Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Though it had never been quite a love match between him and M. K. Martinet, Brooks had been hot and heavy with the dancer for months before Gentlemen Prefer Blondes closed and her interest faded. M.K. played the field and didn’t want a steady boyfriend. All the dancers knew the story—M.K. made sure they did—of the time she had been in bed with the tall, athletically proportioned Wall Street stockbroker Edward Dunay, another stage-door Johnny pursuing the Blondes chorus. Brooks came around late that night to M.K.’s apartment, tossing pebbles at her window, which was one of his cute ploys. M.K. and Dunay continued to make love, pretending not to hear anything, until he slunk away.

  Now that M.K. was immersed in her new dance team career with Charles Basile, she made it clear to Brooks that she was moving on. Neurotic and a heavy drinker, M.K. was not the easiest person to be around, and Brooks would not miss that part of the relationship.

  Almost imperceptibly, in the late fall of 1951, Florence Baum began to find herself sitting next to Brooks or standing outside clubs alone with him after others in their group of friends had drifted home at night. For many of the stage-door Johnnys, Baum was the most beautiful of the chorus girls, the prize of the lot. She had blue eyes, full lips, perfect teeth, and short dark hair pulled back into a chignon. Men rhapsodized about her lithe body and “the most unbelievable insteps in town, a straight line from her knee to her toe tips,” in the words of the author Herman Raucher, who also wooed Baum and later fictionalized her as “Florrie” in his novel There Should Have Been Castles.

  Without thinking much about it at first, because Brooks was always the last to say good night and she’d be alone with him, he began accompanying her on long walks home, ending where she lived in her parents’ apartment on West 81st Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

  Baum was now dancing in a new Broadway musical—Top Banana starring Phil Silvers—that had held previews in the fall and opened in November 1951. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes producer Herman Levin was still trying very hard to get the leggy dancer into bed, as was true of Dean Martin, the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes on, who unfortunately—the way she saw it—had just married his second wife.

  Baum began to wonder if Brooks was courting her. She didn’t mind. When not talking morosely about losing M.K., he was an entertaining, thoughtful companion.

  He appealed to her as different from the many other men who pursued her. For one thing, he was short and ugly with a face like a “Hebrew chipmunk”; that was how he often described himself, as though to remind people and lessen the impact of that impression. Baum was in fact slightly taller than Brooks; she was five feet, five inches and inclined to wear heels besides. Brooks was obsessed with his height, his looks, and his religion, in that order, Baum thought. He was overly critical of himself in that regard. Actually, she decided, Brooks often dressed snappily and could look strikingly handsome.

  He, too, had beautiful blue eyes, and they seemed to flash with hidden depths. When Brooks wasn’t “on” with other people, he could be a quiet, attentive listener. He pondered the eternal verities with what seemed, to her, a profound curiosity and intelligence. They both prized literature, and when he praised the Russians she countered with Stendhal, and then they started in talking about all the other great books they loved. Both adored modern art, especially van Gogh, and they began to rendezvous at museums on Sundays. Going to foreign films was another pastime, and early on the two friends dedicated themselves to the Italian Neorealist films being booked into the Little Carnegie Theatre.

  Brooks saw all types of films incessantly, often going alone to kill an afternoon or evening, but the Italian Neorealist masterpieces were the kind of significant filmmaking he admired and dreamed of doing himself one day. Foreign pictures were a staple of the skewering on Your Show of Shows. The writers skipped work for afternoon screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, and one time, for example, they transformed Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves into “La Bicicletta,” a fake-Italian parody with Sid Caesar at his finest. In private Brooks would never poke fun at De Sica, and he and Baum spent hours talking about movies, books, and paintings. She felt Brooks illuminated the masterworks for her.

  By the spring of 1952, they had become a stealth couple, who didn’t know yet whether to call themselves a couple, although they began to sneak nights together at Brooks’s place on West 68th. “He is the ugliest man I’ve ever known, but I think I love him,” Baum wrote her friend, singer Betsy Holland, who was also in the cast of Top Banana.

  Their blossoming relationship was a dilemma for Brooks, who, unusually for him, was planning to splurge on a summer-long European trip with Your Show of Shows friends and associates. Brooks was thrilled to have been invited along with the elite group, which included Imogene Coca, Lucille Kallen, and another lady behind the scenes, Max Liebman’s assistant, Estelle Jacoby—the three most important women on Caesar’s show.

  The trip was another sign of his acceptance and rising status. He debated asking Baum to come. He knew he had hit the jackpot with her. She was beauty and brains, personality and character, and multifaceted. They were kindred souls, both former Brooklyn kids who might have passed each other on the street when growing up. Brooks joked with Baum that she was exactly the kind of Brooklyn girl he could take home to his mother—a nice Jewish girl, but not too nice and not too Jewish. (“Not too Jewish,” because although Baum had been born to a Jewish mother, her father practiced no religion and her mother had converted to Christian Science. Baum herself was an atheist.)

  But Brooks was not ready for that commitment, nor was Baum. He did not take her home to meet his mother, and the dancer would never have quit Top Banana, now a Broadway hit, for a brief summer fling in Europe. The invitation went unspoken.

  Chapter 4

  1952

  Dreams and Nightmares

  As the Nieuw Amsterdam, the massive flagship of the Holland America Line, left New York Harbor in festive fashion on June 6, 1952, on deck Brooks was feeling less than buoyant. Despite his watershed success—breakthroughs on Your Show of Shows and New Faces of 1952—he felt apprehensive about leaving his new girlfriend behind.

  Among the eleven hundred passengers were his group of friends from Your Show of Shows: the contingent included Lucille Kallen, Max Liebman’s associate Estelle Jacoby, and Peter Goode, who acted as Sid Caesar’s assistant and also designed settings for the show. Goode and Brooks had agreed to share a cabin. Imogene Coca was sailing separately later in the month, with plans for everyone to meet up on the French Riviera.

  Kallen noticed that at the departure Brooks was more subdued than usual. Afterward he spent much of the crossing alone in his cabin, writing long letters daily to Florence Baum. The voyagers enjoyed blue skies and clear weather, but life on board the ship was horribly dull, Brooks wrote Baum, ending many of his letters with the same refrain: “Oh, my sweetheart, my baby, why did I leave you? Why did I ever leave you?”

  At Southampton, already familiar to Brooks from his military service, the Americans passed through customs and immigration, then separated. Kallen and Jacoby departed for Paris, while Brooks and Goode took the boat train to London, where in the afternoon they checked into a regal but antiquated hotel, which was even duller than the boat, as Brooks wrote to friends at home. That night he hurried off to see comedian Harvey Stone, who was closing at the Palladium. Stone, whom Brooks knew from Special Services, had carved a career out of comic, sure-loser monologues about army life that he had perfected in uniform during World War II, giving many shows to Brooklyn-based reinforcements heading overseas at the point of embarkation.

  London was gray and wet, but Brooks roamed it with pleasure. He and Goode made the museum circuit and saw West End shows for several days before heading to Normandy, where Brooks reunited with wartime acquaintances. In Paris in early July, he and Goode hooked up with Ernie Anderson, Harvey Stone’s agent, who was passing through Paris. Anderson took the two Americans to clubs, shows, and parties. They ended up visiting the
set of a Hollywood production being shot on location in the City of Light, Moulin Rouge, whose director was John Huston; the film starred José Ferrer, whom Brooks knew from his guest stints on Your Show of Shows.

  He and Ferrer greeted each other warmly as colleagues, and the Hollywood star took the handoff from Anderson, escorting Brooks on another Cook’s tour of Paris haunts. Ferrer tried to coax Brooks into writing a humorous monologue for him so he might play London’s Palladium one day, and Brooks had to keep reminding himself he was on vacation. If Brooks never forgave a slight, he never forgot a mitzvah, either; years later he would go back to Ferrer—“a sweet guy,” in his words—at a time when Ferrer was no longer in quite the same demand, giving the actor a juicy role late in his career: as the duplicitous Professor Siletski in Brooks’s remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.

  Brooks kept up his daily correspondence with Baum, lamenting her absence and praising her exquisite face and body. He wrote, though less often, to his mother and New York friends. His billets-doux to Baum were frequently incidental and jokey, but other times he confessed he was feeling unfunny and disconsolate without her by his side.

  Baum wrote back less effusively, in care of American Express offices, telling Brooks she felt comfortable with him because of their similar backgrounds, confessing an almost “brotherly love” for him, a phrase that plunged Brooks into depths of despair. What a schnook he was for not bringing her to Paris, which was a city with so many romantic inflections that even Romeo might be forgiven for forgetting Juliet, Brooks wrote; but he could not forget Baum, no, especially late at night. In Paris he had encountered several “fabulous broads” with big knockers, he wrote, but none of them could compare to Baum. The two shared a mutual lust as well as mere affection for each other, Brooks wrote; he urged Baum to reread Theodore Reik on the matter of sex and not deny their profound physical connection nor dismiss their relationship as transient.

  From Paris, Brooks and Goode took the express to Nice, and he wrote more letters from their soot- and smoke-filled compartment. In Nice, where it was very hot and dry, they stayed in a pension near a nightclub. In Paris, they had reconnoitered with Coca, Kallen, and Jacoby, but Coca did not follow them to the south of France. Now they were a foursome: Kallen, Jacoby, Goode, and Brooks, motoring around Provence and Monaco.

  One night, as the Americans wound along the Grand Corniche between Nice and Monte Carlo, one of them remarked on the narrow, dangerous road they were traveling on with cars hurtling toward them that could spell sudden disaster. Brooks “envisioned his death in headlines,” in Kallen’s words. “Lifting his hand to the Mediterranean stars,” she recalled, “Brooks shouted, ‘Caesar Writer Plunges to Death in Mediterranean!’”

  Everyone shared in the laughter, although the joke had special implications for Brooks: He didn’t want to be “just a writer,” much less “just a TV writer.” He realized that writers were less than dust in the hierarchy of show business, and that with his new calling he had attached himself to another oppressed minority. He feared that he would meet an untimely death and that Melvin Kaminsky, aka Melvin Brooks, would be remembered—credited—as “just another Caesar writer.”

  From the French Riviera, Brooks and Goode soldiered on alone—by bus and train—to Rapallo, Portofino, Florence, Capri outside Naples, and finally Rome. Sharing hotel rooms, Brooks and Goode had to make constant personal adjustments. Goode was homosexual, and he sought out European men as assiduously as Brooks chatted up the women. Goode was early to bed, while Brooks did not come home until extremely late, just as Goode was waking up. Goode had to tiptoe around in the morning for fear of rousing the sleeping monster. (In Paris Goode had had to borrow Kallen’s nearby room for his morning toilette.)

  Brooks’s letters home were peppered with their joint and disparate adventures—“the fun-loving Melvin Brooks and hard-hitting Peter Goode,” as he put it. In Venice, besides riding gondolas, the two spent a long, pleasant evening at the castle of a handsome gay count they met, who was eye candy to Goode. First Don Appell, now Peter Goode: even before achieving fame and fortune, Brooks boasted a number of intimate friends who were homosexual. Satirizing male homosexuals and their mannerisms would become a fixture of his films, and his over-the-top comedy was not always politically correct. That was not the case in his 1952 letters, either, in which the count was described “as queer as a bedbug.”

  Brooks’s comedy was always personal, however, revolving around his own little world—his experiences, his views, his colorations. Show business was rife with homosexuals, and Brooks felt entitled to mock homosexual men because he did have homosexual friends and because the mocking aped the ways they mocked themselves.

  His primary relationships, with the exceptions of those with his mother and wives, were usually with men. He was like an addict in his need for intimacy with men. Often smitten with handsome male WASPs, he was still more comfortable with Jewish men. Brooks would make jokes of his own physical attraction to men, kissing male friends hello on television shows, then discouraging any raised eyebrows. He himself, he’d wink, was manly. “You never see,” he’d say in private, “a homosexual man smoking a cigar.”

  The letters home continued. He wore his heart on his sleeve in his missives to Baum. He said his ambition was to write serious plays or novels. After becoming fabulously wealthy as a playwright and novelist, he’d retire to a European villa, probably in Italy, he wrote. For Brooks, already a budding Anglophile, France and Italy would be other touchstones for him for the rest of his life. Brooks made it a mission for his films to conquer foreign countries, especially the English, French, and Italian markets.

  His Italian villa would be desolate without Baum, however, he wrote to his girlfriend. When he returned, he promised, he’d remedy his faults. He’d dine alone with her (it was a bugaboo of his, never dining alone as a couple). He’d get started on making enough money to banish all thought of the rich-as-Croesus Herman Levin, his romantic rival. He missed the dancer terribly, and his letters hinted at marriage and children.

  When Brooks returned by boat from Italy on August 13, he brought lavish gifts for the leggy dancer, including a stunning white summer coat and a gold bracelet from Florence, the city for which she had been named. They fell into each other’s arms.

  Your Show of Shows was not an agency package nor a single-product show but an independent program owned totally by Max Liebman, with top-brand advertisers excitedly bidding against one another in its first three seasons. In the 1951–52 season sixteen sponsors, an unusually high number, made the show profitable. The series offered “a field day for video sales buys,” according to trade papers, to such an extent that the flow of entertainment was marred by what sometimes seemed “a commercial holocaust.”

  Already by its third full season, 1952–1953, however, sponsors had begun to defect from the Saturday night show. Audience numbers dipped and the critics were less enthusiastic. The cast and crew did not realize it in September, but the acclaimed series had peaked.

  Brooks resumed his routine in the fall of 1952, reporting to NBC daily except for on Sundays and when keeping appointments with his psychoanalyst Dr. Clement Staff. Top Banana gave its final performances in October, and Baum went away for the rest of the fall, dancing in out-of-town tryouts for the musical Two’s Company, which starred Bette Davis and was due to arrive on Broadway in mid-December.

  Neither romance nor therapy yielded drastic changes in Brooks’s workplace demeanor, however, and if anything the pressure to maintain the high quality of the show aggravated his behavior. He continued to arrive late; he was brusque to the point of being offensive; and he was the same scattershot writer—a talking/performing writer.

  Even with a guaranteed credit and salary, he was still viewed by some people more as Sid Caesar’s jester. Greg Garrison, who directed Your Show of Shows episodes, had no compunction about describing Brooks as merely “a tummler. He would pull the camera boom [mike] down and pretend he was using a peris
cope. He was there to amuse Sid.”

  Everyone realized that the volatile Caesar was more easily humored when Brooks was around. Caesar knew it, too, and on those occasions when the star abandoned New York for East Coast publicity appearances or when he went farther afield, for weekends in Miami Beach, for example, Brooks continued to tag along to keep the star company.

  The grind of the series and the continued expectations for greatness exerted a tremendous burden on Caesar. It was five days of script work and preparation for each show, frenetic dress rehearsals on Saturday afternoons followed by the live performance in front of a studio audience—really a mass national audience—without cue cards or teleprompters. However godlike he might have seemed, Caesar was not superhuman.

  Caesar had begun to subsist on booze and pills. He developed an incessant nervous cough that was like a red warning light, flashing sometimes even during a broadcast, when he was unsure or unsteady. Depression stalked him. Yet he never missed a day of work or slacked off at rehearsals, and he rose to the occasion every Saturday night.

  Brooks, Mel Tolkin, and Lucille Kallen underwent similar stress. As the pressure built and his star burned brighter, Caesar became more imperious with the writers, carrying an imaginary rifle and whipping it out to shoot any writer’s bad idea out of the air; he’d take aim at Brooks as often as anyone else and hurl objects at him, too, just as Max Liebman once had. They’d get into weird Mexican standoffs. Once Brooks jabbed his finger into Caesar’s chest and demanded: “Do the joke!” Caesar looked down at him from his lofty height and said, “I let you live!” (Another time Brooks got so mad that he hauled off and slugged the star. Caesar, taken aback, shrugged. “Okay, if you feel that strongly!”)