June 16, 1959. For many, this is just another date on the calendar, but for those of us who know a little bit about superhero pop culture, this is also the day that George Reeves, most famous as TV’s Superman and that guy who had two lines at the beginning of Gone with the Wind, was found dead of a single gunshot wound. The death was ruled a suicide—the result of depression coupled with a night of heavy drinking—but nevertheless remains a source of debate and intrigue even today, and as the owner of a superhero blog, it wouldn’t be right for me to let the anniversary of this tragic event go by unobserved.
Now, I’ve gotta be honest… I never watched The Adventures of Superman. I saw the pilot way back when, and I’ve seen History Channel documentaries that mention it, but I really am not all that familiar with the series beyond that. (Though yes, I’ve seen Hollywoodland. No, I don’t want to talk about it.) Still, I recognize the fact that, for many people, George Reeves is not just a cherished childhood (and adulthood) memory but also a beloved introduction to the world of superheroes. So today, we’re going to discuss the one George Reeves Superman-related thing that I do have: his guest appearance on the sixth season of I Love Lucy.
Now in case Captain America or anyone else who has been frozen in a giant ice block since before 1951 is reading this, I Love Lucy is generally placed on “greatest sitcom ever” lists at either number one or number two, with some little series called Seinfeld taking the other spot. But we don’t care about Seinfeld. We care about I Love Lucy, the title character of which is Lucy Ricardo, faux-redheaded housewife, mother, and all-around screw-up. In this episode, she’s planning a birthday party for her son, Little Ricky, but oh noes! Best frenemy Caroline Appleby is planning her son Stevie’s party for the exact same day! AND she has hired a clown, a magician, and puppeteers to entertain! How will Lucy convince the kiddies to come to Ricky’s party instead of Stevie’s? Good old fashioned super-bribery, that’s how!
So yeah, pretty basic plot with lots of conniving and trickery, but you can’t exactly knock a formula that provided awesome ratings for six years straight. And this plot in particular gives us the chance to chat a bit about Reeves, his career up until this point, and why rumors about his death persist to this day. But first, some back story.
The Adventures of Superman debuted in 1952, about a year after Lucy. It was made on the cheap but still proved enough of a hit for the producers to switch from black-and-white to color by 1954, making it one of the first programs to do so. The Wikipedia article seems to indicate that the show was relatively serious at first but devolved into camp at about the halfway point of what would end up being a six season run. At the time of Reeves’ guest appearance on I Love Lucy, his own program was slogging through a painfully campy fifth season. Evidently, however, it was still popular enough with the kiddies to rate a guest appearance on TV’s most popular program.
Getting back to the plot at hand, “Lucy and Superman” really picks up when Lucy’s husband Ricky conveniently remembers that he met George Reeves while making a movie out in Hollywood during an earlier season. And since Reeves JUST HAPPENS to be in New York making appearances at a local mall (not as implausible as it sounds; Reeves often made extra money via public appearances), Ricky decides to see if he can arrange for Reeves to pop by his son’s party that weekend. Lucy, counting her chickens before they’re hatched, immediately calls up everyone she knows—including Caroline—to tell them that Superman will be attending Little Ricky’s party. Caroline admits defeat and agrees to switch Stevie’s party to another day.
This will not backfire in any way, shape or form.
Thing is, though, the name George Reeves never once crosses the characters’ lips. They do credit him at the end, but only as “George Reeves, star of the Superman series,” not “George Reeves as Superman,” and the rest of the time he’s just “Superman.” Supposedly this was done so that any children watching wouldn’t get upset at the idea that their hero was a middle-aged actor in a costume. That should give us some idea of just how much ‘50s kids must have (hero) worshipped Reeves-as-Superman to the point where the secret of his nonexistence was safeguarded almost as zealously as that of Santa Claus. It also gives us an idea of just how closely identified with Superman Reeves had become.
Anyway, big surprise—turns out that “Superman” has to catch a flight to another state and won’t be able to attend Little Ricky’s party after all. Lucy, not wanting to disappoint her son, immediately decides upon the MOST LOGICAL COURSE OF ACTION AVAILABLE.
It all goes south predictably quickly. Lucy goes out on the window ledge outside her apartment so that she can pretend to come flying in like Superman would. Due to only vaguely believable circumstances that could only happen to Lucy and involve a guest-starring
Oh joy of joys! The day is saved, and all of the kids are very happy they came to Little Ricky’s party instead of Stevie’s, including Stevie. This apparently held true in real life as well; Keith Thibodeaux (Little Ricky) has said that Reeves was every bit as great to work with as a kid could hope, even bringing little Superman outfits for all of the kids on set. It’s almost enough to make a viewer believe that “Superman” really would cancel his flight to avoid disappointing the children who loved and believed in him so.
The kids go home happy (both in the show and in real life too, I am sure) and Ricky is about to declare the party a rousing success when Ethel suddenly remembers that somebody-or-other is out on the ledge. With some very friendly pigeons. In… well, you know. This leads to the episode’s famous ending, where Superman finds out that Ricky has been married to Lucy for fifteen years.
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| "And they call me Superman!" |
As funny as this
is, it leaves me mildly confused. If
this is supposed to be George Reeves slipping out of character, then the
previous scene where he is seen handily shoving a piano out of the way when
Ricky was clearly struggling to budge it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. On the other hand, if this is the real Superman,
why would they let him say something that bluntly rude (no matter how deserved)? Then again, I haven’t seen the show, so maybe
he had moments of snarkiness there too. Plus,
Superman has been known to do some questionable things so he can mess with
people. Like in Superman #700 when he does Dick Grayson’s homework just to screw with Bruce, who was sure
(and correct) that Dick hadn’t done it.
We all would have done the same. Be honest.
“Lucy and Superman” aired in 1957, and by that point, both I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Superman were pretty much on the way out; the former was off the air by year’s end, and the latter was cancelled in April 1958. The only difference was that, by this point in their respective careers, Lucille Ball was considered the Queen of Comedy, while George Reeves was considered Superman And Nothing Else. The moment Lucy went off the air, Ball got straight to work on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, which lasted three years. She would star in two more highly successful sitcoms in addition to a truckload of guest appearances and TV movies before her death in 1989. While we can never know for sure just what George Reeves’ post-Superman career would have looked like, all you have to do to make an educated guess is look at the fates of other former “superheroes.” Clayton Moore? Typecast. Adam West? Typecast. Van Williams? Take a guess. All three of them (and two-thirds of their sidekicks) will forever be associated with the hero they played and were/are forced to either:
1: revolve their entire careers around that one role…
Who was that masked man? He was that masked man. Forever.
2: attempt to distance themselves by starring in the kind of dreck that kept Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the air before resigning themselves to 1)…
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| Servo: "I was bored. Whaddaya want?" |
Or 3: get out of the acting business altogether.
Pictured: Green
Hornet Communications Company Owner and Part-Time Sheriffs’ Deputy
But more important than that was the fact that Reeves himself did not believe that he’d ever get to play a role without tights ever again. The only question remaining is: how did Reeves feel about this? And the answer, predictably, seems to be a complicated one. Like I said earlier, Reeves went out of his way to be nice to the kids that he met, and Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen alongside Reeves’ Clark Kent, remembered only one occasion when Reeves expressed negative feelings about playing/being the Man of Steel. Even though this is just one incident, it does show that Reeves had, at the minimum, moments of frustration with being so closely associated with Superman. Whether Reeves felt this way all of the time and just didn’t say so around Larson, or if he only got frustrated with his most famous role at certain times is a question we can never answer, but Reeves almost certainly felt some measure of resentment towards Superman.
For what it’s worth, Larson has stated that he believes Reeves’ death to be a suicide. It’s also worth noting that Larson and Noel Neill (a.k.a. Lois Lane) were both horribly typecast and have appeared in next to nothing since their Superman days, which just adds evidence to the already very obvious pile that Reeves would have shared a similar fate had he lived.
Neill, incidentally, seems to corroborate Larson’s opinions on Reeves and claims that Reeves was actually quite pleased with future prospects. CBS (which aired both Superman and Lucy) was reconsidering their show’s cancellation; between that and frequent appearances as Superman—not to mention the thought of possibly directing future episodes of the show—Reeves was optimistic and certainly not the picture of depression and despair painted by the press. She stops short of saying he was murdered, only that “I just don’t know what happened.” But of course, conspiracy theories being what they are, I’m sure there are quite a few people who have translated that statement as “IT WAS TOTALLY MURDER.” This perception was not helped by people like George’s mother Helen, who never accepted his death was a suicide, and Edward Lozzi, a publicist who insisted that (a by then Alzheimer’s-stricken) Toni Mannix, an ex-girlfriend of Reeves’ with mob ties, had confessed in the late nineties to murdering the actor. But Lozzi never bothered showing anything even remotely like proof and so no one believes him except those who want to.
Final thoughts? Well, “Lucy and Superman” is a whole lot of fun and, for me, really shows everyone at their best. The dialogue is great, the facial expressions are great (seriously, everyone on this program was a genius at facial expressions), and even the characters are great. See, sometimes I get a bit annoyed with sitcom characters for acting like selfish jerks just to be “funny” or get the plot going, and I Love Lucy is certainly no exception. But here, there’s nothing but good characterizations and genuinely funny jokes throughout. Just look at Lucy’s motivations—she may be a bragging nutball, but when push comes to shove and it looks like Superman won’t be coming to the party, she never once mentions what Caroline’s reaction to the news will be. Her only concern is her son’s feelings, and that’s why she nearly gets herself killed pretending to be the Man of Steel, not because she’s afraid of losing face with Caroline. That doesn’t make her any less insane, of course. It just means she’s insane for all the right reasons.
Not only is this
episode a thoroughly enjoyable bit of wackiness from one of America’s most
beloved sitcoms, it also serves as a perfect example of Reeves’ career in the
late fifties. To get away from his most
famous role was as simple and as plausible as breaking free of the grip of
Superman himself. But as much as people may derive a kind of
schadenfreude from debating the circumstances of Reeves’ death, the truth of
what went on in his room so early that almost-summer morning died the moment he
did. And regardless of the rumors and
speculations, the facts and the fictions, one incontrovertible fact remains: on
the morning of June 16, 1959, the world woke up to hundreds of headlines all announcing
the same startling truth:
Considering all the trouble I Love Lucy went through to maintain the illusion of Superman, I can only imagine how terrible, confusing, and frightening it must have been for children to read such a headline and to realize that their idol—the figure they knew was invincible and would always be there to save the day—was mortal after all. And yet, even then, even after the end, the press and the public did not mourn the death of George Reeves; they mourned the death of “TV’s Superman.”
Next Time: Starring Peter Parker, the world’s oldest and stupidest prodigy! Also, Gonzo gets through all of Ben’s scenes without making a single cowboy reference.
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