Steve Martin used to be a funny guy. Only the most curmudgeonly critic would
deny cracking a smile at the daft poem he uttered as The Man With Two
Brains: “Oh pointy bird, so pointy pointy, anoint my head, anointy nointy.”
Or marvelling at the comic’s zany performance as the adopted white son of
black sharecroppers in The Jerk. But somewhere along the way, the original
wacko from Waco, Texas, stopped making people laugh.
Now the 62-year-old actor has offered some clues as to why he began posing as
an intellectual while making mediocre films. His autobiography, Born
Standing Up, published next week, describes the violence he suffered at the
hands of his father and his miserable early career as a stand-up comic.
“I was not naturally talented,” he writes. “I didn’t sing, dance or act –
though working around that minor detail made me inventive. I was not
destructive, though I almost destroyed myself.”
No wonder Martin’s hair went white by the time he was 30 – but at least he
didn’t have to parrot Bob Hope’s gag: “I can turn on the TV and watch my
hairline recede through my old movies.” Watching Martin’s own films
sometimes makes him wince. He felt he was “letting myself down” in Sgt Bilko
and in flops such as Leap of Faith and Mixed Nuts: “It just wasn’t fun any
more,” he told interviewers. Disillusioned fans could add last year’s reboot
of The Pink Panther, which Martin scripted and also starred in.
When not announcing that he is leaving the movies to become a serious writer,
Martin yearns to return to his screen persona of the tidy suburban patriarch
whose life is unravelled by some grotesque intrusion, such as his daughter’s
wedding in Father of the Bride, or the travel partner from hell in his
favourite film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Sceptics say that it is easier to motor out from the ornate gates of his
Beverly Hills home to pick up $6m for working on a dreary family comedy than
rekindle the manic energy of old. Yet nobody can accuse him of being a
failure. He has been honoured as a comedian, scriptwriter, playwright and
author (his collection of stories and sketches, Pure Drivel, was a
bestseller). He is also an avid art collector who counts among his friends
Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi and David Hockney, a neighbour who lives in
the same canyon.
Some argue that Martin mislaid his humour on the tempestuous seas of love. It
had been plain sailing in 1986 when he married the British actress Victoria
Tennant, with whom he had starred in LA Story. After their divorce eight
years later he went on to a high-profile relationship with the actress Anne
Heche, only to be devastated when she left him for the lesbian sitcom star,
Ellen DeGeneres.
Martin’s broken heart was a matter of national concern. “I date. It’s hard,”
he sighed. He claimed his disappointments had prompted him to write
Shopgirl, released in 2005, the story of a “beautiful wallflower” in her
early thirties whose quest for love is fulfilled when she meets a
millionaire in his fifties. The note of wish-fulfilment was unmistakeable.
Eventually, in July this year, Martin was married to Anne Stringfield, a
35-year-old writer for New Yorker magazine. This was an auspicious union,
for Martin has reserved his funniest material for the journal, including a
fantasy in which he believed he was having a baby with Gwyneth Paltrow. It
was Stringfield who encouraged Martin to unburden himself of his memories in
his new book. The result is not a bundle of laughs, but rather a classic
“tears of the clown” memoir.
Born on August 14, 1945, Martin grew up in Waco and later California with his
elder sister Melinda, in the care of upright, religious parents. His father
Glenn was a failed actor who took out his frustrations as a real estate
agent on his timid wife Mary and their son. Few “funny or caring words”
passed between son and father, who was always called Glenn in the house.
Martin was punished for his worst misbehaviour by spankings with switches or a
paddle and became “sick with fear” when his mother warned: “Just wait till
Glenn gets home.” Once, when the boy was nine, Glenn came home in an
“ominous mood”, and angered by his son’s mumbled response, “pulled his belt
out its loops and inflicted a beating that seemed never to end”. The next
day at school he wore long trousers to hide the welts.
This beating and the rage directed by Glenn at his mom made Martin resolve,
“with icy determination” that “only the most formal relationship would exist
between my father and me”. For almost 30 years neither attempted to repair
the rift. This disconnection would result in what Martin calls
“psychological debts” that would arrive years later “in the guise of
romantic misconnections and a wrongheaded quest for solitude”.
Martin’s first stage performance was as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at
kindergarten in Hollywood, where the family briefly lived. Watching
television, he fell under the spell of Laurel and Hardy, Jack Benny and Red
Skelton.
He broke away from home when he started selling guidebooks in Disneyland and
learnt to play the banjo. Honing his skills by appearing at Knots Berry
Farm, a theme park theatre, he closed the four daily playlets with a medley
of juggling and conjuring tricks. Here he fell in love with Stormie Sherk,
with whom he performed melodramas. “I was a late-blooming 18-year-old when I
had my first sexual experience, involving the virginal Stormie, a condom and
the front of my car, whose windows became befogged with desire”.
A course in symbolic logic at California state university led him to consider
becoming a philosophy professor until he made a discovery: “They were
talking about cause and effect, and you start to realise, ‘Hey, there is no
cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no nothing!’ ” In 1967 he
transferred to UCLA and switched his major to drama, while moonlighting at
local comedy clubs.
Thanks to another girlfriend who was a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy
House, he landed a job writing jokes for the show and won an Emmy award with
the other writers in 1969. Even then, his father advised him to go back to
college. With his balloon tricks and vaudeville gags, he was out of sync
with the fashionable antiestablishment humour of Lenny Bruce, although he
smoked pot and wore a groovy white suit. The shy Martin tried to romance the
singer Linda Ronstadt, but gave up when she told him: Steve, do you often
date girls and not try to sleep with them?"
In the mid 1970s he frequently appeared as a comedian on Johnny Carson’s show.
Real fame arrived on Saturday Night Live, the 90-minute television launchpad
for such talents as Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi,
where his verbal tic, “Well, excuuse mmmeee” became a national catchphrase.
True to form, his father wrote a scathing review of his son’s performance in
an estate agent’s newsletter: “His performance did nothing to further his
career.”
To celebrate his first Hollywood movie, The Jerk, in 1979, he took his father
out to dinner after the premiere. Asked by a mutual friend what he thought
of his son’s performance, Glenn replied: “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.”
Martin privately admitted later: “The Jerk had been a smash hit, but my
comic well was dry.”
In 1981 he began to notice empty seats in his Las Vegas stage act and during
an exhausting week in Atlantic City he lost control when a stage prop failed
to descend. “In the wings I began swearing to myself. I ripped off my coat
and threw it against the wall... I had lost touch with what I was doing.”
In the 1990s his father’s attitude began to mellow, prompted by Martin’s
serious play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, about an imagined meeting between
the artist and Einstein at a Paris cafe in 1904. “My father flipped over it,
bragging to friends and telling me I should win a Pulitzer prize.”
One afternoon Martin was surprised when his father hugged him and said in a
barely audible voice: “I love you.” Later, when Glenn was bedridden, he
confessed he wanted to cry. About what? his son inquired. “For all the love
I received and couldn’t return,” his father replied, adding: “You did
everything I wanted to do.”
Martin insisted: “I did it for you.” Then, he recalled: “We wept for the lost
years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: ‘I did it because
of you’.”
The comic does not need to spell it out: the father envied the son his talent
and success, while the son came to regard comedy as secondary to
intellectual acclaim in an effort to win his father’s respect. It’s tragic,
but that’s show business.
