From 'Jerk' to Novelist

Oct. 5, 2000 — -- Steve Martin has a new message: Let’s get small.

And if you are familiar with Martin’s work, you know that this was his message even before he became that wild and crazy guy.

Martin was at the cusp of his Saturday Night Live superstardom, still doing standup comedy at 3,000-seat auditoriums, when he recorded his first album, Let’s Get Small. Political humor had gone out with Richard Nixon. So armed with bunny ears, Groucho glasses and an arrow through the head, Martin ushered in the era of postmodern slapstick — show business that made fun of show business.

Martin’s self-absorbed, wannabe hip Hollywood persona didn’t get high. He smoked something else. He liked to “Get small,” he said. “Real small … It’s a wild drug.”

“A cop stopped me the other night when I was driving and said, ‘Are you small?’” Martin said, “And I said, ‘No man, I’m tall, I’m tall.’

“Well, the cop said, ‘I’m going to have to measure you.’” And the officer had a test. He pulled out a balloon. If you could fit inside, the cop knew. You were small.

Now, once again, Steve Martin is getting high on being small. His latest work, a novella called Shopgirl (Hyperion), hits book stores in mid-October. He’s written several plays and a series of essays in The New Yorker, and this is the next step in the evolution of Steve Martin.

The Sgt. Bilko Merry-Go-Round

Novellas aren’t exactly cash cows. But that’s OK with Martin. He’s not thinking big. “That’s one of the advantages of having money,” he told the audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y at a Sept. 24 reading hosted by Gore Vidal.

“I’ve made two decision in my life,” he says. “One was to leave standup and go into movies. The other is to write. Now is my time to write.”

If you haven’t noticed, Martin has stepped off the merry-go-round of appearing in at least one major Hollywood picture each year. He decided to slow down after 1996’s Sgt. Bilko. It had been the latest in a series of bombs including Mixed Nuts and Leap of Faith. It was time for a change.

Martin had his commercial and critical successes — The Jerk, Roxanne, the Father of the Bride remake — but the misses had far outnumbered the hits. Even though he was earning in the neighborhood of $6 million a flick, it was time to move on. He’s spent the last few years of his life, reading, writing, and looking for new challenges.

“It just wasn’t fun anymore,” he says. “I’ll do other movies, but maybe not many of the major Hollywood productions I did before.”

At the Y appearance, Martin, 54, looked as if he had finally grown into the hair that he allowed to grow prematurely gray in his standup comedy heyday. He looks a bit like the philosophy professor he once aspired to be. Still, the inner clown is irrepressible. Under his conservative dark suit, he sported neon green socks. Pulling up his pant legs at one point, as the audience laughed, he said, “I don’t know why I did it, I just had to.”

As his commercial output diminished over the last few years, he’s given himself space to grow as an actor and writer. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, first produced by the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago in 1993, marked a turning point in his life.

“I was in the audience thinking, ‘I’m really proud of this,’” he says. “This is what I want.”Message From MartyShopgirl tracks the lovelorn Mirabelle, a beautiful aspiring artist who sells gloves at the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus. She captures the attention of Ray Porter, a wealthy, lonely businessman. The consequences are both comic and heartbreaking as they flirt with love.

“I don’t know where the story comes from,” Martin says. “You have heartbreaks, you break other people’s hearts, you start thinking about it.”

Martin is not an autobiographical comic in the mold of Woody Allen, but the past few years of his life have certainly been filled with the sort of disappointments played out by his characters. His marriage to British actress Victoria Tenant ended in 1992. And he has since been known in the gossip pages as the man Anne Heche left before taking up with Ellen DeGeneres.

Martin has never spoken publicly about his lovelife, but he seems willing to make fun of it. In his last movie, Bowfinger, his character’s love interest dumps him in favor of “one of Hollywood’s most influential lesbians.”

It seems, at times, Martin seems confused by his own celebrity. Earlier this year, he accepted a Career Achievement Award at the American Comedy Award in typical fashion: “When I was told I won this award, I spent the next three weeks trying to, well, care.

“At first I did not really understand what the career achievement award was — so I called the producer, George Schlatter, and George said, ‘Let’s put it this way: Without it, we have a short show.’”

But Shopgirl seems to have perked him up. For a while, Heche questions were off-limits. But now he’ll make jokes. “I got a message from Marty Short the other day,” he told Vidal at the Y. “He says, ‘I’m here in Toronto with my wife Nancy and we are walking on the street looking for Anne Heche’s biography.”

More Standup? No WayMartin says there’s no way he’ll ever do standup comedy again, even though he was the biggest act in the country in the late 1970s. “I know it sounds cliché, but it was the most miserable time in my life,” he says. “I couldn’t leave my hotel room, I couldn’t go outside. I was isolated, and isolation is where creativity ends.”

He says the most creative time in his life came while he was playing small clubs, right before he became a TV sensation. “It was magic. I felt so free,” he said. “I got an entire college audience to walk out of the auditorium and get into this empty pool and I swam across the tops of them.”

But then came the bunny ears, and the arrow in the head, and suddenly, the guy who started out playing the banjo and selling programs at Disneyland was too big for his own good. Now, it is time to think small. And if Shopgirl gets the small notice Martin craves, it will be the high of a lifetime.

Buck Wolf is a producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is a weekly feature of the U.S. Section. If you want to receive weekly notice when a new column is published, join the e-mail list.