The Comic Genius Who Pushed Television Further Than It Could Go

At its peak, “Your Show of Shows” had twenty-five million viewers, and Caesar was hailed as a genius. Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein were fans; on Saturday nights, when the show aired, Broadway theatres went half empty. Yet Margolick chronicles Caesar’s miseries as well as his triumphs, and the story slides inevitably into sadness. In show biz, those whom the gods would destroy they condemn to live in Beverly Hills. After his second show, “Caesar’s Hour,” was cancelled, in 1957, he stopped drinking and lost weight. He lived for another fifty-seven years, during which he was never more than intermittently employed. How could so brilliant a talent have had so brief a run at the top?

Sid Caesar was born on September 8, 1922—not in folkloric Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, like so many Jewish entertainers, but in the dour industrial city of Yonkers, just north of the Bronx. His father was Polish, his mother Ukrainian. The family name was Ziser (“zee-sir”), easily Anglicized to Caesar. As a boy, he didn’t speak much but made faces and noise; some adults thought him “impaired.” His parents ran a luncheonette and rooming house near factories whose immigrant workers came in to eat. Busing tables, Caesar heard Italian, German, Polish, and other tongues, absorbing their music without grasping the words. He became a master of foreign gibberish, his doubletalk—animated by expressive pantomime—conveying more meaning than anything he could say in English. When President Eisenhower complimented Caesar’s Russian, he was apparently in earnest.

Caesar was never sure his parents loved him. A fear of abandonment and of the fragility of success (the luncheonette had been sold during the Depression) haunted him. A mediocre student, he was saved by chance. One tenant left behind a saxophone—a Selmer Cigar Cutter tenor—which Caesar claimed as his own, later saying that he was glad it hadn’t been a shotgun. He took lessons at the Hebrew National Orphan Home, practiced obsessively, and, as a teen-ager, played all over Westchester, then “in the mountains”—the Catskills, where pale, urban Jews came to gorge on sunshine, blintzes, and comedy. At hotels like the Avon and Vacationland, he watched the working comics, “picking up tools of the trade like rhythm, timing, discipline, and improvisation,” as Margolick writes, and soon began taking the stage himself.

Caesar joined the Coast Guard in 1939, when he was seventeen, and married Florence Levy (once and forever) in 1943. In the Coast Guard, he performed in the service revue “Tars and Spars,” under the eye of Max Liebman, the extraordinary Vienna-born impresario, who could, despite shaky English, build a full musical at a Poconos resort in a week—dancers, jazz players, even opera singers—and then start over the next. He was rehearsing for an unknown future. “More than anyone else,” Margolick writes, “Max Liebman made Sid Caesar Sid Caesar.”

In 1949, the Admiral Corporation, a television-set manufacturer, took the plunge into production, mounting the “Admiral Broadway Revue” on both the NBC and DuMont networks. Liebman produced and directed. A Variety headline read “Admiral Bows Sock Revue with Top Artists, Yocks, Sizzling Pace Comparable to Best Broadway Hits.” The theatre was still the gold standard, but Caesar himself, as the Chicago Tribune noted, was “one of the soundest arguments for buying a television set.” The performers on Admiral’s show were selling the hardware that made their performances possible.

Admiral, bizarrely, gave the series up after half a season, preferring to spend its money on making more television sets than on production costs. (“We were cancelled because we were too good,” Caesar said.) In late 1949, one of Margolick’s heroes, the NBC vice-president Pat Weaver, rescued Liebman and his troupe. A high-minded man, Weaver believed that the country craved dancers and opera singers, as well as comics. On February 25, 1950, at 9 P.M., “Your Show of Shows” was launched.

Much like “Saturday Night Live” a quarter century later, “Your Show of Shows” was hell to put together. It was ninety minutes long, week after week, with commercials often lasting no more than a minute, and without cue cards. (Caesar thought they stifled spontaneity.) Lodged between musical numbers, the comics, Imogene Coca among them, did six sketches, having already discarded dozens of ideas earlier in the week. On broadcast day, they rehearsed three times, with constant eleventh-hour subtractions and additions. When the show was over, the cast and writers would head to Danny’s Hide-A-Way, on Steak Row (East Forty-fifth Street), where Caesar would down a bottle of Stolichnaya and lead the others in a Trimalchian feast—sometimes throwing up, either from nerves or from the desire to keep eating.