Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Al has no separate studio in Provincetown, so he sets up his drawing board in a corner of the living room. Just before Memorial Day, they pack their rental car with the few critical items they must transport to their summer home: Al’s favorite paintbrushes, some illustration boards for the fold-in, and his collection of houseplants.

  The windowsill in Al’s New York studio is a small greenhouse. Since he left Babylon, it’s as close as he can get to gardening. Al is particularly gifted at cultivating violets, so gifted that he has cloned sixteen plants from fallen violet leaves. “I love to see things grow. When I find seeds lying around on the ground, I feel compelled to find out what’s going to come out of them.”

  His current vegetative triumph is a fifteen-inch-tall stem of a plant that looks suspiciously like marijuana but is, Al believes, on its way to being a tropical tree. He found the seed on the ground in Mexico. Stuck in the same pot is a tiny faux stem with leaves and, where a flower ought to be, the face of MAD’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. Nearby, in the intensive-care section of the windowsill, Al continues to tend to a desiccated tropical orchid plant that’s been dormant for seven years. “I’m afraid it may have had an orchidecto-my,” he explains.

  Joyce has needed to lay down the law about just how many plants Al can bring with him. “Al used to build elaborate boxes for each of the plants so that nothing would happen to the flowers in the car.” Now she permits the orchid, a few violets, and maybe a cactus.

  Provincetown is Jaffee’s reward for enduring yet another winter in Manhattan. After a subdued nine months living, working, and dressing like an adult in Manhattan, Jaffee, by the time he gets to P-town, is more than ready to let his “bad kid” out. For special occasions he keeps and sometimes even wears a pair of high-topped lace-up boots that might have belonged to Li’l Abner. On the tip of each shiny toe, Al has painted the reflection of a window. “That’s a cartoon standard from way back—it’s the way Rube Goldberg and Al Capp showed a shine on a shoe.”

  A few years ago, just for the fun of it, the Al that doesn’t want to grow up created life-sized cardboard caricatures of himself and Joyce, which now sit upright against the headboard of their double bed. “That way,” Joyce explains, deadpan, “we know which side of the bed to get into.

  “There are two Aljaffees,” says Joyce. “One doesn’t want to grow up; he wants to remain a little boy. He wants to make light of everything, but the other one, underneath it all, is very serious.”

  Al tries to be on vacation when he’s in Provincetown but with little success. When he was younger, he allowed himself at least some free time each day for fishing and tennis, but no longer. The grip of work keeps him pinned to his drawing board, except for a break for lunch at a restaurant or dinner out with friends. He keeps promising himself that he’ll retire, that next summer he won’t do any work on the Cape, but he never keeps his promise.

  “My ideal day at the Cape is a day I’ve never had. Somewhere way in the distant past, I hated work. I looked for every possibility to goof off. I hated being tied down. I wanted freedom, the freedom I had in Zarasai. When I came to America, I saw that everything was so rigid, so controlled. At school I had assignments. Then when I got to the army it was the same thing—more work, more assignments, more duties. And when I got out of the army I got married and had kids, and that was more work. All this work finally squeezed out any sense of indulgence that I used to enjoy. Some kind of meshugge work ethic established itself in me, so that I don’t really enjoy free time anymore. If I’m not working, I’m kind of miserable.” In this post-Freudian era, Al tends to interpret as pathological what might, in another age, be appreciated as a consuming passion for his work.

  “My obsession is directly related to my lifelong fantasy that as soon as I finish this damn assignment I’ll be free, I won’t worry. I’ll blow up an outhouse, I’ll swipe some fruit, I’ll go down to the lake, I’ll build a raft, and I’ll just float around.”

  Yet as much as Al loves Provincetown, feeling more relaxed there than anywhere else, he never quite feels at home. “I have the fear of the outsider who is behaving himself in America. I have a desire not to rock the boat. I envy people who feel comfortable. I envy the people I see in downtown Provincetown who flout the law. There’s a sign in front of the Lobster Pot restaurant that says PRIVATE PARKING, PLEASE KEEP CLEAR. Invariably somebody’s parked there. Some people have the balls to park in an illegal zone in the middle of a resort town, and then yell at the cops for even implying they have no right to park there. A guy who can do that is home.

  “When Joyce asks me to drop her at the library in downtown Provincetown, where there’s never a legal parking place, right away I ask her, ‘Do you mind jumping out of the car while it’s moving?’ Sure, I’m fearful. I see the shlumpy things I do. I’m uneasy ordering food in a restaurant. I’m afraid to spend money. Every once in a while I tell myself, ‘Live it up, you’re an American.’ I don’t know what I’m afraid of; maybe that they’ll send me back.”

  WHEN JOYCE AND AL MARRIED in 1977, Harry recognized that his relationship with Al would change completely. It wasn’t just the marriage that sent Harry packing; it was Joyce herself. During her decade of widowhood, she had transformed herself from a Long Island housewife and mother into a guitar-playing vocalist with a folk group and had received a degree from the Columbia University School of Social Work. It was the fact that Joyce was a social worker, a profession that was allied, at least in Harry’s mind, with psychiatry, that frightened Harry off. He’d had enough of psychiatrists. They kept trying to make him take his medication.

  Harry had also had enough of Al. In Harry’s mind, Al had become the big boss to his slave laborer. Harry abruptly decided he no longer wanted to work with Al and went to live in a cheap hotel nearby. “He had saved practically all the pay I’d given him—he had three or four thousand dollars in the bank—and he was free as a bird to wander the streets. It was the right time for him to split and the right time for me to be free of him. We parted amicably. We didn’t need each other anymore, and we didn’t keep in touch.”

  On Father’s Day 1985, Joyce and Al were in bed asleep when the phone rang. It was Lenore. She’d been calling Harry’s number all day and into the evening. Would Al please go over and see what was wrong? It was unlike Harry to be out so late.

  Al begged off. “Lenore, I’ve had a long day, we’re in bed, and I’m not going to go over to Harry’s hotel on a wild-goose chase. Who knows what he’s doing?”

  Lenore and Marilyn went over themselves and found Harry dead in his bed. Like his father, he had died of a heart attack, alone. He was sixty-three years old.

  Al was not devastated by Harry’s death the way he was by David’s. “His death coincided with the new and exciting life I had started with Joyce. I had my sights set on life. I had dealt with so many deaths and separations that I experienced Harry’s death as another split-up. I had been through enough to know that I must deal with reality. I mourn in my own way. I’m caring, but I’m not sentimental. Sentimentality gets you nowhere. Hurling yourself onto the casket is just your latent acting ability coming to the fore. Harry’s early death was inevitable. He didn’t trust doctors. He once came up with the notion that eating tremendous amounts of bacon fat is good for you. A year of eating bacon fat three times a day is going to do it.

  “It’s not as if Harry died suddenly overnight. Harry’s demise was a long time building. When you finally get there it’s like in a play, when you reach the expected denouement. It’s sad. It brings to mind the nice things you did together, but then you say good-bye.”

  Bernard, aged eighty-five, is Al’s only surviving brother. He married a partially deaf woman and had three children. Although he lives in Astoria, in Queens, Al sees him perhaps twice a year. One of Bernard’s daughters brings him to Al’s apartment. They hug each other with shared, abundant affection, but communication remains a problem that makes their visits mutually frustrating.

  Al is proud of Ber
nard for maintaining a happy, loving disposition and for functioning well in spite of his multiple problems. When he graduated from the New York School for the Deaf, Bernard, along with a deaf companion, traveled all over the country selling sign language cards. Later he took a job in a silk-screening factory. When the fumes from that job made him sick, he tried his hand at art. “He figured that with two artistic brothers he might have some talent, too,” says Al. “He didn’t. It was kind of touching.” Ultimately, Al helped Bernard find a job in a Long Island workshop that had a government grant to hire handicapped people. There Bernard supplemented his income by driving three other handicapped workers to and from work, charging them for the price of gas. “That’s something for a man who is as handicapped as he is.” Al regards his three brothers as casualties of Europe. “None of us escaped scot-free, but they took a bigger beating.”

  7

  OUR MAN FROM MARS

  “You can’t go on forever.”

  STARTING IN THE EARLY 1960s, MAD magazine was bought and sold several times. In 1961, Bill Gaines sold it to Premier Industries. “Gaines called all the freelancers together,” says Al, “and assured us that nothing would change. Although he no longer owned the magazine, he would still control it. I put my faith in Gaines—he was ‘Big Daddy’—and hoped for the best. My whole life has been about dealing with things over which I had no control.”

  A few years later, Premier sold Mad to National Periodical Publications. Then, in 1969, National Periodicals merged with the Kinney Parking Company, bought Warner Brothers Movies, and changed the name to Warner Communications. In 1989, Warner Communications became Time Warner. Throughout this succession of owners, Gaines was allowed to run the magazine without corporate interference, although Kinney put pressure on him to move MAD from its eponymous offices at 485 MADison Avenue to Time Warner’s corporate office at 1700 Broadway. Gaines resisted and got his way. “Essentially,” says Al, “he told the executives at Time Warner that MAD would move over his dead body.” Gaines told Al that he was sure that a move to corporate headquarters would be the death knell for MAD, that a zany magazine could not thrive in an atmosphere where corporate suits were always looking over your shoulder.

  In 1992, Bill Gaines died, and over his dead body, MAD moved to the Time Warner headquarters. “There was a big shake-up. A lot of the people that Gaines kept on out of his sense of loyalty were eased out. I was asked to limit my work to the fold-in and, now and then, a ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.’ Our loyal little crew was no more.” Then, in 2001, the magazine took another step down the corporate road and, after nearly fifty years, began taking advertising.

  Bill Gaines’s prediction turned out to be true. The new corporate offices are laid out like an insurance company: not a bit welcoming, not a bit zany, although poster-sized reproductions of MAD covers line the walls of all the corridors. Among them is a blast from the past, the first MAD magazine cover ever, illustrated then by artist/editor Harvey Kurtzman, which greets visitors as the elevator doors glide open on the fourth floor. Still, Al thinks of the place as a fortress. Security measures initiated after 9/11 have certainly impeded accessibility. “I call in ahead when I want to deliver something and ask them to lower the bridge over the moat,” says Al. The old headquarters on Madison Avenue were small, intimate, cluttered, and easygoing. Class trips traipsed through constantly. Kids poked their heads into editorial offices—Gaines’s in particular, where a life-sized head of King Kong, fashioned by Sergio Aragones, hung suspended outside his office window. At today’s MAD, it’s the interns, part of a recruiting program initiated by John Ficarra to help keep the magazine razor-sharp and relevant, who poke their heads into editorial offices, sometimes to remind Ficarra that the joke about Star Wars won’t work. Most of MAD’s current readers weren’t yet born when that movie was released.

  Under the coeditorship of Nick Meglin and John Ficarra—Al Feldstein had retired in 1984—it soon became clear that MAD was going to become a different magazine, one that had less of a need for Al Jaffee. The word went out that the suits wanted the magazine to be “edgier” to appeal to a more modern generation as well as an older audience. To Ficarra, this meant less whimsy, less sweet stuff about pets, and no more Mother Goose satires. Those soft days were over, and with them went a large part of Al’s output and income. Television and movie satires—which Al rarely did even in his heyday—would continue to be included in the new MAD. Politics would play a much larger role, reflecting Ficarra’s personal passion and the 24/7 cable news coverage that has made politics into a form of entertainment and an easy satiric target. “Edgier” also meant more celebrities, whose multiple marriages, divorces, adoptions, drug addictions, and plastic surgeries were the red meat of satire, but Al no longer wanted to keep up with the Zeitgeist if it meant having to watch celebrities on TV and read about them in People. Most significant, everything in the new MAD would be shorter. There would be no more of the seven-page spreads that Al depended upon for his living. “People have shorter attention spans,” says Ficarra. “We’ve deliberately chopped all the articles and made them shorter.”

  Meglin and Ficarra made another critical change that would cramp Al’s style. They didn’t want so many repeat features, as with the MAD Hate Books and More MAD Hate Books that appealed to pre-and postadolescent kids in the seventies. “We had gone to this well too many times ourselves,” says Ficarra. “We had kept on too many writers we shouldn’t have.” The new MAD would never buy a cartoon in which it is recommended that, instead of hiring babysitters, parents should cover a wall with Velcro, dress their baby in Velcro, and stick the kid on the wall. Al didn’t disagree. “Today a joke like that would be old-fashioned and silly.”

  About ten years ago, MAD polled its readers. “The biggest shock to us,” says Ficarra, “was that the magazine had aged up. The average age of our readers was twenty-four; the median age was about sixteen. We learned that we had a two-hump readership. We got kids at about twelve, lost them when they started getting interested in sex and cars, and then picked them up again when they got out of college. Then again, we get some readers at twelve and we never lose them. Harvey Kurtzman, originally inspired by college humor magazines, had aimed for college-age kids at the beginning,” says Ficarra, and then MAD started to evolve downward toward younger readers.

  The fact that kids were reading less and watching TV more was just one of the reasons that MAD’s circulation had fallen from its high of more than 2 million in 1974 to 233,408 in 2000. All magazines were seeing their numbers drop precipitously. Another was that under an aging Gaines, the magazine’s arteries had hardened. “It didn’t change enough editorially,” says Ficarra. “Even its look was off. Video games were coming along with their vibrant colors while MAD, printed in black and white on cheap paper, looked like it was produced in a third-world country.” MAD also didn’t keep up with what Ficarra feels obliged, but not happy, to acknowledge is the coarsening of society. MAD had been kept very “safe.”

  The new MAD’s in-your-face crudity bothers Al. “In the old MAD, if you wanted to indicate that someone was passing wind, you would draw wiggly lines behind him. No one would say, ‘Is he farting?’ Now they do.” In the current MAD, they use boobs and rely on stars (g*d damn) to avoid what some might consider blasphemy, or sh*t to divert accusations of bad taste.

  There are mature, sensitive grown-ups at large today, former MAD readers, people who enjoy chamber music and novels by Henry James, who still remember and revere Jaffee’s cartoon parody of New York City’s pooper-scooper law. “Ever notice how TV commercials handle unpleasant subjects?” he asked his readers in an editorial disclaimer. “Like when they substitute nice clean plastic discs for cruddy false teeth? Well, MAD is going to substitute nice clean link sausages for you-know-what. So if you see anything else depicted in this next article, don’t blame us for your disgusting imagination.” Al would rather use euphemisms, but he concedes that “for each of us, crude is a different thing.” One man�
�s euphemism is another man’s sh*t.

  But Al has no real argument with the changes at MAD. “They made a legitimate judgment. MAD is now soliciting work from underground cartoonists. They’ve taken on some wonderful new people. That’s the way it goes. You can’t go on forever.

  “I’ve gone to bar mitzvahs where someone introduces me. ‘This is Al Jaffee of MAD magazine,’ the person says, and the kid says, ‘What’s that?’” But to his older fans, and to the generation who first discovered him who are now in their fifties and sixties, Al Jaffee’s celebrity remains intact and unique. Stephen Colbert celebrated Al’s eighty-fifth birthday on The Colbert Report with a fold-in birthday cake that featured the message “Al, you have repeatedly shown artistry & care of great credit to your field.” When the center of the cake was cut out and the two ends moved together, what was left of the message read “Al, you’re old.”

  “The fold-in and ‘Snappy Answers’ are evergreen,” says Ficarra. “The fold-in is one of the few things we have that requires reader involvement. It’s a signature piece for the magazine that nobody else does.” While Al is content to fade away as a freelancer for MAD, he draws the line at “entirely”; he can’t imagine life without what he calls his “fucking fold-ins.”