Forty-four years ago, when Jules Feiffer was 32 and indispensable as a weekly zeitgeist cartoonist for The Village Voice – was indeed the central nervous system of that high-adventure Eisenhower-era breakthrough in journalism – he wrote a 35-minute play called Crawling Arnold for Chicago’s Second City improvisational troupe.
It was about a young man in his 20s whose parents in their 70s, Mr. and Mrs. Enterprise, suddenly have another baby. So Arnold reverts. He starts to crawl.
“Well,” says the Jules Feiffer of 44 years later, “I was 65 when my daughter, Julie” – now a spirited, bongo-playing, animal-loving 10 year-old – “was adopted. So my point was well taken.”
Feiffer, now 76, goes on dryly: “Seventy is a ridiculous age to have children. What I can say, in regard to that play, is what I found out years ago: Just as Mr. Enterprise is far more capable than his inadequate son, Arnold . . . just as the father in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is bigger and stronger physically and more able in every way than his son — which defies logic — it turns out in many ways to be accurate.
“Before I had all these family responsibilities [Julie is the youngest of Feiffer’s three daughters] I was far more limited creatively, less productive, interested in fewer things, took longer naps, and wondered about the reason for it all.
“Now, with the hustle and bustle of family life, my questions are less philosophical and more directed toward the reality of everyday life — and getting on with it. I’m having a better time as an older man than I did as a younger man, and am far happier now.”
In the crowded, cluttered writer’s workroom of a great old Upper West Side apartment, ex-cartoonist, ex-playwright, ex-screenwriter (well, almost ex to all those things) Feiffer, now a highly successful children’s book author, draws my attention to a hard-cover published by Knopf in 1979.
“Long before I wrote children’s books I used children as metaphor,” says Feiffer. “This is Tantrum, which I wrote when I was 50.”
Wrote and drew, that is, for Tantrum is a novel in cartoon form about a man named Leo.
“Leo is 42,” says Feiffer. “And he hates his life. He’s married, has two children, and feels totally powerless and out of control in his family life and his working life, with all the decisions being made by others.
“So he wants to go back to when he had power, at age 2. But he still has the grownup inside him. Now he sees that he can relive his life from scratch, and do it right this time because he has that grownup within him.”
Tantrum marked a Feiffer turning point in more ways than one.
“I was about to turn 50, and for years had wanted to write a novel in cartoon form, and never had. It was important to me to do this by age 50 – one of those arbitrary litmus tests. I was somewhat shocked that I had never done it before.
Writing Tantrum led to a creative breakthrough for Feiffer, which changed his way of working. While his own life was better off than Leo’s in every way, one of his frustrations was that he couldn’t draw, in The Voice or anywhere, with the immediacy and freshness of children.
“What I wanted on paper was the feeling that this was happening in front of the reader as he or she was reading the book. And what I found was that [Tantrum] did an amazing thing to my line. It freed me up,” said the artist whose tribute to a truly great master of line, Al Hirschfeld, was among the finest at that 99-year-old’s funeral last year. “Before [Tantrum] it was work, hard work — penciling it, inking it, erasing it, correcting it” — not to mention toting it in by hand, unpaid, on the subway from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, every Sunday in the earliest years of The Voice.
“I was often disappointed in [the failure of] matching the image to the image in my head. Now I’m going back to doing what I was doing [with crayons, etc.] when I was 6 and 7.”
At 6 and 7, Jules the boy started to draw with a #2, pencil, trying to imitate his heroes: Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), E.C. Segar (Popeye), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates). Describing the newspaper strip back in the 1940s as a ‘glorious thing to behold’, his dream was to become a famous cartoonist. “Cartoonists in those years were celebrities,” said Feiffer. “They showed up at Broadway openings, were photographed at nightclubs like El Morocco, and sat with movie stars. They were sexy, and they had glamour. I wanted in.”
Jules Feiffer was born in the Bronx on January 26th, 1929 – a sort of New Year’s present for the coming Depression, as I put it in a piece I wrote about him six years ago. If I may steal from my own 1999 interview, his life before he walked into the original office of The Village Voice in 1956 went like this:
“Grew up in the East Bronx – Stratford Avenue. Went to James Monroe High School. Both my parents were immigrants from Poland. David Feiffer, my father, was a salesman and you name it. He spent most of his life unemployed, finding jobs and losing them. My mother was Rhoda Davis Feiffer, God knows where that ‘Davis’ came from. She was a fashion designer, and carried us through the Depression. I have a sister named Alice; my sister Mimi is deceased.”
Another famous cartoonist from that era was Will Eisner. “I looked him up in the phone book, walked into his office, and showed him my samples. He said they were lousy, which hurt my feelings. But I persisted, commenting on his work with a knowledge and depth that nobody on his staff could rival. So he hired me as a groupie, and I began my apprenticeship.”
Five years after the tall, skinny, eggheaded, discouraged 27-year-old had wandered into the grungy 22 Greenwich Avenue original offices of The Village Voice, his everywhere-rejected portfolio under his arm, and had been grabbed up after one look by editor Dan Wolf, publisher Ed Fancher, and me, he married writer Judy Sheftel. That was in1961. They separated in 1971, and were divorced in 1981. Their daughter, Kate, born in 1964, is about to have her own first children’s book published.
“But as I was reaching 50,” says Jules, “my life was in flux. I had left that first marriage almost nine years earlier and was at this point in a state of not quite habitation with a woman I was in love with.” (He sees no reason to give her name.) “She was a painter. We lived 10 blocks apart. Then when I got this apartment, the very one you’re sitting in, it was on the understanding that we would take up cohabitation.
“We’re talking about 1978, ’79. And shortly after we moved in here, she moved out. And shortly thereafter, what saved my sanity was that I had to go to the island of Malta to work on [the screenplay of] Popeye. Came back from there to Martha’s Vineyard feeling blank, my sex life, my love life over and gone.”
That’s when Feiffer received a phone call from somebody at the Time-Life Building in New York, saying that a reporter was on her way up to interview him.
“This was Jennie Allen. Events cascaded after that. Jennie was 24 when she walked in the door. I was 50. I took one look at her and fell in love. My friends in the Vineyard, all of them my age — it took them about 30 seconds to spot what was going on. And all of them warned me against being involved with this girl.
“And Jennie herself knew that this was a professional no-no – you don’t sleep with someone you’re writing about. So we didn’t. And the minute the story came out in Life magazine, I called her. This was my beginning and my fate.”
Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist who was really a writer, won this writer’s heart forever with the payoff line of one of his earliest strips in The Voice: The mama of a young male analytical patient saying: “Oedipus, schmeedipus, as long as he loves his mother.” Whether the young male was Feiffer’s character, Bernard Mergendeiler, I do not remember. But he may well have been. Bernard Mergendeiler was a tall, skinny, eggheaded nebbish young man who could never make out with girls and had fantasies of himself as Fred Astaire. Feiffer still denies that Bernard was exactly Jules. But Bernard Mergendeiler was maybe at least a first cousin of Jules Feiffer, and a great many real live Greenwich Village girls of the 1950s and ’60s would have loved to take him in hand and teach him a thing or two.
Jules Feiffer’s tenure at The Voice – his weekly contributions the heart and soul of The Voice – stretched from his first appearance in those pages on October 26, 1956, to the black day in 1997 when, in its infinite wisdom, a new management at that journal dropped him and his cartoon out of the paper. Just like that.
The New York Times picked him up as an intermittent Op Ed cartoonist. But his stuff, mostly political, was more constrained and less intimate, less funny, than what he’d been doing for 41 years. There a day came when, upon his decision or theirs, or both, that avenue also ended.
Another turning point came in the late 1980s, when Feiffer was at or nearing 60.
Parallel to cartoonist Feiffer we also had playwright Feiffer, a career that started in earnest with the terrifying Little Murders, written in 1966 and produced in 1969. The play was a metaphor for a country that – first because of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and then the Vietnam War – was headed according to Norman Mailer for a national nervous breakdown.
Five major Feiffer plays later a cold, opaque New York Times review of Elliot Loves (a beautiful play about men, women, fidelity, all that) put a screeching halt to career No. 2 – Feiffer the dramatist. I was there opening night in 1989 when, as that review came in, at a restaurant near the Promenade Theater, everybody decamped the opening-night party, like weasels, leaving Jules to swear to the one or two remaining: “I’ll never write another play.” And for some years, he never did.
Looking back on that trauma, Feiffer says wryly: “With [John Guare’s] Six Degrees opening down the street [at Lincoln Center], it was very clear that one of us was going to be a hit. And I was very sure it was going to be us.” Even more wryly: “How could it not be? I said to Mike [director Mike Nichols] in rehearsal: ‘This is as good as I can be as a playwright. If this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.
Not wryly at all: “It seemed at the time and still seems to me an act of sheer masochism, when you see work you’re very proud of – play after play after play – even when you get good reviews, as with Grown Ups – you get your brains knocked in. Perhaps if one could pursue playwriting as a hobby, an avocation . . .
“Well. I was 59 or 60 and had a family and I had to find some other hobby. At that point a good friend, cartoonist Ed Sorel, asked me to do a children’s book with him. That project didn’t work out, but my interest was whetted.”
Published by Harper Collins, 1993, The Man in the Ceiling was written and illustrated by Feiffer for his daughter, Halley. When the novel about a boy cartoonist and his family was fairly underway, Feiffer realized: “…this was what I was going to do. This was going to be my next career.”
Feiffer, who freely says he either stumbled or backed into his most important life changes, believes that most creative people operate in a similar way. “It was my great fortune to stumble into three different forms of work, each of which was fun and all of which I was good at. [Writing and illustrating children’s books] is the most successful of them all – and actually something that panned out commercially, I’m shocked to say.
“I’m now finishing up what I think is my ninth book. It stars my 10-year-old daughter, Julie. She said to me: ‘You did a book about Maddy’ (her grandmother) before you did a book about me.’ So under the watchful eye of my wife, I said: ‘I’m going to stop what I’m doing’ – writing my memoirs – ‘and write a book about you.’ But I didn’t have any ideas for it. Julie, who loves all animals, said: ‘How about a girl with a zoo in her room?’ Okay. I thought it would be a picture book, but it became a novel, A Room With a Zoo” – and yes, the in-joke on E.M. Forster is intentional.
Halley Feiffer, daughter No. 2, is now 20.
“When she was 7 or 8, she declared that she was tired of being an only child. Jennie had always wanted children. I never wanted children. When I married Jennie, I already had one child, Kate, who was already at Sarah Lawrence. Last thing I wanted was more children. At the same time, I couldn’t consider not giving Jennie a child. She was wild about children. It would have been cruel and stupid of me not to.
“But at 65 I thought I was too old; thought I didn’t have energy enough. It scared the hell out of me. Now I had to be kicked and shoved and bludgeoned into it, again. And what happened was exactly the opposite of what I feared. Having this wonderful [new] child made me more interesting, with more energy, in everything.
“I had had [non-cancerous] prostate surgery early on, in my 50s, and couldn’t [engender] more children. So we decided to adopt. We got Julie on December 7th, 1994. She and Jennie flew into LaGuardia, where Halley and I were waiting. My daughters — Kate, Halley, Julie – were born 1964, 1984, 1994. Every time there’s a presidential election, I have a child,” said Jules Feiffer, twinkling — if Feiffer could twinkle.
I used to see Jules, not quite 10 years ago, walking along Broadway’s Upper West Side on more than one Saturday afternoon with a tiny tot cradled in his arms. The child was somewhere between 1 and 2. The beaming father was 65 or 66. He certainly didn’t look scared to me.
Jerry Tallmer, as critic, reporter, and feature writer, has covered theater, film, the arts, and other activities of human beings for many years and many publications. A regular contributor this past decade to The Villager, the Downtown Express, Playbill, and Gay City News, he was one of the founders of The Village Voice, where in 1956 he created the Off-Broadway “Obie” Awards.
