Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  As usual, in the summer of 1964, Brooks and Bancroft were spending as much time as possible at Bancroft’s house on Fire Island, “repairing to separate rooms for family visits,” according to biographer William Holtzman. Both made forays into the city for business purposes, however, with Brooks, Buck Henry, and Alfa-Betty Olsen meeting to polish the Get Smart pilot script at Talent Associates. Around lunchtime on August 5, the phone rang in their office. Anne Bancroft was calling. The trio of writers hurried down to the street, a cab pulled up, and Brooks jumped in. Henry and Olsen stood on Madison Avenue, waving as the cab bearing Brooks and Bancroft sped off.

  A short time later the couple materialized in the deputy city clerk’s office at City Hall and filled out the marriage license form as “Mel Brooks” and “Anne Italiano.” Brooks grabbed a passerby, recruiting him as their witness. The spontaneity of it was such that they didn’t bring wedding rings. Bancroft deployed her bendable silver earrings, which Brooks twisted into a ring for each of them. After signing the forms, Brooks returned to work at Talent Associates and Bancroft went home to prepare a spaghetti supper.

  Although friends and family promptly learned about the marriage, the press was kept in the dark for almost a week. The New York Times reported the marriage on August 11 with the headline “Comedian Weds Anne Bancroft”—suggesting how Brooks’s public identity had shifted. No longer “just a comedy writer,” he was now a “comedian.”

  Both sets of parents were pleased. Kitty Kaminsky didn’t care that the vows were secular or that Bancroft was Catholic. “When somebody becomes a star,” Brooks explained later, “they’re no longer, you know, Jewish or not Jewish. A star is a big thing, you know, six points is better, but a star! . . . my wife was a star. My mother was very happy.”

  Bancroft went almost straight from their brief honeymoon on Fire Island to Hollywood for rehearsals and Seattle for the filming of The Slender Thread, acting opposite Sidney Poitier. Her new husband visited her in both Hollywood and Seattle.

  Chapter 8

  1965

  Springtime for Mel

  ABC-TV surprised Talent Associates, in late October 1964, by passing on the Get Smart series. Remarkably, network executives felt that the bumbling US secret agent made the proposed series appear too un-American. Brooks, on one of his by now frequent trips to Hollywood, ran into Grant Tinker, NBC-TV’s West Coast head of programming. Tinker, who already boasted spy/secret agent success with I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on NBC, was eager to capitalize on ABC’s stupidity. He wanted Get Smart, but he also wanted Don Adams, who was under contract to the network for The Bill Dana Show. Adams had a running part in the series as a bonehead detective not unlike the bonehead Maxwell Smart.

  Get Smart’s lead had been crafted with the comedic actor Tom Poston in mind. Brooks knew Poston dating back to Shinbone Alley, when he had been Eddie Bracken’s understudy. But Adams, whom everyone liked from stand-up and variety shows, was fine with Brooks and Talent Associates. Famous for his catchphrases, Adams would bring a few of his own to Get Smart, including the stalling-for-time “Would you believe . . . ?”

  Barbara Feldon, a brainy brunette model whose acting résumé was modest, was Daniel Melnick’s pick for Agent 99; and Edward Platt, the Chief, was a familiar face with a lengthy career that included a role as Cary Grant’s lawyer in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

  Brooks had envisioned the pint-sized English actor Michael Dunn as Mr. Big—months before Ship of Fools would be released with Dunn’s Oscar-caliber performance. On the commentary tracks for the Get Smart box set, Brooks also took credit for “that blonde,” the British actress Janine Gray from The Pumpkin Eater, who portrayed the she-villain in the first episode. (“I hired that girl personally,” he said, “because she was so talented.”) Brooks also pushed to hire his friend Howard Morris, whose early TV-directing stints had included several episodes of The Bill Dana Show, to steer the pilot.

  The pilot was shot at NBC Studios in Los Angeles in the second week of January 1965, with the standard schedule of one rehearsal day and five camera days. Brooks and Anne Bancroft flew to Hollywood for the occasion. Still being paid as a consultant for the series, Brooks had been involved in all the major casting and production discussions.

  Curiously, the pilot was photographed in black and white, after which the series would switch to a brightly colored palette. Director Jay Sandrich, also from The Bill Dana Show, and writer-producer Leonard Stern were brought in by Melnick to manage the series, with Sandrich staying for the first season and Stern for the entire five-year run.

  While in Hollywood, Brooks always rendezvoused with Carl Reiner, who had established a beachhead there and whose West Coast presence acted like a powerful magnet on the other Club Caesar writers. Brooks also met with Marvin Schwartz. The onetime press agent had made good on his ambition of forming a motion picture company with the veteran writer-director Philip Dunne. Blackhill, their new production entity, promptly optioned “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” to be filmed probably in late 1965 or early ’66.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Brooks lingered for weeks in Hollywood after Bancroft accepted a role in John Ford’s 7 Women, replacing Patricia Neal on a moment’s notice without seeing the script. (Neal, who had played Helen Keller’s mother onstage in The Miracle Worker, had suffered several strokes.) Ford and Bancroft—Catholics both—got along splendidly. Shot mainly at MGM, 7 Women was destined to be Ford’s last feature.

  Then, the way things worked in those days, NBC took the Get Smart pilot under advisement, mandating a few changes (including the switch to color) and shopping the show around to potential advertisers. It would be months before the series got on the air.

  During those months, the bulk of 1964, Brooks sought short-term jobs that paid well for minimal amounts of time and effort. Doctoring Broadway plays had begun to taper off, and one of his last such fix-it jobs was for a musical called Kelly, which told the tale of Steve Brodie—called Hop Kelly in the show—who had become a celebrity at the turn of the century by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Joseph E. Levine and Talent Associates were the producing partners for Kelly; it was the first Broadway musical for both Levine and David Susskind. Kelly had a score by Mark “Moose” Charlap (famous for his Peter Pan songs) and a book by the comic Eddie Lawrence (whose “The Old Philosopher” was a one-hit wonder in 1956). The earliest previews had been unfavorable.

  The producers blamed the music and the book, and they had all but given up on Charlap and Lawrence. In late January, as Kelly continued to flounder in out-of-town tryouts, Susskind and Talent Associates partner Daniel Melnick thought of Brooks and Leonard Stern. Flown to Boston to watch and critique the musical, the Get Smart team arrived straight from the West Coast and high-level meetings with NBC in Hollywood.

  A small group assembled in a Ritz Hotel suite for the postmortem late one night after Brooks and Stern had sat through a preview performance. The worried faces in the room included Susskind, Melnick, and the show’s choreographer-director, Herbert Ross.

  A Saturday Evening Post reporter, Lewis H. Lapham, was embedded with the production, and Lapham preserved a portrait of Brooks in action in this kind of emergency situation. Brooks (“a small energetic man with thinning hair”) did most of the funny talking, Lapham noted, while Stern (“taller and heavier . . . wearing a goatee and elaborate gold cuff links in his silk shirt”) listened, chewed gum, and spoke solemnly.

  The talking/performing writer was typically blunt, his vernacular colorful. “You’ve got a Chink’s chance [of saving the show],” Brooks told the producers. “As cloying, as horrible, and as saccharine as some of the scenes are, the audience seems to forgive.” He advised them to give up on the prominent actress Ella Logan from Finian’s Rainbow, who was unhappily cast as Hop Kelly’s mother. “I didn’t believe a mother’s tears wouldn’t work but it doesn’t. She softens the show. She’s out there selling torn-rubber raincoats.”

  “She is just dreadful,” director Ross conced
ed.

  “It’ll be a pleasure to fire her,” Melnick added.

  “What we are up against, fellas,” Brooks pursued, “is grievous errors in the structure of the book; too many extraneous characters sing extraneous songs. Moose and Eddie wrote some marvelous stuff, but they only brought you to the five-yard line. No touchdown.”

  “The end of Act One,” Stern interjected, “I don’t know where is the commitment.”

  “The first three numbers in Act Two,” Brooks said, “are the worst, seventy-five miles an hour into a stone wall. Death. Three losers back to back.”

  “That song,” Stern added, “that awful song . . . what’s the name of it?”

  “‘Home Again,’” said Ross.

  “Well, it’s terrible,” Stern continued. “What should be an enchanting lyrical moment is a pedantic horror.”

  Everyone agreed wholeheartedly with the criticisms, according to The Saturday Evening Post. Ross sank into his chair, staring at Brooks through steepled fingers. “You have a very incisive mind, Mel,” Melnick declared after the initial tensions in the room dissipated. The producer had begun to feel hopeful. “It’s fabulous, Mel, fabulous . . .”

  Susskind asked plaintively if there was anything at all worth saving in the musical. Then as later in his career, Brooks counted on performers to give a boost to lame material. He said that the young unknown playing Kelly, a Canadian named Don Francks, was “the best thing” the show had going. “Go all the way with the kid,” Brooks exhorted the producer. “The love for the kid is the tickets. More love, more tickets.”

  Stern thought they should cut three or four of the worst songs, except that then Kelly would run too short. Brooks snorted. “So what? Light the blaze under Don Francks. A few happy moments for the tired businessman watching some girls jump around on stage, and everybody goes home at ten o’clock. They’ll be glad to get the first cabs.”

  Susskind wondered aloud if Hop Kelly’s leap from the Brooklyn Bridge, which climaxed Act Two, was ineffective because it was so obviously done with wires. “Leave it in,” Brooks responded. “The hippies know he’s on wires, but the Hadassah don’t.”

  The talking wound down. By 2:00 a.m., the group was on its eleventh pot of coffee. The producers decided to commission tunes from new songwriters to replace the lackluster ones. Brooks and Stern were asked to write “two scenes” and “several comedy routines” that might bolster the sagging libretto. The confab lasted until dawn; then Susskind, Melnick, and Ross departed. Brooks and Stern lingered behind, charged with their task. Stern paced while Brooks stretched out on the sofa, smoking a cigarette.

  “Isn’t it fantastic?” Brooks asked Melnick as the producer wearily said his good-byes. “You see things in the last six days that you should have seen a year ago . . . fantastic. It’s the same with all shows in trouble. The same sad tune but different lyrics.”

  All this went down regardless of Dramatists Guild of America rules barring major script surgery without the consent or involvement of Charlap and Lawrence. The two creators of Kelly sent an angry “cease and desist” letter to the producers, followed by a lawsuit.

  Kelly finally made it to Broadway, closing after just one performance on February 6, 1965—an infamous flop that dwarfed that of “All American”. The investors (principally producers Susskind and Levine with their investment boosted by another LP advance from Columbia Records) lost $650,000. Talent Associates paid a substantial out-of-court settlement to Charlap and Lawrence, who felt that Brooks and Stern had trampled on the rights of fellow writers; years later, according to Lawrence, Brooks tacitly agreed, privately telling him he felt bad about the role he’d played in their high-handed exclusion.

  Emergency writing had been Brooks’s bread and butter for the first half of the 1960s. He was hardly to blame for the Kelly fiasco, but Broadway increasingly seemed a dead end for him. The last known example of his stage doctoring was notes he submitted on the comedy The Best Laid Plans for the persistent producer Hillard Elkins in 1965.

  Meanwhile, with the success of Brooks’s movie trailers one year earlier, advertising jobs for hire began to fill the gaps of time and money that were always an issue for Brooks.

  The young whizzes of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency were among the fans of the 2000 Year Old Man, and the ad agency also had paid attention to Brooks’s eccentric movie trailers. In mid-1965, the agency hired Brooks to incarnate “the 2500 Year Old Brewmaster” for Ballantine beer. Young & Rubicam recruited Dick Cavett to interview the brewmaster for a series of spots as “a Carl Reiner stand-in,” in Cavett’s words. A onetime stand-up comedian from Nebraska, Cavett knew Brooks from the days when he had been a talent coordinator and writer for The Tonight Show. Brooks had assessed Cavett early in their acquaintance as “spectacularly Gentile,” which had become a running joke between them. Now they’d capitalize on their chemistry for Ballantine beer.

  “There was not a word of script” for their sixty-second radio advertisements, Cavett recalled. Cavett impersonated a young eager beaver carrying his hand mike into an ancient cave, peppering the venerable one with queries about the client’s product. “The ad agency guy directing our sessions urged, ‘Just hit Mel with anything that comes to mind, the way Carl does. He’s best when he doesn’t know what’s coming.’”

  Cavett: Sir, I don’t think you’ve actually tasted the beer we’re selling. Do so now.

  Brooks: All right, Fluffy. (Sipping sound: voop! voop!)

  Cavett: How would you put it, sir?

  Brooks: My tongue just threw a party for my mouth!

  Their first taping session ran three hours, with Cavett, the ad agency director, and the recording engineer holding their sides in laughter. Later that year the outtakes were featured on a WNEW radio program called “The Making of a Commercial,” and Variety said that Brooks’s “ad-lib fallout had a span from brilliantly witty to embarrassingly inane.” But they used only the brilliantly witty stuff in the commercials, and no less an authority than the New York Times described the Ballantine spots as “outstanding.” Young & Rubicam attracted rare fan mail for its brewmaster spots. Unfortunately, the beer itself was “not equally adored,” Cavett remembered; sales did not mushroom, and the sponsor declined to bankroll any future advertisements starring the 2500 Year Old Brewmaster. However, Cavett said, he and Brooks did enjoy a brief “storm of royalty checks.”

  Their friendship and repartee would stretch into the future. After Cavett became a successful talk-show host in the late 1960s, Brooks became one of his most willing interview victims. The professional talkers and listeners, button-down men such as David Susskind, Johnny Carson, and Cavett, embraced their opposite in the unpredictable Brooks.

  Acclaim for the beer commercials opened up similar doors for Brooks in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He began touting Circus Nuts, Bic pens, Fritos, and Teacher’s Scotch, among other products. Some of his sales pitches are included in The Incredible Mel Brooks box set. In 1968, he even took home a Clio Award, the industry’s top prize for excellence in radio and television advertising, for his U.S. Tobacco spots. The obscure Clio was usually slighted when his rare EGOT achievement—i.e., winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony—was later mentioned.

  With Lever soap and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco on board as sponsors, Get Smart finally saw its premiere on September 18, 1965, slotted at 8:30 p.m. EST on Saturday nights. Certain high-minded television critics, Jack Gould of the New York Times for instance, were not sure the series was a keeper, saying the pilot’s humor was overdone and characters such as Mr. Big, played by a dwarf, evidenced (one of the first times the charge was leveled at Brooks) “an undercurrent of tastelessness.” Variety, by contrast, saw Saturday evenings as “kid night at the tube.” NBC had shrewdly positioned Get Smart as an alternative to the geriatric programming on ABC and the more sophisticated shows on CBS. The “broad and unadulterated hokum,” Variety said, was poised “to show its heels to the pack.”

  Inside the business, the Get
Smart series had only fans and admirers. The show drew four major nominations in the annual Emmy Awards competition in 1966, including an Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy nod to Brooks and Buck Henry for their “Mr. Big” pilot (they lost to a Sam Denoff–Bill Persky segment of The Dick Van Dyke Show). Get Smart was also nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series (again losing to The Dick Van Dyke Show). Don Adams went up for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series (although he lost to Dick Van Dyke, Adams would go on to win three acting Emmys for the series in the years ahead). And there was a nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy—not the “Mr. Big” episode but a different one—with regular Get Smart director Paul Bogart losing to William Asher for a Bewitched installment.

  Just as important, Get Smart ended the year at number twelve in the Nielsens—NBC’s highest-rated show after Bonanza at number one. The superspy comedy would stay on the air for five years in prime time.

  For Brooks, over the years, the series generated considerable first-run and syndication earnings, along with eventual video percentages—not only for the series but for the many spin-off versions: the first film rendition, The Nude Bomb, starring Adams, in 1980; the made-for-TV Get Smart, Again!, reuniting Adams and Barbara Feldon in 1989; the short-lived Get Smart, Again! television series in 1995; the rebooted 2008 film variation starring Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway; a made-for-DVD throwaway revolving around the secondary characters; plus numerous insignia products. “I got a [royalty] check today for $50,000!” for Get Smart, Brooks boasted to an interviewer in 1993.

  Though in time the superspy spoof became a cash cow, the financial impact on Brooks was not instantaneous. Actually, he suffered a drop in expected income from the series before its premiere. After the pilot episode was made, clauses in his contract kicked in that had to be concretized, including the one in which, throughout the first season, he was supposed to function as a consultant, “read all scripts and make suggestions.” He was supposed to earn an extra $1,500 per ten episodes as a credited story consultant.