Mel Brooks Turns 100

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0:22Mel Brooks makes the world laugh. Watch the producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein. Listen to the 2 ,000-year-old man or read his autobiography, All About Me, and you are guaranteed to find yourself laughing out loud until it hurts. But for me, having known Mel for 25 years, funny is not the first word I would use to describe this amazing man. Hungry. Hungry. Fiercely proud. When I see you, I get hungry. Do you think that's your adjective? You get hungry when you see me. Yeah, when I see you, I get very hungry. Oh, I get hungry when I see you. I miss the River Cafe so much. We love you there.

1:02Fiercely proud of his children and his grandchildren, the first one to pick up a phone to a friend in trouble, refusing an award in opposition to the Iraq war and waiting to accept it from President Obama. Vulnerable after the loss of people he loved. To Mel, food and wine are crucial. Many of his life's happenings have occurred in restaurants. And as for wine, he will tell you himself. Spill it all over the table. You just take this seriously. I'm trying to take this seriously. Today it is home. We are together. Lucky me. We're going to talk about wine and family and friends. And be prepared to laugh because Mel Brooks is funny.

1:48So that was a serious introduction.

1:54I want to tell you that before we stop talking before I forget I would like to do my imitation of a cat because not a lot of people know that I do I make the best cat sound in the world. Ready? Just give me one second I just need one second to really get myself into this cat. Okay, here's Mel Brooks doing the sound of a cat. Wow! That is a perfect sound. It's hard to do. Hard to do. I do it in Young Frankenstein. I think it's a dart-throwing contest, and one of the darts hits a cat, and you hear, wow! Did you do the sound? I did. You get there every night and do the sound. I always do the sound, yes.

2:41Can you do it again? Wow! That's good. So what's the technique? Technique is to squash some air between your cheek and the front of your mouth.

2:57Let's begin at the beginning. Earliest food memories. What do you remember from your early days? Did your mother cook? Yeah, my mother, okay. It was a standard Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jewish tenement food. So, breakfast in the winter was always a hot cereal. Cream of wheat or Ralston, which was a kind of brown porridge. And then in the summer, cornflakes, Rice Krispies, or Wheaties. What year would that have been? How old would you have been? That would be 35. I'd be around nine. That's when I went. My Uncle Joe, shortest Jew on earth. How short? How short? He was a cab. It was about 4 '4". Okay.

3:46When a taxi, a big checkered taxi cab rolled down the streets of Brooklyn and there was no driver, that was Joe. That was Uncle Joe. He's delighted. There was no driver. He was so short. He could just about peer over the, you know. Anyway, Joe took me because his friend Al was the doorman of the Alvin Theater on 52nd Street. and running at that same theater was Cole Porter's Anything Goes. Anything Goes. I had never seen a Broadway show. I was nine years old, and Uncle Joe took me to see Anything Goes. I was stunned. I couldn't believe it. Even though we were in the second balcony, as far away from the stage as you can get, Ethel Merman was too loud.

4:36No mics. She was just... She was in Anything Goes? Anything Goes. At the end, I nearly clapped my hands over. I just couldn't stop clapping and screaming and shouting. And then I got back in Uncle Joe's camp. I said to him, Uncle Joe, I'm not going into the garment center. Everybody at 365 South 3rd Street, between on Hooper and Hughes, everybody in that building worked in the garment center. There were shipping clerks. There were cutters. these tenements everybody was in the garment center and I screamed at my Uncle Joe Uncle Joe I'm not I'm not going into the garment center I'm not I'm going to go into show business I loved it I loved it and it changed and I did and you did and did he take you to food?

5:29would he take you out to eat? yeah once in a while I always went to the theater as a kid and then there was the meal afterwards or the lunch before it was a day out Well, we had some favorites that Uncle Joe would take us to. Where? One was called Gallagher Steakhouse. They had like half a cow in the window. They always had these half cows in the window. Just the raw meat. Raw meat. Yeah, hanging. Hanging Gallagher. And the steak was incredible. A lot of Jewish restaurants were called dairy restaurants. And they served stuff like blintzes with sour cream and old dairy. You never mixed meat and dairy with some religious nonsense.

6:11Did your grandmother cook for you? My grandmother cooked. What did she cook? Which grandmother? Your mother's mother or your father? My mother's mother. I never knew my father. You never knew your father's mother? No, no. My father's grandmother I did know. She did Seder meals, Passover meals, in Bensonhurst, where they lived in a big one-family house. Were they first generation? Yeah. They were European. Yeah. Born in Europe. Born in Europe. And so do you think your grandparents brought their food with them? Yeah, they all cooked the same stuff. What was it, Mel? Mostly it was chicken and chicken soup.

6:46Brisket? Yeah, they made brisket, absolutely. They made brisket and brown potatoes. Do you know my grandparents came from Hungary and Russia, and my father remembers my grandmother having in the Lower East Side a carp swimming in the bathtub that they would make a filter fish out of. So can you imagine having a, they would bring a live fish. Live fish. You did? My mother would get a live fish. Oh, my gosh. My brother Bernie and I would usually, one, we loved and we called him Artie. And we fed him breadcrumbs and we chased him around the bathtub. And then it was unspeakable. I can't even describe it.

7:27What was the killing of the fish? My oldest brothers, Irving and Lenny, held us back. We were screaming. Don't kill him. And my mother would say, we've got to eat. We've got to eat supper. And she'd kill Artie and serve him to us. And we would cry. But we ate him. And then would you get another carp and kill that carp? We got another carp. It's so interesting that they had live fish swimming in the bathtub. In the bathtub, it's true. And let me tell you, my mother used to make, every once in a while on a Sunday night, she would make spaghetti. She would buy a box of Mueller's noodles. They were flat.

8:07Flat noodles. And she'd cook them until they were dead. They'd be really soft. Oh, yeah, they were really soft. And then she'd put them in a baking pan, and she would empty a bottle of Heinz ketchup over them. This is spaghetti. And then she'd bake it for 30 or 40 minutes until the pan was dead, until everything was dead. And then she'd cut them into squares, and served it to us and she said spaghetti. And I was from 8 years old to about 13 or 14. That was spaghetti and it was okay. It was okay? It was really okay. It was really okay. Then I had joined a club called the Balsa Bugs. We made model airplanes.

8:55I think we enjoyed smelling the glue more than we liked making the planes. But we may, so one of the Balzerbugs, it was Bernie Steinberg, it was Flappy Rothman, and it was Tony Galliani. An Italian. An Italian. And Tony said, I'm going home, it was Sunday, and he said, I'm going home to have spaghetti. I said, we have spaghetti on Sunday, too. He said, well, try, you know, come on and have our spaghetti. So I went home. I walked into his apartment, which was in Greenpoint, a little on the edge of Williamsburg. As I walked in, I was assaulted by these incredible smells, just the aromas of garlic.

9:43I mean, it was just incredible. Then I sat down. they served this warm squiggly spaghetti, real spaghetti, squiggly but not dead. Yeah, al dente, was it sort of al dente? It still fought back a little bit in your mouth, fought back. And sauce, this red, thick red, beautiful sauce with meatballs in it. And sprinkled on top of it was this white stuff, snow, I think it was parmesan cheese. easier. And I took one bite and I started to cry. Did you cry? I wept. I wept and I said, Tony, this is spaghetti. This is spaghetti. How old were you? I was about 14. And I just wept and I went and when I came home, I said, Mom, you're not making spaghetti.

10:36I don't know what that stuff is, that cardboard, but it's not spaghetti. One of the most delicious things was very simple. we lived five stories up in this tenement I was not going to come up for lunch I was not why? because it was five stories and I didn't want to leave the game right so we took a break in the game and we all had lunch they all brought bags and stuff with them sat on the curb my friends and my mother would throw down in a brown paper bag a Kaiser roll smeared with a lot of butter, fresh butter, and almost a whole tomato, sliced and salted. And it was the most delicious thing.

11:23And you'd catch it. And I'd always catch it, but one time I missed it. I was going to say, five stories up is quite high. Five stories, but one time I missed it and splat. Splat. You heard the sound. And the bag was crammed with wet... So I very carefully peeled what used to be the bag away from the sandwich, and I began eating the sandwich, and I once again cried. It was so great. It was the closest thing to pizza. When did you have your first pizza? Oh, I had my first pizza when I was 16 or 17. So you always cared about how food tasted, didn't you? And there was one big, another very big revelation in my, about food.

12:11Gene Wilder, I could cry thinking of him, he was so sweet, the sweetest, invited Ann and I to dinner at his house in the village, at his house apartment in the village. I forgot what we ate, but he served wine. Up until then, the only wine I'd ever really, I never cared for wine. and it always tastes a little sour. Up until then, Manischewitz, Carmel is a sweet Jewish wine. And I tasted this wine. Was it a French wine? It was a French wine, Santa Steff. You know, and I said, what is this? He said, it's wine. I said, so this is wine. This is wine. And he got me hooked. And from that day, I think I was 20-something, whatever, 24, 26, I don't know, to that day, to this, if I have wine, it's always a good wine.

13:15It's either a good Italian wine or a good French wine or a good Napa Valley wine. But he taught me that wine could actually taste, really taste good, you know? And so how did you make the kind of voyage from tasting wine to having one of the great sellers? Well, up until Blazing Saddles, I was hanging on to show business with the skin of my teeth, not making any money. The first movie I made was The Producers. Good movie. I won the Academy Award for the screenplay, but it just about broke even. And then the next one was The Twelve Chairs, which was a foreign movie, kind of. It was a good, one of my best movies.

13:59I agree. But alas, it didn't make a penny. So I was thinking of going back to television where I was doing all right, I was making money, and then Blazing Saddles. And that was an explosion. Busted open the doors and windows and gave me enough money to buy a house and finally paid for dinner. Ann didn't have to slip me money under the table. So I was okay. When you were working in film, in the studios, what would food be like there? Would there be a canteen where you ate? What were they called, the commissary? What would they call? Commissary. Commissary, what was that like? In the Army, it's a mess hall.

14:41Yeah. In the movie studios, it's a commissary. And what happened, what was that like? Well, some had a, Fox was very good. Was that a way of kind of meeting people? Who did you meet when you had lunch? In the commissary? Yeah. Well, mostly the folks that I met, you know, the stuff that, you know, Alan Ladd Jr., who ran Fox, would often like to eat at my table. And Jay Cantor, who at one time, as an agent for MCA, handled Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly. Yeah. I mean, and they all liked him because he was soft and sweet, and he was. So Jay used to eat with us. Your good friend Alan Yentop, who we love.

15:23Alan, whenever he was in town. You told me to ask you a story about Cary Grant? Yes. What's a story about Cary Grant? Oh, it's a good story. Okay. I was not yet a filmmaker, but I was writing a movie for a guy called Marvin Schwartz on the Universal lot. So I'm writing this movie, and I look across the way, and I see Granhart, G-R-A-N-A-R-T. And I say to Marvin Schwartz, Marvin, what the hell is Granhart? Who works there? He said, that's Cary Grant. That's his... Cary Grant? That's about 20 feet away. That's 30 feet away. What year was this, Mel? This was, I can tell you, exactly 59. Yeah, I think 59.

16:12So you're watching... I'm watching to see Cary Grant. I'm watching. And sure enough, a Rolls Royce comes. A guy gets out, a chauffeur. He opens the back door, bounding two steps at a time up the stairs to Grand Harts in a gray. It's got to be dark gray with chalk stripes, double-breasted. Cary Grant, that was him. I said, holy shit, it's Cary Grant. I can't believe it. So one day, soon after that, I'm walking down about 1230 to the commissary at Universal. I hear a little click, clack, click, clack behind me. And I turn around and I hear Mel Brooks. I don't believe it. It's Mel. You're Mel Brooks.

17:10I said, oh, my God, it's Cary Grant. I said, how do you know me? He said, I got your record. I just bought your record. You cost me$1 ,000. I bought so many records. And then he said, buddy, where are you going? I said, to the company. He said, well, let's go together. So, wow. I'm going to have lunch. I had lunch with Cary Grant. I called my brother Bernie, Lenny, Irving. I called everybody in Williamsburg. They wanted to know what he ate. I said, he had two poached eggs. Yeah, on toast. But I had tuna fish. Yeah. Okay, next day, the phone rings. It's Cary. Cary, it's Mel, Cary, Mel. they come lunch yes well boom together me and carrie grant we walked out the wednesday was me and carrie grant thursday me and we're talking what's your favorite color i say blue he says yellow what's your favorite car i say a buick he says a rolls or yeah comes friday i don't know what to ask him i don't you know i know he's going to call i've run out of dialogue so the phone rings and I say to Marvin, if it's Cary Grant, I'm not in.

18:17Which is not true, but it makes for a great story. Did you see him ever again? Oh, sure. Yeah, all the time. One of the Cary Grant stories I love. You know, I used it in my stand-up stuff and I made it funny. But actually, if I told the truth, it was really very touching because he was really a good actor. Yeah. And he had made some very beautiful, you know, intelligent, soft films about love and people and they didn't have none of it. I kept saying, why don't, that was such a great picture, why did they make, he said, because the money was in the light comedies. Oh, really? Yeah. So I think that, you know, life through food and through your family and through your grandparents and coming here to this home and memories?

19:09Well, the food at the River Cafe still is literally some of the best. And I've eaten in some really great restaurants, you know. When I came here, I told Danny, remember Danny the chef? Oh, yeah. And I said, I was coming to see you. And he said, you know, I once made a risotto for Mel. And he came up to the pass and he said, Danny, you made that risotto. you should be proud of yourself and it was so meaningful because you didn't say I'm proud of you and you said you should be proud of yourself so I'd like to end this by saying Mel Brooks, you should be proud of yourself I love you Ruthie I love you Mel, thank you you bet, bye bye

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