Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  When not busy with the summer series, Brooks and Michael Stewart were toiling away on a “spec” TV series for Kay Thompson that Stewart had initiated in New York.* A droll, sophisticated singer and actress on radio and in supper clubs, Thompson was also known for her lucrative sideline as the author of the Eloise series of children’s books. Lately she had been working in Hollywood as a singer and songwriter, and earlier in 1957 she had made a splash with her third-billed role in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face.

  Brooks had adored Thompson since first seeing her act, which combined songs and comic monologues, at the Roxy after World War II; he followed her whenever she performed at niteries and had never forgotten her 1954 “wow” appearance on TV’s The Buick-Berle Show, in which the comedienne, surrounded by male dancers, had sung “I Love a Violin.”

  A television series starring Thompson was the brainchild of the Brooklyn-born lawyer Theodore “Ted” Granik, a moderator of radio and TV shows, who hired first Stewart and then Tony Webster to draft a “pilot for Kay Thompson.” Webster drifted away, and Brooks became Stewart’s partner on the project. During off-hours in London, the Club Caesar duo completed a twenty-eight-page teleplay featuring Thompson as the editor of a fashion magazine, “juggling her business affairs in Manhattan with domestic duties in Westchester,” according to her biographer, where her husband, two children, and a stuffy housekeeper constantly complain about her “gallivanting off to the city every day.”

  When Stewart’s interest began to wane, the project was ceded to Brooks. Although they were jointly paid $2,000 for the “spec” pilot, Brooks eventually had advantages over Stewart in his payments, royalties, and profits if any network picked up the series. Sometimes Brooks got the better deal simply because he had tougher deal makers on his side. Often he gained an edge by pleading poverty, children, and career exigencies. Stewart didn’t care; he was more interested in Broadway than in TV, and that summer the budding producer Edward Padula and the composing team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams approached him to work on the musical that would become Bye Bye Birdie. Stewart dropped the Thompson series and left London in August before everyone else.

  Accompanied by Speed Vogel, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks took one last jaunt to Cap d’Antibes on the Côte d’Azur at the end of August before returning to the United States at the end of the summer. In the Hotel du Cap, even as Florence was desperately trying to avoid lovemaking and scheming to get out of her marriage, their third child was conceived.

  Not everyone thought Brooks was so funny when they first met him. Often people needed time to get used to his sense of humor and become accustomed to his manner.

  Sometime in the fall of 1958, it must have been, the Brookses were invited to dinner at the home of actor Hal March, who was married to actress Candy Toxton. The Marches were squiring around a newcomer, Johnny Carson, a former comedian turned game show panelist and daytime television host, who had recently moved to New York from Hollywood.

  The Brookses knew March, who now hosted The $64,000 Question, from The Imogene Coca Show, where he had played Coca’s spouse in one of the incarnations of the doomed series. The dinner went okay except that Brooks, anxious to make an impression on the guest of honor, took over the occasion with his loud jokes and antics. Carson left feeling nonplussed. A few years would pass before Carson took over The Tonight Show and came around to thinking that Brooks was one of the funniest men alive.

  Brooks tried just as hard—twice—to win over Jerry Lewis. The first time was in the fall of 1958, when he helped write a television special for the established entertainer. Not since his 1953 stint at Columbia Pictures had Brooks visited Hollywood, once the nation’s flourishing film capital, nowadays looking more like a television capital. Moviegoers by the millions had defected to the small screen, and the major studios had cut back drastically on film production and were pouring their resources into the TV revolution.

  Lewis was his idol of idols. Brooks loved Lewis's idiotic, childish humor, his spastic comedy, his mock-suave singing—all components of Brooks’s own formative public persona. A writer besides, Lewis was the whole package in a way that Harry Ritz had never been. Many people in Brooks’s circle—his wife, too—shared a professional background with Lewis, who had now split from his partner Dean Martin. Many of Brooks’s writer friends—Norman Lear included—had worked for Lewis. Brooks knew it would be a trial by fire.

  Yet he was dying for the opportunity. Mel Tolkin had written an earlier special for Lewis, who told Tolkin he could bring a collaborator along with him to Hollywood. Word got around. Tolkin’s phone rang: one call was from Brooks, pleading for the job, another from Tony Webster. Both were qualified, but Big Mel thought it over and reached out to the more amicable Neil Simon. (“Best decision I ever made,” Tolkin said later.)

  Tolkin had passed on a second offer from Lewis, having had his fill of the notoriously crazed and difficult-to-please comedian during that first experience. So Brooks and fellow Club Caesar veteran Danny Simon got the nod for the fall 1958 premiere of The Jerry Lewis Show, which NBC was producing on the West Coast. A third known quantity, Harry Crane, a creator of The Honeymooners, would be joining them.

  By the last week of September, Brooks was again ensconced in the Chateau Marmont, all expenses paid along with his largest salary to date. Lewis’s TV special would follow the usual variety format with singing and dancing interludes, but the writers focused on the comedy, including the main sketch, on which Brooks made his greatest contribution. The sketch involved a sad sack against whom even foul weather conspires; he is forced into a movie theater, where he finds true love in the form of a sad sackess.

  Brooks didn’t bite his tongue when Lewis, at one of the very first story conferences for the special, told his well-paid pencil pushers that no matter how great a script they might write, it wouldn’t make the grade for him. “Boys,” Lewis announced, “I don’t want to do the script. I want to get out there, and I want something magic to happen.”

  “Get Mandrake!” Brooks quipped. “Don’t hire us.”

  “I—want—magic,” Lewis repeated solemnly. “I want every word, every gesture, every sound to be spontaneous and exciting as it was in the Commedia dell’Arte.”

  The writers looked at one another, dumbstruck.

  Lewis behaved like a teenager on espresso, running around the room, waving his arms, jumping onto his desk to shout, taking their ideas, if he accepted them as feasible, and performing them with bizarre exaggerations in order to turn their ideas into his ideas. Brooks, too, was known to jump onto desks, shout, perform, and fold other writers’ suggestions into his own. But he couldn’t outshout Lewis, and deference inhibited him.

  The story conferences were more cacophonous than those of Club Caesar; they got to be too much, and at one point Brooks vowed aloud, “I’ll never work for you again, Jerry!”

  Miraculously, the script came together for the October 18, 1958, broadcast, and although it was probably in the wording of his deal, Brooks was billed ahead of Simon and Crane on-screen. Lewis was pleased with the result. He told Brooks that his movies had become so successful, Paramount was thinking of letting him direct one. First he would have to direct another TV special, as a kind of tryout. He and Brooks really must work together again, Lewis said. Brooks reminded him of his vow. “Forget that,” Lewis said.

  In no hurry to return to New York, his wife, and his family, Brooks lingered on the West Coast, skipping Sid Caesar’s first ABC-TV special in early November. Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen, the latter joining Caesar’s staff for the first time, penned the show.

  Brooks felt the tug of Hollywood, its doors swinging open wide as the film studios, foundering, grabbed onto television ideas. He networked with Hillard Elkins, a Brooklynite once with the William Morris Agency, who’d represented the Kay Thompson project and brought Michael Stewart together with his clients Charles Strouse and Lee Adams for Bye Bye Birdie. Elkins, whom everyone called “Hilly,” had offices in both New York and Hollyw
ood, and he represented major small-screen personalities such as Perry Como and Patti Page. A self-important type who would go on to become a top Broadway producer, Elkins was a man people loved to hate, and Brooks was wary when Elkins tried to get him under personal contract. While jumping around agencies in the late 1950s, however, Brooks did succumb briefly to Elkins before having second thoughts.

  Another displaced East Coaster with whom Brooks reestablished contact was Marvin Schwartz, whom he knew through the music publicist Wally Robinson. Schwartz had been an advance man for the promoter Norman Granz at Jazz of the Philharmonic jam sessions in New York, but now he was a partner in Lewin, Kaufman & Schwartz, a high-powered show business public relations firm in Hollywood. Schwartz dreamed of becoming a movie producer one day. The publicist was more of a bohemian kindred spirit, and together Brooks and Schwartz made the scene at clubs and recording sessions.

  One of Jerry Lewis’s friends was the drummer Bill Richmond, a backup musician in Lewis’s early stage act, who, Lewis thought, was as bright and funny as anyone he knew. Richmond had been booked for the prestigious Capitol recording sessions with Frank Sinatra produced by Nelson Riddle, and he invited Brooks along to watch and observe Sinatra up close and hone the Ol’ Blue Eyes imitation that was already in his repertoire. (His Sinatra imitation, first performed in the Catskills, later became a talk show staple of his and was incorporated into High Anxiety.) Brooks self-promoted his “huge ego,” Richmond recalled, touring the recording studio during breaks, shaking the hands of musicians with the refrain “Hi, I’m Mel Brooks! I wrote the Sid Caesar show!”

  When Florence’s father passed away a few days before Thanksgiving, Brooks flew back to New York for the funeral. He took her an autographed photo of Lewis, who sentimentally had chosen one of him and Dean Martin together, reminding Florence that he had known her back when she was a dancer in their act, fondly inscribing it “What gams!”

  Chapter 6

  1957

  The Genius Awakes

  ABC broadcast Sid Caesar’s first special of the new season on a Sunday night in October. After the ABC show, the comedian rejoined NBC and presided over several more specials for his old network over the course of the 1958–59 season. Although Brooks walked in and out throwing off sparks, he did not receive credit until the last special in May 1959. Officially, this was the first collaboration between Brooks and Woody Allen, Caesar’s latest astute hire. Only twenty-three, an introverted personality, Allen had been forewarned that Brooks might “eat you alive,” in Allen’s words, “he’s so difficult to get along with and so high-pressure.” Girding himself for “a really unpleasant experience,” Allen instead met the Nice Mel, “as nice, amusing, intelligent as could be—he was so nice to me.”

  That one-hour Sunday-night special returned to familiar Caesar terrain: “At the Movies.” Art Carney and Audrey Meadows from The Honeymooners were the guest stars, as they had been for other Caesar specials during the season, along with the dance team Bambi Lynn and Rod Alexander evoking memories of Your Show of Shows. The highlights included a drive-in movies skit, a spoof cavalcade of musicals, and another of Caesar’s bravura silent picture send-ups with the star as a Rudolph Valentino type, Meadows his preening costar, and Carney their exasperated director. Caesar’s refurbishing of old material alienated some critics, even Variety complaining about the “spotty scripting.”

  The familiarity was comforting to other reviewers, however, and the ratings for the specials were solid. After his rocky previous year with Sid Caesar Invites You, Caesar had regained his footing. Switching once more to CBS, he got the budget and go-ahead for another year. Brooks accepted a contract second only to Mel Tolkin’s, and he, Tolkin, and Sydney Zelinka would write a half-dozen more Caesar specials for 1959–1960.

  The Kay Thompson pilot script, meanwhile, was being hawked to the networks. Brooks was optimistic about its chances. Besides chief writer, he had an option in his contract for directing episodes if the series was developed, and for producing the series.

  As his ambitions broadened, Brooks switched his representation from the William Morris Agency to Ashley-Steiner, a hard-charging literary and show business venture that had been founded by Ted Ashley, who had started out in show business as an office boy at William Morris. Ashley-Steiner rivaled the Morris agency as a packager of television programming, but the newer, smaller venture also swaggered in the film business and made a specialty, on its client list, of top comics and comedy writers.

  More important, Brooks signed with Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, an established New York law office, which represented authors and publishers and had been embroiled in landmark civil liberties and censorship battles over the decades—its lawyers had defended the US publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1933, for example. Brooks befriended a rising figure in the firm, a recent Yale Law School graduate named Alan U. [Uriel] Schwartz, who was building his career on literary and entertainment clients.

  Those moves were intended to wean Brooks from his dependence on Caesar. Others in Club Caesar were making similar adjustments, although Brooks lagged behind most of his confreres. Though Caesar’s salary, and the salaries of his writing staff, continued to rise, there were increasingly fewer specials and Caesar’s heyday was past. The pay for his specials could not compare with the prospective rewards of successful Broadway playwrights, the writer-creators of TV series, the scenarists of major motion pictures.

  Brooks’s 1959–60 contract with Caesar alleviated his immediate financial concerns, however, and he collaborated with Tolkin on TV sketches for Perry Como and Ginger Rogers (“one of the best hunks of material I’ve had,” Rogers praised their comedy skits). While waiting for Jerry Lewis’s next offer to come through or for something to happen with the Kay Thompson pilot, Brooks also found time to jot down notes for an original plot that he thought he might stretch out into a novel or a Broadway play.

  Florence Brooks’s pregnancy had been progressing toward her May due date when, one night in the spring, very late, her husband woke her up to brandish the first few pages of “An Olde English Novel,” which he’d dashed off in pencil on a yellow legal pad. His idea was premised on two English producers who contrive to produce intentionally awful stage plays—veddy English producers, almost precious types. There was not yet any mention of Hitler. He was very excited about his story, his wife told friends.

  By now the Brookses had moved house yet again to a larger apartment for his growing family on East 72nd Street. Although the couple still attended the odd get-together at Stella Adler’s or important dinner parties where the other guests were married couples, Florence felt like an increasingly peripheral add-on to Brooks’s hectic life. The moment was long past when they had gone to foreign films or visited museums together. Nor, these days, did they discuss their favorite novels. Brooks rarely sat down to eat with his family, and the couple never dined out alone at restaurants—he still professed to have a hang-up about that.

  Her pregnancy and two young children filled her life. She lunched occasionally with girlfriends, despite Brooks glaring at them when they dropped by. Her husband arrived home late most nights, stayed up late, slept late, and then raced off most mornings.

  Early some mornings these days the phone would ring and Florence would reach for it to hear, without any hello, the voice of Moss Hart: “Is the genius awake yet?” The genius would shake off any of his usual sleepiness or grumpiness to talk with the legendary Hart or, more often the case, listen at length to Hart’s show business gossip.

  The Joe Fields dinner party with Broadway luminaries had not proved to be an unadulterated success for the 2000 Year Old Man, since the old-fashioned Billy Rose and stuffy Alan Jay Lerner had not known what to make of the breezy straight man Carl Reiner and the madcap Brooks. On another night the comedy went over better at Kitty Carlyle and Moss Hart’s place; that couple found the 2000 Year Old Man charming and amusing. A former Hollywood ingenue, once in Marx Brothers films, Mrs. Hart nowadays appeared on T
V game shows, while her husband boasted a long, garlanded career of hit collaborations with George S. Kaufman dating from the early 1930s and more recently as the director of My Fair Lady, which was in the middle of its record six-year run.

  Twenty years older than Brooks, Jewish, and born in New York, albeit with English parentage, Hart had been raised in humble circumstances, partly in Brooklyn. An Anglophile, Hart affected English airs that to many signaled his closeted homosexuality. Smitten by Brooks at the dinner party, Hart embraced the younger writer as a cause, touting him to friends, even asking Brooks, unnecessarily, for tips on his memoir in progress. To be adopted by Hart, a reigning king of Broadway, genuinely touched Brooks.

  On May 24, 1959, Florence gave birth to the couple’s third child, named Edward Anthony, or “Eddie,” in honor of her father, who had passed away late the previous year. The summer of 1959 became a veritable blur to Mrs. Brooks, now a mother with a newborn and two other children under the age of four. Perhaps the summer was also a blur to Brooks, who strove with Mel Tolkin and two London writers to craft an NBC summer replacement series starring the British comedian Dave King. All their combined Anglophilia was not enough to avert the notorious failed experiment; the British humor of The Dave King Show did not travel well with either American censors or American audiences.

  Increasingly, Florence Brooks felt she had no choice but to abandon her marriage. It was not just Brooks’s womanizing: Later, both Lucille Kallen and Imogene Coca told her that Brooks had frequently arrived at work on Mondays holding up fingers to the men in the room, indicating how many times he had gotten laid over the weekend. Another summer Fire Islander, Edward Dunay, a swashbuckling ladies’ man, told Florence he had run into the comedy writer on the subway on one occasion and Brooks had boasted that he was en route to a Harlem brothel; cheating on one’s wife was the sacred duty of a husband, he told Dunay with a grin. With Brooks, it was never clear how much of his boasting was empty or whether the supposed womanizing suited his image of a manly man, like making cutthroat business deals or smoking the cigars that powerful men waved around to celebrate such deals.