“How did they let you get away with saying that?”
Clearly, I was getting away with something. But what was it? I was stunned by the feedback I was getting from readers. There I was, writing and drawing strips based on themes that did not seem all that dangerous to me. I had deliberately stayed away from politics. I wasn’t trying to be subversive—that would come later. Mainly, I was trying to understand and make myself understood, to introduce myself to Voice readers: “Hello, this is who I am and this is what I think, and I will be doing this in front of you every Wednesday. Please say I’m good. Please like me.” My ambition was narrow and specific: to get my cartoons published in order to get famous so that I would be anointed the next Thurber or Steinberg. And then I could get my books published.
The books, Munro and Boom! and Sick, Sick, Sick and Passionella, were my end game. The Voice was to be a means to that end. I had backed into it because I had exhausted all other possibilities. I had nowhere else to back.
And now here I was, inching self-consciously and self-effacingly into the spotlight. Aside from Mort Sahl, still generally unknown on the East Coast, I was working this avenue alone: anxiety, neurotic men and women, making out, not making out.
Fame was happening, faster than I had fantasized. This wasn’t going to take the two years I had anticipated. I had met my readers and they told me that I spoke for them.
TEDSO
I was on my way to becoming a well-known angry young humorist, a midlevel star. Through the title of my Voice strip—Sick, Sick, Sick—I had helped make current the media phrase sick humor, which referred, misleadingly, to what was now a rising generation of young writers and comedians, from Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and Bruce Jay Friedman in fiction to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and Lenny Bruce in clubs.
As I never tired of pointing out (while failing dismally to change perceptions), it was not our humor that was sick, it was our society. America was sick, sick, sick! Get it? It’s not us, we’re the healthy ones. It’s you!
God help me, even after you’ve made me famous, you still don’t understand?
Six months into the Voice strip, a few publishers had begun to show interest, not in the work I was doing for the Voice but in something like it. Not quite so opinionated. It should look like satire, give every promise of being satire, except it shouldn’t offend. The book should be drawn in my style, look exactly like my Voice strips, there was no problem with that. But what these publishers were looking for in book form was more—what was the word for it?—crap. A book written and drawn by me that was pure crap might sell very well.
I held out. I hadn’t spent all those years getting beaten bloody in order to settle for so contemptible a level of compromise. With the response I was building, I was sure that some braver soul would come along who actually would want to put the work I was getting known for between covers.
It took another six months for that publisher to emerge. It was McGraw-Hill, with almost no trade-book experience. They were known for their textbooks. And now they had decided to expand their trade-book division, and I was going to be an experimental expandee. They approached me with an offer to put the Voice strips between covers. The book was to be called Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Conformist Living.
I decided that in book form the strips should not be laid out as they were in the Voice. Instead of six or eight panels running horizontally across a double-page spread, I designed the panels to be read in the manner of traditional book texts, the first four panels on the left-hand page and finishing the strip on the page to the right. I did the mechanicals, inventing the look of the book as I rubber-cemented each panel, page by page.
In time, there were enough pasted-up panels to make a book. I designed a cover. The front matter included an introduction by a friend of my agent, a well-known humorist who was unknown to me. You didn’t know I had an agent?
Well, I had an agent. He had written me on stationery that looked expensive enough, with his name, Ted Riley, engraved in discreet and elegant silvery type at the top. He wrote a dry, witty, minimalist letter that might have been composed by E. B. White, saying that he had been admiring my work, and did I have representation? The one name he mentioned as a client was Roy Doty. Doty was the hottest cartoonist around in advertising illustration. He had a fine, decorative line and used it to do a sort of doodle art that was humorously ornamental. He drew full-page ads for the New York Times and other publications. If I became Ted Riley’s client, would he get me hired to illustrate full-page ads in the New York Times?
I was ready. But if I was going to do ads I wanted to design and draw them my way, not the ad agency’s way. The beauty part of famous was that sometimes they allowed you to do that. Ten months before, when no one had heard of me, the art director would have spread my sketches on the floor, stared at them, bored, while he played pocket pool, and bloodied me with the line “I get a feeling, but I just can’t come.”
Now it was me who had the feeling. And the feeling was success. It was unprecedented. It signified that I had fans, was rapidly gaining influence on my way to status, on my way to big bucks.
Big Bucks. That’s what this agent, Ted Riley, was hinting at. I was thirsting for some real money to go with my budding fame. The Voice didn’t pay. The art jobs that I still had to take were a humiliation. Terrytoons was behind me. And my newly emerged ego had set its sights on Big Bucks.
In my heart of hearts I detested advertising. Advertising misled. Its very existence was based on misleading: to persuade the persuadable to buy what they didn’t need and didn’t want up to the moment they saw the ad or commercial. What better example was there of coded communication, which I had taken on as my mission to expose?
But Roy Doty did ads. Robert Osborn did ads. William Steig did ads, and other New Yorker cartoonists too. Where did I get off being so high and mighty? Turning up my nose at Big Bucks, the kind of money that, though paltry by today’s standards, was a sure sign, back in the fifties, that one had arrived.
So I took on Ted Riley, and he talked me into the unfamiliar attitude of making money from my work. An unusual feeling, not entirely comfortable, but I can’t say that I didn’t like having a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was a Macy’s ad, and then a full-page Time magazine ad. These were sizable illustrations, not comic strips, no dialogue. Just me showing off my art, and to my pleasure and astonishment, the ads looked pretty good. And did I mention Big Bucks?
Ted Riley, this drawling caricature of a Philadelphia blue blood, tall, fortyish, bald, with icy blue eyes, a hawk nose, and a jutting chin. His style dropped hints of the well-bred: prep school, Princeton or Yale, a seen-it-all-and-loved-seeing-it-all manner, casual name-dropping: Saul Steinberg, Leo Lionni (the brilliant art director of Fortune), Robert Osborn (my hero!). He knew, and apparently hung out with, everybody, and now, in his close-to-sleepy offhand manner, he was spending hours with me, on the phone, at lunch and dinner, at his home in Turtle Bay just up the block from Katharine Hepburn.
“Tedso,” I called him, scarcely believing that a Jewish boy from the Bronx could establish so tight and quick a working relationship with this apparently upper-class Brahmin. What’s more, I liked him. I enjoyed his talk, his literary conversations, his gossip, and his way with name-dropping.
And I liked the full-page ads in the Times that knocked my parents’ socks off, particularly my father’s, to whom the New York Times was the equivalent of the scrolls that came down from Mount Sinai. “I’ll really believe you’re famous when you have your own comic strip in the Times,” he later said to me, knowing that this was never going to happen, since the Times doesn’t run comics. He just wanted to make sure that I didn’t get too big for my britches.
Ted negotiated a deal with Kenneth Tynan, newly hired by The New Yorker to review plays. Tynan’s London paper, the Observer, had been publishing my Voice cartoons for about a year, the first paper outside the Village to run them. In the early months of my Voice str
ip, the word on me was: Great stuff, but outside the Village, no one will get it. But I now had a big following in the Observer, and Sick, Sick, Sick was a national best seller in the United States. And the next year, in the spring of 1959, the book was going to be published in London with an introduction by Kenneth Tynan. Arranged by Tedso.
Tynan was the most talked-about theater critic on either side of the Atlantic. He had reviewed John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger with such remarkable insight that, overnight, he established Osborne’s reputation as a playwright and his own as our most influential and perceptive theater critic. Months after his arrival in New York, I was in line at Town Hall on West Forty-third Street waiting to pick up tickets for the premiere performance that night of An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, their first full-length show and their first appearance outside nightclubs and television. I found myself standing two ticket buyers behind a man I soon recognized as Tynan. In the few months since his arrival at The New Yorker, he had done a number of local TV interviews, a thin, slouching, cadaverously white-faced man talking up a storm with a stylish English stammer, posing his cigarette theatrically between his third and fourth fingers.
I asked him if he was who he was and then I told him who I was, and to my delight he was pleased to meet me. He invited me to join him and a few friends for dinner after the show. The few friends turned out to be the up-and-coming literary lights of New York, all engaging, charming, funny, and—most exciting of all—fans of my strip: George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Harold (Doc) Humes, Michael Arlen, Don Stewart, Nelson Aldrich, Jack Gelber, John Marquand Jr. The two women at dinner were both strikingly beautiful, one blond and perky, one dark and sexy. The blond was Sally Belfrage, a journalist whose father, Cedric, was the publisher of the fellow-traveling weekly the National Guardian, whom I had seen testify before HUAC on the day I went to see Jerome Robbins. Sally was charismatic and vivacious, in those years what was described as a golden girl. But it was the second beautiful woman who held my interest. Judy Sheftel. I didn’t know anything about her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. I drank enough to counteract the shyness and reticence that made me stupid in the company of beautiful women. The booze set free my charm, wit, and literary smarts, thank God, because six weeks later Judy moved in with me.
PLAYBOY AT THE SECOND CITY
Playboy wrote. That is, Hugh Hefner, the editor and publisher, not known worldwide as Hef yet, not then known for living in his pajamas, not yet ready to compare himself to Gatsby. All that was in his future. And so, apparently, was I.
Dear Mr. Feiffer:
I’ve just finished your book Sick, Sick, Sick and upon that basis and a really extraordinary modern-day fairy tale that you did a few months ago for Pageant [Passionella], we are very interested in your work.
I think much of what you have been doing for The Village Voice is exactly right for us and with even more emphasis on urban living as apart from strictly Village living, work done specifically for us could be a very exciting addition to Playboy. Does this thought interest you?
Well, yes and no. Who was I to look down on Playboy, which had emerged in the last couple of years as the hot new magazine, with Hefner already on his way to becoming a legend? I was being offered space, a monthly slot, a retainer of $500 a month whether they bought a cartoon or not.
All fine—but Playboy? A girlie magazine? Forgive me, I had loftier aspirations. I was appearing weekly in the Observer, published in London, the darling of literary intellectuals. Did I really want to go downmarket to Playboy? And why hadn’t I heard from The New Yorker?
Okay, The New Yorker didn’t solicit. You went to them, they didn’t approach you. And while I admired much that was carried in The New Yorker, its gentility irritated the hell out of me. I worshiped quite a few of its cartoonists, but it was hard to imagine myself becoming one of them. I was too much of a rowdy for its suburban-supercilious tilt, too much Greenwich Village out of the Bronx. Too much concerned with sex and politics—neither beat covered by The New Yorker in its cartoons. Sex wasn’t covered at all, and for politics it didn’t trust cartoonists. It had journalists.
I could imagine Eustace Tilley, the symbolic figure who was posed snootily examining a butterfly on the cover of every anniversary issue, looking at me disapprovingly through his monocle. Of course, had The New Yorker called, I would have been up in their offices in a minute. But they didn’t.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t appeared in girlie magazines before. Rogue and Rex, two Playboy imitators with a hip and more Villagey bent, had run a couple of my long narrative cartoons. But these were one-shots. What Hefner was offering was a (gulp!) relationship.
Ted Riley must have written to Hefner conveying some of my doubts. I have a copy of his May 21, 1958, response to Ted:
I don’t think there’s any reason for Jules entering this new association with anything but enthusiasm. I’m confident of its outcome if we approach the thing properly. He doesn’t have to change his point of view for us. All we want him to do is bring the same sensitivity and awareness to young executive urban living. He already touches on some of it in many of his gags. All we need is a little more concern with the upper-level income guys and girls, the sports car set, the hi-fi addicts, the cocktail party people, the Madison Avenue guys. These people are not very different from the ones he’s been placing under the microscope so far—their clothes are just a little neater.
I was examining Hefner through the same lorgnette that I imagined Eustace Tilley using on me. I must have resolved my doubts—funny how these things work out—in the direction of a steady paycheck. By June, there was a letter from Hefner to Ted Riley:
Jules’s first roughs are on their way back to him with a request for a finish, so we are off and running.
And in July Hefner wrote:
I am enclosing a couple of advance copies of the August issue which introduces Jules to our readers with materials selected from The Village Voice feature. If you think his work has been well received to date, wait until you begin feeling the response of our audience to his humor. Jules’s genius is as perfect for our readership as gin and tonic.
I appreciated the genius remark, but gin and tonic? In my part of town, we drank martinis.
My unaffordable loftiness was handled by Hefner with cordiality and steady reassurance. He was an amateur cartoonist himself, loved the form, and had already hired on some of the best in the business. Jack Cole, whose Plastic Man was one of the zaniest and best-written features in the short history of comic books, had emerged as a Playboy regular, reinventing himself as a sensuous watercolorist of girlie gags; Shel Silverstein, my age, was doing work that looked like no one else’s and drawing it with a line that I wished was mine; Gahan Wilson had begun making appearances with his gorgeous, ghoulish art, invading Charles Addams territory while, amazingly, not reminding you of Addams.
I was taken aback by Hefner’s responses to the sketches I submitted. He returned my drawings marked up with short comments in the margins, accompanied by long letters of dogged and dazzling detail. With intense scrutiny, he picked apart my work, panel by panel, prodding me to be not another Playboy cartoonist but a better version of the cartoonist I was already trying to be:
A couple of thoughts on copy in the middle of page five—maybe we can change and to then in the first phrase so it isn’t so similar to the phrase that follows. I suggest that we change “This is all mine!” to “This is all my doing!” since that’s what it really is. There is nothing really for him to possess or exclaim, “This is mine!” about. I think the growing sense of achievement and satisfaction makes the point, whereas happiness is somewhat off the point. Achievement and satisfaction might require some effort, whereas happiness could result from either activity or boredom. I’d like you to plan this as opening on a right-hand page and then going to a double-page spread—three pages in all.
This is a beaut.
My God, I was being edited by Edmund Wilson!
I sta
rted to make infrequent trips to Chicago, where I saw a bit of Hefner, who dealt with me as if I were a friend and confidant. We sat at various bars and drank (he Pepsi, me Scotch) and talked endlessly about cartoonists and show business and sexual repressiveness. Unfortunately, talk of sexual repressiveness did not lead him to set me up on dates with Playmates. I was never to get a girlfriend through my Playboy connection. I suspect Hefner didn’t want my finer sensibility brought down by the image of him pimping for me. Fifty years later, I continue to regret his thoughtfulness.
It would be many months before I was invited to visit the Playboy Mansion. Or stay over. But on one visit to Chicago Hefner drove me, in his red James Bond convertible, to a near-empty bar on a dark side street. Over drinks, he told me that he had just bought the place. It was going to be the first Playboy Club.
T he most notable of my early trips to Chicago was in the spring of 1959 to launch publication by McGraw-Hill of my second collection, Passionella and Other Stories. With Sick, Sick, Sick a best seller, I had succeeded in accomplishing what I had hoped for and plotted for years: to use my new celebrity to get into print my early cartoon narratives that so many editors loved and rejected. So while I led the Passionella volume with a redrawn version of the rags-to-riches, movie star satire that originally ran in Pageant, I followed it with Munro, appearing in print for the first time, eight years after his conception. Next came Boom!, my satire on nuclear testing and radioactive fallout, to which the Voice had devoted four full pages the previous fall. The final story, George’s Moon, was created especially for this volume, a thirty-page introspective monologue of a man who lives alone on the moon and wants to move.
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