Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  But Bancroft was not really the clinging type, and she accepted Brooks’s quirks and peccadilloes. Those included his night-owl roaming around the West Village, which suited Brooks better as home turf than the Upper East Side, where it was harder to know what fancy apartment might provide him with a temporary haven. “Mel used to come by my apartment,” recalled agent, producer, and former Upper East Side neighbor Freddie Fields. “‘Hey, just dropped by to say hello.’ Six hours later, ‘Hey, listen, I gotta go.’”

  While Bancroft got her beauty sleep, Brooks roamed sleeplessly. And during those late-night rounds in the 1960s, his girlfriend was not always mentioned when Brooks flirted with the women he met or knew. Some were never sure of his intentions.

  On his rounds he might ring ladies’ doorbells “just to say hello.” A young, pretty talent agent who also lived in the Village—she had met Brooks when she worked for David Begelman at ICA—recalled that it was normal for Brooks to show up unannounced after midnight. He’d ask to use her bathroom. “I was not the only one,” she remembered. “It was an invitation of sorts. I showed him to the guest bathroom, I trust he took care of his business, and then I showed him to the door . . . all in good spirits, with lots of laughter. The invitation, if it was one, went begging.”

  Another person whose doorbell rang amid Brooks’s late-night rounds was the documentary filmmaker Ofra Bikel. Bikel had known Brooks since 1958, when both had been passengers on the ship’s crossing to London for Sid Caesar’s summer program. “[Brooks] was very flirty, always,” Bikel recalled. “The things he would tell you in a flirty way. There was nothing terrible about it, although of course there was unfunny stuff.” Bikel had kept in touch with Brooks, sometimes asking him for tickets to this or that show. He’d drop by her apartment, too, just to use the bathroom or say hello. Brooks was usually flirty when he stopped by, Bikel said. She thought it likely that he was hinting at a tryst. But he wasn’t her type, she gave no signals, and Brooks went away again.

  Brooks waited for four years after meeting Anne Bancroft before marrying the actress, he explained in subsequent interviews, because he had been living hand to mouth, having plunged from “$5,000 a show” writing for Sid Caesar to averaging “$85 a week” and scrounging over the “next five years.” He liked to say he did so many talk shows partly for the $300-plus fee he earned, for instance, for each Tonight Show. That half-truth fed a running gag in his talk-show or documentary-film turns, where he often interrupted the stream of questioning with “Hey, how much am I getting paid for this?!”

  By comparison Bancroft earned a reported $150,000 annually during the run of The Miracle Worker—years encompassing the play and film. Bancroft amassed savings, investments, and ownership of the Federal-style four-story town house she lived in at 260 West 11th Street. Brooks liked to say she was his “patroness,” paying the rent (then and later after marriage) and for some meals in the 1960s. Light and easy success was part of her charm.

  The exaggerations of $5,000 and $85 were vital for Brooks to dramatize his artistic struggle, although actually, except for summer vacations, he worked regularly and steadily and was in the first half of the 1960s often paid handsomely. His fees were typically channeled into Crossbow Productions, the money flowing back to him according to a regulated plan that enabled him to pay lower taxes and justified his grudging payment of child support. There were always per diems and travel allotments. And Brooks had a continuing stream of revenue from his 2000 Year Old Man sideline with Carl Reiner; their third LP, Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival, came out in early 1963.

  He also gambled repeatedly on stage and TV properties that belonged to the producers who hired him. He took such work for hire because the jobs promised pots of gold. But both “All American” and Nowhere to Go but Up ended badly, and Inside Danny Baker did not run for even one year on television, much less the ten Brooks had predicted. Despite the best efforts of Talent Associates, the William Steig series was a no-go by the end of 1962, turned down by all the networks.

  Not all of his hyperactivity was mercenary, however. In mid-1962, Brooks took a referral from Carl Reiner, who had narrated a short by the animator Ernest Pintoff called The Violinist, which was Oscar-nominated in 1959. Pintoff, a New Yorker they all knew from artist and show business circles, was planning “a spoof of the pseudo–art film” that might serve as a lead-in to the main attractions in art houses and other movie theaters. Pintoff needed a script, and Brooks hatched an idea for one as he sat in a movie house one day watching an experimental short by National Film Board of Canada animator Norman McLaren. The McLaren short was being shown before the feature, and Brooks overheard “an old immigrant man, mumbling to himself” a few rows back. “He was very unhappy,” Brooks recalled, “because he was waiting for a story line and he wasn’t getting one.”

  Brooks reimagined the 2000 Year Old Man as a grumpy old moviegoer watching “a fake Norman McLaren short,” in his words, critiquing the weird and incomprehensible cartoon in a mangled dialect. “Don’t let me see the images in advance, just give me a mike and let them assault me,” Brooks told Pintoff. Then, just like the spots he had winged to sell the Inside Danny Baker pilot—whose script also mocked modern art incidentally—“I said, ‘Roll ’em again,’ and I tried some different things and we picked out the best.”

  Brooks: What is it, a squiggle? It’s a fence. It’s a little fence. Nope, it’s moving. It’s a cockaroach. I’m looking at a cockaroach. I came to see a hot French picture with a little nakedness, what am I looking at here . . . ? This is cute, this is cute, this is nice . . . Vat da hell is this?

  One of the best investments of quick time and low money Brooks ever made was that one-off collaboration with Pintoff. The Critic was ready for its New York premiere by late May 1963, opening at the Sutton Theater on the Upper East Side ahead of a new British comedy starring Peter Sellers. United Artists acquired the animated short for national distribution, licensing it to US theaters. Not only did American audiences universally enjoy the cartoon (its four-minute brevity was a selling point), but actual critics also adored The Critic. (“Brooks’ harsh comments and strange noises are truly hilarious,” wrote Box Office. “The short itself is worth the price of admission,” said Back Stage.) Indeed, The Critic proved to be so popular that it was booked for months ahead, through Christmas in chains across the United States, billed in advertisements as an “Extra Added Hilarious Short Short.”

  Brooks’s contract made The Critic a Crossbow-Pintoff coproduction: technically the animated short was the first Mel Brooks film. When the annual Academy Awards show rolled around in April 1964, Anne Bancroft was on the dais in Hollywood for the first time, presenting the Best Actor award to Sidney Poitier. Earlier in the ceremony, however, Shirley MacLaine handed the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Cartoon), to Pintoff, whose brief speech thanked “my collaborator, the wonderful and talented Mel Brooks.”

  So far, post-Caesar, The Critic was Brooks’s most auspicious calling card.

  Anne Bancroft returned to the stage in late March 1963 as the star, billed above the title, of a new production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. It was the actress’s first Broadway appearance since The Miracle Worker two years before.

  A supporting role—albeit he was “terribly miscast,” in his words, as the distinctly unamusing chaplain—was being played by a twenty-nine-year-old former Milwaukeean named Gene Wilder. Brooks may not have made much headway on “Springtime for Hitler,” but the actor whose frizzy hair formed a halo around his beagle face captured his imagination. One night backstage during the three-month run of Mother Courage, Brooks buttonholed Wilder. “Anne Bancroft’s boyfriend,” as Wilder knew him, told the actor he was writing a script with a great comedy part in it for him. That took Wilder aback; he had been classically trained at HB Studio, where Bancroft herself had studied. Wilder did not yet think of himself as any kind of comedic performer.

  After Mother Courage closed, Brooks and Ba
ncroft invited Wilder to Fire Island for a weekend in late June. Bancroft had developed her own relationship with the summer colony and in early 1963 had purchased, for $28,000, an early house designed by the modernist architect Richard Meier. The big rectangular two-bedroom wood structure, constructed of precut cedar and Douglas fir panels, was situated at the ocean tip of East Walk in Lonelyville on the western coast of the island. It stood on stilts and faced the water. In time Bancroft and Brooks, who spent as much time as possible together in Lonelyville in the summers, added a second floor, shingled siding, and guest rooms.

  “There are no autos and few phones on Fire Island,” Bancroft told the press. “If I stayed home [West 11th] I couldn’t get any rest. I’ll do nothing for an entire month. Fire Island has the best beach I’ve ever seen. It is a narrow island with the bay [Great South Bay] on one side and the [Atlantic] ocean on the other. From our house you can see both.”

  Brooks met Wilder on the dock where the ferry passengers disembarked, and the two men went fishing off the surf together for about an hour. “After dinner,” the actor recalled, “Mel asked Anne and me to sit down, and then he began reading the first three scenes of ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ almost verbatim as they eventually appeared on-screen.”

  By mid-1963, the extraordinary success of The Critic had triggered Brooks’s first forays into another remunerative sideline—and occasional short form of comedy—movie trailers.

  Again Carl Reiner trailblazed for Brooks. Reiner had worked to Americanize an Italian picture called Arrivano i titani, a tongue-in-cheek sword-and-sandals picture directed by Duccio Tessari. With Reiner’s redubbed dialogue, Arrivano i titani was transformed into My Son, the Hero for release in the US market in the fall of 1963. United Artists, whose distribution arm also handled The Critic, wanted a funny teaser for the Tessari picture. Brooks took over from Reiner, extemporizing his verbiage over a highlights reel. The resulting two-minute trailer was so riotously funny that it overshadowed what it was intended to advertise. (Describing the on-screen hero dressed in loin-wear, Brooks narrates: “Look, he is wearing his sun-suit . . . it’s one of 27 sun-suits that he keeps in his closet . . . I wanted a girl, my wife wanted a boy, I think we both got lucky!”) “Audiences will be better entertained by the trailers than by the picture itself,” Variety predicted.

  My Son, the Hero led to similar chores for the Seven Arts production company, whose features were also distributed by United Artists. Late in 1963, Brooks created a series of offbeat radio and television spots touting the new “all-talkie” comedy Sunday in New York starring Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor. The spots imagined an interview with the grizzled director of Sunday in New York, played by Lou Jacobi, who reminisces about his box-office triumphs (their titles demonstrating Brooks’s knack for such toss-offs: “Hello, Cincinnati, Hello,” “The Sheriff of Warsaw,” “The Thing That Ate Boston”). Again the spots were so outside the box that they alienated part of the target audience. “Key exhibitors around the country are refusing to support [the spots] via coop advertising budgets,” Variety reported, deeming the plugs “too New Yorkish.”

  By then, however, Brooks had a toe firmly in the waters of New York advertising.

  Many of his bachelor nights in Manhattan were spent with a new bunch of friends, rounded up by Speed Vogel, who dined together on Chinese takeout in Vogel’s loft in Chelsea or at Chinatown restaurants. As Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) says in My Favorite Year, “Jews know two things—suffering and where to find great Chinese food.”

  Mostly Brooklynites and Fire Islanders, the men formed what they dubbed “The Gourmet Club.” Besides Vogel and Brooks the group included novelists George Mandel, a pioneering Beat writer; Joseph Heller, whose Catch-22 made him a literary star in 1961; and Mario Puzo, whose best-selling The Godfather was a few years down the road. Often joining them were the Club Caesar alumnus Joseph Stein, whose Fiddler on the Roof starring Zero Mostel would take Broadway by storm in 1964; diamond dealer Julius Green; artist and illustrator Ngoot Lee; and Broadway and ballet composer Hershy Kay.

  “About once a week, sometimes more,” the Gourmet Club assembled for wide-ranging banter over a gluttonous feast, wrote Heller and Vogel in No Laughing Matter.

  Heller was a special thorn in Brooks’s side, frowning whenever he mentioned his work-for-hire assignments. “Don’t you really want to write?” the author challenged him. “Don’t you want to use your narrative skills? Don’t you want to say something about the arc of humanity? You’re too good to just end up putting jokes on the screen!”

  A few select personages were intermittent or honorary members. Carl Reiner boasted a lifetime pass to the club after he stopped by one time, waved away a menu, and summoned the chef to the table, telling him just to serve the dishes he was proudest of.

  Among the strict rules: “No women.” One night Anne Bancroft, who discovered a note Brooks had scribbled with the night’s designated restaurant address, violated the rule by dropping by unannounced. “It was as if a blanket had descended on the gathering,” the actress told Kenneth Tynan. “Dead silence. Faces falling.” The group treated her with elaborate courtesy for as long as she stayed. She never went again.

  Brooks often ended up at his lawyer Alan U. Schwartz’s offices on Madison Avenue for lunch, just “to talk about the future,” i.e., Brooks’s future. He’d bring his regular cream cheese and walnut sandwich and cup of tea from the Chock Full o’Nuts coffee shop.

  Schwartz had an illustrious list of writers for clients, including Joseph Heller and playwrights Anthony Shaffer and Tom Stoppard. “Mel is as intelligent as any of them,” the attorney explained once. “He must have a fantastic I.Q. But sometimes if he’s with playwrights or novelists, he feels he has to prove he’s a serious literary person. When he met Shaffer, for instance, he kept saying things like ‘pari passu’ and ‘ipso facto.’”

  In rare interviews over the years Schwartz echoed Brooks’s recurrent talking points about that hard-luck period in the mid-1960s. “He had no money—zero,” in Schwartz’s words. “Our firm carried him for a long time; he couldn’t pay his bills.” Schwartz viewed his estimable client as a former “street kid” with a chip on his shoulder, the attorney explained to Saturday Review in 1983, a “‘little Jew’ mentality about the way the big WASP world feels about him.” Brooks had “a very realistic view of the way the world behaves,” he said. “My impression was that he felt rejected, but expected that.

  “He’d sit there and talk about the future,” Brooks’s lawyer recollected. “Included in the future was a very serious idea he had for the great comic stage play called ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ which would show through comedy what the Nazis were really like.”

  Still, no matter how much he talked about it, Brooks had not yet dug deep into “Springtime for Hitler,” and besides advertisements and The Critic in 1963 he raked in easier money penning jokes and vignettes for Andy Williams, The Revlon Revue, The U.S. Steel Hour, other comedians’ recordings, and Johnny Carson’s Timex specials.

  In late 1963 or early 1964, however, he embarked on a new project that was different from anything he had ever tried before; he decided to write an original full-length script on “spec,” without any advance contract from a producer. Even more unusual, the on-spec script amounted to a thinly veiled autobiographical story about Brooks’s own first marriage; it was a romantic comedy intended to entice the commitment of a mainstream star such as Rock Hudson, one of Marvin Schwartz’s former clients.

  Along with Anne Bancroft came many new friends and potential collaborators, including a bright bulb named Martin Charnin, who had worked with the actress on television shows. Not quite thirty, tall, gangly, long-haired, and always dressed to the fashionable hilt, a Mutt to Brooks’s half-pint Jeff, the Bronx-born Charnin had played Big Deal, one of the Jets gang in the original cast of West Side Story, reprising the role for more than a thousand performances; and he had understudied Dick Van Dyke in the short-lived Broadway revue The Girls Against the B
oys. Now a songwriter for Broadway musicals and television, Charnin socialized with Bancroft and Brooks, who were his Greenwich Village neighbors. Often at their dinner parties, Charnin recalled, the guests would play board games or marathon sessions of Charades that would descend into madness à la the “sed-a-give!” guessing game in Young Frankenstein. “I’d always beat [Brooks],” Charnin remembered. “And he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t tolerate defeat.”

  One night Brooks asked Charnin if he cared to collaborate on a script with him. At first it was just a title that was dancing inside Brooks’s head—a one-liner he tossed out: “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.” “Mel always talked about writing or doing something,” Charnin recalled. “I don’t think I have ever spent more than five minutes with Mel that were not spent in him being on or performing in some way or other.”

  They started talking over scenes, meeting at Charnin’s place—never at Bancroft’s. Very soon it became obvious to Charnin that this was a semiautobiographical story revolving around Brooks’s failed marriage to Florence Baum. The autobiographical aspect was merely implicit, however; Brooks never acknowledged it directly. “He wasn’t necessarily forthcoming in terms of making the comparison as we were working,” Charnin recalled. (Playboy got no further, asking him in 1975 if the script was based on “personal experiences.” Brooks replied sardonically, “No, it’s based on a very important conversation I overheard while waiting for a bus at the Dixie Hotel Terminal.”)

  Why did Brooks even need a collaborator, especially on a script that was semiautobiographical? “Mel likes to bounce things off people,” explained Charnin. “In all of the material that he’s done, he’s always needed a collaborator who listens and maybe types better than he did . . . . All of his scripts are dual credits. I doubt strenuously that he ever sat down and just did something himself without the Tommy Meehan or Ronny Graham or whoever happened to be the person of flavor on that particular project.”