Here's a brief profile of Merwin Foard, who has the thankless job of Broadway standby, currently covering two roles (Nathan Lane's and one other) in The Addams Family. I saw Mr. Foard go on in place of Brian Stokes Mitchell in the 1999 Broadway revival of Kiss Me Kate and he was terrific. (So was Stokes. I saw both of them.) I also saw Foard in the non-standby role of Richard Henry Lee in the 1997 Broadway revival of 1776 and he stole the evening. Please, somebody...give this man a regular lead in something.
Forty years ago today, I attended my first comic book convention. It convened at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City...a building which is still hosting comic conventions. I've stayed there a few times since 1970 and it hasn't, sad to say, changed all that much. (It was built in 1919 as the Hotel Pennsylvania. It changed ownership in 1948 to become the Statler Hilton and later went through another name or two before reverting to the Hotel Pennsylvania. Every year or two lately, they announce it will soon be demolished and replaced by something bigger and better...but it's still right where it's always been. It also still has the same phone number it's had since the thirties when seven-digit phone numbers were introduced: PEnnsylvania 6-5000.)
Perhaps you're wondering why, since I've lived in Southern California all my life, my first comic book convention wasn't a San Diego Con. That's because forty years ago today, there hadn't been any comic conventions in San Diego...or anywhere else in this state. The first one in San Diego, which was called the Golden State Comic-Con, was held August 1-3 of 1970. It became an annual affair which has since morphed into the Comic-Con International.
A few days before the 1970 New York Con, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I flew to New York and checked into the Statler Hilton. A day or two later, our friend Mike Royer flew back and joined us in a hotel room barely large enough for one of us. We were there about ten days, during which we attended the con. Between that and our visits to comic book company offices, I — a lifelong comic book reader — managed to meet a pretty high percentage of the writers, artists and editors whose work I'd been following for years.
Our first day in Manhattan, Steve and I spent the day at the offices of DC Comics, which were then located in an austere building at 909 Third Avenue. Among the folks I met in person that day were Julius Schwartz, Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano, Nelson Bridwell, Joe Kubert, Murray Boltinoff, Sol Harrison, Neal Adams, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Robert Kanigher, Murphy Anderson, Gerry Conway, Denny O'Neil, Mary Skrenes, Mark Hanerfeld, Sal Amendola and Byron Preiss. Julie Schwartz took us to lunch at a restaurant where the food wasn't very good but the waitresses wore short skirts and would bend over often.
The next day, we had an 11 AM appointment to go to Marvel and meet Stan Lee and the folks in the famed Bullpen. Around 10, someone called from the office and said Stan had an emergency appointment and like it or not, we were rescheduled for 2 PM. With several hours to kill, Steve and I went wandering around New York and something amazing happened at the corner of Madison Avenue and E. 52nd Street.
We were touristing about when we heard someone yell, "Mi amigos!" We looked and there, having spotted us from across the intersection, was famed cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. This was many years before Sergio and I became good friends and frequent collaborators. I think I'd met him twice in Los Angeles and wouldn't have dreamed he'd remember me at all, let alone recognize me across a busy New York street. We scurried over to say hello to him and explained we were in town for the upcoming convention and to visit comic book company offices. He said, "Are you going to visit MAD Magazine?" We said it hadn't occurred to us but yes, certainly, we'd love to visit the MAD offices. "Where are they?"
He pointed to the building we were standing in front of and said, "Right here! Come...I will give you a tour." As we walked into the lobby, I held the door for a little, sad-faced man who was walking out with an art portfolio. I later realized it was Wally Wood.
Sergio took us upstairs gave us a grand tour. We met William Gaines, Al Feldstein, Nick Meglin, Jerry DeFuccio, John Putnam and others of the Usual Gang of Idiots. Artist Angelo Torres was there that day, dropping off his very first assignment for the magazine. Production Manager Leonard Brenner let me hold and examine the original art to the first issue of MAD. I remember Sergio saying, "You may look at it but you cannot keep it." And I replied, "Hey, if I had a gun, I could keep it!"
That afternoon, we went to the Marvel offices, which were located at 635 Madison. The official address of the company was 625 Madison but the comic book division was squirreled away — hidden in a futile attempt to avoid fannish invasions — in a building down the street. In surprisingly-cramped offices, we met not only Stan Lee but also John Romita, Marie Severin, Roy Thomas, Larry Lieber, John Verpoorten, Herb Trimpe, Frank Giacoia and Bill Everett. The following day, Steve and I spent a few hours with Steve Ditko in his studio.
The high point of the trip — the convention — commenced on Friday, July 3, forty years ago today. That morning, I met in person, my pen-pal of several years, Tony Isabella. We went to breakfast with Al Williamson, Dick Giordano and Frank McLaughlin and spent the day meeting other folks in the comic industry, as well as fellow fans I knew through correspondence and the fanzine network. The latter group included Martin Pasko, Alan Brennert, Gary Groth, Martin Greim, Guy Lillian and Bob Beerbohm. Over the three days of the con, I also met Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Jim Steranko, Joe Sinnott, Gene Colan, Archie Goodwin, Tom Sutton and a few dozen others. It was a three-day conference but so much happened and so much was new and exciting that it felt like three weeks. Today, a four-day con in San Diego feels like it's over in about four hours.
That con and many others in New York were run by a gentleman named Phil Seuling who, for reasons I explained here, was very important in the history of the American comic book. Since then, I have probably attended somewhere around 200 comic book conventions, including many that were larger and more professionally-run. Not to take anything away from any of them but just as there's something special about your first love or your first kiss or your first anything, there's something special about your first comic book convention. At least there was for a guy like me. It was like landing on a distant planet, realizing it was where you belonged and instantly fitting right in. I later worked with many of the people I've namedropped here and some are still good friends.
I'm sure you had some days in your past when you could almost feel your life changing for the better. Mine changed that week in New York...but it really changed forty years ago today, high atop the Statler Hilton.
My major reaction to the Al Gore sex revelations (or lack thereof) is that it really doesn't matter to me, and it shouldn't matter to anybody who is not directly affected. Frankly, the only time that revelations about a public figure's private life makes a bit of difference to me is when it involves hypocrisy. Al Gore has never made any representations of being sexually faithful, or wanting other people to be so. John Edwards, on the other hand, made a big deal of his strong marriage with his wife, so it was relevant with her. I found it somewhat creepy how the press landed on Paul Ryan for daring to have sex, and with his wife of all people, but have little problem with publicizing the records involving Larry Craig's conduct in propositioning an officer for gay sex (or doing an incredibly good imitation of it) while maintaining a solid voting record against gay rights.
I think I disagree with this. Al Gore is being accused of doing something which is (a) a crime and (b) extremely stupid. If it were just a matter of cheating on one's wife...well, that isn't a crime and that shouldn't matter to us. But when a public official breaks the law, that is a matter of public concern. If Gore were accused of robbing a liquor store at gunpoint, would you say it wasn't any of our business? Or that it was only our business if he had been crusading against the robbing of liquor stores so his actions therefore constituted hypocrisy?
And for emphasis: I am absolutely not suggesting Gore is guilty. I am dismayed at how many folks have jumped to convict or exonerate in a case about which they know darn near nothing. I'm also generally sympathetic to Gore because he seems to me to hold the record for having his enemies make up bogus stories about him that were then sold as fact to a large swath of the American public. This and other accusations about him may be true but there seems to be a different standard for the guy...a great willingness out there to instantly believe any negative thing about him.
If (note the "if") there is actual proof that he molested the lady, that's a public issue. Everyone can decide for themselves how much weight they wish to give it in their consideration of Al Gore but it's not the same thing as marital infidelity. It also may be our concern if we invest emotion and loyalty and donations in a leader who then does something as outright reckless as that. My disappointment in John Edwards was all about that. In the Post-Monica Era, anyone who aspires to public office, or tries to lead in other ways as Gore has, has to know such things do come out and your opponents milk them for all they're worth. To screw around is to play Russian Roulette...and when they lose, they take our cause with them.
Scott Marinoff told me about this. The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California recently released nearly 100,000 pages of presidential records and eighty hours of videotaped interviews relating to the 37th president of these United States. Included in the batch was this letter (PDF file) penned on February 21, 1973. In it, John D. Ehrlichman, who was then the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs wrote to cartoonist Garry Trudeau to request the original art to a Doonesbury Sunday page — the one for February 11, 1973.
It's one of those strips in which every panel is the same long shot of the White House and we "hear" voices coming from within — in this case, both ends of a phone conversation between Richard M. Nixon and his wife Pat, who are in different sections of the building. Nixon says to his spouse, "I have this nagging feeling I've forgotten to do something today" and he asks her to read him a copy of a schedule he left in the pocket of his other suit.
She reads it to him and there's three hours alloted for one foreign affairs meeting and two hours for another and so on...until she gets down to "Domestic Affairs — 4:00 - 4:15" and Nixon cries, "That's it!"
That's the page Ehrlichman, who was in charge of meeting with Nixon about Domestic Affairs, wanted to hang on his wall along with other comic strip originals he owned, including a Pogo and a Broom Hilda. There is no information as to whether he received it and no info as to whether he later put any of his comic strip collection up in his cell. On April 30 of that year in connection with the Watergate scandal, Nixon requested and got the resignations of Ehrlichman and his fellow advisor H.R. Haldeman. On January 1, 1975, Ehrlichman, Haldeman and former Attorney General John Mitchell were convicted of multiple Watergate-related crimes and sent to prison for, in Ehrlichman's case, eighteen months.
There's also no information as to whether Mitchell ever requested the infamous Doonesbury strip for May 19, 1973 in which he was proclaimed as "Guilty, guilty, guilty." But I suspect not.
Mao Daichi is a popular Japanese stage actress who has often toured in productions over there of My Fair Lady. And I have to say that I'm a little puzzled as to how that show translates. Does Henry Higgins sing, "Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?" in a language other than English? If so, I would imagine some translator had to do a helluva conversion job. Anyway, here she is in a rehearsal hall somewhere performing one of Liza's numbers from the show...
July 2, 2010
