Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  That said, Brooks was the “driver” of the project. “I contributed a lot,” Charnin said. “I edited a lot of what was ultimately written. I came up with a lot of structural ideas, but basically the entire thing was really a ‘Mel project.’ I don’t even think my credit on the front page of the screenplay is a full credit. If memory serves, it says with Martin Charnin . . . . Mel was not in any way, shape, or form above taking all the credit when he could. But point in fact, a lot of the stuff that ended up on the page was from Mel.”

  “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” evolved over a span of months into a sweet-natured romantic farce that might be suitable for Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It also had a major role tailored for a real-life media celebrity: the broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

  The plot revolved around the deteriorating marriage of Larry, the Brooks character, and Pat, the Florence Baum character (with the “Larry” from Gelbart and the “Pat” from Mrs. Gelbart). A fashion model and fitness buff, Pat hogs the couple’s marital bed, leaving Larry desperately horny and crouched miserably to the side. The Mrs. fills their medicine cabinet with jars of nail polish and their closets with expensive clothing.

  Larry is an evening news anchor who suffers from insomnia, so he watches a lot of late-night submarine movies. His unhappy marriage is turning him into an angry man, which affects his on-camera performance. (His boss, Walter Cronkite, tells Larry he makes the news sound too much as though he’s reading a will.) Larry’s dentist friend Lou tells him he has ruined his love for Pat by marrying her; the only thing men and women need each other for is sex, which goes rotten in a marriage. Their sex isn’t rotten, it’s nonexistent, Larry says. He wonders if maybe he ought to rape his wife. The answer, Lou advises, is cheating.

  Friends’ attempts to counsel the marriage fail calamitously. Larry and Pat separate, and Pat obtains a quickie divorce in Mexico. Larry goes haywire during a broadcast, and high alimony forces him into sleeping on park benches and at his office.

  In order to reduce his alimony Larry advertises Pat’s availability to eligible bachelors, whose names he has itemized in a little black book. Hoping to score caviar at a big charity dinner, Larry runs into Pat, who has had too much to drink and strips on the charity catwalk just to prove she’s a sexpot. The crowd goes wild. Larry, furious, carries her offstage, yelling “No wife of mine is going to make a spectacle of herself!”

  Pat goes to London. Larry wangles an assignment from Cronkite and follows her, disguising himself as a wealthy Englishman with an eye patch and false beard. In disguise Larry woos and marries Pat, thus ending his onerous alimony, after which he plans to fake his death on board the Queen Elizabeth, which is ferrying the newlyweds back to America.

  However, his disguise hasn’t really fooled Pat, who is touched by his efforts and begins to fall in love with him anew. Pacing the deck, feeling guilty, Larry is debating whether to confess everything when he is suddenly blown overboard and goes missing. The crestfallen Pat thinks Larry has abandoned her because he got what he wanted: no alimony.

  Until, back in her New York apartment with friends consoling her, the doorbell rings. It’s Larry, who has been picked up floating in New York Harbor. They fall into each other’s arms: HAPPY ENDING, the script reads. “It’s like the ending of a movie.”

  Was it fun writing “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” with the madcap Brooks? “No,” explained Charnin, “not fun. It was fun to be with Mel, it was not fun to write with Mel. It was fun to be in stitches seventy-five percent of the time because he was ad-libbing jokes and one-liners and ideas, and he would surprise you with a choice phrase or word at a given moment. But you didn’t come away with any sense of having had a good time.

  “Comedians are in their own way insufferable, because they cannot stop being comedians. They cannot stop consistently making jokes, telling jokes, making everything funny. And to calm them down is quite a task.”

  All along it was possible that “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” might become a stage play rather than a movie—that was up to Brooks. Finding a producer? That was also up to Brooks.

  In early 1964, Brooks circled back to David Susskind with another impressive appearance on Open End—this time discussing components of humor on a panel that included comedians Bill Cosby and Nipsey Russell. A short time later the producer Daniel Melnick phoned him from Talent Associates, where he was now ensconced as Susskind’s partner.

  Although no network had picked up Inside Danny Baker, Brooks’s unsold pilot was warmly regarded inside Susskind’s company, and Melnick had another series he was packaging on behalf of Talent Associates for ABC-TV, for which the network had put up some development money. Melnick needed a comedy writer who could bring it home.

  In fact, “the concept, lead character and format” of what became Get Smart “were exposed to several writers,” according to Talent Associates executive Kirk Honeystein, “before Mel or Buck [Henry] ever became involved.” The early candidates declined.

  Brooks was more amenable because he was more available. Melnick first met with the writer at Talent Associates’ Madison Avenue offices in late March and pitched Brooks his idea for a “super-spy satire series” parodying the spy/secret agent genre. “What are the two biggest movies in the world today?” Melnick mused aloud. “James Bond and Inspector Clouseau [the bumbling French sleuth of The Pink Panther]. Get my point?” Indeed, Talent Associates’ first publicity likened its lead character to “a bumbling international spy, in the fashion of the Peter Sellers role in Pink Panther.” Similar spy/secret agent television shows and movies—not all of them comedic—were enjoying a boom because of America’s preoccupation with the Soviet menace during the Cold War.

  Brooks said he always worked best with a collaborator. Fine: Melnick had expected that. Brooks said he would seek out a compatible cowriter and pay him or her through his Crossbow company, thereby making the collaborator his employee and answerable to Brooks, the senior writer. Again Melnick said fine.

  A few weeks went by, however, with Brooks unable to fill the slot. He tried to recruit Lucille Kallen, whose novel Outside There, Somewhere, a prefeminist comedy revolving around a downtrodden housewife who finds new life as a television producer, had just been published. Anne Bancroft was encouraged to read Outside There, Somewhere, and Kallen was likewise encouraged to think of adapting her fiction into a Broadway play that would star Bancroft as the housewife turned TV producer. It was real enough for the New York Times to announce a stage production on the horizon for 1965. Kallen trekked from the Hudson River town where she lived to meet Bancroft for the first time.

  At the Bancroft residence on West 11th Street, where Brooks was also living, Kallen greeted the writer, whom she had seen only infrequently and glancingly since The Imogene Coca Show ten years earlier. Bancroft, whom Kallen admired, was warm and welcoming, while Brooks, who said he was under the weather, acted somewhat lordly and above it all. Kallen remembered afterward that it was “sort of as though a younger brother of mine married the Queen of England,” she told William Holtzman.

  Kallen declined to contribute to the superspy spoof, and the Broadway adaptation of Outside There, Somewhere never eventuated. Soon Melnick got nervous about time passing; he called Brooks in and said they had to get going. The producer showed Brooks a list of writers acceptable to Talent Associates with Buck Henry’s name on the list.

  Brooks said yes to Henry, whom he knew only in passing. A Jewish New Yorker, Buck Henry was born Buck Henry Zuckerman in 1930. Short and bespectacled, Henry may have lagged behind Brooks in his career, but his reputation as a laconic wit was growing. He had attended Dartmouth College, where he had worked on the humor magazine, and after graduation he had crafted an elaborate hoax, for several years pretending to be president of a nonexistent Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, appearing as a guest on national television programs such as Today. More recently he had written for Steve Allen and That Was the Week That Was, a news satire derived from a successful BBC m
odel. His first motion picture, The Troublemaker, scripted with its director, the improvisational troupe leader Theodore J. Flicker, was just about to be released.

  Although the idea for the series had originated in-house, Talent Associates agreed to a credit of “Created by Mel Brooks” in its April 13, 1964, deal memo. Buck Henry’s credit would be determined later, but the company saw Brooks as the more experienced and reputable writer. The first publicity for the series mentioned only Brooks, identifying him, in fact, as the planned “writer-producer” of the series. His bargaining position was strengthened when, even as the deal memo was being crafted, The Critic won its Oscar.

  The deal memo hedged on making Brooks a producer of the series, instead offering him a generous consultancy. But his tentative terms, overseen by Alan U. Schwartz, gave him other edges, including escalations for residuals (up to $2,000 per episode in the third year), network reruns (from 50 percent of initial residuals down to 25 percent by the sixth and subsequent reruns), and syndication earnings ($250 per run around the world). Moreover, Brooks was guaranteed up to 25 percent participation in any postnetwork profits. While Brooks agreed to a $7,500 salary for developing the pilot, Henry, less famous and saddled with less effective representation, received $3,500 along with diminished royalties ($300 per episode over the run) and reduced postnetwork payments.

  Susskind’s company had brought Henry into the equation, so the second writer went under contract to Talent Associates instead of Crossbow Productions. The exact credits and terms—the split of future monies—would be nailed into place somewhere down the road, according to the deal memo.

  The contractual fine points were fluid when, in mid-April, Brooks and Henry launched daily meetings at Talent Associates’ offices. The two writers were given an office with chairs, desks, and typewriters. Melnick intermittently joined their work sessions, supplying the overview and company prerequisites: for example, the series with the working title of “Super Spy” ought to feature a beautiful girl agent, à la the James Bond girls.

  Another person sometimes joining the sessions, though rarely mentioned in accounts, was Brooks’s friend Alfa-Betty Olsen. Olsen was now an assistant to the Broadway producer Arthur Cantor. Brooks asked her if she would help with the new series’s pilot script, manning the typewriter again. “Yes I could,” Olsen recalled. “I would love to. I left Arthur.”

  Talent Associates boasted a pool table on its premises, and at first Brooks and Henry spent a lot of time playing pool and kibitzing. Susskind liked to join the pool games. “We were completely intimidated when he came into the room, and he was a crappy pool player and he beat us every time,” recalled Henry. “I could have beaten him, but he was the boss,” insisted Brooks. Actor Peter Falk, who was involved in various company projects, also popped in now and then and was included in the pool games.

  “[The script] took us a long time to write,” remembered Henry, “because we’re both lazy and it’s way more fun to talk about it than actually putting it down on paper.”

  Olsen was their typist as the work began in earnest in late April. Soon they had about a dozen pages. They couldn’t decide on a name for the superspy, called “Bond” in the first synopsis, but they sketched in a “girl spy” who used knitting needles and a ball of wool to send telegraphic messages. They also proposed a “bumbling spy dog.”

  Melnick asked for a big tease opening that, each week, would proclaim the show’s comic sensibility. Often a contrarian for contrarian’s sake, Brooks argued against “the big joke opening” at one late April meeting. He preferred a more rarefied approach, according to production notes: “You can’t do one laugh after another. Get more tension. Feels a level of reality must be retained like [Dr.] Strangelove [Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film starring Peter Sellers]. It should look like an adventure series, i.e., real bomber pilot as in Strangelove.”

  Everyone else opposed the Kubrick-type reality approach, and the series would ultimately offer no pretense of reality, with big teases the standard opening. The concept continued to evolve after Melnick, Brooks, and Henry took a trip to Boston to refresh their creativity. Many names were proposed for the super-spy—including Lance, Dagger, and Bounty Hunter—before Brooks came up with “Smart,” first Raymond Smart, later amended to Maxwell Smart. Maxwell, Brooks explained in later interviews, was derived from Max, his father’s name, the same as Max Bialystock in The Producers. The title was Brooks’s; Melnick hated it at first because he thought it suggested a game show.

  Which of the writers conceived of some of the famous running gags of Get Smart? Brooks and Henry hotly debated their provenance over the years. Brooks the cat lover believed he had conceived of the dopey spy-dog, Fang. Henry, informing Brooks in a rare joint interview years later that “I’ve got a much better memory than you,” insisted that he devised the cone of silence while Brooks had dreamed up the shoe phone. (In his interview for the earlier Get Smart box set, Brooks had glibly taken credit for both.)

  Topping each other with glee, the writers finished the first draft in May. The key characters were in place: the bumbling Secret Agent 86, aka Maxwell Smart; his beautiful sidekick, Agent 99; and the infinitely perturbable chief of CONTROL, the ultrasecret government agency that battles the evil personified by archrival KAOS. Get Smart’s pilot script also introduced the supervillain that would arrive to dominate each individual episode: Brooks named the first one Mr. Big and suggested he be played by a midget.

  A daily presence at Talent Associates for weeks leading into the summer, Brooks also brainstormed an idea for his own TV series, which he hoped would follow in the successful wake of Get Smart. As usual he had a cowriter, paid by Crossbow: Art Baer, a veteran who had scripted for Victor Borge, Perry Como, and Car 54, Where Are You?

  For this Brooks-only project, a family-friendly sitcom called “Triplets” that was more like Inside Danny Baker than Get Smart, Brooks imagined a comedy series revolving around high-earning young-married professionals who are overwhelmed by their new baby triplets. The couple hires a middle-aged dragon lady as their nanny (“think Hazel or Thelma Ritter,” Brooks said), who assumes dictatorial command of the household.

  The synopsis of “Triplets” promised “every familiar element to make it successful” and “good basic HUMAN comedy,” in Brooks’s words. “For beneath the surface and behind the façade, and when the moment of truth brings it out into the open, there is genuine love and real sentiment in all of the relationships” among the characters.

  David Susskind was high on Brooks, who seemed to have an endless store of clever ideas. The “Triplets” deal memo was easy to write because Baer was an employee of Brooks’s. Brooks was guaranteed a “Created by Mel Brooks” credit with regular consulting fees and escalating royalties for reruns and syndication. Talent Associates agreed to pay Brooks a little seed money to develop a pilot.

  But if Talent Associates was cautiously optimistic about “Triplets,” about Get Smart, whose pilot script was ready by September, it was supremely confident.

  Four years had passed since Brooks and Anne Bancroft had met cute at a rehearsal for The Perry Como Show. Their friends often said they were magical together, always gabbing up a storm, laughing, enjoying the same kinds of foods and fun, the same pastimes mostly. Bancroft did not pester him about marriage. “Mel is so wonderful,” the actress told American Weekly in 1962. “Most people, if you pinch them, they come out with a conventional ‘ouch.’ But he never says anything ordinary, he’s so alive to the fun of life.”

  It helped that Bancroft had a separate career, acting on Broadway and in motion pictures. Mother Courage ran for only two months, but it was a taxing experience and preoccupied her for the first half of 1963. The Pumpkin Eater took up the second half. A stylish domestic drama directed by Jack Clayton, The Pumpkin Eater was shot in London, keeping Bancroft busy abroad for almost five months. It was an excellent role—as a dutiful mother discovering her husband’s love affairs—and when The Pumpkin Eater was screened at the Canne
s Film Festival the next year, Bancroft shared the prize for Best Actress with Barbara Barrie from One Potato, Two Potato. After The Pumpkin Eater was released in the United States in 1964, Bancroft got a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

  Brooks visited Bancroft several times during the filming of The Pumpkin Eater. They adopted the lifelong habit of traveling to each other’s film sets, especially when the location was London, their mutual favorite city in the world outside of New York.

  In London in September 1963, the actress told the press she expected to marry “Mel Brooks, an American writer, this autumn,” The Guardian reported. But another year soon passed; Bancroft was patient, however, and like an angler she had deeply set the hook.

  Paradoxically it was true of the impetuous Brooks that certain notions took a long time to germinate with him, and the ones that took the longest often worked out best in practice. He was the ultimate improviser who was also known to have rehearsed some of his trademark lines or to have repeated them ad infinitum until they were warmly expected of him. He was the maximum controlled personality who also behaved off the cuff.

  In mid-1964, Brooks was not yet quite a household name in the United States. As a writer or performer he could not claim to enjoy the same level of recognition accorded to three other more successful Club Caesar alumni: Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. But suddenly he had especially promising irons in the fire, and he might strike it big with any one of them: Get Smart, “The Triplets,” or “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.”

  His first marriage, memorialized in “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” had transpired after years of courtship. His second marriage was equally impromptu after long waiting.