Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Playboy, July 1959

  In its infinitely stunted promotional wisdom, McGraw-Hill sent me on tour with its other trade book star, the famous Washington hostess Perle Mesta, whose memoir about D.C. high life had become a best seller and the subject of an Irving Berlin hit musical, Call Me Madam. All that Ms. Mesta and I had in common was that the politicians she hosted at dinner, I attacked in cartoons. But there we were, this odd couple paired on two mid-April morning talk shows, one right after the other, having little of interest to say to our hosts or each other.

  After the second broadcast, I retreated to my hotel room at the posh Ambassador West and hunkered down, not having a clue as to what I would do for the rest of my stay except, pathetically, call up Hefner and hope to wangle an invitation to the mansion.

  The phone rang. The caller, a woman, sounding brassy and aggressive, said her name was Barbara Siegel, that she was a local publicist, and what the hell was I doing in Chicago with Perle Mesta, and what had McGraw-Hill planned for me for the rest of my stay?

  The questions she asked were presumptuous from a stranger, but they were exactly the questions I was sitting in my hotel room asking myself. And my answers were unsatisfactory to both of us. Barbara Siegel asked if McGraw-Hill had set up a meeting for me with Burr Tillstrom. I responded to the name: Burr Tillstrom was the brilliant puppeteer creator of the TV series Kukla, Fran and Ollie, a forerunner of and inspiration for the Muppets. I told Ms. Siegel I would love to meet Burr Tillstrom.

  “Has anyone set up an interview with Studs Terkel?”

  Studs Terkel! I was a fan of his short-lived blacklisted TV show, Studs’ Place, and knew of his great reputation as a radio interviewer. “I would love to meet Studs Terkel!”

  “Have you been to Second City?”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I’ll be right over,” Barbara Siegel said. And minutes later there she was in my forlorn luxury hotel room, an apparition not unlike the fairy godmother in Passionella, taking me by the hand all over town to meet and greet the people I should have been in contact with all along, but none of them had a morning show.

  Barbara was dark and pretty, a raspy-voiced, gossipy intellectual. She loved books and hoped someday to own her own bookstore (which she eventually did, appropriately named Barbara’s Bookstore). But now she was determined to reinvent my stay in Chicago. By nightfall on my first day, I had visited with Burr Tillstrom, a genius; become friends for life with Studs Terkel, a great man; and been introduced to Second City, the first important improvisational cabaret. Within two years Second City would become the venue for my first theatrical work and indirectly responsible for my decision five years later to become a playwright.

  It’s conceivable that none of this would have occurred if Barbara Siegel hadn’t happened to tune in to a morning TV show and been horrified by how a Village Voice cartoonist she didn’t know was being misunderstood.

  With Barbara by my side at Second City, I became aware of what all of hip Chicago knew and few in New York had heard about. In a ninety-minute high-wire act of hit-and-miss sketches—smart, provocative, and theatrical—this band of improvisational players with its roots in the University of Chicago (beginning with Mike and Elaine and Shelley Berman) shook us up and sent us up. Its satires, inspired by audience suggestions, were political, sexual, literary, cultural, sociological … You name it and they made it up on the spot in front of you.

  The actors played in concert like jazz musicians, setting up patterns, working off one another in counterpoint, pacing themselves with riffs, beats, and pauses. An occasional smart-as-hell monologue came from the company’s bearded, shambling eccentric, Severn Darden.

  Barbara Harris was in the company, as were Paul Sand and Mina Kolb and Roger Bowen and Eugene Troobnick (who doubled as assistant cartoon editor at Playboy). Alan Arkin, Bob Dishy, and Paul Dooley—actors who would perform in my plays in just a few short years—were soon to join them.

  Beyond laughter, we in the audience responded to the show with a sense of belonging, as if we, sitting out there, were part of the show, part of a conspiracy. “I am not alone,” you could sense people thinking. And the thought was growing.

  PROCESS

  Watching Second City and other improv groups—the Premise in New York and the Committee in San Francisco—made me aware of my own similar method of working on cartoons, to which I hadn’t given much thought.

  With only a topic in mind (and sometimes not even that), I would begin, as the improv groups did, with an opening line—almost any line would do. Without a conscious clue as to where I was headed, I began to riff off my opening, automatically putting words in the character’s mouth, curious to see where this would take me—if anywhere.

  And just as in improv a second character might decide to enter and, unexpectedly, I was writing a scene. If the second character didn’t work, it was a monologue.

  The words my characters spoke decided for me, by the third panel, where the cartoon was going, and by the fifth or sixth panel it was headed home.

  Or it may have been headed nowhere, except into the trash, where it had lots of company.

  I seldom knew in advance where this process was taking me. Any number of times over the years I’d be humming along nicely—and then I’d arrive at what should have been the last panel without a thought in my head. I didn’t know how to end the thing. So I’d stash the idea in a drawer and forget it. A year or ten or twenty-five went by and, searching for something else, I’d come across the unfinished idea. Thirty seconds later the ending would announce itself. I’d draw it and send it in. Twenty-five years in the making: a comic strip.

  SELLOUT

  I was going to be in The New Yorker! What a thrill, what an irony. It wasn’t that I was going to have a cartoon side by side with Arno or Darrow or Steig or Steinberg or Modell or Lorenz. It wasn’t that we were now going to be colleagues, these brilliant cartoonists I admired in this magazine that I dismissed as genteel (but would have given a pint of blood to be in). My appearance was not an actual acceptance of my work by the magazine. I was, more or less, slipping in. I was doing an ad. Full-page. For Rose’s Lime Juice. Something you mixed with vodka. Hey, whatever works.

  Rose’s Lime Juice, not The New Yorker, was a fan of my cartoons in the Voice. Through its ad agency, it had contacted Ted Riley to see if I was available, and then it sent me a nine-panel layout that tried to look and sound like one of my Voice strips: two characters, at a table in a bar, talking about their anxieties in imitation of my style and then relieving their stress by ordering Rose’s Lime Juice in their vodka cocktails.

  For the finished cartoon, I was to be paid $1,000. Playboy paid $500. And I would be rubbing shoulders with the New Yorker greats. I would have the right to call myself a New Yorker cartoonist. With an asterisk.

  Maybe if I could get Rose’s Lime Juice to let me rewrite the dialogue, it would feel a little less gamey, this use of my format to market a product. After all, I had established something of a bond between myself and my readers. They considered me a truth teller. But surely if I did a Rose’s Lime Juice ad once a month, my readers wouldn’t take offense just because I was using my words and pictures to sell a product. My readers also had to make a living. In a better world, where everyone had my politics and no one had to pay the rent, I wouldn’t have to do ads—which, with increasing frequency, I was being commissioned to do. But not with copy, not with dialogue imitating my Voice cartoons. Rose’s Lime Juice would have been the first.

  As mentioned earlier, I didn’t approve of advertising. It manipulated. It lied. Until the offers to illustrate started coming in, I was of the opinion that advertising should be outlawed. I was a civil libertarian, free speech had to be defended. But not commercial free speech. That was my position until ad agencies came after me, at which point I matured. I decided: “Big deal, who cares?” And this is where I stood when Rose’s Lime Juice came to call.

  Just to clarify my thoughts on this issue, let
me paraphrase a section from a speech I gave five or six years later before what was called a Visual Communications Conference, sponsored by, if I remember correctly, the Art Directors Club of New York. Before my speech, I was called repeatedly by the publicist who set up the event. She said, “Don’t pull any punches, our membership expects you to be irreverent.” So, perhaps because irreverent is a word I hate in regard to my work, I wrote a speech in which I said that I knew it was popular to attack advertising these days and call for its reform, but I didn’t believe that advertising could be reformed. That was like calling for the reform of the Mafia. (Is that irreverent enough?) Certain institutions were created to corrupt; advertising was one of them. Instead of trying to improve or change itself, I suggested that advertising go on doing what it was meant to do: deceive. But a federal corruption tax should be applied as a tithe against its deceptions. Tax the profits of advertising and turn the money over to the arts. Every art director who felt that he had sold out, every copywriter who had an unfinished novel in a desk drawer would thus have his guilt assuaged. Each and every sellout would mean more funding for the arts.

  Few art directors found my speech amusing. I had walkouts. I would have walked out on myself if I could, so strong were the waves of hostility rising from the audience of account executives and art directors. By this time, you may guess, I was for some years out of the ad game. I had quit the business over Rose’s Lime Juice.

  A couple of months into the Rose’s Lime Juice campaign, I found that, rather than winning new admirers, I had become the subject of debate. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times, writing an otherwise splendid review of Passionella and Other Stories, made an offhand remark about the brilliant career that awaited me if I avoided the seduction of advertising money that was beginning to compromise my work. Commonweal, the liberal Catholic weekly, ran an editorial defending me against growing criticism for using my characters to sell products.

  Mitgang’s aside wounded me. And I was alarmed by Commonweal’s editorial. Growing criticism? What growing criticism? What was the matter with these people? Just because I was on the side of truth and justice, did that mean I wasn’t allowed to make a living? Commonweal defended me, they didn’t think I was selling out. I would never sell out! This was one more case of the Left devouring its own!

  I fell into a funk. The funk developed into a rage. I received copy for a new Rose’s Lime Juice ad that the ad agency wanted me to adapt because they liked my dialogue better than their own. I stared at the copy on my drawing table, not knowing how to begin. What was I doing? Won’t someone remind me?

  A letter arrived postmarked Austin, Texas. Inside was one of my Rose’s Lime Juice strips ripped out of The New Yorker with a big X scrawled across the face of it. Under the X was written in heavy marker the word Sellout! And it was signed “Two ex-fans.”

  I had a drink. I went to bed. Austin was the home of the University of Texas. This had to be the work of two students. I had meant something to them. They had looked up to me. I had disillusioned them. Their problem.

  I called Ted Riley, who was the one responsible for getting me into all this. A diatribe of self-justification followed—yelling, whining. Ted was sympathetic as always, on my side. He said it was easy for these kids with rich parents who had never earned a dime to pass judgment. He said he would go along with any decision I made.

  What did he mean by that? What did he mean by “any decision I made”? What did I mean? I meant for everyone to go away and stop bothering me and let me do what I wanted to do. Wasn’t that the whole point of getting famous?

  I fumed. I laid out the Rose’s Lime Juice cartoons that had been published in The New Yorker on my drawing table. Rather nicely drawn, I thought. Typical Feiffer characters sitting in cafés, restaurants, and bars. And out of their mouths came my words written or rewritten on instructions from the client. And every word was tripe—demeaning, dissembling, and deeply distressing.

  What had I done? I liked to see myself as an innocent victim but now, out of nowhere, found myself not so innocent, not by any means a victim, and caught up in a crisis of conscience over advertising. What did it say about my character that, without giving it a serious thought, I had so mindlessly sold out—the only name for it! And without a single misgiving. In these strips I had adapted, rewritten, and drawn, my cartoons endorsed with charming advocacy a product I had never tasted.

  I called Ted to tell him I couldn’t do it anymore. No more ads of any kind. Not ever. It was a nice chunk of money he was losing, but he didn’t say a word to talk me out of it.

  HERB

  Jean Shepherd had a late-night radio show on WOR-AM that ran, if I remember correctly, from midnight to 5:00 a.m., during which time he talked and he talked and he talked and he talked. And once in a long while he played a record, and then he went back to talking.

  His talk made a lot of sense, but it was hard to figure out why. Primarily, he cast himself as a storyteller/philosopher. In olden days he would have been called a cracker-barrel philosopher. But Jean was a different breed, a disenfranchised cracker-barrel philosopher with a sly and cynical urban twist.

  He never touched on politics. Nostalgia was his theme. But the nostalgia was laced with recurring talk of defeat, regret, loss of innocence. What they did to us, what they took away. They were never identified, but his stories, political or not, took on political resonance. They were in, we were out. They had power. Guess who didn’t.

  Whispering into the mike in a purring baritone, Jean sought a oneness with his listener—one of us at a time. It was to me and me alone that he was confiding his small-town, Booth Tarkingtonish lost American childhood. His stories resounded with yearning for the good old days in that better world, albeit even then things went more wrong than right. Other boys won the game, wrote the prize essay, got the girl. That girl who, like Charlie Brown’s redhead, didn’t know you were alive. It was as if Charles Schulz, whose Peanuts was just taking off at the time, had a radio show and were spelling out in monologue his actual childhood.

  Jean was three or four years older than I, neither ethnic nor from the Bronx. He came out of the heartland, and yet he spoke to me. He didn’t speak for me. No talk of sex or politics or meaningless relationships. He didn’t touch on urban paranoia or the Cold War. Rather his talk drew his listeners away from our daily dramas to affect us on a more mythic level where dark metaphor lived cheek by jowl with treasured innocence. We, his listeners, awake, isolated, and adrift at one or two or three in the morning, couldn’t get enough. His wry, conspiratorial voice offered us a lifeline.

  He didn’t often do interviews, but late one night in 1954 when I still lived in my first apartment on East Fifth Street I tuned in Shepherd and he was talking to some Germanic-sounding character with an accent not unlike Sid Caesar’s in one of his TV skits. The interview, clearly a put-on, had me laughing so hard that I was banging the top of my drawing table in applause.

  My habit was to listen to Shepherd through the night as I worked up cartoon stories and sample art. (These were my unemployed pre-Voice years.) My radio sat on the windowsill next to the drawing table, and on summer nights with the window wide open my radio habit woke the neighbors, a piece of news I was made aware of the next day in the form of Ukrainian tirades.

  At the end of his interview with the German guest, Shepherd revealed the put-on and introduced his guest to his listeners. He was, of all things, a cartoonist named Herb Gardner. I had seen the name. His satiric cartoons of inconsequential characters called The Nebbishes were displayed all around the Village on greeting cards, napkins, and coffee cups. The best of them, and the best known, showed two bulbous-shaped men sitting back in chairs, feet up on a coffee table, saying, “Next week we’ve got to get organized.” I sensed a kindred soul. I put in a 2:00 a.m. call to WOR. Within minutes, Herb and I were chatting.

  Out of that chance radio encounter began a friendship of forty-five years. Herb was no taller than I but half again wider, teddy bearish in si
ze and appeal, with unruly black curly hair and a cherubic punim that many women found irresistible. He glowed with a generosity of spirit. His wit, hilarious and unstoppable, was without a trace of malice. He broke into theater first, three or four years before I did. He lent me the first draft of a play called A Thousand Clowns, which, to my surprise, had been optioned for Broadway. Although we had been friends for several years and been funny on so many subjects, Herb had not once suggested that he could write a play—or write at all. All he had ever shown me were his cartoons and a short story I didn’t think much of. But this play was a revelation.

  Most plays, even good ones, don’t read well on paper. Herb’s took off and never came down—smart and funny, with wonderful dialogue, incisive and witty speeches, clever but never showing off. The cleverness was organic, built into the characters, particularly Murray Burns, an out-of-work TV comedy writer who was Herb’s main character.

  Murray became a symbol for our time. When the movie was released at exactly the right moment in the sixties, young people, getting younger all the time in attitude, dress, music, and drugs, latched onto the film as a personal testament, seeing it three, four, half a dozen times.

  But the production of the play that had opened on Broadway two years earlier—and become a hit—was a disappointment to me. It had lost a lot of the freewheeling spirit of the play Herb had given me to read. Some civilizing process had taken place. It had been Broadwayed up by the director, Fred Coe, who gave it a production the critics and audiences praised. But what I found missing was the anarchic wit and infectious charm of the original draft.

  As was often the case, if I was critical of a play in previews, the critics loved it and it became a hit. The triumph of A Thousand Clowns was so complete and unexpected that there were friends of Herb’s who couldn’t stand it. Jean Shepherd, in particular. Jean was outraged. He was convinced that this was his play, his material, that Herb had stolen the character of Murray, the hero, from the persona Jean presented in his radio monologues.