I Must Say (34 page)

I told Goldie and Kurt about this the following day. Goldie totally believed it
was
some kind of sign, saying, “Babe! Oh, babe! This is classic. Read any book on the paranormal. It's the first thing that happens.”

Kurt, on the other hand, responded in his typical man's man way. “Y'know what I'd do?” he said. “I'd phone Gord. I think you got a short.”

Gord Gallagher, our caretaker, came over. He checked things out and said, “I'll replace the bulbs, but Marty—there's no short.”

A
damant as Nancy was that there not be a memorial, Rita Wilson called me when I returned to L.A. that September and said, “Marty, Nan's birthday is coming up on the twenty-sixth and I have to do something. All of her girlfriends are walking around and have no closure. Some of them didn't even know how sick she was.” Rita was, needless to say, totally right. So the Hankses hosted a warm, beautiful, low-key daytime thing at their home, mostly women. Rita put no pressure on me to come, but I did—for part of it, anyway, as did two of my children, Katherine and Oliver. A smattering of guys, too: Tom, Kurt Russell, Victor Garber and his partner, Rainer Andreesen. And of course Marc Shaiman, who was there to play piano for old time's sake.

Some people got up and read tributes. Others sang. Victor was too overcome with emotion to do so, but Bette Midler got up and did “The Rose,” which was as powerful and moving as you can imagine.

The assumption at the gathering, understandably, was that I
wouldn't sing. But when Tom, who was acting as an emcee of sorts, suggested as much, I put my hand up and said, “Well, if I'm not going to sing, then
why do I have these lyrics in my pocket
?” And out of my pocket I pulled a sheet containing the lyrics to “Nancy (with the Laughing Face),” a song made famous by my idol, Frank Sinatra. With Marc at the keyboard as ever, I launched into the song, whose words so aptly and uncannily described my wife.

She takes the winter and makes it summer
Summer could take some lessons from her
Picture a tomboy in lace
That's Nancy with the laughing face

I've kept a collection of the tributes to Nancy that were read on that day, and that flowed into my computer's in-box in the weeks and months that followed Nancy's death. Katherine, my daughter, wrote a letter to her mother that she read at the memorial at the lake, and it still melts me. I won't quote from it at length, but she alluded to our sprinkling of her mom's ashes in the lake, and wrote, “Whenever I swim in the lake, I'll be swimming all around your spirit. I will feel the waters rush over me and I'll feel you.”

Laurie MacDonald was particularly cogent about how Nancy handled her illness. “I don't think she was completely in denial, particularly in those last heartbreaking months,” Laurie wrote. “My sense was that she had reached a state of grace, or, to be careful not to slip into spiritual cliché, a state of Nan: treasuring every moment with her family, but with a clear and fearless eye toward the mountain in the distance that she would have to cross alone.”

Catherine O'Hara wrote to Nancy, “You'd refuse to suffer fools. Little fools, big fools: ‘You know what? Bye!' You'd rather turn away from a boring dinner companion than misuse one precious
moment. You wouldn't stand for bullshit. You'd be awestruck at ignorance. You'd take the time to help those truly in need and fearlessly foil the self-indulgent, the self-conscious, and the self-pitying.”

Rita Wilson wrote, “Nancy taught me how to notice if a snake had crossed a trail by pointing out the
S
-shaped rut left in the dry dust. . . . In the mountains, where Nancy cross-country-skied, snowshoed, and hiked, it was hard to keep up with her. If you were Nancy's friend, you were ‘walking the walk.' Literally.”

My brother Michael wrote, “If there's a heaven, Nancy is up there getting things ready for us. I imagine there's some redecorating going on. She'll tell God he has nice shoulders, and he'll make the changes. And sure enough, by the time the rest of us get there, it'll be perfect.”

Eugene Levy wrote to me, “I miss being able to say ‘Marty and Nancy.' I miss the sound of her name rolling off of Ed Grimley's lips whenever you had an apology to make for some petty domestic offense. I miss seeing her at the kitchen island juggling five side dishes to a meal she dismissed as ‘Oh, this is nothing.' I miss her coming to my defense at your dining-room table every time you attacked the size of my portions.”

One of the most touching tributes came from Steve Martin, who composed a song in memory of Nancy for his 2011 banjo album with the Steep Canyon Rangers,
Rare Bird Alert
. The song, an instrumental, is called “The Great Remember.” In his liner notes to the album, Steve writes, “I almost wrote lyrics for this tune, but realized that lyrics were somehow, mysteriously, implied. It is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Short, whose vitality and love of laughter made elegies easy but grief doubly hard.”

Steve, as polished and poised a stage presence as he is, had a hard time performing “The Great Remember” at first. When
that album first came out, he was doing a promotional interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC. Diane (who also happens to be married to Mike Nichols) was a friend of Nancy's and knew what the song was about, so she prompted Steve to play it solo on his banjo. Steve spluttered as he started to introduce the song and was nearly overcome by tears. “I'm just gonna play it,” he said, and he did so, very beautifully. The lead melody of the song is a gently rising figure that is intuitively elegiac, yet not remotely funereal. It sounds like a song that would play under the closing credits of a particularly fulfilling family movie that you're sorry to see come to an end.

I
aggressively threw myself into work in the first few months of life without Nancy. My basic attitude was that if I was in a dressing room in Boston or Grand Rapids, straightening my tie before a show, it would feel kind of normal, as if I was just on the road as usual. Whereas at home in the Palisades, sleeping alone in that big bed . . . well, that would take some getting used to.

We were, as a couple, like a big 747 jet plane, powered by two engines. But now one engine is out. Nevertheless, the plane is still filled with passengers, and there's a lot of responsibility, a lot of lives still to influence. So the plane must continue to fly with one engine. It travels onward, but with a bit more effort and struggle, and with no time to flirt with the stewardess or get a coffee.

Steve Martin was one of the people who best understood my need to keep moving forward. For all our years of friendship, he and I had never performed together onstage, live. Yet in June of 2011 we were given an opportunity to do just that, headlining the TBS Just for Laughs comedy festival in Chicago. We billed our show as “Steve Martin and Martin Short in a Very Stupid
Conversation.” We're more polished now, but that first time out, we just sort of winged it. . . .

STEVE:
Marty, let me say that it's been a longtime dream of mine to perform here at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Chicago. And tonight, I feel I am one step closer to that dream.

MARTY:
Steve, you'd tell me if you'd had a stroke, wouldn't you?

STEVE:
Not necessarily.

MARTY:
But Steve, you're right. It
is
a thrill to be here. And can you believe that we're playing to a sold-out house?

STEVE:
Well, Marty, I actually believe that it's
we
who have sold out.

Steve did some banjo tunes, I did some characters, and then the two of us interviewed each other about our respective careers.

STEVE:
What's the worst job you've ever had?

MARTY:
I once did a pilot in 1980.

STEVE:
I didn't ask you the worst
sex
you'd ever had.

I vacated the stage while Steve played banjo, and Steve pretended to nap in a cot onstage while I sang my ode to Osama bin Laden, “Bastard in the Sand,” set to the tune of Elton John's “Candle in the Wind.” I also did an interview with Steve as Jiminy Glick, telling him, “Your skin is so youthful. I'm not saying it's firm. But it's very youthful.” To the crowd, Jiminy said, “There are
very few people as pale as Steve who actually have a heartbeat. He looks like a coloring book that hasn't been colored in yet. He once got a sunburn from his Kindle reader.”

Steve and I so enjoyed the experience that we've continued to do this double act for a handful of dates every year, but with increasing amounts of preparation and set-list determination, because Steve, for some reason, cares about professionalism.

A
big adjustment to life without Nan was learning how to go about having fun, enjoying oneself. How would it work? “Ticket for one, please.” “A table? No, I'll just sit at the bar, thanks.” Steve was always encouraging me to come back to his place in St. Barth's. I was understandably apprehensive, because it was a place I'd only ever been with Nan. But, like all fears in my new, widower's existence, this one had to be conquered. So I agreed to come join Steve and Anne for a January vacation.

In my mind, St. Barth's was a couples' paradise—and, therefore, a daunting place for me to go, for the first time, as a single man. But as it turned out, whatever trepidation I was feeling as I flew down was wholly preempted by Steve's anxiety about the paparazzi who were lurking everywhere. Princess Diana visited St. Barth's once, and the tabloid photographers never left. Now, obviously, in certain circumstances, when you're a celebrity, having your picture taken is part of the agreement. However, it's another thing entirely to walk out of the surf with seawater flowing out of your nostrils, your hair plastered flat onto your forehead, and your stomach protruding like you've just eaten Kim Jong-un, to discover a telephoto lens pointed right at you, cradled by some goofball who's been hiding in the bushes most of the day. Later on the pictures show up in some supermarket paper, and people looking at them say to themselves,
“Gee, I had no idea he was with child!” At no point in my life has my nickname ever been Ol' Washboard Abs. Even during athletic competitions in my youthful prime, when someone would call out, “Shirts and Skins,” I would pray that the Shirts team would pick me. And to be sure, those celebrity weeklies are rarely looking for the money shot of someone's
good
side.

My coming to St. Barth's on this trip particularly concerned Steve, because, he explained, he had been down for a week before I'd arrived and found the island to be more paparazzi-infested than ever. So the thought of
two
well-known actors galumphing together in the water would attract still more attention than one galumphing by himself. But Steve, wily fellow that he is, had an idea.

Steve happens to have an enormous Twitter following, in the many millions. So, upon my arrival, he presented his scheme. First, the two of us would pose for some ridiculous pictures on a private beach, with Eric Fischl taking the photos. Then Steve would tweet out one of these pictures, thereby diminishing the value to the tabloids of an “exclusive” photograph of Steve Martin and Martin Short together on holiday. After that, Steve hoped, we would be left alone.

We went all in on the props. At a beach store, we got a plastic pail and shovel, along with a big green inflatable alligator. Then the three of us headed down to a private beach. Steve and I both wore black swim shirts. I styled myself as a sort of beach-blanket Ed Grimley, with my hair mussed up and my trunks hitched high. Eric snapped a few different pictures of Steve and me goofing around: some with me wearing the pail on my head and licking the back of the shovel, others with me clutching the pail in one hand and the alligator in the other. It was one of the photos from the latter setup, with Steve gently placing a guiding arm around me, that he tweeted out to his followers. His caption: “Never too
busy to help others, I take time from my vacation to spend quality hours with St. Barth's village idiot.”

Steve was pleased with how his plan was working out; indeed, the photo created a ripple in the Twitterverse, and whether by accident or design, we all felt a little less harassed in the days that followed. As we were leaving the beach the day of the shoot, though, I happened to notice what appeared to be a homeless man, fast asleep on the sand.
Hmm, that's strange
.
Could he be one of . . . nah, can't be.
And I didn't give the guy another thought.

Until, that is, a month or so later, when I was back in the States, en route by car service from Chicago's O'Hare Airport to South Bend, Indiana, to visit my youngest son, Henry, at Notre Dame. A bunch of magazines were tucked into the driver's seat back. I pulled out the
Star
and began flicking through it. And then I saw it: a page with the headline “Stars: Are They NORMAL or NOT?” Beneath it a photo showed just me—Steve cropped out entirely—with the pail on my head, licking the shovel like a deranged moron. The “napping” fellow I'd seen that day was indeed a paparazzo; he'd taken a bunch of shots of us from a different angle, with us none the wiser.

I slouched back in the car seat. This, I thought, will make my children so very proud.

I
n any event, I kept myself very busy and very scheduled in the aftermath of losing Nancy. I did a few episodes of the 2011–'12 season of
How I Met Your Mother
as Garrison Cootes, the righteous vegan boss of Jason Segel's character, Marshall Eriksen. For the CBC, I did a new hour-long television special entitled
I, Martin Short, Goes Home
.

To promote a DreamWorks animated movie for which I'd
voiced a character,
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
, I went to Cannes one week in May 2012, promptly flew back to New York to do a little stint cohosting
Live with Kelly
with Kelly Ripa (in that historic interregnum between the Era of Philbin and the Era of Strahan), and, the very same day, made an appearance on the fourth hour of the
Today
show.