LIFE Superman

IT’S AN EPIC SAGA, A FANTASTIC IMMIGRANT story now woven into America’s cultural fabric: On the doomed planet Krypton, a son was born to Jor-El, an eminent scientist, and his wife, Lara. While the boy, named Kal-El, was still an infant, unstable geological conditions caused Krypton to explode, wiping out the planet; anticipating the apocalypse, however, Kal-El’s parents saved their son by placing him in a small spacecraft bound for Earth. After a 27.1-light-year journey (according to a 2012 analysis by the astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson) the baby landed in a Kansas field, where he was taken in by the God-fearing Kents and christened Clark. As he matured, Clark Kent’s alien physiology developed superhuman strength, X-ray vision, and the capacity for flight, among other physical and mental abilities. Once…

THE BROAD STROKES OF SUPERMAN’S origin story are known even to casual fans of the franchise. His true birthplace was not the planet Krypton, however, but a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Depression-era Cleveland, inside the minds of high school pals Jerome “Jerry” Siegel and Joe Shuster. Aspiring writer Siegel spun tales in a self-published magazine he called Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. Toronto-born Shuster, who hoped to become an illustrator, often provided the artwork. Both young men were small, nerdish, and socially awkward. Siegel was bullied and abused relentlessly—one painful school memory was of urinating in his pants after a teacher refused his desperate pleas to go to the bathroom. “You are a bad, bad, bad, bad boy! Bad and disgusting … Go home!” snapped the instructor…

THE ACTOR WHO WOULD become TV’s first Superman was a Pasadena, California, teen named George Bessolo when—like Smallville’s Clark Kent—he discovered his own true identity. “I came across a picture of a good-looking guy, a big fellow, and idly asked who that was,” George Reeves recalled in 1943. “Mother said, ‘Oh, that’s your father.’” He’d been born George Brewer in Iowa in 1914 but never saw his birth father after his parents divorced before his first birthday. His mother remarried in California and her Italian second husband adopted her son. “I thought I was Italian … And then I found out I was Irish. All Irish.” Six feet tall and athletic, his good looks accented by a dimpled chin and a broken nose acquired from his days as an amateur…

AT THE DAWN OF THE 1970S, EDITOR JULIUS Schwartz took over the Superman titles at DC. He had some thoughts about his flagship superhero—specifically, to update Superman for a hip contemporary audience while at the same time stripping down the character to his essentials, with fewer bells and whistles. Schwartz wanted to dispense with kryptonite, which he saw as an easy gimmick, and simply make the Man of Steel somewhat less inherently powerful. Whereas Mort Weisinger’s Superman, “could balance the earth on one finger,” Schwartz told writer Les Daniels, his version, “would have to use both hands.” He also gave Clark Kent a change of venue, moving him from the Daily Planet to TV. “Our readers are not that familiar with newspapers,” Schwartz said. “Most of them get their news…

AT THE HEIGHT OF FIRST fame in 1979, he was still living in the same “hole in the wall” New York City studio and still driving the same aging Ford Pinto he had before Superman rocketed him to stardom a year earlier. It was all part of his effort to remain earthbound and avoid being typecast in the role—and costume. “The cape and boots,” Christopher Reeve told People, “didn’t follow me home.” He had begun acting at age nine as a source of solace and refuge from an emotionally fraught childhood. His father, a onetime professional actor who quit the stage to become an Ivy League educator and admired poet, and his mother, a journalist, divorced when Christopher was three. The two remained bitterly estranged, and Reeve—raised in Princeton, New…

LOIS LANE’S FEISTY, flighty, love-crushed charms came naturally to Margot Kidder. The daughter of a mining engineer dad and a high school history teacher mom, she was born in Yellowknife, at the edge of the Arctic Circle, in Canada’s frozen Northwest Territories. A brainy, attractive teen—or, as she once told People, “a hot babe with teased hair and white lipstick”—Kidder skipped grades and became a University of British Columbia freshman at age 16. She dropped out a year later to try modeling and acting in Toronto and made her American film debut at 21 in the otherwise forgettable Gaily, Gaily, in 1969. There followed appearances in Brian De Palma’s 1972 psycho horror flick Sisters, the 1974 slasher film Black Christmas, and, in 1975, author turned director Thomas McGuane’s 92 in…