Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  There is at least one bright light in this otherwise dark and brutal story of how the Nazis slaughtered the Jews of Zarasai. A Holocaust record housed at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mentions a Karolka Mikutovistsch who tried unsuccessfully to save a Jewish family by hiding them in his house. That must have been the same Karolka who befriended Al and Harry when he was their landlord.

  “After the war my father suggested that I try to find out what happened to my mother. I remember not wanting to. What if she survived? What if we found her? What if we brought her here? What would we do with her? I didn’t want to look at the sad part. I was married. I had children and a home. I had left her a long time ago, and I didn’t want her back in my life. I didn’t want the madness. Once I came back to America I expunged her. She had no place in my world. I was only twelve when I did that.

  “Decades later, when I was working for MAD, I had a chance to return to Lithuania. Bill Gaines was planning a MAD trip to Russia and asked me if I’d like to take a side trip to Lithuania to visit Zarasai. I thought about it. Berke Lintup, Chaimke Musil, and Itzke Schmidt and their families had been murdered. Danke, I’d learned, had died in the Battle of Stalingrad. What am I going to see? I’m going to see Lithuanians living in the homes of my friends. Who am I going to talk to? The people who killed my friends and my mother? Karolka and his siblings would have died by then. I decided not to go.

  “I dreamed about my mother for the first time a couple of years ago. In my dream I am trying desperately to rescue her before it was too late. The only comfort I could get out of the dream was that they didn’t have the Jews to kick around anymore. That’s not terribly comforting either.

  “Sometimes I think I’m hard-hearted, as if I didn’t care what happened. But I did care. When the selection was made in the concentration camps, some people chose to go to the left, to stay and die with the people they loved. When the selection was made in Lithuania, I didn’t stay with my mother; I went to the right.”

  As a result of David’s rescue, all the Jaffees, except Mildred, were living under the same roof for the first time since 1933. “David took to America and everything American better than the rest of us. He became a fashion plate, an athlete, a typical, happy-go-lucky American teenager. It was as if David had never left America. Harry and I couldn’t figure out how the hell he had integrated so well.”

  It was Harry, not Al, who scored the first artistic success. While strolling down Madison Avenue, Harry paused in front of the display window of a print shop to admire models of antique boats and sailing ships. Among them was a painting of this new rage, the airplane, soon to be a massive tool of the looming war. He assessed the quality of the sky-blue paper on which the plane was painted. He noted that the artist must be French, since his signature ended with an acute accent. The price tag on the painting read five dollars. Harry carefully examined the glittering airplane set against a pale blue sky and thought to himself, “I can do that.” Then he sought out and found the same sky-blue, handmade paper, complete with French watermark.

  Harry signed his first airplane portrait “Jaffée.” The J was large and loopy. The rest of the signature was more modest in size and style, except for the French acute accent over the first e, which went shooting off like a comet into the blue.

  Harry’s first Jah-fey, taken on consignment, sold the next day for five dollars, big money in the Jaffee family. The store ordered more. Al took a portfolio of five of Harry’s airplanes to the art buyer at Macy’s. Tucked under his arm were a TWA Clipper, a B-17, a Vickers Vanguard, a Mariner B-26 Marauder, and a Curtiss Tomahawk. “The art buyer took one look and said, ‘I’ll take them all.’ She bought me out. Airplanes were in the air, so to speak.” Harry scored a similar success at Brentano’s and at Abercrombie and Fitch. He even picked up some private commissions from rich plane owners who wanted portraits of their Piper Cubs.

  Orders were pouring in faster than Harry could fill them. In response, the Jaffee boys set up an assembly line in the living room on Marcy Place. Unable to work comfortably in such cramped quarters, Harry found the family a two-bedroom apartment in a fifth-floor walk-up a few blocks away on Townsend Avenue. One of the bedrooms was an ample sixteen by ten feet. They moved the beds into the living room, brought the table and chairs in from the kitchen, and went to work. The room comfortably held five young men and their drawing boards. Harry, of course, did the original drawing. Bernard, who, like his younger brother, David, had no artistic talent, did the simplest part. Using translucent tracing sheets and carbon paper, Bernard transferred Harry’s drawing onto the blue paper. Then he’d pass the drawing along to Will Elder, who’d add the first color and hand it along to Joel Epstein, a Music and Art graduate, who’d fill in another color and pass the page over to David Gantz, also from Music and Art, who’d add the third color and give the nearly complete drawing to Al. Al would finish up with the fourth color and hand the drawing along to Harry, le vrai artiste, who would add the speed lines and other finishing touches that gave the plane its sparkling, aluminum, three-dimensional look. Even when they split the profits five ways, Al and his friends were making ten bucks a week. “We just kept churning these things out until we were overtaken by silkscreen.”

  The man who would ultimately put an end to the lucrative production line was Rudolf Lesch of Fine Arts, Inc., a national art-print distributor. His representative took one look at Harry’s plane paintings in Brentano’s and placed a huge order, so huge that the Jah-fey team, even working at Chaplinesque speed, could not keep pace with demand. That was when Lesch realized that he didn’t have to sell originals; he could do just as well—maybe better—selling prints. Harry would sign and number the prints and then sit back and collect royalties, two dollars for every five-dollar print. “Harry was ecstatic. He went out and bought a maple living room set for our new apartment, the kind with cushions and wooden arms. Today Harry’s planes sell for as much as eight thousand dollars on eBay.”

  After a year of trying to find himself in all the wrong places, Al began taking his portfolio around to comic-book publishers’ offices. The day he got an appointment with Will Eisner—best known at the time for his crime-fighting comic hero, The Spirit—Al arrived at the beginning of his cartoon career. Eisner flipped quickly through Al’s drawings but stopped when he got to Inferior Man, Al’s satiric response to the wildly popular Superman.

  “When you do satire, you have to have a jumping-off point. With Inferior Man I felt I was on solid ground.” Inferior Man, a.k.a. Courtney Fudd, was an accountant by day and an anti-superhero by night. His outfit included dingy underwear emblazoned with the letter I, garters to hold up his droopy socks, and, of course, a cape. He had no muscles and he didn’t fly—he flitted. “Inferior Man would prance around looking for crimes, but if the crime was more than he could handle, he would step into a phone booth, change into street clothes, and blend into the crowd.” Al, a self-confessed loser, claims a very personal relationship to Inferior Man. “When you have people who are oppressed, whether it’s Jews living in places where people don’t want them, like Jews in Zarasai, or slaves living for masters in Savannah, about the only amusement you have is to see your oppressor from a satirical point of view. You make fun of him. You make yourself feel superior by pretending to be them and exposing their excesses. Inferior Man is my alter ego.”

  Eisner rejected Al’s idea that Inferior Man should be an accountant with delusions of grandeur. Not surprisingly, Eisner, who was packaging Military Comics, preferred that Inferior Man be somebody with a lowly job in the army, a quartermaster, perhaps, who handed out uniforms. Since Will was paying ten dollars a week, and since the ingratiating pleaser in Al found it almost impossible to say no, Al tried to breathe life into Eisner’s idea. He failed, and by failing, found out that his learned passivity had its limits. Whenever he found himself in creative bondage, Al’s inner wild Indian, the kid who lit fires and stole fruit, rebelled. “I’m not comfortable having somebody tell me what to do. It�
��s not difficult to do a one-shot of somebody’s idea, but if that idea is not alive in you, how do you do the second shot? The worst bind I can find myself in is when somebody says, ‘Okay. Now I want your script to show fifteen dancing Cossacks over here, and I want girls, lots of girls, over there; now go ahead and write it.’”

  He found himself in a different kind of bind when he took a job penciling for cartoonist Chad Grothkopf. Grothkopf was drawing The Imp, which was written by the eighteen-year-old wunderkind of Timely Comics, Stan Lee. After several boring, underpaid, repetitive months of penciling The Imp, Al found the courage to quit. “I can’t do rote. I have to break away.” It took a while, but it finally dawned on Al that he was being exploited by Grothkopf. “Why couldn’t I go to Stan Lee directly?” It was a good move. From now on, in spite of his passive nature, and because of his impressive talents and Stan Lee’s imprimatur, opportunity would come to him.

  Stan Lee made short work of his first encounter with Al. “He picked up a script from his desk, tossed it at me, and said, ‘If you can do this, you can work for me.’” “This” was a dull script for a comic book about two bumbling cops called Squat Car Squad. Stan Lee tossed Al what he needed most, a chance to cut loose, draw comic figures, and express his nonconformist zaniness. Al inserted a caricature of himself into the story. There was Al, pratfalling SPLAT on the sidewalk. Then he pushed further. He blamed his own characters for ad-libbing the lines he’d written for them, and in turn, he let his characters blame him for not following Stan Lee’s direction. “It’s as if we were all alive—the cops, the artist, the editor—all of us. We could wander in and out of the panels at will, my will. Stan loved it, and I had a wonderful time. Stan never edited me. He never told me what to write.”

  Anthropomorphic animals were big in this, the Golden Age of Comics. Stan and Al brainstormed their way into a story line for a children’s comic about Silly Seal, an innocent living at the North Pole, and, after a few issues, gave him a companion, a porcine sophisticate named Ziggy Pig to keep Silly Seal from catastrophe. Given a free hand, Al seized the opportunity to indulge his penchant for engineering and mad inventions. Al had Silly Seal build a cannon out of ice that launched snowballs at enemy submarines.

  The war interrupted Al’s career at Timely Comics. “I was 1-A, prime meat.” Harry, who also volunteered, was designated 4-F for psychological reasons. The incurious Jaffee family already knew that Harry was “odd,” but they characteristically looked the other way. “We all denied that there was anything wrong with Harry.

  “I don’t have a clear picture of what Harry was doing while I was in the military—probably hanging out with his Village buddies who were similarly undraftable. The Jaffee airplane business was winding down, but Harry continued to get some royalties, so I guess that’s what he lived on.”

  Al’s father refused to see him off to war. “He said good-bye to me as I left the Townsend Avenue tenement. After he rescued me from Hitler in 1933, here I am, ten years later, heading off to who knows what. Perhaps my leaving brought back memories of his time as a prisoner of war. Perhaps he feared I might never come back.” Whatever the reason, it was Uncle Harry, the family’s surrogate father, who met Al at the Forty-second Street subway station to wish him well. “He gave me a Longines wristwatch, a coveted gift in those times. I wore it throughout the war.”

  Al, who figured he had a better chance of staying alive as a pilot, expressed his preference, took a cram course, and was sent to flight school at Maxwell Field, Alabama, where he developed a serious case of motion sickness. “We tried to throw everything we could at the Nazis, but they didn’t regard my parabolic vomit as an effective weapon.” He flunked flying, which he didn’t much mind. It was the fear of losing his new buddies that upset him. When Al entered psychoanalysis in the 1960s, his shrink would give this, his worst fear, an official name—separation anxiety.

  Grounded, Al was transferred to a replacement center in Greensboro, North Carolina. Up to his old ingratiating ways, Al was making friends and influencing people by drawing funny cartoons on the envelopes his new army buddies sent home to their families. Among others, Al befriended Melvyn Maybe, who, tentative in name only, had relatives in high places, and thought the army should take advantage of Al’s artistic talents. He recommended Al to his brother-in-law, Captain Grow at the Pentagon, who reassigned Al to the luxurious Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables, which had been converted into an army hospital.

  Grow and Maybe were Mormons from Salt Lake City. “They lit a warm fire in my heart for the Mormons. They may also have saved me from getting killed.” It was Al’s job to create and lead art-therapy programs for shell-shocked soldiers. One such program involved recruiting coeds from a nearby college to pose in bathing suits on the Biltmore’s golf course. “Once I stopped throwing up, the air force turned out to be a good thing.”

  After that idyllic stint, Captain Grow intervened again and sent Al to work at the Pentagon, where a Colonel Howard Rusk needed an artist to create and illustrate pamphlets for his convalescent rehabilitation program. Rusk asked Al to do a floor plan, a kind of flow chart, for what, in 1948, would be realized, much as Al designed it, as the Rusk Institute.

  Throughout his life thus far his name, Abraham, had brought him so much grief that little by little he had transformed himself into Al. He signed his work A. Alan Jaffee. His friends called him Al. “When jokes about Abie and Sadie and their efforts to get extra ration tickets started to go through the army ranks, I cringed. The jokes were created to feed upon the resentful soldiers who believed they were in this war because Roosevelt was trying to save the Jews from Hitler.” He learned from a fellow soldier named Lipton (né Lifschitz) that he could change his name for free at the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

  “What the hell. I’m tired of dodging my real name. And I wasn’t very crazy about it either—it didn’t sound very American, and professionally I thought it would be better to be an Al than an Abraham. So I filled out the forms and had my name changed. But they changed it all wrong—Alvin instead of Alan—and then they’d spelled Jaffee with one e instead of two. What had I gotten myself into? So I went back and had it changed again so that now I’m a two-l Allan and a two-e Jaffee.”

  Irony was working overtime when Al met Ruth Ahlquist, a WAC and California beauty queen who was obsessed with the idea that she must marry a Jewish man. Ruth had been raised a Christian but had recently learned that her mother’s side of the family was Jewish. Uneasy about her identity, she responded by determining to resolve her discomfort by declaring herself Jewish and by dating Jewish soldiers. Al, who had never had a serious girlfriend before, was dazzled by Ruth’s good looks. “They validated my masculinity. I could give up the notion that I was totally undesirable.” But there was more to their relationship than his Jewishness and her beauty. He also enjoyed her sweet, shy personality. For her part, Ruth liked the fact that Al was a big man on the Pentagon campus. “I was popular. I think she thought I was fun to be with.” They married while Al was working at the Pentagon, after knowing each other for less than a year. Both were twenty-four years old.

  It wasn’t until after they were married that Ruth would come to resent the fact that her shul-averse husband was not nearly Jewish enough. “She wanted me to join a temple. I wouldn’t give a penny to those fund-raisers,” said Al, sounding just like his father.

  In 1946, after serving for three and a half years in the military, Al went back to work for Stan Lee, this time as an artist-writer and later as an associate editor in charge of teenage and humor comic books at Timely. As associate editor, he was responsible for translating writers’ scripts—usually written with little regard to artistic layout—into a logical sequence, a process called storyboarding. Since Al was a writer, an artist, and a wannabe engineer, he rose to the challenge and loved the job almost as much as he loved the security of a good steady income.

  On weekends he would write the script for Super Rabbit, about a quasi-satirical, Nazi-fight
ing screwup cut from the same comic mold as Inferior Man, thereby augmenting his seventy-five-dollar-a-week salary by eighty dollars.

  In response to his new middle-class status, Al Jaffee, up-and-coming married man, enthusiastically embraced the conformist postwar suburban life. He bought a house in a development in Floral Park, Long Island, as near to the water as he could get, and fathered the requisite two children: Richard and, three years later, Debbie. He dug a garden in the backyard, installed a plastic swimming pool for his kids, finished his basement, maintained his lawn at regulation crew-cut height, and bought himself a golden Hudson convertible with red leather seats and “Envy me” written all over it. “Later, I traded the Hudson for a Buick Roadmaster that was only a half step down from a Cadillac. But I got all that out of my system when we moved to Babylon, Long Island—even closer to the water—except for a short affair with a Chris-Craft cruiser and a small sailboat.”