Presently she is reminisced about on Web sites set up by former students as the teacher who meant the most to them and understood and addressed their problems when no one else bothered to try. Mrs. Korman. Thirty and forty years later, they chat online about my baby sister.
A good thing my mother let her live.
Lovey, 1939
MIMI
Mimi’s death was her triumph. Her final act, an embracing love-filled, bedridden departure before an awestruck family. We were free at last to be with her without having our heads handed to us. She stage-managed her death as she never could her life, telling stories and jokes, exuding cheer. The innate personal magnetism, free now of the explosive temper that, on too many occasions, drove us away. Her death was orchestrated by her as performance art: death as a healer, death as love, death as victory over oneself.
Not only was all forgiven, all was transforming and transcendent. Over the months when her emphysema (which had disabled her for years) reached its final stages, becoming what might, for others, be a death watch, under Mimi’s direction it turned into a show. A tribute to the extraordinary courage that evolved out of rebellion, Stalinism, bad behavior, self-destruction, booze, cigarettes, drugs … In the memorable words of Don Marquis’s Mehitabel the cat, “Wotthehell, wotthehell, there’s a dance in the old dame yet!”
At the end, Mimi rose to heights she never managed during a life that tricked her out of most everything she considered her due. She had never made an effort to work in journalism or to fulfill her earliest ambition and write fiction. She never became a teacher, though she could have become one (and been beloved like Alice); she didn’t exploit her ample gifts or extraordinary charm to mark out a career that would have rewarded her, in reality, with the power and influence she imagined for herself. “I should have run for mayor!” she regularly announced, often drunk and under the influence.
Her life was bravado without backbone, her death was courage without grief, a refusal of grief, a celebration of herself as she most wanted to be: the center of attention, an example to us all.
Her doctor took me aside moments after her death: “Your sister was an inspiration to me.”
I write this twenty-one years after her death. Mimi died at sixty-two, and I am now eighty. She was my older sister. Imagine.
Mimi, 1942
VOICELESS
The Voice had changed. By 1998, it was more of a lifestyle paper, not a writer’s paper. It had drifted into a smug and nasty pop-funk-gay-crypto-counterculture paper. Its old-guard politicos, Nat Hentoff (the Rabbi) and Wayne Barrett (the Muckraker), were, as ever, holding up their end. But the paper resisted reading, certainly from my generation of Voice readers, and, in fact, I knew few people who referred to it or admitted to reading it. Including me.
“You’re still great,” I’d be assured by friends and others who hadn’t read me in five years.
The Voice had been sold and resold and, along the way, traded in its soul for attitude. I had wanted out for some years now, but the question was, Where would I go? Who would have me? Where would my living come from?
After my first eight years on the paper without making a dime, I had gone into Dan Wolf’s office and demanded that he start paying me. The Voice had begun paying some of its contributors about a year earlier, but not me. Nonetheless, Dan looked at me astonished. My request clearly made no sense to him. “But you’re a mandarin!” he told me. It was my opinion that mandarins shouldn’t be penalized. As a mandarin, I should get paid like everyone else.
Pay me they did. Grudgingly. And over the years, with the raises that were built into collective bargaining contracts negotiated with District 65, the Voice’s union, I became, out of longevity, the Voice’s highest-paid contributor. For one cartoon a week, I was making $75,000 a year. It wasn’t irrational to wonder what other newspaper would offer that kind of money.
As I was aging, the Voice was youthening up. I understood that and had been concerned for some time that they might consider getting rid of me. So I had begun to do some looking around. I would have switched if I could have found someone who wanted me for the money the Voice was paying. My friend Pete Hamill was now the editor of the Daily News. Pete said the News would love to hire me but they couldn’t afford what the Voice paid. Newsday said the same thing. So did the New York Observer.
With my friends Judith Goldman and Davis Weinstock I talked over the idea of publishing my own subscription-driven biweekly four-page broadsheet, an overambitious endeavor for a man approaching seventy. I would expand into new features, serial strips, caricature, reportage, essays. It would quadruple the work I now did. The idea was pure fantasy, the production figures far too daunting. While I found the Voice in its present incarnation an embarrassment, I could find no other publication interested enough in my cartoon to pay me $75,000 a year.
So I stuck around for Don Forst, the Voice’s new editor, the latest in a string of new editors, to call and take me to lunch. Always a bad sign. Forst was an old newspaper hand, a former editor of Newsday, a wry, charming, and agreeable fellow. Forst had been brought in to cut costs. I was one of the costs he and publisher David Schneiderman had decided to cut.
But in the act of firing me Forst came on as my fan. “We love your cartoon, I want to keep you in the paper, but I can hire two reporters for the money I’ll save cutting you off staff. I’d like to buy you in syndication, and that way you can go on appearing.”
It took me over an hour to process my way through Forst’s fawning and flattery, then to realize that the deal he was offering was a 75 percent pay cut. This charming fellow had made me an offer I was meant to refuse.
I was sixty-nine, with a wife and two children to support. Eight years earlier I had fired myself from the theater. Elliot Loves, a play about relationships and the near-impossible struggle that two attractive and likable people must go through to not give up on each other, was, I thought, my best play. But it was brutally panned by the critics and ran less than a month. It was a Mike Nichols production, beautifully staged (Mike at the top of his game), so it was one of the few times that the reviews came as a shock. The feedback had been incredible. Preview audiences at the Promenade, a wonderful theater just a block from my apartment, were talking Hit, Hit, Hit!
John Guare, who had his own play in previews at Lincoln Center, came to a preview and between acts sought me out to rave. The cast was led by three remarkable young actors who, in a few years, everyone would know: Christine Baranski, Oliver Platt, and David Hyde Pierce. I felt sorry for my friend John. I knew that the critics were unlikely to approve of two plays opening within a week of each other. Bad critical form. They were honor bound to destroy one, just to keep their hands in. From the reactions we were getting on Elliot Loves, it seemed certain to be poor John’s play, Six Degrees of Separation, that would suffer.
As I write this nineteen years later, Six Degrees is still running somewhere, everywhere, and Elliot Loves, a play that night after night thrilled me as I stood in the back of the house, has vanished into ignominy and shame. It took me ten years to get over it. Actually, I got past it, not over it.
Following the death blows by Frank Rich and company, I swore I was through with theater. I would no longer indulge myself as a pro bono playwright. I had mouths to feed. I had pride to feed. Never again!
The children’s books started coming out as my alternative to theater. For the next decade new picture books and novels were published every twelve to eighteen months. I surprised myself by backing into this new obsession, so full of unexpected rewards. The books made money! (I never made money in theater.) They were well reviewed! (’Nuff said.) Critics liked them, readers liked them, I loved writing and drawing them! No suffering, no anguish, no rejection. How can one call this an art form?
The very nature of this new work released a playfulness, a silliness in approach that I had never tried out on my audiences before. Silliness and playfulness are not the way you write and draw about civil rights and Vietn
am and the duplicity of our leaders. They were a side of myself that readers of my cartoons and books had seldom seen. Theatergoers could point to only two of my plays, The White House Murder Case and Knock Knock, as examples of unrestrained wackiness. But wackiness was now to be my job description.
For more than thirty years, I had labored, on and off, to overthrow the government. And in ways I had never intended, liberal government had been overthrown. And what we got instead was considerably worse. And seemingly popular. It was time to reappraise my agenda, if not my politics, to put politics behind me, switch sights, and opt for a little fun.
The Voice strips still gave me pleasure but after forty years were little more than a weekly twitch. A couple or three days before deadline, I had to come up with an idea, stop whatever else I was doing, and start scrambling. My professional life, for as long as I can remember, has maintained itself as a system of avoidances. Whatever I am supposed to be doing, I write or draw something else. I finish or run out of patience on the work at hand, so I segue into career choice number two or three. After exhausting my patience with two and/or three, I begin the cycle all over again. Eventually, in no particular order, everything I am obliged to do is finished.
It took me a full day to acknowledge the anger and resentment that came in the aftermath of my lunch with Don Forst. The editor of the Voice had been so amiable, so convivial, so admiring, that getting fired seemed like a secondary byproduct of an otherwise good time. I felt almost caddish when I called him the next day and asked for a settlement. I had in my forty-two years at the Voice brought more attention to the paper than any other contributor. I had received more honors than any other contributor—Pulitzer, a George Polk award, the Newspaper Guild Page One award—so many awards but no settlement. I asked that my health coverage be extended for ten years (hoping to settle for five). I was given six months, until the end of the year.
Nor did it matter what else I asked. By the end of a couple of phone calls (none with publisher Schneiderman, whom I had thought of as a friend; no contact at all), it had become clear that mine was a no-fault dismissal. For Voice management, the sooner that I was disappeared, the better.
I called my friend David Halberstam and gave him the news. David, whose outrage was something to witness as long as you were not on the receiving end, called Joe Lelyveld, then the executive editor of the Times. Lelyveld assigned a reporter and the next day, page 1 of the Metro section ran a feature story about my dismissal. It was not the objective reporting that the New York Times is noted for. In the story, I was presented as Jimmy Stewart; the Voice was Satan. At Halberstam’s further suggestion, the Times commissioned me to draw a cartoon on my firing. This, too, was not objective: in this case, I was Bob Cratchit, the Voice was Scrooge.
My friend David made two other calls, one to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, whom he got to put me on as a contributing editor at $2,500 a month. The other call was to Howell Raines, then editorial page editor of the Times.
The next day Howell Raines called me in for a chat. We met in his office surrounded by framed front pages of the New York Times from the past hundred years: the Titanic sinking, World War I declared, the stock market collapse in 1929, Pearl Harbor, the A-bomb … rather impressive, but none of them about me.
Howell’s approach was leisurely, dry, and deferential. It was couched in the courtly good manners natural to his Southern upbringing—mild condescension masked by outrageous flattery. Fine with me. Don Forst’s flattery was a mask for hostility and contempt. I preferred Howell’s way of handling me. “I know that we may not be what you’re used to or go as far as you might like, but if you’re willing to take a chance on us, we’d like you to contribute a page of op-art to the Times on a regular basis, say once a month, for a fee of one thousand dollars whether we print it or not.”
Not to be believed! Four days after the Voice fired me, the New York Times was offering to put me on staff as its one and only resident cartoonist.
Years earlier, when I was a boy, the Times ran an innocuous and deliberately forgettable Sunday strip in the Week in Review section. But never, not ever, had they put a cartoonist on a par with their op-ed columnists. I was being offered unprecedented freedom in a newspaper that, for all its history, was too haughty to run comic strips, so much so that my father, at the height of my early success, enjoyed putting me in my place by saying, “I won’t believe you’re really famous until they print you in the New York Times.” That remark had become family lore. Alice, remembering my father’s barbed jest, choked up when I told her my news.
I was reborn. The Times ran me at a third of a page, then a half page. In the following year they ran me in two columns down the entire length of a page. This was exposure to die for! And I was being talked about again, responded to as I had not been since my early years at the Voice.
Within three months I had made back the $75,000 a year that I had lost with the Village Voice. In addition to my work for the New York Times and Vanity Fair, I was appointed at $35,000 to a Senior Fellowship at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program. It was headed by my friend Michael Janeway, former editor of the Boston Globe, and later dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. My duties for the semester were to meet twice a week with students of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and instruct them in the business of fame and failure.
I was pitied, I was a victim, I was in clover. Had Schneiderman and Forst offered me a reasonable settlement and continued my health care for five years, it would have effectively ended my career. By behaving like jerks, they gave me a new lease on life: new offers, new self-confidence. Who could have dreamed that by the simple act of being themselves, they would so profoundly bless my life.
Roger Rosenblatt called. Roger was an old friend who did everything in journalism and did it with extraordinary flair and grace. Later, he would go on to write satiric and hilarious plays and, in his spare time, two hysterically funny novels. In typical Roger manner, wherein he acts gruff, thus thinking that no one will take him for a softy, he said, “I only want to know one thing. What’s your health insurance situation?”
“At the end of the year, I don’t have any,” I told him.
“Now you do,” said Roger. “I’m starting an MFA writing program at Southampton College and you’re going to teach out here.”
I was grateful. I was confused. “Teach what?”
“Anything you want,” snapped Roger.
“How often?”
“Once a week. We can thrash out the details later. Will you stop bothering me?”
“When do I start?”
“Anytime you want to start. Why are you asking me these idiotic questions?”
“This year?”
“This year, next year, any year you like,” Roger said.
“What about the insurance?”
“As soon as you say yes, the insurance starts.”
“Even if I don’t teach for a year?”
“Yes,” Roger said.
“Roger,” I said. “You know I didn’t go to college.”
“Obviously you’re overqualified.” He sounded as if his patience was wearing thin. I didn’t want him mad at me. I said yes.
THE PROFESSOR OF I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS BUT LET’S FIND OUT
Roger’s offer to teach at Southampton College (now Stony Brook Southampton) backed me into one of the joys of my working life. My class is called “Humor and Truth.” During the spring semester I teach every Wednesday for three hours. I jitney out to Southampton, reading or rereading student papers, making notes, and deciding, on the basis of what I’ve read in their papers or that morning’s New York Times, the theme of the class for that day.
The class is extempore, driven purely by instinct. As much as I try to prepare a day or two before, the class doesn’t begin to take shape until I take the walk from the Times Square subway station to Fortieth Street and Third Avenue, where I pick up the jitney for the hour-an
d-three-quarter bus ride to Southampton. By the time the bus arrives, I have plotted my context, an overview from which most of my comments will derive.
The students are local, but they have been everywhere and done everything: from bartending to massage therapy to teaching preschool to litigating lawsuits to copyediting at the New York Times to writing sports for Newsday to, God help me, modern dance.
The size of the class has varied over the years, from as many as seventeen students to as few as ten. For my get-acquainted assignment, I ask them to write 1,500 to 2,000 words (they always write longer) in the first person on an injustice done to them. They are to write the story lightly, in a humorous mode. Then they are to go at it a second time, also in the first person, but this go-round it will be a table-pounding rant.
The second assignment, a week later, is to revisit the same event but in the voice and from the perspective of the other party, justifying with humor and rant that position.
I see it as my job, week after week, to throw them curveballs, to force them to write in voices that don’t come naturally or easily. I encourage them to try what they don’t know how to do, take risks, and not worry. And definitely not to think of writing pieces to please the professor. Playing it safe is the only way to go wrong. Each semester I start off with this statement: “My class is un-American. I give you license to fail.”
They have license, as well, to speak openly in class, commenting on one another’s papers, one another’s comments, my comments. Often (sadly, too often) my students will pick up on things I’ve missed. In too many ways, they can be more astute than the professor who thought he had figured everything out on the jitney.
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