by Jill Lepore
The cancer metastasized to the lymph nodes in his armpits. He was put on morphine. Two days before he died, he was working on Wonder Woman.36 “The night before he died, he really couldn’t talk much,” Byrne Marston wrote.37 Marston died on May 2, 1947.
O.A. was getting dressed for school when Joye Hummel came to her room on the third floor to tell her that her father was dead. Olive Byrne told her sons. Byrne Marston’s mothers sent him to New York to deliver Marston’s obituary to the New York Times.38
“Dr. W. M. Marston, Psychologist, 53,” was the headline. “He had been most active in the last five years as the originator, writer and producer of ‘Wonder Woman,’ ” the obituary read, but it chiefly identified Marston as “the originator in 1915 of the systolic blood pressure deception test, popularly known as a lie detector test.” It included a lie about the Frye case, the story Marston told himself, the story he wanted to believe: “Dr. Marston, on one occasion, aided in saving the life of a Negro accused of murder.” It listed his survivors: “He leaves a widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Holloway Marston; three sons, Moulton, Byrne H. and Donn R. Marston, and a daughter, Miss Olive Marston.” It made no mention of Olive Byrne.39
R.I.P., Superprof.
THE COMIC-BOOK MENACE
IN JANUARY 1948, seven months after Marston’s death, Holloway sent a three-page letter to Jack Liebowitz, DC’s publisher. “Hire me,” she told him.1
Liebowitz was in a bind. Wonder Woman had been orphaned. Marston had died in May 1947. In August, Charlie Gaines had been killed in a boating accident while vacationing at Lake Placid. That same month, Joye Hummel married a widower with a four-year-old daughter; Hummel adored her. “I resign,” Hummel told Sheldon Mayer when she got back from her honeymoon. “I cannot leave this child.”2 Mayer was desperate to quit, too, but he felt responsible for Marston’s family. “I inherited his kids, I really did,” he said later. “All of a sudden I became a member of the family because, well there’s several reasons, but mainly while I didn’t approve of his approach to Wonder Woman, it became my job to replace the writing, to find someone else. And I was the only person who really understood what he was trying to do.”3
But, as Holloway attempted to point out to Liebowitz in January 1948, Mayer was not, in fact, the only person who knew what Marston was trying to do.4 “Remember I have known Bill since the age of 12,” Holloway reminded Liebowitz. “I suggested the original Lie Detector experiment and cooperated with him in his laboratory work at Harvard. My training is the same as his—A.B., Mt. Holyoke; LLB, Boston University and M.A., Radcliffe. The main difference is that I insisted that he complete work for a PhD which I was too lazy to do. Remember also that I have been editing all my life and have helped materially in the mechanical production of Bill’s books.”
Since her husband’s death, she told him, she’d been studying Wonder Woman from an editorial and business vantage point, making “a careful review of our progress since June first.” She was not impressed. The Wonder Woman comics that appeared in the months following Marston’s death were produced from story ideas and half-written scripts left behind by Marston and Hummel. Most have since been credited to Robert Kanigher, because, decades later, he took credit for them, but actually not Kanigher but a hodgepodge of writers—Holloway thought they were very bad writers—had worked Marston’s and Hummel’s materials into scripts. “Frankly the results show as rank a display of incompetence as it has ever been my discomfort to sit on the side-lines and watch,” Holloway told Liebowitz. Wonder Woman stories had gotten shorter and the printed pages had gotten more expensive to produce. The production schedule was chaotic, “four episodes behind schedule with only eight pages of new script in questionable readiness for the artists.”
There was more to worry about, too. “At this point we also have to meet the competition of Moon Girl,” Holloway warned Liebowitz. “It is being written by a very intelligent, well educational professional writer on a share basis, whose wife, for a short time at least, was editor of Wonder Woman.”5 Dorothy Roubicek had married a comic-book writer named William Woolfolk in 1947; she’d quit DC Comics when she was three months pregnant.6 Moon Girl made its debut in the fall of 1947, published by Charlie Gaines’s EC Comics (after Gaines’s death, EC was run by his son, William). Neither Woolfolk nor Roubicek are listed on the masthead, but Moon Girl was their creation. “As a team they are equipped to turn out a quality product and a strong runner-up for Wonder Woman,” Holloway told Liebowitz. “The one thing they don’t have is the Marston psychology of living which was injected into every page of WW.”7 Moon Girl is, nevertheless, remarkably similar to Wonder Woman. With her long black hair and tight blue shorts, she is “a woman of sensational strength, superhuman speed and endurance and surpassing loveliness.” She is the princess of the moon, sent to the United States by her mother, the queen, to join the man she loves. She’s got a moon rocket and her magic moonstone allows her to stop bullets and gives her “the powers of ten ordinary men.” She looks like Wonder Woman, and she sounds like her, too; she’s forever saying things like “Pluto, aid me!” and “Jupiter protect us!” Her alter ego, Clare Lune, is a history teacher. In the second issue, published in the winter of 1947, “Future Man,” a harassed, henpecked husband who lives three thousand years in the future, goes to the library to watch films made in the twentieth century and there falls in love with Moon Girl. He travels through time to meet her; he wants to marry her. She clobbers him, but he captures her after he manages to steal her moonstone. Then, just as he’s making away with her, his nag of a wife appears, having followed him through time to bring him back home, using her “husband pacifier.”8
From Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk and Bill Woolfolk, Moon Girl #3 (Spring 1948) (illustration credit 29.1)
Holloway made a strong case that Liebowitz should hire her as the editor of Wonder Woman. “Jack, I know I can get writers,” she promised. “I know I can get stories and can put over a high quality Wonder Woman with all the characteristics given it by Bill, if I have your 100 percent backing.” The only way to save Wonder Woman, she insisted, was to keep it in the family. “Jack, if the Marston family doesn’t work on Wonder Woman,” she told Liebowitz, “I give it two years—one to run on Bill’s stuff, the second to peter out.”9
But Liebowitz didn’t give Holloway his 100 percent backing; he didn’t give her any backing at all. Instead, he hired Kanigher, over not only Holloway’s objections but also Mayer’s. Mayer had never liked Kanigher’s Wonder Woman stories. The first time Kanigher gave Mayer a Wonder Woman script, Kanigher said, “I brought it in and he threw it on the floor and jumped up and down on it. I picked it up, went home, and came back with another Wonder Woman story. He went into his routine of throwing it on the floor and jumping up and down on it. The third time I came in he went through his routine. So I said, ‘Fuck you.’ ” But that night, according to Kanigher, Mayer called him and told him Liebowitz wanted to meet with him. “I said, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘About taking over Wonder Woman.’ ” Kanigher came in for a meeting. Liebowitz offered him a position as both writer and editor, with complete control over Wonder Woman. When Holloway protested, Whitney Ellsworth, DC Comics’ editorial director, told Kanigher, “Take the old lady out for lunch.”10
After that, Holloway was altogether cut out of all editorial conversations. Determined to pass along Marston’s vision, she sent Kanigher a long document titled “Information for Wonder Woman Scripts.” It explains Wonder Woman’s origins, her motivation, her favorite sayings, and each of her special tricks and toys. (“WW’s plane is invisible. It is not a robot plane.”) It lists each of the recurring characters, including villains, and their backstories. (“Paula has secret labora-tories in Washington; at Holliday College near Washington, under the steam plant.”) It explains the story structure: Wonder Woman must appear by page 2 or 3, the menace by page 4. It includes a list of curses:
“Bill used feminine expletives for the most part,” Holloway in-structed Kanigher. “This is a d
etail which helps to build the ‘woman’ atmosphere.”11
“You, Daughter, must become the women’s leader,” the Duke of Deception tells Lya in a Wonder Woman story written by Kanigher in 1948. “You must persuade them that they don’t want any political rights and that everything I dictate they vote for.”
Lya smiles. “That’ll be easy!”12
Kanigher filed Holloway’s instructions away. Then he did with Wonder Woman whatever the hell he wanted.
Mayer quit. Holloway was all but forbidden from ever coming to the office again. According to one of her grandchildren, “The guys at DC would hide under their desks when she showed up.”13
Holloway sent Kanigher that set of instructions in February 1948. The next month, in Winters v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a section of the New York State Penal Code banning printed material that appears to glamorize crime. The court found that terms used in the code, like “indecent” and “disgusting,” had no “technical or common law meaning.” Critics of comic books believed that the ruling made a specious distinction between obscenity (which was not then protected by the First Amendment) and violence (which was). To protest the ruling, a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham organized a symposium called “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” One speaker, Gershon Legman of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, said that Winters v. New York meant that naked women could not be tortured on the pages of a comic book but “if they were being tortured to death with all their clothes on, that would be perfect for children.” He attacked both Marston, for having created, in Wonder Woman, a character who “lynches her victims,” and Lauretta Bender, for providing “the standard psychiatric justification for these comic books.”14
In May, an indictment of comics written by Wertham appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature. Working with children in Queens and Harlem, Wertham had grown worried about what comic-book characters like Wonder Woman did to little girls. He told a story about a four-year-old girl living in an apartment building where all the other children were boys; they’d gotten the idea, from comic books, that it would be fun to hurt her: “The boys in the building, from about three to nine years old, hit her, beat her with guns, tie her up with rope whenever they get a chance. They hit her with whips which they buy at the circus. They push her off her bicycle and take her toys away. They handcuff her with handcuffs bought with coupons from comic books. They take her to a vacant lot and use her as a target for bow and arrow. They make a spearhead and scare her. Once, surrounding her in this way, they pulled off her panties to torture her (as they put it). Now her mother has fastened the child’s panties with a string around her neck so the boy can’t pull them down.”15
Wertham, born in Nuremberg in 1895, received his MD in Germany in 1921; the next year, he immigrated to the United States. He was a liberal, an especially ardent supporter of racial equality, and an advocate of gun control. In the 1930s, Wertham worked closely with Clarence Darrow; in criminal cases, Wertham often testified on behalf of indigent blacks. In 1930, Margaret Sanger established a birth control clinic in Harlem, with the support of W.E.B. DuBois. (“Those who would confine women to childbearing are reactionary barbarians,” DuBois said.)16 Two years later, Wertham began setting up mental health clinics nearby. In 1934, he started working at Bellevue Hospital. Between 1936 and 1940, Lauretta Bender’s husband, Paul Schilder, director of Bellevue’s Mental Hygiene Clinic, was Wertham’s boss. In 1938, Wertham argued in John Henry Wigmore’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology that psychiatry had a great deal to contribute to the law because psychiatrists could understand the forces that contaminated children’s minds and turned them into criminals. By that he meant, in part, that psychiatrists ought to decide what kind of children’s reading should be banned. The year Schilder died, 1940, Wertham left Bellevue Hospital to become director of psychiatric services at Queens Hospital, where he started what came to be called the Hookey Club, a therapy group for delinquent children. In 1946 he founded the La-fargue Clinic in Harlem.17
The racism, the sexual exploitation of women, and the glorification of guns in comic books bothered Wertham more than anything else, although he was also obsessed with what he considered the comics’ promotion of forms of sexual “perversion,” including homosexuality. No small part of his animus against comics, though, had to do with Lauretta Bender, who was Wertham’s professional rival, and also his bête noire. When he called comic-book industry advisers “psycho-prima donnas,” he was referring, quite specifically, to Bender: “The fact that some child psychiatrists endorse comic books does not prove the healthy state of the comic books,” he said. “It only proves the unhealthy state of child psychiatry.” Even the troubled children in the Hookey Club could see that anyone who served on a comic-book publisher’s editorial advisory board was untrustworthy. “If you got a thousand dollar check for these funny books, would you talk against them?” he said a fourteen-year-old boy had pointed out. “They give some people side money, so they write, ‘Approved by Dr. So-and-So: Good Reading Matter for Children.’ ”18
Frederick Wertham inspecting the comics (illustration credit 29.3)
By the end of the 1940s, laws banning or restricting the sale of comic books had been passed in dozens of cities and states. In 1950, Congress held a set of hearings on juvenile delinquency, chaired by Estes Kefauver. The hero in comic books is almost always “an athletic, pure American white man,” Wertham pointed out, while “the villains on the other hand, are foreign-born, Jews, Orientals, Slavs, Italians, and dark-skinned races.”19 Very few people interested in shutting down the comic-book industry were as troubled by the racism in comics as was Wertham. Kefauver’s interest was, instead, in the relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency. “It is my belief that comics do not excite children to criminal activity,” Lauretta Bender wrote to Kefauver before the hearings began. “I have found a relationship between comics and delinquency in children but that the relationship is a positive one in that comics can be and are used by children as a means of relief from conflict, confusion, frustration, anxiety and may prove also to be a vicarious release of aggression. In this way, children’s use of comics may be compared to adults’ use of literature of all kinds, art, music, theater, movies etc., as these help us all to a better understanding of life, of other people’s problems, of social concepts and bring all people closer together in a mutual understanding.”20
Wertham tried to discredit Bender by pointing out, during his testimony, that “the comic book experts who have become most known to the public have admitted to the United States Senate Crime Committee that they have been employed by the crime comic book industry.”21 In his final report, Kefauver was unable to demonstrate that comics caused children to commit acts of violence. Wertham was furious, calling Kefauver’s conclusions “the greatest advertisement the crime comic book industry has had to date.”22 Bender was pleased, writing to Whitney Ellsworth at DC Comics to tell him that she felt that Kefauver’s hearings had proved nothing so much as that, regarding the relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency, “there is clearly no evidence that the influence is a negative one.”23
Wertham decided that the only way he could prevail in his fight against the comic-book industry was to discredit Bender. He compiled a list he titled “Paid Experts of the Comic Book Industry Posing as Independent Scholars.” First on the list, as the comic-book industry’s lackey #1, was Bender. “On crime comics payroll since 1941,” Wertham wrote. “Boasted privately of bringing up her 3 children on money from crime comic books.”24
“Dr. Wertham is at large again,” a friend wrote to Bender in October 1953. “He has written a book.”25 That book, Seduction of the Innocent, was published in the spring of 1954. In 1951, Wertham had testified on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a school desegregation case in Delaware. In a study he’d conducted at the Lafargue Clinic, Wertham found that school segregation was psycholog
ically harmful. (Wertham’s work, along with his testimony for the NAACP, was cited, in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education.)26 In Seduction of the Innocent, he revisited this argument in his case against comics. He related, from his case notes, the stories of children he worked with in his clinic in Harlem, quoting, for instance, a twelve-year-old black girl who read seven or eight comic books a day, including Wonder Woman. She said,
I don’t think they make the colored people right. The way they make them I never seen before—their hair and big nose and the English they use. They never have an English like we have. They put them so dark—for real I’ve never seen anybody before like that. White kids would think all colored people look like that, and really they aren’t.
Wertham paid special attention to the three most popular superheroes. “This Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman group is a special form of crime comics,” he explained. One of his chief arguments was that comics promoted homosexuality. Batman and Robin live together (“it is like a wish dream of two homosexuals”); they love each other. “Sometimes Batman ends up in bed injured and young Robin is shown sitting next to him.” Even their house is gay: “They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases.” They share furniture: “Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm.” It wasn’t just that Bruce and Dick were lovers; it was that they turned boys gay. “The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies,” Wertham charged.27 The Amazonian princess, he thought, was worse. “The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman,” Wertham asserted, taking the opportunity to attack Bender: “The Psychiatric Quarterly deplored in an editorial the ‘appearance of an eminent child therapist as the implied endorser of a series . . . which portrays extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian.”28