It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  18

  A Remarkable New Love

  She [Anne Bancroft] understood, she laughed. She loved my mind.… [Then] finally, over time, my face, my body. First my mind, which was much more beautiful.

  —Mel Brooks, 1993

  I had never derived so much pleasure so quickly from being with another human being. Right away, I wanted him [Mel Brooks] to enjoy me as much as I enjoyed him.”

  —Anne Bancroft, 1974

  The failure of Mel Brooks’s collaboration with Jerry Lewis and his team on the screenplay of The Ladies’ Man had not soured Mel on moviemaking. Brooks had never outgrown his childhood love of the glamorous medium. He still cherished a firm belief that one day, somehow, he could be a legitimate part of the still exciting motion picture industry.

  Actually, as far back as the mid-1950s, Brooks had been suggesting to Sid Caesar, his TV star friend and boss, that they should relocate to Tinseltown, where they could make great pictures together. Sid rejected his pals suggestion because NBC had just upped Caesar’s salary to induce him to star on Caesar’s Hour. Later in the decade—by which time Caesar’s TV career was sagging badly, Sid had ended his NBC network pact, and he was fumbling for a new career direction—Brooks again suggested they give Hollywood a try. Still Caesar said no. Somehow, Sid hoped to reestablish himself in the medium of television, which he knew best and in which he felt most comfortable. Therefore he remained based in his hometown of New York, as did Mel.

  What neither party appreciated—or was willing to concede—was that the era of live television based in New York was fast becoming a thing of the past. Already, huge TV production facilities had sprung up in Los Angeles, and most of the industry was now based on the West Coast, where nearly every show was being taped or filmed for on-air distribution.

  For Mel’s part, he remained reluctant to leave the excitement and comforting familiarity of New York City life. He had so many ties to the metropolis: his mother and brothers; his three youngsters, who lived with Florence, his estranged wife; and, of course, his wide assortment of (show business) cronies and acquaintances. Thus, in early 1961, Brooks was still hanging on in Manhattan, frenetically networking with friends and past associates for possible writing assignments to keep himself afloat financially.

  • • •

  One of Mel Brooks’s many acquaintances from the good ol’ Your Show of Shows days was Charles Strouse. The latter, about two years younger than Brooks, was also Jewish and had been born in New York. After Strouse graduated from the Eastman School of Music, he studied with the esteemed composer Aaron Copland and the elite French music teacher Nadia Boulanger. Later, Strouse became a piano player for dance bands. Sometimes, he had worked as a rehearsal pianist for Your Show of Shows while waiting for one of his song compositions to catch on with theater producers and/or the public. In late 1960, Charles had enjoyed a solid Broadway success with Bye Bye Birdie. For this hit musical he provided the music, and his writing partner, Lee Adams (another friend and former coworker of Mel’s), wrote lyrics for the show’s songs. Even in these recent years of Strouse’s growing recognition, he earned extra money as a rehearsal pianist. Not long ago one of his gigs had been at the Actors Studio, where he’d worked with the film, television, and stage actress Anne Bancroft, who was practicing her presentation of song numbers. She wanted to prove her performing versatility and indulge her penchant for singing.

  One day while Mel was visiting Charles Strouse at his apartment, Bancroft dropped by for a few minutes to discuss song rehearsal matters. After Anne chatted with Strouse, she swept out of the room. Even from that brief glimpse of the classy two-time Tony Award winner, Brooks was entranced by her natural beauty and exuberance. Thereafter, Mel—by now separated from but not yet divorced from Florence—pestered Charles to arrange a real introduction between him and the tantalizing Miss Bancroft.

  Strouse did not think this was such a wonderful idea. He knew Mel fairly well, and Anne less well. However, his intuition suggested that these two seemingly disparate individuals were not likely to hit it off. As it was, she was far more successful in her career than Mel had been in his to date. Her achievements included a wide range of impressive performances, especially on stage and on TV. On the other hand, Brooks was a formerly well-employed TV comedy writer whose recent bid for a place in the show business sun was his recent album (2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks), which had yet to prove itself a winner. Mel was prone to a crude sense of humor and was happiest when he was the full center of attention—no matter what outlandish zaniness was required of him to grab the spotlight.

  Physically, Anne was a good inch or two taller than Mel. This brunette with Mediterranean features boasted a pleasing profile and a fine figure. In contrast, Brooks was neither handsome nor well built. Bancroft was Italian Catholic and Brooks was Jewish. It was hard to envision these two as either a love couple or even good friends.

  • • •

  One day—February 5, 1961—Strouse decided once and for all to end Brooks’s constant pestering of him to arrange a meeting with Anne Bancroft. That cold winter day, as Strouse, Lee Adams, and Mel Brooks walked briskly along a crowded Manhattan Street, Charles suggested they stop by the Ziegfeld Theater, where singer Perry Como was rehearsing for one of his upcoming TV shows. The trio entered the theater, and, as Strouse knew, Bancroft was there to rehearse her guest spot on Como’s program. As the three men arrived, Anne was on stage rehearsing a song number, “Married I Can Always Get.”

  Brooks found it hard to contain his enthusiasm now that he was once again in Bancroft’s presence. When the number ended, he and the others applauded enthusiastically—Mel loudest of all. Without waiting for Strouse to make a formal introduction, the determined Brooks boldly rushed up on stage, marched over to the actress, and said jauntily, “Hey, Anne Bancroft; I’m Mel Brooks.”

  • • •

  Anne Bancroft was born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano on September 17, 1931, in the Bronx, New York. She was the second of three daughters of Michael and Mildred (DiNapoli) Italiano. Her father was a dress pattern maker, and her mother helped the close-knit family stay afloat during the Depression by working at Macy’s department store as a telephone operator. As a child, Anna was a ball of energy who happily entertained loved ones at family picnics and gladly gave impromptu song performances in the neighborhood. Later, she recalled, “I was the personality kid. When I wasn’t sick, I was singing.”

  Having been richly pampered by her adoring family, Anna found it difficult to adjust to the regimented academic life at school. One area, however, in which Anna shone at school was in performing snappy song numbers. Her teachers were so impressed with her verve that she was often shepherded from one classroom to another to demonstrate her song-and-dance skills for her peers. Mrs. Italiano took notice of Anna’s special gifts as a performer and decided the plucky girl should have tap dance lessons, even though money was very scarce in the household. Anna began classes, and soon became so devoted to her terpsichorean studies and her desire to transform herself into a lithe ballerina that she lost her appetite for eating. This upset her mother, who withdrew her child from the strict training. As Anna grew older, she maintained her interest in performing at school, at church, and at neighborhood functions. By now, she was developing into a striking young woman.

  It was actually a family friend who launched Anna’s show business career. He worked at a tiny radio station in Peekskill, a little town about 40 miles north of the Bronx. He happened to mention that his station was having difficulty in filling a gap in its Saturday morning broadcast schedule. Anna jumped in and suggested that she and her pals could put together a program of condensed dramatizations that would fill up the 15-minute time slot. Before long, Anna and her group—who named themselves the Radcliffe Radio Players—were performing on air each weekend. The newcomer decided she needed a fancier name for her radio work. She grandly billed herself as Anne St. Raymond.

  By the time Anna reached her senior year at
Christopher Columbus High School, her passion for drama had turned into a strong desire to become a lab technician. She envisioned gaining fame within the medical field. Then the young woman developed a powerful crush on a classmate with whom she had been in school plays. He mentioned that he intended to enroll in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts after graduation. In a flash, Anna decided that this institution was her destiny and she begged her parents to let her attend the Manhattan acting school. The ever-obliging Mrs. Italiano found the funds to pay for her girl’s tuition at the American Academy.

  Anna graduated from high school on an accelerated program. Now she found herself the youngest member of the entering class at the American Academy. She also discovered that, at the last minute, her boyfriend had chosen not to matriculate at the school. To help pay for her classes, Anna held a variety of jobs (including working at local drugstores and giving English lessons to the exotic Peruvian singer Yma Sumac, a talent who became famous for her amazing five-octave range).

  A few weeks before completing her intensive studies at the American Academy, Anna was in a school rehearsal hall preparing a scene. One of her teachers (Frances Fuller) happened to wander into the room and was deeply impressed by the student’s performance. Fuller referred the pupil to her husband (Worthington Miner), the creator/director of the TV drama anthology series Studio One. Anna made her debut on the live program on April 17, 1950, and acquitted herself well in her dramatic role. She was now billing herself as Anne Marno. This appearance led to several other TV assignments, including a recurring role on the popular comedy series The Goldbergs. By 1951, Anne was not only a busy television performer (and receiving good notices), but she had acquired a new boyfriend. He was actor John Ericson, another graduate of the American Academy. The tall, handsome talent had gained prominence in the film Teresa and was then appearing on Broadway in the hit drama Stalag 17.

  During the summer of 1951, an East Coast representative of Twentieth Century-Fox Pictures asked Anne if she would make a screen test with a young actor they were considering signing. She said yes. Ironically, the studio decided against Anne’s coplayer but wanted to hire her. At age 19, her professional future seemed secure. She agreed with Ericson that when his New York play run was over, he would join her in Los Angeles and they would wed. (Unfortunately, during their time apart, John fell in love with another woman. By the time Ericson came to Hollywood in 1953 under an MGM contract, he had married his new girlfriend.)

  Once in Hollywood, Anne was immediately processed through the production mill at Twentieth Century-Fox. The new contractee was ordered to take a less ethnic professional name and agreed to become Anne Bancroft. Her debut was in a melodrama, 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock, but all the attention went to the picture’s leading lady, Marilyn Monroe. Through trial and error, in such lesser films as 1954’s Gorilla at Large and The Raid, Anne learned her craft.

  At first, Anne was thrilled by the mere fact of being in the land of palm trees and swimming pools and being part of the seemingly glamorous film industry. “When I went to Hollywood under contract to Fox, I thought I had arrived; on a clear day you could’ve seen my swelled head from Pasadena!” Later, she recalled of her new hometown, “I thought it was the cat’s meow. Here I was, in the movies! Hey, I thought it was the best thing that could ever happen to a little girl from the Bronx. And it was a dream come true for me. What did I know? I wore spangles. And somebody did my hair every day, and put my makeup on. And brought me coffee, and Kleenex when I sneezed. What a life! And when you’re nineteen years old, that’s great.”

  However, as Bancroft adjusted to the glitzy moviemaking lifestyle, it lost a bit of its sparkle. Meanwhile, she was growing increasingly unhappy at the studio, where she worked diligently in one (mediocre) picture after another but never seemed to get a key part that would truly launch her career.

  Bored with the not-so-merry round of picturemaking, she found solace in the Tinseltown nightlife and became a frequent face at the Sunset Strip nightclubs. Then she met Martin A. May, who came from an oil-rich Texas family. He was a law student at the University of Southern California. The couple began dating and, eventually, they decided to wed. (In retrospect, Bancroft said she was very discouraged with her professional life at the time. She had decided that marriage was her only option and “just about anybody would have done.” The couple wed in a civil ceremony on July 1, 1953. However, the groom insisted they keep their marital status secret until he had the right opportunity to break the news to his mother back in Texas. Thus, for several months, they maintained separate residences, and Anne gained a reputation in the film colony for being a bit ditzy due to her vague answers about the state of her relationship with May.

  May’s legal career did not materialize and he turned to a career in real estate development. By this point, the couple had realized they were ill-matched as a domestic team. (For one thing, Anne was amazed to discover that her husband slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow. It made her nervous, but she assumed all men had that strange habit.) To please Anne’s parents, the couple remarried in a Catholic ceremony back in New York. Eventually, they separated and, in February 1957, they divorced. Bancroft explained the breakup with: “Call it different temperaments. He’s blond and I’m brunette.… He’s from Texas and I’m from the Bronx. Texans will never understand Latins, and vice versa.”

  Later, May said of his ex-wife, “Annie was intense about everything. She’d lie on the floor and watch television by the hour, or she’d fry an egg, standing there leaning over the skillet staring as if the fate of the city depended on that egg. She was either a hungry tiger or a lovable lap dog.” Another time May revealed of his displeasing marriage: “She worked from 4 A.M. to 6 P.M. She came home and couldn’t talk. Once she wouldn’t talk to me for three weeks. There was a lack of companionship with millions of people tracking into the house. She tried to combine two loves—one a marriage and the other a career. The career turned out to be the greater of the two.”

  Anne’s film contract at Twentieth Century-Fox had expired in the mid-1950s. Thereafter, she kept busy both with freelance movie assignments (such as playing a mixed-race Native American in the 1956 Western Walk the Proud Land and the female love interest in the 1957 film noir entry Nightfall) and doing TV parts. One of these roles was on a segment of the esteemed Playhouse 90 TV series. Later, Richard Basehart, her costar in that episode, auditioned for the male lead in an upcoming Broadway play, Two for the Seesaw. He suggested to the playwright (William Gibson) and the director (Arthur Penn) that they audition Bancroft to play opposite him. Anne met with the creative team, but no decision was made about hiring her. Not long after this, Basehart dropped out of the project, and Anne thought that would squash her chances of playing the juicy stage role.

  By now Bancroft was more than fed up with West Coast life. She explained, “I was beginning to have a lot of lonely times out there when there was nothing to do, and I would have to look at myself—at the thoughts that came into my mind—and it was a very dangerous time. I was going steadily down-hill in terms of self-respect and dignity: I was completely demoralized by the time I left Hollywood.” Then came the turning point. “Someone must have hollered at me too loud because I just went home, packed my bag, and asked someone to phone my mother Millie to say I was returning to New York. That was the first time in my life I made a decision entirely on my own. And that was when I was ready to be an actress!”

  Anne returned to New York. She enrolled in acting classes at Herbert Berghofs prestigious HB Studio, convinced she had to unlearn some of her film and TV technique in order to fulfill her dream of becoming an accomplished stage performer. Meanwhile, she continued to campaign hard for the coveted play assignment, which still had not been cast. However, all final decisions on the show were in abeyance until a suitable male lead (with box-office appeal) could be signed. Finally, veteran stage and film star Henry Fonda agreed to do the project. Thereafter, Bancroft was contracted for the cherished part of
the kooky Gittel Mosca, life’s “born victim.” After many pre-Broadway tribulations, Two for the Seesaw opened at the Booth Theater on January 18, 1958. It proved to be an enormous hit and earned Anne her first Tony Award. According to Bancroft, “For the first time in my life I was a star, an honest-to-gosh star in an important production. There was a tremendous sense of achievement in me and I really felt like an actress.”

  Anne cemented her status as the toast of Broadway by headlining in another new drama by William Gibson. She gave a searing performance as Annie Sullivan, the visually impaired teacher who taught the deaf and mute young Helen Keller (played by Patty Duke) to communicate with the world. The Miracle Worker bowed on October 19, 1959, at the Playhouse Theater (where almost a decade later Mel Brooks would film the musical play within the movie sequences for his movie The Producers). The Miracle Worker was a tremendous success and won several major awards, including another Tony for Bancroft.

  • • •

  By now Anne had the professional fame and success that had so eluded her during her Hollywood years and the making of 15 feature films. She was earning around $150,000 a year and had invested her money in real estate, a Texas oil well, and a California bank. (She spent $96,000 to purchase a brownstone apartment building at 260 West 11th Street “because I got tired of paying exorbitant New York rents.” There, she could live life on her own terms.)