Steve Martin: Playboy Interview

People still approach him on the street and ask for his autograph (they don't get it—he hands them a preprinted card instead). They plead with him to do the shtick they remember from his many appearances on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.

Steve Martin refuses. Long gone are his days onstage in his trademark white suit with a fake arrow sticking through his head. The new Steve Martin plays an evangelist, an architect, a producer or a sentimental dad in hit Hollywood movies. The wild and crazy Steve Martin has given way to the mature and sedate Steve Martin, right?

Maybe yes, and maybe no. During Johnny Carson's final week hosting The Tonight Show last spring, Martin appeared in a turban in front of a tiny placard that announced one of his many alter egos, the Great Flydini. After reciting the requisite magic words and unzipping his pants, he conjured forth an egg, then a telephone, then a puppet singing like Pavarotti, all through his fly.

The Great Flydini, of course, is vintage Martin, a throwback to his earlier days of offbeat, zany comedy. His new movie, Leap of Faith, is strictly a dramatic role. Perhaps only Robin Williams has accomplished what Martin has—achieving fame as a stand-up comic and translating it into success as a serious actor. But Martin hasn't stopped there. He has also written some of his most successful movies, including Roxanne and L.A. Story.

His acting work is eclectic: He played romantic leads (in Roxanne and in 1992's Housesitter), earnest and endearing dads (in Parenthood and Father of the Bride) and semi-straight men (to John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, to Lily Tomlin in All of Me and to Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). He stole the show in Little Shop of Horrors (in which he played a mad drill-wielding dentist) and Grand Canyon (in which he portrayed a movie producer whose artistic sensibilities were insulted when the blood and guts were cut from one of his films). In other movies he sang and danced (Pennies from Heaven) and read the weather (L.A. Story). Some were comedies with a bit of drama and others were dramas with some comedy.

Most of Martin's movies have done well at the box office and he has won numerous awards—though the Oscar has eluded him, even when he was rumored to be a shoe-in for best actor for Roxanne. Time called him "this decade's most charming and resourceful comic actor," and Entertainment Weekly estimated that audiences have spent three quarters of a billion dollars to see his movies.

As a child, Martin had no plans to become an actor. He was born in Waco, Texas, and raised in southern California, where his father worked as a real estate salesman. Fortune brought the family to live in Garden Grove, an Orange County suburb in the shadow of Disneyland, where the young Martin found work selling guidebooks and, later, hand buzzers and fake vomit in a gift shop.

As a college student at Cal State-Long Beach, Martin earned money performing at Knott's Berry Farm, where he did magic tricks and sang, accompanying himself on the banjo. But show business was just a hobby; Martin planned to teach philosophy after graduation.

Instead, a girlfriend helped him get his first Hollywood job, as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He wrote hundreds of skits, won an Emmy and went on to write for shows hosted by Sonny and Cher, Pat Paulsen and Glen Campbell.

Although his agent predicted he would fail as a performer, Martin left television writing to take his stand-up act on the road. Stand-up comedy was still in its dark ages then—it would be a few years before comedy clubs started springing up across the country—and Martin had little choice but to serve as the opener for such acts as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Linda Ronstadt.

Those audiences, unfortunately, were not particularly receptive to comedy, so Martin made another career change. In 1975 he decided his days as an opening act were over and his days as a headliner should begin. He started touring small music clubs as a solo act, losing money and trying to establish his oddball brand of comedy with audiences around the country. His move paid off: Rave reviews in Miami and San Francisco gave his career a gigantic boost, and he was finally invited to appear on television talk shows, including The Tonight Show.

No one quite knew what to make of Martin. He wasn't political or topical along the lines of George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Robert Klein or Richard Pryor. He did gags and one-liners with props (the fake arrow through his head, balloons). Much of his comedy was physical, in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Even Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of Saturday Night Live, was confused. "His act seemed too conventionally show business," Michaels said. "It was so new it looked old." At first, Michaels dismissed Martin as too unhip for SNL. But he later relented, and Martin became the show's most popular guest host. Soon, Martin was playing 20,000-seat arenas.

His comedy records sold millions and won Grammys, and he had a best-selling book in 1977, Cruel Shoes. A film he made (The Absent-Minded Waiter, which he showed during his concerts) was nominated for an Academy Award. He had become, as Carl Reiner said, "the first rock-star comedian."

As abruptly as he had started headlining, Martin quit stand-up for a movie career. In The Jerk, directed by Reiner, a friend from his Smothers Brothers days, he played the title role, the adopted son of a black sharecropper. Although the movie was trashed by reviewers, who called it sophomoric, The New York Times, in a TV listing for The Jerk, recently called it "a sophisticated comedy."

Since The Jerk, Martin has been in at least one movie a year. He has also had a run on Broadway in Waiting for Godot, opposite Robin Williams, and has continued to pop up on Saturday Night Live, where his comedy seems as antic and silly as ever.

Offscreen, his life is quiet and busy. He met his wife of the past six years, Victoria Tennant, on the set of All of Me. The British-born actress, goddaughter of Laurence Olivier, was also his co-star in L.A. Story, which he wrote and co-produced. When he's not on location, he lives with Tennant in Beverly Hills. The couple also has an apartment in New York City.

Although Martin hates the glitz of Hollywood, he counts many fellow actors among his good friends. He is an avid art collector whose taste runs from a David Hockney portrait of Andy Warhol to works by Roy Lichtenstein and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. He says he's not political, though he and Victoria traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with servicemen sent to fight the Gulf war.

In his 20th and latest movie, Leap of Faith, Martin portrays a con man evangelist managed by Debra Winger. It's a far cry from his first role in The Jerk, when he was the subject of an earlier Playboy Interview. In that interview, he wondered aloud if he was going to last.

Martin did more than last, he soared. Now, 13 years later, he has become one of the exclusive group of subjects that Playboy has interviewed twice (joining Fidel Castro, Robin Williams and Gore Vidal). Contributing editor David Sheff, who conducted last month's interview with Sharon Stone, was sent to Los Angeles to face off with Martin. Here is his report:

"Martin uses the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills as his living room for business meetings and interviews. It's a hotel that's teeming with movie stars. As Martin drove into the parking lot in his steel-blue BMW, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were slipping into a Porsche and Sam Shepard was reclaiming his Jeep. Later, Ron Howard and Harvey Keitel wandered through the lobby.

"Martin was given the best table in the restaurant, and the waiter was unfazed when he ordered 'Just water,' since he had already eaten lunch.

"At first, Martin was anything but relaxed, though he eased up by our final session. Still, he fidgeted, folding his napkin, rocking in place and drumming his fingers on the linen table cloth. Today, it seems as though Martin no longer feels he needs to hide behind a joke. Offstage, he doesn't try to be funny, at least not on cue. That's a significant change for him. He told Playboy in 1980, 'I'll be funny when there's a question I don't want to answer.' Instead, he spoke candidly, albeit cautiously, and chose his words carefully. There were many subjects he was reluctant to speak about—'because I don't have to,' he said. He usually relented, but it was often like pulling teeth—as if I were the demented dentist he played in Little Shop of Horrors."