I Must Say (28 page)

A
h,
Clifford
—what to make of it? Let's see: poor box office, bad studio karma, critical excoriation . . . all the prerequisites for a
cult hit
. Which is indeed what
Clifford
has become. My first inkling of this came on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York a couple of years after the movie's release. I was sitting in first class, and so was Nicolas Cage, about three rows up from me. I'd never met the man, and I didn't want to bug him while we were settling into our seats. But he had recently won an Academy Award for his harrowing performance in
Leaving Las Vegas
. At the right moment, I'll get up, introduce myself, and congratulate him, I thought.

Half an hour into the flight, I was lost in the
New York Times
when I noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Can I just say something to you?” he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity to his voice. “The dining room scene in
Clifford
, with you and Charles Grodin, where he's confronting you and you keep lying to him”—a sustained battle of wits, much of it improvised, in which Clifford drives Grodin's character to the edge (Look at me like a human boy!)—“well, I broke my VCR watching it. I watched that scene twenty-five times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.”

On and on Cage went—and
he
had just won the Oscar two nights before. When I finally got to speak, replying, “And congratulations on your Oscar, great performance!” it seemed like I was merely returning his compliment—though, Nic, if you're reading this, I swear, it was always my intention to compliment you first.

In any event, Mr. Cage was not alone. On the one occasion I ever had to meet Elizabeth Taylor, she pronounced herself, to my astonishment, “a total
Clifford
freak.” And
Clifford
took on a vigorous afterlife in the heyday of Blockbuster Video stores and repeat movie viewings on premium cable. Today, anyone twenty-five and under who approaches me in public only wants to talk about
Clifford
. Some of them tell me that when they and their friends get nostalgic for their early years of childhood, they get stoned and watch
Clifford
in their dorms.

I take a measure of satisfaction in
Clifford
's belated discovery of its audience, but it was no consolation in the early 1990s. Between that movie's disappearance and the disappointing box office of
Captain Ron
, my feeling was, and I actually heard these words in my head:
Fuck the movies! I'm tired of the movies! Too much caprice, too many random factors, too much disappointment!
Of course, one factor that made it so easy to say “Fuck the movies” was that no one was offering me any. It's amazing how something like that can strengthen your resolve.

However, the beauty of my career and my diverse skill set was that I knew I had options. One of which was, as Tony Randall would put it, Broad-
way
. I had always felt in my heart that the theater was my first love, followed by the movies, then television, and then, perhaps, my family. In May of 1992 I auditioned for Marvin Hamlisch and Neil Simon to play the male lead, the so-called Richard Dreyfuss role, in the new musical version of Neil's
script
The Goodbye Girl
. As I was leaving the audition, the casting director, Jay Binder, came running out, grabbed me by the shoulder, and turned me around, exclaiming, “You are a Broadway star! Do you hear me? You are a Broadway
star
!
And
your sweater matches your eyes!”

I got the part, and on March 4, 1993, opposite the beautiful and exquisitely talented Bernadette Peters, I fulfilled Jay Binder's declaration (although I was wearing a different colored sweater). The critical reaction to the show was wildly mixed, but I won the Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World awards for Best Actor in a Musical and was nominated for a Tony Award. Not only that, but I also got my caricature up on the wall at Sardi's, the fabled restaurant I'd visited with my brother Brian in 1965, on our first trip to New York. It was the ultimate Broadway honor, although I was forced to acknowledge that the restaurant's first attempt to capture my likeness didn't quite work out. The portrait was unveiled live on CNN, which would have been much more exciting had it looked remotely like me; instead, it was of a cross-eyed guy who apparently had a severe thyroid condition. Grasping for something to say on TV, I commented, “Well, what's interesting about this is, if Karen Black ever did a Broadway show, they could save on the framing.”

Afterward Vincent Sardi Jr., the restaurant's owner, came up to me and sweetly inquired, “Mr. Short, you don't like the picture?”

“Oh, no, no, it's a great honor!” I protested. “It's just that . . . I'm not quite convinced that it looks much like me.”

“This new guy we're using,” Mr. Sardi said ruefully, “he just isn't as good as the old guy.”

“How long have you been using him?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight years,” Mr. Sardi said.

In any event,
The Goodbye Girl
ran for 188 performances, and I
reinvented myself in midlife as the singing, stage-loving ham that I've secretly always been anyway.

W
ell, hang on. I shouldn't make it sound quite so tidy. In the mid-1990s I had another of my periodic moments of self-doubt, akin to Breakdown Corner in 1977 and my pre-
SCTV
doldrums. It might have begun one day when I was sitting on my porch in the Palisades with Chris Guest. “Martin,” he said to me, “have you ever felt that our style of comedy is already a little antiquated?”

It was ten years on from
Spinal Tap
and
Saturday Night Live
, but it had never occurred to me that I had a particular style of comedy that could be pegged to a specific time period. I'd never pondered that. Then again, the very reason I was with Chris at that moment was because he was appearing as a guest on an NBC show I was doing,
The Martin Short Show
, that was, if I may again borrow from Ed Grimley phraseology, as doomed as doomed can be. It was a sitvar—a hybrid of a sitcom and a variety program—in which Jan Hooks played my wife and I played a guy named Marty Short. We had some really inventive, funny premises, like one in which we found a lost white poodle with a tracking device on it. It was determined that the dog belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. We returned the dog, but Jan's character rigged the animal's tracking system so that we had a live audio feed and could listen in on Taylor and her then-husband, Larry Fortensky. Smash-cut to me as Taylor, shouting “Larry!
Gladiator
is on!” Jan and I also did a lot of character sketches in a variety of costumes and guises, not a world away from what Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen now do so successfully on
Portlandia
.

Whatever. The show didn't take. NBC wanted something
more traditional like
Home Improvement
, I wanted to include more sketch work, and the thing was yanked after three episodes. My kids were still young, so while I'd had success on Broadway, it wasn't viable for me to commit full-time to that life, away in New York for months at a stretch—not when Nancy and I had made a commitment to being an un-nomadic family. Another round of roles in unsuccessful movies followed—the kid-oriented pictures
Jungle 2 Jungle
and
A Simple Wish
, Tim Burton's
Mars Attacks!
—and suddenly it was the summer of 1997, and I was at our summer place on Lake Rosseau in Canada. My profile was strong, but none of my post-
SNL
projects had turned into anything remotely raging hot. I had nothing new lined up.

I'd always pressed my agents and managers to be brutally honest with me, in good times and bad:
Don't sugarcoat anything. Be honest. This is a business.
So around that time, I checked in with one of my agents to get the lay of the land. Here's what the guy said: “Do you know what it is, Marty? Everyone loves you. Everyone admires you. Everybody thinks you're talented. They're just not talking about you these days.”

Oh.

I gathered myself and replied, “Boy, I—wow! I appreciate the clarity of that statement. Thank you!”

I was staring at the water and thinking, I'm forty-seven years old. Maybe I'm done. Maybe I've hit a wall that has no intention of giving. Not just thinking these things, but saying them to Nancy: “I think we're in trouble, Nan. I think it might be over.”

Another reason to love my wife: she didn't buy it for a second. She saw the bigger picture. She said, “Mart, cream rises to the top. You'll never go away. People just wouldn't have it.” Me, I wasn't so sure.

In that moment, Nancy was more mindful of the flawless logic
of my Nine Categories system than I was. We had three beautiful kids. We had each other. And look at where we were sitting: this beautiful summer retreat, a stone-columned lakefront estate built early in the twentieth century by a Toronto department-store magnate and his wife.

In 1992, in the dead of winter, while I was in Puerto Rico with Kurt Russell making
Captain Ron
, Nan had trudged through four-foot snowdrifts down to the edge of a lake, looked back at the seventy-year-old cottage that overlooked it, surrounded by ten acres of wooded lakefront property, and said, “We'll take it.” She never checked with me, nor would she have needed to. I'd have just said, “Whatever you think, baby,” trusting her wisdom about such things. (For years, my private name for our new estate was Yes, Dear.) Tucked into an area of Lake Rosseau called Snug Harbour, Snug, as I've come to call the property, became our family's favorite place, with spectacular vistas, pine-scented northern woods, and loons that greeted us with their cries each evening—our own Golden Pond, with money. Kurt was so taken with our Rosseau place when he visited us—he and I had become great friends during the filming of
Captain Ron
—that he and Goldie Hawn bought land and built their own compound just across the lake.

Nancy was also aware that I, more than she, am susceptible to that condition sometimes ascribed to actors known as neediness. I was driving once, late at night on a quiet road, and the solitude and darkness sent me into a torrent of thought about how small we are in the infinite scheme of the cosmos, how fleeting our time is, and how mortal we are. I started contemplating the fact that someday I will die and be no more. I started thinking of the sadness that would overcome my family and friends at the news of my death. And I actually started tearing up. When I got home,
I reported this experience to Nancy. She said, “That's the sickest thing I've ever heard.”

“Wait a second. You've never imagined your own death and teared up?”

“Of course not! I've imagined
your
death and teared up!”

“Well,” I said, “that's my point.”

S
uffice it to say, Nancy was right: My career wasn't over, and good things did come up. That fall, I flew to London to play eight different characters in
Merlin
, an NBC miniseries with a wonderful cast that included Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Neill, and John Gielgud. Sir John Gielgud! I had a blast filming that project, which stretched into winter, and, with Nancy and the kids, enjoyed a magical Christmas break at Brown's Hotel in London, where a Boxing Day snowstorm lent the whole city a Victorian storybook feel. Sam, Helena, and I were nominated for Emmys, and my faith in the working actor's life was once again restored.

Concurrent with
Merlin
, I was collaborating with Rob Marshall, who had just codirected (with Sam Mendes) and choreographed the Roundabout Theatre's hit revival of
Cabaret
, on an updated adaptation of Neil Simon's musical
Little Me
. Simon and the songwriter Cy Coleman had originally created the show in the early 1960s as a vehicle for the high-energy comedian and TV pioneer Sid Caesar. Rob and I just clicked; he and I had adored working together in March of '97 doing the limited-run
Encores!
production of Simon's
Promises, Promises
at New York City Center, and we were looking for something else to do together. Like
Merlin
,
Little Me
would require me to play multiple roles—though in this case I would get comically killed in each one. Plus, I'd get to sing!

Rob and I found a week of time to put together an idealized draft of
Little Me
that lifted bits from different productions of the show over the years while adding in new concepts all our own. Yet at the end of the week I was overcome with uncertainty. If there was one thing I had learned from working with Neil Simon on
The Goodbye Girl
, it's that you don't rewrite a word of Neil Simon, the dean of American theater. “Why are we doing this, Rob?” I asked my collaborator. “We're wasting our time.”

Still, Rob and I arranged a meeting with Simon and Coleman at Coleman's office in Manhattan. We sent over our script in advance. As we walked to the meeting, I started fearing the worst, getting increasingly worked up: “You know what, Robby? To hell with them and their closed, ancient minds! They think we're a pair of twenty-one-year-olds! Let me tell you something. They won't know what they'll be missing out on when they pass on this!”

Then we went into the meeting, where a relaxed, smiling Neil Simon greeted us and cut to the chase. “We love it, guys,” he said. “Great job. Let's do it.”

Moments later Rob and I were at the bar of the Four Seasons hotel, drinking martinis in rapid succession, half in celebration, half in panic:
Oh my god, now we have to actually do this.

We opened in November 1998, with the delightful Faith Prince as my romantic foil, to the kind of notices an actor dreams about—“the stage loves him the way the camera loved Garbo,” wrote the
New York Times
's Ben Brantley. I won a second Outer Critics Circle Award, and, the following spring, the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. When I reached the stage to accept the award, I instructed the audience to please be seated, even though they already were. I went on to say that there were so many people I could thank, but the reality was, I'd done it all myself.