Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  The art is harder, although that wasn’t the case with the Peanuts fold-in. Al imagined half a Lucy, half a Charlie Brown, and half a Snoopy. But what was he going to do in the middle to connote contemporary art? Could he make a Roy Lichtenstein or a Picasso out of Peanuts characters? Pollock was definitely out—too drippy. Al lightened his engineering burden by deciding to draw his own legitimate-looking piece of contemporary art.

  Start to finish, Al works on a fold-in for at least two weeks. He makes a lot of preliminary sketches on tracing paper until he is satisfied that he’s surmounted his greatest challenge—fooling the reader’s eye. In the instance of the Peanuts fold-in, the biggest challenge was hiding such familiar characters. “If you have any imagination, you should be able to put it together mentally, but when I look at it years later, even I can’t do it on the first take.”

  After Al has finalized an idea, he transfers the pictures to a two-ply illustration board that measures fifteen by twenty-four inches and is about an eighth of an inch thick so that it cannot buckle or shrink. “The board has its advantages in that nothing can become misaligned, but the disadvantage is that I can’t see what it will look like when the finished product is folded.” Like everybody else, Al has to wait to test his fold-in until he gets his copy of MAD.

  Unlike the fold-in, the inspiration for “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” came from a personal experience. Writers and artists are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a question they can rarely answer, since ideas usually spring from an accidental, split-second union between the chaotic stimuli of the outside world and the artist’s ever-searching subconscious. But in the case of “Snappy Answers,” Al can identify the eureka moment. “Ruth and I were living in Babylon. A storm had bent over the TV antenna that was attached to the chimney. I have a terrible fear of heights, but I decided I had to fix the antenna, so I borrowed an extension ladder and tremulously climbed it, rung by rung, until I got to the roof. I’m balancing on the top rung of the ladder and I’m clinging to the chimney with one hand and with the other I’m trying to straighten out the antenna. While I’m doing this, I hear footsteps on the ladder behind me. I’m too terrified to turn around to see who it is. I’m holding on to the chimney and the antenna, and I can’t move. The footsteps get closer and closer, and I can sense that there’s someone right behind me. Then a voice says, ‘Where’s Mom?’ and I answer, without missing a beat, ‘I have killed her and I am trying to stuff her down the chimney.’ ”

  Once Al got over feeling guilty about terrifying his son, he played around with the title—should it be “Smart Answers” or “Clever Answers”—until he settled upon “Snappy Answers.” When he took the cartoon to MAD, Feldstein made a major contribution to the idea by suggesting that there ought to be more than one snappy answer. Then Jaffee suggested a blank space where the readers could fill in their own answers, and the concept was complete.

  Charmingly hostile “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” was Al’s way of getting back at everyone who had ever put him down, beaten him, starved him, neglected him, abandoned him, or hit him on the head with a log. “Oppressed people resort to humor. They can’t afford to get angry.” His weapon was ridicule, not rage. “I learned to suffer fools. There is anger and violence in my humor, but I package it entertainingly. I’m not exactly your Avon lady.”

  When the going gets rough in the real world, Al just slips into something more comfortable, like a cartoon. “You can’t vent your hostility in real life. You give that kind of a wiseass answer to somebody, and they’ll say, ‘Screw you,’ and walk away. Nobody’s going to stand around and take it—but in a cartoon I can capture and freeze the moment. We’ve all had to be polite when we’d like not to be.” Al himself cringed with compassion when a Madison Avenue bus driver was rude to an old lady who had asked redundantly if the bus goes up Madison Avenue. “You can’t do satire without doing hostility. There’s no such thing as constructive satire.”

  Once Al gets a good idea, he plays it for all it’s worth. “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” was supposed to be a one-shot cartoon but after several appeared in MAD and were greeted with reader enthusiasm, Al saw the possibility of a book and then more books of “Snappy Answers”—More Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, Still More Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, Good Lord! Not Another Book of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and so forth. “The universal appeal of ‘Snappy Answers,’” says Arnold Roth, “is that we all live that moment eighty times a day.”

  Ultimately there were eight books of “Snappy Answers,” all containing cartoons that had never appeared in MAD. The first two sold more than two million copies. Six more were published at two-year intervals for a total of eight books. In all, Al has more than sixty paperback and hardcover books to his credit, including a four-volume boxed set of his fold-ins, due to be published in Spring 2011.

  Inspired by the amortizing of “Snappy Answers,” Al saw a way to eat his cake—enjoy the freedom of the freelance life—and still have the steady income of a salaried man. “I can’t come up with blockbuster ideas all the time, so I cheat by repeating myself.” Al used and reused another idea—“Don’t You Hate?”—in the pages of MAD, starting with The MAD Hate Book. He followed up with The MAD Car Owners Hate Book and then The MAD Christmas Hate Book. In captions that simmer with adolescent wiseass disdain, Al asks his readers, “Don’t you hate meatheads who let other people in ahead of them in line, dentists with hairy arms, fat slobs who go back and forth to their theater seats?” No one is spared. “Don’t you hate,” he asks in the last panel, “magazines that print articles like this?” Al’s motivation was more pragmatic than creative. “I always tried to think of as many themes and variations as I could so that I could get as many pages as possible; the more pages, the more money.”

  JUST WHEN AL was riding high professionally, his income and reputation buoyed by the success of the fold-in and “Snappy Answers,” his personal life hit an all-time low. Just before Christmas 1966, after twenty-one years of marriage and two children, Al and Ruth separated. Ruth instigated the separation, but the marriage had been “cold” for years. Both had resisted divorce—Ruth because of the children and Al because he didn’t think he could tolerate another separation.

  “I was in a deep depression. I had not had any intimate relationships before Ruth. I didn’t know how to reconstitute my life.” To help fill up his lonely evenings and to energize himself by rising to the challenge of something new and different, he took a yearlong course in conversational French at the Alliance Française. He also sought the help of a psychiatrist, who gave him a pep talk. “You’re a desirable male, you’re interesting, your profession is interesting. You are going to find a whole new world.” Eventually and reluctantly, Al did.

  At the MAD Christmas party that year Al peeked into his envelope and a check for ten thousand dollars—three times his usual generous bonus—winked back. Some months later, Gaines invited himself to accompany Al on his quickie Mexican divorce, involving visits to lawyers and bars in El Paso and Tijuana. Two New York Jews with beards did not go over well in a saloon in El Paso. After overhearing a menacingly anti-Semitic remark coming from the direction of the bar, the two abandoned their drinks and left quietly.

  After the divorce, John Putnam, the art director, concerned about Al working at home in isolation, suggested that Gaines offer Al studio space in the MAD offices. “My MAD family came through for me. They recognized my travails, and they took me in.”

  The move to the MAD office was good for Al’s depleted spirits, his professional productivity, and his social life. It was also good for MAD. Because he was in the office, he was able to make extra money when last-minute projects presented themselves. Jerry DeFuccio asked Al to join him and his dates at restaurants. Harvey and Adele Kurtzman invited him to their dinner parties and to hang out with them on what would otherwise have been long, lonely Sundays. Bill Gaines’s wife, Nancy, invited Al to their mansion in Oyster Bay to
join other guests for lavish weekends of food and drink. “What comes naturally to me,” says Al, “is making jokes. I have a drink or two and I can be a bon vivant.”

  Gaines rarely showed up at the Oyster Bay parties. “He didn’t drink at the time, although later he became an oenophile. Is that the right word? I don’t mean to suggest that he was a masturbator—I mean a wine lover. He wasn’t at Oyster Bay a lot because his marriage was deteriorating, as did almost all the MAD marriages. Lenny Brenner got divorced. John Putnam got divorced. Nick Meglin got divorced. Don Martin got divorced. Al Feldstein got divorced. Jaffee got divorced. Jerry DeFuccio was never married; otherwise he would have gotten divorced, too.”

  Al’s brother Harry was profoundly distressed by the divorce. “What will become of me?” Harry asked when Al sold the house in Babylon and moved to a bachelor pad in Manhattan. Harry went back to the Village, where he rented a room in a seedy hotel.

  Harry’s fear of losing the relative mental stability he had enjoyed while living with Ruth and Al was justified. It wasn’t long before Al received a frantic call. Harry had been mugged while trying to stop a gang of black men from attacking a white man over a drug deal. They turned on Harry, who had pulled out a heavy chain he always carried for self-protection.

  “So now he’s Mr. Nuclear Armaments, strutting around the Village. Of course they grabbed the chain and started beating the hell out of Harry. The chain made him brave, in the same way that he believed the toy gun he carried in Zarasai protected him from the wolves. He had such demons in his head! He continually endangered his own life because of his twisted amulet syndrome.

  “I took him to live in my apartment on West One Hundredth Street across from Central Park to keep him safe, even though it wreaked havoc with my bachelor life. The next time I went to the MAD offices, I remember telling the guys, ‘I may be Ruth-less, but I’m not un-Harry-ed.’ I was desperate to get rid of Harry.”

  Separation and death continued to stalk the star-crossed Jaffee family. In 1967, David’s heart gave out; he was forty years old. David, the baby and his mother’s pet, had contracted rheumatic fever in Zarasai. The resulting faulty heart valve threatened his life every winter. The medical team at Montefiore Medical Center recommended open-heart surgery and reassured David and his family that he was a good candidate, since he was otherwise healthy.

  David wanted to talk with Al before making up his mind about surgery, and Al encouraged David to have the operation, telling him that it was his chance at a normal life, that one of these annual attacks was bound to kill him. Al rounded up all the members of the family to give blood in case David needed a transfusion during the surgery. Then he sat all day at the hospital with his cousin Sonie anxiously awaiting some word from the doctors. After twelve hours he was allowed in to see his brother. What he saw was a nearly dead man being worked on frantically by surgeons. “Go home,” they said. “We’ll keep working on him.”

  “When I got home, I got the call that he had died. The heart pump failed during the operation, and the hospital had no backup pump. They asked me to go to the morgue and identify his body. I called my brother Harry and asked him to do it. I couldn’t do any more. I went home, got into bed, and collapsed in tears. I was furious with the hospital for botching it. I was sobbing for my poor brother. After his death, David’s family dropped me; I became a pariah. I’ve only cried two times in my adult life: when Harry was taken away by the police to Bellevue and when David died.

  “Living with Harry was becoming increasingly difficult. I needed to change the situation, but I couldn’t just dump him. He was totally without means, and I couldn’t let him become a homeless person. If I had been near a circus where they needed a human cannonball, I would have volunteered Harry for the job.

  “Then fortune smiled upon me.” Al’s agent told him about an available one-bedroom apartment in her building in midtown Manhattan on Fifty-sixth Street, where Al lives to this day, which meant that Al could have a private life and wouldn’t have to take subways to get to MAD’s offices. Then, by greasing the palm of a superintendent in a building just two blocks away—an uncharacteristic act that further demonstrated Al’s desperation—he secured an apartment for his brother, which would serve as both a residence for Harry and a studio for Al. Al paid the rent on both apartments.

  From 1970 to 1977, Harry assisted Al with his work for MAD and Al paid him a salary. Harry, who couldn’t draw a funny face or figure, had an outstanding talent for detail. The brothers complemented each other; Harry loved to do everything that Al was either terrible at or hated doing, such as complex mechanical drawings, research, and lettering. Harry’s talent for lettering was especially useful, since for many years, Al had suffered a slight tremor in his right hand.

  Harry was so outstanding that Feldstein took note of his talents and asked him if he’d like to do some original artwork for MAD. “Feldstein’s invitation brought out the paranoia in Harry. He became furious at the mere suggestion that he would work for a rich tyrant who took advantage of working people. This was during Harry’s anti-Jewish phase. He became an anti-Semitic Nazi. He exempted me because he thought of the Jaffees as upper-class. During another period, he wouldn’t ride in an elevator with an African American.”

  One might imagine that collaborating day after day for years, with plenty of time to talk, would have brought the brothers closer together, but it didn’t. Now and then, in an effort to rekindle their lost intimacy, Al would talk about their childhoods in Zarasai, how they made fishing poles, begged scraps of glass from the glazier for their lanterns, and played in the lake. Harry would join in for a few moments, and then his paranoia would reassert itself.

  “Harry was living in a world I couldn’t conceive of. I was dealing with a person whose aims in life and lifestyle were diametrically opposed to mine. If I said, ‘Harry, why don’t you let me buy you a suit of clothes,’ he’d tear into me with ‘You and your fancy clothes. You think you’re superior.’ It was hard for me to engage him in conversation; most of the time we chatted about things that were not dangerous.

  “He idolized our mother; he missed her. He told me that one of the many reasons he married Lenore was that she looked like our mother.” Al believes that another of Lenore’s attractions was that she was as passionate about art as their mother had been about religion. To the extent that it was possible to do so in America, Harry replicated his life in Zarasai. He made his own clothes, and he rarely bathed. The Village was as close as he could get to shtetl life.

  If Al hadn’t fallen in love with Joyce Revenson in 1976, Al and Harry might have gone on working together indefinitely. Al and Joyce had known each other for a long time. When they first met at a party in 1960, it was laughter at first sight. She was twenty-nine years old, the mother of two young girls, and married to an artist, Max Revenson. Al was thirty-nine, still married to Ruth, and living in Babylon. Like Al, Joyce had a rapier wit. Al remembers sharing jokes with Joyce in their hostess’s kitchen. “Joyce was very, very attractive—not the Hollywood-beauty type, but beautiful in that she had a lot of character in her face and a beautiful figure.”

  Still, nothing more than humor passed between them when they met again in 1967, after Max had died and Al and Ruth had just divorced. “I always liked Al,” says Joyce. “I loved his wry, satiric sense of humor. He would come up with these wonderful observations that were a step beyond how anyone else would see a situation. It amazes me to this day.” “I’m going to diet,” Joyce once announced to Al. “What color?” Al responded, without missing a beat. “We made fun together,” says Joyce, “but there was no physical attraction at the time.”

  Their platonic humorous relationship changed radically when they met again in 1976. All of a sudden, the chemistry was there. “Al waits for things to come to him,” says Joyce. “He doesn’t go after them, or if he does, it takes him months and years to get himself revved up to do it. The females who crossed his path, those were the ones he’d take up with. I happened to re
cross his path at a time when things were right. Neither of us was dating anyone, and it didn’t hurt that by then our children—my daughters, Tracey and Jody, and Al’s kids—were all in college or beyond. After that meeting we talked on the phone for hours—and neither of us enjoys talking on the phone. A month later—it was Memorial Day 1976—he took me to Provincetown for a week.”

  They married in March of the following year. Joyce was “stunned” when he took her out to dinner and proposed, although she had taken note of the fact that that evening he was, uncharacteristically, wearing a tie. “I didn’t think Al would ever want marriage. He has to trust someone all the way. The desertion issue is a big one for him.”

  Six years earlier, in 1970, a cartoonist friend had introduced Al to the charmingly ramshackle fishing village the natives call “P-town,” at the far end of Cape Cod. The village evoked happy memories of Zarasai—the chockablock arrangement of the cottages, many built in the eighteenth century by Yankee and Portuguese settlers, the few remaining dirt roads, and, most of all, the town’s setting on the water. “I liked the old-fashioned feeling of the town.” Al also liked the fact that the town was full of artists and art galleries. He had been looking for a place to buy ever since his first visit, but it took a passionate week in P-town with Joyce to make the usually cautious Al jump at the chance, just one week later, to buy a one-bedroom apartment on the beach overlooking Provincetown Bay. They have spent every summer in Provincetown for the past thirty-four years, from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Al is a man of steady habits. In the wintertime the Jaffees have vacationed on the same beach in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with their Provincetown friends Will and Rhoda Rossmoore, since 1979.