by Marlo Thomas
The day Orson Welles came to the set, everyone was very excited. I had personally overseen all the goodies to put in his trailer. Then I saw Barney, who worked the cue cards on a lot of variety shows. I asked him what he was doing there.
“I do Mr. Welles’s cards,” he told me.
Mr. Welles uses cue cards? I thought. On a movie? I was flabbergasted. I was about to act in scenes with the great Orson Welles, and he was going to be reading from cards! Sure, Bob Hope and Dean Martin used them all the time on their TV specials, but this was a dramatic film. I felt sick to my stomach.
I needn’t have worried—they didn’t call him Orson Welles for nothing. When we began to rehearse our first scene, it was clear that the way he held his head to read the cards—with his chin slightly down and his eyes peering at me from beneath his intense brow—he looked perfectly right from the camera’s view. And it didn’t hamper his great acting style in any way.
I, on the other hand, didn’t know where the hell to look. His eyes weren’t available to me, and I could hear the cards constantly flipping behind me. I’ve always known that an actor’s performance is in the eyes of the other actor. I remember when I was first studying acting, I asked my father what he did when the actor he was working with didn’t give him anything back. His reply: “I fire him.” Funny, but not practical.
Luckily, in all my scenes with Orson I had to be in a very anxious state. Mr. Potter was the bad guy and I was the little guy being beaten down by him. I barely had to prepare. The real situation had everything I needed to be fearful and anxious.
THE SHOOT WENT SMOOTHLY. Well, we went over budget and over schedule, but the network was thrilled with the rough cut. We were in postproduction, and all we had left to do was put in the music. We had hired Johnny Mandel, one of the great movie composers, to create the score. And after that, we’d be done.
I was looking forward to finishing. Carole and I had been working on the movie full-force for nearly nine months, and we were exhausted. Our plan was to deliver it to the network by Thanksgiving, which was late for promotion, but there was no way we could have done it any faster. It was a miracle that we made it in time for Christmas.
One other reason I was eager to be done was because I was thinking a lot about Phil. We had met in January—just a month before all of this had started—and had been quietly dating throughout. Things were getting serious—so much so that he wanted us to finally come out of the closet with our romance. So he decided to throw a party at his house—rent a tent, hire a band, make it a big bash—to introduce me to his friends and some of the interesting Chicago people he thought I’d like to meet, like Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Mike Royko and others.
Phil’s party was scheduled for the weekend right after we would finish the final mix of the movie—which included the music.
What’s that old saying? “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” The Friday before the scoring session, Johnny Mandel had a heart attack.
We were in shock. Johnny was such a lovely man, and Carole and I had spent many hours spotting the music with him, and had been eager to hear what he was writing. I called the hospital to see how he was. He sounded relieved to be there, but very weak. He was such a pro—he felt terrible to have let us down.
“Don’t worry about us, and just take good care of yourself,” I said. “There will be other pictures for us to work on.”
Okaaay. Panic. We not only had to get a new composer, but we had to have the work done in just a few days or we would miss our mix date. And if you miss your mix date, it can take weeks to get another one. So we needed to move fast: find a composer, sit with him, watch the movie several times, select the right moments for music, then go over every theme. It was a gargantuan task.
Carole and I begged Stephen Lawrence to take it on. Stephen had composed such great music for Free to Be, and he was our friend. You could never tackle this with a stranger. So he was our best shot. But the idea of going to Chicago for Phil’s party was now out of the question. There was simply no time. I wouldn’t even be able to sleep for five days.
I had to call Phil. Well, I thought, this could be the end of it. Being with an actress is a lot of trouble for a guy. My brother, who produced many TV series and spent most of his time with actors, told me once that he went out of his way never to date an actress. And when Phil and I started dating, he always got a laugh with his line “I never knew a woman who had so much energy for so many things other than me.”
Phil picked up the phone. I told him about Johnny’s heart attack and that it would be impossible for me to come to Chicago for his party.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Can’t someone else oversee it just for a day?”
“No,” I said. “There are no extra days. I have to do it. I’m the producer. The buck stops here.”
Phil was silent. I felt awful.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a spot like this,” I offered, “when your work life suffocates your personal life. But I’m hoping you’ll understand.”
I waited, hoping. Finally, Phil said, “Yes, I have—more times than I’d like to admit. But when they pass out the disasters, I’ll take this one.”
How do you not love this guy?
It was too late to call off the party, so we decided that I would phone the party and tell my story to the assembled guests. There were a lot of obsessives there that night—so they got it. Phil said it was a great evening. I wish I had been there.
As disappointed as I was to miss the party, the sacrifice paid off. The work sessions with Stephen were thoroughly successful, and he quickly turned out a vibrant score. One melody was so beautiful, and Phil was so charmed by it, that he shipped the sheet music to a company in Switzerland and had it made into a music box as a gift for me—in time for Christmas. Obsessives were everywhere.
OUR MOVIE, which we renamed It Happened One Christmas, aired on ABC two weeks before Christmas. It got an incredible 46 share of the audience, and played for four successive seasons after that—just as Freddie had wanted. Some critics were abashed that I had monkeyed with the gender in a Capra film, some thought it ingenious. But most important, the audience took the film’s message to heart as passionately as they had with the original. And the mail we received was all about Capra. So I guess he was part of our movie, after all.
A few months later, Orson Welles was a guest on The Tonight Show.
“So you appeared in a movie with Marlo Thomas as the producer,” Johnny Carson said to him. “What was that like?”
“She’s an interesting woman,” “Orson answered. “She’s a cross between St. Theresa of the Flowers and Attila the Hun.”
Chapter 41
The Wright Stuff—Steven Wright
All comedy buffs think they’re the one who discovered Steven Wright. And once we’ve made that discovery, it’s hard to let go of him. He’s addictive—hear one Wright joke and you need to hear another. There have been other comedians who built their acts on a string of one-liners, but Wright’s are different. More than just zingers, each line tells a miniature story—at first bizarre, then eye-opening, then finally brilliant, as we get a deeper, funnier look at the things we thought we knew.
—M.T.
“I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: You know, preparing for this interview wasn’t so easy. Your bio on your website was about as short as your jokes. The whole thing is twenty-eight words—twenty-six if you don’t count “The End.” Why? Don’t you want anyone to know about you?
Steven: Well, my publicist wrote this really long biography of all the stuff I had done, and I felt self-conscious about it, like I was making a speech about myself. So I made a smaller version. I didn’t do it to be mysterious. The other one just seemed too self-centered.
Marlo: Well, that’s sort of what a biography is, you know? There are a lot of them on Winston Churchill, like twenty-seven volumes. He must have b
een a very self-centered man.
Steven: Yeah. That’s hilarious.
“I remember when the candle shop burned down.
Everyone stood around singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: You can say in one sentence what it takes most comics to say in a paragraph. Your one-liners are like gold. How many rough drafts do you go through to get it so perfect?
Steven: Something in my mind starts to edit down the joke so I can get the point across with the fewest amount of words. I don’t like standing there if they’re not laughing. I don’t like doing big, long set-ups.
Marlo: It’s so economical, what you do. You take us from the beginning to the end in such a short amount of time. And you embrace the absurdity of life. If the world were more normal, would you be out of work?
Steven: Probably. There are so many weird things in life—from the time you wake up till the moment you go to sleep. So many pieces of information go by, and some of it just jumps out at me as a joke.
Marlo: How many of these lines do you do in a typical show—like eighty?
Steven: A typical ninety-minute show has a couple hundred lines, probably.
Marlo: Wow.
Steven: To do a five-minute thing on The Tonight Show, that would be about twenty, twenty-two jokes.
“I had a friend who was a clown.
When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: What’s the longest Steven Wright joke on record?
Steven: It was a pretty traditional story.
Marlo: Tell it to me.
Steven: I was on a bus and I started talking to this blond Chinese girl and she said, “Hello,” and I said, “Hello, isn’t it an amazing day?” And she said, “Yes, I guess.” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘I guess’?” And she said, “Well, things haven’t been going too well for me lately.” I said, “Why?” She said, “I can’t tell you. I don’t even know you.” And I said, “Yeah, but sometimes it’s good to tell your problems to a total stranger on a bus.” And she said, “Well, I’ve just come back from my analyst and he’s still unable to help me.” And I said, “What’s the problem?” And she said, “I’m a nymphomaniac, and I only get turned on by Jewish cowboys.” Then she said, “By the way, my name is Diane.” And I said, “Hello, Diane, I’m Bucky Goldstein.”
That’s, by far, the longest joke I’ve ever done. It was worth it because the laugh was huge. I did it so many times, I kind of retired it.
“It was the first time I was in love and I learned a lot.
Before that I never even thought about killing myself.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: People always call you deadpan. How did that start?
Steven: It was an accident. I was so afraid of being on stage that I’d talk very seriously, even though I was saying these insane things. I was concentrating so hard on trying to say them in the correct way, and in the correct order, that it came out deadpan. And that became my trademark.
Marlo: You don’t ever appear nervous. I mean, when I’m nervous, I talk as fast as possible. How did you keep that kind of unflappable calm?
Steven: A friend of mine gave me some good advice when I would do The Tonight Show. I would be so nervous that I’d almost get, like, numb. So my friend told me to play the studio audience like I was playing in a little club. There were 500 people in the studio, so I just ignored the idea that it was going out on TV. And once they started laughing, it became just like in the clubs. If you stop to think that 10 million people are watching you, you’d get so nervous you couldn’t even function.
“I was reading the dictionary.
I thought it was a poem about everything.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: How did it all start for you?
Steven: From TV. I have two brothers and one sister. My brother controlled the television because he was older, so I had to watch what he watched. And I liked it—Johnny Carson’s monologue, and all the comedians he had on, like Robert Klein, David Brenner and George Carlin.
Also, there was a radio show in Boston every Sunday night. The host played two entire comedy albums, and I kept a little radio in bed with me. I guess I was studying it all without knowing I was studying. I loved Woody Allen the best. I also loved Bob Newhart’s albums and Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’s 2000-Year-Old Man. By the time I was sixteen, it was my fantasy to be doing this.
Marlo: But your work is so different from theirs. How did you find your style?
Steven: I started listening to the way Woody Allen structured jokes. Then I got into surrealistic painting. I loved the way the artists combined different realities that couldn’t be combined in the real world. Years later, when I started writing jokes, I did the same kind of thing.
Marlo: That’s really interesting. Sid Caesar and other comics have talked about comedy in terms of music, but no one has talked about it in terms of painting.
Steven: Well, I’ve always been very visually stimulated. Drawing helps my comedy, because when you draw something, you examine it in a much closer way. Like, if you’re drawing a table that has a wine bottle on it, and a wineglass beside the bottle, not only do you see the glass and the bottle, you also see the shape in between them. Exercising that part of my mind helped me with my comedy, because it taught me to notice things more closely than I normally would.
“I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms
from the statues that are in all the other museums.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: Were you the funny guy in school?
Steven: I was always joking around with my buddies and making them laugh. I wouldn’t make the whole class laugh, because I was a shy kid and didn’t want the attention.
Marlo: What’s a Steven Wright joke, circa junior high?
Steven: I made up a joke that made my friends laugh, about a flock of false teeth. I remember thinking that, even though there was no such thing, the words were assembled in a funny way.
Marlo: So what did your flock of false teeth do?
Steven: I have no idea. Just fly by, I guess . . .
“I was at my uncle’s funeral and I was looking at the coffin and
thinking about my flashlight and the batteries in my flashlight. And I
told my aunt, ‘Maybe he’s not dead, he’s just in the wrong way.’ ”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: Okay, so here’s this kid in school who knows he’s funny, and has his own craft. What was your first professional gig like?
Steven: When I did my first open mike, I tried about three minutes of jokes, and the audience laughed at, like, half of it. I thought it was a failure because they didn’t laugh at all of it. One of the other comedians pulled me aside and told me that I was pretty good for never having done it before.
Marlo: After that, did you think you’d make it?
Steven: You never know what’s going to happen. I wanted to try stand-up. I wanted to give it a shot. And I didn’t want to wonder my whole life about what would’ve happened if I had tried it. I’ve had this whole career and this whole life because I took that initial risk.
“I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time.’
So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: Last question: Have you ever owned a comb?
Steven: Used to as a boy.
Marlo: What happened to it?
Steven: I think I lost it.
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”
—Steven Wright
ANOTHER STORY FROM BOB NEWHART
There was a comic who called himself Professor Backwards. His name was actually Jimmy Edmondson. In his act, people in the audience would call out their state or city, then Jimmy would instantly pronounce it backwards. He was probably dyslexic, but he made a small living from the act.
&nbs
p; Jimmy was always hard up for funds, so during the era of person-to-person telephone calls, he figured out a way to avoid paying for calls to his agent. Whenever he needed to know when his next club date would be—and what he’d be paid—he’d speak in code to his agent, through the operator.
“Person-to-person call from Jimmy Edmondson,” the operator said on one occasion.
“He’s not in right now,” the agent answered.
“Do you know where I can reach him?” interrupted Jimmy.
“Yes, he’ll be at the Fontainebleau Hotel on January 1st through the 13th,” the agent said.
“Do you know what room he’ll be staying in?” asked Jimmy. (This was the code for how much money he’d be paid.)
“Yes, he’s in room 750,” the agent said.
“Wait!” said Jimmy. “I thought he was supposed to be in room 1500.” To which the agent replied:
“Tell him he’s lucky he’s not in room 500 . . .”
Chapter 42
Growing a Feminist
Where’s she gonna go?”
That’s what my uncles (all eight of them) would say whenever they had an argument with their wives. And no matter how angry those women might get with their husbands, the bottom line was: Where’s she gonna go?
Was it then? Sometimes I think it was then that I became a different kind of female from all the women in my family. As a girl growing up, I witnessed sixteen marriages—nine on Dad’s side, four on Mom’s, two sets of long-married grandparents, Italian and Lebanese. And, of course, my parents’ marriage. And in every one of them, the husband was numero uno. There wasn’t any abuse or that kind of thing. Just the everyday drip, drip of dissolving self-esteem.
I made up my mind somewhere in the middle of all this that the whole domestic scene was not for me. I had things I wanted to do and didn’t want to do.