Al Capp Page 3

  This is the sole surviving photo of Alfred Caplin prior to the amputation of his leg, taken in 1913.

  Alfred’s brother Jerome, nicknamed Bence, was born a year after Alfred; Elliott was four years younger. Madeline, the only girl in the family, arrived a year later. Alfred was very close to Bence, whereas, by his own admission, he had virtually no use for the two youngest while still living at home.

  By all indications, the Caplin household was loud but far from joyful. Otto was away more than he was home, leaving Tillie with the difficult job of raising the children and managing very meager finances, which normally amounted to holding creditors at bay. Alfred was surly and vile tempered, and his three siblings lived in fear of upsetting him—and it didn’t take much. Bence ate alone in the kitchen on nights when Tillie served soup, because he slurped the hot liquid and that was enough to send Alfred into a rage.

  Tillie hung on, hoping for a change for the better. She would anxiously await the day’s mail delivery, praying for the check her husband promised to send, and as the days went by and the checks seldom found their way to the mailbox, Tillie would look for ways to talk the landlord into allowing her a little more time to make rent, or convince the grocer to extend her a little more credit. She hoarded everything she bought when she did have money, and when there was no money and things got really bad, she would take the children out after dark, when they could go unobserved while they scrounged through trash cans for discarded clothing or even bits of coal.

  Perhaps more humiliating were the loans and handouts she and Otto received from family members, particularly Otto’s brother-in-law Harry, who married Otto’s sister Rose and always seemed to slip Otto urgently needed money for bills or, on occasion, when Otto was feeling really motivated, a new business. Harry had troubles of his own, including his own string of failed businesses, but when times were good he found ways to help Otto and his family.

  The constant lack of money, the moves to squalid apartments after the family was evicted by landlords, the difficulties of raising four children with very little help, the loneliness she felt when Otto was away for long stretches of time—all exacted a steep price, physically and mentally, from Tillie Caplin. On nights when she was alone and the kids were off to bed, she would sit in a rocking chair in the kitchen, sipping tea and talking to herself about the days of her youth, which seemed happier, despite the fact that she had lost her mother at fourteen and, as the oldest of her parents’ eight children, wound up raising her younger brother and sisters.

  On those rare occasions when he did talk about the matter, Al Capp would characterize his mother with a tinge of sadness.

  “Her hair turned white before she was thirty-five,” he recalled. “She was cheerful enough but she had sort of a haunted look—she never had any pretty clothes or good times.” Her voice, once melodic and sweet, became “anxious and scolding and shrill.”

  A life of disappointment reached its lowest point when Alfred lost his leg. Alfred would never quite understand her feelings. While he wrestled with the harsh realities of going from room to room on a clumsy artificial leg, or dealing with the feelings of isolation he experienced when he watched his classmates running and jumping and carrying on the way kids do, his mother concerned herself with his future—whatever that might be. What kind of jobs could he possibly hold? What would women think of this man? Would he ever have a wife and children? Could he even live in a way that was close to normal? She wept when she considered it.

  Albert had little patience for this. In his mind, his mother’s worries were manifestations of weakness. He wasn’t interested in merely surviving. He would learn to thrive on one leg, no matter what it took.

  Al Capp would claim that he could not remember his life with two legs. He would talk of his childhood in only the most general terms. It had been a happy childhood, he’d declare, even though the evidence—and the memories of his younger brothers and sister—said otherwise. He could be surly and difficult; he had little sympathy for others. He’d fought his mother when she tried to get him to learn to play the piano; he tolerated school, achieving average grades, even though it was clear that he had an above-average mind.

  He loved to read and draw and go to the movies, all of which fed into a prodigious imagination. When his father returned from a sales trip, he’d bring home piles of hotel stationery. Alfred would fill the sheets with drawings and his own little comic strips, which were mostly imitations of what he saw in the newspapers or on the screen in the movie houses.

  His father encouraged him at every turn. Otto Caplin was himself an amateur comics artist, and he drew his own strips on grocery bags or butcher paper. Most of his comics were about a married couple, not unlike him and his wife, and their daily travails. “He always triumphed over her in those strips,” Alfred would say, many years later. “But only in them. Never in real life.”

  Comic strips enjoyed widespread followings at that time. Comics had been around since before the turn of the century, when the immense popularity of R. F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid ignited newspaper wars, inspired weak imitations, and, ultimately, began a newspaper tradition that continues to this day. The funnies, as they were called, sold newspapers—lots of them. The competition to get the best artists and comic strips was fierce. Some of Alfred’s favorite artists, like Rudolph Dirks (“Katzenjammer Kids”), Bud Fisher (“Mutt and Jeff”), George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”), Cliff Sterrett (“Polly and Her Pals”), and Billy DeBeck (“Barney Google”), were not only extraordinarily creative and influential; they earned lucrative incomes. When he heard that Bud Fisher was pulling in two thousand dollars a week for “Mutt and Jeff,” and “constantly marrying ‘Follies’ girls,” Alfred reasoned that this might be a career for him.

  His earliest work received much more modest compensation. Alfred had a businessman’s sensibilities, and he recognized that the basic single-joke comic strip was not going to guarantee him a continuing readership. The kids in his neighborhood liked his strips, enough so that Alfred would create his own publication featuring his comics and have Bence and Elliott sell them on the street for a penny or two each. He’d try to pump out an issue a week; to keep interest up, Alfred ended each adventure strip with a “cliffhanger” that assured him a readership the following week.

  But Alfred lost the readership he’d been building when Otto moved his family from New Haven to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood Capp later described as a “block-gang warfare jungle.” Otto had just watched another of his businesses go under and was back with his old stand-by employer, the Atlantic Paint Company, and his new territory included New York City and Long Island. Alfred’s new school, P.S. 62, was, he would later claim, experimenting with a new classroom organization: rather than follow the accepted practice of separating the students according to their scholastic abilities, the school decided to mix the high achievers with the underachievers, the theory being the more intelligent kids would help elevate the others.

  Alfred was terrified. Not only was he the new kid in school, and a one-legged one at that; he found himself surrounded by some of the most frightening classmates he could imagine—kids destined, he was convinced, for one of the state’s finer penal facilities.

  “The experiment went on for a couple of months, and it made thieves and monsters out of us nice kids,” he said of the experience. “It was horrible, like a leper colony.”

  His art became his salvation—and again, a source of income. When his classmates learned that he could draw just about anything, they paid him—first pennies, then nickels, and eventually dimes—to sketch their fantasies on paper. No moral imperatives were involved: Alfred drew whatever they asked him to draw. The typical request found Alfred sketching one of his classmates in action, often as a cowboy. One kid asked him to portray him as a cowboy shooting his older brother. Before long, Alfred had more work than he could manage. He considered enlisting the help of an assistant.

  Then the heat was really turned up. The class�
�s art instructor was a young, attractive teacher named Miss Mandelbaum. When Alfred proved that he could sketch a reasonably convincing likeness of her, all of his commissions changed. The typical sketch now pictured a pubescent student’s leering at a nude or scantily clad Miss Mandelbaum. The price for such a drawing: twenty-five cents.

  “I was just a kid from the country, but soon I became an expert in pornography,” he’d recall. “My price was a quarter a drawing, and with twenty-five steady customers, I was doing fine until I got so many commissions that I starting taking extra work home and my father found out about it.”

  It would have been a short-lived gig in any event. Otto Caplin, always restless, had resigned his sales position and was moving the family yet again, this time to start up a toy store. Alfred would have to rebuild the audience for his art once again.

  The family’s constant movement, necessitated by Otto Caplin’s failed business enterprises, combined with the evictions from landlords when the rent was late, was hard on Alfred. Otto Caplin didn’t fail for lack of effort. His list of business enterprises included a wholesale silk stocking store, a boot store, a wholesale toy distributorship, and still another silk place. He’d manage to scrounge up some backing money from a sympathetic relative, open the business with the highest of hopes, and shut down after a relatively short and sad run, when he could no longer get credit from suppliers and he was overwhelmed by waves of debt. He’d return to a traveling sales position until the next big idea hit him.

  For Alfred, movies were the ultimate escape. He had felt that way since he was very young. His life at home could be difficult, but a nickel could buy him a way out for at least a couple of hours. He had little use for the main attraction, which tended to be a romance. Alfred and his friends would hang around for about ten minutes of the film, catching just enough to supply them with a week’s worth of contempt and fodder for discussion; they’d be long gone before the serious kissing and loving hit the screen.

  The comedies and adventures were an entirely different matter. Alfred never tired of watching the pratfalls, the triumphs of the little (but more clever) guy over much bigger foes, the absurdist heroism, or the acts of bravery that defied all logic. A couple of hours at the White Way or DeWitt theater—or, if he was really doing it up, the Bijou in downtown New Haven—would transport Alfred to worlds that even his own imagination couldn’t invent. A new film by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred’s favorite, was the manifestation of genius.

  The serials influenced the young comic artist in him. He loved the way each installment ended with a damsel in distress, facing her demise in seemingly impossible and inescapable circumstances that were somehow resolved within the first ninety seconds of the following week’s segment. Of course, that installment would end with a similarly inescapable brush with death—or so it would seem until the following week, when the resolution was so simple and obvious that Alfred couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it. Alfred studied these carefully. He learned how to create characters in an abbreviated period of time, how to build and pace a story, and how to mount suspense. The little comics magazines that he created and sold around the neighborhood became indications of a quick learner at work.

  Books educated him further. As a boy, he loved visiting his grandparents’ home and reading the adventure novels that Zayde Caplin favored. By the time he reached his teen years, he was moving on, devouring Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and others. He haunted Whitlocks, the local bookstore, whenever he could put together any money. As his brother Elliott remembered, he especially favored the thick, bound volumes of Harper’s Monthly, which could be purchased used for two bits. These volumes contained some of the most memorable writing and illustrations produced in America in fifty years. According to Elliott, Alfred also looked through newspapers and the backs of magazines for ads offering bound editions of the complete works of such authors as Joseph Conrad, Anthony Trollope, and William Makepeace Thackery. He sent away for these volumes and read them cover to cover until threatening letters to “Alfred Caplin, Esquire” began arriving in the mail, stating that there would be hell to pay—or at least police action—if he didn’t pay for or return the books. Alfred’s library shrank substantially when his mother intercepted one of these letters.

  “Momma hastily packed whatever volumes she could find and mailed them, parcel post, back to the irate publisher,” Elliott Caplin explained. “Alfred didn’t seem to mind very much. He was a reader, not a collector.”

  As acerbic as he could be when contending with his mother and siblings, Alfred cared deeply for his father. He looked forward to Otto’s return from sales trips, he enjoyed discussing his art with him, and while he was well aware of his father’s shortcomings as a father and provider, Alfred sympathized with the difficulties of his life. He couldn’t imagine how it would be to struggle with earning a living, facing failure after failure, and dealing with a wife constantly carping at him and children always whining and demanding attention. This wasn’t the life he would have chosen. He thought his father, “a gifted artist and brilliant man,” should have pursued cartooning, where he might have managed the world he created. “He was a dreamer,” Alfred told Elliott, when both had grown older and discussed their father. “He did his best and never deserted us. Poppa was O.K.”

  If Otto Caplin taught his son anything, it was how to think quickly on his feet. Otto Caplin might have been a dreamer, but he was realist enough to know that, for all his grandiose plans, he would never own the mansion on the hill; if everything fell into place, he just might be able to hold on to an apartment in a good Jewish neighborhood, with furniture for everyone in the family, and enough food in the icebox to offer a few choices. To accomplish this, he had to plan beyond the next minute, even if living in the present seemed impossible.

  Alfred understood this, and it served him well throughout his life. He was always on the lookout for something that gave him a little edge, boosted his income, or set him up for success somewhere up the road.

  One of his earliest lessons in this occurred when he was fifteen. He had befriended a classmate named Stanley, a kid he liked to describe as “solid.” Stanley played on the football team, pulled C+ grades, and dressed very fashionably. Alfred admired his self-confidence, a characteristic you didn’t always see in kids that age. Stanley worked at a gas station, and Alfred dropped by one afternoon to see if he wanted to sneak into the movie theater with him. Stanley replied that he was paid a dollar a night for his work pumping gas, so he could afford to pay his way into the theater.

  Alfred liked the response, which impressed him as being honest rather than highfalutin’, but it also nudged him into doing some on-the-spot math. Stanley had only been working at the station for a couple of weeks, yet here he was, buying clothes that he could never afford on his modest salary. Something didn’t add up. Alfred kept an eye on him, and soon enough he had an answer: Stanley was running a game on the gas station’s customers. A car would drive in and, without getting out of the car, the driver would order his gas. Stanley would pump the gas, but he always stopped a gallon short of the customer’s order. If the customer ordered ten gallons of gas at twenty-five cents a gallon, Stanley would put nine gallons in the tank but charge the customer for ten. He’d pocket a quarter and drop the rest in the gas station’s cash register. It worked perfectly. Sam Moscow, Stanley’s boss, was receiving full payment for the gas leaving the pump, while Stanley was getting a quarter for every customer stopping by the station. On those occasions when a customer did leave the car, Stanley played it straight and pumped what the driver ordered.

  This was a scam that Alfred could stand back and admire. It was beautifully conceived, and the quarters added up to a nice sum by the end of Stanley’s shift. By Alfred’s calculations, Stanley was probably padding his dollar salary by four to five dollars every time he worked.

  Alfred congratulated Stanley on his little enterprise. Stanley initially denied doing any such thing, but he quickly confessed to running the g
ame because he was interested in impressing a girl from the other side of town, a girl from a family much better off than Stanley’s.

  Alfred’s mind downshifted and he quickly hatched a plan. Rather than approach the girl and violate class lines, Stanley should approach one of his buddies and offer to pay for a night out. He could bring along some friends—especially female friends. The young lady in question would inevitably turn up at some point, and she would take notice of Stanley’s bankroll and generosity.

  “But how do I get away from this place?” Stanley wanted to know, explaining that Sam Moscow turned up every night at closing time.

  “I’ll take over for you,” Alfred volunteered. “I’ll put your quarters in my pocket.” All Stanley had to do, Alfred continued, was return to the station before Moscow arrived. Alfred would take Stanley’s nightly dollar as remuneration for his efforts.

  Stanley agreed. What he didn’t realize was Alfred’s own cunning: rather than short the customer by a quarter, Alfred was giving him fifty cents less than he ordered. He’d pocket a quarter for Stanley, a quarter for himself, and have the dollar salary at the end of the night. Stanley was too grateful to notice. He suddenly had all the friends he could handle, and he was still making money, even though he was nowhere near the gas station.

  As Alfred would lament many years later, the scam might have worked indefinitely if he hadn’t fallen victim to his own greed. What would happen, he wondered, if he shorted the customer seventy-five cents’ worth of gas per order, putting a quarter in one pocket for Stanley and dropping two quarters in another pocket for himself? The answer, he realized, all too late, was somebody would notice. On the very first night that Alfred adjusted his pay scale, a customer drove in, ordered gas, and paid. But rather than leave, he pulled out of the station and met another car parked a short distance away. The car belonged to Sam Moscow. The customer and gas station owner held an animated conversation, pausing at one point to dip a stick into the customer’s gas tank.