Walking away? It’s child’s play
STEVE GIVING UP TV & MOVIES AS HE BECOMES DAD AT 67
STEVE Martin is done. No more television shows. No more films.
While enjoying his current Disney+ hit series Only Murders in the Building, he says: “When this television show is done, I’m not going to seek others. I’m not going to seek other movies.”
Not even small guest roles will entice him back.
“I don’t want to do cameos,” says Martin. “This is, weirdly, it.”
Once America’s top stand-up comedian – “I’m a wild and crazy guy!” he would rave on stage, with a fake arrow through his head while hurling sarcastic barbs and an acid-laced: “Well, Excuuuuse me!” – he walked away from stand-up at his peak in 1981, and isn’t about to go back.
Witty
Only his long-running stage comedy double-act – more of a witty conversation – with longtime friend and Only Murders costar Martin Short will entice him back to perform, and even that has a limited shelf life.
“There may be a natural end to that: somebody gets sick, somebody just wears out,” says the 78-year-old. “But I wouldn’t do it without Marty.”
Though deeply protective of his privacy, a new two-part documentary series titled STEVE! (martin) debuts tonight on Apple TV+ offering an intimate look into the comedy legend’s life.
It explores his painful childhood with a demanding and emotionally unavailable father, his 15-year fight to succeed as a stand-up comedian, his rollercoaster Hollywood career, marriage at 60 and the unexpected delight of becoming a father at 67.
Silver-haired and silvertongued, Martin is a multi-faceted enigma, a self-effacing comic who tells the documentary filmmakers: “I guarantee I had no talent. None.”
The star of hit films including Roxanne, L.A. Story, Father of the
Bride and Parenthood, he admits having to make 40 movies to get five good ones.
He has five Grammy awards: two for comedy and three for his banjo recordings, has written three Broadway plays and a musical, published three successful novels, and is famed for his art collection that has included works by Picasso, Lichtenstein and Bacon.
Yet despite his professional success, his personal life has often been a struggle. Scarred by his own love-starved childhood, Martin admits spending most of his life not wanting children.
“The family was not a goal for me,” he says. “I wasn’t shown that it was something fantastic. It just wasn’t for me.”
Yet at the age of 60 he married journalist Anne Stringfield, 27 years his junior, and unexpectedly became a father at the age of 67. That family is one of the key factors keeping Martin from pursuing more film and television roles.
“I have a family life that’s really fun,” he says. “To film a movie now, to go someplace else to live, I’m not willing to do that any more. I can’t disappear for three months.”
Starved
But as the docu-series reveals, a fun family life may have been missing from Martin’s childhood home. Born in August 1945 in Waco, Texas, the son of a failed aspiring actor who became an estate agent, Martin struggled in a home starved for love.
“I don’t remember hugs, I don’t remember affection,” his older sister, Melinda Hobbs, tells the documentary. “I don’t think that he thought he was going to have a child either. That never occurred to him probably, because his childhood wasn’t something so ideal he’d want to pass on.”
When he was five, Martin’s family moved south of Los Angeles in Orange County.
It was the home to Disneyland where, from the age of 11, he began working on weekends and school holidays selling guidebooks and spinning lassos.
The theme park was his showbusiness education: working in their magic shop, learning to juggle, and watching old-fashioned familyfriendly comedy shows whose absurdity he would later parody in his own stand-up act.
But Martin’s father Glenn could be painfully dismissive of his son’s show-business dreams, and his harshest critic.
“During my teenage years, there was little said to me that was not
criticism,” Martin recalled shortly after his father’s death aged 83 in 1997. “I remember him as angry.
“After my first appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1976, he wrote a bad review of me in the newsletter of the Newport Board of Realtors where he was president.”
A perfectionist wracked by self-doubt, Martin suffered panic attacks even as his career soared, playing to stadium crowds and mobbed by fans.
“I started having anxiety attacks,” he admits. “I really struggled with it for many, many years.”
But his insecurities ironically kept him away from drugs. “I never smoked pot,” he says. “I couldn’t take aspirin. I was so afraid of anxiety attacks.”
However, his father’s harsh criticism continued as Martin’s fame rose. After the premiere of Martin’s 1979 hit comedy movie The Jerk, at a celebratory dinner Glenn pronounced his son “no Charlie Chaplin”.
Yet on his deathbed Glenn confessed to Martin: “You did everything I wanted to do.”
Tears in his eyes, Martin replied: “I did it for you.” Hollywood success brought fame and wealth, but Martin felt more alone than ever. “I was very, very isolated and very lonely,” he admits. “You literally can’t go outside.”
On one post-fame visit to Disneyland he dyed his hair brown and wore a fake moustache, explaining: “I don’t like being stared at or yelled at.”
Though shielding much of his private life from view – his 11-year-old daughter Mary only appears in the docuseries as a cartoon – the filmmakers persuaded Martin to offer some rare comments about his failed first marriage to Victoria Tennant, his L.A. Story costar, who he wed in 1986.
Amusing
“She was very funny, very amusing, very smart – and English,” he says.
“It’s a relationship that just sort of defaulted into a romance. Also part of that was, ‘I guess I should get married,’ which is not a good reason. There’s just no way to force it.”
After their eight-year marriage ended in 1994, Martin admits: “I felt lost…
“The marriage breakup was the beginning of the opening of a bottomless pit… It was kind of a mid-life crisis.”
He stumbled through failed romances with stars including Bernadette Peters and Anne Heche, and it was more than a decade before he met his current wife, who was working as a fact-checker on the New
Yorker magazine and called to confirm details of an interview.
“We talked on the phone for a year before we even met,” Martin says.
Grey-haired since his thirties, as he approaches 80 Martin still works long hours as the co-writer and star of Only Murders, while maintaining a busy pace of live shows with his friend Martin Short.
“You look fantastic, you really do,” says Short (74). “That’s the benefit of looking 70 since you were 30.”
Martin is as surprised as anyone to find himself in a loving family with a wife, daughter, and hit TV series Only Murders, co-starring Short and Selena Gomez, and with Meryl Streep and Zach Galifianakis confirmed for the fourth season.
“What an odd life,” he says. “My whole life is backwards. How did I go from riddled with anxiety in my 30s, to [78] and really happy?”
Yet retirement remains elusive for the star.
“My wife keeps saying, ‘You always say you’re going to retire, and then you always come up with something,’” he admits. “I’m really not interested in retiring. I’m not. But I would just work a little less. Maybe.”
STEVE! (martin) A Documentary in 2 Pieces premieres on Apple TV+ today.