In February of ’72 I made a little contract with myself: I would give myself one year after graduation to try to get work as an actor. If by May of ’73 things were going reasonably well, I would renew my showbiz contract for another year; if they weren’t, I would go to the registrar’s office at McMaster and beg them to hold a place for me in grad school that fall.
Counting on nothing much, I went ahead and had a student photographer take some head shots of me in different poses (Happy! Sad! Hopeful!), and I typed up a résumé fraught with lies. Then I headed into Toronto to hit every talent agency in the phone book. Most of them were uninterested, but one agency liked my “atypical” (often a kinder word for “homely”) looks and sent me off on my first casting call, for a credit-card commercial—which, to my shock, I actually got. On March 17, 1972, I worked my first day as a paid actor, playing a talking credit card in a woman’s purse. She opened it, and there I was, miniaturized, in this placard-like costume, sitting on top of an oversize compact mirror and explaining my virtues as a Chargex card, the Canadian version of Visa.
My second audition—and really my first as far as proper acting was concerned—was for the musical Godspell. Talk about a cattle call: every young person with show-business aspirations in Toronto, Eugene and I included, turned out for it, and for good reason. The show was a massive off-Broadway hit in New York, and its composer, Stephen Schwartz, just twenty-four years old at the time, was on hand to personally select the cast for the Toronto production.
Godspell is, essentially, the gospel according to Matthew as told by clowns—as sung, really, by hippie Jesus and his hippie apostles in a wildly original rock-opera musical idiom. Paul Shaffer has long said that in the early 1970s, the theatrical community was obsessed with two things: “full-frontal nudity and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Godspell, mercifully, fit only the latter description.
Eugene and I made it through the initial round of auditions and got a callback for March 25, at the Masonic Temple in Toronto. That day was like an entire season of American Idol compressed into one twelve-hour slog. You’d go up in groups of sixteen, each sing a song, wait an hour, and then eight of you would get called back. Then your group of eight would be called upon to improvise a parable. And then maybe four of those eight would get called back. And then two of the four. And then one of the two. The air was thick with nerves, anticipation, and the sound of longhairs strumming guitars and humming Carole King and Neil Young songs. It was 1972, and not a soul in the room was over twenty-eight. I had never seen so much patchwork denim and rampant bralessness in my life.
There was one girl for whom I immediately felt a pang of pity. She was wearing loose-fitting bib overalls and had her wavy hair tied off in two goofy ponytails that stuck out from either side of her head. She launched into the Disney song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which she sang like a demented child at the peak of a sugar rush. Oh, that poor thing, I thought, she’s so desperate.
But when she finished, to my amazement, Schwartz and the show’s director, Howie Sponseller, jumped out of their seats and broke into spirited applause for this skinny, daffy girl—as did pretty much everyone else in the hall. This was my first sighting of Gilda Radner. Gilda later explained to me that she had actually seen the off-Broadway production of Godspell in New York, and therefore she knew exactly what Schwartz was looking for: a certain looseness, an emphatic lack of Broadway polish. But believe me, advance knowledge alone did not account for the way this talented girl took control of that room.
Earlier in the day, two girls performed their audition pieces not with the house accompanist but with a piano player who had tagged along with them: a bopping Elton John kind of guy with oversize goggle-like eyeglasses and a ferocious, rockin’ approach to his instrument. This was the young Paul Shaffer, though, truth be told, Paul never seemed young, just as he doesn’t now seem “old.”
Paul was not auditioning for the show himself. He was there to accompany his girlfriend, Ginny, and another of his friends, Avril. As I’d soon learn, Paul was, like me, on a one-year contract to make it in show business. Unlike me, however, his contract was with an outside entity: his father, an eminent attorney named Bernie Shaffer. If the music thing didn’t work out soon, Bernie was going to insist that Paul follow in his footsteps and go to law school. At the time of the Godspell auditions, Paul was playing a Hammond B-3 organ in the house band of a Toronto strip club, and had mere weeks left on his contract with Shaffer senior.
After Paul’s two female companions finished their auditions, Stephen Schwartz summoned him to the edge of the stage. Schwartz expressed to Paul how frustrated he was with the regular accompanist’s dainty, traditional piano playing, and how much he admired Paul’s pounding, rockier style. Would Paul, Schwartz wondered, be willing to take over for the rest of the auditions? Though he didn’t know how to read music, Paul said yes. He has the entire catalog of popular music in that brilliant head of his, and he proved himself able to play anything asked of him that day, including Gilda’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
My fashion concession to the times was a jive-turkey newsboy cap—on John Lennon or Sly Stone, it would have been called a pimp cap—that I wore slightly askew over my now-shaggy hair. But my audition piece was pure throwback: a variation of Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Funny Valentine” that I put over with just enough in-on-the-joke self-awareness to connect with the counterculturists who surrounded me.
Nearly everyone else auditioned with a song from the rock or folk idioms, and one, a tall guy with the golden ringlets of Art Garfunkel and the face of Michelangelo’s David, did an actual Godspell song, “Save the People,” which left the rest of us envious of both his cunning and his singing talent. This was Victor Garber. I would later learn that, though he was my age, Victor had already had a 1960s career as part of a Mamas and Papas–like folk-pop group called the Sugar Shoppe, which had made a couple of appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Victor had subsequently toured as part of a revue called Canadian Rock Theatre, which was basically a bunch of young singers covering songs from Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar—a symptom of the Jesus mania that Paul had diagnosed.
Victor, his quavery voice gentle yet strong, like the fluttering of butterfly wings, delivered his song beautifully, to the palpable awe of everyone in the hall. Jesus had come to the Masonic Temple. Poor Eugene had to go next, singing “Aquarius” from the aptly named (given the singer in question) Hair. To this day, he shudders at the thought of having had to follow Victor.
When it was all over that day, Schwartz picked ten people to form the original Toronto cast of Godspell. Victor was a shoo-in as Jesus. Gilda, despite my initial misunderstanding of her approach, was an obvious yes also. As for Paul, Schwartz gave him the break of his life by offering him a job as Godspell’s bandleader and musical director. The Canadian bar’s loss was showbiz’s gain. Honestly, can you imagine how different David Letterman’s show would be if it was just Dave sitting there alone, unable to make all those asides to the guy at the keyboard who looks like the love child of Howie Mandel and James Carville?
Eugene and I made it, too. We couldn’t believe it—close friends, getting our first big break, together. He was twenty-five, and I would turn twenty-two the next day. We went to the back of the Masonic Temple, where there was a pay phone, and took turns calling everyone we knew to share our happy news. I hadn’t even graduated from college yet, and already I was exceeding the terms of my self-imposed contract.
Before rehearsals began, Howie Sponseller, our director, threw a cast party so that we apostles of Christ could better get to know one another. It was just a gathering of callow theater geeks drinking jug wine, but to me it was the most amazing party I had ever been to. Why? Because I was in a room where everyone was making a living by being in show business. That fact floored me. I didn’t want the evening to end. Avril Chown, one of the girls Paul had accompanied, was one of the chosen (though his girlfriend, Ginny, wasn’t) and was sexy as hell. Jayne Eastwood, another woman in the cast, had a quick wit that I instantly took to. Gerry Salsberg, who had been cast in the role of Judas, was sweet yet intense, a perfect foil to the chipper Paul and the chipperer me. By the end of the evening, it was like we’d all fast-forwarded two years in our relationships and become old friends.
The life of the party, however, was Gilda, who jovially worked the room, making conversation with everyone. She did this, however, while very conspicuously holding the tip of her right index finger to her forehead, even as she was walking around and maneuvering between people. When I asked Gilda why she was doing this, she lifted her finger for a moment to reveal a pimple that she didn’t want anyone else to see. I found this hilarious and charming. Gilda was a rare event, hard to explain if not experienced in person. I had never met a woman so comfortable in her strangeness.
With one possible exception: Andrea Martin. Andrea wasn’t at that first party, because she didn’t make the cut at the March 25 auditions. I saw her get the bad news that day. Her face fell almost as if in slow motion, in so nakedly expressive a fashion that I had to suppress a laugh; there was nothing funny about her not getting the job, yet there was something inherently funny about Andrea. Then, a few weeks later, a woman who had made the cast dropped out for personal reasons, creating an opening. Eugene lobbied Stephen Schwartz and Howie Sponseller to hire Andrea.
A petite Armenian-American force of nature from the great state of Maine, Andrea had briefly dated Eugene, and the two of them had recently shot a low-budget horror-film spoof called Cannibal Girls, whose director was another guy who had been a few years ahead of me at McMaster, Ivan Reitman. Howie threw another party, and Eugene and I brought Andrea. She turned it on at the party and just killed, winning everyone over with the same manic energy that she later brought to SCTV. She was in. I’ve known a lot of funny people in my life, but no one matches Andrea for sheer in-person, on-contact funniness.
Throughout the months of April and May, I commuted from Hamilton to Toronto to rehearse between classes and finals. Rehearsals were an exercise in collective euphoria, because, as Paul likes to say, we were all so happy that we didn’t have to go to school anymore, and we were free of that soul-crushing burden of classes, homework, and thinking about getting “real” jobs. We were working on this hip show, a job that everyone in town wanted but didn’t have, and on top of all that, we were getting paid.
By the end of May, having finished my last exam, I bade the city of Hamilton good-bye, never to live there again. Eugene and I, along with our friend John Yaffe, rented a house at 1063 Avenue Road in Toronto. (Tom Hanks, by the way, thinks the name Avenue Road is hilarious and acutely Canadian. He brings it up whenever the subject arises: “Hey, Marty, when you were a kid in Toronto, did you ever wish you lived on Street Lane instead of Avenue Road?”)
Godspell opened at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on June 1, 1972. Our good feelings about what we had were ratified by the audience, whose members, dressed up in black tie for opening night, bought in from the moment the curtain went up, laughing and applauding beyond our wildest expectations. My big song was “We Beseech Thee,” what I would learn is known in theater as the eleven o’clock number—a showstopper that occurs late in the second act. This one was a vamping, up-tempo gospel-style song that, in our version, built and built and built to a rousing finish.
It unfolded so perfectly, with my voice gliding so effortlessly along, that I momentarily levitated outside myself—I was up in the rafters, watching me singing down there, enjoying the show. The reviews in the papers the next day were ecstatic. Most of the writers’ attention focused on Victor, but I was delighted that my hometown paper, the Hamilton Spectator, singled me out. The reviewer noted, perceptively, that at the conclusion of “We Beseech Thee,” my face had “the look film directors try to capture in movies about young stars breaking into the theatre.” He also wrote that Eugene looked “like a well-fed Frank Zappa.” Again, very perceptive.
Your first major work experience tends to be formative, something you remember vividly for the rest of your life. That’s what Godspell was for our cast. To this day, Paul, Eugene, Dave Thomas (who joined the cast later in the run), and I can, and on occasion will, run through the show’s score in its entirety. Sometimes Paul will phone me up in L.A. from New York, and, without so much as a hello, say something like, “Why would Avril open that number that way? It’s such an odd choice”—as if we were still living in 1972. This is a continuation of the obsessiveness with which we lived and breathed the show, all of us involved. Our cast operated as a sort of gestalt—all for one and one for all, more like the Beatles than like Elvis. When we weren’t performing together, we were hanging out together, oftentimes at the Short-Levy digs on Avenue Road, more frequently still at a theater-folk bar called the Pilot. John Candy, with whom many of us fell into friendship at that time, joked that he hated hanging around with the Godspell people because all they ever talked about was fucking Godspell.
In late June, a few weeks after we opened, there was a birthday party for Gilda at Global Village, a little avant-garde theater where we rehearsed Godspell and where Gilda had held a part-time job selling tickets. There was this bizarre couple there, the same age as the rest of us, who spent the entire evening in character as Gilda’s Jewish parents from Detroit. At no point in the night did they ever break character. I eventually found out that they were not in fact a couple, but friends of Gilda’s and a working comedy team to boot. Their names were Dan Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield.
In the weeks to come I started hanging out with them, and with Gilda, as much as possible. I would drive Gilda’s white Volvo around town with her in the front passenger seat and Danny and Valri in the back—deliberately getting lost en route to wherever we were going because I didn’t want my time with these inspired freak-geniuses to end. We would be at a stop sign, and while an elderly couple slowly, deliberately crossed the street, Danny and Valri would become the couple, bantering back and forth.
VALRI: I’m telling you, I’m lactating! I’m moist where I shouldn’t be, and it’s not from drooling.
DAN: Dearest, you’re eighty-seven. It seems so unlikely.
VALRI: You’re calling me a bloody liar?
DAN: Sweetie, not so much as calling you eighty-seven.
VALRI: Oh, piss up a rope.
I was also becoming close with Andrea, whose ritual of initiation for new friends was to whip out her breasts in a public place and say, “You’ve seen these, haven’t you?” Andrea had an original, manic comic energy that rivaled Gilda’s. Preshow at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Andrea would do things like walk past us with her hair in curlers, belch loudly, and then yell at herself, “You whore!” in this coarse, guttural voice, as if channeling some babushka’d Transcaucasus ancestor. Gilda would turn to me, laughing so hard and shaking her head, and say, “What the—who does that?”
But Gilda was the one I fell for. She wasn’t a conventional beauty, with her skinny build and untamed brown hair, but her charisma made her irresistibly sexy. Above all, she was funny. To me, there is nothing more seductive than a funny woman. Her every eccentricity turned me on. The zany, ray-of-light loopiness of her smile. The giant bows she put in her hair. That guileless, children’s-theater-lady speaking voice. The way she walked into a room and filled it, with both her big personality and the bags she encumbered herself with. Gilda typically carried two bags, ones that she’d knitted herself. The bigger one contained her knitting materials and personal effects. The smaller one, more like a little pouch, contained her bingo chips and cards. Gilda loved her bingo and indulged in it with the zeal of a retiree, bundling off to bingo halls whenever she could to get her fix, sitting among all the old folks and smoking her Virginia Slims cigarettes. Her great pride was that she could keep eighteen bingo cards going at once, her mind agile enough to maintain her grids no matter how fast the caller barked out the numbers. It’s like she had a retro-hipster pastime before retro or hipsters existed.
When we started on Godspell in June, I still had a Hamilton girlfriend, and Gilda was dating a guy named Marcus O’Hara. But by September, Gilda and I were more or less living together full-time at her place on 77 Pears Avenue, and I was madly in love. First time living outside of Hamilton, first job, first love—heady is a clichéd word, but it accurately describes the whirlwind of Godspell’s early months. Speaking of which, the show was originally only supposed to be in Toronto for three months before going on tour, with stops in Boston and Chicago, but it kept doing such great business that it never left the city. As Gilda and I were getting serious, Godspell relocated from the Royal Alex to the Playhouse Theatre, where it ran until August 1973, for an ultimate total of 488 performances. (“Playhouse Theater,” now that I think of it, is almost as ridiculous as “Avenue Road.”)
So Gilda and I basically put down roots and played house. When we weren’t getting conjugal on Pears Street, we were hanging around with Eugene and Paul at the bachelor apartment on Avenue Road, partying and laughing, impervious to fatigue because we were all so young. I treasure a tape I have of the four of us, plus Michael Shepley, Godspell’s company manager, in conversation at three a.m. some night that autumn. My kids like to listen to the tape because they love Paul, and it’s perhaps the earliest known recording of that off-camera laugh that generations of Letterman watchers would come to know, the signature Shaffer “Haaaah-hah!” The laughter began that night because of how I reacted to the sound of Eugene’s voice, which was shredded from performing eight shows a week.
MICHAEL: Should we have the microphone, like, on the table?
EUGENE (rasping): Can’t do that, the sound is terrible. It has to be good.
MARTY (in hoarse Louis Armstrong voice): Gotta be as crisp as Eugene’s voice. “Sound is terrible!”
PAUL (hysterically): Haaaah! Ha-ha-haaaa-ha! Haah-haah-haah-ha! That is so-o funny . . .
MARTY: Paul, why is it funny?
PAUL (helplessly, in tears): Oooh-hooo . . .
(Everyone now laughing at Paul’s laughter.)
GILDA (mimicking Paul): Oooh-hooo!
PAUL: For a number of reasons!
MARTY: For a number! Of reasons!
PAUL (slurring a bit): There’zh the obvious reason. In addition to the reason that he sounded so terrible. There’s also the reason that you sounded like Louis Armstrong when you came in.
GILDA (still mimicking Paul): Oooh-hooo!
PAUL: And the choice of words! “Gotta be as crisp.”
GILDA: “Gotta be as crisp.” It’s true. ’Cause “crisp” is an unused word.
PAUL: But gee, it’s going to be fun listening back to this, isn’t it?
The beauty of listening back to that laughter is that it could just as easily take place today between Paul, Eugene, and me. The poignancy of it is that Gilda is no longer around to take part in it with us. She was spectacular, and I was smitten with her. I am told by Catherine O’Hara that the first time Catherine and I met—for she is the little sister of Gilda’s ex, Marcus O’Hara, and Gilda was the type of girl who stayed friends with her ex’s kid sister and took her out to dinner—I barely cast a glance in Catherine’s direction. She was a mere girl of eighteen, as was her school friend who tagged along, Robin Duke. (Robin would later, like me, perform in the casts of both SCTV and Saturday Night Live.) Catherine and Robin both say that I was utterly indifferent to them in the restaurant that night. But to Gilda, they say, I was a gallant gentleman, lavishing upon her all of my attention—mooning over this enchanting, funny girl.
Godspell was a springboard, giving us all new work opportunities even as the show’s run continued. Victor was plucked from the cast almost immediately, summoned by Columbia Pictures to star as Jesus in the movie version of the show. He was replaced by a young actor named Don Scardino, who was almost as angelic looking, and years later would distinguish himself as a film and TV director and one of the executive producers of 30 Rock. After Don’s departure, it was finally Eugene’s turn to play Jesus, though Eugene’s hairiness almost derailed that plan. In our production, Jesus made his entrance wearing only boxer shorts. The producers were concerned that Eugene’s woolly Ashkenazi Jewish chest pelt might frighten the small children who came to matinees, so he was asked to shave or submit to a waxing. Eugene refused. Career disaster was averted when Eugene and the producers agreed to a compromise: Christ would appear before his apostles wearing a tank top. And lo, it came to pass.
Late in ’72, I landed a gig hosting a CBC teen variety program (in my off hours from the show) called Right On. It aired live at 5:00 p.m., and the show’s announcer was a rising Canadian personality named Alex Trebek. Though Right On lasted only a few months, it wasn’t lost on me how great and surreal it was for me to be hosting my own live TV show with an actual band, just seven years after I had play-acted pretty much the same scenario in my attic.
And then, when word got out that Chicago’s Second City improv theater was starting up a sister company in Toronto—in June 1973, just as Godspell was winding down—the better part of my social circle banged down the door to enlist. For reasons I’ve already detailed, I elected not to audition, but Gilda, Eugene, Jayne Eastwood, and Gerry Salsberg from our show did, as did Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield. And they all got in! Second City Toronto’s first cast was supplemented by two veterans of the Chicago operation, Joe Flaherty and Brian Doyle-Murray. Meanwhile, John Candy moved to Chicago to take a slot in Second City’s cast there, alongside Brian’s brother Bill Murray. John came back to Second City Toronto the following year, by which time Catherine O’Hara was also a full-fledged member, soon to be joined by Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas.
Does it seem like I’m blatantly name-dropping here? Yes, it does—and with good reason. Toronto at that time had a Paris-in-the-’20s thing going on. Not in the sense that anyone was sitting around and self-consciously declaring, “Take a good look around, my friends, for someday all of us shall be prominent players in the captivating business of show!” No, it was simply that we were all young and like-mindedly creative, in the same place at the same time. I don’t think of it as a magical “What did they put in the drinking water?” scenario. Rather, I think that so many of us went on to bigger things because we were there for each other early: friends and friendly competitors, pushing ourselves to heights we never would have reached individually.
And remember, at the time, none of us had any idea that we were anything more than very fortunate, very happy young performers. No one was sitting around pointing a finger and saying, “Hey, you’re Gilda Radner! You’re Eugene Levy! And you’re Dan Aykroyd!” We were in Toronto, you see, so we still thought of ourselves as minor-league compared to the real actors who plied their trade in New York and Hollywood.
Paul Shaffer was the first of our circle to leave Toronto more or less for good, moving to New York City in ’74, when Stephen Schwartz beckoned him to be the piano player for a musical that Schwartz had opening on Broadway, The Magic Show (whose star was yet another McMaster alum of my generation, the magician Doug Henning). Gilda and I were so thrilled for Paul, and one day, sitting in the kitchen at her place, we were excited to receive a phone call from him. “Paul,” Gilda asked in wonderment, as if he had bounded over the rainbow and into the land of Oz, “what are New York actors like?” As we cradled the receiver together, Paul, in his kindly Paul voice, said, “Well, maybe it’s just ’cause you’re my friends, but I think you guys are just as talented.”
Gilda turned to me and said, “Aww, isn’t that so sweet?” And then, jokingly, to Paul: “Liar!” Because we found it daunting, the very idea: New York actors. In a year and a half Gilda would be a household name, starring in Saturday Night Live. But on that day, we couldn’t fathom that New York would ever want anything to do with us.