Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Herb’s and Jean’s monologues had but one thing in common: they were long. But Shepherd, I suppose, couldn’t stand it that this cartoonist—who was a virtual unknown, without a reputation, without a cult following—had vaulted past him to become what Jean, with all his gift of gab, was never to become: an authentic playwright. It was insult enough to end the friendship.

  The movie version of A Thousand Clowns, which so affected its sixties audience and turned the work into legend, was successful only because Herb managed to step into a faltering production and take over the direction. He shot new scenes and fixed old ones. And in collaboration with his brilliant editor, Ralph Rosenblum, he made the movie fresher, more pointed, and better than the play, restoring the verve and audacity that I missed on Broadway.

  When my own plays Little Murders (my first) and Elliot Loves (my ninth) opened to brutal notices, Herb took on the job of publicist and advocate that the paid publicists backed off from once they saw the reviews. He called my producers and tried to convince them—and, that failing, harangued them—to keep the shows running despite the fact that no one was coming.

  Later, when Herb showed me his first draft of I’m Not Rappaport, I decided that he was the one who needed rescuing. The relationship between the black man and the white man was alarmingly stereotyped, the two characters so mismatched that I feared Herb was opening himself to attacks of racial condescension. I took a long walk to convince myself to confront my old friend with my doubts and thereby risk injuring or perhaps ending our friendship. I talked to mutual friends about what to do. And those of them who had read Rappaport and shared my doubts assured me, “It’s pointless. You’ll hurt him deeply and he’ll never speak to you again.”

  Herb was famous for reacting to criticism with a closed-door mentality. Once he had written and rewritten and revised and revised some more, once he thought the process was completed, for him it was. It was plausible to imagine our friendship breaking up because I had taken on the mission of telling him his play was racially incorrect. But I couldn’t allow myself to remain silent as he put on this play that I was sure was setting itself up to be clobbered.

  We sat outside on the terrace of his penthouse apartment in the East Seventies on a warm spring day, and in the warmest, friendliest, most urgent fashion, I went into detail on how he was inviting disaster. And Herb, amiable throughout, said, “Really?” And “Do you think so?” And “That’s so interesting.”

  He didn’t seem at all perturbed. Not a hint of anger, not a hint that he had heard a word I said. He did not alter a line. And I’m Not Rappaport opened. And it was a huge success. And it won Judd Hirsch a Tony for best actor. And it won Herb a Tony for best play. And in the movie that Herb directed, Ossie Davis, as famous for his civil rights activism as he was for his acting, was clearly untroubled by what I saw as a problem. He played the part of the black man.

  Before either of us got into theater, Herb and I liked to sit around doing movie star impressions for each other’s amusement. We were both die-hard Warner Brothers and Frank Capra fans and could endlessly revisit old James Cagney, John Garfield, and Gary Cooper movies. Herb did a brilliant John Garfield impression. I did a pretty good Gary Cooper and a great Walter Brennan. Herb did an incomparable Sydney Green-street as Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon.

  Two years before Herb died, I received, by messenger, a hefty package in a brown paper bag. Inside the bag was a bulky object that weighed about five pounds, tightly wrapped in layers of newspaper and secured with masking tape. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. But as I tore at the newspaper wrapping, ripping it off in strips, I began to hear a distant echo of Herb’s perfectly pitched Sydney Greenstreet muttering, “The bird, Mister Spade, the bird, sir.”

  And as I pulled away the last strip, there it stood revealed, a perfect replica of the black bird. The Maltese Falcon. Herby’s gift to me.

  ALEX AND AL

  Yes, I met Al Hirschfeld! I met Alex King! Al Hirschfeld you know about—or if you don’t, I don’t know why you’d be interested in my career. He is one of the greatest and certainly the most famous caricaturist of the twentieth century. And his best friend, among many best friends (because Al was a gregarious fellow and a charming, deadpan storyteller), was Alexander King, who was quite famous for a time in the fifties, having written, perhaps founded, the modern-day memoir of confessional distress. His was called Mine Enemy Grows Older, and what separated Alex’s story from the legion of tell-alls to follow was that his was witty and erudite and somehow, despite that, became an immediate best seller.

  Alex was interviewed by everyone and anyone, finally making it into media stardom as a regular on the Jack Paar Show, at the time the hot late-night talk show. Paar had an intellectually tinged bent and now and again would interview smart guests who didn’t happen to be in show business. This was a generation or more before our culture was swallowed up by celebrity worship, before the media concluded that there was no business that’s not show business.

  Alex’s appearances on Paar made him a celebrity. Every two or three weeks he’d go on to recount episodes out of his jam-packed life with wit and deft eloquence. He had been everywhere and done everything: he’d been an artist, a writer, an art director of an avant-garde magazine, a raconteur, a scholar, a bon vivant, a boulevardier. He knew everybody, and all the everybodies he knew loved him. And why not? He was a low-wattage charmer with an infectious smile and eyes that twinkled, still handsome, still curious, still knowledgeable about almost everything while holding back from showing off.

  He could talk about himself for hours but was more than happy, particularly off camera, to talk of so many other things, which he did with flair. His memory was infallible. One July in the late fifties I rushed over to the house that he and his wife, Margie, were renting in Ocean Beach on Fire Island. I needed to talk to Alex about War and Peace, which I had just finished. Alex, of course, had read the book some fifty years earlier and still knew it by heart, going into detail about episodes that I had already pretty much forgotten.

  He wasn’t showing me up, he was tapping into my excitement, adding knowledge culled from all his other readings to further my interest in Tolstoy’s Russia—and Tolstoy himself, about whom Alex knew more than a little.

  This was the Alex one seldom saw on television, not the raconteur but the literary intellectual, and no less an enthusiast for all his erudition. His own book, Mine Enemy Grows Older, was a memoir of his descent into heroin addiction and consequent self-exile in a Lexington, Kentucky, drug rehab clinic. Alex was not a man who cared to be known for his suffering or, for that matter, his triumph over adversity. He would have thought that banal. But he was perfectly content for his suffering to build him an audience. He adored having an audience (adored was one of his most often-used words—and whatever it took, he accepted).

  But once he had our attention, it wasn’t tales of woe that he was selling, his or anyone else’s. He was far more interested in the insanity of life (insanity, another favorite word). He would recount anecdotes that pointed out the madness of contemporary existence, drawing us close in a comforting circle built on our shared experiences with the insanity around us. It was as if we were sitting in front of a TV campfire, as Uncle Alex made us better by telling stories about how nuts we all were.

  He was in his late fifties when we met, looking old but acting youthful, light on his feet, a light in his eyes, a smile more often than not accenting his handsome old man’s face. His face showed that he had lived, but his sharp blue eyes indicated that his survival skills owed much to his canniness, humor, charm, and defiance. Humor and defiance were milk and honey to me, so I adored Alex.

  We met through Ellie Friedman, like Lois Lane a beautiful girl reporter, not on the Daily Planet but on the Herald Tribune, a great, fast-disappearing newspaper. Ellie was assistant to the popular TV columnist John Crosby, who covered his beat with a wit and wry intelligence that made him stand out among regular TV critics as the smart one, a posi
tion he held all to himself until Michael Arlen began covering TV for The New Yorker. Ellie had called me as Crosby’s assistant to ask if I would write a guest column for John, who was going on vacation. She and I made a date to talk about it, and we made another date to talk about it, and we made date after date, apparently attracted to each other while disagreeing on almost everything. I liked her enormously but the last thing I wanted was to fall in love.

  Falling in and out of love seemed to have developed into a preprogrammed routine for me, a kind of blueprint that charted a course from attraction and infatuation to suffocation and we’ll always be friends. My relationships lasted three months, almost to the minute. And then I would put an end to it or the girl would. (This pattern was to resolve itself a year later. In 1959 I met, and moved in with, Judy Sheftel.) But when I was still pursuing my three-month love affairs, it became a matter of pride that I be the one who would end them. Rejecting a woman was a sign of male strength. Real men didn’t get rejected. They saw what was coming and acted first.

  A basic drawback that prevented Ellie and me from becoming more serious about each other was that we had different faiths: she believed in Judaism, I believed in psychoanalysis. She thought psychoanalysis was a crock, and I felt the same way about religion. Analysis, on the other hand, was teaching me about my guilt, my rage, my self-loathing, my self-pity, my alienation. The complete unexpurgated package that was me. How could I not believe?

  One day Ellie said, “You and Alex King will like each other.” And she set up a date. The Kings had us to dinner at their apartment on Park Avenue and Ninety-fifth Street with Al and his wife, Dolly, and Paddy Chayefsky. Alex’s wife, Margie, was very pretty, blue-eyed, and oh, so young, thirty years younger than he, dressed peasant style like a folksinger, her brown hair worn in a waist-long braid. It seemed to me odd and disconcerting that this pretty young thing, whom I could easily have chased after in the Village, should be married to this relic out of my parents’ generation. Or so I thought as I walked into their apartment, little dreaming that in my future lay a marriage to Jenny Allen, who was three years old the night I went to dinner at the Kings’.

  Now, to be dining with Alex King, as brilliant as he was, was one thing. And to be joined by Paddy Chayefsky, who at the time was the most talked-about dramatist on television and an emerging playwright with a Broadway hit, was another thing. But to meet Al Hirschfeld, whose theatrical caricatures defined the front page of the Drama section of the New York Times, to have Al Hirschfeld treat me as a—dare I say it?—colleague … Al Hirschfeld was—well, he was self-defining, one of those rare people who not only are the best at what they do but are recognized in their lifetimes for being the best.

  It’s pointless to talk about the conversation that evening. I can’t recall what anyone said, so overwhelmed was I to be accepted into their company as if I had a right to be there. No one, not Alex or Al or Paddy or Margie or Dolly, acted as if I didn’t belong. Apparently, I was the only one at the table who knew I was a fraud.

  Having passed muster at the Kings’, I was invited to the Hirschfelds’ for dinner. They lived in a town house a block away from the Kings. Dinner was served on the ground floor, which led out to the garden—and whom else did the Hirschfelds have for dinner that night? Well, they had Alex and Margie, of course, and an unknown young actress named Marian Seldes and the playwrights Jerry Chodorov and Ruth Goetz and the musical comedy composer Harold Rome and his wife, Florence, and Kenneth Tynan, the critic, and Marlene Dietrich.

  I sat across from Dietrich at dinner and stared at Dietrich throughout dinner. She didn’t notice. She had accepted an invitation to dinner with old and dear friends, little realizing that through some stupid error they would invite this kid cartoonist with the mindset of a stalker.

  They all called her “Marlene.” Al called her “Marlene.” Dolly, who had performed with her in Berlin, called her “Marlene.” Everyone around the table called her “Marlene.” She was charming, she was beautiful, she was “Marlene.” I didn’t call her anything. I didn’t speak a word to her but I was especially witty to everyone on all sides of her. Late in the evening she called across the table to Kenneth Tynan, “Ken, have you heard from Papa?”

  The question came out of her mouth as if she were a Marlene Dietrich impersonator, sounding impressively like the real thing.

  Ken replied in his lit-Brit stammer, “M-m-m-arlene, P-p-papa and I are n-n-n-no longer speaking.”

  And Marlene crooned a low “Oh no. Oh no, Ken.” Her voice registered deep distress. No one at the table was aware that I was inhaling this conversation, careful not to miss a syllable. He said, “I s-s-sent P-p-papa my N-N-ew Yorker article on b-b-ullfighting in Spain and he wrote m-m-m-me b-back that I did-did-didn’t know anything ab-b-bout b-b-b-ullfighting.”

  I sat there listening to this wondrous piece of theater played out at Al Hirschfeld’s table for my benefit. And I thought, “This is not happening. I am making this up. Marlene and Ken Tynan talking at the table about his fight with HEMINGWAY! ‘PAPA’ HEMINGWAY!”

  Marlene ended the discussion by shaking her no-less-beautiful-because-of-the-years head and said, “Oh no, Ken. No, no, no, Ken. We can never be mad at Papa.” I heard this! “We can never be mad at Papa.” I was there! I heard this! Little did the others at the table know of the excitement going on in my head, the pure and radiant astonishment that I had lucked into this moment. This conversation, that remark: “No, no, no, Ken. We can never be mad at Papa.”

  SALON

  Reading Dos Passos’s U.S.A. made a romantic of me in regard to early-twentieth-century American radicalism. I particularly admired the artists who came together to create Max Eastman’s socialist magazine, The Masses, cartoonist agitators who were fueled by their outrage at social and economic injustice. Painters and illustrators and cartoonists turned into passionate moralists, striking out in anger, mockery, disdain, and despair made accessible through wit and scathing humor. And oh, that art! No body of subsequent newspaper or magazine cartoons rivals the illustrative talent from any single issue of The Masses.

  A generation of mainstream cartoonists fell under their influence, not of their politics, God knows, but of their graphics. Men such as Art Young, Robert Minor, John Sloan, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Boardman Robinson, working out of pure principle, evoked a power and sense of the moment that still blisters ninety years later. These men were my inspiration when I decided to move my Voice strip into political cartoons.

  But enamored as I was of the political radicalism of the 1920s, I was equally enamored of the salons. Mabel Dodge, the party-throwing heiress—I couldn’t get enough of her, her toney literary political soirées to which everybody was invited and where they discussed and argued and drank and talked about books and plays and manifestoes and drew up plans for marches and demonstrations and new radical publications and then … they had sex! How I wished I was up in Mabel’s room making friends, making jokes, making out.

  I had come of age in the Cold War fifties, and now, through my acquaintance with Ken Tynan, the most gregarious of critics, who mixed and mingled with anyone as long as they were famous or friends of the famous, I was inducted into the New York literary scene. Up at George Plimpton’s, there were Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, the first of whom I never spoke to and the second of whom spoke one or two aphorisms at me and then took his drink elsewhere. But among the famous ones I actually got to know at Plimpton’s was Bill Styron, usually lounging amiably on the couch with a drink in his hand, happily discussing the book he was currently at work on. Styron’s talking about himself was oddly unnarcissistic, as if he might just as well have been talking about someone else’s novel, except that was almost never the case. His wife, Rose, charged with charm and energy and beauty to boot, was a poet. But that wasn’t why I got along better with her than with Bill. It was that when she and I talked Rose made the conversation about me. I found that interesting.

  Plimpton’s parties took place in his four-
story town house in the upper seventies, off the East River. The first floor was where he published and edited his quarterly, the Paris Review, the second was where he had his parties, and the third was where he lived.

  It was at Plimpton’s that I first saw Lillian Hellman, some years before we became friends on Martha’s Vineyard. She was, of course, a famous playwright, but more important to me, she was a heroine of the witch-hunt years, having defied HUAC at a highly publicized hearing where she rather elegantly told them to go to hell and, strangely, got away with it. She wasn’t permitted to write another screenplay for fifteen years, but that was to be expected. Lillian’s public style could be daunting, an oh-too-civilized dominatrix. I suspect she intimidated the committee. Anyhow, they didn’t send her to jail.

  She was the antithesis of Clifford Odets, who had named names and let me down. So I was eager to meet Lillian, sit at her feet, and praise her to the skies, and well might have done that had I not been put off by the mob of gay young men who preceded me at her feet as Lillian chain-smoked and drank, holding court in an armchair.

  It was a given that the writers at Plimpton’s I’d like best were the ones who went in for wisecracks, caustic exchanges, and irony. They included three playwrights: Arthur Kopit, lean, handsome, funny, and professorial; Jack Gelber, wry, sweet-natured, and acerbically amusing when he let you in on what he really thought; and Jack Richardson, witty, darkly handsome, and dangerous-looking, called “Gentleman Jack” by his friends.

  And then there were The New Yorker’s anonymous “Notes and Comments” writers: Tom Meehan, who was going to end up as Mel Brooks’s collaborator on so many moneymaking projects you might want to kill him; Don Stewart, blond and matinee-idol handsome although he didn’t seem to know it and behaved instead with amiable self-deprecating wit; and John Marquand Jr. (the son of the famous forties novelist of manners), who spoke subversively about his class in a hypnotizing upper-class drawl and after a couple of drinks didn’t at all mind sharing gossip about the Kennedys, with whom he enjoyed a long acquaintance.