“Such trash is less harmful than the crime comic books,” he allowed. “I’m afraid the combination of simple text and crude pictures serves only to discourage children from reading real books. Inhibits their imagination. Still, the sale of such material, I don’t protest.”
I said, “But don’t you lump the superhero-type of book in with the crime comics?”
He nodded. “I do.” His eyes met Maggie’s. “And this is what, I’m afraid, does indeed make us adversaries of sorts. Your syndication service has distributed the comic strip versions of some of the most dangerous of these characters.”
Dangerous. That word again.
“The undercurrent of homosexuality in the Batwing comic book,” he said as if tasting something sour, “is extremely damaging to impressionable minds, and children are inherently in that category.”
“Homosexual?” I asked.
That got me another flash of a look from Maggie.
“Impressionable,” he said sternly. “And the Amazonia comic book is rife with fetishistic bondage, and the lead character herself is clearly lesbian.”
“She has a boyfriend, doesn’t she?” I asked innocently. “Some captain in the army or air force?”
“Amazonia is a closeted lesbian, frequently shown participating in semi-clothed frolicking with other lesbians.”
I never get invited to the good parties.
Rather than argue the point, Maggie said, “We no longer distribute those strips.”
“That’s an admirable decision.”
I noticed Maggie didn’t point out to him that in both cases that was a business decision.
“However,” the shrink said, “you continue to distribute the strip version of one of the most offensive of these char-acters—Wonder Guy.”
What the hell was offensive about Wonder Guy? He was just a big lug wearing patriotic colors and a cape, going around saving people from fires and earthquakes and punching out the occasional bad guy.
“This,” he was saying, his eyes cold and glittering, lost in themselves, “is a reprehensible exhibition of the Nazi theme of the superman. A dangerous celebration of the triumph of power and violence over the logical and intellectual.”
I wanted to point out to this dope that the creators of Wonder Guy were Jews, kids from Des Moines who came to the big city. Where other Jews screwed them, but that’s another story.
“We also distribute,” Maggie said pleasantly, putting it right out there, “the Crime Fighter strip, a spin-off of a very successful comic-book title. That puts us in business with Levinson Publications, whose output you hold in much disfavor.”
“Yes,” he said, but now his eyes were narrowing. What is she getting at? he seemed to be wondering.
What is she getting at? I was wondering.
“Here’s what I’m getting at,” Maggie said. “We are a syndication service, as you accurately put it. We provide content to over two thousand newspapers, Sunday and daily. Some of those papers editorially are Republican, others are Democrat. A good number are in major cities, but many more are in small towns.”
“Yours,” he granted, “is an egalitarian pursuit. But I’m not sure I understand how that explains...”
She raised a palm like a traffic cop. “We have comic strips that appeal to young children, and we have comic strips that appeal to teenagers, with soap-opera strips for women, a sports strip for dads, and panel cartoons for both sexes.”
He had begun shaking his head perhaps halfway through that. “I have no objection to comic strips per se. They are an established medium in the pages of our newspapers. The controversy, so-called, over the crime comic books does not apply, generally, to the comic strip.”
“I assure you that comic strips, back at the turn of the century when they began, were crude and rude, fodder for the lower-class, for immigrants, and got plenty of criticism. The Yellow Kid was a hoodlum, the Katzenjammer Kids juvenile delinquents.”
The doctor was frowning. In thought, maybe. Or maybe not.
“I do not dispute that the comic strip,” he said, mildly irritated, “has blossomed in its limited way in the greater garden of the American newspaper. But its bastard child the comic book is a poisonous weed that infests our newsstands. A dozen state legislatures have worked to ban or limit this blight upon our children, and many parents have risen up, even having public burnings of these wretched pamphlets.”
And here I thought the doc didn’t like the Nazis....
Maggie raised her hands as if in surrender. “I didn’t invite you here to argue, doctor. But I did want to...clear the air.”
From his seat he bestowed her a little quarter bow. “I never mind discussing this or any topic with a person of your intelligence.”
“Nice to know.” She rocked back in her swivel chair. “I needed to find out if our disagreement on this subject would stand in the way of our doing business.”
This clearly surprised him. “Business? Of what kind?”
Now she sat forward and her tone became strictly professional. “We’re in the market for a self-help column, doctor, somewhat in the fashion of Dear Abby or Ann Landers.”
Oh, she was good....
The doc’s eyes were wide as his integrity, ego and greed began an epic battle (integrity seemed outnumbered). “That’s hardly my calling, Miss Starr....”
She flipped a hand. “The kind of questions asked and answered in those columns by these self-appointed experts... did you know Abby and Ann are sisters, and quite hate each other?...are of a rather tepid and ordinary nature.”
“From what I’ve seen, I would agree.”
“We at Starr believe that a column written by a psychiatrist, particularly a prominent, well-respected one, could be genuinely helpful to readers...and financially rewarding to columnist and syndicate.”
I liked that “We at Starr” thing. Made me feel part of a team.
The doc was saying, “It would perhaps be unethical for me to treat a patient through an advice column....”
“You wouldn’t treat patients, nor would you handle any problems that couldn’t be simply answered with good common sense, enhanced by your impressive training as a doctor of the mind. For someone with a serious problem, you would recommend treatment by a fully accredited psychiatrist.”
“I see.” He looked like a twelve-year-old who’d just been told the facts of life and was appalled yet intrigued. “Well, that is an interesting notion....”
I gave Maggie a look that said: He’s hooked—reel him in.
“Think of what you would do, doctor, for the science of psychiatry! Think of the millions of readers, many of whom are afraid of ‘head shrinkers,’ coming into daily positive contact with a kind, gentle, brilliant practitioner of the art.”
I was afraid she was piling it on a little too high, but Frederick was caught up. He was sitting on the edge of his chair, his eyes wide and glittering, like a kid racing to the end of a horror comic.
“You make a good case for this cause,” he said.
Already his ego and greed had convinced his integrity that doing a syndicated column was a “cause.”
“But,” he cautioned, waggling a professorial finger, “I have commitments that might prohibit my taking this offer.... Could it be a weekly column?”
Well, she had him. He was flopping around the deck, unaware he was heading for the taxidermist and the cabin wall right over the fireplace.
“I have my private practice to consider,” he went on, “my duties at the Harlem clinic, and right now, of course, I’m promoting my new book...and I’m thinking of doing a follow-up, on the harmful effect of TV on young minds....”
I had told Will Allison comic books were only the latest whipping boy. Here comes TV as the next parental boogeyman!
“If you like,” Maggie said, “we could find an assistant for you...”
A ghost, she meant.
“...someone who could deal with the many letters we’d receive daily, winnowing them into material
for columns, and writing first-draft for you to revise and approve. You might only have to work on the column a few hours per week. And you would make five figures, easily, and more likely six.”
Judging by his expression, he might have been Long John Silver viewing a treasure chest heaped with gleaming doubloons. “I could make as much as $100,000 a year for performing this service?”
“Our top cartoonists make many times that.” She clasped her hands with a clap. “What do you say? Will you consider it?”
He was nodding like I did the night Betty Jean Willis asked me if I wanted her to climb into the backseat of my Chevy.
“I will,” he burbled. He actually burbled. “I’d want to meet and approve and interview any potential assistant, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Would I be under any constraints?”
“Well, of course, we would hold back the names of anyone writing in—that’s where ‘Frustrated in Queens’ and ‘Lonely in Dallas’ comes in. You’d have the usual legal and moral restraints. You’d have to avoid, or handle very delicately, any sexual topics.”
“Certainly.”
“And obviously I would ask that you refrain from any discussion of comic books or strips in the column.”
There it was—the cherry on her sundae, the worm in his apple.
“But that’s what I am best known for,” he said.
Her nod was matter of fact. “It is, but you have your book and your personal appearances for that. And this column will broaden your appeal, and present you as not just a one-note authority, but...well, if all goes as I see it, you’d be ‘America’s Psychiatrist.’”
His eyes were playing the Star-Spangled Banner. He listened to it and we just watched him.
Finally Maggie said casually, “Anyway, with the Starr Syndicate’s peripheral involvement with comic books... specifically the strips we run that are spin-offs of such publications...it would be something of a conflict of interest for you to wage that war in our pages.”
“There are other places for that,” he said.
Rest in peace, integrity. Take your bows, ego, greed.
“Good,” Maggie said, smiled big and slapped the table with her hands.
The doc jumped a little. But he then understood that he’d been dismissed, getting to his feet, asking, “What’s the next step?”
“Our lawyers will write up a contract for you to show your lawyers.”
Which would include language banning him from discussing comics, and making the assistant’s salary his responsibility.
“All right,” he said, dazed but smiling.
She reached her hand out and he shook it. He nodded, bid her several goodbyes, did not shake my hand (he’d forgotten all about me), and loped out, with the gait of a man who’d just narrowly missed getting hit by a bus—relieved but unsteady.
Only he had been hit by a bus.
I said, “You are a very evil woman, and I admire you for it.”
Pleased with herself, Maggie said, “You are too kind.”
A few moments later, Bryce stuck his head in. “I thought he’d never leave!...Look, I’ve got Bob Price out here, hiding in the kitchenette!”
The owner/publisher of Entertaining Funnies.
Maggie snapped, “Did he and Frederick see each other?”
“No! But I slipped up and told him Frederick was meeting with you, and it was all I could do, keeping him from running in there and strangling that quack!...Should I send him in, or wait till he has a stroke?”
As if exiting a burning building, Robert Price came bounding into the office, brushing past Bryce holding open the door. Bryce shut us in with a heavenward glance as the Entertaining Funnies publisher all but ran to the chair Dr. Frederick had so recently vacated. When he reached it, the big man paused, as if he could see Banquo’s ghost sitting there.
Dark-haired, with a big oblong head, eyes small and bright behind black-rimmed glasses, Price wasn’t much past thirty, a heavyset guy not exactly fat, a six-foot heavyset force of nature even when he wasn’t pissed off, red-and-blue geometric-design tie flapping like the flag of a foreign nation. His tan slacks were flapping, too, like there was a high wind in Maggie’s windowless office. Sans suit coat or sports jacket, in just a short-sleeved white shirt with tie, he might have been a high school chemistry teacher.
Which had been his ambition, till his father died in a boating accident, leaving him Entertaining Funnies to run.
Price’s father Leo had been part of the quartet of entrepreneurs that included the major, Donny Harrison, and Louis Cohn, who developed the first comic books, which had led to Americana Comics, lucrative home of Wonder Guy and Batwing. They had started out printing Yiddish newspapers, expanded into racing forms and finally smut, the latter nothing so creative as this kid Hefner was currently was turning out—just rags filled with semi-clothed pics of strippers and showgirls, emphasis on the semi.
There was general disagreement over which of the quartet got the idea to format comic-strip submissions into pamphlets for giveaway purposes with various products. But everybody agreed it was Leo Price who had slapped “Ten Cents” stickers on the covers of the extra copies, distributing them to newsstands and accidentally creating the comic-book medium.
Harrison and Cohn came to control Americana Comics, while the major wound up with Starr Syndicate and a piece of Americana. Price sold out his share in the latter to start his own comics line, Entertaining Funnies.
Well, originally it had been Educational Funnies. Leo wanted to class up the comics business, finding Americana’s long-john heroes distasteful. Instead he published comic books illustrating Bible stories, as well as a secondary kiddie line (which is where the “Entertaining” designation came in) with a singularly non-stellar line-up—Jim Dandy, Animal Tales, Fable Fun. All of those bled money, and when Leo died, this four-color albatross wound up around his unassuming son Bob’s neck.
Initially Bob Price would just stop by to pick up his paycheck, but when Entertaining Funnies appeared on the verge of bankruptcy, the reluctant funny-book publisher started actually publishing. He brought on talented artist/writer/editor Hal Feldman, fresh off Archie knock-offs that had featured big-busted Betty and Veronica imitations (Dr. Frederick liked to call these “headlights” comics). For a year or so, the new team followed comic-book trends, western, romance, crime, before stumbling onto horror out of their mutual love for scary old radio shows like Lights Out and Inner Sanctum.
Feldman assembled some of the best artists in the business, who in grisly detail depicted horrors that radio would consign to its listeners’ imaginations—bloodthirsty vampires, flesh-tearing werewolves, drooling ghouls, and desiccated zombies. Their science fiction comics were variations on the terror theme—grotesque monsters attacking spacemen— and their crime comics dropped “true crime” in favor of greed-and-sex sagas, husbands killing cheating wives, wives killing fat old rich husbands.
And Bob Price had gone from unassuming aspiring high school teacher to enthusiastic, high-energy comic book czar.
That czar was standing there—his tie had settled down but he hadn’t—pointing a finger at the vacant chair next to me.
“He was sitting right there!” Price said, eyes popping behind the glasses, veins standing out on his forehead. “You had that monster sitting right there!”
“Yeah,” I said. “All warmed up for you.”
“Maggie,” Price said, his voice trembling with hurt, “how could you?”
He sounded like the disappointed villainess at the end of I, the Jury.
Maggie, hands on her desk folded, smiled politely. Now she was the one who seemed like a schoolteacher. “Bob— what a nice surprise, you dropping by. Please sit down.”
“I can’t bring myself to!”
I said, “You want me to go downstairs to the restaurant and get you one of those tissue-paper dealy-bobs they use in public toilets?”
He swung his gaze on me. We were friends, or anyway fri
endly acquaintances, going back well before he became a comic-book publisher. The major and his father had been business partners, after all.
And my absurdly sarcastic question made him break out into a grin and he started to laugh, and plopped himself down in that accursed chair. He sat forward, though, hands together between splayed legs.
“But come on, Maggie,” he said, shaking his big head. “What were you doing fraternizing with the enemy?”
“I’m trying to make him less an adversary,” she said. She pointedly avoided calling Dr. Frederick “the enemy.”
His eyebrows climbed. “How is that possible?”
I glanced at Maggie and she nodded, and I said, “We offered him a syndicated column with Starr.”
He had the shocked expression of a kid who just read the last panel of a Tales from the Vault horror yarn.
“We offered him an advice column,” she said. “A psychiatric spin on Dear Abby. And he has said yes, at least tentatively.”
Price’s eyes brightened, like a jack-o-lantern whose candle had just been lit, and he began to smile. The effect was not unlike a jack-o-lantern, either. He pointed a waggling finger at her. “You are a genius, Maggie Starr. An outright goddamn genius. You appealed to that outsize ego of his, and bought the son of a bitch off, without him even knowing it!”
She raised a cautionary hand. “I wouldn’t put it quite that way...”
“Of course you wouldn’t!”
“...but it does potentially put the good doctor in an awkward position. He will find himself working for a firm that is financially tied to Americana Comics, and of course Starr has a history with you and your family as well, so...there are those who would interpret him as, I believe the Madison Avenue term is, selling out.”
Bob was laughing now, so hard he was crying. He dug out a hanky and dabbed his eyes with it and blew his nose with a honk.
I said, “It’s going to be in his contract that he can’t discuss comic books or even comic strips in his column.”
Still laughing, Price put the hanky away and said, “Beautiful. So beautifully played. You’ll show everybody what a hypocrite he is.”
Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime) Page 4