Lee Falk - Life and Career

Life and Career

Falk was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent his boyhood and his youth. His mother was Eleanor Alina (a name he later, in some form, used in both his Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom story lines), and his father was Benjamin Gross. Both of his parents were Jewish. Lee was born and raised Jewish. Benjamin Gross died when Falk was just a boy, and after a time, his mother Eleanor married Albert Falk Epstein, who became the father figure for Lee Falk and his brother, Leslie. Falk changed his surname after leaving college. He took the middle name of his stepfather, but "Lee" had been his nickname since childhood, so he took that name also. His brother, Leslie, also took the name "Falk".

When Falk began his comic strip and comic book writing and drawing career, his official biography claimed that he was an experienced world traveler who had studied with Eastern mystics. In fact, Falk had simply made it up in order to seem more like the right kind of person to be writing about globe-trotting heroes like Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom. His trip to New York City to pitch Mandrake the Magician for publication by the King Features Syndicate was at that time the farthest that he had traveled from home in St. Louis. In later life, however, he became an experienced world traveler for real - at least partly, he said, to avoid the embarrassment of having his bluff inadvertently called by genuine travelers wanting to swap anecdotes.

During World War II, Falk also worked as chief of propaganda for the new radio station KMOX at St. Louis, where he became the leader of the radio foreign language division of the Office of War Information.

Lee Falk married three times, to Louise Kanaseriff, Constance Moorehead Lilienthal, and Elizabeth Moxley (interestingly, he married Elizabeth, a respected stage-director, not long before he decided to depict the marriage of The Phantom to the character's longtime girlfriend Diana Palmer in Falk's The Phantom comic strip). Elizabeth also sometimes helped him with the scripts in his later years. She even finished his last The Phantom stories after he died. Falk became the father of three children, Valerie (his daughter with Louise Kanaseriff), and Diane and Conley (his daughter and son with Constance Moorehead Lilienthal).

Falk died of heart failure in 1999. He lived the last years of his life in New York, in an apartment with a panoramic view of the New York skyline and Central Park; he spent his summers in a house on Cape Cod. He literally wrote his comic strips from 1934 to the last days of his life, when in hospital he whipped off his oxygen mask to dictate his stories. However, new episodes of The Phantom, and also Mandrake the Magician, are still being drawn by others, both as comic strips and in comic books (with the newest addition to The Phantom coming from Moonstone Books). New movie and TV versions of his comic strip characters are also reported to be forthcoming.

His interment was in Brooklyn's Cypress Hills Cemetery.