The interviews he gave attest that Brooks still nursed lofty literary ambitions. “I like what I do—getting ideas and writing about them,” he told one journalist in the 1960s, “and one day I’d like to be better at it. I’d like to write more screenplays, or a Broadway play, or a book, which—hopefully—would note people’s tears and joys, and say something about the human condition. I’d like to grow up and be Sean O’Brooks.”
But he still badly needed collaborators, and the collaborator who helped him achieve his breakthrough, his most important collaborator, was not Terry Southern, his show business friend Martin Charnin, or witty Buck Henry.
It was Alfa-Betty Olsen.
Turning dejectedly away from “Triplets,” “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” and “The Last Man,” Brooks finally set his sights on a project that had been on his back burner for almost eight years. As always, he needed the pretense of a typist’s assistance. When, in mid-1966, he finally got serious about writing “Springtime for Hitler,” he returned to the amanuensis who had helped with “All American” and Get Smart, a woman as clever and funny as she was Miss Norway–pretty. Olsen had moved on and was working as an assistant to Lore Noto, another Brooklynite, the producer of The Fantasticks, which was in the midst of becoming the longest-running off-Broadway musical in history. Noto was busy developing a musical based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling.
Olsen was so pretty that some people thought Brooks was having some kind of romance with her, despite the fact Olsen had a steady boyfriend whom she married in 1967. What she and Brooks did have was a mutual admiration society, a kinship in which he always laughed at her kooky humor and she always laughed at his antics and jokes. When they brainstormed scenes, with Olsen typing, Olsen had an editor’s instinct for what should stay and what should go. Adding her two cents’ worth to lines and scenes as they evolved (Kenneth Tynan described her as “an inventive secretary”), Olsen also had the great virtue, certainly in Brooks’s eyes, of modesty and lack of concern about rewards.
Brooks had originally conceived of his story as a novel; then it had grown into a possible stage musical; now, as the stage musical became a film, the script became a musical within a film about two producers planning to mount “Springtime for Hitler,” a surefire flop that they pitch as “A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.” Brooks and Olsen worked at Noto’s theater district office, trading space for answering his phone and taking messages; other times they convened at the midtown apartment of producer Stanley Chase, who got his return favor by driving Brooks’s ’59 Jaguar around on the West Coast.
Over time Brooks had given names to the two producers: Max Bialystock was a middle-aged fop of a hustler whose surname derived from a large city in Poland and, in the words of Merriam-Webster, “a flat breakfast roll that has a depressed center and is usually covered with onion flakes,” beloved by Jews. Leopold Bloom was his newly engaged, febrile young accountant, whose name came from the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (“I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce,” Brooks later informed The New Yorker, “but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair.”)*
Brooks consciously crafted the two main characters as representatives of his divided self: the Nice Mel (Bloom) and the Rude Crude Mel (Bialystock). “Max and Leo are me, the ego and id of my personality,” he explained later. “Bialystock—tough, scheming, full of ideas, bluster, ambition, wounded pride. And Leo, this magical child.”
Bialystock was the more obvious Mel: all “flash and noise,” as the treatment described him, “not an ordinary man—he is a FORCE . . . extravagantly alive.” The impresario of forgettable Broadway shows, Bialystock finagles seed money from the sex-starved old ladies he seduces in his Times Square office. His new accountant, Bloom, is a shy number cruncher who figures out that a huge flop, which has been overly invested in by, say, 25,000 percent, could escape an Internal Revenue Service audit and make more in profits than a long-running hit. The odd bedfellows decide to stage the biggest turnoff ever, “Springtime for Hitler,” an ode to you-know-who, whose script has been submitted by a Nazi enthusiast. When critics and audiences greet the musical as a genius spoof, “Springtime” becomes a runaway success, and the crooked duo go to jail.
The dumb blond goddess that is their secretary was a patent burlesque of Olsen. Brooks mused about playing the Nazi-admiring playwright, another wacky supporting character, though he never wavered in his determination to direct the film himself.
For once Brooks did little else for months, turning down most other small jobs and offers, appearing on only a few game shows such as The Face Is Familiar and Eye Guess in 1966. Over the first half of the year, he and Olsen drew up a 150-page outline, which became a 400-page first-draft screenplay, then finally a 122-page shooting script. They spent most of the late summer on Fire Island at the Lonelyville house. “They worked in their bathing suits on the deck, with a portable electric typewriter set up on a small table among the folding chairs,” according to Vanity Fair’s authoritative account.
Olsen listened and typed up the immortal maxims oozing from Brooks’s mouth: “When you’ve got it, flaunt it!,” “Money is honey!,” and “He who hesitates is poor!”
Nobody who glimpsed the two working together, nobody who knew Olsen, thought the typist was “just a typist.” Olsen was imaginative in her own right. “Not being able to keep my mouth shut again,” she recalled, “I put a few things into it.”
Olsen was never less than “thrilled,” however, “in seventh heaven to be working with Mel,” she said later. “After all, he had written for Sid Caesar.” She felt Brooks’s yearning for solo greatness. “You could feel him reaching for the brass ring. Writing The Producers was Mel creating himself; he wanted to declare himself on the world.”
Brooks verbally pitched the daring comedy around New York offices and met with interest from the theatrical agent Barry Levinson, who was working closely with Sidney Glazier to line up properties for independent production.* An executive of the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation for Cancer Research, Glazier had made a documentary about the former first lady that won an Academy Award in 1965, and now he wanted to produce feature films. Brooks knew Glazier in passing from Fire Island. They arranged to meet at a coffee shop. As usual Brooks was full of jokes, “some of which weren’t too funny, and I was a little uncomfortable,” as Glazier recalled. Then Brooks started reading highlights from the script. Glazier nearly choked on his coffee with laughter.
From Philadelphia, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Glazier had been thrust into an Orthodox orphanage as a boy before rising up in the world with a knack for charming money out of well-heeled connections. To produce motion pictures, he had partnered with an investment company called United Marion, or U-M Productions, registered in New York and Florida, run by Louis Wolfson, a Wall Street financier and self-made millionaire with a passion for breeding thoroughbreds. Glazier took Brooks “to a horse-racing stable, whose big horse was Affirmed [the American Triple Crown winner of 1978], and I acted out all the parts for Louie and the Horse.” From Wolfson, Glazier wangled $400,000, or about half of the estimated required budget of “Springtime for Hitler.” He needed to secure the other half from a Hollywood partner.
Looking for the remaining $400,000, Glazier and Brooks visited the major studios and talked up the script. All of them passed. Brooks told an anecdote about Lew Wasserman, the top man at Universal, who was averse to Hitler as the centerpiece of a comedy. Wasserman said that Universal might agree to coproduce the proposed film if the title was changed to “Springtime for Mussolini.”
Brooks needed more of a risk taker, someone like Joseph E. Levine, David Susskind’s producing partner on the ill-fated Kelly. Levine had started out in the picture business as a distributor hawking schlock like Godzilla and Hercules but also arty foreign-language films such as Federico Fellini’s 8½. Levine was open to The Producers, and he invited Brooks, Olsen, and Glazier to the midtown offices of
AVCO Embassy Pictures, which he headed and which had moved aggressively into film production. Levine’s inner sanctum was reached through a hallway paved and decorated to evoke the West End neighborhood of Boston, where he had grown up in slums, another child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Upon their arrival, the short, heavyset Levine, the very likeness of a rich and powerful producer (his press releases described him as “a colossus towering above the lesser moguls of filmdom”), immediately endeared himself to the visitors by showing them his favorite trick of making a silver dollar stick to his forehead.
Brooks spieled the story, performing some of his favorite scenes from the script. Levine loved it. The producer only had two issues. First, the title: Levine raised funds for Jewish charities and causes, and it would embarrass him to be associated with a movie called “Springtime for Hitler.” On the spot the title was changed to The Producers.
Next: Who should direct such a problematic thing?
“Joe,” Brooks told him, “I’ve got the pictures in my head. I know what the scenes should look like.”
“You really think you can direct, kiddo?” Levine asked him.
Brooks said he would direct a little something to prove his mettle, a short subject or advertisement, something to show Levine beyond any shadow of a doubt that he knew how to make a comedy funny. Levine was a gambler. Okay, the producer nodded. They had a deal. Levine agreed to put up the rest of the total budget—not to exceed $941,000.
The producer kept a bowl of apples on his desk. He told Brooks, “Mel, my job is to get the money for you to make the movie. Your job is to make the movie. My job is then to steal the money from you. And your job is to find out how I do it. Here, have an apple!”
If he didn’t know it already, Brooks would learn something about taking an apple from a producer. The casting and planning, the budgeting and scheduling could begin.
In the seven years since The Miracle Worker had opened on Broadway, Anne Bancroft had been deliberative in her career, appearing in a couple of plays and four movies (including the Miracle Worker film) and as a guest star with limited exposure on television shows.
In June 1966, the actress inaugurated a summer tradition of spending several weeks at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this year starring as Sabina in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Arthur Penn, who had guided The Miracle Worker to fruition on stage and screen. Among the ensemble was an actor who stood out for his talent, his towering height, and his dark, handsome looks. Bancroft touted Frank Langella to her husband, introducing him to Brooks when he visited.
“After performances, we’d gather almost every night around a table on a sun porch at the home of playwright William Gibson and his wife, a renowned psychiatrist,” Langella wrote in his memoir. The gatherings, which included actress Kim Stanley, stage director Harold Clurman, and the Penns, “were about as full of consistently riotous laughter as any I have ever known. Led by Mel, they were stupendous evenings of improvised insanity. I can still see Mel standing before us, singing ‘You’re My Everything’ to his imaginary penis, which grew larger and larger as he first took it in one hand, then both, flung it over his shoulder, wrapped it around his neck, tripped on it, and slowly began to roll it back in as if it were a garden hose on a storage wheel. Annie’s hopeless, helpless laughter made it funnier, and up she’d get, put on the music and dance.”
At the end of the summer, as always, Bancroft and Brooks contrived to spend time together on Fire Island. No matter how absorbed Brooks was in the final revisions of the script and preproduction planning for The Producers, even if he was on the West Coast and had to fly back to New York, he tried to spend the weekends with his wife.
In early 1967, Mike Nichols approached the actress with a script adapted from a Charles Webb novel by Calder Willingham and none other than Buck Henry, offering Bancroft the plum part of Mrs. Robinson, the sexy seductress in The Graduate. Suddenly she was as excited about a new project as Brooks was about The Producers.
Before heading to Hollywood, though, Bancroft made her first television special, a two-person musical called I’m Getting Married, which aired on ABC’s Stage 67. Dick Shawn costarred as her lover boy. When Bancroft shifted to the West Coast, she rented a Beverly Hills house with Frank Langella, her friend from the Berkshire Theatre Festival, along with Langella’s girlfriend. The actor was preparing for his role in the Los Angeles premiere of The Devils, which had been Bancroft’s showcase on Broadway. Director Nichols scheduled the first read-throughs for The Graduate in late March.
Amid final planning for The Producers Brooks took frequent plane trips to Hollywood in the spring. Besides visiting his wife, who was preparing for The Graduate, he had committed to a one-shot revival of Your Show of Shows that CBS was going to air in April. Sid Caesar had made a television pilot for a CBS series that had failed to make the grade, and the Your Show of Shows reunion special was his consolation prize. Inside the TV business the once almighty Caesar was now obsolete. It would be his and Club Caesar’s last hurrah.
Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris were reunited with the star for the one-hour program, democratically titled “The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special.” The special also brought back the Billy Williams Quartet, conductor Charles Sanford and his orchestra, choreographer James Starbuck, and director Bill Hobin from the original Your Show of Shows. Oddly, for the first time on a Caesar show, the script was alphabetically credited: first Brooks, followed by Sam Denoff, Bill Persky, Carl Reiner (billed twice as a writer and star), and Mel Tolkin. Even more curiously, a separate title card credited the lengthy “Gallipacci” segment in the special, which was a reprise of the Pagliacci takeoff from Caesar’s Hour, to (in nonalphabetical order this time) Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Billy Wilder’s longtime writing partner I.A.L. Diamond, Brooks, Sheldon Keller, and Michael Stewart. The original sketch had been elongated to fifteen minutes.
That was ten writers for one sketch. Two of the show’s four main sketches were recycled from past Caesar shows with added music and jabber. In addition to “Gallipacci,” The Three Haircuts were resurrected as sixties hippie rockers. One brand-new skit saw Caesar and Coca trapped in a marriage more poisonous than the Hickenloopers’, and the other, an idea of Brooks’s, found sailors Morris, Reiner, and Caesar submerged in a submarine and getting on one another’s nerves. (Juggling revisions of the film script he was carrying around with ideas for Caesar’s special, Brooks overlapped some jokes: Coca was nicknamed “Hitler” in the household skit, and Carl Reiner got a comforting blue blankie in the submersible, similar to the one clutched by Leo Bloom in The Producers.)
Noticing the repetition of previous bits and the broad and silly humor that belied the sophisticated comedy of Caesar’s vaunted past, Variety panned the special mercilessly. CBS publicity had promised updates of “classic” Your Show of Shows material, Variety said, but “the years, the times and the updated manners have taken their toll on television’s spectacular warhorses” and “there wasn’t a classic apple in the entire orchard.” The four stars, it said, had “tried hard for laughs,” but the writing lacked ingenuity and zest.
Caesar still symbolized the gold standard for TV writers, however, and at the Emmy Awards ceremonies in June, Club Caesar finally won the high honor that had been denied it in the 1950s. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences voted the show the Outstanding Variety Special and gave the Outstanding Writing Achievement in Variety award to Brooks, Denoff, Persky, Reiner, and Tolkin. (Tolkin, designated to accept the award, pointedly thanked all past Club Caesar writers by name, mentioning the absent Lucille Kallen and Neil Simon.) The Writers Guild also honored the program for Best Writing in a Variety (Non-Episodic) Show. These were Brooks’s first Emmy and first WGA awards.
While in Hollywood, communing with his wife and helping to write Caesar’s TV special, Brooks also spared time for a performance of the 2000 Year Old Man for a Colgate Comedy Hour revival produced by Ro
wan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s George Schlatter. He and Carl Reiner appeared on the Colgate special in May, just before Brooks headed back east to begin shooting The Producers. Again the reviews were surprisingly sour; the duo were only “so-so,” Variety wrote, not just compared to other guests—Rowan and Martin, Bob Newhart, Shelly Berman, and Dick Shawn—“more because of [Brooks’s] tentative manner as a performer (he’s a crack writer to be sure) than the quality of the dialogue.” On the verge of a great leap forward, Brooks had still not hit his stride as a public personality.
Brooks and Alfa-Betty Olsen had finished the shooting script of The Producers by the end of 1966. As they had agreed, Olsen stayed on as casting director, although there was never any question as to who would play Max Bialystock. It was always Zero, or “Z,” as his closest friends called him. Brooks had been chasing Mostel for more than a decade, first writing sketches for the flamboyant big man in the failed off-Broadway musical revue Once Over Lightly in 1955, later trying in vain to craft leads for Mostel that had never come to pass in the ill-destined “All American” and never-produced “The Zero Mostel Show.” Brooks also wrote at least one skit for Mostel’s one-man “Festival of the Performing Arts” TV special in 1964, a satire of an actor undergoing deep, Stanislavskian preparations for a role; he suffers horrific stage fright as the curtain is about to rise before finally stepping out onstage and taking a custard pie in the face. Mostel loved the tailor-made skit, which he reprised on his “Zero Hour” special on ABC-TV in May 1967.
Even though Brooks had done everything possible to win Mostel over (he even bought one of his paintings), they were never soul mates. Mostel was another Moby Dick—like Peter Sellers—whom he chased ceaselessly. But he harpooned Mostel in the end.
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