IT’S GOOD TO BE
THE KING
IT’S GOOD TO BE
THE KING
The Seriously Funny
Life of
Mel Brooks
James Robert Parish
Copyright © 2007 by James Robert Parish. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Parish, James Robert.
It’s good to be the king : the seriously funny life of Mel Brooks / James Robert Parish,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-22526-4
1. Brooks, Mel. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. 3. Motion picture actors
and actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.B695P37 2007
792.702’8092—dc22
[B]
2006016533
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mel Brooks fans everywhere
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Out of the Ashes of Despair
2 Born into the Spotlight
3 The King of the Street Corner
4 Hello and Good-bye to Brighton Beach
5 Swimming in the Borscht Belt
6 Off to War
7 Becoming Mel Brooks
8 Hail Caesar!
9 Smashing into the Ranks
10 Your Show of Shows
11 Living on the Edge
12 On the Torturous Road to Success
13 Broadway, Love, and Marriage
14 Farewell, Caesar
15 Unraveling
16 A Wacky Man for the Millenniums
17 A Season of Many Changes
18 A Remarkable New Love
19 Back to Broadway and Beyond
20 Becoming the Critic
21 Getting Smart
22 Flaunt It, Baby
23 Jumping in Front of the Cameras
24 Back in the Running—Again
25 A Monster Hit
26 On the Hollywood Treadmill
27 Stretching His Career Horizons
28 A Mighty Monarch at Last
29 Next Stop, Outer Space
30 Back to Work
31 Comedy—Tonight!
32 Carrying On
Mel Brooks’s Film, Stage, and Television Credits
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following for their kind cooperation on this project: Academy of Dance on Film (Larry Billman), Patrick Agan, Bruce Bailey, Robert Bentley, Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Ronald L. Bowers, Michael Buckley, Charles Callas, Catskills Association (Phil Brown), Cinefex magazine (Don Shay), John Cocchi, Stephen Cole, Bobby Cramer, Ernest Cunningham, Jacques D’Amboise, Joe Dante, Bernard F. Dick, Douglas Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, Dream City Photo Lab (Jack Allen), Michael B. Druxman, Eleanor Knowles Dugan, Echo Book Shop, Rob Edelman, David Ehrenstein, Emorac, Inc. (Eric Monder), Filming Today Press (G. D. Hamann), Dave Finkle, Professor James Fisher, Sharon R. Fox, Dick Gautier, Alex Gildzen, Bruce Gold, Shecky Greene, Pierre Guinle, Ray Hagen, Harry Haun, Travis Michael Holder, Lawrence Holofcener, Ron Husmann, Judy Israel, JC Archives, Will Jordan, Matthew Kennedy, Allegra Kent, John Kern, Jeff Kisseloff, Sam Kisseloff, Tom Kleinschmidt, Richard W. Krevolin, Audrey E. Kupferberg, Shawn Levy, Ben Livingston, Alvin H. Marill, Lee Mattson, Rick McKay, Marty Meyers, Dr. Gerry Molyneaux, Museum of Television & Radio (Jane Klain), Charles Nelson, Stephen O’Brien, the late Richard O’Connor, Jay Ogletree, Kimberly O’Quinn, Albert L. Ortega, Patrick Pacheco, Photofest (Doug McKeown and Howard Mandelbaum), Michael R. Pitts, Jared Poppel, Seth Poppel, Bill Reed, Barry Rivadue, Jonathan Rosenthal, Brenda Scott Royce, Barry Saltzman, Brad Schreiber, Margie Schultz, the late Arleen Schwartz, Jonathan Schwartz, Joan Seaton, Nat Segaloff, Ted Sennett, J. D. Shapiro, Stephen M. Silverman, Andre Soares, Spyder, David Stenn, Steve Taravella, Allan Taylor (editorial consultant, copy editor, and indexer), Vincent Terrace, University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library (Ned Comstock), Lou Valentino, Dick Van Patten, Laura Wagner, Tom Waldman, Steven Whitney, Don Wigal, Max Wilk, and those additional sources who requested to remain anonymous.
With special thanks to my editor, Eric Nelson, and my agent, Stuart Bernstein.
Introduction
Yeah. I’m buoyant. I’m happy so I can respond to people in a very funny way. I prefer to be funny. Not hysterical. Hysterical only when there’s a lot of people involved and then it is my bound duty to have them falling all over the floor laughing. Then I’m very funny. But comedy is a big risk. One clink. One sour note. And you’re going to look bad. Comics are very brave people.
–Mel Brooks, 1978
Growing up in small-town America, I was thrilled when my family purchased its first television set. It was the late 1940s, and TV was still a fledgling commercial enterprise in the United States. I recall vividly one of the first programs I saw on the tiny 10-inch screen of our just-installed living room set. It was The Admiral Broadway Revue. For a youngster already fascinated with the magical world of entertainment (especially films), the variety and quality of live fare offered on this weekly TV program, and especially its successor, Your Show of Shows, was manna indeed.
Jumping ahead to the winter of 1962 in Philadelphia, it had become customary for me to put aside my college homework on Saturday afternoons to catch a matinee of the latest new play trying out in town. On this particular day I saw All American, a Broadway-bound musical starring Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz) and directed by the famous Joshua Logan. Whatever the show’s flaws in its embryonic form, the lavish production—with its vivid costumes, slick turntable sets, and catchy score—left a strong impression on me for years to come.
A few
years later, I was living and working in Manhattan and made a point of attending a new movie that had recently opened at a local art house theater. It featured Christopher Hewett, whom I had met during recent summers working as propmaster at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts. I was curious to see him perform on the big screen. I watched the offbeat movie The Producers with fascination, and afterward enthusiastically told friends about this outrageous comedy written by Mel Brooks, which costarred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. I soon purchased the sound track to The Producers, which contained not only the film’s background music but dialogue interludes, as well as the highly controversial musical number “Springtime for Hitler” (which, according to the album’s liner notes, had been written by Brooks himself).
Months later, when Brooks received an Academy Award in the Best Original Screenplay category for The Producers’ script, I read several of the extensive articles published about this new Oscar recipient. Suddenly, I realized that Mel Brooks had been a key contributor to many wonderful projects. For TV, he had been a gag supplier for The Admiral Broadway Revue and a comedy writer for Your Show of Shows (and, later, Caesar’s Hour). For the stage, he had authored the book of the musical All American. (In addition, this same man had been featured on the legendary 2000 Year Old Man recordings in the early 1960s and, thereafter, had cocreated a major TV hit with the satirical TV series Get Smart, 1965–1970.)
Thus, without knowing it, I had become hooked on Mel Brooks’s talent and zany persona—and remain so to this day.
• • •
Writing this book led me to examine the complex, lengthy, and creatively productive life of Mel Brooks—one filled with so many chaotic career and personal ups and downs. Here was a Jewish boy from a poor Brooklyn family who was tremendously driven to find his rightful place in life. Early on, he decided his means of achieving fame and creative/ financial success would be—had to be!—in the world of entertainment and, largely, in the field of comedy.
Because Mel was short of stature he always felt compelled to make “loud noises” one wacky way or another so that he would be a focus of attention—whether in his career or in his private life. Boisterous, zealous, sometimes downright vulgar, and often overly opinionated, he would repeatedly prove over the decades to be a man of many dimensions and seeming contradictions. (How can a man greatly admire Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and still delight in making a campfire farting scene the highlight of one of his classic movies, 1974’s Blazing Saddles?)
As Mel Brooks has demonstrated over the years, he can speak out on a subject with authority and passion and, at the same time, with a dash of deflecting coarseness. “How do you explain comedy?” he once rhetorically asked a New York Times reporter. “How do you explain Chopin? I hear a Chopin prelude and I faint. I swoon. How can a human being with hair in his nose just like me create those gorgeous silver melodies?” On other occasions, however, Brooks can be extremely articulate, sensible, straightforward, and even elegant—as when he addresses the art of making people laugh: “You can’t cheat an audience. You promise them comedy, you have to give them that magic carpet that’ll lift them up over their own problems into giggles, laughs, and belly-laughs.”
As to the genesis of his particular brand of “crude” humor (which may seem somewhat tame by today’s “standards”), Brooks says with tremendous vehemence and seriousness, “My comedy comes from the feeling that, as a Jew, and as a person, you don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from the realization that even though you’re better and smarter, you’ll never belong.” Mel’s ethnic background is a powerful factor in who and what he became, and why, in so many of his artistic works over many decades, he set out to ridicule history’s greatest persecutor of the Jewish people—Adolf Hitler. As recently as 2001, Mel, the veteran creative force, told news correspondent Mike Wallace on TV’s 60 Minutes, “Yes, I am a Jew. I am a Jew. What about it? What’s so wrong? What’s the matter with being a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way deep down beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.”
• • •
If Mel Brooks the astute and talented artist can easily slip into Brooks the buffoon both in front of and behind the film and TV cameras and confuse some of the public as to which is the real Mel Brooks, he has similarly confounded the public about his private life. When, in the early 1960s, it was rumored that comedian/comedy writer Mel was dating the dazzling Broadway luminary Anne Bancroft, the running theory was that it must be a wild joke. After all, what would a vivacious and beautiful acting genius like Bancroft (who made such an indelible impression on the stage in Two for the Seesaw and The Miracle Worker) see in the daft Mel Brooks, an ex-Catskills performer and TV writer? When the “disparate” couple actually wed in the summer of 1964, the public took odds on how long this seemingly ridiculously mismatched pair would (or could) maintain their “absurd” marriage. As he did so often in his event-crowded, roller-coaster life, Mel proved the scoffers wrong. He and Bancroft, who became parents of a son, Max, enjoyed one of the longest-lasting and, to all accounts, happiest unions in show business history—a lengthy personal partnership that only ended with Anne’s death from cancer in mid-2005.
• • •
Looking back on his impressive, award-winning show business career—which has included stints as a Catskills summer resort entertainer; a TV comedy writer and sitcom creator and director; a Broadway musical comedy book author; a radio commercial writer and performer; a comedy record star; a TV talk show favorite; a film producer, director, scripter, and actor; a music video performer; and, more recently, a playwright and songwriter of a megahit Broadway show—Brooks once acknowledged, “If you want something, you have to do your homework, you have to take the trouble and make the necessary sacrifices. It’s never easy.”
Many times Brooks miraculously pulled a creative iron out of the fire in the midst of failure and climbed back into the highly competitive show business race once again. His ups and downs are partly the result of one of the most fascinating aspects of this irrepressible, complicated, often bedeviled, and frequently disorganized talent: placed into the standard role of sole writer, director, or comic, he often failed. His greatest professional success came when he went far out on a limb, beyond the limits where he could reasonably be expected to succeed, in transforming himself into a director, in suddenly becoming a composer, and even in playing the figurative Romeo to Anne Bancroft’s intimidating Juliet. But in almost every case, he was only as good as the person holding onto the limb he went out on. In Young Frankenstein, for instance, the limb was not only the original film but the solid structure that Gene Wilder brought to the original story treatment and the screenplay, for which Mel got the lion’s share of credit.
In examining his career, it is impossible not to admire his ability to adapt, cooperate, create, and excel under tremendous pressure. In fact, it’s the way he seems to have done his best work.
1
Out of the Ashes of Despair
The difference [between a director and an auteur] is that a director who is working for a living simply does the job, which may not be akin to his philosophy, but it is not inconsistent to have the same man being both. The word is “hunger.” If you are hungry and nobody will buy your original idea, you might get lucky, direct a Kellogg’s cornflakes commercial and take home a few boxes.
–Mel Brooks, 1971
In the early 1970s, Mel Brooks had reason to find himself in an ironic position as far as his career was concerned. He had already won Academy Awards and Emmys, and had hit radio commercials and three successful comedy albums (such as The 2000 Year Old Man). He was a veteran of the writing teams for two of the most cherished series of American television’s golden age: Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. Brooks’s recent association with the highly successful sitcom Get Smart had enhanced his visibility with the public and given him additional industry credibility. Although his movie The Twelve Chairs (1970) had failed to make any tangible impact at the b
ox office, The Producers (1968) was well on its way to becoming a cult favorite.
Yet Brooks was now unable to get any new show business projects off the ground and into production. How many times, he must have wondered, did he have to crash through the establishment’s barriers before he gained solid acceptance from his peers and the public? How long could he continue to subject himself to the ordeal of starting over—yet again?
For a time, Mel wanted to produce a film version of She Stoops to Conquer. He had seen an off-Broadway production of the Restoration-era comedy and hoped to interest Albert Finney in starring in the vehicle, which would be shot in England. (In Brooks’s excitement over this potential screen venture, he forgot his recent oath to stick to mainstream projects that could be box-office winners.) However, as it turned out, the period piece did not appeal to Finney or to film studio executives. Brooks had to abandon that idea. This new rejection reinforced to Mel just how much Hollywood had turned a cold shoulder toward him as a moviemaker. Meanwhile, there was brief talk of Mel and Gene Wilder joining the cast of an upcoming MGM comedy, Every Little Crook and Nanny. However, when that feature film was shot, others claimed the suggested roles.
While Brooks was vainly searching for a filmmaking deal, he forced himself to keep busy in other aspects of show business, which, at least, would help keep his name alive in the industry. In this mode, Mel took assorted TV gigs, ranging from appearing on Dick Cavett’s talk show to being a guest on the game show Jeopardy! Brooks also provided the voice of the Blond-Haired Cartoon Man on the PBS-TV animated children’s series The Electric Company. In the winter of 1973, producer Max Liebman theatrically released the film 10 from Your Show of Shows (a compilation of restored kinescopes from the beloved TV series), and Brooks and other regulars from that program received renewed media attention and were frequently interviewed. Meanwhile, when Professor Richard Brown taught his filmmakers course at the New York University’s School of Continuing Education in Manhattan, Brooks was among the guest speakers, along with such others as Cliff Robertson, Shirley MacLaine, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson. When Mario Thomas packaged her starstudded ABC special Free to Be .. . You (5* Me (1974), an animated children’s musical, Brooks provided the voice of a baby boy.
It's Good to Be the King Page 1
