I Must Say (10 page)

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.

G
odspell
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.

G
ilda 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.