It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (25 page)

Not that over the years the couple didn’t have their share of normal, everyday arguments. One time, Mel Brooks arrived for a dinner meeting of his beloved Gourmet Club. He was in a rage. When asked what the problem was, he explained that just before he was leaving for his repast with the boys, Anne had said, “Mel, when you die, where do you want me to put you?” He had retorted, “In the kitchen, under the table. And what makes you think I’m going to die before you?” Now he was stewing because he knew his wife had knowingly taunted him about his greatest fear in life—dying. On another occasion Bancroft and Brooks were in the midst of a flare-up that was quickly turning into a heated argument. Anne noticed that Mel was beginning to clench his hand into a fist. She shouted, “Don’t you dare touch me, my body is my instrument.” To which Mel replied, “Oh, yeah? Then play Melancholy Baby.”

To Bancroft’s way of thinking, such disputes were a normal part of any marriage. She reasoned, “Hostility is basic to both sexes. It’s part of the business of sex appeal.… We all have hostility in us. I think it’s dangerous to repress it. Gorillas never do.” Even with their recurrent differences of opinion, Mel knew for certain that “God was very good to me. God said, ‘Here, I’ll give you one present for your life. I’ll give you Anne Bancroft.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s enough. That’ll cover me,’ you know.”

•     •     •

After their marriage, Mel and Anne continued to live at her West 11th Street house. In the next two years she chose to work only infrequently. On film, she costarred in 1965’s
The Slender Thread
and replaced an ailing Patricia Neal in 1966’s
Seven Women.
On stage, she appeared in the 1965 Broadway drama
The Devil
, a short-running mishap in which she was miscast. Meanwhile, Brooks continued to make TV appearances as the 2000 Year Old Man, was a frequent comedic guest on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
, and turned up on such other small-screen fare as
Open End
, David Susskind’s syndicated discussion series.

Back in 1963, Mel had scripted a pilot for ABC-TV. It was titled
Inside Danny Baker.
Its rather thin premise focused on a precocious son of a dentist who hopes to earn funds to buy a fishing boat by turning his Ping-Pong table into a work of modern art. It featured actor Roger Mobley and New York Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford. The half-hour entry failed to inspire network interest, and the project was shelved.

Then, in 1964, Brooks was contacted by TV personality /producer David Susskind. He and his partner, Daniel Melnick, who owned Talent Associates, had had a brainstorm for a new television series. It would play off the then current James Bond craze that had begun with the success of 1962’s Dr.
No
and had built tremendously with its follow-up (
From Russia with Love
). Another Bond entry (
Goldfinger
) was due for late 1964 release. Meanwhile, several movie producers were already jumping on the superspy craze with their own film productions and TV series.

Susskind and Melnick thought the revitalized espionage genre was now ripe to be satirized on TV, where the spy series
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
was already a big hit. The producers also believed that in this era of President Lyndon Johnson and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, much of the American public was becoming fed up with the restrictive, often blundering U.S. government. This led the Talent Associates partners to conclude that a good number of home viewers would be amused to see a show that poked fun at the red tape of the American governmental bureaucratic structure.

Initially, Talent Associates contacted comedian Mike Nichols about this project because of his recognized flare for satire. They asked if he would write and direct the pilot. Negotiations got under way, but then Nichols became committed to several other ventures and had to drop out. Melnick and Susskind were anxious to get their idea into motion, as they feared that their spoof premise might occur to another TV producer or that the spy genre craze could become passe. The executives turned to Mel Brooks.

At this point in time, Brooks was having great difficulties getting his
Springtime for Hitler
to come together as a novel. Again, he badly needed to improve his cash flow situation, so he quickly accepted the offer from Talent Associates. Melnick, who had been a high-ranking executive at ABC, contacted that network and pitched them this idea of a Mel Brooks-created project. The network’s decision makers soon green-lighted the concept.

Despite all Mel’s show business experience to date, he remained a talking writer who was best at coming up with a volley of wild and sometimes viable ideas. He still lacked the requisite discipline and organizational ability to sit down and turn out a script on schedule. He also had deliberately not yet learned to type, reasoning from past experience on TV shows that on a comedy writing team that “the one who typed got tied down. I wanted to be the one who ran around and acted it out.” (Then too, Brooks was still determined, somehow, to finish his book, and that took up a good deal of his time.)

Talent Associates quickly realized they needed to provide Brooks with a collaborator
if
this venture was to materialize in the relatively near future. (Fortunately, Mel allowed himself to be persuaded of the wisdom of this practical decision.) The producers’ choice for Mel’s potential teammate was Buck Henry Zuckerman. He was a New Yorker and a Dartmouth graduate. As Buck Henry, the acerbic young man had made an impact on television by writing for (and sometimes acting in) such TV fare as
The Garry Moore Show
and
That Was the Week That Was.
Like Mel, Buck had already made a foray into films, having cowritten and played a role in the independent feature
The Troublemaker.

The producers arranged for Mel and Buck to meet at the production company’s midtown offices. Brooks detailed, “They had a pool table at Talent Associates, and he [Buck Henry] was a very good pool player. I grew up in a pool hall, so I said, ‘This is the guy.’ Anyway, Buck was immediately brilliant, smart, very sharp, satiric, you know, a truly witty mind.” The two men hit it off. Over the next four months, the duo played a good deal of pool and bounced ideas off each other.

From the start, the iconoclastic Brooks insisted that this show must not fall into the category of the then typical TV sitcom. He explained, “I was sick of looking at all those nice, sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel [the title character of the 1961–1965 series starring Shirley Booth as a busybody domestic], I’d set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal, comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.”

The wacky premise soon fell into place. The male lead would work for CONTROL, a U.S. intelligence agency based in Washington, D.C. The organization’s chief mandate was to outmaneuver KAOS, a global organization dedicated to dominating the world. The “hero” would be a bumbling do-gooder. He would repeatedly exasperate his boss (the Chief) and would often be prevented from screwing up a top secret mission by his levelheaded and beautiful female partner. Brooks came up with the name Maxwell Smart for the clumsy protagonist, who also went by his code name of Agent 86. (That particular number was suggested by Melnick, playing off the slang term “to eighty-six someone” because of drunken, obnoxious behavior.) It was Henry who decided that 86’s attractive partner would be known merely as “Agent 99.” The show was to be called
Get Smart
, a title selected because it had various meanings on different levels.

The writers came up with other inspired lunacy for the program. Maxwell’s trademark gadget would be a shoe phone. (Reputedly, this particular idea was based on the time that several phones were ringing all at once in Brooks’s office, and it prompted him in crazed reaction to take off his shoe and answer it.) Not to be outdone, the hard-working and inventive Henry suggested the Cone of Silence, a plastic dome that could be lowered from the ceiling at CONTROL headquarters so the Chief and Agent 86 could discuss vital matters in secret. (Naturally, the Cone never operated properly and the two men were always forced to shout at the top of their lungs, thus giving away the contents of their top secret discussions.)

With the pilot episode of the daffy situation comedy mapped out, the next chore was to cast the lead characters. At first, Orson Bean was considered to play Maxwell Smart. Mel suggested that he might be right to portray Agent 86, but that idea never triggered great momentum with Talent Associates. When the pilot script was presented to ABC, the network decided that Tom Poston, who had gained currency on
The Steve Allen Show
(especially with his role as the goofy “Man on the Street”) and on panel programs, was the right choice to be Maxwell Smart. While this notion was being bandied about, ABC executives voiced concerns about the overall tone of the pilot script. They claimed they did not realize it would be so antic ... so antiestablishment. Network management suggested that Agent 86 should have a mother (seen on the show) and Max should reveal his tender side by being the thoughtful owner of an appealing canine. Brooks and Henry rebelled at such conventional sentimental notions. In retaliation, they added a pooch for Maxwell, but called him Fang, and made him a rather disheveled dog. As to a mother for Smart, the writers said, “Absolutely not!”

Soon thereafter, a displeased ABC shelved
Get Smart
. Talent Associates wanted to shop the project elsewhere but had to return the $7,500 development money to the network. The duo scraped together the necessary sum, and
Get Smart
was again their property. Through Grant Tinker, an NBC executive on the West Coast, Talent Associates was able to convince that network to shoot a pilot. NBC “suggested” that the acerbic comedian Don Adams (whom they had under contract) be cast instead of Tom Poston in the pivotal role. (Brooks agreed to this decision because he thought he and Adams shared a physical resemblance—especially with their close-set eyes—and each had a biting sense of humor. It was Adams who contributed many of the personality traits and character business for the Maxwell Smart character, some based on past routines he had performed.) Rounding out the show’s lead players were Barbara Feldon as the sexy, intelligent Agent 99, and Edward Platt as the harassed Chief. The pilot was shot in black and white by Brooks’s onetime
Your Show of Shows
and
Caesar’s Hour
colleague Howard Morris.

Get Smart
debuted on NBC-TV on September 18, 1965, in the 7:30
P.M.
time slot. The show quickly gathered momentum with critics and the public alike.
Variety
reported, “It is broad and unadulterated hokum, usually played to the hilt.”
Time
magazine quipped of the new half-hour offering, “It dares to be healthily sick while the competition is sickeningly healthy.”
TV Guides
Cleveland Amory endorsed, “Credit the developers of
Get Smart
, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry with at least getting down to that serious business of being funny right from the start.” In contrast, Jack Gould of the
New York Times
was far less enthusiastic: “Having begun with a whale of a concept, the program promptly proceeded to lay on the slapstick much too heavily and, on the premiere at least, spoil just about everything.… The use of a dwarf in the part of ‘Mr. Big’ was indicative of an undercurrent of tastelessness. With a massive dose of restraint, however,
Get Smart
might still make it.”

The TV show gathered steam through the year and rode a rising crest of popularity. Many of the show’s catchphrases caught on with home viewers, and before long, such expressions as “Would you believe?” “Sorry about that, Chief,” “I asked you not to tell me that,” “Missed it by that much,” and “The old so-and-so trick” entered the lexicon.
Get Smart
ended the season as America’s 12th favorite TV series. Analyzing the program’s hearty endorsement from the public, Brooks sounded off with, “We’re doing a comic strip. Smart is a dedicated boob whose heart is in the right place, but whose brains are in his shoes. We don’t pretend that Smart himself or the situation he’s involved in is plausible. It’s the broadest kind of satire. It succeeds because it’s bright, witty, refreshing—and lucky enough to be on opposite low-rated shows.”

Mel grew expansive as he sounded off on the winning qualities of this highly commercial hit. “It’s a funny bird. It’s the Big City protest. It’s the only witty show on TV today.… I think
Get Smart
, incidentally, is a man’s show, the first one in a long time. All the TV shows today, y’know, are for women. Or for kids. Women and kids, they rule TV. It’s a matriarchal society. But
Get Smart
is for men.”

During the first season, Mel Brooks wrote three episodes (numbers 1, 8, and 16), for one of which he was Emmy nominated in the Comedy Writing category. But then, involved in many other potential projects, he grew tired of his
Get Smart
scripting chores, which demanded far more concentration, organization, and discipline than he cared to invest. (He reasoned, “It’s hard to capture one’s vision and dream in
iV/i
minutes.” Another time, he reasoned, “When you are doing a series, of course, it’s terribly hard to avoid repetition. If I tried to write
Get Smart
every week, I’d run dry very soon—I could put a couple of things together, but the juice, the chemistry wouldn’t be there.”) Thereafter, Brooks served largely as just a consultant to the ongoing program. (This less taxing job required him to commute to the West Coast at least once a month.) Naturally, as one of the show’s creators, he received royalties and other allied income.

Long before the end of the first season, Brooks and Buck Henry had a serious falling-out. It stemmed from the show’s credits crawl, which read “By Mel Brooks with Buck Henry.” Henry felt he deserved equal billing with Brooks, and it irked him greatly that Brooks was receiving the lion’s share of media attention. Mel insisted that the “misunderstanding” was a result of his agents pressuring him to take senior credit on the show because of his array of industry credentials, and that he deeply regretted the rift it had caused with Henry. Brooks also asserted that his representatives had originally wanted only Mel’s name listed as a creator of the series, and it was Brooks who fought to gain Henry his due. (A decade later, Brooks spoke sharply about the still frosty situation with Henry: “Buck envied me because of the hit I’d made with the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. I’d galloped like a greedy child, and got ahead and taken off. I had a reputation for being a crazy Jew animal, whereas Buck thought of himself as an intellectual. Well, I was an intellectual, too.… What Buck couldn’t bear was the idea of this wacko Jew being billed over him. The truth is that he read magazines but he’s not an intellectual, he’s a pedant.”)