Funny Man

by Patrick McGilligan

  The July 26 draft was definitely overstuffed (as many as 412 pages, according to some reports, or 156, per other estimates). Among other things, the lengthy first draft included a Catskills-type comedian who opens for Lili Von Shtupp and a long, rap-style “street poem” Richard Pryor had written for Black Bart to intone as he edges closer to the gallows.

  Brooks seemed to be in no hurry. And he could be doubly loyal to his worst ideas if they met opposition, his obstinacy a way of testing people or a means of sparking internal debate.

  For example, he concocted a cowpoke named Bogey, just so, it seemed, he could perform the “paranoid ‘strawberries’ bit from The Caine Mutiny” for the group, as Andrew Bergman recalled. (“Mel did a very nice Bogart, with the wet lips and the crazy eyes.”) Bogey was penciled into the draft despite people’s qualms, later to be removed.

  Brooks evinced a peculiar fondness for characters with physical deformities and devised a midget character named Ash Tray, whose ashtray hat also honored Brooks’s love of cigar jokes. The midget slavishly served the villain, who initially was going to be called “John Carradine” because he would be played by the real-life John Carradine, the lantern-jawed veteran of many Westerns. (Carradine’s innumerable screen credits would be listed on his office door.) When Carradine called “Ash Tray!,” the midget would pop up from beneath a table and offer himself as a receptacle for cigar ashes. “I hated the character and Andy hated the character, but Mel was adamant,” said Steinberg.

  “The trick with Mel,” said Steinberg, “is to not fold, to stand up for what you believe in, and if you don’t believe [something’s] funny, say that—and he respects that.”

  The dumb behemoth Mongo emerged in the July 26 draft, as did the saloon chanteuse Lili Von Shtupp, modeled after the character of Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. In the July 26 draft, however, the chanteuse was called Lili Von Dyke, evoking the star of Bye Bye Birdie and a certain TV series created by Carl Reiner. The eventual “Shtupp” means “fuck” in German slang; the script (like most Brooks scripts) was sprinkled with faux German such as Lili’s aphrodisiacal sausage, the schnitzengruben.

  In a definitive article on the Blazing Saddles script, published in Written By, the Writers Guild journal, Greg Beal listed the elements that had survived from Bergman’s novella into the July 26 draft and later persisted into the film: Black Bart’s arrival in Rock Ridge, triggering the first use of the N-word; the white deputy who becomes Black Bart’s best friend (later to evolve into the Waco Kid, played by Gene Wilder); Black Bart adopting a patois to save himself; the plot thread of the railroad route “necessitating the destruction of Rock Ridge”; Black Bart’s romance with a sexy white woman; the tollbooth that slows the bad guys; “the hitting of a little old lady.” The basic structure of the film-to-be was in place in the July 26 draft with one major exception: “the grand finale from the Warner Bros. lot free-for-all and the Grauman’s Chinese shoot-out,” wrote Beal.

  Still, there were rewriting and polishing ahead and fewer writers left to do the job.

  Brooks and his family took a summer break on Fire Island, and he also made several trips to Hollywood to confer with Warner Bros. executives. On the West Coast he reunited with Carl Reiner for a private performance of the now 2013 Year Old Man in Warner’s Burbank recording complex. Two hundred friends and family lounged on huge sofas, dined on cracked crab and chili from Chasen’s, and savored the act. 2000 and Thirteen would go on sale late in 1973 as a Christmas package, along with a reissue of the early recordings, recently taken over from Capitol by Warner Bros. Records.

  There was “talk that the pair had given in to their fears and disappeared while ostensibly preparing backstage,” according to New York Times reportage. Brooks “hasn’t been very easy to live with this week,” admitted the wife of the 2013 Year Old Man, Anne Bancroft. Brooks was “chain-smoking and initially rusty,” according to the Times’ account, but Reiner warmed up his friend onstage, and the laughs began to flow.*

  The best dancer in all of history, the 2013 Year Old Man revealed, was the American president Abraham Lincoln. “He used to lock the door and jump and twirl in graceful arabesques,” he said. “But he never went on the stage because of his warts.”

  The 2013 Year Old Man just happened to be passing through LA for his bicentennial physical, he explained. Everything had checked out fine, which was good because he feared dying and meeting Jesus, having once paid him “only four bucks for a cabinet.”

  Bancroft had an ulterior motive for sitting in the audience. In Hollywood the actress met with director Melvin Frank about her forthcoming part opposite Jack Lemmon in the screen adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, her first film role since Young Winston and motherhood. Also a Warner Bros. production, Prisoner would be shot in the fall, partly at the studio, partly in New York City. Other celebrities dotting the appreciative crowd included Miracle Worker director Arthur Penn, journalist Nora Ephron, and longtime Brooks friend Norman Lear, now the producer of the hit television comedy series All in the Family, which had Reiner’s son Rob in the cast.

  In the fall, Brooks and his writers—minus Richard Pryor and Alan Uger—reconvened. Andrew Bergman and Norman Steinberg’s selective memory may be owed to the fact that they persevered for months beyond the July 26 draft, forging a Three Musketeers–type kinship with Brooks. Often the three writers dined together in Chinatown after work sessions on the follow-up drafts, taking long discursive walks home through the Village, where they all resided (Brooks on West 12th Street, Steinberg in the East Village, Bergman in Gramercy Park). The trio argued about scenes and discussed writing and films and life.

  The peculiar gestation of the script and the rare mix of the collaborators would give it a singular flavor in Brooks’s oeuvre. For one thing, although there were often allusions to real-life people and topics within a Mel Brooks comedy, in Blazing Saddles those references were more crammed and variegated: apart from the many Johnsons (Dr. Samuel Johnson, Olsen and Johnson, Van Johnson, and an early Howard Johnson’s that advertises only one flavor of ice cream), there were allusions to Jesse Owens, Mae West, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“Badges! We don’t need no stinking badges!”), Cecil B. DeMille, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Gabby Hayes, Dr. Kildare, Guccis, Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Warner Bros. cartoons, and even, improbably for a Western, Adolf Hitler in the big finale (“They lose me right after the bunker scene”).

  Before Christmas, the Three Musketeers had completed the final draft. The villain was no longer “John Carradine.” Sometime in mid-1972, they had all attended a screening of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Woody Allen’s new film, discovering that Allen had beaten Brooks to Carradine. The veteran actor appeared in one distinctly unfunny segment of the anthology comedy along with—shades of Ash Tray—a strange deformed servant. In addition, Brooks had spotted Carradine in the Warner’s commissary one day and decided the actor did not radiate good health. For weeks Bergman and Steinberg had begged Brooks to drop Ash Tray. Now he did (“Fuck it, he’s gone!”), and “John Carradine” became “Hedley Lamarr.” (“Big upgrade there,” Bergman said.) The name was Brooks’s twist on Hedy Lamarr, which later prompted a nuisance lawsuit from the Golden Age screen siren, who was still alive and didn’t think it was funny.

  The grand culmination, the melee that spills over onto a Warner Bros. soundstage and then segues to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, also emerged in the final draft: that was Brooks’s inspiration, all agree. It was what The Producers and The Twelve Chairs had lacked—a finish to beat all finishes. “The notion of opening the movie up at the end was Mel’s, and his instinct was dead-on,” recalled Bergman. “He didn’t want any kind of traditional ending to this picture. It was a brilliant idea. The details of the ending we all worked on, but the concept was pure Mel.”

  Brooks and Norman Steinberg, who were closest in age, became the closest thing to soul mates. Besides showering people
with medical advice and career tips, Brooks had another specialty: counseling his male friends on their relationships with women. He showed up on Steinberg’s doorstep one Sunday night amid his usual nocturnal rounds in the Village. Brooks and Steinberg’s wife launched into an argument about a Stanley Kubrick film, and Steinberg’s wife stormed off angrily. Brooks and Steinberg stayed up late talking.

  Steinberg and his wife had just spent hours in a car bickering all the way home from a weekend getaway in New England. The gulf in their marriage was widening.

  “Look,” Brooks told him, “I’m going to save you about twelve years of therapy. She is manic-depressive. You have to get out of the marriage. You can’t win this.”

  Whatever else transpired between them in the years to come, Steinberg never forgot that Brooks had given him a leg up early in his career, hired him for Blazing Saddles, and also given him sound marital advice. Soon after that talk, Steinberg divorced his wife. “[Brooks] did save me twelve years of therapy, and maybe more,” he said.

  New fatherhood, marriage, and divorce were very much on Brooks’s mind when he wrote Blazing Saddles, true-life concerns of the sort that never intruded on his comedy—one reason people found his films such a respite from their own pressing problems.

  Even as Blazing Saddles took shape in writers’ meetings, Brooks’s ex-wife, Florence Baum Brooks Dunay, was pressing for a divorce from her second husband, the stockbroker Edward Dunay. Dunay had verbally and physically abused Florence to the point where she had called the police on him several times. Dunay had abandoned his family’s East 62nd Street apartment and no longer contributed to the rent or other household expenses. The couple were battling over custody of their ten-year-old son.

  Brooks’s three children from his marriage to Florence still lived with their mother, as they always had. Stefanie, Nicky, and Eddie were teenagers now, and they had educational, medical, and everyday expenses. Florence was lagging far behind on her rent and had mounting debt; many times she felt desperate for cash, including for Brooks’s monthly payments, which came erratically. Florence phoned Brooks, pleading for him and Anne Bancroft to take his three children for a spell and help her get back on her feet. “My wife is an artist, not a nanny!” he yelled, and slammed down the phone.

  Besides evading child support payments over the years, Brooks never once remitted the one-third percentage of his net income over $44,000 annually, which had been promised to the first Mrs. Brooks as part of their 1962 divorce settlement. The word “net” had pretty much scuttled that clause, which nonetheless still hung ominously over Brooks.

  Acting on the advice of a lawyer, Florence began pursuing a remedy that would kill two birds with one stone: she offered to sell the one-third-above-$44,000 clause back to her husband for a onetime financial settlement. In return she would drop all future claims against him. As he always did, Brooks, through his attorney Alan U. Schwartz, emphasized his failures and hardships, and how his earnings were modest. His career had hit such a low, low point. The Producers and The Twelve Chairs had achieved only succès d’estime—or, as Carl Reiner liked to say, success without the steam.

  The talks between Florence’s lawyer and Schwartz were just beginning as Brooks moved to Hollywood to shoot Blazing Saddles. She was cut off from show business, and she and her lawyer had no access to his contracts, no inkling of the gusher he was about to strike.

  Hollywood had been transformed from the mighty kingdom Brooks had first visited twenty years earlier. “Suits,” with New York agents David Begelman and John Calley among the first wave, had replaced the founding-father moguls as huge corporations began to take over the major studios at the end of the 1960s. Warner Bros. was one of the last studios to sell off in 1969, with the last surviving brother, Jack L. Warner, handing his studio over to Kinney National, a conglomerate that was the parent company of funeral home, parking lot, cleaning service, comic book, and music businesses—and Ashley-Famous.

  The transition between the old guard and the new guardians was a period of tremendous ferment and experimentation in American filmmaking. Traditional genres, especially the Western and the musical, were either dead or dying and ripe for parody.

  “Hollywood is really two Newarks,” Brooks had cracked in the 1960s. But all along it had been part of his plan to abandon New York after the “Black Bart” script was completed. He was going to shoot his first major studio picture in Hollywood on Warner Bros. soundstages and the back lot. The move west, once unthinkable and wrenching for a man with Brooklyn pulsing in his blood, was made easier by the dead ends he had encountered on Broadway, the setbacks in television, and the limitations, chiefly economic, he had encountered while making The Producers and The Twelve Chairs.

  Virtually the entire Club Caesar, with the exception of Lucille Kallen, had gone before him. Most of the old gang was already ensconced in the bosom of the film and television industry. Carl Reiner and the others welcomed him with open arms.

  Brooks made trips back and forth to Hollywood throughout 1972, planning for the production at Warner Bros. During one of his meetings at the studio, after showing the latest draft of the screenplay to the head of the studio, John Calley, Brooks asked Calley if he might be going too far with the Western comedy—pointing out the scene in the third-act free-for-all, where a gang of westerners beat up an old lady. What the onetime Ashley-Famous agent said to him bolstered his confidence. Brooks repeated Calley’s advice in many interviews: “Mel, if you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it!”

  By the end of the year, Brooks, Anne Bancroft, and six-month-old Max had relocated to Los Angeles. First the family leased a place on Rising Glen Road above Sunset Strip. Soon, however, Brooks signed papers and slapped a down payment on a high-ceilinged ranch house on Foothill Road in Beverly Hills proper, with a U-shaped swimming pool, a garden, and a citrus orchard that covered half an acre. Lew Wasserman, another former agent now running a studio—Universal—was one close neighbor.

  Sue Mengers, a superagent at International Creative Management, whom Brooks had first met at Freddie Fields’s Creative Management Associates, hosted one of the first extravagant Hollywood parties the couple attended. Van Cliburn played the piano as guests snacked on beluga caviar. “So I figured this was the place to be,” Brooks recalled.

  At first Brooks told Stefanie, Nicky, and Eddie that he really hadn’t moved to Hollywood. The change of address was merely temporary. It would be especially important for the next two years, while his lawyer was busy whittling down the onetime payoff that would rescue Brooks from future financial obligations to his first wife and family, that Florence and the children be misled.

  The Brookses were stealthy about the move to Hollywood inside the screen colony itself. But Variety tracked the “drift of film personages,” paying special attention to East Coast celebrities who changed their address. “Even such ‘committed’ New Yorkers as Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft have swallowed their ‘tinseltown’ sneers (a New York habit) and joined the migration,” the trade paper reported early in 1974.

  Meanwhile, casting for “Black Bart” progressed. Keeping with his notion of dotting the cast with Western old-timers, Brooks signed Slim Pickens, who had been seen to hilarious effect in Dr. Strangelove, as Hedley Lamarr’s henchman, Taggart. He gave Mongo to the muscled ex–football player Alex Karras, who had not yet appeared in movies. (Karras would make the mentally challenged enforcer lovable as well as fearsome.) The capable character actors included John Hillerman, David Huddleston, Liam Dunn (who’d crossed paths with Brooks in his youth), and Dom DeLuise’s wife, actress Carol Arthur, all playing unrelated townsfolk bearing the last name of Johnson. DeLuise himself accepted a small part that he made unforgettable as the poufy director wielding a megaphone, exhorting a Busby Berkeley–type chorus in the lavish musical of the grand finale. (His character’s name, Buddy Bizarre, is listed only in the credits.)

  Anne Bancroft had a hand in Madeline Kahn’s casting. “Don’t miss this one! She’s the best!�
� she told Brooks, having met Kahn on her television specials and followed her in the Broadway musical Two by Two. A triple-threat actress, singer, and comedienne with a kewpie-doll face and mocking voice, Kahn had stolen scenes in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon; for the latter picture, released in early 1973, she garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

  Brooks asked Kahn to audition for Lili Von Shtupp. The actress prepared the Brecht-Weill spoof “Das Chicago Song,” which she had sung in another Broadway show Brooks would have seen, Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968. Brooks took Kahn aback when he said he needed a good look at her legs. “What, are you crazy?” Kahn sputtered. “I thought I was auditioning for a part in your movie. I didn’t think you wanted to screw me on your desk.” Brooks hastily explained that he wanted Kahn to straddle a chair in her net stockings in a classic Marlene Dietrich pose that he planned for her character to strike in the film. He was happily married, Brooks assured her, and not in the habit of casting on the couch. Having put him on the defensive and drawn a permanent line in their relationship, Kahn did as she was asked and displayed her wares. Brooks nodded approvingly. They talked for two hours. Then, and on numerous future occasions, Brooks invited Kahn home to dinner, “so she could see how much I loved Anne, and there was no straying from that love,” in his words.

  “My audition for Mel for Blazing Saddles was . . . intense,” the actress later reflected. “I felt like I was at the Mayo Clinic. For a funny man, he’s very serious.”

  The hallowed name Randolph Scott was evoked in the script, and Brooks had a notion that another icon from the Golden Age, Dan Dailey, might play Black Bart’s white deputy, his friend and ally, the Waco Kid. Brooks tried hard to lure Dailey, better known for hoofing in musicals than for shoot-’em-ups, into the part, and until just before the March start date Variety still listed Dailey in the cast. However, Dailey had “an attack of qualms,” in Kenneth Tynan’s phrase, so Brooks showed the script to Johnny Carson, “and we had a couple of days of fantasizing about that before Johnny told Mel he really couldn’t do it,” Andrew Bergman recalled. Brooks finally glommed onto Gig Young—an actor better known for drama but capable of comedy and a recent Oscar winner for his role in a picture with hints of a Western in its title: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The Waco Kid in the story was an alcoholic, and Young knew that addiction personally.