Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (34 page)

ANDREW SMITH:

His real name is Duncan Dicky Ebersol. He used to have a Dutch boy haircut. He would come to the office dressed like he was going to a country club — golf sweaters, plaid madras pants, that kind of stuff. He certainly had no embarrassment about being a Wasp. It was really fascinating. It’s as if he hadn’t been down in the city very long.

When I first started working with him, he had this thing about contractions. I think his mother put the fear of God into him and told him that nice people don’t use contractions. I cannot even do an imitation, but if you can think of talking without ever using a contraction, you will be able to assume what it is that I am talking about. It made him sound like a foreigner. And then he had this thing that you don’t talk a certain way in front of women. You know, “You had better get that woman out of here before we talk about that.” He wouldn’t swear in front of them. He wouldn’t say “fuck” or “shit” or anything like that. Or he’d spell it out or use a euphemism. He was much more comfortable in the company of men, which is not to make any kind of sexual aspersions. Women were sacrosanct to him.

JIM BELUSHI,
Cast Member:

I supposedly threw a fire extinguisher at Ebersol. I don’t remember throwing it at him. I remember going down the hall and getting really pissed and grabbing the fire extinguisher off the wall and heaving it toward his office. I was a hungry, aggressive young man. I was a pain in the ass to Ebersol, but not to the other actors.

Ebersol didn’t even really hire me. Brandon Tartikoff was always a fan of mine, and he saw me do a big Second City benefit show that started the John Belushi Scholarship Fund. We invited everybody in the industry, and every studio gave like $7,500. Brandon saw that show, and I did quite a few Second City routines there, and he said to Dick, “Why don’t you hire Belushi?” And Ebersol goes, “You think so?” Brandon said, “Yeah, he was really funny.” So Ebersol did.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

The thing with Ebersol was that he was always looking for the lowest common denominator. The moral majority was really big then, and he didn’t want to do anything to piss anybody off or do anything controversial. I had just come out of Second City, and he tells me, “I don’t want to do political things. I don’t want to do controversial things. Who do you do impersonations of? Can you do Mickey Rooney?” I was like, “Fuck off!” I remember John Candy’s saying that was like the bottom of the comedy barrel. Mickey Rooney!

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

Reagan’s election set the tone. There was a kind of impending doom hanging over the country, and there was palpably a move toward conservatism at the network. We tried ideas for sketches that the network would shoot down. The censors would say, “You can’t do that.” We’d point out they did something similar with Aykroyd three years earlier, and the censor would say, “Yeah, but that was then, this is now. Things are different.” There was to be no mention of the Iran hostage crisis. Ironically, when the crisis was over, we did a whole show with every hostage sketch we could think of.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

Barry had an idea for a great hostage sketch, which was, a guy knows this woman’s husband is being held hostage, and he goes over to console her and winds up hitting on her. The network said no. It was a strange time.

JAMES DOWNEY:

I liked Dick Ebersol a lot. He gets a bad rap. He developed a play-book to run the show which I would argue they are definitely using these days. The way the show works now is Ebersol’s formula: the popular characters in heavy rotation, the kind of pieces they pick. It’s not a writer’s show. Ebersol made no bones: “I’m pushing Eddie Murphy, there’s going to be a ‘Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood’ or a Buckwheat every other show in alternation. I’m going to pretend ‘The Whiners’ are popular characters whether the audience thinks so or not, and we’re going to keep doing it. It’s going to be about the performers. The sets are going to be very simple.”

The show has the feel of one- and two-person sketches, not the kind of things like Franken and Davis and I would write — complicated, plotty sorts of scenes — or like Jack Handey’s stuff. I would argue that the show right now resembles the Ebersol show more than it resembles the old show. I think Ebersol kept the show on the air at a point where it might have been canceled. It’s like Sam Houston holding the Texas army together long enough to hang on.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

Tim Kazurinsky, who came from a business environment, sort of clued me in by saying, “Watch Ebersol. Watch how he leaves the door opened or closed during a meeting. Watch who he has in his office.” What was it they said about Lyndon Johnson? He never had a telephone conversation without needing to win a point. Even when Dick was yelling, he was subtly turning things so that the argument would go his way.

ELLIOT WALD:

I don’t remember who said the line — I’ve said it so much that someone said they thought I said it originally, but I didn’t — but one of the writers said, “Every time somebody in the world lies, Dick Ebersol gets a royalty.”

Dick and I would go head-to-head in meetings, but he would just ignore me, and I didn’t particularly love that. I was always interested in who would fight him and who wouldn’t. And I’m a confronter, so we got on very bad terms. I haven’t seen him or looked in his direction since.

BOB TISCHLER:

I had one big run-in with Dick before our last year. I said, “I know you’re a publicity hog and you can’t control yourself, but at least give me some kind of credit for this. I’m doing all the work. I think you should be much more in the background.” He was dealing with the network and dealing with a lot of the nuts and bolts, and I was really running the show much more from the creative point of view, because he really did not have a good rapport with the writers. So I would do all the rewriting, and that would be a hell of a lot of work. But he would just take all the credit, and I was very troubled by it and told him so. At one point I was going to leave the show — he was thinking of firing me, I was thinking of walking out. But we came together and settled it, so I stayed.

I ended up liking working with him a lot, because he is an excellent producer. He really knows how to deal with the network more than anybody I’ve ever met. It’s just that he had a lot of shortcomings in knowing how to deal with creative people. Dick is a very strange animal.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

The toughest it ever got between me and Dick was at one point he said, “You’re talking pretty big for a guy who was making $90 last week.” That’s sort of a Dickensian moment in my life. I had to get between Dick and a couple of people several times. With Dick there was always an element of fear. Like his argument with Andy Kaufman. I was standing there backstage where they screamed at each other. There was a certain amount of “fuck you” and screaming down the little entranceway leading into the studio there. It was a big confrontation. It was the show where Andy was voted off the air. I will say Dick was always in control. Even when Dick was out of control, Dick was perfectly in control.

ELLIOT WALD:

There was one piece I remember very well that Jim Downey wrote that we were falling off our chairs about. It was hilarious. It was an alien spaceship landing on Earth. The aliens come out and say, “We are superior, you shouldn’t even bother to oppose us,” and it becomes obvious as they talk that they stole the spaceship and haven’t really read the manual or anything and really don’t know how to run it very well. And in four minutes, it just had half a dozen wonderfully funny things. I remember that piece — and there were a million like it — where Dick just didn’t get it. The writers all got it. Dick didn’t.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

I had done this running thing called “I Married a Monkey,” where my wife was played by a live chimpanzee. And I did it because I knew that something would screw up and people would see that it was live. People would always ask me, “When do you tape the show?” No, it’s called
Saturday Night Live
. It’s
live
. It became so slick, people forgot that it was live. So I thought, “I’ll do this soap opera thing with a live chimp, and inadvertently I’ll get to improvise.” And it got to be very popular. And anything that took off, Ebersol wanted: “Let’s do that again,” you know. “Let’s do another monkey thing.” Even when you think it’s played out, you still have to do them. “We need a monkey for this week.” And I’d go, “Christ!”

And we used to hire these midget chimps Butch and Peppy, because they supposedly worked with Ronald Reagan in
Bedtime for Bonzo.
And the trainer told me one time, “Watch out for the chimps. When the hairs go up on their arms, they’re ready to attack.” So I was on the show one night, it was dress, and Madge, my “wife,” is in a hospital bed with amnesia. So I’m sitting there next to her and suddenly I see the hairs on her arm go up. And I make this dash trying to get out of there, and she grabs me and gets my head in a headlock that was like steel. Fortunately she was tethered by a chain at the back of the hospital bed and I was able to pull my head free before she crushed my skull. Then she went berserk and ripped off her leopard skin negligee and diaper and revealed to the audience that Madge was really a male chimp. So, standing there on the bed now, he grabs his monkey member and starts masturbating — as if to say, “I’m a guy.” Out in the audience, mothers are shielding their kids’ eyes, and I thought, “Oh God, if this ever happened on-air, I’d probably have stayed and wrestled with the chimp. But for a dress rehearsal, get the hell out of there.”

So they sedated the chimp for the air show. I look over and he’s just totally glassy-eyed. And the next time I worked with a chimp, its teeth had been removed. Then I found out from a production assistant that Ebersol was secretly taking out like massive amounts of insurance on me when I worked with the chimp! And that’s when I said, “No more. I’m not doing it anymore.” I thought, “He’s taking a million bucks of insurance in case I get killed. And fuck that. It’s too bizarre. I mean, I’m
not
going to die for
him
.”

JIM BELUSHI:

Ebersol’s an executive network manager. He’s one of the tops in that field. I think he knew what worked, and what didn’t work, and I think he really knew how to program the first thirty minutes to be the most successful. He knew the first thirty minutes of the show was the most-watched, so he really kind of messed around with the commercials to try to hold them back. As far as being a writer or a comic and telling you, “Why don’t you try this gag,” he was a little dry that way. Ebersol is like a lot of people in our industry; they’re heat-seeking missiles. What they’re looking for is the heat. He put that heat up there in the first thirty minutes. Sometimes, though, people like that don’t know how to nurture something.

JOE PISCOPO:

The Sinatra stuff was early on, and they had to talk me into that too, because I didn’t want to disrespect my hero. When I first started doing him, I wrote him a letter and I sent him an album through his attorney — we put out this “I Love Rock and Roll, Sinatra Sings the Rock Tunes” kind of thing. I was a North Jersey Italian American just like the Old Man, as we affectionately referred to Mr. S., and he couldn’t have been nicer. Matter of fact, he sent out cease-and-desist letters to anybody who’d even think of doing him and he never sent me a letter. And he used to call me Jusep, which was Italian for Joseph. He would invite me to everything. He just liked it. And when I look at it now, it had a real edge to it, you know?

But he couldn’t have been nicer, and I have the fondest memories, rest his soul, of the Old Man. He was just the greatest. When I first did him on
SNL
, he was at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City and he was about to step onstage — the opening act was an old comic named Charlie Callas — and everybody was waiting for the Old Man, and at eleven-thirty for the first time it was me doing him, and everybody stopped in the room, and I heard this from everybody, and they just said, “How is this guy crazy enough to do Sinatra?” And Callas breaks his silence and says to the Old Man, “What do you think, Captain?” And Sinatra looks at me doing him and he says, “He’s pretty good — the little prick.”

And when I met him, he said, “Hey Joe, baby, come here.” I felt so comfortable, I said, “Can I call you Frank?” He said, “No.” It was great, you know? He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy.

BOB TISCHLER:

We had a piece on one show where people were jumping off a building, and in the sketch Frank Sinatra was supposed to jump, as was Mayor Koch, who played himself, and Joe says, “Frank wouldn’t jump off a building.” And Eddie turns to him and says, “Oh yeah — and Mayor Koch would?” That was one of many “Frank wouldn’t do that” stories. There was another time where Billy Crystal was going to play Sammy Davis Jr. — Billy and I wrote this piece — and Joe was supposed to play Frank, and it was supposed to start in the Carnegie Deli and end up where Sammy would break-dance in front of the NBC studios, which we did. But when we told Joe that we wanted to start in the Carnegie Deli, he said that Frank would never eat in the Carnegie Deli, and he refused to do it until we put Frank in a limo.

Then there’s the Stevie Wonder story. It was a sketch called “Ebony and Ivory,” and it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder — Joe and Eddie. In the sketch, which Barry and David wrote, Frank was supposed to be waiting for Stevie Wonder to show up at the recording studio, and Joe said, “Frank wouldn’t wait for Stevie. Stevie would have to wait for Frank.” And refused to do it that way.

It was sick.

ANDREW SMITH:

Joe needed to think he
was
Frank Sinatra. All that stuff about Frank. And we wanted to write a sketch called “Frank Wouldn’t Do That,” because we’d pitch a sketch or something, and Joe would say, “No, no, Frank wouldn’t do that.” I once wrote a sketch — “The Gay Frank Sinatra Club.” And, “No, not that, Frank wouldn’t do that.” So he really got a little squirrelly about this whole Frank thing. Joe saw his Frank thing not in comedy terms but as a tribute.