Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Earlier in the mid-1970s, Brooks had been in line for a major honor; his face would decorate the cover of Time, coinciding with the release of Silent Movie. However, he had to open his doors and life to the magazine. “Reporters followed me around night and day for weeks,” Brooks complained to Kenneth Tynan. “They tortured my mother and my children all the time looking for negative things about me. Everyone I ever knew was called and cross-examined.” Then, “a couple of weeks before the cover was due, I was told I’d been dumped and replaced by Nadia Comaneci,” the Romanian gymnast who had become the star of the 1976 Summer Olympics. Brooks had to settle for the cover of Newsweek. Never again would he go through such humiliation, the comedian vowed. He admitted to temptation, if another Time cover was guaranteed. But the peak moment had passed.

  The people who knew Brooks best were those who saw him most often on those occasions at which the press and public were not welcome: his wife and son, of course, but also the Club Caesar fellowship, which continued to thrive in Hollywood, gathering for events usually linked to a personal or professional milestone in Sid Caesar’s odyssey.

  Often Caesar hosted big parties at his house. The couples were always there: the Carls, the Mels, the Larrys, the Docs, as Mel Tolkin ticked them off on one occasion in a letter to Lucille Kallen, along with Sid’s brother, Dave, and a sprinkling of name comics such as Jack Carter, Jan Murray, Buddy Hackett. Caesar’s gatherings were “warm, fun, easy,” said Tolkin, the host “flitting about, very much up, talkative and quite incoherent.”

  Early in the 1980s, Tolkin, who enjoyed bumping into Brooks in Caesar’s aerie, took the measure of his old friend at one of the parties. Outside the limelight, Brooks looked pale, worn out, more vulnerable than he’d ever seen him, Tolkin wrote to Kallen. Bancroft looked worse: like a yenta with her stove on the fritz, Tolkin reported uncharitably.

  Tolkin didn’t know that after Fatso Bancroft had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “She kept her illness secret to the point that it was not reported in the press or shared with all her friends,” wrote her biographer Douglass K. Daniel. The press was never informed. Narrating, in 1998, the documentary Living with Cancer: A Message of Hope, the actress did not disclose her own battle with the disease, even to producer-director Fred Silverman.*

  Rumors about Brooks’s private life swirled on the picket lines during the three-month Writers Guild strike of 1981, which tried to carve out improved compensation for scenarists in the fresh markets of cable television and home video. Brooks had first crossed similar picket lines during the 1973 strike, which coincided with the filming of Blazing Saddles.

  As, over time, the Writers Guild ignored his scripts for awards, Brooks increasingly identified himself as a director as much as a writer. He earned generous residuals denied to mere writers through his writer-director hyphenation. His directing, he increasingly hinted in interviews, also deserved industry prizes. At a Guild meeting, Brooks argued, “I crossed the picket line to direct, not write.” The well-known sitcom writer Bob Weiskopf cried out, “You call that directing?!” The room erupted in laughter, Brooks, too.

  The big-name hyphenates were resented for crossing picket lines. Brooks was among eighteen Guild members who were fined $250 for not participating in the 1981 strike.

  One rumor about Brooks, heard on the 1981 picket lines, concerned his paranoia about his son Max. Age nine by the time History of the World, Part I was released, Max had been diagnosed with dyslexia. His mother went into overdrive to alleviate the disorder, reading classic books to the boy while also introducing him to audiobooks. Bancroft did most of the daily parenting. Although she often said she had sacrificed her career to raise their son, she also worked steadily after his birth; and family friend Frank Langella noted the “huge phalanx” of assistants and nannies who were attached to the Brooks household, including an African American woman who superintended Max’s well-being.

  Later in life, Max gave interviews emphasizing that the “old-fashioned existence” he had led in Hollywood while growing up had been due to his “overprotective” parents. “My mum was not just overprotective,” Max told the Times of London in one interview, “she was also a brilliant actress. So she would act out what might happen to me, and because she was raised in the Thirties the bad guy was like some bad gangster. ‘Hey kid, come here.’”

  Brooks, in his midforties when Max was born, was no laid-back father. His own humble upbringing prompted him to yell at his son one day “because I opened a new box of cereal without finishing the old one. Boy was he mad, I had to go back and eat the dust.” Brooks put his foot down a couple of years later when Max asked to camp out in their backyard. “He said, ‘What if I wake up tomorrow and you’re dead?’” Max recalled. “We had just had the Night Stalker, the guy who used to go around killing people in LA.”

  The picket-line rumors revolved around a similar fear of Brooks’s. The comedy filmmaker imagined the possibility that his young son might be kidnapped by thugs and held for a million-dollar ransom demanded from his celebrity mother and father.

  That was why, everyone whispered, Brooks and Bancroft were building such a big, new fortified residence in Santa Monica close to Pacific Palisades. The immense white, four-story stucco structure overlooking the nearby Riviera Country Club golf course had a slanted copper roof and indoor pool. The building was going to be set back forty-four feet from the street and rise thirty-five feet over other residences on La Mesa Drive; it would occupy nearly twelve thousand square feet, easily making it “the largest house in the city,” according to Santa Monica planning director Jim Lunsford. The Brookses wanted a six-foot fence around the house and estate (only three-and-a-half-foot fences were normally permitted). Neighbors were fighting the size and style of the design.

  Beyond the paranoia, another parental issue influenced the house construction. Max would enter seventh grade in the fall of 1983, and the Brookses planned to enroll him in the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a college preparatory academy with a focus on writing. Their new home was closer to that prep school, which was in Santa Monica.

  At Sid Caesar’s parties the old friends did not ask directly about such gossip. The norm there was chitchat, jokes, catching up. Wounded warriors of show business, all of them, they were sympathetic to Brooks for all his peccadilloes. Yet Brooks must have known, even if his former colleagues did not say it aloud in his presence, that few among them wholeheartedly loved his post–Young Frankenstein films, especially when Sid Caesar himself was in the cast. “Associates and fans from the days of Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour,” wrote biographer Will Holtzman, “were genuinely appalled at the irony of seeing Sid Caesar play second banana to Mel, in a silent picture [Silent Movie] no less.”

  Caesar himself could be touchy when questioned about Brooks’s fame and success. He told one interviewer he was “a little jealous.” Another, pressing him for his reaction to being directed by his onetime protégé, got “It was okay. It didn’t make any difference.”

  Club Caesar’s scorn for the Mel Brooks comedies was buried in letters. Imogene Coca, for example, wrote to Lucille Kallen asking if she had seen History. Brooks was such “a bad actor,” she complained, and the film “such an extravagance of bad taste . . . .

  “I thought Sid’s episode was the only good thing in it.”

  Lightning flashes of genius amid a downpour of dreck, Mel Tolkin agreed, corresponding with Kallen. Additionally, it bothered Tolkin that so many of the jokes targeted Jews, or involved sex or toilet jokes. “[Longtime TV writer] Jay Burton [who had bit parts in High Anxiety and History] had an excellent suggestion for Mel after seeing the movie previewed,” Tolkin reported to Kallen. “‘Cut two quarts of pee.’”

  In 1981, Hollywood’s king of comedy was busy fighting public and private affronts, attrition at the box office, crosswinds from his guilds, a creative as well as physical torpor, and a cumulative pile of lawsuits with allegations that did not flatter him.

  Before the relea
se of History of the World, Part I, Anne Bancroft had accepted a guest role in the Italian Broadcasting Corporation’s (RAI) television miniseries Marco Polo, from the producers of Jesus of Nazareth. Partly the reason was that her pages of the telefilm were going to be shot in Venice, Italy. Bancroft played the explorer’s dying mother in the star-studded production. Max accompanied his mother to Venice and watched her enact her death scene. The head of the family came over for sightseeing and beach time. This was the family vacation when, according to accounts, their boy hid out in a beach shack for one day and scribbled his first short story, the quality of which impressed his father.

  In the fall of 1981, Bancroft began rehearsals in New York for her first Broadway play since Golda, costarring with Max von Sydow in a two-character drama that revealed the angst of a world-class violinist (Bancroft) who is suffering from multiple sclerosis and who experiences revelations in her sessions with a psychiatrist (von Sydow). Duet for One was not well received by critics, however, and its run was the shortest Bancroft had ever had on Broadway; it was fated to be her last Broadway appearance.

  Still, Duet gave the Brookses an excuse to spend some time at their New York apartment and Fire Island getaway. Brooks never skipped a Bancroft play, never missed the opportunity to visit one of her film sets. His visits—when she was acting, not directing—were always quiet and respectful; he went out of his way to defer to her.

  Brooks could surprise people with behavior that seemed the opposite of his reputation: sudden sensitivity or gestures of extravagant generosity. Medical or romantic problems particularly sparked his empathy. Despite his dread of hospitals, nowadays when in New York he regularly stopped by the bed of his Gourmet Club friend, the author Joseph Heller, who had been diagnosed with the debilitating Guillain-Barré syndrome in 1981. One day, similarly but less publicized, Brooks stopped a bit player passing by on the 20th Century–Fox lot, whom he recognized only because every time he spotted the actor he was wearing the same inexpensive, nondescript suit. “Are you fricking insane?” Brooks demanded. “You’re here every fricking day with the same fricking clothes on!” The actor, with whom Brooks struck up a friendly relationship, developed obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and suicidal impulses, and Brooks took phone calls from him for twenty years, cheering him up and coaxing him out of despair.

  In the mid-1960s, Howard Morris was down on his luck, and one day, strapped for transportation, he borrowed Brooks’s black Jaguar, the one left over from Brooks’s stint writing for Jerry Lewis, which had always stayed in California. When Morris brought the car back, Brooks said, “That’s okay,” and handed him the keys with the ownership papers signed over to him.

  An acquaintance might comment on the nice new bomber jacket Brooks was wearing, and he might whip off the jacket and hand it over with his compliments.

  Even as he lorded it over some people in their contracts, he went out of his way to find work for other people so they would qualify for standard long-term benefits. One day in the Los Angeles Times, which kept up a lively pro-and-con debate about Brooks in the letters to the editor, a performer thanked Brooks for having given him a small role in Spaceballs “to meet the minimum yearly required earnings for medical insurance coverage for my family.” Brooks knew the actor, Ted Sorel, because their children both attended Crossroads. “When I mentioned this thoughtfulness to one of Brooks’ associates on the movie, he remarked that I was one of many remembered with similar favors.”

  At the same time, privately, Brooks’s anger and his resentments never quite disappeared, and he could instantly revert to the Rude Crude Mel with cruel quips or verbal assaults on people that burst out of the blue with him and impaired friendships.

  Burt Reynolds was one frequent dinner guest at the Brooks/Bancroft abode. He and Brooks were both top-ten box-office stars in the 1970s, and Brooks would phone his friend and begin the conversation with “Hello, Six. This is Five speaking.” Reynolds’s shower scene in Silent Movie, where he was groped by Brooks, Dom DeLuise, and Marty Feldman, was arguably the funniest of the celebrity cameos. Reynolds usually enjoyed Brooks’s company, but he recognized his “nasty sense of humor that’s hysterical if you’re not the brunt of it. I think he considered himself a tough guy. I don’t know where he got that idea.”

  At dinner they often talked about the difficulty of finding worthy projects for Bancroft. One night Brooks suggested that Reynolds, in those days at the height of his box-office prowess, make his wife the costar of a Burt Reynolds film. Reynolds said that was a great idea. “Yeah,” Brooks went on, “you’ll bring them into the theater, and she’ll keep them there.” That cut Reynolds “to the quick,” the actor recalled, “and I didn’t talk to Mel for a long time afterward. We got to be friends again, but it was never the same.”

  Martin Charnin suffered a worse ordeal, arriving one night at a Chinese restaurant in London where Brooks and other old acquaintances were holding a dinner reservation. Charnin had not seen Brooks in several years, not since Brooks had skyrocketed to fame and fortune as the king of Hollywood comedy. Charnin had been busy developing the musical Annie, based on the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, which was his brainchild. He’d recruited Charles Strouse for the music, written all the lyrics himself, and directed the show on Broadway, where Annie had a six-year run. Annie’s afterlife—in community theaters and around the globe—would rival that of Bye Bye Birdie. Charnin was in London to open Annie in the West End. Brooks and the dinner guests had seen the show.

  The night started out cordially, but then Brooks veered into a merciless critique of Annie, mocking the show and Charnin’s success on Broadway, a success that had been denied to him on “All American” with both the Birdie boys, a field—the stage musical—that Brooks had abandoned for an autobiographical film script, “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud,” with Charnin as his writing partner. As was often true, Brooks’s tirade was disguised with humor, and the dinner guests laughed nervously as he belittled Charnin.

  Everyone was laughing except for Charnin, who, hurt and furious, departed vowing never again to speak to Brooks. Charnin thought the evening might not have gone down the same way if Mrs. Brooks had been present. Bancroft might have silenced her husband with a look. But Brooks would be Brooks when Bancroft wasn’t around. The actress never reached out to Charnin, and their long professional relationship was over.

  One outlet for the Rude Crude Mel was litigation, of which there was a surprising amount after he hit the jackpot with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Though court cases are commonplace in Hollywood, not every celebrity spurred or attracted as many lawsuits. Brooks almost seemed to relish the court actions as another arena in which he could test his gladiatorial skills. And a surprising number of the court cases, moreover, revolved around story origination and rights, issues long entangled in his reputation.

  The dispute over the authorship of Silent Movie was not reported in the press until one year after the Mel Brooks comedy was released. The complainant, Nathan Cohen, had made documentaries for ABC in the 1960s, then in 1968 directed an admired independent feature called The Song and the Silence, depicting a small Jewish family in Poland torn apart by the Holocaust. In the early 1970s, Cohen hatched a story idea with writer Marion Zola, who had another script, a big-band love story, under development by Michael Hertzberg for his company. The two wrote a treatment for a modern silent film set in New York; they called it “Jack and the Lean Talk,” as in “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

  Zola, more the writer, had an agent, who submitted the thirty-three-page treatment to Hertzberg at his New York offices in early 1974. Though the treatment was offered to Hertzberg for development, their submission letter made it clear that they were also thinking of Brooks, for whom Hertzberg had produced The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, and Blazing Saddles. Their story, they said, might have possibilities as a Brooks comedy.

  The Zola/Cohen treatment recounted the rags-to-riches tale of a young, idealistic New Yorker who becomes a country-an
d-western sensation. Their romantic comedy shared little enough with Brooks’s eventual Silent Movie except for its “major aspect,” in Zola’s words: “Lean Talk” was proposed as a silent picture, with silent-era title cards.

  Hertzberg’s office rejected the treatment as “too revolutionary” for two unknown writers, Cohen’s agent reported. Until an interview with Brooks in the February 1975 Newsweek, mentioning his new project, they had no inkling of Silent Movie. “Lean Talk” was worthless now: Hollywood was surely not going to make two silent pictures.

  What made the Silent Movie allegations even more provocative, however, was the time Zola spent on the West Coast in May 1975, developing her big-band script with Hertzberg. The producer also had offices at 20th Century–Fox, near Brooks’s, and one day he took her to meet Brooks. They interrupted a Silent Movie script conference with the Club Brooks writers in Brooks’s office. Brooks tried to impress or intimidate her, Zola couldn’t decide which it was. She warily mentioned that she had written a silent-film script, too. Brooks said that it should have been a comedy. “It was a comedy, Mr. Brooks,” Zola replied. “Yeah,” he returned, “but honey, we’re the best comedy writers in the business.”

  Brooks took Zola over to the bulletin board “to show me the index cards on which he was working,” she said in her subsequent deposition. “He stopped work for several minutes to tell me about the process.” Elaborating on the process, Brooks “explained a joke that they were building. I suggested a punch line, and he said, ‘Great. I’m going to use that.’” When a lawyer asked if it had been used in the film, she replied, “I don’t recall.”