I Must Say (16 page)

I
spent twenty-one months with Second City Toronto, improvising throughout. We did all our shows in a handsome redbrick Victorian building known as the Old Fire Hall, which had the main theater downstairs and a restaurant upstairs. On Fridays and Saturdays we'd have dinner in the restaurant between the two shows, right alongside the customers we'd be performing for. Their presence didn't restrain us from drinking and carousing and in general having a great, noisy, swear-y time in each other's company. I think it was at one of these dinners in the summer of 1978 that I, overcome by our collective good fortune, turned to one of my castmates, Steven Kampmann, and declared, “Look at us. We're eating steak for dinner. We're twenty-eight years old. We're a hit. The house is full for every show.
This is as good as life can ever get.
”

My experience at Second City was tremendously important in helping me develop a unique (some would say “off”) comedic voice. What we all learned at Second City was to trust the concept that our comedy wasn't about jokes. Rather, it was about situations and characters—the peculiar moments that we encounter
in life, the peculiar people that we meet, and how we (and they) react to these moments and meetings.

I think this approach was particularly Canadian, and especially emphasized in Toronto. While Second City Chicago's comedy was often more pointedly topical and satirical, Second City Toronto's material tended to be more character-based and just plain strange. Canada is a sparsely populated nation, a mere 34 million people across a vast expanse of land. Consequently, as you grow up there, you encounter more weirdos who have been given a wider berth to stew in their weirdness and become gloriously eccentric. These are precisely the kinds of folks who served as our comic muses in Toronto. On top of this, the performers in Second City Toronto were a particularly nice, un-mean group, so the characterizations were sweet and empathetic rather than cruel; an oddball as played by Catherine O'Hara or John Candy was an unusually agreeable oddball.

Soaking up all this influence, I began obsessively studying the sorts of odd people to whom I hadn't previously paid much attention. There was a guy named Marion who worked behind the counter at my dry cleaner. I became fascinated by him. I was never quite sure if he had a bad hair weave or just really bad genetic luck, but his coiffure resembled something you'd chase out of your garden in the early morning as you were picking up your newspaper. With his madras clamdiggers and midriff tees, cut high to showcase his utter lack of abdominals, he was the type of guy who, if I had pitched him as a character at
Saturday Night Live
, anyone in the room would have said, “Too broad; divide by three.” But Marion wasn't a character on
SNL
, nor was he trying to be funny. And yet, as he earnestly tried to explain why the shop had failed to remove the ink stain from my shirt, he was utterly priceless: “Mr. Shorm, I tried to get dat ink stain from yer outerwear, I did. But dat fucker didn't want to come out from where it had made a home, it didn't.”

As broad as Marion was as a character, his pure sincerity made him totally believable. (Which was good, given that he was a real person.) The innocence with which he inhabited his eccentricities struck me. Don't telegraph, don't oversell—
that
was how you created an absurd yet three-dimensional character.

Now don't get me wrong. As anyone who has seen a reel of my work will attest, I'm also not afraid to explore the world of “Going Big.” But even this world has to be rooted to some extent in reality. As a child, my parents took me to something called the Canadian National Exhibition, an old-fashioned summertime expo that featured everything from amusement-park rides to reputable nightclub headliners. My favorite part of the exhibition, though, was the freak show. We'd go into a tent and pay our quarter to see such memorable acts as Schlitzy the Pea Head (take your right hand, form a fist, and that was Schlitzy's head); Spike Boy (a temperamental fifty-six-year-old guy who belligerently told the audience, “I can't work with all this talking! May I have a little respect for my craft?”—and then shoved a two-foot-long spike up his nose); and my personal favorite, No-Middle Myrtle, whose measurements were 37-0-36. There was also Bones the Defensive Fat Man, who upbraided the audience by shouting, “What're you lookin' at?” These folks proved to be the underpinning of one of my most cherished showbiz philosophies, “More is more.”

N
ancy and I had become homeowners in my Second City period, with a lovely house on Indian Road in the High Park section of Toronto. Provincial Canadian celebrity was ours for the taking: a lifetime of contentment doing husband-and-wife shows like
Love Letters
and
The Gin Game
in summer stock. Perhaps I could even become a spokesman for Tim Hortons! All damned tempting. But in my heart, I knew I wanted more. The reality at that time—and it's
different now—was that there was a low ceiling to Canadian show business. Really low. A Munchkin would have had to crouch.

Nancy and I were determined to try our luck out on the West Coast while we were still young. And we both did pretty well, considering. I landed a part in a pilot very quickly, for a sitcom called
The Associates
. This was 1979. The show was about a group of young lawyers who are new hires at a prestigious white-shoe firm in New York City. Its creator was James L. Brooks, the man behind
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
,
Lou Grant
, and
Taxi.
Actually, it was better than a pilot. Jim Brooks's track record was so good that ABC let us film thirteen episodes, half a season's worth, all at once, sight unseen. An unheard-of deal. Nancy, who had always found steady work as an actress and jingle singer in Toronto, saw her good fortune continue in Los Angeles, quickly getting signed to a holding deal at CBS, which would culminate in a pilot the following year.

The Associates
was a joy to do, with great writing and a great cast, including Alley Mills, later the mom on
The Wonder Years
, Joe Regalbuto, later of
Murphy Brown
, and, as our boss, the wonderful British character actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. (He played Pickering in the movie version of
My Fair Lady
, singing “The Rain in Spain” with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.) Nancy and I rented a furnished house in the Hollywood Hills with views of the Valley. Our first night, we stood there giddily, looking at all the twinkling lights below, while the sound of two gay men arguing—one saying spitefully to the other, “Randy, everything I do is wrong!
Everything!
”—echoed through the canyon.

Ahhh, I thought. Canyon views, same-sex domestic spats, and the smell of jacaranda trees in bloom. I could get used to this. Even the Dobermans that got loose from the house down the street and scared the shit out of us were kind of exciting, because they were
Bill Shatner's Dobermans
.

You can probably figure out, since you've never heard of
The Associates
, that it didn't become the massive hit we all assumed it would be. It was actually a pretty good show, worthy of the Brooks pedigree, and it won positive advance reviews in
Variety
and other publications. But the show just didn't take with viewers. It was pulled from ABC's lineup after four episodes. While it got a second shot in the spring of 1980, with five more episodes airing, no one particularly wanted to be associated with
The Associates
anymore, and off it went.

Still, I forged onward in L.A., undaunted. I was growing to love the place. Wilfrid Hyde-White, an endless font of show-business lore who had worked with everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Marilyn
Mon
-roe, as he pronounced her name, was nominated for a Golden Globe award—as was
The Associates
itself—so Nancy and I got to attend our first L.A. awards show. On top of that, Robin Williams, who was on fire at the time with
Mork & Mindy
, asked me to accept his award for him, since he couldn't make the ceremony. I'd gotten to know Robin a bit from doing work on the side at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, in an ad hoc group that he and I occasionally joined called the Comedy Store Players. Robin was staggeringly fast on his feet onstage and a truly considerate guy. His trick, when he wasn't sure of your name, was to address you as “Doctor”: “
Hell
-o, Doctor! What's goin' on, Doctor? Ha-
ha!
”

That first Golden Globes was a dazzling affair for the likes of little Marty and Nancy Short from Ontario. We shared a table with Marilu Henner and her date for the night, John Travolta. We met Dustin Hoffman after his win for his performance in
Kramer vs. Kramer
. At one point I went up to Al Pacino, of whom I was a huge fan, and babbled on endlessly about what his work meant to me, and how every Al Pacino film is a master class in acting, and
so forth. When I finally took a breath, he looked at me quizzically for a moment and said, “I ordered a vodka about twenty minutes ago. Can you find out what happened to that?” To be fair, Al was thirsty, and I
did
look like a kid waiter!

The following TV season, 1980–'81, Nancy was cast in
Soap
, the hit nighttime soap-opera parody that was pretty daring for the time; Billy Crystal was in it as Jodie Dallas, one of the first regular gay characters on television. Nancy's character, Annie, was the second wife of one of
Soap
's two patriarchs, Chester Tate, a WASP twit expertly played by Robert Mandan. I, meanwhile, was cast in
I'm a Big Girl Now
, a sitcom vehicle for Diana Canova, one of
Soap
's young breakout stars. Both shows were on ABC and had been created by Witt/Thomas/Harris, a highly successful production team, so it felt like we were being well taken care of by the industry.

Well, it seemed that way until we encountered a slight hiccup: in July 1980, our union, the Screen Actors Guild, went on strike, temporarily halting production of our shows and every other scripted network TV program. Nancy and I figured that since we were stuck in a holding pattern, we might as well fly back to Toronto and resume living in our beloved house on Indian Road until the situation resolved itself. I arranged to return to Second City Toronto for an open-ended engagement as a member of the cast.

Shortly before we left L.A., I ran into Robin Williams at a party. He asked me, “What will you do during the strike?” I told him of my Second City plan. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he said, “Can I come and visit? Perhaps do a set or two?” I said absolutely, never expecting him to act upon my encouragement.

Cut to August. It was night, I was onstage performing, and who comes bounding into the Old Fire Hall, rumpled yet bright-eyed, but Robin himself. Bear in mind that
Mork & Mindy
was about to begin its third season and that
Popeye
, Robin's first big movie,
was coming out later that year. He still had most of his fantastic film career ahead of him, but never again would there be a moment when Robin was hotter. The Second City crowd went utterly insane at the sight of him, the audience members suddenly up on their feet.

Robin proceeded to do a set with us and totally killed. The speed of his mind, and the ease with which words, characters, and comic ideas poured out of him, was jaw-dropping—and, for the rest of us in the cast, both inspiring and intimidating. That night, Robin and I played Shakespearean father-and-son haberdashers, competing drunken choreographers with a bitter interpersonal history, and a two-headed man from Newfoundland singing gaily of the glories of Canada.

At one point, in his merry exuberance, Robin, unfamiliar with the dimensions of the stage, tumbled right off it and onto some delighted patrons. He was fine, though the white-linen pants he was wearing got smudged up pretty badly.

Only after the set did I learn from Robin the circumstances under which he had arrived at the theater. He had impulsively decided, in L.A., to take me up on my offer for him to visit. So off to LAX he went—with no cash and no luggage, only a credit card and the clothes on his back. He landed in Toronto, rented a car, and, in those pre-GPS days, drove around confusedly, getting lost a few times, until he finally pulled up at the Old Fire Hall.

We had Robin stay with us at Indian Road. While he slept, Nancy kindly took it upon herself to wash the clothes that he had arrived in. (I loaned him some of my clothes to tide him over until he bought some of his own the next day.) What Nancy didn't realize was that Robin's linen pants were dry-clean-only. After they'd been washed and dried, they looked like culottes, four inches shorter than they used to be. When Robin put them back on he immediately said, “When I get home, I'll say to my
wife, ‘I swear, I didn't fuck anybody! I have no idea why my pants are four inches shorter!'”

Robin was our guest for a week. It was sort of like having an agreeable, very funny teenager in the house; he slept till about two or three p.m. every day. I was never privy to Robin's wild nights out and the compulsions that underpinned them—he never went there with me, nor did he take drugs in my presence. For as long as I knew him, which was pretty much until the end of his life, I witnessed only his sweet and kind side—well, that, and the manic, unceasingly inventive comic side that everyone else witnessed, too. And here's the other thing about Robin: he was such a tremendous audience to other people being funny. He so loved to laugh, his booming “Ha-
hah
!” filling the air. (Robin was later a very good sport about the “Ha-
hah
!”-heavy impression I did of him on
SCTV
.)

But, as we've all learned, the flip side to “manic” is “depressive,” and I did see in Robin, that week in Toronto, a certain melancholy. Our guest bedroom was up in the attic, and in the afternoons, he enjoyed simply staring out the room's street-facing window, watching the local kids play road hockey as he sat quietly. “
Ohhh
,” he'd say in that vaguely Irish-sounding, wonderment-tinged Robin lilt, “they're so
won
-derful, Marty. So utterly carefree. I wish I could stay here and watch them all day!” He reminded me of Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince: wistfully surveying a world to which he felt he didn't quite belong.