Glen Cadigan writes…
In Tales of My Father #3, you say that Mort Weisinger was fired from DC. Everything that I've ever read on the topic (including that written by Weisinger himself) says that he retired. So I guess my question is, is this one of those, "He quit before he could get fired," stories or are you just misremembering?
No, I was just oversimplifying a rather complicated matter because it wasn't relevant to the story I was telling. There are several different accounts of why Mort Weisinger left DC, and all of them had to do with the fact that he'd sold a novel called The Contest that he had allegedly written. (Bob Haney claimed to have ghost-written at least half of it and Bob said that other writers at and around DC, including David Vern, did what he didn't.)
At the time, there were a lot of authors around New York cobbling up books intended to replicate the success of Jacqueline Susann's best-sellers like Valley of the Dolls. Weisinger had been a judge at the Miss America pageant — this was back when anyone cared about the Miss America pageant — and on the strength of that and his connections in the publishing world, he got this deal to "write" his book about a mythical pageant and all the sex 'n' drugs that went on behind the scenes. He made a ton o' money off it and I believe it even got optioned for a movie before publication and he made another ton o' money off that.
In the meantime, things were changing at DC as the company was sold to the firm that would eventually come to be known as Time-Warner. Weisinger had for a long time been jockeying to be named Publisher or Editor-in-Chief or something more than just the editor of the Superman titles. There were folks in the firm who didn't even want him doing that, let alone running the whole outfit. Irwin Donenfeld, who'd been Editorial Director, was to be ousted in the corporate takeover and at some point, Weisinger seemed to believe he was the logical, perhaps only choice to take over that job. He was therefore quite unhappy when Carmine Infantino got it. The higher Infantino rose in the company, the more he began to tamper with the Superman titles…and he even took one of them, Superboy, away from Weisinger.
As you may remember, Weisinger had asked me to write a Krypto story for the rear of that comic. I submitted one which, in hindsight, I'm kinda glad wasn't published. I found a copy of it a few years ago, gave it a read and made that face that Edvard Munch depicted in "The Scream." Really awful. The best thing I can say about it was that it was (a) neatly typed and (b) better than a Jimmy Olsen script of mine Weisinger had rejected. Why he liked the Krypto story, I have no idea…but he wrote one day to say he was buying it and that was the last I heard from Mort Weisinger. And before long, I saw that Murray Boltinoff was editing Superboy.
A few years later, I asked Nelson Bridwell, who'd been Weisinger's assistant, wha' happened. He said Superboy had been wrested from Weisinger as one of many "eviction notices" that had been served on him, the biggie being Infantino being installed in the top job. Oddly enough, Jack Kirby had used the same term — "Weisinger's eviction notice" — to describe his own hiring at DC over, reportedly, Weisinger's objections. Weisinger didn't like the Marvel style (i.e., Jack's) and didn't like Jack personally due to encounters during Jack's previous tours of duty at DC. He also didn't like Jack's old partner, Joe Simon, and it was reportedly because of Weisinger's insistence that DC canceled Simon's 1968 Brother Power the Geek comic before receiving any sales figures on it.
This doesn't make Mr. Weisinger sound all that wonderful so I should point out that he was a very successful editor of comic books who had a lot to do with Superman being successful from the mid-forties 'til around 1970. As editor of those books, he was a target for anyone who wanted to move up in that company. The person who controlled Superman was, almost by definition, the most important person at the firm…and he was in many ways more qualified for the CEO job at DC than the guy who got it.
At some point, Weisinger totalled up all those eviction notices, looked at the money he'd made off The Contest and an advance on his next book (which I'm not sure was ever written) and decided to get out before he was forcibly removed. True, he officially retired but everyone I talked to back then who knew him, including Bridwell and Weisinger's old partner Julius Schwartz, said he felt squeezed out. I met him briefly at the DC offices on what I think was his last day. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say he was fired.