It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  Being stationed in the South was an education in and of itself for Melvin. For the Brooklynite, living in this dissimilar world was “oh so different from living on the asphalt and cement all my life.”

  One part of the army regimen that really appealed to Melvin were those occasional evenings when he and his fellow trainees were allowed to attend the cotillions at the nearby Washington and Lee School. At these dances, the unskilled Casanova experienced the best and worst of times: “I met the flowers of Virginia there. The most beautiful girls. Southern belles. It was one of the best times of my life, but I was just this Jew from New York and not so good-looking.” With further self-deprecation, he added, “I think it was right there and then that I decided I had to go into show business. That’s the only way I’d ever get these girls to notice me.”

  While Melvin was going through military training in Virginia, the Allied armies had undertaken the D-Day offensive (June 6, 1944) in German-occupied France. This successful campaign against the Axis forces was an early sign that an Allied victory in Europe was both inevitable and not that far in the future. Meanwhile, Kaminsky was assigned to complete his basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. By the time he had finished this phase of his military preparation, the Allies had driven the Nazi regime from Paris. The final assault against the Third Reich on German turf was imminent.

  During basic training, Kaminsky lost his remaining baby fat and shed any naivete he may have had about all Caucasian men being equal in the U.S. Army. (In this war, African Americans were largely segregated into their own units.) Melvin repeatedly encountered overt anti-Semitism. It made him furious and prompted some reckless reactions on his part. One day when yet another soldier slung anti-Jewish slurs in Kaminsky’s direction, he could take it no longer. He angrily marched over to the bigot, asked him to remove his helmet (after all, he didn’t want to destroy government-issue gear), and then used his mess kit to whack the offending G.I. over the head. Kaminsky felt he had made his point, and he shrugged off the punishment he received for his action.

  • • •

  In early 1945, Melvin and many others at Fort Sill were sent by troop train to the East Coast. There, they boarded a troop ship, which zigzagged its way across the Atlantic Ocean and docked in Le Havre, France. Next, the soldiers were loaded into trucks and dispatched to the front lines, passing through countless bombed-out French villages, the roadways lined with the corpses of recent victims. Melvin and his fellow troops headed into Belgium, where they encountered “little actual shooting,” but according to Melvin, “there was plenty of mortar and artillery fire, and it was very noisy, and I thought that I would not want to be in the war very long, because of the noise. The earth was very hard when I was there, and I could not dig a V-shaped foxhole, as I wanted to, and stay down at the bottom of the V for the rest of the war. All these hot fragments of shrapnel and stuff were flying around, and I did not want to die, so it was awful. I remember hiding under a desk in a kindergarten while there were air battles going on above us, and bombs rattling.”

  At one point in the ongoing campaign, Melvin was assigned to be a forward observer/radio operator. “We’d figure out our position and tell the artillery, you know, to knock out a German post somewhere. And the minute we broadcast, we had to high-tail it out of there, because 10 seconds later, the road would be strafed with 88 shells. I mean, they would zero in, and they were amazingly accurate.” However, Kaminsky was soon transferred from this task because he “couldn’t learn the artillery argot. You’re supposed to give them map coordinates.… But I’d say, ‘No, no! You’re missing it! You’re going over, dummy! You’re not even near! Aim for the big tree by the church. Say, listen, did the chow come up yet?’ Very unmilitary. I didn’t last long as a forward observer.”

  In actuality, Kaminsky had been trained to be a combat engineer as part of the 1104 Engineer Combat Battalion of the 78th Division. (Said Melvin, “I was a Combat Engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering. I was a little kid from Brooklyn, getting his hair combed every morning by my mother, and suddenly I am doing 40-mile hikes, and being expected to eat grass and trees.”)

  On the battlefront his chief task was to help clear land mines so that advancing Allied troops and tanks could pass safely through the treacherous terrain. Melvin and his fellow soldiers were part of an Allied wave that pushed across the Rhine River at Remagen. Then they moved into Alsace-Lorraine on the German/French border. (Years later, Melvin made light of the dangerous situation by joking, “We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.”) En route to victory, Kaminsky and his fellow soldiers experienced several skirmishes with the Germans, who, by now, were largely in flight. “I mean, we were fired on by a lot of kids and old men who were left in the villages. They were called werewolves, snipers.”

  Sooner or later—even in the midst of the chaos of war—it was inevitable that Melvin’s zany personality would erupt in full force. At one juncture, when he and the others were playing cat-and-mouse with the German forces, the Nazis began blasting propaganda messages over powerful bullhorns, exhorting the Allied soldiers to surrender because they could not possibly win the war. The impulsive Kaminsky decided such nonsense deserved an appropriate retort. He scurried around and located a bullhorn of his own to offer the enemy a rendition of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” in Al Jolson “Mammy” style. One can only imagine what the bewildered Germans thought of this foreign-language assault on their ears. This was not would-be crooner Kaminsky’s only musical outing during World War II. One time back at base when he was assigned to odious latrine duty, he used the occasion to create a “melodious” diversion. He took Cole Porter’s popular tune “Begin the Beguine” and converted it into the satirical number “When We Clean the Latrine.”

  Melvin’s battlefield habit of making up and singing funny songs made perfect sense to him. It was his antidote to the terror of the wartime situation. “Some guy would say, ‘We’re gonna be killed; we’ll never get out of this war,’ and I’d say, ‘Nobody dies—it’s all made up.’ Because otherwise we’d all get hysterical, and that kind of hysteria—it’s not like sinking, it’s like slowly taking on water, and that’s the panic. Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.”

  • • •

  When the war concluded, Melvin found himself with an offer he could not refuse. It was based on his reputation for being his barracks’ goofiest character, an unusual man who could find humor even in deadly chaos and who used his offbeat perceptions to amuse his fellow soldiers and keep up their morale. Kaminsky’s major suggested, “Melvin, why not stay with us and travel around providing the boys with entertainment?” It did not take the soldier long to accept the appealing gig.

  Not only was Melvin promoted to the rank of corporal, but he was issued a classic old Mercedes-Benz for his transportation. Rising to his elevated sense of self-importance, Kaminsky asked his commanding officer to assign him a soldier to be his chauffeur. While that request was vetoed, the major agreed to a compromise. Kaminsky was given a small allowance to hire a German civilian driver. Melvin detailed about his new job: “So I found a German fiddle player named Helga, who became my ‘chauffeuse.’ My official title was Noncom in Charge of Special Services, and I did shows for enlisted men and officers’ clubs. Sometimes for a whole division, with tens of thousands of people out front. I told big, lousy jokes. Every time Bob Hope came by, I would write down all his jokes and use them. Nothing frightened me. I sang like Al Jolson. Everybody could do the low Jolson, but I did the high Jolson that nobody else could do—things like ‘I love you as I loved you when you were sweet sixteen.’ People said they appreciated that. My chauffeuse played the fiddle for them, and together we fiddled in the back seat of the Mercedes.”

  Melvin had a wonderful time in his new capacity. “I used to go to Frankfurt with my special pass and obtain certain
rare cognacs and stick them in my car. There wasn’t a nineteen-year-old soldier who got drunker than I did. Helga played Brahms’ ‘Lullaby’ beautifully. I’d say, ‘Pull over to the curb and play Brahms’ Lullaby.’” But, alas, eventually, the pleasant period came to an end. Kaminsky was advised that his special services duties were being terminated and he would be shipped back to the United States to be processed back into civilian status. Kaminsky hated to have his recent good times end and claims to have countered, “No, no—let me die in the back of the Mercedes with Helga.” Nonetheless, he was ordered back to the States.

  • • •

  As Melvin prepared to return home, he reviewed his relatively brief participation in World War II. “They always say War is hell.’ War isn’t hell. War is loud. Much too noisy. All those shells and bombs going off all around you. Never mind death, a man could lose his hearing. So I used to put Camels in my ears. When I was discharged, the doctor looked in my ears. They wouldn’t let me out of the army because my ears were so brown. I had all this Camel juice inside my inner tubes. I might be the first man to die of emphysema of the inner ear.”

  As Melvin observed repeatedly in the coming years, “I’m grateful to the army. Grateful to Hitler too. The Producers made me the first Jew in history to make a buck out of Hitler.”

  7

  Becoming Mel Brooks

  After I got out [of the military], I had three choices. I could go to college and hang out a shingle and make $10,000 a year. Another thing for a Jew to do would be to become a salesman.… And [the third choice was] show business. But you got to understand something: Jews don’t do comedy in winter. In summer, all right.

  –Mel Brooks, 1975

  Like many returning soldiers, Melvin wanted desperately to get on with his life. He realized quickly that relatives and friends on the home front could never understand the horrors of war he had experienced and seen on the battlefields of Europe. The angst and anger he felt at the Axis atrocities he had witnessed or heard about burned deep within the teenaged Kaminsky. Sometimes, it led him to erupt suddenly into fits of fury or unveiled disgust with the world. On other occasions, he lapsed into moods of total hopelessness over the inhumanity of man to his fellow human beings.

  Brooks vowed that no matter what, he would never ignore his Jewish heritage (despite his lack of religiousness). Moreover, he swore to himself that he would never allow others to overlook or ignore his pride in being a Jew. (In the coming years, Mel often referred to himself in interviews and conversations as “your humble Jew.” As recently as 2001, he vehemently told 60 Minutes interviewer Mike Wallace, “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.”)

  • • •

  Once a civilian, Melvin Kaminsky strove to find his way back to some form of “normalcy.” Because all of his brothers had attended Brooklyn College, he felt he owed it to his mother and them to follow suit. He used the G.I. Bill of Rights to enroll. However, over a 10-month period, the ex-soldier scarcely attended classes, and, eventually, he dropped out. Sometimes, to earn spending money, Melvin worked at the Abilene Blouse and Dress Company. At another point, he was employed in a clerical position at the post office. However, his heart remained tied to show business, and he made a few forays back to the Catskills as a tummler.

  Then, in late 1946, Melvin Brooks, as he now called himself to one and all, found work with Benjamin Kutcher. The latter was a seedy theater impresario who operated from a rundown office on Manhattan’s West 48th Street that boasted a grimy bay window that looked out onto the street. “For about six months, I did everything for him. I ran errands for him. I put placards in barber shop windows. He was a kind of circuit producer for many little towns around New York, like Red Bank, New Jersey. Wherever there was a little theater, he would book some old play—Alan Dinehart’s Separate Rooms, something like that—he didn’t care what it was about. If it had two sets, he wouldn’t make money. If it had more than five characters, he wouldn’t make money. He always wanted a hit, and he never had one. Never.

  “He wore a charcoal-gray thick alpaca coat in the summer and the winter and a Broadway producer’s hat all the time—a homburg—and he screwed a lot of little old ladies out of a lot of cash. I loved him. He’d say, ‘Melvin, I’m going to be busy for an hour.’ That meant he was going to screw a little old lady out of some cash. They’d give him checks made out to Cash and say, ‘What’s the name of the play?’ He’d say, ‘Cash.’ They’d say, ‘That’s a funny name for a play,’ and he’d say, ‘So is The Iceman Cometh!’ ”

  If this sleazy show business figure sounds familiar, it should. The colorful theatrical figure became the basis for Max Bialystock, the grotesque character around whom Mel Brooks shaped his breakthrough 1968 film, The Producers.

  • • •

  In the late spring of 1947, through his multitudinous chores with his fourth-rate producer boss, Mel learned of an upcoming summer job opening. It was with a new theater group in Red Bank, on the north shore of New Jersey. Brooks decided to drop everything for the chance to be on stage—or at least to work backstage—with this low-budget troupe, which was based in the auditorium of the local high school. The biggest attraction of this flimsy enterprise was that it was an Equity company. This meant Mel would be mingling with real theater professionals. As it turned out, the venture was operating on a truly meager budget. If the cast/crew—which included comedian/impressionist Will Jordan—each took home more than $6 a week after kicking back most of their modest official salary to the crafty producer, they were lucky indeed.

  By now, at the ripe age of 21, World War II veteran Brooks had become increasingly cynical about life. Part of his temperament was overshadowed by a sense of inferiority. Emotionally, Mel was still frozen in adolescence, and seemed unable—or unwilling—to break out of that mode and move on to “normal” maturity. At times, he thought himself a real loser. On the other hand, on those occasions when his ego and confidence were riding high, he felt superior to everyone about him.

  One day, the preening director of the Red Bank theater, Percy Montague, chastised Mel repeatedly in front of the company for having dared to commit some minor infraction. Brooks bristled with anger at the injustice of it all—and especially resented the public humiliation. He promptly shifted into an arrogant mode. The previously quiet underling caught the fatuous director off guard when he announced with great bombast, “I will not be the scapegoat!” To emphasize his firm position on the matter, Mel burst into a tirade filled with enough big words and erudite references to convince everyone in earshot that he was not a man to be taken lightly. For this show business neophyte, being taken seriously—even if his frequent bizarre behavior precluded receiving any high degree of respect from associates—was of paramount importance.

  By midsummer, management had had enough of the pretentious Percy Montague, and he was given his marching papers. Shortly thereafter, the man in charge of the company announced he was quitting the failing operation. He offered the troupe the option of following suit or, if they so wished, finishing out the season themselves. Mel and his two roommates rose to the occasion. John Roney added production responsibilities to his acting duties, while performer Will Jordan took on some of the managerial tasks. With the post of company director still vacant, Brooks—always at his best when stretched the thinnest—volunteered for that daunting assignment.

  To everyones surprise—including his own—Mel blossomed in his position of authority. Although he was inexperienced in the demands of stage directing, he had an instinctive flair for knowing when the cast needed to be guided in one direction or another and how to convey his instructions to his coworkers. Amazingly, the season at Red Bank continued onward with relatively few hitches.

  • • •

  When the summer ended and the troupe departed Red Bank, Mel returned to the city. His absorbing New Jersey theater
experience had enticed him into thinking big and trying his hand at acting on the Broadway stage. Summoning up his chutzpah, Mel personally made the rounds to the offices of various established Broadway producers. Typical of Brooks’s brazen determination was his visit to the headquarters of Kermit Bloomgarden, one of the reigning New York theater impresarios. Mel strode cockily into the producer’s office suite, surveyed the crowd (which included some well-known actors) seated in the waiting room, and swept over to the receptionist’s desk. In his best stentorian voice, he announced, “Paul Muni is here and I have to go in three minutes.” The inexperienced secretary jumped to attention and immediately summoned Bloomgarden to greet the visiting stage/film veteran. Kermit emerged into the waiting room, took one look at the young interloper, and said, “This boy is not Paul Muni.” Cheeky Mel was not about to admit defeat. He explained (in a non sequitur), “Muni’s name is Harold Gottwald. I am the real Paul Muni.” Bloomgarden grasped Mel by the collar and said, “You’ve got a lot of moxie. I’m going to remember you.” (Unfortunately or not, Brooks never did get his audition with the august Bloomgarden.)

  If Mel could not obtain any actual theater assignments for himself, he at least could bask in the glory of his growing circle of show business comrades. In the process, he reasoned, he could, perhaps, pick up some professional tips and connections. One evening, with too much free time on his hands, Brooks trekked out to New Jersey to see one of his new pals perform in a cabaret. The entertainer was Philadelphian Ronny Graham, a talented entertainer in several guises (including actor, comedian, songwriter, and pianist). After the gig, the seven-years-older Graham, who would become a lifelong pal of Brooks’s, offered to give Mel a ride back to Manhattan.