Gilda and I were a couple, on and off, for almost two years. The first few months were bliss, but overall we had a tempestuous relationship, with multiple breakups and rapprochements. Basically, our happiness kept running aground upon the same argument, which we had over and over again. Gilda, for all her exuberance, had lots of dark moods and neuroses. I’m not being indiscreet here, because she acknowledged these issues in her own memoir, It’s Always Something, including her struggle with eating disorders. I could never fathom, in our time together, how a woman of her talent and advantages could get so down on herself. It hadn’t been that long since I’d buried my mother, who died before her time and was desperate to stay happy and keep living—who clung to the slightest bit of positive medical news as a cause for celebration.
So for Gilda not to appreciate her good fortune—with her burgeoning career, her well-to-do Detroit upbringing, and her natural gift for making every guy have a crush on her and every girl want to be her best friend—well, it was just beyond what my inexperienced young man’s brain could comprehend.
And that was part of the problem. I was twenty-two years old to Gilda’s twenty-six when we started dating—a significant difference in age at that point in life. I was unworldly and immature, simply too unsophisticated psychologically to understand that a person could have all the blessings that Gilda had and still be burdened with unhappiness and an enormous need for people to demonstrate their love for her, all the time. I had a joke on this subject that amused even Gilda: that one time I’d walked into her kitchen and found her on the phone, saying, “Okay . . . So all right . . . Love you! . . . See ya! . . . Bye! . . . Love you! . . . Call me!” After she’d hung up, I asked her, “Who was that?” and Gilda said, “Wrong number.”
Gilda channeled some of her need for love into her pets, which were suitably eccentric. She had a three-legged cat named Muffin and a morbidly obese Yorkie named Snuffy. I was saddled with the responsibility of dog-sitting the Snuff Machine, as the pooch was alternately known, when Gilda traveled home to Detroit to visit her mother, Henrietta. While she was gone, I decided to take Snuffy to visit my brother Brian and his wife, Gwen, in Ancaster, a little village near Hamilton. I checked in with Gilda from their house, watching as my three-year-old niece fed the podgy little dog slice after slice of Kraft American cheese. “How’s my Snuffy girl doing?” Gilda asked. Suddenly I noticed that the dog was no longer moving. Right at that moment, Gilda said, “Remember, Snuffy’s allergic to dairy, so make sure she doesn’t get any.” I made my excuses and got off the phone. I raced over to Snuffy and collected her near-lifeless body . . . just in time for her to explode all over me, from every orifice.
By the time I picked up Gilda from the train the next day (she was afraid of flying), I had already rushed Snuffy, whose coat had resembled an aerial view of Dresden, to Anita Chapman’s Dog Boutique, where they scrubbed and shampooed her to the best of their ability and adorned her with little Rose Marie hair bows. Gilda eyed the woozy dog suspiciously.
“Why does she look so out of it?” she asked.
“She missed you, baby,” I responded.
After Godspell had been running for several months, the cast started to turn over. Victor Garber was the first to leave, having been tapped to do the Godspell movie. A few months later Jayne Eastwood left, and Andrea Martin shifted into Jayne’s role. Taking Andrea’s old part—as Robin, the girl who sings “Day by Day,” the one Godspell song that every human being knows—was a young woman named Mary Ann McDonald. And when Eugene finally graduated to playing Jesus, our McMaster friend Dave Thomas came in to take Eugene’s old role, as an apostle named Herb.
There was turnover in the understudy ranks, too. One day all of us—all of us guys, anyway—were struck by the new girl who’d been brought in to cover Gilda and Avril Chown. Her name was Nancy Dolman. She was forbiddingly attractive, with Joni Mitchell cheekbones and long, long, straight blond hair that fell halfway down her back and swooshed in a sexy way behind her as she walked. As Ed Grimley would say, “She made your heart beat like a little distant jungle drum.”
Victor, though he was no longer in the show, had already worked with Nancy: the two of them had performed together in that Jesus-rock revue he’d been in, Canadian Rock Theatre, the vehicle through which he learned the Godspell songs ahead of the rest of us. Nancy, much to her parents’ horror, had dropped out of her college, Western University in London, Ontario, at the end of her freshman year to join Canadian Rock Theatre. This was just in time for their U.S. tour, which turned out to be a semi-traumatic experience. The producers hadn’t taken the trouble to secure the rights to do the songs they were doing, and by the time the revue got to Las Vegas, the music publishers had caught wind of it and issued an injunction forbidding Canadian Rock Theatre from performing further. While in limbo in Vegas, the cast was invited to attend some random hip groovy person’s random hip groovy party. Another disaster: Nancy and Victor spent the evening clinging to each other in terror in a hot tub, riding out a bad trip after someone surreptitiously slipped them acid.
Another person who knew of Nancy pre-Godspell was Eugene Levy’s new girlfriend, Deb Divine, who would become (and remains) his wife. Deb and Nancy grew up on the same street in Toronto and went to the same high school, York Mills Collegiate Institute. Deb, two years younger, had looked up to Nancy as York Mills’s golden girl, a blond beauty who, in her mind, was always speeding off with some cute jock guy in a convertible. Nancy was industrious, too. Unbowed by the unraveling of Canadian Rock Theatre, she used her remaining time in the States to raid its thrift shops for secondhand clothes, which she smuggled across the border and sold at a handsome profit at a carefully curated vintage-clothing shop she opened in Toronto with the very much of-its-era name Reflections of Ambrosine.
I knew none of this at the time. All I knew was that Nancy, per her job as the understudy, came to the theater every night, signed in, checked in to see if anyone was sick or otherwise indisposed, and, if not, went on her way. We guys would stand there watching this ritual with our mouths agape, doing everything short of muttering “Humina, humina!” This chick, lissome in her antique capes and filmy dresses, was way out of my league.
One day, though, Paul invited me to join him and Mary Ann McDonald, who was by then his girlfriend, for a night out at a jazz club. Mary Ann and Nancy were friends, so Nancy was coming along too. Gilda and I had just been through one of our “Well, then fuck you, idiot!” fights earlier in the day, and as I had nothing better to do, I agreed to come along. That’s all I thought of it as: me going to the jazz club with Paul and Mary Ann, who happened to be bringing her friend Nancy.
But at our table for four, it became a different situation: my unconsidered “Jesus, she’s beautiful” take on Nancy evolved into genuine feelings for her. It was that thing where you finally talk to the pretty girl and discover that she’s not only pretty but also funny, smart, and simpatico. The chemistry is right, and the hang is great. And as we discovered, we had people and places in common. Nancy’s godfather had worked for my father at the steel company! Her mother was a native Hamiltonian, and she herself had been born in Hamilton! What were the odds?
Still, the night ended innocently. I went home to Avenue Road, and Nancy had a boyfriend at the time named Paul Ryan. (Not the congressman from Wisconsin and 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate; his then three-year-old ass I would have kicked easily.) I was barely in my apartment two minutes when the phone rang. It was Gilda, somehow all-seeing and all-knowing.
“You’ve been with someone!” she said.
“I’ve been with no one!” I protested.
“Tell me the truth, Marty!”
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened: Paul and Mary Ann went to the jazz club with Nancy Dolman, and I happened to go along. That’s all that happened. I swear to you.”
That turned into a huge headline in Godspell land. Gilda, pissed off and vengeful, the next day arranged for all the women in the cast to cut Nancy dead when she walked in. For a few days Nancy was a pariah. Then, as if it had been nothing, the hard feelings evaporated and everything was okay again. Gilda and I resumed being a couple. A while later, I heard, through the high-school-style grapevine endemic to all theater companies, that Nancy had admitted to someone that she had a crush on me. An ego boost, to be sure. But still, I was with Gilda, and Nancy was with non-congressman Paul Ryan.
Gilda and I split for good in July 1974, eleven months after Godspell closed. We didn’t do so with the foreordained finality that the words above suggest; it’s just how things panned out. Not a few days after what, at that time, was simply our latest breakup, I was drinking at my usual haunt, the Pilot bar, when Nancy happened to walk in. Yes, this girl can wear a top, was all I could think at that moment. We began talking. I mentioned to her that I was looking for a new place to live. She told me that there were some nice flats available in the Beaches, her neighborhood, in east-central Toronto. Also, she had just broken up with her boyfriend.
We arranged to spend the next day, a Sunday, looking at apartments together, followed by a round of tennis, since we both played. Before Nancy left the Pilot that night, I said to her lasciviously—
I don’t know what possessed me—“Have you ever tried a comedian before?” Which was either very sexy or very creepy, depending on your opinion of me. She just stared at me, betraying no emotion, and said, “I hope you have a racket. I’m pretty good.”
Our tennis date was such fun that I invited Nancy to come see me that night in the show I was doing, What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This? “I’m Haldeman / I’m Ehrlichman / I’m Klein / Ze three sour Krauts from ze Rhine!”
You know, speaking from experience, I can tell you that there’s no aphrodisiac more potent than Watergate-themed cabaret music. Well, in my case, anyway. By night’s end, Nancy and I were making out while pressed against my Volkswagen convertible in the theater’s parking lot. Boy, were we both easy.
Since I am a decent sort of chap, I wasted no time in asking Nancy out again, and brought her to a cast party the very next night. At the party we were holding hands. Andrea Martin, who was in the show with me, cornered me for a moment and asked, with typical Andrea forthrightness, “When did you start having sex with Nancy Dolman?”
I told her that I had not, in fact, started having sex with Nancy Dolman.
But Andrea was adamant. “You two have the intimacy of a couple,” she said. “I can see it! You’re having sex!” We truly weren’t, but hey, it wasn’t the worst idea.
That very night, after the party ended, I took Nancy to the Hyatt Hotel in Toronto. Bear in mind that it was summer. I was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt. Nancy was wearing very short shorts and a halter top. She was twenty-two years old, and I was twenty-four—though I looked about fourteen. We had no luggage. I walked up to the clerk at the front desk and announced, “My wife and I would like a room, please!” He looked us up and down, burst into laughter, and then very kindly gave us a key.
We opened the door to our room, pulses racing, pheromones pumping. Nancy teasingly told me, “I’ll be right back,” and went into the bathroom to powder her nose. Now, this was the first time I had ever been in a hotel room that featured movies on demand. As I waited for Nancy, sitting on the bed, I turned on the TV and saw that Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles was available for viewing. I couldn’t believe it. How could such things exist? So I ordered the movie and started watching.
Nancy emerged from the bathroom, astonishingly, beauteously naked. She saw the movie playing, and her face momentarily fell. “This is a joke, right?” she said. “Are you serious?”
“I’m gonna turn it off! I can’t tell you how quickly I’m gonna turn this off!” I said, desperately waving my hands in the international I-mean-no-harm gesture.
“Oh, yes, Marty,” she said. “I think you’re going to turn the movie off.”
Nancy and I were a couple from that day forward: July 8, 1974. We wouldn’t marry for another six years—it was the ’70s, maaan—but we were instantly in love. On paper, she was the classic rebound girl, the woman into whose arms one conveniently falls after an epic heartbreak. But the miracle of Nan and me is that once we started, we never stopped; we remained forever devoted to each other. There was never a blow-up I’m-packing-my-bags! moment. Whatever did come up, we dealt with.
In the early days, I admit, there was a fair amount to deal with emotionally, mostly on my end. Falling deeply in love with Nan didn’t instantly obliterate what I’d felt for Gilda, which had been no mere schoolboy crush—it too had been love, real love.
Gilda always had her ear to the ground, and she called me as soon as word got out about Nancy and me. “You’re going out with Nancy Dolman?” she asked, not accusingly, but shocked. “But, but . . . we’re supposed to get back together again! That’s our pattern! We weren’t done.” But we were done.
For a year or so I had some difficulty juggling the roles of good boyfriend and good ex-boyfriend. By the end of 1974 Gilda was living in the States again, part of the touring stage show that National Lampoon magazine had put together. Nancy and I took a trip to New York to check out the show, and we were there for opening night. The director was Ivan Reitman, and the cast was extraordinary: Gilda, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis, and Joe Flaherty.
In one sketch, Gilda played Jacqueline Onassis as a panelist on a What’s My Line?–style show. The host, the John Charles Daly figure, fired a starting gun to begin the games. At this, Gilda, in her Jackie suit, jumped out of her chair and started crawling over the other panelists toward the back of the studio. Bill Murray, as Daly, would say, “No, no, Mrs. Kennedy! We’re just starting the game!” In another sketch, Gilda played a blind woman on a date with John Belushi. As John kept jumping Gilda’s character, forcing himself upon her, he assured her that it was her dog trying to “jazz” her, not him. It played better than it sounds—the kind of classic sick humor for which the Lampoon was notorious.
Because we knew nearly everyone in the cast, Nancy and I were invited to the after-party, which was something of a reunion-slash-fusion of all the people who had ever met through Godspell, Second City Toronto, and Second City Chicago. Ivan Reitman still talks about that party as one of the greatest nights of his life, a sort of here-we-are moment for a generation of comedy people on the cusp of fame. Paul Shaffer was playing piano, and as was the wont of our group, each of us got up to do a little performance.
When it was my turn, I got up and sang “You and I,” the song I’d muffed in front of Tony Bennett on Canadian TV. This time I nailed it, hitting all the notes just as Stevie Wonder had intended them to be sung. My peers greeted me with rousing applause. Then I made a dumb mistake. Nancy was watching from stage left, and Gilda from stage right. When I stepped down to be congratulated, with all these smiling, familiar faces before me, I went . . . stage right, to Gilda. More or less out of force of habit, but still. Nancy was not thrilled with me for a couple of days thereafter, and wondered out loud whether we had a future. I had little to say. I’d already inadvertently revealed too much.
I think it’s true of most relationships that the first year, you have the best sex, but there is some confusion and unsettledness about intention: Does this person really love me the way he says he does? Is this for real? Nan and I were no different. Our first year, we had a lot of fights over things like me spending too much time at parties talking to other people and not paying enough attention to her. I was accustomed to Gilda, who was naturally outgoing and schmoozy, and who ran in the same circles as me; I never felt the need to check in on her in social situations, since she took control of every room she was in through sheer force of personality. Nancy, not an extrovert, expected more of me, and it took a few chilly nights where I got the silent treatment until I figured out that I had to grow up a little and pay her more mind.
Over time, as it became evident to all parties that Nancy and I were a bona fide, in-it-for-the-long-haul couple, the triangular tension drifted away. In fact, when I decided in early 1976 to embark on a career-advancing expedition southward to New York City—auditioning, taking meetings, putting myself out there, so to speak—Gilda and Nancy had a very civilized, adult telephone conversation in which they worked out that I would stay at Gilda’s place on the Upper West Side for the duration of my trip. They did this independently of me and presented the plan to me as a fait accompli.
Gilda’s apartment was painted almost entirely blue and was very her, a combination of expensive furniture that reflected her upbringing and thrift-shop bric-a-brac that represented her funky, wayward spirit; it could just as easily have been Annie Hall’s apartment.
It was an exciting time, because Saturday Night Live was still in its first season, and the novelty of its and her success had not yet worn off. Years later Steve Martin and I had a discussion about how exhilarating that first season of SNL was, even to those of us who were mere spectators. Steve was living in Aspen at the time, and when he saw those first few episodes, his reaction was, “They’ve done it. They did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this new kind of comedy.” Meaning that someone (Lorne Michaels) had finally worked out a way to channel our comedy generation’s loose, weirdo, hairy, nontraditional bent—Belushi’s manic energy, Aykroyd’s subversiveness, Chevy’s smart-ass leading-man thing, Gilda’s woman-child daffiness—into something that could be presented on network television.
Victor Garber was also in New York at the time I was staying with Gilda, so he and I made a plan to watch SNL at her place while she did the show. As she headed out to 30 Rock, Gilda told me, “There’s some grass in that top drawer if you want to get high before the show.”
So at around 11:10 p.m., I got out some of Gilda’s pot, rolled it into a spliff, lit it, and took about five hits. It was potent stuff. Maybe just a tad too potent. By 11:20 I was having a massive anxiety attack: heart pounding, body sweating, hands shaking. Oh, boy, I thought. Papa’s got to sit down.
At 11:25 Victor arrived. In my panic-mindedness, I decided to put up a cheerful front. My logic was that if I articulated to Victor that I was having an anxiety attack, then that would make it real. Whereas, conversely, if I pretended that I was fine, the attack would not be real.
So Victor came in, and in this insane, overly jovial way, I started rat-a-tatting all these upbeat sentiments at him: “Victor! How are you? You look great! Isn’t this exciting? Can you believe Gilda’s on Saturday Night Live? I mean, isn’t it just tremendous to see a friend who’s starting to do so well, and—”
And then, all at once, I could contain myself no more. “I’m too high, Victor!” I wailed. “I smoked some marijuana and I’m having a nervous breakdown! Oh, Jesus, what do I do, Vic? I’m scared! Bad, bad scared!”
Like a surgeon in the field, Victor calmly and completely took over. “Sit down,” he said, and sat me down. Then he went into Gilda’s kitchen and brought back a little dish of honey and a Coca-Cola. Victor is a diabetic. “You’re having the same reaction to the pot that a diabetic has from a blood-sugar crash,” he told me gently. “Everything’s going to be fine. Here, take this.” He fed me a spoonful of honey like I was a sick child. Then he had me drink the Coke. And he was totally right. I was back to normal within minutes.
The first few days of my stay at Gilda’s were fun. I was sleeping on her couch, which wasn’t all that comfortable, so one night Gilda said, “Don’t be silly, come into bed with me. Nothing’s gonna happen.” I said, “It used to happen, though. A lot.” She waved me over with a good-natured C’mon motion. I joined her under the covers.
And indeed nothing did happen, apart from some warm reminiscing. I said, “Isn’t it fun that we had those couple of years together? And you were sooo much older!” This sent her into hysterical laughter—that great inhale-wheeze laugh of hers. It was a lovely night. At lights-out, all we did, literally, was sleep together.
But one day, a week into what was meant to be a three-week stay, I was sitting at Gilda’s kitchen table, stuffing envelopes with my head shot and résumé, when she barged through the apartment door and made a beeline for the bathroom. I could hear her vomiting. Dick Cavett, she explained to me when she came out, was that week’s host, and as she perceived it, he had been rude to her. Her feelings hurt, she had binged on Snickers bars.
I am not giving myself any points for sensitivity here. I lost it. “Honest to fucking God, Gilda,” I said, “this is the same shit. Nothing changes. I’m pathetically and pointlessly licking envelopes that will never be opened, and you’re on Saturday Night Live, and you’re vomiting.” We had fallen back into the same old argument—and we weren’t even a couple anymore.
Paul Shaffer was at that point the piano player in SNL’s house band, and he had a bachelor’s hovel up in the West 100s, near Columbia University. “Fuck this, Gilda, I’m going to Paul’s,” I told her.
“Please don’t go,” she said, starting to cry. “I wanted to do this for you, to help you out by having you stay here. I wanted this to be something I could give you.” But I stormed off and headed uptown.
A night later Nancy came down from Toronto to join Paul and me. Late, around one thirty in the morning, Gilda called, not knowing that Nancy was in town. “Is Morden there?” she asked Paul. That’s what she used to call me. Paul, speaking loudly, so both Gilda on her end and I on ours caught his drift, said, “Ahhh, Gilda! Marty and Nancy are here with me!”
Realizing that I was not available for an emergency heart-to-heart, Gilda meekly told Paul, like her character Emily Litella, “Never mind.”
Gilda and I, I’m pleased to say, eventually grew up into grown-ups about our relationship. We remained good friends to the end of her life. In 1983, when Nancy and I adopted our first child—our daughter, Katherine—Gilda sent over an embroidered wall hanging with Katherine’s name on it, only it read KATHARINE, the Hepburn spelling. Since Gilda and I were never ones to hold back from each other, I told her, “Thanks, Gilda, but honest to God, talk about self-centeredness! Even Hitler knew how the Eichmann kids’ names were spelled!”
She insisted that I put Katherine, a baby, on the phone. I could hear Gilda yelling through the receiver, “Tell your dad he’s an asshole and that he spelled your name wrong! You want it spelled with an ‘A’!”
In 1985, by which time Gilda was happily married to Gene Wilder, the four of us—Nancy and me, Gilda and Gene—had dinner together in London, where we all happened to be at the same time. Nancy and I couldn’t help but notice a touch of concern in Gene. A few times he asked Gilda, “How are you feeling?” To which Gilda replied in sprightly fashion, “I feel great! I feel perfect!”—the takeaway from which could only be that Gilda had not been feeling well.
A year later I was doing a press junket with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase for ¡Three Amigos! in Tucson. We kept getting pestered with questions about Gilda’s health, which we kept deflecting, since we didn’t know anything. But by the end of the day, after the three of us nervously called friends from Chevy’s hotel room, we found out that the reports were true: Gilda had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
She and I talked about it over the phone a few times—her condition, her blood numbers, and her chemo. She had a nice period of remission where, she told me, she was contemplating adopting a child herself. I remember seeing her on the cover of Life magazine in 1988, with shorter hair but looking great. The headline was “Gilda Radner’s Answer to Cancer.” But not long after that, while I was helping arrange a benefit show for Cedars-Sinai, the hospital in L.A. where Gilda had received treatment, I heard through a woman I knew that Gilda was sick again. I called Gilda and told her exactly what I had been told. I wanted her to tell me it was bullshit. She indulged me. “I’m fine!” she said. “In fact, I just hiked up a mountain. So tell that cunt that I just climbed a mountain, okay?”
That talk—aptly defiant, funny, and obscene—was one of our last. Gilda’s cancer had indeed returned, and she passed away in 1989, when she was only forty-two. I found out through Steve Martin, who phoned me with the bad news in the morning. It was a Saturday, and he was hosting SNL that night.
On the show, Steve abandoned his planned monologue and introduced an old clip: a wordless, poignantly funny sketch that he and Gilda had done on the show in 1978, in which they spotted each other across a crowded room at a disco and launched into an MGM-style dance routine, to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark” from the Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon. Both Steve and Gilda wore white, and alternated between genuine grace and total comic spazziness: so committed, so perfect.
Life with Nancy, as we settled in, was a wholly different experience from life with Gilda. Which is not to say that Nan was a shy, retiring little lady who existed at the service and pleasure of her man. (Though I’d love to try that someday.) She was a force of nature in her own right; I am attracted to strong women, if that’s not already evident.
Yet Nancy was a very different type of force. Though she too was an enormously talented singer, songwriter, and actress, she ultimately didn’t “want it” as much as the real strivers do. She didn’t have that “Look at me, laugh at me!” need for approbation that many performers have. (Gilda and I were probably too alike in that regard.) In fact, Nancy was quite the opposite: fiercely individualistic and private—evocative, in a way, of Katharine Hepburn. I realize now that I’ve already mentioned Hepburn several times in this book, and that it may seem like I have a perverse Kate Hepburn fetish. But it’s kind of an odd coincidence. My impersonation of Hepburn came about serendipitously, because I discovered my voice was in the right register to do late-period Kate and she was so imitable to begin with. Nancy was more akin to early-period Kate, in her beauty, outdoorsiness, and independence. And she knew it. The Philadelphia Story was her favorite movie, and she had watched it dozens of times.
Years later, when we became U.S. citizens and Los Angeles residents, Nancy’s women friends—who included Deb Divine, Rita Wilson, Catherine O’Hara, Laurie David, Carolyn Miller (wife of Dennis), and Laurie MacDonald (producing partner and wife of Walter Parkes)—nicknamed her the Mountie: a nod to both her roots and her no-bullshit, no-frivolity, no-disloyalty “If you’ve got buck teeth, either be a clown or get them fixed!” spirit.
But Nancy reigned over the domestic sphere, too. As a new couple, we moved into a little flat for two on the top floor of 44 Binscarth Road, a beautiful old Victorian house in a leafy neighborhood of Toronto. We Canadians have our Thanksgiving in October—like logical people, when the harvest is still in effect and therefore the whole “harvest festival” idea makes sense. (We also stuff our turkey through the beak, but I’ll discuss that later.) On Canadian Thanksgiving 1975, I learned the meaning of domestic bliss, until then a theoretical concept that existed outside my adult experience. Returning home exhaustedly from whatever show I was doing, I was enticed up the staircase by a lovely, wafting aroma of roasted turkey. That was wondrous enough, but here’s the little detail that made my heart swell: As my key turned in the door, I heard Nancy scurrying to the record player, dropping the needle on Frank’s rendition of “Autumn in New York” so it would be playing as I walked in.
We even did a show together, a cabaret version of The Apple Tree, a Jerry Bock–Sheldon Harnick musical that had played on Broadway in the 1960s. The original production was a big to-do, directed by one of my idols, Mike Nichols. Our version was bare bones: just the two of us and a pianist in the dinner theater of Anthony’s Villa, an Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of Toronto whose main dining room featured singing waiters and waitresses in clown costumes. Needless to say, this gig came during a bit of a professional lull for both of us.
There was one warm, muggy night when only two people showed up, despite the theater’s two-hundred-seat capacity. It is a maxim of the theater—which I have since discovered is simply an invention of lazy actors—that if the size of the audience is equal to or lesser than the size of the cast, the performers have the option of not going ahead with the performance. So I walked right up to the solitary couple in attendance and said, “We’ll pay for your dinner if you just want to eat. Don’t you think it seems a little sad to do the show for just you guys?” But the guy said, “No, not particularly. We kind of want to see it.” (There’s the kind of enthusiasm that can get a depressed actor over the hump!) So Nancy and I performed it. The man and woman stared at us blankly the whole time, offering up no reaction whatsoever.
Still, Nan and I were so in love that we had a blast. We even somehow managed to get a terrific review from the Toronto Sun, written by this mustachioed fuddy-duddy English-expat critic named McKenzie Porter. He was something else, infamous for having written a column in the mid-1970s bemoaning the indecency of people who defecate in bathrooms at work, rather than in their home loo. (“Defecation in any place where it is difficult to wash the anus is unhygienic,” he wrote.) But Mr. Porter loved our little-seen production of The Apple Tree. Or, at least, he loved Nancy. He described her in the review’s first paragraph as being “as luscious and curvaceous as a dish of prize melons.” And it went on and on—this old man’s extended, lustful tribute to my future wife’s body. “When men reflect on those firm arcs of flesh and large melting eyes that are inseparable from the ideal cuddle,” Porter wrote, “it is almost certain they have Dolman in mind.” I really couldn’t agree with him more—though I was a little wounded that he made no mention of my beautifully sculpted balls.
Nancy and I established a policy of never going to bed mad at each other, or with unspoken, unresolved issues. Our commitment to talking things out began when, one cold January day early in our time together, Nancy received a phone call that upset her. Without explanation, she ran into our bedroom, shut the door, and pulled the covers over herself. I barged in after her and demanded to know what was wrong. “I don’t want to talk about it!” she said. So I—in a real asshole move, by the way—angrily pulled the covers off her and threw them to the floor. It was my Short-family upbringing coming to the fore: leave nothing alone, and everything in the open.
My sensitivity was wanting, but the ultimate goal was noble: I didn’t want Nancy to suffer whatever she was suffering all by herself. So she opened up: her mother, Ruth, had just told Nancy that her father, Bob, a doctor, had left, and her parents were getting a divorce. It truly was news worth crawling under the covers for. But, as I said to Nancy, “This is not going to be our relationship.” Locked rooms and emotional shutdowns were precisely what caused her parents’ marriage to fail. We were not going to repeat that history.
We skewed in the other direction—we bantered back-and-forth, like Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies. One summer, when I was still merely a very, very minor Canadian celebrity, Nancy and I were invited to be judges in the Miss Prince Edward Island beauty pageant. One of the contestants, in the talent segment of the pageant, opted not to sing but merely recite the lyrics to the Barbra Streisand song “Evergreen,” William Shatner style: “Love—soft as an easy chair!”
Nan and I were convulsing as we tried to hold back our laughter. And remember, we were the judges! But what truly delighted me about that moment was that the two of us found the same things so hysterically funny.
But don’t misunderstand me: there were fights, too, often springing from moments when my natural instinct to push things too far managed to push even Nancy too far. There was, for example, the night of the French Laundry, the Napa Valley restaurant that many critics consider America’s best. They really poured it on for us, literally: I think Nan and I had drunk three glasses of complimentary wine before we even ordered. The staff was incredibly solicitous—“Oh, good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Short”—but in a formal way that I found amusing, especially as the wine started to kick in. I became obsessed with getting at least one of the waiters to laugh, but I was bombing miserably, like a tourist trying to get a rise from one of those fur-hatted Queen’s Guards in front of Buckingham Palace.
Finally the wine steward approached our table and asked Nancy, “Would you like to talk about the wine?” Nancy replied that he was free to choose for us, since we knew very little about fine wines.
That’s when I interjected, “Yeah, I just pulled her out of the chorus!”
Nothing. Crickets. “In fact, on the way here,” I went on, dauntlessly, “it was a struggle for me just to get her to spit out the gum!”
Still nothing. I was bombing badly at the French Laundry.
After the guy walked away, I’d started chuckling about my comic strikeout when I noticed that Nan was staring at me with disgust. “Well, that . . . was . . . embarrassing,” she seethed.
“What?”
“‘I pulled her out of the chorus’? What the hell was that?”
“It was a joke!” I said.
“Well, you know what the problem with that joke is, Marty? It’s not funny. Jokes are supposed to be funny, you know.”
Now the fight was starting. “Oh, c’mon!” I said. “Why do you care what some waiter would think?”
“I care that you act like a moron,” Nancy retorted.
I noticed at that point that we were attracting attention: other diners in America’s most revered restaurant were looking up from their plates to watch us bicker. So, in my most whispery approximation of a shout, I said through clenched teeth, “Stop it! We cannot have this fight!”
“And why is that?” Nancy asked.
“Because the bill is going to be thirty-three hundred dollars! So we have got to have a good time!”
Nancy slumped back in her chair. “You’re right,” she said.
We didn’t speak for the next two minutes, merely eating the fine courses that had been placed before us. At last, after the waiters cleared our plates to make way for yet more plates, Nancy quietly said, “Marty?”
“What?”
“I’m over it now.”
From that point forward, we enjoyed our dinner and found our earlier squabble hysterical. Nancy still deemed my behavior unclassy—“God forbid we should act like we deserve to dine in an elegant restaurant,” she later told me—but the night became a part of our mental scrapbook, a concentrated snapshot of the Marty-Nancy dynamic.
Nancy wasn’t shy about putting anyone—not just her husband—in his place. To bring things full circle back to Blazing Saddles, the movie that nearly dashed our first night of passion, here’s one of my favorite Nan stories, from when we were in Washington, DC, for the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. I was there to take part with Matthew Broderick, among others, in a tribute to one of that year’s honorees, Mel Brooks. My job, in fact, was to sing the Blazing Saddles theme song on horseback, surrounded by a bevy of chorus girls.
Afterward there was a formal dinner in one of the Kennedy Center’s ballrooms, attended by the honorees, along with President and Mrs. Obama and various luminaries from politics and show business. I was seated beside Matthew, with Mikhail Baryshnikov to his left. Nancy, some distance away, was seated next to a prominent if notably pompous intellectual.
Nancy, from the moment I met her, was a stickler for manners, chief among them that one must make conversation with one’s neighbor at the dinner table. What do you do when you’re seated next to someone you don’t know? You ask him questions. You ask him about his life. And then, after the conversational wheels have been greased, your neighbor reciprocates and asks you some questions about your life, or maybe the two of you fall into a fantastic discussion on some completely new topic. But none of this script worked with Nancy’s dining companion, who was known to be socially intimidating and accustomed to deference from all those around him. Nan got nothing from him. She sat there determinedly asking him question after question, but received only bland, perfunctory responses.
Finally, after the umpteenth conversational dead stop, Nancy lost her composure. She said to the man—sharply—“Okay, you know what? At some point, you’re going to have to throw me a bone.”
I was oblivious to the situation until Matthew, who had observed the whole thing, nudged me and pointed in Nan’s direction.
“Ask me something,” Nancy said. “Form words and ask me something. Just for the experience.”
Startled and looking a little ashen, the man thought for a moment before finally coming up with a question. “Do you like L.A.?” he said.
Nancy suddenly extended her arms out in front of her, planted her hands on the table, and flopped her head down in exasperation. Then she looked back up, turned to the man, and said, “Okay, you know what? We’re done.” And at that moment she turned her attention from him to the woman sitting on the other side.
The guy was probably sitting there thinking, What a bitch. But for me, it was hilarious: my wife, at the Kennedy Center, in full Mountie mode.