Every morning, Jules Feiffer woke up happy.
He appreciated the world around him — its beauty and flaws, humor and heartbreak, the fodder that informed his work as a prolific cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author and illustrator.
He was, quite simply, excited to be alive, according to his wife, J.Z. Holden. And with a cup of coffee in hand, he sat down at his drawing board and got to work.
Armed with an arsenal of pencils, pens and markers, he often hummed as he drew, which Holden could hear from rooms away inside their longtime homes in East Hampton and on Shelter Island, she said, before moving to their new house in Richfield Springs, New York.
There, at his drawing table, his artistic expression came naturally, an effortless flow that was both childlike and disciplined to watch, his friends said. In his drawings were movement, courage, wit and playfulness — qualities he embodied himself. He was insightful and kind, charming, intuitive and wise, moving through life with a glint in his eye.
And it all came through on the page.
“It was like the drawing was coming to life,” his friend, author Monte Farber, said, “because he had so much life in him.”
On January 17, Feiffer — a Pulitzer Prize-winning creative and fixture in the East End arts landscape — died at home in upstate New York from congestive heart failure. He was 95.
“Jules was my greatest gift in this lifetime to date,” Holden said. “He came along at a time when I didn’t expect him, and then once he was in my heart, that was it. There was no coming back from that.”
Jules Ralph Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929, in the Bronx. Just 10 months later, the stock market crashed, launching the United States into the Great Depression.
Out of the dark times came comedy, spread by way of radio, film and, of most interest to Feiffer, adventure comic strips. They thrilled and mystified the young boy, while serving a dual purpose. First, they taught him how to read. Second, they planted the seed for what would become his life’s work.
And so, he started to draw.
At age 16, with his samples of cartoons in hand, he marched through the studio door of Will Eisner, his childhood hero who created the Sunday newspaper comic insert that featured the Spirit, a masked vigilante fighting for justice.
“He couldn’t have been kinder,” Feiffer said of Eisner, speaking to The Express News Group in 2022. “He looked at my samples — he told me they were awful. And he essentially told me I had no talent at all.”
But Feiffer quickly won him over, waxing poetic about his idol’s work — and meaning every word. He was hired.
What started as drawing panel rules and word balloons eventually graduated to dialogue and even full script writing. In 1947, Eisner gave him a humor strip, “Clifford,” which ran at the rear of the section until about 1950.
“I’ve been very lucky in life,” Feiffer said. “I’ve had many dreams come true, but this was the first of my dreams that came true.”
In 1951, Feiffer was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the Korean War, which influenced his future voice as a satiric cartoonist — allowing him to express his opinions about the military, politics and thought control in a way that, perhaps, he couldn’t have otherwise.
He captured the country’s attention — starting in 1956 with his cartoon strip, “Feiffer,” which would run for over four decades in The Village Voice. He was unique, bold and unafraid, and illustrated conversations had among his urban, liberal friends.
For the first time, his generation saw themselves reflected back through cartoons, whether the topic was friendship, family, sex or politics. And among them was actor Harris Yulin. Like so many, he read Feiffer before he met him. “I just remember thinking, it hit me with such a force,” he said of the cartoon strip. “I just said, ‘Yeah, he’s got it. He knows exactly what’s going on and has a point of view about it.’”
As “Feiffer” grew in popularity, its eponymous creator branched out into other mediums. His first screenplay was “Carnal Knowledge,” which starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, in 1971, later followed by “Bernard and Huey,” “I Want To Go Home,” “Popeye” and “Little Murders,” which began on Broadway in 1967 before moving to Off Broadway. It ran for 400 performances and won an Obie Award.
Over the course of his 70-year career, his list of accolades grew too long to list. “Every time we were together, I would kid him about the fact that he had just won an award a week before,” Farber said.
Most prominently, he earned a Tony nod for “Knock Knock” (1971) as Best Play; an Academy Award for “Munro,” as Best Animated Short Film in 1961; the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning; and, in 2004, he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.
The Library of Congress also recognized his “remarkable legacy” from 1946 to present, which included his work as an adult and children’s book author, illustrator — notably, the children’s classic “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norman Juster — and art instructor.
“Jules held up an acerbic lens to our social and political ills, but did so with a humor that came with an astute observation of human nature — our fears, our desires, our contradictions, our weaknesses,” his friend, film producer Susan Lacy, said. “He never lost his wit, his playfulness and his ability to see us and the world as it is — and put it in front of us, for all of us to see as clearly as he did.”
After more than 40 years of drawing, as well as writing a dozen plays, four screenplays, five children’s books and a graphic novel, Feiffer — at age 70 — turned to a new passion: teaching. And it is in this capacity that he first crossed paths with Holden.
Already a freelance writer, she had decided to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing and literature through Southampton College’s MFA program. Her first professor was Roger Rosenblatt — and her second was Feiffer. It was 2004 and she was already a longtime admirer.
“I think Jules was so far ahead of the curve,” she said. “He saw things that other people turned away from — and I knew that going in as his student and I was really excited to be in his class. And then he turned around and changed my life in the first three weeks.”
Her first assignment was to write a rant in response to someone who had just made an offhand remark. Next, she was tasked with writing a rant from that person’s perspective. And last, she was told to take her biggest betrayal and make it funny.
It was a painful exercise, she said, and Feiffer knew it would be. He met his students with “his humanity and his big heart, and a tremendous sweetness,” she said, and he reserved any criticism for the work itself.
“He starts by opening your mind and getting you to reframe your reality and look at things from a variety of different standpoints, instead of the one you always hang on to — and, boy, was that a lesson,” she said. “The rest of my time in that class, whatever we did was like having another a-ha moment on top of another a-ha moment.”
They wouldn’t reconnect until 2010, when he moved to the East End full time in the wake of a second failed marriage. He was on his own — his three daughters, Kate, Halley and Julie, living elsewhere. And so, at the request of Heather McAdam, who was teaching at Stony Brook Southampton, Holden drove Feiffer to his 80th birthday celebration at 75 Main in Southampton — “where he proceeded to get absolutely shitfaced,” she said.
“I remember walking into Jules’s apartment that very first time, when I brought him home from dinner, and he had his dog and his cat with him, and I saw the set up with the drawing board,” she said. “And it took him exactly three seconds: He walked in, he sat down, and he started drawing something.”
The next day, Feiffer called Holden and asked her to dinner. She said yes, but ultimately decided to keep their relationship platonic. Six months later, that started to change. She found herself falling in love — with his softness, his humanity, his heart and, of course, his humor.
“I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about anything, so I decided that I was not going to project into the future,” she said. “This exercise was going to be for me to stay in the moment and to celebrate who he was and who I was, whatever that looked like and however long it lasted.”
She paused. “I never, in a million years, thought that I would marry Jules Feiffer.”
That day came in 2016, at a friend’s home on the Napeague Strip, and officiated by Farber. The couple was affectionate, giggly, happy and joyful, recalled their friend, artist April Gornik. “They were both just like kids,” she said.
Over time, their relationship dynamic evolved and wasn’t without difficulty, Holden said — particularly as Feiffer wrestled with his alcohol use and, eventually, quit altogether. But what was constant was their laughter, she said, and together, they were a team — one centered on love and support, acceptance and respect.
“He was the love of my life. He was my partner. He was my best friend,” she cried. “He was everything, all rolled up into one. And he was also Dennis the Menace. I loved him with all my heart. I’ve never loved anyone the way I’ve loved him, and I know that he never loved anyone the way he loved me.
“We agreed that the whole purpose of being together was to celebrate one another,” she continued. “That was the reason we were together.”
From the outside, their relationship looked magical and adoring, agreed Farber and his wife, artist Amy Zerner.
“You ever go out with couples where you like one but not the other so much?” she said.
“It wasn’t like that,” her husband said.
“We loved them both,” she added.
“When you were with him, you felt like you were being blessed by the universe,” Farber said. “And the weirdest thing is, it sounds like hyperbole to say things like that, but it’s true, which is why we’re going to miss him so much.”
Nearly every week, for a number of years, Yulin found himself at one of three dining room tables on the East End — journalist Robert Lipsyte’s, Feiffer’s, or his own — talking about work and life with his two friends.
“The restraints were off, so we could talk about women and people we knew and be as outrageous as we wanted,” he said. “And Jules was always without care, as I would say, as an incisive commentator on our time.”
His voice lives on in the work he has left behind — and it’s not over. In the coming months, Feiffer will take his final bow, by way of a 300-page visual and written autobiography, titled “My License to Fail.” Fighting macular degeneration, he finished it just three days before he died.
“He could only see out of the corners of his eyes,” Holden said. “I watched him work on this book — I thought, ‘I know how blind he is.’ I know that there are days when we’re sitting in the kitchen and he looks up at me and he says, ‘You’re all a fuzz.’
“But there was some inner knowing he had, where he almost didn’t have to look at the page,” she continued. “It was this internal mechanism that knew what he was doing.”
The morning of January 17, she said, was no different than any other.
Feiffer had woken up happy.
He was about to have a cup of coffee.
He was ready to take on the world — and draw.