Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  The work was dangerous, especially early in the advance. From June 11, 1944, to May 8, 1945, when the 1104th Engineer Combat Group entered the hostilities on the continent, 329 engineers were slain and hundreds more wounded. Dozens of Bronze and Silver Stars were bestowed on the 1104th for gallant action against the enemy.

  Death, destruction, and a constant atmosphere of fear surrounded Melvin Kaminsky. The daily news and talk among the GIs revolved around the common goal to vanquish Hitler and his hate-filled Nazi regime. Brooks said his character was forged when a bomb hit his unit one day and he crouched under a desk, debris tumbling all around him. He thought, “Okay, if I get through this, I’ll get through anything.”

  The end was in sight. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, less than two months after the 1104th landed at Le Havre. May 8 was V-E Day. Brooks spent the momentous occasion holed up in a wine cellar in a small town in western Germany, pickled in May wine. Long-serving veterans were promptly demobilized, but the Brooklynite would stay in uniform for almost another year and remain in Germany.

  That lost year is but one of the intriguing gaps in Mel Brooks’s early life. In numerous later interviews, he reminisced about his World War II experiences, often recounting an anecdote about the night he had heard German music wafting from entrenched lines and in response imitated Al Jolson at the top of his lungs, aiming his “Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’bye!)” across no-man’s-land toward the enemy. Another favorite story told of the Camel cigarettes Melvin stuffed into his ears (“I might be the first man to die of emphysema of the inner ear”) to muffle the constant thudding of trucks and bombs.

  Although Brooks later said his unit had been “fired on by a lot of kids and old men who were left in the villages,” not in any interview did he say he had witnessed any fatalities. Under “Battle and Campaigns” on his discharge papers is plainly typed “NONE.” Under “Wounds Received in Action,” also “NONE.” Under “Decorations and Citations” are listed a “Good Conduct Medal,” “American Campaign Medal,” “EAME Campaign Medal,” and “World War II Victory Medal”—all standard issue for dutiful GIs.

  In books, articles, oral histories, and official documents, there are as few sightings of him in the army and World War II as fond reminiscences by his high school classmates. That personal lack of colorful wartime incident might have inhibited him when he considered, in the 1970s, making a semiautobiographical film about World War II, a combat comedy with Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman as wacky tail gunners.

  Yet if he was a shmendrick in high school, in the army he helped make a difference alongside millions of fellow shmendricks. Melvin bonded with his unit, contributed to the push for victory, and in later years often took time to revisit northern France, where the 1104th had been billeted. He’d collaborate with Ronny Graham on a funny song called “Retreat,” with lyrics that encapsulated his attitude: “Run away!/Run away!/If you run away you live to fight another day!” A half century later, nearing ninety, he’d don his old full-dress uniform with medals for the documentary GI Jews, reciting his serial number automatically and recalling his World War II service with bittersweet pride.

  In Hitler and the Nazis he found lifelong nemeses, and he’d channel “that molten ball of hatred for Nazis and Hitler” into his comedy. The army hardened him physically, made him tough and wiry, and added a layer of outer shell to his personality. But he also admitted to having suffered “a lot of conscious and unconscious frustration and hatred” during his time in uniform. In the end, opportunistically, the war assisted his professional goals.

  Already the “barracks character,” in his words, shortly after the war officially ended in Europe Melvin Kaminsky migrated into the Special Services branch of the army, which produced entertainment of every sort and variety for servicemen in the German encampments. The German section had its hands full after the armistice because such a huge number of soldiers remained behind for rebuilding and occupation. Reassigned to the 1262nd Service Command Unit, Kaminsky was reclassified as not a writer, playwright, or artist, three of the four categories, but “entertainment specialist.”

  One of his jobs was squiring around visitors such as the army comedian Harvey Stone or even bigger celebrities. “Every time Bob Hope came by,” Brooks recalled, he sat up close to “write down all his jokes and use them.” The GI from Brooklyn grabbed at Hope’s pants cuff, pleading for an autograph as the star tried to exit the stage after one performance near Wiesbaden in August 1945. Brooks reminded Hope of that encounter when they crossed paths backstage years later on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

  According to his Separation Qualification Record, Brooks scheduled the touring entertainment supplied by the United Service Organizations (USO) and also the amateur productions staged by servicemen. He “directed shows for military personnel. Wrote dialogue . . . acted in capacity of master of ceremonies and comedian during presentation of shows. Arranged schedules of dance orchestra[s] for musical revues and concerts.”

  Many army shows were vaudeville-type revues featuring GIs in skits, with singing and dancing. While it was too soon for the entertainment specialist to think of Bob Hope as any kind of role model, by the end of his time overseas Melvin Kaminsky, though still just a private, rose to noncommissioned officer in charge of Special Services, serving under a sergeant and lieutenant, producing big events for the officers’ clubs and entire divisions. He was furnished with a Mercedes-Benz for transportation, he later boasted, and “a German fiddle player named Helga” as his “chauffeuse.” With a special pass to Frankfurt, he obtained “certain rare cognacs” and indulged in even rarer, admitted debauchery. “There wasn’t a nineteen-year-old soldier who got drunker than I did,” he recalled.

  The noncommissioned officer in charge increasingly took the stage himself, introducing acts or making patter. He donned a German uniform and toothbrush mustache to offer his first public impersonation of Hitler, screaming unintelligible “Deutsch.”

  By the time Melvin Kaminsky returned to the United States in April 1946, he had been promoted to “head of the entertainment crew for Special Services” for the army’s main separation center at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The former combat engineer was a familiar emcee of the Fort Dix shows he organized, telling jokes between the acts and parodying popular songs, including a version of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” that was bound to resonate with his audience (“When you begin/To clean the latrine . . .”). “Nothing frightened me,” he recalled. “I sang like Al Jolson. Everybody could do the low Jolson, but I did the high Jolson . . .” With “two friends,” according to William Holtzman’s dual biography of Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Melvin also “wowed the troops with a raunchy rendition of the Andrews Sisters—Patti, LaVerne, and Maxine—in army drab and five o’clock shadow.”

  Consciously or otherwise, the soldier absorbed comedy lessons that he would bring to his filmmaking years later. “I had a wide audience from all over the country,” he explained, “so I had to find enough ubiquitous stuff to make them all laugh, enough universal ideas. It helped me a lot in forming my own kind of humor.”

  On the base he billed himself as the “atomic comedian,” according to the first known profile of the Special Services entertainer in the Fort Dix Post. A series of photographs in the Post showed a wildly mugging “first sergeant” displaying the same array of funny faces he’d proffer throughout his career: “Determination” (sporting a steel helmet, gritting his teeth); “Man of the World” (a zany look, half effete, half doltish); “Happiness” (a toothy grin); and “Confusion” (crossed eyes and lolling tongue). Already his own best salesman, the first sergeant himself arranged the Post publicity, hired the photographer, and later passed out the one-sheet when applying for show business jobs.

  Importantly, by the end of the war he’d also officially chosen his stage name: “Melvyn Brooks,” according to the Post. (The “y” would come and go over the next few years.)

  The “atomic” side of the nascent comedian reflecte
d the tensions of his personality: at times his humor was too explosive, belligerent, or crude. At least one campmate thought that too many of Brooks’s onstage jokes landed with a thud, a problem sometimes in the years ahead, too. Close up and personal, he was usually funnier.

  “In the barracks there was a funny guy,” recalled infantryman Stanley Kaplan. “Terrible as a comedian, but around the barracks he was very funny”—so funny that Kaplan, a budding comic strip artist, borrowed off-kilter ideas from Brooks for his cartoons. “He would jump from footlocker to footlocker acting like an ape, swing from the rafters, and make up the most fantastic images and stories. I thought this guy is funny!”

  Elevated to the rank of corporal just before his discharge, the newly christened Melvyn Brooks was released from the army on June 27, 1946, just one day before celebrating his twentieth birthday. His discharge records show him at five feet, three and a half inches and 125 pounds.

  The war, which he had entered as a high school graduate, reshaped him like a bullet. Now he was a man. Probably he had lost his virginity somewhere in Europe. One anecdote he told friends was about “the time he was approached by a comely French hooker,” in William Holtzman’s words, “with the businesslike query: ‘Fuck, no?’” Brooks would evade probing sexual interrogatories by the press later in his career, but he did say, once, that he preferred dark-haired women, but not Jewish princesses and not the busty, cartoonish shiksas that cropped up in his films as joke fodder. He told Playboy that he relished “dirty” lovemaking. “Only when it’s dirty and when there’s a lot of yelling and cursing and filth and all the other things that I thought were taboo—then it’s very sexy and very hot for me.” (Albeit any kind of lovemaking, clean or dirty, would be sparse in his films.)

  Upon release, his ambitions recharged, Brooks launched himself back into show business with a gig as social director at his old summer stomping grounds, the Butler Lodge, according to Charles Cohen, whose family operated the Catskills resort.

  He may have hopscotched around several area resorts in the summer of 1946, as he performed as a stand-up comic, drawing on Joe Miller’s Joke Book (“Puns, Quips, Gags and Jokes”) and what had clicked in Special Services. Hearing something he liked, Brooks would throw it into the repertoire. His act was heavy on impersonations: giving the audience his solemn Thomas Jefferson (striking a rigid, statesmanlike pose); his Cagney—not Jimmy Cagney—but “Jimmy Cagney’s Aunt Hilda”; and his Man of a Thousand Faces (“. . . and now ‘Face 27’!”), which took up where the Fort Dix Post’s rubber faces left off.

  That summer of 1946 was probably when the future illustrator and graphic designer Bob Gill, leading a small house band at a Sullivan County resort, saw the act of the twenty-year-old “atomic comedian.” On his own, Brooks was still an acquired taste and not clearly destined for greatness. “He slept in one dressing room just off the stage,” Gill said, “and my trio slept in the other one. I remember thinking he was not very funny.”

  His act was sprinkled with imitative songs, and Al Jolson was almost as much of an obsession for Brooks, in his salad days, as was Adolf Hitler. But probably he performed his own original, amusing, and oddly touching signature song for the first time in the army before taking it to the Catskills that summer. The song ended à la Jolson with Brooks on bended knee. The number became enshrined in his career repertoire. More than one journalist in the years ahead, when he burst into the song during interviews, agreed with the Saturday Evening Post reporter who described it, in 1978, as “a pithier metaphor of all he [Brooks] was and all he has become than anything anyone has ever said about him.”

  Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks!

  I’ve come to stop the show.

  Just a ham who’s minus looks

  But in your heart I’ll grow!

  I’ll tell you gags, I’ll sing you songs

  (Just happy little snappy songs that roll along)

  Out of my mind. Won’t you be kind?

  And please love Melvin Brooks!

  Brooks had left the army with an inner fury never glimpsed in his anecdotes about his boyhood. Hitler, the Nazis, death, and destruction: he saw life now as a battle like those he had survived, with himself as the underdog leader of a personal mission seeking victory and vindication. Slights and drawbacks, both real and exaggerated, became increasingly crucial to his psychology, his drive and willpower, his persona, his brand of comedy.

  Back home with his mother in the fall, he pondered a vague future. Many veterans were signing up for college on the GI Bill. That was his mother’s wish for him. Although according to some accounts in the fall of 1946 Brooks registered at Brooklyn College, where his brother Irving had matriculated, the college has no record of his enrollment or attendance. Later, in 1947, he did turn up in a New School for Social Research course, solemnly intoning Keats and Job 28 from the Bible on a recording that was included in the DVD box set The Incredible Mel Brooks. The minute-and-a-half-long recording might have been for a night course on diction. Again, the New School has no records of him.

  When Brooks said he accumulated about one year of college study over time, he was inflating the two months he had spent at Virginia Military Institute. His lack of higher education always touched a nerve with him; it added to his insecurity as a writer and sympathetically explained why so many of his interviews—and interviews with his friends—insist upon his being a funnyman with the breadth and depth of an intellectual.

  Sitting in a classroom was not for him, and besides, what would he study?

  For a while he drew a regular paycheck as a courier for the US Post Office, working out of the mail department at Penn Station. His brother Lenny was now a postal clerk, working for the same employer. Yet one job was never enough for Brooks, and soon he took another position with flexible hours at Abalene Blouse & Sportswear, a retail and wholesale clothier on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District. He was a born salesman, and, he liked to boast in interviews, “I’m a better salesman than I am anything else.”

  Selling clothing was useful in developing his communication skills, and he didn’t have to learn the cocky, often aggressive manner of the profession, which was his natural demeanor. Beneath it all he was anxious to get something going in show business. He was acutely aware that his father, Max Brooks, had died young, the very week he turned thirty-six.

  To that end, in the late fall, Brooks reconnected with Don Appell, who had established himself after military service as the playwright and director of two Broadway plays. This, Too, Shall Pass, his recent tolerance drama, told the story of a war veteran coping with anti-Semitism. The irrepressible Benjamin Kutcher was an investor, and onetime Butler Lodge social director Joseph Dolphin was involved behind the scenes.

  Appell brought Brooks to the Copacabana nightclub on East 60th Street early in 1947 to see the revue everyone in New York was raving about; and afterward he took him backstage to greet Sid Caesar, the saxophonist of the Avon Lodge house band back in the pre–World War II era, who had become (as the advertising proclaimed) a “comedy star.”

  Caesar was more than just a comedian who could mimic all kinds of funny sound effects, including involuntary bodily functions; he could sing, dance, play the saxophone; he had chameleonic acting skills. The impresario Max Liebman had launched the strapping, charismatic performer in a Coast Guard variety show during World War II, called Tars and Spars, which was later filmed in Hollywood with Caesar making his screen debut. Even as the Copacabana revue drew crowds, Tars and Spars was still playing in theaters.

  The watershed moment of Brooks’s career came backstage at the Copacabana when he was reunited with Caesar, who was now Caesar the budding phenomenon. Caesar remembered Brooks; they took to each other instantly with banter and joking.

  Realizing that fame and fortune were descending on Caesar, Brooks attached himself as a “sort of groupie,” in Caesar’s words. “He was funny and ingenious and he liked my type of humor, so he hung around me.” Brooks began to visit Caesar backstage
frequently at the Copacabana and Roxy, where the star headlined later in 1947, and each time Caesar opened a new show, Brooks lingered longer after the curtain rang down.

  Meanwhile, his old boss Benjamin Kutcher offered him a promising job for the summer of 1947. The New Jersey Atlantic shore was a summer magnet for entertainers as well as vacationers, and Kutcher planned to launch a theatrical stock company in Red Bank, a picturesque Podunk about fifty miles south of Brooklyn on the Navesink River, an estuary that flowed into the Shrewsbury River and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean. Joseph Dolphin was on board as one of the stage directors, and Dolphin said he could work with the onetime pool boy he had chased through the Catskills with a knife.

  The Manhattan-based Kutcher needed a proxy in Red Bank to supervise the ambitious playbill, which promised a new show every week, supplemented with weekend magician and clown acts for children. Kutcher had leased the premises of the Mechanic Street School from the Board of Education, and downtown department stores were already selling tickets. The twenty-one-year-old veteran of Special Services would serve as Kutcher’s Johnny-on-the-spot, and for the first time his name would be proclaimed as “Mel Brooks” in Red Bank Players programs and publicity. (His name fluctuated between “Mel” and “Melvin” over the next several years, but “Melvyn” was gone forever.)

  Brooks would manage the stock company and represent it to merchants, civic officials, and the local newspapers. He would also take the stage to introduce the shows and perform walk-ons in the plays. That summer he roomed with two young members of the troupe: an actor and aspiring comedian named Wilbur Roach and Roach’s cousin John Roney, a townie known as “Red Bank’s Barrymore,” in William Holtzman’s words.