Books in Brief: Where Have I Been?

Where Have I Been? An Autobiography, by Sid Caesar with Bill Davidson (Crown, 280 pp., $12.95). “Your husband is going to be a big, big star,” producer Max Liebman told Sid Caesar’s wife shortly before work began on the premiere, in 1950, of NBC’s Your Show of Shows—to which Florence Caesar nervously replied: “Couldn’t he just be a little star?” Liebman was right, of course; Your Show, of Shows became an instant hit, swept the 1951 Emmy Awards, and won for its brilliant star a lasting place in the ranks of the great comedians. But Mrs. Caesar was right, too; sudden fame, added to the unresolved conflicts of a Jewish-Yonkers-Depression childhood, turned her gifted husband into a pill-popping alcoholic who vomited away twenty years of his life, ending up as a forgotten washout working the dinner-theater circuit. With the release in 1972 of Ten from Your Show of Shows, a movie put together from old kinescopes of the original television broadcasts, more and more people began to wonder exactly what had happened to Sid Caesar since he vanished from network TV in the late Fifties. Where Have I Been? is his belated answer. An as-told-to autobiography skillfully edited by Bill Davidson, Where Have I Been? couples a harrowing account of Caesar’s “twenty-year blackout” with a charming memoir of the four chaotic seasons during which Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and a nowlegendary staff of writers (among them Neil Simon, Woody Allen, and Mel Brooks) churned out an hour and a half of madly funny live television week after week. Mr. Caesar is now on the wagon and back at work again; he recently finished preparing five hundred half-hour tapes drawn from the Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour kinescope libraries for either syndication or cable television sale. It’s about time, too—but until his tapes reach your television set, be sure to pick up a copy of Where Have I Been? and keep pestering your local art house to start showing Ten from Your Show of Shows on, say, a monthly basis. Jeffrey Hart is right: the Fifties were the good old days.