I Must Say (26 page)

“I can't remember, Marc,” I'd say, “but it's
tradition
. Keep pushing.”

We'd have a ten-foot Christmas tree standing in the crook of the staircase's curve, and Marc and his piano would be stationed to the tree's right: a natural stage set for our holiday pageant, visible to all of the sixty or so revelers squeezed into our living and dining rooms. Bernie Brillstein was always the first guest to nab a seat, loading up a plate with food around 8:00 p.m. and parking himself on the couch nearest the stage, lest anyone obstruct his view. It was that unmissable a show to Bernie, who had managed everyone from Jim Henson to Belushi, Lorne, and Gilda.

At 9:30, with a flourish, I would bound onto the piano's top, pretend-crushing Marc's fingers in the process, and open the show with a song whose lyrics varied from year to year, but this version will give you the idea.

{ IT'S THE MOST WONDERFUL SHOW OF THE YEAR }

(to the tune “It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”)

Lyrics by Shaiman/Wittman/Short

It's the most wonderful time of the year
Tom Hanks is a-tuning
While Nancy is crooning
Arianna Huffington IS HERE!
It's the most wonderful time of the year

It's the hap, happiest season of all
Now the party's just startin'
'Cause here comes Steve Martin
He'll juggle a ball!
It's the hap, happiest season of all.

They'll be no hymns or pews here
There's just showbiz Jews here.
My agent's dead drunk in the john.
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell
Are doing the hustle
“Aren't you glad that we made
Captain Ron
?”

It's the most wonderful show of the year.
(Marc) Celebrity butt you'll be kissing
While high notes you're missing
(Marty) And this . . . from a queer!

It's the most wonderful time
It's the hap, happiest time
It's the most wonderful show . . . OF THE YEAR!

Nancy performed, too. Though she had long ago given up her show-business career, she loved to sing and was totally uninhibited about performing for this crowd. Often we'd duet—on the Pogues' Christmas song “Fairytale of New York,” say, or “Hurry Home for Christmas,” a number made famous by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.

In the early years the show was a more spontaneous thing, a “Who's going next?” kind of deal where you'd simply get up and do your bit. Catherine O'Hara would sing the old hymn “Count Your Blessings,” a remnant of her Irish-Canadian upbringing. One year Nathan Lane got up and did a Danny Kaye homage
in which he spluttered in rapid-fire fake Russian and ended with a huge pratfall. Another year, Phil Hartman and Billy Crystal joined me in a suitably cheeseball medley as, respectively, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Liza Minnelli. Bernadette Peters, when she was in town, offered us a moving version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (A year later, I spotted a similarly luxuriant head of curly hair in the crowd and shouted, “Oh, look, Bernadette is back!” When the head turned to face the guests, it was Kenny G. Hey, I was just sayin' what everyone was thinking!)

But given the wattage of the guest list and the quality of performances, the Christmas party took on a slightly more polished look as the years advanced, with no one wanting to half-ass it in front of this crowd. I think it might have been the moment when I saw Tom Hanks, Walter Parkes, and Glenn Frey intently rehearsing a tune in the piano room, guitars in hand—while Marc, who flew in from New York each year just for this party, was feverishly going over some sheet music on the piano—that I thought, Jeez, this looks like backstage at Carnegie Hall.

People would start e-mailing sheet music to Marc and Scott in advance, and asking if they could come ahead of time to rehearse, compelling Marc and Scott to arrive at our house earlier and earlier. “Look at all this stuff I'm being given,” Marc kvetched as he sat at the piano, before the party decorations had even gone up. “Thank God I'm a genius, or I'd be in a tizzy!” Steve Martin spent something like four months mastering how to play “Auld Lang Syne” on the banjo. Victor Garber, one of the most accomplished actors and singers in modern theater, spent thousands of dollars on vocal coaching to prepare for his party performances. In that soft, lilting voice of his, he did a beautiful version of “I'll Be Home for Christmas,” and, another year, “Peace” by Michael McDonald and Beth Nielsen Chapman. Steven Spielberg
nervously joined the fray one time, playing clarinet alongside his wife, Kate Capshaw, as she joined Rita Wilson and Nancy to sing “Kung Fu Christmas,” a soul-song takeoff that Bill Murray used to do in the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
.

Probably the award for most elaborate preparation should go to Tom Hanks. He had seen a Christmas rerun of Judy Garland's 1963 Christmas special on PBS, where Judy welcomed fake guests into her fake living room while she was making merry with her real children, Liza Minnelli and Lorna and Joey Luft. Tom particularly loved the part where the handsome young pop singer Jack Jones made a terrific entrance, old-style corny in the best way. The doorbell rang—
ding-dong!
—and Jones barreled across the threshold with a pile of wrapped presents, launching straight into a swing version of “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” from
My Fair Lady
, distributing the presents to the kids as he sang.

Tom was determined to re-create this scene more or less shot-for-shot. He worked out a cue with Marc and me so that his appearance would be as sudden and straight-into-the-routine as Jones's was. Then Tom waited patiently outside for a period as other people performed.

It worked perfectly. As I went into my cue—“Now we have so many people”—I was interrupted by the doorbell:
ding-dong!

“Well, who the heck could
that
be on this most wintry of winter nights?” I asked. Then I went over to answer the door, and Tom, wearing a replica of the slick sharkskin suit Jack Jones wore in 1963, strode in, singing “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air . . .” And instead of handing out presents to the gathered children, he handed out $20 bills from a stack in his palm. He brought the house down—and, more important, won the kids over with the cash.

My family members were encouraged to become a part of the
show as well. Oliver, a drummer, would set up his drum kit to accompany his sister Katherine on piano and Andrea Martin's boy Joe (my nephew) on saxophone, along with Uncle Bobby Dolman (Joe's father, Nancy's brother, and Andrea's then husband) on harmonica. Together, they'd launch into an instrumental version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” And then my brother Michael, per Short family tradition, would perform the R&B Christmas standard “Merry Christmas Baby” on piano and vocals.

T
here was no requirement that every guest had to perform, or that, if you did, your performance had to be musical. One of the most original nonmusical moments came courtesy of Jan Hooks, who was not only a star of
Saturday Night Live
but also played Jiminy Glick's wife, Dixie Glick, in various TV shows with me, as well as the movie
Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
. Jan is a southerner, from Georgia. I asked her if she was going to do anything, and she casually replied, “Oh, I don't know. I might do something from
To Kill a Mockingbird
. But if I do, and if, at one point, I run away, catch me.”

More than a little puzzled, I said, “Very good then.” At the next opportunity, I stood before the crowd and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jan Hooks!”

Jan stood before the crowd, slowly eyeballed the gathered attendees with a surly face, and then began ranting at high volume.

“I got something to say! And then I ain't gonna say no more!” she shouted. “He took advantage of me! And if you fine,
fancy
gentlemen ain't gonna do nothin' about it, then you're just a bunch of lousy, yella, stinkin' cowards! The whole bunch of ya! And your fancy airs don't come to nothin'! Your ‘Ma'am'-in'! And your ‘Miss Mayella'-in'! It don't come to
nothin'
, Mr. Finch!”

At that, fully committed, she ran tearfully into my arms. It was Mayella Ewell's angry courtroom tirade from
To Kill a Mockingbird
, after the attorney Atticus Finch has ripped holes in the young woman's testimony that his black client, Tom Robinson, raped her. Such a deeply bizarre, borderline sick choice of something to do at a Christmas party, yet it was brilliant.

Jan's
SNL
castmate Jon Lovitz didn't have the same innate understanding of the party's family spirit. He worked too blue too early in the evening. It started with some celebrity-roast-style potty humor about Bernie Brillstein—“I remember one time Bernie was in a stall beside me, and he came into my stall and said, ‘Am I clean, kid?'”—and just devolved from there. I could see the terror rising in my kids' faces. Marc did, too. He pulled an oversize candy cane off the Christmas tree and gave Lovitz the hook.

Scott Wittman had a fabulous tradition to end the show. Marc would start playing “Let It Snow,” joined in by everyone at the party, while Scott went with my three children up to the top of the staircase, where they would sprinkle snowflakes they'd made with scissors and paper onto my head as I sang. And then I'd wish everyone a very Merry Christmas from the bottom of where my heart should be.

T
here was only one year where Marc and Scott and I got into any sort of disagreement creatively concerning the Christmas program. In 2003, they were flying in from New York for the party on the Friday before, and because they had a six-hour flight, they had lots of time to write a new song for the party. So to the tune of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” a 1940s song by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer, they wrote new lyrics about the party and its noted guests and entitled their creation
“Picture-Perfect Christmas in the Palisades.” Unfortunately—from my gracious-host view, anyway—the lyrics also roasted nearly everyone who would be attending. For example:

See the stars walking up the drive
It's good to see that Bernie Brillstein's still alive.
He's been in the biz since the Crusades
It's the picture-perfect Christmas in the Palisades.

Diane Keaton's here, she's one brave chick
I hear she flashes titty in that Meyers flick

The damned thing went on and on, taking a swipe at virtually every friend I'd invited. After reading all their lyrics, I told Marc and Scott, “Absolutely not.”

They were stunned and truly irritated by my apprehension and protectiveness. “Remember when you used to have an edge?” Marc said, meaning it.

“I am not going to potentially offend guests who I have welcomed into my home,” I replied. In the end, we worked out a compromise. After the main show, when it got late and the party got smaller—and most of those named in Marc and Scott's lyrics had departed—I told Marc, “Okay, now we should do it, at the
second
show.”

“You mean it's fine as long as it's behind people's backs,” Marc said.

“What can I say?” I said. “I'm guided by the spirit of Saint Nick.”

The second show, if I may clarify, was for the faithful and intrepid In Crowd, a smaller group that numbered somewhere between fifteen and twenty people. Just like in the
SNL
days, there was an after-party to the big party, a group including such people as Steve; Tom and Rita; Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn; Paul Shaffer,
if he was in town; and Victor Garber, ditto. The after-party began around 12:30 a.m. The kids were asleep by then, so you could and would work blue. (It was the Christmas season, after all.) One year I opened with my own bawdy composition, “Christmas Is a Lady,” set to the tune of the late-period Sinatra song “L.A. Is My Lady.”

You've got to treat Lady Christmas kindly
You've got to sprinkle her with myrrh
Then she'll light your tree and warm your Christmas balls

One year Richard Belzer got up to talk about his close friendship with Jerry Lewis and how our party reminded him of a story Jerry had told him about an event at Ira Gershwin's house back in the 1950s. Seemingly all of old Hollywood was there, said Jerry, who was still a fresh face on the scene and excited to meet two of his comic idols, Jack Benny and George Burns, for the first time. Jerry had listened to Benny for years on the radio, but he had never heard him saying anything racy or off-color. So Jerry was standing there, hanging on every word uttered by the two older men, when Benny turned to Burns and said, “You see Gina Lollobrigida over there, George? Do you know what I would love to do? I'd love to get my cock out, put it in her mouth . . . and just have her say her name over and over again.”

I was standing between Kate Hudson and Larry David when Belzer's line landed—with such force that it literally sent Kate to the ground, writhing in hysterics.

I
t wasn't lost on my Christmas-party guests that a big component of the joy I took in throwing these annual shindigs was that I got to sing before a captive audience. I seized the occasion
to let loose on my most heartfelt versions of such standards as “It Happened in Sun Valley” (apt, given that many of us ski there at Christmastime) and “You're Just Too Marvelous.” Marc, clever chap that he is, and knowing me far too well, had figured out my ulterior motive for throwing these bashes, and composed a song whose lyrics are reproduced here. It's sung from Marc's point of view.

{ “A MARTY SHORT WINTER WONDERLAND” }

Every year, mid-December
Comes a night to remember
With me at his side
We'll watch the guests hide
'Cause Marty throws a party just to sing

See his eyes, how they're glistening
He don't care if you're listening
You think that we're guests
But nobody rests
'Cause Marty throws a party just to sing