At Tony time, however, Young Frankenstein garnered only three nominations, which was not many compared to the fifteen for The Producers. There was not one for Brooks personally, none won, and the audiences began to slack off. (The initial crowds had arrived “so keyed up to see their favorite bits—cheering the first glimpse of Frau Blücher, mouthing ‘What hump?’ with Igor,” as Jeremy McCarter wrote in New York, “that if you don’t share their ardor, you may feel you’ve wandered into a tribute act for the wrong band.”) In June, according to press items, the stars, some of them earning $10,000 or more weekly before bonuses, were forced to accept 50 percent salary slashes in order to help keep the musical afloat until January 2009. Brooks and Stroman, “said to earn nearly six figures a week,” reported the New York Post, took no such reductions.
By any measure, Young Frankenstein enjoyed a healthy run: one year of curtain calls, 485 performances. But the media sniping had left a familiar sour taste in Brooks’s mouth. “It still smarts,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. “I don’t feel welcome on Broadway.” By then he was said to be at work on a Blazing Saddles musical, but “I’m torn between taking a new show like that to Broadway and being slaughtered.”
Indefatigably, Brooks marched toward being a nonagenarian. The awards and recognitions continued to rain down upon the—operative phrase—“national treasure.”
Brooks joined jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, actor Robert De Niro, rock-and-roller Bruce Springsteen, and opera singer Grace Bumbry for ceremonies feting their lifetime achievements in the arts at the 32nd Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington, DC, in 2009. Carl Reiner introduced his 2000 Year Old friend, and Frank Langella opened a musical tribute with the Twelve Chairs’ theme song. Other performers included actor Jack Black in green legwear offering a snippet from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Harry Connick, Jr., crooning “High Anxiety,” and Matthew Broderick with a medley from The Producers.
The occasion was also celebratory when the American Film Institute conferred its 41st Life Achievement Award on the comedian in June 2013. Inaugurated by an award to John Ford in 1973, the AFI Life Achievement Award had been bestowed on a list of Hollywood paragons that included such Brooks heroes as Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, and Billy Wilder. The Life Achievement Award had eluded Woody Allen, among other notable omissions over the decades, because recipients had to agree to appear at the staged and televised ceremony, which was an annual income booster for the organization.
Characteristically, Brooks saw the Life Achievement Award as partial reparation for past motion picture industry oversights. “I was never recognized as a movie director,” the honoree told interviewers. “Never! They always talk about my being a great writer and comic and an important producer. But I’ve never been saluted as a filmmaker.”
Brooks often arrived at such events with prepared shenanigans, as was true when, in 2014, he was invited to add his handprints, footprints, and autograph to the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a tradition dating back to the 1920s. Norman Lear and Carl Reiner stood with him, waving to the crowd and photographers, as Brooks flourished a prosthetic digit and left the first six-fingered handprint in the cement.
The United States Marine Band saluted the comedian with “Springtime for Hitler” as US president Barack Obama conferred the National Medal of Arts & Humanities on a select group of artists and professionals including Brooks in the East Room of the White House in 2016. Among the “impressive crew,” in Obama’s words, were Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, National Public Radio host Terry Gross, nonfiction author Ron Chernow, novelist Sandra Cisneros, poet Louise Glück, and chef José Andrés. When his name was called, Brooks stepped up to the stage, and as Obama placed the heavy medal around his neck, his knees sagged under its weight, sending the president and audience into hysterics. Later, Obama told Brooks that he loved Blazing Saddles, which he’d sneaked into as a kid, and Brooks told the press he’d use the medal “as something to put a hot cup on, so it doesn’t burn the table.”
He embarked on a series of shows staged for cable television and extended interview programs that reunited him with Dick Cavett and the BBC documentarian Alan Yentob (the 2012 show, called Mel Brooks Strikes Back!, was nominated for an Emmy). He retold favorite anecdotes, sang songs from his films, and just kibitzed. The appearances were usually timed with the release of products such as box sets, and often his lines were written or ghostwritten by Club Brooks longtimers Rudy DeLuca and Steve Haberman.
Once Johnny Carson’s most frequent guest, Brooks found endless time for chitchat and reminiscences on 60 Minutes–type newsmagazine TV programs (Mike Wallace had been interviewing him intermittently for nearly half a century). These days he frequently showed up on late-night talk shows hosted by younger admirers. He logged time with Conan O’Brien, Tavis Smiley, Jimmy Kimmel, Queen Latifah, Bill Maher, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, and more. Brooks continued his prolificacy with interviews—on the web and in print—and his face decorated many magazine covers, probably even more now, in the twilight of his career, than in the 1970s.
Usually he joked in interviews, but on occasion he could be soul searching. “I had the three thirds that make one whole,” Brooks told the Jewish monthly The Forward. “One third is the neurotic need for attraction. That’s the first third. The second third is God-given talent, the ability to sing on key, to move your legs well and dance well, to machine gun a joke with the right rhythm. The third is unstoppable diligence and work.”
The same year as the AFI award, PBS’s ambitious and respected American Masters series devoted an installment to Brooks’s life and career. Rudy DeLuca and Steve Haberman built laughs into his staged entrance and exit. Beyond the timeworn anecdotes, however, Brooks was still reticent about discussing personal matters, and the interviews barely touched on Anne Bancroft. He’d wave away questions about the deceased actress, saying, “Too soon . . .” or “Pas un mot. That’s French for ‘not a word . . .’” while tearing up. He didn’t want to include the “Sweet Georgia Brown” clip from To Be or Not to Be in the Alan Yentob television special because it was too “painful” for him to watch, he said. The producers convinced Brooks that “there will be hundreds of thousands of young people who don’t know anything about our marriage, our relationship, they only know about the number, and they would appreciate it.”
Although he still regularly shuttled between coasts, in 2010 he sold the Water Mill oceanfront cottage that had been his and Anne Bancroft’s retreat in the Hamptons. The price was a reported $5.3 million. Hollywood was more home, and after living there for so long, he told interviewers, he knew more people in Los Angeles than in New York.
When home on the West Coast, he wore a groove between the offices he occupied in Culver City, his son Max’s place in Venice, where he stopped nightly to see his grandson, and his Santa Monica house. Max “seems to have made peace with his father’s career,” the Washington Post reported. Since Bancroft’s death, Brooks had “really made up for lost time” in fathering, Max told the Post, adding “in my Dad’s day, as long as you didn’t get drunk and smack the wife around—and brought home a check—you’re father of the year.”
Brooks himself reflected on past parental neglect. “It’s not easy being a father,” he told AARP The Magazine in 2015. “I wasn’t a bad one, but I wasn’t great either; I was too busy building my temple to me. Getting famous, writing and directing movies—they take up a lot of hours, and often I would come home late. I regret this very much.”
Most days now his breakfast was one squeezed orange from his backyard, bran flakes and fruit, coffee with 2 percent milk. He jogged a little daily until he turned ninety.
Nowadays he celebrated his favorite holiday, Passover, which in boyhood had been hosted at his grandfather’s house, at Ron Clark’s. Occasionally actor–folk singer Theodore Bikel led that Seder; more frequently it was West Los Angeles rabbi Jerome Cutler, a former Catskills and Atl
antic City comedian. On the second night of Passover, Brooks usually led a Club Caesar parade to the nursing home where Sid Caesar resided. “He can’t feed himself,” Brooks told The Forward, “and he goes from his bed to a wheelchair, but we try to have a Seder on the second night. He may not get it, but we try.”
Caesar made it to ninety-one, dying in 2014 and hailed in obituaries as one of the early geniuses of television comedy. Ronny Graham had passed away in 1999, Howard Morris died in 2005, Mel Tolkin in 2007, and Larry Gelbart in 2009. Gene Wilder’s death came in 2016, the year Brooks celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Jerry Lewis, whom Brooks had failed to satisfy as a collaborator, lived to ninety-one, dying in 2017. Brooks had idolized and arguably surpassed Lewis in his popularity and accomplishments.
Brooks reliably showed up at friends’ funerals and offered tributes for press obituaries. When Jewish Journal asked him what the hardest thing to accept about aging was, he replied, “It’s empty spaces. That used to be filled with the people you grew up with, the people you love, your family—they’re all gone. That’s the toughest.”
Two show business friends who seemed to last forever were Norman Lear and Carl Reiner, both four years older than Brooks. Both men, like Brooks, remained active. Lear led his People for the American Way organization, continued to produce television shows, and published his autobiography in 2015. Reiner acted occasionally for TV and movies, performed voice work, and wrote a never-ending series of memoirs and novels.
Reiner had lost his wife, Estelle, in 2008, and almost daily, when home on the West Coast, Brooks visited Reiner’s Beverly Hills house for dinner, where they were often joined by Lear. The conversation, always humorous, occasionally touched on mortality.
Alone together many nights, the 2000 Year Old cohorts ate from trays, bent to work on crossword puzzles, and watched TV shows on Reiner’s sixty-inch set. They favored musicals or Ritz Brothers comedies. Sometimes they’d strike it rich with a Sonja Henie musical with Harry Ritz as a tea leaf–reading gypsy. They’d fall to the floor laughing, slipping into remembered routines. Much later they’d debate who had fallen asleep first. Jerry Seinfeld visited the lifelong friends for an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Later, in 2017, Brooks also appeared in a documentary about long-lived artists and celebrities, hosted by Reiner, called If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast.
Brooks’s reactions to the younger comedians they saw nowadays on the tube could be oddly old-fashioned. “Mel sometimes doesn’t like dirty jokes on television,” Reiner explained to one interviewer. Once Brooks even took offense at a Saturday Night Live sketch that was heavy on fart jokes. Reiner admonished his friend. “I said, ‘Mel, you started it!’”
Home alone on other nights, Brooks compulsively watched videos and television—old black-and-white movies, PBS, sitcoms, really anything. When he cast David Hasselhoff as Roger De Bris for a road company of The Producers, he told Hasselhoff he had seen him in the Adam Sandler film Click and on America’s Got Talent, besides Knight Rider and Baywatch. He slipped in the occasional DVD of old Anne Bancroft movies, relishing her great performances in films he still loved to watch such as The Miracle Worker.
Like Reiner, Brooks still accepted small acting jobs, mostly voice work for TV series and family-friendly animated films. He involved himself in several books—a 2000 Year Old Man children’s book with Carl Reiner and a couple of coffee-table tomes telling the screen-to-stage sagas of The Producers and Young Frankenstein. But his publicized autobiography never eventuated; he was not the let-your-hair-down type. And besides, there wasn’t much money in books. His longtime literary agent, Ed Victor—who also represented Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide to huge success—was taken aback one day when Brooks screamed at him for delivering a modest contract offer.
Though it was unclear how much progress was made on the Blazing Saddles musical, Brooks did phone Nathan Lane one day to ask the Max Bialystock of The Producers if he would be open to playing Hedley Lamarr, the Harvey Korman role, in the stage version of Blazing Saddles. A Blazing Saddles musical was a big mountain to climb, however, and instead Brooks and Thomas Meehan fitfully worked on trims for the Young Frankenstein musical, which New York critics had excoriated as too long and dull. Finally there might be a London opening; the 2007 show had never crossed the Atlantic.
The film of The Producers musical became the last Brooksfilms production. Brooks insisted that the company was still active, though, and occasionally announced projects such as Pizzaman, a horror comedy by Rudy DeLuca and Steve Haberman that has not yet come to be.
One sign of the mellowed Brooks was his quiet involvement in the first independent film directed by Nicholas Brooks, his oldest son from his marriage to Florence Baum. Nicholas was almost sixty when he cowrote and directed Sam, starring Natalie Knepp and Sean Kleier with Stacy Keach and Morgan Fairchild in featured roles. The film was a comedy unlike any made by his father: a sweet, old-fashioned romance involving magical happenings and a gender switch. Produced on a shoestring, Sam did not compel the support of a major studio, however, and it became a DVD release in 2015. Though it was not an official Brooksfilms offering, Brooks was listed as executive producer.
Brooks owned stocks but not very many, the New York Times reported in 1997; the comedian preferred safe, tax-free California state bonds. Much of his savings, the Times said, was invested in his Manhattan apartment, his Fire Island residence, two Fisher Island, Florida, beachfront condominiums, Los Angeles and Malibu homes, and a Wilshire Boulevard office building. The real estate alone added up to “a market value of close to $20 million.” The Times estimated that his net profits since Blazing Saddles “probably came to $5 million for each film” (whether that was for Brooks comedies and Brooksfilms productions, too, the article did not say). The newspaper also said that Brooks had earned “12 or 15 percent of the net profits” of Blazing Saddles alone; that megahit—plus “all the foreign rights” for History of the World, Part I—had added considerably to his total worth.
The Times published its piece before his two Broadway musicals appeared. The Producers dramatically enhanced Brooks’s portfolio, while Young Frankenstein turned a profit both on Broadway and on the road. The Internet’s best estimate—from www.therichest.com—that Brooks was worth $85 million by the age of ninety is probably on the conservative side.
You might think the rich man would spend his days dandling his grandchildren on his knee or basking in the sun reading Russian novels. You would be wrong. He still had things to prove: that the “crickets” had been wrong about the Young Frankenstein musical, for example.
Soon after turning eighty-eight Thomas Meehan died, in August 2017. Before his death, however, Brooks’s meticulous cowriter had managed to revise the Young Frankenstein script for a London reboot. Brooks spent several weeks in Newcastle after Meehan’s death testing the show on British audiences. It amounted to “a leaner, meaner Young Frankenstein, if you will,” according to director Susan Stroman, who was back on board to steer the musical toward its West End premiere. The Broadway version had been “cumbersome,” Brooks admitted, so Meehan and Brooks had crafted “a whole new opening.” Brooks had added two new songs and changed some vernacular. (“I’ve kind of cockneyed it up a little bit.”) The show’s three-hour length on Broadway was reduced to two, and the elaborate New York staging was refreshed for the intimate Garrick Theatre in London. Stroman cast the British actor Hadley Fraser as Dr. Frankenstein (“Fronk-en-steen!”) with Broadway’s Shuler Hensley repeating his role of the Monster. As usual, Brooks sat in on all the rehearsals and gave notes. His outbursts of “You’re ruining the show!,” which in olden days might have rubbed people the wrong way, were now a regulated in-joke to alleviate rehearsal tensions.
The standing ovations for the leaner, meaner musical began in Newcastle. In London, Brooks moved into his favorite hotel away from home, the five-star Savoy, which by now was accustomed to highlighting his name in its advertising. He made the rounds of London t
alk shows, looking and sounding like a contented man ten years younger. He appeared on The One Show, seated next to the beaming movie star Russell Crowe, who boasted of seeing Blazing Saddles seven times while growing up in Sydney, Australia; Crowe endearingly segued into a hilarious imitation of Brooks with Jewish inflections, imitating the comedian extemporizing as he watches a rerun of Gladiator.
The October opening supplied a happy ending to the Young Frankenstein saga that had begun in 1974 with Gene Wilder’s original idea for the spoof and a popularity that had made it one of Brooks’s most enduring films. The comedian was the darling of the London paparazzi, which swooned over his stunning “date,” nineteen-year-old Samantha “Sam” Brooks, the daughter of Eddie Brooks, who wore a gold choker above a strapless burgundy velvet gown with a thigh-high split and metallic heels. After the critics rapturously embraced the leaner, meaner show, the Brooklyn-born boy who used to scrounge pennies for egg creams took his granddaughter on a Prada shopping spree.
Though not unanimous (Time Out found the whole schmear “desperately old-fashioned”), four-star reviews emanated from The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Times, The Independent, and more. “An evening of gloriously impure fun,” wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian. “It’s every bit as good as, if not better than, its predecessor in that it piles on the gags even more relentlessly and wittily parodies musicals past and present.”
One last time Brooks had prevailed. The interviews and reviews had the feeling of a valedictory, and the ninety-one-year-old certainly had little left to prove. But while you’re in London, Graham Norton asked Brooks, are you also working on the next thing?
“Her name is Sheila, she’s from Cincinnati, what a knockout,” the American national treasure replied before teasing out an oft-mentioned possibility. “What am I really working on? I’m thinking, actually, there could be a musical in Blazing Saddles. There are so many songs in it . . . . I would just have to add another tune or two. I’m at the very early stages of pencil sketching some ideas and writing some tunes that might work.”
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