Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Tolkin and Kallen thought Brooks’s jollying of Caesar, his performing antics and smart-aleck comments, gave him a sly advantage in the script conferences. All three writers saw their names on the screen now—Tolkin, Kallen, and Brooks, in that order, with the freelancers listed afterward as additional contributors—but there was also a subtle jockeying, a taking of credit within the room, of which Brooks was the master.

  Even when Brooks thought someone else’s idea was funny, he might sit with his arms crossed, unsmiling. “That’s funny, that’s funny,” he’d say noncommittally. One couldn’t be sure, though, that he wasn’t just about to jump up and add his two cents. It was only when he exploded in sudden laughter that he could not control, when he didn’t have any topper at the ready, that people knew he thought something was really funny.

  Inside the room Brooks was brilliant about getting the nod and laughs from Caesar when he had shirked the hard work. He’d “add two jokes and get all the applause from the stars and actors,” Tolkin wrote Kallen, still complaining, forty years later. Brooks has “a very, very funny mind,” Tolkin explained another time, “he’d hit on a couple of classic lines and bits. That would get extreme laughter from the audience [in the room] and from Sid—papa. They’re roaring with laughter. While we knocked our brains out.”

  As good as Your Show of Shows still was—for Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris continued to sparkle as performers—already, in the 1952–53 season, some critics noticed that too many situations and setups were comfortable retreads. The cast members noticed it, too. Actor-singer Bill Hayes, for one, sniffed “strange vibes.” The sketches and musical numbers kept gravitating to familiar ground. Hayes asked Tolkin if he was imagining that, and Tolkin told him that nobody wanted to mess with a “winning formula.”

  “Was Sid’s cough the result of too heavy a load of responsibility?” Hayes wondered. “Did I hear him begin to argue with Max’s decision and taste? Were the production people getting a little testy when final decisions were held off longer than before? Was Max slowing with weariness? . . . Sometime late in 1952, the gears began to slip.”

  Adding to the strain, the show’s acclaimed variety format was now being intelligently imitated by several new television series. By midseason, Your Show of Shows was hemorrhaging advertisers and profits were tumbling even as the talent costs rose on the program that won the Emmy Award for Best Variety Show for the second year in a row.*

  Behind the scenes, NBC recognized the ominous portents. The network was committed to Caesar, so officials looked to lay blame on the scripts. Max Liebman was pressured to hire the proverbial “fresh writer,” only the fourth staff writer after Tolkin, Kallen, and Brooks. He engaged Tony Webster, who had cut his teeth working for the radio comedians Bob and Ray. Webster went on staff in April, becoming, in Brooks’s words, the first of the writers not from “the same background, a second-generation Russian Ukrainian–Jewish intellectual heritage.” Webster was from Middle America besides—Missouri.

  But that was not enough of a fix. There were going to be “drastic changes” ahead for next year’s Your Show of Shows, according to the national entertainment columnist Erskine Johnson.

  With those dark auguries looming over the summer of 1953, Brooks did not take another prolonged vacation, as he had the previous summer in England, France, and Italy.

  Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had announced they were going to team up and star in their first motion picture, probably for Columbia Pictures, that summer. Partly for that reason, Brooks met with Columbia producer Fred Kohlmar in New York in early June, agreeing to a short-term summer contract. The studio would decide his assignment.

  When Caesar visited Hollywood in the spring with Mel Tolkin, however, he made an unimpressive pitch to Harry Cohn, the mogul of Columbia, and the dream of a Caesar-Coca movie began to fade. Caesar returned to New York, read the tea leaves, and decided to take it easy over the summer. Only Coca elected to pursue the assault on Hollywood, accompanied by Max Liebman, who was ostensibly organizing guest stars for the next season of Your Show of Shows. Brooks, flying with them to Los Angeles, made three.

  Hollywood during the sleepy summer of 1953, when Brooks made his first visit to the film capital, was introducing Cinemascope to theaters. The anti-Communist blacklist was in full cry, with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launching a new round of hearings with subpoenas to Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and twenty-three other “pink” artists, mostly scenarists. The Los Angeles Archdiocese was busily urging Catholics to boycott Otto Preminger’s “indecent” The Moon Is Blue.

  Coca splurged on a rented Brentwood mansion with swimming pool, where she hosted admirers and met with producers, talking up future motion picture air castles. Brooks bunked at the Chateau Marmont, the hip hillside hotel on Sunset Boulevard; it had no swimming pool, but Columbia Pictures was paying his tab. As a close student of Caesar’s career, watching the money when he traveled with the star, Brooks had picked up many business tips, including the advantages of demanding such perks in contracts.

  A few miles to the east of Chateau Marmont lay the vast studio complex that included the Columbia soundstages and buildings. On his first day on the lot, Brooks was allocated an office and secretary in the four-story writers’ building and assigned to slog away on a projected Rita Hayworth musical based on a 1919 Somerset Maugham play. His supervisor was Jonie Taps, a producer who specialized in light musicals.

  On his second day, however, Jerry Wald, who supervised Taps, Kohlmar, and other staff producers for Harry Cohn, Columbia’s top boss, walked in and tossed a different script at Brooks—voilà! “It’s another Rita Hayworth movie, but the script is a little lousy,” said Wald. “Jazz it up, boy! Jazz it up!” The little-lousy script was Pal Joey, more important than the Maugham adaptation. The Broadway hit musical had been optioned for somewhere down the road for Hayworth and Frank Sinatra: Double dynamite! Very exciting! Hayworth therefore might not be appearing in the Maugham project. Probably her part would go to Betty Grable. Give me your thoughts on Pal Joey, Wald urged, adding with a wagging finger that the Betty Grable script came first!

  Love at first sight it was not for Brooks and Hollywood. Columbia was a dizzying merry-go-round. Brooks liked to tell the story of Wald taking him over to meet Harry Cohn in the studio barbershop, where the Hollywood monarch was laid out flat getting a foamy shave from an Italian barber. He was encircled by yes-men and eminences, including some A-list directors, sitting in chairs; among the latter group was Fred Zinnemann, whose From Here to Eternity earned thirteen Oscar nominations that year.

  As the barber shaved Cohn, he spun him like a gun turret so his subordinates were rotated into his line of sight. The group was debating a picture in the works that needed a certain something to juice it up. The barber chair swiveled to Brooks. “I think it might need two or three more block comedy sequences,” he volunteered. That TV terminology was met with a deafening silence. The mogul sat up straight, eyeing Brooks. “Who’s the kid?” “I’m not here,” Brooks said quickly. “I’m simply not here.” “Good,” said Cohn.

  Cohn paid no more attention to the newcomer until later that same day or the next, according to Brooks. When Brooks’s new office was fitted with a nameplate, he watched in horror as another nameplate was ripped off—that of writer Alfred Hayes. Realizing that Hayes had just been cashiered, Brooks went a little crazy over the lunch break, switching all the nameplates in the writers’ unit: shuffling around the names on the first and third floors, scrambling those on the second and fourth. Called onto the carpet by Cohn, Wald pleaded for Brooks: “He’s a good kid. I’ll dock his pay. Give him another chance!”

  Maybe true, maybe not. You never knew with Brooks, who embroidered stories and confabulated so much that there were usually multiple variations of favorite anecdotes, with Brooks sometimes making himself the hero in other people’s vignettes.

  Meanwhile at night, Brooks wrote abject letters home. Sure, the Califo
rnia weather was gorgeous. “So were the girls,” Brooks told Conan O’Brien sixty years later. Thanks to the secretarial pool, there was no problem with his “typing.” And not just the girls: everyone in Hollywood was physically beautiful; beautiful people, beautiful place—but empty and phony. And writers ranked lowest of the low in the studio caste system.

  Brooks hated, hated, hated Hollywood.

  He suffered the same terrible anxiety and fears as he’d suffered in New York, but his sleepless nights were accompanied by aching homesickness. He was too busy, he wrote home, even to visit Imogene Coca at her mansion with a swimming pool, except on a few Sundays. He yearned for Florence Baum and repeatedly wrote to the dancer, who had various engagements that summer, including a stint at the Texas State Fair. He begged for letters from her, snapshots (“the one in the turtleneck”), and any New York gossip.

  The one surprising bright spot, he wrote, was Jerry Wald. According to the intimidating legend that wafted around him, Wald was the living embodiment of the producer Sammy Glick—the lead character of Budd Schulberg’s quintessential Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run?—“crass . . . conniving . . . despicable,” in the words of Robert Alan Aurthur, another writer who worked under Wald. But the real Wald was quite different, as Aurthur and Brooks both discovered. Brooks had expected a terrifying Jewish maniac like himself. But he found Wald to be a pudgy fellow with a butterball face and an irresistible smile and grin—“a nice man,” which was the ultimate compliment Brooks might pay to someone. Expecting Sammy Glick, Brooks instead encountered a mensch who treated him like a fair-haired genius from TV-land.

  True, Wald threw out story ideas and shuffled scripts in front of him faster than a Las Vegas card dealer, and there seemed to be an endless list of iffy projects and weary scripts that needed jazzing up. New assignments were lobbed at Brooks almost daily. On the Friday of his very first week, Wald convened a daylong assessment of ongoing projects in his office. According to the studio logs, staff producer Jonie Taps was summoned after 6:00 p.m. to discuss “problems” with Brooks’s compatibility with the Maugham musical, now called “The Pleasure Is All Mine.” The fair-haired TV genius was promptly switched over to full-time on a remake of the 1942 film My Sister Eileen, with Fred Kohlmar producing.

  Kohlmar was simultaneously preparing Pal Joey, and Wald thought it might be convenient for the same writer to be working on both films. However, another meeting after the weekend was convened to decide on the senior writer of the more important—the all-important—Pal Joey. The studio decided it needed a consummate Hollywood pro to satisfy Rita Hayworth and Frank Sinatra, and eventually Wald found one in Dorothy Kingsley. But the upshot was that Kohlmar also confessed misgivings about Brooks, and on Tuesday the fair-haired TV genius was sent back to “The Pleasure Is All Mine,” once more under Taps, whom Brooks always recalled as an amiable guy in black-and-white wingtips.

  Telling tales of his first brush with Hollywood, Brooks always emphasized the Hayworth-Sinatra musical. But the studio relegated Pal Joey to the back burner almost immediately after his arrival, and that film would not show up in theaters for another three years. Brooks barely crossed paths with Pal Joey and spent most of July ping-ponging between the My Sister Eileen remake and “The Pleasure Is All Mine.” He was taken off Eileen indefinitely in mid-July in favor of Richard Quine and Blake Edwards, who took the remake across the finish line, while “The Pleasure Is All Mine”—the script Brooks worked on most of the time—evolved into Three for the Show, both released in 1955.

  The finishing writer for Three for the Show, incidentally, was Leonard Stern, a veteran of Abbott and Costello comedies who crossed paths with Brooks for the first time at Columbia. Little or nothing remained of Brooks’s contribution, and he was not credited. As was the case later with Get Smart, which he also polished to a glow, Stern—another New Yorker, three years older—was not then or ever Brooks’s close collaborator or friend.

  California was beautiful, but Hollywood was empty, Brooks ruefully wrote home. What is to become of me out here? Enough! I pine for New York, he wrote to friends.

  Brooks, however, also experienced a revelation in Hollywood. Back east on Fire Island by the end of summer, he warned Sid Caesar that the future was motion pictures. Television was ephemeral; if he made movies, Caesar could be a Matisse in a museum. “On kinescope you will die,” he told Caesar. “On celluloid you can live forever.”

  That conversation may or may not have happened in quite that way, but a lot of people were whispering into Caesar’s ear in the fall of 1953. Your Show of Shows held its 1953–54 season premiere with anxiety spreading among NBC officials. Along with the salaries of the stars, the production costs had skyrocketed. Ratings and advertising revenue had gone into freefall. Imogene Coca was agitating for her own series. Insiders predicted that it would be Coca’s last season with Caesar and probably the last for the series.

  The midwestern goy Tony Webster had been hired as the fourth staff writer the previous spring because the network and Caesar blamed the downward trend of ratings and profits largely on weak scripts. The 1953–54 writing staff continued to expand, at times including Joseph Stein, the future playwright of Fiddler on the Roof, and Danny Simon and his younger brother Neil, or “Doc,” as he was nicknamed since boyhood. All three New Yorkers had been freelancing for the show, but now they were salaried for extended periods and the Simon brothers filled in for Kallen when she was in the latter stages of a pregnancy.

  At work or out and about, Brooks wore his customary suit of armor, grinning and firing off jokes like silver bullets. In private with certain intimates, though, he was decidedly less effervescent and never more so than in the fall of 1953; his ongoing struggle to affirm his identity as a writer, his failure to do something worthwhile in Hollywood, and the seemingly inevitable fate of Your Show of Shows darkened his mood.

  His closest intimate was Florence Baum, and alone with his girlfriend he cursed the artificiality of television and society in general; indeed, he railed at the overall futility of life. He had turned twenty-eight at the beginning of the summer, and all his birthdays renewed his obsession with the morbid idea that he would die before fulfilling his promise, just as his own father, Max Kaminsky, had at age thirty-six. Sleepless at night on West 68th Street, Brooks read fitfully, turning the pages of Gogol and Tolstoy, identifying with their bleakness and fatalism, their shrewd, morally superior peasants, and, in the case of The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, another novel Mel Tolkin urged upon him, the Russian black humor.

  Baum was a frequent visitor, but in the wee hours she usually returned to her parents’ new apartment, which was about thirty blocks away. Baum was Brooks’s lifeline to positivism; many people thought she possessed a kind of inner Zen. The lovers had immediately reconnected when he had returned from Hollywood; they saw each other almost daily, although not always in a romantic context. With Howard Morris’s connivance more than Brooks’s, Baum had joined the Hamilton Trio when an original member, Pat (“the blonde”) Horn, had quit and Mrs. Hamilton had left the act for motherhood. Now the trio was Bob Hamilton, newcomer Helena Seroy, and Baum, briefly dyeing her hair blond to evoke Horn.

  Brooks and Baum had such divergent involvement on the Caesar series that they sometimes waved to each other as they rushed down the corridors of the NBC building in opposite directions. By now they were sort of going steady, but not officially. Marriage was a touchy subject they avoided. When Brooks suddenly popped the question in late November, however, Baum just as impulsively said yes, and Brooks arranged the whole ceremony in a whirlwind of time. In fact, Baum had a lunch date on the very day of her nuptials that she forgot to cancel with Herman Raucher, another Brooklynite and Fire Islander who was a professional rival of Brooks’s and, because he was friendly with Baum, a seemingly romantic one. (In time Raucher would marry Mary Katherine Martinet.)

  More than once Brooks had told Baum that she was the kind of woman he could take home to his mother: bea
utiful, brainy, ethnically Jewish (albeit personally irreligious). Yet characteristic of the distance, literal as well as emotional, that he kept from his Brooklyn family, Brooks had actually never taken the dancer home to meet Kitty Kaminsky. For the very first time at their marriage ceremony on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1953, Brooks introduced the bride-to-be to his mother and three brothers, Leonard, Irving, and Bernard. The first sight of the Kaminsky clan took Baum aback, according to friends. They all resembled shorter, less prepossessing versions of the groom. Brooks compulsively wisecracked about his own ugliness and short stature, but by comparison, Baum thought with amusement, she had snared the tall, handsome member of the family.

  Yet Baum harbored misgivings about Brooks, and she wept hysterically when her mother woke her on her wedding day. Scolding her, her mother said it was too late and would be too embarrassing to cancel. She’d help Baum get an annulment if it became necessary.

  Typical of Brooks, he arranged a status touch for the ceremony: Their vows were exchanged in the Central Park West home of Rabbi Louis I. Newman, a leading Reform Zionist, who was also a celebrated author of cantatas, stage plays, and Talmudic anthologies. Brooks’s Your Show of Shows friend, “third banana” Howard Morris, who had more or less brought the couple together, and Morris’s first wife, Helen, were the official witnesses among a small party of friends and family hastily rounded up for the occasion.

  The bride and groom were both so busy with Your Show of Shows—and Baum continued to hold dance spots on Sunday TV, too—that they agreed to delay their honeymoon.

  After a small reception at Baum’s mother and father’s flat, the couple took a taxi to Brooks’s place on West 68th, Baum toting one small suitcase. Dust balls lay everywhere, as usual. The floor was seemingly carpeted with torn royalty stubs from New Faces and other bachelor signs of grunge. The heavy ocher drape covering the windows, which had been designed by Peter Goode, sagged amid the detritus.