I Must Say

Tom Hanks had this habit with Nancy. We’d all be gathered somewhere, being loud and boisterous—at a dinner party, say, or on vacation—and he would ask her, “Don’t you ever get tired of laughing at Marty’s jokes?”

And Nancy would always say, “No, I actually don’t.” And it was true. Nancy was the opposite of the stereotypically obeisant show-business wife, but she loved to laugh, and she never wearied of hearing the same jokes (and I mean the same jokes) time after time. Laughter was central to our relationship. And here’s the other really important point: Nan was hysterically funny herself. Way back in 1974, when we first hung out together at the jazz club with Paul Shaffer and Mary Ann McDonald, we were amazed to discover how similar our senses of humor were. By the time we were parents and longtime marrieds, we’d become comfortably complementary.

To say being here tonight for Diane is a thrill . . . would be something I’ve just read off the teleprompter.

Actually, it’s more than a thrill. It’s an obligation.

Diane Hussein Keaton has been responsible for some of the most memorable performances of the past thirty-five years. Although, right now, I’m drawing a blank.

On the cab ride here tonight—’cause they wouldn’t send a car—I was thinking about the first time I ever saw Diane in person. It was on Broadway, in the musical Hair. I remember sitting there in the second row. Just me and my binoculars. And I remember being disappointed because Diane had refused to accept the fifty-dollar bonus given to any performer willing to get naked. Times change. Now, for fifty bucks, Diane will give you a massage with a happy ending.

I don’t think I’m being indelicate here when I say that when you work with Diane, you fall madly in love with her. And I’ll be honest: I once made a move on Diane, and she was very responsive. But unfortunately, at the last minute, she was able to chew through the duct tape.

And when we watch Diane with her children—those of us who know Diane, who love Diane—we are all struck with the same thought: What’s with all the hitting?

The speech went over well with the audience that night, and working on it all day had been a welcome, cathartic diversion from the unsettling news I had received earlier that afternoon. Around two p.m. my cell phone rang, with the name of Bernie Brillstein, my sainted, salty manager, on the caller ID. I picked up, and Bernie began the call with the words “Confirm or deny: the National Enquirer has a report ready to go that Martin Short and his wife, Nancy, had been to Cedars-Sinai on Wednesday, cancerous mass discovered, the full extent of her illness is not known, blah blah blah.” In all likelihood, someone at or affiliated with Cedars had leaked the information the second we’d walked out the door.

“I’m assuming this is bullshit,” Bernie said.

“It’s not,” I told him.

Bernie sighed. “Fuckin’ life, huh?” he said. “I’m sorry, kid. It’s all going to be all good, you know that. Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Let’s not do anything, Bernie,” I said. “Maybe they’ll have a bit of soul and not print it.”

“Very unlikely,” he said. “Remember, they’re all cunts.”

At the party after the Lincoln Center event, I pulled Steve Martin aside. Earlier I had told him about Nan’s cancer, but now I wanted his advice on what to do re the National Enquirer. “Steve, the Enquirer has a story ready to run on Nan, and—”

At those words alone, Steve went completely white—whiter than normal, which is really saying something. “Those fucking bastards! Those fucking bastards!” he said. “How dare they?” Then, softening, he asked, “How are you?”

I was honest: “I’m hanging on by a thread.” This hit Steve harder than the Enquirer news, because I never say things like that. Everyone’s accustomed to me being the smiley Mr. Positivity of our group. Steve began sobbing in full view of many of the guests, then grabbed his wife’s hand and said, “We’ve gotta go.” He turned to me: “Can I tell Anne?” I told him he could.

Nancy Meyers, who was also at our table, had observed this scene, and walked over to ask what it had been all about. I manufactured an excuse. “Oh, we got to talking about John Candy,” I said. John had died in 1994. “Wow,” she said, understandably confused. “It’s been thirteen years. You’re both still that affected?”

“Well, you know,” I said, “we take it day by day.”

I didn’t know what else to say, but I knew that I had to get back home to Nan as soon as possible. I sent baby Henry on to London alone to see his brother. As I was waiting to board a plane back to L.A., Bernie called. “Well,” he said, “The bad news is, it’s in. The good news is, it’s a nice picture.”

Fuck. I put on a cap and sunglasses like a spy and walked into a magazine shop at JFK to pick up a copy of the Enquirer and peek inside. They didn’t have the full details, but what they did have was accurate.

I didn’t tell Nancy until I was home in person. I’m glad I waited, because she was really upset—first, a major health ordeal, and now this violation.

The good news was that the story kind of went away, an evanescent tabloid nuisance that made an impact upon the Short household but not upon the Enquirer readership. More important, if any friends of ours read or heard of the report, all of them had the decency to pretend that they hadn’t.

Well, actually, the really good news was that Nancy was enjoying a good quality of life even though she was ill with ovarian cancer. Despite the hopeful PET scan in San Diego, the cancer had indeed spread. She underwent two more surgical procedures that spring, performed at Cedars-Sinai by Dr. Ronald Leuchter, one of the best gynecologic oncologists in the business. By coincidence, he too grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and had known my brothers as a boy. In a further coincidence, he had been Gilda’s surgeon when she had ovarian cancer. I chose not to share that particular tidbit with Nan.

Nancy rallied remarkably well from the debilitated state in which she found herself after the surgeries. Then we entered the realm of chemotherapy, hair loss, and regular trips to the doctor to get the latest blood numbers. We learned all about CA-125, the protein used as a biomarker for ovarian cancer detection; an elevated CA-125 level means trouble.

Nancy had all manner of wigs made—short, medium, some of them to be worn with a bandana, so it looked like she was going through different cycles of getting her hair cut and having it grow out. She was careful about which friends she told about her illness; as Nora Ephron, a true student of the gossip’s nature, told her, “You tell one, you tell twenty.”

Nancy’s reticence wasn’t about stigma; she wasn’t ashamed of having cancer. It was mostly a matter of her fundamentally private nature and her wish not to be drawn into heart-to-heart conversations on the subject, for which she had no tolerance. She knew that all manner of acquaintances, no doubt well-intentioned, would queue up to “look after” her, and she wanted no part of it. “Deb,” she told Deb Divine, Eugene Levy’s wife and one of her oldest friends (and one of the few whose help she accepted), “you’ve got to keep the candy-stripe brigade away.”

In staggered stages, Nancy let friends know she was sick. That summer we went as usual to our cottage on Lake Rosseau, for there was no place that she loved better. She powered through her usual routine of kayaking, hiking, bicycling, and tennis. She even decided to take up golf, studying it and practicing her swing obsessively, so that the months of chemo wouldn’t be chalked up as wasted time—a true “Nine Categories Girl” after my own heart.

At one point during that summer we had Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman come up to stay with us for a few days. Nancy, not wanting to worry about keeping a wig on at all times, decided before their arrival that she would let them in on her condition. Now Marc and Scott, as much as we adore them, had put us through a certain degree of strain and agita during Fame Becomes Me. They’d been a couple for thirty years, but in the course of mounting the show, they broke up—and then got back together as soon as the show was finished.

So when Marc and Scott arrived at our place, and Nancy, a serious look on her face, told them, “We have to talk,” Marc was braced for a stern lecture. Marc’s joke is that he was so relieved that Nancy wasn’t angry with him and Scott that he said, “Cancer? Oh, thank god! I was afraid you were mad at me!”

Nan finished her round of six chemotherapies that September at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, to which we’d commuted from the cottage all summer for the treatments. Now it was simply time to wait, and pray for the strength to stay positive. In November, by which time we’d returned to Los Angeles, we went in for a CT/PET scan, and, miracle of miracles, everything was perfect. The scan showed nothing bad, and her CA-125 was down to 15, a healthily low count. Our family had the happiest Christmas 2007 imaginable.

But three months later Nan went in for another CA-125 test, and her number had jumped to 48, which naturally threw our entire family into panic. Why had the number spiked like this? Was it just a fluke, or was it possibly a sign of what her Los Angeles oncologist ominously suggested was “early resistance” to the chemo? Early Resistance, I kept thinking. What a great name for a movie, and what a horrible thing to have to hear your wife’s doctor say.

Yet Nan remained strong, even as I struggled to. She sent me an e-mail during this period:

Hi darling . . . I’m going to my golf tournament today and forgetting about all this. There is nothing we can do anyway. As long as I feel this good I’m going to have fun and enjoy life. If, God forbid, I have to start chemo again in the future, I won’t feel like doing all my sports and I won’t have my energy. In my heart I don’t believe anything is there, but we have to be realistic. The PET scan will tell in April. Keep in mind . . . Sarah Ferguson [her Toronto oncologist] wasn’t alarmed. I feel like she is the only person I want to talk to about all this.

Let’s try to forget about all this until we have to.

I love you baby.

Have faith in me and my amazing ability to persevere!

xx Nan

I was dumbfounded by my wife’s gift for compartmentalization. We were now told to sit tight and wait for another six weeks, at which point they would retest her to see where her CA-125 number was. Had it been me with her condition, having to just wait things out, I would have been paralyzed with anxiety and fear. But not Nan. When David Geffen invited us to join him in early 2008 for a trip to Bora-Bora in the South Pacific, on his boat, Rising Sun, my first thought was, it’s too risky for Nancy to travel all that way. Nancy’s was, who on earth would turn down a private yacht trip to Bora-Bora? So we went, as did Steve and Anne, and had a magnificent time. Nancy laughed and played cards and swam without an apparent care in the world.

When we returned to Los Angeles and she was retested in April, though, the news wasn’t good: her CA-125 number was now 94. The cancer wars were once again the headline on our front page, and a new game plan had to be formulated. We were told definitively that Nancy would never be cured of cancer but that the doctors would attempt to keep it at bay through a series of maintenance chemo infusions to be administered every six weeks.

By early 2009, almost two years after her initial ovarian cancer diagnosis, we found ourselves, amazingly, in a pretty good place. Nancy’s CA-125 number was hovering around a very pleasing-sounding 15; the drugs were doing their job. We went to Steve and Anne’s home in St. Barth’s, in the Caribbean, right after New Year’s, and Nancy was as active as ever. The Martins’ house was a happy place for Nan and me. Usually when we went down, there was a group: not just Steve and Anne, but also Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, or the artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik (yet another married couple). The days unfolded at a leisurely pace. We’d get up to find April already doing her yoga, Eric working on a watercolor, and Steve checking his e-mail with earbuds in his ears (bluegrass, probably). Sometimes Steve and I would play cribbage over our coffee. Or maybe we’d all take a little hike to the beach and back, returning in time for midmorning massages from the masseuse that Steve had brought in. Then there was a big lunch. By three p.m., when the sun wasn’t so strong, we’d go down to Saline Beach for some swimming and bodysurfing. It was a great respite from the grind of real life: a way for the 1 percent to finally have a chance to pamper itself.

Eric created a beautiful painting during that 2009 trip of us all in our bathing suits on the beach: April, Anne, Steve, me, and a couple of others, with Nan perched on a towel in the foreground. We had settled into what seemed like a pleasant remission routine, if that’s not an oxymoron: every six weeks Nancy got an infusion of her maintenance drug, Doxil, got her blood checked, and life went on. This was workable.

I was reminded a lot of how my mother handled her illness, defying the grimmest of prognoses and forging onward, stubbornly unwilling to accept death at the very first moment it came knocking. Nancy was aware of the parallels, too; I had become adept early at keeping loved ones alive by telling their stories. I had regaled her and the kids with so many tales of Olive and C. P. Short, and they had all heard the audiotapes from my childhood so often, that they felt intimately acquainted with my parents, despite never having met them. Even now my middle child, Ollie, will sometimes call me out on my more cutting remarks by saying, “Oh, how typical Chuck is that?” And then break into a perfect Chuck impersonation himself.

Nancy, though she was the antithesis of a spiritual person, found it useful to talk to my mother—to sit on the porch or the balcony off our bedroom and internally converse with Olive. It brought her serenity. But one day in April 2009, I found Nancy crying on the porch. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “I’ve been talking to your mother and asking her for strength, because I’m scared right now.”

Nothing was physically amiss. Nan said she felt fine, with no new symptoms, and she looked great. But she had a sense of unease. Her body knew something and was tipping her off: she was coming out of remission.

When we went every six weeks to get Nancy’s blood work done, I was always the one who received the CA-125 number. That was the system we had worked out: she was the patient, and I was the information coordinator. Right after Nancy’s outburst—which I call an outburst because Nancy rarely betrayed emotion about her sickness—I received the results of her latest test. The number was 20: a significant uptick from the 14.8 six weeks earlier, but still not necessarily terrible news. The doctors said it needed monitoring, but it could be just a fluctuation.

At that point, for the first time on our cancer journey, I made the decision that I was not going to share the CA-125 number with Nancy. So I told her that things were holding steady—a white lie not unlike the one my mother had used to keep me from falling apart as a little boy. I was influenced by that period a year earlier when Nancy’s CA-125 number had shot up to 48. Though I was impressed then by her activeness and sangfroid, she confided to me now that she had hated the six weeks of dreadful anticipation that followed the high reading. “I wish I could have those six weeks back,” she told me, “because if I can’t do anything but wait, why tell me? Why burden me?”

Over the spring and summer of 2009, Nancy’s CA-125 number kept going up, though not precipitously; more like 22, 24, 28. But I never told her. When she asked, I would say, “Everything’s perfect, Nan. Everything’s fine.” But we were now also consulting with a specialist in New York, and we had an October appointment to see him. I knew, since we would be sitting down with him to discuss possible courses of action, we would have to be out in the open about the way Nan’s numbers were trending.

Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi generously lent us their guest apartment on the Upper East Side, which Nick used as his writing studio. My plan was to tell Nancy the truth about her numbers the night before the appointment. Then I remembered that Nora and Nick had invited us to a dinner party at their place that night, and I didn’t want to ruin the party for Nancy. So the next day, the morning of the appointment, as we were getting ready to go to the doctor, I asked Nancy to sit down. She did.

“Nan,” I said, “I’ve been lying to you about the numbers.”

For a moment, she was stricken and let out a bruised “Awww.”

Then I explained it all: the incremental upticks, my decision to shield her from them, the fact that now we’d have to talk about all this with the doctor.

She took my hands in hers and said, “Thank you, baby.” The choice I’d made, she told me, was the right one.

The New York doctor’s news, alas, was not good: her CA-125 number was now at 52, and radiation was the next step. A whole new phase of debilitation. Nonetheless, Nancy wasn’t going to let something like metastasizing cancer and radiation treatments get in the way of living her life. We had plans to spend our Christmas vacation skiing with the kids at our home in Sun Valley, Idaho, followed by a few days in January at the Martin residence in St. Barth’s. And off we went.

I had signed on that year to be a regular in the third season of Glenn Close’s FX series Damages, playing Leonard Winstone, the sad-sack lawyer for a Bernie Madoff–esque Ponzi schemer. Damages’s creators, Daniel Zelman and the brothers Todd and Glenn Kessler, liked using comic actors in serious roles, trusting them to be looser and more inventive with dialogue, and they had already enlisted Lily Tomlin and Ted Danson to great effect.

The filming took place over the winter of 2009–’10, and honestly, to this day, I don’t know how the hell I pulled it off, given what my family was going through. I’m no Method actor, but in that case, my state of mind informed my performance. There was a day in December 2009 when I received devastating news from Nancy’s doctors, that her CA-125 number had skyrocketed to 160. She and the kids were already in Sun Valley. I was no longer going to withhold information from her, but I decided that I would wait to tell her the bad news in person rather than over the phone. That night we shot a scene where Leonard goes to a nursing home to visit his frail old mother, only to be informed that she has died. I can see it on my face in that scene: the conflation of a character who’s just received news of his mother’s death with an actor who’s just received news that his wife’s cancer is aggressively taking over her body. I’m quite good in that episode, but I wouldn’t recommend my process.

Terminal illness is so deceptive. There are wonderful days when the sick person rallies and it seems like there is genuine reason for hope, and rough days when the illusions come crashing down. I have a photo of a group of us gathered that winter in Sun Valley: Nan and me, Tom and Rita, Bruce and Patti Springsteen, and Jann Wenner and his partner, Matt Nye. Nancy is the only one in a white ski jacket, so she stands out, and she appears radiant, the picture of health. But I also remember a night in St. Barth’s, the last time we went there together, where we went to bed early, around nine, because Nan felt utterly drained of life force. We lay there side by side, wordlessly holding hands, both of us looking up at the ceiling, both of us knowing that we were at the beginning of something very bad.

By February Nancy was sicker than ever, and she wasn’t expected to make it through March. I abruptly pulled out of two big things I was supposed to do over a ten-day period, one of them being the opening number at the 2010 Academy Awards. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were cohosting that year (they’d just done Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated), and I was meant to duet with Neil Patrick Harris on the curtain-raising song—a number that, ironically, was about teaming up and not doing things alone. Neil valiantly carried on solo. The second big thing was the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics, in which I’d have appeared alongside such Canadian luminaries as Catherine O’Hara and Michael J. Fox.

Whether or not the closing ceremonies were a fitting tribute to my homeland is arguable, but Nancy’s opinion was clear. Watching the gaudy spectacle at our home in the Palisades, she turned to me and said, “It’s the only upside of my cancer.”

“What is?” I said.

“You didn’t have to be in that.”

The oncologists at Cedars-Sinai told me that there was no longer any point in putting Nancy through further chemo unless she wanted to give it a try. I put the proposition to Nancy. She said without hesitation, “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”

I’ve learned that there are two worlds in the land of terminal illness. The first is the one where you hold out hope of a shot at getting better: I’ve got to get the furs to the cleaners for summer storage, because I’ll need them to be ready for next winter! The second is the world where you graciously accept death as an inevitability: Bring me paper and a pen so that I may write letters to be read posthumously at our daughter’s wedding. You can’t really live in both worlds; they’re mutually exclusive.

Nancy was emphatically of that first world, not that there’s anything wrong with the second. And somehow the next round of chemo, though it didn’t bring her all the way back, put her upright and out among the living again. She resumed driving herself to tennis, and in July I found myself flying with Nan back to our summer cottage in Canada—a scenario that, in the privacy of my own mind, I had never in a million years envisioned coming true.

As late as the end of July, Nancy was still lowering herself into a kayak to go for a paddle in the lake, her never-say-die Kate Hepburn instincts overpowering cancer and common sense. But by August she was losing steam. We left Snug Harbour on the sixth day of the month. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn were among the few who knew how seriously ill Nancy was, but they’d kept the news from Kate Hudson, their daughter, until a few days before our departure. Kate, Goldie reported to me over the phone, was inconsolable: she adored Nancy. And she and Rita Wilson insisted upon sending a private plane to deliver us back to L.A.

We returned to our house in the Palisades, and Dr. Kipper, our internist, visited a day or two later, just to check in. After I walked him to his car, I returned to Nancy, who sat propped up in our bed. “You know, Mart,” she said, “I don’t want you to think this is the beginning of the end.”

“I don’t!” I said.

“Well, you sure look like you do.”

Even at that point, Nancy still believed she might rally—and not entirely without reason, for she had before. She wasn’t mournful or mopey. She was pissed off at the situation. Those were oft-spoken Nancy words: “Marty, tell me this wouldn’t piss you off!” She refused to treat her final days like a weepy, valedictory send-off.

But no further rally was in the offing. Nancy only weakened further, slipping gently into unconsciousness within a matter of days. She finally passed away on August 21, 2010. Before she lost consciousness, as, struggling for breath, she saw nine paramedics hurry into our bedroom after I’d placed a frantic 911 call, she calmly turned to me, took my hand, and said, “Marty, let me go.”

And so we did. With me and all three kids in our bed, holding her hand, we let her go.

Nancy’s death was awful, by far the most awful thing I’ve ever been through. Yet life had given me valuable experience to draw upon—not just for my own benefit, but for my kids’. And so I put it to use. The night before Nan died, when we knew it was just a matter of time, I took a moment with Henry, our youngest, to soak in our backyard Jacuzzi. He needed loving and calming. Katherine and Oliver were in the house, keeping vigil.

“Henry, I know it seems unimaginable, but you are being empowered tonight,” I told him. “You are being given something that is horrible, but is also a life lesson. This will make you stronger. This will make you more determined. You’ll be in your office somewhere, someday, and some pompous asshole will say something to you. And you’ll supposedly be upset, and you’ll supposedly be fearful of your boss’s reaction. But then you’ll think, ‘This is gravy. This is fine. I couldn’t care less about this prick. I’m not upset now. I was upset the night my mother died.’”

LOVE, LOSS, AND BUMPKISS