I Must Say (25 page)

His expression turned quizzical at this confession. “I have mixed feelings about that time, man,” he said, “because that was the
old
me, the me that I'm not necessarily proud of.” Billy and I discussed these words afterward and deduced that Sammy was alluding to his well-documented substance-abuse issues. A few days later I related this story of our heart-to-heart with Sammy to Paul Shaffer. That night I turned on the
Letterman
show, and there was Paul on TV saying, “Dave, hey, I'm so sorry about my past behavior. I feel terrible about the
old
me, the me that I'm not necessarily proud of.” I made a mental note:
Never share anything with Paul.

One more thing about Sammy. As we two couples were taking our leave, I somehow ended up alone with Sammy in the hallway leading to his front door: just the two of us in a narrow corridor. “Lay a little of the dance on me,” he said. I didn't know what he meant, and told him so.

“You know, man,” he said, “the
Grimley
thing.”

And I, demonstrating the presence of those balls of steel that John Candy long ago ascribed to me, replied, “I'll do the dance if you sing that soaring passage from that Leslie Bricusse song”—“Tomorrow,” an amazing song written by Bricusse and Anthony Newley that I had never heard until the concert that night. The thing about Sammy was that, to my generation, he became such a joke for a while, but then you'd go see him perform and realize,
Oh, yeah, he's massively talented—that's how he got famous in the first place.
Sammy obligingly broke into song—“Tomorrow is the looong and lonely moment . . . when I look the future in the eye!”—and I simultaneously went into my ecstatic Ed dance.

It was at this moment that Billy, wondering what the hell was taking me so long, appeared in the doorway. “Boy,” he said to
Sammy and me, “it's hard to get you people to do what you do, isn't it?”

B
ut truly, my ultimate childhood-fantasy realization came when I did
The Tonight Show
while Johnny Carson was still hosting it. Moronically, I had resisted going on the Carson show for a while, despite being offered opportunities. There was a feeling in the air during the 1980s that maybe it wasn't hip to do Johnny anymore, especially with Dave Letterman catching fire. Besides, Dave and I had developed such an easy rapport, and Paul Shaffer was my good buddy. And finally, if I was being honest with myself, the idea of sitting in the chair next to Johnny Carson scared the hell out of me.

However, by the later part of the decade, the rumors were growing stronger that Johnny was soon to retire, and I realized how absurd my resistance was. What's more, I didn't have to go the hard-knock route that comedians from Drew Carey to Jerry Seinfeld had taken, where you did your five minutes of stand-up, and if Johnny liked you, he
might
wave you over to take a seat on the couch. I was invited on in mid-career as a successful actor, prebooked in couch class, with extra legroom.

So on January 7, 1988, I finally did Carson, ready for my moment with the great man. What I didn't anticipate was that I would be following, and therefore sitting next to, one of the true legends of the Hollywood screen, Bette Davis. Bette was visibly unwell at that point—she'd suffered strokes and been ill with breast cancer, and would live only a year and a half further. She couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds. And yet she was totally styling, decked out in a bold, nautically striped skirt suit, white gloves, and a wide-brimmed white hat.

And she was completely tough: fiery, witty, on the ball, and, her deteriorating health notwithstanding, smoking like a chimney. At one point, before I went out, I was watching from the green room as they came back from a commercial. Johnny, a smoker himself, was adept at sneaking a last-minute puff before the show resumed, but this time the camera caught him hurriedly stubbing out his cigarette while Bette sat there eyeballing him, proudly puffing away. “One thing about you and me, Johnny,” she said, “we both
love
to smoke!”

“Oh, I know, Bette,” Johnny guiltily responded. “But . . . but it's so
bad
for you.”

“Oh, I suppose,” Bette responded. “But to be told not to! As if we were
little
children.” No one was going to bully that old dame.

The day before the taping, when I received word that I would be following Bette, I told my friend Rob Reiner about the situation. Rob said, “I'll give you a hundred dollars if you do Bette Davis
to
Bette Davis.” So the very first thing I did after walking out and taking my seat was to turn to Bette and say, “And what a
pleaszh-ah
to meet
you
!”

Johnny and Ed McMahon immediately broke up, and Johnny even said, “You had the nerve to come out and do her right away!” But clearly, Bette didn't “get” my impression. She had no idea who I was. As far as she knew, I was some weirdo talking in his normal speaking voice.

The good news is that Johnny took to me immediately. He had the same insane Jerry Lewis obsession that I do, and he loved my Jerry—it got genuine, eyes-watering laughs out of him, which was tremendously gratifying in the moment and tremendously moving to consider now. As I got looser and looser, emboldened by Johnny's goading and enthusiasm, I turned to Bette and did a Jerry-style startle-take: “Yeah, John, howyadoin', and—
BETTE!
”
More big laughs from Johnny, Ed, and the studio audience. But nothing from the impassive Miss Davis.

A little later in my segment, I tried a different tack, going Ed Grimley on her: “If I had known you were going to be here—you are
so
decent. I suppose your movies aren't the best in the world? Give me a break! Pleasure to meet you.” I extended my hand. Very reluctantly and limply—as if I had extended a line-caught fluke in her direction—she shook it.

Johnny kept encouraging me to do impressions, so I ran through David Steinberg, Paul Simon, Robin Williams, Doug Henning (Johnny, incredulously: “Doug
Henning
? Is there a big call for that?”), and Gary Cooper. Finally, from my other side, I heard Bette pipe up, “Do you do
me
?”

Well, I'd already done her, so to speak, minutes ago, and she hadn't picked up on it. So I replied, once again in my most declamatory, high-volume,
All About Eve
voice, “Well, I mean, you
ahn't
that easy to
do
!”

Bette still had no clue that I was doing her. “Then we'll
skip it
!” she said.

Or maybe Bette was slyer than any of us realized, and she was pulling the legs of us all. She was still unbelievably sharp, and I wouldn't put it past her. A lot of people commented to me afterward that they didn't think Bette should have been out in public, looking as emaciated as she did. But you know what? She did a full three segments on the show, killed in each one, and probably went out to the Ivy afterward for a couple of margaritas and a great dinner. Good for her! I hope I'm in such fine fettle for Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon when I'm eighty. Hell, I'll even wear Bette's outfit from that night, provided JCPenney is still in business.

I made up for lost time with Johnny, appearing six more times
on
The Tonight Show
before his 1992 retirement. The final appearance was five shows before Bette Midler sat on the piano and sang “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” as he teared up. (Carson's very last show was a guestless farewell in which he showed old clips.) At the end of one of my later appearances, after the show was over, Johnny leaned in and said, “Next time you come, Alex and I would love to take you to dinner.” (Alexis was his fourth and final wife.) That was a bit of a
whoa
, but the dinner never happened, which is probably just as well, because Johnny, away from his NBC throne, was known to be a different person socially, very reserved, and Nancy and I would have been knotted up with anxiety the whole time.

I
did see Johnny once, though, in a supposedly more relaxed setting: a stag poker night. In L.A. in the 1980s, the movie producer Dan Melnick convened a monthly poker game at his house with some pretty heavy regulars, among them Johnny, Chevy, Steve, Barry Diller, Neil Simon, and Carl Reiner. Steve got me in for one of the nights. I was the poorest and least accomplished person there, but Steve reassured me, “The most anyone has ever lost is six hundred dollars, and you just might
win
six hundred.”

Within fifteen minutes at the table, I had lost $1,800. I panicked and basically gave up at that point. I figured that if I merely lost the ante, I wouldn't have to go home and announce to the family that the house was for sale. Even with four aces, I'd fold.

We took a break for dinner, an elaborate spread prepared by Melnick's cook. I got to sit next to Johnny. At one point, Steve said something funny, I can't remember what, and it cracked me up. As I laughed, a little lump of mashed potatoes flew out of my mouth. But I had no idea where it had landed. My eyes quickly
scanned the table in desperation to see where the spuds had gone, finally locating them . . . on top of Johnny Carson's hand.

I didn't know what to say or do. Fortunately, Johnny didn't seem to notice. I looked away for a moment and then looked back. The potatoes on his hand were gone. Had he eaten them himself? If so, it was an honor and privilege to pre-chew Johnny Carson's food for him.

W
hen Nancy and I were sitcom actors in the late 1970s, I always thought of L.A. as boarding school, a place where I'd spend a few seasons of adventure and mischief before snuggling back into the bosom of Mother Canada. But by 1987, with a growing family, Nan and I had to make a decision on living in one place or the other, and we realized we were ready to put down roots in southern California. Little Katherine and Oliver would have dual citizenship—I'm way too Canadian for them not to—but they, along with young Henry Short, who came along in 1989, would grow up in a pretty house that Nan and I found at the end of a quiet street in Pacific Palisades. It was the perfect house for us—not ridiculously large or grand (the boys always shared the same bedroom), but airy and cozy, with a big living room anchored by a fireplace and an elegant, curved staircase straight out of one of my favorite childhood sitcoms from the 1950s,
Father Knows Best
. The location was beautiful, too: walking distance from the bluffs that overlook the Pacific. The master bedroom opened onto
a balcony where the water sparkled blue in the distance. We can't afford this, I thought every time I looked out at the ocean from my new bedroom. How could I possibly deserve this view?

We bought the house on the basis of the income I was about to make from two pending movies. You can guess what happened next. Practically the second that Nancy and I signed the mortgage, one of the two movies, a David Lynch film with Steve Martin entitled
One Saliva Bubble
, fell through. I was in a panic. I anxiously said to Nan, “What if we can't afford this place? What if we have to sell it?”

“Well, I guess we'd move somewhere,” she calmly replied. “But that's not going to happen, goofy. You know that.” Twenty-seven years later, I'm still here.

There are those who make a hobby of real estate, forever buying and flipping houses, getting bored with a residence after a year or two. I'm totally different; keep in mind I spent the first twenty years of my life in the same house. I like to make a house a home and stay put; Nancy, too. So we did. I think this became part of the appeal of the family Short as we settled into the Palisades. We were show folk, with all the deviancy and egocentrism that such a description assumes, but we lived like a normal American nuclear family—or perhaps like a family on a long-running sitcom: going through the journey of life together on the same comfortingly familiar stage.

The most concrete manifestation of our traditional Short-family values was our annual Christmas party. It started out modestly, as a dinner for my extended family in which my brother Michael (an excellent blues piano player who used to tour with Ronnie Hawkins) would sit at the piano as we all gathered around and sang carols. But by 1988 the party began to evolve into a bigger deal: a carefully planned event held in mid-December
(before people went off on their holiday vacations) that featured not only Nan's superbly potent French punch, but performances by my performing friends. Tom Hanks has described it as “like a Mormon Family Home Evening—a lot of participation, a lot of ‘Everybody, come on up!'” Except with amazing, generally non-Mormon personnel. Basically, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, our party became a private, camera-free, celebrity-studded holiday TV special like the ones Perry Como, Andy Williams, and Bing Crosby used to put on.

The party started at 7:00 p.m., with dinner served at 8:15. Then, at 9:30, the show began. I served as emcee, while the Broadway and movie composer Marc Shaiman served as my accompanist and musical maestro. Marc is a dear friend who goes way back with me, to when he served as
Saturday Night Live
's rehearsal pianist in my time there. He and his longtime professional and personal partner, Scott Wittman, have done the songs for everything from
Hairspray
to the Academy Awards. They were also my co-conspirators on my 2006 Broadway show,
Fame Becomes Me
. However, this impressive résumé did not absolve Marc of his duties as my designated piano mover.

In my house, there's a little piano room between my office and the living room where we keep an old Yamaha upright. As 9:30 approached, it would always be Marc's duty to position himself behind one end of the piano and, with a great show of groaning and hypochondriacal expressions of imminent vertebrae slippage, push until the piano arrived at its destination, against the wall that rises under the curved staircase. As Marc pushed, I would carry the lightweight piano stool over, just so I'd feel a part of things. Marc would routinely complain, “How did this ridiculous tradition start, where
I
have to push the piano in to begin the show?”