I Must Say (3 page)

The picture to which she was alluding is the famous “Kings of Hollywood” shot taken by the great photographer Slim Aarons on New Year's Eve, 1957: Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart gathered together at the restaurant Romanoff's, all of them in white tie, looking dashing as they laugh at some shared joke.

I had to agree with Nancy: looking around the room, I couldn't help but acknowledge that it was a pretty glamorous Hollywood night. And another thought occurred: Wow, this is a long way from Breakdown Corner, and the days when
my
Nancy and I barely knew how to navigate this city.

O
ne of the great benefits of that journey—from Breakdown Corner to comic-icon status (not my words, but those of
my staff)—is that I have been fortunate enough to have become friends with some fascinating people, many of whom happen to be famous. Some of these friendships have endured for so long that they've become tenured, unbreakable.

This is especially true now that we're all reaching the age where the phrase “lifetime achievement” is part of the conversation. For instance, Steve, Tom, and I, along with our film-producer friend Walter Parkes, who used to run the DreamWorks movie studio, get colonoscopies together every couple of years. Well, not
together
together—we get separate rooms at the clinic. But we actually gather for a colonoscopy sleepover at Steve's house the night before the big day. We like to make a party of it. A Hootenanny of Purge, if you will.

As anyone who has gone for a colonoscopy knows, you are required, the evening before you undergo the procedure, to cleanse your digestive system—to make it spic and span for the gastroenterologist's camera. And as much as we show business folk would kill to be able to bring hair and makeup people along for the journey, most hospitals have a real issue with that.

The goal of the evening before—Colonoscopy Eve, as we Christians call it—is to pass the time while also passing as much solid material from our systems as humanly possible. We even have the event catered, inasmuch as you can cater a gathering where the only permitted foodstuffs are water, broth, and Jell-O. At around five p.m., the four of us dutifully glug down our barium-sulfate milkshakes, made from a liquid suspension that highlights the GI tract for the doctor—and sits like molten lead in the stomach. Then we settle in for the evening and play poker.

There's an odd kind of rhythm to this poker game; oftentimes there's only one of us at the table. By midnight, the scene in the
nearest of Steve's bathrooms is straight out of a disabled Carnival cruise ship circa Day 15. The following morning we drive as a group to the clinic and get our insides checked out. A few hours later, we're happily and relievedly toasting our colorectal good health over margaritas at the Ivy.

I
first met Tom Hanks briefly in 1983, when he and John Candy were filming what would turn out to be Tom's breakthrough movie,
Splash
. John, always charitable of spirit, was making a video for a benefit that his old high school in Canada was holding, and he'd arranged for most of the
SCTV
cast to appear in it: Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, and me. We filmed it in some studio in L.A., and John came straight from the set of
Splash
with Tom in tow.

In hindsight, Tom, not yet a box-office juggernaut, was the one who was starstruck: not so much over me, the new guy, but over the rest of the group.
SCTV
, he later told me, was huge to him—his comedy Beatles. His eyes went wide with wonderment in that boyish way that they still do when he gets excited; if you've seen him in
Big
, you know the expression I mean.

Tom's first real memory of me is at a party we both attended in 1986 at the home of Chevy and Jayni Chase. Tom had just arrived, and was passing through the anteroom when he caught sight of me standing on top of a chair, holding forth before a crowd. He turned to his wife, Rita, and said, “Who's the loud guy?” Over the next few years our wives became close friends, and we quickly followed suit. Tom is a deeply lovely man who, in person, is exactly what you hope he would be—as funny and smart and decent as it gets.

Tom has always been obsessed with pens. Whereas many
people's retail fantasy would be to have a moment alone in Tiffany's after closing, Tom would choose OfficeMax. A couple of Christmases ago, I ran into Tom at a pharmacy near where we both live. Actually, I spotted him first. He was, of course, in the stationery section, engrossed in the variety of Post-it notes—Tom is also very particular about his Post-its—and I crept up behind him and blew a puff of warm breath onto the back of his neck, just enough to make him jump out of his shoes. “Aaaagh!” went he. Relieved that it was only me, Tom asked what I was up to. It was Christmas Eve day, and as I explained to Tom, I was heading over to the Gelson's supermarket to buy ingredients for the French punch I would later be making. “Can I come with ya!” Tom said, doing his best demented, demonic smirk.

So there we were in Gelson's: me with my list, Tom at the helm of the shopping cart. “See,” Tom said, “this is what it would be like if we had an apartment together. I'd be pushing, you'd be loading.”

It was a busy time at Gelson's, with lots of cars in the parking lot. As I maneuvered my vehicle through the traffic, Tom and I excitedly talking about the various gifts we'd gotten people, I must have lost focus. I didn't notice a car in front of me backing out of a space, and—
THUNK!
—I slow-motion crashed into it.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the man whose car I'd hit couldn't have been more gracious. As I got out of my car, he immediately recognized me and said with a smile, “Oh! Well, I guess I don't need to see
your
ID!” Then when Tom got out from the passenger side, the guy almost had a heart attack. I went back into the car and started rooting around my glove compartment for the insurance card. By the time I'd dug it out, I found the guy engrossed in deep conversation with Tom. “Look,” he was saying,
“You don't have to read the whole script. But if you can just
listen to the music
. . .”

S
ometimes, like in that parking-lot episode, people are just delighted to see your face, no matter the circumstances; that's one of the upsides of fame. Generally it's fantastic to be a celebrity, an absolute privilege. By doing the movie
¡Three Amigos!
, for example, I became friends not only with Steve Martin but also with Chevy Chase. And by being friends with Chevy, I got to meet one of my all-time idols, Frank Sinatra. Like I said, I'm by and large a pre-rock guy. When our children were growing up, Nancy constantly told them, “You have to understand your father's strange time-warp approach to life.
I
did not listen to Frank Sinatra. My
parents
listened to Frank Sinatra.” I can't help it; I've always loved Frank, as long as I can remember. And through Chevy I met him the night of September 17, 1992, after he'd given a concert at the Greek Theatre in L.A.

I should back up. A few years earlier, sometime in the late 1980s, I had an opportunity to meet Sinatra that didn't pan out. At the time Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and I shared the management team of Rollins Joffe Morra & Brezner. One day Buddy Morra got word from Sinatra's camp that the three of us—Robin, Billy, and me—were invited, with our wives, to stay at Twin Palms, the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. This, though none of us knew Frank. The gist of it was that Frank wanted to be amused, and we were the performing monkeys he had selected. The three of us were like,
Fantastic! How great will this be? Hanging with Frank and getting to show off our leisure wear?
But our wives collectively vetoed the idea. They found it degrading for us men to submit so willingly to Frank's whim—or maybe they just
didn't want to be known as the women married to Frank's monkeys. In any event, it didn't happen.

Cut to 1992. Chevy called me one day and said, “Marty, do you want to be my date to see Frank Sinatra at the Greek Theatre?” I jumped at the chance.

The very process of going to the show was a big production, orchestrated, aptly enough, by a big-time TV producer, George Schlatter, the creator of, among other programs,
Laugh-In
. We all met up at George's house before the concert for drinks, a blend of what you might call old and middle-aged Hollywood: Chevy and me, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Don and Barbara Rickles, Dinah Shore, Jackie Collins, Lionel Richie, and so on. Then, as if we were a senior group on a big outing from an assisted-living facility, we were all loaded onto a bus, which took us to the backstage area of the Greek Theatre.

Frank was in good voice that night, and Chevy was especially funny. Seated directly in front of us was the old-time superagent Swifty Lazar. Swifty, if you don't know what he looked like, was a hairless-little-gnome kind of guy who wore comically oversize eyeglasses that further emphasized how hairless, little, and gnomic he was. Unbeknown to Swifty, Chevy kept removing his own sunglasses and hovering them over the back of Swifty's head, effectively creating a second Swifty face. This caused Dinah Shore and Jackie Collins to titter like schoolgirls in the back row of a classroom.

After the show and the bus ride back to George Schlatter's home, I got to talking with Dinah, who had actually sought
me
out. Who knew that the 1950s big-band sweetheart, 1970s talk-show queen, and avatar of the Ladies Professional Golf Association was such a massive
SCTV
fan? We chitchatted a while, and then Dinah said, “Hey, do you want to meet Frank?”

At long last, the moment I was waiting for! He was at the party at the Schlatters' by this point, standing at the bar by himself. Dinah guided me over. I steeled myself, offered my hand, and said, “Mr. Sinatra, my name is Martin Short.”

Paul Shaffer maintains that, over many years and hundreds of tellings of this story, I have embellished it further and further, and that there's no way that Frank talked like a gangster out of
Guys and Dolls
, as he does in my dinner-party recountings. But I swear that he talked
exactly
like a Damon Runyon character. What he said to me was, “I know well of you. And you're
mah
-velous.”

In response, I couldn't help but gush. “Well, Mr. Sinatra,” I said, “you have no idea,
no concept
, of how big a fan I am of yours.” Frank just stared back at me and said, “I think I do.” Sensing my nerves, he said, “Whaddya drinking, kid?” I told him, “Oh, whatever you're drinking, Frank!” He turned to the bartender and said, “Jack Daniels.”

The bartender looked at me and said, “Straight up or on the rocks?” But in my nervousness, I thought he said, “Straight up or relaxed?” So I said, “Relaxed.”

Sinatra, irritated at my baffling non sequitur response, turned to me and said, “H
E SAID
‘S
TRAIGHT UP OR ON THE ROCKS
!'”

I'd known Frank Sinatra for fifteen seconds, and already I'd pissed him off. Pretty soon, I thought, he's going to take out his gun and shoot me in the leg, and then I'll never be able to enjoy his albums in quite the same way again. So maybe it was time to split.

I
t's an old story for me: every time I've had the chance to meet someone I looked up to as a kid, the experience has been so profound or overwhelming that I've ended up blowing it, either
by being tongue-tied or by saying something utterly silly. I don't have this problem with contemporary stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Nothing against George or Brad, but it's the people who were huge to you when you were twelve who, in person, render you unsteady on your feet. They bring those youthful feelings of awe right back to the surface.

In 1976 I saw Shirley MacLaine perform her one-woman revue at the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto, and somehow I wangled my way into an opportunity to go backstage after the show. Since I knew I'd be meeting MacLaine, I actually wrote down in advance what I was going to say to her, and rehearsed my lines before going to the theater. I would tell her that she was a magnificent performer who had been brilliant in
The Apartment
, and whose elegance shone through every song she sang that night. And then Miss MacLaine would say “Thank you,” and move on to the next person.

However, when I actually met Shirley MacLaine backstage and delivered my little prepared speech, she didn't merely say “Thank you” and move on to the next person. Instead, she started a conversation. “But there was so much reverb through the sound system that I could barely hear myself,” she said. “Weren't you bothered by that at all?” To which, flustered, I replied, “Thank you.”

Damn thee, Marty Short! thought I.

That very same year, I went to New York and scored a ticket to see the play
The Royal Family
, starring Rosemary Harris, at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway. I was by myself, and the seat next to me was empty. Suddenly, before the curtain went up, I heard the unmistakable voice of Katharine Hepburn asking people to move their feet as she made her way across my row: “
Thank
you. . . .
Please
remove that umbrella. . . . Get that
leg
out
of my way, you idiot!” She took the seat next to me. Determined to play it cool, I said nothing to her. But before I knew it, I was so caught up in the brilliance of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's play that I had forgotten that Hepburn was even in the building. As the curtain fell at the end of act one, after Harris unleashed an astounding diatribe that culminated in her collapsing into a heap onstage, I turned to Hepburn, who I'd forgotten
was
Hepburn, and said, “Isn't she classy?”

And because I said it in a normal voice, like a normal person, Hepburn, in a very normal, conversational way, responded, “Well, Rosemary has an incredible ability to convey such deep emotions and make the audience feel that they're a part of her journey. She's always had that magic. I guess always will. So did Spencer.”