Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Who had heard or read anything like it? Certainly not in the genteel pages of The New Yorker and certainly not in fifties movies. Marilyn Monroe titillated, and Doris Day teased, and in those days of the blacklist, no one went near politics any more than they went near honest-to-god sex.

  Mort Sahl opened the discussion. If you were in his audience, you felt that this stuff was dangerous, truly underground humor. One might be arrested for listening. The things Sahl said about our sex lives, or about our president (whom no one made fun of, except for his golf), or about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a forbidding, iconic figure! Before Mort Sahl, no one joked about Hoover. He was beyond criticism or satire, a sainted Cold Warrior sanctified by the press, who took his publicity handouts as gospel. Hoover’s image was that he had saved our shores from Communist subversion.

  Only Sahl made jokes about him, a fact hard to conjure with for those whose impression of the man comes out of post-Cold War America, when he became a figure of ridicule, a closet gay scorned and mocked by comics and columnists who, were they of Sahl and my generation, would have kept their mouths shut.

  But Sahl didn’t. I did. I had grown a lot braver since my fear-filled pre-draft days, but not brave enough to take on the director of the FBI. I remained tentative about politics. A cartoon about radioactive fallout appeared in November of 1956, and then nothing political until the following March, one more in April, and one the following July.

  But I couldn’t shut up about sex. I saw it as my mission—relationships, meaningful or meaningless or just plain mean. It was more than enough for a starting assignment. Politics would have to wait. For now, I needed to write and draw about the young men and women I knew: how we went about conversing in code as we worked to get laid.

  Village Voice, August 19, 1959

  HECKLE AND JECKLE MEET MIKE AND ELAINE

  For most of the first year after I started at the Voice, I found myself in the odd position of being modestly (and modishly) famous while remaining broke. For my first eight years on the paper, the Voice did not pay me a dime. So I had no choice but to continue to move from art studio to art studio seeking employment at hackwork. This changed when I went to work for Terrytoons.

  Terrytoons had been a bottom-of-the-barrel hack animation studio. CBS had recently purchased it from Paul Terry, its founder. It brought Gene Deitch over from UPA (at that time the most innovative and experimental animation studio) to become its new art director. Gene’s assignment was to upgrade Terrytoons into a hip, classy, stylized, but commercially hot studio, i.e., the Tiffany of animation.

  I was hired with several others—Al Kouzel, Tod Dockstader, Eli Bauer—to move the studio out of the past (Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse) into its new and jazzy identity. To accomplish this task, we, the new blood, were thrown in with veteran animators dating back to Popeye, Betty Boop, and Oswald the Rabbit, men who had grown old in the business and were content to knock out junk just as long as they could get in their weekend game of golf. Their ambitions did not go beyond surviving the guerrilla band of arriviste hotshots brought in to replace them.

  Gene was moving fast with his grand plan. He had hired Ernie Pintoff, an eccentric young animator who created a brilliant six-minute short, Flebus, for theatrical release. He had hired R. O. Blechman to adapt his recent cartoon novel, The Juggler of Our Lady, for animation and had enlisted Boris Karloff to do the narration.

  Blechman drew like no one else, in captivating minimalist squiggles that Deitch presented stunningly on a panoramic movie screen. A couple of days a week, Blechman and I found ourselves sitting next to each other on a wrong-way rush hour commute to New Rochelle. We would sound each other out on the business, whom we liked, whom we didn’t like, what we were going to be when we grew up. A modest man of considerable sweetness, it was surprising to find that Blechman was as dismissive as I was of the outdated but amiable hacks we had been shipped in to replace, a company of aging boys, midfifty to seventy, who were unembarrassed by and even took pleasure in their mediocrity. They could pushpin seventy-five to a hundred layouts on wall-length corkboard that showed cats and mice and ducks and pigs and elephants wreaking cartoon havoc on one another. Then, following the age-old tradition of storyboard conferences, they would mortifyingly act out in funny voices before sponsors, network honchos, and account executives what was plainly visible to anyone who could read.

  A man of fifty had to bark like a dog, a man of sixty had to flap his hands and quack like a duck, a man on the verge of retirement had to jump up and down in mock excitement. All this to convey to clients what was assumed they couldn’t understand without the assistance of stand-up interpreters.

  And as it must to all men with an attitude, one day it came to be my turn to humiliate myself. Gene Deitch had brought me into Terrytoons in part to design a three-minute animated story to run several mornings a week on Captain Kangaroo, CBS’s star morning children’s program. Deitch’s own creation for Captain Kangaroo, a popular series called Tom Terrific, was about to run its course. On the basis of my early Voice strips and Clifford, which Deitch remembered from the back page of the Spirit section, he thought I could design a sophisticated cartoon for kids in a UPA mode.

  I went back to my Clifford roots and created a cartoon about a gang of street kids that I called Easy Winners. The title was derived from a Scott Joplin rag I happened to hear late one night on the radio. I put together a model sheet of characters and wrote and laid out a couple of episodes, one of which I pushpinned to the wall. The reaction was more than I could have hoped for. Everyone at Terrytoons loved it. The new guard loved it; the old guard claimed to love it, but it was hard to tell what they really thought, other than that they wished we would all go away.

  Deitch was more enthusiastic than anyone, which was not a surprise. He was happiest working at fever pitch, his energy hyped into overdrive to convince the client, through sheer exuberance, that whatever doubts he might have about the work on the wall, it was potentially a classic. Gene loved my storyboard and he anticipated the excitement of the CBS executive (on his way at this very moment) who would shortly look at and decide the fate of Easy Winners. My role was to do no more than thousands of hacks before me: stand and perform the storyboard before Gene and a claque of animators and layout men, along with Bill Weiss, the president of Terrytoons.

  The man from CBS arrived and my heart sank. He was a tall, silver-haired, mustachioed gentleman dressed in a three-piece pinstripe who, in dress and manner, made the rest of us in the room look inconsequential. His name was Williamson, as English-sounding as his look. He outclassed us all, but Gene failed to notice. “You’re going to love this!” he squealed in his high-pitched salesman’s voice. One look at our distinguished visitor told me he was unlikely to love anything pushpinned to a wall in New Rochelle.

  I had been through many of these storyboard sessions. I was up on the routine, but that didn’t mean I was up for the job. I was years away from public speaking, deep into shyness and self-effacement. Still, I did my best to sound like the quacking, barking, oinking animators I’d seen do this many times, pumping myself up to imitate a gang of five-year-olds from the Bronx. A minute and a half in, my humiliation was intense, and what was worse, it wasn’t getting me anywhere.

  Behind me, Deitch and my claque had been laughing hysterically until it became clear that the unsmiling Mr. Williamson was perhaps having himself a snooze. My approach shifted from manic to wistful. The claque’s laughter dwindled and died, leaving only my own strangled half laugh, half gasp.

  Each time I turned from my storyboard, I noticed the room was a little emptier. My claque had decided that Mr. Williamson’s side was a better one to be on than mine. They had made the only sensible choice: I didn’t want to know me either.

  By the time I limped to the end, only Bill Weiss, the president, and Gene, the head of the studio, remained, plus a goofily grinning threesome of loyal friends.

  It was time for me to shut up and wait for Mr. Williamson’s d
ecision on Easy Winners. His way of presenting it stays fresh in my mind fifty years later. After an uncomfortably long pause, he said, “Well, it’s a little New Yorker-ish.”

  Dead!

  He had one final comment: “I mean, it’s closer to Dostoyevsky than it is to Peter Pan.”

  As I headed home from New Rochelle that night, rage alternated with my sense of reawakened abandonment. Where had Deitch been when the time came to fight for me? I knew I had no call to be angry. Easy Winners was a loser. I gave them exactly what they wanted, but the they I gave it to was the wrong they.

  I knew I was finished at Terrytoons, this studio where I had actually enjoyed a nine-to-five job for my one and only time since leaving the army. But it was no longer a place where my pride would allow me to work, a place where I could do quality work that also had commercial value. Seemingly, such a place did not exist.

  I went home to Brooklyn Heights, where I still lived alone. I prepared myself a frozen dinner. As I was defrosting my favorite (Stouffer’s Tuna Noodle Casserole) and pouring myself a therapeutic dry martini, I turned on the CBS program Omnibus (yes, CBS) in time to hear its host, the British journalist Alistair Cooke (a man very nearly as distinguished as Mr. Williamson), introduce a young comedy team who were making their first appearance on network TV: Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

  And then this young couple I had never heard of launched into a scene that consisted of a teenage boy trying to actually screw (on television!) a teenage girl in a car.

  The temperature in the room altered radically. My spirits, seconds earlier racked with rage and self-pity, yelped in joy. Could it be possible? This was my material, my humor, my wit, my wished-for-but-not-yet-attained style, acted out as if off the pages of the Village Voice!

  But it wasn’t me, it was Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and they were better! Better than anything I’d seen anywhere. They were doing relationships in a way that I dreamed of doing them—honestly and pitch-perfect. I didn’t dare laugh, I might miss something. I couldn’t afford to lose a moment because this was myself writ funnier. Observant and smart as hell. The truth I always looked for in humor, the connection to others that I always hoped to make but had such problems finding.

  After this awful day at Terrytoons, I had feared the worst, that I was once again on my own, that the Village Voice was an aberration. But wait! Mike and Elaine were out there. And they were like me. Maybe they knew my work. I had to meet them. I had to not be alone anymore.

  Jules with Eli Bauer at Terrytoons, 1957

  SPOKESMAN

  I had grown up dreaming of drawing my own newspaper strip in the tradition of the masters—Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Walt Kelly—of creating a stable of characters, proper Dickensian types appropriately named, who’d be caught up in situations and misadventures that lasted for months.

  And in the years between the army and the Voice, I had tried that route. I had come up with sample strips: one named Kermit, about a boy genius, a musical prodigy. I submitted it to syndicates. No sale. Another called Dopple, about a pixyish stage Irishman who sails off the edge of the earth on a raft and finds himself in a never-never land of strange satiric creatures and nutty adventures that he and his devoted wife, Mrs. Dopple, endure. Submitted to syndicates. No sale.

  A pre-Dancer Dancer named Hemlock, also living in a fey neverland, also submitted to syndicates, also no sale. I had met the great Crockett Johnson, the brilliant creator of the comic strip Barnaby, featuring a boy and his fairy godfather. It was pre-Pogo and easily the wittiest and most sophisticated strip of its time, or probably any time.

  About a year and a half before I started at the Voice, desperate as ever to break into syndication, I got an offer from Johnson, who was looking for an artist to work with him on a new strip. We had met through Maurice Sendak, whom I had gotten to know during my rounds of children’s book publishers in the early fifties. Maurice, very much an unknown at the time but already brilliant, introduced me to the author who gave him his first break, Ruth Krauss, with whom he did A Hole Is to Dig, a book that struck me then (and strikes me now) as the perfect collaboration between writer and illustrator, words and pictures becoming one.

  And what a one. Maurice’s spare, whimsical comic drawing style was the style I was about to figure out for myself if he hadn’t gotten there first, mainly because he was six months older and had a head start. The way he drew was the way I wanted to draw. So I left the field of children’s literature (forever, as far as I was concerned), knowing that I was never going to be able to compete with the man who drew the way I would have drawn if I weren’t so busy trying to get laid that I didn’t have time to develop the correct drawing style.

  Ruth Krauss, a small, fey, charming ex-schoolteacher, was married to Dave (Crockett) Johnson. Dave, who was later to gain children’s book immortality with Harold and the Purple Crayon, was well over six feet tall and built like a linebacker. Big and completely bald and pink, with open, friendly features, he reminded me of Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy War-bucks brought to life. Except he wasn’t a right-wing plutocrat as Warbucks was. Dave was a Rowayton, Connecticut, lefty with a house and a boat and the mildest and gentlest manner. During a weekend when he and Ruth had me up to their home, Dave made the offer to work on a strip with him.

  It was the thrill of a lifetime, and what a break! A comic strip written by Crockett Johnson, how could it not sell? He came up with a boy private detective and his talking dog, potentially charming but, as things turned out, not so. It was lousy. Dave’s story, my art—truly lousy. My ambition notwithstanding, it seemed that I was not meant to do a syndicated strip.

  But now, a mere eighteen months later at the Voice, in a position to create any hero or antihero I liked, I chose to move away from a stable of recurring characters. The character I homed in on in Sick, Sick, Sick was the reader. I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page—to adapt the befuddled, feckless little man of humor as conceived by the great Robert Benchley, to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbitry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud and characters (like my readers) so busy explaining themselves that they never shut up. I wanted to put out front the codified communication by which it seemed my entire generation lived our lives, whether it was with family, friends, sex partners, colleagues in the workplace, or simply ourselves when no one else was around to lie to.

  Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraker, had taught me an unforgettable insight when I read his autobiography in my early twenties. Steffens’s first job in journalism was as a cub reporter on a New York daily. He was just back from a classical European education, thought he knew everything, and after a month on the job discovered that everything he thought he knew, everything he’d been taught, was wrong. The assignment he took upon himself was to “unlearn.”

  Unlearn. That became my watchword. My job was to unlearn for myself and pass it on to my readers. Cut through the crap, theirs and ours, the powers that be and the powerless.

  I started hearing from my readers. And this is what I didn’t hear: I didn’t hear “God, you’re brilliant. God, you’re funny. God, how do you come up with those weird ideas?” No, what I heard was: “How did you get that into print? How did they let you get away with saying that?”

  Readers of my generation did not expect to see their thoughts and language and way of explaining themselves in print. On some level they believed it was illegal. Throughout the fifties they had learned to censor themselves in the company of others they didn’t know well, to control their thoughts while on the job, reveal as little as possible in visits to their families. They flocked to movies, watched television, went to the theater, and read newspapers and magazines, seldom seeing themselves represented with accuracy, virtually never reading or hearing their dialogue as they themselves spoke it.

  Eventually these college-educated, rising-through-the-ranks urban Ame
ricans came to take it for granted that free speech was something the establishment had, but it wasn’t meant for them. First Amendment rights didn’t belong to young career-minded liberals.

  I came along and used the Voice to talk in print the way they talked in private, and it was natural, after all those years of McCarthyism and post-McCarthyism, that their first reaction was that I was engaged in some kind of criminal act.

  Mad magazine, which had come along a few years before me, had, through the wit and inspiration of Harvey Kurtzman, its founder and editor, escaped serious attack by simply attacking everyone. Mad learned how to sidestep controversy by assaulting all sides. Taking no prisoners. The high and the mighty and the low and the lumpen, equally abused. Since everyone was offended, it was hard to take offense.

  I was not a fan of Mad. I didn’t find all sides equally ridiculous, equally vulnerable to satire. I thought it was a cop-out to not choose between haves and have-nots, bureaucrats and their functionaries, the rulers and the ruled. I believed in change, in reform, that proselytizing, education, and unlearning could make a difference. Eventually they could make a better world.

  I was twenty-seven and I wanted to blow the cover on what was holding us back. Not politics alone—I wasn’t ready for politics—but what it was that kept us passive, conformist, narcotized, running around in circles, satisfied with yak-yak-yakking ourselves into further remoteness and isolation.