Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  “Brooks was on the staff to write a show—the staff show,” recalled Bill Persky, then serving in a lowly capacity at Grossinger’s. (Persky and collaborator Sam Denoff would go on to write several hit TV comedies and create That Girl starring Marlo Thomas.) “He entertained at the midweek variety show. On the weekends, they’d have big stars, but during the week they’d have lesser people. And Mel got to do stand-up and insulted everyone to the point that they ran him off the grounds the next day.”

  Much of the summer, however, Brooks spent traipsing after Caesar and M. K. Martinet. By September, he was firmly ensconced in better, jockstrap-less writers’ offices at NBC, however, working on a daily basis with Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and Caesar, with Max Liebman increasingly preoccupied with demanding production chores.

  When The NBC Saturday Night Revue premiered in the fall of 1950, again the allotted time was divided between the one-hour Jack Carter Show, which had been moved from Chicago to NBC headquarters in New York, and the one-and-a-half-hour Your Show of Shows, with its broadcast following Carter’s in the same studio. Carter continued to lose ground—his series was canceled after that second season—while the first thirty-nine-week season of Your Show of Shows was lionized as the best and most sophisticated on television, thanks to the “remarkably gifted” Caesar, as Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times. “There can no longer be any doubt that Sid,” he proclaimed, “is now a star.”

  The “sock mature” entertainment, in Variety’s words, continued to revolve around Caesar and his genius: his engaging pantomimes, dialect takeoffs and double-talk, his recurring characters. But Coca was a vital adjunct as his pixyish leading lady; she had solo flights that were just as mesmerizing, and together they hit “expert comedic stride,” said Variety. Their regular sketches together as the squabbling Hickenloopers would fast become a beloved fixture of the show; they were a strong suit of Tolkin and Kallen’s, who drew on vignettes from their own (separate) marriages. The variegated format of the show stayed basically the same, although Caesar and Liebman persistently tinkered with the mix and the regular performers, partly because of incessant budget issues.

  The longhair singers Robert Merrill and Marguerite Piazza were among the people in the original ensemble who returned for the first full season; so did Bill Hayes, a popular vocalist (it would not be long before he reached number one on the charts with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”), who could also be counted on to act in sketches. The Billy Williams Quartet supplied rhythm and blues and jazz. The Hamilton Trio of Bob Hamilton, Gloria Stevens (Mrs. Hamilton), and Patricia “Pat” Horn performed novelty dance numbers.

  Your Show of Shows still opened with a celebrity guest who joined the sketches, but the extra celebrity or two from the opening half season was dropped because of budget concerns and a growing belief that Caesar himself could carry the program on his lifeguard-broad shoulders. Behind the scenes, the $40,000 weekly costs were the highest in prime time, along with Milton Berle’s number one–rated Texaco Star Theater. (By comparison, Arthur Godfrey’s series, also in the top ten, cost about half as much.) The top dollar paid to guest stars on Your Show of Shows—as much as $5,000 per episode—didn’t help.

  The talent portion of the weekly nut, which included the guest stars along with the salaries of Caesar and Coca—both now under exclusive contract to Liebman—also ranked among TV’s highest: $32,000. Caesar had built-in hikes to boost his weekly paycheck from $7,500 to $10,000 over 1950–1951, while Coca was already demanding similar escalation clauses. Liebman added similar incentives to his producer’s salary with raises he paid to himself out of the overall budget furnished by the network.

  Those economic imperatives impelled Liebman to eliminate celebrity frills and solidify the stock company. Partly to stabilize the rising talent costs, Carl Reiner joined Your Show of Shows midway through the 1950–51 season, soon followed by Howard Morris.

  Serendipitously, the budget issues also helped to solidify Brooks’s position as third man on the totem pole. The pace of production was punishing for the writers; a new script had to be served up every week for thirty-nine weeks, translating into a six-day workweek of furious writing and rewriting, extending through the rehearsals leading up to Saturday night’s live broadcast. Sunday was the only day off, and then Monday started the pressure cooker all over again. Even Sunday was only a half day for Tolkin and Kallen, who always arrived on Monday morning having roughed out the next Hickenloopers vignette. (By midseason, the exhausted Caesar and Coca had begun to take episodes off, a pattern that would grow.) Numerous spot writers cycled in and out, helping to ease the burden on Tolkin and Kallen. But Brooks was always around, pitching jokes and ideas.

  At last Liebman surrendered, awarding Brooks his first credit on the screen early in the 1950–51 season. Brooks proposed a setup for “Nonentities in the News,” with Caesar as a “Stanislavski disciple, Ivano Ivanovich, who expounds upon Method acting,” as William Holtzman wrote, “and, by way of illustration, does an impression of a pinball caroming its way around a pinball machine (with bounds, clangs, and choreography) as well as his rendition of Romeo and Juliet (both parts, in alternately basso and falsetto Russian gibberish).” For the Stanislavski skit and other contributions in 1950–1951, Brooks was listed under “Additional Material,” sharing that peripheral credit with other writers.

  Even so, Brooks finally managed to attract the attention of the William Morris Agency. Harry Kalcheim, a wheeler-dealer of the all-powerful talent agency, had been Liebman’s agent since Tamiment days, and he also represented many of the other Your Show of Shows performers, including Carl Reiner. Kalcheim took Brooks on as a client. With Brooks looking over his shoulder attentively, Kalcheim ironed out the details of his contract when Liebman—like all the principals, exhausted by the rigors of thirty-nine weekly shows—finally agreed to add Brooks to the official staff for the upcoming 1951–52 season.

  Once again, after the last broadcast in June 1951, Caesar and his brother Dave and Brooks headed to Chicago for another two-week stand. Though they bunked at the Palmer House, this time their booking was at the bigger Chicago Theatre in the Loop. Caesar’s revue accommodated many from the cast of Your Show of Shows with most of the comedy and music also recycled from the TV series, the whole extravaganza produced by Liebman. Heartland viewers of the TV series were important to NBC, and Caesar had played Chicago regularly since 1946. That was where the idea of a success beyond New York—success in “John Wayne country”—became rooted in Brooks’s professional psychology.

  The visiting troupe from New York included Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Bill Hayes, and the Billy Williams Quartet, but ofttimes in the wee hours the socializing came down to just the Caesar brothers and Brooks. Sid was always wired after delivering an adrenaline-charged performance, and after a show he liked to retreat to his hotel room, where he customarily downed several whiskeys. Offstage, the dynamic Caesar ceased to exist. (“Without a character to hide behind,” Larry Gelbart said later, “Sid was lost.”)

  One night, they relaxed after the show in Caesar’s suite on the twelfth or eighteenth floor (“as retold by many persons over the years,” James Robert Parish wrote in his biography, “the setting of the incident kept moving up to higher floors”). Caesar drank steadily, saying little, as was his custom. Brother Dave watched warily. Brooks was not a heavy drinker, but wired was also his natural state after dark, and as always he was restless; he yearned to go outside and do something—anything! Brooks paced the room, repeatedly mentioning favorite nightspots. Caesar didn’t have the same roaming instincts. “Let’s go somewhere and do something!” Brooks kept insisting. “Let’s see the nightlife!”

  Finally tired of his jabber, Caesar shoved open a window, grabbed the smaller man, lifted Brooks up by the seat of his pants, and thrust him out into the cool night air, holding him by his feet upside down, dangling from some manner of height. “How far do you want to go? Is that far enough?” he shouted. Dave was on his feet in a flash,
pulling at his brother. “In would be nice,” Brooks is said to have quipped. “In is good.”

  That might be the enduring image of their friendship in the early years, symbolic of the disparity in their relationship: Caesar dangling his personal jester out of a hotel window. Mel Tolkin, reflecting on Brooks’s career in later years, thought the jester’s voluntary clowning in the early 1950s had enabled Caesar’s alcoholism, his womanizing, and other self-destructive habits that worsened over time. Tolkin couldn’t understand why Brooks permitted the “humiliation of being held by his feet out of the eighteenth floor of a hotel, by Sid,” in Tolkin’s words, in order to score brownie points with the star.

  After the dangling incident, Brooks followed Caesar and his wife, Florence, to Grossinger’s for a visit in early July. One of the advantages of traveling with Caesar was that doors opened up to people of importance. At Grossinger’s they mingled with other visiting celebrities, including Jerry Lewis, whom Brooks met for the first time. Brooks worshipped Lewis, who was already a major star on television and in motion pictures with his partner, Dean Martin, and envied his success. A demented comedian with a naive, bratty persona and a stock in trade heavy on rubber faces and weird noises, Lewis was also a surprisingly endearing singer and dancer. Though evoking Harry Ritz, another comedian Brooks loved, it was clear that Lewis had it all over Ritz and would go further.

  While in Chicago, Carl Reiner had invited Brooks to come to Fire Island in August. Reiner and his wife, Estelle, had leased a small cottage in Ocean Beach, Fire Island’s de facto capital. New York artists and entertainers flocked to Ocean Beach in the summer. Besides the Reiners, the Your Show of Shows contingent included Sid Caesar and Florence, who was pregnant, and Mel Tolkin, his wife, Edith, and her parents. The Reiners would be vacating their place before Labor Day weekend. Brooks could move in.

  In the middle of the night Brooks woke up Tolkin and everyone else, pounding on the Tolkin front door in a panic, clutching, to defend himself, a kitchen utensil. He was “incoherent with fear,” Tolkin recalled, and refused to spend the night alone in the Reiners’ vacation cottage. He insisted that only Caesar could protect him and pleaded for Florence to sleep out on the enclosed porch while he took over the couple’s bedroom with Caesar.

  It took some time to calm him down. Displacing Florence was out of the question, Big Mel told Little Mel, finally convincing him to take the couch on the Tolkin porch, where Brooks fell asleep clutching his culinary weapon. “I’ve always thought of Mel’s visit as a search for security, for a safe haven,” Tolkin recalled, “a fear of abandonment.”

  All his friends knew that behind Brooks’s bravado—his genuine comedic courage—was profound insecurity. Behind his facade as a perpetual amusant were depths of self-loathing and a fury at the world. Friends believed that his negativity often got in the way of his positivity, his obnoxiousness in the way of his likability. Fears and neuroses limited Brooks’s potential; they needed to be tempered, brought under control.

  Big Mel, his friend and father figure, took him aside. Brooks was a staff writer now; his new position had enabled him to move into his first apartment of his own, a fourth-floor walk-up on West 68th off Central Park. Maybe, considering all the problems he was having, Tolkin said, he ought to see a psychologist. He could afford that now, too.

  Most of the Your Show of Shows leads were also seeing therapists, and talk of Freud and Jung was commonplace among them. Tolkin and Carl Reiner shared the same analyst, and Tolkin sent Brooks first to that practitioner, who listened to Brooks recite a slew of hang-ups before shrugging helplessly and referring him to Dr. Clement Staff, a former student of Dr. Theodor Reik, who had been one of Sigmund Freud’s early disciples in Vienna. Dr. Staff was the editor of Psychoanalysis, the quarterly of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, founded by Reik, and Dr. Staff still communed with Reik in New York. Dr. Staff saw patients in his office on East 94th Street.

  The second full season of Your Show of Shows in 1951–1952 was the first with the linked-arms quartet that most people associate with the series: Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris.* Caesar and Coca fired on all cylinders, Reiner came into his own as a world-class straight man, and Morris proved a wondrous fourth wheel.

  Bill Hayes, Jack Russell, and Judy Johnson completed the shifting troupe of performers, and the opera star Marguerite Piazza appeared intermittently, as she did throughout the series’ five-year run. Bambi Lynn and Rod Alexander upheld the Marge and Gower Champion tradition of a cultivated dance duo, and another new team, Mata (Meta Krahn) and (Otto Ulbricht) Hari, offered their singular mix of mime and choreography. The Hamilton Trio continued on the show with terpsichorean novelties and vignettes.

  It was a banner year: millions and millions of people tuned in, and Your Show of Shows made Nielsen’s top ten (number ten) for the first time in October. (It would close the year at number eight.) Television’s Emmy Awards were only four years old, but at the January 1952 ceremony Your Show of Shows was named Best Variety Show, Caesar won Best Actor, and Coca won Best Actress. (All three had been nominated the previous year and lost.)

  The 1951–52 season was also a landmark for “Melvin Brooks,” his name scrolling thusly every week on the screen, third among the regular writing credits after Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen. “I wanted credit,” Brooks told Albert Goldman in 1968, linking his salary and writer’s credit to his identity crisis. “I wanted money. I wanted to be a man.” Getting credit was “part of the whole business of affirming yourself,” he told Newsweek in 1975.

  Tolkin and Kallen were making $300 weekly by now, and Brooks earned only half as much: $150, later bumped up to $200. But he was no longer a gagman—he was a writer! He began introducing himself, in his first salaried season on the staff, as “Sid Caesar’s writer,” sometimes even (jokingly planting the idea), a “genius writer.”

  But was he really a writer? Did he deserve his big salary?—more dough than even his beloved brother Irving was earning, just for being a “talking writer”? Brooks was defensive about that disparity between himself and “writing writers” at the outset of his career. “I wished they’d changed my billing on the show, so that it said ‘Funny Talking by Mel Brooks,’” he told Kenneth Tynan years later. “Have they found out yet?” his mother, Kitty, liked to tease him about his new status as a professional wordsmith.

  Many of Brooks’s early sessions with Dr. Clement Staff revolved around the dubious nature of his writing credit. Everyone working on Your Show of Shows knew about Brooks’s frequent appointments with Dr. Staff: “four days a week,” sometimes. “Instead of letting us do our work he would tell us everything that had happened to him during his session,” recalled series composer Earl Wild, “from the beginning.”

  His many appointments with Dr. Staff gave Brooks another excuse for turning up late to work. When he wasn’t arriving late and talking about his therapy, he was a notorious procrastinator—hardly an unusual trait among writers. “He was constantly on the phone, even during our meetings,” recalled Wild, often “placing a trade with his stockbroker.”

  Often Brooks wouldn’t arrive at NBC until lunchtime, thereby avoiding the morning pool for bagels and cream cheese and positioning himself to grab the leftovers for free. Brooks was sensitive about this chronic lateness in later years, once sitting on a panel with other Sid Caesar writers and hearing them good-naturedly complain about his habits. “I’d show up by 10:45!” he’d protest to general groans from the others on the panel. No way: Brooks arrived persistently late, especially Mondays, after the weekends, when the writers and stars were laying down important foundations for the show to come.

  Everyone was irked by his lateness, but no one, not even Caesar or Liebman, seemed capable of doing very much about it. Brooks was evasive, unapologetic, belligerent. Neil Simon, soon to join the writing staff, insisted in a later interview that four hours of Mel Brooks was equal to eight hours of most other people. “Mel coming in at one wa
s a better commodity to have than a bum who came in early,” Carl Reiner echoed. Still, “I always resented the fact that he would come in at noon, or past noon,” said Lucille Kallen, “when we’d been there since nine o’clock in the morning.”

  They would draw straws to phone him, knowing they were stirring a hornet’s nest.

  “Mel!” the furious Caesar ordered Tolkin one day. “Call Mel!”

  Lunchtime was past. The group was struggling with a sketch. Caesar kept pointing to his watch, waiting for Brooks. Finally Tolkin dialed Brooks at home, wondering desperately how he could convey Caesar’s mounting exasperation without triggering one of Brooks’s “towering” rages. His screaming was as feared as his sarcasm (“He used to bare his teeth like a rodent if you crossed him,” Tolkin recalled). Brooks was proud of that terrifying weapon in his arsenal and later would sprinkle jokes about shouting through most of his films, even, with sight gags, in the soundless Silent Movie.

  When Brooks eventually picked up the phone, Tolkin reluctantly mumbled something like “It’s kind of late, Mel . . . Sid’s kind of mad . . . how about . . . ?”

  “You cocksucker!” Brooks screamed back so loud everyone could hear him in the meeting room. “Just because you come earlier doesn’t make you a general!”

  Tolkin was not alone in attributing Brooks’s persistent lateness, much less his latent hostility and crudeness, to his fears that the newborn writer could not “rise to the standard he had set himself: to come in with a laugh-getter at entrance, be hilarious through the day, and exit with a laugh.” His spontaneity was always partly a charade, Tolkin and others believed. Brooks pondered and practiced many of his bits at home.

  Often enough, when Brooks finally did show up, he’d make funny, spectacular entrances designed to distract people from how late he was arriving. Once, without so much as a hello, Brooks dashed into the writers’ room, froze in midstride, and then went into the studied pose of a suffering poet. “I have this great idea for a limerick,” he announced grandly. “Beautiful. An inspiration. But I’m having trouble with a rhyme . . .”