Issuu

“I HAve To

LIVE With This Guy!”

by Blake Bell

Featuring: The lives of the Partners & wives of top comics creators!

C HA P T E R a n d V E R S E THE TRENCHES

1. Adrienne & Gene Colan 2. Virginia & John Romita 3. Lindy & Dick Ayers, Loretta & Ric Estrada

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THE THREE WISE MEN

4 . A n n & Wi l l Ei s n e r, M u r i e l & J o e Ku b e r t , J o a n i e & S t a n Le e

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

5 . A d e l e & Ha r v e y Ku r t z m a n

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Published by TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605 919-833-8092 • www.twomorrows.com ©2002 Blake Bell & TwoMorrows Publishing ISBN 1-893905-16-0 First printing, September 2002 • Printed in Canada All reproductions in this book are copyright by the respective copyright holders, as indicated in conjunction with the individual illustrations, and are used here strictly for historical purposes. All prominent characters are trademarks of their respective holders. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. 2

LOSS

6 . J o s i e & Da n D e C a r l o 7. A n n e T. M u r p h y & A r c h i e G o o d wi n

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INDIE , UNDER , OUTIE

8 . D e n i Lo u b e r t & Dav e S i m 9. Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore 1 0. Ed S e d a r b a u m & H o wa rd C r u s e

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FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

1 1. J a c k i e Es t r a d a & B a t t o n L a s h 12 . J u l i e & Dav e C o o p e r

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Cover art adapted from Bill Everett cover to Spellbound #2 (Apr. 1952). Original image ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Pg 1 image from Bill Everett cover to Adventures Into Weird Worlds #6 (May 1952). Original image ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc. Cover Design by Blake Bell and John Morrow Interior Design by Blake Bell Production Assistance by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Dedicated to Luke and Jen on the homefront, Len and Corey for 20+ years of comic memories. 3

CHAPTER ONE

ADRIENNE &

GENE COLAN

“If anybody could draw a hand on a doorknob and keep your interest, it would be Gene.” The above is a “rubber chicken dinner” line from Stan Lee, former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, but truer words have rarely been spoken about a style as unique as Gene Colan’s. Stan Lee encourages every artist during the 1960s through Marvel’s front door to draw like Jack Kirby except for two—Steve Ditko and Gene Colan. They arrive at Lee’s door fully formed, and alterations of their fundamentals would be akin to spraying water on a fiery oil slick. But the talents of the above three artists fill Marvel’s coffers more than their own pockets. The comic book industry has a work-for-hire history, ensuring a creator receives no compensation—other than one’s page rate— even for creating pop culture icons such as Ditko’s Spider-Man, or Kirby’s Hulk. If you don’t step into the engine of the company, if you don’t leave to make greater monies in the animation or advertising fields, you stay because you just love drawing comics. That love can leave you beaten and broken. Industry swoons and fads can see a freelance artist gasping for air, with a family to support, and no hope of pension or medical benefits. The artist and spouse may think the job on the table will pay for the month’s necessities, but one industry slump, one bout of illness, even a work-free vacation brings home the reality that the gerbil’s wheel of pumping out page after page has to spin non-stop. Step off for a breather, or a drink, and you may never get back on board. You’ll find even fewer people who love as hard and as faithfully, and perhaps as blindly, as Adrienne Colan. One is unlikely to find someone so protective of her mate in all aspects of life—the emotional, the physical, the financial and the ego. She is a perfect example of what the male freelance comic book artist, under this industry’s ‘big top,’ requires: a safety net for a partner who will walk a financial and emotional tightrope, never being able to see beyond the next job on the table, or even if there will be one. Is it truly the love of the medium, the industry, the finished page in front of the artist that keeps people like Adrienne and Gene Colan coming back for more, even into the twenty-first century? It’s September 21, 1926 and Gene Colan is born to the Bronx. After attending George Washington High 6

School, a public school focusing on gifted students in the visual arts, Gene falls under the tutelage of illustrator Frank Riley and the Japanese surrealist Kuniashi. Pen and ink prevent him from an early grave in World War II, where Corporal Colan spends two years in the Philippines producing art for the Special Service in the Army Air Corps. With so many peers off at war, Gene finds work at Fiction House in 1944 drawing Wings Comics. Hired for sixty dollars a week, he arrives at Stan Lee’s office doors in the Empire State Building of 1948. The early work is nondescript, but during the 1950s, Gene’s trademark flourishes begin to shine through, especially in the horror genre. It does him no good. The floor falls out of the industry in the middle 1950s, aided by persecution by government, media and P.T.A. organizations. Stan Lee’s company claws back dramatically in 1957. The hands of Gene Colan pump gas for a living at a local service station, while he chases jobs at the nadir of the industry, Charlton Comics in Derby, Connecticut, known for the lowest page rates (and quality of product) in the business. Ten years of working in comics—Gene is left with nothing. He finds work in New York at the Paul Sherry studio, drawing stick figures for educational films. Any attempts at flourishes are quickly crushed by an art director only concerned with the client’s requests for the bland. And what is expected? If you can’t make it as an artist, you either pump gas until you are gray, or you take what your talents afford you. At least it was work. No child of The Depression is going to hang on a wing and a prayer. With the comic industry in tatters, what chance does a freelancer like Gene Colan have? In the eye of the hurricane, who loves you enough to reach in and pull you out? It’s 1942 and Forest Hills, NY, trumpets the birth of Adrienne Colan. Her Broadway dreams are dashed in 1955 when her parents’ dream of owning a home places the young teenager miles away in Fairlawn, New Jersey. Adrienne comments, “It was really just twelve minutes over the George Washington Bridge, but when you’re a teenager, and you can’t drive, Manhattan is a world away. I was absolutely thrilled for my parents and totally bored Left: Gene & Adrienne’s wedding picture, 1963. out of my gourd! Below: Gene’s work for Marvel Comics in the 1950s. “I wasn’t exposed to art much. From fourteen until the end of high school, it was initially Elvis Presley. The Beatles came and Elvis Presley was over. It was like I closed the door. I couldn’t listen. At the same time, there was Motown. I still love jazz: Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Dave Brubeck. I introduced Gene to Brubeck’s Take Five album. “Through all those, there would be Frank Sinatra; Frank Sinatra doing and singing anything. I watched Frank’s films and had every single album.” The influence of Adrienne’s father will dominate how she’ll regard, and manage, Gene and his career. He’s a small business owner in Queens, his independent spirit transposed onto his daughter, to Gene’s ultimate benefit later in life. “When we used to live in Queens, my father would get on a truck at three in the morning,” says Adrienne. “He would go to the manufacturing plants that produced meats like corned beef, pastrami, salami and hot dogs and distribute them to the restaurants, delis and diners. He made out really well and tucked the bucks away. “It was always his dream to have his own manufacturing plant and soon enough, he did, in New Jersey. My dad had an expression all his life. He said, ‘A peanut stand, but my own.’” Her father’s home by three in the afternoon, 7

CHAPTER TWO

VIRGINIA & JOHN ROMITA Above: John Romita, age 18, and Virginia Romita, age 17. There is but a singular difference between the careers of John Romita and Gene Colan: one was driven from The Company—the other embraced it. As a consequence, while Colan fell off the mainstream radar, Romita’s profile has never abated. Work is always on his table. The name “Romita” is a testament to the only given in the industry: if you climb into the engine of The Company, you will likely drive away with a Cadillac, not a jalopy. Arguably, Gene Colan’s talent exceeds that of John Romita’s. Ask Romita and he will modestly (almost punishingly so), dismiss his efforts as inferior to the likes of his peers at Marvel Comics, the Steve Ditkos and Jack Kirbys. “I keep wanting to hit him on the head,” says Virginia, “and say, ‘Stop being so humble. You’re terrific.’ It’s the way he is.” There are three keys to John’s career health: his connection to, and the elevation of, the Spider-Man franchise; becoming an employee of the company; and a clean, polished style that presented little difficulty in communicating a story to readers young and old. Simply put, John Romita is the Norman Rockwell of comic book art. Few in the industry rise from farther depths to such a pinnacle. He also has the distinction of “being married” to the same woman since he was eleven. Perhaps no other woman can say they followed their husband’s career from chalk drawings on the streets of Brooklyn to newspapers all over the world. “I was born in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg,” says Virginia Romita, “and John lived downstairs. He moved into my building when I was about nine. He first lived across the street for a short period of time. He was very shy. One day he walked in and said, ‘Hello,’ and I was so shocked, I nearly tumbled down the stairs! That was my first crush.” Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 1940s, is a ghetto neighborhood according to Virginia. “It was just apartment houses and tenements across the street. We were in a house made of up of six apartments. It was very poor, no heat—just the stove in the kitchen.” Without television and video games, families attend Church for entertainment, and kids hit the streets. John hits the streets with chalk in hand. “We didn’t have much money,” says Virginia, “and did a lot of walking 24

because we didn’t have cars or even bikes. We were a large group traveling from church to church going to all of their dances.” John is the neighborhood artist, but the family can’t afford pen and ink. Asphalt is John’s earliest drawing board. Whatever scars will exist in Virginia’s subconscious from the poverty of her early life, time and remembrance of the budding courtship will wash the bad memories away. “There weren’t any cars parked against the sidewalk, so John would do these big drawings in the streets. They could go on for blocks, just with chalk—a one-hundred-foot Statue of Liberty. Of course the rain would wash it away, and when he got older, the guys would begin asking for nudes,” laughs Virginia. “I disapproved and told them I was very disappointed in John.” Poverty is such a factor that sometimes, one comic book has to support an entire block. “Comic books were very important to us,” remembers Virginia. “One person would buy a comic book and everyone got a shot at it. John was one to draw super-heroes like Superman and Batman in the streets. “I liked the simple stuff like Archie. We looked at them as much as we were able because comic books were not the kind of thing we could purchase. If I had a comic, my father would call my brother and I to dinner and if we did not immediately come, he’d come in and tear it up. We were very obedient!” The independent streak that will serve Virginia well in the lion’s den of Marvel Comics saves her from a life of poverty of her own. “My mother wanted me to quit school and go to work with her in the garment industry. They were both from Europe. It was Depression time. They only cared about making a living and, of course, I had to contribute also. But I did finish high school—at least that—and immediately went to work.” With John living downstairs, and her upstairs, Virginia relishes the free spirits in the close-knit Romita household. “My father was one of the strictest men ever created,” says Virginia. “The only real freedom I had was to go downstairs and listen to them all singing. John’s house always had music. His father’s friends would play guitars and mandolins. John’s sisters, all three of them, sang. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s great having a family like that,’ whereas it was just my brother and I. Those were good days.” In fact, Virginia’s love for John almost has her evicted from her own home. Virginia’s father, a stern disciplinarian, doesn’t take too well to a couple of teenagers getting too cozy in his own home. “One day,” says Virginia, “my father saw John put his arm across my shoulder. He spoke to me later in the evening and said, ‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I say, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Did you let him kiss you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ He said, ‘Don’t do that anymore.’ I said, ‘No!’ and he smacked me,” laughs Virginia, obviously at ease with the memory now. “He said, ‘Alright, you have to leave the house’ and I said, ‘Alright!’ But my mother said, ‘No, no, no! You can’t do that!’ He never discussed it with me again. “I fell in love with John three separate times. I chased him until he caught me. By about seventeen or eighteen, I was stuck on John, but with my father, you had to have that ring on your finger. He adored John, and when we became engaged, he was very pleased.” Her father may be strict, but as long as John is willing to work, his career choice of “artist” is not a concern. “There was about a month where John didn’t have any work,” says Virginia. “That was many, many years later. When we got married, he was in the service and getting Army pay. We got married from that same house: 229 Ellery Street.” John Romita and Gene Colan’s careers are mirror images. Both Colan and Romita consider Milton Caniff (of Terry and the Pirates fame) their “god.” Both appear at Marvel around 1949, are let go in 1957, move to DC and then rejoin Marvel within a year of each other in the mid-1960s. John wants to be an illustrator, but like many artists, comic books are chosen as the launching pad. His entry to Marvel Comics in 1949 is covert. He’s ghosting for an artist named Lester Zakarin, who takes credit for all the art chores, but actually John is doing all the penciling. When Stan Lee asks for changes, Zakarin panics and tells Stan he can’t draw in front of people—he needs absolute quiet—and then runs the pages over to the New York Public Library, close to the Marvel offices in the Empire State Building, for John to correct. “John and I really started going together after high school,” says Virginia, “and I remember the first check he earned doing work, ghosting for Lester. He bought everybody these wonderful presents—a blue velvet skirt was one of mine. It was such an exciting moment for him.” Stylistically, Romita’s artwork of the 1950s is an uneasy hodge-podge of influences when compared with the slick look that will develop in the 1960s. But John is a producer, just what the industry values most in the “Golden Age” of comics. Even when drafted into the service in 1951, Lee still feeds John scripts. 25

CHAPTER THREE

LORETTA & RIC ESTRADA

What do you do—what does this industry do to you— if you don’t have the natural talent of a Gene Colan, or the guile of a John Romita who worked his way into the company and the security within? What if you don’t sublimate your artistic voice for every passing fad? What if all you do is tell a clear, concise story in sequential format? The Army calls them ‘foot soldiers.’ The comic industry calls them expendable. Dick Ayers and Ric Estrada—whose origins couldn’t be less similar—will never be the flavor of the month, never ones to ride a hot trend, but they both have an underrated (some say long-forgotten) ability to present a narrative that can lead one’s eye easily across a page in an industry where pictures and words are supposed to combine to present a unified whole. If a Gene Colan, Kirby or Ditko can get handed the short stick, what chance do a couple of veterans have in this medium? Perhaps there is no more heroic a tale than the struggle of one person’s fifty-year uphill battle, and another’s ability to raise eight children, suffer huge medical debt and abandon the comic industry just to physically survive. One assumes the persons are Dick and Ric, but the real heroes of this tale are Lindy Ayers and Loretta Estrada. Charles Lindbergh makes his historic flight from New This Page: wedding pictures, Dick & Lindy, 1951. York to Paris in 1927. A pair of recent immigrants take note of the Previous Page: Ayers’ Sgt. Fury sketch, 1999 occasion to name their daughter, Charlotte Lindy. Born in and Estrada war art, 2001. Passaic—a town in New Jersey—Lindy spends her early childhood living on a seventy-five acre castle estate in Tarrytown, New York; her Swiss father a gardening superintendent of huge estates in the Westchester County area. The Depression sees many large estates lost, and the family retreats to Scarsdale, continuing to live on the land of others. “He always had a staff of about eight working for him,” says Lindy, “because, in those days, his gardens had to be in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens. The rich were always competing with chefs or gardeners, so you had to produce!” One of the fringe benefits of her father’s job is rifling through piles of comics stashed in the garage on the estate. “One of the chauffeurs, Edward Nord, had a lot of time waiting for the bell to bring up the car. I grew up with Batman and Green Lantern. I don’t remember Marvel heroes like Captain America, since I always liked DC Comics.” Of German descent, her mother—a cook in New York City for Stanley Isaacs, Borough President of Manhattan—can’t protect Lindy from the anti-German sentiment on U.S. shores at the outbreak of war. “When I was really little, because my mother used to talk German to me, some little kid called me a Nazi—this was when Hitler first came to power. I didn’t know what a Nazi was, but after that I never would speak German. In high school, I took German but it was a mental block.” Listening to Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor address from her high school auditorium inspires Lindy to join the 39

JOANIE

STAN LEE

CHAPTER FOUR

MURIEL & JOE KUBERT

Much like one can link the paths followed by the Colans, Romitas, Ayers and Estradas, the same can be said of the wives of three of the most significant creators, and businessmen, in the history of the comic book medium. Ann Eisner, Muriel Kubert and Joanie Lee all meet their husbands within three years of each other, after all three men appear together near the birth of the industry in the late 1930s. The similarities do not end at the chronological. All three men will reap their earned rewards as business juggernauts, allowing their spouses to live a much different life than that of the struggling freelancer. All three will either own their own creations (or can lay official claim to that status) or cement their place in history by the attachment to the companies for which they will work or run. One will find the traits of their fathers in each of the men these women will marry. Ann Eisner’s father is a stockbroker who owned his own firm until his passing. “You could say I was born with a tarnished silver spoon in my mouth,” remembers Ann from her earliest upbringing in New York City, “since the peddlers and impoverished immigrants amongst my ancestors had preceded me by at least two generations on both sides. I always thought of myself as American. We didn’t speak anything but English in my home.” Towaco, New Jersey, in the early 1930s, houses no more than five thousand people, but a small, neighborhood business, Fogelson’s Supermarket, is run by a man whose mantra in life is “get at it and get it done,” says Muriel Kubert. Apropos considering she will marry a man perhaps matched only by Will Eisner for his creativity and business savvy. There’s little ‘New York’ about Joanie Lee’s origins. Born in Newcastle, in the north of England, her father is in the building business; her grandfather writes poetry. “I am a ‘Geordie’ as they call us,” says Joanie, “from Tyne Side; one of three sisters. I crossed on a blacked-out ship, the old Mauritania, while the Above: Joanie Lee modeling, late 1950s. Japanese war was still on. I’ve been an American Below: Muriel Fogelson Kubert with sister Lenore, 1938. citizen for two years now, even though I could have become one fifty-five years ago. That’s how long Stan and I have been married.” If one travels to the Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road, across the Thames river from downtown London, one can experience a recreation of what it was like to live in war-torn England when the Nazi bombing rained down on the English skies. “We had an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. One night when the dive-bombers came over, I remember cheering when some planes were blown out of the sky. We’d run into the shelters when the sirens went off, but after the first year we didn’t bother. We just got used to it. America had been safe from all that, with two oceans to protect her, but nobody anywhere is safe anymore.” Unlike today, when a child sees the movie version of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s creation, Spider-Man, and is more likely to buy the video game rather than the comic, reading is a family event in Ann’s household. “My father would bring home the Sunday Funnies and we would read them 55

CHAPTER FIVE

ADELE & HARVEY KURTZMAN

“As Will Eisner would say, ‘I would give Harvey advice about money matters because he would ask me, but he never took the advice and he never made any money.’” Adele’s quote above aptly describes the dichotomy that is her husband, Harvey Kurtzman: he may have been comics’ greatest innovator, but may have also been too far ahead of his time. The man who probably influenced more people worldwide than anyone else in this book had neither the patience of a Joe Kubert nor the business acumen of a Will Eisner. His quest for innovation, his unerring desire for perfection, and his inability to deal with authority figures who didn’t breathe the same high standards left him in the precarious position of knowing the value of his legacy, but unable to translate it into a monetary value. His early experiments with the comic book page put him on par with Will Eisner; his creation of Mad Magazine splattered his influence across the globe; his Little Annie Fanny character for Playboy became symbolic of a generation, and all of the above created the “Kurtzman Umbrella” under which an entire generation of underground comix cartoonists would fall. Side-by-side with this whirlwind of a man is Adele Kurtzman. Everything must be viewed through the prism of artist William Stout’s astute comment about the woman’s sense of humor: ‘Harvey was not a real funny guy, but his wife Adele has a killer dry wit.’ She, like Harvey, was ahead of her time, describing herself as a holy terror for her mother, growing up in the 1930s in the Bronx. “I was a terrible teenager,” says Adele. “My mother used to call the police. When I tell my children that now, they look at this old mother and say, ‘Our grandmother called the cops on you?’ I regret it because I must have put my mother through living hell. I went to a girls’ school because my mother thought it would be safer. “I had great parents. If my mother would tend to give us a little swat, my father would stand in front of us and say, ‘Don’t hit the children!’ We had a project where he, my sister and I crossed every bridge connecting New York City to other places.” While her father toils as a factory worker, her mother stays home with the kids, tending to all the lost souls 84

in need from the extended family. “These were rough times. We Left: Adele & Harvey (with Rene Goscinny’s head had many people living with us. They helped keep the place cropped off) in their Manhattan Apartment, 1950. going. My mother took in two cousins whose mother had died. Below: Adele at Cloisters Park, NY circa 1947-48. They came for a short period of time and stayed twenty-two years.” Adele’s Bronx neighborhood is an Irish-Italian mix, with a little German. “We had a Nazi spy in our building,” says Adele. “He had one of those dumb shortwave radios. I don’t know what kind of messages he was sending out, but looking back, he was very stereotypical of what a Nazi spy might look like. He was the first person I remember wearing tennis shoes. I don’t remember grown people wearing sneakers then, so we probably should have known he was a spy.” She witnesses the would-be interloper dragged out in chains from their building. “It was kind of exciting. It was kind of pathetic. I don’t think he knew much,” laughs Adele. “The price of lettuce, that would be about it.” Wanderlust describes Adele’s desire to soak up the pop culture influences of her day. “We just kept going as often as we could to movies like Casablanca or Make Way for Tomorrow—tear-jerkers about old age. Growing up as a first generation American, you yearned for better things, and the movies affected you. You wanted to look like they did and you wanted to go places.” Adele doesn’t exhibit the slightest interest in artistic endeavors during her youth, instead presenting herself as a typical teenager with little focus other than to move right into the workforce. “My jobs were short-lived. I was a waitress in Schraffts, worked for Sears-Roebuck and then did some proofreading for Editions for the Armed Services, the little paperbacks that were sent overseas. “I wouldn’t have met Harvey because, even in those days, I thought I was going to be ‘Queen of England.’ I didn’t take typing or any kind of business courses. When I went looking for a job, I had a friend who was very good at that, and she answered the ad in the New York Times’ classified section for a proofreader at Timely Comics. She did a great resumé, typed it herself, and they hired me.” In the mid-to-late 1940s, the Empire State Building houses the only true bullpen Marvel Comics (known then as Timely Comics) will ever have. Myth has it she is Stan Lee’s secretary, but she insists this to be untrue. “I wasn’t hired by Stan and I couldn’t have been a secretary. I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff!” Her direct contact on the job was mostly with Alan Sulman, associate editor to Stan. “I was told it was because I had good legs,” laughs Adele, “which, of course, was very important.” Adele reads every piece of original artwork on its way to the presses, but remembers little investment in the finer points of her job. “I was very young, just out of high school. I read comics all day long, looking for spelling mistakes in the balloons on the original art. I’m embarrassed, but I don’t remember ever seeing anything wrong! There may have been a comma, or a period, but to tell you the truth I don’t ever remember writing anything down. If I did, I faked it. “Stan would look at the stuff I proofread too, and did find mistakes I made, but he was very busy and very glamorous. He was young and cute—good looking. He would blow a whistle and everyone would have to start drawing. Frank Giacoia was busy reading The Daily News when this happened, so Stan sent him home. I guess artists were notorious goof-offs.” In contrast to the freelancing 1950s and 1960s, the Marvel Comics of the 1940s has a coterie of staff artists working in the fourteenth floor offices, with Adele in the middle of all the craziness. “They also had movie star magazines, and those men’s magazines—muscle magazines. I worked in a room with all men. I still know Al Jaffee, but there was one other woman, Violet Barclay, who was an inker. She used to call herself Sheila, then Violet. To me, she seemed very stunning, very exotic looking. I assume a lot of the guys were crazy about her. She and Mike Sekowsky dated a little. “They poked fun at Allen Bellman because he’d bought a TV set. I remember thinking, ‘TV?! What kind of nonsense is that?’” laughs Adele. “It must have been a very crude set in 1948.” 85

CHAPTER SIX

JOSIE & DAN DeCARLO

The alleged ‘hi-jacking’ of Little Annie Fanny artwork by Hugh Hefner is very tangible for Adele, but it can’t compare to the legal struggles of one of the most beloved couples the industry has ever known. Would one be surprised to discover—in one’s heliocentric, super-hero mindset—that the creator in this book whose work has been seen by the most people is none other than longtime Archie artist, Dan DeCarlo? He will be the Jack Kirby of that company, responsible for pop icons like Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats. He will also suffer the same financial and creative fate as Jack Kirby at Marvel Comics. The fight for even a minor piece of the merchandizing pie from his employer, Archie Comics, will have fatal results, leaving his beloved wife Josie (on whom the character in the Pussycats is based) alone, fighting the U.S. Government for his Estate, and trying to raise a teenage granddaughter on her own. What little humor can be found in their struggles is diametrically opposed to the soft, sweet nature of the man and woman. Humor is the basis of Dan’s career and their lives together, making the struggles to the end even 102

more heartbreaking. Still, much of the focus on their lives should be of celebration and laughter, since this is what predominates their time together from the very beginning. Josette Dumont’s beginnings are far from amusing. Shuffled from France to Belgium, her teenage years coincide with Nazi occupation, and she spends her youth on the run from bombings and swarms of enemy invaders. “At the time my parents were married in the mid1920s,” says Josie, “my father went to do his military service in Germany. Since my mother was an only child, my grandparents decided we’d stay with them. When my father came back, my grandparents wanted to keep me with them because they didn’t want to be left with no one, what with my mother leaving them to go live with her husband too. “I grew up with them to the age of twelve until, one Christmas Eve, my grandfather was killed by a train. My grandmother and I went back to Belgium to live with my parents, but it wasn’t an easy adjustment. I was not accustomed to a disciplinarian father. It was a simple life until I was sixteen and World War II started.

Left: The cruise where the costume of Josie is born, Jan. 1966. Above: Dan & Josie in Charleroi, Belgium, 1945. Below: Gettin’ out a Dodge!, 1945.

103

“I was cheated out of my teenage years. Those four years of war, I haven’t forgotten one incident because the bombs were dropped in my own town. The panic was contagious. When we were invaded, we all had the same idea, running to get to the south of France for fear of living under German occupation. “Those who had a car were fortunate. We only had bicycles and it was difficult because we were constantly meeting with columns of soldiers and there were detours all the time. It took about ten days to arrive at the point where we were bombarded again so badly that we were buried in a house. “The English forces came to dig us out and then, from that point on, my father realized there was no point in going any further. Every time we went a few kilometers, the Germans were doing the same thing. We were in the north of France and we came too close to death to go on any further. “When the Germans came in, my father said, ‘You have to hide because I’m going to see what they do, how they behave and then maybe you’ll come out from the hiding.’ All the terrible stories we’d heard in school from our studies of the First World War were implanted in our minds, all the atrocities of that time. “These were the columns of the Elite soldiers. They looked strong, but they didn’t seem

I Have To Live With This Guy!