Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (42 page)

John’s funeral was great theater. It was our first funeral together, and there were TV cameras, and it’s like, “Whoa. There’s nothing funny going to happen and these cameras are here.” And Danny did the motorcycle thing, and the night before I think we’d gone out on John’s property and fired shotguns at the moon and stuff and tried to do something sort of epic that involved howling and sort of displaced rage.

God, the song James Taylor sang — chills. “Walk Down That Lonesome Road,” you know that one? It’s chilling. He sang it with his brothers and a sister, I think. All the press and everything were at a fencepost like a hundred yards away. When he sang that song, it was just, “Ooooh okay. That is the lesson, I guess.”

Whenever I hear it, I’m right back there at John’s grave.

EDIE BASKIN,
Photographer:

Right after John died,
People
magazine called me and asked, “Do you have some pictures of John when he was doing the sketch with the powdered sugar doughnuts?” They wanted me to give them pictures of John with powdered sugar all over his nose so it looked like he was doing coke. I said, “You’re sick. Good-bye.”

GARRETT MORRIS,
Cast Member:

One time I saw his picture in
People
magazine, and he was like a balloon. I thought, “Oh my God.” I couldn’t believe it. I was worried about his heart or his circulatory system. During the previous two years or so, I was thinking he personally didn’t like me, because he was saying a lot of things that just were uncharacteristic. And then when I saw the picture in
People
, I began to realize what had happened.

The way I found out he died was an
L.A. Times
lady got my number and had the nerve to call me and tell me he was dead and then try to elicit a response. She didn’t take into account at all that it broke me up. I said to her, “Look, I don’t want anything about drugs or anything.” And she said, “Well, I don’t let people put restrictions on my interviews.” And of course I hung up, because I didn’t want to have AT&T sue me for using words like — well, “motherfucker” is not a four-letter word, it’s a twelve-letter word, but I was going to call her a motherfucker at least twelve times.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

The day Belushi died, I went in to help out with making calls, because I was very good friends with the Belushi family. John and I were supposed to have had dinner on March third, to celebrate my birthday, and he was in L.A., and he killed himself March fifth. So there were a bunch of us up there, and guys were crying, and I was going to call Second City to get hold of Jim so they could get a medical unit over to John’s mother, because she had a bad heart. They wanted somebody that knew CPR to be there with defibrillator panels when she was told the news.

So I’m off making calls trying to find Jim Belushi. I run back into one of the executive’s offices on the floor and the executive’s on the phone making arrangements for funeral stuff and he has tears in his eyes — and he is leaning over his desk snorting coke! And I went, “What the fuck are you doing?! Jesus! You’re making funeral arrangements for a dead man and —” You know, it was almost laughable. I get sick when I think about it.

PENNY MARSHALL,
Guest Performer:

None of us knew about the other life he had, if he had that life — or if he was just starting or experimenting. All of us were smoking grass and doing coke once in a while. We did what we did, but it wasn’t like he was more abusive than anyone else. We knew there were drugs, but he had a whole different set of friends, I think, that none of his good friends knew about. He didn’t do any more than anybody else unless a fan came up and he wanted to be bold. Fans would just come up and hand him a gram. He represented that to them, a wild person. My fans wrote with crayon on lined paper; I had different fans. But we never saw needles, we never saw heroin, we never saw any of that shit.

LARAINE NEWMAN,
Cast Member:

I was at my house in Los Angeles when I heard that John had died. A friend of mine called me on the phone and said, “Hey, did you know that guy John Bell-utchee?” And I said, “Yeah.” “Well, he’s dead.” And I remember being annoyed that the guy didn’t even know how to pronounce John’s name and then hanging up and turning on the TV and seeing all the coverage and it being so unreal. This was the first time that someone I was close to had died. And unfortunately it wasn’t going to be the last. So it was unreal to me. I just couldn’t believe it — the sight of a covered body being carried out of the Chateau Marmont, and me knowing that that shape had to be him. And the sordid image that the details elicited in my mind, you know, of probably all the shades being drawn and here was this woman giving him a fix and letting him die. Whether she knew he’d OD’d before she left or not, it’s just so hideous.

CARRIE FISHER:

John had offered me some drugs once, and I said, “John, should you be doing this?” and he said,
“Do you want some or not?!”
And I just thought, “You know what? I can’t do this. I am not a cop, and he is three times bigger than I am.” Danny was always trying to get him to stop. We all were. But you couldn’t stop him, you couldn’t stop him. You couldn’t have stopped me. I always think about people who say, “We should have blah, blah, blah.” You can’t. As much as you’d like to think so, you can’t.

The thing I regretted about John was that he hadn’t had a scare, he hadn’t had some sort of overdose, or hospitalization or something, some warning. He just went straight to death.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

Having grown up in the sixties, I was kind of done with my drugs by the seventies. And so here it was the eighties, and I particularly hated cocaine. And whenever a new shipment arrived on the floor, I would come in and see everybody grinding their teeth. I came in one day and pretty much the whole floor was just craving it heavily, and I went, “Oh, this is not good. I’m going to write at home.” Because everybody was running into my office with gigantic pupils and grinding teeth saying, “I’ve got an idea.” And you know, I’ve always found that cocaine causes constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth. In the time it would take to sit and listen to people’s idiot ideas while they were coked up to the tits, I could get more work done at home. It seemed like the secretaries, the PA’s, everybody, was tooted that particular day, so I just took off. A couple of friends of mine who were Chicago writers, I called their wives and said, “I got your husbands hired on the show and I really don’t want to send them home in body bags. You have to come to New York and stop them, because they are doing way too much coke.” And they did. They came and took care of their guys.

JIM BELUSHI:

John would have been happy that I made it onto
Saturday Night Live
, but he actually wanted me to be a dramatic actor. When I started at Second City, I called him and said, “I got in at Second City.” There was a long pause on the phone. He goes, “Uh, shouldn’t you be at Goodman Theater or something, be more like a dramatic actor?” I said, “I’m really enjoying this here.” He said, “You’re a better actor than me, don’t you think you should be, like, doing drama?” I said, “I can probably do both, John.” He goes, “Okay.” That was it.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:

John and I were quite close. He had replaced me at Second City when I left initially. I lived on his couch in New York City for six months. He was bigger than life. No matter what he did, he didn’t think he would die. When he died, Lorne asked me to say something at the end of the show, because we had been together a long time. I recounted this one incident: He and I were walking down Bleecker Street and it was snowing and he had one of those hood things up. And a truck hit him and it flipped him into the air and he rolled up against the curb. And he just jumped right back up. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital. And he was fine. I mean, he got hit
hard
by a truck. And no problem. So I thought he was pretty indestructible.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

I did go to a party one time at the Blues Bar. It was 1980. Belushi had done a guest spot on the show. We walked in. Robin Williams was behind the bar passing out beers. And Belushi stood at the door as we walked in and looked me up and down and said, “Who the fuck are you? I don’t recognize you.” He said, “Did you bring any beer?” I said, “No, but I got a J.” “Oh, all right, come on in.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

When I got the call from Bernie, I was at Broadway Video. I had lost my father suddenly when I was fourteen — he was only fifty. It was a big surprise. So I feel like since then I’ve always been prepared for the worst. It was easier for me to go into a withholding mode. I dealt with John’s family, and Judy and I arranged for airplanes to get everybody there. It was the first time in my life I had ever chartered airplanes. When I walked out of my office, there were cameras and lights everywhere.

Bernie flew in with John in a body bag on the Warner corporate plane. Danny and some other guys were waiting at the airport on motorcycles to salute him. The plane landed. And then they took off. Bernie had to take the body to the mortuary.

I didn’t deal with anything until I saw John in the coffin. I had seen him look worse, but it was awful. Standing at the grave, we all just sobbed.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

When we made the movie
Neighbors
, that was probably the most fun I had. We would work on Staten Island on the movie in the daytime and then every night go back to John’s house and order in food and hang out and watch old movies. And John would do impersonations of Brando as the Godfather and make us howl until our sides hurt. He was the greatest guy to hang with. Half of him was this poor peasant Albanian kid from this small town where he’d been much looked down upon. And he said to me once, “Fuck them, I’m going to go out and become the most famous guy in the world just to spite them.” And he did that, and he could be that person, but the other half of John was that he was just this really lovable guy who did go out and become the most famous guy in the world and that wasn’t the answer. And he would go out on what I call that three A.M. to six A.M. club crawl in New York, where I don’t imagine he was the same person around Mick Jagger and Robert De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola as he was around Tim Kazurinsky. He had this old homebody self, but then he felt he also had to play the role of King of New York. It was really a schizophrenic way to live.

LORNE MICHAELS:

John, as I’ve said many times, lived his life in three eight-hour shifts. And if you spent eight hours with him and then you went to bed, you thought he did too. But he just went on to the second shift. And there, waiting, was a whole other group of people who knew John.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

My theory on Bob Woodward and John Belushi goes like this: They’re both from the same town. Woodward, he’s like Salieri. No matter what the fuck he did —
All the President’s Men
, winning the Pulitzer, whatever — unfortunately he grew up in the same town where John Belushi grew up. And so he’s always going to be number two. And that’s why he wrote
Wired.

PENNY MARSHALL:

We got sort of duped into that one.

DAN AYKROYD,
Cast Member:

I wasn’t happy, because I think Woodward just gave up on it and handed it over to his researcher. Plus there were certain things that he just got patently wrong. He painted a portrait of John that was really inaccurate — certain stories in there that just weren’t true and never happened. So no, I wasn’t happy. This was my friend that was being besmirched. That’s the posture I took, and I live by it today. The book didn’t fill John out to the measure that he could’ve been appreciated. He just overlooked a lot. It was all about the drugs and the excess, not about the quality of work and the background in theater and the preparation and the respect that John’s friends had for him.

JIM BELUSHI:

Woodward — that cocksucker! That motherfucker. Hey, Bob, what’s with the girl who won the Pulitzer Prize, what’s with the eight-year-old junkie? “Oh, that just got right by us.” Bob! You’re the fucking editor, Bob! How did that fucking get by you? You check your fucking sources? My ass! Yeah, Woodward did a really nice job of making John look like a Bluto junkie. I don’t think Woodward’s capable of understanding what love is, or compassion, or relationships. He is one cold fish.

DAN AYKROYD:

I had eight years with John, and we had a ball every second, we had a ball. I mean, we had our disagreements, naturally, but we sure made each other laugh.

In any group you’re going to have people who precede the others. I just hope he’s waiting for me on the other side. I’m sure he will be.

Many stars were created by
Saturday Night Live,
but many talented people also passed through the show little noticed and little utilized. Billy Crystal might have hit it big ten years sooner if he hadn’t been bumped from the premiere back in 1975. Eddie Murphy was all but ignored during his first year in the cast. Jim Carrey failed an audition and wasn’t hired. Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston, both later stars of
Friends,
were passed over.

With Eddie Murphy having ascended to movie superstardom, Joe Piscopo’s services were no longer in great demand in Studio 8H, and he was not invited back after 1983–84. Other cast members who’d failed to make much of an impression also departed, and
SNL
was looking severely talent deprived. The show had the blahs and needed a new direction. The remedy decided upon was simple and yet, considering the show’s traditions, theoretically heretical: Instead of spending time and effort looking for new talent to introduce and nurture, the producers would turn the show over to established comedy stars — fairly well known performers who could generate their own material. The remedy didn’t come cheap: Crystal, acclaimed for his portrayal of a gay son on the ABC sitcom
Soap,
finally signed on as an
SNL
regular, at $25,000 per show. Revenge was sweet.