Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Irving, by then in his early twenties, was working as a shipping clerk for a shirt factory while still taking night courses at Brooklyn College. Leonard was a runner for a novelty company. Bernard sold newspapers and magazines for a newsstand dealer. And now, only twelve, Melvin was earning his first nickels and dimes running errands for elderly people and relaying phone messages to neighbors from the corner pharmacy.

  Saintly Aunt Sadie continued to toil in leisurewear in the garment center, and she brought home “bathing suit sashes,” Brooks recalled, for his mother to turn “inside out with a long metal rod.” His mother was often surrounded by “enormous bags” of such homework from the garment trade, working late into the night, he said. But such work was almost always at home and off the books; resourceful about money, Kitty “lived on welfare checks,” Brooks insisted in interviews. She is listed in every public record, through his high school years, as unemployed, without a profession, or simply as “mother.”

  The family paid regular visits to Williamsburg, where they still claimed close relatives on the Brookman side, and after dark the teenager hung out near a shop that sold candy and soda. Melvin and his friends traded wisecracks as they waited for a school acquaintance of Lenny’s—Lenny’s age—to pass by on his way home late at night.

  That friend of Lenny’s stood out on 3rd Street not only because he was dark and handsome and resembled John Garfield in a gauzy light. He was homosexual—not that the teenagers realized that right away, nor was it ever mentioned. And he was an actor who aspired to be a writer and director. Born Daniel Appel, the son of a Russian ballet dancer, that neighborhood acquaintance even already had a stage name: Don Appell.

  A warmhearted, exuberant person, Appell was friendly to all the 3rd Street kids, who regarded him as “our show business god,” in Mel Brooks’s words. Appell always paused to chat with the youths, sharing gossip about the famous people he had crossed paths with backstage on his engagements—mostly small parts in Yiddish theater and summer stock. But Appell had also done a few walk-ons with the celebrated Group Theatre and had understudied Garfield himself, who was also Jewish, a Brooklyn hero.

  The teenagers tried out their jokes and bits on him. Appell encouraged them with his laughter. He took a particular liking to Melvin, the most persistent if not the funniest of the bunch, who asked half-jokingly if Appell might help him get into show business. Appell was about to go to work, in the summer of 1940, as the social director of the Avon Lodge near Woodridge, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. About ten miles down the road from the Avon Lodge, near Hurleyville, was another, smaller operation, the Butler Lodge, which every summer needed a supply of teenagers to fill lowly staff positions. Appell told Melvin that he could put in a good word for him with the Butler Lodge owner; Appell himself would be close by, organizing the entertainment for Avon Lodge guests. Melvin could draw a summer paycheck and perhaps moonlight in the Avon Lodge shows, as resorts in the same areas shared guest activities. Fourteen-year-old Melvin leaped at the chance.

  The Catskill Mountains in southern New York State, about a hundred miles northwest of Manhattan, hosted a constellation of hotels, boardinghouses, and bungalow colonies that catered primarily to immigrant Jews, frequently Yiddish-speaking and largely from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Some of the estimated one thousand hotels were palatial resorts; others were humble cabin camps. Almost uniformly they offered a kosher diet—hence the “Borscht Belt” nickname—and a hamish feeling for their clientele, who swam in pools or lakes, played golf, went on hayrides, and enjoyed country hikes. Fresh air and outdoor life were the attractions, with daily activities and entertainment. Most big venues had a social director who acted as master of ceremonies and staged theatricals with a core group of professionals hired for the summer; some of the biggest hotels presented as many as three shows a week: one dramatic, one comedy, one revue.

  Both the Avon Lodge and the Butler Lodge were located in Sullivan County. Neither ranked high in the Catskills hierarchy; neither lodge was as magnificent, sprawling, or expensive as the fabled Grossinger’s, with its (eventually) several dozen buildings, twelve hundred acres, and one hundred and fifty thousand guests annually.

  Even so, the Butler Lodge boasted spacious grounds with a swimming pool and handball courts and a dining room that a band could transform nightly into a ballroom dance paradise. First Melvin had to pass muster with Joseph Dolphin, a stalwart of the Yiddish theater who was the summer social director of the Butler. Once hired, the teenager was obliged to perform all kinds of menial tasks as a busboy, waiter, and swimming pool and rowboat attendant (“Mrs. Bloom, if you don’t bring that rowboat in, by God, you’ll never see another one!”). For that the teenager was paid a munificent sum on the order of $8 weekly. Meanwhile, he watched for any opportunity in the weekend programs.

  Everyone on the staff thought of themselves as tummlers, from the Yiddish word tummel, meaning “make a noise.” The Yiddish lexicographer Leo Rosten defined the consummate hotel tummler as an individual forever traversing the grounds and buildings of a vacation spot, “in an uninterrupted exhibition of joking, jollying, baiting, burlesquing, heckling and clowning to force every paying customer to have fun.”

  The new kid was hardly the tummler-in-chief of the Butler Lodge, although he did as much as could be expected of a young employee. His daily routine included stimulating the logy vacationers after a heavy lunch as they lolled around the pool. He’d don a derby and alpaca coat (props in a suspicious number of his anecdotes) and “go to the diving board with two heavy suitcases and I’d say, ‘Business is bad, I don’t want to live’ and I’d jump in the pool and everyone would laugh.” (His rescuer in these anecdotes was “often a tall, blond Gentile,” another biographer, James Robert Parish, noted.)

  On occasion the teenager visited the Avon Lodge, where Don Appell introduced him to a recent high school graduate, not yet eighteen, named Sidney Caesar, who played sax in the house band. Appell had noticed Caesar’s knack for mugging and quipping and found parts for him in his busy slate of staged drama, comedy, and revues for Avon guests.

  Six foot two with lush dark blond hair and the shoulders of a lifeguard, “Sid” didn’t look like the usual Jewish boy from Yonkers. Years later, writer Mel Tolkin, who met Caesar when they worked together on their first television show, Admiral Broadway Revue, said Caesar looked so goyish it took him a while to realize that they were coreligionists. Younger than Caesar by four years and shorter by six or eight inches, Melvin was instantly smitten by such a physical specimen. “Sid was the Apollo of the mountains, the best-looking guy since silent movies,” Brooks recollected in one interview. “He would stretch himself out on a rock near the lake and we’d all stand and look at him.”

  At the time they had only a passing acquaintance, but Caesar was magnetic as a performer and Melvin noted his impressive saxophone jazz work in the band as well as his cavorting in smallish parts in the Saturday-night entertainments staged by Appell. Those varied from a cycle of Clifford Odets dramas, performed reverently, to radio comedy skits with everyone standing around onstage reading into microphones. This time and place may be where a certain factoid originates: that Mel Brooks entered show business with a walk-on in an Odets play, according to some early published reports, or with bit roles in Counterattack and Junior Miss, according to other accounts listing Brooks’s first stage appearances in the Catskills. Many Borscht Belt hotels staged similar established fare, and Joseph Dolphin’s playbill at the Butler was also ambitious.

  The teenager did attain one milestone that summer, landing his first big break at the Butler. Dolphin was directing Uncle Harry, written by Thomas Job, a melodrama involving a small-town perfect crime gone awry; Job’s play was inching toward its Broadway premiere in 1942 (it would be filmed as The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry in 1945). One of Uncle Harry’s pivotal characters was the governor, who at the climax considers a reprieve of the convicted killer. A summer member of the troupe, playing the governor, took ill an
d had to be replaced for one performance. Melvin, who like all the staff was an understudy and walk-on, knew the lines and waved his hand to volunteer.

  The nervous fourteen-year-old was garbed in “gray wig, gray beard, period clothes,” he later recalled. In the final minutes of the play Uncle Harry, shaking with emotion, confesses to the governor, hoping to save his innocent sister from hanging for his crime. The governor hands Uncle Harry a glass of water, telling him to drink it and calm himself.

  “The glass slips out of my hand and breaks,” as Brooks told the tale, “the water goes all over the desk and stage, and I’m mortified. I don’t know what to do. So I walk down to the floodlights, and I say to the audience, ‘Hey, this is my first job as an actor, I’m really only 14,’ and I take off my wig and beard, and the audience gets hysterical.”

  “Joe Dolphin,” Brooks finished, embellishing the anecdote with details that would make it even more colorful, as was his lifelong wont, “leaped on the stage in a rage, I think he had a knife in his hand, and he chased me through three Catskills resorts.”

  Often, in subsequent interviews, Brooks explained why, dating from his youth, he had felt impelled toward a life of comedy. “You hear about the people who become comedians because they had unhappy childhoods,” he said repeatedly, “but a lot of us go into it for the opposite reason. We got so much adoration and love and attention that when we left the nests and didn’t get it we started to ask, ‘Where is it, the throwing in the air?’”

  By high school the throwing in the air had evanesced. Gradually leaving behind the little world of his automatically supportive family, the teenager discovered unhappiness in what he sorely missed, lacked, envied, or felt deprived of. The needs and anxieties, fears, hostilities, and resentments would fuel and sharpen his comedy.

  If he had ever been happy-go-lucky, that changed after his first Catskills summer. By 1940, no longer was Melvin such an adorable puppy. He noticed taller, handsomer people and felt short and ugly. In later interviews he frequently gave his height as five feet, seven inches, which is not really that short. But any height can be psychologically short, and a person who adds knives and desperate chases to anecdotes also might add inches to his height.

  The youngest Kaminsky brother was already the tallest, taller than Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. But outside the little world of his family he was not tall and handsome. Nor was he an athlete, and much of his psychology was formed around what he was not. Although he was okay at sports, he did not enjoy the same athletic reputation as his brothers; repeatedly in interviews Brooks complained about being picked last for sports teams. He became a “court jester” to the jocks, he said, chronologically his first acknowledgment of that role. Wearing the fool’s cap only added to his bitterness, however. “Pretty soon, I came to hate them [the jocks] all. I really hated them for what they made me be.”

  A nonathlete was no babe magnet, and Melvin wasn’t a Romeo, either. For one thing, Kitty didn’t discuss the facts of life with him. “Never,” Brooks told Playboy with unusual candor on the subject in 1975. “Completely taboo.” He had his “first affair” on the roof of 365 South 3rd around the start of high school. But “there was never any unzipping,” he said, “everything in pants, in dresses, never showing. Just a lot of pain and torture. Going home and unable to walk. Struggling into your bed and crying. Terrible. And it’s hard to masturbate because your brothers are in bed with you. You’re in between Bernie and Lenny, and four in the morning even Lenny looked pretty good!”

  In many ways Mel Brooks’s screen comedies would be suffused with a young teenage boy’s sensibility, and what passes for sexual byplay in his films was usually leering and naughty with little actual nudity or sex. There’d never be more than a mock romance in a Brooks film—with the exception of My Favorite Year, which Brooks produced but did not write or direct—the exception for tenderness and in other regards.

  After his summer in the Catskills, in the fall of 1940, Melvin joined the freshman class at Abraham Lincoln High School, a half mile from home in Brighton Beach. “Roughly a year,” Brooks said of his stint at Lincoln. “Did well there.” That included joining the school band and learning to play drums, a move inspired by Borscht Belt combos such as Sid Caesar’s. It helped that the Kaminskys lived around the corner from the Rich family and that Bernard “Buddy” Rich, who drummed in Bunny Berigan’s and Artie Shaw’s big bands, was the older brother of Mickey Rich, another Lincoln high schooler. When Buddy Rich came home to visit, practicing on a spare drum set in the basement, the neighborhood kids flocked around to watch the famous musician, and fourteen-year-old Melvin got pointers: one time he said Rich taught him drumming “for six months”; more likely, as he said another time, it was “half a lesson” or “rudimentary paradiddles.” Just as important, Rich invited his brother and friends to Shaw’s recording sessions in Manhattan, launching Brooks’s lifelong habit of haunting music studios.

  The Kaminskys still lived frugally (his mother served coffee to friends in yahrzeit glasses, he told interviewers, and tea in jelly jars). But long before he entered high school the family had acquired a radio, a big wooden Philco. The brothers squabbled and fought to control the dial. In boyhood Melvin was an unabashed fan of The Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, but he also listened to comedy programs, especially Jack Benny and Fred Allen, The Yiddish Philosopher and The Eddie Cantor Show (“very influential on my work,” he recalled, “along with his timing was [Cantor’s] particular delivery. He took his time, didn’t rush.”). In time he added big-band music to his enthusiasms. Asked to list his ten favorite recordings for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1978, Brooks named “one of my favorite swing recordings,” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”; he specified the Artie Shaw Orchestra version, which was popularized around the time the Kaminskys took up quarters in Brighton Beach.

  Drumming would come in handy down the road; improving his musicianship opened up a means of income for the teenager, and drumming also helped him hone his nascent comedy skills. Drumming had a lot in common with achieving the proper joke-telling rhythm, he often told interviewers. “Some punch lines should be on the offbeat,” he’d say, “they shouldn’t be right on the beat because they’ll sour. There’s a thing called syncopation, in which you feature the offbeat instead of the beat itself. The offbeat is the after-beat. And you wait, and hit it on the after-beat. So I was a real big fan of syncopation and it carried on into my movies—into my writing and my direction.”

  On television talk shows in years to come, Brooks would guide the house drummer into a rim shot—which The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Drums defines as simultaneously striking the rim and head of a snare drum, creating a sound that is “part normal snare and part loud, woody accent”—accentuating the punch lines of his jokes.

  When school let out for the summer in June 1941, fifteen-year-old Melvin returned to the Butler Lodge, this time appearing in “the first sketch I ever wrote” for one of the Saturday theatricals. He persuaded a young female staffer to walk out from the wings and join him in the center of the stage for the debut of Mel Brooks–style comedy:

  He: I am a masochist.

  She: I am a sadist.

  He: Hit me.

  (She does, very hard in the face.)

  He: Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold it. I think I’m a sadist.

  Don Appell and Sid Caesar were still knocking around in nearby Catskills venues, and after the summer Appell made another crucial connection for the teenager, hooking him up after school hours with the low-level impresario Benjamin F. Kutcher.

  Melvin ran errands and handed out flyers for Kutcher, formerly a photographer and theatrical agent in Philadelphia. Now operating out of a modest office in the theater district, Kutcher booked music acts including the jazz pianist-singer Hazel Scott and the Mexican balladeer Tito Guízar. Kutcher invested money in little theater while dreaming of Broadway hits. According to Brooks, Kutcher wore a “charcoal-gray thick Alpaca coat”
and a felt homburg in all weathers, hung laundry in his office, and slept on the office couch, with cans of Bumble Bee tuna stacked beneath it. Upon that couch he seduced rich elderly women who showed their gratitude by writing checks to bankroll his disparate ventures. “I was his sixteen-year-old assistant, his Man Thursday (I wasn’t important enough to be his Friday),” Brooks recalled. “He had about one hundred little old ladies in the New York area. Once I blundered in on him and said, ‘Sorry I caught you with the old lady.’ And he said, ‘Thank you Mr. Tact.’”—an exchange that would find its way into the scene where Leo Bloom meets Max Bialystock in The Producers.

  Although Kutcher would inspire the character of Bialystock, he was probably not a seedy type, and there is no way to know if he really dallied with numerous white-haired lady investors. Kutcher’s many interests included opera, black music and theater, and serious message drama. That was his connection with Appell, who still wore his social conscience on his sleeve and who, in the spring of 1940 in a Greenwich Village showcase, played a lawyer defending a Negro accused of rape. Kutcher was one backer.

  By the fall of 1941, the Kaminskys had shifted back to Williamsburg, moving into 111 Lee Avenue, less than a mile south of their former South 3rd Street neighborhood. “I think my mother missed her mother and her friends,” Brooks explained later. But relocating also made it easier for Kitty’s youngest son to attend Eastern District High School, one of Brooklyn’s oldest and finest comprehensive schools, which was located on Marcy Avenue between Keap and Rodney. Two of his brothers had graduated from Eastern District, including Bernie, who was out of school by the time Melvin joined the tenth grade.

  The sophomore class of roughly 450 students reflected the evolving demographics of Williamsburg. Still predominantly Jewish, since Melvin’s birth in 1926 Eastern District had added a liberal sprinkling of Italians and blacks to the student body (there was even a Negro Culture Club). The curriculum promoted writing, dance, music, and graphic arts over sports. Eulalie Spence, an actress and playwright from the West Indies, who had been a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance involved with W.E.B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Players, ran the drama program. (An earlier student, Joseph Papp, had sung in the Eastern District Glee Club, acted in the school’s Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and served as president of its Dramatic Society; Papp, who went on to found New York’s Public Theater, credited the drama coach from the West Indies, Spence, as “having the greatest influence on me than any teacher’s had.”)