Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by STEVE MARTIN

  The next night I was picked up by a local woman. She was older and looking for sex and, since my boyfriend status with Nina had recently unraveled, I was eager to oblige. Even though I was still reeling from the previous night, we went to her second-floor apartment in a hundred-year-old building and wasted no time. In the middle of this experience, I heard the pop of an amyl nitrate, and then she shoved it toward my nose. I had barely come down from the previous night’s blast and I wasn’t about to have my head ripped off again. I breathed out and tried to make it appear as though I were breathing in, determined that none of the molecules should get anywhere near me. I was successful but had to act as though I was wowed beyond belief. “Yes, yes!” I lied. After this mess was over, she asked if she could take my picture. I said sure, and she went to get her camera. I moved into her living room, where I casually picked up from her coffee table a wood-bound scrapbook bearing the image of a sleeping Mexican on its cover. Pasted inside were dozens of photos of guys sitting in the chair I was now occupying.

  My experience at the Abbey Cellar was important to me, but not as important as what was going on after hours. John and I shared a room, and his future partner, Linda, would join us for lengthy chats. What we discussed was the new zeitgeist. I don’t know how it got to this bedroom in Aspen, but it was creeping everywhere simultaneously. I didn’t yet know its name but found out later it was called Flower Power, and I was excited to learn that we were now living in the Age of Aquarius, an age when, at least astrologically, the world would be taken over by macramé. Anticorporate, individual, and freak-based, it proposed that all we had to do was love each other and there would be no more wars or strife. Nothing could have been newer or more appealing. The vast numbers of us who changed our thoughts and lives for this belief proved that, yes, it is possible to fool all of the people some of the time. The word “love” was being tossed around as though only we insiders knew its definition. But any new social philosophy is good for creativity. New music was springing up, new graphics twisted and swirled as if on LSD, and an older generation was being glacially inched aside to make room for the freshly weaned new one. The art world, always contrarian, responded to psychedelia with monochrome and minimalism. It was fun trying to “turn” a young conservative, which was easy because our music was better. I remember trying to convince a member of the Dallas Ski Club that “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy)” was not really a good song no matter how much he liked it. After two weeks in Aspen, I went back to Los Angeles feeling like an anointed prophet, taking my friends aside and burping out the new philosophy.

  I CONTINUED TO PURSUE my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business. I’m not sure what the purpose of fooling myself was, but I toyed with the idea for several semesters. I concluded that not to continue with comedy would place a question in my mind that would nag me for the rest of my life: Could I have had a career in performing? Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense. A classmate, Ron Barnett, and I spent hours engaged in late-night mind-altering dialogues in Laundromats and parking lots, discussing Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian semanticist. Wittgenstein’s investigations disallowed so many types of philosophical discussions that we were convinced the very discussion we were having was impossible. Soon I felt that a career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.

  I was living several lives at once: I was a student at Long Beach State; I sometimes filled in at the Bird Cage Theatre; and at night I performed in various folk clubs with an eclectic, homemade comedy act that wasn’t to reach its flash point for another decade. One of the clubs I played was Ledbetter’s, a comparatively classy beer-and-wine nightspot a few blocks from UCLA that catered to the college crowd. I was taken under the wing of its owner, Randy Sparks, a theatrical entrepreneur who had founded the New Christy Minstrels, a highly successful folk act. I opened the show for his new acts, the Back Porch Majority and the New Society, two massive, stage-filling folk groups who offered wholesome high spirits and some pretty funny comedy to the Westwood Village audiences. Fats Johnson, a jovial folksinger who dressed to kill in black suits with white ruffled shirts and wore elaborate rings on his guitar-strumming hand, often headlined the club. When I asked him about his philosophy of dressing for the stage, he said firmly, “Always look better than they do.”

  Now that most of my work was in Westwood, Long Beach State College, forty miles away, seemed like Siberia. I transferred to my third college, UCLA, so I could be closer to the action, and I took several courses there. One was an acting class, the kind that feels like prison camp and treats students like detainees who need to be broken; another was a course in television writing, which seemed practical. I also continued my studies in philosophy. I had done pretty well in symbolic logic at Long Beach, so I signed up for Advanced Symbolic Logic at my new school. Saying that I was studying Advanced Symbolic Logic at UCLA had a nice ring; what had been nerdy in high school now had mystique. However, I went to class the first day and discovered that UCLA used a different set of symbols from those I had learned at Long Beach. To catch up, I added a class in Logic 101, which meant I was studying beginning logic and advanced logic at the same time. I was overwhelmed, and shocked to find that I couldn’t keep up. I had reached my math limit as well as my philosophy limit. I abruptly changed my major to theater and, free from the workload of my logic classes, took a relaxing inhale of crisp California air. But on the exhale, I realized that I was now investing in no other future but show business.

  The physical distance from each other had permanently broken up Nina and me, and she had left school to pursue her dancing career. But overnight, there were dozens of new people in my life. Pot smoking was de rigueur—this being the sixties—and since I was now a regular at Ledbetter’s, I was living rent-free over the garage of a mansion in the exclusive area of Bel Air, thanks to the generosity of Randy Sparks and his wife, Diane. Even though I was armed with only a comedy act that was at best hit-and-miss, I was fearless and ready to go. Among the crowd of singers and musicians whose local fame I assumed was worldwide was a sylph-like figure, a nonsinger and nonmusician who nonetheless seemed to be regarded quite highly in this small showbiz matrix. Her name was Melissa, but her friends called her Mitzi. She was twenty years old, with a Katharine Hepburn beauty and a similarly willowy frame. She was intelligent, energetic, and lit from inside. Her hair was ash brown, and always at the end of one of her long and slender arms was a Nikon camera with a lens the size of a can of Campbell’s soup.

  When her current romance withered, Mitzi and I became entwined. After several weeks of courtship, I was ready for family inspection and she invited me to her parents’ house for dinner. Mitzi’s last name was Trumbo. Her father was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were blacklisted during the Red Scare of the early fifties. During his congressional hearing, Trumbo vociferously challenged the right of his inquisitors to interrogate him, prompting a frustrated committee member to scream, “You are out of order, sir! You are out of order!” in a futile attempt to get him to shut up. It was Trumbo who wrote the screenplays for Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, Hawaii, Exodus, and Papillon; whose personal letters read like Swiftian essays; who had to flee to Mexico for several years and write under pseudonyms such as Sam Jackson and James Bonham in order to escape McCarthyism; and whom, at this stage in my tunnel-visioned life, I had never heard of. Mitzi later told me that there were no wrong numbers in their household because any unknown name the caller asked for was assumed to be one of Trumbo’s aliases.

  Mitzi Trumbo, 1965.

  From my perspective, Mitzi was a sophisticate. She had traveled. She was politically aware and had attended Reed College in Oregon, a bastion of liberal thought. Her intelligence was informed by her family history. Wh
en I went to dinner at her home in the Hollywood Hills, I did not know that the few months I would spend in this family’s graces would broaden my life.

  My first glimpse of Dalton Trumbo revealed an engrossed intellect—not finessing his latest screenplay but sorting the seeds and stems from a brick of pot. “Pop smokes marijuana,” Mitzi explained, “with the wishful thought of cutting down on his drinking.” Sometimes, from their balcony, I would see Trumbo walking laps around the perimeter of the pool. He held a small counter in one hand and clicked it every time he passed the diving board. These health walks were compromised by the cigarette he constantly held in his other hand.

  Dalton Trumbo was the first raconteur I ever met. The family dinners—frequented by art dealers, actors, and artists of all kinds, including the screenwriters Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, Jr., and the director George Roy Hill—were lively, political, and funny. I had never been in a house where conversations were held during dinner or where food was placed before me after being prepared behind closed doors. It was also the first time I ever heard swear words spoken by adults in front of their offspring. Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam bombing policy dominated the conversation, and the government’s ironfisted response to war protesters rankled the dinner guests, since the Hollywood Ten were long familiar with oppression. Trumbo had a patriarchal delivery whether he was on a rant or discussing art or slinging wit, but nothing he said was elitist—though I do remember him saying, as he spread his arms to indicate the china and silver serving ladles, “Admittedly, we do live well.”

  Trumbo’s wife, Cleo, beautiful like Mitzi, was at the head of the table when Trumbo was downstairs writing. Cleo was the person actually in charge and could not have been more welcoming. She extended an open dinner invitation to Mitzi and me, and as I was deeply broke, we always accepted. The food was delicious and the company spectacular, so we did not regret missing out on the “health salads” served at our local incense-burning restaurants—gunky concoctions of cheese-laden, ham-draped iceberg lettuce doused with creamy dressing.

  One evening after dinner, we adjourned to the living room—something else I had never done before—and I was surprised to see a marijuana cigarette passed among the guests. The joint finally got to Trumbo, and he clasped it between his knuckles like a German officer in a movie. He didn’t pass it along, just held it and puffed on it but did not inhale. With a broad grin, Mitzi leaned over to me and said, “Pop doesn’t know how to smoke pot. He thinks you smoke it like a cigar, and he never gets high.”

  The family’s liberal bent was never fully tested. When I asked Mitzi if her parents knew about my slipping in the garden door of her bedroom late at night and leaving at daybreak, she said that Cleo knew but Pop would not be pleased. Hence, in the early mornings, I started my car gingerly, thinking that if I turned the key slowly, the engine would not make so much noise.

  The Trumbo house was modern, built on a hillside, and extended down three floors into a ravine. The walls in the living room were large, and they give me my most vivid memory of the house, for they were covered with art. Political art. I had never seen real paintings in a house, and this might have been where my own inclination toward owning pictures began. In the entry was an eight-foot-high Baconesque painting by Hiram Williams, a picture of several businessmen, their hands bloody, emerging from a white background. In the dining room was a William Gropper, depicting members of the House Un-American Activities Committee grotesquely outlined in fluorescent green against a murky background. There was a Raphael Soyer, a Moses Soyer, and a Jack Levine painting of Hindenburg making Hitler chancellor. These artists are obscure today but not forgotten. Gropper’s art depicted politicos as porcine bullies, and Jack Levine’s well-brushed social realism had a biting edge and fit the politics of the family perfectly.

  Dancing with Mitzi in front of the Hiram Williams painting.

  An ad for the Ice House; photo by Mitzi Trumbo.

  Mitzi became my official photographer, and she snapped dozens of rolls of film, all to find the perfect publicity photo. It being the sixties, there were many shots of me with a flower on my head or a daisy between my teeth. We spent one morning taking photos in Fern Dell, where a stream flowed down the concrete center of a man-made mini–tropical rain forest set in the heart of Los Angeles, which up to that point was the most lush place I had ever seen. Later that day, we attended an anti–Vietnam War protest where I was lucky to get—then unlucky enough to lose—my draft card autographed by Cassius Clay, soon to be the most famous person in the world, Muhammad Ali.

  The war was rapidly consuming young men, and the draft was closing in. The thought of being shipped off to Vietnam for possible dismemberment scared me, especially after I read Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar book, Johnny Got His Gun, the story of a young soldier who wakes to discover he has lost his legs, arms, mouth, nose, eyes, and ears and is left with only the ability to think. In the face of this war, which snared so many, I had a case of rolling luck. First I was exempt because I was in college. When the college deferment lifted, I became 1-Y, unacceptable because of migraine headaches, which I had exaggerated. When the definition of 1-Y was tightened and I was moved up to 1-A, the draft went to a lottery, and I drew a middling number. As my number approached, the army went to all-volunteer, and I was saved from an alternate life. But I cannot end this story without a solemn bow to those who weren’t so fortunate.

  I got a one-show job performing near the Russian River in Northern California. I drove there in my second great car, a yellow 1966 Ford Mustang (my third and last great car was a yellow 1967 Jaguar XK-E. Then I lost all interest in cars). Up north, I reconnoitered with Mitzi, and she took photos of me canoeing. Unfortunately, she didn’t photograph the job I had, performing at a drive-in theater at three P.M. under the afternoon sun while a dozen cars hooked up to the sound system listened through window speakers. If the drive-in patrons thought a joke was funny, they honked. You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.

  Once, on the way to the Trumbo house, Mitzi warned me, “Pop’s in a bad mood today. He’s got a screenplay due in four days and he hasn’t started it yet.” The screenplay was for the movie The Fixer, starring Alan Bates. Eventually, the work got done and the movie was ready to shoot. Trumbo encouraged Mitzi to join him and she was whisked off to Budapest for the duration of the film. After I’d received several charming letters from her and then noticed a lag in the regularity of their arrival, Mitzi sent me a gentle and direct Dear John letter. She had been swept away by the director John Frankenheimer, who, twenty years later, tried and failed to seduce my then wife, the actress Victoria Tennant, whom he was directing in a movie. Mitzi was simply too alluring to be left alone in a foreign country, and I was too hormonal to be left alone in Hollywood. Incidentally, Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.

  Television

  I WAS STILL TWENTY-ONE when I was politely booted from Randy and Diane Sparks’s garage apartment. I moved to an unincorporated area called Palms, adjacent to the historic MGM Studios, and shared a small guest-house with the sharp, deadpan comedian Gary Mule Deer (“I think we should put pictures of missing transvestites on cartons of half-and-half”) and the lonely-voiced singer-guitarist Michael Johnson. I continued to work at Ledbetter’s and attend classes at UCLA. But while I studied halfheartedly in Westwood, Nina had entered the world of real show business. She had changed her name to the more mellifluous Nina Lawrence and landed a job dancing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the hippest thing on television and Flower-Powered all over the place. She had begun dating Mason Williams, the head writer on the show. I still had an affectionate crush on her and was glad for her and sick all at the same time. Mason Williams, exuberant, infused with creativity, and the future composer of the smash hit “Classical Gas,” drove an elegant 1938 Pierce-Arrow and could talk the new aesthetic—essentially, the appreciation for all things quirky and creative—much better than I could. Where I could only recite poetry, Mason actually
was a poet. He lived in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills with sparkling views of Los Angeles out the bedroom’s vast picture window. I imagined Mason and Nina doing it every which-a-way for anyone with a pair of binoculars to see. But these days, who could mind? We weren’t a couple anymore, and Free Love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. This was a time when intercourse, or some version of it, was a way of saying hello. About three years later, women got wise and my frustration returned to normal levels.

  I was almost but not quite in a financial bind when Nina phoned me to say that the Smothers Brothers—exercising the slogan of the day, “Never Trust Anyone over Thirty”—wanted to experiment and hire a few young writers for their hit TV show. In college, influenced by Jack Douglas’s book My Brother Was an Only Child and Mason Williams’s The Mason Williams Reading Matter, I had composed, as a defiant alternative to coherent essay writing, some goofy one-paragraph stories with such titles as “The Day the Dopes Came Over,” “What to Say When the Ducks Show Up,” and “Cruel Shoes.” Nina told me to send over my stories. I did, and she gave them to Mason.