Directing his wife Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning in their ill-advised 1983 remake of the classic comedy “To Be or Not to Be,” Mel Brooks began “berating their performances,” angering Bancroft. The nominal director of the film was Alan Johnson, but Brooks was actually in charge. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Mel Brooks is telling Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning how to act?” She laughed and huffed off the set, leaving her tiny husband trailing after her, begging pardon.
Sweet, endearing, goofy Mel Brooks, a comedy hero across two generations for the transcendentally immature, gag-a-minute style of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” both released in 1974, didn’t want Patrick McGilligan’s exhaustive, 500-page Funny Man: Mel Brooks to get written. In a note, the veteran Hollywood biographer says, “I have never been faced with as many people who either did not reply to inquiries, expressly declined to cooperate with an interview, or spoke on the condition of anonymity. … People feared Brooks’s temper or litigiousness.”
Brooks’ desire for privacy is well justified. He treated his first wife, the dancer Florence Baum, abominably. He cheated on her tirelessly and sent alimony intermittently. Just as he knew he was about to strike it rich with “Blazing Saddles,” he moved to buy off all future claims from her with a single, lump-sum payment of $320,000. At the time of their divorce, however, Brooks promised her one-third of all his earnings above $44,000. If anyone should be as ashamed as Brooks about this episode, it’s Baum’s divorce lawyers.
“Nice Mel,” the face Brooks presents to the world, and the admitted basis of sweetly childish Leopold Bloom in “The Producers,” is less the authentic Brooks than “rude, crude Mel,” Bloom’s tyrannical boss Max Bialystock. Day to day, the Brooks of this book is a colossal jerk, an ego monster given to screaming at underlings, appropriating other comics’ jokes before their very eyes, and ordering up thunderbolt legal actions when disinclined to pay his bills.
McGilligan also suspects Brooks cheated on his second wife, Anne Bancroft, with whom he enjoyed, to all appearances, one of the most enduring Hollywood marriages, from 1964 until her death in 2005. He offers only rumor to substantiate this. McGilligan is not a sensationalist; his writing is so affectless that it isn’t apparent why he embarked on the project at all. But this is one of those warts-and-more-warts bios. Brooks should have talked to McGilligan if only to turn the focus back to comedy and away from lawsuits and tantrums.
Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky on a kitchen table in Williamsburg, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1926, and he was only two when he lost his father to tuberculosis. Being fatherless supplied his unquenchable drive, according to his friend Joseph Heller. Brooks enjoyed a rambunctious, free-range childhood, much of it at the movies where he gobbled up Westerns, “Frankenstein,” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Brooks had most of his comic inspiration banked by the end of his teens, having developed in the World War II Signal Corps an obsession with Adolf Hitler.
The “undisputed king of corner shtick” as a boy, Brooks became, as a teen, a tummler in the Catskills entertainment circuit, where he met the 17-year-old Sid Caesar. Brooks became puppyishly devoted to the strapping, charismatic actor, despite the fact Caesar once dangled little Brooks by his heels outside the window of a Chicago hotel, according to several sources. Writing for various comedy-variety shows in which Caesar starred in the 1950s, Brooks did shtick nonstop: “Like a boxer who can never stop sparring, even when he’s eating,” said one observer, “and was driven by a mania to succeed.”
“Next time it’s going to be my ashtray goddamn it,” Brooks said, out of the blue, while editing “The Producers,” his first film, for which he won a screenwriting Oscar. But it was the spell with Caesar that inspired the wonderful Brooks-produced 1982 comedy “My Favorite Year,” whose lead writer trepidatiously informed Brooks that the young scribe played by Mark Linn-Baker would not be modeled after him because he was “too abrasive.”
As for Brooks’ legacy, McGilligan leaves the question for the reader to ponder. “The Producers” was originally called “Springtime for Hitler,” until producer Joseph Levine, who raised a lot of money for Jewish charities, said he didn’t want the word “Hitler” appearing on his resume. The film was only a modest hit at the time but now looks like Brooks’ most enduring work. The flop that followed it, “The Twelve Chairs,” which was an adaptation of a Russian novel, convinced Brooks that his path to success lay with lowbrow movies. Still, he yearned “to grow up and be Sean O’Brooks” as he once put it. He failed with movies such as “Life Stinks,” an homage to Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels.”
The success on Broadway of “The Producers,” for which Brooks wisely retained all stage rights, provided a happy late-life smash in the years after his Hollywood career died with 1995’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” But it’s too bad Brooks never did pivot to writing movies as soulful as “My Favorite Year,” which he helped develop, but for which he did not receive a writing credit.
As it is, convincing your kids that Brooks was brilliant may be a hard sell. A lot of dads must be saying, “This was funny when I was 14, I promise!” We may have possibly overestimated the worth of all those Brooks gags. As the writer Mordecai Richler once put it, “All you need to know about Hollywood is that Mel Brooks is considered a genius.”
Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large.