by Martin Short
There was only one year where Marc and Scott and I got into any sort of disagreement creatively concerning the Christmas program. In 2003, they were flying in from New York for the party on the Friday before, and because they had a six-hour flight, they had lots of time to write a new song for the party. So to the tune of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” a 1940s song by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer, they wrote new lyrics about the party and its noted guests and entitled their creation “Picture-Perfect Christmas in the Palisades.” Unfortunately—from my gracious-host view, anyway—the lyrics also roasted nearly everyone who would be attending. For example:
See the stars walking up the drive
It’s good to see that Bernie Brillstein’s still alive.
He’s been in the biz since the Crusades
It’s the picture-perfect Christmas in the Palisades.
Diane Keaton’s here, she’s one brave chick
I hear she flashes titty in that Meyers flick
The damned thing went on and on, taking a swipe at virtually every friend I’d invited. After reading all their lyrics, I told Marc and Scott, “Absolutely not.”
They were stunned and truly irritated by my apprehension and protectiveness. “Remember when you used to have an edge?” Marc said, meaning it.
“I am not going to potentially offend guests who I have welcomed into my home,” I replied. In the end, we worked out a compromise. After the main show, when it got late and the party got smaller—and most of those named in Marc and Scott’s lyrics had departed—I told Marc, “Okay, now we should do it, at the second show.”
“You mean it’s fine as long as it’s behind people’s backs,” Marc said.
“What can I say?” I said. “I’m guided by the spirit of Saint Nick.”
The second show, if I may clarify, was for the faithful and intrepid In Crowd, a smaller group that numbered somewhere between fifteen and twenty people. Just like in the SNL days, there was an after-party to the big party, a group including such people as Steve; Tom and Rita; Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn; Paul Shaffer, if he was in town; and Victor Garber, ditto. The after-party began around 12:30 a.m. The kids were asleep by then, so you could and would work blue. (It was the Christmas season, after all.) One year I opened with my own bawdy composition, “Christmas Is a Lady,” set to the tune of the late-period Sinatra song “L.A. Is My Lady.”
You’ve got to treat Lady Christmas kindly
You’ve got to sprinkle her with myrrh
Then she’ll light your tree and warm your Christmas balls
One year Richard Belzer got up to talk about his close friendship with Jerry Lewis and how our party reminded him of a story Jerry had told him about an event at Ira Gershwin’s house back in the 1950s. Seemingly all of old Hollywood was there, said Jerry, who was still a fresh face on the scene and excited to meet two of his comic idols, Jack Benny and George Burns, for the first time. Jerry had listened to Benny for years on the radio, but he had never heard him saying anything racy or off-color. So Jerry was standing there, hanging on every word uttered by the two older men, when Benny turned to Burns and said, “You see Gina Lollobrigida over there, George? Do you know what I would love to do? I’d love to get my cock out, put it in her mouth . . . and just have her say her name over and over again.”
I was standing between Kate Hudson and Larry David when Belzer’s line landed—with such force that it literally sent Kate to the ground, writhing in hysterics.
It wasn’t lost on my Christmas-party guests that a big component of the joy I took in throwing these annual shindigs was that I got to sing before a captive audience. I seized the occasion to let loose on my most heartfelt versions of such standards as “It Happened in Sun Valley” (apt, given that many of us ski there at Christmastime) and “You’re Just Too Marvelous.” Marc, clever chap that he is, and knowing me far too well, had figured out my ulterior motive for throwing these bashes, and composed a song whose lyrics are reproduced here. It’s sung from Marc’s point of view.
{ “A MARTY SHORT WINTER WONDERLAND” }
Every year, mid-December
Comes a night to remember
With me at his side
We’ll watch the guests hide
’Cause Marty throws a party just to sing
See his eyes, how they’re glistening
He don’t care if you’re listening
You think that we’re guests
But nobody rests
’Cause Marty throws a party just to sing
Now his house is bright and lookin’ fancy
All the guests are here and looking chic
But though the dress is worn by his wife, Nancy
He thinks he’s Judy Garland at her peak . . .
INTERLUDE: A MOMENT WITH FRANCK
Franck was a character I played in Father of the Bride, a 1991 movie cowritten by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers, and directed by Charles.
Franck is a wedding planner of indeterminate nationality, indeterminate gender, and indeterminate vowel-pronunciation choices. A wedding is a “wahdding” and a cake is a “keck.” For some reason, in the filmgoing public’s memory, Franck pronounces the latter word as “cock.” I get people in airports all the time coming up to me and saying, “We just had a wedding cock, too!” Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m all in favor of honeymoon sex. But I swear, Franck never said “cock.” I’m just too subtle a performer for such a choice.
The concept of Franck in the movie was that he and his “Where would that accent be from, exactly?” otherness symbolized the alienation of the father (Steve Martin) from the process of planning the wedding of his daughter (Kimberly Williams). The daughter and the mother (Diane Keaton) could understand Franck perfectly, while Steve’s character struggled to decipher every word.
In the first scene that I shot in the movie, set in Franck’s office-atelier, we did take after take, ratcheting up or down how broadly I played Franck, and how unintelligible his accent was. At one point the accent had become so subtle that Steve said, “Well, now the scene doesn’t make any sense, because I understand him completely.” But Nancy and Charles were apprehensive, and rightfully so, about the idea of me playing Franck super big; nothing else in the movie was remotely heightened. In the end, though, they ran with the broader takes. As long as my portrayal seemed true to Franck’s fastidious and strange little wedding-planner world, he could get away with just about any idea we came up with.
I could never figure out a way to incorporate Franck into my touring stage show, in which I unleash many of my characters. Unlike Ed Grimley and Irving Cohen, he wasn’t the product of years of improv and TV work, and I didn’t know what in the name of God he could talk about; he couldn’t just talk about “vahdding keck.” (Or, for that matter, “cock.”)
Then, one night in 2008, I was at a dinner party, holding forth on why I thought Barack Obama was unbeatable in that year’s election. It wasn’t so much because of what Obama had to say, I said, but because he had an undeniable star quality. Someone responded, “What a shallow take on politics!” And then the lightbulb went on. That’s it! I thought. Who’s shallower than Franck? He should talk about who in the public eye does and does not have style. From that moment on, Franck found a place in my concerts.
* * *
FRANCK
Hellooo, how are you, lovely to see you! Don’t you all look fabuous. Very chic. Oh, look at you in da front-row-type place. I love your outfit! I loved it when it was in style . . . eighteen years ago. It’s amazing what they sell in thrift shops. The frontage is very low-cut. (Starts barking like a dog.) One suggestion: Why don’t you put those together and make one good one?
To me, it’s all about how you look. Because if you don’t have style, people don’t want to know you. They run from you like a straight man from a Celine Dion concert.
Chris Christie? I wish he would run for president. Just to see him run. He’d be the first oval in the Oval Office. When he goes to a casino buffe
t, the cook yells, “I need backup.”
Kim Kardashian? Not so bright. She thinks “soy milk” is Spanish for “I am milk.” Because let’s face it, some people are born great, and other people have greatness thrust into them. You know, kardashian is an ancient Armenian word. It means “fame whore.”
Donald Trump? He looks like a bouncer in a lesbian bar. That’s not just hair, you see, it’s a way to see if there is a wind advisory.
So remember, style is like a condo in Detroit; once you own it, it’s yours forever.
And when in doubt, the little black cocktail dress is always in style . . . especially for women.
* * *
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, PUT ON A FAT SUIT AND SQUASH THEM BETWEEN YOUR THIGHS
Playing Franck in Father of the Bride and its 1995 sequel was a riot—who wouldn’t want to be paid to spend time hanging around with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton while they do most of the work? During the shooting of the first Father, in 1991, the three of us would scurry off to Diane’s trailer between setups to play cards. I hadn’t known Diane before, and quickly discovered that being around her was exactly how I’d hoped it would be when I first fell for her in Annie Hall. No, actually, it was better—Diane is smarter and more captivating company than Annie. When she was called to the set, leaving Steve and me behind, we looked at each other, simultaneously placed our hands over our hearts, and went, “Ahhhh.” Now, perhaps Steve was having trouble digesting the corned beef sandwich he’d just eaten, but me? I was smitten.
That’s the effect that Diane has on the fellas. And she’s so guilelessly funny, which only makes her more endearing. At the time we were making Father of the Bride Part II together, the O. J. Simpson trial was in full swing on television, replete with its ridiculous cast of characters—Johnnie Cochran, Kato Kaelin, Chris Darden, Marcia Clark—and Diane was riveted. In a typically noisy makeup trailer, she was straining to hear every word of the trial on TV above the din of hair dryers, idle gossip, and me doing comic bits for Steve’s amusement. Unable, due to my chronic loudness and these other factors, to hear the proceedings in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom, Diane turned to me in exasperation and said, “Hey, man, if you don’t shut your mouth, I’m gonna suck your dick!”
Steve and I went completely hysterical. Then Steve calmly said, “Diane, just to be clear: When you threaten someone with the words ‘I’m gonna suck your dick,’ it’s not as strong a threat as you think it is. In many countries, sucking a dick is considered a reward.”
The first time I saw Diane in person was in 1983, when Nancy and I were dining in a beautiful restaurant in Toronto called Fenton’s. She and Mel Gibson, who were in town filming the movie Mrs. Soffel, were seated right next to us. We were so excited that Nan and I barely spoke a word to each other for fear that we might miss a second of their conversation. After about fifteen minutes of us pretending not to be eavesdropping, I asked Nan to pass the rolls, only to be met with a stern “Shhhh!” Years later, I told Diane this story and kidded her that, while I was listening in, I heard her say to Mel, “What are we going to do about all those Jews?”
As fun as the Father of the Bride movies were to make, an uncomfortable reality was setting in: While those two movies were hits, my role in them was secondary. As for movies in which I was the lead or co-lead, my hitless streak from the late 1980s continued right into the ’90s, with Pure Luck, costarring Danny Glover, and Captain Ron, costarring Kurt Russell.
Another picture I did, Clifford, fell victim to the whims of the industry: we made it in 1990, with my friend and frequent SCTV co-conspirator Paul Flaherty directing, but the studio behind it, Orion, folded, and the movie didn’t receive a theatrical release until 1994 (and even then a pathetically halfhearted one). Also, critics, apart from a few hip ones, hated it. Now granted, its central premise—me, at the age of forty, playing a prepubescent ten-year-old boy with an otherworldly affect—made Clifford a very strange beast indeed. Clifford—the boy in question—was obsessed with dinosaurs and desperate to visit a theme park called Dinosaur World; he carried on his person at all times a plastic dinosaur action figure that he called Stephan, to which he confided his innermost thoughts.
To achieve a suitably creepy man-boy look, the makeup people lightened my hair a few shades and gave me a prep-school side parting, while wardrobe dressed me like a little Etonian, in a dark blazer accented by a series of rep ties and tennis sweaters. Also, because I was wearing shorts throughout the movie, I was told to apply Nair, the hair-removal product, to my legs the night before the first day of shooting, so that they would be optimally little-boy hairless. Of course I forgot to do that, so when I arrived in the makeup and hair trailer that first day, I suggested to the movie’s hairdresser, Christine Lee, and her young female assistant, who I had never before met, that they Nair my legs while I was getting into makeup—just to save time and keep everyone on the set from waiting.
I quickly took off my pants, stripping down to my boxers, and propped my legs up on the counter. As I chatted away with my makeup-artist friend John Elliot, the two women spread Nair lotion all over my legs, from thigh to ankle, and started methodically rubbing and rubbing and rubbing the hair off. Ten minutes later, when they had finished and left the trailer to wash out the towels, I looked down to realize, to my mortification, that my penis had been out and exposed the whole time, staring the poor ladies in the face. It took me weeks to have enough nerve to broach the subject with Christine.
“Hey, so, uh,” I said. “You know . . . uh, regarding that first day when you were Nairing my legs: Were you aware that my penis was out of my underwear?”
Christine didn’t flinch. “I sure was,” she said. “And if I had known you then like I know you now, I would’ve shoved that thing back in.”
I spent the bulk of Clifford tormenting one of the funniest actors I’ve worked with, Charles Grodin, who played the boy’s uncle, and smaller amounts of time tormenting the other talented members of the cast, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Kind, and Dabney Coleman. I’m quite fond of this daring, adventurous little picture, and it always makes me laugh when I’m flipping TV channels and there it is. But at the time no one would give Clifford a fair hearing. Roger Ebert memorably wrote of it, “I’d love to hear a symposium of veteran producers, marketing guys, and exhibitors discuss this film. It’s not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe. The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again. I hope.”
Even the act of publicizing the film proved tortuous and unprecedentedly weird. While I was in a limo in New York City, en route to do the Letterman show to promote Clifford, I received a phone call from the actor Tony Randall on the car’s phone (this was before everyone had a cell phone). First of all, I’d never met Tony, so how on earth did he have the car’s phone number? Anyway, the reason he was calling was that he had reached out to me a few weeks earlier about starring in the Georges Feydeau play A Flea in Her Ear, which he was hoping to mount with the theater company he’d founded, the National Actors Theatre. I wasn’t interested, and politely told Tony I would have to pass on his kind offer.
Tony went quiet for a second. I could tell that he wasn’t pleased. “Martin, may I tell you something?” he said in that officious Tony Randall way, sounding very much like the characters he’d played in The Odd Couple and those old Rock Hudson–Doris Day movies.
“Sure, Tony, what is it?”
“You mustn’t make silly movies,” Tony declared. “That’s what I did, and it cost me dearly.” Great, I thought, now I’m being lectured.
“For you to have come to Broad-way,” he continued, “would not have hurt you at all. And I suppose your management tells you you’re hot. But let me tell you something, dear boy. That’s how we lost Marlon. And we never got him back.”
(No
w, which Marlon could he have meant: Brando, or Marlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom?)
“Well, thanks for the advice, Tony,” I said, somewhat coldly. “So great chatting with you, it really was.” I then hit the END button on the phone and, while looking at it, said, “Go fuck yourself, you hot bag of gas!” Then I decided to call Nancy to see if she had any idea how Tony had found me in the limo. As I was jabbing at buttons, trying to reach Nan, I suddenly heard Tony’s voice booming through the receiver with alarm: “Martin! Martin!” To my shock and horror, I realized that I hadn’t hit the END button; I’d hit the SEND button by mistake, and Tony had heard every word. That night, to Dave Letterman, before his studio and viewing audiences, I told the Tony Randall Anecdote verbatim. Months later I finally met Tony in person—at the Tony Awards, funnily enough—and with a big grin on his face he said, “I saw you on Letterman trying to blame the movie Clifford on me.” The “hot bag of gas” got the last laugh, as well he should have.
Ah, Clifford—what to make of it? Let’s see: poor box office, bad studio karma, critical excoriation . . . all the prerequisites for a cult hit. Which is indeed what Clifford has become. My first inkling of this came on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York a couple of years after the movie’s release. I was sitting in first class, and so was Nicolas Cage, about three rows up from me. I’d never met the man, and I didn’t want to bug him while we were settling into our seats. But he had recently won an Academy Award for his harrowing performance in Leaving Las Vegas. At the right moment, I’ll get up, introduce myself, and congratulate him, I thought.
Half an hour into the flight, I was lost in the New York Times when I noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Can I just say something to you?” he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity to his voice. “The dining room scene in Clifford, with you and Charles Grodin, where he’s confronting you and you keep lying to him”—a sustained battle of wits, much of it improvised, in which Clifford drives Grodin’s character to the edge (Look at me like a human boy!)—“well, I broke my VCR watching it. I watched that scene twenty-five times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.”