I Must Say (2 page)

But Tony's plane into Toronto was delayed by a snowstorm. For a while it was touch and go whether he would even make it. He finally arrived with ten minutes remaining in the program, as charmingly at ease as one would hope. They hustled him out onstage. Tony never broke his cool, and he was in perfect voice. As he was killing it with one of his signature songs, “When Joanna Loved Me,” the stage manager tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You're next.”

“Wait!” I said. “You can't follow a singer with a singer!” The stage manager tersely replied, “Watch.”

I was beyond petrified. The number-one rule in show business is: Never follow a singer with a singer. The number-two rule in show business, incidentally, is: Never look Barbra Streisand in the eye when she is walking onstage, or during foreplay.

Anyway: as Tony continued performing, I made my way to my sad little stool downstage. Tony finished big, with Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's “Once in a Lifetime”—“I'm gonna doooo . . . greeeat . . .
thiiiiiiings
!”—and the crowd went insane. The cameras cut over to Norm Crosby, who said, “Thanks, Tony. And now here's a kid that sings really good . . . Marty Short.” And then the cameras cut to me, perched unsteadily on my stool in an outfit that tragically combined a winter wool sweater with flared clamdiggers.

“What a spot, following Tony Bennett!” I said. Crickets.

So I started singing: “Here we are, on earth together. . . . It's you and me!” Already, I was wrong. The lyrics are “It's you and
I.” That's because the song I was singing, by Stevie Wonder, is called . . . “You and I.”

This little slip was enough to knock me completely out of orbit. I suddenly forgot the rest of the lyrics—and worse, for reasons I still cannot fathom, I started to
impersonate Tony Bennett while improvising new lyrics
. Perhaps my subconscious was telling me that the only way I could follow Tony was to
be
Tony, but what viewers of
Everything Goes
got was a spasmodic young man who was twenty-four years old but looked eighteen, and was inexplicably bullshitting new words to a Stevie Wonder song while doing a flop-sweat impression of Tony Bennett having a heart attack: “Our love was made, it was made in heaven, too. . . . Let's have . . . a great big bowl of stew!”

I somehow stabilized just enough to save the tiniest bit of face: I reverted to my own voice and hit Stevie's high notes at the end, a credible finish. But I was devastated. Mortified. I had totally screwed up.

Afterward I went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and steady my nerves. I heard the door open, and someone came in. It was Tony. I straightened up, expecting that my hero would have some pearl of wisdom for me, words to make me feel better. With his genial Tony Bennett face, he looked me square in the eye.

“You froze good, kid,” he said.

That was all I got. “Well, good night,” he said, and off he went.

I
went out on a lot of auditions in those days, too: an endless string of humiliating cattle calls where it was essential to stand out, but not so much so as to appear needy or desperate. I learned about this distinction the hard way at an audition for Tang, the
fruit-flavored drink mix favored by the astronaut John Glenn on his first Mercury flight. I walked into the waiting room where the audition was being held and saw twelve guys, all my age. We kind of looked the same, and we were dressed the same. As we sat there with our eight-by-ten head shots, going over our Tang-commercial copy, I was struck by a brainwave.

I went into the bathroom with my head shot and, with a Sharpie, drew a mustache and a goatee on my photographed face. Then, after the casting director came through the waiting room and collected our head shots in advance of calling us in to meet the client, I returned to the bathroom and, using the same Sharpie, drew a mustache and goatee on my actual face, to match the photo. When I was finally called in, the client—an unsmiling executive—looked at my head shot, which he held in his hand, looked back up at me, and, without remotely acknowledging my clever comedic choice, said, “So, have you had a chance to read the copy?” My hand hovering over my face in a futile attempt to obscure my hand-drawn facial hair, I quickly realized that no Tang-related windfall was headed my way.

E
ager to stretch, I took a part in a minimalist gay-themed prison drama called
Fortune and Men's Eyes
. The show was originally mounted off-Broadway in New York in 1967, but it was its 1969 Los Angeles production, directed by the actor Sal Mineo, that put it on the map.

To say that I was miscast as Rocky, the toughest and most sexually predatory of the inmates, would be a massive understatement. I was required to do a lot of bullying and posturing in my best proto–Sylvester Stallone voice: “Hey, whaddya doin', wimp-ass!” The director was very Method oriented, locking us actors
down for twelve hours a day in the theater so we could improvise in close quarters and really get the
feel
, man, of what it's like to share a cell with three other guys. On top of that the production was down in Hamilton, Ontario, which—though it was my beloved hometown, where I'd grown up—was an hour's commute each way.

Worst of all, as part of the immersive Method experience of doing the show, the director required us to be onstage in character for half an hour before the show began—pacing around the “cell” in our prison garb, which consisted solely of tight white underpants. No shirts for Rocky and his pals. And we had to do our pacing and brooding silently as the audience filed in, because if we engaged with its members verbally, they might think that the show was starting. It was humiliating, and again, not to mince words, I was really bad. One reviewer said that I was unconvincing not only as Rocky but also as a male.

One night Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, and Paul Shaffer came to see the show. I would have preferred that my girlfriend and two closest friends stay away, sparing me the embarrassment. But on the bright side, we planned to go to dinner after the show at a really good high-end restaurant in Hamilton called Shakespeare's. Paul was especially excited about this, because I had told him that Shakespeare's had the best garlic bread in Canada. It was all Paul could talk about for days: “I'm so excited to try the garlic bread! Oh, and of course to see you in the role of Rocky in a fabulous production of
Fortune and Men's Eyes
!”

That night I took my usual position onstage for the preshow period, mutely pacing and brooding in my underwear. As I did so, I saw Paul coming down the aisle, toward the stage. I hated that he, Gilda, and Eugene were there in the first place. And now I was wondering what the hell he was doing, walking right up to me.

Paul has a distinctive look, as anyone who's seen him as the bandleader on David Letterman's show over the last thirty years would know. His head has always had that perfect lightbulb shape. When you stand a certain distance from him, it looks like his suit had a great idea.

So there I was on the stage as Rocky, almost naked, when Paul, looking like a cross between a maître d' on a spaceship and the world's hippest thumb, got right up in my face, a big grin on his.

“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.”

B
y 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.”

L
et'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!”