by Larry Tye
It was Superman at his do-gooder best. He had no faith that the government would fix things on its own and no patience to wait and see. So he tweaked the system while being careful not to upend it. His means were more those of a rebellious teenager than an anarchist, his ends more FDR reformer than Leninist revolutionary. “In the eyes and mind and heart of Superman,” Jerry explained later, “the problems of a penniless tramp or other troubled soul was important. Wealth meant nothing to a super-being who could have acquired all the riches on Earth for himself if he did not have high ideals.”
While Jerry and Superman never stopped caring about penniless tramps, they did stop trying to enrich them, or pushing the government to do so. The law became more sacrosanct and Superman less of an outlaw. Robin Hood was giving way to Prince Valiant, or maybe as he saw more of this world Superman was switching from Democratic idealist to Republican realist. Truth, justice, and the status quo. Lost in the transformation was some of his glee. The remake started in the summer of 1939 and picked up steam as the decades turned. The one-year anniversary issue of Action captured the shift. The story started with the same lifelike premise as in earlier issues, with a criminal syndicate using deadly force to drive independent taxi owners out of business. Superman took off his kid gloves and dispatched a gangster to his leaping death. Four pages from the end, however, the story took a science fiction twist: behind the gangsters was not a conniving capitalist or crooked pol, but a dastardly and masterful scientist named the Ultra-Humanite.
It was a new era and he was a new villain—sort of. Jerry and Joe actually were recycling the evil Super-Man from their high school story “The Reign of the Super-Man.” Same bald pate, roots in a scientific laboratory, and hyphenated name. Same dream of dominating the world. The Ultra-Humanite’s body might be crippled, but his plots to do in Superman were as ingenious as his getaways. He was Superman’s first recurring enemy—a worthy successor to Super-Man and an apt precursor to Lex Luthor, Mr. Mxyzptlk, the Puzzler, and other brilliant (and bald) foes to follow. But culling them from the world of fantasy rather than the headlines carried a price: It meant Jerry and Joe were giving a pass to the real-world bad guys.
The timing was right, as it always seemed to be with Superman. America was in a curious interregnum between the summer of 1939 and the end of 1941: Employment and incomes were climbing back, and while the world was at war, we weren’t, not yet. When the nation was mired in economic doldrums it had needed a combative hero. Now that its economy and spirit were rebounding, the new attitude was a return to normalcy. For Superman, that meant toning down the violence and adhering to a stricter set of rules. No killing unless he had to, and then only with his bare hands. No destroying private property. No hint of sex. No alienating parents or teachers. Evil geniuses like the Ultra-Humanite were too otherworldly to give kids nightmares. They leveled the playing field for Superman, upped the action, and escalated the escapism. This was exactly what post-Depression, prewar America needed. The results could be measured at newsstands across the nation as Superman, just two years after his entry into the field, had surpassed in popularity three of the marquee names in comics: Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Popeye.
SUPERMAN WAS NOT THE only one who was changing. After a prolonged adolescence, Jerry was growing up fast. A year after the first Action came out and just as the Superman book was launching, he married Bella Lifshitz, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish plumber whose home was catty-corner to Jerry’s on Kimberly Avenue. She was eighteen and only a week out of high school; he was six years older but still living at home with his mother. They had known each other forever. It was a June wedding arranged by the Siegels and Lifshitzes and paid for by Superman. Three hundred guests came from as far away as Los Angeles, and the already elegant Hotel Sterling was made more so with candles, palms, and flowers. Leo, the brother Jerry had shared a bed with and who made the family swell with pride when he got his dentist’s degree, was Jerry’s best man. Their mother, Sarah, was beaming, through gritted teeth.
Sarah had never liked Bella. She knew the bride’s mother, who could neither read nor write, and her father, who fixed broken toilets and unclogged sinks for a living. Sarah Siegel came from the same impoverished ghettos of Eastern Europe as Sam and Esther Lifshitz, and had experienced enough hardship in the New World to last two lifetimes. But she was a proud American Jew now—the kind who learned the language and how to get by, and who put on rouge, lipstick, and a hat to go to the grocer because you never knew who you’d run into—and she couldn’t abide people like the Lifshitzes who hadn’t adjusted. Though Sarah liked living with just Jerry after the other children moved out, she was ready to surrender him to the right woman. But now, when his childish dreams about Superman and being a writer finally were coming true, it was the broad-shouldered, buxom Liftshitz girl with whom he chose to share them. Bella looked matronly even at eighteen, with her black hair pinned back and braided in a way that reminded Sarah both of Bella’s mother and of her own babushka. It only got worse when she visited the couple at their new apartment and saw for herself how little Bella knew about keeping house. It broke Sarah’s heart.
Jerry and Bella were sure they were in love as they headed to the World’s Fair in New York for their honeymoon, although she was too young to know what it was supposed to feel like and he was too green. Once they got back to Cleveland, there wasn’t much time to learn. He had to deliver a story for the Superman strip every week and monthly ones for the Action and Superman books. And he still was doing “Slam Bradley,” “Federal Men,” “Spy,” and “Radio Squad.” The deadlines pumped him full of adrenaline and depleted him of energy and time for Bella. “I wrote, wrote, wrote no matter how I felt,” he said looking back. “I found myself writing about terrific super-deeds, even if sometimes I felt like I could barely drag myself to the typewriter.”
He still did much of his typing at home, only this time it was his own home, not his mom’s, and he typed to the beat of Benny Goodman vinyl. For variety he would head into the office that he and Joe had rented for the bargain price of thirty dollars a month. That was enough for a reception nook where Jerry had his desk, with five more desks squeezed into the main room, but too little money for a telephone or to inscribe their names on the frosted-glass door panels. So what? Comics were Jerry’s life then. They were what he talked about in the office and over lunch, which often was just a candy bar, and they were what he dreamed about at night, same as when he was a kid. Another legendary comic book writer, Stanley Martin Lieber, would masquerade as “Stan Lee,” looking ahead to the day when he might give up this kiddy medium to write the great American novel. Not Jerry. This was all he had ever aspired to, and now all his Superman comics were written under the name that Michel and Sarah had given him. He invented the vernacular of Superman as he went along, with his hands moving so fast over the keyboard that it felt as if somebody else were dictating the dialogue.
As time went on, somebody was. Initially Harry, Jack, and the managers they hired to oversee their growing editorial empire had let Jerry do as he wished with the character, and what he did was craft a caped avenger who delighted youngsters with his vigilantism and became a poster child for the goo-goos trying to clean up the government. Once Superman became big business, however, plots had to be sent to New York for vetting. Not only did editors tell Jerry to cut out the guns and knives and cut back on social crusading, they started calling the shots on minute details of script and drawing. Superman must be in costume while using his superpowers. His forelocks couldn’t be too curly, his arms should be shorter and less “ape-like,” and Joe should get rid of his hero’s “nice fat bottom.” The latter especially made Superman look too “lah-de-dah,” 1940s shorthand for shading toward gay. Lois, too, needed a makeover. Nix the “roly-poly hair-do.” Stop accentuating her breasts or tummy in a way that made her look pregnant. “Murray suggests that you arrange for her to have an abortion or the baby and get it over with so that her figure can return to something
a little more like the tasty dish she is supposed to be,” editor Whitney Ellsworth advised in a letter to Jerry early in 1941. “She is much too stocky and much, much too unpleasantly sexy.”
In one now-famous case, an entire 1940 storyline was shelved. It was a twenty-six-page tale about a strange substance called K-Metal. Like Superman himself, the metal floated to Earth from the dying planet Krypton, and even brief exposure to it could rob him of his powers. As the story proceeded, Superman was faced with an onerous decision: Should he rescue Lois from a mine disaster when doing so meant revealing his true identity as Superman? True to form, he saved Lois. The two then agreed to become partners in battling crime and villainy. “How foolish you were not to let me in on the secret! You should have known you could trust me!” she chided. Superman: “You’re right! There were many times when I could have used the assistance of a confederate. Why didn’t I think of it before?”
It was a plot that would have changed everything. K-Metal would become the once-unstoppable superhero’s Achilles’ heel. Superman would learn for the first time about his origin on Krypton. There would be no more secret identity, at least with Lois, and no love triangle. Jerry might have been in the mood for humanizing his hero by consummating the longtime flirtation, as he was doing in his own life, but it was more than his bosses could stomach. No one knows for sure who pulled the plug, but the reason seems self-evident: Never meddle with a proven success. A metal from Krypton that could melt the Man of Steel did enter the lore in the form of kryptonite, but that took another three years, and while Superman would eventually learn the full story of his interplanetary origins, it was not until 1949. As for the thick K-Metal script, which would have run twice as long as the normal Superman comic, it remained secreted away in the archives of Detective Comics until a curious young staffer stumbled upon a smudged carbon copy forty-eight years later.
The message to Jerry was clear: Superman no longer belonged just to him. And there was more, as his editors spelled out in an onslaught of letters. Hire assistants so you can meet your deadlines, and set aside “Slam Bradley” and other second-tier characters. Stop crying poor mouth and begging for raises. Don’t talk to the press. Say goodbye to Cleveland and come to New York, where we can keep a closer eye on you. Grow up. When they really wanted to make their point, his bosses at Detective Comics had their boss, Jack Liebowitz, sign the letter. “Bear in mind,” Jack wrote five months after Action was launched, “that we own the feature ‘Superman’ and that we can at any time replace you.” He wrote again the following April: “You have the germ of a great idea in SUPERMAN but you need constant editorial supervision.” By January 1940 Jack seemed at the end of his rope, growling, “From your promised five releases a month I’m down to one. For anyone to have fallen that badly, you are certainly a Superman in reverse.”
Jerry had moved to New York in 1939, and he reined in his hero to look more like what Jack and his editors wanted. He took the abuse and toed the line not just because Jack had all the power, but because Jerry liked the money Superman was bringing him and loved the prestige. Just how rich he was is a matter of contention. The Saturday Evening Post reported that he and Joe split $75,000 in 1940; Jerry said they were sharing just over $38,000, counting revenues from the comic books and strips. Even at the lower figure he was earning $307,000 a year in today’s dollars, or more than thirty times what he had made two years before. A year later, his share had increased to $29,000. That was enough for him and Bella to move back to Cleveland—or rather to the upscale suburb of University Heights—and buy a home with two and a half baths, a paneled rec room with a bar, silk draperies, and air-conditioning, which was a luxury then. He got Bella a mink coat and a diamond bracelet, and bought himself a hip-reducing gizmo in hopes of undoing the damage done by all those candy bars.
What mattered more than money, to a boy who grew up thinking he was a pariah and sharing a bed with his brother, was being a man-about-town—not just in Cleveland, where newspapers and adoring fans sang his praises, but in New York. His editors might have been trying to cut Jerry down to size, but on the streets of the Big Apple there was no denying his hero’s rise to iconic stature. It was on full display at the 1940 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where the biggest balloon was an eighty-foot-high replica of the Man of Tomorrow, and at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, which staged a first-of-its-kind Superman Day. Best of all: America’s best-read magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, ran a seven-page feature on Superman and his creators that included a picture of Jerry lying in an oversized bed reading a book with hard covers and no graphics.
Joe’s picture in that article showed him not in bed but at the head of a bountiful Sabbath table with his mother, Ida; father, Julius; younger brother, Frank; and kid sister, Jean. It seemed designed to underline how differently he and Jerry had responded to Superman’s success. Joe acknowledged early on that he could not handle the workload. His eyes were bad and getting worse, and his left hand was a problem, too. He had what he called a spastic condition that had started a year after Superman first appeared in print; it prevented him from drawing for long stretches, made him switch to his right hand for lettering, and eventually forced him to wear a leather brace that completely immobilized his bad hand. So he hired assistants, although their bylines never showed up on the comic book or comic strip, and at first even Jack and Harry were kept in the dark. There was just one to start, Paul Cassidy, who worked from his home in Milwaukee and helped with “Slam Bradley,” “Spy,” and other early Siegel and Shuster efforts. Once Superman got going, Cassidy moved to Cleveland and Joe hired three more artists, including Wayne Boring, who would keep on drawing and redefining Superman for two decades. By early 1939 Joe was lightly and sparingly sketching the scenes and leaving them to others to fill in and fine-tune; the one thing he insisted on keeping control over was Superman’s head, which he felt defined his hero. When he moved to New York later that year he did even less, not showing up at the office for long stretches and frustrating his bosses as much as Jerry did. In Joe’s case the complaints were less about his attitude than his health and work ethic.
Joe drew the same salary as Jerry but his assistants had to be paid out of his cut, which in 1941 meant that he earned about $29,000 and kept $14,500. That may not sound like much to live on in New York, but in today’s terms it is $220,000. It was enough to let Joe move out of the YMCA and into a small apartment, then into a ten-room house. He needed something that big because his parents and siblings were with him again, and to ensure they got to enjoy their new surroundings he had a car waiting in the driveway and a maid who came in twice a week. Joe was spending more of his weeks holidaying in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. When he was around, he headed to Barney Kofron’s gym, hoisting 175-pound weights and trying to ensure that the body that stared back at him in the mirror really was a model for Superman. That, along with a T-bone steak and two quarts of milk a day, inflated his weight from 112 to 128 pounds. To lift his height, which was just five foot two, he wore elevator shoes.
Joe stayed single all through those years, but it was not for lack of interest in girls, or for lack of their reciprocation. The once-shy teenager had more confidence now that he was Superman’s personal artist, and he started dating the showgirls he had always dreamed about. Not just anyone would do; they had to have a model’s looks and they had to be tall. “He loved shiksas,” recalled his sister, Jean. “They were always tall and slender blondes like his dream girl Lana Turner.” He also double-dated a lot, with Jean and with Batman artist Jerry Robinson. Once, Robinson fixed him up with his cousin in Trenton, who was brilliant, pretty, and the same height as Joe. The four young people went out dancing and had what Robinson thought was a terrific time. “Afterwards I said, ‘How’d you like Shirley?’ He said, ‘Oh, well she’s great. But she’s too short for me.’ ”
Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, loved double-dating with Joe, if only so he could tell the girls they were dating Batman and Superman. One Saturday
night in the winter of 1940 he and Joe were due to go out with a couple of girls in Miami Beach, but Joe never showed up. He had stopped on the street near his hotel to ogle an antique car, but with his myopic vision, he had to lean in too close for the comfort of two patrolmen who spotted him. At the station he told them who he was, yet all they could see was a would-be auto thief, which earned him a threat of thirty days in the slammer. Although he drew several sketches of Superman, the police remained skeptical. Luckily Harry Donenfeld was in town and bailed him out, though not before word leaked to the press. SUPERMAN RESCUES HIS CREATOR FROM FLORIDA JAIL, The Washington Post blared across its front page.
HARRY AND JACK HAD never had things so good. As always they had their pornography profits, and their book and magazine distribution firm was on the way to becoming the biggest in the country. A year after Superman they scored another hit with Batman, and two years after that Wonder Woman gave them a third cash cow. Still, it was Superman who made the most money and generated the most attention for Donenfeld and Liebowitz’s Detective Comics, Inc. They acknowledged the debt by amending the company logo to read a SUPERMAN-DC PUBLICATION. The profits from Superman comic books were all theirs. Detective took a cut from the comic strip, too—by 1941 it was up to 10 percent, which was a quarter of what Jerry and Joe were getting but a good deal for middlemen who bore almost no costs. There was yet more money to be made from radio shows, movie serials, merchandising, and a full-length novel, and Jack pushed and pulled for every dollar.
Woe to those who tried to horn in. If Superman was a demon in tracking down his enemies, his accountant and attorneys were even more single-minded in protecting their franchise of super-powered costumed heroes. The only question was whom to sue first. Jack settled on Wonder Man, who had been tapped by a Tibetan yogi to fight evil and was given a ring that endowed him with super powers nearly identical to Superman’s. No surprise there: Victor Fox, Wonder Man’s owner, was Harry’s former partner and had seen Detective’s ledger sheets showing how much money Superman made. So the cigar-chomping Fox, a nasty little man who would call himself “king of the comics” but whose kingdom at the time was a single astrology magazine, hired comics wunderkind Will Eisner to beget a hero “with a red, tight-fitting costume, and a red cape.” Fox had one more instruction for Eisner: Lie about Wonder Man’s parentage when he was called to testify in Jack’s lawsuit. Trial records show that Eisner did what he was told, despite his later denials. It didn’t matter, not with the evidence there in cartoon panels for the judge to see. Wonder Man became a one-issue wonder and Jack had bragging rights in the first-ever comics copyright lawsuit.