So I did. She said yes, and I saw her almost every night.
She loved foreign movies; I loved foreign movies. She loved Chinese food; I loved Chinese food. Which leads me to a pretty funny story. Like I said, we saw each other almost every night and after a while I told her that we couldn’t go to fancy places because I was simply not earning a lot of money at that time. As a matter of fact, even though I was writing a show for Broadway, you don’t see any money for that until the show actually opens.
Anne and me sharing a moment.
So one night when we went to a Chinese restaurant I was running low on cash. In those days, one of the least expensive dinners out was at a Chinese restaurant. Knowing my financial situation, when the check arrived Anne slipped me a twenty-dollar bill under the table. The check came to about eleven or twelve bucks. I gave the waiter the twenty dollars and said expansively, “Keep the change.”
When we got outside, Anne hauled off and smacked me!
“What?” I said. “What!”
“Listen, big shot, don’t leave such a big tip with my money!”
She could hit pretty hard, so I never did that again.
Even though she was already a very successful actress and used to going to the best places, she’d join me anywhere that I could afford. I remember one night she said, “Don’t worry. I believe in you. You’re talented. You’re gonna go places…you won’t always be poor.”
* * *
—
Like I said, this was not a great time for me as far as making money was concerned. I took almost any job I could get. One of the more interesting ones was doing the voiceover for a commercial for Bic Banana, which was the name of their new pen. It went like this:
“Don’t write with a peach. If you write with a peach, you’ll get a very wet letter. Don’t write with a prune. Words will come out wrinkled and dopey. Let’s face it, the only fruit you can write with is a banana. The Bic Banana. A fine line marker. Not to be confused with a ballpoint. Writing a letter to your son, right? Right. Usually I write, “Dear son, how are you? I’m fine.” Write that same letter with a Bic Banana and you’ll get: “Dear Sonny, I miss your face, Mom.” See what a nice letter it writes? And it comes in colors. Most fruits only come in one color except grapes, which come in two colors and of course, pits and pitless. Look, if you’ve got to write with a fruit, write with a Bic Banana! It’s only twenty-nine cents. Your best buy in writing fruit. The Bic Banana. A different way to write!”
Commercials were a lifesaver. The next one I did was a lot of fun. It was a Ballantine Beer commercial with Dick Cavett. I did a takeoff on my 2000 Year Old Man, called the 2500 Year Old Brewmaster, and Dick interviewed me. We really hit it off well; we had great chemistry between us.
Many years later, Dick and I recorded a wonderful conversation we had onstage that became a really funny HBO special called Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again (2011). I always looked forward to working with Dick Cavett, he is so bright and funny and a real pleasure to work with.
* * *
—
Still needing money to date Anne Bancroft in style, I did any project big or small that came my way. The Critic, a short animated film, was the brainchild of Ernie Pintoff, who was a cartoonist extraordinaire. He was a brilliant talent at both stills and animation, including New Yorker magazine cartoons. He had an idea. He wanted to do a takeoff on Norman McLaren, who was a Canadian animator and cartoonist who did avant-garde creations. Ernie thought that my interpretation of it with an English accent could be a clever idea.
But I said, “Wait a minute, what if I’m an old Jew who wanders into a movie house, and in between a double feature accidentally sees Norman McLaren’s very avant-garde cartoon? And I try to make some sense of it?”
I said, “You do the animation and just let me ad-lib.”
So he did a kind of Norman McLaren, Picasso-ish, Braque-ish animated short. And I, as a little old Jewish man, recorded the voiceover, trying to make sense out of it.
It was downright hilarious. I said things like:
“This is cute, what the hell is it? I know what it is. It’s garbage, that’s what it is.”
“It must be some symbolism. It must be symbolic of…junk!”
“I didn’t come pay two dollars in a movie to see cockroaches.”
“I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.”
People had never seen anything like it.
The Critic debuted at the Sutton Theatre, a well-known art house on Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The audience loved it. It was about three and a half minutes long and they laughed uproariously from start to finish.
And miraculously enough, it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) that year.
Chapter 9
Get Smart
Anne and I were seeing each other every day and every night. I knew I wanted to marry her, but couldn’t think seriously about it because I was not earning enough money to support her. Not only in the style to which she was accustomed, but frankly, in any style.
And then in 1964—a stroke of luck!
I was called by one of the partners of a successful showbiz company called Talent Associates. His name was Danny Melnick. He ran the company with David Susskind, the well-known host of The David Susskind Show. I went to their offices on Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street in the Newsweek Building. They said, “We need a show and we want you to write it. Inspector Clouseau and James Bond are the biggest things in the world now. Got any ideas?”
They then asked if I would like to write it with anybody. They suggested a list of names. One of the names on the list was Buck Henry. I liked Buck Henry a lot, and admired his talent. He would later go on to write The Graduate and Heaven Can Wait.
He could also shoot pool, and Talent Associates had taken out their conference room table and replaced it with a pool table. What a perfect partner.
This was the year of the secret agent, both in film and television. Sean Connery was James Bond in the recent megahit Goldfinger, and Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of piece about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about a CIA agent who was also an imbecile. I decided to be the first. I called it Get Smart, based on the leading character’s name, Maxwell Smart.
Buck was very intelligent and extremely witty. The more we worked on the pilot, the funnier and more insightful we got. Another stroke of luck was getting Alfa-Betty Olsen, a friend of mine at the time, to be our recording secretary. She nailed down every thought and every crazy joke and brushstroke of madness we threw out. Nothing escaped her.