Playboy Interview: Jules Feiffer

The characters are instantly recognizable: The wife explaining that she had lost all feeling for her husband, that she felt she was just a servant; the he went away on a business trip and at first she had a marvelous time, calling up old friends to chat and the like; until she began to miss him, got lonely, hated herself for failing him, even slept on his side of the bed to feel closer to him. "The fifth week, George came home," she concludes. "The minute he walked in and said 'I'm back, darling!' I withdrew. I can hardly wait for his next business trip so I can love him again." One of life's spectators sitting in a bar fantasizing about picking up the beautiful girl at the next table but tying himself up with a convoluted analysis of whether or not she wants to be picked up, while the superjock who can't comprehend such nuances slicks right in and leaves with her. The executive, a knee-jerk liberal, hustling down the street, attach case in hand, being pursued by a black who wants him to confront his own racism. "Civil rights was so much more tolerable before Negroes got into it," the executive sights to himself.

For the past 15 years, this odd cast of uptight Americans has paraded through Jules Feiffer's cartoon strips in magazines (chiefly Playboy) and newspapers all over the U.S. and in England. His vision of sex, marriage, violence, politics and self-deception is sometimes mordant, as when he draws politicians playing their power games with other people's lives; but more often, the characters are ordinary middleclass types muddling only with the fears and appetites that rule their own lives, and Feiffer portrays them with the empathetic amusement of an author who recognizes that he shares many of the foibles he examines.

Feiffer's approach has made him perhaps American's most successful full-time satirist. "Sick, Sick, Sick," the first of several collections of his cartoons to be published as a book, came out in 1958 and added a new phrase to the popular vocabulary of the period. Critic Kenneth Tynan has described Feiffer's cartoons as well as anyone: "Feiffer had no stories to tell. His main concern was to explore character. In a series of a dozen or so pictures, he would show the shifts of mood that flickered across the faces of men and women as they tried, often vainly, to explain themselves to the world, to their husbands and wives, to their mistresses and lovers, to their employers, to their rules, or simply to the unseen adversaries at the other end of the telephone wires.... It would be no exaggeration to say that his dialog is as acute as any that is being written in America today. Dialog aimed at sophisticated minds, usually with the purpose of shaking them out of sophistication into real awareness."

Feiffer, 42, always wanted to be a cartoonist; the son of a Bronx salesman who always wanted to be a dentist, he was the cause of much hand wringing for his parents, who didn't think that drawing pictures was any kind of work for a grownup. After high school, he studied art at the Pratt Institute for two years without being recognized as a young man with a bright future, and then, in 1951, was drafted into the Army, a traumatic experience that catalyzed his first satiric cartoon--significantly, about a four-year-old kid drafted by mistake. After his discharge, Feiffer scuffled by for a time as a writer-designer for Terrytoons; then, in 1956, New York's Village Voice started publication his work. But it wasn't until the publication of "Sick, Sick, Sick" and the syndication of his cartoons in 1959 that he really began to make it big.

An early postmilitary novel, "Harry the Rat with Women" (serialized by Playboy in June and July, 1963), about the life of a man whose good looks make him irresistible to everyone, including himself, did well enough by commercial and critical standards but convinced Feiffer that novels weren't his métier, so he decided to give playwriting a whirl. "God Bless," about a 110-year-old retired diplomat so pragmatic that he goes to work for an SDS-type radical group that overthrows the U.S. Government, and "The White House Murder Case," about a series of deaths that must be covered up to avoid embarrassment in a political campaign, received decidedly mixed reviews.

"Little Murders," Feiffer's blackest vision to date, depicted the violence breeding in the fears and frustrations of the urban middle class. It opened on Broadway in April 1967--and closed after seven performances. A few days later, Feiffer wrote a typical letter to a friend: "The Boston critics who didn't understand it understood it better than the New York critics, who totally withdrew from it, followed immediately thereafter by the audience. But my dismay has been replaced by hostility, so I am back to normal." The play later reopened for a successful run off-Broadway and last year was made into a movie starring Elliott Gould and Alan Arkin and directed by Arkin. Some of the critics still found Feiffer's bleak message intolerable, but the crowds went along, at least in sufficient numbers to make the film a box-office success. "No [other] stage writer has gone deeper into the paradoxes of middle-class America," wrote one sympathetic reviewer. "Despite the fact that he must suffer arrogant dismissals [by some], he has added significantly to the debate of the nation's destiny."

More recently, Feiffer wrote the original screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge," starring Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen and directed by Mike Nichols, about whose talents Feiffer is rhapsodic: "If I never work with a different director, I'll be happy." The movie, which seems destined to be one of the most controversial--and successful--of the year (see our review on page 40), traces the lives of two men, Jonathan and Sandy, from their college friendship through middle age, graphically chronicling their failed relationships with women along the way. To explore Feiffer's vision of himself and the society he satirizes on film, stage and the printed page, Playboy assigned free-lance writer Larry DuBois to interview him. DuBois says of his subject:

"There's always a tendency to feel on edge the first time you meet someone whose wit can be as sharp as Feiffer's. It's OK reading about yourself in Feiffer's cartoons, but what if he demolishes you in his living room? The feeling vanishes quickly. He greets you in slippers, a baggy old pair of slacks and a sweater that you know he's lived in for most of his life, and he's a pleasant, casual host who invites you into the kitchen to make your own instant coffee before you start the interview.

"Feiffer lives in one of those big, old co-op apartments on New York's Upper West Side, where he hangs around with the neighborhood intellectual-literary set that provides so much material for Spiro Agnew's speeches about the effete Eastern establishment--and, of course, for his own work. His apartment is spacious and cheery, decorated with art prints from the satirical masters of the past couple of centuries, and the hallway from the front door is practically overwhelmed by one of Feiffer's favorite treasures--a three-foot papier-máché caricature of Lyndon Johnson. He works in an oversized den, littered with posters from 'Little Murders,' old sketches, new sketches, papers and books. It was there that we began the interview, which went on for an entire week, with Feiffer sprawling each afternoon in his easy chair punctually at two and not moving until five, at which time he would announce that he was exhausted.

"He talks the way he writes--not so much with one-liners as by hitting upon a thought, slowly expanding it frame by frame until he has stretched the logic to the point where it snapes. A verbal cartoon strip. We both laughed a lot, and even when Feiffer's words were most devastating, his manner made them somehow impish and unmalicious. In many ways, Feiffer is refreshingly unlike your ordinary celebrity. His idea of a big time is to watch whatever old film he can find on television; the week I was visiting, he was particularly impressed by the original version of 'Dracula.' He doesn't travel if he can avoid it. He is terrified by the thought of appearing on a television talk show. He does make his share of cocktail parties, but preferably as close to home as possible and with people he already knows--partly, I would guess, because he's shy, but also partly because he's such a hard worker. I began by asking him about his decision a few years ago to extent that work beyond cartooning."

[Q] Playboy: You had it made a few years ago with your cartoon strip. Why did you decide to risk your reputation to get into writing plays and movies?

[A] Feiffer: The two conscious reasons I had for branching out from the cartoon were that, first, the audience for the cartoon wasn't big enough and, second, the cartoon was becoming so widely accepted that I figured I must be getting misunderstood, so I decided to move into forms in which I could be better understood and thereby narrow my audience. Don't ask me to explain that.

[Q] Playboy: We doubt if you could. In any case, the audience for your latest movie, Carnal Knowledge, is likely to be very large, indeed--at least in part because of its no-holds-barred commentary on American sexual relationships. Would you have been as candid it you had written it five years ago?

[A] Feiffer: I wouldn't even have tried. Carnal Knowledge never could have been made before the sexual and language barriers were dropped in films. But in the past three or four year--I suppose it began with The Graduate--there's been this sudden opening up in movies, and it's a very exciting thing. Most of the newer films have been as unserious and cliché-ridden as the old Hollywood, but still, it's opened up areas for people like me to get involved in.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about arguments that the freedom to deal with sex on the screen and in the bookstores has gone too far, that we're paying too high an aesthetic price for that freedom to those who abuse it?

[A] Feiffer: That's a good Playboy question, but in doesn't interest me very much. I always mean to go to porno movies and always somehow forget. It's one of those things that I may enjoy terrifically once I'm there but that I never remember exist when I'm not there. Anyway, the whole issue has nothing to do with aesthetics. It has to do with censorship. I remember when they were talking about how comic books lead people into violence. Now they're talking about how dirty books and movies lead people into sex. They've come up with the domino theory of pornography. Now it's in the bookstores, the theaters and movies, and if we don't stop it there, soon it will be in the bedroom. Even if the argument worked, the fact that there might be .0002 percent of nuts who would be galvanized into unbridled masturbation, sodomy and rape by going into a 42nd Street bookstore and reading Lesbos in Leather, or by going to some horny flick, still isn't a convincing argument for censorship.

Finally, one has to make choices. That's what a democratic society is all about. To make a choice in favor of what amounts to a rape of the mind in the guise of morality is a very dangerous choice, indeed, and one I can't imagine agreeing to. Anyway, the lesson of Denmark seems to be proven here. Hollywood is discovering that "X" movies aren't such a boon. If all you've got going for you is raunchy sex--which does have a certain charm about it--people are going to get tired of it after the first lavish indulgence, just the way it happens in domestic relations, beginning with, "Oh, boy, I'm getting laid tonight," and progressing to, "Oh, my God, I have to get laid tonight," and ending up, "Not tonight, honey. I'm tired." I tried to capture some sense of that attitude in Carnal Knowledge--the very mixed attitude men develop over a period of years in their relations with women. If there were any censorship, and the sex were cut out, or the language compromised, it wouldn't be the work I wanted it to be or make the point I wanted it to make.

[Q] Playboy: What was the point you wanted to make in Carnal Knowledge?

[A] Feiffer: There's a speech in an early draft of the script that I cut out because it seemed too on the nose and because I'd rather have audiences figure it out for themselves than say it for them. But let me read it to you. In his 40s, Jonathan says to a young woman, "Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other."

[Q] Playboy: How do you explain that attitude?

[A] Feiffer: It's a result of the society that the Jonathans were born into and the mythology they were reared in from birth, which geared them to think in certain ways about themselves as men and about their relationships with women. They were trained to think about women as conveniences, receptacles, appendages and adjuncts, but never to think of them in the same terms in which they think of their buddies. I think it was--and still is--true of both sexes that there is first a sense of relating to sex in a social way rather than a sexual way. It has to do with rivalry and envy, with competition with the other fellows, more than it has to do with women.

There's a cartoon I did about this many years ago in Playboy that's still one of my favorites. There's this guy who says to his friend, "I've quit going out," and his friend asks him what's bothering him. The guy describes what happened the night before. He's sitting home alone, the telephone rings and this great sexy voice says that he doesn't know her, but she's a friend of a friend, she just landed at the airport, and she doesn't know anybody in town, and can she come over and see him. He knows she's going to be awful-looking, but she shows up an hour later and she's the greatest-looking girl he's ever met, with the most extraordinary body he's ever seen. They sit and they drink and they talk for hours. She's got the most fascinating mind he's ever known and they've read the same books and they like the same music. They just fit together like nothing else that's ever happened to him. They come together in the most gentle way and they make the most perfect love. It's the best, the most exciting, the most wonderful moment he's ever experienced in all his life, and he says to his friend, "All through this, do you know what I was thinking?" His friend asks, "What? What?" And he answers, "Wait'll I tell the fellas."

The first thing a kid comes to understand about sex is, "Well, it's something guys and girls do with each other--exactly what, I don't know, but it's supposed to be terrific, and the guys who have done it are the guys who seem to be the block leaders, and they look a different way, and they act a different way, and everybody says that's terrific, so I guess I want to do that, too, whatever it is." Jonathan's friend Sandy has a line in the movie that I love. When he's a freshman, he says, "I feel the same way about getting laid as I feel about going to college. I'm being pressured into it."

[Q] Playboy: Is that the way you felt when you were a freshman?

[A] Feiffer: I was exceptional; Sandy and Jonathan were way ahead of me. I didn't even know about sex. When I was in high school, I was much less interested in getting laid than in getting out. I had a 24-hour-a-day hard-on, but I never quite connected it with sex. I was terribly retarded in that area and never, ever, knew what to do with this thing in my pocket and never, ever, dreamed it could be used with girls, or how you were supposed to use it. A fascination with breasts was the closest I came. To me, sex was something you had with a woman's breast. I didn't know there was anything else. I was so unpracticed in the dark, scary world of carnality that I didn't even know you could go blind, I didn't know you could get warts and pimples or that it would fall off. I didn't even know the folklore.

[Q] Playboy: When did you find out?

[A] Feiffer: About a week ago.

[Q] Playboy: We deserved that. Don't you think most men grow out of most of those childhood attitudes about sex?

[A] Feiffer: Not necessarily. And in many cases, it may be the other way around. It seems to me that when you're dealing in human relations, the problem is continually relearning what you've always seemed to know and always seem to be forgetting. It's one of the things you find in psychoanalysis, and in writing, when you've got to dig up ancient insights about what it was to be 16, 17 or 18. When I was writing Carnal Knowledge, I kept rediscovering things that I used to know but that I didn't remember anymore. I guess what I really discovered is that the only thing separating me from that 17-year-old kid that I was is that I live in a different set of circumstances now. But if some miracle put me back in high school, I don't think I'd do a hell of a lot better now than I did then. If I were single again tomorrow and taking out a girl on the first date, it wouldn't be worldly, sophisticated, 42-year-old Jules Feiffer. It would be some 17-year-old schmuck wearing that as a disguise and still worried about whether or not he was going to get laid. Or a cheap feel. Or even a French kiss. Sandy and Jonathan have the same problem in the movie.

[Q] Playboy: Hasn't the sexual revolution helped liberate men from many of these hang-ups?

[A] Feiffer: Sure, but it's created tensions of its own. The sexual revolution related mainly to men and not to women. The women's lib movement, with all its nuttiness and perversity, is much more important than the sexual revolution, because what it will basically do over a period of years is make both men and women stop dealing with each other as objects. At this point, women are treating men as objects--in this case, the object is "pig"--and much movement writing is just about as foolish as it makes men out to be. But that will wear itself out, and what will come out of it is people looking at each other as individuals and coming to terms with each other as individuals. They'll either make it or they won't, but it'll be on a more realistic basis and have less to do with role playing and mythmaking.

[Q] Playboy: Haven't young people already made progress in that direction?

[A] Feiffer: Superficially, it's a lot easier for kids today to be open and available with each other about sex. I suspect, however, that no matter how early they start on sexual experience, or how much of it they have, they may not be as truly far into understanding it as they think. It's like anything else that's serious: Once you think you've got it down, it gets away from you or reverses field. Look at the communal ideal that appeals to many of them. It's been tried before, and in Western society, at least, it's continually broken down. One thing is very clear: The family situation is basically unsatisfactory and people have forever tried to find replacements for it. The replacements, like the communes, though, are simply finding a substitute family to replace the original family and falling into many of the same patterns that one disliked in the original family. But I really can't talk any more than this about what kids are like now, because I don't know them. I'd have to make all sorts of projections that would end up sounding Max Lernerish. The kids I talk to are always such a combination of incredible sophistication and incredible innocence. They seem to be born with a knowingness about things I still don't know and yet, with it all, an enormous dumbness, a willingness to accept without questioning all the random assumptions of their group, however weird--to accept, as readily as kids in the past, whatever mythology their crowd puts out.

[Q] Playboy: Like?

[A] Feiffer: Christ, I'm lousy at examples--but, well, I find the whole marijuana discussion a pain in the ass. The kids are using grass as a mystical tool, as though it were something more than just a cigarette that gives you a good feeling. What turns me bitter is the cliquishness and snobbery of grass users, the need to find ethical, ideological and political reasons to support something they use because they like to get stoned. I distrust anything that's given a tribal value.

[Q] Playboy: Have you smoked grass yourself?

[A] Feiffer: I've had grass and all it does is depress me and sometimes make me walk into closed doors. That doesn't mean I think it shouldn't be legal. Everything else that depresses me is legal, why not grass? But here are all these kids going around putting down booze and mysticizing grass. Well, I still cling to booze. I don't make much noise about it; I'm not mystical about it. I just like to drink it. It tastes good; it makes me feel better; sometimes it gives me ideas for cartoons; and it allows me to survive dozens of parties till four in the morning when ordinarily I'd be home at 11:30. Now, I know, and everyone else who drinks knows, that we drink out of weakness, out of a basic character defect. We're all a little apologetic when we overdo it. But users of grass are like people who live in San Francisco. They so overboost it you begin to wonder what their true feelings are.

[Q] Playboy: By campus standards, you sound almost reactionary.

[A] Feiffer: In my life style, I'm strictly a conservative; I can't be moved from point A to point B without a subpoena. Obviously, I share much of the kids' criticism of society today, but that doesn't say much. So does Nixon. They and I are really living in different cultures. Mine is corrupt and theirs is getting there. But we're both comfortable. Sometimes I'm in with them, sometimes I'm not.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you stopped speaking on the college lecture circuit about three years ago?

[A] Feiffer: I had a regular "This Is What I Think" speech that I used to give at colleges--until the colleges started giving it back, and one kid at Columbia told me, "I agreed with some of what you said, and I disagreed with some of what you said, and I have the feeling that in ten years you're going to be Al Capp and we'll have to put you up against the wall." So I decided, who needs this? and I quit speaking at colleges. But I've started up again in the past six months, and it seems to be opening up again. You get a sense of thought once more invading the thought process.

I think one of the things that makes it so hard for many us to abide the actions of the young these days--aside from the actions of the young--is that I and many like me cleaved our political identities out of the war in Vietnam. There was a certain post--Joe McCarthy giddiness in knowing that there was only one real opposition to Rusk, McNamara and Bundy, and it consisted of I. F. Stone, Hans Morgenthau, Dr. Spock, Robert Lowell, The New York Review of Books, me and a couple of thousand smiling peace marchers. One felt like a member of a very select minority. We were the left and all those guys in Washington were the enemy. Then we woke up one day to discover that we were nothing more than liberals, no more of a threat to those in power than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. And taken no more seriously by the student left, who had outflanked us, than by the elders of the Democratic Party who, in response to our growing influence, nominated Hubert Humphrey for President.

[Q] Playboy: Those must have been traumatic times.

[A] Feiffer:Oy! For me to find myself talking about responsibility, practicality, pragmatism to all these building burners and bomb throwers, when all those years I thought it was the pragmatists I was exposing, well, needless to say, I underwent my own identity crisis. At the age of 40, I listened seriously to 22-year-old Weatherladies lecturing me about Marxist Leninism. It was like arguing with AYD girls back in high school. I'd catch all their inconsistencies and still lose the argument. I listened to 20-year-old counterculture journalists lecturing me on revolution and rock lyrics, and I began to use words like "groove," "outasight" and "heavy," while quietly building up this enormous thirst for Glenn Miller records. My voice began to crack again. I broke out in psychic acne. I had returned to adolescence.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react to that?

[A] Feiffer: I reacted exactly the way I did in adolescence: I withdrew and became alienated. I recognized there were serious problems, because I watched Walter Cronkite, but mostly I felt: Why don't they all go away and leave me alone? Why don't the Panthers go away and the Vietnamese go away and the elitist kids go away? I began to think things like: Well, I've done my bit, let the others carry on. I began limping around like Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman. I had confronted my middle-aged adolescence with a shot of middle-aged senility. I took solid, pussyfooting stands on every issue. On student occupation of buildings, I decided you could occupy but you couldn't make a mess. When files were raided and they documented the lies and hypocrisy of the school administration and the trustees, I deplored the fact that files were raided, but I applauded the results of the raid. I condemned the shouting down of Washington VIPs on campus but couldn't wait to see it happen again. Mostly, it felt to me as if I were watching a monumental struggle between Venusians and Martians. I was in a world full of funny green people where I wasn't part of the solution, and I wasn't part of the problem and, what's more, I wasn't even part of the culture. Somehow, unknowing, I'd been drafted into the radical middle.

[Q] Playboy: What's the radical middle?

[A] Feiffer: It was the theme of my old "This Is What I Think" speech, which was about how America was being run by an underground conspiracy far more threatening than the more publicized radical right and radical left, and this was the radical middle. And then I'd do an analysis of the radical middle, showing that its role was that of a moral mathematician, that it would find the extremes in any debate and locate itself equidistant between them. But that even its choice of extremes was questionable, because it recognized only certain extremes and ignored other extremes, and the extremes it chose a middle position between would invariably be the safest and least controversial extremes. And then, having taken the middle position on these middle extremes, the radical middle, through its powerful role in the mass media, would publicize its position as the moderate position, or the responsible position, or the pragmatic position--and whatever party was in power, this position would automatically be supported by John McCloy, Dean Acheson and the Rockefeller brothers, plus The Washington Post and The New York Times.

[Q] Playboy: Your radical middle, which sounds suspiciously like the Eastern liberal establishment, sort of came apart on Vietnam.

[A] Feiffer: It was later that the existence of the radical middle was made official by calling it the establishment, but by then it was splitting at the seams. Vietnam did it. The radical middle took every possible position on Vietnam that there was to take, except the position of cut and run. Which was my position at the time. My current position is to bug out. But in 1968, the radical middle was for both continuing to bomb Hanoi and retreating into enclaves, so it was useless to me as a conspiracy. I had to find a new conspiracy theory to explain things. At that point, I came upon my 12-Guy Theory of Government.

[Q] Playboy: How does that one go?

[A] Feiffer: There are these 12 guys running the country, and they all went to the right schools and they're all trained for their jobs and they all have drawers full of classified information and they all have direct lines to the White House. So they resent it terribly when outsiders, like the American people, try to butt into their foreign policy. It's their Vietnam war and, after that, their Indochina war and, after that, possibly, their world war. It's also their civil rights and their economy and their ghettos and their recession. Their role is to guide and our role is to be guided. Because what's a democracy for but to bring in the best-qualified elite to govern us? So it didn't matter who was in--Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon--there would still be these same 12 guys in and out of the White House. Not always the same names, but always the same teams. Kissinger subbing for Bundy, Moynihan in for Schlesinger. So it didn't matter who we voted for in national elections, because we always ended up with a McNamara or a Bundy or a Kissinger, somebody inside the circle, with access to information we didn't have, on the basis of which he was able to advise the President on certain critical decisions. And during any crisis, the President would call in these 12 guys--it might even be 15--and he'd put them together with the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council and they'd discuss the issues, and then the President would take a vote. And this vote was called a consensus. And then the President, just to show that he wasn't the tool of his advisors, would water down the consensus and fashion out of this a policy. And then he'd go on nationwide TV and announce this policy. And within three months, this new policy would be forgotten: by the press, the people, the President, his advisors, everyone--and a good thing, too, because it never worked out.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Feiffer: Because it never has anything to do with reality. It has to do with the church.

[Q] Playboy: What church?

[A] Feiffer: The Church of the Cold War. We've had a foreign policy since 1945 run totally on the basis of theological precepts. We've had Cardinal Acheson, Cardinal Dulles, Cardinals McNamara, Rostow and Rusk. There's Monsignor Katzenbach, the well-known Bishop of Tonkin, and no matter which of the 12 are presently up at the altar, they find it impossible to transcend their basic religious convictions and get us out of the war. And they can never be guilty of doctrinal error, because whatever they believe has to be right, by definition. All their decisions, they tell us, were right at the time they made them--like, for example, bombing North Vietnam to bring Hanoi to the negotiating table--and when those decisions are reversed, that doesn't mean they were wrong the first time. They were right when they were made and right when they were reversed. Only the facts have changed, and the situation in the field, and intelligence estimates, and captured documents.

And since these 12 experts never make mistakes, they never get replaced, only promoted. Ask General Westmoreland. One wonders where Henry Kissinger will find himself in 1973. Probably head of the World Bank. What was interesting, when the first tentative moves to de-escalate the Vietnam war began was that Johnson didn't throw out all the advisors who'd been wrong and who'd helped destroy him, and bring in the critics of the war who, while having no access to classified information, had often been proven right. He didn't fire Rostow and bring in I. F. Stone. He didn't replace McNamara with Morgenthau. They were outside the church--nonexperts. If Johnson had bothered to compare their records for accuracy of forecast and acted accordingly, he would have fired his advisors, hired his critics and would still be President today. The next President who has a chance to last more than one term will be the President who assumes a kind of simplified Nuremberg law in regard to expert advisors: that they are to be held responsible for following their own advice.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there a contradiction between your theories about the cold-war theology of your 12 guys and recent signs of a possible American détente with China, the SALT talks and President Nixon's embrace of Romania on his last trip to Europe?

[A] Feiffer: Holy wars can always be suspended for enlightened commercial purposes. My 12 guys may have finally arrived at the conclusion that we aren't going to get China by force, so they've decided to buy it. One basic idea behind cold-war theology is that it isn't ever supposed to blow up into a hot war. Certainly not with countries our own size. The Dominican Republic is more our speed. Korea we were supposed to clean up in six weeks and Vietnam wasn't supposed to take much longer. How did we know they would betray us and fight back? "In a vicious and violent manner," to use Secretary Laird's words. What the theologians pray for is a permanent state of stabilized hostility. That means you can enjoy the financial benefits of trade while also enjoying the spiritual and financial benefits of an arms race. Since the arms race is beginning to break us, we may be inclined to cool it for a while; but don't worry, it isn't likely to last. Presidents will go on making the same mistakes. Which leads us into my One-Term Theory of the Presidency.

[Q] Playboy: What's that?

[A] Feiffer: That the assassination of President Kennedy after less than three years in office and the abdication of Johnson after his first full term were not accidents but portents. This is the way it's going to be from now on, at least for a generation and possibly longer. The movement of history is so fast and the movement of government so slow that no President, whether Nixon or Ramsey Clark, is going to be able to last longer than one term. The first year, he's such a relief from the last President that his popularity soars. The second year, he swings his soaring popularity behind his economic policy, foreign policy and civil rights programs. The third year, his popularity fades as he tries to hide, explain away and lie about the failures of his economic policy, foreign policy and civil rights programs. And the fourth year, in order to bring together a bitterly divided nation, he announces he won't run again. Or he runs and loses.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think some of the tactics of the antiwar movement, such as the May Day demonstrations in Washington last spring, may help Nixon get re-elected?

[A] Feiffer: Autogenocide seems to be the radicals' favorite outdoor sport. It has been since the days of the wobblies. But what the antiwar movement does that's counterproductive is such small potatoes compared with what the Government does that's counterproductive--for example, the 7000 arrests on May Day--that the leaders of the antiwar movement in this country seem to really be Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell and the Pentagon. What usually happens is that you have an issue, whether it's the war, racism or poverty. There's some protest against it that gets either an indifferent press or a strongly negative press, and it gets lectured editorially--"You're hurting your own cause, playing into the hands of your enemies"--by those who never had much to say on the question in the first place. Then, as the months go by, you find the polls showing increasing sympathy for the demonstrators' position, without any great sympathy for the demonstrators. So in the end, they make their point. They make a respectable issue out of an issue that previously hasn't been discussed, and once it gets discussed, people get dissatisfied, even if they don't examine it much, because they get tired of hearing whatever it is that's being talked about. They get bored or upset and want it to go away. To the extent that the antiwar movement has made Vietnam a pain in the ass to the American public, it's been terribly effective.

Right now I think the GI movement is the most important thing going on. These guys do an incredible job organizing GIs and putting out antiwar newspapers. The Army is going out of its mind, and it's harassing them like mad. Anyhow, it's important that these guys know they're being supported, so send your checks and money orders to GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee, Box 355, Old Chelsea Station, in New York City. The Zip is 10011. That's working outside the system, of course, but who's to know?

[Q] Playboy: What was your experience working within the system during Gene McCarthy's campaign? Was it a worthwhile form of protest?

[A] Feiffer: I don't know. I was miserable. At one point, I had to go up to the Bronx to make campaign speeches. My audiences were only interested in crime in the streets. I was only interested in Vietnam. I ended up giving speeches about McCarthy being against crime in the streets of Vietnam. My mistake was thinking I could be an activist. This is not a political but a psychological fact. You find out what role you can play and you play it, and when you leave that role, you find yourself so uncomfortable that, in my case, while I seemed to drop in, I had really dropped out. I discovered that I simply can't function in an activist role, because I stop believing that it's me who's doing it. What I know about the Chicago convention has more to do with what I saw on television than with what I lived through. Six months later, I heard some tapes of the things I said in Chicago and I was quite surprised. They sounded pretty good to me, but it was somebody else talking. The fact is, I really wasn't there.

[Q] Playboy: After the convention, you refused to endorse Hubert Humphrey. Looking back on it now, less emotionally, wouldn't you have preferred him to Richard Nixon?

[A] Feiffer: In 1954, Nixon wanted us to invade Indochina, and one of the strongest Senate supporters of that move was Humphrey. I really don't know how much Humphrey would have changed things. He was so deeply implicated in the war that the protest would have started sooner, gotten bigger faster and we would have had the repression earlier. If he couldn't stand up to Mayor Daley, how in the world could we expect him to stand up to the Pentagon? Outside the terribly important area of Supreme Court appointments, I'm not sure a hell of a lot would have been different. And with the Democrats still running the White House, the Democratic Congress would have been much less likely to make even the feeble intervention into the war that it has. As much as they like to deny it, a lot of that is just politics. Have you noticed how all those new doves vote when it comes to cutting off funds for the war?

[Q] Playboy: Surely, that line of reasoning didn't lead you to vote for Richard Nixon?

[A] Feiffer: No. I voted my conscience and voted for the best man: Dick Gregory--although I was worried about Mark Lane being number two on the ticket, a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

[Q] Playboy: Are you optimistic about having more of a choice in the 1972 election?

[A] Feiffer: What difference does it make if Hubert Humphrey changes his name and calls himself Ed Muskie?

[Q] Playboy: You think of them as the same?

[A] Feiffer: Well, who is Muskie? The only person who could make Muskie seem a serious figure in American politics is Hubert Humphrey, possibly the least interesting man to run for office since Richard Nixon. What got Muskie the public's eye was that for five minutes once, a kid heckled him and Muskie invited him up to the platform. That was a very theatrical move and a very smart one, but basically an old showman's trick. He got the public's attention and became a star, and that's his only claim to power and fame. He's got no other credentials. It's still not possible to figure out his position on the war, because it changes with the polls. He hasn't made a single statement on the Chicago convention and Daley's police. But he's against pollution. That's terrific. And he's against the war this week. That's terrific. But there's no evidence he's got a single idea in his head--other than wanting to be President. I'm not saying he's a bad man; I'm just saying he's a very ordinary politician, and to that extent, one has every right not to trust him. In a casual way, I've been following his statements on the war since 1968, and he's a professional waffler. If he moves left on the war now, it will have nothing to do with any burst of insight on his part other than the burst of insight that has to do with votes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you regard Ted Kennedy any more highly?

[A] Feiffer: No, for strictly emotional reasons. In 1966, when Bobby was heading the Government in exile, I was trying very hard to get myself to trust him, because his record in the Senate was a good one and his opposition to the war, though still erratic, was becoming increasingly strong, and because if anyone was going to take it away from Lyndon, it seemed clear that it had to be Bobby. So I wanted very much to like the former Attorney General and was working my way around to it, when I made the mistake of going to a party for the Kennedys on Martha's Vineyard, and there they all were--the New Frontier--and the smell of elitist careerism in the room, the smell of high-level inheritance was so powerful that it had a kind of sensuality to it, the smell and look of a bunch of guys about to get laid.

You picked a Kennedy, any Kennedy, and surrounding him or her would be half a dozen boozing hopefuls--advisors to the President, secretaries, undersecretaries, trouble shooters, Congressional liaisons--and they all had this glassy-eyed stare that wasn't hard to interpret. It read: If you think this is a good party, wait till we take back the White House. It was all so naked and self-righteous. As a card-carrying fantasist myself, I was made very uneasy by the Kennedy fantasists. I thought, "Oh, my God, Sorenson back! Salinger back! Mac back!" So it's not Teddy that bothers me, it's Camelot that bothers me. I could never make it with Camelot. So ask not what I can do for Teddy, ask what Teddy can do for me: not run.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any politicians who inspire you?

[A] Feiffer: I don't see why we have to settle for Humskie-Musphrey while George McGovern is around. McGovern was among the earliest critics of the war and a far more serious man with many more qualifications than any of the showbiz people he's running against, so naturally he's not considered a serious candidate. The press seems to have a rule that a serious man can't ever be a serious candidate. I guess the underlying assumption is that anyone who wants to be President has got to be kidding. But let McGovern win one primary and overnight the press will decide he's a serious figure. They'll even try to assign him charisma. You remember charisma? If you're a Democrat and you have it, you get shot.

[Q] Playboy: McGovern might have helped his chances for the nomination if he had capitalized politically on the contents of the Pentagon papers, which were reportedly leaked to him before they appeared in The New York Times; but he decided not to release them. What was your reaction to the controversy?

[A] Feiffer: What's interesting about the Pentagon papers is that they bear out entirely what critics of the war--including McGovern--have been saying for years, and what the press, outside the left press, has been generally denying, ignoring or dismissing. You know, it's hard to blame Nixon and Agnew for being furious with the press. All through the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the press played ball with the Government. During the Korean War, Syngman Rhee, who was no better than Diem, was called the George Washington of his country. The New York Times knew about the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union and it knew about the Bay of Pigs before either became public knowledge, and, in the interest of higher patriotism, it published neither story. If the Times had blown the cover on the U-2, it would have prevented Eisenhower from being caught in a public lie; and remember, in those days, we were still shocked when a President lied. We didn't know it was policy. And if the Times had blown the cover on the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy would have called the whole thing "contingency planning"--the way the Pentagon papers are labeled now--and canceled the invasion. What makes Agnew furious with the press is that for the first time in any war, it's trying to report the truth. The sons of bitches! What a betrayal! Why now? Why us? I mean, no wonder Nixon wants to dump the First Amendment. It's being used against him! See, the point is that if Nixon wanted us out of Indochina, those Pentagon papers would be a godsend; but he doesn't want us out, and that's why, even though the papers deal with the duplicity of Democrats, he had to stop them. They hit too close to home. They make people curious about his own "contingency planning."

[Q] Playboy: Don't you believe Nixon when he says he's ending America's combat role in Vietnam?

[A] Feiffer: If you're still killing people, I tend to think of that as combat. Even if we're no longer using ground troops by 1972, there will still be U. S. planes dropping U. S. bombs. If that's an end to our combat role, it's a curious one. To Nixon, ending the war means arming our gooks to shoot their gooks. That's not pacifism, it's racism. Nixon doesn't know how to end the war. He's still making decisions on the basis of his theology. He'll take seriously 100,000 telegrams about Lieutenant Calley and feel there's a political upheaval in the land that has to be dealt with. But two or three times that number of people--people, not telegrams--can show up in Washington over and over and over again and, as far as he's concerned, they don't measure up to the size of his recent buddy Calley.

[Q] Playboy: Did you follow the Calley trial closely?

[A] Feiffer: I get the feeling I don't follow anything very closely. I always fear that if I read the press too carefully, I'm going to fall into the trap of believing that they're telling me what's really happening in the world. What I find interesting about the Calley trial is how differently the public reacted to Calley than to Manson. Just in terms of record sales alone, Calley has far outdistanced Manson. He's our kind of mass murderer. Or possibly, people believe that the Tate murders happened but that My Lai didn't happen. The Tate murders happened because they took place in Los Angeles--which people think exists but in fact doesn't--and My Lai didn't happen because it happened in Vietnam, which doesn't exist except on television. It also happened to gooks, and they're not real people, and it happened during a war, and anything we do in a war is Ok as long as it's our side that does it. A V. C. throws a bomb in a market place and kills six people and he's a fanatical terrorist. A B-52 pilot drops tons of bombs over North Vietnam and kills hundreds, but he's not a fanatical terrorist; he's just doing his job. And if they shoot him down and take him prisoner, he's a hero, and a martyr, and a bargaining chip. It all has to do with our rules of war, which state: one, that Americans are good guys; two, that we only get into good wars; and, three, that no matter what we do and what acts we commit, they're the acts of good people, perhaps regrettable, but war is-hell-and-acts-such-as-these-have-always-taken-place-in-wartime, which makes them pardonable, and Calley should be given either the Medal of Honor or Agnew's place on the ticket in 1972.

[Q] Playboy: There's been a good deal of talk about war-crimes trials for high-ranking American violators of the real rules of war. With the country already as divided as it is, do you think war-crimes trials would serve a useful purpose?

[A] Feiffer: Well, the talk about Johnson used to be that he meant well, that he was a victim of circumstances, that the didn't want the war any more than anybody else and that if it weren't for Vietnam--people always forget the Dominican invasion--he'd be remembered as one of the best Presidents in history. That makes it sound terribly tragic and complex but simply ignores the fact that the man is a certifiable war criminal. It's like all those articles talking about the pain and indecision McNamara went through. No doubt the German high command went through many moments of self-doubt and torture, too; but despite all that self-doubt and torture, I can't bring myself to feel much pity for them. What's at stake here is more important than any gratification of the left's desire for personal revenge on these men. Our cold-war theology has allowed us to retain in our adventures around the world a self-righteous image of the American, even though he might also be an imperialist, a slumlord and a baby burner. Until recent years, there never seemed to be any conscious sense of contradiction in this; and even today, that sense of contradiction is found only among intellectuals, students and--very late in the day--the clergy. It may take something like a highly respected international war-crimes tribunal to shock us into seeing that while we thought we were playing policeman to the world, we slipped into playing war criminal to the world. But of course there'll never be any tribunal; and every time Nixon sees any light at the end of the tunnel, he'll defoliate it.

[Q] Playboy: You said Johnson is a certifiable war criminal. In what way did he conduct himself differently from any other head of state acting--however misguidedly--in what he perceived to be the national interest?

[A] Feiffer: How many heads of state do you know of who are responsible for trying toturn an entire country into a parking lot? There must be some limitation on the concept of national interest, or when do we start dropping nukes?

[Q] Playboy: You say that Nixon is committing the same blunders as Johnson, but for some reason he doesn't seem to stir the same rage in you that Johnson did.

[A] Feiffer: It's different, in a way. If Nixon reminds us of the man who sells whiskey to the Indians, Johnson reminds us of the man who sold the whiskey to Nixon; Johnson is the snake-oil salesman who comes on publicly like a preacher. With Johnson, who did have a rather brilliant nine months before he was elected in his own right in 1964--as the peace candidate--there was a very clear betrayal. You don't find that feeling of betrayal with Nixon. After all his years in public life, there couldn't have been many people left who would trust him deeply enough to feel betrayed by him. There was no question who he was when he was elected, despite the fact that over the years, James Reston kept inventing and reinventing something he called the New Nixon. One other thing: There's something about Johnson that makes him seem more than he is and makes you seem less than you are, which is a sense that's guaranteed to bring out animosities. With Nixon, it's the other way around.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Feiffer: Well, he always gives the impression of role playing. He knows he's not really President. He knows Eisenhower still is. It's all some sort of amazing charade that he's getting away with. You see it at least once in every Nixon press conference. He'll stumble over a word or two, get it wrong, and there'll be that momentary loss of control you see in the eyes. the sense of panic, and you can see the thought processes: "Oh, my God, they're going to find out!" I saw Nixon's "Checkers" speech playing at the New Yorker Theater the other day. You should see it. If Nixon had gone into the movie business instead of politics, he would have been head of MGM by now--and we might still have a studio system. It was an extraordinary show, and to see it many years later is to see all of the mannerisms, the sentimentalism, the fake Hollywood pathos--"my dog Checkers," "my wife Pat"--and a tense upturning of the lips which he thinks of as a boyish grin. Nixon trying to look boyish is enough to break one's heart. All of it is there, and you watch it, at first laughing, and then ending up feeling about Nixonas you might feel about Busby Berkeley. He's the pop genius of American politics.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that carrying your view of Nixon to an absurd extreme?

[A] Feiffer: That's all satire is--creating a logical argument that, followed to its end, is absurd. All humor is basically about one or another kind of outrage against logic, but satire concerns itself with logically extending a premise to its totally insane conclusion, thus forcing onto an audience certain unwelcome awarenesses. If it's going to be true satire, it has to be subversive, critical of the system it's operating within. It can't be what used to be called satire a few years ago, which was jokes on suburbia and crab grass and commuters.

[Q] Playboy: Taking logic to its extreme risks what those who don't share the satirist's sentiments call going off the deep end. Some critics felt you went overboard in Little Murders by asking audiences to believe that paranoia about crime and social disorders would drive a middle-class urban family mad enough to become mass murderers sniping at passers-by from their apartment window. Do you really feel such an apocalyptic caricature is justified?

[A] Feiffer: I can't justify the view taken in Little Murders. You either respond to it or you don't. I can't prove, for instance, that we're doing badly in Vietnam any more than the Pentagon can prove that we're winning, except that one point of view seems to make sense and the other doesn't. After a number of years, if the convictions and opinions you hold seem to be borne out by events, you simply trust them, and beginning with John Kennedy's assassination, I have developed the view of society that's written into Little Murders. His assassination highlighted for me the age of gratuitous violence we'd come into, a violence that grew out of the frustrations of the American dream as measured against the American reality, out of a previously isolationist nation having to go internationalist very suddenly in a big way. And despite, or as a consequence of, what it thought of as its good works, feeling increasingly isolated, unappreciated and finally unwanted. So, in reaction, it turns narcissistically violent toward the outside world--Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam--and paranoiacally violent toward its own internal world: race violence, random violence, motiveless mass murders.

[A] In that sense, Little Murders is actually about Vietnam, about how we can burn down the country and still see ourselves as good guys defending our homestead. Gary Cooper, the war criminal. I don't think the film's vision is apocalyptic. Because the family is shooting out their window at strangers in the street? That has nothing to do with apocalypse. It has to do with the frontier faith. It doesn't mean the world is ending; it means these particular people, while having gone mad, have gone mad in a very traditional, very American way. By their lights, they're protecting their home. They're taking action after remaining passive for too long. They're Tom Destry strapping on his guns to the cheers of the audience. They're doing what they see as right, and with exactly the same self-justification as any B-52 pilot dropping blockbusters over Vietnam. If the ending of Little Murders is apocalyptic, then what sort of vision do we get every day on NBC when they blandly give us the latest body count? All I was trying to do was show what we've become by putting together one sensibility with another--random murder out of windows with the sort of random murder we're playing around with in Southeast Asia.

[Q] Playboy: All the evils you see in American society must make this an epochal period for a satirist.

[A] Feiffer: Professionally, it's on the upgrade, but there isn't enough cold, hard repression. If the press were still as controlled or timid as it was in the Fifties, then my work would be easier, a more clear-cut case of black and white, censorship and freedom. That's the ideal environment for satire; but beginning with Jack Kennedy, repression became so sophisticated that we slip into it as comfortably as we do into an old shoe. It's very difficult when the Government tolerates diversity of opinion to such an extent that it has practically no effect on anyone, sort of like inviting the opposition into the White House for coffee after they finish picketing. Happily, Mr. Agnew now means to put the press out of business, and Mr. Mitchell means to put the doctrine of a legal defense out of business. So businesswise, things are looking up.

And the Government deserves credit for making a satirist's life more challenging. This began for me some years ago when there was an Atomic Energy Commission committee set up to investigate the effects of radioactive fallout, and they called it "Operation Sunshine." How do you compete with that? In my play The White House Murder Case, the name of the disastrous military operation that backfires and kills 750 GIs was "Operation Total Win." When Nixon went into Cambodia three months later, they called it "Operation Ultimate Victory." A week after Cambodia, the play died. George S. Kaufman once said, "Satire is what closes Saturday night." It's not true. It's reality that closes Saturday night.

I once did this cartoon after the Newark and Detroit riots with Johnson appointing a fact-finding commission that included one Democrat, one Republican, one intellectual, one anti-intellectual, one young person, one old person, one Negro and one bigot. The last panel had the President smiling his least sincere smile and saying, "Come, let us reason together." I thought that was a pretty good satire on the Johnsonian political mind, which thinks that by putting together totally antagonistic, often irreconcilable views, he has bought off the future. A week later, the White House asked for the original. I went into a deep depression, because I couldn't figure out where I'd gone wrong. The only explanation I could come up with was that Johnson didn't realize it was a satire. He thought it was a perceptive and admiring evaluation of the way he did things. Talk about effectiveness!

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you do satire? To influence change?

[A] Feiffer: The first reason is self-indulgence. I like the work. The second is to score points for my side. But I've never thought that one's own work, however strong, was enough to make a real dent in the prevailing culture. All you can hope for is that, along with other small shifts, it might represent a swing of opinion and be part of that swing; and since the mass media, it might be of help simply by showing other people who thought they were alone that they aren't alone.

[Q] Playboy: Satirists seem to be in short supply among conservatives. Why?

[A] Feiffer: Well, there's Al Capp, who's sort of a one-man short supply. Poor Capp. He's turned into an elderly right-wing Abbie Hoffman. If you're going to score points, you've got to make sense, and every time he tries to score, he goes off like an elephant gun and instead of zeroing in with logic, buries us with kamikaze overkill. Satire has to do with logic, not grotesquerie, and all that guffawing, hand-twitching self-titillation works against him as a propagandist.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you partly just disagreeing with his politics?

[A] Feiffer: I once debated Capp and found out he has no politics, just prejudices. What makes him fail as a satirist isn't his conservatism. There's no reason you can't be a successful conservative satirist. I used to think of Bill Buckley as a marvelous satirist. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he took his writing seriosly.

[Q] Playboy: You spend a lot of time talking and drawing cartoons about polities, but you sound a little weary of the subject. Why?

[A] Feiffer: I've o.d.-ed on politics. In any case, it's no longer very interesting or revealing to talk about Vietnam; it's become as institutionalized as racism, so that just like racism, every time your side looks like it's had a victory, you end up pretty much where you started. Besides, there is no new horror or duplicity that doesn't become assimilated into our systems within a matter of days, sometimes minutes. So I've given up solving our foreign-policy problems for a while. I'm sure Vietnam will wait for me to come back to it. I'm moving my other work--plays and movies--back into a much more interior, private world that deals with personal relationships, with men and women, with men and men, with couples interacting with each other, with people in the business of day-to-day survival. At the moment, if I feel at odds with politics, it's because I can't allow it into that created world. I have to sink myself totally into this other atmosphere if I'm going to do anything with it.

[Q] Playboy: Young people seem to be moving in the same direction you are. Do you think there's any connection between your move inward and theirs?

[A] Feiffer: That's interesting. I hadn't thought of it, but who knows, there might be. I think part of it is simply exhaustion. People are always playing the survival game to some extent, and when you find that moving in one direction and beating your head against a wall is increasingly thankless, then to salvage something of yourself, you take a break and move in other directions. It goes back and forth, and in some ways, it's a rejuvenating process. But this whole apathy thing has been overstated for years. When there is apathy, there's a legitimate reason for it, and the reason is that people have realistically looked at the world around them, and they find the alternatives so unrewarding that there's nothing better to do than turn off. But when anything comes along they can finally relate to, they respond like crazy. Look how many people went to the spring demonstrations in Washington. There's still a gut response, despite the history of losership that precedes all demonstrations; they keep on coming. So I don't think it's a slide into apathy based on stereo rigs and dope. I think it's more along the lines of an emotional and psychic process of natural selection. When it gets too dangerous out there, you move inside until you feel at one with yourself, and then you move out again, and the process continuously goes on.

[Q] Playboy: Are you willing to discuss the kind of work that's going on in your head now?

[A] Feiffer: Not much. But whatever I do next, it'll be moving on from Carnal Knowledge, not from Little Murders. I want to do something about marriage. I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how, despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can't possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about. In the end, it becomes rather heroic. It reminds me of the relationship of the two men in Waiting for Godot, who are on this endless search, but after a while the search itself becomes worth while, almost rewarding. Many people find that pessimistic, but I find something inspiring about it.

[Q] Playboy: You said that marriage can't possibly work, but somehow it does. What makes it so difficult?

[A] Feiffer: It's difficult because if you live with another person, you're going to have to deal with that person, and most of us want to be dealt with rather than deal with. Most of us want to somehow be magically taken care of. There's this thing in all of us that I suppose is part aristocrat and part child; we want to be served, anti served without being forced to recognize the existence of the servant, and certainly without dealing with the servant as an entity. What destroys fantasies and gets everybody into trouble early on in relationships is that two people come together each thinking the other is the servant, and they find they've been had. And so it comes to the point where you say, "My God, there's another person in my bed! And she's here under false pretenses."

[Q] Playboy: Is it that simple?

[A] Feiffer: Not always, if you can get yourself past that point, and keep going and going and going--in other words, if you don't retreat and fire that servant arid find another one, and that's all some people do all their lives--then marriage has some remarkable rewards, though the rewards are never as good as the fantasies.

[Q] Playboy: Then why get married?

[A] Feiffer: Most of the married men I know got married because their wives made it impossible for them to stay unmarried. Not necessarily by ultimatum, but by making the pressures and guilts so intense that it simply became easier to get married than to stay shacked up. But being a permanent bachelor can't possibly work. It means you've stopped taking any chances. It means you've made a contract with yourself about what the world had to be, at an age when you were much too young to have any idea what the real world was, and you're insisting that the world stick to that contract. Somewhere along the line, that notion has to be given up, or a person is just going to be dead at the center.

[Q] Playboy: You obviously aren't a great admirer of bachelorhood, yet you didn't marry until you were 32.

[A] Feiffer: Most bachelors, I suspect, aren't the miserable failures at bachelorhood that I was, at this whole business of meeting a girl and establishing false identities, and having exactly the same conversation you've had with hundreds of other girls, and she gives you exactly the same responses, and through it all, while you're being terribly interested in each other, all you're really thinking about is getting laid. Finally, you reach a point where you feel too old and silly to do any of that, or to take it seriously any longer. It seemed to me a thankless game; when it didn't work, it wasn't much good, and when it did, it wasn't much good either. When it worked, it was just a little less lonely, but not a hell of a lot less lonely. I hated every second of it. But I hated and feared marriage even more. It meant I had to become a grownup.

[Q] Playboy: Why the reluctance to grow up?

[A] Feiffer: Look at the examples I had. Also, how could I make it as a grownup and a boy cartoonist all at the same time?

[Q] Playboy: How did you develop your devotion to cartooning?

[A] Feiffer: Cartoons were my first interest as a kid, what I loved the most. I couldn't write well enough to be a writer, or draw well enough to be an artist, so I knew that the only way I would ever make it would be to combine my meager talent for drawing with my meager talent for telling a story and, by putting the two together, come up with something sensational.

[Q] Playboy: Was it always satire that you planned to do?

[A] Feiffer: No. I was mostly attracted to the storytelling in cartoons--Van Buren's Abbie an' Slats, or Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, or Eisner's The Spirit. What I loved best about these comics was that they created a very personal world in which almost anything could take place, and readers would accept it even if it had nothing to do with any other kind of world. It was the fantasy world I loved.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Feiffer: Because reality was such a pain in the ass. I realized that if I didn't put my hooks into fantasy, there would be no hope of surviving my childhood.

[A] Playboy: When did you realize that?

[Q] Feiffer: It must have happened shortly after birth, and it's been happening ever since. I realized at a very young age that there was a conspiracy of grownups against kids, because if a grownup said something, it had to be true, since other grownups believed it was true and if a kid disputed them, he was wrong, by definition.

I didn't know about the class struggle in a Marxian sense, but I understood it very well in a generational sense. I knew that I was a member of one class and that my parents and teachers were members of another class, and that we were enemies. By the time I was five, I felt that I was this rich kid, kidnaped by strangers--my parents--who were terribly kind people, but still not my real parents, because I knew damn well that my real parents didn't live in the Bronx. They lived in a castle in Freddie Bartholomew's England, and it was going to be my inheritance once we got things straightened out. But the reality was this dreary world where I had to go to this dreary school which was teaching me things that neither the school nor I was really interested in. There was this awful sense of injustice. Who could I write to? Roosevelt? I was skeptical of becoming a grownup, but I knew I didn't like being a kid. In the world I lived in, my job as a kid was basically hat of reconnaissance. You had to be this very talented spy, who sounded like one of (continued on page 206)Playboy Interview(continued from page 96) them and looked as much as possible like one of them, but knew every minute of your waking hours that you weren't one of them; but you didn't know what you were one of. I'm sure my childhood would have been radically different if I could have found any friends I could talk to honestly.

[Q] Playboy: Why couldn't you?

[A] Feiffer: I guess it was a formidable shyness. The best kids are the biggest and most athletic--affable, outgoing kids--and I was a shrimp. I was skinny; I didn't eat enough, as my mother never forgot to tell the neighbors. I didn't play ball. I didn't even learn how to catch a ball until I was 15, and to this day I don't know how to throw one. The only person I was at all capable of talking to was myself, and even there, I had severe lags in communication. I understood with complete objectivity that I was a total failure, so if I was going to make a comeback, I knew it had to be as a grownup. Grownups didn't have to take gym.

[Q] Playboy: How did you finally manage to escape from the Bronx?

[A] Feiffer: I got drafted--which, with all its horrors, was a relief, because the enemies were now official; they weren't disguised as parents and advisors who had only your best interests at heart.

[Q] Playboy: It's difficult to imagine you in the Army. What was it like?

[A] Feiffer: I found myself, during basic training, shocked in a more profound way than I had ever been, at the brutality and impersonality that's built into the system. In fact, I no longer existed except as a body. As soon as I put on fatigues, I lost my power of speech. I couldn't talk anymore. I picked up a stammer that I've never totally lost. I couldn't relate my thoughts to my speech. It was the first time in my life I had been exposed to pure naked fascism, and it was terrific. Up to that point, I had always been dealing with reasonable teachers and reasonable parents, and they were always understanding me. All my resentment and hostility, expressed as best I could to them on any issue, was always watered away by some explanation which seemed a hell of a lot more rational and mature than my argument. So while I felt that I was dealing with villains, the villains always ended up being the good guys, and I kept ending up as the bad guy, and I could never quite understand it. The Army was a lot better because, first of all, they were incapable of explaining anything, and while the role playing in civilian life was one of reasonableness, the role playing in the Army was one of Hitler. That's who they all wanted to be when they grew up. So while I felt totally miserable, I felt more justified and more in the right than I had ever felt before. It was a period when I could really allow myself the luxury of hate--pure and blissful hate. It helped me grow. Significantly enough, I did my first satire in the Army.

[Q] Playboy: What was it?

[A] Feiffer: It was about Munro, a four-year-old kid drafted by mistake. Munro tried to explain to the authorities that he was only four. The authorities said that was impossible because they didn't draft four-year-olds. Finally, the authorities convinced Munro that he really couldn't be four, so he faced up manfully to life in the Army. That was my first work of satire, and it was also my first work of satire that was turned down by every publisher in New York.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get by when you were discharged from the Army?

[A] Feiffer: I played the unemployment-insurance game. I'd take some job for six months, then arrange to get fired, which was never difficult, since I spent most of my time on the john reading books. This was the Fifties, and there wasn't any underground press, so I'd take my cartoons around and find that I was a favorite person of editors in publishing houses all around New York, because each new work would entertain them thoroughly and then they'd say, "No, we don't think this would have a market." I gave them a good time while they gave me a bad one, and it became clear that I was never going to get a market. My problem, I decided, wasn't that I wasn't good enough to be published. It was that I wasn't famous enough to be published. And I couldn't get famous until I got published.

[Q] Playboy: How did you break out of that?

[A] Feiffer: In 1955, The Village Voice began in New York, and I offered to do a weekly cartoon for them at no money, which was their usual price. I had carefully selected the Voice for its intellectual audience and its snob appeal. I knew that after a while, if I became the darling of the intellectuals, I would find a publisher who would think me famous enough, because six of his friends read me, to publish me in book form. It worked.

[Q] Playboy: Your fantasies about getting rich and famous sound surprisingly conventional, rather like a young executive out to climb the corporate ladder.

[A] Feiffer: Remember, I'm a product of the John Garfield generation, a veteran of dozens of Warner Bros. movies about poor kids from the East Side shaking their fists at the Manhattan skyline and screaming into the night, "I'll lick you yet!" Deep in my heart was the dream that someday I'd see my name up in lights. What a bitter recognition of reality it was when I finally arrived at the stage where I could have my name up in lights and there were no more lights. Modern theater-marquee design had done away with them. So now my name is up in black. It's not the same thing.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you concerned that success might blunt the edge of your satire?

[A] Feiffer: For several years, I made an honest effort to sell out, but I just couldn't make it that way. I tried very hard, but I wasn't a good enough hack. I was only good at doing my own stuff, and I've discovered that rage can't be bought off. If you have it, you have it for life.

[Q] Playboy: Has success been as good as you fantasized?

[A] Feiffer: I'm not the least ambivalent about it. Success is good and failure isn't. It's been better than I fantasized, because during all those years you work to achieve it, you spend so much time and energy at the business of making it that there's very little time or energy left to pay attention to the craft itself. Finally, with the question of success taken care of, you can start paying attention to being an artist, and it's a hell of a lot more interesting, because until you're secure enough--and I don't mean financially--to be willing to risk failure, the hunger to make it keeps getting in your way.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you feel even a twinge of nostalgia for the "good old days"?

[A] Feiffer: The only time in my life I've ever been nostalgic was when we shot the first scene of Carnal Knowledge. We had to reconstruct a college dance of 25 years ago. Bobby socks. Saddle shoes. Punch bowls. Words like "conceited" and "stuck-up." Phrases like "bullshit artist" and "Your next will be your first." We hired local kids to be the college kids of the Forties. They cut their hair, they learned the fox trot and the lindy. They couldn't believe anyone had ever danced that way; to them it was the minuet. The first shot in the film is this terrific-looking coed walking into a college mixer dressed exactly like Ann Rutherford in the Andy Hardy movies, and on the Victrola is Tommy Dorsey playing I'm Getting Sentimental Over You. I had chills, and tears in my eyes. I found myself nostalgic for a period in my life that I had absolutely hated. But I wasn't nostalgic for my real past. I was nostalgic for my MGM past--the past that, on Saturday afternoons back in the Forties, I had watched on the screen and seen as my future, which would take me out of the East Bronx and into these incredible movie mansions, the real-life duplicate of which I have seen only once--at Hugh Hefner's. Because he saw the same movies I did and had it built according to specifications.

[Q] Playboy: The current nostalgia fad doesn't seem to have overwhelmed you. Why do you think it's so popular with others?

[A] Feiffer: It's my generation's admission that nothing works anymore, so we all want out. God died in the early Sixties, then the two Kennedys and King, then the electoral process, then somewhere in the middle of all that, the family; then America died, and finally hope--although hope didn't so much die as wither away. The reason America died is because we blew it. The reason hope died is because the kids blew it. So at last we're given something solid with which to bridge the generation gap: our mutual failures.

[Q] Playboy: That's a bleak vision. Is there a way out?

[A] Feiffer: Well, before this interview, I decided I'd better force myself out of my adolescent senility and look for some answers, because it's all right not to know the answers around the house, or with friends, or even writing plays and movies; they can be ambiguous and then critics will take them seriously. But in a Playboy Interview, I knew I'd better really know the answers. So I turned off the TV and went back to reading books. Books used to know, before I stopped reading them several years ago. So I read Richard Sennett's The Uses of Disorder, and it's a nice try, but he doesn't really know. And I read Charles Reich's The Greening of America, and boy, does he not know! And I read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which turned out to be a whole book about how he and nobody else knows. So, in disgust, I turned the TV back on and there was the CBS news team. And none of them knew! Not even Eric Sevareid knew! So I realized I'm in the same position as the experts. They don't know and I don't know.

The awful and dangerous thing is that after all these years of disappointment and betrayal, people--particularly college students, because they're trained this way--are still looking for the answer. They feel sure that somewhere there's the right book and in the back of it, they're going to find the answer. Every year, that sends us off at least once in some weird new direction, which lasts about as long as it takes that particular book to rise to the top of the best-seller list and then drop off, to be replaced by the next answer. The awful truth may be that there just aren't any answers. We may simply have to go on this way.

[Q] Playboy: William Buckley once said that despair is a mortal sin. You sound as though you're guilty.

[A] Feiffer: I hope what I've said here doesn't lead anyone to despair. I think there are certain positive values to not knowing, especially after so many years of such uninformed expertise. But don't get me wrong. I don't knock despair. First of all, it's very classy. Secondly. it looks like we're in for a craze of it just as soon as we finish the current craze for nostalgia. One can already see the signs: intellectuals in despair, parents in despair, hard-hats in despair, middle America in confusion, which is their version of despair. But all of it is a peculiarly American kind of despair. Despair with a kind of upbeat. A kind of lilt to it. It's the kind of despair that doesn't stop you from having a terrific time on weekends. All in all, it's not the worst of interim emotions. You can survive pretty good with despair--which is more than I can say for our recent versions of hope.