College Town Life
Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was born and grew up, is a big small town. Interesting things can happen there, many of which involve the University of Michigan which employed my father. Even so, I seemed to see the same people in the same places doing the same things over and over. And, in the 1950’s and 1960’s the town lacked diversity. Ann Arbor, which called itself the “Research Center of the Midwest” when I lived there, could also seem self-satisfied.
Of course, Ann Arbor had its positive features for townies like me. I snuck into movies sponsored by campus organizations, into the university’s gyms to play basketball, and I worked for the Michigan tennis coach.
And, Ann Arbor’s numerous bookstores and newsstands made it easy to get specialty or out-of-town publications. What I read confirmed my suspicions that there were more interesting things going on elsewhere, particularly in New York. I even read Punch to see if I could understand British humor, but I was only partially successful.
I often read The Village Voice which seemed thoroughly sophisticated and “downtown” in a very New York sense. The Voice reported on a different world—even its classified advertisements and personals told interesting stories that were different from life in Ann Arbor.
Jules Feiffer’s cartoons were the coolest part of the very cool Voice, and I read them avidly as I tried to understand the politics and neuroses of the New Yorkers he drew. Feiffer seemed to say so much with a few lines and a little shading.
Feiffer, who excelled at cartooning, plays and screenplays, and fiction in various forms, died at 95 on January 17. The New York Times published a lengthy and admiring obituary describing his remarkably productive, and much honored, artistic life. The obituary can be seen
Numerous tributes capture the astonishing range of Feiffer’s literary and artistic accomplishments. This post will not recover that ground. Even so, the scope of his talent was amazing. Who else could have written the screen play for Carnal Knowledge (1971), which reimagined the battle of the sexes as a kind of thermonuclear war, and illustrated the beloved children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth?
Going East
I was determined to leave Ann Arbor for college even though I knew the University of Michigan was a fine institution. I have met several UM alumni who, learning that I grew up in Ann Arbor, said, “The best four years of my life were in Ann Arbor!” However, like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I wanted to go east.
My plan (if “plan” means anything at age 19) was to go east to college and return to attend the University of Michigan Law School where the tuition for members of staff families was $600 per semester.
Plans can change. Through an accident of fate I ended up at Columbia Law School. A collateral benefit to that development was that I could indulge my curiosity about New York City. My timing was not ideal. In the early 1970’s New York was at an absolute low point: the city was plagued by violent crime, including the Son of Sam killings, grime, graffiti and trash everywhere, gypsy cabs, drug-driven devastation in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and a financial collapse.
New York, New York
Living on on the Upper West Side at 114th Street and Riverside Drive near Columbia was endlessly interesting and sometimes disturbing—a law school professor was stabbed to death in a street robbery near the law school on the first or second day of classes in my first year.
By 1974-1975, my third year, I had essentially figured out law school. I started dating the sparkling Carolyn Kammerer who worked as an assistant cartoon editor at Playboy Magazine. Her boss, Michelle Urry, the cartoon editor, regularly met with Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, to review potential cartoons. Hefner began his magazine career as a cartoonist and he paid a lot of attention to Playboy’s cartoons.
The New Yorker and Playboy paid the most for cartoons in that era. Many top cartoonists appeared in both magazines, but saved their racier material for Playboy. I learned from Carolyn that cartoonists do not offer anything like what appears in newspapers and magazines. A typical submission from a cartoonist might be stick figures on a piece of scrap paper or napkin with a scrawled caption. A finished cartoon is created only after the work is sold to a publisher. At work, Carolyn went through these submissions which she called, “the slush.”
One day, Carolyn invited me to a party later that month that Michelle was giving in her loft in Chelsea. I said yes, of course, but that I had no idea what a loft was and only a vague notion of how to get to Chelsea. I knew Chelsea was downtown, and not just geographically.
On the night of the party, we entered the loft which was dazzling. Formerly a factory, it was a soaring interior space of brick and steel girders. The loft was spectacularly designed and appointed and contained significant paintings and sculptures. The large and supremely hip crowd contained people who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a combination of the Voice and Vogue. They were enjoying lavish food and drinks.
I somehow got in an extended conversation with a tall man with a receding hairline. We talked for quite a while before either of us asked the other what he did. I learned years later that what-do-you-do-for-a-living usually comes up in the first two minutes of any conversation involving newly introduced people in Washington.
Eventually, the tall man asked me what I did. I said that I was a third-year law student at Columbia. He asked me a few questions about law school or lawyers. When I asked him what he did, he said, “Oh, I’m Jules Feiffer.”
Somehow, that was perfect. His accurate and concise reply was not egotistical. It would have been incomplete or inaccurate if Feiffer had identified himself as a cartoonist, an illustrator, a novelist, a playwright, or a screenwriter. He was all of those and more at the highest levels of achievement.
A little later Feiffer said to me, “Let’s go over and talk with my friend, Nora Ephron.” So, we did.
To Jules Feiffer, a man of extraordinary talent and accomplishments who was gracious to a naïve law student at a party: Thank you for everything!
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Now that’s a cool story.
The excitement and awe of that loft party for a young midwesterner is palpable. Thanks for the wonderful story!