Conversations with Steve Martin

By University Press of Mississippi

Baba Yaga is an ambiguous and fascinating figure. She appears in traditional Russian folktales as a monstrous and hungry cannibal, or as a canny inquisitor of the adolescent hero or heroine of the tale. In new translations and with an introduction by Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales is a selection of tales that draws from the famous collection of Aleksandr Afanas'ev, but also includes some tales from the lesser-known nineteenth-century collection of Ivan Khudiakov. This new collection includes beloved classics such as "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and "The Frog Princess," as well as a version of the tale that is the basis for the ballet "The Firebird."

The preface and introduction place these tales in their traditional context with reference to Baba Yaga's continuing presence in today's culture--the witch appears iconically on tennis shoes, tee shirts, even tattoos. The stories are enriched with many wonderful illustrations of Baba Yaga, some old (traditional "lubok" woodcuts), some classical (the marvelous images from Victor Vasnetsov or Ivan Bilibin), and some quite recent or solicited specifically for this collection

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626743229

Book preview

Hey!!! It’s Steve Martin!

Tom Shales / 1977

From the Washington Post © September 15, 1977, The Washington Post. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited. www.washingtonpost.com

Hey—we’ll get to those Revealing Interview Quotes in just a minute. But first—how about some Witty Media Journalism!

Steve Martin bounds onto a stage. Hi, I’m Steve Martin, he says. I’ll be out in just a minute! A little later: Okay—Let’s go with the PROFESSIONAL SHOW BUSINESS! And still later:

I just remembered—I am SO MAD at my MOTHER! She’s 102 years old, and she called me the other day, and wanted to borrow TEN DOLLARS for some FOOOOD! I said, ‘Hey! I WORK for a living.’

At this a normal audience roars, only to be reassured, Hey, we’re havin’ some fun, though, aren’t we, kids? A secret of Steve Martin’s success is making a huge point out of never leaving well enough alone.

Steve Martin: Boon or Boor? Steve Martin: Gross-out Champ or World’s Greatest Comedian? Steve Martin, by his own admission, a ramblin’ kind of a guy . . . a cuh-ray-zee kind of a guy . . . a yew-neeek kind of a guy who once began a guest-host gig on The Tonight Show with, "I know what you’re saying—what’s this guy doing, hosting The Tonight Show? Well—I have hostages!"

Martin, whose fluffy gray hair doesn’t belong on a thirty-two-year-old head (first gray hair: at fifteen), was not having some fun himself when he came into Washington yesterday for tonight’s two sold-out concerts at the Kennedy Center. His cab had a flat tire on the way from the airport; the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel lost his reservation and sent him to the Sheraton-Park. He sat there in his room glum and tired late yesterday, but tonight he’ll be just entertaining people to pieces—until they can’t STAND it anymore.

Martin may seem like just another of those fifteen-years-of-hard-work overnight sensations, but he’s bigger than a standup comic’s been in maybe a decade. He is beginning a fifty-city, sixty-day concert tour selling out right and left, and his new album, Let’s Get Small, has only been out half a week but will appear on Billboard’s what’s-hot chart next week.

There’s no age group he doesn’t appeal to, marvels a flack at Warner Bros. Records.

What does he appeal with? With everything. He throws the book at his audience—a history of American shtick that includes the old arrow through the head gag, the funny nose, the balloons twisted into animal shapes (this one’s a venereal disease), the joke for joke’s sake. He plays the total ego, the clod, the self-assured master of virtuoso ineptitude and the fool who takes the audience riding for a fall with him.

And he’s not very political and he’s not even very dirty. Does he think he is a sign of the times?

Yes, he says. Apathy.

He does not feel a part of any generation. But I feel like we’re part of a new society, a changing society. We’re kicking the ’60s goodbye, and I’m enjoying that extremely. There’s a new formalism now, I think. In the late ’60s, it was a very informal period. You could say dirty words and insult people and it was okay to get up and dance at a movie. All that’s just fashion, not good or bad or anything, just the way things were for a while. Right now things are going back to formalism. I like the change.

It’s Martin’s yew-neeek kind of a style to constantly call attention to form when on stage. He’ll say, We’re having SOME FUN though, aren’t we, kids? or, Okay—that’s enough FUNNY COMEDY GAGS!"

Once, when guest-hosting The Tonight Show and being faced with grumbled reaction to a joke, he shot back, Hey folks—COMEDY is NOT PRETTY. In fact, he gets a louder welcoming ovation from the Carson audience than any other guest host.

And he’ll open the season for the youth-seducing NBC’s Saturday Night Live, where his guest-host appearances helped put him over the top into the total consciousness of all humanity. He’s made it by defying the current; he doesn’t rip any jokes out of the headlines.

I’m just tired of topical humor, he says. "I am consciously atopical. No. 1, topical is old hat, and No. 2, my act’s different. It’s personal. It’s about what happens in the moments you wake up, or the moments before you go to sleep, little personal private observations of the world in general. That person I play on stage is oblivious to newspapers. He’s full of opinions about nothing.

"I think people are distrustful of government, distrustful of organizations, distrustful of everything. They just want to get back to their personal lives, and let those other guys do what they want.

Steve Martin is a cranked-down prophet for a new age of Self.

But our story doesn’t start here—OBVIOUSLY. It starts in the shadow of Disneyland, where Steve grew up, eventually going to work at the Magic Kingdom and once or twice even meeting Unca Walt, though he was too paralyzed with awe to say anything to him. "The balloons? They came later, but the seed was planted there, at the joke shop where I worked. We sold arrows-through-the-head, funny noses, all those things that at first were funny, and then when you were in college they were metaphysically funny, and then they got just funny again.

But I don’t use them much anymore.

He was a philosophy major in college, later got a job working for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS where he found the censors to be just idiots, just people off the street that they turned into censors. Years of performing in small clubs, then as the booed-upon opening act for rowdy rock groups, prepared him for the giant step he took in the past year.

He elbowed his way into our hearts with a loud Well Ex-cuuuuuuse Me! that has, like some of his other trademarks, waddled its way into the language of the times.

At his solar-powered home in chic Aspen, he lives a vegetarian life without drugs or booze, he says, which completes his refreshingly reactionary image.

I quit drinking two years ago and I quit smoking dope ten years ago and my life changed, 100 percent. I don’t mind drugs, but I do mind blithering idiots. When some guy at a concert walks down to the front and stands there just swaying, I can tell he’s stoned out of his mind. I don’t mind drugs, really: I’d like to get drunk every night. But I just don’t want to pay the price.

John Denver comes over to his house now and then and he goes over to John Denver’s house now and then. Sometimes they play horseshoes. Such a healthy life for a comedian. Comedians are supposed to be neurotic wrecks born on the lower East Side of New York.

But Martin is part of a—we hate to say it, but it’s true—New Breed of comedian that includes people like Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase. And he’s also a living parody of comedians when he’s up on stage. Martin doesn’t exactly tell jokes; he does comedy about joke-telling.

I don’t like to offend people, he says on the album, recorded at a San Francisco club, I don’t do any fag jokes or anything like that. Pause. How many fags do we have here tonight, by the way?

He picks up and plunks at a banjo and dares the crowd to sing along: Now I ask you very confidentially, way down upon the Swan—

He tells the crowd he had to break up with his best girl. One night she said, ‘Please drive me home.’ I didn’t want to, so I shot her.

He admits, I love bread. I’m into money. I love everything about money, and lists some of the luxuries he’d bought himself—"a $300 pair of socks. A fur sink. An electric dog polisher.

Of course, he says, I bought some dumb stuff too, you know.

Finally, he gives the crowd his benediction: Laugh once a day—because a day without sunshine is like . . . night.

The world’s greatest comedian’s hotel room is invaded by his manager. They’re playing cuts from Martin’s comedy joke album on WFIL radio in Philadelphia, he tells Martin—and they NEVER do that! It’s unheard of. This Steve Martin is some phenomenon. Martin does not look impressed.

I hope it’s not a flash-in-the-pan career, Martin says later. You know, one year and it’s all over. Right now we’re having a nice rush of concerts and this record thing, but you know, it all comes to an end, no matter who you are.

Behind the Best Sellers: Steve Martin

Carol Lawson / 1979

From the New York Times, June 24, 1979 ©1979 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited. http://www.nytimes.com/.

Up to now, author of everything but a book. That is what the jacket of Steve Martin’s best seller, Cruel Shoes, says, but this breathless claim isn’t quite true. Mr. Martin has been the author of a book—but only a few people know about it. In fact, the book he wrote just happened to be called Cruel Shoes.

The book came out a few years ago, before Mr. Martin turned into a hot property, as they say in show business. He had written some short sketches and poems, which he decided to publish on his own without any hoopla. His first version of Cruel Shoes was a forty-eight-page volume printed in 1977 by the Press of the Pegacycle Lady in Los Angeles. It looked like the product of a minor university press. There was no dust jacket, just a plain gray cover with the author’s name relegated to the spine.

The book was a very private endeavor, not written with a mass audience in mind, Mr. Martin explained over the phone from his office in Los Angeles. (For the record, fans, he was playing it straight. The popular wild-and-crazy guy sounded as funny as an insurance salesman.)

I just wanted to have a private little tome, he said. I took it to Victoria Dailey, the president of the Press of the Pegacycle Lady. She runs an antiquarian book store. We only published 750 copies. I gave away many to friends. I didn’t care what happened to it.

Other people did care. Mr. Martin was vague, however, about exactly who suggested republishing Cruel Shoes and how the book reached Putnam. The new version, published by Putnam under the supervision of Mr. Martin’s manager, William E. McEuen, has grown to 128 pages, thanks to some new material and several fuzzy-looking photographs of the thirty-three-year-old comedian on stage in his familiar white suit.

There has been talk in the trade that Putnam’s involvement with Cruel Shoes was an appendage to Mr. Martin’s film deal with Universal. It has been suggested that MCA, which owns both Putnam and Universal, forced the publishing house to take the book in exchange for getting Mr. Martin’s signature on a contract that calls for him to write and star in several films.

There’s nothing to this that I know of, Mr. Martin said. I was hardly in on the negotiations, because I was on the road. My agent and lawyers visited a lot of publishers. I wasn’t even aware that MCA was associated with Putnam.

For those wondering about the meaning of the title, Mr. Martin had this explanation: It doesn’t mean anything. It’s the title of one of the stories. It was suggested as the title of the book by Eve Babitz, a Los Angeles author who has encouraged me and published some of my stories in her arts newsletter.

What about the roguish picture of the author on the jacket? We were taking pictures for the cover in Las Vegas, and I was very tired from doing two shows a night. I was wearing my white suit, which I hate. I’m tired of it. For the last shot—the one on the cover—I changed clothes, put on my hat and sunglasses and lit a cigarette. And I don’t even smoke.

Mr. Martin described his book as an indulgence. Some of the pieces are silly little jokes. The title is the whole thing. It’s like doing a puzzle. You write the title and fill in something to justify it. Other pieces are thought out and plotted.

The comedian added that he intends to write more books but is in no hurry. I like to write. It’s been my best asset. I write 95 percent of my own material. At the moment, writing and performing in films are my primary concerns.

Is there a hint here of aspirations to emulate Woody Allen? I wouldn’t mind acquiring his status.

Carl Reiner and Steve Martin Plan Another Film at Universal

Samir Hachem / 1979

Published in Drama-Logue, December 13–19, 1979. Reprinted by permission of Backstage, LLC.

Steve Martin and Carl Reiner recently made a national promotion tour covering Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas in less than three hours—without ever leaving NBC’s Studio 4 in Burbank. The actor and director were plugging their new film, The Jerk, which opens here December 14. In a global-village-like press conference, out of town reporters were hooked up by satellite in a closed circuit television broadcast Universal had arranged because, as Reiner mused, they figured it was cheaper. (Actually, cost was estimated by a studio spokesman at anywhere between $40,000 and $70,000.)

Dressed in a gray suit, a burgundy tie and casual tennis shoes, the thirty-three-year-old comedian seemed unusually tense and a bit self-conscious as he attempted to put on a facade of relaxation, while his fifty-six-year-old director had no problem expertly ad-libbing his way through questions.

It was an interesting meeting of a veteran master of verbal comedy and a contemporary craftsman of physical humor. On one hand, Reiner belongs to the Your Show of Shows and the Dick Van Dyke Show TV generation, a school of witty, snappy, and civilized humor. On the other, Martin is often associated with such titles as Let’s Get Small, Wild and Crazy Guy—the Saturday Night Live TV era.

"Carl is a funny person and I don’t think funny people have a generation gap problem, and we didn’t at all. There was an instant rapport, and Carl has an ability to see what’s happening in our times, now, as opposed to today," Martin deadpanned.

You have to look at the times, Reiner began. "Whatever happens in society will be reflected by comedians; if we’re in a repressive society we’ll have a certain kind of comedy, if we’re in a depression, we’ll have another. . . . In the middle of a war the comedians become the commentators that point to the problems, and they do it in a way not to get arrested.

See, a lot of political activists carry banners and throw stones and throw bombs. Comedians have that social sense too, but they’re cowards—they use their mouths, their angularity of look, their faces, and then they say they’re kidding. They’re never kidding.

Perhaps what unites both artists is that they’re simply funny men, they’re professional comedians. Although Reiner seems to be continually (and comfortably) on, Martin is a bit erratic. I’m funny with certain people, I’m serious with others. If I were funny all the time, I would not have any friends, he said earnestly.

I asked Reiner if he had any difficulties with the script (co-written by Martin) and whether he felt a duty to protect the popular comedian’s stage persona. I thought I had to protect his brand of comedy, the director replied. I had to understand and respect his kind of connection with an audience. I’ll tell you something, when Steve brought me the script, I found things that I could never have written myself, but I must say that basically everything in that script made me either smile, giggle, or laugh. I was protecting what he does, because it’s very unusual.

Did Martin feel he had to stick to the wild and crazy image he has created in stage and TV appearances in the past few years? Well, no. I don’t feel limited, that’s the audience’s limitation or the promotion limitation that’s put on me and all it takes is for me to break it. I tried to stay away from my stage routines. But what about the cat juggling routine, and the film’s ad campaign labeling it a wild and crazy movie, I protested. Well, I’m not out there to suddenly become a dramatic actor; I’m out there to make comedies, not necessarily zany ones. We actually shot some things that were wild and crazy and which related to my act, but we cut them out. In the context of the film they looked out of place; they didn’t work.

Reiner, who has received eleven Emmy awards, started out as an actor and eventually found himself writing television comedies. His writing of a Doris Day screwball comedy, The Thrill of It All, paved the way to more writing and directing. His film credits include Where’s Poppa?, The Comic, Oh God, and The One and Only. He never stopped acting, however—from The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to brief appearances in The End and The Jerk.

I think the most satisfying thing to me is to write something and then protect it by directing it. And as far as acting is concerned I think I have a need to get up in front of an audience and score, though unfortunately I don’t think I’m scoring very well today, he said pouting. "I need the exposure, I’m a cheap actor and producers know it. I act in my movies because I cast myself and it doesn’t cost them much. Until The Russians Are Coming I was never offered a starring role in somebody else’s picture."

Before acquiring wide fame from his standup absurdist kind of comedy, Martin, too, wrote for several variety shows. In writing standup, it’s easier to write for myself; in writing TV material it was always easier to write for somebody else, because you gave them something you wouldn’t do. Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it’s like trying to condense ten years of experience into twenty minutes of new material, he admitted.

The comedian, who was born in Waco, Texas, and who virtually grew up in Disneyland where he started working before he was eleven, majored in philosophy and theater at college and was writing for TV’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by the time he was twenty-one. A part of my professional life has always been structured through writing for television and doing sketches, and, naturally, in a movie I didn’t want to do any free-form comedy. I’m interested in writing for movies now and know that it’ll be much more structured than standup.

The Jerk marks Steve Martin’s first starring film role. He had previously played cameos in The Muppet Movie and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and was nominated for an Oscar for his short film, The Absent-Minded Waiter. His strength, as an actor, I’ve found, is his beautiful body, Reiner said jokingly. His weakness is too much hair on his body. Martin explained that he felt his strength on stage is very physical while on the screen, it’s surprisingly in the intimate moments.

Martin and Reiner said they’re looking very carefully at a new script which they plan to collaborate on for Universal. Will Reiner have anything to do with the sequel to Oh God? "Oh no, Oh God, Oh God is a Warner Bros. project, and see, that’s the big business mentality. I say ‘you don’t chew your cud more than once,’ and my theory is that if God had a message and had to come down more than once he’s really lost his strength and he’s become a noodge."

Martin recently signed a major three-year production deal with NBC. He appears on The Tonight Show December 13, and his new special, Comedy Isn’t Pretty, is scheduled to air in January. Beyond that he plans to do one special a year. He said that he is writing a new book, longer and more complex than Cruel Shoes, and is working on a new album. The two-time Grammy Award–winner denied having slighted the Grammys in a recent Playboy interview. I did not slight the Grammys, I slighted the Comedy Award, and the meaning of that is when a comedy record is out, there’s very little competition. You have one big record and you have maybe four records with very low sales, and I’ve found that sales somehow relate to the Comedy Award.

Responding to an Atlanta reporter who requested advice for his young son on his way to Hollywood to become a famous director, Reiner said, Wherever he is, if he’s not on a highway, tell him to make a U-turn. To become a famous director, I’m still trying to do that.

Steve Martin Sings: The Rolling Stone Interview

Ben Fong-Torres / 1982

From Rolling Stone, Issue no. 363, February 18, 1982. Copyright © Rolling Stone LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

So I wanted everything to cease, and I wanted to throw the dice. Steve Martin, overdosed on success, threw his dice and what a number he rolled: the lead in Pennies from Heaven. In this MGM tragi-musical, which zigzags from doomed darkness to dreamy fantasies, Martin plays Arthur Parker, a song-sheet salesman, who lies and cheats, sings and dances—who does just about everything, in fact, but act funny. For a man who rose to stardom through comedy, he was clearly taking the biggest risk of his career.

It was a role Martin worked hard to get. He had to learn dramatic acting—from the director, Herbert Ross—and take tap-dancing lessons for months, well into the production of the film. He had to accept what amounted to a year’s retirement from, to put it mildly, a wildly successful comedy career. And he even had to butt up against his own friend and manager, Bill McEuen. I just think he shouldn’t be doing a dramatic role at this point, McEuen said, a few weeks before the movie opened. I would’ve been happier if he’d done a couple more comedies first, then tried something different.

But Steve would not be stopped. Martin had seen Pennies in its original form, as a six-part, nine-hour television series produced by BBC in 1976 and shown later in the United States on various PBS stations. I couldn’t believe it, Martin said. "I’d sit there and go, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ What the movie’s about is so common to everything. Arthur’s desire to be like what the songs told him. I saw this great parallel to when I was growing up in the fifties. The rock & roll songs were so simple, everything was so simple. You loved her, you got her, you lost her. Pop music now, or in the sixties, was complicated, but these songs were just, ‘Here’s what life is gonna be.’ And that promise has been made to people of our generation as well as to people of Arthur’s