At 95, the award-winning cartoonist and writer is starting “from scratch” in a new house in upstate New York.
By Joanne Kaufman Photography by Tony Cenicola
Oct. 7, 2024
Jules Feiffer, the highly decorated cartoonist, illustrator, author, playwright and screenwriter, left New York City 27 years ago. But to Mr. Feiffer and those who know him, it’s a move that still feels as likely an occurrence as the pigeons departing St. Mark’s Square.
Being a New Yorker was a key part of his identity. “I never thought I could live out of the city or for that matter out of the Upper West Side,” said Mr. Feiffer whose book “Amazing Grapes,” a graphic novel for young readers was published last month. “I walked everywhere. If I had an appointment downtown, I would leave an hour early so I could walk there. I adored it all.”
But here he is now, at 95, in a high-ceilinged, 5,000-square-foot, ranch-style house in a sparsely populated town outside Albany.
“You come up the driveway and you see a majestic, beautiful lake and countryside. You think you’re in Bavaria,” said Mr. Feiffer who moved upstate from Shelter Island with his wife, JZ Holden, a writer, in 2022. “Where we are now is beyond what I’m used to seeing.”
Jules Feiffer and JZ Holden stand on a patio that overlooks a rolling pasture and a body of water on a cloudy day. Both are holding coffee mugs.
“The book I’m working on, called ‘My License to Fail’, is 350 pages, with big drawings because I have acute macular degeneration so I have to work big to see what I’m doing,” he added. “It’s my way of paying back for all this beauty. We’re living in paradise.”
Living in paradise but also working in paradise.
In Mr. Feiffer’s studio, there’s space not just for necessities, like his drawing table, but also such conveniences as a refrigerator, sink and stove.
“Because I have leg twitches, I get up a lot in the middle of the night and I go into the studio and make something for myself to eat,” Mr. Feiffer said. “And suddenly I’m into something. And what was going to be a 15 — or 20-minute excursion has turned into an hour and a half or two-hour nighttime work session.”
The walls of the studio are covered with the work of people Mr. Feiffer loves and admires. There is, for example, a portrait of his dog Lily, now deceased, but brought to vivid life by Ms. Holden. “Jules seems to feel that I captured her essence,” she said.
Nearby is a page from the Al Capp/Raeburn Van Buren comic strip “Abbie an’ Slats,” a stalwart of newspaper funny pages from the late 1930s to the early ’70s.
When the director Mike Nichols, a Feiffer pal, rejected the poster that the artist James McMullan, another Feiffer pal, conjured for the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production of “Waiting for Godot,” Mr. McMullan had it privately printed. One copy, Mr. McMullan’s wedding gift to Mr. Feiffer and Ms. Holden, is on display.
Casting an eye over it all: a reproduction of the Maltese Falcon. Years ago, the playwright Herb Gardner bundled the ebony bird in newspaper and left it outside Mr. Feiffer’s door on West End Avenue. “It always annoyed Herb that I didn’t guess that it came from him,” Mr. Feiffer said.
“I look at the falcon every day, and I think of Herb every day,” he went on. “There are some people I think of every day. Herb is one, Mike Nichols is another. They remain an essential part of my life.”
The list of cherished, long absent friends includes James Baldwin. A photograph of the celebrated writer and activist, a Christmas gift from Ms. Holden a few years back, keeps company with the falcon. Concerns about their own mortality fueled the couple’s decision to move upstate from their once beloved Long Island. Not long after their marriage in 2016, they bought a shingle-style saltbox with a deck on Shelter Island. Granted, the house was so small that Mr. Feiffer’s drawing table was wedged in near the front door, but the property was beautiful, the light was beautiful and Mr. Feiffer savored the proximity to friends like the writer Robert Caro and his wife. And work was going well.
He continued to write even as he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hearing loss, heart failure and macular degeneration, though he was still able to work and be productive. But in 2022, he had an emergency heart treatment, and Ms. Holden, now 72, “also became very ill from something that a neighbor down the block had, and then another neighbor,” said Mr. Feiffer. “Shelter Island had lost its charm, and the signs were that if we stayed much longer we’d be dead.”
Still, Long Island had been a haven during a difficult time. In 1986, Mr. Feiffer won a Pulitzer for his editorial cartoons in The Village Voice. A decade later, the alternative weekly cut his salary so sharply that Mr. Feiffer viewed it as a firing.
To the rescue, his friend, the journalist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt, who was starting a writing program at what is now Stony Brook Southampton, and recruited Mr. Feiffer to teach a class. He rented a series of houses until he and Ms. Holden, bought the Shelter Island house.
At 2,000 square feet, it was significantly smaller than the couple’s new house, which Mr. Feiffer describes as cavernous. “The interior feels like a couple of acres,” he said.
The previous owner generously left behind several pieces of the Renaissance revival furniture he’d had made in Germany and shipped to the property. Mr. Feiffer and Ms. Holden happily fell heir to a dining room table and chairs, a few sofas and lamps, several chandeliers, as well as a couple of Persian rugs and runners.
Ms. Holden was somewhat less enthusiastic about the color scheme they’d inherited: lime green ceilings and bright yellow walls. “I can live with how it is and work around it,” she said gamely. “Repainting would have been a major deal.”
“But,” she added, “there comes a moment when you really want to put your stamp on your home. You want it to be yours however the vision manifests itself.”
The pastels were done by Ms. Holden on a trip to Mexico many years ago. “Everything was in bloom and I was inspired by the colors,” she said.
In addition to the falcon, other memorabilia, the couple’s furniture from Shelter Island and other past residences, including some sofas and side chairs and rugs, a linen press and a pair of faux Tiffany lamps, have been nicely integrated into the space.
Mr. Feiffer will tell you that changing addresses is like being presented with a blank page. “I keep starting from scratch. It’s like I didn’t exist until I got into the new place. Moving to this house has been no different.”
Well, maybe a little different. When Mr. Feiffer gets up at 6 every morning to feed his two cats, he looks outside at the dawn light and, right on schedule, he gets overwhelmed.
“I could not have done my new book on Shelter Island,” Mr. Feiffer said. “There’s a level that the ordinary imagination doesn’t go, and you need something to set if off and fire it. That’s what I have here.”
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