by Martin Short
On and on Cage went—and he had just won the Oscar two nights before. When I finally got to speak, replying, “And congratulations on your Oscar, great performance!” it seemed like I was merely returning his compliment—though, Nic, if you’re reading this, I swear, it was always my intention to compliment you first.
In any event, Mr. Cage was not alone. On the one occasion I ever had to meet Elizabeth Taylor, she pronounced herself, to my astonishment, “a total Clifford freak.” And Clifford took on a vigorous afterlife in the heyday of Blockbuster Video stores and repeat movie viewings on premium cable. Today, anyone twenty-five and under who approaches me in public only wants to talk about Clifford. Some of them tell me that when they and their friends get nostalgic for their early years of childhood, they get stoned and watch Clifford in their dorms.
I take a measure of satisfaction in Clifford’s belated discovery of its audience, but it was no consolation in the early 1990s. Between that movie’s disappearance and the disappointing box office of Captain Ron, my feeling was, and I actually heard these words in my head: Fuck the movies! I’m tired of the movies! Too much caprice, too many random factors, too much disappointment! Of course, one factor that made it so easy to say “Fuck the movies” was that no one was offering me any. It’s amazing how something like that can strengthen your resolve.
However, the beauty of my career and my diverse skill set was that I knew I had options. One of which was, as Tony Randall would put it, Broad-way. I had always felt in my heart that the theater was my first love, followed by the movies, then television, and then, perhaps, my family. In May of 1992 I auditioned for Marvin Hamlisch and Neil Simon to play the male lead, the so-called Richard Dreyfuss role, in the new musical version of Neil’s script The Goodbye Girl. As I was leaving the audition, the casting director, Jay Binder, came running out, grabbed me by the shoulder, and turned me around, exclaiming, “You are a Broadway star! Do you hear me? You are a Broadway star! And your sweater matches your eyes!”
I got the part, and on March 4, 1993, opposite the beautiful and exquisitely talented Bernadette Peters, I fulfilled Jay Binder’s declaration (although I was wearing a different colored sweater). The critical reaction to the show was wildly mixed, but I won the Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World awards for Best Actor in a Musical and was nominated for a Tony Award. Not only that, but I also got my caricature up on the wall at Sardi’s, the fabled restaurant I’d visited with my brother Brian in 1965, on our first trip to New York. It was the ultimate Broadway honor, although I was forced to acknowledge that the restaurant’s first attempt to capture my likeness didn’t quite work out. The portrait was unveiled live on CNN, which would have been much more exciting had it looked remotely like me; instead, it was of a cross-eyed guy who apparently had a severe thyroid condition. Grasping for something to say on TV, I commented, “Well, what’s interesting about this is, if Karen Black ever did a Broadway show, they could save on the framing.”
Afterward Vincent Sardi Jr., the restaurant’s owner, came up to me and sweetly inquired, “Mr. Short, you don’t like the picture?”
“Oh, no, no, it’s a great honor!” I protested. “It’s just that . . . I’m not quite convinced that it looks much like me.”
“This new guy we’re using,” Mr. Sardi said ruefully, “he just isn’t as good as the old guy.”
“How long have you been using him?” I asked.
“Twenty-eight years,” Mr. Sardi said.
In any event, The Goodbye Girl ran for 188 performances, and I reinvented myself in midlife as the singing, stage-loving ham that I’ve secretly always been anyway.
Well, hang on. I shouldn’t make it sound quite so tidy. In the mid-1990s I had another of my periodic moments of self-doubt, akin to Breakdown Corner in 1977 and my pre-SCTV doldrums. It might have begun one day when I was sitting on my porch in the Palisades with Chris Guest. “Martin,” he said to me, “have you ever felt that our style of comedy is already a little antiquated?”
It was ten years on from Spinal Tap and Saturday Night Live, but it had never occurred to me that I had a particular style of comedy that could be pegged to a specific time period. I’d never pondered that. Then again, the very reason I was with Chris at that moment was because he was appearing as a guest on an NBC show I was doing, The Martin Short Show, that was, if I may again borrow from Ed Grimley phraseology, as doomed as doomed can be. It was a sitvar—a hybrid of a sitcom and a variety program—in which Jan Hooks played my wife and I played a guy named Marty Short. We had some really inventive, funny premises, like one in which we found a lost white poodle with a tracking device on it. It was determined that the dog belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. We returned the dog, but Jan’s character rigged the animal’s tracking system so that we had a live audio feed and could listen in on Taylor and her then-husband, Larry Fortensky. Smash-cut to me as Taylor, shouting “Larry! Gladiator is on!” Jan and I also did a lot of character sketches in a variety of costumes and guises, not a world away from what Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen now do so successfully on Portlandia.
Whatever. The show didn’t take. NBC wanted something more traditional like Home Improvement, I wanted to include more sketch work, and the thing was yanked after three episodes. My kids were still young, so while I’d had success on Broadway, it wasn’t viable for me to commit full-time to that life, away in New York for months at a stretch—not when Nancy and I had made a commitment to being an un-nomadic family. Another round of roles in unsuccessful movies followed—the kid-oriented pictures Jungle 2 Jungle and A Simple Wish, Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!—and suddenly it was the summer of 1997, and I was at our summer place on Lake Rosseau in Canada. My profile was strong, but none of my post-SNL projects had turned into anything remotely raging hot. I had nothing new lined up.
I’d always pressed my agents and managers to be brutally honest with me, in good times and bad: Don’t sugarcoat anything. Be honest. This is a business. So around that time, I checked in with one of my agents to get the lay of the land. Here’s what the guy said: “Do you know what it is, Marty? Everyone loves you. Everyone admires you. Everybody thinks you’re talented. They’re just not talking about you these days.”
Oh.
I gathered myself and replied, “Boy, I—wow! I appreciate the clarity of that statement. Thank you!”
I was staring at the water and thinking, I’m forty-seven years old. Maybe I’m done. Maybe I’ve hit a wall that has no intention of giving. Not just thinking these things, but saying them to Nancy: “I think we’re in trouble, Nan. I think it might be over.”
Another reason to love my wife: she didn’t buy it for a second. She saw the bigger picture. She said, “Mart, cream rises to the top. You’ll never go away. People just wouldn’t have it.” Me, I wasn’t so sure.
In that moment, Nancy was more mindful of the flawless logic of my Nine Categories system than I was. We had three beautiful kids. We had each other. And look at where we were sitting: this beautiful summer retreat, a stone-columned lakefront estate built early in the twentieth century by a Toronto department-store magnate and his wife.
In 1992, in the dead of winter, while I was in Puerto Rico with Kurt Russell making Captain Ron, Nan had trudged through four-foot snowdrifts down to the edge of a lake, looked back at the seventy-year-old cottage that overlooked it, surrounded by ten acres of wooded lakefront property, and said, “We’ll take it.” She never checked with me, nor would she have needed to. I’d have just said, “Whatever you think, baby,” trusting her wisdom about such things. (For years, my private name for our new estate was Yes, Dear.) Tucked into an area of Lake Rosseau called Snug Harbour, Snug, as I’ve come to call the property, became our family’s favorite place, with spectacular vistas, pine-scented northern woods, and loons that greeted us with their cries each evening—our own Golden Pond, with money. Kurt was so taken with our Rosseau place when he visited us—he and I had become great friends during the filming of Captain Ron—that he and Goldie
Hawn bought land and built their own compound just across the lake.
Nancy was also aware that I, more than she, am susceptible to that condition sometimes ascribed to actors known as neediness. I was driving once, late at night on a quiet road, and the solitude and darkness sent me into a torrent of thought about how small we are in the infinite scheme of the cosmos, how fleeting our time is, and how mortal we are. I started contemplating the fact that someday I will die and be no more. I started thinking of the sadness that would overcome my family and friends at the news of my death. And I actually started tearing up. When I got home, I reported this experience to Nancy. She said, “That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Wait a second. You’ve never imagined your own death and teared up?”
“Of course not! I’ve imagined your death and teared up!”
“Well,” I said, “that’s my point.”
Suffice it to say, Nancy was right: My career wasn’t over, and good things did come up. That fall, I flew to London to play eight different characters in Merlin, an NBC miniseries with a wonderful cast that included Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Neill, and John Gielgud. Sir John Gielgud! I had a blast filming that project, which stretched into winter, and, with Nancy and the kids, enjoyed a magical Christmas break at Brown’s Hotel in London, where a Boxing Day snowstorm lent the whole city a Victorian storybook feel. Sam, Helena, and I were nominated for Emmys, and my faith in the working actor’s life was once again restored.
Concurrent with Merlin, I was collaborating with Rob Marshall, who had just codirected (with Sam Mendes) and choreographed the Roundabout Theatre’s hit revival of Cabaret, on an updated adaptation of Neil Simon’s musical Little Me. Simon and the songwriter Cy Coleman had originally created the show in the early 1960s as a vehicle for the high-energy comedian and TV pioneer Sid Caesar. Rob and I just clicked; he and I had adored working together in March of ’97 doing the limited-run Encores! production of Simon’s Promises, Promises at New York City Center, and we were looking for something else to do together. Like Merlin, Little Me would require me to play multiple roles—though in this case I would get comically killed in each one. Plus, I’d get to sing!
Rob and I found a week of time to put together an idealized draft of Little Me that lifted bits from different productions of the show over the years while adding in new concepts all our own. Yet at the end of the week I was overcome with uncertainty. If there was one thing I had learned from working with Neil Simon on The Goodbye Girl, it’s that you don’t rewrite a word of Neil Simon, the dean of American theater. “Why are we doing this, Rob?” I asked my collaborator. “We’re wasting our time.”
Still, Rob and I arranged a meeting with Simon and Coleman at Coleman’s office in Manhattan. We sent over our script in advance. As we walked to the meeting, I started fearing the worst, getting increasingly worked up: “You know what, Robby? To hell with them and their closed, ancient minds! They think we’re a pair of twenty-one-year-olds! Let me tell you something. They won’t know what they’ll be missing out on when they pass on this!”
Then we went into the meeting, where a relaxed, smiling Neil Simon greeted us and cut to the chase. “We love it, guys,” he said. “Great job. Let’s do it.”
Moments later Rob and I were at the bar of the Four Seasons hotel, drinking martinis in rapid succession, half in celebration, half in panic: Oh my god, now we have to actually do this.
We opened in November 1998, with the delightful Faith Prince as my romantic foil, to the kind of notices an actor dreams about—“the stage loves him the way the camera loved Garbo,” wrote the New York Times’s Ben Brantley. I won a second Outer Critics Circle Award, and, the following spring, the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. When I reached the stage to accept the award, I instructed the audience to please be seated, even though they already were. I went on to say that there were so many people I could thank, but the reality was, I’d done it all myself.
The big takeaway from this for me was that, while such troughs of despair as I’d experienced in the summer of ’97 were valid and important, and maybe even necessary, they did not need to be repeated. That lakeside moment of reckoning and anxiety would only be valuable to me if it was instructive—if I squeezed every bit of wisdom out of it so that I would not repeat it.
What I’d learned—and the lesson seemed to stick this time—was that I could and would survive quite handsomely in show business because I had the versatility to just keep moving. You don’t want me in movies? Fine, I’ll do TV. You don’t want me in TV? Fine, I’ll do theater. Just in the last year, for example, as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve had as full and eclectic a schedule as I could ever have hoped for: working on the sitcom Mulaney, playing a supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice, and continuing to do concerts all over the country, sometimes on my own and other times as part of a two-man team with Steve Martin.
The summer after Little Me ended its run, I launched my own syndicated talk show, which ran for one season (1999–2000) and was a good test of my resilience. Like my sitvar, it was called The Martin Short Show, and it was another attempt to find a niche by crossbreeding one TV genre with another—in this case, the agreeable daytime chat show crossed with SCTV-style sketch comedy. If I have any one regret about the talk show, it’s that we should have waited a little longer to bring it to air, because the syndicator, King World, had not finished selling it to the local affiliates when we launched. Consequently, as time went on and more stations picked up the show, it was airing in a wild variety of time slots in different cities—early morning, late morning, afternoon, late night—and it became difficult to know what kind of audience to play to.
In San Francisco, for example, we were on at 1:00 a.m. In Boca Raton, 7:00 a.m. So, somewhere in south Florida, some poor ninety-year-old was sitting in an assisted-living home, saying, “What the hell is this guy doin’ pullin’ wacky faces this early when I’m trying to figure out if I’m still alive?” Even though the reviews for the show were terrific (the New York Times said, “At its hilarious best, which it often was during its premiere yesterday, Martin Short’s new comedy-talk show is like a fresh edition of Saturday Night Live with interviews”), by Christmas the ratings were tanking, and not even six Emmy nominations could help. Once again, a show called The Martin Short Show was as doomed as doomed can be.
And yet something lasting and good came out of the project. One thing we did was a series of remote segments in which, playing a character, I would interact with real people. For the first one we tried, I spent about two hours in makeup, getting a bad prosthetic nose, a goofy wig, and pockmarked skin. I wanted to be unrecognizable, and the premise was that I would be this cheerily eccentric fishmonger at the L.A. Farmers Market who offered whole fishes to people, unwrapped, with his bare hands. Yet people immediately recognized me and asked for my autograph. The footage was unusable, which was frustrating, because I really liked the concept of getting lost in a character.
And then I remembered a scene I’d done in the movie Pure Luck in which my character was stung by a bee. He had an allergic reaction and his whole body swelled up, head to toe. I was getting made up for that scene, completely swathed in prosthetic blubber, when Danny Glover walked in, did a double take, and said, “Marty, I literally cannot see you in there.”
Oh, that’s what I want, I thought: to be totally unrecognizable. So that’s why celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick, of whom I now speak, was conceived as a fat guy. Jiminy was a product of my desire to do dispatches from press junkets, awards shows, and movie premieres not as myself but in character as a vapid entertainment reporter. He was also a symptom of my growing disenchantment with daytime television. I’d never watched much of it, but since I was getting into it, I wanted to familiarize myself with the terrain. Some of it, like The View and Rosie O’Donnell’s show, was cool. (And this, mind you, was before the time of Ellen DeGeneres’s show.) But boy, most of what was on was profoundly moronic. I came to re
alize that there was a whole daytime-TV ecosystem of morons who had large staffs at their beck and call: multiple assistants, segment producers, and so forth. I decided to make Jiminy a product of this ecosystem—a moron with power. The power of his TV platform!
As has been the case with all my characters, Jiminy took shape as an amalgam of various influences. There was a neighbor of ours back on Whitton Road in Hamilton named Mr. Braden whose speaking voice slalomed unpredictably from the very top of his range to the very bottom. Mr. Braden was the owner of the Kenmore Theatre, where we kids went to the movies. He didn’t like us running across his lawn—he was older, and all his kids were grown—and he told us that if we stayed off his lawn for an entire year, we’d each get free passes for one Saturday matinee and one box of popcorn. (By the way: bad deal.)
There was also a soupçon of Merv Griffin’s fawning in Jiminy, plus a vapid intensity borrowed from an old physics teacher at my high school, Mr. Devot. From the superagent Swifty Lazar, I borrowed the heavy black eyeglasses that were his visual trademark. And—unconsciously, I later realized—I borrowed my father’s penchant for the unforeseen put-down. By the time the hair, makeup, and wardrobe people were finished with me—what with the fat suit, the latex goiter, the pompadour wig, and the huge glasses—the Jiminy look was complete, and the character took on a life of his own.
One of my first outings as Jiminy was at the Emmy Awards, where game actors who knew it was me, people like Jane Krakowski, totally embraced the concept and went along with it. “Jesus, Jiminy,” Jane said, “it’s been ages!” But Jack Lemmon didn’t seem to understand that Jiminy was a character—more than likely he’d never heard of Martin Short, either—and when he gave me sincere answers to Jiminy’s questions (referring to the abrasive old-time head of Columbia Pictures, I asked him, “Harry Cohn—was he mean?” and Lemmon sincerely replied, “He was never mean to me”), I decided not to use the footage. I wasn’t out to dupe people, least of all national treasures like him.