Part 19

A Westsider for most of her career, Suzanne lists reading and cooking as her preferred pastimes: "I'm a great short-order cook. I think if I weren't a dancer, I'd be a waitress." Two local restaurants she likes to frequent are Rikyu (210 Columbus Ave.) and Victor's Cafe (240 Columbus).

Asked about her salary, Suzanne admitted that "you'll never make a lot of money in ballet. It's something we do because we love it, and we have to do it to be happy. ... The sole attraction is working for Balanchine and the New York City Ballet: that's something you can't put down in dollars and cents. I just assume that the company is paying us as much as they can." She smiled radiantly and added: "Most dancers wouldn't know what to do with a lot of money anyway, because they wouldn't have time to spend it."

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WESTSIDER JULES FEIFFER Screenwriter for Popeye the Sailor

11-5-77

Imagine a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Popeye the Sailor and Lily Tomlin as his girlfriend Olive Oyl.

Anyone who has seen the old Popeye cartoons, or the new computer animated ones, might think that the fighting mariner does not have the dramatic qualities needed for a full-length film. But according to Westsider Jules Feiffer, who is now writing the script for Popeye the Sailor, the original comic strip in the daily newspapers was the work of "an unrecognized genius." E.C. Segar created Popeye and drew him from 1924 to 1938. After that the character changed. Feiffer finds the original strip to be his biggest source of inspiration.

"The cartoons," says Feiffer, sitting on one arm of a chair in his Riverside Drive apartment, "exploit the violence between Popeye and Bluto. That was never part of the strip. It's more along the lines of the traditional cartoon of the 1940s, which could find nothing more interesting than one character dismembering another. I didn't find that funny when I was a kid and I don't now."

Feiffer developed his unique style of humor long before he sold his first cartoon. Today, though still perhaps best known as a cartoonist, he has gained a reputation as a playwright for both the stage (Knock, Knock and Little Murders) and the screen (Carnal Knowledge). He is also a respected prose writer, having recently published his second novel, Ackroyd.

A product of the Bronx, Feiffer recalls that after graduating from high school he went through "a series of schlock jobs to buy food and drawing materials. And long periods of unemployment." He planned all along to become a cartoonist. "I was prepared," he says, "for the eventual success which I was certain was going to happen if my work remained true to myself."

Feiffer spent several years as an assistant to other cartoonists and attended two art schools. Still, no one would publish his work until a day in 1956 when Feiffer, age 27, took a batch of his best 'toons to the office of a new, relatively unknown weekly called The Village Voice. They loved his work, and he became a regular contributor.

"All other publications at that time had their own idea of their readership. And editors insisted on tailoring stories to their own taste. The Voice," says Feiffer, "existed for the artist's taste and the writer's taste. It was a time when McCarthyism and the blacklist were rampant through every strata of society."

The Voice was then the only publication of its kind. It wrote about dissent; it was considered revolutionary, and Feiffer's weekly cartoons helped it to maintain that image.

Success came quickly to Feiffer after he joined the Village Voice: "It happened faster than I thought. It was only about three months or so before my work came to be talked about, and publishers began to offer book contracts." Syndication took place a few years later. Now the cartoon is carried by somewhat over 100 publications in every country of the western world and several in the Far East.

Feiffer's cartoon takes him one day a week to conceive and draw. During the other six days he works on his latest writing project. For three years -- until it was published this past summer -- that project was Ackroyd, an unconventional detective-type novel in which the characters are too human to keep their traditional roles as props for the detective's cleverness. The book is less suspenseful than a standard detective novel, but more revealing of human nature.

One of the things that has been in my work for many years," says Feiffer, "is people's need to communicate with each other not directly, but in code. ... Coded language is used to guide our lives, to frame our relationships with people." Feiffer's main character takes the name Roger Ackroyd and tries to become a private detective. Instead he gets "so intertwined with the coded life of his clients that he works on that for the rest of his career."

Ackroyd got extremely mixed reviews. "It's what I'm used to," notes the author. "Some reviews have been glowing. Others wondered what the hell the book was about and why I bothered to write it." Feiffer takes the good and the bad in stride, remembering what happened when his first play, Little Murders, opened on Broadway in 1967.

"It got all negative reviews and closed in a week," he recalls. "It was immediately done in London after that, which started the revival, because it was done very successfully. Then it was brought back to New York the following year and it won all the awards." In 1971 it was made into a successful film starring Elliott Gould and Marcia Rodd.

An occasional theatregoer, Feiffer ends the interview on a customary depressing note, saying that he is generally disappointed by even the biggest hits in town.

"I don't think of myself as a Broadway playwright," he says. "I'd be ashamed of that title. I don't think the Broadway theatre is very interesting or has been for the last 20 years."

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EASTSIDER GERALDINE FITZGERALD Actress, director and singer

3-15-80

Anyone hearing her rasping, throaty, Irish-accented voice for the first time might think she were suffering from laryngitis. But those who have come to love and admire Geraldine Fitzgerald over the past 40 years hear nothing but earthy humanity in the voice. One of the most versatile actresses in America, as unorthodox as she is gifted, Miss Fitzgerald at 66 remains at the height of her career, constantly juggling a variety of projects, as she says, "like somebody cooking a meal with many courses."

We're sitting in her Upper East Side living room, which is decorated in white from floor to ceiling -- carpet, chairs, tables, sofa, and even the television. The only picture is a childhood portrait of her daughter Susan Scheftel, now a 27-year-old graduate student.

"I like light unimpeded," explains Geraldine, her rosy face breaking into its customary smile. "And if everything is white, it's different in the morning and it's different in the middle of the day, and it's different all the time."

A slender, handsome woman with a penchant for long flowing skirts and bright lipstick, whose straight gray hair descends halfway down her back, Geraldine is soon talking about Mass Appeal, the two-character play that she is directing at the Manhattan Theatre Club; it will open in mid May. "It's by a very young author called Bill Davis. We did it last October at the Circle Rep Lab, and it was very successful, but it needed strengthening points. So Bill has just completed the ninth draft. ... Milo O'Shea is going to star in it. He's Ireland's premier comedian and a magnificent dramatic actor too."

Miss Fitzgerald's next acting role will be in a play titled Eve. "It's about a woman who runs away from home to seek her own internal freedom, like Nora in A Doll's House. The only difference is, she's my age. So of course her options are few. And she goes right down to the bottom: she becomes a derelict. And then slowly, slowly, slowly she comes up to find some kind of strength and independence. It's a drama, but a very comedic drama."