Growing Up Marvel

JC Lee, the only child of the Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee, recently sought the help of a Santa Barbara medium to talk to her parents.

JC had always thought of Stan and Joan Lee as her best friends, the only people who’d ever truly believed in her. Her father, the cocreator of dozens of iconic superheroes, including Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, called her his “greatest creation.” But ever since Stan’s death in 2018, and her mother’s death a year earlier, JC’s efforts to continue her father’s legacy and forge ahead with her own projects had stalled. For six years she’d been mired in never-ending legal battles to regain control of her father’s name and likeness while making little progress on her own dreams: her art, a new superhero franchise, producing a Broadway musical of her father’s life.

Now in her mid-70s, JC needed her parents’ counsel as desperately as ever. Even if it was only for a fleeting moment, through a shaky connection to the afterlife.

As JC tells it, she could feel her mother’s spirit in the room. But it was her father who spoke to her. “Forgive me for the mess I’ve left you,” he said. It was, she thought, a reference to the sad final years of his life, when the small circle of advisors around Stan was accused of cutting him off from the world and draining his money. “You are creative, you matter,” he assured his daughter. “Just do it.”

JC weeps from the memory, as she often does when she talks about her parents. The voice from beyond captured a familiar dynamic between her and Stan: the prolific, world-conquering father — the man who created a comic book “universe” that has all but subsumed the movie industry — urging his child to make something of her own, to see something through. It was advice, throughout her life, that she had experienced as both a birthright and a burden.

JC recounts the seance to me not long after we first meet, at her home in the Hollywood Hills. She had invited me to visit with the promise that she was ready to share her story for the first time. Since her father died at age 95, JC has been widely portrayed as a villain in the Stan Lee story: the spoiled, impossible child who exploited her father, and then failed to protect him in his final years. In the months before his death, Stan said he was surrounded by “unscrupulous businessmen, sycophants, and opportunists” — and JC had done nothing to stop it.

Now, like her dad in his later years, JC is alone. Her family is mostly gone, and she’s fallen out with her many famous friends. Her circle has grown small, and the people who surround her and keep her company have business ties to her or her father. I wonder if JC’s story is one of history repeating itself. Others, I learn, have similar worries.

“The main thing JC inherited from her father is she has a real knack for surrounding herself with con men,” says Jonathan Bolerjack, one of Stan’s closest confidants in his final months who’s known JC for years. “They both have this uncanny ability to be very trusting and yet find themselves surrounded by the worst people.”

JC is acutely aware of being cut off from the world, after having existed for so many years in the shadow of, and at the mercy of, powerful men: not only her father, but a string of boyfriends, business associates, advisors. “No one knows I’m alive,” she tells me. “I don’t talk. I’m ruled by the men. That’s the bottom line.” She can’t understand how she got here — how her father’s wealth and fame and creative energy have eluded her.

“I want it all,” she says. “I have none of it.”

JC’s gated property sits on half an acre of land, surrounded by towering palm trees. Inside, though, the house feels strangely devoid of life. What passes for interior design is mostly Marvel kitsch. The marble-floored entryway boasts not one but three lifesize models of Spider-Man.

Pages of her own artwork are scattered everywhere. They’re lovely — abstract, wavy designs sketched in colored pencil and crayon. She’s uncomfortable with the idea of putting her drawings and paintings up for sale, treating them more as items to be stored than creations to be displayed. In the garage, there are stacks upon stacks of paintings she has done over the decades. Even more, she tells me, are gathering dust in her parents’ home up the road.

As she shows me around the house, her two dogs, Duchess and Rodent, follow at our heels. There’s a screening room, a pool, and a sauna. When she ushers me into what she calls the master bedroom, I wonder if I misheard: The room has no furniture to speak of, not even a bed. The master bathroom has no sink. Seeing my puzzlement, JC explains that there was a leak a few years ago that nearly ruined the place, and ever since she’s been sleeping in a guest room in the back of the house. She doesn’t know why there aren’t any sinks in the bathroom.

Similarly, the many projects that consume her remain stuck in the concept phase. Most of them, which speak to JC’s immediate preoccupations, don’t seem to hold much commercial appeal. She has an idea for a board game, for instance, where the goal is to figure out who holds the copyright to her father’s name. She calls it “Where Is Stan Lee?” The Broadway musical she wants to create about Stan’s life, meanwhile, focuses not on the golden age of Marvel, but on the sad, final years before his death. “I think it’s Shakespearean,” she tells me.

Another preoccupation is money. JC doesn’t seem to know how much of it she has, or how long it will last. She charges everything to an Amex card. I can’t tell if she has willingly outsourced the details of her finances to others, or if whoever is holding the purse strings is deliberately keeping her out of the loop.

As we talk, two friends of JC’s keep a close watch on us. Jesse Gargiulo, her close companion and hairdresser for over 30 years, serves as something of an unofficial spokesman. He looks like a 1970s TV star, with thick black hair, a deep California tan, and an easygoing demeanor.

The other is Eymun Talasazan, who is visibly annoyed at my presence. Tall and well-built, he’s clearly the alpha of the three. When I arrived, he seemed reluctant to shake my hand; I find out later he had no idea I was coming. Talasazan’s father owned an antique business that JC’s mother liked to patronize, and Talasazan, who dabbles in real estate, was the listing agent for one of Stan’s properties in 2015. He tells me he doesn’t want to be in the story, but he makes a point of leaning in close and instructing me to make sure that JC comes out looking good.

After a few hours, JC tells me she isn’t feeling well and suggests I come back in a few days. Gargiulo sees me out.

“Just another day in paradise,” he says.

For as long as Joan Celia Lee can remember, she wanted to be like her dad.

When JC was born in 1950, Stan already had a successful career writing for Timely Comics, which later would be renamed Marvel. Her mother, Joan Boocock, was a British hat model and actor. JC was known as “Little Joan” to her mother’s “Big Joan” — a distinction that grew funnier as JC became the taller of the two.

When JC was 3, her newborn sister died. Stan and Joan channeled their grief into becoming overprotective parents to JC. “I was cross-eyed. I wore glasses. I was a bit of a misfit. I was too skinny,” JC tells me. “For a while, my father would bring home a milkshake every day to get me to gain weight. I got a lot of animals.” When a chimpanzee on roller skates appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Stan cried out, “We’ll get that chimp!” But when the family went to fetch their new pet, it immediately made a pass at Big Joan. “It grabbed her bosom,” JC recalls. “It was horny.” Stan had a change of heart. “No monkey,” he announced. Instead, JC wound up getting a parrot that spoke Spanish.

In 1961, with the release of “The Fantastic Four,” Stan became a full-fledged celebrity. The elder child of Jewish immigrants, he had imagined his way to fame, creating a world of superheroes that became a signature of American culture. From an early age, JC yearned to follow in his footsteps. “I’ve always been terribly ambitious,” she says. “I wanted to get involved in Marvel and in Stan’s world, but I wasn’t a writer and I wasn’t an artist, so what was I going to do?”

Thinking she might pursue a career onstage, she enrolled at the Professional Children’s School in New York City, which catered to child actors and dancers. One of her classmates, Lorna Luft, the daughter of Judy Garland, remembers JC as a free spirit. “She was so stunning, and so pretty, and so nice,” she says.

Luft recalls visiting the Lees at their cottage in Hewlett Harbor and seeing Stan at work at an easel by the pool. “All of a sudden, the pool filter made this bubbling noise, and he went, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I asked, ‘Are you OK, Mr. Lee?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but in my mind it was a sea monster!'”

“I thought, OK, he’s a little strange,” Luft recalls. “I didn’t know what he did for a living.”

As Stan’s success grew, the pampering of JC became more lavish. “My daughter is not sensible and cautious, and I am not sensible and cautious,” Joan would say. “We just spend his money gleefully.” JC describes her attitude toward personal finance in similar terms. “My lifestyle is extravagant,” she tells me, “because my father was Stan Lee and his wife was a great diva and elegant and first class all the way.”

Though she shared a name with her mother, JC’s personality was closer to Stan’s. “They’re both overwhelming people,” Larry Leiber, Stan’s 93-year-old brother, tells me. “They both have a strong presence.”

As she grew older, JC had trouble finding her way. “I was supposed to be a debutante,” she says. “But I had two passionate parents.” She enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but dropped out after a year. She did some modeling, and her parents set her up in an apartment across the hall from theirs. At one point Stan got her a job at Marvel as a receptionist. “We didn’t know what to say to her,” says Roy Thomas, a writer at Marvel who later succeeded Stan as editor. “She was the boss’ daughter, so you’re kind of wary you’ll say the wrong thing.” His impression was that “Stan was getting her something to do to stay busy.”

It lasted only a few months. Trading her father’s New York for her mother’s England, JC moved to London and dived head-first into the 1970s glam scene of Kings Road. With her big hair, false lashes, and hot pants, she looked like Barbarella, the classic sci-fi heroine played by Jane Fonda. She tried to get a foot into the movie business, landing a job as a personal assistant to the English actor Max Wall on Terry Gilliam’s film “Jabberwocky.” She also got occasional work taking photographs of the famous people she encountered for Celebrity, a magazine founded by her father.

“I knew everything that was happening with everyone in town at night,” she says. “I had great stories and had a good time.”

One night at a bar, she found herself sitting next to Eric Clapton. When she introduced herself as Joan C. Lee, Clapton replied: “What are you, a tax accountant? That’s the worst name I’ve ever heard.” He suggested an improvement: JC Lee. The name stuck.

In London, JC dated Isaac Tigrett, a cofounder of the first Hard Rock Cafe, in the city’s fashionable Mayfair district. According to JC, Tigrett and his partner Peter Morton, heir to Morton’s steakhouse chain, cooked up Hard Rock’s name and iconic logo in her apartment. “I’m really a phenomenal muse,” she says. The fact that she never received what she viewed as proper credit for Hard Rock’s success left her feeling bitter. (Tigrett did not respond to a request for comment.)

JC and Tigritt eventually got engaged, and the course of her life appeared to be set: She would accompany her husband on his ride to stardom, just as Big Joan had been there for Stan. But the relationship didn’t last. When JC returned home to America, she was in such bad shape that Stan took her to a psychiatrist. “Broadway wasn’t waiting for my dancing; modeling wasn’t waiting for me,” she says. “My parents took me in.”

The dynamic between father and daughter was on full display in 1979, when Stan and JC appeared on a Father’s Day episode of the daytime show “Midday with Bill Boggs,” alongside Paul Sorvino with his daughter Mira, the future Oscar-winning actor. The host asked JC what she did for a living. “At the moment I’m pursuing an acting career,” she replied. “But it’s moving a little bit faster than I can catch it.” Dressed like Stan, in a cream sports coat and dark sunglasses, she was asked which of her father’s creations was her favorite. “Me,” she replied.

By the 1980s, Stan had moved the family out to Los Angeles; the poor kid from New York City was now the publisher of Marvel Comics and was starting to act as a Hollywood executive. Thomas, the Marvel editor, remembers visiting the Lees and being shocked when Stan suddenly appeared and began roller-skating across “these nice marble floors.”

JC, now in her 30s, had followed her parents out west and was continuing to enjoy the fruits of Stan’s labors. One of her confidants was the celebrity photographer Harry Langdon, whose father was a star of the silent screen. He could relate to the difficulties Joan was experiencing from having a famous parent. “Stan wanted her to be creative,” he recalls.

The trouble was that JC didn’t want to part with any of her works. For her, they seemed to possess a sort of talismanic power — something intensely personal that was not meant to be shared with others. Langdon recalls JC selling one piece for about $75,000, only to later ask for it back. “She missed her artwork,” he says.

Though by all accounts a devoted and loving family man, Stan grumbled constantly about JC’s spending. “I don’t think my daughter has ever read a comic book in her life, and I doubt that my wife has,” he told Rolling Stone in 1971. “They get very bored if I even discuss the subject. All they want is the paycheck every week.”

JC didn’t like being dependent on her father. “No one wanted me to work,” she tells me. “I think I was their pet.” In a home video shot in the late 1980s, she speaks of her desire to play a bigger role at Marvel. “I wouldn’t mind helping contribute,” she tells Stan.

“The only way you can help contribute is to stop spending so much money,” he responds. “That would be the greatest contribution.”

As JC tried to find a place for herself, her social circle began to change. By the late 1990s, Langdon noticed that the arty bohemian parties she’d been known for hosting now featured well-dressed corporate types, who soon “overrode” JC’s older friendships. “She got acquainted with some people that were a little more business-oriented,” he recalls. “They were trying to make sure she was provided for in the future, in case something happened to her father.”

Those cozying up to JC may have believed there was money to be made from having the ear of Stan Lee’s daughter. But her father’s creative genius didn’t always translate into great business sense. In 1998, as Stan prepared to exit day-to-day operations at Marvel, he signed a contract that set him up with an annual salary that would cap at $1 million a year for life, stock options, and 10% of the profits from any movies that used Marvel characters he had helped create.

That last clause, had he held on to it, would have been a gold mine. In 2002, “Spider-Man,” starring Tobey Maguire, became a box office sensation, grossing over $825 million worldwide. But when Stan didn’t receive his promised 10%, he sued. In a settlement signed in 2005, Stan agreed to drop the profit-share agreement in exchange for a one-time lump sum of $10 million.

For Stan, who was in his 80s, it must have seemed like a generous deal. Instead, he had given away the keys to his kingdom. The Marvel Cinematic Universe went on to become the world’s highest-grossing film franchise. By the time of Stan’s death, his comic book creations had raked in close to $30 billion at the box office — including six of the 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.

“My father is supporting everyone,” JC says. “I feel these people have taken my life, and they’re eating off gold utensils and I’m eating off plastic.”

Since Stan didn’t own the iconic Marvel characters he helped create, he was forced to keep working into his 90s to maintain his lifestyle. Most of his money came from trying to cash in on his name. In 1999, he formed Stan Lee Media, followed by POW Entertainment. Both quickly descended into scandal, accused of mismanagement and ripping off investors.

JC tried launching a few ventures of her own, including a jewelry line and a brief foray as a recording artist. But her most successful projects were those that relied on her father’s name. She published a photo book, “Stan Lee’s Love Story: It’s All About Love,” and launched a company selling “I Love Stan” T-shirts at comic conventions for $20 a pop. But according to James MacLean, her partner in the enterprise, JC lost interest in the business when she learned they would have to recoup their initial investment before she would see any profits.

“When that happened she stopped supporting the T-shirt,” MacLean says. “Any time her dad did something, there was always a lot of cash around, so that was her expectation.”

A devastating blow arrived in 2017, when Big Joan suffered a stroke and died at the age of 95. JC had lost her best friend at the very moment her father’s wealth was drying up. Arguments over money between JC and Stan were starting to escalate into full-scale shouting matches, and Big Joan had been the only one who could defuse the tension. “It was a very difficult and sad time,” MacLean says.

Eight months later, stories began appearing in the press that painted a dire picture of Stan’s life, including accusations that his closest confidants were fleecing him. The Hollywood Reporter presented a particularly unflattering portrait of JC, describing hysterical demands for money and a “powder-keg relationship” with her father. The story included an allegation by Bradley Herman, Stan’s former business manager, who accused JC of attacking her parents in 2014, after she discovered that her new Jaguar was actually leased in her father’s name. As the argument escalated, Herman alleged, JC had violently grabbed Big Joan’s arm and slammed Stan’s head against the back of a chair. Herman provided The Hollywood Reporter with photos of a bruise on Big Joan’s arm, but said the Lees had told him not to go to the authorities because their daughter was in a fragile state.

JC, who can be volatile and prone to fly off the handle, concedes that she often screamed at her parents, usually over money, but she vehemently denies hitting them. “I never ever touched my parents,” she tells me. “It was a lie.” Five people I spoke with who were close to Stan at the time told me they never saw JC commit any physical abuse. “They were equally abusive, the way they screamed at each other,” MacLean recalls. “But then it would be like, ‘Let’s sit down and have dinner.’ That was their relationship.”

With Big Joan gone, Stan grew increasingly isolated. By 2018, the people in his inner circle had been driven out. That August, a few months before Stan’s death, he obtained a restraining order against his new business manager, Keya Morgan, who was later charged with stealing from his client. (The case was dismissed after a jury failed to reach a verdict.) One of the world’s greatest artists was abandoned and alone, with only his daughter by his side.

One day Bolerjack, a long-haired comic book fan who had been part of Stan’s entourage on the convention circuit for years, got a call from JC. In the background, he could hear Stan calling out, “Is that Hairspray?” — the nickname Stan had given him. Bolerjack, who hadn’t seen his friend in months, rushed over to the house. The comic book icon looked to have aged a decade.

“He sat me down and said: ‘I’ve made a lot of bad decisions with people lately and I keep getting betrayed. I just need you to help me,'” Bolerjack tells me, choking up at the recollection. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Please don’t let me down.'”

“She just really wanted to know Stan was proud of her,” says Stan’s friend Jonathan Bolerjack. “She wanted to make her dad proud.”

For the last six months of Stan’s life, Bolerjack showed up nearly every afternoon, and earlier on weekends, to stay with Stan until late in the evening. “When you have just an old man, a guy that you love, who is just so battered by things and asks you to please don’t let him down — that’s such an emotionally weighted request that I took it very seriously,” says Bolerjack. Most of the time, Stan would sit on his couch and look out at his pool, seemingly haunted by the past.

JC remembers her father’s final days as filled with regret. “The whole time he was sitting on the couch, he never had any peace,” she says. “He was worried about me. Were there any happy moments at the end? Absolutely not. I wish there was.”

On November 12, 2018, Stan Lee collapsed at his home. JC, arriving for a visit with her father, pulled into his driveway just as he was being loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. “They wanted to do all these terrible things to his body to see if they could bring him back,” she says. “I said no. He appeared to be gone.”

Stan was pronounced dead from a heart attack. For the first time in her life, Little Joan, the sole heir to what remained of Stan’s empire, was truly on her own.

Before my second visit to JC’s house, I stop by Stan and Joan’s home in the exclusive Bird Streets neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills. Imagining the Xanadu of a comic titan — Leonardo DiCaprio is a neighbor — I instead find the place in a state of disrepair. The house is missing siding, and Big Joan’s once meticulous landscaping is overgrown. Incongruously, two pristine cars sit in the driveway. I wonder who is using Stan’s oasis as a parking lot.

When I get to JC’s house, I find her in the same spot as before, sitting at the end of the couch and sipping a Heineken. I notice that a chair with worn green fabric has been brought into the room. JC tells me it was a favorite of Stan’s, and invites me to sit in it.

Since her father’s death, JC tells me, she’s been frozen out by those who control her father’s legacy. Her stake in the Stan Lee Universe, now controlled by a company called Kartoon Studios, is less than 5%. At one point, JC reached out to Kartoon about being more involved in the business, but those conversations ultimately disintegrated.

“My father is supporting everyone,” JC says. “I feel these people have taken my life, and they’re eating off gold utensils and I’m eating off plastic.”

Andy Heyward, the founder and CEO of Kartoon, had a relationship with Stan that dated back to the 1980s. He recalls Stan’s “constant” complaints about JC’s spending and considers her spoiled. “I would not want to be in any more state of business with her than we currently are, where she is a passive participant,” he tells me. “At some point, for all of us, we can’t just go on through life saying we’re a victim of whatever made us the way we are. At some point, you’re an adult, and you’ve got to take responsibility for who you choose to be and how you live your life.”

JC has made other attempts to gain control of Stan’s empire. After his death, she sued POW in federal court, claiming her father’s business partners had misled him about deals that signed away the rights to his name and likeness. In 2020, a judge dismissed her lawsuit as “frivolous” and ordered her to pay $1 million — though that sanction was later tossed out by a higher court. In 2023, JC sued POW again, arguing that the Lee Trust, which she controls, should have a greater share in the company. The case is pending.

The lawsuits strike those who know her as another sign of her lifelong desire to win her father’s approval. “She just really wanted to know Stan was proud of her,” Bolerjack says. “She wanted to make her dad proud.”

Despite her legal setbacks, JC remains buzzing with ideas, but short on allies. As I sit with her, she is once again accompanied by Gargiulo, her longtime friend, and Talasazan, who she tells me is serving as an informal financial advisor. Talasazan seems as grumpy about my presence as he was on my first visit. With him is a friend who, I learn later, was the one who’d parked the vintage cars in Stan’s driveway.

Like many of those who circled around Stan before his death, both Gargiulo and Talasazan have made efforts to involve themselves in Lee’s business empire. Toward the end of Stan’s life, JC set up a meeting so Gargiulo could pitch her father on a superhero movie he hoped to produce with JC. As Gargiulo recounts it, Stan looked at him and put his hand on Gargiulo’s knee.

“Look, is this going to help my daughter?” he asked.

“Of course,” Garguilo assured him.

“OK, that’s all I wanted to make sure of,” Lee said. He gave the project his blessing, but nothing ever came of it.

Talasazan, for his part, has been trailed by controversy. In 2018, he made headlines when he took the R&B artist The Weeknd to court, alleging that the artist’s Marvel comic book “Starboy,” based on his chart-topping album of the same name, had been Talasazan’s idea. (He dropped the lawsuit a year later). In 2021, a court issued a default judgment against Talasazan for defrauding a teenager and ordered him to pay $633,380. Another lawsuit against him, which is still pending, alleges that he failed to repay more than $300,000 in loans — including legal fees to fight the previous case.

MacLean, JC’s partner in the T-shirt business, recalls Talasazan as an aggressive salesman while Stan and Joan were still alive. “He would bring stuff from his dad’s, a carload of antiques, and be like, ‘Oh, Mrs. Lee, this is so nice.’ She was in a lot of pain and on a lot of medication and she would buy a lot of antiques.” There were so many pieces, JC tells me, that parts of the family home wound up looking like a furniture warehouse.

Gargiulo is worried that Talasazan is taking advantage of JC. He says Talasazan has been gutting Stan and Joan’s house and putting the contents in a loft in downtown Los Angeles. “You can’t watch somebody you really care about be abused by people,” Gargiulo says. “Eymun just screams at JC about doing what has to be done and ‘signing these papers.’ I would say, ‘There’s no reason to scream at her.’ There’s something not right here.”

JC acknowledges that Talasazan sometimes screams at her, but she brushes it off as his “passionate Persian way.” At one point, she interrupts a voicemail message she’s leaving me to take a call from Talasazan on another phone, and I can overhear him swearing at her. “Just shut your mouth!” he yells.

JC tells me that Talasazan convinced her to list her home for sale last year for $8.8 million. “I need the money,” she says. He’s also helping her assemble a new team of lawyers and business partners to reclaim her father’s empire. She’s never met them, but Talasazan has assured her they are “bona fide billionaires” who are “going to help me with retrieving my money.” She’s unclear on precisely how they — and Talasazan — stand to benefit from supporting her cause.

“Eymun, when I call him, he’s at the computer and he’s working endlessly,” she says. “It’s men things. I don’t understand a lot of this. He does.”

Gargiulo tells me that my visit contributed to a rift between him and Talasazan, who warned him to stop bringing people to the house. Otherwise, Talasazan told him, “you’re out — you’re not going to be part of this anymore.”

“I’m not a part of anything,” Gargiulo says he responded. “She’s my friend.”

Talasazan arranged a time to speak with me, but then stopped responding to my calls and texts. When I tell JC that her current situation feels eerily similar to what her father went through, she ponders for a moment. “I would be dead in the water if not for E,” she says of Talasazan. “If you want to find imperfect, you can always find it.”

The reality is, like many heiresses, JC really never had a shot at a normal life. When you’re born into a famous family, as Lorna Luft tells me, “you inherit the fame.” JC also appears to have inherited the worst aspects of both her parents — her mother’s penchant for spending money, and her father’s poor judgment about making it. As her father was during his latter years, she is largely alone, cut off from friends and family. She speaks on the phone from time to time with her uncle, Stan’s brother Larry, who still lives in Manhattan. “I’m sad that we weren’t close,” Larry tells me. “I’m glad we’re able to talk now because she wants family. At my age, I can’t come to California and slay dragons. But I do care about her.”

Speaking with Stan’s brother brought me back to my final visit with JC. As I sat across from her in Stan’s favorite chair, I thought about how many times he must have sat on the same worn green fabric, looking across at his daughter, worried about what would become of her, his little girl who had never truly managed to find her way in the world. He tried to give her everything, and he left her with next to nothing. For JC, the privilege he provided her is inseparable from the pain she has suffered.

“I had a wonderful life,” she tells me. “And I knew I’d pay a price for it.”

Jason Guerrasio is an entertainment correspondent at Business Insider.