I Must Say (12 page)

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.”

G
ilda 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.

L
ife 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.

N
ancy 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.