On Steve Martin’s birthday, revisit his Personal History about his first performances for a paying audience, at Knott’s Berry Farm, in the ’60s.
Martin in an ad for his act at the Ice House, a folk club in Pasadena, in 1967.During the nineteen-sixties, the five-foot-high hand-painted placard in front of the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm read “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.” The missing “n” in “entertainment” was overlooked by staff, audience, and visitors for an entire decade. I worked there between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two as an actor in melodramas.
The theatre was stocked with genuine characters. Ronnie Morgan, rail thin, would dress up as Lincoln and read the Gettysburg Address for local elementary schools. On a good day, he would show us young lads cheesecake photos of his wife in a leopard-skin bikini, and even at age eighteen we thought it was weird. There was Joe Carney, a blustery and funny actor, who opened the lavatory door from the top to avoid germs.
Catalyzed by the popularity of the folk group the Kingston Trio, small music clubs began to sprout in every unlikely venue. Shopping malls and restaurant cellars now had corner-stage showrooms that sometimes did and sometimes did not serve alcohol. There were almost no clubs dedicated to comedy—they would not exist for at least another fifteen years—so every comedian was an outsider.
This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy—at all. But I did know that I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, pilfered from gag books or other people’s routines, and consequently lose a major portion of my already strained act. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.
My college roommate, Phil Carey, was an artist and musician. He sang bass, not in a barbershop quartet but for a sophisticated chorale that favored complicated rhythms and mismatched twelve-tone arrangements. Phil’s contagious enthusiasm got me excited about art, particularly the avant-garde, and we quickly noted that the campus art scene was also a great arena in which to meet girls.
I’m not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration. Aspen was no place for poetry readings, and they were stripped permanently from my act. I was now doing my triptych of banjo playing, comedy, and magic. One evening at the Abbey Cellar, I had my first experience with a serious heckler, who, sitting at a front table with his wife and another straight-looking couple, stood up and said, “See if you think this is funny,” and threw a glass of red wine at me.
Now that most of my work was in Westwood, Long Beach State, forty miles away, seemed like Siberia. I transferred to U.C.L.A., so I could be closer to the action, and I took several courses there. One was an acting class, the kind that feels like prison camp and treats students like detainees who need to be broken; another was a course in television writing, which seemed practical. I also continued my studies in philosophy.
My first glimpse of Dalton Trumbo revealed an engrossed intellect—not finessing his latest screenplay but sorting the seeds and stems from a brick of pot. “Pop smokes marijuana,” Mitzi explained, “with the wishful thought of cutting down on his drinking.” Sometimes, from their balcony, I would see Trumbo walking laps around the perimeter of the pool. He held a small counter in one hand and clicked it every time he passed the diving board.
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