Jules Feiffer was the subject of a Dramatists Guild “Conversation With” session moderated by Christopher Durang under the auspices of the Guild’s Projects Committee (Gretchen Cryer and Terrence McNally co-chairs, Sandra Schreiber director of special projects). The transcript of this conversation, edited with the approval of the participants, originally appeared in the Winter 1987 edition of The Dramatists Guild Quarterly and is excerpted below.
Christopher Durang: I thought the first question I would ask is about your work as a cartoonist. I am curious about how you got started.
Jules Feiffer: My mother saved everything I ever did, back to my scrawls when I was four years old. There was no question from the start that the scrawls were anything but cartoons. So it’s hard to say what started me off. I seem to have always done cartooning.
Durang: When did you start making a living at cartoons?
Feiffer: Not at four. As a kid, I was able to make a quasi-living as an assistant to some cartoonists, but when I started out on my own in the early 50s, trying to sell my own work, it developed quickly that this work was blatantly uncommercial, and I really couldn’t sell it anywhere. For years, I thought my ambitions were strictly to be a syndicated strip cartoonist, meaning that I would do a daily, which would involve six daily strips plus a Sunday page of an adventure or a humor strip. My heroes at the time—and I’m talking about the late 40s and early 50s—were people like Al Capp (“Li’l Abner”), Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”), and the man I worked for, Will Eisner, who did a story strip called “The Spirit.” I wanted to be as good or better than these gentlemen.
Then I got drafted during the Korean War, discovered the U.S. Army and so discovered rage, hate, fascism, and all those other complicated ideas that a life in the Bronx with my mother and David Feiffer had left me unaware of. This gave me a real enemy to strike out against, as opposed to my parents and high school teachers and girls who wouldn’t date me. I found that a mild liberal vision turned into a hotly radical and lifelong jaundiced vision of the state’s authority and language as used by the state. I began to do work illustrating this new vision.
The first was a rather narcissistic story called Monroe about a four-year-old boy who is drafted into the army by mistake and finds that nobody will understand that he’s only four. The form I chose was a traditional children’s book, but the story of what happens to Monroe in the army is horrendous. The people in the animation business I took it to had a hard time dealing with the anti-military politics. This was at a time when McCarthyism was officially over, but the resultant suppression and fear were still very much hallmarks of society. In fact, the blacklist in the entertainment industry didn’t end until some years later, so the entertainment industry wasn’t likely to take to anything with a message such as this.
The publishers I took it to also had problems with it. They had a hard time reconciling the innocence of the form with the bleakness of the satire. They also didn’t know how to market it. They explained to me over and over that unfortunately I was not William Steig (who was famous) or James Thurber (who was famous) or Saul Steinberg or Robert Osborne (who were famous), therefore nobody would buy since nobody had heard of me, even though they thought the work was very good. I understood instantly the necessity of becoming famous in order to sell my work. The Village Voice had started just about a year earlier. The Voice had a pitiable circulation at the time, maybe several thousand, but they were several thousand book editors. I got the cynical notion (I was 27, fully time enough to grow cynical) that the very editors who turned me down because I wasn’t known and commercial enough were among the small number of people who read the Voice, so if they saw my work there they would think, “Oh, this man’s in print. I guess he’s commercial.” So I went to The Voice, and we cut a stiff deal. They would publish anything I wrote and drew as long as I didn’t ask to be paid. It was the best deal I had yet been offered in my career, and I grabbed it. And it worked just as I had fantasized it would. An editor said, “Oh boy, this guy is good, he’s in The Voice,” and accepted the same stuff his company had turned down when I had come to their offices as an unpublished cartoonist. Eventually, a book of cartoons from The Voice was published under the title Sick, Sick, Sick. It became a best seller, and from that point on the satire I had wanted to do but couldn’t I now could do because it was marketable.
Durang: How and when did you decide to become a playwright?
Feiffer: When I was a kid, the two fields I thought I’d want to enter (had I the hubris) were literature and theatre. But I didn’t believe for a minute that I could be a “real” writer, and so I pretty much gave up those notions. Over the years, I piddled around with attempts at TV plays, particularly during the alleged golden age of television—the years of Playhouse 90 and the Philco Playhouse—but the stuff was really quite bad, and I never got very far. I didn’t really think about theatre seriously until the choice was, in a sense, removed from me.
I had written a novel in the early 60s called Harry, the Rat with Women just to prove that I could write a novel. It took two hard years, and I managed to get out 180 pages. But I’m someone who really wants to get pleasure out of his work, and there wasn’t a single moment’s pleasure in writing that book.
I had pretty much decided that fiction was not for me, and then John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I found myself thrown into a fit of gloom as to what this meant in terms of what America had become, but I saw no way of encapsulating these feelings into cartoons of six or eight panels. There was just too much on my mind and too much I wanted to say, so I started to write my second novel. In it I was going to tell all the things I felt about the country as a result of the Kennedy assassination. But I was also going to try to prove that I was a much better and more proficient writer than I was in the first novel.
I got stalled on the book and, in desperation, got myself admitted into the wonderful writers’ community upstate in Saratoga, New York, called Yaddo. I took all four hundred pages I had written up with me. I read them in one night and one day, then I went to town and bought a bottle of Scotch and finished that and then tried to figure out what to do. I was supposed to stay there for three more weeks to work on my book, but the book was terrible. But I couldn’t just go home. It would have been too humiliating. My friends had given me a party before I left. If I’d come back early, they would have laughed at me. So, since I was supposed to be up there anyway, I thought I’d take the time to look at my original notes for the book. It seemed to me that it was still a good idea and that the material I had written had had nothing to do with that idea. So I decided to start it again, only this time as a play.
The reason I had avoided doing anything in regard to theatre up to that point was that it seemed to me that any play I really liked—any play about difficult subjects or themes—closed very fast, and the hits were plays that I didn’t like. So I thought that if l ever wrote a play I liked, it would probably only run a week like the other plays I liked. Who wanted to put all that work into something that would only run a week?
But, as I say, it wasn’t working. So, being desperate to do something with this material, I ignored all the reasons for not doing it as a play and began dramatizing. And, in 24 hours, I discovered that I was a playwright. The form—creating characters, putting them into action and writing dialogue—came naturally to me, and writing it was a lark from beginning to end. Even the things that didn’t work were fun. It was fun to go back and find out why they didn’t work. Even writing the grimmest stuff in the play, which I called Little Murders, was a joy. And writing scenes of people doing awful things to each other was a joy. I never stopped having a very, very good time, and, three and a half weeks later, I had a first draft. I realized that whatever happened to the play, whatever fate it met, I was addicted. I was a playwright. As a footnote, the play opened on Broadway and it closed in a week.
Durang: Some years later Little Murders was revived off-Broadway, directed by Alan Arkin, and was quite a success. This opens the question of how different productions can affect a play.
Feiffer: I don’t think the success of the off-Broadway version was simply a matter of the quality of the production, although that certainly had something—perhaps a lot—to do with it. It also had to do with different times. I structured Little Murders to look and sound in many ways like a darkened version of a traditional Broadway comedy. You had this kooky family and their upright daughter who stands for all truth and strength and energy and all the basic verities of apple pie. She’s the darling of the family, and she brings home this guy who is some kind of weirdo radical extremist who stands for none of the things the family does. What we’ve learned from years of Broadway theatre is that this nut can get off wonderful lines and do terrific takeoffs on and insults of the family. The audience loves this as long as, according to tradition, by the climax of the play he admits that he’s wrong about everything, the family forgives him, he discovers the error of his ways and goes into business with the father. Or he reveals that he was just kidding. But the sense in the traditional scenario is, “None of this is serious, folks.” None of this titillation, none of the leg-pulling of the audience, none of the nose-tweaking—none of this is for real.
I planned the structure of the play to go by those rules. Then, just as the fadeout is about to come and the hero, Alfred, admits he was wrong about everything and he doesn’t want to live in the world that he believes in, he’d much rather live in the world that the heroine Patsy believes in, and she rises from the fallen and says, “I hope this is a lesson to you,” and they hug and kiss and the family comes on to look proudly on what is obviously the end of the play—just at that moment, from a window across the street, a sniper fires a bullet and blows her head off and the 1960s begin.
From that point on, the play investigates how these theatrical figures that we’ve known all of our lives will deal with a world that has changed on them, a world which is no longer a safe society but contains Vietnam and Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. To me, the play never was particularly about urban violence. Urban violence was a metaphor for American violence in the world, for the rules breaking down everywhere in Western society. This odd period encompassing no more than fifteen years of our lives saw all the icons crumble. Belief in the family fell apart, belief in organized religion fell apart, belief in liberal social orthodoxy fell apart, and belief not in the promise but in the fulfillment of the American dream fell apart. The belief that this was a just society, the belief that the President did what was best, that Congress was more or less honest, all of that came unglued. The play took a look at what this did to our psyches. How this crumbling of faith left us almost nothing but a sense of chaos and how violence filled the vacuum.
Durang: So you think that by the time the off-Broadway production happened, that dark view was more acceptable?
Feiffer: I think that when the play was first done in the spring of 1967, what I was saying was news. At any rate, it was news to the critics. Vietnam hadn’t appeared on the theatre pages yet, so they didn’t know about it. Audiences, however, certainly responded. The first production was dreadful, and only intermittently did the play come through. Even so, on any given night, particularly in previews, the audiences hooked into it. There was a lot of talk going on around about it, and I had this odd sensation of watching what I knew was a sure flop and at the same time feeling rising excitement because this flop was being responded to. People were responding to something coming of the stage that reflected what they felt going on in their own lives, and in the world they lived in, but which they hadn’t seen dealt with before. This wasn’t unlike the response my cartoons had received at the beginning. This was terribly exciting. About two and a half years later, when Alan Arkin’s infinitely better (and as far as I was concerned brilliant) production of the play was done downtown at Circle in the Square, it was a great success and ran a long time. But I felt that a lot of the threat of the play had dissipated simply because the audience had caught up to a lot of what was going on onstage. For me, the fun of theatre is not to be even with the audience but to pull their strings, to set them up one way and then turn around and do something else, lead them down a path where they hadn’t been before, not to make them aware of what they already know.
That’s one of the things that bothers me, by the way, about the anti-nuke plays. Generally they cover what the audience already knows. They reinforce the values the audience has brought into the theatre. This may be good politics, but I don’t find it very interesting theatre.
Durang: You’ve mentioned the family a few times in relation to Little Murders, and it made me want to jump ahead and ask you a bit about Grown Ups.
Feiffer: The family in Little Murders turned out to be— though not deliberately—a trial family for Grown Ups. For reasons I haven’t looked into, as I’ve continued writing plays I’ve moved progressively away from political and social statements toward plays more concerned with personal relationships. Whether this has to do with times changing and becoming less overtly political, moving from the 60s through the 70s and into the 80s and my passively going with that, I don’t know.
Specifically with Grown Ups, my mother had died in February of 1973. I knew that I could handle that because I’d spent eighty-five years in psychotherapy talking about my mother and working out all of our problems. Except that the day that she was buried, I couldn’t go to the funeral because I had a fever of 104 and no voice. Something had gone wrong. Since I couldn’t get a refund on my psychotherapy, I decided that this needed looking into in some other way… So maybe I’d better write a family play.
There was a problem: I am cursed with instant boredom and immediately move into naptime when I touch on anything directly autobiographical. When I start telling people about something that’s really happened, I lose interest instantly because I know the ending. I see no point in telling it. So I had to create characters who were related to me and my family but weren’t simply photographs of paste-ups of those people.
The parents in Grown Ups I made as close to my parents as I could. In the first draft of the play, I had a hard time recreating their voices. When I finished it, I realized that they were the conventional Jewish parents of modern-day novels and plays. They weren’t my parents. So I went through my files and was fortunate enough to discover letters that my parents had written to me from the 40s and 50s. I rediscovered their voices. I remembered again how they talked, how they sounded, and I started jotting down notes. Then I rewrote the play with the real parents.
After I revised the script, I put it all on tape to hear what it sounded like. It was chilling. I shuddered with the realization that I had raised Dave and Rhoda Feiffer from the dead. It was scary and wonderful and moving, but the one thing it wasn’t was a play. It was just an act of memory. So I had to go back like a playwright and do the difficult job of cutting all the stuff that was nice writing as I wrote it but turned out not to be so nice when it was all put together. So I did that and then decided, for personal reasons, that it was simply too potent a piece of work to put on the stage at that particular time. My first child was seven or eight years old then, and I really didn’t like the idea of her seeing this onstage until she was older. So I waited seven years. Then Robert Brustein went to Harvard to start the American Rep. He had read it before and liked it, and he brought it up again. We had a reading of the play in my apartment, he came up with the idea of getting John Madden to direct it, and the play was launched.
Q: Mr. Feiffer, do you feel that economics defeated your Broadway production of Grown Ups? If you had it to do over again, would you opt for an off-Broadway production first?
Feiffer: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have written any plays. As I say, this makes sense only as an obsession. Beyond that, there’s no sense at all. I keep swearing that I would never do another Broadway play, and I stick to that until I write a play and somebody says, “O.K., we’ll put this on Broadway.”
I can’t complain about the review [Grown Ups] received from Frank Rich in the New York Times, but the power of the Times did not seem to go all that far with this play. My assumption is that if it had been done off-Broadway, it would have done better. The question is would the cast have been as good? I don’t know. I’ve seen off-Broadway plays with wonderful companies, of course. But if you get a wonderful company off Broadway, you’re more likely to lose them when the agents and producers and movie and TV people come around and discover them and take them away for their projects.
Q: Grown Ups was also done on television. Did you find that the change from stage to TV — moving from a public medium to a private one — required you to do any appreciable rewrites?
Feiffer: No. I insisted that John Madden direct it again, and we put together a completely different company of actors—Jean Stapleton, Martin Balsam, Charles Grodin, Mary Lou Renner, and a Canadian actress named Patty Campanero. We had three weeks of rehearsal and shot it in something like six days. I was just bowled over by the work Madden and his company did. I had nothing to do with the production. I just dropped in now and again. I had a bit more to do with how it was edited—“This works,” “This doesn’t,” “Can we tighten this”—which was easy enough. But what happens to the play on TV is that it becomes much less a public event, one that you can laugh at with a bunch of other people in the theatre. Watching it at home on TV, in the middle of your own family situation, it seems to be much more personally threatening. The laughs go. They come back with a large audience. I showed the TV version at the New School once, and with a group of over 50 people it was a laugh riot. But in a room of five or six people, maybe you’ll get an ironic groan from them out of the entire two acts. If you ask me which I prefer, I think I love it both ways. I would hate to miss the laughs in the theatre, but I don’t miss them on TV.
The laughs I get are out of an ironic disposition toward social situations. I’m very bad at making up jokes. I was never a big gag cartoonist. My focus is more along the lines of dealing with two people in a relationship wanting different things and how they do or do not deal with that. How they do or do not deal with that may come out funny, but it’s not because they’re joking. It’s because they’re not joking. It’s because the characters have no sense of humor about the situation they’re in, no distance. So the laugh comes not out of a joke but out of thwarted objectives or outright lies which the characters may not catch but the audience does.
Q: Can I ask you about screen writing, with particular reference to your work with Robert Altman and Mike Nichols?
Feiffer: Altman has a better visual sense than just about any other American filmmaker. He can take anything and make it visually credible, and so I was sure he could take the Segar characters that I had in my Popeye script—the Popeye of 1936, 1937, 1938—and make that world real. That is what he did, exactly. He cast almost impeccably. He had a town built that housed cartoon characters as if they were people out of a documentary. He created a reality on the screen that made almost anything possible. And he shot maybe 45 or 50 percent of the script I had written. This was something of a record for him. I mean, when you work with Altman, you know from the start what the rules are going to be, so I had no real complaints. I knew what I was going to be getting into. We had our disagreements, our fights, but unlike some other industry people I’ve had fights with, he behaved like a gent. He showed extraordinary generosity during the shooting of the film.
I did have problems with the film. Like any bigoted writer, I think if he had shot every line I had put into the script, it would be a better film. On the other hand, I think in many ways it is pretty good. I know that it has been very successful in video stores and that kids love it. People talk to me about it a lot, now even more than when it came out. So it seems to have a shelf life, which pleases me. That’s the story on Altman.
With Nichols, it’s another story. As I said before, I wrote Carnal Knowledge originally as a play, and I sent it to Nichols. I had originally sent Little Murders to Nichols, and I’d never heard from him about it. So I was surprised when, within 24 hours, he called up to tell me he loved the play but he thought it wasn’t a play but a movie, that we could shoot it just as it was written (which turned out to be grossly untrue); also that the role of the lawyer from the Bronx could only be played by a young actor who was in a new movie I should see called Easy Rider. Jack Nicholson. So I went to see Easy Rider and thought, “This is weird.” And Nichols said that the other part could only be played by Art Garfunkel, who had never acted in a movie until something Nichols was then finishing called Catch-22. I thought that was weird, too. And then he suggested Candice Bergen, who I didn’t think could do it. And Ann-Margret, to whom I objected strongly.
It generally went that way. I had learned a bit about casting from the Broadway version of Little Murders. I was directly involved in several awful mistakes in casting on that, so when Arkin was going to do Little Murders, the one demand I made was that he not consult me on casting, and he didn’t. Every time I heard that so-and-so was going to be cast in a particular part, I said, “That’s awful. That’s a terrible mistake.” And his choices turned out to be perfectly right. So, when Carnal Knowledge was being cast, every time I thought Nichols was making a mistake, I figured I still had a bad sense of casting (I am much better at casting my friends’ plays than my own). I didn’t quite stay out of it, but I made leaps of faith with Mike that paid off.
As far as script changes went, it really was a matter of taking stage dialogue—which sounds fine in the theatre but sounds weird on film—and finding new ways of saying the same things or finding visual metaphors. A lot of the time, material which would have been fine onstage is redundant in film because, say, a closeup of someone’s eye shifting will get across what onstage might have required explanation. It was about this sort of thing that Mike was particularly knowledgeable.
There’s one scene in Carnal Knowledge in which the character played by Nicholson and the character played by Ann-Margret are in the bedroom, and Nicholson says the most awful things in the world to this woman. He curses her up and down, verbally and morally numbs her. The night before we were supposed to shoot this scene, Mike said, “Let’s go for a drive.” So we did, and he said, “I don’t know about this scene. I don’t know whether audiences will accept it. It may be too strong. I just don’t know. I’m really worried about it.” He didn’t ask me to defend it, and I didn’t. I just didn’t. By then we had been into the movie long enough so that I felt I didn’t have to argue about it or say, “This is crazy. What do you mean?” At the end of the drive, he said, “No, we have to do it. We have to shoot it because this is what would happen.” He understood from his own point of view that the logic of the story he was telling made the scene absolutely necessary, so, despite his concern about the audience reaction, he went in and shot it.
Durang: One of my favorite scenes in Carnal Knowledge is the one in which Nicholson shows slides of the women he’s been involved with, talks about each of them and is absolutely beastly about each one. I was curious, was that in the play as well?
Feiffer: Yes, and it was even longer.
Q: I wonder what your thoughts are on being a hyphenated artist, someone who’s successful as both a cartoonist and a playwright.
Feiffer: When I embarked on my theatrical career, I knew that, because of the subject matter that interested me, it would be perilous. But I was able to enter it with total abandon because I had flop insurance in that I was already a successful cartoonist. If you have success and only use it to conserve what you’ve got, then you become a kind of prisoner to it, and that stops you from progressing in your work. It seemed to me that if I wasn’t able to use my success as a tradeoff against commercial failure in the theatre and getting lumps from the critics, then there was no point to that success. This was what I had in mind when I started, and it helped me launch myself into work that I had been afraid to do before because I’d been afraid of failure. Having a cartoon that comes out in front of an audience once a week guarantees that you can recover from a play that gets terrible reviews —though I must say, it takes longer periods of time for me to recover these days. I’m not as resilient as I used to be.
