Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  Not for the last time Brooks disparaged Bob Hope, describing the older comedian as “never really dangerous . . . Hope is America’s pet, America’s puppy.” Gelbart, who had written for Hope early in his career, rose in defense, saying that Hope was a “joy” to work for.

  “But,” Brooks interjected, “does Hope translate anything of the things you wanted to say?”

  Hope was a gentleman, Gelbart replied, and when he had worked for Hope he had not been concerned about messages, he had been happy just to write second lieutenant jokes.

  “I don’t mean ‘message,’” Brooks pressed Gelbart. “But the joy of creating something, you know, and having the comic translate that experience.”

  “I was not looking for a vicarious experience through the comic,” Gelbart replied evenly.

  The panel pondered the topic of Jerry Lewis, for whom most of them had written at one time or another. Brooks was surprisingly blunt, considering that he had a fresh contract with Lewis in his pocket. He said that Lewis was fun to work for yet “I find it impossible to write for him, in a big wide open sense.” He told anecdotes about the previous TV special he had written with Danny Simon and Harry Crane, and how Lewis, in a meeting with Paramount executives and the writers, had jumped up onto a desk, then jumped around on top of the desk, then jumped off the desk. “He is a great jumper,” Brooks finished, and that, he added, was what Lewis really wanted as his epitaph: “Jerry, you’re the best jumper!”

  “The horror of it, this is my own opinion,” Brooks finished oddly, “is he is essentially one of the most brilliant comedic talents to have ever come upon the horizon.”

  By the time the Open End program was widely broadcast in August 1960, Brooks had already been residing in Hollywood for two months, working for that same “most brilliant comedic” talent: Jerry Lewis. Brooks arrived in late June with a ten-week guarantee and his best salary yet. Ashley-Steiner, in conjunction with Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, finalized the contract, with Brooks looking over their shoulders and learning.

  Lewis was a beacon in the Hollywood firmament amid overall slumping attendance and declining motion picture production. Since Brooks had last seen the comedian, Lewis had made his debut feature as writer, director, producer, and star. Paramount had just released the result, The Bellboy, to solid reviews and box office. Studio publicity for Lewis’s new project described “The Girl’s Boy” as based on “an original unpublished story idea” by the comedian about a lovelorn schlub dwelling in a house of gorgeous gals.

  This was the first time Brooks started on page one of a blank script for either Broadway or Hollywood. His contract stipulated that he would be paid $3,500 weekly for ten weeks in addition to first-class round-trip air travel from New York, an open-ended residential lease at the Montecito Apartments on Franklin Avenue, and generous per diems and expenses.

  Brooks thought he would be working closely alone with the comedian, but it did not take long—only two weeks—for Lewis to decide he wanted a third sounding board in script conferences. The comedian hired his friend, big-band drummer Bill Richmond, to join them, starting after the July Fourth weekend. A novice who had never worked as a professional writer, Richmond was promised $500 weekly with no guarantees after week one.

  The surprise of Richmond’s hiring was softened by the disparity in their résumés and salary differences that automatically made Brooks the senior partner. In his free time the transitioning drummer studied the format and mechanics of screenplays in the Paramount library. Brooks was already friendly with Richmond, and most of the time the two worked amiably together sans Lewis, who restricted himself to weekly conferences.

  The weekly summits took place in the inner sanctum of Jerry Lewis Productions on the Paramount lot, which was filled from floor to ceiling with photographs of Lewis, plaques, certificates and gold records, innumerable electronic devices and gadgets, stacks of Kool cigarettes, and piles of sharpened pencils. The comedian was a bad listener with a short attention span, and he wielded a heavy gavel, interrupting the writers to deliver long rants and then rushing off busily. He recorded the conferences and had the tapes transcribed, so he wouldn’t forget anything he had said that was brilliant or might be useful.

  Sid Caesar often laughed when Brooks topped his jokes. Lewis took that strength away from Brooks. Lewis didn’t like to be topped. At the very first script conference with his new writing team, he complained ruefully that Brooks and Richmond had tried to alter and improve every great idea in the script that he had already thought of.

  It was one thing to have crafted short TV sketches for Lewis, as Brooks had done the previous year, and quite another, he quickly realized, to develop a feature-length screenplay revolving around Lewis’s peculiar comic persona. The task was oppressive, even if Lewis’s persona was not far from Brooks’s own; the two shared a mutual enthusiasm for rubber faces, oinks and grunts, infantilism and tastelessness.

  Lewis was as changeable as he was controlling in the script conferences. He was “balky,” as Shawn Levy wrote in King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. When the star was absent, which was most of the time, the writers were obliged to try out their scenes on associate producer Ernest D. Glucksman and others on the Paramount lot. Lewis was irked when they reported back any outsider reaction. Folks thought his stuff was funny, too, Lewis chided them, “and we’re never gonna know until I photograph it.”

  If Lewis cottoned to any of their proposals, he swiftly appropriated them as his own, even as the ideas were being voiced; he used the writers more as gagmen and took their ideas as springboards for his “long free-association screeds,” according to Levy, “about what character names were funny or what sorts of wacky poems the main character (who, he’d decided, should be a serious writer) should compose.”

  Brooks could not shout louder, jump up higher on desks, or make crazier wisecracks; that was territory already carved out by Lewis. Very soon, Brooks didn’t see the value of working too hard on any idea or scene before they got Lewis to sign off on it. “Mel would say, ‘Let’s run it by Jerry and see if he likes it,’” Richmond remembered. “So we’d call Jerry, and Jerry would say, ‘I can’t talk right now, but let me get back to you.’ Now, if anybody had a bigger ego than Jerry Lewis, it was Mel Brooks. Jerry did this to Mel about four times, so finally Mel literally just said, ‘Fuck this.’”

  Brooks reverted to old habits, arriving late and lounging around, making phone calls to stockbrokers, griping to his agent, hobnobbing around the studio. Actress Hope Holiday, a longtime friend of his estranged wife, Florence, now lived in Hollywood; earlier in 1959 she had appeared memorably in the Christmas Eve sequence with Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. (Later, she’d play “Lolita” in Wilder’s Irma La Douce.) She spotted Brooks touring Paramount on a golf cart. Never overly friendly before, now he was suddenly Nice Mel, striving to say hello and arrange an interview with Lewis for a part in the new film. “I thought he was being so sweet and so nice to me, but maybe it was because I had made an impression in The Apartment,” said Holiday.

  Brooks took increasingly long lunches, pondering the future with music and movies publicist Marvin Schwartz. Carl Reiner lived in Hollywood nowadays, still writing for Dinah Shore, and with so many other projects in the works he needed a sandwich board to list them. As always, Reiner, Brooks’s best friend, lent a sympathetic ear.

  When Lewis took a vacation in late August, Brooks bailed east to New York, the first of several breaks he stole from Hollywood. He walked the sands alone on Fire Island.

  By now Richmond had gained the upper hand in the writing team, in part because Richmond was always on-site, loose and accustomed to Lewis’s erratic behavior from club days, and better at “reading” the comedian and scratching his endless itch; better at rolling with the punches. The novice writer got a pay raise and a contract extension.

  By late September, Lewis had noticed Brooks’s absences, which occasionally stretched past weekends, and he’d begun sending c
urt memos to the writer to “polish” scenes already stamped for inclusion in the script. Famous for verbally topping people, Brooks now became a polish-and-finish writer, not his forte and not what he enjoyed.

  By the end of the first week of October, Lewis had decided to dismiss Brooks. It would have been an awkward negotiation, except that Brooks was ready to leave. His pay was docked for the two weeks in August that Lewis had been on vacation and Brooks had gone AWOL and for two days in early October when Brooks again had traveled to New York and tarried, discussing his availability with agent Hillard Elkins, producer Edward Padula, composer Charles Strouse, and lyricist Lee Adams, who wanted him to write their successor to Bye Bye Birdie. Brooks had been wangling for just such an opportunity.

  Variety had taken to calling Strouse and Adams “the Birdie boys” as shorthand for the magic touch they had showed with their first hit musical. Michael Stewart had declined to toil on the follow-up. (Stewart had already committed to a musical called Carnival!, which also involved Gower Champion, Birdie’s director.) The new Birdie boys’ musical was going to be based on a 1950 comic novel by Robert Lewis Taylor called Professor Fodorski, which concerned a European professor who applies his brainpower to the football team of a southern Baptist college. The Birdie team (minus Champion and Stewart) envisioned another hit musical, another top-selling cast recording, national touring companies, and the proverbial big sale to Hollywood. Brooks, Stewart’s friend and fellow Club Caesarite, was his natural heir apparent. Brooks “had never really written a stage story before,” as the show’s eventual director, Joshua Logan, recalled, but the Birdie team “was willing to take a chance on him because he was so brilliant with dialogue.”

  This prospect eased the severance talks between Paramount and Brooks’s West Coast talent representative, Fred Engel of Ashley-Steiner. Brooks was freed up for Professor Fodorski without reward or penalty. Mutually it was agreed that he had “made no contribution whatsoever to the script” of The Ladies Man, as the Jerry Lewis vehicle was ultimately titled when released in June 1961. Lewis wanted sole credit on the screenplay with mention of “Special Material by Bill Richmond,” but the Writers Guild, which had the authority to determine credits, refused to accept that language, which was atypical; instead the credit on the screen became “written by Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond,” and it stayed that way for seven more Jerry Lewis features.

  The failure to harmonize with Lewis, on top of the collapse of his marriage, added to the sense of crisis in Brooks’s life. Yet he did salvage one happy memento from his unhappy experience with Lewis. The comic had complained incessantly about the handling of the black ’59 Jaguar, with red leather interiors, that he owned. Brooks thought it was the most beautiful car in the world. “He had paid $10,000–$12,000 a year before for it,” Brooks recalled. Lewis told Brooks, “You want it? Give me five grand and it’s yours.” Lewis took the five grand out of the final salary payment he owed Brooks.

  Almost accidentally, then, something else happened in Hollywood in late 1960 that involved Carl Reiner and that salvaged Brooks’s stay in the film capital, refreshed his momentum, and in some ways became, in his career, the tail that wagged the dog.

  Faster than most of the other fated-to-be-famous people associated with Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, Carl Reiner had proved himself as a writer and as a paragon of hard work and accomplishment away from Sid Caesar. Remarkably, if only because it was done with such speed and seeming modesty, by 1960 he had written an acclaimed novel, a play, and several television scripts, including a pilot for a series starring himself that would soon evolve into The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reiner also had a handful of screenplays in development, including one with collaborator Larry Gelbart that would eventually be produced as a Doris Day comedy. Meanwhile he acted in films and TV specials and had launched his lifelong penchant for appearing on game shows.

  Curiously, Reiner would never collaborate with Brooks as a writer, then or later, no matter how many setbacks buffeted Brooks, no matter how much money such a pairing might have brought. Brooks never wrote a single episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, for example. “He’s never done domestic comedy,” Reiner explained in one interview.

  With one exception: the 2000 Year Old Man was as much a writing partnership as a performing one, and by the end of 1960 the duo had been running the act, in private among friends, for nearly a decade. They had practiced, tape-recorded, and honed the routine for many small groups on Fire Island and in Manhattan. Its seeming spontaneity, if only partly genuine, was impossible to separate from its appeal. The act was a quirky cat-and-mouse game, with Reiner the cat trying to trap Brooks the mouse. “If I said, ‘Here now is the world-renowned sculptor Sir Jacob Epstone,’” Reiner remembered, “he would, without skipping a beat, create a whole new person, complete with voice, attitude, and an extraordinary knowledge of the subject’s profession.”

  Brooks’s New York booster Joe Fields was ensconced in his Beverly Hills mansion in the fall of 1960, and hearing that both Brooks and Reiner were in town, he threw a party to show off the 2000 Year Old Man. Among the big-name guests were actor Edward G. Robinson, who told them, “I would like to play this guy on Broadway”; comedian George Burns, who advised the pair to put their act onto an album before he stole it; and the versatile talk-show host Steve Allen, who offered to underwrite a recording session at World Pacific in Los Angeles, a label known for its cool jazz, where Allen had contacts.

  Not long after the party, Allen booked Reiner and Brooks into the World Pacific studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. Although he was still reeling from the Jerry Lewis fiasco and his marital imbroglio, Brooks was never down in the dumps before an audience, which in that instance included “a hundred or so family members and friends,” in Reiner’s words, who had been corralled for their live reaction. The duo recorded for two hours, then trimmed the length down to forty-seven minutes for a November release. The atmosphere on 2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks would be partylike, with Reiner chuckling along with the crowd as Brooks vamped on the Stone Age and Jesus.

  Reiner: Could you give us the secret of your longevity?

  Brooks: The major thing is that I never even touch fried food. I don’t eat it, I wouldn’t look at it, and I don’t touch it. And never run for a bus, there will always be another, even if you’re late from work. I never run for a bus . . . I just stroll, jaunty, jolly.

  Reiner: What was the means of transportation then?

  Brooks: Fear. Mostly fear.

  Reiner: Fear transported you?

  Brooks: An animal would growl, you’d go two miles in a minute. Fear would be the main propulsion.

  Reiner: What language did you speak then?

  Brooks: They spoke rock. Basic rock.

  Reiner: That was before Hebrew.

  Brooks: Two hundred years before Hebrew was the rock talk.

  Reiner: Can you give us an example of that?

  Brooks: Hey, don’t throw that rock at me! Hey, what are you doing with that rock there?

  Curiously, the 2000 Year Old Man and his time travels (“I’m gonna wash up,” he remembers telling girlfriend Joan of Arc, “you save France!”) were confined to about eleven minutes, or roughly one-fourth of the LP. The rest of that first recording was filled out by Reiner interviewing some of the other personas spun by Brooks’s imagination, which included a pop singer named Fabiola who was not far from the Three Haircuts. But the eleven minutes of the 2000 Year Old Man was what really resonated.

  Stand-up humor was in the early throes of a “dangerous” revolution. Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman were among the pioneers of a new, cool, candid, political, and philosophical style of comedy that grew to encompass the first recordings of Lenny Bruce, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, and soon Dick Gregory. 2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks fit into the trend partly because the 2000 Year Old Man, the daft eyewitness to the turning pages of history, was—like many (not all) of the dangerous comedy avatars—as proudly Jewish as his creators.
Jewishness had lurked in the closet and had in fact been unmentionable on Caesar’s shows, for example, ever since Hitler and the Holocaust. That was one reason why it took the 2000 Year Old Man so long to go public. “Would WASP America get him?” Reiner recalled worrying. “Would Christians find the old Jew funny? Do ‘our people’ still consider the Yiddish accent to be non grata?”

  Reiner was billed first on the LP in deference to his higher public profile. Brooks was a virtual unknown outside the entertainment industry. He had performed fleetingly on the Texaco Star Theater in 1951 but had never appeared on a single Sid Caesar program, except once, sort of: the time he had volunteered to voice a cat off camera during a sketch. He had come down with a bad case of stage fright. “In the dress rehearsal my mouth turned to cotton,” he said, “and I couldn’t do the cat sound.” Apologizing to everyone, he redeemed himself during the live broadcast with his off-stage meows.

  Later Brooks often said in interviews that Caesar had been such a perfect vehicle for his comedy that he had not thought to nurture his own talent as an entertainer during the 1950s. In truth, he hadn’t been ready to perform in public. Privately, everyone knew that Brooks was always “on,” and for ten years the 2000 Year Old Man had nurtured the “on” button.

  The first LP liberated something at Brooks’s core: not only the Jewishness that was manifest in private but also his offbeat improvisational genius. The recording took off among laugh lovers, amid the explosion of new-breed spoken-word comedy sweeping across America. Some critics were unkind: “not very funny,” declared Billboard; “only intermittently funny,” said the New York Times. (Years later Brooks could quote those negative reviews.) Yet sales boomed. The 2000 Year Old Man became hip and popular.