Post by Dreyfus on Nov 18, 2007 11:20:59 GMT
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/books/17mart.html?em&ex=1195448400&en=d08221d070de59da&ei=5087%0A
BOSTON — In person, Steve Martin, now 62, is far from a wild and crazy guy — if he ever really was one. His hair is snow white. Though still youthful, his famously mobile face is mostly in repose. He’s a lot like your tax accountant, only a little shyer.
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Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Steve Martin (in hat and sunglasses), now back in New York, has published a memoir of his stand-up years.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Born Standing Up’ (November 16, 2007)
'Born Standing Up,' by Steve Martin: Even When You’re a Star, Comedy Isn’t Always Pretty (November 15, 2007)
From “Born Standing Up”
In the 1970s dressing for comedic success meant balloons.
Lately, however, he has been sporting a mustache that you would hate to see on your accountant: a little pair of sleazy Gallic brackets outlining his lip and the groove beneath his nose. This is part of his get-up for his role as Inspector Clouseau in “Pink Panther Deux,” a sequel to his 2006 remake of the classic Peter Sellers film. “It’s growing on me,” Mr. Martin said of the mustache last month. “In both senses.”
For much of the autumn, Mr. Martin was living in Boston — the new Toronto of the film industry — where “Pink Panther Deux” was being filmed. He and Wally, his yellow Labrador retriever, shared a trailer equipped with a flat-screen television, a gas fireplace and a couple of industrial-size dog dishes.
Mr. Martin is also publishing two books this fall: “The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z!” (Flying Dolphin Press), illustrated by Roz Chast, which is just what the title suggests, and “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life” (Scribner), a memoir of his years as a stand-up comedian.
Reviewing the second book for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it a “lean, incisive” work that was “smart, serious, heartfelt and confessional without being maudlin.”
Mr. Martin discussed the memoir on set on a recent Friday when the script called for Clouseau to marry his colleague Nicole (played, as in the first film, by Emily Mortimer) at a ceremony conducted by John Cleese as Chief Inspector Dreyfus. His wedding uniform consisted of red-striped trousers and a tunic with epaulets the size of scrub brushes, which kept getting knocked off as Mr. Martin walked through the trailer door.
“I’m not used to ones this big,” he apologized to the wardrobe assistant, who sewed them back on.
Mr. Martin’s career as a stand-up comedian lasted roughly 18 years, from the early 1960s when he was performing sketches at the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, to 1981, when he was the most successful comic in America. He had such a following that, wearing a mock arrow through his temples, he could, and did, lead audiences out of the theater and ask them to pick him up and pass him over their heads. He made so much money that, as he used to say, he could afford a gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater. In a foreword to “Born Standing Up,” he notes, “In a sense this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
He says now that that part of his life seems part of another era, almost ancient history. Recently he came across a photograph of the sign outside the Bird Cage, which he had with him in the trailer: It says, “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.”
“Look at that,” he said, pointing to the missing n. “I don’t think anyone ever noticed.”
The book came about, Mr. Martin said, because he felt the urge to write something, and following his two best-selling novellas, “Shopgirl” and “The Pleasure of My Company,” he had temporarily run out of characters and ideas. “It’s the old adage: write what you know,” he said. “I realized that I had had this unique experience, and then I happened to see the show ‘Jersey Boys,’ which reminded me that it’s the years before you make it that are interesting. And then it all seemed navigable to me. I always like to begin with an ending, and I had one: it was when I quit stand-up.”
Mr. Martin, who says he is “neurotically punctual” about turning up at the set, had to break off so he could head over to the Sûreté for his wedding. He crossed a parking lot, entered the warehouse and made his way through castoff scenery (bushes, walls, a giant backdrop of the Eiffel Tower) to the Chief Inspector’s Office, already packed with dignitaries, including the pope.
A makeup assistant dabbed powder on Mr. Martin’s forehead and fussed with his hair; another groomed his mustache with a tiny comb, and then Mr. Martin took his place at the front of the room. A bell rang, the cameras rolled, and as Ms. Mortimer, in a strapless gown, walked toward him up the aisle, a little leer crept over Mr. Martin’s face, and he gave a shudder of pleasure and pomposity. He half-turned to whisper something to Mr. Cleese, and his voice came out in that famously fractured French accent, with gargling r’s, and vowels so ripe they lingered in the air like little zeppelins.
“I really like the collegiality of movies,” Mr. Martin said, back in his trailer, and speaking unaccented English again. He insisted that he didn’t miss stand-up. “It’s really, really hard,” he said. “The solitude, the traveling, the sense that every night you’re being judged.”
The appeal of writing, he added, was that “I feel like I can get to the point where I know I did the best I can. I really love the sense of finality in writing, the sense of getting it right in a way that only I can know about. In comedy, if they’re not laughing, there’s no doubt.”
In the book Mr. Martin describes a career that seems more accidental than ordained, the story less of an irrepressible, Mel Brooksian sort of funnyman than of a shy, introspective young man looking to find a place for himself. He grew up, in a not terribly happy family, in Orange County, Calif. For most of his childhood, he and his father, a failed actor, barely spoke. Like a lot of sensitive, gifted boys — Johnny Carson and Woody Allen, for example — he drifted into magic.
His early acts were a hodgepodge — some juggling, some magic, some balloon tricks, some banjo-playing — and to a great extent his style remained eclectic, with the crucial addition of irony; the act became in some ways the parody of an act, with no punch lines, and audiences found it even funnier.
“It was a great discovery,” Mr. Martin said. “There I was making fun of what I was doing, and yet I was still getting to do it.”
The only relic Mr. Martin keeps from those days is his banjo, which he taught himself to play as a teenager from a Pete Seeger instruction book, practicing alone in his car with windows rolled up even on hot summer nights. Waiting for the knock on the trailer door, and the summons to don his epaulets and marry again, he picked up the banjo and played a bluegrass song he had been learning. “When I play music, it’s like an alternate form of living,” he said.
A little later he remarked: “Every now and then I suppose I get a little nostalgic for the stand-up days. They were so — redolent, I guess you could say. I can still smell those hot, smoky clubs, the cigarettes, that awful nightclub wine. It was years before I learned there was such a thing as good wine.”
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Steve Martin (in hat and sunglasses), now back in New York, has published a memoir of his stand-up years.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Born Standing Up’ (November 16, 2007)
'Born Standing Up,' by Steve Martin: Even When You’re a Star, Comedy Isn’t Always Pretty (November 15, 2007)
From “Born Standing Up”
In the 1970s dressing for comedic success meant balloons.
Lately, however, he has been sporting a mustache that you would hate to see on your accountant: a little pair of sleazy Gallic brackets outlining his lip and the groove beneath his nose. This is part of his get-up for his role as Inspector Clouseau in “Pink Panther Deux,” a sequel to his 2006 remake of the classic Peter Sellers film. “It’s growing on me,” Mr. Martin said of the mustache last month. “In both senses.”
For much of the autumn, Mr. Martin was living in Boston — the new Toronto of the film industry — where “Pink Panther Deux” was being filmed. He and Wally, his yellow Labrador retriever, shared a trailer equipped with a flat-screen television, a gas fireplace and a couple of industrial-size dog dishes.
Mr. Martin is also publishing two books this fall: “The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z!” (Flying Dolphin Press), illustrated by Roz Chast, which is just what the title suggests, and “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life” (Scribner), a memoir of his years as a stand-up comedian.
Reviewing the second book for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it a “lean, incisive” work that was “smart, serious, heartfelt and confessional without being maudlin.”
Mr. Martin discussed the memoir on set on a recent Friday when the script called for Clouseau to marry his colleague Nicole (played, as in the first film, by Emily Mortimer) at a ceremony conducted by John Cleese as Chief Inspector Dreyfus. His wedding uniform consisted of red-striped trousers and a tunic with epaulets the size of scrub brushes, which kept getting knocked off as Mr. Martin walked through the trailer door.
“I’m not used to ones this big,” he apologized to the wardrobe assistant, who sewed them back on.
Mr. Martin’s career as a stand-up comedian lasted roughly 18 years, from the early 1960s when he was performing sketches at the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, to 1981, when he was the most successful comic in America. He had such a following that, wearing a mock arrow through his temples, he could, and did, lead audiences out of the theater and ask them to pick him up and pass him over their heads. He made so much money that, as he used to say, he could afford a gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater. In a foreword to “Born Standing Up,” he notes, “In a sense this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
He says now that that part of his life seems part of another era, almost ancient history. Recently he came across a photograph of the sign outside the Bird Cage, which he had with him in the trailer: It says, “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.”
“Look at that,” he said, pointing to the missing n. “I don’t think anyone ever noticed.”
The book came about, Mr. Martin said, because he felt the urge to write something, and following his two best-selling novellas, “Shopgirl” and “The Pleasure of My Company,” he had temporarily run out of characters and ideas. “It’s the old adage: write what you know,” he said. “I realized that I had had this unique experience, and then I happened to see the show ‘Jersey Boys,’ which reminded me that it’s the years before you make it that are interesting. And then it all seemed navigable to me. I always like to begin with an ending, and I had one: it was when I quit stand-up.”
Mr. Martin, who says he is “neurotically punctual” about turning up at the set, had to break off so he could head over to the Sûreté for his wedding. He crossed a parking lot, entered the warehouse and made his way through castoff scenery (bushes, walls, a giant backdrop of the Eiffel Tower) to the Chief Inspector’s Office, already packed with dignitaries, including the pope.
A makeup assistant dabbed powder on Mr. Martin’s forehead and fussed with his hair; another groomed his mustache with a tiny comb, and then Mr. Martin took his place at the front of the room. A bell rang, the cameras rolled, and as Ms. Mortimer, in a strapless gown, walked toward him up the aisle, a little leer crept over Mr. Martin’s face, and he gave a shudder of pleasure and pomposity. He half-turned to whisper something to Mr. Cleese, and his voice came out in that famously fractured French accent, with gargling r’s, and vowels so ripe they lingered in the air like little zeppelins.
“I really like the collegiality of movies,” Mr. Martin said, back in his trailer, and speaking unaccented English again. He insisted that he didn’t miss stand-up. “It’s really, really hard,” he said. “The solitude, the traveling, the sense that every night you’re being judged.”
The appeal of writing, he added, was that “I feel like I can get to the point where I know I did the best I can. I really love the sense of finality in writing, the sense of getting it right in a way that only I can know about. In comedy, if they’re not laughing, there’s no doubt.”
In the book Mr. Martin describes a career that seems more accidental than ordained, the story less of an irrepressible, Mel Brooksian sort of funnyman than of a shy, introspective young man looking to find a place for himself. He grew up, in a not terribly happy family, in Orange County, Calif. For most of his childhood, he and his father, a failed actor, barely spoke. Like a lot of sensitive, gifted boys — Johnny Carson and Woody Allen, for example — he drifted into magic.
His early acts were a hodgepodge — some juggling, some magic, some balloon tricks, some banjo-playing — and to a great extent his style remained eclectic, with the crucial addition of irony; the act became in some ways the parody of an act, with no punch lines, and audiences found it even funnier.
“It was a great discovery,” Mr. Martin said. “There I was making fun of what I was doing, and yet I was still getting to do it.”
The only relic Mr. Martin keeps from those days is his banjo, which he taught himself to play as a teenager from a Pete Seeger instruction book, practicing alone in his car with windows rolled up even on hot summer nights. Waiting for the knock on the trailer door, and the summons to don his epaulets and marry again, he picked up the banjo and played a bluegrass song he had been learning. “When I play music, it’s like an alternate form of living,” he said.
A little later he remarked: “Every now and then I suppose I get a little nostalgic for the stand-up days. They were so — redolent, I guess you could say. I can still smell those hot, smoky clubs, the cigarettes, that awful nightclub wine. It was years before I learned there was such a thing as good wine.”
