It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks
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Authors: James Robert Parish
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Rich & Famous
IT’S GOOD TO BE
THE KING
THE KING
The Seriously Funny
Life of
Mel Brooks
James Robert Parish
Copyright © 2007 by James Robert Parish. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Parish, James Robert.
It’s good to be the king : the seriously funny life of Mel Brooks / James Robert Parish,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-22526-4
1. Brooks, Mel. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. 3. Motion picture actors
and actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.B695P37 2007
792.702’8092—dc22
[B]
2006016533
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mel Brooks fans everywhere
Contents
3 The King of the Street Corner
4 Hello and Good-bye to Brighton Beach
5 Swimming in the Borscht Belt
12 On the Torturous Road to Success
13 Broadway, Love, and Marriage
16 A Wacky Man for the Millenniums
19 Back to Broadway and Beyond
23 Jumping in Front of the Cameras
27 Stretching His Career Horizons
Mel Brooks’s Film, Stage, and Television Credits
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following for their kind cooperation on this project: Academy of Dance on Film (Larry Billman), Patrick Agan, Bruce Bailey, Robert Bentley, Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Ronald L. Bowers, Michael Buckley, Charles Callas, Catskills Association (Phil Brown),
Cinefex
magazine (Don Shay), John Cocchi, Stephen Cole, Bobby Cramer, Ernest Cunningham, Jacques D’Amboise, Joe Dante, Bernard F. Dick, Douglas Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, Dream City Photo Lab (Jack Allen), Michael B. Druxman, Eleanor Knowles Dugan, Echo Book Shop, Rob Edelman, David Ehrenstein, Emorac, Inc. (Eric Monder), Filming Today Press (G. D. Hamann), Dave Finkle, Professor James Fisher, Sharon R. Fox, Dick Gautier, Alex Gildzen, Bruce Gold, Shecky Greene, Pierre Guinle, Ray Hagen, Harry Haun, Travis Michael Holder, Lawrence Holofcener, Ron Husmann, Judy Israel, JC Archives, Will Jordan, Matthew Kennedy, Allegra Kent, John Kern, Jeff Kisseloff, Sam Kisseloff, Tom Kleinschmidt, Richard W. Krevolin, Audrey E. Kupferberg, Shawn Levy, Ben Livingston, Alvin H. Marill, Lee Mattson, Rick McKay, Marty Meyers, Dr. Gerry Molyneaux, Museum of Television & Radio (Jane Klain), Charles Nelson, Stephen O’Brien, the late Richard O’Connor, Jay Ogletree, Kimberly O’Quinn, Albert L. Ortega, Patrick Pacheco, Photofest (Doug McKeown and Howard Mandelbaum), Michael R. Pitts, Jared Poppel, Seth Poppel, Bill Reed, Barry Rivadue, Jonathan Rosenthal, Brenda Scott Royce, Barry Saltzman, Brad Schreiber, Margie Schultz, the late Arleen Schwartz, Jonathan Schwartz, Joan Seaton, Nat Segaloff, Ted Sennett, J. D. Shapiro, Stephen M. Silverman, Andre Soares, Spyder, David Stenn, Steve Taravella, Allan Taylor (editorial consultant, copy editor, and indexer), Vincent Terrace, University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library (Ned Comstock), Lou Valentino, Dick Van Patten, Laura Wagner, Tom Waldman, Steven Whitney, Don Wigal, Max Wilk, and those additional sources who requested to remain anonymous.
With special thanks to my editor, Eric Nelson, and my agent, Stuart Bernstein.
Introduction
Yeah. I’m buoyant. I’m happy so I can respond to people in a very funny way. I prefer to be funny. Not hysterical. Hysterical only when there’s a lot of people involved and then it is my bound duty to have them falling all over the floor laughing. Then I’m very funny. But comedy is a big risk. One clink. One sour note. And you’re going to look bad. Comics are very brave people.
–Mel Brooks, 1978
Growing up in small-town America, I was thrilled when my family purchased its first television set. It was the late 1940s, and TV was still a fledgling commercial enterprise in the United States. I recall vividly one of the first programs I saw on the tiny 10-inch screen of our just-installed living room set. It was
The Admiral Broadway Revue
. For a youngster already fascinated with the magical world of entertainment (especially films), the variety and quality of live fare offered on this weekly TV program, and especially its successor,
Your Show of Shows
, was manna indeed.
Jumping ahead to the winter of 1962 in Philadelphia, it had become customary for me to put aside my college homework on Saturday afternoons to catch a matinee of the latest new play trying out in town. On this particular day I saw
All American
, a Broadway-bound musical starring Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow of MGM’s
The Wizard of Oz
) and directed by the famous Joshua Logan. Whatever the show’s flaws in its embryonic form, the lavish production—with its vivid costumes, slick turntable sets, and catchy score—left a strong impression on me for years to come.
A few years later, I was living and working in Manhattan and made a point of attending a new movie that had recently opened at a local art house theater. It featured Christopher Hewett, whom I had met during recent summers working as propmaster at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts. I was curious to see him perform on the big screen. I watched the offbeat movie
The Producers
with fascination, and afterward enthusiastically told friends about this outrageous comedy written by Mel Brooks, which costarred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. I soon purchased the sound track to
The Producers
, which contained not only the film’s background music but dialogue interludes, as well as the highly controversial musical number “Springtime for Hitler” (which, according to the album’s liner notes, had been written by Brooks himself).
Months later, when Brooks received an Academy Award in the Best Original Screenplay category for
The Producers
’ script, I read several of the extensive articles published about this new Oscar recipient. Suddenly, I realized that Mel Brooks had been a key contributor to many wonderful projects. For TV, he had been a gag supplier for
The Admiral Broadway Revue
and a comedy writer for
Your Show of Shows
(and, later,
Caesar’s Hour
). For the stage, he had authored the book of the musical
All American.
(In addition, this same man had been featured on the legendary
2000 Year Old Man
recordings in the early 1960s and, thereafter, had cocreated a major TV hit with the satirical TV series
Get Smart
, 1965–1970.)
Thus, without knowing it, I had become hooked on Mel Brooks’s talent and zany persona—and remain so to this day.
• • •
Writing this book led me to examine the complex, lengthy, and creatively productive life of Mel Brooks—one filled with so many chaotic career and personal ups and downs. Here was a Jewish boy from a poor Brooklyn family who was tremendously driven to find his rightful place in life. Early on, he decided his means of achieving fame and creative/ financial success would be—had to be!—in the world of entertainment and, largely, in the field of comedy.
Because Mel was short of stature he always felt compelled to make “loud noises” one wacky way or another so that he would be a focus of attention—whether in his career or in his private life. Boisterous, zealous, sometimes downright vulgar, and often overly opinionated, he would repeatedly prove over the decades to be a man of many dimensions and seeming contradictions. (How can a man greatly admire Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and still delight in making a campfire farting scene the highlight of one of his classic movies, 1974’s
Blazing Saddles
?)
As Mel Brooks has demonstrated over the years, he can speak out on a subject with authority and passion and, at the same time, with a dash of deflecting coarseness. “How do you explain comedy?” he once rhetorically asked a
New York Times
reporter. “How do you explain Chopin? I hear a Chopin prelude and I faint. I
swoon.
How can a human being with hair in his nose just like me create those gorgeous silver melodies?” On other occasions, however, Brooks can be extremely articulate, sensible, straightforward, and even elegant—as when he addresses the art of making people laugh: “You can’t cheat an audience. You promise them comedy, you have to give them that magic carpet that’ll lift them up over their own problems into giggles, laughs, and belly-laughs.”
As to the genesis of his particular brand of “crude” humor (which may seem somewhat tame by today’s “standards”), Brooks says with tremendous vehemence and seriousness, “My comedy comes from the feeling that, as a Jew, and as a person, you don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from the realization that even though you’re better and smarter, you’ll never belong.” Mel’s ethnic background is a powerful factor in who and what he became, and why, in so many of his artistic works over many decades, he set out to ridicule history’s greatest persecutor of the Jewish people—Adolf Hitler. As recently as 2001, Mel, the veteran creative force, told news correspondent Mike Wallace on TV’s
60 Minutes
, “Yes, I am a Jew. I
am
a Jew. What about it? What’s so wrong? What’s the matter with being a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way deep down beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.”