It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  • • •

  Among Mel Brooks’s Your Show of Shows confreres, he had particularly high regard for Mel Tolkin, who was both an agile comedy and songwriter and had the knack for being able to keep his collaborators largely in line to meet their weekly deadlines. (One of Tolkin’s favorite sayings to alert his team that it was time to get back to the grindstone was, “It’s Tuesday and hundreds of Jews all over America are waiting to see what we’ll do [on Saturday night].”) “Big Mel” was also a diplomat who knew how to stay on the right side of the mighty, short-tempered Caesar. One day, Tolkin presented Sid with the punch line to a sketch that he and the others had labored over for some time. As Caesar read it, a frown came over his face. “I’m not crazy about this joke,” he announced. To punctuate his adverse reaction, the comedian lifted up a nearby piece of heavy furniture and then allowed it to slam back to the ground. In the silence following this outburst, Tolkin—with perfect timing—responded with a wry, “We’re not married to it.”

  One of Tolkin’s other attributes was that he was extremely well read in the classics, especially in the literature of his native Russia. It was he who first educated Brooks about the great Slavic writers, enthusing about the works of such Russian literary giants as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Nikolai Gogol. Such tutorials prompted Mel to read many of these authors’ works, and it solidified his lifelong habit of enhancing his knowledge of literature, history, and so much more. Brooks was always grateful for Tolkin’s efforts in prodding him to expand his cultural horizons.

  Like many other bright, self-made individuals, Tolkin had overcome several obstacles in his strenuous efforts to succeed in life. This left him with unresolved emotional issues that, eventually, caused him to visit a psychiatrist and begin therapy. The sessions helped the writer to gain clarity and perspective to better deal with his problems. (In actuality, Tolkin was not alone among the creative forces at Your Show of Shows then undergoing analysis. Caesar regularly visited a therapist.) When Tolkin got to know Brooks better and learned more about his collaborator’s emotional angst, he suggested that therapy definitely might help his colleague to adjust better to his life of increased responsibilities and demands.

  Brooks had long been a strong believer in good physical health. His ongoing concern prompted him to seriously read medical literature so he could personally diagnose any possibly aberrant health symptom he might experience. Over the years, Mel subscribed to medical journals, pored through his personal library of medical dictionaries, and investigated a wide variety of innovative treatments for various serious ailments. He was convinced that such studies would help him to recognize—early on—any potentially dangerous health issues that might befall him. He believed that being so forewarned he would be forearmed and could prolong his time on earth. (As a result of this near-obsessive activity, Brooks became familiar with a wide range of medical conditions and was able to advise concerned friends when they consulted him about health problems they were experiencing or treatments they were undergoing.)

  With all his medical reading, Mel had given little conscious attention to the state of his mental health. However, he knew something was wrong, and his knowledge/intuition suggested it was not of a physical nature. As he grew more successful and earned more on Your Show of Shows he found that, frequently, he would suddenly become panic-stricken at work. At such times, he’d have to leave a meeting quickly, or stop whatever else he was doing, and rush out into the street. Brooks described his plight: “I started having acute anxiety attacks. I used to vomit a lot between parked Plymouths in midtown Manhattan. Sometimes I’d get so anxiety-stricken I’d have to run, because I’d be generating too much adrenaline to do anything but run or scream. Ran for miles through the city streets. People stared. No joggers back then. Also I couldn’t sleep at night and I’d get a lot of dizzy spells and I was nauseated for days.” He also recalled suffering “bouts of grief for no apparent reason. Deep melancholy, incredible grief where you’d think that somebody very close to me had died. You couldn’t grieve any more than I was grieving.”

  Following the suggestion of Tolkin and the example of his coworkers, Brooks visited a Manhattan psychiatrist. (This particular specialist had been analyzed by the renowned Theodor Reik, who, in turn, had been a protege of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychiatry.) Mel began treatment, visiting the doctor several times a week between 1951 and 1957. He found his analyst to be “kind and warm and bright.” Many of his troublesome symptoms “disappeared in the first year, and then we got into much deeper stuff—whether or not one should live and why?”

  As the exploratory process continued, the patient began to comprehend key causes of his internal turmoil. One of them was a fear of growing success. “When I was listed as a regular writer [on Your Show of Shows] and my pay went to $205 a week, I began to get scared. Writer! I’m not a writer. Terrible penmanship. And when my salary went to $1,000 a week, I really panicked. Twenty-four years old and $1,000 a week? It was unreal. I figured any day now they’d find me out and fire me. It was like I was stealing and I was going to get caught. Then the year after that, the money went to $2,500 and finally I was making $5,000 a show and going out of my mind. In fact, the psychological mess I was in began to cause a real physical debilitation To wit: low blood sugar and under-active thyroid.” (Mel’s suspicions as to the validity and durability of his career achievements were reinforced by his beloved, skeptical mother. Many times when Kitty Kaminsky’s youngest son bragged of his show business success and mentioned yet again how much money he was being paid at Your Show of Shows, this cynical little lady asked him pointedly, “Have they found out yet?” Such statements guaranteed a deflation of Mel’s self-confidence.)

  In the therapeutic process, Brooks experienced other vital insights. He revealed, “You often hear, you know, that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don’t get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.”

  In later years, the highly successful Brooks would shrug off the seriousness of this siege of heightened emotional stress. He told a Rolling Stone magazine reporter in 1978, “I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood. It comes from the suspicion that only an incredible amount of failure is there to greet us. But if you can fail between the ages of twenty and thirty, it’s fabulous. Too much early success and the rest of your life becomes a measure of repeating it.”

  Meanwhile, in the early 1950s, as Brooks’s therapy sessions helped to relieve the great weight on his mind, he made a concerted effort to turn his personal life around. That required him to make a concerted effort to bid farewell to his prolonged adolescence and to strive for emotional maturity. A great catalyst in the process was Florence Baum, a Broadway musical comedy dancer.

  13

  Broadway, Love, and Marriage

  I was grieving about the death of childhood. I’d had such a happy childhood, my family close to me and loving me. Now I really had to accept the mantle of adulthood—and parenthood. No more cadging quarters from my older brothers or my mother. Now I was the basic support of the family unit. I was proud of doing my bit, but it meant no longer being the baby, the adorable one. It meant being a father figure. Deep, deep shock. But finally I went on to being a mature person.

  –Mel Brooks, 1975

  Now that Brooks felt secure about his post on the writing staff of Your Show of Shows, he sought additional outlets for his spurts of creativity. One of these was to write a skit for Curtain Going Up, a Broadway-bound revue. The show tried out in Philadelphia in early 1952. Unfortunately, it failed to meet expectations and soon closed. A few of the projects numbers (including Mel’s s
atirical sketch) were acquired by the veteran show packager Leonard Sillman to be used for his forthcoming revue, New Faces of 1952. The cast included such rising and new personalities as Ronny Graham, June Carroll, Robert Clary, Alice Ghostley, Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde, and Rosemary O’Reilly.

  New Faces of 1952 bowed at the Royale Theater on May 6, 1952. It quickly proved to be a major winner. One of the highlights of the production was Brooks’s lampoon, “Of Fathers and Sons,” a parody of a recent Broadway drama (Death of a Salesman). The substantial success of New Faces gave Brooks a legitimacy within the theater community and reinforced his ambitions for a lofty future in the prestigious world of Broadway. The show enjoyed a yearlong run and was then brought to the screen in early 1954 by Twentieth Century-Fox with most of its numbers intact, including Brooks’s well-regarded “Of Fathers and Sons.” Now Mel could boast that he had “conquered” three mediums: television, theater, and films.

  • • •

  During the early 1950s, Mel was a devoted attendee of Broadway offerings (especially musicals) and had several acquaintances among the show business crowd. He therefore encountered many young women in the entertainment field. Thanks to his increased success as a television writer, his social poise had improved to a degree, and he discovered that women often found comedians/comedy writers to be, somehow, sexy. Among Brooks’s circle of friends in the early 1950s were tw o dancers (Mary Katharine Martinet and Florence Baum) from the cast of the hit Broadway musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Mel and Mary Katharine (known as M.K.) dated for a time. Even when the romantic aspect of their relationship ended, the two stayed friends. In early 1952, while Brooks was involved with the Broadway-bound revue Curtain Going Up, he pulled strings to get M.K. a part in the production. By 1953, Mel was dating M.K.’s good friend Florence Baum.

  Florence’s father, Edward, was a Londoner who had relocated to New York when he was about 20. He became an auto mechanic and soon had his own shop. In time, he met and married Lenore Douglas, a New Yorker. The couple’s only child, Florence, knew at the age of four that she was “born to dance.” A few years later she began ballet classes. Thereafter, she worked as an extra in Lewisohn Stadium opera productions. During World War II, she joined a group of youngsters who performed regularly for the USO. Around 1946, the teenager appeared on TV on Places Please, a talent/variety program. She then began working on Broadway.

  At five feet five inches tall, this lithe, personable brunette with long, shapely legs proved to be an agile stage performer. She won out against strong competition to appear in a series of major Broadway musicals: 1947’s Allegro, 1949’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 195l’s Top Banana, and 1952’s Twos Company. This last show was a revue starring Hollywood diva Bette Davis. When the cinema queen became seriously ill, the show closed in March 1953. Over these years, Florence had also danced on several major TV variety programs, including The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Your Show of Shows.

  (It was in 1950, during Florence’s tenure in the long-running Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that she unwittingly helped create the tradition of the “Gypsy Robe,” which became legendary among Broadway chorus performers. Bill Bradley, a fellow chorus member in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, persuaded Baum to give him her well-worn dressing room gown. He wrapped the item ornately and sent it to Arthur Parkington on the opening night of a new Broadway musical, Call Me Madam. Bradley informed Parkington that the much-frayed robe had once been worn by all the Ziegfeld Follies beauties. In turn, Arthur cut a rose off a costume worn by the star of Call Me Madam [Ethel Merman] and sewed it on the robe. He then sent it to a friend in the chorus of the next main stem musical [Guys and Dolls] to open. The tradition continued over the decades right up to the present day, and the original gown, now much decorated and far heavier, has become greatly venerated as a good luck charm.)

  • • •

  The romance between Mel and Florence blossomed. On November 26, 1953, they were married in New York City in front of the library fireplace at the home of Rabbi Newman. Among the attendees were Mel’s mother and three brothers (and their wives) as well as the bride’s parents. For Brooks, in particular, the adjustment to married life was especially difficult. Having been brought up largely by a single parent, he had little to no frame of reference of what was required of him as a husband, let alone about how to act when he and Florence became parents. Later, Mel observed of his precipitous decision to marry Florence Baum that his wife thought she was marrying a man like her father. For his part, he had assumed that his new bride would be a younger version of the spunky, self-sacrificing, and always understanding Kitty Kaminsky. Such hasty assumptions soon propelled the newlyweds onto a distressing matrimonial path. Eventually, it led to escalating domestic disharmony.

  14

  Farewell, Caesar

  I was aggressive. I was a terrier, a pit bull terrier. I was unstoppable. I would keep going until my joke or my sketch was in the show. I didn’t care if anybody else’s was in or out. All of us writers were like a litter of pups, and we all fought for our little tit and struggled and screamed. Sid [Caesar] was God, and if we could get his ear and he would smile on us and say, “good,” that was important.… We nearly got punching each other. You’d hear, “Don’t change that,” and “How dare you!” There were mighty big egos in a little room.

  —Mel Brooks, 1989

  On September 12, 1953, Your Show of Shows returned to the television airwaves at its usual Saturday evening time slot, broadcast live from the Center Theater at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street.

  At the end of the 1952–1953 season, changes were in the works for this well-established program, which many in the business felt was becoming a bit old hat for home viewers. To freshen up the show’s lineup, some of the regular support talent (such as Marguerite Piazza and Bill Hayes) would be featured less frequently on the 90-minute program. It was also agreed that every fourth week, NBC-TV would schedule its All-Star Revue in the 9 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. Your Show of Shows time slot. It would use a group of rotating hosts (including Martha Raye and Tallulah Bankhead). In addition to these alterations to the venerable Your Show of Shows, the NBC network executives tried to pressure Max Liebman to permit more dramatic changes to the structure of his “baby.” However, the producer remained insistent about not tampering with a good thing.

  Certainly, Your Show of Shows did offer an abundance of inspired ingredients in its recurrent sketch lineup. There were “The Hickenloopers” domestic routines, featuring Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar, as well as the troupe’s elaborate spoofs of Hollywood movies (including A Streetcar Named Desire, Shane, and From Here to Eternity), American TV shows (such as This Is Your Life), and foreign art movies (such as Japan’s Rashômon, Italy’s The Bicycle Thief,’ and France’s Grand Illusion). Also on the show’s plus side were the inventive Caesar-Coca pantomimes, and the airport interviews with Carl Reiner as the roving reporter and Caesar as the buffoonish foreign professor.

  During 1953–1954, Liebman exerted his authority over his beloved showcase by expanding the number and length of each episode’s musical segments. He granted more air time for such guest talent as Nat “King” Cole and Lily Pons and allowed Coca more opportunities to headline song-and-dance production numbers. However, TV critics had grown increasingly negative toward this once highly lauded vehicle. For example, the Washington Posf’s reviewer noted that the series’ opening episode was “considerably uneven, ranging from excellent to pedestrian.” Variety, once a great champion of the august program, complained, “The show is losing its peculiar distinctiveness and falling into the category of vaudeo [i.e., TV vaudeville].”

  Of even more concern to NBC decision makers was the fact that as more geographic areas of the United States (especially the hinterlands) gained access to television reception, a greater portion of home viewers were unsophisticated, compared to the early 1950s when the bulk of TV stations broadcast only to large urban markets. Those changing demographi
cs meant that many of the high-culture ingredients of Your Show of Shows were alien to an increasingly larger percentage of TV watchers. Many home viewers had never seen a foreign movie (the springboard for many of the show’s spoofs) or cared little about opera and ballet, and were therefore not much interested in much of the fare provided on Liebman’s show.

  In February 1954, it was rumored that Your Show of Shows would not return for the following season. By May of that year, it was official: Your Show of Shows would end its run, and each of its three big talents (Caesar, Coca, and Liebman) would thereafter undertake separate projects for the NBC network. On June 5, 1954, the cast presented its 160th and final live broadcast of the landmark show that had become an acclaimed TV institution (and, later, would be credited with being the springboard for such future seminal television programs as Saturday Night Live).

  As plans for the upcoming TV season began to be formulated, it was announced that Caesar, with a newly signed 10-year contract with NBC-TV that contained a $100,000 yearly minimum guarantee, would headline his own series. Liebman would produce a series of color “spectacular” musical specials for the network. As for Imogene, the most upset of the three about ending the trio’s years of collaboration, she was undecided as to just how she might fulfill her recently negotiated 10-year NBC pact.

  In the wake of the demise of Your Show of Shows, the programs subordinate talent was divvied up largely between the Caesar and Coca projects. Writers Mel Tolkin and Tony Webster and actors Carl Reiner and Howard Morris were set to work on Sid’s forthcoming new small-screen venture. Lucille Kallen chose to take time off to be with her family but agreed that she would be on tap to assist Coca in shaping a fresh TV showcase. As for Mel Brooks, he made a daring choice by announcing that he intended to explore his options and refused offers to join either camp. (It went without saying that there was no place for Brooks on Liebman’s upcoming projects.)