Free It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks by James Robert Parish Page A

Lullaby.’” But, alas, eventually, the pleasant period came to an end. Kaminsky was advised that his special services duties were being terminated and he would be shipped back to the United States to be processed back into civilian status. Kaminsky hated to have his recent good times end and claims to have countered, “No, no—let me die in the back of the Mercedes with Helga.” Nonetheless, he was ordered back to the States.
    •     •     •
    As Melvin prepared to return home, he reviewed his relatively brief participation in World War II. “They always say War is hell.’ War isn’t hell. War is loud. Much too noisy. All those shells and bombs going off all around you. Never mind death, a man could lose his hearing. So I used to put Camels in my ears. When I was discharged, the doctor looked in my ears. They wouldn’t let me out of the army because my ears were so brown. I had all this Camel juice inside my inner tubes. I might be the first man to die of emphysema of the inner ear.”
    As Melvin observed repeatedly in the coming years, “I’m grateful to the army. Grateful to Hitler too.
The Producers
made me the first Jew in history to make a buck out of Hitler.”

7

Becoming Mel Brooks
    After I got out [of the military], I had three choices. I could go to college and hang out a shingle and make $10,000 a year. Another thing for a Jew to do would be to become a salesman.… And [the third choice was] show business. But you got to understand something: Jews don’t do comedy in winter. In summer, all right.
    –Mel Brooks, 1975
    Like many returning soldiers, Melvin wanted desperately to get on with his life. He realized quickly that relatives and friends on the home front could never understand the horrors of war he had experienced and seen on the battlefields of Europe. The angst and anger he felt at the Axis atrocities he had witnessed or heard about burned deep within the teenaged Kaminsky. Sometimes, it led him to erupt suddenly into fits of fury or unveiled disgust with the world. On other occasions, he lapsed into moods of total hopelessness over the inhumanity of man to his fellow human beings.
    Brooks vowed that no matter what, he would never ignore his Jewish heritage (despite his lack of religiousness). Moreover, he swore to himself that he would never allow others to overlook or ignore his pride in being a Jew. (In the coming years, Mel often referred to himself in interviews and conversations as “your humble Jew.” As recently as 2001, he vehemently told 60
Minutes
interviewer Mike Wallace, “Yes, I am a Jew. I
am
a Jew. What about it? What’s so wrong? What’s the matter with being a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way deep down beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.”)
    •     •     •
    Once a civilian, Melvin Kaminsky strove to find his way back to some form of “normalcy.” Because all of his brothers had attended Brooklyn College, he felt he owed it to his mother and them to follow suit. He used the G.I. Bill of Rights to enroll. However, over a 10-month period, the ex-soldier scarcely attended classes, and, eventually, he dropped out. Sometimes, to earn spending money, Melvin worked at the Abilene Blouse and Dress Company. At another point, he was employed in a clerical position at the post office. However, his heart remained tied to show business, and he made a few forays back to the Catskills as a tummler.
    Then, in late 1946, Melvin Brooks, as he now called himself to one and all, found work with Benjamin Kutcher. The latter was a seedy theater impresario who operated from a rundown office on Manhattan’s West 48th Street that boasted a grimy bay window that looked out onto the street. “For about six months, I did everything for him. I ran errands for him. I put placards in barber shop windows. He was a kind of circuit producer for many little towns around New York, like Red Bank, New Jersey. Wherever there was a little theater, he would book some old