Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Critics mean little to a play, except life and death. The audience that I cared about—or that portion who didn’t walk out as soon as they heard the word shit for the first time in a theater—responded with enthusiasm. This Boston tryout was way too slow, way too long, deeply in need of revisions and cuts and so much else—and even so, a sizable percentage of the audiences understood that for the first time they were seeing a brash, satiric comment on the post-JFK sixties. And this excited them in the way my early Voice cartoons excited readers. At long last, they were seeing a play that was trying to address what we all felt had gone wrong but almost no one was talking about.

  I had been told many times that real theater was not at all as it was portrayed in movies. But after the Boston tryout of Little Murders, I began to look on all those backstage musicals I’d seen over the years as documentaries. Stuck in my room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel doing late-night rewrites after every performance—elevator operators taking me up to my room, gossiping about what they’d heard about the show; a bellman with a play script he wanted me to read; down the hall Betty Comden and Adolph Green, authors of The Band Wagon and Singin’ in the Rain in the midst of rehearsing their new show, On the Twentieth Century. Al Capp called and wanted me to appear on his local TV talk show.

  I said no to Al. I hadn’t looked at a newspaper in about a month. I didn’t want to go unprepared into a political debate with Al, who had moved to the right since his liberal youth and was presently a passionate supporter of the war and a hyperbolic critic of the peace movement. Besides, I had to revise the detective scene at the beginning of act 3, a parody murder mystery that went on far too long and wasn’t funny. Everything was going wrong, and I was having a ball because it felt like the movies.

  Locked in my room overlooking the Public Gardens, rewriting and sipping Scotch, answering phone calls I warned myself to ignore, arguing with Alex Cohen over how many shits to cut without disemboweling the play even further, taking one call, then another from Al Capp’s daughter, then his producer, then Al himself, who, after all, had been my hero when I was a kid, not only for Li’l Abner but for creating just about the best-told story strip of all, Abbie an’ Slats. Al promised we wouldn’t talk politics. “You love comics, I love comics, we’ll only talk comics.”

  I put Al on hold for a bellman delivering a 1:00 a.m. snack. Before he would leave, he had to tell me a joke that he thought would go great in my show. I got rid of the bellman, got rid of Al by saying yes, had a great idea for the detective scene that I’d put in the next night. Then I fell into bed thinking, “I’m trapped inside a backstage musical.”

  The new detective scene worked, the Al Capp show didn’t. I showed up and was held offstage as Al introduced me by reading a commentary off a prompter about a New York Town Hall meeting of some months back sponsored by Artists and Intellectuals Against the War in Vietnam. In Al’s version, as all these anti-Americans went up to the microphones and spouted their Hate America speeches, it became too much for a poor, solitary policeman, a security guard in the back of the house. He interrupted the denunciations of our great country by singing, in top voice from the rear of the house, “God Bless America.” The audience of peaceniks and anti-Americans booed. They booed this patriotic police officer, and they booed “God Bless America,” can you imagine? Without skipping a beat, Al said, “And now I want to introduce my good friend, the great cartoonist Jules Feiffer.”

  I stood backstage in a fury, not at Al but at myself. I’d set myself up, I’d got what I deserved. I thought of walking off, out of the studio. But that would leave Al with the last word. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I walked out onstage grinning stupidly, goofily shook Al’s hand, and said, “Al, I was one of those anti-Americans—” Oh, my God, I had lost my voice! I had become a soprano. I could have been doing an impression of Mickey Mouse. Rage had throttled my vocal chords, no one was going to be able to hear my response to this jerk except dogs watching TV who respond to high-pitched whistles.

  Gradually my voice came to its senses and I was able to confront Al with the fact that I was one of the organizers of the event he had just slandered. He chortled. “I thought you might be.” He had planned this ambush from the beginning!

  He and I went on to engage in a full-throated, thoroughly unpleasant exchange. I batted back one ad hominem digression after another. Al’s response was to guffaw (his way of expressing aggression) and launch another pointless assault. We didn’t get to talk about comics, we didn’t get to plug my play. We wrangled to a draw, and I walked off at the end of my segment without saying good-bye or shaking hands.

  Al and I ran into each other just one time more. A year later, flying in from a campaign trip on behalf of Eugene McCarthy in his antiwar bid for the presidency, I passed Al going in the opposite direction at LaGuardia Airport. He shouted after me as I fled, “You know your problem, Feiffer? You’re a self-hating Jew!”

  My producer, Alex Cohen, had been trying to fire my director for weeks. And I wouldn’t let him. Then I woke up one morning and thought, “What do I owe my loyalty to, my play or this man who’s ruining it?” I called Robby Lantz, my agent, and told him to tell Alex to dump the director. Robby said, “Alex has shown the play to Elia Kazan and he’s willing to come in and take over.”

  What?

  So much of my political sensibility had been shaped by the blacklist, the warfare that took place between those who named names and those who stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. I liked to fantasize the day I would be called before the committee and asked if I was a Communist. And to name names. In my fantasy, I testify, “Yes, Mr. Chairman, I was a member of the Communist Party. And you, sir, were the head of my cell.”

  Elia Kazan was the most famous director in American theater. And now he was winning awards for his movies. I despised everything he represented. Not only had he named names before the committee, he took out a full-page ad in Variety and the New York Times in the early years of the blacklist, when his standing up against HUAC might have done something to turn the tides, and he boasted about his sellout, defending the decency and the morality in his betrayal of friends and colleagues.

  I told Robby over the phone, “Kazan is what this play is all about. How could I think of letting him come in to direct it?”

  Fifty years later, I have no idea what I meant by that remark. My play was not about the witch hunts or the blacklist or naming names. In 2001 I was to write that play, A Bad Friend. Trying to reconstruct my thoughts after all these years, the best I can come up with is that perhaps I considered even a discussion of the pros and cons of a Kazan takeover as an act of monumental hypocrisy, a sellout of the highest order. To allow near my play the weasel who aided and abetted, then promptly promoted the atmosphere of fear and demoralization in our arts and culture would make my production a mockery.

  I called Alex Cohen and told him that I would rather Little Murders close in Boston than have Kazan come in and make it a hit (which, in any case, I doubted he’d be able to do; he was not noted for his comic flair).

  My last act in Boston, after packing to fly to New York for a week of previews and then our opening, was to fire my director. Alex Cohen, who had been pushing me hardest on this, made himself unavailable for the job. No one else was willing to do it. Everyone liked the director. He was a sweet fellow, he was an enthusiast, he was brilliant, he had ruined my play. (I helped him ruin it, but I couldn’t fire myself, although that might have been a possibility before all those years of therapy.)

  The director and I met in my room at the Ritz-Carlton. He refused to believe I was firing him. I had to say it two, then three, then four times. The words didn’t form a concept that he could understand. “What if I can’t convince him,” I wondered. “What if he leaves here refusing to acknowledge that he’s fired?” It was a reminder to me of how he directed. Once he was fixed on an approach, it couldn’t be modified, altered, or dislodged.

  He stuck out his arms and started flailing h
is hands at me. “You’re cutting off my hands. How can you cut off my hands?”

  Instead of sympathy, I felt anger. He had yet to admit, he refused to admit, that he had screwed up, that the production was in serious trouble, that the actors were confused by his inept blocking, or that entrances and exits had become traffic jams. He couldn’t see his failure. He could see only his hands flailing at me like sausages in a high wind. “You’re cutting off my hands!”

  “Not a moment too soon,” I thought.

  LITTLE WONDERS

  Little Murders opened on a Tuesday in April of 1967. It closed on Saturday. In those days, the New York critics still came to review plays on opening night. Walter Kerr was there for the Herald Tribune, his wife, Jean, seated next to him. I knew the Kerrs through Al and Dolly Hirschfeld, and liked them, although I couldn’t imagine Walter thinking well of my play. I sat a row behind and a little to the side and kept my eye on him, curious to see the effect that bad word I was introducing to Broadway would have the first time he heard it.

  A third of the way into the first act, Alfred explains to Patsy’s family what he does for a living. In a long, rambling monologue, he describes his career in photography and his disdain for the success he’s achieved. Carol, Patsy’s father, Marjorie, her mother, and Kenny, her brother, are in attendance.

  MARJORIE: You must be extremely talented.

  ALFRED (more to himself than to family): I got sick of it! Where the hell are standards? That’s what I kept asking myself. Those people will take anything! If I gave them a picture of shit, they’d give me an award for it!

  A surprised laugh from the audience.

  MARJORIE: Language, young man!

  ALFRED: Mm? So that’s what I do now.

  CAROL (hesitantly): What?

  ALFRED: Take pictures of shit.

  This time the laugh built and didn’t stop for what seemed like twenty seconds. Walter Kerr threw back his head and let out a sustained bark.

  MARJORIE: Language! Language! This is my table!

  ALFRED: I don’t mean to offend you, Mrs. Newquist. I’ve been shooting shit for a year now [big laugh], and I’ve already won a half dozen awards [smaller laugh].

  MARJORIE (slowly thaws): Awards?

  ALFRED: And Harper’s Bazaar wants me to do its spring issue.

  The audience went nuts, as did Walter Kerr. The laugh must have gone on for thirty seconds. It was the high point of my evening.

  A week earlier the English director John Dexter had been brought in by Alex Cohen to save us. Dexter had become well known in the States for directing Peter Shaffer’s plays in London and New York. He was a smart, no-nonsense, efficient craftsman. But he had only a week to get his work done, and much of that week was spent being a traffic cop. Cleaning up entrances and exits so that the actors stopped tripping over one another. There was little time to work on character, so John simply speeded up the pace of the show. Without cutting a line, he shortened the play by fifteen minutes. And as he cleaned up and paced and polished, the play I wrote (and did so much to undermine) began to emerge as what I thought it was during my euphoria at Yaddo.

  By now most of the company was punch drunk, but not Elliott. He was a rock throughout the previews, solidly supportive, giving his every ounce of oddball charm and deadpan intensity to my passive, listless antihero. You couldn’t take your eyes off him.

  The other actors delivered wildly uneven performances. Too much had happened in Boston and beyond. They’d been told too many things by too many authorities and, to add to their confusion, we were now home in New York and their friends in the business came back after each preview to give them their notes—what they better do onstage to dissociate themselves from this turkey so their careers would not suffer.

  I knew we were doomed. The lack of suspense eased my anxieties. At least I wouldn’t be on tenterhooks opening night. I had told my mother that she couldn’t come to the opening, that the play’s language would upset and offend her. In fact, she shouldn’t come to the play at all. I would write other plays that she could see. She didn’t argue; she must have sensed something. That something was the prospect of watching herself portrayed onstage by Ruth White, who looked a little like her and got laughs with lines taken right out of Rhoda’s mouth. She would have thought she was being held up to ridicule. She would have had a point.

  Accidents happen. At our very last preview, the night before our opening, the theater was sold out. It was filled with theater people. I remember Lanford Wilson and Jon Voight, among others. And it was at this performance, for the first and last time, that the play and the production came together. The actors fed off the audience, and the audience was inside the play, onstage with the performers, rocking the house with laughs, followed immediately by intense and resonant silences. The play that night was pure and happy subversion, with the audience behaving as co-conspirators.

  Seconds after the final curtain, a mob of people rushed up to congratulate me. I felt relieved and grateful to the point of tears and, at the same time, more sorry for myself than ever in a lifetime of feeling serially sorry for myself. I knew how great and compelling the performance I had just witnessed was. And I knew there was no way that this cast could repeat it the next night. And the next night was our opening.

  Opening night was the disaster I expected. For most of the last act, I hid out in a bar down the block. I returned to the Broadhurst in time to see a dismayed and irritable audience leaving. I stood on the sidewalk across the street from the theater feeling like Tom Sawyer watching his own funeral. Then, an unexpected moment of uplift: Leonard Lyons, the popular Broadway gossip columnist for the New York Post, a dapper little man who was sweet and likable, and often as not got his stories wrong, rushed up to me, his face livid. He screamed, “How dare you use language like that on the second night of Passover?!”

  My response to Leonard was to give him a bear hug. I said, “Leonard, thank you. You’ve rescued my evening.”

  I left the not-much-of-a-party at Sardi’s to go upstairs to the ad agency and monitor the bad reviews filtering in, none worse than that of the New York Times. Herb Gardner came along as my spin doctor and bodyguard. Each time we were shown a bad review, Herb scanned it with a copy editor’s eye. He never failed to find a line buried somewhere toward the bottom of the pan. “That could be a quote!” he’d announce cheerily to the demoralized few still in attendance.

  Judy and I quit the death watch at about one thirty in the morning. I said that I had to go to Elaine’s. The joint was locked when we stepped out of the cab at Second and Eighty-eighth Street. I saw signs of life inside the darkened interior. I knocked on the door. Elaine Kaufman came to the door and opened it. She led us inside without a word, turned on a couple of lights, went behind the bar for a bottle of champagne, and we proceeded to celebrate my first flop.

  Late the next day, Sam Zolotow called. “Okay, Mr. Big Shot Cartoonist, you wrote a play that’s a flop. Now what?” Sam was a theater reporter for the New York Times. He ran its “News of the Rialto” column. I liked Sam because he sounded exactly like the actor Sam Levene, who played Nathan Detroit in the original production of Guys and Dolls.

  On paper, his remark sounds harsh and hostile, but he didn’t mean it that way, nor did I take it that way. It was simply Broadway wise-guy banter, and I chose to go along with it. My response to him was, “Sam, I’m just going to keep bringing it back until you guys get it right.”

  A month later, Little Murders went into rehearsal in London. It was the first American play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Our director, Christopher Morahan, came out of BBC TV dramas. In contrast to everything that had gone wrong on Broadway, Chris, in his dry, witty, at times self-effacing, at times Jules-effacing manner, found the key to the play, or at least the English production of it. Little Murders was resuscitated a mere two months after the New York critics left it for dead.

  Chris Morahan went back to the original script that I had sent him, preferring it over t
he changes I had made to “fix” it and accommodate my Broadway cast. “Why don’t we just wait for now and put in the changes as we need them?” he said at our initial meeting. As it turned out, the changes never went in. Chris gave the show a cohesiveness, a pace and vitality that it never came near having in New York. And with that, the point of the play became clear as it never had on Broadway, except for our last preview.

  The English love America-bashing, particularly when an American does it on an English stage. So Little Murders won prizes, and this critic-bashed American was grateful. If that’s all it took …

  But there was a problem with the production, a sizable one: I wasn’t allowed to use the word shit. In 1967 Britain still had its Lord Chamberlain’s Office. This was the official censor whose mission it was to keep obscene language off the London stage. Jeremy Brooks, the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company, had made an appointment for the two of us to meet with the lord chamberlain in his Downing Street headquarters to argue our case. Jeremy, friendly, charming, urbane, and a great supporter of the play, thought our chances were nonexistent. But I didn’t think a lost cause was a good enough reason to give up the only chance I might ever have of going up against the lord chamberlain.

  We met the great man and his aide, two cordial, spiffily dressed, exceedingly correct Englishmen. One was assigned the good-cop role, the other played the bad cop. The argument I had come up with in defense of the word shit was that Alfred, the nihilist, the bad boy, the cynic who believed in nothing, was the only character to use foul language in the play. This was a deliberate ploy on my part to show the audience that this otherwise attractive rebel was a representative of all the wrong, anti-authoritarian values, the values that were dragging down both British and American society. If Alfred was not permitted to say “shit,” audiences might well miss my point and mistake my antihero for a hero. They might, God help us, identify with the fellow, which would be a misreading of the play and would pervert its message.