On a warm night in October, 1959, I was bidden to a party at Mamma Leone’s, a restaurant on Forty-eighth Street that was (and is) one of the largest and most popular in Manhattan’s theatre district. Random House had taken it over for the evening to celebrate the publication of “Act One,” the first volume of Moss Hart’s autobiography, which in no way surprised its publishers by turning out to be a best-seller. A further excuse for festivity was the fact that the author’s fifty-fifth birthday was to take place the following day. By any standards, the guest list—some two hundred strong—was fairly eye-catching. In addition to a favored bunch of critics and columnists, it included a representative selection of the show-business celebrities then in New York, among them Claudette Colbert, John Gielgud, Sam Goldwyn, Margaret Leighton, Ed Sullivan, Alan Jay Lerner, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Ethel Merman, Alec Guinness, Truman Capote, Rosalind Russell, and Marlene Dietrich—at which point my memory gives out. A group of Moss Hart’s admirers had put together an entertainment in his honor, and this was already under way when I arrived. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were just finishing a routine that satirized some of the more disastrous ways in which “Act One” might be adapted for the screen. During the applause I was burrowing through the resplendent mob, and, like many of my fellow-guests, I failed to catch the names of the next performers when they were introduced by the master of ceremonies, Phil Silvers.
Peering over the heads of a hundred or so standees, in front of whom other spectators sat, squatted, or sprawled, I saw two men in business suits. One, tall and lean, was conducting an interview with the other, who was short and compact. Their faces were among the few in the room which were not instantly recognizable. Though I took no notes, I recall much of what they said, and the waves of laughter that broke over it, and the wonder with which I realized that every word of it was improvised. The tall man was suave but relentlessly probing, the stubby one urgent and eager in response, though capable of outrage when faced with questions he regarded as offensive. Here, having been shaken in the sieve of nineteen years, is what my memory retains:
When they stopped, after about a quarter of an hour, the cabaret ended, and that was just as well, for nobody could have followed them. A crowd of professional entertainers erupted in cheers. The idea of a puritanical analyst was a masterstroke of paradox, and the execution had matched the concept in brilliance. Moss Hart was heard to say that the act was the funniest fourteen minutes he could remember. The room buzzed with comment, yet hardly anyone seemed to know who the little maestro was. Diligent quizzing revealed that he was a thirty-three-year-old television writer, that he had spent most of the preceding ten years turning out sketches for Sid Caesar, and that his name was Mel Brooks. I later discovered that his interrogator was Mel Tolkin, another, and a senior, member of the renowned menagerie of authors whose scripts, as interpreted by Caesar, Imogene Coca, and a talented supporting cast, had made “Your Show of Shows” a golden landmark in the wasteland of television comedy. Tolkin (a harassed-looking man, once compared by Brooks to “a stork that dropped a baby and broke it and is coming to explain to the parents”) was standing in at the party for Carl Reiner, a gifted performer who had also been part of the Caesarean operation. Ever since Brooks and Reiner met, in 1950, they had been convulsing their friends with impromptu duologues. The Moss Hart jamboree was an important show-business event, and, the press being present in force, it would have marked their semi-public début. Unfortunately, Reiner had a TV job in Los Angeles and could not make the date; hence his replacement by Tolkin, who had performed with Brooks on several previous occasions, though never in front of such a daunting audience. I knew nothing of this at the time; Tolkin struck me as a first-rate straight man. All I knew as I left Mamma Leone’s that night was that his stubby, pseudo-Freudian partner was the most original comic improviser I had ever seen.
We move forward to Hollywood in 1977. Carl Reiner, who has just directed a boomingly successful comedy called “Oh, God!,” recalls for me the events that led up to Brooks’s appearance at the Hart party. “During the fifties,” he says, “we spent our days inventing characters for Caesar, but Mel was really using Caesar as a vehicle. What he secretly wanted was to perform himself. So in the evening we’d go to a party and I’d pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be, but I always tried for something that would force him to go into panic, because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see. For instance, I might say, ‘We have with us tonight the celebrated sculptor Sir Jacob Epstone,’ and he’d have to take it from there. Or I’d make him a Jewish pirate, and he’d complain about how he was being pushed out of the business because of the price of sailcloth and the cost of crews nowadays. Another time, I introduced him as Carl Sandburg, and he made up reams of phony Sandburg poetry. There was no end to what he could be—a U-boat commander, a deaf songwriter, an entire convention of antique dealers.
“Once, I started a routine by saying, ‘Sir, you’re the Israeli wrestling champion of the world, yet you’re extremely small. How do you manage to defeat all those enormous opponents?’ ‘I give them a soul kiss,’ he said, ‘and they’re so shocked they collapse. Sometimes I hate doing it, like when it’s a Greek wrestler, because they have garlic breath.’ I asked him whether he was homosexual. ‘No, I have a wife.’ ‘But what’s the difference between kissing her and kissing a wrestler?’ ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is the only one I know who kisses from the inside out.’ That was pure Mel—a joke so wild it was almost abstract. I used to enjoy trying to trap him. One night, when he was doing an Israeli heart surgeon, I said, ‘Tell me, sir, who’s that huge man standing in the corner?’ ‘Who knows? Who cares?’ ‘But surely, sir, you don’t want a total stranger hanging around your operating theatre, bringing in germs?’ ‘Listen, in a hospital, a few germs more or less, what’s the difference?’ ‘Even so,’ I said, ‘I’m still curious to know what that very large gentleman does.’ ‘Look,’ he said. ‘He’s a big man, right? With a lot of muscle? You’re small and Jewish, you don’t mess around with big guys like that. Let him stand there if he wants to.’ I still wouldn’t let him off the hook. ‘But what’s that strange-looking machine beside him?’ ‘You mean the cyclotron?’ ‘No, the one next to that.’ ‘Oh’ he said, ‘that is the Rokeach 14 machine. It makes Jewish soap powder. As you well know, we Jewish doctors are incredibly clean, and we try not to soil our patients during the macabre process of cutting them to pieces. We get through an awful lot of Rokeach 14. Rokeach is in fact a brand of kosher soap used by orthodox Jews.” (Brooks later told me, apropos of Reiner’s attempts to outwit him, “He was absolutely dazzling. I’d be going along pretty good, getting laughs, and he would suddenly people the room with alien characters bearing mysterious devices. What was I supposed to do? I had to come up with an explanation or die.”)
Reiner continues, “Another time, we created a family consisting of a Jewish mother, a black father, and a homosexual son. Mel was playing all three parts when I threw him a curve. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why is your son white-haired when you are not?’ He answered as the mother. ‘I told him always to stay inside the building,’ he said, ‘because it’s full of Jews. One day, he went out and saw a whole bunch of Gentiles on the next block and his hair turned white overnight. It was his own fault. He should have stayed indoors.’ Sometimes, if a party went on late, Mel would get punchy and forget the name of the character I’d given him. Once, I said, ‘Here is Irving Schwartz, author of the best-selling novel “Up.” We developed that for ten minutes or so, and then I said, ‘Your book has a very unusual jacket. It’s triangular in shape.’ ‘I’m glad you noticed that,’ he said. ‘It’s a one-breasted seersucker jacket. The name is on the lapel—Irving Feinberg.’ ‘I think you’ve got that wrong, sir. Your name is Irving Schwartz.’ ‘Wait’ he said. ‘Wait till I look at my driver’s license.’ He pulled out his wallet, looked at the license, and reacted with shock. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘My name is Mr. William Faversham.’ ‘Well, Mr. Faversham, could you tell us how you came to write a book under the name of Schwartz?’ ‘I think somebody stole my wallet.’ But if Mel had a specialty it was psychiatrists. He did dozens of them, maybe because he was in analysis himself between 1951 and 1957. When I made him a Greek psychiatrist, he said he was Dr. Corinne Corfu, the man who analyzed Socrates. And there was one amazing evening when he played eight different psychiatrists simultaneously, without getting any of them mixed up. He was never at a loss.”
“Never” may be an overstatement. Mel Tolkin remembers a party at which Brooks, sans Reiner, delivered a soaringly funny monologue but could not find a satisfactory payoff line. He finally broke off in the middle of a sentence and walked out of the room. After the guests had waited for a while in expectant silence, Tolkin went out to look for him. He had gone home in self-disgust, leaving a scribbled note on a table. It read, “A Jew cries for help!”
“In the fifties,” Reiner says, “Mel and I performed just for fun, among friends.” Around 1953, Reiner bought a tape recorder on which to preserve some of their routines. One evening, after dinner at his home in Westchester, inspiration nudged him. He turned on the machine, picked up the microphone, strolled over to where Brooks was sitting, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are fortunate to have with us tonight a man who was present at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” The curve had been thrown. Brooks rose to the challenge and hit it out of the park, with repercussions to which we shall return: enough, for the moment, to note that this occasion marked the birth of a comic figure indestructible in every sense of the word; namely, the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. “The guy who gave us our entrée into the celebrity world was a well-known playwright named Joe Fields,” Reiner goes on. “He heard us performing somewhere in the late fifties and invited us to eat at his apartment, along with people like Lerner and Loewe, Harold Rome, and Billy Rose. We became a sort of upper-bohemian cult. Then, in 1959, I appeared in a movie called ‘Happy Anniversary,’ and Mel came to the wrap party for the cast and crew at a restaurant in the Village. Moss Hart was dining with his wife on the other side of the room. Mel recognized him. All of a sudden, he got up and walked across to Hart’s table and said, very loudly, ‘Hello. You don’t know who I am. My name is Mel Brooks. Do you know who you are? Your name is Moss Hart. Do you know what you’ve written? You wrote “Once in a Lifetime” with George Kaufman, and “You Can’t Take It with You” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” You wrote “Lady in the Dark” and you directed “My Fair Lady.’” And he ran right through the list of Hart’s credits. ‘You should be more arrogant!’ he shouted. ‘You have earned the right to be supercilious! Why are you letting me talk to you?’ He went ranting on like that, and Hart looked petrified. It took him quite a time to realize that Mel wasn’t just a nut case. But eventually he started laughing, and everything was fine. Later on, Mel and I did one of our bits. Hart couldn’t help hearing it, and that was how we got the invitation to Mamma Leone’s.”
In the autumn of 1959, Reiner’s career was prospering, both on TV and in the cinema. As he put it to me, “I didn’t need to sing for my supper anymore.” Brooks’s position was very different. Sid Caesar, for whom he had worked at a steeply rising salary for ten years, had been taken off the air, and Brooks was almost broke. “One day it’s five thousand a week, the next day it’s zilch,” he said in a magazine interview long afterward. “I couldn’t get a job anywhere! Comedy shows were out of style, and the next five years I averaged eighty-five dollars a week. . . . It was a terrifying nose dive.” Recently, he told me, “At the time of that Random House party, I was on the brink of disaster.” Even during the high-flying days with Caesar, he had been prone to recurrent fits of depression. “There were fourteen or fifteen occasions when I seriously thought of killing myself,” he went on. “I even had the pills.” One of his colleagues on “Your Show of Shows” recalls how Brooks snapped out of a particularly black mood by grabbing a straw hat and cane and ad-libbing a peppy, up-tempo number that ended:
Mamma Leone’s gave me my first sight of Brooks in performance. My last (to date) took place in the summer of 1977, when he was shooting his Hitchcockian comedy “High Anxiety.” In the intervening eighteen years, and most drastically in the last three of them, his life had changed beyond recognition. A trio of successive hits—“Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Silent Movie”—had made him a millionaire. In December, 1976, the exhibitors of America had placed him fifth on their annual list of the twenty-five stars who exert the greatest box-office appeal—a fantastic achievement for a middle-aged man whose only starring appearance up to that time had been in a picture, “Silent Movie,” that did not even require him to speak. His friend Burt Reynolds, rated sixth that year, grew accustomed to picking up the phone and hearing a jubilant voice announce, “Hello, Six, this is Five speaking.” In the 1977 poll, Reynolds rose to fourth position, while Brooks slipped to seventh, but, considering that no new film by Brooks had been shown that year, it was remarkable, as he pointed out to me, that he had retained a place in the top ten. “And in 1978,” he said, “I’m sure I’ll be No. 5 again.”
I draw on my journal for the following impressions of the Once and Future Five at work (and play) on “High Anxiety,” a quintuple-threat Brooks movie, on which he functioned as producer, director, co-author, title-song composer, and star:
JULY 14, 1977: Arrive in Pasadena for last day of shooting. By pure but pleasing coincidence, location is named Brookside Park. Temperature ninety degrees, atmosphere smog-laden. Only performers present are Brooks, leaping around in well-cut charcoal-gray suit with vest, and large flock of trained pigeons. As at Mamma Leone’s, he is playing a psychiatrist. Sequence in rehearsal is parody of “The Birds,” stressing aspect of avian behavior primly ignored by Hitchcock: Pigeons pursue fleeing Brooks across park, subjecting him to bombardment of bird droppings. Spattered star seeks refuge in gardener’s hut, slams door, sinks exhausted onto upturned garbage can. After momentary respite, lone white plop hits lapel, harbinger of redoubled aerial assault through hole in roof. Brooks’s hundred-yard dash is covered by tracking camera, while gray-haired technicians atop motorized crane mounted on truck squirt bird excreta—simulated by mayonnaise and chopped spinach—from height of thirty feet. Barry Levinson, one of four collaborators on screenplay, observes to me, “We have enough equipment here to put a man on the moon, and it’s all being used to put bird droppings on Brooks.” After each of numerous trial runs and takes, pigeons obediently return to their cages, putty in the hands of their trainer—“the same bird wrangler,” publicity man tells me, “who was employed by Hitchcock himself.” Find manic energy of Brooks, now fifty-one years old, awesome: by the time shot is satisfactorily in the can, he will have sprinted, in this depleting heat, at least a mile, without loss of breath, ebullience, or directorial objectivity, and without taking a moment’s break.
Each take is simultaneously recorded on videotape and instantly played back on TV screen—a technique pioneered by Jerry Lewis—to be scrutinized by Brooks, along with his fellow-authors, Levinson, Rudy DeLuca, and Ron Clark, who make comments ranging from condign approval to barbed derision. Dispelling myth that he is megalomaniac, Brooks listens persuadably to their suggestions, many of which he carries out. The writers, receiving extra pay as consultants, have been with him throughout shooting, except for three weeks when they went on strike for more money. Brooks coaxed them back by giving up part of his own share of profits not only of “High Anxiety” but of “Silent Movie,” on which he worked with the same three authors. Main purpose of their presence is not to rewrite—hardly a line has been changed or cut—but to offer pragmatic advice. In addition, they all play supporting roles in picture. Later, as also happened on “Silent Movie,” they will view first assembly of footage and help Brooks with process of reducing it to rough-cut form. “Having us around keeps Mel on his toes,” Levinson explains to me. “He likes to have constant feedback, and he knows we won’t flatter him.” All of which deals telling blow to already obsolescent auteur theory, whereby film is seen as springing fully armed from mind of director. Good to find Brooks, who reveres writers, giving them place in sun; he has often said that he became a director primarily in self-defense, to “protect my vision”—i.e., the script as written. “There’s been no interference from the front office,” Levinson continues as Brooks trudges back to his mark for yet another charge through cloudburst of salad dressing. “Nobody from Fox has even come to see us. Mel has free rein. Jerry Lewis once had that kind of liberty, but who has it now? Only Mel and, I guess, Woody Allen.”
Am reminded of remark made to me by Allen a few days earlier: “In America, people who do comedy are traditionally left alone. The studios feel we’re on a wavelength that’s alien to them. They believe we have access to some secret formula that they don’t. With drama, it’s different. Everybody thinks he’s an expert.”
Writers and camera crew gather round tree-shaded monitor to watch replay of latest take. Smothered in synthetic ordure, star bustles over to join them:
BROOKS: I stare at life through fields of mayonnaise. (Wipes eyes with towel.)
The take (last of twenty) is generally approved, and Brooks orders it printed. Welcoming me to location, he expresses pleasure at hearing British accent, adding, “I love the Old World. I love the courteous sound of the engines of English cabs. I also love France and good wine and good food and good homosexual production designers. I believe all production designers should have a brushstroke, a scintilla, of homosexuality, because they have to hang out with smart people.” (Brooks once declared, in an interview with Playboy, that he loved Europe so much that he always carried a photograph of it in his wallet. “Of course,” he went on, “Europe was a lot younger then. It’s really not a very good picture. Europe looks much better in person.” He lamented the fact that his beloved continent was forever fighting: “I’ll be so happy when it finally settles down and gets married.”)
Brooks’s version of shower scene from “Psycho,” shot several days before, now appears on monitor. An unlikely stand-in for Janet Leigh, Brooks is seen in bathrobe approaching fatal tub. Cut to closeup of feet as he daintily sheds sandals, around which robe falls to floor. Next comes rear view of Brooks, naked from head to hips, stepping into bath. Star watches himself entranced.
BROOKS (passionately): When people see this, I want them to say, “He may be just a small Jew, but I love him. A short little Hebrew man, but I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.” I want every fag in L.A. to see it and say, “Willya look at that back?”
Before lunch break, he takes opportunity to deliver speech of thanks to assembled crew, whose reactions show that they have relished working with him.
Recall another apposite quote from Woody Allen, who said to me in tones of stunned unbelief, “I hear there’s a sense of enjoyment on Mel’s set. I hear the people on his movies love the experience so much that they wish it could go on forever. On my movies, they’re thrilled when it’s over.”
“As you all know,” Brooks begins, “you’ll never get an Academy Award with me, because I make comedies.” This is a recurrent gripe. Brooks feels that film comedy has never received, either from industry or from audience, respect it deserves, and he is fond of pointing out that Chaplin got his 1971 Academy Award “just for surviving,” not for “The Gold Rush” or “City Lights.”
BROOKS (continuing): I want to say from my heart that you’re the best crew I ever found. Of course, I didn’t look that hard. But you have been the most fun, and the costliest. I wish to express my sincere hope that the next job you get is—work.
Over lunch, consumed at long trestle tables under trees, he recounts—between and sometimes during mouthfuls—how he visited Hitchcock to get his blessing on “High Anxiety.”
BROOKS: He’s a very emotional man. I told him that where other people take saunas to relax, I run “The Lady Vanishes,” for the sheer pleasure of it. He had tears in his eyes. I think he understood that I wasn’t going to make fun of him. If the picture is a sendup, it’s also an act of homage to a great artist. I’m glad I met him, because I love him. I love a lot of people that I want to meet so I can tell them about it before they get too old. Fred Astaire, for instance. And Chaplin. I’ve got to go to Switzerland and tell him—just a simple “Thank you,” you know? [Chaplin died five months later, before this pilgrimage could be made.]
More Brooksian table talk, in response to student writing dissertation on his work:
STUDENT: What’s the best way to become a director?
BROOKS: The royal road to direction used to be through the editing room. Today, my advice would be: write a few successful screenplays. Anybody can direct. There are only eleven good writers. In all of Hollywood. I can name you many, many screenwriters who have gone on to become directors. In any movie, they are the prime movers.
STUDENT: Have you any ambition to make a straight dramatic film?
BROOKS (vehemently): No! Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? Sydney Pollack can do that. The people who can’t make you laugh can do that. Suppose I became the Jean Renoir of America. What the hell would be left for the other guys to do? I would take all their jobs away. It would be very unfair of me.
STUDENT: In other words, “Shoemaker, stick to your last”?
BROOKS: Yes. And in Hollywood you’re only as good as your last last.
STUDENT: But don’t you want to surprise your audience?
BROOKS: Sure. Every time. I gave them “Blazing Saddles,” a Jewish Western with a black hero, and that was a megahit. Then I gave them a delicate and private film, “Young Frankenstein,” and that was a hit. Then I made “Silent Movie,” which I thought was a brave and experimental departure. It turned out to be another Mel Brooks hit. “High Anxiety” is the ultimate Mel Brooks movie. It has lunatic class.
STUDENT: But what if you had a serious dramatic idea that really appealed to you ? Would you—
BROOKS: Listen, there are one hundred and thirty-one viable directors of drama in this country. There are only two viable directors of comedy. Because in comedy you have to do everything the people who make drama do—create plot and character and motive and so forth—and then, on top of that, be funny.
UNIDENTIFIED BEARDED MAN: Have you ever thought of being funny onstage?
BROOKS: No, because I might become this white-belted, white-shoed, maroon-mohair-jacketed type who goes to Vegas and sprays Jew-jokes all over the audience. A few years of that and I might end up going to England, like George Raft or Dane Clark, wearing trenchcoats in B movies.
Debate ensues about differences (in style and personality) between Brooks and the other “viable director of comedy,” Woody Allen. Both are New York Jewish, both wrote for Sid Caesar, both are hypochondriacs, much influenced by time spent in analysis. There is general agreement at table on obvious distinction—that Brooks is extrovert and Allen introvert.
BARRY LEVINSON: They’re total opposites. Mel is a peasant type. His films deal with basic wants and greeds, like power and money. Woody’s films are about inadequacies—especially sexual inadequacy—and frailty and vulnerability. Also, like Chaplin, Woody is his own vehicle. His movies are like episodes from an autobiography. You couldn’t say that about Mel.
HOWARD ROTHBERG (slim, dark-haired young man, who has been Brooks’s personal manager since 1975): The big difference is that Mel’s appeal is more universal. “Blazing Saddles” grossed thirty-five million domestically, and “Silent Movie” is already up to twenty million. Woody, on the other hand, appeals to a cult. I love his pictures, but they have a box-office ceiling. They don’t go through the roof.
BROOKS (who has been wolfing cannelloni, followed by ice cream): No matter how much “High Anxiety” grosses, it won’t give me one more iota of freedom. I have the freedom right now to do anything I want. My contract is with the public—to entertain them, not just to make money out of them. I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself. I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people. If I can’t do that, I’m not going to make a quiet, exquisite noise for a cabal of cognoscenti.
This is Brooks the blusterer speaking, the unabashed attention-craver who started out as a teen-age timpanist and is still metaphorically beating his drum. Can testify that drummer has alter ego, frequently silenced by the din: Brooks the secret connoisseur, worshipper of good writing, and expert on the Russian classics, with special reference to Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy. Is it possible that—to adapt famous aphorism by Cyril Connolly—inside every Mel Brooks a Woody Allen is wildly signalling to be let out?
STUDENT: I think your films are somehow more benevolent and affirmative than Woody Allen’s.
BROOKS: Let’s say I’m beneficent. I produce beneficial things. A psychiatrist once told me he thought my psyche was basically very healthy, because it led to product. He said I was like a great creature that gave beef or milk. I’m munificent. I definitely feel kingly. Same kind of Jew as Napoleon.
STUDENT: Napoleon was Jewish?
BROOKS: Could have been. He was short enough. Also, he was very nervous and couldn’t keep his hands steady. That’s why he always kept them under his lapels. I put him in one of my records. [Fans will remember how the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man took a summer cottage on Elba, where he met the exiled Emperor on the beach—“a shrimp, used to go down by the water and cry”—without at first realizing who he was: “Fellow in a bathing suit, how did I know? There was no place to put his hands.”] Anyway, there’s something disgustingly egotistical about me. I never truly felt inferior. I never developed small defenses. I never ran scared. Even in comedy, you don’t want your hero to be a coward. You want him to go forth and give combat, which is what I do in “High Anxiety.” Now, Woody makes Fellini-ish, Truffaut-ish films. He starts out with the idea of making art. He feels that his art is his life. And more power to him. The difference is that if someone wants to call my movies art or crap, I don’t mind.
Detect, once more, sound of obsessive drum-beating; last sentence, in particular, seems intended to convince drummer himself as much as anyone else. Conversation breaks off as Brooks returns to work. Hear him in distance inviting youthful assistant to take over direction of brief scene in gardener’s hut, already rehearsed, where star is deluged anew with bird droppings—“a job,” he graciously declares to the grinning apprentice, “fully commensurate with your latent talents.”
Finishing my coffee, I mull over recent conversation with Gene Wilder, who has been directed thrice by Brooks (in “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” and “Young Frankenstein”) and once by Allen (in “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask”). According to Wilder: “Working with Woody is what it must be like to work with Ingmar Bergman. It’s all very hushed. You and I are talking quietly now, but if we were on Woody’s set someone would already have told us to keep our voices down. He said three things to me while we were shooting—‘You know where to get tea and coffee?’ and ‘You know where to get lunch?’ and ‘Shall I see you tomorrow?’ Oh, and there was one other thing—‘If you don’t like any of these lines, change them.’ Mel would never say that. The way Woody makes a movie, it’s as if he were lighting ten thousand safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one of them is a little epiphany, topical, ethnic, or political. What Mel wants to do is set off atom bombs of laughter. Woody will take a bow and arrow or a hunting rifle and aim it at small, precise targets. Mel grabs a shotgun, loads it with fifty pellets, and points it in the general direction of one enormous target. Out of fifty, he’ll score at least six or seven huge bull’s-eyes, and those are what people always remember about his films. He can synthesize what audiences all over the world are feeling, and suddenly, at the right moment, blurt it out. He’ll take a universal and crystallize it. Sometimes he’s vulgar and unbalanced, but when those seven shots hit that target I know that that little maniac is genius. A loud kind of Jewish genius—maybe that’s as close as you can get to defining him.”
This reminds me of something that was written in 1974 by the critic Andrew Sarris:
Reflect that this positive judgment is not necessarily incompatible with negative opinion. I lately heard from former colleague of Brooks; viz., “Woody has become a professional, whereas Mel is still a brilliant amateur. Amateurs are people putting on parties with multimillion-dollar budgets.”
Return to set, where, after nearly twelve weeks’ shooting, current party is over. Brooks has brought in picture—budgeted at four million dollars—four days ahead of schedule. Though in buoyant mood, he expresses horror at rocketing cost of filmmaking: “One actor and a few birds, but I’ll bet you this has been a twenty-thousand-dollar day.” (Studio accounting department afterward confirms that he would have won his bet.) I take my leave. Brooks clicks heels and bows, saying, “Your obedient Jew.” He misses no opportunity to brandish his Jewishness, which he uses less as a weapon than as a shield. Remember—he seems to be pleading—that I must be liked, because it is nowadays forbidden to dislike a Jew.
Manager Rothberg accompanies me to parking lot, explaining how much success of movie means to Brooks. I suggest that surely he can afford to make a flop. “Financially, he can,” Rothberg says. “Psychologically, he can’t.”
AUGUST 31, 1977: “My beloved, you are guinea pigs.” It is a balmy evening seven weeks later, and Brooks is introducing first showing of rough cut to audience of two hundred (including workers on picture, their friends and relations, and minor studio employees such as waiters, cleaners, and parking attendants) who have crowded into private theatre at Fox. He continues, “There are children present. Some of them may be mine, so I’m not going to do the filthy speech that is customary on these occasions. For the nonce, by which I mean no offense, this movie is called ‘High Anxiety,’ a phrase that I hope will enter common parlance and become part of the argot of Americana. But what you will see tonight has no music, no sound effects, and no titles. You won’t even see our swirling artwork. You will, however, see a lot of crayon lines, which I will explain for the benefit of the editor. They indicate something called opticals. This picture has one hundred and six dissolves, of which you will see not one. There are some other very fancy opticals that I am having processed in Cairo right now. There is also one crayon mark that should be on a men’s-room wall, but we couldn’t get it out in time. As you know, it’s incumbent on us all to be killed in a Hitchcock movie, and you will see several people being very tastefully slaughtered. I regret to tell you that in casting four crucial roles we ran out of money, so the people who wrote the picture are in it. Finally, let me say that I wish you well, but I wish myself better.”
Screening gets warm response, punctuated by applause. Brooks scampers down front and thanks audience for its attention, its laughter, and its profound awareness that “there are eighteen million Arabs surrounding two hundred and six Jews, and—no, wait, that’s from some other speech, at some hospital somewhere.” He then requests detailed and candid criticism: Where did movie drag? Which gags failed? Was plot clear? He listens raptly to all answers, asks other spectators for corroboration or dissent, makes careful notes of points on which action should be taken. And goes back to three and a half more months of furious work, polishing the film for a December première, so that it will qualify for the Academy Award, which, as he repeatedly, belligerently, fate-placatingly asserts, no comedy can ever win.
The man we know as Mel Brooks was born in a Brooklyn tenement on June 28, 1926. To the question “What were you born?” when it was posed by David Susskind on a TV panel show in 1970 he replied, “George M. Cohan.” (Later in the program, he admitted that he really had two diametrically opposed selves, that there were two different sides to “the strange amalgam, the marvellous pastiche that is me.” Under Susskind’s remorseless interrogation, he confessed, “The first side of me is Sir Anthony Eden. . . . And the other is Fred Astaire.”) In reality, what he was born was Melvin Kaminsky, the youngest of four boys, whose parents were Eastern European immigrants. His father, Maximilian Kaminsky, came from Danzig, and his mother, née Kate Brookman, from Kiev. According to Brooks, one reason for the success of his collaboration with people like Carl Reiner and Mel Talkin was that they all shared “the same background, the second-generation Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish intellectual heritage.” He told Susskind that his mother left Kiev in early childhood, never having learned Russian, and that her English was still fairly impenetrable, mainly because the voice of authority, which was what she took as her model on arrival in New York, invariably belonged to an Irish cop. The result, Brooks said, was that “she speaks no known language, and speaks it with an Irish accent.”
His father, a process server, died suddenly of a kidney disease at the age of thirty-four, when Brooks was two and a half years old. The shock left him with a sense of loss that persisted into adult life. For example, he recognizes that his relationship with Sid Caesar was that of a child clamoring for the attention and approval of a father. When Brooks went into analysis, in 1951, his purpose, he recently told me, was “to learn how to be a father instead of a son.” (His six years on the couch, two to four sessions per week, undoubtedly hastened the emergence of Brooks the father figure, patriarchal ruler of movie sets. “He’s sometimes my mother hen, and sometimes even my brother,” Gene Wilder says, “but most of the time he’s my father.” On a wall of Wilder’s office at Fox is a photograph of the two men, inscribed “To my son Gene, with love, Daddy Mel.”) Kate Kaminsky, widowed and penniless, with four boys to support, took a job in the garment district, putting in a ten-hour day and bringing home extra work in the evening. A miniature dynamo, less than five feet in height, she also found time and energy to keep her children fed, their clothes washed and mended, and their apartment in spotless trim. The roach or bedbug that entered her domain had signed its own death warrant. She exemplified what Brooks said to Susskind of Jewish mothers in general: “Until they die themselves, they clean and kill.” He went on to sum up his feelings about this indomitable woman by declaiming, “If I could, I would go skinny-dipping with my mother.” (Still vigorous in her eighty-third year, she nowadays lives in Florida.) Irving and Leonard, the eldest two sons, were sent out to work when they were twelve, and, on a family income that averaged about thirty-five dollars a week, ends were precariously made to meet. Mrs. Kaminsky was obsessed with the idea of preserving what Brooks describes as “a certain threshold of dignity,” and for this reason she always refused to go on relief. It must be remembered that her husband died shortly before the Wall Street crash and that Brooks spent his childhood in the roughest years of the Depression. To be Jewish, Brooklyn-born, fatherless, impoverished, and below average stature—no more classic recipe could be imagined for an American comedian. Or, one might suppose, for an American suicide.
Not long ago, discussing Brooks with a prosperous Jewish movie producer, I remarked that he had once been prone to suicidal impulses. “Nonsense,” the producer said. “That’s self-dramatization. Jews don’t kill themselves. Look at their history. They’re too busy fighting to survive.”
When I reported this conversation to Brooks, he said, “You were talking to a rich Jew. Poor people kill themselves, and a lot of poor people are Jews. One evening, when I was a kid, a woman jumped off the top of a building next door to where I lived. She was Jewish. And there were plenty of other Jewish suicides during the Depression.” The image of that death is burned into Brooks’s memory. He was playing with friends on a nearby street. Hearing screams and police sirens, he ran to see what had happened. A corpse, covered by a sheet so that only the feet were visible, was being loaded into an ambulance, and he was sure he recognized the shoes as a pair belonging to his mother. His own apartment was empty. Unknown to him, Mrs. Kaminsky was working overtime in Manhattan. The hours that passed before she returned were the worst he ever lived through.
Some revealing sidelights on Brooks’s relationship with his parents are thrown by the recorded routine in which he plays a two-hour-old baby, precociously endowed with the faculty of speech. Interviewed by Carl Reiner, he declares that he already knows his mother, though he hasn’t yet “seen the outside.”
He has a simple theory to account for the attacks of queasiness that women suffer during the early months of pregnancy:
His knowledge of world celebrities is extremely limited. Reiner reels off a list of names including Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro, and Pandit Nehru, none of which means anything to him. Then:
Pressed by Reiner, he explains that while he was still in the womb his mother went to a lot of Cary Grant pictures, whereas she never took him to any Pandit Nehru pictures. “But I’m sure,” he generously adds, “that he’s a hell of an actor.”
At one point, he leaps to the conclusion that he is a girl (“That’s adorable!”), but Reiner gently disabuses him. “That’s all right,” he says, putting a bold face on it. “I’ll play ball and get drunk and things. I’ll be fine.” He tentatively asks whether Burt Lancaster is a girl. Reiner gives him a negative answer, which seems to relieve him. “That’s good,” he says, reconciled at last to masculinity. “I’ll be like him.” It has been established earlier that Baby Brooks’s linguistic skill is a freakish and short-lived gift, likely to be withdrawn at any moment. As long as the theme is his mother, he is eagerly articulate. Significantly, the withdrawal symptoms begin to appear in the following passage, when Reiner introduces a new subject.
And the track ends with Brooks regressing into wailing, bawling, frantic inarticulacy. It is quite an unnerving sound. Listening to it, I recall something that an old friend of Brooks’s, the novelist Joseph Heller, once said to me: “There’s a side of Mel that will never be fulfilled, no matter how hard he drives himself, and it all goes back to his father’s death.”
At P.S. 19, Brooks was bright but unstudious—the kind of disruptive, obstreperous child that teachers slap down on principle, wearily aware that he will bounce right back up. “I wasn’t an avid reader,” he says. “I was always an avid talker and doer. Reading books seemed too conservative for me to bother with.” He quickly established himself as the clown of the classroom. One of his favorite movies was “Frankenstein” (the 1931, James Whale version), and he discovered at the age of eight that he could reduce his closest chum, a boy called Gene Cogen, to uncontrollable hysterics by singing “Puttin’ On the Ritz” in the manner of Boris Karloff . “We had folie à deux,” Brooks told me. “It got so bad that Cogen couldn’t hear that song near a window, because he might roll out and fall to his death. I would start to sing and he would collapse. He would have to be dragged to the principal’s office by his feet, with his head banging on the steps, still laughing.” Thus the infant Brooks achieved what every comic traditionally strives for—a knockdown, drag-out exit. (He stored up this triumph for future use: Peter Boyle performs the same routine in “Young Frankenstein.”) Despite, or perhaps because of, the damage to his head, young Cogen remained a fan of Brooks’s, and said to him one day, “You’re going to be famous when you grow up. I know that because nobody else uses words like ‘urchin’ in English composition.”
On the streets, where Irish, Italian, and Polish gangs roamed only a few blocks away, Brooks was funny in self-defense. He later said to a Playboy interviewer, “If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death?” Whenever it was possible, he and his pals would travel in the company of a well-built Gentile. Even today, it is an article of faith with Brooks that “every small Jew should have a tall goy for a friend, to walk with him and protect him against assault.” Much of Brooks’s humor, as we shall see, is inspired by fear: fear of injury, illness, sex, and failure; and also of unfriendly Gentiles, especially large ones, and most particularly if they are Germans or Cossacks. Fear, too, of predatory animals, though not, apparently, of sharks. My evidence for this is drawn from the Susskind program mentioned previously
All the apprehensions that surface in Brooks’s comedy have the same eventual source: a fear—or, to put it more positively, a hatred—of death. The noise he makes is literally death-defying. I append some Brooksian reflections on mortality, culled from various conversations over the past year.
BROOKS: The whole business of death is too formal nowadays. Bing Crosby just succumbed to the great spectre at the age of seventy-three, but the way it’s covered by radio and television and newspapers it is no longer calamity. It is worded in correct obituary paragraphs and it becomes a normal and ordinary event. The good shock value is taken out of it. The moments of horrible grief over somebody’s death are handled for us so that we don’t experience them, and then they stay with us too long because we didn’t grieve properly. The media formalize the tragedy, put a quick film of Saran Wrap over it, so that we don’t feel, “My God, one of us has suddenly ceased to be,” so that millions of people don’t ask, “Where did Bing Crosby go?” Well, where did he go? Don’t just tell me he died. I want to know where he went. And I want to grieve a little bit.
MYSELF: Are you scared of dying?
BROOKS: Not right now, not just this moment, because I’m feeling good, I’m not in a lot of pain. But I always intend to be afraid of it. To pay proper respect and homage to it. When I was nine, my friend Arnold said to me that we were both going to die. I said, “You’re obviously not right, you can’t be right. We’re not going to die, because why were we born? It wouldn’t make any sense.” He said, “What about your grandfather? He died. And what about fish?” I said my grandfather was very old, exceptionally old, and fish had nothing to do with us. I thought I sounded very clever. All the same, that was the first time I knew I was going to die.
Again:
MYSELF: Do you believe in life after death?
BROOKS: No, I don’t. I think that’s silly. And there’s no Judgment Day, either. There isn’t a day when we all kiss the little fishes and shake hands and walk together into God’s green Heaven. So what are we doing here? My guess is that we are part of an evolving process that has no knowable purpose. What’s happened is that we were given too many brains, and our brains have screwed up our biological evolution. If we didn’t think so much, we’d know what it was all about. When one leaf on a tree begins to turn yellow, it doesn’t turn to the other leaves and say, “Jesus Christ, all you guys are green and I’m turning yellow! What the hell is this?” They just turn yellow, and then red, and then brown, and then they leave the tree, and it’s all proper. But we say, “Look at this gray hair! Look at this wrinkle! And, my God, I’m so tired after I walk up fourteen steps!” We defer far too much to our brains, our logic, our powers of rational thought. That’s why we’re so vain, so egotistical, so full of complaining. Leaves never complain.
MYSELF: You’re saying that we ought to go along with the processes of nature. But science tells us that we live on a dying planet, where everything—leaves and people alike—is ultimately doomed to extinction. If that’s correct, surely the best way to obey the laws of nature would be to kill ourselves now and have done with it?
BROOKS: But we don’t have to, because we’re going to die anyway. And, because of that, let’s have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more. “Now thyself” is more important than “Know thyself.” Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful. (Catching himself on the brink of sounding pretentious, he retreats to the safety of self-mockery, and adopts the tone of a humorless pseudo-intellectual.) By this, of course, I do not mean to intimate that I espouse a totally Sartrean position.
MYSELF: But you’re in the movie business. You have to plan ahead.
BROOKS: I only look ahead commercially. I never look ahead spiritually.
On his records with Reiner, there was no advance planning; Brooks lived entirely in the moment, wholly committed to now. For this reason (which we’ll examine later), they may well represent his most personal comic achievements. A final exchange with Brooks on eschatology:
MYSELF: When you’re playing the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man, Reiner asks whether you and your fellow cave dwellers believed in a superior being. You answer, “Yes. A guy Phil.” You used to offer up prayers to him, like “O Philip, please don’t take our eyes out.” Then, one day, he was struck dead by lightning. Reiner asks how you felt about that, and you say, “We looked up. We said, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil.’ ” Is there?
BROOKS: Yes. There is something bigger than Phil, and I’m afraid of it. That’s where my standards of morality come from—fear. And not only fear of God. I know how strong I am, how powerful I can be, how aggressive I can get. And I don’t want a world where that kind of force can be turned against me. It frightens me. That’s why we’ve all got to behave. That’s the beginning of civil behavior. Fear of ourselves.
In 1939, the Kaminskys moved to Brighton Beach, where they shared a house a block and a half from the sea. “It was sort of rustic out there,” Brooks recalls. “We actually got to see trees. I loved it.” One of their neighbors was Buddy Rich, Artie Shaw’s new drummer, who befriended Brooks and gave him an occasional free lesson in the art of percussion. The following summer, Brooks took a vacation job as general helper at a hotel in the Catskills, washing dishes, keeping the tennis courts clean, and yelling things like “Mrs. Weiss, your time is up!” at people in rented rowboats. The food supplied to the staff still haunts his nightmares. Of one especially feculent pie, he says, “It lay under my heart for three years. I called it Harold. I used to pat it every morning and ask how it was—‘Remember how you were when I ate you, you little devil?’ ” He worked out a simple comedy routine, which, as a reward for good conduct, he was occasionally allowed to perform. Clad in a black overcoat and derby hat, and toting two suitcases, the fourteen-year-old Brooks would trudge out onto the diving board. Pausing at the edge, he would suddenly scream “Business is terrible! I can’t go on!” and plunge into the pool.
After two years of seaside life, Mrs. Kaminsky brought her family back to the old neighborhood; the reason, Brooks says, was that “she missed the friendships of the ghetto.” He attended Eastern District High School, where he was either an all-talking, all-singing version of Harpo Marx or a major nuisance, depending on whether you were his classmate or his teacher. Through his brother Lenny, he met Don Appell, a Broadway actor who had appeared with Canada Lee in Orson Welles’s 1941 production of “Native Son.” Appell introduced him to the social director of a borscht-belt hotel in Ellenville. Brooks made a strong impression and was hired, for the summer season of 1942, as drummer and part-time tummler. Two quotations from Brooks may here be helpful. (1) To Playboy: “Jews don’t do comedy in winter. In summer, all right.” (2) To me: “A tummler can be defined as a resident offstage entertainer at a Jewish mountain resort, mostly after lunch.” He found it hard to decide on a professional name. Melvin Kaminsky was too overtly Jewish for a comedian. David Daniel Kaminsky, also of Brooklyn but unrelated to Brooks, had faced much the same problem a decade or so earlier, and had solved it by billing himself as Danny Kaye. (Just why Jews in the performing arts were—and, for the most part, still are—expected to Anglicize their names is a question worthy of a separate study. To take three cases at random, is it to simplify pronunciation, to enhance euphony, or to disarm bigotry that Emanuel Goldenberg becomes Edward G. Robinson, Benny Kubelsky becomes Jack Benny, and Isadore Demsky becomes Kirk Douglas? The whole rigmarole discredits the public that demands it.) Brooks’s first thought was to borrow his mother’s maiden name, but Melvin Brookman turned out to be a non-starter, because, he told me, “I couldn’t get it all on our drum.” Chopping off a syllable, he settled for Melvin Brooks.
That summer, two events occurred that helped to lay down the course of his future career. In the band at the Avon Lodge, a nearby Catskill pleasure dome, there was a pretty good saxophone player called Sid Caesar. Brooks met him in off-duty hours, howled at his mimetic gifts, and formed a friendship that was renewed, to the lasting gratitude of TV audiences, after the war. The other significant event took place back in Ellenville. It was a classic demonstration of the First Show-Biz Law of Psychokinetics, according to which major talent, if unfulfilled, acquires the power of temporarily disabling minor talent that comes within its sphere of influence and impedes its development. One morning, in obedience to this law, the regular stand-up comic fell mysteriously sick and had to be shipped back to New York. Brooks, inevitably, was asked to replace him. He went on that night and improvised, using real characters—the manager, staff, and clientele of the hotel—as his points of departure into fantasy. He also found time to prepare a short blackout spot, for which he coöpted a girl assistant. “It was entitled ‘S. and M.,’ thirty years before anyone had heard of S. and M.,” he told me. “The girl and I walked out from the wings and met in the center of the stage. I said, ‘I am a masochist.’ She said, ‘I am a sadist.’ I said, ‘Hit me,’ and she hit me, very hard, right in the face. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold it. I think I’m a sadist.’ Blackout. That was the first sketch I ever wrote.” Within a few days, he had composed his own theme song, the climax of which was a rousing plea for sympathy:
He was not an overnight smash, but he improved with every performance and held down the job for the rest of the season, in the course of which, incidentally, he celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
One night last winter, Brooks dined with me at my rented house in Santa Monica. Although I was the host, he insisted on providing the wine, which turned out to be Château Lafite ‘66. (He makes the same stipulation wherever he eats. Even at the most expensive restaurants in Beverly Hills, Brooks will arrive with a neat leather case that holds two bottles from his own cellar. He does this partly because few wine lists offer items of comparable quality and partly because he sees no reason to pay exorbitant markups if he can avoid it. Thus, he exploits his status while restricting his expenditure, since the restaurateurs would rather slim their profits than lose his patronage.) Over dinner, he told me a little-known story, the saga of Brooks at war, which I here reproduce in his own words:
“I came in at the end. I went overseas with the artillery, and we docked at Le Havre, France, in February, 1945. Then I was transferred into the 1104th Combat Engineer Group. We travelled in a big truck through the nation of France on our way to Belgium, and every time we passed through a little town we’d see these signs—‘Boulangerie,’ ‘Pâtisserie,’ and ‘Rue’ this and ‘Rue’ that, and rue the day you came here, young man. When we got to our hundred-and-eightieth French village, I screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘The joke is over! English, please!” I couldn’t believe that a whole country couldn’t speak English. One third of a nation, all right, but not a whole country. There was very little actual shooting in Belgium, but there was plenty of mortar and artillery fire, and it was very noisy, and I thought that I would not want to be in the war very long, because of the noise. The earth was very hard when I was there, and I could not dig a V-shaped foxhole, as I wanted to, and stay down at the bottom of the V for the rest of the war. All these hot fragments of shrapnel and stuff were flying around, and I did not want to die, so it was awful. I remember hiding under a desk in a kindergarten while there were air battles going on above us, and bombs rattling.
“I was a pfc. Once, I was out on patrol with seven other men, and we found a case of German rifles near an old railway siding—beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt action. Sure enough, there were some cartridges right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about twenty-one dollars when suddenly we got a strange call on our jeep radio. It said that German werewolves—guerrillas operating behind our lines—had cut all communication between the 1104th and the Ninth Army by destroying the telephone wires. My God, I realized it was us, so we barrelled right back to camp, and they said ‘Did you see anything?’ and we said ‘Not a thing.’ Then I became very brave. I said, ‘Give me some men, sir, and I’ll go back. We gotta stop these werewolves.’ So I was sent out again on patrol to hunt them down. We hung around the railway siding for about four hours and then came back. My colonel offered to make me a corporal on the spot, and I said, ‘No, no, sir, I’m not worthy of it.’ Because I knew that noncoms and officers got killed, and that somehow privates could survive in This Thing Called War.
“Along the roadside, you’d see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. And I sang all the time; I made up funny songs; I never wanted to think about it. Some guy would say, ‘We’re gonna be killed, we’ll never get out of this war,’ and I’d say, ‘Nobody dies—it’s all made up.’ Because otherwise we’d all get hysterical, and that kind of hysteria—it’s not like sinking, it’s like slowly taking on water, and that’s the panic. Death is the enemy of everyone, and, even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.
“At the end, it was very sad, because the Germans were sending old men and little boys to fight against us. I was very good about that. I’d say, ‘N0 shooting, throw down your guns,’ and talk to them in Yiddish and German. Of course, when we ran into pockets of trained German soldiers, genuine S.S. Flammenwerfer Nazis who wanted to die rather than surrender, I’d hide, because they’d kill you as soon as look at you. But these groups of little boys and old men wanted nothing but just to go to their mothers or their toilets. From around April 25th onward was the worst two weeks of my life. Then it was over, and it was V-E Day. And on V-E Day I hid again, because the Americans all got drunk and fired off every round of ammunition they had, and a lot of people were killed in the festivities. I knew if I went out on the street I’d get shot to death. I was in a village near Wiesbaden, and the May wine was still green. It can make you very drunk, so I found a wine cellar and opened a hundred bottles of it and poured it all over me. I stayed there for twenty-four hours, until the shooting had stopped.”
“And then you went back to the States?” I asked.
“No,” Brooks said. “You see, I was the barracks character, and they didn’t want to lose me. My major said to me, ‘Melvin, why not stay with us and travel around providing the boys with entertainment?’ I said ‘Great!’ So he made me a corporal and gave me an old Mercedes, a real beauty. Then I told him I’d need a chauffeur, and he said, ‘I can’t let you have a military man.’ I said, ‘Could you spare a few pfennigs for a German civilian driver?’ He said ‘Fine,’ so I found a German fiddle player named Helga, who became my chauffeuse. My official title was Noncom in Charge of Special Services, and I did shows for enlisted men and officers’ clubs. Sometimes for a whole division, with tens of thousands of people out front. I told big, lousy jokes. Every time Bob Hope came by, I would write down all his jokes and use them. Nothing frightened me. I sang like Al Jolson. Everybody could do the low Jolson, but I did the high Jolson that nobody else could do—things like ‘I love you as I loved you when you were sweeeet sixteeeen.’ People said they appreciated that. My chauffeuse played the fiddle for them, and together we fiddled in the back seat of the Mercedes.
“I used to go to Frankfurt with my special pass and obtain certain rare cognacs and stick them in my ear. There wasn’t a nineteen-year-old soldier who got drunker than I did. Helga played Brahms’ ‘Lullaby’ beautifully. I’d say, ‘Pull over to the curb and play Brahms’ “Lullaby.” ’ That dream world lasted for four months. Then they told me my Occupation duties were over and I could go back to civilian life. And I said, ‘No, no—let me die in the back of the Mercedes with Helga.’ But they sent me home anyway.”
Professionally speaking, what he returned to was almost three years of not very much. During his absence, things had been moving fast for his friend Caesar. While serving in the Coast Guard, Caesar had appeared in a recruiting revue called “Tars and Spars;” its director was Max Liebman, a sharp-eyed impresario who already numbered Imogene Coca and Danny (Kaminsky) Kaye among his discoveries. Dominated by Caesar’s comedy routines, “Tars and Spars” opened in Florida and then went on a national tour, after which Columbia made a movie version that retained nothing of the original except the title and Caesar. His notices when the film was released, in 1946, launched him on a thriving career in night clubs and vaudeville houses. Nobody, however, seemed inclined to discover Brooks. To demonstrate the versatility of his face, he hired a photographer to snap him in four contrasting moods—Brooks beaming, Brooks scowling, Brooks pensive, and Brooks aghast—and had the results printed on one page, copies of which he sent in vain to every agent in town. He once arrived without an appointment at the headquarters of the eminent producer Kermit Bloomgarden. “There were dozens of actors waiting to see him, some of them quite famous,” Brooks told me. “I walked up to his secretary and said, ‘Paul Muni is here. I have to go in three minutes.’ She got on the intercom, and within ten seconds Bloomgarden came running out of his office. He looked at me and said, ‘This boy is not Paul Muni.’ I said, ‘Muni’s name is Harold Gottwald. I am the real Paul Muni.’ [Whose real real name, incidentally, was Muni Weisenfreund.] Then Bloomgarden grabbed me by the collar and said, ‘You’ve got a lot of moxie. I’m going to remember you.’ But he didn’t give me an audition.”
Under the pressure of need or fear, Brooks was capable of any audacity. One night during this period, he went out to New Jersey to see the comedian Ronny Graham, who was a friend of his, performing in cabaret. After the show, Graham gave him a lift back to New York. To continue in Brooks’s words: “We stopped off on the way to have a sandwich at a diner. It was about 3 A.M. and the place was full of enormous truck drivers. Ronny was still wearing his stage makeup and some pretty avant-garde clothes, and these big, hairy men all swivelled round and started to stare at us. Some of them even stood up. While we were eating, everything went very quiet. I was terrified. Suddenly, I turned on Ronny like a cobra and said, ‘I want my ring back.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘You spoke to that man. Back at the club. Don’t think I didn’t see you speaking to him, because I did. I want my ring back.’ And we both went into this berserk faggot row. Finally, I picked up my cup of coffee and threw it in his face. Then I flounced out to the car with Ronny right behind me, wiping his eyes and screaming. Some of the truck drivers followed us out to the parking lot. They just stood there, dumbstruck, with their hands on their hips, as we drove off, kissing and making up. I waved at them out of the window.”
In the autumn of 1947, Caesar invited Brooks to come and see him at the Roxy, where he was starring in the stage show that accompanied the long-running movie “Forever Amber.” Afterward, in his dressing room, Caesar mentioned that Max Liebman was planning a revue for presentation on television. “What is that?” Brooks claims to have asked, and he further claims to have received the reply “It’s a thing that takes pictures of you and sends them into people’s living rooms.”
“Don’t do it,” Brooks begged him, straight-faced. “It’s trafficking in graven images, and there are strict Jewish laws against that. You better stay away from that stuff or you’ll never get your image back. The very least that can happen is that you’ll be sterilized by the cameras.”
A superstitious man, Caesar was thoroughly unnerved by Brooks’s little joke. A few months later, however, when Brooks was directing a shoestring production in Red Bank, New Jersey, Caesar called him with the news that he had decided to risk infertility. He had signed with NBC to appear in “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” a sixty-minute program, produced by Liebman, that would make its début in January, 1949. Caesar proposed a deal whereby he personally would pay Brooks a weekly stipend of fifty dollars to supply him with special material. Brooks jumped at the offer.
“The Admiral Broadway Revue,” which ran for nineteen sparkling weeks, was an acorn that soon grew into an oak. With many of the same participants—e.g., Caesar and Imogene Coca as performers, Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen as principal writers, and Liebman as producer—it reappeared in February, 1950, now expanded into a full-blown, high-budget, prime-time, ninety-minute Saturday-night event, entitled “Your Show of Shows.” Brooks refused to renew his private arrangement with Caesar; as he put it, “I don’t want to be your boy.” Instead, Liebman hired him, at a hundred and fifty a week. His first contribution to the new series was the famous sketch in which Caesar played a jungle boy who is discovered, clad in a lion skin, roaming the streets of New York.
Within a couple of months, Brooks’s salary had risen to two hundred dollars, from which it steadily ascended to the peak of five thousand.
Many detailed accounts exist of the writing team that worked on “Your Show of Shows.” Not since the Algonquin Round Table has a group of American wits been more extensively chronicled. In addition to Tolkin, Kallen, and Brooks, it eventually included Joseph Stein (who wrote the book of “Fiddler on the Roof”), Larry Gelbart, and Neil Simon, with Michael Stewart (author-to-be of “Hello, Dolly!”) acting as typist, a post in which he was later replaced by “a little red-headed rat”—to cite Brooks’s affectionate phrase—named Woody Allen. Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, from the supporting cast, threw in ideas; and Caesar, with Liebman at his side, presided over the collective delirium, a madhouse of competing egos in which nobody could outshout Brooks. According to Miss Kallen, “Mel imitated everything from a rabbinical student to Moby Dick thrashing about on the floor with six harpoons sticking in his back.”
Tolkin told me, “Half of Mel’s creativity comes out of fear and anger. He doesn’t perform, he screams.” (By the end of 1950, Tolkin and Caesar were already in psychoanalysis, and it is not surprising that in the following year Brooks also took to the couch. His therapist had been analyzed by Theodor Reik, who had been a protégé of Sigmund Freud. Brooks felt that what he learned, though it might not be straight from the horse’s mouth, was at least feedbox noise from the same stable.)
Addressing the American Film Institute in 1977, Brooks said, “We wrote things that made us laugh . . . not what we thought the audience would dig. . . . What really collapsed us, grabbed our bellies, knocked us down on the floor and made us spit and laugh so we couldn’t breathe—that went into the script. Except for the dirty portions, which we couldn’t do on live television.”
A character in which Brooks specialized, and in which his distinctive comic style first began to assert itself, was the German Professor, played by Caesar. He appeared under many names—such as Kurt von Stuffer, the dietitian, or Siegfried von Sedativ, the authority on sleep—always pontificating with the same majestic fraudulence in the same bedraggled and ill-fitting frock coat. His ignorance, exposed by Carl Reiner’s questions, was boundless in its scope and variety. How, for instance, do aircraft fly? As Dr. Rudolf von Rudder, aeronautical expert, he spelled out the answer in layman’s language: “It’s a simple theory. Matter is lighter than air. You see, the motors, they pull the plane forward and they cause a draft, and then it taxis faster down the field and the motors go faster and the whole plane vibrates, and then, when there’s enough of a draft and a vacuum created, the plane rises off the runway into the air. From then on, it’s a miracle. I don’t know what keeps it up.”
After a complex buildup, the laugh comes not from a witty, climactic payoff but from a sudden plunge into bathos. We hear exactly what we would expect to hear from this obvious half-wit. Cf. the reply of Dr. Heinrich von Heartburn when Reiner asked him for his advice on keeping one’s marriage alive: “Make it interesting. . . . I showed a friend of mine once how to keep his marriage exciting. . . . One day he’d come home from work, his wife would open the door, he’s a French soldier. . . . The next day he’s a policeman, he comes in, he starts to run around with the handcuffs and the badges, and the next day he don’t come through the door, he jumps through the window, he’s a clown. He somersaults all over the living room and throws his wife all around the place. [Pause] She left him. He was a maniac.”
A final glimpse of the Professor (for which, as for the preceding quotes from the original scripts, I draw on the lengthy extracts reprinted in Ted Sennett’s book “Your Show of Shows”): In the guise of a mountaineering pundit, he is mourning the loss of a colleague, Hans Goodfellow, who gave his life trying to prove that it was possible to climb mountains on roller skates. What should a climber do, Reiner inquires, if his rope breaks?
In this exchange, and dozens like it, Brooks was breaking fresh ground, exploring territory that he was eventually to make his own. He was inventing the interview as a new form of comic art.
The last edition of “Your Show of Shows” went out in 1954, by which time Brooks was married to Florence Baum, a dancer in Broadway musicals. They had three children—in order of appearance, Stefanie, Nicholas, and Edward. The youngest is now studying music in Manhattan, while both of the older ones are taking courses in film at New York University. Brooks refers to them as “these nice friends I’ve grown.” Their parents were divorced in 1962. “We had married too young,” Brooks said, more than decade later. “I expected I would marry my mother, and she expected she would marry her father.” Minus Coca, Caesar returned to the small screen in 1954, starring in a show of his own called “Caesar’s Hour.” He was also minus Brooks, who, determined to go his own way, had rejected the offer of a top writing job on the new program. Before long, however, Brooks regretted his decision to quit the nest. His own way was leading him nowhere but into debt, and after the show’s first season, unable to resist the money, he rejoined his old boss, under whose paternal shadow he stayed until 1959. Which brings us back to Mamma Leone’s.
Although Brooks left a lasting impression on everyone who saw him at the Moss Hart jamboree, it did nothing to help his career. He was a brilliant party turn, but what had after-dinner improvisation to do with professional comedy? In 1960, with his marriage crumbling and no source of income, he went job-hunting to Hollywood, where Carl Reiner was already working. Hearing that they were both in town, Joe Fields threw a party in their honor, on the tacit understanding that they would provide the entertainment. Before an audience of celebrities that included Steve Allen and George Burns, they got up and did the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. When the applause had died down, Burns said, “Listen, you better put that on a record, because if you don’t, I’ll steal it.” Allen, who shared Burns’ enthusiasm, had friends who were highly placed in the recording business. He made a call to one of them the following morning.
“A few days later,” Reiner told me, “Mel and I walked into a studio at World Pacific Records and ad-libbed for over two hours.” The edited result was an L.P. that came out in the spring of 1961 and sold over a million copies. “That was a turning point for Mel,” Reiner continued. “It gave him an identity as a performer for the first time.” Moreover, it gave him a comic persona that at once embodied and exorcised his own deepest anxieties; for the main point about this jaunty survivor—more than twice as old as Methuselah and still going strong—is that he has conquered death. By playing a character who was immortal, Brooks may have staked his principal claim to immortality as a comedian.
Gene Wilder summed up for me a mental image he has of Brooks: “I see him standing bare-chested on top of a mountain, shouting ‘Look at me!’ and ‘Don’t let me die!’ Those are the two things that rule his life.” They recur throughout his records with Reiner, of which, to date, there are four. Following the runaway success of the original L.P., further revelations by the garrulous oldster of his close encounters with “the great and the near-great” of the past two millennia were issued in the fall of 1961, with sequels in 1963 and 1973. In these classic interviews, Brooks triumphs not only over death but over another of his besetting phobias, that of the lifelong seeker after father substitutes who fears he will never make a convincing father himself; for what is the Two- Thousand-Year-Old Man if not the most prolific parent on earth? He tells us that he has been married “several hundred times” and that when he looks back on his wives “a thousand violins explode in my mind.”
At least, he misses their company, which is more than can be said for Warren Bland, the Gentile advertising executive who is one of the many other characters Brooks plays on these remarkable discs. Bland lives in the city of Connecticut, Connecticut, “a very exclusive community,” where they don’t allow children. They have children, of course, but “we send them to Hartford . . . to Jewish and Italian families, people who like children.” From time to time, Bland goes on, “I might just mosey over to Hartford, say ‘Hi, gang!,’ you know, and then speed right back to Connecticut, Connecticut.”
As Bland, Brooks has a quintessentially WASP accent. When he is playing the bimillenarian, it becomes not Jewish but—Brooks is insistent on this—American-Jewish. “Within a couple of decades, there won’t be any more accents like that,” he said to me. “They’re being ironed out by history, because there are no more Jewish immigrants. It’s the sound I was brought up on, and it’s dying.” Beneath the jokes, these recordings are a threnody. Even on the surface, there are odd moments of unexpected melancholy, as when the patriarch reflects, “We mock the thing we are to be. We make fun of the old, and then we become them.” Although he has foxed the grim reaper, it has often been by inches. He has led a life dominated by peril and hostility, in which practically every human activity springs from one motive.
All of which corroborates the scriptural doctrine that perfect love casteth out fear. (And, I might add, compares very favorably with the behavior of a well-known English writer who fled London during the wartime blitz, pausing only to explain to his girlfriend, “Perfect fear casteth out love.”) Again, consider the following exchange:
As for the origins of human speech:
In other words—or, rather, in no other words—the need to communicate arose from the threat of imminent assault. Similarly, the custom of shaking hands “stemmed from fear.” In order to check whether the other fellow was carrying a rock or a dagger, “you grabbed his hand—‘Hi there, Charlie!,’ ‘How you doing, Bertram?’—and you held that hand, then you looked and you opened it up and you shook it a little.” The primal art of dance evolved because it was an even more comprehensive means of self-protection. By dancing with your antagonist, you immobilize both of his hands and “you keep the feet busy, so he can’t kick you.” Song, too, had its roots in terror. If you were in real danger, a high-pitched rhythmical yelling was the only way to make anyone pay attention. The message had to be simple and ear-catching, as witness the opening lines of the first lyric ever sung:
Shortly afterward came national anthems, with which each group of cave dwellers tried to frighten its neighbors; e.g.:
The old man has immunized himself against death by obeying a number of rules—some pragmatic, some purely superstitious—which he is eager to share with us. Every morning, for instance, he sinks to his knees and prays “fiercely” for twenty-two minutes “that the ceiling shouldn’t fall on me, or my heart should not attack me.” Among his other precepts for longevity: avoid fried food; consume nectarines in bulk (“Even a rotten one is good. . . . I’d rather eat a rotten nectarine than a fine plum”); never run for a bus; and “stay out of a Ferrari or any small Italian car.” He has also preserved his pep by using drugs derived from “certain barks of certain trees that made you jump in the air and sing ‘Sweet Sue.’ ”
His fear of illness, though intense, is more than matched by his fear of hospitals, which are run today, he believes, on principles that have not changed since his troglodytic youth.
Over the centuries, some of this indifference has rubbed off onto his own philosophy. It emerges most vividly when Reiner challenges him to define the difference between comedy and tragedy. His reply, brutally concise, is an aphorism as memorable as any I have heard on this ancient subject: “Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”
He drops names like a drunken waiter dropping plates: few great reputations pass through his hands unchipped. Robin Hood “stole from everybody and kept everything;” Shakespeare, though personally “a pussycat,” was a terrible writer (“He had the worst penmanship I ever saw”); Sigmund Freud was nothing more than a good basketball player; and, as for Michelangelo’s painting, “I thought it stunk,” because it showed naked people flying around, and “you can’t hang a naked in your living room.” Perhaps his most startling disclosure is that he cohabited with Joan of Arc. He volubly describes the ups and downs of their relationship, after which Reiner intervenes.
For me—and, I have discovered, for Brooks himself—this is the high point of the whole extravagant saga.
The words are Max Beerbohm’s, the italics mine. The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man fulfills Beerbohm’s demands to the letter. With this verdict Brooks, who is not noted for bashfulness, would probably agree. “Everybody knows,” he has said of his work on these records, “that that is terrific stuff.” It extracts a unique comic euphoria from a fundamentally pessimistic view of life. I’ve dwelt on it not only as a milestone in Brooks’s past (and in the history of comedy) but as a signpost to which in the future he is likely to return for guidance.
Early in the nineteen-sixties, Brooks began to acquire a cult following. To the relatively small number of people who buy non-musical L.P.s he became, in his own words, “a royal personage, an emperor of comedy.” In other respects, he remembers the years between 1959 and 1965 as “that terrible period when I couldn’t get anything off the ground.” In 1961, Jerry Lewis had an idea for a screenplay, “The Ladies Man,” and hired Brooks to work on it. To Brooks’s furious chagrin, Lewis took the script and had it entirely rewritten, so that few of Brooks’s lines survived. (Show business offers few pleasures keener than that of paying tribute to a former foe who happens to be in eclipse. Brooks’s present opinion of Lewis is that “he was an exciting, dynamic creature, and I learned a lot from him.” He cannot, however, resist adding, “High-key comics like that always burn themselves out. Lewis could do thirty-one different takes [i.e., physical reactions], and when you’d seen them all, that was it. Low-key, laid-back comics like Jack Benny are the ones that last.” Moreover, Lewis stooped to sentimentality—something utterly foreign to Brooks. Gene Wilder told me, “There’s not much white sugar in Mel’s veins. He would never ask an audience for sympathy.”) For some time, Brooks had been working on a novel; he now revamped it as a play, called “Springtime for Hitler.” No producer would touch it. “All American,” a Broadway musical with a book by Brooks, was among the more resounding flops of 1962. In the same year, during which his divorce became final, he turned out another screenplay, entitled “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.” Nobody bought it. Meanwhile, most of his colleagues on the Caesar shows were prospering—a fact that neither escaped his attention nor soothed his frustration.
After separating from his wife in 1960, Brooks had spent a bleak and insolvent period in an unfurnished fourth-floor walkup on Perry Street, for which he paid seventy-eight dollars a month. He then moved in with a friend called Speed Vogel, who had an apartment on Central Park West and a studio on West Twenty-eighth Street, where he made what Brooks describes as “direct metal sculpture.” Vogel had left his wife shortly before Brooks arrived. The two men cooked for themselves, carried their clothes to the laundromat, rose at conflicting hours (Brooks late, Vogel early), and bickered over practically every aspect of housekeeping—a setup uncannily prophetic of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.”
One Tuesday in the summer of 1962, Vogel gave a party at West Twenty-eighth Street. Among his guests were Zero Mostel, who had a studio in the same building; Joseph Heller, whose first novel, “Catch-22,” had appeared the previous year; and Ngoot Lee, a painter and calligrapher of Chinese parentage. These three, together with Vogel and Brooks, enjoyed one another’s company so much that they decided to commemorate the occasion by reassembling every Tuesday for food and talk. Meetings were held at cheap Chinese restaurants selected by Ngoot Lee, who knew where the best chefs worked, and kept track of their movements from job to job. The nucleus, itself a fairly motley crew, grew steadily motleyer as it swelled in numbers. Brooks introduced a diamond dealer named Julius Green, who could do eccentric impersonations of movie stars. Heller contributed a fellow-novelist, George Mandel, who had a steel plate in his head as a result of injuries suffered in the Battle of the Bulge. “One night,” Heller recalls, “Mandel told us in detail how he had been wounded. There was a long pause, and then Mel did something typical. He said, very slowly, ‘I’m sure glad that happened to you, and not to me.’ He wasn’t being cruel, he was being honest. He just blurted out what we were all thinking but didn’t dare to say.” Mandel, in turn, brought in Mario Puzo, later to become famous as the author of “The Godfather.” These were the charter members of the fraternity. They called themselves the Group of the Oblong Table or, in more pretentious moments, the Chinese Gourmet Club. What bound them together, apart from revelry in conversation, is best epitomized in a statement volunteered to me by Heller. “I’d rather have a bad meal out than a good meal at home,” he said. “When you’re out, It’s a party. Also, I like a big mediocre meal more than a small good one.”
The membership list has been closed for many years. Approved outsiders, like Carl Reiner and Joseph Stein, are invited to the Oblong Table from time to time, but merely as “honored guests.” The club has strict rules, some of which I learned from Reiner: “You are not allowed to eat two mouthfuls of fish, meat, or chicken without an intermediate mouthful of rice. Otherwise, you would be consuming only the expensive food. The check and tip, and the parking fees, if any, are equally divided among the members. It is compulsory, if you are in New York, are not working nights, and are in reasonable health, to be present at every meeting.” He continued, “The members are very polite. Once, I had a seat facing the kitchen door and I looked through and saw a rat strolling across the floor. They immediately offered me a chair facing the other way.” Anxious to retain his status of “honored guest,” Reiner begged me to quote Heller and Brooks on the subject at greater length than I quoted him.
Brooks recently told an interviewer that the talk at the Oblong Table dealt mainly with such weighty subjects as “whether there is a God, what is a Jew, and do homosexuals really do it.” Reiner has other recollections. “From the sessions I’ve attended,” he said to me, “I would put that group up against the Algonquin Round Table and bet that, line for line, they were funnier. The speed of the wit is breathtaking. It just flies back and forth.” Brooks’s comment on this: “I’m sure we’re funnier than the Algonquin crowd, but we’re not as bright.”
Hershy Kays, the composer and Broadway arranger, had a bitter experience that confirmed what Reiner said about the club’s rigorous eating procedure. According to Brooks: “Hershy Kay came once as a guest and took the nicest bits of the lobster and the choicest parts of the chicken, including the wings, which I like. He did not touch his rice. He had to go, and he went.” There may, however, have been another reason for Kay’s rejection. My source here is Heller, who said, “Bear in mind that I am the only tall member of the group. At the next meeting after the Hershy Kay incident, Mel made a little speech. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘Except for Joe, all of us are quite short. Some of us are very short. Hershey is too short.’ ”
Brooks, incidentally, has grave reservations about Heller’s own table manners. “From the very start,” he declares, “we accepted Joe on Speed Vogel’s word that he would behave, and Speed lied to us, because he did not behave. He took the best pieces of everything and laughed in our faces. One Tuesday, we ordered a tureen of special soup full of delicious things, and Joe grabbed it, scooped all the good stuff to his own bowl, and then said, ‘Here, let me serve this.’ We each got a spoonful of nothing.”
Far from denying this story, Heller openly confesses, “I am a greedy man. I’ll eat anything. I even use a fork instead of chopsticks, so I can eat faster. I’m known in the club as the plague of locusts.” Presumably, his physical bulk protects him against reprisals.
Puzo, the only non-Jewish member other than Ngoot Lee, is tolerated because of his limited appetite. “Being Italian, Puzo is no threat to us,” Brooks says. “He doesn’t really like exotic dishes. He prefers noodles and rice—things that remind him of home. He is provincial, and that saves us from the rape of our best food.” A stickler for party discipline as well as a dedicated glutton, Brooks never misses a club meeting when he is in Manhattan. If business suddenly compels him to fly in from the Coast on a Tuesday evening, his first act on arrival at J.F.K. is to ring every eligible restaurant in Chinatown until he finds the chosen venue. Thither he dashes, straight from the airport; and before saying a word he heaps a plate with whatever is left.
Despite their differences over matters of etiquette, Heller has a high respect for Brooks. He freely admitted to me that he used a lot of Brooks’s lines in his second novel, “Something Happened,” and that in his next book, “Good as Gold,” “the hero is a small Jewish guy, and there’s a great deal of Mel in that.” In the early seventies, Heller was teaching writing at City College of New York. He had long been aware that Brooks was vulnerable to practical jokes. One evening, Heller casually lied about his salary, saying that it was sixty-eight thousand dollars a year—more than double the truth. A couple of days later, Heller’s accountant, who also worked for Brooks, called him up and said, “For God’s sake, Joe, what the hell have you done? First thing this morning, Mel was up here screaming, ‘Why am I in the entertainment business? Why aren’t I teaching and earning seventy thousand a year like Joe Heller?’ He was out of his mind!” Having told me this story, Heller went on, “Mel has always had plenty of resentment and aggression that he can sublimate into creativity. He’s usually at his best when he’s envying people more successful than he is. Now that there’s hardly anyone more successful, what will he do?”
I cited a mot attributed to Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
“I thought that was La Rochefoucauld,” Heller said. “But anyway it doesn’t apply to Mel. He likes to see his rivals fail, but not his friends. Provided, of course, that he’s succeeding.”
I asked whether, in Heller’s opinion, fame had changed Brooks.
“Not a bit. He’s just as nasty, hostile, acquisitive, and envious today as he ever was. Please be sure to quote me on that,” Heller said warmly. He went on, “You have to distinguish between Mel the entertainer and Mel the private person. He puts on this manic public performance, but it’s an act, it’s something sought for and worked on. When he’s being himself, he’ll talk quietly for hours and then make a remark that’s unforgettably funny because it comes out of a real situation. You might say that he’s at his funniest when he’s being most serious. He has a tremendous reverence for novelists and for literature in general, because it involves something more than gag writing. In his serious moments, I don’t think he regards movies as an art. For Mel, the real art is literature.”
Brooks staunchly challenges this view: “When Joe says things like that, he’s just electioneering for the novel, because that’s what he writes. I think ‘La Grande Illusion’ is as good as ‘Anna Karenina,’ and ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ is in the same class as ‘La Chartreuse de Parme.’ If we’re talking about art at the most exquisite level, Joe may conceivably have a point. But I’m a populist. I want color, I want visual images, I want the sound of the human voice.”
In February, 1961, Brooks attended a rehearsal of a Perry Como TV special in which Anne Bancroft, then starring on Broadway in “The Miracle Worker,” was making a guest appearance. Brashly introducing himself, Brooks started to woo her on the spot. They were married in 1964 and are still together, now accompanied by a six-year-old son—“Mel in miniature,” according to Miss Bancroft—named Maximilian. “On our second date,” Brooks told me, “I asked her, ‘Where do you keep your awards?’ She’d already won two Tonys. She said she gave them to her mother. I said, ‘Funny, so do I’—although the only thing I’d won up to then was a Writers Guild Award for ‘Your Show of Shows.’ Then I asked her, ‘Where does your mother keep them?’ She said, ‘On top of the TV set.’ My heart stopped, and I said, ‘So does mine.’ My mother now has two Oscars and an Emmy. But Annie has something like thirty major awards—Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, Cannes Festival, about everything an actress can win.” Miss Bancroft, whose parents were the children of immigrants, was christened Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, and it took Brooks a long time to reveal to his mother that he intended to marry an Italian girl. If we believe (as we can’t) the account he gave David Susskind on TV, his mother’s reaction when he finally broke the news and announced that he was bringing his lasagna-loving fiancée over to meet her was simply to say, “That’s fine. I’ll be in the kitchen; my head’ll be in the oven.”
In the early sixties, Miss Bancroft was continuously working, either on Broadway or in movies. Brooks had many evenings to kill, and she suspects that this may explain why he founded the Chinese Gourmet Club. “But in any case Mel really loves men, he has a terrific sense of male camaraderie,” she said to me recently. “Have you noticed how all his films before ‘High Anxiety’ end up with two men together? His attitude toward women can be very primitive. “When we have big rows, he yells, ‘No more monogamy with women for me! Next time, it’ll be with a man!’ He actually threatens me with Dom DeLuise! Once—and only once—I managed to find out where the club was meeting, and I crashed the dinner. As soon as I came in the restaurant, it was as if a blanket had descended on the gathering. Dead silence. Faces falling. I turned around and left, without eating.” She smiled and shrugged. “All the same,” she said, “whenever he comes home at night the whole place lights up. He’s like an incandescent schoolboy. There are no dull moments.”
One evening in the spring of 1962, Brooks was sitting in a Manhattan movie theatre watching a dazzling abstract cartoon by the Canadian animator Norman MacLaren “Three rows behind me,” he recalls, “there was an old immigrant man mumbling to himself. He was very unhappy, because he was waiting for a story line and he wasn’t getting one.” Brooks listened hard, and the result of his eavesdropping was that, for the first time, a film based on a Brooks idea actually got made. “I asked my pal Ernie Pintoff to do the visuals for a MacLaren-type cartoon,” he says. “I told him, ‘Don’t let me see the images in advance. Just give me a mike and let them assault me.’ And that’s what he did. There was no script. I sat in a viewing theatre looking at what Ernie showed me, and I mumbled whatever I felt that that old guy would have mumbled, trying to find a plot in this maze of abstractions. We cut it down to three and a half minutes and called it ‘The Critic.’ It opened at the Sutton in New York, later to become renowned as the home of Mel Brooks hits. It was a smash then and has been ever since.” In 1964, it won Academy Awards for both Brooks and Pintoff. A fact to remember: the film’s comic impact was entirely dependent on something non-visual—Brooks’s mesmeric power of vocal improvisation.
Alan Schwartz, an urbane, silver-haired native of Brooklyn who has been Brooks’s legal adviser and friend since 1962, said to me not long ago, “By Mel’s standards, an improviser isn’t class. He wanted to be classy. Writing is classy. A screenplay is classy.” Schwartz’s other clients include Joseph Heller, Peter Shaffer, and Tom Stoppard. “Mel is as intelligent as any of them,” he says. “He must have a fantastic I.Q. But sometimes, If he’s with playwrights or novelists, he feels he has to prove that he’s a serious literary person. When he met Shaffer, for instance, he kept saying things like ‘pari passu’ and ‘ipso facto.’ ”
Brooks’s return to the affluence of network TV came in 1965, when he collaborated with Buck Henry on “Get Smart,” a series of half-hour episodes from the career of a dangerously incompetent secret agent named Maxwell Smart. ABC, which financed the pilot script, found the central character too charmless and the satiric wit too bizarre.
NBC took over the project (which nowadays looks tame enough), and it became a long-running success, relieving Brooks of such urgent financial worries as alimony and child support. It also left behind it a heritage of bad blood between Brooks and his coauthor, Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay of “The Graduate” a couple of years later, resented the billing he received on “Get Smart”—“By Mel Brooks with Buck Henry”—and there were rumors that, once the series was launched, Brooks’s main contribution was to arrive at an advanced stage of rehearsals, propose a few radical and impracticable changes, and then disappear. Rebutting the charge of self-aggrandizement, Brooks says that his agent wanted to exclude Henry’s name altogether and that it was he who demanded that both names should appear. “Buck envied me because of the hit I’d made with the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man,” Brooks asserts. “I’d galloped like a greedy child, and got ahead and taken off. I had a reputation for being a crazy Jew animal, whereas Buck thought of himself as an intellectual. Well, I was an intellectual, too. I knew that Dante’s last name was Alighieri, but I didn’t flaunt it. What Buck couldn’t bear was the idea of this wacko Jew being billed over him. The truth is that he reads magazines but he’s not an intellectual, he’s a pedant.”
Time has not softened Henry’s reciprocal animosity toward Brooks. “I’ll bet you,” he said to me in 1977, “that his name appears five times on the credits of ‘High Anxiety.’ ”
Informed of this, Brooks replied, “Tell him from me he’s wrong. The correct number is six.”
“The Producers,” shot in New York in 1967, was the first Brooks script to reach the movie screen. It also marked his début as a director—a job he undertook out of no sense of vocation but simply to protect his work against the well-meaning vandalism of rewrite experts. The script had gone through a strangely protracted gestation period. Brooks had originally conceived it, more than ten years earlier, as a novel. He had never thought of himself as a writer until 1950, when he saw his name on the credits of “Your Show of Shows.” “I got scared,” he told me, “and I figured I’d better find out what these bastards do. I went to the library, and read all the books I could carry—Conrad, Fielding, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoy. I decided that Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It’s like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page. He may not even have been talented. And I said to myself, ‘My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a talker.’ I wished they’d change my billing on the show so that it said ‘Funny Talking by Mel Brooks.’ Then I wouldn’t feel so intimidated.” Before long, however, he stifled his fears and embarked on a novel. “One little word at a time, but, by God, I was going to do it.”
The title was “Springtime for Hitler,” and the hero was a nervous young accountant called Leopold Bloom. “I stole the name from ‘Ulysses,’ ” Brooks said to me. “I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce, but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair. In the course of any narrative, the major characters have to metamorphose. They have to go through an experience that forces them to learn something and change. So Leo was going to change, he was going to bloom. He would start out as a little man who salutes whatever society teaches him to salute. Hats are worn. Yes, sir, I will wear a hat. Ties are worn. Definitely, sir. No dirty language is spoken in this world. Absolument, Monsieur. But in Leo Bloom’s heart there was a much more complicated and protean creature—the guy he’d never dare to be, because he ain’t gonna take them chances. He was going to play it straight and trudge right to his grave, until he ran into Max Bialystock, the Zero Mostel character. Bialystock is a Broadway producer who’s so broke he’s wearing a cardboard belt. He sleeps with little old ladies on their way to the cemetery. They stop off to have quick affairs on the leather couch in his office, which charm them so much that they write out checks for any fictitious show he claims to be promoting. Compared with Bloom, Bialystock is the Id. Bite, kiss, take, grab, lavish, urinate—whatever you can do that’s physical, he will do. When Bloom first meets him, he’s appalled. But then they get embroiled in each other’s lives, and they catalyze each other. Bialystock has a profound effect on Bloom—so much so that this innocent young guy comes up with the idea of making a fortune by producing a surefire flop and selling twenty-five thousand per cent of the profits in advance to little old ladies. On the other hand, Bloom evokes the first sparks of decency and humanity in Bialystock. It was a nice give and take. But after a while all they did was talk to each other. So I said, ‘Oh, Christ, it’s turning into a play,’ and I rewrote it, with a big neo-Nazi musical number right the middle.”
At this point (1963), Anne Bancroft was appearing on Broadway in the title role of Brecht’s “Mother Courage.” Gene Wilder played the Chaplain, her hanger-on and would-be bedfellow. He is now Brooks’s closest friend and most impassioned fan. “Whenever Mel says ‘Let’s go,’ ” he told me recently, “I drop anything I’m doing and follow him.” They met backstage during the run of the Brecht play. “Anne introduced me to this little borscht-belt comic she was going with,” Wilder recalls. “I knew his name from the Caesar shows, which I’d been brought up on. I used to do Caesar impersonations at junior high, and it turned out that all my favorite bits had been written by Mel. Now he started to give me advice on Brechtian acting. The Chaplain has these ironic speeches and lyrics about war and injustice, and I didn’t know how to handle them. Mel said to me, ‘Don’t try to work them out in terms of psychology and motivation. He’s stopped his play to pamphleteer. Step out of character and treat them like song-and-dance routines.’ I didn’t agree with him then, but I do now. Without knowing it, he was talking pure Brechtian technique. One day, we went out to Fire Island, and he said, ‘I’ve written a play with a terrific part for you.’ He read me the first twenty minutes and I was knocked out. Brooks told me, ‘You are that character, and if it’s ever done on stage or screen you’re going to play it! But that’s an easy promise, because I’ve never written a play or a screenplay and you’ve never had a starring role in a movie, so let’s just dream together and eat warm pretzels and drink beer and think about reaching the stars.’ Even so, he made me swear not to take any other job without checking with him. Not long afterward, I was offered a part in the Broadway production of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ I told Mel, and he made me write a month’s release clause into my contract, which I did. Then three years passed, during which—nothing. He didn’t even call me. Finally, I’m back on Broadway, in Murray Schisgal’s play ‘Luv.’ After a matinée, there’s a knock on my dressing-room door, and it’s Mel. ‘You didn’t think I forgot, did you?’ he says. Then he explains that ‘Springtime for Hitler’ has become a movie and that I’m going to play Leopold Bloom. I took the script home and read it, and at 3 A.M. I called him and said ‘It’s magnificent! When do we start?’ I didn’t ask about my salary, and I don’t think I ever did.”
What had happened in the lengthy interim was that Brooks had found the action of his play spreading all over New York, spilling out onto sidewalks and rooftops, leaping from place to place with a spatial flexibility for which film seemed the obvious form. Helped by an inventive secretary with the arresting name of Alfa-Betty Olsen, he had refashioned it as a movie. Several agents had “run with it”—to lapse into Hollywood patois—and got nowhere. It had then come into the hands of Sidney Glazier, a fund-raiser and contact man who had won an Academy Award for producing “The Eleanor Roosevelt Story.” Brooks describes Glazier, whom he met on Fire Island, as “a crazy man, he drank and he bellowed, he faced the ocean and roared like a sea lion.” Glazier had ordered Brooks not to read the script to him but simply to tell him the story. “About halfway through,” Brooks continues, “Sidney was drinking coffee and he laughed so much it went up his nose. He fell on the floor, snorting and coughing. As he rolled around, he stuck up his arm, and when I reached out for it he grabbed my hand and said, ‘We’re going to make this movie. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard.’ And he knew what an impossible deal I was demanding: My first condition was that I had to direct the picture.” Glazier budgeted the production at a million dollars, supplied half of it through his own company, and ran with the script around all the major studios. No dice. He eventually appealed to the independent producer Joseph E. Levine, who had just raised what he claimed was the last cent at his disposal to finance an extremely risky project called “The Graduate.” Like every other moneyman who had seen the script, Levine said that no Jewish exhibitor would put “Springtime for Hitler” on his marquee. Brooks, for his part, rejected the suggestion that it should be retitled “Springtime for Mussolini.” By now, however, he was reluctantly prepared to settle for something as neutral as “The Producers.” There was one major point in Levine’s favor: he genuinely liked what Brooks had written. Against this was the fact that he could not see his way to hiring the author as director.
Desperate to resolve these matters, Glazier brought the two men together over lunch. “I ate very nicely,” Brooks says. “Nothing dropped out of my mouth. I didn’t eat bread and butter, because I didn’t know whether you should cut the bread or break it. Meanwhile, Joe Levine ate like an animal. Just on top of some trout, he said, ‘What would you do if I said yes? Could you direct it? What do you say, kid? Tell me from your heart. Don’t lie to me; it may be the end for me. He was impressed with me because I was cute and funny, so I said ‘Yes, I can do it.’ And he said ‘O.K.,’ and we shook hands.” (Long after the film was made, Levine admitted to Brooks, “I was wrong. We should have called it ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ ” Brooks told me, “Actually, they did call it ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in Sweden. And when ‘The Twelve Chairs’ came out, they called it ‘Springtime for the Twelve Chairs.’ ‘Blazing Saddles’ was ‘Springtime for the Sheriff,’ ‘Young Frankenstein’ was ‘Springtime for Frankenstein,’ and ‘High Anxiety’ is ‘Springtime for the Lunatics.’ I’m big stuff in Sweden. Everything is springtime there.”)
Ten years from conception to handshake, and still not an actor signed: such is the life-devouring pace at which the movie business conducts its affairs. A deal with Gene Wilder was quickly concluded, but Zero Mostel, whom Brooks had always wanted for the role of Bialystock, read the script with mounting horror. “What is this?” he bellowed to Brooks. “A Jewish producer going to bed with old women on the brink of the grave? I can’t play such a part. I’m a Jewish person.” Enlisting the support of Mostel’s wife, Brooks finally managed to change his mind, but their working relationship, once shooting (and shouting) began, was not easy. Between takes, Mostel would be found lying in his dressing room like a beached whale, moaning, “That man is going to kill me! He keeps saying, ‘Do it again.’ ”
According to Brooks: “He was wonderful and he was a great friend, and he was a great pain in the ass. It was like working in the middle of a thunderstorm. Bolts of Zero—blinding flashes of Zero—were all around you. When he wasn’t on, he was very dear, very pensive, very accessible. We had family feuds. He had a sense of the grandeur of an artist. He had what I like in an actor—power, stature, and enormous bravery. I knew that if I could reach the end of the solar system of his talent, if I could just prod him into some outburst of insane anger, I could wake up the sleeping emotional depths of that extraordinary man. And I did, and, although he protested bitterly, he was fabulous.”
The picture took eight weeks to shoot and eleven months to edit: Brooks was then learning his trade. Nowadays, he gets through the editing period in about four months. “The Producers” was brought in under budget, at nine hundred and forty-one thousand dollars. It opened in 1968 and, despite murderous notices, acquired a cult reputation that enabled it to creep into the black within four years. Brooks has little faith in critics, believing that they always catch up with him one movie too late. “I never got good reviews in my life and I never will,” he declares. “They took one look at ‘The Producers’ and said it stank. Then I gave them ‘The Twelve Chairs’ and they said it lacked the great chaotic buoyancy of that majestic triumph ‘The Producers.’ Then came ‘Blazing Saddles,’ and they said that everything I’d learned about films had been forgotten in this disgusting mess.”
Badly wounded by the reception of his maiden effort, Brooks was resoundingly compensated by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who, showing an unusual disdain for the opinions of both the press and the general public, awarded him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay of 1968. It was a bold and unexpected choice. In order to enjoy “The Producers,” you have to cultivate a taste for grotesque and deliberate overstatement. In the early scenes, Mostel and Wilder play together like figures out of a Jonsonian comedy of humors. Cupidity (Mostel) seduces Conformity (Wilder): in each, a single trait is exaggerated to the point of plethoric obsession, and beyond. These are cartoon creatures, whose dialogue seems to be written in capital letters, heavily italicized. To say that this makes it too “theatrical” is irrelevant, for as soon as we agree to abandon the convention of naturalism anything goes, and the screen can be as unrealistic as the stage. (Who complains, after all, that the Marx Brothers’ “Cocoanuts” is merely a photographed stage production?) The film’s peak is the sequence, already a modern classic, in which a chorus of Storm Troopers, shot from above à la Busby Berkeley, sings “Springtime for Hitler”—a lilting melody composed by Brooks—while revolving in swastika formation. Afterward, everything runs downhill. The idea of playing the Führer as a Southern redneck high on flower power and L.S.D. not only mixes up too many incompatible jokes but destroys the bedrock plausibility of plot without which even the looniest farce collapses. Like most of Brooks’s work for the cinema, “The Producers” shows him at his best and at his worst.
Academy Award notwithstanding, there was no stampede in the movie industry for Brooks’s services. His fame is now so widespread that we tend to forget (though he does not) how recent its origins are. It was not until 1974, with “Blazing Saddles,” that the days of wine and grosses began. His second picture, “The Twelve Chairs,” opened in 1970, nearly three frustrating years after “The Producers,” and crashed to immediate box-office failure. It was based on a satirical Soviet novel of the nineteen-twenties, by Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov. Like “The Producers,” it dealt with greed—the prize in this case being a hoard of diamonds concealed in one of a dozen chairs that are confiscated from a palace during the revolution. Again, the characters are raging obsessives, with the difference that here the model is Gogol rather than Jonson. The atmosphere of rural Russia is lovingly evoked, and Brooks himself, making his movie début, is superb in the minor role of a masochistic, vodka-sodden caretaker with an insatiable yearning for the good old days of servitude. Yet the film as a whole never comes to life; its jokes seem shod with lead, and one watches glumly as, like the wounded snake in Pope’s poem, it drags its slow length along. Perhaps excess of ambition was what betrayed it. Alan Schwartz told me, “It was meant to be a great statement about man’s relationship to man, and how revolutions fail to work because of human frailty. Mel wanted to be serious and literary.”
Two ironic footnotes should be added: (1) In 1945, an updated travesty of the same novel, transplanted to New York and entitled “It’s in the Bag,” was shot in Hollywood. Starring Fred Allen, it treats the source material as an excuse for a parade of cameo appearances by well-known names, among them (the roll is worth calling) Victor Moore, Don Ameche, Jerry Colonna, William Bendix, Rudy Vallée, Jack Benny, and Robert Benchley. Though rampantly disloyal to the original, it has many more laughs than the Brooks version, mired in reverence. Benchley, who plays a hotel ratcatcher, must surely have written his own best line. Frock-coated at his son’s wedding, he draws the lad aside to calm his nerves with a last-minute word of advice. “In-laws’ suits never fit,” he says gravely. “Remember that, boy.” (2) Nothing in “The Twelve Chairs” is as funny as the account of its making which Brooks gave in the interview with Playboy, published in February, 1975. Having explained that shooting took place in Yugoslavia, where he spent nine months, Brooks continued:
It is tempting to quote more. Brooks’s performance throughout twelve seventy-five-minute sessions he devoted to answering Playboy’s questions was a marathon display of his gift for chat in full flower. The printed result deserves a place in any anthology of modern American humor. The Master is back on his home ground. Brooks is showing off his own invention—the interview as comic art—and doing so with a virtuosity that makes one wonder how any other form could ever put his talents to better use.
Fifty thousand dollars was Brooks’s reward for writing, directing, co-producing, and acting in “The Twelve Chairs.” It consumed three years of his life, and this means that, after taxes, he was subsisting on an annual sum of approximately eight thousand dollars. Since then—except on one eccentric and abortive occasion—he has shrunk from writing a film alone, preferring to test his ideas in the crucible of collaboration. In his words, “I didn’t want to go back to the tables and risk another gambling session with my career.” By resorting to teamwork, he has turned out the hits that have established his reputation; in pragmatic terms, he cannot be faulted. Even so, there are those—Alan Schwartz is one of them—who feel that the time may now have come for Brooks to trust his own intuitions and fly solo again. “Mel surrounds himself with other writers because to him the screenplay is the most important part of a movie,” Schwartz told me. “But I’d like to see him doing his own stuff. He ought to give us pure, vintage Brooks, not Brooks riding on the backs of a lot of other people. There’s a strange legal phrase that expresses what I mean. Suppose I’m working as a driver for a guy named Al. If I run someone over in the course of my duties, Al is responsible. But if I take the car to the beach and run someone over, that is called in law a ‘frolic and detour,’ and I’m responsible. I think Mel should go in for more frolics and detours.”
In 1970, when “The Twelve Chairs” were pulled out from under him by critics and public alike, Brooks was forty-four years old and was still, by his own standards, a failure (“To be the funniest has always been my aim”—statement to Newsweek, 1975.) Unable to resist another fling at the tables, he plunged into his last frolic and detour to date—a flirtation with culture which was so alien to his temperament that it seems, in retrospect, a gesture of self-destructive defiance. He saw and was impressed by an Off Broadway production of Goldsmith’s comedy “She Stoops to Conquer.” The play struck him as “Mozartean,” and he promptly adapted it for the screen. His plan was to shoot it in England, with Albert Finney as Tony Lumpkin. A couple of years before, Finney had spent several weeks on a remote Pacific island with only one record, “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man,” which he played every night. “When I met him in New York,” Brooks recalls, “he was in awe of me, he couldn’t believe I lived, he thought I was God.” Finney listened to the divine proposition and reverently turned it down. Brooks took his screenplay on the familiar round of agents, producers, and studios without raising a flicker of interest, and got ready to face the fact that he was finished in show business.
David Begelman, recently fined for financial misdeeds committed while he was head of Columbia Pictures, here enters the story. Despite the cloud of scandal over Begelman’s head, Brooks remains his impenitent admirer. “When he took over Columbia in 1973,” Brooks says, “David Begelman turned it around and made it, by dint of his aggression and his perspicacity and his acumen, a wonderful, working, winning company. I love it the way I love Fox, where I work, because it is not Gulf & Western, it’s not Transamerica, it’s Columbia Pictures.” Before Begelman moved to Columbia, he was vice-chairman of Creative Management Associates, perhaps the most powerful talent agency in the entertainment industry. One day in 1972, Brooks was aimlessly trudging the streets of New York. Begelman spotted him and approached him. According to Brooks, the following conversation took place:
BEGELMAN: Where are you going?
BROOKS: Nowhere. I am walking in circles.
BEGELMAN: Why is the most talented man in the world walking in circles?
BROOKS: Because the most talented man in the world is out of a job and is maybe not the most talented man in the world.
BEGELMAN: Can I buy you lunch?
BROOKS: Oh, I would be so happy if you would, because I haven’t eaten in days.
(They have lunch, after which Brooks is whisked off to Begelman’s sumptuous office, where “even the indirect lighting is good.”)
BEGELMAN: The first thing you should do is sign with me. You’re nobody and I’m everybody. It’s a good deal.
BROOKS: You’re right. (He signs.)
Soon afterward, a friend in the script department of Warner Brothers sent him a treatment by Andrew Bergman of a Western comedy called “Tex X.” Would Brooks like to rewrite it? Immobilized by self-mistrust, Brooks passed the script on to Begelman for advice. This led to another exquisitely lit confrontation.
BEGELMAN: I think this could be very funny. Do you want to do it?
BROOKS: No.
BEGELMAN: All right, you don’t want to do it. Fine. You’ll do it.
BROOKS: Why do I have to do it?
BEGELMAN: Because you owe a fortune in alimony, because you are in debt, and because you have no choice. You have to do it, and with all the talent you possess.
BROOKS: O.K. I’ll do it. As long as I can have Andrew Bergman to work with.
BEGELMAN: Swell. I’ll make that one of the conditions.
BROOKS: And not only Bergman. (His mind races to recapture the security of the past.) I want to do it the way we did “Your Show of Shows.” We’ll get a black writer, maybe Richard Pryor, and a comedy team like Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, and we’ll lock ourselves up and write it together, fancy-free and crazy.
Through Begelman’s mediation with Warners, this group was rapidly assembled. He negotiated a deal whereby Brooks would receive fifty thousand dollars for the screenplay (his fellow-authors would split a smaller sum four ways) and a hundred thousand more if the studio liked the result and asked Brooks to direct it. Brooks regards “Blazing Saddles”—his new title for “Tex X”—as “a landmark comedy,” a historic blast of derision at the heroic myths of the Old West. “I decided that this would be a surrealist epic,” he said to me. “It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie. For nine months, we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far-out and very catalytic. I figured my career was finished anyway, so I wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session. I just got everything out of me—all my furor, my frenzy, my insanity, my love of life and hatred of death.”
Warners snapped up the completed script and hired Brooks to direct his first Hollywood movie. There was one stipulation: the campfire sequence, in which the bean-fed cowpokes audibly befoul the night air, must be cut. Brooks and his colleagues stood firm: either the scene stayed or they quit. Here, and elsewhere in the screenplay, they saw no reason to disown what is called “healthy vulgarity” when it occurs in Chaucer but “childish smut” when it infiltrates the cinema. Eventually, the studio gave in. However, casting was also not without problems. Brooks wanted Richard Pryor to play the black protagonist, whom knavish State Procurer Harvey Korman appoints as sheriff of a white chauvinist community in the hope of destroying its faith in law and order. Warners rejected Pryor, whom they thought too undisciplined; Cleavon Little (a suave performer with no flair for comedy) got the job instead. The late Dan Dailey was engaged for the role of the Waco Kid, the burnt-out alcoholic gunfighter whom Little enlists to support him. On the Friday before shooting began, Dailey suffered an attack of qualms and cabled that he was pulling out. With forty-eight hours to go, a replacement was found but when the new actor arrived on the set it was obvious that he was in no shape to act. Personal problems, it seemed, were oppressing him, and at the end of a wasted day he withdrew.
“It’s a sign from God!” Brooks suddenly cried. “Get me Gene Wilder on the phone in New York!” Though Wilder knew the script and was eager to help, he was about to leave for England, where he was due to appear in “The Little Prince,” directed by Stanley Donen. “Nothing’s impossible!” Brooks shouted at him. “Call Donen in London now and ask him to rearrange his schedule. If he can let you out for three weeks, or even two, it’s enough.”
A couple of hours later, Wilder called back with the news that Donen had generously agreed to reshuffle his plans and release Wilder for three months. “I’ll fly out tomorrow,” Wilder said. Brooks met him at Los Angeles Airport and drove him straight to the costume department of Warners, where he was transformed within minutes into something out of “Stagecoach.” Next morning, roughly thirty-six hours after the idea had first come up, Gene Wilder, word perfect, was playing the Waco Kid. “I don’t believe in fate,” Wilder said to me recently, “but I’m tempted to when I think of my relationship with Mel. If I hadn’t been miscast in ‘Mother Courage,’ none of this would have happened. And if two actors hadn’t dropped out of ‘Blazing Saddles’ at the last moment, I would never have got the part.”
When shooting (ten weeks) and editing (nine months) were over, Brooks and his producer, Michael Hertzberg, held an afternoon showing of their rough cut for a dozen top executives of Warner Brothers. The occasion was about as festive—to borrow a phrase dear to Laurence Olivier—as a baby’s open grave. The jury sat like so many statues on Easter Island and filed out at the end in frozen silence. Brooks was shattered, convinced that he had thrown away his last chance in movies. Hertzberg was more resilient. Grabbing a phone, he instructed his staff that he was going to run the picture again that evening, in a larger viewing theatre, and that he wanted it packed with at least two hundred people: secretaries, janitors, cleaning women, waiters—anyone but studio brass. Let Brooks continue the story: “So 8 P.M. comes and two hundred and forty people are jammed into this room. Some of them have already heard the film is a stinker, because of the afternoon disaster. So they’re very quiet and polite. Frankie Laine sings the title song, with the whip cracks. Laughs begin—good laughs. We go to the railroad section. The cruel overseer says to the black workers, ‘Let’s have a good old nigger work song.’ Everybody gets a little chilled. Then the black guys start to sing ‘I get no kick from champagne. . . .’ And that audience was like a Chagall painting. People left their chairs and floated upside down, and the laughter never stopped. It was big from that moment to the last frame of the last reel.”
“Blazing Saddles” opened in 1974 and went on to become one of the two top-grossing comedies in the history of the cinema, outearned only by Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H.” It is farce with the gloves off, living proof that a feast can be every bit as good as enough. We are not invited to smile: we either laugh or cringe. The major gags are blatant to the point of outrage, as when a thug on foot, faced with a mounted adversary, fells his opponent’s horse with a roundhouse right to the jaw. Brooks’s method is the comedy of deliberate overkill. The annoyance of Hedley Lamarr (the Harvey Korman character) at being addressed as Hedy is funny the first time and tedious the third, but by the fifth or sixth it is funnier than ever; in a film full of unexpected twists, the expected twist can pay surprising dividends. Though the jokes run wild, the plot is tightly organized, and parts of the script are remarkably literary; e.g., this far from untypical exchange:
With “Blazing Saddles,” a low comedy in which many of the custard pies are camouflaged hand grenades, Brooks made his first conquest of Middle America. He told Playboy that it was “designed as an esoteric little picture,” but the statement simply does not ring true; he had always wanted the big audience in addition to the art-house minority, and now he had both.
“Young Frankenstein” (1974) started life as a phrase doodled by Gene Wilder during an Easter vacation at Westhampton in 1973. He called Brooks and explained what he had in mind: one of Frankenstein’s scions revisits the family castle in Transylvania and revives the monster his ancestor created. Brooks had no time to do more than express interest, since “Blazing Saddles” was already in preparation. A deal was set up with Columbia whereby Wilder would write a first draft and then, after “Blazing Saddles” was finished, work with Brooks on a revised version. Their collaboration was speedy and harmonious, Brooks supplying the broad comic emphases and Wilder the grace notes. Wilder restrained Brooks, who, in turn, liberated Wilder. “Mel has all kinds of faults,” Wilder said to me. “Like his greed, his megalomania, his need to be the universal father and teacher, even to people far more experienced than he is. Why I’m close to him is not in spite of those faults but because of them. I need a leader, someone to tell me what to do. If he were more humble, modest, and considerate, he would probably have more friends, but I doubt whether he and I would be such good friends. He made me discover the me in Mel. He taught me never to be afraid of offending. It’s when you worry about offending people that you get in trouble.” (Compare something that Cocteau once said: “Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it—it is yourself.”)
Brooks and Wilder presented their final draft to Columbia before “Blazing Saddles” appeared. The estimated budget was two million two hundred thousand dollars. The studio wanted it reduced to a million and three-quarters. Happy to compromise, Brooks asked, “How about two million?” The answer was an unyielding no. “So we took the script to Fox, and made the picture there for two million eight,” Wilder told me. “We were already shooting when ‘Blazing Saddles’ came out and hit the jackpot.” Wilder thinks—and is not alone in thinking—that this was the biggest mistake Columbia ever made. Since “Young Frankenstein,” which has so far grossed over thirty-four million dollars, Brooks has remained unshakably loyal to Fox. (In his office on the Fox lot, the wall overlooking his desk is dominated by a large portrait of Tolstoy, hanging alongside a blown-up label from a bottle of Château Latour ’29. “To remind me,” Brooks says, “that there are more important things than grosses.”) “On the set of ‘Blazing Saddles,’ there was a lot of love in the air,” Wilder continues. “But ‘Young Frankenstein’ was the most pleasurable film I’ve ever done. I couldn’t bear to leave Transylvania.”
It would be fair to call “Young Frankenstein” the Mel Brooks movie that appeals to people who don’t like Mel Brooks. “I like things in all his films,” Woody Allen said to me cautiously, “but they’re a little in-and-out for my taste. ‘Young Frankenstein’ is the most consistent whole.” The parts mesh instead of clashing. The pace throughout, audaciously stately for comedy, is modelled on that of James Whale’s “Frankenstein;” and Gerald Hirschfeld’s black-and-white photography exactly matches Whale’s crepuscular visual style. The members of the supporting cast play together with a self-denying temperance unique in Brooks’s work: I think particularly of Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachman), the fright-wigged housekeeper, at every mention of whose name we hear the distant whinnying of terrified horses; and of the Transylvanian police chief (Kenneth Mars), with an expatriate accent even less penetrable than the late Albert Basserman’s, and with a prosthetic arm that he uses as a battering ram when he leads the pitchfork-brandishing peasants against the gates of Schloss Frankenstein. In the title role, Gene Wilder—his eyes burning, his voice an exalted, slow-motion tenor—gives the finest performance yet seen in a Brooks picture. In the best sequence, fit to be set beside the “Springtime for Hitler” routine in “The Producers,” Wilder proudly appears before an assembly of grave Victorian scientists to introduce his new, improved monster, who clumps onto the stage and goes into a halting impression of Boris Karloff singing “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” The spectators instantly subject the zombie and his master to a bombardment of cabbages and broccoli, the underlying joke being that an audience of bearded savants should have come laden with vegetable missiles in the first place. It is not the gags, however, that give the film its motive force. We have seen that Brooks is driven by a fear, amounting to hatred, of mortality, and what is “Young Frankenstein” but the story of a man who succeeds in defeating death?
Brooks now began to savor the delights of power. “It’s an achievement of a kind,” he told me some time ago, “to know that I can walk into any studio—anyone in town—and just say my name, and the president will fly out from behind his desk and open his door. It’s terrific, it’s a great feeling. My worst critic is my wife. She keeps me straight. She says, ‘Are you pleasing that mythical public of yours again, or is this really funny and heartfelt?’ ” Brooks refers to the by-products of success under the collective title of the Green Awning Syndrome. He explains what he means in an imaginary anecdote: “Mike Nichols has just made ‘The Graduate,’ and it’s a worldwide smash, and he goes to Joe Levine and says, ‘Now I want to do “The Green Awning.” ’ ‘The what?’ ‘ “The Green Awning.” ’ ‘What is that?’ ‘It’s a movie about a green awning.’ ‘Does any famous star walk under the green awning?’ ‘No. All unknowns.’ ‘Are there any naked women near the green awning?’ ‘No, no naked women.’ ‘Are people talking and eating scrambled eggs under the green awning?’ ‘No. It’s just a green awning. Panavision. It doesn’t move.’ ‘How long would it be?’ ‘Two hours. Nothing but a green awning.’ Levine sticks out his hand. ‘All right, what the hell, we’ll do it!’ That’s the Green Awning Syndrome.”
Brooks knew that the syndrome had descended upon him when he proposed “Silent Movie” as his next picture for Fox: given his track record, the studio simply dared not turn it down, though Brooks admits that he helped Fox to be brave by revealing that there would be cameo roles for Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman, James Caan, and Burt Reynolds. The idea for a movie with no spoken words (apart from a resonant “No!” to be uttered by the mime Marcel Marceau) had come from Ron Clark, a laconic playwright and comedy writer. Clark suggested that he and Brooks should collaborate on the script with Rudy DeLuca and Barry Levinson, widely admired as the writers of “The Carol Burnett Show;” and so it worked out. For more than twelve months—very much on and off, to fit in with their other assignments—the four men met in a room at Fox and reduced one another to hysteria. Shooting began in January, 1976, and the film had its première during the summer.
A string of sight gags linked by captions (the verbals in many instances being funnier than the visuals), “Silent Movie” consolidated Brooks’s international fame. No dubbing was required to make its more explosive set pieces as accessible in Bora Bora as they were in South Bend. It spoke softly but carried a big slapstick. Moreover, it established Brooks as a movie star: Mel Funn, the ex-alcoholic director who saves his old studio from conglomerate takeover with a silent movie called “Silent Movie,” was the first leading role he had ever played. The picture was his third comedy hit in three years, and up to the beginning of 1978 it had brought in more than twenty million dollars at the box office. Yet there are times when one not only can but must argue with success. Even as I smiled (which was more often than I laughed) at “Silent Movie,” I knew I was watching an act of supreme perversity. Here was a master of the improvised word devoting more than a year of his life to something speechless and meticulously planned in advance. Do not suppose, by the way, that Brooks is a director who works on impulse, prancing around the set in ecstasies of Felliniesque free association. The final script of “Silent Movie” was the film the public saw, except for a brief but expensive sequence that Brooks described to me afterward: “It was called ‘Lobsters in New York,’ and it starts with a restaurant sign that reads ‘Chez Lobster.’ Inside, a huge lobster in maître d’s tuxedo is greeting two very well-dressed lobsters in evening dress and leading them to a table. Already, we thought this was hysterical. Then a waiter lobster in a white jacket shows them a menu that says ‘Flown in Fresh from New York.’ They get up and follow the waiter lobster to an enormous tank, where a lot of little human beings in bathing suits are swimming nervously around. The diner lobsters point to a tasty-looking middle-aged man. The waiter’s claw reaches into the tank. It picks up the man, who is going bananas, and that was the end of the scene. We loved it; we thought it was sensational. Every time we saw it, there was not enough Kleenex to stuff into our mouths.” Nobody else, however, so much as snickered—not even at the sneak previews—with the result that Brooks decided to jettison the whole sequence. Never before had he faced such a setback, and the memory of it still ruffles him. Seeing “Silent Movie” for the second time, I found myself recalling and endorsing something that Gene Wilder had said to me: “Mel has no physical skills, like Chaplin or Fields. His skills are vocal. Not verbal but vocal.” And in “Silent Movie,” for all its popularity, rusting unused.
Excerpts from a dinner with Brooks at the Chambord Restaurant in Beverly Hills late in 1977. He is wearing a dark-blue coat, gray slacks, a light-blue shirt, and a striped blue tie; as usual, he has arrived with a leather case containing two bottles of absurdly expensive wine from his own cellar. Neither of them, alas, comes from the case of magnums of Haut-Brion ’61 which Alfred Hitchcock recently sent him as a gesture of gratitude for “High Anxiety.”
In reminiscent mood, Brooks speaks: “Just before ‘Silent Movie’ came out in 1976, I was approached by a staff writer for Time who asked me whether I’d like to be on the cover. Well, I expected to be described in Time as ‘Mel Brooks, flinty, chunky Jew,’ but nevertheless I said yes. I had no idea what an insane Pandora’s box of heartache would be opened by this simple exchange. Reporters followed me around night and day for weeks. They tortured my mother and my children, all the time looking for negative things about me. Everyone I ever knew was called and cross-examined. Everyone eagerly coöperated. Then, a couple of weeks before the cover was due, I was told I’d been dumped and replaced by Nadia Comaneci. So I asked, ‘Isn’t the election coming up soon?’ ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘It’s you next week for sure.’ Next week, Ford gets the cover. I called them up and said, ‘I’m disgusted with myself. I feel used and humiliated, and I may hang myself in my cell.’ They said, ‘Look, if you’ll just help us fill in one or two gaps, there’s a good chance that next week, perhaps . . .’ Even then I hesitated, but I finally said no.”
I ask what seems the obvious question.
After a pause, Brooks slowly replies, “If I could get a legal guarantee that they wouldn’t bother my immediate family, and if that guarantee was signed by every member of the Supreme Court, then the answer is yes, I would do it all again for a Time cover.”
“High Anxiety,” which featured the same star, director, and writing team as “Silent Movie,” made its début in the closing weeks of 1977. Sniffed at by some of the critics (though not by the public, which has swept it into the black with a box-office take that so far amounts to about twenty million dollars), it borrows elements from a number of Hitchcock films—in particular, “Spellbound,” “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” “The Birds,” and “North by Northwest”—and, having given them all a ferociously farcical twist, arranges them in a way that would make narrative sense to an audience entirely ignorant of Hitchcock. Brooks once told me that for him the Marx Brothers were “the healthiest of all the comics,” and it is not fortuitous that the middle initial of Dr. Robert H. Thorndyke, the character he plays in “High Anxiety,” stands for Harpo. The best half-dozen moments in the picture have the anti-social outrageousness that was always the Brothers’ trademark—moments when inhibitions evaporate and excesses long dreamed of are allowed free play; e.g., Thorndyke’s fulsome impersonation of Frank Sinatra in a hotel night club, and his first dinner as the newly appointed head of the PsychoNeurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. In the latter sequence, an establishing shot shows us, by night, a mansion like Manderley in “Rebecca.” The script continues:
When “High Anxiety” failed to receive a single nomination, either from the Academy or from the Writers Guild, Brooks was in despair. “He was as low as I’ve ever known him,” his wife said to me.
Despite its virtues, “High Anxiety” fitted into a confining pattern. Brooks had now made four films in succession, all of them based on other kinds of films—the Western, the horror picture, the silent comedy, and the Hitchcock thriller. Nor was he alone in this dependence on incest—or, if you prefer, cannibalism. As Barry Levinson remarked to me, “ ‘Rocky’ is a remake even though it’s never been made before.” In the Times on September 25, 1977, Roger Copeland dealt with the whole subject of movies about movies:
Among other pictures cited by Copeland were Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” Brian De Palma’s “Obsession,” Don Siegel’s “The Shootist,” Marty Feldman’s “The Last Remake of Beau Geste,” and Herbert Ross’s “Play It Again, Sam” (written by Woody Allen), all of which drew their inspiration from celluloid sources. Nor did he overlook the career of Peter Bogdanovich, an extended act of homage to the achievements of other directors. He concluded:
In 1965, in an introduction to Malcolm Lowry’s novel “Under the Volcano,” Stephen Spender wrote, “Someone should write a thesis perhaps on the influence of the cinema on the novel—I mean the serious novel.” I should say that there was a more urgent need for a study of the influence of the cinema on the cinema—and I do not mean only the serious cinema. It is self-evident that all the arts live off and grow out of their own past. What is new about film is that it is the first narrative art to be instantly accessible, twenty-four hours a day, in virtually every living room. To immerse oneself in drama, opera, or literature, it is necessary, from time to time, to carry out certain errands, like going to a theatre, an opera house, a record shop, a bookstore, or a library; but to become saturated in cinema you do not even have to go to the movies. They come to you. The lover of stage acting will never know exactly how Sarah Siddons or Edmund Kean performed, or what the theatre in Periclean Athens was really like, but for the movie buff such problems do not arise, since the art of his choice is on permanent record, its whole history an open book, visible at the turn of a switch. This explains why so many contemporary novels and plays as well as films are swollen with references to, quotations from, and parodies of old movies. A process of artistic imperialism is going on. Never before, I believe, has one art form exercised such hegemony over the others; and the decisive factor is not intrinsic superiority but sheer availability.
The first generation of children nourished, via television, on films has only recently reached maturity, yet it’s already clear how deeply—in their private behavior, not to mention their work as artists—they are imprinted by the movies. As the amount of exposed and edited film inexorably piles up, its ascendancy will increase, and we may have to cope with a culture entirely molded by cinematic habits and values. Edmund Wilson, I suspect, was hovering over this point as long ago as 1949, when, having seen a pastiche Hollywood musical called “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” he indignantly wrote to a friend, “All these attempts to exploit the immediate past show the rapidity of the bankruptcy of the movies as purveyors of popular entertainment.”
Brooks, discussing his future plans, sometimes sounds worryingly unaware of the perils involved in continued addiction to the Self-Regarding Cinema. In the past twelve months, I have heard him frothing with enthusiasm about such projects as (1) “a World War Two picture to end all World War Two pictures;” (2) a remake of the Lubitsch masterpiece “To Be or Not to Be,” in which he would costar with Anne Bancroft; and (3) “a Busby Berkeley-style musical where crazy people sing for no reason,” which would be tantamount to self-plagiarism, since the perfect comment on Berkeley already exists in the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence from “The Producers.” Not long ago, he called up Gene Wilder and said, “When we work together again, we’re going to have to bring up the big guns, and there are only two—love and death.” Which is all very well except for the fact that “Love and Death” is the title of a film by Woody Allen.
Intermittently, however, Brooks will say something that bolsters one’s faith in the curious inner compass that guides him. This, for instance: “I’ve tied myself to no end but the joy of observation. And I need to pass that on. I’m a celebrator. That’s why I like the Russians. They’ll look at a tree and cry out, ‘Look at that tree!’ They’re full of original astonishments.” And, still more reassuringly, this—a remark uttered in a context that had nothing to do with Brooks’s own career: “We are all basically antennae. If we let ourselves be bombarded by cultural events based on movies, we won’t get a taste of what’s happening in the world.”
Springtime, 1978: A sunny lunch in Los Angeles with Anne Bancroft, who is, according to her husband, “a strange combination of the serf and the intellectual.” They live in a one-story house (no pool) in Malibu. She tells me that Brooks’s newest obsession is to make a film called, tout court, “The History of the World, Part I.” She likes the idea, because it means that, as she puts it, “he can play any period in which he feels happy.” This, of course, was precisely what he did in the footloose days when he was recording “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man.” The story of mankind would be an ideal frolic, a definitive detour; and Miss Bancroft agrees with me that he ought to write it on his own. “One evening, I came back late from a difficult rehearsal,” she says. “Mel had been working at home all day. I was feeling very sorry for myself, and I wailed, ‘Acting is so hard.’ Mel picked up a blank sheet of paper and held it in front of me. ‘That’s what’s hard,’ he said. I’ve never complained about acting again.” ♦
