It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  In the coming months, between bread-and-butter writing assignments and performing gigs related to the 2000 Year Old Man, Mel forced himself to toil on his book project. It proved to be a very slow and frustrating process. Meanwhile, assorted distractions kept cropping up, including his latest creative brainstorm, which he’d had one Manhattan evening in the spring of 1962. Brooks was about town doing one of his favorite things: attending a movie. Besides the feature, the cinema’s program included a short subject. It was a surrealistic abstract cartoon made by Norman McLaren, the noted Canadian animator. According to Brooks, “Three rows behind me there was an old immigrant man mumbling to himself. He was very unhappy, because he was waiting for a story line and he wasn’t getting one.”

  Brooks could not help but eavesdrop on the noisy patron, and from the man’s rambling an idea sprang into Mel’s fertile mind. Within a short time, Brooks contacted a friend, Ernest Pintoff, who had written, directed, and sometimes produced short subjects (such as Flebus and The Shoes). He asked his pal to provide the visuals for a McLaren-type cartoon. After Pintoff agreed to the request, Brooks warned him, “Don’t let me see the images in advance. Just give me a mike and let them assault me.” With the help of Bob Heath (as animator-designer), producer-director Pintoff fulfilled that task. Next, Brooks went into a screening room—without a script—and viewed what Ernie had prepared. Said Mel, “I mumbled [in a Russian Jewish accent] whatever I felt that that old guy would have mumbled, trying to find a plot in this maze of abstractions. We cut it down to three and a half minutes and called it The Critic.” The result was a product of Pintoff’s company and Brooks’s newly formed Crossbow Productions (an entity created for tax purposes and, as a side benefit, for Mel to feel that he was becoming a more prestigious figure within the show business world).

  In May 1963, the short subject opened at the Sutton Theater on Manhattan’s East Side. Within The Critic a series of geometric patterns flow across the screen. On the sound track there is a running commentary by a cranky and clueless old Jewish man who has obviously wandered into the art house cinema and cannot fathom what he sees on the screen. As the elderly Russian seats himself in the theater, he wonders aloud, “I don’t see a poyson heah. What is it, a squiggle? It’s a fence. It’s a little fence. Nope, it’s moving. It’s a cockaroach. I’m looking at a cockaroach. I came to see a hot French picture with a little nakedness; what am I looking at here?” Later, he mutters, “Vat da hall is it? ... I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this was a ‘doity’ picture.” Relying on the same type of comedy patter that made his 2000 Year Old Man performances and his Ballantine beer commercials so popular, Brooks turned this relatively brief footage into an engaging piece of satire.

  The Critic benefited from playing at the Sutton Theater on the same program as a new Peter Sellers comedy, Heavens Above! That British film was held over at the art house cinema, and during the coming weeks, many moviegoers had the opportunity to view Brooks’s amusing spoof of the pseudo-art film. By then several movie critics had already endorsed this Brooks-Pintoff offering. Bosley Crowther (of the New York Times) applauded the “cheery” entry, calling it “good for a few rich laughs.” The New York Herald Tribune scribe judged The Critic to be “brilliant… the epitome of wit.”

  To everyone’s astonishment, The Critic began winning plaudits at assorted film competitions, including a prize at a West German film festival and a trophy from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. To Brooks’s and Pintoff’s great pleasure, The Critic was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Subject—Animation category. At the April 13, 1964, ceremonies, held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Mel was on hand with Anne Bancroft (who had won an Academy Award the previous year for The Miracle Worker but had not been able to attend the ceremonies because she was working on Broadway at the time). To the nervous couple’s joy, The Critic won an Oscar.

  Later in life Brooks wisecracked that The Critic and “Fruit of the Loom were the best shorts ever made.” Nevertheless, Mel was elated to have finally begun his filmmaking career and to have made such a positive impression on the industry and the public alike. Possibly, he speculated, his long-held ambitions of becoming a Hollywood mover and shaker might have a legitimate chance of occurring.

  21

  Getting Smart

  [Anne Bancroft] … was my patroness. We were living separately, and then I moved in with her. I always saved enough money to pay for dinner. I was not quite a gigolo. I always paid for the food, even though I didn’t pay for the rent.… But she was paying for a lot of other stuff that I don’t bring up. Like laundry and dry cleaning.

  –Mel Brooks, 1997

  When Anne Bancroft fled Hollywood in 1957 and retreated to New York to begin a new life as a Broadway performer, she felt extremely vulnerable in her private life due to her recent bad marriage. That sour experience had made her defensive and suspicious and led her to remove herself somewhat from the social scene. “I guess men were afraid of me, of the character I represented then, since no one dared dating me,” she later told a friend. As Bancroft underwent therapy and became more self-confident and emotionally open, she found that, over time, she had attracted two serious suitors: comedian turned stage/film director Mike Nichols and Mel Brooks. Anne recalled to the same confidant about these two audacious bright wits who dared to infiltrate her emotional wall, “I admired Mike Nichols for his talent, but Mel had a lethal weapon: he made me laugh to death. I fell instantly in love with him.” (In fact, Bancroft told her psychiatrist soon after meeting Brooks: “Let’s speed this process up—I’ve met the right man.”)

  Anne did her best to make Mel feel less self-conscious about the fact that she was earning a very good income while he was struggling mightily to make ends meet. (Years afterward, Brooks kidded of their temporary role reversal in which she was the breadwinner, “When we went to a Chinese restaurant, she’d slip the money under the table so I could pay the bill. And she’d say, “Don’t leave such a big tip; it’s my money!”’

  After his divorce from Florence Baum in 1962, Mel moved fully into Anne’s West 11th Street brownstone home. They were seen about town as a pair and now made no pretense of hiding their relationship (even in an era when unmarried couples were still not readily accepted). However, neither of them, particularly Bancroft, would commit publicly to when she and her comedian boyfriend might marry.

  By the fall of 1963, Anne Bancroft was in London preparing for her demanding role in the upcoming screen drama The Pumpkin Eater, which was to costar Peter Finch and James Mason. During Anne’s time away, Brooks frequently flew to England to be with her. When filming ended, Bancroft returned to the United States. In the spring of 1964, she attended the Academy Awards, at which she was a presenter. More important to her, she wanted to be at Mel’s side as his animated short subject, The Critic, had been Oscar nominated. While in Hollywood, Anne renewed her acquaintanceship with the Tinseltown press. Bancroft informed veteran newspaper snoop Louella Parsons that she had already completed six years of psychoanalysis, adding, “I’m at that time in my life where you stop looking for the man on the white horse and settle for another human being.”

  Bancroft and Brooks were now into the fourth year of their romantic relationship, and they had settled many of their differences of opinion. She had learned to trust this wildly funny man, who, like her, came from a humble background, had survived an unhappy first marriage, and badly wanted to gain self-identity through substantial show business success. By now, Bancroft had become less fierce in her consuming drive to be a selfsufficient career woman, while Brooks accepted that his beloved was far too talented to become “just” a conventional housewife. Anne summed up their give-and-take domestic negotiations with: “Like so many problems, we found that they really didn’t exist except in our minds. I don’t know why—maybe my thirtyish ‘maturity’ solved it. I simply found myself working only when the role was exactly what I wanted with time and emotion left for other t
hings in life.”

  Once those barriers were largely resolved, the couple still had to deal with the issue of her being Catholic and his being Jewish. Having an interfaith marriage did not bother the twosome, but they were concerned about how each of their strong-willed mothers would react to news of the impending marriage. Anne noted, “When I brought Mel home, my mother said, ‘You could do better.’ We still laugh about that.” As for Mel, he claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that when he and his intended visited Kitty Kaminsky to tell her of their imminent nuptials, he had a hard time conversing with his mother. “Her head was in the oven, I couldn’t hear a word.” Later, on a more serious note, he countered his oft-told joke with: “The truth is, my mother was so delighted and proud that I married such a wonderful, beautiful girl. You know, when somebody becomes a star, they’re no longer, you know, Jewish or not Jewish. A star is a big thing, you know, six points is better, but a star! You know, my wife … my wife was a star. My mother was very happy.”

  Bancroft claimed that Brooks never actually proposed to her, but that she asked him to get married and he finally said yes. Thus, on Thursday, August 6, 1964, the duo arrived at city hall at noontime to be wed in a civil ceremony. (No one there seemed to recognize the famous actress.) A man they encountered on the way into the clerk’s office served as their witness. Although the pair had thought to obtain a marriage license, neither party remembered to bring wedding rings for the ceremony. (Bancroft improvised by taking off one of her silver earrings and using it as a substitute.) Later, the radiant bride quipped of her groom, “My mother was so happy I got married, it could have been an orangutan.”

  When the media first reported on the offbeat union, actress Patty Duke, Anne’s teenaged costar in The Miracle Worker, said, “It wasn’t a surprise to me that she and Mel Brooks married—of course she would marry that crazy man!” However, much of the public was puzzled by two such seemingly disparate individuals becoming a legalized couple. Many onlookers felt that crazy—meshugge—Mel was definitely getting the better end of the deal: wedding a beautiful, talented, and successful performer. Some less kind souls labeled the offbeat couple Beauty and the Beast.

  Despite the public’s surprise about this out of the ordinary celebrity marriage, each of the newlyweds was genuinely happy with his/her choice of a new life partner. Bancroft said, “People think we’re an unlikely couple. Wrong; we’re perfect. He’s terribly funny all the time. I’m not above competing, and at first maybe I would try to top him. Now, I’d rather just sit back, laugh and enjoy, y’know? Maybe ‘cause I discovered early, I couldn’t.” Anne summed up her feelings about Mel with: “He makes me laugh a lot. I get excited when I hear his key in the door. It’s like, ‘Ooh! The party’s going to start!’” Brooks observed facetiously, “We’re so close we interchange roles. I can become the wonderfully statuesque, feminine Anne Bancroft, she becomes the Yiddish Mel.”

  Not that over the years the couple didn’t have their share of normal, everyday arguments. One time, Mel Brooks arrived for a dinner meeting of his beloved Gourmet Club. He was in a rage. When asked what the problem was, he explained that just before he was leaving for his repast with the boys, Anne had said, “Mel, when you die, where do you want me to put you?” He had retorted, “In the kitchen, under the table. And what makes you think I’m going to die before you?” Now he was stewing because he knew his wife had knowingly taunted him about his greatest fear in life—dying. On another occasion Bancroft and Brooks were in the midst of a flare-up that was quickly turning into a heated argument. Anne noticed that Mel was beginning to clench his hand into a fist. She shouted, “Don’t you dare touch me, my body is my instrument.” To which Mel replied, “Oh, yeah? Then play Melancholy Baby.”

  To Bancroft’s way of thinking, such disputes were a normal part of any marriage. She reasoned, “Hostility is basic to both sexes. It’s part of the business of sex appeal.… We all have hostility in us. I think it’s dangerous to repress it. Gorillas never do.” Even with their recurrent differences of opinion, Mel knew for certain that “God was very good to me. God said, ‘Here, I’ll give you one present for your life. I’ll give you Anne Bancroft.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s enough. That’ll cover me,’ you know.”

  • • •

  After their marriage, Mel and Anne continued to live at her West 11th Street house. In the next two years she chose to work only infrequently. On film, she costarred in 1965’s The Slender Thread and replaced an ailing Patricia Neal in 1966’s Seven Women. On stage, she appeared in the 1965 Broadway drama The Devil, a short-running mishap in which she was miscast. Meanwhile, Brooks continued to make TV appearances as the 2000 Year Old Man, was a frequent comedic guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and turned up on such other small-screen fare as Open End, David Susskind’s syndicated discussion series.

  Back in 1963, Mel had scripted a pilot for ABC-TV. It was titled Inside Danny Baker. Its rather thin premise focused on a precocious son of a dentist who hopes to earn funds to buy a fishing boat by turning his Ping-Pong table into a work of modern art. It featured actor Roger Mobley and New York Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford. The half-hour entry failed to inspire network interest, and the project was shelved.

  Then, in 1964, Brooks was contacted by TV personality /producer David Susskind. He and his partner, Daniel Melnick, who owned Talent Associates, had had a brainstorm for a new television series. It would play off the then current James Bond craze that had begun with the success of 1962’s Dr. No and had built tremendously with its follow-up (From Russia with Love). Another Bond entry (Goldfinger) was due for late 1964 release. Meanwhile, several movie producers were already jumping on the superspy craze with their own film productions and TV series.

  Susskind and Melnick thought the revitalized espionage genre was now ripe to be satirized on TV, where the spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was already a big hit. The producers also believed that in this era of President Lyndon Johnson and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, much of the American public was becoming fed up with the restrictive, often blundering U.S. government. This led the Talent Associates partners to conclude that a good number of home viewers would be amused to see a show that poked fun at the red tape of the American governmental bureaucratic structure.

  Initially, Talent Associates contacted comedian Mike Nichols about this project because of his recognized flare for satire. They asked if he would write and direct the pilot. Negotiations got under way, but then Nichols became committed to several other ventures and had to drop out. Melnick and Susskind were anxious to get their idea into motion, as they feared that their spoof premise might occur to another TV producer or that the spy genre craze could become passe. The executives turned to Mel Brooks.

  At this point in time, Brooks was having great difficulties getting his Springtime for Hitler to come together as a novel. Again, he badly needed to improve his cash flow situation, so he quickly accepted the offer from Talent Associates. Melnick, who had been a high-ranking executive at ABC, contacted that network and pitched them this idea of a Mel Brooks-created project. The network’s decision makers soon green-lighted the concept.

  Despite all Mel’s show business experience to date, he remained a talking writer who was best at coming up with a volley of wild and sometimes viable ideas. He still lacked the requisite discipline and organizational ability to sit down and turn out a script on schedule. He also had deliberately not yet learned to type, reasoning from past experience on TV shows that on a comedy writing team that “the one who typed got tied down. I wanted to be the one who ran around and acted it out.” (Then too, Brooks was still determined, somehow, to finish his book, and that took up a good deal of his time.)

  Talent Associates quickly realized they needed to provide Brooks with a collaborator if this venture was to materialize in the relatively near future. (Fortunately, Mel allowed himself to be persuaded of the wisdom of this practical decision.) The producers’ choice for Mel’s potential teammate was Buck Henry Zuckerman. H
e was a New Yorker and a Dartmouth graduate. As Buck Henry, the acerbic young man had made an impact on television by writing for (and sometimes acting in) such TV fare as The Garry Moore Show and That Was the Week That Was. Like Mel, Buck had already made a foray into films, having cowritten and played a role in the independent feature The Troublemaker.

  The producers arranged for Mel and Buck to meet at the production company’s midtown offices. Brooks detailed, “They had a pool table at Talent Associates, and he [Buck Henry] was a very good pool player. I grew up in a pool hall, so I said, ‘This is the guy.’ Anyway, Buck was immediately brilliant, smart, very sharp, satiric, you know, a truly witty mind.” The two men hit it off. Over the next four months, the duo played a good deal of pool and bounced ideas off each other.

  From the start, the iconoclastic Brooks insisted that this show must not fall into the category of the then typical TV sitcom. He explained, “I was sick of looking at all those nice, sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel [the title character of the 1961–1965 series starring Shirley Booth as a busybody domestic], I’d set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal, comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.”

  The wacky premise soon fell into place. The male lead would work for CONTROL, a U.S. intelligence agency based in Washington, D.C. The organization’s chief mandate was to outmaneuver KAOS, a global organization dedicated to dominating the world. The “hero” would be a bumbling do-gooder. He would repeatedly exasperate his boss (the Chief) and would often be prevented from screwing up a top secret mission by his levelheaded and beautiful female partner. Brooks came up with the name Maxwell Smart for the clumsy protagonist, who also went by his code name of Agent 86. (That particular number was suggested by Melnick, playing off the slang term “to eighty-six someone” because of drunken, obnoxious behavior.) It was Henry who decided that 86’s attractive partner would be known merely as “Agent 99.” The show was to be called Get Smart, a title selected because it had various meanings on different levels.