I called the comedian David Brenner for advice. David was successfully guest-hosting The Tonight Show and filling theaters and clubs. Our paths had crossed, and we had exchanged phone numbers. I explained that I was getting jobs, but the travel costs were killing me. If I got five hundred dollars for an appearance, it would cost me three hundred just to get to it. He told me the deal he always proposed to club owners. He would take the door, and they would take the bar. He said he would hire someone to stand at the entrance with a mechanical counter to make sure he wasn’t being cheated. I didn’t have the chutzpah to “audit” this way, but otherwise it seemed like a fair gambit. I wanted to either get in or get out of the business. I would be paid according to how many people I drew, and that satisfied my Protestant inclination to earn my keep.
I proposed this deal immediately to an amenable club owner—after all, he didn’t have to put any money up front—and in October 1973 I got a job at Bubbas in Coconut Grove, Florida, now vanished into the folkie sinkhole. It held about ninety people, seated in the worst configuration a club could have. Directly in front of the stage were seats for about ten; extending to the performer’s right were the other eighty seats. There was no depth at all, and most of the audience saw only a side view of the performer. These lopsided arrangements were never conducive to laughter because the audience couldn’t quite unite. I arrived a day early, in time to see the closing night of another performer, a comedian who, at least in the show I saw, lifted a line or two from Lenny Bruce. Doing other people’s material was on my taboo list, but he was a nice guy and still funny, and when we met after the show, he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew, but we ignored it.
The next night I opened, and business was slow. However, I was ready to put my experience at Vanderbilt into effect. The Florida night was balmy and I was able to take the audience outside into the street and roam around in front of the club, making wisecracks. I didn’t quite know how to end the show. First I started hitchhiking; a few cars passed me by. Then a taxi came by. I hailed it and got in. I went around the block, returned and waved at the audience—still standing there—then drove off and never came back. The next morning I received one of the most crucial reviews of my life. John Huddy, the respected entertainment critic for The Miami Herald, devoted his entire column to my act. Without qualification, he raved in paragraph after paragraph, starting with HE PARADES HIS HILARITY RIGHT OUT INTO THE STREET, and concluded with: “Steve Martin is the brightest, cleverest, wackiest new comedian around.” Oh, and the next night the club owner made sure all tabs had been paid before I took the audience outside.
Roger Smith had told me that when he came to Hollywood from El Paso to be an actor, he had given himself six months to get work. The time elapsed, and he packed up his car, which was parked on Sunset Boulevard, where his final audition would be. Informed that he was not right for the job, he went out and started up his car. He was about to pull away, away to El Paso, when there was a knock on his windshield. “We saw you in the hall. Would you like to read for us?” the voice said. He was then cast as the star of the hit television show 77 Sunset Strip. My review from John Huddy was the knock on the window just as I was about to get in my car and drive to a metaphorical El Paso, and it gave me a psychological boost that allowed me to nix my arbitrarily chosen thirty-year-old deadline to reenter the conventional world. The next night and the rest of the week the club was full, all ninety seats. Three thousand miles away, Bill McEuen took the review and waved it in the face of every record executive in Hollywood, with no bites.
The flyer at Bubbas. Steve Goodman played the week before me, and later he became a sensational opening act for my show.
I continued to appear on The Tonight Show, always with a guest host, doing material I was developing on the road. Then I got a surprise note from Bob Shayne: “We had a meeting with Johnny yesterday, told him you’d been a smash twice with guest hosts, and he agrees you should be back on with him. So I think that hurdle is over.” In September 1974 I was booked on the show with Johnny.
This was welcome news. Johnny had comic savvy. The daytime television hosts, with the exception of Steve Allen, did not come from comedy. I had a small routine (suggested by my writer friend Michael Elias) that went like this: “I just bought a new car. It’s a prestige car. A ’65 Greyhound bus. You know you can get up to thirty tons of luggage in one of those babies? I put a lot of money into it…. I put a new dog on the side. And if I said to a girl, ‘Do you want to get in the backseat?’ I had, like, forty chances.” Etc. Not great, but at the time it was working. It did, however, require all the pauses and nuance that I could muster. On The Merv Griffin Show I decided to use it for panel, meaning I would sit with Merv and pretend it was just chat. I began: “I just bought a new car. A ’65 Greyhound bus.” Merv, friendly as ever, interrupted and said, “Now, why on earth would you buy a Greyhound bus?” I had no prepared answer; I just stared at him. I thought, “Oh my God, because it’s a comedy routine.” And the bit was dead. Johnny, on the other hand, was the comedian’s friend. He waited; he gave you your timing. He lay back and stepped in like Ali, not to knock you out but to set you up. He struggled with you, too, and sometimes saved you.
I was able to maintain a personal relationship with Johnny over the next thirty years, at least as personal as he or I could make it, and I was flattered that he came to respect my comedy. On one of my appearances, after he had done a solid impression of Goofy the cartoon dog, he leaned over to me during a commercial and whispered prophetically, “You’ll use everything you ever knew.” He was right; twenty years later I did my teenage rope tricks in the movie ¡Three Amigos!
Once Johnny joked in his monologue, “I announced that I was going to write my autobiography, and nineteen publishers went out and copyrighted the title Cold and Aloof.” This was the common perception of him. But Johnny was not aloof; he was polite. He did not presume intimate relationships where there were none; he took time, and with time grew trust. He preserved his dignity by maintaining the personality that was appropriate for him.
Johnny enjoyed the delights of split-second timing, of watching a comedian squirm and then rescue himself, of the surprises that can arise in the seconds of desperation when the comedian senses that his joke might fall to silence. Johnny was inclined toward the sciences, especially astronomy, and his Nebraskan pragmatism—and knowledge of magicians’ tricks—guaranteed that the occultists, future predictors, spoon benders, and mind readers never left his show without a challenge. He knew the difference between the pompous ass and the nervous actress and who should receive appropriate consideration. He enjoyed the unflappable grannies who sewed log-cabin quilts, as well as the Vegas pro who machine-gunned the audience into hysterical fits. Johnny hosted authors, children, intellects, and nitwits and treated them all well, and he served the audience with his curiosity and tolerance. He gave each guest—like the ideal America would—the benefit of the doubt: You’re nuts, but you’re welcome here.
For my first show back, I chose to do a bit I had developed years earlier at the Ice House. I speed-talked a Vegas nightclub act in two minutes. Appearing on the show was Sammy Davis, Jr., who, while still performing energetically, had also become a historic showbiz figure. I was whizzing along, singing a four-second version of “Ebb Tide,” then saying at lightning speed, “Frank Sinatra personal friend of mine Sammy Davis Jr. personal friend of mine Steve Martin I’m a personal friend of mine too and now a little dancin’!” I started a wild flail, which I must say was pretty funny, when a showbiz miracle occurred. The camera cut away to a dimly lit Johnny, precisely as he whirled up from his chair, doubling over with laughter. Suddenly, subliminally, I was endorsed. At the end of the act, Sammy came over and hugged me. I felt like I hadn’t been hugged since I was born.
This was my sixteenth appearance on the show, and the first one I could really call a smash. The next day, elated by my success, I walked into an antique store on La Brea. The woman behind the counter looked at m
e.
On The Tonight Show with Johnny and Sammy.
“Are you that boy who was on The Tonight Show last night?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yuck!” she blurted out.
Breakthrough
I DID HAVE A TINY BIT of drawing power, generated through my daytime television appearances and my growing presence on The Tonight Show, but mostly my name was a rumor. My dubious status as a headliner led me to a tiny pie slice of a folk club in Greenwich Village, the Metro. Now I had an opening act. Still, no one showed up to see me and a new duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. I told the club owner that he could let me go if he wanted, that I wouldn’t hold him to his contract. He said he wanted me to stay…until the next night, when again no one showed up. We parted with a handshake.
In March 1975 my agent, Marty Klein, secured a job in San Francisco, two weeks headlining the Playboy Club for fifteen hundred dollars per week. A big payday, and I was desperate for money. Playboy Clubs always made me nervous. I never seemed to do well in them, but I had no choice. Opening night was on a Monday, which was already unusual; clubs were usually closed on Mondays. I stood at the back of the club and checked out the capacity crowd. Amazed, I said to one of the musicians leaning against the wall, “We got a nice house out there.” An odd look crossed the musician’s face. “Yeah,” he said mysteriously.
After I was introduced as Steve Miller, I walked out onstage and saw a sea of Japanese faces. I attempted a few lines; nothing came back except nice smiles. No one spoke English. It turned out that the bus tours offered a nightclub as part of their packages, but on Mondays the Playboy Club was the only one open, so every foreign tour group was herded into this showroom. Now I understood the musician’s wry grin. I gamely went forward, not doing badly because the audience was kind and polite, and my balloon-animal and magic act went over well because it was visual and antic. The next night I went on for the regular audience: death. Comedy Death. Which is worse than regular death. I sank low and, in spite of my declining financial situation, called Marty, saying, “You’ve got to get me out of here.” He did, and I went back the next night to collect my things. My clothes had been stolen. A week later, I took out a bank loan of five thousand dollars.
The euphoria from my week at Bubbas in Coconut Grove and my nice score on The Tonight Show had dissipated, and I was marooned in the depression that followed my flop at the Playboy Club. In June 1975 I was booked into the frighteningly named Hub Pub Club, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Hub Pub Club, located in a shopping mall, was trying to be a fancy spot for gentlemen, but the liquor laws in North Carolina limited attendance at nightclubs to members only. About the worst things an entertainer can hear are “members only” and “group tours.” While I was onstage doing my act to churchlike silence, a guy said to his date, loud enough that we all heard it, “I don’t understand any of this.” And at that moment, neither did I.
In spite of the gloom, I had a premonition of success, and in January 1975 I started a short-lived diary. It surprises me that a diary meant to chronicle an important year in my life could contain so many negative passages. My entry for the Hub Pub Club started this way: “This town smells like a cigarette.” Then I sank a bit lower: “My material seems so old. The audience indulged me during the second show.” Then I really started wallowing in it: “My act might have well been in a foreign language…my act has no ending.” Next I degenerated into my version of Kurtz’s lament, “The horror, the horror,” from Heart of Darkness: “My new material is hopelessly poor. My act is simply not good enough—it’s not even bad.”
However, there was one, sole, positive entry in my journal that week. It related to a lonely-guy phone call I had made to a new acquaintance, Victoria Dailey. Victoria was a young rare-book-and-print dealer in Los Angeles whom I had stumbled upon in my collecting quests, and who had her wits about her in the same way that Oscar Wilde had his wits about him. I must have had an intuition about the future depth and scope of our relationship, as I called her long distance from a motel phone, which in those days cost about a million dollars a minute. While traffic whizzed by outside the gray motel room, I churned out my Winston-Salem stories with the same toxicity as the R. J. Reynolds company churned out cigarettes. Victoria used her refined sense of artistic ethics to talk me down from my metaphorical window ledge, and over the next few years we cemented an enduring relationship that has been complex and rewarding. We have been connected over the past thirty years intellectually, aesthetically, and seemingly, gravitationally. In my latest conversation with her, I complimented her recent essay on early Southern California history. I said, “Do you realize you’re going to be studied one day?” She replied, “Only one day?”
Two months after Winston-Salem everything was about to change. A few blocks away from San Francisco’s Playboy Club, where I had died so swiftly, was a very different kind of club, one that booked current music acts, and where the waitresses were sexy but didn’t have to wear bunny outfits. I had played the Boarding House before, but only as a developing opening act. The owner, David Allen, saw that things were different, both with my act and with its reception, and he was ready to try the new and improved me. In August 1975 I was booked to headline, evidence that the Boarding House and the Playboy Club did not speak to each other. My years on the road had produced a change I had only dreamed of earlier: I now had four hours of material from which to pick and choose, and there was more to come.
I opened at the Boarding House on a Tuesday evening to a fair-sized crowd. Headlining there, in friendly and familiar San Francisco, where I had established some kind of beachhead, filled me and the audience with confidence. They had paid to see this show, this particular show, and I was inspired to push the limits even further. What had been deadly at the Playboy Clubs was lively with a younger crowd. I wanted the audience to leave with the feeling that something had happened. The first few minutes into the show, I began to strum the banjo, singing a song that had no particular tune or rhyme:
We’re having some fun
We’ve got music and laughter
And wonderful times
That’s so important in today’s world
Oh yeah.
It’s so hard to laugh
It seems that short of tripping a nun
Nothing is funny anymore
But you know
I see people going to college
For fourteen years
Studying to be doctors and lawyers
And I see people going to work
At the drugstore at 7:30 every morning
To sell Flair pens
Onstage at the Boarding House.
But the most amazing thing to me is I get paid
For doing
This.
Midweek, before the show, I told the spotlight operator not to change the light no matter how urgently I asked him to do it. Then, onstage, I made a small request for some mood lighting, a blue spotlight. The light stayed white. I slowly grew more and more angry. “Please,” I said, “I would really like a blue spot. It’s for the mood-lighting thing.” I got very serious and murmured under my breath, “I can’t even get a light change.” John McEuen was sitting in the light booth that night. He said the operator began to believe me and moved to change the spot, but John stopped him. Soon it became clear that it was a gag, because I was reaching new levels of anger as I said how disgusting it was “that I, this entertainer who keeps giving, and giving and giving, and keeps on giving, can’t seem to get a simple blue spotlight!” The bit ended at an exaggerated level of madness, with me screaming another phrase from my past, “Well, excuuuse me,” turning four syllables into about twenty. The audience response was nice enough, but I was surprised weeks later when I heard this expression coming back to me on the streets. It surprised me even more when in another few years it became a ubiquitous catchphrase.
Toward the end of the Boarding House show, I stepped off the stage, saying: “I just want to come down in
to the audience with my people…DON’T TOUCH ME!” I took them into the lobby, where there was an old-fashioned grand staircase. One of the doormen, a very likable and funny guy named Larry who had seen my show all week, happened to come in from the street, carrying a pair of pants on a hanger fresh from the dry cleaner. I looked at him, and he looked back, knowing he was in for it. He had a great sense of humor and didn’t mind a bit. I said disdainfully, “Oh, it’s Cleanpants. Mr. Cleanpants. You think your pants are so CLEAN. Well, CLEANPANTS, we don’t need your type around here…. WAIT, CLEANPANTS…where ya going? You think you don’t need us because your PANTS ARE SO CLEAN?” A better comic foil could not have been found; I still can see Larry standing there holding his dry cleaning and accepting the fake lambasting with bemused patience. And the audience, crowded together in the stairwell and mezzanine, ate it up.
MY SISTER, MELINDA, had gotten married and was raising her two children in San Jose, an hour’s drive from San Francisco. My communication with her over the past decade had been minimal. She had made efforts to connect, but my travel kept sweeping me away, and I was most comfortable in the world I had made, detached from home ties. When I first became an uncle, I could have used a self-help book, So Now You’re an Uncle. Melinda showed up at one of these Boarding House performances, and we visited after the show. It turned out she had been proudly monitoring my career from a distance, saving reviews and magazine stories, but our relationship, because of my familial ineptness, remained awkward and was not yet ready to bloom.