Ill health and low spirits led Al Capp to stop writing “Li’l Abner,” the comic strip he had once
turned into a national institution, in November 1977. The move probably came
several years too late, as readers for the last decade had watched the
cartoonist fall into creative decline and public scandal.
In some ways, before the term was coined, Capp was a
neoconservative—a left-winger so unnerved by the cultural tumult of the 1960s
that he turned sharply rightward. An artist whose criticism of Senator Joseph
McCarthy was so fierce that he provoked monitoring by the FBI ended up supporting
Richard Nixon.
In a far more sinister way, he was Harvey Weinstein
before the #MeToo movement—a predator who used his wealth and power to harass
or violate numerous women who crossed his path, up to and including actresses
Edie Adams, Grace Kelly and, as recounted here, Goldie Hawn.
The “cancel culture” has retroactively brought to
the surface how to evaluate Capp. His activities certainly deformed his life,
but to what extent did they deform his art? How can we view Dogpatch,
USA knowing that its creator could be as bad as the outsiders who periodically
threatened the peace of hillbilly innocents like its strapping title character?
When I first wrote about Capp 40 years ago for my
college paper, I knew about an accusation of a sexual offense in the early
‘70s. At that time, my feelings about him were similar to the praise offered by Stefan Kanfer in this 2010 City Journal piece. But I was unaware that this was part of a persistent, deeply troubling pattern of Capp's misconduct. Since then, I must
admit, I find it harder to appreciate his work.
It was hard to imagine anything like that at the
height of Capp’s influence, when “Li’l Abner” ran in 900 U.S. papers and
another 100 in 28 countries around the world.
Capp had readers hanging on every curved line of his
to see which fictional characters he would parody (e.g., Dick Tracy became
“Fearless Fosdick”), which holiday he would create (Sadie Hawkins Day, in which
unmarried maidens set their eyes on bachelors), or which term he would coin
(the “Double Whammy” endures).
Lyricist Johnny Mercer and composer Gene De Paul
used the strip as a basis not just for a 1956 Broadway musical but for its 1959
film adaptation. John Steinbeck not only compared him to Laurence Sterne but
championed him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Li’l Abner” gloried in its Dickensian names and
exuberant characterizations (Senator Jack S. Phogbound and the sultry "Appassionata
Bon Climax"). But literary devices were not the only traits that Capp
shared with the Victorian novelist:
*Childhood trauma: The indebtedness of his
father led Dickens to work at age 12 in a rat-infested factory pasting labels
on bottles of boot blacking. But, while Dickens’ wound was psychic, Capp’s was
physical: run over in a trolley accident, the nine-year-old awoke to find a leg
amputated. Each incident would have a lasting impact on their work: Dickens
would be obsessed with poverty, while Capp’s cynical, Swiftian worldview
assumed the rule of those who had seemingly everything.
*Success by their mid-20s: From a start reporting
parliamentary debates, Dickens soon gained a mastery of London’s streets, then
parlayed that into short vignettes (Sketches by Boz) and a full-length
novel (The Pickwick Papers) that made him the hottest young fiction
writer in the city. Capp’s father may have been as unsuccessful in business as
John Dickens, but at least he introduced his depressed son to one of his own
hobbies: cartooning. After a year acting as “ghost writer” for “Joe Palooka”
creator Ham Fisher, he broke off to start his own strip, “Li’l Abner,” which
quickly became an enormous success.
*Fame lasting several decades, crossing media:
A number of observers, including Dan Brotzel in this Digital Doughnut piece,
have noticed Dickens’ expert skills in marketing his own work, including
through serialization (which enabled him to hook readers through “cliffhangers”
and to adjust his narrative if he sensed lagging interest) and personal
appearances (in which he wowed audiences with highly theatrical readings). In
the mid-1950s, after several abortive attempts, Capp agreed to having DePaul
and Mercer adapt his strip into their musical. In other cases, Capp was even
more visible in the entertainment media: serving as a judge for “Miss
Television” in 1950, for instance, and, in the late Sixties, airing a series of
radio commentaries collected in the LP, Capp on Campus.
*Sexual scandals: In middle age, the eyes of
both Dickens and Capp were caught by young women. The 45-year-old novelist,
tiring of his wife, took up with an 18-year-old actress, printing a “Personal”
statement announcing his separation from his wife but providing few other
details. (I discussed the affair with Ellen Ternan in this blog post.)
Capp’s sexual misadventures were more protracted than Dickens’, more numerous,
and, in the end, more damaging. Although Adams, Hawn and Kelly all went on to
enjoy success in show business, not all the objects of his advances were so
fortunate. (For instance, see Dr. Jean Kilbourne’s account of how his
rebuffed advances nearly led “to extinguishing my sense of myself as a
talented, competent and hopeful person.")
The death spiral of “Li’l Abner” was
precipitated by muckraking columnist
Jack Anderson’s exposure of how Capp groped co-eds at two different
college campuses—incidents even more embarrassing and hypocritical because the
cartoonist was constantly castigating student immorality. The number of papers carrying Capp's strip dropped precipitously, and, with his health troubles mounting, the joy
quickly went out of his work.
In his farewell to readers, Capp admitted that the
quality of his work had suffered in the last several years. Actually, it had
probably been dropping for the prior decade, as his characterizations became
increasingly shrill. (Joan Baez, for instance, was renamed “Joanie Phoney.”)
In one sense, Capp’s anger was understandable. He
could not help comparing what he saw as privileged, pampered baby boom radical
students with his own difficult upbringing.
Even during his creative and personal decline, Capp
could show the better angels of his nature, as when, upon hearing of an
operation to amputate the leg of the son of Ted Kennedy (whom the cartoonist
had taken to dubbing “O. Noble McGesture”), he wrote an extended sympathy
message to the boy, explaining how he might cope with his physical loss. The
plight of wounded veterans could also move him to numerous quiet and extremely generous contributions.
But Capp’s advances toward young women—compulsive,
and filled with threats about what could happen to their careers if he were
refused—represented exactly the kind of hypocrisy his comic strip used to send up at
its best. And that was utterly sad.
