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THERE’S MORE TO MARTY THAN MEETS THE EYE
From:
The Australian Women’s Weekly
, January 26, 1972The funnyman is a poet, too…and now he has plans to write – and dance – a balletTHERE’S MORE TO MARTY THAN MEETS THE EYE--- says Diane BlackwellEverybody loves a clown, but even without the madcap humor and famous profile MartyFeldman would capture hearts.For when the clown’s mask is off the slightly built English comedian is a warm, gentle,and likeable human being, anxious to please – and disturbingly honest.In Australia to perform his first live concert, “Marty Amok,” a non-stop mad romp onstage having its world premiere in this country, Feldman has made no bones about hisfear that audiences may not think him funny. Comedy to this professional funnyman is nolaughing matter.And any similarity between the shy, contemplative man with a soft cockney accent and passion for poetry and Berlioz and the wild-eyed, tangle-haired lunatic before thecameras is strictly physical.But even The Face, that bizarre asset to Feldman’s career, loses impact under the pressureof serious talk.“What I do as a humorist,” he explains, “is to cartoon. Life is absurd or tragic. I laugh atit.” And the profile is a tool in his comedy workshop.Thinking back over some of the imaginative, insulting, and sometimes nice things writtenabout The Face, he recalls: “Often I’m compared to birds, and this is strange because Irecognize in myself a bird-like way of moving.” He is not joking.“Actually, I have a phobia about birds. I’m terrified of them. If a bird was let loose inhere I’d go crazy.”After 15 years of pouring his brilliant wit on to paper as a radio and televisionscriptwriter, and three and a half years performing his own material, Marty Feldman now basks in the glow of success.At 23 he joined the BBC as a scriptwriter. He was chief writer on the television program“Frost Over England,” which won the 1967 Montreux Gold Award; and his own BBCshow, “Marty,” won the Montreux Award in 1969.
 
Solid enough acknowledgement of his prolific talents. But to Marty Feldman “success” isan indefinable term, and as for trying to pinpoint a highlight of achievement in his career:“I don’t really even know what my achievements are supposed to be. They are not clear cut. I can see several goals to aim for – each performance is in its way a separate goal –  but there are no high spots, just higher and lower spots.”Then, with a twinkle (and with those eyes it’s some twinkle): “But really, one of thenicest things about success is that I’ve been able to get tickets very easily to see Chelsea play.”In show business Marty Feldman sees himself not so much an actor as a reactor, and prefers to do sketches in collaboration with other people, including, ideally, theaudiences. “I don’t have any visions of standing alone on a stage.”And as for ambition, he says he is not competitive in the sense of striving to be better than anyone else. “I just want to be better than me.”In his public role as a clown who sees the world as absurdly funny, Marty likens himself to the medieval court jester performing to his king, the television viewer.Just as the jester could ridicule to dangerous limits and be tolerated, so he can get awaywith things in a skit that would be impossible in real life. And just as the jester paid withhis life for exceeding the limit, so his death knell is the television switch.It was as a result of early dabblings with a paintbrush that Marty got his first break as a professional writer.“I was about 16, and used to write poems on the bottoms of my paintings. My teacher thought the paintings were lousy but that the poems were rather good.”“He showed them to Dylan Thomas, who helped me get them published. Most of the poems were verbose and imitative of Thomas’ style. I was very hung-up on the physicalsound of words at the time.”Today Marty’s poems take a much sharper form. “It’s like sculpting,” he saysthoughtfully. “I write like a sculptor models in clay. I used to work upward, but now Iwork backward, chipping away the stone until I’m satisfied with what’s left.”“A poem can start out three pages long, become four lines, then two words. I look at itand think, this isn’t a poem, so I rip it up and throw it away.”Those poems that survive the elimination process usually go to Marty’s wife, Lauretta,the woman he fell in love with long before fame and fortune came along; the companionand critic who leaves the limelight to her husband.
 
The Feldmans’ home at Hampstead, where from the famous heath one has a sweepingview of London, is a church-like structure “built by a lunatic Victorian industrialist,”according to Marty. They love it because it is Gothic-inspired, and because the location isthe nearest one can get to a village within London.Although Marty Feldman is a self-confessed romantic, he shamefacedly admits his firstencounter with Lauretta was anything but romantic. “I met her in a club going on 14years now. I was very drunk, and she was embarrassed because I was very drunk. I heardher voice – Lauretta has a very husky voice – and apparently I swung right around andsaid, ‘What an interesting voice.’”“She was bored by me, but we started talking, about ballet, of all things.”And her reaction to the face? “She said she found it fascinating” – then with thatinfectious chuckle, “but she always did have strange taste.”The Hamburg Opera House has invited Marty to write, choreograph, and dance a ballet.With the unforgettable vision of Marty in a riotous dance skit on television, I questionedhis dancing experience. “None,” he replied calmly.“I’ve never written a ballet and never danced. But I want to do it. Hopefully this will not be a formal ballet but dance based on free movement. I’d like to go back to the source of movement and learn how to do it.”Childhood was a frustrating period for young Marty Feldman, born into a working-classfamily in the East End of London. “My father and mother married when they were both16 and I came along when they were 21. They had five years to think about it, so theyobviously knew what they were doing when they produced me.”“I went to a variety of poor schools all over England and was expelled from some of them. I ran away from one harsh boarding school three times. The fourth time theyexpelled me. That was what I was trying to tell them in the beginning: that I didn’t wantto go to their school. But they kept bringing me back and beating me, bringing me back and beating me again.”It goes without saying that Marty left school permanently as soon as possible.There might have been less friction between school and pupil if Marty’s well-meaningefforts had not been trodden down. He recalls: “When we were asked to write essaysabout our school holidays they used to be appalled by my stories, saying they didn’t wantwhat I gave them.”“School holidays were always dull, so I used to make up wild inventions about spies andgangsters. They’d say, ‘But you didn’t do that on your holidays.’ I could never explainthat that wasn’t the important thing.”
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