Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by STEVE MARTIN

  Following the advice in Showmanship for Magicians, I kept scrupulous records of how each gag played after my local shows for the Cub Scouts or Kiwanis Club. “Excellent!” or “Big laugh!” or “Quiet,” I would write in the margins of my Big Indian tablet; then I would summarize how I could make the show better next time. I was still motivated to do a magic show with standard patter, but the nice response to a few gags had planted a nagging thought that contradicted my magical goal: They love it when the tricks don’t work. I started to think that the future of a serious magician was limited. Plus, I was priced out of the market by the impossible cost of advanced stage illusions: Sawing a Lady in Half, two hundred dollars. By doing comedy, however, I could be more like Stan Laurel and Jack Benny, more like Wally Boag. I was still using Claude’s somber introduction to my floating silver ball routine, but I added a twist at the end of the long-winded speech: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the toilet float trick.”

  My performing notes, from age fifteen, complete with misspellings.

  My time at the magic shop gave me a taste of performing and convinced me that I never wanted to wait on customers again. I didn’t have the patience; my smile was becoming plastered on. I then crossed all kinds of jobs off my list of potentials, such as waiting tables or working in stores or driving trucks: How could my delicate fingertips, now dedicated to the swift execution of the Two-handed Pass, clutch the heavy, callus-inducing steering wheel of a ten-ton semi?

  But there was a problem. At age eighteen, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent. Having been motivated by Earl Scruggs’s rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” I had learned, barely, to play the banjo. I had taught myself by slowing down banjo records on my turntable and picking out the songs note by note, with a helpful assist from my high school friend John McEuen, already an accomplished player. The only place to practice without agonizing everyone in the house was in my car, parked on the street with the windows rolled up, even in the middle of August. Also, I could juggle passably, a feat I had learned from the talented Fantasyland court jester Christopher Fair (who could juggle five balls while riding a high unicycle) and which I practiced in my backyard using heavy wooden croquet balls that would clack against each other, pinching my swollen fingers in between. Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

  After high school graduation, I halfheartedly applied to and was accepted at Santa Ana Junior College, where I took drama classes and pursued an unexpected interest in English poetry from Donne to Eliot. I had heard about a theater at Disneyland’s friendly, striving rival, Knott’s Berry Farm, that needed entertainers with short acts. One afternoon I successfully auditioned with my thin magic act at a small theater on the grounds, making this the second happiest day of my life so far.

  My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.

  The Bird Cage Theatre

  DURING THE 1960 S, the five-foot-high hand-painted placard in front of the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm read WORLD’S GREATEST ENTERTAIMENT. The missing “n” in “entertainment” was overlooked by staff, audience, and visitors for an entire decade. I worked there between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two as an actor in melodramas. Knott’s Berry Farm didn’t have the flash of its younger sibling, Disneyland, but it was authentic and charming. Knott’s Berry Farm began in the 1930s, when Walter and Cordelia Knott put up a roadside berry stand. A few years later, Cordelia opened her chicken-dinner restaurant, and Walter bought pieces of a ghost town and moved the Old West buildings to his burgeoning tourist destination. Squawking peacocks roamed the grounds, and there was a little wooden chapel that played organ music while you stared at a picture of Jesus and watched his eyes magically open.

  My first performances for a paying audience were at the Bird Cage, a wooden theater with a canvas roof. Inside, two hundred folding chairs sat on risers, and a thrust Masonite stage sat behind a patch of fake grass. A painted cutout of a birdcage, worthy of a Sotheby’s folk art auction, hung over center stage, and painted representations of drapes framed the proscenium. The actors swept the stage, raised and lowered the curtains, cleaned the house of trash, and went out on the grounds pitching the show to visitors strolling around the park. I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low.

  The show consisted of a twenty-five-minute melodrama in which the audience was encouraged to cheer the hero and boo the villain. I appeared in The Bungling Burglar, performing the role of Hamilton Brainwood, a detective who was attracted to the provocatively named soubrette, Dimples Reardon. Fortunately, I ended up with the virtuous heroine, Angela Trueheart. My opening night was attended by my high school girlfriend, Linda Rasmussen, and her parents, who, it turned out, were more nervous for me than I was. The play was followed by a ten-minute “olio” segment involving two five-minute routines where the actors did their specialties, usually songs or short comedy acts. Though I didn’t do an olio that night, the Bird Cage was the first place where I was able to work steadily on my magic act, six minutes at a time, four times a day, five on Sunday, for three years.

  Performing the olio at the Bird Cage.

  The Bird Cage was a normal theatrical nuthouse. Missed cues caused noisy pileups in the wings, or a missing prop left us hanging while we ad-libbed excuses to leave the stage and retrieve it. A forgotten line would hang in the dead air, searching for someone, anyone, to say it. The theater was run by Woody Wilson, a dead ringer for W. C. Fields, and a boozer, too, and the likable George Stuart, who, on Saturday night, would entertain the crowd with a monologue that had them roaring: “You’re from Tucson? I spent a week there one night!” Four paying customers, in a house that seated two hundred, was officially an audience, so we often did shows to resonating silence. Woody Wilson, on one of these dead afternoons, peed so loudly in the echoing bathroom that it broke up us actors and got laughs from our conservative family audience.

  The theater was stocked with genuine characters. Ronnie Morgon, rail thin, would dress up as Lincoln and read the Gettysburg Address for local elementary schools. On a good day, he would show us young lads cheesecake photos of his wife in a leopard-skin bikini, and even at age eighteen, we thought it was weird. There was Joe Carney, a blustery and funny actor who opened the lavatory door from the top to avoid germs. Paul Shackleton was the son of a preacher and could not tolerate a swear word, but he once laughed till he cried when we sat down under a eucalyptus tree to drink our Cokes and a bird shit on my head. His laughter made me think it was funny, too, and for days we could not look each other in the eye without breaking into uncontrollable hysterics. John Stuart, a talented tenor with a mischievous sense of humor, once secretly put talcum powder in my t
op hat. Onstage, whenever I popped the hat on or off, a mushroom cloud of smoke bloomed from my head, causing an unscheduled laugh from the audience.

  Me, Terri Jo Flynn, Ronnie Morgon, and George Stuart in a publicity photo, though we never got any publicity.

  Kathy Westmoreland, another actress at the theater, had attended Garden Grove High School at the same time I did and was the first indisputably talented person I ever met. She sang like the Swedish Nightingale and, later in life, achieved a strange kind of celebrity. As a backup singer for Elvis, she became his confidante and then, quietly, his lover. Years later, after his death, she wrote a book revealing her secret, making her the focus of overwrought Elvis fans.

  Kathy and I developed a hillbilly routine, she on wash-tub bass and I on banjo. It was my first foray into comedy without magic to back me up. She blacked out a tooth, and the act included crossed eyes and corny jokes, and it absolutely killed. We soon ascended to the premier slot for the Bird Cage’s olio acts, the Saturday-night nine o’clock performance. The audience would howl and weep and thrash about, and the laughs would double the length of our five-minute show.

  We decided to take our act to the Golden Bear for a Monday tryout. The “Bear” was a folk music club in Huntington Beach, California, where all the big names played, including Kenny Rankin, John Mayall, Jackson Browne, and Hoyt Axton (an accomplished performer and songwriter himself—author of the oddly unforgettable lyric “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!”—but it’s hard to forget that his mother cowrote “Heartbreak Hotel”). I was smug about presenting our fully broken-in and seemingly invulnerable act. My belief in the inevitability of our success charged me up before, during, and after the show, and it was not until days later when I acknowledged to myself that our debut in the tougher world of real show business had been met with only a polite response. Kathy and I were probably too corny for an exploding folk scene that was producing many serious and spectacular artists. The willing and forgiving audiences at the Bird Cage did not necessarily reflect those at hip folk clubs.

  And then there was Stormie.

  Stormie Sherk, later to become an enormously successful Christian author and proselytizer under her married name, Stormie Omartian, was beautiful, witty, bright, and filled with an engaging spirit that was not yet holy. We performed in plays together; my role was either the comic or the leading man, depending on the day of the week. She wore antique calico dresses that complemented her strawberry-blond hair and vanilla skin. Soon we were in love and would roam around Knott’s in our period clothes and find a period place to sit, mostly by the period church next to the man-made lake, where we would stare endlessly into each other’s eyes. We developed a love duet for the Bird Cage in which she would sing “Gypsy Rover” while I accompanied her on the five-string. When she sang the song, the lyric that affected me the most was—believe it or not—“La dee do la dee do dum day.” We would talk of a wedding in a lilac-covered dale, and I could fill any conversational gaps with ardent recitations of Keats and Shelley. Finally, the inevitable happened. I was a late-blooming eighteen-year-old when I had my first sexual experience, involving a condom (swiped from my parents’ drawer) and the front seat of my car, whose windows became befogged with desire. Later, Stormie wrote in her autobiography that when she was a girl, her severely mentally ill mother would lock her in a dark closet for days, cruelly abusing her. I had no idea.

  If Stormie had said I would look good in a burgundy ball gown, I would have gone out and bought a burgundy ball gown. Instead, she suggested that I read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. The Razor’s Edge is a book about a quest for knowledge. Universal, final, unquestionable knowledge. I was swept up in the book’s glorification of learning and the idea that, like a stage magician, I could have secrets possessed by only a few. Santa Ana Junior College offered no philosophy classes, so I immediately applied to Long Beach State College (later renamed the loftier-sounding California State University at Long Beach) and enrolled with a major in philosophy. I paid for schooling out of my Bird Cage wages, aided in my second year by a dean’s list scholarship (one hundred eighty dollars a year) achieved through my impassioned studying, fueled by Razor’s Edge romanticism. I rented a small apartment near school, so small that its street number was 1059 1/4. Stormie eventually moved an hour north to attend UCLA, and we struggled for a while to see each other, but without the metaphor of the nineteenth century to enchant us, we realized that our real lives lay before us, and, painfully for me, we drifted apart.

  Stormie, me.

  At the Bird Cage, I formed the soft, primordial core of what became my comedy act. Over the three years I worked there, I strung together everything I knew, including Dave Steward’s glove into dove trick, some comedy juggling, a few standard magic routines, a banjo song, and some very old jokes. My act was eclectic, and it took ten more years for me to make sense of it. However, the opportunity to perform four and five times a day gave me confidence and poise. Even though my material had few distinguishing features, the repetition made me lose my amateur rattle.

  Catalyzed by the popularity of the folk group the Kingston Trio, small music clubs began to sprout in every unlikely venue. Shopping malls and restaurant cellars now had corner-stage showrooms that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t serve alcohol. There were no clubs dedicated to comedy—they did not exist for at least fifteen years—so every comedian was an outsider. The Paradox, in Tustin, was where I first saw the Dillards, a bluegrass group that played hard and made us laugh, too, and featured the whizbang five-string banjo picker Doug Dillard, who looked like a grin on a stick but played with staggering speed and clarity. There was the Rouge et Noir in Seal Beach, where I saw David-Troy (aka David Somerville, aka Diamond Dave), a singer-guitarist who had the ladies swooning and who had been, years earlier, the lead singer on the Diamonds’ monster hit “Little Darlin’.” I didn’t realize I was hearing one of the most famous voices in early rock and roll. At the Mecca, in Buena Park, I saw the up-and-coming comedian Pat Paulsen, who opened with this funny line: “I’ve had a great life, with the exception of 1959, when, unfortunately, I passed away.” (The best opening line I ever heard was from Sam Kinison. In the late eighties, playing the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, he said, “You’re going to see a lot of comedians tonight; some will be good, some will be okay. But there’s a difference between me and them. Them, you might want to see again sometime.” But wait—maybe the best opening line I heard was Richard Pryor’s, after he started two hours late in front of a potentially miffed crowd at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. He said simply, “Hope I’m funny.”)

  Using the Bird Cage as a home base, I flirted with outside work, auditioning for gigs while keeping my class load at school as light as possible. The Prison of Socrates was a music club in the T-shirts-and-shorts beach town of Balboa. The Prison’s main star was a charismatic sandal-clad folksinger named Tim Morgon, who was so popular that for several months in Southern California, his record outsold the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. My Monday-night audition at the Prison was marginal, but because the opening acts were usually marginal anyway, I was hired for a weekend tryout. I now had my first job outside Knott’s Berry Farm, which presented a particular difficulty. It was one thing to do five minutes at the Bird Cage, or ten minutes at a “hoot,” but it was another thing to do twenty minutes for paying customers. Furiously trying to expand the act before my three-day gig, I threw in earnest readings of the poets e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and Stephen Vincent Benét, all aimed at stretching my act to show length. Nobody cared about hearing Eliot and cummings in a nightclub, but the Benét piece, a socko narrative poem about a fiddle contest in Georgia, stayed in the act for at least a year until I canned it.

  Opening night, I stood in the parking lot behind the club, going over my material and warming up on the banjo. Adjacent to garbage cans and blowing with beach sand, the parking lot was where the opening acts tuned up and rehearsed, as there was no place else to practice out of the au
dience’s earshot. I performed to a sparse crowd, among them my college friend Phil Carey, his brothers, and their dates. How did it go? I have no idea. My only memories of it are the unsettling echo of chairs screeching on the concrete floor as patrons adjusted their seats. After the show, I was informed by my college friends that I had mispronounced the word “incomparable.”

  I now had two credits, the Bird Cage and the Prison of Socrates—my Disneyland credit was not quite professional—and I was able to land intermittent jobs, among them the Ice House in Pasadena, which had been converted from—guess what—an icehouse. Many earnest folk musicians appeared there, strumming guitars and wearing shirts with puffy sleeves. At the Ice House, I faced a real nightclub audience and performed almost as frequently as I did at the Bird Cage. Three shows a night was standard at these small clubs. Eventually, I ingratiated myself with enough venues that I wondered if I could possibly finance my life without the security of my steady job at Knott’s Berry Farm.