Split (1)

train · 367k rows

text stringlengths 9 2.4k
The discovery of an eleventh specimen was announced in 2011; it was described in 2014. It is one of the more complete specimens, but is missing much of the skull and one forelimb. It is privately owned and has yet to be given a name. Palaeontologists of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studied the specimen, which revealed previously unknown features of the plumage, such as feathers on both the upper and lower legs and metatarsus, and the only preserved tail tip. A twelfth specimen had been discovered by an amateur collector in 2010 at the Schamhaupten quarry, but the finding was only announced in February 2014. It was scientifically described in 2018. It represents a complete and mostly articulated skeleton with skull. It is the only specimen lacking preserved feathers. It is from the Painten Formation and somewhat older than the other specimens. The existence of a thirteenth specimen (the Chicago specimen) was announced in 2024 by the Field Museum in Chicago, US. One of two specimens in an institution outside Europe, the specimen was originally identified in a private collection in Switzerland, and had been acquired by these collectors in 1990, prior to Germany's 2015 ban on exporting "Archaeopteryx" specimens. The specimen was acquired by the Field Museum in 2022, and went on public display in 2024 following two years of preparation. The specimen is to be studied by famed paleornithologist Jingmai O'Connor.
A fourteenth specimen, SMNK-PAL 10,000, was published in January 2025, this one from the Mörnsheim Formation. It preserves the right forelimb, shoulder, and fragments of the other limbs, with various features of the shoulder and forelimb resembling "Archaeopteryx" more than any other avialan within the Mörnsheim Formation. However, due to the fragmentary nature of this specimen, it cannot be assigned to a specific species within "Archaeopteryx". Authenticity. Beginning in 1985, an amateur group including astronomer Fred Hoyle and physicist Lee Spetner, published a series of papers claiming that the feathers on the Berlin and London specimens of "Archaeopteryx" were forged. Their claims were repudiated by Alan J. Charig and others at the Natural History Museum in London. Most of their supposed evidence for a forgery was based on unfamiliarity with the processes of lithification; for example, they proposed that, based on the difference in texture associated with the feathers, feather impressions were applied to a thin layer of cement, without realizing that feathers themselves would have caused a textural difference. They also misinterpreted the fossils, claiming that the tail was forged as one large feather, when visibly this is not the case. In addition, they claimed that the other specimens of "Archaeopteryx" known at the time did not have feathers, which is incorrect; the Maxberg and Eichstätt specimens have obvious feathers.
They also expressed disbelief that slabs would split so smoothly, or that one half of a slab containing fossils would have good preservation, but not the counterslab. These are common properties of Solnhofen fossils, because the dead animals would fall onto hardened surfaces, which would form a natural plane for the future slabs to split along and would leave the bulk of the fossil on one side and little on the other. Finally, the motives they suggested for a forgery are not strong, and are contradictory; one is that Richard Owen wanted to forge evidence in support of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is unlikely given Owen's views toward Darwin and his theory. The other is that Owen wanted to set a trap for Darwin, hoping the latter would support the fossils so Owen could discredit him with the forgery; this is unlikely because Owen wrote a detailed paper on the London specimen, so such an action would certainly backfire.
Description. Most of the specimens of "Archaeopteryx" that have been discovered come from the Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria, southern Germany, which is a , a rare and remarkable geological formation known for its superbly detailed fossils laid down during the early Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period, approximately 150.8–148.5million years ago. "Archaeopteryx" was roughly the size of a raven, with broad wings that were rounded at the ends and a long tail compared to its body length. It could reach up to in body length and in wingspan, with an estimated mass of . "Archaeopteryx" feathers, although less documented than its other features, were very similar in structure to modern-day bird feathers. Despite the presence of numerous avian features, "Archaeopteryx" had many non-avian theropod dinosaur characteristics. Unlike modern birds, "Archaeopteryx" had small teeth, as well as a long bony tail, features which "Archaeopteryx" shared with other dinosaurs of the time. Because it displays features common to both birds and non-avian dinosaurs, "Archaeopteryx" has often been considered a link between them. In the 1970s, John Ostrom, following Thomas Henry Huxley's lead in 1868, argued that birds evolved within theropod dinosaurs and "Archaeopteryx" was a critical piece of evidence for this argument; it had several avian features, such as a wishbone, flight feathers, wings, and a partially reversed first toe along with dinosaur and theropod features. For instance, it has a long ascending process of the ankle bone, interdental plates, an obturator process of the ischium, and long chevrons in the tail. In particular, Ostrom found that "Archaeopteryx" was remarkably similar to the theropod family Dromaeosauridae.
Archaeopteryx had three separate digits on each fore-leg each ending with a "claw". Few birds have such features. Some birds, such as ducks, swans, Jacanas ("Jacana" sp.), and the hoatzin ("Opisthocomus hoazin"), have them concealed beneath their leg-feathers. Plumage. Specimens of "Archaeopteryx" were most notable for their well-developed flight feathers. They were markedly asymmetrical and showed the structure of flight feathers in modern birds, with vanes given stability by a barb-barbule-barbicel arrangement. The tail feathers were less asymmetrical, again in line with the situation in modern birds and also had firm vanes. The thumb did not yet bear a separately movable tuft of stiff feathers. The body plumage of "Archaeopteryx" is less well-documented and has only been properly researched in the well-preserved Berlin specimen. Thus, as more than one species seems to be involved, the research into the Berlin specimen's feathers does not necessarily hold true for the rest of the species of "Archaeopteryx". In the Berlin specimen, there are "trousers" of well-developed feathers on the legs; some of these feathers seem to have a basic contour feather structure, but are somewhat decomposed (they lack barbicels as in ratites). In part they are firm and thus capable of supporting flight.
A patch of pennaceous feathers is found running along its back, which was quite similar to the contour feathers of the body plumage of modern birds in being symmetrical and firm, although not as stiff as the flight-related feathers. Apart from that, the feather traces in the Berlin specimen are limited to a sort of "proto-down" not dissimilar to that found in the dinosaur "Sinosauropteryx": decomposed and fluffy, and possibly even appearing more like fur than feathers in life (although not in their microscopic structure). These occur on the remainder of the body—although some feathers did not fossilize and others were obliterated during preparation, leaving bare patches on specimens—and the lower neck. There is no indication of feathering on the upper neck and head. While these conceivably may have been nude, this may still be an artefact of preservation. It appears that most "Archaeopteryx" specimens became embedded in anoxic sediment after drifting some time on their backs in the sea—the head, neck and the tail are generally bent downward, which suggests that the specimens had just started to rot when they were embedded, with tendons and muscle relaxing so that the characteristic shape (death pose) of the fossil specimens was achieved. This would mean that the skin already was softened and loose, which is bolstered by the fact that in some specimens the flight feathers were starting to detach at the point of embedding in the sediment. So it is hypothesized that the pertinent specimens moved along the sea bed in shallow water for some time before burial, the head and upper neck feathers sloughing off, while the more firmly attached tail feathers remained.
Colouration. In 2011, graduate student Ryan Carney and colleagues performed the first colour study on an "Archaeopteryx" specimen. Using scanning electron microscopy technology and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis, the team was able to detect the structure of melanosomes in the isolated feather specimen described in 1861. The resultant measurements were then compared to those of 87modern bird species, and the original colour was calculated with a 95% likelihood to be black. The feather was determined to be black throughout, with heavier pigmentation in the distal tip. The feather studied was most probably a dorsal covert, which would have partly covered the primary feathers on the wings. The study does not mean that "Archaeopteryx" was entirely black, but suggests that it had some black colouration which included the coverts. Carney pointed out that this is consistent with what is known of modern flight characteristics, in that black melanosomes have structural properties that strengthen feathers for flight. In a 2013 study published in the "Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry", new analyses of "Archaeopteryx"s feathers revealed that the animal may have had complex light- and dark-coloured plumage, with heavier pigmentation in the distal tips and outer vanes. This analysis of colour distribution was based primarily on the distribution of sulphate within the fossil. An author on the previous "Archaeopteryx" colour study argued against the interpretation of such biomarkers as an indicator of eumelanin in the full "Archaeopteryx" specimen. Carney and other colleagues also argued against the 2013 study's interpretation of the sulphate and trace metals, and in a 2020 study published in "Scientific Reports" demonstrated that the isolated covert feather was entirely matte black (as opposed to black and white, or iridescent) and that the remaining "plumage patterns of "Archaeopteryx" remain unknown".
Classification. Today, fossils of the genus "Archaeopteryx" are usually assigned to one or two species, "A. lithographica" and "A. siemensii", but their taxonomic history is complicated. Ten names have been published for the handful of specimens. As interpreted today, the name "A. lithographica" only referred to the single feather described by Meyer. In 1954 Gavin de Beer concluded that the London specimen was the holotype. In 1960, Swinton accordingly proposed that the name "Archaeopteryx lithographica" be placed on the official genera list making the alternative names "Griphosaurus" and "Griphornis" invalid. The ICZN, implicitly accepting De Beer's standpoint, did indeed suppress the plethora of alternative names initially proposed for the first skeleton specimens, which mainly resulted from the acrimonious dispute between Meyer and his opponent Johann Andreas Wagner (whose "Griphosaurus problematicus"—'problematic riddle-lizard'—was a vitriolic sneer at Meyer's "Archaeopteryx"). In addition, in 1977, the Commission ruled that the first species name of the Haarlem specimen, "crassipes", described by Meyer as a pterosaur before its true nature was realized, was not to be given preference over "lithographica" in instances where scientists considered them to represent the same species.
It has been noted that the feather, the first specimen of "Archaeopteryx" described, does not correspond well with the flight-related feathers of "Archaeopteryx". It certainly is a flight feather of a contemporary species, but its size and proportions indicate that it may belong to another, smaller species of feathered theropod, of which only this feather is known so far. As the feather had been designated the type specimen, the name "Archaeopteryx" should then no longer be applied to the skeletons, thus creating significant nomenclatorial confusion. In 2007, two sets of scientists therefore petitioned the ICZN requesting that the London specimen explicitly be made the type by designating it as the new holotype specimen, or neotype. This suggestion was upheld by the ICZN after four years of debate, and the London specimen was designated the neotype on 3 October 2011. Below is a cladogram published in 2013 by Godefroit "et al." Species. It has been argued that all the specimens belong to the same species, "A. lithographica". Differences do exist among the specimens, and while some researchers regard these as due to the different ages of the specimens, some may be related to actual species diversity. In particular, the Munich, Eichstätt, Solnhofen, and Thermopolis specimens differ from the London, Berlin, and Haarlem specimens in being smaller or much larger, having different finger proportions, having more slender snouts lined with forward-pointing teeth, and the possible presence of a sternum. Due to these differences, most individual specimens have been given their own species name at one point or another. The Berlin specimen has been designated as "Archaeornis siemensii", the Eichstätt specimen as "Jurapteryx recurva", the Munich specimen as "Archaeopteryx bavarica", and the Solnhofen specimen as "Wellnhoferia grandis".
In 2007, a review of all well-preserved specimens including the then-newly discovered Thermopolis specimen concluded that two distinct species of "Archaeopteryx" could be supported: "A. lithographica" (consisting of at least the London and Solnhofen specimens), and "A. siemensii" (consisting of at least the Berlin, Munich, and Thermopolis specimens). The two species are distinguished primarily by large flexor tubercles on the foot claws in "A. lithographica" (the claws of "A. siemensii" specimens being relatively simple and straight). "A. lithographica" also had a constricted portion of the crown in some teeth and a stouter metatarsus. A supposed additional species, "Wellnhoferia grandis" (based on the Solnhofen specimen), seems to be indistinguishable from "A. lithographica" except in its larger size. Synonyms. If two names are given, the first denotes the original describer of the "species", the second the author on whom the given name combination is based. As always in zoological nomenclature, putting an author's name in parentheses denotes that the taxon was originally described in a different genus.
""Archaeopteryx" vicensensis" (Anon. "fide" Lambrecht, 1933) is a "nomen nudum" for what appears to be an undescribed pterosaur. Phylogenetic position. Modern palaeontology has often classified "Archaeopteryx" as the most primitive bird. However, it is not thought to be a true ancestor of modern birds, but rather a close relative of that ancestor. Nonetheless, "Archaeopteryx" was often used as a model of the true ancestral bird. Several authors have done so. Lowe (1935) and Thulborn (1984) questioned whether "Archaeopteryx" truly was the first bird. They suggested that "Archaeopteryx" was a dinosaur that was no more closely related to birds than were other dinosaur groups. Kurzanov (1987) suggested that "Avimimus" was more likely to be the ancestor of all birds than "Archaeopteryx". Barsbold (1983) and Zweers and Van den Berge (1997) noted that many maniraptoran lineages are extremely birdlike, and they suggested that different groups of birds may have descended from different dinosaur ancestors. The discovery of the closely related "Xiaotingia" in 2011 led to new phylogenetic analyses that suggested that "Archaeopteryx" is a deinonychosaur rather than an avialan, and therefore, not a "bird" under most common uses of that term. A more thorough analysis was published soon after to test this hypothesis, and failed to arrive at the same result; it found "Archaeopteryx" in its traditional position at the base of "Avialae", while "Xiaotingia" was recovered as a basal dromaeosaurid or troodontid. The authors of the follow-up study noted that uncertainties still exist, and that it may not be possible to state confidently whether or not "Archaeopteryx" is a member of Avialae or not, barring new and better specimens of relevant species.
Phylogenetic studies conducted by Senter, "et al." (2012) and Turner, Makovicky, and Norell (2012) also found "Archaeopteryx" to be more closely related to living birds than to dromaeosaurids and troodontids. On the other hand, Godefroit "et al." (2013) recovered "Archaeopteryx" as more closely related to dromaeosaurids and troodontids in the analysis included in their description of "Eosinopteryx brevipenna". The authors used a modified version of the matrix from the study describing "Xiaotingia", adding "Jinfengopteryx elegans" and "Eosinopteryx brevipenna" to it, as well as adding four additional characters related to the development of the plumage. Unlike the analysis from the description of "Xiaotingia", the analysis conducted by Godefroit, "et al." did not find "Archaeopteryx" to be related particularly closely to "Anchiornis" and "Xiaotingia", which were recovered as basal troodontids instead. Agnolín and Novas (2013) found "Archaeopteryx" and (possibly synonymous) "Wellnhoferia" to form a clade sister to the lineage including "Jeholornis" and Pygostylia, with Microraptoria, Unenlagiinae, and the clade containing "Anchiornis" and "Xiaotingia" being successively closer outgroups to the Avialae (defined by the authors as the clade stemming from the last common ancestor of "Archaeopteryx" and Aves). Another phylogenetic study by Godefroit, "et al.", using a more inclusive matrix than the one from the analysis in the description of "Eosinopteryx brevipenna", also found "Archaeopteryx" to be a member of Avialae (defined by the authors as the most inclusive clade containing "Passer domesticus", but not "Dromaeosaurus albertensis" or "Troodon formosus"). "Archaeopteryx" was found to form a grade at the base of Avialae with "Xiaotingia", "Anchiornis", and "Aurornis". Compared to "Archaeopteryx", "Xiaotingia" was found to be more closely related to extant birds, while both "Anchiornis" and "Aurornis" were found to be more distantly so.
Hu "et al". (2018), Wang "et al". (2018) and Hartman "et al". (2019) found "Archaeopteryx" to have been a deinonychosaur instead of an avialan. More specifically, it and closely related taxa were considered basal deinonychosaurs, with dromaeosaurids and troodontids forming together a parallel lineage within the group. Because Hartman "et al". found "Archaeopteryx" isolated in a group of flightless deinonychosaurs (otherwise considered "anchiornithids"), they considered it highly probable that this animal evolved flight independently from bird ancestors (and from "Microraptor" and "Yi"). The following cladogram illustrates their hypothesis regarding the position of "Archaeopteryx": The authors, however, found that the "Archaeopteryx" being an avialan was only slightly less likely than this hypothesis, and as likely as Archaeopterygidae and Troodontidae being sister clades. Palaeobiology. Flight.
"Archaeopteryx" wings were relatively large, which would have resulted in a low stall speed and reduced turning radius. The short and rounded shape of the wings would have increased drag, but also could have improved its ability to fly through cluttered environments such as trees and brush (similar wing shapes are seen in birds that fly through trees and brush, such as crows and pheasants). The presence of "hind wings", asymmetrical flight feathers stemming from the legs similar to those seen in dromaeosaurids such as "Microraptor", also would have added to the aerial mobility of "Archaeopteryx". The first detailed study of the hind wings by Longrich in 2006, suggested that the structures formed up to 12% of the total airfoil. This would have reduced stall speed by up to 6% and turning radius by up to 12%. The feathers of "Archaeopteryx" were asymmetrical. This has been interpreted as evidence that it was a flyer, because flightless birds tend to have symmetrical feathers. Some scientists, including Thomson and Speakman, have questioned this. They studied more than 70 families of living birds, and found that some flightless types do have a range of asymmetry in their feathers, and that the feathers of "Archaeopteryx" fall into this range. The degree of asymmetry seen in "Archaeopteryx" is more typical for slow flyers than for flightless birds.
In 2010, Robert L. Nudds and Gareth J. Dyke in the journal "Science" published a paper in which they analysed the rachises of the primary feathers of "Confuciusornis" and "Archaeopteryx". The analysis suggested that the rachises on these two genera were thinner and weaker than those of modern birds relative to body mass. The authors determined that "Archaeopteryx" and "Confuciusornis", were unable to use flapping flight. This study was criticized by Philip J. Currie and Luis Chiappe. Chiappe suggested that it is difficult to measure the rachises of fossilized feathers, and Currie speculated that "Archaeopteryx" and "Confuciusornis" must have been able to fly to some degree, as their fossils are preserved in what is believed to have been marine or lake sediments, suggesting that they must have been able to fly over deep water. Gregory Paul also disagreed with the study, arguing in a 2010 response that Nudds and Dyke had overestimated the masses of these early birds, and that more accurate mass estimates allowed powered flight even with relatively narrow rachises.
Gregory Paul also disagreed with the study, arguing in a 2010 response that Nudds and Dyke had overestimated the masses of these early birds, and that more accurate mass estimates allowed powered flight even with relatively narrow rachises. Nudds and Dyke had assumed a mass of for the Munich specimen "Archaeopteryx", a young juvenile, based on published mass estimates of larger specimens. Paul argued that a more reasonable body mass estimate for the Munich specimen is about . Paul also criticized the measurements of the rachises themselves, noting that the feathers in the Munich specimen are poorly preserved. Nudds and Dyke reported a diameter of for the longest primary feather, which Paul could not confirm using photographs. Paul measured some of the inner primary feathers, finding rachises across. Despite these criticisms, Nudds and Dyke stood by their original conclusions. They claimed that Paul's statement, that an adult "Archaeopteryx" would have been a better flyer than the juvenile Munich specimen, was dubious.
They claimed that Paul's statement, that an adult "Archaeopteryx" would have been a better flyer than the juvenile Munich specimen, was dubious. This, they reasoned, would require an even thicker rachis, evidence for which has not yet been presented. Another possibility is that they had not achieved true flight, but instead used their wings as aids for extra lift while running over water after the fashion of the basilisk lizard, which could explain their presence in lake and marine deposits (see Origin of avian flight). In 2004, scientists analysing a detailed CT scan of the braincase of the London "Archaeopteryx" concluded that its brain was significantly larger than that of most dinosaurs, indicating that it possessed the brain size necessary for flying. The overall brain anatomy was reconstructed using the scan. The reconstruction showed that the regions associated with vision took up nearly one-third of the brain. Other well-developed areas involved hearing and muscle coordination. The skull scan also revealed the structure of its inner ear. The structure more closely resembles that of modern birds than the inner ear of non-avian reptiles. These characteristics taken together suggest that "Archaeopteryx" had the keen sense of hearing, balance, spatial perception, and coordination needed to fly. "Archaeopteryx" had a cerebrum-to-brain-volume ratio 78% of the way to modern birds from the condition of non-coelurosaurian dinosaurs such as "Carcharodontosaurus" or "Allosaurus", which had a crocodile-like anatomy of the brain and inner ear. Newer research shows that while the "Archaeopteryx" brain was more complex than that of more primitive theropods, it had a more generalized brain volume among Maniraptora dinosaurs, even smaller than that of other non-avian dinosaurs in several instances, which indicates the neurological development required for flight was already a common trait in the maniraptoran clade.
Recent studies of flight feather barb geometry reveal that modern birds possess a larger barb angle in the trailing vane of the feather, whereas "Archaeopteryx" lacks this large barb angle, indicating potentially weak flight abilities. "Archaeopteryx" continues to play an important part in scientific debates about the origin and evolution of birds. Some scientists see it as a semi-arboreal climbing animal, following the idea that birds evolved from tree-dwelling gliders (the "trees down" hypothesis for the evolution of flight proposed by O. C. Marsh). Other scientists see "Archaeopteryx" as running quickly along the ground, supporting the idea that birds evolved flight by running (the "ground up" hypothesis proposed by Samuel Wendell Williston). Still others suggest that "Archaeopteryx" might have been at home both in the trees and on the ground, like modern crows, and this latter view is what currently is considered best supported by morphological characters. Altogether, it appears that the species was not particularly specialized for running on the ground or for perching. A scenario outlined by Elżanowski in 2002 suggested that "Archaeopteryx" used its wings mainly to escape predators by glides punctuated with shallow downstrokes to reach successively higher perches, and alternatively, to cover longer distances (mainly) by gliding down from cliffs or treetops.
In March 2018, scientists reported that "Archaeopteryx" was likely capable of a flight stroke cycle morphologically closer to the grabbing motion of maniraptorans and distinct from that of modern birds. This study on "Archaeopteryx"s bone histology identified biomechanical and physiological adaptations exhibited by modern volant birds that perform intermittent flapping, such as pheasants and other burst flyers. Some researchers suggested that the feather sheaths of "Archaeopteryx" shows a center-out, flight related moulting strategy like modern birds. As it was a weak flier, this would have been extremely advantageous in preserving its maximum flight performance. Kiat and colleagues reinterpreted this purported moulting evidence to be problematic and equivocal at best, and considered that these structures more likely represents the calami traces of the fully grown feathers, though the original authors still remained by their conclusion. Growth.
Daily activity patterns. Comparisons between the scleral rings of "Archaeopteryx" and modern birds and reptiles indicate that it may have been diurnal, similar to most modern birds. Palaeoecology. The richness and diversity of the Solnhofen limestones in which all specimens of "Archaeopteryx" have been found have shed light on an ancient Jurassic Bavaria strikingly different from the present day. The latitude was similar to Florida, though the climate was likely to have been drier, as evidenced by fossils of plants with adaptations for arid conditions and a lack of terrestrial sediments characteristic of rivers. Evidence of plants, although scarce, include cycads and conifers while animals found include a large number of insects, small lizards, pterosaurs, and "Compsognathus". The excellent preservation of "Archaeopteryx" fossils and other terrestrial fossils found at Solnhofen indicates that they did not travel far before becoming preserved. The "Archaeopteryx" specimens found were therefore likely to have lived on the low islands surrounding the Solnhofen lagoon rather than to have been corpses that drifted in from farther away. "Archaeopteryx" skeletons are considerably less numerous in the deposits of Solnhofen than those of pterosaurs, of which seven genera have been found. The pterosaurs included species such as "Rhamphorhynchus" belonging to the Rhamphorhynchidae, the group which dominated the ecological niche currently occupied by seabirds, and which became extinct at the end of the Jurassic. The pterosaurs, which also included "Pterodactylus", were common enough that it is unlikely that the specimens found are vagrants from the larger islands to the north.
The islands that surrounded the Solnhofen lagoon were low lying, semi-arid, and sub-tropical with a long dry season and little rain. The closest modern analogue for the Solnhofen conditions is said to be Orca Basin in the northern Gulf of Mexico, although it is much deeper than the Solnhofen lagoons. The flora of these islands was adapted to these dry conditions and consisted mostly of low () shrubs. Contrary to reconstructions of "Archaeopteryx" climbing large trees, these seem to have been mostly absent from the islands; few trunks have been found in the sediments and fossilized tree pollen also is absent. The lifestyle of "Archaeopteryx" is difficult to reconstruct and there are several theories regarding it. Some researchers suggest that it was primarily adapted to life on the ground, while other researchers suggest that it was principally arboreal on the basis of the curvature of the claws which has since been questioned. The absence of trees does not preclude "Archaeopteryx" from an arboreal lifestyle, as several species of bird live exclusively in low shrubs. Various aspects of the morphology of "Archaeopteryx" point to either an arboreal or ground existence, including the length of its legs and the elongation in its feet; some authorities consider it likely to have been a generalist capable of feeding in both shrubs and open ground, as well as along the shores of the lagoon. It most likely hunted small prey, seizing it with its jaws if it was small enough, or with its claws if it was larger.
Arthur Laurents Arthur Laurents (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, theatre director, film producer and screenwriter. With a career spanning seven decades he received numerous accolades including two Tony Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and nominations for two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes "West Side Story" (1957), "" (1959), and "Hallelujah, Baby!" (1967), winning the Tony Award for Best Musical for the latter. He directed the musical "La Cage aux Folles" in 1983 and received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. Laurents also worked as a screenwriter on Hollywood films such as Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Rope" (1948), "Anastasia" (1956), "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958) and Sydney Pollack's romance "The Way We Were" (1973). He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for the Herbert Ross drama film "The Turning Point" (1977).
Early life. Born Arthur Levine, Laurents was the son of middle-class Jewish parents, his father a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher, who gave up her career when she married. He was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, New York, the elder of two children, and attended Erasmus Hall High School. His sister Edith suffered from chorea as a child. His paternal grandparents were Orthodox Jews, and his mother's parents, although born Jewish, were atheists. His mother kept a kosher home for her husband's sake, but was lax about attending synagogue and observing the Jewish holidays. His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents's religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions, although he continued to identify himself as Jewish. However, late in life he admitted to having changed his last name from Levine to the less Jewish-sounding Laurents, "to get a job." After graduating from Cornell University, Laurents took an evening class in radio writing at New York University. William N. Robson, his instructor, a CBS Radio director/producer, submitted his script "Now Playing Tomorrow", a comedic fantasy about clairvoyance, to the network, and it was produced in the Columbia Workshop series on January 30, 1939, with Shirley Booth in the lead role. It was Laurents' first professional credit. The show's success led to him being hired to write scripts for various radio shows, among them "Lux Radio Theater". Laurents' career was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in the middle of World War II. Through a series of clerical errors, he never saw battle, but instead was assigned to the U.S. Army Pictorial Service located in a film studio in Astoria, Queens, where he wrote training films and met, among others, George Cukor and William Holden. He later was reassigned to write plays for "Armed Service Force Presents", a radio show that dramatized the contributions of all branches of the armed forces.
Career. Theatre. According to John Clum, "Laurents was always a mirror of his times. Through his best work, one sees a staged history of leftist, gender, and gay politics in the decades after World War II." After graduating from Cornell University in 1937, Laurents, who was gay, went to work as a writer for radio drama at CBS in New York. His military duties during World War II, which consisted of writing training films and radio scripts for "Armed Service Force Presents", brought him into contact with some of the best film directors—distinguished director George Cukor directed his first script. Laurents's work in radio and film during World War II was an excellent apprenticeship for a budding playwright and screenwriter. He also had the good fortune to be based in New York City. His first stage play, "Home of the Brave", was produced in 1945. The sale of the play to a film studio gave Laurents the entrée he needed to become a Hollywood screenwriter though he continued, with mixed success, to write plays. The most important of his early screenplays is his adaptation of "Rope" for Alfred Hitchcock.
Soon after being discharged from the Army, Laurents met ballerina Nora Kaye, and the two became involved in an on-again, off-again romantic relationship. While Kaye was on tour with "Fancy Free", Laurents continued to write for the radio but was becoming discontented with the medium. In 1962, Laurents directed "I Can Get It for You Wholesale", which helped to turn then-unknown Barbra Streisand into a star. His next project was the stage musical "Anyone Can Whistle", which he directed and for which he wrote the book, but it proved to be an infamous flop. He later had success with the musicals "Hallelujah, Baby!" (written for Lena Horne but ultimately starring Leslie Uggams) and "La Cage Aux Folles" (1983), which he directed, however "Nick & Nora" was not successful. In 2008, Laurents directed a Broadway revival of "Gypsy" starring Patti LuPone, and in 2009, he tackled a bilingual revival of "West Side Story", with Spanish translations of some dialogue and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. While preparing "West Side Story", he noted, "The musical theatre and cultural conventions of 1957 made it next to impossible for the characters to have authenticity." Following the production's March 19 opening at the Palace Theatre, Ben Brantley of "The New York Times" called the translations "an only partly successful experiment" and added, "Mr. Laurents has exchanged insolence for innocence and, as with most such bargains, there are dividends and losses." The national tour (2011–2012) was directed by David Saint, who was Laurents' assistant director on the Broadway production. The Spanish lyrics and dialog were reduced from about 18% of the total to about 10%.
Hollywood. Laurents' first Hollywood experience proved to be a frustrating disappointment. Director Anatole Litvak, unhappy with the script submitted by Frank Partos and Millen Brand for "The Snake Pit" (1948), hired Laurents to rewrite it. Partos and Brand later insisted the bulk of the shooting script was theirs, and produced carbon copies of many of the pages Laurents actually had written to bolster their claim. Having destroyed the original script and all his notes and rewritten pages after completing the project, Laurents had no way to prove most of the work was his, and the Writers Guild of America denied him screen credit. Brand later confessed he and Partos had copied scenes written by Laurents and apologized for his role in the deception. Four decades later, Laurents learned he was ineligible for WGA health benefits because he had failed to accumulate enough credits to qualify. He was short by one, the one he failed to get for "The Snake Pit". Upon hearing 20th Century Fox executives were pleased with Laurents' work on "The Snake Pit", Alfred Hitchcock hired him for his next project, the film "Rope" starring James Stewart. Hitchcock wanted Laurents to Americanize the British play "Rope" (1929) by Patrick Hamilton for the screen. With his then-lover Farley Granger set to star, Laurents was happy to accept the assignment. His dilemma was how to make the audience aware of the fact the three main characters were homosexual without blatantly saying so. The Hays Office kept close tabs on his work, and the final script was so discreet that Laurents was unsure whether co-star James Stewart ever realized that his character was gay. In later years, Hitchcock asked him to script both "Torn Curtain" (1966) and "Topaz" (1969), However, Laurents, in both cases unenthused by the material, declined the offers.
Laurents also scripted "Anastasia" (1956) and "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958). "The Way We Were" (1973), in which he incorporated many of his own experiences, particularly those with the HUAC, reunited him with Barbra Streisand, and "The Turning Point" (1977), inspired in part by his love for Nora Kaye, was directed by her husband Herbert Ross. The Fox animated feature film "Anastasia" (1997) was based in part on his screenplay of the live-action 1956 film of the same title. Blacklist. Because of a casual remark made by Russel Crouse, Laurents was called to Washington, D.C., to account for his political views. He explained himself to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his appearance had no obvious impact on his career, which at the time was primarily in the theatre. When the McCarran Internal Security Act, which prohibited individuals suspected of engaging in subversive activities from obtaining a passport, was passed in 1950, Laurents and Granger immediately applied for and received passports and departed for Paris with Harold Clurman and his wife Stella Adler. Laurents and Granger remained abroad, traveling throughout Europe and northern Africa, for about 18 months.
Years earlier, Laurents and Jerome Robbins had developed "Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!" (1948), a stage musical about the world of ballet that ran for 188 performances on Broadway, and starred Nancy Walker and Harold Lang. Laurents left the project, however, and the musical was ultimately produced with a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. When Robbins approached Paramount Pictures about directing a screen version, the studio agreed as long as Laurents was not part of the package. It was only then that Laurents learned he officially had been blacklisted, primarily because a review of "Home of the Brave" had been published in the "Daily Worker". He decided to return to Paris, but the State Department refused to renew his passport. Laurents spent three months trying to clear his name, and after submitting a lengthy letter explaining his political beliefs in detail, it was determined they were so idiosyncratic he could not have been a member of any subversive groups. Within a week his passport was renewed, and the following day he sailed for Europe on the "Ile de France". While on board, he received a cable from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offering him a screenwriting assignment. The blacklisting had ended.
Memoirs. Laurents wrote "Original Story By Arthur Laurents: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood", published in 2000. In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher (August 24, 1929 - October 26, 2006). Hatcher was an aspiring actor whom Gore Vidal suggested Laurents seek out at the Beverly Hills men's clothing store Hatcher was managing at the time. The couple remained together for 52 years until Hatcher's death on October 26, 2006. Laurents wrote "Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story and Other Musicals", published in 2009, in which he discussed musicals he directed and the work of other directors he admired. His last memoir titled "The Rest of the Story" was published posthumously in September 2012. Death. Laurents died from complications of pneumonia at his home in Manhattan on May 5, 2011, aged 93. Following a long tradition, Broadway theatre lights were dimmed at 8 p.m. on May 6, 2011, for one minute in his memory. His ashes were buried alongside those of Tom Hatcher in a memorial bench in Quogue, Long Island, New York. Accolades. Legacy. A new award was established in 2010, The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award. This is awarded annually "for an un-produced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright." The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation will give $50,000 to the writer with a grant of $100,000 towards production costs at a nonprofit theatre. The first award will be given in 2011.
Adrian Lamo Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood (February 20, 1981 – March 14, 2018) was an American threat analyst and hacker. Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of "The New York Times", Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest. Lamo was best known for reporting U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. Lamo died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 37. Early life and education. Adrian Lamo was born in Malden, Massachusetts. His father, Mario Ricardo Lamo, was Colombian. Adrian Lamo attended high schools in Bogotá and San Francisco, from which he did not graduate, but received a GED and was court-ordered to take courses at American River College, a community college in Sacramento County, California. Lamo began his hacking efforts by hacking games on the Commodore 64 and through phone phreaking. Activities and legal issues. Lamo first became known for operating AOL watchdog site "Inside-AOL.com".
Security compromise. Lamo was a grey hat hacker who viewed the rise of the World Wide Web with a mixture of excitement and alarm. He felt that others failed to see the importance of internet security in the Web's early days. Lamo broke into corporate computer systems but never damaged them. Instead, he would offer to fix the security flaws free of charge, and if the flaw was not fixed, he would alert the media. Lamo hoped to be hired by a corporation to attempt to break into systems and test their security, a practice that came to be known as red teaming. But by the time this practice was common, his felony conviction prevented him from being hired. In December 2001, Worldcom praised Lamo for helping to fortify its corporate security. In February 2002, he broke into the internal computer network of "The New York Times", added his name to the internal database of expert sources, and used the paper's LexisNexis account to research high-profile subjects. "The New York Times" filed a complaint, and a warrant for Lamo's arrest was issued in August 2003 following a 15-month investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. At 10:15 a.m. on September 9, after spending a few days in hiding, he surrendered to the US Marshals in Sacramento, California. He surrendered to the FBI in New York City on September 11, and pleaded guilty to one felony count of computer crimes against Microsoft, LexisNexis, and "The New York Times" on January 8, 2004.
In July 2004, Lamo was sentenced to two years' probation with six months to be served in home detention and ordered to pay $65,000 in restitution. He was convicted of compromising security at "The New York Times", Microsoft, Yahoo!, and WorldCom. When challenged for a response to allegations that he was glamorizing crime for the sake of publicity, he responded: "Anything I could say about my person or my actions would only cheapen what they have to say for themselves". When approached for comment during his criminal case, Lamo frustrated reporters with non-sequiturs, such as "Faith manages" and "It's a beautiful day." At his sentencing, Lamo expressed remorse for the harm his intrusions had caused. The court record quotes him as adding: "I want to answer for what I have done and do better with my life." He subsequently declared on the question-and-answer site Quora: "We all own our actions in fullness, not just the pleasant aspects of them." Lamo accepted that he had made mistakes. DNA controversy. On May 9, 2006, 18 months into a two-year probation sentence, Lamo refused to give the United States government a blood sample it had demanded to record his DNA in its CODIS system. According to his attorney at the time, Lamo had a religious objection to giving blood but was willing to give his DNA in another form. On June 15, 2006, Lamo's lawyers filed a motion citing the Book of Genesis as one basis for Lamo's religious opposition to giving blood.
On June 20, 2007, Lamo's legal counsel reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice whereby Lamo would submit a cheek swab instead of a blood sample. WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning. In February 2009, a partial list of the anonymous donors to the WikiLeaks website was leaked and published on the site. Some media sources indicated at the time that Lamo was among the donors on the list. Lamo commented on his Twitter page, "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list... That's dedication." In May 2010, Lamo informed U.S. Army authorities that Chelsea Manning had claimed to have leaked a large body of classified documents, including 260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables. He said that Manning also "took credit for leaking" the video footage of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike, which has since come to be known as the "Collateral Murder" video. Lamo said he would not have turned Manning in "if lives weren't in danger". He characterized her as "in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as [she] could and just throwing it up into the air." WikiLeaks responded by denouncing Lamo and the author of the article as "notorious felons, informers & manipulators", and said: "journalists should take care."
Lamo was a volunteer "adversary characterization" analyst for Project Vigilant, a Florida-based government contractor, which encouraged him to inform the government about the alleged WikiLeaks source. The head of Project Vigilant, Chet Uber, claimed, "I'm the one who called the U.S. government... All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying." The Taliban insurgency later announced its intention to execute Afghan nationals named in the leaks as having cooperated with the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. By that time, the U.S. had received months of advance warning that their names were among the leaks. Manning was arrested and incarcerated in the U.S. military justice system and later sentenced to 35 years in confinement. President Barack Obama commuted the sentence to seven years, including time served. Lamo responded to the commutation with a post on Medium and an interview with "U.S. News & World Report".
Lamo characterized his decision to work with the government as morally ambiguous but objectively necessary, writing that "there were no right choices that day, only less wrong ones. It was cold, it was needful, and it was no one's to make except mine." Lamo was criticized by fellow hackers, such as those at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in 2010, who labeled him a "snitch." Another told Lamo, following his speech during a panel discussion: "from my perspective, I see what you have done as treason." Greenwald, Lamo, and "Wired" magazine. Lamo's role in Manning's case drew criticism from Glenn Greenwald, who suggested that Lamo lied to Manning by turning her in and then lied after the fact to cover up the circumstances of her confessions. In an article about the case, Greenwald mentioned "Wired" reporter Kevin Poulsen's 1994 felony conviction for computer hacking and wrote that "over the years, Poulsen has served more or less as Lamo's personal media voice." In an article titled "The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired", Greenwald wrote that "Wired" was "actively conceal[ing] from the public, for months on end, the key evidence [the full Lamo–Manning chat logs] in a political story that has generated headlines around the world."
This drew a response from "Wired": "At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership." On July 13, 2011, "Wired" published the Lamo–Manning chat logs in full, stating: "The most significant of the unpublished details have now been publicly established with sufficient authority that we no longer believe any purpose is served by withholding the logs." Greenwald wrote that the logs validated his claim that "Wired" had concealed important evidence. Film and television. On August 22, 2002, Lamo was removed from a segment of "NBC Nightly News" when, after being asked to demonstrate his skills for the camera, he gained access to NBC's internal network. NBC was concerned that it broke the law by taping Lamo while he possibly broke the law. Lamo was a guest on "The Screen Savers" five times beginning in 2002. "Hackers Wanted", a documentary film focusing on Lamo's life as a hacker, was produced by Trigger Street Productions and narrated by Kevin Spacey. Focusing on the 2003 hacking scene, the film features interviews with Kevin Rose and Steve Wozniak. The film has not been conventionally released. In May 2009, a video purporting to be a trailer for "Hackers Wanted" was allegedly leaked onto the Internet film site Eye Crave Network. In May 2010, an early cut of the film was leaked via BitTorrent. According to an insider, what was leaked on the Internet was very different from the newer version, which includes additional footage. On June 12, 2010, a director's cut version of the film was leaked onto torrent sites.
Lamo also appeared on "Good Morning America", Fox News, "Democracy Now!", "Frontline", and repeatedly on KCRA-TV News as an expert on netcentric crime and incidents. He was interviewed for the documentaries "" and "True Stories: WikiLeaks – Secrets and Lies". Lamo reconnected with Leo Laporte in 2015 as a result of a Quora article on the "dark web" for an episode of "The New Screen Savers". Lamo wrote the book "Ask Adrian", a collection of his best Q&A drawn from over 500 pages of Quora answers. Personal life and death. Lamo was known as the "Homeless Hacker" for his reportedly transient lifestyle, claiming that he spent much of his travels couch-surfing, squatting in abandoned buildings, and traveling to Internet cafés, libraries, and universities to investigate networks, sometimes exploiting security holes. He usually preferred sleeping on couches, and when he did sleep on beds, he did not sleep under covers. He also often wandered through homes and offices in the middle of the night, by the light of a flashlight.
Lamo was bisexual and volunteered for the gay and lesbian media firm PlanetOut Inc. in the mid-1990s. In 1998, he was appointed to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning Youth Task Force by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Lamo used a wide variety of supplements and drugs. His wife, Lauren Fisher, called his drug use "body hacking". One of Lamo's preferred supplements was 'kratom' (Mitragyna speciosa), which he used as a less-dangerous alternative to opioids. In 2001, he overdosed on prescription amphetamines. After he turned in Manning, his drug use escalated, but he later claimed that he was in recovery. In a 2004 interview with "Wired", an ex-girlfriend of Lamo's called him "very controlling", alleging "he carried a stun gun, which he used on me". The same article claimed a court had issued a restraining order against Lamo; he disputed the claim, writing: "I have never been subject to a restraining order in my life". Lamo said in a "Wired" article that, in May 2010, after he reported the theft of his backpack, an investigating officer noted unusual behavior and placed him under a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold, which was extended to a nine-day hold. Lamo said he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at the psychiatric ward.
For a period of time in March 2011, Lamo was allegedly "in hiding", claiming that his "life was under threat" after turning in Manning. Lamo died on March 14, 2018, in Wichita, Kansas, at age 37. Nearly three months later, the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center reported that "Despite a complete autopsy and supplemental testing, no definitive cause of death was identified." Many bottles of pills were found in his home, some of which were known to cause severe health problems when combined with kratom. As a result, evidence points to an accidental death due to drug abuse.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States An associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, other than the chief justice of the United States. The number of associate justices is eight, as set by the Judiciary Act of 1869. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution of the United States grants plenary power to the president to nominate, and with the advice and consent (confirmation) of the Senate, appoint justices to the Supreme Court. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution effectively grants life tenure to associate justices, and all other federal judges, which ends only when a justice dies, retires, resigns, or is impeached and convicted. Each Supreme Court justice has a single vote in deciding the cases argued before it, and the chief justice's vote counts no more than that of any other justice; however, the chief justice leads the discussion of the case among the justices. Furthermore, the chief justice—when in the majority—decides who writes the court's opinion; otherwise, the senior justice in the majority assigns the writing of a decision. The chief justice also has certain administrative responsibilities that the other justices do not and is paid slightly more ($298,500 per year as of 2023, compared to $285,400 per year for an associate justice).
Associate justices have seniority in order of the date their respective commissions bear, although the chief justice is always considered to be the most senior justice. If two justices are commissioned on the same day, the elder is designated the senior justice of the two. Currently, the senior associate justice is Clarence Thomas. By tradition, when the justices are in conference deliberating the outcome of cases before the Supreme Court, the justices state their views in order of seniority. The senior associate justice is also tasked with carrying out the chief justice's duties when he is unable to, or if that office is vacant. Current associate justices. There are currently eight associate justices on the Supreme Court. The justices, ordered by seniority, are: Retired associate justices. An associate justice who leaves the Supreme Court after attaining the age and meeting the service requirements prescribed by federal statute () may retire rather than resign. After retirement, they keep their title, and by custom may also keep a set of chambers in the Supreme Court building, and employ law clerks. The names of retired associate justices continue to appear alongside those of the active justices in the bound volumes of Supreme Court decisions. Federal statute () provides that retired Supreme Court justices may serve—if designated and assigned by the chief justice—on panels of the U.S. courts of appeals, or on the U.S. district courts. Retired justices are not, however, authorized to take part in the consideration or decision of any cases before the Supreme Court (unlike other retired federal judges who may be permitted to do so in their former courts); neither are they known or designated as a "senior judge". When, after his retirement, William O. Douglas attempted to take a more active role than was customary, maintaining that it was his prerogative to do so because of his senior status, he was rebuffed by Chief Justice Warren Burger and admonished by the whole Court.
There are currently three living retired associate justices: David Souter, retired June 29, 2009; Anthony Kennedy, retired July 31, 2018; and Stephen Breyer, retired June 30, 2022. Souter has served on panels of the First Circuit Courts of Appeals following his retirement; Kennedy and Breyer have not performed any judicial duties since retiring. List of associate justices. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the following 104 persons have served as an associate justice:
Alan Jay Lerner Alan Jay Lerner (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986) was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later Burton Lane, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre both for the stage and on film. Lerner won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors. Early life and education. Lerner was born in New York City to a Jewish family. He was the son of Edith ( Adelson) and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian and television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied music composition at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard", a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
Career. Owing to his eye injury, Lerner could not serve in World War II. Instead he wrote radio scripts, including "Your Hit Parade", until he was introduced to German-Austrian composer Frederick Loewe, who needed a partner, in 1942 at the Lamb's Club. While at the Lamb's, he also met Lorenz Hart, with whom he would also collaborate. Lerner and Loewe's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Conners's farce "The Patsy" called "Life of the Party" for a Detroit stock company. The lyrics were mostly written by Earle Crooker, but he had left the project, with the score needing vast improvement. It enjoyed a nine-week run and encouraged the duo to join forces with Arthur Pierson for "What's Up?", which opened on Broadway in 1943. It ran for 63 performances and was followed two years later by "The Day Before Spring". Their first hit was "Brigadoon" (1947), a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village, directed by Robert Lewis. It was followed in 1951 by the Gold Rush story "Paint Your Wagon". While the show ran for nearly a year and included songs that later became pop standards, such as "They Call the Wind Maria", it was less successful than Lerner's previous work. He later said of "Paint Your Wagon", it was "a success but not a hit."
Lerner worked with Kurt Weill on the stage musical "Love Life" (1948) and Burton Lane on the movie musical "Royal Wedding" (1951). In that same year Lerner also wrote the Oscar-winning original screenplay for "An American in Paris", produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli. This was the same team who would later join with Lerner and Loewe to create "Gigi". In 1956, Lerner and Loewe unveiled "My Fair Lady". By this time, too, Lerner and Burton Lane were already working on a musical about Li'l Abner. Gabriel Pascal owned the rights to "Pygmalion", which had been unsuccessful with other composers who tried to adapt it into a musical. Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz first tried, and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II attempted, but gave up and Hammerstein told Lerner, ""Pygmalion" had no subplot". Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" retained his social commentary and added appropriate songs for the characters of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, played originally by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It set box-office records in New York and London. When brought to the screen in 1964, the movie version won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.
Lerner and Loewe's run of success continued with their next project, a film adaptation of stories from Colette, the Academy Award-winning film musical "Gigi", starring Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier. The film won all of its nine Oscar nominations, a record at that time, and a special Oscar for co-star Maurice Chevalier. The Lerner-Loewe partnership cracked under the stress of producing the Arthurian "Camelot" in 1960, with Loewe resisting Lerner's desire to direct as well as write when original director Moss Hart suffered a heart attack in the last few months of rehearsals and died about a year after the show's Broadway premiere. Lerner was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers while Loewe continued to have heart troubles. "Camelot" was a hit nonetheless, and immediately following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his widow told reporter Theodore H. White that JFK's administration reminded her of the "one brief shining moment" of Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot". As of the early 21st century, "Camelot" was still invoked to describe the idealism, romance, and tragedy of the Kennedy years.
Loewe retired to Palm Springs, California, while Lerner went through a series of musicals—some successful, some not—with such composers as André Previn ("Coco"), John Barry ("Lolita, My Love"), Leonard Bernstein ("1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"), Burton Lane ("Carmelina") and Charles Strouse ("Dance a Little Closer", based on the film, "Idiot's Delight", nicknamed "Close A Little Faster" by Broadway humorists because it closed on opening night). Most biographers blame Lerner's professional decline on the lack of a strong director with whom Lerner could collaborate, as Neil Simon did with Mike Nichols or Stephen Sondheim with Harold Prince. (Moss Hart, who had directed "My Fair Lady," died shortly after "Camelot" opened.) In 1965 Lerner collaborated again with Burton Lane on the musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever", which was adapted for film in 1970. At this time, Lerner was hired by film producer Arthur P. Jacobs to write a treatment for an upcoming film project, "Doctor Dolittle", but Lerner abrogated his contract after several non-productive months of non-communicative procrastination and was replaced with Leslie Bricusse. Lerner was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.
In 1973, Lerner coaxed Loewe out of retirement to augment the "Gigi" score for a musical stage adaptation. The following year they collaborated on a musical film version of "The Little Prince", based on the classic children's tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This film was a critical and box office failure, but it has gained a modern following. Lerner's autobiography, "The Street Where I Live" (1978), was an account of three of his and Loewe's successful collaborations, "My Fair Lady", "Gigi", and "Camelot", along with personal information. In the last year of his life, he published "The Musical Theatre: A Celebration", a well-reviewed history of the theatre, with personal anecdotes and humor. The "Los Angeles Times" reviewer wrote: "There are several reasons why this book makes a fine introduction to musical theater. One is that Lerner knows exactly what was new, and when and why...In "The Musical Theatre," one is privy to the judgment of a man... who expresses his opinions in a forthright, warm and personal manner." A book of Lerner's lyrics entitled "A Hymn To Him", edited by a British writer Benny Green, was published in 1987.
At the time of Lerner's death, he had been working with Gerard Kenny and Kristi Kane in London on a musical version of the film "My Man Godfrey". He had also received an urgent call from Andrew Lloyd Webber, asking him to write the lyrics to "The Phantom of the Opera". He wrote "Masquerade", but he then informed Webber that he wanted to leave the project because he was losing his memory (he had developed metastatic lung cancer) and Charles Hart replaced him. He had turned down an invitation to write the English-language lyrics for the musical version of "Les Misérables". After Lerner's death, Paul Blake made a musical revue based on Lerner's lyrics and life entitled "Almost Like Being In Love", which featured music by Loewe, Lane, Previn, Strouse, and Weill. The show ran for 10 days at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Songwriting. Lerner often struggled with writing his lyrics. He was uncharacteristically able to complete "I Could Have Danced All Night" from "My Fair Lady" in one 24-hour period. He usually spent months on each song and was constantly rewriting them. Lerner was said to have insecurity about his talent. He would sometimes write songs with someone in mind. For instance, he changed the rhymes in some lines of "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" to ones that Rex Harrison was more comfortable with.
Lerner said of writing: In a 1979 interview on NPR's "All Things Considered", Lerner went into some depth about his lyrics for "My Fair Lady". Professor Henry Higgins sings, "Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters / Condemned by every syllable she utters / By right she should be taken out and hung / For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." Lerner said he knew the lyric used incorrect grammar for the sake of a rhyme. He was later approached about it by another lyricist: Dramatists Guild. Alan Jay Lerner was an advocate for writers' rights in theatre. He was a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. In 1960, he was elected as the twelfth president of the non-profit organization. He continued to serve as the Guild's president until 1964. Personal life. For nearly twenty years, Lerner was addicted to amphetamines; during the 1960s he was a patient of Max Jacobson, known as "Dr. Feelgood", who administered injections of "vitamins with enzymes" that were in fact laced with amphetamines. Lerner's addiction is believed to have been the result of Jacobson's practice.
Marriages and children. Lerner married eight times: Ruth Boyd (1940–1947), singer Marion Bell (1947–1949), actress Nancy Olson (1950–1957), lawyer Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (1957–1965), editor Karen Gundersen (1966–1974), Sandra Payne (1974–1976), Nina Bushkin (1977–1981) and Liz Robertson (1981–1986 [his death]). Four of his eight wives — Olson, Payne, Bushkin, and Robertson — were actresses. His seventh wife, Nina Bushkin, whom he married on May 30, 1977, was the director of development at Mannes College of Music and the daughter of composer and musician Joey Bushkin. After their divorce in 1981, Lerner was ordered to pay her a settlement of $50,000. Lerner wrote in his autobiography (as quoted by "The New York Times"): "All I can say is that if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood." All of this lent some irony to the lyrics for his song "Get Me to the Church on Time". Lerner had four children — three daughters, Susan (by Boyd), Liza, and Jennifer (by Olson), and one son, screenwriter and journalist Michael Alan Lerner (by di Borgo).
Lerner's multiple divorces cost him much of his wealth. Still, he was primarily responsible for his financial ups and downs and was less than truthful about his financial fecklessness. It was claimed that his divorce settlement from Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (his fourth wife) cost him an estimated $1 million in 1965. This was untrue. Lerner's pattern of financial mismanagement continued until his death from cancer in 1986 when he reportedly owed the U.S. Internal Revenue Service over US$1 million in back taxes and was unable to pay for his final medical expenses. Death. On June 14, 1986, Lerner died of lung cancer in Manhattan at the age of 67. At the time of his death he was married to actress Liz Robertson, who was 36 years his junior. He lived in Center Island, New York. He has a memorial plaque in St Paul's Church, the Actors' Church in Covent Garden in London. Works. Films. Source: TCM
Al Capp Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip "Li'l Abner", which he created in 1934 and continued writing and (with help from assistants) drawing until 1977. He also wrote the comic strips "Abbie an' Slats" (in the years 1937–45) and "Long Sam" (1954). He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award, posthumously for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning". Capp's comic strips dealt with urban experiences in the Northern United States until the year he introduced "Li'l Abner". Although Capp was from Connecticut, he spent 43 years writing about the fictional Southern town of Dogpatch, reaching an estimated 60 million readers in more than 900 American newspapers and 100 more papers in 28 countries internationally. M. Thomas Inge says Capp made a large personal fortune through the strip and "had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South".
Early life and education. Capp was born in New Haven, Connecticut, of East European Jewish heritage. He was the eldest child of Otto Philip Caplin (1885–1964) and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin (1884–1948). Otto Caplion was a failed businessman and an amateur cartoonist; Al's brothers Elliot and Jerome were also cartoonists, and his sister Madeline was a publicist. Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s. "My mother and father had been brought to this country from Russia when they were infants", wrote Capp in 1978. "Their fathers had found that the great promise of America was true — it was no crime to be a Jew." The Caplins were indigent; Capp recalled stories of his mother going out in the night to sift through ash barrels for reusable bits of coal. In August 1919, at age nine, Capp was run over by a trolley car and had his left leg amputated above the knee. According to his father Otto's unpublished autobiography, young Capp was not prepared for the amputation beforehand; having been in a coma for days, he suddenly awoke to discover that his leg had been removed. He was eventually given a prosthetic leg but only learned to use it by adopting a slow way of walking which became increasingly painful as he aged. The childhood tragedy of losing a leg likely helped shape Capp's cynical worldview, which was darker and more sardonic than that of most newspaper cartoonists. "I was indignant as hell about that leg," he revealed in a November 1950 interview in "Time" magazine.
"The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else", Capp philosophically wrote, "was to be indifferent to that difference." The prevailing opinion among his friends was that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability. Capp's father introduced him to drawing as a form of therapy. He became quite proficient, advancing mostly on his own. Among his earliest influences were "Punch" cartoonist–illustrator Phil May and American comic strip cartoonists Tad Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, Rudolph Dirks, Fred Opper, Billy DeBeck, George McManus, and Milt Gross. At about this same time, Capp became a voracious reader. According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw before he was 13 years old. Among his childhood favorites were Dickens, Smollett, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and later, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman. Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, without receiving a diploma. He liked to joke about how he failed geometry for nine straight terms. His formal training came from a series of art schools in the Northeast. Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition—the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston—the last before launching his career. Capp already had decided to become a cartoonist. "I heard that Bud Fisher (creator of "Mutt and Jeff") got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses", Capp said. "I decided that was for me."
In early 1932, Capp hitchhiked to New York City. He lived in "airless rat holes" in Greenwich Village and turned out advertising strips at $2 each while scouring the city hunting for jobs. He eventually found work at the Associated Press when he was 23 years old. By March 1932, Capp was drawing "Colonel Gilfeather", a single-panel, AP-owned property created in 1930 by Dick Dorgan. Capp changed the focus and title to "Mister Gilfeather" but soon grew to hate the feature. He left the Associated Press in September 1932. Before leaving, he met Milton Caniff and the two became lifelong friends. Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met earlier in art class. She died in 2006 at the age of 96. Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. "I was 23, I carried a mass of drawings, and I had nearly five dollars in my pocket. People were sleeping in alleys then, willing to work at anything." There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to ghost on "Joe Palooka". During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's "Joe Palooka" story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named "Big Leviticus", a crude prototype. (Leviticus was much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg than to the much more appealing and innocent Li'l Abner.)
Also during this period, Capp was working at night on samples for the strip that eventually became "Li'l Abner". He based his cast of characters on the authentic mountain-dwellers he met (This would have been before the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 began the years-long process of bringing basic utilities like electricity and running water to the region.) Leaving "Joe Palooka", Capp sold "Li'l Abner" to United Feature Syndicate (later known as United Media). The feature was launched on Monday, August 13, 1934, in eight North American newspapers—including the "New York Mirror"—and was an immediate success. Alfred G. Caplin eventually became "Al Capp" because the syndicate felt the original would not fit in a cartoon frame. Capp had his name changed legally in 1949. His younger brother, Elliot Caplin, also became a comic strip writer, best known for co-creating the soap opera strip "The Heart of Juliet Jones" with artist Stan Drake and conceiving the comic strip character "Broom-Hilda" with cartoonist Russell Myers. Elliot authored several off-Broadway plays, including "A Nickel for Picasso" (1981), which was based on and dedicated to his mother and his famous brother.
"Li'l Abner". What began as a hillbilly burlesque soon evolved into one of the most imaginative, popular, and well-drawn strips of the twentieth century. Featuring vividly outlandish characters, bizarre situations, and equal parts suspense, slapstick, irony, satire, black humor, and biting social commentary, "Li'l Abner" is considered a classic of the genre. The comic strip stars Li'l Abner Yokum—the simple-minded, loutish but good-natured, and eternally innocent hayseed who lives with his parents—scrawny but superhuman Mammy Yokum, and shiftless, childlike Pappy Yokum. "Yokum" was a combination of "yokel" and "hokum", although Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965–1970 with comics historians George E. Turner and Michael H. Price: The Yokums live in the backwater hamlet of Dogpatch, Kentucky. Described by its creator as "an average stone-age community", Dogpatch mostly consists of hopelessly ramshackle log cabins, pine trees, "tarnip" fields, and "hawg" wallows. Whatever energy Abner had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae Scragg, his sexy, well-endowed, but virtuous girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This newsworthy event made the cover of "Life" on March 31, 1952.
Capp peopled his comic strip with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Hairless Joe, Lonesome Polecat, Evil-Eye Fleegle, General Bullmoose, Lena the Hyena, Senator Jack S. Phogbound (Capp's caricature of the anti-New Deal Dixiecrats), the "(shudder!)" Scraggs, Available Jones, Nightmare Alice, Earthquake McGoon, and a host of others. Especially notable, certainly from a G.I. point of view, are the beautiful, full-figured women — Daisy Mae, Wolf Gal, Stupefyin' Jones, and Moonbeam McSwine (a caricature of his wife Catherine, aside from the dirt) — all of whom found their way onto the nose art of bomber planes during World War II and the Korean War. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoos, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it. Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, who wants to be a loving friend but is "the world's worst jinx", bringing bad luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk (his name is "pronounced" by simply blowing a "raspberry" or Bronx cheer) always has an iconic dark cloud over his head.
Dogpatch residents regularly combat the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials, and intellectuals with their homespun simplicity. Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention, including El Passionato, Kigmyland, The Republic of Crumbumbo, Skunk Hollow, The Valley of the Shmoon, Planets Pincus Number 2 and 7, and a miserable frozen wasteland known as Lower Slobbovia, a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy that remains a contemporary reference. According to cultural historian Anthony Harkins: The strip's popularity grew from an original eight papers to eventually more than 900. At its peak, "Li'l Abner" was estimated to have been read daily in the United States by 60 to 70 million people (the U.S. population at the time was only 180 million), with adult readers far outnumbering children. Many communities, high schools, and colleges staged Sadie Hawkins dances patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.
Li'l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing. In response to the question "Which side does Abner part his hair on?", Capp would answer: "Both." Capp said he finally found the right "look" for Li'l Abner with Henry Fonda's character Dave Tolliver in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" (1936). In later years, Capp always claimed to have effectively created the miniskirt, when he first put one on Daisy Mae in the 1930s. Parodies, toppers, and alternate strips. "Li'l Abner" also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: "Fearless Fosdick" is a parody of Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy". It first appeared in 1942, and it proved so popular that it ran intermittently during the next 35 years. Gould was parodied personally in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the "Fosdick" sequences closely mimicks "Tracy", including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick was the star of his own short-lived puppet show on NBC, featuring the Mary Chase marionettes.
Besides "Dick Tracy", Capp parodied many other comic strips in "Li'l Abner"—including "Steve Canyon", "Superman" (at least twice; first as "Jack Jawbreaker" in 1947, and again in 1966 as "Chickensouperman"), "Mary Worth" as "Mary Worm", "Peanuts" (in 1968, with "Peewee", a parody of Charlie Brown, and "Croopy", a parody of Snoopy, drawn by "Bedley Damp", a parody of Charles Schulz), "Rex Morgan, M.D.", "Little Annie Rooney", and "Little Orphan Annie" (in which Punjab became "Punjbag", an oleaginous slob). "Fearless Fosdick"—and Capp's other spoofs such as "Little Fanny Gooney" (1952) and "Jack Jawbreaker"—were almost certainly an early inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman's "Mad Magazine", which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comics in the same distinctive style and subversive manner. Capp also lampooned popular recording idols of the day, including Elvis Presley ("Hawg McCall", 1957), Liberace ("Loverboynik", 1956), the Beatles ("the Beasties", 1964)—and in 1944, Frank Sinatra. "Sinatra was the first great public figure I ever wrote about," Capp once said. "I called him 'Hal Fascinatra.' I remember my news syndicate was so worried about what his reaction might be, and we were all surprised when he telephoned and told me how thrilled he was with it. He always made it a point to send me champagne whenever he happened to see me in a restaurant..." (from "Frank Sinatra, My Father" by Nancy Sinatra, 1985). On the other hand, Liberace was "cut to the quick" over Loverboynik, according to Capp, and even threatened legal action—as would Joan Baez later, over "Joanie Phoanie" in 1967.
Capp was just as likely to parody himself; his self-caricature made frequent, tongue-in-cheek appearances in "Li'l Abner". The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with "fans" (see excerpt), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, "Hal Yappland". Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire—in one storyline Li'l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man. In another, the search is on in Dogpatch for a pair of missing socks knitted by the first president of the United States. In addition to creating "Li'l Abner", Capp also co-created two other newspaper strips: "Abbie an' Slats" with magazine illustrator Raeburn van Buren in 1937, and "Long Sam" with cartoonist Bob Lubbers in 1954, as well as the Sunday "topper" strips "Washable Jones", "Small Fry" (a.k.a. "Small Change"), and "Advice fo' Chillun". Critical recognition. According to comics historian Coulton Waugh, a 1947 poll of newspaper readers who claimed they ignored the comics page altogether revealed that many confessed to making a single exception: "Li'l Abner". "When "Li'l Abner" made its debut in 1934, the vast majority of comic strips were designed chiefly to amuse or thrill their readers. Capp turned that world upside-down by routinely injecting politics and social commentary into "Li'l Abner". The strip was the first to regularly introduce characters and story lines having nothing to do with the nominal stars of the strip. The technique—as invigorating as it was unorthodox—was later adopted by cartoonists such as Walt Kelly ["Pogo"] and Garry Trudeau ["Doonesbury"]", wrote comic strip historian Rick Marschall. According to Marschall, "Li'l Abner" gradually evolved into a broad satire of human nature. In his book "America's Great Comic Strip Artists" (1989), Marschall's analysis revealed a decidedly misanthropic subtext.
Over the years, "Li'l Abner" has been adapted to radio, animated cartoons, stage production, motion pictures, and television. Capp has been compared, at various times, to Mark Twain, Dostoevski, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Rabelais. Fans of the strip ranged from novelist John Steinbeck—who called Capp "possibly the best writer in the world today" in 1953 and even earnestly recommended him for the Nobel Prize in literature—to media critic and theorist Marshall McLuhan, who considered Capp "the only robust satirical force in American life". John Updike, comparing Abner to a "hillbilly Candide", added that the strip's "richness of social and philosophical commentary approached the Voltairean". Charlie Chaplin, William F. Buckley, Al Hirschfeld, Harpo Marx, Russ Meyer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Bakshi, Shel Silverstein, Hugh Downs, Gene Shalit, Frank Cho, Daniel Clowes, and (reportedly) even Queen Elizabeth have confessed to being fans of "Li'l Abner". "Li'l Abner" was also the subject of the first book-length scholarly assessment of an American comic strip ever published. "Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire" by Arthur Asa Berger (Twayne, 1969) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature, and grotesquerie, the place of "Li'l Abner" in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image. "One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture," wrote Professor Berger, ""Li'l Abner" is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance." It was reprinted by the University Press of Mississippi in 1994.
The 1940s and 1950s. During World War II and for many years afterward, Capp worked tirelessly going to hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb did not mean an end to a happy and productive life. Making no secret of his own disability, Capp openly joked about his prosthetic leg his whole life. In 1946, Capp created a special full-color comic book, "Al Capp by Li'l Abner", to be distributed by the Red Cross to encourage the thousands of amputee veterans returning from the war. Capp also was involved with the Sister Kenny Foundation, which pioneered new treatments for polio in the 1940s. Serving in his capacity as honorary chairman, Capp made public appearances on its behalf for years, contributed free artwork for its annual fundraising appeals, and entertained disabled and paraplegic children in children's hospitals with inspirational pep talks, humorous stories, and sketches. In 1940, an RKO movie adaptation starred Granville Owen (later known as Jeff York) as Li'l Abner, with Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat, and featuring a title song with lyrics by Milton Berle. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater on November 15, 1956, and had a long run of 693 performances, followed by a nationwide tour. The stage musical, with music and lyrics by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, was adapted into a Technicolor motion picture at Paramount in 1959 by producer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank, with a score by Nelson Riddle. Several performers repeated their Broadway roles in the film, most memorably Julie Newmar as Stupefyin' Jones and Stubby Kaye as Marryin' Sam.
Other highlights of that decade included the 1942 debut of Fearless Fosdick as Abner's "ideel" (hero); the 1946 Lena the Hyena Contest, in which a hideous Lower Slobbovian gal was ultimately revealed in the harrowing winning entry (as judged by Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dalí) drawn by noted cartoonist Basil Wolverton; and an ill-fated Sunday parody of "Gone With the Wind" that aroused anger and legal threats from author Margaret Mitchell, and led to a printed apology within the strip. In October 1947, Li'l Abner met Rockwell P. Squeezeblood, head of the abusive and corrupt Squeezeblood Comic Strip Syndicate. The resulting sequence, "Jack Jawbreaker Fights Crime!", was a devastating satire of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's notorious exploitation by DC Comics over "Superman". It was later reprinted in "The World of Li'l Abner" (1953). (Siegel and Shuster had earlier poked fun at Capp in a "Superman" story in "Action Comics #55", December 1942, in which a cartoonist named "Al Hatt" invents a comic strip featuring the hillbilly "Tiny Rufe".)
In 1947, Capp earned a "Newsweek" cover story. That same year the "New Yorker's" profile on him was so long that it ran in consecutive issues. In 1948, Capp reached a creative peak with the introduction of the Shmoos, lovable and innocent fantasy creatures who reproduced at amazing speed and brought so many benefits that, ironically, the world economy was endangered. The much-copied storyline was a parable that was metaphorically interpreted in many different ways at the outset of the Cold War. Following his close friend Milton Caniff's lead (with "Steve Canyon"), Capp had recently fought a successful battle with the syndicate to gain complete ownership of his feature when the Shmoos debuted. As a result, he reaped enormous financial rewards from the unexpected (and almost unprecedented) merchandising phenomenon that followed. As in the strip, Shmoos suddenly appeared to be everywhere in 1949 and 1950—including a "Time" cover story. A paperback collection of the original sequence, "The Life and Times of the Shmoo", became a bestseller for Simon & Schuster. Shmoo dolls, clocks, watches, jewelry, earmuffs, wallpaper, fishing lures, air fresheners, soap, ice cream, balloons, ashtrays, comic books, records, sheet music, toys, games, Halloween masks, salt and pepper shakers, decals, pinbacks, tumblers, coin banks, greeting cards, planters, neckties, suspenders, belts, curtains, fountain pens, and other Shmoo paraphernalia were produced. A garment factory in Baltimore turned out a whole line of Shmoo apparel, including "Shmooveralls". The original sequence and its 1959 sequel "The Return of the Shmoo" have been collected in print many times since, most recently in 2011, always to high sales figures. The Shmoos later had their own animated television series.
Capp followed this success with other allegorical fantasy critters, including the aboriginal and masochistic "Kigmies", who craved abuse (a story that began as a veiled comment on racial and religious oppression), the dreaded "Nogoodniks" (or "bad" shmoos), and the irresistible "Bald Iggle", a guileless creature whose sad-eyed countenance compelled involuntary truthfulness—with predictably disastrous results. "Li'l Abner" was censored for the first time, but not the last, in September 1947 and was pulled from papers by Scripps-Howard. The controversy, as reported in "Time", centered on Capp's portrayal of the United States Senate. Edward Leech of Scripps said, "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks ... boobs and undesirables." Capp criticized Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, calling him a "poet". "He uses poetic license to try to create the beautifully ordered world of good guys and bad guys that he wants," said Capp. "He seems at his best when terrifying the helpless and naïve."
Capp received the National Cartoonists Society's Billy DeBeck Memorial Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year. (When the award name was changed in 1954, Capp also retroactively received a Reuben statuette.) He was an outspoken pioneer in favor of diversifying the NCS by admitting women cartoonists. Originally, the Society had disallowed female members. Capp briefly resigned his membership in 1949 to protest their refusal of admission to Hilda Terry, creator of the comic strip "Teena". According to Tom Roberts, author of "Alex Raymond: His Life and Art" (2007), Capp delivered a stirring speech that was instrumental in changing those rules. The NCS finally accepted female members the following year. In December 1952, Capp published an article in "Real" magazine entitled "The REAL Powers in America" that further challenged the conventional attitudes of the day: "The real powers in America are "women"—the wives and sweethearts behind the masculine dummies..." Highlights of the 1950s included the much-heralded marriage of Abner and Daisy Mae in 1952, the birth of their son "Honest Abe" Yokum in 1953, and in 1954 the introduction of Abner's enormous, long-lost kid brother Tiny Yokum, who filled Abner's place as a bachelor in the annual Sadie Hawkins Day race. In 1952, Capp and his characters graced the covers of both "Life" and "TV Guide". The year 1956 saw the debut of Bald Iggle, considered by some "Abner" enthusiasts to be the creative high point of the strip, as well as Mammy's revelatory encounter with the "Square Eyes" Family—Capp's thinly-veiled appeal for racial tolerance. (This fable-like story was collected into an educational comic book called "Mammy Yokum and the Great Dogpatch Mystery!" and distributed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith later that year.) Two years later, Capp's studio issued "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story", a biographical comic book distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Often, Capp had parodied corporate greed—pork tycoon J. Roaringham Fatback had figured prominently in wiping out the Shmoos. But in 1952, when General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, nominated for a cabinet post, told Congress "...what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa", he inspired one of Capp's greatest satires—the introduction of General Bullmoose, the robust, ruthless, and ageless business tycoon. The blustering Bullmoose, who seemed to own and control nearly everything, justified his far-reaching and mercenary excesses by saying "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for "the USA!"" Bullmoose's corrupt interests were often pitted against those of the pathetic Lower Slobbovians in a classic mismatch of "haves" versus "have-nots". This character, along with the Shmoos, helped cement Capp's favor with the Left, and increased their outrage a decade later when Capp, a former Franklin D. Roosevelt liberal, switched targets. Nonetheless, General Bullmoose continued to appear, undaunted and unredeemed, during the strip's final right-wing phase and into the 1970s.
Feud with Ham Fisher. After Capp quit his ghosting job on Ham Fisher's "Joe Palooka" in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had "stolen" his idea. For years, Fisher brought the characters back to his strip, billing them as "The ORIGINAL Hillbilly Characters" and advising readers not to be "fooled by imitations". (In fact, Fisher's brutish hillbilly character—Big Leviticus, created by Capp in Fisher's absence—bore little resemblance to Li'l Abner.) According to a November 1950 "Time" article, "Capp parted from Fisher with a definite impression, (to put it mildly) that he had been underpaid and unappreciated. Fisher, a man of Roman self esteem, considered Capp an ingrate and a whippersnapper, and watched his rise to fame with unfeigned horror." "Fisher repeatedly brought Leviticus and his clan back, claiming their primacy as comics' first hillbilly family – but he was missing the point. It wasn't the setting that made Capp's strip such a huge success. It was Capp's finely tuned sense of the absurd, his ability to milk an outrageous situation for every laugh in it and then, impossibly, to squeeze even more laughs from it, that found such favor with the public," (from Don Markstein's "Toonopedia").
The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it grew more personal as Capp's strip eclipsed "Joe Palooka" in popularity. Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff. After Fisher underwent plastic surgery, Capp included a racehorse in "Li'l Abner" named "Ham's Nose-Bob". In 1950, Capp introduced a cartoonist character named "Happy Vermin"—a caricature of Fisher—who hired Abner to draw his comic strip in a dimly lit closet (after sacking his previous "temporary" assistant of 20 years, who had been cut off from all his friends in the process). Instead of using Vermin's tired characters, Abner inventively peopled the strip with hillbillies. A bighearted Vermin told his slaving assistant: "I'm proud of having created these characters!! They'll make millions for me!! And if they do – I'll get "you" a new light bulb!!" Traveling in the same social circles, the two men engaged in a 20-year mutual vendetta, as described by the "New York Daily News" in 1998: "They crossed paths often, in the midtown watering holes and at National Cartoonists Society banquets, and the city's gossip columns were full of their snarling public donnybrooks." In 1950, Capp wrote a nasty article for "The Atlantic", entitled "I Remember Monster". The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed "benefactor" with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip. The thinly-veiled boss was understood to be Ham Fisher.
Fisher retaliated, doctoring photostats of "Li'l Abner" and falsely accusing Capp of sneaking obscenities into his comic strip. Fisher submitted examples of "Li'l Abner" to Capp's syndicate and to the New York courts, in which Fisher had identified pornographic images that were hidden in the background art. However, the X-rated material had been drawn there by Fisher. Capp was able to refute the accusation by simply showing the original artwork. In 1954, when Capp was applying for a Boston television license, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received an anonymous packet of pornographic "Li'l Abner" drawings. The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) convened an ethics hearing, and Fisher was expelled for the forgery from the same organization that he had helped found; Fisher's scheme had backfired in spectacular fashion. Around the same time, his mansion in Wisconsin was destroyed by a storm. On December 27, 1955, Fisher committed suicide in his studio. The feud and Fisher's suicide were used as the basis for a lurid, highly fictionalized murder mystery, "Strip for Murder" by Max Allan Collins.
Another "feud" seemed to be looming when, in one run of Sunday strips in 1957, Capp lampooned the comic strip "Mary Worth" as "Mary Worm". The title character was depicted as a nosy, interfering busybody. Allen Saunders, the creator of the "Mary Worth" strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character "Hal Rapp", a foul-tempered, ill-mannered, and (ironically, as Capp was a teetotaler) inebriated cartoonist. Later, the "feud" was revealed to be a collaborative hoax that Capp and his longtime pal Saunders had cooked up together. The Capp-Saunders "feud" fooled both editors and readers, generated plenty of free publicity for both strips—and Capp and Saunders had a good laugh when all was revealed. Production methods. Like many cartoonists, Capp made extensive use of assistants (notably Andy Amato, Harvey Curtis, Walter Johnson, and Frank Frazetta). During the extended peak of the strip, the workload grew to include advertising, merchandising, promotional work, public service comics, and other specialty work—in addition to the regular six dailies and one Sunday strip per week. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, there were scores of Sunday strip-style magazine ads for Cream of Wheat using the "Abner" characters, and in the 1950s, Fearless Fosdick became a spokesman for Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic in a series of daily strip-style print ads. The characters also sold chainsaws, underwear, ties, detergent, candy, soft drinks—including a licensed version of Capp's moonshine creation, Kickapoo Joy Juice—and General Electric and Procter & Gamble products, all requiring special artwork.
No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on his drawing and inking the characters' faces and hands—especially of Abner and Daisy Mae—and his distinctive touch is often discernible. "He had "the touch,"" Frazetta said of Capp in 2008. "He knew how to take an otherwise ordinary drawing and really make it "pop". I'll never knock his talent." As is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited— although, sensitive to his own experience working on "Joe Palooka", Capp frequently drew attention to his assistants in interviews and publicity pieces. A 1950 cover story in "Time" even included photographs of two of his employees, whose roles in the production were detailed by Capp. Ironically, this highly irregular policy (along with the subsequent fame of Frank Frazetta) has led to the misconception that his strip was "ghosted" by other hands. The production of "Li'l Abner" has been well documented, however. In point of fact, Capp maintained creative control over every stage of production for virtually the entire run of the strip. Capp originated the stories, wrote the dialogue, designed the major characters, rough penciled the preliminary staging and action of each panel, oversaw the finished pencils, and drew and inked the hands and faces of the characters. Frazetta authority David Winiewicz described the everyday working mode of operation in "Li'l Abner Dailies: 1954 Volume 20" (Kitchen Sink, 1994):
There was also a separate line of comic book titles published by the Caplin family-owned Toby Press, including "Shmoo Comics" featuring Washable Jones. Cartoonist Mell Lazarus, creator of "Miss Peach" and "Momma", wrote a comic novel in 1963 entitled "The Boss Is Crazy, Too" which was partly inspired by his apprenticeship days working with Capp and his brother Elliot at Toby. In a seminar at the Charles Schulz Museum on November 8, 2008, Lazarus called his experience at Toby "the five funniest years of my life". Lazarus went on to cite Capp as one of the "four essentials" in the field of newspaper cartoonists, along with Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, and Milton Caniff. Capp detailed his approach to writing and drawing the stories in an instructional course book for the Famous Artists School, beginning in 1956. In 1959, Capp recorded and released an album for Folkways Records (now owned by the Smithsonian) on which he identified and described "The Mechanics of the Comic Strip".
Personality. Although he was often considered a difficult person, some acquaintances of Capp have stressed that the cartoonist also had a sensitive side. In 1973, upon learning that 12-year-old Ted Kennedy Jr., the son of his political rival Ted Kennedy Sr., had his right leg amputated, Capp wrote the boy an encouraging letter that gave candid advice about dealing with the loss of a limb, which Capp himself had experienced as a boy. One of Capp's grandchildren recalls that at one point, tears were streaming down the cartoonist's cheeks while he was watching a documentary about the Jonestown massacre. Capp gave money anonymously to charities and "people in need" at various points in his life. Sexual harassment and assault claims. Two biographies, one of Grace Kelly and the other of Goldie Hawn, describe Capp as trying to force the younger women to have sex with him. While no firsthand allegation has ever surfaced regarding Kelly, in her autobiography, Hawn stated that Capp sexually propositioned her on a casting couch and exposed himself to her when she was 19 years old. When she refused his advances, Capp became angry and told her that she was "never gonna make anything in your life" and that she should "go and marry a Jewish dentist. You'll never get anywhere in this business."
In 1971, investigative journalist Jack Anderson wrote that Capp had exposed his genitals to four female students at the University of Alabama. In 1972, after an incident at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, Capp was arrested. He pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted adultery, while charges of indecent exposure and sodomy were dropped. He was fined US$500 (). In 2019, Jean Kilbourne was inspired by the MeToo movement to publish in "Hogan's Alley" her own experience of being groped and sexually solicited by Al Capp while doing freelance writing and research work for him in contemplation of a permanent job in 1967. Public service works. Capp provided specialty artwork for civic groups, government agencies, and charitable or nonprofit organizations, spanning several decades. The following titles are all single-issue, educational comic books and pamphlets produced for various public services: In addition, Dogpatch characters were used in national campaigns for the U.S. Treasury, the Cancer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Heart Fund, the Sister Kenny Foundation, the Boy Scouts of America, Community Chest, the National Reading Council, Minnesota Tuberculosis and Health Association, Christmas Seals, the National Amputation Foundation, and Disabled American Veterans, among others.
Public figure. In the Golden Age of the American comic strip, successful cartoonists received a great deal of attention; their professional and private lives were reported in the press, and their celebrity was often nearly sufficient to rival their creations. As "Li'l Abner" reached its peak years, and following the success of the Shmoos and other high moments in his work, Al Capp achieved a public profile that is still unparalleled in his profession, and arguably exceeded the fame of his strip. "Capp was the best known, most influential and most controversial cartoonist of his era," writes publisher (and leading Shmoo collector) Denis Kitchen. "His personal celebrity transcended comics, reaching the public and influencing the culture in a variety of media. For many years he simultaneously produced the daily strip, a weekly syndicated newspaper column, and a 500-station radio program..." He ran the Boston Summer Theatre with "The Phantom" cartoonist Lee Falk, bringing in Hollywood actors such as Mae West, Melvyn Douglas, and Claude Rains to star in their live productions. He even briefly considered running for a Massachusetts Senate seat. Vice President Spiro Agnew urged Capp to run in the Democratic Party Massachusetts primary in 1970 against Ted Kennedy, but Capp ultimately declined. (He did, however, donate his services as a speaker at a $100-a-plate fundraiser for Republican Congressman Jack Kemp.)
Besides his use of the comic strip to voice his opinions and display his humor, Capp was a popular guest speaker at universities, and on radio and television. He remains the only cartoonist to be embraced by television; no other comic artist to date has come close to Capp's televised exposure. Capp appeared as a regular on "The Author Meets the Critics" (1948–'54) and made regular, weekly appearances on "Today" in 1953. He was also a periodic panelist on ABC and NBC's "Who Said That?" (1948–'55), and co-hosted DuMont's "What's the Story?" (1953). Between 1952 and 1972, he hosted at least "five" television shows–three different talk shows called "The Al Capp Show" (1952 and 1968) and "Al Capp" (1971–'72), "Al Capp's America" (a live "chalk talk", with Capp providing a barbed commentary while sketching cartoons, 1954), and a CBS game show called "Anyone Can Win" (1953). He also hosted similar vehicles on the radio—and was a familiar celebrity guest on various other broadcast programs, including NBC Radio's long-running "Monitor" with its famous "Monitor" Beacon audio signature, as a commentator dubbed "An expert of nothing with opinions on everything."
His frequent appearances on NBC's "The Tonight Show" spanned three emcees (Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson), from the 1950s to the 1970s. One memorable story, as recounted to Johnny Carson, was about his meeting with then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Capp was ushered into the Oval Office, his prosthetic leg suddenly collapsed into a pile of disengaged parts and hinges on the floor. The President immediately turned to an aide and said, "Call Walter Reed (Hospital), or maybe Bethesda," to which Capp replied, "Hell no, just call a good local mechanic!" (Capp also spoofed Carson in his strip, in a 1970 episode called "The Tommy Wholesome Show".) Capp portrayed himself in a cameo role in the Bob Hope film "That Certain Feeling", for which he also provided promotional art. He was interviewed live on "Person to Person" on November 27, 1959, by host Charles Collingwood. He also appeared as himself on "The Ed Sullivan Show", Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows", "The Red Skelton Show", "The Merv Griffin Show", "The Mike Douglas Show", and guested on Ralph Edwards' "This Is Your Life" on February 12, 1961, with honoree Peter Palmer (the actor who played Li'l Abner in the Paramount film). Capp also freelanced very successfully as a magazine writer and newspaper columnist, in a wide variety of publications including "Life", "Show", "Pageant", "The Atlantic", "Esquire", "Coronet", and "The Saturday Evening Post". Capp was impersonated by comedians Rich Little and David Frye. Although Capp's endorsement activities never rivaled Li'l Abner's or Fearless Fosdick's, he was a celebrity spokesman in print ads for Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pens (along with colleagues and close friends Milton Caniff and Walt Kelly), and—with an irony that became apparent later—a brand of cigarettes (Chesterfield).
Capp resumed visiting war amputees during the Korean War and Vietnam War. He toured Vietnam with the USO, entertaining troops along with Art Buchwald and George Plimpton. He served as chairman of the Cartoonists' Committee in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's People-to-People program in 1954 (although Capp had supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956), which was organized to promote Savings bonds for the U.S. Treasury. Capp had earlier provided the Shmoo for a special Children's Savings Bond in 1949, accompanying President Harry S. Truman at the bond's unveiling ceremony. During the Soviet Union's blockade of West Berlin in 1948, the commanders of the Berlin airlift had cabled Capp, requesting inflatable shmoos as part of "Operation: Little Vittles". Candy-filled shmoos were air-dropped to hungry West Berliners by America's 17th Military Airport Squadron during the humanitarian effort. "When the candy-chocked shmoos were dropped, a near-riot resulted," (reported in "Newsweek"—October 11, 1948).
In addition to his public service work for charitable organizations for disabled people, Capp also served on the National Reading Council, which was organized to combat illiteracy. He published a column ("Wrong Turn Onto Sesame Street") challenging federally funded public television endowments in favor of educational comics—which, according to Capp, "didn't cost a dime in taxes and never had. I pointed out that a kid could enjoy "Sesame Street" "without" learning how to read, but he couldn't enjoy comic strips "unless" he could read; and that a smaller investment in getting kids to read by supplying them with educational matter in such "reading" form might make better sense." Capp's academic interests included being one of nineteen original "Trustees and Advisors" for "Endicott, Junior College for Young Woman", located in Pride's Crossing (Beverly), Massachusetts, which was founded in 1939. Al Capp is listed in the 1942 Mingotide Yearbook, representing the first graduating class from what is now the 4-year school known as Endicott College. The yearbook entry includes his credential as a "Cartoonist for United Feature Syndicate" and a resident of New York City.
"Comics", wrote Capp in 1970, "can be a combination of the highest quality of art and text, and many of them are." Capp produced many giveaway educational comic books and public services pamphlets, spanning several decades, for the Red Cross, the Department of Civil Defense, the Department of the Navy, the U.S. Army, the Anti-Defamation League, the Department of Labor, Community Chest (a forerunner of United Way), and the Job Corps. Capp's studio provided special artwork for various civic groups and nonprofit organizations as well. Dogpatch characters were used in national campaigns for the Cancer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Heart Fund, the Boy Scouts of America, Minnesota Tuberculosis and Health Association, the National Amputation Foundation, and Disabled American Veterans, among others. They were also used to help sell Christmas Seals. In the early 1960s, Capp regularly wrote a column entitled "Al Capp's Column" for the newspaper "The Schenectady Gazette" (currently "The Daily Gazette"). He was the "Playboy" interview subject in December 1965, in a conversation conducted by Alvin Toffler. In August 1967, Capp was the narrator and host of an ABC network special called "Do Blondes Have More Fun?" In 1970, he was the subject of a provocative NBC documentary called "This Is Al Capp".
The 1960s and 1970s. Capp and his family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard University, during the entire Vietnam War protest era. The turmoil that Americans were watching on their television sets was happening live—right in his own neighborhood. Campus radicals and "hippies" inevitably became one of Capp's favorite targets in the sixties. Alongside his long-established caricatures of right-wing, big business types such as General Bullmoose and J. Roaringham Fatback, Capp began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez (in the character of Joanie Phoanie, a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage ten thousand dollars' worth of "protest songs"). The sequence implicitly labeled Baez a limousine liberal, a charge she took to heart, as detailed years later in her 1987 autobiography, "And A Voice To Sing With: A Memoir". Another target was Senator Ted Kennedy, parodied as "Senator O. Noble McGesture", resident of "Hyideelsport". The town name is a play on Hyannisport, Massachusetts, where a number of the Kennedy clan have lived.
Capp became a popular public speaker on college campuses, where he reportedly relished hecklers. He attacked militant antiwar demonstrators, both in his personal appearances and in his strip. He also satirized student political groups. The Youth International Party (YIP) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) emerged in "Li'l Abner" as "Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything!" (SWINE). In an April 1969 letter to "Time", Capp insisted, "The students I blast are not the dissenters, but the destroyers—the less than 4% who lock up deans in washrooms, who burn manuscripts of unpublished books, who make combination pigpens and playpens of their universities. The remaining 96% detest them as heartily as I do." Capp's increasingly controversial remarks at his campus speeches and during television appearances cost him his semi-regular spot on the "Tonight Show". His contentious public persona during this period was captured on a late sixties comedy LP called "Al Capp On Campus". The album features his interaction with students at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) on such topics as "sensitivity training", "humanitarianism", "abstract art" (Capp hated it), and "student protest". The cover features a cartoon drawing by Capp of wildly dressed, angry hippies carrying protest signs with slogans like "End Capp Brutality", "Abner and Daisy Mae Smoke Pot", "Capp Is Over [30, 40, 50—all crossed out] the Hill!!", and "If You Like Crap, You'll Like Capp!"
Highlights of the strip's final decades include the stories "Boomchik" (1961), in which America's international prestige is saved by Mammy Yokum, "Daisy Mae Steps Out" (1966), a female-empowering tale of Daisy's brazenly audacious "homewrecker gland", "The Lips of Marcia Perkins" (1967), a satirical, thinly-veiled commentary on venereal disease and public health warnings, "Ignoble Savages" (1968), in which the Mob takes over Harvard, and "Corporal Crock" (1973), in which Bullmoose reveals his reactionary cartoon role model, in a tale of obsession and the fanatical world of comic book collecting. The cartoonist visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their 1969 Bed-In for Peace in Montreal, and their testy exchange later appeared in the documentary film ' (1988). Introducing himself with the words "I'm a dreadful Neanderthal fascist. How do you do?", Capp sardonically congratulated Lennon and Ono on their ' nude album cover: "I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair. You've done it, and I tell you that I applaud you for it." Following this exchange, Capp insulted Ono ("Good God, you've gotta live with that?"), and was asked to "get out" by Lennon publicist Derek Taylor. Lennon allowed him to stay, however, but the conversation had soured considerably. On Capp's exit, Lennon sang an impromptu version of his song "The Ballad of John and Yoko" with a slightly revised, but nonetheless prophetic lyric: "Christ, you know it ain't easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are goin' / They're gonna crucify "Capp!" "
Despite his political conservatism in the last decade of his life, Capp is reported to have been liberal in some particular causes; he supported gay rights, and did not tolerate any attempts at homophobic jokes. He is also said to have supported Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for racial equality in American society, although he was very sceptical of the tactics of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. In 1968, a theme park called Dogpatch USA opened at Marble Falls, Arkansas, based on Capp's work and with his support. The park was a popular attraction during the 1970s, but was abandoned in 1993 due to financial difficulties. By 2005, the area once devoted to a live-action facsimile of Dogpatch (including a lifesize statue in the town square of Dogpatch "founder" General Jubilation T. Cornpone) had been heavily stripped by vandals and souvenir hunters, and was slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding Arkansas wilderness. On April 22, 1971, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported allegations that in February 1968 Capp had made indecent advances to four female students when he was invited to speak at the University of Alabama. Anderson and an associate confirmed that Capp was shown out of town by university police, but that the incident had been hushed up by the university to avoid negative publicity.
The following month, Capp was charged in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in connection with another alleged incident following his April 1 lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Capp was accused of propositioning a married woman in his hotel room. Although no sexual act was alleged to have resulted, the original charge included "sodomy". As part of a plea agreement, Capp pleaded guilty to the charge of "attempted adultery" (adultery was a felony in Wisconsin), and the other charges were dropped. Capp was fined $500 and court costs. In a December 1992 article for "The New Yorker," Seymour Hersh reported that President Richard Nixon and Charles Colson had repeatedly discussed the Capp case in Oval Office recordings that had recently been made available by the National Archives. Nixon and Capp were on friendly terms, Hersh wrote, and Nixon and Colson had worked to find a way for Capp to run against Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate. "Nixon was worried about the allegations, fearing that Capp's very close links to the White House would become embarrassingly public", Hersh wrote. "The White House tapes and documents show that he and Colson discussed the issue repeatedly, and that Colson eventually reassured the president by saying that he had, in essence, fixed the case. Specifically, the president was told that one of Colson's people had gone to Wisconsin and tried to talk to the prosecutors." Colson's efforts failed, however. The Eau Claire district attorney, a Republican, refused to dismiss the attempted adultery charge. In passing sentence in February 1972, the judge rejected the D.A.'s motion that Capp agree to undergo psychiatric treatment.
The resulting publicity led to hundreds of papers dropping his comic strip, and Capp, already in failing health, withdrew from public speaking. Celebrity biographer James Spada has claimed that similar allegations were made by actress Grace Kelly. However, no firsthand allegation has ever surfaced. "From beginning to end, Capp was acid-tongued toward the targets of his wit, intolerant of hypocrisy, and always wickedly funny. After about 40 years, however, Capp's interest in "Abner" waned, and this showed in the strip itself," according to Don Markstein's "Toonopedia". Although Capp had used assistants on the strip practically since the beginning, in the final years his own involvement in the strip decreased. His health issues made it increasingly difficult for Capp to work, recalled his assistants. On November 13, 1977, Capp retired with an apology to his fans for the recently declining quality of the strip, which he said had been the best he could manage due to declining health. "If you have any sense of humor about your strip—and I had a sense of humor about mine—you knew that for three or four years "Abner" was wrong. Oh hell, it's like a fighter retiring. I stayed on longer than I should have," he admitted, adding that he couldn't breathe anymore. "When he retired "Li'l Abner", newspapers ran expansive articles and television commentators talked about the passing of an era. "People magazine" ran a substantial feature, and even the comics-free "New York Times" devoted nearly a full page to the event", wrote publisher Denis Kitchen.
Capp's final years were marked by advancing illness and by family tragedy. In October 1977, one of his two daughters died; a few weeks later, a beloved granddaughter was killed in a car accident. A lifelong chain smoker, Capp died in 1979 from emphysema at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire. Capp is buried in Mount Prospect Cemetery in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Engraved on his headstone is a stanza from Thomas Gray: "The plowman homeward plods his weary way / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", 1751). Legacy. "Neither the strip's shifting political leanings nor the slide of its final few years had any bearing on its status as a classic; and in 1995, it was recognized as such by the U.S. Postal Service", according to "Toonopedia". "Li'l Abner" was one of 20 American comic strips included in the Comic Strip Classics series of USPS commemorative stamps. Al Capp, an inductee into the National Cartoon Museum (formerly the International Museum of Cartoon Art), is one of only 31 artists selected to their Hall of Fame. Capp was also inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2004.
Sadie Hawkins Day and double whammy are two terms attributed to Al Capp that have entered the English language. Other, less ubiquitous Cappisms include skunk works and Lower Slobbovia. The term shmoo also has entered the lexicon, defining highly technical concepts in no fewer than "four" separate fields of science, including the variations shmooing (a microbiological term for the "budding" process in yeast reproduction), and shmoo plot (a technical term in the field of electrical engineering). In socioeconomics, a "shmoo" refers to any generic kind of good that reproduces itself, (as opposed to "widgets" which require resources and active production). In the field of particle physics, "shmoo" refers to a high energy survey instrument, as used at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to capture subatomic cosmic ray particles emitted from the Cygnus X-3 constellation. Capp also had a knack for popularizing certain uncommon terms, such as druthers, schmooze, and nogoodnik, neatnik, etc. In his book "The American Language", H.L. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning—not with beatnik or Sputnik—but earlier, in the pages of "Li'l Abner".
Al Capp's life and career are the subjects of a new life-sized mural commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth. Created by resident artist Jon P. Mooers, the mural was unveiled in downtown Amesbury on May 15, 2010. According to the "Boston Globe" (as reported on May 18, 2010), the town has renamed its amphitheater in the artist's honor, and is looking to develop an Al Capp Museum. Capp is also the subject of an upcoming WNET-TV "American Masters" documentary, "The Life and Times of Al Capp", produced by his granddaughter, independent filmmaker Caitlin Manning. Since his death in 1979, Al Capp and his work have been the subject of more than 40 books, including three biographies. Underground cartoonist and "Li'l Abner" expert Denis Kitchen has published, co-published, edited, or otherwise served as consultant on nearly all of them. Kitchen is currently compiling a biographical monograph on Al Capp. At San Diego Comic-Con in July 2009, IDW announced the upcoming publication of "Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays" as part of their ongoing The Library of American Comics series. The comprehensive series, a reprinting of the entire 43-year history of "Li'l Abner", spanning a projected 20 volumes, began on April 7, 2010.
Ann Druyan Ann Druyan ( ;) is an American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series ', hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, ' and its sequel series, "", as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series. In the late 1970s, she became the creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which produced the golden discs affixed to both the "Voyager 1" and "Voyager 2" spacecraft. She also published a novel, "A Famous Broken Heart", in 1977, and later co-wrote several best selling non-fiction books with Sagan. Early life and education. Ann Druyan was born in Queens, New York, the daughter of Pearl A. () and Harry Druyan, who co-owned a knitwear firm. Her family was Jewish. Druyan's early interest in math and science was, in her word, "derailed" when a junior high-school teacher ridiculed a question she asked about the universality of . "I raised my hand and said, 'You mean this applies to every circle in the universe?', and the teacher told me not to ask stupid questions. And there I was having this religious experience, and she made me feel like such a fool. I was completely flummoxed from then on until after college." Druyan characterized her three years at New York University as "disastrous", and it was only after she left school without graduating that she discovered the pre-Socratic philosophers and began educating herself, thus leading to a renewed interest in science.
Career. In the late 1970s, Druyan became the creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project. As creative director, Druyan worked with a team to design a complex message, including music and images, for possible alien civilizations. These golden phonograph records affixed to the "Voyager 1" and "Voyager 2" spacecraft are now beyond the outermost planets of the Solar System, and "Voyager 1" has entered interstellar space. Both records have a projected shelf life of one billion years. Druyan's role on the project was discussed on the July 8, 2018, 60 Minutes segment "The Little Spacecraft That Could". In the segment, Druyan explained her insistence that Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" be included on the Golden Record, saying: "..."Johnny B. Goode", rock and roll, was the music of motion, of moving, getting to someplace you've never been before, and the odds are against you, but you want to go. That was Voyager." The segment also discussed Sagan's suggestion, in 1990, that Voyager 1 turn its cameras back towards Earth to take a series of photographs showing the planets of our solar system. The shots, showing Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles as a small point of bluish light, became the basis for Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" passage, first published in " (1994).
During that time, Druyan also co-wrote (with Carl Sagan and Steven Soter) the 1980 PBS documentary series ", hosted by Carl Sagan. The thirteen-part series covered a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of humans place in the universe. It was highly acclaimed, and became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television at that time. The series won two Emmys and a Peabody Award, and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people. A book was also published to accompany the series. , it is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. Several revised versions of the series were later broadcast; one version, telecast after Sagan's death, opens with Druyan paying tribute to her late husband and the impact of "Cosmos" over the years. Druyan wrote and produced the 1987 PBS "NOVA" episode "Confessions of a Weaponeer" on the life of President Eisenhower's Science Advisor George Kistiakowsky. In 2000, Druyan, together with Steve Soter, co-wrote "Passport to the Universe", the inaugural planetarium show for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Natural History Museum's Hayden Planetarium. The attraction is narrated by Tom Hanks. Druyan and Soter also co-wrote "The Search for Life: Are We Alone", narrated by Harrison Ford, which also debuted at the Hayden's Rose Center.
In 2000, Druyan co-founded Cosmos Studios, Inc, with Joseph Firmage. As CEO of Cosmos Studios, Druyan produces science-based entertainment for all media. In addition to "", Cosmos Studios has produced "Cosmic Africa", "Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt", and the Emmy-nominated documentary "Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message". In 2009, she distributed a series of podcasts called "At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan", in which she described her works, the life of her husband, Carl Sagan, and their marriage. Druyan is credited, with Carl Sagan, as the co-creator and co-producer of the 1997 feature film "Contact". In 2011, it was announced that Druyan would executive produce, co-write, and be one of the episodic directors for a sequel to ', to be called ', which began airing in March 2014. Episodes premiered on Fox and also aired on National Geographic Channel on the following night. At the time of its release, Fox gave the series the largest global rollout of a television series ever, debuting it in 180 countries. The premiere episode was shown across nine of Fox's cable properties in addition to the broadcast network in a "roadblock" style premiere. The series went on to become the most-watched series ever for National Geographic Channel International, with at least some part of the 13-episode series watched by 135 million people, including 45 million in the U.S.
In March 2020, a third season of "Cosmos", named "", for which Druyan was executive producer, writer, and director, premiered on National Geographic. Druyan also said: "I very much have season four in mind, and I know what it's going to be. And I even know some of the stories that I want to tell in it." Writing. Druyan's first novel, "A Famous Broken Heart", was published in 1977. Druyan co-wrote six "New York Times" bestsellers with Carl Sagan, including: "Comet", "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors", and "The Demon-Haunted World". She is co-author, along with Carl Sagan, F. D. Drake, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman Sagan, of "Murmurs Of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record". She also wrote the updated introduction to Sagan's book "The Cosmic Connection" and the epilogue of "Billions and Billions". She wrote the introduction to, and edited "The Varieties of Scientific Experience", published from Sagan's 1985 Gifford lectures. In February 2020, Druyan published "Cosmos: Possible Worlds", a companion volume to , which premiered in March 2020.
Work in science. Druyan is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Druyan served as program director of the first solar-sail deep-space mission, Cosmos 1, launched on a Russian ICBM in 2005. Druyan is involved in multiple Breakthrough Initiatives. With Frank Drake, Druyan is the co-chair of Breakthrough Message and also a member of Breakthrough Starshot. She is a member of the advisory board of The Carl Sagan Institute. Activism. Druyan has for many years been a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. She was arrested three times at the Mercury, Nevada nuclear test site during Mikhail Gorbachev's unilateral moratorium on underground nuclear testing, with which President Ronald Reagan did not cooperate. This included an arrest in June 1986, when she crossed a white painted line indicating the test site's boundary. Sagan, who attended the same protest with Druyan, was not arrested. In the early 1990s, Druyan worked with Sagan and then-Senator Al Gore Jr. and a host of religious and scientific leaders to bring the scientific and religious worlds together in a unified effort to preserve the environment, resulting in the "Declaration of the 'Mission to Washington".
She was a founding director of the Children's Health Fund until the spring of 2004, a project that provides mobile pediatric care to homeless and disadvantaged children in more than half a dozen cities. She is currently a member of their advisory board. She has been on the board of directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for over 10 years and was its president from 2006 to 2010. Honors. An asteroid discovered in 1988 was named in Druyan's honor by its discoverer Eleanor F. Helin. In a 2020 interview with "Skeptical Inquirer", Druyan discussed 4970 Druyan and the asteroid named after her late husband, saying that 4970 Druyan is in a "wedding ring orbit" around the Sun with 2709 Sagan. Druyan was presented with a plaque on Sagan's sixtieth birthday, which is inscribed: "Asteroid 2709 Sagan in eternal companion orbit with asteroid 4970 Druyan, symbolic of their love and admiration for each other." In November 2006, Druyan was a speaker at "". In January 2007, she was a juror at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, responsible for selecting the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for films about science and technology.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.