Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Bruce Jay Friedman, Joe Heller, and Philip Roth were the Jewish novelists in the group, and Terry Southern was the gravelly-voiced Texas bad boy.

  Plimpton himself seemed charmingly and distantly above it all, a genial host speaking in a parody Brahmin accent and often acting like a guest at his own party. Now that I review the names, it becomes clear that George’s parties were the tryouts for what was later to be the literary salon of the sixties, Elaine’s.

  My girlfriend, Judy Sheftel, whom I met through Ken Tynan, had been part of this party scene for some time before I was. Sexy and beautiful, Judy had an old-fashioned, forties movie star face with eyes that shared secrets although it wasn’t always clear to me what they were. This served to make her more interesting. She had lived in Paris with Elaine Dundy before Elaine married Ken, and she’d traveled around with the Tynans in Europe and the States. Since Ken and Elaine knew everyone, Judy, too, had met everyone.

  By late 1959, she had moved into my apartment on Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights. It was a floor-through duplex in an old historic brownstone, with nineteen-foot ceilings and a baronial-sized living room, made more impressive by antiquey cream-colored walls and restored elegant moldings. Downstairs, on the garden-level floor, there was a rather gloomy bedroom, where Judy liked to spend late afternoons in bed reading novels. I worked, or tried to, upstairs at my drawing table, boxed away in a corner of the living room.

  My parents, who knew as little about my life as I could get away with, didn’t know Judy and I were shacking up. Living out of wedlock with a woman? My mother would have had a stroke.

  Which raised a question. What if my mother called me? And Judy picked up the phone? Yikes! My mother called fairly frequently, my father hardly at all, except to chide me. “It’s been a week since you called. Call your mother, but don’t tell her I told you to.”

  Sooner or later there was going to be an accident. Judy would forget herself and answer my mother’s call. What then? How could I lie my way out of it? Besides, it wasn’t fair to keep Judy a prisoner in my home: “You can do anything, go anywhere, just don’t pick up the phone.”

  I was waiting to get past the three-month mark with Judy to see if we’d break up. We didn’t. So I solved the problem by putting in a second line, the Rhoda Feiffer line. My mother was the only one with that number, and I was the only one who answered when it rang.

  Steele Commager was a Columbia classics professor and the son of the famous historian, Henry Steele Commager. Steele liked to throw parties that were more academic than Plimpton’s, bringing together teachers, scholars, critics, and journalists, many of them famous, all of them talkative.

  This was an older crowd than the one found at George’s, and more overtly political, many of the guests coming out of a City College socialist and Trotskyite background and then having gone on to write essays and criticism for Partisan Review, the New Leader, the New Republic, the Reporter, and Commentary.

  It was a crowd that went in for argument, so if you wandered about, drink in hand, you encountered a round robin of intellectuals happily going for each other’s throats. Dwight MacDonald might be having at Murray Kempton, who ten minutes later you’d see fencing skillfully with the more easily agitated Alfred Kazin. Judy had introduced me to the Kazins, Alfred and his sexy blond wife, Ann Birstein, also a writer, who found herself adrift in this sea of intellectuals when the person she really wanted to be was Ginger Rogers. That made it easy to become friends, because the person I wanted to be was Fred Astaire.

  Argument, loud and informed, with these (mostly Jewish) intellectuals was seen by them as fun, a novel idea to me, who, going back to the days of Mimi and my mother, associated argument with retribution and death. The Kazins asked us to come to their parties early. I’d start on the martinis and they’d start on the argument so as to be in full scream just as the other guests arrived. Alfred’s cheeks twitched as he argued, and his eyes went into rapid-response blinking whenever he was disagreed with.

  He called me “Feiffer,” I called him “Alfredo.” Ann called me “Fifferman,” which sounded a little like Bernard Malamud’s character Fidel-man. Malamud was a friend of the Kazins and became a friend of ours.

  Bern taught up at Bennington, and if Philip Roth and I happened to be at Yaddo at the same time, we’d visit Malamud, a little over an hour away. He’d read to us from his latest manuscripts. Philip and I were appropriately appreciative, but mostly we were there to make jokes. When we were in each other’s company, it seemed to be our mission to amuse. He was, when he chose to be, the funniest man I knew, except for Herb Gardner.

  The Malamuds were good friends of the Kazins, as were Dwight and Gloria MacDonald and the Partisan Review crowd, William Phillips and the two Lionels, Abel and Trilling. One of my favorites of the Partisan Review crowd was Philip Rahv. Philip was built like a Russian bear and sounded like one. His voice came out in a low and guttural growl. Like the rest of his fellow intellectuals, he had a subject to launch into the moment he laid eyes on you. But his growl was so incoherent that much of the time I didn’t understand a word he said.

  One time when I ran into him on Madison Avenue soon after Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” appeared in Partisan Review, Rahv stopped me to rant, “Susan Sontag, who is she? A literary gangster!” And just as he got interesting, he also got agitated, and the rest of what he had to say was in bear code and indecipherable.

  Fred Dupee was a mild, twinkling, gentle soul, endlessly curious, certainly not someone I’d expect to see gripping hands with fellow Columbia faculty members in the spring of 1968, a cordon of middle-aged professors circling Hamilton Hall in a protective ring, fifty-, sixty-, and seventy-year-old men and women mounting a barrier against roving squads of police in an effort to dissuade them from what they most wanted to do: charge through the line and bust the heads of student strikers occupying the building.

  Among these intellectuals, the one I was most delighted to see when we happened on each other was Dwight MacDonald. Dwight was tall but pretended not to be, with a pronounced stoop, his head cocked forward intently in order to rebut you more firmly. His voice was high and squeaky, reminding me of a comic actor in the Busby Berkeley Gold Digger musicals, Hugh Herbert. I called him “Sprightly Dwightly,” and I was happy to see that during our involvement in Vietnam he was the first among the few of his generation’s public intellectuals to speak out against the war. Often we shared the same platform.

  Susan Stein’s salon did not go in for quality-lit types or intellectuals. Susan had high-glitz showbiz parties, theater people and movie stars, which was perfectly appropriate for the daughter of Jules Stein, the founder of MCA. Susan lived in a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment in the Dakota (famous for Rosemary’s Baby and John Lennon), cheek by jowl with Lauren Bacall and Robert Ryan, whom one often saw at her parties. Around the corner lived her sister, Jean, who entertained as much as or more than Susan. Jean’s parties, however, were slanted more toward politics, with literary and showbiz types added for color. So you’d find Mailer mixing it up with Galbraith, and a Kennedy or two or three chatting with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kurt Vonnegut, or the Styrons.

  As the daughter of Jules Stein, Susan was able to recruit the upper echelon of moviedom for her parties. On one particular spring night a few days after the Academy Awards ceremonies, who should arrive but the best picture winner, Woody Allen, who had been a no-show in Hollywood to pick up his Oscar for Annie Hall.

  Now, I had loved Annie Hall, and I used to like Woody. When he started out, I’d see him perform at clubs, and after his act we’d talk and he’d flatter me and I’d flatter him. I thought he was brilliantly talented and I was under the impression that he liked me. As he moved into film with Take the Money and Run and Bananas and Sleeper, I became even more of a fan. I was pleased and astonished that Woody had taken the sort of humor I did, and that Mike and Elaine did, and found a way to make it palatable to a mass audience, or a masser audience than I was ever able
to reach with my cartoons, plays, or movies. I found his success promising for the rest of us.

  I was all for Woody—until he went shy. He didn’t strike me as particularly shy when he was a struggling comic. He’d sit around in a club talking to me, and I didn’t once think the poor guy was in pain. No, he seemed as much at ease as a nervous, neurotic, young Jewish genius can be. But the more he became an “auteur,” the more reticent he became. His shyness, however, had an idiosyncratic twist. Woody hid away from people, as you might expect from a shy person, but he hid conspicuously, like at the head table at Elaine’s.

  I’d run into him there and he could barely meet my eyes. He kept barely meeting my eyes at one big party after another that he must have been attending in pain. At just about every celebrity gathering in New York, people would look over at Woody suffering with shyness within a circle of admirers.

  On this particular post-Oscar night at Susan Stein’s, I was headed up to her party in an elevator with Kirk Douglas and Robert Ryan and Sidney Lumet and Jay Presson Allen and her husband, Lew, and Angela Lansbury (some of these names I’m making up, but it was that kind of elevator). The last to enter the elevator were Woody and Mia Farrow, his then girlfriend. They were being stalked by paparazzi, who wouldn’t let the elevator door close until they got at least one shot of Woody.

  But Woody was too shy to let himself be photographed by the paparazzi, who were yelling “Just one, Woody! Drop the hat!” He had worn a big floppy hat, perfect for the occasion, and rather than try to hide behind, say, Robert Ryan, who was big and might have shielded him from all that attention, he just stood out in front with the elevator door closing, then being pushed open by paparazzi, closing and being pushed open again, his face hidden from the cameras behind his hat. Meanwhile Robert Ryan and Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Clark Gable and Joan Crawford and I stood waiting patiently to go upstairs.

  The scene must have played out for a minute: door closing, pushed open, closing, opened, closing, opened, as Woody held us hostage in the elevator. In the midst of this extreme awkwardness, the only words spoken were by me, standing just behind him. I snarled, “Woody, let them take your picture or get the fuck off the elevator!”

  Woody dropped his hat. Flashbulbs popped. The door closed. Complete silence as we ascended to the party.

  Kenneth Tynan, that man responsible, more than any other, for my knowing all these writers, intellectuals, and theater people, was leaving town, going back to London to work as Laurence Olivier’s assistant at the new National Theater, which Olivier had recently been named to head. Tynan was offered the job, or so the story went, because Olivier wanted to get rid of him as a theater critic. In any case, Ken in typical style threw himself a farewell party at the Four Seasons. It was a noisy, heady mix of critics, writers, actors, and movie stars. For ten minutes I was excited to sit across a table from a drunk James Thurber, who was almost completely blind by this time and apparently deaf, too, because he reacted to not a word I said.

  I remember Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, eyes popping out of his head, so excited was he to spot Lauren Bacall at the party. That was one of the things I liked about Norman. As oracular and stuffy as he was likely to be, there were these other occasions, quite a few, when he reverted to this Jewish kid from the Brooklyn streets, naked in his likes and dislikes, fun to be around. Norman was in the act of rescuing Commentary from its dreary, stifling right-wing bent (to which he would return it, in spades, just a few years later). When he took over the magazine, he brought in Norman Mailer to write for it, and Paul Goodman and Hans Morgenthau, noted critic of the Vietnam War. He had livened up its pages considerably. Now, at Tynan’s farewell party, Norman Podhoretz sighted Bacall and he livened up considerably.

  I introduced Norman to Bacall. He was overwhelmed, and Bacall was impressed to meet an honest-to-God New York literary intellectual. An hour or so later, as I moved about the room, I happened on Bacall, deep in conversation with her friend Arlene Francis, the actress, radio host, and TV panelist. I saw Norman hovering nearby, monitoring their conversation. Being a New York intellectual, he had something to say. He interrupted. Halfway through his first sentence, Bacall shot him a Lauren Bacall glare and, with a classic growl, said: “Butt out, buster, I’m talking to one of my peers.”

  Norman circled the room, stopping to tell the story to everybody. “You’re not going to believe this, do you know what Lauren Bacall said to me …” By the end of the party, the Four Seasons emptying out fast, Norman was still buttonholing anyone he could find, thrilled and making the most of his humiliation.

  WHITE LIBERAL

  On the one hand, there is the reasoning of the New York Times moderate who says that the problems are so enormous and complicated that Negro militancy is a futile irritation, and that the need is for “intelligent moderation.” Thus, during the first New York school boycott, the Times editorialized that Negro demands, while abstractly just, would necessitate massive reforms, the funds for which could not realistically be anticipated; therefore the just demands were also foolish demands and would only antagonize white people.

  Bayard Rustin

  They were not called “African Americans” or “blacks” in the fifties. They were “Negroes.” The term Afro-American was coming up on the outside, but never to become part of mainstream usage.

  I saw an ad in my primary left-wing source, the Daily Compass, for a meeting on “The Future of Civil Rights in America.” (This had to be not long after I got my apartment on Fifth Street in 1953, but how would I know? I tried to keep a journal once but nodded off after the third entry.) The event was being held at the Quaker Meeting Hall downtown in what is now the East Village. Its speaker was a man I had never heard of, who within a few years would become known all over the world as the organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin.

  I was a young radical. I thought I knew what I needed to know about civil rights in America, but if there was new information I wanted to hear what it was. And then there was the possibility of meeting girls. Paramount to my interest in attending left-wing public meetings was my hope of meeting her. We would spot each other across a crowded room. She’d be short and stocky, because that was the only type of left-wing girl I got to meet who was attracted to me. Fine. I liked them that way, though not too stocky, just as long as they came with sizable boobs.

  I would have preferred taller, movie-star-zaftig girls, but I was not going to find them at lefty meetings. I might find them at Ivy League mixers, but to what avail? These girls were not going to have anything to do with me, they were out of my class. I dressed wrong and looked wrong. At twenty-four, I looked less like a boyfriend than a kid brother. When I’d see myself in a mirror (a seldom deliberate choice), my reflection differed from what I hoped for. I looked like my own kid brother.

  This particular meeting was sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nonviolent group led by the veteran organizer A. J. Muste. This group was seriously out of step with any politics that I was interested in. First of all, it was pacifist, which meant it had opposed United States entry into World War II. Many of its number, including the speaker, went to prison as conscientious objectors.

  I couldn’t understand how anyone could oppose a war against fascism. Still I was curious to see the speaker, a man who went to prison as a conscientious objector, a notion I had entertained when I was called up for the draft. But I lacked the courage to act on my beliefs (if they were beliefs—I may have just been chicken).

  Bayard Rustin, then in his early forties, had an immediate attention-getting presence. Tall and slender, with dark West Indian good looks and eyes that shot sparks, he spoke in a clipped half-English, half-Island accent, and what he had to say I had never heard before. And it changed to this moment how I perceive race in America.

  Rustin said that the issues created by the end of the Civil War were as unresolved in 1953 as they were in 1865. The inability of white America, North and South, to come
to terms with its Negro citizens, a tenth of the population, was the single most important issue Americans faced.

  The issue of white and black in America, he said, was more important than the bomb, the Cold War, or the witch hunts. America’s future, white and black, depended on whether in the next decade we began to seriously address segregation and racism in our society. The harm we were doing by not addressing this issue was not to black America alone but to white America as well.

  Whether we lived in a Jim Crow society or an integrated one defined both white and black, who, like it or not, were dependent on each other. How whites existed (or refused to exist) with blacks, worked (or refused to work) side by side with blacks, held membership in the same unions—or didn’t—resided in decent housing in decent neighborhoods with decent schools or lived apart in class and race-dominated neighborhoods, good schools in one part of town, bad schools in another, ensuring a permanent division based on race and class—this would lead to a final definition of the America we were about to inherit. Little or no effort was being made to address the problem of a growing minority of undereducated, unemployed, and underemployed, predictably seething with resentment, who would eventually be driven to violence and rebellion. Urban streets would turn uncontrollable, and another great migration would begin, prompting affluent whites for their own protection to move en masse into upscale enclaves.