Even as the late-February 2005 start date of filming neared, however, Bancroft returned to doctors and was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She immediately began intensive chemotherapy. Losing her hair, the actress wore self-knitted caps, “marvelous inventions of texture and color,” according to Alan Alda, and hid out in the Hamptons as much as possible. As filming began on The Producers musical, there were days when the usually fussy and bossy man in charge absented himself from the set. Meehan filled in, watching over the script and speaking quietly to Stroman if he felt the line readings were off. Brooks shuttled between the Hamptons and the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, keeping the secret of his wife’s critical illness. “He didn’t want to get a lot of sympathy from people on the set,” said Jonathan Sanger, who had returned to Brooksfilms to produce the musical version of The Producers, “so he didn’t talk about it and nobody on the set really knew what he was going through. It was all about Annie.”
One day Bancroft stopped by a shooting location, a Fifth Avenue town house, just as she had always visited other sets of Mel Brooks comedies. “She was really tired,” Sanger recalled, “but it was great to have her there. Obviously, at that point, people knew that she had been ill. They didn’t really know the extent of it.” In fact, she was dying.
Her grandchild, Max and Michelle Kholos’s baby, named Henry, was born in March, “in time for Anne to hold him,” in the words of Bancroft biographer Douglass K. Daniel. For a few months, Max told an interviewer several years later, his days consisted of “waking up in the afternoon, seeing my mom in the hospital, taking Dad to dinner, bringing him back to see the baby, then taking him back to the hospital. I’d stay up all night writing and changing diapers and warming milk. This was my routine.”
Bancroft succumbed on June 6, 2005. Seventy-three at the time of her death, the actress had been married to Brooks for forty-one years. Broadways lights were dimmed in her honor. The obituaries extolled “one of the most versatile and resourceful actors of her generation,” in the words of Newsday. Private memorials were held on both coasts.
Carl Reiner hosted one gathering at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. A hundred invited guests also convened at the St. James Theatre in New York, where The Producers still played nightly. Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Patty Duke, Mike Nichols, and Alan Alda delivered testimonials. Arthur Penn, the director of The Miracle Worker, wept during his eulogy, and Paul Simon performed “Mrs. Robinson” from The Graduate on his acoustic guitar. “If any of you are grieving,” the bereft Brooks told people at both events, “keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear it.”
Bancroft was laid to rest in a cemetery in the small community of Valhalla within the town of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, near the grave of her father. (Her mother outlived her.) A small sculpture of a bereaved kneeling angel topped her tombstone, which was inscribed “Anne Bancroft Brooks,” with her birth and death dates, and “Cherished Actress, Beloved Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Sister and Daughter.”
Returning to Manhattan after the funeral, Brooks upbraided the limo driver, “What the hell are you doing? We don’t take tunnels!” Considering the time of day, the driver explained hesitantly, this route was fastest. “That doesn’t matter!” Brooks shouted. “We don’t take tunnels! We can’t!” Max, in the limo, took his father’s hand. Dad, he reminded Brooks gently, Mom was the one who disliked tunnels. “He’d been her shield against those dark, closed spaces, and he wasn’t putting down his guard yet,” Max recalled.
Many nights—long nights now—Brooks would knock on his son’s door. He would switch off his cell phone, help with the baby’s bedtime bottle. He’d fall asleep on the sofa watching television until Max woke him up and insisted that he go to bed. Max was now “my father’s keeper,” he realized, writing about that period for Men’s Journal two years later.
“What am I going to do?” Brooks repeatedly asked his son, “sad, anxious, sometimes angry,” Max recalled. All Max knew to reply, he said, was “One hedgerow to the next, Dad,” which was one of Bancroft’s maxims, meaning one day at a time.
“My dad liked going to the same restaurant, so I took him every night,” Max wrote. “Just a hole in the wall, one of the few in New York where he wouldn’t be recognized. He also liked old war flicks, so I scoured Froogle and Amazon for all the black-and-white DVDs I could find. I could probably act out every scene in Run Silent, Run Deep.”
For a spell Brooks avoided longtime friends, especially couples who reminded him of his loss. He’d go to the racetrack with old cronies; that was different—it was about the horses. One day he ran into Dick Van Patten at Santa Anita, however, and Van Patten interrupted their conversation to phone his wife, arranging to meet her later at a restaurant. Nothing was said about it until the next day, when the two chanced to meet again, and Brooks upbraided him, “You know, Dick, you really hurt my feelings yesterday. That was very inconsiderate.” Van Patten was stunned, asking what he had done to upset him. “You have a wife to go with to a restaurant,” Brooks replied, “and I don’t.”
Bancroft’s death revitalized Brooks’s relationship with his children from his first marriage, too. Though at times they all had held small Brooksfilms jobs (without screen credit), Stefanie, Nicholas, and Eddie had struggled to establish themselves professionally.
Stefanie Brooks had married and moved to New Jersey, where she lived out of the public eye. Nicholas had worked as a story editor for Brooksfilms and other production companies for twenty years; he aspired to be a filmmaker like his father. Eddie was in the music business and trying to launch an album that would pay tribute to his father (with U2, who drew the title of their seventh studio album, Achtung Baby, from The Producers, among the hoped-for pop-rock lineup of artists).*
Brooks’s three children with Florence Baum were not particularly close to Max, their half sibling, when Bancroft was alive, because they had been treated like add-ons to the close Brooks-Bancroft family unit. Now the half siblings engaged with Max and conspired with one another to keep their father company. Around the same time, Brooks began to show up at the apartment of Florence’s son from her second marriage to Ed Dunay, turn on the TV set at his place, too, curl up on the couch, and fall asleep.
Out in public Brooks upheld his comic profile. In August the New York Post reported a late-night sighting at the twenty-four-hour French Roast coffee shop in Greenwich Village. A woman sidled up to Brooks and offered condolences on his wife’s passing. “I know how you feel,” she said. “I just lost my mother.” How old was your mother? Brooks asked politely. “Ninety-six,” the woman replied. “Well,” he said, “she was asking for it.”
After a few months, Max began pleading with his father to go back to work. “I’d always been jealous of my father’s passionate devotion to his career,” he wrote. “My mother called it his mistress. I called it his favorite son. Of all the emotional barriers I’d overcome to help my dad, embracing my childhood archrival was the toughest.”
Somewhat anticlimactically, Susan Stroman’s film version of The Producers was released to theaters at the end of 2005. It was a point of pride for Brooks to see the stage musical filmed—“memorialized . . . fixed forever.” Stroman infused the screen adaptation, especially the dance numbers, with cinematic energy. But if time had been kind to The Producers on Broadway, which was fond of musicals set in a roseate past, the world of film had moved on. Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, “reputedly great on stage (I never saw them), are barely good on-screen.” A. O. Scott in the New York Times said that the 134-minute movie “feels, in every sense, like a rip-off.” (Brooks was soon quoted in the New York Post as going around saying that he was tempted to send Scott a letter: “Be sure to save this because, after you’re gone, it’ll be the only thing of yours people want to read.”)
The film never returned its reported $45 million budget, four times the initial cost of the Broadway show. Nor did
any Oscar or Writers Guild nominations come to pass.
By year’s end, though, the old gleam had returned to Brooks’s eye—“the passion,” in Max Brooks’s words. He made his first public appearance since his wife’s death at the January 2006 Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles (The Producers had received multiple nominations). Not long after that he summoned director Susan Stroman, writing partner Thomas Meehan, and musical arranger Glen Kelly, and they rolled up sleeves on the musical version of Young Frankenstein. At times Meehan had doubled as his “grief therapist.” The past year had been “the worst year of [Brooks’s] life,” Meehan recalled.
Brooks’s inner mensch awakened after the megasuccess of The Producers and the death of Anne Bancroft. Apart from signs of renewed devotion to his children, sources say Brooks gifted a sum of money to Alfa-Betty Olsen, his amanuensis on the original Producers film. He began to mention the overlooked Olsen’s help on the script in interviews, though he stopped short of saying that she had been an actual collaborator. But the Brooks-Olsen friendship had survived its onetime breach and continued stronger than ever.
When Nathan Lane took leave from The Producers in 2003, the company needed a replacement for Bialystock and Brooks approved the casting of Lewis J. Stadlen, the actor he had tyrannized during the filming of To Be or Not to Be. Stadlen was eminently qualified for the role, but still there was a hint of an apology in Brooks’s decision.
On camera Buck Henry looked a little trapped when his Get Smart cocreator behaved so deferentially to him the day they shot “extras” for the boxed set of the sixties television series, which included background interviews with Henry and Brooks.*
“I’m so embarrassed,” Brooks explained as the credit “Created by Mel Brooks with Buck Henry” flashed by on a screen during their joint interview, “that my lawyer or agents stuck the word ‘with’ [in the contract] and I didn’t see it—I never saw it in the contract—I knew it was you and me writing it—until I saw it on the screen. They were protecting me. They wanted to make me a big star. And I didn’t apologize to you too profusely enough, but I did in the future—you’ve cost me—every time I’m interviewed, every program, I say, ‘It’s Buck Henry, he is the best . . . . I was so glad to tag along with him and get some credit.’ You know that, every time I’m on, I always say that.”
“I don’t know that,” Henry replied dryly, “because of course I never watch you . . .
“But here’s the other half of that,” Henry went on, “the other half of that is yes, of course I was furious and blamed you. But later on I figured out that Talent Associates made this deal with you without telling me, so the blame got shifted. Then for the audience’s delectation, what happens one day . . .”
“The audience’s delectation!” Brooks interrupted. “Okay, continue.”
“For the audience’s delectation, I was sitting in the office somewhere—at Talent Associates—and you came by and said, ‘I’ve got it! Here are the credits: Mel Brooks or Buck Henry,’ and I thought, ‘I can’t really hold a grudge when he says stuff like that.’” Henry paused, staring into the camera with the slight shadow of a smile. “But I did anyway.”
On April 22, 2007, the curtain finally rang down on The Producers after 2,502 performances and $300 million in tickets sold over the course of six years. The night began with a standing ovation for Brooks as he took his orchestra seat in the St. James Theatre. He gave the final curtain speech, with the audience calling out “We love you, Mel!”
Brooks was two months shy of his eighty-first birthday, and Young Frankenstein was revving up for fall tryouts and its November 8, 2007, opening at the Hilton Theatre.
Gene Wilder had shouted down the phone—something that wasn’t “We love you, Mel!”—when informed of the planned stage musical based on the horror-film spoof that Wilder had originated and cowritten in 1976. For one thing, how could “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” the Irving Berlin evergreen sung by the Monster, the only song in the original Young Frankenstein, still be a “showstopper if you’ve got eighteen other songs in the show?” in Wilder’s words. The longtime friends did not speak again for a week.
Wilder had recovered from a bout with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was married to his fourth wife and living in Stamford, Connecticut. Although he spent his days painting and writing—he told interviewers he had retired from acting—he did not involve himself in the Young Frankenstein musical. Yet as angry as he was initially, the actor was resigned to the show ultimately billed as “The New Mel Brooks Musical, Young Frankenstein.” Brooks’s cowriting and producing contract gave him overriding control.
“Mel was always driven by money,” Wilder told The Independent in London. “Even after he started earning good money, he was still so driven by it.” By the time the two spoke on the phone again, a week later, Wilder was ready to accede; he had come around to thinking “I had everything to win and nothing to lose. If it’s a flop, they’re not going to blame me.” Brooks had sounded so happy and excited about the musical. “If I dampened that experience,” said Wilder, “I’d feel terrible for the rest of my life.”
Brooks went the extra mile, phoning Wilder as the songs were being constructed, singing them over the phone. Brooks and Anne Bancroft had often driven up to Stamford to see Wilder. The friendship between Brooks and Wilder endured. Roger Bart, Carmen Ghia from The Producers musical, was cast in Wilder’s role, Dr. Frankenstein. The stage veteran Shuler Hensley would portray the Monster, which Peter Boyle had portrayed in the original film.
Robert F. X. Sillerman and Harvey Weinstein were principal investors in the new show, along with Brooks himself. But when, after tryouts and previews, the $18 million production opened in late 2007, many reviewers lambasted Brooks’s second musical overhaul. One of the most consequential critics, Ben Brantley of the New York Times, complained of “a monster-size headache” and said he had “laughed exactly three times” at the tired jokes. “Despite its fidelity to the film’s script, ‘The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein’ (to use its sprawling official title) feels less like a sustained book musical than an overblown burlesque revue, right down to its giggly smuttiness.”
The chink in Brooks’s armor, his songwriting, came under special fire. “There are some enjoyable musical routines,” conceded Brantley, but “my count is 2 out of nearly 20.” The score was “nondescript,” wrote Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal. Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times described some of the songs as “schlocky.” So many of Brooks’s tunes were “tinny,” according to Peter Marks in the Washington Post, that “even some of the better material ends up feeling a bit shrill and hollow.”
A number of critics sneaked in disapproving mention of the $450 select seating. Brooks would earn a quarter of the profits after investors were paid, according to rumors.
Feeling persecuted anew by reviewers, the mastermind of the musical flared up when appearing on a City University of New York panel with Susan Stroman and cast members, moderated by New York Times reporter Campbell Robertson. “Why don’t you say anything nice about Young Frankenstein?” Brooks demanded of Robertson. “I’m not Ben Brantley!” Robertson replied, squirming. “Holy [expletive]!” Brooks responded, his mouth a bagel of astonishment, getting laughs from the audience before “the lovable egomaniac,” according to an account in the New York Post, pressed his “relentless defense strategy,” “wildly” overpraising his own musical and interjecting “self-adoring things like how an arrangement of one of his songs made him cry.”
Brooks also singled out Seattle Times theater critic Misha Berson (Berson thought Young Frankenstein was “too close to the movie,” Brooks complained. “What should it have been close to? Gone With the Wind?”) and attacked a New York Post columnist (“a flimsy excuse for a journalist”) while taking a broad swipe at all the New York drama reviewers. “I feel sorry for the critics. They’ve got to report the show and run alongside it. But with my show they can’t run alongside because they’re not that talented.”
Brooks told the audience listening to the panel, “Look, critics want to support a green caterpillar inching towards the sun. They want to play God. But we’re a butterfly!”
An enterprising Newsday reporter phoned Brooks at his Upper East Side pied-à-terre to ask about the $450 top ticket and the quarter share of profits said to be guaranteed in his contract. Brooks insisted that the $450 price tag had been the idea of entertainment mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, who’d also been a backer of The Producers—which had been the first $450-ticket musical. Brooks stoutly defended the steep pricing. “A lot of people have the money, and want special seats, and they’re rich . . . so why give it to the scalpers?”
As for his personal remuneration, Brooks appeared to confirm the scuttlebutt. “For writing half the book, all the score, being around to assist the actors, do I not deserve it?” he snapped at the Newsday reporter. “After four or five Broadway shows [in the 1950s and 1960s] where I worked for two or three years and didn’t get a paycheck, am I not entitled to twenty-four percent of the show if it is a big hit? . . . My argument is: I supply. If the stuff is really memorable, then I deserve a fair share of the profits.”
Bad notices notwithstanding, Brooks stuck with the production, tweaking it only in the way he edited his films, with small substitutions and deletions. “I was there last night,” Brooks told one columnist, “and took out one exchange that didn’t work. One pause was three seconds too long, so I shortened it. And there’s a tap routine. I suddenly realized we had to raise the sound on the dancers’ taps for the final eight bars.”
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