Two Guys, Two Takes: Memoirs from Mel Brooks & Stanley Tucci

—Jan Farrington

Need a book to read at the beach, by the pool—or to hide behind when the Kids of Summer are getting to you? Two memoirs by very different performers—comedian Mel Brooks and actor Stanley Tucci—could be just the thing. Grab them both, if you have time; they’re enjoyable in utterly different ways.

Brooks’ All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021) is as fall-down, spit-take funny as one could want—practically a who’s who of comics and actors he’s known through the years. The story takes him from a happy, big-family Brooklyn childhood (though nobody had a dime), to the combat forces of World War II, to writing jokes for Sid Caesar’s legendary Your Show of Shows in the ‘50s, creating TV’s Get Smart in the ‘60s—and on and on. 

Along the way he fell in love once, with Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft, and their lively, loving marriage lasted nearly 40 years, until her death in 2005. Brooks is the successful creator of movies including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs, produced extraordinary films including The Elephant Man and The Twelve Chairs, and adapted his own movie into the Broadway smash The Producers. Brooks is an EGOT, one of the rare breed who have won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards for their work.

The stories make you shake your head. In the midst of the Depression, “Melvin’s” cabdriver uncle took  him to see Ethel Merman in Cole Porter’s Anything Goes on Broadway. (Uncle Joe drove the theater doorman home most nights; free tickets were perks.) “Uncle Joe,” nine-year-old Mel said on the way home in the taxi, “I am NOT going to work in the Garment Center like everyone else in our neighborhood. I am going into show business!” And he did.

During WWII, Brooks was an Army combat engineer, clearing live land mines, searching empty buildings for booby traps, building bridges across creeks and rivers. One afternoon, hearing German songs across the stream, he launched into an Al-Jolson-ish round of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie”—and got a round of applause. “Sehr gut, sehr gut!”

His boss Sid Caesar did dangle him from a window once—but in the end, let him live. A popular act created with Carl Reiner, who interviewed Brooks as the 2000 Year Old Man, was in part, Brooks says, a tribute to the wonderful Yiddish dialect he’d grown up with, and to his Jewish family and community—“feisty” and tough survivors.

If you’ve been alive for the past few decades, you’ve probably seen a Mel Brooks movie, TV show, musical, HBO special—and you might think you know everything about the guy. But trust me, there’s more in All About Me! than you can imagine—and half the fun is in “meeting” all the people who come in and out of his truly “remarkable” life.

Enjoy!

Actor and director Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food (2021) is the kind of life story you piece together slowly, by just sitting around and knowing someone for a few years, absorbing the details as they come. Things aren’t arranged neatly, nothing’s in order by date or year—and every so often, a story about childhood, or travel, or loss turns into a delicious Italian recipe.

It’s delightful…and strangely soothing.

We learn about Tucci’s growing-up years north of New York City in Westchester County—but not the posh part: the Tuccis and Tropianos settled in hard-working towns like Peekskill and Katonah and Verplanck. His mother, he says, was an “extraordinary cook,” and his father, luckily, had a “voracious” appetite. “My God, what does the rest of the world eat?!!” his Dad liked to ask at the end of a great meal.

One year, his teacher father took a sabbatical and moved the family to Italy for a whole year. Pre-teen Stanley liked the adventure, but was glad to get back to peanut butter and Velveeta in the end. All the same, Tucci says the family’s Italian year changed the direction of his life.

On page 23, you’ll find the most perfect description of how to make a chocolate “egg cream” I’ve ever read. (If he can wander around in the story, so can I.) Tucci apparently is in high demand on movie sets to make the best cocktails ever. He eventually tells us, with feeling, how he lost his much-loved first wife Kate to cancer, then (several years later) met and married actress Emily Blunt’s sister Felicity. They created a blended family: Tucci came with three nearly grown children, and he and Blunt added a son and daughter to the mix.

And today, they live in London (most of the time), apparently finding a way to blend passionate Italian cookery with English traditions—though “Italian” isn’t new to the “Big Smoke.” Along with Indian food, it’s been a presence on the London restaurant scene for years. 

Tucci saves the most eye-opening sections for last, ending with two chronicles (not in order, as usual): his tale of living in London during the lockdown of 2020 (with small children; who can relate?), and an account of the life-threatening illness he dealt with before the pandemic.

On many levels, that experience explains a lot about Tucci’s current “tilt” toward food, both in this book and in his television travels (Searching for Italy, etc.).  It’s not just about cooking. It’s about the joy of preparing meals and enjoying them with the people you love, in a loving, life-giving “food chain” that goes on forever.

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Hirschfeld: The Biography by Ellen Stern (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021)

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