Caesar treated Brooks in fatherly fashion sometimes, taking Brooks along with him on the road to Chicago, for example, in late June after Admiral Broadway Revue went off the air. Caesar was booked into the Empire Room of the Palmer House, and he wanted refinements in his nightclub act, in which Caesar convulsed audiences with what were already evergreens from his repertoire, giving impersonations, according to a Chicago Tribune columnist, of “slot machines, aerial dogfights, condensed movie plots, a callow youth at his first prom, and French and British casts enacting the same playlet.”
Caesar’s two-week engagement at the Empire Room stretched into a triumphant eight-week stand. Brooks was there for much of that time, getting to know and love Chicago, as was another one of Caesar’s close companions—his older brother and chief lieutenant, Dave—“the funniest, the most good-hearted and finest man I ever knew,” in Caesar’s words. Savvy about show business, Dave was the one who coined the phrase “Funny is money.” (“Exec is dreck,” Dave would add, especially in later years after Caesar became his own producer.) Brooks had long since begun to collect such little sayings, adopting them as his own, popularizing them for his own purposes. Another was something Adolphe Menjou said to Eleanor Powell in some forgotten movie: “Tops in taps!”
Dave sided with his brother on the subject of Brooks; both liked the younger man. At night after performances the Caesar brothers and Brooks all hung out with lead dancer Bob Fosse, who’d been on Admiral Broadway Revue and now was part of the stage act.
The William Morris Agency was helping to package the new NBC series for Caesar. The popular dance bands of the 1930s and ’40s had begun to lose their luster. The agency had begun to gravitate toward nightclub and hotel bookings with comedians, more and more, as the top attractions of the future. Through Liebman, Caesar had the benefit of agency resources, and at his Chicago opening, Brooks sat at a front table with Lou Weiss from the William Morris Agency, who’d come from New York to stroke the ego of the agency’s hottest new star. Brooks did not have an agent yet; he lusted after such powerful representation and did his best to ingratiate himself with the William Morris man.
Chapter 3
1949
Funny Is Money
Your Show of Shows would never have come to pass without Max Liebman, although it was Sid Caesar who stood center stage, with everything depending on him and his exploding talent. If Liebman rejected a joke or an idea, there might be wiggle room; if Caesar rejected a joke or an idea, it was dead. But Caesar had huge mood swings; he could be very calm and businesslike at one moment and other times extremely volatile or tricky to read. Among Liebman’s many gifts was his ability to handle Caesar.
At the outset of Your Show of Shows, Liebman was essential as its producer, Caesar was indebted to him, and they had a close partnership. Drawing on lessons from Tamiment and previous shows they had done, Liebman took the lead in organizing the new series around the brilliance of Caesar and Imogene Coca; the skits, mime, comedy, and songs—Caesar and Coca together, alone, and with guest stars—would be interspersed with jazz, opera, and a corps de ballet capable of any style of dance. “What we did, every night, in Max’s mind,” Brooks said later, “was a Broadway revue.”
Liebman signed backstage personnel for the series that would guarantee not only a high production gloss but also continuity with his and Caesar’s mutual past. There were key holdovers from Admiral Broadway Revue, many dating back to Make Mine Manhattan or Tamiment, including set designer Frederick Fox, costumer Paul duPont, choreographer James Starbuck, musical supervisor Charles Sanford, and director Hal Keith.
Liebman also brought back the nonpareil writing twosome of Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen. They’d pen every script for the first half season of Your Show of Shows, although Liebman and Caesar were also often credited on the screen. And many specialty writers passed through the revolving door to help out with spot material.
A nonentity from Liebman’s point of view, at the start of the first half season of Your Show of Shows, Brooks was still shut out of the meetings that mattered. A composer waiting outside Liebman’s office at NBC, hoping for a job writing song and dance numbers, recalled his first sight of Brooks racing up the stairs one day, yanking open Liebman’s door, shouting “Fuck!,” slamming it, then running back down the stairs.
“Fuck!” meant it was an important meeting and Liebman had waved at the gagman to go away. Enemies caffeinated Brooks, and he took relish in irritating the boss with his cockiness, his arrogance, his bursting into rooms and rehearsals where he wasn’t welcome. Caesar was usually his best audience, laughing at such shenanigans, but “I was not entertained,” Liebman recalled, “when, on several occasions, I came upon [Brooks] in my chair, smoking my cigar, with his feet on my desk wearing my shoes.”
However, for Your Show of Shows Brooks was admitted to the interim writers’ room, which was rented space at the Malin Studios on West 46th Street. The “closet sized cubbyhole,” in Tolkin’s words, had previously been used as the male dancers’ changing room; hence its nickname, the Jockstrap Room. Over time Tolkin and Kallen had surrendered to Brooks, recognizing his occasional valuable contributions, even if Little Mel—as he was dubbed to distinguish him from the older, taller Big Mel—often irritated them, too.
When there were story conferences, Caesar and Liebman also congregated in the Jockstrap Room with Tolkin, Kallen, and Brooks, and Liebman’s cigar figured in the arguments that could turn fierce. The producer liked to quote a supposed Goldwynism to explain his theory about script conferences (“From a polite conference comes a polite script”), but Brooks made an art of impoliteness; irrepressibly rude and crude, he’d pop off with jokes so out of context that Liebman would whip his burning stogie out of his mouth and hurl it at him. “That to me was more than the playful rejection of an idea,” Tolkin recalled. “It was the rejection of Mel as a person, someone to be taken seriously.”
Tolkin and Kallen were the stable personalities. They were not spontaneous, or shouters. Shouting made them uncomfortable. Tolkin was inarguably the lead writer, and Kallen was generally the only woman in the room, the only sitter, the person taking notes, capturing lines as the sketches evolved. Most of the time the stable writers had come in before the conferences with drafts of the sketches. Then the shouting started.
People knew (he compulsively confessed it) that Brooks suffered from insomnia and roamed shows, cafés, bars, and the streets until late at night. He usually fell asleep while watching TV; that was one reason why he often burst into the middle of meetings and story conferences and was especially cantankerous and discombobulated in the morning.
His expected job—his role as gagman—was to top off what someone else had already written with a better joke or stronger finish. Everyone else in the room might be trying hard to solve the same problem. Brooks would do anything to grab attention; he’d shout insults or jump onto a desk, waving his arms. His proffered toppers were often flabbergasting non sequiturs, but other times he really hit the bull’s-eye. “He always had a joke,” Kallen recalled. “Nine out of ten were ‘forget it,’ and the tenth was brilliant.” (Later, Carl Reiner was fond of saying “To get one good idea you have to have ten lousy ones.”)
His lateness, his rudeness and crudeness, his screaming fits worried Tolkin, who took him aside and related an incident from his youth that had made an impression on him. As a boy Tolkin had been practicing the piano one day, diligently working on his scales, attempting to apply equal graceful pressure to each note in spite of a sluggish thumb. A younger kid from his neighborhood had appeared, slid next to him at the piano, and started banging away with his fist, shouting rapturously “Look, I can play! I can play!”
Brooks nodded as he listened to Tolkin’s anecdote. He understood that the story underlined the differences between the two Mels. Big Mel lived a structured existence, agonizing over his ability to do anything serious or artistic with his talent. “The one enjoying the sounds he makes at the piano,” in Tolkin’
s words, that was Little Mel.
Tolkin perceived the hidden depths of anger and angst in Brooks, and he empathized with anger and angst. He took Brooks under his wing, urging him to read Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky and to exhibit more patience and decorum if he wanted to be a writer. “The Russian novelists made me realize it’s a bigger ballpark than the Bilko show,” Brooks said later. “Right from the moment I read them, I knew I wanted to achieve more than Doc [Neil] Simon and Abe Burrows did. I wanted to be the American Molière, the new Aristophanes.” Everyone noticed how “an ancient Jewish respect for literature,” in Kallen’s words, began to improve Brooks’s behavior—if only a tad.
In numerous interviews Brooks said Tolkin was not just an early paragon of the profession for him; he was the Caesar writer who more than any other took the show into the realm of “the human condition.” “He was never Bob Hope contemporary,” Brooks said; Tolkin wrote about “what happened in the human heart, and he taught me that.” More crucially, Tolkin was another father figure, an older man who treated him sympathetically at a time in his life and career when Brooks needed the touch of love.
Tolkin and Kallen worked like Trojans. Liebman gradually yielded to other responsibilities. Caesar increasingly reigned, making emendations to scripts as they evolved, as well as in performance. Often enough, Brooks slid in with his brilliance.
Although the talent, power, and maturity were not equally dispersed in the Jockstrap Room, a rhythm and teamwork soon emerged that would produce fabled scripts. The machinery of the team needed constant oil and grease, there were continual crises, eruptions, and breakdowns, but for as long as it lasted it was a beautiful machine.
Your Show of Shows premiered on February 25, 1950, shooting fireworks into the sky for thirteen weeks. The one-and-a-half-hour-long program was presented as part of a two-and-a-half-hour-long live block of time called The NBC Saturday Night Revue. As was true of Admiral Broadway Revue, the new Sid Caesar series was performed and broadcast live before a studio audience without taped applause, cue cards, or teleprompters. Caesar’s share of the time block was preceded by one hour of The Jack Carter Hour, also transmitted live from Chicago from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time; that led into the hour-and-a-half-long Your Show of Shows from 9:00 to 10:30 p.m., beamed from Rockefeller Center. The rapid-fire Carter was more of a traditional stand-up comedian, but the two variety programs overlapped with peculiarly similar formats (Carter’s also featured a recurring German professor, for example). The great difference really was Caesar.
Actor Burgess Meredith emceed the Your Show of Shows premiere and joined in the sketches with Caesar and another guest star, the stage doyenne Gertrude Lawrence. Caesar and Imogene Coca teamed up to parody silent pictures; Caesar played Columbus quelling a mutiny while en route to America; and Coca warbled a beguiling “Smorgasbord Song.” The Metropolitan Opera baritone Robert Merrill performed a duet with the soprano Marguerite Piazza, and Nelle Fisher and Jerry Ross demonstrated ballet and folk dances.
Though critical reaction to The Jack Carter Show was mixed (“not good,” the New York Times declared), reviewers rhapsodized over Your Show of Shows. Variety, the show business bible, said Caesar’s new showcase was adult and imaginative, magnificently produced—“big time entertainment and sales potential.” Caesar was the “standout,” but Coca, long “a comedienne of much promise,” had found her natural groove as his female counterpart and foil. The influential television critic Jack Gould of the Times said Caesar’s maturing artistry now ranked him “with the genuine clowns of the day.”
Again Brooks’s name never once appeared on the screen during the debut half season of Your Show of Shows. Max Liebman’s resistance to Brooks was linked to his faith in the Tolkin-Kallen combo and to his reluctance to pay for a third writer. Moreover, Liebman viewed Brooks as a “talking writer,” not a “writing writer.” His spin and toppers were great, but Tolkin and Kallen—and he and Caesar—were writing writers.
With Liebman still refusing to hire him, Caesar continued to dole out $40 weekly to Brooks, which got pushed up to $45 or $50 when Brooks dragged the star down to Horatio Street, showing him his humble digs and impressing Caesar with his poverty.
NBC was overjoyed at the show’s success and ordered up a full season for 1950–1951: thirty-nine hour-and-a-half-long episodes. (“We were too stupid to know it was impossible,” Tolkin said later.) Liebman and Caesar immediately began looking to augment the ensemble and take pressure off the stars—Caesar and Imogene Coca—meeting with Carl Reiner, an “all around utility man,” in Variety’s words, who had appeared in other Max Liebman ventures, and the high-strung, priggish Howard Morris, whose short height made him the natural butt of physical humor. Reiner and Morris were compatible with the show and each other; they had crossed paths in radio and army shows.
Classically trained, Morris had played Rosencrantz in Maurice Evans’s most recent Hamlet and made his comedy debut on television the previous spring, doing small parts on Admiral Broadway Revue. Currently he had a billed role on Broadway in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos’s 1926 comedy revamped as a musical for Carol Channing.
Caesar took one look at Morris and lifted the short actor up by the lapels until their eyes locked; Caesar’s head swiveled to Liebman: Him. Get! Brooks, who was also in the room, proceeded to pose as a visiting Parisian scholar, speaking mangled French to Morris for ensuing hours, days, or weeks—depending on versions of the anecdote.
While the TV world was fixated on Your Show of Shows in early 1950, New York theater mavens were more focused on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which had become a sensation after its celebrity-studded December 8, 1949, opening at the newly renovated Ziegfeld Theatre.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes boasted the prettiest chorus of singers and dancers in memory, and an army of stage door Johnnys pursued them. Brooks began to turn up, ostensibly visiting Morris. Not all the chorus girls were blondes; many were dark beauties of the type Brooks confessed to preferring. This group included Polly Ward, one of triplet sisters, a short, cute midwesterner, and Mary Katherine Martinet, whom everyone called “M.K.”—she hailed from Baltimore and had short brown hair and a gorgeous body. Ward and Martinet were strong, athletic types, while another chorine, their friend Florence Baum, a nineteen-year-old from Brooklyn, was more elegant and graceful and was ballet trained.
A number of the nonstars often went out on the town after the final curtain, and Brooks, looking almost as dapper as Howard Morris, palled along. He put a successful full-court press first on Polly Ward, then on M.K. M.K. hypnotized men: her personality was electric, her body sinuous. Brooks thought he might be in love with the dancer, eight years older than he, and M.K. made no secret of their intense sexual chemistry.
The third dancer in the trio of friends had just sat down to a scrambled eggs supper with Morris in his Greenwich Village apartment one Sunday night when the doorbell rang. Morris nursed a crush on Florence Baum, although they would only ever be platonic friends. Morris had just separated from his first wife, and Baum was playing hard to get with Herman Levin, the roly-poly producer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while trying to decide what to do about the heavy come-hither signals she was getting from the much handsomer Dean Martin. On Sundays, her Blondes night off, Baum often danced on NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour, where Martin did his act with Jerry Lewis.
Two men strolled in the door when Morris opened it. One, Brooks’s Horatio Street roommate, was pleasant looking; the other, bristling like a porcupine, not so much, Baum thought. That was her first close-up of Mel Brooks, who frowned when Morris introduced everyone, mentioning that Baum and Dean Martin were a romantic item. Brooks seemed to radiate hostility. Making a rude comment about her bright red lipstick, the visitor reached over with one finger, traced it across her lower lip, and smeared the lipstick across Baum’s face. Outraged, Morris threw Brooks and his roommate out.
Brooks never intimidated the scrappy Morris, then or later. Partly for that reason—in
addition to his classical training and their age difference (Morris was almost seven years older than Brooks)—Morris held a peculiar edge in their lifelong friendship.
Brooks put a different full-court press on Max Liebman. Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen needed help for a full season of Your Show of Shows, and Liebman finally consented to a work-for-hire salary in the fall and a screen credit for Brooks if the show used any of his ideas.
If you didn’t have a powerful agent, you were doubly powerless in negotiations with Liebman. By early 1950, Brooks had finally wangled his first representation: a small-timer working out of his own theater district office named Fred Wolfe. Wolfe advertised Brooks as a “special material writer for Sid Caesar.” But the small-timer had little clout, and the only job he could finagle for Brooks was Brooks’s first stab at acting on television: a part as a brash window washer in pitchman Sid Stone’s regular segment on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater. That Star Theater was packaged by the William Morris Agency, where Brooks boasted contacts via Caesar, didn’t hurt.
Stone: So, you’re a window washer, and you’re working on the Empire State Building. What’s your biggest fear?
Brooks (foreshadowing High Anxiety): Pigeons!
This early proof of Brooks’s willingness to try anything aired in 1950. He performed dynamically in his fleeting turn at a point in time when the Milton Berle show was top rated (“I was the king of Williamsburg,” Brooks recalled). But it was a one-off, no miracle followed, and a decade would pass before his face was again glimpsed on national TV.
In June, meanwhile, Caesar opened a new stage show at the Roxy Theatre, featuring Imogene Coca along with Faye Emerson. Brooks was ubiquitous in the greenroom. But after that he had to spend the rest of the summer scrounging for work: more drumming, a few Catskills dates as a comic. The summer of 1950 is probably when he traded on his Caesar connections for a few weeks as social director at Grossinger’s, producing the midweek entertainment.
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