Martin Short: 'Cross My Heart'

There's a benefit at Second City for Comic Relief, the stand-up's favorite charity, and word is all over the room that Martin Short is going to sit on on the 11 p.m. improvisational set. Nobody budges when the lights go up after the early show, and there is a certain buzz in the room. These guest appearances by famous former Second Citians have become a tradition over the years, a promise that if others who once labored in wretched anonymity made it onto "Saturday Night Live," there is hope for us all.

The lights go down, and it is announced to no one's surprise that Short is joining the cast. He sticks his head out from the wings, grins and wiggles his eyebrows. There is a roar from the crowd. Later he appears as one of his most famous Second City characters, the hairdresser who reads the supermarket tabloid over his customer's shoulder and confides that everyone in the paper "goes both ways, y'know."

Halfway through this sketch, he does a little dance step on the stage and the crowd roars again because they recognize the distinctive footwork of Ed Grimley, the most famous character Short created on "SNL." And I remembered what Short had been telling me earlier in the day: "On the stage at Second City, if you come out with a funny look on your face and get a laugh, well, that's one laugh you didn't have to write. The whole idea is, `How do I get out of writing?' "

But a second later he was telling me about his all-time favorite Second City sketch, which was entirely written, and which he first saw performed onstage at the Toronto branch of Second City by Brian Doyle-Murray and Joe Flaherty:

"That's the one where the student goes into the professor's office to try to talk him out of doing the take-home exam, and the professor surprises him by agreeing - and then insisting on an oral exam, on the spot. The student is of course caught completely off guard, and has not spent a second studying for the course. The professor asks him to describe the principal provisions of a famous European treaty. Well, the student says, in connection with this treaty, France . . . of course . . . had nothing to do with it . . . and Russia . . . which was, of course, on the periphery of Europe . . . did not precisely, I think we could say, see eye-to-eye with England on certain provisions . . . although the Germans were, typically, not uninvolved. . .

"The whole genius of the sketch," Short had explained, "is that the student is trying to read the right answer in the professor's eyes. Everybody has gone through a situation like that, in which you are desperately trying to say the right thing, and have no idea what the right thing is."

Onstage, Short was in another sketch now, one in which a middle-aged man was trying to live with the consequences of having persuaded two disco bimbos to move in with him. But I was flashing back to a scene in "Cross My Heart," his new movie, in which Short and Annette O'Toole appear in a scene with the same basic premise as the oral examination.

In the movie, Short plays a district sales manager for a company that sells designer sunglasses. He has just been fired. He is out on a date with O'Toole, a woman he thinks may be perfect for him. His problem is that he has filled her full of lies. He's told her he just got a promotion. He has borrowed a car from his successful friend, Bruce, and now he has brought her back to Bruce's apartment, passing it off as his own. His problem is that Bruce's apartment is filled with Bruce's mail, Bruce's family photos, Bruce's model airplanes, Bruce's telephone answering machine with Bruce's voice on it.

As Short desperately tries to explain one inconsistency after another, O'Toole grows more and more suspicious, until finally he confesses one small fib, and she confesses two large ones, and then he turns on her, drawing attention to her falsehoods in order to draw the truth away from himself. It is a fascinating sequence in the film - even if he is rather cruel to her - and what I found myself realizing, as I thought about the scene and watched Short onstage, was that he approached it in a completely different way than he might have for Second City, or "SNL." He played it straight as an actor, with no funny faces and no little Ed Grimley two-step.

That is the secret of Martin Short: He is a compleat actor, who spent 10 years in Toronto working at any acting job he could find. His experience does not begin and end with the most visible part of it, his enormously successful time on "Saturday Night Live," nor even with the similar comic acting he did for "SCTV" and at Second City in Toronto.

"My requirements were fairly simple, when it came to acting jobs," he was remembering. "Is it a job? Does it pay? I'll be there." In Toronto he did all sorts of acting, community, experimental, improvisational, commercial, and by the time he landed his first U.S. network job, on the 1979-80 series "The Associates," he already had four Canadian series under his belt.

"It all started for me in 1972, when they held the famous open auditions for `Godspell' every city where it played. I stood in line with hundreds or even thousands of other people in Toronto, but somehow I was chosen. That was my first acting job. And in that same cast, from those same auditions, they also picked Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas, and Paul Shaffer was the piano player. Within a few months, I had met some of the other people who were going to come out of Toronto, like John Candy and Danny Aykroyd, who always smelled of gasoline because he was always tearing down cars and cycles and rebuilding them."

For some of that crowd, like Radner and Aykroyd, success came quickly. But in 1975, when they were begining to be successful New York, Short was having the worst year of his life.

"I went for five straight months completely unemployed," he said, drinking diet pop in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton. "That's why I feel for this guy in the movie, this sunglasses salesman who depends on confidence and poise and luck for everything, and fears that he will never be hired again. I would actually keep tabs of things like subway trains. When I was unemployed, I would go down to the subway station and the train would just be pulling away. Time after time. Once I finally got a job again, I would go down to the station and the train would just be pulling in. I don't know. I think it's got to be more than mere coincidence. You start questioning yourself. Your luck is gone. Your magic is gone."

For Short, there were more years when it looked like the train had passed him by, while Aykroyd and Candy became big stars and he was still on the brink. Then came the big rebuilding season at "SNL," with Eddie Murphy and Martin Short as the two hot names on the revitalized show, and Ed Grimley leaping around on the furniture, his pants pulled up under his armpits, his hair marceled into a fin, making Pee-wee Herman look like a Supreme Court nominee. For a decade, ever since "National Lampoon's Animal House," "SNL" has been a launching pad for movie careers.

Short's began with "Three Amigos," which co-starred Chevy Chase and Steve Martin and opened last Christmas and closed very soon. Then there was "Innerspace," with Short playing a wimp who was accidentially injected with a tiny capsule bearing the miniaturized body of a former astronaut played by Dennis Quaid. It opened in August and also closed quickly. Now there is "Cross My Heart," with Short and O'Toole onscreen for almost the entire movie, including a long and eleborate sex scene, during which they become the first reputable Hollywood stars to discuss and employ condoms.

"I wasn't that disturbed about the failure of 'Three Amigos' because it was not necessarily a great movie," Short said. "With 'Innerspace,' it was a different story. Everyone thought it had the potential to be a big hit. I was talking all the time with Quaid, who was in `The Right Stuff,' which people thought was going to be the greatest hit of all time, and when it didn't do so well at the box office he was crushed. So he warned me against getting my hopes up.

"I told him the thing we used to do at Second City, which was to look at one another and say, What if we go out there . . . and nobody laughs? I asked him, What if there are NO laughs in this film? He said I would get over it: In 10 or 11 months, you're fine. But then they started test-marketing the movie and people loved it. And even Dennis began to cautiously permit himself some hope. And then it didn't do it at the box office, maybe because nobody knew what the movie was about."

He sighed. "Well, I felt good about it," he said. "I saw it, and I felt it was a good movie and I did a good job, and all the rest is just a bonus. It's nice to be in a movie good enough so that, if it comes up in a conversation, you don't have to jump in and say something so your friends won't feel they have to talk about it."

What about "Cross My Heart," with its sexual frankness and extended bedroom scenes and nonstop game-playing and of course its condoms?

"The first thing you have to understand is that I am very happily married and have not gone out on a date for 13 years. If I had to go out on a date, I have no idea what I would do. Anything would be preferable. In the movies, comedies about dates have a tendency to be about how the guy knocks over the grandfather clock. What we really do on dates is, we do an impersonating of ourselves being relaxed. That was what I was trying to bring to the character. When I first read the script, I asked myself, can I play this guy? And I knew I could. Sometimes the cadences just fall out of your mouth.