A Crowded Life in Comics –

 Al Capp’s Own Crowded Life and Family 

 by Rick Marschall 

I knew Al Capp better through the conservative movement, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, than through cartooning. Nevertheless this Crowded Life I chronicle led me to interact in several ways and various times with him.

I also knew his brother Elliot Caplin, about whom not enough has been written in comics histories. Elliot was quiet, taciturn to the extreme; seldom registering emotion, forever with a pipe clenched between his teeth. He let his writing do the talking – Elliot, always anonymously, scripted a dozen or so strips through the decades.

… maybe more; some he co-created; some he scripted; some (like Broom-Hilda) he lived in a zone between plating a seed and “packaging” a syndicate presentation. Among the strips with his plots and dialog, or with various aspects of his fingerprints: Dr. Bobbs; Peter Scratch; Adam Ames; The Heart of Juliet Jones; Big Ben Bolt; Abbie an’ Slats; Long Sam; On Stage; Encyclopedia Brown; Best Seller Showcase; Dark Shadows; Buz Sawyer; post-Gray Little Orphan Annie; and others. More than Allen Saunders and Nick Dallis combined.

There was a third Capp brother, Jerry. For a while he handled business affairs for Al, but the L’il Abner creator largely considered Jerry a hanger-on, and for most of his career he hung around Elliot. Elliot himself was the quiet center of an active business career beyond his writing. He was on the staff of Judge magazine (“I put them to bed for good,” he dead-panned) and then was an editor of Parent’s Magazine. He parlayed his experience and Al’s success into Toby Press, named for his third child. It was a comic-book publisher mostly handling Li’l Abner titles.

A fourth Capp I knew, also. When I joined the staff of the Connecticut Herald out of college, as cartoonist and editor, there was an old fellow who shuffled through all the rooms every morning, dispensing lollipops to every desk. He had been with the paper since forever, I was told; probably since the 1930s in its glory days as The Bridgeport Herald. He was a pleasant old relic of the sales staff, and when, after a week or two, I became a recipient of Harry Resnick’s morning lollipops, I knew I had arrived.

Hesch Resnick had served as Al Capp’s agent when, as Alfred G Caplin, he proposed the L’il Abner strip to syndicates. It was Resnick’s advice to reject King Features’ meddling in the strip’s premise, and accept an offer from the smaller United Feature Syndicate.

It is not generally known that Elliot’s birth name was Elia Abner Caplin; so Li’l Abner was an in-joke from its inception. Al would refer to Eliot – never without his trademark wheezy laugh – as “that lovable idiot Elliot,” but affectionately. The pair had supreme admiration for each other. (Jerry became a Capp, legally.)

As I said, I knew Al Capp during the period when he multi-tasked, diverting attention from his strip to politics. Claiming he never changed his famously liberal stances that infused Abner for years, it was the leftward stampede in American politics that made him seem like a conservative.

Whatever. Almost overnight, as he lampooned hippies and limousine liberals in his strip, he found himself a favorite of William F Buckley; a guest on Firing Line and late-night talk shows; a newspaper columnist; and a speaker on the college circuit. Like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro of our day, he was picketed and the object of protests. Allegations that he propositioned “co-eds,” as female students were then called, severely damaged his celebrity.

The recent issue of Hogan’s Alley has a first-person account of Capp’s lecherous advances (“amorous” is finally an inappropriate term in these cases); and there were other similar claims, most famously by Goldie Hawn from days before her own celebrity. Capp’s celebrity, but more importantly his credibility, was damaged.

The article has a sidebar reproducing a column by Jack Anderson, a prominent political writer of the day, about Capp’s peccadillo described by the writer. Another serendipitous connection (a "Crowded life," after all). I was Anderson’s editor for a while, believe it or not. Personal and political animosity fueled many of his “scoops.” His former boss, then partner, on the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column was Drew Pearson, who observed, and skewered, everything from his far-left perch.

Capp mercilessly lambasted Pearson (for many years a fellow liberal) in Li’l Abner. One time I asked Pearson about the bad feelings, and he would not confirm that when Pearson himself created (and thereafter "edited," but credited as a writer) the newspaper-reporter strip Hap Hooper for Capp's own syndicate, United, its hero was spoken of internally as a serious-world Li'l Abner type. A hillbilly who stumbled into situations. Capp was livid, even after the premise was somewhat revised – and the incident became one on a list of grievances Capp held against his syndicate for years.

It would not have been above, or beneath, Jack Anderson to be joyful in “exposing” the claims against Capp for his own “exposing” events. By the way, one of Anderson’s legmen in those days was Brit Hume, before ABC News’ White House beat, and as Fox News Channel’s Senior Analyst. Times have changed.

[Speaking of exposing, I have received many inquiries about me and Hogan’s Alley, prompted by my essays for Yesterday’s Papers and the announcement of Nemo Magazine’s imminent revival. Formally, I have not left Hogan’s Alley and in fact am on track to deliver an article for publication. I founded, or co-founded, the magazine, named it, invited the Art Director David Folkman to join the team; and I retain an equal-ownership position with Editor Tom Heintjes. Nevertheless this latest issue sees my name dropped from every category in the staff boxes. When Dorothy McGreal invited me to write for her excellent World of Comic Art, she specified that I should feel free to write elsewhere. After writing several articles for Cartoonist PROfiles, Editor Jud Hurd kindly blessed my writing elsewhere, and said his door was always open. The foregoing might answer the questions of some people, even if not mine.]

Back to Capp: Previous to the assault allegations, he had been discussed as a candidate against Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy… but all that collapsed.

So did his health and his leg. As a boy in New Haven, Al Capp was run over by a street car, and forever limped noticeably and bravely, and a bit awkwardly, on a wooden prosthesis for the rest of his life. In rare appearances toward the end, even at cartoonists’ events, he was “handled” by Eliot, helping Al walk and deflecting conversations, even from well-wishers.   

Back in cartooning’s turf, I acquired items from his crowded studio (organizational chaos must have run in the family: Elliot’s office in Manhattan was smaller than most people’s utility closets – but he never could lay his hands on proof sheets of his collaborations with, say, Lou Fine, Ken Bald, and Neal Adams – he knew how to pick ‘em!) and I conducted Al Capp’s last interview.

Some day, here, I will tell more of my interview, conducted after he very publicly retired Li’l Abner (“It simply is time for a fresh, new talent, to take my space”). Al was miserable. He had difficultly reaching the living room and settling in an easy chair; he complained of his emphysema – but chain-smoked (“It’s simple; I can give these up or stop breathing,” between drags). He complained, I tentatively recall, of diabetes. A joy for him, during that afternoon, was the presence of his granddaughter, a reporter for the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger. Tragically the following week she was killed by a car when she crossed a street.

He shared a lot with me that day. As I said, we’ll dive deeper in A Crowded Life, but I remember that he disputed the length of time Frank Frazetta assisted on Abner. And the wonderful answer to my question about the greatest humorists: he said the great American comic writers were all named Sol and Nat, representative of the anonymous radio-show staffers of the 1930s. He drew a terrific self-caricature for me that afternoon in Cambridge, looking as jolly as, sadly, he was not.

Al and Elliot liked the interview I conducted (published first in Cartoonist PROfiles) and wanted me to ghost-write Al Capp’s autobiography. So did Don Hudder, a friend who was Editor of Simon and Schuster. Tony Gardner, Al’s nephew and then agent, got involved, and eventually my modest fee was too high, and the book was published, “by” Al Capp. It was, frankly, a pastiche of my annotated interview in many places; and four-fifths strip reprints… from the recent past. The Best of Li’l Abner, which it was not; and scarcely claiming to be an autobiography. I still have Hudder’s letter apologizing for the slight and affirming that I could have made a good treatment even better.

I the meantime, it was, of course, a privilege to know and work with Al Capp – in two spheres of Crowded Lives, his and mine.

 👀 

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