Seduction of the Innocent (2 page)

I am talking about funny books, kids.

The most popular entertainment medium of all, here in 1954. My city boasts twenty comics publishers putting out 6oo-some titles every month, selling eighty to one hundred million copies a week, reaching an audience larger than movies, TV, radio and magazines combined (they figure a comic book gets passed around or traded to six or more readers).

It’s an industry employing a thousand-plus writers, artists, editors, letterers and assorted spear carriers, men and women, white and Negro and what-have-you. It’s a form of storytelling that arrays newsstands with superhero fantasy and talking ducks, though those are outnumbered of late by monsters both supernatural and human, as well as cowboys and Indians, romance and war, and science fiction...even adaptations of classic literature (“Turn to page 345 in
Great Expectations,
class
—
Timmy, that’s page 16 in your
Classic Comics”).
The chief audience is kids but grown-ups indulge, too, especially veterans who learned to read portable funny books, bought at the PX, in the Second World War and more recently Korea.

Me, I work in that industry, albeit on the fringes. My name is Jack Starr, and I’m the vice president of the Starr Syndicate, where that more respectable brand of comics is sold to newspapers nationwide—the comic strip. As it happens, Starr is, of the various syndicates, the one most closely aligned with the comic book industry. I’ll tell you more about that in the pages to come, and about myself and my interesting boss, Maggie Starr, who happens to be my stepmother as well as the World’s Second Most Famous Striptease Artist (after Gypsy Rose Lee) (retired).

What’s important for you to keep in mind is how big, how popular the comic book industry is right now.

And how everybody and your Uncle Charlie wants to kill it.

What the hell... every murder mystery needs a victim....

Speaking of live television, I had a stake in a local show on WNBC,
The Barray Soiree.
Not that Steve Allen or even Howdy Doody had much to worry about, but the show— airing 10:30
PM
Monday nights, after the nationally aired
Robert Montgomery Presents
—was popular enough.

Harry Barray was a chatty disc jockey who made a mark doing on-air interviews with recording stars between platter spins. His NBT-FM radio show,
Sway with Barray,
had a decent following among borough-bound housewives taking a mid-afternoon beer or gin break.

Barray was alternately obnoxious and fawning—he was sort of Arthur Godfrey without the ukulele (or the talent)— and being even vaguely in business with this guy did nothing for my digestion.

Here’s the thing.
The Barray Soiree
was what they called a “remote,” a show broadcast not from a studio but a location. And Barray’s weekly location was a big cushy corner booth of a popular Manhattan restaurant, the Strip Joint, just a block and a half off Broadway on Forty-Second Street. The bar took up the front third of the long, narrow space, with its tan plaster walls with dark wood trim and glass and chrome. This fed into the restaurant itself, tables and new comfy tufted booths replacing the original wooden ones.

Maggie Starr and I owned the Strip Joint, but that was really just an afterthought. We owned the whole building, six stories otherwise devoted to the Starr Newspaper Syndication Company, a couple floors of which were my quarters and Maggie’s (hers on the fifth, mine on the third). A Chinese restaurant used to take up the main floor, but after Maggie found a fingernail in an egg roll, we reluctantly went into the restaurant business, more for her own dining convenience than an actual investment.

But the Strip Joint stayed solidly in the black, year after year, thanks to the chef Maggie imported from St. Louis and the simple, high-quality fare (best New York strip steak in, well, New York). The venue also benefitted from a wait staff consisting of gorgeous striptease artistes either between gigs or recently retired, a battalion of pulchritude in black tie, white shirt, and tuxedo pants.

Of course, more revealing looks at the lasses could be found in the bar area, where signed photos hung, usually as crooked as the leers of the male patrons studying them.

Elsewhere in the joint, comic strip characters rode the walls, courtesy of big-name cartoonists, encouraged by their usually absent hostess to contribute to the comic-strip ambience—mostly Starr Syndicate stuff, like Wonder Guy, Batwing and Mug O’Malley, but also Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, and Alley Oop. Mostly these were grease-pencil drawings done right on the plaster, but the back wall had framed original comic-strip artwork.

The stripping theme, both burlesque and funny page, had come to attract two very different crowds—a luncheon two-martini businessman group, keen on the waitresses; and a suppertime tourist trade, from honeymooning couples to vacationing families, here to enjoy the renowned comic-strip wallpaper. Well, maybe the occasional Dad had snookered Mom into coming for the latter when the former was the real draw.

But what do I know about it? I’m a bachelor. Thirty-three, six feet erect (so to speak), dark blue eyes, dark brown hair, pulling down five figures with no yen to share it with a wife or kids or anybody else.

I’m the vice president of Starr, but my chief role is trouble-shooter—I look out for the syndicate’s interests in the case of lawsuits, or when a cartoonist or columnist gets in a jam, or when a background check on prospective new talent is needed. This requires a private investigator’s license, and the State of New York seems fine with getting my sixty-buck yearly fee.

Maggie was my late father’s third and final showgirl wife. Major Simon Starr might have racked up more, but his heart attacked him before he could find a fourth showgirl to marry. If you’re wondering why I didn’t inherit the business, and why I wasn’t the president of the Starr Syndicate, that makes two of us.

Not really. The major knew I was what they used to call a ne’er-do-well. I majored in drinking and coeds in college, and did such a fine job of it, I flunked the hell out. I was an MP during the war, and spent enough time wrestling drunks to not want to be one anymore. For nine years now I’d been on the wagon. But who’s counting.

When the major made out his will, however, I was still a wastrel. There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore—still, till the Army straightened me out, that’s what I was. So when my old man left the lion’s share of his estate to Maggie, it came as no surprise. The only surprise was how effectively she moved from one kind of stripping to another.

Maggie, to tell you the truth, I felt not a whit of resentment toward. Even if she did own 75% of the Starr Syndicate (and this building and the Strip Joint) to my 25% (yeah, I know— who’s counting).

She was a great boss, if not always as warm as the gawkers used to get in her audiences back in her striptease days. Funny thing about that name “Starr”—when she married the major, that had already been her stage name (her real last name was Spillman). Maybe the major had been attracted to her in part because she came with her own monogrammed luggage and towels. Maybe not.

My stepmother, who I lusted after only in my most out-ofcontrol dreams, was not without eccentricities. She was, about half the time, a recluse. The Strip Joint even had a rear room she could sneak down to by way of her private elevator, and take meals when she was keeping out of the public eye.

Recently she had completed a six-month Broadway run as Libidia Von Stackpole in the musical version of Hal Rapp’s comic strip
Tall Paul
(not one of ours) (damnit), and was still at or anyway near her “fighting weight” of 118. She had a fully outfitted gym just off her office up on the fifth floor, and worked hard to stay appealing, even if she was no longer peeling.

Whenever she got up around 125—she had been as high as 135, and believe me, there was nothing really wrong with a pound of it—she went into full recluse mode. Not a foot out of the Starr Building, with a very restricted list of business associates allowed to meet with her in the office.

My guess was, after six months of strictly maintaining fighting weight due to the Broadway stint, she would fall off the wagon and before long get “fat and sloppy” (you know— maybe 130).

Right now, though, she was maybe 120 at most, a stunning woman just past forty who might have been thirty. She’d have looked even younger if she didn’t insist on her “full battle array,” which is to say endless fake eyelashes, heavy makeup over her natural girlish freckles, and a red mouth that Marilyn Monroe might say was overdoing it.

Past all that paint, she was a green-eyed natural beauty with bee-stung lips perfect for the Clara Bow/Betty Boop era of her rise as a teenage ecdysiast from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

At the moment, while I half-stood, half-sat at a stool at the bar, working on a rum and Coke (without the rum), trying not to wrinkle my gray Botany 500, Maggie was answering a question posed by Harry Barray. Her red hair (its color unknown in nature, unless you considered Lucille Ball nature) was brushing her shoulders, and her midnight-blue gown was clingy with her full bosom nicely on display. Eat your heart out, Faye Emerson.

They were seated in that corner booth, and you could barely see them past the bulky TV camera. Heavy micro-phones—three of them—were positioned around the linen-covered table, Maggie’s trademark red rose in a vase getting lost in the broadcast trappings. That extra mike indicated a third guest might be joining in.

But right now it was just Harry and Maggie.

Six months before, when the program began, the TV station had at its own expense wired the restaurant so that all the patrons—and tonight the Strip Joint was at least at its 150 capacity—could hear Barray and his guests during the live broadcast. These were not tourists, not on a Monday night, rather sophisticated, cliff-dwelling Manhattanites. And I fit right in.

“Yes,” Maggie said, in a rich, throaty contralto Bacall might well envy, “I’m aware that comic books are a big controversy right now. But I’d remind you, Harry, that I’m in the comic
strip
business.”

Barray, a big blond man with once-pleasant features that had assumed the puffy, acromegalic look of the heavy drinker, let out a cloud of cigarette smoke that Maggie politely backed away from. His nose, its redness concealed by pancake, seemed it might explode at any moment.

“But Maggie,” the disc jockey said, “your syndicate—the Starr Syndicate—aren’t you more closely associated with comic books than any other outfit in your field?”

He picked up a comic book with a particularly disgusting horror-themed cover from the prop pile resting nearby, and shook it at her like a warrant for her arrest.

Her smile seemed warm enough but I could feel the ice in those eyes as if it were clinking in my Coke.

“We syndicate
Wonder Guy.
The enthusiasm for supermen has faded somewhat, Harry, and not long ago we dropped a couple of the comic-book properties from our roster.”

He tossed the horror comic back on the pile as if disposing of a dead rat.
“Batwing? Amazonia
?”

“That’s right.”

“Those are two fairly controversial titles.”

“Are they? We never had any complaints from readers.”

His mouth was wide and thick-lipped and his smile was wet. “Well, Dr. Werner Frederick has stated...uh, you’re
familiar
with the good doctor?”

She nodded.

“Dr. Frederick, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book,
Ravage the Lambs,
labels the
Batwing
strip as perverse, saying there’s an unhealthy relationship between Batwing and Sparrow.”

She smiled. I knew she was wishing she could ask him to be more specific, and embarrass his ass; but a show biz pro like Maggie knew better than that. You behaved yourself on TV. Otherwise you were blacklisted like all those Commies hiding under Senator McCarthy’s bed.

She said, “Most parents would find that notion absurd, Harry. Like Wonder Guy, Batwing represents justice and fair play and even patriotism.”

He flashed a sly smile. “Aren’t you part
owner
of Americana Comics, Maggie?”

“My stepson Jack and I have some shares in the company. We wield no editorial influence.”

“But you get first crack at syndicating comic strip versions of Americana features?”

“Yes. With
Amazonia,
like
Batwing,
we did not have a large enough list of subscribing newspapers to keep it going. I wish we could have, because it’s one comic strip built around a strong, adventurous heroine, and I think young girls enjoy that, for a change.”

“Well, Dr. Frederick doesn’t agree.” Barray’s sly smile dissolved into a concerned fold in his pious mask. “He finds ...and I apologize to my audience for my frankness, but the doctor
is
a scientist...
sado-masochistic
elements in
Amazonia
.”

There were whips and chains in that strip, all right. Man, you did not want to get on the wrong side of that Amazonia doll.

“Harry, have you heard about the psychiatrist who was showing ink blot pictures to a patient, but when the psychiatrist asked the patient to tell him what he saw in those ink blots, the patient refused. ‘Is there something wrong?’ the psychiatrist asked. ‘Don’t look at me, doc!’ the patient said.
‘You’re
the one showing the dirty pictures!’”