I Must Say Read online

  However, when I actually met Shirley MacLaine backstage and delivered my little prepared speech, she didn’t merely say “Thank you” and move on to the next person. Instead, she started a conversation. “But there was so much reverb through the sound system that I could barely hear myself,” she said. “Weren’t you bothered by that at all?” To which, flustered, I replied, “Thank you.”

  Damn thee, Marty Short! thought I.

  That very same year, I went to New York and scored a ticket to see the play The Royal Family, starring Rosemary Harris, at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway. I was by myself, and the seat next to me was empty. Suddenly, before the curtain went up, I heard the unmistakable voice of Katharine Hepburn asking people to move their feet as she made her way across my row: “Thank you. . . . Please remove that umbrella. . . . Get that leg out of my way, you idiot!” She took the seat next to me. Determined to play it cool, I said nothing to her. But before I knew it, I was so caught up in the brilliance of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s play that I had forgotten that Hepburn was even in the building. As the curtain fell at the end of act one, after Harris unleashed an astounding diatribe that culminated in her collapsing into a heap onstage, I turned to Hepburn, who I’d forgotten was Hepburn, and said, “Isn’t she classy?”

  And because I said it in a normal voice, like a normal person, Hepburn, in a very normal, conversational way, responded, “Well, Rosemary has an incredible ability to convey such deep emotions and make the audience feel that they’re a part of her journey. She’s always had that magic. I guess always will. So did Spencer.”

  At that, I was suddenly jolted back into the reality that I was having a conversation with Katharine Hepburn. When she finished, I said, “Well, Miss Hepburn, you’re no slouch.” Suddenly the conversation was over. I had burst the bubble and brought celebrity into the conversation. She turned to the person on her other side and said, “Do you mind if we switch seats?”

  Damn thee, Marty Short! thought I.

  Even from the grave, Frank Sinatra and his star power continue to trip me up. (Though, I must admit, these trip-ups make for good talk-show fodder.) I was fascinated by a Vanity Fair story from 2013 in which Mia Farrow, who was briefly married to Sinatra in the 1960s, said that her twenty-six-year-old son Ronan, long thought to be the biological son of Farrow and Woody Allen, could “possibly” be Sinatra’s kid, since she continued to see Frank long after they divorced. Ronan has grown up to be a formidable young man—bright, funny, and a media star in his own right, with his own public-affairs show on MSNBC. Just recently I happened to meet him. I was in an L.A. recording facility looping some dialogue for my part in the English-language version of the Japanese animated film The Wind Rises, for which veteran Hollywood producer Frank Marshall had recruited me.

  As it turned out, Ronan too had a part in the film, and he came in to work the same day. I’d been skeptical about the Sinatra-parentage thing, since, based on the photos I’d seen, it was entirely possible that Ronan got his blue eyes and good looks from his Farrow side. But when I saw him in person, I was utterly transfixed: Holy cow, this kid looks exactly like a young Frank. Obviously this was not a subject I was going to broach with him, though God knows I would have loved to.

  I introduced myself to Ronan and left it at that. I went into the recording booth for a round of looping. Then, during a break, I decided to walk into the common area to get some tea. There, sitting at a desk and filling out some paperwork, was Ronan, who was also engaged in conversation with a production coordinator on the film. “Marty,” she said, “Ronan and I were just talking about Frank.”

  Well, since you brought it up . . . “Oh my God, Frank,” I said. “I just think he really was the greatest singer of the last hundred years. The phrasing! The passion! Who could disagree?”

  The production coordinator looked at me quizzically. “Marty,” she said, “we were talking about Frank Marshall.”

  Ronan looked away, and the conversation died out.

  Damn thee, Marty Short! thought I.

  MARTY WITH PARENTS

  How Frank-crazy am I? Well, imagine a boy of sixteen, on the eve of the Summer of Love, with the whole world going warpedly psychedelic around him. Yet what’s this kid doing? Standing solo in his attic, microphone in hand, affecting a Sinatra pose, ruminating autumnally on the swingin’, sweet-and-sour life he’s led:

  One day you turn around, and it’s summerrrrrr

  Next day you turn around, and it’s faaalll . . .

  That was me in November of 1966, cutting my own faithful rendition of the title track of September of My Years, Sinatra’s milestone LP from the year before. I actually covered the entire album. I still have the recording. It is labeled, in my adolescent handwriting, “Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago.” On it, you can hear me re-creating the fiftysomething Frank’s takes on such wistful classics as “It Was a Very Good Year” and “Last Night When We Were Young.” Outside my attic walls, the hip sentiment was the Who’s “Hope I die before I get old.” Me? I was hoping I’d get old before I turned seventeen.

  Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago was not a joke. It wasn’t like the crooner-parody stuff I would later do on SCTV and Dave Letterman’s show. I performed it totally straight and took it very seriously, without a trace of irony. I had my own reel-to-reel tape recorder and, of equal importance, a professional-grade microphone that came with a mic stand.

  I bought a lot of this equipment with my baby-bonus money. After World War II, Canada established a program in which parents, every time they had a child, received a modest government stipend to aid in that child’s upbringing. (Thank you, socialism!) Being the youngest of five kids had certain advantages, far from the least of which was that I, alone among the Short children, got to keep my baby-bonus money to spend as I pleased. I also had a huge bedroom, on the third floor, the attic level. I adored my childhood home, on Whitton Road in Hamilton, Ontario. It was a four-bedroom brick house with a spacious, flat backyard, behind which was a brick patio where my parents entertained in the summer months. Beyond the patio was a thickly wooded ravine that ran the length of our block and seemed, in my youth, to extend forever into the northern wilds.

  Of the five Short children, I was not only the youngest but also the smallest even after I finished growing, and the most precocious—and without question, as evidenced by the baby-bonus money, the most spoiled. Whereas the older four all had to share bedrooms at different times of their lives, I had that attic bedroom to myself, for it had already been vacated by my eldest sibling, David, born fourteen years before me and out in the wider world by the time I was in grade school.

  The hallway outside that bedroom had an amazing echoey quality that perfectly complemented my singing—it was my own little version of Frank’s beloved Studio B in the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. What I’d do is play the Sinatra album on the turntable in my bedroom, holding the microphone to my stereo’s speakers during Nelson Riddle’s rich orchestral intros. Then, just before Frank came in, I’d pause the recorder, lift the needle off the record, quickly move into the hallway so I wouldn’t lose the pitch, and record my vocal where his would have been. Following that, I’d hop back into the bedroom, find the place on the record where the next instrumental passage was, record that—and then repeat the process of pausing, lifting the needle, and doing my vocals in the hallway. I managed to match Sinatra’s pitch pretty well, but because I was thirty-five years his junior, my timbre was closer to a baby froglet’s than a grown man’s.

  Outside, on Whitton Road, normal Canadian childhoods were taking place, with kids playing hockey in the street until darkness fell and the streetlights came on. Inside, little Marty was snapping his fingers and singing, “Weather-wise, it’s such a cuckoo daaay!” But what was amazing about my fantasy showbiz life, and underscored how lucky I was to be a member of this particular family, was that at no point did my parents or siblings ever belittle me or make me feel foolish for what I was doing
. My mother, the former Olive Hayter, was wonderfully supportive of my musical efforts. She was a superb, classically trained violinist who had served for a time as the concertmistress of the Hamilton Symphony Orchestra. When I eagerly presented her with a copy of . . . Sings of Songs and Loves Ago, she didn’t laugh or find the gesture merely cute. She listened carefully and adjudicated each performance. I still have sheets of paper where she wrote things like “Beautifully sung; four stars” and “Some pitch issues on this one, maybe not a good selection for your voice; two and a half stars.” Mom was giving me the feedback I craved, the loving encouragement that any child should receive when he’s brave and willing enough to share something creative.

  And was I ever creative. With my fertile imagination and trusty reel-to-reel recorder, I imagined myself not only a singer but a triple-threat entertainment juggernaut: movie star, TV host, and savvy mogul. In my mind I had my own television network, MBC, the Marty Broadcasting Corporation—the anchor program of which was, naturally, The Martin Short Variety Hour. I was on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m.—well, actually, every other Tuesday, because I always made sure to leave room for my imaginary film career. My bedroom was my stage and the pictures on the walls my audience. I had a gooseneck lamp in the corner that I’d arch upward for performances; even then I understood the importance of good lighting.

  I’d open The Martin Short Variety Hour with an up-tempo tune, something along the lines of Cy Coleman’s “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and then follow it with an edgy monologue.

  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You’re so very kind . . . and right. You know, we Canadians love living right next to America. It’s like spooning with Mama Cass—you feel safe, but by morning, your spine is completely shot.

  I’d then introduce my first guest.

  Please welcome a three-time Oscar winner: the legendary Katharine Hepburn and her spinning plates!

  I’d run over to a smaller tape recorder that played pretaped applause, record some of that applause on the bigger recorder, and then become Hepburn, juggling plates on long sticks while saying things like:

  My goodness, these plates are so wobbly! I feel they’re somewhat precarious. If they’re not going to spin properly like plates should, then to hell with them!

  Then I’d do a hard-hitting interview with Kate, playing both parts.

  ME: Miss Hepburn, what’s your favorite day of the week?

  HEPBURN: I would say Sundays. Sundays are mine. They always were. I wake up very early. I then have a huge bowl of oat bran. The next few hours, I’m indisposed. And then, before you know it, it’s Monday.

  My show also strived to be current. My brothers smuggled copies of Playboy into the house, and I’d page through them greedily—I swear!—for their long, serious interviews with newsmakers. So if, for example, Playboy featured an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, the author and Black Panther, I would do both sides of the Q&A, in my own voice and in my best approximation of Cleaver’s.

  After that, Johnny Mathis might walk on as a surprise to sing “Chances Are” and perhaps join me in a medley of songs that featured the word locomotive. I even went so far as to type up TV Guide–style listings for these shows: the guests on each episode, what songs were being performed, and so forth.

  At the conclusion of each episode, I would bid the audience farewell:

  Well, that’s our show. Good night, God bless you, and remember, if you must drink and drive, be sure you have a car.

  Then someone downstairs would yell, “Dinner!” and I’d put away my taping equipment for later.

  Though my eccentricities were warmly indulged most of the time, they did occasionally cause some concern. In my bedroom, beside the gooseneck lamp, I had an old rocking chair whose left arm kept popping out of place, so I almost always had an open tube of glue sitting around on my desk. At one point my brother Michael—perhaps after hearing me in the attic shouting, “Whoa, how did all of you get into my room?” to my imaginary audience—took my mother aside and said, “I think Marty might be sniffing glue.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said.

  “Well,” said Michael, “he just finished a medley of ‘songs that weren’t nominated,’ so I’m going with glue.”

  Still, my mother just laughed him off. She was used to doing so, and to laughing me off, too. Once, I walked in the door from school and jokingly shouted at her, “Owlie”—we sometimes called her that—“Owlie, you ol’ flea-bitten whore! Where are ya?” I didn’t realize that there were three additional musicians in the house, practicing in the string quartet over which Mom was presiding. Her eyes met mine when I made it to the living room, and, with a combination of embarrassment and amusement, she said, “Marty! Why don’t you say hello to our guests?”

  The beauty of my “Hey, let’s put on a show!” obsessiveness—the saving grace of it, really—is that it never felt pre-professional. With hindsight, it’s easy to think, well, he was fantasizing about having his own TV network; it’s obvious where he was headed. But back then I never dreamed of being in show business. I never even performed in school plays. Show business, as I perceived it via the Sinatra albums and The Ed Sullivan Show (which we picked up, along with most American TV, through the networks’ Buffalo affiliates), existed at arm’s length, in a fantasy world. Canada at that time was further away from the United States, psychologically, than it is now. I’d see ads during Ed Sullivan for products not available to us—Bosco chocolate syrup, Ipana toothpaste—and think, boy, those American kids are so lucky. I’ll never get to try those things. I was so taken in by those “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” toilet-paper ads that when I finally did get to visit the States, I dashed into a supermarket’s paper-products aisle almost upon arrival to fondle the product, thinking, wow, it really is soft!

  So for me to say “I’m going to be in show business someday” would have been tantamount to saying “I’m going to live on Venus someday.” The Marty Broadcasting Corporation was pure imaginative play, and that was probably very healthy. Certainly music was a regular part of my life, with Mom playing violin, Michael an excellent pianist, and David a trumpet player in a swing-jazz band. But no one, including me, walked around our house with delusions of becoming a Hollywood or Broadway star.

  As a kid, I assumed I’d end up a doctor—not because I was particularly interested in science, but because I found medicine a noble calling and was a big fan of Richard Chamberlain’s work on Dr. Kildare. Becoming Dr. Short would have been very much in keeping with my upper-middle-class upbringing. My father, Charles P. Short, was an executive at Stelco, the biggest steel company in Canada, which had its headquarters in Hamilton. We were the type of family that went every weekend to the Hamilton Golf and Country Club for dinner. We had season tickets to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League, and, as only we Canadians can say, we had prime seats right on the fifty-five-yard line. And we faithfully attended Sunday mass at Cathedral Basilica of Christ the King.

  All of these facts make us Shorts sound traditional. Believe me, we weren’t. I grew up thinking that our household was the strangest on the street, bordering on insanity. I later learned that many of the other families on Whitton Road—and it was the kind of street where every family had lived there for twenty, thirty, forty years—had their own brand of lunacy, with drunken dads, sedated moms, and so on. By comparison, ours was a happy home, but it was still nuts. My father would come home from the steel company wearing that Mad Men fedora that all executives wore back then, and he would immediately pour himself his usual drink: gin and ginger ale, no ice. Dad didn’t eat dinner with us. As we Short children convened with Mom around the dinner table in the kitchen nook, he would sit off to the side, about six feet away, sipping his gin and ginger at the little table with the radio on it, his face buried in the newspaper.

  Still, his remove from the family table didn’t prevent Dad from peering over his paper on occasion to insult our manners. “Marty, don’t shovel the food in like an animal, de
ar,” he’d say. Or he might jump from his chair with feigned urgency, arms wide open in a protective stance, and pretend to guard the table, saying, “Good boy, Michael. Eat even faster. I’ll make sure the dogs don’t get at your plate.”

  Later on, around 9:30 p.m., Dad would go into the kitchen and pan-fry a steak for himself, heavily seasoned with Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Occasionally he’d fry an extra one for us, sliding a piece of bread under the steak as it finished cooking so that the bread absorbed the juices. He’d bring his plate into the den, where we were watching TV, and we kids would pretend to be dogs, panting around his chair, paws out, begging for scraps. He’d say, “Here ya go, dear,” and give us bites. Maybe it’s sentimentality, but, to this day, I have never tasted anything more delicious.

  Dad was smart, funny, and, as you might have surmised, witheringly sarcastic. His bluntness and condescending wit were hysterical as long as you yourself weren’t bearing the brunt. Years later, when I was playing the celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick on TV, I’d watch the playback of my totally improvised scenes—things like Jiminy telling Conan O’Brien, “Look at how wonderful you look; whatever cosmetic surgery you’ve had done, I’d say twenty percent more and then stop,” or asking Mel Brooks, “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?”—and think, where on earth did that instinct come from? Oh, right: Dad. (Mel’s response, by the way, was, “Oh, I don’t know. I find them rude.”)