I Must Say

by Martin Short

  We wouldn’t have given these wares another thought (I swear!) were it not for what happened a month later. We were back in Toronto on break during our shows’ hiatuses when we got a call from our landlady, Mrs. Vogel. She was a kindly German woman who lived three doors down from us. She was calling to inform us that our house had been broken into. “All da drawers in da bedroom vere pulled out,” Mrs. Vogel reported, “and their contents vere scattered around da bedroom.”

  I said, “When you say all the drawers, do you mean all the drawers?”

  “Jah, all da drawers,” she said. “And all da contents of da drawers vere dusted for fingerprints.” Normally Mrs. Vogel was very friendly, but there was an uncharacteristic coldness to her voice. Suddenly I understood why.

  “Were the contents put back in the drawers?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, even more coldly than before. “Ve vill leave that for you.”

  Nancy and I wasted little time in flying back to L.A. We hurried from the airport to our robber-tossed crime-scene house, and when we got there, lo and behold, spread out on the floor for all of the LAPD to see were our carefully fingerprint-dusted wedding gifts.

  As it turned out, our high-riding L.A.-sitcom days were short-lived. Soap was on its last legs by the time Nancy joined up, and the show was canceled after her one season on it. I’m a Big Girl Now fared no better. I played one of Diana Canova’s professional colleagues, Neal Stryker, the office whiz kid at a Washington, DC, think tank. But by the season’s eighth show, the writers found the think-tank setting too limiting so they decided, without any explanation to the audience, to turn our workplace into a newspaper. Needless to say, I’m a Big Girl Now was not renewed. On the plus side, I did get to meet Danny Thomas, who played the father of Diana’s character and had been a childhood favorite of mine on his 1950s TV show Make Room for Daddy. Danny was very nice to me, though, discomfitingly, he wore a holstered pistol on his person at all times. Diana would feel it pressing against her stomach when they would hug on-camera as father and daughter. Diana said that if the series had been picked up for a second season, she wouldn’t have asked for more money, but, rather, for Danny to lose the gun.

  Eventually the chanciness and highly variable quality of television work chased Nancy and me out of town. Another pilot I did, between The Associates and I’m a Big Girl Now, was so bad that I was rooting for it to fail almost from the start. White and Reno was loosely based on the veteran black comic Slappy White’s experiences as part of an interracial comedy team called Rossi and White. In our show, Slappy played the manager of a young comedy team composed of me (Reno) and his nephew (White, played by William Allen Young). Reno and White were not only partners but also roommates whose friendly, foxy neighbors were played by the real-life sisters and Playboy models Audrey and Judy Landers. Audrey’s character was a nurse, while Judy’s was—and here, the word stretch comes to mind—a stripper with a heart of gold. Dick Martin of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In fame directed the pilot, and the humor was on the level of me saying to Slappy’s character, “Ben, jokes like this won’t get us a spot on The Tonight Show with Johnny,” and Slappy replying, “Yah, but jokes like this will keep you from going down the—Johhhh-nnny!”

  Every time Slappy said that line during the run-throughs, I’d suddenly feel the sharp knife of a migraine ripping through my brain. Mother’s balls, I’d think, what if this horrid thing actually goes? About a month after we filmed the pilot, while we were awaiting word on the show’s future, I was at the Crocker Bank in Studio City when I noticed a familiar NBC executive standing in line. He saw me and beamingly flashed me a thumbs-up, as if to say, Looks like your show is getting picked up, kid. Me, the star of the freshman NBC sitcom White and Reno! It was a future I found so appalling that I had the audacity to walk right up to the guy and say, “Look, I don’t run your network, but I’m here to tell you that you’re making a terrible mistake.” To my relief, White and Reno went down the Johhhh-nnny shortly thereafter.

  Nancy and I moved to New York for a spell after our respective sitcoms died. We had no jobs lined up, but we could afford to take the risk, because we had earned dual network incomes in L.A. and were childless, so the financial cushion was there. Nancy was already pulling away from show business. Though she never had trouble getting cast in TV pilots, she disliked the process more and more—the idea of driving over that hill into Burbank to sit, yet again, in a waiting room with a bunch of other girls who all looked alike and all wanted it so badly, even though the pilots she was reading for made White and Reno look like The Wire. Plus, we were trying to get pregnant, and Nancy saw segueing into motherhood as a natural way out of the performing phase of her life.

  And me? I wanted to take a shot at Broadway. I auditioned to be a replacement in a hit musical that had been running for a while, A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine. Didn’t get it. The Nine Categories served me well at this point, the early 1980s. I didn’t panic as I had on Breakdown Corner, but, rather, I started contemplating the reality that most people don’t make it as actors—and maybe I wasn’t going to, either. I was thinking about pursuing a more backstage involvement in show business, the way that my friend Harold Ramis had, brilliantly refashioning himself as a writer, with Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, and Stripes already to his credit. Sure, the fact that I couldn’t really write gave me slight pause—but then, that hadn’t stopped a lot of successful screenwriters in Hollywood, so I remained upbeat.

  As all these thoughts were churning in my head, Andrew Alexander, for the second time in five years, descended suddenly from the rafters with harp in hand, my guardian angel. He called me in New York and asked if I would be interested in moving back to Toronto and joining SCTV as a writer-performer. I had to think about it for, like . . . oh, I don’t know—zero seconds?

  SCTV was, it’s not hyperbolic to say, the hottest thing going in comedy at that moment. The show had been on Canadian TV sporadically between 1976 and 1981, bouncing from commercial to public television. By its 1981–’82 season, though, NBC had picked up SCTV as a ninety-minute program that aired Friday nights after The Tonight Show. Its ratings were never particularly high, but it was during that season that SCTV really took off among the comedy cognoscenti—in marked contrast to Saturday Night Live, which was then in its post-Lorne period, with Dick Ebersol trying to salvage the show after a bad season with Jean Doumanian at its helm.

  Andrew Alexander was the Lorne of SCTV, and he faced an issue not unlike the one that Lorne had discussed with me when Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi were poised to leave SNL: Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas were on the verge of departing to do, among other things, a Bob and Doug McKenzie movie called Strange Brew. Catherine O’Hara was thinking of leaving at season’s end, too. But Andrew wanted me to come north right away, to work on the remaining three 90-minute episodes of the 1981–’82 season alongside Rick, Dave, and Catherine, as well as Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and Joe Flaherty.

  These people, with the exception of Rick, who had never been in Second City Toronto and had come aboard SCTV via his friendship with Dave (and, needless to say, his obvious talent), were all old friends. Not only were the performers and writers of SCTV like family to me, but in some cases they were family: Andrea was now my in-law, married to Nancy’s brother, Bob Dolman, who was working at the show as a writer . . . as was my own brother, Michael.

  All that said, my exhilaration at being tapped by Andrew quickly turned into intimidation. It’s entirely possible to be awed by your old friends. While I had been away doing my L.A. thing, they had all honed and perfected their craft to a point where they were now doing work way beyond anything we ever did onstage at the Old Fire Hall. SCTV was so brilliantly realized: a sketch TV show organized around the premise of a fictitious network (the Second City Television Network) that operates out of a fictitious town (Melonville) and offers its own slate of dodgy programming, populated by its own constellation of demi-stars. Far away from the meddling hand
s of American network executives, Joe, John, Eugene, Catherine, Dave, Rick, and Andrea, along with Harold Ramis, who was the show’s original head writer and a cast member for SCTV’s first season, had created something stunningly layered and original.

  Joe was Guy Caballero, the station’s owner, as well as the talk-show host Sammy Maudlin and the howling horror host Count Floyd. Andrea was unrelentingly hilarious as Edith Prickley, the network’s horny, leopard-print-clad station manager. Catherine was spectacular as the steely-needy-leggy showbiz survivor Lola Heatherton. John and Eugene were comic perfection together as the polka duo the Shmenge Brothers, and, individually, especially adroit at parodying low-budget local advertising (John, in snake face paint: “Hi, I’m Harry, the guy with a snake on his face!”; Eugene, with beard and flailing limbs: “Hi, my name’s Phil, and I got a warehouse full of nails!”), while Rick and Dave were great not only as Bob and Doug but as impressionists, their Woody Allen–Bob Hope homage, “Play It Again, Bob,” astonishingly well-realized. And those characters are just a fraction of those that every cast member wheeled out week after week. Everyone was acutely versatile, equally capable of playing broad or subtle.

  And SCTV placed great faith in the intelligence of its audience, assuming that its viewers were as bright as or brighter than its creators. The nuance that its writers and cast brought to their parodies of showbiz made watching the show feel like a very smart, very insider experience. Conan O’Brien has told me that he and his brother, when they were very impressionable (and very pale) teens, would watch SCTV and say, “They’re saying the things that we just think!” It was almost disappointing, Conan says, when the brothers O’Brien discovered that people besides them knew of SCTV, because they considered it their show.

  I felt the same reverence. I couldn’t believe how good SCTV was. And now I had to plunge in and become a part of it. But my nervousness swiftly fell away after the first read-through, where, to my surprise and delight, two pieces I’d written with my brother Michael not only got laughs but were actually approved to be filmed. One was a bit in which I played the paparazzo Ron Galella, who was known for pursuing Jackie Onassis everywhere she went, and the other was a takeoff on Richard Pryor’s then-massive Live on the Sunset Strip concert film—only ours was a promo for Martin Scorsese’s Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées. After the read-through, Joe Flaherty congratulated me by saying, “Well done—and next time, write cheaper!”

  I got my first sketch lead in a piece that Rick didn’t want to do, a parody of a 1950s-era Red Scare movie called “I Was a Teenage Communist.” I also made a positive impression in a Paul Flaherty–Dick Blasucci piece called Battle of the PBS Stars, in which I, as Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, squared off in a boxing ring against Julia Child, played, inevitably, by John Candy. (Mister Rogers won dirty, by decking Julia with his King Friday puppet.) I did a lot of flipping and tumbling as Mister Rogers, which excited Paul and Dick, who happily exclaimed, “Ah, a physical-comedy guy!” If nothing else, that was a niche I could occupy.

  But what made me truly earn my SCTV stripes was Martin Scorsese’s Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées. Having idolized Lewis my whole life, to actually play him—and to “run around like a monkey,” as Dave Letterman once described my Lewis shtick—was as fulfilling a moment creatively as I’d ever experienced. I appeared not as early slapstick Jerry, but as mid-period auteur Jerry, with the slicked hair, the blockish oversize eyeglasses, the attitude of superiority, and the legions of adoring French faithful. In one scene I wore a child’s sailor suit while smoking a cigarette and lecturing the crowd: “And the point is, they’re terrified of a perfectionist. And if a Jerry Lewis ain’t gonna get a distribution deal, because of some fakakta twelve-year-old with the pimples on his face who’s head of the studio . . . this week . . . who doesn’t know from Hardly Working or The Errand Boy or Cinderfella . . . where are you, the public, expected to find the love and the caring and the feeling and the good and the nice? And even if you did, it wouldn’t be the good kind, because of the difference caused by the earlier thing.”

  My Jerry was a temperamental fellow who broke down while singing “You’ll Jamais Walk Alone” and went ballistic at his conductor (played by Dave) for not picking up this breakdown as a musical cue: “When I do the cry, you do the cue! Cry? Cue! You like your job? Do it!”

  It was during this Jerry bit that one of the show’s producers, Nancy Geller, called people over to the TV monitor showing the live feed in her office and said, “Is everyone watching what’s going on here?”

  I was in; I had proven that I was attuned to that not easily located SCTV frequency where each sketch, and each characterization, was rife with subtle, unexplained touches that lent the comedy unusual texture, even if they didn’t always make apparent sense. (This sensibility would also serve me well in working with Christopher Guest in the years to come.) It had all been pent up in me, these ideas, these characters, this energy. For the first time my career trajectory was coinciding with the hip energy in comedy. At thirty-two, I was finally able to give the world the Full Marty.

  Rick, Dave, and Catherine did indeed leave the show at the end of that season, in May ’82. As I’ve said, I still think in terms of the school-year calendar, and the SCTV schedule neatly coincided with my mind-set: we didn’t have to go back to work until the day after Labor Day. I was beside myself with joy. It had been a long time since I’d had the perfect actor’s summer: two months off, with the guarantee of a good job in the fall.

  It was daunting to carry on with SCTV with a mere five performers—John, Joe, Andrea, Eugene, and me—but the atmosphere that next season was total bliss. Collectively, the five of us were in great spirits and creatively fertile. We would go on to win an Emmy that season for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Music Program. There was literally no way for us to lose: all five nominees in the category were SCTV episodes.

  John Candy—how fabulous was it to finally collaborate creatively with this man? Though he and I had known each other ten years, we’d never truly worked together closely, unless you count the time he (unintentionally) broke two of my ribs while we were roughhousing with a football on the set of The David Steinberg Show. The two of us just looked funny together, given our size difference, whether it was the Fred Rogers–Julia Child thing or him playing Ed Grimley’s evil, manipulative brother Skip Grimley in What Ever Happened to Baby Ed?, our homage to the Joan Crawford–Bette Davis kitsch classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  A typical John writing session took place at his huge house north of Toronto. John always radiated prosperity and magnanimity; he had movie roles in real movies way ahead of the rest of us (in Stripes, The Blues Brothers, and even Steven Spielberg’s 1941), and he loved playing host and picking up the check. Actually, we never really got much writing done at John’s. We’d drink a bunch of rum and Cokes, watch some delivery men load a new pool table into his rec room, eat dinner at around eleven thirty, and then I’d clap my hands and say, “John, we have got to write this scene.” “And we will,” he’d say, “but first, how dare your glass be empty, you bastard!” And there would go the night.

  Which isn’t to say we didn’t work hard on SCTV. But it was all so idyllic. As a little boy, I’d watched The Dick Van Dyke Show and romanticized its view of show business: the way Rob Petrie’s job was to go sit in a room all day, write jokes with Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, and then be home in New Rochelle in time for dinner with his sexy wife. SCTV was really like that. Every episode was labor-intensive, but we kept civilized hours. And the conviviality of our writing sessions was unlike anything I’ve experienced since—even when things got contentious.

  One time, Andrea was pitching an idea that Eugene didn’t get. Now, Eugene was SCTV’s most prolific and selfless writer, generating more material than anyone else and giving himself the least flashy roles in the cast pieces he’d write. He was and is the sweetest human being ever created; I still address him by the nickname his mo
ther bestowed upon him, Lamby. (Mrs. Levy was that rarest of specimens, an Orthodox Jew reared in Scotland; “Oh, my wee Lamby,” she’d tenderly say in her unique Yiddish-Scottish accent as she served Eugene an extra helping of brisket.) But in the writers’ room, Eugene could get very professorial. And in his slightly serious, analytical way, Eugene said, “Andrea, I wish I could understand the humor of that scene, but I just can’t.” Andrea, who was sitting next to Eugene, stared at him for a beat and then reached over with her pen and marked an X on the crotch of his pants, where his penis would be. “I’m just putting that there so Deb can find it later,” she said.

  The working pace at SCTV was so civilized. We’d take six weeks to write and then six weeks to shoot, followed by another cycle of six weeks writing and six weeks shooting. The writing breaks were crucial, for they allowed inchoate ideas to develop, mature, ripen, and, on occasion, ferment into total, utter originality, all without the SNL-style pressure of “Whaddaya got for this week?” And when Catherine came back to do our Christmas shows, we had even more fun. (Catherine, I think, had the most unique, brilliant comic instincts of any of us—a fearless Canadian individuality coupled with a magical changeling’s ability to morph into any being her fertile, freaky mind could conjure—while Andrea was the most instinctively funny of us as a performer.)