Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [83]
Carole and I begged Stephen Lawrence to take it on. Stephen had composed such great music for Free to Be, and he was our friend. You could never tackle this with a stranger. So he was our best shot. But the idea of going to Chicago for Phil’s party was now out of the question. There was simply no time. I wouldn’t even be able to sleep for five days.
I had to call Phil. Well, I thought, this could be the end of it. Being with an actress is a lot of trouble for a guy. My brother, who produced many TV series and spent most of his time with actors, told me once that he went out of his way never to date an actress. And when Phil and I started dating, he always got a laugh with his line “I never knew a woman who had so much energy for so many things other than me.”
Phil picked up the phone. I told him about Johnny’s heart attack and that it would be impossible for me to come to Chicago for his party.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Can’t someone else oversee it just for a day?”
“No,” I said. “There are no extra days. I have to do it. I’m the producer. The buck stops here.”
Phil was silent. I felt awful.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a spot like this,” I offered, “when your work life suffocates your personal life. But I’m hoping you’ll understand.”
I waited, hoping. Finally, Phil said, “Yes, I have—more times than I’d like to admit. But when they pass out the disasters, I’ll take this one.”
How do you not love this guy?
It was too late to call off the party, so we decided that I would phone the party and tell my story to the assembled guests. There were a lot of obsessives there that night—so they got it. Phil said it was a great evening. I wish I had been there.
As disappointed as I was to miss the party, the sacrifice paid off. The work sessions with Stephen were thoroughly successful, and he quickly turned out a vibrant score. One melody was so beautiful, and Phil was so charmed by it, that he shipped the sheet music to a company in Switzerland and had it made into a music box as a gift for me—in time for Christmas. Obsessives were everywhere.
OUR MOVIE, which we renamed It Happened One Christmas, aired on ABC two weeks before Christmas. It got an incredible 46 share of the audience, and played for four successive seasons after that—just as Freddie had wanted. Some critics were abashed that I had monkeyed with the gender in a Capra film, some thought it ingenious. But most important, the audience took the film’s message to heart as passionately as they had with the original. And the mail we received was all about Capra. So I guess he was part of our movie, after all.
A few months later, Orson Welles was a guest on The Tonight Show.
“So you appeared in a movie with Marlo Thomas as the producer,” Johnny Carson said to him. “What was that like?”
“She’s an interesting woman,” “Orson answered. “She’s a cross between St. Theresa of the Flowers and Attila the Hun.”
Chapter 41
The Wright Stuff—Steven Wright
All comedy buffs think they’re the one who discovered Steven Wright. And once we’ve made that discovery, it’s hard to let go of him. He’s addictive—hear one Wright joke and you need to hear another. There have been other comedians who built their acts on a string of one-liners, but Wright’s are different. More than just zingers, each line tells a miniature story—at first bizarre, then eye-opening, then finally brilliant, as we get a deeper, funnier look at the things we thought we knew.
—M.T.
“I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: You know, preparing for this interview wasn’t so easy. Your bio on your website was about as short as your jokes. The whole thing is twenty-eight words—twenty-six if you don’t count “The End.” Why? Don’t you want anyone to know about you?
Steven: Well, my publicist wrote this really long biography of all the stuff I had done, and I felt self-conscious about it, like I was making a speech about myself. So I made a smaller version. I didn’t do it to be mysterious. The other one just seemed too self-centered.