It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (11 page)

The writing staff generally worked well together under the constant pressure, excited by the repeated challenge to outdo their past creative efforts. Each of these diverse talents had his or her particular strengths and weaknesses (especially Caesar, who was becoming intensely moody), but this writing squad was a well-oiled machine. Its members were in sharp contrast to the freewheeling Brooks.

“Little Mel” had great difficulty even showing up on time at the scheduled writers’ meetings. By nature he worked best on the spur of the moment and found it very hard to adapt to the rigors of a structured work environment. He was further inhibited from being a compliant team player by being plagued with insomnia. No matter what he did (including changing his diet to adjust his blood sugar levels) he couldn’t fall asleep until very late at night. By the time he had managed a few hours’ rest, it was well past the time he should have been at the office. It forced him to race to get dressed for the workday and then scurry uptown to West 56th Street.

Mel’s situation also was complicated by his suffering from extreme professional insecurity. There were many contributing factors to his plight. He was extremely sensitive to the fact that—unlike his confreres—he did not have a college education or formal experience as a comedy writer, and that he had had to blatantly push his way onto the writing staff (through the sponsorship of Caesar). Therefore, he felt at a great disadvantage to his peers. Others in a similar position might have compensated for such “failings” by bending over backward to follow the work schedule at the TV show and by being overly solicitous of their coworkers. But not the iconoclastic Brooks. Years of fighting the odds to stay afloat had left him pessimistic—even fatalistic—about the outcome of most every situation in his life.

With all of Brooks’s emotional baggage he could not avoid being the odd person out among the writers of
Your Show of Shows.
He would arrive for the day’s work hours late, offering absurd excuses for his tardiness. He did not deign to make an unobtrusive entrance but made his arrivals a perpetually noisy affair. He might stride into the room clasping his bagel, coffee, and newspaper, and sit on the arm of a chair (or even leap upon a table) and demand to know what the others had come up with during his absence. Other times he might make a more dramatic entrance by throwing open the office door. Next, he’d sprint in and slide across the floor as if he were stealing to third base, and yell some non sequitur.

Once “settled” down, Brooks was a hotbed of ideas, which he spewed forth. For every several unusable ones he tossed out, he typically came out with a gem that met with Caesar’s instant approval. His specialty on
Your Show of Shows
soon came to be Sid’s “Professor” skits, in which the star would appear as an eccentric expert from abroad who was being interviewed at the airport and would offer nonsensical responses to the reporter’s queries.

To be sure, the other writers in the group were not always models of decorum. Lucille Kallen once described a typical work session: “To command attention, I’d have to stand on a desk and wave my red sweater, Sid boomed, Tolkin intoned, [Carl] Reiner [the show’s recently installed second banana comic who had become a frequent attendee at the writers’ conferences] trumpeted, and Brooks, well Mel imitated everything from a rabbinical student to the white whale of
Moby Dick
thrashing about on the floor with six harpoons sticking in his back. Let’s say that gentility was never a noticeable part of our working lives.”

The very professional Max Liebman deliberately allowed this circuslike atmosphere because he believed that informality sparked creativity and originality. By this he was following the golden rule of the veteran Hollywood movie producer Samuel Goldwyn, who observed once, “From a polite conference comes a polite movie.” However, where Brooks was concerned, Liebman was less indulgent, especially since Mel so often pushed Max’s tolerance to the limit with his hyper, often crude, and always disruptive behavior. When Liebman thought the bothersome upstart had gone too far and was becoming much too much of a distraction for the general good, he would puff deeply on his cigar to get the red-hot end burning more intensely. Then he would toss it in Mel’s direction to signal his great disapproval of this unmanageable,
meshuggeneh
character. Brooks quickly became expert at dodging these fiery missiles and learned to make a joke of Liebman’s taunts to lessen any sting of humiliation he might feel. Mel also turned a deaf ear to those many times when the exasperated producer shouted in disgust, “You’re fired!” Brooks reasoned that Max’s outburst of anger would pass, so why worry. After all, Sid was his almighty protector, and Brooks believed he could always redeem himself by bursting forth with another useful contribution to the show.

No matter what the career risks, the irrepressible, rebellious Brooks could not desist from sassing Liebman. One day, as Brooks recalls, Max and Little Mel were standing on the rehearsal stage. “I yelled, ‘Pepper Martin sliding into second! Watch your ass!’ And I ran straight at him at full speed and then threw myself into a headfirst slide. Slid right between his legs, sent him flying in the air, scared the shit out of him.”

Such continual misbehaving by Brooks, the intractable juvenile, took its toll on the
Your Show of Shows
ringmaster. One day, Max Liebman’s irritation with his unruly helper reached a breaking point. He exploded in a verbal torrent directed at his rebellious staffer. The diatribe ended with Max screaming at Mel, “You are nothing!”

To which Mel replied, “If I am nothing, then you are king of nothing!” With that, Brooks turned on his heels and left the scene of the latest confrontation. He knew better than to step on a good exit line.

11
Living on the Edge

What changed me was success and having to solve the problems of success. At that time of life, no matter what you do, you’re getting your education, what [novelist] Joseph Conrad called the bump on the head. I got mine from the analyst and Mel Tolkin. Between them, they were the father I never had.

–Mel Brooks, 1975

In early June 1951, during the summer break from
Your Show of Shows,
Sid Caesar flew to the Windy City to appear live onstage. During the week’s engagement, he was scheduled to perform six to eight times daily in a capsule revue presentation with his talented TV partner, Imogene Coca. Sid’s traveling companion aboard the four-engine Constellation plane bound for Chicago was Mel Brooks. Somehow, during the several-hour flight, the usually agitated Mel managed to remain relatively calm. It was not until after the craft had landed in Chicago and Brooks had solid ground beneath his feet that it suddenly hit him that he had actually survived what was, for him, a major ordeal. Mel was not a happy traveler in the best of circumstances, and he always had great concerns about flying, a mode of travel he avoided whenever possible. Being aloft in the stratosphere triggered all sorts of fears in this hypochondriac: of not being in control ... of tempting death ... of God knows what else. It was, as Mel phrased it, his burden of “high anxiety.” In later years, he would recall that on his arrival at the Chicago airport he had literally kissed the ground in joy at having outfoxed the fates and survived the perilous trek from Manhattan.

•     •     •

On June 8, 1951, the
Your Show of Shows
revue debuted at the Chicago Theater. In the presentation, Sid and Imogene shared time on stage with other talent from their TV series: comedian Carl Reiner, singer Bill Hayes, and the Billy Williams Quartet (a vocal group). Backstage in Sid’s dressing room, the star’s entourage (including Caesar’s older brother/ assistant, Dave) was coping with the high-strung Brooks. Mel was on hand to provide any last-minute jokes that Sid might need to freshen oftrepeated routines during the Chicago run. However, Brooks too often had too little to do to keep himself occupied while waiting to be needed.

It was not long before the antsy Brooks grew bored with being cooped up in the relatively small star’s quarters at the theater. Often he paced the halls backstage to kill time and expend some of his surplus energy. He furiously chain-smoked cigarettes as his busy mind concocted new visual and verbal bits that his boss might or might not decide to use the next time he was on stage. With a quicksilver mind that was always working in overdrive, Mel was a nonstop comedy invention machine, unable to withhold sharing his each and every wild, ridiculous suggestion with Caesar. Most of these absurd ideas Sid discarded with a slight back and forth shake of his head. However, the TV star knew that for every batch of unusable material that spewed forth from Mel’s frantic, fertile mind, there would be a gem that he could use—now or later—to amuse audiences.

If the hectic regimen of the many daily shows was a strain for Caesar, Coca, and the others, it soon grew intolerably tedious for the hyperactive Mel. After all, he was stuck backstage—away from the limelight—awaiting the great Sid to return to his dressing room between performances. These bleak periods gave Mel ample time to ponder—and then discard as imprudent, disloyal thinking—the question of why he himself wasn’t performing onstage. After all, it was what he had always intended to do before he became a disciple, associate, and friend of the great Caesar.

At the end of each long day at the Chicago Theater, Sid—accompanied by Dave and the faithful Mel—returned to the Drake Hotel. There, Caesar, who had a voracious appetite, looked forward to a deluxe late evening meal delivered by room service. On one of these nights, Brooks was especially restless. On the way back to Sid’s suite on the 18th floor, Mel kept urging Caesar to break the routine. “Let’s go out and do something!” he begged his boss. “Let’s see the nightlife!” The repeated requests fell on deaf ears. Unlike Mel, Sid was married and already a family man. He had no interest—especially after the exhausting series of daily performances—to see the town. The shy Caesar was much happier unwinding in the privacy of his hotel. There he could devour his large repast in peace and quiet, away from the public’s prying eyes.

But Mel was always itching for activity, and it was especially true this evening. Once a notion had popped into his mind, he rarely could let it rest—no matter how many impediments there might be to accomplishing his latest whim. Once back at Caesar’s accommodations at the Drake, Mel continued harping at Sid, “Let’s get out of here! Let’s do something!” The self-contained Caesar vetoed or ignored each plea from his insistent sidekick.

When room service delivered the sumptuous dinner, Caesar sat down at the dining table to tuck in to his elaborate spread. Food was a great pacifier for the highly creative, volatile Sid, who expended so much energy on pleasing the public while all the time fighting a constant battle to keep his inner (childhood) demons at bay. The meal was delicious, and the comedian consumed it in great mouthfuls. Meanwhile, as Dave Caesar looked on, ensuring that his sibling had everything at hand to make his repast as pleasant as possible, Mel continued to frantically pace the room liked a caged ferret. Every few minutes he confronted Sid with his latest nudging request that they go out—now.

According to Caesar, he finally couldn’t take the pestering anymore. Reluctantly, he set down his knife and fork. Next, with lightning speed, the tremendously strong Sid seized the bothersome Mel by the collar and the seat of his pants and stuck him out the open window of the 18th-floor hotel room. As Caesar dangled Brooks out over the street down below, Sid gibed, “How far out do you want to go? Is that far enough?”

Flailing in the wind and seeing fragmented moments of his life passing in front of him, the thrashing Brooks managed to timidly quip, “In would be nice.… In is good.” Meanwhile, the powerfully built Dave came to the rescue. He slowly pulled the distraught Sid, and, in turn, the dangling Mel, away from the window. As he was doing this, Dave spoke soothing words to his enraged brother. Finally, the acrophobic Mel was retrieved from the clutches of death and was soon back safely inside the suite.

If this potentially near-death experience had deflated Mel Brooks’s insistent need to partake of Chicago nightlife, it did nothing to dispel his great affection for the gifted Caesar. (Similarly, it did not damage the complicated friendship that Sid shared with Mel. As Caesar said of Brooks in his memoir,
Caesar’s Hours
, “We were two close friends who genuinely loved each other and we had a relationship that was based on trust, affection and his relentless attempts to piss me off.”)

As Mel rightly anticipated, the dangling episode soon became common knowledge and quickly turned into a show business legend (in which, as retold by many persons over the years, the setting of the incident kept moving up to higher floors at the Drake Hotel). This would not be the first or the last time that Mel would face such a traumatic physical or emotional situation. As he had already proven during his army service in World War II in Europe—and as he would countless other times during his extensive, multifaceted show business career—he was a born survivor.

12
On the Torturous Road to Success

I stayed with the game [i.e., working on TV with Sid Caesar] because the money got better and better. I always thought it was just something I would do until I found myself.

–Mel Brooks, 1966

By 1952, Mel Brooks was in his midtwenties. Since officially joining the writing staff of
Your Show of Shows
he had received several healthy salary increases: jumps from $50 to $150 per week and then much higher. Brooks’s pay raises reinforced a discussion Liebman had had with his junior staff writer some months before. Max had said, “You know, Mel, when I first saw you backstage at the Broadhurst Theater, well, I would say from that moment until this very moment, you were a kid.” That is not to say that Brooks’s unorthodox behavior still did not drive Liebman to distraction, but now he accepted that the young man had a fertile comedic mind and was a good addition to the
Your Show of Shows
company.

Also in this period there were changes in the writers’ room. When Lucille Kallen went on maternity leave, the comedy writing team of Danny Simon and his younger brother Neil filled in for her. (The siblings departed when Kallen returned to work.) Later in the show’s run, Tony Webster became the first non-Jew to join the ranks of the
Your Show of Shows
writing team. Another regular attendee at the writers’ meetings was Carl Reiner, who had joined the lineup some months after the series debuted. Reiner, who had been born in the Bronx and was already a seasoned veteran of stage and TV shows, had a wonderfully inventive comic mind. He also displayed a flair for doing foreign-language double-talk—almost as well as the mighty Caesar. (What convinced Max Liebman to bring the multitalented Carl aboard was that he was slightly taller than Sid. This factor fulfilled Max’s dictate that a show’s support comedian—i.e., the second banana—should always be taller than the leading man.) Like Sid Caesar (and the less frequently present Imogene Coca), Reiner made solid contributions to the creation of the weekly skits. In short order, Carl became a close friend of Mel’s.