[My father] was … was not lucky.… He couldn’t find a job. He would be sitting home reading the want ads. I felt so sorry for him.
—Stan Lee1
Nine-year-old Stanley Martin Lieber sat transfixed in his seat in the opulent upper Manhattan movie palace, the only light coming from the silvery screen upon which a dreamworld was projected.
Bigger than life, charismatic movie star Warren William, playing a powerful prosecutor in the 1932 Warner Bros. melodrama The Mouthpiece, seemed to be staring right at young Stanley—staring through him, perhaps—as he summed up his case against an accused killer:
The eminent attorney for the defense has made the point that this case is based upon a chain of circumstantial evidence. That is true.
But the evidence is a strong chain, one that cannot be broken—a chain that has wrapped itself around this murderer like an avenging python—and delivered him into the hands of the law!
Entranced by this bravura performance, Stanley decided that, when he grew up, he would become a lawyer. Or an actor. Or both.2
One way or another, he wanted to, like Warren William, reach out to people, to make them think—and feel!
It made no sense that Stan Lee’s family lived at 777 West End Avenue when he was born.
But they did.
The building, at the corner of West Ninety-eighth Street, was built in 1910, as West End Avenue was becoming a coveted address among the rising Jewish middle class in New York. High-rise luxury buildings like 777 were appearing, replacing the smaller tenements that had lined the avenue.
Jack Lieber was born in 1885 (any siblings he might have had are unknown), and his wife, Celia Solomon Lieber, the third of six siblings, was born in 1890. Both were Romanian-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in New York in the early years of the twentieth century and met in the city. By most accounts, the couple didn’t have much money, although Jack seemed to have somewhat regular work as a dress cutter until the middle of the decade.3
When Lee was born—as Stanley Martin Lieber—on December 28, 1922, his parents, Jack and Celia, shouldn’t have been able to afford to live at 777. The neighborhood, off the IRT subway line, was ideally located for Jack Lieber’s work in the garment center, which encompassed much of Manhattan’s West Thirties around Seventh Avenue. However, Jack didn’t make much money as a garment worker and was chronically unemployed starting around 1926.4 The apartment was small and certainly not glamorous. Lee slept in the living room and found it in general depressing that his family always lived in rear-facing apartments, his only view a brick wall.5
But even a tiny, dark apartment in a luxurious building would have been difficult for a factory worker like Jack to afford. Lee didn’t remember the West End Avenue apartment at all, saying, “I think my parents [and I] lived there for a very short time before they moved.… I lived there when I was, like, six months old, so my memories of it aren’t too clear.”6
Perhaps the Liebers had a sympathetic landlord or a generous relative—some of Celia’s relatives had some money7—which enabled the family to be living in a posh building when their first child was born.
However they did it, they couldn’t do it long, and soon moved to the more affordable regions of upper Manhattan—in this case, Washington Heights—in the decade before the George Washington Bridge was built. The family would spend the next twenty years bouncing between apartments in the Heights and in similar working-class, immigrant neighborhoods in the Bronx.
Born the same year as Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac, Lee entered the world in the middle of the Jazz Age and Prohibition (and the ensuing speakeasy culture) and the beginning of an economic recovery that followed a post–World War I economic dip. But it doesn’t seem as if his family was involved with the glamour of the flapper era. They were simply poor people trying to survive. Both Lee and his brother, writer and artist Larry Lieber (born October 26, 1931), remember their parents as not getting along well, frequently anxious and arguing about money.8
If the Liebers had financial issues in the relatively prosperous years of 1922 and ’23, then it’s unlikely that the stock market crash of October 29, 1929—when Lee was six years old—made things any better for them. Lee recalled going to elementary school at PS 173, which he remembered as being on University Avenue in the Bronx.9 But PS 173 was actually in Washington Heights. It seems most likely that he was living in the Heights when he was in elementary school, moving to the Bronx for high school, and then moving back to the Heights sometime after he graduated.
According to Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon in Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, “Money was scarce in the Lieber home, and the family often accepted financial help from Celia’s sisters, who were better off.… Jack was intelligent, but difficult and demanding, recalls Jean Goodman, a close relative. ‘He was exacting with his boys.…’ Celia, on the other hand, was warm and nurturing to the point of self-sacrifice. ‘The demanding father and the persecuted mother, that made the atmosphere difficult,’ Goodman says.”10
As Lee recalled of his father:
[My father] was not a good businessman, and he was not lucky. Most of the time I knew him, he just wasn’t working. He couldn’t find a job. He would be sitting home reading the want ads. I felt so sorry for him.11
While his brother, Larry, was nine years younger than Stan, and so couldn’t have witnessed their parents’ treatment of his brother before he was born, Larry did remember his mother regularly urging him to be more like his brother, whom she likened to President Roosevelt.12 So it seems safe to say there was no lack of support from Celia Lieber toward Stanley.
Money or no money, kids will make do with what they have. Lee recalled, in 2002, for the now-defunct website Yesterdayland.com, some of the diversions he enjoyed as a kid:
One thing I remember … was, as if it was an official thing, there were seasons. For example: it would be handball season. All of a sudden, all the kids in the neighborhood would be playing handball..… Then it was hockey season.… and we’d all be playing hockey [on roller skates] in the gutter, risking our lives because the traffic kept coming around us.13
There was one toy that proved to be the most exciting—and liberating—thing in Stanley’s young life:
I was about 10 years old, I don’t know where my parents got the money, but they finally bought me a big red two-wheeled bicycle.… I could go wherever I wanted.14
Unknown to Lee, it was Ida Davis—Jean Goodman’s mother—who paid for the bicycle, as well as for some minor sinus surgery Stanley would have in 1934.15 The George Washington Bridge was first opened to the public on October 25, 1931 (a day before Larry was born). So to ride a bike across the new, man-made wonder must have been especially awe-inspiring.
Lee described himself as an “average student” who “couldn’t wait to get out of school.… I didn’t hate being in school, but I just kept wishing it was over and I could get into the real world, because I wasn’t studying anything I was particularly interested in.”16
Asked if he were a sports fan, Lee replied, “Yeah, but just a casual sports fan. I wasn’t the kind of guy that would run through the neighborhood breaking store windows if my team lost. Or won.”17 Nonetheless, living close to both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants baseball team, Lee recalled of being so close to both stadiums, “It was wonderful” and that he was a fan of “both of them.”18
What he was particularly interested in was reading (anything and everything) and popular culture in general, especially the movies and the radio.
Lee recalled reading popular kids’ book series, including the Hardy Boys, the Boy Allies, and Tom Swift. Two of his favorite series, Jerry Todd and Poppy Ott, were written by Leo Edwards (the pen name of Edward Edson Lee—no relation). He especially loved those because they had more humor than the others. And, he noted:
best of all was the end of the [Jerry Todd] book[s] … there were letters from readers with answers by the author. I thought that was so wonderful. It made me feel I was part of this thing and I knew him.19
Some of the other authors he loved to read included H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. As he grew older, he discovered Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Edmond Rostand, Omar Khayyam, Émile Zola, “and, of course, Shakespeare.… [and] the Bible.”20 “I think my biggest influence was Shakespeare, who was my god.… I loved Shakespeare.… To me, he was the complete writer…”21
Lee also loved the radio, which was a bonding experience with his family. “Sunday night in our house was family night. We’d have delicatessen. We’d have hot dogs, beans, sauerkraut, if times were good.”22 He also recalled:
Sunday night we listened to the comedians.… There was Fred Allen and Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and there was W.C. Fields.… [T]he funny thing to me [was] … when it was time for the family to gather ’round and listen to the radio, all the chairs were turned facing the radio. Everybody sat looking at the radio just as if it was television.23
Unsurprisingly, young Lee liked comic strips, both in the newspapers and in the collected editions that made up the first comic books. His favorites were, “the ones by Milton Caniff … Terry and the Pirates. That was the big one. And then there was Li’l Abner. I liked the humor stuff. I liked the adventure stuff.”24 His likes also included The Katzenjammer Kids, Skippy, Dick Tracy, Smitty, and The Gumps.25 But as he said in the 2000 documentary, With Great Power, “Creating comic books was never part of my childhood dream. I never thought of that at all.”
Perhaps more than any other entertainment, Lee loved the movies. There were five movie theaters in his Washington Heights neighborhood.26
He was especially moved by the 1932 movie The Mouthpiece, starring Warren William, whose performance in it “hypnotized” young Stanley.27
William was indeed outstanding in the film, playing an aggressive prosecutor, Vincent Day, who unwittingly sends an innocent man to the electric chair. This so traumatizes Day that he becomes a defense attorney who then ends up becoming corrupted, getting wealthy criminals, who are very much guilty, off the hook. As you might imagine, his life becomes complicated and tragic, not unlike the melodramas that would, years later, be found in Lee’s comics.
While Lee mentioned in his 2002 memoir, Excelsior!, a number of movie stars—notably Errol Flynn—of whom he was a fan, The Mouthpiece was the only specific movie he singled out in the book as making a big impression on him. After seeing the film, Lee daydreamed of becoming a lawyer and would become the president of the Future Lawyers Club in high school.28
Of note about the film, as well, although apparently not consciously noted by Lee, was that the female lead is named Celia—the same as Lee’s mother. In addition, Celia was played by Sidney Fox, an eastern European Jewish immigrant who came to America as a young child and who, before her move to Hollywood, lived in Washington Heights at the same time and in the same area as the Lieber family.
It’s not the wildest speculation to imagine that seeing a familiar neighborhood face twelve feet tall on a movie screen, attached to a character with the same name as his mother, might have made as big an impression on Lee as the bravura performance by Warren William, and made the film significant in his memory.
Lee didn’t recall his family being especially religious. His parents didn’t keep a kosher home, but Jack Lieber, according to Larry Lieber,29 was a semi-regular attendee at synagogue services. While Lee didn’t have any substantive Jewish education, he did have a bar mitzvah. As he recalled in 2006, “My father insisted I be bar mitzvahed, and I took a crash course in learning to read Hebrew, all of which I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotten by now. My parents didn’t have much money at that time, and I remember during the [bar mitzvah] ceremony at the temple, there was my father and me, and maybe two other people had wandered in. That was the whole thing.”30
Lee developed an interest in acting—and in a girl—which led to him to regularly show up at a Washington Heights synagogue (whether or not the same one where he had his bar mitzvah is unknown) around the same time as his bar mitzvah. As he recalled:
There was a time I wanted to be an actor, and there was place called … the Hebrew [Tabernacle] of Washington Heights [on West 161 Street].… And they had a theatrical group, so I joined that outfit in order to be part of the theatrical group and be in their plays.… See, the big thing, there was a girl that I liked who was part of the group. I still remember her first name was Martha, and she was a blond Spanish girl, very pretty, so I enjoyed being there because of Martha.31
It’s also unknown whether Lee’s interest in Martha was reciprocated and, if so, to what extent.
As was common in the era, Lee skipped a couple of grades over the years. That enabled him to eventually go into the working world sooner. But it also regularly made him the youngest kid in his class, so it was hard for him to relate to his schoolmates, and vice versa.32
When time for high school came, the Liebers were likely living at 1720 University Avenue in the Bronx’s University Heights. (Decades later, comics writer and editor Len Wein would live, as a child, in the same building.) The avenue and the area were named for the “uptown” branch of New York University (today, Bronx Community College), which was on the thoroughfare. Once again, the family lived in a rear-facing apartment. Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School, an enormous institution on a sprawling campus on the borough’s Mosholu Parkway. The all-boys school was fed by a large part of the Bronx’s population and, at its peak, hosted twelve thousand students.33
Clinton, with its mix of Jewish, Italian, and Irish children of immigrants, along with a number of African American students, has one of the most impressive alumni rosters of any school in the country, with graduates who went on to achievement and fame in numerous fields. Other notable alumni from Lee’s era include author James Baldwin, playwright Paddy Chayefsky, and photographer Richard Avedon. Clinton boys besides Lee who ended up in the comics industry included Bob Kane and Bill Finger (creators of Batman), Will Eisner (creator of the Spirit and pioneer of the modern graphic novel), and Irwin Hasen (Wonder Woman and Dondi artist).
According to his yearbook entry, Lee was a member of numerous organizations, including the Future Lawyers Club.34 While he was not an editor of the school literary magazine, The Magpie (Chayefsky took that role), he was listed on its staff pages as the magazine’s publicist.35
It was while working in the Magpie office that he pulled a prank that he frequently described with pride (and a bit of shame, too). As he recalled:
I must have been a little bit crazy, even then, because I remember they had a school magazine called The Magpie … and it was published in a room called The Tower, which had a very high ceiling, and there was no way anybody could ever reach that ceiling.… One day, it was being painted, and one of the painters had left the ladder when he went down for lunch, so I climbed up and wrote “Stan Lee is God,” on the ceiling, which was one of the earliest evidences of my overpowering inferiority complex.36
Interestingly, when speaking about the prank to this author in 2017, Lee noted, “I’m so ashamed of that, but, as far as I know, it’s still up there.”37
When asked, “So you were calling yourself ‘Stan Lee’ even back in high school?” Lee realized, “No, I wasn’t calling myself Stan Lee then, I don’t believe. I guess I told it that way because I now think of myself as Stan Lee. But I must have written Stan Lieber.”38
When he was fifteen, Lee won a small, seventh-place prize and a couple of honorable mentions in three different weeks of a regular “Biggest News of the Week” contest run in the New York Herald Tribune. This was certainly nothing to be ashamed of, but, for whatever reason, Lee would, years later, always say that he had won first prize in the contest three weeks in a row. No evidence of such triumphs, however, has been found.39
At some point during his high school years, Lee was “initiated into the mysteries and pleasures of sex.… one of my great regrets is that that I cannot remember the name of the daughter of the neighborhood candy store proprietor with whom I lost my virginity.”40
While eager to get out into the world, Lee still found time to participate in extracurricular life at Clinton, even while holding down a number of part-time jobs. He sold subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune to fellow students, modeling himself on a student named John J. McKenna, who impressed him doing a similar job for The New York Times. He also delivered sandwiches for Manhattan’s Jack May’s Pharmacy, near Rockefeller Center, where he prided himself on his efficiency, which thereby enabled him to collect more tips than the other delivery boys.41
Lee often spoke of being employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project at the same time that Orson Welles was (freely admitting that they didn’t work together or know each other). Welles left the WPA in 1937, so Lee’s time there must have been while he was still in high school. However, in Excelsior!, coauthor George Mair wrote that Lee was with the project “sometime after graduating high school.” In any case, Lee joined the project to meet a girl who was involved with it. They did indeed date for a time. And after appearing in a few shows, he got to love acting, but the pay was so low, he was forced to quit. The romance with the girl had ended, anyway, making leaving the WPA easier.42
After graduating DeWitt Clinton in June 1939, at age sixteen, Lee worked as an usher at the Rivoli Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where, he recalled, he had a memorable encounter with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt:
One day … Mrs. Roosevelt came into the theater … and we all hoped she’d come down our aisle, and I got her. Well, I was so proud. I walked down the aisle with my flashlight shining for her feet, my head high and my shoulders back, and I said, “This way, Mrs. President.” Which, of course, was the wrong thing to say. [“Mrs. Roosevelt” would have been the correct form of address.] I tripped and fell over the foot of some son of a bitch who had his foot stuck in the aisle, and the next thing I know, “Mrs. President” was helping me to my feet with her arms around my shoulders. “Are you all right, young man?” You can imagine how embarrassed I was.43
Lee then had a stint writing celebrity obituaries for a wire service (although he sometimes recalled having this job while in high school), which he found depressing, since he was assigned to write death notices for people who were still alive, and so left the job.44
Lee’s cousin on his mother’s side, Jean Goodman, was married to Martin Goodman, a publisher who had hit it big putting out a wide variety of pulp magazines. Martin would go on to be one of the most important people in Lee’s life, but at this point, they didn’t know each other well. The Goodmans connected their cousin with Jewish communal organization B’nai B’rith’s recently founded Vocational Service Program.45 Through the program, Lee got a job writing publicity materials for National Jewish Health, a tuberculosis hospital in Denver, although he did the work in New York. (Lee recalled that there was also someone named “Charlie Plotkin,” who “wore a sweater all the time,” involved in getting him this and possibly other writing jobs.)46
Lee claimed that “I could never understand what I was trying to do [with that job]—get people to get tuberculosis so they go to the hospital? But anyway, the idea was that if anybody had tuberculosis, we had to convince them to go to that hospital.”47
Lee’s connection with the Vocational Service Program didn’t last long, and he ended up getting a job as an office boy for H. Lissner Co., a Manhattan trouser manufacturer, where he felt exploited and unappreciated by supervisors who never even bothered to learn his name. He was fired from that job because he had less seniority than another office boy, even though he felt he worked much harder than the other guy.
Angry about this unjust dismissal, on his way out the door, Lee impulsively upended a few large batches of cutting tickets—sheets that listed data about different types of trousers.48 Luckily, he never had to ask H. Lissner Co. for a reference.
But as awful as that job was, Lee couldn’t afford to be without one. He urgently needed to find new employment.
While Lee was a teenager, making his way through school, various jobs, and a romance or two, America was pulling out of the Depression, even as the world seemed to be erupting. Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939—a couple of months after Lee’s graduation from Clinton—triggered the start of World War II. The United States wasn’t in that conflict when it began, but it seemed like just a matter of time before it would be.
In the world of popular culture, while 1939 was famous for the classic movies released that year, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Stagecoach, in the less high-profile world of comic books, major events were also transpiring. In 1938, Superman had debuted in Action Comics #1, and in early 1939, Batman had his first appearance in Detective Comics #27. Both characters were enormous hits out of the gate, and publishers—especially pulp publishers, whose magazines were experiencing severe sales slumps—rushed to jump on the new superhero comic book fad.
Among those pulp publishers was Martin Goodman, Lee’s cousin by marriage, who in the summer of ’39 had launched a comic book line under the Timely imprint, starting with Marvel Comics #1, which was hugely successful, selling close to a million copies, with very few returns from news dealers. The comic introduced, among other characters, the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch.
Marvel Comics #1 and subsequent Timely titles had been produced for Goodman by an outside packager, Funnies Inc. But the publisher soon wanted his own in-house comic book line that would be produced by staffers and freelancers working directly for him. To accomplish this, he had, in early 1940, hired two young men—both of whom were skilled writers and artists—who were making a name for themselves in the still-young comic book business: editor Joe Simon and art director Jack Kirby.
Out of Timely’s offices in the McGraw-Hill Building on West Forty-second Street, the two were producing comics for Goodman, done by themselves as well as by others. In late 1940, Simon (then twenty-seven) and Kirby (then twenty-three) came up with what would be Timely’s biggest hit: Captain America Comics #1. The magazine went on sale in most areas in the United States around December 20.
And it was shortly before that landmark comic book debuted that seventeen-year-old Stanley Martin Lieber appeared at Timely’s door, looking for a job.49