I Must Say Page 2

  “Marty! Pssst . . . Marty!”

  I was in character, so I tried to ignore him. But he wouldn’t let up.

  “Pssst . . . Marty! Horrible news! Shakespeare’s is closed tonight! Wink if Bavarian’s makes sense.” That was another Hamilton restaurant.

  I did not wink or acknowledge Paul in any way. Inside, however, I was saying, Paul, when I am able, I will kill you.

  As it turned out, we had a perfectly pleasant dinner at Bavarian’s that night, and Paul and Eugene very charitably acted like I was halfway decent in the play. But Gilda knew the score. As soon as I came out the stage door, she wrapped me up in her arms and said, in the sweetest way, “Aw, honey, don’t ever do a play like this again. Ever. Promise.”

  By 1976 I was feeling, for the first time in my life, a measure of professional regret. I realized that there was a hip energy in my friends’ careers that was absent in mine. That year Catherine O’Hara, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, and Harold Ramis started work on a primitive version of SCTV—Second City Television—for Global, the network that Everything Goes had been on. Gilda, with whom I remained on good terms after our breakup in ’74, had moved to New York and was now making it big on Saturday Night Live. Paul was in New York, too, as the piano player in SNL’s house band.

  Me? Well, at the top of 1977, I was finishing up a run in Toronto in Harry’s Back in Town, a revue of the songs of Harry Warren, the old-timey tunesmith behind “Lullaby of Broadway” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” Not a bad show, truthfully, but . . . not exactly plugged into the happenin’ zeitgeist, either. Sure, I was fortunate to have a hot and sexy live-in girlfriend named Nancy Dolman, whose beauteous and supportive presence I did not for a moment take for granted. But by February I had nothing on the employment docket: no work, no auditions, no exciting prospects. It was a career low point.

  That month, absent any professional obligations, I flew out to L.A. to join Nancy, who was knocking on the doors of the record companies, trying to get a deal. (She was an amazingly talented singer and songwriter, her music not miles away from what Linda Ronstadt and Melissa Manchester were doing at the time.)

  It so happened that Paul Shaffer was in town at the same time, since SNL was on hiatus. He was staying at the Sunset Marquis hotel—walking distance from where we were staying. Bill Murray was also in town, so Paul invited Nancy and me to join the two of them for dinner. Remember that this was the winter of 1977. Chevy Chase had left Saturday Night Live after the show’s first season, 1975–’76. Bill was drafted in as Chevy’s replacement, and he was just now coming into his own. In a couple of months, he and Paul would unleash upon the world their iconic recurring “Lounge Singer” bit, in which Bill was the smarmy crooner Nick, and Paul was his accompanist.

  I, meanwhile, was stuck in a rut. There was always work for me in Toronto, but increasingly it was in the dreary safe harbor of cabaret. Having once felt like the guy who didn’t need Second City, I now felt like the guy who, unlike all of his classmates, chose not to go to university because he wanted to open his own shawarma stand, but for some reason the shawarma stand hadn’t worked out. So now he was behind the grade.

  Nancy and I were walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, en route to our dinner with Bill and Paul, when I froze. There was a bench nearby. I coolly turned to her and said, “I have to sit down now.”

  “Why?” Nancy said. “What’s going on?”

  “I cannot spend an evening with Bill and Paul,” I said. “I can’t spend another evening pretending to be happy for someone else’s success. I just need to sit.”

  So we sat. I brooded silently. I wasn’t jealous of my friends, but I resented my own lack of fulfillment and momentum.

  Nancy, bless her heart, sat by me and held my hand. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, she whispered, “How long are we going to sit here?”

  “Boy, that’s a good question,” I responded. “If I only had an answer.”

  “Interesting,” said Nan.

  I gathered myself—eventually. But we didn’t have dinner with Bill and Paul that night. Instead we headed east, to the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, where an improvisational comedy troupe called War Babies was performing. They were good. They made me laugh. And I finally saw the light: That is what I am supposed to be doing.

  The next morning, I phoned Andrew Alexander, who owned and operated Second City Toronto, and boldly declaimed, “I want to join Second City.” Andrew, the savior of so many of us, was, thankfully, happy to make a place for me.

  And so northward I flew, ready to begin life as Martin Short, Funnyman. And forever thereafter, into our eventual lives as Los Angelenos, Nancy, whenever we drove past the corner of North Flores Street and Santa Monica Boulevard, would point to the bench and say, “Hey, look, honey, there’s Breakdown Corner.”

  HUMBLE CELEBRITY ME

  Let’s jump, for a moment, to the present day. Not so long ago, I found myself onstage in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood, about two miles northeast of Breakdown Corner, giving a speech in honor of Steve Martin. Steve was receiving a lifetime-achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a remarkable evening, and Steve was deeply moved. Kind of like how I felt when I got my CableACE Award in ’87, but, you know, different.

  The lifetime-achievement Oscar is not the kind you’re awarded in front of a gigantic international TV audience at the big ceremony in February, but rather the kind distributed at a comparatively modest L.A. banquet called the Governors Awards—as I described it onstage, “the highest honor an actor can receive . . . in mid-November.”

  “Of all the people I have a fake show-business friendship with,” I said in my remarks, “Steve is the star I’m fake-closest to.” I also reminded Steve of the old adage: This year’s honorary Oscar is a good predictor of next year’s “In Memoriam” package.

  A little later, turning momentarily serious, as the conventions of showbiz demand, I thanked Steve for his guidance, his wisdom, and the kindnesses he has shown me and my family. I adore Steve Martin. We’ve been great, close friends for almost thirty years, ever since we did the movie ¡Three Amigos! together in 1986.

  After the ceremony, a group of us adjourned to Steve and his wife Anne Stringfield’s home for a celebratory binge on grilled cheese sandwiches and Dom Pérignon.

  The gents of our group were standing elbow-to-elbow in our tuxedos: Steve, me, Tom Hanks, Frank Oz, and, to lower the median age a tad, Judd Apatow and Bill Hader. We must have looked uncommonly smart, for the director Nancy Meyers, who was snapping photos of us with her iPhone, kept telling us, “You look just like that picture!”

  The picture to which she was alluding is the famous “Kings of Hollywood” shot taken by the great photographer Slim Aarons on New Year’s Eve, 1957: Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart gathered together at the restaurant Romanoff’s, all of them in white tie, looking dashing as they laugh at some shared joke.

  I had to agree with Nancy: looking around the room, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that it was a pretty glamorous Hollywood night. And another thought occurred: Wow, this is a long way from Breakdown Corner, and the days when my Nancy and I barely knew how to navigate this city.

  One of the great benefits of that journey—from Breakdown Corner to comic-icon status (not my words, but those of my staff)—is that I have been fortunate enough to have become friends with some fascinating people, many of whom happen to be famous. Some of these friendships have endured for so long that they’ve become tenured, unbreakable.

  This is especially true now that we’re all reaching the age where the phrase “lifetime achievement” is part of the conversation. For instance, Steve, Tom, and I, along with our film-producer friend Walter Parkes, who used to run the DreamWorks movie studio, get colonoscopies together every couple of years. Well, not together together—we get separate rooms at the clinic. But we actually gather for a colonoscopy sleepover at Steve’s house the night befo
re the big day. We like to make a party of it. A Hootenanny of Purge, if you will.

  As anyone who has gone for a colonoscopy knows, you are required, the evening before you undergo the procedure, to cleanse your digestive system—to make it spic and span for the gastroenterologist’s camera. And as much as we show business folk would kill to be able to bring hair and makeup people along for the journey, most hospitals have a real issue with that.

  The goal of the evening before—Colonoscopy Eve, as we Christians call it—is to pass the time while also passing as much solid material from our systems as humanly possible. We even have the event catered, inasmuch as you can cater a gathering where the only permitted foodstuffs are water, broth, and Jell-O. At around five p.m., the four of us dutifully glug down our barium-sulfate milkshakes, made from a liquid suspension that highlights the GI tract for the doctor—and sits like molten lead in the stomach. Then we settle in for the evening and play poker.

  There’s an odd kind of rhythm to this poker game; oftentimes there’s only one of us at the table. By midnight, the scene in the nearest of Steve’s bathrooms is straight out of a disabled Carnival cruise ship circa Day 15. The following morning we drive as a group to the clinic and get our insides checked out. A few hours later, we’re happily and relievedly toasting our colorectal good health over margaritas at the Ivy.

  I first met Tom Hanks briefly in 1983, when he and John Candy were filming what would turn out to be Tom’s breakthrough movie, Splash. John, always charitable of spirit, was making a video for a benefit that his old high school in Canada was holding, and he’d arranged for most of the SCTV cast to appear in it: Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, and me. We filmed it in some studio in L.A., and John came straight from the set of Splash with Tom in tow.

  In hindsight, Tom, not yet a box-office juggernaut, was the one who was starstruck: not so much over me, the new guy, but over the rest of the group. SCTV, he later told me, was huge to him—his comedy Beatles. His eyes went wide with wonderment in that boyish way that they still do when he gets excited; if you’ve seen him in Big, you know the expression I mean.

  Tom’s first real memory of me is at a party we both attended in 1986 at the home of Chevy and Jayni Chase. Tom had just arrived, and was passing through the anteroom when he caught sight of me standing on top of a chair, holding forth before a crowd. He turned to his wife, Rita, and said, “Who’s the loud guy?” Over the next few years our wives became close friends, and we quickly followed suit. Tom is a deeply lovely man who, in person, is exactly what you hope he would be—as funny and smart and decent as it gets.

  Tom has always been obsessed with pens. Whereas many people’s retail fantasy would be to have a moment alone in Tiffany’s after closing, Tom would choose OfficeMax. A couple of Christmases ago, I ran into Tom at a pharmacy near where we both live. Actually, I spotted him first. He was, of course, in the stationery section, engrossed in the variety of Post-it notes—Tom is also very particular about his Post-its—and I crept up behind him and blew a puff of warm breath onto the back of his neck, just enough to make him jump out of his shoes. “Aaaagh!” went he. Relieved that it was only me, Tom asked what I was up to. It was Christmas Eve day, and as I explained to Tom, I was heading over to the Gelson’s supermarket to buy ingredients for the French punch I would later be making. “Can I come with ya!” Tom said, doing his best demented, demonic smirk.

  So there we were in Gelson’s: me with my list, Tom at the helm of the shopping cart. “See,” Tom said, “this is what it would be like if we had an apartment together. I’d be pushing, you’d be loading.”

  It was a busy time at Gelson’s, with lots of cars in the parking lot. As I maneuvered my vehicle through the traffic, Tom and I excitedly talking about the various gifts we’d gotten people, I must have lost focus. I didn’t notice a car in front of me backing out of a space, and—THUNK!—I slow-motion crashed into it.

  Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the man whose car I’d hit couldn’t have been more gracious. As I got out of my car, he immediately recognized me and said with a smile, “Oh! Well, I guess I don’t need to see your ID!” Then when Tom got out from the passenger side, the guy almost had a heart attack. I went back into the car and started rooting around my glove compartment for the insurance card. By the time I’d dug it out, I found the guy engrossed in deep conversation with Tom. “Look,” he was saying, “You don’t have to read the whole script. But if you can just listen to the music . . .”

  Sometimes, like in that parking-lot episode, people are just delighted to see your face, no matter the circumstances; that’s one of the upsides of fame. Generally it’s fantastic to be a celebrity, an absolute privilege. By doing the movie ¡Three Amigos!, for example, I became friends not only with Steve Martin but also with Chevy Chase. And by being friends with Chevy, I got to meet one of my all-time idols, Frank Sinatra. Like I said, I’m by and large a pre-rock guy. When our children were growing up, Nancy constantly told them, “You have to understand your father’s strange time-warp approach to life. I did not listen to Frank Sinatra. My parents listened to Frank Sinatra.” I can’t help it; I’ve always loved Frank, as long as I can remember. And through Chevy I met him the night of September 17, 1992, after he’d given a concert at the Greek Theatre in L.A.

  I should back up. A few years earlier, sometime in the late 1980s, I had an opportunity to meet Sinatra that didn’t pan out. At the time Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and I shared the management team of Rollins Joffe Morra & Brezner. One day Buddy Morra got word from Sinatra’s camp that the three of us—Robin, Billy, and me—were invited, with our wives, to stay at Twin Palms, the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. This, though none of us knew Frank. The gist of it was that Frank wanted to be amused, and we were the performing monkeys he had selected. The three of us were like, Fantastic! How great will this be? Hanging with Frank and getting to show off our leisure wear? But our wives collectively vetoed the idea. They found it degrading for us men to submit so willingly to Frank’s whim—or maybe they just didn’t want to be known as the women married to Frank’s monkeys. In any event, it didn’t happen.

  Cut to 1992. Chevy called me one day and said, “Marty, do you want to be my date to see Frank Sinatra at the Greek Theatre?” I jumped at the chance.

  The very process of going to the show was a big production, orchestrated, aptly enough, by a big-time TV producer, George Schlatter, the creator of, among other programs, Laugh-In. We all met up at George’s house before the concert for drinks, a blend of what you might call old and middle-aged Hollywood: Chevy and me, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Don and Barbara Rickles, Dinah Shore, Jackie Collins, Lionel Richie, and so on. Then, as if we were a senior group on a big outing from an assisted-living facility, we were all loaded onto a bus, which took us to the backstage area of the Greek Theatre.

  Frank was in good voice that night, and Chevy was especially funny. Seated directly in front of us was the old-time superagent Swifty Lazar. Swifty, if you don’t know what he looked like, was a hairless-little-gnome kind of guy who wore comically oversize eyeglasses that further emphasized how hairless, little, and gnomic he was. Unbeknown to Swifty, Chevy kept removing his own sunglasses and hovering them over the back of Swifty’s head, effectively creating a second Swifty face. This caused Dinah Shore and Jackie Collins to titter like schoolgirls in the back row of a classroom.

  After the show and the bus ride back to George Schlatter’s home, I got to talking with Dinah, who had actually sought me out. Who knew that the 1950s big-band sweetheart, 1970s talk-show queen, and avatar of the Ladies Professional Golf Association was such a massive SCTV fan? We chitchatted a while, and then Dinah said, “Hey, do you want to meet Frank?”

  At long last, the moment I was waiting for! He was at the party at the Schlatters’ by this point, standing at the bar by himself. Dinah guided me over. I steeled myself, offered my hand, and said, “Mr. Sinatra, my name is Martin Short.�
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  Paul Shaffer maintains that, over many years and hundreds of tellings of this story, I have embellished it further and further, and that there’s no way that Frank talked like a gangster out of Guys and Dolls, as he does in my dinner-party recountings. But I swear that he talked exactly like a Damon Runyon character. What he said to me was, “I know well of you. And you’re mah-velous.”

  In response, I couldn’t help but gush. “Well, Mr. Sinatra,” I said, “you have no idea, no concept, of how big a fan I am of yours.” Frank just stared back at me and said, “I think I do.” Sensing my nerves, he said, “Whaddya drinking, kid?” I told him, “Oh, whatever you’re drinking, Frank!” He turned to the bartender and said, “Jack Daniels.”

  The bartender looked at me and said, “Straight up or on the rocks?” But in my nervousness, I thought he said, “Straight up or relaxed?” So I said, “Relaxed.”

  Sinatra, irritated at my baffling non sequitur response, turned to me and said, “HE SAID ‘STRAIGHT UP OR ON THE ROCKS!’”

  I’d known Frank Sinatra for fifteen seconds, and already I’d pissed him off. Pretty soon, I thought, he’s going to take out his gun and shoot me in the leg, and then I’ll never be able to enjoy his albums in quite the same way again. So maybe it was time to split.

  It’s an old story for me: every time I’ve had the chance to meet someone I looked up to as a kid, the experience has been so profound or overwhelming that I’ve ended up blowing it, either by being tongue-tied or by saying something utterly silly. I don’t have this problem with contemporary stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Nothing against George or Brad, but it’s the people who were huge to you when you were twelve who, in person, render you unsteady on your feet. They bring those youthful feelings of awe right back to the surface.

  In 1976 I saw Shirley MacLaine perform her one-woman revue at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, and somehow I wangled my way into an opportunity to go backstage after the show. Since I knew I’d be meeting MacLaine, I actually wrote down in advance what I was going to say to her, and rehearsed my lines before going to the theater. I would tell her that she was a magnificent performer who had been brilliant in The Apartment, and whose elegance shone through every song she sang that night. And then Miss MacLaine would say “Thank you,” and move on to the next person.