On June 28, he will be 97 years old and, despite his advanced age, the legendary Mel Brooks is still just as fireproof. So much so that he wanted to share with the public the numerous and amusing adventures that have marked his personal and professional life with a book of memoirs, ¡Todo sobre mÃ!, which has just been published in Spanish by the publishing house Libros del Kultrum. In English they went on sale in November 2021, when the author was 95 years old.
It was during the pandemic, stuck at home, that he began to write this juicy inventory animated by his son Max. Through nearly 500 pages, Brooks shares “all my secrets” with readers, who he encourages to spread every tip to the rooftops. It is his way of understanding and living a famous life in experiences and anecdotes that have made him the undisputed king of comedy as a creator of unforgettable and crazy films, including Super Agent 86, The Producers, The Crazy History of the World or The Young Man. Frankenstein.
The director, producer, screenwriter and actor, one of the few who can boast of having the four most important awards in show business: Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony, starts his memories at the tender age of 5 years. He had just gone to see Frankenstein with his brother and was afraid that the monster would climb through the window of his house in Brooklyn and grab him by the neck. Melvin was the fourth child of Max and Kate Kaminsky, from families of European immigrants (Polish-German and Ukrainian) who survived rejection and misery. His mother, Kate, was a seamstress and “very short.” She “loved her very much. She was especially sweet and loving to me.”
The father, a dock operator, died of tuberculosis when little Mel was only two years old. In Williamsburg, at the time of the Great Depression, he discovered the magic of movies very early: “You would leave the real world (which had terrible things, like homework) and enter a dimension with happy endings where dreams come true.” Your favorites of him? Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, as well as films by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
He was devoted to the music and lyrics of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. He thought being a songwriter would be more rewarding than playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the wildest of his dreams up until then. His uncle Joe told him the true secret of comedy while he was taking him to see Broadway plays. A love, for comedy, that he developed on the corners of the neighborhood. “Comedy gave me friends, great friends who protected me from bullies (…) We laughed a lot with the chronicles of everyday tragedies. They had to be real and funny,” he says.
And he says that his humor is more New York than Jewish: “In my case, doing comedy extended the joy of a happy childhood” surrounded by the affection of his mother, his brothers and his uncles. At 17, in 1944, he couldn’t escape the call of the Army in the midst of World War II, and served in the artillery in Oklahoma and trained in Normandy. When the war ended, he did not immediately return to the United States because he was part of the Occupation Army. One evening he saw a Bob Hope show in Germany: “I have never laughed so much in my life.” Back in his country, he did some performances and wrote parodies. From his passage through that military stage, he remembers that he learned to fend for himself and that he gave him “an education.”
Brooks recalls his beginnings in television with Sid Caesar, “a genuinely nutty comedian” for whom he wrote his monologues for Your show of shows. His brilliant career took off there, alongside other screenwriters such as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. But Caesar’s decline, coupled with exhaustion from the television job, took its toll on Brooks and the crew. “He was always in a bad mood. It must have been hell living with me, that’s probably what led to the end of my first marriage. It was one of the worst periods of my life.” He is referring to his union with Florence Baum. But he names with unconditional love the three children he had with her: Stefanie, Nicholas and Edward, “a real blessing.”
His friend Carl Reiner saved him from falling into the well and together they devised the hit albums for The 2000 year old man, for which they won the Grammy. Later, Johnny Carson helped him on his show to “become a famous name in the world of comedy”.
His heart pounded again when he met the great love of his life, Anne Bancroft, who was singing as a guest star in a show at the Ziegfield Theatre. “When the song was over, I jumped to my feet, clapped my hands like mad, and yelled, ‘Anne Bancroft! I love you!’ She laughed and yelled, ‘Who the hell are you?’ “I’m Mel Brooks! No one you’ve ever heard of.’ She said: ‘You’re wrong. I have your record The 2000 year old man with Carl Reiner. It’s great.’ That was the beginning of a long love story between the comedian and the future Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate.
He came back as co-creator with Buck Henry of the hit series Agent 86 about a bungling secret agent inspired by Jamnes Bond. He no longer had to worry about money. He made his big-screen leap with The Producers, a comedy about a con-artist musical producer and a shy, nervous accountant who find the biggest con ever created. The film, starring Gene Wilder, would earn him a golden statuette for best original screenplay. In Spain it was banned for politically incorrect and offensive content.
With Wilder, an actor who could “be sad and funny almost at the same time” would return to work in the satire Hot Saddles. During a break in the film’s shooting, he saw Gene scribbling down ideas for a movie called Young Frankenstein. “My dream would be for you to write it with me and direct it,” he told her, to which Brooks responded by asking how much money he had on him. When Wilder replied that he had fifty-seven dollars, Brooks asked him for that money as a down payment.
The black-and-white comedy horror parody of the Mary Shelley classic reunited Wilder with Marty Feldman and Teri Garr in a zany gag-filled story that was the third-highest-grossing movie in America in 1974. “I was very lucky Before Feldman, who has doe eyes, agreed to play the part of Igor. He came up with the funniest retort in the movie. When Gene tells him: ‘I don’t want to go where I’m not supposed to, but I’m a surgeon pretty brilliant. Maybe I can help you with that hump.’ To which Marty responded with: ‘what hump?’ It was pure dynamite,” he says of a tape that also had unanimous applause from critics. Feldman later accompanied him in La última locura, a satirical homage to North American silent cinema.
He received wise advice from his admired Alfred Hitchcock and invited him several times to eat. “I think he was amused by my crude Brooklyn humor,” observes the genius of suspense, to whom he paid tribute in Maximum Anxiety, with Brooks in front of and behind the camera displaying his infinite humor parodying mythical scenes from films by the great Hitch. With his Brooksfilms company, he produced critically acclaimed films such as The Elephant Man, Frances, The Fly, 84 Charing Cross Road and the comedy My Favorite Year, with Peter O’Toole nominated for an Oscar.
Brooks continued to take the director’s chair and lead the cast in The Crazy World Story, an irreverent look at the evolution of history; The crazy history of the galaxies, absurd humor to laugh at the Star Wars saga with Brooks in the skin of Yogurt, an irreverent version of Master Yoda; What a disgusting life!, playing a billionaire who bets with a partner to survive without money for 30 days in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and the mediocre Dracula, a very content and happy dead man, with Leslie Nielsen in the costume of the sinister count.
And from Hollywood to the musical adaptation of his film The Producers to the Broadway stage in 2001, where he won 12 Tony Awards, an all-time record. “Producing Broadway brought my life full circle as a writer/composer/producer/actor/director. It was my happiest professional experience because I felt like I was really getting paid for my creative work. The audience roars with laughter, applauds, and, at the end of the play, he gives you an ovation. My God! This is what I should have always done.”
Looking back on recent years, Brooks fondly remembers being honored in 2009 at the Kennedy Center for his contribution to American culture, receiving the prestigious American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 2013, and the day the president and longtime friend Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. “He overwhelmed me with emotion with his words and when he put the medal on me I pretended that it weighed so much that I was falling. I grabbed the president to stabilize myself and everyone laughed.”
Laughter, that well-known and faithful companion that has accompanied him and has helped him enjoy a long and pleasant existence: “If you can laugh, you can get ahead. You can survive when things go wrong if you have a sense of humor.” And she doesn’t want to hear or talk about retirement. For Brooks, staying creative is the key to his longevity. “I’m always looking for new projects to exercise my mind. Because in my experience, if you’re not working, you’re not really alive.” Will have to take note.
