Maverick Mel, by his biggest fan – HIMSELF!
He saw a shrink because he was scared of not being funny... but that didn’t stop Mel Brooks writing a memoir laden with self-adulation
All About Me! My Remarkable Life In Show Business Mel Brooks
Century £16.99
Mel Brooks is not what you’d call a humble guy. For decades, rumours have circulated in showbusiness that his ego is in inverse proportion to his size, which is small (5ft 4in, to be precise).
So deciding to call his autobiography All About Me! sounds like a pre-emptive strike on the part of the 95-year-old Jewish comedian and film-maker, the mastermind behind such much-loved classics as The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Basically, he’s going to label himself a total egomaniac (to put it mildly) before we tumble to the same conclusion.
At least, though, we know that this isn’t a ghosted memoir. Every sentence comes laden with compliments paid to him by the world at large: ‘They loved it!’ is a phrase that recurs again and again.
The adulation seems to have started early. The youngest of four brothers from Brooklyn, Brooks was an adored child, especially after his father died tragically early from TB. ‘I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again,’ he writes. ‘Until I was five, I don’t remember my feet touching the ground.’
Armed with such extraordinary self-belief, it wasn’t long before Melvin Kaminsky was employed as a ‘tummler’ (Yiddish for entertainer) in the Borscht Belt, where his job was to keep the summer visitors awake and amused.
His best gag was to dress like a suicidal businessman in an alpaca coat and, weighed down with suitcases full of rocks, plunge into the pool in the hope that the lifeguard would fish him out in time. You probably had to be there.
Indeed, much of Brooks’s comedy seems to arise from a world view tinged with cruelty.
He retells the story of how Sid Caesar, the troubled comic for whom he worked as a gag writer in the golden age of 1950s television, once dangled him out of a high-rise Chicago hotel by his belt in an attempt to stop him complaining about the smoky atmosphere.
And then there are the two occasions that Brooks himself menaced a fellow scriptwriter called Howie Morris into handing over everything in his pockets, including his wedding ring. The second time, he made Morris wade waist-deep in Central Park Lake before eventually revealing that it is all a ‘joke’. Again, you probably had to be there. Brooks, you see, doesn’t really do introspection, despite telling us that he spent some time in psychoanalysis to deal with his anxiety attacks, which made him vomit in the street because he was so frightened of not being funny enough. He never mentions his first wife by name and barely refers to the three children from that marriage. With his second wife, the brilliant actress Anne Bancroft (Mrs Robinson in The Graduate), it is another matter entirely.
We hear not simply about her beauty and talent but the fact that ‘boy, could she make spaghetti’ (she had been born Anna Maria Italiano). All the same, when she dies in 2005 from cancer, he barely misses a beat, recalling how colleagues ‘pulled me out of my abyss of despair and we went to work on our next musical together’. The show must go on.
And perhaps it is good that it does. Brooks has some great stories to tell about the Hollywood legends he has met and outlived. Cary Grant was nice but dull, and John Wayne loved the script of Blazing Saddles but knew that it would damage his public image if he appeared in a film in which there was a scene given over to cowboy flatulence.
Alfred Hitchcock, meanwhile, lived up to his reputation as the Master of Suspense by keeping Brooks guessing as to whether he approved or was furious about High Anxiety, the 1977 film in which Brooks mercilessly parodied Psycho and The Birds. (Of course, Hitchcock loved it, and sent a crate of fine wine to prove it.)
If you are a long-time Mel Brooks fan, then the chances are you will
have heard many of these stories before, since Brooks is a veteran of the chat-show circuit. But for those of us who have never been sure what all the fuss was about, this does fill in some important gaps.
It is too easy to forget just how radical and risky his
humour was in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Numbers such as Springtime For Hitler from his hit comedy musical The Producers, in which storm troopers dance like a chorus line from a Busby Berkeley musical, posed challenging questions to a post-war audience
about political memory and moral responsibility (Brooks had himself served in Europe during the latter part of the Second World War).
You could even argue that the famous farting cowboy scene in Blazing Saddles is a sly deconstruction of toxic
masculinity several decades before anyone else thought about these things.
Or you could, as Mel Brooks does himself in this entertaining, if self-congratulatory, memoir, simply wonder at one man’s ability to keep on being funny for nearly a century.