LEGENDARY HEROES #43

BRENDA STARR, REPORTER

Eternally 23 years old, Brenda Starr the "girl reporter" spent decades solving murders and mysteries, capturing jewel thieves, and thwarting international spies.  As a reporter Brenda mixed hot copy with high fashion and was always the most glamorous woman in the room.  As WWII raged Brenda parachuted into action without mussing a single red hair.  She would eventually marry the mysterious Basil St. John, an eye-patched scientist who, without regular injections of a "black orchid serum" from the Amazon, would die.

Brenda Starr was the creation of Dale Messick who was born in South Bend in 1906.  At age 28 she left her hometown of Hobart, Indiana and struck out for New York City and a career in comics.  She had spent a year at Chicago's Art Institute and a summer painting bathing beauties on oilcloth tire covers, and for the first few months in NYC she survived by designing greeting cards.  The comic strip business was a competitive one and pretty much a male-dominated industry.  Dale Messick, born Dalia, changed her name to the gender-neutral Dale for that reason...no one would know if she was male or female.

Dale submitted a strip proposal to the offices of Joseph Medill Patterson at the Chicago Tribune-NY Daily News Syndicate.  Patterson was responsible for such great comic strips as Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Smilin' Jack, and Terry and the Pirates.  Messick's strip was about a girl bandit named Brenda Starr.  Patterson, who worked with a woman cartoonist once before and did not enjoy the experience, wanted nothing to do with Dale Messick for that simple reason.  Patterson's assistant Mollie Slott saw the discarded samples and thought there was something there, and she encouraged Dale to make Brenda Starr a newspaper reporter.  With the encouragement of his assistant, Patterson accepted the strip.  And as Dale Messick reminisced, "I've had a steady gig ever since."

In June 1940 the Sunday newspapers were trying to compete with the booming comic book industry.  "The Spirit" had been launched as a comic book insert that month by the Register-Tribune Syndicate, and the Chicago Tribune-NY Daily News Syndicate began their own comic book newspaper venture.  "Brenda Starr, Reporter" made her debut on June 30, 1940 in the comic book supplement of the Chicago Tribune.  Patterson wouldn't give the strip national distribution until the following year, and it was May 1945 before Brenda finally graduated to the Sunday comic pages across the country.  A daily comic strip began on October 22, 1945.  And still Patterson refused to run Brenda Starr in his own paper, the New York Daily News.  Brenda would eventually appear there in 1948, two years after Patterson died.

The situation of Brenda Starr paralleled that of her creator Dale Messick - a female reporter working in the male-dominated field of journalism.  Brenda was challenged to prove herself by taking assignments that were too tough for the male reporters on her newspaper, The Flash.  And like Brenda, Dale had to fight for every bit of recognition in her field.  Messick modeled Brenda after actress Rita Hayworth and debutante Brenda Frazier, and at the peak of it's popularity "Brenda Starr" appeared in over 250 newspapers in the 1950s.  During WWII a soldier sent Messick a fan letter asking her to provide him with a "daring" picture of Brenda.  Messick responded with a picture of Brenda going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and wrote, "Is this daring enough for you?"

The popularity of Brenda Starr was such that in 1943 she was featured in a Big Little Book.  Her stories were also carried in comic books by four different publishers - Four Star Publications in 1947, Superior Publishing 1948-1949, Charlton Comics in 1955, and Dell in 1963.  Most of the comic books reprinted strips from the newspaper but the Superior line also devised original content with artwork by Jack Kamen.

In 1945 Columbia released "Brenda Starr, Reporter" as a 13-chapter movie serial with Joan Woodbury playing the glamorous newspaper reporter.  The entire 13 chapters were shot in 21 days of filming and Woodbury felt that she got the role because she could memorize her lines in a single read and shoot her scenes in a single take.  On the last day of the shoot a stocked bar had been set up for the wrap party and everyone was anxiously waiting for Woodbury to film her final scenes.  The final scenes consisted of 19 separate sequences of her speaking on the telephone.  Woodbury would read a page of dialogue and say, "Okay, let's do it."  She shot all 19 scenes - back to back - in one take each.  Then she joined the rest of the crew in getting drunk.  The serial was considered to be a "lost" film for many years with the only known copy in the hands of a private collector.  It was shown for the first time since it's original release in 2006 and was released on DVD in 2011.  A TV-movie starring Jill St. John as Brenda came out in 1976, and an unsold TV pilot with Sherry Jackson aired in 1979.  A 1980s film (sources differ as to 1986 or 1988) starring Brooke Shields as Brenda and Timothy Dalton as Basil St. John was not released in theaters until 1992 due to litigation concerning film rights and distribution.  Critics hated the film, but Ms. Shields was glamorous in her portrayal.

Dale Messick was married twice for a total of 36 years.  From 1952 until the late 1960s she lived in Ogden Dunes, Indiana, along Lake Michigan with her second husband Oscar Strom, a Chicago trial lawyer.  Messick reflected, "It's very hard to keep a long term relationship with someone, especially when you both have busy careers.  But women still want to try it, and Brenda's no exception."  Messick gave birth to her only child, christened Starr, in 1942, and two hours after giving birth she was sitting up in her hospital bed drawing her strip.  Actual female reporters complained that the glamorous Brenda was too far removed from the routine of real newspaperwomen - city council meetings and supermarket openings.  Messick responded, "If I made Brenda's life like theirs, nobody would read it."  When Brenda and her mystery man were finally married in the newspapers on January 15, 1976, the strip was still being carried in 100 newspapers with a readership of 7.5 million.  President Ford even sent his congratulations.

Dale Messick retired in 1985 and Ramona Fradon, an accomplished woman cartoonist, was chosen as a successor.  Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich was picked to write the stories, and in 1995 June Brigman took over the artwork.  Schmich commended Messick saying, "she created, where there did not exist on the comic pages, a gutsy, independent, working woman so the little girls of my age could read the comics, and could find something to relate to."  Dale Messick received the National Cartoonist Society's Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.  She died in 2005 at the age of 98.  After 71 years in the comic pages, it was decided that "Brenda Starr, Reporter" would come to a close.  Brenda made her last appearance on January 2, 2011.  And like the teletype, she was gone.

A real life mystery involving the creation of Brenda Starr took place in 1940 and would have been worthy of an investigative news story by the female reporter.  The initial storyline of the strip was suggested by writer Courtney Riley Cooper, a former reporter of the Chicago Tribune who had also been a publicist for the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.  In the 1920s and 30s he wrote screenplays in Hollywood, and he was an early champion of the FBI and it's young director J. Edgar Hoover.  Riley Cooper became good friends with Hoover and it is widely believed that Cooper had ghostwritten books and magazine articles for Hoover.  Cooper wrote extensively about illegal drugs and was responsible for the 1937 magazine story, "Marijuana, Assassin of Youth".  A few short months after "Brenda Starr" made her debut Cooper was found dead in his Park Central Hotel room in New York City.  It was September 29, 1940 and he was found hanging in his closet, an apparent suicide.  Two of his associates told J. Edgar Hoover that they were certain Cooper had been murdered.  Cooper's wife said that he had just completed an exhaustive investigation in Mexico and unearthed details of Nazi activity and propaganda there.  Was it murder?  Was it suicide?  Where's Brenda Starr when you need her?