Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  After the deal was signed, Brooks worked closely with Chase over the summer. Inside Danny Baker picked up momentum in August, when Talent Associates, David Susskind’s company, took the project over from the Frederick W. Ziv Company. Ziv was a prolific syndicator, but Talent Associates preferred to gamble on a network slot. Before too long, however, Brooks found himself tempted by another irresistible project dangled before him, and, as was his established pattern, he began to divide his time and attention.

  Regardless of his recent Broadway misfire, Brooks found himself in sudden demand as a “script doctor” for other stage musicals with book problems, the producers hoping for some of the knockout punches (or “impish moments,” as John Chapman of the New York Daily News had described the highlights of “All American”) he was capable of delivering.

  In the early fall of 1962, one such Broadway-bound enterprise, called Nowhere to Go but Up, was going nowhere but down in its Philadelphia previews. Originally called “Izzy and Moe,” the James Lipton–Sol Berkowitz musical recounted the misadventures of two comically bumbling federal agents during the Prohibition era. Estimable talents were involved in the show: the choreographer was Michael Bennett, the future mastermind of A Chorus Line; the director was Sidney Lumet, respected for his film and television work; the seasoned producer was Kermit Bloomgarden. The large cast featured Tom Bosley, Martin Balsam, and Dorothy Loudon in her Broadway debut.

  The Philadelphia critics and the producer, too, saw defects in the libretto by Lipton (the future host of cable television’s Inside the Actors Studio). By mid-October, after receiving $3,500 as his two-week minimum salary along with first-class per diems, with the guaranteed credit of “Additional Material by Mel Brooks” and assurances of 1.5 percent of the weekly gross of all future incarnations of the show (those royalties drawn from Lipton’s contractual share), Brooks began to shuttle between meetings and deadlines on Inside Danny Baker for TV and Nowhere to Go but Up for Broadway.

  Brooks was expected to inject laughs into feeble scenes and bulk up the proverbially weak third act. According to Bloomgarden, writing to investors afterward, Brooks hit his marks, proving to be “a very fine comedy writer” who had “helped the show enormously but apparently not enough.” Lumet foresaw the looming disaster and quit the musical a week before its Broadway opening in the second week of November. Brooks took over the final rehearsals, but any eleventh-hour contribution he may have made to the musical—writing or directing—was not reflected in the playbill, which omitted his name. Lucky for him, Brooks also went unmentioned in the “very bad” reviews, in Bloomgarden’s words, that shuttered the musical after only one week of performances. Speaking for the consensus, Howard Taubman in the New York Times pilloried Nowhere to Go but Up as “a dull-witted comic strip” and cited the laugh line “No man is a Coney Island”—vintage Brooks—as among its “higher flights of sententiousness.”

  Nowhere to Go but Up was Brooks’s third Broadway letdown in a row, counting Shinbone Alley, each of them ushered to their death by a negative New York Times review. But he got something besides money for his pains. Bloomgarden agreed to read some pages of “Springtime for Hitler,” and he told Brooks: It’s not a play, Mel, it’s a film.

  The final revised teleplay of Inside Danny Baker was stamped November 16, 1962, the same week Nowhere to Go but Up opened and closed. Adapting William Steig’s children’s book into a television show had been Stanley Chase’s pipe dream, and the earliest publicity said the series was based “on an idea created by Stanley Chase.” Even with Brooks on board, the producer expected to see “Conceived by Stanley Chase” on the screen, standing alone, its size and typeface equaling the final wording of Brooks’s credit. The size and sequence of the names were of supreme importance to Brooks, however, and he understood how they could lead to long-term rewards and distinctions. He insisted upon his own screen card as creator and a separate credit as cowriter of each episode.

  Brooks’s lawyer was adamant about those demands, and the arguments wore Chase down. He was not fixated on a future as a writer. If Brooks was happy, that was the important thing. Chase did not appreciate being totally eclipsed, however, and he wholly disposed of his interest in the series, selling his share of future profits back to his partner Richard Brill. Brooks ended up with sole credit on the pilot script; Chase was left with “Created by Mel Brooks and Stanley Chase”—Brooks first—in the closing scroll.

  The script Brooks wrote saw Danny Baker and a friend creating a work of modern art, which they dub “Harry,” by splashing paint all over the family Ping-Pong table. The boys trade “Harry” for a skiff to pursue their dreams of boating. Danny’s dentist-father scolds him for ruining the Ping-Pong table. Danny daydreams about starving himself for art, dying as he paints his last masterpiece, as his father begs forgiveness.

  All along, Brooks’s name was key to the appeal of Inside Danny Baker for David Susskind, who belonged to Brooks’s fan club. Talent Associates staff producer Robert Alan Aurthur supervised the filming of the pilot, with Roger Mobley as Danny and Arthur Hiller behind the camera, in late November. Brooks was not involved, although he urged the producer to use the borough locations that lent authenticity to the trial episode.

  Aurthur, a veteran scenarist of live television, applied the final touches to Brooks’s script, including casting Whitey Ford as the “guest star in a uniform” who appears in Danny’s dying daydream, springing from a crowd to ask for the boy’s autograph. “Somebody else’s idea,” Brooks, not a Yankees fan foremost, admitted in one interview. “A great idea—I would have said [New York Giants star] Mel Ott.”

  Brooks did not leave Danny Baker behind entirely. Susskind had learned to value Brooks’s salesmanship, too, and Talent Associates called upon his expertise in that capacity one week before Christmas. The writer was filmed for a spot that Talent Associates could show to ABC-TV executive Daniel Melnick, who was considering the series for a prime-time slot. Brooks posed at a desk with his dread enemy—the typewriter—smoking a pipe and spieling in the manner of a writer floating his ideas into the camera.

  “What can I tell you?” Brooks asked, warming up on the first take. “I’m a high-priced writer. I write it. How bad can it be? Will you buy it? Buy it already! Son of a bitch!”

  Chuckling to himself, Brooks broke off, staring at the lens. “All right,” he addressed the cameraman, “that’s the first one. Now we’ll try a new approach. Do you want to keep rolling, or do you want to make with sticks [the slate] again to make it legal? . . .”

  Voice: “We’ll keep rolling.”

  It took another half-dozen takes before they ended up with the version that worked best: “I’m Mel Brooks . . . and I don’t write half-hour situation comedies . . . I write for Sid Caesar, and if you could remember, we did the Show of Shows and it ran for ten years.

  “So when I write for television it runs ten years.”

  In fact, Brooks was still closely attached to Sid Caesar, even in superbusy 1962. For the first time in three years, Caesar was back on ABC-TV in the fall, starring in a series of half-hour specials on Sunday nights; sponsored by Dutch Masters cigars, the series was called As Caesar Sees It. The episodes were hit or miss (“Sid Caesar’s return was not triumphant,” Variety ho-hummed), and part of the problem was the sketches, which included town clocks gone haywire, man-on-the-street interviews, and silent-movie spoofs of the sort Caesar had done for ages. More than one critic found the specials stale.

  There was no Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, or Howard Morris. Part of the hook was all the fresh faces from off-Broadway clubs and theaters. The Club Caesar members from Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour were truant, too—except for Brooks, who not only contributed to the half-dozen episodes scattered over the 1962–63 season but now rose, in Mel Tolkin’s absence, to head writer. He supervised As Caesar Sees It scripts at the same time as he prepared Inside Danny Baker and doctored Nowhere to Go but Up.

  Although critics hurled brickbats at As Caesar S
ees It, the star still displayed his old pizzazz, and As Caesar Sees It was invited back for the 1963–64 season, when it would be telecast on Tuesday nights, alternating with another variety series starring the comedienne-singer Edie Adams. The successor version was renamed The Sid Caesar Show. As reported in the New York Times, when Greg Garrison, who had worked on Your Show of Shows, was installed as producer for the fall, he forced Brooks’s departure. The veteran humorist Goodman Ace, who had written for Milton Berle, took over as head writer, reinforced by a new staff that included the battle-scarred Club Caesar members Tony Webster and Selma Diamond. Garrison promised “a new look” for The Sid Caesar Show.

  The new look paid off briefly (“The comedy is more deft [and] the routines more inspired,” Variety reported), but the show lasted only thirteen episodes before being axed.

  Of all the Club Caesar writers, Brooks had the hardest time weaning himself from Caesar. Records indicate that he earned $71,000 in 1956, working almost exclusively for Caesar, while making just a few hundred dollars in freelance work. In 1957, it was $45,000 coming his way from Caesar out of Brooks’s $60,000 total income. In 1958, he drew $36,000 from work for Caesar, out of $55,000. In 1959, it was $41,000 out of $49,000.

  Caesar rang the dinner bell for Brooks. But although Caesar continued to hike Brooks’s salary every year, there was increasingly less work. Only two Caesar specials were broadcast in the 1960 fiscal year, with Brooks earning just $15,000. That was the first year that other specials and the Jerry Lewis gig represented the bulk of his income.

  Some of the other Club Caesar writers were already ringing Big Ben. They had taken bigger chances with their careers after the last club-written Caesar specials of the late 1950s. Foremost among them, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Carl Reiner mingled their comedy projects with the romance and sentiment Brooks had trouble mustering.

  Simon’s first Broadway play was Come Blow Your Horn, which opened in 1961 and was on its way to becoming a vehicle for Frank Sinatra in Hollywood. Simon also wrote the libretto for Little Me, which opened in the fall of 1962 and starred Caesar himself, even as the comedian continued to appear in his TV specials. At the 1963 Tony Awards, Little Me vied for Best Musical against A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The latter won the coveted top prize, and cowriter Larry Gelbart (who shared the libretto credit with Burt Shevelove), was also doing well independently of Caesar. He had written several telefilms and two features: the Doris Day comedy The Thrill of It All with Carl Reiner as his collaborator and The Notorious Landlady with Blake Edwards.

  Reiner, while continuing to act in films and on television, was just about to have his first novel, Enter Laughing, adapted for Broadway (by Joseph Stein, another Club Caesar veteran). Where Reiner was really riding high was in prime time, where the multitalent had begun to collect multiple Emmys for The Dick Van Dyke Show, the hit weekly series that Reiner created, wrote, and acted in, which was lodged in Nielsen’s top ten.

  Nineteen sixty-two was an abortive year on paper for Brooks, with one marked exception.

  His career was profoundly affected by one television appearance on Monday, October 1, at 11:15 p.m. EST. More important than Inside Danny Baker, Nowhere to Go but Up, and all the year’s Sid Caesar specials was the premiere of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Along with Rudy Vallee, Joan Crawford, and Tony Bennett, all better known to audiences than he, Brooks was a guest on NBC’s new late-night talk show.

  The kinescope of the first broadcast of The Tonight Show (as it became known) has been lost, and it might have been hard for a novice to stand out in that crowd. Variety felt that Brooks “talked a lot without making too much headway,” and Jack Gould in the New York Times opined, “Mel Brooks went his strained way.” In Hollywood, where Brooks was still a relative nonentity and the broadcast was delayed one day from the East Coast, his presence went unmentioned in the Los Angeles Times. Within a few years, however, that same newspaper would recommend The Tonight Show broadcasts repeatedly in its pages, if only because Brooks was a scheduled guest. He was “funny without uttering a word” and guaranteed to “brighten” the late-night show, the paper attested.

  Carson competed with Carl Reiner for always seeing Brooks in a sympathetic light and laughing hardest at his jokes. The same age as Brooks, taller and dapper, thoroughly Gentile with midwestern roots, Carson had built a liking and mutual respect for Brooks since their first acquaintance. When Carson enjoyed the guests on his show, the night was always doubly enjoyable. He would watch Brooks “like a pup watching you for a cookie,” Brooks recalled once. “Sometimes if I was really good, he’d lose it.”

  After the premiere, Brooks became one of Carson’s recurrent guests (several of his many stints over the ensuing decades are featured on The Incredible Mel Brooks box set, and others can be found on YouTube). Brooks honed his salesmanship and the image-conscious side of his persona on The Tonight Show, telling warm, humorous anecdotes about his career and delivering favorite comedy bits such as (more than once) impersonating an Indian ichthyologist or imitating Frank Sinatra (recurrently) coolly smoking an imaginary cigarette while crooning “America the Beautiful” (“. . . above the Tutti-Frutti plain . . .”). Early on—not on the maiden show—Brooks launched a decades-long running gag with Carson’s “straight man,” Ed McMahon: after mistakenly sipping from McMahon’s coffee mug, he’d spit the liquid out, staring at McMahon in horror with his expression hinting at booze. “Gentiles! They’ll drink anything!” he’d exclaim.

  Carson’s show catapulted Brooks into the first echelon of talk-and game-show guests in the 1960s, appearances that helped solidify his skills as a comedian and boost his recognition with the public. He had earlier attracted bookings for the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner, but in the wake of the first Tonight Show he increasingly materialized without his straight-man friend. Whether aired in the afternoon or late at night (it was never too late at night for Brooks), he began showing up on (a partial list) The Jack Paar Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Steve Allen Show, The Irv Kupcinet Show, The Les Crane Show, The All-Star Comedy Hour, The Arlene Francis Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Williams Show, and Jeopardy!

  He appeared often on Hollywood Palace from 1964 to 1967, recurrently on The Celebrity Game (a comedy quiz show hosted by Reiner) in 1964–1965, and several times on The Face Is Familiar, a summer replacement in 1966. Though certain variety shows and serious talk shows offered wider “exposure,” in Brooks’s parlance, others paid onetime sums ranging from $250 for The Jack Paar Show to $3,750 for The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Nineteen sixty-two was also a hectic year personally for Brooks. Despite their ongoing relationship, he was still hedging his bets with Anne Bancroft, or so it seemed to some friends.

  Brooks stayed attentive to his ex-wife and family, often stopping by to see Florence Baum Brooks Dunay (as she was now known) and their three young children—Steffi, Nicky, and Eddie—at the Dunays’ apartment on Second Avenue near 61st Street. He tried to stop by when Florence’s current husband, Edward Dunay, was not home. Brooks and Dunay had a patent dislike for each other, aggravated by the fact that Brooks’s child support payments were chronically overdue or skipped entirely; he would miss payments, claiming “The check is in the mail.” (In today’s vernacular he might be called a “deadbeat dad.”) The many tense standoffs between Brooks and the tall, handsome stockbroker, who was now a stand-in father to Brooks’s children, often ended with the shorter man slinking away.

  When alone with his ex-wife, Brooks sometimes wondered aloud forlornly if it was too late to resuscitate their marriage. He gave up forever when Florence became pregnant in the fall of 1962, delivering her fourth child, Peter Dunay, in April 1963.

  To the outside world, it appeared that Brooks was crazy in love with Bancroft. The couple took long walks together and were spotted at clubs and cafés. Many nights the two stayed “home”—Bancroft’s Greenwich Village brownstone—playing board games such as “Careers” wit
h friends like actor Jerry Orbach and his wife, actress Marta Curro.

  Bancroft was treading water in her career, taking Actors Studio classes and appearing on TV game shows, as she searched for a worthwhile Broadway vehicle that might compare to The Miracle Worker. The actress had spent months in 1961 reprising her signature role as Anne Sullivan, the teacher of the deaf-blind Helen Keller, in the screen version of The Miracle Worker, which arrived in New York in late May 1962, around the same time weak reviews and ticket sales were killing “All American”. Bancroft had better luck with the critics, who praised her overwhelmingly; as Anne Sullivan, Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, Bancroft brought Helen Keller’s mentor to life, revealing “a wondrous woman with great humor and compassion as well as athletic skill.” She was propelled to a dark-horse Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

  On April 8, 1963, Brooks sat with Bancroft in her brownstone, watching the televised Academy Awards. Tears streamed down Bancroft’s face as her name was read out for Best Actress, surprisingly winning over the year’s strong competition, which included two aging Hollywood thoroughbreds, Bette Davis for her performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Katharine Hepburn for Long Day’s Journey into Night.

  The Brooks-Bancroft romance had been firmly cemented in the press by then, even if the actress’s New York celebrity at that point easily overshadowed Brooks’s. (The New York Journal-American reported her Oscar-night companion as “boyfriend . . . Mel Blanc”—the voice actor for numerous cartoon characters including Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig.) When interviewers asked about marriage, both shrugged. “When two people have both had bad marriages, they’re inclined to move slowly,” Bancroft told a columnist. “Look, I’ve got love. That’s enough, isn’t it? What else would you want out of life?”

  Behind the scenes some skeptics believed that Brooks deliberately moved in slow motion while Bancroft kept her eyes on the prize and nursed the relationship along. She was known to haunt “All American” run-throughs, lingering in the theater, with Brooks sometimes having to dodge out a side door rather than leave arm in arm with her.