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Martin Short took a trip down memory lane recalling his past romance with Gilda Radner.
“Every girl wanted to be her best friend and every guy wanted to go out with her. I remember she came up to the first rehearsal and said, ‘Hi, Marty. I’m so happy to be here.’ She had her finger on her forehead. I said, ‘OK, good.’ She pulled [away] and she had a big pimple here,” Short, 74, said on the Tuesday, March 18, episode of Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast. “She was just so original. The size of her purse, the fullness of her hair, and you know, I fell for her madly.”
Short was 22 when he dated Radner, who was four years older than him. He revealed that the couple “would break up” and “get back [together] every couple years.”
“In fact, I’ll tell you exactly what is very interesting,” Short said. “Gilda had, you know, emotional ups and downs. And I had just gone through a period where my parents had died, and my mother had died, and all she wanted to do was live. And she was the happiest person in the world.”
He continued, “So to me, one of the issues that Gilda and I had, what we’d have fights about, was I think, ‘What do you have to be not happy about? You’re talented, you have family money, everyone loves you, everyone wants to be your friend, everyone wants to date you, no one is funnier, you get the biggest laughs of anyone on stage.’ But I was only 22. I didn’t understand.”
When Poehler, 53, noted that she would’ve “really love[d]” Radner, Short replied, “You would’ve been madly in love with her.” (Radner died in 1989 of ovarian cancer at the age of 42.)
Short revealed in his 2014 memoir, I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend, that the pair met when he was cast by Stephen Schwartz for his 1972 production of Godspell. While he and Radner were on a break, Short met Nancy Dolman.
Short went on to tie the knot with Dolman, who died in 2010 of ovarian cancer after 30 years of marriage. (Short and Dolman welcomed three children via adoption: Katherine Elizabeth, 41, Oliver Patrick, 38, and Henry Hayter, 35.)
“I believe that when people die, they zoom into the people that love them,” Short told AARP The Magazine in 2019. “This idea that it just ends, and don’t speak of them — that’s wrong. That’s based on denial that we’re all going to die. So to me, she’s still here.”
Short has since sparked romance rumors with Only Murders in the Building costar Meryl Streep. Amid speculation, Short denied that he and Streep, 75, were more than friends.
“We’re not a couple,” Short said during an appearance on the “Club Random with Bill Maher” podcast in January 2024. “We are just very close friends.”
The twosome have only continued to fuel the speculation, however, stepping out together twice this month alone.
