I Must Say

by Martin Short

What useful purpose served?

  What noble cause fulfilled?

  Or was it I who was to blame?

  Wrapped in my own security—

  Of love and family and the joy of music.

  Serenely living, until the jealous Gods

  Struck with ironclad fist

  To sickness and despair!

  But no, if there is only one omnipotent God,

  He could not surely choose—

  —“You I will slay, and you protect.”

  In petty favoritism.

  ’Twas but an accident of fate.

  A single moment out of time.

  A tired and nodding head perhaps,

  That hurled him to his death

  Upon a lonely road.

  OLIVE G. SHORT

  (xxooxx)

  This poem, and the events surrounding it, had a profound influence upon my views about organized religion. Mom’s words made complete spiritual sense. Why did David die? For some noble cause? At some perverse whim of God? No, she concluded, it was just a matter of a tired head on the road. Oh, and by the way: that letter that Dave wrote to me on July 2? I didn’t receive it until after his death, after the camp forwarded it to our house in Hamilton. Its chipper tone, promising fun with me in the future, did not suggest that there was some cosmic plan afoot for my brother to be called to heaven. Yet in the days and weeks after David died, well-meaning family friends and members of the clergy constantly advised me that “God works in mysterious ways, and you can’t understand the will of the Lord.”

  This sentence not only failed to reassure me, it angered me. Yeah, well, God also created my mind, which is questioning everything, including His will, so your theory doesn’t hold.

  I had been the kind of kid who ritually said his prayers before bedtime: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild / Look upon a little child,” that sort of thing. But no more. I didn’t stop praying or believing, but I had no further interest in church doctrine and unquestioning faith. My prayers changed, too. No longer did I pray over trivial matters: “Please let me pass my history exam.” I went bigger-picture. I prayed, simply, for strength, for the inspiration to go on.

  As for Mrs. James, our neighbor, she was clearly just trying to comfort my mother. But “getting over this”—what did that mean? How was it done? It was a new concept to me. And then, the night after the funeral, something instructive happened, pertaining to this very subject. Like my mother, I too had been traumatized by the fact that David’s coffin was closed. I would never see him again. My brain struggled to process the thought.

  This trauma was fresh in my head as I went to bed that night. And then I fell asleep, and had a dream unlike any I’ve had before or since. For one thing, it was in bright Technicolor worthy of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I was outside a log cabin in the woods, sitting by a scenic little stream—artificially scenic, like an MGM-backlot version of the old frontier. And while I was sitting there, David walked up and took a seat beside me. He looked handsome and strong, not remotely in need of a closed casket. He wore a vivid orange jersey that matched the scenery. And he said to me, in the most reassuring tone, “Everything’s fine. It won’t be long before we see each other again. I’ll see you in a fleeting moment.”

  “A fleeting moment”—funny words for a twelve-year-old to dream.

  When I woke up, I felt great, as if the veil of sadness had lifted. A spiritualist would say that I had experienced a visitation. A psychologist would say that my subconscious had manufactured this dream scenario to fulfill an emotional need for closure. In any case, I learned what would turn out to be a valuable lesson: that something terrible can happen to you, and yet, the day after this something terrible, the sun still rises, and life goes on. And therefore, so must you. I don’t mean to sound facile, or to imply that David’s death doesn’t still pain me to this day. But I was glad of this lesson, because it would not be long before I was forced to heed it again.

  INTERLUDE: A MOMENT WITH IRVING COHEN

  Irving Cohen was invented for SCTV, born of necessity when two of the show’s writers, Paul Flaherty and Dick Blasucci, asked me to create an old Jewish songwriter character for a sketch they were writing. Paul is the brother of my friend and SCTV castmate Joe Flaherty. One of Joe’s recurring SCTV bits was “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” in which he played the titular star of a cheesy, clubby talk show. In this new sketch, Sammy’s Ed McMahon–like sidekick, William B. Williams (John Candy), had left Sammy’s show to launch his own, The William B. Show. My character was meant to be the kind of depressing third-tier guest to which lesser talk shows, such as William B.’s, must resort to fill their airtime.

  A lot of people think that Irving Cohen is based on the prolific Tin Pan Alley great Irving Berlin, because both Irvings were/are notoriously prolific. But this is wrong on two counts: (1) Irving Berlin actually wrote good songs; and (2) Irving Cohen was largely inspired by Sophie Tucker, a veteran singer and former vaudeville entertainer who made frequent appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was a kid in the early 1960s. She had a deep, mannish voice and seemed ancient (she was actually in her seventies), and whenever she came on, she’d start in with a declaration along the lines of “You know, Ed, in the old days, they had a little ting they called vaud-dih-ville!”

  One afternoon I was idly watching the movie Broadway Melody of 1938 on TV, and there was Sophie standing beside a young Judy Garland, telling her, “You know, in the old days . . .” Jesus! I thought. Even then she was talking that way! She must have had, like, one year when she was current.

  At any rate, when Paul and Dick told me they wanted this old Jewish trouper, I knew precisely which influences and references to draw upon, and exactly how Irving would present himself: shriveled, irritable, smoking a huge cigar, and moving gingerly out onto the stage at a rate of about three inches a minute. Paul and Dick, not to mention Joe and John, seemed stunned by how fully I inhabited Irving right from the outset. I’ve been dragging him out onstage—very, very slowly—ever since.

  * * *

  IRVING COHEN

  You know, in da old days, dey had a little ting dat dey used to call vaude-dih-ville. And it was a chance for da kids to learn their craft. Whether it was da guy with the dogs jumping through the hoop-type ting, or da Russian kid without the green card throwing cutlery at his common-law wife.

  I just had a near-death experience and got to speak with God’s kid, Jesu. And I’m here to announce, he says he’s coming back to Earth—but first he’s got to revisit da tree million planets in the universe where dey didn’t nail him to a cross!

  He said heaven is exactly like Earth, except up there, the outlet stores don’t have so many fat people.

  Then we played cards, but he’s a horrible poker player. I can always tell when he’s bluffing, because his hand starts to bleed.

  Before dey sent me back, God, who has a much higher voice than you’d tink, confessed to me dat He’s sorry about da terrorism, da hurricanes, and da earthquakes and war and famine and flood and disease . . . but den, He gets moody whenever He’s trying to kick wheat and dairy.

  I’ll let you all in on a little show-business secret. Justin Timberlake? Third-generation octoroon.

  In de old days, celebrity-type people didn’t live in the world of delusion. Madonna thinks she’s Jewish because she studies Kabbalah. Sorry, Madonna, you can’t be Jewish if you look like every Jewish man’s second wife.

  If you’re a singer, I don’t need to hear you talk about your religion. If you’re a model, I don’t need to hear about your politics. And if you’re a lesbian, I’m all ears.

  I tink I hear a song coming on. Gimme a C! A bouncy C!

  (Singing) Girl-on-girl action is my kind of ting

  And if one is an Asian, my bell’s gonna ring

  From Gertrude Stein to Rosie O’D

  Lovely lesbo loving is my cup of tea

  Da da da

  Dee dee dee

  And whatever the hell else you wanna put in ther
e

  (Back to speaking) You tink you’re in pain? Last night my doctor had to give me a prescription for urine softener.

  Another showbiz secret: Pat Boone? Lubavitcher Jew.

  I remember when Cole Porter got into dat horrible, horrible horse accident. I said, “Cole, you’ve always been luckier when somebody’s riding you.”

  I don’t want to say Cole was a sexual deviant, but it’s da first time anybody fell from da bottom of a horse.

  Den dere was the always-bickering and tight-with-a-buck conjoined Siamese twins Chang and Eng. Dey were living with me in a thirty-two-story walk-up right around da corner from da old Paramount. One night Chang, or maybe it was Eng, came into my room and said dey wanted to break up. I sat ’em both down and said, “Boys! Stick together. You need each other because you’re money in da bank. You have dat special ting dat some performers work an entire lifetime trying to steal! And most importantly, you share a spleen.”

  Da problem with today’s songwriters is, dey’re just ripping off what I did years ago. “Send In da Clowns”? I wrote da same tune back in 1910 under the title “Send Up Some Towels.”

  Back in my day, minstrel shows were performed by white men in blackface. Not like today, with da black men in da blackface. I remembah telling Ben Vereen as he sat in his makeup chair, “Why gild da lily?”

  * * *

  MARTY WITHOUT PARENTS

  On the evening of September 26, 1962, two months after David’s death, my mother and I were watching the very first episode of a new CBS sitcom entitled The Beverly Hillbillies. We were sitting in the den, Mom in her chair and me on the couch next to her. The show was all about rural hayseeds finding oil on their property, striking it rich, and moving to a mansion in Beverly Hills, but to me it was mainly about Donna Douglas, who played the daughter in the hayseed family, Elly May, unbelievably sexy in short shorts and a gingham shirt tied off at the midriff.

  At one point Mom turned to me and said something along the lines of “It’s so good to see Buddy Ebsen working again. Did you know that he was the original Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, but they had to recast the part because his skin couldn’t handle the silver paint?” Even at twelve I wondered, how could I not know of Buddy Ebsen? Today, I’d Google Buddy; then, not so easy. I was turning to respond to Mom when I saw, to my horror, that she was in the midst of a grand mal seizure—her arms and legs twitching, her eyes rolling back into her head.

  I leaped out of my chair and screamed at the top of my lungs, prompting my father to come charging into the room. Neither of us knew what to do. Utter pandemonium and confusion. Michael came running down the stairs (Brian was away at boarding school), took one look at Mom convulsing, and bolted out the front door. Instinctively I took off after my big brother, and we two shoeless Short boys ran frantically down the street to fetch the neighborhood doctor. By the time we got back, with Dr. Ambrose Listen in tow, Mom’s seizure had come to an end, and Dad had gently laid her out upon the living-room couch. She was hospitalized that night at Joseph Brant Hospital, and a whole new scary chapter in my young life had begun.

  What I didn’t know then was that Mom had breast cancer way back in 1957, and had undergone a mastectomy and radiation treatment. I don’t know quite how this was kept from me, but in 1950s households it wasn’t uncommon for illnesses, especially those with the word cancer in them, to be kept very hush-hush. Did the stress of her son’s death compromise Mom’s immune system, allowing the cancer to recur? It’s hard for me to believe otherwise. We knew that at David’s funeral, Mom had developed a nagging cough that hadn’t gone away, but we had all assumed it was psychosomatic.

  Mom came home from the hospital after a short stay, and she and Dad acted as if the seizure had been a onetime event, not for household discussion, especially among the children. However, by Christmastime I knew that something was terribly wrong. Mom was thinner, not her effervescent self, and clearly burdened by something she wasn’t telling me.

  When she eventually leveled with me, she did so, oddly, on the phone. I had called her from school about something banal, like a delayed volleyball practice, and asked her how her doctor’s visit had gone. She quietly said, “Well, darling, they’ve found a small little lump in my breast and they think it might be cancer.”

  “Cancer!” I blurted out.

  “Shhh, Marty,” she said. “Don’t say it so loudly. This will be our secret.”

  In 1962 a cancer diagnosis was still often seen as a death sentence. No one had yet come up with the term survivor—there was scarcely need for it. When I returned to my volleyball practice, I didn’t know what else to do than impersonate myself acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. If I willed things to be normal, they would be. It was a little trick I’d use many more times in the years to come.

  By the spring of 1963, thanks to the many bar and bat mitzvahs I was privileged to attend in my predominantly Jewish ’hood, I was having the greatest social season of my life. Libby Stephens from down the street and I had started making out in her basement. My social life was fully abloom. But home was a different story. Mom had gone downhill quickly, her weight plummeting to 114 pounds, which was nothing, considering that she stood five-eight—that is to say, my height. All right, fine, half an inch taller than I would ever be. By April she was back in the hospital, and no one could say for sure when she was coming home.

  My sister Nora, who had been nursing at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, decided to take a leave of absence from her job to private-nurse our mother back to good health. When she arrived at the hospital in Hamilton, she was shocked—not by the withered condition of Mom, for which she was prepared, but by Mom’s dire condition as outlined in her medical files. Dad, in complete denial about his wife’s terminal prognosis, had told none of us kids, including Nora, the extent of her illness. When Nora read Mom’s charts for the first time, she burst into tears and confronted the doctors. “Why haven’t you told my father how ill my mother is?” she asked.

  “We have,” they told her. But my father had told no one. Not even the patient, his wife. Poor Daddy, keeping all of that horror to himself.

  Nora was present when the doctors finally told Mom that she had no more than three months to live. After they left the room, Nora says, Mom turned to her and matter-of-factly said, “Well, that just can’t happen. I have one more child to raise. Nora, pass the grapes, won’t you, honey?”

  That phrase—“Pass the grapes, won’t you, honey?”—would be used many times in the years to come as a shorthand for Short-family determination in the face of adversity.

  At that point, though, little Marty was still none the wiser as to the severity of Mom’s illness. The evening of the day that Mom told Nora to pass the grapes, I could hear Nora and Dad and Michael talking heatedly in the kitchen. But when I walked in, they all clammed up.

  What the hell is happening here? I thought. Even then, I was acutely sensitive to bad acting; I knew something was up. I immediately went upstairs to my bedroom, shut the door, and phoned Mom in the hospital. When she picked up, I asked her, “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “Well, darling,” she said, in the sweetest voice possible, “I’ve been told that I’m not going to live my four score and twenty.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I’m not going to live to be a little old lady.”

  “You’re not?” I asked, aghast. “Then how long?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, baby. Perhaps just another ten years.” Another lie, but in this case a welcome and probably well-advised one. I hung up the phone, and for the first time in my life, I felt true fear. I didn’t tell anyone that I had talked to Mom. I was afraid that if I stated the cold facts out loud, then they would become real; if I kept mum, the bad news might go away. Oh, the things we learn from our fathers.

  Mom came home from the hospital shortly thereafter. Everyone besides little Marty—who’d been spared the awful truth by her white lie—expected h
er to be dead in a matter of weeks. Yet somehow she rallied. There was no stopping the “pass the grapes” chick.

  Only a few days had passed before I heard Nora happily shout up the staircase, “Marty, Mom weighs one-sixteen!” She had entered a wholly unexpected remission that couldn’t be explained, since she was not receiving any further medical treatment. By the summer of ’63, she was to all appearances back to full health and seemed more radiant than ever. My father, who despised doctors because they never gave him the news he wanted to hear, ran into Mom’s oncologist on a golf course. “Well,” Dad said in his sarcastic Irish singsong when the man asked after my mother, “she’s up to one-forty—and she’s dieting.”

  “Well, Charlie,” the guy said matter-of-factly, “that’s what we occasionally experience in medicine: a pure miracle.”

  For the whole of my first two years in high school, Grades 9 and 10, Mom was in excellent health. But from Grade 11 to the start of Grade 13—in Ontario, in those days, secondary school lasted a year beyond the American norm—her health fluctuated. She would plummet and then pull through, plummet and pull through. Finally, though, the cancer metastasized throughout her body, and on February 14, 1968, a very sad Valentine’s Day, she died at the age of fifty-five.

  So many people have commented to me through the years about how sad I must have been to lose my mother at seventeen. And of course it was. But I was very aware, even as she lay dying, that I’d been the beneficiary of an extraordinary act of willpower: Mom’s determination to hang in there on behalf of that “one more child to raise.” To lose her at thirteen, before I was done cooking in the oven, would have been far more devastating than losing her at almost eighteen, by which time I was something approaching an adult. During those precious extra five years, Mom gave me her critical evaluations of Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago. Those were the years when our legendarily argumentative, preserved-for-posterity Christmas dinner happened, and when she organized our family trips to Toronto to see the great artists play the O’Keefe Centre: Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, Richard Burton in Camelot, the London production of Oliver! on its way into New York.