THE LIFE AND EXCEEDINGLY HARD TIMES OF SUPERMAN

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LOS ANGELES When ''Superman II'' opens in 1,354 American and Canadian theaters next Friday, it will already have sold $100 million worth of tickets on the planet the comic-book character has saved more than 100 times during the last 43 years.

Two years from now, unless production is delayed by Hollywood labor disputes or some unforeseen catastrophe, ''Superman III'' will be opening in an equal number of theaters. Christopher Reeve has already signed his contract as Superman. Richard Lester, the director of ''Superman II,'' is close to signing his. And Ilya Salkind, the producer who has renewable options to make movies about the invulnerable Man of Steel until the year 2000, envisions a saga of four, six or even eight Superman movies. ''Like 'Star Wars,' '' Mr. Salkind says.

According to Mr. Salkind, the first two Superman movies have cost $109 million. He has, at various other times, estimated the cost as $120 million or $140 million. ''This is the catastrophe of the situation,'' said Mr. Salkind, ''that movies that made so much money are still in the red.''

Mr. Salkind's figures have been challenged in suits filed by Marlon Brando, Mario Puzo, and Richard Donner. In part, these suits contend that Ilya Salkind and his father, Alexander, a movie promoter and producer, fraudulently schemed to deprive them of their share of the revenues. In addition, Los Angeles theater chain owner William Forman filed civil lawsuits alleging that more than $20 million was misappropriated from him by Alexander Salkind to make a series of movies and to buy the movie rights to Superman. Eventually Alexander Salkind settled with Mr. Forman; Mr. Salkind told a reporter the settlement was $23.4 million.

''Every movie that makes more than $40 million has lawsuits,'' says Ilya Salkind sanguinely. ''Look at any blockbuster.'' It won't matter to the two bespectacled 66-year-old men who created the Red-Caped Crusader whether ''Superman II'' is a blockbuster or not. Back in 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold their rights to Superman for $130 to Detective Comics Inc. ''We were young kids,'' says Mr. Siegel. ''What did we know?'' After ''24 years of frustration and hell,'' as Mr. Siegel describes it, stammeringly, they lost their court cases for percentages of the Superman products. In 1975, both men nearly destitute and one of them legally blind, they tried their case in the newspapers. The publicity embarassed Warner Communications Inc., now the parent company of National Periodical Publications, which controls the rights to the character. So Warner's gave the two men a pension of $20,000 each a year. Six months ago, Warner's, by coincidence the distributor of the Superman movies, raised the pension to $30,000. Warner's also gave each a $15,000 bonus after the $275 million worldwide ticket sales of ''Superman I.''

Friends from their high school days in Cleveland, Ohio, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster are closing out their lives in apartments 10 minutes apart under the warm California sun. Mr. Shuster, the artist, whose eyes have not allowed him to draw for nearly 20 years, is ''grateful for the financial settlement.'' Mr. Siegel and his wife, Joannie, the model for Lois Lane, are more ambivalent. ''We live a very quiet, secluded life in contrast to the opulent lives of the other people connected with Superman,'' says Mrs. Siegel. ''Sometimes I feel like a fictional character myself,'' says Mr. Siegel. ''Sometimes I feel like half a corpse rescued from a horrible old age.''

Superman began his public life in the very first issue of Action Comics in June, 1938, but he was created by Mr. Siegel five years earlier in an amateur fan magazine as a villain with supernatural powers. A year later, according to Mr. Siegel who has perhaps embellished the story over the last dozen years, the idea of a superhero from another planet who came to earth as a baby, who could defy the laws of gravity, and who was committed to Justice and The American Way, came to him whole one night. The next day he talked his 18-year-old friend, Joe Shuster, into doing the drawings.

Mr. Siegel had created the archetypical fantasy hero out of ''The Mark of Zorro'' and ''The Scarlet Pimpernel,'' and the science fiction he had read avidly as a 12-year-old. He was also influenced by memories of Rudolph Valentino in ''The Eagle.'' He would never be so lucky again. Slam Bradley and Funnyman (who fought evil with weapons attached to his clown costume) and half a dozen other attempts would end in failure. Eventually he would have to sell his treasured early copies of Action Comics, today worth as much as $4,000 apiece, in order to buy food and pay the rent.

Mr. Shuster speaks of himself and Mr. Siegel as ''both the Clark Kent type.'' ''I had crushes on all the attractive girls in high school,'' adds Mr. Siegel. ''I kept thinking that if I had superpowers I'd bowl them over.'' As in ''The Scarlet Pimpernel,'' Superman had an alter ego, Clark Kent, a coward subject to fainting spells. Although a number of fictional heroes have secret identities, Superman was unique in that his heroic identity that was real. As Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist, has phrased it, ''The fellow with the eyeglasses and the acne and the walk girls laughed at didn't exist....his fake identity was our real one. That's why we loved him so. For if that wasn't really us, if there were no Clark Kents, only lots of glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities -what a hell of an improved world it would have been!''

For two or three years, Superman was turned down by the newspaper syndicates. The supreme comic book character had to await the invention of original comic books in 1937. Detective Comics Inc. paid Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster $10 a page for their first 13-page story. They signed a release form selling the character to the publisher and split the check.

The dashing Zorro, personified in silent movies by Douglas Fairbanks, had been a progenitor of Superman. Oddly enough, nearly 40 years later, it was a poster of Zorro that led Ilya Salkind to seek the movie rights to Superman.

''I was walking down a street in Paris in 1974 and I saw a poster advertising Zorro,'' Mr. Salkind says. ''The next day out of the blue I said to my father, 'Let's do Superman.' ''

Where Mrs. Siegel dreams of opulent living, the Salkinds practice it. International entrepreneurs, they stay at the best hotels on three continents and have a fine skill for raising money in half a dozen languages. In 1974, Ilya Salkind, then 26, and his father, Alexander, had just finished their ''The Three Musketeers'' and ''The Four Musketeers'' and were weathering threatened court suits by Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, and other of the movies' stars over their decision to cut a single movie into two films. Now they were looking around for something to do next.

Although, according to Mr. Salkind, his renewable options on the Superman character will eventually cost $6 million, the initial payment was less than half of that. National Periodical Publications consulted Warner Bros. before selling. ''They were told to go ahead and sell, that 'Superman' wasn't such a hot property.''

The boredom with which Hollywood regarded Superman in 1974 had nothing to do with the character's ability to make money. Now published in 38 countries and 15 languages, Superman had almost single-handedly created the action-adventure comic book in 1938.

By 1940 there was a three-times-weekly radio serial; in 1941 an animated cartoon series done by Max Fleischer; in 1942 a novel by George Lowther; in 1948 and 1950, 15-episode Columbia serials starring Kirk Alyn. George Reeves then starred in a theatrical film, ''Superman and the Mole Men,'' in 1951 and in a Superman television series from 1951 to 1957. The first Superman product was licensed over 37 years ago. According to Licensing Corporation of America, which had held the rights since 1960, in the last decade the Superman property has grossed over $1 billion in goods and services.

The problem, as surveyed by Hollywood's cold-eyed financiers, was that all the comic books, bubble gum cards and lunch boxes were sold to children, not to adult moviegoers. One attempt to make the character appeal to adults -a 1966 Broadway musical written by Robert Benton and David Newman -had been a commercial flop.

Coincidental with the Salkinds' purchase of the rights to Superman, George Lucas was planning ''Star Wars.'' ''Star Wars'' would prove the box office potential of mythic heroes; with its release in May 1977, Hollywood executives would begin cannibalizing the comic strips.

Academy-Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman was asked to write the script and refused. The Salkinds' bankers demanded a star to play Superman; so the role was offered to Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds, who refused. Eventually Guy Hamilton, director of some James Bond movies, agreed to direct, and Mario Puzo, author of ''The Godfather,'' to write the script. But after what Mr. Salkind describes as ''five months of running back and forth from Europe to Los Angeles,'' he still had no actors. And no American studio was interested in co-financing or distributing the movie.

Mr. Salkind finally convinced his bankers to allow him to use an unknown actor as Superman and ''to surround him with stars.'' Then comes what Mr. Salkind calls his hasard, the unexpected luck of having Marlon Brando agree to play Jor-El, Superman's father. Mr. Brando was to be paid $3.7 million against 11.3 percent of the movie's domestic gross and 5.6 percent of the foreign gross for two weeks' work. Even if every foot of film in which Mr. Brando had appeared had ended on the cutting room floor, he would still have been worth his $3.7 million. Signing Marlon Brando was like pumping air into a flat tire. Now it could roll. Within two days, Gene Hackman was signed as the villian, Lex Luthor, for $2 million. And Warner Bros. wanted in.

The Salkinds weren't happy with Mario Puzo's script, which they considered too heavy. Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman wrote a second script. Then Tom Mankiewicz was brought in to rewrite their campy script into earnest tongue-in-cheek. Bruce Jenner, winner of the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, was tested as Superman and found polished as an athlete but rudimentary as an actor. Christopher Reeve, an unknown 24-year-old stage actor, was eventually signed for $250,000.

When production was shifted from Rome to London, Guy Hamilton, who had English tax problems, was replaced by Richard Donner. Unexpected summer storms in Canada, where scenes of Superman's boyhood were filmed, cost a few million dollars. The difficulties of making Superman fly cost several million more. Within a few months, the Salkinds and Pierre Spengler, the film's other producer, weren't speaking to Mr. Donner, whom they accused of wrecking their picture by going millions over budget. His response was that he couldn't be over budget because no one had ever given him a budget. Richard Lester, who had directed the Salkinds' two Musketeers movies, was brought in as a go-between. Additional millions were wasted because an attempt to shoot much of ''Superman II'' at the same time was a failure. Because of what Mr. Salkind calls ''our traumatic financial situation,'' ''Superman II'' was jettisoned.

''Superman'' was originally to have been released in the summer of 1978. Unfinished in time, it was rescheduled for the slightly less desirable playing time at Christmas. On Dec. 15, ''Superman'' opened in 508 theaters in the United States and Canada and set an all-time record of $12,044,352 in ticket sales its first week. Only a few weeks earlier, however, according to reports that have seeped out during the last year, the film was being held by Alexander Salkind for what one insider called ''ransom.'' Mr. Salkind asked Warner Bros. to purchase additional distribution rights for $15 million. Warners had to agree to pay the money in order to get the film in time to make prints, even though the distribution rights were considered to be worth only a fraction of $15 million. Ironically, the film was such a success that Warners made money on its last minute $15 million investment.

Now, with ''Superman II'' a few days away from release, Ilya Salkind is looking forward to 1983 and ''Superman III.'' ''Our budget,'' he says, without the slightest hint of irony, ''will be in the normal range for a big film and not absurd. We simply will not spend more than $30 million or $40 million!''