Sprinkling in Red Bank residents with an ensemble of low-wattage New York professionals, the Players opened the season in mid-June with Hell-Bent fer Heaven, a Pulitzer Prize–winning melodrama from 1924 about feuding Blue Ridge Mountain clans. Things went swiftly downhill from there. The Red Bankers did not turn out in droves, and ticket prices had to be slashed. Guest celebrity performers were jettisoned, and plays were trimmed from the calendar to extend the up-and-running shows and save money. Strapped for cash, Kutcher fell behind on the Mechanic Street School rent, and then the Red Bank Board of Education—already alarmed by reports of cigarette butts and empty soda bottles strewn all over the public grounds—tried to cancel the Players’ lease.
Onstage blunders and miscues only added to the negative publicity. The curtain was so tardy one night that Roney had to take the stage in his dressing gown and wave Roach and Brooks on from the wings. The roommates improvised “with close to sixty minutes of mimicry,” William Holtzman wrote, with Roach offering an “admirable” Charles Laughton while Brooks did a “regrettable” Al Jolson that closed with his trademark song, “Mammy.”
There was a gray area of authority between the stage director and the producer’s surrogate, and more than once, according to another biographer, James Robert Parish, Brooks clashed with Dolphin’s successor, director Percy Montague, who took over in midsummer. Montague tongue-lashed Brooks in front of the company for a “minor infraction,” at which Brooks “burst into a tirade filled with enough big words and erudite references to convince everyone in earshot that he was not a man to be taken lightly.”
Wilbur Roach remembered a roommate who was keen at the time on nasal Jolson impersonations and sophomoric clowning. Brooks was “flirtatious and grabby” with women, Holtzman wrote in his book, but also “awkward and almost adolescent.”
Red Bank also occasioned the first glimpse of the wishful wordsmith. Brooks spent part of the summer crafting a short story, Roach recalled, “an allegory really, about two cats at opposite ends of the social ladder, one patrician, the other plebeian. When they finally come to words, the alley cat lectures the fat cat: ‘You may have this beautiful home, but I have my freedom of being able to go from trash can to trash can.’”
After their problem-plagued summer, the Players limped across the finish line in late August, barely making it to the sixth and final production of the season with Separate Rooms, a comedy revolving around the love life of a self-centered actress. A week or two before the comedy opened, director Percy Montague either quit in a pique or was fired by Kutcher. Either way, the “atomic” Mel Brooks was poised to assume the reins.
The twenty-one-year-old oversaw a furious scramble of last-minute casting and rehearsal. The professionals had dwindled, but Cathy Clayton, as the self-centered actress, and John Dennis, as her man-about-town husband, had played leads all summer. Brooks’s roommates Roney and Roach took bigger parts, and so did local thespians.
For himself, Brooks set aside the eighth-billed role of Scoop Davis, a press agent for the self-centered actress, his only listed role of the summer. “Not the typical blustering sort,” the script describes Scoop, “a natural comedian and a little screwy.”
With assistance from Roney and Roach, however, Brooks really “blossomed” as a director, Holtzman wrote. “If Mel’s directorial style had few niceties (he once corrected [Roach’s] interpretation of a British character: ‘Too much swish,’ neither did he have any pretensions. They were all having fun, they were experimenting and learning.”
The Asbury Park Press, reviewing the premiere of Separate Rooms, wasn’t sure how much fun the show really was, however. The largest-circulation paper in the county said the cast suffered from “a lapse of memory” and “the play lost some of its best scenes thru dialog bungling.” The production was “not up to the standards” of “earlier efforts.”
Even so, for the first time that summer the turnout was strong, the applause and laughter loud. Wilbur Roach would go on to become the comedian Will Jordan, famed as an Ed Sullivan impressionist. He stayed in touch with Brooks for decades and on more than one occasion, in interviews, traced Brooks’s borrowings, especially his Hitler riffs, from Jordan’s own earliest stand-up comedy bits. John Dennis moved on to a long career in Hollywood, and his onetime Red Bank director remembered Dennis fondly, years later, by giving him some moments in Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety.
Chaos fed Brooks’s energy and imagination. In war and summer stock he prevailed, and he blasted through all the obstacles, in the summer of 1947, for the Red Bank Players and himself.
Was he an aspiring comedian, actor, writer, or director? All of the above? Or was he condemned to forever be a ladies’ wear salesman with colorful summer jobs?
Returning in the fall of 1947 to work at Abalene Blouse & Sportswear (which he’d “use as a stopgap when money was tight,” in Holtzman’s words), Brooks looked for the occasional gig as a comic or fill-in drummer. In one interview he said a friend recommended him once as a substitute for an ailing drummer with Charlie Spivak’s big band, which was performing at Bill Miller’s Riviera at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey. If true, he had just reached his pinnacle as a musician.
But he had treaded water for two years since leaving the army, making only haphazard progress in his show business aspirations. His brothers, no longer such an integral part of his life, held good-paying jobs and were married now. His mother worried about her youngest son. Brooks’s answer was to move, in the fall, into a flat on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, which had become his favorite neighborhood, sharing the modest space with another escapee from Brooklyn.
Brooks was burning with ambition by the time he visited Sid Caesar backstage in the spring of 1948, following performances of Caesar’s latest triumph, Make Mine Manhattan, a musical revue of songs and skits playing at the Broadhurst Theatre. By now Caesar’s reputation was in steep ascent. Besides Manhattan, which had been filling seats since January, Caesar boasted a new Hollywood movie, a straight melodrama, The Guilt of Janet Ames, which was playing in Times Square at the same time as his hit musical.
Reviewing Make Mine Manhattan in the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson had grumbled that most of the performers were “still in the junior class” but that was not true of Caesar, for he was “the most original item in the program. An amiable product of the local habitat, he can mimic anything from a subway vending machine to a dial telephone or a taxi driver, and rush through it with tremendous speed. Mr. Caesar is imaginative and clever.”
Ever since Tars and Spars, Caesar had been under personal contract to Max Liebman, who had discovered him and paved the way to his breakthrough in the Coast Guard show. Liebman had helped devise Make Mine Manhattan and now was in talks with the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) about a television variety series to star Caesar.
Brooks learned that NBC had come through with an offer for a midseason TV series, beginning early in 1949 after Manhattan would close its expected run. The live one-hour program, aired simultaneously by NBC and the Dumont Network and sponsored by Admiral, a television manufacturing company, would give Caesar a revue format similar to the one he and Liebman had developed for Tars and Spars and successive stage shows.
Brooks saw Caesar as a role model for everything he dreamed of being and as the mentor who might light the path ahead for him. Caesar saw Brooks as an entertaining sidekick; Brooks’s smart-aleck remarks, his off-beat sense of humor, distracted the rising star from his many other preoccupations. Yet Caesar also had an eagle eye for talent and saw possibilities in Brooks before anyone else did. He loved pulling people into a room and calling on Brooks to sing his signature tune, “Please love Melvin Brooks!” Caesar always chortled over that song. In the last few years their friendship had really grown.
Backstage at the Broadhurst, Caesar spoke about the new television series he and Liebman were planning, saying that maybe Brooks could tag along, help out with the jokes.
; But first Brooks would have to pass muster with Max Liebman, and at first he didn’t make the grade.
A Jewish native of Vienna transplanted to Brooklyn, where he had graduated from Boys High School, Liebman was a hunched, owlish man who customarily wore a neat bow tie and a dead-animal hairpiece. (“It looked like a family of birds that just left,” Brooks said.) Born in 1902, Liebman had begun his career as a sketch writer for revues in the 1930s. Before linking up with Caesar during World War II, he was already a vaunted name in show business for having launched an array of talent, most famously Danny Kaye, out of Camp Tamiment in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. The Poconos belonged to a more politically progressive tradition than the Catskills, and Tamiment in Pike County was a resort well known for its show business training and entertainment. For much of the 1930s and again after World War II, Liebman ran Tamiment’s theater workshop and staged the shows for its playhouse. His weekly revues blended character-driven satire with songs, pantomime, and highbrow ballet and opera.
One day in the summer of 1948, Harry Kalcheim from the William Morris Agency, which represented Liebman, brought NBC executive Sylvester “Pat” Weaver to Tamiment to watch the shows and meet Liebman, setting into motion Admiral Broadway Revue, the new Liebman/Caesar series that NBC had scheduled for liftoff in January 1949.
Caesar needed supporting players for the projected series, and Liebman’s hand was manifest in the casting. The two lead actresses the producer hired were Mary McCarty, a former child performer who was now a reliable character actress, and, from Tamiment, Imogene Coca, “a lovely little lady with big brown eyes,” in Caesar’s words, in whom Liebman had great confidence. Coca had starred with Danny Kaye in The Straw Hat Revue, a Liebman/Tamiment show that had been “transferred in toto” (in Liebman’s words) to Broadway back in 1940. After the success of Straw Hat, Coca had been languishing except for other Tamiment bookings. Caesar knew Coca in passing, but now, reintroduced, they clicked. “I always called [Coca] Immy because she was so little,” Caesar said. “We had chemistry right away and liked each other immediately.”
Liebman also reached back to Tamiment for the team he engaged to write the Admiral Broadway Revue series. Initially the producer had put Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen together to write the summer camp shows. Tolkin was the senior partner not only by dint of age. Jewish, born Shmuel Tolchinsky in the Ukraine in 1913, he had been raised in Canada. An infinitely resourceful comedy writer, Tolkin was also thoughtful to the point of being angst-ridden with “more tics than a flophouse mattress,” as Larry Gelbart once described him. (The theater critic Kenneth Tynan said that Tolkin was “a harassed looking man,” while Brooks said he evoked “a stork that dropped a baby and broke it and is coming to explain to the parents.”) Kallen had also grown up in Canada, although she, too, was Jewish and a native of Los Angeles. Younger (born in 1922), Kallen was a brunette as attractive as she was brainy. She complemented Tolkin with her savvy and sensibility; she had a feminine but also feminist sensibility—“out of her guts,” in Tolkin’s words.
Both had written songs as well as satirical sketches for Tamiment, as they would also do for Sid Caesar down the years. (Tolkin wrote the theme song introducing Your Show of Shows: “Stars over Broadway/See them glow . . .”) Tolkin had clocked time as a jazz pianist in nightclubs and could imitate the style of any composer, popular or classical. Kallen was Juilliard-trained as a pianist and had performed in nightclub revues.
The same decidedly elaborate and sophisticated template that Liebman had developed for the Tamiment shows would be carried over to Admiral Broadway Revue—only everything would revolve around Caesar, who had never been to Tamiment. That was the plan of action as Brooks trailed Caesar to production meetings in the fall of 1948.
Except that Brooks could not get past Liebman. Caesar introduced them backstage at the Broadhurst one night, urging Brooks into his signature song: “Do it for Max!” As always, Brooks went down on the close à la Jolson. Liebman was unmoved. “Who is this meshuganah?” he demanded. (“He didn’t know how right he was,” Caesar recalled.) Caesar touted Brooks as a prospective gagman, but Liebman, notoriously thrifty, did not want more writers on the payroll. Apart from himself (he’d started as a writer) and Caesar (who always contributed), he had the gifted duo of Tolkin and Kallen.
Brooks had to wait outside in the corridor and then race to catch up with Caesar as the star left meetings, fuming and in long stride. Brooks would throw out jokes and ideas—which from the get-go usually came in the form of icing on the cake—his verbal spin on other people’s lame finishes, “topping” the comedy to Caesar’s satisfaction.
Inside the room, the proven scribes—the older, taller Tolkin, always billed first, and Kallen—paid little heed to Brooks, at least initially. But Tolkin’s family had fled Russia and anti-Semitic pogroms; he was a sensitive man who was always in dialogue with his own conscience, and gradually he and then Kallen took sympathetic note of Brooks.
Caesar decided to pay Brooks a little money out of his own pocket, thereby making him his personal gagman. The scowling Liebman looked the other way. Brooks remained persona non grata and had trouble talking his way into the rehearsals and live broadcasts at the International Theatre on Columbus Circle, which served as the NBC broadcasting studio. “He would make catlike noises and scratch at the door in order to be let in,” Caesar recalled. “My manager, Leo Pillot, refused to believe that Mel knew me, and had two ushers grab him and literally toss him into the alley. When I found out about it, I told them that we were friends and it was okay to let him in.”
When Admiral Broadway Revue premiered on Friday, January 28, 1949, it made an instant impression. Caesar was “[as] great on TV as he’s been in other branches of showbiz,” Billboard enthused, and the star was sublimely matched with Coca in the sketches. (Coca, a deft light comedienne, singer, and pantomimist, quickly outshone Mary McCarty, who would not last into the next year’s Your Show of Shows.) The versatile singers and dancers behind the stars included the young Bob Fosse and the married smoothies Marge and Gower Champion, who were catapulted onto the cover of Life.
Much of the Revue was borrowed from Tamiment, Caesar’s nightclub act, and his previous stage shows, but for the first time a national television audience was exposed to his specialties: the foreign-language gibberish and bits such as “Nonentities in the News,” where he played a know-it-all ignoramus professor. Ratings soared, and sales of Admiral TV sets emptied out the warehouses. Liebman was hailed as “the new Ziegfeld of TV.”
Brooks made small, targeted contributions, including to a skit for Caesar called “Bomba, the Jungle Boy.” Caesar was “a boy from the African jungles, who had been discovered wearing a lion skin roaming the streets of midtown Manhattan,” in the words of comedian Steve Allen, who published this excerpt from the skit in his book Funny People:
Interviewer: Sir, how do you survive in New York City? What do you eat?
Caesar: Pigeon.
Interviewer: Don’t the pigeons object?
Caesar: Only for a minute.
Interviewer: What are you afraid of more than anything?
Caesar: Buick.
Interviewer: You’re afraid of a Buick?
Caesar: Yes. Buick can win in a death struggle. Must sneak up on parked Buick, punch grill hard. Buick die.
A proper ending to that exchange stumped the salaried writers: Tolkin and Kallen—Caesar and Liebman, too—were all credited as writers in the early days. “Something was missing from the piece,” James Robert Parish wrote in It’s Good to Be the King. “No one could quite put his or her finger on what new funny ingredient needed to be introduced.” Caesar summoned Brooks, commanding him, “Do something. Write!” Brooks improvised “a few off-the-wall ideas,” according to Parish, which went nowhere, until he suggested “a bizarre noise,” which the gagman dubbed “The Cry of the Crazy Cow,” a “strange, harsh cawing sound” that indicated how Bomba, the Jungle Boy, ordered breakfast in the jungle. That was somet
hing Caesar had in common with Brooks: both loved weird noises. The star guffawed. “It worked,” Parish wrote. The crazy cawing went into the sketch.
To most people he was the Kid, the schlepper, Caesar’s jester. “I belonged to Sid,” Brooks recalled. “Sid called me night or day, sometimes three in the morning. ‘I need a joke.’” But Brooks began to think of himself as a gagman—a bona fide species in show business. Not once, however, was he screen-credited for Admiral Broadway Revue. And the twenty-two-year-old wannabe was still shut out of all the important meetings.
When, surprisingly, Admiral Broadway Revue was canceled in June 1949—for the remarkable reason that Admiral executives had decided to channel their allocation for the series into stepped-up factory production to meet the surge in demand for new TV sets—the hurt was only temporary. NBC quickly authorized a new series starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, produced by Max Liebman, to be introduced in the midseason of 1950. The new series raised the production budget and everyone’s salaries, and Caesar was allowed to take over several floors of office and rehearsal space at NBC’s City Center facility on West 55th Street.
Over the summer, Brooks continued to juggle day jobs and moonlight in the Catskills while never, not for the next ten years, straying far from Caesar’s side.
Brooks recognized that “his relationship with Sid Caesar was that of a child clamoring for the attention and approval of a father,” as Kenneth Tynan wrote, although the new television star was only four years older than he. (Brooks was hardly alone; other writers for Caesar, even those who were older such as Mel Tolkin, loved and admired Caesar. Several were wont to refer to him, only half jokingly, as “Papa” or “Daddy.”)
“I lost my father when I was only two,” Brooks explained once in an interview. “I can’t even remember him. There’s something big, you know, emotionally missing in my life. [Making] alliances with father figures was always very important to me. Like Sid Caesar—he was very important to me, emotionally as well as professionally.”
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