At its peak, Your Show of Shows was watched by 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 theaters were half empty. However, Margolick chronicles Caesar's tribulations as well as his triumphs, and the story inevitably descends into sadness. In show business, those whom the gods wanted to destroy are sentenced to live in Beverly Hills. After his second show, Caesar's Hour, was cancelled, he quit drinking in 1957 and lost weight. He lived another fifty-seven years, during which he worked only occasionally. How could such a brilliant talent last so long at the top?
Sid Caesar was born on September 8, 1922—not in folkloric Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, like many Jewish artists, but in the gritty industrial city of Yonkers, north of the Bronx. His father was Polish, his mother Ukrainian. The surname was Ziser (“zi-sir”), easily anglicized to “Caesar”. As a child, he spoke little, but made faces and made noise; some adults considered him “incompetent”. His parents ran a diner and rooming house near the factories where immigrant workers came to eat. While placing tables, Caesar heard Italian, German, Polish and other languages, absorbing their music without understanding the words. He became a master of foreign gibberish, his ambiguous speech, animated by expressive pantomime, conveying more meaning than anything he could say in English. When President Eisenhower praised Caesar for Russia, he obviously meant it.
Caesar was never sure that his parents loved him. He was haunted by the fear of abandonment and the fragility of success (the diner was sold during the Great Depression). A mediocre student, chance saved him. One tenant left behind a saxophone—a Selmer Cigar Cutter tenor—that Caesar called his own and later said he was glad it wasn't a shotgun. He took lessons at the Jewish National Orphanage, practiced obsessively and, as a teenager, played all over Westchester and then “up in the mountains” in the Catskills, where pale city Jews came to enjoy sunshine, pancakes and comedy. At hotels like the Avon and Vacationland, he watched acting comics, “picking up tools like rhythm, timing, discipline and improvisation,” Margolick writes, and soon began taking the stage himself.
Caesar enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939, when he was seventeen, and married Florence Levy (once and for all) in 1943. While in the Coast Guard, he performed in the service revue Tarsus and Spars under the supervision of Max Liebmann, a brilliant Vienna-born impresario who could, despite his shaky English, build an entire musical in a week at a Poconos resort—with dancers, jazz players, even opera singers—and then start again. He was rehearsing an unknown future. “More than anyone else,” Margolick writes, “Max Liebman made Sid Caesar Sid Caesar.”
In 1949, television manufacturer Admiral Corporation entered production, placing The Admiral Broadway Revue on NBC and DuMont. Liebman produced and directed. A Diversity The headline read: “Admiral Bowes Socks Revue with Top Performers, Yorkies, Breakneck Pace to Match Broadway's Greatest Hits.” The theater was still the gold standard, but Caesar himself, like the Chicago theater, Tribune as noted, was “one of the most compelling arguments for buying a television.” The Admiral's show performers sold the equipment that made their performances possible.
The Admiral, oddly enough, abandoned the series after half a season, preferring to spend the money on producing more televisions rather than on production costs. (“We got canceled because we were too good,” Caesar said.) In late 1949, one of Margolick’s heroes, NBC vice president Pat Weaver, rescued Liebman and his troupe. A noble man, Weaver believed that the country needed dancers and opera singers, as well as comics. February 25, 1950 at 9 P.M., “Your Show Show” was launched.
Like Saturday Night Live a quarter century later, Your Show of Shows was hell. It lasted ninety minutes, week after week, with commercials often lasting no more than a minute and without prompts. (Caesar believed they stifled spontaneity.) Between musical numbers, the comics, including Imogen Coca, did six sketches, having already tossed out dozens of ideas earlier in the week. On the day of broadcast, they rehearsed three times, with constant subtractions and additions for eleven hours. When the show ended, the cast and writers would head to Danny's Hideout on Steak Row (East Forty-fifth Street), where Caesar would drink a bottle of Stolichnaya and lead the others to a Trimalchian feast – sometimes making him sick, either from nerves or the desire to keep eating.
