It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  Then, out of the blue, it was announced that Brooks would be teamed with TV writer/personality Dick Cavett in a series of radio commercials for Ballantine beer. It was a timely job offer that Mel was in no position to reject. Brooks enthused/rationalized of this gig, which had him do spiels in the guise of a 2,500-year-old man (a variation of his comedy album persona), “They gave me carte blanche. I had complete script approval. Although, truthfully, we never used scripts. My interviewer, Dick Cavett, and I started with a premise and then winged it. We made all kinds of tapes, but they used only the ones that we liked.” When Mel was asked what prompted the unlikely combination of the brash Brooks and the mild-mannered Cavett, he explained, “Dick is a marvelous foil for me. He’s innocent and guileless, and he just aches to be cut to pieces. He reacts beautifully during the interviews, especially when I call him ‘company rat,’ ‘pusher,’ ‘marshmallow,’ ‘fluffy,’ ‘sellout.’”

  The Ballantine commercials were a solid hit and did much to enhance Mel’s standing in both the entertainment industry and in the advertising world, as well as with the public at large. (In analyzing Brooks’s success with this venture as a spokesman, Madison Avenue copywriter Alex Kroll pointed out, “That’s why you have a Mel Brooks. Because he can give you that flash of genius. He doesn’t use punch lines so much as he uses startling non-sequiturs which get better with repeated hearings. It’s much more long-lasting than the typical comic-type of surprise-ending humor.”

  • • •

  Mel remained in a flurry of activity throughout 1962, hoping that one or more of his scattershot creative efforts would pay off royally. He tried his hand at writing a screenplay based on his failed marriage to Florence Baum, but there were no buyers for Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud. That fall, Brooks returned to Philadelphia to help out on another Broadway-bound musical. It was Nowhere to Go But Up, a Prohibition-set tale of two undercover law enforcers (Martin Balsam and Tom Bosley) coping with bothersome bootleggers (including a hoodlum played by Bruce Gordon). The show’s book and lyrics were written by James Lipton (much later the host of cable TVs Inside the Actors Studio), and the music was by Sol Berkowitz. The expensive musical ($480,000) was being produced by, among others, Kermit Bloomgarden (the Broadway figure who years earlier had promised to audition Mel Brooks the actor but failed to follow through). Sidney Lumet was directing the show and decided the unsatisfying libretto required fresh repairs.

  Brooks journeyed to Philadelphia to doctor the book, but his efforts were to little avail. The production received poor notices and did only fair business at the Shubert Theater. Then the production moved to New York, where it bowed on November 10, 1962, at the Winter Garden Theater (the site of Mel’s prior Broadway effort). The reviewers quickly nailed the lid on the coffin of the new musical, and it closed days later, on November 17—despite the effort of 235 irate backers who picketed the theater to prevent the producers from shuttering their costly investment.

  Fortunately for the resilient Mel, this latest of many career setbacks would soon be supplanted by new show business opportunities that proved that Brooks, indeed, had nowhere to go but up.

  Mel Brooks earned his first official TV credit as a member of the writing team on Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), a variety series costarring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Courtesy of JC Archives

  Florence Baum, a successful dancer in Broadway musicals and on TV variety programs, in the early 1950s. She and Mel Brooks wed on November 26, 1953.

  From the authors collection

  The stellar members of the Writers’ Room on TVs Caesar’s Hour circa 1956. Front row: Gary Belkin, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart, and Mel Brooks. Back row: Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin, and Larry Gelbart. Courtesy of NBC/Photofest

  Anne Bancroft, Cary Grant, and Mel Brooks attending the Hollywood premiere of Bancroft’s screen vehicle The Miracle Worker (1962). Courtesy of Photofest

  A mid-1960s TV appearance by Mel Brooks as the venerable 2000 Year Old Man and Carl Reiner as the intrepid reporter. Courtesy of JC Archives

  Mel Brooks cocreated the hugely successful TV series Get Smart (1965–1970). Pictured are four of the show’s regulars: Barbara Feldon, Don Adams, Dick Gautier (lying down), and Edward Platt. Courtesy of JC Archives

  Moviemaker Mel Brooks gives Dom DeLuise a few pointers for The Twelve Chairs (1970), shot on location in Yugoslavia.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Mel Brooks wore many hats in his breakthrough film, Blazing Saddles (1974). He is seen here in one of his roles in the comedy hit—a Yiddish-speaking Native American chieftain.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Gene Wilder (as Dr. Frankenstein) gives Peter Boyle (as the monster) a helping hand in Young Frankenstein (1974). Courtesy of JC Archives

  Bernadette Peters, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, and Dom DeLuise hope for the best in a scene from Silent Movie (1976). Courtesy of JC Archives

  Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn disguise themselves as an elderly Jewish couple to elude airport security in High Anxiety (1977). Courtesy of JC Archives

  Mel Brooks as the French monarch Louis XVI proves why “it’s good to be the king” in History of the World: Part I (1981). The object of his lust is the buxom Pamela Stephenson. Courtesy of JC Archives

  Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks teamed on camera in To Be or Not to Be (1983). They played the stars of a Warsaw acting troupe involved in underground activities in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Courtesy of JC Archives

  Filmmaker Mel Brooks at an industry screening in Hollywood of his new picture, Life Stinks (1991), Photo by Albert L. Ortega

  Amy Yasbeck, Mel Brooks, and Cary Elwes costar in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). Courtesy of JC Archives

  Nathan Lane (as Max Bialystock), director/choreographer Susan Stroman, Matthew Broderick (as Leo Bloom), and writer-producer Mel Brooks on the set of The Producers (2005), the film adaptation of the megahit Broadway musical. Courtesy of Universal Pictures/Photofest

  20

  Becoming the Critic

  Credit is part of the whole business of affirming yourself. You start as a little boy, scratching your initials in your desk. You’re saying, “I was born. I am here. I live.” I began by making noise. “Ya! Ya! Ya! Here I am!” I yelled but nobody cared. I discovered you had to find a form for that noise if people were going to notice. So my next noise was as a drummer, then as a comedian and tummler. But I wanted the noise to last longer, so I became a writer.

  –Mel Brooks, 1977

  While Mel Brooks was wildly making forays into many areas of show business in 1961 and 1962 and hoping for the best, Anne Bancroft was being more selective (for better or worse) in her career choices. After ending her run on Broadway in The Miracle Worker, she returned to film-making. Although she lost out on re-creating her stage role in the screen adaptation of Two for the Seesaw, Bancroft was given the opportunity to portray Annie Sullivan in the movie adaptation of The Miracle Worker. This 1962 release was largely shot on the East Coast. Thereafter, the in-demand Bancroft was offered other stage and film parts, but nothing in particular appealed to her. As a lark, however, she appeared on a mid- 1962 “All-Star” edition of the TV game show Password, as well as turning up on television talk shows, which she found fun to do. In 1963, she starred on Broadway in a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, a somewhat misguided venture that lasted for only 52 performances.

  Because the down-to-earth Bancroft was such a high-profile and distinctive personality, the media was constantly eager to interview her. To one columnist the celebrity admitted that she was experiencing a pleasantly expansive period of her life and felt less restrained by any emotional baggage. She acknowledged that, through therapy, “I learned to uncork my thoughts, if nothing else/’ She also mentioned, “I feel that if my artistry is based on my neurosis, well then, my artistry will just have to go out the window. Because I think a human being is the finest thing that’s ever been put on this earth, and it’s bigger and better than anything else it
can produce.” She summed up her emotional goals by stating she would rather be a “healthy human being… not necessarily a happy human being.”

  Since Mel Brooks was still officially married, Bancroft played down his ongoing role in her private life, and focused on discussing with the media her general likes and dislikes about the opposite sex. To illustrate her feelings on the topic, she referenced an unspecified male suitor: “He kept opening doors for me and trying to help me on with my coat. I’m not the kind of woman who needs those gestures, and I can’t stand being forced to accept them. I can’t stand any man trying to make me behave like his image of me.… Women don’t need doors opened for them anymore. That’s an old social custom that has no more meaning. As women are becoming liberated and independent, they need men who find other ways to prove they’re men.”

  She informed the press: “I have a very active [social] life. I find that the more I am with—of course, it may be just the role that I’m in—but the more I have to do with people, the more eager I am that night to give what I got that day on the stage.” On the subject of ever remarrying, she explained to another scribe, “It’s not best for any woman. I will marry, but certainly my husband has to understand that sometimes I must work from 4 A.M. to 6 P.M.—but not always.”

  • • •

  Besides keeping company with Anne Bancroft, Mel had several other constants in his New York social circle of the early 1960s. For one, there was Alan Schwartz, an attorney (born and raised in Brooklyn) whom Mel first met in 1962 and who became an integral part of Brooks’s career team as well as a good friend. Schwartz recalled, “Mel had just written a play called All American, which was a disaster. He had no money—zero. He was getting a divorce. He had three kids. And he would come to my office in New York with a cup of tea and a walnut-and-cheese sandwich from Chock full o’Nuts and talk about the future. Our law firm carried him for a long time; he couldn’t pay his bills .”

  Schwartz has described the Brooks of this period as “a street kid” with a “‘little Jew’ mentality about the way the big WASP world feels about him.” The lawyer found the complex man to be full of interesting surprises, and sometimes, contradictions: “Here’s a guy with very little education and sophistication who … [over the years became] ... a wine expert.” The lawyer observed, “Mel was surprisingly resilient. My impression was that he felt rejected, but expected that.” [Part of his childhood legacy was] “a very realistic view of the way the world behaves.”

  According to Schwartz, “By Mel’s standards, an improviser isn’t class. He wanted to be classy. Writing is classy. A screenplay is classy.” Over the years, this lawyer’s other clients included such illustrious writers as Joseph Heller, Peter Shaffer, and Tom Stoppard. As Schwartz saw it: “Mel is as intelligent as any of them. He must have a fantastic IQ. But sometimes, if he’s with playwrights or novelists, he feels he has to prove that he’s a serious literary person. When he met Shaffer for instance, he kept saying things like ‘pari passu’ and ‘ipso facto.’”

  Other key people in Brooks’s life during this transitional phase were the members of the Gourmet Club (aka the Oblong Club). As legend has it, this colorful group evolved as the result of a party hosted by Speed Vogel in the summer of 1962 at his West 28th Street studio. Among the guests were Zero Mostel (who had a studio in the same building), Joseph Heller (whose novel Catch-22 had been published the prior year), Ngoot Lee (a painter and a calligrapher of Chinese parentage who also lived in Vogel’s building and was a gourmet cook), and Mel Brooks. These five men found they enjoyed the evening so much they agreed to celebrate the occasion by reassembling every Tuesday thereafter for food and talk. Club “meetings” were generally held at inexpensive restaurants in the heart of Chinatown.

  Over time, various of the charter members brought others to these sacred gatherings, but it was understood that the newcomers were ineligible to become official members of the group. Among the visitors allowed to attend one or more of these Chinatown meals and wide-ranging gabfests was a diamond dealer whom Brooks knew. This particular guest entertained the others with odd impersonations of movie notables. Among Heller’s personal invitees was George Mandel, a novelist who happened to have a steel plate in his head as a result of an injury he suffered at the Battle of the Bulge. At a later Gourmet Club assemblage, Mandel recited the particulars of his World War II combat wound as the others listened respectfully in silence. Then, out of the blue, Mel said, “I’m sure glad that happened to you, and not to me.” (Heller assessed of Brooks’s abrupt remark, “He wasn’t being cruel, he was being honest. He just blurted out what we were all thinking but didn’t dare to say.”)

  In turn, Mandel brought another writer, Mario Puzo (who later authored the best-selling The Godfather), to a Gourmet Club outing, and Puzo soon became a frequent attendee at the gatherings. Among other “approved outsiders” were Mel’s longtime friend Carl Reiner and writer Joe Stein. (Stein had been an early member of the Caesar’s Hour writing team. Later, he adapted Reiner’s novel/memoir Enter Laughing for the Broadway stage and wrote the book of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which became a major hit for its star, Zero Mostel.)

  Reiner, who could only attend sporadic congregations of the Gourmet Club due to the demands of his screen and TV work on the West Coast, observed that this formidable group had several standing rules. “You are not allowed to eat two mouthfuls of fish, meat, or chicken without an intermediate mouthful of rice. Otherwise, you would be consuming only the expensive food. The check and tip, and the parking fees, if any, are equally divided among the members. It is compulsory, if you are in New York, are not working nights, and are in reasonable health, to be present at every meeting. The members are very polite. Once, I had a seat facing the kitchen door and I looked through and saw a rat strolling across the floor. They immediately offered me a chair facing the other way.” Carl also allowed, “I would put that group up against the [celebrated 1920s and 1930s literary/Broadway gatherings at the] Algonquin Round Table and bet that, line for line, they were funnier. The speed of the wit is breathtaking. It just flies back and forth.” (Regarding that evaluation, Brooks noted, “I’m sure we’re funnier than the Algonquin crowd, but we’re not as bright.”)

  Anne Bancroft proved to be a onetime visitor to the Gourmet Club outings. She had heard so much about the group from Mel that she was intrigued to know firsthand what actually transpired at these gatherings. What really whetted her appetite was the fact that women were not welcome at the meetings, whose locations were a closely guarded secret, known only to certified members. One evening, by happenstance, Anne came across a notepad on which Mel had jotted down the address of that night’s Gourmet Club rendezvous in Chinatown. Bancroft surprised the clan with her unexpected arrival. Although everyone was polite to her, it was clear to the show business star that she was not to make another such impromptu appearance at these cherished men’s nights out.

  Over the years of the Gourmet Club’s many get-togethers, Joseph Heller got to know Brooks quite well. (In fact, variations of Mel’s persona appeared in Heller’s novels Something Happened and Good as Gold.) Later, after Brooks gained international fame in the mid-1970s, Heller was asked to describe Brooks for a New Yorker magazine profile of Mel. In a blend of shrewd observation, sly wit, and unabashed fun, Heller pointed out about his longtime pal, “Mel has always had plenty of resentment and aggression that he can sublimate into creativity. He’s usually at his best when he’s envying people more successful than he is. Now that there’s hardly anyone more successful, what will he do? … He likes to see his rivals fail, but not his friends. Provided, of course, that he’s succeeding.”

  When the New Yorker interviewer asked Heller if he believed fame had truly changed Brooks, Heller answered teasingly: “Not a bit. He’s just as nasty, hostile, acquisitive, and envious today as he ever was.” He explained further: “You have to distinguish between Mel the entertainer and Mel the private person. He puts on this manic public performance, but its
an act, it’s something sought for and worked on. When he’s being himself, he’ll talk quietly for hours and then make a remark that’s unforgettably funny because it comes out of a real situation. You might say that he’s at his funniest when he’s being most serious. He has a tremendous reverence for novelists and for literature in general, because it involves something more than gag writing.”

  To illustrate the “real” Mel Brooks, an amused Joe Heller recounted for the journalist a prank that Joe had once pulled on Brooks. On that occasion Heller had exaggerated the fee he was then earning for teaching creative writing courses at City College of New York. He told Mel that he was receiving $68,000 a year for his efforts. Soon thereafter, Brooks met with his accountant (who also had Heller for a client). The comedy writer promptly launched into a tirade: “Why am I in the entertainment business? Why aren’t I teaching and earning seventy thousand a year like Joe Heller?” According to Heller, the highly competitive Mel “was out of his mind.”

  • • •

  Back in the early 1950s, when Mel Brooks bullied his way onto the writing staff of Your Show of Shows, he was thrilled—at first—to receive screen credit for his contributions to the program. Then he began to suffer pangs of self-doubt. He told himself, “My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a talker. I wish they’d change my billing on the show so that it said, ‘Funny Talking by Mel Brooks.’ Then I wouldn’t feel so intimidated.”

  In that and other instances thereafter, he found a way to deal with and survive the professional pressures of being a comedy writer. A decade later, when Mel set out to write his novel, Springtime for Hitler, he had to stifle anew his many fears about his true abilities as a writer. He sought to overcome his trepidation with a pep talk. He vowed to himself, “One little word at a time, but, by God, I was going to do it.”