Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  I feared (I said) that if the lord chamberlain deprived us of shit, he would deprive the audience of the signal that would allow them to understand the play correctly. The cultural decay that Alfred’s taking pictures of shit signified might be mistaken for a healthy critique of society, which was the last thing I wanted to suggest. Take away shit, I said to the lord chamberlain, and you take the audience down the wrong path, from which it might never return.

  As Jeremy and I left the lord chamberlain’s headquarters, he looked at me in consternation. “Jules, have I completely misunderstood your play?”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. “Jeremy, it was an improvisation! I made the whole thing up!” I had convinced Jeremy. He shook his head, puzzled and a little pleased. “I didn’t think we had a chance when we went in there. Now I think it’s fifty-fifty.”

  We lost. However, they did allow us to substitute dog crap for shit, a word I found infinitely more vulgar. But that’s the English for you—no ear for language.

  The success of the play in Britain reawakened the innate snobbery of American producers. Since Little Murders had come up with an English seal of approval, it might be worth taking a second look at it in New York. Ted Mann and Paul Libin ran the Circle in the Square, then located on Bleecker Street, downtown in the Village. They presented the play to Alan Arkin to direct. Alan said he was interested. Since we had met as near neighbors in Brooklyn Heights, I had come to know and admire Alan as a Second City performer. He was smart, intuitive, and very funny, and with his cabaret experience I thought he was the right choice to bring the play back. It was what I had been waiting for. It had taken a year and a half, and now Little Murders was coming back to New York.

  I decided that the play would be best served if I had nothing to do with the production. I had made so many mistakes with the Broadway version—the wrong producer, the wrong director, some inept casting, and stupefyingly wrong cuts and script changes. It was very clear that my best bet to save my play in its off-Broadway revival was to stay away from it. In addition, however tough and defiant the stance I maintained in public, I knew I could not take a second failure. If I allowed myself to get too involved with Alan’s production and that too failed, it would break my heart. I doubted if I had the bravado to come back to the theater after that. I instructed Ted Mann to tell the director: “You can cast anyone you like, do anything you like. And under no circumstances do I want to be consulted.”

  Alan didn’t consult me. And I thought his casting was way off. Linda Lavin, who was too short and entirely the wrong look, was cast as Patsy; Elizabeth Wilson, who was to be Marjorie, the mother, was too tall, not at all like my mother; Vincent Gardenia, whom Alan cast as the father, Carol, didn’t remind me of my father in looks or demeanor. He was clearly miscast. Fortunately for me, I understood that I was miscast as playwright in regard to choosing actors for the show. Everyone Alan cast, including Jon Korkes as Kenny, the brother, and Andrew Duncan as Lieutenant Practice, was fresh, funny, and exhilaratingly good.

  Village Voice, December 29, 1966

  RIOT

  Alan’s production of Little Murders went on in the spring of 1969. It followed the upheaval of 1968: student strikes and demonstrations, police repression and violence, the march on the Pentagon and countless other marches, student occupations of college and university buildings, police riots in Chicago brought on by the Democratic Convention, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy … The lesson hammered home in 1968 was that we were living in another country.

  I was at the Democratic Convention as a Eugene McCarthy delegate, but the spirit and momentum of McCarthy’s antiwar campaign had palled considerably. Inside the convention hall, hanging around caucuses in order to affirm or oppose motions made pointless by the action in the streets, I found the rituals demoralizing. Much of my time was spent in the streets with the protesters, meeting and greeting friends and strangers, an amiable, high-spirited mob on its way to getting gassed and assaulted. Late afternoons I hung out in the Hilton Hotel bar, a favorite convention drinking spot, with Chicago legend Studs Terkel, his journalist friend Jim Cameron of the London Evening Standard, and Bill Styron. We drank martinis in the bar, which faced out on Michigan Avenue with a picture window of CinemaScope dimension that provided us a view of the police in the process of committing mayhem. Pissed off by the rebellious long-haired, druggy kids who had taken over their turf, the police began to section off marchers, corralling them into an increasingly narrow perimeter butting up against the Hilton’s picture window, the very one we were staring out of with martinis in hand. With the protesters boxed in, the police began pounding them with nightsticks, all of this witnessed by us from the vantage point of our bar stools.

  Within moments, there was no longer a picture window for us to stare out of. The demonstrators had been beaten against, and then through, the plate glass. They lay sprawled on the floor inside the bar, cops bent over them continuing to work them over with nightsticks. Finally they were dragged through shards of glass back into the streets to be arrested. Delegates and media looked down at the violence everywhere at our feet. So stunned by the brutality, so sickened by the injustice, so helpless to do anything about it in this purportedly free society, what was left to do but finish our drinks.

  I took my outrage out on Hefner. I was staying at the Playboy Mansion during the convention. Every night after the bloodletting, there was a party. Delegates, politicians, media, and celebrities recovered among the Playmates. Hef didn’t have the vaguest clue what was happening on the streets. After the Hilton bar assault, I angrily insisted that he leave the house, which he was loath to do, and see what was really going on, as opposed to what he was watching on his closed-circuit color TV. I guilt-tripped him into letting me lead a delegation—Hef and friends—out into Lincoln Park, where even now, hours after the police assaults, the scent of tear gas was still strong. I wanted the editor and publisher of Playboy to see our shame firsthand.

  By the time we were out on the streets, the day’s violence had ended; everything looked calm, quiet, unthreatening. This adventure might even turn out to be fun. There were about ten or twelve of us, including Hef’s resident guru, the columnist and historian Max Lerner. The rest of us were either Democratic Party honchos from various delegations or a mix of media types, including Art Buchwald, the humorist. We were taking a shortcut through an alley when suddenly both ends were blocked by police cars with flashing lights. We couldn’t go forward, we couldn’t go back. The cops herded us in, apparently unmoved by the fact that we weren’t longhaired hippies. Hefner tried to explain who he was: Hef! Chicago’s own! A local boy who made good; whose magazine they kept stashed in their police lockers. But these were Mayor Daley’s thugs in Mayor Daley’s town in the worst of times in the 1960s. Hef was shoved against a wall by a police officer who then slapped him hard on the butt with his nightstick. A historic butt thwack: the sound of Hugh Hefner being radicalized.

  I don’t claim that I am the man responsible for radicalizing Hefner. That distinction belongs to an unidentified Chicago policeman. But I can and do boast that I was responsible for getting him out of the house. One thing may not have led to the other, but the next move Hef made was to a more reclusive gated and electronically protected mansion in Holmby Hills, California. No Chicago cops in California.

  My candidate for president, Gene McCarthy, did not behave well in Chicago. He displayed little interest in his young supporters who were getting pounded by Daley’s cops in Lincoln and Grant parks. Walking through Lincoln Park one afternoon, I ran into Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, star movement revolutionaries who were instrumental in conceiving, planning, and organizing the protests. Jerry, who was hairy and diminutive and boyishly cute, proudly showed off his security to me as if this were proof that he was a true VIP. “This is Phil, my bodyguard. He’s a Hell’s Angel.” Phil was twice the size of both of us, a hirsute biker in leather boots, menacing in size and demeanor.

  Jerry gri
nned from ear to ear, proud to have a bodyguard. One day you’re a nobody demonstrating for the legalization of drugs and against the war in Vietnam, and the next day the revolution has recognized your prominence and assigned you protection. America!

  A year and a half later, when I was back in Chicago doing a book of drawings at the conspiracy trial of Jerry and Abbie, Dave Dellinger, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, John Froines, and Lee Weiner, whom should I see up on the witness stand, testifying for the prosecution? Jerry Rubin’s bodyguard, Phil, clean-shaven, wearing a blue suit and tie. He was testifying against Jerry. He was an undercover cop. America!

  MY CANDIDATE

  Gene McCarthy, whose worst and most revealing moments came during the Chicago convention, had had his best and quirkiest moment three months earlier in an Oregon hotel room where I happened to be a day before that state’s presidential primary.

  I had flown off the Vineyard with Bill Styron at the behest of the McCarthy campaign to make speeches in Salem and Portland. After McCarthy’s final rally, at which Robert Lowell and Styron and I spoke, we were invited back, with Jason Epstein, to McCarthy’s hotel suite. Drinks were handed out, and the antiwar candidate and the antiwar poet sat around for over an hour genially trying to stump each other with the opening and closing lines of poems.

  Lowell, with his robust good looks and flowing white hair, had a demeanor that was casual, intense, and intimate. He was nearly as tall as McCarthy, and far more charismatic. Cal, as his friends called him, loved to drink, talk, and conversationally quote poetry. In a mesmerizing gesture, he would extend his arm to full length, hand out, palm up, and, as if it was an offering, recite obscure lines to McCarthy, who, diffidently, without missing a beat, finished the poem. McCarthy then tossed his own four or five lines back, which Cal completed. An amiable exhibition, not unlike a tennis match, with two pros at the top of their game thoroughly enjoying themselves but much too aristocratic to let it show.

  A little after midnight the phone rang. An aide to McCarthy announced, “Scotty Reston’s downstairs. He wants to come up and interview you.” Now, James Reston was the star columnist of the New York Times, an opinion maker, a consensus builder. A friendly column from Reston might take McCarthy’s campaign several giant steps down the road. The important California primary against Bobby Kennedy was only a month away.

  McCarthy reflected for only a moment, and then, as Cal and the rest of us stared in wonder at our serenely remote antiwar candidate, he said with an air of dismissal, “Oh, just tell him I’m asleep.” Then he returned to the more serious contest with Lowell.

  Jules and Gene, 1968

  THE COMEBACK KID

  In its first incarnation, admirers described Little Murders as “prescient,” meaning that I had dramatized what was not yet clear to most of my audience—notably theater critics.

  The respected reviewer of the Boston Globe was hardly alone when he said that he couldn’t make sense of the play or figure out what point it was making (if, indeed, it had a point) or recognize the world it was describing. It certainly wasn’t any world the Boston critics recognized.

  That was in March of 1967. By 1969, the world of Little Murders was too recognizable. After the King and Kennedy assassinations and the attempt on George Wallace’s life, after one escalation after another in Vietnam, after Kent State, after the blowing up of college campuses, after thousands demonstrated in the streets, after the rapid trajectory of the Left from explosion to implosion, the point of my play was self-evident—and Alan Arkin’s production at the Circle in the Square was ready to take off.

  Arkin had done with the play what it needed all along, but only after he had shown me did I understand. I had assumed that the style of the piece was rooted essentially in the conventions of sketch comedy, such as Second City’s.

  That was how it played in London, and it went well. But Alan staged it as all-out, over-the-top farce, with many improvisational moments that took me by surprise. No lines were changed or altered but he added actions and reactions, bits of improvised business and familiar family banality that slipped back and forth between competitiveness and chaos. Arkin informed the audience that what it was watching was an entirely credible family seen through a distorted lens. Eye exchanges, interactions, a half turn this way or that—viewers sat there astonished. They were watching their own families, and what they were seeing was insanity. A wildly exaggerated but true, oh so true drama.

  And the truth staged farcically allowed the audience to stay with the play as the comedy darkened. Violence erupted offstage, then on, Patsy shot to death and the Newquist family descending into urban paranoia. At play’s end, our antihero, Alfred, surrenders nihilism for cool. He is in tune with his times: a happier, more idealistic mass murderer.

  The style Arkin found permitted the audience to go with the play without recoiling from what it said. It connected its events to our specific moment in history, but the grim realities were viewed through an ironic prism that allowed audiences to feel the thrill of truth diluted with that other thrill, of pure theatrical invention. Alan’s staging skillfully whistled us past the graveyard of sixties America.

  As the play took off, so did I. At dawn the next day, having been informed by my producers that the early reviews looked good, before seeing a copy of the New York Times, I fled with Judy and three-year-old Kate on a flight to Jamaica. I was out to make the point that commercial success in the theater was less important to me than a tropical holiday with family and friends.

  John and Sue Marquand had rented a rather large beach house on a spit of land in the Caribbean called Salt Cay. The Styrons and Bob and Norma Brustein and their son, Danny, were already down there. On our arrival, I announced that I was there to have a good time and had no interest in how things were going in New York. I would learn all I needed to know in good time, but I had no intention of becoming a hostage to my notices from the theater critics. I was not going to invest the power to affect my thoughts or emotions in the sort of people I wouldn’t have to my house for dinner.

  I was surprised and pleased to see—as if it were some kind of omen—that on our bedroom wall hung a beautiful original editorial cartoon in color. It was drawn by the early-twentieth-century Chicago Tribune cartoonist John McCutcheon. McCutcheon was one of the most famous cartoonists of his time, a prairie conservative glorifying the rural values that had begun to fade even in his time. Politically, we couldn’t have differed more. But I felt a kinship to that cartoon on our wall.

  Whatever fate befell my play at the Circle in the Square, I would remain, first and foremost, a cartoonist. I had no desire to use theater to upgrade me from status-free cartoonist to lofty playwright. Since the early success of the Voice strip, I had periodically found myself cornered by literary types at Plimpton and Tynan parties who would start, “I love that thing you do, that column—”

  “My comic strip?”

  “No, no! It’s not at all a comic strip, it’s so much more.”

  “It’s a cartoon.”

  “No, no, no! It’s an essay, it’s a little play, that’s what it is, it’s a play on paper!”

  Intellectuals could not admit that the work they attached significance to was a mere comic strip. It was degrading for them to admire a work in so unserious a form. So to permit themselves to appreciate me, they social-worked me into a profession they respected: hence, I was redefined into playwright.

  So, okay, I wrote a real play. To me, it had different rules and different rhythms and developed in an entirely different way from my strip. But two years earlier, when Little Murders had its original opening on Broadway, one of the complaints from almost every critic was: “This isn’t a play, it’s a Feiffer cartoon!” Writing a flop play was how I came to be validated as a cartoonist. That’s not what I had in mind.

  No one flatters you when they refer to you as a cartoonist, even a great cartoonist. An ordinary screenwriter occupies a higher status than a great cartoonist. Illustrators, who aren’t exp
ected to come up with their own ideas, enjoy a higher status. I know too many colleagues who are flattered, who are pleased when they are labeled illustrators instead of cartoonists. I’m offended. I know what it means. It means that I’m not good enough.

  I once chaired an evening of cartoonists at the Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the panel with me were Lee Lorenz, at the time the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, and George Booth and Ed Koren, two of the best New Yorker cartoonists of that time. Along with them on the panel were David Levine and Edward Sorel, the two most trenchant political caricaturists of the late twentieth century. All of us were more than happy to be labeled cartoonists.

  But our audience of fans wasn’t all that happy. These were people who loved our work or they wouldn’t have been there. But their comments, every now and again, reeked of doubts about our legitimacy. Toward the end of the evening, a woman in the balcony asked, “You men are all so gifted at what you do, have you ever thought of expanding into something more profound? Like directing film?”

  I laughed, an instinctive reaction that has plagued me my entire life: Things I can’t stand I react to as if I find them funny. I said, “Here in a nutshell is the cartoonists’ curse. Even our fans condescend to us.”

  McCutcheon’s picture on the wall at Salt Cay provided comfort for a day or two. John and Sue and our other friends were good company—the Marquands always were. I loved to track the meandering Marquand mind as he told a story or made an observation. He never ended up where you thought he was going, but wherever he went it was worth the trip. And no better drinking companion existed than Styron in the right mood.