It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (7 page)

What could he use to fill his time more effectively on stage? All day the teenager pondered and worried about his creative options. However, he refused to fall back on tried and true routines.

As the time drew near for Melvin to step out on stage to entertain the crowd, he still had not resolved his creative dilemma, and his fretting had turned to desperation. His dread of failing both the audience and himself had pushed him into an adrenalin overdrive that left him in a cold sweat. Suddenly, Kaminsky hit upon a linchpin for his opening gambit with the hotel guests. Earlier that day, a Butler’s Lodge chambermaid had, somehow, locked herself in a linen closet. Her repeated banging on the door failed to rouse anyone and the increasingly upset worker began screaming in Yiddish “Los mir aroys!” (“Let me out!”) Her desperate cries for help soon led to her liberation, and her rescue plea became an instant catchphrase at Butler’s.

So that night Kaminsky launched onto the stage with a mighty cry: “Los mir aroys!” The familiar phrase brought instant laughter and applause. Melvin was emboldened by his “success” and followed up with a series of ad-libbed, humorous observations on the latest goings-on at the resort establishment. The crowd gave the novice comic an enthusiastic send-off when he ended his stand-up act. Melvin was jubilant when he left the stage. This gig for a paying audience had given him far more of a rush than he had experienced when he did his chatter on a Brooklyn street corner for his peers.

Despite this well-received stage turn, Kaminsky vowed to himself that he would further hone his material on coming nights. (The house comic showed no signs of making a recovery anytime soon.) Much later, Melvin explained his instinctive compunction to improve the caliber of his act: “Look, I had to take chances or it wasn’t fun being funny. And you know, there was a lot of great material lying around in the Catskills, waiting to be noticed.”

In subsequent turns before the lodge’s guests, Kaminsky did not always enjoy the same beginner’s luck. Through trial and error he discovered that some of his latest wild, irreverent, and often desperate bits would never succeed with this tough crowd. It caused him to reach out in every direction to find something—anything!—that might appeal to the guests. Sometimes, drenched in sweat from fear of flopping, he’d grab at any straw to keep his act moving along. He might say, “And here’s my impression of Thomas Jefferson.” He’d then stand there in a stately pose, hoping it might catch the onlookers off guard and prompt a sympathetic chuckle. That would give him a moment’s reprieve to think of something new to do to amuse the clientele.

As Melvin gained more self-assurance in his stand-up comedy performances during the course of the summer, he grew more bold and inventive in his onstage gambits. One evening, Kaminsky organized a brief blackout skit, using a female staff member as his assistant. He called the spot “S. and M.” Melvin recounted, “The girl and I walked out from the wings and met in the center of the stage. I said, ‘I am a masochist.’ She said, ‘I am a sadist.’ I said, ‘Hit me,’ and she hit me, very hard right in the face. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold it. I think I’m a sadist.’ Blackout. That was the first sketch I ever wrote.”

Despite the frequent occasions when Kaminsky’s material failed to interest his audience, he never gave up the creative challenge of entertaining them, somehow. Occasionally, after the young man had completed his energetic gig and was walking among the guests, he might hear one of the little old women shout out, “Melb’n, we love you, but you stink!” (Another time, he allowed of his haphazard apprenticeship as a comedian, “But I wasn’t a big hit, not at first. The Jews in the rear [of the] room, the Jewish ladies with blue hair, would call me over and say, ‘Melvin, we enjoyed certain parts of your show, but a trade would be better for you. Anything with your hands would be good. Aviation mechanics are very well paid.”) Even such negative responses did not greatly discourage him. He smiled at the naysayers and determined to do better at the next performance.

Performing a two-hour show every night, week after week should have been exhausting, even to the overenergized Melvin. However, that was not the case. Years later, by which time he had gone on to international success, he described this grueling summer schedule: “We thought nothing of it. We thought that’s the way it is in show business. After that, the big time was a cream puff. One show a week on television, one picture a year in the movies. Are you kidding? I’ve spent the last 20 years catching up on my sleep.”

The summer over, Melvin returned to Brooklyn and to his family and friends and life at Eastern District High School. By now he’d stockpiled plenty of stories to tell his Brooklyn cronies about his Catskills adventures. As he reflected on his many successes (why think of the moments of misfire?), he told himself that he could never go back to “just” being a drummer. His heart and soul now belonged to the world of comedy, where his wit, personality, and physical being could all be a vital part of his self-created act.

6
Off to War

Even when I went into the Army I should have had a nervous breakdown, because you are not the baby of the family in the U.S. Army. When D-Day happened they just took us all out and sent us overseas. So now I was a combat engineer and I wasn’t trained for that kinda thing. It was very scary and there were mortar shells. It was a lotta noise, you know.

–Mel Brooks, 1977

Now in his mid-to-late teens, Kaminsky’s constant goal was to score with the girls. However, with his less-than-average height and his unconventional looks, “crazy” Melvin met with little success, despite being a quasi-experienced laughmaker in front of resort audiences.

By now, he had already adopted a more American-sounding name for professional purposes. He called himself Melvin Brooks. Variously, the future celebrity has said that he made the name change because he decided Melvin Kaminsky would not fit easily on a personalized set of drums or on a marquee. Another time he suggested that he altered his name so he would not be confused with the celebrated cornet player Max Kaminsky.

In actuality, Melvin was following the tradition of many entertainers who had abandoned their ethnic-sounding original names in favor of a moniker that sounded more American and less Jewish. Thus, he joined the ranks of Benjamin Kubelsky, Emanuel Goldenberg, Milton Berlinger, Joseph Abramowitz, and David Kaminski, who, respectively, transformed themselves into Jack Benny, Edward G. Robinson, Milton Berle, Joey Adams, and Danny Kaye. Melvin’s altered name came from his mother’s surname of Brookman, which he shortened/adapted into Brooks. (Later, Melvin would further simplify his moniker by shortening his first name to the less formal Mel.)

As Melvin grew comfortable with his show business alter ego, he wove his stage name into a rhyme that he used as a performance opener. He hoped the ditty would ingratiate him with audiences even before he launched into his comedy act, which now included his crooning songs (especially those of A1 Jolson and Eddie Cantor) that would be familiar to audiences in the Catskills. The verses began with:

Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks
I’ve come to stop the show.
Just a ham who’s minus looks
But in your heart I’ll grow.

The next refrain set forth what his audience could expect from his solo act:

I’ll tell you gags, I’ll sing you songs,
Just happy little snappy songs that roll along.
Out of my mind
Won’t you be kind?
And please love Melvin Brooks.

Typically, Melvin ended his beseeching introduction on one knee, sporting a big toothy smile, with his arms spread wide in the tradition of the great Jolson. Young and still naïve, Brooks was so enthralled with this “showstopping” routine that it did not dawn on him for a long time that this gambit was quite derivative and threadbare.

•     •     •

In the spring of 1944, 17-year-old Melvin Kaminsky graduated from Eastern District High School. In the class yearbook, Melvin’s school activities were listed beneath his photo: “Class Day Committee, Senior Council, Dean’s Assistant, Fencing Team.” A few of these extracurricular activities seemed unlikely for this particular student. However, Kaminsky’s stated ambition in life was more true to the actual Melvin: facetious, comical, but with an oversized belief in his potential for the future. He gave as his career goal: “To be President of the U.S.”

•     •     •

After graduating, he enlisted in the army (as part of the Army Reserve Specialized Training Program) and was dispatched to the Virginia Military Institute (founded in 1939) in Lexington, Virginia. He and other new recruits were put through basic training, which included such arcane activities as riding and learning to use a saber. “They had us ride horses and cut down flags on bamboo poles.… I was trained to become a Confederate officer.”

Being stationed in the South was an education in and of itself for Melvin. For the Brooklynite, living in this dissimilar world was “oh so different from living on the asphalt and cement all my life.”

One part of the army regimen that really appealed to Melvin were those occasional evenings when he and his fellow trainees were allowed to attend the cotillions at the nearby Washington and Lee School. At these dances, the unskilled Casanova experienced the best and worst of times: “I met the flowers of Virginia there. The most beautiful girls. Southern belles. It was one of the best times of my life, but I was just this Jew from New York and not so good-looking.” With further self-deprecation, he added, “I think it was right there and then that I decided I had to go into show business. That’s the only way I’d ever get these girls to notice me.”

While Melvin was going through military training in Virginia, the Allied armies had undertaken the D-Day offensive (June 6, 1944) in German-occupied France. This successful campaign against the Axis forces was an early sign that an Allied victory in Europe was both inevitable and not that far in the future. Meanwhile, Kaminsky was assigned to complete his basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. By the time he had finished this phase of his military preparation, the Allies had driven the Nazi regime from Paris. The final assault against the Third Reich on German turf was imminent.

During basic training, Kaminsky lost his remaining baby fat and shed any naivete he may have had about all Caucasian men being equal in the U.S. Army. (In this war, African Americans were largely segregated into their own units.) Melvin repeatedly encountered overt anti-Semitism. It made him furious and prompted some reckless reactions on his part. One day when yet another soldier slung anti-Jewish slurs in Kaminsky’s direction, he could take it no longer. He angrily marched over to the bigot, asked him to remove his helmet (after all, he didn’t want to destroy government-issue gear), and then used his mess kit to whack the offending G.I. over the head. Kaminsky felt he had made his point, and he shrugged off the punishment he received for his action.

•     •     •

In early 1945, Melvin and many others at Fort Sill were sent by troop train to the East Coast. There, they boarded a troop ship, which zigzagged its way across the Atlantic Ocean and docked in Le Havre, France. Next, the soldiers were loaded into trucks and dispatched to the front lines, passing through countless bombed-out French villages, the roadways lined with the corpses of recent victims. Melvin and his fellow troops headed into Belgium, where they encountered “little actual shooting,” but according to Melvin, “there was plenty of mortar and artillery fire, and it was very noisy, and I thought that I would not want to be in the war very long, because of the noise. The earth was very hard when I was there, and I could not dig a V-shaped foxhole, as I wanted to, and stay down at the bottom of the V for the rest of the war. All these hot fragments of shrapnel and stuff were flying around, and I did not want to die, so it was awful. I remember hiding under a desk in a kindergarten while there were air battles going on above us, and bombs rattling.”

At one point in the ongoing campaign, Melvin was assigned to be a forward observer/radio operator. “We’d figure out our position and tell the artillery, you know, to knock out a German post somewhere. And the minute we broadcast, we had to high-tail it out of there, because 10 seconds later, the road would be strafed with 88 shells. I mean, they would zero in, and they were amazingly accurate.” However, Kaminsky was soon transferred from this task because he “couldn’t learn the artillery argot. You’re supposed to give them map coordinates.… But I’d say, ‘No, no! You’re missing it! You’re going over, dummy! You’re not even near! Aim for the big tree by the church. Say, listen, did the chow come up yet?’ Very unmilitary. I didn’t last long as a forward observer.”

In actuality, Kaminsky had been trained to be a combat engineer as part of the 1104 Engineer Combat Battalion of the 78th Division. (Said Melvin, “I was a Combat Engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering. I was a little kid from Brooklyn, getting his hair combed every morning by my mother, and suddenly I am doing 40-mile hikes, and being expected to eat grass and trees.”)

On the battlefront his chief task was to help clear land mines so that advancing Allied troops and tanks could pass safely through the treacherous terrain. Melvin and his fellow soldiers were part of an Allied wave that pushed across the Rhine River at Remagen. Then they moved into Alsace-Lorraine on the German/French border. (Years later, Melvin made light of the dangerous situation by joking, “We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.”) En route to victory, Kaminsky and his fellow soldiers experienced several skirmishes with the Germans, who, by now, were largely in flight. “I mean, we were fired on by a lot of kids and old men who were left in the villages. They were called werewolves, snipers.”

Sooner or later—even in the midst of the chaos of war—it was inevitable that Melvin’s zany personality would erupt in full force. At one juncture, when he and the others were playing cat-and-mouse with the German forces, the Nazis began blasting propaganda messages over powerful bullhorns, exhorting the Allied soldiers to surrender because they could not possibly win the war. The impulsive Kaminsky decided such nonsense deserved an appropriate retort. He scurried around and located a bullhorn of his own to offer the enemy a rendition of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” in Al Jolson “Mammy” style. One can only imagine what the bewildered Germans thought of this foreign-language assault on their ears. This was not would-be crooner Kaminsky’s only musical outing during World War II. One time back at base when he was assigned to odious latrine duty, he used the occasion to create a “melodious” diversion. He took Cole Porter’s popular tune “Begin the Beguine” and converted it into the satirical number “When We Clean the Latrine.”