Lee Falk

Leon Harrison Gross, more known by the alias of Lee Falk, (April 28, 1911 - March 13, 1999) was an American writer, best known as the creator of the popular comic strip superheroes The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, who at the height of their popularity secured him over a hundred million readers every single day. He was also a playwright and theatrical producer, and contributed to a series of novels based on The Phantom. Several famous film stars appeared in his plays, like Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Chico Marx, and Ethel Waters.

Leon was born in St. Louis, where he spent his childhood and youth. His mother was called Elanore Aleina (a name he would later on, in some form, use in both Mandrake and Phantom stories), and his father was Benjamin Gross. Both of his parents were Jewish. However, Albert Gross died when Leon was a small baby. Eleanor married Albert Epstein, who became Leon's father figure in life.

Leon reportedly changed his surname after leaving college. It is not known why he took the name "Falk", but "Lee" had been his nickname since childhood. His brother, Leslie, also took the name "Falk".

During World War 2, Lee also worked as chief of propaganda for the new radio station KMOX in Illinois, where he became the leader of the radio foreign language division of the Office of War Information.

When he began his comics writing career, his official biography claimed that he was an experienced world traveller who had studied with Eastern mystics, etc. In fact, he 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 and the Phantom; the trip to New York to pitch Mandrake the Magician to King Features Syndicate was at the time the farthest he'd been from home. In later life, however, he became an experienced world traveller for real - at least partly, he said, to avoid the embarrassment of having his bluff inadvertently called by genuine travellers wanting to swap anecdotes.

Lee Falk married three times, with Louise Kanaseriff, Constance Morehead Lilienthal, and Elizabeth Moxley (interestingly, he married Elizabeth, a respected stage-director, not long before he decided to marry the Phantom and his longtime girlfriend Diana Palmer in The Phantom strip). Elizabeth would sometimes help Lee with the scripts in his last years. She also finished his last Phantom stories after he died. Lee became the father of three children, Valerie (daughter of Louise Kanaseriff), and Diane and Conley (children of Constance Moorehead Lilienthal).

Lee died because of heart failure in 1999. He lived the last years of his life in New York, in a luxury apartment not far from Central Park. He also had a summer house on Cape Cod. He literally wrote his comic strips from 1934 to the last days of his life, when in hospital he tore off his oxygen mask to dictate his stories. However, his two characters, Mandrake and, in particular, The Phantom, are still active and popular, both in comic books (the newest addition of the Phantom coming from Moonstone Books) and comic strips. New movie versions of his two creations are also on the schedule.