Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (14 page)

By and large, people who are performers are looking for some sort of immediate gratification to begin with, some validation of what their identity is, who they are, some acceptability. They’re not novelists who are waiting after ten years to see how they did. They want it right away. They’re children, basically. And in all children there’s this reservoir of self-doubt and guilt and sense of low self-esteem, I think. And so one lives with this kind of dualism, this disparity between the marvelous magic of becoming accepted by so many so fast and, at the same time, a lingering sense that one doesn’t deserve it and sooner or later will be found out.

Lorne used to say that coke was God’s way of telling you that you have too much money. He used to say, “Don’t stay on one thing. If you’re going to take anything, rotate them.” This was a long time ago.

DICK EBERSOL:

There were drugs, but I was not nor have I ever been a drug user. I’d been around them in college. I just made different choices. I fell in love with business.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The widow Belushi was quoted in a book about a time when she found coke on John in the first season of the show and she said, “Where did you get it?” and he told her that Chevy and I gave it to him. But he had been doing coke for years.

CHEVY CHASE:

Everybody was supplying him, supposedly. No, I was supplying Lorne, who was supplying John, it was a middleman kind of thing.

CRAIG KELLEM:

John Belushi and I have the same birthday, January 24th. In 1976 they had a party for John but kind of included me. And the cake that they gave him was a facsimile of a quaalude. My cake was a facsimile of a Valium.

HOWARD SHORE:

I went on the road for four years with a rock group, and this was ’69 through ’72, the years before the show, and we opened for acts like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Those four years of touring for me — you talk about partying. Those were the great amazing rock-and-roll years. So by the time I came off the road in ’72, I did a few years of performing on my own, and writing film documentaries. So by ’75, when I went to NBC to start to do the show, I’d already had years of rock and roll. And partying. And quite hard partying at that.

So now the midseventies were actually the comedy generation, a new generation; these were like the rock stars of that period — Belushi and Aykroyd and Chevy. It was a new generational thing. Those groups were now just experiencing the kind of era that I had been through already, officially on the road for all those years, so whatever they were up to never seemed as monumental as the craziness I’d already seen on the road.

TOM SCHILLER:

Belushi was the first person to show me how to roll a joint. It was very exciting. You would come to the seventeenth floor, and as you walked down the hall, the stench of marijuana would greet you like about a hundred feet away from the offices. They kind of turned a blind eye to all that. It was like suddenly it was okay to do that. These “kids” were doing a show and it was all right. I remember Lorne at one of the earliest meetings, when we were sitting in his office, the first thing he did was light up a joint and pass it around. It was like saying, “It’s okay to smoke up here.”

Maybe Jane Curtin didn’t smoke and maybe Marilyn Miller didn’t, but that was about it. That was our drug of choice. Then it turned to coke. I didn’t like coke. I tried it for one week and I just got diarrhea.

DICK EBERSOL:

My office was on the fourth floor. The writers basically never got there before one o’clock in the afternoon — ever. We had so little space. Herb Sargent was back in a corner. In the hallway to Herb’s office were like Franken and Davis and Alan Zweibel, the three apprentice writers. Al and Tom had bought their first-ever cocaine, and they had it all out on the desk. First time they were ever able to buy any. As apprentice writers, their pay was, I think, $325 a week. So they have the cocaine on the desk, they’re like literally staring at it. I’m off in the distance. I’m in a tough place because I’m supposedly the executive, but I decided it wasn’t my job to play the policeman.

Suddenly this figure comes roaring through the room. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a straw in his hand. He gets to the table, and he has half of that stuff up his nose by the time they knew who it was: Belushi. They didn’t know whether to be thrilled that Belushi had just done this to their coke or be absolutely decimated, because that represented about half the money they had in the world at that time.

The drugs didn’t bother me, yet I knew they could be the end of the world for the show. And when I found out there was a partially available space on the seventeenth floor I said to Lorne that’s where we’re going. It’s the best place because of the elevators. One elevator bank says fourteen and up, the other elevator bank one through sixteen in the old NBC. That’s where everybody was, every executive was on that side, from the head of the network to the chief lawyers, between the first and the sixteenth floor. You could go up either elevator bank to the sixteenth floor, but if you got on the other elevator bank you only had three floors in common. Fourteen and fifteen were sports and press, sixteen was personnel and I figured, “Fuck them.” But if they were on the other elevator, they’d be on the same elevator with Schlosser. And so we were somewhat insulated, but initially in an area that was too small.

EUGENE LEE:

That was a mistake, choosing the seventeenth floor, because we never thought that we’d have to wait for elevators. The elevator door used to be full of big dents where people had kicked it. They couldn’t bear waiting.

EDIE BASKIN:

Drugs were definitely part of the times, but I just think if you wanted to do it, you did it, and if you didn’t want to do it, you didn’t do it. It didn’t have anything to do with pressure. I didn’t think anybody was cool because they did drugs, and I didn’t think anybody was cool because they didn’t. People just made their own choices.

NEIL LEVY:

Franken and Davis I think shared an apartment, and they threw a party so we could get together to watch Howard Cosell’s
Saturday Night Live
. It came on before us, which is why we weren’t allowed to call our show
Saturday Night Live
at first. We wanted to see this other
Saturday Night.
All the writers showed up, Michael O’Donoghue, Dan Aykroyd. They were passing around these joints. I had never smoked before, or not really gotten stoned, and I didn’t want to seem like “the kid,” so I started smoking. This pot was from Africa or something. You didn’t even have to smoke it; you just looked at the joint and you were unconscious. It kept coming around and around to me, and then I just got so incredibly paranoid. Never in my life had I been that bad before. I locked myself in their only bathroom, and I was terrified, and I kept praying to God that it would stop. Every once in a while someone would come to use the bathroom and I’d flush the toilet and go, “I’ll be out in a minute!” And I just got worse and worse, because people had to know I was in the bathroom and something was going wrong.

Finally Dan Aykroyd knocked on the door and he said, “Neil, this is Dan. You probably smoked some of that weed, you’re probably paranoid, and you probably think you’re the only one. Let me tell you, my friend, you’re not the only one. We’re all paranoid, we’re all stoned.” And he talked me out of the bathroom into the bedroom. And he started making me laugh. One of the things he did was he pulled his pants a little of the way down and pretended he was fixing the radiator as a radiator repairman. And later I remember he used that as a refrigerator repairman in a Nerds sketch. I think I saw it first.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:

Alan and I were so young when we did that show, and we had so much extra fuel that after being up all night writing, we still had to think of other stuff to do. So one night we went into Franken and Davis’s office and took out all the furniture — all the desks, ripped the phones out of the wall, took the chairs, took the file cases, took everything in the middle of the night and shoved it into Herb Sargent’s office where it couldn’t be seen. And then all we did was take a piece of paper and leave it on the floor that said, “See me. Lorne.” This is like the first season, when they were apprentice writers! Alan and I thought this was hilarious. Needless to say, Franken wasn’t too happy. But we did stuff like this all the time.

GARRETT MORRIS:

People suppose that if you are in a cast, that means you automatically go everywhere together twenty-four hours a day and you can tell what every other member is doing and that in fact you think that’s good. I have always been an asshole with any cast I’ve been with. I was gone as soon as I could be. The fact that I didn’t hang out with the gang at
Saturday Night Live
is no reflection upon anybody but me. At that time, I was in my Carlos Castaneda thing, and so I was doing a whole lot of mysticism and stuff. I was a loner. And that actually cost me. Because with
Saturday Night Live
, I learned that the social life is just as important as your own talent. Particularly with writers, they have to hear you talk and get to know you.

I’m not saying anybody was racist, but there are stereotypical things people draw from action that is devoid of me sitting down, talking, and getting into people’s minds about what they think, et cetera, et cetera. For example, one time I said something about a particular duo of intellectual Jews at
Saturday Night Live
which was then spread all over the whole Jewish world and for like a year I had the reputation of being anti-Jewish because I told these particular Jews that they were for shit. The point is, no, I didn’t hang out, but later I realized it was something I should have done.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

We loved television, quite frankly, and we had our own sensibility and we were given the opportunity to do it. But I think it was because of the love for television that anyone who ordinarily didn’t do television did this show. So Belushi could say, “I hate television.” I think what that really meant was, “I hate what they’ve done to television,” or “I hate what television is right now.” I don’t think that was anything against Newton Minow or the medium itself.

The one rule that we had, if there was a rule, was if we make each other laugh we’ll put it on television and hopefully other people will find it funny and tell their friends. So there was a purity about the intent.

There was a nobility to me and Gilda taking a subway ride, saying something to make us laugh, and then we would go back to the office afterwards and write it up and it’s on television a day later. There was an immediacy to it; it was just like, “This is the way the world works.”

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:

The word of mouth was starting to get around. It was either in our November or December board of directors meeting at NBC. Boards of directors, then as now, had old guys with ties and gray hair. And we did get flak about the show — bad taste and this and that. But one of the directors pulled me over and asked me if he could get tickets for one of his kids who was coming home from college.

CRAIG KELLEM:

We were beginning to get some action out there in that first year, but people were not making a lot of money. Then some guy came along — I cannot remember his name — who was doing commercials for the United States military, and the
Saturday Night Live
gang were hired to appear in these commercials. And Lorne, being a kind of a born snob, wanted no part of dealing with these people, but it was a good way for everybody to earn money. So I became the guy who was the link to the commercial guy and did all the coordinating and producing, as it were. And we actually made a series of commercials for the military. I never saw them. I’ve never even heard about them since. But it’s a fact. This guy spent thousands of dollars on this thing. Belushi did them because he wanted that money, and fast. They all made money, including Lorne, but Lorne kept a very pronounced arm’s length from the whole venture.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

I knew Belushi was going to be a hit when Paul McCartney called and offered me $6,000 for Belushi to perform his Joe Cocker impression at his birthday party. John was making $800 or $1,000 a show. Six thousand dollars to sing like Joe Cocker? Oh my God, oh my God, he was so happy — not the money, just singing for McCartney. Oh my God.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I remember exactly how much money I made in 1975. I made $115,000, and it was more money than I’d ever imagined. I’d been offered the season before four Flip Wilson shows, four specials, for a little over a hundred thousand dollars and I said I would do one. The experience wasn’t a special one for me. It wasn’t a show I was terribly proud of, but it did a 46 share, and what I remember learning from that was if you did a show you really cared about, it didn’t matter if anybody watched it. But if you did a show that wasn’t any good, it was much better if everyone saw it. If it was highly rated, you knew you’d be able to work again.

JEAN DOUMANIAN,
Associate Producer:

I didn’t start working for
Saturday Night Live
until the eleventh show in 1975, because I had been working on the first show called
Saturday Night Live
, with Howard Cosell on ABC. We were canceled after the seventeenth show, and Lorne called and asked if he could use the title of the show.

CRAIG KELLEM:

That was a signature issue as far as Lorne was concerned: he wanted to call his show
Saturday Night Live
. It totally pissed him off that the title was taken by Howard Cosell. And when the other show went off the air and he got the title back, I kind of chuckled inside, thinking how Lorne had decided that he wanted that title and he was going to get that title. And you know what? He ended up with that title. That’s Lorne Michaels to a T.