Cartoonist, illustrator, and writer
(1929– )
My sister Mimi was a big shot in high school. She got good grades, she was articulate, and she was also a dogmatic Stalinist. She was a Communist and she was going to convert me. She got me to join a youth organization, American Youth for Democracy. AYD. It was a Communist front, which in those days, to the world at large, was presented as progressive. What is now called progressive had nothing to do with what used to be a “red” word. As a matter of fact, when they formed a political party, they called it the Progressive Party and got as many people from the outside as possible. They ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948. If you were on the left at all, you supported Wallace for president. Do you remember the comedian Milt Kamen? Milt was a friend of mine. In his act he talked about his boyhood in Brooklyn, and he said, “When I was a kid in the Depression, my Jewish neighborhood was a very political one. There was the Communist Party, there was the Socialist Party, there was a Socialist Workers Party, there was a Socialist Labor Party, and there was the American Labor Party. I had to be twenty-one and move to Manhattan before I even heard of the Democratic and Republican parties.” And that’s pretty much the way it was for us too.
But my sister’s Communist friends were infinitely more interesting and smarter and wittier than my friends, and I liked them better. My friends were these would-be thugs who I adjusted to because that’s who we were hanging around with. Like every kid, I had an assortment of friends who I thought of as best friends and better friends and first best friend and second best friend, but none of them had my interests. I mean, they all knew that I was going to be a cartoonist or wanted to be a cartoonist. They didn’t read but I did. They weren’t political and I was. The way that gays were closeted in those days as a young man or woman—I was a “closet Jules.” I hid out. I didn’t even know what a Jules was at that time, but I knew that I wasn’t like them. At one point, three or four of us were walking around Parkchester, which was a neighborhood I enjoyed walking in because it was middle class and upper middle class. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where we lived on Stratford Avenue. There was a beautiful sunset. I commented on the sunset and I was called a fag. I learned what I could say and what I couldn’t say, and I accepted all of that.
I was also an abject physical coward in every possible way. Therefore most of my real life was lived inward in my imagination. Radio was a close personal friend. Movies were close personal friends. Fred Astaire became a role model, and to this day I follow his lead. He took something that was impossibly hard and made it look effortless. And that’s my goal as an artist. To make it look as if you’re not doing anything. I use that image both as a cartoonist and as a writer. To leave no footprints. About ten years after Carnal Knowledge came out, I saw a screening of it somewhere and halfway through the movie when I saw Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, I thought, they’re making up their lines. They’re improvising. And I was very pleased that that’s how it felt. It didn’t feel as if those lines had been written.
I used to be able to remember my dreams. I always loved this. I would dream that I was in a movie theater and I would walk in, in the middle of whatever the movie was. I’d see the movie to the end and then it would start again. Then it comes to where I had come in, in the dream I say, “Oh, this is where I came in,” and then I’d wake up.
I was always terrified of leaving the neighborhood or leaving home because I had then, and have now, no sense of direction. It isn’t as if I have a bad sense of direction. I have none. Even in New York, if I get out of the subway I can walk half a block and not know where I am, right in the middle of Manhattan. So I got lost all the time when I was a kid. And in those days I would be terrified because I didn’t know where I was and would be embarrassed if I had to ask people how to get to Stratford Avenue, where I lived. I wouldn’t go to Manhattan until I was in my late teens because I was terrified of getting lost. To this day I get lost all the time.
While I was terrified of getting on a subway going to a theater in Manhattan, somehow or other the Bronx seemed safer. So I saw Death of a Salesman at the Windsor Theater near Fordham Road and fell in love with plays. I saw theater for the first time at the Windsor and would take two trolleys to get there, as I recall. And I loved that. I saw Ethel Barrymore at the Windsor. I still remember the actor who played Willy Loman. Duncan Baldwin.
At school, I essentially wasn’t good at anything except bullshitting. I was the Jewish wiseguy. I was funny! As a “closet Jules,” I understood what I could get away with and what I couldn’t. And what I couldn’t get away with was talking seriously about any serious ideas because that was always suspect. But being funny was great and I was a funny guy. I made people laugh. I amused them. So I knew how to do that. And I knew how to draw cartoons and people liked that. I loved that because it was really where I wanted to be. Al Capp who did Li’l Abner and Milton Caniff who did Terry and the Pirates, I mean, I had real heroes. And I learned my craft by studying the work of these guys in the daily newspapers.
But I did have one friend in the Bronx, Irwin, who read books, who liked to talk, who liked opera. He was on his way to being an intellectual and because we were teenagers, you know, we had hard-ons all the time. And his luck went amok because he came from an Orthodox Jewish family and he happened to fall in love with an Italian Catholic girl. It broke the whole family up. It wasn’t because of her but because of the upset in the family. When he got out of college, he married a Jewish girl but changed his name. He never had contact with his parents again. All because he was so angry and so upset that they tried to sit on him, which they did.
Years later, after I had become known, I was on a radio show being interviewed on one of those call-in shows. A woman got on the phone and said, “Jules, this is Irwin’s mother. Do you know where he is?” Just like that. On the air! Well, I said, “If you give the person who takes the phone calls your number, I will call you as soon as I get off the air and we’ll talk.”
So then I called her and we had a painful talk. I told her what little I knew. I’d seen Irwin a few times after school but had lost touch. Then later I heard that he had died of a heart attack because his daughter, who worked for Tom Brokaw when he had the evening news, contacted me. But she had no contact with her grandparents. She didn’t know anyone in her father’s family. That’s why I’m so fond of religion. The day after my bar mitzvah was the last day I went to synagogue.
My father was a Polish Jew. My mother was also a Polish Jew, but after first settling in New York her family moved to Richmond, Virginia. She grew up as a southern girl. She didn’t have a southern accent and didn’t have a Jewish accent. She sounded, as I used to say, like Walter Cronkite, quintessentially American. And because in our Jewish neighborhood you had either a New York accent or an Eastern European accent, she was Eleanor Roosevelt. She was treated as the lady on the hill because she sounded superior to everybody and also felt that she was superior.
She had always wanted to be, and was, a fashion designer. She kept the family afloat during the Depression while my father got occasional jobs. Essentially she would go door to door to those in the rag trade on Seventh Avenue and sell sketches for three dollars a sketch. She was very adept at that and kept us going somehow. Over the years, in criticism of my father, she would say, “He’s a good man, but…”
My mother was very seductive with other people and with her own children in terms of being charming—and then Hitler. All my friends and all my sister’s friends would fall in love with my mother. She would seduce them socially.
I don’t know the following for sure, but she didn’t believe in sex. I think she got married because her family made her. It’s what I’ve surmised. If my mother had her druthers, she would have been a single woman with a career as an artist or an illustrator and wouldn’t have had sex at all, although if she did it might have been with a woman. I don’t think she was attracted to men. And I don’t think for a second that she was attracted to my father. But my mother came from a poor Jewish family and she wasn’t going to defy anybody. One of the things that terrified her was when her Communist daughter and her radical son defied—no, went into the business of defiance. That scared the hell out of her.
Because of her art background, the fact that I wanted to be a cartoonist was fine with her. When she was growing up, some of the cartoonists, like those in The New Yorker, had great reputations. The newspaper strip cartoonists had great reputations too. Some of them went on the vaudeville circuit and she loved show business. She used to quote me stories about Moss Hart and what a down-and-out kid he was in the Bronx but how he promised his mother that when he got to be rich and famous he would buy her a mink coat. My mother expected that of me. And I promised that I would buy her a mink coat.
Mike Nichols was telling me that when he was casting The Graduate he had Redford in to interview, because Redford was so brilliant in Barefoot in the Park. Mike was talking to him about the role of Benjamin in the movie, saying, “You know what it is when you’re that age and you want to get the girl and you’re not sure you can get the girl and you’re not sure of anything.” Redford had no idea what he was talking about. Because he was Robert Redford. There are those kids who grow up to have the good fortune of being Robert Redford, knowing that they’ll always be Robert Redford, or O. J. Simpson before he became an accused killer. I think the reason he found himself in that position is that from the time he’s a kid, he’s a star. No one ever says no to him. He was handsome. He was the best athlete in the world and he was charming. There was nothing he couldn’t have.
We who weren’t the best looking, we who weren’t the biggest, we who wouldn’t automatically have women fall all over us had to find our own way of figuring out how to deal with rejection, failure, high-level schmuckery. How to deal with the casual insults of others and the not so casual. I used to say in my twenties, and I felt it was true, I’m gonna have to get famous in order to get girls. Because I’m essentially shy, I don’t know how to start a conversation. If I sit on a plane, and this is still true, if I sit on a plane next to a stranger, unless he or she talks we can ride around the world and not a word will be said.
Fame really meant a lot. When people talk about the downside of fame, I don’t know what they’re talking about because it’s only been good for me.
The reason I’m a cartoonist is because I was good at it. If I could throw and catch a ball, maybe I would’ve been an athlete. But I couldn’t throw or catch a ball easily. I gravitated to the thing that I felt I had a chance to be successful at. You want to break into some circle of acceptance with people who’ll buy your story and pay attention to you. It was about being paid attention to. I wanted to go out in the street and get attention when I was a kid so I would draw cartoons on the sidewalk. I got some attention because I could do that and the others couldn’t. I could draw Dick Tracy and Popeye. They couldn’t. That’s how I survived. That’s how I didn’t get beat up. I was little. I was underweight. I wasn’t the masculine macho kid. I would’ve been thought of as sissy or a pansy. But no, I was an artist. I was an artist and they let me live. That was a lesson I learned at a very early age. If you draw a lot they’ll let you live.