I Must Say

by Martin Short

  When it was my turn, I got up and sang “You and I,” the song I’d muffed in front of Tony Bennett on Canadian TV. This time I nailed it, hitting all the notes just as Stevie Wonder had intended them to be sung. My peers greeted me with rousing applause. Then I made a dumb mistake. Nancy was watching from stage left, and Gilda from stage right. When I stepped down to be congratulated, with all these smiling, familiar faces before me, I went . . . stage right, to Gilda. More or less out of force of habit, but still. Nancy was not thrilled with me for a couple of days thereafter, and wondered out loud whether we had a future. I had little to say. I’d already inadvertently revealed too much.

  I think it’s true of most relationships that the first year, you have the best sex, but there is some confusion and unsettledness about intention: Does this person really love me the way he says he does? Is this for real? Nan and I were no different. Our first year, we had a lot of fights over things like me spending too much time at parties talking to other people and not paying enough attention to her. I was accustomed to Gilda, who was naturally outgoing and schmoozy, and who ran in the same circles as me; I never felt the need to check in on her in social situations, since she took control of every room she was in through sheer force of personality. Nancy, not an extrovert, expected more of me, and it took a few chilly nights where I got the silent treatment until I figured out that I had to grow up a little and pay her more mind.

  Over time, as it became evident to all parties that Nancy and I were a bona fide, in-it-for-the-long-haul couple, the triangular tension drifted away. In fact, when I decided in early 1976 to embark on a career-advancing expedition southward to New York City—auditioning, taking meetings, putting myself out there, so to speak—Gilda and Nancy had a very civilized, adult telephone conversation in which they worked out that I would stay at Gilda’s place on the Upper West Side for the duration of my trip. They did this independently of me and presented the plan to me as a fait accompli.

  Gilda’s apartment was painted almost entirely blue and was very her, a combination of expensive furniture that reflected her upbringing and thrift-shop bric-a-brac that represented her funky, wayward spirit; it could just as easily have been Annie Hall’s apartment.

  It was an exciting time, because Saturday Night Live was still in its first season, and the novelty of its and her success had not yet worn off. Years later Steve Martin and I had a discussion about how exhilarating that first season of SNL was, even to those of us who were mere spectators. Steve was living in Aspen at the time, and when he saw those first few episodes, his reaction was, “They’ve done it. They did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this new kind of comedy.” Meaning that someone (Lorne Michaels) had finally worked out a way to channel our comedy generation’s loose, weirdo, hairy, nontraditional bent—Belushi’s manic energy, Aykroyd’s subversiveness, Chevy’s smart-ass leading-man thing, Gilda’s woman-child daffiness—into something that could be presented on network television.

  Victor Garber was also in New York at the time I was staying with Gilda, so he and I made a plan to watch SNL at her place while she did the show. As she headed out to 30 Rock, Gilda told me, “There’s some grass in that top drawer if you want to get high before the show.”

  So at around 11:10 p.m., I got out some of Gilda’s pot, rolled it into a spliff, lit it, and took about five hits. It was potent stuff. Maybe just a tad too potent. By 11:20 I was having a massive anxiety attack: heart pounding, body sweating, hands shaking. Oh, boy, I thought. Papa’s got to sit down.

  At 11:25 Victor arrived. In my panic-mindedness, I decided to put up a cheerful front. My logic was that if I articulated to Victor that I was having an anxiety attack, then that would make it real. Whereas, conversely, if I pretended that I was fine, the attack would not be real.

  So Victor came in, and in this insane, overly jovial way, I started rat-a-tatting all these upbeat sentiments at him: “Victor! How are you? You look great! Isn’t this exciting? Can you believe Gilda’s on Saturday Night Live? I mean, isn’t it just tremendous to see a friend who’s starting to do so well, and—”

  And then, all at once, I could contain myself no more. “I’m too high, Victor!” I wailed. “I smoked some marijuana and I’m having a nervous breakdown! Oh, Jesus, what do I do, Vic? I’m scared! Bad, bad scared!”

  Like a surgeon in the field, Victor calmly and completely took over. “Sit down,” he said, and sat me down. Then he went into Gilda’s kitchen and brought back a little dish of honey and a Coca-Cola. Victor is a diabetic. “You’re having the same reaction to the pot that a diabetic has from a blood-sugar crash,” he told me gently. “Everything’s going to be fine. Here, take this.” He fed me a spoonful of honey like I was a sick child. Then he had me drink the Coke. And he was totally right. I was back to normal within minutes.

  The first few days of my stay at Gilda’s were fun. I was sleeping on her couch, which wasn’t all that comfortable, so one night Gilda said, “Don’t be silly, come into bed with me. Nothing’s gonna happen.” I said, “It used to happen, though. A lot.” She waved me over with a good-natured C’mon motion. I joined her under the covers.

  And indeed nothing did happen, apart from some warm reminiscing. I said, “Isn’t it fun that we had those couple of years together? And you were sooo much older!” This sent her into hysterical laughter—that great inhale-wheeze laugh of hers. It was a lovely night. At lights-out, all we did, literally, was sleep together.

  But one day, a week into what was meant to be a three-week stay, I was sitting at Gilda’s kitchen table, stuffing envelopes with my head shot and résumé, when she barged through the apartment door and made a beeline for the bathroom. I could hear her vomiting. Dick Cavett, she explained to me when she came out, was that week’s host, and as she perceived it, he had been rude to her. Her feelings hurt, she had binged on Snickers bars.

  I am not giving myself any points for sensitivity here. I lost it. “Honest to fucking God, Gilda,” I said, “this is the same shit. Nothing changes. I’m pathetically and pointlessly licking envelopes that will never be opened, and you’re on Saturday Night Live, and you’re vomiting.” We had fallen back into the same old argument—and we weren’t even a couple anymore.

  Paul Shaffer was at that point the piano player in SNL’s house band, and he had a bachelor’s hovel up in the West 100s, near Columbia University. “Fuck this, Gilda, I’m going to Paul’s,” I told her.

  “Please don’t go,” she said, starting to cry. “I wanted to do this for you, to help you out by having you stay here. I wanted this to be something I could give you.” But I stormed off and headed uptown.

  A night later Nancy came down from Toronto to join Paul and me. Late, around one thirty in the morning, Gilda called, not knowing that Nancy was in town. “Is Morden there?” she asked Paul. That’s what she used to call me. Paul, speaking loudly, so both Gilda on her end and I on ours caught his drift, said, “Ahhh, Gilda! Marty and Nancy are here with me!”

  Realizing that I was not available for an emergency heart-to-heart, Gilda meekly told Paul, like her character Emily Litella, “Never mind.”

  Gilda and I, I’m pleased to say, eventually grew up into grown-ups about our relationship. We remained good friends to the end of her life. In 1983, when Nancy and I adopted our first child—our daughter, Katherine—Gilda sent over an embroidered wall hanging with Katherine’s name on it, only it read KATHARINE, the Hepburn spelling. Since Gilda and I were never ones to hold back from each other, I told her, “Thanks, Gilda, but honest to God, talk about self-centeredness! Even Hitler knew how the Eichmann kids’ names were spelled!”

  She insisted that I put Katherine, a baby, on the phone. I could hear Gilda yelling through the receiver, “Tell your dad he’s an asshole and that he spelled your name wrong! You want it spelled with an ‘A’!”

  In 1985, by which time Gilda was happily married to Gene Wilder, the four of us—Nancy and me, Gilda and Gene—had dinner together in London, where we
all happened to be at the same time. Nancy and I couldn’t help but notice a touch of concern in Gene. A few times he asked Gilda, “How are you feeling?” To which Gilda replied in sprightly fashion, “I feel great! I feel perfect!”—the takeaway from which could only be that Gilda had not been feeling well.

  A year later I was doing a press junket with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase for ¡Three Amigos! in Tucson. We kept getting pestered with questions about Gilda’s health, which we kept deflecting, since we didn’t know anything. But by the end of the day, after the three of us nervously called friends from Chevy’s hotel room, we found out that the reports were true: Gilda had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

  She and I talked about it over the phone a few times—her condition, her blood numbers, and her chemo. She had a nice period of remission where, she told me, she was contemplating adopting a child herself. I remember seeing her on the cover of Life magazine in 1988, with shorter hair but looking great. The headline was “Gilda Radner’s Answer to Cancer.” But not long after that, while I was helping arrange a benefit show for Cedars-Sinai, the hospital in L.A. where Gilda had received treatment, I heard through a woman I knew that Gilda was sick again. I called Gilda and told her exactly what I had been told. I wanted her to tell me it was bullshit. She indulged me. “I’m fine!” she said. “In fact, I just hiked up a mountain. So tell that cunt that I just climbed a mountain, okay?”

  That talk—aptly defiant, funny, and obscene—was one of our last. Gilda’s cancer had indeed returned, and she passed away in 1989, when she was only forty-two. I found out through Steve Martin, who phoned me with the bad news in the morning. It was a Saturday, and he was hosting SNL that night.

  On the show, Steve abandoned his planned monologue and introduced an old clip: a wordless, poignantly funny sketch that he and Gilda had done on the show in 1978, in which they spotted each other across a crowded room at a disco and launched into an MGM-style dance routine, to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark” from the Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon. Both Steve and Gilda wore white, and alternated between genuine grace and total comic spazziness: so committed, so perfect.

  Life with Nancy, as we settled in, was a wholly different experience from life with Gilda. Which is not to say that Nan was a shy, retiring little lady who existed at the service and pleasure of her man. (Though I’d love to try that someday.) She was a force of nature in her own right; I am attracted to strong women, if that’s not already evident.

  Yet Nancy was a very different type of force. Though she too was an enormously talented singer, songwriter, and actress, she ultimately didn’t “want it” as much as the real strivers do. She didn’t have that “Look at me, laugh at me!” need for approbation that many performers have. (Gilda and I were probably too alike in that regard.) In fact, Nancy was quite the opposite: fiercely individualistic and private—evocative, in a way, of Katharine Hepburn. I realize now that I’ve already mentioned Hepburn several times in this book, and that it may seem like I have a perverse Kate Hepburn fetish. But it’s kind of an odd coincidence. My impersonation of Hepburn came about serendipitously, because I discovered my voice was in the right register to do late-period Kate and she was so imitable to begin with. Nancy was more akin to early-period Kate, in her beauty, outdoorsiness, and independence. And she knew it. The Philadelphia Story was her favorite movie, and she had watched it dozens of times.

  Years later, when we became U.S. citizens and Los Angeles residents, Nancy’s women friends—who included Deb Divine, Rita Wilson, Catherine O’Hara, Laurie David, Carolyn Miller (wife of Dennis), and Laurie MacDonald (producing partner and wife of Walter Parkes)—nicknamed her the Mountie: a nod to both her roots and her no-bullshit, no-frivolity, no-disloyalty “If you’ve got buck teeth, either be a clown or get them fixed!” spirit.

  But Nancy reigned over the domestic sphere, too. As a new couple, we moved into a little flat for two on the top floor of 44 Binscarth Road, a beautiful old Victorian house in a leafy neighborhood of Toronto. We Canadians have our Thanksgiving in October—like logical people, when the harvest is still in effect and therefore the whole “harvest festival” idea makes sense. (We also stuff our turkey through the beak, but I’ll discuss that later.) On Canadian Thanksgiving 1975, I learned the meaning of domestic bliss, until then a theoretical concept that existed outside my adult experience. Returning home exhaustedly from whatever show I was doing, I was enticed up the staircase by a lovely, wafting aroma of roasted turkey. That was wondrous enough, but here’s the little detail that made my heart swell: As my key turned in the door, I heard Nancy scurrying to the record player, dropping the needle on Frank’s rendition of “Autumn in New York” so it would be playing as I walked in.

  We even did a show together, a cabaret version of The Apple Tree, a Jerry Bock–Sheldon Harnick musical that had played on Broadway in the 1960s. The original production was a big to-do, directed by one of my idols, Mike Nichols. Our version was bare bones: just the two of us and a pianist in the dinner theater of Anthony’s Villa, an Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of Toronto whose main dining room featured singing waiters and waitresses in clown costumes. Needless to say, this gig came during a bit of a professional lull for both of us.

  There was one warm, muggy night when only two people showed up, despite the theater’s two-hundred-seat capacity. It is a maxim of the theater—which I have since discovered is simply an invention of lazy actors—that if the size of the audience is equal to or lesser than the size of the cast, the performers have the option of not going ahead with the performance. So I walked right up to the solitary couple in attendance and said, “We’ll pay for your dinner if you just want to eat. Don’t you think it seems a little sad to do the show for just you guys?” But the guy said, “No, not particularly. We kind of want to see it.” (There’s the kind of enthusiasm that can get a depressed actor over the hump!) So Nancy and I performed it. The man and woman stared at us blankly the whole time, offering up no reaction whatsoever.

  Still, Nan and I were so in love that we had a blast. We even somehow managed to get a terrific review from the Toronto Sun, written by this mustachioed fuddy-duddy English-expat critic named McKenzie Porter. He was something else, infamous for having written a column in the mid-1970s bemoaning the indecency of people who defecate in bathrooms at work, rather than in their home loo. (“Defecation in any place where it is difficult to wash the anus is unhygienic,” he wrote.) But Mr. Porter loved our little-seen production of The Apple Tree. Or, at least, he loved Nancy. He described her in the review’s first paragraph as being “as luscious and curvaceous as a dish of prize melons.” And it went on and on—this old man’s extended, lustful tribute to my future wife’s body. “When men reflect on those firm arcs of flesh and large melting eyes that are inseparable from the ideal cuddle,” Porter wrote, “it is almost certain they have Dolman in mind.” I really couldn’t agree with him more—though I was a little wounded that he made no mention of my beautifully sculpted balls.

  Nancy and I established a policy of never going to bed mad at each other, or with unspoken, unresolved issues. Our commitment to talking things out began when, one cold January day early in our time together, Nancy received a phone call that upset her. Without explanation, she ran into our bedroom, shut the door, and pulled the covers over herself. I barged in after her and demanded to know what was wrong. “I don’t want to talk about it!” she said. So I—in a real asshole move, by the way—angrily pulled the covers off her and threw them to the floor. It was my Short-family upbringing coming to the fore: leave nothing alone, and everything in the open.

  My sensitivity was wanting, but the ultimate goal was noble: I didn’t want Nancy to suffer whatever she was suffering all by herself. So she opened up: her mother, Ruth, had just told Nancy that her father, Bob, a doctor, had left, and her parents were getting a divorce. It truly was news worth crawling under the covers for. But, as I said to Nancy, “This is not going to be our relationsh
ip.” Locked rooms and emotional shutdowns were precisely what caused her parents’ marriage to fail. We were not going to repeat that history.

  We skewed in the other direction—we bantered back-and-forth, like Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies. One summer, when I was still merely a very, very minor Canadian celebrity, Nancy and I were invited to be judges in the Miss Prince Edward Island beauty pageant. One of the contestants, in the talent segment of the pageant, opted not to sing but merely recite the lyrics to the Barbra Streisand song “Evergreen,” William Shatner style: “Love—soft as an easy chair!”

  Nan and I were convulsing as we tried to hold back our laughter. And remember, we were the judges! But what truly delighted me about that moment was that the two of us found the same things so hysterically funny.

  But don’t misunderstand me: there were fights, too, often springing from moments when my natural instinct to push things too far managed to push even Nancy too far. There was, for example, the night of the French Laundry, the Napa Valley restaurant that many critics consider America’s best. They really poured it on for us, literally: I think Nan and I had drunk three glasses of complimentary wine before we even ordered. The staff was incredibly solicitous—“Oh, good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Short”—but in a formal way that I found amusing, especially as the wine started to kick in. I became obsessed with getting at least one of the waiters to laugh, but I was bombing miserably, like a tourist trying to get a rise from one of those fur-hatted Queen’s Guards in front of Buckingham Palace.