It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (15 page)

Carl Reiner, who went on to produce, direct, and write TV sitcoms and feature films, was once asked how the writing squad at
Caesar’s Hour
and the earlier
Your Show of Shows
could be funny at a given time within the nine-to-five workday. The second banana responded, “The answer lies in the nature of the comic beast. Professional comedy writers and performers will be funny wherever and whenever they are brought together. They are programmed to produce laughter, and when there is a job at stake, a professional reputation involved, and a wife or husband to be told on Saturday night, ‘That’s my joke,’ the comedic motor quickly turns over.… All comedians are writers. Some are talking writers; others are writers who work for performers. The pros among them could no more turn off their fun-loving mechanism than a certified public accountant could suspend his knowledge of the multiplication tables.”

As to the particular creative contributions of the perpetually tardy Brooks, Reiner recalled, “When Mel came to work a sketch would often be half written. He’d come in angry, and he’d listen to us and he’d say, ‘All shit.’ And he would start to try to destroy things that were written. Well, because Mel is really one of the funniest human beings in the world, he was able very often to improve on the jokes that were already written. He had to prove he could come in late and contribute at least his share or more. Mel coming in at one [
P.M
.] was a better commodity to have than a bum who came in early.”

•     •     •

During these years, Brooks spent far more time with his collaborators at
Caesar’s Hour
than he did with Florence, his wife. The day’s work and shenanigans often spilled over into the evening, ending up with drinks and dinner with Sid after they had quit for the day or before heading back to the offices to repair an unsatisfactory sketch. (Sometimes the food/ alcohol breaks were at Danny’s Hideaway or at Lindy’s restaurant.)

As at the office, the writing crew and the others in attendance had to deal with the vagaries of Caesar, who in recent years had become even more addicted to pills and booze. On one famous occasion, the group was seated around the dinner table, having just placed their orders. This evening, a particularly exhausted Sid was no match for the array of selfmedication he had consumed that day. Suddenly, he fell over face forward, landing in a dish of coleslaw. The gang knew better than to arouse the volatile Sid from his stupor. Instead, for the next 40 minutes they played a variety of charades to disguise from the restaurant’s patrons and staff that the mighty Caesar was unconscious. They performed ad-libbed routines and bits of business—such as “Let us all bend our heads down and pray”—waiting for Sid to eventually revive. He finally did so and continued on with his previous discussion, totally unaware that he had blacked out.

Not only were the demands and competition of work enough to keep Mel away from his home, but he also still felt ill at ease playing the role of husband. He was not sure what was truly expected of him and what he should require of Florence. In those first years they rarely ate at home. He preferred to be out and about in public surroundings. These settings avoided awkward domestic silences and gave him fresh locations and new audiences in which to be “on” and go into one of his nutty routines, which provided him with the attention he craved. (That these bouts of zaniness might be embarrassing to Florence or others caught in the situation never seemed to faze Brooks.)

Frequently, Brooks and his wife joined Sid and Carl and their wives for dinners, to see foreign movies (which was good fodder for their TV work), or to attend art exhibits. In the summer, Mel and Florence often visited Carl and Estelle Reiner at their Fire Island retreat and fell in love with the vacation spot, which had such a relaxed tempo and was populated with members of the show business crowd. Sometimes, the Brookses attended industry functions together. As always, no one knew what to expect from the attention-seeking Mel, who marched to his own beat.

There was the time (March 16, 1957) at the Colonial Theater when key talent of
Caesar’s Hour
assembled for the Emmy Awards presentation, which was being televised by NBC. Sid Caesar, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner, and new cast regular Pat Carroll had won Emmy Awards for their work on
Caesar’s Hour.
Sid’s writing team was nominated in the Comedy Writing category. That year they were convinced they’d win the coveted prize. However, the victors proved to be Nat Hiken and his writing staff from
The Phil Silvers Show.
While the others from
Caesar’s Hour
politely applauded their rivals’ triumph, Mel could not contain his anger at this cruel slight. He jumped up on the dinner table and began ranting loudly, “Nietzsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!” Brooks’s outrage did not abate on the taxi ride home with his wife. He asked Florence to borrow the manicure scissors she carried in her purse, and he began shredding his expensive tuxedo.

When they were first married, the Brookses lived in a walk-up apartment building on Manhattan’s West 68th Street. Later, they moved to 33 West 70th Street, then to an apartment at 1056 Fifth Avenue, and then on to 125 East 72nd Street. Many of these relocations reflected Mel’s escalating income as well as the salaries Florence earned as a dancer. Then they started a family (which led to Florence’s abandoning her show business career) and required more room. The couple’s first child, Stefanie, was born at New York’s Lying-in Hospital on February 21, 1956. Their second child, Nicholas, “Nicky”—named after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol—was born on December 12, 1957. Their third child, Edward, would be born on May 24, 1959.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1957, unthinkable news spread about the
Caesar’s Hour
headquarters. NBC was thinking of canceling the show,
unless
the increasingly intractable star would listen to (their) reasonings.

Mel Brooks and the others involved with
Caesar’s Hour
all wondered the same thing: “What now?” For many of the troupe, such as Brooks, who had family responsibilities, the thought of suddenly being jobless was particularly frightening—especially if, like Mel, one did not have a large nest egg tucked away safely. Brooks wondered if he would ever find financial security in the roller-coaster ways of his chosen profession.

15
Unraveling

There were two me’s. There was a glib, slick conscious me and a deep, brooding, disturbed unconscious me without a voice.

–Mel Brooks, 1996

When the American commercial TV industry was in its infancy in the late 1940s, it occurred to very few people that a popular personality who appeared on the airwaves too frequently could actually wear out his welcome with home viewers. Yet such a seeming impossibility did happen to Milton Berle with his weekly variety series, which ended its run in June 1956. He had been on the airwaves constantly since 1948 and, in the process, had become old hat to home viewers, who became enthusiastic fans of new programming.

Sid Caesar suffered the same ignoble career fate as “Uncle Miltie,” an unfortunate situation exacerbated by other issues. For one thing, at the end of the 1955–1956 season, his weekly program lost the valuable services of Nanette Fabray who recently had requested a substantial pay raise. Rather than meet her financial demands, Caesar chose to go with a new leading lady. The assignment went to song-and-dance movie actress Janet Blair, a pleasant but bland talent who had once appeared with Sid on the big screen (in 1946’s
Tars and Spars
). Sadly, the give-and-take between Caesar and Blair in front of the cameras proved to be less than inspired, and that had sorely damaged the show’s energy level. Another debilitating factor in the 1956–1957 season was that NBC had switched
Caesar’s Hour
from its Monday-night berth to Saturday evening in the nine to ten time slot. Now the program had to compete with the already very popular
The Lawrence Welk Show
on ABC-TV. As the year progressed, bandleader Welk and his Champagne Music captured an increasingly bigger chunk of the Saturday night audience ratings. Meanwhile, the overhead at Caesar’s weekly hour kept escalating and now had reached more than $225,000 per episode.

NBC tried to reason with Caesar that he must adapt his offering to meet TV audiences’ fickle interests, and especially find some way to freshen the program’s overly familiar format. Caesar did not take kindly to such suggestions from on high. He believed he was too potent a force for the network to contend with, especially since he possessed a longterm NBC contract. Caught up in his hubris, Sid ignored management’s insistence that he trim the show permanently into a half-hour presentation. As an alternative, it was recommended that
Caesar’s Hour
be repositioned in the 1957–1958 season to an every other week or every few weeks schedule (or better yet, have Sid concentrate on a succession of occasional specials). When Caesar (struggling with his swelling substance abuse) continued to balk at the options put forth on the bargaining table, NBC took unilateral action: the network canceled his show, and it went off the air on May 25, 1957.

•     •     •

During Sid Caesar’s fall from TV grace, Mel Brooks realized anew that, somehow, he must expand his show business work options so he would not be fully tied to Sid’s purse strings. Thus, he readily accepted an offer to help smooth out the book (i.e., the story line and dialogue) of an upcoming Broadway show,
Shinbone Alley.

The property was based on the late Don Marquis’s well-liked tales about archy (a cynical cockroach) and mehitabel (a randy alley cat). In 1953, composer George Kleinsinger and lyricist Joe Darion (who went on to write the lyrics to the huge Broadway hit
Man of La Mancha
) adapted the popular stories for an album. The Columbia Records release featured narration by David Wayne, with vocals by Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing. This, in turn, led to a December 6, 1954, concert presentation of the adaptation at Manhattan’s Town Hall by Thomas Sherman and the Little Orchestra Society. Among those who attended that Monday evening performance was stage producer Peter Lawrence. He was intrigued by the concert’s subject matter and acquired an option on the offbeat property. He believed that the material could be turned into a captivating musical. In the coming months, Lawrence raised $220,000 to fund the Broadway-bound venture, which was first known as
Back Alley Opera
and then was retitled
Shinbone Alley.

Initially, filmmaker/actor Orson Welles was touted as likely to direct the vehicle, which was to costar Eartha Kitt and Eddie Bracken (with Chita Rivera and Tom Poston assigned as understudies). But Welles dropped out of the enterprise, and actor/director Norman Lloyd took over. When Joe Darion (responsible for both the show’s libretto and the song lyrics) was unable to resolve the script’s plot-heavy second act, Brooks was hired to work out the kinks in the story line.

Shinbone Alley
was scheduled to open on April 13, 1957, at the Broadway Theater, without benefit of an out-of-town tryout. A week before it was to bow, Norman Lloyd left the project, telling the
New York Times
that he was departing because of “a great difference of opinion regarding the approach to the show” between him, producer Peter Lawrence, and the writers. Thereafter, Peter Lawrence unofficially took over the directing chores on the troubled production (which featured the fine choreography of Jacques D’Amboise, Allegra Kent, and a sturdy ensemble).

Shinbone Alley
managed to open on schedule, but the critics were not impressed—especially by the quality of the show’s book. Brooks Atkinson (of the
New York Times
) wrote, “Not much of the humorous comment on human nature is left in the libretto of
Shinbone Alley.
A librettist would have to be the equivalent of Don Marquis to bring it into the theatre. What Mr. Darion and Mr. Brooks have done on their own account is not a satisfactory substitute. Taking the line of least resistance on the musical stage, they have portrayed archy as being in love with mehitabel … this is hard to accept. A cat and a cockroach do not make attractive lovers.” The other New York critics were in agreement. Tom Donnelly (of the
New York World-Telegram
and
The Sun
) missed the presence of “a coherent narrative,” while John McClain (of the
New York Joumal-American
) pointed out that there were “long lapses when the story falters.” One of the few champions of the book was Robert Coleman (of the
New York Mirror
), who thought the coauthors had done an “amazing job in adapting the esoteric essays of Don Marquis.” Most of the reviewers devoted their attention to praising the talents of the captivating Eartha Kitt.

Shinbone Alley
closed after a meager 49-performance run. Looking back, Brooks analyzed, “It should have been at a little off-Broadway theater,” but instead it opened at a big venue and “was lost on that stage.” (In 1970, the property was adapted into
archy and mehitabel
, a two-hour PBS-TV special headlining Tammy Grimes and Eddie Bracken. The next year, the stage vehicle became an animated cartoon feature released by Allied Artists Pictures. The low-budget entry utilized the voices of Carol Channing, Eddie Bracken, John Carradine, and others. It quickly came and left theatrical distribution.)

The show’s failure, and Mel’s association with the misguided production, exacerbated Brooks’s growing doubts about the viability of his show business future. It was hard for him not to become panic-stricken. Brooks’s usual optimism was sorely tested by this professional failure.

•     •     •

With Sid Caesar off the air and
Shinbone Alley
a flop, Mel Brooks had to really scramble for new work in the summer of 1957. Grabbing at proverbial straws, he signed on as a producer/writer for
The Polly Bergen Show
, which debuted on NBC-TV on September 21, 1957. One of the other writers on this 30-minute musical variety series for the singer/actor was Michael Stewart, another
Caesar’s Hour
veteran.