Rickles' book

IN David Lynch's film "The Elephant Man," a shrouded John Merrick (played by John Hurt) steps off a train and manages for a moment to move unnoticed through the crowd. Soon, though, a child points him out, and Merrick no longer belongs to the throng but is hounded by it, chased until he has no escape, and finally, turning unmasked to his tormentors, he lets forth with "I am not an animal!" - a cry now so famous as to beg farce, to suggest fodder for, say, a Mel Brooks movie. Except that "The Elephant Man" already is a Mel Brooks movie. In James Robert Parish's biography "It's Good to Be the King," Brooks, executive producer of the film, explains why he kept his name off the credits: "I knew the critics would take offense if there was a property they felt was sacred and the bean-farting wacko from 'Blazing Saddles' was going to put his grimy paws on it." That may have a certain logic, even though the movies that made Brooks a household name don't shy away from racism, from Nazism - from pain. As he broke it down in Kenneth Tynan's 1|978 New Yorker profile: "Tragedy is if I cut my finger. ... Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die." Parish chronicles the rise of Melvin Kaminsky from poor kid in Brooklyn to Catskills tummler to enlisted man removing land mines in World War II, a war he would turn into career-defining material: "'The Producers' made me the first Jew in history to make a buck out of Hitler." By the time Brooks turned to filmmaking in the late 1960s, he had been a writer for Sid Caesar's television shows and a co-creator of "Get Smart," and he had known breakout success as the 2,000-Year-Old Man in an improv act with Carl Reiner. Parish is generous with details: Anne Bancroft, to whom Brooks was married for 40 years, paid for acting school by teaching English to the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac; the foley artists responsible for the campfire flatulence of "Blazing Saddles" relied on hand-armpit coordination and wet soap for sound effects. Brooks is astute about comedy, and Parish, who has written a book about notorious Hollywood flops, is wise to quote him at length, especially since the author has a predilection for adjectives. On one page we encounter "the high-strung Brooks," "the antsy Brooks," "the hyperactive Mel" and "the faithful Mel," making the filmmaker more pet than man. More troubling still is the absence of endnotes. Parish draws liberally on Tynan's profile, usually without citing the anecdotes and quotations taken from the article. Since "Blazing Saddles," Brooks has continued mostly with parody - monster movies ("Young Frankenstein"), Hitchcock ("High Anxiety"), "Star Wars" ("Spaceballs"). Tynan did question "this dependence on incest - or, if you prefer, cannibalism." Or homage. Whatever you call it, Brooks has made a formidable career out of his affection for others' work; a biographer should respect his sources as well. Sometimes the man who does not belong to the crowd turns and cries, "I am not an animal - but you are!" Don Rickles, "the Merchant of Venom," has been tormenting willing, paying audiences for more than 50 years, spraying all manner of insult and invective. For "Bullethead," as Frank Sinatra called this bald, yapping comic, spectatorship is the sport. Like Brooks, Rickles spent his early years on the resort circuit and served in the military. After the war, he moved on to bar mitzvahs and supper clubs. Considerably warmer and fuzzier than his lounge act, this memoir, written with David Ritz in a clipped noir voice, draws readers close for celebrity spotting and backward glances. Rickles reserves the sharpest barbs for himself: "Failure was still my best friend," he recalls of his efforts in school. We might have known it all along: Rickles is a softy. He professes love for Sinatra, his mother, his wife and the Los Angeles Dodgers. More affecting than these avowals, however, are the comic's sideways reveries about the business of show. He doesn't say much about his own style - "I just let it happen" - but "Rickles' Book" betrays a sense of wonder at the whole enterprise, at what happens when you stare at an audience and it stares back. On the way to "Nowhere, Connecticut," to open for two strippers, Rickles casts doubt on his fellow performers: "Their dresses are plain. Their figures need work." Then the show starts. "They might have looked average in the car, but when the lights hit the runway, they come alive," he says. "The crowd is theirs." Liz Brown's reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Newsday, Time Out New York and other publications.