From the early fifties, I had been spending my summers on Fire Island, a long strip of sandbar particularly convenient to New Yorkers on vacation who didn’t drive or didn’t want to. I fit both categories, but Fire Island had its shortcomings. It was jammed, particularly on weekends, because of its easy access to the city. You had to love the ocean because that and the beach were its only attractions. I was scared of the ocean. The ocean had surf, sometimes pounding. It could slap you around, knock you into the ground. Surf had no respect for me or my family or my future. We understood each other very well, the surf and I. Surf was out to sweep me out to sea and drown me.
I was a bad swimmer, hardly a swimmer at all, twenty-five strokes and I moved a couple of feet. While I thought I was swimming, an observer would think I was standing up in the water, waving my arms.
But the Vineyard had an ocean, too, so it wasn’t my dread of water that made me leave Fire Island, it was my dread of the volleyball game. Unathletic in the extreme, I nonetheless enjoyed taking part in the Ocean Beach Sunday morning volleyball games. For years they were considered not a contest but a way for both sexes to get together on weekend mornings, to meet, get acquainted, have fun. Winning was not the point, it was not competitive. It was a game for diving at the ball, missing it, and falling on your face in the sand. We inept players thought of that as a good time.
Then in the summer of ’65, the good times stopped. There I was on a fine Sunday morning, playing my usual sloppy game, and I noticed something different. I was being yelled at. I was being ordered to shape up. Wall Street and Madison Avenue had discovered literary, showbiz Ocean Beach, the scene of our game. They had come to expel soft-bodied weak-kneed fun for hard-bodied kick-ass fun. Laughter was replaced by grimaces and gritted teeth.
The aim now, at all costs, was to win. Win! This new volleyball with its new players was a contest to crush the opposition, to incorporate the aggression and hostility of the marketplace, the worst of Madison Avenue and Wall Street pugnaciousness. The spirit of the city, which I’d left to escape, had advanced on the beach in full fury. “That was an easy shot! What the hell is wrong with you?!” Eyes bulging in rage. Fun on Sunday mornings had turned into another day at the office.
I was out of there. I said to Judy, “Either we find another place to go to next summer or we stay in New York.”
As has happened so often in my life, at exactly the moment we were out of ideas for where we could spend our summer vacation, the invitation came from Bob and Norma. In the spring of the following year, 1966, we found ourselves backing into the Vineyard. When we arrived, what we found was a continent scaled to the size of an island. Within a few minutes, one traveled from Hampton beachiness to Connecticut countryside to upstate New York farmland. Romantic lakes and ponds inland, and on the ocean side, vibrant red-and-orange-and-purple clay cliffs supplementing the eye-popping grandeur of the Atlantic Ocean.
Miles of enchantment with an older crowd to appreciate it than one found on Fire Island. More literary, more elusive when it came to competitiveness, wit displayed in place of muscle. Was this ever my turf! Clusters of Plimpton-like parties for the summer residents. Bill and Rose Styron next door to Lillian Hellman next door to John and Barbara Hersey next door to the Rahvs, a few doors away from Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale, up the street from Albert and Frances Hackett, who not only wrote The Diary of Anne Frank for Broadway but, far more impressive to me, wrote the first Thin Man movie.
This was the environment that Bob and Norma Brustein invited us into, the hideaway of the fortunate few, writers, artists, academics who could take two months off in the summer, not just weekends. First we rented, then we bought. And forty years later, I remain there, in my second marriage, three generations of children grown to womanhood on Vineyard beaches. Beatific summers followed by deadline summers, interspersed with political summers and even one Vietnam summer.
In 1967, at a Styron party for Robert Kennedy, I was introduced to Lyndon Johnson’s undersecretary of state, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who shook my hand warmly, beamed at me, and told me what a great fan of mine he was.
I was at a stage of life where I was unable to respond to flattery with a simple “Thank you.” So I replied to Katzenbach, “You can’t be a fan of mine. I’m against everything you stand for.”
Katzenbach, a balding, pleasant-looking man, was clearly taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“How can you be in an administration that’s fighting this war in Vietnam and say you are a fan of mine?”
Katzenbach, instead of walking off, stuck around to insist that he was as opposed to Vietnam as I was. And after a couple of minutes’ conversation, accompanied by a drink or two, he had me convinced that he was a fellow dove, working from the inside, where he could get so much more done. Katzenbach, I was assured by Katzenbach, was doing all in his power to end this carnage.
The next morning I was on the phone to Brustein, Philip Roth, and John Marquand, relaying the hot news that Nick Katzenbach was one of us. Or could be. If we got a group together one weekend when my new friend Nick took time off from the war, maybe, just maybe, we could convince him what a great move toward peace it would be if he resigned from the government as a matter of conscience. It seemed to me that this was possible. Katzenbach had become famous in the Kennedy Justice Department as a civil rights advocate, a man of conscience. Why not Vietnam?
If we found a soft spot in Katzenbach, if we talked him into leaving the government, denouncing the war that he hated as much as I did (he told me so himself), who knew who else might resign? A covey of doves hiding out in the State Department? In the Pentagon? The Feiffer Domino Theory of Resignations.
In the midst of feverish phone calls and late-night conspiring, I happened to turn on the TV one morning, no more than a week after meeting Nick, and—my God! there he was, standing before Senator William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raising his hand to take the oath. My new pal, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, testifying nauseatingly in support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave total war powers to the administration, a full-scale endorsement of open-ended escalation. Say it ain’t so, Nick!
Talk about a betrayal of friendship. My buddy Nick, whom I was going to get to quit because he hated the war, appearing as the government’s personal advocate for the war’s escalation.
What to do? I called a meeting. Some of us (me) wanted to picket Nick’s Vineyard home. Secretary of Defense McNamara also had a summer home on the island. I suggested that we picket him too. They can’t screw around with me!
Except for myself and one or two others, the idea of picketing McNamara and Katzenbach, in shorts and flip-flops, in front of their summer houses drew more wisecracks than support.
We came to the not-surprising decision that, as writers, our best form of protest was a full-page ad in the Vineyard Gazette, the island’s New York Times-like newspaper. Roth volunteered to write a first draft. It was gussied up by Brustein, with a final edit by John Marquand. John drew on his better-informed prep school sensibility to retrofit the language into a coded assault certain to offend all those in the Pentagon or State who had attended Ivy League schools—that is, the entire crew.
The ad caused a rift in the liberal island community. Some, like Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, argued that the Vineyard was a sanctuary. Problems and differences should be deferred as one boarded the ferry at Wood’s Hole. We, the ad’s organizers, had violated basic Vineyard rules and ethics. Our act was nearly as offensive as the war itself.
Among the signers of the ad—an open letter to Katzenbach—the name that created the biggest stir was that of the venerable and widely respected editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette, Henry Beetle Hough, a beloved nineteenth-centuryish Vineyard elder of dignity and rectitude who, when first approached about placing the ad, instead of turning it down, as we feared, asked deferentially, “Would you very much mind if I added my name?”
We created our share
of noise, stories in the Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek. Predictably the ad was dismissed as “frivolous” and “unserious.” Among those Vineyarders appalled at our behavior, our action was branded “that Village Voice ad,” although I had not written a word of it.
FIRST MISTAKE
The Feiffers and the Brusteins had been friends since the late fifties. Norma Brustein was blond, sexy, and chatty. She spoke in the high-pitched squeal of a showgirl a few years out of the chorus. She reminded me of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Norma’s sexiness and near parody of a voice hid the fact that she was smart, quick-witted, and perceptive, and had a great sense of humor, meaning she laughed at my jokes.
She and Bob were a theatrical-looking couple. He was tall and handsome and spoke in an oracular radio-actor’s baritone, which he employed with a friendly but forceful style as he commented on contemporary theater, culture, and politics.
Being a humorist and satirist, I took a lighter, funnier tone, even when I agreed with Bob. But Bob was a critic and an academic. He spoke with a solemnity that resonated gloom. One came away from a conversation with him thinking, “It’s over! We are all going to die!” But because of the high intellectual content invoked in describing our ineluctable downward spiral, one felt better informed, even cheery about it.
The doom I wrote into Little Murders played very well into Brustein’s vision. This was going to be a cinch, a production at the Yale Rep, possibly with Walter Matthau playing Alfred, the lead (he demurred, didn’t understand a word of the play). Possibly Mike Nichols directing (he was sent the play, didn’t respond, and I didn’t speak to him for two years). Okay, we would do our time at Yale, get the necessary attention, build momentum, then move into a Broadway or off-Broadway house. Sounded like a plan.
At least, that was my view of the production. Brustein had another. He was, somewhat sniffily, I thought, opposed to using the Yale Rep as a tryout house for Broadway. He had no intention of allowing his nonprofit theater to become a feeder house for commercial theater.
Bob was not commercial. Nor was I, God knows. I was as opposed to commercial theater as he was. But what did that have to do with my first play, subversive as hell, having the chance to open in a Broadway house and, possibly, make it as a hit?
It wasn’t likely. The odds were against it. But as I explained to Brustein after a good deal of pained and strained discussion, I didn’t write Little Murders to have it run for six weeks in New Haven. New York was where I wanted it to be. On Broadway in front of the audience it was about. Brustein, along with his academic loftiness, has an inherent sweetness. He expressed with resonant gravity his disappointment in what he was convinced was this dumb move I was about to make. Nonetheless, he wished me luck. Our friendship was not affected. The play moved on, and as I had once predicted (but forgot), it opened and closed on Broadway in a week.
FLOP
Elliott Gould flew up to the Vineyard to talk to me about playing Alfred. Alexander H. Cohen, the producer, had suggested Elliott, whom I had seen in Jerome Weidman’s Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
That was the show that, according to legend, was stolen by Barbra Streisand. But not the night I saw it. I liked Elliott, I didn’t like Barbra. He was big and goofy-looking and had a relaxed, shambling charm. His naturalness onstage instantly engaged me. On the other hand, Streisand’s over-the-top salesmanship grated on me.
The night Little Murders opened on Broadway, by which time Barbra Streisand had become Barbra, she showed up wearing a foot-high pillbox hat, perhaps to correct anyone who might want to look at her husband onstage instead of the real star. Her high hat blocked the view of whoever was sitting behind her. Too bad it wasn’t a critic.
I got lost on my way to pick up Elliott at Katama airport, the small private airfield just outside of Edgartown on the Vineyard. By this time I had a driver’s license, but it didn’t mean I could drive well or find my way around in a car. To this day I am capable of getting lost when I leave my driveway, so you’d think I’d have taken precautions to be on time when I was to pick up an actor who was coming all the way from New York to talk to me about starring in my first play. You’d think I’d have taken pains to get to the airport early instead of fifteen minutes late. When I drove up, Elliott was perched on a wooden fence that bordered the airport, the kind of fence that pens in horses. Elliott, in jeans and a light suede jacket, sitting on the top slat in the manner of an ordinary guy. Who guessed that in a couple of years he would be a big movie star?
I drove him to our rented house in Chilmark, just off the ocean, where we spent the rest of the day into the evening talking about our production because, by then, both of us took for granted that the part was his.
Recently in a downtown new-glitz restaurant, I ran into David Steinberg, the director and comedian who, as a young actor, originated the role of Kenny, the kid brother in Little Murders. A booth away, I was hailed by Oliver Platt, the actor who was one of the stars of Elliot Loves, the play that drove me out of the theater for ten years, swearing that I would never return. Both plays, twenty-three years apart, had scripts that pleased me and casts I admired. Both were critical flops. One of them deserved to be, the other not. The one that deserved to be was Little Murders.
With my lack of experience, I didn’t realize that Little Murders required a director with the ingenuity to figure out how to stage a piece that required something apart from a conventional Broadway approach. Someone like Mike Nichols or Alan Arkin, with a background in improvisation. But Mike didn’t like the play, and Alan was busy becoming a movie star, not yet ready to direct. (Two years later he would do a stunning revival of Little Murders off-Broadway.) I had offered the play to Gene Sachs, a wonderful actor who had taken up directing Neil Simon comedies. Gene was as confused by the play as Walter Matthau.
I had knowingly written a play not meant for the usual Broadway presentation, then, perversely, gone after a commercial comedy director who had the good sense to turn me down. So I switched my sights to regional theater, hoping for—I don’t know what—something experimental. Directors are groomed for the theater that exists at the moment, and I was not writing for that theater. I was writing for a theater that was informed by improvisational cabaret and absurdism. Directors trained in putting on more conventional comedies—the works of F. Hugh Herbert or Norman Krasna or the best of them all, Neil Simon—were confounded by my script. It was chaotic, scattershot, three acts different in tone from one another, not by any definition a well-made play as the species was defined. If I’d known how to write a well-made play, I might have tried my hand at it. As it was, I just put down everything that came to mind: fast-breaking scenes, long set-piece monologues, killing off my heroine, the only likable person on stage, in the middle of the play. I can well imagine Broadway directors reading this and thinking, “What the fuck?”
I had found my regional theater director in Philadelphia, where he had just had great success with an absurdist comedy by Saul Bellow. I chose a director (whose name I will keep to myself) who was brilliant in his analysis of the play, perceptive about our goals, articulate and nuanced in expressing himself, exuberant in regard to the scope, promise, and ambition of the production. He was also genial, charming, intelligent—and he didn’t have a clue as to how to direct Little Murders. With all his gung-ho attitude and love for the script, he was completely flummoxed. He blocked a scene only to change the blocking the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Scenes did not grow; they were changed, and changed again. Weeks into rehearsal, the actors did not know where they were going onstage or why. All the director’s good ideas were topped the next day by better ones. He was every bit as excited about today’s ideas as he was about yesterday’s and the ones he’d had the day before.
Actors approached me with suggestions for line changes, which a stronger director would not have tolerated. In the spirit of collaboration, he gave in to them. So did I. If an actor said he couldn’t do a certai
n speech, I rewrote it, subverting my cadences for his or hers. What the actors seemed to have most trouble with were my quick shifts within the body of a scene, so I tried to smooth out the scenes, tamp them down. To please the performers, I sold out the play.
This is what one did in collaboration, I thought. I was a cartoonist, spent my entire career working alone. What did I know from collaboration? I had no experience in team sports or playing with others. My one experience in playing with others was within my family, where I hid my thoughts and modified my behavior to make for smoother sailing. That may have gotten me through a family alive, but shucking off the authority of a playwright in order to revert to the role of middle child was not my best move.
We opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston to bad reviews, which were not entirely deserved. The critics were right to be unhappy with the production, but they were even less happy with what the play had to say. Critics are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, particularly when it comes to ideas. They prefer not to deal with ideas in a play. They are likely to say, “This is a play that purports to be about ideas, but it is merely pretentious.” Little Murders, however, was so little regarded in Boston that it wasn’t even labeled “pretentious.”
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