A lot of dreams have come true for Marc Shaiman, Broadway songwriter, soundtrack savant, Jewish Eeyore and human Spotify. (Go ahead, ask him: He knows every song.) And yet each fruition seems to have prompted an equal and opposite karmic blowback. In 2012, after bragging to his mother that he’d “rehearsed with Billy Crystal all day and recorded with Bette Midler all night,” she pricked his ego balloon by saying, “So, maybe through them you’ll meet someone important?”
Shaiman, 66, relates that story, along with hundreds of other hair-raising, name-dropping tales of success and comeuppance, in “Never Mind the Happy,” a memoir of his 50-year musical career to be published this week by Post Hill Press. (The title was his mother’s response to being wished a “happy and healthy new year.”) “If showbiz puts you on a pedestal on Tuesday,” he writes, it’s only to have a better shot at your anatomy on Thursday.
The pedestal is impressive, though, especially when you consider that he climbed it on the strength of innate talent. No one in his family had musical interest, let alone musical ability, yet Shaiman wasn’t even out of his teens when he started working with Midler. In his 20s, he wrote scrappy, zany East Village shows with Scott Wittman, his lyricist partner and, for 25 years, romantic partner too.
“It was an honor just to be animated,” he allows in the book.
That joke has a sting in its tail: Nominated seven times for Academy Awards, he has never won. (He’s an EG-T.) He still sulks about it, as well as the five Broadway shows that followed “Hairspray,” of which only one (“Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me,” in 2006) turned a profit. Also still rankling him are an endless series of manipulations by producers, betrayals by studios and his own sometimes bratty reactions to brush-offs by celebrities. Let’s just say that when he accompanied Nora Ephron at one of Short’s Christmas parties, the key he selected was not ideally suited to her voice.
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