It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  Brooks recalled of the occasion: “Carl’s son Robbie [i.e., actor turned film director Rob Reiner] got very excited when we said we were going to do another record and he sat down right in the front, and I was scared. I didn’t think I had the rhythm, the thoughts, the sound, the wisdom for this. But the minute he started laughing, I was off and running.” Reiner noted, “We knew we were going to have to do two sessions. It was like spring training, you’re rusty. The second session, it was like back 20 years. This guy was wailing. It was just wonderful.” Mel remembered, in particular, of this recording session, “You know, it’s hard to fall off a chair, but it’s easy to slip off a couch. I remember seeing a lot of empty couches and thinking that people had left. But I heard the screams of laughter. They had actually fallen off the couches and onto the floor. They obviously liked the character.”

  On January 11, 1975, CBS-TV aired a special titled The 2000 Year Old Man. The half-hour animated cartoon entry was made by filmmaker Leo Salkin and featured the off-camera voices of Brooks and Reiner. Salkin planned a follow-up special, but it never materialized. However, a much delayed new album, the fifth in the series, was released in 1997. Titled The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000, this Rhino label CD covered a plentitude of subjects for the old philosopher to vent his opinions on. The topics ranged from “Famous People” to the “Seven Wonders of the World” and “Wives and Famous Women.” Simultaneous to this most recent release—which earned the costars a Grammy Award—HarperCollins published a companion book to the disk. (This led to The 2000 Year Old Man Goes to School, a 2005 HarperCollins book/CD set geared for readers in the fourth to eighth grades.)

  Over the many years that Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did their 2000 Year Old Man routine in different media and venues, the partners maintained such a high level of performance that it made them the envy of generations of comedians. For Brooks, the great success of the act helped to restore his self-esteem and bank account at a time when life was crashing down upon him. It also provided Mel with a forum to vent (and, sometimes, excise) his deepest fears about mortality and the meaning of life. Most of all, it gave the public an opportunity to experience a side of the irreverent Brooks of which previously only friends and business associates were aware.

  Without the 2000 Year Old Man coming to Brooks’s timely and remarkable rescue, Mel might never have had the impetus and opportunities that led to his noteworthy filmmaking career.

  17

  A Season of Many Changes

  I kept yelling about how great I was, and Jerry [Lewis] and the others said, ‘What do you mean, great? When the world says you’re great, you’re great.’ They were right.

  –Mel Brooks, 1977

  Before Mel Brooks’s show business career took an upturn in 1961 thanks to his 2000 Year Old Man persona, he was at very loose ends in all facets of his life. His income had dropped from a $5,000-a-week high to an $85-a-week low in really bad weeks. To pay some of his many bills, Mel had to scramble for any writing assignments available. The occasional Sid Caesar TV specials (for NBC and then CBS) in 1959 and 1960 were brief respites from Brooks’s career doldrums. However, these occasional programs were churned out relatively quickly and were only a temporary career/financial stopgap for most of the individuals involved.

  Meanwhile, the birth of the Brookses’ third child, Edward, in May 1959, had not helped to resolve the chronic domestic troubles between Mel and Florence. (As before, the chief problem was Brooks’s inability, at the time, to handle his responsibilities maturely. Seemingly, he found it too difficult to avoid falling back on familiar adolescent behavior.) During one of the couple’s several breakups, Mel took an unfurnished fourth-floor walk-up on Perry Street. He paid a monthly rent of $78 for this modest Greenwich Village apartment. Then, with his meager income stretched by several new financial obligations, he found he could no longer afford even this place.

  Then Irving “Speed” Vogel came to Mel’s rescue. Vogel was the son of a well-to-do family and had grown up in Manhattan. (He earned the nickname “Speed” because he was just the opposite of speedy in many things he did in life.) A man of many talents, Vogel had once been a herring taster at Zabar’s, the gourmet food shop on the Upper West Side. Later, he became a furniture manufacturer. When he retired at a relatively early age from that business, he turned to expressing himself artistically through sculpture and painting.

  Vogel first encountered Brooks in the early 1950s at a small party in Manhattan hosted by actor Stanley Prager. Speed’s first sight of the offbeat Mel was of the latter holding forth at the gathering with an impromptu entertainment. In a bid for attention, Brooks was impersonating the Queen Mother of England ordering her son (the king) not to leave the palace without benefit of a warm cloak. (As was Mel’s wont, the routine was replete with a Jewish accent and Yiddish words.) The two men met again the next summer when Speed and his wife had a vacation home at Ocean Beach on Fire Island. Mel’s rented house was nearby. Vogel and Brooks became good friends.

  In the coming years, Vogel’s marriage fell apart. He moved to a small apartment on Central Park West and maintained a studio on West 28th Street as a haven to work on his art projects. During this period, Speed became a father confessor of sorts for Mel, who could not make up his mind about how to cope with his recurrent domestic turmoil. Frequently, Brooks the insomniac persuaded Vogel to accompany him on long late-evening walks, during which Mel would regale Speed with all the reasons why he wanted to leave Florence and how he worried about the effect that would have on their three youngsters.

  Speed liked the amiable Mrs. Brooks and hated being caught in the middle of the couple’s unresolved conflicts. Nevertheless, Vogel soon found himself stuck in that ticklish position. One evening, Brooks remarked that Florence was repeatedly telling him that he should follow his often expressed wishes to leave home once again. Speed wanted to be sympathetic to his pal’s woes and found himself saying—without thinking of the consequences—that this was kind of a “demeaning situation” for Brooks to be in. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be best if Brooks did move out of his home. In a flash, Mel was asking, “Will you bring your car and help me pack? Can I move in with you?” The obliging Speed said yes, although he instantly regretted it, because he was aware that insomnia was not Mel’s only current neurosis.

  For the next three increasingly impossible months the two men were roommates. In No Laughing Matter, a 1986 memoir Vogel coauthored with his novelist friend Joseph Heller, Speed wrote of Mel, “He was the worst. We were living in rather close quarters, which did not improve matters. Mel’s insomnia didn’t help either. He had a blood-sugar problem that kept us a scintilla away from insanity, and his brushstroke of paranoia had me on the verge (more than twice) of calling Bellevue to come and collect him.”

  There were times when the hyper Mel would answer the phone at Speed’s art studio with such loony statements as “Mr. Vogel can’t speak to you now. He’s working on his horsey and he cannot be disturbed.” Even worse was the morning Vogel awakened to find the white walls of his studio covered with graffiti. Mel had appropriated tubes of his host’s best-quality oil paints to smear on the walls “You snore, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes, that’s what you do! All night! Snore! Snore! Snore! You fuck!” Adding further insult to the situation, the obtrusive, phobic houseguest had taken to borrowing Vogel’s luxury dress shirts and imported underwear to replenish his own depleted wardrobe. Despite each new infraction perpetrated by Brooks, the good-natured Vogel thought it would be uncharitable to evict his distraught guest. However, Speed finally reached the end of his patience.

  When Brooks went off to Los Angeles in 1960, Vogel decided it was his golden opportunity to cut loose from this untenable situation. He hastily called Florence Brooks and begged her to forgive him for having helped Mel leave home. Speed offered to make amends for his interference in their private lives by moving Mel’s things back to the Brookses’ apartment. He suggested that, thereafter, “You guys can do whatever you think best w
ithout me in the picture.”

  According to Vogel, Florence listened to Speed’s extended apology with polite silence. When he finished relating his idea that Mel should move back home, she let loose with: “Are you crazy? Where did you get such a dopey idea? If you can’t stand him anymore, throw him out. What do you want from me?”

  With that avenue of salvation cut off, a desperate Vogel decided to meet his pressing problem head on. He phoned Mel in Los Angeles, where he was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A flustered Speed gently began his opening salvo that would, somehow, lead into his telling Brooks that he was at his wits’ end with having Mel as a roommate. Speed had barely gotten out a few words before Mel interrupted him. “I know.… You want me to leave, right?” Brooks laughed and asked his caller, “Will you help me pack and move?” A much relieved Speed sighed, “Sure! This time it’ll be a real pleasure.”

  Thus, the disastrous roommate situation ended on a positive note, with Mel and Speed remaining good pals throughout the coming decades. The fiasco also had an aftereffect: it provided the inspiration for the characters and plot of Neil Simon’s 1965 smash hit Broadway play, The Odd Couple.

  • • •

  Over the years, Mel Brooks had seen Jerry Lewis perform (with and without his once partner Dean Martin) and thought he was a terrific clown. Their paths also crossed socially and, occasionally, professionally. (Like Brooks, Lewis had worked as a tummler in the Jewish Catskills.) Now a freelancer anxious for work, Mel accepted an offer to cowrite Lewis’s comedy/variety special that aired on December 10, 1959, on NBC-TV. Both parties were pleased with their working association on this production. It led to Lewis’s inviting Brooks to Los Angeles to collaborate on the script for Jerry’s The Ladies’ Man, the prankish star’s upcoming comedy vehicle for Paramount Pictures.

  Brooks was used to the freewheeling work environment that he experienced on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, where the writers’ room was filled with mayhem and anarchy but the scribes always had the attention and respect of management and the stars. Mel had no real inkling that working with Jerry Lewis would differ from the good old Sid Caesar days.

  Since Lewis’s hugely successful show business partnership with Dean Martin had ruptured in the mid-1950s, Jerry had become a solo act starring in his own Paramount screen vehicles. He made two or three movies a year. He soon took on the added chores of being producer, director, and sometime songwriter for these screen showcases. Thanks to his string of highly lucrative movie hits, he was king of the Hollywood film lot and could do pretty much as he wished. In such an exalted position, Jerry had become accustomed to having his movie team be a loyal work force who understood that in all areas their boss had the first and final word—and every one in between.

  Knowing none of this, the unsuspecting Mel arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1960 prepared to begin his scriptwriting chores on The Ladies’ Man. One can only imagine how Mel must have felt initially to be working for a major Hollywood studio and for the industry’s then biggest comedy star. Brooks must have concluded that he indeed had come a long way from his days of street corner antics in Williamsburg and his summers in the Catskills, where he had frantically sought to amuse the demanding resort guests.

  It was soon made clear to Brooks that he would work in tandem with writer Bill Richmond and Lewis, and that Jerry would set the speed and direction in which the group composed their screenplay. Eager to be accommodating in order to receive his weekly paycheck, Mel agreed to the setup. However, it was not long before Brooks discovered that Lewis was a supreme egotist who felt he knew far more than anyone else about most things related to moviemaking. In addition, because of the star’s continued movie success, no one interfered with his fiefdom or dared to question his inflated outlook on the world. The more Mel realized the extent of the restricting situation in which he had gotten himself, the more he bridled. For a while, he managed to hold his tongue in order to keep the job.

  By September, Lewis, Richmond, and Brooks were deeply involved in an ongoing series of story conferences on The Ladies’ Man. As always, Jerry was in total control of these meetings. He autocratically made creative suggestions and expected his coworkers to jump at his every command. He might change direction on the script from day to day and leave his writing team perplexed, but that was the big boss’s prerogative. Lewis was accustomed to yes-men, and he shortly discovered that Brooks did not easily fall into this category, and increasingly was being obstinate in his refusal to follow the boss’s demands. Jerry would discuss a plot point or character development in the embryonic screenplay and Mel would have his own thoughts. By now he was expressing his divergent opinions, not always in a diplomatic way. It did not help the tenuous situation that Brooks was unused to structure or discipline at work. At the time he found it difficult to understand that on a movie lot, the script was the basis for big expenditures and needed to be created on time, in an orderly manner, and according to protocol.

  The more Mel offered suggestions that he thought appropriate from his viewpoint as a writer, the more he got slammed by the domineering Jerry. Because Lewis had a very sentimental outlook toward his screen characters and screenplays, he wanted the story line to reflect a gentle, almost sweet approach. This sensibility was alien to the cynical Brooks. (Actor Gene Wilder later said of Brooks, his pal and coworker, “There’s not much white sugar in Mel’s veins.… He would never ask an audience for sympathy.”) Such opposing points of view further widened the gulf between Mel’s and Jerry’s approaches to the film.

  Before long it was evident that Jerry the boss and Mel the hired writer were on a collision course. As the friction escalated between the two men, the story conferences on The Ladies’ Man became increasingly tense. Soon, Lewis was lecturing Brooks with sarcastic pronouncements on the proper scriptwriting process.

  Eventually Lewis dismissed Brooks from the project. Mel received a total payment of $46,900 for his labors over a 13-week period. When The Ladies’ Man was released in June 1961—with the usual excellent box office results for a Jerry Lewis caper—Mel’s name was not among the picture’s credits. Rather, Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond were the only ones listed as the film’s coscripters.

  Looking back on his Tinseltown fiasco with The Ladies’ Man in the mid-1970s (by which time he was himself the new king of Hollywood comedy), Brooks said, “That didn’t go well. I gave him [i.e., Jerry Lewis] the material and he and another writer took it and went on a boat and rewrote it. I’d always had that privilege, with Sid Caesar of being consulted, you know. My work was highly respected. So I was incensed.” Brooks, the industry’s prized new funster, also observed of Lewis, his onetime boss, whose glory days had long since passed, “He was an exciting, dynamic creature, and I learned a lot from him.” Nonetheless, Mel could not resist pointing out that, “high-key comics like that always burn themselves out. Lewis could do thirty-one different takes [i.e., physical reactions], and when you’d seen them all, that was it. Low-key, laid-back comics like Jack Benny are the ones that last.” By 2004, a more mellow Brooks was telling interviewers of his decades-ago professional misadventure with Jerry Lewis, “I didn’t get along with him too well. I thought he was silly. Today, I think he’s funnier.”

  • • •

  Brooks was back in New York in the late fall of 1960. He had already recorded the first of the 2000 Year Old Man albums with Carl Reiner, but he had no concept yet of how successful it would become. Meanwhile, Mel had to find new living quarters, since neither his wife, Florence, nor his pal Speed Vogel desired him as a roommate. No matter how he tried to ignore the implications of their rejection of him, it was obviously a personal embarrassment for him not easily diverted and covered over by any of the usual Brooksian bravado.

  Making the situation even more awkward for Brooks, by February 1961, he was in New York Supreme Court being questioned by Justice Vincent A. Lupiano about the state of his finances. Florence was then suing Mel for a legal separation and seeking temporar
y alimony of $1,000 per week from Mel to support herself and their three children. Brooks explained to the judge that TV industry trends had changed and comedy writers were no longer in great demand. (He noted that of his $87,000 gross income for 1960, only $40,100 had come from television work.) The trade paper Variety published an article about the breakup of the show business couple, noting that the plaintiff “charged Brooks committed adultery with ‘many women of various repute while in Hollywood.’” After hearing testimony from both parties, the court awarded Florence Brooks $400 a week in temporary alimony for the support of herself and their three children.

  Mel Brooks and Florence Baum divorced on January 20, 1962. “We had married too young,” Mel assessed later of their domestic incompatibility. He frequently repeated the glib statement “I expected I would marry my mother and she expected she would marry her father.” He explained further, “It reached the point where it was irreparable, and the best thing to do for the entire family was to separate. It was done mutually.”

  At first after the divorce, Mel saw his children frequently. (“For myself. I wasn’t doing anyone a favor. I had to see them.”) However, changes in his private life and career soon altered that situation and it was largely left to his ex-spouse to rear their three youngsters. By the mid-1970s, when Mel and Florence’s children were 18, 17, and 15, Brooks had enough distance from the painful reality of his broken marriage to acknowledge of his ex-wife, “I think she did a splendid job with the children. They’re healthy, terrific kids and it’s all due to their mother’s upbringing.” In 1975, he also admitted that “the thing that sickens my heart the most” was the physical distance that separated him from his children. “I live in California and my three children, who are of an age now to really be my friends on a more adult level, are living in New York and I can’t see them enough. We’re lucky if we see one another three times a year for a week or so at a time. It’s not enough. I really enjoy being with them. They’ve helped me with everything I’ve written. I bounce ideas off their good, young, supple minds and they say ‘bullshit’ or ‘sensational.’ They don’t think I’m a kook. They know I’m a serious human being who is a humorist.” Then, in typical Mel style, he sidetracked from revealing further uncomfortable honest feelings to the interviewer by resorting to a quip: “Think what a barren existence it would be without the constant asking for money and the sarcasm and the laughing at you.”