Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (16 page)

I’ve seen this attributed to John Lennon, but I know Michael O’Donoghue said it, because I was there when we heard Elvis died. My secretary came in and she said, “Elvis is dead,” and Michael O’Donoghue said, “Good career move.”

JUDITH BELUSHI,
Writer:

John apologized a lot. He knew when he was wrong. And I think that he always came back and made sure to do that. He had a childlike way of seeing things, which is what I think artists and comedians need. He’d see things fresh. He’d see the thing that everyone is looking at a little differently.

DAN AYKROYD,
Cast Member:

John would watch tape on whoever he was impersonating. He was meticulous in the preparation in terms of wardrobe, hair, makeup. He was always concerned with doing an accurate impression. He was very well read in English and history and theater. He counted among his friends Lauren Bacall and Judge Jim Garrison, and he was a student of American politics. John just astounded me with his references to English literature, American literature, history, politics — he was so well versed in things that you would never expect. He was a football star when he was a kid. An all-American guy — Albanian blood, and his father had an accent, his mother had an accent — but to me he was totally all-American.

He was extremely bright — really, really smart — a great administrator and executive. When we were doing our Blues Brothers thing, he was clearly in charge. He was the front man, he was the boss, he was the guy that was calling the shots, everything was brought to him for decisions, and ultimately his decisions were correct ones. He was very together as a businessman, understood the creative world and the business world and the marriage between the two. He was just one of the smartest people I have ever met.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER,
Writer:

If you look at the Samurai, if you look at the Beethoven piece he did, there’s no plethora of words. A lot of times he’s doing a lot of acting, he’s just acting all over the place, but he’s not using words to do it. I wrote a piece where he crossed over into using words — and he was brilliant! The piece is really a great piece — about this young couple who are having trouble with their sex life and the guy can’t get it up because he secretly believes she’s thinking about somebody else. And John was so bound and determined to get every fucking word. That’s what was so great about it, he was really acting and he was really using words. That was proof that John Belushi was meant to live to be a great actor.

I cried at the end of it, because it was so thrilling.

AL FRANKEN,
Writer:

On one of the shows where Belushi played Fred Silverman, he was like totally out of it, almost unable to perform. I remember it very, very well because I was one of the writers of the sketch. Between dress and air, I went with another writer, Jim Downey, to John’s dressing room. I had the script in my hand and I knocked on the door, and when I went in, I saw that John was kind of out of it, sitting in a chair. And I said, “John, I want to read the script to you so that when you say the lines on the air, it sounds familiar.” And then he threatened to hit me. At which point Downey started to back out the door.

But I knew John would never hit me; he just wouldn’t do it. So he held his fist up, and I just read him the sketch. And then I left. And it was marginally better on-air.

JUDITH BELUSHI:

I don’t remember John ever hitting anybody. I tried to punch
him
once, though. It was very aggravating. Because he was like a fellow that you really cared about and you could see him hurting himself. You’d see him sinking. And it made you want to say, “Stop it now! Or I’ll stop you!”

LORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

One of the things you realize after a while is you can be having a talk about whatever you’re thinking is important or matters with a comedian, and more likely than not he’s just getting an impression of you down. You think it’s about the content of what you’re saying, but they’re just sort of seeing your lips move and going, “Oh, he holds his head like that.” It’s like people caricaturing you but you don’t see the drawing. So John Belushi used to have heart-to-heart talks with people, particularly when they were talking about drugs, and they’d say, “I had a really, really good talk with John.” And — no. John was using his time in another way. He’d already heard the content of that message.

AL FRANKEN:

Yes, there were some people on the show doing coke. I don’t like to get into this. John died of it. He had a problem, he got addicted. We didn’t know about that, we didn’t know at the time. When I say “we,” I mean Americans didn’t know what cocaine did, and about addiction, and that kind of thing.

DAN AYKROYD:

The powders and the pills were never attractive to me. It was just John. One of the nights when he played Silverman — that was pure blow. Pure blow, yeah. It made me angry. God knows I poured a lot of it down the toilet. But there were times when he was clean, and then of course there were times when he was at his peak — you know, the Joe Cocker stuff. And he really took the work seriously. It’s just that he had an addiction.

He would also get screwed-up on pain killers. We were doing a lecture in Rhode Island once and he jumped off the stage and shattered his shin. It was a Catherine the Great sketch, and he had a long, long wig. He was really fucked-up that day.

RICHARD DREYFUSS,
Host:

I remember that during the final dress rehearsal, John Belushi couldn’t stand up. He’d been like falling around and mumbling and forgetting everything. I thought, “Whoa boy, this won’t be great. He’ll never make it through this show.” Then the show came around and he was perfect, he was incredible, and I remember being astounded by that, because at the time I was very admiring of anyone who could take drugs better than I could.

BILL MURRAY:

John was great. John was very good to all of us. He was tough on the hosts, though. The better an actor the host was, the sicker Belushi would be. He would be at death’s door. He would be hours late and at death’s door, and he would come in in a robe, unable to speak. He’d have doctors in his dressing room. It would be just incredible. And the host would be thinking, “Belushi isn’t even going to show up, he’s too sick even to work” — and then John would come out on the show and just blast them away. He would sucker-punch guys that just didn’t see it coming. And the more actorish they were, the worse they got it.

If it had been someone who’d won an Academy Award or something, they didn’t have a chance and you knew it. Somebody would write a great sketch for them, and Belushi would be in it, and he’d rehearse it at sort of like 40 percent, too sick to really work, coughing into Kleenexes and pockets full of Kleenex. They’d be out there on the set waiting to rehearse and he’d come in assisted, and in a robe and looking like hell, barely speaking and coughing the whole time, and just completely distracted. Just like barely alive. And he’d be that way pretty much through dress. The doctors would be there. You’d be waiting for him during the run-through and the dress rehearsal. You’d smell vaporizers from his room. He had the smell of Vicks VapoRub and salves and creams and all sorts of medicines — and he would come out and just kill. Just
kill
.

I think he did it to Richard Dreyfuss. He did a Dreyfuss impression the week before Dreyfuss hosted. He did Dreyfuss in
The Goodbye Girl:
“I don’t like the panties hanging on the rod.” He just hated the performance in the movie, and he did it the week before the guy got there and murdered it, just murdered it.

There was no point in warning the host. They had too much anxiety anyway. They’d run to the next sketch going, “What happened? What happened to my sketch?” He would come out of nowhere, off his deathbed — and he was on his deathbed a couple times a year. And, you know, it was, “He’s been doing the Blues Brothers all week and he just came back from rehearsal last night and he hasn’t slept.” He had things with names — bronchitis and all that — and he had the Dr. Feelgood guys there giving him shots and stuff. It was delightful.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

We did this one sketch about fishing in Alaska, and right before we went onstage I was in back of the set with John and he was green. Just
green
. I knew he would go on — I just didn’t know how long he was going to live.

TOM SCHILLER:

When I started making films for the show, the third one I made was
Don’t Look Back in Anger
, the Belushi-in-the-cemetery one. It was based on the idea that I can look at people and I can “see” how they are going to look when they get old. Of course, I didn’t know John wasn’t going to get old, but I was intrigued with the idea. When he shot it, he did every line perfectly and went to every spot perfectly without even blocking it beforehand. It was shot at some cemetery in Brooklyn. It was creepy.

ROBERT KLEIN:

In a sketch about giant lobsters attacking New York, I played the guy who said, “Oh, the humanity!” Like the radio reporter from the
Hindenburg
fire. There was a very revealing line in there that was pretty awful when you think about it: “Oh, John Belushi is dead. We knew he’d die young, but not this young!”

Another time, in one sketch we were rehearsing, Belushi had the part of the father — miscasting, but it was just a sketch. And he just was sort of shaking and quick-tempered and impatient, and finally we were almost going to hit each other. And Aykroyd breaks it up and calms everything down quickly and says, “Oh, I’ll do the part.” It was like a terrible flare-up — a very bad memory — and Aykroyd, ever the mensch, stepped in and settled everything.

And it was nothing permanent with Belushi and me, but I do recall in subsequent weeks Belushi was off the show. I called it “getting docked,” like at camp or something, where you’re being punished. This is another of Lorne Michaels’s talents that I’ll have to give him, that he was able to juggle this stuff. Because there were drugs around. There were cocaine lines the length of a desk, you know. And most people could handle it, but a few people fell very badly through the cracks.

JANE CURTIN:

Lorne and I stopped speaking. It was during the second year. He wouldn’t answer my questions. I would say, “Why aren’t you doing something about John? I found him going through my purse. He set your loft on fire. His behavior is reprehensible. He’s not coming to rehearsals or if he does come, he comes three hours late. Do something!” And he didn’t. He would just sort of throw his hands in the air. Lorne doesn’t deal with issues. Lorne cannot confront an issue. So I thought, “Well, this is pointless, I’m not going to talk to him anymore.”

Gilda became our go-between. When Lorne wanted me to do something, he would call Gilda and say, “Would you ask Jane if she would do this?” And Gilda would come up to me and say, “Lorne was wondering if you would mind doing this?” And I’d say, “No, that would be fine.” This made life so much easier. We would say hello, but beyond that, there was nothing I needed from Lorne. I had “Update,” so I didn’t need anything. I didn’t need a father. I had a husband who loved me, and a great little dog. Life was good.

KATE JACKSON,
Host:

I got a phone call from Bob Woodward when he was doing his book
Wired
, and he wanted to talk to me because he had heard that the show I had hosted was John’s worst in terms of drug abuse. I didn’t know that, because I never saw anybody do anything, so I didn’t talk to Woodward. I heard later that paramedics had been called over to the studio and were standing by for John all through the show.

But John didn’t miss the show. He was perspiring a little bit. But he never, never went way off on a wrong tangent, never went off the cards, or never messed anything up that made it hard for me to get back on track. He did what he was supposed to do.

John called me afterwards. For weeks he would call me on Thursday afternoons just to say hello and to thank me for saving his life. “Wow,” he’d say. “Katie, man, you really saved my life, wow, and thank you.” And I frankly didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know why he was calling; he was just so sweet, you know. Danny had told me, “John is a bad boy, but a good man.”

NORMAN LEAR,
Host:

I loved in John and also in Aykroyd what I loved in Carroll O’Connor and Bea Arthur — a madness that would allow them to go anyplace. I have to say, whatever year I am destined to die, I have five years or ten years on top of that because those people who offered me that touch of madness gave me time, added to my life.

NEIL LEVY,
Production Assistant:

I was at Catch a Rising Star trying to pick up a girl one night. When I first started on that show I looked like I was about twelve, and this girl didn’t believe I worked on
Saturday Night Live
. And then suddenly everyone turned toward the door because Belushi had entered. Whenever he entered a room, there was an energy about him that made people turn their heads. And this girl saw him, and John saw me, and he went, “Neil!” and starts coming right toward me. And I’m thinking, “This girl is going to be putty in my hands now.” And he comes right up to me and gives me a big bear hug and says, “You got any money?” I’m thinking, “Not only do I know John Belushi, but he’s going to borrow money from me.” So I take out my wallet and he takes the wallet out of my hands, rummages through it, hands it back, goes “Thanks,” and disappears into the crowd. Well, he’d left me with a dollar. And there were no ATM’s back then. When I went to find him, he had disappeared.