Speaker 1: Let's go.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten the Hollywood, your podcast
Speaker 2: and memories of Yesteryear. My name is Doug Hess and
Speaker 2: if you're tuning in Forgotten Hollywood for the first time,
Speaker 2: what I do on this podcast is take you on
Speaker 2: a journey back in time and share with you pieces
Speaker 2: of Hollywood that you may or may not know about.
Speaker 2: And in this episode, we have very special guests with
Speaker 2: us today, David Margolick, and he is here to talk
Speaker 2: about his latest book, When Caesar Was King, How Sid
Speaker 2: Caesar reinvented American comedy. David, Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Doug. It's nice to be here with you.
Speaker 2: Ooh, it's our pleasure, and thank you for spending a
Speaker 2: few minutes with us today to talk about your book
Speaker 2: When Caesar Was King. And obviously I think a lot
Speaker 2: of it kind of goes with the title of the book,
Speaker 2: but we always like to have the author to tell
Speaker 2: us in their own words what the book is about.
Speaker 1: Well, the book is sort of a biography of Sid Caesar,
Speaker 1: who was one of the five Others of American television
Speaker 1: comedy and American comedy. More broadly, I mean, he was
Speaker 1: this incredible meteoric figure in television history who appeared sort
Speaker 1: of at the same time that television was just getting
Speaker 1: off the ground, but with a groundbreaking kind of comedy,
Speaker 1: a more intimate comedy that lent itself to the small screen.
Speaker 1: So he was really the first true television comic and
Speaker 1: a man of astonishing gifts and diverse talents who attracted
Speaker 1: really the best comedy writers of his generation to work
Speaker 1: with him and to help him shape his famous programs,
Speaker 1: most notably Your Show of Shows, which a lot of
Speaker 1: people will have heard of there ran from nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: to nineteen fifty four, and then Caesar's Hour which ran
Speaker 1: from nineteen fifty four to nineteen fifty seven, and then
Speaker 1: followed by a couple of years when he was on
Speaker 1: and off TV. And in that in that time, he had,
Speaker 1: you know, his famous writers room that was depicted in
Speaker 1: My in the movie My Favorite Year and the Broadway
Speaker 1: play Laughter on the twenty third Floor. And his writers
Speaker 1: included not all at the same time, but mel Brooks,
Speaker 1: Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Woody Allen. I mean, he had
Speaker 1: this incredible lineup of writers. And so when you talk
Speaker 1: about Sid Caesar, you talk about his own comedy, which
Speaker 1: was very unusual and brilliant in many different ways. And
Speaker 1: then you talk about all of the comedy that his
Speaker 1: disciples went on to write, and and you know, it's
Speaker 1: absolutely everywhere. It's on TV, it's in the movies. It's me,
Speaker 1: you know, mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles. It's TV with
Speaker 1: the Dick Van Dyke Show and and all of its
Speaker 1: progeny Saturday Night Live, It's Broadway with the shows of
Speaker 1: Neil Simon. You know, it's disciples like Johnny Carson and
Speaker 1: Carol Burnett and Billy Crystal and Conan O'Brien. All of
Speaker 1: them have talked about the influence that Sid Caesar had
Speaker 1: on them. So he was really he was sort of
Speaker 1: the prime mover in American comedy in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: and then beyond, and even as he faded, and the
Speaker 1: story about his fall is really as dramatic as his rise.
Speaker 1: Even after he faded from the scene, you know, his
Speaker 1: disciples were out creating, you know, lavish comedy and all
Speaker 1: of these different realms. So his fingerprints are everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're still feeling those effects today.
Speaker 1: That's right. I mean, you know you can I you
Speaker 1: know I had. I corresponded with Larry David and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, Sid Caesar was the best sketch comedian ever,
Speaker 1: you know, and nobody was even a close second, you know.
Speaker 1: And John Stuart, you know, the night that Sid died
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen, John Stewart said on his program, the
Speaker 1: grandfather of us all has died today. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think that in a way, Seinfeld's comedy the comedy
Speaker 1: about not you know, comedy, the show about nothing. In
Speaker 1: a way, Caesar was a student of human nature and
Speaker 1: human nature is a series of nothings in a way.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can you can poke fun at anything
Speaker 1: having to do with human beings. And this was the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that Sid Caesar did in a variety
Speaker 1: of ways on his shows. And so in a way,
Speaker 1: I think the Seinfeld has a debt to Caesar. And
Speaker 1: then you know, all these different sitcoms, the Andy Griffith Show,
Speaker 1: I mean all of them, I think they were all
Speaker 1: done by Caesar alum or influenced by Caesar himself. So
Speaker 1: he's an unusual character. He's an interesting character from a
Speaker 1: biographer's standpoint, because there you have the two great prongs
Speaker 1: of storytelling you have the story of his rise, which,
Speaker 1: as I say, was dramatic, meteoric, and then you have
Speaker 1: the story of his fall, which was also very dramatic
Speaker 1: and very quick actually, And so it's not a My
Speaker 1: book is not a conventional biography. It's malaportioned in a way.
Speaker 1: Most of it has to do with his early life,
Speaker 1: because arguably he was over the hill by the time
Speaker 1: he was forty, and you know, the last fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty years of his life. I deal within a couple
Speaker 1: of chapters. I mean, they're also they're dramatic, and they're poignant,
Speaker 1: but one can get through them a bit. You know,
Speaker 1: one can get through them quickly because there's less to
Speaker 1: write per year at that part, you know, over that
Speaker 1: period of his life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, David, how did you come about writing this book? What?
Speaker 2: What kind of inspired you to do this?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, my back my background, Doug is in
Speaker 1: journal is in daily and magazine journalism, and and uh
Speaker 1: I covered law for many years for the New York Times.
Speaker 1: I was one of their law writers. I have a
Speaker 1: law degree, but I had always wanted to broaden and
Speaker 1: you know, write about culture more generally.
Speaker 2: And this was.
Speaker 1: Originally a book for a Jewish book series, and and
Speaker 1: and a series of Jewish biographies of famous Jewish figures.
Speaker 1: And I thought that, you know, when you look at
Speaker 1: the sweep of Jewish history, a lot of the stories
Speaker 1: aren't very happy. And I thought that maybe I'd give
Speaker 1: myself a break and write about a comedy figure. And
Speaker 1: I was intrigued by Sid Caesar because I had gone
Speaker 1: to a testimonial dinner for him in the year two
Speaker 1: thousand where mel Brooks was the featured speaker, And there
Speaker 1: were a lot of intriguing things that night, I mean,
Speaker 1: but the most intriguing thing was here was this kind
Speaker 1: of almost wreck of a guy, I mean, very fragile looking,
Speaker 1: you know, already already very aged, almost prematurely aged, and
Speaker 1: dysfunctional in a way, fragile, halting, and yet everybody was
Speaker 1: saying such wonderful things about him, including mel Brooks. I mean,
Speaker 1: mel you could see was profoundly moved to be in
Speaker 1: Sid Caesar's presence again. And that may have been one
Speaker 1: of the nights where mel Brooks said, if you didn't
Speaker 1: say it explicitly, he said it effectively that he said,
Speaker 1: you know, mel Brooks was fond of saying no, Sid Caesar,
Speaker 1: no mel Brooks. That Sid was the one who discovered
Speaker 1: mel Brooks and developed him and gave him a chance
Speaker 1: and tolerated him because mel was a high maintenance character
Speaker 1: and hard to work with and one had one had
Speaker 1: to put up with a lot to have him on board.
Speaker 1: The producer, Sid, Caesar's producer on your show of show
Speaker 1: is a guy named Max Leidman, wanted only to get
Speaker 1: rid of mel Brooks because he was just such an annoyance,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of hectoring them and you know, just
Speaker 1: you know, always badgering them and trying to get his
Speaker 1: stuff in and driving everybody crazy with his high energy
Speaker 1: and his pushiness. And Sid protected him, even paid him
Speaker 1: out of his own pocket and kept him around because
Speaker 1: he made Sid laugh and Sid didn't laugh very easily.
Speaker 1: Sid was a complicated guy, and they developed this very
Speaker 1: kind of love hate sato masochistic relationship over the next
Speaker 1: ten years. And ever since then, Mel has been talking
Speaker 1: about Sid and the debt that he the debt that
Speaker 1: he owes to Sid. One of really one of my
Speaker 1: rewarding interviews was with Mel, and you know, Mel just
Speaker 1: couldn't stop talking about Sid's rise and fall and the
Speaker 1: impact that Sid had had on him. And Mel has
Speaker 1: spent you know, the last fifty years thanking Sid Caesar
Speaker 1: and acknowledging how important Sid was in his life. So anyway,
Speaker 1: I went to this testimonial and it raised the question
Speaker 1: everybody was thanking Sid and honoring him, and he was
Speaker 1: a shell of a man, And you know, the two
Speaker 1: questions were obvious. I mean, why are they all in
Speaker 1: such awe of him? And what was it that he did?
Speaker 1: And then what happened to him? Right? And so that
Speaker 1: I think kind of wetted my appetite for doing a book.
Speaker 1: And when the opportunity arose several years later and the
Speaker 1: editor of the book series asked me which figure I
Speaker 1: wanted to write about, I suggested Sid Caesar. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I made a lot of mistakes, but I
Speaker 1: think this was a good decision because his story needed
Speaker 1: to be written. And I think that people like Mel
Speaker 1: and Woody Allen when I interviewed him, and all all
Speaker 1: of these people, Conan O'Brien, as I mentioned, Billy Crystal,
Speaker 1: lots of younger comics, they all knew that Sid was
Speaker 1: in the pantheon. Sid was at the top of Mount Olympus,
Speaker 1: and they were eager to talk about him because they
Speaker 1: wanted to restore him to his rightful place. And I
Speaker 1: think that my book does that. My book is not
Speaker 1: a hagiography. Sid was a difficult guy and kind of
Speaker 1: hard to know and in some ways hard to like.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think that, you know, I've honored
Speaker 1: him by describing just how important he was.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. You know, one of the things I kind of
Speaker 2: found interesting myself was that how much food played a
Speaker 2: part of his comedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that, you know, you raise a good point, Doug,
Speaker 1: because one of the things that you're doing when you're
Speaker 1: writing for a Jewish book series is that you need
Speaker 1: to explain what's Jewish about Sid Caesar's comedy. It's a
Speaker 1: subtle thing because they never wore it, they never proclaimed it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have to remember that. You know, they
Speaker 1: were on TV in the early nineteen fifties, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was the McCarthy era. It was an era when
Speaker 1: everybody was very scared to do anything topical political in
Speaker 1: any way, and so they had to tread very carefully
Speaker 1: in that respect. It was also an era where American
Speaker 1: anti Semitism, which had you know, subsided some during the
Speaker 1: war and after the Holocaust was still ubiquitous, and you know,
Speaker 1: Sid show was of buy and in some ways for
Speaker 1: Jews at the beginning, when the television audience was very
Speaker 1: urban and Eastern, and they were very conscious of downplaying
Speaker 1: their Jewishness. They didn't want to. You know, the word
Speaker 1: jew was never uttered on any Sid Caesar show. Yiddish
Speaker 1: words were very scarce. So you have to look for
Speaker 1: other other elements of their comedy that are that that
Speaker 1: reflected Jewish sensibility, you know, the certain sense of irony
Speaker 1: and a sense of detachment and a sympathy for the underdog,
Speaker 1: and skepticism of authority. And there are lots of them.
Speaker 1: But and one of them, and one of the most
Speaker 1: blatant and conspicuous ones is food. They're always eating, and
Speaker 1: they're always talking about eating, and all there are lots
Speaker 1: of great Caesar sketches that revolve around eating and uh
Speaker 1: and so that you know, it just it, just it.
Speaker 1: It became an important It was an important lightmotif in
Speaker 1: Caesar's comedy and therefore becomes an important theme in my book.
Speaker 1: You know, the book is filled with anecdotes about food,
Speaker 1: and it's something that's dear to my heart too. And
Speaker 1: I actually I had an interesting conversation. Some of your
Speaker 1: listeners will remember me, Me Sheridan, who is the restaurant
Speaker 1: critic for the New York Times where I worked for
Speaker 1: a long time and instead of an observer of the
Speaker 1: food scene, and I asked her once about this thing
Speaker 1: about Jews and food. She was Jewish. I'm Jewish, but
Speaker 1: I needed somebody to explain it to me. And I said,
Speaker 1: you know, food is obviously a central part of life
Speaker 1: and a central part of every tradition. And you know,
Speaker 1: all you had to do was look at the Sopranos,
Speaker 1: which was on then, and you know they're always eating too.
Speaker 1: And I said, like, what's the difference between the Jews
Speaker 1: and the Italians when it comes to you know, how
Speaker 1: are the Jews different, if at all? She said, the
Speaker 1: Italians are just like the Jews, but without the panic.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was really a brilliant line, because
Speaker 1: you know, there's a kind of insecurity around food. In
Speaker 1: Caesar's sketches. I have a passage in the book where
Speaker 1: I describe it. You know, Sid is going to a
Speaker 1: health food restaurant Imogene Coca, his co star, is bringing
Speaker 1: him to a health food restaurant and all Sid wants,
Speaker 1: he's a nineteen fifties guy. All he wants is a steak,
Speaker 1: you know, a traditional steak, and all of these plants
Speaker 1: are coming out and you know, all of these you know.
Speaker 1: It really is a forerunner of the scene where Woody
Speaker 1: Allen is stricken when he goes to a health food
Speaker 1: restaurant with Diane Keaton. You know, here's the same thing
Speaker 1: twenty years earlier. And so Sid's not getting enough food,
Speaker 1: or he's not getting the right kind of food, you know,
Speaker 1: or you know, somebody else is getting more of it,
Speaker 1: you know, or he's getting sick from it, you know. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's just, you know, it's absolutely all over the show.
Speaker 1: Sid was a great respector of food in his heyday.
Speaker 1: He always insisted also, I think because he wanted real food,
Speaker 1: that real food was used in all the sketches. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're not faking it. You know, if you watch The Honeymooners,
Speaker 1: you can see that Alice is stirring a pot with
Speaker 1: nothing in it, you know, in all the you know,
Speaker 1: in Sid's stuff, there there's always real food. And maybe
Speaker 1: because of the tradition of the history of privation and
Speaker 1: not having enough. There were no food fights on any
Speaker 1: Sid Caesar show. They're not the Three Stooges. I mean,
Speaker 1: the comedy is more elevated than that anyway, but food
Speaker 1: was too important to throw around.
Speaker 2: Wow, no pie fights. Oh, very interesting. In one of
Speaker 2: those things that I think so many times you were.
Speaker 2: When we're watching, whether it's on TV or the big screen,
Speaker 2: we take so much for granted and we don't really
Speaker 2: realize some of the meaning behind some of the things
Speaker 2: that's being incorporated into a scene or a movie or
Speaker 2: a sketch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's right, And yeah, I mean this obviously
Speaker 1: touched a real nerve among you know, Caesar and the
Speaker 1: people who are working for him. And you know most
Speaker 1: of Caesar's key colleagues were Jews like him, right, I
Speaker 1: mean on your show of shows, the three writers were
Speaker 1: Jewish mel Brooks, Lucille Callen. Unusual to have a woman
Speaker 1: writing these days in the early nineteen fifties. So Sid
Speaker 1: had a woman writing for him even before Lucille Ball did.
Speaker 1: And Sid was doing domestic comedy even before Lucille Ball
Speaker 1: and the Ricardos came along. And you know, Sid's producer
Speaker 1: was Jewish his co stars were Jewish Howard Morris and
Speaker 1: Carl Reiner, Carl Reiner being the second banana on the show.
Speaker 1: The cover of my book shows Sid and Carl together.
Speaker 1: Carl is absolutely a crucial part of the Sid Caesar story.
Speaker 1: And then when Caesar started his own show, as I said,
Speaker 1: Caesar's Hour in nineteen fifty four, at one point all
Speaker 1: seven of his writers were Jewish. But this was, as
Speaker 1: I say in the book, this was something that neither
Speaker 1: Philo Semites nor anti Semites talked about, nor the people themselves.
Speaker 1: It was just sort of a secret, that an open
Speaker 1: secret that Caesar's Show was a Jewish operation. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't the kind of thing that anybody proclaimed.
Speaker 2: I mean, they wanted.
Speaker 1: To sort of keep it quiet so that you know,
Speaker 1: the two thousand year old man that Carl Reiner and
Speaker 1: mel Brooks invented, he was invented in Caesar's writer's room,
Speaker 1: but he was also imprisoned in caesar writer's room. They
Speaker 1: never would have let him out. I mean, he could
Speaker 1: never have been on national television. You know, he would
Speaker 1: have offended you know, he would have offended more mainstream viewers.
Speaker 1: And it was something that they just they felt that
Speaker 1: they were on thin ice and that they couldn't They
Speaker 1: felt that they had to soft pedal their jewishness, you know,
Speaker 1: Carl Reiner said, and you know, Carl, it was interesting
Speaker 1: coming from him because Carl was you know, very he
Speaker 1: had He gave the image of being very sort of
Speaker 1: care free on the air, you know, always in a
Speaker 1: good mood, never heavy and crucial because he complimented Sid
Speaker 1: Caesar so well. Caesar had an element of madness to him,
Speaker 1: and Carl Reiner was the image of stability. But in
Speaker 1: one interview Caesar, Carl Reiner said that Caesar we all
Speaker 1: felt the way that Sid that Sid did as Jews
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, in the early nineteen fifties, that
Speaker 1: everything that the TV, the network people were the owners,
Speaker 1: the network people, the advertisers, you know that the advertisers,
Speaker 1: the sort of money people in America, the lawyers, they
Speaker 1: were the owners and we were just the renters. We
Speaker 1: we as Jews were just the renters. And so they
Speaker 1: they were, you know, as brilliant as their comedy was,
Speaker 1: it was almost never edgy or risky.
Speaker 2: Because of fear of being probably canceled.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fear of being canceled. And also, I mean I
Speaker 1: left out the other element, which was that, you know,
Speaker 1: politically they were progressive. You know, one of one of
Speaker 1: Sid's earlier the writer who lasted with him the longest,
Speaker 1: Mel Tolkien, who was later on All in the Family later,
Speaker 1: you know, helped run All in the Family. And you know,
Speaker 1: another tributary therefore, of the of Caesar's show. You know,
Speaker 1: he had been a leftist activist, so had Carl Reiner,
Speaker 1: another of Caesar's writers, had been in the Communist Party.
Speaker 1: You know, they steered clear of anything political because they
Speaker 1: were afraid of being red baited. So that was another
Speaker 1: reason for them, you know, to come up with this
Speaker 1: kind of brilliant comedy that was not topical. There were
Speaker 1: no jokes about McCarthy, there were no jokes about Stalin.
Speaker 1: There were you know, Eisenhower's name. You know, Eisenhower was
Speaker 1: president for all eight years of Caesar's reign on television
Speaker 1: and his name appeared once.
Speaker 2: Well, that that really tells you all you need to
Speaker 2: know about that, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, now, that's right. That they were you know,
Speaker 1: they were brilliant and innovative, but they were also very careful.
Speaker 2: Right, well, David. I know we're getting closer on time,
Speaker 2: but I do have one last question for you. Did
Speaker 2: anything really surprise you during the writing and the research
Speaker 2: of this book.
Speaker 1: Well, you know what I had to do, Doug, because
Speaker 1: Caesar was so forgotten. He was forgotten. You know, I
Speaker 1: should explain why he was forgotten because his shows were
Speaker 1: done live, which is really part of the extraordinariness of
Speaker 1: his accomplishment to do all of this live before twenty
Speaker 1: million people when you couldn't screw up and bring it
Speaker 1: in on time. I mean, it really, it's an extraordinary thing.
Speaker 1: And it ate Sid Caesar alive, and it really accounted
Speaker 1: for his demise because his brain cells were consumed, you know,
Speaker 1: he was he became alic and a pill popper, and
Speaker 1: he was you know, mel Brooks said, you could basically
Speaker 1: watch him disintegrate, you know, I mean you could see
Speaker 1: the tensions eat eating away at him. And you know,
Speaker 1: the other thing that I should just mention briefly was
Speaker 1: that television was changing. Television was spreading into the countryside.
Speaker 1: Tastes were changing. So Sid was Sid came across as
Speaker 1: high falutinant to a lot of people, you know, in
Speaker 1: the hinter lands, and in smaller towns and cities. So
Speaker 1: when Sid was knocked off the air, it was by
Speaker 1: Lawrence Welk. Lawrence Welk was on ABC and Sid was
Speaker 1: on NBC, And you know that nothing better crystallizes what
Speaker 1: did Sid caesar in apart from his own his self destructiveness,
Speaker 1: was that the television audience was changing. But I think,
Speaker 1: to answer your question, what really surprised me was the
Speaker 1: dazzling quality of the work. I had to go out
Speaker 1: because he had forgotten, because he'd been forgotten because his
Speaker 1: stuff was never syndicated, so that it died, unlike I
Speaker 1: Love Lucy or Sergeant Bilco or Graucho Marx or or
Speaker 1: the Honeymooners. You know, it disappeared, and so I had
Speaker 1: to go out and watch it all. And while there's
Speaker 1: a lot of repetition and a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: obviously you're doing a show every week, you know, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of mediocre stuff. The brilliant of the
Speaker 1: great stuff is what surprised me and delightedly delighted me
Speaker 1: and and treat me, and that I wanted to proclaim
Speaker 1: to everyone in doing the book. I mean, the work
Speaker 1: is just dazzling, and it's you know, there's great variety
Speaker 1: in it. He was a pantomimist, he was a linguist.
Speaker 1: He could talk, you know, and in fake Gibberish and
Speaker 1: German or French or Italian or Russian. He could do
Speaker 1: brilliant soliloquies. I mean, the range of his work is astonishing.
Speaker 1: But you had to go look at it all, and
Speaker 1: I did. I'm sure that I've watched more of it
Speaker 1: than probably anybody on the planet at this point. And
Speaker 1: how great is it that I had the chance to
Speaker 1: do that, you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely well, David, great work on the book. Appreciate
Speaker 2: you coming on and spending some time with us today.
Speaker 2: We really appreciate this into our listeners. Please go out
Speaker 2: and get a copy of David's book When Caesar was
Speaker 2: King House Sids Caesar remitted American comedy. It's out. You
Speaker 2: can get on Amazon or your favorite local bookstore. Like
Speaker 2: I said, we've only hit the tip of the iceberg,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot more there to dive into, so
Speaker 2: pick up your copy When Caesar was King Again. David,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on spending some time
Speaker 2: with us today.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Doug. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, thank you and thank you for listening to
Speaker 2: this episode Forgotten Hollywood. Just search for dodcast or Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 2: You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram at hastep fourteen.
Speaker 2: If you listen to this podcast or iTunes or another
Speaker 2: podcast service, please subscribe, a rate and review this episode.
Speaker 2: Tune in next time for letus episode and Forgotten in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening and we will see you soon