Suddenly Reiner and Brooks found themselves invited to happening nightclubs such as the hungry i in San Francisco; interview requests came from all manner of daytime and late-night talk shows (including Brooks’s first sit-down with Mike Wallace and return invitations from David Susskind); the 2000 Year Old Man was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show; FM radio gave the LP incessant exposure; and a spate of other comedians, including Vaughn Meader, who was making a second LP spoofing the Kennedy First Family, and a wild stand-up named Dick Shawn, asked Brooks to write fresh material for them. Faster than you could say “sequel,” plans for a second 2000 Year Old Man recording with Reiner and Brooks were placed on the agenda for the spring of the following year by Capitol Records, which bought out the surging World Pacific catalogue.
Those and other positive repercussions from the first comedy album loomed ahead as Brooks returned to New York in late December. He plunged into meetings with producer Edward Padula, composer Charles Strouse, and lyricist Lee Adams for Professor Fodorski, or “All American”, as their planned Broadway musical was now retitled.
Late in 1960, a judge approved a temporary divorce arrangement between Brooks and his estranged wife that allotted alimony of $400 weekly to Florence and their three children. When Brooks dodged his payments, early in 1961, her lawyers went to court.
The open hearings afforded a rare public glimpse behind the closed doors of Brooks’s private life. His wife accused him of numerous extramarital flings, itemizing those suspected by her or claimed by him. He was a serial womanizer who had even recently consorted “with many women of various repute while in Hollywood,” Variety reported.
Florence also alleged that Brooks, on several occasions, had struck her “over the face and body.” The family’s longtime nurse and nanny, Frances Barmore, filed an affidavit supporting her accusations, saying she had once witnessed “the defendant [Brooks] threaten to beat the plaintiff,” while conceding that “I personally did not witness the assault.” Nanny Barmore confirmed Brooks’s constant berating of his wife and his customary use of foul language even in front of the children. Barmore said she had tried to be friendly with the head of the household on numerous occasions, greeting him the first thing each day with “Good morning!,” to which he would invariably reply, “Good morning, my ass!”
While smarting from seeing his dirty laundry aired in the press, the normally talkative Brooks was tight-lipped in his sworn affidavit, dismissing “completely” his wife’s “charges of adultery.” Yet he declined to specifically rebut those charges. His brief denial rejected claims of “other misconduct,” i.e., physical abuse, saying “there are no factual allegations to support them nor could there be since they are not true.” His wife had been “guilty of serious misconduct” of her own, Brooks stated, but, gentleman that he was, he would refrain from “interposing such affirmative defensives and counterclaims.”
Filings in the case attested that Brooks had earned $87,000 in 1960, with $41,000 of the total coming from television and $46,000 from his Hollywood spree with Jerry Lewis. After court actions forced Brooks to reveal that substantial income, Florence’s lawyers demanded that the $400 weekly alimony, already in arrears, be upped to $1,000.
Brooks, in his court statements, argued that 1960 had been an extremely unusual year for him, and in actuality his prospective earnings had “dramatically dropped.” It would be fairer, and he might be able to keep up with his payments, if his weekly alimony were reduced to $200, he said. The $87,000 did not take into account his stepped-up coast-to-coast travel, with costs often borne by him, he claimed; nor his agent, lawyer, and accountancy fees, or state and federal taxes; the total did not reflect the one-fourth of his income allotted to business expenses, including show tickets and “home entertainment,” as well as entertainment “outside the home” for “professional associates.”
Maybe his earnings had peaked in 1960, but the upcoming year looked dismal. So far he had been paid only $6,000 as an advance against royalties for many months of future work on “All American” (“I consider work on this musical crucial to my future for it offers me a real chance for a new kind of writing career”) and $1,800 for rewriting Sid Caesar’s scenes sans credit for a forthcoming film, probably It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Yes, the 2,000 Year Old Man was selling “very well,” Brooks admitted, but he had already been paid and spent his share of the $6,250 advance. His 2000 Year Old Man paycheck did not reflect the many business expenses he had had to absorb in order to participate in the recording. And he did not foresee significant royalties in 1961. (Years later, in interviews, he would boast that the first LP had “sold maybe one million copies.”)
Yes, it was true that Brooks had a side deal with Capitol to produce four new recordings with favorite comedians. The first, Here’s Milt Kamen!, had showcased an underrated comic who had substituted for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour. Brooks introduced Kamen on the recording, and Groucho Marx, now a fan of Brooks (he had seen the 2000 Year Old Man act in Hollywood), penned the liner notes. Brooks had also received $6,250 for the Kamen recording but, he said, he had had to pay Kamen his fee out of the advance. The sales were modest, and Capitol had tabled the other three recordings.
Having “no further offers for work as a writer,” Brooks informed the court, and “no commitments for my services as a performer,” he had been forced to liquidate his stocks and bonds, including a Wellington Fund of $11,000, using some of the money to prop up his career while doling out the rest to his estranged wife and three children.
Adding up all the circumstances, he told the court, if things went okay he might earn as much as $39,000 in 1961. But if things went badly, which seemed more likely, he said, he would gross something more in the neighborhood of $14,000.
Alden Schwimmer, the head of the Writers Department of Ashley-Steiner, weighed in with an affidavit analyzing the stasis of Brooks’s career and supporting his client’s claim that his prospects in the broadcast arena were “problematical.” “We have offered his services, without success, to numerous people,” Schwimmer said. “Indeed, we have been so concerned about his future . . . we have voluntarily released him from his commitment to pay commissions on moneys earned as a performer, recording artist, or writer, or playwright.” That unusual waiver allowed Brooks to liaise with other agents; Ashley-Steiner represented him exclusively only for television or motion picture writing.
All Florence’s lawyers knew about the state of Brooks’s finances came from his voluntary affidavits and the personal tax returns covering the years of their marriage. Her lawyers fought to obtain access to all his contracts, especially those with ongoing payment clauses; any nonpaper agreements that might be off the books (as frequently happened when one comedian wrote for another); all stock holdings; his accountant’s records; checkbook stubs; and so on. But Brooks’s lawyers battled back fiercely, successfully blocking all subpoenaing of documents and keeping Brooks from having to make any formal depositions.
Florence had asked for more alimony than she could ever hope to obtain because she believed she would never get whatever amount the court ordered. She said her ex-husband had treated his family in a “niggardly fashion,” making payments reluctantly and irregularly, letting her bank account fall as low as three dollars “time and again.” Brooks derived “some enjoyment” from plunging her into dire circumstances and constant pleading, she said. Perpetually chasing after the money had put her on the constant verge of collapse.
Brooks still saw his children almost daily when he was in New York, stopping by the family apartment and often hanging around for hours until inevitably Florence asked him if he wanted to stay for supper. Then he’d sit a little off to the side of the family table, looking woebegone as he spooned from his plate. Though he bought the children lavish toys and took them on outings, he never took them home with him overnight to where he now lived in the West Village, however, not then nor later in time.
His woebegone look underscored his ceas
eless entreaties to Florence to give their marriage one more try. Brooks was apologetic, saying he still loved her and the couple could still reunite. The sad face dovetailed with the explanations he made, over and over, in court and in person to Florence, about how “the new trend in viewing” had “cut into the market for humorous material,” making his finances fragile; he expected to earn so much less money in the future, he said, that he couldn’t possibly pay sizable alimony.
However sincere he may have been about wanting to repair his broken marriage, one of the first things Brooks did upon returning from Hollywood in late 1960, in consultation with his lawyer Alan U. Schwartz, was to form a private corporation called Crossbow Productions, Inc. That filing made him an employee of his own company, with all future professional activities, including stage, television, motion picture, and recording endeavors, wholly owned or licensed under the aegis of Crossbow. Crossbow could bank Brooks’s earnings and pay his income out of the earnings while setting the bulk aside to invest in future company projects. The chairman of the board of Crossbow was of course Brooks himself, while his lawyer and accountant were the only other named directors.
Apart from that being standard operating procedure for rich people wishing to limit taxes on fluctuating income, Crossbow was useful for the shell game with Florence, who had sacrificed her dancing career for motherhood and now despairingly sought the best possible divorce terms for herself and her three young children. Brooks never mentioned Crossbow in his affidavits, nor was it referred to in court records.
Personally as well as professionally, Brooks was nothing if not agile and resilient; moss did not grow under his feet. Curiously, even while in the midst of ugly alimony disputes in the New York courts and pleading privately with Florence to give their marriage a second chance, he also began to court the actress who’d become his next wife.
A vivacious brunette from the Bronx, whose real name was Anna Marie Louisa Italiano, Anne Bancroft had started out in Hollywood in the early 1950s playing insignificant roles. Returning to her native New York, the actress had enrolled at Herbert Berghof (or HB) Studio before gravitating to the Actors Studio, where she studied under Lee Strasberg. She then embarked on a more auspicious stage career, winning two Tonys, the first for playing opposite Henry Fonda in William Gibson’s two-character Two for the Seesaw in 1958, followed by her portrayal of Anne Sullivan, the tutor of the deaf-blind Helen Keller (played by Patty Duke), in Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. The Miracle Worker had been selling tickets for a year and a half by early 1961 and would soon become an acclaimed Hollywood picture, with Bancroft Oscar nominated for Best Actress.
The thirty-year-old was Catholic, five years younger than Brooks, and at least three inches taller. No actress in New York show business was more instantly recognizable, successful, respected. Bancroft, too, had endured a bad first marriage; she was wary of men and intimidated them. Famously in New York, she was single and available.
There are many versions of how and when Brooks first got together with Bancroft, but there are William Morris agents who believed it was an “agency package,” because the writer and the actress, both known to be available on the relationship market, were introduced by talent representatives who conspired for the two to meet and shake hands as they walked down agency corridors from opposite directions in late 1960.
Just as curiously, Charles Strouse, who had enjoyed a secret romance with the first Mrs. Mel Brooks one year earlier, believed he had played Cupid. Strouse had a day job in the late 1950s playing piano for musical theater lectures at the Actors Studio, where Bancroft practiced her singing with him. Strouse and Brooks were talking over the “All American” script one day when Bancroft stopped by to say hello, and after she departed, Brooks, tongue-tied in her presence, pleaded with Strouse for another try at catching her attention.
On February 5, 1961, Strouse took Brooks to a run-through for The Perry Como Show at NBC, where Bancroft was guest-starring. The actress was onstage in a shimmering white dress singing “Married I Can Always Get” from Gordon Jenkins’s Manhattan Tower suite. “She was gorgeous!” Brooks recalled. “My tongue was hanging out!” When Bancroft finished her number, Brooks stood and applauded wildly, then strode up to the stage, stuck his hand out, and said, “Hey, Anne Bancroft, I’m Mel Brooks!” Then he followed her to the William Morris Agency, where she performed a one-woman takeoff of The Miracle Worker for him, bringing him to his knees in laughter. The next day it was his turn, playing his 2000 Year Old Man LP for her at Bancroft’s West 11th Street brownstone. That night, Bancroft told him, she was heading to the Village Vanguard, a jazz club in Greenwich Village, and Brooks connived to materialize at the Vanguard, too. Brooks started “following me around,” Bancroft often said in later interviews, finding out beforehand where the actress was going to be and then showing up and accidentally running into her as though their relationship were kismet.
Both told versions of the Perry Como show anecdote over the years, with their own emendations. (According to one Brooks interview, right away Bancroft said she owned his LP, adding “You’re a genius!”) Suffice it to say that they began seeing a lot of each other: the taller, younger, pretty Catholic actress and the short, Jewish, homely comedy writer.
Years later, actor Frank Langella, who knew them both but was especially friendly with Bancroft, described personal qualities in the actress not far removed from Brooks’s own. Bancroft possessed a “galloping narcissism” that would ultimately hinder her career, he wrote in his memoir. Although very funny in private, he added, the actress could be very angry, nobody angrier. Fiercely private, she was also chary of the press.
The new couple would not see very much of each other in the next few months. Bancroft was en route to Hollywood for work on the screen adaptation of The Miracle Worker.
The Recording Academy, an organization of music business professionals similar to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, nominated the first 2000 Year Old Man LP for a Grammy for Best Comedy Performance (Spoken Word) in March. 2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks had to compete, in its category, against Shelley Berman (The Edge of Shelley Berman), Mike Nichols and Elaine May (An Evening with Nichols and May), Bob Newhart (The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!), and Jonathan Winters (The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters). When Newhart won, the 2000 Year Old Man began a drought of losing Grammy nominations that finally ended for the duo in 1998 with a Best Spoken Comedy Album prize for their fifth LP, The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000.
No matter; the first LP was still selling well, and in April they recorded 2000 and One Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks. Again the audience, this time at weekend midnight sessions at Capitol Records’s studio in New York, was friends and family.
For most of early 1961, Brooks was busy on “All American”. In the spring he met daily with Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, and Edward Padula. Bye Bye Birdie had evolved from Padula’s original idea, and Gower Champion had been of tremendous assistance, guiding Michael Stewart through revisions of the libretto. The reconfigured Birdie team began slowly, acclimating themselves to the new project and one another. Sometimes Brooks seemed needlessly digressive or combative. “He’s like a boxer who can’t stop sparring, even when he’s eating,” recalled Strouse, who dubbed Brooks “The Screaming Samurai.”
The months passed with gradually achieved consensus and progress. But the team needed Brooks to get a draft done, down on paper, by the end of the summer. So the writer holed up on Fire Island, taking introspective walks on the beach. “[Brooks] does his best work in longhand,” Padula told the press, “or dictating to anyone handy.”
The “anyone handy” was someone in particular, though: Alfa-Betty Olsen. Although female and not Jewish, a fetching blonde who could pass for Miss Norway, Olsen fit the other prerequisites for a Brooks collaborator, having been born in a Norwegian pocket neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she had grown up, everyone else around her speaking Norwegian, with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. Olsen had sta
rted premedical studies at the University of Iowa before being corrupted by artistic and show business ambitions. After college she had moved back to New York, where she lived on West 15th Street with an aspiring actress named Candace Hilligoss. Olsen worked by day at an advertising agency and at night as a bonded babysitter. In the summer of 1960, she and her roommate attended a Fire Island party hosted by Charles Kasher, a hair care entrepreneur who pioneered the infomercial. Kasher, whom they knew from Manhattan, aspired to be a producer, and on weekends his house filled up with artists and show business friends.
At one Kasher party the roommates met Brooks, hitting it off right away. Their friendship transitioned to the Village, where Brooks and the young women lived in close proximity; because Brooks stayed up late, really late, he’d sometimes wind up his evenings over at their place. One Friday night Brooks said to Olsen, “You can type and I can’t, and I have to have something ready on Monday. You have to help me.” That something was Act One of “All American”. Brooks talked, Olsen typed, making choices and decisions, and “maybe [I] added a few things because I can’t keep my mouth shut.”
To write a Broadway musical had been Brooks’s lifelong quest, and this was his first big chance. With his background in short sketches and his spotty record with longer scripts, however, it helped to have a solid story foundation to begin with: a novel (by a onetime Pulitzer Prize winner) with a lead character explicitly Eastern European and implicitly Jewish. He (and Olsen) started with a prose treatment of the book, carving out scenes for transfer into the musical, leaving holes for songs, building up the romantic subplot between a football player and a coed, developing a theme of “having the professor first attracted and then repelled by superficial success, go back to teaching,” in Brooks’s words.
Olsen accompanied Brooks to meetings with Strouse, Adams, and Padula. Brooks wrote a treatment, breaking the play into scenes, before completing a full script by summer’s end. “Well, Mel didn’t actually write, he just talked,” Strouse said later. “He had a secretary [Olsen] who would transcribe what he said. Michael Stewart told me that on Your Show of Shows, none of the writers actually wrote, they simply copied down what Mel said.”
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