Tuesday night was a busy one for me. My older daughter’s middle school soccer team played in the city semi-finals at 5:00 (a clean 3-0 win), leaving just enough time for a quick dinner before we had to head back out the door for her basketball practice at 7:30 — all of which made a live watching of the Yankees and Angels fairly impossible. I thought about avoiding the game during the evening so I could watch the DVR’d version when I got home, but I decided against it.
When I was a young, baseball-crazed boy growing up long before the dawning of ESPN and three thousand miles away from my favorite team, there were only two ways I could get a Yankee score. I could wait for the box score in the morning paper, but more often I chose to listen to the Dodger game while lying in bed, waiting for Vin Scully to read the out-of-town scoreboard. It’s become almost passé to point this out, but baseball and radio fit together perfectly. A game’s tense moments force you to focus every ounce of your awareness on every syllable of the announcer, every cheer of the crowd, every crack of the bat, but at other times your mind can drift in and out of the game as desired.
And so it was for me as I turned to my old friends Suzyn Waldman and John Sterling. It was the third inning by the time I found a folding chair in the high school gym and sat down to listen, and the Yankees were already in trouble. Hiroki Kuroda had just been victimized by his defense, specifically Yangervis Solarte, who botched a sacrifice bunt attempt by Colin Cowgill and set the Angels up with runners on second and third and nobody out. Thankfully, Kuroda seemed to be pitching well, but he still give up both unearned runs with back-to-back sacrifice flies from Erick Aybar and Mike Trout, and the Yankees were down, 2-0.
The worst part about these slumps the Yankees fall into from time to time, is that the deficits seem enormous. Down by only two runs with six innings to play, I already felt defeated. How could they climb that mountain? When I listened as the heart of the heartless order (Mark Teixeira, Alfonso Soriano, and Brian McCann) went down meekly in the top of the fourth, I felt the clouds gathering.
In the fifth, though, Solarte singled to left to start the frame and Brett Gardner pushed him ninety more feet with a single of his own. When Brian Roberts picked up the Yankees’ third consecutive hit and scored Solarte, it seemed like a miracle. Two pitches later Jacoby Ellsbury grounded into a double play, killing the rally but scoring Gardner, and the game was tied at two.
Kuroda, meanwhile, continued to cruise, working through a bit of trouble in the fifth by striking out Trout with runners on first and third, then setting down six straight batters as he coasted through the sixth and seventh, all of which set up the top of the eighth.
Derek Jeter was clipped on the heal by Angels starter C.J. Wilson, then Carlos Beltran dribbled a ball up the middle that narrowly missed being a double-play ball but instead pushed Jeter to third, and suddenly I was flashing back to last night. Would they fail again? When Teixeira grounded weakly to third and Jeter was tagged out after a short rundown, I seemed to have my answer. Dark thoughts began to cloud my vision, and I imagined another double play to end the top half and an Angel rally in the bottom half. But Soriano came through instead, rapping a grounder just beyond Aybar’s outstretched glove at third, and Beltran rumbled around third with the go-ahead run.
Kuroda talked his way into the eighth inning and used just three pitches to get the first two outs. My daughter’s practice was over by now, and we were listening to the Angels’ broadcast in the car on the drive home. With Trout walking to the plate and Albert Pújols in the on deck circle, I desperately tried to send a message to Girardi through the radio, hoping he’d pull Kuroda in favor of Dellin Betances, but Girardi wasn’t listening. After battling his way into a full count, Trout golfed a ball high off the wall in right field and sprinted his way to third for a triple. Girardi had no choice now, so he lifted Kuroda for Shawn Kelley, who quickly went to 3-0 on Pújols, raising fears that he hadn’t yet recovered from last night’s affliction. Pújols watched the next two pitches pipe straight down the middle to work the count full, then he roped a soft liner into left center and the game was tied.
Again, cue the dark thoughts.
But I needn’t have worried. I finally sat down on the couch to watch the top of the ninth, and with two outs Brian Roberts (yes — Brian Roberts!) crushed a no-doubter into the stands in right field, snatching the lead back for the Yanks at 4-3. From there the Alabama Hammer pounded three quick nails into the Angel’s coffin and the night was over.
Man, oh, man. The Yanks need our guy Hiroki to pitch well tonight.
A mess o runs wouldn’t hoit, either.
Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Derek Jeter SS
Carlos Beltran RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alfonso Soriano DH
Brian McCann C
Yangervis Solarte 3B
Brett Gardner LF
Brian Roberts 2B
In his new autobiography, “The Closer,” Rivera writes about how much affection he has for his former teammate, but adds, “This guy has so much talent I don’t know where to start… There is no doubt that he is a Hall-of-Fame caliber (player). It’s just a question of whether he finds the drive you need to get there. I don’t think Robby burns to be the best… You don’t see that red-hot passion in him that you see in most elite players.”
As for his favorite second baseman, Rivera says Red Sox Dustin Pedroia is “at the top of the list” of players he admires, adding: “Nobody plays harder, gives more, wants to win more. He comes at you hard for twenty-seven outs. It’s a special thing to see.”
He later writes, “If I have to win one game, I’d have a hard time taking anybody over Dustin Pedroia as my second baseman.”
What I sincerely hope is that you didn’t watch last night’s game. I hope you noted the West Coast start time, weighed it against an East Coast alarm clock, and simply went to bed early.
But of course if you had done that, you would’ve missed David Phelps, who was pressed into service by the recent disintegration of the Yankee starting rotation. With Michael Pineda still suspended and headed for the disabled list, Ivan Nova a distant memory, and C.C. Sabathia drifting into oblivion, the Yankees aren’t far from holding open tryouts in Central Park. But since they were three thousand miles away, Joe Girardi simply put the ball in Phelps’s shoe and hoped for the best. He got more than he could ever have hoped.
I’ve always liked David Phelps. With his darting fastball and precision-based arsenal, he’s always seemed like a poor man’s Greg Maddux, and he almost made that comparison look valid as he skated his way through five and a third innings, allowing just three hits and a walk while striking out three. The Angels scored when Yankee Killer Howie Kendrick led off the fifth inning with a triple down the right field line, then came home on an Ian Stewart ground out, but aside from that Phelps held the Halos in check most of the night.
The game stayed right there until the eighth inning, and that’s when everything went crazy. The tease came with the game tied at one in the top of the eighth. Kelly Johnson took ball one, then singled to right. Brian Roberts jumped on the first pitch he saw and shot one-hopper through the middle that shortstop Erick Aybar could only knock down. Ichiro was up next, and he beat out a perfect bunt. Angels starter Jered Weaver had thrown only four pitches in the inning, but the Yankees had the bases loaded with no one out.
Brett Gardner took the first pitch he saw for ball one, then let the next one go by, thinking it was low. Home plate umpire Laz Diaz, however, called the ball a strike. If we’re being honest, I’d have to say that the pitch was at Gardner’s knees, the type of pitch that can go either way. The problem, though, was that Diaz’s strike zone had been wildly inconsistent all night long, as usual. When Girardi pointed this out from the dugout, he was immediately tossed. Girardi’s been managing this team for seven years now, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen him this angry before. He was at DEFCON 1 as soon as he left the dugout, and he raged nose to nose with Diaz for several minutes before finally picking his hat up from the ground and heading for the clubhouse.
As Girardi explained afterwards, it was the most important pitch in the game up until that point, and he felt Diaz had gotten it wrong. Instead of 2-0 with the bases loaded and none out, Weaver was back in the count at 1-1. Two pitches later Gardner was headed back to the bench after striking out.
Derek Jeter came to the plate, and the large contingent of Yankee fans in the stadium rose to their feet. Jeter had already singled, doubled, and scored his team’s only run, so there was hope. With the infield playing halfway in, Jeter shot a rocket to Kendrick’s left at second base. Kendrick made a nice stab on the one-hopper, turned to make the throw to second, and Aybar’s return throw beat Jeter by about a step. If he hadn’t hit it quite as well, the Captain would easily have beaten it out and driven in a run. If he had hit it a bit to the right, he would’ve driven in two. Instead, it was just a 6-4-3 double play. It had taken Weaver only nine pitches to lower himself into the fire and back out again, and he sprinted off the mound, fist-pumping and f-bombing his way to the dugout.
Ah, but things would get worse. Much worse. Shawn Kelley came in to pitch the eighth and promptly walked the leadoff batter, Collin Cowgill, but recovered to retire the next two hitters, Aybar and Mike Trout. Cowgill had advanced to second on Aybar’s groundout, so acting manager Tony Peña wisely ordered Kelley to walk Albert Pújols intentionally, bringing pinch hitter Raúl Ibáñez to the plate.
Ibáñez put together a long, eight-pitch at bat before working a walk to load the bases, but even then — and even with Kendrick coming to the plate — I had faith. But Kelley walked him on five pitches to give the Angels a 2-1 lead, and my faith was broken.
I wasn’t alone; Peña lifted Kelley in favor of Matt Thornton. Pitching changes are normally uneventful, but Kelley was steamed with Diaz. With a 1-0 count on Kendrick, Kelley had thrown a pitch that Fox Trak said was identical to the 1-0 pitch Weaver had thrown to Gardner, but this time Kendrick saw it low. Instead of climbing back into the count at 1-1 the way Weaver had, Kelley had been crippled at 2-0 before eventually losing Kendrick, and he had a few comments for the home plate umpire as he walked towards the visitors’ dugout.
Instead of understanding the situation and simply turning his head as a frustrated player blew off some steam, Diaz decided to become part of the show. He barked right back at Kelley, then told him repeatedly to “keep walking,” emphasizing his point with the type of dismissive flick of his hand that a princess might use when shooing an attendant out of the throne room. When Kelley snapped back at him, Diaz got what he wanted — an excuse to throw Kelley out of the game that he was exiting.
The Yankees lost this game because they couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield in the top of the eighth and couldn’t throw a strike in the bottom half, but Laz Diaz is part of the story. An umpire’s strike zone sometimes expands and contracts like an amoeba, but that’s part of the game. The bigger issue is how this umpire responded when his strike zone was questioned. His behavior was inexcusable and an embarrassment to baseball. If we don’t hear of a suspension for him, I’ll be disappointed.
But back to the mockery of the bottom of the eighth. To recap: walk, ground out, fly out, intentional walk, walk, walk. So with the Angels now up 2-1 and the bases still loaded with two outs, Matt Thornton faced the mighty John McDonald — and walked him. Peña then brought in Preston Claiborne to face Chris Iannetta — and Claiborne walked him. The merry-go-round would probably still be spinning if Grant Green hadn’t mercifully swung at the first pitch he saw for a fly out to right, but the damage was done.
Three Yankee pitchers had combined to walk six batters — five of them consecutively — and allow the Angels to bat around and score three runs without the benefit of a base hit.
Jacoby Ellsbury, Mark Teixeira, and Brian McCann went down quickly in the ninth, and that was that. Angels 4, Yankees 1. Hopefully you slept through the whole, damn thing. I didn’t.
Three years ago this month I started a Tumblr blog. Today, I reached my 40,000th post. It’s not a work-friendly site as I post lots of sexy photographs but if you like that sort of thing–along with other photographs, paintings, collages, posters and comic book panels that grab my attention–head on over.
I once asked a friend: “If you could do one thing in a major league game what would it be? Strike a hitter out, hit a home run, steal home?”
He said, “Rob someone of a homer.”
That hadn’t occurred to me.
I was reminded of this yesterday when Paul Pierce blocked Kyle Lowry’s shot in the final seconds of Game 7 in Toronto. It was a clean block. If the shot went in, the Raptors would have won. But Pierce blocked it–with his left hand–and the Nets won.
Keeping Harpo out of trouble was a full-time job, especially during the summer of 1928, when he and Harpo rented a villa on the French Riviera with their friends Alice Duer Miller, Beatrice Kaufman, and Ruth Gordon. Harpo set the tone when he had a tuxedo made of green pool table felt for the high-society soirées. When Woollcott alone was invited to one affair at the Eden Roc, he lorded it over the others, so Harpo and Gordon decided to crash it and surprise their friend. They sneaked in through the kitchen and got a table next to Woollcott’s. When the waiter arrived with the main course—a whole poached salmon—Harpo grabbed the platter and tossed it over the patio railing into the Mediterranean. “Don’t think I care for the fish,” he said. “What’s on the Blue Plate tonight?” Everyone but Woollcott laughed; he pretended not to know who the rude clown was.
Part of the problem that summer was Woollcott’s melancholy. His sister Julie had just died and he was feeling his own mortality. He’d quit his job as a drama critic and begun freelancing full-time in hopes that he could produce something lasting. The trip to France was part of his plan. He wanted to make a splash there with the international literary set. Instead, it was Harpo who made the splash. One day, Woollcott took him to meet Somerset Maugham at Maugham’s villa, lecturing him all the way about good behavior. When they arrived, Harpo was surprised to find Maugham younger-looking and less swishy and stuffy than he’d expected. He greeted them, Harpo recalled, looking “lean and brown” in “only shorts and sandals,” and “sizzl[ing] with energy and good cheer.” Maugham insisted on a tour of the house. Upstairs, he showed them the master bedroom, positioned so he could dive from its window straight into his pool. While Woollcott and Maugham were turned away discussing a painting, Harpo stripped down and made the dive. Woollcott acted appalled, assuming that Maugham also would be aghast, but the Englishman quickly shed his shorts and sandals, and followed Harpo through the window.
Another afternoon, Woollcott invited Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw for lunch. He fussed over arrangements all morning (“jittery as a girl on her first date,” said Harpo) and then had himself chauffeured into town to meet the Shaws, who were arriving by train. Harpo said “to hell with the whole affair” and went for a nude swim. As he dozed in the sun, the Shaws pulled up. They had missed Woollcott in town and hired their own driver out to the villa. Harpo just managed to get a towel around himself as the guests came up the walk, Shaw yelling “Where the devil’s Woollcott? Who the devil are you?” As Harpo introduced himself, Shaw reached down and yanked the towel away, laughed, and nonchalantly introduced himself. By the time Woollcott arrived, sweating and anxious, Harpo and the Shaws were fast friends. The three of them spent the next month palling around Antibes—much to Woollcott’s apparent chagrin. “Harpo Marx and Bernard Shaw!” he sniffed. “Corned beef and roses!”
Here’s some comedy for you from Paul Slansky, a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His work has also appeared in, among dozens of publications, The New York Observer, Spy, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and The Soho News. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
This story on Martin Mull was originally published in The New Times, January 1978. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.
By Paul Slanksy
Martin Mull’s manager has forgotten to make a reservation, so we stand in the entrance to the Universal commissary waiting for an empty table while stars like Lily Tomlin and Sly Stallone march past us to immediate seating. “I guess I’ll have to do some speed eating,” he says.” “Just run my fingers over the food.” Ten minutes into our wait, a departing couple approaches and hands Mull their lunch checks and a $10 bill. He politely explains that he is not the cashier. “When I met Martin Mull he was accepting cash and checks at the Universal commissary,” he says wryly. “There’s your opening line.”
Through six years as a singer of loony tunes that found inspiration in the mundane (“Dancing in the Nude,” “Noses Run in My Family”) and earned him a diminutive but devoted following, Martin Mull maintained a mighty sense of self. If no one showed up at his gigs, it was their loss, not his. Out of a combination of defensiveness and egomania, he created a stage persona that exuded a smug arrogance totally out of proportion to the degree of success he had achieved—a character superficially similar to, but significantly smarter than, the one Steve Martin is currently overexposing. So when he was offered a part in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a show that exalted the banal, he certainly wasn’t about to let his total lack of acting experience stand in the way.
In the role of wife-beating PR man Garth Gimble, Mull developed one of the most odious characters since Cagney smashed a grapefruit in Mae Clark’s face in Public Enemy. The damage Garth inflicted on his wife, Patty, was psychically as well as physically brutal: for Christmas he gave her a mop and pail—early, so she’d have plenty of time to use them. When a shirt button came off, Garth insisted that Patty fix it before she left for work. While she was sewing, he strolled out of the bedroom fully dressed. “You wore another shirt!” she said, to which he ad-libbed condescendingly, “A topless executive, Patty? I think that’s years away!” When Garth was impaled on an aluminum Christmas tree, he was mourned by no one but Mull fans.
Six months later Mull was back, hosting Norman Lear’s talk-show parody, Fernwood 2-Night, as twin brother Barth Gimble, a small-time hustler who had fled Miami on a morals charge, then pointed out that he has “a pretty darn good case of entrapment.” Barth Gimble was the perfect comic symbol for the seventies, a con man who revealed his ignorance even as he thought he was being incredibly hip. Here he is coming on to a nubile youngster who has been the spankee in a demonstration of corporeal punishment:
B: You have quite a talent there, Debbie. You know, we have “Rocket to Stardom” here on the show. Would you wanna be on that?
D: Well, the only thing I know how to do is sing our school song.
B: Sing! Perfect, you can come back and sing your school song. I love it.
D: It’s in Latin.
B: OK. Latin music. You guys know Latin music, huh? (The band goes into a samba.) That’s the stuff.
In the space of one year, Martin Mull brought to life two personalities who could be put into any situation and react true to character.
Martin Mull is almost famous. In the last few months he has done Merv, Dinah, Tom Snyder, the Rock Awards, Wonder Woman and Hollywood Squares. He is currently playing a disc jockey who gets laid on the air for in his first film, FM. (An appearance in Oh, God!, in which he briefly stepped in for John Denver—whom he has called “the Poland of music”—was cut from the final print.)
He is also finishing up work on his new album, I Haven’t the Vegas Idea, and a best-of collection, No Hits, Four Errors, has just been released. Next month he begins taping 13 more weeks of Fernwood 2-Night for an early-April air date. Time said he has the best sense of timing “since Jack Benny passed age 39.” Playboy wants him for the interview. So when, as he wolfed down his shrimp cocktail and beer before rushing back to the FM set, I told him that a random sample of 20 Californians turned up only five who knew who he was—plus one who thought he was “that guy who says ‘Excuse me,’ with the arrow in his head”— Martin Mull laughed. “That’s terrific,” he said. “When I walked into the house last night, everyone knew me.”
“Martin always had the demeanor of a star,” says his manager, Larry Bresner. “He’d go out and buy $200 shoes when he couldn’t pay the rent.”
“We don’t take on a lot of performances,” he continues. “You can only handle so much, and you’re really not interested in handling somebody who can’t go to the full limit of their potential, because it’s not fun. You book them into 50 dates a year and it’s boring. With Marty, there’s no such thing as boring. I’ve never met anybody that’s got a brain that’s full of more ideas. The man could be the number-one advertising executive in the country.” (When Earth Shoes recently asked him to do an ad for them, Mull came up with “Shoes: Fetish or Necessity?”)
“Martin is one of a kind,” says Al Burton, one of Norman Lear’s creative supervisors who caught Mull’s show at the Roxy in Los Angeles and signed him for Mary Hartman. “He has this unique hateful quality while still being an appealing performer.”
“Martin was a joy to work with,” he adds. “He is one of the quickest-thinking wits since the old days of wits. The nuances that he got out of those lines were incredible. I know very few actors who can make a written word sound as if it’s ad-libbed. I like Steve Martin, but I don’t think I would have gone after him the way I went after Martin Mull.”
In fact, Martin and Mull are good friends and have worked together on several projects. “There was a time when Martin and Steve seemed to osmose off of each other a little,” says comedy writer Harry Shearer, whose credits include Fernwood 2-Night. “I think Steve picked up a little of Martin’s arrogance, and I don’t know what Martin picked up from Steve—three or four good lines probably. With Steve it’s so obvious that he’s putting it on, but with Martin it’s a lot closer to home. You can never quite be sure whether he’s doing a character or whether that’s the guy, which is interesting.”
Eugenie Ross-Leming, co-producer of Forever Fernwood, is another Mull fan. “The Garth character was so grim that it was really hard on Martin,” she says. “The real tribute was that he carried it off.” How he did it, though, she’s not sure. “I don’t know, maybe Martin’s past is incredibly sordid and warped—we can hope.”
Martin Mull was born in Chicago in 1943 and grew up in Ohio towns not unlike Fernwood. “Up until the age of 16, I was the same as Taft,” he says. In 1959 the family moved to Connecticut, where Martin was the star place-kicker for the New Canaan High football team. He went on to become an honor student at the Rhode Island School of Design and receive a Master’s degree in painting in 1967. That same year, he made his acting debut before the Providence draft board.
Slicking his hair back with Vaseline and sporting a lumberjack shirt several sizes too small, Mull prepared a lunch of carrots, celery and a tuna fish sandwich. Each carrot stick and celery strip was individually wrapped in aluminum foil, as was the lump of tuna fish and each slice of bread. He carried it in an oversized grocery bag with his name scribbled all over. He claimed membership in every Communist group he’d ever heard of. After his hearing test, he pretended to be locked in the booth. When the psychiatrist asked him what he thought of the draft, Mull, chewing on his hand all the while, said, “Well, actually, I think it’s sort of chilly in here. Would you mind closing the window?” The Army brought on the hook.
By this time Mull’s interests were divided between art and music. He joined a conceptual-art group whose most notorious project was Flush with the Walls (Or, I’ll Be Art in a Minute), a 1971 exhibition in the men’s room of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
“We wanted to have a show at the museum,” he says. “But generally you had to be dead to be chosen. This was a price we didn’t really want to pay. So at 8 p.m. sharp, six of us, women as well as men, went in there and put up our work with masking tape while there were still people in there using it. In a matter of minutes we had over 300 people in the men’s room, including film crews for the 11 o’clock news. It was a terrific success.”
The following year, The Umbrellas of Pitchburg (mais oui serve vous) was sponsored by the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. The show consisted of hors d’oeuvres in the shapes of great works of 20th-century art, such as “Picasso on Rye,” which were eaten by the guests. (One doggie bag remained for years in the Institute’s freezer.)
Mull continued to produce his Fantasia-esque paintings, and was making some money—”I priced them very much like merchandise,” he says. “It wouldn’t be $500, it would be $499.99.”—but his career as a musician began to take up more of his time. In his senior year at RISD, Mull had formed a group called Soup, a band remembered less for its musical abilities than for its demented stage show. Mull, in a chef’s hat, was Captain Soup; the other costumes ranged from pajamas to a giant cigarette carton. The group recorded one unmemorable album before disbanding.
After getting his degree, Mull moved to Boston, where he lived in a basement apartment while working at a small recording studio. He was writing songs and thinking seriously about performing. When he married artist Kristin Johnson in 1970 (they are currently getting a divorce), he quit his job, collected unemployment and hired a manager with a special talent for securing nonpaying bookings.
“We had no money,” Kristin recalls. “Martin had to take public transportation to the gigs carrying his guitar, and not get paid, and play to an empty house. But he has a very large ego, and that sustained him for a long time.”
His songs would take a bizarre premise (What if I married a midget?) and extrapolate the logical results (“Walking hand and ankle/she’s got her arm around my sock”). They were strange but basically sweet—when he poked fun at something, it was good-natured. But when he began performing, another character developed between the songs, a character from which Barth and Gimble is a direct descendent. “I first started making music during the folk music scare of the sixties,” he says, “and I always felt that messages should be sent by Western Union, not by music. I would get in front of the audience and try to play these little alternative songs, and they’d look at me like I was half-baked. So I realized I’d have to introduce the tunes, and my tongue sort of went into my cheek, because that’s who I am. And out of that, certain things got great laughs and cumulatively built into an act.”
The laughs came at the audience’s expense. If they couldn’t appreciate a song like “Partly Marion” (“She was only 17/when she cut them off in the washing machine/she just reached for the wringer/and zap went the fingers/it was no consolation that they come off so clean”), it was their fault.
“Initially it was defensive,” he says. “I’d been told for years by my folks that I could not sing, and that’s quite a lot, to go on stage doing something you’ve been told you cannot do.”
He signed a contract with Capricorn Records and was soon on the road more that he was home. Then came Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture. “Standing up there in front of a stack of amps wasn’t really satisfying,” he says. “And when I’d sit around my living room and play with some friends, that did seem satisfying. I thought, ‘Maybe the catalyst here is furniture,’ so I figured, why not try it? It made me feel more at home, which would make the audience feel more at home. So I brought my home. It was literally my real furniture.” When he couldn’t schlep his own things, he rented old tables, chairs and lamps from local Salvation Armies.
The Mulls were then living in New York on Riverside Drive, and Martin’s career began putting a strain on the marriage. “He demanded an audience no matter where he was,” says Kristin. “Even if it was just me and him. It was, ‘Listen to this, no, wait, listen to this, what do you think of this?’ If there were more people, eventually we’d just be sitting around listening to Martin’s tunes. At one point I told him, ‘Martin, we’re living in a two-bedroom apartment and you’ve got a six-bedroom ego. I feel crowded.’ But I think that’s why he’s where he is now, because he’s so proud of what he does.”
Mull recorded four albums for Capricorn, and although he became close to the president of the company, Phil Walden, Mull claims the label had no idea how to market them. (“They were putting them out in fields and hoping people would find them,” he says) He had one near-hit, a single called “Dueling Tubas,” the Deliverance theme hilariously rendered by out-of-tune tubas. He was working steadily at colleges and clubs like the Boarding House—San Francisco and Boston have always been his best markets. But he wasn’t making any money, until he signed with Rollins & Joffe, the firm which also manages Woody Allen and Robert Klein.
“At that time he was traveling around with tap-dancers, a band, horns, craziness,” recalls Larry Bresner. “We could always get him work, but if he was getting paid $2,000, it cost him $4,000 to do it. We insisted on getting rid of everybody in the band. That wasn’t Martin Mull. Martin Mull was what he did sitting in a chair. The whole key was being able to expose him on a mass level.”
Mass level equals television. Mull did a couple of Cher shows and was offered the position of band leader on Saturday Night. “At that point, I didn’t feel it was quite enough for me to do, to sit there and say two or three lines a night,” he says, and turned it down. That may be one reason he has never been asked to host the show; another is more obvious.
A few years ago, Mull went to see the National Lampoon Show in New York. He sat right up front and talked with his friend, Peter Boyle, throughout the performance. When he went backstage afterward to congratulate the cast (which included John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray), Murray went berserk. He grabbed Mull around the neck and tried to choke him, screaming, “I’LL KILL HIM, I’LL KILL THAT FUCKER, HE TALKED THROUGH THE WHOLE THING, I HATE HIM!”
“As I recall, Bill had to be restrained by John Belushi,” says Michael O’Donoghue, who worked with Mull on an aborted project titled Lincoln: The Man, the Car and the Tunnel. “When Martin left the dressing room, Billy kept screaming after him, ‘Medium talent! Medium talent!’ Of such things show business legends are made.”
“I feel very bad about that show,” says Mull. “I’d had a bit to drink” (he doesn’t smoke grass), “and quite frankly, it was more amusing at that point to talk to Peter, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. I confess to having been extremely rude, though not quite as rude as Bill Murray trying to strangle me afterward.”
Then came Mary Hartman. “I thought they hired me because I was a comedian,” Mull says. “I was kind of surprised when all of a sudden we got all this Virginia Woolfish high drama. I didn’t like the character at all. I don’t care for violence, and wife beating is particularly repugnant to me, so it was quite hard.”
When Garth was killed off, the plan was to bring Mull back as a twin brother later in the season. But Al Burton saw him as the ideal host for Fernwood 2-Night. Norman Lear, however, had never seen Mull’s stage act, so a special night at the Roxy was arranged. In the middle of his act, Martin stopped and said, “Well, Norman, do I have the job?” He did.
Fernwood 2-Night was the perfect vehicle for Mull; he had been playing Barth Gimble since the first time he appeared on stage. The character incorporated some of the most basic comic schticks: the classic Gleason/Carney relationship between Barth and Jerry Hubbard (brilliantly played by Fred Willard, of the Ace Trucking Company), the exaggerated exasperation of Jack Benny, and the disgusted stare of Oliver Hardy, as lifted by Johnny Carson. (How long can it be before Mull is perceived as the obvious successor to Carson?)
“Martin was the one who realized that the show had to be more real,” says Harry Shearer, “as opposed to just raiding the files of topics taboo for TV. There was one meeting where one of Norman Lear’s vice-presidential flunkies said, ‘This reality shit is OK for Andy Warhol, but we’re doing TV.’ That was what he was up against.”
“What we didn’t do, that a lot of television does do,” says Mull proudly, “is we didn’t say to ourselves, ‘Whoops, we’re missing the dumb-belt contingent, we better make sure we have more tits and ass, or more fart jokes.’ Occasionally I thought I would get extremely antsy because I thought some of the acts were a little bit toward a Gong Show kind of thing, and to me, you don’t have to have a grandmother who plays the tuba and tap-dances at the same time—that’s not funny to me, because it’s a reach. To me, just having a grandmother, period, come on and talk about her grandchildren and show photos is much funnier. It’s not as obvious.”
What is obvious is the appeal of the concept to Mull. Like his songs, the show started with one absurd premise—what if the town of Fernwood decided to produce its own talk show—and took the idea to its limits.
So if you’ll beg my pardon
I’m goin’ out and start a garden
It’ll just be small potatoes
Just some lettuce and tomatoes
And if either one comes up, we’ll joint the Grange
What say you and I get normal for a change.
Martin Mull’s garden is a small sod lawn that cost only $38. (“It’s just back from the cleaners,” he says.) It is in back of the modest Malibu house he shares with his new love, Fernwood costume designer Sandra Baker, her two children and two dogs; the beach is a few hundred feet away. He clearly enjoys being normal for a change.
It’s 80 degrees out in the yard, but Martin is wearing brown pants, a green turtleneck and a tan jacket with a “Bah! Humbug!” button, in preparation for a photo shoot for the cover of the Christmas issue of Ampersand, a college monthly.
“Did you hear about the three Polacks who froze to death at a drive-in?” he asks. “They went to see Closed for the Season.”
His manager calls to discuss a possible book deal. “If it works out,” he says, “I’ll be limited to books, records, TV, movies, live performances and art.”
Martin is not above poking fun at himself—the cover of his latest album for ABC, I’m Everyone I’ve Ever Loved, shows him reclining on a couch gazing lovingly into a hand mirror, surrounded by signed photographs of himself. He is trying to get his stage persona more in sync with his private one, which he observes, “would not totally remove the smug arrogance.”
He is excited about the return of Fernwood 2-Night, mainly because the show allows him so much creative freedom. “I’m lucky,” he says. “The stuff that makes me happy has enough in common with enough people that it can become a commodity. There are a lot of people who, given compete license, can have the time of their life and have the communication of a rock.”
The Norman Lear organization is talking about a network sit-com after Fernwood runs its course. “I would have to have enough control over the thing that it wouldn’t compromise me,” he says. “I’m still very young, I’m still looking forward to making money, as opposed to trying to maintain some sort of lifestyle by selling out.” His managers want him to come up with a screenplay that he could direct and star in.
“What I really want to do with my life,” he says, “is take Sandra and the family to the south of France, fins a little château, set up the easel and paint.”
Martin Mull is a lucky man. He is getting paid for being funny, which is like a “normal” person getting paid for breathing. He is at last getting the recognition which, in his own words, he has so desperately deserved. He is unlikely to be spoiled by success—he’s been ready for it for too long.
Two women come by to shoot the photo. He walks over to the outdoor fireplace. “I could be hanging up a pair of panty hose and hoping that Santa fills ’em with the proper item,” he suggests. They ask for a quote about Christmas. “I’m very hard to buy for,” Martin says. “Do you want a list of things? I think I should publish my sizes. Just a simple Christmas, and if all I receive is a Mercedes-Benz 280SL, hey, I was with my folks.
Once he’s ensconced in that ominous room at the Hotel Earle and charged by an inexplicably fawning studio exec with the task of churning out a script that will deliver “that Barton Fink feeling,” Barton embarks on a process so many writers experience, in miniature, every time we’re on deadline. The obdurate, set-in-stone first paragraph that will yield no further wisdom no matter how long we stare at it (and that, if we had the perspective our readers do, we would realize sounds suspiciously like the last opening we wrote). The importuning neighbor (John Goodman as the jolly yet obscurely menacing Charlie Meadows) who drops by for a friendly nip of hooch and winds up making off with our time, our inspiration and possibly — or so it’s suggested in “Barton Fink’s” violent third-act conflagration — our soul. The bitter acceptance of our own fraudulence, flowing in a continuously alternating current with the grandiloquent conviction that this time, by gum, we’ve broken the whole thing wide open.
There are films about writers — Jane Campion’s luminous Keats biopic “Bright Star” comes to mind — that capture the potential of literature to distill the essence of a human life (it helps when the writer’s words really are sublime, and as well used and understood by the filmmaker as Keats’s are by Campion). But “Barton Fink” is remarkable for just the opposite: its wicked, earthbound honesty about both the sinkhole of authorial self-obsession and the often sub-sublime results of those triumphant typing montages. The movie’s first, more realistic section is separated from its oneiric second half by a spectacular tracking shot that dives down the drain of a hotel sink, symbolizing the hero’s descent into damnation, madness or both. But my first thought every time I see that camera go down the drain is: Well, so much for that deadline.
Everybody thinks they know what’s wrong. Everybody thinks they have an answer to why C.C. gave up his usual 4 or 5 runs, this time in 3-2/3 innings, a continuing downward trend from last season that has sparked outrage and debate about what to do with him and the only thing that is outsized about him these days (his contract). Neither Girardi nor pitching coach Larry Rothchild are worried about him or Kuroda, who is also struggling for “obvious reasons” (heh).
Hey, you have to admire Girardi for not getting nervous or flying off the handle at the relentless questions or speculation; he’s juggling a lot of issues this season and entering May in first place is certainly a relief. You could also say that it’s only May, and the Yanks are in first in a division that resembles the NBA Atlantic Division with a host of weaknesses and injuries, but to a fan like me, that ignores the larger issue of what to do while having one or possibly two reliable starters for your five man rotation, not to mention a lineup that more often than not lately has shown a propensity for leaving a lot of men on base. Is it too soon? Yes and no; too soon to look for reliable support via trade or down in the minors… well, except for our old friend, the Friendly Neighborhood Aceves, who swooped in around the fourth inning and stopped the bleeding the rest of the way, saving the bullpen from collapsing from exhaustion. He’ll do.
But the lineup as written needs attention. Once again the Yanks had ample opportunity to score and failed. Does it seem like when the bases are loaded, that’s when the batters decide to be aggressive and swing at the first, second and third pitch (if it gets that far), often resulting in swinging strikeouts, routine grounders or infield pop-ups? Outside of Teix, are they pressing or are they pressing? Again, too early to tell, yet in the meantime the cracks are showing in the field as well, where a fly ball to center turns into an inside-the-park three run homer. I tell you, I could not follow this game any further than I did; as a fan it disappoints me to have to look at or listen to it.
I did tune in later to hear Ace still throwing zeroes at the Rays in the eighth and through the rest of the game, but as usual, the bats threatened and then wimped out. I guess I’m not much of a fan if I can’t follow these games all the way through and then expect to recap them in a serious way, huh?
Well, at least Montrose (a village in the town of Cortlandt next to Peekskill, NY) has a state park with a fine hiking trail, who knew?
