Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  A self-confessed neatnik, Baum felt overwhelmed and confused. She knew Brooks’s place well, but the fourth-floor walk-up was now going to be her home, too. The first thing she wanted to do was clean. But Brooks wouldn’t let her. He even seemed reluctant to divide his tiny closet and give her space in his small chest of drawers for her personal items.

  Before that moment, whenever the two had been together, most of the time it had been at night, usually out among a bunch of friends. Brooks still had a phobia about dining alone with Baum, at home or in restaurants. Now they were stuck with each other—alone.

  Baum always felt that Brooks had a kind of Jekyll-Hyde personality. In public, he could be counted on to function as a one-man roller coaster: “a happening,” as one friend described him. In public, he was constantly, compulsively entertaining. He had no “off” button. In private, though, he could turn glum, or worse, sullen, with no “on” button.

  Jokes were his way of warding off emotional intimacy, she believed. And she loved the jokester who sometimes went too far, but she treasured more the Jekyll side of him. The Jekyll-Brooks began to vanish almost from the moment the two crossed the threshold that day. The ebullient humor, the tender affection, the thoughtfulness evaporated.

  Just a few days more was all it took for them to start bickering and for the miserable Baum to pack up and move out, back in with her parents. Brooks phoned her parents, demanding “Send back my wife!” Tearfully, she returned, and they made up.

  Then the couple went out with friends, and Brooks performed his already familiar shtick of putting a napkin over his arm and roaming tables, pretending to be an obsequious French waiter. Everyone laughed, including Baum. Baum hoped that all marriages had rough starts and her husband would return to being thoughtful and caring.

  Along with hiring several new writers, producer Max Liebman had refreshed the format of Your Show of Shows for what was fated to be its last season, adding a surfeit of music and dance numbers to alleviate the burden on Sid Caesar and shift the spotlight to Imogene Coca.

  Accordingly, the September premiere featured guest stars Nat “King” Cole; Lily Pons, who sang opera and a duet with Coca; the prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova, making her television debut, who danced to a tango; and a lavish musical finale entitled “Love Never Went to College,” with the nightclub singer Robert Monet. Florence Baum danced with the Hamilton Trio in the premiere and in many other episodes in the 1953–54 season.

  Although he was still very much the star of the series, Caesar’s comedy was rationed. Along with his “Dentist’s Apprentice” pantomime and a Hickenloopers outdoor barbecue with Coca, the main sketch of the season premiere was the Caesar-Coca takeoff of the famous love-on-the-beach scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning Best Picture that was fresh in Brooks’s mind after his stint in Hollywood. Caesar and Coca’s romancing on the beach as waves surged over them is one of the show’s famous sketches to this day.

  Critics, watching the premiere, tolled the series’ end, however. “Curiously unsatisfying,” said the New York Journal-American. “Considerably uneven,” agreed the Washington Post. No “real pep or imaginative verve,” Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times, partly blaming “the horrendous number of commercials” needed to support costs.

  It hardly helped that once every fourth Saturday night, all season long, Caesar and Coca took desperately needed time off while another NBC show, All-Star Revue, filled the time slot. Your Show of Shows’ cancellation was officially announced in February, and the 160-episode run of the acclaimed series ended on June 5, 1954, with a huge after-party, as it had most Saturday nights during the four and a half years, this last time at the Rainbow Room. Amid muttering about the unfairness of critics, the party celebrated the remarkable achievement. But it was also a funeral for the momentous time past. “There has never been a program before or since the natal day of February 25, 1950,” Variety eulogized Your Show of Shows in the last week it was broadcast, “that embodied so many show business elements with such skill, imagination and truly big league touch.”

  NBC was anxious to try again with Caesar, though, and the network threw so much money at the star, giving him a ten-year deal with extraordinary financial guarantees and creative freedoms, that he didn’t give any thought to Brooks’s admonitions about the future lying in Hollywood. The network doled out several new contracts that divided Your Show of Shows, like Gaul, into three parts: Caesar, Coca, and Liebman.

  Caesar got professionally divorced from Liebman, whom he no longer needed, and he was announced as the star and producer of Caesar’s Hour, planned for the fall. NBC was amenable to Carl Reiner and Howard Morris rejoining Caesar with a new actress replacing Coca in the linked-arms quartet. Liebman accepted a long-term contract for producing network telefilms and “spectaculars” (soon to be renamed “specials”). Cleaved from Caesar, Coca was awarded with her own eponymous half-hour series also for 1955–1956.

  The writers, too, had to be apportioned. One can imagine Caesar and Coca dividing the staff up as though they were choosing players for a neighborhood baseball game, a scenario that had rarely benefited Melvin Kaminsky in the past. Caesar got first pick, and the star took Mel Tolkin, the man he trusted above all for his mingling of comedy and wisdom. Big Mel would continue as the senior writer of Caesar’s Hour.

  Coca took Lucille Kallen, the only woman in the writers’ room and the writer best attuned to Coca’s talent. Caesar then picked Tony Webster, maybe because Brooks had preemptively chosen to strike out on his own and prove he was no longer Caesar’s sidekick. Brooks had received overtures from comedian Red Buttons, who needed a head writer for his television variety show. Also, Brooks had plans to collaborate again with Ronny Graham, this time on a full-blown Broadway musical. Coca and Kallen, who both valued Brooks, said he could join The Imogene Coca Show if and when he became available.

  In time Brooks would become the Matisse in a museum, but he’d keep Your Show of Shows alive in his films. The silent-picture spoofs, the genre parodies, the visits to random historical epochs—all those were staples of Sid Caesar’s series. Even off-camera stuff from the Caesar years crept into Mel Brooks comedies, such as the scene in Blazing Saddles inspired by a fabled incident, perhaps apocryphal, that had supposedly occurred when Caesar decked a rented horse in Central Park after the animal had the gall to throw his wife, Florence, to the ground. Many of the “wonderful bits” rejected by TV censors, which “were considered too vulgar or too insulting to certain groups at the time,” said composer Earl Wild, “Mel later recycled. In all of Mel Brooks’ cinematic efforts,” he wrote admiringly in his memoir, “it’s easy to recognize the crumbs from Caesar’s table.”

  Summer came and with it the annual retreat to Fire Island, the thirty-two-mile-long spit of beach and dunes lying off Long Island’s south shore about forty-five miles from Manhattan. Brooks leased a bungalow near the Reiners in Ocean Beach. Everyone was sanguine. Perhaps Your Show of Shows had to die, but they all believed in a television afterlife.

  The previous summer, the weekend population of Fire Island had ballooned to a record eight thousand people. Vacationing yachtsmen and fishermen, sun worshippers, and partyers thronged the main walk of Ocean Beach, especially on Saturday nights.

  This was Florence Baum’s coming out as Mrs. Brooks, her first summer on Fire Island. People stopped by and knocked on their door simply to say hello and meet her. “I just wanted to see what the person looked like who married Mel!” Brooks took weekday trips into the city for meetings on his projects. The only way onto or off of the island was by ferry; the last one left nightly for mainland Bayshore at 7:15 p.m., and the train filled up with Fire Islanders coming and going, including Nora Kaye, a pretty garment district showroom model.* Brooks chatted with Kaye and told her to stop by his Ocean Beach cottage and meet his wife with the message “Hi! Mel said we should be friends!”

  The writers and artists who mingled in Oc
ean Beach that summer included the radio and television announcer Ken Roberts, who introduced NBC soap operas; budding actors Robert Loggia and James Coburn; acting teacher Stella Adler; and authors Herman Wouk and James Jones. (The last took perverse pleasure in his friendship with people connected with Your Show of Shows, which had satirized the film of his book From Here to Eternity, offending Columbia executives to the extent that the studio even filed a short-lived lawsuit against NBC.) The future novelist Herman Raucher, who would later write the best-selling Summer of ’42, was also part of the Ocean Beach scene.

  The Carl Reiners, the Mel Tolkins, and the Norman Lears were among the many vacationers who were associated with either Sid Caesar (who continued to spend part of every summer with his family on Fire Island), The Colgate Comedy Hour, or both.

  The partying of the television crowd was pretty tame compared to the revels taking place at many island bars and clubs. Apart from Caesar, the Your Show of Shows folks were not heavy drinkers. Modest drinking was part of Brooks’s paradox—self-control despite being a wild man. He’d take one Scotch, often with a dash of milk and ice, as he rushed out the door to a dinner or gathering. And no marijuana, then or ever.

  Brooks loved the solitary walks he took on Fire Island beaches, and he enjoyed surf casting alone for hours, time that afforded him calm and inspiration. He and other Your Show of Shows friends whiled away the nighttime hours playing parlor games that involved words, songs, or playacting. He and Carl Reiner brought out the 2000 Year Old Man, polishing the repartee and introducing new bits, and many people first saw the act on Fire Island.

  Fire Island was a status marker, and Brooks was never happier or more at ease than in the summers when he was among like-minded show business sophisticates. And in general, things always went better in his marriage when other people were around.

  Though he bragged about his new wife, telling people how beautiful and smart Florence was, he also suffered fits of jealousy. One night Baum went to the island’s small movie theater with her new girlfriend Nora Kaye, who met up with a man who was accompanied by another friend they all knew, Herman Raucher. Raucher sat next to Baum and stole his arm around her at the end of the movie. When the lights went up, Brooks was in the back row, staring stonily. He had followed them. He exchanged sharp words with Raucher. Baum said it was all a silly misunderstanding, but Brooks fumed.

  Brooks had at least one paying summer job along with his other projects, and some of the train trips into Manhattan were for The Colgate Summer Comedy Hour. Collaborating with Ronny Graham, he contributed to sketches for an episode featuring New York Giants star Willie Mays singing his novelty “Say Hey!” Still an unabashed baseball fan, Brooks befriended the outfielder, who returned the favor with guest tickets for a Yankees game played against their bitter rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers—Brooks’s team—in August.

  Together Brooks and Graham were also involved in a planned musical called “Samson and Lila Dee,” which was intended as an “all-black retelling of the biblical Samson and Delilah story,” according to Howard Pollack, the biographer of lyricist John Latouche. Latouche, a celebrated songwriter who had written lyrics to Vernon Duke’s music for the 1940 film Cabin in the Sky, had conceived the story, but despite a series of collaborators—most recently Edward Chodorov—he had failed to produce a viable book.

  Partly because Latouche had trouble landing an important black star, “Samson and Lila Dee” morphed into Delilah: The Vamp, a vehicle for Carol Channing, instead. No longer was there any black-Bible angle. Channing would play “a vamp enamored of a cinematic cowboy” in the pre–World War I era of East Coast silent-picture making, a spoof category already on Brooks’s vitae from Your Show of Shows. There was talk of Graham, besides sharing book duties with Brooks, playing a lead role opposite Channing.

  Brooks and Graham found it difficult to get their ideas past Latouche, however. Brooks tried a power play with Latouche and the nervous producers, telling them he and Graham might work better alone. Brooks “nailed me down over the phone,” Latouche wrote in his journal, “finally getting rather triumphant as he sensed my confusion, and attempting to force a situation that would rule me out utterly.” The producers proved “unexpectedly sympathetic” to Latouche, however, according to his biographer, and Brooks and Graham were dismissed. (Later in 1955, retitled The Vamp, the musical had a brief Broadway run, with Latouche solely credited for the story, book, and lyrics.)

  The future still looked so good, however, that Carl Reiner and Howard Morris convinced Brooks to take a larger apartment for himself and his wife in the fall. They moved into a one-bedroom Strauss town house on West 70th Street. Their only roommate: an orange tomcat they named Chichikov in honor of the main character in Dead Souls. Brooks liked dogs but loved cats and did cat impressions at the drop of a hat.

  One of the positive auguries was Red Buttons, whose revamped television variety show was now being produced by Brooks’s old friend Don Appell. The Red Buttons Show had a phenomenal early success, starting out on CBS in 1951 and peaking at number eleven in the Nielsen ratings; the next year, however, the show began to sag in audience size, and after two seasons it had moved to NBC. Brooks met with Buttons, a New York comic with stubby red hair and freckles, and Buttons offered him upgrades and provisos in a contract that would, for the first time, let Brooks direct episodes he wrote. The William Morris Agency outdid itself on the details.

  Puckish and (albeit a matter of taste) mirthful as he was on-screen, it was no secret in the television industry that off camera Buttons was an unpleasant egomaniac who blamed writers for show problems and went through writers like breath mints. At one time or another he employed many Caesar writers, including the Simon brothers—Danny and Neil—Joseph Stein, and Larry Gelbart, who had just joined the staff of the new Sid Caesar series.

  Could Buttons be tougher to work for than Caesar at his worst? The answer: yes. Brooks later claimed he had written the premiere of Buttons’s series that fall and was scheduled to direct the second episode before he quit in the first week of October. (For the record, Variety credited only Danny Simon and Milt Rosen with the premiere.)

  Privately this is the tale Brooks told: He arrived for a high-level meeting at NBC with Buttons presiding. He listened with growing dismay as the freckle-faced comic spoke long and obstreperously about the quality he demanded from his writers. “None of that Caesar-Coca stuff,” Buttons, who had a chip on his shoulder about Your Show of Shows, proclaimed, staring accusingly at Brooks. “None of that garbage. I want good writing.” Buttons also reminded Brooks that he always sang his signature pop hit, “The Ho Ho Song,” in each and every program. Besides grimacing when Buttons attacked Your Show of Shows, Brooks detested “The Ho Ho Song,” and now, he decided, he detested Buttons, too. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, slipped out the door and away from the building, racing home to phone the William Morris Agency and beg out of his contract.

  He still had positive options, and the most expeditious one was The Imogene Coca Show, which had premiered the same week as the retooled Red Buttons series. But Coca’s new show was already looking like a loser. The decision had been made to present Coca in a situation comedy variant, playing a version of herself, an actress with sundry crises, interspersed with singing and dancing. The first reviews had been harsh (“A hapless occasion,” Variety said), and director Marc Daniels, who had championed the original premise, was let go. The endless adjustments began, along with a parade of new producer-directors.

  Lucille Kallen, famous for her ability to “handle” Brooks with tact and composure, needed him badly, even if inwardly Brooks felt growingly panicked at having chosen Coca over Caesar’s Hour—which was doing better with both audiences and reviewers.

  Ernest Kinoy and Max Wilk were the other Coca staff writers; they and Kallen showed up for work at 9:00 a.m. at the William Morris offices, then located in the Mutual of New York Building in midtown Manhattan, and sweated over the scripts. Brooks, same as ever, would
turn up around lunchtime, proclaiming “I feel terrible. Send out for chicken soup!” His habit of lateness had been grandfathered in on Your Show of Shows, and there he had had a safety net of supporters including Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—absent here.

  The latecomer would read the progress and begin shouting “That’s not funny! You don’t know what’s funny! I know funny!” The Wrecker, Wilk dubbed him. “He just takes everything and says, ‘Forget that! We’ll do this instead.’ And he walks up and down screaming and yelling about what he is gonna do . . . it never happens very much.”

  The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Brooks already had a pattern of filling his plate with so many extracurricular jobs and prospects that it was hard to know how he divided his time or which had priority. Probably it was hard for Brooks himself to know.

  With his days theoretically devoted to Coca’s series, he filled his nights, from late 1954 into early 1955, with preparations for another, less ambitious (off-Broadway) revue, again in collaboration with Ronny Graham, called Once Over Lightly. This time, suggesting that Brooks had gained the upper hand in their partnership, the credits would read, “Sketches mostly by MELVIN BROOKS . . .” (his name in caps), trailed by another writer’s name, Ira Wallach, then “Ronny Graham” in third position, upper- and lowercase. New Faces of 1952 had had the order reversed: “Sketches mostly by Ronny Graham and Melvin Brooks.”

  Once Over Lightly might have been overlooked as the usual mélange of song, dances, and skits except for the involvement of actors Jack Gilford and Zero Mostel and a thespian turned director, Stanley Prager. Brooks had mingled with the three and a businessman friend of theirs named Irving “Speed” Vogel at Greenwich Village parties.

  Mostel and Prager were left-wing refugees from Hollywood, looking warily over their shoulders after being cited in Red Channels and other blacklisting guides drawn up by anti-Communist zealots who targeted subversives in the film industry. Mostel got his official blacklisting later in 1955 after he was summoned before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. Although Gilford was not as politically engaged as his wife, actress Madeline Lee Gilford (who was also blacklisted ultimately), he traveled in the same circles.