<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0
transitional//en">The Lethal Luthors:
Deceptive
Brilliance
by Dennis Power
PART TWO: THE SECRET FOUR
D. D. Warburton (Daddy Warbucks)
1903-2002
David Luthor ran away from home at the age of ten to join a circus. He spent five years under the big top, befriending an Indian fakir and an animal trainer who had been a safari master in India. He resolved to go to India. At fifteen he worked his way across the Pacific on a merchant ship. He jumped ship in Bombay. He knocked around India for a few years and became involved in a few adventures with a British agent named Kimball O'Hara and a semi-shady character named Danny Dravoit.[1]
Dravoit remarked to David once that a man could be the richest bloody man alive if he kept the world supplied with guns. This clicked with him. When he and a friend discovered a temple filled with jewels, they wasted not a second thought about looting it. His friend and he were surrounded by a group of religious zealots who objected to their temple's treasure being pilfered. Luthor's friend made the ultimate sacrifice and made a stand while David escaped with the jewels. Yet even this sacrifice was not enough, and Daniel was nearly captured by the Thuggees. He was rescued by a bear that barreled out of the rain forest and chased the cultists away. The bear ran back into the woods and almost immediately a large elderly man who resembled Thomas Nast’s pictures of Santa Claus emerged from the forest.[2] He introduced himself as Mr. Am. He volunteered to lead David back to British-held territory.
David Luthor inquired what the elderly man was doing in the woods so far from civilization. Mr. Am told David that he was investigating a temple that had recently been taken over by a group of Thuggees. When Luthor inquired who he was working for and whether he would have to turn over the loot he had just taken from the temple. The elderly man said he was working for a private concern and that they would not begrudge young Mr. Luthor the temple treasure since it was loot stolen from people that the Thuggees had killed.
Luthor started at his savior’s use of his name. Mr. Am told David that they had a mutual friend in Kimball O’Hara. Although Luthor, like Kim, was a charming rogue with the soul of a con man, Mr. Am declared that he could not but like him. He knew that Luthor would have a hard time staying on a path that was straight and narrow, but generally he would be a good man. Mr. Am told Luthor that he would do what he could to help him stay on the right side of the path. In his own way David Luthor would be one of Mr. Am’s agents, pushing back the darkness that threatened to overwhelm the world.[3]
David Luthor returned to the United States to discover that his brothers had already long gone their own ways. Not wanting his brothers’ often unsavory reputations to affect his reputation in the slightest (although at the time they were only petty criminals), he took the last name of his friend as a sort of tribute and called himself D. D. Warburton.[4] Using his fortune in gems as the basis for his business venture, he bought into a small arms factory. He quickly used his great intellect to design and distribute munitions. He became a multimillionaire, who was on one hand a ruthless businessman and on the other a generous philanthropist, like his contemporaries John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
At twenty he looked older with his bald scalp, and he used his training in make-up to make himself appear considerably older so he could gain respect from his fellow businessmen. Out of the blue he received a note from his brother Lex, who had broken out of the Kansas State Reformatory. Lex had seen D.D. Warburton's photo in the newspaper as a millionaire on the rise and recognized his brother, despite the make up. They arranged to meet. Lex said that their parents had moved away from Kansas and changed their names, ostensibly because of the disgrace to the family name caused by his criminal career but also because their father was afraid of being discovered by his enemies. Their brother William had also disappeared shortly after graduating college. Lex did not have the freedom and Lawrence did not have the inclination to do what needed to be done, so in Lex’s view that left David.[5]
Lex gave David a choice: he could either pay a yearly stipend to him so his true identity would not be revealed or he could take care of a little girl. David was perplexed by the offer. Lex told them that their brother Lawrence had sired a child as an experiment to see if his ultimately evolved genes would carry onto to the next generation. The child's mother either died in childbirth or abandoned the child out of shame. It was not until Anne was of legal age that David was able to discover that her birth-mother's name was Alice Adams.[6] Lawrence had no use for the child; even if his genetic enhancements had carried over, the child was female and therefore inferior.
Although he almost would have rather have paid the yearly stipend, D. D. Warburton answered the call of family responsibility—rare as it was among the Luthors—and became little Anne’s guardian in 1922. It was the urging of Mr. Am that finally convinced D.D. Warburton to do the right thing. And in doing so he would discover that he was rewarded ten fold as he became famous for being her guardian and parlayed this fame into increased wealth.
The family resemblance, particularly because of the bright red hair, was immediately noticeable. David’s relationship with his ward Anne was tumultuous. He had very little experience dealing with children, and so overwhelmed her with material gifts. Having many businesses to run, D. D. Warburton was not home very often. Feeling abandoned, Anne would run away. Warburton would spend time and effort to find her. It was a pattern that repeated during her childhood, and Anne's adventures became the basis for a comic strip.
Although he used his influence to keep the publicity of the story of his guardianship of the little girl down to a minimum, the story of the self-made millionaire bachelor who adopted a little girl from the wrong side of the tracks leaked. A cartoonist by the name of H.W. Gray based a long-running comic strip on the basic story, although he changed David Douglas Warburton to Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. Annie, as Gray called Anne, was given a mostly fictional background. Gray also filled the strip with his own ultraconservative social and political views. When strip first came out David was furious, but then he thought that it would make a good cover and lead people to believe that he and Anne were fictional characters. He had begun to suspect that his brothers Lawrence and Lex had become career criminals and wanted to create some distance from them. David also thought that this would be a way of defraying the cost of raising a child and would allow Anne to earn money of her own, so he licensed Gray’s comic strip for a share of the syndication profits. Mr. Am became a more frequent visitor to D.D. after he had taken charge of Little Anne in order to give the girl more moral guidance than D.D. could provide.
David Warburton and Anne took to granting H.W. Gray interviews. Gray would expand these interviews into the adventures of Little Orphan Annie. These adventures were mostly fictional but not entirely. Mr. Am was more amused than angered when the cartoonist took little Anne's stories about her friend Mr. Am and made them even more fantastic than they were in real life.
Anne was a delightful child, but she was a bit of a trouble magnet and was always managing to get herself in a jam when David had to go away on business. One might make the case that she was acting out as a way of gaining attention.
As the world progressed towards another war, munitions became a highly competitive and dangerous business. David hired a bodyguard for himself, one of his ex-circus friends named Britt Shelleen, who was a trick shot, an expert knife thrower and a trick rope artist. This man was incorporated into the comic strip and given the name The Asp—the mysterious, almost supernatural protector of Daddy Warbucks.[7] Warburton also acquired a bodyguard for Anne, a man he had met in his Indian travels. His name is never really given, but a certain clue that was contained within the comic strip can narrow down the search, in the comic strip he is called Punjab, which is a place rather than a family name. Anne's bodyguard was a Sikh warrior, possibly with the last name of Singh.[8]
Anne's tendency to run away increased slightly during 1932 because of the stepmother factor.
Around 1932, Kimball O'Hara came to visit Warburton, he brought with him his cousin Deirdre O'Hara. Deirdre was heir to a parcel of land in Georgia; through a convoluted legal process she found herself part owner of a remnant of the famed cotton plantation Tara. The Butler family owned the other portion.
Kimball had come to America with Deirdre to help her settle her affairs. Warburton was interested in purchasing the property because he had been thinking of expanding into cotton and tobacco. There was an immediate attraction between Deirdre O'Hara and David Warburton. They wed in a quick ceremony and had a tumultuous, tempestuous passionate love affair that lasted six months, ending with Deirdre on a luxury liner heading back to England, cursing Warburton’s name. She bore David Warburton’s children, a pair of boys, but never let him know about it. She named the boys Austin David O'Hara and Douglas Evelyn O'Hara. She later married a military man named Nigel Powers. He adopted the boys. Austin was renamed Austin Dangerfield Powers and would often joke that Danger was his middle name. Douglas Evelyn O’Hara merely had his last name changed to Powers for the remainder of his short life.
Nigel took the family on a vacation to Belgium. As Deirdre sat in the car with the two boys, it was blown up. Nigel had actually been an agent of British Intelligence and was investigating Nazi infiltration of Belgium. Two Krafthaus operatives planted a time bomb in his car. Austin was blown clear of the wreckage to be raised by his ever-absent father. Douglas and Deirdre were apparently killed.
Austin grew up to be a top notch sailor; his military career is still classified. After the military he joined the M16 British spy service and became a top spy. He was provided a cover as a fashion photographer, and he blended into the madcap swinging sixties as if made for that era. His greatest foe was the man history knows as Dr. Evil.[9]
David Warburton never married again, but he continued his guardianship of Anne, at first because of his duty to his brother and his innate sense of responsibility but he also came to love her as if she were his own child. They had adventures all over the world as Warburton expanded his financial empire. At one time he took steps to adopt her, but his brother Lawrence suddenly took an interest in his daughter and blocked every attempt to do so, by various illegal means. Somehow Lawrence was convinced that Anne was a valuable asset, no doubt due to the genetic material she inherited from him that he supposed to be highly evolved. Lawrence decided that he would either possess Anne or destroy her. Using various goons and stooges, Lawrence ordered a variety of assassination and kidnap attempts, which Anne and Warburton successfully avoided.[10]
After attending three years of a finishing school for young ladies, Anne Luthor attended the University of Chicago where she became briefly enamored with Professor Henry Jones, Jr. Although the infatuation with Jones passed, she remained intrigued by archaeology and paleontology. Another student who shared her passion was Daniel Clampett, the scion of an Arkansas mountain clan whose land was rich in uranium. The Clampetts sold their land and made certain their children had more than a sixth-grade education, as opposed to their cousins in Bugtussle who seemed content to live in the hard scrabble conditions of Ozark mountain life. Clampett was an archeologist, anthropologist, adventurer, and entrepreneur, who also invented advances in sonar technology that were used in geology and archaeology.
Daniel Clampett and Anne Luthor became romantically involved while on various archaeological digs sponsored by the University of Chicago. They married and formed their own research group, funded by their families’ wealth. They would often share their resources and digs with other notable and independent archeologists, such as Don Sturdy, Carter and Shiera Hall, Abner Ravenwood, and Lord Richard Croft.[11]
As she had in her childhood, Anne Luthor Clampett spent her young adulthood traveling the world undertaking various adventures. These adventures were related to H.W. Gray and re-imagined as the continuing adventures of an eternally young Little Orphan Annie. Having a child, Daniel Lionel Clampett, in 1944 barely slowed her down. Anne Luthor Clampett and Daniel Clampett disappeared in 1951 while looking for the fabled city of Agartha,[12] and were presumed dead. Daniel Lionel Clampett was placed under the guardianship of D. D. Warburton.
As D.D. Warburton became wealthier, he knew that if his true personal wealth were discovered by the United States Treasury he would be taxed into penury, or rather a good deal of his money would go to pay taxes rather than going to the purposes for which he wished. Therefore he began to set up an elaborate system of holding companies, shell companies, and proxy companies. Various men who became widely acclaimed as millionaire entrepreneurs were actually working for Warburton, fronting for some of his hidden business ventures. As part of the labyrinth corporate structure David Warburton became the secret business partner of many the notorious and also the unknown figures of organized crime. Unlike his relatives William Luthor and Alexis Luther, David Warburton did not deliberately seek out criminal ventures in which to invest but rather allowed criminal ventures to invest in his legitimate enterprises. While this could be seen as a giant money-laundering scheme, this was not David Warburton’s intent or purpose. Most of his clients were people who had made their fortunes during Prohibition, originally through bootlegging and then through other criminal enterprises. Many of these people, who were now approaching late middle age, were family men wishing to divest themselves of their criminal enterprises and make their operations totally legitimate. David Warburton saw this as giving these criminals who wished to reform by becoming legitimate a chance to do so, a prerequisite of his aid was that he would receive 10% of the profits up front, that he would control their business interests to make certain that they stayed in legitimate enterprises and that another 30% of the profits would be given to various charities. In this way Warburton believed that the prison system would not have to carry the burden of punishing these reformed criminals. Had many people been aware of David Warburton’s activities during this period, eyebrows might have been raised that he became chummy with various officials in the law enforcement and justice sectors as well as known or suspected criminals.
Warburton’s contact with the law-enforcement and justice sectors allowed him access to the various law-enforcement institutions so that if need be he could arrange to have any of his clients who violated their agreements arrested and charged with crimes. These contacts also ensured his protection. This access to law-enforcement agencies also gave him a wide list of possible candidates to contact and open a dialogue about using his method to become legitimate. As a result of legitimizing the holdings of these criminal fortunes, Warburton’s financial empire began to control an extremely diverse array of companies dealing with everything from talent agencies to parking meter factories.
Warburton became savvy about media manipulation early in his career. It was through the medium of the newspaper, and then the radio, that he used fiction as a tool to shape reality. Although the adventures of Little Orphan Annie were an exaggerated, fictionalized, and somewhat sanitized version of his relationship with his ward Anne, they served several purposes. First the wild tales convinced most of their audience that they were pure fiction and were not based on reality. The comic strip and radio adventures thus were able to give David Warburton and Anne Warburton a level of privacy that others in their position might not have had. No one believed that they were real characters, so if by chance mention were made of Warburtons in the media, people would believe this was a publicity stunt, a joke, or the work of a lunatic.
The comics and radio shows also enabled Warburton to shape his public image. It was unavoidable that some people would realize that Daddy Warbucks and Orphan Annie were real people; however, their perceptions of David Warburton and Anne Warburton were shaped by the public images of Daddy Warbucks and Little Orphan Annie. In other words people saw David Warburton as the hard-driving, charitable capitalist with a heart of gold and Anne as a happy-go-lucky, pulled-up-by-her-bootstraps plucky orphan girl. While there was a grain of truth to these portraits, a grain was about all there was.
It was a great revelation to him when, like his brother Alexander, he investigated his family tree to see if they were, as their father claimed, heirs to the throne of the Kingdom of Lutha. As his brother would discover, they were not. However David did learn of his Wold Newton family heritage. He learned through genealogical research that the Wold Newton Families often had quite an influence on literature and popular culture. These often-fictionalized portraits of real people frequently led to the same phenomena that he had observed with himself and Annie. The public disbelieved their true existence and most of those who knew about their true existence believed that the public image was the true image.
He saw how Tarzan was regarded a purely fictional creation, which was fine with Lord Greystoke since he wanted to keep out of the public spotlight. Yet David Warburton also noticed how Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Spider, and The Shadow all had very public exploits that were printed in the papers, yet overall most people, because of the print and radio portrayals, believed them to be fictional persons.
When David Warburton had investigated his family’s past and discovered his connection to the Wold Newton family, he also discovered the connection that many members of the Wold Newton family had to famous literary characters and to their “creators.” This was something to which he could relate considering how his life had been portrayed as Daddy Warbucks.
After Warburton had discovered the reality of Tarzan and the connection that Tarzan had between Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.[13], he became interested in meeting Tarzan and discussing their shared ancestry. Tarzan was wary of David Warburton but after several different inquiries through various private detectives, Tarzan discovered that David Warburton was kin to him, literally and figuratively. Warburton was a warrior in the jungle of commerce, he was ruthless with his enemies and loyal to his partners. He was a man of his word and adhered to the spirit and letter of an agreement.
David Warburton’s global financial empire became partners with Tarzan’s and the Walker family’s financial interests to help native Africans develop the necessary economic and industrial base to modernize and not become marginalized by the European industrial nations.
Warburton became interested in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ideas to capitalize on the Tarzan character by merchandising it, thus making the character well known and furthering the notion that the character was fictional; he began doing the same for his Daddy Warbucks and Orphan Annie likenesses. Publicly Burroughs scoffed and mocked the way the major studios’ Tarzan films treated his character, although privately Burroughs and Tarzan were pleased that the films promoted the fictionality of the character by creating popular variations on the character depicted in the “novels,” thus making the films and books seem very removed from a real person. When the ERB Inc. became interesting in making films about the Tarzan, character to make certain that the “character” was depicted “correctly” Warburton became a financial backer for this venture. These, however, were not as profitable as the films released by the major studios. Warburton through his investments in all of the major studios in Hollywood became Burroughs’ silent investment partner in backing some of the major studio’s Tarzan films.
Despite Warburton's great wealth and power, he still had unresolved personal issues, most dramatically revolving around his brothers; he both hated and loved them. He learned through various channels that the Ultra-Humanite was his brother Lawrence Luthor, his brother Alexander was Lex Luthor, and his brother William was possibly the worst of them all. William was the head of the mysterious Scorpia organization. He blamed his brothers for his parents’ disappearance, despised them for their often callous disposal of human life in the achievement of their goals, and yet he was proud of their intellectual prowess. He also feared the consequences should their names ever become linked with his.
David Warburton began to use his influence subtly, behind the scenes. He was instrumental in getting newspapers and radio stations to downplay all true media news coverage of the activities of Lex Luthor, the Ultra-Humanite, and the Scorpion. A few media outlets, of course, would not play ball.
David Warburton discovered that he had an odd ally in this manipulation of the media image of Lex Luthor and the Ultra-Humanite. This ally was Superman, who believed that comic books, radio, and cartoons about him needed to regulated, as did coverage of the various villains he fought. He believed that fictionalizing and exaggerating the exploits of himself and his villains would lessen the likelihood that someone would try to replicate the villains’ plans or weaponry. He also believed that the less people knew about many of the real threats to civilization, the less they would worry about future threats. He also thought that by making certain that children knew that the stories were imaginary, children would not try super stunts on their own and become seriously injured. Superman also believed that the comics could provide a good format for children to learn a code of morality and the difference between good and evil. The comics could provide examples, for the line between good and evil was well defined in them and the characters of the comic books were caricatures so broadly written as to be seen as fictional.
Warburton was content to influence events indirectly until the opportunity arose to work with other members of the Wold Newton family to tailor their public presentations and guard their privacy by regulating the fictions surrounding them.
By the late fifties many of the people who had grown up reading comic books, pulp magazines, and watching movie serials were grown men who had begun to apply analytical thinking to the favorite entertainment figures of their youth. Some began to wonder if these characters were entirely fictional or if there were some truth behind the fiction. One of the main targets for this type of research was Tarzan.
To counter this type of speculation, Tarzan, in accord with the Burroughs estate, began allowing more Tarzan films to be made. Although both Burroughs and Tarzan had disliked the portrayal of Tarzan in the Weissmuller movies, the characterization did serve well to increase the perceived fictionality of the character.[14]
Yet a movement towards a more realistic portrayal of Tarzan in the films was already under way. The first few films starring Gordon Scott depicted the dim monosyllabic Tarzan, yet as the series progressed Tarzan became more intelligent and articulate.
Although we now know that the intensive research into Tarzan's life was not directly connected to the changing trend of his public image, Tarzan, Burroughs Inc., and others were not so certain. One particular researcher, Philip José Farmer, was uncovering certain leads that Tarzan and the Burroughs family would rather not be uncovered. To confuse the path of discovery and possibly discourage the researcher, Tarzan and company arranged for new Tarzan books to be published but to do so under a cloud of controversy. The hope was the that new series of fictional books and the controversy surrounding them would further obfuscate the issue of whether Tarzan and his fellow Wold Newton Family members were fictional or real.
A series of five books were published in quick succession by Gold Star books. They arranged for this publisher because David Warburton was co-owner of this firm.
The adventures were based on some of the events in the life of another Tarzan, Richard Lansing, Lord Greystoke. Lansing was the actual Lord Greystoke, that is he held the title that E. R. Burroughs had borrowed as one of Tarzan's. Richard Lansing was depicted in the earlier Tarzan films as Boy. He had been raised by the man designated as Tarzan-2, whose origins were unknown but who seemed to be a duplicate of the actual Tarzan. Some of the later Tarzan films had also been based on the life of Richard Lansing.[15]
Gold Star Books was founded by G. Gold and D. Warburton in 1963 and continued through 1965. The Tarzan books published were Tarzan and the Silver Globe (1964), Tarzan and the Cave City (1964), Tarzan and the Snake People (1964), Tarzan and the Abominable Snowmen (1965), and Tarzan and the Winged Invaders (1965)
The author of these books was named Barton Werper. Werper is an interesting character. Many Wold-Newtonian scholars are familiar with the name Barton Werper from two different sources. The last name is clearly based upon Lieutenant Albert Werper, a disgraced Belgian officer sent to the Congo instead of being court-martialed, who is a villain in Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Barton Werper was the pseudonym of Peter and Peg Scott, a married couple who were commissioned to write the Tarzan pastiches and write them in a certain way.[16] These volumes were designed to further promote the fictionality of the Tarzan character by their outlandish plots.
To further muddy the waters Burroughs Inc. launched a lawsuit against Gold Star books that proved that many of the passages from the five books had been plagiarized from Tarzan books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The end result of the suit was that Gold Star had to cease publication of the Tarzan books and that all further copies would be destroyed.
This lawsuit accomplished several things. First it created concrete legal evidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs had created that character of Tarzan of the Apes, proving his fictional nature once and for all. The lawsuit also made these unauthorized and bizarre adventures of Tarzan very rare and sought after books. It established to a certain extent Barton Werper's credentials with Burroughs material; even negative credentials are credentials in some minds.
It was also designed to curb the investigation into the reality of Tarzan by Philip José Farmer and others. In this it was only moderately successful.[17]
After the Werper books were published and then stopped from being published, a Tarzan television series was created based on the life of Richard Lansing, but set in a mythical Africa with pronounced South American borrowings, such as Native American tribesmen and other such inaccuracies. These additions and anachronisms were, of course, intended to create even more of a false impression of Tarzan and his Africa.
Another related project turned out to be nearly disastrous, the film called Tarzan 66 or rather Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. A well-known science-fiction author, Fritz Lieber, was tapped to write up the novelization of the film. A mix up resulted in the film version and the novelization having very different characters and divergent storylines. Tarzan was said to be very upset about this. Fortunately no one thoroughly investigated the two storylines together until recently.[18]
Another science-fiction writer, Philip José Farmer, was living in California at that time; an acquaintance of his who worked at the movie studio where some of the scenes were shot drunkenly mentioned that the real Tarzan had visited the set. Farmer used the information gleaned from this to re-launch his investigation into the truth of Tarzan. What he discovered shocked, sickened, and fascinated him. He later used these researches to write three pastiche novels about Tarzan and his brother Doc Savage, using the roman a clef of Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban. He did not realize until later that while Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban were real people, they were not the Tarzan and Doc Savage recorded by Burroughs and Dent. The pastiche novels were A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, and The Mad Goblin.
In 1965 David Warburton became aware of yet another of his brother Lawrence Luthor's natural children by the name of Nasthalia Luthor via a letter from Lawrence. According to Lawrence’s account, Nasthalia was not biologically related to David Warburton, but rather was fathered by Rodney Prescott upon Dolores Winters, an actress into whose body Lawrence Luthor’s brain had been transplanted. Hence she was in a real sense Lawrence Luthor’s daughter, but not David Warburton’s niece.[19]
Lawrence did not care if David did anything about this girl or not. However since David had raised and one of Lawrence’s other daughters, he thought David might like the opportunity to try once again. David Warburton had private detectives locate Nasthalia Luthor. She was the leader of a female biker gang who had been pestering Supergirl. Nasthalia was twenty-five years old and on parole, so she was not a little girl to be raised by any stretch of the imagination. However her life was certainly on a fast downward spiral. Johnny Hazard, the private eye Warburton had hired, believed that Nasthalia was using drugs, a serious violation of her parole.
Warburton met with Nasthalia and gave her the option of getting off drugs and attending school or going to prison, explaining that he had close connections with many law enforcement agencies. She chose school. Warburton had no children after the disappearance and presumed death of Anne and was looking for an heir. Daniel Clampett was due to inherit the Clampett fortune and so Warburton felt that Daniel would have little interest in controlling the Warburton's holdings. Daniel was, however, demonstrating the genius that seemed to frequently occur in the Luthor family. He was racking up degrees in finance, molecular biology, and agricultural sciences. Daniel planned to use the Clampett fortune from uranium to preserve life rather than destroy it by developing positive uses for radiation in medicine and agriculture.
D. D. Warburton used his influence in the media portrayal of his family until 1967 when an opportunity to control the media portrayal of his family came his way. David Warburton was the secret owner of Kinney National Services. This was one of the acquisitions that David Warburton made when he legitimized the holdings of criminals who wished to retire or fold their holdings into legal companies. Kinney Systems had been owned by Caesar Kimmel, a New Jersey gambler who was part of Longy Zwillman’s mob.[20] Kinney System owned parking garages, many of which were, it is rumored, built by mob-controlled labor and construction companies. After Warburton acquired this company, he wished to further legitimize it so he went into partnership with the Rosenthal family, whose main source of income was a chain of funeral homes. The Rosenthals also owned horses in which they shared interests with Kimmel. Warburton arranged a joint venture between the Rosenthals and the Kinney System in a car-rental business. This led to a merger between Kinney and Rosenthals that would create a public corporation. The new company would be run by the Rosenthals with Steven Ross as the president of Kinney Service Inc. The mob connections would be buried deep.
Steve Ross proved to be a master of business acumen and a master of the art of negotiation. Kinney National Services soon began acquiring cleaning, painting, plumbing, and electronics companies.[21] In 1967, another lucrative company whose owners had hidden mob ties was offered a chance to be legitimized. This company was National Periodical Publications, the publishers of DC Comics but also publisher and distributors of Mad Magazine, Playboy, and Signet Books. The mob ties were from Harry Donnenfeld. In the twenties during Prohibition, Harry and Irving Donnenfeld had owned Martin Press, for which they bought pulp paper from Canada. Through an arrangement with Frank Costello, they also looked the other way when some of the pulp shipment turned out to be liquor from Canada. Harry Donnenfeld became a useful middleman for Costello in dealing with judges and other politicians who could not be publicly seen with a notorious figure such as Costello. For these services Martin Press received lucrative contracts for printing campaign literature. There were also unconfirmed rumors that Harry Donnenfeld was business partners with Costello in jukeboxes, gambling machines, and possibly the numbers racket. Harry Donnenfeld’s familiarity with a distribution network that circumvented border patrols and postal inspectors made him a good contact for publishers whose material would have been seized by postal inspectors for violating the obscenity laws. From there it was only a small move for Donnenfeld to enter the publishing industry himself as a publisher of sex pulps and true crime pulps. In this venture he went into partnership with Paul Sampliner. Sampliner was a wealthy young man who had dabbled in the publishing business, owning Eastern News, which had focused on psychology and politics. This venture had failed, and Donnenfeld proposed going into partnership with Sampliner to partially absolve Eastern News debt of $30,000 dollars to Donnenfeld’s distribution network. In 1935 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson made a deal with Donnenfeld’s Independent News to publish his two comic books. In a few months Wheeler-Nicholson was bought out and vanished from the comics industry and Harry Donnelson and his silent partner Paul Sampliner owned the company called Detective Comics, Inc.[22]
There were some editorial changes introduced once Warburton’s front company bought National Periodicals. One of the most lasting editorial changes was to make the major three superheroes—Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman—reflect the modern era and have more realistic-seeming storylines. Long time Superman editor Mort Weisinger was retired and Julius Schwartz became the editor of the Superman comics.[23]
Warburton had Daniel Clampett act as his agent at DC Comics. Lionel began re-negotiating the licensing fees that the company had with various heroes, refusing to acknowledge their existence or else limiting the appearances of super heroes who wanted too much for their images or stories. He also stressed that there should be tighter continuity between the various magazines.
Warburton believed that film technology had reached the point that stories of superheroes could be told on the motion picture screen without seeming ludicrous. Also the commercial value of the stories of other Wold Newton Family members were a plum ripe for the picking.
Kinney National Services bought Warner Brothers Studio-Seven Arts in 1969. Although this was a natural extension of Kinney National Services’ corporate expansion by acquiring access to another media, insiders also knew that this was another of Warburton’s legitimizing acquisitions. Seven Arts pictures had been owned by Elliot Hyman, a business associate of Meyer Lansky, who had bought Jack Warner’s shares of his movie studio and record company. Kinney National Services became Warner Communications.[24]
Since Daniel Clampett had a fortune of his own and set of businesses to inherit, Warburton began to groom Nasthalia to take over for him. Because of her criminal past as Nasthalia Luthor, she changed her name to Lacy Warburton. Once she had a concrete goal in life, she set her mind to making it a reality.
Daniel disagreed with the idea that Lacy should be Warburton's heir. Lacy was, after all, not a blood relation and was illegitimate to boot. Daniel believed that he should be Warburton's heir and that the Warburton fortune should join the Clampett fortune. This led to a rift between Daniel Clampett and David Warburton, one that David thought was healed but actually never was.
After Daniel Clampett was legally swindled out of most of his fortune by a distant cousin, Jethro Bodine,[25] he believed that D. D. Warburton would now have no choice but to appoint him as his heir.
Although David Warburton believed that Daniel Clampett had gotten a raw deal, he believed that his failure was a good lesson for him in the cutthroat world of finance and refused to bail him out. D.D. did, however, allow him to take control of some smaller aspects of Warburton Enterprises (Warner Communications); these included DC Comics, although D. D. Warburton made sure that certain guidelines were to be followed as per agreements with the people on whom the characters were based.
One of the major projects of the new company was the release of the big budget Superman film, which was intended to revitalize and redefine the Superman myth for a new generation. However the film received bad publicity before it was even went into production when it was publicly cursed by Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of the Superman character. After Jerry Siegel appeared on national television on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder in October 1975 a movement came into being dedicated to convincing DC Comics to give Siegel and Shuster due credit for having created Superman and getting them just compensation. Unbeknownst to many people, Superman had instigated this movement with Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams, who publicly spearheaded it. This issue became a battle royal at DC comics because giving Siegel and Shuster credit for creating Superman would play havoc with Daniel Clampett’s future plans for the comics. He fought tooth and nail to hold the line and deny Siegel and Shuster any credit and any compensation. David Warburton had to use all of his influence to win over the board of directors and run rough shod over Daniel Clampett’s stalling.
In 1976 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were given their justified credit for being the creators of the Superman character and a lifetime annuity as partial compensation.
Daniel Clampett realized that he could no longer afford to play second fiddle to David Warburton and in 1977, having learned his lessons well, Daniel Clampett did some corporate backstabbing and usurped much of Warburton Enterprises from D.D. Warburton. This was, however, so far behind the scenes as far as the front companies were concerned that only a few people realized at first that there had had been a change in leadership.
D. D. Warburton was able to hold onto enough to keep himself and Lacy in their accustomed style of living. The shock of the betrayal and the loss of his fortune at such an advanced age threw him into a depression, and he partially retired from business. Lacy became a high-flying socialite and fashion-magazine editor/publisher.
The rumors that David Warburton became a paranoid reclusive, much like Howard Hughes, are however very untrue. Rather he was like Jonas Cord, who continued to work in some capacity until he died.[26] Although semi-retired, David Warburton did keep tabs on his former company. He grew very disgusted at the way it was being run and at the various unseemly business ventures in which Daniel became involved.
The Clamp Tower incident[27] was the catalyst for D. D. Warburton to once again spring into action and save the reputation of his company. While Daniel Clampett’s companies were in a disarray after the Clamp Towers incident, D. D. Warburton moved swiftly and surely to retake much of his empire. Being on the outside for many years had made him harder, more inflexible, and less willing to compromise. He needed the quick infusion of capital that the tabloid style news would bring him so he turned the “Daily Planet” into a tabloid newspaper. When Warburton’s old acquaintance Clark Kent protested against turning the Daily Planet into a tabloid, Warburton summarily fired Kent.[28]
He was in the fight of his life. When it appeared that Superman had died as part of the Doomsday events, D. D. Warburton acquired his cape, intending to display it for money.[29] Lois Lane objected to his plans for it, so he fired her. The cape disappeared when she did, but he chose not to pursue the matter, realizing that she had been correct that displaying the cape would have been a crass, ghoulish act.
When the editor of the paper was able to get enough share holders to turn his large block of stock into a minority stake, Warburton did not hold a grudge—it was merely business. Besides it was time to move on.
By 1987 the corporate war between Daniel Clampett, who had recently changed his name to Lionel Luthor in the aftermath of the Clamp Tower incident, and D. D. Warburton was winding down. Through intermediaries, various agreements had been negotiated. In the end, D. D. Warburton once again gained partial ownership of the publishing houses, the film studio, the television production company, radio stations, and some manufacturing concerns. Neither Luthorcorp nor Warburton had controlling interest in any of these ventures, merely the two largest blocks of stocks. So Warburton and Luthorcorp had to wrangle for votes whenever there was a showdown at the board meetings.[30]
D.D. Warburton believed that communications industries and information systems would be the next big money-making concern and so was content to hold onto these. Luthorcorp retained control of the areo-space industries, the agricultural companies, and the medical research facilities. It also took over Warburton's share of the Atlanta-based ”Daily Planet.“[31]
A bone of contention remained with DC comics. Although neither side saw comic books as a lucrative venture, they did see them as a useful means of reaching younger potential customers and so they fought over it. They shared the company, uneasily, for the next few years. This conflict saw the erosion of one of the two major comic book companies in the eighties and nineties. Also a power struggle against Marvel Comics, which was secretly owned and controlled by another member of the Luthor family, created a vacuum and allowed the independent comics to rise.
Rumors also leaked out about a super child or super children living in Littleton, Georgia.[32]
Warburton, however, could not resist tweaking his opponent, and Superman IV, which came out in 1987 and depicted Warbuton’s transformation of the Planet into a tabloid, included a character named Lenny who was the nephew of Lex Luthor. Lenny, i.e. Lionel Luthor, helped Lex escape from prison and aided in the creation of the creature that fought and nearly killed Superman.
The film Superman IV depicted part of the incident which as come to be known as The Doomsday. This was the day that Superman was killed. . .twice. Rather it was revealed that rather than there being one Superman moving across the country at superspeed, there were in fact at least two supermen.[33] The Superman currently based in New York was killed by a supposedly alien creature dubbed Doomsday. This was actually a genetically modified and cybernetically enhanced Mr. Hyde.[34] The other Superman—who had operated in Cleveland and New York, but was killed in his most recent home, Atlanta—was killed by the Atomic Man, a genetically modified clone of one of the Superman.[35]
Lionel Luthor’s actual involvement in this part of the Doomsday Plan, beyond the hints provided in Superman IV, was never really proven; there were only hints and suspicions. The film tested Lionel Luthor's forbearance with the portrayal of Lenny, but what really caused Lionel anger was the small bit that had Lacy Warfield buy the old Kent Farm in Smallville.[36] As will be seen in the article “Secret Signals,” this small barb hit a little too close to the mark. Some believe that Lionel's wrath is what caused the film to fail so dramatically at the box office.
David Douglas Luthor, a.k.a. David Douglas Warburton, a.k.a. Daddy Warbucks, lived to the ripe old age of 99, passing away in 2002. One of his last achievements was an exposé of Lionel Luthor's illicit, illegal, and extremely dangerous control of Littleton, Georgia. Working with the heir to the Superman name, one of his television companies produced the television series, Smallville.