I Must Say (17 page)

T
he actors' strike was finally settled in October. Nancy and I returned to L.A. and plunged right into work, our Hollywood careers seemingly ascendant. Near the end of the year, with both of us raking in sitcom dough, we decided that we deserved
a celebration. So on December 22, 1980, after six years of living in sin, we were married in St. Basil's Church in Toronto, in the midst of a whirling, swirling snowstorm. Weather aside, our wedding reception, which was held at the Palais Royale, a gorgeous old waterfront dance hall where Count Basie and Duke Ellington had once played, was as raucous and sloppily fun as we'd hoped. (Though we did have one of those towering, elegant croquembouche cakes.) We'd booked a honeymoon suite in the swanky Windsor Arms Hotel, but as we were driving there, Nancy said, “Marty, do you realize that all the Shorts are back at our house right now, having one of the greatest post-wedding after-parties imaginable—and
we're missing it
?” My bride, the genius! I made a quick illegal U-turn on Bloor Street and headed straight back to our place on Indian Road to swing with the Shorts. After all, Nan and I had already done the “consummation” thing years ago, that night I'd nearly blown it with
Blazing Saddles
interruptus.

Upon our return to L.A., Diana Canova and another of my
I'm a Big Girl Now
castmates, the bawdy, sexy Sheree North, organized a celebratory wedding dinner for us. When it came time to open our gifts, it was clear that someone—I suspect Sheree—had mandated that they all be pornographic in nature. I can tell you from experience that there's nothing more awkward than listening to your waiter announce the night's specials while you are unwrapping a brand-new set of Ben Wa balls. The presents only got filthier from there: vibrators of all shapes and colors, a potpourri of flavored lubricants, and, to cap it all off, a monstrous two-foot-long rubber dildo attached to a pair of rubber testicles. When the night was over and we got home, Nancy and I laughingly stashed our sex-toy haul into an unused bottom drawer of our dresser in the house that we were renting at the time.

We wouldn't have given these wares another thought (I swear!)
were it not for what happened a month later. We were back in Toronto on break during our shows' hiatuses when we got a call from our landlady, Mrs. Vogel. She was a kindly German woman who lived three doors down from us. She was calling to inform us that our house had been broken into. “All da drawers in da bedroom vere pulled out,” Mrs. Vogel reported, “and their contents vere scattered around da bedroom.”

I said, “When you say all the drawers, do you mean
all
the drawers?”

“Jah, all da drawers,” she said. “And all da contents of da drawers vere dusted for fingerprints.” Normally Mrs. Vogel was very friendly, but there was an uncharacteristic coldness to her voice. Suddenly I understood why.

“Were the contents put back in the drawers?” I asked.

“No,” she said, even more coldly than before. “Ve vill leave that for you.”

Nancy and I wasted little time in flying back to L.A. We hurried from the airport to our robber-tossed crime-scene house, and when we got there, lo and behold, spread out on the floor for all of the LAPD to see were our carefully fingerprint-dusted wedding gifts.

A
s it turned out, our high-riding L.A.-sitcom days were short-lived.
Soap
was on its last legs by the time Nancy joined up, and the show was canceled after her one season on it.
I'm a Big Girl Now
fared no better. I played one of Diana Canova's professional colleagues, Neal Stryker, the office whiz kid at a Washington, DC, think tank. But by the season's eighth show, the writers found the think-tank setting too limiting so they decided, without any explanation to the audience, to turn our workplace into a newspaper. Needless to say,
I'm a Big Girl Now
was not renewed. On the plus
side, I did get to meet Danny Thomas, who played the father of Diana's character and had been a childhood favorite of mine on his 1950s TV show
Make Room for Daddy
. Danny was very nice to me, though, discomfitingly, he wore a holstered pistol on his person at all times. Diana would feel it pressing against her stomach when they would hug on-camera as father and daughter. Diana said that if the series had been picked up for a second season, she wouldn't have asked for more money, but, rather, for Danny to lose the gun.

Eventually the chanciness and highly variable quality of television work chased Nancy and me out of town. Another pilot I did, between
The Associates
and
I'm a Big Girl Now
, was so bad that I was rooting for it to fail almost from the start.
White and Reno
was loosely based on the veteran black comic Slappy White's experiences as part of an interracial comedy team called Rossi and White. In our show, Slappy played the manager of a young comedy team composed of me (Reno) and his nephew (White, played by William Allen Young). Reno and White were not only partners but also roommates whose friendly, foxy neighbors were played by the real-life sisters and
Playboy
models Audrey and Judy Landers. Audrey's character was a nurse, while Judy's was—and here, the word
stretch
comes to mind—a stripper with a heart of gold. Dick Martin of
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
fame directed the pilot, and the humor was on the level of me saying to Slappy's character, “Ben, jokes like this won't get us a spot on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny,” and Slappy replying, “Yah, but jokes like this will keep you from going
down
the
—Johhhh-nnny
!”

Every time Slappy said that line during the run-throughs, I'd suddenly feel the sharp knife of a migraine ripping through my brain. Mother's balls, I'd think, what if this horrid thing actually goes? About a month after we filmed the pilot, while we were awaiting word on the show's future, I was at the Crocker Bank in
Studio City when I noticed a familiar NBC executive standing in line. He saw me and beamingly flashed me a thumbs-up, as if to say,
Looks like your show is getting picked up, kid.
Me, the star of the freshman NBC sitcom
White and Reno
! It was a future I found so appalling that I had the audacity to walk right up to the guy and say, “Look, I don't run your network, but I'm here to tell you that you're making a terrible mistake.” To my relief,
White and Reno
went down the
Johhhh-nnny
shortly thereafter.

Nancy and I moved to New York for a spell after our respective sitcoms died. We had no jobs lined up, but we could afford to take the risk, because we had earned dual network incomes in L.A. and were childless, so the financial cushion was there. Nancy was already pulling away from show business. Though she never had trouble getting cast in TV pilots, she disliked the process more and more—the idea of driving over that hill into Burbank to sit, yet again, in a waiting room with a bunch of other girls who all looked alike and all wanted it so badly, even though the pilots she was reading for made
White and Reno
look like
The Wire
. Plus, we were trying to get pregnant, and Nancy saw segueing into motherhood as a natural way out of the performing phase of her life.

And me? I wanted to take a shot at Broadway. I auditioned to be a replacement in a hit musical that had been running for a while,
A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine
. Didn't get it. The Nine Categories served me well at this point, the early 1980s. I didn't panic as I had on Breakdown Corner, but, rather, I started contemplating the reality that most people don't make it as actors—and maybe I wasn't going to, either. I was thinking about pursuing a more backstage involvement in show business, the way that my friend Harold Ramis had, brilliantly refashioning himself as a writer, with
Animal House
,
Meatballs
,
Caddyshack
, and
Stripes
already to his credit. Sure, the fact that I couldn't really
write
gave
me slight pause—but then, that hadn't stopped a lot of successful screenwriters in Hollywood, so I remained upbeat.

As all these thoughts were churning in my head, Andrew Alexander, for the second time in five years, descended suddenly from the rafters with harp in hand, my guardian angel. He called me in New York and asked if I would be interested in moving back to Toronto and joining
SCTV
as a writer-performer. I had to think about it for, like . . . oh, I don't know—zero seconds?

S
CTV
was, it's not hyperbolic to say, the hottest thing going in comedy at that moment. The show had been on Canadian TV sporadically between 1976 and 1981, bouncing from commercial to public television. By its 1981–'82 season, though, NBC had picked up
SCTV
as a ninety-minute program that aired Friday nights after
The Tonight Show
. Its ratings were never particularly high, but it was during that season that
SCTV
really took off among the comedy cognoscenti—in marked contrast to
Saturday Night Live
, which was then in its post-Lorne period, with Dick Ebersol trying to salvage the show after a bad season with Jean Doumanian at its helm.

Andrew Alexander was the Lorne of
SCTV
, and he faced an issue not unlike the one that Lorne had discussed with me when Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi were poised to leave
SNL
: Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas were on the verge of departing to do, among other things, a Bob and Doug McKenzie movie called
Strange Brew
. Catherine O'Hara was thinking of leaving at season's end, too. But Andrew wanted me to come north right away, to work on the remaining three 90-minute episodes of the 1981–'82 season alongside Rick, Dave, and Catherine, as well as Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and Joe Flaherty.

These people, with the exception of Rick, who had never been in Second City Toronto and had come aboard
SCTV
via his friendship with Dave (and, needless to say, his obvious talent), were all old friends. Not only were the performers and writers of
SCTV
like family to me, but in some cases they
were
family: Andrea was now my in-law, married to Nancy's brother, Bob Dolman, who was working at the show as a writer . . . as was my own brother, Michael.

All that said, my exhilaration at being tapped by Andrew quickly turned into intimidation. It's entirely possible to be awed by your old friends. While I had been away doing my L.A. thing, they had all honed and perfected their craft to a point where they were now doing work way beyond anything we ever did onstage at the Old Fire Hall.
SCTV
was so brilliantly realized: a sketch TV show organized around the premise of a fictitious network (the Second City Television Network) that operates out of a fictitious town (Melonville) and offers its own slate of dodgy programming, populated by its own constellation of demi-stars. Far away from the meddling hands of American network executives, Joe, John, Eugene, Catherine, Dave, Rick, and Andrea, along with Harold Ramis, who was the show's original head writer and a cast member for
SCTV
's first season, had created something stunningly layered and original.

Joe was Guy Caballero, the station's owner, as well as the talk-show host Sammy Maudlin and the howling horror host Count Floyd. Andrea was unrelentingly hilarious as Edith Prickley, the network's horny, leopard-print-clad station manager. Catherine was spectacular as the steely-needy-leggy showbiz survivor Lola Heatherton. John and Eugene were comic perfection together as the polka duo the Shmenge Brothers, and, individually, especially adroit at parodying low-budget local advertising (John, in snake face paint: “Hi, I'm Harry, the guy with a snake on his face!”; Eugene, with beard and flailing limbs: “Hi, my name's Phil, and
I got a warehouse full of nails!”), while Rick and Dave were great not only as Bob and Doug but as impressionists, their Woody Allen–Bob Hope homage, “Play It Again, Bob,” astonishingly well-realized. And those characters are just a fraction of those that every cast member wheeled out week after week. Everyone was acutely versatile, equally capable of playing broad or subtle.

And
SCTV
placed great faith in the intelligence of its audience, assuming that its viewers were as bright as or brighter than its creators. The nuance that its writers and cast brought to their parodies of showbiz made watching the show feel like a very smart, very insider experience. Conan O'Brien has told me that he and his brother, when they were very impressionable (and very pale) teens, would watch
SCTV
and say, “
They're
saying the things that we just
think
!” It was almost disappointing, Conan says, when the brothers O'Brien discovered that people besides them knew of
SCTV
, because they considered it
their
show.

I felt the same reverence. I couldn't believe how good
SCTV
was. And now I had to plunge in and become a part of it. But my nervousness swiftly fell away after the first read-through, where, to my surprise and delight, two pieces I'd written with my brother Michael not only got laughs but were actually approved to be filmed. One was a bit in which I played the paparazzo Ron Galella, who was known for pursuing Jackie Onassis everywhere she went, and the other was a takeoff on Richard Pryor's then-massive
Live on the Sunset Strip
concert film—only ours was a promo for
Martin Scorsese's Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées
. After the read-through, Joe Flaherty congratulated me by saying, “Well done—and next time, write cheaper!”

I got my first sketch lead in a piece that Rick didn't want to do, a parody of a 1950s-era Red Scare movie called “I Was a Teenage Communist.” I also made a positive impression in a Paul Flaherty–
Dick Blasucci piece called
Battle of the PBS Stars
, in which I, as Fred Rogers of
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
, squared off in a boxing ring against Julia Child, played, inevitably, by John Candy. (Mister Rogers won dirty, by decking Julia with his King Friday puppet.) I did a lot of flipping and tumbling as Mister Rogers, which excited Paul and Dick, who happily exclaimed, “Ah, a physical-comedy guy!” If nothing else, that was a niche I could occupy.