I Must Say Page 6

  And in 1965 Mom was the ringleader of the Short boys’ first trip to New York City. Dad had to work, so she took Michael, Brian, and me, and we stayed at the Hotel Astor. The whole experience was magical and mind-boggling: the far-off fantasy world glimpsed in our television-watching made real. I was excited simply by the fact that we could see the giant, neon-lit Camel cigarettes billboard from our window, with puffs of smoke blowing out from the fedora’d Camel man’s mouth.

  The ostensible hook of our trip was the tail end of the 1964–65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. But Mom, ever the cultural omnivore, made sure we took in as many shows as possible. We saw Sammy Davis Jr. in the Broadway musical Golden Boy. Sammy broke up during the show, momentarily losing himself in laughter—something that apparently wasn’t in the script—and he actually came out onstage after the final curtain call to rap with us all and make amends. Cigarette in hand, he said, “I feel like I’m cheatin’ the audience, man. Let me just explain something to you cats, if I may, about what transpired . . .” (You can see how this experience might have had some bearing on some characters in my later television career.)

  We also saw Phyllis Diller do her comedy show at the Royal Box cabaret at the Americana Hotel, and Buddy Hackett do his at the Latin Quarter. (God, how mid-century showbiz does that sentence sound?) Hackett’s act was the filthiest thing I had ever heard: “How come Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke don’t have no bulge in his pants? No cock!” My mother sank into her chair, mortified at what she was exposing her boys to. But overall, we had a joyous adventure. Mom was too spent to take us to Sardi’s, the theater-world hangout whose walls were covered with caricatures of big stars, but Brian and I really wanted to go. Seemingly every sophisticate on What’s My Line? seemed to mention it: “Didn’t I just see you earlier tonight at Sardi’s?” So Michael stayed behind with Mom, and Brian and I went, taunting our mother and brother afterward that they’d missed out on seeing Ginger Rogers and Anthony Newley. (A complete lie, by the way.)

  The point is, Mom made the most of her borrowed time with us, and gave so much of herself. Even during the making of the raunchy family comedy tapes that we Short kids recorded together on my reel-to-reel, ol’ Owlie was always there. While she was a bright, sharp woman, she did not exactly have the comedic skills of Elaine May. As she was bombing when I interviewed her, you’d hear Michael in the background saying, “Jesus, Pope Paul could get more laughs.” No one would laugh harder than Mom herself.

  Her congenital happiness, her cheerful approach to life, informed the way our entire family operated. Our default mode was exuberant, noisy, argumentative merriment, not icy, silent, Ingmar Bergman–movie despair. This carried us Shorts through—not only through David’s death but also Mom’s and, finally, in June of 1970, Dad’s.

  Dad’s decline was more of a denouement than the final act of a three-part family tragedy. His health was already failing when Mom was in her end stages; he suffered a series of mini-strokes that sometimes caused temporary paralysis in his left arm and forced him to spend the night in the same hospital as Mom, unbeknown to her, for observation. There were mornings when Michael and I, the last ones still living at home, would come down to breakfast, look across the big family table at each other, and simply laugh at the “What the hell is going on?” heaviness of it all. Humor was what kept us sane.

  After Mom died, Dad was a deeply diminished man, no longer the force of nature who filled every room he entered. He was fifty-nine, but he seemed more like seventy-nine, slowed and afflicted by atherosclerosis, among other ailments. He became passive and dependent on me, the only child living in the house on Whitton Road after Brian got married and Michael got engaged. In 1969 Dad took a leave of absence from his job at Stelco. Though he told anyone who asked that the leave was temporary, it was pretty clear that he would never go back to work. That summer, after I completed my first year of college at McMaster University, he and I embarked on a cruise aboard the SS Statendam that departed from New York, crossed the Atlantic, and hugged the coasts of western and southern Europe. He wanted one last vacation but didn’t have the stamina for hotels or restaurants, so we did it shipboard-style.

  In this period I became, although the youngest, the de facto head of the Short household, administering the family’s finances and being the primary contact for doctors, Dad’s office, and so forth. There came a point where the bank called and asked if my father could come in and resubmit his signature; it had changed as his signing hand had weakened, and it no longer resembled the one they had on file. Rather than force Dad to schlep down to the bank in his state of infirmity, I mastered his “C. P. Short” signature and took over the books.

  This played out as a natural evolution, not a power grab. I was simply doing what had to be done. My siblings didn’t resent it, but they were amused and a bit baffled that little Marty, of all people, now controlled the family’s purse strings. Michael got married on June 6, 1970, and I was the one who cut him the $5,000 check to cover some of the wedding costs. “You fuckin’ little weasel!” Michael joked. “How the hell did you pull this off?”

  Dad was well aware of Michael’s pending wedding to his fiancée, Liz, but as the big day approached, it was clear that he was too ill to attend, tethered to the machines that kept him alive in the face of advanced renal failure. So Michael and I, his best man, decided to pay Dad a visit at the hospital in our formal morning coats—between ceremony and reception—to give him a little taste of the festive day.

  When we arrived, though, Dad was unconscious, having fallen into a coma. We continued on to the reception hall where the wedding party was set to take place. Nora asked us what Dad thought of our suits. We told her about Dad’s condition. And she, being the nurse, said, “Well, he’s got no more than a day.”

  All the guests were there, waiting. We made the executive decision to carry on with the festivities. The party was, in customarily rousing Short-family fashion, a roaring, drunken success. At one point I got up and serenaded the crowd with “My Way” and “Ol’ Man River,” with Michael at the piano: unusual choices for someone my age, especially at a wedding, but then, they were among the few songs to which I knew the entire lyrics. The reception raged on and then continued into the wee hours at our house. We kicked out the last guest at 3:15 a.m. or so. And then, at 3:45, we got a call from the hospital: “We’re so sorry, but your father is dead.”

  I was twenty years old, and parentless. I’ve ever since demarcated my life in those terms: Zero to Twenty, Marty with Parents; Twenty to the Present, Marty without Parents.

  That said, I’ve always resisted people’s efforts to make too much of the hard knocks I suffered in my early life. When I first became famous, and writers discovered that I’d lost my brother and parents at a young age, it became the obvious angle: Aha! He went into comedy as a way to alleviate the pain of a tragedy-scarred childhood! Great stuff! It writes itself! Now let’s go get lunch.

  It’s an easy sell, that angle, but it isn’t remotely accurate. My childhood was a blast. It was unequivocally happy. The difficult times were difficult, but they yielded important lessons—they gave me information about life that few guys my age had, as well as a certain fearlessness. John Candy once said to me after a particularly insane improv set at Second City (in which I’d played “Mumbo Boone,” the illegitimate black son of the very, very white Pat Boone) that I had “balls of steel.” Ah, but balls of steel are earned, I thought, not grown.

  I’m also reminded of a conversation I had with Stephen Colbert shortly after he roasted President George W. Bush as the keynote speaker of the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Stephen’s routine had been audacious and divisive, mocking a sitting president as he sat literally inches away, and as an increasingly nervous audience withheld its laughter.

  “Were you scared?” I asked him. And Stephen, who lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was a boy, said, “No. That day when I was a kid—then I was scared.” When you’re met with fir
e early, you develop a certain Teflon quality.

  We buried Dad a few days after Michael’s wedding. And so began the still-ongoing epoch that historians with time on their hands call Marty without Parents.

  In a Dickens novel, the Marty without Parents era would begin with me being cast into the street, shivering in alleyways, and falling into the clammy hands of an untrustworthy old benefactor with a name like Mr. Picklefrottage. But the truth is, I never had to worry about getting by; my father had seen to it that the family’s finances were sound. I even had a legal guardian for a year, a man from the National Trust Company who I referred to as “Mr. Mooney,” a reference to the uptight Gale Gordon character on The Lucy Show. I spent my first “orphan’s relief cheque” from the Ontario government on a case of Beefeater’s gin, restocking the family bar in Dad’s honor. We surviving four Shorts were not rich, but our immediate concerns—most significantly in my case, college tuition and living expenses—were well taken care of.

  Well-intentioned people tried to help me anyway. At Dad’s funeral, the chairman of Stelco, Vincent Scully, put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Martin, I’m sure, with all that’s been going on, you haven’t been able to organize a summer job yet.”

  “No sir, not quite,” I said, never in my life having desired a summer job.

  “Well, consider it done, eh?” he said Canadianly.

  So suddenly, despite an inheritance and no parents to tell me what to do, I found myself getting up every weekday at seven in the morning to put on a tie, drive to some godforsaken office building at the east end of Hamilton, and work in the stultifyingly boring clerical job that dear Mr. Scully had arranged for me. I’d been doing this for three days when my brother Michael, who’d come back to our house to hang out with me one night, asked, “Marty, why are you doing this job? You don’t have to, you know. Who do you think you’re impressing? If anything, I think less of you.”

  Michael the Wise made great sense. I quit the next day without a moment’s guilt.

  While Marty without Parents was not a phase I welcomed, I took to it easily enough. For a year I lived in our family home all by myself, with our non-live-in housekeeper, Phoebe Harris, still showing up for work every day. Mrs. Harris was a kindhearted woman who never quite understood the new parameters of things. One day she said, “Will you be home for dinner?” and I replied, “No, I don’t think so, but I might bring some people back a little later.” At two in morning I returned home with nine or ten beer-soaked college buddies, staggering through the front door to see a full china service for twelve set out on the dining room table. God bless confused little Phoebe.

  In 1971 we Short kids finally divested ourselves of the family house on Whitton Road, and I moved into my own flat at 10 Mapleside Avenue in Hamilton, not too far from where I’d grown up. Having spent my first two years of college on a premed track, I switched my major to social work, which freed me up to do more plays. During my freshman year it had been a struggle to balance my required course load with even a mere chorus part in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. By sophomore year, given my interest in theater and growing lack of interest in medicine, I was barely squeaking by academically.

  There came a point when I’d missed so many science classes, including the ones where I was supposed to dissect a cat and study its internal anatomy, that I stole a frozen cat from the McMaster biology department so I could catch up at home. While I was performing dead-cat surgery one night, in a bedroom that reeked of formaldehyde, my elderly and faithful cat Tiger, a holdover from my Hamilton boyhood, walked in on me and caught me in the act. I don’t know which one of us shrieked louder. Poor Tiger. Not only was she seventeen and hanging on by a thread, but she was also roughly forty pounds overweight. The worms in her stool had Type 2 diabetes. She didn’t need to see that.

  Free at last my junior year from the premed grind, I became a member of the McMaster Shakespearean Players and the president of Proscenium, the club that mounted the school’s musicals. Two friends I made through acting at McMaster were Dave Thomas, who was my year, and Eugene Levy, who was a little older. Dave, the son of a McMaster philosophy professor, was the most intellectual and comedically quick person I had met in my still-young life. He seemed to know every minuscule detail of the life and work of Bob Hope (and even then did the note-perfect Hope impersonation he’d later bring to SCTV), yet he was also fluent in the intricacies of Shakespeare’s entire catalog of plays.

  Eugene was a fellow Hamiltonian, the older brother of a fleeting high-school crush of mine, Barbie Levy. He was a talented and nimble actor, but what pulled me in was his dry, charismatic cool. And he was quite something to look at in those days, too, with a massive, horizontal-skewing frizz of Abbie Hoffman hair that he futilely tried to keep tucked into a little gray knit cap—or tuque, as we Canadians call them—plus a bristly handlebar mustache, uncommonly hirsute arms, and thick, Grouchoesque eyebrows that, he would later claim, “have their own agent.” Eugene wasn’t particularly crazy about me at first, finding me gratingly loud and cocky. The first time we met, I asked him what it was like to have the arms of an otter. He didn’t quite know how to take that. Nor should he have. Years later, when I turned fifty, Eugene recalled his initial wariness of me in a birthday poem he wrote for the occasion:

  What was it about this diminutive chap

  That repelled me so strongly

  That caused such a flap?

  Was it arrogance? Well, yes . . .

  And peppered with smug.

  This vain little man

  You could swat like a bug.

  Yet we three—Eugene, Dave, and Marty—quickly developed a rapport, onstage and off. We did The Odd Couple together, with Eugene as Oscar, me as Felix, and Dave as Murray the Cop, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Eugene as Caliban, me as Trinculo, the fool, and Dave as Stephano. Even after Eugene graduated, I lured him back to campus to direct our McMaster production of an original musical comedy called Benjy, in which, of course, I starred.

  Still, as my final semester of college began in 1972, I continued to regard show business as an unrealistic goal. As a teenager, I’d seen it as a fabulous fantasy world to which I enjoyed escaping. In university, it had become a fun hobby. To expect anything more seemed both naive and arrogant. I suppose if I’d grown up in Manhattan, with show business right down the street, I might have been more ambitious. But to me, making a living as an actor seemed as realistic as buying a summer home on Neptune.

  My plan for the future was very set and clear, for order and clarity had always been the pillars I leaned upon in times of uncertainty. I was going to serve society and pursue a master’s degree in social work. Like a lot of 1960s kids, I was very much influenced by the John F. Kennedy “Ask not what your country can do for you” ethos, and I sincerely thought I might end up in public policy or even electoral politics. (I’d have been every bit as entertaining a Canadian politician as Rob Ford, but without the “bad-tooth smell” that we know is there.)

  However, Eugene wouldn’t let me slip off that easily into bourgeois respectability. By that point he was living in Toronto and doing the struggling-actor thing, and he urged me to join him. More than anyone, it is Mr. Eugene Levy who deserves credit or blame for inflicting me upon the masses, for it was he who kept nudging, telling me that I had real talent and would be a fool not to give the performing life a stab. “Try it for a year,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, you’ll still be able to look in the mirror at fifty with no regrets.”

  IN WHICH I FIND JESUS

  In February of ’72 I made a little contract with myself: I would give myself one year after graduation to try to get work as an actor. If by May of ’73 things were going reasonably well, I would renew my showbiz contract for another year; if they weren’t, I would go to the registrar’s office at McMaster and beg them to hold a place for me in grad school that fall.

  Counting on nothing much, I went ahead and had a student photographer take some he
ad shots of me in different poses (Happy! Sad! Hopeful!), and I typed up a résumé fraught with lies. Then I headed into Toronto to hit every talent agency in the phone book. Most of them were uninterested, but one agency liked my “atypical” (often a kinder word for “homely”) looks and sent me off on my first casting call, for a credit-card commercial—which, to my shock, I actually got. On March 17, 1972, I worked my first day as a paid actor, playing a talking credit card in a woman’s purse. She opened it, and there I was, miniaturized, in this placard-like costume, sitting on top of an oversize compact mirror and explaining my virtues as a Chargex card, the Canadian version of Visa.

  My second audition—and really my first as far as proper acting was concerned—was for the musical Godspell. Talk about a cattle call: every young person with show-business aspirations in Toronto, Eugene and I included, turned out for it, and for good reason. The show was a massive off-Broadway hit in New York, and its composer, Stephen Schwartz, just twenty-four years old at the time, was on hand to personally select the cast for the Toronto production.

  Godspell is, essentially, the gospel according to Matthew as told by clowns—as sung, really, by hippie Jesus and his hippie apostles in a wildly original rock-opera musical idiom. Paul Shaffer has long said that in the early 1970s, the theatrical community was obsessed with two things: “full-frontal nudity and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Godspell, mercifully, fit only the latter description.

  Eugene and I made it through the initial round of auditions and got a callback for March 25, at the Masonic Temple in Toronto. That day was like an entire season of American Idol compressed into one twelve-hour slog. You’d go up in groups of sixteen, each sing a song, wait an hour, and then eight of you would get called back. Then your group of eight would be called upon to improvise a parable. And then maybe four of those eight would get called back. And then two of the four. And then one of the two. The air was thick with nerves, anticipation, and the sound of longhairs strumming guitars and humming Carole King and Neil Young songs. It was 1972, and not a soul in the room was over twenty-eight. I had never seen so much patchwork denim and rampant bralessness in my life.