Мемуарная публицистика: переводческие решения

I Must Say by Martin Short
HUMBLE CELEBRITY ME
Let’s jump, for a moment, to the present day. Not so long ago, I found myself onstage in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood, about two miles northeast of Breakdown Corner, giving a speech in honor of Steve Martin. Steve was receiving a lifetime-achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a remarkable evening, and Steve was deeply moved. Kind of like how I felt when I got my CableACE Award in ’87, but, you know, different.
The lifetime-achievement Oscar is not the kind you’re awarded in front of a gigantic international TV audience at the big ceremony in February, but rather the kind distributed at a comparatively modest L.A. banquet called the Governors Awards—as I described it onstage, “the highest honor an actor can receive . . . in mid-November.”
“Of all the people I have a fake show-business friendship with,” I said in my remarks, “Steve is the star I’m fake-closest to.” I also reminded Steve of the old adage: This year’s honorary Oscar is a good predictor of next year’s “In Memoriam” package.
A little later, turning momentarily serious, as the conventions of showbiz demand, I thanked Steve for his guidance, his wisdom, and the kindnesses he has shown me and my family. I adore Steve Martin. We’ve been great, close friends for almost thirty years, ever since we did the movie ?Three Amigos! together in 1986.
After the ceremony, a group of us adjourned to Steve and his wife Anne Stringfield’s home for a celebratory binge on grilled cheese sandwiches and Dom P?rignon.
The gents of our group were standing elbow-to-elbow in our tuxedos: Steve, me, Tom Hanks, Frank Oz, and, to lower the median age a tad, Judd Apatow and Bill Hader. We must have looked uncommonly smart, for the director Nancy Meyers, who was snapping photos of us with her iPhone, kept telling us, “You look just like that picture!”
The picture to which she was alluding is the famous “Kings of Hollywood” shot taken by the great photographer Slim Aarons on New Year’s Eve, 1957: Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart gathered together at the restaurant Romanoff’s, all of them in white tie, looking dashing as they laugh at some shared joke.
I had to agree with Nancy: looking around the room, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that it was a pretty glamorous Hollywood night. And another thought occurred: Wow, this is a long way from Breakdown Corner, and the days when my Nancy and I barely knew how to navigate this city.
One of the great benefits of that journey—from Breakdown Corner to comic-icon status (not my words, but those of my staff)—is that I have been fortunate enough to have become friends with some fascinating people, many of whom happen to be famous. Some of these friendships have endured for so long that they’ve become tenured, unbreakable.
This is especially true now that we’re all reaching the age where the phrase “lifetime achievement” is part of the conversation. For instance, Steve, Tom, and I, along with our film-producer friend Walter Parkes, who used to run the DreamWorks movie studio, get colonoscopies together every couple of years. Well, not together together—we get separate rooms at the clinic. But we actually gather for a colonoscopy sleepover at Steve’s house the night before the big day. We like to make a party of it. A Hootenanny of Purge, if you will.
As anyone who has gone for a colonoscopy knows, you are required, the evening before you undergo the procedure, to cleanse your digestive system—to make it spic and span for the gastroenterologist’s camera. And as much as we show business folk would kill to be able to bring hair and makeup people along for the journey, most hospitals have a real issue with that.
The goal of the evening before—Colonoscopy Eve, as we Christians call it—is to pass the time while also passing as much solid material from our systems as humanly possible. We even have the event catered, inasmuch as you can cater a gathering where the only permitted foodstuffs are water, broth, and Jell-O. At around five p.m., the four of us dutifully glug down our barium-sulfate milkshakes, made from a liquid suspension that highlights the GI tract for the doctor—and sits like molten lead in the stomach. Then we settle in for the evening and play poker.
There’s an odd kind of rhythm to this poker game; oftentimes there’s only one of us at the table. By midnight, the scene in the nearest of Steve’s bathrooms is straight out of a disabled Carnival cruise ship circa Day 15. The following morning we drive as a group to the clinic and get our insides checked out. A few hours later, we’re happily and relievedly toasting our colorectal good health over margaritas at the Ivy.