Melvin continued steady in math and the sciences while showing aptitude and a good pronunciation in French; in other classes he mainly got by. After Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the United States entered World War II, aviation fever swept the nation, and Kitty pushed for him to switch to a technical school—the Herron High School for Aviation in Manhattan. He tested the waters, joining Eastern District’s Aviation Club, aka the “Balsa Bugs,” and with a pal went up in a biplane for his maiden fly-round at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field. The teenager crafted one of his first songs for the occasion (“We’re a bunch of Balsa Bugs, Balsa Bugs are we . . .”), but he also vomited during the flight and afterward said no to aviation. At home, his brother Irving stuck up for him and told their mother, “This kid is special. We have got to give him a chance.”
Instead Kitty bought Melvin a set of drums, and he began to play at weddings and bar mitzvahs and on subway platforms, he claimed later, with a small unit dubbed Melvin Brooks and the Wife Beaters. Chronologically, this is the first appearance of “Brooks” in his life story—his mother’s maiden name shortened with the addition of an “s” for professional purposes. The change had been necessary, he often said in interviews, because the longer words “Kaminsky” and “Brookman” did not fit on the front head of his bass drum. He didn’t say that many Jewish immigrants to the United States anglicized their surnames to make them sound “less Jewish” and “more American.” As Carl Reiner once explained forthrightly, with the change from Kaminsky to Brooks his friend Mel had “made himself more Gentile.” Mel’s own brother Irving eventually changed his surname to Kaye.
Although Brooks could rattle off the Wife Beaters (“two Italians, two Jews, and me”), the local press contains no record of their performances. The most important thing, though, may have been the band’s summer engagement at the Butler Lodge before Melvin’s senior year in high school, when the veteran comic headliner took ill. The drummer, who knew all the routines, took the microphone for the next show. Later Brooks told many variations of this milestone: how he had aped the veteran comic’s clichés (“You can’t keep Jews in jail, they eat the lox!”) while improvising his own permutations. Already he had developed the habit of borrowing from and tweaking other people’s most entertaining bits, a penchant that would sustain him in his future as a comedy writer, performer, and filmmaker. Comics stole from other comics all the time, reinventing the jokes as their own; there was a very long and contentious tradition of theft in the comedy profession.
The teenager also imitated the proprietor of the Butler Lodge, Pincus Cohen, and a hotel maid who, after accidentally locking herself in a room, had screamed her panic in a mockable dialect. He may or may not have hung a star on his dressing room door after his debut as a stand-up comic, as he claimed in one interview; he may or may not, at that time, have introduced his signature song (“Please love . . . Melvin Brooks!”). His debut as a funnyman was less than auspicious, and the true headliner returned after his recovery.
Melvin’s presence was certainly underwhelming in the arts programs on offer at Eastern District High School. His high school years, 1941–44, are something of a black hole in his résumé. Official records, including the high school newspaper and the complete yearbook for his senior year, cannot be found in any archives. His senior class portrait surfaced decades later in the New York Times, courtesy of a classmate, and under his jacket-and-tie photograph were listed these activities: Class Day Committee, Senior Council, Dean’s Assistant, and (following his brothers’ example) the Fencing Team.
His future ambition, according to the caption adorning his senior class photograph: “Kaminsky—To be President of the U.S.” But such captions under the names of classmates were often intended as jibes, and that is probably the more accurate reading.
His teachers did not spare the rod, he often said in interviews. “The class would laugh and I’d get hit. But by then I’d be laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. Slapped, grabbed by the hair, down to the principal’s office, couldn’t stop laughing,” he recalled. He was the class clown, he said more than once. But not officially: he was not mentioned among the forty honors accorded to graduating classmates, ranging from “Brightest” and “Personality Plus” to “Best All-Round” and “Best Class Writers.”
Over time few classmates have come forward with colorful reminiscences about Melvin. No evidence exists that he had the slightest involvement in Eulalie Spence’s vaunted dramatic society. Most likely he kept to himself and his small circle, at least one of whom—Mark Nelson, whom James Robert Parish tracked down for his 2007 biography of Brooks—noted that his friend was “always on. Mel really commanded an audience. He mesmerized all the boys. But it was only the boys, the girls never paid him much attention.”
From the point of view of most of his classmates, while at Eastern District Melvin Kaminsky was—in the words of Lester Persky, another graduate of the class of ’44 who went on to produce such films as Taxi Driver and Shampoo—“the class shmendrick.”*
Maybe high school plays just weren’t cool and Melvin had set his sights higher, circling the theater district, seeing every show for which he could wangle tickets, breathing the same rarefied air as Benjamin Kutcher and Don Appell. Just before joining the army in the spring of 1944, he may even have gone before the footlights, fleetingly, on Broadway.
Appell had returned from military service by the spring and was hovering backstage during rehearsals for a new show called Bright Boy. Preparing to direct his first Broadway play, Career Angel, Appell would pluck several cast members from Bright Boy, a prep school drama, after the show closed within two weeks. Bright Boy’s first-time producer was David Merrick; its director was Arthur J. Beckhard, who resided in frowsy hotels and seduced aspiring actresses. “A somewhat disreputable Broadway ‘character,’” roly-poly with a soup-strainer mustache, Beckhard became another “model for Max Bialystock” for a certain Brooklyn teenager helping out backstage at the Playhouse Theatre, according to drama critic and Merrick biographer Howard Kissel.
One of Bright Boy’s lead juveniles, Carleton Carpenter—who was among those who segued into Career Angel—recalled a teenager who may have “edged onto stage” now and then. Carpenter, who went on to a lengthy Broadway and Hollywood career, said he remembered the kid, a standby, “because I always suspected him of putting thumbtacks in my shoes” as a practical joke. Melvin Kaminsky “very well may have been that kid.” Certainly he was not billed, and he exaggerated his appearance, as his army stint wound down, in the Fort Dix Post: “I had three lines, was on the stage about two minutes, what a part!”
Brooks paid a return visit to the Playhouse Theatre, incidentally, when he staged the big musical number “Springtime for Hitler” there for The Producers. And Liam Dunn was an actor in the cast of Bright Boy, playing one of the prep school professors. Brooks always remembered Dunn fondly and reached back to cast the veteran character actor in several later comedies, starting with the sanctimonious Reverend Johnson in Blazing Saddles.
Chapter 2
1944
Big World
Around the same time that Melvin Kaminsky anglicized his name to Melvin Brooks for billing purposes, he embraced his Jewish religion and heritage on a deeper level.
World War II disrupted the entire world, but it also rocked the little world of his family. The Selective Training and Service Act conscripted Leonard among Brooklyn’s first sixty draftees in late 1940, and soon after Pearl Harbor and the United States’ subsequent declaration of war, Leonard started aviation training in Texas. The next year, Irving, who could have been deferred because he was still in college and also working to support his dependent mother, enlisted in the Signal Corps. Bernard joined the army soon after his twentieth birthday in early 1943, leaving Melvin home alone with Kitty.
Seventeen-year-old Melvin was in his senior year in early November 1943, when Leonard, an engineer/gunner in the waist of a B-17 Flying Fortress, took part in a large force of US heavy bo
mbers dispatched from Britain over northwest Germany and Austria. During a raid on a German Messerschmitt factory at Wiener Neustadt near Vienna, as enemy planes assailed the bombers, Leonard’s machine gun jammed. At a height of some five miles and in a temperature of thirty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit, his hands froze “almost immediately,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “as he knew they would. His fingers swelled to twice their normal size and the skin of his hands stuck to the steel as he worked. But he repaired the gun and went back into action.”
Shot down during a similar air battle over Austria six months later, Leonard was first reported as missing in action, then described as a prisoner being held in an unknown location. Jews in US uniform bore an H for Hebrew on their military IDs, noting their religious preference, but many, like Leonard, ripped their dog tags off before possible capture to lessen the threat of torture or removal to a concentration camp under Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime. Leonard remained a POW for the duration of the war.
Hitler, World War II, and his brothers’ exemplary military service bolstered the Jewishness that, although firmly rooted in the family, Melvin had largely taken for granted.
A synagogue had sponsored his time at Camp Sussex, and a mezuzah always hung by the Kaminskys’ front door. Kitty’s mother, Minnie, was omnipresent on the Sabbath, a handkerchief over her head, lighting the candles, reciting the blessings. But ironically—for a comedian later famous for wearing his Jewishness on his sleeve—the Kaminskys were secular religionists. Melvin’s Jewish upbringing was “very Reformed,” he noted in interviews. Kitty might pore over the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, but there were no anecdotes of her scrutinizing the Torah. Nor did the boys frequent shul. “I went for a little while” with his brothers, Brooks recalled. “About forty-five minutes. They told us religious life was important, so we bought what they told us. We faked it, nodded like we were praying. Learned enough Hebrew to get through a bar mitzvah.”
The capture of Leonard sealed Melvin’s determination to follow his brothers into the army, and he enlisted in April, the week Leonard made headlines as missing in action somewhere in Europe. Melvin was tested for intelligence, and it says something about his aptitude—not reflected in his high school grades—that he was promptly channeled into the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which was intended to develop the technical skills of junior officers and personnel. In early May he was sent to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), located in Lexington, Virginia, about sixty miles east of the West Virginia border. Skipping his formal high school graduation ceremony, the new VMI student arrived in time for D-Day (June 6) and his eighteenth birthday (June 26).
“I knew what Hitler was doing to Jews, so I really did feel this was a proper and just war,” he said later. “I could have gotten out of it but I was gung ho to be a soldier.”
Listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio—FDR, in fireside chats, spoke fervently about the war as the battleground of civilization—also affected him. “For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish,” Brooks said. “No kidding. I mean the Nazis called him a Jew bastard, right? I loved him. I thought of him as my father.”
Popularly known as the “West Point of the South,” the Virginia Military Institute was one of dozens of US colleges training Army Specialized Training Program soldiers alongside their regular pupils. ASTP recruits, some 348 strong arriving at VMI that May, wore their army uniforms, while the VMI “rats” were clad in traditional gray. Dining on rations in the mess halls, the ASTP soldiers underwent twelve-week cycles of classroom instruction that included traditional cadet drills and skills—saber use and horsemanship—along with a grounding in civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering.
One local perk was invitations to the cotillions sprinkled with chaperones and “the flowers of Virginia,” in Brooks’s words. “The most beautiful girls, Southern belles,” he recalled, “but I was just this Jew from New York and not so good-looking.”
In Brooklyn, he had encountered anti-Semitic taunts from gangs of young toughs when, a few times, he had ventured into Gentile fiefdoms. While standing in the commissary line at VMI, however, a fellow serviceman growled, “Come on, you dirty Jew, move it!” Melvin lunged at the GI, swinging his mess kit, and was dragged off to quarantine, as he recalled, until a lieutenant asked for his side of the story and released him with a caution. Melvin was proud of being “a tough Jew from Brooklyn.”
By the first of August, Melvin had completed his twelve-week orientation, and then, partly because the ASTP was being phased out nationally, he was transferred to Fort Sill, a longtime army installation the size of a small city located near Lawton, Oklahoma, about eighty-five miles southwest of Oklahoma City. A headquarters for officer and artillery training, Fort Sill groomed fresh army troops to support infantry advances in both the European and Pacific theaters of war.
At Fort Sill, Melvin Kaminsky, along with thousands of other raw GIs, received his standard-issue supplies, a buzz haircut, and vaccinations. He underwent eight weeks of basic physical training for toughening up, followed by, in his case, another eight weeks of schooling in combat engineering practices, which would prepare him for the post–D-Day infusion of US personnel into Europe that loomed on the horizon.
The Oklahoma weather was blistering. A mere cog in the army, Melvin didn’t make the Lawton Constitution or Fort Sill Army News. He kept his head down, marching to the refrain “Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot!” while chuckling at the signs proclaiming the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center: F.A.R.T.C. “Somewhere in my head I said, ‘I will. I will use this,’” he later recalled. “You know, because it was too crazy. It was all over the place. You saw F.A.R.T. everywhere at Fort Sill and I said, ‘Don’t they know this? Can’t they see this?’”
Anywhere west of Brooklyn was “John Wayne country,” the way he saw it, and Virginia and Oklahoma were his first far-flung adventures. But Oklahoma was too far away; it got him down. As the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) asks Black Bart (Cleavon Little) in Blazing Saddles, “What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?” Cheering themselves up as much as their audience (Brooks recalled that he felt like a fish out of water, “near suicidal,” at Fort Sill), he and another displaced urbanite performed an Army Club skit lampooning the differences between East Coast sophisticates and heartland rubes. Just as in Brooklyn, the army recruit roamed far and freely whenever he could slip the leash, including to Dallas, Texas, two hundred miles southeast of Sill, where the nightlife beckoned. Dallas felt like “Brooklyn-in-the-West,” Brooks recalled. “Every weekend,” he said. “It was great. It was still foreign to me. It was still Texas. But it was a big jump from Oklahoma in terms of elegance and sophistication. So Dallas was important to me every weekend for four months.”
In December, the Fort Sill soldiers were packed onto a train, the windows blacked out to minimize any fifth-column surveillance; they headed east to Fort Dix, New Jersey, near Trenton. While waiting for overseas orders, Melvin could visit his mother and friends in Brooklyn. The Battle of the Bulge, the German counteroffensive against Allied forces, was bogging down in the hilly, densely forested Ardennes, located primarily in Belgium and Luxembourg but stretching into eastern France and southern Germany.
The reinforcements would not depart the United States until midwinter, transported on troop ships carrying upward of eight thousand servicemen, the officers in staterooms and the enlisted men quartered in the hold and cramped bottom decks. Through rough winter seas the convoy-guarded ships zigzagged across the Atlantic, avoiding enemy threat. Most of the ships were routed from Bermuda around UK-friendly Northern Ireland, a ten- or twelve-day trip ending with Red Cross doughnuts and coffee in Liverpool. Upon landfall, Melvin and the other soldiers were crammed into a train, making stops across the English countryside, including at Nottingham, the mythical home of Robin Hood—the future subject of a Mel Brooks comedy—before grinding to a halt a
t Southampton port.
By the time they crossed the English Channel to Le Havre, France, arriving sometime in early February 1945, the fiercest battles in the Ardennes had concluded, Germany was in retreat and fighting rearguard actions, and the winter temperatures had turned frigid.
Briefly Melvin Kaminsky was pressed into duties as a forward observer/radio operator, helping to call in aerial support for the advancing forces, but soon he and his unit were handed daily assignments as part of the 1104th Engineer Combat Group. The 1104th was attached to the 78th Infantry Division, one of multiple divisions and numerous battalions, both US and British troops, under command of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which joined together the soldiers of both countries in the drive to the Rhine River.
The combat engineers were tasked with rebuilding mountain roads and supply routes in the rugged Ardennes terrain, which had gone to pieces under dismal weather and the constant pounding of artillery and trucks. They erected vehicular bridges and footbridges across the Roer and lesser rivers; tore out wire barriers and cleared minefields; removed rubble and demolitions and destroyed German pillboxes to assist forward movement.
By late March, moving closely with the assault forces, the 1104th crossed the Rhine and marched with the main army toward northern Germany, from Magdeburg to Goslar in the Harz Mountains, a grueling advance of more than two hundred miles in fourteen days, during which time Brooks and the 1104th were reposted multiple times.
Funny Man Page 4
