by Martin Short
The driver looked at her a little longer this time through the rearview mirror before announcing, “The 405 is clear.”
I, meanwhile, hadn’t even been officially introduced to him, so I’m thinking, Wow, what a name—I’ve got to use that name. So I said, “Oh, Bumpkiss, you know that we’ve arranged to have a greeter meet us at the terminal, right?”
He stared at me through the rearview mirror for a beat longer than he just had with Nan, his eyes a little deader than before. “Yeah,” he replied.
Something seemed off. I stage-whispered to Nancy, “How do you know his name is Bumpkiss?”
She stage-whispered back, “Because you told me!”
Whaaat? “What are you talking about?” I hissed. “When did I tell you his name is Bumpkiss?”
Nancy whispered, “I asked you, ‘Is Carlos picking us up?’ and you said, ‘No, Bumpkiss is.’”
“I did not say that!”
“You certainly did!”
Fantastic. Not only were we calling the driver by the wrong name, but we had also assigned him some vaguely racist name straight out of Margaret Mitchell or Show Boat.
Flushed with embarrassment and liberal guilt, I whispered to Nancy, “What are you talking about? I said, ‘He’s sending someone else.’ That doesn’t sound anything like ‘Bumpkiss’!”
Bumpkiss—er, the driver—delivered us to LAX’s American terminal in prompt fashion. After he and I finished unloading the bags onto the skycap’s cart, I pulled out a wad of hundreds and gave them to him as fair recompense for our unintentional psychological abuse. “Thanks, and I’m so sorry,” I said. “There might have been some, uh . . . some confusion about—well, I’m sorry, what is your name?”
“My name is Larry,” he replied with a tight smile.
Once we landed upon the beautiful island of Kauai, though, the tension went away, and Nancy and I had the most romantic, Zen vacation of our lives. Apart from one harrowing experience, that is. We paid a visit to Brennecke’s Beach, a place famous for its bodysurfing, and couldn’t resist testing its waters. We quickly paid for our curiosity—the two us were pummeled by a giant wave that we didn’t see coming. It threw us high into the air, and we each landed with a heavy thud, facedown in the sand. The beach was pretty crowded, and when I stood up to see if Nan was okay, I saw her getting to her feet, unaware that the top of her two-piece was now missing. “Can you believe how big they are?” she shouted over to me. She was referring to the waves. But all the guys on the beach who were now smiling and doing double takes didn’t necessarily see it that way.
Even though Nancy and I had a lot of fabulous show-business friends because I happen to be in show business, the truth of our social world was that Nancy was very often the greater engine of our social life. She and Rita Wilson, for example, became very close very fast—playing tennis together, recognizing in each other kindred competitive-jock spirits, and sharing thousands of laughs—and their friendship accelerated the development of my own with Rita’s husband, Tom Hanks. Nancy and Nora Ephron bonded over being voracious readers and witty, tart conversationalists—trading books, articles, and poison-dart commentary about how insane everyone but they were—and that’s how Nancy and I became a frequent dinner quartet with Nora and her husband, the author and screenwriter Nick Pileggi.
As acclimated as Nancy and I became to the Hollywood scene, a few figures still froze us in our tracks, neutralizing our normal gregariousness with their megawatt presence. One was George Harrison. You never get over the fact that a Beatle is a Beatle, even after he has stopped being a Beatle. Nancy and I met George in 1990, at an L.A. dinner party hosted by Dick Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner. I’d met Ringo Starr when he was on SNL, and later would work with Paul McCartney, but George seemed the most mysterious and reclusive of the surviving Beatles. To Nancy and me, there was something otherworldly about him.
We knew in advance that George was going to be at the Donners’ party. On the drive over, we played Rubber Soul over and over again, and Nan kept saying, “Wouldn’t you love to just corner him and ask him every Beatle question you’ve ever wondered about?” We both laughed, and I said, “Yeah, boy, he’d sure love that, wouldn’t he?” And then we went silent and just listened for a while to the genius music that George made with the three other guys in his old band.
There were ten other guests there that night, and when George walked through the door all I could think was, My god, he looks exactly like George Harrison. George was perfectly friendly throughout the dinner—in fact, he brought along a tape of the still-unreleased second Traveling Wilburys album, which he eagerly played for all of us on the Donners’ stereo like a proud teen showing off his garage band. I found that sweet. But Nan and I maintained a cordial, deferential distance from him, fearful that the word “Beatle” would come out of our mouths in an involuntary, Tourette’s-like outburst.
After dinner, we all retired to the Donners’ screening room, where Dick had arranged for us to view an advance reel of The Hunt for Red October. I ended up sitting right next to George on the couch, with Nancy on my other side. Dick Donner, an outgoing, no-B.S. guy with a thick thatch of white hair, announced, “Does anyone mind if I smoke a doobie?” Then he pulled out a large joint, which he proceeded to light, his plans clearly not contingent upon anyone’s answer to the question.
As we watched The Hunt for Red October, the joint was passed around until it landed with Nan. My wife, who could never really handle any kind of smoke, took one puff just for the sake of sociability. She immediately started coughing and, as fast as she could, passed the Donner doobie to me.
I took a hit, and then it was my turn to pass the joint to George on my right. But all of a sudden I started to panic, wondering about the etiquette of it all: Do I pass this to a Beatle? Maybe I shouldn’t. Am I going to offend him? Gee, I wouldn’t want to offend him. Would the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi be pissed or elated? Or maybe it would be rude if I didn’t pass him the joint. Oh, what the hell. Probably best to just pass George Harrison the joint.
I gently nudged George, who was engrossed in the movie, and offered him the spliff. He looked at it, smiled, and in his best documentary-narrator’s voice said, “Ah, the sixties!” He happily accepted the funny cigarette and took several drags on it.
I looked back at Nan, and she was already fast asleep, her head bent back, her nose in the air. George, on the other hand, became totally amped, very gregarious and chatty, talking right over the movie. “I have a hard time watching Sean Connery in a movie, a hard time accepting him in the part he’s playing,” George said, his voice now rising to lecture-hall volume. “Because he’s too bloody famous, too iconic—it’s like watching a Beatle.”
At that—George’s fortissimo pronouncement of the word “Beatle”—Nancy’s head shot up with a start. Not even quite sure where she was, she muttered, “Who said that?”
Meanwhile Lauren Shuler Donner had been contemplating for the last minute or so whether or not it was okay to shush a Beatle. Now she concluded that it was. “Guys,” she whispered, “shhhhh!”
George and I both went quiet like reprimanded kids in the fourth grade. After a moment, I turned to him and whispered, “Way to go, asshole!” The two of us burst out laughing, eliciting, now from the entire group, a new round of shushing.
For the remainder of the evening—away from the screening room—George and I enjoyed a rich, funny, fast-moving conversation. He was even familiar with some of the work I’d done, which I found incredibly flattering—but then he was a comedy aficionado, close to Lorne and Eric Idle of Monty Python. As we said our good-byes at the end of the night, George and I exchanged numbers, and we made a plan to have lunch the next day.
Nancy, having benefitted from a refreshing, head-clearing nap, said to me as we buckled into our car seats, “Out of curiosity, how do you intend to have lunch with your new best friend George Harrison tomorrow, given that you’re flying to Boston first thing in the morning?”
Mother’
s balls! I’d forgotten that I had a gig in Boston!
The next day, as early as I could without being rude, I telephoned George and told him I’d forgotten about my trip. He was gracious and told me that we’d make it happen another time.
Sadly, that other time never came. Our paths never crossed again, and George passed away in 2001.
Just a few months after his death, I was in Bungalow 8, a New York club that Paul Shaffer had dragged me to, when I noticed a skinny fellow who was the spitting image of George, only young George, coming right toward me. Before I could say anything, this young man embraced me in a tender hug. And then pulled back to explain himself.
“I’m Dhani Harrison,” he said. “One of the last things my father told me was that if I ever come across people who were important to him, I should give them a hug.”
Early in 2007 Nancy and I returned to our home in the Palisades after a nice stretch in New York, where I’d spent the latter half of ’06 on Broadway, doing Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me. That show was the ultimate in ego gratification and attic-fantasy realization: a musical expressly built for me, with my name in the title, and with original songs written for the show by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. (Marc also joined me as a performer onstage, while Scott directed the show, along with Kathleen Marshall, the polymathically talented sister of Rob.) Fame Becomes Me was loosely autobiographical in the loosest sense of “loosely autobiographical”: vaguely based on my life and career, yet filled with patent untruths. (I was not raised as a gypsy, did not go through a twelve-step program, and never starred in an all-nude, tribal-rock musical version of the second-greatest story ever told, Stepbrother to Jesus.)
As spring began, we were in a good place, familywise: Katherine had graduated from New York University and was contemplating grad school, Oliver was doing a semester abroad in London while enrolled at Notre Dame, and Henry was still with us at home, though soon to follow his brother to South Bend. Somewhere in the period leading up to Easter, Nancy felt a lump in her groin and thought she might have a hernia. She’d had one when she was twenty-four and thought it might be an avocational hazard of being a jock who hiked and played tennis all the time.
The Wednesday before Good Friday, Nancy went into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for outpatient hernia surgery, and I accompanied her. Neither of us thought much of it; while I waited, I jotted down jokes for the speech I was going to deliver the following Monday in New York, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Gala Tribute, whose honoree that year was our friend Diane Keaton.
But the doctor had an ashen face as he addressed the two of us after Nancy’s procedure. He had discovered not a hernia, he said, but a mass. He put the likelihood at 90 percent that it was cancerous—a diagnosis that the biopsy confirmed the next day.
This was not Nancy’s first go-round with the terrifying word cancer. Ten years earlier, in 1997, she’d had a double mastectomy after her doctor discovered carcinoma in situ, an early-stage form of cancer, in both breasts. It was obviously traumatic to us, but because Nancy didn’t have to go through chemotherapy and radiation, she charged through the unpleasantness with her typical unshakable Mountie spirit, and that was that—cancer gone. Unfortunately, at that time, they hadn’t yet developed what is known as the BRCA gene test, in which a patient’s blood is analyzed for mutations in her BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which naturally suppress tumors. Mutations to these genes indicate a higher susceptibility to ovarian cancer as well as breast cancer. Had the test existed then, Nancy might have undergone a preventive hysterectomy as well.
All of that was moot when we got the bad news that Thursday. The big question was, how widespread was Nancy’s cancer? We wanted to know right away, but the only way to get clear information was via PET scan, and it wasn’t possible to schedule one for the next day, Good Friday, in Los Angeles. But our internist, Dr. David Kipper, arranged for his brother, Dr. Michael Kipper, a radiologist and one of the pioneers of the PET scan, who was based in San Diego, to open up his clinic just for us. We drove down that Friday in dreary, overcast weather, wordless and tense.
The scan didn’t reveal any cancer beyond her pelvic region; no spreading, as far as they could tell. Though this news was not definitive, we received it ecstatically, in tears. We drove home and toasted Nancy’s good health with cosmopolitans. And the truth of it was, Nancy looked and felt great. This was just something to be gotten through. The main thing that concerned us was keeping her medical ordeal under wraps, out of the press. Nancy was private to begin with, and the last thing she wanted was for her friends and family to be worried about her, or, worse, to learn of her condition by reading about it.
Nan was supposed to accompany Henry and me to New York. Monday was the Diane Keaton gala. Tuesday I was taping Conan O’Brien’s show, then Late Night, on NBC. Wednesday, there was a release party for the original cast recording of Fame Becomes Me. And then that night we would all fly to London to visit Oliver while the boys were both on spring break. Nancy, though, wasn’t up to flying, given what she’d just been through. As for me, the thought of leaving Nan’s side and fake-exuberantly bulldozing my way through a series of functions and talk shows seemed utterly incomprehensible. But Nancy would have none of my protestations. She urged Henry and me to carry on. Henry, she said, shouldn’t be cheated out of the London trip, and any abrupt cancellation of my scheduled appearances might raise some eyebrows that she was not ready to have raised.
So off to New York I went with my adorable seventeen-year-old son. Henry had a great night at the Lincoln Center event, with Meryl Streep sweetly heaping loads of attention upon him at the dinner after the ceremony. At one point I interrupted their conversation to ask Henry, “Are you aware of all the brilliant films Meryl has been in?”
Henry smiled nervously; he couldn’t actually think of any of her movies at that moment.
“You can’t name one?” boomed Meryl in mock indignation.
I offered, “Sophie’s Choice, you know that one?”
Hen just shook his head no.
“The Devil Wears Prada?” asked Meryl.
“Didn’t see that one either, sorry,” Henry said, shaking his head in embarrassed laughter.
Meryl suddenly stood up and declared, “You know nothing of my work! How dare you!” And then she threw down her napkin and circled the table dramatically, as if to exit—before finally swooping back to Henry to give him a big hug. So fantastic and loving. But then, she has a son named Henry too.
Earlier in the evening I had delivered my typical defamatory roast speech in Diane’s honor.
To say being here tonight for Diane is a thrill . . . would be something I’ve just read off the teleprompter.
Actually, it’s more than a thrill. It’s an obligation.
Diane Hussein Keaton has been responsible for some of the most memorable performances of the past thirty-five years. Although, right now, I’m drawing a blank.
On the cab ride here tonight—’cause they wouldn’t send a car—I was thinking about the first time I ever saw Diane in person. It was on Broadway, in the musical Hair. I remember sitting there in the second row. Just me and my binoculars. And I remember being disappointed because Diane had refused to accept the fifty-dollar bonus given to any performer willing to get naked. Times change. Now, for fifty bucks, Diane will give you a massage with a happy ending.
I don’t think I’m being indelicate here when I say that when you work with Diane, you fall madly in love with her. And I’ll be honest: I once made a move on Diane, and she was very responsive. But unfortunately, at the last minute, she was able to chew through the duct tape.
And when we watch Diane with her children—those of us who know Diane, who love Diane—we are all struck with the same thought: What’s with all the hitting?
The speech went over well with the audience that night, and working on it all day had been a welcome, cathartic diversion from the unsettling news I had received earlier that afternoon. Around two p.m. my cell phone rang, with th
e name of Bernie Brillstein, my sainted, salty manager, on the caller ID. I picked up, and Bernie began the call with the words “Confirm or deny: the National Enquirer has a report ready to go that Martin Short and his wife, Nancy, had been to Cedars-Sinai on Wednesday, cancerous mass discovered, the full extent of her illness is not known, blah blah blah.” In all likelihood, someone at or affiliated with Cedars had leaked the information the second we’d walked out the door.
“I’m assuming this is bullshit,” Bernie said.
“It’s not,” I told him.
Bernie sighed. “Fuckin’ life, huh?” he said. “I’m sorry, kid. It’s all going to be all good, you know that. Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Let’s not do anything, Bernie,” I said. “Maybe they’ll have a bit of soul and not print it.”
“Very unlikely,” he said. “Remember, they’re all cunts.”
At the party after the Lincoln Center event, I pulled Steve Martin aside. Earlier I had told him about Nan’s cancer, but now I wanted his advice on what to do re the National Enquirer. “Steve, the Enquirer has a story ready to run on Nan, and—”
At those words alone, Steve went completely white—whiter than normal, which is really saying something. “Those fucking bastards! Those fucking bastards!” he said. “How dare they?” Then, softening, he asked, “How are you?”
I was honest: “I’m hanging on by a thread.” This hit Steve harder than the Enquirer news, because I never say things like that. Everyone’s accustomed to me being the smiley Mr. Positivity of our group. Steve began sobbing in full view of many of the guests, then grabbed his wife’s hand and said, “We’ve gotta go.” He turned to me: “Can I tell Anne?” I told him he could.
Nancy Meyers, who was also at our table, had observed this scene, and walked over to ask what it had been all about. I manufactured an excuse. “Oh, we got to talking about John Candy,” I said. John had died in 1994. “Wow,” she said, understandably confused. “It’s been thirteen years. You’re both still that affected?”