Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  When after the eleventh issue Humbug was still not making a profit, the Charlton Press made a demand: either we take over the magazine or we’ll pull the plug. Without consulting anyone beforehand, Kurtzman told Charlton Press he would not be owned, and so the magazine failed.

  Al had no regrets. “Going broke working with Harvey was the best experience of my life.” He took his stock certificate, folded it into a paper airplane, and sailed it out Hefner’s rent-free-office window.

  Actually, Humbug died twice. Shortly after Kurtzman turned down Charlton Press’s offer to take it over, Al got a phone call from Al Feldstein, who by then had replaced Kurtzman as the editor of MAD. “Al and Bill Gaines had come up with an idea. They knew they couldn’t negotiate with Harvey. Either they had tried or they figured he was unapproachable. They asked me if the Humbug staff would be interested in being a sister magazine to MAD, alternating publication months. MAD was published eight times a year, and even that was a strain for them. They were willing to keep Humbug alive, at what price I do not know. I told them I didn’t have any control over Harvey. The feeling I had at the time was that Harvey should have called us together to discuss the plan to save Humbug. If Gaines wanted to own it, we could always have said no. But suppose he would have been willing to give us stock?” In effect, Al refused the role of intermediary, and so the plan died aborning. “There never was a meeting with Gaines. Harvey refused to negotiate with them. I was disappointed because at that moment I was without a job or any prospects, but I wouldn’t do it without Harvey being involved.”

  After the financial losing streak of Trump and Humbug, Kurtz-man and Will Elder teamed up to create Help!, a magazine similar to MAD, and Arnold Roth and Jack Davis returned to their freelance careers as illustrators. After an uncharacteristically perilous couple of years, Al reverted to form. He wanted steady, lucrative work, the kind of sinecure that a syndicated feature could provide. “If I could sell a syndicated column, I could live a life of ease, but the odds of success, even for a pro like me, were terrible.” The competition for space on the funny pages was Darwinian. “I was told that you couldn’t sell a new strip without knocking out an old one.” Al’s chances for displacing the likes of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, or Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon were just about nil.

  How, he wondered, could he occupy space that wouldn’t challenge an old strip. He opened the newspaper and stared at the familiar layout of the funny pages until the obvious—yet something no one seemed to have noticed before—dawned on him. All the cartoons were horizontal; therefore, Al would go vertical. He employed the same kind of slightly perverse oppositional thinking that he used as a child to defend himself from his mother. “My thought process has always been to look at how it’s always been done and then turn it upside down. I thrive on change and novelty. It’s just a natural part of me. I love the challenge.”

  Al immediately started thinking vertical—flagpoles, trees, staircases, ladders, ski slopes, skyscrapers, trampolines, and snails that unfurl when they sneeze. “I doubt,” said Al, “that the people who do horizontal cartoons ever bother to think, ‘Now I have to draw snakes, clotheslines, garden hoses, and anything else that lies flat on the ground.’”

  What Al likes best about what became Tall Tales is that the height of the panel allowed him to elicit double takes from his readers. “One of my first Tall Tales was a roofer who had dropped his hammer on the lawn and was reaching for it two stories down through the drainpipe.” Al has intentionally dressed the roofer in a black shirt and executed the rest of the cartoon in minimal lines against a white background, thereby making him the focal point. Then, after having had a moment to take in the strained look of the roofer’s face, the reader follows the drainpipe downward and is rewarded with the double take of a pantomime punch line—the roofer’s hand impossibly poking out of the end of the drainpipe, attempting to grasp the fallen hammer. Although he sometimes had to rely on a word or two—in one instance to send a bank robber from the deposit to the withdrawal window—Al loved being able to tell a tale without the help of words and to have his creativity be literally hemmed into a tight vertical space.

  The feature sold immediately to the Herald Tribune Syndicate, but, like Harvey Kurtzman’s uniquely small Humbug format that contributed to its undoing, the fact that Tall Tales could be placed anywhere in the paper doomed it to obscurity. By going vertical Al had avoided competing for space on the comic pages. “Unfortunately, because the column could be put anywhere in the newspaper—from the editorial page to the classifieds—fans of the feature got sick of trying to find it. I had out-created myself.” Even so, the feature appeared for six years and at the height of its popularity ran in about one hundred papers, thirty-five of them foreign. The coup de grâce was delivered by an editor who insisted that Al add text to Tall Tales, thereby killing one of its unique features and destroying its considerable foreign market. “My doom was sealed. I’m a visual humorist, not a gag writer. The feature lost its raison d’être.”

  Although Al’s writing is as well regarded as his drawing, he is prouder of his wordless cartoons. “If you can turn the action into a story where words are superfluous, it’s a complete art form. Sergio Aragones is the master of pantomime art. He could tell a two-hundred-fifty-page story without a single word in it, and you would be able to read it.”

  Aragones and Al belong to a mutual admiration society. “I grew up in Mexico,” says Aragones, “and I knew his work from MAD, but I never saw Tall Tales. I was so proud of my pantomime cartoons, and then, ten years later, I saw Tall Tales and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he must think I’m a plagiarist.’ He is a master cartoonist. I am in awe of that man. He’s the best cartoonist ever.”

  Al feels the same way about Aragones. “Everything he does I wish I had thought of. Sergio is the epitome of what I admire in cartooning, and I like to believe I can do it, too.” Antonio Prohias, originator of the supremely popular and silent Spy vs. Spy, joined MAD in 1961. Aragones would follow in 1962, giving MAD a trio of wordless cartoonists—a quartet if one counts Don Martin, the master of sound effects.

  Al set his sights on MAD at about the same time he embarked upon Tall Tales. Ever since he’d done the Ben Hogan parody, he knew that MAD was “home.” However, he lacked the nerve to knock on the front door. What stopped him was that he feared guilt by association with Kurtzman.

  “There was bad blood between Harvey and the MAD staff. I knew I had to be persona non grata at MAD. Even though I was an innocent bystander—I wasn’t even a regular when Harvey left—I felt that I was being tarred with the same brush.” Then there was the added taint that Al had worked for Kurtzman on both Trump and Humbug, two publications that had declared war on MAD. Nor could Al forget the time he, along with Kurtzman and Arnold Roth, had promoted Humbug on the popular Long John Nebel talk radio show. On that acrimonious occasion, MAD staffers phoned in to the show to excoriate Kurtzman for leaving the magazine in the lurch. Even though none of this hostility had been directed at Al, the mere possibility of an angry confrontation was enough to make an ingratiating man cringe.

  He screwed up his courage and made the call. “I don’t know if I’m a pariah because of my association with Harvey,” he told Al Feldstein, but before he could say another word, Feldstein said, “C’mon down.”

  Al brought with him an armload of scripts left over from Trump and Humbug that had never seen print. Feldstein looked them over and handed them to Bill Gaines.

  “A couple of days later, Gaines calls me into his office and greets me warmly. ‘So you’re the guy Harvey’s been raving about all these years,’ he tells me. Then he asks me if I’d mind going through the old issues of Humbug and pointing out which of the stories were mine. We rarely signed our work in those days. It wasn’t unusual for multiple artists to work on a single project.

  “So we sat on a couch in Gaines’s office, and as Bill turned over each page I would identify my work—this is mine, this is
mine, this is mine. After Gaines had paged through all eleven issues, we went to Al Feldstein’s office and Gaines said, ‘Hire this guy.’”

  6

  MAD DAYS

  “Every once in a while

  I tell myself, ‘Live it up,

  you’re an American.’”

  IN SPITE OF THE FACT that his work for Humbug and Trump made it evident to Gaines that Al could draw as well as write, Al began his official association with MAD in 1958 as a writer, because MAD needed writers more than it needed artists. Al accepted the limitation with grace. “The magazine was voracious. It would eat scripts up as fast as they could be produced. Artists like George Woodbridge, Bob Clarke, and Jack Rickard needed to be fed.”

  During his first year at the magazine Al flooded the MAD machine with ideas, and because he couldn’t resist, he also offered accompanying cartoon sketches. “I was a hybrid.” Alone in his office, Nick Meglin, MAD’s associate editor, would read Al’s storyboards and laugh out loud at the sketches. “Even before Al came to MAD,” says Nick, “I knew his work from Trump and especially from Humbug. I saw him as a rare talent, one who could write as brilliantly as he drew. Not only were you looking at something somewhat realistic, but it was realistic in a clever disguise so that the humor was evident at first blush. You saw the gag immediately. You didn’t have to labor.” Nick took Al’s work to Al Feldstein and said, in effect, “Jaffee turns in scripts with these funny sketches, and then we hand them over to an artist who takes the life out of Al’s work. You cannot separate Jaffee’s writing from his art. He’s a whimsy writer-artist. Let Jaffee draw.” After that, Al became a writer-artist. Only occasionally did he illustrate other writers’ work.

  When Al finished a job, he’d call Al Feldstein to arrange a time for him to deliver it. Then he’d sit down with the whole staff: Feldstein, the editor; the two associate editors, Nick Meglin and Jerry DeFuccio; John Putnam, the art director; and Leonard Brenner, the assistant art director. “Each one would read my submission for five or ten minutes and then vote. Even when there was a chuckle or a smile here and there, it was a rather demeaning experience to have your work discussed in front of you. These days they don’t do that. I deliver the article and go home. They have a meeting, vote, and give me their verdict by phone. It’s an up-or-down thing. They don’t bring me in to discuss the script unless they want it rewritten.” Since Al’s acceptance rate has always been in the high ninetieth percentile, he is rarely called back to the MAD offices to discuss changes.

  The key to his success, he believes, is that he rarely queries the editors in advance to test their reactions to his ideas. “What I learned is that if you test your idea out on the editors, sooner or later everyone’s little ego gets into it and they start making additions or subtractions and pretty soon you’ve got nothing.” Instead, he writes and draws the article in advance and presents it to the editors as a fait accompli.

  Al noticed a sea change when Feldstein took over. “Al Feldstein and Harvey were equals on the level of writing,” says Jaffee, “except that Kurtzman was a funny writer and artist and Feldstein was a serious writer and artist. Feldstein could recognize funny stuff, but he, himself, was not a jokester.

  “The two men had different ambitions for MAD. If Harvey was successful at what he was doing, he wanted to take another step forward, make it fancier, better written, more expensive, more sophisticated. Harvey imagined editorials written by prominent people. He wanted MAD to have the stature that Punch enjoyed in England. Kurtzman was always on the lookout for new talent, whereas Gaines and Feldstein were interested in holding on to their freelance staff. The group had established a sense of identity with the reader. Feldstein was happy to exploit what was working and just do more of it.”

  While Al was a great admirer of Harvey’s innovative drive and his ability to attract the best artists, temperamentally he was in Feldstein’s more pragmatic camp. “Trying to invent a new magazine every month is a big job. Why kill yourself? MAD served my purposes. I didn’t evaluate MAD on the basis of whether it was up to my sophisticated taste. I recognized it for whatever it was, and if I could be useful to them, they could be useful to me. I had no notions that I was better than MAD.”

  While more conservative than Kurtzman, Feldstein remained open to new material. The fold-in began under Feldstein’s leadership, as did Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and later, during the Vietnam years, Hawks and Doves, an antiwar strip.

  “As an editor Feldstein considered his job to be the boss, not one of the boys. He was friendly and appreciated good work, but he was tougher than Harvey. He would tongue-lash his subordinates before he’d go on vacation, leaving the staff a quaking mass. I think he did it out of insecurity. It was as if he was afraid of a palace coup.”

  “It was my policy to remain aloof from the freelance staff and not socialize so that I could maintain a professional relationship with them,” says Feldstein. Al Jaffee and his wife were the only members of the freelance staff that my late wife, Lee, and I did socialize with. I felt that Al was ‘professional’ enough to separate our business and our social relationships.”

  Al Jaffee won’t say whose editing style he preferred, but he will say this: “MAD was a commercial enterprise. Feldstein made a lot of money for MAD. Would Harvey have made money? Maybe not.”

  Jaffee saw Gaines as a benevolent ruler. “He didn’t want his stable of artists to sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for work. He also didn’t want them going elsewhere looking for outside assignments. Gaines ran a tight ship.” He not only paid his freelancers the same day they delivered their finished work to the MAD offices, but he paid more than most publishers of similar magazines. Al was amazed. “Other magazines could take weeks to come through with a check. Nowhere in publishing had I ever heard of paying on the barrelhead; it was Gaines’s policy, and it was both generous and selfish. He gave with one hand and took with the other.”

  With the hand that took, Gaines kept all rights to his freelancer’s work, a practice that was common in the industry at the time. Al doesn’t own anything he has ever drawn or written for MAD, including the fold-ins and even the sketches for the fold-ins. Adele Kurtz-man, Harvey’s wife, recalls that Bill Gaines sold Harvey’s first MAD cover to Steven Spielberg for fifteen thousand dollars. “Harvey didn’t get a dime.” Each time a freelancer endorsed a check from MAD, he simultaneously signed a brief contract stamped on the back of the check, giving away all rights.

  When Al started to work for MAD on an irregular basis in 1955, he remembers, the magazine paid one hundred dollars a page for art and seventy-five dollars for the script. Comic books had always paid less for script, but writing for MAD was more demanding than writing for comic books, and the writers rebelled. Nick Meglin went to bat for his rebels, and the price for a page of script was raised to one hundred dollars. It wasn’t until the last decade that the fee per page for writer-artists such as Al reached a peak of sixteen hundred dollars—eight hundred for art and eight hundred for the script. (Now, with MAD cut from twelve to six issues per year, the fee is down to five hundred and five hundred and, Al fears, probably going lower.)

  Gaines made sure that no one would woo away one of his stars by offering him more money. (After all, that’s one of the reasons he’d lost Kurtzman to Hugh Hefner.) “Gaines was so concerned about losing talent that he used his assistant editor and closest confidant, Jerry DeFuccio, as both talent scout and cop.” It was DeFuccio’s job to read whatever script ideas came in over the transom—most of which he rejected—and to turn away offers from outsiders who wanted to hire MAD artists. Al hates to think about how many lucrative offers he never heard about. “If, God forbid, NBC should call up and want to pay me twenty-five thousand dollars to do a cartoon, it was Jerry’s job to tell them I wasn’t available. Everything had to pass through DeFuccio, but he was made of steel and nothing passed through.” (Years later, in the seventies when MAD was at the height of its popularity, Gaines fired the once-trusted DeFu
ccio when some original art that was under DeFuccio’s control went missing. John Ficarra, MAD’s current editor, took DeFuccio’s place at Nick Meglin’s suggestion.)

  Gaines took a lot of friendly abuse from his staff, although never from Al. “I am totally uncomfortable insulting anybody. But Lenny Brenner, the lowly assistant art director, had no qualms about walking into Bill’s office and saying, ‘Look at this cartoon, you big fuck. Do you think this is funny?’ Bill would respond in kind and laugh. We lowered the level of respect to something approaching nonsense, and it worked. People didn’t try that with Nick Meglin or Al Feldstein. I guess maybe we felt their egos wouldn’t allow it.”

  Gaines was famous for treating his writers and artists to luxurious annual trips to faraway destinations. But there was a catch. In order to qualify for the trip, the artists and writers had to have contributed a minimum of eighteen pages to MAD. (The prolific Al always qualified.) “When Gaines’s mother died, we were all notified of the funeral. Arnie Kogan, a writer who did a lot of work for MAD and later went on to Hollywood, joked in Gaines’s presence that he hadn’t done enough pages to get invited to the funeral. Gaines roared.

  “The smartest thing Gaines ever did was to take us on those trips.” The magazine’s annual expeditions were the means by which the usually isolated writers and artists got to know one another and coalesced into a team, a family. Gaines was the father, a compassionate, mercurial, stern father, a role he not only relished, but insisted upon—except when he didn’t. Then he wanted to be everyone’s pal. Early in their association at MAD, Gaines expressed his desire to be “one of the boys” to Harvey Kurtzman, who was cool to the idea and not afraid to express his feelings to Gaines. “Bill, Bill,” said Harvey in his usual deliberate search for words, “you control our lives. We’re all dependent upon you to pay our rent and feed our children. How can you ever be one of the boys?” The accommodating Al would not have been so forthright. “If Bill had said that to me, I would have said something like, ‘Sure, that would be fun.’ But Harvey, who had a very low bullshit threshold, went to the heart of the situation.”