I Must Say

by Martin Short

  Late in ’72, I landed a gig hosting a CBC teen variety program (in my off hours from the show) called Right On. It aired live at 5:00 p.m., and the show’s announcer was a rising Canadian personality named Alex Trebek. Though Right On lasted only a few months, it wasn’t lost on me how great and surreal it was for me to be hosting my own live TV show with an actual band, just seven years after I had play-acted pretty much the same scenario in my attic.

  And then, when word got out that Chicago’s Second City improv theater was starting up a sister company in Toronto—in June 1973, just as Godspell was winding down—the better part of my social circle banged down the door to enlist. For reasons I’ve already detailed, I elected not to audition, but Gilda, Eugene, Jayne Eastwood, and Gerry Salsberg from our show did, as did Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield. And they all got in! Second City Toronto’s first cast was supplemented by two veterans of the Chicago operation, Joe Flaherty and Brian Doyle-Murray. Meanwhile, John Candy moved to Chicago to take a slot in Second City’s cast there, alongside Brian’s brother Bill Murray. John came back to Second City Toronto the following year, by which time Catherine O’Hara was also a full-fledged member, soon to be joined by Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas.

  Does it seem like I’m blatantly name-dropping here? Yes, it does—and with good reason. Toronto at that time had a Paris-in-the-’20s thing going on. Not in the sense that anyone was sitting around and self-consciously declaring, “Take a good look around, my friends, for someday all of us shall be prominent players in the captivating business of show!” No, it was simply that we were all young and like-mindedly creative, in the same place at the same time. I don’t think of it as a magical “What did they put in the drinking water?” scenario. Rather, I think that so many of us went on to bigger things because we were there for each other early: friends and friendly competitors, pushing ourselves to heights we never would have reached individually.

  And remember, at the time, none of us had any idea that we were anything more than very fortunate, very happy young performers. No one was sitting around pointing a finger and saying, “Hey, you’re Gilda Radner! You’re Eugene Levy! And you’re Dan Aykroyd!” We were in Toronto, you see, so we still thought of ourselves as minor-league compared to the real actors who plied their trade in New York and Hollywood.

  Paul Shaffer was the first of our circle to leave Toronto more or less for good, moving to New York City in ’74, when Stephen Schwartz beckoned him to be the piano player for a musical that Schwartz had opening on Broadway, The Magic Show (whose star was yet another McMaster alum of my generation, the magician Doug Henning). Gilda and I were so thrilled for Paul, and one day, sitting in the kitchen at her place, we were excited to receive a phone call from him. “Paul,” Gilda asked in wonderment, as if he had bounded over the rainbow and into the land of Oz, “what are New York actors like?” As we cradled the receiver together, Paul, in his kindly Paul voice, said, “Well, maybe it’s just ’cause you’re my friends, but I think you guys are just as talented.”

  Gilda turned to me and said, “Aww, isn’t that so sweet?” And then, jokingly, to Paul: “Liar!” Because we found it daunting, the very idea: New York actors. In a year and a half Gilda would be a household name, starring in Saturday Night Live. But on that day, we couldn’t fathom that New York would ever want anything to do with us.

  NANCY’S BOY

  Gilda and I were a couple, on and off, for almost two years. The first few months were bliss, but overall we had a tempestuous relationship, with multiple breakups and rapprochements. Basically, our happiness kept running aground upon the same argument, which we had over and over again. Gilda, for all her exuberance, had lots of dark moods and neuroses. I’m not being indiscreet here, because she acknowledged these issues in her own memoir, It’s Always Something, including her struggle with eating disorders. I could never fathom, in our time together, how a woman of her talent and advantages could get so down on herself. It hadn’t been that long since I’d buried my mother, who died before her time and was desperate to stay happy and keep living—who clung to the slightest bit of positive medical news as a cause for celebration.

  So for Gilda not to appreciate her good fortune—with her burgeoning career, her well-to-do Detroit upbringing, and her natural gift for making every guy have a crush on her and every girl want to be her best friend—well, it was just beyond what my inexperienced young man’s brain could comprehend.

  And that was part of the problem. I was twenty-two years old to Gilda’s twenty-six when we started dating—a significant difference in age at that point in life. I was unworldly and immature, simply too unsophisticated psychologically to understand that a person could have all the blessings that Gilda had and still be burdened with unhappiness and an enormous need for people to demonstrate their love for her, all the time. I had a joke on this subject that amused even Gilda: that one time I’d walked into her kitchen and found her on the phone, saying, “Okay . . . So all right . . . Love you! . . . See ya! . . . Bye! . . . Love you! . . . Call me!” After she’d hung up, I asked her, “Who was that?” and Gilda said, “Wrong number.”

  Gilda channeled some of her need for love into her pets, which were suitably eccentric. She had a three-legged cat named Muffin and a morbidly obese Yorkie named Snuffy. I was saddled with the responsibility of dog-sitting the Snuff Machine, as the pooch was alternately known, when Gilda traveled home to Detroit to visit her mother, Henrietta. While she was gone, I decided to take Snuffy to visit my brother Brian and his wife, Gwen, in Ancaster, a little village near Hamilton. I checked in with Gilda from their house, watching as my three-year-old niece fed the podgy little dog slice after slice of Kraft American cheese. “How’s my Snuffy girl doing?” Gilda asked. Suddenly I noticed that the dog was no longer moving. Right at that moment, Gilda said, “Remember, Snuffy’s allergic to dairy, so make sure she doesn’t get any.” I made my excuses and got off the phone. I raced over to Snuffy and collected her near-lifeless body . . . just in time for her to explode all over me, from every orifice.

  By the time I picked up Gilda from the train the next day (she was afraid of flying), I had already rushed Snuffy, whose coat had resembled an aerial view of Dresden, to Anita Chapman’s Dog Boutique, where they scrubbed and shampooed her to the best of their ability and adorned her with little Rose Marie hair bows. Gilda eyed the woozy dog suspiciously.

  “Why does she look so out of it?” she asked.

  “She missed you, baby,” I responded.

  After Godspell had been running for several months, the cast started to turn over. Victor Garber was the first to leave, having been tapped to do the Godspell movie. A few months later Jayne Eastwood left, and Andrea Martin shifted into Jayne’s role. Taking Andrea’s old part—as Robin, the girl who sings “Day by Day,” the one Godspell song that every human being knows—was a young woman named Mary Ann McDonald. And when Eugene finally graduated to playing Jesus, our McMaster friend Dave Thomas came in to take Eugene’s old role, as an apostle named Herb.

  There was turnover in the understudy ranks, too. One day all of us—all of us guys, anyway—were struck by the new girl who’d been brought in to cover Gilda and Avril Chown. Her name was Nancy Dolman. She was forbiddingly attractive, with Joni Mitchell cheekbones and long, long, straight blond hair that fell halfway down her back and swooshed in a sexy way behind her as she walked. As Ed Grimley would say, “She made your heart beat like a little distant jungle drum.”

  Victor, though he was no longer in the show, had already worked with Nancy: the two of them had performed together in that Jesus-rock revue he’d been in, Canadian Rock Theatre, the vehicle through which he learned the Godspell songs ahead of the rest of us. Nancy, much to her parents’ horror, had dropped out of her college, Western University in London, Ontario, at the end of her freshman year to join Canadian Rock Theatre. This was just in time for their U.S. tour, which turned out to be a semi-traumatic experience. The producers hadn’t taken the trouble to secure the ri
ghts to do the songs they were doing, and by the time the revue got to Las Vegas, the music publishers had caught wind of it and issued an injunction forbidding Canadian Rock Theatre from performing further. While in limbo in Vegas, the cast was invited to attend some random hip groovy person’s random hip groovy party. Another disaster: Nancy and Victor spent the evening clinging to each other in terror in a hot tub, riding out a bad trip after someone surreptitiously slipped them acid.

  Another person who knew of Nancy pre-Godspell was Eugene Levy’s new girlfriend, Deb Divine, who would become (and remains) his wife. Deb and Nancy grew up on the same street in Toronto and went to the same high school, York Mills Collegiate Institute. Deb, two years younger, had looked up to Nancy as York Mills’s golden girl, a blond beauty who, in her mind, was always speeding off with some cute jock guy in a convertible. Nancy was industrious, too. Unbowed by the unraveling of Canadian Rock Theatre, she used her remaining time in the States to raid its thrift shops for secondhand clothes, which she smuggled across the border and sold at a handsome profit at a carefully curated vintage-clothing shop she opened in Toronto with the very much of-its-era name Reflections of Ambrosine.

  I knew none of this at the time. All I knew was that Nancy, per her job as the understudy, came to the theater every night, signed in, checked in to see if anyone was sick or otherwise indisposed, and, if not, went on her way. We guys would stand there watching this ritual with our mouths agape, doing everything short of muttering “Humina, humina!” This chick, lissome in her antique capes and filmy dresses, was way out of my league.

  One day, though, Paul invited me to join him and Mary Ann McDonald, who was by then his girlfriend, for a night out at a jazz club. Mary Ann and Nancy were friends, so Nancy was coming along too. Gilda and I had just been through one of our “Well, then fuck you, idiot!” fights earlier in the day, and as I had nothing better to do, I agreed to come along. That’s all I thought of it as: me going to the jazz club with Paul and Mary Ann, who happened to be bringing her friend Nancy.

  But at our table for four, it became a different situation: my unconsidered “Jesus, she’s beautiful” take on Nancy evolved into genuine feelings for her. It was that thing where you finally talk to the pretty girl and discover that she’s not only pretty but also funny, smart, and simpatico. The chemistry is right, and the hang is great. And as we discovered, we had people and places in common. Nancy’s godfather had worked for my father at the steel company! Her mother was a native Hamiltonian, and she herself had been born in Hamilton! What were the odds?

  Still, the night ended innocently. I went home to Avenue Road, and Nancy had a boyfriend at the time named Paul Ryan. (Not the congressman from Wisconsin and 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate; his then three-year-old ass I would have kicked easily.) I was barely in my apartment two minutes when the phone rang. It was Gilda, somehow all-seeing and all-knowing.

  “You’ve been with someone!” she said.

  “I’ve been with no one!” I protested.

  “Tell me the truth, Marty!”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what happened: Paul and Mary Ann went to the jazz club with Nancy Dolman, and I happened to go along. That’s all that happened. I swear to you.”

  That turned into a huge headline in Godspell land. Gilda, pissed off and vengeful, the next day arranged for all the women in the cast to cut Nancy dead when she walked in. For a few days Nancy was a pariah. Then, as if it had been nothing, the hard feelings evaporated and everything was okay again. Gilda and I resumed being a couple. A while later, I heard, through the high-school-style grapevine endemic to all theater companies, that Nancy had admitted to someone that she had a crush on me. An ego boost, to be sure. But still, I was with Gilda, and Nancy was with non-congressman Paul Ryan.

  Gilda and I split for good in July 1974, eleven months after Godspell closed. We didn’t do so with the foreordained finality that the words above suggest; it’s just how things panned out. Not a few days after what, at that time, was simply our latest breakup, I was drinking at my usual haunt, the Pilot bar, when Nancy happened to walk in. Yes, this girl can wear a top, was all I could think at that moment. We began talking. I mentioned to her that I was looking for a new place to live. She told me that there were some nice flats available in the Beaches, her neighborhood, in east-central Toronto. Also, she had just broken up with her boyfriend.

  We arranged to spend the next day, a Sunday, looking at apartments together, followed by a round of tennis, since we both played. Before Nancy left the Pilot that night, I said to her lasciviously—

  I don’t know what possessed me—“Have you ever tried a comedian before?” Which was either very sexy or very creepy, depending on your opinion of me. She just stared at me, betraying no emotion, and said, “I hope you have a racket. I’m pretty good.”

  Our tennis date was such fun that I invited Nancy to come see me that night in the show I was doing, What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This? “I’m Haldeman / I’m Ehrlichman / I’m Klein / Ze three sour Krauts from ze Rhine!”

  You know, speaking from experience, I can tell you that there’s no aphrodisiac more potent than Watergate-themed cabaret music. Well, in my case, anyway. By night’s end, Nancy and I were making out while pressed against my Volkswagen convertible in the theater’s parking lot. Boy, were we both easy.

  Since I am a decent sort of chap, I wasted no time in asking Nancy out again, and brought her to a cast party the very next night. At the party we were holding hands. Andrea Martin, who was in the show with me, cornered me for a moment and asked, with typical Andrea forthrightness, “When did you start having sex with Nancy Dolman?”

  I told her that I had not, in fact, started having sex with Nancy Dolman.

  But Andrea was adamant. “You two have the intimacy of a couple,” she said. “I can see it! You’re having sex!” We truly weren’t, but hey, it wasn’t the worst idea.

  That very night, after the party ended, I took Nancy to the Hyatt Hotel in Toronto. Bear in mind that it was summer. I was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt. Nancy was wearing very short shorts and a halter top. She was twenty-two years old, and I was twenty-four—though I looked about fourteen. We had no luggage. I walked up to the clerk at the front desk and announced, “My wife and I would like a room, please!” He looked us up and down, burst into laughter, and then very kindly gave us a key.

  We opened the door to our room, pulses racing, pheromones pumping. Nancy teasingly told me, “I’ll be right back,” and went into the bathroom to powder her nose. Now, this was the first time I had ever been in a hotel room that featured movies on demand. As I waited for Nancy, sitting on the bed, I turned on the TV and saw that Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles was available for viewing. I couldn’t believe it. How could such things exist? So I ordered the movie and started watching.

  Nancy emerged from the bathroom, astonishingly, beauteously naked. She saw the movie playing, and her face momentarily fell. “This is a joke, right?” she said. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m gonna turn it off! I can’t tell you how quickly I’m gonna turn this off!” I said, desperately waving my hands in the international I-mean-no-harm gesture.

  “Oh, yes, Marty,” she said. “I think you’re going to turn the movie off.”

  Nancy and I were a couple from that day forward: July 8, 1974. We wouldn’t marry for another six years—it was the ’70s, maaan—but we were instantly in love. On paper, she was the classic rebound girl, the woman into whose arms one conveniently falls after an epic heartbreak. But the miracle of Nan and me is that once we started, we never stopped; we remained forever devoted to each other. There was never a blow-up I’m-packing-my-bags! moment. Whatever did come up, we dealt with.

  In the early days, I admit, there was a fair amount to deal with emotionally, mostly on my end. Falling deeply in love with Nan didn’t instantly obliterate what I’d felt for Gilda, which had been no mere schoolboy crush—it too had been love, real love.
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  Gilda always had her ear to the ground, and she called me as soon as word got out about Nancy and me. “You’re going out with Nancy Dolman?” she asked, not accusingly, but shocked. “But, but . . . we’re supposed to get back together again! That’s our pattern! We weren’t done.” But we were done.

  For a year or so I had some difficulty juggling the roles of good boyfriend and good ex-boyfriend. By the end of 1974 Gilda was living in the States again, part of the touring stage show that National Lampoon magazine had put together. Nancy and I took a trip to New York to check out the show, and we were there for opening night. The director was Ivan Reitman, and the cast was extraordinary: Gilda, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis, and Joe Flaherty.

  In one sketch, Gilda played Jacqueline Onassis as a panelist on a What’s My Line?–style show. The host, the John Charles Daly figure, fired a starting gun to begin the games. At this, Gilda, in her Jackie suit, jumped out of her chair and started crawling over the other panelists toward the back of the studio. Bill Murray, as Daly, would say, “No, no, Mrs. Kennedy! We’re just starting the game!” In another sketch, Gilda played a blind woman on a date with John Belushi. As John kept jumping Gilda’s character, forcing himself upon her, he assured her that it was her dog trying to “jazz” her, not him. It played better than it sounds—the kind of classic sick humor for which the Lampoon was notorious.

  Because we knew nearly everyone in the cast, Nancy and I were invited to the after-party, which was something of a reunion-slash-fusion of all the people who had ever met through Godspell, Second City Toronto, and Second City Chicago. Ivan Reitman still talks about that party as one of the greatest nights of his life, a sort of here-we-are moment for a generation of comedy people on the cusp of fame. Paul Shaffer was playing piano, and as was the wont of our group, each of us got up to do a little performance.