It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (24 page)

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.”

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 things 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.”