About Steve :: Writer :: Profile :: Mister Lonely Hearts

 Steve has come to hate this article because it made him sound all moony and caught in a midlife crisis. 

While his distaste is understandable, it's one of the must-read profiles.

 

    
    Esquire
MISTER LONELY HEARTS
Martha Sherrill
1 Apr 1996, Vol. 125, Issue 4

Why would a fifty-year-old comic genius like Steve Martin want to spend the rest of his life alone? He wouldn't. Know any nice girls?

He has a nightmare that he shares -- finally. It's his own scenario of hell, an ugly vision that plays in the dark, swampy part of his mind. We are drinking many cups of tea -- first Earl Grey for stimulation, then chamomile for calming down -- and sitting in a golden little corner of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, a place of sunlight, poolside deals, and overly fancy motorcars with movie stars getting out.

Steve Martin is loose and relaxed, fresh an appointment with his therapist. There is nothing overly fancy about him. He is wearing a navy-blue knit sweater. Reading glasses hang on a cord around his neck. "I fee like I'm in an interim period," he says. And I worry. "This is my last viable decade," he says. And I worry some more. The lonely-death scenario. The pathetic old. L. A.-Guy scenario. I could feel it coming. Martin has everything all other men could want-talent, money, respect, freedom, game, a brilliant art collection, a cast of loyal old friends and discreet young girlfriends. But somethings troubling him.

He can see the future, as though it were one of his paintings on a wall before him. It is a vision of hell, as complicated and horrifying as one by Hieronymus Bosch. As empty as an Edward Hopper, as self-absorbed as a late Rembrandt.

In this downbeat scenario, it is ten years hence: Martin is turning sixty. By then, presumably, he will have thirty-five middlebrow family hits in the can and might be starring in Father of the Bride VI. But worse than all that, far, far worse: He is getting another divorce. Another bitter divorce. But this time, he has a three-year-old child living in some other part of the city.

He can see it vividly, he says. Watching his friends Lorne Michaels and Paul Simon remarry and start new families must cause even more anguish. He could fall in love, marry again, and then something could go terribly wrong--or even a little wrong. Love, as he has been learning lately, is an idiotic, unpredictable thing. "I don't want that. I don't want that," he says. In his mind's eye, the nightmare is materializing.

"It's different when you're twenty or thirty," he says. "I mean, it's still painful. But there's something horrible about it happening at sixty. So the next relationship has to be it. And I have to make sure it's really, really right."

What to do? The following describes Steve Martin's multistep plan of self-renewal--the grand overhaul and full embrace of a midlife crisis--divined by me over several weeks of interviews, E-mails, and talks with friends. For the last year, every brain cell has been firing as he has contemplated the nature of romance. The whole man-woman thing. He seems desperate to figure it out--before it's too late.

"I've been sorting out what it means to be a bachelor," he says. "Is this what I want? It's possible, you know, that I could never meet someone."

STEP NUMBER ONE: KNOW THAT YOU DON'T KNOW In the mornings, Martin rides his bike around the canyons of L. A. Afternoons, he's at home-as we are now--in the new house he moved into a year ago. What does he do all day long? "I don't do anything," he says seriously and mock seriously, and a little sadly. "I sit around and read and answer the phone." He is trying not to be a phony. And, indeed, Martin seems to have no routine in private. He is the most unactorish of performers.

The phone rings. "I can't talk," he whispers, but seriously. "I'm doing an interview. Can I call you back?"

He brings a tray into the living room with a pot of green tea. Even the way he sets it down seems earnest, deliberate, a little clownish, but it would be wrong to laugh. He builds a fire in the fireplace, with great purposefulness--it's 70 degrees outside-and sinks into a big white armchair, his back to the roaring blaze. His face beads up with sweat; he takes off his sweater--the same one he wore yesterday at tea. He begins to talk about things of interest to him. What would those be? The nuances of human behavior and big landscapes--love, death, aging. He has a terrific need to figure things out. And unlike most artists, he is an intense listener. He leans forward, as though English weren't his first language, as though he needed to breathe your words through the pores of his skin, and his face locks into an all-absorbing gaze.

"What were you saying about men when they turn forty?" he asks. "You suggested something. What happens to them? What did you mean by that?"

You can ask about his career or his art collection-- Hoppers, Picassos, Diebenkorns--and he will answer you dutifully. But when the conversation shifts back to what's been on his obsessive, hungry mind, he comes alive. Before going into show business, he wanted to be a philosophy professor, so exploratory thinking suits him.

"I've had these incredible revelations lately on how completely stupid I've been--in terms of relationships with women," he says. "And now I've dated a few women, and I've talked with them about it. It's like women have a network of knowledge. Things only women know and men don't. It's kept from men, and it works every time."

Pondering the vagaries of love seems to have opened his mind, let new things pour in.

"It's kept from them because we're so stupid about it," he continues-and he's talking about the manipulations, the games, the little numbers that one sex can pull on the other--"we can't believe it's actually happening. . . . Some women I've dated don't have it at all--don't even know how to do it. Others know about it, used to do it, don't do it anymore. Others don't even know they have it and do it, like, endlessly. Am I sounding macho?"

STEP NUMBER TWO: GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FALL APART Upon meeting him at the Four Seasons, I was surprised by his candor, his immediate ability to dive into an intimate conversation. A number of people, friends of friends of his, had said that he was tough to talk to and uncomfortable with strangers. "He can be positively monosyllabic," one person told me. Another described him as "socially autistic." "He's almost rude," said another. "No, he is rude."

Was it possible that he had changed? And so quickly? "He has become more open," explains close friend Nora Ephron, the writer and director. "Very open and vulnerable and dear."

He talked quite easily about his divorce from actress Victoria Tennant in 1993 and told me how his heart had been broken next by a younger woman. The last two years have been "traumatic," he said. He'd obviously been thrown, headlong, into a period of introspection and regeneration. But rather than finding myself pleased--or relieved--I was growing a little troubled, particularly since Martin began discussing what he'd been reading lately. He was, after all, a certified intellectual, as entertainers go, the man who defined postmodern comedy and influenced a generation of stand-up performers. "A phenomenon," as Lorne Michaels put it.

Now, overwhelmed by sadness and a midlife crisis in full throttle, he'd been reduced to modish psychology cures--and sitting in a corner of a Beverly Hills hotel and telling me about it.

"I am not a depressed person," Martin says, "but I was pretty gloomy for about a year. I read books. Lots of books. From the ridiculous to the sublime. From the simple to the very sophisticated. I was in the bookstore, and I was searching the shelves, like"--and he makes a sorrowful, pained look-"I need help. And I saw this little book: How to Survive the Loss of a Love. I go, okay. So I picked up some other books on the subject, all too embarrassing to talk about. And I read this book, and it's, like, so fundamental. It's got big paragraphs in bold and poems. I was, like, sure. But it spoke directly to the issue. You know, it's like why corny movies make people cry, because they are right on. What we're thinking and feeling is usually not very sophisticated. .

"Here's how naive and stupid I was," he says. "This little book taught me something so fundamental. Having the pain is what heals you."

His list continued as my jaw descended into a gape. He had read a book called Obsessive Love, and he says, "I picked it up and went, This is not for me, and then, when I read it, I realized it was."

There were Getting the Love You Want and Care of the Soul, both of which he loved, and The Drama of the Gifted Child-"I really related," he says. Then, while discussing Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, he became excited. "It was so revelatory, I couldn't believe it! It's written in a very simplistic, pop way, but it's something I would never have dreamed up on my own--or figured out in my entire life!"

STEP NUMBER THREE: BUY A DOG Unlike his old house, which was famously cold and spare and modern and a shrine to his art collection, his new place, a spectacularly comfortable, rambling ranch house, is decorated warmly, in a tasteful California old-Wasp hacienda style. There was no wall space for all his big, important art, so he put some of his things in storage and sold others. Now only a handful of understated masterpieces dot the walls. Each room looks out on a courtyard with a swimming pool and a garden. And Roger.

Before Roger. After Roger. This might be how the world will someday think of Steve Martin--for Roger's mere presence says as much as anything else. Roger is a yellow Labrador retriever and Martin's only regular companion these days--aside from Lucy and Bub, the two cats. He's a year old.

Right now, Roger is outside a glass door and looking in, sort of smearing his nose around. He wants in. But after he wants in, he wants out. He is a lucky dog, because he keeps getting what he wants. He has a very wry, deadpan expression. Especially when being yelled at.

"Roger!

"Roger!

"I'm sorry to shout," Martin says, "but I've been instructed to be firm with him."

This is their relationship. Steve has been instructed to be firm. Roger is running the show. Roger just exists. Steve thinks a lot about existence and relationships, including his relationship with Roger. Roger is warm, friendly, outgoing. He likes everybody he meets and wags his tail and shimmies his back end. Martin, while he's thinking so much these days, might be thinking he should be like Roger.

STEP NUMBER FOUR: REMEMBER, YOU HAVE FRIENDS He may have flawless comedic timing and great theatrical courage--he once roller-skated in a King Tut outfit on The Tonight Show--but now Martin seems vulnerable, innocent. "I have a giant dumb area of my brain," he says. And a little lovelorn. He wants to be alone now, he says.

He goes down the hall to fetch a paper. He has printed out some E-mail exchanges with Ephron. He stands behind me and reads one dated December 23, 1995: "I think it's wonderful that you now are trying to be alone and are spending it by finding ways to feel sorry for yourself for being alone."

"I'm not seeing any one person now in a permanent way," he says. "I'm seeing some people I like a lot and have really nice relationships with. It's a very tricky thing because you don't want to get too dose, and yet you have to get a little dose or it's no fun."

Yes, you have to get a little dose or it's no fun at all. A movie star has to make his own way, just like any other lonely single guy, I guess, the only difference being that Steve Martin is Steve Martin. Although this can be a problem, too. His friends have worried that his inability to make chitchat with strangers could hamper his chances for happiness.

He went out to dinner recently with his close friend Brian Grazer--who has produced three of Martin's movies, including his most recent comedy, Sgt. Bilko--ad Grazer's girlfriend, Gigi Levangie. "And all night long, Steve was just hysterically funny," says Grazer. "And I said later, 'Steve, why can't you do that on a date?' 'I just can't,' he said."

Grazer is just one of the many people Martin has to call upon for assistance and wisdom--so even when he's alone, he's not that alone. People like Martin Short, Kevin Kline, Tom Hanks, Lorne Michaels, and Mike Nichols are close friends, as well as a cast of accomplished women in his age range: Ephron, painter Jennifer Bartlett, and novelist Susanna Moore. And when they aren't kibitzing on the sidelines, they seem determined to find the right woman for him. "There's a perception of Steve that he's this awkward, whispering, Andy Warhol, monosyllabic character," says Short. "I think he's very normal and healthy."

"He's very forthcoming about his relationships with women and very, very curious about getting it right," says Moore. "He's serious about this. Steve has a practical-American, expedient, logical side. And he has confidence that if he talks to people and thinks about it and reads about it, and if he's honest with himself and works hard, he can find true love."

STEP NUMBER FIVE: EXAMINE THE PAST

He was born in Waco, Texas. He moved to California when he was five. His father never made it as an actor and sold real estate. The family lived in Garden Grove, California. They weren't a warm bunch. (See his play WASP. Long silences at dinner. Young Steve worked at Disneyland, selling guidebooks. Did magic tricks at birthday parties. Painfully shy. Studied philosophy at Long Beach State, then UCLA. Left school to write for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Won an Emmy. Left comedy writing to perform. Wasn't dark and obscene like Lenny Bruce. Had some rough, lean years. Wore a white suit and played the banjo. Made animals out of long, skinny balloons. Became famous. Worked even harder.

STEP NUMBER SIX: OPEN YOUR HEART Roger is scratching at the door again. He wants out. Forget women's special knowledge. "Roger!" the comedian shouts. The low, booming baritone Martin uses is a total act--his worst performance-and Roger knows this. His ears prick up at the sight of a bird swooping into the backyard. He whines and barks once.

"Roger!"

Roger looks over at the comedian and stares at him a little coolly. "I'm sorry about this," Martin says, "but I think I need to let him out."

STEP NUMBER SEVEN: QUIT TRYING SO HARD Martin has a reputation in Hollywood for hard work and discipline, for generosity with other performers, for loyalty. He has made many movies with Carl Reiner, for instance, even though it's clear that Reiner is no Kurosawa. But he also moves on, regenerates, hasn't stayed satisfied with one genre-or one routine.

After he got into movies, in the late '70s, he moved from making edgy, original comedies like The Jerk, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and Pennies from Heaven to taking on more serious acting roles, such as the ones in Parenthood and Leap of Faith, and to writing screenplays--the brilliantly sweet Roxanne and L.A. Story--while keeping up regular appearances on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live and coming up with new stage acts, too--like "The Great Flydini"--and, in the last five years, writing plays on the side.

"First, you work hard to prove you aren't a flash in the pan," Martin says. "Then you work to show other things you can do. And you write to show something else. It's showing and showing and showing. And pretty soon, you realize there's a kind of emptiness left, and it's traumatic. . . . And I realized that unless I was continually working, I felt people wouldn't like me."

You didn't exist if you weren't getting attention?

"No, it's not that," he says. "Something embarrasses me about that. I can't stand that. My own reason is just as embarrassing, but it's different. . . . It's, like, only in the last couple of years did I discover that I had anything to say. And before that, I was running on a sort of comedy energy--and the love of comedy. Comedy alone was enough.

"And then, suddenly, the motive started to wear out. I used to get great, great satisfaction from my work, and it gave me my reason to respect myself. And when you start to lose that, it's very traumatic--because no longer does just working make you happy."

Martin says he's taking time off now, not working--to see what happens. He'll ride his bike in the morning. Read and answer the phone in the afternoon. "I'm going to stop myself from thinking," he says, "just to see what comes up, where it goes."

And as he stands at the threshold of trying to exist, rather than pondering existence, he offers one more thing to think about: "I heard this great quote. I think J. P. Donleavy said writing is a way of turning your deepest pain into money." He breaks into his big tragicomic smile and then laughs. "But now I realize that's not even cynical. Writing is a way of forming your pain into something. So it's a way of delivering it to someone else."

STEP NUMBER EIGHT: LEARN FROM MISTAKES
How did all his love problems start? Martin offers another E-mail that he received from Ephron. "I'm not Steve's love adviser," she says later, when asked about them. "That would be the blind leading the blind. [Ephron was once married to Carl Bernstein.] I was just writing him back after he wrote me." This second E-mail is even more devastating and also from December 1995: "Anyway, for what it's worth . . . you see the women you do because you are still so hung up on women who aren't kind and sweet that seeing the ones who are is a way of being with the ones who aren't. Do you know what I mean?"

I look up at Martin. Sweet and kind? Was your wife sweet and kind?

"My wife was strong and, uh, nice," he says. "But those wouldn't be the two words that would come to mind to describe her. No."

He met British actress Victoria Tennant while they were making All of Me in 1983. After a few years together, they married in 1986. She was thirty-five. He was forty-one. And even though some would say there was a discrepancy in talent between them, by Martin's account, he married up. She was all the things he wasn't. Martin was shy around strangers and had not had a long-term relationship, aside from the time he'd spent dating Bernadette Peters. Tennant, on the other hand, seemed to know how to become part of a couple easily and was gregarious, quick to make friends. Martin had grown up middle-class. Tennant was from a cultured family--and her godfather was Laurence Olivier. Despite Martin's refined sensibilities, he had never traveled much. Tennant spoke several languages, knew her way around the globe.

"We eloped and were married in Rome," says Martin, "because Victoria was the sort of woman who knew how to do complicated, impossible things like that."

They set up house in Beverly Hills and an apartment New York, and entertained, acquired friends, bought art, traveled, inspired each other. "As far as muses go, Victoria was a good one," says Ephron. "I think she truly knew how brilliant and talented Steve is, and that was a focus of the marriage."

Martin continued to make a picture a year--which has been his habit ever since his first film cameo, in The Kids Are Alright in 1979--but he started writing again, too: Roxanne in 1987 and L. A. Story in 1991 (in which Tennant also appears). When he began toying with the idea of writing plays, Tennant was especially supportive.

His first attempt was a comedy called Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the story of a fictional encounter between the young Picasso and the young Albert Einstein, which he says he had been waiting to write all his life. The play, like his two screenplays, offers all the Martin trademarks. It merges his interests in art, magic, science, and philosophy--and runs an emotional range that goes from slapstick to esoteric to schmaltz. A few critics complained that it was too showbiz, or theory of relativity lite, but Martin's gift has always been to make the intellectual accessible, and when Picasso opened in Chicago in 1993, and later ran in Los Angeles and New York (where it is now), it was a commercial and critical success.

By the debut of Picasso, Tennant was gone. While on location making a TV miniseries in 1993, she fell for an Australian television star (friends refer to him as the Tom Selleck of Australia) and returned to Martin just long enough to announce she was leaving. Later, she would explain privately to friends that though her marriage had been satisfying in some respects, Martin was emotionally unavailable. According to Martin, the divorce wasn't friendly and though the two share a circle of confidants, they rarely speak.

But it wasn't Tennant, he says, who devastated him. It was the subsequent relationship with Anne Heche, a twenty-five-year-old actress (the Heartbreak Kid, as Martin's friends now refer to her), that kicked him into a more reflective period. "It was a torturous love affair," Martin says, and when the relationship ended, he found himself forty-nine, alone again, and wondering what his life was all about.

"If it was a midlife crisis," says Moore, "it wasn't self-destructive or reckless or harmful to anyone else. It seemed instructive. And it wasn't just about sex, either; it was more complicated than that. The conventional male midlife crisis just seems to be about sex and death. And I don't think this is about death. It's about life."

STEP NUMBER NINE: TURN MISERY INTO ART "I spent about a year recovering," says Martin, "and searching out myself and asking why things happened the way they did. I wrote a play about it, Patter for the Floating Lady. Oh, I shouldn't have told you that. I should have said I made it up."

In Floating Lady, a magician appears onstage and levitates a young woman named Angie. At the end of the play, after it's clear these two have loved each other and never quite trusted each other and caused each other the requisite sorrows, she says, "'Now I wait for a man my own age who will stand before me at arm's length, and I will hand him unimaginable joy, and he will not move forward, and move back. Then I will hand him unimaginable pain. And he will stand neither moving forward nor moving back. Then and only then, I will slit myself from here to here [she indicates a vertical line from her neck to her abdomen], open my skin, and close him into me."

The character of Angie is a little brutal in her honesty and also self-contained. She is described as "twenty-five, off-beat-looking in her clothes, wears glasses, but that's because she's quietly hip. She's got something, but it's stand." She is also "very beautiful in her plainness."

"I'm not attracted to really beautiful women," Martin explains. "Certainly not to women who are all done up. But I'm not attracted to women who, even without makeup, are considered real drop-dead beauties. I find them sort of scary."

Since the Heartbreak Kid, he has turned up at friends' houses with several different women, most of them also beautiful in their plainness, as well as smart, serious, and aloof. At dinner parties, "Steve's dates never say anything," says Ephron. "I'd be grateful if he found a twenty-seven-year-old," Bartlett says, laughing. "That would be in the older range. In any case, some of us are bemused by his romantic desires, and we also wish him the best."

"I have learned," says Martin, in his defense, "that it's possible for a fifty-year-old to have the mentality of a twenty-five-year-old. And vice versa."

"I have a theory that I tease him about," says Moore. "It's a version of the principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the development of the human being mirrors the development of the human race. It seems to me that Steve is conducting his own ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny experiment in regard to women. He's crowding the first forty years of a man's sexual experience into a few years. Maybe when he's eighty, he'll catch up to women my age. I just hope by then it's not too late."

Martin says that since his divorce he's had relationships with "a thirty-five-year-old, a fifty-year-old, and a twenty-six-year-old"--he is determined not to go down in history as the Guy Who Dates Young Things. He agrees with Ephron that he gravitates toward two types: sweet and kind; and not. What's attractive about women who aren't sweet and kind? "It's valuable when you finally win them," he says.

They hate everybody else and love you?

"Well; it just means you're constantly in the process of winning their love. Want to see the backyard?"

STEP NUMBER TEN: BE OPEN TO NEW THINGS In the backyard, the swimming pool has a basketball hoop at one end, and some rafts are leaning up against a wall. There's a swing set in the corner, too--and a slide. Martin is playing Frisbee with Roger on the grass. He has a handsomeness that's quite conventional, almost doctorish. He seems upstanding, reliable, old-fashioned. A vulnerability that might make other men seem pathetic makes Martin genuine and dear. "He's the friend," says Moore, "you'd call in the middle of the night for help."

And there's something about his outfit--the sweater and khakis and sensible loafers-and his manner, and something about the house, too--the cozy rooms, the fire going, the clutter--that's very inviting, very ready. As though he were waiting for a family to appear.

"Want a frozen Haagen-Dazs bar?" Martin asks. "Nonfat? Sorbet? Chocolate? It's really, really good. It's like a frozen sorbet chocolate thing with no fat. No dairy at all." We head for the freezer. The tape recorder is left running, and later you can hear steps walking away as we shuffle out. Then a sniffing sound comes on. Louder and louder. Roger.

"He says he could imagine having children someday," Jennifer Bartlett says. "He just finished training his dog--and found it pleasurable."

"There's been an enormous change," says Moore. "Before, one was always loath to introduce him to a new person or to bring along someone to dinner who might, of all horrible things, turn out to be a fan. He didn't encourage anything casual or loose. But now that's all different."

"Oh, he's much more liberated now," says Brian Grazer. "Before, it was about his work and the art world. Learning more about art. Being ahead of the art curve. It was always about more tangible stuff. Buying the right art. Being brilliant in another movie. Being in another hit. You know. And now he's trying to be reflective and find a balance."

"The swing set was in the yard when I bought the house, and it seemed fascistic to tear it down," Martin says. "Also, one never knows. . . ."

Tennant has moved on, remarried in March--not to the Tom Selleck of Australia but to a Warner Bros. executive, Kirk Stambler, eight years her junior. And a number of Martin's friends have new, young wives and new babies.

Martin sits down again. He tells a story--a way to explain the intangible, the thing missing from his life. The thing he keeps thinking about but is now trying not to think about. In an E-mail, he says, Nora Ephron was describing a dinner party that she and Nick Pileggi, her husband, had gone to together. While they were at the table, somebody told a story that was "sort of chilling," says Martin, and Ephron looked up at Pileggi. She was waiting for him to make eye contact.

"It's a perfect definition of companionship," Martin says. "It was one of those moments that marriage is all about. Somebody says something, and you just look at your mate. You have to have that eye contact. Because you know exactly what they're thinking. It's so joyous."

Roger stands at the glass door, looking out. Martin sits alone, his back to the fire. The light is soft, and the day is fading. The pool is turning a haunting blue. Twilight is coming. The paintings on the wall look beautiful, a little wistful. So does the swing set.
 		    
 
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