Book review: “When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy” by David Margolick

Two mysteries of my childhood: Imogene Coca and Nanette Fabray.

These two names seemed to pop up frequently on the edges of conversations on television — on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, perhaps, or on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety hour, or at an awards show. I could tell that they were significant in some way, but I couldn’t figure out how.

This, you must realize, was when I was eight or nine and into my teens.

Now, after I’ve read David Margolick’s fascinating new book When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, I understand. And I don’t.

I understand now that these two women were the female co-stars of Sid Caesar on his two huge early television programs: Coca on Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), Fabray on Caesar’s Hour (1954–1957).

I understand how successful and influential those shows were at the time and how gargantuan as a comic entertainer Sid Caesar was. Indeed, Margolick’s book is filled with the awestruck admiration of later generations of comedians for Caesar’s over-the-top, overabundance of talent.

And I also understand now, nearly seventy years after the fact, why I had no clear idea who Coca or Fabray were or, for that matter, Caesar.

 

Baseball

All my life I’ve told the story of how I fell in love with baseball and, despite being a lifelong Chicagoan, how I fell in love with the New York Yankees.

It was during the 1957 World Series. The TV was on in our apartment on Chicago’s West Side while our parents had some friends over, and I remember watching a game — between the Yankees and the eventual series winner, the Milwaukee Braves — and suddenly baseball made sense to me. Gears shifted, and everything fell into place about the sport. (Well, maybe not the infield fly rule.)

I guess I could have ended up a Milwaukee Braves fan, but it was the Yankees I embraced as a fan. It also helped, I think, that, a short while later, I got a Yankees hat that I wore for months before realizing, from looking at a baseball card, that it was a New York Giants cap. Nonetheless, by then, I was hooked.

All of that is old news.  What’s new news is that, while reading Margolick’s book, I realized that the television set on which I saw the 1957 World Series must have been newly purchased. Those baseball games must have been among the first shows I ever saw on TV.

 

Just names

I say this must have been the case because it explains the mystery of Imogene Coca and Nanette Fabray. Not the mystery of who they were, but the mystery of why I never quite understood their importance.

It seems certain now, in retrospect, that our family never watched either of the two immensely popular Sid Caesar shows.  Otherwise, I would have had some idea of who Coca and Fabray were, either by having seen them myself on TV or by hearing my parents talk about them and those shows.

Because we hadn’t seen those programs, the names of the two female comedians, as well as that of Caesar himself, were just names to me without any nostalgic resonance.

That’s what I’ve come to understand from reading When Caesar Was King.

 

Pfft!

But here’s what I don’t understand:

It was one thing for Coca and Fabray to fade away from high-level success after their Caesar years, but how was it possible that Caesar himself could be such a big deal from February 25, 1950, until May 25, 1957, and then — pfft! — nothing?

As Margolick makes clear, five of Caesar’s writers had long and highly successful careers after working for him: Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen.

But Caesar’s career as a comic force in American entertainment pretty much ended with the end of Caesar’s Hour when he was 36. He lived another 55 years and never again reached anything like his former stardom.

 

The comic yips

In fact, I do understand it, in a way, because that’s what Margolick’s compelling and well-told story is all about — how Sid Caesar became the huge success he was as a television moneymaker and as a brilliantly gifted comic and how he fell from grace for any number of reasons.

He ate too much and drank too much and was too acquisitive and became a bitter unfunny human being. He drove himself so hard to be a success during his eight years at the top that he exhausted himself and, it seems, exhausted his comic talent.

He had great writers who, when they finally had to, got out from under his shadow and went after their main chance, never looking back.

It is, at its heart, a sad and ugly story of a creative genius who forgot how to be a genius.

It called to mind, for me, the memory of New York Yankees second baseman Chuck Knobloch who, for no apparent reason, suddenly found that he couldn’t throw straight to first base any more.  He had what was called “the yips.”

Caesar came down with a case of the comic yips.  Knobloch, who hit very well, was moved to left field where he no longer had to worry about throwing to first.  Maybe Caesar could have found some other position to play, such as dramatic actor (a la Frank Sinatra), but he never did.

 

His body wasn’t failing

It also called to mind the sad situation that every athlete, no matter how great, has to face at some point — when physical talent fades away.

Think of Babe Ruth, unquestionably the greatest baseball player of all time, a hitter (and pitcher) who loomed over the major leagues for two decades, boosting the popularity of the sport beyond anything anyone had ever imagined.

And, then, at age 40, he couldn’t play at that level any longer. Indeed, he wasn’t even good enough to be average.

Caesar’s fall was similar to that, and, yet, it wasn’t his body that was failing him. It was his mind, heart and spirit.

 

A rich book

This is a book that would be depressing to read if it were only about Caesar. But what makes When Caesar Was King so rich is Margolick’s ability to place Caesar in the context of his times and of his Jewishness and of his community of writers.

Caesar and his two shows worked so well, in part, because television was so new that most of the audience was in big cities and on the East Coast. For that reason, the Jewish humor and the urbane New York comedy of the Caesar shows were perfect for the majority of viewers.

And, for the same reason, as television expanded to more Midwestern and Western parts of the nation and to more rural areas, Caesar’s comic tone proved less and less attractive to viewers until, finally, he was crushed by, of all people, Lawrence Welk.

 

Short-changed

So, yes, Margolick has written the story of Sid Caesar and his shows and his times with such verve and zest that, now, seven decades later, I understand who Imogene Coca and Nanette Fabray were, and who Sid Caesar was.

And, yes, I can understand why the complex personality of Sid Caesar led him to a self-destructive way of living — and of entertaining — that he was left with no second act after his immense success of eight years of television dominance.

I understand that Caesar was a human being who, afflicted with the demons that he had, could not pull himself together to find a new way of tapping into his comic inventiveness.

At the same time, though, I don’t understand.

Which, I think, is to say that I don’t want to understand.

Which, I think, is to say that I feel short-changed.

 

Never remade

In the years before I knew television, Caesar was making comic art.  But, then, in 1957, when I began to be able to watch TV, he wasn’t there in any sustained way to blow up and reshape comedy as he had from 1950 to 1957.

Frank Sinatra was a crooner for the bobby socks crowd, and then he remade himself into a saloon singer for adults, becoming the greatest American pop voice of the twentieth century.

Sid Caesar never remade himself. That’s the sad thing.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

2.27.26