Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.
Have you, perchance, decided — as I have — not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Gracie Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.
How they must enjoy tuning into our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the 10th time.
Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzz-word “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”
Is all this stuff a ratings bonanza? Who in the media could be that heartless?
Let’s turn from tragedy to a somewhat lighter subject — say, comedy.
Years and years ago, when I was writing for Johnny Carson during the day, I was moonlighting (with permission) after sunset, beginning the fretful route to hoped-for comedy stardom
in the prescribed starting place in those days, clubs and coffee houses in Greenwich Village.
My manager, the great Jack Rollins, brought a woman from a big ad agency to catch my act at The Bitter End. I was beginning to develop some skill at ad-libbing, and my dealing with a pest of a heckler impressed her.
That’s how, a few days later, I found myself in a recording studio across a table from — yikes! — Mel Brooks. I knew the name from his writer credit on “Your Show of Shows,” where, still mute and inglorious behind the scenes, Mel once had Carl Reiner ask Sid Caesar’s German professor character what to do if your rope breaks while mountain-climbing.
First he recommends, “Scream and keep screaming all the way down … This way they’ll know where to find you.”
Carl asks if there’s maybe anything else you can do.
Caesar: Well, there’s the other method. As soon as the rope breaks, you spread your arms and begin to fly.
Reiner: But humans can’t fly.
Caesar: How do you know? You might be the first one. Anyway, you can always go back to screaming.
(This and much like it can be found in Ted Sennett’s book “Your Show of Shows.”)
But I, and others, knew Mel big-time from the best-selling “2,000-Year-Old Man.”
Ballantine Beer, starting a new commercial campaign, had hired Mel to be “The 2,500-Year-Old Brewmaster.” They needed a Carl Reiner stand-in to interview the old gent, whose voice resembled, not entirely coincidentally, the 2,000-year-old man’s.
I’ve never had more fun.
First, I stood around nervously. Then Mel Brooks himself walked into the studio. He eyed my slight, 20-ish self with suspicion. “Spectacularly gentile!” he observed. We’ve been friends ever since.
There was not a word of script. The ad agency guy directing our sessions urged, “Just hit Mel with anything that comes to mind, the way Carl does. He’s best when he doesn’t know what’s coming.”
I played an eager young interviewer, bringing his hand-mike to the old man’s cave and peppering him with questions, challenges, skepticism and, once, mock hurt feelings, asking,
“Why are you rude to me, sir?”
“Why are you wearing a cardboard belt?”
Example of a challenge:
“Sir, I don’t think you’ve ever actually tasted the beer we’re selling. Do so now.”
“All right, Fluffy.” [sipping sound: voop! voop!]
“How would you put it, sir?”
“My tongue just threw a party for my mouth!”
I could never corner Mel. God knows I tried. I sat there and watched him go comic-mad before my wondering eyes, scoring every time he opened his mouth.
There was no dross. The first session went three hours, at the end of which both of us were exhausted but high.
Once an engineer in the control room laughed so hard he fell against the recording equipment and it had to be re-set. Mel broke me up in such helpless laughter, and so many times, that the agency was forced — or someone was hip enough — to leave some of my laughter in. I’ve seen this faked, but it was obvious that I was genuinely convulsed by my partner.
If the raw, unedited tapes — from which the commercials were cut — are not preserved somewhere, it’s comparable as a cultural loss to the burning of the library at Alexandria.
The commercials were loved. The agency said they’d never gotten such a volume of fan mail as poured in from people mad for them; demanding to know when they were scheduled so as not to miss any. Men told their wives to listen all day and record them.
I decided I could soon retire, thanks to the storm of royalty checks that jammed my mailbox.
But there was a problem.
The product was not equally adored. I was shown a letter from one fan: “I don’t know how long I can afford picking up six-packs of Ballantine to keep those commercials on the air. It tastes like piss.”
Soon, alas, the brewmaster and his young quizzer/tormentor were out of work. There are those who contrived to somehow collect the commercials. (They’re on a DVD Mel and Carl put out for Shout Factory.)
Happily, this greatly gifted man and I have been re-united. On HBO you can now catch a hilarious hour (yes, I do say so) called “Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again.”
It was an evening of seemingly non-stop laughter that we did together in a grand and glorious old theater in Los Angeles earlier this year. Mel had the wit to have it recorded.
A moment I’ll never forget: standing backstage at the 1,500-seat showplace before we went on, I don’t think either of us was full of confidence. Mel’s in his 80s, and when I looked at him standing there with just a hint of a stoop, I thought, at this point in his life he may really need this to go well.
Suddenly, we were introduced from the stage. I looked at Mel. The stoop had vanished. “Hey, this might be fun,” I said. Mel: “Good audience.” I let Mel walk out first, and held for a bit as he was bathed in roaring applause. He dropped a couple of decades. Then I did much the same.
It was a case of two performers sparking each other. When Mel laughed at me — genuinely, not false break-up — I felt a surge and got better. It worked both ways and, of course, much of that mutual sparking had to do with mutual affection.
It might be illegal or something for me to quote from the program — though I will say that the conversation and stories ranged from Alfred Hitchcock to Cary Grant to Mel’s theatrical debut — so let me have a free go at your funny bone with an earlier recollection from Mel.
Years back, I tuned in once just in time to see Mel describing — almost certainly to Johnny Carson — how dismal were his nine months stuck in Yugoslavia shooting “The Twelve Chairs.” He said you couldn’t really do anything at night “because all of Belgrade is lit by a 10-watt bulb, and you can’t go anywhere because Tito has the car.”
I remember laughing so hard I spilled something.
He went on to say that the food in Yugoslavia ranged between very good and very bad: “One day we arrived on location late and starving and they served us fried chains. When we got to our hotel room, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.”
After the reunion show a woman from the audience said, “I wonder what it would be like to be married to a man like that.”
The late Anne Bancroft, who was, when asked a similar question had replied, “When he comes home at night and I hear his key in the lock I say to myself, ‘Oh good! The party’s about to begin.’”
How many of us can claim such a tribute?