Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  (“Begging him to see the humor in the situation,” according to Stadlen.)

  “I can’t make up my mind,” Brooks reiterated. (“Sounding even more like a big-breasted Jewish woman hanging out a Brooklyn window,” in Stadlen’s words.) Brooks waved Stadlen away. Days later, however, he learned that the part of Lupinsky was his.

  A few days before shooting began, however, the first read-through convened and the audition nightmare was repeated. When they got to the scene where Lupinsky delivers his first reading of Shylock’s speech, perhaps Stadlen performed it too casually; Brooks interrupted the actor in midsentence, shouting at him in front of the assembled cast, “Now that is the very opposite way I want you to do that speech!” Stadlen and the others were embarrassed by the “totally disproportionate emotional outburst,” Stadlen recalled. “I would come to understand that whenever Mel lacked confidence in a situation, he believed he was totally within his rights to punish the source of his doubt.”

  During the first break Ronny Graham came over and threw his arm around Stadlen. “I thought you did that speech wonderfully,” Graham consoled the actor, leading him sympathetically down a hallway away from the room. “I wasn’t aware that we were expected to deliver a finished product,” Stadlen responded defensively. “You have to understand Mel,” continued Graham as they walked. “He’s a wonderful, warmhearted human being. He’s just in the habit of saying whatever comes into his mind.”

  “Why are you apologizing for me!” screamed Brooks, suddenly close behind them. He had followed them into the hallway.

  “I was just telling Lewis—” began Graham.

  “Don’t tell Lewis anything! Stop being the best boy! He doesn’t understand how to do the speech!” Brooks snapped, pushing past the two into the men’s room.

  Rehearsal and filming went no better. “The conceit” of To Be or Not to Be, in Stadlen’s words, was that Brooks was not directing, but in fact “Mel was directing the film and while we all had to pretend he wasn’t, he absolutely demanded that we recognize that he was.”

  One of Stadlen’s first scenes to be photographed was the one where he takes the stage to inform the audience of a sudden change in the night’s program, announcing that Bronski’s detested “Highlights from Hamlet” would be performed rather than their new play mocking the Nazis. Brooks was absent, and Stadlen performed several takes for Johnson: long shot, medium shot, close up—improving, he felt, with each take.

  In the afternoon, Brooks arrived on the set in his Elizabethan Hamlet costume, wearing a blond wig. “He was agitated,” Stadlen wrote, “because he was about to recreate one of the most memorable moments from the original film,” the one that begins with Bronski reciting “To be or not to be . . .” (He is interrupted by a handsome young bomber pilot who stands up from his seat and leaves the theater, because the phrase is a prearranged signal to meet Bronski’s wife backstage in her dressing room.) Stalling for time before his big scene, the star gathered the “entire cast and crew around a television monitor” to review the morning’s footage. “Sitting in his director’s chair in his blond wig and blue Shakespearean tights,” Stadlen recalled, “he seemed to be gathering strength from the absurdity of his appearance, the class clown having merged with the school principal.”

  The first footage up was the long shot of Stadlen’s curtain speech. “It wasn’t very good,” Stadlen noted. “My performance was self-conscious and over-gesticulated.”

  “What is that idiot doing?” roared Brooks, although Stadlen was standing only two feet away from him. “The man is an absolute moron!” Stadlen thought his second take was better (“I could see I was beginning to work things out”) but Brooks did not concur (“The man is a complete imbecile!”). Mercifully, Stadlen’s third take, his close-up, came up for review, and Brooks announced, “O.K., that’s good!” suddenly pacified.

  “It was an ugly moment,” Stadlen recalled, “and as soon as Mel walked away, several colleagues came over to see if I was still breathing.” He’d be all right, he reassured them. “But I wasn’t all right,” he confessed in his memoir. “No one had ever bullied or embarrassed me that way. I was not a confident enough actor to be berated at the beginning of what was certain to be a challenging eight-week process.”

  The next day Brooks tried to make nice with Stadlen during a filming break. (“It was my romantic notion that the night before, just before she dozed off, Anne Bancroft had whispered in her beloved’s ear, ‘You know Mel, for a great man you sure can be a terrible prick. You have to apologize to Lewis Stadlen.’”) But Brooks offered only small talk, no apology.

  Not long after, Brooks, not Alan Johnson, directed the scene in which Stadlen as Lupinsky initially performs his “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech; it was the first time in the story, with Lupinsky’s only audience a spear-carrying pal standing next to him in a stairwell. “He gave me two takes,” Stadlen recalled. After the second, Brooks grumped, “Well, the first part’s a piece of shit and the second part’s all right. All right, print it!”

  Brooks later cut the scene during editing, which not only reduced the importance of Stadlen’s role but meant that “Hath not a Jew eyes?” is heard only once in the “Re-Do.” The repetition of the speech, the second time under dangerous circumstances, was what had lent it special resonance in Lubitsch’s film; it also gave a supporting player the chance to shine, adding texture and roundness to the original. Cutting the scene, despite having photographed it, continued the drift toward spotlighting Brooks.

  After “a horrible first few days,” Stadlen said, “I was hurt and disillusioned but I was also really pissed at Mel Brooks.” Stadlen was not the only actor on whom Brooks took out his frustrations. One day, showing up on the set after root canal surgery, every bit the “Jewish man in pain,” in Stadlen’s words, Brooks interrupted a scene between Bancroft and Charles Durning that in everyone else’s eyes was going fine, “berating their performances.” Bancroft cut him off. “Let me get this straight,” the actress said. “Mel Brooks is telling Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning how to act? Ha ha ha ha!” She loftily stormed off the set with Brooks plaintively dogging her heels.

  Another day, decked out in his Nazi regalia as Hitler, Brooks materialized before supporting actor George Wyner, who was portraying Ratkowski, a character in Bronski’s troupe who figures pivotally in the plot. Brooks told Wyner he wanted him to come to his house on Saturday morning to run through crucial lines in his scenes that simply were not making the grade. “Because you don’t understand the speech!” Brooks explained to him, adding as an afterthought, “But you’ll call up the union first so you don’t get into any trouble!” The Screen Actors Guild strictly forbade unpaid weekend services.

  Wyner had a philosophy about it that he imparted to Stadlen, an eyewitness to the incident. “When Mel Brooks asks you to do something,” explained Wyner, “he wants you to shake your head yes and then go out and do it. He doesn’t appreciate your weighing whether it’s a good or bad idea.” So Wyner went to Brooks’s house on Saturday morning and rehearsed.

  One day Brooks took Stadlen aside and said he was going to give him some useful tips. He asked Stadlen if he had ever heard of the acting coach Robert Lewis. Yes, Stadlen said warily. (“Mel figured New York had lost most of its intellectual wattage the day he decided to move to Los Angeles,” Stadlen thought.) Brooks said he was going to send him to Lewis to bolster his understanding of the nuances of his Shylock speech. Perhaps Brooks kept singling him out because “as much as I admired Mel as a comic innovator (I was beyond referring to him as a genius), I thought he was a terrible actor.”

  Referring him to Lewis was “truly insulting” to Stadlen, who had already logged time with Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler and who, besides, was earning “a substantial weekly salary” for appearing in To Be or Not to Be. Stadlen thought he probably did need some acting advice, but he was not getting any real help from Brooks. He realized he might have interpreted his Lupinsky character, early in the filming, as
too much of a victim, too cognizant of the Holocaust, rather than playing him as watchful and ready to do his utmost under dire circumstances. “Unfortunately,” Stadlen wrote in his memoir, “Mel didn’t have the acting vocabulary to say ‘Stop playing a victim. Play him like a winner, and events will take care of themselves.’ His approach was to tell me I didn’t understand a great piece of literature because I wasn’t a good enough actor.”

  Came the day when Brooks also summoned Stadlen to his home. Again Brooks wore his Hitler makeup, though his body was draped in a satin robe. Brooks told Stadlen he wanted to see him on Saturday to go over his Shylock lines. Be sure to alert the Guild, he added, so no rules would be broken. “I won’t pretend that I wasn’t a little afraid of Brooks,” Stadlen recalled. “He exuded authority, and he had a very loud voice. But I had taken quite enough.” The Guild would not pose any difficulty, Stadlen replied evenly, because Brooks would have to pay for any weekend work he was asked to do.

  A long pause followed. “Mel looked at me with the insolence of someone who had never been told he wasn’t everybody’s favorite,” Stadlen recalled. “He searched my face as if trying to determine what manner of man I was, to tell him an unpleasant truth.”

  Well, Brooks said, what are you doing on Friday? Brooks commanded the actor to see him during his Friday lunch break “because you don’t understand the speech!”

  Friday lunchtime came, and Stadlen went to Brooks’s trailer—with the star again draped in his satin robe, wearing a Hitler mustache, his hair combed over his forehead.

  “Do you like it here in Los Angeles?” Brooks began.

  “No, I don’t,” Stadlen replied.

  “You don’t like it here? Why not? You don’t like the smell of azaleas?”

  “I guess nothing good has ever happened to me here.”

  “That’s too bad, because it’s a very beautiful place,” Brooks said ruefully.

  (“If Mel Brooks could be submissive, this was as close as he was ever going to get,” recalled Stadlen.)

  “I’m going to show you how to do the speech,” Brooks said, “because from the very beginning you have never understood the meaning of that speech. Listen to the way I do it. Hath not a Jew eyes?” he singsonged. “Hath not a Jew hands? Did you see what I did there? The operative word of the first two sentences is hath. You have to stress the hath.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, I’m wrong,” Brooks continued. “The operative word is not, not hath! Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands?”

  (Stadlen thought that sounded vaguely like the 2000 Year Old Man, albeit “in classical style.”)

  “Wait a minute. Goddam it! I’m wrong again. The operative word is Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands?”

  Spotting the warm pastrami sandwich that awaited his pleasure across the room, Brooks ended the tutorial abruptly. “Do you see the way the poetry rolls off my lips?”

  By and large the “crickets” found much to enjoy about the To Be or Not to Be “Re-Do” when it was unveiled in theaters just before Christmas 1983. The cast glittered; together Brooks and Bancroft were a joy; and the trappings were top notch, the more affirmative reviewers agreed. Thomas Meehan penned a New York Times piece saying he had counted eleven “favorable” reviews out of fifteen in New York. One was by Vincent Canby of the Times, who probably became the first critic to describe Brooks as a “national treasure.”

  Brooks and Bancroft underwent publicity chores and endured the inevitable interrogations about their marriage. Appearing on the national morning show Today, where they were questioned by Gene Shalit—one of the most rhapsodic Brooks fans, who in his review declared that the Lubitsch remake should be ranked “eight trillion on the laugh meter”—the couple was less guarded than usual. “Marriage is a retail store,” Brooks told Shalit. “Somebody has to watch the register, and somebody has to get the pretzels down for the kids . . . . Life is very hard. I think you need a partner that you love and who loves you to get through it successfully. And I think we were very lucky.”

  Shalit pressed, asking if after nearly twenty years of togetherness the old marrieds were content with each other. “I’m more than content,” Bancroft answered. “I mean, when he comes home at night, when that key goes in the door, I mean, my heart’s fluttering. I am so happy he’s home, you know. I mean, it’s like the party’s going to start.”

  Again, however, the “favorables” included caveats such as the one voiced by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, who found Brooks’s To Be or Not to Be “benign but not really funny” and said that the lead actor seemed ill at ease and “never cuts loose.” Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice said the remake was “guilty of undermining the original with mocking facetiousness” and complained about the “lumpy and leaden performances compared to the original.” Outright pans came from a number of critics in major markets, including Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times and Gary Arnold in the Washington Post. The latter agreed with Kael that whereas Jack Benny had been sly and elegant, Brooks blustered and foundered. “I’ve never seen Brooks at such a loss,” Arnold wrote.

  Kevin Thomas attempted to explain why the remake did not, like the original, convey any sense of urgency, despite a homosexual character wearing a pink triangle that tried for “a serious message.” As written and directed, gay Sasha came off as a “stereotypic sissy,” he wrote. Brooks himself set an unsubtle tone, overegging his performance. And except for a brief newsreel, the “Re-Do” offered little historicity. “We know far more than was known in 1942 of the full extent of the Nazi evil, especially in regard to the fate of the Jews,” Thomas wrote thoughtfully. “In The Producers Brooks carried off his ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number . . . . Somehow an entire movie that depicts Nazis as the buffoons of fantasy, while we know full well that the peril of Brooks’ largely Jewish acting company is all too real, isn’t very funny but instead is merely crass. Ironically, for all its sparkle, the original actually took the Nazis far more seriously than this remake does.”*

  Brooks desperately yearned for the approval of critics while at the same time he resented their power and opinions—that is, their mixed or negative opinions. He had made this “smartie” just for them, and even if many critics accepted the remake kindly on its own terms, he’d never forget the slights. The worst insult the even-handed Kevin Thomas could muster was that Brooks’s remake was “disappointing.” A few years later, Brooks, interviewed by the same newspaper to promote his latest film, ate up the clock venting about Thomas’s critique. “What I really want to know is this. What did Kevin Thomas think was so terrible about ‘To Be or Not to Be’? Why that awful review? . . . Sometimes I feel like writing these critics a letter, saying ‘Why so angry? What was there to hate so much?’ I want to tell them, ‘I meant no harm. I only wanted to entertain you.’”

  After the United States publicity Brooks and Bancroft toured extensively overseas, cheerfully performing “Sweet Georgia Brown” for TV cameras and giving interviews in England, France, Italy, Sweden, and, for the first time, West Germany. The $13 million US gross barely covered the budget. The foreign take augmented the total but not enough to tally meaningful profits. To Be or Not to Be did not attract his usual fans, nor any enthusiasm from moviegoers in the American heartland, and the dismal box office did not bode well for his future at 20th Century–Fox.

  Which of the married Bronskis in To Be or Not to Be is the faithful one? It is the husband, Frederick Bronski, played by Brooks. Asked whether the nuptial contract means devoting herself to one man only, Bronski’s more lustful wife, Anna (Anne Bancroft) tells her bomber-pilot admirer (Tim Matheson), “I’ve always felt that true love should never stand in the way of a good time.”

  In real life was it the other way around? Had Brooks ended the trifling and womanizing that helped poison his first marriage? And was it Bancroft who was the stoic, steadfast partner, understanding and accepting the behavior of her errant husband?

  Since Brooks persistently batted his
eyes at women—secretaries at the studio, waitresses in coffee shops, ladies at the airport—it was just as hard as ever to know if he was, at any time, doing anything more than simply flirting. He had a reputation among Hollywood insiders for having a “zipper problem,” in the words of one associate, who traveled with him. But was it a real “zipper problem” or just the whispering of detractors?

  According to the author and film critic William Arnold, the plaintiff in the Frances lawsuit, one court reporter who took depositions in the case was a cute young woman in her early twenties still living at home with her parents. She transcribed Brooks’s sworn affidavit in the case. Smitten by her look of youthful innocence, Brooks made a play for her. Somehow he ascertained the woman’s home address and appeared outside her house late one night, tossing pebbles at her window and pleading for her to come out. A light appeared in her parents’ bedroom, however, and Brooks skedaddled. “I’m not sure how much of that story I believe,” said Arnold, “but I swear to God it’s what she told us.”

  A person who traveled with Brooks in the 1980s said he had been eyewitness to Brooks’s “zipper problem.” One day, as the two rode in a taxi together, Brooks took out a little black book of female contacts, similar to the type that had been mentioned in the Florence Baum divorce and that had figured in his screenplay “Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.” Brooks thumbed through the book and phoned a call girl, the eyewitness said.

  If true—the source, though reputable, did not care to be identified because of Brooks’s litigiousness—it was a rare transgression in the presence of another party. Brooks and Bancroft enjoyed the image of the perfect couple, the parents of a happy family, spouses who might bicker, might clash, but always ended up in each other’s arms. In an industry that manufactured pleasant fakery, they seemed the romantic ideal.

  “People don’t write wonderful parts for women,” Anne Bancroft complained astutely to the New York Times in 1984, “because women have not been given a chance to live wonderful lives that people want to write about, and because most writers are men.”