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On a warm night in October, 1959, I was bidden to a party at Mamma Leone’s, a restaurant on Forty-eighth Street that was (and is) one of the largest and most popular in Manhattan’s theatre district. Random House had taken it over for the evening to celebrate the publication of “Act One,” the first volume of Moss Hart’s autobiography, which in no way surprised its publishers by turning out to be a best-seller. A further excuse for festivity was the fact that the author’s fifty-fifth birthday was to take place the following day. By any standards, the guest list—some two hundred strong—was fairly eye-catching. In addition to a favored bunch of critics and columnists, it included a representative selection of the show-business celebrities then in New York, among them Claudette Colbert, John Gielgud, Sam Goldwyn, Margaret Leighton, Ed Sullivan, Alan Jay Lerner, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Ethel Merman, Alec Guinness, Truman Capote, Rosalind Russell, and Marlene Dietrich—at which point my memory gives out. A group of Moss Hart’s admirers had put together an entertainment in his honor, and this was already under way when I arrived. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were just finishing a routine that satirized some of the more disastrous ways in which “Act One” might be adapted for the screen. During the applause I was burrowing through the resplendent mob, and, like many of my fellow-guests, I failed to catch the names of the next performers when they were introduced by the master of ceremonies, Phil Silvers.
Peering over the heads of a hundred or so standees, in front of whom other spectators sat, squatted, or sprawled, I saw two men in business suits. One, tall and lean, was conducting an interview with the other, who was short and compact. Their faces were among the few in the room which were not instantly recognizable. Though I took no notes, I recall much of what they said, and the waves of laughter that broke over it, and the wonder with which I realized that every word of it was improvised. The tall man was suave but relentlessly probing, the stubby one urgent and eager in response, though capable of outrage when faced with questions he regarded as offensive. Here, having been shaken in the sieve of nineteen years, is what my memory retains:
When they stopped, after about a quarter of an hour, the cabaret ended, and that was just as well, for nobody could have followed them. A crowd of professional entertainers erupted in cheers. The idea of a puritanical analyst was a masterstroke of paradox, and the execution had matched the concept in brilliance. Moss Hart was heard to say that the act was the funniest fourteen minutes he could remember. The room buzzed with comment, yet hardly anyone seemed to know who the little maestro was. Diligent quizzing revealed that he was a thirty-three-year-old television writer, that he had spent most of the preceding ten years turning out sketches for Sid Caesar, and that his name was Mel Brooks. I later discovered that his interrogator was Mel Tolkin, another, and a senior, member of the renowned menagerie of authors whose scripts, as interpreted by Caesar, Imogene Coca, and a talented supporting cast, had made “Your Show of Shows” a golden landmark in the wasteland of television comedy. Tolkin (a harassed-looking man, once compared by Brooks to “a stork that dropped a baby and broke it and is coming to explain to the parents”) was standing in at the party for Carl Reiner, a gifted performer who had also been part of the Caesarean operation. Ever since Brooks and Reiner met, in 1950, they had been convulsing their friends with impromptu duologues. The Moss Hart jamboree was an important show-business event, and, the press being present in force, it would have marked their semi-public début. Unfortunately, Reiner had a TV job in Los Angeles and could not make the date; hence his replacement by Tolkin, who had performed with Brooks on several previous occasions, though never in front of such a daunting audience. I knew nothing of this at the time; Tolkin struck me as a first-rate straight man. All I knew as I left Mamma Leone’s that night was that his stubby, pseudo-Freudian partner was the most original comic improviser I had ever seen.
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Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) lived one of the most intriguing theater lives of his century. A brilliant writer, critic, and agent provocateur, he made friends or enemies of nearly every major actor, playwright, impresario, and movie mogul of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. He wrote for the Evening Standard, the Observer, and the New Yorker; served eleven years as dramaturg for Britain’s newly formed National Theatre, and spent his final years in Los Angeles. He made numerous and powerful contribution to post-war British theater, set against the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies and his own turbulent life.