Superman Was Murdered, Book Contends

He could change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel in his bare hands. But, disguised as actor George Reeves, Superman--the 1950s incarnation--proved both sad and sadly mortal.

Reeves died in 1959 of a gunshot wound to the head, a demise that went down in Hollywood’s annals as self-inflicted. He’d been depressed at being typecast, conventional wisdom went. But a husband-wife investigative reporting team have dug into old files and old jealousies and unearthed a different story.

“Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman,” by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, suggests that Reeves was the victim of Eddie and Toni Mannix. Eddie was a hood turned Hollywood studio enforcer; Toni, his wife, was having an affair with the erstwhile Man of Steel.

Along the way, the book provides illuminating glimpses into the seamy side of 1950s Hollywood, into what it means to portray a hero and the mind-set that ruined many movie actors who did TV work.

“It had always bothered me and my friends, watching the show endlessly on reruns,” said Kashner, 42, who most recently co-wrote a book on Oscar Levant with Schoenberger.

“Here was this guy, standing up to the bad guys with hands on his hips, bullets bouncing off his torso,” Kashner said. “To know he was dead and had died under a cloud was disquieting for kids growing up.”

Employing a Raymond Chandler style (“She was a handsome woman with a brooch where her heart should have been”), the couple has uncovered enough information to make Lois Lane proud.

“We wanted to write about a pure product of American culture, and we wanted to make it an homage to the hard-boiled detective genre,” said Schoenberger, 45. “But they were all straight out of Central Casting anyway. The characters in the story are so wild--almost too wild to be true.”

This is gripping (melo)drama, complete with shadowy figures, hang-up phone calls at midnight, mistresses, tainted evidence, a possessive mother and gunshots in the night.

The narrative, too, is fascinating: It unfolds in an intricate manner while revisiting June 17, 1959, the night of Reeves’ death, several times from different perspectives. The authors’ ability to shift the lens--and view the death from all angles--lends credence to their ultimate charge of murder.

“I really believe our conclusion,” Schoenberger said. “You couldn’t take this to court because there are no living witnesses and the forensic material was so incomplete to begin with. But we tried to make the most compelling circumstantial case that we could.”

The B-movie characters:

* Toni Mannix, aging, elegant glamour girl. She saw Reeves not only as a classically handsome boy toy but also as a man who would give her the affection that her husband wouldn’t.

* Leonore Lemmon, socialite with a wide wild streak and, apparently, an even wider mean streak. She was living with Reeves when he died and resented Toni Mannix’s meddlings. Her initials were “LL”--the initials of all the comic-book women Superman has ever loved.

* Helen Bessolo, Reeves’ controlling mother. She wanted to believe her son was a big-time movie star even as he lamented the Superman typecasting. She refused to allow his body to be buried until her crusade to prove a suspicious death ran out of gas.

* Jack Larson, today a successful producer (“Urban Cowboy,” “Bright Lights, Big City”) but in those days the young man who played Jimmy Olsen, Daily Planet boy reporter. Larson, a good friend of both Reeves and Toni Mannix, has said he believes Reeves’ death was suicide. Though he cooperated with the authors, he didn’t subscribe to many of their conclusions.

And there is a supporting cast of dozens--producers, moguls and strangely tangential figures who may or may not have played parts in the mysterious death.

Reeves, of course, is the main character, and he comes across as a schizophrenic--not clinically, but as a hard-drinking, manipulated man who loves life dearly and also feels consistently beaten down by it.

“He was fighting the myth. He was fighting with Superman,” Kashner said. “It’s the Superman imprisonment, and he was trying to break out of it but couldn’t.”

But in the end, Schoenberger said, “he may not have had the career he wanted, but he became a mythic figure instead.”

They’re all dead now except for Larson, and perhaps the truth died with them. But people are still wary.

“When we talked to a contemporary of George Reeves who was involved in that night to some extent or another, they would actually say to us, ‘Who’s still living?’ ” Schoenberger said. “They’re out there in nursing homes and they wanted to know who’s left and who’s missing. The specter of the Mannixes was so great that they were at first a little hesitant to talk to us.”

So if you’re interested, grab your remote control, flick among the higher cable channels and look for a 1950s show featuring a strikingly handsome man who’s either wearing a gray suit and mild-mannered glasses or tights with a big “S” on the chest.

That’s Superman--not the one who lived on in Christopher Reeve and Dean Cain, or the one whose new stories come out in comic-book form every month, but the one who met an unhappy end, swallowed by a cliched and unfriendly place called Hollywood.

Maybe this new book finally reveals the truth. Maybe it doesn’t. But it seems convincing, and it certainly is fascinating.

“It was kind of a crushing notion that none of us in the schoolyards wanted to accept--that Superman killed himself,” Kashner said. “And now we don’t have to accept it anymore.”