DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter, died Friday at his home in Richfield Springs, New York. He was 95. Feiffer's syndicated strip titled "Feiffer," used simple line drawings to portray characters in scenes that satirized contemporary life. The strip began in The Village Voice and ran for more than four decades. Feiffer's creative impulses found expression in many media. He illustrated the classic children's book "The Phantom Tollbooth." He wrote screenplays for the films "Little Murders" and "Carnal Knowledge," among others. He wrote novels and Broadway plays, and his cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Playboy Magazine. Terry spoke to Jules Feiffer in 1982 when a collection of his cartoons titled "America: From Eisenhower To Reagan" was published. He told her that finding anyone who knew what to do with his cartoons and his particular brand of humor took a while.
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JULES FEIFFER: I'd gone around for years peddling my work, and I'd take it to editors of publishing houses because in those days, I was helping to publish little books of cartoon satire. And what I generally got from these editors was not frowns of disapproval. They'd just take the stuff, and they'd hold it for a while, and they'd laugh like crazy and they'd call me up and be wildly enthusiastic and tell me they couldn't use it and didn't want to publish it. And the reasons all seemed to be that they had no idea how to market this, that they didn't know who would buy it, that I was an unknown quantity, that my name was not Saul Steinberg or James Thurber or William Steig, all of whom were quite popular at the time. I was quite unknown at the time. Since nobody would pay me to have it in print, I decided to get it in for free and went down to the Voice, which was happy to take anybody's work for free, and that's how the cartoon began. The Voice at the time had a small circulation, something like five or 10,000, but it was an increasingly knowledgeable and influential circulation. And I knew that if I were picked up by Voice readers, including those very editors who turned me down because I had no market, once those editors knew that I had - that they had five or six friends who were reading me, that becomes the market. Suddenly, what was uncommercial becomes possibly commercial, and I'm in business. And that's what I did, and that's exactly how it happened.
TERRY GROSS: You wrote for Playboy for a while. And in your book, you said that Hugh Hefner was really a terrific editor, and I think you were surprised at that.
FEIFFER: Well, Hefner came along still when I was making absolutely no money - zilch money - out of the cartoon. And he was the first one to pay me to do the work that I cared about. And at the time, he said he wanted me to do just the sort of cartoons I wanted, sort of cartoons that were appearing in The Voice in strip form, and didn't want to do anything to alter that. And I did, and I was just as suspicious of Playboy as everybody was then and is to this day. And I found that Hefner was easily the most sensitive cartoon editor I've ever had anything to do with. And all the suggestions - and he would make many. I've never seen anybody deal with a cartoon with such meticulous care and concern, possibly due to the fact that he had begun as a cartoonist, was an amateur cartoonist, had - first wanted to be one. In any case, he would send back my roughs with two- or three-page, single-spaced typed letters making all sorts of suggestions, and often, they were very, very good, sometimes they were good and bad. Sometimes they were just bad. And whenever we disagreed, he said, OK, run it your way. There was never any problem between us. He never pulled any rank, there was never any tension. There was - I mean, he was always the most affable colleague to work with. And only years later, when I got into the theater and met people who were also just as easily to work with did I meet his equal. Certainly not in publishing.
GROSS: Let's talk about some of the presidents who you've cartooned and who are featured in your book. You said that Kennedy's face changed so much when he was in office. Did - and I remember how true that is.
FEIFFER: Well, I was talking about how I had difficulty drawing Kennedy because he was so handsome, and it was hard to - he was just a conventionally handsome man, it seemed to me. And that after three years in office, that problem was cured for me as a caricaturist because his face heavied, he got jowls. Now, some of that may have been the cortizone. He had Addison's disease, I think, and he was on this drug which does thicken your features and heavy it up and made him no less striking looking, it just made him easier for my pen.
GROSS: What about Johnson? Was he easy to do?
FEIFFER: Not in the beginning because I liked him. Lyndon Johnson was the only president in all the time I've been doing cartoons who I was actually very fond of in his first nine months in office, after he succeeded Kennedy and got through an unprecedented amount of social legislation - certainly unprecedented since the first New Deal days. And I thought Kennedy was style without substance, and I thought Johnson was substance without style, and I much preferred him to Kennedy. I thought he was wonderful. And I had a great deal of trouble arriving at a caricature for a man who looked so clearly unlike a hero and yet I felt was heroic. And I didn't know how to go about it, and I tried drawing him, and I didn't get him very well, and I kept my caricatures down.
And then the one and only time it's ever happened, I was invited down to the White House for some kind of function - lunch out on the White House lawn - and actually got to see Lyndon Johnson in the flesh and found him very different to look at than the photographs and the pictures on a television screen because I saw in him something that wasn't yet reflected in the writing about him or in the way we saw him. I saw a real meanness there, you know, and I saw it not in the famous nose but in the set of his mouth, which is very, very tight and without humor, and the eyes, which were very cold and suspicious. And I remember telling people at the time he looks like the man who turns down your loan at the bank. And that affected - that taught me how to draw him. And within another six months or so, he was no longer this presidential hero of mine. He was now a war criminal because he had gone to the polls as a peace candidate and then immediately after his inauguration started bombing North Vietnam.
GROSS: What about Ford?
FEIFFER: Well, Ford I found wonderful to draw. Most cartoonists didn't like him. They found him so innocuous and a kind of meatball. And his very meatballism (ph) struck me as a wonderful thing to work with. And looking for an idea for a cartoon, I did what I often do when I'm out of ideas - I started doodling, and I found myself drawing - doing a drawing, for no reason at all, of the Frankenstein monster. And I didn't know why I was doing that, and I said, oh, my God, it's Gerry Ford.
GROSS: (Laughter).
FEIFFER: So...
GROSS: How did you recognize Gerry Ford in him?
FEIFFER: Well, just because the two of them strongly resemble each other. You know, my unconscious brought Gerry Ford with a nail in his neck (laughter). And, yeah, Ford had this big, clumsy, shambling way of moving, not unlike that of the Frankenstein monster. So I did a drawing of Henry Kissinger as Dr. Frankenstein and Gerry Ford as being on the table, being invented.
GROSS: (Laughter).
FEIFFER: And I had great fun with that.
GROSS: I suppose we should get back to Nixon.
FEIFFER: We always get back to Nixon. I think I'll be probably doing cartoons on Nixon in 20 years. He'll outlast us all.
GROSS: Is it fun, if that's the right word, to have someone like Nixon in the White House for you as a cartoonist?
FEIFFER: Well, Watergate was enormous fun. While serious people around the country like Eric Sevareid and others were talking about the tragedy of Watergate, everybody I knew was laughing like crazy. And one couldn't get enough of these characters on television. And so I had great fun, you know, in and out of the cartoon.
GROSS: Well, let's skip ahead to Reagan because of his Hollywood background. Can you use that in your cartoons?
FEIFFER: Well, from the start, I described Reagan as the candidate of movie America. And I write in the book - in the introduction to this section - that there are two Americas out there. There's a real America of which Ronald Reagan is ignorant and there's movie America, which he's the most qualified source we have. And it's a land which is made up - who's substance is made up of a myth, and it's a land of small towns and white picket fences and shady lane streets and small, framed houses with happy little families and an Irish cop on the corner. And there's movie church where you - everybody goes to hear movie sermon where Jesus Christ is the Gipper and God is our gross national product. And Reagan actually believes in that world that he was taught existed on the studio back lot. And since most other systems of belief have collapsed over the past 20 years - the belief in the American dream, the belief in civility, the belief in the melting pot, the belief, even in a pluralistic society - since people who once put a great stock into that mythology which can generally be described under the umbrella term of the American dream, since we've lost faith in that, there was some desperate need to go to some kind of faith, that - somebody who believed in something. And when there's no other faith left, you go to movie faith. And we had the perfect man that seems to apply movie faith, and that was a real movie star.
GROSS: Do you think he really believes that, or do you think he's good enough - a good enough actor to make us believe that he believes it?
FEIFFER: If you see him on the screen, you know he was never a good enough actor. I think...
GROSS: (Laughter).
FEIFFER: ...He really does believe it.
DAVIES: Jules Feiffer spoke with Terry Gross in 1982. Feiffer died Friday. He was 95. To find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair. Susan Nyakundi directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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