Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

430 Pages·2012·4.21 MB·English

by  Larry Tye

ALSO BY LARRY TYE
Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations
Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora
Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters
and the Making of the Black Middle Class
WITH KITTY DUKAKIS
Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy

Copyright © 2012 by Larry Tye
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tye, Larry.
Superman : the high-flying history of America’s most enduring hero / Larry Tye.
p. m.
eISBN: 978-1-58836918-5
1. Superman (Fictitious character) I. Title.
PN6728.S9T94 2012
741.5′973—dc23 2011045280
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: David Stevenson
Jacket illustration: © The Dynamic Duo/Corbis Images Jacket photograph: © Shutterstock
SUPERMAN is a trademark of DC Comics. Used under License
v3.1
To Lisa
Preface
ENDURANCE
of the last century is someone who lived half
THE MOST ENDURING AMERICAN HERO
his life in disguise and the other half as the world’s most recognizable
man. He is not Jack Kennedy or Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, Batman or Jerry
Seinfeld, although all of them were inspired by him. It was on his
muscle-bound back that the iconic comic book took flight and the very
idea of the superhero was born. He appeared on more radio broadcasts
than Ellery Queen and in more movies than Marlon Brando, who once
pretended to be his father. He helped give America the backbone to
wage war against the Nazis, the Great Depression, and the Red Menace.
He remains an intimate to kids from Boston to Belgrade and has adult
devotees who, like Talmudic scholars, parse his every utterance. And he
has done it all with an innocence and confidence that allowed him to
appear publicly wearing underpants over full-body tights, and to assume
an alter ego who kept pursuing the prettiest girl in town even though he
seldom got her.
The most enduring American hero is an alien from outer space who,
once he reached Earth, traded in his foreign-sounding name Kal-El for a
singularly American handle: Superman.
Ah, you say, the Man of Steel—I know him! But do you really? Do you
know the wrenching story of his birth and nurturing at the hands of a
parade of young creators yearning for their own absent fathers? The first
was the youngest child of Lithuanian immigrants who was devastated
when his dad died during a robbery. While there was no bringing back
his father and role model, Jerry Siegel did bring to life a hero able not
just to run fast and jump high but, as we see early on, to fend off a
robber. Who would publish this fanciful tale? How about Jack Liebowitz,
a hardheaded comic book entrepreneur whose own dad had died just
after he was born and who needed a champion? Whitney Ellsworth, the
man who wrote, edited, and produced nearly all the episodes of the
1950s TV show that introduced many baby boomers to this costumed
hero, was just fourteen when he lost his forty-five-year-old father to a
heart attack. George Reeves, TV’s original Clark Kent and Superman,
didn’t even know who his real father was until he was in his twenties.
Who better to create the ultimate childhood fantasy figure than men
whose childhoods had been stolen from them?
Not just Superman but his rivals, too, were more than they seemed—
and more than just fantasy. Many of them were real-world menaces,
which made the Superman stories timely and authentic. Superman stood
up to Hitler and Stalin before America did. The Metropolis Marvel used
his radio broadcast to expose the savagery of the Ku Klux Klan, and in
his comic books he upended slumlords and wife-beaters. Lex Luthor,
Superman’s most persistent foe, likely came from Jerry Siegel’s boyhood.
The day after Jerry’s father died, his hometown newspaper published a
letter denouncing the kind of vigilante justice that would become
Superman’s early signature. The letter writer: A. L. Luther.
The superhero never revealed how he voted, but during the Great
Depression he was a New Dealer hell-bent on truth and justice, and
during the Reagan Revolution he was a patriot trumpeting the American
way. His sex life underwent an even more drastic about-face: from
celibate to satisfied husband. There is one more thing that even his most
fervent fans may not know about the Man of Steel: He is Jewish.
I have been captivated by Superman ever since I wrote my first book,
the life story of the public relations pioneer and master manipulator
Edward L. Bernays. Borrowing ideas from his uncle Sigmund Freud,
Bernays single-handedly shaped many of our political and cultural
appetites—from sweetening sour politicians like Calvin Coolidge to
selling America on the European tenor Enrico Caruso. Negro Leagues
strikeout king Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the subject of my most recent book,
borrowed Bernays’s techniques in crafting his own eye-popping legend.
Paige and Bernays got me wondering: Why does America embrace the
heroes it does? What do our choices say about them and, more
important, about us? There’s no better way to understand modern-day
heroes than to look at Superman, the superhero who tapped into the
American psyche more effectively than anyone else and, as a result, has
lasted longer than all of them.
Clearly there was a serious story here, but for me the other appeal of
writing this book was getting to be ten again. I had grown up reading
Superman comics and watching nearly all 104 episodes of Adventures of
Superman on TV. I sat mesmerized by his movies and pondered: What
would it feel like to actually take flight? Superman was comfort food for
my spirit, and writing this book let me partake of that comfort all over
again. It also let me imagine what Superman did between adventures,
when he doffed his cape and sprawled out on the couch.
Okay, so I still cared about Superman, but did anyone else? Sure, he
was a big deal when I was coming of age in the 1960s, but I assumed he
was passé in the virtual realities of the new millennium. Then I started
paying attention. My four-year-old nephew showed up one night
wearing a Superman shirt. My sixteen-year-old stepdaughter told me
how, when she was four, she had trick-or-treated dressed not as
Supergirl but as Superman. My oldest friend’s fourteen-year-old daughter
showed me her DVD collection of Smallville, a show I had never heard of
that, for ten seasons, has chronicled the adventures of a young Clark
Kent. The final test came on Halloween, when merchants in my
hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, hand out candy all afternoon,
packing sidewalks with costumed kids who provide the perfect sampling
with which to judge who’s hot in the world of heroes. Spider-Man did
well, with half a dozen children dressed in webbed costumes, but the
hands-down winner was the blue tights, red cape, and bright yellow S of
Superman.
I still had doubts, but they had changed from whether anyone cared to
why. Why did Senator Barack Obama pose in front of a Superman statue
and later, just before his election as president, joke that he, too, came
from Krypton? Surely he understood better than anyone the value of
bonding to such a symbol of strength and honor. Why is the Man of Steel
as popular today as he was in my boyhood and in every era back to his
begetting in the 1930s? That is more than we can say for Jim Thorpe or
Dwight Eisenhower, the Phantom, the Lone Ranger, or Tarzan the Ape
Man. By the time of his death, even a brilliant pitcher and consummate
character like Satchel Paige had become a vague if nostalgic memory for
most. Heroes, understandably, are woven into their time and seldom last
far beyond it. How had Superman broken the mold?
To answer those questions, I did what any journalist would: I asked
smart people who ought to know. I did more than two hundred
interviews, starting with historians, clerics, and psychologists who have
written and lectured about Superman’s godlike attributes, his corrupting
influences, and why children and their grandparents continue to
embrace him. I spoke with writers and artists who brought Superman to
life in comic books, comic strips, novels, and graphic novels, as well as
on radio, TV, film, and animation. Ninety-two-year-old ghostwriter Alvin
Schwartz told me that he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that he was the
man behind the newspaper strip, but then The New York Times outed
him. Jack Larson and Noel Neill explained why they initially did all they
could to escape their Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane personas from the
wildly popular Adventures of Superman, but now—like Superman’s other
aging midwives—they relish the attention the connection still brings.
Aaron Smolinski recounted the way kids teased him for appearing naked
as baby Clark in Superman: The Movie and the way people still ask, “How
did you lift the truck?” “I say, ‘I’m Superman.’ ”
I visited Superman’s publisher in New York. I went to his movie studio
in California and his hometown of Cleveland. I talked to fanatic fans and
casual ones, adolescents and octogenarians, here and abroad. They all
agreed with Donald Wurzelbacher of Cincinnati that Superman is “the
godfather of superheroes … the original, first, and greatest.”
I listened to hour after hour of Superman’s old radio broadcasts and
watched his early and recent TV shows, cartoons, and films. I read
everything I could find about him in books, magazines, and newspapers,
where columnists loved to quote him in the financial and editorial
sections as well as in the comics, in tabloids like the New York Post and
high-minded broadsheets like The New York Times. I pored over
thousands of pages of public records, and others that have never been
released, from the ongoing lawsuit against Superman’s publisher by his
creators’ heirs. I read the unpublished memoirs of Jerry Siegel and Jack
Liebowitz, Superman’s originator and patron, and talked to their friends
and relatives. I reviewed yellowing police files and coroner’s reports on
George Reeves, the TV Man of Steel, with forensic experts and
researchers who have spent a lifetime looking into his death. I began by
worrying whether, given all that has been written on Superman, I would
have anything new to say. I ended by worrying how to fit into a single
manuscript all I have to say on this unambiguous hero who is as much a
part of our communal DNA as Paul Bunyan or Huckleberry Finn.
So how has Superman managed to thrive for nearly seventy-five years?
It starts with the intrinsic simplicity of his story. Little Orphan Annie
and Oliver Twist remind us how compelling a foundling’s tale can be,
and Superman, the sole survivor of a doomed planet, is a super-
foundling. The love triangle connecting Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and
Superman has a side for everyone, whether you are the boy who can’t
get the girl, the girl pursued by the wrong boy, or the conflicted hero.
His secret identity might have been annoying if we hadn’t been let in on
the joke, and if we didn’t each have a hero hidden within ourselves. He
was not just any hero, but one with the very powers we would like to
have: the strength to lift boulders and planets, the speed to outrun a
locomotive or a bullet, and, coolest on anyone’s fantasy list, the gift of
flight.
Superpowers are just half the equation. More essential is knowing
what to do with them, and nobody has a more instinctual sense than
Superman of right and wrong. He is an archetype of mankind at its
pinnacle. Like John Wayne, he sweeps in to solve our problems. No
thank-you needed. Like Jesus Christ, he descended from the heavens to
help us discover our humanity. He is neither cynical, like Batman, nor
fraught, like Spider-Man. For the religious, he can reinforce whatever
faith they profess; for nonbelievers, he is a secular messiah. The more
jaded the era, the more we have been lured back to his clunky
familiarity. The outcome of his adventures may be as predictable as
those of Sherlock Holmes—the good guy never loses—but that too is
reassuring.
So is his uniform. His tights and cape, in radiant primary colors, make
Superman as instantly recognizable as Santa Claus—and as comforting.
That familiarity helped his handlers move him from the printed page to
the airwaves, then from the small screen to the big. No need to explain
who he was; everyone knew as soon as they saw him. A costume could
also be electrifying, the more so when it didn’t come with a mask. Just
ask Robin Hood and Elvis Presley.
That does not mean he hasn’t changed with the times. Superman has
evolved more than the fruit fly. In the 1930s he was just the crime