When I was young, my mother was very ill, and the doctor said to me: “Don’t ever get angry with your mother, because you might kill her.” The only other thing he said was: “Try to make her laugh.” So he did an evil thing and a good thing with just one breath.
I get nervous at the strangest times. Why? I don’t know, except that when I was 10 or 11, my mother had a heart attack – her second – and when she came back she said to her friends after dinner: “And now, my son will entertain you.” My heart was racing. I thought: what am I supposed to do? So I sat down at the piano, as if I were about to play, which I couldn’t. I said: “I will now give my imitation of a little boy going to bed.” And I walked out as fast as I could.
If there’s an audience, I think they’re going to expect me to be funny. But what if I’m not funny? What if I fail?
I went to military academy at 13. When I came home for Christmas and my mother saw all the bruises where I’d been beaten up, she started to cry. So I went back to my old school.
Whatever simplicity I’ve achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I’ve read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I’ve forgotten what the point was.
In 1956 I was drafted to the peacetime army. At my request I was sent to Valley Forge army hospital in Pennsylvania. I chose the neuropsychiatric hospital, because I thought: that’s the closest thing to acting. I had to help administer electroshock therapy there. I’d see the patients watching Amos ‘n’ Andy every morning – one boy would stand right in front of the television set, blocking the view, kneel down and start to pray. I said: “Now, that boy is sick. But not that much sicker than I am.”
I’ve read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.
Sex? I thought about it, but not when my mother was alive. When she died I was 23. It was both terrible and liberating. I thought: I’m free to act normally. And I became more normal.
I didn’t know what love was – I knew what falling in love was, but lust is not loving, it’s falling.
I first met Mel Brooks one night after a performance of Brecht’s Mother Courage, a play I was doing on Broadway with Mel’s girlfriend, Anne Bancroft. He had on a beautiful black Russian marine pea jacket. He said: “They used to call it a ‘urine jacket’, but they didn’t sell.” I thought: Oh, God, this is the guy for me! He read me the first 30 pages of a new movie he was writing, and he said: “Do you want to play Leo Bloom?” And that’s how The Producers happened.
What I learned from Mel Brooks was audacity – in performance as in life. Maybe you go too far, but try it.
People think I’m a Francophile, but I’m not: I’m an Englishphile. I like cream teas, I like the Tate Gallery, I like the theatre. I think London taxis are the best in the world.
I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had a stem cell transplant seven years ago. I asked my doctor recently: “What if people say, ‘How are you doing, Gene?’ Apart from ‘swell’, what do I tell them?” He said: “Say you’re in complete remission.” I said: “What if they don’t understand that? Can I say I’m cured?” He said: “Just tell them that if you outlive your doctor, you’re cured.” I thought the best way to secure that would be to get a gun and shoot my doctor. But I love my doctor, so I can live with complete remission.
