I Must Say (29 page)

The big takeaway from this for me was that, while such troughs of despair as I'd experienced in the summer of '97 were valid and important, and maybe even necessary, they did not need to be repeated. That lakeside moment of reckoning and anxiety would only be valuable to me if it was instructive—if I squeezed every bit of wisdom out of it so that I would not repeat it.

W
hat I'd learned—and the lesson seemed to stick this time—was that I could and would survive quite handsomely in show business because I had the versatility to just keep moving. You don't want me in movies? Fine, I'll do TV. You don't want me in TV? Fine, I'll do theater. Just in the last year, for example, as I've been writing this book, I've had as full and eclectic a schedule as I could ever have hoped for: working on the sitcom
Mulaney
, playing a supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson's film
Inherent Vice
, and continuing to do concerts all over the country, sometimes on my own and other times as part of a two-man team with Steve Martin.

The summer after
Little Me
ended its run, I launched my own syndicated talk show, which ran for one season (1999–2000) and was a good test of my resilience. Like my sitvar, it was called
The Martin Short Show
, and it was another attempt to find a niche by crossbreeding one TV genre with another—in this case, the agreeable daytime chat show crossed with
SCTV
-style sketch comedy. If I have any one regret about the talk show, it's that we should have waited a little longer to bring it to air, because the syndicator, King World, had not finished selling it to the local affiliates when we launched. Consequently, as time went on and more stations picked up the show, it was airing in a wild variety of time slots in different cities—early morning, late morning,
afternoon, late night—and it became difficult to know what kind of audience to play to.

In San Francisco, for example, we were on at 1:00 a.m. In Boca Raton, 7:00 a.m. So, somewhere in south Florida, some poor ninety-year-old was sitting in an assisted-living home, saying, “What the hell is this guy doin' pullin' wacky faces this early when I'm trying to figure out if I'm still alive?” Even though the reviews for the show were terrific (the
New York Times
said, “At its hilarious best, which it often was during its premiere yesterday, Martin Short's new comedy-talk show is like a fresh edition of
Saturday Night Live
with interviews”), by Christmas the ratings were tanking, and not even six Emmy nominations could help. Once again, a show called
The Martin Short Show
was as doomed as doomed can be.

And yet something lasting and good came out of the project. One thing we did was a series of remote segments in which, playing a character, I would interact with real people. For the first one we tried, I spent about two hours in makeup, getting a bad prosthetic nose, a goofy wig, and pockmarked skin. I wanted to be unrecognizable, and the premise was that I would be this cheerily eccentric fishmonger at the L.A. Farmers Market who offered whole fishes to people, unwrapped, with his bare hands. Yet people immediately recognized me and asked for my autograph. The footage was unusable, which was frustrating, because I really liked the concept of getting lost in a character.

And then I remembered a scene I'd done in the movie
Pure Luck
in which my character was stung by a bee. He had an allergic reaction and his whole body swelled up, head to toe. I was getting made up for that scene, completely swathed in prosthetic blubber, when Danny Glover walked in, did a double take, and said, “Marty, I literally cannot see you in there.”

Oh, that's what I want, I thought: to be totally unrecognizable. So that's why celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick, of whom I now speak, was conceived as a fat guy. Jiminy was a product of my desire to do dispatches from press junkets, awards shows, and movie premieres not as myself but in character as a vapid entertainment reporter. He was also a symptom of my growing disenchantment with daytime television. I'd never watched much of it, but since I was getting into it, I wanted to familiarize myself with the terrain. Some of it, like
The View
and Rosie O'Donnell's show, was cool. (And this, mind you, was before the time of Ellen DeGeneres's show.) But boy, most of what was on was profoundly moronic. I came to realize that there was a whole daytime-TV ecosystem of morons who had large staffs at their beck and call: multiple assistants, segment producers, and so forth. I decided to make Jiminy a product of this ecosystem—a moron with power. The power of his TV platform!

As has been the case with all my characters, Jiminy took shape as an amalgam of various influences. There was a neighbor of ours back on Whitton Road in Hamilton named Mr. Braden whose speaking voice slalomed unpredictably from the very top of his range to the very bottom. Mr. Braden was the owner of the Kenmore Theatre, where we kids went to the movies. He didn't like us running across his lawn—he was older, and all his kids were grown—and he told us that if we stayed off his lawn for an entire year, we'd each get free passes for one Saturday matinee and one box of popcorn. (By the way: bad deal.)

There was also a soupçon of Merv Griffin's fawning in Jiminy, plus a vapid intensity borrowed from an old physics teacher at my high school, Mr. Devot. From the superagent Swifty Lazar, I borrowed the heavy black eyeglasses that were his visual trademark. And—unconsciously, I later realized—I borrowed my
father's penchant for the unforeseen put-down. By the time the hair, makeup, and wardrobe people were finished with me—what with the fat suit, the latex goiter, the pompadour wig, and the huge glasses—the Jiminy look was complete, and the character took on a life of his own.

One of my first outings as Jiminy was at the Emmy Awards, where game actors who knew it was me, people like Jane Krakowski, totally embraced the concept and went along with it. “Jesus, Jiminy,” Jane said, “it's been ages!” But Jack Lemmon didn't seem to understand that Jiminy was a character—more than likely he'd never heard of Martin Short, either—and when he gave me sincere answers to Jiminy's questions (referring to the abrasive old-time head of Columbia Pictures, I asked him, “Harry Cohn—was he mean?” and Lemmon sincerely replied, “He was never mean to me”), I decided not to use the footage. I wasn't out to dupe people, least of all national treasures like him.

At the American Comedy Awards, though, we had a little tent set up, and Goldie Hawn, one of my close friends, played it like Jiminy was a totally entrenched pillar of the Hollywood media. “Oh, Jiminy,” she said, “you're so full of wisdom—you always have been.” Since the Jiminy bits were improvised, I'd use these little snippets of commentary from his interviewees as information, to supply him with a backstory. Tom Hanks told Jiminy, “During the actors' strike in 1980, I watched that morning show of yours every day,” and I instantly replied, “Well, we did it from the Beverly Garland Motel in Studio City”—and just like that, I had another piece of Jiminy's history: a teatime program from somewhere in his semi-distinguished past.

Daytime talk's loss was Comedy Central's gain. The cable channel was gung-ho about letting me devote a full program to the Jiminy character. Furthermore, after a year of walking onstage
every day as myself, in a talk show bearing my name, I was downright sick of performing as me.

For the three wonderful seasons that we did
Primetime Glick
(2001–'3), my real face never once showed up on-screen. I'd do one-on-one Jiminy interviews with a celebrity, either before a studio audience or as a pretaped remote. I'd do sequences in which the celebrity joined Jiminy in a steam room. I did sketches showing Jiminy reading sordid Hollywood tales to schoolchildren (the story of how Sal Mineo was murdered, for example, or how Eddie Murphy was caught helping a transgender prostitute get home safely in a sketch entitled “The Damsel in Dis Dress”), and we'd have marionettes reenact the stories as Jiminy read. We would also see Jiminy at home with his beloved wife, Dixie (again enlisting the great Jan Hooks), as well as his four robust sons: Morgan, Mason, Matthew, and Modine. And we did some
SCTV
-type commercial parodies in which I played other characters and impersonated such figures as John Malkovich, who was promoting his new sitcom,
Malkovich in the Middle
. For the studio-audience sequences, Jiminy was joined by the brilliant Michael McKean as Adrian Van Voorhees, his harp-playing bandleader, who masked his chronic skin condition with a tragically orangey foundation.

The interview segments were my favorite. Not since Second City Toronto had I been given a chance to improvise so anarchically. I was as surprised as anyone at some of the bizarre things that came out of my mouth. I'd use expressions that I never, ever used in my daily life, such as “I take great umbrage.” I made a knowing reference to a 1940s actor named John Hodiak and later had to look up who he was—where the hell had that come from? It was as if Jiminy was some sort of
Altered States
exercise in recovered memory and primordial regression.

More to the point, Dave Foley, of
Kids in the Hall
fame, said,
“Marty, you've finally created a character who is as mean as you really are.”

I wouldn't go that far, but Jiminy, a man of appetites, had an unfettered id that was both fun and scary to watch in playback. He cut off an answer from Edie Falco with an abrupt, cruelly sibilant “
Shhhh!
” that truly startled her, followed by his admonition, “Just because I ask you a question doesn't mean that I need to know the answer. If you keep interrupting me when I have more questions, how can I possibly double-task!” (And when Edie said that she never watches her own work, Jiminy reasoned, “You can't look at yourself, because you see the
limited range
.”) Jiminy scandalmongered without restraint, answering Conan O'Brien's complaint that he wasn't making eye contact by saying, “I'm looking right into your peepers—
which is what Wally Cox used to say to Marlon at night.
”

Jiminy showed himself to be an improbably horny bastard, too—ever in need, he'd say, of his “nightly pop.” He unabashedly molested Ellen DeGeneres and Catherine O'Hara, forcing himself upon them in fits of lust. Ellen rolled with it, literally, as we carnally tumbled over the studio set—the host and guest chairs and the big platter of doughnuts on the table between them. One nice discovery I made about the fat suit, which is filled with foam, is that it was a real gift to a physical comedian—I could do flips, rolls, and pratfalls with abandon because I was fully padded.

One of my favorite hallmarks of Jiminy was his utter lack of preparation. He always had a sheaf of research that his staff had compiled for him, but he clearly never read it, or merely cherry-picked it for a couple of factoids—which he still got wrong. To Steven Spielberg, he said, “I loved this film you did,
Schindler's Express
, with Goldie Hawn,” and demonstrated his willingness to ask the tough questions by inquiring of the esteemed director, “
You've made so many films—when are you gonna do the big one?”

Steven was apprehensive about doing
Primetime Glick
because he hadn't been on a talk show since Dinah Shore's in the 1970s, and because he is not a performer. But he was a terrific straight man. The one cue I gave him in advance was that, when I asked him a question about his process and his craft, he should ramble on at length, and get so wrapped up in his answer that he looks away from Jiminy, his eyes focused on the middle distance. Steven handled this assignment expertly, earnestly enumerating his influences: Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and so on. Jiminy, bored to stultification by this answer and distracted by his ever-present hunger, slowly and stealthily slid out of his chair like a melting wheel of brie left out too long in the sun, commando-crawling over to the craft-services table to binge on food—and then slithering back just in time to pop back into place and offer a banal reply, his mouth full of pretzels and crudités: “Well, that sounds, like, really good!”

J
iminy was, in essence, the polar opposite of a character I'd done on
SCTV
named Brock Linehan. Brock was a straight-up parody of a well-regarded Canadian television interviewer named Brian Linehan (really subtle name-change detail on my part), a thinking man's host of the 1970s and '80s akin to Dick Cavett or Charlie Rose. Brian Linehan was known for his meticulous preparation for interviews—all the more impressive in the pre-Internet age—and his cerebral manner and turtlenecks. I'd been on his show in 1977, when I was first attracting notice at Second City Toronto, and he was gracious and solicitous.

But my
SCTV
homage to Linehan became so popular in
Canada that Linehan reported back to me that he was increasingly having a hard time being taken seriously in public. A waiter, he told me, had broken up with laughter when he, Brian Linehan, was simply trying to place his order. So, he asked me, could I please stop doing my Brock Linehan character? I said of course, and did stop—though I withheld from him that we already had three more Brock segments in the can.

Anyway, back to Jiminy: he was a wild, liberating character to do, and, when paired with an accommodating guest, was prone to embark upon dark, dangerous journeys deep into the comedic unknown. Alec Baldwin and Jiminy got to discussing Alec's left-wing politics, and Jiminy went straight to the Communist place: “A lot of people speak ill of the Blacklist, and I don't get it . . . Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. Personally, I'd like to see them isolated in Catalina!”

Alec ran with it, indignantly: “A United States penal colony in Catalina?”

Jiminy: “I would have Tim Robbins in a cell!”

Alec: “But Susan on a boat!”

Jiminy: “Yes!”

Alec: “So would I.”

We took a break, and Alec was excited, clearly getting into the Glick spirit. “Ask me about women,” he said. So we rolled tape, and every woman Jiminy mentioned, Alec acknowledged having had sex with. Meg Ryan? “She couldn't get enough of it.” Sarah Jessica Parker? “What do you do, she comes to your apartment at three o'clock in the morning after she wraps the friggin' TV show.” Dame Maggie Smith? “It was just a thing in the back of a car with an overcoat over my lap.” Dianne Feinstein? “She liked to watch. I was with Barbara Boxer. Feinstein came up to me, she'd had a few, and she said, ‘Would you, um . . . would you like to do
Barbara? And would you mind if I watched?' And I said ‘Whatever blows your dress up, let's go.'”