I Must Say (15 page)

Green (“Low”) would denote that I'm fasting for a role à la Jared Leto or Matthew McConaughey, or perhaps dying.

I also maintain week-at-a-glance files, the upcoming week detailed in red lettering, the week just past recorded in black: yet another way to review my activities in total and see how they will impact, or have impacted, my overall well-being. I'll note, say, that I deserve an A in career for the week I've spent prepping for a Broadway show, but I'll also see that I've failed to return Eugene Levy's call, or that my children are no longer speaking to me, and I'll think, hey, Marty, you'd better put that right.

My manager, Bernie Brillstein, who passed away in 2008, was convinced that the Nine Categories system was my ticket to untold riches as a self-help guru. “Kid, I'm tellin' ya,” he'd say, “you're sittin' on a fuckin' self-help
bible
!” (Bernie looked like a Jewish Santa Claus and talked like a Hoboken stevedore.)

“The color-coded weight, the Nine Categories . . . it's a Goddamned
life philosophy
,” Bernie told me. “You do the book and we'll book you on
Oprah
. It's real simple.”

Bernie's idea was tempting, but ultimately, I'm no evangelist. The Nine Categories are a tremendous aid to me, but they are not something I push on other people, not even my own kids. I preside over a cult of one.

O
ne of the crucial benefits of the Nine Categories is that they've gotten me through the many uneven periods of my career and kept in focus the true priorities of life. Maybe, at times, the inconsistency and iffy quality of some of the work I took on held my “career” grade down, but this would only encourage me to push my “creativity” grade as high and fearlessly as I could. In the 1970s, for example, audiences weren't yet conditioned, as they are now, to laugh at the very sight of me, so I could do straight drama, like a production of Clifford Odets's
Paradise Lost
for Canadian television. On the flip side, I had nothing to lose by trying my hand at stand-up comedy, so I did. Once.

I had a friend named Carole Pope who fronted a punk band called Rough Trade. In 1978 she asked me to open for her band at a club in Toronto called Egertons. Rough Trade's lyrics dealt with bondage, homoeroticism, and other taboo subjects; they had a song called “What's the Furor about the Führer?”

For whatever reason, I agreed to do a stand-up set before Rough Trade went on, despite having zero stand-up experience. I decided that, as a stand-up, I'd position myself as a cerebral, observational comic, making references to Camus and Kierkegaard. I wasn't so much concerned with getting laughs as I was with seeing audience members turn to each other at any given moment and say, “
Exactly!
” The fact that I was opening for a band whose members wore jockstraps and chaps onstage didn't dissuade me from pursuing this direction, for some reason.

The audience was terrifying from the moment I got up onstage: punks, goths, and people who had crudely carved the words
ROUGH TRADE
into their skin with razor blades. There was one scary man done up as a priest—who I later learned actually was a priest. I was booed and screamed at, it seemed, before I even left my house. Yet with the balls of steel that John Candy had once attributed to me,
I bounded onstage undaunted and launched into my material: “Tonight is eerily reminiscent of Truman Capote's infamous Black and White Ball in 1966—as well as his infamous Black and Blue Ball from that unfortunate dismount off Sal Mineo in '72.”

Nothing.

“People constantly want to know what religion I am. I find that rude. It doesn't matter. Whether you're Christian, Jewish, or . . . you know . . . help me out here—Who are those crazy people constantly blowing things up for no reason? Americans! That's it!—we're all God's children. Some of you are his bastard children. I think the Turks in the audience know what I'm talking about.”

Nothing.

“I recently saw Mel Brooks's film
Silent Movie
with an all-black audience, and they were signing back at the screen.”

Nothing still . . . except crescendoing boos, shouted obscenities, and harassment. One member of the audience even started bleating at me, like an enraged sheep.

Suddenly, a Jack Ruby–type guy came out of the shadows and threw a beer in my face, momentarily stunning the audience into silence. I used this opening as my exit: “Hey, that was a light beer,” I said, “and I don't have no weight problem! Well, good night!”

After my set, Carole came up to me and said, “I'm so sorry, Marty, I promise that tomorrow night will be different.”

I told her, “Carole, I
know
it will be different. Because I won't be here. I'll be home, watching Jack Klugman chew up the scenery on
Quincy
.”

O
ut of the ragtag array of acting jobs during this period came some good things: signposts leading the way to
SCTV
and
Saturday Night Live
. In 1976, shortly after my fruitless job-hunting trip to New York City, the one where I stayed with Gilda first and then Paul, I was cast in
The David Steinberg Show
. David, eight years older than me, was and is a Canadian comedy godhead, the man who proved to his countrymen that one of us could make it in America. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Winnipeg, the son of a rabbi, but he broke from the rabbinical path (no doubt infuriating Old Testament God, the more volatile and Sinatra-like of biblical deities) to join Second City Chicago in 1964. He zoomed to success in the 1960s as a stand-up comic and frequent guest on Johnny Carson's
Tonight Show
and on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
.

David's new show was pretty much what Garry Shandling's
Larry Sanders Show
would be on U.S. television fifteen years later: a behind-the-scenes look at a dysfunctional variety show. What's significant about David's show now, though we didn't know it then, was that it served as a sort of test run for
SCTV
. Joe Flaherty played David's stage manager. Andrea Martin was David's secretary. John Candy was the show's Doc Severinsen–like bandleader. Dave Thomas was the studio's security guard. And I was Johnny Del Bravo, David's annoying cousin, who he was forced to hire due to family pressure although he was ashamed of him. We had all worked together before in different combinations, but this was the first time that the five of us were collected in one place.

David wanted Johnny Del Bravo to be a lounge singer because he found them unbearable and tacky. The mid-1970s were fertile ground for the mockery of such crooners, because rock had taken over and there wasn't yet a new generation of Harry Connicks and Michael Bublés to bring verve, youth, and style back to the Great American Songbook. The guys plying their trade in Vegas and the dinner theaters of Jupiter, Florida, in those days were
generally pale imitations of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett—all the mannerisms and none of the talent. In early '76
Saturday Night Live
ran a short film by Gary Weis called “Play Misty for Me” that intercut between performances by an array of such singers as each of them, in their various toupees and ruffle tuxes, sang “Misty,” the Erroll Garner standard.

Even some of the big-time entertainers of the old guard were having a rough time fitting in during that period. The Murray brothers of Second City, Bill and Brian, were obsessed with the train-wreck syndicated talk show that Sammy Davis Jr. hosted for a couple of years in the mid-'70s,
Sammy and Company
: an unintentionally hysterical spectacle of rococo wardrobes and overcooked production numbers, with Sammy rappin' Very Sincerely with such guests as Liza Minnelli, Lola Falana, Chita Rivera, and Suzanne Pleshette. The Murrays, along with Paul Shaffer, organized what they called the Sammy Club for their like-mindedly hip and funny friends: everyone would gather at either Bill's or Brian's place for a laugh-along viewing party of
Sammy and Company
.

Equally obsessed were the Flaherty brothers, Joe and Paul, and Paul's writing partner, Dick Blasucci. When
SCTV
first reared its head, it was not for nothing that Joe's variety-show send-up was called
The Sammy Maudlin Show
, and that its guests included “Lorna Minnelli” and “Lola Heatherton,” and that Maudlin's sidekick had the exact same name as Davis's, William B. Williams. (Though John Candy looked nothing like the real Williams, a slender New York radio personality.) Sammy Maudlin and Bill Murray's lounge singer, Nick, were products of the time—of our generation's fascination with the showbiz entropy taking place before our eyes.

But first—for the historical record—came my Johnny Del Bravo.

Johnny wore chest medallions, chunky rings, shiny, wide-collared shirts, and a cream-colored suit with rhinestone studs. His hair (a wig) was wavy and thick in a way that to him probably evoked virile masculinity but to the audience evoked Rue McClanahan. His mannerisms were more explicitly Sammy-influenced than Bill's Nick—I greeted the audience with the exhortation, “Peace, love, and grooviness,” and pulled the occasional wonky eye. I said smarmy things like, “You know, in my business, or, in
our
business, when a song
lingers
for many many years, man, it becomes what we like to call
a standard
.”

Johnny was basically a less extreme version of my future
SCTV
character Jackie Rogers Jr. Doing
The David Steinberg Show
was a step toward the fulfillment of my comic destiny. Alas, it lasted only one season on CTV, its network. They replaced us with something called
Stars on Ice
, because, as David put it mournfully, “In Canada, anything ‘on ice' is better.”

“Well, Marty's done it again,” said Joe Flaherty in the
SCTV
writer's room. “Created yet another disgusting, unlikable character!” Jackie Rogers Jr. was basically a version of the Johnny Del Bravo character I created for
The David Steinberg Show
, dialed up to the point where he made the entire
SCTV
cast and crew go “Eww!” every time I did him.

Jackie Jr. was supposed to be a one-off, a footnote gag. Early in my tenure at
SCTV
, circa 1982, I used to go into the writer's room and do this stylized freak singer who I called Jackie Rogers. Dick Blasucci, Paul Flaherty, and my brother Michael, all then writers for the show, suggested that I play this character in a sketch, but I resisted. “Cheeseball lounge singers have been overly satirized at this point,” I said. “Nothing fresh there.”

However, it occurred to me that if I introduced the character of Rogers and then had him killed off in the same piece, we could have some fun without overdoing it. So the four of us—Michael, Dick, Paul, and me—wrote a piece in which the SCTV Network was promo-ing an upcoming Jackie Rogers special called
Old Mother Nature, She Loves Me
. In the promo, Rogers was shown bantering with various creatures of the forest and singing upbeat standards to them: “Pardon me, miss, but I never done this with a real live squirrel!” You get the idea.

Abruptly, the promo cut to a shot of a lurking cougar, who lunged at Rogers in mid-song and fatally mauled him. At the very end, Jackie Jr. popped up in a little inset circle on-screen and said, “Hi, I'm Jackie Rogers Jr. In 1970, my dad gave his life
making this special. . . . I miss my old man. I hope you don't—Saturday nights at nine on
SCTV
.”

I had recently seen a picture in a newspaper of Mickey Rooney Jr., a musician son of the famous actor who, for some reason, struck me as albino. (He was merely blond.) So I rather randomly made Jackie Rogers Jr. a cross-eyed albino. And as the character gained legs on
SCTV
and
SNL
(legs encased in silver-lamé tights, that is), I made Jackie Jr. this grotesque vehicle for the idea of a child using a famous parent—a dead parent, no less—as a way to gain credibility in show business.

Jackie's facial tics were a nod to Sammy Davis Jr., and his laugh—a dorky
thhh-thhh-thhh
emitted by raising my tongue to my upper teeth and breathing through them—was taken straight from Andrew Alexander, the head of Second City Toronto and executive producer of
SCTV
.

Andrew for years denied that he laughed this way, but then he got married, and among the wedding pictures was a shot of him caught unmistakably in the middle of a
thhh-thhh-thhh
laugh. He sent it to me with a note that read, “Dear Marty: Fuck you.”