Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  In every possible way the initial deal memos had privileged Brooks over Buck Henry, starting with the informally agreed upon “Created by Mel Brooks.” Henry’s agent had gone ballistic when he discovered that language, and Talent Associates’ executives had grown sympathetic to the likelihood that Henry had been screwed. Eight months passed between the filming of the pilot and the NBC premiere, by which time everyone (except Brooks) saw Henry as an equal partner in the creation. Daniel Melnick and Leonard Stern wanted Henry’s goodwill and steady hand; they wanted him as their script consultant. Melnick signed Henry to a story editor contract covering the first two years of Get Smart, which also called upon him to write multiple episodes of the series.

  Though Henry’s revised contract compensated him as story editor, his salary actually fell below Brooks’s projected consultancy payments. Henry would receive $1,250 per show for his daily duties on Get Smart, while Brooks was due to earn an extra $1,500 per episode for doing—what both Talent Associates and Henry suspected, according to internal memoranda—as little as possible and farming out any real script troubles.

  Using Brooks’s consultancy as a wedge, Talent Associates went back into the deal memo on the eve of Get Smart’s premiere, revisiting the terms pledged to Brooks and Henry, “the two creative genii,” as executive Kirk Honeystein phrased it felicitously. Based on the reality of what had transpired behind the scenes in the partnership, the company proposed new language: “Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.” Brooks dug in his heels, insisting his name take precedence, but Honeystein pointed out to Alan U. Schwartz that the solo “created by” credit had been tentative in April 1964 and its temporary nature “was exposed to you and to Mel very frankly . . . . I thought [that] had been agreed to.” Honeystein reminded Schwartz that Talent Associates had consented to “created by” but that the company had actually conceived the show and controlled the creative rights. “For historical reference,” he noted, “neither Mel nor Buck are really the creators here.”

  The dispute had simmered over the summer, with Schwartz threatening litigation. Talent Associates stood its ground, believing it had the better chance of gaining a victory in any lawsuit. Brooks backed down in stages, asking for extra money and a consultancy credit on the first eight shows in the first season, then four, finally none. He was “irked” by the demotion, according to Talent Associates memos, and voiced threats to wash his hands of the whole series, “rendering no more consultancy services of any kind.” A company executive privately wrote to Melnick, “Do we need his touch?”

  The answer was no. Brooks was obliged to share the “created by” credit that would appear after the tease opener of each episode; his consultancy position was dropped; and as a final slight his 25 percent profit slice was reduced to 15 percent.

  “Created by Mel Brooks with [author’s emphasis] Buck Henry” became the compromise language for the originating credit. The with instead of and might have been arcane for audiences, but inside the business the distinction ranked Henry’s contribution as secondary both creatively and financially. Henry’s agent fought against with but was outlawyered by Schwartz. Brooks got his name on a line above Henry’s and in bigger type. Henry was given a sop: “Written by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry,” with Brooks’s name still positioned above Henry’s, was on the end credits for the pilot episode—only.

  Henry had cause to grumble in later years when Brooks gave interviews explicitly or implicitly taking credit for this or that idea for the series, but the underlying cause of friction between them was Brooks’s preferential contract, which gave him the upper hand in the originating credits and in future royalties and spin-off income for decades to come.

  Down the years, the two creative genii sniped at each other behind the scenes. Sometimes they even sniped in public. Brooks was irate when Kenneth Tynan told him that Henry had bet that Brooks’s name would appear an egomaniacal five times on the credits of High Anxiety, his 1978 Hitchcock parody. “Tell him from me he’s wrong. The correct number is six [lyricist, composer, actor, writer, director, producer],” Brooks snapped.

  Asked by Tynan about the feud behind Get Smart, Brooks attacked Henry by way of defending himself. “I had a reputation for being a crazy Jew animal, whereas Buck thought of himself as an intellectual. Well, I was an intellectual too,” he explained. “What Buck couldn’t bear was the idea of this wacko Jew being billed over him. The truth is that he read magazines but he’s not an intellectual, he’s a pedant.”

  Over the summer, in advance of the premiere, Buck Henry and Leonard Stern gave Brooks the two Get Smart episode assignments mandated in his contract. Brooks wrote number ten, “Our Man in Leotards,” with Caesar Club member Gary Belkin, and number fifteen, “Survival of the Fattest,” with Ronny Pearlman. The scripts paid $3,500 each, with Brooks in charge of the split. Brooks received boosted royalties for airings of the two episodes, which were not among the best of the first season. And they were the last episodes of the hit series that he’d write.

  Talent Associates desired his name for publicity, however, and Brooks gave many interviews promoting Get Smart, even its supposed social commentary, while disparaging other television series. “It’s a show in which you can comment, too. I don’t mean we’re in the broken-wing business. We’re not social workers, but we can do some comment such as you can’t inject in, say, My Three Sons.” And “It’ll never be Petticoat Junction. I never want to do that. If I ever did I’d go out and put a bullet in my foot—wing myself.”

  Brooks acted above the fray with David Susskind. He was no longer “irked.” He didn’t care to alienate Talent Associates because he pinned such hopes on “Triplets,” which was going to be his TV series, emblazoned with his name only as creator. With its family-friendly premise—a crusty nanny raising triplets for a professional couple—hopes for “Triplets” peaked in the fall of 1965, benefiting from the Get Smart hoopla.

  Brooks’s contract for the projected series, by now retitled “The Triplets and I,” was easier to craft than the pilot script, however. Over the summer Brooks supervised Art Baer and his writing partner, Ben Joelson, but Baer and Joelson struggled with the tone of the comedy before Brooks gave up on them and sought Club Caesar reinforcements.

  Again he tried wooing Lucille Kallen, who was busy with her novel writing and did not want to work on the project with Brooks as her boss. Then he turned to Big Mel—Mel Tolkin—who was available for the rewrite. Tolkin did what he could and moved on.

  Domestic situations were never Brooks’s forte, and like other times when he made stabs at family-friendly sitcoms, “Triplets” never came alive on the page. The project slipped off Talent Associates’ radar after the initial Get Smart excitement died down.

  Even so, Brooks and Susskind remained on good terms. Susskind had insulated himself from the contract wrangling; Melnick had handled that, and for Susskind it was the usual mud wrestling over a deal. He still found Brooks one of the funniest guys alive.

  Similarly benefiting from the excitement surrounding the blastoff of Get Smart, “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” Brooks’s script fashioned for a Rock Hudson–type star, saw a spike in its chances of becoming his first feature-length film.

  Brooks traveled to Hollywood in the fall of 1965, trying to bolster the momentum. Briefly he worked out of the offices of Blackhill Productions (the Marvin Schwartz–Philip Dunne company) at Universal Studios in Universal City, located in the San Fernando Valley. Carl Reiner had nearby offices on the lot, as did Cary Grant, which led to a favorite Brooks anecdote, told on The Tonight Show more than once (including during Johnny Carson’s final week in 1992). One version is included on The Incredible Mel Brooks box set.

  Grant was an enormous fan of the 2000 Year Old Man and cadged free copies of the LPs from Reiner, claiming at one point to be taking them over to England for the royal family. Brooks was excited one Monday to glimpse Hollywood’s debonair leading man spring out of a car on the Universal lot—in the retelling, sometimes it
was a Rolls-Royce, other times a Porsche. The living, breathing icon looked as though he had stepped out of a screwball comedy, wearing a flower in his lapel (make that a boutonniere in Brooks’s favorite color: yellow). Brooks shook the star’s hand and was invited to lunch in the studio commissary, where they held the sort of conversation only Brooks could conjure up. (“‘What is your favorite car?’ . . . I said Buick, he said Rolls-Royce.”) Relishing his company, Grant phoned Brooks every day for a week, arranging more lunches. But Brooks found less and less to talk about (“he was a real schnorrer”), until on Friday, Grant called the office, Brooks answered and said no, Brooks wasn’t there anymore.

  Such anecdotes that built into laughs stretched like Pinocchio’s nose in Brooks’s hands: the specifics of what Grant had ordered for lunch (“just a hard-boiled egg”) versus what Brooks himself ordered (“a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat bread with tomato”) were as writerly as they were changeable. Other parties that might have been present—in this case, probably Carl Reiner—were left out of the anecdotes altogether. Brooks’s anecdotes were like oral short stories or comic sketches that he polished to a gloss over the years. “Who can tell when the manic Mr. Brooks is remembering and when he’s improvising?” as Walter Goodman wrote some years later in the New York Times.

  The Cary Grant encounter was the highlight of the whole “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” saga, however. Rock Hudson had agreed to be penciled in, but as it happened, Blackhill Productions got only one motion picture off the ground—Blindfold starring Hudson—before senior partner Philip Dunne, whose career harked back to the early 1930s, quit the business and Marvin Schwartz soldiered on alone as producer of the more sure thing, The War Wagon, starring top-ten box-office attraction John Wayne.

  Schwartz was genuinely quirky. He left Hollywood several years later to travel around the world with a backpack, becoming a follower of Buddha. Brooks never lost his fondness for Schwartz, and Schwartz family members are convinced that “The Schwartz be with you!” is a tribute to their friendship. Although another Schwartz was Brooks’s longtime lawyer, of course (Alan U. Schwartz would appear in cameos in several Mel Brooks films including Spaceballs), for Brooks two reasons for something were even better than one.

  In any event, Brooks did not abandon “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” overnight. Nine years later, in 1975, a journalist visiting Brooks at 20th Century–Fox for the Directors Guild magazine reported that storyboards for the semiautobiographical romantic comedy lined one office wall. Brooks was still musing about filming his pet script.

  It was a script that would have needed at least one more vigorous rewrite. Martin Charnin had nothing more to do with “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” after its first draft, other than hearing occasional mention of the project in the press. But Charnin recalled of the script, “It was long. Excessive. It needed a lot of pruning and caring. It needed to be focused more.”

  Although Brooks had personalized the story and characters, he also pulled his punches so that the script was neither particularly intimate nor confessional. Nor was it “dangerous” comedy. Striving for commercial appeal, he had tried instead for the Nice Mel, lending his most autobiographical script what was ultimately a conventional quality. By the end of 1966—much less 1975—“Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” was a dead bunny.

  Returning from Hollywood, Anne Bancroft accepted one of the leads in a new Broadway play, The Devils, which the Royal Shakespeare Company had originated in London. Based on Aldous Huxley’s nonfiction-based novel about the demonic possession of a convent in seventeenth-century France, The Devils would open in November and last for sixty-three performances.

  While Bancroft was busy and “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” slowly ran aground, Brooks had plenty of time on his hands. “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud” was a pretty square comedy, considering that the sixties were in full flower. Nowadays, in public and private, he might throw around, even write words such as hippie, dig it, and groovy, but he also used Chink and fag on occasion and was no more engaged in the sixties—the antiwar and civil rights protests, the demonstrations and riots, the psychedelic rock and roll and recreational drug taking, the lifestyle revolution—than most people’s grandmothers were.

  Charles Strouse had been a participant in the Selma-to-Montgomery March for civil rights in 1965. Carl Reiner hosted anti–Vietnam War fund-raisers. Norman Lear went on to found the progressive advocacy organization People for the American Way. But the solipsistic Brooks steered clear of political commitments or contributions.

  The notion that he can be spotted in Robert Downey, Sr.’s, Putney Swope, a satire that brought black power to Madison Avenue, seems plausible—because couldn’t the 2000 Year Old Man turn up anywhere? Yet it is an urban myth sustained by the Internet; another Mel Brooks, an actor by that name, appeared in that ultrahip independent film.

  Brooks could be said to wear a patchwork of influences, most dating back to his boyhood in the 1930s. He passed through the tumultuous sixties more like an accidental tourist, shrewd about seeing the sights and grabbing souvenirs. Traveling always in the same small circles—music, comedy clubs, theater, ad agencies, radio, television, and film—now and then, however, he incongruously intersected with the extremes of the decade.

  Shortly after its opening in December 1965, Brooks became the most unlikely regular of Max’s Kansas City at the corner of East 17th Street and Park Avenue. At Max’s, which quickly became one of New York’s trendiest restaurants and nightclubs, Brooks hung out at a round table of off-Broadway performers, writers, and artists, many of whom lived in the East or West Village. Among the group were Michael Elias and his writing partner Frank Shaw;* there were also the self-deprecating blonde Alfa-Betty Olsen and her boyfriend, David Patch, a director passionate about Henrik Ibsen; Kenneth H. Brown, a former marine who had written The Brig for the Living Theatre; and actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. In Max’s more exclusive back room you’d be apt to find the poet Patti Smith, the artist Andy Warhol, and the acid-rock Lou Reed and Velvet Underground.

  Your Show of Shows was already a faint memory to younger people, television was uncool, and Brooks was just another guy at the table, albeit famous for being the 2000 Year Old Man, but that was old-man Jewish comedy, already passé to sixties rebels. Brooks could listen as well as he talked if he felt like it, however, and he could never resist performing. He churned out bits for the Max’s group, ad nauseam. Max’s stayed open until very late, but at closing time, Brooks, who hated to walk home alone or pay for a taxi, would often jump into someone else’s cab to share the ride.

  His generous gestures—buying champagne for everyone at the table when someone’s play opened—were fondly remembered. If someone rubbed him the wrong way, however, he’d erupt with a brusqueness and foul language that were equally memorable.

  He was insulting even to the owner of Max’s, Mickey Ruskin, who one night passed by the table, pulled up a chair, and snapped his fingers at a waitress. “Coffee!” Brooks stared at him stonily. “Who invited you to join us?” Ruskin was flustered. “Ha, Mel.” Brooks rejoined, “No, I’m serious. You think just because you own the place you can sit down with the famous interesting people? You want to sit with us, pick up the check.”

  Ruskin left.

  Perhaps Max’s was where Brooks crossed paths for the first time with the quintessential sixties littérateur Terry Southern; or maybe David Begelman, Southern’s agent, introduced them; or perhaps it was Alan U. Schwartz, who also represented the author of Candy and scenarist of Dr. Strangelove and other Peter Sellers pictures Brooks adored. Around the time of Max’s opening, Brooks courted Southern, with his sixties cachet, to be his ghost partner for another spec script—probably intended as a film—called “The Last Man,” which would take Brooks’s wellspring of jokes about homosexuals into the realm of wild satire.

  Brooks’s story, which appears to have been typed up by Southern from their talks, devised, for the first time, a starri
ng role for him—playing a character named “Mel”—who also narrates with a “voice characterization” (according to the synopsis) à la The Critic.

  The story began with “Mel” convinced by John Rechy’s novel City of Night, a Life magazine spread on “Homosexuals in America,” and growing statistics from newspapers that “faggots” were everywhere, “8½” in his building alone, “not including the Super.”

  Believing that one out of every five men in America is a “faggot,” which meant at least one of his own best friends is thus inclined, “Mel” jumps on a city bus to explore the new world of homosexuality blossoming all around him. He warily eyes tall, crew-cut Madison Avenue types. He goes shopping, making purchases that include an appropriate athletic supporter. (Saleslady: “What size?” Mel: “LARGE!”) He balks when a “charming” male salesman tries to measure his inside crotch, however. And he likes it less when a psychiatrist tells him to lie down on the couch. (“Another Dirty Doctor!”)

  A “tall, well-dressed, well-built Negro man” winks at “Mel,” and his voice-over mocks prejudices: “He’s not a colored fellow . . . he’s a FAG!” When another handsome man begins to follow “Mel,” his paranoia grows until in an elevator the man whips out a gun and steals his money, his watch, his tiepin, everything. (“Thank god he was a mugger! I was afraid he was a fag!”) His self-exploration ends when he attempts to make nice with a genuine “fag,” who rejects his advances, leaving “Mel” to wonder “how come he is not attractive to ‘them’ and determined to take steps to alter the situation.”

  The six-page synopsis suggests that those vignettes were plotted out in an open-ended manner. Brooks had several dozen “other ideas” ready to flesh out the story line.

  Although “The Last Man” was hardly a topical satire of gay liberation, neither was it as sweet and earnest as other Brooks script efforts in the 1960s. Its “faggot” and “colored man” language were already outdated, however, and its humor was corny. Perhaps Southern’s Beat sensibility could have juiced it up the way Richard Pryor later elevated Blazing Saddles. But Southern and “The Last Man” did not progress beyond the synopsis.