Will Eisner (19 page)

Eisner was especially pleased that he’d been able to tell the story with only minimal involvement of the Spirit. This was the type of story that had enthralled him as a boy, when he’d steal away and read pulp magazines on the sly or study the short stories of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, or Ambrose Bierce and marvel at how much could be said, in such an entertaining way, in so little space. The Spirit’s appearance in the story was only to satisfy the Sunday comics readers. “You didn’t need The Spirit there,” Eisner said of his presence in “Gerhard Shnobble.” “It could have been somebody else.”

Eisner could make light of the idea of his reducing his main character’s role to that of a walk-on in “Gerhard Shnobble” and other
Spirit
stories.

“I guess I could be classified as having created the world’s first useless hero.”

Never content to settle in with a single feature in the late forties, Eisner began to look for other comics options to explore. He was creatively restless, ready to pounce on the next idea.
The Spirit
had its own boundaries and audience, which was fine on a week-to-week basis; the fast pace of producing new episodes satisfied both the feature’s readers and its artists’ creative drives. But it wasn’t enough. Eisner stayed busy developing new projects and pitching ideas, most not advancing beyond the preliminaries of an idea and some rough pencils. Eisner pitched a few of these, such as
Sears, Roebuck Comics
and
Trade Name Comics
, books designed as giveaway promotional items for retail stores, but they never reached fruition. The businessman in Eisner told him that he had the ideas and staff to handle a wider variety of comics, ranging from kids’ stories to work directed toward specialized audiences. His experience with
Army Motors
had convinced him that there was a large, untapped market for comics that did more than entertain.

All this led to the 1948 founding of American Visuals, a company that would put out a line of Eisner’s own comics and explore other commercial and educational comics possibilities. Planned titles for the comic book line included
Baseball Comics
,
Kewpies
,
The Adventures of Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy
, and
John Law
. Not one of them enjoyed even a hint of success.

You didn’t have to search far for answers for why these comics didn’t work.
Kewpies
, the comic book adventures of characters based on the famous Rosie O’Neill characters, was too attached to a fad—and geared to consumers not inclined to buy comic books—to stand a chance on the market. Eisner undoubtedly hoped they would appeal to the same readership that followed the Walt Disney cartoon characters, and to simulate this, Eisner hired former Disney artist Lee J. Ames to do the art. One issue of the comic came out, did poorly at the marketplace, and
Kewpies
disappeared.

Baseball Comics
suffered a similar single-issue fate. Written by Jules Feiffer, with artwork by Eisner and Tex Blaisdell,
Baseball Comics
followed the exploits of Rube Rooky, a talented but naive baseball phenom that Eisner hoped would catch the public’s fancy similar to the way Ham Fisher’s
Joe Palooka
had reached a large readership twenty years earlier. It didn’t. The first issue bombed on the newsstand, and the title was discontinued. A second issue had been planned, written, and drawn, but it wasn’t published until 1991, when Kitchen Sink Press resurrected the two books as part of its reprint operations. More than four decades after publishing the first issue, Eisner still seemed befuddled about the comic book’s failure.

“
Baseball Comics
was a specialized comic book, a book devoted to one topic,” he told Kitchen Sink editor Dave Schreiner. “Such books sold well in the pulp magazine field, and I didn’t think there was any reason it couldn’t work in comics.”

The
Nubbin
and
John Law
comics, inextricably connected from the onset, had a longer history. Originally conceived to be a daily comic strip,
Nubbin
went nowhere. Eisner then thought he might be able to create another ready-print, Sunday newspaper insert similar to
The Spirit
, with
Nubbin
as the feature story every week and the
John Law
story to be included, much the way
Lady Luck
and
Mr. Mystic
had rounded out the original
Spirit
comic book supplement. Newspapers weren’t interested in Nubbin, an orphaned shoeshine boy in the tradition of
Little Orphan Annie
, or John Law, a pipe-smoking, eye-patch-wearing detective with an unmistakable resemblance to the Spirit. Finally, Eisner considered just converting the insert idea into a monthly comic book before ultimately deciding to give each character his own book. Neither got off the ground. Eisner eventually converted the
John Law
stories into
Spirit
entries, though this was more a matter of his hating to see work go to waste than any great value they held.

Eisner lost a bundle producing his own line of comics, although American Visuals enjoyed success in other endeavors, as when the company produced one-off public service titles such as
The Sad Case of Waiting-Room Willie
and
A Medal for Bowzer
, with Eisner writing the scripts and doing the covers and Klaus Nordling, one of his shop’s old standbys, taking the interior art. These books, though nothing special in terms of art or story, would serve as templates for a career waiting around the corner. Eisner, tiring of
The Spirit
even as the feature was reaching its zenith, had found his new direction, one that would take him away from entertainment and into instruction, giving him the opportunity to pioneer an entirely different brand of comics.

chapter seven

A N N

He said, “She’s a very nice girl.” I said, “My mother likes nice girls. I don’t like nice girls.”

A
s restless as he could be creatively, Will Eisner preferred rock-solid stability in his life away from the office. To say that he didn’t change readily would be an understatement. On the day he celebrated his thirty-second birthday, he was still living with his parents, brother, and sister, his daily routine alternating between work and family, just as it had been before the war. He still contributed to his family’s financial welfare, assisting whenever necessary with the rent and bills. He’d even helped with his sister Rhoda’s college tuition, assuring that she would obtain the degree he’d never have. He wasn’t wealthy, but he was very comfortable. Ever the child of the Depression, he guarded his money carefully, always aware that in his line of work prosperity could disappear very quickly and with no warning. His social life had slowed to a crawl shortly after the war, when his relationship with the young woman from Detroit had fallen apart, victim of distance and Fannie Eisner’s disapproval of her son’s dating a Gentile. As far as Eisner was concerned, this was okay: American Visuals was progressing steadily, and
The Spirit
, although not as compelling to Eisner as it had once been, remained a steady, reassuring presence. Eisner’s priorities, like those of any serious artist, began with his work.

Eisner looked forward to spending the extended 1949 Labor Day weekend on a brief vacation in Maine. He and a friend, Arthur Strassburger, made arrangements to drive to Camp Mingo in Kezar Falls, where they planned to relax, enjoy a few drinks, and, in Eisner’s case, maybe pick up a local woman for a holiday fling. Eisner looked forward to his time away from the city.

Their plans changed abruptly when Strassburger called Eisner and asked if he’d be willing to give a young woman named Ann Weingarten a lift to another town in Maine. Eisner was immediately suspicious. The town wasn’t anywhere near their destination, and from what he could surmise from this and subsequent calls, Strassburger’s request was a formality; his friend had already consented to giving the woman a ride.

“Did you promise her?” Eisner pressed.

“Sort of,” Strassburger answered sheepishly.

It turned out that Strassburger was interested in Ann Weingarten’s younger sister, Jane, and his invitation to take Ann to Maine was spur-of-the-moment. Arthur and Jane had been sitting on a couch in the living room one day when Ann walked in and mentioned that she was hoping to visit her older sister, Susan, and her two young boys, Allan and Carl, aged five and two, respectively. Susan, seven and a half years older than Ann, had been widowed very young when her husband had a heart attack, and she and her sons were spending the summer in Maine. “Susan and I were very close,” Ann would remember. “We were much more alike in tastes and things like that than Jane and I.

“Anyway, Jane was sitting in the living room with Arthur, and I happened to walk in. We started to talk and I said, ‘I’d love to go up and see Susan over Labor Day.’ Arthur said, ‘Oh, this friend and I are going to Maine, and we’ll be glad to give you a lift.’ Arthur then called Will and said, ‘You want to give some girl a lift up to Maine?’ and Will said, ‘No, I don’t want to give some girl a lift up to Maine.’ Arthur kept calling him and pushing him, and Will finally said, ‘Okay, okay.’ He was a good friend.”

None of this appealed to Eisner, who suddenly saw his boys’ weekend out turning into something much more tame and domesticated than he’d bargained for. He tried unsuccessfully to pawn her off on a friend, Jerry Gropper, who didn’t know her any better than he did but who was driving up that same weekend. Gropper turned him down, using the transparently lame excuse that he didn’t want to drive his new car over 35 mph until he’d broken it in properly. Eisner was stuck.

The trip went much better than either Will or Ann could have predicted. After a rocky start that found Eisner silent and sulky, Eisner’s mood lightened considerably and he regaled his two passengers with stories and jokes. He was still in a rush to reach Holyoke, Massachusetts, where they planned to spend the night at the Roger Smith Hotel, a YMCA-like facility, before completing their trip the next day. They didn’t stop for anything to eat, and by the time they reached the hotel, Ann, who had gone straight from work to Eisner’s, was famished.

She also found herself attracted to Eisner. He was six years her senior and very unlike the young men she was accustomed to dating. He was sophisticated, not stuck on himself, good-looking, mature—and funny. As she would remember, she laughed heartily throughout the drive, and this, in turn, loosened him up and ultimately made him notice her. “I was having a marvelous time, and Will said that’s what did it: I laughed at all of his jokes.”

When they arrived in Holyoke, Arthur ran ahead and, for the sake of appearances, made certain that Ann had a room on a separate floor. The three then went their separate ways, Ann figuring that she wouldn’t see either of the two men before the following morning, when they started out for the remainder of their trip to Maine. Although she was still hungry, Ann intended to clean up and turn in for the night.

“I was hot and tired,” she recalled, “and I was starting to get undressed, and the phone rang. It was Arthur. He said, ‘Will and I are downstairs in the bar, having a drink. Would you like to join us?’ I got dressed very fast and came down, and we had a very good time. By the time we got to my sister’s place, the boys had had a good time, too, and they stayed overnight there before they went on.”

Eisner rarely spoke in detail about meeting his future wife, so it’s impossible to say if he was trying to attract her attention with all his stories and jokes, first on the drive and later at Ann’s sister place, where, as Ann remembered, he was also the life of the party. It must have been obvious that he was interested, because he instigated Arthur’s call to Ann and the invitation for drinks. At one point Arthur asked him, “You like her, don’t you?”

Eisner answered coyly, “She’s okay.”

Ann, on the other hand, wasn’t about to let this one get away without at least one formal date. When she returned to New York, she called Arthur, and under the guise of wanting to call and thank Eisner for the ride, she asked for Eisner’s number. She also learned from Arthur that they had taken a young woman named Margot back to New York when they returned.

“When I got him on the phone, I said, ‘Hi, Will, this is Margot,’” Ann recalled with a laugh. “But Arthur had forgotten to tell me that Margot had a German accent. Will played along, and he finally said, ‘Ann, what are you doing Saturday night?’ And that was the beginning.”

To that point, Eisner had said very little about what he did for a living. As Ann would learn, this was not at all unusual. Decades later, after her husband’s death, Ann hosted a special screening of a documentary on Eisner at an auditorium on the grounds where she and her husband lived, and many of their acquaintances were startled by the extent of Eisner’s fame. “We knew what he did,” they told Ann, “but he never talked about it. We never knew he was famous. He never talked about his acclaim and how he had an award named after him.”

“He just didn’t talk about it,” she said.

Not that it would have mattered in those early days. Ann couldn’t draw and she had no interest in comics. In fact, she didn’t even see Will’s studio until after they were married, and she wouldn’t read one of his
Spirit
stories until they had been married for more than twenty years. They connected through their interest in other arts. Both enjoyed music, ballet, movies, and theater, and their dates almost always began with dinner, which, Ann recalled, was something she wasn’t accustomed to. They spent a lot of time just talking, learning more about each other.

Their backgrounds couldn’t have differed more. Ann’s father, Melville D. Weingarten, was a successful stockbroker with a Manhattan firm on Fifth Avenue and a branch office in Fordham. His first wife, Susan’s mother, died in 1918 in the flu epidemic, and he remarried Ann and Jane’s mother, Nanette, a couple of years later. Ann, along with her parents and sisters, lived what Ann described as a “Park Avenue lifestyle,” very social, wanting for very little, with the girls attending the right schools. Ann wasn’t impressed by it. By her own admission, she was a bookish tomboy, upsetting her mother because she wasn’t the little girl of her times, playing with dolls and dressing in frilly clothing. She attended several different schools, including a boarding school, but the best of her education came from her own explorations in the books she read and the museums she visited. She balked when her father enrolled her at Barnard, where she managed to make it through a year before refusing to go back. She then attended secretarial school, more to satisfy her frustrated father than out of any real interest, but it proved to be more beneficial than she could have guessed: she found a job as a secretary, which put her in touch with much less privileged people than she’d grown up around—co-workers with whom she soon became friends.

“I saw a different part of life,” she said. “These were different kinds of people, different than the people I had come in contact with through my family. I became friendly with them. I remember being friendly with a girl from a very large Irish Catholic family. We would go to the cafeteria there in the building where we worked, and she would be very careful to spend only fifteen cents—three nickels—in the Automat. She had to give money from her job to help support her family, and this was an eye-opener for me. I became very conscious of never spending more than fifteen cents, because I didn’t want her to think anything.”

Shortly before meeting Eisner, she had taken a job as an administrative assistant in Paramount’s New York offices, working in the advertising department for the film company, doing everything from writing business letters to running errands. The job led to a
Spirit
episode that might have tested another relationship. Paramount had just released
Samson and Delilah
, a film greeted by critical derision. Will and Ann had attended a private Paramount screening of the movie, and Eisner hadn’t thought much of the film, either. His
Spirit
story “Sammy and Delilah,” a send-up of the movie, was unappreciated by the Paramount publicists. Fortunately for Ann, who was still relatively new on the job, her relationship with Eisner was unknown to her co-workers.

She was in her office the day after the
Spirit
story appeared in the papers when she heard a disruption in another office. “I was sitting at my desk and I heard screaming between the head of the department and my boss,” she said. “They’re screaming, ‘We’ll sue the son of a bitch.’ They said something about Will Eisner, and of course my ears perked up.” When she realized what all the shouting was about, she stole away to a phone booth, where she could talk without being overheard. “I got on the phone and called Will. ‘They’re going to sue you,’ I said. He said, ‘That’s good.’”

As Eisner saw it, the publicity generated by a Paramount Pictures lawsuit could only work in his favor.

“They claimed we defamed the movie,” he said. “I was rubbing my hands, saying it was great news. Ann said, ‘What do you mean, great news?’ I said, ‘Just think if they sue me—think of all the publicity I’ll get.’ I was sure I’d win.

“During the two or three weeks that followed, Ann and I were brought closer together. I kept hoping they would sue. I kept telling the syndicate to get ready for a big burst of publicity, but ultimately, they didn’t sue. They came to their senses. But this story has always been regarded by Ann and me as a very significant one because the incident occurred during our romance. I guess I was a little overwhelmed by her concern for me.”

Their relationship moved along quickly. Eisner proposed by the end of the year, only a few months after their Labor Day introduction. Ann’s parents, the Weingartens, liked their daughter’s future husband, although both had reservations about his background and intentions. They had little use for Sam and Fannie Eisner, who seemed like peasants compared with the people with whom they usually associated; and although Eisner may have made a success of his career given
The Spirit
’s syndication in all those newspapers, the livelihood it afforded him was small-time next to the kind of money earned by a stockbroker. Ann’s mother, who’d spent years dealing with her daughter’s rebellious streak, decided that Eisner was acceptable if it meant getting Ann out of the house.

It was different with Ann’s father.

“At first, my father was suspicious that Will was after my money—which I didn’t have,” Ann remembered, “and he wasn’t going to give us any, either. We found out later that my father had Will investigated. One of his customers was in the magazine or newspaper business, and my father had him look Will up. Was he a reputable person? Did he steal? Whatever you looked into. I was furious when I found out, but Will said, ‘Why not? Let him look me up. I haven’t done anything bad.’

“After we got married, my father went to Will’s office one day and said, ‘This is what you do?’ He was very gruff. Will showed him around the office. My father said, ‘Don’t you want to be in a gentleman’s business?’ And Will said, ‘No, I’m happy. If I’m going to lose money, I’m going to lose it my way.’ When Will came home and related this to me, I said, ‘If you had said yes, I think we would have had a divorce immediately.’”

The were married on June 15, 1950, at the Temple Immanuel in New York City, with a reception at the Harmony Club attended by three hundred people. Ann had wanted a much smaller affair, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. He was going to send his daughter off properly, with his most highly regarded clients in attendance. There was great food, spirits, music, and dancing. Neither bride nor groom could dance three good steps—each accused the other of having no rhythm—but that didn’t matter. They had a good time.