I Must Say (22 page)

The problem was that we four ringers—Billy, Chris, Harry, and me—considered ourselves the stars of that season of
SNL
and generally didn't care too much about writing material for the hosts. We were a little arrogant about our standing as
SNL
's headliners; we basically thought that
we
were the hosts every week. But finally we yielded, devising a
Broadway Danny Rose
–like deli sketch in which Eddie revived his kvetchy, irritable, greenface Jewish version of Gumby (“I'm Gumby, dammit!”). Billy threw in a recurring old Jewish character that he did, the phlegmy Lew Goldman, while I, naturally, played Irving Cohen.

Eddie's show went fine, but it was another week in the
SNL
pressure cooker. Harry Shearer, increasingly discontented, lasted just one episode beyond the Christmas one—he, rather than I, became the cast member who quit before the season was up. In his view, he was writing quality material that wasn't making the show, while other writers' inferior work did. So he left, citing creative differences. Or, as Harry put it in his parting salvo, “I wanted to be creative, and they wanted something different.”

Another guy who quit in a huff was Larry David. Larry was a writer for
SNL
that season, some years before his world domination as the mastermind of
Seinfeld
and
Curb Your Enthusiasm
. He's now one of my closest friends, but back then we were merely coworkers who didn't know each other that well. Larry was in a constant state of aggravation that season, because only one of his sketches ever made it to air. I do remember going to precisely one
lunch with him. I can't forget it, because all he did was vent: “Can you
believe
this place? Nothing is done the way it should be!”

I actually witnessed Larry's famous row with Dick Ebersol, in which he quit on the spot, a few minutes before airtime one Saturday night. It's a famous TV moment because it later became the inspiration for a
Seinfeld
episode, “The Revenge,” in which George Costanza angrily quits his job but immediately regrets it, and decides to show up at work the next week as if nothing has happened. That's exactly how it went down. Larry walked right up to Dick and simply unloaded: “You don't know what the fuck you're talking about! You're totally incapable! You have no comedy background, no artistry!” And out he walked, into the freezing Manhattan night—realizing, suddenly, that he'd made a horrible mistake and needed every penny he could earn. So Larry just showed up the next Monday morning, pretending he hadn't quit and greeting people with perky geniality: “Hey, guys, how's it going?” His job remained secure, as if nothing had happened.

I
t says a lot about the volatile nature of
Saturday Night Live
, at least in that era, that a writer could curse out the executive producer more or less without consequence—that it was, on some level, an acceptable part of getting the show to air. But good lord, it wasn't my thing. I'd spent two and a half years in Television Oz at
SCTV
, and I knew I would be strictly a one-year baby at
SNL
.

Not that I don't appreciate that season. It changed my life and opened the door to friendships and opportunities I'd never have experienced otherwise. I still know no greater high than what I felt when I walked offstage from an
SNL
episode that had gone well. And because I was still relatively young and impressionable, this high was extended by going to the after-party and having
someone like Warren Beatty walk up to me and say, “Love your work”—or by going to the manager Jack Rollins's seventieth birthday party and being told, “Woody really wants to meet you.” (As it turned out, Woody offered me little more than a cursory nod, but I knew that going in.)

In our final show of the season, I experienced the exquisite joy of watching our guest host, Howard Cosell, play Ed Grimley's Uncle Basil, complete with the hair-horn and plaid shirt, and hearing him ward off an intruder by saying, in That Cosell Voice, “Unhand my nephew, I must say.”

Cosell was actually pretty apprehensive about doing the sketch. After the dress rehearsal, I had one note to give him about his performance as Uncle Basil. His mere entrance triggered huge laughs, what with his face matched with the pointy hair. But, I told Cosell, it would be even better if he entered with the signature wincing Grimley facial expression, the upper lip raised to expose the top teeth. I demonstrated this for him, and there was a surreal moment in which I was standing there, my face two feet from Howard Cosell's, contorted in the Ed expression, while he stared back in stony contempt. Just before the show I heard Cosell talking to Chris outside my dressing room: “Okay, I'll do that piece-of-shit scene—but I'm not doing the fucking teeth!”

And when it was all over—that episode, that season—I exhaled. Nancy and I started thinking about the Pacific Palisades again. And I was getting feelers about the movies. What a lovely place to be after twelve months of frayed nerves. My inner Grimley was filled with excitement:
L.A., the movies, no weekly pressure . . . oh, I'm going mental, GIVE ME A BREAK!

I
've always loved this story about Hollywood. In 1981, the legendary costume designer Edith Head passed away. A few days later, the great actor William Holden died tragically from a fall. In the same time period, Allen Ludden, the host of the game show
Password
and the husband of Betty White, died as well. Now, according to Hollywood folklore, celebrities
always die in threes
, and nothing thrills Hollywood more than seeing its bogus folklore realized. So newscasters on all the L.A. television stations were proclaiming left and right, “You see, it's true—
they die in threes
.” And then suddenly Natalie Wood died, and the newscasters dropped Allen Ludden. Even in death, his heat was fleeting.

In Hollywood, you're hottest at the point when you're all about anticipation: when everyone in the business knows you have product pending, but none of it is out yet. You're busy, in demand, hectically jumping from one job to the next, energized by a sustained industry murmur of
MartyShortMartyShort . . . Couldbebigcouldbebig . . . Ihearhe'ssomethingIhearhe'ssomething . . . DoyouhaveaMartyShortthing'causeIhaveaMartyShortthing.

My own professional hot streak started in May 1985, when I flew back to New York—
SNL
's season had wrapped mere weeks earlier, but Nan and I wasted no time resettling into our Pacific Palisades rental—to do
Late Night with David Letterman
. It wouldn't be my first appearance, by a long shot. Paul Shaffer, Dave's bandleader since the show launched in 1982, was, of course, a good friend. And Dave had been a fan of my work on
SCTV
and
SNL
, a fandom more than reciprocated by me; like everyone else on the 1980s comedy scene, I was in awe of Dave and the clever, anarchic ways he had revolutionized the late-night format. So this appearance on Dave's show wasn't in itself a big turning point. By now I was such a regular guest that Paul had his own entrance music for me, Julian Lennon's “Valotte,” the title song from Julian's one mega-hit album—and an inside joke between Paul and me, one of approximately twelve million we've shared since
Godspell
. It goes like this: In December 1984, the guest host of
SNL
was Ringo Starr, and the whole week I was working with Ringo on the show, he kept remarking to a friend he'd brought along, the producer Allan McKeown, “Don't 'ee look like Julian? The spittin' image of Julian!” I told Paul this, and—boom!—“Valotte” became “Marty's theme.”

(FYI, after Dave moved to CBS in 1993, Paul changed my tune to the theme from
Hollywood and the Stars
, an early 1960s NBC program about Hollywood's golden age, hosted by Joseph Cotten, that Paul and I were both obsessed with as kids. The theme, written by the great movie composer Elmer Bernstein, has a swelling, Oscars-ceremony sentimentality to it, the sort of music that would herald the slow, minder-assisted entrance onstage of some frail human legend slated to receive that year's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.)

What really kicked off my season of Hollywood hotness was
the meeting I had with Lorne Michaels during this New York trip. He'd gotten in touch with me beforehand, wanting to discuss a movie he was doing,
¡Three Amigos!
I was excited about this—no one had ever wanted me for a movie before—so I went to Lorne's apartment straight after the
Letterman
taping. The first thing he asked was surprising to me: Was I at all interested in returning for another year on
Saturday Night Live
? It wasn't yet official, but Lorne was poised to take over the show again, having recovered from the burnout that had driven him away five years earlier. Perhaps, Lorne said, I could be persuaded to reenlist.

“But I thought you wanted to talk to me about
¡Three Amigos!
” I said. “How would I be able to do both?”

“Well, you
know
, Marty,” Lorne said, in that wry tone I would come to know well, “I've heard tell that
occasionally
schedules can, in fact, actually be sorted out in show business.”

In retrospect, I think I could have managed it. My career might have benefitted from pulling double duty and doing Lorne's rebooted
SNL
and
¡Three Amigos!
at the same time. But it probably would have been at the expense of my sanity. So I told Lorne, “I'm not sure
SNL
is in my future. But you say you're producing a Western-type movie?”

¡Three Amigos!
is an anomaly in Lorne's long and illustrious résumé: his only screenwriting credit on a feature film, shared with Steve Martin and Randy Newman. It was your basic Old West bandito musical comedy of mistaken identity, featuring three dopey silent-film stars who happen to perform in mariachi costumes and get themselves mixed up in a Mexican turf war with the villagers in a small, gangster-besieged town, who mistake them for real crime fighters.

I think that at one point it was going to be Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi as the other two amigos alongside Steve. At another
point, it was going to be Bill Murray and Robin Williams. Then it became Chevy Chase and John Candy, but Candy was too busy by the time the production schedule finally snapped into place, and that's when it became Chevy Chase and Martin Short, with John Landis slated to direct.

The very day after the meeting with Lorne, I was back in L.A., headed to Steve Martin's house in Beverly Hills to meet him and pick up the script. I have this philosophy around people I don't know but am excited to meet that I call “immediate intimacy”: I do an impersonation of someone who is relaxed, loose, and not at all intimidated, in the hope that this impersonation will ultimately become reality. Because I
was
intimidated by Steve. We're the best of friends now, but at that point I was this mere sketch-comedy guy and he was
Steve Martin
, the most innovative stand-up comic of the 1970s, who had done so many great comedy films. The latest to date,
All of Me
, had blown me away, not to mention
The Jerk
and the ambitious musical
Pennies from Heaven
and all the TV specials, and then there was his groundbreaking “white suit” era.

I was immediately overwhelmed upon arriving at Steve's house. I'm pretty certain that everyone who has ever visited his home for the first time and gone from room to room has been struck by the very same thought: How many portraits can one man possibly sit for? In all seriousness, I was astounded by what I saw. In one direction, there was a Picasso. In another direction, there was an Edward Hopper. And in a third direction, there was . . . Steve himself. That's when I blurted out, “How did you get so rich? Because I've seen the work.”

Steve burst out laughing. Wow, I thought, I just made Steve Martin laugh. Pretty damn cool. My heart jumped an extra beat of joy. As it turned out, my icebreaker was more perfect than I
could have known. Steve, I would soon learn, is an inherently shy and unrelentingly self-critical person. A joke that is both at his expense
and
makes him laugh is the ideal combination.

Still, it took a while for me to feel like I belonged in his and Chevy's world. Nancy and I were invited that autumn to the premiere of
Spies Like Us
, the movie John Landis did before
¡Three Amigos!
, which starred Chevy and Danny Aykroyd. It was my first Hollywood premiere, and the first time I underwent the experience of walking a red carpet, having my name announced, and hearing a crowd of strangers on the street cheer for me. I'd been in such a bubble while doing
SCTV
and
Saturday Night Live
that this was the first moment when it became real that I had connected with the public, and not just people in entertainment. The following day, I joined Chevy and Steve for lunch at the Grill, the consummate Beverly Hills industry lunch spot. Chevy was smarting from the reviews for
Spies Like Us
, yet still voicing his confidence in Landis. Steve was fretting about his level of preparedness and telling me, “It's different for you, because you have
real
talent.” I couldn't help but step out of myself for a moment.
You're sitting here with Chevy Chase and Steve Martin, and you're one of the Three Amigos. Gee, I hope you don't blow this! Just pretend you're someone who wouldn't.

In fact, in this period, when I had agreed to do the movie but we hadn't yet begun shooting it, I suggested to John Landis that I do my amigo, Ned Nederlander, as another one of my bizarre and dim-witted creations, in the same world as Ed and Jackie and Lawrence Orbach. I just didn't believe that my own face could be as comedically rewarding as the tic-laden, makeup-heavy characters of my last four years on television.

But when I pitched this to Landis, he shot it down immediately. “Absolutely not,” he declared. “Do you know the problem
with you people from
SCTV
? You overanalyze. You're cute, and you're going to look cute.
Period!
”