|
|
 |
|
Steve Martin's Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park West is
decorated with the genteel understatement of an upper-class British men's
club. In the living room, where a fire is blazing on this bright cold March
afternoon, there are overstuffed sofas and chairs in muted colors, layers of
rugs, cut-glass jars filled with matches and dark, ceiling-high bookshelves.
The only relic of Martin's show-business beginnings is a banjo on a chair in
one corner. On the walls are several discreetly sized pieces of fine art,
including a portrait of Andy Warhol by David Hockney and a canvas by the
American Synchromist Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
Playing on the television just left of the fireplace is a taped Carnegie
Hall performance of Martin's "Great Flydini," a magic act in which a
miraculous succession of objects -- from a full glass of Sherry to a
Pavarotti-singing puppet -- emerge from the magician's unzipped fly. As
Martin, attired in an exquisite light-blue dress shirt buttoned at the neck,
watches from a couch, sipping cranberry juice, and his elegant wife, the
British actress Victoria Tennant, her blond hair set off by a black sweater,
skirt and stockings, puts fresh flowers in a vase, Martin on screen is
making a weird birthing grimace and taking eggs out of his pants.
What appeals to Martin about "Flydini," a piece he has been developing for
about two years, is the purity and simplicity of its stupidity. "It's just
one idea, and it could go on forever," he says in the disembodied
pedagogical cadences he uses to answer questions. "I remember Carl Reiner
told me about an act he saw in Paris in something like the Folies-Bergere. A
curtain opens on a table with 500 dinner plates on it and a little man
standing next to it. The man begins to sing la la la la la la, and as he
sings he picks up the plates and smashes them over his head. I just thought
that was so funny."
Martin bears no resemblance to the mentally and socially retarded characters
he has portrayed in his stand-up comedy act, on "Saturday Night Live" or in
many of the 16 movies he has made over the last dozen years. Unlike them, he
is a cerebral, shy, articulate lover of crossword puzzles, cats, computers
and lunch. "I'm not kidding, lunch is very important to me," he says. When
Martin isn't working, he enjoys a life of rarified freedom. "Like today," he
says, "I went to the bank to exchange some money, worked out, had lunch with
Frank Oz. Now I'm talking to you. Later we'll have some people over for tea
and tonight we're going to the theater."
A man who grew up in a religious family, he was a cheerleader in high
school, and in college became interested in the writings of the Austrian
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to the extent that he thought of becoming a
philosophy professor. He became a writer for the Smothers Brothers instead.
"In terms of who he is, not what he does, he's really very conservative,"
says a longtime friend, Terry DeLapp, a Los Angeles art dealer. There is
something very old-fashioned about Martin. It can be seen in his extreme
politeness, punctuality, his grin-and-bear-it niceness. "It is impossible to
get him to say anything unkind about anyone," Tennant says.
Asked if he felt disconnected from his time, Martin says: "I can't answer
yes and I can't answer no, but I feel my roots are somewhere in the past,
vaudeville, or something. I could trace a line to me and beyond. Carson is
on that line, and Tommy Smothers -- the blank face, the double takes. I was
also influenced by Keaton, Laurel, Chaplin and Gleason. I saw Gleason before
I saw Chaplin. That was the first time I saw elegance, comic elegance."
The nonrelationship between Martin and his performing persona is what his
comedy is about. The contrast between the silliness of his shtick and the
propriety of his mind gives it its purity.
Rather than intellectualizing material, Martin simply seems to turn his body
over to it, like a good, if somewhat alarmed, host. The perfect expression
of it can be found in one of Martin's stand-up characters -- a meticulously
coifed, almost annoyingly earnest gray-haired young man in a three-piece
white suit with an arrow through his head.
The 46-year-old Martin has covered impressive ground as an actor, steadily
working his way from the sublimely stupid to the semiserious. From the
arrogant twit in such early films as "The Man With Two Brains" (1983) he
moved to romantic lead in "Roxanne" (1987), to Everyman in "Parenthood"
(1989) and "Father of the Bride" (1991).
About his ninth film, "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" (1987), Martin says,
"I actually played a real man, a real person, living in the 20th century."
And his cameo in this year's "Grand Canyon" as a bullying, articulate
producer of violent movies had the edge of a nearly straight performance. In
1988, he took a shot at theater and got generally good reviews for his
interpretation of Vladimir in "Waiting for Godot" at Lincoln Center in New
York. He says his latest film, "Housesitter," which opens June 12, will be
his last "low-high comedy or high-low comedy, whatever."
Martin also wrote two films, "Roxanne" and "L.A. Story" (1991), in which he
plays fairly normal types who only occasionally give in to sheer silliness.
But Martin's greatest gift isn't acting, it's acting like a jerk. Inside of
this intelligent and private man, a passionate collector of 20th-century
American art, lurks a 12-year-old boy, naive and importunate, who's dying to
get out -- and often does.
It may have started when he was 10 years old. Disneyland opened two miles
from his house and for the next eight years he spent every free moment in
America's most ambitious carnival peep show. From age 10 to 13, he stood
just outside the gates wearing a straw boater and bow tie and selling
guidebooks. Then he sold little lassos at Frontierland and opened boxes in
the warehouse at Tiki's Tropical Traders in Adventureland, before getting
his first break -- a spot at Merlin's Magic Shop in Fantasyland. There, in
addition to selling humorous staples like fake vomit, he was allowed to
perform magic tricks.
All the iconographic elements of the stand-up comedy act that he developed
in his 20's -- the
arrow through the head, the rabbit ears, the funny glasses and big nose --
were taken right off the shelf at Merlin's. "Happy feet," the name of that
exalted moment when he suddenly surrenders to the Muzak in his soul and,
fingers splayed in private ecstasy, starts dancing all over the stage, was
taken from a lewd little item he used to sell there consisting of two pairs
of naked feet suggestively facing each other. Even "Well excuuuuuuuse me!"
has its source in Disneyland. A Southern woman Martin knew there liked to
say "Well, excuse me for living."
However menial his assignments, Martin viewed them as an apprenticeship in
show business, something that placed him among the players, not the paying
customers. "I feel very lucky in that I always knew what I wanted to do," he
says. "There are people who are 10 times smarter and more educated who
really don't know, and I don't think you have a minute to spare."
Martin says the most vivid memory of his youth was a show at Disneyland
called "The Golden Horseshoe Revue," in which a middle-aged vaudevillian
named Wally Boag told jokes and made balloon animals. "I was compelled to
see it over and over," Martin recalls. "I would anticipate the jokes and
empathize with the audience: this one's going to kill them, wait till he
gets to that one. It was like doing four shows a day."
THE PROTOTYPE FOR all of Martin's jerks was the inept entertainer named
"Steve" he played in his stand-up act for 15 years, who like so many Martin
characters was imbued with the unstoppable combination of arrogance and
stupidity. Martin's comic found his own material so hilarious he often had
to stifle a chuckle, and when he wasn't saying things like "I know what
you're thinking, 'Steve how can you be so funny?'" he was reminding his
audience that as a performer, he got his drinks half price: "That's right,
for every one of yours, I get two."
Navin Johnson, the title character in Martin's first feature film, "The
Jerk" (1979), is simply a more moronic version of his stand-up persona.
Raised by a poor black Southern family, Johnson runs around in overalls like
a village idiot. Then one fateful night he hears a Mantovani arrangement on
the radio and feels compelled to venture out into the world. But, like
Candide, he loses everything because he tends to believe that everyone is
good.
Next came Rigby Reardon, the suave 1940's private eye who keeps getting
caught fondling Rachel Ward when she's unconscious in "Dead Men Don't Wear
Plaid" (1982), a movie intercut with clips from film noir classics, and Dr.
Hfuhruhurr, the eminent inventor of the cranial screw top in "The Man With
Two Brains."
These vintage Martin jerks aren't real characters in any conventional
dramatic sense. There isn't much more to them than jokes, silly facial
expressions and ridiculous body movements, but at their best the expressions
are so insipid, the means of locomotion so unlike anything seen in nature
that they are completely satisfying pieces of fiction.
For hard-core Martin fans, these films, along with "All of Me" (1984),
represent his finest work. They were also all directed by another stand-up
comic, Carl Reiner, whose previous collaborations with Sid Caesar and Mel
Brooks made him eminently qualified to nurture Martin's genius for deranged
but beamish innocents.
In later films, Martin's trademark maneuvers are limited to set pieces, like
the Ruprecht sequences in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988) when an impaired
younger brother is invented by Martin and Michael Caine to scare off Caine's
rich female admirers. With only an elegantly simian posture and beatifically
constipated smile, Martin conjures up a heady mix of mental retardation,
sexual perversion and supercilious vanity.
Whether it's the way Navin Johnson, reading a letter in the tub, elongates
his mouth to match the blurring ink or the way Ruprecht limply extends his
arms and stomps his feet in anticipation of a hug, Martin's finest moments
are almost always physical. "It's the way you stand," he says, "the way you
hold your hands, the way you tilt your head. It's not acting, and I wouldn't
call it mime, it's just being funny with your body." With his nostrils
alone, Martin can express lust, humiliation, anger, pride, terror and low
I.Q.
Martin has the uncanny ability to manipulate his body as if it belongs to
someone else, one piece at a time. In "All of Me," his tour de force of
physical disconnection, half of it belongs to a woman who, through an
accident, cohabits his body, forcing him to lurch frantically from being her
to being himself.
Because of his dignified mien, its a surprise, as in "The Jerk" when he
chases after Bernadette Peters while wearing only two small dogs, to see
what a powerful frame Martin is walking around in. And Martin has always
found a rare redemption in the physical. As he says about his
near-professional banjo playing, "It's not the music I was interested in,
but the fun of moving my fingers across the strings." And his movies are
filled with athletic feats. Who else could have passed the stringent
Viennese sobriety test in "Man With Two Brains," which required him to do a
somersault, walk on one hand, then juggle and tap dance while singing "Catalona
Magdelena Lupensteina Veleneina?" (approximately). "Steve's a great
athlete," says Rick Moranis, a close friend and sometime co-star. "He's like
the Jack Nicklaus of comedy."
From Richard Pryor to lesser comics, the best stand-up routine has often
been such a naked venting of old traumas and neuroses that it could be
considered vertical therapy. Martin's humor, however, never seems to spring
from hurt or anger or insecurity. Abstract and Dadaistic, it's the comedy of
disconnection and denial.
One attraction of this kind of comedy is that it lets Martin distance
himself from what he's doing by seeming to disavow that he's doing it. "What
I liked," he says, "was saying something and denying what I was saying it by
the way I was saying it, like 'And believe me, I'm sincere when I say this.'
"
Unlike most comedians, Martin doesn't appear to suffer from a need to be
funny when he's not performing. As Mike Nichols, who directed Martin and
Robin Williams in "Waiting for Godot," says: "Robin is nine different
characters in a minute, constantly revving his motor even during rehearsal
breaks. Steve is perfectly happy to wait until rehearsal starts again."
Five meetings with Martin yield only the tiniest crumbs of humor, and each
is delivered without any sign that he thinks it's funny. One is a joke he
tells Frank Oz, the director of "Housesitter" during a looping session for
the movie: "Why did the Mafia kill Einstein? He knew too much." Another is
at lunch -- that important meal to Martin -- in a West Side restaurant. A
woman recognizes him and says, "I just wanted to let you know you've given
me and my family so much laughter over the years." To which Martin responds,
"I'm sorry about that."
In fact, Martin is so low-key he sometimes gives the impression that he is
barely there. Although he'll politely answers questions until the batteries
die, his answers are almost eerily dispassionate. "He's like an absolute
witness," says his "Housesitter" co-star, Goldie Hawn. "He only says what he
sees." According to Mike Nichols, "He's a warm and loving friend, but you
have a sense of him coming to you across a great distance." Tennant, who met
Martin during the filming of "All of Me" and has been married to him for
five years (his first, her second), says, "He doesn't get worked up about
politics, movies, books, life."
Martin's sense of disconnection is more than a comic posture. One of his
preferred forms of interaction is exchanging anonymous notes on a computer
bulletin board. And in Los Angeles, he lives in a house with no windows in
front, which he describes as "the house that says 'Go away.' " And he never
goes to parties, he says, "because the conversation always ends up being
about you."
MARTIN GREW up in the Orange County, Calif., town of Garden Grove, where his
mother was a housewife and his father sold real estate. According to Melinda
Dobbs, Martin's older sister, he wasn't close to either of them or to her,
and only visited her house near San Francisco for the first time last
Christmas. Transplanted Baptists from Waco, Tex., his parents kept a strict
household in which he and Melinda were required to go to church regularly.
Mike Nichols compares Martin's fragile link to this household to being "a
foundling from another planet, sort of like Superman dropped from Krypton on
this nice Midwestern couple."
But beyond a determination to escape from what he calls "a cultural
wasteland," Martin never displayed the classic signs of rebellion and he
never turned on himself. Here was an adolescent who would soon be performing
what Frank Oz describes as acts of "comic terrorism" yet who spent part of
his last two years in high school jumping up and down on the sidelines as a
cheerleader for his high-school football team. Martin claims he liked it,
that it was just another excuse to get up in front of a lot of people.
In fact, Martin seems to have absorbed much of the traditionalist spirit of
his upbringing. Although Martin emerged from the riot of the 1960's, his
material was so neutral that it fit as comfortably on "The Tonight Show" as
on "Saturday Night Live." As Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of
"Saturday Night Live," says, "Steve has an essential decency that is like
the way we like to think about America 30, 40 years ago."
Maybe this inbred decorum explains why Martin has never said anything
negative about his childhood, despite the fact that his friends are
unanimous in their impression that it was fairly miserable. Asked leadingly
about the prevailing emotion of his childhood -- alienation? isolation?
loneliness? -- Martin says, "There was just this overwhelming excitement
about being alive."
Then again, Martin never complains about anything, not even the fact that he
has had a permanent ringing in his ears since the filming of a
pistol-shooting scene in "Three Amigos!" (1986). "You just get used to it,
or you go insane," he says.
YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE to see it watching Martin shave his tongue in "Dead
Men Don't Wear Plaid" or urinating in the surgical scrub sink in "The Man
With Two Brains," but Martin was transformed by the three years he spent at
California State University at Long Beach in the mid-60's. "I found out
making things was an important thing to do," he says, "that I could be an
artist in show business, but I had to drop everything in my act that wasn't
original and push the limits a bit." Martin immersed himself in the study of
logic and the work of Wittgenstein, who argued persuasively that it was
impossible to prove that what one person says has anything to do with what
another understands.
While other students were rallying against the Vietnam war, Martin and a
fellow student named Ron Barnette, now head of the philosophy department at
Valdosta State College in Georgia,would convene in a Long Beach Laundromat
and hold metaphysical dialogues against the existential drone of washers and
dryers. Barnette says that, in three years, Martin never mentioned Vietnam.
Studying logic pushed Martin's comedy that much harder the other way.
"Absurdity was just so much easier to find," he says. The short pieces
published in his best seller "Cruel Shoes," published in 1977 but written a
decade earlier, are little more than three or four elegant but ridiculous
paragraphs.
Here is the opening paragraph of "The Vengeful Curtain Rod":
"The story of the vengeful curtain rod is an exciting
and dramatic tale told by the people who only say 'hup hup' on the east
coast of Borneo. The real facts are vague and misty, but the legend of the
vengeful curtain rod as told by the people who only say 'hup hup' goes like
this: 'Hup hup hup hup hup hup hup hup hup hup hup.' "
While his early writing mocked writing, his early stand-up,
as Martin says, "held a mirror up to comedy." Martin would walk on stage and
read the periodic table of elements. "Just the abbreviations," he says, "so
it was that much more obscure and unintelligible." Or he'd say, "Now I'm
going to do 'Nose on Microphone' " and simply place the large nose that's
figured so prominently in his oeuvre ("Dogs in My Nose" and "The Children
Called Him Big Nose" are titles of two other pieces in "Cruel Shoes") on the
microphone and leave it there. "I remember doing that in front of about 15
people and just dying," says Martin, using a comic's phrase for total
failure.
His early masterpiece of anticomedy was a mime titled "The Adventures of
Hairy Man." It began with Martin meticulously combing his hair, getting
every strand in place, then working his way in tiny segments down to his
toes.
To Martin, one of the funniest, most poignant things of all is that there
even are such things as jokes, that a corny sequence of words -- like the
sign at Merlin's that read "There's no place like this place anywhere near
this place, so this must be the place" -- can crack people up. Rick Moranis,
who has appeared with Martin in four movies, says that in the many times
they've had dinner together three things always happen: one of Martin's pale
hairy-knuckled hands lights on Moranis's thigh, Martin asks Moranis if he
would like to have sex with Victoria and when the meal is over Martin looks
up and says: "I really enjoyed myself. And I enjoyed all of you too."
"They're all pretty stupid jokes," says Moranis, "but just the fact that it
is Steve who is doing it, that he thinks they're worthy of repeating every
time makes it funny. There's something so liberated and liberating about
doing the same lousy joke a thousand times."
Martin's best material often consists of one nonjoke after another, the
longer and unfunnier the better. The tyranny of the "hip" was one of the
things he reacted against, and one favorite ploy was to get an entire crowd
to proclaim in unison that they would start thinking for themselves. He was
working this vein at coffeehouses and folk venues around Los Angeles and San
Francisco by the late 60's, but what marks the beginning of his forward
progress was his first appearance as a headliner in Coconut Grove, Fla., in
1973. Within a year, Martin had made it to "The Tonight Show."
Michaels says that when Martin was invited to host his first "Saturday Night
Live" in 1976, there wasn't much enthusiasm among the regulars for a comic
who made lousy balloon animals and wore a fake arrow through his head. "We
were a group of people who had taken the 60's very seriously," Michaels
says. "His act seemed too conventionally show business. I missed it. It was
so new it looked old."
In some very stiff competition, Martin held his own. "He was operating at
the same level we were," Dan Aykroyd says. "We knew he was going to carry
his comic load." In half a dozen appearances during the late 70's, Martin
contributed to some of the show's most enduring sketches, from the swinging
Czech brothers with Aykroyd to an absurdly overreaching dance number with
Gilda Radner. There were also several intriguing collaborations with Bill
Murray, in which Martin's bullies met their match in Murray's masochists.
"There's a time," Martin says, "when you're so hot, when you're so connected
to what's happening, you are what's happening. You can't wait for the show
to happen -- like, there would be five sketches on the show that were
instantly, I don't want to say classics, but whatever the relative version
of that word is."
With his appearances on "Saturday Night Live," Martin's career exploded,
taking him from 500-seat rooms to 20,000-seat arenas. That eliminated for
him whatever joy was left in doing stand-up. "It might have helped if I had
understood that it had become an event, but I still thought it was about art
and the words, and they thought it was about yelling 'Steve' at the worst
possible moment," he recalls.
In 1978, Martin played a series of sold-out concerts at the Universal
Ampitheatre in Los Angeles, and in a move that was both generous and shrewd
invited the Blues Brothers (Aykroyd and John Belushi) to perform as the
opening act. "There wasn't a single major studio executive who didn't attend
one of those shows," says Marty Klein, Martin's agent.
JERRY DELAPP points out that Martin is one of the world's great autodidacts.
He is also clearly a perfectionist. From the first time he walked into "The
Golden Horseshoe Revue" as a 10-year-old, he began teaching himself the
solitary show business arts -- magic, sleight of hand, juggling and the
banjo -- that he would later incorporate in his act.
To master the banjo, Martin would slow down a record far enough to decode
the plucking note for note, then spend days sitting in his father's car
strumming the same chord. He wrote the screenplay for "Roxanne" (another
nose joke), by commissioning a verbatim translation of Edmond Rostand's 1897
play "Cyrano de Bergerac," then updating and rewriting it line for line over
the course of some 30 drafts. For "Pennies From Heaven," he spent seven
months learning to dance well enough to share the screen with Fred Astaire.
"He never says anything without thinking about it first," his wife says.
"When I loosely paraphrase something off of one of his comic albums, he
corrects me, explaining, 'The line has to read exactly the way it was
written, every word, every comma, or it's not funny.' "
But Martin's most impressive feat of self-tutoring has to be his sustained
growth as an actor. With the notable exception of his portrayal of Arthur
Parker in "Pennies," in which he plays a Depression-era music salesman who
escapes from the emptiness of his life and marriage into the lyrics of the
songs he can't sell, Martin's early efforts from "The Jerk" to "The Three
Amigos!" had no more to do with reality than the comedy of Pee-wee Herman or
the Marx Brothers. Yet from that point on, his acting has grown steadily
more realistic and believable. "That's what I want to explore," Martin says,
"comedy that's 100 percent within reality and within character."
Martin's most personal films -- "Pennies From Heaven" and the two he also
wrote, "Roxanne" and "L.A. Story" -- seem to address his own sense of
disconnection. Their protagonists are perpetually dangling men, afflicted by
an unfocused wistfulness, trying to find some point of engagement with the
world. He felt a particular empathy for Dennis Potter's script for
"Pennies," in which Parker's escape from empty reality into empty fantasy
resembles his own childhood flight from the void of Garden Grove into the
make-believe of Disneyland. "I really liked the longing, the dreams of
wanting to be someone else, of wanting to burst into song and have a
beautiful voice," he says. "In a very abstract way, that's what my act was
about, a guy who wanted to be in show business."
|
|
|
