How did you meet your manager, Bill McEuen?
Well, I used to go to high school with his brother, John, and we slowly communicated. We didn't get together, though, till I started writing for the Smothers Brothers. I was about 22 when we decided to sign a management thing, and neither of us, I swear to God, knew what we were doing. [Dumbstruck voice] "I got a manager now ..."
I can't believe the intensity of his devotion. He tape-recorded everything you did back in the early days.
Sure. He used to sit out there every night, watch every show, and laugh. And I'd hear his laugh and it'd sort of keep me going. It was like him and me, kind of cheering each other up. I know I'm dying, he knows I'm dying, and we're laughing about it.
For a while you slipped into a hippie look. How much did it reflect your life?
Well, I was just going through a stage, like anybody. I was listening to rock music. I smoked some marijuana. That was when I was about 20. Marijuana's so strange in that you can get a lot of different things from it. When you first start smoking it, you get really high, and then after a while, you just get tired. When I started writing, I quit.
How did you get the job writing for the Smothers Brothers?
I had written a stack of things in college, in creative writing class. I had a girlfriend who was a dancer on the show, and she showed Mason Williams [the show's head writer] my stuff.
After your hippie phase, around 1971, you started wearing white suits. How contrived was that?
It seemed at the time like something really far out. It was planned, and then the white suit became gurulike when I started achieving success. But when I cut my hair, I didn't do it to think, "Well, this will help me out in show business." I just wanted to forget about the past.
Even before the white suit, you were doing some strange things, not only in your act but especially after the shows, leading crowds out into the streets and going to McDonald's and ordering three hundred hamburgers... and one French fry.
That's what I had to learn in acting, that it was the degree of your commitment to an idea that made it successful or not. The idea could be wrong, but you must be committed, and that's what I was to the act at the time. All the way.
I remember the first time I ever walked out of the hall at the end of the act, and the audience came with me and I had them all get in a swimming pool-which was empty-and then I swam over the top of them, and they all put their arms out, and I thought, "Gee, there's a breakthrough! I'm gonna do this every time now." It was that spirit, I think, that caught fire to the rest of my act. I stopped going outside because it got too dangerous. I realized if I go out and take three thousand people, someone's gonna get run over.
That's when the concerts became "events."
But even after that, they were great shows, shows that thrilled me. It was like playing an instrument. The audience was an instrument. I can do this, and they'll do this. There was a period of, like, a year and a half where I felt so good; my body, my fingers, everything was working. When it got beyond that.... I don't want sour grapes, like I was selling out twenty thousand-seat concerts and was unhappy. I wasn't, on one hand. It was the traveling, the circumstances-it just got me. I started doing things like collapsing onstage. It was a signal.
What about the time you had to go to the hospital?
It was a concert in Knoxville, Tennessee, with about seven thousand people in, like, a gymnasium. They were hanging from the rafters. It was about 100 degrees outside and humid, so it must've been 125 degrees onstage. The first five minutes I could feel sweat coming from my hair and running down my face. And the suit got soaked through. And I was about a half-hour into the act when I realized I couldn't go on. I had to leave. They called the medics and took me to the hospital. It was just exhaustion. I was a wreck.
How did it affect your performance? Did your act become rote?
No, that wasn't the problem. My act was always formulated. It's not like you get depressed and go out and do a lousy show. You could be exhausted, and something happens and you're on top of it. That's the enigma of performing. You can be very down and go out there and suddenly feel it. Or be very high and never connect with the audience. I started getting tired when I was getting into the nonconcert situations, like Atlantic City or Las Vegas. I felt something was missing.
When you began to get a lot of media attention, people tried to explain why you hit when you did. Did you agree with their assessments?
You know, in those articles, I always looked for something larger. I always felt there was a deeper meaning to what I was doing than just being "wild and crazy," something more philosophical. I had a view that there was something funny about trying to be funny. I needed a theory behind it in order to justify it at the time, but now I don't. I see it for what it was. It was just fun, and it was stupid, and that's why it was successful.
But a lot of "stupid" comics have failed. Why did you succeed?
It was like everyone was ripe, and I was there and had the act I'd been doing for ten years, and boom, you know? I just think people wanted something new. I mean, I wanted something new, so I sort of became it.
You were one of the most popular guest hosts of Saturday Night Live. Was there an instant chemistry?
It grew over the years. After a couple of times, it was a lot easier to write for me, and we had things to go to. I was not much of a contributor, except for my monologues.
When you were invited onto SNL, did you already know the show?
Sure, I saw the very first show, and I loved it. Saturday Night Live was a huge force. It made movie stars John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray. They and Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin and myself were the comedy of the seventies.
Do you plan to get back to the stage soon?
I want to stay in contact with live performing. Once you lose it, you've lost something real important. I want to go back with something really fresh. I need six months at the Comedy Store to get back into shape, and I look forward to going back. I'd like to start from the bottom again. Work up a whole other feeling. And to get that feeling again of funny.
Can a successful Steve Martin still play the jerk who thinks he's making it when he's actually making a fool of himself?
I'd still be that character. That's me. I can't walk out and be a somber Lenny Bruce or change the focus of my material. Onstage, when I say I've made it, it doesn't mean career-wise or celebrity-wise. It means [smugly], "I'm good." You can always think you're good when you're really not.
How are you coming up with new material now?
My act was ad-libbed, really, for over ten years, and the good ad-libs stayed and that's how it evolved. I sat down and wrote some things, but pretty much everything was, "Hey, that'll work," laying at night in your bed and going, "Well, that's another good idea!" [Laughs.]
Offstage, you're a very serious kind of distant.
That's what my close friends say, too, you know.
Why is it that you come off so cold to people?
You know, I can't answer that. That's for a shrink to answer. I'm a lot better at it now than when I was touring. When you're touring and if you go to a party, there's automatically a celebrity-audience distance. It follows you around, especially when you're on the road in small towns. Any time there is awe, it gets very difficult to be nor mal, to be yourself. But I'm not saying that that's what made me the way I am. I've probably always been distant.
As a kid, too? In high school and college?
Well, I had one very close friend in high school and college, two different people. Otherwise, it was hard to get to know people. But I had real good rapport with these specific friends. We had this communication, generally through humor.
Do you appreciate a comic like Andy Kaufman, who seems more interested in arousing the audience than in getting laughs?
I've only seen Andy Kaufman be funny. I always felt like if what I was doing then hadn't broken through, I would eventually have gone on to something like that. I always felt like A
ndy Kaufman was the next step.
What about other comics? Do you keep tabs on them?
Not much. I can look at it almost objectively because I don't feel like one anymore. I feel like I've moved... changed somehow, and it's so far behind me in some spiritual way. I feel more inclined toward the movies now. I'm not looking for my next college date. I want to be a comedian-actor.
I hear you met recently with Stanley Kubrick in London.
It's not the kind of stuff you want to put in the papers. That's the way deals are blown. But I met with him in London for about eight hours. He likes The jerk, and we talked about doing something together.
You're also the executive producer of a late-night show on NBC called Twilight Theater.
It's part of my television deal; we created a production company that feeds ideas to NBC, and late-night really appealed to me. We're doing a prime-time situation comedy with Martin Mull-that's in development-and Twilight Theater, which is our version of those Alcoa anthology shows from the late fifties. We've got Roddy McDowall as the host, and it looks like we present great drama. He sits by the fireside and pulls books off the shelves and introduces the next, you know, piece of art, and it's all sort of pompous. Then we do New Wave, with a punk-expressionist set.
(Among planned segments: a soap-opera parody set in a high school whose population is three-quarters punks and one-quarter preppies; a New Wavey video clip of Rosemary Clooney doing "Come on-a My House," accompanied by Spazz Attack, the dancer in Devo's video of "Satisfaction.")
Now that you're two films past it, what do you think of The Jerk?
I saw it recently; it came on cable TV. I sat there... "You know, this is pretty funny." I liked it. There are things I would've done different, but I recognized that was me then; that's the style of the film.
The jerk got worked over by the critics, and that came around the time you were being slammed for the Cruel Shoes book. Other writers said you were repeating too many bits and putting out too many albums. How did you respond to all this?
The thing that's wrong is that they [the critics] try to make you ashamed of your work. And nobody has the right to do that. We do this out of-oh, I can't say why [laughs]. I was gonna say love, but that's not true. Love sounds like you're implying [in a sincere voice], "I want to go out there and make those people happy." And I've never thought that. I wanted to get onstage and exercise this craft. It's to please yourself.
...Or to make the world a better place?
I'll tell you, I'm sure musicians don't feel they're going out there making people happy. They're happy with moving their fingers across the neck of that guitar, and that's the way I felt. It just happens in comedy that that's superficially what it looks like you're doing. I never thought I was making them happy. I always figured they hated me. I felt happy that the show went right, and if I had this elevating moment, I felt there was communication. That's why when the thing got out of control-you know, the rock-audience syndrome with some guy throwing a beer bottle at you and the people running up onstage. That really got to me because it threw everything out of sync. I learned how to handle it, but I didn't want to have to handle it.
How have you handled the money that's come with success?
Well, I don't want to sound like I have $100 million. I did well. I have no complaints.
You have what? About $50 million?
That's about eighty million [laughs]. I have no problems with money at all. I'm not depressed because of it. It's so relative. You can quibble over $100 but not over $100,000. But I hesitate to discuss money because it's-I don't care who you are, there's a real hatred of rich people, there's hostility-this real snide attitude toward the rich as though you didn't earn it and that it was easy, or that there's a great difference between the rich and the not-rich. What's the difference? Now why is he an asshole? I mean, I didn't start it out as a business. There are two things-what you do and the business of what you do-and I don't feel like a businessman.
Bill McEuen told me that he wanted to do well more to have freedom than for the money. But he also said, "While we're hot, why not take it? If we don't, we'll hate ourselves in ten years.
I have to tell you something. Bill vacillates, and it depends on the mood he's in. Sometimes he'll say, "Fuck you, we're only doing this for the money, and if we don't get the money, we're not gonna do it." Other times he's the most artistic, dedicated, devoted-to-art person I've ever met. And I think all of us are like that. You're making so much on a concert tour, and it excites you a little and you go, "How much?" There's a certain thrill to it. It's detached. I don't care if I'm getting five cents for a show or $100,000, it's just as hard. The work is the same, and you're not gonna let it die. I mean, you're out there sweating, working for something else.
You know, talking about selling-that's a whole style. You're on the road, you're selling records, it's a period of your show-business life that maybe happens once, or two or three times. Everything's coming together. The road was meant to sell records, it was meant for you to be out there and be Number One: it was to do everything, to explode and ride that wave. But it only comes every once in a while, and now I'm happy. I intentionally beached to calm it down, to let it subside, because if you're on that wave, pretty soon it's gonna break, just by its own weight.
Is there that sense of having retired a champ? You didn't quit, but you stepped back by your own choice.
That's right. Pull it back and just say, "I'm gonna get sick of this, they're gonna get sick of it," and you just go... [Martin leans back, allows himself one of his wide, eye-closing smiles, breathes out and sits up again] "That was wonderful."
-February 18, 1982
Rolling Stone
Long after this interview, Steve and I have stayed in touch. A few years ago, I asked him for a "blurb" for my memoirs, The Rice Room. He wrote back, and we happily quoted:
"The Rice Room is a poignant examination of Ben's life. I couldn't put it down ...in fact, I'm still holding it."
See? Some people can just plain write funny.
Annie LThoii!t:
THE PHOTOGRAPHER AS AN ACTIVIST
nnie Leibovitz first joined me, if memory serves, on an interview with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner in 1970. She'd already proven herself as a professional photographer with her portraits of John Lennon, accompanying a Rolling Stone interview conducted by Jann Wenner in 1971. And for the next decade, she would be a critical part of the success of most of Rolling Stone's cover stories, and of Rolling Stone itself.
W H E N I F I R S T K N i, W H E R thirteen years ago, Annie Leibovitz was a gangly bundle of nerves, a young photographer who exuded insecurity. At work, though, she was both sharp, in terms of knowing what she wanted, and blunt, with her adolescent manner. Do this, do that. No. Don't worry, it'll be great. It was just right for the young, brash San Francisco-based magazine we both worked for: Rolling Stone.
And her photographs, mainly of rock 'n' roll artists, were great. With Annie Leibovitz shooting my stories, even the worst would look good, and the good would look fantastic.
Annie contributed more than illustrations. She often disarmed our subjects with her quirky charm, so that they acted differently-often more candidly, than they might with a reporter. Shooting them in separate sessions, she would pick up and pass along her own insights on the characters of her subjects; those invariably made their way into my stories.
I remember, from just the stories we did together, Grace Slick hoisting her daughter China; Ike Turner caressing Tina (a slave master and his caged tigress); Mick Jagger at the helm of a yacht off Oahu; Ray Charles in the cockpit of his own aircraft.
Her new book, Photographs, includes shots for the last two cover stories I did for Rolling Stone: Rodney Dangerfield, in a blue-eyed panic over a baby Annie has forced into his arms, and Steve Martin, who becomes a part of one of his prized contemporary art pieces.
These are examples of Annie as the activist photographer, the woman who goes to a session armed with i
deas, ready to go as far as a subject will allow, and, often, further.
Photographs, as a result, is a scrappy book. There's Debra Winger, topless, Frenching her dog Pete; there's Linda Ronstadt in a torrid red camisole, sprawled rump up, across her Malibu bed; Christo mummified in his own sheets, Lauren Hutton, topless and smeared in mud: Carly Simon with a leg up on James Taylor; a nude John Lennon climbing and kissing Yoko in a photograph taken the day of his death; Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin, laughing and crying, and, finally, Yoko, crying.
The photographs-mostly from 1977 on, coinciding with Rolling Stone's move from San Francisco to New York-are a testament to the way many of the most prominent people in our social and cultural landscape look or pose these days.
They also are testament to the growth of Annie Leibovitz, who's traveled a ways since Rolling Stone's black-and-white, smudgy newsprint days at Third and Brannan streets.
Leibovitz, now photographing exclusively for Vanity Fair, was back in San Francisco recently, on a promotional tour for the book. Most of her interviewers, she says, "ask me how I get people to do it. I don't think I make them do anything. It's the old idea of journalists as manipulators. But 95 percent of my pictures are collaboration. Like Debra Winger. Maybe it shows a bit much, but she's that way: boisterous, tough, brilliant. I think she was using her dog. It was 3 8 degrees, and the dog was warm. Actually, I'm probably more embarrassed by the picture than she is."
Leibovitz has also drawn attention with her shots of shirtless men, ranging from then-teen idol David Cassidy in 19 72 to writers Jerzy Kozinski, John Irving, and Robert Penn Warren.
"It was so easy shooting them seminude," she says. "You didn't have to worry about what they wore. Actually, it just seemed appropriate to me at the sessions. I mean, it was hard to imagine Mick Jagger with his shirt on. You're dealing with people with a lot of sexual attraction."
Even the well-worn Robert Penn Warren?
"Oh, I loved that, shooting a series for Life on poets. To work with people who were not self-conscious about how they looked. I'd been reading Warren, and he was writing about time passing, about dying. And he gave himself over to me immediately. He sat in his bedroom, which was all gray; it looked like no one lived there. I found out he spent most of his time there.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 47