BARELY REACHING FIVE FOOT THREE, with a mop of blue-rinsed white hair, Alexander Salkind brought to mind a mole man more than a Superman. His taste ran to white bucks, silk ascots, and jeweled lorgnettes, the elegant spectacles favored by operagoers. His suits were strictly powder blue and Savile Row, with a Légion d’honneur rosette proudly pinned to the wide lapel. He held court amid the faded opulence of luxury hotels and refused to ride an elevator or an airplane. His exotic accent, a thick blend of old-school Romance languages, left no doubt that English was not his native tongue. Indeed, his background was Russian, his homeland Germany, his citizenship Mexican, his ethnicity Jewish, and his passport that of a cultural attaché to Costa Rica. He had bankers in every capital in Europe yet had never paid a bill on time. But this son of Greta Garbo’s film producer knew how to make movies—his production credits ranged from Orson Welles’s The Trial to the blockbuster The Three Musketeers. In the spring of 1974 he was looking for the next big thing.
“Why don’t we do Superman?” his son and protégé, Ilya, asked expectantly over dinner at the Café de la Paix in Paris.
“What’s Superman?” Alex asked back.
Not an auspicious beginning for the man who was about to define the Last Son of Krypton for a new generation in America and around the globe. But what he lacked in appreciation of popular culture Alex made up for with his instinct that a world disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate might need a superman. This was the intuition of the Holocaust survivor—an understanding that it wasn’t the particular myth that mattered but our aspiring to something bigger. His own life had always been defined half by suspicions and anxieties, half by defying norms and accomplishing the impossible. That fearlessness—what was a tax problem or lawsuit to someone who had been hunted by the Gestapo?—was precisely what was needed to revive Superman more than twenty years after his last radio broadcast and fifteen after his TV show and its star died, when he was again the limited province of adolescent readers of comic books.
“I told my father who Superman was—that he flies, that he’s as known as Jesus Christ, that we can’t do it tiny—and why it has to be a big movie,” Ilya recalls. “He said, ‘Sounds very interesting, this Superman. Flies. Powers. Stronger. Known. Ahhh, let me talk a bit with my people.”
His people were bankers and other moneymen from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, and Chicago. Some were reputable while others skated on the edge. It was the same combination that had worked for Harry and Jack over the years. Enough of them approved to give Alex and Ilya confidence. More than enough. Looking back, even his lawyer concedes that Alex sold or traded more than 100 percent of the production, in the style of a Ponzi schemer or of Max Bialystock, Mel Brooks’s double-dealing producer. He didn’t go to jail only because the film made enough money to pay everyone off handsomely.
Step two was getting Warner Communications, Superman’s new owner, to hand over the keys. Warner Bros. executives were busy with their own big films—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Night Moves, Dog Day Afternoon—and had never imagined Superman as much more than a comic book. A buoyant superhero seemed an especially poor fit at a moment when the nation was reeling from one of the deepest recessions since the 1930s along with the resignation and pardoning of its disgraced president, Richard Milhous Nixon. So whatever they thought of the elfin Alex and his slightly taller son, Warner agreed, turning over twenty-five years of moviemaking rights to the Salkinds in return for $850,000 and the promise of millions more in the unlikely event the producers cashed in. It was a golden chance for Ilya and Alex and a lack of both vision and intestinal fortitude by one of Hollywood’s biggest dream factories. “It wasn’t one of the studios” that recognized what Superman could be, concedes Terry Semel, Warner’s former president. “I’d like to take credit for it, but I think Alex Salkind saw it and he did it.”
More than a thousand people would be involved in the production, including six writers and rewriters and three directors. Eleven separate film units shot at three studios in eight countries on three continents. More than a million feet of film were recorded, although just twelve thousand were needed. It took the largest movie budget ever to pull it all off, with more bounced or delayed paychecks than anyone could count. A director, a writer, and the biggest stars all sued the Salkinds afterward, and they all won settlements. Alex had to hijack the film to squeeze the extra money he needed from Warner, and his fear of flying—and of being arrested—kept him from the U.S. premiere.
But what mattered to him, to Ilya, and to studio executives like Semel was that it worked. Five years after that father-son dinner in Paris, the Salkinds released Superman: The Movie. It was nominated for three Oscars and took home a Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation and a Grammy for best musical score. The box office results were even more uplifting. It was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1978, bested only by Grease, and the most profitable in Warner Bros.’ history. It was the first time a comic book hero had starred in a serious movie and it launched Superman as a film franchise, with three sequels over the next decade. For the Man of Steel, it meant a bold new adventure that would define him for Generation Xers the same way George Reeves’s Adventures of Superman had branded him for baby boomers. And it was made possible by one of the few people on the planet who had never heard of Superman.
BEFORE THE SALKINDS COULD MAKE a movie they needed a script, and so, as they would with everything, they opened their checkbooks and went hunting for a big name. Alfred Bester qualified, having written The Phantom comics and award-winning novels like The Demolished Man, and he was hired to produce a treatment. Ilya loved what he wrote; Alex didn’t. Bester might be a celebrity in the world of science fiction, father Salkind said, but he wanted big. Bester got a generous kill fee and Mario Puzo got a call.
Puzo’s Godfather had recently been made into two movies that earned him a pair of Academy Awards for best screenplay. An Oscar was the kind of credential Alex could relate to, and Ilya signed Puzo up for 5 percent of the film’s gross sales. His Superman was a TV anchorman at a station where Lois Lane was the weather girl and there was no competition from the Daily Planet, which had folded. Lex was there, too, or rather “Luthor Lux.” When Superman went looking for Lux he found a bald Kojak in a trench coat who, sucking a lollipop, asked, “Hey! Superman! Who loves ya, baby?” Puzo thought camp like that gave his movie pizzazz. Everyone who read it, especially the National Periodical people, was sure it would undermine the film’s credibility and Superman’s. Puzo’s opus, which stretched to more than three hundred pages, read more like a novel than a screenplay and would have cost a billion dollars to produce, says Ilya. Yet both sides found silver linings when Puzo walked away at the end of 1975: He eventually got his promised 5 percent, with $300,000 of that up front and an on-screen credit for a largely useless product, while the Salkinds got bragging rights to one of the world’s best-known writers, whose legend they used to refill their dwindling coffers.
Next up were Robert Benton and David Newman, who had written the script for the Broadway production It’s a Bird, along with Newman’s wife and writing partner, Leslie. Ilya offered the new team a million dollars and simple instructions: “Fix it.” They spent their first three days tossing out big chunks of Puzo’s work, then got their own bead on the hero. “We decided that Superman is our King Arthur, he’s our legend,” says Leslie. What fascinated Benton was the Clark Kent–Superman split: “Is he Clark Kent until that emergency call happens, or is he Superman? Does he miss going full tilt or does he get used to being this guy who sits in a coffee shop and has a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch?” As for what the Salkinds wanted, “They had no idea and couldn’t have cared less,” says Benton, although they made clear they wanted screenplays for a film and a sequel. Newman says Alex often asked about what was happening with “Mr. Superman and Mrs. Lois Lane,” but “when we would start telling him he would fall asleep in about five minutes. I said to David, ‘It’s like telling bedtime stories.’ ” They did get paid—at the end of each day, in cash, with money from whatever country had the best currency exchange rate. They also got ongoing guidance from National’s E. Nelson Bridwell, who was a living encyclopedia of everything that Superman had said, done, or imagined.
Heeding Bridwell’s advice was less a matter of choice than of law, as spelled out in a fifty-four-page agreement between National and the Salkinds. It prescribed that the films “shall not be satirical or obscene.” They had to be G-rated, or at worst PG, and had to be consistent with the way Superman spoke and acted in the comic books. National would get to vet the screenplay and be there during filming. Costumes for Superman and Superboy had to be preapproved, as did the actors who played them and Lois. Just to be sure, the publisher submitted its preferred lists for these parts. Superman and Clark, it suggested, might best be handled by any of twenty-four A-list actors, from Charlton Heston, known for his roles as Moses and Ben-Hur, to tough guy Charles Bronson. Lois’s list had twenty-three actresses, from Natalie Wood, who had gotten rave reviews as Maria in West Side Story, to sexpot Raquel Welch.
Before they could worry about stars, the Salkinds needed a director. Tops on their list was Chinatown maestro Roman Polanski, who was still reeling from the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and would soon be accused of sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old girl. “Not exactly my kind of thing, Ilya,” Polanski said of Superman. Jaws director Steven Spielberg approached him, Ilya says, but Alex worried that “the shark might go down, let’s wait and see how this fish movie does.” Jaws was a smash and now Spielberg was out of reach. From there they moved on to a who’s who of top Hollywood skippers—from Francis Ford Coppola, who was busy with Apocalypse Now, to John Guillermin, whose hero of the moment was King Kong, to Sam Peckinpah, who pulled a gun on Ilya and said, “You gotta shut up, kid. What do you think you know about movies?” They finally settled on Guy Hamilton, who had made his name with Goldfinger. He looked like a gem until the production moved from Rome, where star Marlon Brando had a pending arrest warrant for sexual obscenity, to London, where Hamilton was a tax exile. Moving back to London, Hamilton decided, would cost him too much money.
Richard Donner was a perfect fit. He had grown up in the Bronx as a “comic book man” and his first true love was Lois Lane. He had just finished directing The Omen and was ready for new work. So he listened intently when he got a call on a Sunday morning from a man with what sounded like a Hungarian accent saying, “I am a world famous producer. I am making Superman and I want you to make it.” Two hours later Alex Salkind’s messenger was at Donner’s door with a copy of the Puzo-Benton-Newman script. But the deeper he read, the more alarmed Donner became. “It was a parody on a parody. They were destroying Superman,” he recalls. To see whether it could be salvaged, he invited over Tom Mankiewicz, a friend and the screenwriter for some of the James Bond movies. By the time Mankiewicz arrived, Donner had put on a Superman costume and convinced himself that if Mankiewicz agreed to rewrite the script, and Salkind agreed to hire both of them, he would do the movie. “I took the job to protect Superman,” he says, “plus the fact that I was being paid a million dollars.”
It actually was a million dollars as an advance against 7.5 percent of the film’s gross, which made it even more attractive to Donner but still looked like a bargain to the Salkinds. They had already agreed to pay Brando more than any film star had ever received—11.3 percent of domestic gross and 5.6 percent of foreign, with a guarantee of at least $2.7 million—to play Jor-El, who was on-screen for thirteen and a half of the movie’s 143 minutes. Two days later they signed up Gene Hackman for $2 million to play Lex Luthor. High-priced talent like that reassured anxious executives at Warner Communications and helped Alex woo his financiers. Still, with no final screenplay in hand, and without a frame of film, the Salkinds had just agreed to hand over a quarter of their profits, or 30 percent including earlier promises to Puzo. They were on the hook for another $10 million in salaries, agents’ fees, and bills for gilded suites at hotels like the Plaza in New York and the Beverly Hills in Beverly Hills. And they still had no clue who would be their Superman.
Saturdays were “Superman test day.” By the time Donner and Mankiewicz came on board at the end of 1976, a lineup of first-rate stars had refused or been rejected for the part. Alex’s first choice was Robert Redford, who said no. So did Paul Newman, although Ilya says Newman “vomited” when he heard later how much Brando was earning. Nearly two hundred other actors were considered, including Sylvester Stallone (too Italian), Arnold Schwarzenegger (too Aryan), Muhammad Ali (too black), James Caan (too greedy), Bruce Jenner (too little talent), and Clint Eastwood (too busy). Ilya’s wife had her own favorite—her dentist in Beverly Hills—and he was flown in for a firsthand look (everyone agreed that he “looked terrific” and wasn’t worth the risk). Gossip columnists were having a field day and Alex was having a conniption. It was reminiscent of the casting calls that eventually found Kirk Alyn and George Reeves, only worse, with shooting set to start in eight weeks. Ilya says he was all for using an unknown actor who wouldn’t overshadow the role but Donner was intent on a big name; Donner says it was just the reverse. They agreed it was time to have a second look at the skinny Juilliard-trained actor whose photo the casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, kept putting back in the in-pile every time they’d toss it out.
Christopher Reeve was an unlikely choice. It wasn’t just his honey brown hair, or that his 180 pounds did not come close to filling out his six-foot-four frame. He had asthma and he sweated so profusely that a crew member would have to blow-dry his armpits between takes. He was prep school and Ivy League, with a background in serious theater that made him more comfortable in England’s Old Vic theater than in its Pinewood movie lot. He was picked, as he acknowledged, 90 percent because he looked “like the guy in the comic book … the other 10% is acting talent.” He also was a brilliant choice. He brought to the part irony and comic timing that harked back to the best of screwball comedy. He had dramatic good looks and an instinct for melding humanism with heroism. “When he walked into a room you could see this wasn’t a conventional leading man, there was so much depth he had almost an old movie star feeling,” says Stalmaster. Alex loved the price: $250,000, or less than a tenth of what Brando would get. Donner asked Reeve to try on his horn-rimmed glasses. Squinting back at him was Clark Kent. Even his name fit: Christopher Reeve would be assuming the part made famous by George Reeves. “I didn’t find him,” Donner would say throughout the production. “God sent him to me.”
Margot Kidder fell into her part. “She literally tripped into the door when she arrived for her test,” says Donner, “and I looked at Lynn and said, ‘That’s Lois.’ ” Growing up in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Kidder was banned from watching television, reading comic books, or doing anything else that would have put her in touch with Superman. She didn’t have to be. To play Lois Lane she just had to be herself: “I’m manic and I’m overambitious and I’m often frantic and disorganized.” When Donner told her she had the part that stars like Stockard Channing and Leslie Ann Warren wanted, she thought, “ ‘Thank God, I really need the money!’ Then I went out and to the best lingerie boutique on Beauchamp Place in London and bought six hundred bucks’ worth of underwear!” She also went to charm school, courtesy of her director, learning how to wear high heels rather than cowboy boots and to sit in a skirt instead of blue jeans. In the end Kidder was what old fans had always imagined Lois Lane looked like, and what young ones would from 1978 on.
With the big roles filled and the big names signed, Donner and Mankiewicz could zero in on telling their story. Their key was recognizing that, to fans, Superman was not a fantasy character but an embodiment of real hopes and ideals. “It’s as simple as that: truth, justice, and the American way. What other comic book hero could say that?” asks Donner. Over the years, Superman’s handlers had labored over whether they should aim for kids or parents, longtime fans or new ones. Donner had a less complicated calculus: “I was making it for me.… This picture is the biggest Erector Set given to the biggest kid in the world.” This was just what had driven Jerry Siegel to dream up the hero forty years before. To make sure his cast and crew understood his passion and never slipped into parody or pretension, Donner hung on his wall a plastic airborne Superman trailing a banner that read, VERISIMILITUDE.
The movie itself was equally straightforward and came in three acts: the science fiction birth and backstory on Krypton, Clark growing into his down-to-earth values and superhero persona on the wheat fields of Kansas, and nonstop adventures in Metropolis like rescuing Lois from a crashing helicopter and saving the president from a crashing Air Force One, which were what moviegoers had paid to see. Each segment had its own cast, with limited overlap. Each was filmed at its own location. Ground zero was Pinewood Studios, just west of London, where the crew assembled a crystalline version of Krypton along with the world’s biggest soundstage. Alberta, Canada, doubled as Smallville, U.S.A. New York was the stand-in for Metropolis the way Metropolis had always been for New York. The settings and stories were truer to the spirit of the comic book Superman than anything filmed before. And it was more than Superman who benefited: Donner, Mankiewicz, and their collaborators were creating a prototype for the new genre of superhero epic, one that held old fans with an elegant rendering of nostalgic origins while it offered neophytes their first bite of the legend. It was a model that everyone from Batman to Spider-Man would follow. The Man of Tomorrow had again shown the way.
What wasn’t straightforward was the flying. It never is, but moviegoers in the 1970s were not as forgiving as they had been in the low-tech 1940s and 1950s. Surely a world that had just unveiled videocassette recorders, neutron bombs, and a test-tube baby named Louise Brown could give us a convincing human airliner. Donner tried having his superhero skydive into the action. He hoisted him onto a three-hundred-foot crane behind a miniaturized Golden Gate Bridge. He experimented with flying harnesses and depressurized weightless chambers. Nothing worked. The solution came from an unlikely source: special effects wizard Zoran Perisic, who had read Superman comics growing up in Serbia and had been asked, “Who is Superman?” when U.S. authorities quizzed him for his naturalization papers. He was so convinced he could make Reeve fly that he offered to pay for the tests if his idea didn’t work. He put zoom lenses on both the camera and the projector so that the projected image, as seen by the camera, never changed size. Superman, who was in front of that image, appeared to come closer or move farther away—and to be performing aerial maneuvers when the camera/projector rig rotated—when in fact he was standing still. Perisic called the technique “Zoptic.” Donner called it a lifesaver. The producers didn’t want anyone drawing attention to the invention for fear other filmmakers would use it before they did. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was impressed enough that it gave the film its Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects.
Gimmickry was just half the equation; the other half was Christopher Reeve. He wanted to do more than run and dive the way Kirk Alyn and George Reeves had done. As a licensed aviator, Christopher knew what it felt like to take wing. Even without an airplane or any movement, he banked the turns, rolled, and looped, all with the ease of a stunt pilot. Back on the ground, he studied his predecessors to see what else they did poorly or well. Like them, he performed many of his own capers. George offered critical lessons in how to play the role as if he believed it but none when it came to differentiating Superman from Clark Kent, something he had never managed to do. “How could a thick pair of glasses substitute for a believable characterization?” Christopher asked. “Lois Lane shouldn’t have to be blind or dim-witted.” His model for Clark was a young Cary Grant—shy, vulnerable, and charmingly klutzy—and his watchword was to underplay the character. By slumping his shoulders and compressing his spine, Christopher’s Clark lost a full three inches from his Superman frame. His voice became more nasal and midwestern. He slicked back his hair, flipping the part from left to right and losing the spit curl. His demeanor now suggested a guy who not only couldn’t get the girl, he couldn’t even get a taxi.
Bulking up for the role was a different kind of challenge for Reeve. “We shoved food down Chris and got him lots of protein drinks, five to six cans a day,” recalls Dave Prowse, a bodybuilder and gym owner in London who, having played Superman in a TV commercial, had hoped to land the movie role himself. When he didn’t, he agreed to train the man who did. Working out five nights a week with free weights and a trampoline, Prowse and Reeve focused first on Reeve’s pectoral muscles, thighs, and back, then on his arms, shoulders, calves, and abdominals. Teatime meant a plate of cakes, and mealtime came four times a day. In just six weeks Reeve put on more than thirty pounds, mostly muscle, adding two inches to his chest, two to his biceps, and enough overall that he could take the muscle padding out of his blue body stocking. Training him was easy at first, but when he had to leave for a week to be with another client, Prowse says, “Chris called me all the names under the sun. He said he was losing weight and strength. Donner called me over and said, ‘He really thinks he is Superman.’ ”
And so he was. Superman himself changed with every artist who filled in his features, every writer who scripted his adventures, and even the marketers and accountants who managed his finances and grew his audience. Each could claim partial ownership. Actors like Christopher Reeve did more molding and framing than anyone and could claim more proprietorship. As each scene was shot it became clearer that he was giving the hero a different face as well as a unique personality. Christopher’s Superman would be funnier and more human—if less powerful or intimidating—than any who had preceded him. He was more of a Big Blue Boy Scout now, in contrast to Kirk Alyn’s Action Ace and George Reeves’s Man of Steel. In the hands of this conservatory-trained actor, Supes was getting increasingly comfortable baring his soul.
As the filming slogged through its second year, the cast and crew were growing temperamental and the media were wondering whether it would ever be done. Ilya and Alex watched Donner spend their money all too freely. Donner says he was the first director ever who never got a budget, so he never knew whether his spending was under or over. Brando had shown up on the set with the flu and what he thought were humorous suggestions—that Jor-El the Kryptonian should look like a bagel, or perhaps a green suitcase—although he left calling the film “a fucking Valentine” to the superhero. Alex’s wife, Berta Domínguez D., who called herself the Shakespeare of Mexico, attacked Mankiewicz with a steak knife when he made a joke about Alex’s height. Alex apologized for Berta, saying Mexicans shouldn’t drink, and he apologized for his perpetual lying, saying, “I can’t help it.” Jack O’Halloran, an ex-heavyweight boxer playing a Kryptonian supervillain, was so outraged when his paychecks took months to clear that he says he dragged producer Pierre Spengler across his desk, shouting, “This is bullshit. I signed a contract to work. I worked. Now pay me.”
Thankfully, the relationship that mattered most off-screen as well as on, Lois and Clark’s, was in good shape. The two actors behaved like brother and sister. Christopher was the uptight, ambitious sibling, Margot was loosey-goosey. She reassured him about being typecast as Superman. He pushed her to read the script, not a novel, while they dangled from cranes waiting for the next scene. She couldn’t resist pinging his steel codpiece until he’d scream, “For God’s sake, stop it!” Their chemistry was most apparent in the movie’s most remembered scene, on Lois’s balcony. Superman arrived saying, “Good evening, Miss Lane,” then cuddled her in his arms for a flight over Metropolis’s skyscrapers and bridges. Mankiewicz expanded the scene from two pages to seven and says that when he first heard Chris utter his greeting, “I remember putting my hands together and pleading that he would just keep going like that.” He did. When Lois asked, “Who are you?” Superman answered sweetly: “A friend.” Margot says they were indeed friends, which made it easy to act that way. What was difficult was summoning the sexual energy the scene demanded. “I had to pretend,” she explains, “that Christopher was Harrison Ford.” It worked. She asked the man with the X-ray eyes what color underwear she was wearing and, after awkward evasions, he told the truth: “Pink.” But then, Reeve’s Superman could make even a fib sound guileless, the way he did when he looked into Lois’s eyes and promised, “I never lie.”
The scene was more a Shakespearean drama—think Romeo and Juliet—than a comic book spoof, and Donner demanded an equally elevated tone for the music. “Superman was the perfect hero to be musicalized in quasi-operatic or balletic fashion,” says John Williams, who composed the score and conducted the London Symphony’s performance of it. There was a rousing “Superman March” for the opening and closing credits, a mysterious “Krypton crystal” motif to introduce the doomed planet, an all-American melody for Smallville, and a playful “March of the Villains” for Lex and his henchman, Otis. “My challenge and opportunity,” Williams says, “was to capture musically Superman’s optimism and invincibility and athletics and heroism. The perfect fifth and the perfect octave are heroic intervals that have a strength and a core power to suggest just those qualities of heroism and heroics.”
While Donner and his team were working to assemble a movie worthy of their hero, the Salkinds were building an audience that would want to watch. In 1975, before they had a final screenplay, they hired three planes to fly over the Cannes Film Festival every hour with a banner reading, SUPERMAN, SALKIND, PUZO. The next year five planes carried a slightly amended message: SUPERMAN, SALKIND, HAMILTON. By 1977 a blimp was carrying the message, along with a fleet of aircraft worthy of France’s Armée de l’Air.
That was just the drumroll. The fully orchestrated rollout was plotted by Warner Bros., which was handling the film’s distribution and was finally convinced it had real commercial potential. Super-secrecy was Warner’s watchword, with paparazzi kept clear of the studio and street sets, even when the setting was the streets of New York. Pictures of Superman on cranes and wires could undermine the illusion of him flying on his own. There were none of the standard photo handouts, either. That would shatter the intrigue that was building over this new Superman and what he looked like in tights and cape. The secrecy campaign worked so well that someone broke into Pinewood Studios to try to filch shots. The first photographs of Christopher Reeve in uniform and in the air were published just where and when Warner wanted—in the two biggest newsweeklies, just before and after the film’s release, with Newsweek’s shot consuming the full cover. As for paid advertising, the Warner team hatched a classic come-on that captured all that was new in the movie and happened to be true: “You’ll believe a man can fly!”
But there was a last-minute glitch. Alex Salkind refused to deliver the completed film unless Warner executives agreed to kick in another $15 million. He said it would buy them additional distribution rights for “certain foreign territories.” They said it was blackmail. Alex knew that 750 theaters were planning to screen the film, sight unseen, starting December 15, 1978. He also knew that his contract didn’t require delivery until December 31. “There was an element of extortion in it,” concedes Tom Pollock, Alex’s lawyer, “but he was totally legally entitled.” So Alex honored his contract, if not his word, and set a price that was $5 million more than Warner had paid for the distribution rights to all of North America and three-quarters of its international markets. The company knew it was over a barrel, and with just two weeks to spare, it agreed to pay.
Finally, five years after that dinner at a Paris café and just ten days before Christmas, the film was ready for viewing. President Jimmy Carter took his daughter, Amy, to see it at a premiere in Washington. Queen Elizabeth brought Prince Andrew to a royal unveiling in London. At the New York bash, Mario Puzo showed up in a blue Superman T-shirt and Norman Mailer wore a blue velvet tuxedo, but Marlon Brando stayed on vacation in Tahiti. A more confounding no-show was Alexander Salkind. He had been arrested by Interpol officers in Switzerland on charges of stealing $20 million from the German company that bankrolled his films and was released only after he displayed the diplomatic credentials he had secured years before courtesy of the president of Costa Rica. Rather than head to the Superman parties in the United States, where he feared another arrest, he overcame his phobia of flying by using heavy sedation and hired a jet to deliver him to the safe haven of Mexico. Had he come to the U.S. gala, Alex could have met Jerry Siegel. As the film ended, Jerry approached National’s publisher in tears, saying, “It was exactly how I had imagined it.”
Reviewers offered a mixed verdict on Alex’s production. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll proclaimed it “a mass entertainment of high class and energy,” while Roger Ebert called it “a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects, and—you know what else? Wit.” Pauline Kael of The New Yorker seemed to be writing about an entirely different movie, saying it was “cheesy looking” and gave “the impression of having been made in a panic,” by a director who “can’t seem to get the timing right,” with a score “that transcends self-parody.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times began his review hopefully, writing that Superman offered “good, clean, simple-minded fun.” Then he took his shot: “To enjoy this movie as much as one has a right to expect, one has either to be a Superman nut, the sort of trivia expert who has absorbed all there is to know about the planet Krypton, or to check one’s wits at the door, which may be more than a lot of people are prepared to do for longer than two hours.”
More people qualified than Canby might have expected. The film clocked in as the sixth highest grossing of all time, bringing in just over $300 million worldwide and appearing on screens as far away as Shanghai and Peking. With the average ticket in 1978 selling for $2.50, 120 million people watched Christopher Reeve fly across the screen—one hundred times more than were buying Superman, Superboy, and the rest of their family of comics that year. The movie won twenty-one awards, including best science fiction film of 1978 from the International Society of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy. It was an even bigger hit in pharmacies and department stores, where merchants couldn’t stock enough thermoses, sneakers, lunch boxes, cereal bowls, cookie jars, and anything else with Christopher Reeve in blue tights. And it wasn’t just little boys and their dads who were bewitched by the movie and its star. “I took my 7-year-old son to see the picture, not expecting very much,” Penelope Hoover told readers of the Los Angeles Times. “When I emerged from the theater afterward, I felt like a 10-year-old kid who had just seen something wonderful.… It made me rediscover the little girl in myself and I’m happy to find her.”
Hoover grasped what Warner Communications hadn’t. Periodically we all need to recapture our youth and idealism, especially at a moment when America was mired in a malaise that President Jimmy Carter called a “crisis of confidence.” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster understood that when they introduced their hero in the midst of the Depression and on the eve of a world war. The Salkinds understood it when they bought the rights to Superman and hired two grown-up kids—Donner and Mankiewicz—to make the movie. Superman, the world’s biggest optimist, understood it better than anyone, which is why Hoover and her son so adored him.
One group that wasn’t sure how to feel about the new film was scriptural literalists. They had plenty to mull over, starting with Marlon Brando as Jor-El. With a long-flowing white robe and a shock of silver hair, he looked as well as acted like God. “They can be a great people, Kal-El,” he told his only son, explaining why the boy had been dispatched to Earth. “They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all—their capacity for good—I have sent them you. My only son.” The Almighty couldn’t have said it better. Similarly, Superman’s adoptive parents, the Kents, were written into the script as “Christian folk whose morals are as basic as the soil they till.” The movie was meant to have religious resonance, says screenwriter Mankiewicz, although the religion could as easily have been Muslim or Jewish as Christian. To many filmgoers, those references made Superman even more compelling, offering grist for editorials, Sunday school discussions, scholarly articles, and more than one book. To some, it was blasphemy. “I got major death threats,” remembers Donner. “How dare I symbolize Brando as God and Christopher as Jesus? Studio security brought them to my attention. Some of them were just nuts, fanatics. There was talk of blood running in the streets.”
Alex had his own problems. His film, he said, cost $55 million, making it the most expensive ever, although others insisted he was inflating the costs as a bragging right and to downplay his profits to his partners. Marlon Brando sued him for $50 million. Mario Puzo had Ilya served with his legal papers at the Washington premiere of the film. Richard Donner, Christopher Reeve, and Margot Kidder filed their own lawsuits with their own gripes about promises Alex had broken. But no one should have been surprised. Breaking promises had long been Alex’s modus operandi. In one of his earlier films, The Three Musketeers, he had made history: He and Ilya paid their actors for one movie but came away with enough footage for a sequel as well. They got away with it that time, but the Screen Actors Guild insisted that all future contracts with them or any other producer have a provision—labeled a “Salkind Clause”—specifying how many films were being made. The lineup of Superman claimants realized too late that they should have included their own clauses to help them sort out which of Alex’s movie production figures were real, which hotel and country he was currently calling home, and which of his “people” were real rather than fronts set up to inflate debts and disguise profits. Even Ilya ended up suing his dad, although that wouldn’t come until later and it wouldn’t get resolved to either’s satisfaction.
Nearly all of what people alleged against Alex was true. He had few scruples and no shame. He always had one foot in his Citroën ready to leave town, and he would never say where he was calling from for fear the FBI or Interpol might be listening. He promised shares of Superman to everyone from Brando and Puzo to his German, French, and Swiss lenders. The part of his story that is seldom told is that “everyone got paid off from this movie every dollar they were entitled to,” says Tom Pollock, the former MCA/Universal president who was Alex’s lawyer when the lawsuits were percolating. “Dick Donner made millions and millions of dollars of profit, as did Marlon Brando, as did Mario Puzo. Warner Bros. made vastly more than anybody. I have no idea what Alex actually kept for himself. He walked away depleted and exhausted but not defeated. Through force of will and money, he put together the team that made a great movie, that generated and spawned other movies, and that created a huge business mostly for other people.”
THE 1970S WERE A TIME for rebooting Superman’s comic books along with his movies. Gone were Mort Weisinger’s imaginary stories, along with Mort himself. Many of the Man of Steel’s powers melted away, as did the robots that Mort had inserted in Superman’s place to explain his absences when he was pretending to be Clark. The most surprising departure was kryptonite, which had been Superman’s most effective adversary. The changes amounted to decluttering an encrusted story. The aim was about marketing as much as storytelling: Bringing Superman closer to Jerry and Joe’s Golden Age creation would, his bosses hoped, win back older readers who missed the hero of their youth and educate younger ones on the brilliance of that more streamlined, less gimmicky vision.
Who better to oversee that restoration than an editor who had helped spawn the original, or claimed to have? The son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, Julie Schwartz grew up in the Bronx—the place that had spawned more comics pioneers than any neighborhood in America. Julie and Mort attended the same high school, shared a passion for science fiction, and teamed up to publish a fan magazine, one of whose first subscribers was Jerry Siegel. Jerry liked what he read and launched his own publication, where he self-published “The Reign of the Super-Man.” All of which led Julie to pose, only partly tongue-in-cheek, his Big Bang Theory: “If Mort and I had not created our fanzine, neither would have Jerry Siegel created his—and as a result may never have triggered his creation of the original Living Legend, Superman. No Siegel fanzine, no Siegel Superman!”
Julie had taken his first job in comic books in 1944, as an editor with one of the firms that would be absorbed into National. In the 1950s he was a central force in reviving the Flash and Green Lantern, kicking off a Silver Age of comics that lasted until 1970 and recaptured much of the energy and prosperity of its Golden Age beginnings. In the 1960s, while Mort was managing Superman, Julie was Batman’s master. In the 1970s it was Julie’s turn. He took over Superman not because he wanted to—he liked Superman but loved Batman—but because he knew the company’s preeminent superhero was the comics world’s definition of professional success. Now he was in the big time.
It was time for a change. Writers and artists had chafed under Mort’s heavy hand. Circulation of the Superman family of comic books had been plummeting since 1966 and by 1970 its most popular title, Superman, was selling barely half what it had five years before. Archrival Marvel was moving up fast; within two years it would, for the first time, wear the mantle of industry leader. That got the attention of the Warner Communications executives who had taken over National and were asking whether they belonged in the comics business. Newly installed publisher Carmine Infantino was the man on the spot, and since his specialty was artwork, not writing, he turned to his friend Julie Schwartz, now in his mid-fifties, to come up with answers for Superman. Julie was the right choice, sharing Mort’s deep grounding in comics yet with few of Mort’s rough edges or insecurities. The Schwartz empire, however, was not as all-encompassing as Weisinger’s, including Superman and World’s Finest but not Action or the rest of the Superman-related titles that Mort had overseen.
Julie’s impact was apparent from the first issues under his control in 1971. “Superman Breaks Loose” was the aptly named kickoff for a six-part series by lead writer Denny O’Neil in which a freak chain reaction converted all of the Earth’s kryptonite into ordinary iron. Fans had complained that the deadly green metal was too omnipresent so, poof, it was gone, along with its gold, red, red-gold, and other rainbow of flavors. KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE! the cover promised. But kryptonite, O’Neil recognized, “was merely a symptom. The disease might have been called elephantiasis of the powers. Superman was just too mighty.” Getting rid of kryptonite actually aggravated the illness by making Superman more invulnerable. The remedy, courtesy of Dr. O’Neil, was to have the explosion that rendered kryptonite harmless bring to life a demonic sandman who robbed Superman of critical powers. What was left was a streamlined hero, still super but now requiring both hands rather than the tip of a finger to hold up the world. The goal was to ratchet up the suspense by giving his enemies a better shot at taking him down. It also was to make the Kryptonian more human, more like the heroes that Stan Lee and Marvel were dreaming up.
Clark, too, was different under Julie, although in his case the change had more to do with modernizing than restoring. He moved from being a newspaperman on the Daily Planet to anchoring the news desk at the Galaxy Broadcasting System, which had bought the Planet. Young people, Julie explained, “got their news from the television, so therefore it was only natural that Clark Kent should take a job as a television reporter.” Not so natural was that whenever Clark needed to change into Superman, the station took a commercial break. His reliable but crusty boss, Perry White, was supplanted by Galaxy president Morgan Edge, who was less steeped in journalism and less trustworthy. Clark’s rumpled blue suits were out as well, with a new look snazzy enough to warrant an article in the real Gentlemen’s Quarterly. More interesting to Marvel readers was Superman’s internal struggle over which of his identities—the human reporter or the alien superhero—was the real him. The verdict: Both were indispensable.
Mort’s successors took Superman places politically that he hadn’t been since Jerry’s early days. In “I Am Curious (Black),” which came out in 1970 just as Julie was about to take the reins, Lois was shunned by the black community she was trying to write about because “she’s whitey.” Superman helped darken her complexion for a day, which she spent exploring the world from an African American perspective. A taxi zoomed past her outstretched arm “as if I don’t exist!” Other subway riders stared at her “as if I were a … a … freak?” In the end Lois asked Superman whether her temporarily black skin would stop him from loving her. His answer planted Superman squarely back in his 1930s role as Champion of the Oppressed: “You ask that of me … Superman? An alien from Krypton … another planet? A universal outsider?”
That wasn’t the only story in which race was front and center, nor was racial justice the only hot-button issue on which Superman weighed in during the decade that brought us the legalization of abortion, the fall of Saigon, and mood rings. Something important was always at stake now for the hero and his friends. Lois helped recruit Dave Stevens as the Daily Planet’s first black columnist. Superman and Lois promoted Native American rights and she temporarily adopted an Indian baby. Pollution got him even more riled up. He sucked smog out of the air and expelled it into outer space a year after America celebrated its first Earth Day, and he worked to shut a dangerous chemical plant two years before toxins forced the evacuation of the Love Canal section of Niagara Falls, New York. Kal-El already had watched one home, Krypton, disintegrate when its inhabitants failed to acknowledge its impending environmental doom. He was determined to make sure the same thing didn’t happen here on Earth.
Julie and his young writers collaborated in ways the scripters never had with Mort, and they answered, more convincingly than Mort’s Cinderella Fallacy, the age-old question of why anyone believed Superman’s lame masquerade as Clark Kent. Waking from a dream where his secret identity had been exposed, Superman put on his glasses and looked in the mirror, concluding, “That’s the dumbest disguise I’ve ever seen!” By the end of “The Master Mesmerizer of Metropolis!” Superman and all of us had the answer. His power of “super-hypnotism” entranced anyone he met and “automatically projects my subconscious desire to be seen as a weaker and frailer man than I really am!” Not just that, but his glasses—made from the shattered glass of the Kryptonian rocket that sent him to Earth—had “some unknown property” that intensified the hypnotic effect. “Did you realize that the most successful practitioner of mass hypnosis in the world is Superman?” the editors asked as the story closed. “We didn’t think so! After all—until today, Superman didn’t even know it himself!”
The truth was that real fans didn’t need a short-lived gimmick like that—or Christopher Reeve’s shifting his hair part—to buy into Superman’s disguise as Clark Kent. They loved all that he stood for, from his idealism to his unflinching heroism. Too many of their flesh-and-blood heroes were gone now. Assassins got Jack Kennedy, then Martin Luther King and Jack’s brother Bobby. Drugs took Elvis and Marilyn. Baseball great and humanitarian Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash, his body lost at sea. A breakup spelled the end of the Beatles. They were all gone, but Superman endured, seemingly forever, and all those who looked to him as an archetype were grateful. If all he wanted back was for them to play along while he switched in and out of his cape and tights, his fans were ready.
For his part, Julie Schwartz added personal touches that he hoped would make his hero even more appealing and abiding. Julie drew on his Jewish heritage in stories pitting Superman against the galactic golem, Lex Luthor’s evil incarnation of the mythic character of clay that watched over Jews. The editor dropped into his comics notes steering readers to old stories or explaining arcane terms, sometimes signing them with an impersonal “editor” and sometimes as “Julie.” He tipped his hat, or rather Clark’s, to his predecessor: The Kent apartment was furnished with a sculpted bust that looked like Weisinger and when Clark came home he tossed his hat on the statue, saying, “Evening Morty.” Julie also tipped his hat to his writers and artists, including their bylines along with his on every story. And, with help from writers like the legendary Jack Kirby, the family of Superman books showed a flourish for the science fiction Julie had been raised on—giving readers a handheld computer decades before it came into use, and delving into genetic research and cloning before they were part of our vocabulary.
Many fans applauded the changes Julie brought as a return to first principles. Others mourned the dulling-down of Weisinger-era tomfoolery. In any case, most of the plot shifts didn’t last long and some never made it into Action and other DC titles beyond Julie’s control. By 1973 Superman was back with the world on his fingertip and Denny O’Neil was back to Batman. Kryptonite returned as Superman’s Achilles’ heel in 1977. By the end of 1978, to realign Clark Kent with Christopher Reeve’s wildly popular incarnation, Julie’s comic book journalist again had print flowing through his veins and a job at the Daily Planet. Like reboots of Superman that came before and would follow, Julie Schwartz’s arrived with fanfare and fizzled without notice.
That is less a commentary on Julie and Mort than an observation on how Superman shaped his own reality. The same way parents, through a blend of nature and nurture, influence their child’s values, politics, and looks, so Superman’s handlers animated who he was and what he did. But at some point a child grabs hold of his fate, and so, too, did the superhero. His writers, artists, and editors thought they were in control when it was Superman’s personality and legend—what he stood for and what his fans demanded—that set their boundaries. If the DC creative team moved him too close to Clark and away from Superman, or made him more (or less) powerful than he needed to be, he quietly tugged them back toward Jerry and Joe’s original vision. Sometimes it took decades, as with Mort’s imaginary world; “Kryptonite Nevermore” and Julie’s other tinkering unraveled more quickly. Alvin Schwartz was one of the few who saw that it was the fictional hero who was pulling the strings. “Superman directed his own destinies,” says Schwartz, who ghostwrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and 1950s. “All of us were merely his pawns.”
By the mid-1970s, even Superman’s magic had stopped working. His troubles had less to do with him, his editors, or his writers and more to do with the wider business of comics. Marvel had pulled ahead of National, but both were slumping. Readers continued to age, sales at newsstands were still in free fall, and while specialty comic book stores were catching on, it was not enough to make up the difference. Movies, meanwhile, were making a comeback with special effects blockbusters like Star Wars; TV was attracting young viewers with shows like All in the Family and Saturday Night Live; and video games like Atari’s Pong were making a claim on the time and money of bell-bottomed preteens. Even The New York Times wondered whether America’s most popular superhero, once a symbol of vitality, had fallen victim to that dreaded affliction: the irrelevancy of middle age. “The famous blue long-john union suit, now faded to the color of old jeans, sags loosely where steely abdominals once stopped speeding locomotives dead on the tracks,” humor columnist Russell Baker wrote. “The double chin is nearly a triple. On the back of the skull the hair is sparse, and a bit too blue to be persuasive.”
Superman may never have looked like that, but it was a generous take on the cigar-chomping sixty-year-old men who ran National. New blood was needed to spice up the company and refill its coffers, and it arrived in 1976 in the person of Jenette Kahn. At twenty-eight, National’s new publisher was the youngest senior executive at Warner Communications and in the world of comics. This daughter of a rabbi also was everything that Jack and Harry hadn’t been: college-educated, with a degree from Harvard; an art history major who believed comic books were a form of art; and a neophyte to the industry, although she had grown up reading Superman by flashlight under the bedcovers. Most unsettling, she was a woman in a field where there were almost none. One male colleague later confided that when he heard about her hiring he headed to the men’s room and threw up.
But Kahn knew publishing, having launched three successful kids’ magazines, and she was willing to try anything to raise her heroes’ profiles. When Bill Sarnoff, the head of Warner Publishing, was interviewing her for the job, he actually proposed terminating publication of any new comic books and focusing on licensing and other media, which was where the firm made its money. “Whether he really would have done that I can’t say,” she says looking back, “but I said that if we were to do that, the characters would have a radioactive half life and all the other revenue would dry up.” She sensed she had limited time to make her case, so she started pushing from the day she arrived. One symbolic move was to change the company’s name from National Periodical Publications, a colorless title that hid what the company did from would-be censors, to what young readers had always called it: DC Comics. Superman novels were not new, but there were more of them now, including Superman: Last Son of Krypton. Kahn’s company also was anxious to get more free publicity, as it did when Henry Kissinger showed up on the cover of Newsweek wearing a red cape, blue tights, and the moniker SUPER K, and when a former DC intern began teaching the first accredited college course on comic books. His class was approved only after Michael Uslan convinced the Indiana University dean that Superman and Moses shared an origin story and a teachable moment. Carmine Infantino made history just before he left as publisher with a special-issue comic book teaming Superman with Marvel’s Spider-Man; Jenette Kahn did him one better with a book in which Superman partnered with Muhammad Ali to defend the Earth against an alien attack.
She recognized that with so many new forms of entertainment to distract the young, Superman never again would be a million-seller, and that even steep price hikes—comic books began the decade selling for fifteen cents and ended at forty—couldn’t make up for the revenue lost with declining circulation. So Jenette and her business-savvy sidekick, Paul Levitz, started viewing comics as creative engines rather than cash cows, able to spin off profitable enterprises in other media. It was a process that Jack Liebowitz had started when comic books themselves were big moneymakers; now those efforts were redoubled.
Superman animated cartoons had come and gone since the Fleischers pioneered them in the 1940s, but by the late 1970s the Colossus of Krypton and Froot Loops were once again a Saturday morning ritual across America. The animator this time was Hanna-Barbera and the lineup of characters came from the Justice League of America comic book. Teamwork was the theme, with Superman collaborating with such heroic friends as Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. A not-so-subtle subplot, given the target audience of four- to eight-year-olds, was that violence was verboten the way it had been during the scare of the 1940s and 1950s. The show took on various names, all but one of which included the words Super Friends, and each made friends of sleep-deprived parents, who delighted in the extra hours they got in bed while their kids were mesmerized by Superman.
But the Hanna-Barbera cartoons were more than a distraction. If reach and duration are the measure of a medium’s influence, Super Friends gave Superman his biggest stage yet with the small fry. The series ran, with occasional interruptions, from 1973 to 1986. At its height it attracted several million children, most of whom were getting their first look at Superman and many of whom would form a lifelong bond. The show became a paradigm for Kahn’s new DC, and it was Superman’s most successful venture into animation. Super Friends “drew a humungous audience compared to the comics,” Levitz says. “It introduced more kids to our hero than Reeves or Reeve.”
Luis Augusto was one of those kids. The forty-year-old architect says the Super Friends cartoons were “totally real to me, then, and Superman was more real than all of them. He could fly! He could bend steel with his bare hands! Nobody could bully him (unless he was pretending to be weak)! Oh, how I dreamed of all these [things].” For Augusto as for so many children, the cartoons were a gateway to other Superman experiences—feasting on Superman comic books, entertaining himself with Superman toys, and cherishing the way Christopher Reeve brought his hero alive in the movies. Superman became a part of Augusto’s life, no matter that Metropolis was thousands of miles away from his home in Salvador, Brazil. Superman was “not just some action hero,” says Augusto, who today writes and draws his own comic strips, “but a model. A goal to achieve in my life.”
Back in the United States, Big Blue had returned to the newspapers with a strip that was launched in 1978 as The World’s Greatest Superheroes and the next year was renamed The World’s Greatest Superheroes Presents Superman. Movies offered even more potential for the synergy that Kahn and Levitz were so keen on. Comics lovers had been gathering for ever-bigger conventions since the mid-1960s, and DC capitalized on these gatherings to get fans geared up for Christopher Reeve’s Superman film long before it hit the theaters. Not long after its release in late 1978 they published the first comic book miniseries, World of Krypton, along with a behind-the-scenes book on the movie and a Superman dictionary for kids. The film and its stars also hitched themselves to the Special Olympics, which was good for the charity and for the company’s bottom line. Movie-related marketing had become standard fare by then, but it had never been seen on this scale. Two hundred licenses were awarded for more than twelve hundred products, from soap packaged like a telephone booth to velour sweatshirts that sold at Bloomingdale’s. Companies paid even more to see their names or merchandise on the screen. It was no accident that we could easily read the name of Lois’s Timex watch when she romanced Superman on her balcony, and in the sequel Philip Morris paid forty thousand dollars to get its Marlboro delivery truck into the fight scene with Kryptonian bad guys.
Kahn and Levitz weren’t just focused on the present. They were building for a future when comic books would again pay their own way without offshoots like licensing. The turnaround didn’t come as soon as they expected—the “DC explosion” of new titles quickly and embarrassingly became the “DC implosion” when many old and new books couldn’t pay for themselves—but comics did eventually regain some of their profitability. Advertising helped. Comic books had drawn ads from the beginning, but they took up fewer than two of the sixty-four pages in Action No. 1. Advertising copy quickly grew to 10 percent of the publications and stayed that way through most of the Golden Age. By the 1970s, DC was running up to sixteen pages of ads in books that were down to thirty-six pages, which would prove to be the high-water mark for advertising space in comics, although still not at the 50 percent level of most magazines. The nature of the ads was shifting, too, reflecting comic books’ changing readership and society’s changing priorities. Gadgets were replaced by beauty aids and muscle manuals. “Sex education” products came and went quickly, thanks to the Comics Code. Breakfast cereals were a perennial advertiser, along with Oreo, Reese’s, and other sweets. Pitches for correspondence courses suggested that high school dropouts were a key part of the fan base, just as pitches for older comics made clear how many collectors there were.
The DC brain trust also realized that it paid to treat the creative talent better. When Kahn arrived in 1976, she began giving artists and writers 20 percent of licensing fees for characters they dreamed up, and in 1981, when she became president as well as publisher, she began paying them 5 percent of revenues on comic books that sold more than one hundred thousand copies, a milestone that Superman hit regularly. Freelancers were now getting medical insurance and yearlong contracts, the very benefits that had made Jack Liebowitz blanch. Giving creators a financial stake measurably improved their work. Suddenly a job at DC was a better deal than one at Marvel or at other competitors, which helped lure away the best talent, at least until the competition started matching the benefits. DC Comics, which thanks to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had been a poster child for the old feudal system, now seemed the model of enlightenment.
EVEN JERRY AND JOE would benefit from the new ownership, not that it was easy.
Jerry had spent the first half of the 1970s hoping to win his lawsuit against National and settling into his new life. He was in dire enough straits that he took work first as a writer and then as a proofreader at DC’s archrival, Marvel, then he moved his family to California, where there was a healing sun for him and Joanne and inexpensive colleges for their daughter, Laura. To pay for the move, he had to sell off some of his treasured collection of comic books. To make a living, he took a seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a clerk-typist with the state of California, while Joanne sold Chevrolets at a car lot in Santa Monica. Jerry earned extra income by writing stories about Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck for Walt Disney’s Italian line of comic books. He had fallen so far that he sometimes thought about killing himself, as George Reeves had. A living wage and the California weather helped overcome his depression, but now he worried about his weakening heart and how, if he needed an operation, he would pay for it.
No one found out about any of that until later because Jerry had gone underground, declining to talk to the press and steering clear of most old friends and colleagues. He emerged from the shadows in the fall of 1975, just as Mario Puzo was turning in his movie script and Superman was back on center stage. The creator of Superman knew how to grab the spotlight when he wanted to, and now he did. “Jerry Siegel, the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie!” read the press release he tapped out on his manual typewriter and distributed to all the major media. “I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.” For anyone unfamiliar with the stench, Jerry filled them in with a single-sheet summary and a nine-page exposition. National Periodical Publications and Jack Liebowitz especially had “killed my days, murdered my nights, choked my happiness, strangled my career. I consider National’s executives economic murderers, money-mad monsters.”
It was Jerry at his melodramatic best, showing the same passion and single-mindedness he had tapped to compose and sell his first Superman story forty years before. What led him to cook up Superman? He was inspired by President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, by the Nazis’ slaughter of fellow Jews, and by a depression that left him and millions of others jobless, which gave him “the great urge to help … help the despairing masses.” What would he do if he had the strength of his superhero? “Rip apart the massive buildings in which these greedy people count the immense profits from the misery they have inflicted on Joe and me and our families.” What did he want now? A cut of the profits.
Jerry had always been torn as well as tortured, as demonstrated in years of letters to Jack. The angry young man who felt wronged quietly did battle with the lonely one aching to be embraced. His memoir would reflect the latter; his press release bared his mad-as-hell side. No matter that Jack was just a board member now while others ran the company, or that Jerry had promised in his legal settlement never to rehash these issues. It was not just he who was hurting now but his wife and child, and he was out for blood.
The press saw this for the great story it was. A Washington Star reporter visited Joe Shuster in 1975 in the dingy apartment in Queens where he was “slowly going blind, still hoping his Superman would come to his rescue.” The next month a New York Times reporter talked to Jerry. “For years,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for Superman to crash in and do something about it all.” Their stories played even better on TV, as the Today show, the Tomorrow show, and Howard Cosell appreciated. Orchestrating the publicity was Neal Adams, whose fiery art had brought new life to the Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman. Adams chaperoned the aging creators around New York, persuading the media to pay for their hotel rooms and cartoonist Irwin Hasen to draw his wide-eyed war orphan Dondi with a huge tear on his face and the words, “Is it a plane? Is it a bird? No, it’s a pity.” Adams remembers that “Joe was like an angel sent from heaven, I never heard him utter an angry word. Jerry was very bitter.” Adams drew on both and, with help from Batman artist Jerry Robinson and the Cartoonists Society, he made the case with Warner Communications. “What was my leverage?” Adams asks. “Humanity. Pity. Common sense. I mean, truth, justice and the American way.”
Warner’s point man in the publicity struggle was Jay Emmett, Superman’s longtime marketing whiz and now a man in the middle. On one side, his uncle Jack Liebowitz was adamant that Jerry and Joe had voluntarily signed away their rights and didn’t deserve anything more. On the other, morality dictated that Warner, flush with cash from its Superman franchise, help the creators of that golden goose. Business logic bridged the difference. “We were about to put out a movie worth tens of millions and I said, ‘Let’s not worry about chicken feed,’ ” recalls Emmett. So after back-and-forth over particulars, Emmett and his company agreed—two days before Christmas—to give Jerry and Joe $20,000 a year for life, an amount that was intended to be fixed but that rose substantially over the years. Their medical expenses, which were enormous, were covered, along with a one-time bonus of $17,500 for each of them. Their bylines were back on the comic books and nearly everywhere else Superman appeared, including a prominent opening credit in Superman: The Movie and its sequels. In return, the creators agreed, again, not to sue for more.
“Joe and I are very happy to be associated with our ‘Superman’ creation again,” Jerry wrote in his memoir, with his joyful tears at the movie premiere making clear he meant it. Joe was happier still. The money let him move to California, where he could be in the sun, in an apartment of his own, back near Jerry and Joanne. It also let him get married for the first time, in December 1976, to Judith Ray Calpini, who seemed to have everything he had been looking for. The attractive blonde was three years younger than he was and five inches taller. Their marriage license listed her as a nurse, while a press photo called her a former showgirl and current writer and artist. It was her fourth marriage, her third having ended nine months before, and it happened almost exactly a year after his settlement with Warner Communications. It lasted eleven months and nineteen days, although their official divorce wasn’t granted for another three and a half years. The divorce proceedings listed Judith as a housewife and spelled out what possessions Joe had left: three suits, a topcoat, a color TV, a lounge chair, an eight-year-old Mazda, a few thousand dollars’ worth of comic art, no job, and declining health.
Being abandoned was nothing new for Joe Shuster and he didn’t let it spoil the fun he was having being reunited with Superman. The settlement with Warner “has meant a tremendous change in our lives,” he told The New York Times. “We’ve received marvelous recognition for the Superman movie and our names also appear in the comics. A whole new generation knows us.”