Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Still, you can’t take the shtetl out of the kid. “That first spring at Floral Park I went out and bought every packet of flowers and vegetables I could think of. I planted cucumbers against the back fence. I wanted to get back to that agrarian society that I liked so much. But the cucumbers that emerged were diseased and puny, totally unlike the big, luscious ones in Zarasai. Turns out I liked stealing cucumbers. I didn’t like taking care of them.” A few years later, when he moved to Babylon, where he had a larger backyard, he planted a grape arbor and an orchard of apple and pear trees. “Oh, how I loved that orchard! That’s what I missed most—the orchard and my workshop—when I eventually moved into Manhattan.”

  His passion for designing and engineering traveled better. “I went to Macy’s and bought a brand-new tool I’d been salivating over, called a Shopsmith. It was a power drill, a saw, a shaper, and a sander all in one—brilliantly conceived. I became obsessive.” Only instead of building clubhouses, boats, and sleds, Al finished his basement so elaborately that he made his neighbors gasp. When it came to woodworking, there was no keeping up with the Jaffees. Then he turned the porch into an all-season room by enclosing it with twenty windows, making the wood frames, inserting the glass, and attaching the hardware. Next he moved on to the kitchen, where he overengineered a foldaway table. “If I hadn’t been able to draw, I would have been a cabinetmaker. I would have loved it.”

  By his own admission, Al was not an attentive father. He enjoyed the idea but not the reality of having a family. He traces his relative indifference to his children back to when he was a mere eighteen months old. As the eldest, he found the glory of his primacy taken away after eighteen months by Harry and thereafter, at eighteen-month intervals, by the births of two more brothers. “I was inundated by brothers. I wanted to get away from it all, and the next thing I knew I had children.”

  Ruth would encourage Al to pay more attention to his son, and Al would try. When Richard outgrew his tricycle, Al retrofitted the pedals with paddles and a float so that Richard could ride his bike in the pool, but it was the inventive engineering that appealed to Al more than the opportunity to delight his son. “It was me reliving my youth.”

  When Richard’s Boy Scout project was to carve a totem pole out of a piece of balsa wood, Al meant to use the opportunity for father-son bonding. “I forgot myself. I forgot that I was supposed to be a father. I got so into it that when I’d finished mine I realized that Richard was just sitting there, forlorn, holding an untouched stick of balsa wood. We had some good moments, too, but I wasn’t a doting father. I didn’t get down on the floor and play with them. I just took them for granted.

  “Ruth would say to me, ‘Richard has me as a friend, why don’t you be a friend to Debbie?’” Al tried. He sometimes played Chutes and Ladders with her. He built furniture for her dollhouse. He would cuddle up to Debbie when they watched television. But as Al sees it now, what was enough for Al wasn’t enough for Debbie.

  “If I had it to do over again, if I knew then what I know now, I would have made more of an effort and everyone would have benefitted. I was a prominent part of the equation, and different behavior on my part—screw the garden, screw the woodworking—might have made a difference. But I had to have a garden. I had to do my woodworking. I did neglect Ruth and the kids.”

  For a long time, well after the war years, the public’s appetite for comic books seemed insatiable. Al could work as much as he wanted and he wanted to work a lot. Timely was publishing up to fifty comic books every month and Al was writing, drawing, and editing as fast as he could. “My first year out of the army I made fifteen thousand dollars. That was a lot of money. If I’d had my way, I would have stayed on salary forever and never would have worked for MAD.” But the law of supply and demand deemed otherwise. By 1949, the bottom dropped out of the comic-book business. GIs, who had been comic books’ greatest fans, returned to civilian life as did a glut of cartoonists and writers. Martin Goodman, the publisher of Timely, who had filled numerous offices in the Empire State Building with a staff of forty to fifty salaried artists and writers, let them all go, including Al. The staff was told that when Timely reestablished itself, certain people might be coming back.

  For a few months in the fall of 1949 a depressed Al floundered, picking up an occasional freelance assignment and worrying about how he was going to afford the mortgage on his Floral Park home. In January of 1950, Al got a call from Stan Lee, asking him if he wanted to take over the comic book Patsy Walker, a popular teenage idol and a takeoff of the popular Broadway show Junior Miss. Al had drawn Patsy Walker as part of his editorial job at Timely. It was freelance work, but he couldn’t afford to say no. Al and this vapid teenager would go together—one might say they were pinned—for five long years.

  Al Jaffee and Patsy Walker were hardly a perfect fit, as Al was quick to bring to Stan Lee’s attention when Stan offered him the job. “I don’t do teenage girls; I do funny stuff,” Al reminded Stan. “Try,” Stan answered. “It won’t kill you.” Lee, at least, was not worried. “Maybe Al was better at writing humor, but really talented people can’t be typecast. Al could do anything well.” Patsy’s trivial, high school concerns—would she or her raven-haired rival Hedy get to go to the prom with Buzz?—could not have been less related to Al’s satiric wit, except as an object of it. Al forced himself to read Seventeen magazine to learn about teenage fashion. In spite of these problems, Al found a way to loosen the ties that bound him and his paper-doll characters. He animated the petty plots that had previously moved his characters from panel to panel and instead made them react to more serious social issues in their limited world—meanness, gossip, poverty, and cliques. Even so, the job exhausted him. He had to produce two entire magazines in a four-week period, which kept him working long after midnight, seven days a week.

  Help came in the form of the highly esteemed cartoonist Frank Fogarty, a retired old-timer who had prospered in the 1940s with Clarence and Mr. and Mrs. He didn’t need the money, but he was desperate to get back to work—retirement at age sixty-five didn’t suit him any more than retirement at eighty-nine would suit Al—and Fogarty didn’t mind taking the meager five dollars a page that was all Al could afford to pay him.

  “Frank Fogarty was an idol of mine, and now he was doing piecework for me. I felt uncomfortable about that. His job was to fill in the backgrounds of each frame of Patsy Walker—the trees, the high school, the sky. I told him not to work too hard. The backgrounds didn’t really matter.” But nothing would satisfy Fogarty except to do his best, whether the job merited it or not. Fogarty didn’t drive, so every week Al would zoom off in his golden Hudson to pick up Fogarty’s drawings, and every week Al was stunned by the quality of Frank’s work. “The backgrounds were a labor of love. He drew every blade of grass. The pictures that hung on the walls of Patsy Walker’s house were little Rembrandts.”

  Al’s odd-couple professional relationship with Frank lasted four happy years. (By then, Al had made the upscale move to a house in Babylon, too great a distance to drive to Fogarty’s home in Manhasset.) The men had developed a warm friendship in spite of the fact that Al was a lapsed Jew and Fogarty a devout Catholic, just the kind of believer whom Al and his agnostic father would have made fun of. And yet when Al mentioned to Frank that his father’s doctors were worried that Morris might have throat cancer (he didn’t), Frank said to Al, “I know you’re Jewish and I’m Catholic, but do you mind if I say a prayer for your father?”

  “His compassion really got to me. It brought back memories of religious conflict and turned them upside down: a devout Christian offering to pray for a Jew’s welfare just wasn’t in the playbook I’d brought back from Lithuania. Some kind of circle got rounded.”

  It was Fogarty who made sure that Al was invited to join the National Cartoonists Society, where he met all his childhood heroes—Rube Goldberg, Otto Soglow (The Little King), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon), and Walt Kelly (Pogo). “I was one of th
e younger members, and there I was, rubbing elbows with the crème de la crème.” In 2008 this same society honored Al with its cartoonist-of-the-year award, the Reuben. “When he got nominated,” says cartoonist Sergio Aragones, “everybody knew he was going to win, everybody knew he was the best. That kind of unanimity never happens. Other candidates didn’t even bother to show up.”

  While Al was earning his stripes at Timely, Harry was impressing everyone at Benton and Bowles, a top-notch advertising agency, with his extraordinary talents. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before his mental problems, which included delusions of grandeur, reasserted themselves. Harry felt he should have his boss’s job. His boss, predictably, did not agree, and Harry was fired.

  In 1954, while Al was still lashed to Patsy Walker, Harry suffered a complete mental breakdown. By this time he had married and fathered a daughter, Marilyn, with Lenore, a talented Greenwich Village artist who shared his bohemian lifestyle. Lenore had been handling Harry’s volatile moods and behavior for years, but this time she knew the situation was much more serious. She called Al to report that Harry wouldn’t get out of bed, talk, or go to work. By the time Al got to their apartment, Harry was gone. After several panicked hours, during which Al filed a missing-persons report with the police, Harry returned home, but he remained mute until Al asked him where he had gone.

  “I go out to eat,” Harry answered. “I just stop at whatever place has food and I get something to eat.”

  “Why do you do that?” Al asked.

  “When Irish people are in trouble, they drink. When Jews are in trouble, they get something to eat.”

  “It made a kind of weird sense,” Al thought, “even in the midst of his catatonia.” Then Harry shut down all conversation and reverted to gibberish.

  Al remembered that his doctor, with whom he played poker and bowled, had a brother who was a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist examined Harry and diagnosed him as being in a catatonic state. A call to Bellevue, the nearest mental hospital, brought an ambulance, medical attendants, and two policemen who stood by with their guns drawn while Harry got dressed.

  “You don’t need a gun,” Al pleaded with the officers. “My brother is as gentle as a lamb.”

  But guns were standard operating procedure in such situations. Al stood helplessly by while the police escorted Harry into the ambulance. “They took him away. I drove home. As I was telling Ruth about Harry, I collapsed in tears.” Al wasn’t crying for the Harry who had turned his back on Al in high school or the Harry who continued to disdain his older brother for being a bourgeois philistine. “I was mourning my little kid brother, the five-, six-, and seven-year-old Harry, my childhood companion in Zarasai with whom I’d hung out for so many years. My job was not yet finished.

  “Harry’s condition did not improve at Bellevue. He was given shock treatments, after which he talked a blue streak and then relapsed into catatonia.” Once again Al called the psychiatrist. Harry was transferred to Hillside Hospital, now a part of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, which had a good reputation for dealing with mental patients. Al convinced them to take Harry temporarily, even though Harry had no insurance and Al and his father could not afford private care. Later, at about the same time that Al, Ruth, and the children moved from Floral Park to Babylon, Harry was transferred once again, this time to Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood on Long Island, where a lobotomy was recommended. Lenore responded with an emphatic no.

  Morris had no car. This meant that he was dependent upon Al to take him to his frequent doctor appointments and, on Sundays, to whatever institution in which Harry was confined. Once there, Morris would insist upon sitting in silence with an utterly uncommunicative Harry for three to four hours, while Al grew increasingly impatient to leave a situation that seemed doubly insane and emotionally anguishing. Besides, these visits kept him from his family and social life. “One Sunday I begged off. My father was so angry with me he didn’t speak to me for months.”

  Ultimately, with the advent of psychotropic drugs, a more compliant and complacent Harry was deemed well enough to leave Pilgrim State and Morris took Harry to live with him in Rego Park. There Harry resumed his passion for building. Morris feared that Harry’s nonstop sawing and hammering would provoke the landlord to throw him out of his apartment and suggested that Harry move back to the Village.

  Lenore had separated from Harry after he was institutionalized, but she never divorced him. For the rest of Harry’s life, Lenore, their daughter, Marilyn, and the man who had by then replaced Harry as Lenore’s lifetime partner remained concerned about his well-being and involved in his life. He sometimes lived with them in an odd foursome, but when Harry’s paranoia strained that situation to the breaking point, he would move in with his father or with Al, or take a room in a cheap hotel.

  Harry, having worn out his welcome with his father and with Lenore, went to live with Ruth and Al in Babylon. There he did household chores, mowed the lawn, engaged happily with Richard and Debbie, and found security, comfort, and significant relief from his demons. Once a dapper dresser when he worked in advertising, Harry now wore ragged clothing and bathed infrequently. “It was as if he had adopted a Zarasai life. He idolized our mother. He missed her and wanted to be back with her. He identified with the beggars of Zarasai; they were his mother’s favorites. Harry saw himself as the recipient of tzedakeh. He loved to be taken care of, and Ruth catered to him.”

  Little by little, crisis by crisis, Al’s weary, broken father shifted the role of paterfamilias to a very reluctant Al, who was frequently called upon to bail out his three younger brothers when they found themselves in desperate straits and in need of financial help. “Now I was Uncle Harry.” Morris would bring his concerns about his children to Al, as if he were not one of them, as if he and Al were coparents.

  “My father talked to me about his will. He told me that he was leaving what little money he had to my three brothers because they needed it more than me. All the childhood affection he’d shown me in Savannah was lost.

  “‘I don’t think that’s fair. I want to be one of the sons. I want some kind of demonstration that I’m part of the family and that I’m going to be treated equally. Each one of us should get one-quarter. I guarantee you that not one penny of it will go to me, but I want to be in the position of giving my brothers what you left to me.’ My father agreed. And, as I predicted, it all went to my brothers. Not one penny of it did I spend on myself.”

  By 1955, Al was working eighteen-hour days grinding out Patsy Walker. “Once I got an idea for a Patsy Walker story, I would write it out and add my quick sketches; I’d feel as if I’d done the whole thing. But then I’d have the drudgery of turning the idea into a cartoon, and by then the only inspirational voice I’m hearing is ‘I’ve got to finish this; the mortgage is due.’ It was hard labor to work up the enthusiasm to put myself into her milieu, but I probably would have gone on forever if nothing else showed up.”

  But something did. Earlier that year, Bill Gaines had agreed to turn the MAD comic book into a magazine under Harvey Kurtz-man’s editorship, never imagining that Kurtzman would quit after two years. This meant that Harvey was free to offer Al his first opportunity to write for MAD magazine.

  “I’m a fan of yours going way back to high school,” Kurtzman told Al, “but I don’t think you’ve ever reached your real potential. I’d like to give you a chance to do that.” Between 1955 and 1957 he assigned Al a number of articles. The subject of the first was champion golfer Ben Hogan, whose technique had been celebrated on the August 1955 cover of Life magazine. Even nongolfers were caught up in the Hogan craze. What was the secret of his amazing swing? Sportswriters had concluded that the magic was in his grip, but what, they all wondered, was so special about his grip? Was it supination, pronation, the way he held his thumbs? At last, here was something seriously preposterous that Al could reduce to ridicule with a thrust of his satiric pen. He would reveal the secret of Hogan’s grip. He would show what actually happ
ens when the great man swings.

  “Nowhere is it better to look for funny stuff than in a slow-motion sequence. We all know the beginning and we all know the end, but we don’t know what’s in between. Hogan starts out with the normal ten fingers. Then, in each subsequent panel, he keeps growing fingers. By the middle of the two-page spread, fingers are sprouting out of Hogan’s wrists—but by the time he finishes his swing, he’s back to five-fingered normalcy.” Harvey loved it. So did Bill Gaines.

  Shortly thereafter, Harvey called again, this time to offer Al a job working for MAD. By then Harvey was a legend in the comics industry. Al was thrilled at the prospect of getting what he’d always wanted—the opportunity to let his crazy, arrested-adolescent self run wild. Joining creative forces with some of the most innovative cartoonists of the time—Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, and his old pal Willie Elder—was a dream he’d never dared to dream. “I was part of the philistine group. They were the elite group. I never considered approaching them. They were doing the kind of work I would kill for.” Perhaps best of all, Al saw them as a family. He anticipated a convivial band of cartoon brothers presided over by the paternalistic Bill Gaines.

  Then reality intruded. Al realized that he couldn’t afford to take his dream job. The pay—Kurtzman estimated that Al could make about ten thousand dollars freelancing for MAD—was half of what he was making with Stan Lee.

  “I’ve got to make a living,” he told Harvey. “I can’t just throw over Patsy Walker and go to MAD on a freelance basis with no guarantee.” A disappointed, cautious Al said no. He might have been expressing his financial reality or his shtetl fears of once again finding himself poor and starving. Harvey had once described Al as “close with the buck.”

  Just days after he’d received and turned down the offer to join MAD, Al made his monthly visit to New York to deliver yet another Patsy Walker to Stan Lee. Instead of engaging in their usual banter—“Hi, Al, what garbage have you brought me today?” “Well, Stan, you’re going to love this garbage; it’s perfumed”—Stan held up a page of Patsy Walker panels, submitted by a cartoonist who was campaigning for Al’s job. “Look at what came in over the transom, Jaffee. You’d better look to your laurels.”