I Must Say

by Martin Short

  But the movies didn’t open big, and my days as a leading man were numbered. I was disappointed, of course, but I can’t honestly say I was devastated. This was partly a matter of my innate Canadian suspicion of massive success—Oh, it’s probably not gonna work out anyway, eh?—and partly because the takeaway from these experiences was never “Marty can’t act.” I mean, Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review of Cross My Heart, came right out and said, “Martin Short makes a delightful leading man even when there’s little for him to do.” Critics were if anything overly generous toward me. What I came to understand is that critical favor, talent, and tenacity are only part of the formula for a hit. You also need luck and good timing. Today, ¡Three Amigos! is on several “100 Funniest Movies of All Time” lists, and young adults accost me all the time to tell me how much they love Innerspace. I say to them, “Where were you when these movies opened?” And then it occurs to me: Oh, that’s right. You were lying on your back in a crib. It wasn’t until these pictures took on a second life on cable and DVD that they became quote-unquote classics.

  As it happened, the fourth of my leading-man movies of the ’80s, Three Fugitives, did decently at the box office, although the critical reaction was mixed. Personally, I have warm feelings about that picture, and I adored working with its French writer-director, Francis Veber, who is a master of cinematic physical comedy. The movie was an adaptation of a French-language film that Veber had done with Gérard Depardieu.

  Three Fugitives was especially memorable for me in that it gave me the chance to work with that lovable, crazy lug of a nutball named Nick Nolte. With a voice that sounded like a rusted hinge on a heavy old door, Nick played a just-sprung convict who is taken hostage at a bank by a bumbling, desperate schlemiel—you guessed it, me—who has resorted to crime to raise money for the medical care of his mute little daughter.

  I had never before met Nick. It was my understanding that, while he’d had his struggles with booze and other substances, he was currently on the wagon, and had been for many months. We were introduced at a dinner party held by Lauren Shuler Donner, the executive producer of the film, and her director husband, Dick Donner. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio head of Disney, whose Touchstone division was producing the film, was also there with his wife, Marilyn. It was all a little nerve-racking: we two leads, having never met, sitting there on display for the powers that be. A butler came over and said, “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Short?”

  Because of the weird pressure of the night, I really wanted a drink. But, mindful of Nick, I said, “A Perrier, please.” Then the butler said, “Mr. Nolte?” And Nick said, “I’ll have a triple vodka and Seven.” Well, that night, Nick proceeded to triple, or maybe more than triple, his triple vodka and Seven. He fell right off the wagon; he too was a bundle of nerves over this dinner. At one point he went silent at the table for a long stretch before suddenly turning to Nancy and proclaiming in a loud voice, “I like to salt my food. Do you like to salt your food? A lot of people start judging you when you start salting your food—like the manipulative assholes they are. Do you ever find that?”

  He proceeded to pour about half a shaker’s worth of salt on his branzino before again falling into a prolonged silence—a silence that, this time, everyone else at the table, momentarily stunned, joined him in. About fifteen minutes later, by which time everyone but Nick was back in convivial conversation, he abruptly stood up, rising to his full height, and loudly inquired to no one in particular, “Do you ever find that, like, you get the feeling that, like, you walk in a room—or you’re in a moment, and—aaaah, fuck it!” And down he sat again. I could see the concern on Jeffrey Katzenberg’s face: We’ve got $60 million going into this one. Good lord . . .

  Somehow the movie did get made. We shot it up in Tacoma. I grew really fond of Nick, who was wild but dear. He’d always want me to have a drink with him after we’d wrapped for the day. The first time he asked, I said, “Absolutely!” and hurried back to my trailer to get changed. Suddenly Nick was pounding on my trailer door, saying, “What are you doing? Don’t get changed. Be an actor. Actors drink in their wardrobe.”

  “But Nick, the wardrobe people want to go home,” I protested.

  “What are you talking about? They’re in my trailer, drinking.”

  Nick also had great stories about working with Katharine Hepburn on Grace Quigley, one of the last films she ever made. He was frank about having been strung out on cocaine at the time, and he remembered a moment in which he sat, whacked out and glazed, while Hepburn turned to the movie’s director, Anthony Harvey, and said, “Look at him, Tony! Look at him! There’s no one fucking there!”

  Hepburn, Nick told me, took pity upon him, saying, “Nick, I think I can help you. Spencer would get like this, too. He’d go on these tirades, but at least he had the decency to wait until he’d finished working. But I can get you some Thorazine!”

  Nick politely declined her offer. “That’s very kind of you, Katie,” he told her, “but I’ll be fine.” When Hepburn left, someone in the trailer declared, “Nick, I can get you some black beauties,” the preferred pick-me-up of long-haul truckers, a combo of speed and dextroamphetamine. Quickly perking up, Nick said, “Those I’ll take.”

  The most poignant thing about Nick during Three Fugitives was that he set a bedtime for himself of 8:00 p.m. I found this astonishing. “When do you get up?” I asked.

  “Around three thirty in the morning,” he said.

  “And what do you do at that hour, Nick?”

  “I take a long bath.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I try to read, but I get kinda tired.”

  “So why do you go to bed at eight, then, Nick?”

  “To avoid those dangerous hours, buddy.”

  There was a scene in Three Fugitives in which Nick had to wear hospital scrubs, and that became his basic look, I think, for years thereafter. Circa 2005, more than fifteen years after we’d worked together, I was at the Toronto Film Festival, staying at the Four Seasons, when who should walk into the elevator but Nick Nolte—in hospital scrubs. Not having noticed me, he took his place at the front. I had, during our time on Three Fugitives, developed a dead-on impression of him. In my most ravaged, guttural Nolte voice, I croaked, “I hear Nick Nolte’s a fuckin’ asshole.”

  Nick didn’t know it was me, and in hindsight, he might very well have turned around and punched me in the face. Arguably, he should have. But he merely pivoted partway, not even bothering to look back, and said resignedly in his most ravaged, guttural Nolte voice, “I don’t disagree.”

  I crammed one other movie into the 1980s, Chris Guest’s first as a director, The Big Picture. More conventional than his later mockumentaries, it was about a young screenwriter, played by Kevin Bacon, whose promising script and life get mangled by the Hollywood machine. I played a small part as his character’s agent, Neil Sussman. I took no salary and no billing. The salary part I don’t regret, because Chris’s movies are tiny-budget labors of love. But it was foolish of me not to take billing. It just happened to be a cool thing to do in movies at the time: the unbilled cameo.

  Chris loves the idea of characters who are sexually ambiguous, or whose sexuality is ambiguous only to them. So Neil was developed as this in-between figure, neither gay nor straight but definitely vain, full of himself, and also full of show business bullpoo. Here’s how Neil pitched his agenty woo to Kevin’s character:

  This is the thing: If you decide to sign with me, you’re gonna get more than an agent. You’re gonna get (holding up four fingers) three people. You’re gonna get an agent, a mother, a father, a shoulder to cry on, someone who knows this business inside and out. And if anyone ever tries to cross you? I’ll grab them by the balls, and squeeze till they’re dead.

  Chris is very loose in granting his actors leeway to mess with the dialogue, but very detail-oriented in developing his characters’ looks. My hair was longish then, so we had it curled and tinted orange.
Chris really wanted Neil to look like someone who had obviously undergone a really bad face-lift, so the makeup people taped my face back as far as they could, fastening the tape at my temples and covering it with my tufted hair. It was far from comfortable, and by the end of each shooting day, after several takes, I had huge welts on the sides of my face, like I’d been in a fight.

  A while afterward, Chris and I were discussing Neil, and he was mad at himself for having blown an opportunity to work in an extra joke. He should have had me appear in my first scene with conspicuous bags under my eyes, he explained. And then, the next time I appeared, the eye bags would be gone. And here’s the key Chris Guest part: none of this would ever be explained. Like the SCTV cast, Chris loves subtlety—layers upon layers of texture and micro-jokes that people will either pick up on or not. This is why, over several films, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara have worked so well and so instinctively with him.

  A fringe benefit of working with and becoming friends with Chris was getting to know his extended family, which included not only his very cool wife, Jamie Lee Curtis, but also her father, Tony Curtis, another big figure from my youth—Some Like It Hot, Spartacus, Sweet Smell of Success—and therefore an exciting person to see in the flesh.

  I met Tony at a birthday party that Chris and Jamie were having for one of their kids. I was impressed by the sheer Tony Curtis–ness of him: he still had the dark hair then, not the Jor-El pompadour he would later adopt, and he just looked so exactly like himself, if you know what I mean.

  But the person most impressed by Tony was my five-year-old daughter, Katherine. She had no idea who he was, but he fussed over her at the party and even got out his paints to do a quick sketch of her, which he presented to Katherine as a gift. (Like the other big Tony of my youth, Bennett, Curtis had a major sideline as a painter.) Tony clearly made quite the impression on my little girl. As we were leaving the party and saying our good-byes, Katherine loudly asked him, “Mr. Curtis—would you like to have my phone number?”

  On cue, a dozen voices at the party cried out, “Boy, Tony, you still got it!”

  And the next day, upon returning from some outing, we saw the light flashing on our answering machine. Nancy pressed play: “Hello, Katherine, this is Tony Curtis, calling to say what a pleasure it was to meet you yesterday.” Needless to say, we kept that one for a while.

  Speaking of people with whom I was obsessed as a youth: in this same period, I finally met Sammy Davis Jr. He was playing a concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Frank Sinatra, so Nancy and I made a date with the Crystals, Billy and Janice, to see the show. It was the Shorts’ responsibility to provide the champagne for the limo ride, and the Crystals’ to provide the caviar. I can still see a beaming Billy emerging from their house with an elaborate platter weighted down by a huge tin and all the accoutrements: toast points, hard-boiled eggs, capers, and so forth.

  Sammy did the first set, Frank did the second, and at the end they teamed up to perform a few songs together. At intermission, after Sammy’s set, Billy went backstage to visit Sammy, who he’d gotten to know in his pre-SNL days, when he opened for Sammy in Las Vegas. (It was during that period, working up close to the legend, that Billy mastered his impeccable Davis impersonation.) As Sinatra was about to begin his set, Billy rejoined us and excitedly whispered, “Sammy and Altovise are having a party at their house tonight, and they’ve invited us!” My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t believe that the same man I’d seen at fifteen in the Broadway show Golden Boy (and whose mannerisms I’d appropriated in albino whiteface for Jackie Rogers Jr.) would soon be welcoming me into his home.

  When we arrived at Sammy’s house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills—which was immediately next door to Pickfair, the legendary fifty-six-acre estate once owned by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford—the first thing that struck me was that every square inch of every wall was covered in show-business memorabilia: Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz, sheet music from Fred Astaire musicals, and framed pictures of everyone from Frank and Dino to JFK and Richard Nixon. By the swimming pool was a giant statue of Maurice Evans as Dr. Zaius from the original Planet of the Apes movie. And the fireplace had been glassed-in and turned into an aquarium, with tropical fish swimming in it. How strange, I thought. Also, Sammy had seemingly invited all the Bobbys from 1970s Hollywood: Bobby Culp, Bobby Blake, and I want to say Bobby Vaughn.

  Sammy was a magnanimous host and tour guide, leading us around while clutching an unlit cigarette in one hand and an empty cognac glass in the other. He explained to us that the cigs and booze had been his traditional rewards after a performance, but that he needed to avoid them now. “But the props still make me feel comfortable, man,” he said. In retrospect, I think Sammy might have known that he was not long for the world. He died within a year of our visit, and that night he told us that he’d been nervous before the concert because he had recently undergone hip-replacement surgery; a lifelong dancer, he was new to relying solely on his singing voice in performance.

  At one point Sammy led us to his upstairs study, away from the rest of the party. There were just the Shorts, the Crystals, Sammy, and Heinrich Himmler’s elaborately engraved waist gun on the wall above us in a glass case. (I guess Sammy, famously a proud Jewish convert, cherished the idea of disarming Hitler’s pit bull.) I took the opportunity to tell Sammy about how I’d seen him on Broadway in Golden Boy as a teen, and how formative an experience it had been for me.

  His expression turned quizzical at this confession. “I have mixed feelings about that time, man,” he said, “because that was the old me, the me that I’m not necessarily proud of.” Billy and I discussed these words afterward and deduced that Sammy was alluding to his well-documented substance-abuse issues. A few days later I related this story of our heart-to-heart with Sammy to Paul Shaffer. That night I turned on the Letterman show, and there was Paul on TV saying, “Dave, hey, I’m so sorry about my past behavior. I feel terrible about the old me, the me that I’m not necessarily proud of.” I made a mental note: Never share anything with Paul.

  One more thing about Sammy. As we two couples were taking our leave, I somehow ended up alone with Sammy in the hallway leading to his front door: just the two of us in a narrow corridor. “Lay a little of the dance on me,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, and told him so.

  “You know, man,” he said, “the Grimley thing.”

  And I, demonstrating the presence of those balls of steel that John Candy long ago ascribed to me, replied, “I’ll do the dance if you sing that soaring passage from that Leslie Bricusse song”—“Tomorrow,” an amazing song written by Bricusse and Anthony Newley that I had never heard until the concert that night. The thing about Sammy was that, to my generation, he became such a joke for a while, but then you’d go see him perform and realize, Oh, yeah, he’s massively talented—that’s how he got famous in the first place. Sammy obligingly broke into song—“Tomorrow is the looong and lonely moment . . . when I look the future in the eye!”—and I simultaneously went into my ecstatic Ed dance.

  It was at this moment that Billy, wondering what the hell was taking me so long, appeared in the doorway. “Boy,” he said to Sammy and me, “it’s hard to get you people to do what you do, isn’t it?”

  But truly, my ultimate childhood-fantasy realization came when I did The Tonight Show while Johnny Carson was still hosting it. Moronically, I had resisted going on the Carson show for a while, despite being offered opportunities. There was a feeling in the air during the 1980s that maybe it wasn’t hip to do Johnny anymore, especially with Dave Letterman catching fire. Besides, Dave and I had developed such an easy rapport, and Paul Shaffer was my good buddy. And finally, if I was being honest with myself, the idea of sitting in the chair next to Johnny Carson scared the hell out of me.

  However, by the later part of the decade, the rumors were growing stronger that Johnny was soon to retire, and I realized how absurd my resistance was. What’s more, I didn’t have to go
the hard-knock route that comedians from Drew Carey to Jerry Seinfeld had taken, where you did your five minutes of stand-up, and if Johnny liked you, he might wave you over to take a seat on the couch. I was invited on in mid-career as a successful actor, prebooked in couch class, with extra legroom.

  So on January 7, 1988, I finally did Carson, ready for my moment with the great man. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would be following, and therefore sitting next to, one of the true legends of the Hollywood screen, Bette Davis. Bette was visibly unwell at that point—she’d suffered strokes and been ill with breast cancer, and would live only a year and a half further. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. And yet she was totally styling, decked out in a bold, nautically striped skirt suit, white gloves, and a wide-brimmed white hat.

  And she was completely tough: fiery, witty, on the ball, and, her deteriorating health notwithstanding, smoking like a chimney. At one point, before I went out, I was watching from the green room as they came back from a commercial. Johnny, a smoker himself, was adept at sneaking a last-minute puff before the show resumed, but this time the camera caught him hurriedly stubbing out his cigarette while Bette sat there eyeballing him, proudly puffing away. “One thing about you and me, Johnny,” she said, “we both love to smoke!”

  “Oh, I know, Bette,” Johnny guiltily responded. “But . . . but it’s so bad for you.”

  “Oh, I suppose,” Bette responded. “But to be told not to! As if we were little children.” No one was going to bully that old dame.

  The day before the taping, when I received word that I would be following Bette, I told my friend Rob Reiner about the situation. Rob said, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you do Bette Davis to Bette Davis.” So the very first thing I did after walking out and taking my seat was to turn to Bette and say, “And what a pleaszh-ah to meet you!”