The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  The family in 1946. Left to right: Huntley, Byrne, O.A., Pete, Marston, Olive Byrne, Donn, and Holloway (illustration credit 28.2)

  Hedy Lamarr, Fuzzy, and Molecat were rabbits. They’d had pet rabbits at Cherry Orchard for years. “We had a domestic crisis in the family today, which is in the nature of a grave reflection on me, your niece,” Olive Byrne once reported to Margaret Sanger. “Four weeks ago we had two rabbits, three weeks ago the number was increased, via blessed event, to eight. Father rabbit was hurriedly removed from mother’s vicinity and has lived a solitary life since. However, today we were presented with ten more—father apparently made an affectionate good bye.”14

  With regret, in 1944 Marston reported to his son Byrne, “I had to put poor little Limpy the paralyzed rabbit out of his misery”; he assured him that he’d done the job quickly. “The other rabbits are thriving,” he went on. “Hedy Lamarr got out yesterday and made for the garden but Pete soon recaptured her; she’s a very tame rabbit and she kept licking little Limpy’s sore parts up to the very last—a fine mother.” (Marston wrote a whole script about Wonder Woman and a rabbit; it was never published.)15

  When O.A., age eleven, was at Camp Po-Ne-Mah in Connecticut, Marston drove everyone out to visit her. “Donn and Pete went (with both Mommies and poor old Dad),” he reported to Byrne, adding that O.A. had become an expert Ping-Pong player. Marston wrote to Byrne every few days and sent him care packages—including comics. “Wonder Woman is going very well—they’ve sold her to a lot of new papers including one in Honolulu and one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Will send you more comic books if you want and the camp permits. (But you don’t have to read WW if you don’t want to—say which books you want.)” For the first time in his life, Marston was writing stuff his kids might actually want to read. He loved asking their opinions. He conducted his own informal readers’ polls. “Sometime when you think of it,” he asked Byrne, “write me what you and other boys prefer about other books as contrasted to the D-C comics (not WW but the other D-C books).”16

  Marston adored his life of nonconformity, a family life with “both Mommies and poor old Dad.” The older the kids got, the more Marston wanted to tell Donn and Byrne that he wasn’t only their adoptive father but their biological father. Olive Byrne refused. She said she’d kill herself if anyone told them.17

  “Olive Richard has been hectoring me for years,” Marston wrote in an article for Family Circle in 1943. “I decided something must be done about it.” He and “Olive Richard” switched places. The next time “Olive Richard” stops by his house, he hectors her. He tells her she’s a loafer.

  “I’m going to tell you a few things, Mr. Psychologist!” she replies. “Do you really imagine that I write articles just to pass the idle hours? I have two children—you’ve psyched them, and you say they have high I.Q.’s and are marvelously well adapted to their school and home environment. Do you suppose that nice adaptation just happened? Or do you think I’ve worked my head off to bring it about?”

  “You fascinate me,” Marston says.

  “You think I’m lying, do you?”

  The real point of the article was to give Marston a chance to shower Olive Byrne with affection, in print: “This young woman is a truly remarkable mother. I hate to admit it publicly because it will make her unbearably cocky when she interviews me again. But the fact is that she has everything it takes.”18

  But if Marston had everything he wanted—a house tumbling with children and animals, exactly the number of women he wanted, and a runaway best seller—he also felt, keenly, the sting of censure. And he wanted something more: he wanted academic acclaim. He wanted the world to know—he wanted scholars to know, he wanted Harvard to know—that Wonder Woman was a work of scholarship. He sat down in his study on the second floor of his house in Rye and tried to explain. He wrote an article called “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics.” It was published early in 1944 in American Scholar, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

  “The phenomenal development of a national comics addiction puzzles professional educators and leaves the literary critics gasping,” Marston began. “Comics, they say, are not literature—adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds.” But, he wondered, “Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons?” No, of course not. Readers of comics weren’t morons, and neither were the writers. They were brilliant! And comics were brilliant; they were the highest form of art: “The picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations, hidden customarily beneath long accumulated protective coverings of indirection and disguise.”19

  This explanation did not sit well with literary scholars. In particular, it outraged New Critics. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, who, at the time, were both teaching at Louisiana State, objected to Marston’s presumption in presenting himself as a scholar and Wonder Woman as a scholarly project. They objected to Marston’s feminism. Above all, they objected to Marston’s argument that the popularity of a comic book, or of anything, was a measure of its quality. In a response published in American Scholar, Brooks and Heilman offered a satire of Marston’s own bloated and pretentious essay. They purported to celebrate Marston’s marriage of the academic and the popular, high and low: “Here is no ivory tower, no intellectual attic: here is the common touch: here the high realm of scholarship is married to daily actuality.” They said they’d conducted a Marston-inspired experiment in their own lecture halls: “In all our classes we now have the aid of two alluring young things clad as ‘Wonder Woman.’ Part of the time they stand, gracefully poised, on either side of the lecture desk. At least once during each hour we pause while the two beauties do a modern dance routine, and you have no idea how it livens things up. Our class enrollments are truly marvelous. Our joint seminar in Vedic Mysticism has grown in size from two to 367. Who dares to say that 367 American university students can be wrong?”

  They added that, in their class on Vedic Mysticism, “The climax of each hour comes when our two lovelies reach over and tap us on the head with charming pearl-handled hammers, and as the bell of dismissal rings we fall cold (not really, of course). Thus is the enemy vanquished; thus do our Wonder Women add, to their allure and their altruistic homilies, a convincing demonstration of power. All in all, we have helped remove the shackles of MAN’S SUPERIORITY, PREJUDICE, AND PRUDERY from lovely woman.” (Marston’s article had been illustrated by a drawing made by Harry Peter of Wonder Woman breaking chains that bind her hands and feet. The chains are labeled PREJUDICE, PRUDERY, and MAN’S SUPERIORITY.) The professors had become wildly popular: “the students here voted forty-to-one for us in a popularity contest in which we ran against a professor who has been using male athletes to give gymnastic exhibits during his lectures.” A colleague of theirs, they said, had done Marston one better, having created “a new comic, ‘Superprof.’ ”20

  On August 11, 1944, a Friday night, Marston, Holloway, and Olive Byrne went to dinner at the Harvard Club and then to the theater. They saw School for Brides, a farce about a much-married man, at the Royale on West Forty-fifth Street. The play was very funny, Holloway remembered; she remembered everything about that night: the dinner, the play, and yelling at Marston to wait up and not run so fast along Forty-fourth Street. “Our last date,” she called it.21 She remembered the running because he never ran again.

  Two weeks later, on August 25, Marston, carrying a briefcase and lugging a suitcase, took the train from Rye into the city and walked from the station to his office at Forty-third and Madison. Just before five, Joye Hummel walked him back to Grand Central to catch a train to Boston; he had banking business to do there. On the train, he worked on Wonder Woman, writing a week’s worth of the newspaper strip. When Marston got to Boston, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, who’d been visiting Ethel Byrne on Cape Cod, was waiting for him at the station. Marston and Huntley wrestled his bags to Caro
lyn Marston Keatley’s apartment, but only with difficulty; Marston was unsteady and in pain. When he woke up the next morning, his left leg was “unaccountably lame and wobbly.” Before the end of the day, he’d been admitted to the Deaconess Hospital. He could no longer move his left leg. On August 28, he was taken by ambulance to the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. He had contracted polio.22

  He spent a month in the hospital and went home to Cherry Orchard on September 25. As best he could, he went back to work that same night. “When pain began around midnight, I concentrated on revising a WW daily,” he wrote in his diary.23

  At first, Marston used braces and crutches—braces make an ap-pearance in a Wonder Woman story called “The Case of the Girl in Braces”—but before long, he was confined to a wheelchair. Holloway had a ramp installed out front and a hand-driven pulley on the stairs inside, so Marston could get from a car into the house, and from the first to the second floor. A nurse, Annette Trainor, visited nearly every day. The children called her Misty (for “Miss T”).24

  Joye Hummel had been working for Marston for only five months when he was struck ill. He couldn’t possibly travel to New York to supervise the production of Wonder Woman. Hummel worked in Marston Art Studio with Peter all week. On weekends, she took the train up to Rye to meet with Marston at his house. She had no idea about the family arrangements. She was told that Olive Byrne was Marston’s widowed sister-in-law.

  Marston after polio (illustration credit 28.3)

  The daily newspaper strip was canceled in 1945. It’s possible that it hadn’t been picked up by enough newspapers; more likely, Marston simply could no longer produce it quickly enough.

  The weaker Marston became, the more of the writing Hummel handled.25 “The Winged Maidens of Venus,” the first story written by Hummel, appeared in Wonder Woman #12, with a cover date of Spring 1945. She was paid $50 a script. Marston kept on writing his own scripts, too. Together, he and Hummel would talk through story ideas. “He would write his scripts,” Hummel said. “And I would write my scripts. I would type all of my scripts. And take them to the editor Sheldon Mayer. He always okayed mine faster because I didn’t make mine as sexy.”26

  Hummel’s stories were more innocent than Marston’s. She also started writing Wonder Woman just at the moment when the censure of the Catholic bishops, the fan mail from fetishists, and Josette Frank’s resignation had led Gaines to request even more oversight from the editorial advisory board. “We had a group of people who were psychologists or professors, whatever, who oversaw what I wrote,” Hummel said. “We had ten restrictions. Things that we could not put in a comic strip. And then at the end of it Mayer would say, Now, I dare you to write a good story.”27

  The most concerted attack on Wonder Woman came just after V-E Day. Walter J. Ong, a Jesuit priest who had written a master’s thesis under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan, and who was at the very beginning of what would be a long career as a literary theorist, had read Marston’s American Scholar essay and found it both foolish and contemptible. He wrote a response called “Comics and the Super State.” He sent the manuscript to the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the Commonweal, the Yale Review, and the Kenyon Review. Everyone rejected it.28 Finally, Ong placed his article in the inaugural issue of a new journal called the Arizona Quarterly. It appeared in the spring of 1945.

  “In the 25,000,000 comic books which are produced in this country monthly, each to be read by an average of four or five individuals, and in the 6,000,000,000 comic strips which appear every month in the United States newspapers, there is at work a squirming mass of psychological forces,” Ong wrote. “What all these forces are, no one knows. Not many people care.” But Ong did care, as a priest, as a literary theorist, and as a citizen of a democracy. He believed that Superman and Wonder Woman comics, specifically, had a great deal in common with the Third Reich, not least Hellenism, paganism, and totalitarianism.

  “The very title ‘superman’—as well as its earlier and unsuccessful form, ‘overman’—is an importation brought into English by George Bernard Shaw out of Nietzsche, the herald of Nazism and the new order,” Ong wrote. Wonder Woman was worse: “The companion female-hero piece which has recently appeared is in a way more symptomatic than Superman himself.” For this, he blamed Marston: “Its calculated conception in the mind of an American educational psychologist as an ideal comic strip shows the fertility of the superman ideology outside Germany.” Ong found Marston’s explanation for Wonder Woman as a remedy for what ailed comic books to be entirely unconvincing. “Indeed, although he says she is designed to counteract the ‘blood-curdling masculinity’ of the other comics and to introduce ‘love’ into the comic field, Wonder Woman is dubbed by her enthusiastic creator an Amazon, while the ambit of her activities excludes the life which most normal women might desire.” Ong’s deepest problem with Wonder Woman was that she was too much like a man: “She is incapable of sustaining womanly standards in the face of the demand for total leveling in the monolithic state ideology. She therefore exists entirely by the standards of males, supplying on the score of her womanhood only the sexiness which the herd of males demands. This is, of course, not a healthy sex directed toward marriage and family life, but an anti-social sex, sex made as alluring as possible while its normal term in marriage is barred by the ground rules from the start.”

  Ong had read Wonder Woman comics carefully. And he’d read the work of both her critics and her defenders. He quoted the remarks made about “chained women” by Josette Frank in a report she wrote for the Child Study Association of America. He repeated Lauretta Bender’s contention that comic books are modern-day folklore and dismissed it as ridiculous: “Only say that the comics are like folk tales, and all misgivings vanish. The taut muscles of the mind relax.” Anyone who believed that was just plain gullible, Ong maintained: think of how the works of Wagner were “snapped up as props for the official civilization of the Third Reich,” and it becomes clear that “the defense of the comics, which adopts as the ultimate criterion of worth an indiscriminating enthusiasm for mass likes and dislikes, is in the same tradition.” Undoubtedly, 100,000,000 Americans read the comics; it didn’t follow that the comics were brilliant, or even folklore. No: they were fascist propaganda.29

  Harry Behn, the editor of the Arizona Quarterly, had decided to run Ong’s essay in his inaugural issue because he figured it would draw the attention of the press. “Your article on the Comics promises to be the most exciting grenade we have yet tossed out!” Behn wrote to Ong, letting him know that he was pitching a write-up in Time and a reprint in Reader’s Digest. Time published a condensation titled “Are Comics Fascist?” Ong received congratulations from Catholic intellectuals across the country. “I got a big laugh when I read that Moulton [sic] has an A.B., LL.B. and a Ph.D., and that he has resorted to such low and despicable means to convince an unsuspecting public,” Aldo Notarianni wrote from Catholic University. “Even should publication of Superman and Imitators continue, it has now definitely been proclaimed that the Catholic mind has not been lulled into accepting what is in reality an insult to man.”30

  By the time Ong’s piece appeared, it was mostly obsolete. Wonder Woman had weakened. With the war over, and Marston confined to his bed, many Wonder Woman stories were being written by Joye Hummel, and those written by Marston had grown domestic.31 He started putting his children in them. In a story Marston wrote in 1946, when Donn was thirteen, a thirteen-year-old boy named Don struggles with his impulsive nature in “The Battle of Desires,” in Comic Cavalcade #16. Donn Marston had a famously bad temper. Also, he was reckless. He and his brother Byrne made some pipe bombs, which almost got them both arrested when the police came to the house in Rye.32 In “The Battle of Desires,” Don, who can’t control his anger, keeps getting into trouble. Lately, he’s been blowing things up. “Your desire for dominance is too strong,” Wonder Woman tells him. “It controls your good desires. I’ll show you what’s happening inside your own mind: a battle of desi
res.” Then she attaches him to her Introspection Machine. It shows Don that there’s a battle going on in his head, between a giant, ugly caveman called Dominance and a beautiful winged angel called Love. Dominance captures Love and gets out a pair of scissors. “Oh let me keep my wings!” she begs him. He refuses: “I don’t trust you, Love. Your wings must be clipped!” (This scene comes straight out of Inez Haynes Gillmore’s Angel Island.) Wonder Woman races to the rescue, but Don has learned a lesson. “Thanks, Wonder Woman, for teaching me to control my dominance.”33

  From “The Battle of Desires,” Comic Cavalcade #16 (August-September 1946) (illustration credit 28.4)

  From “The Bog Trap,” Sensation Comics #58 (October 1946) (illustration credit 28.5)

  In another story Marston wrote in 1946, when pigtailed Olive Ann Marston was twelve, Wonder Woman meets a pigtailed girl of just that age, also named Olive, who is being tormented by her older brothers. The splash page reads, “Poor Olive! The boys wouldn’t let her play with them. They said she was a mere girl—a sissy. But after Wonder Woman took Olive to Paradise Island and gave her Amazon training, she showed strength and courage which amazed her former tormentors and even saved one of them from a horrible death! The boys had to admit, then, that girls are something!” In the story, Olive is playing baseball with her brothers but keeps striking out. Wonder Woman tells her, “You can be strong as any boy if you’ll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.”34

  Marston was dying. He had surgery, at home, for the removal of a mole that turned out to be malignant. He was never told that he had cancer. “The family swore everyone to secrecy,” Hummel said. “If he knew, he would have gone into a deep depression.” There was some worry, too, that he’d become violent and difficult to handle; Marston’s temper could be terrifying. He was in nearly constant pain.35