Funny Man Read online

  Dedication

  FOR CLANCY, BOWIE, AND SKY

  Epigraph

  My mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

  —HEDLEY LAMARR, Blazing Saddles

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: 1926: Little World

  Chapter 2: 1944: Big World

  Chapter 3: 1949: Funny Is Money

  Chapter 4: 1952: Dreams and Nightmares

  Chapter 5: 1955: Club Caesar

  Chapter 6: 1957: The Genius Awakes

  Chapter 7: 1962: The Warm and Fuzzy Mel

  Chapter 8: 1965: Springtime for Mel

  Chapter 9: 1967: Auteur, Auteur!

  Chapter 10: 1971: Blazing Mel

  Chapter 11: 1974: Tops in Taps

  Chapter 12: 1975: Club Brooks

  Chapter 13: 1980: Uneasy Lies the Head

  Chapter 14: 1983: Why So Angry?

  Chapter 15: 1986: Frolics and Detours

  Chapter 16: 1995: He Who Laughs Last

  Chapter 17: 2001: Unstoppable

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Chapter Notes

  Filmography

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick McGilligan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  1926

  Little World

  What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny? Later people said—he himself said—it was Brooklyn, the Depression, being Jewish and growing up in the shadow of Hitler. But there was also something about birth order and the family genes that contributed to “the strange amalgam, the marvelous pastiche that is me.”

  Before there was Mel Brooks there were the Kaminskys. The Kaminsky family formed their own little world in Brooklyn, the mother and four brothers living in humble circumstances, the brothers sharing the same bed and crawling over one another like a litter of adorable puppies in a cardboard box, as Brooks often said in interviews.

  The oldest, Irving, was almost ten when his youngest brother was born. Intelligent and wholesome, Irving acted more like a father than an older brother when Melvin was growing up. He was the only Kaminsky brother to get his college diploma.

  Leonard was older than baby Melvin by seven years. Unassuming Lenny was interested in machines and science. As time would tell, he had the stuff of a war hero.

  Bernard, only four years older, was closest in age and perhaps also in jaunty-jolly spirit. He was also the best athlete among the brothers. In his youth Bernard was “a great softball pitcher” (in Brooks’s words) and a star of Brooklyn bowling leagues.

  His older brothers held regular jobs and helped out with household expenses long before Melvin finished high school. Each played a different role inside the family and in life, but birth order—being the youngest—benefited Melvin, just as the B for Brooks alphabetically advantaged the sequence of his later writing credits. Melvin was still in diapers when his father passed away; his older brothers mentored and shielded him.

  Being the youngest, most pampered brother with the least responsibility in the family, Melvin found that his role from infancy was to make people laugh. His family tossed baby “Melb’n” (as his mother called him in her fractured English) into the air, he made funny sounds, and they all cracked up. Everyone indulged the last born, Brooks recalled in many interviews, so much so “my feet never touched the floor until I was two.”

  Making people laugh—forging a career out of laughter—became his lifelong quest. In time millions of people would find the youngest Kaminsky hilarious, whether they experienced his comedy on television or in stage plays, recordings, advertisements, or motion pictures. Eventually he’d make several hundred times as much money from his comedy as all his brothers combined—or, for that matter, most of his famous show business friends.

  The mother of the four boys had to be a miracle woman, and Kitty Kaminsky was: “a little Jewish rhino,” in Brooks’s words, and as good-humored as she was hard-charging. Shorter than her boys, which was really short—“so short she could walk under a coffee table with a high hat on,” Brooks liked to say—Kitty worked like a slave day and night, stretching the dollars and pushing her boys through school, dividing the love and matzah ball soup equally. She was the heart and soul of the family and the supreme boss.

  As a boy Irwin Alan Kniberg, who later changed his name to Alan King when he, too, grew up to become a comedian, lived in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood, at the same time as the Kaminskys. He remembered the formidable sight of the family as they arrived as one to pick up the youngest of the bunch after the school bell, the three older boys surrounding Kitty in a phalanx as the Kaminskys swept across the playground and swooped down on little Melvin. They were a tight-knit, fierce, single-minded unit.

  Before Brooklyn there was Manhattan, where the Kaminsky clan, the paternal side of the family, turned up on Henry Street in the 1900 census amid the tidal wave of European and Russian Jews flooding into the Lower East Side of New York City. Many immigrant Jews came to the United States to escape religious pogroms in their native lands, while others were seeking economic opportunity. Persecution and opportunity were the yin and yang of Jewish identity, and they were fused in the bloodline of the Kaminskys.

  Most Henry Street denizens were Russian Jews. Their number included thirty-two-year-old Abraham Kaminsky and his wife, Bertha, who arrived in America in about 1896, with their eldest child, Martha, and her brother Maximilian James, called Max. Max was born on January 8, 1893; some records say in Grodno, an ancient city near the onetime western border of Poland and Lithuania; others say in Danzig, then a region encompassing the city now known as Gdansk. Grodno was part of the Russian Empire before remapping, and Gdansk was a Baltic Sea industrial port within imperial Germany.

  In Russia, Abraham Kaminsky had been a traveling merchant who specialized in sewing and knitting supplies. He had learned to read and write in English by the time of the 1900 census, although his wife relied upon Yiddish for most of her long life. Kaminsky also knew enough Norwegian to strike deals with the Norse captains who arrived in New York with their ship holds filled with herring—the coveted silver of the sea. Selling herring to Eastern European Jews on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century was akin to selling white rice to Chinese. The Kaminsky herring business boomed with, at its height, a storefront on Henry Street, a warehouse close by on Essex, and reportedly a hundred neighborhood pushcarts. Eight Kaminsky children were born in New York following Martha and Max: ten siblings in all.

  The Kaminskys were as good-hearted as they were prosperous. Even with twelve members in his own household, Abraham, whom everyone called “Shloimy,” made room for relatives arriving from Russia. He donated generously to Jewish charities. Perhaps that was how the Kaminskys became acquainted with the Brookmans, who came to the United States in about 1899, initially living on Norfolk Street, a few blocks north of the herring dealer.

  Their surname, first reported as “Brockman” in the 1905 New York census, became “Bruckman” a few years later. The spelling changes might be ascribed to the family’s imperfect English, or perhaps, later, a desire to shed the name of the patriarch, Isaac Bruckman, a tailor from Kiev who arrived in 1899 with his wife, Minnie, and three children, including the last to be born in Kiev, two-year-old Kate or Katie, called “Kitty.” Three more Brookman children followed. But the Brookman side of the family—the “Brooks” in Mel Brooks—experienced setbacks and did not flourish like the Kaminskys.

  Isaac “absconded” from his wife and six children in early 1906,
according to documents, and was never seen nor heard from again. Minnie did not matriculate beyond primary school and only ever spoke Yiddish; she did not boast a profession. Throughout the ordeal of her abandonment the mother of six kept her two youngest children, four-year-old Dora and one-year-old Sadie, at home. Kitty and one or more of her siblings were sent uptown to the main building of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York on Amsterdam Avenue between 136th and 138th Streets. The Hebrew Benevolent Society paid Minnie’s rent starting in 1906, and immigrant neighbors pitched in to help out the family.

  The original surname disappeared from records for five or ten years, reemerging as “Brookman” by World War I. The five Brookman sisters and their brother were devoted to one another as a result of this early family rupture—especially the sisters, who were close to their mother and keenly felt Minnie’s hardships and humiliation. The weeks if not months that Kitty spent as a young girl in Jewish charity homes fortified her survival skills in preparation for life’s later tribulations and made her a tenacious mother.

  The Kaminskys were not dependent on the garment industry, which employed thousands of immigrant Jews in New York City, but the Brookmans may have had a familial foothold in women’s wear. The sisters took their first jobs as floor girls and milliners, while Joseph, the only boy and oldest sibling, started as a capmaker. One way or another, nineteen-year-old Kitty Brookman met and fell in love with twenty-two-year-old Max Kaminsky by late 1915. Both already had passed the US citizenship test and been naturalized. Their marriage took place on January 31, 1916, after which Mrs. Max Kaminsky briefly moved in with her husband at the family’s crowded 200 Henry Street address.

  Within the year, however, the newlyweds joined the swelling exodus of Jews from the Lower East Side that moved to Brooklyn, one of the five New York City boroughs, across the nearby Williamsburg Bridge; they initially took up residence on Stone Avenue in Brownsville. Brooklyn was an enclave separate from Manhattan, with its own unique character, then as now comprising distinct neighborhoods, thickly populated by people with a common ethnicity, religion, national origin, or income level. Brownsville was an eastern district packed with poor Eastern European Jews, tenements, and synagogues.

  Max Kaminsky, who bore the high expectations for the oldest Kaminsky son, was a catch: short and wiry, with brown eyes and a full head of black hair. He could read and write English, and he had bookkeeping skills. He had an auspicious job as a general factotum for an attorney, Jacob W. Hartman, whose offices were situated on Broadway in lower Manhattan; his varied duties included serving as an investigator for insurance cases, knocking on doors as a process server, and acting as a public notary.

  As for Kitty, a striking redhead with pop eyes, she had a commanding personality from girlhood. Soon after marriage she devoted herself to motherhood, giving birth to her first son, Irving, in late 1916, then to Leonard in 1919 and Bernard in 1922. By the time her fourth baby came along on a muggy summer day, June 28, 1926, the Kaminskys were ensconced in 515 Powell Street, still in Brownsville, sharing a building with a hundred other people, the vast majority Jewish, listing Russia or Poland as birthplaces. A great number of the occupants were unable to read or write English; Yiddish was their language.

  The Kaminsky family was so poor, Mel Brooks liked to say, that his mother couldn’t afford the medical expenses—so “the lady next door gave birth to me.” Actually, Kitty gave birth while lying on the kitchen table, which was standard in that era, especially among the lower classes. The couple named the newborn Melvin with no middle name.

  By now Max, the father of four sons, was toiling round the clock for Joseph J. Jacobs, the law partner of Jacob Hartman, who had died in the postwar flu epidemic. Mel Brooks said in later interviews his father had sometimes delivered writs and summonses to celebrities such as the Broadway musical headliner Marilyn Miller, “and he’d often get into the picture with them. He was known at the courthouse as ‘Process Server to the Stars.’” But this is hand-me-down family lore, and little evidence of Max’s brushes with celebrities can be found. Much of Max’s work was as a paralegal for court filings.

  Over the next three years the Kaminsky family moved several times, first to an apartment on South 4th Street in Williamsburg, which lay northeast of Brownsville, adjoining the East River where the Williamsburg Bridge penetrated Brooklyn; then to another multifamily dwelling at nearby 145 South 3rd. The Brookman sisters, who helped Kitty out, lived in the same Williamsburg neighborhood, as did Grandma Minnie.

  3rd Street was the family’s address when Max Kaminsky was admitted to Kings County Hospital two days before Christmas 1928, suffering from chronic pulmonary tuberculosis, which was a pandemic ailment among immigrants living in unhealthy crowded conditions. Max died on January 14, 1929, having marked his thirty-sixth birthday as he lay dying in hospital. Curiously, his death certificate lists as his address 16th Avenue in New Utrecht, a distant Brooklyn neighborhood within Bensonhurst, probably because that was where his parents now lived and Abraham Kaminsky had footed the hospital bills.

  A temporary estrangement between Max and Kitty cannot be ruled out, however. One relative interviewed for this book depicted Max Kaminsky as a secretive, brooding, hard-wired personality. Max spent most of his time busy at work and at home was often tense and moody. He left the parenting to Kitty, that relative said.

  The family lived frugally. Radio ownership was considered one measure of affluence, and the Kaminskys did not own a radio set, according to the 1930 census. But another curious detail surrounding his death suggests that Max possessed hidden resources.

  From 1917, New York State corporation records list Max Kaminsky as a founding shareholder in a surprising number of business enterprises, including the D. Wald Mfg. Co., which marketed food products and glassware; the K. & C. Dress Company, Inc., which manufactured and sold dress apparel; the Abraham Pomerantz Company, Inc., which collected and traded woolen rags and remnants; and Hygienic Hot Salt Water Baths, Inc., which specialized in hot-water baths.

  Mel Brooks’s father may have been a nominal signatory fronting for lawyers, but his business shares were sometimes valued as high as $100 each and in number might run to ten. The various entities were launched, in certain instances, with as much capital as $10,000; some appear to have been going concerns at the time of Max’s death.

  Devastated by the loss of their golden child, Abraham and Bertha Kaminsky unstintingly assisted Kitty and her four boys in the years ahead. “He gave us money sometimes or gobs of herring,” Brooks recalled. “Lenny used to collect the herring.” (His beloved firstborn son was the only member of his immediate family to have predeceased Abraham when the Kaminsky patriarch passed away in 1948; his wife, Bertha, survived Abraham, as did their nine other offspring—then still alive and well.)

  The Brookmans were just as profoundly committed to helping the bereaved mother raise four sons on her own. Grandma Minnie helped out with babysitting and cooking. Aunt Sadie always lived close by Kitty (sometimes in the same building) and tithed out of her garment industry paycheck to her sister’s family. Sadie also arranged piecework for Kitty when the children were asleep, at relatives’, or in school. She remained a spinster and after retirement shared a condo with Kitty in Florida.

  Mel Brooks was two and a half years old when his father passed away; all he would ever know about Max Kaminsky was what family members told him; that included the faint notion his father was “lively, peppy, sang well.” Melvin shrugged off that heartache as a boy, saying he never even thought about not having a father until later in time. But subconsciously it must have influenced him, he subsequently realized; for one thing, it affected how he dealt with his own family responsibilities as an adult and father. “There’s a side of Mel that will never be fulfilled, no matter how hard he drives himself,” his friend novelist Joseph Heller once said, “and it all goes back to his father’s death.”

  Brownsville, where Max and Kitty Kaminsky started out after their marriage, was probably the mos
t densely populated, most Jewish section of Brooklyn in the early 1920s—the most religious, Orthodox, Old World neighborhood. Gentiles were neither common in nor alien to Williamsburg, which was more polyglot and fluid than Brownsville, its jammed, low-rent housing and slum dwellings broken up by occasional fields and parks.

  Not long after Max’s death, Kitty moved the family one more time, just a couple of blocks north, to the home of first memories for Melvin, now a toddler. This cheaper apartment house stood at 365 South 3rd, “close to the corner of Hooper and Keith,” in Mel Brooks’s words, and the Kaminskys lived on “the top floor of a five-story building.”

  South 3rd in Williamsburg became the first crucible of his humor. The neighborhood was tough and impoverished, in ways both good and bad, and Brooks could recall boyhood memories of a suicide victim, for example, a despondent building jumper, whose broken body lay on the sidewalk amid the police and ambulances. Little Melvin suffered a fright, noticing that the dead woman wore the same brand of shoes as his mother.

  Almost from the cradle, it seemed, Melvin could make jokes out of his terrors and pitfalls. Kitty Kaminsky, rarely interviewed, said once that her youngest son’s special knack for drawing laughter had first become obvious to her when Melvin was about five years old—around the time the family settled on South 3rd Street. “He was very talented,” she said. “He showed signs of it. He was a lively boy. He was never a quiet boy.”

  The first targets of his comedy were undoubtedly his Jewish neighbors in the crowded 3rd Street tenements, “a hotbed of artistic intellectuality,” in his words. They “filled their daily lives with assorted expressions of art, particularly with theater, music and dance. Above all they loved theater. And these tenement Jews loved books and serious plays—Boris Thomashefsky–type plays.* They loved information so much they could read a dental manual with fierce appreciation, as if it was a comic book.”

  Kitty’s lively boy drew from his observations of the other inhabitants of his building. “My very first impressions were of Mrs. Bloom and Mrs. Rosenthal,” Brooks remembered. “We had Mr. Katz on the third floor. He had a fierce stutter. For me, he was like an ace in the hole. And the guy who lived in apartment 9B had this crazy walk.”