Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Although Brooks’s disaffection with critics had begun with those who had hastened the demises of Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, it was here, with Shinbone Alley, that the animus hardened and they became lifelong foes. Brooks Atkinson (who had hailed New Faces of 1952) and other New York reviewers betrayed him with their negative notices.

  “We thought we were bringing happiness and joy to people, and I was just sitting on top of the world,” Brooks recalled angrily four decades later. “It didn’t get one good review,” he continued, exaggerating the negativity of the notices, “and closed in a week.”

  Shinbone Alley actually managed to last for forty-nine performances and, like New Faces of 1952, it had a robust afterlife. A cast recording was released. Eddie Bracken and Tammy Grimes starred in a television version in 1960. It was animated in 1971 with the voices of Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing. And to this day regional theaters across the United States and around the world occasionally revive the odd musical about a cat and cockroach.

  The best reviews for the 1957 musical went to its two stars, Eddie Bracken and Eartha Kitt. The latter was especially otherworldly, Atkinson wrote in the Times. Her husky singing was “electric with personality,” her dance numbers transfixing and positively catlike.

  Florence Brooks, who was newly pregnant, rented a white mink stole to drape over her best evening dress and took a taxi alone to the opening. Afterward Mrs. Brooks wove backstage and glimpsed her husband through the open door to Kitt’s dressing room. The two were exchanging heated words and struggling physically. Kitt refused to come out to meet the writer’s wife. As Brooks finally emerged with a stone face, Bracken took him aside. Florence overheard the Shinbone Alley star’s admonishment: “Mel, what are you doing? You have a nice, beautiful, pregnant wife. Why are you fooling around?”

  Brooks quickly explained to Florence that he had to attend the opening-night cast party, where wives were not welcome. Ushering Florence outside, he escorted her down the street, trying to hail a cab. “Wait!” he said, then dashed into the Stage Deli and emerged with a bag containing a corned beef sandwich. He handed it to her and thrust her into a taxi. That night he came home very late—not all that unusual—at 5:00 a.m.

  Florence had danced in Broadway shows, however, and knew her husband was lying about the cast party. Spouses and intimates were always welcome. She realized that he and Kitt were having an affair. But she didn’t bring it up to his face; she was too passive and felt humiliated and wondered if, in some way, her own shortcomings were to blame. She told only a few girlfriends. She continued to hope for changes in their marriage. Pregnant with their second child, she had no other choice—no means of earning an income.

  Soon enough it was summer anyway. Both Caesar’s Hour and Shinbone Alley ended, and as usual the couple went off, this time by limousine, to Fire Island, where they had leased their biggest cottage yet. They sunbathed and swam and socialized with old and new friends also taking beach vacations. The 2000 Year Old Man was in increasing demand, and the parties expanded to include elder statesmen of Broadway and Hollywood, who laughed and applauded alongside the younger crowd. Carl Reiner lugged around a portable reel-to-reel recorder and taped the living room performances, “concerned that my probing questions and Mel’s brilliant ad-lib answers might be lost to posterity,” according to Reiner. The tapes might be useful in polishing the act.

  One of their enthralled new fans was Fire Island summer denizen Joseph “Joe” Fields, who belonged to a famous family of stage producers (his father, Lew Fields) and librettists (his sister, Dorothy, and brother, Herbert). In his sixties, Fields was a prolific author of hit plays and musicals, often in collaboration with Jerome Chodorov, including My Sister Eileen (the second screen version of which Brooks had toiled on briefly in Hollywood) and Wonderful Town. Most recently Fields had written the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes musical with Jule Styne in which Florence Baum had been dancing when she met Brooks. Fields became “our number one benefactor,” in Reiner’s words, promising to arrange a New York dinner party where the duo could perform for the royalty of Broadway: Billy Rose, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Harold Rome, and Moss Hart.

  As was true when they were home in Manhattan, the Brookses’ summer cottage often filled with friends and acquaintances, although they rarely if ever hosted private dinners with just one other couple. “We lived next door to them [on Fire Island] for a while,” recalled their neighbor Hope Holiday, a singer-dancer who was friends with Mrs. Brooks. (Holiday had performed in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Top Banana, and her husband was Sandy Glass, the William Morris talent agent now representing Brooks.) “[Mel] always used to say, ‘When are you going to come over and have dinner?’ But whenever we tried to nail him to a date it didn’t work out, so we never did have dinner with them.”

  Club Caesar—the “name” writers who had been Emmy nominated as a group and whose close bonds had been forged in daily creative strife and prime-time triumph—would stay loyal to Caesar and stick together on non-Caesar projects for decades to come. Caesar united them professionally and deeply influenced their work and their approaches to comedy.

  The majority of Brooks’s projects in the immediate post–Caesar’s Hour years were, one way or another, referrals or collaborations with members in good standing of this band of brothers. Often Brooks’s partner was Mel Tolkin, but other projects had links to Michael Stewart, “the typist,” who was equally friendly with both Mr. and Mrs. Brooks.

  The Polly Bergen Show was almost an Upper East Side neighborhood thing. A popular actress, singer, and television host, Bergen was getting ready to launch a half-hour variety show on NBC, airing on alternate Saturdays in the fall of 1957. Howard Morris was set as one of her costars, and Stewart had been enlisted as a writer. The Brookses lived next door to Bergen and her husband, the talent agent Freddie Fields, who’d started out at the Music Corporation of America (MCA) booking Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Bergen and Mrs. Brooks strolled through Central Park together with their young children.

  Brooks joined up to write for Bergen’s new show, with options for directing episodes that didn’t interest Stewart. However, Brooks’s deal was not worked out in time for him to impact the premiere in September, which was poorly reviewed; the original producer was then dismissed, and Brooks became a “writer-producer.” By comparison, Variety said, the first half hour under Brooks’s stewardship, in early October, was “snappy and clean.”

  The series became complicated for Brooks, however, after two episodes spotlighting the English actress and comedienne Kay Kendall, who was making her TV debut in the United States. Kendall had just starred in the MGM musical Les Girls. Her episodes were excellent, with Howard Morris and Kendall lighting up the small screen with ebullient song medleys. (Singing tended to overshadow comedy on The Polly Bergen Show.) Backstage, though, Brooks fawned over the tall, leggy, brunette actress, embarrassing some onlookers. He had done much the same kind of over-the-top flirting with the bosomy Italian screen star Gina Lollobrigida during her guest stint on Caesar’s Hour.

  The stars’ husbands—Rex Harrison in the case of Kendall—were never far away when the shows were produced. With Brooks, an incessant flirter, it was not always clear if he intended the flirting to lead anywhere or if the flirting reached any fruition. Brooks told some people he had had a fling with Kendall, later even taunting his wife with the boast of “a sexual relationship,” according to Mrs. Brooks’s claim in later court records.

  One group of people Brooks usually courted with extra charm were wealthy or famous personalities, famous women especially; celebrities got a pass from him on every level, even if they later turned out to be not nearly as much fun as their fame implied.

  Not long after Kendall’s last appearance on the series, Brooks’s well-paid job ended abruptly. Lyricist Lee Adams was waiting outside his office for an assignment when Brooks came out with a long face and told him he had just been fired. The Imogene Coca Show had proved he was neither comforta
ble with nor adept at writing for women, and Bergen’s show had affirmed that weakness. Actresses rarely played leads in Brooks’s later big-screen comedies; they might get juicy parts, but the parts were usually secondary.

  Bergen’s series lasted only eighteen episodes before NBC terminated it. Yet Brooks had a survivor’s ability to take something positive away from almost any bad experience, and he was able to stay on friendly terms with both Bergen and Fields. The latter would be a useful connection in the future when Fields broke away from MCA to form a new talent agency, Creative Management Associates (CMA), with his partner David Begelman.

  Fortunately, Sid Caesar had other work waiting for Brooks. Initially Caesar had not budged in his negotiations with NBC, refusing, after the cancellation of Caesar’s Hour, the network’s proposal to further downsize his series into a half hour. (“There are only twenty-four minutes in a half-hour show,” he noted, “and I have nothing to say in twenty-four minutes.”) He had been off the air since the demise of Caesar’s Hour.

  In the end he caved in, however, taking a counteroffer from ABC for the new Sid Caesar Invites You, which boasted the same half-hour time constraint he previously had abjured. The ABC series was set to bow in January 1958. One attraction for Caesar of the ABC half hour was that it reunited him with Imogene Coca. Carl Reiner would also return to the lineup. More than ever the emphasis would fall on comedy. Once again Mel Tolkin was the chief writer of the series, along with Brooks, Neil Simon and his brother Danny, and Michael Stewart. (Larry Gelbart contributed only to the premiere.)

  “Just so long as [Caesar and Coca] don’t get egghead and do stuff that gets esoteric,” one ABC vice president was quoted anonymously (and ominously) in The New York Times Magazine as saying, “I mean takeoffs on Japanese movies that nobody has even been to an art theatre in New York to see. They’ve got to give it that old common denominator—empathy.”

  After initially bright reviews, however, the show’s familiarity bred contempt. The series began to falter in its 9:00 p.m. Sunday slot opposite The General Electric Theater and The Dinah Shore Show. The sponsor, Helena Rubinstein cosmetics, withdrew its support. The only vote of confidence came from BBC-TV in England, which offered Caesar a reported $140,000-plus to re-stage the series as a summer offering in London. The BBC rendition would also be a half hour, but the generous budget allowed Caesar to bring an entourage with him to London, including Brooks, Stewart, and head writer Tolkin.

  Not long after word began to spread of the summer ahead in London, Brooks became a father for the second time, with Florence giving birth to their first son on December 13. The boy was named Nicholas or “Nicky” after Nikolai Gogol, an author they both revered.

  His wife had made the private decision to escape from her marriage somehow after their second child was born. Her unhappiness at home, her husband’s cold treatment of her, went unabated. He had an “ungovernable and vicious temper,” according to later court documents. She suffered barrages of insults from her husband and “great humiliation, degradation, shame and embarrassment” before her friends and children.

  Florence had been devastated by Brooks’s affair with Eartha Kitt and by what had happened on the night of the Shinbone Alley premiere. Later she discovered a little black book of women’s names belonging to Brooks that bore notations suggesting that her husband “has had sexual relations or openly associated with each of said women.” When Florence was incapacitated or unwilling to go to bed with him, he upbraided her by boasting of the many beautiful actresses who had slept with him and were willing to do so again. He continued to go out most nights, often not coming home until dawn and refusing to account for his absences “except to state that he had been out having relations with other women.”

  Although some of her girlfriends knew about his womanizing, they tried to shield Florence. “It wasn’t a good marriage,” recalled Hope Holiday. “He cheated on her left, right, and center. I didn’t tell her a lot of things that I knew because I didn’t want to hurt her.”

  When the upcoming London trip was dangled in front of her, Florence temporized. Steffie was not yet two when Nicky was born; Florence had no profession or livelihood. Her father and grandparents were English. She yearned to go to London.

  They knew, before the Queen Elizabeth sailed in late May, that future American sponsors were allergic to Sid Caesar Invites You and that ABC would take the series off the air indefinitely in the United States after its last broadcast. The news did not dampen their spirits, however.

  Among the some 2,500 passengers on board the Queen Elizabeth were the Brookses, the Tolkins, Michael Stewart, and numerous mutual acquaintances including Leonard Bernstein’s sister, Shirley; the documentary filmmaker Ofra Bikel (ex-wife of actor-folksinger Theodore Bikel); and Stella Adler.

  Most of the friends and friends of friends enjoyed a carefree ten-day crossing. They played shuffleboard on deck and all kinds of memory and charades-type games to pass the time. At night they danced to the orchestra that held forth in the dining room.

  By all accounts Brooks was the star of the crossing, always light and easy in his manner and making everyone laugh all the time, “almost to a fault,” as Ofra Bikel recalled. There was no “off” button on that voyage. It took Bikel a few days to realize that the woman so often at Brooks’s side was his wife; there were no telltale signs, including children, because Brooks had insisted on leaving two-and-a-half-year-old Steffie and six-month-old Nicky at home under the watch of his wife’s mother, a nanny, and housekeepers. The wife, Florence, was not laughing much. “I was surprised to learn they were married,” Bikel recalled. “They didn’t act married. They didn’t look married.”

  In London the couple moved into a hotel room while Brooks looked for a summer rental. Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca arrived separately by plane. Brooks spent his days huddled with the stars and working on the scripts with Tolkin and Stewart at the Shepherd’s Bush production center, preparing for the first broadcast in July. Most of the pages would be spruced up from the half season of Sid Caesar Invites You. The main sketches as usual revolved around Caesar and Coca; as with most Caesar shows, dancers and singers, including the Metropolitan Opera tenor William Lewis, were interwoven.

  Brooks’s wife had time to sightsee and to make a side trip to Italy, visiting a vacationing girlfriend. After returning to London for a few days, Florence began to worry about her children in New York and flew home, debating whether she would return to London.

  While at home she took a phone call from the Italian vacationer, who had just returned to New York via London. Her girlfriend warned her that, one by one, Brooks was working his way through the chorus girls in Caesar’s show. However, Brooks phoned a few days later and told her he had just leased a house in South Kensington. She should hurry back, he said. She did not want to return without their older child, and Brooks said okay, bring Steffie. They flew to London in time for the show’s premiere.

  After “unusually strident advance publicity,” in the words of The Times of London, the BBC version of Sid Caesar Invites You proved “disappointing.” Caesar and Coca were okay in their performances, but overall the program gave “no impression of the qualities which are said to have held American audiences in thrall.” Something may have been lost in translation: Variety, reviewing the same premiere, said it gave a “favorable impression” with “solid yocks,” even if overall it was “disjointed.”

  But Caesar’s half-hour series, aired Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m., competed against the top-rated Emergency—Ward 10 on ITV, a commercial network, and it did no better in English ratings than it did with English critics (with the notable exception of a rave from Punch). Caesar had the drawback of being a virtual unknown in the United Kingdom, and besides his comic edge had begun “to blunt,” in Mel Tolkin’s words. Serial television had exhausted him and his talent, Brooks often told interviewers later. When Caesar and Coca appeared at a London benefit that summer, “The Night of a Thousand Stars,” doing one of their surefire
sketches from Your Show of Shows, Sid emitted his nervous cough throughout the performance, which was “a theatrical disaster.” The audience barely chuckled.

  Caesar hoped that the BBC might offer him a fall series. Instead his second banana, Cliff Norton, who had been brought over to substitute for Carl Reiner, got those kinds of feelers. (Reiner had skipped London to finish his first novel, the quasiautobiographical Enter Laughing.) Caesar returned to the United States, tail between his legs, and quickly took the only deal ABC was willing to offer—for a string of “specials,” not another weekly series.

  In the end Caesar derived little professional or personal enjoyment from his BBC sojourn, according to Tolkin, while for Brooks and everyone else, that summer in London was virtually a holiday spree. A generally upbeat mood prevailed among the Americans.

  Brooks circulated widely, forming lasting attachments in the city. One of the guests of “The Night of a Thousand Stars” was actor and comedian Peter Sellers, who was just then transitioning from The Goon Show on BBC Radio to attention-getting leads on television and in motion pictures. They talked about working together one day.

  Brooks’s house in South Kensington was large enough to accommodate non–Club Caesar friends whom the writer invited to join them in London: Ronny Graham and his wife came along with everyone’s favorite add-on, the easygoing Speed Vogel, the New Yorker, Fire Islander, and passionate devotee of the arts, who toiled in his wife’s textile business. Only a few people noticed any strain between the Brookses; the couple spent little time alone together and took excursions with shifting clusters of friends and the Club Caesar colony, sometimes including Coca, to Rome, Paris, and Madrid.