LOS ANGELES — If you ask Jules Feiffer how he likes L.A., he will launch into a story about the time he spent 90 minutes driving around in traffic, becoming so lost and frustrated that he fled back to New York, thus forfeiting a substantial paycheck by abandoning the job he had come out here to do. Feiffer, it seems, actually lives in the world of his own cartoons.
The iconic cartoonist ventured out here again recently, however, to appear in conversation with Carl Reiner for Andrea Grossman’s Writers Bloc. The two men were not long-time friends, but their obvious respect and affection for each other’s work gave a warm and hilarious fillip to the evening’s discussion. The focus was on Feiffer’s newly published memoir, Backing Into Forward, in which he tells the very personal story of how he became the neurotic voice of a generation.
Two days before his Writers Bloc appearance I had the opportunity to interview him and ask him about some of the incidents in the book. He had arrived in L.A. earlier that day, but his energy level belied his 81 years as we sat in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton and he sipped Glenlivet on the rocks.
He has always worried, he said, about things “almost all of which never happened.” But his career, especially in Hollywood, had more than its share of ups and downs. “I never did anything for the money,” he contends, “and I had my standards. Standards here are the bottom line.” He did, however, write a number of TV pilots: “the usual crap that writers do, half of which I’m proud of,” he says. “I dumbed them down—but not enough!”
Producers, he says, “were always great fans. They loved everything I suggested. Then I would flesh it out and they loved it even more. Then I would write the script and they would say, ‘No, this isn’t what we had in mind,’ and their notes would have nothing to do with what we had talked about.
“Some people just weren’t meant to work together,” he adds. “I could never work with somebody else’s vision.”
One man he did work with, though, was Mike Nichols, whose initial comedy routines with partner Elaine May gave Feiffer heart. “They let me know that I wasn’t alone. They were saying what I was drawing!” he says. Later, when he sent Nichols a play script, Nichols told him it wasn’t a play, but a movie, and offered to direct it if Feiffer would adapt it as a screenplay. “I told him I’d have to think it over,” Feiffer says, “and it took me nearly 30 seconds to agree.”
Feiffer and Nichols moved into David O. Selznick’s house to work on the film that became the classic Carnal Knowledge. “We had a ball,” Feiffer says, “but Hollywood hated the film and I didn’t get another offer for 10 years.”
That next offer came from Bob Evans, who wanted Feiffer to do a screenplay for Popeye, with Dustin Hoffman playing the spinach-eating sailor. “Evans was a joy to work with,” Feiffer says, but then Hoffman decided he wanted a script that was more Beckett-like and Kafkaesque—not the script that Feiffer had created at all. “Evans stuck with me,” Feiffer says, and they gave the role to “that new kid from Mork and Mindy—Robin Williams.”
Feiffer has always written about and drawn the people he knows. Like his mother, who is every Jewish mother in his plays and cartoons. And he readily identifies the whimsical dancing woman of his most angst-ridden cartoons as “a cross-dressed version of me.” A woman, he says, who typified Greenwich Village in the ‘50s, she was “sweet and desperate, full of pretension, full of hope, and full of shit.” And then, of course, there was his Aunt Alva, a woman who “hated men so much that she glued down her toilet seat!”
Another relative, a cousin, was the opportunistic lawyer Roy Cohn, who served as the right-hand hatchet man of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the infamous trials conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early ‘50s. “Those trials affected me very strongly,” Feiffer says. “They were like hits in the solar plexus; they destroyed a whole generation.”
He recalls one time when he was writing a political play and he wanted to include a “smoke-filled back room” scene. He wanted to make sure his dialogue would be authentic, so he went to Cousin Roy, then a power broker in the New York Democratic Party, for some advice. “Roy gave me a long, involved Civics lesson,” Feiffer says, “but what he was actually telling me was to go f—k myself. He was certainly affable about it, though.”
Feiffer enjoys the fact that he has been friends with some of the major creative thinkers of his time: Bellow, Malamud, Roth, et al. He says when he got out of the Army in 1953 it was “in” to be Jewish. “It was just in the air,” he says. In his memoir, however, he acknowledges that familiar feeling of being a “fraud” as a young man, primarily because of his lack of a college education. “It has to do with being young and immature,” he says now. “All of us struggle with that, and when we have a success we feel lucky, as if we got away with something. It takes time to recognize that you are who you are, and you’re not a fraud!”
In 1956 the Village Voice began to publish his cartoons, and he stayed with that paper for the next 42 years—even getting paid after a while. At the same time he was venting his political and social outrage in plays such as Little Murders and earning a 1961Academy Award for his animated short, Munro, about a 4-year old who is drafted into the Army.
Which led to his children’s books (beginning with his illustrations for Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth) and his gigs as an adjunct professor at Stony Brook Southampton, and at the Yale School of Drama, Northwestern University, Arizona State, and Dartmouth. “I’ve always been against teaching,” he says. “I find it condescending, supercilious, and unhelpful.
“But my books are helpful because I’ve set out not to be helpful.
And with my cartoons I look for the ones I loved as a kid and I only steal from the old masters.”
Fortunately, nobody can steal from Feiffer. He is most definitely one of a kind.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World