I Must Say (9 page)

My plan for the future was very set and clear, for order and clarity had always been the pillars I leaned upon in times of uncertainty. I was going to serve society and pursue a master's degree in social work. Like a lot of 1960s kids, I was very much influenced by the John F. Kennedy “Ask not what your country can do for you” ethos, and I sincerely thought I might end up in public policy or even electoral politics. (I'd have been every bit as entertaining a Canadian politician as Rob Ford, but without the “bad-tooth smell” that we know is there.)

However, Eugene wouldn't let me slip off that easily into bourgeois respectability. By that point he was living in Toronto and doing the struggling-actor thing, and he urged me to join him. More than anyone, it is Mr. Eugene Levy who deserves credit or blame for inflicting me upon the masses, for it was he who kept nudging, telling me that I had real talent and would be a fool not to give the performing life a stab. “Try it for a year,” he said. “If it doesn't work out, you'll still be able to look in the mirror at fifty with no regrets.”

I
n February of '72 I made a little contract with myself: I would give myself one year after graduation to try to get work as an actor. If by May of '73 things were going reasonably well, I would renew my showbiz contract for another year; if they weren't, I would go to the registrar's office at McMaster and beg them to hold a place for me in grad school that fall.

Counting on nothing much, I went ahead and had a student photographer take some head shots of me in different poses (Happy! Sad! Hopeful!), and I typed up a résumé fraught with lies. Then I headed into Toronto to hit every talent agency in the phone book. Most of them were uninterested, but one agency liked my “atypical” (often a kinder word for “homely”) looks and sent me off on my first casting call, for a credit-card commercial—which, to my shock, I actually got. On March 17, 1972, I worked my first day as a paid actor, playing a talking credit card in a woman's purse. She opened it, and there I was, miniaturized, in this placard-like costume, sitting on top of an oversize compact mirror and explaining my virtues as a Chargex card, the Canadian version of Visa.

My second audition—and really my first as far as proper acting was concerned—was for the musical
Godspell
. Talk about a cattle call: every young person with show-business aspirations in Toronto, Eugene and I included, turned out for it, and for good reason. The show was a massive off-Broadway hit in New York, and its composer, Stephen Schwartz, just twenty-four years old at the time, was on hand to personally select the cast for the Toronto production.

Godspell
is, essentially, the gospel according to Matthew as told by clowns—as
sung
, really, by hippie Jesus and his hippie apostles in a wildly original rock-opera musical idiom. Paul Shaffer has long said that in the early 1970s, the theatrical community was obsessed with two things: “full-frontal nudity and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Godspell
, mercifully, fit only the latter description.

Eugene and I made it through the initial round of auditions and got a callback for March 25, at the Masonic Temple in Toronto. That day was like an entire season of
American Idol
compressed into one twelve-hour slog. You'd go up in groups of sixteen, each sing a song, wait an hour, and then eight of you would get called back. Then your group of eight would be called upon to improvise a parable. And then maybe four of those eight would get called back. And then two of the four. And then one of the two. The air was thick with nerves, anticipation, and the sound of longhairs strumming guitars and humming Carole King and Neil Young songs. It was 1972, and not a soul in the room was over twenty-eight. I had never seen so much patchwork denim and rampant bralessness in my life.

There was one girl for whom I immediately felt a pang of pity. She was wearing loose-fitting bib overalls and had her wavy hair tied off in two goofy ponytails that stuck out from either side of her head. She launched into the Disney song
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which she sang like a demented child at the peak of a sugar rush. Oh, that poor thing, I thought, she's so desperate.

But when she finished, to my amazement, Schwartz and the show's director, Howie Sponseller, jumped out of their seats and broke into spirited applause for this skinny, daffy girl—as did pretty much everyone else in the hall. This was my first sighting of Gilda Radner. Gilda later explained to me that she had actually seen the off-Broadway production of
Godspell
in New York, and therefore she knew exactly what Schwartz was looking for: a certain looseness, an emphatic lack of Broadway polish. But believe me, advance knowledge alone did not account for the way this talented girl took control of that room.

Earlier in the day, two girls performed their audition pieces not with the house accompanist but with a piano player who had tagged along with them: a bopping Elton John kind of guy with oversize goggle-like eyeglasses and a ferocious, rockin' approach to his instrument. This was the young Paul Shaffer, though, truth be told, Paul never seemed young, just as he doesn't now seem “old.”

Paul was not auditioning for the show himself. He was there to accompany his girlfriend, Ginny, and another of his friends, Avril. As I'd soon learn, Paul was, like me, on a one-year contract to make it in show business. Unlike me, however, his contract was with an outside entity: his father, an eminent attorney named Bernie Shaffer. If the music thing didn't work out soon, Bernie was going to insist that Paul follow in his footsteps and go to law school. At the time of the
Godspell
auditions, Paul was playing a Hammond B-3 organ in the house band of a Toronto strip club, and had mere weeks left on his contract with Shaffer senior.

After Paul's two female companions finished their auditions, Stephen Schwartz summoned him to the edge of the stage.
Schwartz expressed to Paul how frustrated he was with the regular accompanist's dainty, traditional piano playing, and how much he admired Paul's pounding, rockier style. Would Paul, Schwartz wondered, be willing to take over for the rest of the auditions? Though he didn't know how to read music, Paul said yes. He has the entire catalog of popular music in that brilliant head of his, and he proved himself able to play anything asked of him that day, including Gilda's “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

M
y fashion concession to the times was a jive-turkey newsboy cap—on John Lennon or Sly Stone, it would have been called a pimp cap—that I wore slightly askew over my now-shaggy hair. But my audition piece was pure throwback: a variation of Frank Sinatra's version of “My Funny Valentine” that I put over with just enough in-on-the-joke self-awareness to connect with the counterculturists who surrounded me.

Nearly everyone else auditioned with a song from the rock or folk idioms, and one, a tall guy with the golden ringlets of Art Garfunkel and the face of Michelangelo's
David
, did an actual
Godspell
song, “Save the People,” which left the rest of us envious of both his cunning and his singing talent. This was Victor Garber. I would later learn that, though he was my age, Victor had already had a 1960s career as part of a Mamas and Papas–like folk-pop group called the Sugar Shoppe, which had made a couple of appearances on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Victor had subsequently toured as part of a revue called Canadian Rock Theatre, which was basically a bunch of young singers covering songs from
Godspell
and
Jesus Christ Superstar
—a symptom of the Jesus mania that Paul had diagnosed.

Victor, his quavery voice gentle yet strong, like the fluttering of
butterfly wings, delivered his song beautifully, to the palpable awe of everyone in the hall. Jesus had come to the Masonic Temple. Poor Eugene had to go next, singing “Aquarius” from the aptly named (given the singer in question)
Hair
. To this day, he shudders at the thought of having had to follow Victor.

When it was all over that day, Schwartz picked ten people to form the original Toronto cast of
Godspell
. Victor was a shoo-in as Jesus. Gilda, despite my initial misunderstanding of her approach, was an obvious yes also. As for Paul, Schwartz gave him the break of his life by offering him a job as
Godspell
's bandleader and musical director. The Canadian bar's loss was showbiz's gain. Honestly, can you imagine how different David Letterman's show would be if it was just Dave sitting there alone, unable to make all those asides to the guy at the keyboard who looks like the love child of Howie Mandel and James Carville?

Eugene and I made it, too. We couldn't believe it—close friends, getting our first big break,
together
. He was twenty-five, and I would turn twenty-two the next day. We went to the back of the Masonic Temple, where there was a pay phone, and took turns calling everyone we knew to share our happy news. I hadn't even graduated from college yet, and already I was exceeding the terms of my self-imposed contract.

Before rehearsals began, Howie Sponseller, our director, threw a cast party so that we apostles of Christ could better get to know one another. It was just a gathering of callow theater geeks drinking jug wine, but to me it was the most amazing party I had ever been to. Why? Because I was in a room where
everyone was making a living by being in show business.
That fact floored me. I didn't want the evening to end. Avril Chown, one of the girls Paul had accompanied, was one of the chosen (though his girlfriend, Ginny, wasn't) and was sexy as hell. Jayne Eastwood, another
woman in the cast, had a quick wit that I instantly took to. Gerry Salsberg, who had been cast in the role of Judas, was sweet yet intense, a perfect foil to the chipper Paul and the chipperer me. By the end of the evening, it was like we'd all fast-forwarded two years in our relationships and become old friends.

The life of the party, however, was Gilda, who jovially worked the room, making conversation with everyone. She did this, however, while very conspicuously holding the tip of her right index finger to her forehead, even as she was walking around and maneuvering between people. When I asked Gilda why she was doing this, she lifted her finger for a moment to reveal a pimple that she didn't want anyone else to see. I found this hilarious and charming. Gilda was a rare event, hard to explain if not experienced in person. I had never met a woman so comfortable in her strangeness.

With one possible exception: Andrea Martin. Andrea wasn't at that first party, because she didn't make the cut at the March 25 auditions. I saw her get the bad news that day. Her face fell almost as if in slow motion, in so nakedly expressive a fashion that I had to suppress a laugh; there was nothing funny about her not getting the job, yet there was something inherently funny about Andrea. Then, a few weeks later, a woman who
had
made the cast dropped out for personal reasons, creating an opening. Eugene lobbied Stephen Schwartz and Howie Sponseller to hire Andrea.

A petite Armenian-American force of nature from the great state of Maine, Andrea had briefly dated Eugene, and the two of them had recently shot a low-budget horror-film spoof called
Cannibal Girls
, whose director was another guy who had been a few years ahead of me at McMaster, Ivan Reitman. Howie threw another party, and Eugene and I brought Andrea. She turned it on at the party and just
killed
, winning everyone over with the
same manic energy that she later brought to
SCTV
. She was in. I've known a lot of funny people in my life, but no one matches Andrea for sheer in-person, on-contact funniness.

Throughout the months of April and May, I commuted from Hamilton to Toronto to rehearse between classes and finals. Rehearsals were an exercise in collective euphoria, because, as Paul likes to say, we were all so happy that we didn't have to go to school anymore, and we were free of that soul-crushing burden of classes, homework, and thinking about getting “real” jobs. We were working on this hip show, a job that everyone in town wanted but didn't have, and on top of all that, we were getting
paid
.

By the end of May, having finished my last exam, I bade the city of Hamilton good-bye, never to live there again. Eugene and I, along with our friend John Yaffe, rented a house at 1063 Avenue Road in Toronto. (Tom Hanks, by the way, thinks the name Avenue Road is hilarious and acutely Canadian. He brings it up whenever the subject arises: “Hey, Marty, when you were a kid in Toronto, did you ever wish you lived on Street Lane instead of Avenue Road?”)

Godspell
opened at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on June 1, 1972. Our good feelings about what we had were ratified by the audience, whose members, dressed up in black tie for opening night, bought in from the moment the curtain went up, laughing and applauding beyond our wildest expectations. My big song was “We Beseech Thee,” what I would learn is known in theater as the eleven o'clock number—a showstopper that occurs late in the second act. This one was a vamping, up-tempo gospel-style song that, in our version, built and built and built to a rousing finish.

It unfolded so perfectly, with my voice gliding so effortlessly along, that I momentarily levitated outside myself—I was up in the rafters, watching me singing down there, enjoying the show.
The reviews in the papers the next day were ecstatic. Most of the writers' attention focused on Victor, but I was delighted that my hometown paper, the
Hamilton Spectator
, singled
me
out. The reviewer noted, perceptively, that at the conclusion of “We Beseech Thee,” my face had “the look film directors try to capture in movies about young stars breaking into the theatre.” He also wrote that Eugene looked “like a well-fed Frank Zappa.” Again, very perceptive.

Y
our first major work experience tends to be formative, something you remember vividly for the rest of your life. That's what
Godspell
was for our cast. To this day, Paul, Eugene, Dave Thomas (who joined the cast later in the run), and I can, and on occasion will, run through the show's score in its entirety. Sometimes Paul will phone me up in L.A. from New York, and, without so much as a hello, say something like, “Why would Avril open that number that way? It's such an odd choice”—as if we were still living in 1972. This is a continuation of the obsessiveness with which we lived and breathed the show, all of us involved. Our cast operated as a sort of gestalt—all for one and one for all, more like the Beatles than like Elvis. When we weren't performing together, we were hanging out together, oftentimes at the Short-Levy digs on Avenue Road, more frequently still at a theater-folk bar called the Pilot. John Candy, with whom many of us fell into friendship at that time, joked that he hated hanging around with the
Godspell
people because all they ever talked about was fucking
Godspell
.