by Martin Short
Finally the wine steward approached our table and asked Nancy, “Would you like to talk about the wine?” Nancy replied that he was free to choose for us, since we knew very little about fine wines.
That’s when I interjected, “Yeah, I just pulled her out of the chorus!”
Nothing. Crickets. “In fact, on the way here,” I went on, dauntlessly, “it was a struggle for me just to get her to spit out the gum!”
Still nothing. I was bombing badly at the French Laundry.
After the guy walked away, I’d started chuckling about my comic strikeout when I noticed that Nan was staring at me with disgust. “Well, that . . . was . . . embarrassing,” she seethed.
“What?”
“‘I pulled her out of the chorus’? What the hell was that?”
“It was a joke!” I said.
“Well, you know what the problem with that joke is, Marty? It’s not funny. Jokes are supposed to be funny, you know.”
Now the fight was starting. “Oh, c’mon!” I said. “Why do you care what some waiter would think?”
“I care that you act like a moron,” Nancy retorted.
I noticed at that point that we were attracting attention: other diners in America’s most revered restaurant were looking up from their plates to watch us bicker. So, in my most whispery approximation of a shout, I said through clenched teeth, “Stop it! We cannot have this fight!”
“And why is that?” Nancy asked.
“Because the bill is going to be thirty-three hundred dollars! So we have got to have a good time!”
Nancy slumped back in her chair. “You’re right,” she said.
We didn’t speak for the next two minutes, merely eating the fine courses that had been placed before us. At last, after the waiters cleared our plates to make way for yet more plates, Nancy quietly said, “Marty?”
“What?”
“I’m over it now.”
From that point forward, we enjoyed our dinner and found our earlier squabble hysterical. Nancy still deemed my behavior unclassy—“God forbid we should act like we deserve to dine in an elegant restaurant,” she later told me—but the night became a part of our mental scrapbook, a concentrated snapshot of the Marty-Nancy dynamic.
Nancy wasn’t shy about putting anyone—not just her husband—in his place. To bring things full circle back to Blazing Saddles, the movie that nearly dashed our first night of passion, here’s one of my favorite Nan stories, from when we were in Washington, DC, for the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. I was there to take part with Matthew Broderick, among others, in a tribute to one of that year’s honorees, Mel Brooks. My job, in fact, was to sing the Blazing Saddles theme song on horseback, surrounded by a bevy of chorus girls.
Afterward there was a formal dinner in one of the Kennedy Center’s ballrooms, attended by the honorees, along with President and Mrs. Obama and various luminaries from politics and show business. I was seated beside Matthew, with Mikhail Baryshnikov to his left. Nancy, some distance away, was seated next to a prominent if notably pompous intellectual.
Nancy, from the moment I met her, was a stickler for manners, chief among them that one must make conversation with one’s neighbor at the dinner table. What do you do when you’re seated next to someone you don’t know? You ask him questions. You ask him about his life. And then, after the conversational wheels have been greased, your neighbor reciprocates and asks you some questions about your life, or maybe the two of you fall into a fantastic discussion on some completely new topic. But none of this script worked with Nancy’s dining companion, who was known to be socially intimidating and accustomed to deference from all those around him. Nan got nothing from him. She sat there determinedly asking him question after question, but received only bland, perfunctory responses.
Finally, after the umpteenth conversational dead stop, Nancy lost her composure. She said to the man—sharply—“Okay, you know what? At some point, you’re going to have to throw me a bone.”
I was oblivious to the situation until Matthew, who had observed the whole thing, nudged me and pointed in Nan’s direction.
“Ask me something,” Nancy said. “Form words and ask me something. Just for the experience.”
Startled and looking a little ashen, the man thought for a moment before finally coming up with a question. “Do you like L.A.?” he said.
Nancy suddenly extended her arms out in front of her, planted her hands on the table, and flopped her head down in exasperation. Then she looked back up, turned to the man, and said, “Okay, you know what? We’re done.” And at that moment she turned her attention from him to the woman sitting on the other side.
The guy was probably sitting there thinking, What a bitch. But for me, it was hilarious: my wife, at the Kennedy Center, in full Mountie mode.
INTERLUDE: A MOMENT WITH ED GRIMLEY
People always ask me which of my characters I would save if they were all drowning? My heavens, that’s like asking Hugh Hefner which of his registered nurses he prefers to cut and pre-chew his food for him. It’s almost an impossible thing to answer. But I suppose that if I had to choose, it would probably be a toss-up between Jiminy Glick and—oh, give me a break, Ed Grimley, and that’s no lie!
Born in 1977 on the stage of Second City Toronto, Ed not only helped me through some fraught moments with Nancy early in our relationship but also went on to have “a very decent time, I must say” on SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and even his own very hip Hanna-Barbera animated series, The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, which ran on NBC for a year. For a time Ed was also available in toy stores as a Tyco talking doll; you’d pull the string in his back and he’d say things like “Gee, that’s a pain that’s going to linger!” (A mint Ed doll in its original packaging fetches a fortune on eBay. By the way, I don’t really know if that’s true, but that’s what I tell people.)
As I’ve already detailed, Ed’s peculiar manner of speaking was a combination of how my school friend Patrick and my brother-in-law Ralph spoke, and his shirt was salvaged from my teenage 1960s wardrobe (and eventually replaced with a series of look-alike shirts). But his signature verbal tic—“I must say”—was not there from the beginning. At first Ed simply punctuated his sentences, as many Canadians do, with the expression “Eh?” I have in my personal archive a rare clip of early Ed, circa the late 1970s, from a Canadian TV show I did for a season called Ferguson, Short & Ross. In it, Ed’s still wearing my actual childhood plaid shirt, which is in complete tatters at the elbows, and he says “Eh?” where you expect him to say “I must say”: “Sometimes people can be rude, eh? It seems sad when they are, but sometimes people can be rude, eh?”
But by the time I got to SCTV, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas had hit it big with their “Great White North” sketches as Bob and Doug McKenzie, ultra-Canadian brothers who called each other “hoser” and finished their sentences with “Eh?” And, you know, there just wasn’t room for yet another SCTV character who said “Eh?,” eh? So Ed’s “Eh?” became “I must say.” Oh, and I suppose it didn’t!
* * *
ED GRIMLEY
Oh, give me a break! I couldn’t be more excited to appear here in this literary memoir, I must say. Just the thought of it is making me go completely mental and my heart is beating like a distant little jungle drum.
What if this book goes on to win a National Book Award, I must say, or a Pulitzer in letters, or even the Nobel Prize in literature? I think I would be found dead amongst my own mental excitement, and my head would be, like, exploding with untainted elation. Oh, and I suppose meeting His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, wouldn’t be the best. Give me a break! Like, I suppose life could get better than that. No way! ’Cause it’s sad, in a way, but royalty have that special glow that commoners just can’t muster.
(SUDDEN SWITCH TO EXCITABLE ENERGY.)
What if we became best friends? Best friends ever, so that I could just like phone him and say, “Oh, is Gustaf there? Well, just tell him it�
��s me.”
(SUDDEN DESPAIR.)
Oh, and I suppose that would ever happen! Like the King of Sweden doesn’t have, like, a million billion friends already.
(SUDDEN BURST OF OPTIMISM.)
But then again, maybe he doesn’t! It’s difficult to always know!
Some of you have perchance been wondering where I’ve been aboding for the last thirty years. Well, it’s like, I’ve been dwelling in the “Characters Who Were Popular in the ’80s for an Hour” Home in Trenton, New Jersey. Don’t pity me. My rock bottom is still your wildest dreams.
(OVEN-TIMER BELL GOES OFF.)
Gee, my gingerbread cookies are ready! How pleasant.
(ED RUSHES TO OPEN THE OVEN DOOR. A HUGE CLOUD OF SMOKE BLASTS OUT.)
Could be a tad overdone.
(ED PULLS OUT THE COOKIE TRAY.)
Gee, they do look very decent—and yet I can’t help but wish that I’d worn some sort of oven mitt.
(ED DROPS THE TRAY IN PAIN.)
Gee, that’s a pain that’s going to linger.
(SUDDENLY LEAPS INTO THE AIR WITH EXCITEMENT.)
But I don’t care, ’cause I’m in a literary memoir, I must say. Oh, and I suppose being in a literary memoir isn’t the best. It’s like a joke!
(THE STRAINS OF A HUNGARIAN CZARDAS FILL THE AIR. ED GRABS HIS TRIANGLE AND BEGINS TO DANCE.)
Yes, it’s time to dance the dance of merriment, for joy is my new middle name, I must say.
* * *
THE NINE CATEGORIES
One of the paradoxes of my early, crazy-in-love years with Nancy is that they coincided with my lowest ebb professionally. As successful as my debut in Godspell had been, and as many opportunities as it afforded, it didn’t fast-track me to any particular destiny or destination. Though I seldom lacked for work, my choices were simply the jobs that were available.
In Canada at the time, there was no real star system that built up actors to the point where any of us were in a position to mull the merits of one job over another. There was never a question of whether you said yes or no when offered work; you simply asked, “Do I need to bring a suit?” In the course of a day, you (“you” meaning me) might do a radio commercial for Chrysler and an audition for a role in a CBC radio production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and then, at night, appear in a cabaret show such as Cole Cuts: The Music of Cole Porter.
Although I made little headway in mid-1970s Toronto in terms of gaining fame or making serious money, I did get to experience life as a working actor and to grow with each job, which I consider a blessing. At that point, had I been thrown into the bigger showbiz ponds of Hollywood or New York, I don’t think I would have survived. My one-year contract with myself would have lapsed, and I’d have found myself back in Hamilton as a social worker, handing out checks to the needy and gently cautioning them, “Now, don’t spend this all on booze.”
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?
The 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.
