by Martin Short
Dick handled the situation masterfully. He was apologetic (“Wow, this place must really be dysfunctional if a good guy like you is this unhappy”) and complimentary (“But Marty, you have the highest Q rating!”—I still don’t know, by the way, quite what a Q rating is). Above all, he was calm and reasonable. “Marty,” he told me, “if you leave now, this will look bad for us. But I’m here to tell you, it will also look really bad for you, too.” He offered a proposal: agree to stick around through Christmas, and if at that point I still wanted to leave, he would get me out of my SNL contract, no strings attached. Brilliant. The perfect thing to say. Since it was now almost November, I could already see the Christmas lights at the end of the tunnel.
Dick later told me that he was nearly certain what would happen next: I would get over the hump, figure out the show’s rhythms, and complete the season. Indeed, I pulled myself through that fourth episode and figured it out: no matter what happens, Saturday night comes and there’s a show to do. You can either plunge headlong into the process and, in a good week, see your stuff triumphantly realized on-air, or you can sit there petulantly like a spoiled, immature idiot and end up in one sketch at 12:50 if you’re lucky, saying, “Yes, my liege” and handing someone a sword.
For the remainder of the season I plunged in headlong. I was never fully relaxed, because Saturday Night Live doesn’t allow you to be, but my perseverance paid off, and lo and behold, I actually started to have fun. In a few short months I saw myself elevated from cult comic beloved by the James Wolcotts and Conan O’Briens of the world to a bona fide TV star. My repertory of characters was known across America: Ed Grimley, Jackie Rogers Jr., Irving Cohen, and Nathan Thurm.
Nathan was a new character, born on SNL and, like so many of the characters I’d already created, based to a certain degree on a real person. There was a long-serving, chain-smoking makeup artist on the show—let’s call her Isabel—who was without question the most defensive human being I’d ever met. You’d sit there in her makeup chair and say, “Gee, Isabel, I look a little pale, don’t I?” And she’d say, “I know that! You don’t think I know that? I’m a makeup artist! I would know that.”
Anyway, for the sixth show of the season (hosted by Edward Asner), Harry, Chris, Billy, and I were writing a satire of 60 Minutes in which Harry played Mike Wallace and Chris and Billy played the Minkman brothers, whose venerable novelty business was threatened by Chinese counterfeiters who were circulating inferior whoopee cushions, dribble glasses, and plastic vomit. In every Mike Wallace investigation on 60 Minutes, he would inevitably conduct an adversarial interview with some stonewalling, defensive corporate weasel. That was my role: Nathan Thurm, attorney for the Chinese counterfeit-novelty overlord, Ping E. Lee.
Billy said, “Why don’t you do him as Isabel? You do her behind her back all the time, anyway. She’d be perfect.”
“Are you nuts?” I said. “I can’t do that. She’d find out.”
“C’mon, she’ll never know,” Billy said. “They never know when you’re doing them.”
So when I did Nathan, I gave him Isabel’s smoking and verbal mannerisms, a stock 60 Minutes villain’s defensiveness, and Richard Nixon’s peculiar form of perspiration. You know how Nixon famously had that smear of sweat on his upper lip during his 1960 presidential debate with John F. Kennedy? We used glycerin to create that effect on my upper lip. I also gave Nathan a special cigarette, rigged with a thin metal wire, so the ash just grew longer and longer throughout his interview without ever falling off. And he had circular wire-rim glasses whose lenses were so thick that I could barely see out of them.
Harry and I did our little Wallace-and-Thurm pas de deux: him saying, “Pardon me for saying this, but you seem defensive,” me saying, “I’m not being defensive, you’re the one who’s being defensive. Have you ever thought about that? Maybe you should think about that.”
What I had forgotten was that Isabel would be there when we were taping the piece because, of course, she was the makeup artist. So at one point, as Nathan, I was saying, “I know that! You don’t think I know that? I’m a lawyer, I would know that.” And the director yelled, “Cut! He’s sweating too much.” And Isabel, none the wiser, just as Billy predicted, responded, “I know that! You don’t think I know that? I’m a makeup artist, I know that!” It was insane.
The Minkman piece proved to be a big hit, and thereafter Nathan was a convenient figure to bring back whenever the show needed a defender-of-the-indefensible character. Like, when reports came out in the news that a circus was presenting surgically modified goats as unicorns, Nathan was called upon in a “Weekend Update” segment to represent the animal modification company, telling the interviewer (Chris), “Maybe the ASPCA should publicly condemn you. For being so uninteresting facially. Have you ever thought about that? Maybe you should think about that.”
All this time, as Nathan recurred and re-recurred, Isabel never caught on. I was so relieved. But then, at the final after-party of my one season on SNL, one of her assistants got drunk and said to Isabel, “How stupid are you? Don’t you realize that Nathan Thurm is you?”
Poor Isabel was so hurt. She stormed up to me at the party: “I thought you were my friend.”
I felt so horrible: caught like a rat. “But I am your friend, Isabel,” I said. “Don’t you know that impersonation is the sincerest form of flattery?”
To which Isabel quickly replied, “I know that! You don’t think I know that?”
I don’t want to make my SNL season sound like an endurance test of unending anxiety. In the moment, onstage, I had some of the greatest fun of my life. Dick Ebersol did something really cool that year. In his zeal to revive the sagging fortunes of the show, he established a kind of rotating visiting professorship for veteran comic writers, wherein someone of great credentials—such as Alan Zweibel or Marilyn Suzanne Miller, both from SNL’s original 1975–’80 run—would join the staff writers for a week to give that Saturday’s show some extra oomph. One week, to my delight, the invited writers were my SCTV buddies Dick Blasucci and Paul Flaherty. With them, I wrote a sketch that was one of the high-water marks of the season.
Well, first, I suppose, I should tell you about the sketch that, too SCTV-ish for the SNL audience, went down in flames in dress. The premise was that Lucille Ball (me) was coming back to do one last sitcom, playing Bess Truman in a show called Look Who’s Married Harry. In the episode in question, Lucy and Eleanor Roosevelt (Mary Gross) wanted to wallpaper the Oval Office before “the boys” got home—with hilarious consequences! It was one of those curveball concepts that just might have worked in filmed form on SCTV, but boy, did it bomb before the live audience. I can still hear the crickets chirping. After the scene finished, I asked Chris Guest, “Why didn’t they at least hit the Applause sign?” Chris replied, in all honesty, “They did.”
But Dick, Paul, and I, this time abetted by Chris and Billy, made up for that clunker with a game-show sketch called “Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad,” in which Jackie hosted a Pyramid-style program that paired civilian contestants with celebrities. It was nearly as absurd as “Look Who’s Married Harry,” but it was more palatably absurd, and, above all, everyone in the sketch was at the top of their game. Jim Belushi, as Captain Kangaroo, just wanted to know when he was going to be paid (“You are paying me in cash, right? No checks. That was the deal!”), and Mary Gross was his playing partner, a frightened schoolteacher from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her challenger was Rajeev Vindaloo (Chris), a sexually ambiguous Indian private investigator, and his playing partner was none other than Sammy Davis Jr. (Billy). Chris and Billy were on fire in this one:
JACKIE: The category is . . . “Horn of Plenty.” Sammy, describe these foods, if you will, sir.
(Popcorn.)
SAMMY: Okay, this is a thing at the movies, it comes in kernels, you heat them up in oil.
RAJEEV: Popcorn.
(Pickle.)
SAMMY: This is a little hot, spicy number.
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br /> RAJEEV: Rita Moreno.
SAMMY: No, babe. It comes from a cucumber; they let it sit in a barrel with its brothers so it becomes something else.
RAJEEV: A caterpillar.
SAMMY: Let’s move on.
(Angel food cake.)
SAMMY: This is an après-dinner kind of thing, dessert, three layers, icing on top.
RAJEEV: Japuti.
SAMMY: No, babe. Say you’re in heaven, you’re flying around, you got a little halo, you’re . . .
RAJEEV: Dead.
SAMMY: Yeah, but you did a lot of good stuff, you’re . . .
RAJEEV: Blessed.
SAMMY: Yeah, but you got the wings, the halo, you’re going from cloud to cloud . . .
RAJEEV: I don’t know, what is it?
SAMMY: Next.
(Chocolate babies.)
SAMMY: Uh . . . This is, uh . . .
RAJEEV: Chocolate babies?
SAMMY: Right.
Another of Dick’s big coups that season was to get Eddie Murphy to return as the host of the Christmas show. Eddie had been the savior of Dick’s early days in charge of SNL, and now he was the biggest star in comedy. His first two movies, 48 Hours and Trading Places, were hits, and he was coming on to promote his latest and biggest, Beverly Hills Cop. Well before the week of Eddie’s episode, in fact, Dick was pestering all of us ringers, saying, “Are you writing stuff for Eddie? You’ve got to give me good stuff for Eddie. Eddie really wants to work with you guys.”
The problem was that we four ringers—Billy, Chris, Harry, and me—considered ourselves the stars of that season of SNL and generally didn’t care too much about writing material for the hosts. We were a little arrogant about our standing as SNL’s headliners; we basically thought that we were the hosts every week. But finally we yielded, devising a Broadway Danny Rose–like deli sketch in which Eddie revived his kvetchy, irritable, greenface Jewish version of Gumby (“I’m Gumby, dammit!”). Billy threw in a recurring old Jewish character that he did, the phlegmy Lew Goldman, while I, naturally, played Irving Cohen.
Eddie’s show went fine, but it was another week in the SNL pressure cooker. Harry Shearer, increasingly discontented, lasted just one episode beyond the Christmas one—he, rather than I, became the cast member who quit before the season was up. In his view, he was writing quality material that wasn’t making the show, while other writers’ inferior work did. So he left, citing creative differences. Or, as Harry put it in his parting salvo, “I wanted to be creative, and they wanted something different.”
Another guy who quit in a huff was Larry David. Larry was a writer for SNL that season, some years before his world domination as the mastermind of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He’s now one of my closest friends, but back then we were merely coworkers who didn’t know each other that well. Larry was in a constant state of aggravation that season, because only one of his sketches ever made it to air. I do remember going to precisely one lunch with him. I can’t forget it, because all he did was vent: “Can you believe this place? Nothing is done the way it should be!”
I actually witnessed Larry’s famous row with Dick Ebersol, in which he quit on the spot, a few minutes before airtime one Saturday night. It’s a famous TV moment because it later became the inspiration for a Seinfeld episode, “The Revenge,” in which George Costanza angrily quits his job but immediately regrets it, and decides to show up at work the next week as if nothing has happened. That’s exactly how it went down. Larry walked right up to Dick and simply unloaded: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! You’re totally incapable! You have no comedy background, no artistry!” And out he walked, into the freezing Manhattan night—realizing, suddenly, that he’d made a horrible mistake and needed every penny he could earn. So Larry just showed up the next Monday morning, pretending he hadn’t quit and greeting people with perky geniality: “Hey, guys, how’s it going?” His job remained secure, as if nothing had happened.
It says a lot about the volatile nature of Saturday Night Live, at least in that era, that a writer could curse out the executive producer more or less without consequence—that it was, on some level, an acceptable part of getting the show to air. But good lord, it wasn’t my thing. I’d spent two and a half years in Television Oz at SCTV, and I knew I would be strictly a one-year baby at SNL.
Not that I don’t appreciate that season. It changed my life and opened the door to friendships and opportunities I’d never have experienced otherwise. I still know no greater high than what I felt when I walked offstage from an SNL episode that had gone well. And because I was still relatively young and impressionable, this high was extended by going to the after-party and having someone like Warren Beatty walk up to me and say, “Love your work”—or by going to the manager Jack Rollins’s seventieth birthday party and being told, “Woody really wants to meet you.” (As it turned out, Woody offered me little more than a cursory nod, but I knew that going in.)
In our final show of the season, I experienced the exquisite joy of watching our guest host, Howard Cosell, play Ed Grimley’s Uncle Basil, complete with the hair-horn and plaid shirt, and hearing him ward off an intruder by saying, in That Cosell Voice, “Unhand my nephew, I must say.”
Cosell was actually pretty apprehensive about doing the sketch. After the dress rehearsal, I had one note to give him about his performance as Uncle Basil. His mere entrance triggered huge laughs, what with his face matched with the pointy hair. But, I told Cosell, it would be even better if he entered with the signature wincing Grimley facial expression, the upper lip raised to expose the top teeth. I demonstrated this for him, and there was a surreal moment in which I was standing there, my face two feet from Howard Cosell’s, contorted in the Ed expression, while he stared back in stony contempt. Just before the show I heard Cosell talking to Chris outside my dressing room: “Okay, I’ll do that piece-of-shit scene—but I’m not doing the fucking teeth!”
And when it was all over—that episode, that season—I exhaled. Nancy and I started thinking about the Pacific Palisades again. And I was getting feelers about the movies. What a lovely place to be after twelve months of frayed nerves. My inner Grimley was filled with excitement: L.A., the movies, no weekly pressure . . . oh, I’m going mental, GIVE ME A BREAK!
EIGHTIES-HOT
I’ve always loved this story about Hollywood. In 1981, the legendary costume designer Edith Head passed away. A few days later, the great actor William Holden died tragically from a fall. In the same time period, Allen Ludden, the host of the game show Password and the husband of Betty White, died as well. Now, according to Hollywood folklore, celebrities always die in threes, and nothing thrills Hollywood more than seeing its bogus folklore realized. So newscasters on all the L.A. television stations were proclaiming left and right, “You see, it’s true—they die in threes.” And then suddenly Natalie Wood died, and the newscasters dropped Allen Ludden. Even in death, his heat was fleeting.
In Hollywood, you’re hottest at the point when you’re all about anticipation: when everyone in the business knows you have product pending, but none of it is out yet. You’re busy, in demand, hectically jumping from one job to the next, energized by a sustained industry murmur of MartyShortMartyShort . . . Couldbebigcouldbebig . . . Ihearhe’ssomethingIhearhe’ssomething . . . DoyouhaveaMartyShortthing’causeIhaveaMartyShortthing.
My own professional hot streak started in May 1985, when I flew back to New York—SNL’s season had wrapped mere weeks earlier, but Nan and I wasted no time resettling into our Pacific Palisades rental—to do Late Night with David Letterman. It wouldn’t be my first appearance, by a long shot. Paul Shaffer, Dave’s bandleader since the show launched in 1982, was, of course, a good friend. And Dave had been a fan of my work on SCTV and SNL, a fandom more than reciprocated by me; like everyone else on the 1980s comedy scene, I was in awe of Dave and the clever, anarchic ways he had revolutionized the late-night format. So this appearance on Dave’s show wasn’t in itself a big turnin
g point. By now I was such a regular guest that Paul had his own entrance music for me, Julian Lennon’s “Valotte,” the title song from Julian’s one mega-hit album—and an inside joke between Paul and me, one of approximately twelve million we’ve shared since Godspell. It goes like this: In December 1984, the guest host of SNL was Ringo Starr, and the whole week I was working with Ringo on the show, he kept remarking to a friend he’d brought along, the producer Allan McKeown, “Don’t ’ee look like Julian? The spittin’ image of Julian!” I told Paul this, and—boom!—“Valotte” became “Marty’s theme.”
(FYI, after Dave moved to CBS in 1993, Paul changed my tune to the theme from Hollywood and the Stars, an early 1960s NBC program about Hollywood’s golden age, hosted by Joseph Cotten, that Paul and I were both obsessed with as kids. The theme, written by the great movie composer Elmer Bernstein, has a swelling, Oscars-ceremony sentimentality to it, the sort of music that would herald the slow, minder-assisted entrance onstage of some frail human legend slated to receive that year’s Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.)
What really kicked off my season of Hollywood hotness was the meeting I had with Lorne Michaels during this New York trip. He’d gotten in touch with me beforehand, wanting to discuss a movie he was doing, ¡Three Amigos! I was excited about this—no one had ever wanted me for a movie before—so I went to Lorne’s apartment straight after the Letterman taping. The first thing he asked was surprising to me: Was I at all interested in returning for another year on Saturday Night Live? It wasn’t yet official, but Lorne was poised to take over the show again, having recovered from the burnout that had driven him away five years earlier. Perhaps, Lorne said, I could be persuaded to reenlist.