I Must Say (13 page)

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.

N
ancy 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.

People always ask me which of my characters I would save if they were all drowning? My heavens, that's like asking Hugh Hefner which of his registered nurses he prefers to cut and pre-chew his food for him. It's almost an impossible thing to answer. But I suppose that if I had to choose, it would probably be a toss-up between Jiminy Glick and—
oh, give me a break, Ed Grimley, and that's no lie!

Born in 1977 on the stage of Second City Toronto, Ed not only helped me through some fraught moments with Nancy early in our relationship but also went on to have “a very decent time, I must say” on
SCTV
,
Saturday Night Live
, and even his own very hip Hanna-Barbera animated series,
The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley
, which ran on NBC for a year. For a time Ed was also available in toy stores as a Tyco talking doll; you'd pull the string in his back and he'd say things like “Gee,
that's
a pain that's going to linger!” (A mint Ed doll in its original packaging fetches a fortune on eBay. By the way, I don't really know if that's true, but that's what I tell people.)

As I've already detailed, Ed's peculiar manner of speaking was a combination of how my school friend Patrick and my brother-in-law Ralph spoke, and his shirt was salvaged from my teenage 1960s wardrobe (and eventually replaced with a series of look-alike shirts). But his signature verbal tic—“I must say”—was not there from the beginning. At first Ed simply punctuated his sentences, as many Canadians do, with the expression “Eh?” I have in my personal archive a rare clip of early Ed, circa the late 1970s, from a Canadian TV show I did for a
season called
Ferguson, Short & Ross
. In it, Ed's still wearing my actual childhood plaid shirt, which is in complete tatters at the elbows, and he says “Eh?” where you expect him to say “I must say”: “Sometimes people can be rude, eh? It seems sad when they are, but sometimes people can be rude, eh?”

But by the time I got to
SCTV
, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas had hit it big with their “Great White North” sketches as Bob and Doug McKenzie, ultra-Canadian brothers who called each other “hoser” and finished their sentences with “Eh?” And, you know, there just wasn't room for yet another
SCTV
character who said “Eh?,” eh? So Ed's “Eh?” became “I must say.”
Oh, and I suppose it didn't!

O
ne of the paradoxes of my early, crazy-in-love years with Nancy is that they coincided with my lowest ebb professionally. As successful as my debut in
Godspell
had been, and as many opportunities as it afforded, it didn't fast-track me to any particular destiny or destination. Though I seldom lacked for work, my choices were simply the jobs that were available.

In Canada at the time, there was no real star system that built up actors to the point where any of us were in a position to mull the merits of one job over another. There was never a question of whether you said yes or no when offered work; you simply asked, “Do I need to bring a suit?” In the course of a day, you (“you” meaning me) might do a radio commercial for Chrysler and an audition for a role in a CBC radio production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, and then, at night, appear in a cabaret show such as
Cole Cuts: The Music of Cole Porter
.

Although I made little headway in mid-1970s Toronto in terms of gaining fame or making serious money, I did get to experience life as a working actor and to grow with each job, which I consider a blessing. At that point, had I been thrown into the bigger
showbiz ponds of Hollywood or New York, I don't think I would have survived. My one-year contract with myself would have lapsed, and I'd have found myself back in Hamilton as a social worker, handing out checks to the needy and gently cautioning them, “Now, don't spend this all on booze.”