Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  “Why is it,” the teacher asked, “that when I get a really gifted student he quits?”

  “You mean I’m gifted?” Al replied, always the last to know anything good about himself.

  Although it was his goal to be well liked, Al failed to appreciate the fact that he had achieved the popularity he sought. Harvey Kurtzman looked up to Al. “Al was the BMOC. I used to worship him from afar.” Harvey’s opinion is borne out by the couplet that accompanies Al’s 1940 yearbook photo.

  We like his art, his music, sport, et cetera,

  In fact, there’s nobody M & A likes bettera.

  Music and Art was strictly devoted to the fine arts and frowned upon cartooning and satiric art. Nevertheless, Al found an outlet in doodling for his not-so-fine artistic urges. While studying Charles Dickens in Miss Hollander’s English literature class, Al couldn’t resist doodling an avaricious Tiny Tim tucking into an entire turkey. “To doodle or not to doodle” was not the question when the class studied Hamlet. Al drew Laertes staggering around, blood gushing from his gut, declaiming, “Forsooth! Is this a dagger that I see inside me?”

  “Miss Hollander always waited until the end of the class, and then she’d march right over to my chair and confiscate my doodling. ‘How dare you do this while the class is going on? Don’t you ever let me see you doing that again.’ Of course I paid no attention to her. I kept on doodling, and she kept on confiscating. The day that I graduated she presented me with a loose-leaf album that contained about sixty of my doodles. ‘This is a collector’s item. Someday this is going to be worth a fortune, and that’ll teach you not to draw in my class.’”

  Miss Riley, Al’s art teacher in his sophomore year, was another fan. In fact, she had far more confidence in Al than he had in himself. She was amazed by his talent for composition. She’d make a point of looking over his shoulder while he indulged in his favorite subject, the mob scene. “I just want to see where you start,” she’d say. “Go ahead. Start.”

  Al’s Borscht Belt crowd scene, circa 1939.

  “So I’d put the pencil down in one place, and I’d start. And she’d say, ‘I’ll come back later to see what you’ve done.’ I had fallen in love with Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, which all took place in China, and I stole plenty from him. I filled the paper with about three hundred Chinese people. By the time Miss Riley came back, I had completed an entire street scene in what I thought might be Shanghai. Rickshaws were going hither and yon; people in pointy hats from the movie The Good Earth were bustling about all over the place. The signs on the ramshackle tumble of Chinese stores were meaningless; they might have been in Yiddish for all I know.”

  Miss Riley was stunned. “It’s hard to believe. How can you know you’ll end up with a viable composition if you start in the middle of nowhere?”

  Al didn’t know how to answer the question. He just knew he could, but he didn’t know how he could. “I can see it,” he told Miss Riley. “I may not see all the detail, but I know what’s going to flow out wherever I start. All I have to do is draw it in.” What, after all, he wondered, was the big deal? The “big deal,” according to Miss Riley, was that not many people could do it.

  “Oh, Al, you’re so blasé,” said Miss Riley.

  “Thank you, Miss Riley,” Al replied.

  “Now I had to find out what blasé meant.” Al headed off in the direction of the French department to ask Miss Judels, who told him the word meant “world-weary.”

  That winter, Morris, still a substitute mail carrier, suddenly lost the use of his legs. He was taken to the Veterans Hospital, where the diagnosis was hysterical paralysis.

  During the two weeks that Morris spent in the hospital regaining his mobility, Al traveled by trolley to visit him, a journey that would have a serendipitous effect on his career as a cartoonist. As the trolley rattled along, Al’s attention was drawn to the advertisements for a bug spray called Flit. Unlike the public ads Al was used to seeing, these were cartoon ads drawn by Theodor Seuss Geisel, who would later become famous as Dr. Seuss, the writer and illustrator of children’s books. Each ad bore the caption: “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” “I loved those cartoons. They strengthened my resolve to be a cartoonist. For some reason I thought that the Sunday funnies were all sewn up, but these ads made me realize that there were other areas for cartooning. To be on a trolley car and see this ad with a cartoon lent a new legitimacy to the kind of work I might do someday.”

  After the paralysis incident, Morris made one last attempt to lift himself and his family out of abject poverty, from substitute letter carrier to permanent mail sorter. In order to do so he had to pass a test demonstrating how quickly he could throw so many letters into so many cubbies without making any mistakes. He sent away for a cardboard box with cubbyholes that Al helped him assemble. Al would write addresses from his father’s Grand Central Terminal territory on cards and place the cards in a pile at his father’s right hand. Then his father would draw from the pile and throw the cards as fast as he could into the appropriate cubbies—a section of Madison Avenue into one slot, a section of Lexington into another. “My father practiced every waking moment throwing these cards into the practice bin while I timed him. It was pretty boring for me, but I knew it was important to him. He was elated when he was finally accurate and fast enough to make clerk. Still, he could never shake the feeling that life was hopeless.”

  Even as a regular with an eight-hour workday, the post office turned out to be difficult and degrading for Morris. He had to work three different shifts. Al used to watch him get dressed at midnight to go out into a snowstorm to spend eight hours throwing letters into boxes. This man, his father, who had once ruled Blumenthal’s department store in his glory days in Savannah, had to be accompanied to the bathroom by the foreman to make sure he wasn’t taking a cigarette break.

  “When I’d ask my father if he wanted to do something entertaining, like go to the movies, he’d say, ‘Movies? Is a movie going to buy you a piece of bread?’ He was so depressed I was surprised he could function. He was sure that there was no way out of the post office for him, and that none of us were going to amount to anything, that we were all destined to be the poor slobs that we are. I don’t fault him for his attitude, but at the same time, he failed to transmit any optimism to me. He got so little out of life that these piddling things didn’t mean anything to him. As a consequence, they didn’t mean anything to me, either. My father didn’t even come to my graduation. My Uncle Harry and Aunt Pauline did. I couldn’t believe it when my Uncle Harry once said to me, ‘You know, your father’s very proud of you. Every time he visits when you’re not with him, he raves about all that you and your brother Harry are accomplishing.’”

  Al and Willie cutting up in the High School of Music and Art cafeteria.

  Wild Willie Elder was the perfect antidote to morbid Morris. He and Al were the class cutups. “I was a physical comedian,” Will Elder said. “Al was more mental. We made a great pair. We worked off each other. Al gave sophistication to my zaniness.”

  Willie was the master of the spontaneous. “Will and I would be walking toward the subway, about to descend the stairs, along with a lot of other people. Just when we’d get to the top step, Willie would all of a sudden turn to me and say, All right now, Al, here’s the way you do it. You put one foot—that’s it, pick up your foot—good, good—and then you put it down on the next step—that’s it, good, very good—and then you bring the other foot over.’ He would walk me down the stairs like I was a moron.”

  Will pulled the same kind of stunt at the Horn & Hardart cafeteria. “We’d put our dollar down, and the cashier would slide us twenty nickels. We’d head toward the wall with the glass windows, usually to get a piece of pie. One time, without any warning, Willie goes into his shtick. ‘All right, Al. Take the nickel—see—this is a nickel—Al—listen to me—take the nickel and you put it in the little slot—that’s it—Don’t rush it! Don’t rush it!—and then you turn the handle—go
od, good—and then you get your pie.’ And all the while Willie is slapping me on the face to make sure I’m paying attention.”

  Al and Willie’s work dominated the bulletin boards at the annual art shows. Al, in particular, was an artist for all seasons. “I loved doing everything and I did everything well. I wasn’t the best oil painter, but I was good; there’s always somebody better than you in one thing—but I did pastel, oil, woodcuts, puppetry, everything.

  “The first time I heard the name Harvey Kurtzman was when someone came up to me and said, ‘Watch out, Jaffee. There’s a young kid that just came in who did a drawing that’ll amaze you. It’s on a bulletin board near the gym.’ I went and looked, and I was very, very impressed. It was a drawing of the class boat ride. Now, I was known for mob scenes. I’d even done one of the class boat ride, and here I was looking at another guy who kind of did what I was doing—his was more artsy and mine was more earthy—but he was good, very good. I knew he had a great talent.”

  Kurtzman and Jaffee held each other in mutual esteem. Harvey saw Al as “a natural-born satirist and humorist and a good storyteller. I always had the feeling I was nothing alongside of Al. I was in awe of him.”

  Because Al and Will Elder were well-known seniors and Kurtzman a mere freshman, their friendship was limited to the school lunchroom, where it didn’t take long for the three boys to recognize their shared talent for clowning around. Al remembers Harvey as “a shy boy who absorbed everything,” but every once in a while, Harvey would join in the fun, spoofing the films and comic-book stories of the day.

  When he was a small child Harvey had written and illustrated papers filled with news and jokes and distributed them to his friends and neighbors. By the time he entered high school, Harvey knew that he wanted to produce humor magazines. At Music and Art he was already on the lookout for artists who could further his dream.

  Years after their graduation from high school, when Harvey and Al drifted together again at Timely Comics, Harvey told Al that “when he saw Willie’s and my work at Music and Art he determined that someday he was going to create a humorous magazine and include us in it.” But Harvey’s high school dream would not be realized until fifteen years later when he edited the first issue of MAD magazine.

  5

  THE RISE OF INFERIOR MAN

  “I very often see myself as a ridiculous person.”

  NO ONE HAD EVER ASKED AL what he wanted to be or do, and as a consequence, he had almost ceased to want. For the next few years, Al would play an essentially passive, reactive role in the progress of his own career as he went from job to job, moved by the vagaries of chance and the interventions of others. He had been at everybody’s mercy for his entire life, taken, always against his will, from Savannah to Zarasai to Far Rockaway, back again to Zarasai, then on to Kaunas, South Fallsburg, Woodbourne, and finally to the tenements of the Bronx, the move that Al believes crushed his spirit.

  “I rarely did anything to advance myself in my career. It’s like the story of my life. Just one thing after another would happen to me. I was amiable, nonthreatening, and funny, and people gravitated toward me. I was a ‘go with the flow’ guy. I’m not a pioneer. I respond to someone who says, ‘Here’s what we do.’” Al likes to say he was only following the aphorism he invented at the time to apply to his own reluctance to seize control of his life: To ensure success, aim low.

  “I’m not aggressive. There’s this old joke about the guy who walks up to a girl and says, ‘Do you want to go to bed with me?’ and she slaps his face. Someone asks him, ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ and he says, ‘Well, I get my face slapped a lot, but I also go to bed a lot.’ Aggressiveness pays off. However, it’s not part of my character. I’m a wuss.

  “I have a built-in bullshit meter that I apply to myself as I do to others. I wasn’t going to bullshit myself into thinking I’m the greatest artist to come down the pike and that all I have to do is graduate from art school and go out and conquer the world. I very often see myself as a ridiculous person. I hear the expression ‘Don’t beat up on yourself,’ and I think to myself, ‘Why not? I’m handy. I do beat myself up.’

  “I never had the technical, sparkling skills that many people had. They wind up being recognized. When I went to school I was good at many things but not spectacular at any of them. I shot in all directions. There wasn’t one quality in me that was screaming, ‘Develop me!’ I was searching for something that would give me uniqueness. That’s what held me back.” That very same quality that Al so disparaged, his ability to do so much so well, to write as well as to draw, would eventually work to his advantage in the world of cartooning.

  In spite of his intransigence, Al’s teachers took the measure of his talent and were aggressive on his behalf. One of them persuaded him to take the entrance exam for Cooper Union; he got in and quit after a week. Without Al’s knowledge, another art teacher had submitted his portfolio to the Art Students League, which offered him a full scholarship. He left Cooper Union and turned down the scholarship partly because he realized he didn’t want to go to school anymore and partly because of the impending war. He saw no point in initiating anything—hardly Al’s specialty anyway—when he was probably about to be drafted. Undeterred, one of Al’s English teachers used her influence to get Al a series of short-lived, dead-end jobs designing Ex Libris cards and, when that enterprise failed, stenciling letters for advertising signs. He and Dave Gantz—who would later go on to create the cartoon strip Don Q.—developed a nonconfrontational cartoon character named Chiquillo inspired by Ferdinand the Bull. It went nowhere. Al hit bottom when, following up on a tip from one of Harry’s friends, he tried out for but failed to get a job assisting a superhero cartoonist who was going blind. “Apparently,” said the ever self-deprecating Al, “his eyesight was good enough to see no promise in my work.”

  While Al struggled to find his place in the world of cartooning, Morris Jaffee, deeply concerned about the Nazi threat and convinced that his wife would never leave Lithuania, was determined at least to save David. On August 23, 1939, just days before Germany entered Poland, the Russians signed the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which ultimately relegated Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence. In response to increasingly urgent appeals from her husband to return to the United States with David, Mildred wrote back, “I’ve lived with Russians before, I can live with them again.”

  No one knows for sure how or by whom David was saved. Israel David Jaffee (his given name), aged thirteen, is listed on the ship Westernland’s manifest, along with four adult American citizens. The Westernland departed Antwerp on April 13, 1940, went on to Southampton, England, left Southampton on April 17, and arrived at the Port of New York on April 25. David’s destination in the United States is listed as 38 Marcy Place, Bronx, NY.

  Morris’s brother Harry probably financed the trip. He might also have arranged the rescue, since it seems unlikely that a thirteen-year-old boy could have made his way alone from Zarasai to Antwerp, especially against what might be assumed were his mother’s wishes. One of the four other American citizens listed on the manifest, Joseph Walicky, age twenty-one, of Polish extraction, might have been his “kidnapper” and his escort. Walicky is now deceased, but his nephew, Krist Joseph Walicky, confirms that his uncle, an adventurer and a member of the merchant marine whose mission it was to assist travelers and matériel across the oceans, was living in Vilnius at the time of David’s rescue.

  While the most important aspects of David’s return elude verification, David did share some of the details of his escape with Al. “During the train trip to Antwerp, David yakked with German soldiers in Yiddish. They understood each other perfectly. The Nazis even shared their lunch with him. David had a great time with the Wehrmacht.” David also bragged about how delicious the food was on the Westernland. He retained the lavish menus, which he showed to Al. The culinary bounty that so delighted David might have had something to do with the fact that a group of chefs and waiters were aboard, on
their way to work at the Belgian pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which opened its second season that month.

  David rarely spoke about the seven years he spent, from 1933 to 1940, with his mother in Lithuania, except to say that they moved back to Zarasai, perhaps to settle her father’s estate. The formidable Chaim Gordon had passed away on December 9, 1933, at the age of seventy-two. David also reported that his mother made a living in Zarasai teaching English, no doubt to Jews trying to emmigrate to America. “I wish I had asked David what life was like for him and my mother during those seven years when the rest of us were in New York, but I never did. We’re a strange family. We’re not curious or communicative. My mother became a taboo subject.”

  Sixteen months after David was rescued, Mildred Jaffee was most likely murdered. There is no record of how individual Zarasai Jews met their deaths. Two fates are most likely. One possibility is that Mildred Jaffee was shot on June 26, 1941, by Lithuanian partisans who colluded enthusiastically with the Nazis against their Jewish neighbors by blocking all the roads that led out of town and shooting every fleeing Jew on the spot. The other is that she died in an aktion (a Nazi euphemism for “mass murder”) on August 26, 1941. Men and women, as well as children and the old and feeble from Zarasai and surrounding towns and villages were forced to march to the Daugutzi Forest where the aktion took place. A total of 2,569 Jews were shot that day. A Nazi with a Teutonic fondness for statistics must have stood by with a clipboard, recording each murder. His report reads: “767 Jews, 1,113 Jewesses, 1 Lithuanian Communist, 687 Jewish children, and 1 female Russian Communist.” It is likely that Mildred Gordon, who believed until the end that God would save her, was one of the 1,113 Jewesses. One woman, the mother of two children, had overheard two Lithuanian guards talking about how the Nazis were planning to kill all the Jews the next day. She, along with her children, managed to escape to Kaunas through the woods. They were shot later that year, however, in the “Great Aktion of October 28 and 29” in Kaunas, thus rendering the little town of Zarasai 100 percent Judenrein.