Mr. Chamberlain Deconstructs His Dream House

“Martin and I love houses,” wrote actor and author Richard Chamberlain in his memoir Shattered Love. “A wise friend and teacher of ours says we have house karma. Over the years we’ve created several wonderful houses, always remodeling existing structures. Our lifelong goal has been to design and build our dream house.

“We love living in Hawaii, and for 20 years we’ve had our eyes on a particularly beautiful house site. About three years ago the lot became available, and to our surprise and delight the owner accepted our first offer. This all happened so easily that we assumed our project was blessed.

“This home was to be our final stop and guarantee our future happiness. We hired an architect and created a serene and handsome design that took maximum advantage of the gorgeous setting. We even engaged a top-notch interior designer from the mainland and started thinking about furniture. We were on our way to a nirvana of sand, surf and sunsets.

Richard Chamberlain in Hawaii in 2003

“We sold our big house in Honolulu, put a lot of stuff in storage and crammed ourselves and the rest of our possessions into our small beach house in the country to wait for building permits and for construction to begin.

“Then, out of the blue, a series of bureaucratic hassles big and small began an endless series of delays and costly legal confrontations. I’ve lost track of how many times we all said with relief, ‘Well, that’s finally over, now we can begin!’ only to be surprised and dismayed by yet another, sometimes whimsical change in official policy. Permissions granted, permissions withdrawn. Our guarantee of happiness was turning into the prescription for a mix of smoldering rage and clinical depression.

“Though we love the sweetness of the people here, over the years we’ve found the State of Hawaii bureaucrats to be self-important, arbitrary and downright unfriendly. Our frustration with this latest lengthy fracas with officialdom led us to think seriously about selling the lot and leaving the islands for good. We both felt worn down, hugely disappointed and unaccountably victimized.

“So where is the Christ, where is the Buddha in this mess of frustrated dreams?

“One recent afternoon, feeling thoroughly bummed out by all this, I sat down in the living room of the beach house we’ve owned for 26 years and took a long look at the absurdity of letting the supposed source of our future bliss, our imagined tropical Shangri-la, cause us so much unhappiness and angst.

“I got very quiet and just looked at our situation as objectively as I could. Gazing out the windows, I noticed the sunny perfection of the day and heard the rhythmic rumble of the waves. The plumeria trees were blooming and scenting the breeze, the doves and mynah birds were gabbing. A lamb stew was simmering in the kitchen. Our much-loved dog was asleep at my feet. There wasn’t a hint of turmoil anywhere. If I was stressed out, the cause was nowhere in sight. The cause must be in my own head, in my thinking.

“It was suddenly clear: I had attached my well-being to an imagined dream house and its easy manifestation. Ignoring past experience, I had staked my happiness on cooperative, concerned officials and honest, thrifty, competent contractors (good luck!).

“And I wondered why it’s so easy for me to forget that my sense of well-being is only now in the present. It cannot be dragged in from the past, which is gone, dead and buried, nor can it be found in the future, which doesn’t exist. Well-being is simply being well right now, living with as much integrity, clear awareness and open-heartedness as we can muster, with a willingness to examine whatever barriers we’re putting in the way of our innate if sometimes elusive wisdom.

“When I remember to quiet down and do this, the problems that pollute my thinking and vaporize my wa (inner harmony) become interesting challenges rather than subversive attachments — I’m free to “be well” and at the same time to vigorously deal with the difficulties at hand. I had been victimized only by my own thinking. I was painfully disappointed not by the officials who were just doing what they do for inscrutable reasons of their own, but by my unrealistic expectations.

Chamberlain: The Ugly Stories We Tell Ourselves

Richard Chamberlain appeared as the compassionate, dedicated Dr. Kildare on television

Aspiring actor Richard Chamberlain had a problem. Growing up with an unstable, overbearing, alcoholic father, he became emotionally withdrawn and guarded, presenting a false image of perfection and fearing his own feelings. And that proved to be no way to win over an audience with the truth of a performance.

“This is a near perfect example of how we endlessly torture ourselves and distort our lives with our own faulty thinking,” wrote Chamberlain in his memoir Shattered Love. “There I was, a reasonably talented young actor trying to get work in Hollywood, ruthlessly sabotaging my efforts with distant memories of mean old Dad. My father was far away busily saving people in AA, but I couldn’t help dragging him back into my life. In his absence, I took on his role of suppressing and making me fell impotent. Dad was gone, but I couldn’t let go or all my painful stories about the damage he’d done me and about my inadequacy in his presence. I continued to hate him even though I had assumed his nefarious ways.

“We bamboozle ourselves with largely fictional stories all the time. My father despises me (how can I know that for sure?); anyone who really knows me couldn’t possibly love me; my children don’t appreciate me; my husband doesn’t listen to me; my religion makes me better than you; they should have dealt with me fairly; I’m more important than you because I’m famous; I’m too addictive or stressed to quit smoking; life is so unfair; they should have taken better care of me.

“Byron Katie, a savvy teacher I know, suggests putting our mental stories and beliefs to the test with three questions: 1) Can I really know this is true? 2) What do I get from this story or belief, what does it do for or against me? 3) Who would I be in this situation without this belief?

“Then she suggests we turn it all around and take full responsibility for all the stuff we’re blaming on others. For instance, the story ‘You don’t love me enough!’ becomes ‘I don’t love myself enough, and I don’t love you enough.’ My story ‘My father suppressed and weakened me’ becomes the much more accurate ‘I suppress and weaken myself with my thinking, and I also suppress my father by probably misunderstanding and misrepresenting him.’ 

“In other words, being a grown-up means taking responsibility for my own life and my own integrity. My father’s integrity or lack of it is none of my business. My business is to come to understand the stifling fictions of my thinking and learn to prefer and honor reality, truth, what is.”

A Word About Anthropomorphic Super-Animals...

The first superhero to which an American child of the 1950s was likely to be exposed was either Superman or Mighty Mouse, both of whom were on television.

Mighty Mouse’s appeal was obvious and derivative, combining the 1928 Disney sensation Mickey Mouse with the 1938 DC Comics sensation Superman. The Terrytoons character debuted in 1942, appearing in 80 theatrical cartoons until 1961. A considerable number of cats got beaten up in the process.

Charlton Comics, which rarely failed to copy any popular trend or character (the Lone Ranger, Casper the Friendly Ghost, etc.), offered multiple Mighty Mouse knock-offs that interested me as a child. All were caped, black-clad funny animal heroes who, in one of those derangements peculiar to the nuclear-nervous 1950s, used the word “Atomic” as a synonym for “Super” in their names.

We had Atomic Mouse, Atom the Cat (a Tom Cat, get it?) and two atomic Leporidae, along with one magical one. In 1955, Atomic Rabbit gained the powers of flight and super strength by eating irradiated carrots.

The talented artist Al Fago “…handled Atomic Rabbit from his first appearance, dated August, 1955, through the end of the series under that name — #11, dated March, 1958. As of #12, it was changed to Atomic Bunny, and it’s not certain they're the same character,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “Bunny looked like Rabbit in the first issue, (although) drawn by Charlton’s editor, Pat Masulli, but his appearance changed radically after that. Then, he was back to his former appearance with the last issue (December, 1959).”

A 1997 issue looks back with cheekiness

“Funny animal superheroes have been a part of the animation and comic book scenes since the days of Mighty Mouse and Supermouse, respectively — almost as long as human superheroes have been around, in fact,” Markstein noted. “Marvel had Super Rabbit, DC had The Terrific Whatzit, Fox had Cosmo Cat etc. But the biggest concentration of the sub-genre was at Charlton Comics during the 1950s, which had Happy the Magic Bunny, Atom the Cat, and several others — in fact, its longest-lasting superhero title ever was Atomic Mouse. What Magazine Enterprises (Red Mask, Presto Kid) was to western heroes with secret identities, Charlton was to funny animal superheroes.”

In particular, the company boasted an embarrassment of super-rabbits. Happy the Magic Bunny was Charlton’s barely retooled version of Fawcett’s Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, who debuted the same year as Mighty Mouse. When Captain Marvel and his pals were legally hounded out of business by Superman, Hoppy/Happy remained quietly on the back pages, the last surviving member of the once million-selling Marvels.

The Short and Double Life of Private Strong

Even given the quirky history of comic books, The Double Life of Private Strong was an odd title.

For one thing, what other superhero comic was named after the protagonist’s secret identity? For another, why would a title created by two industry legends — a title that was launched at the perfect time to become popular — be killed after only two issues?

Created for Archie Comics by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in June 1959, just ahead of the 1960s’ boom market for superheroes, the title took the route that had proven successful with DC’s the Flash (and would work well for Green Lantern the next month, in July 1959, and later for the Atom and Hawkman). In each case, a popular 1940s superhero was rebooted, updated and streamlined for the jet age.

Simon and Kirby’s most successful creation had been 1941’s Captain America, a Marvel character they essentially parodied for Prize Comics with 1954’s Fighting American. Ironically, in their third try at a star-spangled superman, they were revamping a character they might once have been accused of copying.

That’s because the first flag-costumed patriotic superhero had been the Shield, published in January 1940 by MLJ, which would become Archie. Joe Higgins, an FBI agent who possessed superhuman strength and durability, fought criminals and spies as the Shield until 1948 (although his super powers had faded by then).

In retooling the Shield, Simon and Kirby amped-up the superman factor, granting him flight, super-strength, invulnerability, super-vision and the ability to project lightning. The orphaned son of a scientist who’d given him his expanded-mind powers, Lancelot Strong was adopted and raised by a kindly farm couple.

All that was a bit too similar to Superman for DC, which promptly threatened legal action and ended the title after its second issue. However, this Shield would reappear once or twice more as a guest star in the second superhero title Simon and Kirby created for Archie, The Adventures of the Fly.

They made the Shield’s secret identity that of an Army private, perhaps because most young men were drafted in those days, and perhaps because their most successful character had also hidden his red, white and blue costume under the tan of an U.S. Army uniform.

Peter Cannon, Son of Amazing-Man

The writer-artist who created the Charlton comics “action hero” Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt was, ironically, a secret crime-fighter himself.

But first, some history. Thunderbolt was also, in a way, the brain-grandchild of the celebrated artist Bill Everett.

In 1939, every comic book publisher wanted creators to come up with knock-offs of the new sensation Superman. Everett was one of the few who managed the difficult feat of an original take on the much-imitated Übermensch template – not once, but twice.

For what would be Marvel Comics, Everett created the amoral, arrogant Sub-Mariner, an anti-superhero who murdered people in fits of pique and helped others in manic spasms, wrecking Manhattan infrastructure like King Kong.

And for Centaur Publications, Everett created Amazing-Man, another champion of justice given to occasional derangement. An orphan raised by the presumably Buddhist monks in the Council of Seven, John Aman was yet another character who acquired uncanny abilities in Tibet, the country that seems to be the central headquarters for super powers in popular fiction (The crime-fighting magicians Chandu and Mandrake and the Shadow had already been empowered there).

In 1966, a New York City police officer who moonlighted as a comic book artist, Pete Morisi, was inspired by his childhood memories of Amazing-Man to create his own variation on the theme, Thunderbolt — “a thoughtful superhero comic that contained some of the earliest respectful invocations of Eastern mysticism in American pop culture,” Wikipedia notes.

Morisi, who disguised his identity under the nom de plume PAM, wrote, “Peter Cannon, orphaned son of an American medical team, was raised in a Himalayan lamasery, where his parents had sacrificed their lives combating the dreaded Black Plague! After attaining the highest degree of mental and physical perfection, he was entrusted with the knowledge of the ancient scrolls that bore the secret writings of past generations of wise men! From them he learned concentration, mind over matter, the art of activating and the harnessing the unused portions of the brain, that made seemingly fantastic feats possible!”

Both Amazing-Man and Thunderbolt had mysterious super-powered enemies back at their temples (the Great Question for Amazing-Man, and the Hooded One for Cannon).

Two more superheroes sprang from that same source — Marvel’s Iron Fist, who was a 1974 version of Amazing-Man, and DC’s Ozymandias, a 1986 iteration of Thunderbolt who appeared in the graphic novel Watchmen.

Although Morisi’s art was a bit static for my taste, I had to admire the realistic veneer he had worked out for his character. Thunderbolt’s will-based powers were relatively restrained by comic book standards, and his costume was really a monastic training outfit with an added mask.

Cannon didn’t want to fight crime, having an enlightened contempt for the greed and corruption of a western culture that remained alien to him. He just wanted to be left alone so he could write. 

Cannon had to be prodded into action against various menaces by his socially conscious companion Tabu. If the blond hero and his turbaned Tibetan sidekick seemed naggingly familiar, maybe that was because they bore such a weird resemblance to a grown-up Jonny Quest and Hadji.

The Bad Old Days, But Still Better than Today

The corporate news media was in such a goddamn hurry 

to get rid of Howard Dean that they didn't even bother

coming up with a plausible reason.

They Might Be Mighty

The company that became Archie Comics, MLJ, has often anticipated the popularity of superheroes while being unable to fully exploit that knowledge.

In November 1940, the publisher introduced the first flag-draped patriotic superhero, the Shield, but that concept would get knocked out of the ballpark 14 months later at what would become Marvel Comics.

From 1939 into the late 1940s, MLJ published dozens of mostly low-powered, surprisingly gory superheroes, with one of them — the Black Hood — branching out into radio drama and pulp magazines.

As the Golden Age superheroes vanished, Archie Andrews paid the bills. But just as the Silver Age superheroes were becoming popular in 1959, the publisher tried again with the Shield, a Superman-ish reboot by Jack Kirby that ran afoul of DC Comics’ lawyers and disappeared after two issues of the oddly titled The Double Life of Private Strong.

Kirby’s second MLJ creation headlined The Adventures of the Fly, which ran for 30 issues until October 1964 and guest-starred the Black Hood and the Shield. The insect-powered hero with a magic ring inspired an animal-powered hero with a magic belt in The Adventures of the Jaguar.

Within a year, the Fly had returned as Fly-Man, gaining the advantage of additional powers like the ability to expand to giant size along with the burden of some heavy-handed “humorous” writing.

The renamed “Mighty Comics” could never quite fan away the smell of flop sweat, with the cheeky voice-over narrator’s attempts to mimic Stan Lee’s confidence coming across more as desperation.

The fact that the Fly’s nom de guerre was changed to Fly-Man in May 1965, months before the Batman TV show premiered in January 1966, demonstrates that the name change wasn’t inspired by Batman or Superman, but by that newly popular hyphenated hero, Spider-Man.

Almost all the company’s old Golden Age superheroes were revived before the Mighty Comics line died along with the Batman boom in 1967.

The only character I found really interesting was the Web, a criminology professor who’d left his heroic days behind in the 1940s. Marrying one of his students, John Raymond saddled himself with a nagging wife and mother-in-law who forbid him to do anything silly like fight crime in tights. He began to sneak around behind their backs to do just that, nursing some unexpected aches and pains in his middle-aged muscles. 

As a metaphor for lost dreams, for the exuberant illusions of youth fading into the disappointing limitations of age, the character had a certain poignant appeal.