I Must Say (14 page)

The array of jobs I had back then was staggering. There were some good ones, such as working with Andrea Martin in an Elaine May play called
Not Enough Rope
. But there were a lot of strange, misbegotten choices, too, more akin to
Fortune and Men's Eyes
, my ill-fated gay-prison fantasia. I played rough trade for a second time in an episode of a mid-1970s CBC anthology program called
Peep Show
, a showcase for daring theater. My costar was Saul Rubinek, excellent as a buttoned-down classical pianist who picks up a ragged, thrill-seeking rent boy: yours truly. I was trying to convey the coiled menace of a young Brando, but I delivered something closer to the young Jerry Lewis, especially as I barked at Saul, “I'm twice as Jewish as you are! And I ain't never wore a beanie, either! You know why? I been circumcised twice!”

In a completely different direction, I did a guest spot on an ecology-themed children's TV show called
Cucumber
as Smokey the Hare, a character who sang downer songs about the rape of the planet:

Where, oh where is the polar bear . . .
He's hard to find, and getting more rare

I did my best to sell the lyrics, but it was no easy task, given that I was outfitted in giant ears, long whiskers, an argyle sweater, and skinny jeans with a white cottontail sewn onto the ass.

Even after I found my calling at Second City Toronto—after that fateful moment with Nancy in L.A. on Breakdown Corner, and my consequent rebirth as Martin Short, Funnyman—my
career, while full of fun and creativity, remained rather middling. Not until 1982, when I joined
SCTV
and was in my thirties, would I achieve what I'd call lasting professional success.

Thankfully, though, my happiness was never predicated first and foremost upon my career. It's an outlook that has served me well. I did a joke recently on Conan O'Brien's show in which I said that on my gravestone, there will be but one word:
ALMOST
. I
almost
made it big as a movie star in the 1980s, except that none of my string of high-profile movies from that period did well at the box office. I
almost
caught the wave of talk-show mania that gave people like Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres huge second careers in daytime television, but my talk show ran in so many different time slots in so many different places (this was in 1999–2000) that it had no chance of taking hold.

I have a whole list of almosts and coulda-woulda-shouldas. I
almost
joined the cast of
Bosom Buddies
, the early 1980s sitcom that launched Tom Hanks (I'd have played his cousin or something), but the timing wasn't right, and I turned down the chance. I
might have
ended up on
SCTV
sooner than I did, but Nancy and I decided in the late 1970s to leave Toronto and try California for a while. And I perhaps
could have
been on
Saturday Night Live
years earlier than I was, in the original Lorne Michaels era, but the stars were not aligned.

Though my friendship with Lorne didn't really take flight until the 1980s and
¡Three Amigos!
, he was someone with whom I'd been vaguely acquainted since the
Godspell
days. He was already a big deal then, a homegrown Canadian hotshot who had starred in his own CBC variety program,
The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour
, and worked in L.A. as a writer for
Laugh-In
and Lily Tomlin's TV specials.

I had a formal meeting with Lorne in New York in December 1978, in which he offered me what is known in our fabulous
business as a holding deal, wherein I would agree, in exchange for a modest sum of money, to give him the right of first refusal if I got an offer for some other job, such as a sitcom pilot.

There was a lot of speculation at the time that John Belushi and Danny Aykroyd were going to leave
SNL
after the '78–'79 season. The premise of the holding deal was that I'd put other opportunities on hold until the situation cleared up; if Lorne needed reinforcements, I would be one of the people he might call upon. But I was hardly the only actor on his list—I still suspect that Lorne took the meeting with me only as a favor to Gilda, who generously remained a staunch Marty advocate—and there was no guarantee of me making the
SNL
cast. Besides, I was at a point then where I wanted to check out this thing they had in L.A. called pilot season. (And, indeed, I got cast in a good pilot—more on that in the next chapter.)

So I never signed the holding deal with Lorne. As it happened, John and Danny did, in fact, leave
SNL
in the spring of '79, to make
The Blues Brothers
. I might have had a shot after all. The new person that Lorne ended up bringing in for the '79–'80 season was the ingenious, deeply talented Harry Shearer—with whom I'd work in the '84–'85 season, by which time Dick Ebersol was running the show.

I do sometimes wonder what might have been if I'd made it into the tail end of
SNL
's mystique-laden Original Era. Would Ed Grimley have impacted the outcome of the Carter-Reagan election? Would late 1970s fame have warped me in a way that mid-1980s fame somehow didn't? Would I be the bestest of bestest chums with Garrett Morris?

T
he truth is, I'll never have a clue, because it didn't happen. In my heart of hearts, I know I wasn't ready for
SNL
then.
And if it had happened, I probably wouldn't have been a part of
SCTV
, unequivocally my most satisfying professional experience. As I said earlier, I was never career-driven to the exclusion of all other factors, so I lost no sleep over missed opportunities. I stayed happy.

This wasn't purely the result of my contentedness with Nan, nor was it wholly a consequence of the perspective that my early family losses gave me, though both of those factors were huge. It was, to me, a simple matter of logic. On that subject, permit me a brief detour into an atypical period of unhappiness. In October of 1975, after three packed years of consistent acting employment, the work suddenly and inexplicably stopped for about three months. This was a new experience for me: a frustrating state of professional limbo. I resented that, as I saw it, my fate was somehow no longer in my own hands. It really felt as if the world was conspiring against me. For example, every time I took the subway during that period, my timing was off. Whether I ran to catch the train or slowly took my time getting to the station made no difference; inevitably, as soon as I descended to the platform, I'd find a train closing its doors and pulling away.

I was in a funk. The way my mind was working at that point, I decided that my career wouldn't get moving again until I started having better luck with the subway. And when, for reasons just as mysterious as those for the lull, I started getting acting work again, I looked back at those three months in limbo as utterly wasted time. I had accomplished little besides sitting by my telephone and sulking. And from that day forward, I resolved to never again fritter away my precious hours.

Recognizing that prolonged periods of unemployment are part of an actor's lot, I devised a rigorous self-evaluation system that I call the Nine Categories. I know, it sounds like some sort of scary Illuminati
initiation gauntlet, but to me it was merely my benign, orderly way of taking personal inventory: objectively weighing the good against the bad. I wanted to see if I could use logic to overcome emotion.

I decided to systematically compare my performance in that one specific category of my life—work—with my performance in the other important life categories, and to give them all equal importance. My mind has always worked systematically to begin with. For example, I still operate according to the school-year calendar, where September heralds a new start and May/June the conclusion of another grade; as I write this, in the spring of 2014, I am finishing up what I think of as Grade 59.

Since I was already thinking of time in school-year terms, I decided to think of life in course-load terms, with the main objective being to maintain a credible GPA. I might be getting a D in career, I thought, but if I got good marks in some of the other subjects, I could bring my average up. After thinking long and hard, I drew up what I thought of as the course load of life, aka the Nine Categories.

The logical starting point. Without a highly functioning self, nothing else works. It can be anything from “Have you had your yearly physical?” to “What's your current weight?” to “Any blood on the pillow this morning?” Everything else in life unravels if you're not perpetuating your own survival. You have to take care of yourself, and when you do, try and lock the door so no one walks in on you.

The proverbial wife and kids. This category is about gauging how your family relationships can be made stronger. When was the last time you sincerely told your kids you loved them—even the chubby redheaded one you don't really care for?

The important thing with children is to ask them questions.
Like, How was school? How are your friends? Am I fat? Do your friends think I'm funny? Should I fire the gardener? Is Mommy getting it on with the gardener? Why does Mommy seem so distant in bed? She's getting it on with the gardener, isn't she? You would tell me if she were, right? If you didn't know me, how old would you say I look? Did I ask you how school was?

And it's not just your kids; you must always be sensitive to your wife's needs—and make sure your personal assistant fulfills them.

When I am fortunate enough to have grandchildren, they shall be included in this category as well. I was heavily influenced, while devising this system, by the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III, the teenage grandson of the Getty oil tycoon. The grandson was taken captive while living in Italy. His abductors told his mother that they were going to send her one of his fingers as proof that the boy was still alive. But Old Man Getty, unmoved, refused to get involved. Even after the kidnappers cut off one of the boy's ears and sent it to a Roman newspaper, the senior Getty would pay only the amount of the ransom that his accountants said was tax-deductible; he made his adult son, the poor kid's father, borrow the rest of the ransom from him at 4 percent interest. I was struck by how profoundly skewed the old man's values were. By my system, no matter how high his grades were in finance and career (Categories 5 and 6), his family grade would have been so fathomlessly low that his GPA would have been screwed. You simply
must
balance career with family.

Unless, that is, you have an amazing, unstoppable career. Then, I agree: who needs family? They'll just get in the way.

How are you getting along with the people you grew up with: Mom, Dad, and your siblings? In my case, since I no longer have living parents, I like to phone up people who have played my parents in movies, such as Richard Kind (
Clifford
), just to let them know I still care.

Are your friendships in a healthy place? Are you keeping in touch with everyone adequately? Are there any seething undercurrents of resentment that need to be put on the table and worked out? As a wise woman named Bette Midler once put it, “You've got to have good friends and good lighting.”

Speaking of Bette: In 2005 Tom and Rita Hanks had a spectacular New Year's Eve party at their home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Around eight p.m., as Nan and I were driving there, the snow was coming down unrelentingly. It continued to do so throughout the evening, never letting up. At one thirty a.m., I was gazing out the window at the continuing blizzard, and Bette Midler was standing beside me. I said, “Jeez, Bette. If this snow continues like this, we're going to end up eating each other.”

To which Bette replied coquettishly, “Why, thank you!”

Beatrice Kaufman, the wife of the playwright George S. Kaufman and a fellow member of the Algonquin Round Table, once said, “I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better.” I'm with Beatrice. I believe it was also Beatrice who said, “Money can't buy you happiness, but at Exotic Thai Massage, it can buy some relief.” Or was that Donald Trump?

As it says on my answering service, “I'll take it.”

In my business, there's a traditional career path: TV, movies, Broadway, your own reality show, Chabad Telethon performer, the Palm Springs Follies, and writing your autobiography. So what grade do you give your working life?

At this very moment I'd give mine a solid grade, although,
cumulatively, I still feel that I'm two films short of making the Oscars-night memorial reel.

Beyond the
amount
-of-work aspect, is your work creatively fulfilling? Innate creativity is a wonderful blessing. But when I look at George W. Bush's paintings, I wonder if a pill could be invented that causes something called painter's block.

Not just the simple imperative of self-preservation as addressed in Category 1, but having the self-control to actually implement your goals. In my underemployed-actor days, I used this category as motivation:
I'm not working, but I'll use this time to get into the best shape of my life. Or to read more, or write more, or do more of what I feel I should do so that this fallow period jobwise won't be wasted time.
Discipline is essential to life, whether you are administering or inflicting the spanking.

Put aside all the usual yardsticks of success and well-being: Oscars, Tonys, Emmys, deals, yachts, beach houses, penis length. Are you actually enjoying life? Are you having any
fun
? And, God forbid, are you doing something to make the world a better place?

T
he Nine Categories have been a part of my life for more than thirty-five years now. Every Monday I assign myself a grade in each category, augmenting the grades with comments. I used to do this by hand, in a spiral-bound notebook, but now I do it on the computer. Some categories have subcategories. In Category
1, for example, I keep track of my weight using color-coded classifications based on the old Tom Ridge Homeland Security alert system. So let's say my ideal weight is 142 pounds. (I'm not a tall man.) That means that the 142–44 range would be blue (“Looking Fine”), 145–47 would be yellow (“Guarded”), 148–50 would be orange (“Elevated—subject must go on diet”), and 150 and up would be red (“Severe—subject no longer requires fat suit to play Jiminy Glick”).