Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  If Evans had agreed to fire me he could have held on to Dustin. All he had to do was hire the writer of Dustin’s choice. Dustin Hoffman was a big movie star. His name had the power to move a picture forward. Most producers, most studios would have fired me the minute the star made known his demands. Instead, Bob Evans, Dustin’s good friend, said, “Dustin, I’m the producer of this film, you’re the star, Jules is the writer. If you want to be connected to this film, that’s the way it’s going to be.” This is not done in Hollywood.

  Moved as I was by Evans’s decision to stick by me, I soon realized that without a star we had no financing and no movie. Popeye was dead, going nowhere. About nine months later, with me back to self-parody in my weekly strip, Evans called from Hollywood. “Jules, have you seen Mork and Mindy?” I immediately understood: Robin Williams, the frenetic and magnetic star of this new TV series, was going to be our Popeye.

  The list of directors who said no to Popeye, or whom Evans insanely gave me veto power to say no to, included Hal Ashby, Louis Malle, and Jerry Lewis. And just when we had run out of choices, Robert Altman said he wanted to make the film. He said he loved the script, wouldn’t change a word. I laughed when Evans reported this to me. I was a friend of Altman’s and a fan. As a fan, I knew what was coming.

  Now, I loved Altman’s work. His films were wildly uneven, but virtually any frame told you that he was pure artist, meaning that he’d throw out my script first thing. Altman didn’t believe in scripts except as a necessary evil to get films financed. He didn’t much believe in words, he didn’t care if you heard the dialogue or not. And he didn’t believe in story. But I could imagine no one better to give credibility to Segar’s outlandish creations on-screen.

  In Altman’s repertory company of actors, he had Shelley Duvall, who seemed to me to be the perfect Olive Oyl. I could think of no one better to play Popeye’s sweetie, and Altman had discovered her. But Shelley had done something on their last movie to offend him. Bob didn’t want her. He made offers to every actress in Hollywood who was not Shelley Duvall: Lily Tomlin, then Goldie Hawn, then God knows who. It was embarrassing. When none of his preferences, which were getting sillier by the minute, were interested, Altman grudgingly accepted Shelley, who gave the best performance in the movie.

  The film was shot on the island of Malta, for no reason other than that Altman preferred locations in terms of their distance from the studio brass. If he could have rationalized a shoot on the moon, that’s where we would have shot Popeye. Malta is a rock. It has little indigenous wood. The script called for Popeye to come ashore in the shantytown of Sweethaven, a ramshackle village of vari-angled, weather-beaten, cartoony dwellings made of wood.

  Tons of wood were imported from Canada and the western United States to construct our shantytown. Under the guidance of production designer (and Sweethaven’s architect) Wolf Kroeger, it emerged as half village, half roller coaster, not a right angle in sight. Nor did Wolf build it like your usual movie set. This was a real town, no backdrops. One might live in it, bed oneself down if one didn’t mind sleeping on a slant. Late at night, after occasional fights with Altman, I would walk down the hill from the motel the cast and crew were staying in and visit the set. I climbed rickety, narrow steps to look out over cramped and deliciously exotic dwellings. High over Sweethaven, I perched myself on porches and decks as substantial as matchsticks that could collapse under me at any moment. What did I care? I was depressed.

  Three weeks before I had left for Malta, my girlfriend of six years, Susie Crile, had broken the news that she was opting to be my ex-girlfriend. Susie was a painter. We had met and come together at Yaddo two years after my marriage to Judy had ended. And now, at fifty-one, I was decoupled, a situation I saw little possibility of changing for the rest of my life. That gave me motivation to climb to the top of this fake town without regard to treacherous decks and look down on this wondrous fantasy creation. I was contented, living inside this cartoon I had written, to know, as I knew at seven, that I was happier in comics than in life.

  Altman and I had been fighting. I had come to understand that my script was primarily his beard, the cover story that got him financing for the real movie he intended to shoot, the one he was busily improvising on the set, sandwiched between mandatory scenes he was under contract to shoot from my script. This other movie featured the townspeople of Sweethaven, most of them hired as extras, little suspecting that they were going to figure prominently in this second, parallel movie that Altman planned to make while he was shooting Popeye. Included among the extras was a company of free-form clowns from San Francisco calling themselves the Pickles Family Circus, featuring Bill Irwin. Altman choreographed madcap stunt improvisations, funny or not so. (He didn’t make a distinction.) His plan—if he had a plan—might have been to liven up this script he had signed on for, and was thus obligated to shoot, by inserting scenes that were more to his liking.

  Whether Altman seriously intended to kidnap my movie and turn it into a circus act, I can’t say. He was an elusive character, rumpled and charm-laden, a twinkling teddy bear who was happy making mischief. When Robert Evans saw the first rough assembly of the film, he went bananas. “It’s a mess! It’s got no story, it’s practically got no Popeye, it’s incoherent!” he stammered in the first of several panicky calls from Hollywood to New York.

  I assured Evans that Altman, despite the rough cut, had shot most of my script, he had just chosen to bury it, but I didn’t think he had burned the footage. I was sure that Evans could dig it up and make Altman restore it to create some semblance of continuity.

  I was not privy to Evans’s next confrontation with Altman, whether or not they argued or if Altman, having screened his preferred cut (nearly giving his producer a heart attack), affably retreated and agreed to include the story of Popeye in the movie Popeye.

  Harry Nilsson had written a charming and altogether lovely score that Altman downgraded as he did my script, burying Harry’s songs amid dopey bits of business. Evans pressured Altman, and the songs made a comeback. Not everywhere they should have, but enough to make an impression, particularly in the “Sweet Sweethaven” number and—one of the few quiet moments in the film—Shelley Duvall’s poignant love song, “He Needs Me.”

  Robin’s great musical moment, on the other hand, was trashed. Harry and I planned a “Singin’ in the Rain” breakout number. This was Popeye’s big credo song: “I Yam What I Yam.” But Altman shot it perversely, with Popeye obscured almost entirely by dancing extras. At the very moment he growls out his defiant song, he is all but offstaged by a phalanx of leaping, twirling, cavorting clowns. The star relegated to a supporting role in Altman’s circus. It was as if Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number were shot with the camera focused on the puddles.

  Evans and Altman eventually cobbled together a final cut that was an odd, engaging, and eccentrically charming film with astonishingly convincing cartoon characters brought so completely to life that one forgot they were cartoons. Half my script never made it to the screen, but what Altman had abandoned in story, he made up for in imagery. The film had (and still has) a glorious look and a sweet nature. The studio thought otherwise, as did the critics. Nonetheless, Popeye made money despite Paramount’s halfhearted efforts to sabotage it. The studio hated Altman, and didn’t much like Evans, and kept under wraps the fact that it was a hit. I didn’t find that it had gone into profit until almost ten years later, when I started receiving royalties.

  After the film was screened in Chicago, I received a call from a woman who introduced herself as the daughter of E. C. Segar. “I heard you in a couple of interviews saying how you were going to write this film as a testimonial to my father and not do the Max Fleischer animated Popeye. And I’ve heard people say that before and they didn’t mean it, so I didn’t think you meant it. But I just came from a screening and I want to thank you. It is my father’s Popeye and this means so much to me.”

  I hung up and wept.

  Po
peye was my first work for children. My second was for Shelley Duvall’s series for Showtime, Faerie Tale Theatre. She asked me to write a script for Puss in Boots.

  It was ten years after Popeye that Ed Sorel asked me to write his picture book about old movies. How could I resist? I took two cracks at a story line. Ed, who does not suffer fools gladly, dismissed both versions, not very kindly. I slunk off to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer. During the last two weeks of August, I came up with an idea far simpler than anything I had shown him before. I wrote feverishly for ten days, then as soon as I got back to the city I called Ed. I yelled over the phone, “I’ve got the story. I think it’s good!”

  There was a long pause at the other end, and at last Ed said, “Um—I guess I should have told you. I decided to write it myself.”

  Subdued rage. Really well hidden. “When did you decide this?” I asked, feigning calm.

  “About two weeks ago,” Ed said. In other words, just when I had begun work.

  I snarled into the phone, “That’s when you should have called me.” I hung up on Ed. He called back in ten seconds, stammering apologies. “You do the book. I’ll give it up. I won’t do it. It’s yours!”

  His apologies didn’t make a dent. “No, it’s your idea,” I said. “You do your kid’s book, I’ll do my kid’s book. My book will be better than your book.”

  And so it was spite that decided my unlikely late-life conversion to writing and illustrating children’s books. And I owe it all to Ed Sorel. Spite works!

  I sat down the next day to write something reminiscent of Ed’s idea but different. It wasn’t going to be a kid who liked movies but a kid who liked—what did he like? What else did I adore as a kid besides movies? Well, there was old-time radio, but I couldn’t see young readers of today, immersed in electronics and technology that I will never understand, displaying an interest in my interest in old-time radio. But comics, what about comics? A boy who loved comics! Yes! A book about me as a kid and my love for comics—oops, I wrote that book in 1965, The Great Comic Book Heroes. It reinvented the comics career of Will Eisner and helped create a new generation of superhero readers. I wasn’t about to do that again. Nor did I want to. No, there had to be something in regard to comics that I could turn into a kid’s book … Duh! A boy who drew comics!

  This was not to be an autobiographical novel about a Bronx boy living in the Depression forties. Too close to my own past, too close to Ed Sorel’s book. I wanted this to be about me—but as a fictional boy cartoonist. I created Jimmy Jibbett. Jimmy thought like me and drew like me when I was ten and a half, but he didn’t live in the Bronx. He lived in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and he lived not in the forties but now, right now. Jimmy didn’t have two sisters named Mimi and Alice, no way! He had two sisters named Lisi and Susu. And he didn’t have Dave and Rhoda as parents. Other than Jimmy’s mother’s being a fashion designer who told endlessly boring stories in the vain hope of educating her son, his parents were a complete creation.

  From the time I began work on the book, I was in love. The same euphoria I felt in writing my plays, I felt in writing my first novel for children. The uncertainty and self-consciousness that plagued the writing of Harry, the Rat with Women did not once surface. I wrote steadily every day for four months, half the time not knowing where I was going but curious to find out—and pleasantly surprised when I got there. By the time I finished the novel, it had become clear that I was not writing a one shot. I had stumbled backwards into my next future.

  I was sixty-two. The strip was treading water, theater had beaten me to a frazzle, and what I required was a major new obsession.

  I decided not to offer The Man in the Ceiling, as I called the book, to my agent. Robby Lantz knew nothing about children’s books or the children’s book market. I knew only a little more. But I was a friend of Maurice Sendak. I called Maurice and told him what I had done. I asked him, “What now?” There was only one man in the business to go to, Maurice said. He gave me the name and phone number of his editor. A half hour later Michael di Capua called, introduced himself, and said, “Maurice says you have a book for me. Can I send a messenger?”

  Late the next afternoon, just twenty-four hours after the manuscript was sent to HarperCollins by messenger, Michael was on the phone again. He opened with, “I’ve been waiting twenty-five years for this book.”

  The manuscript seemed to be in pretty good shape, it wouldn’t need much revision, Michael assured me. We made a date to go over it and four days later, after a two-hour session in his office, I went home and rewrote almost everything.

  The tutorial I got from Michael di Capua in our two-hour session was the equivalent of what I learned about screenplays from Mike Nichols in his tutorial on Carnal Knowledge. From that point on, I understood the form and what it demanded, the questions that I needed to ask myself before I considered a first draft complete.

  A second novel followed on the heels of The Man in the Ceiling. This one, A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, was a fractured fairy tale. And following that, in quick succession, came a series of picture books for young readers where the illustrations dominated and I found myself struggling to learn how to use color as if I knew what I was doing.

  In the usual way, I had backed into what became one of the most rewarding and easily the most sentiment-laden career move of my life, creating picture books for young readers that were inspired by the Sunday comics supplements of my childhood: reinventing, for my own purposes, the line, the layouts, the colors, all led by the text—words and pictures—the very form that seduced me at six and seven and eight and led me, first as an aging and then as an old man, back to my masters to learn my craft.

  Final illustration from I Lost My Bear, 1998

  ALICE

  Alice, my mother’s third child, was a mistake. Rhoda did not want more children. Why should she? After two tries, she got her son, the Jewish prince she desired, in the gender she disapproved of. And four years later, in her forties, she became pregnant with Alice. It’s a less risky age today, much riskier then.

  One day in the early sixties, at the V.A. hospital in the Bronx, after a visit with my father, who was recovering from his heart attack, Alice, my mother, and I were leaving. As we stood waiting for an elevator, my mother, to whom any male dressed in white was a figure of authority even if he turned out to be a porter, started chatting up a man in white who, for all I knew, might have been a pizza deliveryman. She said, “That’s my daughter over there, a wonderful woman. She raises two children, she teaches in school, she never stops. But three times a week she drives all the way in from Long Island to drive me from Queens, no less, up here to the Bronx for a visit to my husband in the veterans hospital. And she has never once complained about the inconvenience. Can you imagine? And just think, before she was born I tried to abort her.”

  Alice and I stared at each other, text messaging “What the fuck?” with our eyes. My mother, who had hundreds of secrets we weren’t old enough to be told, had revealed to a complete stranger (because he wore white) a mind-boggling secret, stated so casually that if the two of us weren’t standing there, witness to what the other heard, we might not have believed our ears.

  I shook my head at Alice and glared. The glare meant: “Do not, under any circumstances, respond. We will talk about this the second we escape from this maniac.”

  Her confession to the man in white explained a lot. Family photos from childhood documenting day trips, outings, family vacations were a puzzle to my sisters and me. There would be the three of us in drugstore-developed snapshots: caught in Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, up in Wappinger Falls at a two-week summer bungalow rental. Pictures of the three siblings posing with my mother, my father, assorted animals, dogs, a horse, a goat. And my mother fastidiously labeled, on the bottom of each picture or on the back, the subjects of the photograph. Repeatedly you might read, Jules, Mimi, Ma, Dad, goat, dog, horse, but year after year, picture after picture, the name seldom inscribed—the name ab
orted—was Alice’s.

  But it was not that simple. My mother loved Alice. When she was an infant, my mother dubbed her “Lovey” because of her cuddly adorableness. She paid her as much attention and related as many anecdotes about her as she did about Mimi and me. She boasted about her gift for affection, her love for children, her babysitting skills at ten and eleven, boasted later about her daughter the college graduate, the social worker, the history teacher. “Can you imagine? How does she keep so much in her head? Doesn’t it give you a headache, Alice, all that thinking?”

  At those times when she remembered her, she was proud of her youngest child. She doted to the extent she could (which was hardly at all) on Alice’s sons, Bruce and Glenn. The adult Alice was someone she took pride in, a successful teacher and mother, the only one of her children who was a college graduate; this Alice was a recognizable and certifiable entity. But the child Alice, named after Lewis Carroll’s immortal creation, stared out at us from early photographs with nothing for a mother to show off about. She was not a cartoonist like her big brother or a talented writer like her bigger sister. This may have left my mother nonplussed, challenged as to what to do with a child without artistic talent. What do you say about such an Alice? Not that much. Maybe it’s better to disappear her down a rabbit hole.

  Because she was the child my mother overlooked, Alice grew up the least neurotic, married Hal, a musician and social worker from the other side of Stratford Avenue, the 1100 block, across the trolley tracks. They moved to East Meadow, Long Island, and then into a beautiful large home in Huntington. Alice taught American history for twenty years in the Island Trees district under the sway of a McCarthyite superintendent of schools whom my sister agitated against as a union activist.