Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  All the while Brooks made frequent 2000 Year Old Man promotional appearances on radio and television. He also scripted a funny solo for Art Carney’s guest stint on singer Connie Francis’s ABC-TV special in September. He’d acquired a reputation for speed and availability and would squeeze in small paying jobs throughout the protracted work-up of “All American”, sometimes with his amanuensis, Alfa-Betty Olsen, at his side.

  “All American” awaited the imprimatur of its director, Joshua Logan, who would not formally join the project until September, supervising the final script and casting.

  All along the team had pinned high hopes on Logan, who had shaken Edward Padula’s hand on the triumphant opening night of Bye Bye Birdie and told the producer he wanted to stage the Birdie boys’ next musical. The “All American” team met with the director in the first half of 1961, but he had previously committed to shooting a movie, Fanny, in Paris and Marseilles, over the summer. The delay was itself an augury: Fanny was the screen version of the last Broadway play Logan had directed, in 1956, before going over to Hollywood and film. And Fanny had run 888 performances.

  The “All American” team hoped that Logan would bring a master’s touch to the still evolving libretto, as Gower Champion had done so well for Birdie. To that end, in the fall they launched a series of meetings with Logan at his Japanese-style country home in Stamford, Connecticut, and his posh apartment in the River House in Manhattan.

  Logan began by picking apart Brooks’s draft, saying it needed “much more of a story” and “some new material.” A tall, commanding presence, the stage and screen director was even taller standing up as he addressed the short folk of the team, who gazed up at him as he loftily expounded on the joys of a Broadway hit and the horrors of a flop.

  Charles Strouse and Lee Adams impressed Logan (“cultivated and enthusiastic and comparatively contained”), but the third writer on the team, a “bustling original” named Brooks, who was often accompanied by a blond secretary, threw him. (Not that Logan had anything against secretaries; he had two—a personal one and a show business one.)

  One of the hottest points of debate was who should play Fodorski, the European professor who must assimilate to American ways. All along Brooks and the Birdie boys had favored Zero Mostel, whom Logan now vetoed because he “could not visualize him as a romantic lead,” Strouse recalled. Brooks proposed the Metropolitan Opera tenor Jan Peerce, whom Logan also rejected. Another candidate was an adept English actor named Ron Moody, who had just rocketed to fame as Fagin in the London musical Oliver! But when columnists were tipped off to Moody’s chances, Logan angrily nixed Moody, too.

  One day Brooks, who thought of himself as something of a casting whiz, stood and paced as he delivered a long “peroration,” as Logan recalled, insisting that their lead did not have to be a funnyman with a funny-looking nose and face. Instead they might opt for “a romantic leading man,” someone in the Charles Boyer mold. On and on Brooks perorated, until finally he halted dramatically with a long pause, before adding “two very emphatic words,” as Logan recalled. “Or not!” the writer proclaimed, sitting down.

  “Gray-haired, smooth Ed Padula was a permissive referee” for Brooks’s constant extemporizing, Logan recalled. “I did listen to his rather off-center remarks with great interest because there was obviously a huge brain behind that rather Easter Island face,” he wrote later. “It got so we began roaring with laughter any time Mel Brooks opened his mouth. It was no way to get a full afternoon’s work done, but it was fun.”

  One of Brooks’s repeated interjections was “Guess what? I’m going to marry Anne Bancroft!” The others took that revelation with a grain of salt. Brooks also spoke enthusiastically about his next musical. “An Olde English Novel” had moved on from his initial late-night brainstorm about London producers who cheat investors by producing an overcapitalized play that was guaranteed to flop. The idea had metamorphosed into a stage musical, not a novel. Brooks credited that progression to “my friend Moishe, who lived in my building”—perhaps another ghost collaborator—who had read scenes, entirely in dialogue without description or narrative, and told Brooks it made more sense as a play.

  More important, inspired by the vogue for Jewish comedy that encompassed the 2000 Year Old Man, Brooks had taken the major step of bringing Hitler into the story as the subject of the producers’ intended flop musical, thereby personalizing the comedy with one of his own obsessions. The Hitler innovation, as much as the basic story,* had antecedents and may have been indebted to Lenny Bruce, whose “Adolf Hitler and the MCA,” from The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, had been released in 1959. Or perhaps it was borrowed from an old summer stock friend. “Comedian-impressionist Will Jordan has sometimes claimed that the idea of a Nazi musical was part of his nightclub act in the early 1950s,” Steve Allen wrote in Funny People. “And indeed, I recall that it was.”

  Brooks prided himself on titles, and he tried his new one out on the group: “Springtime for Hitler.” In later interviews he would explain the title as being derived from a 1934 movie, a comedy called Springtime for Henry, which he had seen as a boy. “I’m not joking,” Brooks told the “All American” team. “That’s exactly what I’m writing. A play about Hitler’s young and idyllic love life.” He said he had spoken to Peter Sellers about maybe playing one of the leads. Padula liked Brooks’s snappy title enough that at Christmastime the producer informed the press that he would produce “Springtime for Hitler” after “All American”. “The setting is contemporary England,” the producer told the New York Times, and Hitler would not be an actual character in the play; Carry On’s Kenneth Williams, “England’s new comic discovery,” was under consideration for the lead.

  It’s unlikely that there was a completed manuscript for Padula to read, however, and as with Brooks’s boast about Anne Bancroft, “Springtime for Hitler” still had years to incubate.

  December was dampened by the death of Moss Hart from a sudden heart attack at age fifty-seven. Brooks was in the final throes of his protracted divorce negotiations with Florence, which had been slowed and hampered by his constant pleas of poverty because of the declining television variety show market as well as his stubborn efforts to win his wife back.

  Speaking to Playboy more than a decade later, Brooks painted himself as a mensch in the divorce proceedings. “Like a schmuck, I said, ‘Take everything. I don’t need a penny. All I need are my Tolstoy and my skate key. Give me these and I can live.’”

  In fact, he adamantly fought every nickel and dime of the ultimate settlement. His lawyers gave his alienated wife a choice of alimony (a potentially higher sum earmarked for her while putting the tax burden for that sum on her) or child support (a tax-free set-aside). Wanting the whole thing over and done with, Florence agreed to a $300-monthly child support plan, per child. Skeptical, however, that $900 monthly was all that Brooks could afford, her lawyers managed to wangle a clause in the agreement promising Florence “a sum equal to one-third of her husband’s net income in excess of $44,000 per year for the next 18 years, 1962 through 1980.” Two thousand five hundred dollars of the excess of $44,000 was to be deposited monthly into her bank account. Brooks’s accountant took her aside, telling her, not unkindly, that she would never see that money.

  In mid-January 1962, the ex–Mrs. Brooks flew to Juárez for a quickie Mexican divorce. One month later, she married the Wall Street stockbroker Edward Dunay.

  Chapter 7

  1962

  The Warm and Fuzzy Mel

  With Ray Bolger in the role of Professor Fodorski, the European intellectual who learns to love football in the Deep South, “All American” opened at the Winter Garden on March 19, 1962, and lasted through May. Brooks shared 8.5 percent of the gross with composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams. In the last weeks the principals’ salaries were reduced, however, and the profit participants waived points to stretch out the run. (The show had six profitable weeks and “four losing stanzas,” in the words of Varie
ty.)

  Gross revenue there was, but in the end no real profits. “$479,521 Deficit on ‘All American’” Variety headlined several months later. The accompanying article autopsied the financial catastrophe: The production costs had been too high. The cast recording had never taken off in sales, although the score yielded one pop standard, “Once Upon a Time,” later recorded by dozens of artists from Frank Sinatra to Bob Dylan. (Half of the show’s production budget had come in the form of a loan against royalties from Columbia Records.) Despite the exertions of Hillard Elkins, there was no lucrative Hollywood sale.

  Blame there was to go around. Ray Bolger had been director Josh Logan’s choice. The seasoned director had insisted upon Bolger, even though Strouse had thought the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz might be badly miscast as a European Jewish professor with a Slavic accent. (Bolger was a Roman Catholic from Massachusetts.) Moreover, Bolger had been absent from Broadway for a decade. (“Why is Ray speaking Japanese?” Brooks whispered to Strouse when Bolger debuted his accent for them.) Bolger never really settled into the role. He was also full of himself and made impossible demands.

  The chemistry had never been right between Logan and the musical, the “All American” team came to believe. “Logan is a crazy lady,” Brooks complained to friends, alluding to the bouts of manic depression Logan had confessed to on talk shows. The Philadelphia previews attracted a slew of negative notices, and Logan behaved in “childlike” fashion as tensions rose, Strouse recalled, “in turn forceful, angry, and thoughtful.”

  Brooks and the Birdie boys had wrestled with eleventh-hour changes in Philadelphia before the Broadway opening. Tensions ran so high that they had nearly come to blows; at one point Brooks grabbed Strouse by the collar, raised a fist, and threatened, “If you don’t take that fucking song out of the show, I’m going to kill you!” “Not wishing to descend to his level,” Strouse recalled, “I replied coolly, ‘Yeah—you and who else?’” The fighting-mad Brooks backed off. But he also wrote like a street fighter who “keeps swinging wildly and wildly and wildly, and when he connects he knocks you out,” Strouse said later. There were knockout moments in his script but no fulfilling arc in the story line. “Mel Brooks had delusions of grandeur,” Logan remembered, “but he was so funny and so willing to turn anything into a comic situation that he was irresistible to work with. The trouble is, he would never sit down to write a playable second act . . . finally, in a moment of desperation, I called everybody together, and we all more or less dictated the act, using Mel’s general idea. We were happy with it but Mel never liked it. I had a simple solution. I told him to write another one, but he never got around to it.”

  The Broadway reviews targeted Brooks and his responsibility for weaknesses in the book. The actors “seem better than their material,” wrote Richard L. Coe in the Washington Post. “The Mel Brooks libretto,” according to Newsweek, “bites off much that it should eschew.” Brooks’s script was merely “serviceable,” complained Variety, with “flagrantly contrived and preposterous” plot twists. The script was “diffuse and heavy-handed,” Howard Taubman wrote in the New York Times. “I’m not sure whether it means to be sentimental, satirical, or simply rowdy, and it ends by being dreary.”

  The reception was not entirely adverse: there were enough admirers of “All American” to nominate the musical for two Tonys in 1962: Directing (Logan) and Lead Actor (Bolger). Yet the team’s dream of another Birdie-size hit was crushed. That particular brass ring would elude Brooks for decades. “We wanted to salute America and its opportunities,” the librettist told interviewers. But his book had never jelled.

  Chastened by two high-profile professional failures—with Jerry Lewis and with “All American”—Brooks would shift direction over the next few years. In television and film scripts, talk-show appearances and advertising jobs, he’d try accenting the Nice Mel, the warm and fuzzy side of his personality. The 2000 Year Old Man had showed the way to please a crowd. He’d endeavor to be as commercial as it was possible for him to be.

  Despite “All American”, 1962 proved to be one of his busiest years thus far as a writer. Brooks chased after numerous diverse projects, shifting from one to the next like a decathlon athlete rushing from track to field. Perhaps the overlapping events affected his score.

  Most of the jobs he stacked up were, not unlike “All American”, work for hire for producers whose options on story properties gave them ownership and control. In his mind Brooks always needed the jobs, the money, and the prominence of his name in credits. But it was also true that he usually needed other people’s stories as starting points.

  Having his own television series was one of Brooks’s most lusted after goals, right up there with creating a hit stage musical. Even as he appeared on Mike Wallace’s and David Susskind’s interview programs railing about the trend of insipid situation comedies that had supplanted the artistry of Sid Caesar on network television (“If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel [in the 1961–65 show of the same name starring Shirley Booth], I’d set her hair on fire”), he tried hard to cash in on that booming market.

  By late spring 1962, Brooks had formed a partnership with the producer Stanley Chase. Jewish, another child of Brooklyn, Chase had graduated from a different high school than Brooks had, though in the same class of 1944. The producer hung around with the group of show business lefties that included Stanley Prager, Jack Gilford, and Zero Mostel. (Chase would later produce the 1975 telefilm Fear on Trial about a seminal blacklisting incident.) Chase had produced noteworthy plays in the 1950s, including the long-running revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which had been an off-Broadway fixture from 1955 to 1961. These days Chase worked in television, where he packaged programming for syndication or outright network sale.

  Simultaneous with the closing of “All American” in May 1962, another musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—with music by Stephen Sondheim and a book cowritten by Larry Gelbart—opened on Broadway. The toga farce wowed critics and audiences and revived the future for Zero Mostel, who starred (along with Gilford) and reaped a Tony for playing an exuberant Roman slave who connives his way to freedom.

  One of the first projects Brooks worked on with Chase was intended to showcase their mutual friend, once blacklisted, now reborn. “The Zero Mostel Show” posited Mostel as a “super-janitor” of Greenwich Village apartments, a soulful building manager who dabbles in painting and music while neglecting tenants’ leaky sinks and defective lights. Brooks’s script for a pilot (credited to him alone) was precious to a fault, its sincerity and playfulness light-years from his later brand. A string of writers contributed revisions over time, but no network could be coaxed into underwriting a filmed pilot.

  The mercurial Mostel was never fully on board, eventually deciding that “The Zero Mostel Show” was “creatively worthless,” in the words of his biographer Jared Brown. A veritable cottage industry had sprung up around the flamboyant big man, cashing in on his newfound cachet. Mostel had offers for months ahead; plus he was going to re-create his Broadway triumph in the film version of Forum. Still, Brooks never gave up on Mostel, and time and again in the 1960s he built trust by doing little writing jobs for the actor.

  Equally precious was Brooks and Chase’s next project: an adaptation of The New Yorker cartoonist William Steig’s 1953 book Dreams of Glory and Other Drawings. It had long been Chase’s ambition to adapt the whimsical book into a film or TV series, and he and producing partner Richard Brill optioned the story rights from Steig in 1961.

  Dreams of Glory focused on a boy who lives a Walter Mitty–like existence. The boy has daydreams in which he becomes a sports hero, a fearless detective, and the first boy on the moon, achieving fame for his feats. Steig did not give the boy an age or name; probably Brooks came up with the moniker of Danny Baker, as his penchant for character names took a Gentile turn in this warm-and-fuzzy period. Brooks made Danny a twelve-year-old Brooklynite, the same age as he
was during the few years he had lived in Brighton Beach. Danny also lived near the ocean in Brooks’s story line, but the boy was not Jewish; he belonged to the WASP-y all-American Bakers—the kind of family unit that was a 1960s sitcom staple. Partly because of the boy-and-family setup, Inside Danny Baker, as the project was titled, had network potential above “The Zero Mostel Show.”

  Brooks got down to work on Inside Danny Baker after the July Fourth weekend, by which time his lawyer Alan U. Schwartz had ironed out a contract with advantageous clauses. Hillard Elkins was also involved in the packaging of the sitcom (his Birdie boys Charles Strouse and Lee Adams were writing the theme song). The Ashley-Steiner Agency still represented Brooks, but his changing agents over the years had been increasingly subordinated to the constant presence of “my Jewish lawyer,” as Brooks liked to introduce Schwartz. Schwartz oversaw his contracts, but Brooks oversaw his lawyer, and they met regularly to discuss business at the Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst offices on Madison Avenue.

  Brooks was his father’s son, with an abiding interest in legalities, and by now he could school Schwartz on the nuances of show business deals, with clauses that were almost as creative as comedy in his hands. Brooks asked for and got $7,500 for the pilot script for Inside Danny Baker, with an additional $400 royalty and $500 for consulting on each episode—paid to Crossbow Productions for “tax reasons,” in his words. Brooks insisted upon 40 percent of the net profits stemming from the series (with 60 percent flowing to Chase and Brill); along with standard expenses he also got language reimbursing his attorney fees and protecting his rights to non-Steig characters or material.