Brooks liked to say that if he had been born ten years earlier he might have become a radical; then he, too, would have been vulnerable when HUAC swooped down first on Hollywood in 1947 and later on the New York stage world. The Your Show of Shows writers, who were mostly Jewish, like the majority of the blacklist victims, were keenly aware of the anti-Red witch hunts. In the spring of the final season Caesar’s writers compulsively watched the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Because of their heightened paranoia, the TV material they wrote was rarely topical and almost never infused with political messages. “We were political people, but we rarely did anything political,” Larry Gelbart said later. Brooks’s comedy, throughout his career, would likewise play down topicality and politics.
Despite his dominant credit, Once Over Lightly was one revue for which Brooks enlisted an uncredited ghostwriter. He required help on a sketch that overlapped the similar-sounding short story about cats he had started years earlier in Red Bank, New Jersey. That became a pattern in his career; certain signature ideas of his could be traced back over years of germination and evolution, taking an almost inordinate time to reach fruition. The ones that took the longest, arguably, ultimately worked out best.
Brooks’s pièce de résistance for Once Over Lightly, in the words of the ballerina Sono Osato, who was also in the revue, was a particularly “zany but touching vignette” featuring “an alley cat whose mother had just been run over by a Chock Full o’Nuts truck and was now hopelessly enamored of an obstreperous stray dog.” Osato impersonated the cat; Gilford was the gentle squirrel philosophizing about starvation in Central Park; and Mostel, who stomped around rehearsals like “a petulant child in a miniature operetta about the making of Kreplach,” was the howling, growling, barking, panting, and ogling stray dog.
Although they were comradely at parties, Brooks clashed with the director, Stanley Prager, whom everyone called “Stash” and who was “a gifted comedian in his own right,” in Osato’s words. Watching the cat, dog, and squirrel sketch being rehearsed one day, Brooks jumped up and pronounced it shit, shit, shit! Prager and Brooks went chin to chin heatedly before their expletive-filled argument was defused by general all-around laughter at its absurdity. Another time Brooks intervened, and “Stash” simply threw him out.
Nobody felt very optimistic on opening night, which had been preceded earlier in the day by a long, tension-filled run-through. The only happy note in the run-through had been another one of Brooks’s interruptions—this one calculated to break the prevailing mood of gloom. He had abruptly taken center stage and delivered “an extemporaneous one-man operetta version of Anna Karenina, complete with howling wolves chasing Anna in her troika across the frozen steppes of Russia,” in Osato’s words, reducing the cast and crew to hysterical guffaws. Someone suggested that Brooks go on instead of the company, performing his one-man Tolstoy, and all of a sudden people’s spirits lifted.
When Once Over Lightly opened in late February at the Barbizon-Plaza Theatre, however, the revue went over like a lead sinker with critics. Its run was brief. Then it was back to the limping Coca series, Brooks’s main job, which had become a writer’s nightmare.
With his erratic hours and insulting manner, Brooks quickly alienated Ernest Kinoy and Max Wilk, and finally he also ran afoul of Lucille Kallen, once his champion, by treating her as a mere “typist” in their increasingly strained arguments over what The Imogene Coca Show scripts lacked in the way of comedy. “That’s very funny, Mel, but we can’t use it,” she told him one day. “Don’t you tell me what’s funny,” he retorted. “You just type!”
First Wilk and Kinoy were let go; then Kallen left, asking to have her contract settled. Brooks stayed. The producers flew in a couple of “name” writers from Hollywood, trying to fix the series, then flew them back when they failed. To be fair, Coca was clueless without Sid Caesar, and she rejected scripts at the eleventh hour without providing constructive feedback. During that difficult season she was also coping with her husband’s serious illness, ending in his death, and the passing of her mother. The frazzled actress began to skip episodes of the half-hour program; NBC ran “kinescopes,” 16-millimeter prints made from the broadcasts and used for different time slots and reruns.
With Kallen gone, Brooks briefly became the head writer. He had a good contract: $1,750 per episode, second only to Kallen’s. Producer Don Appell brought in Tony Webster to help with the scripts. But the series kept vacillating between situation comedy and revue. The revolving door of writers had neither the power nor the imagination to reinvent it.
Brooks couldn’t save the show, not with his lateness and absences and impracticable suggestions, often “substituting energy and noise for any ideas,” in the words of another writer in the rotation. He and Webster were both closed out in late March along with Appell. Obviously, as even his William Morris representative conceded, Brooks was ill suited to be head writer of the series. He was a decided “eccentric,” according to his agent, Lester Colodny, “and, I’m guessing, ADD to the nth degree in a world that didn’t even know what attention deficit disorder meant.”
Brooks had come home every day from the Coca series in a darker mood. The show was a stinker, and his contribution had been negative. His misery mounting, he thought wistfully of Sid Caesar. The precise format of Caesar’s Hour had been a trade secret until its premiere that September, but the new program had come roaring out of the gate with splendid reviews and robust ratings. The reduced one-hour structure made the show easier on the star and writers; variety numbers were deemphasized in favor of comedy and sketches. “No small credit,” Variety wrote, “belongs to the quartet of writers,” naming Mel Tolkin, Tony Webster, and Joe Stein, all Caesar veterans, along with Aaron Ruben, “fugitive from the Milton Berle show . . . anything but a slouch.”
“Mel,” Brooks’s wife urged him, “call Sid. He loves you. He’ll take you back.”
“No,” he replied dismally, “I can’t. I’m saving face.”
“Just dial the number.”
“He’ll turn me down.”
“He won’t turn you down.”
Brooks finally phoned, telling Caesar “I want to come back.” Caesar said, “Okay, fine.” Seven words—five from Brooks, two from Caesar—and he was set for the fall.
Florence Brooks danced intermittently on both The Imogene Coca Show and Caesar’s Hour. Because her husband made at least $1,750 weekly, and she was making about $300, he paid the rent, and she covered household expenses, laundry, and all else. He was secretive about money. The honeymoon he had promised her never transpired.
Despite the rocky year he had undergone with Red Buttons, Once Over Lightly, and Imogene Coca, Brooks’s income continued to rise. He had Caesar’s Hour banked for the fall and as usual many other irons in the fire. Once again, over the summer of 1955, he could afford a bungalow in Ocean Beach, and the couple sunbathed, read books, and hobnobbed with Fire Island friends, some of them already prominent in show business circles, others destined for fame. Again the 2000 Year Old Man was a hit at parties among the NBC and Sid Caesar circle. With Carl Reiner softening Brooks’s edges, the act was never in bad taste. Everybody loved it, and word began to spread.
At the end of the summer, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks moved their household once again, this time to a spacious, fashionable Upper East Side apartment on Fifth Avenue.
Chapter 5
1955
Club Caesar
A half hour shorter than Your Show of Shows, Caesar’s Hour used three times as many staff writers. A small army contributed to the second-season premiere in the fall of 1955. Credited for the script were Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Melvin Brooks, Neil (“Doc,” the credits say in parenthesis) Simon, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart, and Gary Belkin, in that order. Danny Simon pitched in frequently during the season, as did actress-writer Selma Diamond, who had contributed occasionally to Your Show of Shows; informally she replaced Lucille Kallen as the only distaff writer. (Diamond, not Kallen, inspired the Sally R
ogers character played by Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)
Tony Webster had been sent packing (and over to the Red Buttons Show) midway through the first season after he had returned from a multiple-martini lunch one day and insulted Sid Caesar. Numerous other writers checked in for individual episodes. At one point Variety ran an eye-catching publicity item noting that “nine cleffers” had composed a single song for the show: in order were credited Caesar, Bernard Green (musical director), Tolkin, Gelbart, Brooks, Keller, Neil Simon, Stewart, and Belkin.
Taking the place of Imogene Coca was Nanette Fabray as the leading lady of Caesar’s Hour. Carl Reiner and Howard Morris were still the second and third bananas, celebrities still made guest appearances, and the singers, musicians, and dancers rotated. The new series borrowed heavily from what had worked best on Your Show of Shows. “The Hickenloopers,” for example, became the kindred “The Commuters” with Caesar and Fabray. The “hour” may have been shorter, but the comedy sketches tended to run longer and be more elaborate: for example, “Aggravation Boulevard,” which was among the most fondly remembered of the silent era send-ups, featuring Caesar as a John Gilbert type whose high-pitched voice dooms his transition to talkies. Without Max Liebman pushing highbrow musical interludes, the show’s song and dance numbers also trended toward humor, such as the memorable spoof with Caesar, Reiner, and Morris as The Three Haircuts, teen-idol crooners rocking and bopping to “You Are So Rare to Me.”
Without Liebman or Coca, the show was truly Caesar’s. The star was remarkably canny about what worked for him and, above all, canny about the writers he needed to make the show hum, hiring the best available and paying them as well as possible, goading them in story conferences (“Show me the brilliance!” he’d proclaim upon arrival in the morning), sprinkling their names into interviews, and touting them in trade advertisements. (That tradition began with Your Show of Shows: “You mean the show is not AD LIB? No, it’s written by—MEL TOLKIN, LUCILLE KALLEN, MEL BROOKS.”)
The Caesar’s Hour writers’ room, bigger and with more writers than in the past, was rented space in the Milgram Building on West 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. Even more than before, it was a battlefield of competitors vying for Caesar’s attention and approval. They told proud war stories afterward. “We became our own fan club,” Neil Simon once said.
Arriving late to the series, after its first season, nonetheless Brooks was a senior writer, slightly older than some of them but senior also from having been present, more or less, at the creation of Your Show of Shows. Although two years younger than the red-haired Michael Stewart, Brooks called Stewart “the Kid” or “the typist,” because Brooks had seniority with Caesar. (Stewart, in his early thirties, was at the typewriter partly because he had been to college and been awarded an MFA by the Yale School of Drama. He could spell, punctuate, and type.) But when Brooks referred to Stewart as “the typist”at the Writers Guild reunion of Caesar writers in 1996, there was murmuring from the panel and Carl Reiner gently reminded Brooks that no, not in the first year of the series—then the typist had been Aaron Ruben. The writers from the first season of the series were sensitive to being overlooked, as they—not Brooks—had laid the foundations of Caesar’s Hour.
They may have been the most illustrious writers ever assembled in one place since Shakespeare wrote alone, as someone wisecracked at the 1996 reunion. (Albeit that the shifting aggregation was not always actually in the same room at the same time.) Admittedly the Caesar’s Hour writers’ room was even more of a shout fest, although not everybody was a shouter. Mel Tolkin rarely shouted. Stewart was inclined toward quiet thoughtfulness. Larry Gelbart, originally from Chicago, raised in Los Angeles, was the gentleman of the lot, arguably the wittiest and least contentious. Neil Simon was quiet as a mouse and never in the least aggressive, as Brooks said in one interview. “[Simon] would have to tell Carl Reiner, who was aggressive, what his ideas were.”
They went to work as gladiators, however, their words weapons as they pitched shtick, jokes, characters, and sketches. They fought for the privilege of one-upping one another and pleasing Caesar. They threw pencils at the walls and at one another. “We nearly got to punching each other,” Brooks remembered. Caesar decided who the losers were in every confrontation, and each of the writers—the best of the best—was bloodied in turn.
One often had to shout just to get Caesar’s attention, and Big Mel had long before noted Little Mel’s penchant for shouting loudest or last, jumping up, and taking the floor, “adding jokes to our pages,” in Tolkin’s words. “He’d start ad-libbing, as if he were searching for some idea, some humorous angle. Then he’d warm up and soon be on a roll.” “Mel’s performance,” Tolkin noted, was always shrewdly directed at Sid, the Boss.
Tolkin recalled the time the group had labored to solve the problem of how to finish a sketch that took place in an Irish saloon. It involved a fey leprechaun, played by Howard Morris, who is confronted by a skeptic: “If you have magical powers, prove it. Make it rain.” Leprechaun: “It will rain!” Skeptic: “In the middle of July from a cloudless sky?”
What should the punch line be? The writers were stumped. One of them spoke mildly from his seated position behind Brooks, who was up and pacing. “It will rain—inside the saloon.” Brooks, wheeling around for attention, shouted, “It will RAIN INSIDE the saloon!” Brooks, not the other writer, got “the approval, the laugh, the love,” Tolkin recalled.
That practice of Brooks stealing from other writers never ceased to bother Tolkin, and it took him decades to forgive it. Brooks realized that, and one time after a similar “performance” he sat quietly beside Tolkin, throwing his arm around Big Mel. “I’m a counter-puncher,” he confessed. “I come in after you and others have done your work.”
Carl Reiner, by now in the script room as a writer as well as a performer—often credited separately for both—became Brooks’s most sympathetic explainer. “[Brooks] wasn’t writing,” Reiner told an interviewer decades later. “He was talking words. He was writing with his mouth. He still writes better with his mouth than anybody I know. What is writing? Writing is thinking, talking. Then writing it down is something else.”
In large part thanks to the internecine rivalry, Caesar’s Hour was initially as magnificent a series as Your Show of Shows. With their ever-growing numbers, it was no less difficult to unravel which writer had written what remembered highlight. Someone would suggest a scene, Caesar would nod with approval, and Michael Stewart would begin to type. Then there would be step-by-step enrichment: emendations and embroidery, twists and turns, with Caesar adding his final touches and editing, often in front of the television camera.
To a person the writers of Caesar’s Hour, Emmy nominated as a group for Best Comedy Writing for every season in which the show was broadcast, forged distinguished careers. Neil Simon became America’s most recognized Broadway playwright. Larry Gelbart triumphed with M*A*S*H on television and twice was Oscar nominated for his screenplays. Michael Stewart, “the typist,” wrote the librettos for the stage musicals Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly! While not quite the same household names, the others were known inside the business as kings of comedy—the creators of many successful sitcoms.
The only way one could belong to that privileged club was to have written for Sid Caesar in the 1950s. Except for Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond, the membership was men only. They belonged to an elite fraternity—Club Caesar. Mel Brooks’s future screen comedies would never evidence a single female name among the writing credits.
Club Caesar worked by day and socialized at night throughout the 1950s, and then the group did much the same for the rest of their lives, often collaborating with one another on other projects, congregating in New York and Hollywood. There was always schadenfreude among the competitors but also permanent bonds of shared affection and respect. They had fought in the same war to make the best possible television show for Sid Caesar. With Caesar as their patriarch, they were more than a club; the
y were a professional family. One couldn’t resign. Outsiders need not apply.
One day Florence Brooks felt stomach pangs during the dance rehearsals for Caesar’s Hour and went to a doctor on her lunch hour, learning that she was pregnant. On February 21, 1956, she gave birth to a girl the couple named Stefanie (“Stefanie with an ‘F,’” Brooks always emphasized). The New York Times published a news item, “Mrs. Melvin Brooks Has Child,” which was another sign of Brooks’s rising recognition.
Now Brooks was a father as well as a husband. Florence had experienced an earlier pregnancy in their relationship, but she had insisted upon an abortion because she had not wanted to box them into a premature marriage. Yet Brooks had wanted children, always.
New fatherhood and returning to the Caesar fold, combined with turning thirty in 1956, led him to end psychoanalysis after six years of appointments with Dr. Clement Staff. In interviews in later years, especially when he was promoting High Anxiety, the comedy in which he played a psychiatrist warding off real and imagined fears, Brooks recalled Dr. Staff as “kind and warm and bright,” a doctor who had done his best to heal him.
For years Brooks was afraid of dying before the age when his father had passed. Ironically, although a genuine hypochondriac, physically he seemed built of India rubber and rarely took sick even for a day. He used his hypochondria to learn all he could about illnesses and diseases from books and medical journals; often he volunteered plausible medical advice to friends. He and his wife kept a floor-to-waist-high medicine chest in their apartment, crammed with prescription bottles. Where Florence’s health was involved, Brooks showed a heartfelt concern not often manifest in their marriage.
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