Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (25 page)

During the first five years, the show changed a lot of stuff that you don’t think about. It changed this business of dinner at eight into dinner at ten or dinner at midnight. The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing. Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket, and blue jeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levi’s and a jacket.

Riding a tsunami of success and acclaim, Lorne Michaels proposed sending the entire show on location to New Orleans for the 1977 Mardi Gras. Since NBC figured the production cost of that to be at least $700,000, executives decided to put the show in prime time on a Sunday night, stretching it to two hours and making it an entry in a weekly anthology called
The Big Event.
Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were among the guest stars. But this was one big event that went busto, and in a spectacular way — a live show in a city full of drunks and near-naked revelers turned out to be much harder to control than one mounted in a TV studio. It was such a fiasco that it almost became self-parody, a sort of instant legend, and thus didn’t really do a thing to impede the surging popularity of
Saturday Night Live
.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

We had Buck Henry and Jane Curtin at the “Update” desk waiting for this Bacchus Parade to come, and all our jokes were about the floats and the specific things that would pass by the reviewing stand where they sat. But then somebody got killed — there was this horrible accident at the beginning of the parade route, two miles away. So for the entire hour and a half or so that we were on TV, there was no parade. Every time the bright lights came on Jane and Buck, millions of kids were vomiting and drinking and throwing balloons at them. And I’m under the desk while they’re on live TV being pelted, and I’m writing jokes about there not being a parade — what you would have seen had somebody not been killed, okay?

And I remember the last joke I wrote, the concluding joke, was something along the lines of, I’m paraphrasing, “Mardi Gras is French for ‘no parade.’”

PENNY MARSHALL:

Oh, was that a disaster! That was ridiculous. The parade was rerouted because there was an accident. People were throwing things at Buck and Jane. Meanwhile, Cindy and I had to do this Apollo Ball thing, but Cindy got lost and didn’t make the first part of it. There were men dressed as women, but we weren’t allowed to say that on television. We couldn’t say they were men because it was prime time. In those days, we couldn’t even say “do it” on
Laverne and Shirley.

BUCK HENRY:

It was a very, very bad week for Garrett Morris, because that was his hometown and his sketch was canceled and he didn’t have much to do. He was severely pissed off. He wandered off. Everyone felt very badly about it. And yet the show wasn’t bad, considering there were, I think, fifteen live locations. O’Donoghue even got to do his reindeer dance, or whatever the hell that was, and there was Belushi doing, of course, Brando doing
A Streetcar Named Desire.

GARRETT MORRIS:

I was unhappy about it, because I had a song I wanted to do, a song called “Walking Down Bourbon Street.” I’m a composer, and here I’m also a native son and I would have been doing a song about New Orleans. But Lorne didn’t see it, and I think he was influenced by a lot of people. So now I’m not in one thing on the show, and nobody is saying anything about that. The only thing I could do is walk off, but I don’t want that reputation. By the way, the cast went to my aunt’s house and ate ’til they could hardly leave the house. They had to like put their stomachs on wheelbarrows to get to their cars.

PAUL SHAFFER:

Naturally I wanted to do more performing. The fifth season, Lorne made me a featured player, which was a supporting actor, and I was in certain sketches that year playing various characters and things. I had a Nerd character I played, I played Robert Vesco one time in a Christmas sketch, and various things.

And then there was the famous time when I said “fuck” on live television. The sketch was about a medieval band rehearsing. Did you ever hear of the Troggs tape? The Troggs were a band in the sixties; “Wild Thing” was their song. There’s a tape that circulates in the music business of them in the studio trying to make a follow-up to “Wild Thing” and not being able really to communicate. They didn’t know musical terminology so they just kept saying “fuck” over and over: “
You
had the fucking beat,” they kept saying. They couldn’t seem to re-create what they had done before. It’s a famous music biz tape.

Anyway, Franken and Davis had the idea to transcribe this Troggs tape and make a sketch out of it but make it into a medieval band rehearsing and saying those lines. I remember James Taylor was in it too, because he was the musical guest that week, and Laraine Newman. We made up our own word, “flogging,” instead of “fucking,” and we would say, “Well, you had the floggin’ beat before” and we were all doing British accents, some more successfully than others. So it went very well in the dress rehearsal. And Al Franken said to me, “You’re getting big laughs. If you want to add any more of those ‘floggings’ go ahead.” But I got carried away, and just without thinking I said, “You had the fucking beat before.” And then I, oh my God, I watch the tape of it and I go white. And I look off, you know — what am I going to do?

But nobody noticed I said “fuck,” because we were doing these bad English accents. You couldn’t hear it, it wasn’t really clear, and there were no phone calls or anything. Everybody in the sketch heard it, though, and I remember Laraine coming over to me right after and saying, “Thank you for making broadcasting history.” And then Lorne came over and said, “You just broke the last barrier.” But I didn’t get in trouble, because it was clearly an accident. I didn’t get fired or anything.

HOWARD SHORE:

We really were of that period: the sixties. I think I was even more than Lorne. The spirit of that period was still inherent in our relationships through that time. By the eighties, we all changed and had quite different ideas. But I think the kinds of sexual ideas in the early days of the show were from the sixties — the idea of free love and different relationships with different partners.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I wasn’t actually in a couple with Lorne when the show started; that’s the real folly of all of it. But I never really actually got divorced from him, I don’t think, until like 1980 or something. I just didn’t want to deal with that. And so I didn’t.

DAN AYKROYD:

By the time Rosie and I became involved, it was over between Rosie and Lorne. They might have been married in name, and all that, but he was seeing other people. There was definitely separation there.

TOM DAVIS:

When Rosie and Danny first started dating, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him because Rosie was his ex-wife. I was very close to Danny, and he was like, “Don’t tell anybody, Davis, don’t tell anybody.” And of course everybody knew anyway. Finally Lorne said to me, “Danny and Rosie sure are hitting it off,” and it was like, why are we going through all this hiding and charade kind of thing? I mean, Danny and Rosie and I went on vacations together. But somehow, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him.

DAN AYKROYD:

My thing with Rosie never really got in the way of work until near the end. I was pretty upset, because Rosie was breaking up with me and going with a guy who is one of my best friends now.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

I always had these long-distance romances, which were about as much as I could handle. I really didn’t get involved with people I was working with. I liked keeping it light. I was involved with lots of people who were just numb lotharios, but because I knew that about them I could just enjoy them and not get involved. I was in no shape to be involved with anybody.

ANNE BEATTS:

When Michael and I broke up, he “closed the iron door” on me. I was not a part of Michael’s life or attitudes after that except at a safe distance. It was very difficult, very difficult — not just for me, but for both of us. But I didn’t quite go to town on it in the same way that Michael did. We had some argument about something during the dress rehearsal of a show shortly after we had broken up, and Michael smashed his fist into a glass ashtray and had to be taken to the NBC nurse. He then spent the rest of the evening bandaged, and when people asked him about it he would say, “Anne and I had an argument.”

ROSIE SHUSTER:

On Wednesday mornings, people were scrambling for the showers. We did bunk there and it was pretty fun — and pretty funky. Sometimes people would crawl out of their offices in the glow of those fluorescents, and it was not pretty. It was dormlike. Gilda came in once in her pajamas to write in the middle of the night.

BUCK HENRY:

John and Danny left the show at the same time, and I thought they shouldn’t have. I thought they owed Lorne another season. The kind of spontaneity and cleverness and responsiveness that went into that night when I was injured and they all ended up in bandages, I don’t know why, but I just have that feeling that wouldn’t happen today. It’s too homogenized now. It’s too mechanized. It’s corporate. And to a certain extent I think it’s because Lorne’s still the only one who can come and say, “No, don’t do that.”

But you also get the feeling that people are there because, first and foremost, it’s their launching pad or stepping-stone or way station or whatever, not as a destination in itself. They all know that it’s a franchise which leads to making bad movies.

DON NOVELLO:

As I see it, the main star of the show is really the format. Look at other comedy shows — the Smothers Brothers,
Laugh-In
, any of them, with the stars out front, the cast out front, they never last. Like popular music. As you look at television history, the old things that stay on are maybe the
Today
show, the
Tonight Show
and
60 Minutes.
That has stayed on all the time. The
Tonight Show
went through Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. So why did
Saturday Night
stay on? I think because of that format, and that is a genius who came up with that — the idea of having a guest host, music, the news, and so on. From the very beginning, one of the first shows, they set up that format. And that really is why they’ve stayed on that long, plus having exciting performers. The format of the show is the main reason for its longevity.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER,
NBC President:

Once I invited the whole cast to come up and have lunch in this big dining room that the chairman and I shared. And the cooking was not nouvelle cuisine. We were used to having heavy stuff, so we had roast beef with all the trimmings. And I said, “Bake an extra batch of chocolate chip cookies.” Well, you’ve never seen people eat like this — second portions of roast beef and so on. And then the cook gave each of them a little bunch of these cookies, tied up in paper napkins so they could take them with them. And I remember Bill Murray told me, “I’ve heard you’re a good guy and I’m going to give you a noogie.” And he came over and rubbed his knuckles into my head. My God, they really were wild.

HARRY SHEARER,
Cast Member:

Three years into the show, I got an offer to join the writing staff, and I sent back a fairly brusque letter to the effect that, if I wanted to write for television, I could do that very well in Los Angeles, I didn’t have to move to New York — the implicit message being that I’m a writer-performer and I don’t take writing jobs. So two years further on, I’m in Washington, D.C., being interviewed to be the host for what ended up being
Morning Edition
on NPR, and I got a message to come up to New York; Lorne wanted to meet with me. And I came up and the meeting was in the darkened auditorium of the Wintergarden Theater, where Gilda was doing
Gilda Live
, and there Lorne offered me a job as a member of the cast and as a writer.

LORNE MICHAELS:

In 1979 I was doing Gilda Radner’s show on Broadway, which I was directing. Belushi was definitely leaving
Saturday Night Live
, and Aykroyd was coming back as a performer only and not going to write. We all thought we’d do just one more season. So we made some additions to the writing staff. We hadn’t added any cast. That was the plan.

Just before Gilda’s show opened, I got a call first from Bernie Brillstein and then from Dan Aykroyd saying they had a chance to make the Blues Brothers movie in November and that Danny wouldn’t be coming back after all. That happened in July. Now I didn’t have a plan. Al Franken was a big fan of Harry’s from the Credibility Gap, which we all were, and it seemed like yeah, that would work.

HARRY SHEARER:

I thought fairly early on that the show betrayed a certain desperation to try to repeat anything that got a laugh — which I thought was, given the show’s advertised adventurousness, a little puzzling. The times they ran “News for the Hard of Hearing” in the first season probably numbered in the double digits, and it seemed to me a tip-off that the show’s agenda was to develop running bits and running characters as quickly and as determinedly as possible, whether or not they really had legs.

But by the fifth season, the show had serious career implications for anybody who was involved in it, obviously. I overestimated my ability to put my mark on it.

AL FRANKEN:

I had sort of recommended Harry, so Lorne held that against me. And Harry did too. That’s the wonderful part about Harry. Harry actually held it against me that I had recommended him for the show.