Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by STEVE MARTIN

  IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, I continued to tour. My schedule was this: After sleeping all night on a band bus, I would arrive at the hotel around seven A.M. and collapse in a groggy half-sleep until four P.M. Then I would have a room-service dinner, and the only thing on the hotel menu that fit my fish-a-tarian diet was breaded fried shrimp with the texture of sandpaper, really just a ketchup delivery system. Following that, I would dumbly watch the five-thirty P.M. airing of The Brady Bunch (this showing, it seemed, was universal), then I would do the show. We—my roadie, Maple, and the sound team—were moving with such clockwork that some nights it seemed as though we were rolling down the highway for the next town before the applause had stopped in the arena.

  One month’s itinerary; design by Maple Byrne. Even though it indicates two shows at the Nassau Coliseum, a third was added. I remember nothing on this schedule except the Universal Amphitheatre—because it was in my hometown and opening the show were my friends the Blues Brothers—and the Nassau Coliseum, because of the harrowing helicopter ride to get from Manhattan to Long Island, with jets from LaGuardia Airport streaking all around us.

  Sixty cities in sixty-three days. Seventy-two cities in eighty days. Eighty-five cities in ninety days. The Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio, largest audience in one day, 18,695. The Chicago International Amphitheatre: twenty-nine thousand people. Stealth limousines and subterranean entrances. I played Nassau Coliseum in New York. How many tickets sold? Forty-five thousand. I was astonished that popular culture had fixed its attention so intensely on my little act. This lightning strike was happening to me, Stephen Glenn Martin, who had started from zero, from a magic act, from juggling in my backyard, from Disneyland, from the Bird Cage, and I was now the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever. I was elated. My success had outstripped my wildest aspirations. I had hit a gusher, and I stopped checking prices in restaurants, hotels, and clothing stores. I bought my first house, and then I bought my second house, skillfully negotiated by my father. My wisecrack about success was “We’ll offer you fifty thousand dollars to go stand over there.” “I can’t,” I would say, “I’m getting seventy-five thousand to stand right here.” I had a line: “I think I’m spending my money wisely…. I just bought a three-hundred-dollar pair of socks. And last week I got a gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater.”

  Standing Down

  THE ACT WAS SHIFTING into automatic. The choreography was in place, and all I had to do was fulfill it. I was performing a litany of immediate old favorites, and the laughs, rather than being the result of spontaneous combustion, now seemed to roll in like waves created far out at sea. The nuances of stand-up still thrilled me, but nuance was difficult when you were a white dot in a basketball arena. This was no longer an experiment; I felt a huge responsibility not to let people down. Arenas of twenty thousand and three-day gigs of forty-five thousand were no place to try out new material. I dabbled with changes, introducing a small addition or mutation here and there, but they were swallowed up by the echoing, cavernous venues.

  Onstage, Syracuse, New York, 1978, as King Tut.

  Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui. As I was too famous to go outdoors without a discomforting hoopla, my romantic interludes ceased because I no longer had normal access to civilized life. The hour and a half I spent performing was still fun, but there were no band members, no others onstage, and after the show, I took a solitary ride back to the hotel, where I was speedily escorted by security across the lobby. A key went in a door, and boom: the blunt interior of a hotel room. Nowhere to look but inward. I’m sure there were a hundred solutions. I could have invited friends to join me on the road, or asked a feel-good guru to shake my shoulders and say, “Perk up, you idiot,” but I was too exhausted to communicate, and it seemed like a near-coma was the best way to spend the day. This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life.

  I was caught and I could not quit, because this multi-zeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me. In the middle of all this, I saw that the only way I could go, at best, was sideways. I wasn’t singing songs that you hum forever; I was doing comedy, which is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper. Onstage I was no longer the funniest I ever was; my shelf life was expiring. I recently found a discarded joke among my papers: “You might think I’m making a lot of money, but you have to understand my expenses. Twenty percent to a manager, ten percent to an agent, thirty percent to travel, and.000000005 percent to develop new material.” It was 1979, and I was already booked for the next two years.

  The prospect of the remaining stand-up dates loomed over me. The glowing reviews changed; I was now a target. Critics who once lauded me were starting to rebel. Easy headlines appeared: STEVE MARTIN, A MILD AND LAZY GUY. I received a bad review in a local newspaper before I even performed. The backlash had begun. My tired body had rebelled, too. One summer night I was midway through my show in a southern college gymnasium when the temperature reached 120. In a resurrection of my old anxiety, my heart began to skip beats, and I panicked. I abruptly walked offstage and went to a hospital, where I was given a well-attended celebrity EKG. Fine. Stress and heat, I was told, but as I was lying on a gurney, with the sheet up to my neck but not quite over my head, confident that I was dying, a nurse asked me to autograph the printout of my erratic heartbeat. I perfunctorily signed to avoid further stress. The concept of privacy crystallized at that moment and became something to protect. What I was doing, what I was thinking, and who I was seeing, I now kept to myself as a necessary defense against the feeling that I was becoming, like the Weinermobile, a commercial artifact. Once, in Texas, a woman came up to me and said, with some humor and a lot of drawl, “Are you that Steve Martin thang?”

  Being the good Baptist-raised boy I was, I honored all my contracts and did the shows, though with mounting frustration. The act was still rocking, but audience disruptions, whoops and shouts, sometimes killed the timing of bits, violating my premise that every moment mattered. The days of the heckler comebacks were over. The audiences were so large that if someone was calling or signaling to me, only I and their immediate seatmates could hear them. My timing was jarred, yet if I had responded to the heckler, the rest of the audience wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. Today I realize that I misunderstood what my last year of stand-up was about. I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making. If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn’t. I still thought I was doing comedy.

  During this time, I asked a woman to dinner, and she accepted. After the salad course, she started talking about her boyfriend.

  “You have a boyfriend?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Does he know you’re out with me?” I asked.

  “Yes, he does.”

  “And what does he think of that?”

  “He thinks it’s great!”

  I was now famous, and the normal rules of social interaction no longer applied.

  Suddenly, restaurant reservations were always available, and VIP considerations made hassles with travel, long lines, and rude salesclerks vanish. Waiters were cordial and prompt. Every call was returned, there was no further need for ID, and I was able to meet artists whom I admired. I was surprised by James Cagney’s noblesse oblige phone call to my New York hotel room just to say hello, and by Cary Grant’s friendly backstage chat at the American Film Institute’s salute to Gene Kelly, during which he seriously charmed my girlfriend.

  But guess what. There was a dark side. A regular conversation, except with established friends, became difficult, fraught with ulterior motives, and often degenerated into deadening nephew autograph requests. Almost every ordinary action that took place in public had
a freakish celebrity aura around it. I would get laughs at innocuous things I said, such as “What time does the movie start?” or “Hello.” I would pull my hat down low on my head and stare at the ground when I walked through airports, and I would duck around corners quickly at museums. My room-service meal could be delivered by four people wearing arrows through their heads—funny, yes, but when you’re dead tired of your own jokes, it’s hard to respond with the expected glee. Cars would follow me recklessly on the freeway, and I worried for the passengers’ lives as the driver hung out the window, shouting, “I’m a wild and craaaazzzzyy guy!” while steering with one hand and holding a beer in the other. In a public situation, I was expected to be the figure I was onstage, which I stubbornly resisted. People were waiting for a show, but my show was only that, a show. It was precise and particular and not reproducible in a living room; in fact, to me my act was serious.

  Fame suited me in that the icebreaking was already done and my natural shyness could be easily overcome. I was, however, ill suited for fame’s destruction of privacy, for the uninvited doorbell ringers and anonymous phone callers. I had never been outgoing, and when strangers approached me with the familiarity of old friends, I felt dishonest if I returned it in kind.

  When I got divorced in 1992, a tabloid reported that I would practice my routines in front of a mirror, and if they weren’t going well, I would find my wife and scream at her. At the time, as I was naturally sensitive about the divorce, this lie seemed almost actionable. And once, on a local Los Angeles news show dealing with “celebrity assassinations,” I was shown getting out of a car while cross-hairs were superimposed over my head along with the sound effect of a rifle crack. In spite of these examples, I have been treated fairly for most of my career in showbiz, probably by being dull and dreary and failing to excite the needle on the gossipometer. I admit that I’m a lousy interview. My magician’s instincts make me reluctant to tell ’em how it’s done, whether it’s a movie, book, play, or any aspect of personal life. Sometimes a journalist will lean in and say, “You’re very private.” And I mentally respond, “Someone who’s private would not be doing an interview on television.”

  Time has helped me achieve peace with celebrity. At first I was not famous enough, then I was too famous, now I am famous just right. Oh yes, I have heard the argument that celebrities want fame when it’s useful and don’t when it’s not. That argument is absolutely true.

  I WAS DETERMINED to parlay my stand-up success into motion pictures while I still had some clout. A movie career seemed to foster longevity, whereas a career as a comedian who had become a fad seemed finite. Plus, the travel was exhausting me, and I swooned at the idea that instead of my going to every town to perform my act, a movie would go while I stayed home.

  I had an idea for a film. It came from a line in my act: “It wasn’t always easy for me; I was born a poor black child.” That was the idea, and that was all I had. I knew only that I wanted the movie to have the feel of a saga, and I toyed with story ideas.

  I was hot enough to get in any door, or so I thought. Bill McEuen had a relationship with David Picker, then the head of Paramount Pictures. This was not a time when it was automatic that a popular comedian could land a movie deal, so the prospect was considered carefully by the studio. I gave them the notes on a screenplay I had dabbled with.

  We see Steve sitting on the porch of a ramshackle tenement farm in Tennessee. He is his white self while his black family members do chores about the yard. His mother, a big black woman à la Hattie McDaniel, sits on the porch and sings the blues. Steve says things like “Gosh, Mom, that’s really great blues you’re singing!” His family relationship is very close with his black brothers and sisters, so when he makes a decision to go on the road after hearing the music of Lawrence Welk on the radio, it is a sad occasion. There is a tearful farewell, and Steve sets off hitchhiking in the front of the family house and gets a ride about two hours later. His family stands outside with him in awkward silence while he waits for a ride.

  The notes continue to describe a series of odd jobs that “Steve” gets on his journey: a ranch hand who practices roping fence posts and ends up with a herd of fence posts; a buffalo counter in Beverly Hills who stands on Rodeo Drive—after several days, a buffalo finally walks by, and “Steve” takes out a clipboard and writes down, “One.” My list of odd jobs went on: “My third job, perhaps the weirdest of all, was standing on my head in a river.” None of these odd jobs ended up in the movie, which was ultimately written and rewritten many times with Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias. Eventually, Bill McEuen and David Picker, who by now had left the studio, moved the film to Universal after Paramount passed.

  Carl Reiner, who, in a six-year burst of comic perfection, wrote and produced television’s The Dick Van Dyke Show, was our lucky choice as director. Carl and I met constantly. His memory was sharp as cheddar, and he would spontaneously relate anecdotes relevant to our work. One day I mentioned concern over my lack of concrete talents. Carl told me about his first appearance on The Sid Caesar Show, a sketch in which he spoke a long stretch of German-sounding gibberish. The next day his mother called and said, “Carl, I was with some ladies in the park, and they said they didn’t know you spoke German.” Carl said, “Ma, that’s why they hire me, because I can’t speak German.” Carl’s mother then said, “Well, the ladies don’t have to know that.”

  We were still mulling over titles for the movie. One day I said to Carl, “It needs to be something short, yet have the feeling of an epic tale. Like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but not that. Like The Jerk.” The title, after a few more days of analyzing, stuck.

  I was injecting stage material into the screenplay, including a bit that was taken directly from the end of my act, first developed at the Boarding House. Onstage, I would exit through the audience, saying, “I’m quitting, I’m leaving and never coming back, and I don’t need anything, nothing at all, well, I need this ashtray.” I would collect doodads from the tabletops until I finally disappeared out the door. The bit appears in the final film as I forlornly leave Bernadette Peters and my movie mansion:

  “Well, I’m gonna go then! And I don’t need any of this! I don’t need this stuff [I push all of the letters off the desk], and I don’t need you. I don’t need anything except this [I pick up an ashtray], and that’s it and that’s the only thing I need, is this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game and the remote control, and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need. I don’t need one other thing, not one—I need this! [I pick up a magazine.] The paddle game, the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this! [I pick up a chair.] And that’s all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine, and the chair. Well, what are you looking at? What do you think I am, some kind of a jerk or something?”

  It was a joy to work on the movie and the script. Our goal in writing was a laugh on every page. But my favorite line in the movie was an ad lib, one that is mildly obscured by traffic noise in the finished film. My character, Navin Johnson, is hitchhiking in Missouri, headed for the big city. A car pulls over, and the driver asks, “St. Louis?” “No,” I answer, “Navin Johnson.”

  We made the film and went off to preview it in St. Louis. As much as I loved the comedy in the movie, my favorite moment was when Bernadette Peters and I sang a simple song on a beach, “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a tune that was a hit in the twenties and again in the fifties, when it was recorded by two adolescent sisters called Patience and Prudence. I thought the scene was touching, and I couldn’t wait for it to come on-screen, hoping the audience would be as affected as I had been. The movie was rolling along with lots of laughter. Then the song came on. Mass exodus for popcorn. Song over, audience
returned for more laughs. After the screening, I got a left-handed compliment of juicy perfection: A woman approached me and said, “I loved this movie. And my husband loved it, and he hates you!”

  The world of moviemaking had changed me. Carl Reiner ran a joyful set. Movies were social; stand-up was antisocial. I was not judged every day by a changing audience. It was fun to have lunches with cast and crew and to dream up material in the morning that could be shot seven different ways in the afternoon and evaluated—and possibly perfected—in the editing room months later. The end of a movie is like graduation day, and right or wrong, we felt we had accomplished something wonderful. I got another benefit: my daily observation of Carl Reiner. He had an entrenched sense of glee; he used humor as a gentle way of speaking difficult truths; and he could be effortlessly frank. He taught me more about how to be a social person than any other adult in my life.

  The Jerk, receiving one lone good review from a small paper in Florida and getting dismissive and sadistic reviews from the rest of the country, made one hundred eighty million dollars in old money. It was recently voted among the American Film Institute’s top one hundred comedies of all time, he said smugly. Because it was a hit, my life changed, though again, my father was not impressed. I had invited him to the premiere. The Bruin Theatre in Westwood, next to UCLA, was ringed outside with spotlights drawing figure eights in the sky and packed inside with clamoring, vocal fans. Press crews lined the red carpet, and it took us forty-five minutes to get from the car to our seats. The movie played well, and afterward my friends and I took my father to dinner at a quiet, old-fashioned eatery that didn’t offer “silly” modern food. He said nothing about the film; he talked about everything but the film. Finally, one of my friends said, “Glenn, what did you think of Steve’s movie?” My father chuckled and said, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.”