Today would have been the 100th birthday of movie legend Irving Brecher. You’ve never heard of him, you say? Have you heard of the Marx Brothers? The Wizard of Oz? Meet Me in St. Louis? Then you’ve heard of Irv Brecher!
Brecher died in 2008 at the age of 94. I actually attended his funeral — he was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California,surrounded by many of his former colleagues. Hillside is the final resting place for many of the movie industry’s most prominent Jews — the list of people buried there reads like a Friars Club Roast: Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Moe Howard, Shelley Winters, Sheldon Leonard, Jan Murray, and, in a spectacular towering white stone monument at the entrance to the park, Al Jolson. By all accounts, Irv Brecher was a joy to be around. At the funeral, his wife and his friends confirmed that he could be quite difficult and opinionated, but that he was also a fantastically loyal friend and, of course, one of the funniest, wittiest men on the planet.
Irving Brecher was born on January 17, 1914, in the Bronx. He was a teenager working in a movie theatre on 57th Street in Manhattan when he started sending one-liners to columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. Amazingly, many of his jokes ended up in print. When someone told him he should try getting paid for the one-liners, he put an add in Variety, touting his “positively Berle-proof gags—so bad not even Milton will steal them.” Milton Berle saw the ad, thought it was funny, and became Brecher’s first paying customer: $50 for a page of one-liners. Irv thought he was a millionaire. He was only 19.
The young writer started writing for Berle’s radio show and eventually got signed by producer-director Mervyn LeRoy who brought him to MGM. There he was the sole writer for two films starring his idols, the Marx Brothers. Brecher wrote the screenplays for At the Circus and Go West. He used to tell the story about meeting Groucho for the first time. He walked into Mervyn LeRoy’s office and Groucho was sitting at LeRoy’s desk.
“I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Marx.’ He said, “Hello? That’s supposed to be a funny line? Is this the guy who’s supposed to write our movie?” I probably turned white.
“Then I said, ‘Well, I saw you say hello in one of your movies, and I thought it was so funny I’d steal it and use it now.”
How many people could come up with such a perfect response to such an intimidating remark? Groucho laughed, took Irving to lunch, and they were great pals from then on.
Although his personal style was far more appropriate for Marx Brothers films and the other Jewish comedians he wrote for including George Burns, Milton Berle and Jack Benny, Brecher was soon writing screenplays for some of the most beloved MGM musicals of all time, most notably Meet Me in St. Louis. The year before he died, I attended a Writers’ Guild screening of that film where Brecher regaled the crowd with all sorts of ribald stories of those glory days. Though well into his 90s and not well, Brecher always came to life in front of an appreciative crowd — he could have gone on for hours.
Irving Brecher’s other claim to fame was creating the series The Life of Riley that gave Jackie Gleason his first big break. The show won the first Emmy Award in 1949 but was cancelled after a year because of low ratings and because Jackie Gleason wanted to move on to other projects. It reappeared in 1953 with William Bendix in the title role and stayed on TV until 1964.
Irving’s final screenplay was for another adaptation of a stage musical, 1963’s Bye Bye Birdie” Brecher did a fabulous job adapting that Elvis-like story into a hysterically funny film starring Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Maureen Stapleto and a hot new discovery, Ann-Margret. Between The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis and Bye Bye Birdie, I probably haven’t gone a week without quoting some line written by Irv Brecher. Here’s the feisty man himself, in a spot filmed during the big Writer’s Guild strike when Brecher was already in his 90s: