SATURDAY RUBRICS: 1/11/25
BANCROFT & BROOKS, SULLIVAN & KELLER, CHARLIE CHAPLIN, AND PATTY DUKE
SOME JOY
Cary Grant looking at Mel Brooks, Mel looking at the camera, and Anne Bancroft seeing someone else in the audience here at the 1962 film premiere of The Miracle Worker as if she is returning their look about Grant grinningly paying them homage but Bancroft perhaps thinking at the same time, “I’m with the sexier guy and I’ll brook no argument about that.”
Brooks on meeting Bancroft from his memoir All About Me!:
It’s 1961, and I’m working with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams on a Broadway show called All American. They had just had a huge hit with Bye Bye Birdie, and I was brought on to write the book for their new musical project.
One day, in the middle of writing, Charles, whom we all called Buddy, said, “Mel. Come with me. I have to go to a Perry Como show rehearsal at the Ziegfeld Theatre because I’m going to be playing the piano for Anne Bancroft. We’re rehearsing for a performance she is going to do at the Actors Studio later this week, and I have to find the right key for ‘Just You Wait (Henry Higgins).’ After I get the key, we’ll go back to work at my place.”
So I tagged along. After a few minutes, the guest star, Anne Bancroft, takes the stage. I’d never seen anything like it.
She was wearing a stunning white dress, and she was singing in a sultry voice a Gertrude Niesen favorite, “I Wanna Get Married.” She was just incredibly beautiful.
When the song was over, I leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, “Anne Bancroft! I love you!”
She laughed and shouted back, “Who the hell are you?”
I said, “I’m Mel Brooks! Nobody you’ve ever heard of!”
She said, “Wrong! I’ve got your 2000 Year Old Man record with Carl Reiner. It’s great.”
That was the beginning.
After Buddy got the key for their song, he said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
I said, “Forget it. I think I’m in love.”
I went backstage to see Anne. We started talking, and we never stopped.
I asked her, “What are you doing after this? Let’s go out for coffee.”
She said, “I’m sorry, I have an appointment. I have to see my agent, Bernie Seligman, at the William Morris office.”
I said, “Bernie Seligman? I have to see him too! I promised to get back to him two weeks ago.”
That was the beginning of a string of lies that I never stopped telling, just to be wherever she was.
I said, “Let’s share a cab.”
When we hit the street, I whistled for a taxi. She was really impressed with my whistle. “That’s the best taxi whistle I’ve ever heard,” she said.
True or not, it struck a chord. That was February 5, 1961. A date I’ll never forget.
Every night that week, I checked on where she would be. I found out who her friends were, and I called them. For some reason, they trusted me and actually told me her whereabouts.
I’d show up at a restaurant she was at or a nightclub or I’d even wangle my way into a big party if she was going to be there. By the end of the week, I said to her, “It’s amazing! We’re always showing up at the same places! It’s Kismet!”
She laughed and shouted back, “It’s not Kismet. You’re stalking me! If you wanna see me, why don’t you be brave and ask me for a date?”
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.
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 $20 bill under the table. The check came to about 11 or 12 bucks. I gave the waiter the $20 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 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.”
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Brooks, after selling the pilot for Get Smart with his co-creator Buck Henry to Grant Tinker at NBC after ABC passed on it, finally wasn’t poor - or had enough money to marry Bancroft. He continues in his memoir:
What Get Smart’s success meant for me personally was that at last I was getting a steady paycheck. So on August 5, 1964, I was able to marry Anne and pay the bills. I was not only able to take her out to dinner, but now she didn’t have to slip me money under the table to pay the check.
We went down to City Hall in lower Manhattan to get married by a justice of the peace. We were in such a hurry that I forgot two things: one, a ring, and two, a witness! We were lucky on the ring: Anne happened to be wearing hoop earrings, and she took them off and we used one of them for the ring. But a witness, where would I get a witness? There was a couple at City Hall that had just been married, so we asked to borrow their witness. They called over this kid named Samuel Boone.
And I walked up to him and said, “Sam, we don’t have a best man or anything. Could you stand up for us?”
He said, “Yeah. Sure.” Then he said, “But I want to warn you. Let me tell you about the clerk who is gonna marry you. He just married my friends, and he has a really crazy voice. We had a tough time not breaking up when we heard that loopy voice.”
I said, “Well, we’re in show business. We can deal with that, whatever it is.”
So we get in front of this clerk, and the kid was right. The clerk had the wackiest voice I had ever heard. He started with, “Dooo youuuu, Anna Marie Louise Italianoooo …”
And already we were in big trouble. For the rest of the ceremony, Anne and
I never looked at each other, because if we did, we knew we’d crash to the floor laughing. Somehow, we got through the ceremony. All’s well that ends well.
We took a cab back home to the Village, kissing each other and both kissing the earring that had become our wedding ring.
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Below, Bancroft and Brooks celebrating in New York after she had won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1963 for The Miracle Worker. They couldn’t attend the ceremony in Los Angeles because Bancroft was performing the title role in Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children on Broadway directed by Jerome Robbins. Joan Crawford accepted the award for her and later presented it to her at a curtain call for Mother Courage.
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