But I was miserable. I was living a lie. I was not indifferent to my fate in New York. I thought by this time someone would have called to read me my reviews. But there was no telephone service on our little island.
I invented an excuse to go to the mainland. The women thought that was a great idea—they could shop. I had no interest in shopping. I wanted a long-distance phone line. But by now it was the weekend. I found my phone line but no one was around to take my calls. No one to tell me if I was a hit.
I had worked myself into a parody of my own self-righteousness. Too above the battle to care about reviews? Fine. Years will pass before I find out.
After three technically glorious, fun-filled days at Salt Cay, every minute of which was mired in anxiety and frustration, I said good-bye to my wife and child and dear friends. I flew back to New York to read what Clive Barnes in the New York Times had to say.
Village Voice, November 14, 1976
PRO BONO PLAYWRIGHT
Little Murders was a hit. The critics got it. They loved the production, they loved—but not uncritically—the play. They responded positively enough to give us a two-year run down at the Circle, to give me a steady, not great, but not measly royalty for a two-year period, the one and only time I have made money out of the theater.
This, my first flop play, became a hit. All my other flop plays remained flops. Knock Knock started out as a hit, then it moved from off-Broadway to Broadway and into the flop category. The White House Murder Case was a hit, rave reviews for this political satire on cover-ups in the Oval Office in regard to a future war in Brazil. Then Nixon and Kissinger started a real war in Cambodia and my imagination seemed too close to reality. Overnight, audiences shunned us, and White House closed in a month.
Grown Ups got great reviews, but it was about an acrimonious Jewish family that didn’t kiss and make up in the end. Audiences in the eighties—and Jews made up much of the Broadway audience in the eighties—didn’t mind a fighting Jewish family, but they needed a happy resolution. Otherwise, it came too uncomfortably close to their own lives. But in Grown Ups, matters only got worse. The play closed after a short run. I realized, too late, that I should have made it about an Irish family or, perhaps, set it in Cape Town, not on the Upper West Side. I might have had a hit.
Elliot Loves got incredible reactions from preview audiences, but guess what? The critics, most notably Frank Rich of the New York Times, he who had raved about Grown Ups, hated it. It closed in a month.
Rightly or wrongly, I was convinced that there was an audience for my plays. They were very good plays, but ticket prices prevented audiences from going to the theater without the prior approval of critics. I had no doubt that if there had been comic strip critics back in the fifties, I would have been drummed out of the Village Voice in a couple of weeks. I was convinced that if Carnal Knowledge, the play, had been done by Mike Nichols on Broadway and it was every bit as good as the film, it would have been panned. And would have closed immediately. I was convinced that I had a following. What I didn’t have was a theater-critic following. Worn out by rejection and stymied as to how to get to audiences without the approval of critics, I swore off playwriting. I had aged out of the rage that used to fuel my defiance. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted approval. I wanted love.
So I showed them. I quit the theater forever. Forever lasted ten years. But in the meantime, I backed into children’s books.
Jules at fifty
© John Olson
THE JEWISH MOTHER CABAL
I anger Jewish mothers by the way I talk about my mother. I have read chapters of this memoir to JCC (Jewish Community Center) audiences here and there, and the Jewish mothers in my audience, almost all a generation or more younger than I, say that I’m wrong about my mother, that I misrepresent her.
They say this with absolute conviction about a woman they have never met. “She couldn’t have been as bad as you claim,” they say. “Look how you turned out. Did you turn out so bad?”
Now, the section I read to these JCC groups is from the early part of this book, the part where I come home from school and find that my mother has given away my dog, Rex. Without telling me. And these women are unaffected by that—no, I’m wrong, they’re not unaffected. They take my mother’s side. “She must have had her reasons,” they tell me.
Remember, this is a woman they have never met. Me, they have met. But of the two of us, when it comes time to choose up sides, to identify with one of us or the other, they decide for this total stranger, dead many years, when an hour earlier I was saying hello to them, shaking hands, sharing a glass of wine with some of them, pretending to be personable.
And none of it counted. Their first loyalty was to the Jewish Mother Cabal. If you think cabal is too strong a word, call it what you will: a sorority, a club, a conspiracy that spans centuries, secretive, communicating with nods, grimaces, shrugs, heightened stares that speak volumes, and, of course, tightly pursed lips, that dagger in the heart.
They do good, this cabal. They take pride in doing good, and so does that other group with which they have so much in common, the Masons. But they also wield influence far beyond their number, again like the Masons. And when one of them is criticized, turned into a figure of ridicule or, worse, contempt, they go on the offensive. They attack.
Because if I am allowed to talk about my mother with such disrespect, what ghastly door does that open for their children to kick down? What will they, having been swayed by my bad example, confess about their mothers? Ungrateful wretches! Someday they’ll find out. Someday they’ll be sorry.
“You will never know the sacrifices I made for you.” That is the line from which all opposition shrivels in shame.
My mother, who dies in this chapter, started out with so much talent, intellect, wit, charm, prettiness, vivacity, humor, grace … What could stop her? What did stop her? Others, millions of others, went through hard times and survived the Depression. But it crushed and embittered my mother. It implanted in her first the courage and fortitude to save our family and afterwards the rage and bitterness that ruined her life. I don’t know why. Was it that she could not recover from the humiliation of being the breadwinner when it was then understood by the Jewish girl in her, by the Southern girl in her, by the culture at large that this was supposed to be the man’s job?
And her reward? Her children mourned the father who let them down and scorned the mother who kept them afloat.
I said to Mimi once, over drinks at my apartment, “You know, we both think of ourselves as rebels, but we were really obedient children. Ma raised me to be a success and I am, and she raised you to be a failure and you are.”
Mimi threw her glass at me—and why not? Then, after screaming insults for a while, she went home. She called the next morning to say, “You know, I can’t get what you said out of my head, and I think you may be right.”
My mother was a strong woman who never sat still and never stopped complaining about her health. “My stomach, it gives me so much trouble, the doctors say it’s upside down. My head, too much thinking, I have to think all the time to come up with new designs. My temples press in on me, it feels like my head is being crushed.”
Walking on the street with her was pure torture. She was the slowest walker alive. I, who could barely swim, could swim faster than my mother walked. Her slow walk, I was convinced, was not the result of bad health, it was an exercise of control. By forcing me, a loping adolescent, to walk at a snail’s pace, she was asserting who wore the pants in the family, although she never wore a pair of pants in her life.
Just about every action of hers seemed connected to establishing proof of her authority. She was a control freak whose control did her no good at all. She controlled nothing. Her children gave way to her to make her less unhappy (and in the hope of getting her to leave us alone), but behind her back we did exactly as we pleased. And she knew that we did.
Her authority was in name only; it was the image of authorit
y without substance. She was a micromanager who managed ineptly. She expected her authority to be either ignored or disobeyed. Acts of defiance by others made up her life. Endless letdowns, betrayals (as she saw them), weakness on the part of men who left her holding the bag.
After my father’s death, now in actual failing health, she lived in Queens alone, insisting, when she visited the city to see her grandchildren, on taking the subway. Over and over I offered to pay her cab fare. “A waste of good money,” she said, and then complained about the hardship of the hour-long subway ride, the dirt, the heat, the difficulty of getting up and down stairs.
And I would say, “Ma, take a cab next time. I can afford it.” To which she had one set response: “Spend the money on your family.”
She was disappointed over so much, bitter over so much: the dutiful but undevoted care she received from her children, the indifference bordering on disrespect from her grandchildren, who tried not to show (but they did show) that they dreaded her visits. She preferred them to line up like an army of little courtiers to pay her obeisance, to submit to her as she had submitted to her parents and grandparents. She related to Amy and Abby and Glenn and Bruce and my Kate through lectures and intimidation. She loved them, but she saw it as her job as grandmother to teach and advise, knowing that her own children were not up to the job. And that just added to her bitterness over the raw deal she had been handed in life.
She could get no respect. The older and sicker she got, the more unwanted she felt. And the more alienated. We took care of her without caring for her, and that made itself perfectly clear. It drove her inward and downward.
She was short of breath; she had been short of breath for years. “I can’t breathe—” she’d say. And sit herself down in the nearest chair and wait, we all waited, as she caught her breath. “My flushes—” Her flushes came upon her regularly, most often in response to disagreement, when she wasn’t getting her way. Her flushes prevented her from breathing. We sat watching her as she waited out her flushes. Our breathing was affected by her not breathing. When hers resumed, our breathing went back to normal. Our emotions dangled from hers, as if on a string.
Her shortness of breath became more and more serious. She was hospitalized. Booth Memorial Hospital in Queens. We talked about what was to be done with her when she got out of the hospital. My mother could no longer take care of herself. She could not go back to her apartment and live alone. Someone had to live with her. Someone had to be there to take care of her.
Mimi and Alice and I discussed the situation, out of concern not for my mother’s needs but for ours. None of us wanted to take her in. None of us wanted the responsibility, to have to deal with the care that would not be enough, the tending to her that would be met with reproach, the effort at keeping her alive that would undo our families.
My mother, in good health or bad, was in charge of the temperature in the room. None of us could tolerate the idea of her in control of our households, of our helplessly standing by as she raised or lowered the temperature. We picked out a nursing home. On the day that I was getting ready to move her, the message came that she had died.
It was her breath. I believe she was driven to hold it. “I’ll show you, I’ll hold my breath till I die.” She did show us. “I’ll die and then you’ll be sorry!” She died. We weren’t sorry.
The news of her death came through a voice mail on my answering machine. It was a doctor with an Indian accent. He gave his name on the machine and then said, “I am sorry to inform you that your mother, Rhoda Feiffer, is deceased. Will you please call me to inform me what to do with the remains.” And then, on the machine, he left a referral telephone number. Dignity, which was so important to her, eluded her to the end.
It was a hard life that she never stopped making everyone pay for. But when we were kids she sang show tunes and danced comic dances. And on the subway downtown to sell her sketches, she observed everything around her, made notes on a pad of paper, and wrote comic verse that commented on her home life:
I’m sittin’ here wishin’
The electrician would stop drilling the walls and would leave, The rain of plaster
Is like a disaster, I tremor in each sleeve.
If only it weren’t
That we needed strong current
The house would be tidy and quiet, But now we’re upset
And the end is not yet
On his own home
The landlord should try it.
NO SENSE OF DIRECTION; OR, HOW TO GET FROM CARNAL KNOWLEDGE TO BARK, GEORGE
My life as a father began in middle age (thirty-five) with Kate, Judy’s daughter, succeeded twenty years later by Halley (I was fifty-five), and, ten years later, Julie. By then I was sixty-five and married for over a decade to Jenny, the second and final Mrs. Feiffer.
Throughout my attenuated production of daughters, I (and they) got into the habit of expecting Dad to tell them bedtime stories. Julie, being the last, was the toughest, not willing to accept your run-of-the-mill Red Riding Hood or your Three Pigs and Bears. Julie appointed me her Scheherazade. Three hundred or so nights a year, my assignment was to make up a story for Julie (repeats were not acceptable). So every night I had to mint her a new story. She slept in her bedroom in a two-tier bunk bed, and since she took the top, I stretched out on the lower bunk to tell my story. One night without a clue as to what I was getting into (I never had a clue), I began: “George’s mother said, ‘Bark, George.’ George was a dog, but George went, ‘Meow.’ ‘No, George,’ said George’s mother. ‘Cats go meow. Dogs go arf.’”
Word for word, as it appears in the published text, I made up the story. As I ad-libbed Bark, George (or as it ad-libbed itself), the thought struck, “Oh, my God! This is a book!”
But I faced a dilemma. My bedtime stories for Julie not only put her to sleep, they put me to sleep. Seconds after I finished telling a story, I dozed off, sometimes before Julie. When I awoke, always twenty minutes later, I had no memory of the story I had just told. Nor did Julie. We were bedtime story amnesiacs. So it was clear to me that Bark, George would never see itself between covers if I allowed myself to fall asleep after I finished telling it.
As soon as I came out with the last line of the story, with George’s surprise word to his mother (see book), I forced myself, groggily, out of Julie’s lower bunk, already halfway into my stupor. I staggered to my studio next door. Semicomatose, I scribbled down a half page of notes and prayed that they were legible, and in a language I could recognize, and would make sense when I awoke from my nap. After writing down a short list of key words and phrases, “Mother,” “Meow,” “Quack,” “Oink,” “Moo,” “Vet,” “Hello!” I staggered back to the lower bunk in Julie’s room. I collapsed. Twenty minutes later when I awoke, I didn’t remember a word. But I had my notes, I had my book, published a year later, the most successful thus far of my ten books for children.
I started writing children’s books only because I was mad at Ed Sorel. Ed is the brilliant and celebrated cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, muralist, writer, bon vivant, and grouch-about-town. He and David Levine are the cartoonists I admire and envy most in this world. If I could draw like anyone else, I would draw like Ed.
Ed had an idea for a children’s book. He had been writing and drawing his own for some years now, but this one he wanted to illustrate, not write. He asked me if I would write it for him. I loved the idea he told me, I loved the idea of working with Ed; as far as I could see, this combination was a natural, a no-brainer. Ed’s idea was about a kid living in the Bronx in the early 1940s, ten years old and on his way on the subway to a violin lesson. The kid gets off at the wrong stop and discovers—remarkably—that he is not in the Bronx anymore but in a Hollywood black-and-white version of Manhattan. In fact, in Movie City, that other glittering, glamorous Gotham, where Depression kids like Ed and me liked to imagine ourselves in residence.
Ed was after a story that gave him reason to draw lavish old-time-metropolis
movie sites and landscapes, formidable movie palaces that we entered with a veneration we never gave to synagogues. He was dying to draw the interior of Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx, the Roxy, Radio City Music Hall … architectural dreamscapes that merged Versailles with the Taj Mahal. He was dying to caricature the great old stars whose names still made our pulses beat faster.
Fifty years later it was still possible to summon pure and radiant memories of giant silver screens in darkened theaters, to feel the excitement and contentment of Movie World taking over, the ultimate romantic vision for kids like Ed and me, before sex changed everything and brought us down to earth faster than a speeding bullet.
The magic pull of movies started when I was about five and, as I write this, I am eighty and I’m no less in its thrall. When Mike Nichols was shooting my screenplay for Carnal Knowledge in Vancouver in the fall of 1969, I found myself in a constant state of dithery wonder. A one-line description in a script transformed into a college campus. Amherst College. (In Vancouver!) Snow falling on a mild day in mid-October. Jonathan and Sandy, my two heroes, were trekking outdoors through made-for-movies snowdrifts, breathing actual white clouds of vapor in the manufactured atmosphere, a bare nine months after I wrote, “Exterior Amherst Campus. Jonathan and Sandy on their way to class in the snow.” I stood behind the camera witnessing, with the kind of pleasure you cannot believe, fake snow falling. I made it happen! I wrote one sentence in a script, and without that sentence, no snow. This very adult, dark, and controversial movie inspired in me, as I watched the cameras roll, a magical, childlike glee.
Carnal Knowledge came into existence as a play, written at Yaddo at the same time that Philip Roth was in residence working on Portnoy’s Complaint. When my first draft was finished, I sent it to Mike Nichols. The next morning he called. “I want to do it. But I don’t think it’s a play. It’s a movie.”
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