Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  “If you were to see some naked guy sitting on top of a mountain somewhere in India, with pins stuck into his body, how would you know whether the guy was nuts or religious? My mother was both.”

  Like many mothers living in America in the 1920s and beyond, Mildred Jaffee believed that castor oil was the dose of choice for growing children, but she believed it with a vengeance. “We had to get our daily castor oil. She would line up the three of us, Harry, Bernard, and me—not David, the baby. Bernard was only about one and a half, but he could stand, so he qualified. One day I said to her, ‘I’m never taking any more castor oil. You can kill me.’ The next time we were lined up, she turned out the lights and said, ‘If you don’t take your castor oil, you’re going to have to face the witch that’s in the closet.’”

  “There is no witch in the closet, and I’m not taking the castor oil,” Al shot back. But there was a witch in the closet. Al’s mother had gone to the maniacal trouble of fabricating a life-sized witch, dressed in black, wearing a hideous, snaggletoothed Halloween mask. “She opened the door and shined a light on the witch, and I took the castor oil.” The adult Al thinks of this incident as the original bathroom experience, the first of many scatological episodes that would influence his comic art to such a degree that he would become known as MAD’s “cocky-doody” artist. “There’s an awful lot of cocky-doody in my life, starting with my mother’s castor oil campaigns down the alimentary canal and ending in the outhouses of zarasai. It’s been sort of embarrassing until recently, when I read a glowing review of a new book about how the world is threatened by rising levels of excreta that make global warming innocuous by comparison. So maybe I was a visionary after all.”

  But for all her eccentricities, Mildred Jaffee was not the immigrant, stay-at-home babushka one might imagine—certainly not in Al’s eyes. “It seemed to me she was a normal mother. She had a treasured sealskin coat. She wore the fashionable chapeaus of the time. We did normal things in Savannah: we ate watermelon, salted peanuts, and Cracker Jacks. We bought ice cream from the ice-cream truck.” Al remembers going to the movies with his parents. “Everyone was crazy about Chaplin except me.” Al was frightened by Chaplin’s comic violence. When Charlie bopped someone over the head with his cane, a terrified Al yelled, “Get me out of here!” “I ruined all their movies.”

  “I knew there was humor in my mother. She was a wonderful storyteller. When she was in a good frame of mind, she could be very tender and affectionate, at least verbally. She would use English superlatives. ‘Oh, my dearest darlings, what have we done today?’” But he doesn’t remember hugs or kisses. “Having four children in six years will tax anyone.

  “She read to us. She taught us the Ten Commandments and lessons about right and wrong. She told us never to laugh at people who are crippled and to feel sorry for the poor.

  “She was smaller than my father, and trim. I thought she was beautiful. She was like a star. All the photos I have of her show her with her brunette hair falling down to her waist. Her hair was her glory. She braided it when she went out. Later, she sold her hair in zarasai to get money.”

  Al’s mother loved to sing. One might expect that Mildred Jaffee would soothe herself with liturgical melodies or folk songs from zarasai, but in fact her favorite was a popular, romantic American tune, “When I Get You Alone Tonight.”

  All of my life they told me I’m wrong,

  I thought they were right, but then you came along,

  I finally believe, and now I can see,

  I was right all along, and it brought you to me.

  “To this day, the melody runs through my mind,” says Al, “like Citizen Kane’s Rosebud.”

  Other than zarasai—and subsequently, and in short order, four sons—Mildred and Morris Jaffee seemed to have little in common, yet Al believes that his father was “madly in love” with his mother. He vividly recounts two fragments of memory. Al was about three years old, seated on the kitchen table, naked, drinking a glass of milk. His parents were talking and laughing. “I sensed that they were having a laugh about my genitals. It pleased me to see them both happy.” At another time, he caught a glimpse of his mother bent over the bathtub, scrubbing his father’s back. “I don’t remember much else about them being happy together.” Mostly what Al remembers is a house wracked by constant, loud arguing, in English, and mostly about religion.

  “My mother got my father to do what she wanted, and when he didn’t, he caught hell. Her mishegoss with religion was something he was not going to be able to penetrate or prevent. If he was going to have any kind of peace in the house, he would have to go along as much as he could. The reason I could be found wandering all over town might have been because I didn’t find it too pleasant being home.”

  If Morris Jaffee did everything he could to avoid conflict with his wife, Al seemed hell-bent on doing everything he could to invite it from his mother. As a child Al was, by his own description, an “adventurous troublemaker. I got attention by being mischievous. It was my way of being creative, of being noticed. I was the apple of my mother’s eye until the other kids started coming. Then I wondered, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ I figured nobody gave a damn what I did, so I went out and did crazy things.

  “I was having a great time being the terror of the neighborhood. I was out playing, making trouble for myself and others. I didn’t have a bike or skates. I was perfectly happy with a stick or a rock—anything I could lay my hands on. I was curious. I did all kinds of idiotic things like throwing various objects out of windows to see if they would bounce. I knocked out my front teeth trying to fly from the roof of my house to a neighboring palm tree.”

  The Jaffees lived in four different rented houses in Savannah. The move from the second house, on East Thirty-ninth Street, to the third, on the second floor of a two-family antebellum house on West Gaston Street, near Forsyth Park, was Al’s doing. “My mother was extremely modest. Once, when she was nursing one of my brothers in the bedroom, she posted me on guard duty at the head of the stairs with instructions not to let anybody in.” Al’s mother undoubtedly intended Al to protect her privacy by politely turning away any visitors, but when the landlord’s representative came to collect the rent, Al, ever the confrontational overachiever, told her, “You can’t see my mother. If you come up here, I’m going to kick you down the stairs.” In response, the landlord kicked out the Jaffees. “I was about five years old, still in my American tough-guy mode,” says Al. That would change the first day he set foot in zarasai.

  When Al was hardly more than a toddler in Savannah, his playtime frequently concluded with the wail of a siren. While walking in the park one day with Harry, Al spotted a pile of burning leaves. “Harry and I got into a discussion about whether or not the fire was hot. I don’t know what devilish impulse got into me, but I talked Harry into finding out by sticking his hand in the bonfire. That didn’t make me too popular at home.”

  He lit a fire in an abandoned store across from a fire station because he had promised his little friends they could see the fire engines come out. “So I got them all into the store and set a bunch of papers on fire. We all sat there with the fire and smoke billowing all around us, and of course the fire engines came out. My father got called at Blumenthal’s. He had to come home from work and contend with the neighbors. Something like that happened once or twice a week. I’m probably one of the reasons he eventually lost his job. If it wasn’t my mother calling him, making some unreasonable, hysterical demand, it was me.” In spite of his tenuous hold on his job, on Saturdays Morris Jaffee would give Al and Harry free run of Blumenthal’s third-floor toy department. “That must have been a big bone of contention with my mother. How she allowed us to go there on the Jewish Sabbath I don’t know. Maybe her excuse was that we were underaged for committing sins.” Morris would send James, the store’s handyman, to pick up Al and Harry and ride them back to Blumenthal’s on the handlebars of his bike. James wore a fedora hat. “In retrospect it seems i
mpossible that two little boys could ride on his handlebars at the same time, but we did.

  “My father would take us up to the toy department and leave us there. We ran amok. After we’d wrecked half the toys, we’d examine them and then go home and figure out how to make them even more interesting. Later, in Lithuania, we built toys out of scrap wood that dazzled all the shtetl kids.”

  Trips to Blumenthal’s sometimes meant a chance to see the man who pulled taffy. “He sat in the store window facing out onto the main street, churning and pulling, attracting passersby into the store. I remember my father bringing me there to watch him do his shtick. But as often as not, when I ran to the window, the taffy man wasn’t there. My father took the time to explain to me that the taffy man was very nice but that he was an alcoholic. That meant that he’d go on what my father called ‘binges,’ alternating two weeks of working with two weeks of drinking. Of course, he must have been profitable to the store in spite of the binges. Still, the fact that we were living in the uptight Bible Belt and that my father wasn’t judgmental, didn’t discriminate against this man or punish him in any way, and instead showed him generosity and understanding, impressed me. Of course, I wasn’t analyzing it then the way I am now, but I remember being filled with the warm, proud feeling that my father was good.

  His mother’s temperament was volatile and often punitive. “She didn’t take a belt or a stick to me, but she would smack me hard. My brother Harry says he couldn’t stand seeing how much she beat up on me, but I thought it was part of our relationship. She gave me instructions about what she wanted me to do, and I either disobeyed or got carried away by my fantasies and forgot. I did things wrong and she hit me. At the time it seemed like a reasonable quid pro quo. After all, she had a lot on her plate—four kids under the age of six. To keep this menagerie together would drive any woman crazy.

  “By contrast, Harry was obedient and demure. He was very needy—much more than I was. He would hug her around the knees. I’d sass her. I’d stick my tongue out at her, and she’d slap me across the face.”

  “I can’t control you,” she’d complain. “You’re a wild Indian.” It’s a title Al relishes to this day, because it confirms both his bona fides as a “bad boy” and his mother’s reluctant affection, and perhaps even respect, for his defiance.

  Al sees his cartoon career as beginning in Savannah, where he was drawing recognizable cartoon characters, while other five-year-olds could barely make stick figures. “Any white wall was fair game. It never occurred to me that anybody treasured white walls. I filled all the margins of books with my little cartoons, too. I remember getting a pretty sound beating for doing that to some of my mother’s religious books—Maggie and Jig-gs meets Genesis.

  “The creative impulse must have been in me all my life. Being destructive is being creative,” Al insists. “After all, geniuses create atomic bombs. Wanting to see how fire trucks come out of firehouses is, I think, a pretty creative impulse. When I get these crazy ideas now, I control them, but when I was a kid, I put them into practice.”

  Actually, Al doesn’t control them. He puts them into cartoons. He tries to be serious—he thinks of himself as a very serious person, a brooder, even—but he can never completely black out the animated antics of the bad kid who is perpetually acting out in his head. In fact, when he’s working in his studio, he’ll get up from his drawing table and act out the cartoon frame by frame. “If anybody ever saw me, they’d think I was crazy.” Long before the concept of the “inner child” was even a glimmer in pop psychology’s eye, Al Jaffee was in constant touch with his.

  For the first six years of his life, when Al was in Savannah, he could rely on his playful and indulgent father to provide him with affection, attention, and special treats. “Father was fun. He took me and Harry places. He was ‘old European’ in that he didn’t kiss us, but he picked us up and carried us and took us for walks in the park.” It was on one of these walks in Forsyth Park, amidst a profusion of pink azaleas, palm trees, and live oaks swagged in Spanish moss, that Al’s father took him to meet the man who would be Al’s first superhero, whom his father named “Fartman.” Hardly a high-concept character, Fartman was a fat, uninhibited man in a straw hat who sat on a bench near the gloriously ornate two-tiered fountain, a replica of the one in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and demonstrated to interested passersby how to fart at will. “He would challenge me to do it. Then he’d rip off another one. My father would laugh hysterically; my father was very loose about bodily functions. We’d go to the park often, and Fartman would perform.

  “My father was always taking us places. He once took us to an airfield where they had a barnstorming show. There was no fence, so you couldn’t charge admission, but they must have made a few bucks taking people up for rides. We wandered around, looking at the planes. My father had us both by the hand—maybe we were walking home—and we heard this roaring noise. My father looked back and there was a plane coming in to land. My father threw us both to the ground and lay down on top of us, with both arms around us. The plane came right over us and touched down a hundred feet away. We weren’t really in danger, but it was scary as hell. My father was more shaken up than anybody.”

  One of Al’s favorite destinations was an amusement park on the Isle of Hope on the Skidaway River, a seven-mile train ride from Savannah. “I thought it was one word, ‘Ilahope.’ My father took us on rides—nothing dangerous like the Loop-the-Loop, but I know we went on a merry-go-round. I remember my father standing next to me when I was on the horse and then next to Harry while I waited. It was a beautiful outing. There was plenty of popcorn and hot dogs. We wouldn’t let my father take us home until he got us a hot dog. He made us promise that we would not tell our mother what we had to eat, but I couldn’t control myself. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you I had a hot dog,’ I’d tell my mother. I covered all bases. My father used to curse me out for years afterward. ‘The minute we got home, you couldn’t wait to tell her you had a hot dog.’ He was feeding pig to her kosher children. I may have had some guilt about her eventually leaving my father; I don’t know.”

  Why did she do it? Al will try to answer that question for the rest of his life. “Taking four little kids back to Lithuania with no schedule for bringing them back to their home in America is cuckoo. But if you give her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she had some plausible reason for wanting to get away. First she got traumatized going to Savannah. Then she got traumatized having a baby every year and a half. In leaving Savannah, she was not only leaving a world she didn’t fit into, but maybe she was also escaping the projection of what her life was going to be like if she kept having babies. Ironically, my father was bitterly critical of his own father for the endless pregnancies that prematurely killed his beloved mother. I think there’s a tie there. The way things were going, perhaps my mother thought that would be her own fate.

  “If religion is anything, it’s expedient. You can’t have an abortion, you can’t use contraception, and you can’t deny your husband his conjugal rights—they’re probably all sins in the Bible. I can identify with her wanting to get away from constantly being pregnant. If I were that woman, I’d be in East Timor, or as far away from my husband as I could get.”

  At the end of every working day, Al could be found at the front door, waiting to greet his father with a big hug. Morris would bring the newspaper home and read the comics to Al and Harry. But the best day of Al’s week was Sunday; that was when a week’s worth of brief evenings with the funnies would crescendo into a full day of cartoon fun. First their dad would narrate the funnies, pointing to each panel of Bringing Up Father, or The Katzenjammer Kids, exploding the balloons above each cartoon character’s head into meaning and laughter. But what enthralled Al even more was his father’s ability to draw each character perfectly.

  Morris Jaffee had a small but spellbinding talent. He was not a creative artist, but he could make exact copies of almost anything. He seems to have passed his artist
ic talents to his two older sons and his specific aptitude for replication to Harry. “Harry was very bright and talented. Even as a little boy he could draw everything I could draw. Sprawled belly-down on the floor in the parlor with my father, drawing cartoons all day Sunday—you couldn’t beat that. My father would take a piece of paper and put it alongside one of the cartoon characters. He would lean forward and meticulously copy them all—Maggie, Jiggs, and Boob McNutt. I was mesmerized, absolutely mesmerized. The magic of cartooning was overwhelming to me. I fell in love. It was magic. It was absolute magic. I drove my father crazy, asking him to draw those characters over and over again.

  “My father copied all the cartoons with a massive orange Parker fountain pen. You could get a hernia lifting it. It’s still being sold today as a classic. He must have gotten it as a gift from Mr. Blumen-thal, the way a big executive or a rich bar mitzvah kid would get a Rolex today. It was the Rolls-Royce of writing instruments.” Al would plead with his father—“Let me make magic with it”—but his father constantly put him off. “No, no. When you’re older.” “And I’d plead some more. ‘Why can’t I try it now? I want to make pictures like you’re making.’ He kept pushing me away with one excuse after another. ‘You’re too young for such a delicate instrument. There’s ink in it. The ink will run out. Someday you’ll inherit it.’ But I never gave up. I pestered him to death about it.”