Jules Feiffer
Appearances
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I'd gone around for years peddling my work and I'd take it to editors of publishing houses because in those days I was hoping to publish little books of cartoon satire. And what I generally got from these editors was not frowns of disapproval.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
They'd just take the stuff and they'd hold it for a while and they'd laugh like crazy and they'd call me up and be wildly enthusiastic and tell me they couldn't use it and didn't want to publish it. And the reasons all seemed to be
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
that they had no idea how to market this, that they didn't know who would buy it, that I was an unknown quantity, that my name was not Saul Steinberg or James Thurber or William Steig, all of whom were quite popular at the time. I was quite unknown at the time.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Since nobody would pay me to have it in print, I decided to get it in for free and went down to The Voice, which was happy to take anybody's work for free. And that's how the cartoon began. The Voice at the time had a small circulation, something like 5 or 10,000, but it was an increasingly... knowledgeable and influential circulation.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I knew that if I were picked up by voice readers, including those very editors that turned me down because I had no market, once those editors knew that they had five or six friends who were reading me, that becomes the market. Suddenly what was uncommercial becomes possibly commercial, and I'm in business, and that's what I did, and that's exactly how it happened.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Well, Hefner came along... still when I was making absolutely no money, zilch money, out of the cartoon. And he was the first one to pay me to do the work that I cared about. And at the time, he said he wanted me to do just the sort of cartoons I wanted, the sort of cartoons that were appearing in The Voice in strip form, and didn't want to do anything to alter that.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And I did, and I was just as suspicious of Playboy as everybody was then and is to this day. And I found that Hefner was easily the most sensitive cartoon editor I've ever had anything to do with,
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And all of his suggestions, and he would make many, I've never seen anybody deal with a cartoon with such meticulous care and concern, possibly due to the fact that he had begun as a cartoonist, was an amateur cartoonist, had first wanted to be one. In any case, he would send back my roughs with two, three-page single-spaced type letters making all sorts of suggestions.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And often they were very, very good. Sometimes they were good and bad. Sometimes they were just bad. And whenever we disagreed, he said, okay, run it your way. There was never any problem between us. He never pulled any rank. There was never any tension. I mean he was always the most affable person. colleague to work with.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And only years later, when I got into the theater and met people who were also just as easily to work with, did I meet Ezekiel, certainly not in publishing.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Well, I was talking about how I had difficulty drawing Kennedy because he was so handsome. He was just a conventionally handsome man, it seemed to me. After three years in office, that problem was cured for me as a caricaturist because his face heavied, he got jowls. Now, some of that... It may have been the cortisone.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
He had Addison's disease, I think, and he was on this drug which does thicken your features and heavy it up and made him no less striking looking. It just made him easier for my pen.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Not in the beginning because I liked him. Lyndon Johnson was the only president in all the time I've been doing cartoons who I was actually very fond of. in his first nine months in office after he succeeded Kennedy and got through an unprecedented amount of social legislation, certainly unprecedented since the first New Deal days.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And I thought Kennedy was style without substance, and I thought Johnson was substance without style, and I much preferred him to Kennedy. I thought he was wonderful. And I had a great deal of trouble arriving at a caricature for a man who
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
looked so clearly unlike a hero and yet I felt was heroic and I didn't know how to go about it and I tried drawing him and I didn't get him very well and I kept my caricatures down and then the one and only time it's ever happened I was invited down to the White House for some kind of function lunch out on the White House lawn and actually got to see Lyndon Johnson in the flesh
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
and found him very different to look at than the photographs and the pictures on a television screen because I saw in him something that wasn't yet reflected in the writing about him or in the way we saw him. I saw a real meanness there, and I saw it not in the famous nose but in the set of his mouth, which is very, very tight and without humor, and the eyes, which were very cold and suspicious.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And I remember telling people at the time, he looks like the man who turns down your loan at the bank. And that affected – that taught me how to draw him. And within another six months or so, he was no longer this presidential hero of mine. He was now a war criminal because he had gone to the polls as a peace candidate and then immediately after his inauguration started bombing North Vietnam.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Well, Ford – I found wonderful to draw. Most cartoonists didn't like him, but they found him so innocuous and a kind of meatball. And his very meatballism struck me as a wonderful thing to work with. And looking for an idea for a cartoon, I did what I often do. When I'm out of ideas, I started doodling, and I found myself doing a drawing for no reason at all of the Frankenstein monster.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I didn't know why I was doing that, and I said, oh, my God, it's Jerry Ford.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Just because the two of them strongly resembled each other. My unconscious brought Jerry Ford with a nail in his neck, and Ford had this big, clumsy, shambling way of moving, not unlike that of the Frankenstein monster. So I did a drawing of Henry Kissinger as Dr. Frankenstein and Jerry Ford as being on the table being invented, and I had great fun with that.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
We always get back to Nixon. I think I'll be probably doing cartoons on Nixon in 20 years. He'll outlast us all.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Well, Watergate was enormous fun. Well... Serious people around the country like Eric Severide and others were talking about the tragedy of Watergate. Everybody I knew was laughing like crazy. And one couldn't get enough of these characters on television. And so I had great fun in and out of the cartoon.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Well, from the start, I described Reagan as the candidate of movie America. And I write in the book in the introduction to the section that there are two Americas out there. There's the real America of which Ronald Reagan is ignorant and his movie America of which he's the most qualified source we have.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And it's a land which is made up – whose substance is made up of a myth and it's a land of small towns and white picket fences and shady lane streets and small framed houses with happy little families and an Irish cop on the corner and this movie church where you – Everybody goes to hear a movie sermon where Jesus Christ is the gipper and God is our gross national product.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And Reagan actually believes in that world that he was taught existed on the studio backlot. And since most other systems of belief have collapsed over the past 20 years, the belief in the American dream – The belief in civility, the belief in the melting pot, the belief even in a pluralistic society.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Since people who once put a great stock into that mythology, which can generally be described under the umbrella term, the American dream. Since we've lost faith in that, there was some desperate need to go to some kind of faith, to somebody who believed in something. And when there's no other faith left, you go to movie faith.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And we had the perfect man in the scene to supply movie faith, and that was a real movie star.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
If you see him on the screen, you know he was never a good enough actor. I think he really does believe it.