Quote of the day: If you've ever wondered how Steve Martin's, er, distinctive mind came to be, um, the way it is, you must read "In the Bird Cage"

Steve Martin has one of the more free-wheeling, unboxed imaginations on the planet. True, what comes out of it often seems scatter-shot, but perhaps that's the point, or part of it--except that "scatter-shot" suggests something less carefully planned than I suspect is usually the case.

If you've ever wondered how a mind like this develops its particular cast, there's a wealth of information in an excerpt from Martin's forthcoming memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, in this week's New Yorker. Called "In the Bird Cage," the excerpt recalls the formative period of his late teens and early 20s, in the '60s, which includes three years working in a ramshackle theater at Knotts Berry Farm called the Bird Cage.

(The piece itself doesn't seem to be available on the magazine's website, but there is a five-minute audio clip of Martin reading from the book.)

Not surprisingly, the piece is impossible to pigeonhole, being by turns witty, nostalgic, wacky, introspective, charming, and cosmic--sometimes even all at once. With a rather surprising ending, it certainly gives me, at least, the feeling of something important having been shared.

I don't say that the following anecdote is at all representative, but I do say that the punch line it builds to (yes, it's an anecdote with a punch line, though it's a more or less thrown-away one) is almost impossible to imagine coming out of anyone else's mouth. I recognize that there are people who won't even crack a smile. It blew me away.

We're near the end of the period of Martin's life under discussion, and he has struck up an acquaintance with Melissa ("Mitzi") Trumbo, daughter of the formerly blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo [left]. Martin describes with grace and more than a little wonder the world he came to see in the Trumbo house, Mitzi's father having been one of the luckier of the Holllywood Ten in that, after a number of fairly desperate years, he was able to resume his career. ("Trumbo had a patriarchal delivery whether he was on a rant or discussing art or slinging wit, but nothing he said was elitist--though I do remember him saying, as he spread his arms to indicate the china and silver serving ladies, 'Admittedly, we do live well.'")

During Martin's time with Mitzi, her father wrote the screenplay for The Fixer, which would star Alan Bates. ("One afternoon, on the way to the Trumbo house, Mitzi warned me, 'Pop's in a bad mood today. He's got a screenplay due in four days and he hasn't started it yet.'") At that point Mitzi "was whisked off to Budapest" by her father to accompany him during the making of the film.

After I'd received several charming letters from her and then noticed a lag in the regularity of their arrival, Mitzi sent me a gentle and direct Dear John letter. She had been swept away by the director John Frankenheimer [right], who, twenty years later, tried and failed to seduce my then wife, Victoria Tennant, whom he was directing in a movie. Mitzi was simply too alluring to be left alone in a foreign country, and I was too hormonal to be left alone in Hollywood. Incidentally, Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.