Al Capp Read online

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 Flashpoint

  2 Young Dreams and Schemes

  3 The Hills

  4 Uncle Bob’s Generosity

  5 Breaking into the Business

  6 Hatfield and McCoy

  7 Li’l Abner

  8 Nina

  9 Merry-Go-Round

  10 Greetings from Lower Slobbovia

  11 The Shmoo, the Kigmy, and All One Cartoonist Could Ever Want

  12 Demise of the Monster

  13 Bright Lights

  14 In the Halls of the Enemy

  15 Scandals

  16 Descent

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Plate Section

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Preface

  Once upon a time, long before Garry Trudeau entertained newspaper comic strip readers with his astute political commentary in “Doonesbury,” before readers visited the Okefenokee Swamp and followed the social satire in Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” before comic strips were aimed at the hearts and minds of adult readers, Al Capp introduced his followers to a hilarious mythical Kentucky hillbilly hamlet known as Dogpatch. The strip, “Li’l Abner,” created and drawn by Capp from the very beginning, ran for forty-three years and, at the height of its popularity, reached a worldwide readership of more than ninety million.

  Although it had its charm, Dogpatch was populated by folks just a few steps behind modern big-city ways. Turnips provided the town with its only known source of income, pigs were raised as both pets and a primary food source, single women literally chased eligible bachelors in the annual Sadie Hawkins race (with the captured men forced into wedlock), and creatures with such unlikely names as shmoo, kigmy, and bald iggle dropped by as figures in Capp’s humorous observations on the human race. Politicians and businessmen did their best to bilk Dogpatchers out of the puny bit they did possess. The typical story ran for weeks on end, until even Capp himself seemed occasionally befuddled over where his winding plots would end up.

  Abner Yokum, the strip’s title character, lived with his parents, Mammy and Pappy Yokum, and by all appearances had everything a perennial nineteen-year-old could possibly want. He was tall, handsome, muscular, and constantly being pursued all over the hills by Daisy Mae Scragg, the most beautiful single girl in Dogpatch, who, for reasons escaping any other male in the vicinity, wanted only a man totally uninterested in her. Abner was naïve on his best day, dumb as a fencepost on his worst, and always caught up in an adventure more complicated than his native intelligence could handle. Al Capp delighted in working him in and out of trouble, using his predicaments as stagings for satire, parody, and a brand of comedy that won the praise of Charlie Chaplin, John Steinbeck, Hugh Hefner, John Updike, and a host of others.

  Capp’s rise to prominence was swift and unprecedented. As far back as the turn of the twentieth century, comic strips had bolstered newspaper circulations and earned their creators fame and fortune. “Hogan’s Alley,” an early comic dynamo featuring a kid wearing what appeared to be a yellow nightshirt, touched off newspaper wars, while a beautiful surrealistic strip called “Little Nemo in Slumberland” guided its readers through previously unexplored regions of the subconscious. Other strips and one-panel cartoons aspired to do little more than deliver daily punch lines. Action and adventure strips, boasting of long-running plots that held readers’ attention for weeks and even months, were capturing the country’s fancy right about the time “Li’l Abner” made its debut.

  Capp had no idea where his strip would take him; he only knew that he wanted to succeed as a cartoonist. He knew, from an early age, that he could draw, and he’d kicked around art schools and worked on a few short-lived jobs before landing a breakthrough job as an assistant to Ham Fisher, the creator of the enormously popular boxing strip “Joe Palooka.” It was only a matter of time before Capp struck out on his own.

  The world was ready for “Li’l Abner,” which started out as an adventure strip but quickly developed into a humorous feature with long-running stories usually associated with such comics-page favorites as “Flash Gordon,” “Dick Tracy,” or “Little Orphan Annie.” Readers, still bruised from the Depression and fearing the events in Europe leading to World War II, connected with Capp’s adult humor, outrageous adventures, buxom female characters, and snide but spot-on commentary. “Li’l Abner” shot to the top in very little time and would become one of the most widely read strips in comics history. Capp was a wealthy man before he celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

  But this was only the beginning. Restless and hypercreative by nature, Capp trained his sights on how to broaden his artistic and financial horizons. His marketing genius led the way. Besides developing ideas for new comic strip titles, he pushed to find ways to nudge his “Li’l Abner” characters off the comic strip pages and into previously unexplored or barely explored territories. There were product endorsements and, more lucrative yet, merchandising blitzes tied into the strip. In one year alone, the shmoo, a cuddly little critter capable of providing humanity with everything it ever needed, grossed $25 million in merchandising—and this was mid-twentieth-century dollars.

  Capp created a new template for the successful comic strip artist as he went along. “Li’l Abner” blazed the trail for such future marketing phenoms as “Peanuts” and “Garfield.” Then, when Dogpatch USA opened its gates in 1968, Capp became the only cartoon creator other than Walt Disney to have his own theme park. By that point, Capp’s face had appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, he was a regular contributor to Life, his mug had been seen on countless newspaper and magazine ads, and he was a regular guest on television, most notably The Tonight Show. Comics artists had almost always been solitary figures spending hours alone at the drawing table, collecting good salaries but remaining relatively unknown to the public. Al Capp changed all that, through the force of sheer ambition, talent, marketing know-how, and a winning personality.

  Capp created his own success, but he might have been destroyed by it as well. A contrary individual by nature, he was more apt to argue than agree with you. If someone or something was popular, chances were Capp would find a way to skewer it in “Li’l Abner.” The high and mighty would be cut down to size, sometimes playfully, as in Capp’s parodies of Frank Sinatra and John Steinbeck, sometimes savagely, as in the case of his commentaries on Joan Baez and the antiwar activists of the 1960s. Anyone or any idea could be a target. Even when he was at his silliest, as in “Fearless Fosdick,” his long-running send-up of Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” something dark seemed to be bubbling just beneath the surface.

  This contrary attitude, once so amusing to his readers, lost its charm when his political views took a sharp turn to conservatism and he crisscrossed the United States in a lucrative but dizzying series of appearances on college campuses, where he aggressively confronted his student audiences. When he was implicated in a couple of sex scandals while touring the universities, even his close friends Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew couldn’t save him. His career’s downward spiral rivaled its ascent in sudden and dramatic fashion.

  Capp’s fall from grace, the retirement of “Li’l Abner” from the daily papers, and Capp’s death in 1979 did little to lessen the comic strip’s legacy. “Li’l Abner” has been available in reprint editions (nearly forty volumes, in total) for all but a few years since Capp’s death, and it has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and theses. Li’l Abner, the play, at one time a smash hit on Broadway, continues to be performed by professional, student, and local theater groups. Sadie Hawkins Day, an annual feature in the “Li’l Abner” strips, is still celebrated in dances and events across the country. Expressions originating in
the strip—“double whammy,” “hogwash,” and “going bananas,” to name a few—are still part of the everyday vernacular.

  For Capp, it all began with a traumatizing yet defining moment early in his life, a fateful meeting with a trolley car.

  1 Flashpoint

  No one will ever know the precise, unvarnished details surrounding Al Capp’s losing his left leg at the age of nine. He’d claim that it was the turning point of his life, and there is no reason to doubt it, any more than there is good reason to question his assertion that he never enjoyed a pain-free day over the next six decades.

  Capp, a first-rate storyteller, comic strip artist, humorist, inventor of tall tales, occasional liar, entertainer supreme, and hair-trigger wit, offered many versions of the accident that cost him a leg, each account slightly different from the others—each, one suspects, tailored for a specific audience or readership.

  “Al Capp may have been his own greatest creation,” Dave Schreiner, a comics historian and editor, once wrote. “He built around himself out of his personal history a pyramid of truth, near-truth, and myth which helped transform the already colorful and interesting Alfred Gerald Caplin into the controversial and legendary Al Capp, world’s best-known newspaper cartoonist.”

  Schreiner, whose significant work in comics included editing all but two of comics giant Will Eisner’s graphic novels, believed that Capp had the ability to make any story believable, including his account of losing his leg.

  “Capp was one of the very best storytellers,” Schreiner observed, “and he did not confine his enormous talent to the funny pages. He mixed plausibility and outrageousness in his work, and when he related anecdotes and incidents from his life, the same rules applied.”

  What is known about the accident that claimed Capp’s leg is that Capp, then answering to his given name of Alfred Caplin, was in need of a haircut. The eldest son of Otto and Matilda “Tillie” Caplin, of New Haven, Connecticut, Alfred was five weeks shy of his tenth birthday and had a full head of thick black hair that, more often than not, looked as if it had been groomed with a mixing spoon. Alfred’s parents would let it go until it had grown too long for the day’s standards, at which point one or the other would hand him enough money for a haircut.

  On this day—Friday, August 21, 1919—father and son were on their own. Tillie was upstate with the other children: younger sons Bence and Elliott and daughter Madeline, all afflicted with the mumps. She had rented rooms in a farmhouse, hoping the clean country air would do them good. That afternoon, Otto Caplin pressed a fifty-cent piece into the palm of Alfred’s hand: thirty-five cents for the haircut, with five cents as a tip and ten cents to cover trolley fare.

  But Alfred had other ideas. He knew something about money, even at that young age, and after some quick calculations, he figured that he could get more bang for his half-buck if he made a few adjustments to the plan. He knew of a Prof. Amoroso’s Barber Academy, where, he later remembered, “you could get a haircut for fifteen cents and they’d bind your wounds,” a place of wonder where tips were rejected—the perfect transaction.

  There was one hitch to the plan. The academy was across town, a fair distance from the Caplins’ Stevens Street house. Rather than catch a trolley and cut into his potential savings, Alfred decided to hitch a ride on the back of an ice wagon. The free ride, not to mention a sliver of ice on a hot day, seemed to be the ideal solution. “I hopped on that wagon, in a state of bliss,” he’d write many years later.

  Somewhere, somehow, Alfred tumbled off the wagon. It might have occurred as he was dismounting near the academy, as Alfred would claim in his accounts, or he might have simply walked in front of the trolley without looking, as Otto Caplin later suggested. Whatever happened, the result was horrific: Alfred wound up sprawled out on the tracks, directly in the path of an oncoming trolley. Unable to stop, it rolled over Alfred’s left leg, crushing his thigh well above the knee. Mercifully, the boy blacked out.

  When he regained consciousness, he was in a hospital emergency room, surrounded by people in white, all trying to bring him around long enough to determine his identity. Alfred stole a peek at the damage. The sickening mess reminded him of scrambled eggs. “There was just nothing that you could call a ‘leg’ left of it,” he’d remember later.

  In 1946, Al Capp created a booklet distributed to amputee veterans by the Red Cross. In these autobiographical panels, he depicts himself as slightly older than the nine-year-old he was at the time of his life-changing accident.

  Indecision was the rule of the hour. Hospital personnel didn’t want to take action until they had talked to the boy’s father. Otto Caplin didn’t want to make a decision until he’d talked to his wife. Tillie Caplin, stuck in the middle of nowhere with three kids under the age of nine, didn’t know what to think.

  Elliott Caplin would never forget the call from home. His mother, in the kitchen of the farmhouse, was handed the phone, and she struggled to get details while a group of people stood around the kitchen, listening to Tillie and trying to piece together what had happened. Something was wrong, and it had to be bad. No one called long distance in those days unless it was serious.

  “Her expression never altered,” Elliott recalled. “Her face had lost all color, but her hand remained steady throughout what must have been a nightmare.”

  Otto told her someone would be picking them up as soon as he could arrange the ride. Then he rushed to the hospital and joined Alfred, who lay on a table near the emergency room. Alfred, sweating profusely, stared ahead in a daze.

  “How are you doing?” Otto asked.

  “All right,” his son answered. He looked like he was about to nod off, but suddenly opened his eyes. “Don’t you tell Ma,” he implored.

  Doctors didn’t immediately remove Alfred’s damaged leg. Instead, he was given painkillers but very little hope. When the hospital emergency physician insisted that Alfred’s leg would have to be amputated, Otto Caplin demanded a second opinion. Two other doctors confirmed the original finding, but rather than allow the hospital staff to work on the leg, Otto insisted that another specialist handle it. Hours passed. The doctor couldn’t be located. Finally, the following morning, the doctor arrived and Alfred’s left leg was amputated well above the knee.

  In writing about the procedure in his unpublished autobiography many years later, Al Capp played down the trauma. “There is no more drama about the amputation of a leg than about a pedicure,” he wrote. “The offending mess is lopped off, and the remains sewn up. It makes no difference whether it’s down near the ankle or six inches from the hip, as mine was.”

  At the time, however, the boy was in agony. Alfred was not immediately told that his leg had been removed, and for days on end he lay in a daze, heavily medicated, in and out of consciousness. Tillie refused to leave his bedside. When Alfred finally discovered that he’d lost his leg, he was angry and accusatory.

  “They took my leg off!” he shouted at his mother.

  “We had to, to save your life,” she assured him. She attempted to explain how they had consulted the best doctors, how they had prayed for him to survive, how he was now like the brave soldiers who came home from wars without arms or legs.

  Alfred wasn’t interested in explanations.

  “But they have lived,” he said of the soldiers. “I’m only a kid. I’ve just started to live!”

  Alfred healed quickly, and three weeks after the accident he returned home. His childhood, at least the one he knew, had ended.

  Alfred hated being a one-legged curiosity. Classmates who once had no interest in him at all were suddenly overflowing with concern and pity.

  “With two legs I had been a nobody,” he observed bitterly. “With one leg I was somebody.”

  Nor did he care for the smothering he received from his mother, who fretted over his condition and cooked him heaps of steaks and lamb chops, protein-laden foods that doctors recommended for the healing process. He was relieved when the money ran low, as it
always did, and she was forced to serve the usual meals.

  Alfred could be a terror around the apartment. He’d always been temperamental, but following the loss of his leg, he became even more stubborn and surly, prone to explosive fits of rage, usually directed at his mother. He did not attend school for a prolonged period following the accident, and his sense of isolation and immobility fueled his dark moods.

  “Alfred fidgeted,” his father later wrote in his own account of his son’s life. “He hated dark days; he hated monotony. He had an insatiable urge to keep moving.”

  He was tormented by phantom pains and itches in his missing leg and toes. He’d experience these sensations—not uncommon for amputees—for the rest of his life.

  Getting around on one leg at home was relatively easy. Alfred could hop from room to room in the apartment. When he had to leave home, he’d use crutches, his left pantleg pinned up and out of his way. But traveling any kind of distance, like to his school on Davenport Avenue, was problematic. Otto Caplin would take Alfred on those occasions when he was at home; otherwise, the job fell to Alfred’s Uncle Ellie, whose difficulties meeting car payments made the week-to-week arrangement precarious.

  Alfred’s parents plotted to rearrange their finances in a way that would permit them to buy him an artificial limb. The nearest supplier, a man with the unfortunate name of Butcher, worked out of Hartford, and his services weren’t cheap. Otto managed to come up with a twenty-five-dollar deposit, and Butcher began custom-designing a prosthetic leg that would fit Alfred.

  Alfred hoped the artificial limb would allow him to walk around with little effort—and look normal while he was doing it. Those hopes were dashed as soon as Butcher showed up in New Haven with the leg. The older man led Alfred into a bedroom and, while the Caplin family waited anxiously in the living room, instructed him on how to use the leg. Alfred strapped it on.

  There was nothing natural about moving with the leg, and after a few tentative, stumbling, uncomfortable steps, he grew frightened. He could barely maintain his balance, let alone move around smoothly and naturally.