Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Dr. Staff had diagnosed him as having “anxiety hysteria,” Brooks said, which Merriam-Webster defines as “an anxiety disorder and especially a phobia when the mental aspects of anxiety are emphasized over any accompanying physical symptoms (as heart palpitations and breathlessness)—used especially in Freudian psychoanalytic theory.”

  Very early in the 1950s, he was a “psychological mess,” according to Brooks, and suffered “real physical debilitation. To wit: low blood sugar and under-active thyroid.” Insecure about his status as a well-paid television writer (“Writer! I’m not a writer. Terrible penmanship.”), he ran “miles through city streets,” underwent dizzy spells, was “nauseated for days,” and vomited “between parked Plymouths” on his way to various places.

  “The main thing I remember from [those days],” Brooks told Playboy in 1975, “is bouts of grief for no apparent reason. Deep melancholy, incredible grief where you’d think that somebody very close to me had died. You couldn’t grieve any more than I was grieving.”

  More than once he told interviewers that analysis had saved him from thoughts of suicide.

  In his sessions with Dr. Staff, Brooks could not really build the standard case against Freud’s typical patsy: his mother. Kitty Kaminsky had been the greatest mother possible, the greatest cook and nurturer. She had a tremendous sense of humor. “All I could say was, ‘She was swell.’” Brooks had enjoyed more alone time with Kitty than his brothers had, and his mother “was really responsible for the growth of my imagination.” Nonetheless he felt “multiple guilt on every level,” including guilt that maybe he had “failed my mother” and for collecting a higher weekly salary than his hardworking older brother Irving. He also felt guilty about never having really known his father.

  Dr. Staff helped him link his feelings about his father’s early passing to his apprehensions about fatherhood. His “anxiety hysteria” revolved around “accepting the mantle of being a person, a mature person,” Brooks told one interviewer. “And deep down I felt I would die if I ever did that. Because as long as I was metamorphosing as a green shoot and not a tree there was no chance of dying: I was still growing. The minute I stopped and became an adult, soon I would become a father and I would die. Because my father was dead. Men die. Boys do not. That’s how primitive and deep it was . . .

  “And the other thing was that I didn’t think I was capable of doing the job I was doing, really, and they would find me out.”

  Again and again in interviews Brooks said he had learned from Dr. Staff that his aggressive personality and sometimes crude comedic impulses sprang mainly from defense mechanisms: trying desperately to please his absent father, getting even with people who hadn’t picked him for the neighborhood sports teams in boyhood, bitterness over the girls who had looked past him in his youth, and resentment for having been born short, poor, and Jewish, not resembling—by any stretch of the imagination—FDR or Cary Grant.

  Jewish himself, Dr. Staff discussed the Jewish comedy heritage with Brooks. Freud had written about humor and especially Jewish humor; so had Theodor Reik in a famous paper called “Jewish Wit,” in which the renowned analyst even approved of jokes about “bodily functions,” one of Brooks’s comedy mainstays. As Stefan Kanfer summarized Reik’s beliefs in A Summer World, his book about the Catskills, Jewish jokes served a variety of purposes, including, at their most desperate, “the Jew sharpens, so to speak, the dagger which he takes out of his enemy’s hand, stabs himself, then returns it gallantly to the Anti-Semite with the silent approach, ‘Now see whether you can do it half as well.’”

  According to Reik, Jewish humor could bring “relaxation in the ardor of battle with the seen and with the invisible enemy; to attract as well as to repel him; and last . . . to conceal oneself behind them. Jewish wit hides as much as it discloses. Like the seraph in the Temple of the Lord it covers its face with two of its wings.”

  Dr. Staff could explain why so many of the comedians Brooks loved—the Marx and Ritz brothers, the Three Stooges—were Jewish. He talked with Brooks about Nazism and the role of Jewish comedy in the post-Hitler world. Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour were subliminally Jewish in many ways, but they couldn’t be explicitly Jewish in that era. The 2000 Year Old Man setup had begun to draw on Brooks’s Jewishness, this wellspring of his imagination, in private performances. Dr. Staff, citing Reik, could validate that emerging side of Brooks’s comedy. It was natural, Dr. Staff said, for a Jew to be preoccupied with anti-Semitism, Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust.

  Freud also wrote extensively about the id, the ego, and the superego, and Brooks learned that terminology and used it a decade later to describe the naive Leopold Bloom (the ego) and the Falstaffian Max Bialystock (the id) in The Producers. Comedians, Freud believed, expressed the thoughts society forbade. A benevolent superego created a lighthearted, comforting humor, while the harsher superego created sarcastic humor. The ego and the id might be seen as the Jekyll and Hyde sides of behavior in a person.

  In effect, according to Dr. Staff’s analysis, there were a Nice Mel and a Rude Crude Mel. The Nice Mel loved people and wanted people to love him. The Nice Mel bore deep humanistic feelings and was attuned to literature and the arts. The Rude Crude Mel defended himself psychologically against possible slights and prejudices by uncivil behavior and offensive humor. Though the two Mels coexisted, they also vied for supremacy within him. Neither of the Mels could ever be extinguished, so Brooks’s struggle—for the rest of his life—would be to strike the right balance in his character and his comedy.

  Even though Brooks told Playboy that “most of my symptoms disappeared in the first year, and then we got into much deeper stuff,” that was probably gilding the lily; it served hindsight and publicity. No one detected a dramatic change in his personality or professional comportment when he quit analysis—nor for years to come. Brooks still couldn’t sleep at night and arrived late to work; his anger continued to seethe beneath the surface and revealed itself in bizarre, seemingly hostile, sometimes hilarious outbursts.

  But he never returned to psychoanalysis, nor could he have done so with Dr. Staff, who was struck with a sudden illness and died only two years later, in 1958. Colleagues mourned the forty-seven-year-old analyst as an “ecstatic visionary” in his field.

  Curiously, in all the many interviews he gave that touched on his six years of therapy—exploring the influence of his mother and father, his fears of illness and death, his conflicted identity as a writer, and his role as a Jewish writer of comedy—Brooks never once mentioned having discussed his wife or his marriage with Dr. Staff. About all he ever said on the record about his first marriage were variations on (per Playboy) “we had married too young. I expected I would marry my mother, and she expected she would marry her father.” Or “the word ‘more’ comes into it. I think my first wife needed more. I needed more attention from the world, and less attention from a wife.”

  The only people Mrs. Brooks discussed her marriage with, apart from her own therapist, were close girlfriends. To the men in Club Caesar the Brooks marriage looked—on the surface—to be a perfect one. The writers and their spouses dominated the Brookses’ social circle; there were many informal get-togethers at one another’s houses. The couple also socialized frequently with Ronny Graham and his wife, singer Ellen Hanley, and comedian Alan King, who had grown up in Williamsburg with Brooks. A few times a year, Sid Caesar invited the Brookses to his Fifth Avenue apartment.

  Brooks was careful around other couples to give the best impression of the marriage. Florence was the beautiful young mother, and he was the perpetual funnyman. In fact, Florence had grown increasingly uneasy since the first day of their marriage. Dancing jobs had alleviated her unhappiness, but with new motherhood her misery grew.

  She knew her husband to be a different and less amusing man when their show business friends were not around. He saved his worst tantrums for her friends and relatives, it seemed. Coming home fuming from work, he’d grab her visitors an
d physically throw them out the door. Alone with her, the verbally gifted writer was often taciturn and gloomy, treading heavily around their apartment as though slogging through snowdrifts. He’d punch walls and doors in anger, leaving behind cracks or holes. Novelist James Jones, visiting the couple once in their apartment, wondered aloud at the peculiar blemishes on the walls and remarked at how barren the place appeared of personal items, furniture, and adornments. Their apartment seemed, he said, more like a rented space than a family home. Brooks chuckled, but Florence silently agreed.

  His despondence was another kind of performance, she felt. One time, claiming to be overcome with despair, he vaulted out of their car at Morningside Heights and threatened to jump over a black iron fence into the roaring traffic below. His wife talked him back into the car, but she brooded over the incident with her girlfriends. They agreed with her that Brooks was, in today’s parlance, a drama queen, always saying “Look at me!”

  Florence tried to empathize. Brooks was under constant pressure to prove himself; his wife knew better than anyone else that he really did have trouble “typing,” i.e., writing alone without a collaborator. At times, he complained, Caesar rejected his best stuff. He was earning the only paycheck in the family, and with fatherhood his burden intensified.

  Florence, however, had sacrificed her career to motherhood; she had made no big decision about it—it just happened. Without any independent source of income, she no longer contributed to the household expenses. Brooks wanted her to concentrate on being a mother. She might have accepted jobs, but when the phone rang with offers Brooks would rush to answer, shouting “My wife is not going to shake her naked ass in Macy’s windows!” then slam the receiver down. Later, crafting his semiautobiographical script “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” Brooks wrote variations of that dialogue into scenes.

  At home Brooks was penurious with Florence, making a ritual of slapping three one-dollar bills on the dresser every morning and telling her the three dollars were her daily allowance. She had no access to his bank account or investments, no real idea of his financial worth. Although he allowed her a few charge accounts for household and personal belongings, he watched the bills like a hawk, exploding at “unnecessary expenses.”

  Florence was afraid to ask him for money because of his sharp-tempered rebukes, which cut her like knives. Once he yelled at her, “Who do you think you are, a diva like Marguerite Piazza?” before storming off. His standard insult when she brought up money: “You should never marry a woman who is either poor or Jewish, and I did both!”

  He was hardly a homebody; he was always out and about or stuck at NBC or hanging out at Danny’s Hideaway with Caesar and the other writers talking after the workday, frequently coming home very late, saying the script had needed extra attention. But Florence knew that the work couldn’t have gone on that late because she had just gotten off the phone with Pat Gelbart, Joan Simon, or another Club Caesar spouse and knew that the other writers had been home for hours. Florence had suspicions but tried to put them out of her mind. It was a peaceful blessing when Brooks wasn’t home. He’d often arrive in a sour mood, and even after finally nodding off he might jump up suddenly and begin sleepwalking, noisily taking down the odd painting or framed certificate from the walls.

  Most of the time Florence felt helpless and alone. Most of the time she was alone, at home with the baby, while Brooks roamed the streets until late. And if one of her female friends happened to be visiting when he did show up, he was especially gruff and unpleasant, because he suspected his wife of sharing confidences with her girlfriends.

  In the past the couple had often visited museums together. On weekends now, Brooks was more likely to traipse around New York galleries and museums with Zero Mostel and the painter Robert Gwathmey. Another new acquaintance was the Columbia Records press agent Walter “Wally” Robinson, with whom Brooks played long, intense chess matches. Robinson facilitated entrées to clubs and music recording sessions.

  Passive and insecure, Florence never confronted her husband; she let her unhappiness slide. She feared his explosions. Busy being a new mother, she did not have time to think very much about their estrangement, and she kept hoping the marriage would improve. By early 1957, besides, she was pregnant with their second child.

  The third year of Caesar’s Hour was destined to be its last. Although the cancellation was not announced until the end of the 1956–57 season, everyone foresaw the descent of the guillotine.

  Nanette Fabray had left the show in a pay dispute, and NBC had switched the series from Monday nights to Saturdays opposite The Lawrence Welk Show on ABC. To the everlasting consternation of Club Caesar, famous later as the crème de la crème among writers, Lawrence Welk topped Caesar in the ratings. The sponsors began to flee, while the production costs, bloated by the talent and writers’ fees, rose to $110,000 weekly by September 1956.

  In those days the bland bandleader reigned in Middle America, where many more Americans owned television sets now than in the heyday of Your Show of Shows. The first TVs had belonged mainly to affluent, well-educated Americans on the East Coast.

  Once upon a time Caesar had prided himself on presenting the most sophisticated comedy and variety format on television. Sophistication was no longer as viable. Nobody thought Caesar’s Hour had become guarded or stale, but the episodes varied in quality, and critics complained about its unevenness. Caesar, in spite of the booze and pills, was still superb much of the time. The show was still superb. That was the tragedy of it.

  Caesar’s Hour was Emmy nominated for Best Variety Show each of the three years it was aired and it won in 1956. Caesar himself was nominated every year in his category of lead performer, and he also won in 1956. In that second season of 1955–56, the year Brooks joined the writing staff, the show garnered multiple Emmys: Best Series, Best Continuing Performance by a Comedian in a Series (Caesar), Best Continuing Performance by a Comedienne (Nanette Fabray), Best Supporting Performance by an Actor (Carl Reiner).

  For three years in a row the writing staff, including Brooks for two of those years, was nominated for Best Comedy Writing. In the first two years Club Caesar lost to Nat Hiken’s similarly lauded troop of scribes for The Phil Silvers Show (a group now including former Caesar colleague Tony Webster). By the third and last year of the show, when the contenders assembled for the annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, Caesar’s Hour had been off the air for months, and the writers prayed to beat Phil Silvers, who was seated at a nearby table.

  That was an anecdote Brooks loved to recount, embroidering the facts with fancy. When the Phil Silvers staff was announced as winners for the third consecutive year, a livid Brooks stood on his chair, or table—accounts differ—screaming “Nietzsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!” In one interview he said his rage did not abate: on the way home in a taxi with his wife, he claimed, he grabbed a manicure scissors from her purse and proceeded to cut his tuxedo into strips. According to Mel Tolkin in his unpublished memoir, Brooks merely reached for the mike that sat at each table for the winners and shouted into it. Still, Brooks and Tolkin—all of Caesar’s writers—felt crushed.

  At the outset of the third and final season of Caesar’s Hour, most of the writers were already taking side jobs when they could, anticipating a future without Sid Caesar.

  Brooks certainly moonlighted, as he always had. Besides his responsibilities for the Caesar show, he was immersed in yet another Broadway musical, called archy and mehitabel, based on the popular World War I–era stories of New York Sun columnist Don Marquis, who had imagined a friendship between a slinky back-alley cat named mehitabel and a philosophical cockroach named archy. A poet and storyteller, archy can type only one letter at a time and can’t manage the shift key; hence the names in lowercase.

  Composer George Kleinsinger and lyricist Joe Darion had developed archy and mehitabel over years. They presented a Town Hall concert version in 1954, and that same year Columbia Records produced a “concept
album” of archy and mehitabel: A Back Alley Opera, which broadened its jazz stylings and featured Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing as archy and mehitabel. Bracken had committed to a Broadway adaptation, while Channing’s involvement depended on how the scheduling panned out. The momentum of the Broadway musical slowed down because Darion, who could not be faulted as a lyricist (he would go on to write Man of La Mancha and its signature anthem, “The Impossible Dream”), struggled to complete a satisfactory book on his own.

  In late December 1956, the planned musical got a boost when Eartha Kitt agreed to play mehitabel. But Darion needed a collaborator. Brooks knew several key people behind the scenes of the production, and he boasted an especially close friendship with Kitt, the breakout star of New Faces of 1952. Also, Brooks loved cats; he already had cat short stories and sketches in his background and could relate to a cockroach that typed badly.

  Involved early on in the packaging of archy and mehitabel, in January 1957 the William Morris Agency arranged for Brooks to come to Darion’s aid on the libretto. His contract guaranteed he would share the book credit, his name listed second and for the first time (in a departure from the ongoing Caesar’s Hour) as “Mel Brooks.” Darion and Kleinsinger’s archy and mehitabel got a spiffy new title: Shinbone Alley.

  The indefatigable writer stole time away from Caesar’s Hour and labored nights and weekends to get Shinbone Alley ready for its April 13, 1957, opening at the Broadway Theatre. Differences with the writers led the director, Norman Lloyd, to leave the musical a week before its premiere, adding to the unease surrounding the show. The producer, Peter Lawrence, took over for the final rehearsals. For that and other reasons Shinbone Alley failed to live up to the high expectations for it. Many critics singled out problems with the libretto: John McClain of the New York Journal-American lamented the book’s “long lapses,” and Thomas R. Dash in Women’s Wear Daily likewise bemoaned the “languid patches.” Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times said that the musical “does not really come alive.”