A Hit Man's Life

Tho

mas Meehan is sipping coffee by the rooftop pool of the tony Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. From the ankles up, he's obviously a visitor from the Northeast, swathed in a tweed jacket despite the sunny skies and warm temperature. But on his feet is a dash of West Coast: a brand-new pair of brown suede New Balance sneakers. "Mel got me these," he explains. "He said I looked too much like a New Yorker in my black dress shoes." The munificent Mel is Mel Brooks, and the bond between Meehan and Brooks has been that much stronger since the duo teamed up to spin Brooks' 1968 film The Producers into a Broadway hit — an effort that earned both men Tonys in 2001.

Now Meehan, who looks more like a comparative-literature professor than the zany other half of a comedic duo, is visiting California to see if another Brooks film, Young Frankenstein (1974), can yield the same dividends as their previous endeavor. And if that means wearing a pair of suede sneakers, then so be it.

When it comes to recasting films as Broadway musicals, Meehan's got cachet in movie circles. Last year he helped turn John Waters' 1988 cult film Hairspray into a Broadway blockbuster. Waiting in the wings — until he completes revisions of the London hit Bombay Dreams for New York audiences — is Sylvester Stallone's Rocky.

Meehan is no stranger to theater. He had his first hit in 1977, when he won a Tony for writing Annie. At 72, he shows no signs of waning. "I feel like I'm 27," he says. "I look in the mirror, and I'm surprised to see this old man looking at me."

Like many of the characters he writes about, Meehan had a modest upbringing that was the prelude to a life of fame and fortune. Raised in Suffern, N.Y., then a small town dotted with apple orchards, he was the oldest of four brothers and sisters. When he was 15, his father died, and his mother returned to nursing to support her family. He says with astonishment in almost a whisper that he has a jacket that cost as much as the house he grew up in.

From the age of 10, Meehan was set on becoming a writer, and he went to college fully expecting to be a "serious" novelist one day. At Hamilton College in upstate New York, he earned the senior writing prize of $350 before graduating and moving to New York City. By age 24, he had landed a job at the New Yorker, where his first editor, Roger Angell, remembers him as being "terrifically funny" even then.

Meehan wrote dozens of parodies, short stories and other humor pieces for the New Yorker. One of the more famous was a 1962 short story, "Yma Dream," a frequently anthologized tale of a strange cocktail party whose guests bear tongue-twister names. He adapted it as a sketch for Anne Bancroft's 1970 television special, Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man, which not only won him an Emmy but also introduced him to both its director and producer, Martin Charnin, who later offered him his first Broadway show, and his future writing partner, Bancroft's husband, Mel Brooks.

When Charnin called two years later with the idea of recasting the Little Orphan Annie comic strip as a musical, Meehan had zero interest. "My reaction was, 'Ugh, that's the worst idea I ever heard.' I still had all these serious ideas of being a serious writer, and I thought if I was going to write a musical, it was going to be something monumental, not comic strips. But he talked me into it."

The Annie theme would replay itself through much of Meehan's subsequent work. Whether the main character is an orphan in the Depression, a down-and-out producer or a working-class prize-fighter, Meehan roots for the underdog. "It wasn't until after Annie opened that I looked around and said, 'Oh, my God, I've written Cinderella,'" he says.

Meehan went on to write books for such lesser-known musicals as the 1979 I Remember Mama and the 1993 Ain't Broadway Grand? But when Mel Brooks, with whom he had co-written the films Spaceballs and To Be or Not to Be, came along with plans to set The Producers onstage, Meehan found himself back in familiar territory.

The Producers isn't exactly a Cinderella story, but it ends on an upbeat note that immediately attracted Meehan. In the show, producer Max Bialystock is back on top, and Leo Bloom, an accountant with big dreams, is a Broadway producer who gets the girl and the money. "Sweeney Todd is the most brilliant job of musical writing that I know of, in terms of both score and book," says Meehan, "but I don't work that side of the street. I only do shows with happy endings."

The real-life ending has been even sweeter for Meehan, who watched The Producers sweep the 2001 Tonys. At that point, Meehan and his wife, Carolyn Capstick, had planned to take some time off and mill about their place in Nantucket. But Meehan was lured back to the stage to work on Hairspray with Mark O'Donnell, the playwright and novelist, who had already drafted the initial script for the musical. "When I came into Hairspray, there was a lot of very funny, very clever stuff that Mark had written," says Meehan. "The thing I helped do mainly was to focus the story."