Playing Franck in Father of the Bride and its 1995 sequel was a riot—who wouldn’t want to be paid to spend time hanging around with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton while they do most of the work? During the shooting of the first Father, in 1991, the three of us would scurry off to Diane’s trailer between setups to play cards. I hadn’t known Diane before, and quickly discovered that being around her was exactly how I’d hoped it would be when I first fell for her in Annie Hall. No, actually, it was better—Diane is smarter and more captivating company than Annie. When she was called to the set, leaving Steve and me behind, we looked at each other, simultaneously placed our hands over our hearts, and went, “Ahhhh.” Now, perhaps Steve was having trouble digesting the corned beef sandwich he’d just eaten, but me? I was smitten.
That’s the effect that Diane has on the fellas. And she’s so guilelessly funny, which only makes her more endearing. At the time we were making Father of the Bride Part II together, the O. J. Simpson trial was in full swing on television, replete with its ridiculous cast of characters—Johnnie Cochran, Kato Kaelin, Chris Darden, Marcia Clark—and Diane was riveted. In a typically noisy makeup trailer, she was straining to hear every word of the trial on TV above the din of hair dryers, idle gossip, and me doing comic bits for Steve’s amusement. Unable, due to my chronic loudness and these other factors, to hear the proceedings in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom, Diane turned to me in exasperation and said, “Hey, man, if you don’t shut your mouth, I’m gonna suck your dick!”
Steve and I went completely hysterical. Then Steve calmly said, “Diane, just to be clear: When you threaten someone with the words ‘I’m gonna suck your dick,’ it’s not as strong a threat as you think it is. In many countries, sucking a dick is considered a reward.”
The first time I saw Diane in person was in 1983, when Nancy and I were dining in a beautiful restaurant in Toronto called Fenton’s. She and Mel Gibson, who were in town filming the movie Mrs. Soffel, were seated right next to us. We were so excited that Nan and I barely spoke a word to each other for fear that we might miss a second of their conversation. After about fifteen minutes of us pretending not to be eavesdropping, I asked Nan to pass the rolls, only to be met with a stern “Shhhh!” Years later, I told Diane this story and kidded her that, while I was listening in, I heard her say to Mel, “What are we going to do about all those Jews?”
As fun as the Father of the Bride movies were to make, an uncomfortable reality was setting in: While those two movies were hits, my role in them was secondary. As for movies in which I was the lead or co-lead, my hitless streak from the late 1980s continued right into the ’90s, with Pure Luck, costarring Danny Glover, and Captain Ron, costarring Kurt Russell.
Another picture I did, Clifford, fell victim to the whims of the industry: we made it in 1990, with my friend and frequent SCTV co-conspirator Paul Flaherty directing, but the studio behind it, Orion, folded, and the movie didn’t receive a theatrical release until 1994 (and even then a pathetically halfhearted one). Also, critics, apart from a few hip ones, hated it. Now granted, its central premise—me, at the age of forty, playing a prepubescent ten-year-old boy with an otherworldly affect—made Clifford a very strange beast indeed. Clifford—the boy in question—was obsessed with dinosaurs and desperate to visit a theme park called Dinosaur World; he carried on his person at all times a plastic dinosaur action figure that he called Stephan, to which he confided his innermost thoughts.
To achieve a suitably creepy man-boy look, the makeup people lightened my hair a few shades and gave me a prep-school side parting, while wardrobe dressed me like a little Etonian, in a dark blazer accented by a series of rep ties and tennis sweaters. Also, because I was wearing shorts throughout the movie, I was told to apply Nair, the hair-removal product, to my legs the night before the first day of shooting, so that they would be optimally little-boy hairless. Of course I forgot to do that, so when I arrived in the makeup and hair trailer that first day, I suggested to the movie’s hairdresser, Christine Lee, and her young female assistant, who I had never before met, that they Nair my legs while I was getting into makeup—just to save time and keep everyone on the set from waiting.
I quickly took off my pants, stripping down to my boxers, and propped my legs up on the counter. As I chatted away with my makeup-artist friend John Elliot, the two women spread Nair lotion all over my legs, from thigh to ankle, and started methodically rubbing and rubbing and rubbing the hair off. Ten minutes later, when they had finished and left the trailer to wash out the towels, I looked down to realize, to my mortification, that my penis had been out and exposed the whole time, staring the poor ladies in the face. It took me weeks to have enough nerve to broach the subject with Christine.
“Hey, so, uh,” I said. “You know . . . uh, regarding that first day when you were Nairing my legs: Were you aware that my penis was out of my underwear?”
Christine didn’t flinch. “I sure was,” she said. “And if I had known you then like I know you now, I would’ve shoved that thing back in.”
I spent the bulk of Clifford tormenting one of the funniest actors I’ve worked with, Charles Grodin, who played the boy’s uncle, and smaller amounts of time tormenting the other talented members of the cast, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Kind, and Dabney Coleman. I’m quite fond of this daring, adventurous little picture, and it always makes me laugh when I’m flipping TV channels and there it is. But at the time no one would give Clifford a fair hearing. Roger Ebert memorably wrote of it, “I’d love to hear a symposium of veteran producers, marketing guys, and exhibitors discuss this film. It’s not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe. The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again. I hope.”
Even the act of publicizing the film proved tortuous and unprecedentedly weird. While I was in a limo in New York City, en route to do the Letterman show to promote Clifford, I received a phone call from the actor Tony Randall on the car’s phone (this was before everyone had a cell phone). First of all, I’d never met Tony, so how on earth did he have the car’s phone number? Anyway, the reason he was calling was that he had reached out to me a few weeks earlier about starring in the Georges Feydeau play A Flea in Her Ear, which he was hoping to mount with the theater company he’d founded, the National Actors Theatre. I wasn’t interested, and politely told Tony I would have to pass on his kind offer.
Tony went quiet for a second. I could tell that he wasn’t pleased. “Martin, may I tell you something?” he said in that officious Tony Randall way, sounding very much like the characters he’d played in The Odd Couple and those old Rock Hudson–Doris Day movies.
“Sure, Tony, what is it?”
“You mustn’t make silly movies,” Tony declared. “That’s what I did, and it cost me dearly.” Great, I thought, now I’m being lectured.
“For you to have come to Broad-way,” he continued, “would not have hurt you at all. And I suppose your management tells you you’re hot. But let me tell you something, dear boy. That’s how we lost Marlon. And we never got him back.”
(Now, which Marlon could he have meant: Brando, or Marlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom?)
“Well, thanks for the advice, Tony,” I said, somewhat coldly. “So great chatting with you, it really was.” I then hit the END button on the phone and, while looking at it, said, “Go fuck yourself, you hot bag of gas!” Then I decided to call Nancy to see if she had any idea how Tony had found me in the limo. As I was jabbing at buttons, trying to reach Nan, I suddenly heard Tony’s voice booming through the receiver with alarm: “Martin! Martin!” To my shock and horror, I realized that I hadn’t hit the END button; I’d hit the SEND button by mistake, and Tony had heard every word. That night, to Dave Letterman, before his studio and viewing audiences, I told the Tony Randall Anecdote verbatim. Months later I finally met Tony in person—at the Tony Awards, funnily enough—and with a big grin on his face he said, “I saw you on Letterman trying to blame the movie Clifford on me.” The “hot bag of gas” got the last laugh, as well he should have.
Ah, 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.
Well, 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.”
Suffice 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.
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.
What 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!”
Jiminy 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.’”
Over the course of the program’s run, Jiminy had his way with Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Stewart, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, John McEnroe, Goldie Hawn, Ben Stiller, and Ice Cube (Jiminy: “I love Rex Harrison, he was one of the first rappers”), among many others. All of this with me now in my fifties. It was welcome reassurance that the well of comic invention had not run dry.
Eugene Levy has said that Jiminy is my greatest creation, which, coming from my oldest and dearest friend, is an especially moving compliment. Not that Jiminy was particularly reverent toward Eugene. He pronounced his last name incorrectly on Primetime Glick (as “LEE-vy” rather than “LEH-vy”) and greeted him by declaring with an accusatory pointed finger, “You’re not exactly who I assumed you’d be.” The interview carried on for a couple more minutes, with Eugene holding forth on some subject, when Jiminy brusquely interjected, “Gabe Kaplan! From Welcome Back, Kotter! That’s who I was hoping you would be!”