Just One Catch (40 page)

One day in 1960, fleeing a failing marriage and seeking studio space for his art, he rented a place on West Twenty-eighth Street. Zero Mostel was one of his neighbors. A former Borscht Belt performer and an Off-Broadway actor, Mostel (who had tangled with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s for giving “Red” speeches) was trying to be a painter, and he shared a studio with a sculptor named Herby Kallem, a friend of Speed. Recently, Speed had met at a party another downtrodden showbiz type, a loud little fellow named Mel Brooks. Born Melvin Kaminsky to a Russian-Ukranian Jewish family, and raised in a Brooklyn tenement, Brooks had been a tummler at Grossinger's, a writer for Sid Caesar's
Your Show of Shows,
and was now scrambling for money while trying to write a novel—or maybe it would be a play—tentatively titled “Springtime for Hitler.” He was married to a woman named Florence, but the marriage was ending. Impulsively, Brooks asked Speed if he could move in with him. For three months, the men lived together uneasily, bickering over housekeeping and laundry, keeping alternate hours. “[Mel] had a blood-sugar problem that kept us a scintilla away from insanity, and his brushstroke of paranoia had me on the verge (more than once) of calling Bellevue to come and collect him,” Speed wrote. For his part, Brooks did not appreciate Speed's sculptural talents. Once, while he was watching Speed—tall, wiry, deliberate in his movements—hammer metal, the phone rang. “Mr. Vogel can't speak to you now,” Brooks said into the receiver. “He's working on his horsey and he cannot be disturbed.”

Finally, tensions broke into the open. One day, while Speed was away, Brooks painted all over the walls “You snore, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes, that's what you do! All night! Snore! Snore! Snore! You fuck!” Speed called Brook's ex and asked her to take him back. “What do you want from me?” she said. “If you can't stand him anymore, throw him out.” Throughout the ordeal, the men remained friends (Brooks referred to Speed affectionately as “Huck Finn on his raft in Manhattan”). Years later, Speed heard Neil Simon had based his play
The Odd Couple
on stories he'd heard about them.

Speed introduced Brooks to Joe. They became buddies. “Mel and Joe had tremendous similarities in their backgrounds,” Speed said. “Their fathers died when they were young. Mel was two, Joe was five. They both lived in Brooklyn and were very poor. Neither expected to afford an education.” In Brooks, Joe saw what he could not yet fathom in himself. “There's a side of Mel that will never be fulfilled, no matter how hard he drives himself,” he told Kenneth Tynan for a
New Yorker
profile of Brooks in 1978, “and it all goes back to his father's death.”

The men shared a wicked sense of humor. “Tragedy is if I cut my finger,” Brooks once said. “Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

At about this time—early 1962—Zero Mostel smelled warm and grassy odors wafting down the stairwell from a second-floor loft late each afternoon. He walked up and introduced himself to the man in the apartment, a young Cantonese fellow named Ngoot. Mostel told Ngoot his cooking smelled marvelous, thereby earning an invitation to lunch. Speed wrote:

Ngoot, a little guy, said Zero looked like a Japanese sumo wrestler, so he prepared plenty to eat. As soon as Zero finished the food on his plate, without asking, Ngoot filled it again. Zero ate himself into a stupor. He could not rise from his chair. Acknowledging his guest's mumbled appreciation for the exquisite cuisine, Ngoot thoughtfully removed Zero's plate so his head did not smash it as he fell asleep at the table.

Soon, Ngoot was feeding Mostel and his friends on a regular basis, and giving Speed lessons in Cantonese cooking: soy sauce chicken, barbecued spare ribs, beef and spinach with oyster sauce, lobster, egg foo young, pork chops and onion in beer, shrimp in the shell, sautéed butterfish. “If you don't have it, you don't need it,” Ngoot would say, surveying his kitchen in the evenings. Speed asked if he could invite more friends to dinner. “No problem,” Ngoot said.

Mel Brooks came by, bringing a pal, Julie Green, a diamond merchant he'd met. Joe came once, twice, twice more. He brought George Mandel. In time, George brought Mario Puzo. Joe Stein, a playwright who would one day write
Fiddler on the Roof,
showed up now and then. No one had any idea what Ngoot did for a living. They knew he had come from a Cantonese village run by his grandfather. They knew that as a kid he'd kept a pet water buffalo. Mostel taught him Yiddish, as well as curse words in English. According to Speed, no matter how hard he tried, Ngoot was unable to learn the phrase
Se schver tzu zein ah yid
(“It's hard to be a Jew”).

The men called themselves “the Group of the Oblong Table” or “the Chinese Gourmet Club.” Eventually, they shortened this to “the Gourmet Club.” They met in Speed's studio, which had a fireplace, formerly walled off, and a cast-iron grate. “Mel was strangely attracted to fire so we put him in charge of providing us with heat,” Speed wrote. “We picked up our fuel from the street—fruit crates, parts of cargo pallets, broken furniture—anything that would burn. Once Mel got started, there was no holding [him] back.… [T]he blaze was so tremendous it was coming out of the wall. We feared for the building and our lives.”

The male camaraderie soothed them. They could just be themselves. They could confess their ambitions, career insecurities, and puzzlement over women. One night, Mario Puzo quipped, “The trouble with fucking is that it leads to kissing.” On another occasion, George Mandel told the group the story of how he'd received his head wound. A silence fell; there was only the crackling of fruit crates in the fireplace. Then Brooks said, “I'm sure glad that happened to you and not to me.” As Joe recalled, “He wasn't being cruel. [H]e was just being honest.” That was the great thing about the Gourmet Club. “He just blurted out what we were all thinking but didn't dare to say.”

*   *   *

JOE
NEEDED
FRIENDS NOW
. It was fun to share his success, to be able to walk into a room, shout “I'm hot! I'm hot!” and give people bear hugs. More important, it was essential for folks who had long known him to keep him grounded. “Joe loved to move around Manhattan, being lionized,” said Mell Lazarus, a cartoonist whose daily comic strip, “Miss Peach,” Joe admired. Lazarus met Joe one day at the Café Renaissance, a place over in the East Forties, near the UN. Joe was sitting in the bar with Richard Condon, author of
The Manchurian Candidate.
Lazarus introduced himself, told Joe he had been “staggered” by
Catch-22,
and they got to talking. “We were both Jewish, both mother-stricken. We had so much in common,” Lazarus said. “He was so much fun, so interesting to know. He seemed to get to know everybody very quickly. He was magnetic, charismatic.” He was most at ease with men, but Lazarus learned how much Joe depended on his wife's “sweetness” and “typical middle-class” values to help him maintain a solid daily perspective. It was difficult to stay steady when reporters kept coming around asking him to expound upon literature, on the state of American politics. Little Joey from Coney Island! They wanted to know what
he
thought! He would say something—“The Kennedy Administration [is] like a bunch of spoiled fraternity brats celebrating after having bought a campus election … cavort[ing] around, pushing each other into swimming pools”—and reporters scribbled every word. Then Joe would go to a bar or restaurant with friends. “Women flock[ed] to him,” said Barbara Gelb. It was “difficult to know whether this happen[ed] because of his curls, his fame, his hostility or a combination of all three.” (“You can't be a female fan of [Heller's work] without feeling a bit daft,” wrote the British journalist Sally Vincent years later. The writing, she believed, showed a “total disregard for [women].” Still, she was charmed by him.)

Joe had quit his advertising job, but among men in the pubs and eateries of Manhattan, success was still measured by the size of a paycheck and the number of affairs a man had—or the ability to brag, regardless of the truth. Joe insisted he wasn't all that invested in literature, writing, and reading; he admired
achievement,
no matter the field, and he had seized his opportunity. That it happened to be in novel writing was neither here nor there.

Shirley saw through this ruse. She had no patience with his posturing. Her insight was both reassuring and irritating. She never let him forget he had a family to support. But she also told him to guard his integrity. She knew he valued literature and art. She understood it mattered to him whether he had written a good, as opposed to a merely popular, novel. Sometimes, though, her support felt like pressure and he'd respond with anger or impatience. In truth, the pressure came from within: He'd gotten a few tentative ideas for his second novel; he'd written a few lines on index cards. But the fear that he might not be able to pull off another book never left him. It was all very well for Shirley to talk about integrity. She didn't have to do the work!

The apartment could seem stultifying when ideas weren't coming and the children ran from room to room, distracting him. “I think as soon as I was old enough to have my own opinions and challenge him things changed [between us],” Erica recalls. “As far as I was concerned, he pretty much always had to be right, and whenever I challenged that as a kid … I think he found it tiresome. George Mandel told me a story about a dinner party my parents gave when I was about three. Apparently, at some point they heard my father screaming and he was in my room, shouting and stabbing his finger at me for emphasis. No one knew what any of it was about, but I think George had to pull my father away from me. ‘Joe!' he told Dad. ‘She's
three
years old!'”

“[W]e were not an … affectionate family,” Ted says. “Maybe this came from Joe not having a father … [but] I don't know if our relationship was that much different than any other one between fathers and sons back in those days.… I was always a very, very private person and still am and if our relationship was warier than others, I'll take the blame for it.… [I]t was a great thing to have a dad who didn't have to work all day long. We would often go to Riverside Park and play football or baseball or do it in the courtyard in the Apthorp. I loved sports (a lot more than he did) but when he could he was always ready to play.”

In reflective moments, Joe understood it was confusing for his kids to watch him get so much attention from strangers. And he was sometimes confused about how to balance his responsibilities. “[I]t is never, or hardly ever, an entirely good thing [to be a celebrity presence in the household],” he wrote years later. “It would have been witless of me to attempt to ward off [people's] flattering acknowledgements, and hypocritical to pretend I did anything other than lap them up.”

He would leave the apartment to relax with the Gourmet Club or he'd head down to P. J. Clarke's or some other place to sit and swap stories with buddies. “He was funnier, more incisive, more interesting than anybody else,” said Norman Barasch. “He could be abrasive, but not if you made him laugh. I always made him laugh, so he didn't turn that abrasiveness on me. We always had a good time.”

Joe's Swedish publisher, Per Gedin (a “very warm, open man,” Erica recalls) became a close pal. “They loved each other and when Per would come to town, he would always take Dad to the Russian Tea Room, quite the place then, and I gather they would drink mass quantities of vodka and have a real blast,” Erica says.

At parties with other couples, Joe was often the center of attention, sometimes to Shirley's embarrassment. “He was always complaining about the food,” Barasch said. “‘This is all you're serving?' he'd say. ‘This is nothing!' He'd go around saying, ‘Water! Water! I want more water!' He was like a camel.” If in public his voice, stories, and gestures were getting grander, it was, Shirley knew, because he was swinging from the joy of being “lionized” to the terror of not being able to make another
Catch.

He took screenplay assignments. Why not? People threw them his way. Easy money, he told himself. He could knock these things out in his sleep. The work was a merciful relief from brooding about his “serious” writing. On April 3, 1962,
Fred Astaire's Premiere Theatre
on ABC-TV aired an hour-long drama entitled “Seven against the Sea,” starring Ernest Borgnine. Fred Astaire, dressed as if for a dinner party, introduced the story, walking along a set meant to evoke a war-wrecked beach. “This is the world of Stevenson, Conrad, and Gauguin,” Astaire announced, “men who were inspired to great art by the beaches of the South Sea Paradise. But even Paradise has its hell, and in the late spring of 1942, [the island of] Taratupa became an inferno.” In the background, waving palm trees gave way to the flashes and sounds of big guns firing. The story concerned a U.S. Navy Commander named Quinton McHale—played by Borgnine—who was trapped on the island with a handful of men following a devastating Japanese attack. The script was attributed to veteran TV writer Albert Aley. Overwrought and melodramatic, the show received respectable ratings.

ABC ordered scripts for a series to be called
McHale's Navy.
The series producer, Edward J. Montagne, veered the material toward slapstick, as he had scored a previous TV success with a military comedy starring Phil Silvers.
McHale's Navy
evolved into a weekly half-hour situation comedy about a reprobate noncom officer and his motley PT boat crew: a forerunner of
M*A*S*H,
and both of them—
M*A*S*H
to a greater degree—descendants of
Catch-22.

Montagne asked Joe to write a script for the show. At the time, John F. Kennedy was widely admired for having served on a PT boat; Joe may have relished the chance to lampoon him by representing PT crewmen as opportunistic, greedy, and none too bright.