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His house in New Hampshire, a big, comfortable modernized farmhouse on 65 acres of rolling land, sees him only at irregular intervals. The farm, which he enjoys in a baffled sort of way but can seldom stand for more than a few days at a time, is Mrs. Capp's particular pride & joy and is headquarters for their three children, Julie Ann, 17, Catherine Jan, 14, and Colin Cameron, 6. Though Capp sometimes talks his wife into spending stretches of weeks in Manhattan, she is a woman "who gets sleepy at n o'clock" and pines for the New England countryside. Capp has mirrored his astonishment at this phenomenon by making her the model for a character named Moonbeam McSwine, a lovely girl but one who "likes to stay down on the farm with the hawgs."
Food that Fights Back. Capp himself thirsts continually for the uproar and excitement of New York, and spends from ten days to two weeks every month in a suite at Manhattan's Warwick Hotel. He loves "21," the Stork Club, and the Sixth Avenue delicatessens. Though he has a delicate stomach, he forces it to accept "food that fights right back" and is constantly chewing soda-mint tablets in an attempt to placate its outraged state.
Manhattan is also the seat of Capp Enterprises, a firm devoted to the vastly remunerative business of commercializing the byproducts of Capp's comic strips. This odd institution's headquarters on East 45th Street (it also has a branch office in Montreal) is presided over by brother Jerry and has a desk for brother Elliot, who also runs a publishing firm and writes the action for Abbie & Slats, a strip which Capp originally founded.
Capp Enterprises not only licenses the manufacture of such direct offshoots of the strip as Shmoos and Kigmies, but more than a hundred other products, including Li'l Abner orangeade, Daisy Mae blouses, Li'l Abner corncob pipes and Li'l Abner skonk hats. A good guess at the gross profit for 1950: $200,000.
But Capp's journeys to New York are basically vacation trips. When it is time to begin producing fresh chapters in the lives of Li'l Abner and his colleagues, he retires to a big, handsomely furnished apartment on Boston's Beacon Street. One of its back rooms—a bare-walled hideaway fitted up with three drawing boards—is the workroom in which Capp and two longtime assistants, Andy Amato and Walter Johnston, grind out the installments of their never-ending serial.
The Music Was Simply Grand. Capp writes the story the strips tell, and the dialogue in which it is told, and draws the faces of the characters. Amato and Johnston—who each get 10% of Capp's profits, or about $30,000 a year—produce figures and backgrounds and finish the laborious chore of inking in the finished product. Capp does his work in long, furious bursts. He usually turns out a month's strips in two weeks.
For all his glee over his wealth and fame, these long, exhausting bouts of creation seem to be Al Capp's greatest reward. "No matter what else happens to me," he says, "I'm God himself when I sit down at this drawing board."