Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by STEVE MARTIN

  My body was on the road but my heart was elsewhere. I continued to fulfill my contracts, mostly weekly gigs where I was allowed to “sit down,” a term meaning the performer wasn’t having to travel to a different town every night. Working in Vegas for several weeks, I taped tinfoil over the windows in my rental house so I could adjust to the city’s all-night schedule. According to scientists, no sunlight for two weeks can do things to a person, such as make you insane. I fell into a depression that might be called self-indulgent but was real just the same.

  The Jerk had been a smash hit, but my comic well was dry; the movie represented my small act’s ultimate expression. My cheap cassette player, which I now used to play thirties songs from Pennies from Heaven—the dark, audience-jolting drama that I chose to do next—was my only solace inside the blacked-out bedroom.

  In 1981 my act was like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction. One night in Las Vegas, I saw something so disturbing that I didn’t mention it to my friends, my agent, or my manager. It was received in my mind like grim, inevitable news. I was onstage at the Riviera showroom, and the house, as usual, was full. The floor tables were jammed, and the club was ringed with tiers of booths. There were soft lights around the interior wall, which silhouetted the patrons in halos of light. My eyes scanned the room as I worked, seeing heads bobbing and nodding; and then, in one booth in the back, I saw something I hadn’t seen in five years: empty seats. I had reached the top of the roller coaster.

  I had a week’s job in Atlantic City. The shows were still sold out, but I was exhausted, physically and existentially. When I performed the song “King Tut,” a guitar suspended on wires (a beautiful, mirrored Fender Flying-V) would descend from the rafters. I would then “Tut walk” over and strum it only once, and it would ascend back into the ceiling, creating the shortest guitar solo in the history of show business. For the third night in a row, the guitar failed to descend, leaving me horribly stuck. I guessed that I hadn’t greased the right union guy. The act ended normally, and I exited the stage and felt something rare for me: rage. In the wings, I began swearing to myself. I ripped off my coat and threw it against a wall. Of course, my fury was not from the failure of the King Tut guitar to descend from the ceiling—it was that over the last few years I had lost contact with what I was doing, and I was suffering an artistic crisis that I didn’t know I had a capacity for. I went to my dressing room, opened my travel-weary black prop case, and stowed away my magic act, thinking that one day I would open it and look at it sentimentally, which for no particular reason, I haven’t. I never did stand-up again.

  IN THE EARLY 1980 S, a friend whose father had been killed crossing the street and whose mother had committed suicide on Mother’s Day advised me, “If you have anything to work out with your parents, do it now. One day it will be too late.” This thought nagged at me and I began a fifteen-year effort to reconnect with my parents. I took them to lunch almost every weekend, probing them for anecdotes about our life together, and these consistent visits made us closer. My father enjoyed dealing with fan-mail requests and used his real estate expertise to help manage my vacation home. In the 1990s, my father’s attitude toward me began to soften. I had written Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a play set in 1905 about a hypothetical meeting between Picasso and Einstein. My father flipped over it, bragging to his friends and telling me I should win a Pulitzer Prize. He was laughing more, too, enjoying pranks on telemarketers and mail solicitors, and he exhibited his charitable streak by delivering Meals on Wheels, a service that provides food to the elderly. I began to appreciate him more as his humor started to shine through. Though he was experiencing disturbing health issues, he took my twenty-five-year-old nephew, Rusty, to a car dealer to help him negotiate a price. After a few offers and counteroffers, the dealer looked at the purchase order and said, “I don’t know, I’m not really comfortable with this.”

  “You’re uncomfortable? You’re uncomfortable?” my father said. “I’m the one with the catheter in my peter.”

  After our lunches, my parents, now in their eighties, would walk me to my car. I would kiss my mother on the cheek and wave awkwardly at my father as we said goodbye. But one afternoon, perhaps motivated by a vague awareness that time was running out, we hugged each other and he said, in a voice barely audible, “I love you.” This would be the first time these words were ever spoken between us. Several days later, I sent him a letter that began, “I heard what you said,” and I wrote the same words back to him.

  My father’s health declined further, and he became bedridden. There must be an instinct about when the end is near; Melinda and I found ourselves at our parents’ home in Laguna Beach, California. I walked into the house they had lived in for thirty-five years, and my tearful sister said, “He’s saying goodbye to everyone.” A nurse said to me, “This is when it all happens.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I soon understood.

  I was alone with him in the bedroom; his mind was alert but his body was failing. He said, almost buoyantly, “I’m ready now.” I sat on the edge of the bed, and another silence fell over us. Then he said, “I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.”

  At first I took this as a comment on his condition but am forever thankful that I pushed on. “What do you want to cry about?” I said.

  “For all the love I received and couldn’t return.”

  I felt a chill of familiarity.

  There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other’s eyes. At last he said, “You did everything I wanted to do.”

  “I did it for you,” I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: “I did it because of you.”

  Our father’s sickness reunited me and my sister. When we visited our ailing parents, we did something we had never done in our lives: talked. We had something uniquely in common, and each conversation turned to our past, as though we had found a mine with a rich vein. I was surprised that our views of the household jibed. I had thought I was the only outsider, but no, she was, too. She was aware of the tension and fear that had made home life so miserable and the outside world so appealing. When she confirmed our father’s unprovoked hostility toward me, I was shocked. Somehow I thought I had made it up, had caused it, or had an innate, unlikable quality that riled him.

  Together again.

  My father died in 1997, and my mother, for a short time, became a stylish matriarch. She immediately cut off all the consistent small loans my father had continued to make to a few friends; to her they were freeloaders. But she didn’t have long to enjoy her single life. Having few interests to sustain her, over the next few years she fell into a vacant, mental decline. I continued my visits with her, and always when I walked into the room, her blue eyes lit up and her face brought forth a smile. I was, after all, her son.

  She began to alternate between lucidity and confusion, creating moments of tenderness and painful hilarity. She told me she thought Glenn had treated me unfairly, that she wished she had intervened. She said when I was a child, she hugged me and kissed me a lot, something I did not recollect. Then she took a long pause. She looked at me, quietly puzzled, and said, “How’s your mother?”

  Another day, curious about an old family rumor, I asked her if she ever had a miscarriage. “No, I never did.” Then my ninety-year-old mother added, “Knock on wood.”

  One emotional afternoon I told her that I loved her and I thanked her for bringing me into the world. Her eyes moistened, and she said, “This is the highest moment of my life.” I asked her if she had any regrets. She said, “I wish I had been more truthful,” a comment regarding, I believe, her lifelong subordination to my father. She expressed embarrassment that she was dying, saying, “I hate to be silly.” In February 2002 she lay on a bed in the house, not able to speak, but with her eyes smiling. Her saintly Filipino nurse, Mila, was daubing her head with a damp towel and was, in an eerie recall from my childhood, singing to her “America the Beautiful.
” Then Mila quietly left the room. I moved closer and said goodbye to my mother. I put my arms around her and, surprising myself, choked out, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” a term I hadn’t used since childhood. I kissed her on the cheek, and her skin felt cool and young. She seemed to pass into a trance, and eventually, I left the house.

  I drove toward home and on the way felt a sentimental urge to stop by the Bird Cage. It had been thirty-one years since I had left the little theater where I got my start. I cruised the main gate, but the lines were long. I almost went home but decided to try the employee entrance in the back. I pulled in to a parking space wondering if they were going to throw me out, but an elderly security guard immediately said, “Hi, Steve.” He was saying hello to me not as a celebrity but as someone he remembered from thirty years ago. A few hand waves were telegraphed from security guard to security guard, and I found myself entering the grounds through the employees’ gate.

  Knott’s had expanded over the decades, giving it the qualities of a tree trunk: The newest developments were on the outside, with the oldest buildings still standing at its core. As I moved toward the theater, I felt a peculiar sense of passing through rings of time. The newer Knott’s gave way to the seventies Knott’s, which gave way to the Knott’s of the sixties, fifties, and forties. I was time-traveling, not in an exotic Wellsian time machine, but with every footstep.

  The deserted lobby of the Bird Cage looked as though time had stopped the day I left. On the walls were photos from various productions, some of which included me as resident goofball. On one wall were hall-of-fame eight-by-tens of graduates, including me, John Stuart, and Kathy Westmoreland. Stormie’s photo was from the period: She was probably twenty when it was taken. It was hung at eye level, and I had the feeling of staring into her face, just as I did then.

  I tugged on the theater door; it was locked. I was about to give up when I remembered a back entrance in the employees-only area, a clunky, oversize wooden gate that rarely locked because it was so rickety. I sneaked behind the theater and opened the door, which, for the millionth time, had failed to latch. The darkened theater flooded with sunlight, and I stepped inside and quickly shut the door. Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness.

  I went backstage and had a muscle memory of how to raise and lower the curtain, tying it off with a looping knot shown to me on my first day of work. I fiddled with the sole lighting rheostat, as antique as Edison. I stood on the stage and looked out at the empty theater and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.

  Driving home along the Santa Ana freeway, I was still unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic 8-Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and high jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.

  I ALWAYS GAVE MY PERFORMANCES, even my five-minute talk show appearances, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It turned out that my stand-up career took that shape, too. I was in a conversation a few years ago with a friend, the painter Eric Fischl. We were comparing psychoanalysis with the making of art. I said, “Both require explorations of the subconscious, and in that way they are similar.” He agreed, thought about it, then added, “But there is a fundamental difference between the two. In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.” He was right. I had not looked at or considered my stand-up career until writing this memoir; I had, in fact, abandoned it. Moving on and not looking back, not living in the past, was a way to trick myself into further creativity.

  My career in stand-up gave me a vestigial sense of the crowd that I have relied upon over the last twenty-seven years. In the world of filmmaking, where there is no audience, where, in fact, quiet on the set is required, I sometimes try to determine if a particular idea is funny. I picture myself at the back of a darkened theater, watching the bit in question unspooling on the screen, and somewhere, in the black interior of my brain, I can hear the audience’s response. Thankfully, when the movie is finally screened, I discover that my intuition is not always right. If it were, there would be no surprises left; I would be living in a dull comedy heaven.

  I do not know if my act holds up these many years later. It is not for me to decide or even think about. Sometimes I hear or see a piece of the old show, and it sounds funny; sometimes I don’t get it and can’t figure out what all the fuss was about. I did, however, in the course of writing this memoir, come across routines and ad libs, long forgotten, that made me smile, like this description of a radio show in Austin, Texas, in the seventies, remembered by the host Sonny Melendrez:

  “Steve Martin came directly from a recording session to debut his Let’s Get Small album on my show. Before he left, he got very serious, and I truly thought we were seeing another side of him. He launched into a monologue of what seemed like sincere words of friendship. It took me by surprise, given the hour of silliness that had just taken place. ‘Could this be the real Steve Martin?’ I thought.”

  “Sonny, you know, I’ve listened to you for years, and I really feel like you’ve become my friend. I feel like I can ask you this question.”

  “Sure. Steve, you can ask me anything.”

  “What time is it?”

  Acknowledgments

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, I looked at the collected flotsam of my life and sent it off to an archivist, Candace Bothwell, who did an outstanding job of sequencing and preserving whatever she could. Later, I collected other cardboard boxes from my parents’ house, some moldy from garage floods. Inside were sedimentary layers of collected junk, ephemera, snapshots, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Like a geologist, I was sometimes able to date items by their position in the stack. As much as I enjoyed the writing of this book, researching it was a new thrill for me. Finding a photo that confirmed a dim recollection of days gone by hooked me on the detective work, and the legwork—marching from my desk back and forth to the archival boxes—gave me something to do besides type, think, worry, and cry.

  This book has allowed me to contact old friends and dig through their memories and memorabilia. All contacts have been pleasant and some quite moving. The arrival of a package of photos or copies of letters offered by a friend was like having an archaeological dig brought to my own home. People to whom I am grateful include, in no particular order, Gaylord Alexander, George and Carole McKelvey, John McClure, Nina Raggio, Gary Mule Deer, Dave Archer, John McEuen, Ivan Ultz, Dean Carter, Nick Pileggi, Kathy Westmoreland, Mitzi Trumbo, Melinda Dobbs, Stormie Omartian, Phil Carey, Bob Shayne, Betty Buckley (not the actress), Maple Byrne, and many others. They all helped fill in the past. In distilling my life, or a portion of my life, I may have left out people who had a crucial impact on me. Victoria Dailey deserves her own biography in order to tell the story of my debt to her, and Lorne Michaels deserves a bio, too, but he’s already the subject of about ten.

  Two valuable editors helped shape this book, Bill Phillips and Nan Graham, without whom I would still be wondering, “Where did I go wrong?” My representative, Esther Newberg, gave me tough love when she could have said, “You’re beautiful, Stevie baby, you’re beautiful.” I also have to thank the host of friends I have used through the years as readers. I’m sure they’re grateful that I have finally learned an important rule: You can’t ask a friend to read your manuscript twice. I would string them out through the writing stages from clumsy first draft to shiny final, knowing I only had one shot at them, and, after the manuscript had improved, I always felt bad that a particular friend had read it when it stank. My thanks extend to Rebecca Wilson, Geoff Dyer, Nora Ephron, April Gornik, Eric Fischl, Adam Gopnik, Bruce McCall, Joan Stein, Ricky Jay, Mike Nichols, Davi
d Geffen, Pete Wer-nick, Anne Stringfield, and finally, the Internet: I have learned that people are uploading their lives into cyberspace and am convinced that one day all human knowledge and memory will exist on a suitable hard drive which, for preservation, will be flung out of the solar system to orbit a galaxy far, far away.

  Photograph Credits

  Photographs were provided courtesy of the author except for the following:

  Chapter Coffee and Confusion © Morris Lafon

  Chapter The bird Cage Theatre © Dean Carter

  Chapter The bird Cage Theatre © Mitzi Trumbo

  Chapter The bird Cage Theatre © Nina Raggio

  Chapter The bird Cage Theatre © Cleo Trumbo

  Chapter Television © Henry Diltz

  Chapter Television © William E. McEuen

  Chapter Breakthrough © Norman Seeff

  Chapter Breakthrough © 1978 Edie Baskin

  Chapter Breakthrough © John Malmquist/pixdude.com

  Chapter Standing Down © Bill Thompson

  Table of Contents

  Beforehand

  Coffee and Confusion

  Comedy Through the Airwaves

  Disneyland

  The Bird Cage Theatre

  Television

  The Road

  Breakthrough

  Standing Down

  Acknowledgments

  Table of Contents

  Beforehand

  Coffee and Confusion

  Comedy Through the Airwaves

  Disneyland