He said, “You’re never too old to become a movie star, and I’m going to make you one.”
And he did. Mel Brooks signed me to co-star with him and Anne in the movie To Be or Not to Be. I played Anne’s dresser, and she coached me every single day for six months during filming. They could’ve hired a coach, but instead she did it personally. We were in lots of scenes together, and I had a big dance number in drag with Mel. My name was submitted by the head of the studio to the Academy for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I didn’t get it, of course; I didn’t even get the nomination. But my name was submitted. Since that movie, I have done 20-something films and about 100-some television episodes.
Gypsy was a wonderful addition to the cast as well as a never-ending reservoir of good humor and fantastic stories. He helped make the set a happy place to be.
* * *
—
I am so pleased to say that the movie was successful. It did well at the box office and garnered some great reviews, including Vincent Canby’s stellar review for The New York Times:
EVERYBODY can relax. Mel Brooks’s remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic, “To Be or Not to Be,” is smashingly funny….
Mr. Brooks and Miss Bancroft played together once before, in his “Silent Movie” in which she had a cameo role, but this is their first co-starring romp. It’s one in which we are allowed to discover for ourselves what they seem to have known all along—they were made for each other….
It’s no news that Mr. Brooks is one of our national treasures. The revelation for film audiences is that Miss Bancroft is such a wildly gifted comedienne. She is not a foil, but an equal partner, who never fails to meet Mr. Brooks’s comic challenges and who, I suspect, provides him with the sort of solid presence that allows him to reach the heights he does. Performing singly or in tandem, they are terrific.
Hard to beat that review!
I was thinking that as part of Fox’s publicity campaign for To Be or Not to Be, I would do something I had done successfully on History of the World, Part I—a rap song. “It’s Good to Be the King” made a little history of its own, so I thought why not call Pete Wingfield (my collaborator on “It’s Good to Be the King”) and make another rap?
I called it “The Hitler Rap.”
Here’s a little of the opening:
Well hi there people
You know me
I used to run a little joint called Germany.
I was number one
The people’s choice
And everybody listened to my mighty voice
My name is Adolf
I’m on the mic
I’m gonna hip you to the story of the New Third Reich.
It all began down in Munich town and pretty soon
The word started gettin’ around.
So I said to Martin Boorman I said “Hey Marty…”
“…why don’t we throw a little Nazi party?”
The song was really successful; it shook things up, to say the least. Fox even gave us the money to make a “Hitler Rap” music video. I played Hitler singing and dancing with beautiful chorus girls. Once again Alan Johnson created some daring and funny choreography for the backup dancers, and I even hit the floor and did some break dancing. (Which I must confess…wasn’t always me.)
Me as Adolf, once again slapping on the most infamous mustache in history.
That was the last time I put on my mustache and played Hitler, but there was one other time before that which is worth mentioning. In 1978 Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson, who did such a wonderful job as writers on Silent Movie and High Anxiety, created a really funny TV show called Peeping Times. It was a send-up of news shows like 60 Minutes. They wrote a sketch about Hitler and Eva having lunch together at Berchtesgaden, and of course they asked me to play Adolf. It really was hysterically funny and goes a little like this: As they are having lunch Eva swats a fly on the table and my version of Hitler is horrified.
“You killed it!” I say.
She says, “Adolf darling, why are you so upset? It was just a fly!”
Then I reply (mimicking her voice), “It was just a fly! It was just a fly! Tell that to the fly’s family, see how they feel about it!”
Anyway, the sketch was hilarious.
All in all, I have many fond memories of making To Be or Not to Be, it was so much fun. Especially singing and dancing with my gorgeous and sensationally talented wife. Anne really understood me, or at least enough to tolerate me, especially when I was being myself. I truly believe that when you’re with the right person, they love you not in spite of your flaws, but because of them. Anne once told a reporter that after meeting me she told her shrink, “Let’s speed this process up. I’ve met the right man.”
During an interview with both of us on the Today show, Gene Shalit asked Anne whether she was content in her marriage. She stared at him, surprised at the question. Then she said, “I’m more than content! When I hear his key in the lock at night my heart starts to beat faster. I’m just so happy he’s coming home. We have so much fun.”
* * *
—
In addition to being a wonderful wife and partner, Anne was a truly great mother. Max was diagnosed with dyslexia at a time when it was relatively unheard of. They didn’t even call it a learning disability back then. It was dismissed as just laziness, goofing off, or “you’re not trying hard enough.” So my Annie, one of the greatest, most successful actresses of her day, set aside her career to raise Max and become his educational advocate. She taught herself all about dyslexia and developed coping mechanisms for Max. She met with all of his teachers and made sure that they understood what he was going through. She found ways Max could learn in a nontraditional format. Every year she took all of his schoolbooks to the Braille Institute and had them all read onto audiocassettes so that Max could listen to all of his reading assignments. Had she not done that, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Max to have graduated from high school.
If that wasn’t enough, Annie was figuring out how technology could help Max. When he was in eighth grade, she forced him to take a typing class. He hated it. She said, “Technology and computers are the way of the future. You’re gonna be a writer. This is a writer’s tool. You are gonna learn how to type so you can be a writer. You will never have to dictate and you will never have to be dependent on anyone else.”