Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Another early fount of imagination for him was actors and the fictional characters they portrayed in motion pictures. Sometimes on weekends, his mother took the boys to Feldman’s, a beer garden restaurant on Coney Island, which offered free silent pictures to customers along with its beloved hot dogs. There for the first time little Melvin watched Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton while eating “a frankfurter, a root beer and a boiled-to-death ear of corn.” Later in life Brooks would express varying opinions about Chaplin and Keaton, telling the New York Times in 1976 that Modern Times “isn’t all that funny” and The General was “dreadful,” while pointedly siding with the zanier comedians whom many critics viewed as less artistic. Never mind. “I fell in love with movies right there,” Brooks recalled. “This was much better than real life. Who needs real life?”

  Closer to home, on Broadway as it wove through Williamsburg, were “many movie houses” offering “three features for ten cents or a double feature and a ‘chapter’ [in a serial] and Fox Movietone News, the races, where if you chose the right one you got a stick of gum for free.” On Fridays his mother would “put out three milk bottles,” Brooks recalled; she would “get nine cents back and then borrow a penny from somewhere so she could give me ten cents to go to the movies.” Sometimes, if Kitty had other things to do, Melvin would go hand in hand with one of his grandmothers to the theater at the corner of Marcy and Broadway; just as often one of his older brothers took him to a matinee.

  Around Hanukkah in 1931, it must have been, he saw director James Whale’s version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the Monster. Little Melvin was not yet six; no wonder that at home afterward, he had recurring nightmares of the Monster climbing up the fire escape toward his bedroom window; and no surprise, forty years on, that he recalled the classic horror film so vividly when sending up its scary story, its spooky milieu and atmospherics in Young Frankenstein.

  As a nonagenarian, Brooks could reel off favorite stars and scenes from movies he had first watched in boyhood, those that had afforded escape from the “outside” world, where “life was dirty and hard.” He relished The Adventures of Robin Hood with the dauntless Errol Flynn; Flash Gordon and other boy-oriented fantasy adventures; carefree musicals, especially the series starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; and the slapstick of the reigning comedy teams, many of them Jewish, such as the Three Stooges, but especially those that were made up of brothers—the surreal Marxes, the goofy Ritzes.

  The Ritz brothers, Al, Jimmy, and Harry, were former Brooklynites, of whom the youngest brother, Harry, was “the sire of mugging,” in Brooks’s view. Pure clowns who made stupid puns with manic eye-rolling, the Ritzes were also comedic song-and-dance artists. The boy loved their wacky number “The Horror Boys from Hollywood” from One in a Million in 1936, with Al as a singing-dancing Frankenstein’s Monster. Brooks would incorporate a lot of mugging into his career, and “The Horror Boys from Hollywood” was an example of how he frequently drew from youthful favorites later, to inspire and to create memorable scenes such as “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Young Frankenstein.

  The boy began to follow the films of Alfred Hitchcock, dating to a reissue of The Lodger, a silent thriller he saw at a Brooklyn theater with his brother Irving, and he’d rush to any picture featuring Cary Grant in the lead—or, for that matter, any glossy British production with a tall handsome leading man and lady with perfect diction and teeth.

  His own teeth? A dentist looked into his mouth, diagnosed cavities, and pulled four teeth out for fifty cents each after Kitty balked at a dollar each for fillings. The surprise of the anecdote may be that he even visited a dentist, but for the rest of his life he had “tooth problems because of that,” his son Max Brooks told an interviewer decades later.

  When he was seven going on eight years of age, Melvin physically escaped Williamsburg for the first time. He left behind his brothers and mother and New York and felt the first pangs of insecurity, and he learned to defend himself by making strangers laugh.

  The boy spent part of the summer of 1934 at Camp Sussex in New Jersey, spread over one hundred scenic acres on the shore of Lake Glenwood in Sussex County. Although it was run by a Jewish welfare organization and underwritten by comedian Eddie Cantor, Camp Sussex was open and free to all orphans and poor children. The goal was to provide needy children with a respite from the city’s sweltering summers and its dismal slum conditions while immersing them in nature and outdoor activities.

  Melvin rose with the other kids early every morning to boom out the camp ditty (“We welcome you to Sussex Camp/We’re mighty glad you’re here/We’ll send the air reverberating/With a mighty cheer!”) and to eat crabapples until his belly ached.

  At Camp Sussex Melvin found his first audience outside the neighborhood. Whatever dictum the camp counselors issued to the boys, he would promptly subvert for laughs. (“Stay at the shallow end of the pool until you learn to drown!”) At one weekend show the boy took center stage to offer his devastating imitation of a counselor. “I brought the house down,” he recalled years later, “and I understood then that if you take comedy from life instead of repeating Henny Youngman jokes it works even better.”

  Jokes protected him, he learned. “They were afraid of my tongue . . . words were my equalizer.” His antics preempted the counselors and made a nonathlete feel as though he belonged with the other boys. “‘Who said that? Kaminsky! Grab him! Hold him!’ Slap!” Brooks recalled. “But the other kids liked it and I was a success. I needed a success. I was short, I was scrawny. I was the last one they picked to be on the team.”

  He loved singing and dancing and clowning more than sports. When relatives gathered, he did animal impressions (“As a boy, I could make the greatest cat sounds in the world”) and sang favorite songs, shuffling his feet in time with the music, which was not uncommon, even among Brooklyn kids, in an era that exalted song and dance on Broadway and radio and in movies. “I always got ’em at family parties,” Brooks said years later, “with [Al] Jolson’s ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie,’ and Eddie Cantor’s ‘If You Knew Susie.’”

  After his Camp Sussex summer, toward the end of 1934, Joe Brookman, Kitty’s older brother, arranged a special outing for the eight-year-old that proved as influential as any experience—good, bad, or indifferent—that Melvin notched in his boyhood.

  Cherished Uncle Joe, now a taxi driver, was a “character” with peculiar mannerisms and maxims; sometimes he was mock wise (“Marry a fat girl, don’t marry a face”); sometimes he made head-scratching pronouncements (“Never eat chocolate after chicken”). The diminutive Joe wore Adler’s elevator shoes and drove a Parmelee cab sitting on a stack of phone books with a special apparatus that allowed him to shift gears and operate the pedals and brakes. “When you saw a cab coming down the street with no driver at the wheel,” Brooks said, “that was Uncle Joe.” Uncle Joe was absorbed into the boy’s repertoire, and years later there would be a little of him in the 2000 Year Old Man.

  Uncle Joe had done a mitzvah for a Manhattan doorman who thanked the taxi man with a pair of tickets for Anything Goes, the hottest show on Broadway after its opening in late November 1934. The Cole Porter musical starred the electrifying Ethel Merman. Uncle Joe in his taxi chauffeured his nephew to the Alvin Theatre. The two sat “in the next to the last row at the top of the balcony,” Brooks recalled with writerly exaggeration. The performers weren’t using microphones in those days. Still, “all these Russian Jewish melodies that came from Cole Porter . . . Ethel Merman started to sing, and I had to hold my ears—she had a big voice. It was the most thrilling experience of my life.”

  “That day infected me with the virus of the theater,” he recalled in Michael Kantor’s documentary Broadway: The American Musical seventy years later. Cole Porter became “my all-time favorite composer,” he said, but over time Uncle Joe took his nephew to other Broadway musicals that impressed the boy, including Hellzapoppin’ in 1938, a hectic revue stuffed with slapstick and sight
gags, written by and starring the goyish comedy duo of John “Ole” Olsen and Harold “Chic” Johnson. “A musical not only transports you, but stays in your brain because of the songs,” Brooks told Kantor. “The musical blows the dust off your soul, like no other phenomenon in the history of show business.”

  Even before he saw his first musical the stage-struck boy already knew “the tunes and lyrics to a whole bunch of the numbers,” because there was “music in the air, music everywhere,” in his Brooklyn neighborhood, as he wrote in a piece he bylined more than half a century later for The Times of London. “Bing Crosby singing ‘From Monday On’ on the radio, the Millers in the next apartment playing Russ Columbo records on their wind-up Victrola, a wannabe Benny Goodman practicing ‘Don’t Be That Way’ on his squeaky clarinet in the apartment across the backyard, a piano player in the open window of Heller’s Music Emporium down the street knocking out Broadway tunes as a come-on to peddle street music.”

  When music wasn’t in the air, there were plenty of other things for a boy to see and do all day long on crowded 3rd Street. The backyards and front steps were clogged with kids from big Jewish families. The Kaminskys played stickball, stoopball, and bottle-cap checkers and invented card games “with dirty old, very thick cards.” With precious pennies they bought egg creams delicious enough to make you “swoon with ecstasy.”

  Somehow the pennies always stretched. “We were really poor but so was everybody else,” Brooks said. “We always had enough to eat. Our poverty didn’t really bother us emotionally.” He added, “Being poor was good! It was a good thing for me.”

  The older brothers chipped in money from their small jobs. Before Melvin was a teenager, Kitty convened a family meeting. The Kaminskys lived in a fifth-floor back apartment with a view of fluttering clotheslines and prowling cats, which cost about sixteen dollars monthly; it had a kitchen, a living room, Kitty’s bedroom, and another room for the boys. “One big bed for us, and we slept across the mattress,” Brooks said. “I loved it because I loved my brothers, and I loved the action, and I loved being warm.”

  Kitty made sure of the warmth. “On cold winter mornings,” Brooks recalled, she “put my underwear, my socks, my shirt and trousers on the radiator, and she dressed me under the covers. And she gave me kisses and whistled while she was doing it. When I go onstage or write something, I want my clothes from the radiator. I want my mother whistling.”

  The space was okay, but Kitty yearned for a front apartment with a big window overlooking busy 3rd Street. Such an apartment had just been vacated and was available for a few more dollars per month. Irving and Leonard agreed to squeeze the extra money out of their earnings, and the family moved again from inside the building.

  Until he was about ten Melvin went to grade school at P.S. 19, and then it was J.H.S. 50 for junior high—both schools located on different nearby blocks of South 3rd. Junior high was a shock to the system, Brooks said later, because it introduced the concept of homework into his life. He remembered struggling with a test calling for him to memorize the names of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Irving had just returned home from Brooklyn College, where he was studying pharmacy and chemistry at night after “working at a ten-hour job during the day to help pay the rent.” His older brother sat down to help and asked Melvin where he played punchball. On Rutledge Street, he replied. Where else? Rodney Street. On and on through all the familiar streets of their turf, even Williamsburg itself the name of a Declaration of Independence signer, William Williams, Irving pointed out. “I got an A on the exam,” Brooks recalled.

  Not the best student, by his own admission, since he couldn’t sit still for very long, Melvin was less an avid reader than “an avid talker and doer.” If he read at all, it was more likely to be comics than book-books. Yet like his brothers he easily got good grades in science classes, and perhaps for that reason Kitty did not worry too much about her youngest son. Kitty was really something: “the best cook in the world,” a person with an “exuberant joy of living,” in Brooks’s memory. Melvin could say virtually anything at all and get a smile or a chuckle out of his mother. He was encouraged, coddled. Among his tales of growing up there was not one of Kitty spanking him.

  As Melvin became a teenager, he hung out with friends in daytime and darkness, honing his wisecracks. He regarded himself as the “undisputed champ of corner shtick.” Street-corner shtick was “a kind of rudimentary stand-up comedy,” as his first biographer, William Holtzman, explained, “an unruly verbal slapstick.” Brooks recalled: “The corner was tough. You had to score on the corner—no bullshit routines, no slick laminated crap . . . and you really had to be good on your feet. . . . Real stories of tragedy we screamed at.”

  By junior high he was roaming freely across Williamsburg, and he and his friends even took twenty-minute walks across the long suspension bridge to the Lower East Side for knishes and root beer. “That was okay, there were a lot of Jews there,” he recalled. “However, when we’d go any farther uptown it became very scary and very exciting.”

  He and his pals experienced a few close calls. They hung out at the neighborhood Woolworth’s and were known to pocket the yo-yos and cap pistols. One time Melvin was making his getaway with a cap pistol when he felt the manager clutch his shoulder. “Without thinking I turned the cap gun on him and said, ‘Lemme go or I’ll blow your head off,’” Brooks recalled. “He was so surprised that he stepped back, and I ran around him and out the door.” Brooks told variations of that yarn in many interviews in later years, but the incident must have happened in some way; an uproarious reimagining of it occurs in Blazing Saddles when Black Bart (Cleavon Little), threatened by the racist townsfolk of Rock Ridge, turns his own gun around and threatens to shoot himself.

  By that time in his young life, admittedly, Melvin was watching “a big diet of Western movies” either with his best friend, Eugene Cohen—later a Broadway press agent under the name Eugene Cogen—or alone at some “dump neighborhood theater. My mother was always sending an older brother to drag me out. Sometimes I went there when it opened at 11:30 in the morning and stayed until nightfall starved to death, a splitting headache, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.” As boys will do, he’d watch all those cowboys sitting around the campfire eating beans and wonder about farting. “How many beans could you eat and how much black coffee could you drink out of those tin cups without letting one go?”

  On the Williamsburg Bridge he and Cohen smoked a pack of Sensations for the first time. The young teenagers had a contagious-laughter friendship. The pair had begun to sneak into neighborhood movies rather than fork over their pennies, and one time they were caught at it and dragged into the manager’s office. They just couldn’t stop laughing. “You have your choice,” the manager barked. “I could call the police or give you a beating.” Melvin shouted, “Beating!” at the same time that Cogan yelled, “The police!” The youths burst into more helpless laughter. The manager glared. “Just get out of here!”

  By the mid-1930s, Kitty had decided to move yet again, this time across Brooklyn, as far southwest as one could go before splashing into the Lower New York Bay: to Brighton Beach, named for the English resort town, one of several shore-adjacent communities leading to Coney Island. Once the westernmost barrier island of Long Island, Coney Island was by now a fabled sandbar destination of fairgrounds and amusement rides for New Yorkers.

  Brighton Beach was densely populated and heavily Jewish, but perhaps Kitty moved the family there to be close to the ocean and Bensonhurst, where Abraham and Bertha Kaminsky still maintained their residence. There were vague Kaminsky relatives sprinkled all over the borough, synagogue leaders and public officials, including a radical state assemblyman who probably accounted for Brooks’s later remarks about “my Labor Party beginnings in Brooklyn.” Kitty’s family usually celebrated holidays with Kaminsky aunts, uncles, and cousins; some served fancy melon balls and lived in luxury buildings with elevators, at which Melvin and his bro
thers, the shabby relatives, gawked. Passover was always held at Grandfather Shloimy’s, with the elder statesman presiding over the rituals of the Seder. Max’s youngest brother, Leon, a teacher, sat closest to the children’s table and regaled them with play-by-plays of Mel Ott at bat—going, going, gone!

  Perhaps Melvin’s family moved to the larger Brighton Beach apartment because the household now boasted a lodger, Kitty’s boyfriend, Anthony Lombardi. Born in Italy and a few years older than Kitty, Tony was “a pal” to take the place of her deceased spouse (that is how Lainie Kazan, playing Belle Carroca, describes her second husband, who acts as stepfather to the Mel Brooks character in My Favorite Year). The brothers called their mother’s boyfriend “Uncle Tony” or “T.” Brooks didn’t often mention Uncle Tony in interviews, but one time he described him as a trash collector who gave the boys and their friends rides to Coney Island in his garbage truck. (“The garbage trucks were big . . . people got out of the way!”) Probably Uncle Tony held several jobs; the 1940 census lists him, like Aunt Sadie, as working in the garment industry—a presser of ladies’ coats.

  Some days in those Brighton Beach summers Melvin and his friends headed to Ebbets Field in Flatbush, scrounging Brooklyn Dodgers tickets. If they couldn’t get their hands on extra tickets or couldn’t afford the scalped ones, they’d sneak through cracks in the gate, St. Louis outfielder Joe “Ducky” Medwick waving to them as they grabbed seats.

  Most summer days they spent at the beach: their place on Brighton’s 6th Street and Mostmere was three blocks from the boardwalk. Forever after, saltwater ran in Brooks’s veins. “Right near the sea and I loved that,” he recalled, “loved the smell of the ocean.”