Mel Tolkin, Lead Writer for ‘Show of Shows,’ Dies at 94

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Front, from left, Gary Belkin, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart, Mel Brooks; behind, Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin and Larry Gelbart.

The New York Times

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November 27, 2007

Mel Tolkin, Lead Writer for ‘Show of Shows,’ Dies at 94

By MARGALIT FOX

Mel Tolkin, the long-suffering head of Sid Caesar’s celebrated television writing team, who was present from the cramped, sweaty, malodorous beginning, died yesterday at his home in Century City, Calif. He was 94.

Mr. Tolkin‘s son Michael confirmed the death.

As the lead writer for “Your Show of Shows” and its successor, “Caesar’s Hour,” Mr. Tolkin presided over a team that at one time or another included Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen. “Your Show of Shows,” starring Mr. Caesar and Imogene Coca, was broadcast on NBC from 1950 to 1954. A wellspring of American television comedy, the show endures to this day as a national treasure.

Mr. Tolkin, who went on to write for Danny Kaye, Danny Thomas and Bob Hope, was later a writer for “All in the Family” and other television shows. With several colleagues, he won an Emmy in 1967 for “The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special.” An accomplished pianist, Mr. Tolkin also wrote the musical theme, “Stars Over Broadway,” for “Your Show of Shows.”

Broadcast live on Saturday nights, “Your Show of Shows” was a voracious beast that had to be fed 90 minutes of pitch-perfect comedy every week. For the writers, this meant laboring seven days a week, 39 weeks a year, in the famed (and famously unsanitary) Writers’ Room, an office on West 56th Street in Manhattan.

In the heady atmosphere of cigar smoke, pooled coffee and cures for a thousand diseases growing on long-forgotten sandwiches, Mr. Tolkin and his colleagues paced, muttered, swore, occasionally typed and more than occasionally threw things: crumpled paper cups, cigars (lighted) and much else. The acoustical-tile ceiling was fringed with pencils, which had been flung aloft in a rage and stuck fast; Mr. Tolkin once counted 39 of them suspended there.

The room was an orgy of interruption. “Nobody ever finished a sentence,” Mr. Tolkin told The New York Times in 1982. “Somebody else would jump on it, competitively grab a sentence, a thought.”

When the pace slackened, Mr. Tolkin had the perfect spur. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to get something done!” he cried. “Jews all over America will be watching Saturday night!”

As Mr. Tolkin and other writers made repeatedly clear in interviews, a shtetl past, which many of them shared, proved an ideal qualification for the job.

“I lived through pogroms in the Ukraine,” Mr. Tolkin told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. (He was born Shmuel Tolchinsky there on Aug. 3, 1913.) “The pressures made heroes of some, and poets and violinists of some. But it made for a lot of broken human beings too. I’m not happy to have to say this: It created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”

The Tolchinsky family moved to Montreal in 1926. There, Shmuel (known in the New World as Samuel) set out, with his parents’ blessing, to study accounting. But what he actually did, without his parents’ blessing, was compose musical numbers for various left-wing revues. It was then, in an effort to conceal his real vocation from his family, that he became Mel Tolkin.

In World War II, Mr. Tolkin served his country by playing the glockenspiel in the Canadian Army.

After moving to New York in 1946, Mr. Tolkin honed his art at Camp Tamiment, a Poconos resort famous for its entertainment. He was paired there with Ms. Kallen, who would be his longtime writing partner. In 1949, the two of them were hired by “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” a forerunner of “Your Show of Shows” that also starred Mr. Caesar and Ms. Coca.

Mr. Tolkin and Ms. Kallen were the revue’s only writers. This was just as well, since their office was a tiny corner of the male dancers’ dressing room, redolent of sweaty underclothes.

After the revue went off the air later that year, Mr. Tolkin, desperate to stay in New York, sought help from Mr. Caesar.

“I thought I’d have to go back to Montreal and be an accountant again,” he said in a 1995 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I borrowed $70 from Sid. I never repaid him. I never will.”

Mr. Tolkin’s indebtedness, at 6 percent interest compounded annually, is now $2,055.12.

Besides his son Michael, a novelist and screenwriter in Los Angeles, Mr. Tolkin is survived by his wife, the former Edith Leibovitch, whom he married in 1946; a brother, Sol Tolchinsky of Montreal; another son, Stephen, also a Los Angeles screenwriter; and four grandchildren.

Over the years, the motley crew of the Writers’ Room has often been memorialized on stage and screen. One of the best-known incarnations is in Mr. Simon’s play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which opened on Broadway in 1993. In an interview quoted in The Houston Chronicle in 1995, Mr. Tolkin had this to say about the play:

“Not a single word said onstage was ever uttered by any of us.”

He added: “But all of it is true.”