My cousin David Evanier is currently in the middle of writing a biography of Woody Allen for a major publisher…and was when the latest eruption of the Woody/Mia/Dylan matter hit. Good luck to him on sorting all that out for the book. Anyway, David sent me this link to an obit on Sid Caesar that ran in the Jewish Daily Forward. It does, of course, write of his life from a slightly different vantage point than most other newspapers.
I will take issue with one statement in the obit, though. Writing about the writing room on the Caesar shows, the author says…
The interactions of all these verbally gifted Jews with chips on their shoulders was as inspiring as the product they created, and Reiner offered a version of the experience in his classic 1960s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, with Reiner himself playing the role of vainglorious star, modeled after Caesar.
No. Reiner got the idea to write about a comedy writer from his experiences working for Sid and perhaps a few episodes were based on things that happened to writers working for Caesar. But there was nothing Jewish about Rob Petrie or Sally Rogers and apart from one episode where he was Bar Mitzvahed and one or two other quick jokes, nothing all that Jewish about Buddy Sorrell.
And apart from being stars of TV variety shows, there was nothing of Sid Caesar in Alan Brady. Sid didn't wear a rug. Sid didn't have a flunky brother-in-law as producer. Sid didn't have an outsized ego and always brag about his greatness. Sid's writers all thought Sid was a genius. Alan's writers said that but they feared him more than they respected him.
There's one episode of the Van Dyke show — the one about the snail — where Alan Brady visits the writers' office and much is made of the fact that it's the first time he ever set foot in there. Sid lived in the writers' office on his shows and was in there constantly, participating in the writing…something Alan Brady didn't do. The way The Alan Brady Show worked, the three writers would write a script, send it to Alan to read and it could sometimes come back crumpled and therefore rejected. Sid Caesar never did that. Jackie Gleason, on the other hand…
That's actually what Gleason did. He didn't see his writers very often, either. Some came and went without ever even meeting him. Alan Brady is an amalgam of stories Carl Reiner heard from writers who worked for Gleason and also Milton Berle and Red Buttons. It's pretty obvious…and Reiner also said that on several occasions. He said it a few months ago when he was interviewed by Stu Shostak and Vince Waldron on Stu's Show.
Reiner would probably have folded Red Skelton into the mix except that Reiner was working on the east coast when he created The Dick Van Dyke Show and wrote much of the first season, and Skelton was on the west coast. There are actually a lot of stories about stars of variety shows keeping their writers at a distance and crumpling scripts. Sid Caesar was close to unique in that the writers felt he was one of them and genuinely liked the man. That's probably the main way he was unlike Alan Brady.