I Must Say

by Martin Short

  Johnny and Ed McMahon immediately broke up, and Johnny even said, “You had the nerve to come out and do her right away!” But clearly, Bette didn’t “get” my impression. She had no idea who I was. As far as she knew, I was some weirdo talking in his normal speaking voice.

  The good news is that Johnny took to me immediately. He had the same insane Jerry Lewis obsession that I do, and he loved my Jerry—it got genuine, eyes-watering laughs out of him, which was tremendously gratifying in the moment and tremendously moving to consider now. As I got looser and looser, emboldened by Johnny’s goading and enthusiasm, I turned to Bette and did a Jerry-style startle-take: “Yeah, John, howyadoin’, and—BETTE!” More big laughs from Johnny, Ed, and the studio audience. But nothing from the impassive Miss Davis.

  A little later in my segment, I tried a different tack, going Ed Grimley on her: “If I had known you were going to be here—you are so decent. I suppose your movies aren’t the best in the world? Give me a break! Pleasure to meet you.” I extended my hand. Very reluctantly and limply—as if I had extended a line-caught fluke in her direction—she shook it.

  Johnny kept encouraging me to do impressions, so I ran through David Steinberg, Paul Simon, Robin Williams, Doug Henning (Johnny, incredulously: “Doug Henning? Is there a big call for that?”), and Gary Cooper. Finally, from my other side, I heard Bette pipe up, “Do you do me?”

  Well, I’d already done her, so to speak, minutes ago, and she hadn’t picked up on it. So I replied, once again in my most declamatory, high-volume, All About Eve voice, “Well, I mean, you ahn’t that easy to do!”

  Bette still had no clue that I was doing her. “Then we’ll skip it!” she said.

  Or maybe Bette was slyer than any of us realized, and she was pulling the legs of us all. She was still unbelievably sharp, and I wouldn’t put it past her. A lot of people commented to me afterward that they didn’t think Bette should have been out in public, looking as emaciated as she did. But you know what? She did a full three segments on the show, killed in each one, and probably went out to the Ivy afterward for a couple of margaritas and a great dinner. Good for her! I hope I’m in such fine fettle for Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon when I’m eighty. Hell, I’ll even wear Bette’s outfit from that night, provided JCPenney is still in business.

  I made up for lost time with Johnny, appearing six more times on The Tonight Show before his 1992 retirement. The final appearance was five shows before Bette Midler sat on the piano and sang “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” as he teared up. (Carson’s very last show was a guestless farewell in which he showed old clips.) At the end of one of my later appearances, after the show was over, Johnny leaned in and said, “Next time you come, Alex and I would love to take you to dinner.” (Alexis was his fourth and final wife.) That was a bit of a whoa, but the dinner never happened, which is probably just as well, because Johnny, away from his NBC throne, was known to be a different person socially, very reserved, and Nancy and I would have been knotted up with anxiety the whole time.

  I did see Johnny once, though, in a supposedly more relaxed setting: a stag poker night. In L.A. in the 1980s, the movie producer Dan Melnick convened a monthly poker game at his house with some pretty heavy regulars, among them Johnny, Chevy, Steve, Barry Diller, Neil Simon, and Carl Reiner. Steve got me in for one of the nights. I was the poorest and least accomplished person there, but Steve reassured me, “The most anyone has ever lost is six hundred dollars, and you just might win six hundred.”

  Within fifteen minutes at the table, I had lost $1,800. I panicked and basically gave up at that point. I figured that if I merely lost the ante, I wouldn’t have to go home and announce to the family that the house was for sale. Even with four aces, I’d fold.

  We took a break for dinner, an elaborate spread prepared by Melnick’s cook. I got to sit next to Johnny. At one point, Steve said something funny, I can’t remember what, and it cracked me up. As I laughed, a little lump of mashed potatoes flew out of my mouth. But I had no idea where it had landed. My eyes quickly scanned the table in desperation to see where the spuds had gone, finally locating them . . . on top of Johnny Carson’s hand.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. Fortunately, Johnny didn’t seem to notice. I looked away for a moment and then looked back. The potatoes on his hand were gone. Had he eaten them himself? If so, it was an honor and privilege to pre-chew Johnny Carson’s food for him.

  MARTY THROWS A PARTY JUST TO SING

  When Nancy and I were sitcom actors in the late 1970s, I always thought of L.A. as boarding school, a place where I’d spend a few seasons of adventure and mischief before snuggling back into the bosom of Mother Canada. But by 1987, with a growing family, Nan and I had to make a decision on living in one place or the other, and we realized we were ready to put down roots in southern California. Little Katherine and Oliver would have dual citizenship—I’m way too Canadian for them not to—but they, along with young Henry Short, who came along in 1989, would grow up in a pretty house that Nan and I found at the end of a quiet street in Pacific Palisades. It was the perfect house for us—not ridiculously large or grand (the boys always shared the same bedroom), but airy and cozy, with a big living room anchored by a fireplace and an elegant, curved staircase straight out of one of my favorite childhood sitcoms from the 1950s, Father Knows Best. The location was beautiful, too: walking distance from the bluffs that overlook the Pacific. The master bedroom opened onto a balcony where the water sparkled blue in the distance. We can’t afford this, I thought every time I looked out at the ocean from my new bedroom. How could I possibly deserve this view?

  We bought the house on the basis of the income I was about to make from two pending movies. You can guess what happened next. Practically the second that Nancy and I signed the mortgage, one of the two movies, a David Lynch film with Steve Martin entitled One Saliva Bubble, fell through. I was in a panic. I anxiously said to Nan, “What if we can’t afford this place? What if we have to sell it?”

  “Well, I guess we’d move somewhere,” she calmly replied. “But that’s not going to happen, goofy. You know that.” Twenty-seven years later, I’m still here.

  There are those who make a hobby of real estate, forever buying and flipping houses, getting bored with a residence after a year or two. I’m totally different; keep in mind I spent the first twenty years of my life in the same house. I like to make a house a home and stay put; Nancy, too. So we did. I think this became part of the appeal of the family Short as we settled into the Palisades. We were show folk, with all the deviancy and egocentrism that such a description assumes, but we lived like a normal American nuclear family—or perhaps like a family on a long-running sitcom: going through the journey of life together on the same comfortingly familiar stage.

  The most concrete manifestation of our traditional Short-family values was our annual Christmas party. It started out modestly, as a dinner for my extended family in which my brother Michael (an excellent blues piano player who used to tour with Ronnie Hawkins) would sit at the piano as we all gathered around and sang carols. But by 1988 the party began to evolve into a bigger deal: a carefully planned event held in mid-December (before people went off on their holiday vacations) that featured not only Nan’s superbly potent French punch, but performances by my performing friends. Tom Hanks has described it as “like a Mormon Family Home Evening—a lot of participation, a lot of ‘Everybody, come on up!’” Except with amazing, generally non-Mormon personnel. Basically, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, our party became a private, camera-free, celebrity-studded holiday TV special like the ones Perry Como, Andy Williams, and Bing Crosby used to put on.

  The party started at 7:00 p.m., with dinner served at 8:15. Then, at 9:30, the show began. I served as emcee, while the Broadway and movie composer Marc Shaiman served as my accompanist and musical maestro. Marc is a dear friend who goes way back with me, to when he served as Saturday Night Live’s rehearsal pianist in my time there. He and
his longtime professional and personal partner, Scott Wittman, have done the songs for everything from Hairspray to the Academy Awards. They were also my co-conspirators on my 2006 Broadway show, Fame Becomes Me. However, this impressive résumé did not absolve Marc of his duties as my designated piano mover.

  In my house, there’s a little piano room between my office and the living room where we keep an old Yamaha upright. As 9:30 approached, it would always be Marc’s duty to position himself behind one end of the piano and, with a great show of groaning and hypochondriacal expressions of imminent vertebrae slippage, push until the piano arrived at its destination, against the wall that rises under the curved staircase. As Marc pushed, I would carry the lightweight piano stool over, just so I’d feel a part of things. Marc would routinely complain, “How did this ridiculous tradition start, where I have to push the piano in to begin the show?”

  “I can’t remember, Marc,” I’d say, “but it’s tradition. Keep pushing.”

  We’d have a ten-foot Christmas tree standing in the crook of the staircase’s curve, and Marc and his piano would be stationed to the tree’s right: a natural stage set for our holiday pageant, visible to all of the sixty or so revelers squeezed into our living and dining rooms. Bernie Brillstein was always the first guest to nab a seat, loading up a plate with food around 8:00 p.m. and parking himself on the couch nearest the stage, lest anyone obstruct his view. It was that unmissable a show to Bernie, who had managed everyone from Jim Henson to Belushi, Lorne, and Gilda.

  At 9:30, with a flourish, I would bound onto the piano’s top, pretend-crushing Marc’s fingers in the process, and open the show with a song whose lyrics varied from year to year, but this version will give you the idea.

  { IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL SHOW OF THE YEAR }

  (to the tune “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”)

  Lyrics by Shaiman/Wittman/Short

  It’s the most wonderful time of the year

  Tom Hanks is a-tuning

  While Nancy is crooning

  Arianna Huffington IS HERE!

  It’s the most wonderful time of the year

  It’s the hap, happiest season of all

  Now the party’s just startin’

  ’Cause here comes Steve Martin

  He’ll juggle a ball!

  It’s the hap, happiest season of all.

  They’ll be no hymns or pews here

  There’s just showbiz Jews here.

  My agent’s dead drunk in the john.

  Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell

  Are doing the hustle

  “Aren’t you glad that we made Captain Ron?”

  It’s the most wonderful show of the year.

  (Marc) Celebrity butt you’ll be kissing

  While high notes you’re missing

  (Marty) And this . . . from a queer!

  It’s the most wonderful time

  It’s the hap, happiest time

  It’s the most wonderful show . . . OF THE YEAR!

  Nancy performed, too. Though she had long ago given up her show-business career, she loved to sing and was totally uninhibited about performing for this crowd. Often we’d duet—on the Pogues’ Christmas song “Fairytale of New York,” say, or “Hurry Home for Christmas,” a number made famous by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.

  In the early years the show was a more spontaneous thing, a “Who’s going next?” kind of deal where you’d simply get up and do your bit. Catherine O’Hara would sing the old hymn “Count Your Blessings,” a remnant of her Irish-Canadian upbringing. One year Nathan Lane got up and did a Danny Kaye homage in which he spluttered in rapid-fire fake Russian and ended with a huge pratfall. Another year, Phil Hartman and Billy Crystal joined me in a suitably cheeseball medley as, respectively, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Liza Minnelli. Bernadette Peters, when she was in town, offered us a moving version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (A year later, I spotted a similarly luxuriant head of curly hair in the crowd and shouted, “Oh, look, Bernadette is back!” When the head turned to face the guests, it was Kenny G. Hey, I was just sayin’ what everyone was thinking!)

  But given the wattage of the guest list and the quality of performances, the Christmas party took on a slightly more polished look as the years advanced, with no one wanting to half-ass it in front of this crowd. I think it might have been the moment when I saw Tom Hanks, Walter Parkes, and Glenn Frey intently rehearsing a tune in the piano room, guitars in hand—while Marc, who flew in from New York each year just for this party, was feverishly going over some sheet music on the piano—that I thought, Jeez, this looks like backstage at Carnegie Hall.

  People would start e-mailing sheet music to Marc and Scott in advance, and asking if they could come ahead of time to rehearse, compelling Marc and Scott to arrive at our house earlier and earlier. “Look at all this stuff I’m being given,” Marc kvetched as he sat at the piano, before the party decorations had even gone up. “Thank God I’m a genius, or I’d be in a tizzy!” Steve Martin spent something like four months mastering how to play “Auld Lang Syne” on the banjo. Victor Garber, one of the most accomplished actors and singers in modern theater, spent thousands of dollars on vocal coaching to prepare for his party performances. In that soft, lilting voice of his, he did a beautiful version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and, another year, “Peace” by Michael McDonald and Beth Nielsen Chapman. Steven Spielberg nervously joined the fray one time, playing clarinet alongside his wife, Kate Capshaw, as she joined Rita Wilson and Nancy to sing “Kung Fu Christmas,” a soul-song takeoff that Bill Murray used to do in the National Lampoon Radio Hour.

  Probably the award for most elaborate preparation should go to Tom Hanks. He had seen a Christmas rerun of Judy Garland’s 1963 Christmas special on PBS, where Judy welcomed fake guests into her fake living room while she was making merry with her real children, Liza Minnelli and Lorna and Joey Luft. Tom particularly loved the part where the handsome young pop singer Jack Jones made a terrific entrance, old-style corny in the best way. The doorbell rang—ding-dong!—and Jones barreled across the threshold with a pile of wrapped presents, launching straight into a swing version of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady, distributing the presents to the kids as he sang.

  Tom was determined to re-create this scene more or less shot-for-shot. He worked out a cue with Marc and me so that his appearance would be as sudden and straight-into-the-routine as Jones’s was. Then Tom waited patiently outside for a period as other people performed.

  It worked perfectly. As I went into my cue—“Now we have so many people”—I was interrupted by the doorbell: ding-dong!

  “Well, who the heck could that be on this most wintry of winter nights?” I asked. Then I went over to answer the door, and Tom, wearing a replica of the slick sharkskin suit Jack Jones wore in 1963, strode in, singing “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air . . .” And instead of handing out presents to the gathered children, he handed out $20 bills from a stack in his palm. He brought the house down—and, more important, won the kids over with the cash.

  My family members were encouraged to become a part of the show as well. Oliver, a drummer, would set up his drum kit to accompany his sister Katherine on piano and Andrea Martin’s boy Joe (my nephew) on saxophone, along with Uncle Bobby Dolman (Joe’s father, Nancy’s brother, and Andrea’s then husband) on harmonica. Together, they’d launch into an instrumental version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” And then my brother Michael, per Short family tradition, would perform the R&B Christmas standard “Merry Christmas Baby” on piano and vocals.

  There was no requirement that every guest had to perform, or that, if you did, your performance had to be musical. One of the most original nonmusical moments came courtesy of Jan Hooks, who was not only a star of Saturday Night Live but also played Jiminy Glick’s wife, Dixie Glick, in various TV shows with me, as well as the movie Jiminy Glick in Lalawood. Jan is a southerner, fr
om Georgia. I asked her if she was going to do anything, and she casually replied, “Oh, I don’t know. I might do something from To Kill a Mockingbird. But if I do, and if, at one point, I run away, catch me.”

  More than a little puzzled, I said, “Very good then.” At the next opportunity, I stood before the crowd and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jan Hooks!”

  Jan stood before the crowd, slowly eyeballed the gathered attendees with a surly face, and then began ranting at high volume.

  “I got something to say! And then I ain’t gonna say no more!” she shouted. “He took advantage of me! And if you fine, fancy gentlemen ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it, then you’re just a bunch of lousy, yella, stinkin’ cowards! The whole bunch of ya! And your fancy airs don’t come to nothin’! Your ‘Ma’am’-in’! And your ‘Miss Mayella’-in’! It don’t come to nothin’, Mr. Finch!”

  At that, fully committed, she ran tearfully into my arms. It was Mayella Ewell’s angry courtroom tirade from To Kill a Mockingbird, after the attorney Atticus Finch has ripped holes in the young woman’s testimony that his black client, Tom Robinson, raped her. Such a deeply bizarre, borderline sick choice of something to do at a Christmas party, yet it was brilliant.

  Jan’s SNL castmate Jon Lovitz didn’t have the same innate understanding of the party’s family spirit. He worked too blue too early in the evening. It started with some celebrity-roast-style potty humor about Bernie Brillstein—“I remember one time Bernie was in a stall beside me, and he came into my stall and said, ‘Am I clean, kid?’”—and just devolved from there. I could see the terror rising in my kids’ faces. Marc did, too. He pulled an oversize candy cane off the Christmas tree and gave Lovitz the hook.

  Scott Wittman had a fabulous tradition to end the show. Marc would start playing “Let It Snow,” joined in by everyone at the party, while Scott went with my three children up to the top of the staircase, where they would sprinkle snowflakes they’d made with scissors and paper onto my head as I sang. And then I’d wish everyone a very Merry Christmas from the bottom of where my heart should be.