Swan Song for Jules Feiffer’s Satiric Dancer

When he was 23 years old and living in his first apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jules Feiffer got lucky. A modern dancer came home with him and spent the night.

“She was the first girl who ever did that,” Feiffer recalled with just a note of nostalgia. “You don’t forget that. She has been revisiting me ever since in the cartoons.”

These days, the dancer--sketched differently at various times in his life to reflect past girlfriends--is disappointed.

Last month, he broke the bad news.

“You’ve been my dancer for 43 years, so this is hard for me,” Feiffer’s drawing of himself said. “In four weeks, I give up this comic strip.”

“You’re dying!” the dancer said.

“No, I’m fine,” Feiffer reassured her, before putting the blame on politics.

“It’s not you. I’m a political cartoonist and it’s become a real problem,” he explained. “The material I have to work with: Al Gore . . . George W. Bush . . . When I grew nostalgic over Bill Clinton, I knew it was time to go.”

The touch of political dyspepsia is only a small part of the story why Feiffer’s wispy, ironic sketches capturing the foibles of politicians and the anxieties of ordinary Americans will stop appearing weekly in newspapers. The final strip appears this weekend in The Times’ Sunday Calendar section, where it has been running since March 1968.

Blame it on his busy schedule. We should all be so lucky at the age of 71.

“After 40-plus years, it occurred to me in the middle of a deadline that I was no longer having fun juggling cartoons, children’s books, plays, screenplays, teaching, lecturing and a wife, three children and a granddaughter,” he wrote in a farewell message on his Web site (https://www.julesfeiffer.com).

“Something had to go, and I decided it was newspaper syndication. It was a painful choice, but the only one that made any sense. It frees up about 60 days a year, and God, do I need them.”

Feiffer has illustrated “Some Things Are Scary,” a new children’s book by Florence Parry Heide, an 80-year-old author who lives in Kenosha, Wis. It comes out in October. He has two children’s books in the works, a busy teaching schedule, multiple magazine commitments--and something he swore he would never do again: writing for the theater.

He still carries the scars of the review in the New York Times of his 1990 play “Elliot Loves.”

“Frank Rich said it stank, although the audiences walked out starry-eyed,” Feiffer said over the phone this week. “I felt embittered and too hopeless.

“It didn’t seem to me that the next play would have any better luck, and they were going to continue to say what they were saying. ‘Elliot Loves’ is a piece of work I am proud of.”

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Two years ago, on Martha’s Vineyard, where he spends summers with his family (he is married to journalist Jennifer Allen), Feiffer was asked if he could do something for a benefit at the Vineyard Playhouse.

“I put together a number of short pieces, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show in a barn. . . . The reading went so successfully [one of the actors was Polly Draper, his wife’s best friend] that the California State Summer School for the Arts in Valencia contributed $20,000 to take the company west to turn the material into a full production.”

The following summer, minus Draper, who was starring in a play on Broadway, the company returned to the Vineyard, where “Jules’ Blues” had a sold-out run.

Later, New York’s Lincoln Center Theater commissioned him to write a new play.

“They had asked me before, and I swore I was never going near a theater again. But to quote the theatrical impresario Michael Corleone, ‘Just when you think you’re out of it, they call you back in.’

“It has always been important to me in my career to be having fun,” Feiffer explained. “And if I can’t have fun, I really don’t want to do it. During the rehearsals for ‘Jules’ Blues,’ I found I was having as much fun as anything I had been doing in years.”

Much more fun, it turned out, than meeting weekly deadlines.

“In this balancing act of doing all these different things, something had to give,” Feiffer said, “and it was the drumbeat of deadlines that I could do nothing about. . . .

“The Reagan years gave me lots of material, like the Nixon years did. Clinton and his weirdness gave me material, but he really wasn’t fun because I started out liking him.

“The quintessential comment I made in one cartoon was if you look at the Starr Report and see what his sexual escapades were, they were more connected to the doings of an adolescent, which suggested he should not be impeached. He should be grounded.

“If I didn’t have the children’s books, the plays plus two grown children and a granddaughter, I wouldn’t be stopping,” he added. “Once I get over my disdain, I will be more enthusiastic about the campaign.”

In 1949, Feiffer drew his first comic strip, called “Clifford.”

“I couldn’t sell cartoons when I started that went in the direction I cared about,” he said. “Nobody was interested. . . . All the publishers I took the cartoons to would say, ‘Great work, but you have to be famous to be published.’ . . .

“I was cartooning before I went into the Army. I thought of doing a syndicated strip no more dangerous than Al Capp. The Army taught me contempt for abusive authority. I realized coming out of the Army what I needed to do was not going to be mainstream.”

He took his drawings to the Village Voice, which agreed to print them in 1956, and it was the start of a prolific career.

Numerous collections of his cartoons have been published. He has written five plays, teleplays and screenplays including “Carnal Knowledge” and “Popeye.” In 1986, Feiffer received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He has won a George Polk Memorial Award, two Outer Circle Critics Awards, an Obie and a 1960 Oscar for his animated short “Munro.”

“He has been drawing forever, as far as I am concerned, really beautiful, different work, a real special satirist,” said Paul Conrad, a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner whose cartoons have long appeared in The Times. “I can’t believe he is going to take off now. We need him more than ever. We should organize some kind of dance for the return of Jules Feiffer.”

While he has put down his weekly pen, Feiffer will still draw regularly for the New York Times and the American Prospect, the New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone and occasional other publications.

This is small consolation for the figure of the dancer.

“What makes me sorry is the dancer is unemployed,” Feiffer said.

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Starting June 25, Feiffer’s place on the letters page of Sunday Calendar will be taken by Katie Maratta’s Silent Pictures comic that has been running on Page 2.