THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701100663
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 78 lines
Actor George Reeves, who had been told early and falsely by his manipulative mother that his father had committed suicide with a gun to the head, endured a recurring nightmare.
He saw a man whose face seemed obscured by wire mesh, as if seen from behind a screen door. The man held a gun. Reeves would beg the man to leave him alone.
Then the man would laugh and fire the gun once, into the actor's face.
Very early on June 16, 1959, while his fiancee shared drinks with strangers in the living room of his small Benedict Canyon home above Beverly Hills, Calif., Reeves suffered a fatal gunshot to the head in the upstairs bedroom.
The gun was a well-oiled .30-caliber Luger kept on the dresser.
Reeves, 45, had starred on network television from 1951 to 1957 in ``The Adventures of Superman.''
Who shot the Man of Steel?
Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman (St. Martin's Press, 207 pp., $21.95) provides a couple of answers.
Authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, poets who divide their time between Virginia and New York City, send up a racy, literate, ironic read on the subject. They have engaged complex and intriguing show-biz material before, in A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant. Their ability to research, dish and turn a phrase like a cornering Porsche makes for interesting entertainment history.
``Television started out as a live medium,'' the authors note, ``but Hopalong Cassidy - William Boyd - changed all that. Boyd had bought up all of his 40-minute Saturday matinee `programmers' and was able to distribute them to independent television stations, and they became the biggest sensation in the country after Milton Berle. `Hoppy' was on the cover of Time and he was absolutely the biggest star in the world.''
Boyd, an astute businessman, showed television its film future; but he was content to be Cassidy and to clip coupons. Reeves wanted to be an artist, and he didn't find financial or emotional satisfaction suiting up in a caped set of sleepers.
The Iowa-born actor and amateur boxer, who had had small roles in ``Gone With the Wind'' and ``So Proudly We Hail,'' saw TV as a celluloid slum.
Said playwright Jack Larson, who played cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the old series, ``He was a movie star, really - he'd had all the preparation and training to be a movie star. But he was trapped on that small screen. He was a movie star acting in a box, on a kiddie show, in a piece of furniture.''
Larson, captured forever in the public imagination as a boyish shlub, was himself typecast, but went on to another identity of his own as a writer, libretticist and film producer. Reeves, the paternalistic Kent/Superman, seemed instead never to mature in real life: In Hollywood Kryptonite he repeatedly becomes involved with tough women who manipulate him as his fierce mother did. They even looked like her.
One of them, Toni Mannix (the ``lady'' of the title), happened to be married to Eddie Mannix (the ``bulldog``), a hardboiled MGM vice president who was the muscle for Louis B. Mayer. Copies of every message that went through the MGM Telegraph Office wound up in Eddie's hamlike mitts. And knowledge was power.
Guess who remains a likely suspect as Superman's nemesis?
But Reeves threw over Toni for another fringe performer named Leonore Lemmon. Toni went bananas; so, eventually, did Leonore. And Reeves wound up dead with the shell casing inexplicably under his body.
And two other bullet holes in the bedroom floor.
Reeves played his role with a distinct charm that surpassed the part, but circumstances and drink clouded his sunny personality and his judgment. Larson still expresses sadness at the premature loss of his colleague and friend, an individual of real generosity and talent. He no doubt remembers the last lines they exchanged in the final series episode, ``All That Glitters.''
Olsen: ``Golly, Mr. Kent, you'll never know how wonderful it is to be like Superman.''
Kent: ``No, Jimmy, I guess I never will.`` MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Viginia
Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
George Reeves portrayed Superman on television for 1951 to 1957