Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  More than because her husband was a cheat, Florence felt persistently heartsick owing to the coldness that emanated from him whenever other people weren’t around laughing at his jokes, the belittlement and insults she endured when they were alone.

  In the fall Brooks wrote a little for Victor Borge, but mainly he busied himself on Sid Caesar’s specials for CBS. The first was “Holiday on Wheels” in October, followed by “Marriage: Handle with Care” in December, both of them written by Tolkin, Brooks, and Sydney Zelinka, credited in that order. Zelinka, the least mentioned of Club Caesar—if he ever happened to be mentioned at all—was an old-timer who had been among the Emmy winners for The Phil Silvers Show that had repeatedly beat out the Club Caesar writers and whose long career had begun with the Marx Brothers in vaudeville.

  “Holiday on Wheels” featured guest star Tony Randall in a series of linked sketches about a pioneer carmaker’s family—their rise and fall—with Caesar as the patriarch, Randall as the spoiled scion. Randall remembered it as a “brilliant show,” among “the funniest things I ever did on television.” The sketches involving Caesar’s and his interplay were “all Mel Brooks,” Randall recalled; and Brooks directed the first reading, delivering precise imitations of how both he and Caesar should essay their roles. Later during rehearsals, Randall said, he had “lost the flavor” of one “wonderful speech” he had to master in the sketch, so he had gone back to Brooks, asking for the line reading again. Brooks repeated his previous performance to a tee, delighting and guiding Randall.

  The publishing event of the fall was Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One, which reviewers lauded and which shot up the best-seller lists. Brooks was sent an advance inscribed copy, but he struggled to convey his admiration for the book in an unusual three-page letter he wrote to Hart. Also unusual for him, he typed the letter, because now he did type—laboriously—on rare occasions. When he typed, his usual sense of humor was muted and his language grew formal with earnest clichés (“from the bottom of my heart”).

  Brooks pecked the letter out late one night at East 72nd, jokingly relating how he had decided to devote himself to Act One rather than surrender to his wife’s (“curlers et al”) tempting invitation to watch a very good British submarine picture on The Late Show. (A die-hard fan of submarine pictures, Brooks channeled that incident into the semiautobiographical “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” script he later wrote.)

  Initially fearing that his famous friend might have written a slick or dull memoir, Brooks explained, he had instantly been won over by Hart’s life story, which was so magnificently told. Hart, who admitted to being a little peeved that Brooks had not read his book and reacted sooner, responded with an invitation to a gala party in his honor in October. He hoped that Brooks and Carl Reiner might perform their 2000 Year Old Man sketch.

  The October 23 event was timed to celebrate Hart’s fifty-fifth birthday (the next day) and the publication of Act One, which had been officially issued by Random House in September. Reiner was busy in Hollywood as a new writer for The Dinah Shore Show, so Brooks persuaded Mel Tolkin to stand in. Together they crafted a skit in the 2000 Year Old Man mold, this time with the ancient Jew, Brooks, as Hart’s supposed psychoanalyst.

  In between the final emendations for Caesar’s maiden fall special, Tolkin rehearsed with Brooks, scribbling questions for the 2000 Year Old Shrink on both sides of an envelope. Little Mel would ad-lib “much of the answers” with “the freedom to come up with new material during the performance,” Tolkin recalled. The two Mels practiced in front of José Ferrer, a frequent Caesar guest over the years and this season, too. Not only a consummate actor, Ferrer had a keen sense of comedy. He, too, had been invited to the Hart party. “Only what [Ferrer] approved of remained,” Tolkin said.

  It was the show business occasion of the year, and it was held at Mamma Leone’s, a popular Italian restaurant in the theater district. The crowd of some two hundred people was “fairly eye-catching,” in the words of Kenneth Tynan, who cast his mind back to the party years later in his New Yorker profile of Brooks. The gathering included emcee Phil Silvers, Bennett Cerf (the head of Random House), Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Simone Signoret and her husband, Yves Montand, and composers, songwriters, and the leading lights of acclaimed Broadway musicals, including Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Looking around the celebrity-filled room Tynan noticed Brooks and Tolkin “as among the few [faces] not instantly recognizable.”

  Star performers lampooned the guest of honor, and among the singing and dancing highlights was a parody of “The Rain in Spain” from My Fair Lady featuring a youthful Hart being schooled in his posh English accent for future Broadway endeavors by writer Edward Chodorov (played by Melvyn Douglas) and producer Dore Schary (Ralph Bellamy). Finally the least recognizable faces were introduced, with Brooks whispering last-minute changes to their script as the pair approached the microphone. Brooks told Tolkin that “he was not going to play the shrink Jewish,” as they’d planned. “And he would cut all homosexual or transvestite references.” Those were “deep, surgical cuts” in their rehearsed skit, and Big Mel’s natural nervousness multiplied. But after Brooks bit off his reply to Tolkin’s first question—where had Herr Doctor obtained his medical credentials?—answer: “The Vienna School of Good Luck”—the duo were warmed by a roar of laughter from the crowd, and Brooks instantly reverted to Jewish affectations.

  Tolkin: Tell me, Doctor, what was Mr. Hart’s problem? Inferiority complex, sibling rivalry, Oedipus complex?

  Brooks: Oedipus complex? What’s that?

  Tolkin: The instinctive desire inherent in every man to possess his own mother.

  Brooks (after a long pause): That’s the dirtiest thing I ever heard. Who thought up such filth?

  Tolkin: Well, it’s a myth, dramatized by the Greek playwright Sophocles.

  Brooks: A Greek, maybe, but not our people. With my people, you don’t even do it to your wife, let alone your mother. Of course, if you take your mother out for dinner and a movie, then maybe in the taxi you grab a kiss. But the other—feh . . . !

  The least rich and famous among them convulsed the room, their performance ending with a standing ovation. A grateful Hart told Brooks it was the funniest fourteen minutes he could remember. Alec Guinness shook his hand, saying he was a very, very funny man, and then froze as Brooks replied with a straight face, “You’re not so bad yourself!”

  Florence Brooks, also attending the party, did not find her husband very funny at all anymore. She would never miss his brand of mocking humor that in private too often made a merciless target of her. She would miss, she told friends later, all those times in years past when Brooks had illuminated books and movies for her and when the couple had had long, thoughtful, searching conversations about life’s mysteries.

  Soon after the Moss Hart celebration, just before their sixth wedding anniversary, Florence asked her husband to leave. His reaction was total astonishment. She said she needed some time and space. He stared at her uncomprehendingly. He couldn’t simply leave his three children, he declared. He could see his children and be with them all he wanted, she replied. She begged him tearfully: Please. Leave. It’s only temporary, she insisted, not even knowing if that was true. She felt on the verge of a breakdown.

  Her tearful pleading went on for days. Brooks took long walks with his friend Speed Vogel, who had separated from his wife and was morphing from a businessman into a metal-sculpting artist. Vogel resided on Central Park West but also maintained a West 28th Street studio. Vogel listened “patiently and sympathetically” to his friend, while “staying carefully noncommittal. I was extremely fond of Florence.” Vogel finally told Brooks that if your spouse asks you to leave more than once, it’s probably time to leave.

  So Brooks moved in with Vogel, staying sometimes at Central Park West, other times at Vogel’s studio. “He was the worst” roomm
ate, Vogel recalled, an insomniac with a “brushstroke of paranoia.” Lacking a proper wardrobe, Brooks would borrow Vogel’s expensive clothing, right down to his underwear. He’d jump up to answer the phone when it rang (he was big on answering phones) and, disappointed when people asked for Vogel, would hang up with an insult or wisecrack. He’d stay out late and then fall asleep in front of the TV set and be dozing there in the morning when Vogel got up.

  One morning Vogel awoke to find graffiti splashed all over the white walls of his studio: “You snore, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes, that’s what you do! All night! Snore! Snore! Snore! You fuck!” Some nights, because he was seeing a woman who would later become his second wife, Vogel didn’t return home until the next day at noon, with Brooks waiting balefully. “You’ve eaten your breakfast—I didn’t! You’ve eaten, and I’m starving!” Vogel would begin warily, “There’s the fridge, there’s the orange juice, there are the eggs, make yourself something” before shrugging and just fixing breakfast for Brooks.

  Soon enough “I was treating him like a wife,” Vogel recalled. Neil Simon heard about the strange bedfellows–type situation, “and I think that’s where The Odd Couple came from,” Vogel said later. (After The Odd Couple became a huge success, Brooks sometimes jokingly referred to the playwright as “Neil Swine-Man,” a rare jibe at his Caesar colleague.)

  Whenever Brooks felt pain, he felt the twinges first in his pocketbook. Shortly after leaving his East 72nd Street home, he proclaimed emergency budget measures. The rent had just been raised on their ten-room apartment, so Florence and the three children would have to move, he said; he couldn’t afford to underwrite the comfortable lifestyle to which his family had become accustomed, especially if he had to endure hardships on his own. On the day after Thanksgiving, Florence and the children were obliged to move from East 72nd to a less expensive six-room place on East 63rd Street, reinforcing Brooks’s physical dislocation from his family while he simultaneously made gestures of rapprochement.

  The separation was passive-aggressive. Brooks fired the maid and cleaning woman and tried to lower the salary of Frances Barmore, the family nurse and nanny, hoping that she would quit. Florence was entirely dependent on Brooks; she had no professional income, nor “a single dollar of assets of my own,” according to her court records. Her bills were sent to Brooks now and disappeared as though into a bottomless hole.

  Brooks told his wife he had job prospects in Hollywood and would be moving there posthaste. Vogel phoned Florence, pleading: he’d help the couple patch things up; he’d do anything to get Brooks out of his life and back home. “Are you crazy?” Florence demanded. “Where did you get such a dopey idea? If you can’t stand him anymore, throw him out!”

  In truth, Florence was miserable: conflicted about having forced the separation yet glad to be free of her husband—his neuroses and his temper. Regardless, for weeks after leaving, Brooks would show up at East 3rd Street late at night and hang around for hours, eventually falling asleep in the living room in front of the TV or on her bed in the bedroom. She’d have to wake him up and send him off into the dark, all the while torn.

  Michael Stewart took the unhappy Florence under his wing and invited her along on the train to Philadelphia for the tryout of Bye Bye Birdie in March. Stewart had written the book for the musical, which told the tale of an Elvis-type rock-and-roll star drafted into the army. Stewart sat Brooks’s estranged wife next to Birdie’s composer, Charles Strouse, whom she had never met before, even though Strouse—whom everyone called “Buddy”—had started his career as a rehearsal pianist for Your Show of Shows. In his early thirties, slightly bald and pudgy, Strouse was another Jewish New Yorker, who had been educated under Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.

  Everyone in Club Caesar was excited about Birdie, which was going to be the great breakthrough for Stewart, his first Broadway musical. Brooks knew Stewart, Strouse, and all the principals, including the three stars: onetime radio deejay Dick Van Dyke, portraying the rock star’s agent and songwriter; former stand-up comedian Dick Gautier, playing Birdie; and Chita Rivera, who had been Eartha Kitt’s stand-in for Shinbone Alley, as the agent’s secretary and sweetheart. Backstage, the man who had nurtured Birdie into existence was another mutual acquaintance, Edward Padula, who had kicked around behind the scenes on Broadway for years, first directing the Lerner and Loewe musical The Day Before Spring, later as a stage manager. (A “perfect producer,” Lee Adams said of him, with “taste, guts, imagination and thoughtfulness.”) Director Gower Champion had danced with his wife, Marge, on Admiral Broadway Revue.

  Florence hit it off instantly with Buddy Strouse, who was everything Brooks was not: sweet, soft-spoken, self-deprecating. They embarked on a romance. “She was smart, beautiful, understanding, and had a great sense of humor,” said Strouse, contacted for this book, “but then again, she would have had to have all these qualities to have lived with Mel.” When her affair with Strouse, who had treated her graciously, ended, Florence realized that she would never go back to Brooks. In May, she began dating the stockbroker Edward Dunay, whom everyone knew from Fire Island. Later in 1960, she filed for divorce and asked for temporary alimony from Brooks, citing physical and verbal abuse and degradation and adulterous relationships “of which [Brooks] openly bragged.”

  At first Brooks told other people that the couple had separated because Florence had gone momentarily crazy, insisting that in the long run they would work things out. Motherhood, he’d say, shaking his head. The pressures. She just needs some alone time.

  After rooming with Speed Vogel for a few months, Brooks moved into a fourth-floor walk-up on Perry Street in the West Village. Living in Vogel’s studio had reignited his love affair with the Village; his impending divorce ruined the Upper East Side for him.

  Brooks never learned of Florence’s affair with Strouse. After Florence’s lawyer filed divorce papers, Brooks grew terse on the subject of his first marriage. People learned not to ask about Florence, not then or in later years in interviews. Although personally devastated, he pretended their breakup had been just one of those things.

  The collapse of his marriage, a relationship that had lasted for almost ten years, was one reason why it was nearly impossible for Brooks ever to write semiautobiographical comedies as Neil Swine-Man did. Brooks had to present his divorce as mutual rather than cast any blame on himself. He preferred to think of himself as Nice Mel.

  Professionally, Brooks did put on a happy face. Very soon after Florence cast him out, he got the offer he had been waiting for from Jerry Lewis and returned to Hollywood.

  Circumstantially, at this troubled time in his life, a personal and professional crossroads, the American public got its first introduction to Mel Brooks—not merely by name.

  Sid Caesar’s television specials led to Brooks’s striking up what would become a long and profitable relationship with the producer David Susskind, whose company was associated with Caesar through its contractual relationship with Art Carney. Susskind was a deep-thinking producer who believed Brooks to be, in person as well as in his writing, one of the most amusing men on the planet. Among the many projects the prolific Susskind had going, which included highly commercial television and motion picture properties, the producer hosted a talk show on public television in New York, broadcast by Channel 13 and WNTA locally and distributed nationally to educational TV outlets. The show, Open End, convened panels to mull over cultural and political issues.

  In mid-February 1960, Susskind put Brooks on television for the first time since his fleeting appearance on Texaco Star Theater ten years earlier, as part of a roundtable that included Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, Jack Douglas (a writer for Bob Hope and Red Skelton), and Charles Andrews (an occasional Caesar writer who also produced shows for Arthur Godfrey). The topic was “the truth behind your favorite comedians, comedy programs, and comedy writing,” in Susskind’s words. Noticed favorably by many broadcast critic
s, the low-key, high-prestige affair evidenced Brooks’s gift of gab and presaged his future as one of TV’s ubiquitous talk-show guests.

  Thoughtfully, and with unusual candor, the congregated television writers rated and analyzed various famous small- and big-screen comedians, chewing over the differences in their styles of comedy—comparing, for example, Jack Benny to Bob Hope.

  The panel also discussed critics, and not for the last time in his career Brooks took potshots at certain TV and Broadway tastemakers, i.e., those who had negatively critiqued his work, naming names. More compulsively than most public personalities, he held grudges and called critics out throughout his career. Jack Gould, the small-screen critic for the New York Times, was “dreadfully unfair,” he said; ditto for Ben Gross, the New York Daily News columnist. “I wrote a show called Accent on Love for Pontiac with Ginger Rogers . . . and Ben Gross dismissed it with vitriol . . . ‘I don’t like you, Ben Gross.’”

  For the first time Brooks publicly defined himself as a “dangerous” comedy writer, the modern equivalent of the “atomic comedian” he had tried to be in the army. He was outspoken, bemoaning the decline in sophisticated comedy (i.e., the Caesar shows) in favor of the bland family sitcoms that had swept prime time. “Low key plus inoffensiveness equals mass acceptance,” he sniffed. That complaint would recur as a motif in his interviews. Again, he pointed fingers, mocking shows with laugh tracks such as the popular The Loretta Young Show (“Nobody can get hurt watching the show”) or The Donna Reed Show (“I wouldn’t say there are a lot of laughs in that show”).

  Interesting differences surfaced among the Caesar writers. Discussing how writers were valued and credited by the comedians they wrote for, Brooks admitted that “It bugs me” when writers were not mentioned in interviews or were insufficiently praised by critics. The milder-mannered Gelbart jumped in: “Well, I don’t eat my heart out.”