Brooks’ lost loves
Mel Brooks has spent the pandemic missing his two greatest loves, said Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (U.K.). Fellow comedy legend Carl Reiner, his best friend for eight decades, died at age 98 in June 2020. The two New Yorkers, who met as writers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the early 1950s, formed a nightly tradition in old age of eating dinner together while watching Jeopardy! Brooks, 95, can’t bear to watch the show alone. “Ahh, I miss him so much,” he says. “He would call me in the evenings and say, ‘Come over! I got a big stuffed cabbage for us!’ Even at the end he was always Carl: funny, sweetnatured, warm.” The 2005 death of actress Anne Bancroft, his wife of 40 years, left the other big hole in Brooks’ life. “I could never bamboozle her. She always knew what was going on. Also, she was downright, flat-out beautiful!” Brooks, who hadn’t been able to afford to pay for Bancroft’s meals when they started dating, became a filmmaker at her urging. Does he ever watch her movies? “I don’t decide to, but if one is on when I turn on the TV, then I’m caught, and I’ll stay until the end and cry. I’ll see her energy, her joie de vivre. She was just amazing.”
The cop who silenced the Beatles
Ray Dagg pulled the plug on the Fab Four’s final gig, said Liam Kelly in The Times (U.K.). On Jan. 30, 1969, police in London’s West End were inundated with noise complaints, and Dagg, then a 19-year-old constable, was sent out to investigate. He discovered that the Beatles were performing on the rooftop of their Apple record label’s Savile Row headquarters—the band’s first public performance in three years. A film crew recorded Dagg as he asked Beatles road manager Mal Evans to stop the show, saying it was causing gridlock on the streets below. “It’s got to go down, otherwise there will be some arrests,” Dagg told Evans. “I’m not threatening you, I’m telling you what’s going to happen.” In truth, Dagg, 72, admits his threats to jail the world’s biggest band were empty. “The gamble was that they didn’t know that. I was so young and stupid I was running a bluff on it.” Paul McCartney grinned gleefully when he saw the constable, and eventually Evans unplugged George Harrison’s guitar amplifier during “Get Back.” The band, which broke up eight months later, never performed again. Dagg, who says he preferred Simon and Garfunkel to the Beatles, is happy to go down in history as the man who silenced the Beatles. “If that’s what people remember me for, that’s not bad. Millions of people don’t get remembered at all.”