Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (15 page)

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

Lorne had one corner office. And I had the other corner office. I liked Lorne a lot, we got along very well. But I was never intimidated by him. And I was never part of the family. I didn’t do drugs, and I had a life outside the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The Desi Arnaz show in February was a great show. He wouldn’t stay at our normal hotel; he had to stay at the Waldorf. The great moment was when he was doing “Babalu” live on the air with Desi Jr. I was in the control room watching and we were trying to figure out when to cut away. He throws himself into it so much, I’m like seeing his lips turn blue. He’s going into it totally, like he’s thirty. And I’m thinking, “Oh my God, he’s going to have a coronary. What happens if he dies on live TV?” And so we finally cut away to commercial.

JANE CURTIN:

There were huge highs and huge lows. I think that because of the talent, and because of the people’s temperaments, you could have these incredible moments of sheer exhilaration and excitement, and then moments where you just feel like you’re a pill, you’re a tiny little piece of lint. You feel as though you don’t deserve air. So the highs and lows were huge, but there was a middle ground, because the show had to go on. At eleven-thirty, you had to put all of that stuff aside and hit the ground running and do what you were trained to do — and, hopefully, have a good time. More often than not, you did.

LILY TOMLIN:

Never, never, never, never would it occur to me that I could teach them something about comedy. Comedy is so personal and so individual, and no, I would never have the attitude that I was there to teach or something. Oh my God, no. Some of that has been written at different times — not about them specifically, but my part in comedy, let’s say — but it would be like me telling someone how to perform or something. It would never occur to me.

Laraine was always good. And of course Gilda was a very adorable person. I don’t know Chevy really well, but I’ve always liked Chevy. And Jane Curtin — I was never close to her and I don’t know that anyone was, but while the other girls were just kind of spinning around her, Jane was always just kind of centered, and ironically she’s the one that’s had the biggest career. She was always very anchored. I was always impressed with Jane.

The original, still-most-famous cast in the history of
Saturday Night Live
actually remained intact for only one season. Chevy Chase, the only performer who regularly identified himself by name on the show and who was the player most featured in magazine and newspaper stories — even as possible successor to Johnny Carson as host of
The Tonight Show
— left at the end of the first season, returning in later years only for cameos and guest-hostings. Because he had signed a contract with NBC as a writer and not a performer, and stipulated a one-year term instead of five, he was free to go. In August 1976, when the parting was announced, Chase radiated self-effacing graciousness, saying he had “a very strong love affair with the show” but that “my leaving won’t affect it. It has its own momentum. There’s more talent in Danny Aykroyd’s right hand than in my entire body.” Twenty-three years later, at the unveiling of a Lorne Michaels star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, Chase would tell a crowd assembled for the event that leaving the show when he did was a mistake — and that he still regretted it.

BUCK HENRY:

I thought Chevy shouldn’t have left. I thought it was really stupid to leave that early in the run, because he was so great on it. The show made him. He should have gone and done his movies later. Maybe Belushi wouldn’t have blossomed so much, though, if Chevy had stayed. Because John was so happy to see him go.

JUDITH BELUSHI:

John and Chevy were always antagonistic
and
friends. It was a love-hate kind of thing. They worked together well when they were trying to. A funny thing they used to do on the side — underwear ad posing. They would just strike a pose together, like Chevy’s arm on John’s shoulder, one knee up on a chair, like the underwear poses in the Sears catalog.

I’d say John had mixed feelings about Chevy leaving. The whole thing around
Saturday Night Live
was, if you were in the circle with Lorne, you could get a lot more of what you wanted. Chevy was part of that circle, and Paul Simon and whoever, I forget. And Chevy was getting a lot of airtime and John felt
he
should get more, and that Chevy was sometimes cast for things that John thought he could do better.

JOHN LANDIS:

The part of Otter in
Animal House
was originally written for Chevy Chase. Ned Tannen at Universal said to me, “Here’s this script,
Animal House.
If you can get me Chevy Chase and John Belushi and a movie star, I’ll make it.” So Ivan Reitman was desperate to get Chevy. Chevy was the first star out of
SNL
for a very simple reason, which is that if you look at
SNL
, he’s the only one who said, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” and he became a celebrity. His face was up front. He was also damn funny.

But I was adamantly opposed to casting him. I had nothing against Chevy, I just believed that he wouldn’t feel honored, and that he was too old. So I had this wonderful, famous lunch that Ivan Reitman will remember differently but where Ivan and Thom Mount desperately blow smoke up Chevy’s ass, trying to convince him to take
Animal House
even though he’s been offered
Foul Play
as well. Chevy was smoking a huge cigar; this was the first time I ever met him. A good-looking guy in good shape, and I was doing everything I could to sell it to him. And finally I had a masterstroke. I said, “Chevy, if you take
Foul Play
, you’re then like Cary Grant; you’re opposite Goldie Hawn, a major sex star, you’re like Cary Grant. But if you take
Animal House
, you’re a top banana in an ensemble, like
SNL
.” And under the table Ivan gave me I think the most vicious kick I’ve ever had. He was furious, but it worked: Chevy took the other movie.

CHEVY CHASE:

For me at the time, the question was, could I actually be in a movie with somebody who’s talented — Goldie — and actually be in something I’d never done before and actually try to act? You know, what would that be like? It wasn’t a question of could I do something that was marginally subversive for movies, when I’d already done five years of underground television on Channel 1 and had written for
Mad
magazine, the
National Lampoon
, et cetera.
Animal House
is an ensemble piece any way you look at it.

DAN AYKROYD:

It’s fair to say that John’s mood, on a read-through day or whatever, was infectious to the point where he could dominate — like if he was in a jovial mood, it became a jovial table reading, or if he was down, it didn’t. I think when you have great people that have charisma like that, that’s probably a truism. Yeah, for sure, it was him and Chevy, him and Chevy were the ones primarily that could make the room, bring the room up or bring the room down. O’Donoghue to a certain extent too. You know, the giant talents like that.

CHEVY CHASE:

Look, I would have stayed. There was this girl I wanted to marry who ended up throwing a candelabra at me. Lorne knew she was wrong for me, but I thought I was in love. I also felt after one year that we should all leave, that we should all take off at least one year and think this over, because otherwise it was going to become solipsistic — jokes about ourselves, showcases for characters as opposed to what it should be, which is a vehicle to take apart television. Satirize it and rip it to pieces, show it for what it is — and we’d done that. We had a year to do it, we did it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot more that you could do except start on something else. That was the way I felt then. But I’m still hurting, I still grieve for all those years that I could have had there.

And you know, if Lorne had put his arms around me and given me a hug and asked me to stay, then I probably would have. But he didn’t.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

Bullshit. Chevy was my client, and he said in my office, “The reason I’m leaving is I am a producer and a writer, and Lorne’s a producer and a writer, and that’s a conflict.” The real reason was he got a fucking car and more money. William Morris was blowing smoke in Chevy’s ears as well as his wife at the time, that he should leave the show. They weren’t getting big commissions from the show, I think eighty bucks a week or something. I thought he should stay on the show for at least two or three years, for no other reason than that the exposure he was getting was great. But William Morris went to NBC, and NBC was so unsure about
SNL
, they just wanted to make sure they kept Chevy, because he was a good-looking guy and he was like a television star. They gave him two specials. William Morris got a package commission for the specials, and NBC gave Chevy a car. I think it was a Porsche. So NBC attacked its own show.

Chevy was very gentlemanly. He came to me and paid all the money he owed me and he said, “Look, I want to do it on my own. I’m competitive with Lorne, I want to produce too.” He went and did the movies, you know, and for a while he was fine, but he destroyed himself.

DICK EBERSOL:

Lorne just felt totally betrayed when Chevy left, not because he was losing his biggest star, but because this was his biggest partner on the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I’m sure I was devastated by it, but I knew there would have been a struggle: was the show going to become the Chevy Chase show or was it going to stay an ensemble show? I think he’d become too big a star.

ANNE BEATTS:

I don’t know exactly when Michael and Chevy’s relationship went sour. I know that Chevy said — I’m sure you’ve heard this — that Michael told him once in a taxi, “One day you’ll be a B-movie star.” I know that Chevy has really taken that remark to heart. And so I think that perhaps the Michael-Chevy going sour thing was part of Michael calling it as he saw it, which he unstintingly did even when it was detrimental to his best interests.

CHEVY CHASE:

You have no idea what my life was like as a kid, you have no sense of that at all. You’re probably looking into books and saying, “Hey, he went to a private school,” as if that somehow is an explanation for my personality. You have no sense at all — nor would I share with you what my childhood was like.

ANNE BEATTS:

Chevy was the Waspy golden boy that neither Michael nor Lorne would ever be.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

It was emotional. We were a colony. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn’t go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort.

LORNE MICHAELS:

No one thought we’d have a summer holiday, because nobody at the network thought they could rerun these shows. I said, “No, we’re going to put on reruns.” And when we put on the Richard Pryor show, it rated higher than it had originally. And I won the case.

Some of us spent the summer together. We went to Joshua Tree in California. I’d been there many times before. It was a spiritual place for me, and so I was showing them this place that had a lot of meaning for me. We stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn, a motel with a pool in the center. John and Danny were in the room next to mine.

One night we had a barbecue. Chevy, who came with his girlfriend, cooked. I remember it was a very beautiful night, and we were all sort of grateful for each other and just beginning to soak up whatever that first season was. This was late June or early July, and we were just beginning to understand what being on a hit show was like, the full throttle of that.

We drank a lot and stayed up really late. Then at about five o’clock in the morning, the sun was way too bright and woke me up. There was some sort of noise outside, so I staggered to the door. When I opened it, I saw Danny standing in the archway just a few feet away, and he’s in the same shape I’m in, and we look out and there’s John, on the diving board, doing these cannonballs. He goes straight up, hits the board, comes down, and then flips over into the pool. This was just for our benefit, Danny’s and mine, because there was nobody else awake or watching it. And we were like completely wrecked, the two of us, and just barely conscious, and Danny looked at me and he said, “Albanian oak.”

And that’s what we believed. We believed this guy was absolutely indestructible. He was like an animal. You couldn’t have been through the night we’d just been through and be up at five o’clock doing cannonballs — neither of us could live that hard — but there was John.

The beauty of all that for me is that we were comrades-in-arms in the way that, growing up after World War II, you’d hear people talk about army buddies, or say the only people they could talk to were people who had been through it with them. A year earlier, we hadn’t been in any way linked or close, and now we were suddenly on a holiday together. All this stuff was swirling around in the press and we were together at the center of it. We’d gone all the way to the finals and we’d won the Emmys and here we were on the road. We all liked each other. We had more in common with one another than with any other group of people.

To me, our first season was “that championship season.” That said, I’m not sure it was the best season in terms of quality, but the freedom was intoxicating. And so was the success.

2

Heyday: 1976–1980

By the beginning of its second season
, Saturday Night Live
was the talk of television, a national sensation both hot and cool, and the first hit any network ever had at eleven-thirty on Saturday night. Chevy Chase had become a star and flown the coop, though he would continue to make the occasional cameo appearance. Some cast members and writers saw his leap into greener pastures as tantamount to treason, but it kept
SNL
from turning into “The Chevy Chase Show” and cleared the way for John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and others to become the kind of household name that Chevy had managed virtually overnight.

The Muppets were gone. Short films by Gary Weis and Tom Schiller would replace those of Albert Brooks. NBC censors were virtually forced by the program’s surging popularity to become less strict — this was well before people could say “pissed off” or “that sucks” on television — and as other programs took advantage of the liberation, a new candor and a new realism came to American TV — for better and, sometimes, for worse. The way people talked on television was becoming closer to the way people talked in everyday life; a longtime boundary was being erased. Today one hears language in prime-time sitcoms and even commercials that was unthinkable on early editions of
Saturday Night Live
. (In time, the show would break the “penis” and “vagina” barriers, among many others.
)

They couldn’t fully know it at the time, but the cast, writers, and producers of
Saturday Night Live
were living through the program’s golden age, from 1975 to 1979, the era of the original cast (with Bill Murray replacing the departed Chevy Chase), the founding writers, and occasional visits from such off-the-wall novelties as quixotic comic Andy Kaufman and Mr. Bill, a little clay man who each week would be mauled and mangled. This was a time of exuberance, adventurousness, and unbridled excess. It would become legendary and infamous and set standards by which every subsequent manifestation of the show, including all future casts, would be judged.

LARAINE NEWMAN,
Cast Member:

There was one point in the second season where we were onstage rehearsing a Nerd sketch or something, and we were all talking about what we were naming our corporations. And I think it was Gilda who said, “Listen to us, for God’s sake. We’re talking about our corporations! What’s happened? We’ve joined the establishment.” And we were really kind of being hurled into all the trappings of a successful adult life at a young age.

TOM HANKS,
Host:

It was the cultural phenomenon of the age. It was truly as big as the Beatles. It was this huge riotous thing and it was on every week and everybody gathered together on Saturday nights to watch it.

We would get together in college and then, later on when I was working in the theater, we would all get together after shows at a house and watch. Everybody from the theater that I was working at in Cleveland was in the living room of this rented house watching a ten-inch black-and-white television with a coat hanger for an antenna. And that’s just what you did every week — got together and had something to eat and sat around waiting for
Saturday Night Live
to come on.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY,
Cast Member:

The show felt like it was the center of the universe. There was such a clamor about it. People at parties would stop and turn on the show and watch it. So it felt like the big high point of TV. Half your job seemed like arranging for tickets for people you knew.

JAMES SIGNORELLI,
Director of Commercial Parodies:

By the autumn of the second year, I remember walking around with Gilda and not being able to go fifty feet down the street without people stopping us warmly and saying, “Hi,” “I love you,” and “I love your stuff,” and so on. At first Gilda was pleased and delighted, and then later — much later — felt kind of put-upon.

TOM SCHILLER,
Writer:

There were all kinds of people like Mike Nichols who thought the show was hip, and Norman Mailer, and you’d see them at restaurants and they’d nod to you and stuff, and you thought you were so great. And then, some nights you would come out of the show and you would see these really strange geeky people with eight-by-tens and marking pens to have you sign your autograph, and they were like troglodytes, these people. They were strange people who were your fans. So it was hard to reconcile who really liked you.

ROBIN SHLIEN,
Production Assistant:

You would look around and Jerome Robbins would be in the back of the control room one night, or Michael Bennett. It was this place where the toasts of the town would show up.

ALAN ZWEIBEL,
Writer:

To this day, I look back on those first five years with incredible fondness. I tend to romanticize the experience, because it was way more good than bad. But when it was bad, it was very painful. It was very,
very
painful.

JANE CURTIN,
Cast Member:

I loved doing the ninety minutes of the show, just loved it, but I couldn’t do the other stuff. I couldn’t be in the writers’ meetings; it was too frustrating. I just didn’t function well in that situation. I didn’t know how to push my ideas. So I would come in for the read-through on Wednesday and then go right home. On Thursday, when I came to work, I came to work on time. In the second season I had “Update,” so I had something to do on the show and didn’t have to fight to be on the air.

“Update” was my anchor. Everything else was gravy. The Nerds — I loved those sketches. I loved working with Buck and Billy and Gilda, and we always laughed, because they were just so dumb. And sometimes things like the Widettes, because they would just make you hysterical. I loved the epics and the costume dramas, and some of the talk shows that we did were just yummy. There were a lot of other things, but the fact that I had “Update” and didn’t have to plead for material kept me sane. I had the luxury of being able to leave and come in when I needed to. I didn’t hang around. And so I approached it from a totally different point of view than I think anybody else.

ROSIE SHUSTER,
Writer:

Those first five years, only Jane amongst the cast really was able to have a total personal life. I think a few of the guys maybe could have someone back home. Of the girls, you lived and slept and breathed the show. You stayed there. I remember Danny and I, after sleeping over at the office, would walk each other like dogs around 30 Rock just to get a little fresh air. In those first years it was just pure gonzo, total commitment. There was this phenomenon that was exploding and we all threw ourselves into it 200 percent.

The whole thing sort of marked the beginning of comics being thought of the way rock stars had been. The rock stars had that real pulsing energy and immediacy, and this particular show, because of its live, New York danger vibe, gave you that same kind of raw immediacy. It was just raggedy-ass a lot of times.

PAUL SIMON,
Host:

I don’t think they necessarily changed for the worse with that metamorphosis into success. They became more confident. And they were still young so that they hadn’t burned out and weren’t cynical yet. They were, you know, excited. Maybe they had more offers and distraction; that might have been a negative, I don’t know. But they weren’t jaded. They were just in the first, early years of great success. And when you look back on a career, the first year isn’t the beginning; the first
couple
of years are the beginning. Three, four, five years of success are — if a career spans twenty-five or thirty years — the early days.

BILL MURRAY,
Cast Member:

I remember my very first show. I had a sketch that was a little tricky to do, a telephone sketch. They were making me up for the first time and they were trying to make me look old and — well, you don’t feel really comfortable the first time they make you look old. I was twenty-five or twenty-six, and they’re trying to make you look like you’re seventy-five, and it plays a little on your confidence. There was like a committee of people going, “Maybe if you put some gray in his temples,” and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, we’re going to be in trouble out here.” But that’s one that I sort of pulled together on the air. I read it well the first time in the read-through, but you’re not thinking about what it looks like, and even in rehearsals it’s like you’re still Bill, you know. My confidence sort of dropped, because I thought, “This isn’t really helping me.”

So I had to do it two times that day, the run-through and the dress rehearsal in that makeup, then for the air there was still that “put some gray in his temples” business, and at a certain point about forty seconds before I had to do it, I just said, “That’s enough. Stop.” And I just walked away and it was just on me to make it work. So I made that one work. That was pretty successful.

I did three shows and they were on a look-see basis. I think they hired me for three shows. And I remember just walking out onto the street after the first show and Lorne said, “I guess you’re going to be moving to New York.” And it felt great, you know. It felt really good. And so I thought, “This is great, I did it.” But then I didn’t get any sketches for weeks after that. That’s when I became the second cop. Most of the rest of the year I played the “second cop” in sketches.

That speech I did to the audience — the one where I said, “I don’t think I’m making it on the show” — that was during my “second cop” period. I’d really been there a pretty long time, and they were sort of stuck with me. I was there, they’d sort of hired me, I was getting paid, but I was playing that second cop every week. You sort of have to break through, be noticed by the audience. They have to understand you a little bit, see a little bit of who you are, but as the second cop you don’t really get those opportunities.

I’d actually had the idea to do something exactly like what it was, and that day when I went to work, Lorne said, “You know, I think you should do a direct appeal.” He had the same idea too. So I did this thing, I wrote the thing, and it was kind of funny, and I wasn’t too full of myself or anything. There was a couple tablespoons of humility in it, I got laughs in it, and I think the combination of the two broke some sort of ice, not just for me but for people watching, and they thought, “Well, okay, he’s going to be funny. He made us laugh with that sort of ‘I’m dying here’ thing” — which I’ve seen people do and die at. You know, I’ve seen people make that move before and fail, so the fact that I made that move and it was funny sort of took the pressure off. I felt pretty good about that. And it is sort of a funny water-shed. It’s a moment.

ROBERT KLEIN,
Host:

I had hosted during the first season, but the next time I was on the show wasn’t until the third season, in ’77. And Lorne called me into the office that time and said, “You know, a lot has changed since you hosted. The kids have become celebrities — stars, you know — and the host is just one of the gang now.” I said I understood that fully. But the real difference was Belushi. He was a changed person. There was a lot of difficulty rehearsing with him.

JANE CURTIN:

When John started making too much money, and started doing too many drugs, the sweet John was gone, and the ambitious John took over, and that’s what was difficult to deal with. His ambition was just overwhelming, as was his need to self-medicate.

STEVE MARTIN,
Host:

Once when it was very late after the show and everybody was in their limos and we were on like Seventy-second Street or something, Belushi got out of the car in the middle of the night and stood in the street screaming and directing traffic and being funny. And I thought, “Oh.” There was something about it that was forced. I remember feeling like John felt he had to do this stuff. It was what he wanted to be. He also did things that were unforced, but at that moment he was trying to fulfill an image.

CARRIE FISHER,
Host:

I was hanging around with Belushi, though Lord knows how I got to him. Everybody kind of knew each other. These were people who were abusers, people who liked to drink and use and stay up all night. Once one got into that little society, you were well in.

Danny used to call John “The Black Hole in Space,” because if anything got near him, it disappeared into it. And he was also “America’s Guest,” because he literally could go to anybody’s apartment or house — and did — and say, “Hi, can I use your kitchen or your bathroom or your bedroom?” Or your anything. John was always kind of a little bit of an emergency happening — but a fun emergency. At that time, I don’t think anyone had said to me yet, “If John keeps this up, he will die.” That was like two years away. It wasn’t that dark.

HERB SARGENT,
Writer:

I happened to be the one who broke the news to Belushi that Elvis had died. He had wandered into my office, there were just the two of us, and I told him I’d just heard it on the news. And he just froze for ten minutes. He didn’t move. He couldn’t talk. Nothing.

JOHN LANDIS,
Film Director: