Flashback, November 1977: Capp Steps Away From ‘Li’l Abner’ Cartoon

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.

Photo of the Day: Johnny Mercer Statue, Savannah, GA

The last time I visited Savannah was three years ago this month, for an afternoon, on a vacation spent mostly in Hilton Head, SC. 

But, in this coastal city of distinctive Southern charm, I was delighted to come across, on my way to somewhere else, something I never expected to see, in Ellis Square. I’ve been waiting three years to use this photo of an outdoor sculpture I snapped then, and what better occasion than on what would have been the 108^th birthday of Johnny Mercer?

I never grasped the full extent of this lyricist’s contribution to the Great American Songbook until I saw Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which uses—more effectively than anything else in that often disappointing movie—a soundtrack filled with classic Mercer songs. But really, his songs had been flowing slowly into my consciousness, much like the lazy Georgia rivers this Savannah native loved as a boy.

In the early 1960s, Mercer won consecutive Best Song Oscars for “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” to go along with two others he had won previously. But that comes nowhere near to conveying the breadth, beauty and verve of his work. Think also of “Skylark,” “Blues in the Night,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive,” "Jeepers Creepers," “That Old Black Magic,” “One For My Baby," "Autumn Leaves," “Satin Doll" and “Summer Wind.”

Outside of his lyrics, Mercer—unique among lyricists and composers in the golden age of the Great American Songbook—also made his mark as quite a good singer in his own right and an astute business executive and talent scout, as co-founder of Capitol Records, which he helped establish 75 years ago.

Back in October 1999, on a longer vacation in Savannah, I had made sure to see Bonaventure Cemetery, where Mercer was buried in 1976. While it’s a lovely spot, his gravesite is, of course, a somber affair.

That was part of the reason why the Ellis Square bronze statue—unveiled in 2009, in commemoration of the centennial of Mercer’s birth—pleased me so much when I viewed it. 

Sculptor Susie Chisholm placed it not far from Savannah’s City Market, a setting with an active nightlife and music. Here looking up from his newspaper, as if you’ve just caught him by surprise, wearing a hat and a Huck Finn grin (even down to the gap in his teeth), is a guy with all the warmth and charm in the world—with not merely one song in his heart, but 1,400.

Quote of the Day (Andy Richter, on Paul McCartney Lyrics)

“When I want to alert my children to the dangers of marijuana abuse, I just print out the lyrics to some Wings' songs.”—Comedian/second banana Andy Richter, April 26, 2013 tweet

According to Skylark, Philip Furia’s biography of Johnny Mercer, the singer Margaret Whiting was used as an intermediary to sound out the Oscar-winning lyricist of “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” about the possibility of collaborating with Paul McCartney. Mercer turned down the invitation, using as an excuse his wife’s fragile health, though more likely it was his own (he died shortly afterward). There are conflicting reports about the Georgia-born writer’s feelings about the Beatles, but he is unlikely to have been impressed with most of McCartney’s lyrics in the Seventies.

Andy Richter’s comment brings to mind the usual complaints about the “cute Beatle” after his breakup from longtime songwriting partner John Lennon. Case in point of what Richter and the other (less snarky) critics have in mind: the album Red Rose Speedway, released in the United States on this date 40 years ago, recorded with the backup band Wings. It was a success, of course, hitting #1 in the U.S., including the singer's tribute to wife Linda, "My Love." But...

Here, for instance, are some sample lyrics of “Big Barn Bed,” the LP’s first song:

“Who you gonna weep on?

Who you gonna sleep on?

Who you gonna creep on next?”

Amazingly, McCartney thought seriously about releasing this as a double album. (Other songs, released in other formats later, were “Live and Let Die,” admittedly one of the better James Bond songs, and “Hi Hi Hi,” which—well, talking about “who you gonna creep on next”!)

Of course, Richter’s jibe could apply just about across the whole spectrum of rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, can anyone really explain America’s “Horse With No Name”? And let’s not get anywhere near their “Muskrat Love”!

This Day in Film History (‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Drama of Addiction, Opens)

December 26, 1962—Days of Wine and Roses, perhaps the most searing drama about alcoholism put on the big screen since The Lost Weekend, opened just before a new year in which, once again, all too many people would get drunk in more than just a silly way—and in which far too few would decide that somehow, they must start their lives all over again, like Jack Lemmon’s public-relations man, Joe Clay.

Like The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses expanded the repertoires of its male star (Ray Milland, in the case of the former, and Lemmon) and directors (Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards, respectively) far beyond the comedies for which they had been primarily known. And, like that earlier film’s Don Birnam, the predicament of Joe Clay hinges on a relationship with women.

Well, in the case of The Lost Weekend, sort of. Jane Wyman’s warmly sympathetic magazine researcher could set Birnam right, maybe, if only he could open his eyes. Then again, maybe not. The original source of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script, a novel by Charles Jackson, implied strongly that Birnam’s chemical addiction—and larger depression—traced back to a homosexual affair in college. With such subject matter verboten on the big screen before the Sixties, the best that Wilder and Brackett could do was drop hints about Birnam’s orderly (played by Frank Faylen) at the hospital, and to use the failed writer’s genteel artistic background and massive case of writer's block as code for lack of male virility.

Days of Wine and Roses is, on the other hand, unmistakably a love story between a man and woman, albeit one with a twist. Take the bowler hat that Lemmon wears in the photo accompanying this post. Fans of his most significant prior film, The Apartment (1960), would have recognized that little bit of stage business as the same one that junior-executive-on-the make Chuck Baxter tries out in front of the girl of his dreams, Fran Kubelik.

To his regret, Lemmon was offered the role of Clay onscreen rather than the man who had played the part originally in the 1957 teleplay by J. P. Miller, good friend, Cliff Robertson, whom producers felt did not provide sufficient box-office pull. Some critics have suggested that Robertson, Piper Laurie, and TV director John Frankenheimer created a grittier drama than the one on which Lemmon, Lee Remick and film director Blake Edwards collaborated.

But the comedy backgrounds of Lemmon and Edwards (he had done Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before) served the film extremely well, I think. The opening scenes between Lemmon and Remick, typified by that bowler hat, look like they’re going to start a rather traditional rom-com, with the protagonists meeting cute. But they pull you in and seduce you, the way alcohol does in this film. We think we’re about to watch Pillow Talk, but instead we get Scenes From an Alcoholic Marriage. (The initial shock of that was such that there were a virtually unheard-of number of walkouts at a preview for the film. Studio execs were sure they had a disaster on their hands until someone remembered that the audience hadn't been told beforehand that they would be watching a drama--and a particularly devastating one, at that.)

Lemmon’s Clay begins by getting Remick’s Kirsten Arnasen, a teetotaling secretary with an endearing sweet tooth, to share his good times by trying a Brandy Alexander (with a doubly intoxicating mixture of brandy and creme de cocoa). By the middle of the film, she fully shares what has become his full-fledged addiction. By the film’s pull-no-punches ending, the intensity of her addiction is so bad that his only hope of extricating himself is to break away from her, no matter how much it hurts. (That is the blunt message delivered by Clay's sponsor, who, as I indicated in a post from earlier today, was played by the late, great Jack Klugman.)

The attractiveness of Lemmon and Remick is essential to keeping viewers’ interest through the rest of the film. Their characters, after all, end up doing unsavory, degrading things for the sake of the booze that becomes part of their “threesome.” This is what part of what Kim Morgan has in mind in her film blog, Sunset Gun, when she writes:

“Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They can't indulge the brilliant mental gymnastics of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfunctional way, disarmingly romantic and strangely heroic. Lee and Jack -- they're like a lot of people -- just regular old drunks. No wonder they drink.”

That lack of “mental gymnastics” is precisely why the humor and vivacity that Lemmon and Remick carry from their prior work is so necessary in this film. Without the sympathy generated in those opening scenes before the marriage of Joe and Kirsten, it is questionable if viewers would root for them to find a way out of their predicament.

As it turned out, many people did. In addition to a win for Best Song (the title tune, by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini), the film garnered nominations for Lemmon, Remick, best art direction and best costume design. (Inexplicably, it was edged out of a Best Picture nomination by the likes of Mutiny on the Bounty and The Music Man.) It was also named one of the best 400 films by the American Film Institute.

Several years ago, on a long flight back from California, I spoke with a lawyer who, despite (or, I have thought sometimes since, because of) his completely drink-besotted state, knew every word in the film’s Oscar-winning title song. Had he been alive to see it, that might have made lyricist Mercer smile at first—before he realized that this highly intelligent, charming, literate man not only shared his most humane qualities, but also his thirst for drink.

(Incidentally, nearly three decades after the film, Lemmon shocked an Inside the Actors Studio audience with his first public admission that he also—like Mercer and Miller--had been an alcoholic, offscreen as well as on.)

As with The Lost Weekend, many viewers of Days of Wine and Roses are likely to recall one scene as particularly memorable in depicting the desperate state of an alcoholic: Birnam’s Sunday search for a pawnshop where he can get enough money for a drink, versus Clay’s trashing of his father-in-law’s greenhouse in search of a bottle he firmly believes is there. Yet for me, one other scene in the Edwards film has left a much more shattering, enduring impression.

Years ago, a female friend recalled, virtually word for word, these lines from Remick toward the end, when she explains why giving up alcohol has become so difficult: “This is the way I look when I'm sober. It's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say? You see, the world looks so dirty to me when I'm not drinking. Joe, remember Fisherman's Wharf? The water when you looked too close? That's the way the world looks to me when I'm not drinking.”

So often when I think of my friend, those lines come to mind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the film since she recalled that bit of telling dialogue: It hurts me too much to think of it.