by Martin Short
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.
CATEGORY 1: SELF
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.
CATEGORY 2: IMMEDIATE FAMILY
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.
CATEGORY 3: ORIGINAL FAMILY
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.
CATEGORY 4: FRIENDS
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!”
CATEGORY 5: MONEY
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?
CATEGORY 6: CAREER
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.
CATEGORY 7: CREATIVITY
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.
CATEGORY 8: DISCIPLINE
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.
CATEGORY 9: LIFESTYLE
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?
The 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”).
Green (“Low”) would denote that I’m fasting for a role à la Jared Leto or Matthew McConaughey, or perhaps dying.
I also maintain week-at-a-glance files, the upcoming week detailed in red lettering, the week just past recorded in black: yet another way to review my activities in total and see how they will impact, or have impacted, my overall well-being. I’ll note, say, that I deserve an A in career for the week I’ve spent prepping for a Broadway show, but I’ll also see that I’ve failed to return Eugene Levy’s call, or that my children are no longer speaking to me, and I’ll think, hey, Marty, you’d better put that right.
My manager, Bernie Brillstein, who passed away in 2008, was convinced that the Nine Categories system was my ticket to untold riches as a self-help guru. “Kid, I’m tellin’ ya,” he’d say, “you’re sittin’ on a fuckin’ self-help bible!” (Bernie looked like a Jewish Santa Claus and talked like a Hoboken stevedore.)
“The color-coded weight, the Nine Categories . . . it’s a Goddamned life philosophy,” Bernie told me. “You do the book and we’ll book you on Oprah. It’s real simple.”
Bernie’s idea was tempting, but ultimately, I’m no evangelist. The Nine Categories are a tremendous aid to me, but they are not something I push on other people, not even my own kids. I preside over a cult of one.
One of the crucial benefits of the Nine Categories is that they’ve gotten me through the many uneven periods of my career and kept in focus the true priorities of life. Maybe, at tim
es, the inconsistency and iffy quality of some of the work I took on held my “career” grade down, but this would only encourage me to push my “creativity” grade as high and fearlessly as I could. In the 1970s, for example, audiences weren’t yet conditioned, as they are now, to laugh at the very sight of me, so I could do straight drama, like a production of Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost for Canadian television. On the flip side, I had nothing to lose by trying my hand at stand-up comedy, so I did. Once.
I had a friend named Carole Pope who fronted a punk band called Rough Trade. In 1978 she asked me to open for her band at a club in Toronto called Egertons. Rough Trade’s lyrics dealt with bondage, homoeroticism, and other taboo subjects; they had a song called “What’s the Furor about the Führer?”
For whatever reason, I agreed to do a stand-up set before Rough Trade went on, despite having zero stand-up experience. I decided that, as a stand-up, I’d position myself as a cerebral, observational comic, making references to Camus and Kierkegaard. I wasn’t so much concerned with getting laughs as I was with seeing audience members turn to each other at any given moment and say, “Exactly!” The fact that I was opening for a band whose members wore jockstraps and chaps onstage didn’t dissuade me from pursuing this direction, for some reason.
The audience was terrifying from the moment I got up onstage: punks, goths, and people who had crudely carved the words ROUGH TRADE into their skin with razor blades. There was one scary man done up as a priest—who I later learned actually was a priest. I was booed and screamed at, it seemed, before I even left my house. Yet with the balls of steel that John Candy had once attributed to me, I bounded onstage undaunted and launched into my material: “Tonight is eerily reminiscent of Truman Capote’s infamous Black and White Ball in 1966—as well as his infamous Black and Blue Ball from that unfortunate dismount off Sal Mineo in ’72.”
Nothing.
“People constantly want to know what religion I am. I find that rude. It doesn’t matter. Whether you’re Christian, Jewish, or . . . you know . . . help me out here—Who are those crazy people constantly blowing things up for no reason? Americans! That’s it!—we’re all God’s children. Some of you are his bastard children. I think the Turks in the audience know what I’m talking about.”
Nothing.
“I recently saw Mel Brooks’s film Silent Movie with an all-black audience, and they were signing back at the screen.”
Nothing still . . . except crescendoing boos, shouted obscenities, and harassment. One member of the audience even started bleating at me, like an enraged sheep.
Suddenly, a Jack Ruby–type guy came out of the shadows and threw a beer in my face, momentarily stunning the audience into silence. I used this opening as my exit: “Hey, that was a light beer,” I said, “and I don’t have no weight problem! Well, good night!”
After my set, Carole came up to me and said, “I’m so sorry, Marty, I promise that tomorrow night will be different.”
I told her, “Carole, I know it will be different. Because I won’t be here. I’ll be home, watching Jack Klugman chew up the scenery on Quincy.”
Out of the ragtag array of acting jobs during this period came some good things: signposts leading the way to SCTV and Saturday Night Live. In 1976, shortly after my fruitless job-hunting trip to New York City, the one where I stayed with Gilda first and then Paul, I was cast in The David Steinberg Show. David, eight years older than me, was and is a Canadian comedy godhead, the man who proved to his countrymen that one of us could make it in America. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Winnipeg, the son of a rabbi, but he broke from the rabbinical path (no doubt infuriating Old Testament God, the more volatile and Sinatra-like of biblical deities) to join Second City Chicago in 1964. He zoomed to success in the 1960s as a stand-up comic and frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
David’s new show was pretty much what Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders Show would be on U.S. television fifteen years later: a behind-the-scenes look at a dysfunctional variety show. What’s significant about David’s show now, though we didn’t know it then, was that it served as a sort of test run for SCTV. Joe Flaherty played David’s stage manager. Andrea Martin was David’s secretary. John Candy was the show’s Doc Severinsen–like bandleader. Dave Thomas was the studio’s security guard. And I was Johnny Del Bravo, David’s annoying cousin, who he was forced to hire due to family pressure although he was ashamed of him. We had all worked together before in different combinations, but this was the first time that the five of us were collected in one place.
David wanted Johnny Del Bravo to be a lounge singer because he found them unbearable and tacky. The mid-1970s were fertile ground for the mockery of such crooners, because rock had taken over and there wasn’t yet a new generation of Harry Connicks and Michael Bublés to bring verve, youth, and style back to the Great American Songbook. The guys plying their trade in Vegas and the dinner theaters of Jupiter, Florida, in those days were generally pale imitations of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett—all the mannerisms and none of the talent. In early ’76 Saturday Night Live ran a short film by Gary Weis called “Play Misty for Me” that intercut between performances by an array of such singers as each of them, in their various toupees and ruffle tuxes, sang “Misty,” the Erroll Garner standard.
Even some of the big-time entertainers of the old guard were having a rough time fitting in during that period. The Murray brothers of Second City, Bill and Brian, were obsessed with the train-wreck syndicated talk show that Sammy Davis Jr. hosted for a couple of years in the mid-’70s, Sammy and Company: an unintentionally hysterical spectacle of rococo wardrobes and overcooked production numbers, with Sammy rappin’ Very Sincerely with such guests as Liza Minnelli, Lola Falana, Chita Rivera, and Suzanne Pleshette. The Murrays, along with Paul Shaffer, organized what they called the Sammy Club for their like-mindedly hip and funny friends: everyone would gather at either Bill’s or Brian’s place for a laugh-along viewing party of Sammy and Company.
Equally obsessed were the Flaherty brothers, Joe and Paul, and Paul’s writing partner, Dick Blasucci. When SCTV first reared its head, it was not for nothing that Joe’s variety-show send-up was called The Sammy Maudlin Show, and that its guests included “Lorna Minnelli” and “Lola Heatherton,” and that Maudlin’s sidekick had the exact same name as Davis’s, William B. Williams. (Though John Candy looked nothing like the real Williams, a slender New York radio personality.) Sammy Maudlin and Bill Murray’s lounge singer, Nick, were products of the time—of our generation’s fascination with the showbiz entropy taking place before our eyes.
But first—for the historical record—came my Johnny Del Bravo.
Johnny wore chest medallions, chunky rings, shiny, wide-collared shirts, and a cream-colored suit with rhinestone studs. His hair (a wig) was wavy and thick in a way that to him probably evoked virile masculinity but to the audience evoked Rue McClanahan. His mannerisms were more explicitly Sammy-influenced than Bill’s Nick—I greeted the audience with the exhortation, “Peace, love, and grooviness,” and pulled the occasional wonky eye. I said smarmy things like, “You know, in my business, or, in our business, when a song lingers for many many years, man, it becomes what we like to call a standard.”
Johnny was basically a less extreme version of my future SCTV character Jackie Rogers Jr. Doing The David Steinberg Show was a step toward the fulfillment of my comic destiny. Alas, it lasted only one season on CTV, its network. They replaced us with something called Stars on Ice, because, as David put it mournfully, “In Canada, anything ‘on ice’ is better.”
INTERLUDE: A MOMENT WITH JACKIE ROGERS JR.
“Well, Marty’s done it again,” said Joe Flaherty in the SCTV writer’s room. “Created yet another disgusting, unlikable character!” Jackie Rogers Jr. was basically a version of the Johnny Del Bravo character I created for The David Steinberg Show, dialed up to the point where he made the entire SCTV cast and crew go “Eww!”
every time I did him.
Jackie Jr. was supposed to be a one-off, a footnote gag. Early in my tenure at SCTV, circa 1982, I used to go into the writer’s room and do this stylized freak singer who I called Jackie Rogers. Dick Blasucci, Paul Flaherty, and my brother Michael, all then writers for the show, suggested that I play this character in a sketch, but I resisted. “Cheeseball lounge singers have been overly satirized at this point,” I said. “Nothing fresh there.”
However, it occurred to me that if I introduced the character of Rogers and then had him killed off in the same piece, we could have some fun without overdoing it. So the four of us—Michael, Dick, Paul, and me—wrote a piece in which the SCTV Network was promo-ing an upcoming Jackie Rogers special called Old Mother Nature, She Loves Me. In the promo, Rogers was shown bantering with various creatures of the forest and singing upbeat standards to them: “Pardon me, miss, but I never done this with a real live squirrel!” You get the idea.
Abruptly, the promo cut to a shot of a lurking cougar, who lunged at Rogers in mid-song and fatally mauled him. At the very end, Jackie Jr. popped up in a little inset circle on-screen and said, “Hi, I’m Jackie Rogers Jr. In 1970, my dad gave his life making this special. . . . I miss my old man. I hope you don’t—Saturday nights at nine on SCTV.”
I had recently seen a picture in a newspaper of Mickey Rooney Jr., a musician son of the famous actor who, for some reason, struck me as albino. (He was merely blond.) So I rather randomly made Jackie Rogers Jr. a cross-eyed albino. And as the character gained legs on SCTV and SNL (legs encased in silver-lamé tights, that is), I made Jackie Jr. this grotesque vehicle for the idea of a child using a famous parent—a dead parent, no less—as a way to gain credibility in show business.
