with me because . . . because she knows I’ve been contemplating a lawsuit to halt the production.”

  This was news. “Really? You could stop Tall Paul?”

  “That’s right, kiddo.” He grinned like a maharajah surveying his harem. “Wouldn’t that frost my former assistant’s shriveled matzohs, if I got an injunction slapped on his precious production?”

  “On what grounds?”

  His eyes flared; so did the well-carved nostrils. “The same grounds as always: plagiarism.”

  Oh God, I thought. He’s not singing that old song. . . .

  Fizer leaned forward, his expression that of a bulldog sniffing a hydrant. “You know who really created those hillbilly characters? Sam Fizer! In Mug O’Malley, a good year before that ingrate’s ‘new’ strip appeared!”

  I managed not to sigh. “I thought this had been resolved. . . .”

  “I’ve spoken with lawyers over the years. And I could have filed suit any number of times . . . but as you know, ultimately, I’ve tried to be magnanimous about it. Somebody in my position always has little people trying to take advantage.”

  “But now that Rapp’s insulted you by hiring your wife, knowing that he’d drive a wedge between you two, enough’s enough?”

  “No!” A pudgy hand pushed the air. “No, kiddo, that’s not it at all. It’s just a matter of what’s right.”

  He paused to arrange his features in an approximation of concern for someone other than himself.

  He continued: “You should probably warn Maggie that she ought not get her hopes up, about that musical ever opening at all on the Great White Way. Hate to disappoint her, and I hate to disappoint little Misty; but the day of reckoning will soon come for the smug son of a bitch who has made a fortune off of my characters, my ideas. . . .”

  When Rapp had been Fizer’s assistant on Mug O’Malley, in 1933, a story line about comic hillbillies had appeared—Mug and his manager Louie Welch had been traveling in the Ozarks when their car broke down, and they found themselves among a backwoods clan including a strapping lad called Little Luke. Luke had diminutive parents (Mam and Pap) and a curvy girlfriend called Sweetwater Sal and, as Fizer had frequently pointed out, the whole setup mirrored what would become Rapp’s Tall Paul.

  Fizer had pissed and moaned in public from the first week Tall Paul appeared nationally in a handful of papers; actually, his howls of indignation had probably helped inadvertently publicize the new strip.

  And Rapp, when interviewed in 1934, took the position that he would take throughout the coming years: yes, the Little Luke sequence in Mug O’Malley was a trial run for Tall Paul—why shouldn’t it be? Rapp insisted he’d written and drawn the continuity in question, ghosting for Fizer, who’d been off vacationing on the Riviera.

  Since Fizer was legendarily touchy about his artistic limitations, and that his reputation as a cartoonist was largely based on the talents of his assistants, Rapp’s words were salt in a very raw wound.

  Fizer had indeed taken his case to a succession of lawyers over the years, and—as our luncheon conversation indicated—was still seeking redress, twenty years later. Sam insisted he’d written the Li
ttle Luke continuity, and done all the inked drawings and, anyway, the copyright was in his name and Rapp had been in his employ.

  Still, the character names were different in Tall Paul, and comic hillbillies were blossoming all over the popular culture in the early ’30s—on radio and in the movies and even the comics: cartoonist Billy De Beck’s Snuffy Smith character was already a staple in the Barney Google strip when the Little Luke story appeared in Fizer’s boxing feature.

  “Do you know what the ingrate did last year?” Fizer asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “He wrote a so-called memoir about me for the Atlantic monthly! ‘My Year Chained in the Monster’s Cave,’ he called it. I was the monster! Sam Fizer, who only discovered the ingrate. Have you ever heard the story, kiddo?”

  I had, but didn’t bother to say so.

  “It was in Central Park South. I was on my way to my studio, sitting in the back of the Caddy, when I saw this creature limping along, with rolled-up bristol boards under his arm. I knew he was a cartoonist, and from his clothes I could see he was struggling. My heart went out to this young man, so I told the driver to pull over and said to the boy, ‘Are those original cartoons under your arm?’ And he said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And I said, ‘Are you any good?’ And he said, ‘I was in the Associated Press stable, awhile, sir.’ And I said, ‘Want a crack at being my assistant? I’m Sam Fizer!’ You should have seen his face light up! This was the depth of the Depression, remember. I paid him twenty-two dollars a week at first, and raised him to twenty-five and then twenty-seven fifty. I treated him like a son. He couldn’t have asked for a better teacher or benefactor, a better real father . . . but who was it that said, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth an ungrateful child?’ “

  “Papa Dionne?”

  Our lunches came. No business was discussed, nor painful past history, as Fizer gave most of his attention to eating, though he would pause to smile and chat briefly with anybody famous or boxing-related who wandered by. With his rant about Rapp off his chest, Fizer was pleasant enough, and he could be a very likable and affable fella, when he wasn’t focusing on some wrong, real or imagined, that had been done him.