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!”
I don’t know about John’s macro point about us people from SCTV, but he was right in one important regard. If I was going to make it in the movies, I’d have to be brave enough to be me, and to find the comedy in the character’s sweet-faced innocence, without hiding behind prosthetics, bald pates, and the like.
And was I ever an innocent. On the first day, on the film’s first set, I went into my first trailer. I went to the sink, filled a glass with water, drank the water, and nearly retched. Nobody had told me that you don’t drink the trailer water, because trailer water is just for washing your hands. Then I opened the toilet, and there was a giant turd in it. I was never certain if it belonged to Chevy or some teamster who was trying to break me in—I didn’t have it sent to the lab. Knowing how his mind works, though, my money’s still on Chevy.
But I adapted quickly. It was my “immediate intimacy” philosophy put into practice: I needed to feel as if my two established-movie-star costars were my real buddies, so mentally, I fast-forwarded three years ahead in our relationship. When we first started filming ¡Three Amigos! on a Hollywood backlot, Nancy came by the set, and Chevy was completely discombobulated by her; “I feel like I’m cheating on my wife by just looking at your wife,” he told me. (Nancy had this effect on men. She underestimated her own beauty, and therefore carried herself nonchalantly, which only made her more attractive.) In our downtime Chevy loved nothing more than to play Scrabble. To my frustration, he and Steve were much better at it than me. I got sick of losing. So during one game, while Steve was deliberating on his next move, to make Chevy laugh, I very classily passed Steve a handwritten note that read, “I will let you ball my wife Nancy for an E or a Q.”
My first experience shooting a movie was a relatively happy one, even though Chevy and John Landis had a testy, somewhat combative relationship, a carryover from their collaboration on Spies Like Us. I saw them butt heads more than a few times. But in a way, I think, my presence helped defuse the tension. I’d had a similar effect as the new guy in the cast of SCTV. Though the SCTV-ers were all old friends, by 1982 they were getting on each other’s nerves more frequently. (What’s that old expression about what familiarity breeds?) Yet all it took was the presence of a new person—“Mr. Litmus Paper,” Andrea Martin called me—to put them on their best behavior. Same deal with Chevy and John—neither guy wanted to be seen as the jerk in front of Impressionable Li’l Marty on his first picture.
And I have to give John credit for fighting for me when the studio behind the film, Orion, resisted some of my more unusual flights of unscripted fancy. Whereas Steve and Chevy’s characters, Lucky Day and Dusty Bottoms, were confident in their stardom, my former child star character, Little Neddie Nederlander, was still stumbling on his adult legs like a wobbly foal. I improvised a scene in which, in a misguided attempt to impress the village children, Ned tells how, as a boy, he met the great silent-screen actress Dorothy Gish: “And she looked me in the eyes, and she said, ‘Young man, you have got it!’ Dorothy Gish! It’s a true story!”
The Orion people definitely didn’t want this scene in the movie. They felt it was too improvisational and too far over people’s heads—and granted, there was some deliberate SCTV-style insider silliness going on. Ned wouldn’t have been big enough to meet the more famous Gish sister, Lillian, I thought; he’d only have met Dorothy. But John put his foot down, and the scene stayed. Another of my favorite lines in that movie was “Sew, very old one! Sew like the wind!”—Ned’s rallying cry to an elderly Mexican woman in the movie’s climactic scene, where the whole town uses its sewing skills to vanquish the villain, El Guapo.
Chevy was someone who loved to push his comedy as far as he could. Three years after ¡Three Amigos!, he and I were seated next to each other at an American Film Institute tribute to Gregory Peck. At one point Charlton Heston stood up at his table and delivered a characteristically windy, bombastic toast that concluded with the words, “I guess you could say, Greg, that I’ve been one lucky guy.” To which Chevy boomed out at high volume, still looking down and cutting his steak, “I’ll say!”
No one knew where the crack had come from, including Heston, who glanced around the room, rattled, while Chevy calmly went on cutting his meat. That same evening, Chevy spotted Mary Hart of Entertainment Tonight way off in a corner of the room interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor. Palming a roll in his hand like a baseball, he asked me sincerely, “I wonder how far a human can actually hurl a baguette?” He then stood up, threw it with all his might, and, with jaw-dropping accuracy, beaned Hart square on the noggin. Even the generally unflappable Chevy was stunned. He quickly lowered himself back into his seat like a naughty schoolkid hoping not to be caught by the teacher.
I was the target of Chevy’s penchant for mischief on the night of the ¡Three Amigos! premiere in December 1986, with Steve complicit in his scheme. Chevy told me that the studio wanted us to show up for the big gala in our complete mariachi costumes: a great red-carpet visual, to be sure. So, that night, Nancy was all dolled up, looking fantastic, and I was compliantly dressed in my amigo outfit, my bedazzled sombrero tucked under my arm. The limo had just arrived at our house, and we were about to get in, when I heard the phone in our house ring. It was Chevy: “Marty! Don’t wear the costume! Wear a tuxedo! I’m so sorry, it was a joke.” I hung up, and a second later the phone rang again. It was Steve: “Marty, thank God you’re home! Please don’t wear the mariachi outfit. Get into a tux. I’m so sorry. Chevy and I . . .”
Well before that premiere, I’d already wrapped movie number two, Innerspace. That’s where I met another person with whom I would develop a lasting and close friendship, Steven Spielberg, the picture’s executive producer. He paid me a sort of gestural compliment right off the bat. Though I was something of a hot property at the time, Warner Brothers still wanted me to read for the part. Some actors take this as an affront, believing that once they reach a certain phase of their careers, they should never have to read again. I never saw it that way and still don’t. No matter who you are, you should read for a role, because maybe you’re not right for the material, or maybe the material is not right for you. It’s a pragmatic thing, not a personal one.
Anyway, I went to Amblin, Steven’s production company, to audition for Steven, Joe Dante, the movie’s director, and Mike Finnell, its producer. Shortly after we were introduced, and before I read, Steven got up and said, “We’re good here, I was just leaving,” making it clear he didn’t need to see me audition.
I got the part, and then I got a phone call from Dennis Quaid. He was playing the macho navy pilot who volunteers for a secret government miniaturization project and ends up getting injected into the body of my nerdy grocery-clerk character, Jack Putter. “Hey, dude,” Dennis said, “this is going to be a blast!” It was 1986, and it is embossed upon my brain: the first time anyone had ever called me “dude.” As a Texan, Dennis was way ahead of his time.
Dennis was so right: Innerspace was a blast to make, and it’s also where he met Meg Ryan, who was gangly and nervous and heartbreakingly adorable. She called everyone “Mister”: Mister Spielberg, Mister Dante. And though she was playing Dennis’s love interest, Dennis’s character was stuck inside my body, so I got to kiss her.
When we started that film, Dennis was going out with Lea Thompson and Meg was with Anthony Edwards, but from the very beginning you could tell that Meg and Dennis were infatuated with each other. Then again, every guy on the set was infatuated with Meg, so irresistibly cute was she. Thank heavens for Nan’s wise words, which forever echoed in my head: “If I ever find out that you’ve cheated on me, I won’t say anything during the day, but at night, when you are asleep, so help me God, I will take an empty wine bottle and smash it over your head.” That certainly can get a fella thinking.
So, as of December 1986, I’d completed two major motion pictures in which I had a leading role. Chevy, Steve, and I flew together to New York to triple-host Saturday Night Live, with Randy Newman as the musical guest. (This is what Lorne would call synergy.)
It was far preferable to be on SNL as a conquering hero than as a beleaguered cast member, though it seemed that things had definitely stabilized on the show that season, with Lorne having recruited the talented likes of Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, and Phil Hartman for the cast. I reprised Ed Grimley and got a huge cheer just making my entrance, in a strong sketch in which Jon Lovitz, as the devil, tries to steal Ed’s soul.
I wasn’t just hot, I was ’80s hot: always welcome on Dave Letterman’s couch, my calendar chockablock with movie work, my hair tousled and poufy, my wardrobe a succession of boxy, big-shouldered blazers and dress shirts worn with the top button buttoned—what scholars of ’80s fashion call the “air tie.” (See also Winwood, Steve, and Bolton, Michael.) And in my next movie, I was playing the handsome romantic lead!
The year 1987 began with me filming Cross My Heart, a romantic comedy centered around a third date, the one in which, if all goes well, a couple is supposed to have sex. JoBeth Williams was originally supposed to play opposite me, but she got pregnant, so Annette O’Toole was recast in the role. Talk about ’80s hot: Annette was ravishingly beautiful, and the script called for nude scenes. I was determined to get in shape for my role, so I enlisted the services of Dan Isaacson, the Hollywood trainer who had whipped John Travolta into glisteningly chiseled perfection for Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever.
I was still filming Innerspace when I started training for Cross My Heart. Nancy would walk into the living room at night to find me working up a sweat on the exercise bike I’d installed there. “God forbid you’d have done this for me!” she joked. “All these years I’ve had to live with a shell-less turtle, and they get Buffed Boy.”
Cross My Heart marked the only time I had the articulated abs and sexily hollowed cheeks of the truly pumped up. Dennis Miller ran into me and said, “Heeey, Marty, I hear you’ve gone all Piscopo on us!” I wouldn’t go that far, but I got as buff as this particular five-foot-seven frame will ever allow.
Cross My Heart was also the closest I would ever get to knowing what it is like to shoot a porno. There were days when I would literally wake up, shower, have my coffee, kiss my wife and kids good-bye, drive to the set, and then take off all of my clothes to spend hours naked in bed with Annette. Then I’d come home and want to talk about work. I’d say, “Jesus, Nan, it was so weird, I had to tweak Annette’s nipples in a scene today, and then—”
Nancy would cut me off. “Okay. You know what?” she’d say, hands up in front of her face. “We’re not doing this. I can’t hear about your workday and the hardships of you having to tweak Annette’s nipples.”
“But baby . . . ,” I’d plead as she got up and stormed out of the room. Point taken.
Believe it or not, I had a nudity clause in my contract. In my Canadian modesty, I did not want the world to see the Marty member. Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and directed Body Heat and The Big Chill, was the producer of Cross My Heart, and there came a point when he and I got into a heated discussion in my trailer, because they’d added a scene in which my butt would be shown. That I didn’t mind, but I minded that, of necessity, the crew positioned on the other side of me would get an unobstructed view of my penis.
Larry tried to reason with me. “We have no intention of showing your penis. After all, we’d like the film to make money,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but people like Jan, my hairdresser—she’s gonna see my dick.”
“Fine,” Larry said. “We can rig it.”
And we amicably reached a compromise wherein they rigged up some kind of sock that kept my genitalia covered while the rest of me was exposed. A big sock, I might add. Really big, as the late Ed Sullivan used to say. Like, the kind you hang on the mantel on Christmas Eve.
Filmmaking is a strange kind of work, in that for two or three months, you’re very intensively and intimately working with a group of people over long, long hours, and you get to know everything about everybody—and then, once the filming’s over, you never see most of these people again. This serves the libidinous and affair-minded well, but it’s hard on friendships. After working with Larry Kasdan, and successfully navigating this ridiculous situation with him, I made a mental note to myself that I never wanted to lose this guy from my life. Happily, he and I have been close friends ever since. And he has still never seen my penis.
My awesome ’80s hotness did not, alas, translate into boffo box office. None of those three films, ¡Three Amigos!, Innerspace, and Cross My Heart, did particularly well financially. I think Innerspace was the biggest surprise in this regard. It had tested through the roof, as they say in the trades, and it got strong advance reviews. For heaven’s sake, Gene Shalit declared unequivocally on Today that “Inner . . . is a winner!”
On the eve of Innerspace’s release, I was called in on short notice to appear in a video with Rod Stewart for his cover of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” which appeared on the movie’s sound track. It was then—on the set of that video, flanked by Rod and some beautiful models, in as ’80s a tableau as I’d ever inhabit—that I allowed myself a little moment of excitement: This is going to be fun, to be in a colossal hit.
But the movies didn’t open big, and my days as a leading man were numbered. I was disappointed, of course, but I can’t honestly say I was devastated. This was partly a matter of my innate Canadian suspicion of massive success—Oh, it’s probably not gonna work out anyway, eh?—and partly because the takeaway from these experiences was never “Marty can’t act.” I mean, Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review of Cross My Heart, came right out and said, “Martin Short makes a delightful leading man even when there’s little for him to do.” Critics were if anything overly generous toward me. What I came to understand is that critical favor, talent, and tenacity are only part of the formula for a hit. You also need luck and good timing. Today, ¡Three Amigos! is on several “100 Funniest Movies of All Time” lists, and young adults accost me all the time to tell me how much they love Innerspace. I say to them, “Where were you when these movies opened?” And then it occurs to me: Oh, that’s right. You were lying on your back in a crib. It wasn’t until these pictures took on a second life on cable and DVD that they became quote-unquote classics.
As it happened, the fourth of my leading-man movies of the ’80s, Three Fugitives, did decently at the box office, although the critical reaction was mixed. Personally, I have warm feelings about that picture, and I adored working with its French writer-director, Francis Veber, who is a master of cinematic physical comedy. The movie was an adaptation of a French-language film that Veber had done with Gérard Depardieu.
Three Fugitives was especially memorable for me in that it gave me the chance to work with that lovable, crazy lug of a nutball named Nick Nolte. With a voice that sounded like a rusted hinge on a heavy old door, Nick played a just-sprung convict who is taken hostage at a bank by a bumbling, desperate schlemiel—you guessed it, me—who has resorted to crime to raise money for the medical care of his mute little daughter.
I had never before met Nick. It was my understanding that, while he’d had his struggles with booze and other substances, he was currently on the wagon, and had been for many months. We were introduced at a dinner party held by Lauren Shuler Donner, the executive producer of the film, and her director husband, Dick Donner. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio head of Disney, whose Touchstone division was producing the film, was also there with his wife, Marilyn. It was all a little nerve-racking: we two leads, having never met, sitting there on display for the powers that be. A butler came over and said, “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Short?”
Because of the weird pressure of the night, I really wanted a drink. But, mindful of Nick, I said, “A Perrier, please.” Then the butler said, “Mr. Nolte?” And Nick said, “I’ll have a triple vodka and Seven.” Well, that night, Nick proceeded to triple, or maybe more than triple, his triple vodka and Seven. He fell right off the wagon; he too was a bundle of nerves over this dinner. At one point he went silent at the table for a long stretch before suddenly turning to Nancy and proclaiming in a loud voice, “I like to salt my food. Do you like to salt your food? A lot of people start judging you when you start salting your food—like the manipulative assholes they are. Do you ever find that?”
He proceeded to pour about half a shaker’s worth of salt on his branzino before again falling into a prolonged silence—a silence that, this time, everyone else at the table, momentarily stunned, joined him in. About fifteen minutes later, by which time everyone but Nick was back in convivial conversation, he abruptly stood up, rising to his full height, and loudly inquired to no one in particular, “Do you ever find that, like, you get the feeling that, like, you walk in a room—or you’re in a moment, and—aaaah, fuck it!” And down he sat again. I could see the concern on Jeffrey Katzenberg’s face: We’ve got $60 million going into this one. Good lord . . .
Somehow the movie did get made. We shot it up in Tacoma. I grew really fond of Nick, who was wild but dear. He’d always want me to have a drink with him after we’d wrapped for the day. The first time he asked, I said, “Absolutely!” and hurried back to my trailer to get changed. Suddenly Nick was pounding on my trailer door, saying, “What are you doing? Don’t get changed. Be an actor. Actors drink in their wardrobe.”
“But Nick, the wardrobe people want to go home,” I protested.
“What are you talking about? They’re in my trailer, drinking.”
Nick also had great stories about working with Katharine Hepburn on Grace Quigley, one of the last films she ever made. He was frank about having been strung out on cocaine at the time, and he remembered a moment in which he sat, whacked out and glazed, while Hepburn turned to the movie’s director, Anthony Harvey, and said, “Look at him, Tony! Look at him! There’s no one fucking there!”
Hepburn, Nick told me, took pity upon him, saying, “Nick, I think I can help you. Spencer would get like this, too. He’d go on these tirades, but at least he had the decency to wait until he’d finished working. But I can get you some Thorazine!”
Nick politely declined her offer. “That’s very kind of you, Katie,” he told her, “but I’ll be fine.” When Hepburn left, someone in the trailer declared, “Nick, I can get you some black beauties,” the preferred pick-me-up of long-haul truckers, a combo of speed and dextroamphetamine. Quickly perking up, Nick said, “Those I’ll take.”
The most poignant thing about Nick during Three Fugitives was that he set a bedtime for himself of 8:00 p.m. I found this astonishing. “When do you get up?” I asked.
“Around three thirty in the morning,” he said.
“And what do you do at that hour, Nick?”
“I take a long bath.”
“And then what?”
“Well, I try to read, but I get kinda tired.”
“So why do you go to bed at eight, then, Nick?”
“To avoid those dangerous hours, buddy.”
There was a scene in Three Fugitives in which Nick had to wear hospital scrubs, and that became his basic look, I think, for years thereafter. Circa 2005, more than fifteen years after we’d worked together, I was at the Toronto Film Festival, staying at the Four Seasons, when who should walk into the elevator but Nick Nolte—in hospital scrubs. Not having noticed me, he took his place at the front. I had, during our time on Three Fugitives, developed a dead-on impression of him. In my most ravaged, guttural Nolte voice, I croaked, “I hear Nick Nolte’s a fuckin’ asshole.”
Nick didn’t know it was me, and in hindsight, he might very well have turned around and punched me in the face. Arguably, he should have. But he merely pivoted partway, not even bothering to look back, and said resignedly in his most ravaged, guttural Nolte voice, “I don’t disagree.”
I crammed one other movie into the 1980s, Chris Guest’s first as a director, The Big Picture. More conventional than his later mockumentaries, it was about a young screenwriter, played by Kevin Bacon, whose promising script and life get mangled by the Hollywood machine. I played a small part as his character’s agent, Neil Sussman. I took no salary and no billing. The salary part I don’t regret, because Chris’s movies are tiny-budget labors of love. But it was foolish of me not to take billing. It just happened to be a cool thing to do in movies at the time: the unbilled cameo.
Chris loves the idea of characters who are sexually ambiguous, or whose sexuality is ambiguous only to them. So Neil was developed as this in-between figure, neither gay nor straight but definitely vain, full of himself, and also full of show business bullpoo. Here’s how Neil pitched his agenty woo to Kevin’s character:
This is the thing: If you decide to sign with me, you’re gonna get more than an agent. You’re gonna get (holding up four fingers) three people. You’re gonna get an agent, a mother, a father, a shoulder to cry on, someone who knows this business inside and out. And if anyone ever tries to cross you? I’ll grab them by the balls, and squeeze till they’re dead.
Chris is very loose in granting his actors leeway to mess with the dialogue, but very detail-oriented in developing his characters’ looks. My hair was longish then, so we had it curled and tinted orange. Chris really wanted Neil to look like someone who had obviously undergone a really bad face-lift, so the makeup people taped my face back as far as they could, fastening the tape at my temples and covering it with my tufted hair. It was far from comfortable, and by the end of each shooting day, after several takes, I had huge welts on the sides of my face, like I’d been in a fight.
A while afterward, Chris and I were discussing Neil, and he was mad at himself for having blown an opportunity to work in an extra joke. He should have had me appear in my first scene with conspicuous bags under my eyes, he explained. And then, the next time I appeared, the eye bags would be gone. And here’s the key Chris Guest part: none of this would ever be explained. Like the SCTV cast, Chris loves subtlety—layers upon layers of texture and micro-jokes that people will either pick up on or not. This is why, over several films, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara have worked so well and so instinctively with him.
A fringe benefit of working with and becoming friends with Chris was getting to know his extended family, which included not only his very cool wife, Jamie Lee Curtis, but also her father, Tony Curtis, another big figure from my youth—Some Like It Hot, Spartacus, Sweet Smell of Success—and therefore an exciting person to see in the flesh.
I met Tony at a birthday party that Chris and Jamie were having for one of their kids. I was impressed by the sheer Tony Curtis–ness of him: he still had the dark hair then, not the Jor-El pompadour he would later adopt, and he just looked so exactly like himself, if you know what I mean.
But the person most impressed by Tony was my five-year-old daughter, Katherine. She had no idea who he was, but he fussed over her at the party and even got out his paints to do a quick sketch of her, which he presented to Katherine as a gift. (Like the other big Tony of my youth, Bennett, Curtis had a major sideline as a painter.) Tony clearly made quite the impression on my little girl. As we were leaving the party and saying our good-byes, Katherine loudly asked him, “Mr. Curtis—would you like to have my phone number?”
On cue, a dozen voices at the party cried out, “Boy, Tony, you still got it!”
And the next day, upon returning from some outing, we saw the light flashing on our answering machine. Nancy pressed play: “Hello, Katherine, this is Tony Curtis, calling to say what a pleasure it was to meet you yesterday.” Needless to say, we kept that one for a while.
Speaking of people with whom I was obsessed as a youth: in this same period, I finally met Sammy Davis Jr. He was playing a concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Frank Sinatra, so Nancy and I made a date with the Crystals, Billy and Janice, to see the show. It was the Shorts’ responsibility to provide the champagne for the limo ride, and the Crystals’ to provide the caviar. I can still see a beaming Billy emerging from their house with an elaborate platter weighted down by a huge tin and all the accoutrements: toast points, hard-boiled eggs, capers, and so forth.
Sammy did the first set, Frank did the second, and at the end they teamed up to perform a few songs together. At intermission, after Sammy’s set, Billy went backstage to visit Sammy, who he’d gotten to know in his pre-SNL days, when he opened for Sammy in Las Vegas. (It was during that period, working up close to the legend, that Billy mastered his impeccable Davis impersonation.) As Sinatra was about to begin his set, Billy rejoined us and excitedly whispered, “Sammy and Altovise are having a party at their house tonight, and they’ve invited us!” My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t believe that the same man I’d seen at fifteen in the Broadway show Golden Boy (and whose mannerisms I’d appropriated in albino whiteface for Jackie Rogers Jr.) would soon be welcoming me into his home.
When we arrived at Sammy’s house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills—which was immediately next door to Pickfair, the legendary fifty-six-acre estate once owned by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford—the first thing that struck me was that every square inch of every wall was covered in show-business memorabilia: Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz, sheet music from Fred Astaire musicals, and framed pictures of everyone from Frank and Dino to JFK and Richard Nixon. By the swimming pool was a giant statue of Maurice Evans as Dr. Zaius from the original Planet of the Apes movie. And the fireplace had been glassed-in and turned into an aquarium, with tropical fish swimming in it. How strange, I thought. Also, Sammy had seemingly invited all the Bobbys from 1970s Hollywood: Bobby Culp, Bobby Blake, and I want to say Bobby Vaughn.
Sammy was a magnanimous host and tour guide, leading us around while clutching an unlit cigarette in one hand and an empty cognac glass in the other. He explained to us that the cigs and booze had been his traditional rewards after a performance, but that he needed to avoid them now. “But the props still make me feel comfortable, man,” he said. In retrospect, I think Sammy might have known that he was not long for the world. He died within a year of our visit, and that night he told us that he’d been nervous before the concert because he had recently undergone hip-replacement surgery; a lifelong dancer, he was new to relying solely on his singing voice in performance.
At one point Sammy led us to his upstairs study, away from the rest of the party. There were just the Shorts, the Crystals, Sammy, and Heinrich Himmler’s elaborately engraved waist gun on the wall above us in a glass case. (I guess Sammy, famously a proud Jewish convert, cherished the idea of disarming Hitler’s pit bull.) I took the opportunity to tell Sammy about how I’d seen him on Broadway in Golden Boy as a teen, and how formative an experience it had been for me.
His expression turned quizzical at this confession. “I have mixed feelings about that time, man,” he said, “because that was the old me, the me that I’m not necessarily proud of.” Billy and I discussed these words afterward and deduced that Sammy was alluding to his well-documented substance-abuse issues. A few days later I related this story of our heart-to-heart with Sammy to Paul Shaffer. That night I turned on the Letterman show, and there was Paul on TV saying, “Dave, hey, I’m so sorry about my past behavior. I feel terrible about the old me, the me that I’m not necessarily proud of.” I made a mental note: Never share anything with Paul.
One more thing about Sammy. As we two couples were taking our leave, I somehow ended up alone with Sammy in the hallway leading to his front door: just the two of us in a narrow corridor. “Lay a little of the dance on me,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, and told him so.
“You know, man,” he said, “the Grimley thing.”
And I, demonstrating the presence of those balls of steel that John Candy long ago ascribed to me, replied, “I’ll do the dance if you sing that soaring passage from that Leslie Bricusse song”—“Tomorrow,” an amazing song written by Bricusse and Anthony Newley that I had never heard until the concert that night. The thing about Sammy was that, to my generation, he became such a joke for a while, but then you’d go see him perform and realize, Oh, yeah, he’s massively talented—that’s how he got famous in the first place. Sammy obligingly broke into song—“Tomorrow is the looong and lonely moment . . . when I look the future in the eye!”—and I simultaneously went into my ecstatic Ed dance.
It was at this moment that Billy, wondering what the hell was taking me so long, appeared in the doorway. “Boy,” he said to Sammy and me, “it’s hard to get you people to do what you do, isn’t it?”
But truly, my ultimate childhood-fantasy realization came when I did The Tonight Show while Johnny Carson was still hosting it. Moronically, I had resisted going on the Carson show for a while, despite being offered opportunities. There was a feeling in the air during the 1980s that maybe it wasn’t hip to do Johnny anymore, especially with Dave Letterman catching fire. Besides, Dave and I had developed such an easy rapport, and Paul Shaffer was my good buddy. And finally, if I was being honest with myself, the idea of sitting in the chair next to Johnny Carson scared the hell out of me.
However, by the later part of the decade, the rumors were growing stronger that Johnny was soon to retire, and I realized how absurd my resistance was. What’s more, I didn’t have to go the hard-knock route that comedians from Drew Carey to Jerry Seinfeld had taken, where you did your five minutes of stand-up, and if Johnny liked you, he might wave you over to take a seat on the couch. I was invited on in mid-career as a successful actor, prebooked in couch class, with extra legroom.
So on January 7, 1988, I finally did Carson, ready for my moment with the great man. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would be following, and therefore sitting next to, one of the true legends of the Hollywood screen, Bette Davis. Bette was visibly unwell at that point—she’d suffered strokes and been ill with breast cancer, and would live only a year and a half further. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. And yet she was totally styling, decked out in a bold, nautically striped skirt suit, white gloves, and a wide-brimmed white hat.
And she was completely tough: fiery, witty, on the ball, and, her deteriorating health notwithstanding, smoking like a chimney. At one point, before I went out, I was watching from the green room as they came back from a commercial. Johnny, a smoker himself, was adept at sneaking a last-minute puff before the show resumed, but this time the camera caught him hurriedly stubbing out his cigarette while Bette sat there eyeballing him, proudly puffing away. “One thing about you and me, Johnny,” she said, “we both love to smoke!”
“Oh, I know, Bette,” Johnny guiltily responded. “But . . . but it’s so bad for you.”
“Oh, I suppose,” Bette responded. “But to be told not to! As if we were little children.” No one was going to bully that old dame.
The day before the taping, when I received word that I would be following Bette, I told my friend Rob Reiner about the situation. Rob said, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you do Bette Davis to Bette Davis.” So the very first thing I did after walking out and taking my seat was to turn to Bette and say, “And what a pleaszh-ah to meet you!”
Johnny and Ed McMahon immediately broke up, and Johnny even said, “You had the nerve to come out and do her right away!” But clearly, Bette didn’t “get” my impression. She had no idea who I was. As far as she knew, I was some weirdo talking in his normal speaking voice.
The good news is that Johnny took to me immediately. He had the same insane Jerry Lewis obsession that I do, and he loved my Jerry—it got genuine, eyes-watering laughs out of him, which was tremendously gratifying in the moment and tremendously moving to consider now. As I got looser and looser, emboldened by Johnny’s goading and enthusiasm, I turned to Bette and did a Jerry-style startle-take: “Yeah, John, howyadoin’, and—BETTE!” More big laughs from Johnny, Ed, and the studio audience. But nothing from the impassive Miss Davis.
A little later in my segment, I tried a different tack, going Ed Grimley on her: “If I had known you were going to be here—you are so decent. I suppose your movies aren’t the best in the world? Give me a break! Pleasure to meet you.” I extended my hand. Very reluctantly and limply—as if I had extended a line-caught fluke in her direction—she shook it.
Johnny kept encouraging me to do impressions, so I ran through David Steinberg, Paul Simon, Robin Williams, Doug Henning (Johnny, incredulously: “Doug Henning? Is there a big call for that?”), and Gary Cooper. Finally, from my other side, I heard Bette pipe up, “Do you do me?”
Well, I’d already done her, so to speak, minutes ago, and she hadn’t picked up on it. So I replied, once again in my most declamatory, high-volume, All About Eve voice, “Well, I mean, you ahn’t that easy to do!”
Bette still had no clue that I was doing her. “Then we’ll skip it!” she said.
Or maybe Bette was slyer than any of us realized, and she was pulling the legs of us all. She was still unbelievably sharp, and I wouldn’t put it past her. A lot of people commented to me afterward that they didn’t think Bette should have been out in public, looking as emaciated as she did. But you know what? She did a full three segments on the show, killed in each one, and probably went out to the Ivy afterward for a couple of margaritas and a great dinner. Good for her! I hope I’m in such fine fettle for Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon when I’m eighty. Hell, I’ll even wear Bette’s outfit from that night, provided JCPenney is still in business.
I made up for lost time with Johnny, appearing six more times on The Tonight Show before his 1992 retirement. The final appearance was five shows before Bette Midler sat on the piano and sang “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” as he teared up. (Carson’s very last show was a guestless farewell in which he showed old clips.) At the end of one of my later appearances, after the show was over, Johnny leaned in and said, “Next time you come, Alex and I would love to take you to dinner.” (Alexis was his fourth and final wife.) That was a bit of a whoa, but the dinner never happened, which is probably just as well, because Johnny, away from his NBC throne, was known to be a different person socially, very reserved, and Nancy and I would have been knotted up with anxiety the whole time.
I did see Johnny once, though, in a supposedly more relaxed setting: a stag poker night. In L.A. in the 1980s, the movie producer Dan Melnick convened a monthly poker game at his house with some pretty heavy regulars, among them Johnny, Chevy, Steve, Barry Diller, Neil Simon, and Carl Reiner. Steve got me in for one of the nights. I was the poorest and least accomplished person there, but Steve reassured me, “The most anyone has ever lost is six hundred dollars, and you just might win six hundred.”
Within fifteen minutes at the table, I had lost $1,800. I panicked and basically gave up at that point. I figured that if I merely lost the ante, I wouldn’t have to go home and announce to the family that the house was for sale. Even with four aces, I’d fold.
We took a break for dinner, an elaborate spread prepared by Melnick’s cook. I got to sit next to Johnny. At one point, Steve said something funny, I can’t remember what, and it cracked me up. As I laughed, a little lump of mashed potatoes flew out of my mouth. But I had no idea where it had landed. My eyes quickly scanned the table in desperation to see where the spuds had gone, finally locating them . . . on top of Johnny Carson’s hand.
I didn’t know what to say or do. Fortunately, Johnny didn’t seem to notice. I looked away for a moment and then looked back. The potatoes on his hand were gone. Had he eaten them himself? If so, it was an honor and privilege to pre-chew Johnny Carson’s food for him.