9 Wild and Crazy Things You Didn’t Know About Steve Martin

Success wasn’t good enough for his dad

His father, Glenn Martin, was a thwarted actor stuck in a dull job, and not his son’s fan. “My work was really trying to get approval from him,” Martin says, but even when he made it big onstage and in movies such as The Jerk, his dad said, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.” Martin recalls, “He couldn’t quite be proud of an unconventional showbiz act that he didn’t quite understand.” Later in life, Martin reconciled with his father, but his life was haunted by the relationship, and it made him a lonely man until he found peace, happiness and parenthood with his wife, Anne Stringfield, 52, his former New Yorker magazine fact-checker.

​Saturday Night Live scared him, so he joined it

He was alarmed when Saturday Night Live popularized a subversive comedy style akin to his own, but both he and the show got more famous when he hosted it — 16 times so far, most recently with his Only Murders in the Building costar Martin Short, 74, his best friend and a star of the documentary.

Minneapolis Star Tribune/ZUMAPRESS.com / Alamy

He made SNL more musically funny

His biggest SNL moment was his 1978 hit tune “King Tut,” satirizing the blockbuster “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition. It was the show’s most ambitious production number, with a band featuring his old Disneyland Magic Shop pal John McEuen, 78, of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who has great stories to tell in the doc. “King Tut” hit number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, launching Martin’s parallel career as a music star.

Singer Edie Brickell, left, and Steve Martin on opening night of "Bright Star" at The Cort Theatre on March 24, 2016 in New York.

Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

​He’s a banjo wizard as well as a comedian

Martin taught himself to play banjo at 17, used the instrument in his comedy act, jammed with Jerry Garcia and, after two Grammy wins for best comedy album in the late ’70s, he picked up three more trophies strictly for his music — best country instrumental performance, best bluegrass album and best American roots song. Teamed with singer Edie Brickell, 58, he cowrote the musical Bright Star, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in the 1940s, which earned five Tony nominations, including nods for best book and best score, plus a Grammy nomination for best musical theater album.

Steve Martin’s success secret: aging

Martin’s Smothers Brothers writing partner Bob Einstein told him, “You know what’s going to help you? Age.” Martin says, “He was right, because [my] act looked juvenile. That’s why it helped when my hair turned gray. You always had to think that a grown man was doing this.” That made the silliness funnier and Martin more distinctive in the days when everyone looked like a hippie and did politically topical humor, not balloon animals and surrealist patter.

At first, he had long hair and a beard that his dad said made him look “like a simian at the San Francisco Zoo, or the San Diego Zoo, which is even worse. I don’t think it does anything for your career."

In the doc, we see Martin cut his hair and beard and switch to the famous white suit. “Instead of looking like a hippie from the ’60s, I looked like somebody new from the ’70s. Like someone from the future.”

In a scene from a Steve Martin/Martin Short stage show, Short speaks the truth: “May I say to you, young Stephen, you look fantastic. I guess that’s the benefit of looking 70 since you were 30.”

Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage

​He’s equally obsessed with art — and loneliness

He owns artwork by Picasso, Francis Bacon, Georges Seurat, Willem de Kooning, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein and many more, and sold an Edward Hopper painting at Sotheby’s for $26.9 million. In the doc, Martin’s friend Adam Gopnik says, “Are you aware that everything you collect has in common, whatever period it’s from, a quality of plaintive isolation?”

Martin notes that his movies and plays are all about longing, even the comedies, such as Bowfinger. Tina Fey says of his imagination, “It’s a bittersweet chocolate bar. It’s Hershey’s Special Dark — it’s not milk. There is a longing at the center of pretty much everybody he shows us. There’s a melancholy, and the only person who can fix it is Martin Short.” Martin tells Seinfeld, “But that’s dissipated. I had more melancholy younger.”

Miserable for decades, he's blissfully happy in his 70s

He says he’s achieved “pihentagyú,” a Hungarian word meaning “with a relaxed brain.” “My brain is relaxed,” Martin says. “I’m not under the pressure that I put myself under. I’m not out to prove anything.” And he says his work is better — he’s amazed to have an Emmy-magnet hit show at 78.

“Usually you get married, you have a child, you work, and then your child is grown, and then you’re 60 or 70, and the children are out of the house,” he observes. “My life is completely backwards. I worked very hard early on, and then I have a happy marriage and have a fantastic child at this end. And I love it.” He tells Martin Short in the doc, “You know, as you get older, you either become your worst self or your best self. I’ve become a better driver. I’ve become nicer, kinder, more open.”

“Yeah,” Short retorts, “because for about 50 years there, you were a real p---k.”