Some people see the glass as half full and some as half empty. Marc Shaiman is something else entirely.
“I’m not even happy with the glass,” he says with a laugh.
The award-winning Hollywood and Broadway composer and lyricist cheerfully likes to call himself an “Eeyore” and “a card-carrying pessimist” despite many of his biggest dreams coming true.
“Just as soon as something good happens, something bad’s going to happen,” he says. “I am always waiting for that other shoe to drop, and it inevitably drops.”
His career and personal ups and downs are on full display this winter with Tuesday’s publication of his memoir, “Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner,” which is filled with funny stories from a man who has helped fuel popular movies and musicals for decades.
“I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot and I’ve been lucky enough to have an outrageous longevity. I thought, ‘Let me write it down, finally,'” he says.
Tales of Bette Midler, Stephen Sondheim and the “South Park” guys
The memoir charts the New Jersey-born musical prodigy’s rise from Bette Midler’s musical director in his teens to scoring such films as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Mary Poppins Returns” and Broadway shows like “Hairspray” and “Catch Me If You Can.”
He’s worked with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Luther Vandross, Raquel Welch and Rob Reiner, sparred with producer Scott Rudin and had a spat with Nora Ephron (“I’m certain she’s in heaven, telling all the angels she doesn’t like harps,” he writes). He also played at the White House and was a force in the early days of “Saturday Night Live.”
There was the time in 1999 that he got legendary composer Stephen Sondheim so high on pot at a party in his apartment that the iconic composer collapsed three times. “I’ve killed Stephen Sondheim,” he thought to himself. (Sondheim asked him to tell the story only after he died.)
He tells the story of hearing Meryl Streep repeatedly working on a song for “Mary Poppins Returns.” Moved, he and his writing partner, Scott Williams, knocked on her door to say how impressed they were by her dedication to rehearse. “Well, guys, fear can be a powerful motivator,” she told them.
“I’m mostly just trying to show how human everyone is — even these bold-faced names,” Shaiman, a two-time Grammy winner and two-time Emmy winner, says in the interview.
Shaiman isn’t above mocking himself, as he does for becoming an inveterate pothead and cocaine user. “I should go into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the only person who put on weight while being a cocaine addict,” he writes.
There are stories about how a misunderstanding over an unpaid bill with Barbra Streisand left him shaken for days and the time he insulted Harry Connick Jr. (Both would later reconcile.)
Then there was the time he found himself dressed in an ostentatious powder-blue suit and feather boa alongside Matt Stone and Trey Parker on a red carpet for “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” — they were dressed as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez.
One lesson from Shaiman: “Show up”
One lesson Shaiman hopes to teach aspiring artists is to go for it: “What you can do is show up. Show up to everything. Say yes to everything because I’m a good example of that.”
He tells the story of Midler organizing a world tour and offering his services but being told she was only hiring local Los Angeles people. So he withdrew all his money from the bank, hopped on a flight from New York and called her from a phone booth: “I’m in L.A. Where’s rehearsal?”
“Even if you don’t get the job, keep your spirit up because someone in that room is going to remember you for another thing. That’s the thing I think to really learn from the book,” he says.
As a sign of Shaiman’s pull on Broadway, the audiobook will feature performances by Crystal, Short, Matthew Broderick, Megan Hilty, Nathan Lane, Katharine McPhee and Ben Whishaw, among others.
“I had included a lot of lyrics in the book and then I suddenly realized, ‘What, am I going to sing them all or speak them all?’ So I started calling friends, some who had sung those songs and some who had sung the demos,” he says.
Crystal met Shaiman at “Saturday Night Live” and quickly hit it off. In a separate interview, Crystal called his friend funny and quick to improvise, with an almost photographic memory of music.
“Look at his range: From ‘Misery’ to the beautiful score from ‘The American President.’ And I brought him in on ’61(asterisk)’ and then the ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ score,” Crystal says. “He’s just so uniquely talented as an artist.”
Despite being a Tony Award winner in 2003 with “Hairspray” and earning two other nominations for “Catch Me If You Can” in 2011 and “Some Like It Hot” in 2023, Shaiman is flustered by Broadway.
His last two shows — “Smash” and “Some Like It Hot” — earned great reviews but closed early, a victim of high costs and fickle audiences.
“I wish the shows kind of stunk and I could go, ‘Oh, man, that really stunk. People are really not liking this,'” he says. “But when they’re enjoying it?”
Shaiman really has nothing else to prove and yet he laughs that his skin has gotten thinner — not thicker — over the years. He’d like to take it easy, but that’s not what Eeyores do.
“I don’t know how well I’ll actually do with retirement, but I’d like to give it a try.”
