These prejudiced behinds take up enough seats to insure the weakest joke gets a guffaw and the least memorable tune performed in the most lackluster way will receive enthusiastic applause. The remainder of the backsides belong to die-hard first-nighters, current or prospective agents of cast members, New York-based Hollywood scouts, investors in the show (and family and friends), and of course the one group not laughing and applauding like parents at a school play: the jury. By which I mean the dozen in the audience who ignore the warm reception the rest of the crowd is bestowing, a panel of twelve who respect no presumption of innocence (or talent).
The critics.
Jaded arbiters whose verdict can be overturned by the public court of appeal, though that happened only rarely. It takes a lot of word of mouth to drown out a little bad ink. But now and then a Tobacco Road or an Abie’s Irish Rose comes along to remind Broadway that it’s part of a supposed democracy.
An opening-night tradition in theater is that the cast and other key members of a show gather at Sardi’s or Toots Shor’s or some other top restaurant to wait for the early editions to hit the street. After opening night on November 12, 1953, Maggie played hostess at the Strip Joint for the Tall Paul family.
The Strip Joint was smaller than some of those other celebrated dining spots, so my stepmother closed the place off for a private party. The beautiful boys and girls of the cast were packed in there, laughing, talking, throwing down champagne and noshing on goodies served up by Maggie’s shapely waitresses in their white shirts, black ties and tuxedo pants; blue cigarette smoke drifted and the tinkle of glass and laughter rose above a pianist’s subdued efforts in one corner jazz-noodling show tunes, though nothing from Tall Paul
Everybody was confident—the previews had gone very well, the show had been shorn of a few excess songs and extraneous slapstick bits, and the lively remainder was clearly an audience pleaser. As long as at least some of the critics liked the show, Tall Paul should enjoy a long run.
Press coverage of Sam Fizer’s strange suicide, including the arrest of his assistant on first-degree murder charges, had mentioned Hal Rapp only in passing. The forged and doctored Tall Paul strips came up not at all. Later some of that might emerge at the trial, but for now no particular pall had been cast upon Broadway’s newest musical.
At the bar I spoke with Mel Norman about it.
“Rumor has it you’re the guy who cleared Hal of this terrible thing,” the slender, round-faced director said. He was in a tuxedo tonight. So was I, and most of the other men there.
“Maggie deserves the rave reviews,” I said. “I just hauled the facts in like a trapper and let her make a fur coat out of the stuff.”
“She’s very good in the play, you know. Twice the age of some of the girls in the chorus, but every bit as beautiful.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Be sure to remind Maggie she’s twice as old as these girls. She loves that kind of thing.”
“We already have interest from Paramount, you know. And I’m going to be the first producer of a Broadway show ever to use the entire original cast in the film version!”
He’d had quite a bit of champagne. I had no intention of holding him to that.
“Say, Jack, I heard the cops found the guy who killed Tony Carmichael.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Tony had overextended himself with IOUs from the likes of Fizer and Charlie Mazurki. Got himself killed fork.”
“Got to hand it to these cops.”
“Yeah. They’re wizards. Excuse me.”
I went over to congratulate Candy Cain about her performance. She was unpretentiously dressed in a pink blouse with a yellow scarf and a black dress, and wore very little makeup, her blonde tresses up in a bun. Not a sexy Catfish Holler gal, but still a striking young woman.
“I thought you were great,” I told her. “That song they added at the last minute is a lot of fun.”
Sunflower Sue and Preacher Luke had a number about how Sue was over the hill because she was pushing seventeen.
“Glad you like it,” she said. “Real pleasure to work with Chubby Charles . . . but I still feel like window dressing. What the heck, the audiences are having a good time, and that’s what counts.”
Her husband, Charlie Mazurki, ambled up, also in a tuxedo, but with a loose riverboat-gambler string tie, sporting another of his trademark pool-cue cigars. A smile blossomed under his other trademark, that generous mustache.
“I see where Tony Carmine got killed!” he said, as if his favorite team had just won a game. “Who says they only print bad news in these papers?”
Maybe he was funny off camera. “How many of your IOUs died with him, Charlie?”
“None, Jack.” He smiled boyishly at his bride. “Ask Candy—I gave up gambling, when was it? Last year.”
I moved on, stopping to say hello to Misty Winters, memorable aspects of whom were falling fetchingly out of an eye-popping black sequins dress; she introduced me to a Hollywood producer friend of Mel Norman’s who’d been a guest at the premiere, and whose arm was now in hers.
I whispered in her ear: “He can only get you in the movies. I can get you in the funnies.”
She whispered in my ear: “I’m already in the funnies, Jack—Bathless Bessie, remember?”
Finally I wound up over by the wall on which many a nationally syndicated cartoonist had drawn their famous characters, including Mug O’Malley and his manager, Louie, blithely happy in better days. Rapp was standing right beside a Tall Paul drawing he’d done several years ago; and Maggie, in a blue-and-beige plaid dress with navy blue gloves (Jean Desses from a recent Paris trip), was sipping champagne and chatting him up.
Rapp wasn’t drinking anything, just smoking a cigarette (in holder, of course); he, too, was in a tuxedo, and smiling big, his bray of a laugh periodically punctuating every conversation in the crowded restaurant.
He was saying to Maggie, “I can’t begin to say how much I appreciate what you and Jack did for me, in that tragic, ridiculous Fizer affair!”
She said, “You can express your appreciation by signing those contracts for Lean Jean we sent over to your attorneys.”
“We’re looking at them,” he assured her. “I’m positive there’ll be no problem—I’m just in the hands of a typical law firm: anything in a contract that isn’t incomprehensible, ha ha ha, they immediately find suspicious.”
I asked, “What are the chances you’ll wrest Tall Paul away from Unique Features?”
“Good, Jack, I’d say, very good. I’ve made unreasonable demands for a new salary, ha ha ha, which will send those miserly bean counters into cardiac arrest. They’re sure to realize that Tall Paul without Hal Rapp is like Charlie McCarthy without Edgar Bergen.”
“Well,” Maggie said, “in any event, Lean Jean will be a good start.” She raised her champagne glass to him in a little one-sided toast.
Rapp turned to me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Jack, I’m sorry I held out on you, about those forgeries Fizer did. I should’ve put you in touch with Ray Alexander right at the start. I guess I was sentimental about my old boss—I mean, with Sam dead, why send him out with a ruined reputation?”
I grinned at him. “Hal, don’t kid a kidder—you held out on me on that score for the same reason you held out on the cops: what Fizer tried to do to you with those doctored drawings gave you the best murder motive yet.”
He didn’t like hearing that, but his face split in a big cartoonish grin, anyway. “You, you’re an inspiration, Jack. I haven’t done a Hawknose Harry sequence in a long time, ha ha ha, and you’ve just given me the best idea for one.”
Hawknose Harry was the outrageous strip-within-a-strip parody of Dick Tracy that Rapp did in Tall Paul on occasion—Harry a well meaning but dim detective who blew big round holes in all the bad guys and many an innocent bystander.
Rapp was gesturing with a fluid hand. “I’ll have Harry visit all the suspects in a case, unwittingly leading the killer to all of them—th
e corpses’ll be stacked up like, ha ha ha, cordwood by the end of the story!”
“Funny stuff,” I said. “Listen, something you should know.”
“Yes, Jack?”
“When I was turning over rocks in this thing, half of them had you under them, pawing after some babe, including underage ones.”
Maggie, who’d been taking this in, closed her eyes; to anyone else, her expression would have appeared blank—to me, it screamed pain. I was giving the top cartoonist in the business a hard time, right when he was giving serious consideration to letting us syndicate his new strip.
But she knew enough not to bother trying to stop me.
His mouth hung open, jaw slack. “Jack, that’s, uh . . . a little out of line.”
“Hal, buddy, pal—I like girls, too. But I like them of age.”
Now he was frowning, the brow deeply lined under a dark comma of Tall Paul-like hair. “That’s more than a little out of line.”
I shrugged. “Hal, I want us to syndicate Lean Jean. Hell, I want us to syndicate Tall Paul. But I don’t want to wake up some morning to read about a Hal Rapp scandal worse than anything Sam Fizer ever cooked up.”
He was scowling. “You’re comparing me to Sam Fizer now? Are you sure you want to do business with me, Jack?”
“I don’t think Sam started out a monster, Hal. I think he had to work at it, over the years. Using your powerful position to take advantage of young women isn’t your most attractive trait. Be careful, or it’ll catch up with you.”
All humor had drained from Rapp’s face, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. “I better mingle. Excuse me, Maggie. Jack.”
And he moved away from us with his familiar herky-jerky gait.
“You have quite a touch with the talent,” Maggie said to me. “We’ll be damn lucky if he still signs with us.”
“If he signs with us,” I said, “it’ll be a miracle.”
Her eyes grew large; for a moment there she looked like Libidia Von Stackpole. “What? Why?”
I shrugged. “I know a guy over at Unique Features. He says Rapp is just using us as a bargaining chip.”
That was when the first papers made their way into the room, and the reviews were mostly stellar, Walter Kerr calling the musical “a rip-snorting ring-tailed roarer.” Even the weaker notices loved the Batch’ul Catch’ul Ballet.
“Everybody, everybody!” Mel Norman called out. “We’re a hit! We are a hit! . . . Let’s all raise a glass to the man of the hour, Tall Paul’s real pappy—Mr. Hal Rapp!”
And everybody, even me and my rum and Coke (without the rum), hoisted a glass to the creator of Catfish Holler. Rapp, not drinking, waved a hand in regal fashion and beamed a smile so broad, his cheeks seemed about to burst.
Was it just me, or were his eyes glazed and hard?
The musical Tall Paul was indeed a big hit, running for two years at the St. John Theatre and touring for a year after that, with much of the original cast, although Candy Cain dropped out after her initial one-year contract expired. She never thought much of the show, finding it “pleasant” at best, and almost didn’t attend the Tony Awards the night she won for Best Actress in a Musical. Choreographer Richard Childe also won, presenting a soft-spoken humble speech about his “hardworking boys and girls” somewhat at odds with his Marquis de Sade rehearsal style.
And there was indeed a movie, several years later, which Candy also opted out of, though Mel Norman was as good as his word: most of the original cast returned, including Maggie, which made for an interesting Hollywood trip (but that’s another story).
Misty Winters—who did well with the Fizer estate, his most recent will thrown out due to clear evidence he had not been of “sound mind” making it—was in the Tall Paul film, too. She soon wound up marrying a Hollywood producer (not the one she met at the musical’s opening night, though) and made only a handful of features. She had several children and hers was a happy, long-lasting marriage, something of a rarity in such Hollywood circles. Ethel Schwartz really did wind up an incredible-looking grandmother.
Mel Norman never directed another Broadway show—apparently he just wanted to prove to himself that he could do it; but he made many other Hollywood films throughout the ’50s and ’60s, although as the film careers of Bob Hope and Danny Kaye wound down, so did Norman’s.
Cartoonist Ray Alexander kept his promise and created a detective strip, Nick Steele, about a suave New York private eye; he sold it to King Features, however, not the Starr Syndicate (he did send me an original strip for my collection). Steele was successful, but Alexander died a little over four years into its run, in a high-speed crash in one of his sports cars in the upstate New York countryside.
Coincidentally, in the same year, Charlie Mazurki also died in an automobile accident, when he hit a wet patch and then a telephone pole on a rainy night after a long, long poker game. He left Candy Cain in hock to the IRS and countless creditors, and the talented singer/actress spent years working in film, on TV and in nightclubs, digging her way out. Her most famous role, after Sunflower Sue, was as a sexy pitchwoman for cigars in a long-running series of commercials.
Murray Coe was convicted of manslaughter; though he had murdered Sam Fizer with undoubted premeditation, the circumstances were mitigating enough for the lesser charge to come into play. He served ten years and never worked in comics again, as far as I know; you can never be sure with a ghost. We found a good artist for Mug O’Malley and a good writer, too, and the strip lasted into the early 1970s, but everybody knew it was a pale shadow, in only a handful of papers when it ceased.
With a hit show on Broadway, Hal Rapp renegotiated with Unique Features and got a deal that would turn ownership of Tall Paul over to its creator in ten years; Unique also distributed Lean Jean, but the strip was only a modest success and was gone within five years. By the mid-’60s, when Rapp—now sole owner of Tall Paul—took the feature to another syndicate (no, not Starr), he swung the strip in a new direction.
After decades lambasting the follies of the right wing, Rapp shifted to their camp, offended by college protestors who looked to him like Catfish Holler residents come unfortunately to life. Their antiestablishment attitude, dope smoking and free love rubbed Rapp the wrong way. (Personally, I think he envied them.)
When he ham-handedly lampooned these long-haired kids in Tall Paul, he began losing papers (as well as his touch), and began a controversial series of college lecture tours, where he would take on the hippies on their home turf, making fun of them, laughing off their boos and hisses, playing Don Rickles to the counterculture. The college administrators who brought Rapp in relished the public spanking of their students.
I never saw him in those days. If I had, I would have asked him if it ever occurred to him that he had become Sam Fizer—a patriotic liberal turned right-wing zealot, a man of the people turned selfish monster.
By the early ’70s, several charges were brought against Rapp for indecent sexual conduct with coeds on his college tours, which muckraking columnists brought to light. Stories dating back many years began to emerge; actresses spoke out about the celebrated cartoonist’s embarrassing misbehavior, from Candy Cain and Maggie Starr to a certain princess of Monaco and an Oscar-winning graduate of Laugh-In.
His once revered strip dropped by hundreds of papers, stung by sexual scandal, Hal Rapp quietly pulled the plug on Tall Paul in the mid-’70s.
And about all that is left of Rapp’s once-famous creation are amateur productions of the musical based upon it, and of course annual Batch’ul Catch’ul dances. Even now, when Tall Paul is almost as forgotten as Mug O’Malley, at high schools and on college campuses all across America, the girls chase the boys. Wishful thinking, from beyond the grave, by the tragic genius who created the greatest comic strip of all.
Barely a year after he ended the strip, Hal Rapp died of natural causes, a broken man. Unlike Sam Fizer, however, he did not commit suicide.
Or did he?
A TIP OF THE FED
ORA
This novel, despite some obvious parallels to events in the history of the comics medium, is fiction. It employs characters with real-life counterparts as well as composites and wholly fictional ones.
Unlike other historical novels of mine—the Nathan Heller “memoirs,” the Eliot Ness series, the “disaster” mysteries and the Road trilogy—I have chosen not to use real names and/or to hew religiously to actual events. As this is a mystery in the Rex Stout or Ellery Queen tradition, the murder herein has only the vaguest historical basis, and real-life conflicts have been heightened and exaggerated while others are wholly fabricated.
Characters reminiscent of real people, in particular cartoonists in the comic strip field and performers in show business of the 1950s, are portrayed unflatteringly at times, because they are, after all, meant to be suspects in a murder mystery.
While I invite readers—particularly comics fans—to enjoy the roman à clef aspect of Strip for Murder, I caution them not to view this as history but as the fanciful (if fact-inspired) novel it is. The National Cartoonists Society, for example, is a real organization but I have rewritten their early history to suit this story, and do not mean to suggest that the NCS in any way endorses this fictional work.
The central conflict of this novel, the feud between two celebrated cartoonists, is inspired by that of Al Capp and Ham Fisher. “Hal Rapp” and “Sam Fizer,” though obviously suggested by these real cartoonists, should be viewed as fictional characters. Many details in the novel have no parallel in history, and many aspects of the real men’s lives have no parallel in this novel. Aspects of both men’s personalities and lives have been exaggerated, and other traits invented, and still others omitted, to suit the purposes of this murder mystery. While Ham Fisher indeed committed suicide after his expulsion from the National Cartoonists Society, the timing of this novel is off by several years, and many aspects of the mystery have no basis in reality.
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