As has been told in many places, I met Bob Kane in 1968. I was 16 years old and I spent a couple of extraordinary afternoons with this man. In one, urged on by the vodka he was sipping, he rambled on for a couple of hours about his life and career, sometimes weaving dangerously close to what I now believe to have been the truth.
He went down a list of all the people he'd dealt with at DC Comics over the years, identifying which ones were idiots and which ones were pricks. All fell into one category or the other. I often note how some people use the same words over and over, and I couldn't help but observe that Mr. Kane did not seem to know any synonyms for "idiot" or "prick." Those were the only words he used to describe anyone. At one point, he identified one editor there as an idiot, then thought better of it and said, "No, come to think of it, he's not an idiot. He's actually a prick."
He was not particularly nice to me, either. He read some of my writing and told me that I had no talent and should just forget about this silly idea I had of doing what I've been doing for a living now for almost half a century. Oddly enough, him saying that did not particularly bother me at the time, nor did I consider the possibility that he might be right. A few swigs of Stolichnaya earlier, Mr. Kane became the first of five people I've met in my life who told me they'd screwed Marilyn Monroe. Since I didn't believe that, I decided not to believe what he said about my writing. (If you must know, the other four were Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, James Karen and Tony Curtis. And as far as I can tell, these men didn't just tell me. They told everybody.)
My meetings with Kane occurred in his rented apartment on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood Village. He was in town for a while to close a huge TV deal, he explained — something he'd created that was going to be "bigger than Batman." He didn't say what it was but I assume it was The Silent Gun, a 1969 TV-movie/pilot that did not become a series. It was a western starring Lloyd Bridges as a "fast gun" who accidentally kills a little girl and thereafter vows to never fire his weapon again. He carries it but does not fire it, relying instead on his wits to prevail in situations where he previously would have just yanked the pistol from its holster and shot somebody. Not a bad little premise, I suppose.
Otherwise, Kane was doing a lot of public appearances at the time, most of them keying off a "Batman for President" campaign he was flogging to tie-in with the then-current presidential election in this country. Around his apartment, he had big sheets of illustration board on which he'd drawn caricatures of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and other folks who may also have screwed Marilyn Monroe or claimed they did. Of all the claimants, I'd put my money on Nixon and maybe L.B.J., not because I think they screwed her but because I think they screwed everyone.
Kane actually drew them, I'm pretty sure. He often signed his name to the work of others but these, I believe he did himself.
There was a Batman one and on my first visit to his apartment, which was with some friends, he gave us all autographed photos of himself holding the "Batman for President" drawing. On my second visit, to which I went alone, he gave me the original. I found it the other day at the bottom of a big drawer and I took a photo of my lovely friend Jewel Shepard holding it…
Kinda cute, huh? I mean the poster, not Jewel, though she certainly is. And I just noticed that after the first photo was taken, Bob added a box around his signature. This is probably indicative of something though I have no idea what it is. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy this trip back to a day when the notion of electing a cartoon character to the presidency was way past ridiculous.